Dealers and businesses in general have been walking a fine line between “having fun and being interesting” on social networks like Twitter and Facebook and truly using them for business. What most dealers do not understand is that engaging, being interesting and having fun is the only way to be able to promote your business through social media.  At Carrera & Fiorini, we have packages that work with your dealership so you use social media the right way without alienating the very people you are trying to persuade into doing business with you.

Call Cristina Carrera or Pierre Fiorini  today – before your competitors do!

Facebook allows for 2 networking tools:

1. Creating/ joining a Facebook group

1. Creating/ joining a Facebook fan page

While the major differences become evident only after you try out them first,

the 2 major differences include

1. Unlike groups, fan pages are visible to unregistered people and are thus indexed (important for reputaion management, for example)

1. Unlike pages, groups allow to send out “bulk invite” (you can easily invite all your friends to join the group while with pages you will be forced to drop some invites manually). Groups are thus better for viral marketing, meaning that any group member can also send bulk invites to the friends of his.

Now let’s go into some details:

To conclude

• Pages are generally better for a long-term relationships with your fans, readers or customers

• Groups are generally better for hosting a (quick) active discussion and attracting quick attention

As General Motors files for bankruptcy and plans to close thousands of dealerships, Ford Motor Company aims to gain market share. And a big part of their strategy moving forward will involve social media. Specifically, Ford has opened up a dialogue online between the company’s marketers, engineers, product people and its customers through mediums like Twitter, blogs, YouTube, Flickr and social media press releases. In addition, they’re reaching out to key influencers through a number of online initiatives.

And that’s just the beginning. Ford is in a different place from most of the American auto industry right now, says Scott Monty, the company’s head of social media, because of forward-looking innovation. “First of all, we didn’t have to take any government money,” Monty says. “We refinanced about a year and a half ago on our own. In addition, we’re shifting from 70 percent trucks and SUVs to 60 percent cars and crossovers. And we’re not just pursuing hybrid or electric. We have a number of ways to meet these new specifications,” such as fuel-efficient “EcoBoost” engines.

However, in order to create the new kinds of cars people value and want, Monty says, “we need a dialogue.” Using the Web for this purpose makes sense, he says, because it offers “real-time, transparent developments.” In fact, one Ford program, called the Fiesta Movement, allows online influencers to help co-create the final five to ten percent of the 2011 Fiesta automobile for the North American market, Monty says.

In these tumultuous times for the auto industry, Ford is looking to the Web to track customer feedback, monitor potential crises, educate consumers, get its message out, release news-and even build new cars. Below Monty answers questions and talks more specifically about Ford’s online media programs-and outlines how others can similarly leverage social media to position themselves for growth as the economy begins to turn around:

How is Ford using social media in programs like the Fiesta Movement program?

Ford is using social media in a variety of ways, primarily for marketing and communications purposes. With the Fiesta Movement, they are giving 100 vehicles to 100 digital influencers, or “agents,” for six months to get feedback on the vehicle before it goes into production. Together with these influencers [through test drives, experience reports, feedback and other "missions"], they are co-creating the final five to ten percent of the Fiesta automobile for the North American market. It’s a small car-smaller than a Ford Focus, and comparable to the Honda Fit.

How are influencers or “agents” chosen?

Each one has social presence across a variety of platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, their own blogs and other platforms. They’re out there talking about the project on their own, and we’re aggregating all of that content through a central portal on the Fiesta page.

Ford invited them to participate in a contest for a two- to five-minute video. Ford used an agency named Undercurrent to help get the word out, and we received over 4,000 applications and 700 videos. Ford selected the 100 agents through a whole screening process that included background checks.

What other social media outreach is Ford involved with?

Social media is rampant at Ford. Ford has been using social media releases for two years. We use Wordpress and repurpose press releases into digital snippets. All the photos we post are Creative Commons licensed and posted on Flickr. All the videos are fully embeddable off of YouTube.

Ford has had a lot of positive results. They have posted about 150 videos, which have received 1.2 million views, as well as over 30,000 downloads of Flickr photos-and our social media press releases have been picked up by over 5,000 blogs and media.

