This morning I typed into Google the search term: VoIP (which stands for Voice over Internet Protocol) and I got 64 Million responses. 64 Million!!

How archaic is that?

Does Google have any idea how long would it take me to go through 64 Million responses? One day we are going to look back at the days of searching and getting 64 Million responses to anything and equate that to a Commodore 64 or Betamax tape.

I know, I know the point is Google is trying to bring me the best responses to the term in the first few pages (if not the first page). But the best responses according to who? Why don’t they know I work at Avaya (who sells products and services in the VoIP space) and therefore I most likely have a very different mission in typing in VoIP?

Microsoft just launched Bing a new search service which is supposed to rival that of Google. To me it looks like Google but in a new wrapper with a few enhancements. This post is not an indictment of Bing, my point is they didn’t take it far enough.

Someone can (and will) connect search to my social profile (say on Facebook) thereby making a truly intelligent search engine that will know where I work, and who my friends are. Then when I Google a term like VoIP – it will know I work for Avaya, it will know my friends and can present me with a way to filter the web based on my social profile – call it Social Search.

Then I will be able to narrow down a search for VoIP down in seconds based on the company I work for, members of my marketing team, friends I have in my network and get a completely different view of the internet that I can’t get now.

24 months from now Social Search should be common place – we should see social tools like Facebook Connect or OpenID which are already out there, used for search. I feel everyone wants to make the search market more competitive (right now Google has 87% of the US marketing and 90% of the European market) so perhaps Yahoo or AOL can revive their search business by going Social!

For more ideas like this please check out my latest eBook called 7 Ways Facebook will Change your Life!

One of the great things about the Facebook platform is that it provides you access to a large audience of over 200 Million people worldwide at a low cost. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a strategy in place for what you are trying to achieve. Whether you are a small local business, or even a well known product or service you will need to give some thought to your audience like, who they are, how do they want to be spoken to, what messages would you want them to receive, and what are the tactics for having them interact with your message. So let’s go through some of your options when it comes to the tactics of social networking marketing.

Have a Strong Presence

A Facebook presence, like a website, is a fundamental tactic and should be on everyone’s list of must haves for social network marketing. Similar to the .com land grab that happened in the late 90’s, you should secure your company name on as many social sites as you can.

Once you have your presence you will need a strategy for posting updates as frequently as you can with interesting content. Be sure to get your employees involved. Encourage them to become fans and drive the conversations to create a thriving community. The reason being, you will want Facebook users to be able to discover your Facebook Page through their friends’ profiles and with Facebook searches. This is the key to growing your fan base “virally”. Also keep in mind Facebook Pages are indexable so be sure to write your content with good SEO in mind.

Do some Advertising

You will find that advertising on Facebook is unlike any other advertising experience you have ever had. Mainly do to the unique ways in which you can precisely target a specific ad down to the person’s profile. For example if you want to target MBA graduates that are 3-5 years out of school and working in Southern Connecticut that like Classic Rock music whose favorite food is Sushi – you can do that!

There are 2 basic types of ads: Display ads and Social ads. And they can be purchased like banner ads with Cost per Click (CPC) and Cost per Thousand (CPM). And they work similar to online banner ads but try not to use them in the same way. Most Facebook users feel more comfortable staying within the Facebook environment. So try to direct them to someplace on your Facebook Fan page. With the new Facebook Fan page design, you can send them directly to a tab of your Fan page since each tab has a unique URL.

Create an Application

If you are going to send your ads to a specific tab why not send them to an application you built to engage them with your brand. Facebook Applications are similar to widgets or snippets of code that can be embedded in any Facebook Fan page to make it more distinguished. You can think of them like interactive spaces that can allow the user to take a poll, play a short game, or anything you can dream up.

Creating a Facebook Application has become widely popular because custom applications are not that hard or expensive to build. Some Facebook Applications have seen tremendous growth because they were built to take advantage of the viral nature of Facebook.

Syndicate your Content

Another tactic to consider if you already have a steady stream of rich content is using Facebook as an outpost for your content. If you already have a blog, podcast series or video series you can effectively use Facebook to attract another audience to interact with those assets.

There are a variety of ways to syndicate content on your Fan page. You can use the Notes page to import blog posts to your Fan page, you can use the My Del.icio.us application to import any bookmarks you may have made in your Del.icio.us account, you can use the Simply RSS application to bring in all the RSS feed you may have on your company website, you can edit your links section of have a variety of blogs or websites you may want to highlight perhaps by employees or partners of your company, and don’t forget to edit your Feed settings to include the complete versions of all your blog posts so they appear not only on your Fan page but on the Feeds of all your fans.

Throw an Event

Facebook Events are a great way of getting people together virtually or in person in support of your local business, brand or product. They are also a very economical way of getting the word out beyond your normal in-house marketing list by inviting the Fans of your Page. Fans can also help you promote your Facebook Event to their friends by sharing the event if it seems of value to a group of their friends.

