Posted in Marketing, Social Media Community, Social Strategy, blogging, social media, social networking

3 comments

3/11 2008

Taking Social Media Beyond the Comfort Zone

I was reading through The Next Web and came across a post called the Perfect Viral Marketing in 2010. I thought to myself, “I love viral marketing so why not check out the video that Boris listed underneath the post. The video is an absolutely brilliant video produced by Slate V on Youtube.

I doubt that marketing companies will ever take the concept of viral marketing to the point where they are paying actors to actually relate to a consumer group. The concept is absolutely hilarious.

There is something to learn from the video from a marketing perspective. When you are building and implementing a marketing strategy try to get into the heads of your target market. Don’t take it to the point where you are PERSONALLY entering into their lives.

The concept is worthy enough to note. Watch the video!

Posted in Corporate Strategy, Marketing, blogging, social media

1 comment

31/10 2008

When Worth-Your-While Isn’t Worth-The-While

Image via Wikipedia

What goals do you have when it comes to your social media use?

I recently had a fellow blogger, Scot Duke of Mr Business Golf, post a comment in regards to a article I had written regarding trying hard to reach your goals and being persistent in social media. His comment to my post:

Good advice, but what if you have been knocked down more times than a bowling pin and gotten up more times than the Energizer Bunny and still are not generating a following large enough to make it worth the while? Changing gears and changing stages are the natural thing to do to keep it going, but what else can be done when all the mapping and consistency is not paying off? There are REAL people who would like to know.

It was interesting to me that Scot used “worth-the-while” to explain the return on investment he was expecting from social media. Seth Godin responded to this comment by saying that sometime a plan B is the best route. Sometimes plan C, D, E, and F are necessary too to reach your goals in social media.

So what does worth-the-while mean in social media. What happens when everything you do and have done in the past just does not work? Should you reevaluate your goals? Change your tactics for the 200th time? Or just give up?

Well we all know that giving up is never the right option. The truth of the matter could be that your worth-the-while is missing the point and is not aligned with your goals. Scot made it a point to throw his goal out there:

My goal is like everyone else, to make what I do worth-while which I don’t think is a flaw in my goal but maybe the arena I am battling in.

Your strategy being worth-the-while could mean many things. Maybe it is more money in your pocket as a direct result from social media? Maybe it is an increase in search engine rankings? Maybe it is just to gain a little brand recognition in the process of having some fun.

If you find yourself struggling to figure out what is Worth-Your-While you are probably doing something wrong.

Re-adjust. Try again. Make it a hobby instead of a chore. If it still doesn’t work… try something else. Add it into another strategy plan. If you are not having fun in the social media world you need to try something else.

Life and business life cycles are too short to be doing something you dislike.

Posted in ROI, Social Strategy, blogging, social media

4 comments

29/10 2008

The Best ROI Explanation for Social Media and Some Additions

As an owner of a social media marketing and design company, it can be hard to explain the return on investment in accordance with social media use. I think many of us (marketers) try to find a return on investment because:

A. It can be easier to sell the marketing because of an ROI explanation.

B. We believe so much in social media. We want to use it… every chance we get.

Jason Falls has one of the best explanation (and personal views) of ROI in Social Media in his post: What is the ROI for Social Media?

In the post he starts out by stating a quote I have posted in my office on the wall:

The problem with trying to determine ROI for social media is you are trying to put numeric quantities around human interactions and conversations, which are not quantifiable.

He goes on to say that it is hard to convince business owners that the point of social media is the conversation and relationships. If they are mainly in it for money “they will fail.”

Your ROI is what you got out of the conversation, not what you got out of their checkbook.

I have always been a believer in social media to help grow your business. You can use it as a delivery tool to send a message to many users in a short time span and build relationships. The problem with the business environment and social media is the mindset many business owners are under… the “i need my return now” mindset. “I’m investing $2000 a month in marketing.” I need to see return every month.

Social Media takes time to develop. Amy Nowacoski has a comment on Jason’s blog post has a great comparison for Social Media and ROI:

ROI on human interactions is always very tricky. I’ve worked in fundraising and development for years, and have always held that fundraising events cannot always be about the bottom line. It can’t be about just the dollar figure you amassed that night. Events are also about cultivation and engagement. I would spend time making sure everyone, not just the big donors, feel like VIPs because that guy who only bought a $20 ticket today, could be the guy who gives you $20K in 10 years.

There are always methods of combining social media marketing with traditional marketing. This will give you something of substance (ie direct mail) with something intangible (social media).

Social Media is growing in popularity and growing in validity as a powerful marketing tool. Start getting involved. Set some goals and achieve trusted relationships in your community!

Posted in blogging, small business, social media

0 comments

26/10 2008

Part 4: Social Media Marketing for Small Business: Mentors

It is time for a roundup and the last two parts of the Social Media Marketing for Small Business posts.

