I’ve written quite a few articles about the Ning family of social networking sites focusing primarily on social marketing and business networking concepts.

In this article I address every type of Ning user.

By using Ning sites, not only can you transact business, you can also make new friends, discuss special interests, and promote favorite causes. You can network with people all over the world from the comfort and privacy of your home, any time of day or night.

I cannot cover every possible contingency, so feel free to ask questions below in the comments, and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Before looking at what you should do on Ning sites, I must explain one thing that you should never do on Ning or on any other social network.

Thou Shalt Not Spam

Last September, I slammed the practice of spamming in How Do You Like Your SPAM? If you’re not sure what spam is, please invest a few minutes to read through that article.

Spamming is something that you should never do on Ning or anywhere else. You’re spamming on Ning if you push unwanted advertising, commercial or otherwise, on other people by using:

• private or instant messages
• profile or blog comments
• forum or discussion posts or comments
• site, group, event, page or comment sharing
• something I haven’t dreamed of listing here

Be considerate of your fellow site members at all times. If you want to advertise, use only your page’s profile and blog, and watch for my upcoming piece, Promoting Yourself on Ning.

Uploading Your Photo

When you join your very first Ning site, you need to upload your photo. While you can theoretically skip this step, a picture makes your site page friendlier and more credible.

If for some reason you believe that you cannot use your photo — or a family photo — then find another image to upload in its place. Avoid using the dreaded default image, since it implies a lack of seriousness on your part.

Creating Your Profile

Although volumes could be written on this subject alone, here are ten suggestions to help guide you:

1. Get clear about who you are and what you represent.
2. Study other people’s profiles. What do you like about them? Dislike?
3. Know how you want to portray yourself on each Ning site.
4. Express yourself in an accurate, friendly and interesting manner.
5. Write in the first person. Avoid bad grammar, misspellings, overused clichés, exaggeration, distasteful slang, etc. Learn to write well — or find somebody who will help you.
6. Include links to your relevant websites or blogs.
7. Fill in the details each site requests as best you can. If the site doesn’t ask for enough, use your page’s Text Box to present additional information and links.
8. Revise your profile often, as you re-invent yourself or gain clarity.
9. Ask others for their opinions and listen carefully.
10. Don’t wait to get started. As Mike Litman taught me: “You don’t have to get it right. You just have to get it going.”

Making Connections

Once you have set up your page, you’re ready to invite people to be “friends” and accept friendship offers from other people.

I know that you’re not naive enough to believe that you can make friends with the click of a mouse, so I must explain to you what it means to be friends on Ning.

Please read the following very carefully:

When you make friends on Ning, you are each giving the other explicit permission to communicate directly using private messaging and Ning’s content sharing features.

E-mail messages will inevitably arrive in your inbox. Some will be spam and others not.

Ask yourself whether you’d mind receiving direct messages from a person. If yes, be friends. If not, pass. However, don’t be too cautious, since you always have the option to remove a so-called friend who has turned out to be problematic.

Communicating One-on-One

When you meet a new person offline, you communicate cautiously at first. You make small talk. Gradually you reveal details about yourselves, and a relationship develops. Approach online communication in the same way.

Be genuinely interested and ask questions to give your new friend an opportunity to open up to you. Reciprocate appropriately as you go along.

Use a profile comment or two to get a conversion going, and then switch to private messaging if and when it seems right. Don’t force anything. It’s better to take your time.

Communicating with the Community

In my opinion, the best way to communicate with all members at one time is by writing blog articles within the Ning site.

If you don’t know how to write, you’ll learn. This is a great way to get practice before starting a stand alone blog on Blogger.com or your own hosting account. Your writing will improve as you do more and more of it.

Write about topics that are important to you. Create a desire within your readers to return and read subsequent blogs. If your articles are helpful, the site creator may feature them, and that will help you to gain readers.

In Promoting Yourself on Ning, I’ll teach you how to promote your blog articles.

Inviting Friends

Social networking sites need new members to grow and thrive. All members share the responsibility for bringing in new members.

Use the Invite feature to send a short invitation to people whom you know. In the comments area of the invitation, say briefly why you like the site. If everybody participates in this process, everybody benefits from the new faces on the site.

Now It’s Your Turn

Ask questions below, so that I can clarify or elaborate on any of the points I’ve made in this article — or address any omissions.

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Nearly a year has passed since my first Ning article, Ning Social Networking Sites.

