Social Media – where the selfish thrive
The only way to really truly succeed in social media marketing is to learn to be selfish. What I mean by that is that you’ve got to learn to love it. Luckily it’s an easy thing to love (for a lot of people).
I talk to business professionals every day about how to use social media as a vehicle for growing your business. A lot of people think ‘Oh I have to do this and that and I have to do this as well and….’ The problem is that people often look at it as a burden. If this describes you then you need a paradigm shift right away.
When I really started delving into social media I did it slow. There was no way I was going to start using Twitter, Friendfeed, read 50 blogs a day, enter all my contacts into linked in, experiment on some niche social networks… you get the idea. There’s so much to do that it makes no sense form a strategy standpoint to try to do everything at once.
In my case, I started with a blog. Then I joined a niche social network for business professionals in Indiana. I moved on from there to everything else. As I eased my way into social media I slowly began to love it, and that’s why I’m so active in social media today. I don’t necessarily do it to build my personal brand, or promote my company, or anything else. I do it because I truly love it. I do it selfishly. If you can get to the point in your life where the things you HAVE to do are the same things that you LOVE to do, then you’re doing very well indeed.
Buzzzzzzzzzz
This is how it starts. One buzz. One follower. One idea. But, bees are not solitary creatures. A few of your followers start talking and your message spreads, or no one says a word and it shrivels up and dies. This has been the way of the world since the dawn of civilization.
In the 17th century coffeehouses were banned in France. Why? Because people talk. The monarchy considered coffeehouses to be subversive because when people get together ideas always spread. People talk even faster under the influence of caffeine.
The advent of the printing press was the second most important technological development of all time (I’ll talk about the first in a second). Suddenly the speed at which ideas could travel was dramatically accelerated. One idea, duplicated thousands of times, spreads through the populace. But it still took time. Printing and distribution limited the speed at which information could travel.
Fast forward to the present. The social web. The most important technological development in the history of the world. Ideas spread instantly. Communities of followers emerge overnight. Your success hinges on 2 factors and 2 factors alone. 1) Is your idea good enough, original enough, and groundbreaking enough to inspire people to follow? and 2) Are you utilizing the tools available to allow your idea to ignite?
One follower becomes two. Two becomes 4. Your hive grows and grows. Lets go harvest some honey.
Your website is software, your blog is for content.
This is becoming more and more true and it’s only going to become more widespread in the next few years. The ‘informational website’ is going to go away and give rise to websites that are a lot more like software applications and a lot less like press releases and information packets. Asp.net, php, ajax, and javascript are already beginning to replace html web pages. In this new age of complicated scripts and high-tech interfaces, people will come to your website to DO things instead of merely gather information. They’ll get your information from your blog.
In the next few years business blogging will become ever more important. In fact it will be critical. There will simply be no way for anyone to find your business or organization without a blog that is updated relatively frequently. Now is a golden opportunity to get ahead of the curve. Right now it’s possible to jump on the bandwagon and enjoy a few years of success before your competition tunes in and eliminates your monopoly of the market.
So, what do you do with your website? Be creative. What services can you make available to your customers? How can you make it easier for people to buy from you? Do you do ecommerce? Should your customers be able to view their account online? What makes sense from a customer service standpoint. These are questions that even the most technically backward companies are going to have to acknowledge in the coming years.
The fact is that the only things that are valuable on the Internet are content and services. Content tells people what they need to know and services let people ‘do stuff’ to make their lives easier or more fun or whatever. My recommendation is to provide both, and to do it now and not in five years when you’ve already missed the boat.
5 reasons no one cares about your blog
1. You don’t care about anyone else’s blog. There’s kind of a karma effect in blogging. If you don’t read and comment on other people’s blogs then people don’t know what you do or even that your blog is out there. Say you have a gardening blog. Find another gardening blog. Read a post that interests you and write ‘nice post blah blah blah I too have a gardening blog blah blah blah…”
2. You’re not working to broadcast your message. The most obvious place to broadcast is on twitter. Since twitter is up-to-the-minute, people can check out your latest post as soon as you post it. Also you can find people who are talking about similar things that you talk about.
3. You haven’t done the basics. Have you registered your blog with feedburner and technorati? Are you set up with Google Analytics? These are things that must be done. I’m not saying that these things will get you traffic, but they’re basic and easy to do. Just do it.
