My son, Garret, is an aspiring baseball writer and an autodidactic analyst of the sport. As a high school student, he set out to establish himself in the industry out of absolute obscurity. Just over a year later, he writes for a reputable online publication about the Detroit Tigers and has amassed a Twitter following of over 500 people interested in his work. This small prominence has already opened other doors for him that will further advance his career. How did he rise from nothing to gain a large but intimate and interested Twitter audience? Let’s hear it from him:

GC: The first thing, for me, was simple: be active. Things happen from there. On Twitter, most of the people you want to network with are actively seeking out other smart people with similar interests. I didn’t go around pleading for followers—I just did my best to project valuable information about baseball. Once I was discovered, my first followers shared my work and the size of my audience snowballed from there.

DC: You mention that you “didn’t go around pleading for followers.” Can you expand on that statement and explain why it’s important?

GC: Self-promotion is needed to an extent, but there’s a fine line. For one, you want your followers to want to be there. Natural followers—the ones who found you themselves—are also the ones who have the most genuine interest in you and the ones who will promote you to their followers. Ideally, people will know you exist without perceiving you as arrogant or annoying. In order to accomplish this, I’ve made a conscious effort to promote, in addition to my work, articles and insights not my own. This strategy has proved beneficial in more ways than one.

DC: What ways are you referring to?

GC: First of all, my followers are pleased because I’m providing them with topical material and possibly introducing them to others in baseball analysis whose activity they may want to keep an eye on. Next, I gain appreciation from the authors of said material and potentially gain them as valuable followers and contacts by plugging it. Of course, for this to apply, it’s important to credit the author (but then, it’s always important to credit the author), like so; “check out this piece from @hypotheticalbaseballwriter on why MLB should expand replay to all fair/foul calls: (link)”.

DC: Do you have any other Twitter advice?

GC: Stay professional and on topic. Your followers are there for a reason—whether it’s your absurd knowledge of avian migration or your expertise in muscle car restoration—and they generally aren’t interested in your dog’s grooming appointment or the poor service you received at dinner last night. If you want to be taken seriously, stick with what you know and what your followers can benefit from. Lastly, always use spell check (which most internet browsers now include) and make sure to fix those mistakes that application won’t catch. (Granted, it is Twitter—informal by wide perception—but that’s no excuse for mixing up “your,” and “you’re,” even if you’re not a writer.)

That’s great advice, Garret!

While Twitter might not have been something you considered before, I highly suggest you give it another try. Let us know how it goes for you, we would love to hear about how you have become Twitter Famous.  You can tweet @gotwww or post your comments below.

Naturally, with the revamped format for pages, the social media-savvy are buzzing with discussion on how to make pages stand out and take full advantage of this exciting new aspect to Facebook’s design. Following is a tip we bet you haven’t heard:

Most people think the ideal size for a cover image is 851 x 315 pixels. While that is what will display on your page upon entry, consider this: If you choose to upload a photo taller than 315 pixels, the whole photo will be visible when the image is clicked.

This is significant for several reasons.

People subconsciously tend to assume images on the internet, as the logo or header on most websites, to be clickable. Especially in the Facebook age, users click images habitually, expecting them to either become enlarged or to take them to the home page of the website they’re on. Such is the case with your cover photo.

Now displayed more prominently even than your profile picture, your cover photo should complement your page. It may be designed to leave space for, or work together with, your profile picture, but your cover image should also be capable of standing alone. When the covers on most pages are clicked, the logo, contact information, and other essential details can no longer be seen. To combat this, a thing we perceive as a major issue, we advise you to transform your cover photo into a complete marketing piece. Add your logo, along with some additional text and your website address, in case the photo ends up being commented on or passed along in other ways.

Another oft-neglected item is the description box for the picture. Fill this with a useful and concise summary of your business or organization.

The cover photo is stored in an album aptly titled ‘Cover Photos’ along with any other images you’ve featured in the past. Make sure to remove any photos you no longer wish to be viewed. Once you’ve purged the album of unnecessary and potentially unflattering images, take advantage of the set-up by adding other photos beyond the primordial one; people love to browse through photos once they have already opened an album.

Check out one of our Facebook pages here to see how we’ve taken advantage of the cover photo.

Have you tried to market your business through Facebook?

Have you found that the return on investment just isn’t worth the time or money?

The solution may be in the form of a custom Facebook welcome page.

Facebook provides you a few avenues to customize your page; a custom profile picture, an info tab (which is rarely clicked), and the option to add various applications to your page.

A Facebook page tab is actually an app (in the Facebook programming world) that results in a custom page on your Facebook profile. The most important place to start is a welcome page, or landing page — also known as a gateway page on Facebook, because it can show content tailored to the current subscription status of the visitor. This is usually used to convince a visitor to take the first, all-important step of “liking” your page (clicking on the “like” button that appears just above the custom content).

