One of my favorite tools of all time is one I often find marketers have never heard of. A colleague told me just last week they hadn’t heard of it. Seriously? I can’t figure out how they managed to miss it. This single tool can help you get the ball rolling for all of your social media, brand management and online reputation management campaigns, and assist you with content creation and link building. It alone has saved me countless hours of mind numbing work  and possible carpal tunnel.

It is, of course, Knowem (like “know ‘em”).

In essence, Knowem signs up for all your social media profiles for you. Like, 300 of them. Run an agency and frequently sign up social media accounts for clients? Save your interns from carpal tunnel and sign up for one of their plans. If you work for a large organization with many brands to manage, again save your interns the pain and sign up for a plan.

Even as a smaller business, on a tighter marketing budget, you can still make use of Knowem without paying a cent, if you can spend a bit of time with it.

Check Your Name

First of all, the most obvious use is that you can check your username or brand name for free. Knowem displays which social sites have that name available, and links off to them so you can go sign up manually.

You can do this without even registering, but if you sign up for a free account you can keep track of which sites you’ve signed up for without doing the manual searching. This is particularly helpful as new sites get added.

Cover Your *ss

If your name is common or trademarked, you likely want to control it across the entire web. While Knowem doesn’t quite include every social network, it comes pretty close, and gets you everything from the most popular sites like Twitter and Facebook, to obscure ones like Scoopeo.

And you can check if all the versions of your domain have been registered, including the random .aero TLD.

Clearly I need to purchase some domains

Discovery

Best of all, though, is that you can find some really unique, niche social networks that you never would have known existed otherwise. These sites can end up becoming part of your social media or content strategy.

Take Scoopeo, for example, which bills itself as a French social bookmarking site. If you’re doing international SEO, you might want to check into a site like this. Blog about fitness? Check Knowem’s Health tab for sites to share your content on. Looking for new content ideas? Browse through the sites listed and see what’s popular. There are as many ideas as there are sites.

On the whole, Knowem is one of those tools that internet marketers must have in their toolbox, regardless of whether you specialize in social media or search engine optimization, and no matter your budget.

When Google released their new Local search results format in October, 2010, SEOs quickly determined that the number of reviews and overall rating associated with a business were ranking factors. They also predicted that these would be quickly be gamed.

It was an easy ranking factor to launch the new integrated SERPs with, as they already had piles and piles of review data from their own properties as well as sites they’d partnered with. But Google’s algorithms are not static, and it couldn’t be too long before the Local algorithm included other ranking factors.

Now, it looks like they might be starting to think about other options. A paper submitted to the upcoming Very Large Data Bases conference, on Hyper-Local, Directions-Based ranking and written by two Googlers along with two other researchers, proposes a method for using direction queries…say, of the sort a user might enter into Google Maps…to determine interest in particular places that could possibly be used for ranking such places.

Greg Linden has a post summarizing the key points of the paper, and wrote, “the core idea is that, when people ask for directions from A to B, it shows that people are interested in B, especially if they happen to be at or near A.”

And of course, who happens to have piles and piles of data regarding direction queries?

I’m sure there are some people out there already thinking about how they could game this. But this got me thinking: what other sources of hyper-local, location-based, user-generated data is out here that could supplement direction queries?

GPS Trails on Android Devices

I’ve always believed that Google developed Android simply as a massive data mining engine. After the recent debacle where it was discovered Apple devices store GPS data, it was also uncovered that Android does too, which is not entirely unsurprising.

*removes tinfoil hat*

However, the paper addresses the main issue with GPS trails, in that “GPS datasets typically contain many positions for a few users,” and Greg points out that “just being in a location doesn’t make it clear that it is your endpoint or that you want to be there.”

All good points.

Location-Based Check-In Services

So what applications do people use when they want to be somewhere and want to tell people about it? Well, with increasing frequency, people are checking into location-based games like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places.

Sure, this data would be heavily skewed to early adopters, owners of mobile devices, and geeks, but it could be another indicator of interest in places.

