Mid-Size Business

Jan 29

I only want your business if

At this point of my business, I’m in a position where I can hand pick my clients. I feel really blessed for this and only hope that it lasts looooooong, looooong, loooooong. It’s maybe the fruit of dedication and proven knowledge but I also think social media is the right business today because of the momentum. I expect a huge increase in 2010 and it will become steady by 2012. Hoping to have Web 3.0 by then so we can all move on and revolutionize everything all over again. How fun is that?

Back to the title of this post, I’ve had to say no a little too much these last couple of weeks to some projects. Some clients have understood my “no” while others have taken this personal. I feel that if I list my reasons objectively here, it will heal some bad feelings and at the same time, it will give potential clients a clear understanding of how to get a “yes”

I want your business if:

1) You are as passionate about your business as much as I’m passionate about mine

2) You are willing to learn Social Media (regardless of your high position, busy schedule & fears)

3) Your project is inline with my areas of expertise

4) You have a genuine commitment to make this project successful and not just because your boss asked you to do this or because your competitor is doing it

5) Your project does not require a full-time presence on site (this is often the case during a big brand scandal or disaster management)

6) You are willing to work ethically and with transparency (I will not spam for a million dollars)

7) Your field/industry is new to my company and can add value to my portfolio

Your project is innovative, creative and fun

9) Your project adds a value or a service to your users

10) Your project matches with one of my communities (moms, Latino(a)s, entrepreneurs, consultants, small businesses, work-life enthusiasts, developers, young families, women, faithful, multicultural, and so forth)

11) You’ve been a client before

12) Your project will share revenue with a non-for-profit organization

This doesn’t mean that if you are not in one of the above categories you cannot give it a try. Just don’t take it personal when I say no and move on. I’ll write another post about how to select the right social media company in the next days. Slowly, this industry is taking shape and formalizing among professionals. So the jungle era of social media is coming to an end and that is good for all of us. You can find a good group of service providers who have proven results and a healthy portfolio to share.

Tagged with: accept social media projects • Social Media for Business

Dec 08

Social Media: Online Reputation Management

Mid-Size Business, Small Business, Social Media for Business 5 Comments »

image credit to dreamsystemsmedia.com

As any business owner knows, reputation is what really makes a business. You just won’t stay on top for long if no one is happy with your products or services. Online, this is even more certain. You’ll find that there are so many sites where you can post poor reviews that it can be devastating to your business if someone decides to trash you online.

Fortunately, there is online reputation management. Essentially, you keep track of what people are saying about you and make sure that there is more positive than negative in the search results. While you can use something like Google Alerts to find out who is talking about your company, a good old fashioned search will also turn up plenty of information on what people are finding if they do a search on your company name. We often check for keywords, but when was the last time you looked up your actual company name?

With social media, you can help recover some of the rankings. There are two main ways to accomplish this:

Replace it with social media. This is the first method where you would use your company name in tweets or other public forums. Since Google loves these instant update, it will likely pick them up faster and they will rank ahead of the poor reviews, particularly if the review wasn’t at the top of the page, anyway.

Be sure to include your keywords and the name of your business. In many cases, you will want to include the name of the main business owner, as well, which may well be your own name. This is because some people will look for the business, others will look for your name, instead, it really depends on how they know you.

Create links for existing pages. If you have a website and articles or other smaller sites spread out around the internet, you can use social media to build these up so they rank higher than poor reviews or unhappy blog posts about you.

Don’t worry, even if you don’t have a huge web presence, social media can be used, along with bookmarking, to bump positive reviews up to the top positions in Google, effectively knocking any unpleasantness off the front page or two. It does take some work, but this is why you need to be very aware of what is going on and what people are saying about you, as you can start fixing things as soon as it happens.

Online reputation management is a great use for social media, particularly if you already have a good following.

Tagged with: Business • online reputation • reputation management • Social Media