The content of the page tab app is generated by a service developed and hosted outside of Facebook itself. It can include anything you can put on a website (with very few limitations, mostly size-related); text, graphics, and even video or forms to capture information.

A professionally designed welcome page tab can increase like rates by 100% or more without the use of cheesy gimmicks like contests. Holding a contest on Facebook can certainly give you more followers, but in most cases they will be low-quality followers.  People will like you just long enough to enter your contest, then either unlike the page or simply block you from their news feed, which means they will result in a negative return.

Some good examples of custom welcome tabs are those utilized by Coca-Cola and SoBe.  Or, if you’re not already a fan, you can try ours here.

Follow their lead and entice the masses to join your page and view your content.

If you’ve seen a welcome page that you like, please share it below in the comments.

UPDATE: As of March 31, 2012 you can no longer set your welcome page to display by default, you can only get users to that page by linking directly to it from a website or advertising links.

You’ve probably heard the story by now. Emma Sullivan, a high school senior participating in a Youth in Government program, tweeted the above while listening to Kansas governor Sam Brownback speak last week.

The governor’s staff, like those in the service of many modern political figures, monitors social networking sites to evaluate the public perception of their policies and campaigns. For politicians and their advisers, understanding how they are being received by citizens gives them insight on how they need to adapt. Facebook and Twitter are perfect environments for gathering such information. At least that’s the idea.

In an effort to increase the number of businesses, specifically small businesses, utilizing Facebook’s targeted advertising, the social media giant recently launched a program to educate business owners that encourages them to “learn how to grow” their business “with Facebook’s powerful marketing tools.” Probably the most tangible and highly publicized part of this program is the one that will commence in January 2012, when Facebook plans to offer a total of $10 million in free advertising dispersed on a first-come first-served basis to 200,000 different businesses which will each receive a $50 ad credit.

Before you take Facebook up on this offer or even consider paying for an opportunity to market your service or product to more than 800 million active site users, there are a few steps you need to take.

Plug the holes in your current order process – Have your ordering system evaluated before you flood it with prospects. If your system is not user-friendly, your new mass of prospective clients will simply leave out of frustration. Make it easy for people to give you their money. What’s the sense of working to get people to your page if you’re just going to lose them because you failed to put work into your own site?

Formulate a plan for your social media presence – Increasing followers alone doesn’t pay, and you will see little or no return on your investment. Don’t advertise on Facebook just to get likes on your page; rather, if you’re going to use a Facebook ad to draw attention to your presence on Facebook itself, you need to have a specific plan. Once your Facebook following grows, you have a tremendous opportunity to reach the people who have ‘liked’ your page on a regular basis. Strategize beforehand on how to turn those people who have shown interest in your Facebook page into customers.

Create a targeted landing page – Any time you advertise, you should do everything you can to maximize your rate of return (even if it’s only your time). One of the most effective ways to do this when marketing online is to have a customized landing page on your website or Facebook page that is specifically targeted to the same demographics your ad is. When a potential customer clicks on your ad, they should be welcomed with a specific, personal call to action rather than a generic home page that will force them to put extra effort into purchasing your product. Again, make it easy for potential customers to spend their money on your product or service. You might only have once chance to convert this customer to a client – don’t blow it.

Set up a tracking system – In order to properly evaluate the effectiveness of a given ad, use a tracking software (such as Google Analytics). You can use the detailed statistics provided by the service to determine whether an ad has been sufficiently productive (including the dollars returned per visit from each ad) — and from there, decide whether to continue using it, change it to better appeal to a certain demographic, or terminate it altogether.

Of course, at least I would hope, your talents are not remotely similar to those of The Joker. You’re not trying to get hired by a Gotham City crime boss to “kill the Batman.” Does the assertion that you should never use your trade expertise without monetary compensation hold up in the real world?

This question has been on my mind for a long time, but to this point, I’ve failed to apply it favorably to my own experience. As an aspiring journalist, I found that the only way to insert myself into the industry was to write. I needed to get my name out there, and through writing sports on my personal website and advertising my posts to the Twitter following I have built over time, I have accomplished that. I’ve been utilizing this strategy for less than a year, but numerous opportunities have already presented themselves to me because of it; including job offers. I recently took a position writing baseball for a website. The pay was minimal, but it was there. Not long after, I had to decide between staying at the small site I was already at, which would have meant a decent pay raise, and moving to a much larger site with a sizable following, which would not be paying me at all.

Call me crazy, but at this stage in my career, I chose the larger following. Why? With more readers comes a fantastic opportunity to build my reputation. Also, paid or not, the position is as close to my dream job as I can get at the moment and it’s helping me build relationships and grow my contact list. This will be extremely beneficial to me later.