Twitter

Google already partners with Twitter to use their data. The Twitter API includes a portion for GPS coordinates, and many mobile Twitter apps and third-party supporting sites like Twitpic have a setting that allow users to embed their coordinates in their tweets. Rather convenient, considering the number of people who tweet frequently from doctor’s waiting rooms, restaurants, grocery store line-ups, etc.

Of course, we’re not there yet. This paper is to be presented at VLDB in August, so it’s not even being implemented by Google yet.  And by the time something like this is anywhere nearing integration into the Local algorithm, Foursquare and the like may not even exist. But with more users adopting mobile devices faster than desktop computers, and everyone under the sun trying to develop a location-based app, the opportunity is certainly there.

Photo: 23am.com/Flickr

Now that I’ve introduced you to the 8 Social Media Tools That Your Small Business Needs to be Using, it is time to discuss some important social media don’ts. In the world of Google Cache, nearly everything you put out there on the Internet is there to stay for all eternity. While some of these suggestions might be common sense, you’d be surprised at the type of information that makes its way to the public courtesy of social media. Without further ado, I present you 10 things you shouldn’t use social media for.

• Don’t Tweet about hating the job you will have if you accept a new job offer. A Cisco job offer and ultimate reversal of said job offer made quite a news story last year.
• Don’t talk about the Grand Opening party of the new gentleman’s club in Las Vegas if you know your wife is following your Tweets.
• Don’t rave about your new hack proof tool because it isn’t hack proof and someone will quickly prove it.
• Don’t talk bad about your competition because you may one day find yourself out of a job and looking for employment with said competition.
• Don’t post funny or compromising photos from high school or college. Even if you think your account is secure, this will come back to haunt you. I promise.
• Don’t comment on your new super sexy or hunky coworker. Can we say sexual harassment lawsuit? Yes we can!
• Don’t post about your daughter’s potty training mishaps because she may one day grow up to be President of the United States and we’ll all know what she did at two.
• Don’t get your social media accounts mixed up. If you run an adult entertainment business and a family-centered nonprofit, make sure you’re logged into the right account before posting.
• Don’t post a play-by-play of your last-minute trip to Vegas if you called in sick to work or you may find yourself out of a job.
• Don’t forget that anything you post has the potential to be seen by everyone. Understand the permanence of the Internet and social media and use it wisely!

What social media don’ts would you add to this list?

If you own a small business and you haven’t embraced social media yet, you need to get started now. The world of social media feels like it is in a constant state of change but there are some important social media tools that your small business needs to be using now. This guide will help you get started.

Facebook
With over 500 million active users, half of whom log on to the site every day, your company absolutely needs to have a presence on Facebook. Facebook has changed over the years but right now, you should get a Facebook Page set up. The process is really quite simple, especially if you already have a Facebook account. The site even has a step-by-step tutorial to create a Facebook Page for your business. I could dedicate an entire post to Facebook best practices but for now, get your page set up and start promoting it.

Twitter
Connect with your customers in 140 characters or less on Twitter. With a quick one-minute tweet you can update the Twitterverse with information about your latest sales special, share exciting news about your company and even head off any customer service issues.

Believe it or not, consumers that use Twitter will often use the service as an outlet to vent their frustrations about a specific company. If you’re not on Twitter, you may never know what your customers are saying about you. For more information, read Twitter 101 for Business.

LinkedIn
Although LinkedIn doesn’t have as many users as Facebook or Twitter, the site is home to over 80 million users from 200 different countries. LinkedIn is designed to help you manage your professional network. In addition to connecting with customers, you can build your relationship with businesses that offer complementary services to your own, find new business partners or opportunities, join discussions with others in your industry and more.

Although anyone can join LinkedIn with a basic account, the site offers three different premium subscription tiers for businesses. The paid subscriptions open up a new set of tools that can help small businesses get the most out of their LinkedIn account.

Foursquare
Foursquare, which was just launched in March 2009, is relatively young in the social media world but the site already had three million users as of August 2010. Foursquare is a mobile tool that allows users to locate nearby businesses, connect with friends and take advantage of special offers and discounts at participating venues.

