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.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a word that every website owner should be familiar with. SEO means that you have designed and written your website so that it shows up high in the search engine rankings for searches using the major engines like Yahoo and Google. Backlinks are of enormous importance in the ranking of your website. Backlinks are links from other sites to yours. While links that are “swapped” carry some weight in search engine rankings, one way backlinks from other sites to yours carry far more weight.

While there are services that will sell your links, and sites that allow you to swap large numbers of links with other users, these can be seriously detrimental to your search engine rankings. Major search engines are aware of this practice, and when they’re able to ferret it out, they penalize sites for doing so. It’s far better to get a dozen one-way backlinks over the course of a month than to purchase 1,000 paid links or make a quick 100 link trade. Fortunately there are many things you can do to organically develop backlinks to your site that will boost your search engine rankings significantly. Here are seven great ways to get high quality one way backlinks to your website.

1. Article Marketing. Suppose you have a website that sells leather cleaning and conditioning products. You want your site to be nice looking and easy to navigate, with a memorable domain name. How do you get traffic on your site without having a big advertising budget? A great way is through article marketing. There are a number of article sites that people use every day to learn about topics that interest them or to learn how to accomplish certain tasks.

Sites like eHow.com, goarticles.com, and ezinearticles.com are where millions of people go when they need to learn something. If you were to write an article about how to care for leather boots and handbags for one of these sites, you would have at the bottom of your article a “resource box” in which you tell a little about yourself and include links to your commercial website. Some of these sites allow links to your site embedded in the articles themselves, and these will also help drive traffic to your site, increasing the probability that you will get backlinks.

2. Video Marketing. If you’re using video marketing, you want the maximum number of people to watch your video. There are many ways to promote your video content and encourage backlinks to it. If you have an email newsletter, that’s a great way to get a link to your video content to a lot of people. Some forums and blogs allow links to your video as long as they are not obvious spam posts, and some even allow you to provide a link to your website in your forum “signature.” Read the FAQs on any forum you consider joining before posting links to your site.

Twitter is another great way to announce new video content. On Twitter you have 140 characters with which to convince people to click on a link to your site. This can be very effective because of the huge number of people who use Twitter to quickly search for information.

3. Social Bookmarking. You can encourage backlinks with Social Bookmarking sites like Digg.com, del.icio.us, and stumbleupon.com. With sites like these, you can submit a link to your website, and people visiting the site will see it when they look for new information related to your website. Not only can they easily visit and watch your video, they can “second” your submission by vouching for it as having good content. The more people who see and like your content, the more prominent the link to your video will become, and the more high quality backlinks you’ll earn.

4. Squidoo Lens. Squidoo is a site that is a little like the articles sites mentioned above, but it’s different in some ways. For example, rather than articles, Squidoo publishes what it calls “lenses.” The idea is that you’re an expert on something – everyone is – and that by using text, photos, and video, you can use your lens to focus on information and share it with a huge readership. You can write a lens about your business. Then perhaps you can write more lenses about individual items you sell. You can link all these lenses together to maximize the traffic you drive to your site and encourage backlinks.

5. Hubpages. Hubpages is similar to Squidoo in that you use it to make content-rich pages with text, videos, pictures, and links. You create an account, pick a title for your Hubpage, and add tags. Then you add content: photos, text, products, or comments. While you don’t “own” a topic on Hubpages, the more Hubpages you create, the higher your Hubpages ranking will be, and the more you’ll be seen as the expert on a given topic.

6. Directory Submission. Directory submission is an adjunct to search engine submission. Instead of just submitting your website to search engines, you should submit it to search engines and directories. Directory submission is different because editors review submissions for quality before accepting it into the directory. These editors have so many sites submitted to them that they can be selective about them. The main thing you should keep in mind when submitting your site to a directory is to follow that directory’s instructions exactly. If you don’t, you’re automatically out of the running, even if your site is brilliant. You must also submit it to the proper category and subcategory if applicable. Next to following submission instructions, this is the most important thing to remember with directory submissions.

7. Social Media Sites. These are the sites you always hear about, like Facebook, Twitter, DeviantArt, and MySpace. These sites allow the sharing of content as well as socializing. If your website or business doesn’t have a Facebook page, it should. Same thing with MySpace. But it is important to know that you need to keep your content on these social media sites up-to-date. A stale MySpace or Facebook page will rapidly disappear from the collective memory. If someone is a “fan” of your Facebook page, they’ll be notified when your page is updated. It is also important to know that even though some of these sites are especially popular among college students and even high school students, your business’s page should retain a degree of decorum. In other words, your page should be made for grown-ups.

These seven tips for generating one way backlinks, implemented consistently, will help your site gain many valuable one way backlinks. The more genuine backlinks your site has, the higher it will rise in search engine results. And that is the best way to drive traffic to your site and help your business grow.