I’m going to start you out with some basic Facebook etiquette because if you break the basic rules on this social network your account will get banned in a heartbeat.

Facebook is especially strict and the admins have a zero tolerance policy for spam and bots.

Soon I’ll give you specific tactics on how I use Facebook to grow my business, get more visitors to my website, and increase my brand recognition, awareness and goodwill.

Facebook is great for business and has achieved tremendous adoption and growth because it’s a protected environment and you can easily connect with influencers you probably never would’ve reached through any other channel.

This is the true power of the social network and probably why they’re so strict…to protect how powerful it is and keep abusers and spammers out.

Sometimes it has a very ‘Big Brother’ feel to it like something out of 1984. But spam is bogging down the net and fighting it off is good even when some innocents get caught in the crossfire.

The problem is when newbies come in and don’t understand the rules nor the Facebook specific definition of spam.

These guys mean well but unfortunately sometimes the “baby gets thrown out with the bathwater”.

Even some very experienced and seasoned users of the site like Robert Scobliezer have been banned and had their account shut down. He later got it reinstated but why waste time with that unnecessary hassle.

I’ll start you off on the right foot in order to avoid these time wasting and frustration inducing issues from the jump.

You will spend quite a bit of time building up 500 or 1,000 friends and making solid deep connections so you want to protect your time investment.

Here are some basic rules you want to follow.

When you’re sending friend requests always include a personal message and only send the same message to 8-9 people before using a different one. Realize this is a general guideline and Facebook changes their algorithm periodically. To be ultra safe at the start you may want to send only 5 of the same personal message each day.

This ‘message’ field is available for your friend requests and I strongly urge you to include a personal message in each friend request because you’ll have a higher probability of them accepting your request.

They won’t tell exactly what their filter is but right now it seems if you send 10 or more of the same messages on the same day it triggers one of their filters and you’ll get warned. This changes periodically but as long as you stay under this low limit you should be fine.

It’s almost like your parent slapping the back of your hand… it stings for a while but you get over it. However, you get enough of those account warnings, seems to be between three and five, and the quickly fading hand sting becomes a swollen, painful nightmare. Your account gets disabled.

When you’re sending out your friend requests make sure to have a few different messages you can use so you don’t look like a spammer sending the same thing over and over.

I recommend, and do this myself, you include a personal message telling how you know them or mention a mutual friend’s name and what kind of business or reason you’re contacting them.

In this case you want to be friends and network with them to mutual benefit.

Also make sure to only send three or four of the same messages in e-mail otherwise it can look like spam to the Facebook algorithm. Use Facebook events here instead of sending out multiple e-mails with the same message.

This is what events are for and allow you to send all your friends notification with a link to the admin page where you put all the relevant information about your site or product launch or what ever you’re promoting.

Follow these basics and you’ll have a good networking experience on Facebook. The contacts and connections I’ve made have been invaluable to my business and overall goals in life.

Social media marketing is an all-encompassing term that is batted around the Internet these days in a very willy-nilly fashion.

There are lots of “gurus” who claim to know their stuff and can show you the promised land on how to make a mountain of profits with zero advertising costs by using their social media marketing techniques or their social marketing tactics.

Unfortunately, most of these “gurus” show you no proof nor any pictures or video evidence of campaigns they’ve run in the social media space which successfully made these millions and millions of dollars they claim you’ll make by using their process.

Caveat emptor definitely applies on the Internet.

It’s a big bad world out there and you’ve got to consider the source of who you’re going to take advice and training from.

The simple rule I use is for anyone to give me advice they have to have achieved what I want to achieve already. This way I know they know their stuff and by following them I should get similar results to what they’ve already gottten.

All too often on the Internet though it’s easy to get hyped up and excited by a sales message and just act on that impulse to buy. This can get you in trouble though.

Whenever you’re looking at buying something, any kind of training material it’s always best to do a search with that training package name and the word “scam” or the product name plus “reviews”.

I know this is basic day one type of stuff but it’s very important and all too often overlooked. You want to know the reputation of the person selling you the stuff and get any reviews from people who’ve bought and used it.

Now I’m going to give you your start with social media marketing.

The first thing you have to understand is it’s a completely different space than regular advertising formats. Most people would argue you shouldn’t even do any marketing in this type of space because the people are there for socializing and to connect with friends.

This creates a unique challenge and absolutely demands a different type of marketing than the blatant advertisements you see in banner ads and on paper click campaigns like Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Network, and MSN Adcenter along with all the smaller PPC places.

