Brands cannot afford to not be on media social anymore. Whether you like it or not, people are taking about you on the Web. It is better for the growth and long-term survival of your business that you monitor and participate in those discussions.

Where do you start?

The answer depends on your goal, how confortable/savvy you are with the tools, how much time and ressources you can allow to the task and what is your industry (B2B vs. B2C). In short, there is no one size fits all answer. Instead, let’s go over the 4 main tools for business to become an active participant in social media.

Remember to use a friendly, casual tone conversation in all your messages whether you are posting on Twitter, Facebook, writing a post on your blog or commenting another blog. People are looking for authenticity. They do not want to read formal messages that look like they were taken from a press release. Use as a reference how you speak in every day conversations at the office.

Twitter

Twitter launched yesterday its Twitter 101 guide for business. An excerpt from the guide states that

From local stores to big brands, and from brick-and-mortar to internet-based or service sector, people are finding great value in the connections they make with businesses on Twitter.

What I like about Twitter is that it is easy to setup an account. It allows brands to experiment the benefit of social media without investing time and money on an infrastructure. All you need to do is open your account – finding the right user name may be the most time consuming for some. Import your brand avatar and a branded profile background before you launch your account. Make sure to fill up the bio with the description of your Twitter account and put a link to your Web site or blog.

Tweeple (users of Twitter) prefer to talk with a brand that identifies their spoken person(s) on their bio. It is not an absolute must but it helps to humanize the conversations.

Facebook Fan Pages

If a brand wish to get a presence on Facebook, they created a page. Facebook can be used to find employees and know better your prospects. Clara Shih wrote Facebook Era, a book about tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff. I encourage you to read it. While you are buying Facebook Era, get your copy of Tribes by Seth Godin.

Beware that it takes more work to have a dynamic fan page on Facebook than to engage the conversations on Twitter. This is why I often advise businesses who hired me as a social media expert to start with a Twitter presence. Once they get a grip on how to interact in social media, they can start their own blog and then have a Facebook presence.

I covered how a brand can use their Fan page on my social media blog. Therefore, I am referring you to the last 3 posts I wrote on the matter:

+ How I Use the Facebook Fan Page of My Blog
+ Properly Setting the Fan Permissions on Facebook Pages
+ The Need for Fresh Content on Your Facebook Fan Page vs. Your Blog

LinkedIn

If Facebook is for many their private life social network, LinkedIn is where they keep business relations. LinkedIn is suited if your brand is on the B2B market.

A Corporate Blog

I am a full-time blogger. Thus, it is no surprise that I strongly believe in the power of the blog. The blog is where you can really highlight your philosophy, your approach. You can operate a corporate blog to educate your customers about how to use your products, talk about what is going on in your industry, be a leader by explaining what it takes to run a successful small business. I strongly believe that a corporate blog should be written by an employee of the company.

A blog is a conversational Web site where you share your ideas, your finds and your solutions about a niche topic. You invite people to discuss what you write about. The author of a blog is the investigator of the conversations. You put your stamp on the conversation through the topic you selected and the angle that you presented. You are also the moderator of the discussions going on on your blog. I wrote several posts on On the Web with Kim Vallee about how to write good blog content.

Twitter, Facebook and the blog complement each other. Each one promotes the other two.

Kim Vallée, Paradivision’s vice-president and Social Media strategist, finally has a new home for her popular blog on stylish living and entertaining.

For At Home with Kim Vallée, we designed a new blog layout and redo her identity. We also moved her blog to the WordPress platform. For branding reasons, the URL for her blog changed from http://blog.kimvallee.com/ to http://athome.kimvallee.com/.

Why the move from subText to WordPress?

At Home with Kim Vallée was previously powered by the subText engine. It is not a very well known engine and it mainly appeals to .Net geeks. It runs on Windows servers and uses ASP.Net and Microsoft SQL Server.

