Every now and then a site comes along and just explodes into the social media stratosphere. Pinterest is one such site. Just look at its growth. In June, it didn’t even have half a million visits. By December, it had over 11 million! And this is still an invitation-only site. (Email me if you want an invite!)

So what is the site exactly? It’s an online inspiration board, a place to “pin” images and group them together. Say you’re redoing your kitchen and searching online for ideas. Before Pinterest, it wasn’t easy to grab those images and put them all together on one easy-to-view (and share) inspiration board. (You could do it with Evernote but Evernote’s boards don’t render so simply and elegantly.) We built a house a few years ago and I bookmarked and tagged stuff in Evernote and nothing was as easy or fun to use as Pinterest.

If you are a product company, add a “pin it” button to your products, just like you have a Facebook “like it” button. Pinterest doesn’t seem to play well with Java, so check to make sure your images are pin-able.  Do this now. I wish I’d told you to do this last week because a lot of folks will be cruising around on their shiny new ipads this weekend, daydreaming on Pinterest.

Pinterest is the world’s largest idea board. Images are placed onto boards that are categorized. Looking for a craft project to do with the kids during the winter break? Search the DIY/Crafts boards.

Or a fun recipe for a holiday gathering? Check out this idea I pinned.

Planning a wedding? Make a board for flowers, one for food, one for dresses, one for decor . . . and share with your groom or wedding planner or mother.

The very social nature of this site is part of the reason for its adoption. It’s also insanely fun and useful. Friends tell me it’s addictive. And that, my friends, is marketing gold. Alas, they aren’t accepting ads (yet) but you can integrate the Pin It app into your site, as I mentioned. I’ve also seen brands create inspiration boards (Whole Foods has some great ones) that link back to their products. It’s a wonderful way to engage with your customers where they are already online and dreaming.

If you answered “Google,” you are . . . wrong. It’s Facebook and has been for a while now. Facebook is becoming the digital on ramp: Not only is it a place to see what your friends and colleagues are doing, it’s often the entry point to interact with your favorite brands or stores. I know if I’m looking to see if there’s a sale at any of my favorite stores, I check out their Facebook page first. Facebook is likely to have the most recent, topical promotions, contests and sales. Plus, a lot of businesses run Facebook-only specials.

For those of us old enough to remember AOL and its original “walled off” web model, it’s uncanny how much Facebook is sort of succeeding at that. You don’t have to go through Facebook to access content (the way AOL tried to force you) but you certainly can and because businesses are making their Facebook pages so engaging, Facebook itself IS becoming that digital gateway. Fascinating stuff!

Here are the top ten sites as ranked by Experian Hitwise for the week ending 11/12/2011.

Want more quick stats and useful info? Follow us on Facebook here.

More and more, it looks like social media is here to stay. In fact, more than 50% of all adults use some form of social networking DAILY (and 65% of all Internet users). Twitter’s usage alone grew from 8% of Internet users to 13% from November 2010 to May 2011. It’s not just teenagers using social media, and hasn’t been for a while: fully 83% of Facebook users are between the ages of 18-54 (and increasingly more women than men, which isn’t a huge surprise given that women tend to be slightly more social in real life, too).

Once in a great while, I send out an update. And by “once in a great while,” I mean something like “once a year.” A long time ago, I published an e-newsletter. Now I post tips here on the blog. (You can subscribe to it like a newsletter over on the right.)

It’s been a busy year at New Thought Marketing. Some highlights:

Mobile Apps

We’ve added mobile app development to our suite of services. Our first app (NameBuddy) is in the Apple app store and got a GREAT review on cnet. We’re currently in the early stages of development for a few more apps. As you’ve probably heard, more people are searching the Internet on their phones than on their computers now. Smartphone ownership and data usage have skyrocketed. There are so many opportunities for businesses to use mobile to increase their sales. We’re even testing out Facebook check-in deals for a physician practice client.

Mobile is probably the hottest and fastest-growing aspect of our business right now. We have a great development team, and our usual awesome designers and smart thinkers to help you develop a mobile strategy that works for you.

Social Media

We’re creating Facebook pages for clients (like this one) and running targeted contests and Facebook ads to drive engagement. We’ve seen strong results with Facebook ads. They’re inexpensive and offer endless targeting abilities. In a campaign we did last year for a major business association, Facebook was one of our best performing online ad outlets.

Online Reputation Management

If you haven’t claimed your business on Google Places yet, then quit reading this and go do it right now; it’ll only take you a few minutes. It will help you come up better on search results. Write a good description for Google Places and use that same description on other directory and review sites, like Yelp and Kudzu. (Make sure to claim your businesses on those sites, too.)