Since then online social networking has taken some exciting twists and turns. MySpace has lost luster, while Facebook and Twitter have become social media darlings.

Ning Still Facing Obstacles

Ning seems to be in somewhat of a holding pattern.

There have been some changes here and there, mostly for the better in my opinion, but no exciting breakthroughs. There are new apps, a new Ning central networking site, and new flexibility, but site creators and users still have their reservations.

As mentioned in Ning Social Network Controversy, the Ning management has been criticized for its policies and its tactics and, as too many people are aware, Ning sites haven’t been immune to spamming by both Ning members and by intruders.

My Ning sites now all require membership pre-approval, since I know of no better way to deal with persistent outsider spamming.

What is Right with Ning

Despite any shortcomings, I still feel as when I wrote about the Ning controversy, that Ning truly epitomizes Web 2.0. Ning sites are communities of people, and Ning is a community of community sites.

I’ve certainly written a good deal about social media list building including both List Building Paradigm Shift and List Building Using Ning Social Networks. Nevertheless communities are the essence of social media, not lists, and social marketing must therefore favor community building over list building.

Fortunately Ning can be used to build either communities or lists. There are creative ways to build communities within Facebook and Twitter, but Ning networks were designed expressly for that purpose and afford marketers a variety of useful tools and a degree of social media ownership.

Ning Still My Favorite Networks

I still use Ning social networking sites more than all others. I like them for the reasons cited above and for the many other reasons I’ve discussed in previous Ning related articles.

I have so far created four Ning sites of my own and hope to create more in the future:

• Let’s Follow Each Other - This is a fun networking site for Twitter folk who want to gain followers, share ideas, promote themselves and network with each other.
• Beyond Business Coaching - This is a site for entrepreneurs and marketing professionals who are interested in social media, customer acquisition, customer retention and CRM.
• Online Kosher Networking - This is a niche site for orthodox affiliated members of the Jewish faith to network and share their ideas about Jewish values, Israel, religious observance, charities, politics, jobs, business, etc.
• Outside the Box - If you enjoy my blog, but you don’t use Twitter, and you aren’t necessarily business oriented, this may be the right site for us to connect and network together.

In all fairness, I must tell you that Ning has competitors such as SocialGO, GROU.PS and others but admit that I haven’t yet evaluated them. If you have tried other social network platforms, I invite you to share your experiences with them.

To learn more about using Ning, please read Introduction to Using Ning Sites.

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Social media sites are rapidly altering the web marketing landscape. Now you can use social media to drive targeted traffic to your websites.

You may be trying to determine whether social media is a viable alternative to search engine optimization.

After all, search engine optimization requires extensive keyword research and ongoing content development to achieve top search engine rankings. Is it possible that social media sites might provide a more expedient web marketing solution?

I’ve found in my experience that social networking sites and other social media can generate a modest level of response much more quickly than search engine optimization initiatives. So why not focus exclusively on social marketing?

Social Media AND Search Engine Optimization

Please read The Long Tail and Social Media, and you’ll start to appreciate the extent to which search engine optimization can enhance social media.

Not only does search engine optimization help you promote your website, it also helps you promote your social media content. Your website and your social media together constitute your web presence, and search engine optimization helps you to market your overall web presence.

Interestingly, the converse is also true.

Social media helps your search engine optimization efforts. It adds to the links back to your website generating both referral traffic and credibility with the various search engines.

They key is to coordinate your social media and search engine optimization, creating the maximum synergy between the two through an integrated approach.

The New Online Marketing Professional

It’s no longer enough for online marketing pros to be fluent in search engine optimization technique. They must also fully understand social media sites and their role in building both your online presence and the desired backlinks to your website.

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A rose by another name might smell as sweet, but could a horrifically long string of gobbledygook ever smell as sweet as facebook.com/larrybrauner?

Not by any stretch of the imagination.

In case you haven’t heard, Facebook started giving out real user names yesterday morning just past the stroke of midnight. To claim yours, go to facebook.com/username.

However if you have a Facebook business page with fewer than 1,000 fans and want to name it, you’ll have to wait. The biggies have first dibs.

My Facebook business page link is still:

facebook.com/pages/Larry-Brauner/80577106448

I use Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, and other social networking sites to network one-on-one with people, and a simple Facebook app merges my Twitter updates directly into my Facebook feed. That’s synergy!

