While more and more small businesses are experimenting with social media marketing, many remain hesitant about wading into what they see as a public relations minefield. Social media marketing isn't near as scary as it can sound. Like anything else in life where you interact with other people, it simply takes some common sense, decorum and respect for those around you.

Thankfully, the marketers who have already been making their way through the social media world often have good advice for those who are new to the game. That's why, on the heels of the SMX Social Media conference in New York City, Search Engine Watch writer Eric Enge offers up 11 Guidelines to Social Media Success culled from the sessions he attended.

Eric offers up eleven great tips, but a few really stand out.

Discover their needs - Study the site and learn what type of content prospers in their environment. This acts as a second check to tell you that you have targeted the right social media site, and it also tells you something about how to present your content within their environment.

Learn the lingo and value system - This is just important. According to Rob Key, who spoke on Wednesday, each social media site begins to develop their own unique dialect. If you don't understand the basic dialect, you will stick out like a sore thumb to the regular users of the site.

Be patient - The big wins may well take some time to achieve. You are going to need to make up front investments to become a part of the community and figure out how to fit in. The right way to get the content you are trying to promote on the community site varies by social media site, but following the above guidelines will cause the people who come to know you to start following your stuff. You can also learn from them what is appropriate for that particular community.

One consistent theme through all eleven tips? Respect for the users in the community. From not wasting their time with bad information to speaking their language to understanding the investment of time social media requires, every last suggestion Eric offers up has it's roots in respect for the community.

Social media marketing is simple as long as you go into it with good intentions.

Here's an analogy for you. The other day, I was working my butt off in the gym on the cardio machines, panting wildly with sweat dripping off me and my face as red as a beet. Not the most attractive sight, but I figure, you're at the gym to work out right? I might as well "go hard" or "go home", as they say.

As I looked around me, I could see all these people simply going through the motions. There they were, minus perspiration in their shiny new lycra and expensive gym shoes, casually walking on the treadmill or lazily turning the wheels on a bike while reading a book or glued to the TV screens in front of them. Only a few seemed to be there for the actual purpose of working out. The rest seemed to be there to check out the talent or to simply keep up the appearance of fitness, while doing the bare minimum.

Huh? I don't get it. Why have these gym bimbos paid so much money for a gym membership and all the related gear if they aren't going to take full advantage of their investment?

Then it struck me - these gymbos were just like those companies who spend thousands of dollars on a shiny new website with all the bells and whistles like graphic design, blogs, shopping carts, web analytics, the lot and then fail to take advantage of it. I see it so often, regardless of company size. Web sites that could easily be bringing in loads of traffic and revenue simply wasting away because nobody can be bothered tracking visitor activity, analyzing trends or checking for search engine compatibility and usability.

These companies are simply keeping up appearances, investing heavily in Internet technology because their competitors are doing the same. But no thought has gone into the search engine compatibility of the site, how usable it is for visitors or whether it meets accessibility guidelines. They don't look at their site statistics, they don't check for broken links and they sure as heck don't investigate why their sites aren't converting traffic into customers. What a waste!

Is your web site working hard enough for you? Run it through the following 20 point fitness assessment to find out:

• Is your site fully search engine compatible? Are all your pages being indexed by the major search engines?
• Do you track your visitor statistics on a regular basis? Do you use the information provided by your visitor statistics to improve your site?
• Is your web site accessible to visually-impaired visitors? Does it meet the international standards set down by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)?
• Do you know which sites and search engines provide you with the most traffic? Do you use this information to increase your traffic further?
• Do you track the source of all reported errors in your site statistics and fix them promptly?
• Do you know which keywords your site was found for in the search engines? Have you conducted keyword research to determine what search terms your target markets are looking for so you can optimize for them?
• Does your web site HTML code validate to W3 standards? Do you check for validation regularly?
• Does your site contain zero broken links? Do you check for and fix broken links regularly?
• Has your site been fully search engine optimized to integrate your target search terms into your Page Titles, META Tags and visible page text?
• Have you created and submitted an XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps?
• Have you created and submitted a sitemap to Yahoo Site Explorer?
• Have you checked to see if your site meets Google's Webmaster Guidelines?
• Do you measure your visitor sign-ups and conversions on a regular basis? Do you tweak your landing page copy to increase the conversion rates?
• Is your site navigation intuitive and are your visitors following the navigation paths you intended?
• Do you encourage feedback from your site visitors and provide an obvious way for them to provide such feedback?
• Are there at least 250 words of text on your home page to satisfy search engines?
• Does your site contain a visible, text-based site map to aid user navigation?
• Do you have an ongoing link building campaign running to secure more incoming links to your site and improve your site's link popularity score?
• Does your site have a high percentage of repeat visitors? Are the majority of your visitors staying on your site for more than a minute?
• Do your search engine referrals and site traffic figures grow each month?

Unless you can answer yes to all the questions in the above checklist, your web site is not working hard enough for you and needs a workout. Get to it!