Kim was already using WordPress for her most recent blog: On the Web with Kim Vallée. She quickly grew to love WordPress. With subText, Kim used to write her post using Microsoft Live Writer as subText online post editor is not as user friendly as WordPress’ interface. Live Writer is very good to publish to different blogging platforms, including WordPress. However, Kim has moved to Mac OS X a while ago and she had to struggle using VMWare to use Live Writer. Live Writer was the only remaining reason she had to use Windows on her Mac.

Another reason for her move is that WordPress has better support plus tons of easy to install free plugins developed by an army of developers. With subText, if she desired new features, chances were we had to develop these for her instead of finding a ready-made solution.

At Home with Kim Vallée also uses Praized to allow her and her readers to rate and comment places where they like to shop. Before the move to WordPress, Kim Vallée’s places platform was hosted separately. Now, she can easily use the Praized plugins. You can have a look at http://athome.kimvallee.com/places/.

To top it off, subText had a bug where her readers would get an error while posting a comment if they stayed too long on the Web page while writing their comment. Very annoying!

Designing Kim’s new blog

WordPress is the ideal blog platform for Kim. It is easier to use, easier to support and allows her to easily improve her blog. Using existing WordPress plugins and adapting a few allowed us to integrate all the features she wished for (she is demanding!):

• Improved categories and tags management
• A widget that displayed a tabbed interface for popular posts, latest comments, latest posts and a tag cloud. It saves lots of real-estate!
• A customized monthly archive widget that aggregates posts by year and month while again saving real estate
• CMS features for every page on her blog
• An integrated and more powerful search engine
• Full integration with the Praized social platform
• Customized support for caching to improve performances while avoiding inconsistencies
• More flexibility in displaying her blogroll

Features and usability are one side of the equation. Defining the new branding and graphical design was essential for Kim. For the new design, she wanted:

• A cleaner and more contemporary design
• Put more focus on the content
• A new logo
• A new color palette
• A two-column layout to feel airy and support the IAB 300 pixels-wide ad family
• A new branding which will include a future integrated revamp of On the Web with Kim Vallée

Kim worked closely with our designer. After different mock-up iterations, our designer was able to really capture the essence of what Kim was aiming for with the new look.

From the comments about the new look, we were very happy to notice that her objectives with the redesign were successfully reached!

About the new branding

Kim has many ideas and objectives regarding the future of her brand. She extensively consulted with renowned experts on the matter. Her blog has moved to http://athome.kimvallee.com/ instead of http://blog.kimvallee.com/ firstly because she now runs two blogs. Her latest one is http://ontheweb.kimvallee.com/.

Another good solution would have been to put her blogs under the http://kimvallee.com/ URL. However, when she gives interviews and talks about one of her blogs, it would become harder to give the proper URL. For the moment, http://kimvallee.com/ brings visitors to http://athome.kimvallee.com/. In the future, http://kimvallee.com/ will become a portal to Kim’s different properties and ventures.

The decision to move to a new URL was a hard one. We knew it would affect for a while her Google and Technorati rankings. However, all her previously referred links are permanently redirected to the right pages. Hopefully it shouldn’t cause many problems Google-wise. But, for the future of her brand, we all thought it was the better move.

About the migration

Migrating Kim’s 1,200 posts to WordPress was another challenge. To do so, we programmed a subText to WordPress converter. In the near future we will publish the code as an Open Source project and hopefully, other developers will improve it to add support for other blogging platforms.

We believe it might be a useful resource for our clients and readers. Her blog description quickly explains what it is about:

On the Web with Kim Vallée explores the dynamic world of blogging and social media. Learn easy to follow blogging tips on how to set up, run and market a blog. Get insights on how women use technology and social media to enhance their daily activities.

July 2009 Update: Since then, the scope On the Web has evolved to how a blogger or a business can use every aspect of social media to develop their brand.

You do not need to be a women to enjoy her blog. She writes concise and easy to understand posts. If you are new to social media, her tips should prove useful. If not, you might still learn a thing or two.

Here are a few of favorite posts so far:

1. 5 simple and free ways to grow your traffic when you are launching a blog
   
2. How to Write Great Blog Content
3. Web Site Design Trends 2009
4. Twitter 101 | Basic Commands

Feel free to follow @KimVallee on Twitter.