Category

Social Media

Mar 02
Love0

Social Media Therapy: Keeping my Eye on the Zuckerberg Prize

By Social Media

If you follow me in all the various places online, you know that a) I hurt my back awhile ago b) I have been going to physical therapy to get better and c) the injury woke me up to the need to get in shape and follow a plan to do so.

The good news is that all I’m doing is working — really working. And even though it is sometimes painful or I don’t feel like it, the exercises, eating right and getting increasingly more active are going to have the results I desire.

I was propped up after a grueling session, with a heating pad on my knee and the issue of Time with Zuckerberg on the cover, thinking about physical therapy and social media.

There are many similarities between following a strategic digital communications plan and a self-improvement plan.

  1. You enter with your goals in mind. With my healthy-living plan I’m losing weight and strengthening my core so I get pressure off my arthritic knees and avoid injuring my back again. With social media, you should begin knowing that you want the work to result in establishing you as a thought leader in your industry, or in increased sales that help you make your business goals. It doesn’t matter what the goals are, as long as they’ve been defined.
  2. In social media as in exercise, you can’t just do it once here and there and expect results. You can’t binge exercise then sit on the couch for a month. It takes consistent effort and renewed challenges. My physical therapist will ask me how I feel and if I’m not groaning too much, will make me do another set of exercises. Challenge yourself — if you get used to doing one blog post a week, challenge yourself to crank out two.
  3. You can’t cheat. I know that if I eat that donut and don’t enter the points using my Weight Watchers tools, I still ate the donut, and if I do that too often, I’m not only not going to lose the weight, I’m going to gain weight. Since I really, really want to slim down, not just for summer, or my son’s upcoming wedding, but for life, then cheating becomes less attractive. You can’t cheat social media either — people try to hire someone else to do it for them, or sacrifice authenticity and engagement by relying too much on automated actions. To create lasting relationships, you’ve got to be there, and you’ve got to stick it out.

I’m paying attention to the techniques the physical therapists use to keep me motivated so I can apply them to clients struggling to stick with a social media plan. And as I stick to both my healthy living plan and my own social media pursuits, I will keep picturing myself (a fit and thin me) on a future cover of Time.

 

Feb 23
Love0

7-Steps to Social Media Startup for Small Businesses

By Social Media

My friend Denny and I go way back. So far, in fact, that I remember him trying to teach me how to do paradiddles during our freshman year sociology class at the University of Missouri.

Apparently people call him Dennis now, but he’ll always be Denny to me.

Yes, Denny is a drummer (that’s a recent photo on the right), and it’s been no surprise to me that over the last several years he’s been teaching young kids how to be drummers, too.

The music store where Denny taught is closing shop, and Denny intends to continue his side-business from home. He reached out to me for some advice on how to market his services efficiently and inexpensively.

Here’s what I told him to do . . .

7 Steps to Social Media Startup for Small Businesses

  1. Buy the domain name for your business and/or your first and last name.
  2. Arrange for a year or more of hosting the website (I am fond of DreamHost).
  3. Install something easy to manage, like WordPress on the site.
  4. Get some YouTube videos posted of you and your students.
  5. Create a Facebook page for your business and share it with all of your friends, students and former students.
  6. Grab a Twitter account and include “drum lessons” and your location in the bio — make sure you’re following people in your community (find them via Tweepz.com) and interacting with them.
  7. Create a schedule for yourself and post new content to your website at least once a week — drum solo videos, your thoughts on your approach to teaching, your favorite drummers (etc.)

If Denny, (ahem) Dennis, does all of this, and makes sure he’s connecting via LinkedIn and Facebook with members of his community, parents and potential students, I’m sure he’ll have dozens of future drummers beating down his door.

Feb 23
Love0

How to Seduce Others into Social Media

By Social Media

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we’ve been successful at moving the social media needle in business.

It’s what Jay Baer and Amber Naslund call The Now Revolution, that tipping point at which business realized that this social phenomenon that has over taken the Internet is not going away; that it affects business, for good or for bad and ignoring it is a not only a bad business practice, but can cause your business to fail.

While I’m trying to figure out how to afford to buy a copy of Jay and Amber’s brilliant book for all my clients, I asked my readers to share some of the ways they’ve been able to create excitement around social strategy. Some of the best answers are here:

20% of New Patient Base Comes from Social Media

I’ve shared with my colleagues that as a working mom with a little one, launching a biz in a down economy in a new location…all I could manage WAS growing my biz through social media and connecting online.

