Last night’s keynote, “The Future of Social Media: A Forecast Based on Research,” featured Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang. The presentation seemed to be slanted toward the stakeholders responsible for social media activity in corporate environments, but Owyang’s message contained some useful strategies for small businesses, social-media consultants, and nonprofits as well. His main message contrasted two possible paths for social-media efforts—getting caught in a reactive “social media help desk” scenario or implementing a proactive approach he called “achieving escape velocity.”

To reach escape velocity, Owyang suggests a six-point strategy:

1. Formalize a coordinated system for social-media management within your organization. He advocates for a “hub and spoke” model—centralized governance, process management, and education with widely distributed execution.
2. Create a peer-to-peer community for interaction with your customers.
3. Integrate relevant social-media conversations at every stage of the “customer lifecycle.”
4. Build a program to turn your satisfied customers into advocates for your product or service.
5. Streamline your efforts with a social-media management system. He suggests replacing piecemeal postings to Facebook, Twitter, and other outlets with a consolidated approach. (See Owyang’s list of SMMS resources.)
6. Design a strategy to measure your return on investment. You shouldn’t limit yourself to engagement metrics—clicks, fans, likes, etc.—but should also analyze what your social-media numbers mean and how they affect your bottom line.

Owyang’s presentation was loaded with facts and figures. Many of the reports he cited are available on his blog, Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang. They’re offered under an open-research Creative Commons license for use and sharing. (In other words, read them, pass them around, and give credit to Altimeter Group.) You can also view Owyang’s presentation slide deck on Slideshare.

All of the seminars and presentations of the Social Media Success Summit 2011 are being recorded as videos for participants to watch as streams or downloads with supporting files and links, so if you’d like to take part, you won’t miss out on any content by signing up now. But a conference seat at this late stage will cost you a steep $597.

If that’s too rich for your blood, take a look at the Social Media Success Summit 2011 event site, consider putting yourself on the mailing list for next year’s conference, and check back here to read my reviews of more SMSS seminars as I get a chance to watch them.

Starfall Graphics’ local-search listing

The big search engines know this, and in their competition to provide the highest-quality search results, they’ve created systems to provide highly relevant results to people searching with local intent. They’ve set up localized directories and made their own sites location-aware. That means that when you visit search engines, they check your IP address to get an idea where you are in order to tailor search results to you.

If your business offers a service that’s limited by geographical range, or if you’d prefer working with clients in your area, you need to get yourself found in local searches. One way to rank high in local searches is to include some geographical terms among the keywords and keyphrases encoded in your web site. Refer to yourself frequently in your content and meta tags as a “Houston web designer” or a “Texas writer.”

Another way to make your way up the search engine rankings is to register yourself with local-search directories. At the July 23 Community & Conversation workshop, we introduced two good resources for local search: Local.com and Getlisted.org.

Are you using local search resources to promote your business? How it is working? Let us know in the comments area.

In the last couple of years, though, there’s been growing interest and browser support for a specification called @font-face. @font-face is a component of the Cascading Style Sheet standards that allows a web designer or programmer to place font data on the web server and then specify that font in web pages. A few foundries have made “web fonts” available for download and use under free (or at least generous) licenses. Webfonts.info is a helpful resource for learning about this technology.

Commercial foundries are getting into the act, too. But in the interest of keeping downloadable fonts from getting redistributed willy-nilly, they’ve come up with ways to maintain control of the font data. They host the fonts on their own web servers, and web designers have to sign up for free or paid accounts to make use of them. Within the user account, the designer creates a “project” or “kit” that makes selected fonts available for use on a specific web site. In some cases, the designer must also associate specific fonts with the CSS styles to which they’ll be applied on the web site under development. The foundry then supplies a javascript code for the designer to place on each page where the font will be used.

Monotype is offering a free web font beta program while it works to develop its proprietary method for selling font subscriptions. Typekit already offers three tiers of subscription pricing, as well as a free-trial plan, which lets designers who are new to this technology get their feet wet. The free plan allows users to specify two Typekit fonts on a single site.

On Monday, Typekit announced a partnership with Adobe to add 26 Adobe font families to the Typekit library, including the wildly popular Minion, Myriad, and Adobe Garamond fonts.

