This morning, I’m one of three keynote speakers at SEM for SMB in Austin, Texas. My topic, naturally, is social media. Specifically, I identified 5 primary strategies for building small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) via social media marketing. This post is a summary of my presentation, for those that couldn’t make it to Austin.

Why should SMBs care about social media? Because they can’t afford to ignore the fact that Web 2.0 technologies have changed the way we research, communicate and collaborate. The adoption of universal search (embedding social media into results) has forever and profoundly affected how companies can and must market.

Most significantly, Google’s adoption of the OneBox has essentially minimized the impact of a top 5 list in target search results by pushing down organic listings and replacing the top 2 or 3 spots featuring news, blogs and/or a Google Map featuring local businesses that meet your search criteria. There is hope, however. I’ve outlined 5 simple but effective strategies for marketing your business in the Web 2.0 World.

Networking
Do you have a profile on LinkedIn? What about Plaxo, Biznik, Bebo or Facebook? Have you optimized your profile to appear in organic search results? These social networking sites are targeted at business professionals, are largely free (or low cost) and require only a few minutes to set up. The benefits are plentiful and well worth the effort. Obviously, the sites are designed to network virtually with professionals that share your interests, can answer your questions as subject matter experts or offer you an opportunity to return the favor by answering questions from others. It’s more than just creating “friends” or “connections”…it’s about building meaningful relationship, endorsements, reviews and ultimately business. My primary reasons for creating and managing social networking profiles are twofold: proactively manage my reputation (aka online reputation management) and build my personal and company brand as thought leaders by participating in questions & answers.

Awareness Building
While social network profiles can help build awareness for you or your company, there are more effective means of achieving this objective. There are a variety of content creation, sharing and syndication platforms available for free. If your small business is in an industry where images, audio or video are an output (i.e. a film production company or photography studio) then there is no reason you shouldn’t have profiles on sites like FlickR or YouTube. Once uploaded, your multimedia content can be embedded or syndicated to other sites (including your corporate site or blog). Even if your business isn’t intuitively connected to multimedia, you can create training or demo videos (remember Blendtec?). Additionally, don’t forget the king of content: text. Developing a series of articles for distribution to article syndication sites and industry publications can be highly affective at generating visibility.

Thought Leadership Development
As mentioned earlier, I’m a big fan of questions & answers on sites like LinkedIn and Yahoo Answers! Each site has a slightly different audience, business and consumer respectively, but both offer highly targeted communities sharing similar interests. By simply committing time to monitor and engage when you have information of value to share, you can quickly move from general awareness to though leader status. The 10 to 15 minutes I spend each day on LinkedIn has resulted in new partners, business leads, press coverage, and best of all, a keynote speaking engagement in Austin. Did I mention it’s also a great resource of experts who can answer your burning business and marketing questions? Even if you don’t ask or answer questions, expert communities are still fantastic for market research. Additional thought leadership strategies and tools include the time-tested blog, as well as newfangled Twitter. While Anvil has two blogs, one for SEM news and another focusing on brand reputation management, I have my own personal blog and Twitter account, which I use to keep my constituents updated.

Collaboration
Many of the platforms I’ve mentioned have multiple applications or value propositions. So far, I’ve mentioned LinkedIn as a networking and expert community platform. It’s also a wonderful collaboration tool (beyond Q&A), in its Groups capability. Anyone can start, promote and manage Groups on LinkedIn and Facebook. Similar to forums, groups offer an opportunity for like-minded individuals to join a community, share information and encourage collaboration. There are other tools and platforms developed strictly for collaboration, like Basecamp and Jive ClearSpace, but they are meant primarily for internal/exclusive/private group projects or communities.

Revenue Generation
It took me awhile to get to the point, but here it is: social media marketing is measurable and can generate revenue on its own. For example, relationships you develop through networking or thought leadership can turn into revenue-generating clients or partnerships. Video demos and watermarked images can be used to lure in potential customers, if not used to generate revenue by being sold on revenue sharing platforms like Revver. Laying on additional marketing strategies like public relations (aka SEM PR) can be utilized to generate customers through measurable channels (unique URLs, promo codes or phone numbers).

At the end of the day, the five social media marketing strategies listed above can be utilized to grow your SMB and take your marketing to a new level. You know where to find me. Good luck!