Social Media

Mar 18

How to Build Expert Status in 6 Weeks

Everyone knows that if you are considered an expert in your niche, you will be able to sell your products and services better. Unfortunately, most people don’t realize how they can feature themselves as experts without spamming everyone on the sites they frequent. Let’s take a look at a quick plan to gain you expert status in just six short weeks.

Week One: Build It and They Will Come

This is actually false, since most people won’t show up at your blog until you start advertising it, but it’s a good idea to have a place to redirect your followers to. A blog is your best bet, since it will also rank faster in the search engines, but a regular website will also do. Make sure to post regular updates if you decide to blog. In fact, this first week, you can easily write 12 blog posts and set them to publish twice a week . . . thus eliminating the need to write every week.

This week, you should also be looking at blogs in your niche and making comments on them.

Week Two: Establishing a Twitter Presence

Whether or not you have a Twitter account already is irrelevant. This second week, you need to build up your presence on Twitter, which means you will be online every single day. Set yourself twenty minutes in the morning and twenty at night to work on Twitter, more if you have the chance. And avoid fooling around. Stay focused on cultivating your community. Remember the 12 to 1 rule (promote your fellow experts 12 times before you promote yourself).

Step 1: Befriend people. You can search for those who are in your niche and start following their followers, or do searches for people who are interested in your area of expertise.

Step 2: Start posting quality information. Again, these can be written ahead of time if you like and posted.

Step 3: Respond to other people. Now that you are following all these Twitter colleagues, you need to start interacting with them. Talk to them, answer their questions, make comments on their updates . . . basically, get yourself noticed.

Step 4: Find the relevant #Hashtags. This is the best way to know the threads and conversations around your area of expertise. It’s also a great way to find who is already engaged, who needs to be followed, promoted, learned from. Ideally, become friends with those leaders by trying to offer your own experience and get on the phone with them.

Week 3: Get Going on Facebook

Now that you’ve established yourself on Twitter, it’s time to get noticed elsewhere! Don’t forget to keep up on Twitter, though.

Step 1: Set up a fan page for your business and load at least a couple of photos and an article or two. Make sure you fill out all the relevant information.

Step 2: Let people know! Tweet about the Facebook page, post about it on your blog and add a button to your sidebar to make sure people know that you can be found on Facebook.

Week 4: Hit the Forums

Forums are excellent places to spread the word about yourself. Look for 2-3 forums that focus on your niche or cater to potential clients and start looking for questions you can answer. Make sure you follow the rules of the forum and attach a signature with your link in it.

Week 5: Open the LinkedIn Treasure -

Step 1: Answer questions related to your topic: I’m not sure if you’re aware, but the LinkedIn questions/answers are getting hot! I have a few friends who have gotten pretty good contracts through this platform.

Step 2: Join relevant groups: Of course, not only join but participate actively in the groups. Volunteer your opinion and if you can, back it up with research results. You can also finish your answer with “I elaborate further on this issue on my blog http://the super expert on this topic . com but please don’t make that your only answer as it will seem opportunistic.

Week 6: Rinse and Repeat

For the final week, continue to post on Twitter, Facebook, forums and LinkedIn on a regular basis. Also, continue to post on your blog and comment on other blogs and you’ll find that you have gained expert status by the time a month and a half has gone by. If you do that again and again, your path to success is guaranteed.

Remember that if you can’t keep up with it, it’s much better to skip a platform all together than trying to pretend to “be in”. You can always come back to the platform on the second or third round. What’s key here is that a particular community recognizes your “expert” status.

Oh last thing: Please, please, please try not to call yourself “the expert” – “the best” – “the guru” or whatever! You can only do that on a sale pitch where nobody else but your client is listening. Everyone hates the new kid on the block auto proclaiming himself as “the best”. Even if you’ve been in the industry for many years and you are just new to the social media platform. It is so much better and classier to wait patiently for someone to give you the title. I promise you 200% that if you are consistent and really know your stuff, the title will come sooner than later.

Mar 10

Why You Should Share Videos, Audio and Photos

Social Media 17 Comments »

picture credit to wareseeker

Social media is often looked at as a text based networking solution. While many social networking sites are indeed text based, most also have the option for sharing photos, audio and videos, something that is sorely underused. Just look at Facebook, for example. While photos are rampant, when was the last time you shared a video on there? Or Twitter, for that matter?

Why should you use multi-media in social marketing? There are a number of good reasons, but the big one is that it makes you real and trustworthy.

