The way Groupon works is to offer a discount on a product or service for a specific metropolitan area. These offers are usually substantially discounted, but do come with some heavy restrictions that vary by offer. Some merchants will allow an unlimited amount of coupons to be purchased, some merchants will cap the number number of coupons that could be sold.

There isn’t any cost to use the service, however, depending on the deal you negotiate, Groupon may keep some or all of the money from the Groupons sold. If your margins are small or you have high expenses fulfilling the Groupons, this could work out to be a fairly expensive advertising option.

There have been many stories about Groupon bringing hundreds of new customers into businesses. Groupon claims that over 97% of their customers want to get featured again. One of the favorite stories Groupon likes to share is about a bagel store owner in Chicago who had over 10,000 bagel Groupons redeemed.

Click here to view the embedded video.

However, in some cases, the merchants underestimated the response or weren’t prepared for the “Groupon Effect”, which started a domino effect of bad press. For example, Posies Cafe in Denver offered $13 of food for $6 and ended up losing $8,000 dollars due to labor and materials costs. Crystal Nail Salon ended with so many Groupon customers and long wait times, it led to their Yelp ratings taking a nose dive. Groupon addressed many of these complaints and situations on their blog.

If you are merchant considering Groupon, look at the financial end of the offer very carefully, and make sure you negotiate the best terms you can, so you don’t put yourself in precarious monetary position. Also think very strongly about about capping the number Groupons you are willing to redeem, it’s better to have 300 very happy customers, as opposed to 1,000 angry ones. Make sure you have the time and resources to devote to other social media channels when your Groupon is running. Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp can be powerful tools and these are key times to leverage them.

Animal rights group Mercy for Animals released a video showing undercover footage depicting cruelty to animals on YouTube (note the video shows graphic violence towards animals and is extremely uncomfortable and unpleasant to watch.) While animal rights activists have typically been more likely to use technology and social media tools, that’s not what happened here.

Farmers who were outraged that it was an unfair representation of many farms, reached for their smartphones and began fighting back. They took to Twitter and Facebook and began responding. One farmer, Ray Lin, led the initiative by starting his own blog where he posts stories and pictures directly from the farm.

To help teach other farmers how to use technology wisely, he started the group AgChat, which has a Facebook page, Twitter Account, LinkedIn Group and Youtube Channel. The group will also be holding its first conference in Chicago at the end of August. The key message he’s trying to get out is that if the farmers don’t tell their side of the story, someone else would tell it for them.

The lesson to learn here is to be prepared for a social media crisis before it happens. If you have a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube channel up and running before the catastrophe, you’ll be more prepared for a social media crisis. Have a rapid response team with a few key players in place, give them the power to get things done quickly.

A crisis is not the time send things out to the copywriter to lovingly craft a response that has to pass through marketing, legal, and the CEO’s office before it gets published. You need to be able to move quickly and decisively, and giving something that first person human voice, instead of a sanitized corporate one, usually makes you a little more sympathetic. Lastly, don’t be afraid to use Adwords and Press Releases to direct attention to your social media efforts, particularly in a time of crisis.

Update your profile

If you or anyone on your key executives, creative talent, or sales staff doesn’t already have a LinkedIn profile they should create one. Chances are though that most people already have an account, and unless they recently changed jobs, there profile hasn’t been touched in a while and could use some updating. Here’s an example of a before and after LinkedIn profile from Guy Kawasaki that has some excellent examples, but if you’re short on time here are the highlights:

