Go to the Facebook homepage. Log into your account by typing your email address and password into the space provided and clicking the button marked “Login.”

Navigate to your Facebook fan page. Look the fan page over to make sure that you meet the prerequisites for having a custom vanity URL. You need to be an Administrator of the fan page and the page must have a minimum of 25 fans.

Go to the Facebook username menu by single clicking in browser’s address bar to place the cursor in it. Type “facebook.com/username” and click the “Enter” button. Note that you should actually type the word “username.” Do not substitute this with your personal user name.

Review the username menu screen. The screen is divided, with the top half devoted to your personal Facebook page, and the bottom half devoted to the fan pages of which you are an Administrator. Look over the page and familiarize yourself with the layout.

If you have 25 or more Fans get this done!

Click the drop down menu on the bottom half of the screen to retrieve a list of fan pages you administrate. Click on the page for which you wish to create a custom vanity url.

Choose a unique url. Type the address that you would like to use into the box provided as “facebook.com/myname,” replacing the “myname” portion with the actual name you would like to use. Click the “Check Availability” button to confirm that the selection is not already in use by another fan page, then click “Save” to complete the process.

Just remember: names will be given out on a first come, first served basis. Certain exceptions will be made for public figures and trademarked names, but that’s probably not an option unless your name is Madonna

How to use Facebook Places

Facebook’s How to Video
A Field Guide to Using Facebook Places
Keep Facebook Places From Driving You Crazy

Marketing Opportunities of Facebook Places

Three ways business can take advantage of Facebook Places
What Facebook ‘Places’ Means for Marketers and Developers

Competitors & Partners – Facebook Places

Why Recommended Places Are the Next Big Thing in Location
To 100 million and beyond with Google Maps for mobile

The Dark Side to Facebook Places

How to Almost Sabotage a Dinner Party With Facebook ‘Places’

Is it Time to get on Board the Facebook Train?

Facebook Places (just announced) is a direct competitor to Google Places.   Any small business that wants to take advantage of people shopping, and looking for places & services with their Smartphones should consider developing their Facebook presence.

What is Facebook Places?

Facebook Places is a mobile product that  can be accessed through Facebook’s most recent iPhone app or via on other phones by accessing touch.facebook.com.  If a Facebook Place is already created, a business can claim its Facebook Place and merge their existing Facebook Fan Page with Facebook’s Place page. Facebook Places is similar to Google Places because information about the business is created and available.  The extra spin is that Facebook allows Facebook users to “check in” themselves and any of their Facebook  friends.  Check out Facebook’s video below to get a better understanding of Facebook Places:

Why should I care?
Remember that Facebook is the #1 application used on iPhones and Droids.  When people check into a Facebook Place, they are broadcasting that business to their Facebook network and any network of a friend they may have also checked in.  Right now if  10% of FB users use Facebook Places , that’s 50 Million people!  Over 100 Million people a month using Google Maps on mobile phones to find local businesses, Facebook Places may instantly have 50% of the value of Google Places.

I am not yet recommending investing in Facebook Places for all businesses. But if you are a restaurant or a business where people meet their friends,  Facebook Places could become as useful as Google Places, Review sites (ex. Yelp or UrbanSpoon) and Twitter combined.

For some large consumer brands such as Coca-Cola and Starbucks, their Facebook Fan page is becoming more important than their own websites.  Kraft Foods’ Oreo is the No. 3 brand page on Facebook with an 8.7 million fan base growing at a clip of 71,000 a day.

At a minimum I would recommend that you search Facebook to determine if they have created a Facebook Place for you business.  If Facebook has not I would create one.  This is a small effort for any small business, that could be the next big thing in promoting your business.  As always if you need help give me a call or send me an email.

This is a big topic and Part I of a series of Posts about Facebook Places I look to develop.  If you want more information now, here is a list of useful Facebook Places Articles.

Good discussion.  Things not to do are:

1. Using a weak password
2. Leaving your full birth date on your profile
3. Overlooking useful privacy controls
4. Posting your child’s name in a caption
5. Mentioning that you’ll be away from home
6. Letting search engines find you
   1. This is an interesting one as for people that are trying to promote their business, want this to occur.
7. Permitting youngsters to use Facebook unsupervised.

What are Others Doing?

Here is a brief overview of the what you will discover in this 33 page report titled 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report :

• How much time marketers invest with social media activities
• The top benefits of social media and how time invested impacts results
• The most used social media tools
• Marketers future social media plans

For my part Social Marketing is one of many tools that will delivery your Small Business Advantage. Contact me so that I can provide you a Free Analysis of your present (or get started) Internet Presence.

Tune up your Advantage

The first step of any Internet effort is understanding where you stack up. Let me provide you an analysis of your Internet Presence. If you are considering starting or have been using Social Media already my FREE analysis can set you in the right direction or give you a second opinion.

