Should your website be social? Are you looking to turn that static website into an interesting social media–enabled destination?

Keep reading to discover how.

Should Your Site Be Social-Enabled?

There’s no doubt that social media is a powerful marketing and communication tool for businesses and non-profits that have embraced it.

Yet, for most of us, our websites are still where the rubber meets the road. It’s where you turn visitors into leads and prospects into customers. It’s where you build your lists and sell your goods.

Can you inject some of the “humanness” of social media into your website without compromising its ability to sell? Can you use social media to drive traffic to your website for conversion without alienating your community?

More and more businesses are showing us that this is an achievable and worthwhile goal; that the two together can foster improved communication, build brand loyalty and create a better, more responsive, more profitable company.

Here are nine examples of how you can integrate your social media activity into your website for maximum results.

#1: Add social media buttons to your home page

A few years ago, the idea of sending people to another site from your home page after you had worked so hard to get them there in the first place seemed boneheaded. However, many companies now see the long-term benefits of gaining a follower, fan or subscriber on a social media platform, even weighed against the short-term risk of sending them away from the website.

Businesses commonly link to their social media profiles, even from their home pages.

By getting someone to follow you on Twitter, become LinkedIn with you or subscribe to your YouTube channel, you have the opportunity to keep the lines of communication open long after they’ve left your website.

Unsolicited Advice: If you’re concerned about losing that prospect, consider having the site open in a new tab or window, keeping your own website available for later viewing.

Also, make sure you have a social media profile that will engage your audience. You can borrow ideas from these 10 top Facebook pages, read up on how to optimize your LinkedIn profile and put into practice Darren Rowse’s tips for improving your Twitter profile.

#2: Connect your blog with your website

The line between blog and website has never been blurrier, with many businesses choosing to build their entire site on platforms that were traditionally meant for blogging, such as WordPress.

Whether your blog shares a domain with your website or not, you can improve the interactivity of your website by teasing your blog posts from your home page.

For example, Harold Night, an improv show out of Boston, uses the Posterous platform to blog, and has successfully integrated the blog into their website, both in the navigation and by pulling the recent posts as links onto their home page.

Harold Night connects its Posterous blog with its website.

Unsolicited Advice: Although services like Posterous and Tumblr are great and their prices can’t be beat, I prefer to have my blog under a domain I control. That way you can move from one platform to another without hurting your search engine visibility, and you’re more insulated against a third-party blogging platform going out of business.

#3: Embed videos on your website

There are few things as engaging as a well put-together video. Imagine adding a how-to or explanatory video to your product or services pages… How much more compelling would they be? How much could you increase your conversion rates by showing examples of other customers finding success by using your products?

Embed a video on your website to bring your offerings to life.

#4: Make your website shareable

Retweet buttons and Facebook Like buttons aren’t just for blogs. You can add them to any page of your website to get visitors to share the content more easily with their networks.

#5: Add your presentations to your website

If you market your business through public speaking, you can maximize your results by putting your presentations on your site.

The best way to do this is to set up a free account at SlideShare (think YouTube for PowerPoint). Once you’ve uploaded your slides, SlideShare will allow you to embed that presentation back into your website or blog. This creates an interactive experience for visitors who can now click through your slides.

Maximize the reach of your presentations by embedding SlideShare into your site.

#6: Socially bookmark new content

As you add new articles or archive your email newsletters to your site, make sure that you add them to appropriate social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Reddit and Delicious. These popular sites can drive huge amounts of traffic to your website in a short period of time.

Unsolicited Advice: It’s always best when someone else bookmarks your content, so it might make sense to have a small “bookmarking club” with friends where you promote each other’s work. This “seeding” will often encourage others to bookmark your content.

#7: Add a Facebook Like box to your website

It's easy to like I Love to Gossip with a Like box on their page.

We’re all influenced by other people, a concept often referred to as “social proof.” When we see our friends or people we respect liking, supporting or promoting something, we’re more open to liking it ourselves.

