The Social Aspect of the Internet             How did we ever get by without Facebook? A defining feature of the start of the 21st century, social networking has changed the way we, well, socialize. SMS Texts probably thought nothing could topple its crown so quickly, or as thoroughly as the social network has done. For the purposes of getting your website noticed, you have to make sure it is supported by such mechanisms, the more popular they are, and the more credibility your site will have.             I remember struggling to get my fan page many fans to start with. The shop had just opened and apart from a couple of hundred friends on Facebook that was all I could muster. Of course a lot of people ignored requests to ‘join my group’ as spam, and some actually were not divers, so I changed tactics. For the price of a few t-shirts I launched a photographic competition open to all. Soon I had doubled the amount of fans, and as it was a dive photo competition, all of them divers and potential customers. Not bad for a few dollars, and the search engines picked up on it too.             Social networking is here to stay, until the next big thing anyway. Use it as a sales vehicle; keep it fun, interesting, relevant and try to think of ways of getting people to become fans. Make sure you update you Facebook site at least every two weeks with shout-outs and congratulations, local wildlife spots and general dive related news and Twitter every few days. Oh, and also a competition if you can, once in a while too! If you are unsure of how to get connected with your Hammerhead CMS, either watch the tutorial, read the manual or get a pack.             Get Rated    Getting rated can really cause some upsets for service providers. They see sites such as Trip Advisor as a double-edged sword, one bad rating destroying years of hard work by what can be a totally unsupported and incorrect review. It is extremely difficult to meet the expectations of say a father of four and a teenager with the same schedule of events, you seem to be at the mercy of consumer choice and business limitations. That fact is they will still write a review about you with, or without your permission, good and bad.    One of the first reviews we received for our dive center had such a bad effect on me that I lost some sleep over it for some time. We had tailor-made a dive program, discounted heavily and even taken the time to personally show the diver around the locale. When we got a 4/5 I was taken aback, as despite the discount the only complaint was “…not very clear on pricing.” Even right now I feel I am stabbing at the keyboard in frustration! But to be fair to the review website, it had no effect on the trade it generated; after all, all of the other centers are the mercy of these ‘hard-to-please’ customers.    There is another risk caused by not starting your own page on these types of sites, in that if a customer cannot find you rated on it, they will avoid you. So my advice is to embrace review sites, as they work exceedingly well for generating business and with 40 million users of Trip Advisor alone, you can be sure a lot of your customers use it too. You do have an option to reply to the reviews, try to keep them absolutely positive in the face of adversity and customers will see that basically you have just been unlucky. Another use of the much sort after 'freebie' like a t-shirt. Offer them as an incentive to write reviews. These will invariably strike a positive note with the customers (and surely the review) whilst bringing in extra trade from the review site. It works, trust me!    In the next article we will talk about branding and the Content Management System from Hammerhead CMS and how it works – all non-technical, I promise. A system designed specifically for dive centers and as easy to use as Facebook, or Twitter and definitely Trip Advisor!