The biggest thing in the social space is establishing your reputation and your personal brand. These people don’t want to see a bunch of corporate sales pitches.

You want to allow your personality to emerge in your communications.

Some of the things you can do depending on the site is provide valuable content and information the people you want to connect with would be interested in.

So at the start you want to target and make friends with influencers in your market and start making friends with people interested in that topic. You can do this by searching groups which encompass your topic area and make friends with members of those groups obviously.

Once you have this down you can start to ask some of your friends what information they’re interested in and what’s missing from the information which is out there and available to them.

Then of course you provide that information in multiple formats including text notes and article posts, audio podcast, and video trainings/how to video tutorials.

I can see you may be starting to whine saying “it sounds like a lot of work”.

It does take some upfront investment in order to get some returns out the back end.

You can think of the social media space as a bank. You have to put money in before you can take money out. When your bank account goes into a negative you have problems.

It’s the same in the social media space in that you’ve got to give value and establish yourself and your brand before you can sell stuff and take money out.

So start out giving good valuable information and encourage people to comment. Encourage them to ask you for more information and then when they do so you can send them a link to your sales letter.

This has gone over very well when I’ve used this tactic and it’s also worked very well for my friends who’ve used it. It works far better than just shoving a link in someone’s face.

You follow these basics and you’ll be well on your way to establishing a quality presence and getting valuable interaction and value exchange from your social media marketing efforts.

Facebook connect is the much talked about and ballyhooed software widget for websites and blogs which allows your users and readers to log in to their Facebook account and be able to see which of their Facebook friends are currently online on your site.

Of course they can also invite their Facebook friends to join your site which is the real superpower of the software and the reason you’d want to take the time to get it up and running on your site.

Just imagine the growth and viral possibilities for your site having easy one click button access to FB’s 110 million users. This vast network could be at your fingertips very soon.

Already two sites I’ve seen theinsider and CNN have integrated Facebook connect and I can only presume they’ve done so instead of Google’s friend connect.

There is a storm coming. Like when William B. Travis drew a line in the sand at the Alamo there is going to be an imaginary line drawn through the Internet “sand”.

On one side of this imaginary line you’ll find Microsoft and their cohorts which currently include Facebook (who they’ve invested hundreds of millions in), CBS (who owns theinsider), CNN and the select other well-funded private investors who just invested in FB’s latest three or 400 million round of financing raising which happened earlier this year.

And the opponents on the other side of the imaginary line are Google and their cohorts. As you’ve probably heard if you spend any time on the Internet, Microsoft and Google are locked in a celebrity death match for full Internet supremacy.

G’s allies currently include MySpace who has come out in support of G’s open social, along with propeller and a number of other sites who currently allow you to log in with your open ID, which is coincidentally enough based on open social. Ning is probably the biggest which has pledged to go with the Googler’s open social.

Clearly the two main players have been identified and now the scrum is going to be over the other major sites who have yet to decide which side they’re on.

Probably the most interesting (and the biggest site on the Internet right now) is Yahoo. And if you haven’t been keeping up with the headlines this year I’ll give you a quick recap on why they’re the most interesting part of this battle.

Early in the year around February March timeframe MSFT made a power-play and an offer to buy all of Yahoo for $33 a share which was quite a premium over their $17 per share price they closed that day at on the stock market. Unfortunately, for Microsoft and their executives in the Yahoo executives felt it was worth more than that… in the range of $40 per share which Microsoft was unwilling to go that high.

The deal eventually failed due to this valuation stalemate.

In response to shareholder outrage the Yahoo executives had to make a big stand and a big statement. Their solution was quite funny… to form a joint venture with their arch rival the one who had been kicking their ass in search which is of course Google.

So from the outside Yahoo has ties to both sides of this major Web 3.0 Internet battle for social supremacy. What side they choose to fall on will have major fallout for the rest of the Internet.

Also other big sites like eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, Hi5, Orkut, Friendster, Bebo, AOL, Propeller, Digg, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Youtube, DailyMotion, EzineArticles, Go2Articles and many other of the biggest sites will have to make a choice.

There are advantages to becoming an early adopter but there are also drawbacks when the software has bugs which can anger users.

The advantage to being an early adopter obviously is you get a jump on everyone else in your market and maybe just this opportunity alone can allow you to dominate your market and take users away who would have possibly joined with one of your competitors.

My suggestion is to be an early adopter for your site because the software’s that outstanding and allows serious growth for your website.

