Today’s Post is on using additional social networking tools to enhance your business standing, increase your reach, and promote different facets of your business. Last time we covered Facebook and Linkedin, and today we’ll go over YouTube, Meetup, MySpace, Flickr, and Twitter.

If you’re a business person, or you’re promoting products and services on the web, you will just have to learn a little bit about the web and some basic HTML to succeed. I don’t encourage you to become a full-fledged web developer (that’s my job at my company, 10K Webdesign), but you definitely benefit from understanding some basics. Here’s a my one-minute primer below.

ONE-MINUTE PRIMER on WEB PAGES

The web is a collection of many billions of pages, from personal to commercial, to educational, to spam. You interact with these pages using search engines, as well as through your referral network and your friends and family. Every single page is some variant of a text file. Typically files are either .html or .htm, or .jsp or .asp or .php, and you “land” on that file using your browser, which then renders the page into a format you may view.

Graphics, video, and sound are different kinds of files, but they all display (with varying levels of sucess) in your browser.

These are the three main html codes I want you to learn:

1) Putting a “b” or a “strong” around your text <b>text goes here</b> makes text bold.

2) Putting a “i” or a “emphasis” around your text <i>text goes here</i>makes text italicized.

3) Make a link by adding <a href=http://www.yourlink.com>yourlink.com</a> to your text, like so: asuccessfulwoman.com.

Some of the tools below will give you access to snippets of code that are like building blocks: you may copy-and-paste and place somewhere in your own blog or homepage. Backup your work and play around with your pages if you’d like to test.

Understand that everything within the page is just like building blocks: each item is a different block added on, with the whole thing comprised of many different “blocks.”

That’s the END of this ONE-MINUTE PRIMER

I’ve had varying experiences with all of the below and want to share with you some ideas on how to integrate these free services into your professional networking and marketing.

YouTube

http://www.youtube.com
The well-known viral video site, this is a social networking site in that people upload pre-made videos (or even record directly from your webcam), tag them and categorize them, and share them with associates. If you upload a movie, it must be your own work, not someone else’s copyrighted material, so your own music, images, or video is fine (uploading films in small segments is not allowed).

One of the best video promotions I’ve seen is called “Will it Blend?” [DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME] by Blendtec, a hilarious and unexpected series of snippets where a white-coated technician tests the Blendtec blender against a variety of items (action figure, lighters, SPAM, iPhone, tiki torch, scissors, etc., with the appropriate [DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME] disclaimer). It’s silly and amusing, and it also demonstrates the effectiveness of the Blendtec blenders. They’ve added all the videos to their own site but enjoyed great coverage through the viral nature of Youtube.com

Ryan, an entrepreneurial 19-year-old, has videos of himself playing popular songs on piano/keyboard on Youtube. From those videos, he now sells DVDs at playpianoDVD.com that teach you how to play without learning to read music. An excellent resource that shares music for anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection or DVD player. He recently expanded to sell sheet music popularpianosheets.com.

A final example is the Justin Laipply 6-minute video “Evolution of Dance,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMH0bHeiRNg, which has 63 million views (as of November 2007) and gives Laipply an opportunity to promote his entertainment and motivational speaking career. Youtube pays a small portion per view to these top-ranked video producers, so if you’re considering a career in showbiz, you might find your viewers here first.

Are there ideas you have cooking that you’d like to try out on Youtube? Use your home video camera or even your cell phone to put together a sample video and upload it there with your specific tags. You may just find some viewers!

Meetup

http://www.meetup.com
I first came across Meetup during the 2004 elections, where the group’s easy-to-use organizing tools allows you to find other people with similar interests who are physically meeting, in person, in your location. I love the niche markets that you may find here, with practically any group represented, from French language to scrapbooking to goth to classical music. If your business fits a specific industry, this would be a great place to meet either partners, associates, or potential customers.

You may search available groups by keyword, zip code, country, or city. You register to signal your intent to participate in a group. Or, you might just want to see when that group is meeting, who’s RSVP’ed, and then show up. If you like it, you may register back online and get notifications for the next meeting.

The political candidates have found a strong following here and have grown their campaigns and even specific organizations through Meetups: person-to-person is an effective and fun way way to build your grassroots campaign.

MySpace

http://www.myspace.com
One of the first sites to have in-depth profile pages, this site offers the ability for you to add music clips, show videos, or maintain a blog. Primarily for the younger audience, the site is heavily focused on music, films, and entertainment, so if you’re in this industry, you may want to reserve your band or musical group name.

Users may personalize their own pages, but a drawback of the coding for this site includes the ability for spammers and phishers to insert malicious code into their profiles, which then impact your machine if you visit those pages accidentally.

Flickr

http://www.flickr.com
This is a photo sharing site. If you have a large collection of photos, or if you have many before-and-after photos of your work in action, or if your products or services are highly visual, this may be a good way for you to share your skills. I think wedding photographers, graphic designers, and architects might use this site as an ancillary tool to highlight their gallery.

Perhaps the best part of this site is the ability to organize your photos into sets, or using keywords. You may specify if a set is viewable by the public, by your friends, or by your family only. The easy-to-use interface gives you the option to upload photos directly from your hard drive, and it’s an intuitive process. A fun “widget” is to use their “badge” maker to export a rotating sample of images from your flickr set to export to your website. I have one on the bottom bar as a sample.

Flickr would not be appropriate if you have images that are confidential or whose owners/subjects would rather you keep them private.

Twitter

http://www.twitter.com
I wanted to include this just for fun, because it’s a cute and cool little application where you send out “tweets” via the website or your mobile phone, which then update those in your network or people who are “following” you. The most striking example I have recently used this site for is keeping abreast of recent developments during the San Diego wildfires in October 2007. My family was evacuated and the different news websites were seriously slowed down by the website traffic, so KPBS switched to Twitter to send out up-to-the-minute updates.

When you use Twitter in conjunction with your blog (free ones are available via blogger.com or wordpress.com, but I recommend having someone install the software onto your own domain and host), you have a powerful informational tool that you may update from literally anywhere in the world (with an internet or phone connection).

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