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By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER- New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Three weeks after Curtis Kimball opened his crème brûlée cart in San Francisco, he noticed a stranger among the friends in line for his desserts. How had the man discovered the cart? He had read about it on Twitter.

For Mr. Kimball, who conceded that he “hadn’t really understood the purpose of Twitter,” the beauty of digital word-of-mouth marketing was immediately clear. He signed up for an account and has more than 5,400 followers who wait for him to post the current location of his itinerant cart and list the flavors of the day, like lavender and orange creamsicle.

“I would love to say that I just had a really good idea and strategy, but Twitter has been pretty essential to my success,” he said. He has quit his day job as a carpenter to keep up with the demand.

Much has been made of how big companies like Dell, Starbucks and Comcast use Twitter to promote their products and answer customers’ questions. But today, small businesses outnumber the big ones on the free microblogging service, and in many ways, Twitter is an even more useful tool for them.

For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well.

“We think of these social media tools as being in the realm of the sophisticated, multiplatform marketers like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, but a lot of these supersmall businesses are gravitating toward them because they are accessible, free and very simple,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst who studies the Internet’s influence on shopping and local businesses.

Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word of mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network.

Umi, a sushi restaurant in San Francisco, sometimes gets five new customers a night who learned about it on Twitter, said Shamus Booth, a co-owner.

He twitters about the fresh fish of the night — “The O-Toro (bluefin tuna belly) tonight is some of the most rich and buttery tuna I’ve had,” he recently wrote — and offers free seaweed salads to people who mention Twitter.

Twitter is not just for businesses that want to lure customers with mouth-watering descriptions of food. For Cynthia Sutton-Stolle, the co-owner of Silver Barn Antiques in tiny Columbus, Tex., Twitter has been a way to find both suppliers and customers nationwide.

Since she joined Twitter in February, she has connected with people making lamps and candles that she subsequently ordered for her shop and has sold a few thousand dollars of merchandise to people outside Columbus, including to a woman in New Jersey shopping for graduation gifts.

“We don’t even have our Web site done, and we weren’t even trying to start an e-commerce business,” Ms. Sutton-Stolle said. “Twitter has been a real valuable tool because it’s made us national instead of a little-bitty store in a little-bitty town.”

Scott Seaman of Blowing Rock, N.C., also uses Twitter to expand his customer base beyond his town of about 1,500 residents. Mr. Seaman is a partner at Christopher’s Wine and Cheese shop and owns a bed and breakfast in town. He sets up searches on TweetDeck, a Web application that helps people manage their Twitter messages, to start conversations with people talking about his town or the mountain nearby. One person he met on Twitter booked a room at his inn, and a woman in Dallas ordered sake from his shop.

The extra traffic has come despite his rarely pitching his own businesses on Twitter. “To me, that’s a turn-off,” he said. Instead of marketing to customers, small-business owners should use the same persona they have offline, he advised. “Be the small shopkeeper down the street that everyone knows by name.”

Chris Mann, the owner of Woodhouse Day Spa in Cincinnati, twitters about discounts for massages and manicures every Tuesday. Twitter beats e-mail promotions because he can send tweets from his phone in a meeting and “every single business sends out an e-mail,” he said.

Even if a shop’s customers are not on Twitter, the service can be useful for entrepreneurs, said Becky McCray, who runs a liquor store and cattle ranch in Oklahoma and publishes a blog called Small Biz Survival.

In towns like hers, with only 5,000 people, small-business owners can feel isolated, she said. But on Twitter, she has learned business tax tips from an accountant, marketing tips from a consultant in Tennessee and start-up tips from the founder of several tech companies.

Anamitra Banerji, who manages commercial products at Twitter, said that when he joined the company from Yahoo in March, “I thought this was a place where large businesses were. What I’m finding more and more, to my surprise every single day, is business of all kinds.”

Twitter, which does not yet make money, is now concentrating on teaching businesses how they can join and use it, Mr. Banerji said, and the company plans to publish case studies. He is also developing products that Twitter can sell to businesses of all sizes this year, including features to verify businesses’ accounts and analyze traffic to their Twitter profiles.

According to Mr. Banerji, small-business owners like Twitter because they can talk directly to customers in a way that they were able to do only in person before. “We’re finding the emotional distance between businesses and their customers is shortening quite a bit,” he said.