Just as you’re probably not a psychotic killer, there’s a good chance you’re not a writer. But this idea of establishing a reputation, gaining industry contacts, and building relationships doesn’t just apply to journalism. These things are invaluable for anyone in the business world, whether they (reputations, contacts, and relationships) are attained through an internship or otherwise.

Before Got WWW? started attracting high-profile clients, we had to establish our portfolio; it’s hard to get hired as a start-up with no reputation. We gained credibility by helping friends, deserving non-profits, and other start-up businesses for little or no cost (this is still essential for every business, established or not, but that’s a topic for another post).

Whether you want to start a new business, expand your business, or even change career paths altogether, doing some work for free is one of the best ways to lay a foundation.

Google.com officially turned fourteen 14 today, September 15, 2011.  The domain name, google.com, was registered by two Stanford computer science grad students on September 15, 1997, almost a year before Google filed for incorporation in California.

What’s in a name? 

When Juliet coined that famous saying, she had no idea what the future held.  Though it didn’t matter to her what Romeo’s real name was, today, a name, especially a company’s domain name, is a great asset.

Whether Google is actually 13 or 14 right now might not make much difference to you, but if the internet giant had not been able to secure google.com when they did, the company would likely never have been named that.  I’m kind of glad it was, otherwise we might still be calling it BackRub  (yea, just doesn’t seem to fit, does it?).

Here are some important things you need to know about domain names:

When you have an idea, you need to protect it – immediately

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s founders, decided that the name “BackRub” didn’t fit their search engine and they came up with a great new name, they immediately protected it by registering google.com. When they met at Stanford they disagreed about almost everything, but this they agreed on. They did this almost a year before they incorporated as a company or had their first investor.

Once you have the name, you need to secure it – long term

Having your domain name expire means that your website is down, your email stops working, and you and your company look foolish.  I have seen this happen too many times to count, but it seems like the people responsible usually blame the company they registered with.  Whose fault is it that their website is down?

If your domain does expire, there is also the possibility that someone else will buy it before you have a chance to renew. While these days, most companies allow for some kind of grace period, that hasn’t always been the case, and they make no guarantees.

Most people only pay for one year when they buy or renew a domain name.  Each year they have to remember to pay again.  At minimum, you need to put your payment information on file with the registrar, so that when your domain name is up for renewal, it happens automatically.  But the best way to make sure your domain name doesn’t accidentally expire is to pay well in advance. Google has protected it’s domain in this way by paying for it through 2020. In addition to protecting your domain, paying for it in advance is usually less expensive thanks to multi-year discounts.

You should have your domain name monitored by a third party so that if for any reason the domain isn’t pointing to the right place, you will know about it immediately.  A monitoring service will watch your website and your mail server. If anything isn’t working the way it is supposed to, they will notify you immediately and in several ways – text message, Twitter, email, etc.

Ask to have your domain name locked at the registrar.  This provides an additional level of security that makes it more difficult for your name to be stolen.  Without taking this step, someone could steal it with nothing more than your email password.  We go one step further at Got WWW? by privatizing your domain’s contacts, so that any transfer request has to be approved by us.

We manage hundreds of domains for our clients, and while we’re not the least expensive place (in terms of money) to buy a domain, keeping your domain working correctly is invaluable.  Your domain will be protected in the best way possible if you follow our advice.

In July of this year, Twitter announced their acquisition of BackType, a service that helped users to further their understanding of their influence through social media, and specifically, how their Tweets translated into web traffic. The creation of this innovative new tool was induced by that purchase.

Here’s a screenshot of this essential resource:

Have you ever considered the effect what you say and do with social media has on the success of your business?

Before you recklessly upload an album full of snapshots from the party last Friday night to cyberspace –before you submit your latest 140-character bit of cheeky wit or wisdom to the world, will you stop to think of the consequences?

According to an infographic from CareerEnlightenment.com, 79% of hiring managers and job recruiters review online information about job applicants before making a hiring decision. Of those, 70% said that they have rejected candidates based on information that they found online. That means there’s an incredibly high likelihood that your prospective employer will be doing a sort of amateur background check on you; essentially, they will look for a reason to not hire you.

In June, the Federal Trade Commission gave its blessing to background check companies that screen job applicants based on their use of social media. This means that the job application process is no longer a simple paper application and personal interview. Instead, a search of what you’ve said or posted online has become standard. “We store records for up to 7 years as long as those records haven’t been disputed,” says Social Intelligence COO Geoffrey Andrews.