• Add your voice. Everyone has a personal style, way they talk or do things, and your profile should reflect your voice, quirks, and personal style, its what makes you memorable. Want your profile come up more often and for the right searches? Here are some tips from LinkedIn on adding the right keywords to your profile.
• Go for the Readers Digest level of detail. Give details about what you did at your previous jobs, and what schools you went to. Give some details, but not too much. Try to be like a mini skirt, long enough to cover the essentials, but short enough to keep it interesting. Here are tips from LinkedIn on building a stronger profile.
• Get connected. LinkedIn has put out a lot of stats that the more connections you have the more business you are likely to get. Unless you want to be a LION, I suggest connecting only with people you know.
• Get recommendations. Again, LinkedIn has a lot of stats showing recommendations help you get business. Ask previous and current clients you have done business with, or people you know for recommendations, and give them back. Be honest and don’t make everyone sound like Superman, if you don’t have something nice to say, it’s probably best not to say anything at all. Try to keep getting referrals, someone with 6 referrals spread out over 3 years probably looks better, than someone with 20 referrals all more than 2 years old. Here are some tips on getting and giving LinkedIn recommendations.
• Vanity URL. LinkedIn started offering vanity URLs years ago, if you don’t have one get one, it looks much more professional than a random string of numbers, here’s mine: Michael Gray’s LinkedIn Profile.
• Link to Your Website. You can add up to three links, and if you choose “other” you can customize the anchor text, use it but don’t abuse it.

Create a company profile

LinkedIn now has the ability to create a company profile for your company, it will list everyone who works there and some information about the company. If you don’t have one you can create it, but only if one of the email addresses connected to your profile is from the same domain as the company website. You don’t need to do this but it makes your company look more complete, and provides a tool for reputation management should you ever need it. Here are some tips on building an effective company profile on LinkedIn.

Groups

Groups are a double-edged sword, joining more groups can make you look more important, but at a certain point it becomes unmanageable. I suggest starting small and building up, and trimming down, based on the conversations and your ability to participate. Here’s are some tips from LinkedIn on getting more out of groups.

Getting involved

It should go without saying, but to get any value out of social media you have be social, and participate, that’s why limiting your contacts and groups is an important part of the process. Search Engine Land has a group on LinkedIn and you can see there are quite a few active discussions. My suggestion is read the group guidelines and watch before getting involved. Don’t try to be a know it all and answer every question, but answer the ones that match your area of expertise. Also if a discussion is a few days old with no comments, earn some good karma by answering if you can. It would be nice if LinkedIn showed your activity in groups on your profile page but, currently it only shows on the homepage when you log in.

Questions and answers

Another way to get involved is to ask/answer questions, working on a research project ask your peers for an opinion or run a poll. If you want people to answer your questions or polls, make sure you answer there’s from time to time. As a general rule I would answer 2-4 times as many questions as you ask.

Update your status

You can send status updates on LinkedIn the same way you send status updates on Facebook and Twitter. If you’re interested in efficiency, you can save time using services like Ping.fm (http://www.ping.fm) to update all of your services at once. That’s generally not a strategy I’d recommend, your Facebook friends might want to know your kids won the baseball championship, your LinkedIn network probably doesn’t care, so choose your updates strategically.

Did you publish a white paper, interesting article, bit of research, or complete a project, that’s something that’s much more appropriate, for a status update, and don’t forget to put a link where appropriate.

Finding the time

While the owners of LinkedIn would love it if you logged in every day, that’s probably not the best use of your time. Logging in once or twice a week is enough for most people. Answer some questions, participate in one or two groups, and post a status update, you should be able to do this in less than an hour a week.

Power user tip

You can be strategic about your participation, use the built-in search functions in the groups and answers sections to create searches to find questions targeted to your expertise or the service your company provides. Use Google’s custom RSS feature to notify you when the topic comes up. Another solution is to use Google Alerts with a [site:linkedin.com "your keywords"] search.

The payoff and getting business

When you create a LinkedIn profile and join groups, you set up contact preferences, every action you do can be included in these update emails other people in your network get. You won’t get included in every email, but you will get included in some, and the more you participate the more you’ll be included. Every time someone sees your name and your activity on the network it reminds them you are there, and what you’re doing. The more they remember you the more likely they are to refer business to you when someone asks them a question about something they’ve seen you participate in.

Use the power search tips to target phrases of people who are asking questions that someone in the sales funnel would ask. Use your network, to help you gain new leads, ask everyone to describe their ideal customer to you, if you know someone who fits the bill make a connection, people are much more likely to give referrals to people who give them referrals.

