Social media is a concept that bubbled up through the masses starting, roughly speaking, around 2005. While social media sites like MySpace and Facebook began as ways for primarily young people to find each other and keep in touch, corporations soon saw how these sites could be used to improve customer relations. By 2009 social media begun to revolutionize the way corporations managed customer relations.

According to IT research and advisory company Gartner, by 2010 60% of Fortune 1000 companies will be using social media in some form as a way to improve customer relations. That’s the good news. Gartner also posits that over half of the companies using social media for this function will do it wrong and actually harm customer relations. Gartner suggests that companies focus their analysis on customer online buying in order to offer a direct calculation of return on investment in terms of sales and customer loyalty coming through social media sites.

Gartner says that there are four steps businesses need to pursue to successfully use social media to manage customer relations. The first step is clearly defining the purpose of the social media initiative. Second, they must be willing to give up some degree of control over the medium, because the public wants some degree of ownership of the relationship as a reward for participating.

Companies then have to reward those customers that participate socially. This may mean allowing them to vote on, or otherwise rate contributions and information on the site. Finally, companies must appoint someone in-house who has the skills to head up a social media customer relations initiative. Using social media for customer relations should never be an afterthought. In fact, it should probably have someone specifically devoted to it full time, with their own staff if necessary.

There is no question that social networking has changed the behavior of a critical mass of individuals as customers and prospects. According to Gartner, they can no longer be described adequately based on demographic information, which is the usual target for corporate customer relations efforts.

When it comes to your company, you’re not going to want to invest a lot of time or effort in such an undertaking without knowing if it will pay off in terms of driving quality traffic to your company’s website.

Non-linear Creations did a one-year study of the effects of five social media sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Stumbleupon) on their own home page. After a year, it was determined that social media sites drove about 18% of their site’s visitors from the referring sites in aggregate.

In the Case of Non-linear Creations, Linkedin and Facebook outperformed the other social media sites. That’s important, but it isn’t the whole story. What about conversion rates? Non-linear Creations measured conversion rates by whether visitors downloaded one of their white papers, subscribed to their blog or newsletter, or contacted them by phone or email. In this case – driving real prospects – Linkedin outperformed the other sites. Traffic from Linkedin was much more likely to convert than the average site visitor. Other social media sites actually underperformed the average.

There’s no guarantee that Linkedin will give your company the tangible results that Non-linear Creations got. It probably depends on what type of business you have. It is not quite understood what the less tangible benefits are of reaching customers online in a way that makes them feel as if the brand is listening and cares enough to interact in the way they desire. One of the things people dislike about customer support call centers is their anonymous feel. It keeps them from feeling a sense of relationship to the brand. So far no obvious downsides of using social media for customer service, so it would seem to be in any company’s best interests to use this form of outreach.

It certainly isn’t hard to create accounts on social media sites. The hard part is in actually interacting with customers on them, listening to them, and analyzing your online visitor numbers to see which social media sites give you the most return on investment in terms of online sales or some other metric. At that point you’ll have to determine how much effort to put into making under-performing social media referrers more effective.

Most people know that one of the keys to utilizing SEO and ranking your website in the search engines is the use of keywords. Still, there are many factors you must consider when using keywords if you want to see success. One of the elements that some people get focused is how many keywords they should target on one webpage.

One of the overlooked factors that people don’t give much attention to is how many keywords you should target on a single web page. The truth is that many people want to do too much when they work with SEO. It’s easy to get ahead of yourself and try to cram tons of keywords on one page, assuming that the more you use the better. However, that’s not really the way that it works.

There was a time over a decade or more ago when the use of keywords was first gaining importance where the more you used, the more you ranked for. At this time nobody really knew anything about SEO and how it really worked, and the search engines themselves were still developing their formulas for how to produce high quality rankings.

However, this kind of strategy is no longer effective, and most people try to go after too many keywords on a single page of their website. If you have a huge list of keywords, it’s not smart to try to rank for each of them on every page of your site. You’re only thinning out your association with each individual keyword and wasting your time and effort. Additionally, your content will up looking spammy to both visitors and search engines that see all of those keywords on one page.

However, in actuality the opposite is true. More is less when it comes to SEO and the number of keywords you are trying to target. By targeting too many on a single web page, you aren’t doing anything but thinning out your focus. You’ll also likely be including so many keywords that your content will come across as spam to both the search engines and your visitors.

Now that you know that less is more, what’s the answer for how many keywords should be on a single page for maximum SEO success? There is no guaranteed answer that is going to ensure you a perfect mix, however targeting 2 or 3 keywords on a single web page is usually the best idea. For pages with less content you’ll want to reduce that to 1-2 keywords, and for pages with a great deal of content you can target a few more.

When you break up your site and individual pages like this you will be able to target a complete list of keywords effectively. Each page will have a few keywords that they can rank for and you’ll avoid using anything excessively. It’s the best way to use keywords across your entire site and it will produce great results for you in the search engines.

Of course, use your good judgment when you determine how many keywords you want to target on each individual web page. Think about factors such as what the page deals with and how much content it has. But remember, when in doubt a smart guideline is not to target more than 2 or 3 different keywords per each page of your site.