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If you have been living under a rock for the past year or so, you wont be aware that on the web, one of the best ways of generating new, direct traffic to your website or blog is via Social Media marketing. The blogosphere and twitter trail is all a buzz with the term, which can seem dauntingly new and intimidating to marketers with traditional experience. Hopefully this guide should help to summarise how to interact online, and what services to use.

An idiots guide to Social Media Marketing

Businesses are missing out on the benefits that Web 2.0 technologies have to offer them, according to an expert.

Many executives think Web 2.0 is a drain on their resources but in fact is a way of engaging with partners and customers and is simply an extension of email, according to the chief executive of IT Governance, Alan Calder, who was speaking in CIO magazine.

‘There is a genuine need for CIOs to enable people to use this technology to benefit the firm,’ he told CIO magazine.

‘No matter what policies a company has in place, people will tell other people what it is like to work there, whether it is through Facebook or a blog and everyone has a computer at home today.’

Banning use of the sites is also effectively saying to young people who use the sites that they are not wanted, and senior management had to understand that the technology is ‘embedded in the way of life’ of younger people.

‘Young workers feel that Web 2.0 technologies such as Facebook, YouTube, blogging and Flikr, are key to how they do their job,’ he said.

He did sound a note of caution however, warning that businesses need to be careful with the technology, for instance with the posting of litigious comments.

Email marketing is ‘easy’ and ‘inexpensive’, meaning that anyone can create a strategy, an online business resource has told.

However, to make the campaign successful it needs to engage readers and build trust, a representative from Emma told Ecommerce Guide.

When sending out emails they should be relevant to the interests of the subscribers and strike the right balance between content and image Emma’s Suzanne Norman told the resource.

Her eight tips included letting the design and message ‘flow’ from the original message a business wanted its campaign to communicate.

The marketing campaign should also be consistent with the business brand and ultimate message, she added.

As with all campaigns, it is important the reader is engaged straight away by using a well-crafted and intriguing subject line in the subscription email.

Ms Norman added that it was also important to make the correspondence personal.

‘Try segmenting your list so you can personalise the content based on the audience group to which you’re sending,’ she advised.

In a blog that offers advice to businesses, Ecommerce Guide contributor Jennifer Shiff advised businesses designing online campaigns to ‘never offer a product or service or make a commitment you cannot fulfil’.

Google has come up with some new features to attract the regular user to the internet.

The mega search engine has devised an experimental search page and added some new features to its “alternative views” experiment from last May.

Map view is one feature that according to the official Google blog, solves the problem of looking through many sites for information by “plotting some of the key locations contained in your web results onto a map“, according to Andrew Hogue of Google.

Timeline view is another feature that looks up dates on the internet much like Map View looks up locations along with biographical information generated from a user’s search results.

Mr Hogue explained the control panel on the right side of the page: “Usually we show some text from the page that includes a few of the words you searched for.

“Now you can instead reveal text containing dates, locations, measurements, or images,” he said.