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Sending gifts and promotional products has always been a powerful marketing tool. It can be used to improve client retention and to reach out to prospects. The Guinness Book of World Records Most Successful Salesman in the World used to send out greeting cards to every customer and prospect on a monthly basis. He was sending out more than 16,000 cards each month, and it worked. Customers knew him by name, and they came to him for all their car-buying needs.

photo credit: Adam Swank

But now, with the power of social media, gift giving as a marketing tool can make an even bigger splash than before.

I want to share a couple of stories with you of my experiences with receiving promotional products from some of my friends on Twitter.

• 2 Bottles of Wine from St. Supery Winery—I’ve been following @RickBakas, Director of Social Media for St. Supery Winery, for quite a while now. We had a little interaction with each other, but it wasn’t on a regular basis. Then, one day Rick reached out to me for help pushing some content on Twitter. I obliged, and next thing I know, I’m receiving 2 bottles of wine in the mail. By the way, the wine truly was amazing. Thanks again Rick!

So, why did Rick send me the wine? Well, I think there are a couple of savvy marketing reasons he did so.

1. To cement our relationship. See, you can only build a relationship through Twitter so much by @replying and DMing. Rick decided to think outside the box by sending me 2 bottles of his companies wine, knowing I’d be forever grateful and pay much closer attention to him.
2. To spread the word. After getting the wine from Rick, I of course thanked him through Twitter, and now even felt compelled to write an entire blog post about his company’s effective social media marketing tactics.

• Books from my followers—Rick isn’t my only Twitter follower who has reached out by sending me a promotional product. On a few occasions, my social media pals have sent me books they’ve authored or co-authored. The 2 most recent examples that come to mind are @ConvertBond and @AlisaBowman.

  The book I received from @convertbond (Lawrence McDonald) was called A Colossal FAILURE of common sense(a New York Times best seller), and it took a look at the fall of Lehman brothers. Lawrence was a former VP at Lehman Brothers, so he had an interesting story to tell.

  Alisa Bowman, who gives marriage advice at her blog, and has also collaborated on five New York Times best sellers, sent me a book she co-authored called The Skinny: On Losing Weight Without Being Hungry.

What’s my point? The point is that you need to do something different to stand out from the crowd. Sending a promotional product or a simple greeting card can put you on a first-name basis with influential social media users and your customers. It can also create a buzz, getting your name out there and driving sales.

Do you have a “outside of the box” marketing story? We would love to hear about it in the comments.

This is a guest post byPerri Blake Gorman aka @bethebutterflyPerri is an expat living in Hong Kong, connector of experts, Twitter passionista, social media trainer and consultant, blogger, environmentalist, lover of children & animals, & citizen of the world.

Right now Foursquare is in a major growth phase with new users joining at a rapid rate and the availability rolling out in cities around the world.

People are getting on board, becoming Mayors, unlocking badges and vying for top of the leaderboard.

Ok – first for all of you out there that still don’t know about Foursquare, it is ok.   It is very simple to understand and get going.

You can find this section on the help menu of Foursquare.com.  Each phone has a detailed page of how to download the application and how to adjust phone settings if necessary.

Considerations & Room For Improvement

Invitations:

How many of us really “know” the people we meet on Twitter? We are essentially out there making Foursquare friends with strangers as people sync their Twitter with their Foursquare.  I know: Only accept people you know, but this is realistically not what is happening because of the invitation system.  I can see this becoming an issue somewhere down the line.  “Woman Gets Stalked Via Foursquare” is not a difficult headline to foresee.  I have done a bit of browsing of profiles on Foursquare, and like the way people have opened up Facebook to strangers, by the sheer volume of friends you can imagine it is a result of just syncing with Twitter.

I think if you meet people and add them to Foursquare it is really useful  (if you can actually find them on the database).  You get all of their information all at once: Facebook, Twitter, email, or whatever information they have logged into the system. While I am not using that aspect to its full potential, Robert Scoble makes some really interesting points about how he is in his blog.

