You’re a small business owner, and you know that you need to use Facebook for promotion. You might even have a fan page already built.  But are you using it to its fullest potential? What are you leaving on the table, and how can you maximize the very little time in your day to get the most out of your social media marketing?

It’s important to understand  how, when, where and why using social media makes sense and what impact using them will have on your business.

Join us for lunch at Three Birds Tavern (pardon the music) on Tuesday, March 23 to learn:

• What to post and what not to post – and when
• How to make – and keep – fans
• Creative ideas for engaging your fans
• Why and why not to use Facebook ads
• How to translate fans into sales

Where:  Three Birds Tavern
When: Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 12:00 pm
How much: $15 for paid LS1 members / $20 non-members / $25 at the door
(includes lunch, drink and tip + 45 minute workshop and discussion time)

Register in advance at LocalShops1.com »

If I told you there was a free, easy way to get listed in Google above most of your competitors, right on the first page within a couple days . . . would you believe me?

(You’ve probably heard it all before from the 20-thousand SEO spam companies that fill your company’s contact form every day, right?)

This isn’t snake-oil or a magic wand. It’s not going to make you famous overnight. But if you do what I’m about to tell you, your business will often outrank even top-performing national companies when someone is searching for your keywords. In most cases, you’ll show up around the 4th spot on Google’s first page of search results. Most businesses would be willing to pay for that position!

I’m simply talking about claiming your business on Google maps, through the Google Local Business Center. You’d be surprised how easy it is and how many small businesses overlook this awesome tool.

For instance, you’ll see when I search for “elevator interiors” from downtown St. Petersburg (Google recognizes my geo-location and tailors my results based on where I’m located), I see the following results:

The top three results are long-standing websites that have worked hard honing their keywords to claim that spot; but look who’s number 4? One of my clients, who just launched his website last summer and who claimed his Google Local map listing just this past October. (Don’t get me wrong – we’re working toward those top spots, but SEO takes time. This is a quick solution.)

Add Your Listing

Your business might already be listed on Google maps; in that case, you only need to claim it and update any erroneous information. If not, it’s really easy to add it at the Local Business Center. You can add your address and phone number, talk a little bit about what you do or sell, your hours of operation, and even upload a logo and some photos.

After you’ve set it all up, you’ll have to verify that you actually own the business, either by accepting an automated phone call or receiving a snail-mail postcard. Both options offer a PIN that you’ll enter at the Local Business Center that tells Google you’re really there. It’s quick and painless, and if you’re able to answer the phone, takes all of five minutes.

Once you’re verified, you’ll start seeing your listing show up in both Google maps and web searches whenever Google thinks it’s appropriate.

Adding Reviews

If you really want to harness the power of social media, start telling your customers and clients to leave you reviews on your Google maps listing.

If you already have some testimonials from your customers, ask them if they could write them on your Google Maps listing. Send them a link to your listing to make it easier. If you don’t already have testimonials from your customers, start asking for them. Ask them to put them directly onto your Google Maps listing, then you can cut and paste them onto your own website or other publications if you wish.

It’s easier to copy them from your Google Maps listing than to copy them to your listing.

Google Maps listings with at least one review tend to rank higher than those without any reviews. And of course, the reviews that you get should also help to turn those visitors into customers.

Additional Resources

Get to it! Go claim your listing or add your business to Google maps now.

• Google Local Business Center
• Local Business Center Users’ Guide

My biggest learning this week:  Think it all the way through. Design.  Content strategy.  New opportunities.  Site structure and implementation.  Be clear about what’s next.

A few golden nuggets of the week:

• When someone approaches you with a golden opportunity, understand that in most cases, they’re expecting the same in return.  One hand washes the other, so to speak.  This can work for you or against you – but think it through from both perspectives.
• When you’re designing an interface, it’s ok to break UI rules if it works best for the user – especially when no one else is going to use it.
• If you’re going to try to do something different, to be bold, be sure to think through the entire implementation – not just the homepage.  Where do we go from here?
• We all have to make compromises and need to learn what to fight for and what to let go.  This is a hard lesson when it comes to design, but we need to remove emotion from the equation and keep it as impersonal as possible.
• Even if you think something looks awesome, if the colors remind someone of a childhood trauma, it’ll never fly.  (That’s ok.)

It was a week of big lessons – but I anticipate there being a lot more “hey here’s a cool JQuery technique I tried!” next week as I get rolling on actual design and coding again.

More than that.

It’s been a hectic few months.

Big Sea is busier than ever. Which of course is a good thing (make that a great thing!) but I find myself forgetting to pause.  To step back. To close my computer and to turn off.

When you work for yourself, it’s hard to find an off switch.  Emails come in and you respond – because it’s not really work, it’s just finishing a conversation.

I don’t even think of it as something I’m expected to do or as work, really – but I’m starting to realize it’s consuming me and affecting my relationships with my family, my friends, my self.

How do you do it?