Adding a Facebook Like box to your site adds accelerant to the idea of social proof. Visitors can quickly see how many people have liked your business on Facebook, get a sense of your level of commitment to social media (by the posts you’ve added to your wall), and may even spy some of their friends and connections through the Like box.

Further, you make it easy for your site visitors to like your business without having to leave your site.

For more on Facebook and social proof, be sure to check out Are You Using Social Media as Social Proof?

#8: Feed your website

Websites tend not to get updated as often as they should be… something that has probably been exacerbated by the rise of blogging and social media.

If the framework of your website is fairly static, you can still keep it fresh by adding feeds from your blog, Facebook, Twitter and just about every social media platform that generates an RSS feed.

Unsolicited Advice: Not all of your feeds may be website-appropriate. Your tweets about American Idol, your love of bacon or thoughts on Sarah Palin may not be appropriate for first-time visitors to your website who are just looking for a reliable plumber or a trustworthy veterinarian (or whatever you may happen to be).

#9: Use QR codes to drive traffic

QR codes like this one can drive traffic to your website.

QR codes are two-dimensional bar codes that can be scanned by smartphones with cameras. Once scanned, they can redirect people to a website (among other tricks). Check out QR Code Marketing for Small Business and How QR Codes Can Grow Your Business.

Whether you post QR codes on one of your social media profiles or in the real world (i.e., direct mail, a business card or poster) you can use them to drive people to your website.

Unsolicited Advice: To maximize the impact of a QR code, consider sending people to a special landing page or a mobile version of your site, rather than just the home page. This will improve your conversion rates and help build your lists.

Now let’s hear about your ideas. This is by no means an exhaustive list. Let us know how you’ve integrated your social media activity into your website. Feel free to include links so we can see how you’ve done it. Leave your comments and suggestions in the box below.

I recently interviewed Guy Kawasaki, co-founder of Alltop.com and the author of the bestselling book, The Art of the Start. His latest masterpiece is called Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.

In this interview we talk about what makes for great content, how he came up with the title of his latest book, what Enchantment means for business, why businesses need to embrace nobodies and how he promoted his book. (Be sure to listen to the MP3 of this interview below.)

Mike: Most of our readers are marketers and business owners. Can you explain what Alltop does for them and why they might find it useful?

Guy: One of the functions of marketers, PR people and social media people is they need to keep on top of things.

The vision of Alltop was that we should aggregate RSS feeds for people by topic and create essentially an online magazine rack so that you could go to one place and say, “Okay, these are all the social media blogs and websites aggregated in one place.” It’s the five most recent stories from each source, and we give you a preview of the first paragraph of each story so you can see if you really want to click through.

This way, if your audience went to social-media.alltop, for example, they would see several hundred sources aggregated in one place, the five most recent stories from each source, and in seconds they could scan through hundreds of stories and get a good feel for what’s going on. That’s the vision of it.

Mike: Now you can create your own custom Alltop, right? How does that work?

Guy: Yes. We have about 850 topics ranging from adoption to zoology. A person who has a greater interest than just social media might have a few favorite tech blogs. Maybe the person has a desire to adopt kids, is a foodie, is a Macintosh user and is a real hockey buff. So he or she would want a couple of hockey blogs, a couple of tech blogs, a couple of social media blogs, some food blogs, an adoption blog, and that would be the person’s custom magazine rack. What we let you do is select from any of the 40,000 blogs that are at Alltop, and you can create what’s called “My Alltop.” That’s your custom magazine rack.

The difference between us and Google Reader is Google Reader says, “We’re giving you a container. Fill it up.” We say, “We have preselected 40,000 blogs for you. Just click on a plus sign and you’ll subscribe and create your own shelf.”

Mike: Obviously, you’re looking at a ton of content, and Alltop is really not just any content—it’s from the best content providers. Thinking about content, in your opinion, what do you think makes good content? What separates the best of the bunch? What makes certain blogs stand out?

