Feb 22

Just Get Started

Beginner's Track, Social Media, Social Media Classroom, Social Media for Business 5 Comments »

Every time I speak at a conference, there are always some business owners who come up to me and say: Ok! I’m convinced now, but how do I get started?  I often send them to my blog and other trusted blogs that I think add value. However, the other day I came across an entrepreneur who claimed “I did what you said, found a lot of reasons why I should use social media for my business, but couldn’t find much on How to get started”
I must give him credit since I looked & looked to prove his laziness but had little success myself. Since the biggest obstacle for today’s business owner is to overcome the fear of technology, I’ve decided to produce a series of  “Starting2 videos”
These videos will not be for my typical reader since most of my traffic comes from Twitter.  But I’m sure you all know someone who can make use of them. In the spirit of sharing, please send them this way or just embed the video in your blog.  I will create a new page where I’ll place all the Starting2 videos.

I am happy to introduce “Starting2 Tweet” please let me know how you like the content.  I’m struggling with the visual on YouTube but I saw other tutorials and it doesn’t seem I can improve much.  The idea is to keep them really simple and straight to the point.  If you would like to see a platform, please feel free to make your wish.  I have a whole list to publish, so if I hear from you, then I’ll give you priority.

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Jan 30

3 Social Media Mistakes You May Be Making

Intermediate Track, Social Media Classroom, Social Media for Business 10 Comments »

Social media is an excellent way to make valuable connections in your industry. Just about everyone who does any kind of business online is aware of the usefulness of social media sites, but that doesn’t mean they know how to use them. There are plenty of articles on how to make social media work for you, but today I’m going to look at some of the big mistakes that you could be making. These aren’t just little glitches that can be overlooked, they are mistakes that could destroy your online reputation or ruin your carefully built network.

Social Media Mistake 1

Going on a rant. When you’re using Twitter, Facebook, etc. on a daily basis, it’s easy to fall into a false sense of security. You feel that you’re among friends. And when that happens, it’s not difficult to move into other territory . . . where you start sharing personal information. This in itself isn’t bad, until something happens that makes you angry and you splash it all over the web.

Being upset about something is fine. Tweeting about how horrible your client is . . . not fine. In fact, it could lose you business. Even if your client or boss never realizes what you said, others will see it and realize that they don’t want to work with someone who blasts their personal vendettas across the social networks.

Social Media Mistake 2

Dropping off the face of the planet. Unfortunately, this happens quite often in social media because people start out with great intentions and then lose focus. When they come back a couple of months later, no one cares anymore.

You can easily avoid this problem by not overdoing things. There’s no need to post 50 times a day. A handful of posts will keep your presence up without taking too much time or energy and you won’t be overwhelmed and drop out. Social media is a very valuable method of promotion, so don’t waste it by burning out and disappearing for too long.

Social Media Mistake 3

Spamming. Most of us are aware that spamming is a bad idea . . . yet a lot of people are still flooding others with unwanted offers and ads. However, that isn’t the only way you can spam and you MIGHT be spamming without even realizing how offensive it is!

Are you signed up for one of those Twitter ad networks? If you’ve allowed them or any other site to publish auto-tweets then your followers are probably quite annoyed with the spam they get when you aren’t even online. Another way that many people spam is through auto responses to followers. When someone follows you, sending them a direct message with an ad is not a good way to make a nice first impression.

Are you making any of these mistakes? If so, you might want to reconsider how you handle your social networking before it’s too late.

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Jan 08

Social Media Hunting Spree

Intermediate Track, Social Media for Business 7 Comments »

Social media has two main purposes for business owners and consultants: To acquire new clients and To retain happy customers.  Everything else must serve these two goals.  Often we start building a social media presence and wonder around without a clear direction, goal or strategy.  A real easy way of getting right to the point is to compare social media to a Hunting Spree. The main difference is obviously the end result.  Hunting leads to a dead prey that you might eat once.  Instead social media should lead to a healthy prey that will freely come back to you again and again.   Here’s how:

The basics: I still can’t believe that business owners and consultants jump to social media just for the fun of it.  Yes, we can make it fun but it can’t stop there.  A hunter knows What he’s hunting, Where he’s hunting, When he’s hunting and How he’s hunting.

Scouting: Determining the exact place (platform) and timing of your prey allows the hunter to have a successful or stressful experience.  The scouting is done prior to the hunt.  If you’re hunting executives for your B2B service, it might be a good idea to get active on LinkedIn during the day.  Instead if you’re hunting entrepreneurs or start-ups for your coaching products, you’ll be better off on Twitter during the evenings.

