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.

The Social Media Widget adds a set of buttons to the sidebar of your WordPress site to allow visitors to connect to you through a variety of social-media sites. The latest version of the plugin (2.4.1) comes loaded with icons for more than 30 sites, including all of the most popular ones, plus icons for your site’s RSS feed and e‑mail subscription link. The developer, Brian Freytag, has maintained the plugin in very active development recently, with each update adding a few more resources. It also includes three slots in which you can insert custom links with icons that you supply yourself.

The plugin comes with three sizes of icon sets—16, 32, and 64 pixels—in four styles: default (plain, clean designs that match the standard identities of the referenced sites), sketch (more playful, hand-drawn-looking versions), heart (just what it sounds like), and my least-favorite, cutout (which looks like you’re viewing the icon through a hole torn in a piece of paper). It also offers several animation effects and an option to control the opacity of the default state of the icon; the plugin displays each icon at full opacity when the visitor hovers over it. (View an example at my portal site, EFGumnick.com.)

You can replace the provided images with icons of your own design, or any of the hundreds of free icon sets available online. But beware that you’ll need to back up your custom icons before and restore them after each automatic update of the plugin. (I’ve suggested to Brian that he build in a “custom” folder that will be ignored by upgrades, and he’s pledged to include this feature in a future version.)

Update on 8/11/10: Brian made good on his pledge, and Social Media Widget now includes a menu option for a custom icon set. Create your own icon images, following the same naming scheme as the provided sets. Upload them to the folder corresponding to the size you’re using, and future upgrades will leave them alone. The plugin will ignore any missing or mismatched icons, so if an item fails to display, make sure the image file is named correctly and placed in the appropriate folder.

The Social Media Widget produces HTML that’s nicely marked-up for customization with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). On the EFGumnick.com site, for example, I’ve used CSS to float the icons over the header area, reduce their size to something in between the 16- and 32-pixel sizes, space them closer together than the default behavior, and hide the “Find me” headline.

To install and use the plugin, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your WordPress account. From the Dashboard, select the Plugins menu, then Add New.
2. Type social media widget into the search box. As of this writing, the plugin I’m discussing is the first result, but you can confirm that you’ve found the correct one by looking for Brian Freytag’s byline at the bottom of the description. Click the Install link at the top right, then click the big red button at the top right of the installation pop-up window.
3. When you see the “successfully installed” message, click the link to activate the plugin.
4. From the main menu, choose Appearance > Widgets. You’ll now find Social Media Widget in the Available Widgets area of the page. Drag it into one of the sidebars or content areas on the right side of the page. It should pop open to show all of the available options.
5. Populate as many of the fields as you’d like to use with the URLs of your social-media pages and profiles. Empty the boxes for any sites you don’t plan to use.
6. You can leave the widget open while you preview the icons on your site in another browser window. Click the Save button at the bottom right from time to time.
7. Optional: Customize your site’s style sheets to adjust the appearance of the icons and their heading. Below you’ll see the code I used to customize the display of the social-media icons on EFGumnick.com. (Note: The numeral in the ID selector for the widget will vary depending on how many instances of the widget you’ve installed. Search the HTML source code of your site for the phrase social-widget-, and make your custom CSS match the ID that’s in use on your site.)

/* Reposition Social Media Widget in the header */
div#social-widget-3 {      <=== Check your site’s HTML
position: absolute;             to confirm this numeral.
top: 25px;
left: 575px;
width: 325px;
}

/* Hide heading of Social Media Widget */
div#social-widget-3 div.widget-title {
visibility: hidden;
height: 0;
}

/* Tighten space between icons in Social Media Widget */
.socialmedia-buttons img {
margin-left: -3px;
}

/* Resize Social Media Widget buttons */
img.combo {
width: 28px;
}

Give it a try, and call me at 713‑562‑1813, send e‑mail, or leave a comment below if you need help.

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.

Here’s what you’ll need to bring with you to the workshop:

• Laptop* and power supply
• Software: web browser(s) of choice, e‑mail client of choice. (Or user name and password for a web‑based e‑mail account, if your laptop is not configured for e‑mail access. Some of the resources we’ll be exploring will require verification by e‑mail.)
• User name(s) and password(s) for your own WordPress site(s)
• User names and passwords for your accounts on any or all of the following social-media sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter

Please give us a call at 713-562-1813 if you have any questions or need help to prepare for the workshop.

Featured Strategy: Local Search

• What Is Local Search, and Why Should You Care?
• Resources:
  • Local.com
  • Getlisted.org

WordPress Mod-of-the-Month
Plugin: Social Media Widget

The Social Media Widget adds a set of buttons to the sidebar of your WordPress site to allow visitors to connect to you through a variety of social-media sites. Read a full review and tutorial of the Social Media Widget.

Questions

Feel free to post your questions, feedback, or suggestions for future workshop topics as comments at the bottom of this page, or using the Comment Wall area at right.

Web and social-media projects include:

• Web site built in WordPress.
  Note the custom-made bullets in bulleted lists!:
  
• Facebook fan page. New blog posts on the web site are automatically posted to the Facebook page using the Networked Blogs application.
• Twitter account that tweets Mark’s blog updates
• PBworks wiki for internal communications and project management

Fortunately, WordPress comes loaded with a strong defense against comment spam. It’s a plugin called Akismet, and it’s provided by Automattic, the same folks who supply the WordPress software itself. The plugin checks new comments from unknown users against a database of known spam sources. To activate Akismet, you need to register with WordPress.com and obtain an API key—a password that tells the Akismet servers that a request for data is coming from a legitimate WordPress user. It’s free and easy to obtain.

Comment form with CAPTCHA feature

Akismet quarantines everything that it suspects is spam, so you need to take a look from time to time to make sure that no legitimate comments get caught in the filter. But I’ve been using Akismet for a couple of years, and it hardly ever makes a mistake.

If you don’t want to bother with moderating your comments, or if you just want a second line of defense against comment spam, you can install a plugin to add a CAPTCHA feature to your comment form. (I’ve had good results with one called SI CAPTCHA Anti‑Spam.) This will prevent robotic agents from posting any comment spam to your site. But only your attention will stop the human shameless self‑promoters.

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?