Guy: For me, one of the easiest, quickest and most effective ways to determine if content is really useful is if it uses either unordered or ordered lists; i.e., bullets or numbers. Maybe it’s just my mind, but whenever I go to a blog post and I see 1), 2), 3), 4), 5) or bullet, bullet, bullet, my mind says, “Better organized, better thought out, more easy to use.”

When I go to a blog post that’s just paragraph after paragraph with nothing in bold and no sort of navigation tips, it’s hard to find the value. The ones I hate the most are “How to Be a More Effective Social Media Marketer” and you go to the post and it’s just paragraphs. There are no bullets. So you have to dig out of each paragraph what the tips are. Where are the tactical, actionable items? I think one very good indicator of a good blog post is, “Is it in bullet list format?”

Lots of people say, “Guy, that’s such a superficial way to look at things,” and “It’s not my style to write in bullet points,” but try looking at the world through the bullet point filter, and I think you’ll see that the best information is bulleted.

Mike: I’ve often said that I think the path to the mind is through the eyes, so if you can get the attention of an eyeball through formatting, then ultimately you can ensure your content makes its way into the minds of people. I think what you’re saying resonates true. It’s all about the way it’s presented, first and foremost. And you know, if it’s crappy content, then people won’t pay attention to it, but if it’s great content and it’s presented in a way that accommodates the eye, then I think you’ve got a magic formula.

Guy: With a bulleted list, I would make the case that even if it’s crappy content, it will be easier to determine it’s crappy with a bulleted list because you won’t have to dig through the crappy paragraphs to determine it’s crappy. You could just glance at a bullet, which is much faster.

Mike: Most of us are becoming inundated with content, so we have to make it easier for people to digest, and that’s where bullets come in.

Guy: I think a second and related point to this is that the greatest headlines to me are “Top 10 Tips…”, “How To…”, and “The Art Of…”. It happens that I’m a very tactical, action-oriented person. I’m looking for ways to do things better. Just give me what to do, tell me the 10 things to do.

Mike: Let’s talk about your story a little bit. Let’s talk about Enchantment. What is that word in your mind? What does it mean? Why did you choose it for your book? It’s quite an interesting word.

Guy: Well, I came at it from two directions. One very pragmatic, which is I needed a word that Guy Kawasaki could own in the same sense that Tom Peters owns the word excellence and maybe Geoffrey Moore owns the word chasm and Clayton Christensen owns the words innovator’s dilemma. Everybody has his or her word, and I needed a word.

The genre of this kind of writing is influence or persuasion, and those kinds of things.

Mike: Cialdini has the word influence, right?

Guy: Right. Cialdini owns influence. He’s also my friend, so I’m not going to try to steal the word from him. So when it came right down to it, coming from that pragmatic direction, enchantment was the word.

Coming from the other direction, which is a more philosophical direction, I wanted a word that went beyond influence and beyond wooing and beyond persuading. I wanted something that took it to the next level. It’s one thing to influence another person—it’s another thing to enchant the person.

Mike: What does that mean, especially for a business?

Guy: I think that a business that enchants a customer has a customer who’s beyond loyal. It’s delight. You can influence me and you can woo me and you can persuade me, but when you enchant me, that means that I’m head over heels in love. It’s the difference between like and love.

Mike: I think of Walt Disney World fans. People who are fans of Disney are enchanted, and they’ll do anything to participate in any of those kinds of activities endorsed by Disney because they’ve been enchanted, right?

Guy: Yes, and of course, the greatest example of all is Apple. What other company gets people to buy a phone that can barely go one day without charging, and that has the worst (until a few weeks ago) carrier in the world exclusively? That’s the power of enchantment. Anybody can sell a great phone with a great carrier.

Mike: What’s the benefit to a business of enchanting its customers?

Guy: Two levels. One is loyalty, repeat business, forgiveness at times. It just makes sense to have this relationship, this Nordstrom-esque kind of relationship with your customer. So that’s an obvious sort of business return, bottom-line answer. But I also think there’s a higher-level answer, which is that it’s a lot more fun to have a customer relationship based on enchantment rather than arm’s-length, sort of tit-for-tat, quid pro quo. I think that permeates the entire organization.