4. You’re not leveraging social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Stumbleupon, Digg, and Reddit. An associate of mine had 40 thousand hits the other day because of a random post he submitted to Reddit. There are similar success stories all over the web. These sites are where people who want to read good stories go to find them. It’s your job to start showing up. If your stuff is good, there’s a lot better chance that you’ll get site traffic.
5. You don’t post often enough. I once heard someone define the word ‘blog’ as, ‘a crappy website that someone started with good intentions and then abandoned’. Every once in a while I’ll find a story that I like on some random blog and I’ll decide to subscribe only to find that they only update once every 3 weeks. Why would I go to the trouble of checking your feed every day if you don’t even have the decency to put up a new post 2-3 times a week?
Surviving the Blizzard of '09
I think it’s obvious to anyone living in the Indianapolis area that it is EXTREMELY snowy out right now. When I realized how incredibly snowy it was I realized that if I didn’t stock up on some supplies we wouldn’t survive the blizzard. I am the man of the house after all (I live with my fiancee and my sister), and I have a responsibility to provide for the women-folk.
So, we all got bundled up and made the 4 block trek to our friendly neighborhood Walgreen’s pharmacy. Hey, it’s not a mega-mart, but I don’t think we did too bad.
If you’re going to survive a blizzard, here’s what you’ll need…
1 – Jiffy corn muffin mix (2 packages)
2 – Shredded Mexican cheese
3 – Jose Ole frozen Chimichangas (2 ea)
4 – Dwight Yoakum’s chicken fries (2 boxes)
5 – 20 oz Diet Coke
6 – 20 oz Diet 7 up
7 – Goobers (1 box)
8 – Sliced American Cheese
9 – 1 Dozen Lg Eggs
10 – 6-pack Chicken flavored Ramen Noodles
11 – 56 oz Walgreens brand vanilla ice cream
12 – 6-pack English muffins
13 – Tostitos tortilla chips
14 – Salsitas tortilla chips
15 – Fruity Pebbles cereal (1 box)
16 – 1/2 gallon 2 % milk
17 – Oscar Meyer lunchable snack pack (not pictured)
Can you believe that all these wonders can be found at a Walgreen’s pharmacy!? How did you survive the blizzard?
Shocking Website Design
I was working on a web project late last night when I received an email from my friend Erik Deckers confirming a meeting we had this morning and asking me to take a look at his new website. Naturally I clicked through to find that the site was unbelievably, astoundingly, and shockingly YELLOW. I mean, you really need to click through and check this thing out. It is INTENSE.
It was so intense that I had to stare at it for a few seconds before I could get my bearings. However, after those few seconds I started to take a look and I really fell in love with the intensity. There are so many sites out there that look alike and this one is very different. After reading some of the content I found that the yellow wasn’t really as hard to look at as you might think, and it’s definitely unforgettable.
I think it looks a lot like the yellow pages, which is cool if you own a marketing company, because you’re always trying to steal money out of people’s yellow pages budgets. Erik says it reminds him of an old-style newspaper which is also cool. It’s just really nice to see someone doing something different for a change.
So I came in this morning to meet Erik and a few other local Indianapolis networkers to discuss an upcoming event. He asked everyone ‘So what’d you think of my new site?’ ‘I don’t like it, it’s too YELLOW.’ They all proclaimed. Oh well… I like it anyway.
Why Seth Godin Loves Me
So I’m at the bookstore with my fiancee yesterday looking through the business and marketing books and I see that there is only one copy left of Seth Godin’s book ‘Unleashing the Ideavirus‘. I read Seth’s blog fairly regularly, and I’ve also read a few of his other books, and lots of people have recommended that I buy ‘Unleashing the Ideavirus’, but I don’t think anything ever had as much of an effect on me as the time when Seth commented on one of my blog posts.
So, I meet back up with my lady and I show her what I’ve decided to purchase. ‘Are you obsessed with Seth Godin’, she asks. I though about it for a moment and I realized that Seth Godin is obsessed with ME (well at least people like me)! A lot of people ask me ‘How can I leverage blogging as a strategy for building relationships with my customers?’ You do exactly as Seth has done.