To wrap up, make sure your profile and the profiles of your other key team members, company is up to date, and sends a professional memorable message. Update your network of connections and make sure people are aware of you, ask about the types of business they are looking for, and pass on referrals. Join and participate in some groups, look for and answer questions. Use power search tips to get notified of questions and discussions that match your expertise. Using these tips you’ll gain exposure, and get referrals from your network, and help out qualified potential new customers.

For those people who aren’t familiar with Foursquare, it a location-based social media tool that allows people to “check in” and broadcast their location to their friends or to the world. The service was built by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. Dennis Crowley was also the creator of another location based service called Dodgeball which was bought, ignored, and eventually shut down by Google .

Foursquare basics

Foursquare works by allowing people to use a GPS based smart phone to verify their location (called checking in) and earn rewards. The rewards come in two forms: badges and mayor-ships. To earn a badge, you have to check in a specified number of times–for example, 10 check-ins earns you the adventurer badge. There are also location specific badges, such as the “Brooklyn 4 life” badge, which requires 25 check-ins from Brooklyn New York. The second type of reward is being declared mayor of a location. To become mayor, you have to have checked in at a location at least twice and be the person with the most check-ins over a 60 day period.

Now that we’ve covered how Foursquare works, why is it important for (local or neighborhood locations of regional or national) businesses to join Foursquare and how can they get the most out of it? Since Foursquare is based on getting people to your place of business, it’s going to work best for places which people actually visit regularly, such as a gym, coffee shop, restaurant, club, bookstore, day spa, or hair salon. If you run a business and you see a meaningful portion of your customers using smartphones when they are there, it’s probably an idea worth exploring.

Claim your business on Foursquare

Foursquare allows business owners to claim their business. Once they do, they can create incentives. For example, a business can offer a discount or free item to anyone who proves they are the mayor, or to anyone who visits a certain number of times.

Social sharing

The premise behind Foursquare is that when users check in, they broadcast or share their check ins with their Twitter stream and/or Facebook stream. For good or bad, oversharing is a hallmark trait of social media, so much so that foursquare has an oversharing badge for anyone who checks in more than 10 times in a 24 hour period.

If the user has a Twitter stream every time they become mayor it is automatically shared, so it’s a good idea to use that promotion. By enabling the “X number of visits” or “every X number of visits” discount, you are encouraging repeat business and repeat broadcasting of your business. On their business page, Foursquare has more information and links to Foursquare advertisements you can use to let people know you are on Foursquare.

Strategic business partnerships

Foursquare is currently working with several partners for special badges. For example, if you check in to four different Starbucks, you get a Barista Badge. Check in to 5 Zagat rated restaurants and you’ll get the Zagat foodie badge. They also have partnerships with Bravo TV for checking in to locations related to Top Chef, Real Housewives, and other shows. Foursquare has also started partnering with real world publication like Spin Magazine and the Wall Street Journal. Earning these special tie-in badges requires that you are friends with the publisher.

Life on Foursquare isn’t all a bed of roses. Danny Sullivan had a first hand experience with someone exploiting a bug in the system and ousting him as mayor. Additionally, there was bit of negative press from the site PleaseRobMe.com earlier this year when the site pointed out that telling people you are “out” tells them you are not home.

Should your business join Foursquare?

The answer depends on what type of business you are and the demographic of your customer. Local consumer oriented busineses that depend on foot traffic will get the most out of Foursquare, especially if your customers are gadget-friendly, smart phone owners. However, your business has to be something that people want to tell others about. It might be pretty hard to get someone to check in to a dry cleaner store, but if you offer check in incentives (like dry cleaning coupons), Foursquare just might work for you.

While the FTC doesn’t have a game plan yet, that doesn’t mean it’s something you can ignore, it’s something you are going to have to address sooner or later. First you should read and try and understand the original FTC document (PDF link) and not rely just on summaries from the web. One of the main complaints in the document, had to do with unsubstantiated claims, or claims that were not typical (IE lose 30 pounds in 5 days with XYZ herbal supplement).

If you publish a website that sells products that make claims like this, or are an affiliate who runs ads with claims like this, you will probably need to make some adjustments. Check your content and any user generated content to make sure you are in compliance.