Do I start setting a schedule of ‘work time’ and commit to keeping my laptop shut (and iPhone off) during the off hours?

I don’t feel obligated to work after-hours – I do it by choice because I really love what I do and am invested in my clients’ success (as cliche as that sounds, these projects consume me).

I need to take some time to unwind so that I can recharge  Not a vacation (although that would be awesome), but a daily/weekly change of habit.   What do you do to unplug?

To me, the payoff is obvious.

Relationships are created, fostered and flourish.  Friendships form.  Conversations are held.  Clients and customers are engaged.

Twitter is especially difficult for people who don’t already get it.

In general, I advise my clients to spend 10 minutes each morning logging in to Twitter and/or Facebook; retweeting interesting articles or posts; replying to customers or interesting tweets; generally engaging and interacting.  Ten minutes.  A good place to start.

For clients who really want to get involved though, I learned a really great tip from the small business roundtable that I hosted at the Social Fresh conference in Tampa today.

(I really wish I could remember the name of the fantastic guy who gave us these tips, so if you’re out there, please comment and let me know!)

Five Tweets to Send Every Morning (for new Twitter users)

1. Tweet a link to an article that you find interesting from a publication you read regularly.  This can be industry specific or locaation-specific or just something you find funny.  Doesn’t matter. Share good information.
2. Find 2 people who you would like to notice your business, and retweet or reply to something they have written, tweeted or posted.  If that’s a writer at a newspaper or an influential blogger or a big customer, doesn’t matter.  Engage them on Twitter.
3. Find 2 people looking for information about your business or industry and retweet, reply or engage them somehow.  If you’re a caterer, these are brides talking about getting married.  If you’re a digital document storage company, these are lawyers or HR folks or people complaining about filing.

If you can stick to just these 5 tweets and keep up with the conversations that start, you’ll be one step closer to landing those new big clients and introducing your company to new customers.

Sure beats cold calling, right?

Problem: Recently we migrated a client’s website to a new server at Media Temple, which is set up with Plesk. In testing their new environment, they emailed that they were unable to upload something via an upload form on the website. Apparently, Plesk doesn’t allow a PHP file to write in its default settings. After doing some research I came up with the solution.

Solution: We need to first ensure that our owner and group of the httpdocs folder is set accordingly. The next step is to give the group write permissions. Then it gets fun, when we  add Apache to our psacln group.

• First we will ensure that our folder has the correct owner and group assigned to it (Quick note: [username] should be the username that you setup for the domain through Plesk):

chown -R [username]:psacln httpdocs/

• Next we want to give the psacln group write permissions:

chmod -R g+w httpdocs/

• Next we need to edit /etc/group & /etc/group-. Locate the following in the /etc/group & /etc/group- file:

psacln:x:2524:

• Change the previous line to the following:

psacln:x:2524:apache

After all this you will want to restart Apache and all will be well.

This wraps up the first Development Post. If you have any questions or comments regarding this solution please feel free to let us know !

You’re entering into a relationship that is going to last a very, very long time because seriously?  Moving websites from one server to another is a pain in the ass.  A serious headache.  Incompatible versions of PHP? Check.  Out of sync SVN repositories? Check.  Inability to render filetypes?  New IP requiring reissuance of SSL? Folders of uploaded assets not committed to the SVN repository?

Should I go on?

Everything we’ve encountered is a small problem unto itself;  together they form a huge headache and a couple days of troubleshooting.

So my warning is this:  a web host decision is a much bigger commitment than you might think.

• Do a little research and read reviews before you make that commitment.
• Find out how their customer service responds to issues.
• Is their default server setup compatible with the software you want to utilize (i.e. Wordpress)?
• Does your web design team have any advice?

And if you take nothing else away from this warning, just stay away from GoDaddy hosting.  Please.

And I tried.  I really did!  (Ok, I didn’t try that hard, but I gave it a couple weeks.)

This was going to be: the year that I went digital.

So idealistic was I:  I’ll scan all of my documents! I’ll use iCal and Evernote and the ‘To-do’s’ in Mac Mail!  I’ll put everything in Basecamp!   No more lists and scraps of paper all over my desk, I thought.

I work all day on a computer and rely on my iPhone for everything – this will be easy!

First, there were client meetings.  Added to iCal: check.  To-do’s based on emails in my inbox:  added to the To-do list in Mail: check.  But wait – now where does it go?  Where’s an overall list of ‘to-do’s’?  And I have to remember to plugin my phone to sync my calendar.  And there’s a totally different to-do list in iCal!  Then there’s Evernote and learning to use it for the tool that it is. . . Desktop app syncing with iPhone app . .. and more lists.  It started taking me as much time to add something to my To-Do list (and figure out how to sync it with everything) as it does to just complete the task.

Needless to say, I still have my scribbled notebooks on my desk, and I broke down and bought a day planner this week too (to add to my library of day planners I’ve had since 1994 – which make for neat scrapbooks and memory albums for me).  I essentially scurried back into the hole from which I came, quickly.  I guess I wasn’t ready to make the change, to commit.