Understanding your prey: A hunter studies the prey, the eating and sleeping patterns, social activities, nap times and so forth.  Understanding their habits, tendencies and activities helps a lot.  In social media, you can do this best by joining groups where your prey interacts.  Join the conversation (without your sales hat please) or simply observe.  It’s really interesting to watch what turns a specific group on. What gets them going in a discussion or a blog by just watching the comments.  It will take you about a month of binocular observation to understand patterns and trends of a group.  This can be the CEOs, social entrepreneurs, moms, realtors, you name it.  The intrinsic behavior of human interaction within a group is pretty standard and tends to respect the subculture of their common denominators.

Guns and Loads: When selecting a shotgun, hunters go simple and within their budget. They also know the appropriate size, speed and weight of the bullet.  Furthermore, they understand all the prey-specific hunting regulations to avoid unintentional violations. In social media, you want to know the right instrument to use when you finally decide to conquer a client.  A real heavy/invasive pitch can destroy the relationship for ever.  You might need more than one shot, from different angles until you can make the final one.  On Twitter for example, I interact, retweet, reply at least 10 times before I send a direct message with my initial sale.  The same on a LinkedIn group, I join discussions, provide answers and Bam! I send the message.  One thing is to receive the same typical boring sales pitch from a perfect stranger.  A totally different thing is to receive an invitation to “continue our discussion off line” – by this time, my prospect knows who I am, that I know my stuff and that I have a genuine interest in helping him.  See the difference?

Shooting: A hunter picks a good stand, allows the prey to come up to a certain distance, waits for the right timing and shoots.  I’ve seen so many consultants chat and mingle with their dream client and nothing happens because they don’t shoot.  What was the point?

Keeping in mind the purpose of why we’re investing our time (therefore money) in social media will really help us stay focused on the prey, waste less time and avoid distractions.  Yes, build all the authority in your field, be a pioneer, build your communities and everything else.  But at the end of the day, we do all this To acquire new clients & To retain happy customers.

How are you hunting? Can you share your experience?

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Dec 08

Social Media: Online Reputation Management

Mid-Size Business, Small Business, Social Media for Business 5 Comments »
image credit to dreamsystemsmedia.com

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.

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Dec 02

The Real Cost of Social Media

Small Business 23 Comments »
The cost of social media

The cost of social media

Everyone says that social media is free and if you just take a quick look, it certainly seems to be. After all, you don’t need to pay anything to sign up for most social network sites and you can enjoy unlimited hours of interconnection for nothing. That doesn’t mean it’s actually free, though. In fact, social media does cost something, your time.

As they say, time is money and when it comes to promoting your business, that really is true! The time you put into social media is a cost and for every minute you spend working on networking, you aren’t working on something else in your business. While the benefits of networking online can be huge, it does take time to see those result and in the meantime, you aren’t being paid for those hours of working on connecting with worthwhile people.

There are, of course, monetary costs, as well, particularly if you have hired someone to take on some of the networking duties for you. Keep in mind that even big companies set aside thousands of dollars for their social networking budgets. You might not need that much, but it is something to keep in mind when planning your marketing budget.

It’s important to understand this ahead of time even before you start your social media strategy, because you’ll need to be consistent with social media, even when it seems that there aren’t many results. It can take months to see the benefits and during that time, you will need to stay on top of things, spending time each day to respond to messages and communicate with other business owners, potential clients, and gurus in the niche you’re interested in. Once you’re prepared to do this, you should be good to go.

Social media isn’t free. You will be paying with your time, even if you do everything yourself. When you’re on Twitter or LinkedIn, you aren’t working on client assignments, so that means you aren’t pulling in money, usually. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be interested in social media or that you should consider dropping it. It merely means that you should be aware of the cost when planning your networking campaign. Make sure you take into consideration how much time will be lost from other areas of your business while you are working on social media.

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Nov 28

StumbleUpon and Your Business

Social Media Classroom, Social Media for Business 6 Comments »
StimbleUpon

StumbleUpon for your business

At first glance, StumbleUpon doesn’t seem like it’s much use for the average business owner. However, it can be insanely useful if you now how to leverage it and can drive a lot of traffic.  I personally get a lot of quality readers and I’ve heard many other friends who get most of their traffic from this site.  You will need to make sure that you aren’t just spamming, though, since StumbleUpon users are very aware of this and tend to give a thumbs down to anyone who has repeatedly submitted their own website or who stumbles content of obviously poor quality.

What else can you do to make sure that your business is getting noticed on StumbleUpon?

