You’re a savvy business owner, so you’re using social media. Unfortunately, you can’t say for certain whether or not it’s really worth your time. If you’re asking yourself what you should be doing and what you should be getting out of social media, the following three musts are for you.
Use Social Media to Find New Ideas
Business owners are some of the best idea people in the world. They find a need in their community and figure out how to address it, but the most aware business owners recognize that they can learn a lot and get a lot of new ideas from others. Whether just monitoring, dipping in a toe, or spending hours in social media, you can pick up a lot of new ideas in social media.
Use Twitter searches, Topsy, Social Mention, and other services to search for your company, your competitors, your industry, and mentions of your local area. Find people that are having relevant conversations and jump in to see what you can learn from them. And, don’t forget to keep track of what people say so that you can see what new ideas get mentions most.
Involve Your Whole Staff
HubSpot, Dell, Cisco, and Zappos are perfect examples of companies that involve their whole staff in social media, which not only takes the burden of the leadership, marketing, and PR departments, but also makes handling customer service and spreading awareness of the company easier because they have more than just one person supporting multiple channels. Imagine that you run a shoe store and have one employee that is really passionate about photography and another that loves music. Ask your photographer is she would like to contribute to your Instagram, Facebook, and other accounts that can host images. Ask you musician if he would like to share his love of music or if he wants to help create videos for the business that you can then share on YouTube and other channels. This helps to share the burden, since social media is time consuming, and ensures that both people with passion for social media and people with diverse interests get the opportunity to connect you to different parts of your potential audience.
Give Sneak Previews of Upcoming Products and Services
Offering sneak previews of your new products or services online to your potential customers is one of the best ways to build demand even before a launch. The customers can provide vital feedback that can be extremely helpful in ensuring a smooth and better launch. You can post photos of your new products or services on your social media sites and ask for comments from customers.
Anyone that is interested in ever improving themselves in anything and anyone that might ever want to be a parent.
When?
Now.
Why?
This book left the strongest impression on me of almost any book I have read in the last few years.
Best Quote
Research confirms that merely putting in the years isn’t much help to someone who wants to be a great performer.
Review
Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated is the perfect companion for Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. They discuss very similar topics, while Colvin’s book goes much more deeply into the hard work aspect of becoming great. Colvin’s thesis is that the truly great get there not just by putting in the time, but by putting in the time deliberately. Great violinists don’t practice just the things that are fun. They practice the things that need practiced most whether they are fun or not, and they do this over and over until they become masters. The same goes for athletes, business people, and more.
I was so impressed by Talent is Overrated partially because it is extremely well researched and written, but even more so because it made me wonder how great I could be at something if I was more deliberate or maybe even how great my children could be if I helped them to be more deliberate. Think about it. If success is a determiner of happiness and success could be achieved with dedicated and deliberate practice, wouldn’t you go out of your way to do that for yourself and your family?
Last Word
I wholeheartedly recommend Talent is Overrated to anyone that thinks they might be even remotely interested. Even for non-business people, I really believe that you will find this fascinating simply when looking at it through the lens of your personal life and your family’s.
Companies like SEOmoz and HubSpot make marketing look easy. Not only do a number of their employees blog and participate in relevant conversations on other blogs, Quora, and a number of other sites, but they also have very responsive social media outlets on Facebook and Twitter. Seeing that and then reading things like this from my friend Marcus make some of us think, “We need to do that. I could do that. Let’s do it.”
After all, if you can make everyone in your company a marketer, that will not only reduce marketing’s workload, but also give you so much more content and perspectives to work with, right? Right? Wrong.
Good marketing requires planning and coordination.
The thing that you don’t think about when you read social media books and blogs about new marketing is that the central leadership role of the CMO, CCO, VPM, or even just community manager is more important than ever. Without standards and guidelines and then a quality filter (ie. your head of marketing), blog posts go out that have bad formatting, terrible writing, and are off message; emails get sent that don’t align with your strategy; and updates get posted to Twitter and Facebook that ultimately make you look bad.
I won’t link to any examples because there’s no need to shame anyone, but have you ever seen something from a company in social media, email, on a blog, etc and thought, “That’s a little weird coming from them”? There’s a good chance that company tried to make someone a marketer, when they really weren’t, and didn’t put the proper planning and coordination in place to ensure that their content aligned with the business’ goals.
via Occupy Global
Sadly, the marketing problem is often the CEO.
