It’s a great way to get started quickly, but consider these factors.

Potential customers who want to contact your company are likely to turn to your Web site for a phone number or e-mail address. If that contact information is difficult to find, you could not only lose a sale, but your reputation could suffer as well. According to a study by MaCorr Research, 70 percent of consumers have a negative opinion of companies that don’t give them the opportunity to get in touch directly. Fortunately, it’s easy to make your contact information accessible on your Web site. Here are a few tips to help.

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Today we’re covering Part 4 of our Budgeting 2009 Web Strategy Series - Social Media.

Social Media

Cost: Free - Completely variable depending on scope

Time: An hour a day - at least

As a preface - I am not a social media expert. If you want expert analysis, see the resources below.

Social Media is all about community and conversations. You cannot simply sign up for Twitter and Facebook and consider it social media marketing. The biggest part of a social media budget, at least for us at 48Web, is time. It takes time to build community - and community is one of the most powerful facets of a an effective web strategy. There are three steps to using social media as a marketing tool - listen, join the conversation, and engage discussions. (If you think there are more or less, please share them with us in the comments).

Listening is easy and can be automated. This is the simplest step to get into social media - start listening. Subscribe to Twitter and Google Blog Searches to get started. Set up Google Blog Alerts for your company. All these listening tools are free. And if you want to really start researching - start using Trackur or FiltrBox. Setting up this research environment is easy and takes little time - but has a HUGE ROI. Joining the conversation is often the hardest part because social media is very adverse to traditional marketing messages. In fact - I’d just start joining discussions without any marketing broadcasts. Next up - engage conversations.. Start discussions and gear them towards your brand. Again - I am not a social media expert, but these methods do work. If you have other recommendations, please leave them in the comments.

Social media is a low budget (time and cost), high ROI method of marketing - It’s a must-do internet marketing tactic for an effective web strategy. If you are looking to get started in Social Media, check out Zane’s simple Social Media Starter Kit… Or, check out the Social Media Cheat Sheet. Or, see the resources below.

Tools and Services

There are dozens of tools and services to help you embrace social media and this is a very short list of those. Please let us know any additional tools or services you use in the comments.

• Conversations: Twitter, FriendFeed
• Research: Google Blog Search, Google Alerts, Twitter Search, Trackur

Resources

• Need Help? Ask us!
• Get ahold of Lava Row or Dosovo
• Follow on Twitter: Nathan, Jeremiah, Louis Gray, Danzarella, Mike Templeton, Todd Defren
• Blogs: Social Media AllTop, Christopher Penn, Lava Row, ConverStations, Louis Gray, Chris Brogan, GrowMap
• Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day(book)
• Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies(book)
• Have other resources for us? Leave them in the comments…

Budgeting 2009 Web Strategy

• Part 1: Hosting
• Part 2: Analytics
• Part 3: SEM/SEO
• Part 4: Social Media (you are here)

Featuring: Ask Andy I’ve done the research, so you don’t have to.

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Even if you do nothing, your site will be found–eventually. Use these techniques to make a bigger online impact faster than your competition.

Search engine indexing is how information is collected, parsed, and stored in search engine databases to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. The search engine index design uses interdisciplinary theories from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, physics and computer science.

Search engine optimization is about creating a site that meets search engine criteria.