Brokers on Wall Street weren’t the only individuals cringing over the crisis last week, nor was this the first verification that the U.S. economy is in a recession.  The ramifications of large drops in the stock market, coupled with the mortgage crisis, have affected everyone from blue-collar factory workers to hundred-year-old investment banks, and not even those of us trying to earn a buck doing online work are immune.

The Deal, a provider business and financial news to corporate and financial dealmakers, advisers and institutional investors, interviewed a number of gurus and entrepreneurs at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City last week regarding the current state of Internet business in the growing recession and their reactions to such.

While venture capitalists see a bleaker future for start-ups seeking funding, CEO Miles Beckett of Eqal, the company behind Internet phenomena lonelygirl15 and KateModern, believes that sound money-management is key to surviving in a bad economy.  “The good thing is, entertainment does well in a recession,” he said, laughing.  “We’ve always been very, very cost-conscious as a company … we try not to overhire, try not to reach too far, too fast.”  Eqal’s chief operating officer, Greg Goodfried, notes that strategic partnerships are key to generating revenue in the short-term, but to maintain internal ideas and projects for long-term growth.

Companies that sell sales and marketing tools are in a very healthy place as well.  Umberto Milletti is CEO of InsideView, a company that proclaims to “take advantage of the convergence of social media and enterprise applications – what [they] call ’socialprise’ – and bring the insights gained from subscription-based and user-generated sources to the enterprise.”

Milletti says, “Historically, sales and marketing applications like ours are helped by a tough economy,” citing Salesforce.com’s success in the early part of this decade.  “Frankly, I think [a poor economy] is sometimes the best opportunity because the weak companies get weeded out, and the strong ones make it.  For a healthy market, you do need these times where the good companies break away from the not-as-compelling companies.”

Mary Kathleen Flynn, Senior Editor at The Deal, also speaks with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, Lane Becker of GetSatisfaction, and Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, and you can view the entire interview at BlipTV.

The economy’s rough, and it will probably get worse before it gets better, and to survive in a poor economy you should always consider the following:

1. Be cost-conscious.  Don’t overspend, don’t overhire.  You don’t need that corporate jet just yet.
2. Have integrity.  Your potential customers are likely to be very concerned about budgets right now, so ensure that you don’t tell them one thing and deliver another.
3. Don’t lay your big ideas to rest, but put them aside for now in favor of immediate revenue-generating projects.  Remember that this too shall pass.  The U.S. been through a number of recessions, and that is likely the same for other countries, but economies do bounce back in the end.

And if in fact you provide a service that thrives in a poor or unstable economy, enjoy it now!  Those offering cost-friendly alternatives to pricier products should use this time to their advantage, and focus on the soft spots within companies that are struggling now with the high costs of their current solutions.  Providing a more efficient solution to companies that need it, while earning some revenue for your own company, is just great business.

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Traditional PR has involved a public relations firm dropping your press release on the wire and hoping somebody picks it up. Sure, they may have conversations with analysts prior to the drop, but in this Web 2.0 era even you can make a huge splash on a ‘Net, grab the attention of thousands, and, perhaps, even get some conversions or sales out of it, all for no added cost to you. All it requires is a little elbow grease and the right kind of thinking.

Ensure that your title, header, and first paragraph include your targeted keywords.

The title of your press release needs to include your biggest keywords, and these keywords should be emphasized within the introductory paragraph of the release as well. The introduction can be normal paragraph length, but do make sure that you have a headline between the title and the introductory paragraph that sums up the piece in 100 characters or less. And don’t over-saturate your press release with your keywords, either. You lose valuable search engine points for that.

Utilize headers to their full potential.

Headers benefit you in two ways: one, it breaks up the content and makes your press release much easier to read, and two, they’re an easy SEO tweak. <h1> tags are the strongest rated by search engines, and they go down from there. Remember, though, to only have one <h1> tag in a release, otherwise they are likely to be disregarded by the search engine spiders as trying to mess with the crawling system. Plus, it looks juvenile, and is not pleasant on the eyes.

Use descriptive, keyword-rich text anchors for links to your website.

