If you are an SEO, I bet you get a little tired of making titles out of keywords like “mobile application development” and “business process improvement”? I sure do. While keyword optimized titles are legit SEO-wise, it can be challenging to create an interesting title out of dull keywords.

Back in my more regular blogging days (3-5 per week) one of my most ridiculous blog titles was, “Rich Internet Application Database Development: Project Crescent” Keyword stuffing anyone? I was obviously tired after writing the article, and just took the easy (and boring) way out with the title.

If you read the content/news-aggregator Huffington Post, you know that they have great titles for their syndicated content. I visit often and usually make several tabs of articles I want to read, simply because the titles are so interesting and make me to want to know more.

Because Huffington Post is an aggregator, they have the luxury of having both a title that is optimized (coming from the actual news source) and a vanity title (that they ‘rename’ the content, this is the one you see and click on). This means they can focus on pure draw with the headline.

Here are a few examples:

Unfortunately, we’re not all aggregators and cannot have vanity titles for our own original content. There is however a lesson in this; about breaking the mold on conventional titles.  In the ever-evolving world of SEO, Google Panda and changing user relevancy algorithms, creating less keyword-stuffed, more interesting titles will serve us better rankings and popularity-wise.

How to Create Interesting Titles for Content:

Limit keywords: Fit in a keyword if you can, 1-2 maximum. We know sometimes they have to be there, but do not keyword stuff.

Leave them asking questions: “How did she change it all?” “How was the Cain Train rocked?” Make readers want to answer the question that comes from the title.

Put away the thesaurus: Try to use smaller words; big words do not register as easily with readers.

Test Different Things: Test a sensational/goofy/alluring title once-in-a-while to see if it works.

Take some time to think about it. Many of us rush titles because it’s the last thing we think about; but it’s really the price tag on your product. How will your title entice people to act?

Soldier On SEOs!

For small businesses not up to speed on social media, this form of online networking can open up a plethora of opportunities for companies who are looking to better engage their current and potential customers.

But what happens when your social media plans go astray? Is it too late to fix them or can you make the necessary changes and still capitalize on all social media has to offer your company?

The answer to those two questions is no and yes, respectively.

Understanding Your Social Media Mistakes

The first and foremost task is realizing what the mistake is, how it happened, and what can be done about it. Once those areas are understood, you can be on your way to bettering your social media efforts.

So what are some of the top SM mistakes your small business should try and avoid? They include:

• Not being social media oriented to begin with – This sounds like a no-brainer, but you would be surprised how many companies are slow to catch on to social media. Whether they think it is not worth their time or they don’t believe they have the resources for it, both are bad excuses. When used correctly, social media for a business can be quite profitable, both in terms of public relations and return on investment (ROI).;

• Not tracking your SM metrics – What’s the sense of doing something if you’re not going to track the results? Too often, companies will throw stuff out there for the public and not measure the ROI. Take the time to delve into the analytics and see what aspects of your company’s SM program is working and what needs attention;

• Not engaging when you get feedback – If you have a company blog, Twitter, Facebook accounts etc. you’re more than likely going to receive feedback from both current and potential customers. When an individual sends you questions and/or comments regarding your products and services, you need to respond in a prompt manner. In the event you don’t, the individual contacting your company is likely to take their questions and/or concerns elsewhere, perhaps your competition. This includes responding to negative feedback, something too many companies shy away from;

• Not providing fresh content – In the event part of your SM campaign involves blogging, you cannot blog once or twice a month as a business and expect to gain a large following. Along with the obvious reason for wanting fresh content (being viewed as up with the times), the major search engines will treat you more kindly if your content is fresh. Stale content leads to a lower ranking and less eyes on the page;

• Not thinking ahead – Remember, social media is always evolving, so you need to have your finger on the pulse. If your company chooses to outsource its social media needs, make sure you are working with a public relations or marketing firm that has your best interests in mind, not what is best for them. If you’re doing the SM campaign in-house, then sit down with the marketing team (assuming they are leading the project) and ask them to plan out what they will be doing tomorrow, the next day and the next day regarding social media. When consumers come to your site, you want them leaving with that ‘wow factor’ and not the ‘I’ve seen this so many times before’ factor.

Utilizing a strong social media campaign for your company is actually easier than you think.

At the end of the day, being social in today’s world has a lot more rewards to it than being anti-social.