Ford is also on Twitter extensively. Ford leverages Twitter to give an inside look at the company, and they have a half-dozen corporate accounts from products to broader areas. For example, there’s Ford Trucks, Ford Mustang, Ford Drive Green-and our customer service team members are on Twitter. They use it to send out coupons and monitor customer comments.

Twitter is also handy for monitoring crises, because it’s in real time. Ford has a lot of comments about us on Twitter, and a lot of people who notify them via Twitter.

In addition, Ford’s social media hub is Fordstory.com, which is in a constant state of development. It offers a mix of marketing and communications functions and is the site through which we funnel our blogger drive experiences. So, if Ford gives a blogger a car to drive and they write about it on their blog, typically, only their blog readers see it. But Ford aggregates it through a single portal that distributes it through every platform, everyone can see what these bloggers are saying about Ford.

Everybody has a car story-and you want to know other people’s impressions before you drive a car. This gives customers a chance to do that.

Fords ultimate goal with these various social media initiatives

Ford’s goal is to humanize the company and put a face-or many faces-on the Blue Oval. If Ford has been viewed as not having any brand personality or very little human element, this breaks down the barriers and shows that there are consumers and people working at Ford who are passionate about it. Ford helps them connect with Ford and with each other to provide value. This ensures that everyone wins.

Ford is a company founded by a single man whose name is still on the logo today. Years ago, in the era of mass media, we moved away from that. Now, we’re bringing it back to the people behind these developments. You can now talk to the engineers, marketers and product people on a regular basis.

Competitors, like GM, have made great strides in social media? GM’s “FastLane” blog – What is Ford doing about this…

A number of independent studies showing that Ford has been ranked at the top of all automotive brands in terms of presence on the social Web. Other companies are doing things that are right for them. GM has been long respected and worked hard at “FastLane” and other online components. Ford has taken another approach. Ford went heavily into Twitter because no other auto company was on it, and it allowed us to have one-on-one conversations with customers. We zigged while others zagged. Ford always did something a little different.

How has the economic downturn affected the ways companies should be using social media?

Budgets have been trimmed, and people are looking at social media to be one of those ways to cut costs. But it’s not necessarily the cheapest. It’s certainly cheaper than buying a multi-million dollar ad. But there’s a human element, so there’s a people cost.

How are Fortune 1,000 companies in general embracing social media?

It depends on the sector. The travel industry has done well: Jet Blue, Southwest, Marriott, Starwood. They do a good job, and so do the more consumer-facing brands like Starbucks and Whole Foods, and the technology companies like Dell. There are a lot of great examples, but the entire Fortune 500 has not seen a lockstep movement forward. Sixty years ago, when everyone bought ads on TV-that was a single move. Now there are so many choices. Should you do Twitter? Facebook fan pages? A blog? There are so many ways of communicating. Each company has either figured it out or they’re watching it unfold and will jump in when the time is right.

When is the right time?

Every company must move at their own speed. And that’s the thing: Ford has often been thought of as an old school company-but from the inside, we’re always pushing for what’s next.

What are the best ways to integrate traditional and non-traditional media outreach?

Integrating Fordstory.com into ad buys to drive people to the online space is one way. And one component of social media that people overlook is face to face. There’s no substitute for getting out there and making relationships face to face. Ford does a lot of events where they invite bloggers to their test track.

Also, when you consider the Fiesta Movement, it’s a very powerful online movement with agents creating content, but there’s a parallel offline track, called “Ride and Drive.” We take 40 vehicles, separate from the 100 we give out, and do a city tour. This gives the public a chance to see the vehicles up front. By the end of the year, Ford will have 100,000 test drives completed.

Then, you can go the online and the two merge. When you see all of these test drive cars out there, they all have fiestamovement.com on the vehicles. We always drive people back to the website to interact.

What are the legal and IR ramifications of using Twitter and social media? Is that a challenge? Do IR and legal have to vet everything?

Ford works closely with their office of general council, particularly when talking about things where claims can be made, such as fuel economy, set standards or safety claims. Ford needs to be careful, because anything they say could be used in a lawsuit. For the most part, the way Ford thinks of social interaction on the Web is that it’s no different than how they interact on email or the phone. If Ford comes out of a meeting where learn of something that hasn’t been released to the public yet, there’s no way they would say that on the phone. The same holds for social media. Ford also has online guidelines that they’ve created with legal. It’s not censorship or restrictive, but they give social media users a sense as to what they can and can’t say.