That’s a very different attitude than, “Oh, let’s just get up and see what our click-through rate is, and can we get a better CPM deal? How are we being rated in a statistical survey?” It’s a very different outlook on life.

Mike: Well, in Chapter 4 of your book, since we’re talking about Apple, you say the following about Steve Jobs: “Steve Jobs can enchant the shell off an egg without disturbing the yolk. But without Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, or iPad, Steve wouldn’t have anything to sell.”

You worked for Apple and you worked with Steve. Can you talk to me a little bit about the connection between being enchanting as Steve Jobs is, as you talk about him in your book, versus having something that is enchanting? What’s more important?

Guy: Neither, or both, actually. A great enchanting person with nothing to sell has nothing to sell. And a great product, without people who can enchant people and evangelize people to embrace, it is also a half-completed project.

Apple has this sweet spot of a CEO who really can enchant people with just his keynotes alone, and he has an enchanting product. So if you said to me, “Guy, you can either have an enchanting person or an enchanting product. Pick one,” I would pick the product. I would say, “Give me an enchanting product and then I can train people to be enchanting with it.” Whereas, if you give me enchanting people but a crappy product, it’s a lot harder to fix the product.

Mike: What makes an enchanting person?

Guy: I think an enchanting person starts off with a fundamental basis of being likeable. If you think about it, have you ever been enchanted by someone you can’t stand? Probably not.

The second component is trustworthiness, because you can like a person—you can like a Hollywood star, or their persona anyway—but that doesn’t mean you trust them. So the second component is trustworthiness.

The example I cite in the book of trustworthiness and competence and likeability is someone like Terry Gross of NPR. I don’t know her personally, but in listening to her on Fresh Air, you have a very good sense of her that she really is competent. She really can conduct a great interview across many, many subjects. She’s laughing, she’s teasing. You have a sense that she’s just not reading off a teleprompter that some producer put up 30 seconds ago.

So it’s between likeability and trustworthiness and knowledge and competence. And the difference between knowledge and competence is that knowledge is what you know, competence is the ability to apply it. A knowledgeable, competent, likeable, trustworthy person is enchanting.

Mike: Now let’s flip it over to the enchanting product. What are some qualities of an enchanting product? Can you give us some examples?

Guy: Sure, there are basically five or so key elements to the product. The first is depth—a product that is feature-rich. It does a lot.

The second thing is that it’s intelligent in the sense that its makers have intelligently figured out the customers’ problem and a solution to their problem, maybe even before the customers have.

The example I like to cite is that Ford Motor Company has a product called MyKey. What that enables you to do is program the top speed that the car can go. Imagine if you bought a really hot Mustang and you had to loan the car to your teenage son. You could program it so that the car could go no more than 60 miles an hour. I think that’s a really brilliant idea!

The next quality is completeness. Great products, enchanting products, they’re not just a physical entity and they’re not just a download. There’s a totality of the experience, which would be a string of enhancements, online documentation, technical support, all the good stuff. It’s not just the car. It’s the totality of the experience.

Another quality is elegance in terms of user interface. Someone has cared about the interaction between you and the product. That’s where Apple really shines.

The last thing is that I think enchanting products are empowering. That is, they make you feel better about yourself. A Macintosh is enchanting because it makes you feel more creative and more productive. Some computers you fight and some computers make you better.

Mike: I like the way you’ve analyzed that. I think a lot of businesses can really be thinking about this when they’re developing their products and services.

Guy: The acronym is DICEE. It’s deep, intelligent, complete, elegant and empowering.

Mike: Let me switch into a totally different discussion. You talk about the importance of embracing nobodies in your book. I’d like to explore this a little bit with you because so many people simply go after who they think is the highest profile individual when it comes to trying to get endorsements or support. I like the fact that you’re kind of going countercultural here and saying maybe you should not just look at those people. Can you explain what it means to embrace nobodies and why it’s important?