Also don’t forget to follow-up after your event, it’s just good protocol to do so. If you had a very healthy debate with lots of questions – why not send a transcript out to everyone who attended or even those that didn’t attend. If some questions didn’t get answered because of time constraints – why not write up the answers and send them to the all attendees too.

The key point is try not to take a “set it and forget it” mentality to any social presence you have. While the costs of social marketing are low don’t let that fool you. The true cost is found in the creation of content. And your key to success will be the consistent participation and willingness to engage your customers you can create by using great content.

This article contains excerpts from Facebook Marketing For Dummies (September 2009, Wiley - available for pre-order on Amazon)

In a blog post last week, Dell revealed that it has generated more than $2 million in revenue from @DellOutlet, one of its many Twitter sites. Late last year, there were some headlines about Dell crossing the $1 million mark via Twitter and it’s only gotten bigger since then.

How did they do it? With a coupon code!

Wow, now that’s inventive. But this is not a dig at Dell it’s a dig at all of us marketers who say they don’t understand how to calculate an ROI from Social Media. My point is Dell isn’t using any secret sauce – its just plain old common sense. And at this point in social media or even in the development of the web - we have plenty of ways to track and measure lead generation coming from Social Media. So much so that I have lost all patience for this discussion.

In a blog post a few weeks ago called - Why is measuring Lead Gen in Social Media so hard? - I detailed a few ways that companies used to track lead generation such as: a unique 800 number in their white papers or a unique hotlink or email address embedded in their white papers. These would be only accessible via the various social media outposts they use to share their story like on RSS, syndicated Blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Same goes for Video or Podcasts – have a strong call to action and send them to a unique URL. Don’t have a call to action try sharing it with a service like Bit.ly – a unique service that shortens your URL’s and then provides unique tracking of them.

If that’s not enough try flipping the equation around and using Google Analytics to find out how much traffic was driven to your website from services like Twitter, blogs you syndicate to etc … If your tracking system isn’t robust enough to do that then remember back in the early days of Pay Per Click advertising when we used to create separate pages (I called them Ghost Pages) to track the traffic and conversions of each keyword. So for example if you had purchased a keyword such as: VoIP, I would set up a landing page on the website for that, a unique page for Google clicks, a unique page for Yahoo clicks and a unique page for AOL clicks (remember when we used to buy keywords there – sorry Tim Armstrong).

My point is back in the early days of the web marketers found ways to measure and track lead gen with a lot less sophisticated tools then we have now. True the number of channels have blossomed but that shouldn’t have changed our creativity when it comes to measuring the ROI of Social Media!

The short answer is – YES!

In a recent article in the NY Times called Tweeting Your Way to a Job. They talk a lot about people who have found a new job Tweeting for an employer. Social Media roles are opening up in many firms and the Twitterati that have a combination of public relations, analyst relations and even customer relations are snapping them up. But what about those people that are interviewing for a job?

I think it is equally as important for those that are job hunting to be Twittering. Not just for job leads but for the differentiation. What better way for prospective employers to get a sense of the way you think and your unique point of view. And what better way to distinguish yourself amongst a short list of potential hires than to have a strong following on Twitter because of a unique point of view.

I feel that building your network personally is one of the best things you can do for yourself because I believe in the next few years your social graph (those that follow you and those that you follow) not only on Twitter but on Facebook and LinkedIn will be used very differently than you use it today.

Remember we are still in the early years of Social Media and everything from a simple search to something more complex like job hunting will change as we start to leverage the social graph more and more. So don’t forget to build your network now before you need it!

After reading Chip and Dan heath’s article in Fast Company called “Why It May Be Wiser To Hire People Without Meeting Them”. I couldn’t help but agree with the findings in the article having fallen into that trap myself over the last few years with some key hires. In short, they talk a lot about how the interview process has little to do with the success of a candidate in your organization.

It’s true that every manager has their blind spots but I think marketing managers have it worse than other managers when it comes to hiring since most marketers are optimists by nature. Marketers want to believe in our products, marketers want to believe in our sales team, and most of all marketers want to believe in people. This is why the hiring process has always bedeviled me. Ask any of my new hires that I made interview with a half dozen people after I interviewed them! It was a way of compensating for my optimism.

They go on to say that: “Research has consistently shown that one of the best predictors of job performance is a work sample.” So if you agree with this premise I would say that those work samples should be the “social presence” of your candidate. What are they contributing on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Do they have a blog? What do they say?

Moreover my favorite sales guy here at Avaya (who writes the blog called: A Sales Guy) recently wrote an article on: Why Your Social Graph Will Be Worth as Much as Your Home - where he cites: “If employers, or recruiters can’t learn about you online, through your social graph, they won’t be interested.” Moreover he expects online vetting of dates, baby sitters etc will only increase and “having an online social presence will be the required price to play.”

And I agree with him – what better way to get inside the mind of a potential new hire than to see how they market themselves and whether their viewpoint matches up to your. Yet another use of Social Media we didn’t expect at the inception of Web 2.0.