Dave Thomas, who covers among other subjects’ business phone systems writes extensively for www.business.com an online resource destination for businesses of all sizes to research, find, and compare the products and services they need to run their businesses.

Hi, I’m Lauren, the newest addition to the Room 214 team. As the company’s new research maven, I’ll frequently share my thoughts about all things social media and WOM. I’m looking forward to opening up some conversations with our readers about the way that you and I view and understand the ever-changing online world.

As this is my first proper post for Room 214, I’ve done a lot of thinking about the concept of voice in a company blog. I’ve spent the whole week obsessing over this post. What should I say? What do you, the reader, feel like reading? Will you connect with me? Will you comment? How does one begin the practice of being a consistent, passionate blogger for her company? I began to search around.

Forming a Relationship

Spend some time Googling best practices for corporate blogs and you’ll find an overwhelming amount of information. You’ll also find this depressing study from Forrester, which says that in 2008 only 16% of those who read corporate blogs trusted them. Yikes. People think corporate blogs lack honesty.

Knowing that stumbling block, it’s important to consider why successful corporate blogs create a sense of trust with their readers. Jason Keath compiled a list of great examples of corporate blogs that I spent some time looking through. The radically different styles of each of those blogs reminds me of the importance of knowing your audience as a basis for forming trust. So do you know your audience? How is it that you come to understand your audience?

Jeremiah Owyang took the time to poll his blog readers and was kind enough to share the results here, which gave not only him but also his readers a chance to understand why people chose to connect with his website. Here at Room 214, we do this on a much larger scale, asking who, what, where, when, why and how as a basis for shaping communication with our clients’ consumers.

Creating Space for Dialogue

But it’s not just about knowing your audience. It’s about having a conversation with them, a notion that Jason Cormier explained as the top of the Conversation Maturity Model. Marriott shared a lovely, simple detail on hosting Cleveland’s 18th annual Polka Festival, letting me know about their engagement in the local community. Zappos taught me the best way to wrap a package for return, which is helpful to both me and them. All the blogs on this top ten list, because they are blogs, are clearly sharing with me. But, as explicitly clear with the Zappos example, they let me know that they are listening to me or, rather, the collective “me” that makes up their blog consumer. I enjoy this. I feel empowered to let them know what is on my mind.

Where Do We Go From Here?

It’s funny to me that, on a high level, the basic tenets of a good corporate blog sound like the same basic tenets of a healthy romantic relationship: establish trust, listen, create a forum for open dialogue. Interesting. So here I am, pondering what to do with all this and hoping that I can begin a conversation. In the coming weeks I’ll spend some time highlighting interesting conversations I find online. To kick it off, I’d love to hear of the ones you think are most interesting, whether that means successful, bizarre, failed, or other.

Five years ago, search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising were only beginning to take shape as legitimate lead generation and marketing strategies. At the time, SEO and PPC were cutting edge marketing strategies – many brands and companies had heard the buzz surrounding SEO and PPC, but were unable to pinpoint strategy or purpose behind it.

Today, SEO and PPC have evolved into common marketing strategies for brands to place their marketing budget. Companies understand the huge opportunities that exist within search marketing for return on investment. Social media, conversely, exists much like SEO and PPC did five years ago. Companies and brands are keen to explore the social media space, but are often unable to define social media marketing success or execute a defined strategy.

Within our niche in the industry, we execute both search marketing and social media marketing for clients. As such, there exists a unique opportunity to take learnings and success from search marketing efforts and transition into the social media space. This is what happened with an opportunistic client of ours.

We were initially hired to restructure The Client’s AdWords account and increase conversion volume. They had managed their PPC efforts internally, and reached out to us to take their account to the next level. After much research and testing, we were able to determine what converted within their account – what calls to action best resonated with users, what keywords and themes were most effective, and what landing page variations were most conducive to converting. We branched out their PPC efforts into Yahoo! and Bing with continued success. Eventually, The Client began asking, “what next?” – their PPC accounts were converting in record numbers at the lowest cost per conversion yet.

Moving forward, we thoroughly researched The Client and their presence online and saw a huge opportunity for them to improve their organic search rankings. Therefore, our next step in their overall strategy was an SEO overhaul. We were able to construct an SEO blueprint based upon their PCC successes and laid out a clear strategy with actionable goals. This SEO strategy is still being executed, but we have already seen important gains in organic search results for several search terms. Recently, The Client again asked “what next?” with their sights set on entering into the space of social media.