The Real You. See, anyone can write anything online. You could be a 16 year old boy writing as a 50 year old woman . . . who would know the difference? Because of this anonymity that is so easy online, people have an automatic distrust of anyone they see just writing information on the web. A photo can drastically up the trust factor, one of the biggest reasons bloggers put a photo of themselves in their profile.

Photos, audio and videos give people a glimpse of who you are and that makes it easier for them to trust you. If you say you’re a 30 year old banker and then appear in a video, people realize that you aren’t faking it, you really are who you say you are. While there are many people who hide their true identity for assorted reasons, if you really want to burst through the barrier of not being trusted, then a quick video uploaded to YouTube can be just the ticket.

You don’t need to share anything terribly produced, even a quick 1 minute video where you explain something about your niche can be a great way to start out.

The Simple You. Another reason that people like to see photos and video of you is that it makes you more approachable. It’s easy to think that a guru is untouchable, someone almost godlike . . . but when you see them chatting away on video, you instantly realize that they are just another person like you. This means people will be more interested in interacting with you, something that is pretty important in social marketing.

Text will always be the base of interaction online, but by adding video, audio and photos, you can really change the way people look at you and react to you. They will be far more likely to trust someone they have “met” than an anonymous persona who tweets at them. Share yourself and the rewards will come.

Tagged with: photos • Social Media • twitter • video

Mar 09

Twitter TMI Syndrome and How to Avoid It

Social Media, Twitter 6 Comments »

Picture credit to 4.bp.blogspot

“Just changed the most nuclear diaper this year!”

“My ex is the worst pig on the planet and here’s a photo as proof.”

Don’t deny it, you’ve seen tweets just like this before. You may have even tweeted something similar yourself! These types of tweets tend to stem from Twitter TMI Syndrome, a self-destructive spiral that is very easy to fall into.

There’s a fine line between personal sharing and networking on Twitter. You can’t expect to talk about business 24/7 and never discuss anything else. It makes you seem like a robot. So most people encourage realism in tweeting and sharing a little personal information. It makes you seem real and encourages people to connect with you.

That being said, there is a line that is being crossed by even some important internet marketers who have fallen prey to the TMI Syndrome. TMI, or “too much information”, is something that happens on a regular basis and it’s not just bored housewives or adventurous college kids posting this stuff.

What exactly constitutes TMI? It can be hard to tell sometimes, but basically, if you are tweeting something that will make people go, “Whoa, why am I following this person?” then you need to stop. For example:

It’s fine to tweet about your new puppy. TMI is tweeting every time that puppy has an accident on your carpet.

People won’t mind if you let them know the cute way your 4 year old pronounces a word. They will mind if you tweet how he pronounces every single word throughout the day.

It’s not bad to share what you’re having for dinner at the Olive Garden. It’s not cool to share what you eat, snack and see in the kitchen every 10 minutes.

Tweeting that you don’t feel well is ok. Tweeting the details of bodily functions, not so much.

Let’s not forget the safety TMI. I pull my hair every time I see “hubby left for a month, alone with 3 kids” or “going on vacation for a week, hope the plants won’t die” – How about re-phrasing that with “please come and rape me, I can’t wait” or “be my guess while you steal in comfort for an entire week”. I don’t want to be sarcastic, but please, please you must stop. This is specially the case if you live outside the US, but even here it’s still considered TMI.

How to Stop It

You might not even realize that you’re posting TMI tweets. Go to your archives and take a good look at what is there. At least 80% of your tweets should be with your networking goals in mind. If you have a few that are just random fun, that’s ok, but you need to be careful.

Once you are aware of what you’re tweeting, it’s time to implement a wait period. When the urge to share hits you, write down the tweet in a text document or even on a sticky note and wait at least five minutes before you actually tweet it. Many people find that they just type and hit send without thinking too much about it. You’ll have far better results if you take the time to consider what you’re about to send out into cyberspace.

Think about what your goals are. Does this tweet help you reach them? Is it going to offend people? If so, is it worth losing followers over?

Do you suffer from Twitter TMI Syndrome? Do you know someone who does?

Tagged with: goals • Social Media • twitter

Mar 08

Revver

This site is best known for the revenue sharing program that they offer, considered to be one of the easiest types for earning. For social networking, Revver offers superior embedded player design and very good quality video. Their QuickTime files work best, but they also do Flash conversions and you have 100MB file size limit.

YouTube

You can’t make a list of top video sites without including YouTube, of course. For sheer visibility, this is the site many marketers choose. However, their strict regulations and changing rules mean that it’s not necessarily the best site. The quality of video is so-so and you are limited to 100MB or 10 minutes for videos.

