“If you stand still in the car business, you get run over.” – Lee Iacocca

Promoting a business used to be so simple. You run an ad. You distribute a news release. But just like in the car business, if you don’t adapt to new ways of promotion your customers will be looking at you in their rear view mirrors. Smart businesses understand that old school marketing techniques no longer work – they’ve been replaced by new methods with names like Twitter and Facebook and Delicious.

You’ve probably heard all about these new tools; in fact, you may have already begun to implement some of them. But whether you’re a geek or a newbie, there probably isn’t enough time in your day to manage your business let alone tweet! So don’t.

Open Door Communications can manage all of your social media marketing efforts for you. We not only help set up your blog and your social media accounts, we do the work. We can create relevant and interesting posts for your blog, manage your Twitter account, post photos of your latest event on Flickr, promote your fan page on Facebook, bookmark  key articles about your business on Digg, and best of all make sure all of your messages are aligned to your brand and integrated across all of these social platforms.

Open Door Communications has been providing quality public relations services to clients for more than a decade and we were one of the first firms to jump on the social media bandwagon. We’ve witnessed firsthand how over the past few years the marketing climate has shifted from traditional media relations to direct-to-customer web-based promotion. Company principal Len Gutman has been a sought after speaker on the subject of social media for years, has written numerous articles about these tools and techniques, and has worked with scores of businesses to implement social media programs. He is the founder and lead blogger for Valley PR Blog, one of the top marketing blogs in the world as ranked by Ad Age Power 150.

Let Open Door Communications not only build a social media strategy for your business, but implement it and manage it too. The list of available social media tools grows all the time. We stay on top of all the latest techniques and then help you decide which technologies will work best for your business. Below are some of the services we provide:

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Blogs — Blogs are the heart of the social media world because content is king online. Blogging helps you reach your customers directly, serves as a tool to reinforce your brand, gives you an outlet to promote products and services and helps establish you as a subject matter expert. Best of all, each time you post you create new inbound links to your company web site and create indexed pages that help search engines – and therefore customers – find you. Blogging also creates content that you can then repurpose on social networking sites like Facebook and micro blogging sites like Twitter.

Micro Blogs — Ashton Kutcher has more than three million followers on micro blogging site Twitter, but that’s not a compelling reason to tweet. You should tweet because it’s a simple and effective way to blast out messages to your customers.  Twitter helps you gain exposure for your blog, market products and  services, answer questions from potential customers, seek out potential business partners, announce events, share interesting articles and encourage customers to share information about your business with their followers.

Social Networks — At last count there were more than 300 million people worldwide on Facebook. The social networking site has swiftly become the second most visited site on the Web behind only Google. You know what they say: 300 million Facebook fans can’t be wrong – or ignored for that matter. Smart businesses are setting up “fan pages” on Facebook and reaching out to millions of people at once. Here are just a few reasons why you need to be on Facebook: communicate directly to customers; build relationships; raise visibility; develop your brand; find business contacts; target your niche, and increase search engine placement. And Facebook is only one social networking site among thousands including MySpace, Linkedin, Friendster and Orkut to name a few.

eMarketing – Direct email is a powerful way to reach your customers with news, information, promotions and more. Best of all, modern tools like Constant Contact and iContact manage the whole process for you, from sign up to newsletter design to contact management to distribution and even measurement. These low cost sites make managing an enewsletter simple and affordable.

Social Media Releases (SMRs) – Traditional news releases are going the way of the dinosaur and quickly morphing into a new breed called social media releases. SMRs give companies the ability to not only announce new products and services, but to also share multimedia content. With an SMR, the reader can easily share your news with friends and associates via email, social networks and social bookmarking tools.  Some SMR sites even enable users to tweet your news with one button. On top of all that, powerful tagging features greatly improve your search engine optimization.

Online Surveys – Feature-rich online survey sites provide businesses with easy and effective tools to gather facts on everything from customer satisfaction to marketing to research and everything in between.

Online Video – These days the Internet is all about multimedia content and creating and sharing video is easier than ever. High quality camcorders are inexpensive and provide unlimited possibilities to share video. Have a new product? Post a video tour on YouTube, blog about it and add a link to your web site. Need to train customers? Record the training session and post it on a web conferencing site for all to see. Best of all, you can integrate video with all the rest of your social media vehicles like your blog, Facebook and even Twitter.

Social Bookmarking — Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. These sites give users a placeholder to keep track of things they want to remember, but more importantly they enable users to share what they’ve found with their friends. Popular social bookmarking sites include Delicious, Digg, Propeller and StumbleUpon to name a few.

Photo Sharing – Sharing photos on the web with your customers used to mean getting the photos to your webmaster to upload onto your web site. The photos would turn up online a few weeks or months later, after everyone has forgotten about your big event. These days companies can post photos in minutes using social networking sites like Facebook or photo sharing services like Flickr. You can even take photos on your camera and send them directly to your Facebook or Flickr site in real time.