User Generated Content (UGC) is content that someone outside of your company generates. It is likely generated about your brand whether or not you are aware of it. It is authentic, using keywords that the consumer uses. So why not provide a forum on your website for it and let your users help improve and market your business?

UGC has many benefits:

• Rich keywords for SEO that your marketing department may not have thought of
• Additional and fresh content for SEO
• A reason for users to drive traffic to your site
• Community development and participation chain extension: Users who contribute content to your site have an investment and are more engaged
• Reduction in customer support/ service calls and expenses
• Product development. If you can create an engaged community of users, they can help you improve and develop products.

Types of UGC that can be incorporated into your site:

• Blog comments and conversations
• Twitter/ Facebook streams
• Ratings & Reviews
• Forums (Ask & Answer type platforms)
• Wishlists
• Photo & Video Galleries
• Polls & Surveys
• “Like” buttons

Invite to Pimp Your Blog

A great recent example I witnessed of using a blog (and Twitter) to create UGC and engagement was from someone I follow on Twitter, social media strategist Danny Brown. Danny sent out a tweet inviting his followers to shamelessly promote their blog. I hadn’t read Danny’s blog until he gave me this opportunity. He gained a new follower (probably many) out of the invitation. He introduced his community to each other’s interests and blogs. He drove traffic (and links—key for SEO) to his site and created conversations (172 comments to date) with people. You can see this example at http://dannybrown.me/2010/02/18/an-invite-to-pimp-your-blog/.

Businesses who have not yet implemented social media into their marketing plans are wondering why they should and what kind of ROI they can expect. There are some businesses who have had success in quantifying the return of their social media efforts. One such company is Dell. Dell has used Twitter to both improve customer satisfaction and to drive buyers to their outlet store. They were able to survey their Twitter followers to determine what percentage found out about the outlet store through Twitter and using that quantify new revenue numbers. Other businesses are also finding creative ways to do the same for their social media plans. Here’s a great article at Mashable.com with ideas on how to measure the ROI of your social media plan. Note: The slide show in the Mashable article is a good one!

Even Dell could not have known what their results would be before they put forth the effort. There is no way to know prior to implementing a social media strategy exactly what the ROI will be, but if you have clear goals such as customer retention, conversion to sales, engagement or driving web traffic, etc. you will be able to measure the results as your strategy progresses.

Social media is simply a new tool in the marketer’s toolbox. The more time and resources you invest into it and the more creative uses you find for it, the more influential it becomes. You print a brochure and it isn’t just the brochure itself that sells your product, it is also how you use the brochure. Some brochures get thrown out and have no influence and others make a difference in a person’s decision to buy.

But before you head into implementing a social media strategy, you need to have a clear concept of wha

One of the few positive aspects of a recession is that it creates and motivates entrepreneurs. According to Entrepreneur.com, “Results from Challenger, Gray & Christmas’ job market index revealed that 8.7 percent of job seekers gained employment by starting their own businesses in second quarter 2009–way, way up from the record low of 2.7 percent during the last quarter of 2008.” New businesses create new jobs, which will also help us climb our way out of this recession. Are you an entrepreneur? Have you ever thought of starting your own business? Do you know someone thinking of starting a business? There are a few basics that you will need from a marketing perspective to get you going: a logo, business cards and a website.

We here at Kaleidos Marketing like to think of ourselves as entrepreneurs and aspire to support those like us, and those who have the motivation and creativity to help pull our economy out of this recession. So… Kaleidos Marketing is offering a branding package that includes a logo design, business card design and printing and a basic 4-5 page website designed, programmed and optimized for SEO with a content management system for only $2250. This package retails for more than $5000 and will be available for only $2250 until March 1, 2010 at which time we will consider renewing it based upon its success and positive feedback.

So, what’s the catch? Well there are a couple of limitations, but you can always add to the package. We are happy to provide estimates for any “extras”.

How does it work? You give us your elevator pitch and describe and show us a couple of logos that you like and what you like about them. We’ll take that and come up with two original logo options for you. You can then give us feedback and we’ll make one round of revisions, presenting you with a final professional logo that represents your business. Then, we’ll take the logo and put it into a couple of business card designs. Again, if you have any business cards that you really like, share them with us and what you like about them and we’ll incorporate that into your business card design. You choose the design you like, give us any changes and then we’ll send your final design to print, providing you with a set of 250 business cards that you can be proud to hand out, printed on 14pt CS25 gloss card stock. Then finally we’ll design a 4-5 page website for you and program it into a content management system so that you can change the text on the go. No need to contact us and pay us to change it for you. You have control. Once we have set you up, you will actually enter the content yourself.

This package includes a basic website, which means that it does not include any flash, e-commerce, forms, blogs, photo or video slideshows, domain name registration, hosting, e-mail, etc. You will provide content and photography. If any of these things are important to your web presence we are happy to provide an estimate and you can opt to incorporate it now, or wait until your budget allows.

Oh, and once you have entered your content and the website is ready to go live we will optimize the site for search engines. We will write meta tags for each page of the website and submit it to the larger search engines. Voila.

As we have become more engaged on Twitter over the past couple of months we have seen Twitter work its way up to our top traffic source. Our number of Twitter followers has increased and likely many of them are clicking through to our website link to learn more about us before deciding whether to follow. Also during the past couple of months we have been more dedicated to this new blog and seen it work its way up to the second most visited page of our website. We have posted links on Twitter to our blog posts and likely some of our followers have clicked through to read our posts. Hopefully they have found them informative!

According to Mashable, including a link in your Twitter profile is a “great way to drive traffic back to your destination of choice; although, the link does not provide any offsite reputation – a.k.a. SEO link juice – due to a “Nofollow” attribute that Twitter has in place.”

As an agency sometimes we forget to market ourselves as we market our clients. There are many times in this career where I have quoted the old saying that the cobbler’s son has no shoes. We are proud to say that in this case we are implementing some of the tactics that we encourage for our clients and seeing them work.

What we need to keep in mind both for ourselves, and for our clients, is that while these SEO and social marketing initiatives may help drive traffic and position us as knowledgeable, or maybe even experts if we are successful, it will require a tipping point to actually result in new business.