Then Google yourself and monitor your reviews on a regular basis (weekly for most of you). If you need help getting this all set up, let me know. We can do it for you or help you with it. We’ve had clients bring their laptops over and we divided up the list and got them set up in a few hours.

It’s a simple thing that many people put off but it’s really important you claim your pages and begin to ask your customers to write reviews. Word-of-mouth is still the top way to grow your business; increasingly, though, word-of-mouth is happening online. These are basic, easy tactics that every business should be doing.

Twitter

We’re still doing the occasional “Tweetorial,” helping business get set up on Twitter and learn the ins and outs of using it. Even if you don’t think you need Twitter, please go ahead and register for an account and grab your Twitter name (like www.twitter.com/sherean which is my personal one or www.twitter.com/newthoughtmktg) so that nobody else claims it. Same thing goes for Facebook. You want to set up your page and claim your vanity URL. (One minor hiccup with Facebook: you have to have 25 followers to your page before you can claim your company name/URL, assuming it’s available. You can probably ask your friends to follow you so you hit that platform quickly.)

Google+

The short answer is: wait. They haven’t rolled out their business offering yet. I do have lots of invites if you want to try it out and see what all the cool kids are doing.

YouTube

Video is a great way to allow prospects to get to know you. Did you know you can set up a branded channel on YouTube (like we’ve done here)? You can then embed videos on your website. The videos don’t have to be fancy. Just try not to say “um” or “you know” too many times and you’ll be fine! (I have a tendency to scratch my nose and play with my hair too much. So irritating!)

How to Keep Up with All This

There are a lot of inexpensive, effective marketing opportunities out there but it is daunting to keep up with them all and figure out which ones will give you a good R.O.I. We try to post links to smart how-to articles on our Facebook page, so follow us there if Facebook is your thing; we also opine on our blog. You can subscribe to our blog like a newsletter or it’s even available now in the Kindle store if you want to read it there!

Take good care,

Sherean and the team at New Thought Marketing

I love Scrabble. My husband loves Scrabble. We own five or six Scrabble games: one deluxe edition, the Cubs edition, a travel version, a plain old regular version, etc. A few years ago, people were playing a Scrabble-ish  game, “Scrabulous,” like mad on Facebook. Problem was, that app was not developed by Scrabble, so Hasbro sued for copyright infringement and the app was removed. No worries; other Scrabble lookalikes have popped up in its wake.

People still play word games on Facebook but the “in” thing right now is to play on your phone. The most popular app is called “Words with Friends” and it allows you to play with other friends who are online, or to play with random folks if your friends are all too scared to play with you (yeah, I’m talking to you, Wendy!). Take that! Triple Word Score with an “X” on a double letter tile! (Words with Friends for iPhone/iPad here, and just released for Android phones here.)

Hasbro has been criticized for not digitizing their game fast enough or providing it in all the various digital formats their customers want. Their response?

“Hasbro innovates, but we innovate when we know there’s a real market,” according to Mark Blecher, senior vice president for digital media and gaming for Hasbro. Mark, Mark, Mark. I realize “innovate” is only an 11-point word and hardly worth your time, but to innovate is to lead, to come up with something new. You just admitted that you follow the market. WTH?

Do you think housewives were screaming for a microwave when it was created? Think they were just sitting around waiting for someone to come up with a way to nuke their food into dry, hot, rubbery messes? Do you think the folks who created the Internet were going where there was already an established market? Cuz really, there were so many people sitting around with broadband connections just wondering what to do with them 50 years ago.

If you wait until there is already a “real” market, you run the very real risk of becoming the market loser. Just ask Borders.

p.s. Read more of this story at the New York Times. I’ve been very pleased with their tech and social media coverage lately.

Good grief. Who is in charge of their PR over there? Never mind that their reputation went from 60 to 0 in nothing flat because of their vehicles’ sudden acceleration problem. Now someone at Toyota has decided that the best way to combat the negative PR is to pay a bunch of mommy bloggers to write positive things. Now, to be fair, they aren’t asking them to lie. And there is a push among bloggers to reveal if they’re writing a paid review or not. (It’s called Blog with Integrity, and yes, I’ve signed the pledge.)

But the better way to combat negative publicity is to do something positive as a company. Do lots of positive things and give people a chance to write about that.

This is all part of a growing field of marketing science called “Online Reputation Management,” or “OTR” if you’re collecting marketing acronyms. It’s one of the most important, and most overlooked, tactics a business can employ. And many of the companies who are trying to do it (like Toyota, I assume), are making a mess of it. Stay tuned to our blog. We’re working on some OTR how to’s for you.