The next phase in the overall strategy for The Client was taking the business intelligence learned from successful PPC and SEO implementation and applying it into the space of social media. Sometimes, depending on what industry you are looking to engage with, simply setting up a Facebook page or a Twitter handle is not a priority for a client. After all, you cannot fit a square peg into a round hole. With The Client being in a niche industry, there simply was not enough chatter or interest on Facebook or Twitter to warrant developing a strategy. Therefore, we researched alternative, more relevant opportunities in the social media space for The Client to engage with.

After meeting with key stakeholders and discussing goals, we were able to conclude that the next logical step was for The Client to begin a blog. A blog strategy presented the best opportunity to base conversation in the social media space around learnings from search marketing. Why? Because through search marketing, we are able to pinpoint what inspires potential customers to engage with the company. The Client will be able to create engaging conversations based around these learnings through a blog. They will be able to reach their target audience, reach industry influencers who act as information-hungry word of mouth propellers,as well as comment on other niche blogs, message boards and forums.

As it was with search marketing five years ago, social media marketing today poses a conundrum for brands – they realize that they should probably participate in the space, but are unclear how to enter in and achieve success. For a company like The Client, calculated steps and a logical progression from search engine marketing to social media marketing proved to be the best strategy. The calls to action that have worked best through SEO and PPC now act as a road map for content creation we know will be relevant to prospects, customers and influencers in the social media space.

Has anyone else had success transitioning learnings from search engine marketing into social media? Have any questions or comments? Leave them here!

As many of you know, we have worked to keep a very free and open culture here. One of the ways that manifests is in Room 214 being a flat organization. That means letting natural talent and leadership emerge without forcing programmatic job descriptions and titles. As James likes to say, “job titles are for your next job.”

With respect to the success generated from these kinds of practices, sharing profits regularly with employees has been the intention since forming the company in 2004. Our decision to do this (every 90 days) is about three things: driving performance, recognizing the individuals’ work that helps makes us profitable, and the act of giving.

So I’ll get to it: Each of you who were eligible to receive profit sharing for Q2 should have seen it in your last check. Furthermore, your quarterly profit sharing for the 3^rdquarter is tied to the following actions:

1. Innovate: Your first objective is to pick any one of our current clients for the purpose of focusing on what we could be doing better for them within the next 75 days. Consider things like case studies, new applications, methodologies, best practices, creative concepts, etc.

2. Execute: Your second objective is to actually implement your idea(s). Keep in mind this is by no means a “team-me” effort. Expectations may include required buy-in from the client, in addition to coordinated brainstorming and review with your peers.

3. Share: Once you have implemented your idea, you will write a blog post about what you did. What was implemented? What were your thoughts around measuring success? Has it benefitted the client? If not yet, then when? What were the results? What was learned?

Potential Limitations:
a.) Some of your ideas may require additional budgeting from the client. File those for later – and determine what can be done with existing budgets. Proposed out-of-pocket expenses will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

b.) We are moving at the speed of social media here. That means it may not make sense to do a deep dive into application development. You know who to talk to on our team if you do… just keep in mind they should be busier than you, and October 15 is your deadline to do your blog post.

c.) Client confidentiality should be an obvious consideration. Feel free to check with me or James if you are hesitant about what can or can’t be said in your blog post. If you choose to use the client’s name in your post, save it as a draft to be reviewed prior to posting.

I know we didn’t think of everything, so feel free to post your questions as comments to this post, and I will respond in the same. Thanks for your awesome contribution to the team, and good hunting!

I know there is already a great deal of information on this, but it keeps coming up in client conversations. Since one of our clients recently requested that we create a checklist, I’m posting a version of it here to share with you all. As always, feel free to add your input too!

Blogging Best Practices Checklist

When Posting
1. Title: Intriguing titles go a long way. Consider using odd numbers as part of your title (example: The 7 Deadly Sins of Social Media)

2. Keywords: As much as possible, use your top keywords in:
i.) The post title
ii.) Hyperlinks pointing to older posts or specific company web pages in the post body
iii.) Tags used to describe the post subject matter

3. Scheduling: Consult your editorial calendar, in addition to top keywords highlighted in your SEO/Analytics report and/or your keyword analysis. No less that one post per week if possible.

