Social media sites are hot these days, so much so that marketers have tapped well-known sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube to build brand awareness, increase visibility, and possibly sell a product or service.

Considering that most social communities are not receptive to traditional direct or hard sell techniques, an effective campaign will require more subtlety for it to be executed effectively. But given the current boom, which of the thousands of social media sites should marketers target? Search Engine Land columnist Neil Patel (whose column, Let’s Get Social,  is published every Tuesday) shares some useful tips:

1. List out the keywords associated with your website. For example, “Search Engine Land” is probably related to: search engines, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, social media, search engine marketing, etc.

2. Once you have a list of all the major keywords that are related to your website, go through a list of social media sites, select a number that look promising, visit each and search for all of your keywords.
3. With certain social sites you will get tons of results and with others you will get no results. The sites that have few to no results can be crossed off your list and the sites that have tons of results are probably the sites you want to target.

4. Before spending time targeting a site, do a check for competition. Chances are your competition is leveraging the social web. Take the time to search for your competitors’ content on the social sites you’ve selected. Instead of looking to see who has stories submitted on these sites, you need to look at who leveraged what social site successfully. By “successfully” I mean that your competition had a story that received enough votes to go popular or to the homepage of the social media site.

5. The final step helps you decide whether to continue submitting to a particular social media site. Visit all those that allow comments, and see if any users offered an opinion about your website. You shouldn’t always take these comments seriously because many will be a joke, but they should give you an idea of what the users of these social websites think about your website.

Over the past few years, the wiki has emerged as an information superpower, popularized by Wikipedia and its unique online community strategy. Now, wikipages.com intends to do the same thing with regard to business directories.

Wikipages.com is an online business directory focused on New York City, for the time being. Born a little over a year ago, Wikipages already has over one thousand entries for NYC and several for other major US cities. Using MediaWiki software, the website includes discussion pages and a community portal page where anyone can add their input.

The site has connections to the blogosphere, from its own blog, blog.wikipages.com, and nyc.metblogs.com, where Wikipages co-founder Tracey Donvito blogs regularly. Wikipages has the potential to expand as people join its community. While still in the beginning stage, this growing site is part of the ongoing wiki trend.

In a way, wikis bring a democratic element to a website. In the future, more wikis and other open source technologies could replace the former totalitarian website methods. Wikis have the advantage of displaying a whole community’s knowledge, rather than that of just a few select people. Easy to use and edit, wikis have rapidly increased in popularity in a short timespan.

But for it to be effective, Wikipages.com needs more to be involved its community. With a strong community, wikipages will utilize its democratic platform to create a constantly-growing, easily-changeable source of information. As of the moment, they have approximately 1,000 businesses listed all within NYC and centered around three communities: Astoria, Queens; Greenwich Village, Manhattan; and the Financial District, Manhattan.

Given Wikipedia’s meteoric success in recent years, Wikipages seems promising. But they are not without criticism. According to an article by Allen Stern in CenterNetworks.com, their design and interface may need some improvement for it to be taken seriously.

This throw up a wiki and use Google ads to monetize  is really getting boring, wrote Stern. I see it a lot and it just always makes me wonder if it’s a real business. Tracey and Ben are very passionate about their idea and it seems like it could have some traction (will require a lot of work) and I think people would take it much more seriously if it looked like a Web site not a out-of-the-box Wiki software.

Other concerns center around their competition against Yelp and Google. As I reported in this blog recently, Google has started a program to pay people to create pages for local businesses.

Can Wikipages (and the other business directories) afford to compete? asks Stern. The answer is obviously no, so I think it’s important that [Wikipages] continue to innovate. They need to stay a step ahead of Google in terms of their offering. What about video interviews of the business owners? What about video interviews with customers? Video is hot, and local is not utilizing it yet.

Social networking sites are evolving, apparently. Two weeks ago, SearchEngineWatch.com reported that popular social networking site Facebook has forged a partnership with Buy.com to create Garage Sale, a new video classifieds engine. Garage Sale will allow users of the social networking site to create videos for the things they want to sell.

This latest move [of Facebook] is more of a partnership, and one that makes sense, as video can be seen as a natural extension of online classifieds (especially in visually oriented categories such as real estate and autos), wrote Michael Boland, a senior analyst with the Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media program, and a contributor to the Search Engine Watch Blog.