Do you plan to add web fonts to your web site or blog? Will you stick to free options, or do you think web typography is worth spending some money on? Let me hear from you in the comments.

You can register with Getlisted.org to get a user account (called a “LocalDashboard™”) that will track your local-directory listings. The site also provides a “Resource Center” page with a handful of articles on topics related to local search and a page called “Enhance Your Listing,” which provides links to even more free and paid directories.

You could go nuts trying to cover all the bases in local-search listings. My advice is to start with Google, Yahoo, and Bing if your business is primarily providing business or personal services in clients’ homes or offices. If your business is anchored in a specific location—that is, if you sell a product or service from a storefront or an office with regular foot traffic—then you should also make sure to get yourself listed with Yelp.

If you’ve used Getlisted.org, I’d appreciate hearing about your experiences in the comment area below, or send me e‑mail.

To register your business in the directory, start by visiting Local.com and searching for your business using the boxes in the red bar at the top of the page. If your business is already listed, look for the link that says, “Own this business? Sign in to update listing.” You’ll be taken through a few steps to establish an account and create your free listing. If your business doesn’t show up in the search results, click on the red header bar to return to the front page, then look for the link right below the header that says, “Own a business? Get your business listed….” This link will also take you through the process for setting up an account and creating a listing.

A few minuses (and one plus) to be aware of:

• Free directory listings don’t include your company logo. You’ll have to pay for a premium listing if you want to give your listing any graphic appeal. Several other local-search directories (most notably Google Local) allow graphics at the free-account level of service.
• Local.com makes its money from paid advertising. Soon after you post your free directory listing, you’ll get a call from one of their ad sales representatives. But so far, the clients to whom I’ve recommended Local.com report that the sales reps don’t take a high-pressure approach and will take “no” for an answer if you say that you’re not ready to spend money on advertising.
• Local.com rejects ads with post office box addresses. You’ll need to supply a physical address, but if you don’t want it published, you can look for the option below the address area of the sign-up form that says “Do not display my business address.” Your business will show up in searches as “Serving your area.”
• If you have trouble signing up, try the Live Chat feature of the web site. When my listing was rejected because I used my P.O. box address, one of Local.com’s live-chat support staffers explained the rejection, waited while I plugged in my physical address, and then reviewed and approved the listing while we were still connected. I appreciated this proactive approach to customer service.

If you’ve used Local.com, I’d appreciate hearing about your experiences in the comment area below, or send me e‑mail.

Yesterday I went looking for an image to illustrate a blog post, and I stumbled across an exciting application of “free as a business model” at FreeDigitalPhotos.net. This stock photography site offers web-resolution versions of all of its images for free on one condition: the user must acknowledge the photographer and FreeDigitalPhotos.net. You can also purchase higher-resolution versions at very reasonable rates and without the acknowledgement restriction.

FreeDigitalPhotos.net’s terms of use are simple, clear, and very generous. Few types of use are prohibited even for the free versions of images. The site merely requires you to include a photo credit on printed pieces or a hyperlinked text acknowledgement in online media. You can find an example of the required credit on the latest post on my lifestyle blog, Working or Playing?

YouTube permits registered users to post an unlimited number of videos and to share, rate, and comment on other users’ videos. Unregistered users can watch and share videos. The ease of sharing has turned some YouTube offerings into “viral” videos—clips that spread around the Internet like wildfire (see Evolution of Dance, for example)—and has made some obscure producers into Internet celebrities.

As a registered user, you can also set up a “channel,” a user page that organizes your own videos and others that you’d like to feature. If you’re producing video content, YouTube can be a great way to find an audience and to lead them to other elements of your online presence. Google also offers the option of designating your content as a Promoted Video. Promoted Videos are a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising system for driving viewers to your channel.

Your channel can contain a photo or logo image, information about your business or organization, and a link to your web site, blog, or Facebook fan page. The channel can be customized to coordinate with other branding efforts. For example, we’ve configured the font and color scheme of The Clutter Fairy’s YouTube channel to match the client’s web site:

YouTube channel
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Web site
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