4. Images: Including an image with a post is recommended when possible. Use your keywords in the image “alt” attribute when possible

5. Links: Link to other blogs and/or to previous posts of your own (using keywords for links to posts of your own when possible)

6. Post Length and Content: Mix up length of your posts. Don’t be afraid to be brief (i.e. 200 words). When possible, offer analysis, new tips and tricks

7. Submitting: If resources are available, run your pending post by a trusted advisor or editor who can do a review, make minor edits and immediately submit on your behalf. If it has to go back to you for your “final approval,” it may not be worth having an approval process.

8. Announcing: Sometimes announce on other social networks to notify others about your post (example: Facebook or Twitter). Chris Brogan recommends doing this tactfully by writing a question, then including a link to your post. Also remember not all posts are Twitter worthy – so don’t abuse this.

When Commenting
1. On Your Blog: Comment to other’s comments in your own blog. This will grow the conversation and ad more value to your posts

2. On Other Blogs: Make your comments thoughtful, beginning often by referencing what stood out to you in the post or in another’s comments. Strive to include a valuable take-away for anyone else reading your comments

3. Frequency: No hard rule, but remember conversations are easier to join than start. Commenting on a few of the same blogs often can establish a relationship with the blogger and their audience.

4. Linking: If you are linking to content of your own, be sure it very relevantly addresses the topic at hand. Consider including links to other blogs often. Linking to your own content in a comment is better received when the blogger recognizes you have commented earlier.

Now I understand that there are a ton of bloggers out there posting innocuous crappy content, but let’s keep this conversation in the mindset of business blogging.

First off – in business blogging you better be blogging about what you know about, or don’t even come to the party. Can we all agree on that?

The real conflict is in the need to “filter” employee blog content. Most companies should have a blogging policy about disclosure, offensive content and profanity to set the parameters for blogging under the corporate banner. Can we all agree on that?

Now the crux becomes letting go and not reviewing every post before it goes live out of fear of what employees are going to say. A company MUST embrace the fact that employees are humans, who operate on emotion and from time-to-time might post something that’s not totally in agreement with management.

In social media conversations, it is very apparent when someone’s content has been cleansed by “corporate message handlers”. How do we know this? The same way we know politicians are lying to us. It’s too crafted, there’s zero real emotion, no personal experience, no point of view that calls out a position on the topic matter that someone is willing to be accountable for.

So here’s my plea to businesses considering blogging – if you live in fear of what your employees might say – if your messaging is cleansed and reviewed by legal – then please, please, please don’t blog.

Read Wired’s recent article The See-Through CEO on Radical Transparency. Use that as a basis for considering if you want to enter the online conversation. If it freaks you out, go back to sending out press releases as your official means of communications.

"More and more, corporations find themselves in the headlines because they ignore two realities of the information age:

1. A company's attempt to covertly influence opinion is only as effective as the reaction people have when they find out who's behind it and why.
2. Yes, they will find out."

He's right. Transparency has become the currency of online reputation. Simple oversights can make your company look clueless, and attempts to conceal, misdirect, or misinform often generate outright scorn — causing lasting damage to your reputation and your business.

Here are my tips for transparency in conversational media. These apply to PR/marketing pros as well as news organizations, bloggers, citizen journalists, and, well, anyone…

He wrote: "…It turns out the designers [had] just built their own blogging platform which they would happily set up for the client.

"…I asked some basic questions such as, does the platform have RSS feeds and does it support trackback links? At this point the main designer looked blank, turned to his colleague and said: 'Do you know what he's talking about?'

"Luckily he did. But neither of them seemed to understand the importance of [these features]."

With such a broad variety of blogging tools available these days for free or for license, and given the speed at which blogging evolves, it amazes me that any organization would consider building their own blogging tool. Especially when the people building it obviously lack familiarity with crucial features that support public conversations and findability.

If your organization is considering building its own blogging tool: Stop! Trust me, you'll be much better off examining existing popular tools and choosing one to integrate into your site.

Why? Because then you can take advantage of updates that the people who really live and breathe blogging every day build into those tools. You won't be forever playing catch-up. Ultimately, you'll be able to converse more easily online without having to worry about tools getting in your way.

TIP: If your blog is currently supported by a custom tool, it's time to take a look at third-party options and consider migrating. I've worked with several custom-built content management systems, some of which have had blogging tools tacked on as an afterthought, and they're always far more trouble and far less flexible than third-party or open-source solutions such as Movable Type, WordPress, or Drupal.