Check-in Reliability & Relevance

Sometimes people check-in after they leave, so Foursquare isn’t always a reliable way of finding your friends.  The status also stays there until they check-in again somewhere else. Tweeting or SMS is a far more reliable way to meet up.  People also have a habit of checking in at the post office, their office, the MTR, or their house.  It kind of kills the point.  The leaderboard and points system drive that kind of behavior.  I can only speak for Hong Kong, but do you really need to be the Mayor of the Ferry Terminal?

Quality of Venue Data

What you put in is what you get out.   It will be sometime before Foursquare is filled in to a high level with accurate information and good tips. Some people put in cool tips about happy hours and deals but I haven’t seen much of that in Hong Kong. Therefore, Foursquare may end up doing very well in some cities and fail in others.

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This is a guest post: by Alisa Bowman. In addition to being a friend of mine, Alisa is also a freelance writer and blogger. She gives free marriage advice and help. at her blog ProjectHappilyEverAfter.com. You can find her on Twitter @AlisaBowman.

About six months ago, I had 1500 blog subscribers—all of whom left few if any comments. On a good day, I would get maybe 8 comments.

On a bad day, I might get zero

It hurt my feelings more than a little.

And it made me wonder: Is anyone actually reading my blog? Or are all of these people pressing the delete button whenever my blog feeds into their inbox? Am I the most unloved blogger on the planet?

I thought about throwing a De-Lurking Party, as I’d read about other bloggers doing that sort of thing. But that seemed, well. In a word? Terrifying. What if I held a party and no one showed?

No, I couldn’t do that. No. No. No. A De-Lurking Party? That was waaaaay too risky.

So I did all of the usual things that people tell you to do in order to get more comments. I ended each post with this line, “Please leave a comment.” I installed the Comment Luv and the Subscribe To Comments plugins. I begged my Twitter followers to please comment on my blog.

Nothing.

Then, one day, I accidentally purchased the wrong size of bed sheets. I opened the package and washed them before realizing the issue. I didn’t know what to do with the dang things, so in the middle of a post Of Cobwebs, Bedsheets and Butter I wrote: Would you like a set of free Bakugan bed sheets? Leave a comment on today’s post that makes me laugh and forget all of my life’s problems and they are yours.

It was a joke. I didn’t think anyone would want them. I mean, seriously? They were kid’s bed sheets. They were already out of the package.

They had Bakugan designs on them.

That post? It generated 23 comments. As the comments flowed in, I danced around my room saying, “Who-hoo. People really do read my blog. Who-ho. People love me.”

Reward Your Readers

Let me tell you something. I. Did. Not. Want. To. Come. Down. From. That. 23 Comments. High.

Did not.

So I decided to give away more stuff.

I included a line from Where the Wild Things Are in one post’s headline and offered to send a chocolate bar to the first reader who figured out the book from which I’d stolen the line.

I won a bunch of dildos at a conference (don’t you just wish you were at THAT conference?), so I gave two away to my readers.

I re-gifted swag. I gave away crap that I didn’t want anymore. I gave, and I gave, and I gave.

Here are some other things that I did:

Created a Reader of the Month award. I give it to one frequent commenter each month.

Thanked my readers. I thanked them in my posts. I thanked them in the comments area. I told them just how much their comments helped inspire me. I told them just had crappy I felt whenever a post did not generate a lot of comments.

Started a Reader Participation post. I did the first one on a morning when I was busy and didn’t have enough time to write a real post. So I posed a question, asking, “What was the best marriage advice you ever got?” In the body, I told readers that they would write the post instead of me. I would, however, reward one commenter with a subscription to Wired magazine. That post? It got 46 comments. Now I regularly post questions—usually ones that were sent to me by readers—and I ask my readers to answer them.

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As a search marketer I have long been looking for an ideal link building model: where everyone’s happy, Google can ban you for selling or buying your link authority, quality wins over quantity and there’s no room for manipulation (note: as a marketer I am well aware of the fact that there’s nothing perfect under the sun. But I wanted something at least better than what we have now).