The second part of the FTC guidelines, which deals with advertising in “non traditional contexts,” and is much more problematic. An example of a non traditional context would be blogging a statement like “I had a great time on my Caribbean Cruise last week” with any part of the sentence containing an affiliate, or otherwise incentivized link. There are several types of arrangements that would be affected by these guidelines:

Paid

The simplest and easiest to understand is where a person or organization pays you directly with cash for making a post, putting up a link, making a tweet, Facebook post or other social media engagement.

Cash in kind

A cash in kind arrangement can be a significantly less clear situation. Basically, a company or person will give you something that has a cash value in exchange for you making a post, putting up a link, making a tweet, Facebook post or other social media engagement. This can be something like a free hotel visit, free spa treatments, or free cell phone.*

Incentive

This type of arrangement constitutes a cash or cash in kind payment at a later date for hitting traffic milestones, generating leads, generating sales, for making a post, putting up a link, making a tweet, Facebook post or other social media engagement.

The context of the action is what’s really important, accepting payment for a sidebar banner isn’t what the FTC is concerned with as they are almost always labeled as advertisements. It’s the links or tweets that are in areas that generally aren’t used for advertising and aren’t labeled as advertising, that will be most likely to cause problems.

If you are publisher or an affiliate, it’s probably a good idea to disclose anywhere you think there might be confusion. If this happens with any regularity on your website, you should also look into incorporating a disclosure policy into your website or creating a page that deals specifically with disclosure.

If you’re looking for an extremely in-depth example of a disclosure statement, you should look at Kara Swisher’s or Walt Mossberg’s from AllThingsD.com. If you are looking for an example of something more appropriate for an affiliate website, look at the disclosure policy for Shawn Collins on AffiliateTip.com.

At this point in the game, the rules are a bit fuzzy and enforcement is almost non-existent. However, that doesn’t mean should throw caution to the wind, and proceed ahead at full speed. Take this opportunity to get ahead of the curve and figure out how you are going to disclose. Don’t think approach disclosure from a negative position, look for ways you can turn disclosure into a selling point.

*Editor’s disclaimer: Search Engine Land’s coverage of the Nexus One phone launch would still have been published whether ‘free’ phones were given out or not.

Everyone has social media channels that they prefer to use, and by creating a social media hub with links to all of the social media areas they participate in, it makes it easy for end users, and search engines to discover them. Another interesting and noteworthy point, is that NASA has chosen to divide content into different channels, by mission. For example, there is a Facebook Channel for the Ares I-X program, a Flickr channel , a Twitter channel, and a YouTube channel. What this does is give them the flexibility to cross-post the best content. The best photos from Flickr and videos from YouTube were cross-posted into the Facebook account. But the Facebook account has other pictures that aren’t in the Flickr account. There’s overlap, but each channel has unique content or value add.

Another sticking point that many organizations face when engaging in social media is controlling the message. Many organizations favor a top down, tightly controlled, output of information. In fact, the NFL and Dreamworks Animation are inserting clauses and restrictions on Twitter usage for employees. In a recent interview about how NASA uses Twitter, it was revealed there are over 100 NASA employees using Twitter. While there isn’t an official policy in place, they do ask everyone to abide by their “release of government information guidelines” when using social media.

To get the most out of social media, it’s important for information be released in a timely fashion. Creating bottlenecks of very small groups of people who are allowed to publish/approve will limit your success. Instead, set up some ground rules, and let everyone who agrees to abide by them to publish freely. When you do, you end up with interesting and unexpected results, like this TwitPic of a spent rocket booster from the Ares X-1 launch bobbing in the ocean waiting to be recovered.

Here are some takeaways that you can put into action after looking at NASA’s strategy:

• Create accounts for each different type of platform (blogging, microblogging, pictures, and video). You may never use that service/content, but if you decide to, it’s good to already have an account in place.
• Unless one service offers an advantage which matches your vertical market, choose the most popular service.
• Be aware of market trends and shift accordingly, 2 years ago having a mySpace page was important, today it’s more important to be on Twitter and Facebook.
• Give each channel its own unique content, and cross promote the best of each channel. The best pictures and videos, should always make it into your blog, Facebook page and Twitter stream.
• Information wants to be free, set up basic guidelines of what is and isn’t acceptable with your employees, and subcontractors. Don’t require anyone to become involved, but as long as it doesn’t interfere with their job, allow and encourage engagement.

