If You Like Our New Site, Tell Your Friends. (If You Don’t, Tell Us.)

An important part of our strategy for driving the success of the new BlackEnterprise.com is to harness the power of social networking sites to extend the reach of our content and attract (as opposed to traditional marketing, which aims to drive) traffic. I have personally been encouraged and inspired by the example of the campaign of President-Elect Barack Obama, which used social networking to historic effect to win the White House, as we detailed in the TechWatch article “The Politics of Web Strategy” in the November 2008 issue of Black Enterprise. As the editor-in-chief of BlackEnterprise.com, I am more determined than ever to apply some of the lessons of that article to our efforts to make our web site one of the top web destinations on the Internet.

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Our site has been built with a number of tools and features that make it easier than ever for people to find our content and share it with others in their networks. I’ve put together a brief list of things that everyone who believes in the Black Enterprise mission of wealth creation and financial empowerment for African Americans–especially those who are already on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Linked-In, etc.–can do to draw traffic to our site. The Black Enterprise Interactive team would appreciate you taking some time to do the following:

SHARE OUR ARTICLES
Click on the “Share This” link, which you’ll find at the end of every article and blog posted at www.blackenterprise.com. You’ll have the option of e-mailing a link to the articles for others to click, which will bring them to the site to read the item. Better yet, you can post the article on your Facebook, MySpace or other social network profile page or blog. That way, all of your friends can click and read, or may even be inspired to repost it or send it to their friends, who can send it to theirs, and so on. This works really well with Facebook, where you can post articles to walls or e-mail them to your network of friends.

JOIN OUR FACEBOOK GROUP ON NETWORKED BLOGS
BlackEnterprise.com is a member of NetworkedBlogs via Facebook. If you are already on Facebook, go to http://www.networkedblogs.com/blog/blackenterprise.com and follow instructions to join our network. Once you join the group, you can invite up to 20 of your friends to join every day.

So far, after only a month or so, we have more than 260 people in our network and counting. If everybody in the Black Enterprise audience who is on Facebook did the same, we should be able to reach more than a thousand people, very shortly. This will increase our popularity among the other blogs on the network. (People in our group can also rate our content. So far, group members have given our content a top, 5-star rating.) More importantly, when anyone clicks on one of our articles from our Networked Blogs profile page on Facebook, it brings them back to BlackEnterprise.com to read the article. Ideally, we can grow this network into at least a few thousand people, all of whom will be exposed to our site via their connection to our NetworkedBlog presence.

NOT ON FACEBOOK?
Then bookmark our NetworkedBlogs URL, http://www.networkedblogs.com/blog/blackenterprise.com, and e-mail the link to your network of contacts, and encourage them to do so as well. Remember, any link they click from this profile page will bring them to our site.

SHARE OUR WIDGETS
Down load our widgets to post on your social network profiles or into your blog or

newsletter. Right now we have three widgets: “The Obama Inauguration Countdown Clock” (on the home page), “BlackEnterprise.com Recent Posts” (on the home page and most articles pages) and “Follow Alfred on Twitter” (on Alfred Edmond Jr.’s bio page and blog postings), with more to come. You’ll find all of our downloadable widgets (including one hosting video from our site) in our MultiMedia section.

Just click on the “Get Widget” tab found at the bottom of our widgets, and follow the instructions. (Basically, you will copy the embedded code, and click the “Edit Profile” or similar tab on your social network profile, and paste the code into the existing text where you want it to appear.) Once you post the widget, anybody who sees it on your profile can also download it to their profile or share it among their friends. Clicking on our widgets, no matter where they are found, will bring them back to our site.

Here are some examples of widget posts on some of my social network profiles: www.myspace.com/alfrededmondjr, http://mediapro.foliomag.com/profile/AlfredAEdmondJr, http://rutgersafricanamericanalumni.ning.com/profile/AlfredAEdmondJr)

SPREAD THE WORD ON TWITTER
If you are on Twitter, tweet to your followers regularly links to articles and other content on

the site. If you establish an account at www.Ping.fm, it will condense URLs to fit within Twitter’s 140-character limit for messages. Also, if you are a member of more than one social network, Ping will allow you to update to as many of them as you want to simultaneously. I use this service to share info about our events, the magazine (I’ve been really hyping the January 2009 issue) and the website to my MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter and Linked-In networks simultaneously. Again, if you are on Twitter, or plan to join, be sure to connect with me so we can follow each other’s tweets: http://twitter.com/alfrededmondjr.

As we think of other things, we will let you know, just as we welcome any ideas you may have that we may not have thought of. There are so many cool things to do in social media, so many ways to apply them strategically, and so much more for me to learn–I know we’re just scratching the surface. With your help, we can succeed in making BlackEnterprise.com a dominant media presence.

Alfred Edmond Jr. is the editor-in-chief of BlackEnterprise.com