Here is a look back at Parts 1-3.

Part 1: Prioritize, Plan, and Execute
Part 2: The Circle of Life
Part 3: Attention to Action

We have touched on many strategy elements when it comes to small businesses using social media for marketing and promotion. I wanted to talk quickly about the importance of having “social media mentors.”

Some of us are entrepreneurs with small business start-ups and having mentors to help with everyday occurences should be a strong part of our business routine. Andrew Hyde of StartupWeekend said it best on Chris Brogan’s blog:

Find Great Mentors. I think I have said this before, but it is slammed into my head by TechStars. It is the best thing you can have as a startup. Find them early, and listen as much as you can.

We should all have mentors. The same applies to social media use. Find a couple of industry leaders, as well as, local leaders to follow and ask questions. This should be applied beyond hiring a social media marketing company or a consultant to guide you in your social media use.

Social Media Mentors can give you great tips and benefits of using social media on a daily basis. This will help you hone your craft on top of your daily routine.

There is so much information shared on a daily basis that it is hard to seperate the good and the bad. Personally, I rely on some of my mentors to do this for me.

I wanted to list the couple of people that I am blessed to call my social media mentors (whether they know it or not).

Douglas Karr

Pat Coyle

Social Media mentors do not have to be different than your business mentor (mine happen to be).They can be anyone you trust to lead you in the right direction through your new media use.

Posted in millennial, social media

4 comments

23/10 2008

Are We The Dumbest Generation? Do Me A Favor And Take a Look in the Mirror

There is an underground campaign slowly spreading through the rank and file of many academics, journalists, and other individuals. This campaign can be aptly named the Digital Stupidity of the Younger Generations. I have been reading quite a few posts recently about the lack of “true” intelligence in the digital generation. Frankly, I’ve reached my breaking point. Thanks to The Independent, a newspaper based out on London, I have finally gone over the edge of annoyance to downright anger.

Andrew Keen has a post on Digitally Addicted Kids Threaten to Return Civilisation to the Dark Ages. Here is a brief synopsis of the post from the author:

The internet is creating a generation of ignoramuses with tiny attention spans, who will surely become the dumbest generation in history.

Andrew starts the post by talking about Megan Meier, a teen who committed suicide over the cyber-bullying of a peer and the peer’s mother. This is a sad story of a social network being used in the worst possible way. I haven’t quite figured out how it connects to the increasing lack of intelligence in my generation.

Book cover via Amazon

From Andrew’s Post:

In The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future, the Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein demonstrates how the internet is making young people increasingly ignorant about almost everything except online video games and the narcissism of self-authored internet content.

I don’t know about the rest of my generation but I am getting pretty tired of being stereotyped.

Would you like to know one of the main reasons why kids spend too much time playing video games? Why do you think teenagers spend so much time on social networks like Myspace and Facebook?

Parenting.

There has been so much blame placed on media and technology for the lack of intelligence in my generation. In reality, the majority of the problem is in the older generation and how they have raised the younger future. If you want your kids to read. If you want the younger generation to pick up a book instead of browsing blogs… encourage us.

I would rather not read degrading posts and comments around our lack of inhibition or intelligence. You are stereotyping an entire generation of future business leaders, politicians, service workers, teachers, and everything in between.

We need to take a look at all areas of the problem and not just video games or social media. Social Media has been a huge influence in my life, both intellectually and personally. If you are going to completely degrade something that has had a large impact in my life… do it with some class because you are embarrassing yourself.

Posted in Investing, Venture Capital, social media

1 comment

20/10 2008

Warren Buffett Was Right in 1999. Web 2.0 Firms Should Listen.

Book cover via Amazon

I am in the process of reading Alice Schroeder’s book entitled The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. The book is a massive source of information about the life of Warren Buffett. Needless to say the book is unbelievable! I love to read about the life of people who, in my opinion, have lived a valuable and influential life.

At the beginning of the book Alice recounts an event from the Sun Valley Conference in Hailey, Idaho. Allen & Company, a boutique investment firm in Hollywood handles the event inviting such notables as Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, and Rupert Murdoch.

In 1999 Warren Buffett was asked to be the keynote speaker to end the conference. This was a special year because the conference was filled with Internet tycoons ready to embark on billion dollar ventures in the new year. They were invited and were making the most of rubbing shoulders with the richest individuals around the world.

The Internet tycoons walked into the conference room that day hoping for a glowing reception and the blessings from one of the greatest investors of our time. What they received was quite the opposite.

Warren Buffett practically dismantled the belief in the new Internet startup companies. He likens the Internet Boom to that of the airline industry:

“…So I submit to you: I really like to think that if I had been down there at Kitty Hawk, I would have been farsighted enough and public-spirited enough to have shot Orville down, I owed it to future capitalists.”

