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

Last week, I introduced you to Josh, our new search engine optimization (SEO) specialist, and I promised you we’d be rolling out search engine packages. We’ve put together basic packages where we make sure your pages are set up with the appropriate tags and content/copy. Our packages are a la carte so if you only need us to do the set-up, we can. Or if you need monthly link building, we have that, too.

We’ve also heard from a lot of you that you’d like a Facebook page, but aren’t sure how to set it up. Take a look at the pages we’ve done for Atlanta Women’s Specialists and Happy Baby Solutions. Looking for a more custom look? Take a look at this custom welcome page Kemba, our creative director, designed.

Vesatee and I are at the Women’s Council of Realtors/Alabama Chapter (WCR) annual retreat at Callaway Gardens. They asked us here to speak on social media and other online marketing tools. Today, we discussed the importance of referrals in service-based businesses (well, any business really). Social media gives us the ability to amplify that word-of-mouth. If you used to be able to call 10 people a day, you can now easily reach hundreds of people that you already know (if you know that many people) in just one day — well, minutes really.

I meet lots of social media skeptics, people who think it’s just another waste of their time. And some of it is. But I think most of us agree that we want to hang out where our customers are hanging out, and increasingly, that’s online. They are interacting on Facebook, using Twitter to communicate, uploading videos to YouTube and blogging. It’s important to cruise this virtual town square and insert yourself in these online conversations.

The women of WCR understand this. They are building their local association chapters, in addition to building their individual businesses. They are dynamic and motivated. They understand that in times of economic distress, it’s more important than ever to step up one’s game.

Tomorrow, we are going to teach the group how to use Twitter. Twitter, for all its bare-bones functionality (it is, after all, just short messages), is still baffling for new users to figure out. The interface is not intuitive; that’s why so many people use Twitter apps like Tweetdeck, Twhirl and the like. For new people just getting started, the learning curve can be steep. What’s a “retweet?” What’s the difference between an “@reply” and a “dm”? Heck, what’s an “@reply” anyway?

Given how confusing it can be to get started, it’s remarkable how much Twitter usage has grown: it grew an astonishing 2,613% year to year (July 08 to July 09). Somebody’s figuring it out. Your customers? Your competitors? Might it be time for you to find out?

Thanks to the WCR for asking us to be part of their retreat.

“I don’t even talk to anybody with less than 900,000 followers,” opines Ryan Seacrest in this satiric little bit with Ben Stiller on how to get Twitter followers. For those of you who came to the Tweetorial yesterday, I thought this might provide some additional, uh, insight. Enjoy!