Vimeo

The video quality of Vimeo is very good, but you do need be careful to follow their rules. The embedded player is very easy to use and you can upload any length of video, as long as it’s only 250 MB. However, you need to keep in mind that this is also the weekly upload limit.

Veoh

With very good quality video and audio, easy to use upload system and a quality embedded player design, this video sharing site is a popular one with marketers and anyone who needs to get the word out about their business. There are also no size limits on Veoh, so you can go wild with longer videos.

Blip.tv

Blip is another good place to set up video account. There is a 100MB file size limit, but the top quality (blip.tv has the highest quality video of all these sites) and extremely easy to use uploader make up for that. This is the preferred spot for anyone who is more concerned about quality than popularity.

DivX Stage6 Beta

This is a high end, slightly complicated video site that requires more than the usual steps to set everything up. That being said, the quality is excellent, second only to blip.tv and you have a full 2GB limit for videos.

VodPod

This is a hidden treasure that I’ll tell you about. It’s not a video uploading site, instead it’s a video organizer. The secret of this service is the widget. They offer the best ways to display your videos on your blog. I use them all the times on my personal blog Fantasticos4. You can display the video icon anywhere you want. It will enlarge the screen when your reader clicks it. I also love using their video sequence widget. You can display a series of videos in order. This can be done horizontal or vertical. Try it out, you’ll have fun with it.

All of these video sharing sites are easy enough to use, so if you are looking to get into videos, then check these sites out. It’s a great way to really create a bond with your visitors and interact with them.

Tagged with: video • video sharing

Mar 05

What I Learned from Maxine Clarks

Social Media, Social Media for Business 10 Comments »

Sharing new concepts learned at the Disney Social Media Moms Celebration – Part 2

Maxine Clark and AnaRC

I was impressed by Maxine as a woman, a business owner, a social media example to follow and more. Let me go straight to the point and share with you all I learned from the CEO of Build-a-Bear Workshop:

Follow your passion. Maxine lost her Teddy Bear at the age of 10 and she was proud to announce that she’s found that bear millions of times. This is equivalent to the number of teddy bears sold at the Build-a-Bear Workshop since the day she started the company.

How many of us can make a business out of a need? a passion? a lost Teddy?

picture credit to buildabear.com

Those of in Social Media can learn so much from this lesson. Is our passion clear to our audience? Are we adding value? Are we fulfilling a need? Is our blog/business only focused on me, myself and I? Transcending from the “me” approach to the “client center” approach is the real secret of turning one’s passion into a business.

Make a business plan. The passion was the source of Maxine’s inspiration but her pragmatic approach was what made it happen. She had over 15 years of experience in the retail business and a very elaborate business plan before she started her company. She had also saved some money and done a fare amount of research.

I personally loved this. So many of us in social media are sold the “get rich fast scheme” we have an unrealistic Silicon Valley dream that success will come by magic when we least expect it and we’ll be BRF (beautiful, rich and famous) forever and ever Amen. Yeah right! there’s actually more possibilities that you’ll win the lotto than for that to happen.

So stop buying those “Make money while you dream” ebooks and follow Maxine’s advice: “buy a Business Plan software” It is a tedious exercise but trust me, once you have it ready (or at least started) you’ll have the most liberating feeling you can imagine.

Focus on your employees. Train for top customer experience! One of the moms noted how stellar was the customer service at the BuildaBear Workshop. They are always willing to help and make your child feel the center of the store. Maxine answered with her recruiting strategy. The core competency she looks for in candidates is that of “caring” if they genuinely care, the rest can be done with training. Then the competency development is customer centered. All about their experience and how to make it even better the next time.

Do you make your customer feel that he/she is the only one you have at the moment? Do you take more than you can handle for the sake of money or ego (or to make sure the competition won’t take it) and then under-deliver? Have you given careful thought about the core competencies your business needs? Do you train and empower your staff or do you compete with them?

Give back. As a social entrepreneur, this was my favorite part. Maxine actually gave before she even made profit. Giving back has been part of her business model and culture from the get go. Maxine and her husband just opened up a health center “Casa de la Salud” to improve the health conditions of Hispanic families in her area. You can imagine how thrilled I was to hear that.

Do you give back to your community? Do you share your assets? Remember that they don’t need to be money. It can be knowledge, time, friendship….