I got to thinking about the ways this applies to building websites, building online businesses and social networks.

Whenever we build a new website for a client, we’re essentially building them a new way to interact with their clients or customers.  We’re giving them a different voice, with different methods of publishing and creating information.  We’re asking them to add these new methods to their daily routine – because the web, after all, requires that sort of dynamic interaction.  We put everything on a CMS these days – and we ask our clients to change things, add things, keep it fresh.

I’m putting together a few social media packages for clients right now that include a blog, Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts.  They’re easy enough to set up, but I’m not sure my clients understand the commitment they require.  We can’t just ‘build it and they will come.’

Successful online communication, if you’re not already doing it, requires a total change in the way you go about your day.

That’s the hard part.  There are some of my clients who ‘get it’ – they understand and are ready for that challenge;  they wade in slowly but with both eyes open, embracing the new opportunities the web can provide them.  And then there are those who don’t fully trust what an online communications strategy can do for them.  They balk at daily updates and laugh at Twitter’s value.  I build those websites – but when I’m done, I’m not excited about the future of the new site.  I’m sad, knowing that my new baby will sit untouched for months, maybe even years -  well past it’s usefulness.

(If you’re going to invest in a website, make sure you’re ready to commit to using it.)

So how do you incorporate all of these new communication tools into your life?  How do you make your investment really work for you?  Stop thinking about your web presence as a brochure, and start thinking of it as a voice.

1. You’re working with a new client that has a unique question:  a blog post idea or FAQ question pops into your head!  If one client has this question, others might too.  Write about it!
2. You see something interesting on an industry news feed: Tweet it!  Share the link!
3. You just sent out the biggest order ever – or one that’s a especially remarkable:  take photos of the packing process and share them on Facebook!
4. A client tells you how pleased they are with their new fill-in-the-blank from your company: add it to the testimonials page and ask them to write a review on your Google Local listing!
5. You just signed a deal to provide something previously unheard of in your industry – the quickest installation or revamp or largest whatever it is – get out your Flip video camera and record it!  Use your desktop movie editor (iMovie, Windows Media) to edit a quick video together and post it to your Flickr and YouTube and Facebook accounts.  Add it to your website.

I completely understand that we are all busy people, and continuing on the path of least resistance requires the least amount of effort.

But the rewards that come from making these changes – the rewards of building your online presence, creating that online community and establishing your online credibilty – those rewards are worth the effort.

I’m not sure that the rewards of moving my calendar and to-do lists online are as great – so I don’t feel too bad about not committing 100% – but in an effort to show my clients that I get it – I am going to incorporate Evernote into my life as much as possible, and start getting used to organizing things digitally.  Each day, I’m going to take a small step to changing the way I organize my life, so that maybe, just maybe, 2011 will be the year.

To our dear clients, our fantastic colleagues and our creative, talented friends.  It’s been a big year for Big Sea -  a year full of new beginnings, growth and the struggles that come with that – and we’re poised to make 2010 a more stable, prosperous and adventurous new year.

We’re working hard to build a web shop that excels in both function as well as fashion.  To learn and grow and build our own knowledge so that we can guide our clients with both experience and expertise.  I can honestly say that I think we’ve got one of the most talented pools of designers and developers in the area right now – a group that is passionate about web usability, is willing to take creative risks and always keeps an eye on the site’s true goals.

I’m thankful to everyone that’s worked with us over the past year – Adam, Dave, Keith, Tony, Charlene, Maria, Laura, Nate, Joe, Toni, Peter, Eric, Jason, Matt – to help deliver web-based solutions and creative projects and just kick-ass websites whenever possible.

I’m excited to see what 2010 brings as we are really gelled and getting really good at asking the right questions; delivering the right solution – and hopefully doing it with kindness and integrity.  There’s a lot of room in this market for a web shop that’s not in it for the buck alone.  We’re passionate about the web – about programming, about designing, about making the web a more fun and friendly place.

So thank you, to everyone.  We look forward to working with you in 2010.

We’re looking for a fulltime 60-day contract PHP developer to work with us in our downtown St. Pete office. The project is custom enterprise-level PHP/MySQL. You will work on a two-person team in conjunction with an experienced front-end web designer. More details about the position will be made available to candidates that meet the criteria below.

If we like you and you like us – and your performance is up to par, there’s a fulltime position available.

Location: Gorgeous downtown St. Pete, or, if you’re really dedicated, you can work from home.

Start Date: ASAP

Required Skills:

- Expert PHP programming experience
- Expert MySQL database experience
- Basic CentOS / Apache server administration
- Basic FTP, E-mail, backup and security experience
- Expert HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Ajax front-end experience
- Intermediate API integration experience
- Intermediate Google Maps creation via JavaScript, API
- Intermediate experience using version control software, i.e. GIT, SVN

Please send me some links to your work and and resume with experience and references.

Email jobs@bigseadesign.com