As of August 2010, 15,000 venues were posting special offers on Foursquare. When a customer checks in at your business, he can take advantage of a special you’re offering. For example, when customers check in at the American Eagle in Minnetonka, MN, they receive a 15% discount on their purchase.

Foursquare is definitely a different type of social media tool but one that is growing in popularity. Read Foursquare + Your Business for details on how to get started.

YouTube
Although you may think of YouTube as a place for moms to upload videos of their kids or cat ladies to share their pets’ latest hijinks, it is more than just a video memory book. YouTube is a great way to introduce your business to new customers. Some businesses go after the viral video approach – something catchy that has the chance to get a million clicks and end up on the national news.

Of course this is the exception not the norm so you may want to take a more realistic approach – use YouTube to add a new visual element to your site. Sometimes you can do a better job of pitching your product in video instead of text. Today’s Internet world is multi-dimensional and you need to make sure that you’re offering more to your customers than just text on a page. You can do this by embedding a YouTube video into your site. By uploading it to YouTube first, you’re exposing the video to YouTube’s massive audience while maintaining the ability to display the video on your own site.

Flickr
Flickr, a photo-sharing site, is another great way to advertise your business online. Now you can’t blatantly market your business on Flickr but you can certainly utilize the site to help boost your company’s visibility. The Small Business Search Marketing website has a great post on getting started with Flickr. Number one on the list is to use your web site address as your Flickr screen name. Read the other suggestions to help guide you in launching Flickr for your business: How to Market on Flickr.

StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a service that provides personalized web site suggestions to its nearly 12 million users based on their individual interests and web surfing patterns. If you come across a site you like, you give it a thumbs-up and then “StumbleUpon” another site. As a business, you want to make sure that your content is included in the StumbleUpon network of sites.

You can do this in a few ways: submit a link to content on your site so that other users can StumbleUpon it, encourage customers to add a link to your site with a review or use the site’s paid promotion option.

Delicious
Delicious is simply a social bookmarking site. Although the site’s concept is straightforward, it can actually be a valuable tool for your business. You can use one of the official Delicious tool sets or one of the many third-party applications to encourage site visitors to bookmark your site on Delicious.

As each new visitor bookmarks your site, they have the opportunity to share the new bookmark with friends. This process can quickly introduce your site to a new network of potential customers. Delicious is very easy to set up and requires little time to manage on an ongoing basis so it is a social media tool that I’d recommend for all small businesses.

If you’re just getting started with social media for your business, you can be quickly overwhelmed by the plethora of social media sites out there. If you start with these eight you can quickly build your online presence without stressing yourself out.

If you’re a small business owner, what are some of your favorite social media tools?

An update on #tweetsforboobs, but first … thanks for everyone’s participation so far. You all have been amazing!!! Keep it up!

How #tweetsforboobs Started (if you’re curious)

We’re really happy to be involved with the #tweetsforboobs twitter campaign for breast cancer awareness. At the beginning of September I decided I wanted to do something non-profit oriented on Twitter. I bounced the idea off of my buddy Josh Strebel, he liked it and reminded me that October is breast cancer awareness month. I have a few women very close to me who are currently fighting breast cancer or have survived it. Because of that, I really wanted to see if we could make something work, on Twitter, to 1) help raise awareness, and 2) generate donations. A few days later we bought the domain tweetsforboobs.org and started putting things in motion.

I had noticed a few successful Twitter promotional givaways like the #moonfruit campaign. I had also noticed a few other non-profit efforts that were successful as well, so we tried to model those. I started reaching out to potential sponsors, to match $1 for every hashtag tweeted. The problem was, it was a little late in the game to find a sponsor at the level we needed. I reached out to Komen Phoenix and Komen National, but again it was too late to get any of their contacts committed. About a week before October 1 we gave up on finding a sponsor and realized we could do this without one.