Guy: My theory is that nobodies are the new somebodies. In the old world, information came down from the mountain and trickled down to the masses. You had to look up at the mountain and see god, and god was the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Fortune and Forbes, Wired and CNET.

So in a world dominated by gods or goddesses on a mountain, you had to suck up to the gods and goddesses, hoping that they would like your product so they would tell the great unwashed masses, “We, the gods, have decided that you should like Facebook, and you should like Twitter, and you should like Macintosh, and you should like Shutterfly, and you should like Delicious.” I guess Delicious is a bad example now.

That’s the old world. In the new world, with blogging and tweeting and Facebooking and all the other stuff, I think it’s just as likely that someone you never heard of who has absolutely no platform compared to any of these publications will love your product and spread the word.

LonelyBoy15 on Twitter might tell 200. But it may be that LonelyBoy15 who is really a database administrator telling people about your product is more powerful in aggregation than this godlike person on the mountain.

I’m not telling you to ignore the gods, what I’m telling you is that the LonelyBoy15s and the Tiffany65s, they all add up.

Facebook grew because nobodies signed up for it and these nobodies created this total force. Now the somebodies have to say that Facebook was interesting, and they had to cover Facebook because if they didn’t, they’d look stupid.

My theory is that you don’t know who LonelyBoy15 is. It’s not like there’s a LonelyBoy15.com that’s ranked according to Alexa or Compete in the top 500 sites on the Internet. What you have to do is plant a lot of seeds, and you just hope that some of them are LonelyBoy15s.

Mike: What kind of practical tips would you give to your fellow marketers who want to try to plant seeds with nobodies?

Guy: The more seeds you plant, the more likely some will take root. With my book, the typical business book rollout involves inviting a few hundred reviewers. Obviously, you try to get The New York Times and The Washington Post and whatever. That’s the traditional method.

I happen to have a very valuable asset that’s kind of unique in the world, which is I’m the co-founder of Alltop, which has 40,000 blogs created by 20,000 people. I sent an email to all 20,000 saying, “I’m coming out with a new book. Would you like to review it?” Of those 20,000 people, roughly 1,200 said yes, so 1,200 people are going to review this book.

In a perfect world, I’m going to send out all 1,200, so on or about March 8, there’ll be 1,200 reviews of Enchantment. I don’t think that all 1,200 are going to come through, but let’s say 500 do. I don’t think there’s ever been a book that rolled out with 500 reviews, to put it mildly.

One of them might be Silicon Valley moms blog, or it could be the homeschooling blog because I have homeschooling.alltop, so homeschooling bloggers got my email. If they responded and said, “Yes, we would like to review your book,” then my book might be reviewed in Homeschooling World. Homeschooling World might only have 1,000 readers, but God bless them.

Mike: And they’re probably very influential people, I would imagine too.

Guy: In homeschooling, absolutely they are. So do I care if the person who’s the homeschooling main blogger tells all the other homeschoolers, “You have to read this book”? That is my best-case scenario!

Don’t get me wrong. I would love for The New York Times Book Review to say, “Everyone should read this book,” but that’s highly unlikely. On the other hand, I think I’ll get a lot of homeschooling blogs, I’ll get travel blogs, I’ll get mommy blogs, I’ll get food blogs.

Mike: And social media blogs.

Guy: Social Media Examiner. And they all add up.

Mike: Just a few closing comments. I was skeptical at first, I’ll be honest with you, because I wasn’t sure what you were trying to accomplish with the word enchantment. But having read through it, I believe that it’s really powerful what you’ve done here, and I think that time will prove that what you’ve done is created your next bestseller, so congratulations.

Guy: Thank you. Everybody has to have goals. Do you know the book How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie? That book is totally awesome. It came out in 1937, and it has sold roughly 15 million copies. If you go to Amazon today, you’ll probably see that it’s in the top 200 sellers to this day. That’s kind of my goal.

Mike: You want it to be a timeless book.