BestBuy

BestBuy has a multi-pronged approach, the main account @BestBuy provides interaction for BestBuy’s employees. A secondary account @Twelpforce (which stands for Twitter Help Force) is geared towards helping customers with technical problems and issues. Another account, @GeekSquad focuses just on computer support for customers.

The thing that’s missing from this strategy, however, is a pure sales channel. BestBuy puts a lot of resources behind the sales flyers and promotional catalogs you get with your Sunday paper every week. There are certainly ways to leverage those promotions in conjunction with Twitter. While there is a @BestBuy_Outlet account, it has limited quantities of products available.

Another opportunity I think BestBuy is missing out on is by not capitalizing on the vanity account name. The account @BestBuy is going to be where most people who might be interested in BestBuy will start to look, if they see it’s an employee centric account, they might not dig deeper. In my opinion, BestBuy should use the main account as a public facing account, have a dedicated account for sales/specials, and relocate the employee account to another name.

When many people hear multiple accounts, they assume this means an increase in time and resources you need to devote to twitter. This simply isn’t the case anymore. There are tools that allow you to manage multiple accounts from one interface like Easytweets, TweetDeck, and HootSuite, which make switching from one account a single painless mouseclick. If you do decide to use multiple employees, a product like CoTweet can help you do it more effectively.

Toys R Us

It’s rare to find an account that can blend promotions with customer and community engagement and keep it balanced, but @ToysRUs is one of them. Another interesting thing that this account does is distribute links to online only and offline only coupons. This works because ToysRUs has a large number of locations, and it gives them the ability to track how effective Twitter is for them.

At first glance, this would seem to be a very active account with multiple tweets per day, however what they are really doing is leveraging content from the blog at Toys.com which automatically posts to the twitter account. As long as you write your blog posts knowing they will turn into individual tweets, and schedule your posts for “prime time” (9 to 5, when people should be working) it can be very effective.

One of the criticisms many merchants have about using Twitter as a sales channel, is everyone is looking for discounts or deals. While that can be attributed partially to the anemic economic rebound, that is a fair criticism. If as a merchant or retailer, you aren’t prepared to offer discounts, sales, or other preferential pricing you will probably have a lot of difficulty making Twitter contribute to your bottom line.

For merchants who are willing to offer discounts there is substantial audience. For example, @CouponTweet which launched early this year is approaching 25,000 followers, and there are other accounts related to coupons with thousands of followers as well.

If you’re a merchant or retailer and are looking to engage on Twitter, or have an existing account and are looking to get more value out of here are some tips:

• Decide if you are going to go with a single or multiple account strategy. Try to gauge the amount of interest for different channels when making your decision.
• Look for ways to engage directly with your existing followers, or the followers of related, and similar companies. Not every tweet should have commercial intent.
• Look for opportunities to leverage your existing content into your Twitter account. Your Twitter account should have some unique elements but it’s, OK to mix in your blog posts or other content.
• Tweet when you have the opportunity to reach the most followers. Not everyone is in your time zone, so you can tweet more than once per day.
• Track your Twitter promotions with landing pages, tracking URL’s, coupon codes and cookies.

As I’ve stated in the past, there isn’t a right or wrong way to use Twitter, only a way that helps you meet your goals. However, when most companies use Twitter they fall into three general categories:

• Community engagement and customer service
• Broadcast channels for news, articles, and information
• Dedicated sales channel

It’s not surprising that the accounts with some of the highest follower counts, in some cases over a million followers, are those that fall into the “community and customer service” category, examples of these would be @jetblue, @southwestair, and @alaskaair. Traditional publishers such as @LATimestravel, @nytimestravel and @TravelMagazine use Twitter as a broadcast channel for their articles. An interesting variation of this method is used by @EmiratesAir, who tweets links to  publications and articles about Emirates Airlines. Examples of sales channels include @Expedia and @SpiritAirlines.

