How do you communicate with your customers and build your brand? Are you talking at them, or do you have an online dialogue with them? Stepping into social media allows merchants the opportunity to speak to customers and build a brand-loyal community. This requires loss of some control, since customers will be generating their own content. It is worth the investment. Written for Multichannel Merchant, Netconcepts President Stephan Spencer and analyst Tim Gill discuss the benefits of social media for merchants.

Retailers can leverage this dialog to gain insight into marketing research, generate product feedback, conduct merchandise testing, and initiate product improvements. By taking a dialog approach to social media instead of a louder, flashier version of commercial interruption, you can learn what consumers want, and how they want it, on a one-to-one basis.

For more on this topic, read the complete article here.

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Facebook.com â?? a company that less than a year ago looked like fools for not accepting Yahooâ??s bid to purchase it â?? has become the powerhouse of social media websites. Itâ??s been said that much of the success is due simply to Facebook being the latest in a string of recently-hip online socialization sites, with MySpace being the last destination to peek out and then slow as the â??true hipstersâ?? move on, drawing the semi-hip behind them. A large part of that rise, however, has been Facebookâ??s open source policy with regard to the creation of Facebook applications. The result has been twofold: A huge demand for fun and informative applications and the corresponding, explosive proliferation of applications created for the site.

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“One great avenue for link bait is social media â?? sites like MySpace, YouTube, Digg and Facebook allow users to share and promote content and opinions, almost always for free. Social media sites (sometimes referred to as Web 2.0 sites since most are based on Web 2.0 technologies) are quickly becoming primary promotional vehicles, and the very core of that promotion is link bait,” writes Jeff Muendel, Search Analyst for Netconcepts in this compelling article about the power of social media to attract links to your retail site.

Jeff Muendel is a Search Analyst at Netconcepts. He specializes in SEO related to Flash, video, social networking, and other Web 2.0 parameters.

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In Picture This, Part 1, PJ Fusco, Lead Strategist for Netconcepts, discusses the importance of image optimization on websites and blogs. For the conclusion of image optimization, Fusco covers the importance of social media optimization (SMO), and weighs the benefits of several photo-sharing sites.

Not all photo-sharing sites are perfect when it comes to social media optimization (SMO). A quick comparison of some particularly popular photo-sharing sites shows that one stands out for its inherently search-engine-friendly design.

Read the conclusion of Picture This here, and learn how you can use and optimize images through Flickr, an SEO-friendly photo-sharing site.

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Wouldnâ??t it be great if all the whiz-bang Web 2.0 interactive elements like Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), widgets, Flash, RSS feeds, podcasts, video blogs and so forth were all search engine optimized?

Unfortunately, thatâ??s not the case. In fact, many of these technologies are inherently unfriendly to search engine spiders. So, if you intend to harness Web 2.0 technologies for increased conversion, improved usability and greater customer engagement, youâ??d better read on or youâ??ll end up missing the boat when it comes to better search engine rankings.

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