What tips would Ford offer to other PR professionals who want to leverage social media right now?

Spend some time listening and observing out there. Know where your customers are and where you want to play-if it’s even appropriate. It might not be appropriate for some companies. Additionally, make sure you have the support of senior management. This can’t be done at the grassroots level within a company. Come from the top, and bring in legal early and often. Understand that it will take time. Social media isn’t a panacea nor will it have immediate results. It’s about relationship building. And that happens over time.

Lastly: Understand that it’s more than one person’s job. It’s not just for PR or marketing. Every division should be involved.

What are the implications here for agency side pros?

It can be tough and tricky for agencies. For example, blogger relations-while similar to media relations-is not the same as media relations. Bloggers have their own personalities and behaviors. It takes a while to understand that before you can jump in. Spend time reading blogs and learning about the issues of the bloggers in your industry before pitching them. As far as supporting clients goes, the agencies that come to the table with a strong strategic vision as well as strong operational backup to put that vision into practice will be helpful allies.

Topsy.com Providing a Better Twitter Search

Topsy, new Twitter search site, was launched in May 2009. Rankings for social media data is purely based on the number of times the link has been tweeted, for whatever time window you select: hour, day, week, month, all-time. When grouping by URLs, they resolve compressed versions from bit.ly or tinyurl. The resolved link, along with the number of tweets, and the text of a recent tweet, are displayed. Along the right margin, you get a list of common users and the number of times they’ve contributed to the result set. You can also search within a particular user.

If you click on a tweet group, you’ll get a list of posts, and a list of “What’s Related”. The quality of the related tweet groups is a bit sketchy. Tweets are short, not much to go on. You could imagine just pulling out the most statistically overrepresented words from the a tweet group. For the baseline you’d want to calculate word frequency from a lot of tweets, not a corpus of standard written English. Tweets have their own language. Take the top few words, throw them into a full-text search engine, and group the results by their resolved URL. As I mentioned before in a post about real-time search, its not terribly complicated. The tricky part is getting a feed of tweets from Twitter. Once you have it, you pull every URL. For each one, do a HTTP HEAD request to get past bit.ly, tinyurl and the like. That will save you some time and bandwidth over downloading the entire page. Perhaps have a short list of URL-shortening services and use those to filter. Some of them, like bit.ly, also provide an API where you can expand the shortened version without doing the HEAD request.

You have the URLs, timestamps, usernames, and tweet text. Since you’re grouping by URL’s, you might also consider only indexing tweets that have links — that will reduce the size of your indicies. This is not rocket science. I was baffled by their $15MM purchase of Summize. I suppose in the case of Summize a premium was paid to get it quickly. According to CrunchBase, Topsy raised $15MM. Of that, $11MM was raised last December. I wonder why they need all that money? Right now they list 14 people on their web site, and their product feels like a $4MM product, what they have so far is not terribly complicated even when implemented for scale. Perhaps they have big plans for the future, or anticipate big hardware bills and low revenue in the short run.

So although I like Topsy very much, they are dependent on Twitter for their feed of tweets, and whatever current value you might give to their enterprise, most of that value is in their access to the complete tweet feed. Twitter controls that, and can shut it off, so they don’t seem like a good target for acquisition for anyone except Twitter. I don’t see any patent applications on file at the USPTO. Or as with Summize, they might hope to fetch another premium for getting a search product out quickly. Twitter already did that once, I doubt they’ll do it again, they already have search expertise in-house now. Perhaps they want to get a big user base, and hope that Twitter won’t have the guts to shut them down — negotiating with someone who’s holding a gun to your head, and hoping they don’t want to bloody their shirt.

You don’t raise $11MM without a plan, even with all the crazy hype over real-time search. That money probably put the finishing touches on their current search offering, but will largely be going towards new products that would be better targets for acquisition. Their investors have experience with mobile technology, perhaps they have a clever way to move this onto mobile devices.

A new search engine, Topsy, which has been in stealth development for three years, has recently launched and may eventually challenge Google for search engine supremacy.

A Brief History of Search Engines…

Before Google, search engines like determined relevance based on how well a web page matched the query. Then came Google, which views the web as a network of documents. Today, all search engines analyze linking behavior around the web.