It’s worth noting that very few people use it purely for community engagement, broadcasting or sales; instead, most use a hybrid strategy, with the majority of tweets falling into one category, but having some tweets of each type. In some cases, it makes sense to create a separate dedicated channel. An example of multiple channels comes from @jetblue who recently introduced @JetBlueCheeps specifically for discounted fares. Some companies also use Twitter to extend their real world marketing efforts  and specialty campaigns such as the Travelocity Traveling Gnome @roaminggnome and Priceline’s William Shatner Price Negotiator @TheNegotiator.

As Twitter becomes a “breaking” news channel for many, the importance of having a presence on Twitter can’t be understated. For a small but vocal part of the population, Twitter is a primary news source, a prime example of this occurred during the US Airways Flight 1549 emergency landing in the Hudson River in New York City. Some of the earliest reports and photographs from the incident appeared first on Twitter. US Airways scrambled during a crisis to get an account working to push out official information @USAirways. The account has become dormant now, but the key point is if your customers are looking information here, you should be there too. The use of Twitter isn’t limited just to commercial and private organizations, for example the US State Department issues travel information via @TravelGov, as does the US Forest Service @forestservice.

While the majority of the organizations that get most attention on Twitter are larger national groups, there is a growing and active local travel component as well. Local but well known tourist destinations such as the Queen Mary in Long Beach have a presence on Twitter, @QueenMary. However smaller travel groups and companies such as Ohio Travel Association @OhioTravel, St. Louis Hilton @HiltonSTL, Tuscon Radisson @RaddisonTuscon, Alcatraz Cruises @AlcatrazCruises, and Air Ship Ventures @AirShipVentures are also on Twitter.

One of the biggest resistance points I get when I talk with clients about using Twitter or social media in general, is the fear of negative press and negative communication. However, hiding from negative feedback isn’t going to make it go away, remaining mute only makes you a bystander in the communication. One of the most disliked organizations in the world- the TSA, has a blog and presence on twitter @TSABlogteam, and should be case study for anyone concerned about negative feedback. For companies who still decide not to participate, the problem of fans or someone else developing a presence in their absence still exists. Case in point, the @AmtrakNews is an unofficial news feed for Amtrack. The @Amtrack profile is a non-malicious brand squat, it appears she’s securing “AM Track” and not trying to pretend to be the company. Sometimes a brand advocate or fan can also start up a profile, such as this fan from KLM Airlines @klmfan. The worst case scenario is if one of your detractors sets up a profile such as the @IHateEasyJet profile.

For companies who decide to participate but aren’t sure how and when to engage, the best suggestion is proceed slowly and with caution until you feel comfortable. Larger companies may find benefit in having more than one person doing the actual tweeting. In most cases, it’s best to let people know there are multiple people responding and to identify who is responding with initials or some other easily identifiable abbreviations. Some profiles such as @FrommersTravel link their twitter profile to a page with information about who is tweeting. If your organization is uncomfortable about how and when to engage others directly, you should review the US Airforce Social Media Response Chart (PDF) for guidance.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that participating in social media can amplify the voice and exposure of people or organizations who would normally have a very small reach. One social media advocate, @AdventureGirl has in excess of 1 million followers. There are a handful of travel bloggers @everywheretrip, @ecointeractive, @kathika, and @WeBlogTheWorld who each have between 50,000 to 100,000 followers, and yet, aren’t well known brands.

Below you’ll find a list of over 100 different noteworthy Twitter profiles from the travel industry. In the interest of full disclosure, there are a few (<5%) companies listed below which I have had working relationships with.

Airlines

Rental Car Companies

Hotels and Hotel Chains

Cruise Lines

Travel Providers and Aggregators

Travel Magazine & Newspapers

Travel TV & Radio Shows

Travel News and Information

Travel Bloggers & Social Media

Posterous

Posterous is my favorite micro-blogging platform in this article. It’s extremely easy to set up and use; the only thing you need to get started is a working email account. Technically, you don’t even need to create an account to get started – however, I recommend you do, as it allows you to manage the operation. To get information into Posterous, all you need to do is email to post@posterous.com, text, pictures, even video – they handle the whole thing. If you’ve gone through and created an account, you can unleash the power of Posterous, by connecting to Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Tumblr, Blogger, Picasa, WordPress, Facebook and a handful of others, the process is unbelievably easy. You can set up where each item is posted by default or on a post by post basis.

