Entries Tagged 'Social Media' ↓

Just finished reading the book Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk. Great book (only 150 pages) about following your passion and the use of social media to achieve these dreams. Some of you might not know Gary, he is the founder behind Wine Library TV. Gary has quite a story of were he came from, growing up in New York working for his father, and his passion and entrepreneurial spirit.

Gary has some great suggestions and examples as to how you can turn your passion into your personal brand and business. One of Gary’s strategies was the use of social media to market his brand!

Leveraging social network platforms into effective conduits for your personal brand is all about building word of mouth. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk

Chapters 5 and 6 – Create Great Content and Choose Your Platforms – provide great advice as to how to create your content and distribute it through the various social media platforms. Chapter 11 – Start Monetizing – provides some ideas as to how you can start making money from your brand – granted you need to build your followers and brand first. In Appendix A – Did You Forget Anything – Gary provides a quick checklist to help you get started.

I highly recommend this as a great introduction book to anyone interested in how they can turn what they know, and are passionate about, into their dreams of doing it for a living!

I have been recently viewing the plethora of posts on Facebook, Twitter, etc. from various people and organizations. I assume these people or organizations are attempting to leverage social media as one of their marketing strategies. One thing that was quite alarming was the number of posts that had no follow through in terms of responses to comments made by viewers.

The whole point of utilizing social media is to engage in conversation with your followers or customers. Utilizing social media, as one of your marketing strategies, should not be treated like the traditional approaches; whereby, you shotgun information out on as many mediums as possible in hopes that a percentage of recipients will respond (i.e. leads in traditional marketing terms) and you will be able to convert these into opportunities.

The point of social media is to engage with people in order to learn more about them, and they can learn more about yourself and organization. Only once they feel comfortable, and start to trust you, will there be an opportunity for your business. Now this may sound a little manipulative, in terms of attempting to establish trust, with the intention of try to generate business. However, I believe if you are sincere, whereby you really believe that you are trying to help them with need or a problem, than this shouldn’t be an issue. One of the best definitions for marketing I have ever heard is…

Marketing is getting people who have a specific need or problem to know, like, and trust you.

Remember, the point of using social media is to engage with your followers and customers. Therefore, be sure to take every opportunity to respond to comments made by your viewers.

I have just recently designed, developed and launched a new website for my client Quest Wellness. This was my first website developed on the awesome CMS (Content Management System) Expression Engine. Expression Engine had a bit of a learning curve to it, however once I mastered this I find it to be one the best and most flexible CMS I have ever worked with.

So what else did I do besides the website. I integrated the website blog and event calendar into their Facebook Fan Page and Twitter account. So now when Quest Wellness updates their blog, or adds upcoming events, their social media sites will be updated automatically. Also, the website and relevant pages where optimized for search engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo, etc.) based on key words and phrases.

In terms of measuring the results of these effort I have integrated their website, Fan Page and Twitter account with analytics so that they can see how many visitors the get, how long the visitors stay at the site and what the visitors are looking at. This is important to understand in order to determine which of their marketing activities are successful.

If you would like to learn more about this project, or what I could do for your company or organization, please do not hesitate to contact me.

I am about to go on a bit of a rant here, just to warn you.  Now don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter and concept of micro-blogging, but the Twitter-sphere has become insane!  It has become spamming nightmare!  Just this morning as I was going through my Twitter followers, looking for those that I believe are posting interesting content and I would like to follow,  my followers were increasing faster than those I was removing… YES I remove followers!

I remove followers… GASP!  Yes, as eveyone and their dog is preaching about how to increase your followers, I am removing some of mine.  To me it is about “quality” and not “quantity”.  If you have followers, that are not reading your tweets, then do you really have a follower?  It would be like saying… If you Tweet in a forest, and no one is there to hear it, did you really Tweet at all?  Some of the things that I look at when I evaluate the quality of a “potential” follower are:

• Are they a real person, i.e. is there a picture of them, do they post more than just links back to a site, etc.
• Are they Tweeting ways to increase your Twitter followers (sure sign of a spammer) or some other link generation strategy!
• Do they follow more people than would be reasonably possible, e.g. if they follow tens of thousands of people then it is a pretty good indication they are not reading the Tweets of who they are following.
• Do they follow other people of similar interests, or are they just following anyone with no real discretion as to the content.

These are just a few of things that I look at when deciding if I want to keep them as a follower, and I have no hesitation of blocking and reporting someone for spamming.  I believe the quality and integrity of myself comes into question based on who I follow on Twitter, and just as importantly who I allow to follow me on Twitter!  So please people of the Twitter-sphere, let’s crack down on those that are ruining Twitter for the rest of us, or it will become just another spamming – if not already so – tool like email has become!

OK, I am done my rant now, feeling much better!

I am currently reading the book Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.  The book describes how to use the web to build influence, improve reputation and earn trust.  The dilemma I have with this is that if you are attempting to build trust in order to influence people, is this right?  Many organization are looking at the social web as the new medium for marketing.  Admittedly, I am not a big fan of marketing, I have taken numerous marketing classes at the local University and each time I do I walk away with moral dilemmas.  Regardless, is it ethical to build a relationship with someone, to gain their trust, just so that you can promote yourself or businesses?

I don’t have an answer to the previous questions.  However, one way that I look at this dilemma is to go back to the word “trust”.  To me trust is all about intentions, when I engage in a relationship with someone I always ask myself “what is my intent”?  If I can honestly answer myself with “to help this person to the best of my abilities”, then I believe I am trustworthy.  This does not mean that I will always live up to their expectations.  However, if my intent was true, and I can honestly say that I gave it my best effort, then I can live with the results.

So one last question I would like to answer is what is my intent with regards to my company.  My intention is to follow my passions, work at doing what I enjoy, and generate an income that provides for me and my family.  For my customers my intent is to help them utilize technology and the Internet to promote what they are passionate about, whether this be a new business, organization or worthy cause.