When a web page is linked to a lot, it’s given more influence than other pages competing for attention around the same topics/keywords. Jeff Jarvis summed it all nicely in 2005 “In this new world, links are currency. Links grant authority. Links build branding. Links equal value.” There’s lots more to it, but the notion that links create value is what drives Internet search.

The Search Engine Landscape Today…

Well, it’s no longer 2005. Back then blogs were giving Google fits because of how fast and irregularly they updated. Google had to make decisions on how often to index pages. Indexing is expensive, so there’s a tradeoff. Ping servers and blog search engines rose briefly to fill the niche, but Google indexes most popular blogs so often that those blog search engines are no longer much better.

Now, though, we have so much real time content being created that Google and the other engines can’t keep up. Most of this content is on Twitter, but FriendFeed, Facebook, Digg and lots of other services are adding to it, too. The result – more and more people are doing searches in Twitter search in addition to Google. For me, someone who’s obsessed with news and stuff that’s happening right now, Twitter search is about 25% of my total Internet searches. The ratio keeps going up over time.

That’s where Topsy comes in. It’s not strictly speaking a real time search engine like Scoopler, which we wrote about earlier this month. Topsy is just a search engine. That has a fundamentally new way of finding good results: Twitter users.

The 30 million or so Twitter users are an army of little content-finding machines. Topsy says those users are sending tens of thousands of unique links per day to interesting things around the Internet.

Some of those users have more influence than others. And some links are sent by lots of Twitter users, others just sent once. Those links, combined with the information in the Twitter message itself, is what Topsy uses as the basis of its search engine.

And the results are…amazing – See for yourself at Topsy.com

New stuff in particular percolates up very quickly. A search for Facebook, for example, shows lots of news about the funding that was announced earlier today. And the links are sorted by those that Twitter users are sending around the most, weighted in favor of links sent by more influential Twitter users. You can sort results over all time (going back to September 2008), last month, week, day or hour. For all time, top results for Facebook are the Facebook site and developer site, among others. But in the last hour and day, it’s all about the funding news.

Results show popular links but also the most influential users tweeting about that topic. Click on that user and you’ll see all their tweets about the topic. Here’s the results for TechCrunch and Facebook, for example.

User influence is a hot topic, of course. Topsy isn’t looking at the number of followers. Rather, Influence is gained when others retweet links you’ve sent out. And when you retweet others, you lose a little Influence. So the more people retweet you, the more Influence you gain. So, yes, retweets may be part of the new currency on the web. Told you.

Topsy was founded in 2006 and has raised nearly $15 million to date in venture and debt funding. More information on the funding and founders is on the CrunchBase page for today.

Here’s a video where the Topsy founders give an introduction to the service and how it works:

Talking to a friend today, the conversation quickly turned to Twitter. He just didn’t get it, and he’s certainly not the first person to tell me that. Specifically, my friend didn’t understand the massive valuation ($250 million or more) that Twitter won in its recent funding. I told him why I thought it was more than justified: Twitter is, more than anything, a search engine.

I told him what I thought of Twitter as a micro-blogging service: it’s a collection of emotional grunts. But it’s wonderful nonetheless. And enough people are hooked on it that Twitter has reached critical mass. If something big is going on in the world, you can get information about it from Twitter.

Twitter also gathers other information, like people’s experiences with products and services as they interact with them. A couple of weeks ago, for example, I was stuck in an airport (Philadelphia) and received extremely poor service from US Air. I twittered my displeasure, which made me feel better – at least I was doing something besides wait in an endless line.

More and more people are starting to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time as they interact with them. And those brands want to know all about it, whether to respond individually, or simply gather the information to see what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.

And all of it is discoverable at search.twitter.com, the search engine that Twitter acquired last summer.

People searching for news. Brands searching for feedback. That’s valuable stuff.

Twitter knows it, too. They’re going to build their business model on it. Forget small time payments from users for pro accounts and other features, all they have to do is keep growing the base and gather more and more of those emotional grunts. In aggregate it’s extremely valuable. And as Google has shown, search is vastly monetizable – somewhere around 40% of all online advertising revenue goes to ads on search listings today.