Guy: Yes.

Mike: That’s awesome. I want to close with this last question. If folks want to learn more about you specifically, and your book Enchantment, where would you like them to go?

If you want to find out more information about Enchantment, go to Facebook.com/enchantment. It’s a fan page where I post all my information. Mari Smith opened my eyes to Facebook and she introduced me to the Facebook programmer who did my custom work. She also introduced me to Wildfire, that is doing an Enchantment quiz for me.

Mike: Guy, thank you very much. I know that you’re a busy man and I greatly appreciate your taking the time out. We look forward to seeing more great things from you very soon.

Guy: Michael, I know you would do the same for me!

Mike: You know it!

Listen to our complete extended interview (below) to hear some of the interesting ways Guy promoted his book, as well as the dark side of enchantment.

Click here to download MP3.

What do you think of Guy’s ideas? Leave your comments in the box below.

When Michael Stelzner started Social Media Examiner in October 2009, he never dreamed it would become so successful so quickly.

As of March 2011, Social Media Examiner has 59,000 email subscribers, 33,000 Facebook fans, over 60 writers and half a million page views per month.

In addition, the site has generated almost $2 million in sales; ranks among the top 12 websites on two Technorati lists – business and small business; and ranks among the top 1,500 websites in the entire United States, according to Alexa.

“We didn’t do anything unique,” Stelzner said. “We simply employed great content with smart social media marketing and our community did the rest. And any business can achieve great results.”

Listen to Michael share more of the story.

Here’s How Your Business Can Thrive With Social Media

Would you like to learn the tactics of social media from pros like Stelzner—all from the comfort of your home or office? If so, keep reading.

Imagine how much it would cost you to attend a week-long conference with 22 different experts in a faraway city. The conference fee, airfare, hotel room, rental car and restaurants would set you back several thousand dollars.

But you can attend an online conference with 22 different social media pros for a fraction of that cost.

Yes, we’re talking about Social Media Examiner’s upcoming third-annual social media conference, Social Media Success Summit 2011.

You may have been one of the 2,500 attendees at last year’s summit and now you’re wondering if you can skip this one. We don’t recommend it!

“LinkedIn and Facebook have gone through many changes just in the last two months,” Stelzner said.

If you’re one of those 59,000 Social Media Examiner subscribers, you already know that, right? Because you’ve read the following stories:

• 8 New Facebook Page Changes: What You Need to Know
• What the Facebook Message Platform Means for Business
• 8 New LinkedIn Features Worth Exploration
• How LinkedIn Apps Can Promote Your Business

All of these articles were published in the last two months.

Learn What Works in Social Media Marketing

“We have a whole new lineup this year,” Stelzner said. “And the major emphasis in this summit is monitoring and tracking your social media marketing results.”

Nearly all of the presenters have either authored a social media book or manage social media programs for well-known corporations.

You’ll hear from Boeing, Verizon, Intel, Citigroup and Cisco. Here’s a partial list of the 22 presenters:

• Jeremiah Owyang, Altimeter Group
• Brian Solis, author of Engage
• Mari Smith, co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day
• Frank Eliason, Citigroup
• Mario Sundar, LinkedIn
• David Meerman Scott, author of Real-Time Marketing and PR

And here’s a sample of what you’ll learn: Facebook news feed optimization, how big B2B brands are using social media, how to use LinkedIn to grow your business, how to attract local customers using Facebook Places and the 6-step process for measuring social media return on investment.

Last year’s attendees included General Mills, American Express, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, 3M, Kellogg’s, General Electric, MetLife, Fox TV, U.S. Army, NCR, Ben & Jerry’s, Xerox, Capital One, Disney and thousands of small businesses.

There are only 2,500 spots and a lot of them have already been taken. Grab yours before it’s gone!

Sign up here to see a FREE sample class or take advantage of the half-price sale. It’s only available for a limited time! Last year’s summit sold out.

Did you attend last year? What did you think? What are your social media plans? Please leave your comments in the box below.