You set up a system where you reward your customers for spreading your message, and believe me the reward does not have to be monetary, in fact it’s better if it’s not. In my previous post where I mentioned Seth’s blog, I was absolutely floored when I got an actual reply. Obviously it’s worth a lot to Seth when people spread his message, but do you think I would have been nearly as ecstatic if Seth had sent me a check for $2? No!
Blogging is a great tool for INCLUDING your customers in your success. It allows you to talk, but it also provides an avenue to listen. It’s a great way to show your customers that you really do care, control your message, and listen to feedback. What do you think Seth?
One of my Biggest Wordpress Pet Peeves
In my never-ending search for knowledge, I picked up a new book today which reminded me of one of my all time pet peeves. The book is a guide to wordpress 2 by Maria Langer and Miraz Jordan. It seems to be really good resource for learning the ins and outs of wordpress setup, customization, and management.
While reading one of the setup chapters they describe how to setup the outgoing RSS feed options. Here’s where I get irritated sometimes. Some people set up their RSS feed so that when you view it in a reader you can only see about the first 100 words of the post. To view the rest of the post you have to click through to the actual page itself.
What’s the point? The reason I subscribe to RSS is so that I can easily read lots of blogs at the same time. It’s not that I don’t understand the reasoning behind this decision. The blog owner wants you to click through to their site so that you can see their ads, blog, design, and whatever else they have displayed there, but I GARANTEE that I will UNSUBSCRIBE to your feed if you do this.
Here’s the thing; you don’t want this to happen. People who read lots of blogs are the very same ones who are likely to cite what you’ve written, link back to your blog, and tell others about it. You need to make it AS EASY AS POSSIBLE for these people to enjoy your content.
To avoid this situation go to the ’settings’ tab in wordpress. Click on the ‘reading’ button. Scroll down to where it says ‘For each article in a feed, show…’ and select ‘full text’. Not ’summary’. Follow this tip and people (like me) are much less likely to unsubscribe to your feed. If anyone has some good reasons why they choose ’summary’ please let me know in the comments.
Is your marketing working???
The real question with every marketing initiative you consider should be, WHY? Why should I blog? Why am I doing direct mail? Why should I pay an SEO consultant to work on my website? What are the results going to be? How am I going to measure those results? What is a reasonable time frame? What is the ROI going to be? IS THIS GOING TO PUT DOLLARS IN MY POCKET?
If you can’t get answers to these questions, then why do anything? At the end of the day, if you spend $5000 a month on marketing, then that should result in more than $5000 in profit. If it doesn’t, then you need to re-evaluate what you’re doing. If you don’t know, then that’s even worse.
There are a variety of sources at your disposal to find out what you should be doing, why you should be doing it, and how to measure success on the back end. It’s absolutely imperative that you know. No one should be flushing money down the toilet, when it’s completely feasible to make a plan that works. Are you putting money in your pocket with your marketing, or are you just spinning your wheels?
Live in person! Live! Over the web
My honest goal is to help people utilize social media as a valuable business tool. I though I’d share a few tips on how I combine online networking and face-to-face networking. I have a very simple strategy. First I attend an in-person networking event where I talk to other business professionals and try to start establishing a relationship (and discern who I should be establishing relationships with). I make sure that I get cards from everyone that I talk to. Pretty basic stuff.
At the end of each event I look through the stack of business cards and think about each person I talked to and what I talked to them about. I jot down notes if I think I’ll forget anything. When I get back to my office I take the stack of cards and type in each contact’s name into LinkedIn and SmallerIndiana to see if they’re set up in either network. I use these two networks, because most people in Indianapolis who network are set up on both services.
My goal is to connect with everyone I meet on as many platforms as possible. This serves a dual purpose. 1) I remind every contact I meet a few different times that we did in fact meet. I’d like to think that I’m unforgettable, but sadly it’s just not the case. 2) It helps me remember all the people I meet. My memory’s not perfect either. It also provides an easy way for me to contact that person in the future.
Using social networks to organize your contacts is a great start in your quest to dominate online. Obviously there are many ways to take this a lot further, but this is a great jumping-off point. Does anyone have any other tips for leveraging the power of social media for networking? Please leave them in the comments.
Hi, I'm Colin Clark, President of TribeSwell. We specialize in helping small businesses utilize online technologies to drastically expand their business. From social media consulting to search engine marketing, we have the skills and knowledge to take your business to the next level. read more 