Even more amazing is the fact that you can use it as a full fledged blog if you want to. It’s a really good choice for someone who want to write and doesn’t want the technical hassles associated with running a blog. The bad part is that you’re developing a website on the subdomain of another company, so if you decide to move to a different platform in the future,  all of the link equity and traffic you built will vanish. There is an option to run Posterous on your own domain if you are comfortable changing your A-Name records.

From an SEO perspective, the URLs are clean and taken from your post titles as is the HTML title. The biggest danger of the default installation is sitting on someone else’s subdomain. Setting it up on your main domain or as a subdomain on your domain is better, but the software isn’t available, so you’re locked in.

My suggestion is to use it as temporary blog for a short term event or promotion. Does your company exhibit at or visit a lot of trade shows or other venues where you interact with fans or customers? This would be a great tool to document and share, because it’s fast and easy to set up and get running. You could mail pictures, videos, stories of the event into Posterous very easily. You could even set up an email alias to allow customers to send you their pictures as well (I’d suggest turning on moderation if you do).

FriendFeed

If Posterous makes micro-blogging quick, easy and useful, FriendFeed is at the complete other end of the spectrum, filling your data stream with lots of noise, data, and in this author’s opinion being completely unusable. What FriendFeed does is allow you to aggregate all of your social media information into one stream –  all of your tweets from Twitter, links from StumbleUpon, pictures from Flickr, Facebook updates, Blogger posts, and so on – are now in one nice package to share with your friends.

On the surface this sounds like a really great idea, but it quickly turns into an unmanageable fire-hose of information. If you have a small group of friends who are active in social media, it quickly becomes so noisy that it becomes impossible to extract the value. There are, however, a few people who find FriendFeed valuable, such as Robert Scoble, so I invite you to read his post on how he uses it and why he likes it.

From an SEO perspective, the biggest benefit you can get from FriendFeed is traffic – if a high profile user puts one of your URLs into their stream. All of the outbound links on FriendFeed are no-followed, so there isn’t any link equity being passed. The links are long, but they do have keywords from the title in them, so it’s possible to link to a page within the website and use some satellite optimization techniques.

Tumblr

Tumblr is another micro-blogging platform that is very similar to Posterous. It allows you to post text, pictures, video, audio, chat and links. Currently the only other micro-blogging platform it interfaces with is Twitter. Tumblr does give you a little bit more control over how your micro-blogging platform looks visually,  for example, if you want to use hi-res photos, post in a specific time zone, enjoy the ability to import links, and toggle a few other settings. Similar to Posterous, you can move Tumblr onto your own domain.

From an SEO perspective, the URLs are on the long side, but have keywords and are clean, the titles are sub-optimal as they all have the “my tumbles” before the post title. They also suffer from the same subdomain issues that were mentioned above.

One of the more interesting uses of Tumblr comes fromTwitter, which uses it as a status blog for downtime or tech issues. Mainstream users include musicians such as Katy Perry and Lenny Kravitz. From an SEO perspective, the URLs are long, but do have the keywords from the title, however, the pages titles also have the sub-optimal blog title before post title arrangement.

While Posterous and Tumblr are very similar, Posterous has much stronger cross-media integration, although Tumblr has a lot more flexibility as far as design and styling options. You’ll need to decide which of those is more critical for your project.

Dailybooth

The next micro-blogging platform we’ll be looking at is Dailybooth and deals only in pictures. The concept behind Dailybooth is to take and upload a picture of yourself everyday, and chronicle your good days, bad hair days, and dog blogging days. It’s simple to use – you upload or email in your pictures and it’s done.

As this service is only for pictures it is somewhat limited, and probably best used as a niche tool that’s part of a social media strategy. They have a lot of widgets that make it simple to integrate into a blog or other website.