Listen to your customer. I was moved by the way Maxine read letters from her clients to the audience. It was actually part of the presentation. Her customers are able to reach her directly and influence her. One mom asked a question on Facebook. That question not only was heard, but also ended up turning into a new line of products the company will offer. How cool is that? The other thing that really moved me was the fact that Maxine has chosen to manage her own accounts. This includes Twitter! and she added: “That’s why you’ll see my tweets come out at 3:00 am”

We were so impressed by her that even Chris Brogan called Maxine “Your Highness” to show his admiration. I have taken so many notes that I can go on writing but I learned even more from the way she engaged with her customer’s letters, Facebook messages and tweets even during her presentation.

Thank you Maxine for sharing your success with us all.

Tagged with: BuildaBear • Disney social media conference • Maxine Clark • Social Media for Business

Feb 26

Social Bookmarking: How Social is It Really?

Social Media 2 Comments »

picture credit to earningguys.com

When it comes to social media, most of us think first of social networking. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, these are all places that come to mind. Next, you might think of video sites like YouTube and Hulu. Social bookmarking is usually at the very bottom of the list. Why is that?

The main reason is that for all the talk of sharing, most people only use social bookmarking for their own personal gain and never actually check out what others are doing.

This doesn’t mean that social bookmarking can’t be social. StumbleUpon is an excellent example of very social bookmarking. It allows you to find great sites quickly and easily and it can really be quite addictive. Even there, you’ll find many people who bookmark things that are really not worthy of bookmarking, just to get the added exposure.

If you look at places like Reddit, Propeller, etc. you will rapidly see that there is very little actual sharing going on. Most people bookmark and leave it at that, doing it only for the actual backlink to their website. However, if you look, you will find others like you who are actually interested in engaging with others. Start by befriending these people and checking out their links. Make comments on what they are doing and what they bookmark.

Certain bookmarking sites are better for this than others, Digg and Propeller, for example, get a lot more comments than Reddit or Fark. You need to divide your time between a handful of sites that are best suited to your business niche. Some sites are very specific in the type of niche they accept. If yours isn’t on the list, then chances are they aren’t looking for the content that you like to share.

It’s also vital that you bookmark something other than your own posts and content all the time. It’s tempting, but don’t do it. A good rule of thumb is to bookmark 10 other sites for every one of yours. Keep in mind that you want to give people value, so don’t just bookmark everything you put up, stick to the really important stuff.

There are so many different areas of social media to explore, bookmarking being just one of them. Do you use social bookmarking? Do you think it’s social enough?

Tagged with: bookmarking • Social Media

Feb 24

What I learned from Guy Kawasaki

Social Media, Social Media Events 40 Comments »

Sharing new concepts learned at the Disney Social Media Moms Celebration – Part 1

Picture credit to Jeannet Kaplun

Holy Kow!
I must admit that I’ve had an admiration for Guy Kawasaki but always knew that he didn’t have the style I wanted to pursue for myself nor my clients. However, I was genuinely curious to hear about his ways of using Twitter. Guess what? I ended up learning a ton from Guy and totally changed my perception of him. Here’s what I found most relevant:

It’s ok to use ghosts as long as you’re transparent. Often we’re under the impression that we must do it all when it comes to our social media presence for the business. At that point it’s better if we close the shop and stay on our pajamas writing blogs and engaging with every single comment that comes our way. Then come the bills!! It’s ok to delegate and be transparent about it. Guy gave excellent examples of what he delegates: The staff will do the research, look for killer content relevant to his communities and target audience, edit some publications, manage his brand accounts, monitors traffic, sentiments and so forth. Not ok to make people believe your secretary is actually you!

Take a practical approach: I’m in love of Guy’s definition of the CyberNazis: “poor SEO expert who goes in life telling people that he knows how Google works and really has no clue about what he’s doing” the he added: “most likely still leaving with his mom and spends most of his time playing video games and dictating to people the right way to use social media”. I found that to be so true. It’s ok to have the humility to know that people are not waiting for your little tweet all day long. So set-up some automatic tweets. Guy uses Objective Marketer and TwitterFeed to do that. Here I’m not too sure about the numbers, Guy sends 25 links 4 times a day. I’ve done it twice since the conference and my traffic has actually gone from 540 to an average of 1010 per post. So it really works. I have the temptation to go up to 3 times, but it totally embarrasses me. The best idea is to do it at different times of the day. Usually the people who are around 7 am are not the same folks who join the evening Twitter parties or chats. So the same applies to the afternoon crowd, usually young moms who have their toddlers napping or business owners who have already taken care of morning business and are managing email inboxes, @replies, LinkedIn connections and so forth. Give me your advice on this one.
Use of powerful tools. I love it when the pros share their secret tools. Here is a list from Guy: Stumbleupon, Prosterous (I just started that one today. Check it out) MyAlltop (love the one created for LATISM) and Friendfeed. If you remember any other I might have missed, please add it here.