And as John Battelle says, its not clear that Google or anyone else can compete with Twitter at this point (Facebook’s giving it a solid try, though).

And it’s not just ads that can bring in the money. Brands need tools to make sense of all this data that Twitter doesn’t yet supply. Third parties like Scout Labs are going to be mining this data themselves, I’m sure. But there are lots of other ways Twitter can tax the utility they are bringing to brands. If they manage to turn down the acquisition offers like Facebook did a couple of years ago, there’s no reason Twitter can’t find revenue streams that will support them as a standalone company. Possibly even a public one.

Does Twitter have SEO Value?

Since Twitter started gaining popularity the question about its “SEO value” has been on the minds of many webmasters who obviously want to boost their placement into Google’s SERPs. But using Twitter for “link juice” is a lost battle in Google’s ranking methodology.

Twitter adds a “nofollow” attribute to links submitted by its users. The “nofollow” attribute advises Google, and a few other search engines, to ignore the link. Some of these follow the links but exclude them from their ranking calculations (Yahoo!, Google); some ignore the links completely (MSN). The only known search engine that doesn’t comply with Google’s “nofollow” at all is Ask.com. This example alone shows that Google’s algorithms are not the gospel for all search engines.

Do Shortened URLs Have SEO Value?

The short answer is yes. TinyURLs are dynamically created URLs that redirect users to the real URL via 301 (permanent redirect). Search engines do not index TinyURLs, but index and pass PageRank to the actual URLs instead. The problem with Twitter, as we already discussed, is the “nofollow” attribute added to all submitted links.

Are There Any Other Possible SEO Advantages with Twitter?

SEO is not only about building links. Optimizing a site is about creating and promoting content that can be regarded as a resource. “Creating” is “onsite SEO.” “Promoting” is “offsite SEO.”

Every time you submit your site to a directory you “promote it” – meaning that you do “offsite SEO.” Every time a link to your site is published somewhere on the web a gate to your site is being opened. People don’t care about “nofollow” attributes. If they see a link and they think the content it leads to is interesting, they follow.

When visitors land on a page from an exterior link some other metrics are affected: number of unique visitors, number of page views, and time on site. These metrics matter for the search engines more and more; since all other variables are so easily gamed (links and keywords are all subject to spam and black hat SEO strategies).

To make a long story short: although Twitter is a social media tool meant to create community and relationships, it does have an SEO value. For example, Twitter can affect positively your Alexa rankings by sending visitors to your pages.

Here are some tips to Optimize for the twitter search:

1. The Importance of Keyword Research

As long as search engine optimization exists, keyword research will always be important. In optimizing anything for search online, understanding the language of your potential customers and audience is crucial. It will help you not only to improve your search traffic but also to tweak your marketing message and better relate to the people you are selling to.

That being said, tweeps (people on Twitter) are no different than searchers on Google. They use the language that they’re used to, both in their Twitter conversations and in search queries.

The great thing about Twitter is that you can easily use it as a market research tool to better understand the people you’re targeting. Use the wealth of knowledge existing on the site to look into popular keywords and market needs.

2. Twitter Profile Branding and Branding Yourself

Branding is extremely important, in SEO and in social media. If you’re using Twitter as a business tool to reach out to more potential customers and increase your traffic, then you absolutely need to have a strong brand presence. Rather than using the same Twitter account to target various audiences, set up multiple identities and use them to cater to specific audiences. Brand yourself and stand for something. Twitter search will eventually give more weight in the search results to Twitter users who talk mainly about the specific niche being searched for.

Being focused will also help you to stay consistent with your marketing message and get the attention of your target audience. This in turn will increase the chances of people following you and paying more attention to what you have to offer (more on this in the next section) – which means you get better rankings in Twitter search.

It also helps to customize your Twitter profile to be consistent with your brand image. Use a catchy background with all of your contact information and write a descriptive bio that includes your name, location, and website. For examples, check out the list top Twitter users.

3. Get more Followers and Build Relationships

Google uses factors such as domain age and the quantity and quality of inbound links to determine the authority of a site. In the same way, Twitter will probably do something similar and give more trust to users who have been using the service longer and have more followers. Tweets of trusted users will likely receive a boost in the Twitter search results.