From an SEO perspective, it’s worth noting they’ve gone with the sub-folder approach instead of subdomain. Individual pages have a numerical sequence number, but they do also have the keywords in the HTML title.

Some possible uses might be a fashion website that uploads pictures of outfits. Sell t-shirts? Upload a picture of you or someone on your staff in t-shirt every day, try to start a picture meme. Most people on the site use it for pictures of themselves, but I didn’t see anything saying it was limited to that. Run a cooking site? Why not put up pictures with link to recipes or cookware items? Personally, I really like this site – it’s simple, easy to use and has the potential for a lot of run.

12 Seconds

12 Seconds is a micro-blogging video website. We’ve all been sent links to 8 minute YouTube videos where there is really only a small bit of content that’s entertaining. 12 Seconds combats that by limiting the length of your uploads to just  12 seconds. Making a video that’s interesting but is only 12 seconds can be a bit of challenge. Currently, they only offer integration with facebook and twitter.

From an SEO perspective, the URLs are sequential number strings without any keywords. However, the page does have the title of the video. It sits within a subfolder of a larger site, so it doesn’t have any of the subdomain issues.

As this is a fairly limited site and the 12 second cap makes things difficult, my advice is use this for limited purposes. One interesting use I saw, was asking people to sing their national anthem in 12 seconds or less,  and here’s an entry from Shoemoney. Using it for fast-talking contests related to your site would be something that could generate viral interest if done correctly.

In my opinion, the key with micro-blogging sites is simplicity. The easier it is to use, the more likely people are to use it, and the more successful you will be trying to leverage it to help promote your website. I’d suggest testing each of them before deciding on one over the other. If you are going to do any promotional activities, opening up a dialog with the site owner is a good idea as well.

Don’t focus solely on sites that allow you to put up straight links; instead focus on sites that are more socially engaging and allow you to implement ideas that have a higher likelihood of going viral – getting you press and links outside of the site itself.

First up is the Whale in the Natural History Museum of New York. If you’ve never been to the Natural History Museum, there actually is a large whale hanging from the ceiling there.

The whale tweets about a lot of things from children underneath, things going on at the museum, whale facts, even having a little fun with the night watchman. The Natural History Museum isn’t the only famous whale on twitter, you can also find Shamu the mascot of Seaworld. Killer whales aren’t as docile, and looking at this account, you can see it’s quite a bit more snarky in tone.

This account tweets lots of pictures, such as rescue efforts, funny animal pictures, contests, and a bit of killer whale humor. Museums, aquariums and zoos aren’t traditionally organizations that embrace this type of bleeding edge marketing efforts, but there are lots of other zoos and aquariums who using Twitter effectively:

Fictional characters on Twitter aren’t limited just to animals, the Mars Rover and Mars Phoenix landers gave personalities to robots in 2008. You can also find Darth Vader and The Joker on Twitter as well.

While smaller and mid-sized business may not have the luxury of well known characters or mascots, they can replicate and adapt some of the tactics and strategies used by these accounts. Here are a few suggestions to help you put your plan into action:

1. Be transparent. If you are going to pretend to be an animal, people can figure out there is a human behind the keyboard without you telling them. The closer you come to pretending to be an actual person, the clearer you need to be about who you really are.
2. Role Accounts. Use role accounts like “HardwareHelper” or “MrAccounting” instead of accounts with actual names in them.
3. Be an Actor. Portraying a fictional character like “TechLepruchaun” you’ll be able to get away with a little bit more than “BobFromTech”.
4. Multiple Authors. Using multiple authors is a smart strategy for many companies, it keeps any single employee or subcontractor from feeling they own the account.
5. Keep a Consistent Voice. If you do use multiple people, try to use the same voice or tone as much as possible.
6. Engage Your Audience. Don’t use Twitter strictly as a broadcast medium, find ways to interact with the people who follow you.
7. Use Humor and Current Events. Look for opportunities to inject a bit of humor into the account whenever possible. Current events are another opportunity, for example: the Natural History Whale used Sarah Palin’s stance on whale hunting to promote whale conservation links.