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Today, I participated in my first speaking engagement teaching a group of real estate agents on how they can use social media for their business. My speaking engagement became more of a discussion and I quickly realized I had to start from the beginning. I called my presentation, “The Power of Social Media Networking.”

Before I could begin my discussion, a few members started talking about a new movie released today titled, “Precious.” One of them had never even heard of the movie. Since my presentation was more of a freestyle, I quickly pulled up YouTube and showed the trailer for the movie. Interestingly, it led right into my presentation. In just a few moments of watching the trailer, the young lady who had never even heard of the movie, was eager to go see it tonight! That’s how easily, social media can translate into dollars. It was a great segue into my presentation.

Real estate, like most businesses and industries today, need a new way to market their products and/or services to new consumers or a larger demographic. While I wanted to highlight using popular social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) easily became the highlight of the discussion. I was able to connect the PC to a larger screen and I showed the audience real-time conversations about home buying on Twitter, quick searches on Google, home tours on YouTube and even found groups and relevant profiles on Facebook.

I am coming to realize that everything boils down to SEO. Whether it is Bing search, Search.Twitter or using a search engine on a blog or website, are you using the proper keywords and phrases to help others find you? Are you using highly searched keywords on your LinkedIn profile or tagging the necessary keywords on your professional or personal blog so your target audience will be able to view your posts?

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Finally, your web site is complete. It looks great, the content is appealing, but web traffic is not where you want it to be. There may be a problem that you have not considered: search engine optimization a.k.a. SEO.

What is SEO?
Search engine optimization is the process of driving traffic to a website by weighting algorithmic search results in a site’s favor. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

Hire an SEO expert
If you haven’t completely exhausted your online budget on the web build or online media and can carve a bit more room in the budget for assistance with SEO, by all means do so. It is not nor is it ever too late to hire an agency, consultant or in-house expert to assist you with getting your website up to par and ready for indexing with the search engines. In fact, there are certain barriers that your newly designed website may have that can be overcome swiftly with a bit of hired help. In the long run, this can be worth the additional investment for your website.

Consider the following when deciding whether or not to hire yet another vendor or outside consultant to assist you with the next phase of your website’s development as recommended from SEOChat.com:

-If your website is very large and complex and contains deep content and variables in the URLs, then an SEO or programmer who is knowledgeable in URL rewriting can help you overcome this barrier quickly and effectively.

-If your primary navigation and/or site structure is in Flash, hidden behind frames or composed mainly of images, a seasoned SEO can work with you and your programmer to optimize the site as much as possible and assist you with major overhauls, if necessary.

-If you do not have much actual content on the site (e.g., product numbers but not descriptions), then an SEO copywriter can work with you to create relevant keyword-rich content that ensures people will find your site for your targeted keywords.

-If you are overwhelmed by the laundry list of SEO tasks that must now be implemented, you may want to hire an SEO for a few hours of consulting to help guide you. Remember, you do not need to be the expert here. You are already an expert in your chosen industry. A professional SEO can provide you with a game plan based on their own expertise in the field, which will save you time and money in the long run.

Just because you did not plan for SEO in the first phase of your website’s development does not mean it cannot be effectively implemented after your site has been made live. Always keep in mind that SEO is an ongoing process and can be incorporated into your annual online marketing budget along with things like regular website updates, newsletter mailings to site subscribers and online and offline media planning.

It can be overwhelming to discover that your work is not done once your website is live, but learning about SEO at the end of the project curve, rather than the beginning, is not as much of a setback as it seems. Most website owners already have the tools in place for good SEO and with some relatively simple tweaks to code and copy for the short term, and a comprehensive SEO strategy for the long term, you’ll do just fine.

For more information on how I can help your website or blog with SEO, contact me at 816-267-0678 or by email at EllaBee PR @gmail.com.

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The Problem
180 Urban Design is an architecture and design firm that specializes in New Urbanism design. The principal architects wanted to be recognized as leaders in New Urbanism, form-based codes, and LEED regulations. The company was having issues with low Google rankings which hurts business because people can’t find the company online. 180 wanted city planners and developers to know that they were building communities across the country. Awareness to the company’s projects were to be promoted through a podcasting blog.