So what does that mean for you, a Twitter SEO? You need to build relationships with other people in your industry and build your Twitter audience by collecting more followers. Make connections with other people, online and off, through whatever channels you have access to (e.g. other social media sites, blogs, conferences, etc). SEO is quickly becoming more and more social and it’s not necessarily what you know anymore – it’s who you know. The people who are most-connected will rise to the top and get the majority of the attention.

If you want to build your Twitter audience fast you can start some sort of contest or promotion. Just be aware that whenever you run these types of campaigns your followers won’t be very engaged with you because of you. A lot of them want the benefits and prizes but don’t care about you or what you have to say, at least in the beginning. The best way to do it is organically through real connections but promotions do give a good jolt to your numbers.

4. Be Engaging by Adding to the Conversation

As you may know, Twitter is a giant online conversation where millions of users exchange ideas and information. Since Twitter search pulls information from this enormous pool, it’s important that you add relevant content and links where appropriate using the keyword research insights you learned in step one. Sure, you only get 140 characters of space but that doesn’t mean you can’t pack a punch and gain attention. Spark up debate and conversation in your niche, answer questions, and add relevant content and advice whenever possible. Be an expert and an authority and engage with anyone and everyone. It will pay off.

5. Start viral marketing campaigns

Whereas inbound links represent “votes” for a page in Google Search, Twitter is likely to incorporate re-tweets (another Twitter user broadcasting your message to their own audience) into their algorithm to better understand the popularity of content. As a Twitter SEO, this means that you need to maximize the number of re-tweets of your content. Viral marketing becomes extremely important and in order to do well in Twitter search you need to have people talking about you and sharing your stuff on a regular basis.

Write interesting tweets and link to exceptional related articles to share with your audience. It might be a good idea to use other social sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon to find good articles you can easily share. Build up your profile and get re-tweets to your content, especially when you’re linking to your own site.

6. Add links and multimedia where appropriate & use Twitter as a marketing channel

A Twitter search returns tweets, so you may be asking what benefit you get from ranking highly with a 140 character message. The answer to that question is that by getting exposure in Twitter you add a big marketing channel to drive traffic back to your own site and increase conversions. You not only drive traffic to your site through links but you also establish your brand and develop relationships with potential customers – which means a big boost in your bottom line.

Twitter SEO is a lot like email marketing. Your first priority is to develop a solid relationship with your followers by offering interesting and useful content. Once you have that in place you can add your own links and promotional marketing to drive sales.

It’s no secret that this decade’s social networking platforms have given way to some of the most infectious online mediums as a means to communicate. Fittingly, viral video has been one of them, and with YouTube dominating the market, everyone including the creators of Facebook and others has been trying to get a piece of the action.

uStream.tv offers anyone the chance to stream live video feeds, collaborate in video chats and broadcast webcasts across the internet.

Anyone with a camera and a usb cord can be on TV – not just not just your NBC, CBS, FOX, etc. Also, it integrates with famed social networking fads, Facebook.com & Twitter, and posts viewers’ video chat comments to their Twitter.com homepage, all while alerting the streamer’s Facebook friends that he or she just started taping a new video.

It’s a well-oiled machine, and from a business perspective, this equates to – free advertising.

Clearly, uStream’s marketing potential is HUGE.

As an example, consider Brittany Spears. Suppose Brittany streams a pre-release of one her new songs and an interview one its servers. Then thousands of Twitter users are jumping at their chance to talk to a real life celebrity, in real time.

“OMG, Brittany is on uStream.tv live singing her new song!”

This means, as a result of her popularity as an artist, potentially thousands of people are typing her name online as a key word.

A watershed of events will now quickly occur: “Brittany’s new song” will become one of twitter’s trending topics (for non-users, one of the most-used keywords in the TwitterVerse), and people who hadn’t heard her new song will be now.

It spawns millions of search engine hits, webpage views, and possibly products bought, which = $$$. Even the placed on this blog post have the potential to make her millions of dollars.

A neat feature of uStream is that is functionality is similar to that of YouTube. Not only can you stream live in a webchat, but you can record what you’re taping for viewing later. thus, you not only have users visiting your uStream page to see you live, you also could potentially draw users to view older videos, the latter of which YouTube is limited to.

Find out more about registering for a uStream account here.

Find out how to set up uStream video and Check out our experimental uStream account here