Social media represents an opportunity to engage with online communities to foster tighter customer relationships. Those relationships, in turn, can increase brand recognition and loyalty, and ultimately increase revenue. That’s why social media continues to be an exploding area of interest for marketers worldwide.

There are five principles that have proven to be successful in leveraging social media as part of an interactive marketing effort:

1. Fit the right tactic to the right goal
2. Listen first
3. Have a measurable goal
4. Evaluate your ability to generate content
5. Recognise your limitations

Fit the right tactic to the right goal
Social media or Web 2.0 tactics are extensions of the interactive marketing efforts that include Web 1.0 technologies. It’s the same way a web seminar can be an extension of a live seminar. In both instances, you’re pursuing the tactic to achieve an end.

For many marketers, social media is meant only to generate buzz — which, in online terms, means traffic. Social media can certainly do that, but you should first assess your resource spend and any slightly more-traditional interactive tactics.

The first tactics you tap to build more site traffic, for example, should be search engine optimisation (SEO) to boost your organic rankings, coupled with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on search engines.

Classic SEO is about careful writing, careful coding, and building a community of links for your topics. While it’s a slow process that requires focus, the payoff can be huge. You get the branding blush of top rankings, plus the traffic. More important, every click for you is generally a click denied to your competitor.

PPC advertising is an extension of — not a substitute for — your organic SEO work. Visitors are more likely to click on your link if you have the top organic and paid listings. Done right, with adequate focus and oversight, PPC offers a low-cost option to build traffic and attract people who are already in a buying frame of mind.

Social media tactics can reniforce your SEO offers by bringing in a new set of people to link to you on keywords.

Listen to the conversations around you
Before you start holding your own conversations online, visit other blogs in your industry or your product niche. Visit Twitter. Listen to industry influencers. Take the pulse of your community through newsgroups, user forums, or product-support sites.

Through participation in existing conversations, you’ll get a better sense of the issues at stake for your business, enabling you to perhaps proactively prevent challenges from becoming headaches. By listening and responding as an expert, it’s possible to effect positive change on your brand and also to influence others.

You may discover you don’t need to create your own community, and that it’s sufficient to work with existing traffic. This route is a good initial approach for smaller companies limited by budget and resources.

Have a measurable goal
“If you don’t know where you’re going, you can never be lost.” This may seem to be a logical concept, but it’s definitely not the mantra for marketers in a social media environment, or in the current economic downturn. With finite marketing resources, it’s crucial to clearly define your social media objectives as an integral part of your marketing strategy.

You’ll need to evaluate how those objectives match up with your existing search engine optimisation efforts, podcasts, blogging, and other online tactics. Detailing how specific tactics can be applied to generate traffic and why you consider them to be most effective in creating sales leads, will help establish the proper foundation for your programme.

You can link social media efforts with other marketing tactics. For example, with a traditional product launch, conduct blogger outreach to share your story. For topline traffic growth, you can also create a podcast channel on iTunes to reach a new audience through RSS.

Evaluate your ability to generate content
The cardinal rule on the web is “Content is King.” People don’t browse to your site or read your feeds unless valuable information is delivered (or at least promised). To start using social media within marketing, you need to ensure you have a strong pipeline of content. This includes having a coherent story to tell; and people to tell it in an engaging way.

First, you have to evaluate your ability to create and package content. For instance, assess whether you can provide a regular newsletter and use that as your content “litmus” test.

For real success, content must be original and not repackaged. While blogs are alluring, is it better for your company to deliver a regular and lively newsletter to your customers and prospects? Promoting offers or events are generally no-no’s in blogs, but you can safely have ads in a newsletter.

With a strong newsletter in place, marketers have the opportunity to offer exclusives or select stories as a means of syndicating their own content. The creation of trackable inbound links will help build better-targeted traffic, for stronger search engine optimisation. This process helps build brand and sales over time.

In parallel with the newsletter effort, consider podcasting as a way to leverage multimedia to get your message across.

Recognise your own limitations
Your resources are far from boundless. Understand that there’s no easy way to have an extremely effective social media strategy across all areas. It’s best to not enter marketing arenas in which you know you can’t do well, i.e. don’t host a blog if you don’t have the original content to keep it fresh.

Have you ever heard someone say “don’t judge a book by its cover”? Well, they’re absolutely right – especially when it comes to designing for the web. In contrast to a book, designing for the web raises a much more complex dilemma: we don’t have the reader’s undivided attention and we’re often telling more than one story. We’re addressing several different readers with different needs through the same medium.

In reality, web designers have they’re work cut out for them. It’s not as simple as creating a pretty template and plugging some content into it. The design itself is an outcome of the content. We’re essentially creating a framework for communication and messaging.

Our work in web design is all about the content. The visual design is intended to effectively deliver and support our content. So to judge the quality of a site, you really have to judge it by it’s content. Next time you critique a website try to answer these three questions:

1. Who is this website serving?
2. Why are they coming here? (specifically, what is it they need to do?)
3. How does the site inform the reader or guide them through a process?