Grab Your Name and Make New Facebook Friends

Hurry and get your new Facebook user name. Then leave a comment below with your main reasons for using Facebook and your new Facebook link, so that we can add you as a Facebook friend.

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Lots of effort and expense went into building your site, but your return on investment is marginal or non-existent.

Here are possible reasons why your website isn’t generating leads or sales and some ideas that might help you correct the problems.

Too Little Traffic

Perhaps you lack an effective strategy for driving visitors to your site.

You set up your storefront but didn’t tell potential customers that you were in business, a mistake I often see both online and off.

Lack of traffic leads to lack of exposure for you and your offer or message.

Don’t assume that traffic will somehow find its way to you through word-of-mouth, search engines or otherwise. It rarely happens that way.

Generate exposure for your website offline via print advertising, direct mail, radio, etc. and online using social media, search engine marketing, search engine optimization and so forth.

Think big. You can dominate your niche, so don’t settle for less.

The Wrong Traffic

You have traffic, but either your traffic is not targeted or it’s poorly targeted, the result of using bad copy, selecting the wrong media, or choosing the wrong keywords.

For greater and more targeted traffic, employ a good mix of research, analysis and experimentation.

Direct marketers have been using this approach offline since before you and I were born, and it works like a charm online as well.

Insufficient Stickiness

You have plenty of visitors, but they leave your website too soon.

Consider these questions:

• Are you targeting the right traffic?
• Are your branding and message clear?
• Are your pages too cluttered, or do you give your visitor too many choices?
• Is your font hard to read? Try to avoid white on black in all your media, since it slows down your reader.
• Is important content “above the fold?” Can visitors see your most important content without scrolling down?
• Is your content up-to-date, relevant and interesting?
• Do you use social techniques on your website to engage your visitors?

Poor Conversion

You have plenty of visitors who stick around but nothing happens.

Here are more questions to ponder:

• Do you have a conversion strategy?
• Does each of your pages have a call to action?
• If not ready to buy, can your visitor join, opt-in to or subscribe to your site?

If you don’t have a lead capture mechanism and follow-up strategy, you’re leaving lots of money on the table.

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Let me explain.

Spamming

Spammers often follow myriads of random people on Twitter hoping that enough of them will follow back like sheep, or that they’ll click through the spammer’s profile link to view his or her offer.

However, too many marketers with good intentions adopt a similar strategy. They follow large numbers of targeted people but expect them to follow back without providing ample reason for them to reciprocate.

Getting and Staying Followed

People often ask me how I was able to get tens of thousands of followers. They’re hoping that I can point them to some magical system that will generate as many followers for them as I have.

I don’t use those types of systems nor do I recommend that you use them either. At best they match you up with large numbers of unresponsive followers.

Part of any outreach strategy includes following the people whom you would like following you. Life would be simple if each person you chose to follow reciprocated and followed you back.

While some Twitter users will follow back everybody, most of the ones who are desirable to connect with will be selective. They will follow you back only if they like what you’ve been tweeting or if they like you.

Unless your name is Oprah Winfrey, people will probably size you up based on some combination of your …

• Username - Avoid the use of underscores (_) and numerals (0-9) if at all possible.
• Name - Your real name is usually best.
• Picture - Use a professional looking head shot or company logo.
• Background - Use a layout that’s interesting and tasteful.
• Location - Nothing dorky please!
• One Line Bio - Mix professional and personal details. People search on profiles, so use carefully selected keywords.
• More Info URL - Point to content that’s helpful and makes a good impression.
• Privacy Settings - Don’t make your profile private if you want people to follow you. Marketers aren’t supposed to be secret agents.
• Follower Count - It pretty much is what it is.
• Follower Ratio - If you follow many more than follow you, you might look like a spammer. If you follow too few, you look unapproachable or like you don’t value two-way communication.
• Tweet Count - All other things being equal, the more the better but again, it is what it is. Just make sure you post a half dozen representative tweets before you start following people. Fewer than that can be a big turnoff.
• Tweets - You are what you tweet. What you tweet will be the single biggest success factor in your Twitter career. Refer to Tons of Great Twitter Resources or The Twitter Power System Review.
• Retweets - Some Twitter users like to connect with people who are somewhat likely retweet their tweets.
• Tweet Frequency - Some don’t like to follow people who tweet too often, as it tends to fill up their “timeline”.
• Date of Last Tweet - If you stay away too long, your followers will start giving you the axe.
• Personal Recommendations - It certainly helps to have fans to promote you, especially on what’s come to be known as #followfriday or #ff, which is actually every Friday.