Friend connect is cleverly disguised as a so-called widget titled “Followers” and released on google’s blogspot blogger domain. This is most likely a response to the broken down negotiations between Google and Digg.

As you may know Google was just a hair away from purchasing Digg and integrating its data and results into search results. This would supposedly improve the search listings but at the 11 hour negotiations broke down and the Googlers left the table seemingly walking away forever.

You can see an example of what it looks like on some blogger blogs. Do a search for friend connect followers widget on blogger and that should give you a good start.

When you go to a page which has the widget you have the opportunity to become what is called a “follower”. You can see the widget and the pictures of the current followers avatars at the upper left of the page or upper right depending on the template being used on that blog.

There is no way to tell at this point whether Google will use the number of followers and how long people read your blog posts as factors for increasing or decreasing your ranking in big G’s search results.

It may just be the G men of search following their standard MO by mostly secretly under cover of night releasing this. This is about par for the course for the googlers.

Friend connect is only found on certain blogspot blogs right now basically the bloggers in the know on how to install it. It is available to all blogger blogs just most people don’t know about it because of the launch secrecy and many people on blogger are newbies and amateurs who don’t know how easy it is to install the widget.

I believe you have to be logged into your account to be able to follow blogs. (Sidenote: I also recommend putting in a good photo of yourself into your google account). Depending on what you’re going to be using your big G profile for the photo should reflect this. Obviously business photo should be more professional and if you’re going to be using it mostly personal you can certainly throw up a wacky photo of yourself. I leave that part up to you

Confirm the settings you want because you’re in control of how you get your content. You can join publicly and your picture will show same as it does on the MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog widgets.

Or you can join “anonymously” and just receive the updates without being seen. This is the very cool part about friend connect because it keeps you in complete control of what content you get and how you get it.

I join blogs publicly and recommend you do the same because you’re part of the community and want to be participating in the discussions and being seen by other members.

Next, click one of the avatars of those who have already joined and add the person as a friend and send them an introductory blurb. This will give you a fledging taste of using friend connect as your first baby steps. Obviously, I’ve taken the time to talk about this with you because I believe it is going to be a huge part of the web going forward.

I’ll be talking about this more in my Facebook research. The process of adding friends here and making true connections is the same as it is on FB. This is true for any and all social networks because the underlying key is the “social” aspect.

There are some basic fundamentals to make you much more successful in meeting new people and making new connections. Deepening those connections will be the key but beyond the scope of this article.

The next screen you will see after clicking on their photo is their profile, links to their social networks and their G Reader shared items. This is big G’s social bookmarking application.

For those of you who do not know how to use Google Social, called Googling Social, I have instructions to create a profile, add friends to it from Gmail and get started with the Reader which is the social bookmarking application.

Currently, the links to get to the pieces of Googling Social are hard to find so the best starting point is someone elses profile, you can find mine in the resource box at the bottom of this article.

Once you are on my profile page, look in the upper right hand corner of the page, the link is “my profile” and it is just to the right of your gmail address. Assuming he you’re logged into your account it will take you to a screen after you click on the my “profile link” where you can set up your own profile.

Sidenote: it looks like big G is starting to index these profiles in their main search engine index. So be aware of this privacy reasons and also as a predictor of how influential their social platform will be in their 2009 search engine results.

Word of warning, the Gmail address that you are logged into will be your public Gmail address in Reader and how you make friends thru Gmail. So if you have a private address then don’t use it. Use one you’re ok being public (despite G’s best efforts some spam bots maybe able to harvest your address and spam you).

You only get one profile no matter how many Gmail addresses you have, so choose wisely.

If you have any questions you can email me from my contact page on my site also in the resource box.

You make friends in this system by first initiating an e-mail. And then your new friend has to reply back to your e-mail.

This does a couple of things which are beyond the scope of this article but the main one you need to know about now is the more friends you have the more follow links you’ll get to your website. If you don’t know followed links are very important to your Google, Yahoo, and MSN rankings.

After you’ve made the initial e-mail contacts and gotten a reply back from your new friend, then invite your new friend to Gchat by clicking the link at the bottom of the email communication you had with them. At that point you’ll be connected. The friending process is made purposefully difficult to insure there’s a 2 way connection and cut down on spam which is a good thing for all of us.

This is WIN WIN. The more friends you have in this the better it works for you; and everyone in your network.

This will be huge so jump into the deep end now and be an early adopter dominator.

Stay tuned for more info about the big G’s big changes to their social platform, how the new search results will show (hint: personalized), and how you can profit from it the whitehat way.