“It’s wonderful to promote new industries, because they are very promotable. It’s very hard to promote investment in a mundane product. It’s much easier to promote an esoteric product, even particularly one with loses, because there’s no quantitative guideline.”

Warren Buffett, pg 19.

Most of the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs left the meeting slightly chuckling at “old Warren’s mistake.” They found out later that he was exactly right.

Web 2.0 companies should listen to Warren Buffett. He has always cautioned the vamping of over-promoted companies and increasing investment in techonolgy companies with no substance.

“You can get in way more trouble with a good idea than a bad idea, because you forget that the good idea has limits.” -Warren Buffett, page 21

I have always been a skeptic of increasing investment in social media and web 2.0. I do love the sites and I love the fact that they are free. I have a problem with the valuation of multiple billions of dollars for the site like Facebook.

This is a dangerous game we are playing when it comes to the multitude of millions of dollars invested in Internet startups. I am afraid we never learned to begin with.

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Posted in Marketing, Social Strategy, small business, social media

3 comments

13/10 2008

Part 2: Social Media Marketing for Small Business: The Circle of Life

Thanks to Lorraine Ball at Roundpeg for turning me on to Jay Ehret’s blog, the Marketing Spot.

I wanted to talk about some of the concepts Jay uses pertaining to the marketing circle of life. I wanted to relate his four pillars to social media marketing for small business.

Jay has a post entitled The Marketing Circle of Life. In the post Jay talks about the “four primary spots of the marketing circle of life: Branding, Experience, Conversation, and Promotion.”

According to Jay the first step of any marketing plan should be the Branding of your company. You cannot focus on any type of promotion until you have established your brand.

Experience is related to how your customers feels through every touchpoint your customer offers. To quote Jay from his post, “You cannot give people something to talk about unless they first have something to talk about. “ Makes sense to me!

Conversation is what happens after the customer experience. What is the message your customer is spreading? You need to figure it out!

“You should be using your Promotion to attract, not seduce customers.” Promotion should be used to advertise the top three choices. AND THEN we come full circle.

This is a simple and amazing model from Jay to help small business owners understand their marketing plan. I know… I know… How does social media marketing fit into this marketing model? I decided to take Jay’s model and readjust it to show visually how social media supports this model.

The four social media marketing support structures for the circle of life are productive planning, design/content, community involvement, and investment.

Productive Planning

When you are adding social media into the mix of brand building you need to make sure you are planning, setting goals, and mapping out time management.

Planning is essential to building your brand online. Before and after you develop your brand identity you should be constantly revamping your brand strategy. Social Media should be a part of that brand strategy.

Design/Content

Design: You should try and use the same user name, a personal picture, data (both business and personal), and your logo/colors. Users should experience you (and your company) the same way over many different platforms.

Content: Content is key if you are wanting to enhance the user experience to your social media marketing. This is most important if a blog is a part of your SMM. Create meaningful content and add personality into what you write. Authentic communication is key when using social media. Keywords and linking are both extremely important.

Community Involvement

This is where the time management aspect comes into play. It is extremely important that you become involved in the social media communities. The same concept applies to offline social business networking. If you don’t show up all the time… People are going to forget you. Believe me, it is even faster on the web. Get involved. Add some comments. Join in the conversation. Start building some name recognition.

You will also learn some stuff along the way.

Investment

First off, investment is different than involvement. By becoming involved in a social media community your are enterting into a conversation with potential clients or referrals to the potentials. Investment means you are constantly reinventing how to keep readers to your blog, spicen up your profile pages, creating new meaning content, building your brand, and re-designing your blog. It should be a combination of the three previous steps.

Posted in Social Strategy, blogging, business, small business, social media, social networking

7 comments

12/10 2008

Part 1: Social Media Marketing For Small Business: Prioritize, Plan and Execute

We are constantly selling.

Whether a sole proprietor or a multi-employee company, small business owners are constantly selling themselves and their service/product. Most of the time the two go hand in hand.

From traditional marketing to email marketing, there are a multitude of ways to go about marketing your products and services. Social Media has just recently come to the limelight in the small business circle. There has been a recent push to utilize the world of social media to

Image via Wikipedia

take advantage of the multitude of eyes and ears in this space.

At Brandswag we talk a lot about using social media for your small business marketing strategy. The biggest hurdle in explaining social media is the issue of weighing the benefits against the time spent on social media platforms. If you are thinking of social media in terms of a sales cycle you should stop. Let me say that again…. Just stop!

By looking at social media as a sales cycle it keeps you from seeing the absolute value and benefits of using platforms like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and LinkedIN (to name a few). If you view your use of social media as an instant ROTI (return on time investment) you are going to become frustrated and give up before the magic happens.

Social media takes time. There needs to be sense of importance and goal setting when using social media for your small business. You need to be able to set aside the time every day to check your social media sites and update your blog.

