Got to go to Nashville last week to meet with some clients, and with time to kill before my flight, had a chance to drop by Print Design Mecca, aka the Hatch Show Print office. This is a famous letterpress shop, specializing in concert posters. However, they had this great new post card on the rack, which I thought I’d share:

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz had a tweet recently where he was wondering how the heck do you follow hundreds of people on Twitter? He had decided to quit following his brother because he posted too frequently…kept Rand from seeing too many people. I had the same problem with Guy Kawasaki, finally deciding that he has 10 people posting to his Twitter account. BTW, in 1993, when Rand started playing with the internet, he was in high school. I had already helped build my first commercial B2B site, for Schlumberger. Glad that we can share the pain of too much too fast too soon.

How about you? How are you managing to follow all the interesting people on Twitter?

While most readers of this blog do not work for local businesses, many of you know local ‘bricks and mortar’ business owners needing some guidance about advertising locally.  I am also assuming that most of you have a bulky yellow pages taking up room on a shelf in your home.  Mine has never been opened since it arrived at my front door, and it has stayed out of the recycle bin only because a day may come when my internet connection goes down.  So it was not surprising for me to read a recent article in SearchEngineLand.com that two thirds of people looking for information about local businesses are abandoning their print yellow pages for the internet.  A July 2008 study by TMP Directional Marketing shows that of the 90% of people looking for local business information, about a third use print yellow pages, a third use internet yellow pages and local search websites, and a third use search engines.  However, those using search engines are often directed to internet yellow pages and local search sites, making these directories very important for local businesses!  For example, of the top twenty organic results on Google for ‘austin tx party store,’ only two of these link to the websites of stores in Austin selling party supplies.  All the others comprise eleven different national yellow page directories, local search directories, and party specific directories.

So local businesses need to pay attention to directories – but which ones should they choose? It is important to do keyword research to know what terms people are using to find the products and services you offer.  If you then use these keywords to run searches through Google and Yahoo!, it will become clear which directories have visibility, and you should spend some time adding as much free information that is allowed on those directories. SearchEngineLand.com gives additional guidance here, showing the usefulness of Google Trends in determining the web search volume of particular sites. Google trends will also show regional distinctions between directories – Citysearch is by far the leader in Austin, but comes a distant third to Yellowpages.com and Superpages.com in Dallas. Google Analytics will also help businesses see how internet traffic is coming to their site.  A minimum amount of advertising can be done on a number of high ranking directories, and then the performance of those directories can be tracked over several months.  Directories in their ‘resurrected’ form can definitely help small businesses!

Some people make resolutions around this time of the year. If you like them, great. I have no use for them. I prefer challenges and goals, things with restrictions and deadlines, things that demand work every day. The problem with resolutions is that they’re so nebulous, so open-ended. For me to be successful, I need a community, too. Back in college, a bunch of friends and I did the Danskin Women’s Triathlon. I never would have signed up on my own. Never ever. The community of friends was only way I wound up standing in front of a lake, watching the sun come over the horizon with a few hundred women.

The secret wasn’t support, though that was great. It was having to be accountable on a daily basis for working toward a goal. We hired a coach. We learned to run and to swim together. We were stunned at our successes and marveled at the unexpected roadblocks. Almost every single big, personal accomplishment in my life has a similar structure. NaBloPoMo was easy compared to NaNoWriMo (next year, so help me God, I will get to 50,000 words).

I’m a writer, and I mostly live in the land of words. That’s not all I do. Right now, I take pictures every day. Every single day. If there weren’t flickr and the various groups and challenges and projects and photo friends, I think it would be really hard to do. It’s the same with anything. When people ask me about adding various social media aspects of marketing to what they’re already doing in marketing, the main point I try to make is that it doesn’t create itself. Yes, it’s free and available to everyone, it’s not hard to do, but you actually have to DO it.

We all have computers, pen and paper—how many of us write books or poems or stories? The idea of sitting down to write a book is incredibly daunting. Writing for an hour or so a day for a month? Not so bad. You can do all 50,000 words of NaNoWriMo in 60-90 minutes of writing a day. You can do social media in far less time. A huge part of successful social media is being involved with the community. You don’t have to blog every day. Blog on Monday mornings. On the other mornings, you come in to work, grab your cup of coffee, and spend 20 minutes reading what other people write. Make pertinent comments. Internalize what they say. Not only does it foster relationships and bring you readers, it makes you informed and creates something for you to write about when it’s time for you to sit down and say something.

My challenge to you isn’t to make resolutions or identify places that could use some work, but to actually find something small to add to your daily routine that will make a big difference in aggregate. You don’t have to be a writer or a social media expert or incredibly clever in snippets of 140 characters or fewer. You just have to do the work.

Just finished cleaning out my inbox from the holidays (one keeper in my spam folder: “She will remember the image of your watch forever”), so am actually looking forward to work resuming next week. I’m ahead of the game, for a change!

While cleaning off my desk, I saw a cheerful article in the Austin Business Journal, “Interactive Marketing Expected to Buck 2009 Spending Cuts.” That’s certainly good news to those of us in the interactive marketing business. Forrester Research polled marketers late in 2008 to discover that 72% expected to maintain or even increase their interactive budgets during a recession (here’s the article that cites the Forrester data), but the article includes this gem: “The measurability, combined with the relatively cheap cost of digital programs…makes interactive marketing a smart investment, according to Forrester analysts.” As my friend Sam Decker says in the article, “People are focusing on what has already proved to drive results.”