Who is your website serving?
A lot of our upfront design research is dedicated towards understanding our users and segmenting them by the types of tasks they need to accomplish so that we can derive mental models and personas. One key benefit of doing such research is so that we can get the right content to the people who matter.

Why are readers coming to your site?
Remember that we go online for a reason. It could be to learn something, such as reading an article, to achieve something, such as checking Facebook, or simply to be entertained, such as playing an online game. No matter what, we visit sites for one reason or another. We need to write our content and structure our design to facilitate these motivations. Your readers came to your site to do something; get to the point.

How is your site informing its readers?
It’s still all too common to see brochureware. These sites are organisation centric and are chock full of information that tends to be informative but irrelevant to the user and their task. For example, if you’re in retail chances are most people coming to your site because they want to buy something or find out how to get to your store. They don’t care about staff policies, or how the business was founded twenty years ago, etc…

Taking content and copy seriously
It’s all too common for design teams to only consider full fledged GUI’s as interaction design. Email addresses and even the URLs your website use are forms of interaction and need appropriate amounts of attention. Remember the golden rule…the shorter your text is, the more important it is to design text for usability.

Think about short text in your design. Are the terms you’re using to describe each section in your primary navigation correct? It’s critical to get this right from the get-go.

Designers can spend hours on the colour, drop shadow, and font-face used on a button. But more important than all of those things, even its placement/positioning, is what the label on that button says. If a user notices and reads your call to action but doesn’t understand what it means than all of that effort was pointless. This is not to discount art direction, visual hierarchy, and aesthetics, but rather to put them in their place. You need to know what you’re saying before you get into any of those details.

Starting the website design process can either give you a really great feeling, or can leave you feeling hollow in the pit of your stomach. The feeling you get is usually dependent on how great of a kick start you get with your design process.

What if I were to tell you that you can control those feelings even more than you’re used to? The truth is, you can control the feelings you have by utilising some tips on how to make sure you’re creating a killer site design right from the start.

There are things that you should (and shouldn’t) be doing during your website design process. These things can be as small as subtle colour choices or as large as advertisement placement or layout. Regardless of the size of each item on the list, the impact of each item is equally huge when you look at the bigger picture.

Making proper use of white space

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of minimalism (take alook around you). This translates perfectly into site design because using the right amount of white space can make your design have a better flow and help visitors find what they’re looking for – and fast!

For those who are new to web design, when we say “white space” I’m not actually referring to the actual #FFFFFF colour. What I’m referring to is the open, airy spacing that is utilised in designs.

The wrong colour choice can kill a business

When you’re designing a site that’s geared towards making sales and getting people’s attention, you’ve got to remember that the wrong colour choice will throw off potential buyers, especially if the colour scheme you’ve chosen isn’t giving off the proper vibe for your product/business.

For example, a business aimed at selling meditation products wouldn’t do very well with a loud colour scheme filled with bright reds or yellows. That business model would be better suited for muted colours – something calming and soothing. On the other hand, a website that’s sells training equipment would do well with a brighter, more “tough” colour scheme.

One way to find good colour schemes for your site is to check out Colour Lovers – the’ve got great palette choices for all kinds of styles.

Don’t turn your navigation into a game of “Where’s Waldo?“

Your goal is to keep people on your site for longer than 4 seconds, so one of the main things you should be thinking about is your navigation. Is it easy to find? Are people able to get from page to page easily? Will your visitors know how to contact you in the first couple seconds of viewing your site? (we’ve all seen Flash sites that have the navigation buried under 37 seconds of animation and heavy graphics?)

These are all questions that should be asked while designing your site. Turning your navigation into a game of Where’s Waldo? will definitely ensure that your page views per visit drop, your interaction plummets and your visito’s overall experience is shot to hell.

Ignore the “keep everything above the fold” mantra

Some people will have you believe that you must keep all of your content above the fold, disregarding the design and interaction you build into the top part of your website. Maybe they tell you to make your navigation and logo so small that the content comes in at 100px. Maybe they say that a “buy now” button doesn’t work if it’s below the fold. Whatever “they” say – they’re wrong; if you execute the top part of the design properly.

Paddy Donnelly has a great post titled “Life below 600px” that you must read. A lot of great points are brought up in that article that you should really be thinking about when designing your site. Sacrificing design to appease the masses shouldn’t be at the top of your to do list.

Don’t be afraid to sell yourself as much as possible

If you’re designing your own site to promote your business or you’re building another company’s site, one of the main thing that site is supposed to do is sell. Don’t let people tell you anything else because it would be a lie. Interaction is great and socialising with your clients is obviously a no-brainer, but if your site design doesn’t sell you to them, what’s the point in having a site to begin with?

If you look over most business sites, you’ll see a pattern – they all have buttons of some sort that say things like “sign up” or “buy now” or “view pricing and plans“. Checking out sites like Woo Themes, Basecamp and Mail Chimp will allow you to visually see what I mean. There’s a reason they’re utilising these types of calls to action – one of their (many) goals is to turn a profit.

As long as you don’t forget that and you make sure it’s easy for people to know you’ve got something to sell (and for god’s sake don’t over do it!), you’re on the right track.