How #tweetsforboobs Works (if you don’t know already)

If you’re not familiar with it, basically we (ie: tweetsforboobs.org) keeps track of every account which mentioned #tweetsforboobs and counts that as a $1 pledge. People can pledge all they want through October, and at the end of October the site will DM each participating account their pledge total with a link to our Susan G. Komen donation page. This model met a few requirements: 1) pledging / donating needed to be easy 2) it needed to be public via Twitter, which raises awareness and 3) we couldn’t touch the money. Brian Roy hooked us up with a JustSignal account (thanks!), to track Twitter mentions, and over the course of a couple days, Josh designed and built out http://tweetsforboobs.org. We put the site live late Friday the 25th of September.

#tweetsforboobs Status

Alright … enough back story, lets get down to it. How has the campaign done so far?

Goal 1 = raise breast cancer awareness on Twitter.
Goal 2 = raise donations.

I’ll start with Goal 2 because it’s still early October and frankly, at this pace we won’t meet it. We’re almost at $900 pledged a week into October, which is great, but not enough. So … if you’re reading this please help!!! We’ll do another post summing up the campaign when it’s all said and done, with a more detailed analysis on who pledged what and who actually followed through with their donations.

As for goal #1, I think we’ve been successful so far and if you like data, here’s why

The first thing we started tracking was the bit.ly link included in the suggested tweet text. You can check that out in real-time here http://bit.ly/2l4npd+. Our link has been clicked almost 3,000 times and the aggregate link has been clicked almost 3,200 times. Pretty cool!

Google Analytics is showing us we’ve had 2,807 visits to http://tweetsforboobs.org and 2,170 unique visitors. We’ve had visitors from 59 different countries. That’s not bad either!

What we really need to know, though, is how much exposure our hashtag, #tweetsforboobs, has received. This is a little bit more difficult to measure, as Twitter is fairly new and all the social media monitoring solutions are therefore, also new. I reached out to a few I knew off the top of my head, Radian 6 and ScoutLabs … both basically gave me the cold shoulder. Radian 6 generously offered their “non-profit” pricing which was around $250 / month right off the bat. ScoutLabs didn’t offer anything more then their 30-days free which I’ve been using somewhat. It really doesn’t give much Twitter data, just a list of all the tweets matching our filter. Not much help here…

I was hoping for something more insightful. I asked Brian what we could get from JustSignal, since we’re already using it to track mentions. From http://tweetsforboobs.org, we know that 895 tweets have included the hashtag #tweetsforboobs. We also know who’s using it the most, from the top BRAs leaderboard. Out of the box JustSignal gives us some interesting details like most frequent re-tweeters, tweets per day and tweets per hour (yesterday).

What I wanted to know was what kind of exposure this has had. How many streams has the hashtag made it into? Who’s helped us the most, in terms of exposure? I needed some more data for that and JustSignal helped me get it. I was going to get into TweetMeme’s new analytics, but they only track links

We have all the twitter accounts which tweeted the hashtag, so I got their tweet count (for #tweetsforboobs) and their follower count. Their follower count we can think of as Unique Reach. I multiplied their follower count by the amount of times they tweeted #tweetsforboobs to get the Reach per Account then added all those up to get the Total Campaign Reach and Total Unique Reach.

So, our hashtag has had a Total Unique Reach of 625,627 and a Total Campaign Reach of 1,257,570 for an average 2.01 hashtags per feed. Basically, #tweetsforboobs has made it into 625,627 unique account streams on average, 2.01 times.

I’ve also broken down Total Reach per Account, showing the top 25 accounts here…

There are obviously some caveats to this, like accounts don’t = viewed or even people; as well as a number of other issues, but it’s the quickest and simplest metric I could put together today.

What’s Next?

First and foremost, we need more support and we’re asking for your help. We’d really like to reach our pledge goal by the end of October and YOU are the ones who make that happen.

As far as the data goes … I’d really like to be able to see who has been responsible for getting the most people involved. Getting re-tweet and reply data into this will be able to show us some interesting things. Specifically, we’d be able to understand who is responsible for what percentage of the total amount pledged, beyond just how much they’ve pledged themselves. We would be able to see how much influence, in dollars, each participating Twitter account has.

Thanks again for everyone’s participation so far!!