The Strategy
As account manager, I developed a strategy that would position 180 as industry leaders by tagging search engine optimized (SEO) keywords to their blog posts, posting relevant articles from other industry leaders, promote the blog through other online communities, and pitch the blog to traditional and new media outlets. I knew podcasting would be great for other architects, but it takes grassroots marketing to promote a blog. You can’t just let it sit there in cyberspace, you have to interact with people who might be interested in your blog and find new and creative ways to not only get them to the blog, but make them stay there. I was determined to get the bounce rate under 50%. It was one of my secret goals. The bounce rate is when a user presses the back button-the lower the better. 180 Urban Design would become the go-to source for New Urbanism design.

The Tactics
Referring sites helped bring visitors to the blog. I registered the blog on Alltop, a blog search directory-one listing under architecture and another under design. I also posted relevant comments to other blogs and online articles like the New York Times Green Inc. blog, Facebook‘s New Urbanism groups, and Huffington Post’s Green section. When posting comments on these blogs, you shouldn’t just state, “Great post/article.” You have to share insight, ask questions, provide solutions, then the magic trick, leave your blog’s link. I also shared the podcasts on sites like Digg and Technorati. One of the main referring links came from Twitter. The Twitter profile 180Degree attracted more than 1,100 profiles in just two months. I had to search for not only architecture and design profiles, but for green profiles too. New Urbanism is all about green, walkable communities. Eventually, I started to attract my client’s target audience, city planners. Again, I listed the Twitter profile under a Twitter search directory, We Follow. I listed the 180Degree profile under architecture, design and urbanism. I posted tweets linking to the blog’s articles, other New Urbanism news stories, and other prominent architecture and design blogs.

In three short months, the New Urbanism Blog attracted more than 2,500 site visitors, from more than 50 countries from around the world. The client was very impressed by the blog’s appeal to the global architecture community. The client stated if I ever got a blog hit from Belize, please let him know; he would have to make a special vacation/trip to the country (smile).The average site visitor viewed the blog for approximately 2:05 minutes (think about how long you stay on a web page).The blog received 75 online subscribers and more than 300 comments. The page views were more than 4,550 with the average page views at 1.95 page views per visitor- that’s nearly two page views per site visitor. The top landing page was the blog’s front page so site visitors could read more than five posts. I was impressed with this data. Most visitors were looking deep into the site by searching under the categories listed, visiting the “About 180″ and “About New Urbanism” page, and going to older pages of blog posts.

The Solution
One of the firm’s principal architects was a great speaker on form-based codes. I posted and tweeted that he would be speaking around the country on what his company is doing with urban design. One subscriber posted a comment asking could we provide video of the workshop since he would not be able to attend. I immediately contacted the client and the organization he was speaking to and they loved the idea of sharing his insight through video to the blog. I immediately established a YouTube channel for the company. Once the videos were posted on YouTube, I provided link exchanges between the two platforms. One of the blog posts with a YouTube video helped the video go viral amongst the architecture and design community. 180 received praise for the insight and city planners immediately began contacting the company for help developing their downtown areas and residential communities. 180 Urban Design’s social media success led to potential clients. Since one of the firm’s principal architect was such a great speaker, he secured another speaking engagement but this time for the Congress for New Urbanism’s annual conference.

Basically, the blog did exceedingly well compared to other architecture and design blogs of similar size. Benchmarking for site visitors is +475%; Page views +282%; Average time on site +90%.

I also secured traditional media placement for 180 Urban Design. The company has been featured in Period Homes, New Orleans Channel 4 WWL, The Kansas City Star, One KC Voice, Panama City Beach Daily, Midwest Construction Magazine, Midwest Contractor online magazine, Kansas City Small Business Monthly-architecture issue, and GreenBuilderAdvisor.com

Overall, 180 Urban Design’s Google search engine ranking increased from no listings within the first 1,000 results to be included amongst the top 10 results listed for keywords and phrases such as New Urbanism, form-based codes, walkable communities, urban design, architecture blog, sustainable design, revitalize downtown, green in the Midwest, smart dwelling, and LEED for homes.

It’s been tried, tested and proven: SOCIAL MEDIA CAN GENERATE NEW BUSINESS.

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