Currently, the most popular (and the easiest) link building method is still paying for a link (paid reviews, paid editorials, sponsorships, etc). Still, two main reasons why I try to avoid link buying includes:

• Paid links are almost impossible to camouflage: a website selling links has obviously sold quite a few of them, so it is very likely to be flagged for selling links. By buying several links here and there, you are much likely creating a pattern and Google most probably already knows you are doing that (so this is either non-effective or even dangerous);
• The affect from paid link campaigns is somewhat lopsided: you are only paying money for possible ranking increase. A paid link is unlikely to promote your brand or generate you some good, targeted traffic.

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When I first started using Mixx, none of the links on the site had the NoFollow attribute applied to them. However, several weeks ago, I had the “Highlight NoFollow Links” option enabled on my SearchStatus add-on for Firefox as I was using Mixx, and I noticed that all of the links on my profile page were NoFollowed (as seen in the screenshot below):

This observation piqued my curiosity, so I decided to check out the Mixx Popular Stories page. When I saw that the Popular Stories did not have the NoFollow attribute applied to them, I initially assumed that Mixx had taken a page out of Digg’s playbook. However, a little bit of additional research revealed that this wasn’t the case.
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photo credit: dimnikolov

They say ‘Owning a Blog is No Longer a Luxury but rather a Necessity’. How true!

And so is social media marketing.

As the real focus of this ebook is on social media and in the true spirit of it, let’s take a look at the meaning of blogging from the s-o-c-i-a-l m-e-d-i-a perspective.

Selling – Blogging opens a window of countless opportunities. One of those is the opportunity to sell your product and/or service. Most bloggers, if not all, are online entrepreneurs who blog passionately for money.

What it takes is trust, credibility and the right product. Just be sure that the kind of product/service you want to sell on your blog should be relevant, of value and could really make a difference in their life.
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With the seemingly endless number of social sites popping up all over the web, venturing into the world of Social Media and community voting sites can be an exercise in masochism, if you’re not careful. Every site has its own community, its own culture, its own etiquette and its own set of rules & regulations that users are expected to adhere to.

Unlike many social voting based sites, like Digg and Reddit – which tend to have an inherent hostility toward the search marketing industry – Sphinn, which was started by the team at Search Engine Land, caters specifically to the Internet marketing community. Much like other voting sites, the ultimate goal is to generate enough votes to make it to the “Hot Topics” page, which will expose the content to the biggest Sphinn audience.

Being that Sphinn was created by, is moderated by and its community is made up of Internet marketers, it’s no place for the faint of heart. As a rule, the community is somewhat suspicious of newcomers initially and there are some dues to pay before you’re welcomed into the fold. Spammers, the thin-skinned and whiners need not apply. Don’t believe me? Here’s a taste of what my first few weeks at Sphinn were like… (more…)

What’s web 2.0? According to an old joke, for a site to be a web 2.0 startup, it needs to be in beta and have a strange hard-to-pronounce name. With hundreds of so-called web 2.0 startups popping up daily, this joke actually describes the reality. But not everything is that bad. There are still new projects that do have something unique and innovative to offer. I tried to pick those 4 standing out in the crowd that have emerged in 4 different niches:

• search engines;
• social networking;
• social bookmarking and annotating;
• user-generated content.

Compare CognitionSearch is a new enhanced semantic search engine.

Key feature: search Wikipedia using semantic search technology.

What’s so innovative about CognitionSearch? The tool allows to compare their search results with the "simple" search (i.e. Google. Yahoo, and MSN) giving a better idea of what behind the semantic search technology is and how it is different from the conventional or "simple" search. The difference is graphically represented showing you the overlap and the number of unique results for both cognition and simple search. What’s more, it shows you which exactly meaning of the term(s) searched the comparison was based on.

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Social media being a fairly recent phenomenon, some marketers still have yet to dip their toes in the social media river. This post is intended to help newcomers get started in the social media world. There are many social sites out there; however, the following 5 should be a part of any social media marketing plan. The following is a synopsis of the author’s 5 favorite social media sites; an in-depth blog relating to each of these sites will follow.

Twitter: Follow Me!

is at the forefront of the current social media craze. If you do not already have a twitter account, you need to get one right now and you can do that here www.twitter.com. (Ok you can finish reading this post first).

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