This follows Facebook’s partnership with classifieds aggregator Oodle in May to bring classifieds to college campuses (Facebook’s sweet spot), which also makes a lot of sense, given the turnover of goods (books, bicycles, couches) and apartments in the average college town.

Given that majority of Facebook users are in university or high school, a technology-savvy demographic that uses online video, the merging of classifieds, video, and social networking in Garage Sale will harmonize well in this environment.

Many of these improvements, if integrated into Facebook, could continue to attract MySpace users and make the current domineering social network solidify its lingering position amongst social networking faithfuls as so 2005, Boland added. And given the herd mentality present in social networks, it only takes a few to lead, and the rest will eventually follow.

Given their progressive development strategy, Facebook could well take the lead over MySpace if it continues to keep bringing such unique innovation into the fold. Rather than depending on the staying power of their need to stay connected to friends, they have utilized a constantly evolving product to keep users around.

Through this innovation we can expect to see, among other things, many more locally oriented tools developed in the areas of classifieds, video, local merchant advertising and others that will develop or could even be invented under the Facebook umbrella, writes Boland.

What factors truly influence online searches? That question was answered in a new study sponsored by search engine marketing firm, iProspect. Conducted by JupiterResearch in June of this year, the study revealed that 67% of the online search population is driven to search by offline channels, such as television, newspaper or radio.

More specifically, 37% said a television ad encouraged them to conduct a search, 36% said word-of-mouth initiated a search, 30% said a print ad, 20% said a physical store’s location, and 17% said a radio ad. The study also found that 39% of online searchers who are influenced by offline channels ultimately make a purchase.

The survey was completed by a total of 2,322 randomly selected individuals from the Ipsos Insight U.S. online consumer panel, and was comprised of 25 questions about their behaviors, attitudes, and preferences as they relate to games, digital imaging, portable devices, and service bundles.

Amongst its key findings, the survey shows that offline channels clearly influence a significant percentage of online search users to subsequently perform queries on search engines based on the company name, product/service name, or slogan that appears in the messaging of that offline channel. Specifically,the study revealed that two-thirds of the online search population is driven to search by offline channels.

The implications of such findings are clear: online search marketers have a huge opportunity to leverage offline channels to drive their audience to search for them or their products. Doing so could greatly enhance the effectiveness of their efforts.

Beyond examining the power of offline channels to drive search, the study also took a look at purchase behavior. Specifically, offline-influenced online searchers were asked whether they ultimately had made a purchase from the company whose website had been the object of their search. The data revealed that more than one-third do so. This translates into a 39% conversion rate, and suggests that a synergistic relationship exists between search and offline channels.

Sure, offline channels can drive traffic, but at the end of the day, it’s pretty much meaningless if a purchase isn’t made, said iProspect President Robert Murray. Marketers want to know the pay-off. And the data from this study suggests that search and offline produce extremely impressive results. Savvy marketers will capitalize on that synergy.

Last July 25, Yellow Book USA, one of the leading independent publisher of print and online yellow pages, announced that they have partnered with cable operator Charter Communications in a distribution and marketing deal.

Charter and Yellow Book will co-market products and services through a variety of sales and marketing channels, including each company’s advertising products and sales forces. The agreement also provides for the creation and distribution of co-branded Yellow Book directories in Charter’s markets.

With Yellow Book as its partner, Charter can increase the awareness and visibility of their commercial and residential telephone service. Yellow Book’s sales representatives serve as a powerful channel to the small and medium-sized businesses they’re targeting with Charter Telephone. The alliance will enable them to accelerate their recent entry into the commercial telephone business. At the same time, Charter is filling a demand for local directory information for residential customers.

The bottom line is that Yellow Book and Charter have a lot in common, wrote John Kelsey a The Kelsey Group blog. They share many common markets, and hence a common competitor in AT&T. There is an easy logic to the notion that Yellow Book exposes charter to more potential voice customers and Charter gives Yellow Book entre to potential new advertisers.

Where these deals succeed or fail, of course, is in the execution, he added. Will the two sides promote one another’s services with enough vigor to make a difference? Time will tell, but it is clear the two have interests that are well aligned.