With such a long list of criteria, it’s a wonder anybody gets followed or followed back. Fortunately people are looking for reasons to follow as much as to reject, and a reasonable effort on your part can be effective enough.

Web Marketing Strategy

As a marketer, the quality of your content off Twitter is as important as the quality of your tweets on Twitter.

You will use your “more info URL” and a portion of your tweets to reference your content, and your content will determine your marketing success with Twitter — and other social media initiatives as well.

It is this to which I refer when I ask, “Where does your Twitter lead people?”

Your Twitter, social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, blog and website all link together to create a web marketing strategy that builds your image, your community and ultimately your business.

Well written, produced, and placed content and skillful search engine optimization and social media marketing both on and off Twitter will enable you to achieve your key objectives.

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Holistic emphasizes the importance of the whole and the interdependence of the parts. But is not each whole a part of a greater whole?

Web marketing is one part of the marketing function, as is offline marketing. The marketing function is one part of the business enterprise, as are finance, HR and MIS. And so on.

Therefore it seems that holism is relative and depends entirely upon one’s perspective.

Nevertheless, I emphasize the importance of web marketing as a whole and the interdependence of its parts which can include all of the following:

• needs assessment and planning
• competitive intelligence
• market segmentation and targeting
• positioning
• keyword research
• on-page and off-page SEO
• multimedia content development
• content management
• legal review
• web site design and programming
• search engine marketing
• database management and e-mail marketing
• social media policy and training
• social media optimization
• social networking community moderation
• reputation monitoring
• marketing analytics
• tracking of key performance indicators

That’s quite an impressive list, and it’s not necessarily complete.

As a whole, web marketing requires the expertise of generalists who have some knowledge of each of the many interdependent parts. Generalists can see the forest through the trees.

Each of the parts requires the services of specialists who possess a great depth of experience in their individual areas of specialty.

Being a generalist but having good experience in several key areas allows me to effectively wear more than one web marketing hat.

I stated in Web Developers Don’t Know Social Media that web developers know “how to build a website and how to create a web page that interacts effectively with visitors,” but that they “are neither experienced Internet marketers nor skilled copywriters.”

It’s equally true that copywriters know how to write effective copy, but they don’t know how to assess the competition nor how to compute marketing metrics.

Web marketing is a team effort. The team cannot succeed without its captain nor the captain without his or her team.

Choose a wise captain, and let your captain assemble your web marketing team.

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As a top Twitter business user, I was sent an advance copy of the Twitter Power System for my review. Here are my observations.

The Twitter Power System is a very comprehensive set of videos, e-books, resources and tools.

New users learn how to set up an account and all the basics they need to get going. Experienced users learn how to craft powerful tweets, how to create viral tweets — and everything in-between.

Twitter Power System Content

Thirteen videos in the Twitter Power System learning center provide a total of three hours and 32 minutes of instruction:

1. Account Setup - for new and even experienced Twitter users
2. Twitter Basics - a how-to guide with the essentials for newbies
3. Account Automation - using SocialToo and Tweet Later, two automation tools I love, and some important caveats
4. Targeting Your Followers - how to target and use techniques such as sampling and testing
5. Managing Your Followers - using FriendOrFollow, My Tweeple and Twitter Karma to manage followers.
6. Tracking Your Twitter Links - how to use Cligs to shorten and track your Twitter links
7. “Crafting” Your Tweets - the four elements of a tweet and how they all work together
8. Finding Information to Share - using Google Alerts and other tools to discover useful information you can share
9. Post on Autopilot - create your own content automation tool using Google Alerts, Cligs and Twitter Feed
10. How to Use Twhirl - a desktop client such as Twhirl can offer greater convenience and capabilities than accessing Twitter directly from the Twitter.com domain.
11. How to Use TweetDeck - ditto for TweetDeck.
12. The Bigger Picture - a Twitter review that ties everything together
13. Retweet System - creating viral tweets that can be retweeted easily with only two mouse clicks

E-workbooks such as the Getting Started Quickly Guide, Harness The Power of Twitter and the Twitter Power Tools Guide contain a total of 205 pages that serve to complement and reinforce the video presentations.

They discuss many useful strategies and the third-party tools that facilitate the implementation of those strategies.

