A friend of Coulson Macleod’s Car­o­lyn Mor­gan, who is an online mar­ket­ing guru work­ing with media brands, wrote this piece and I thought it was par­tic­u­larly rel­ev­ant to us. We have, after all, built our typo­graphic art busi­ness using social media. And for any­one else start­ing out with a lim­ited budget (or, like us, no budget at all) for advert­ising, then these 20 tips could be the make or break of your future business.

Fol­low­ing an online mar­ket­ing con­fer­ence organ­ised by @ebizclub in Not­ting­ham, Car­o­lyn was so impressed with the speak­ers that she sum­mar­ised her top 20 takeaways from the day below; find more snip­pets on #omce2011 or fol­low these speak­ers on Twitter…

(We’ve added bits in and put them in ital­ics.)

1. Stay In The Kit­chen (@grahamjones GJ)

Human beings like to social­ise above all else.  At parties they stay in the kit­chen as it feels like the place to be. Online social net­works are like the kit­chen; it’s hard to tempt them from there to the lounge where your web­site is. So get chat­ting to your cus­tom­ers where they want to be.

2. Mavens Make Most Profit (GJ)

Com­pan­ies who use many social chan­nels and update them fre­quently (ideally daily!) gen­er­ate more rev­enue. Just like to add here that we at Coulson Macleod HQ are on the case with this one. We have a Face­book page, we’re on Twit­ter (@CoulsonMacleod), Flickr, Linkedin, and run this blog.  One Brownie point to us!

3. Daily Blogs Gen­er­ate Most Leads (GJ)

Small busi­nesses updat­ing blogs and social media daily get the low­est cost per new lead.

4. Social Media = Digital Dia­logue (@mediasnackers DK)

Focus on con­ver­sa­tions not mar­ket­ing, and use to build rela­tion­ships. Give your brand a human face; you’re selling to people, not com­pan­ies. We spend all day chat­ting, about quite ran­dom things and not about art and cul­ture! We’d love it if you want to chat to us too.

5. Talk About Pro­cess Not Product (DK)

People are more inter­ested in how you did it rather than what you did. Well, I guess we earn another Brownie point, as how we’re doing it is what this blog is all about, the gen­esis of an art busi­ness — highs and lows!

6. Meas­ure Out­comes Not Out­put (DK)

Don’t obsess about what and how often you pub­lish on social media, work out what dif­fer­ence it makes.

7. Play First (DK)

The best way to under­stand each social media chan­nel is to exper­i­ment with it before jump­ing in.  Think about each chan­nel as a room full of real people.

8. Be Enga­ging Rather Than Set Out To Build Engage­ment (DK)

Share inter­est­ing con­tent, para­phrase and add value; get atten­tion by being use­ful and giv­ing people some­thing to talk about rather than try­ing to sell. Hello! We’re shar­ing con­tent right here. Pat on the back to us.

9. Mis­takes Are Pub­lic, But Solv­ing Them Cre­ates Advoc­ates(@andrewgrill AG)

Social media means unhappy cus­tom­ers can share prob­lems, but if you admit them and offer a solu­tion they will tell more people. Not had too much exper­i­ence of this

10. Mobile Is VERY Per­sonal (AG)

People don’t share their phone, and find ads highly intrus­ive. You’ve been warned!

11. Mobiles Cap­ture The Moment (AG)

Mobile devices are there at the moment of cre­at­ive impulse. Social media and mobile can cre­ate a toxic mix as instant neg­at­ive feed­back, but can cap­ture pos­it­ive thoughts too.

12. Watch The Geo­loca­tion Ser­vices (AG)

Slow take-up of foursquare and Face­book places as yet, but worth mon­it­or­ing as provide lots of data.

13. Peer Advocacy Is Power­ful (AG)

Con­sumers are pla­cing more weight on recom­mend­a­tions from people online even if they have never met.

14. Con­tent Qual­ity Will Count For More (@ianlockwood IL)

Google updates mean poor qual­ity or copied con­tent will be pen­al­ised and links from art­icle sites less valu­able, so cre­at­ing ori­ginal qual­ity con­tent will be key.

15. Paid Links Risk Pen­al­ties (IL)

Google can’t spot paid links, but will pen­al­ise offend­ing sites so it’s a risky strategy.

16. Social Influ­ences Search Rank­ing (IL)

Google will start to meas­ure amount of shar­ing and author­ity of retweets for your con­tent. So qual­ity, fresh con­tent shared by oth­ers will help search res­ults. So please retweet this please!

17. Inter­net Now Is Your Busi­ness (GJ)

What you do online is cent­ral to mar­ket­ing your busi­ness; all other activ­ity has to fit in to this. Hear hear!