• Campaign Name: The name you designate here is just simply a name you will recognize that differentiates this campaign from others in your account.

• Will Run Until: Although this setting is quite self-explanatory, overlooking it can cause you to overspend or underspend. If you're seasonal and your ads stop after Christmas, for example, make sure you indicate a date to stop the campaign rather than relying on your memory. If your campaign has no end date, use the new feature that allows you to indicate that. That was not around when I started with Google Adwords and I fell into the pitfall of having my campaign stopped because I didn't push the date out far enough.

• Budget: This is a DAILY BUDGET number. Not monthly. Not Yearly. DAILY. If you run campaigns where you do not show ads on the weekends and only on weekdays, make sure to adjust your daily budget accordingly to coincide with the fluctuation in monthly business days. I allocate a certain amount per month to my campaigns and the daily budget changes month-to-month because the amount of actual business days is different from month-to-month.

• View Recommended Budget: This is what Google feels you should be spending. Unfortunately, Google is not in your budget meetings and doesn't know how much in reality you have to spend. But, check it out and see what they recommend, but remember there are other ways to maximize your spend than just loading in more money.

• Delivery Method: You can have Google use up your budget early in the day and show your ads very quickly or you can have them space them out and try to make them last throughout the day. I typically have them space them out and even using that method I'll notice my ads show more often in the morning. Another reason I like to try to space them out is because not everyone is going to research and buy my products in the morning. I actually find I get more quality leads later in the afternoon.

• Keyword Bidding: With Keyword Bidding you can select how you want to handle the process for deciding the amount you're paying per keyword bid in the campaign. Options include Maximum Bidding (max CPC you're willing to pay), Preferred Bidding (setting average CPC you want to pay), Budget Optimizer (Google manages your bids to get most clicks), and Conversion Optimizer (Google's new cost-per-acquisition tool). With the budget and conversion optimizer, ad scheduling is turned off so the option to not run ads during certain times is lost. Sticking with max bidding or preferred bidding at the campaign level gives you the most control over where your ads place and how much you spend for that placement.

• Ad Scheduling: A very powerful setting that allows you to set when your ads appear. Only targeting morning searchers Monday through Thursday? Well, you can run your ads during those times using this tool. Find out when your audience is most likely to want to see your ad and have maximum exposure during that time.

• Position Preference: Another useful utility that let's you try to place your ad in certain positions on the SERP. If you know your ads convert the best in positions 4-6 than only put your ads in those spots. Remember, it's not a given that your ads will perform better because they're in the top spot. Test, Test, Test!
  

• Ad Serving: I'm not a fan of letting Google decide which one of my ads is performing better so I typically choose to show my ads more evenly. This is a must if you're doing any kind of ad copy testing. Through your copy testing you'll be able to figure out yourself which calls to action or benefit points works best.
  

• Location: Do you have a local business that serves only a small geographical area in your town? No problem. With these selections, you can select either a country/territory, region/city, or a custom location that is within a specified distance from a location you choose. The more specific you are in your geographical selection, the more targeted your ads will be - and in some cases cost less per click. A big pitfall here would be to select the whole US when you serve a much smaller area. You'll wind up with many unqualified clicks. Remember, even in the US, it might make sense to launch separate campaigns by region as more localized reference or text might appeal more to each individual region.

• Languages: This is fairly self-explanatory, but I mention it here because I think it's important to point out that you can launch a campaign in Japan and actually use the Japanese language in your text. I would NOT try to launch a global campaign and only use English in your ads.

There?s a really good article in the Houston Chronicle labeled Internet Startups Going Social. Normally, mainstream articles like this can be pretty vague, but I thought this one really hit the spot. Plus, I?ve always liked the Chron.com format.

The article gives some cool information regarding these social sites themselves, their overheads, word-of-mouth marketing, and attracting ad dollars.

It winds up that Houston (also home to Search Engine Guide and the updated social-based Small Business Brief) has a number of cool social networking sites. Based on the success of sites like MySpace and Facebook, these Houston-based sites are similar, but built more toward a particular niche from "wannabe" stars, social networking for moms, illnesses and injuries, and even a user-recommended search engine ? algorithm free (sort of).

OpMom.com is built for moms gaining advice, giving wisdom, finding great ideas, and meeting other moms.

IRazoo.com touts itself as a true ?social search engine?. The sites that come up on top are determined by user votes. It looks like it?s at least partially algo-based, but it gives users the chance to recommend the site or not. It probably has a long way to go, but it does have promise.

My favorite is CareFlash.com. It lets users keep up to date with friends and relatives of those who are ill with requests down to picking up mail to informational videos regarding their illness or injury. The videos themselves are really slick and informative.

The only things I really know about Houston is that it?s big, my cousin Jerry lives there, and I?m going to make my first visit there in a couple weeks (I'm still working on that shirt, Robert!). It?s cool to know that there seems to be quite the social media scene there as well.