I ended up learning so much that I’m even harvesting some fruits already. I hope you can also put some of these lessons into practice. And please share your thoughts about how often we should push our own content to the networks.

Tagged with: Disney social media conference • Social Media Events • social media tips

Feb 24

Why Being Yourself is the Best Strategy

Beginner's Track, Social Media, Social Media Classroom 16 Comments »

Online, it’s easy to adopt any personality you like. You can even pretend to be of the opposite gender if you so choose. The point is that no one knows you online, so you can literally be anyone. And many people choose to change themselves and present a more scholarly persona.

While there are occasionally reasons to change your online persona (such as when you’re on a company account), it really is best to just be yourself. There are a few reasons for this:

Better Off-Line Experience. When people meet you in real life, they’ll already know what you’re like. You might not think you’ll ever actually meet anyone that you interact with online, but these days, more and more people are meeting in real life, after knowing each other online. Meetups, tweetups and such are all times when you could be meeting others from your Twitter network and they’ll probably notice how different you are!

Relax and Focus. It’s also a lot easier to keep up your real personality. If you’re trying to be someone you aren’t, it can be very difficult to keep it up and you’re likely to slip up. If someone realizes that you are essentially lying about who you are, you will lose credibility. There’s no point in losing trust for no good reason. You can relax and focus on your social media goal without having to guard a fake personality.

Only you are the You. The final and best argument for just being yourself online is that you are the only you. Everyone is unique and you are the only person who can really be yourself on social media! By portraying your real personality, you’re bound to stand out because you ARE unique! There’s no need to try hard to be someone more exciting or interesting. You might not be as wild or hilarious as some people out there and that’s ok. By being who you really are, you’ll find that people respond to you and you’ll have loyal followers who are interested in you for you. Why do you think we love @GaryVee talking about m&m flavor in his wine?

Are you being yourself online? Why or why not? Share your reasons in the comments, I’d love to hear what you think.

Tagged with: be yourself • Social Media • unique

Feb 21

Google Buzz – Privacy #Fails

Google, Social Media, What's New in Social Media 7 Comments »

I just want to throw out there some food for thought with the scope of engaging in a constructive conversation that’s currently going on about Google Buzz. Social Media aficionados tend to jump on the “new thing” the minute it launches. There is almost a need to be the first to try, the first to post, the first to claim “expert” status. I must admit that I often fall into this trap and can waste a significant amount of time trying the last kid on the block.

Google Buzz - I was an early adopter of Google Wave. To the point that I had a pre-launch account and even played with the API a little. I was convinced and still am that Google Wave in an innovative way of changing the communication and collaboration game. When it came to Google Buzz, I didn’t have the same reaction. There was something smelly about it and I couldn’t figure it out. However, for the first time, I decided to sit back and observe.

A closer look – It wasn’t until one of my clients called to ask me if his widget shouldn’t also connect to Google Buzz that I decided to take a closer look. My first reaction: I don’t want my over 10,000 contacts to suddenly get an update from me with my status (often funny & sarcastic or informative and friendly). I couldn’t remember who all those contacts were, but I knew for a fact that it included all types of exxxxxx (exboyfriends, exbosses, excolleagues, exfriends, exenemies, exexexex) so NO WAY!

Privacy Fails – Those instead who jumped on Google Buzz and rushed through the OK button without even reading the terms of service found an amazing surprise. Suddenly it broadcasted their “buzz” to all their email contacts without even asking permission. No wonder the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission charging Google with failing to protect the personal data of Google Buzz users. Even worse, a woman from Florida filed a local class action against Google over Google Buzz. What triggered her was the fact that Google added Google Buzz to most of their Gmail user’s accounts. Thank God I wasn’t one of them, otherwise I would have been pretty upset too.

Google reaction – Having said all this, we must give Google some credit. They started making privacy changes and improvements almost imediately after people started complaining. They’re also doing a pretty good job with keeping everyone informed on their blog and even made some appology posts.

Lesson Learned - What ever happened to the pre-launch, pilot testing, phased implementation and all those concepts? I think we should all learn from this and never make an arrogant full blown launch. I hope my clients read this and understand my conservative implementation approach with any project.

What do you think? has it ever happened to you (even with a small scale project)? what do you think about Google Buzz privacy?

Tagged with: Google • privacy • Social Media

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