If you have goals set and a plan laid in place to utilize social media you will succeed with creating brand awareness, organic search engine optimization, and becoming a trusted adviser in your local industry.

It is extremely important for you to prioritize, plan, and execute. Execute. Execute. Execute.

Prioritize

Take some time to travel in and out of the different social media platforms. Figure out which sites make sense for you to spend some time. Check out a previous post of mine (in collaboration with Brogan, Rowse, and Sanders) on how to be productive and choose the right social networks.

Find four to five social media platforms that cater to what you are wanting to accomplish.

Plan

Figure out how much time you can committ to using social media. If you want to set aside 30 mins a day to take care of your sites.. DO IT! By all means, the time involvement is important but frequency is just as important. Community users want to know you care and are active in the site.

Execute

Follow Nike when they scream JUST DO IT through all of their advertising. Execute your plan with perfection, create meaningful content, and communicate with your friends online. You can prioritize, dream, and plan all you want but if you do not execute…. well, I wont have anything to say to you.

By executing and joining in the conversation you are developing your brand every single day you spend on social media.

This is part 1 of a 5 part series on how to help small business owners understand, utilize and become successful using social media.

Posted in Corporate Strategy, Smaller Indiana, blogging, corporate blogging, louis gray, social media

4 comments

10/10 2008

Independent Blogging Compared to Corporate Blogging

I follow the writing of many of the staff at Compendium Blogware, a local company here in Indianapolis offering an extremely trackable and orangic seo based blog software. I was reading through a post by Megan Glover called Is Blogging In Your 2009 Marketing Budget?, and happened across a powerpoint presentation about measuring, tracking, and adjusting your corporate blog. You can view the ppt by clicking here: measure-track-and-adjust-webinar.

In the webinar they had a graphic from Google Analytics that show where the traffic to their blog was originating from (image below). Of course being a search and keyword driven blogging platform you would

imagine that the majority of the sites traffic would be from search engines. I decided to check out my analytics to see if I was completely opposite, in the middle, or the same.

Below you will see my traffic sources from Google Analytics. Not surprisingly most of my traffic is driven through referring sites. It got me to thinking about the value of blogging and the underlying reason of why I am writing this blog. Without hesitation I can say that the main reason for blogging is my love for social media both here and in Indianapolis. I love the concept of building community on the web. I have met some wonderful people through my dealings in Friendfeed, Twitter, and Smaller Indiana.

The other reasons can be contributed to my social media marketing and design company and becoming a trusted adviser in the city of Indianapolis. A blog is a great way to build credibility among your peers and collaborate with many individuals on a global scale.

Of course, another big reason for blogging is the organic search engine optimization I gain through posting and linking. I don’t know if I should be worried that my lowest referring center is search engines. I have been contemplating a way to switch that tables and even out my traffic sources. Any ideas on how to do that?

It is interesting to see the sources of traffic of certain blogs both on a personal and professional level. I would gather that the majority of corporate blogs have a higher search engine traffic rate than most independent blogs out there.

Do you find referring sites more valuable or search engine traffic? Maybe you find direct traffic the most valuable of them all? I guess it is all based on the goals and aspirations of the blog strategy itself. Any tips on blog strategy can more than likely be found at Chris Brogan, Chris Baggot, Hutch Carpenter or Louis Gray’s blogs.

Posted in social media

8 comments

9/10 2008

A Good Way To Ruin Social Media: Thank You WMDukeofEarl

I was just about to leave to enjoy a frosty brew at a local establishment here in Indianapolis. I decided to check the inbox one more time before leaving a found I had a new comment on my blog! COOL! I opened the email and read down the message:

Author : WMDukeofEarl
E-mail :
Comment:
Build your Linkedin network quickly and easily by inviting open networkers to connect.

I am offering 1250+ Linkedin ( Linked in ) connections, or in other words, a list (in Microsoft .CSV) of 1250+ e-mail addresses ready to be uploaded on LinkedIn and to which you can instantly send invitations to connect. All of the individuals whose e-mail addresses are on this list have been screened and are self-declared open networkers and should be trusted to accept all invites. Please visit my auction on ebay! http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320309384428

Talk about ruining my night. No, I don’t want to bid on your LinkedIN contact book. No, I don’t want to turn an awesome social community platform into another worthless, waste filled, email marketing wasteland. I would appreciate it if you would respect the concept of relationship building, as well as, the idea of open collaboration between individuals. Maybe you should try and form a relationship every once in awhile instead of doing a friend train and then ruining your 1250+ connections you have gained.

This is one example of how certain people are ruining the world of social media. You can use it as a marketing platform but don’t turn it into a InfoSeek USA.

I am going to go drink because I feel like I was just gassed with poisonous BS fumes.

And no I will not approve your comment and quit spamming my BLOG!

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