18. Tailor Mes­sage To Platform/ Audience

Adopt a dif­fer­ent tone or style for Linkedin, Face­book, and Twit­ter. Think we’re doing that. Are we?

19. Your Bro­chure Site Is The End Of The Conver­sa­tion (GJ)

Your own web­site won’t gen­er­ate leads; they come from social spaces, but it helps with con­ver­sion as place to check cred­ib­il­ity: are you a real business.

20. Under 25s Blur Work And Per­sonal Life (GJ)

See no bar­rier between per­sonal social net­work and work per­sona; it’s just the older gen­er­a­tion who like to have a divi­sion. On Face­book you can have a busi­ness page and a private per­sonal pro­file. Well we’re much older than 25 and we see no bar­rier. Yeah! We’re down with the kids!

If this is use­ful to you too, do fol­low Car­o­lyn on Twit­ter (@carolynrmorgan ) or go to her web­site Pen­maen Media and men­tion you found her via Coulson Macleod. She’ll be chuffed!

Admit­tedly, we’re a bit biased on this one as Lark & Linen won Design Refuge’s Octo­ber Chal­lenge. This means Lark & Linen get to choose a Coulson Macleod typo­graphic print of their choice.

How­ever, there is a good reason Lark & Linen received so many votes (181 out of 813) in the Chal­lenge, because it’s a beau­ti­ful blog, run by Jac­quelyn Clark, a Toronto-based interior designer. Her blog is a real joy to read. And the pho­tos are heavenly.

Jac­quelyn says she is pas­sion­ate about uncom­plic­ated, well thought-out, liv­able, usable design. Snap. She has a door crush. Snap. She likes all things neut­ral. Snap.

In par­tic­u­lar we love Jacquelyn’s “Scenes from my week­end” with her won­der­ful photo montages.

Cer­tainly not a new blog, but one of Coulson Macleod’s long-time favour­ites and guar­an­teed to make you chuckle. So a good one for a Fri­day. If you’ve not seen it, then allow me to intro­duce Unhappy Hip­sters (It’s lonely in the mod­ern world)…

And the fowl kettle cover con­tem­plated suicide—Thursdays as usual, basically.

The neigh­bors never did come around to their “exag­ger­ated portal” concept for the back door.

Bon­ing up on indie rock his­tory before her after­noon quiz. Oh, the per­ils of homeschooling.

Their cul­tural ethos dic­tated that they purée homemade baby food; their aes­thetic dic­tated stor­ing the jars on an overly self-aware back­lit shelf. Either way, little Moses was amused.

Coulson Macleod spends a lot of time brows­ing blo­g­dom. We love blo­g­dom. Our favour­ite crush is Paris vs New York…

We’ve just been approached by Design Refuge to see if we’d be inter­ested in giv­ing one of our typo­graphic prints as a first prize in their com­pet­i­tion. Of course we’re interested!

This is a huge hon­our. Design Refuge is the largest meet­ing place online for interior design blog­gers. Their mem­bers com­prise the very best blog­gers in the design world. The super­stars of design blo­g­dom. Our heros. Mem­bers include {this is glam­our­ous}, coco&kelley, Bright.Bazaar, Lob­ster and Swan, Made by Girl, Nick Olsen, and sfgirlby­bay.

To win a Coulson Macleod print, Design Refuge mem­bers have been given the chal­lenge to describe their style aesthetic.

Mem­bers of Design Refuge come from all over the world includ­ing Greece, Nor­way, USA, Canada, Rus­sia, Sweden, UK, Aus­tralia, Montenegro, Fin­land, Ser­bia, Bel­gium, Neth­er­lands, Malay­sia, France, Thai­l­and, Ire­land, Den­mark, Israel, and Spain.

We’ll let you know who wins and what typo­graphic print they choose.

We men­tioned awhile back that a friend of Coulson Macleod had been nom­in­ated in the 2010 Blog­gies.

We can proudly announce that 3limes has won! 3limes won in the Best Latin Amer­ican category.

Well done Sam­antha, you deserve it as your blog makes for a bril­liant read. Next year fin­gers crossed she’ll win the Best African Web­log as Sam­antha now lives in Uganda (she used to live in Trin­idad). If you have a spare five minutes do read her blog, a fas­cin­at­ing insight into liv­ing in the more exotic parts of the world.

Tech­nor­ati needs to verify that Coulson Macleod is the author of this blog by look­ing for a unique code, which I have to publish.

NF3WFDHSPV3V

Once the code is pub­lished, Tech­nor­ati can verify that Not For Squares is the Coulson Macleod blog.

Sorry, very bor­ing I know.