Social Media is About Connection

There’s a whole lot of sharing going on, but are we really connecting?

One thing that I'm finding fascinating watching people interact through social media is how much more important face-to-face has become even though we have up-to-the-second information sharing with the people in our lives. 

I think there is a distinction between the sharing of information through social media (pictures, links, videos, random political rants, etc..) and true relationships that involve trust and bonding. As businesses, we might use online search and social media to narrow down candidates for a job, but I doubt any of us would hire sight unseen. There's too much non-verbal communication that you miss without the face-to-face. When you need to build a true relationship with someone, digital communication doesn't fill that need.

I watched recently as a distant connection lost a child. The outpouring of support and sympathy came from all corners of this person’s life through social media. But then the pictures came - pictures of friends who went beyond social media and spent time face-to-face to console and grieve with their loss. Lesson: you can say you’re sorry over the Internet, but it sure doesn't take the place of an honest moment in person.

You can’t replace eye contact. You can’t replace a smile. You can’t replace the warmth of being with another person. And you really can’t replace the all the non-verbal communication that takes place where words are simply not enough. A hug says more than a thousand Facebook posts. 

Coca-Cola & Social Media Marketing

There was a great article on Linkedin the other day that discussed Coca-Cola and their social media strategy. I was dismayed by some of the comments suggesting a lot of people don’t think that social media marketing works for smaller businesses or less “glamorous” ones.

Yes, it can.

How you make social work is by providing value to people. One commenter suggested that social media wouldn't work for a copy machine company and I disagree. For demonstration, here’s how I would do a social media campaign for a copy machine company - let's call them MemoX.

The people who've chosen to become fans of MemoX are most likely already owners of MemoX products, so what we're doing is brand building to keep MemoX in the market leader position. The social strategy for MemoX is all about customer service and creating a sense of value around the MemoX brand. Their Facebook page should include a once or twice weekly post that focuses on the many great product features and how they can help customers work more efficiently.

Each product feature post should lead off with how that feature saves the customer time and helps them deliver a superior quality product to the stakeholders on their end. You can pull an entire year's worth of Facebook posts out of the product user manual that 90% of MemoX customers never read.

I would also encourage MemoX to run specials on supplies that are only available to Facebook fans, maybe once a quarter.

On a regular basis, their social guru should toss out a request for questions or issues that they can help solve, this shows their fans that MemoX is listening and cares about their customers. They also should post the occasional copy-related joke to keep things fun and informal. The key point is MemoX needs to be front and center with offering their customers valuable tips (sprinkled with the occasional giggle) that improve their work and lives. Always go back to how you can deliver more value to the customer via social media.

Lastly, nobody wants to socialize with a brand. They want to socialize with human beings that represent the brand. They aren't interested in mission statements and they really aren't interested in carefully crafted, focus-group-tested, advertising agency spin cluttering up their social newsfeed.

Social is easy. Deliver value. That's it.

Defining Goals for Your Event

We started having a discussion on Linkedin a few days ago about defining “success” for events. Since most events are done as a form of Event Marketing, what did the client have in mind when they committed xx dollars to the event?

The goals are important not just from an ROI standpoint, but because the destination determines the road that you take. To borrow a bit from Brian Tracy, if you want to go to San Diego, you take roads that lead to San Diego. If you want to go to Santa Barbara, you take a different set of roads that lead to Santa Barbara. In order to successfully navigate to your destination, you have to know what the destination is and which roads lead there. Every goal for your event has a set of roads that lead to the successful achievement of the goal.

The goal of the event dictates the routes you travel and effects every single event decision you make, from venue to catering. All choices come down to “does this move us toward the goal?” It is frighteningly easy to spend large amounts of money that do nothing towards achieving the goals of the event, especially when the client is the one coming up with idea.

One thing I always like to do at the start of a project is to sit down with the stakeholders and ask what the top 3 priorities are. Then we prioritize the priorities so that if there is ever any conflict we can steer back onto the correct path leading to the priorities in the order which the client specified them.

With the focus on ROI for event dollars spent, it is imperative that event producers define success and goals ahead of time. When everybody agrees on the destination, it’s a lot easier to justify costs.

What are your techniques for keep your projects on goal?

Small Business Branding with LinkedIn

A lot of small business owners are hesitant to jump into social business networking via LinkedIn and consequently they are missing a vital opportunity for branding and building their businesses.

