A few days ago, we talked about using Tumblr as a way to promote your blog to your potential clientele. We wanted to delve into the new growth of Tumble-blogging, and how you can use it more fully.

Tumblr (no ‘E’) has been embraced especially by Generation Y who wanted something more informal and easier to use than a regular blog. While a regular blog is just as effective — if you have one, don’t abandon it — there’s something hipper and funner about a Tumblr blog.

The first thing to do is claim your Tumblr blog. Go to Tumblr.com, and set it up using your gallery name — StevesGallery.tumblr.com — and set the background theme the way you want it.

Next, download the Tumblr app to your mobile phone. Take a few minutes and familiarize yourself with how it works. It’s pretty easy. Just take a photo on your phone (or choose one from the gallery), type in some text, and upload it to your Tumblr blog. Unfortunately, you cannot send more than one photo at a time this way.

You can also email several photos and copy at once to your Tumblr blog. Each account is given its own special, secret email address. Put that in your phone’s address book. Then, when you take a series of photos, attach them all to an email to your Tumblr account, add in the text, and then send it off.

And of course, you can also upload a series of photos to your Picasa or Flickr account, and then copy the embed code for a slide show into your email and send that off, or just go to Tumblr.com on your laptop, and write the post like you would any other blog post.

Then promote the posts via your social network and use it to build both search engine traffic and foot traffic to your gallery.

Are you familiar with the term “mastermind group?” You may hear it called other things, but basically, it’s a group of people who are closely aligned to your business’ success and growth. These are people you meet with on a regular basis, so you can contribute to each others’ success.

A mastermind group can be built around a certain industry or niche, like residential real estate, which includes a Realtor, a mortgage broker, an attorney, a handyman, and anyone else who might be related to that specific niche.

The group could be built around a certain type of people, like small business owners or marketing directors. People who want to share new information and ideas with each other, so that they can take it back to their own jobs and do them better.

Or it can even be based on geography, like all the retail businesses in a particular neighborhood. While some of them may compete, they instead focus on the general health and prosperity of the neighborhood, and share ideas on how to run their businesses better.

The idea is to find people who share a common business goal and can work together without competing. They come together once a week or once a month to share knowledge, share ideas, and even share leads with each other.

The Realtor can refer new clients to the mortgage broker. The marketing directors can bounce ideas off each other, and give advice. A small theater and a restaurant can team up to sell special dinner-and-a-show packages.

Whatever you do with your mastermind group, leave yourself open to the possibility that some very creative and beneficial ideas can grow out of it.

We’ve talked about the importance of online social networking for the last several months, but we don’t want to ignore the importance of meeting people in person. This kind of networking is just as important to growing your business as online networking is.

Here are three benefits of doing real-world networking:

1. Networking events lets you meet more than one person at a time.

We like networking events where you get to meet a lot of people at once. Not only does it increase your odds of meeting people who can have a positive influence on your life, it lets you be more visible within your community. Your Chamber of Commerce, business networking groups, and even local industry groups are all places to network.

2. Read nonverbal cues, and learn about a person’s passions.

Sitting down and speaking with someone face-to-face lets you hear the excitement in their voice when they tell you about the things that excite them. It’s a bonus when that passion is their work. It helps you understand why they love what they do, and helps you make connections for them later on.

3. Create deeper relationships than you can online.

It doesn’t matter how well you get to know someone online, you will never have as deep a relationship as you can by talking to them in person. You need to see their face, hear their voice, and see their nonverbal communication to get to know them. You’re creating, in a loose sense of the word, a friendship, and you just can’t do that through a keyboa

One online guerilla marketing tactic is to write blog posts and other content that capitalize on the hottest trends going on that day. But how do you practice this real-time communication and real-time marketing, and find out what’s going on locally, nationally, or even internationally as it’s happening, rather than after the fact?

Start with Hashtags.org, which keeps track of the different Twitter #hashtags. If people are talking about it, it’s on Hashtags.org. To see how popular a topic is, visit the site, and either look at the most popular topics on the front page, or do a specific search for a topic of your choice to see what kind of traffic it’s generating.

We also like TweetLevel, a Twitter monitoring and ranking tool. You can find people who are influential about a certain topic (which you found on Hashtags.org), and start interacting with them, or place them in a Twitter list so you can follow them more easily.

With this information, you can now create your own content — blog posts, tweets, videos, podcasts, you name it — and capitalize on the popularity of the subject. Write your post, then tweet out the URL, using the same hashtag.

Next, find the influential people who are talking about a particular topic, and respond to their comments and questions. Share your own content with them. They may share your stuff with their own networks, where it can be seen by tens of thousands of people. Do this often enough, and you can be recognized as a voice of authority within that field or topic as well, and become your own influencer.

Restaurants need to keep track of what’s being said about them, but it’s not enough to watch each
and every review site — at one count, we saw over 10 of them, and that didn’t include networks like
Twitter, Facebook, or anyone and everyone’s personal blogs.

You could spend all day online looking for mentions of you and your restaurant, and you’d still miss
them all.

That’s why we like Google Alerts as our brand watchdog.

The search giant indexes millions of websites a day, looking for any and all important keywords,
including yours. So why not put that to work for you?

Go to Google.com/alerts, and enter your
restaurant name. “Use quotes” around the name if it has more than one word; that tells Google to
find exactly that phrase. Otherwise, it returns all instances of all the words, regardless of where they
appear on the page.

Set the Result Types to Everything, How Often to Daily,
and How Many to All Results.

This way, you will receive a once-a-day email of any and every time someone mentions your
restaurant name in a blog post, news article, or restaurant review. Then you can respond accordingly,
either thanking the person for the compliment, or offering to fix any problems.

There are other tools to help keep track of your restaurant brand and name (i.e. setting up a search
column on your favorite Twitter client), but Google Alerts will save you time while still keeping a
watchful eye on your brand.