So what should you avoid posting online, to the land of no take backs and few apologies? Here are some dos and don’ts:

Don’t bad mouth your current or former employer, your co-workers, or your clients.
This could be the most important kind of post to avoid. Who wants to hire someone who is liable to publicly complain about them later? Who wants to work with such a person? Slandering anyone in the business world can be extremely damaging to your chances of landing a job or acquiring a new client. This seems like the most obvious point I could make, which is why I find it truly amazing how often I see disparaging remarks of this nature from my Facebook friends. Some have posted such comments very regularly over extended periods of time about their current employers. I can only hope that my friends have been extremely careful about regulating who can see their posts, but even that is not enough to guard that their boss will not somehow be made aware of them. The tech-savvy have innumerable ways of getting around your privacy settings.

Don’t be negative.
Instead of constantly droning on about your problems–in the workplace, at home, or otherwise–focus on the positive aspects of your life and the progress your business is making. It’s painful to write this terrible cliché, but you should probably heed your mother’s timeless advice; if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Chronic complainers are overwhelming to their coworkers and can seriously damage the atmosphere of a workplace and the quality of customer service. From the perspective of a job applicant, if you’re equally qualified for a position along with any number of candidates, a reputation as a whiner will quickly land your résumé in the trash. Negative people have fewer followers online, and fewer friends in real life. Businesses regularly gauge their interests in working with other companies based on the personal reputations of their contacts within that company.

Don’t be overly argumentative.
We get it. You’re smart. It’s okay to be smart. It’s not okay to shove your intelligence (or arrogance, depending on your perspective) in everyone’s collective face. Steer clear of controversy for the sake of being controversial. If you feel the need to defend your opinions to someone, be respectful about it, or preferably, do it face-to-face. Hiding behind the protective barrier that is the internet is not cool.

Do keep it G-rated.
First of all, avoid abusive language at all costs. Stay away from crude jokes and curse words no matter the context. This is your personal page, but it reflects your business. In the past, some of my friend’s Facebook profiles have read like a public bathroom stall. Those “friends” have been since removed from my list. To me, and to most in the business world, raunchy language significantly reduces credibility. In addition, employers and customers alike will distance themselves from you if they find any hint of racism or sexism, even if your comments are meant humorously or sarcastically. Beyond how such words impact your reputation, job recruiters undoubtedly will fear legal repercussions should your online ignorance translate to the workplace. This also applies to pictures. Don’t post anything provocative, or any content that suggests drinking or drug use.

Do spell check.
This one’s pretty self-explanatory. You’re not in fourth grade. Watch your spelling and grammar if you want people to view you as an able, intelligent, adult–capable of effectively communicating in the workplace.

CareerBuilder.com published the results of a very interesting survey back in 2009. Undoubtedly, the percentages they found are all more extreme two years later. Their survey reported that 35% of employers found content on social networking sites that caused them not to hire a candidate. Reportedly, 53% of those candidates posted provocative or inappropriate photographs or information, 43% posted content about them drinking or using drugs, 35% bad-mouthed their previous employer, co-workers or clients, 29% showed poor communication skills, 26% made discriminatory comments, 24% lied about qualifications, and 20% shared confidential information from a previous employer.

All this is not limited to job applicants, however. As a business owner or executive, your social media footprint is also accessible to potential customers and partners. If you’re like most, its time to rethink your approach to social media.

And by the way, I don’t want to work with you if your entire Facebook wall is plagued by Bejeweled Blitz high scores and incessant Farmville updates.

How has a negative social media contact affected your buying decision?

At least until the term becomes more commonplace, it seems ludicrous to expect just anyone to know that definition, not excluding new business owners or those looking to start a website for the first time. Why advertise to people using a term that will seem like non-sense to them?

Recently, I overheard a conversation between my two grandmothers. One, a generation younger, was trying to explain the concept of a wireless Bluetooth headset to the other, who, to my knowledge, has never used the Internet (my family was overjoyed when she learned to send a text message last year, but I digress). Though it was an admirable attempt, it was also somewhat humorous, and it was apparent that very little progress, if any, was made in convincing my elder grandmother that this technology would be beneficial to her.

It’s vital when selling anything to know who you’re marketing to, and to market in a way that is easy to understand for that specific person or group of people. It’s even more important when trying to market in the technology industry, which adds another new gadget (or two or two hundred) quicker than you can refresh your Twitter feed.

There’s a very high likelihood that your potential customers don’t even know that there is a solution to their problems out there. In the case of cloud hosting, most people are unaware such a service exists, let alone what it means or that it will correct the fact that the servers hosting their website were overloaded by a recent spike in traffic. They’re not going to find your service by using the search terms “best cloud hosting” or “secure cloud hosting.” Rather, they’ll be looking to find a way to eliminate the issue they had with their previous hosting service. Instead of marketing the tools or services you provide, market the solutions you have to the problems real people face. Put yourself in their shoes. Tell them why they want–why they need–what you have.

Of course, this concept isn’t limited to just hosting and servers. What are you marketing that just doesn’t seem to be catching on? Maybe it’s time to reconsider who is seeing your ads, and to evaluate the possibility of re-wording them to increase their effectiveness.