It is essential to keep social media personal. Folks typically like to talk to a person and not a robot or a brand. But just how personal is personal. The 'rules of engagement' have not changed from traditional marketing to digital or social media marketing. It is good practice to tend to avoid engaging in politics or religion in business settings, for example, and this is not different in social media. Love it or hate it the Internet is a 'permanent record' of sorts. Knowing this, here are two things to think about: Any tweets, postings, comments, for example, are not only recorded permanently but subject to being indexed by search engines and other content consumers in the web. In many cases, this ends up in multiple copies of the content attributed to you. There are no 'take back stupid comment' buttons on the web. Whether tweeting, bloggig, or commenting on blogs, most everything you share in the web are short out of context snippets. This leaves your readers/viewers like prospects to c more »

There is no doubt that getting traffic to your site and exposure online increases your chances of developing leads. Here is how the Chamber is helping you on this regard: Over the last 30 days, the Chamber has gotten over 5,300 pageviews where over 500 of these are views of the member directory page. This translates to over 500 opportunities for someone to find you. Need I remind you that a photo of a funny profile guy doesn't help connect your name with your face? PageRank for the Chamber, a metric Google uses to measure how relevant a site is, is now 3 (out of 10) ... this might seem low but considering the average website PageRank is from 0 to 1 we are doing great. This is especially amazing when we have not yet started any search engine optimization. It is a well known fact that search engines like Google and Yahoo rank your site higher when links pointing to your site are highly relevant. Find your PageRank for free, visit http://www.pagerank.net/pagerank-checker/. more »