Set up a blog. This allows you to have fresh content on a continual basis for new stumbles. After all, each person can only give your webpage one thumbs up, but if you are constantly turning out great content, then you will be able to get the same people, fans, stumbling your content over and over.

Create quality content. Of course, if you have nothing of importance to blog about, no one will be giving you any thumbs up. That means your blog has to be full of interesting and useful information  . . . but truth be told, it should be that even if you aren’t looking for traffic from SU. Make sure that each post is crafted to give something to the reader, NOT just to get your keywords out there.  This is a very common mistake that people tend to make when starting a business blog. Rather than turn it into something useful, they try to make it search engine friendly and forget to write for human beings.

With StumbleUpon, what you write is very important since it makes all the difference as to whether people will like it or not. If they don’t, you won’t get any stumbles.

Finally, you need to network. Like other social media sites, StumbleUpon is designed for connecting with others. You should befriend people who are interested in specific niches that also interest you, as well as people who might be interested in your products.

Just having friends isn’t enough though. You’ll need to go stumble some of their pages, leave comments for them and make sure that you share websites of interest with them when you find something they might be interested in. This is the social part of the network. Without the connections, you can only bookmark your own stuff and no one else will care or give it a thumbs up. However, having friends means that your blog can easily be stumbled over and over, driving traffic and views up. It has to be worth seeing, though.

All of these pieces tie in together. You have to have friends, but you also need great content if you want those friends to stick around and stumble you. Without the blog it is much more difficult to build up the levels of traffic that you want for your business website. Once you have all the pieces of the puzzle, you will begin to see success.

What else works for you to bring good traffic and quality readers?

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Nov 19

7 Questions When Planning Social Media Strategies

Beginner's Track, Social Media Classroom 6 Comments »

Ivan WalshSocial media is such a useful tool for businesses, but many business owners end up doing it wrong. They try very hard to fit social media into their preconceived ideas of business marketing and end up failing miserably. The reason for this? Social media isn’t your normal marketing technique.

Traditionally, marketing was something that was presented to people. However, these days, things are far more interactive. Rather than presenting a corporate front, which no one pays much attention to, you will find that offering the people behind the business is something that far more potential customers will respond to.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself when getting started in social media as a marketing tool.

  1. Who do you want to talk to? Potential clients is a pretty obvious answer, but narrow it down. What are your potential clients interested in? Are they parents? Singles bringing in a six figure income? Get specific and it will be easier to find your target market online.
  2. What are they talking about? You won’t win any friends by jumping into conversations that you don’t understand, so check out what these people are discussing on social media sites first. Then decide if you can talk about the same things.
  3. What can you bring to the conversation? If you leap in and start advertising, no one will follow you. Social media is like talking to your friends at the Christmas party about what you do. You discuss other things and if they ask, you mention what you do. If they have a problem, you might offer a solution that involves your business.
  4. Who is going to be the face of social media? You may have more than one person in your business doing this, but the important thing is to be consistent. You want to make sure that your business is always being presented in a good way, with plenty of interaction.
  5. When can we mention our product? This is particularly important if you have more than one person doing the social media for your site. You want to lay basic groundrules for when you should be able to mention the product and when to avoid it.
  6. How can we encourage participation? Interactivity is key in social media marketing. If you want people to trust your brand, you’ll need to get them interacting with you. This will also encourage people to spread the word about your company, too.
  7. What is success in social media? Define what your success is before you start your social media plan. This helps keep everyone on track and will let you know when you have reached the goals you wanted to meet.

It’s important not to just jump into social media for marketing purposes without taking the time to plan. You should have a strategy in place or it will be very difficult to decide just what you’re doing. Plan ahead and you’ll rapidly meet your goals.

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Nov 06

How to Gain Trust Online

Intermediate Track 5 Comments »

A certain level of trust is required in order for someone to buy from you or pay you for services. Social media has gone a long way toward helping establish trust online, but just how can you make sure people feel they can trust you? It can be a slow process at times, but if you are consistent, you’ll get results.

Be consistent across the internet

If you act like two (or more!) different people on different sites, you can bet that it can get confusing for others. Whatever your personality or even persona, be careful to stay consistent everywhere you appear online. You should also refrain from being too formal, since most people prefer to buy from human beings.

Being consistent also refers to frequency. If you run a blog, make sure you don’t vanish for weeks at a time. The same goes for social media. Post on a regular basis and don’t disappear unexpectedly . . . people will wonder if you are really serious about business, too.