In the meantime, read the whole story of Toyota’s botched mommy blogger outreach here. The blogger who wrote this is not a marketer by trade, but she sure writes like she is one. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

UPDATE: The company that contacted the blogger with the offer says they are not affiliated with Toyota, nor did Toyota ask them to do this. They are trying to build a company where stay at home moms can be paid for simple blog posts and I guess they put up their own money and selected Toyota as a test case to build their proof-of-concept. <sigh> OK, so I could write a whole other post on why this was a bad idea, starting with the fact that Toyota might not like it very much. And that there are some other, well-established companies already doing this, such as BlogHer. Not to say you can’t create a competitive venture, just that if you’re going up against a well-funded competitor, you’d better have a strong differentiating proposition, which this company does not seem to have. Also, you might not want to mess up right out the gate with your intended target audience!

One of the most misunderstood social networking sites is Yelp! Is it a social network, a location-based check-in game, or a review site? Well, the answer is “Yes” to all three.

Yelp! Is designed to give users the experience of a social network geared at connecting with other users while also leaving reviews of products/services/companies on the site. While Facebook Places, Google Places, Foursquare and many other location-based apps attempt to do the same thing, Yelp! is moving ahead at a pace that deserves attention.

Yelp! released growth statistics last week that indicate they are a marketing channel every brick-and-mortar business should be paying attention to. Here are some quick stats you should consider:

• Yelp! currently boasts 41 million visitors monthly
• Yelp! has 15 million reviews (at the time the report was released last Thursday) and counting
• The growth curve for this site has been exponential over the last 5 years. This means we can continue to expect people to interact with the site, telling people where they’re doing business, and writing reviews
• 82% of Yelpers are under the age of 50, 36% aged 35-49.
• 68% are college grads, 21% with graduate education
• 63% earn $60k+, 35% earn $100k+

With these statistics, it’s hard to imagine why any business would not want to put their best foot forward. You can learn more about how to claim/list your business on Yelp! through a YouTube video they’ve provided.

Oh wait, I almost forgot, you do get stuff for claiming your business. Here’s some of what you can enjoy once you do claim your business:

• Statistics on how many people are viewing your business on Yelp!
• Ability to promote new offers, events, etc.
• Ability to communicate, either publically or privately, with people who’ve reviewed your company. This allows you to address any dissatisfied customers/clients and make the relationship right again.
• Increased exposure on traditional search engines

We’re on Yelp. Take a few minutes today and claim your company. Need help? Contact Josh (at NewThoughtMarketing dot com).

Social media isn’t for every business. But as more and more people log on to Facebook, tweet out every little thing, and broadcast their location with Foursquare, social media is increasingly becoming an important part of the marketing mix for businesses, large and small.

Here, then, are the latest traffic numbers for the most dominant player, Facebook. We always joke with our clients that Facebook and Twitter might not be for everybody, but with numbers like this, we would be committing “marketing malpractice” if we didn’t at least tell you about it! It’s worth noting that Facebook now has more visits than any other site on the web, including Google.

Experian HitWise Top 20 WebSites Ranked by Visits

It’s an interesting question and certainly varies depending on your perspective. Goldman Sachs thinks Facebook is worth $50 billion. Financial blogger Barry Ritholtz has doubts about Facebook’s ability to monetize its user base:

If and when Facebook goes public, they must monetize their user base — I find it hard to see how they do that without annoying their base of users away. . . The challenge for FB is that as a free site, there is a dynamic tension between the users and the people who seek to monetize those users.

As marketers, we look at Facebook’s numbers and salivate. This year, Facebook overtook Google as the most trafficked site on the web. Facebook logs more visitors and more time spent per visitor on the site than any other. Most of its users are in the coveted 18-49 demographic. (In fact, less than 9% of its users are teen-agers.)

All of these numbers would be meaningless to marketers, of course, if we can’t find a way to reach and engage with this massive horde of users. The explosion in business Facebook pages is one way for businesses to deepen and solidify their relationships with customers and prospective customers. Big companies get this; so do some smaller ones. We’re seeing more and more of our clients take advantage of this free tool.

And that brings us back to Barry’s point. Perhaps the BEST way for businesses to use Facebook is the FREE way. We can also buy ads and Facebook’s targeting abilities are very, very good. We just ran a campaign for a client across multiple sites and Facebook outperformed them all, including Google. Of course, that’s just one campaign and one client. But we’ve noticed that all our Facebook ad campaigns are performing well.

So from a marketing perspective, Facebook offers us a number of ways to reach your customers effectively and affordably. To Barry’s point, though, they need to continue to offer innovative options that marketers will pay for, if they want to monetize their user base.