There’s also a 54-minute podcast, Twitter Unwrapped, to download and enjoy on your computer or iPod. This interview with James Rivers, the founder of the Twitter Power System provides an excellent audio overview of the system.

Twitter Power System Thumbs-Up

I myself have written Twitter articles and spent much time studying and compiling Twitter resources for my article, Tons of Great Twitter Resources. Knowing much about the Twitter content available online, I can enthusiastically recommend the Twitter Power System to you.

I’d like to see greater detail in the varying approaches to meeting different business needs. I’d also like to see case studies. Nevertheless, the Twitter Power System is the best training venue I’ve seen so far.

I’m very impressed by the content and the quality of the videos, and I’ve already picked up ideas from them that are helping me to refine and improve my Twitter methodology.

You can follow me @larrybrauner.

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The long tail has recently become a major buzzword both in business and online.

The long tail concept is rather abstract, so it can help to look at concrete examples. Let’s look at examples from my blogging experience.

The Long Tail of the Search

I started publishing Online Social Networking in November 2007, and I installed Google Analytics to monitor, analyze and track traffic to my website.

My blog, as you can probably guess, has been search optimized for the keyword online social networking.

Out of 25,515 visits that were due to search engines, only 1,469 were searches for online social networking. The remaining 24,056 visits were based on 10,769 other search terms. 3,658 of those 10,769 were variants of online networking.

Fewer than 500 of the 3,658 search terms were used to find my site more than one time. These search terms each occurred very infrequently, yet in aggregate they accounted for a great proportion of my visits.

The long tail of the search refers precisely to this phenomenon.

Most searches are based on all sorts of low frequency keywords. See the diagram to the left in which the yellow region under the curve corresponds to the long tail.

The Long Tail of ROI

I spend several hours writing each post on my blog and another hour or so bookmarking and promoting it. My hope is that people will come read the article and subscribe. Just to keep things simple, consider subscribing to be my return-on-investment.

A couple of hundred people, more or less, will visit within a couple of days to read my piece. Some will comment, and some will subscribe.

As I mentioned above, my blog is search engine optimized. I receive more than 100 visitors daily just from search engines. Over time each individual article on the blog will be read by a handful of search visitors per day. That’s not a large number, but it eventually adds up.

That’s the long tail of ROI: The small number of residual daily visits and subscriptions eventually match or surpass the initial surge of visits and subscriptions when the article is first written and posted.

The Allure of Social Media for Marketing

There are many aspects of social media that are appealing. It’s free. It’s social. It’s far reaching. However, the long tail aspect of social media I’ve described makes it especially attractive to savvy marketers.

Well written and keyword researched content remains online indefinitely and attracts an enormous number of search engine visits over time, a benefit not enjoyed using other media.

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What can a “regular” marketer do to stand out and make a strong impression in the social media space?

What if You’re Not a Thought Leader?

Thought leadership is probably not as important in social marketing as is keen interest and enthusiasm.

Certainly some degree of expertise in your niche is desirable and, as I indicated in The 80/20 Rule is readily attainable. However, what you feel about your product, service or brand may be as or more important than what you know.

Several months ago, a close friend suggested that I offer to help one of the U.S. political parties with their social media campaigns.

After serious consideration I decided against it. While I possessed the knowledge I would need to succeed, I was not aligned with that party’s views. Therefore my heart wouldn’t be in the right place to do the top notch work that would be required.

If you enjoy a subject and communicate confidently about it, people will respond favorably.

What if You’re Not a Writer?

Let’s suppose that you don’t write and don’t want to start. What can you do?

Here are a few options:

• If you have a sizable business, you’ll have a person or a department to do the writing for you. Problem solved.
• If you’re a small business or working on your own, outsourcing is an important option. You can hire a writer such as Ivo Jackson to develop your content or a virtual assistant such as Denise Griffitts to do all sorts of creative and technical things that you can’t or don’t want to do yourself.
• On Twitter you can make small talk, post links to interesting content and “retweet” other people’s messages. I have written numerous articles on Twitter. Connect with me @larrybrauner and @MyNewMediaIdeas.
• You can use videos instead of text to spread your message. On YouTube you can create your own video blogs, and if you can sing like Susan Boyle, the sky’s the limit.
• If none of these ideas work for you, you can use your voice and the voices of others. On Blog Talk Radio you can create your own Internet-based talk radio show blog.

Above all be authentic. As I’ve said before, social media marketing is about people, not companies or products.

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