You cannot expect your appearance in Google searches to improve dramatically if the links to your site just look like URLs. Ensure that links within your press release have appropriate, keyword-rich anchor text. This way, wherever the press release is picked up on the ‘Net will link to your site with the keywords that are important to your company. ‘Tis far better for people to link to you with “online PR tips” as the anchor than it is with “www.yourcompanyname.com/products/newamazingproduct.html.”

Also, never waste these links by directing them at your home page. Guide clickthroughs to an informative, valuable inner page, even if it means creating a landing page from scratch. This way, the meat of your web site is what gets viewed, rather than the superficial, oft-bounced-from home page.

Allow viewers to share the content easily.

Through RSS feeds, links to social bookmarking sites, and email subscriptions, your press release’s message can travel further and be seen by thousands more people than it otherwise would by simply dropping it on the wire as in the days before social media. Of these thousands of people, Justin Levy, author of That’s Great PR! Blog, says, “Many will click on the link to your website to see what you’re all about. Some of those will even buy from you. So rather than putting all your eggs in one basket with the … major media channel of your choice, you do better to diversify and let larger numbers of people in smaller, under served niches find you.” When you post your press release to your web site, ensure that you have links to various social media outlets. Insert a means of allowing readers to subscribe to your feed, thereby allowing them to automatically view any new press releases you may have in the future.

Perhaps most importantly, set up a Google alert to let you know when your press release is being discussed by outside sources, and be sure to submit these articles to social bookmarking sites. It is important to note that straight press releases are Dugg or Stumbled-Upon far, far less than the commentary surrounding it.

Provide a straightforward call to action.

You have the most incredible news story in the world. People will read your press release, no doubt about it – but then what? Conversions come from giving visitors a single path to the information they desire, and they’ll continue along that path provided each step gives them information or content that is a little more valuable than the stuff before. Thus, drop the press release with a paragraph that details a new whitepaper that is available on the same subject, or link to a free trial of the product you’re launching.

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In my previous post, Building the Social Media Marketing Foundation, I emphasized the importance of delivering valuable and useful content to your audience as a means of building a following and, consequently, increasing sales.

Chris Brogan, a ten-year veteran of using social media and technology to build digital relationships for businesses, drives home the same principle in his guest post today at Talent Zoo.  He focuses on the five points of content marketing:

• It’s brief.
• It’s easy to share.
• It’s about the buyer, not the product.
• It’s useful.
• It isn’t the sales offer.  It’s the lead into a marketing funnel.

Chris writes, “A how to video on hanging up a picture sponsored by Black & Decker is content marketing.  A blog post about the five things we often forget when staying at a hotel sponsored by Priceline.com is content marketing.”  He adds, “We’re talking about useful information presented in a way that makes the receiver of that information feel they’ve been given a value.”

The point of content marketing is not, by any means, to make it a blatant sales pitch.  People are far more receptive to information that is given to them free of charge, and they will be more willing to respect the sponsors/vendors creating the informational piece if it doesn’t seem like a “buy our product” ploy.

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That’s exactly what the engineers over at Inuda Innovations want to figure out. HowSociable? is the nifty new tool for those of you who wish to gauge how big of a presence and how much visibility your company or brand has on some of the top social media outlets, including Del.icio.us, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Technorati.

Though still in its infancy – the first prototype was only made available at the end of May, and even then they had “only spent a week building it” – HowSociable? has already measured over 7500 brands as of approximately fifteen minutes ago, and the number is quickly rising. Do note that many of the brands measured are actually just people’s names; I definitely checked mine, and apparently I’m not being sociable enough to have my name splashed all over the ‘Net … though that could be perceived as a good thing, I suppose.

Brands are measured based on a sliding scale that begins with a rank of 1000 for internationally-known brands such as Coca-Cola, and it goes down from there. The ranking system is a good start, but even the developers realize there is much to be altered within it – just think of the Google PageRank algorithm – and so they’ve launched a Feedback Forum for users to post their suggestions for the tool.

In any case, it’s a fabulously interesting concept, and I suggest you try it out for yourself.

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