I’ve had at least 20% of my new patient base come in as referrals from social media, not to mention thousands of dollars of free media exposure on the news, magazines (including a national publication), newspapers, and numerous websites….all from consistently and sincerely getting engaged in social media.

It’s cost me time and sweat equity, but the pay-off has been tremendous. Seriously…who can’t afford to get involved today? — Dr. Dolly Garnecki, Spinal Health and Wellness, http://www.scoliosisdoc.com/

Show, Don’t Tell

When we had our first meeting to discuss the fact that we really needed to be engaging with our customers via social media I really didn’t need to actually SAY much at all. I just pulled up the very active Facebook pages of our top competitors in each of our geographic areas… they were there, they were active, and it was CLEAR they were talking to OUR customers! Point made!  – Andrea Heapes, High Peak Sportswear, http://www.hipeak.com/

Networking on Steriods

In 18 months on Twitter and Facebook I’ve met, connected with, and become friends with far more people here, than I had in the previous 10 years living here without it. Social media is networking on steroids. Trying to go without it is like leading a sedentary life and expecting to remain fit. — Steve Gaines, Monticello Media http://twitter.com/SteveGaines62

These are great stories to share with clients, businesses and organizations still dragging their feet into “now.”

If your business is already engaged in social media, what was the tipping point that made you begin?

Feb 21
Love0

The 4 Must-Do Items for Social Media Startup

By Social Media

A friend of mine (and former colleague) is a public relations consultant in another market. She, like many of us in PR, is being asked for good counsel in social media for her PR client. She sent a note, asking me for quick basics to share with the client, and to give her a framework for what the client should be doing with social media.

Here are the four absolute musts for her client to be doing with social media, and the structure with which she should be building a plan to address her client’s needs:

  1. Listening — they should be reading local bloggers and have RSS feeds set up/alerts to tell them when people are posting online, looking for key words and phrases that indicate people searching for their services — you can use Ice Rocket, Social Mention and Google Alerts to create feeds for good monitoring of the social web.
  2. Connecting — whomever represents the company online needs to expand their social network as wide and deep as possible. That means ALL contacts uploaded to LinkedIn, a new list on Facebook for business connections, with all contacts uploaded there, a Facebook page for the business and exploring Tweepz to figure out who to follow in the community.
  3. Engaging — this is what takes a lot of effort; replying to others, responding to those you’re following, in short, interaction!
  4. Publishing — sharing the stories of the customers, the company, the vendors, etc. and news releases as well (and republishing content published by others, e.g., sharing links to news clips about the business.)

This is probably the quickest, simplest answer I can give for getting started with social media.

Feb 17
Love0

The Independent Author and Social Media: A Marriage of Necessity

By Social Media
Editor’s note: I’m out gallivanting (actually, several speaking gigs and new clients to serve this week), so my friend and social media-savvy author, William Esmont has provided us with a guest post. Enjoy!

With the introduction of the Kindle platform, Amazon made it possible for independent authors and publishers to make their work available to the world with a click of the mouse.

Independent authors rejoiced. Then they set about the business of learning how to sell on the web, and in the process, discovered it’s a lot harder than it looks.

Following are some strategies I learned during my first year as an independent author. In isolation, they are interesting diversions. When combined however, they become a powerful machine capable of drawing global attention to your work and building a loyal fan base of repeat customers.

1. Independent author message boards

Web sites like kindleboards, nookboards, and mobileread are excellent places to meet other authors and hone your craft.

2. Twitter

Create an account dedicated to your writing identity and tweet about your experiences. All of them. Learn hash tags and use them to your advantage.

3. Goodreads

Goodreads is like Facebook for book aficionados. This is where hardcore readers congregate.

4. Book Bloggers

A good review from the right blogger can send your sales into the stratosphere. All they ask in return is a review copy.

5. Facebook

Create a Facebook page for your author activities and post in writing-related groups using the new ‘post as page’ functionality.

6. Personal Blog

This is your public face. Link it with Twitter and your blog posts are distributed to the world automatically.

And last, but not least, buy business cards. You never know when the person sitting next to you in Starbucks is a potential customer.

William Esmont lives and writes in Tucson, Arizona. You can learn more about him and his books at www.williamesmont.com.