Offer advice and information

It’s one thing to say you’re an expert, quite another to prove it. Unfortunately, there are many more self-proclaimed experts than real ones and people are starting to realize this. That’s why it doesn’t usually work to simply say that you know what you’re doing. You have to show it. This is possible through social media, offering tidbits of information and helping people out on social media, forums and blogs with advice they can actually use. Once they get curious enough, they will come to you directly.

Maintain your reputation

Make sure you keep your rep clean by avoiding things like making a rude comment or lashing out at someone. Anything you do online can be immortalized forever. Remember that when people Google you, just about anything that has happened online could turn up, so it’s a good idea to make sure you keep your hands clean.

It’s also worth it, if you run a business, to keep an eye out for possible complaints. While you may not be able to get rid of the complaint published, you can certainly address it in a tasteful manner and possibly gain more trust this way.

Interact with your followers

As your reputation grows, more and more people will start to follow you. Some gurus are notorious for their lack of interest in the crowds of fans, but you’ll have much better results if you pay attention to them. Answer some questions, interact with your followers on Twitter and Facebook and they will respect you even more.

It takes time and effort to build trust. Online, people are even more suspicious than usual because of the overabundance of scams. Prove you aren’t a con artist, provide consistent, regular content and interact with people to boost your business.

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Oct 12

Networking With Your Social Media Followers

Social Media 6 Comments »

FollowersWhile it’s nice to have a lot of followers or friends on social media . . . what are you doing to leverage the power that comes with that many followers? Are you making the best use of those who are interested enough in what you have to say that they are willing to listen to everything?

For many, social media is a place to make friends and hang out. That’s fine, but if you’re running a business, it’s also the perfect place for a little marketing. That doesn’t mean you have to be pushy, but if you aren’t letting people know what you do for a living and how you can help them, then you’re missing a big opportunity.

What are some ways you can start optimizing all that potential power? Here are a few ideas to get you started.

  • Offer solutions. One of the advantages of social media is that people complain. If they have a problem and you have the solution, not only will you help them out and gain a fan . . . chances are the word of mouth function will work for you, too. Soon, people you don’t know at all will know what you do.
  • Mention your business at least once a day. You don’t have to go all out and say stuff like, “Buy from me NOW!” However, a well placed tweet about what you are up to works just as well and is not so pushy. Something like, “Writing copy for my new motocross website” lets people know what you are up to in a manner that is completely acceptable.
  • Ask others to retweet important info relating to your industry. Not surprisingly, a number of your followers, fans or friends on social media will be members of the same industry, so getting them to retweet information will reach a large number of potential clients. Offering news is also an excellent method of non-pushy marketing.

What are you doing to maximize the potential of your followers?

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Sep 11

How Is Your Online Reputation?

Social Media 4 Comments »

One of the areas that many business owners don’t think much about is their online reputation. Everything we do online contributes to this, but there are a few other factors, as well.

What You Can Do

Staying consistent with your message is the best way to build a solid reputation. If you are jumping back and forth between topics and promoting a new product each week, then people aren’t going to necessarily start trusting you. However, if you are consistently offering quality information and advice, you will eventually gain not only trust, but a sort of guru status. This can be extremely valuable and really depends entirely on you.

What Others Might Do

You can’t control what other people are doing, but they do have an effect on your rep, as well. Let’s say a well-known blog writes a review of your site. That will most certainly affect how people feel about you and your products or services, depending on whether the blog was positive or negative in their review.

Other things that can affect your online reputation include blog comments, online reviews on review sites or anywhere that your product is for sale, such as on Amazon where customers can rate and review each purchase. Forums and social media sites can also have an impact on your business reputation.

How is Your Rep?

What are people seeing when they look for you? Every couple of months, you should be doing a check to see just what is being said about you. Do a search for your business name and another for your own name to see what comes up in Google. Your own business site should be first, of course, but what are others saying about you?

Another method of monitoring this information on an ongoing basis is to set up a Google Alert for your business name. This will send you an email with all references to the keywords (your name in this case) each day. You can see at a glance who is talking about you and what they’re saying.

When Things Are Negative

There are a few courses of action that you can take when others are trashing your reputation. The first is to respond to them. Often, bloggers or social media users will be giving a bad review because they had a bad experience. Do what you can to remedy the situation and they will likely blog and tweet that, as well, boosting you in the public eye again.

The other thing that you should be doing is making sure that you have control of the top results in Google. These can be articles on article marketing sites, blogs that you own, Squidoo pages, etc. but they should be under your control so you can make sure that people are seeing positive things about your business.

We can’t control everything that everyone says about us, but we can certainly stay on top of things and make sure that we know when someone says something about our business. It’s not difficult, with the tools available these days, so make sure you know how your online reputation is and make sure you keep it positive.

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