The “Tune-Up” includes:

• Review of your website and the social media elements currently being leveraged on the site.
• Review of current local online marketing efforts (where is the site listed today? e.g. Google maps, etc.)
• Review of current social media efforts (what sites are being leveraged, and how.)
• 30-minute phone consultation to address your social media goals/concerns.
• Written summary of findings and recommendations to improve current efforts

Take the first step and let me help you generate awareness and traffic for your store cost effectively.

Call ( 760.420.8734 ) or email me today

“Twitter has just 156 employees. Facebook currently says it has “1,000+” employees — a shockingly tiny work force for a site with 350 million active users. Neither company needs a lot of warm bodies because you and I are doing most of the work: perpetually creating and uploading vast amounts of fresh content that Twitter and Facebook can do with as they please……
In general, if you’re soft-selling something — like content or an idea — that can benefit from free publicity, Facebook and Twitter are your friends……
My Twitter ROI — the return I get on the time I invest in tweeting — feels like it’s worth it. For one thing, because I track in-bound links to my column on Bit.ly, I know that I’ve gotten literally tens of thousands of additional page views to my column and its offshoots, thanks to readers tweeting and retweeting links. So, thank you, Twitter. “

You may not always be getting direct results from your facebook communications but remember that those post are also indexed and searched by our favorite search engine Google.com.  It was also good to see that the author is using Bit.ly .  It is always important to track efforts on the internet and a lot of the tools are free.

Click here for the article in Ad Age

Posted via email from E. David Callender Consulting

My key point is that all these applications are going to use content that is already developed by Google Local Business or similar content from Yahoo, MSN, etc….

In the article they highlight an application from Layar :

One company working to make this happen is Amsterdam-based Layar, which recently released an augmented-reality browser by the same name for Android phones. Layar lets you search for things on Google but delivers the results based on your location, which it determines from the GPS readout. So you can search for, say, a bike shop or a pet store close to where you happen to be.

As you can see above Layar is using data sets like Google Local Search for their application

Love them or hate them Yelp (Review Service) is going all out for the iPhone crowd:

For a year, Yelp, a Web site with business reviews written by customers, had an iPhone app that used the device’s GPS and wireless Internet connectivity to deliver local search results. But when the iPhone got a compass, bloggers wondered whether Yelp would go further and make its app overlay information onto a real-time view of the world. After noticing the speculation, Yelp quietly created such an app this summer, spokesman Vince Sollitto said.

The augmented-reality program, known as Monocle, was built for Yelp by an industrious intern and originally hidden in Yelp’s app. (It was activated if you shook the iPhone three times.) Monocle is a formal feature that combines the iPhone’s camera view with tiny tags indicating the names, distances and user ratings of proximate bars, restaurants and more. Poke a floating tag on the screen with your finger and up pops detailed information about the business.

All business need to get their best reputation they can out on services like Yelp ASAP.

Click here for the article in the San Diego Union-Tribune

2007 to 2009 Advertising Focus / Online vs Traditional

The Local Commerce Monitor study also revealed a decrease in overall ad spending by SMBs, owing to unfavorable economic conditions and the long-term substitution of traditional media with lower-cost digital/online media. SMBs decreased spending on advertising and promotion by 23.5 percent, from $2,734 annually (reported in August 2008) to $2,092 annually (reported in August 2009). In spite of the overall decrease in spending on advertising and promotion over the past 12 months, on average, SMBs increased spending on Web sites and profile pages by 26.8 percent, from $608 in 2008 to $769 in 2009.

With Guerrilla Marketing and a focus on online advertising you can reduce your spending and get more new customers.

Retail Advertising and Marketing Association says that Moms are more likely to use Facebook (60.3%), MySpace (42.4%) and Twitter (16.5%) than average adults (50.2%, 34.4%, 15.0%, respectively), according to the survey conducted by BigResearch. In addition, 15.3% maintain their own blog.

“Retailers who aren’t engaging customers through social media could be missing the boat,” said Mike Gatti, executive director for RAMA, a division of the National Retail Federation. “Twitter, Facebook and blogs are becoming increasingly popular with moms as they search for coupons or deals and keep in touch with loved ones. The web provides efficient, convenient ways for brands to stay in front of their most loyal shoppers and attract new ones.”

On a scale of one to five, when asked what types of promotions most influence their purchases, product samples in the store (3.8), product samples delivered to home (3.6), loyalty cards (3.5), and special displays (3.4) rank as favorites.

Nine out of ten (93.6%) mothers regularly or occasionally seek the advice of others before buying a service or product, according to the survey. And 97.2% said they give advice to others about those products or services they purchased.

This points out again how key internet reviews are for bringing customers into your business.