Today we want to cover some basic concepts of using LinkedIn to brand your small business with a focus on creating your starting network. We are not going to go over details on the LinkedIn platform elements, as there are tons of great tutorials on this topic already.  

For purposes of this post, we are going to assume that you’ve created a LinkedIn account and are unsure of your next steps forward to start branding yourself and your business.  We are also going to assume you probably already have an existing network of clients, customers, and other professionals that you currently do business with via email. We want to turn this group of people into an audience for you to brand yourself to.

Create your starting network:

•  Follow the LinkedIn directions for finding contacts. Export your email address book from Outlook or whatever mail program you are using (I found that LinkedIn seems to prefer .txt files over .csv files.)  Import your contact list into LinkedIn.
•  LinkedIn will then match up your contact list with people who are already on LinkedIn and will offer to send out “Connect” invites.  You can select people individually or just go all-in and hit your entire email list with an invite.
• Sit back and watch who connects with you and how fast.

Task:  Make a list of the people who responded to your invite in the first 48 hours.  Those people who responded within 48 hours are your active business network on LinkedIn. Those are the people who are truly paying attention to the LinkedIn platform and using it. They are the audience you are branding yourself to.

Most people who are in your active network are either logging in daily to glance at their news feed, accept invitations, send out invitations, etc.  Or they are at least following what’s going on in their network via the Weekly Digest email. This means that your name is going to be appearing in front of these people (your active network) on a regular basis. 

The way to use LinkedIn most effectively as a business owner is for branding. Associating your name with an idea or ideas.

True story. There’s a guy in my network named Mike. I somehow worked with him somewhere long ago, don’t really remember. Mike used to post these slideshow presentations on business topics as a self-promotion tactic. I thought it pretty smart what he was doing and made a mental note. Then he stopped posting those great presentations....Time passes and he drops off the radar. Until about a year ago, when he joined a LinkedIn group that talks about small airplane selling. Now, for the past year, every time I see Mike’s name in my LinkedIn news feed or on a Weekly Digest update, it is in relation to a post he made in a group on airplane sales.  So, in my mind…Mike is an airplane broker. I associate his name with airplane sales because that’s what I see his name most often in relation to.  If airplane sales are not his main revenue stream, then he’s totally botched his branding because that’s what I associate him with now. 

See what I mean?  You become what you share.

To borrow a concept from Guy Kawasaki: "You should post about what you want your followers to know you for." 

Your active network is going to see every move you make on LinkedIn. And you want them to, because you are branding yourself. Everything you do will be to associate your name with key words and key ideas.

You can put ideas out in front of an enormous range of professionals with elegance and subtlety. Instead of following the ideas around, you become someone who influences the ideas in your network.

But we are not going to go into influence and ideas just yet, baby steps. First you build up an audience to play to and get comfortable with the LinkedIn Platform. You want to make your “new guy” mistakes with 20 followers, not 500. You’ll aim for adding 10 new connections a week. You want your network to grow – the larger your network, the more people you are influencing.

We will talk about sharing engaging and relevant content that builds your brand in a future post, be sure to bookmark us or add us to your RSS feed so you don’t miss it!

Small Business Video Marking - Kevin Allocca on Why videos go viral

I just watched this and was intrigued. Very intrigued. Kevin Allocca is YouTube's trends manager, and thus knows a thing or two about not only what works on YouTube but what goes viral and why.

Video marketing has been creating a lot of buzz in the business community, and with great reason. Done right, video can help you dramatically expand your reach and create a portfolio of shareable content -- who doesn't want that?

The number one thing that I take away from this video was the idea that "we don't just enjoy media now, we participate." This is an important concept for small businesses marketing via the internet and social media. Don't just broadcast; you need to participate and engage.

Via TED talks.

3 Ways to use Pinterest for Special Event Marketing

Pinterest is the rage in the social media and special events marketing world - and for good reason. It's a visually rich platform built on images, so it has lots of potential for any events that generate a lot of great images or video content. It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words and all those pictures your event generates tell a story - that story is an integral part of your special events marketing strategy.

