In the August issue of Inc. Magazine there is a terrific article on social media marketing called “4 Ways to Master Social Media Marketing.” The basic theme of the article is that social media is no longer an option; rather, it is a necessity.

According to Nielsen, 79% of large businesses are using social media “to engage their audience…build buzz, establish relationships, foster communication…and cultivate long-term brand awareness and consumer trust.”

The article claims that it doesn’t matter what type of company you are or how much experience you have. All you need is to learn a few simple rules. “Social media is not so much a new idea as it is a way to communicate ideas, and the nature of a good idea hasn’t changed. The same marketing principles from 50 years ago apply today; they are simply communicated in a different way.”

This is a very good article that offers concrete suggestions on how to use social media. There are four “take aways” that you can immediately utilize in your own business.

• Raise Brand Awareness

• Drive Valuable Traffic

• Grow Consumer Loyalty

• Build Brand Equity

In addition, the article gives a handful of very valuable examples of successful social media campaigns from which we can all learn.

Although poorly written, this is a very good article about the relationship between quality content and link popularity in achieving high ranking in the search engines. Most of us know that quality content – defined as valuable, unique and keyword rich content – is one of the most important criteria search engines use for ranking. Even more important, though, is link popularity. And how are they connected?

That’s the gist of the article, and rather than put my spin on it, I’ll let you read the article and see for yourself how the author cleverly explains the relationship between the two, how good content, in fact, leads to improved link popularity.

So how do you measure ROI for your social media marketing efforts? This is a question all business owners who experiment with social media sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook must ask themselves. Or if you have someone managing your social media marketing campaigns – what criteria do you use to measure results?

In a blog post entitled Looking for clear-cut social media ROI? There’s an SEO for that!, the author, Hugo Guzman, claims that you can calculate the ROI of your social media efforts by correlating the relationship of these efforts with the improvement in search engine rankings. Simply stated, social media marketing improves SEO, which increases website or blog visitors, which increases leads, which increases conversions (or sales).

Truly, it’s a lot more complex than this, and Guzman lays out a very convincing case for the importance of social media marketing. You be the judge, though, and determine for yourself if your business can benefit from marketing on the various social media sites.

There is so much talk nowadays about Cloud computing I thought it might be helpful to discuss the topic in a way that I think everyone can understand. So here is a three-part article on Cloud computing broken up in three topics: (1) What is Cloud computing, (2) What are the benefits of Cloud computing and (3) What is the future of Cloud computing?

According to Wikipedia, cloud computing is internet computing whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand similar to an electricity grid.

Cloud computing is a paradigm shift following the shift from mainframe to client-server in the early 1980s. Details are abstracted from the users, who no longer have need for expertise in, or control over, the technology infrastructure “in the cloud” that supports them. Cloud computing describes a new supplement, consumption, and delivery model for IT services based on the Internet, and it typically involves over-the-Internet-provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources. It is a byproduct and consequence of the ease-of-access to remote computing sites provided by the Internet.

The term “cloud” is used as a metaphor for the internet, based on the cloud drawing used in the past to represent the telephone network, and later to depict the Internet in computer network diagram as an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it represents. Typical cloud computing providers deliver common business applications online that are accessed from another Web service or software such as a Web browser, while the software and data are stored on servers.

Most cloud computing infrastructure consists of services delivered through common centers and built on servers. Clouds often appear as single points of access for all consumers’ computing needs. Commercial offerings are generally expected to meet quality of service (QoS) requirements of customers and typically include SLAs. The major cloud-only service providers include Salesforce.com, Amazon and Google.

According to wikiinvest.com, a simple example of cloud computing is Yahoo email or Gmail. You don’t need software or a server to use them. All a consumer needs is an internet connection and you can start sending emails. The server and email management software is all on the cloud (internet) and is totally managed by the cloud service provider Yahoo, Google, etc. The consumer uses the software alone and enjoys the benefits.

Here is a great article for all you “do it yourselfers” who want to perform SEO on your own websites. Of course, we don’t recommend this because, well, because we provide SEO for our clients…and charge for it. But that’s OK, give it a try anyway.

The article is filled with excellent tips – some general, some very technical – that might require the help of your web designer, but there are some that you might be able to do yourself if you have a content management system (CMS) or can edit the content in your site. To name a few: page names, directory structure, Meta tags, flash, navigation, and much more. Even if you don’t want to do your own SEO, you’ll find good information in the article that is useful for any website owner.