Special Events can use Pinterest for marketing in all three marketing phases:

1) Pre-event marketing - pin images and video from previous events or images that will draw the right audience. For example, if you have an art show, start a collection of great art imagery that all links back from Pinterest to your website and/or blog. Encourage participation by announcing to your mailing list that you have a board on Pinterest for lovers of art and start your audience participating in curating the collection. Run contests around art images and showcase outstanding images curated that week on your event Facebook page.

If you have previous images from last year's event, put those up - encourage event participants to share their pictures from last year. Done correctly, you end up creating a community built around the sharing of images relating to your event. We will come back to that word: community, in future posts. Social media is all about community.

2) During event - be posting pictures and video constantly from the event, encourage your participants to do the same. Create contests and build community. The more you interact with your social participants, the more they share your content and help you build your brand/event. If you can bring them back to an email sign up page and collect addresses for future marketing, even better.

Pinterest

3) Post event marketing - it's the day after your event and you've got hundreds of photos and videos sitting around not helping you start your marketing for next year. Pin 'em up! Put them out slowly over time so that you can use this month's collection of pictures as a reason to reach out and touch your email list or Facebook fans, encourage participants to share and repin. You did hire a professional photographer, didn't you? User pictures are wonderful, but you need your own professionally shot photos for promotion. This is such a small budget item in the grand scheme of things; and any event is pound foolish to be cutting this expense to save a few pennies.

Just like any other form of social media, there are dozens of ways to build community through participation and sharing. The only limit is your own creativity and willingness to spend the time to participate yourself and cultivate the relationship.

My boards in Pinterest are here. Follow me if you like gorgeous images of architecture and art!

Marketing Your Business: The Neighborhood Approach

A Fresh Outlook to Alleviate the Confusion of Search Engine Marketing & Search Engine Optimization

Introduction

We have several websites that we maintain for ourselves and clients, so we are barraged with emergency notices from vendors that this website or that one is in need of SEO. And from their perspective, yes, they could use some; however, we think about more than the search result ranking when it comes to our sites. Result Ranking is highly weighted as one of the more important desired outcomes, which is why SEM & SEO are the current trends in strategic marketing. We prize their value as well, but we use these techniques as tactical tools, not strategically.

Strategic & Tactical Marketing Considerations

When you design and implement your marketing plan, the first thing you must decide is what you are selling. Most of us are selling goods, services, or both. This is critical to ascertain, especially with regards to the idea of Search Engine Results Rankings and clicks on your website. Just a mere “click” on a website can become a  product if you can cause an enormous number of clicks to happen in a short period of time, monetizing it through basing your Revenue Stream on traditional Advertising Models, certain number of impressions (=clicks) equals a particular cost to the advertiser. In this Advertising Model, as with a magazine’s circulation, what economically matters is the number-of-eyeballs on an ad. Here your objectives are to get any click on your page from anyone, stay for a certain amount of time, and that is it. This subordinates your content to bait-on-a-hook status where you do not care what your content is or what it says, just as long as it relevant enough to get a click.

Relevant enough? For what? Enough for the search engines to determine whether or not to put it at the top of the Organic Results for any reason and for anyone. Huffington Post is a good example of this. They create little of their own source content, but they are master curators of others’ content. To them, it does not matter that someone with or without cancer clicks on an abstract of a currently circulating article/subject on, say, some new research and product that helps. They delivered their value proposition to their customer segment when the page was clicked-on or a sponsored ad was clicked-through. This is SEM & SEO on steroids, and a business model in and of itself.

Wrap-up

The following posts will not be about the strategic seo gaming, although some of it is necessary and helpful. We will explore the business owners’ opportunities to seize control of their own business marketing and have the marketing investment dollar return ten-fold in new access to the targeted customer segments.

In simple terms, if you are a Locksmith with a shop in Long Beach and take great pride in your 24-7 Emergency Services within a 25-mile radius. Unless you have invented a new bullet-proof locking mechanism that you want to sell to anyone, your primary revenue streams lie within your 25-miles service area. You only deliver your value proposition when you make that service call or counter sale at the shop. So do not pay for advertising, marketing and promotions dollar for anything outside your territory. If you are good and authoritative, you will earn that fame just by being dynamite in your own market.

So next time, we will talk about drilling down to what it is that you do or what your product does and your strategic marketing plan. We will start by clearly identifying what you do that directly benefits your customer segment(s).

Be sure to bookmark us or add us to your RSS feed for more installments of this post and other good stuff.