I’ve seen too many organizations where the CEO charged in with passion, which is great, and promptly messed everything up, which is not great.
Making everyone a marketer doesn’t mean there should no longer be internal controls, guidelines, filters, or a gatekeeper. Just because your CEO calls the shots doesn’t mean that your lowly community manager doesn’t know better how your blog subscribers will react to his writing, so when you do try to make everyone a marketer, your CEO might have to slow down and be forced to take a No or simply just guidance from the real marketers.
Get yourself a schedule, a gatekeeper, some training, and the power to tell people No.
It’s so easy to avoid this problem too. As long as your CEO recognizes the need for quality and consistency, she should be willing to stick to a plan. Once you have the CEO on board, you can make everyone a marketer and still ensure that you don’t have those embarrassing things happen.
This is one of the best marketing books I have ever read.
Best Quote
Marketing by interrupting people isn’t cost-effective anymore. You can’t afford to seek out people and send them unwanted marketing messages, in large groups, and hope that some will send you money.
Instead, the future belongs to marketers who establish a foundation and process where interested people can market to each other. Ignite consumber networks and then tet out the way and let them talk.
Review
I first read Permission Marketing 2 years ago and was blown away. Recently, I revisited it in audiobook form and was still very impressed. Even though it was written in 1999, it is still one of the best books for marketers looking to build their foundation in permission marketing.
Since this book was published, forward thinking marketing has grown into inbound marketing, content marketing, and more – the value of all of which will be debated for years. Regardless though, Seth Godin helped to push marketing leaps and bounds ahead of where it had been as soon as Permission Marketing came out.
Last Word
A permission mindset is not the only thing I look for when hiring a marketer, but it is a huge qualifier. Paid media, PR, branding, and other aspects of marketing all have their place at the table, but if a young marketer does not have at least a basic grasp of permission, it tells me that either their education was poor or they’re more interested in short term, zero-sum games than long terms benefits.
I’ve been blogging since early 2007 and have made money and gotten recognition from it, but not in the way that most aspirants think of it. The fact of the matter is that making money directly from blogging is nearly impossible. I’ve run AdSense, participated in affiliate campaigns, been paid for my writing, and more, and the money I can attribute to directly to my blogging is easily less than $200 per year on average.
At the same time, my income has quadrupled, I’ve spoken at conferences and events like the DMA and Social Slam, and I’ve secured a position as a knowledgable and dependable marketer and analyst. Those results easily outweigh the direct financial benefits of blogging, but I would never have realized them if all I had been focused on was making money from blogging.
via Maria Reyes-McDavis
How can you make money blogging?
As trite as it sounds, don’t focus on the money. The thing is that you can afford to not focus on the money is you don’t delude yourself into thinking that your blog is your business. It’s not. It is a vehicle for you and your business.
Do great work. Create a great product. Make your customers so happy that they blog about you.
Then and only then, when your business is so good that you can afford to spend time on blogging, write about what you know best. If you’re a web startup CEO, don’t blog about marketing and social media unless that’s where you really add value. Stick to leadership, company building, or leadership. If you’re a market analyst, stick to that. How do you add value by blogging about tools, or engagement, or management?
via cowbite
Yeah, I don’t know either.
Stick to what you know, and don’t focus on the money.
The best bloggers create crap content now and then, and they’re writing about their areas of expertise, so how can you or I compete if we don’t stick to what we know best?
Simple answer – we can’t, and it gets even worse if trying to market yourself or your company or, worse, make money from blogging comes at the expense of actually doing great work.
By this time, the question of whether or not you should be using social media to grow your online business has been answered definitively, and it was a yes. The question that remains in most people’s mind though is How. How do you actually use social media to grow your online business?
Customer Communication Platform
Some people don’t like the phone. Others don’t like email. Others don’t like face-to-face communication, and on, and on, and on. Social media introduces a whole new set of channels through which you have the opportunity to communicate with your customers, and while some people do not like using social media, 950 million people using Facebook, hundreds of millions using Twitter, and millions more using other channels confirm that there is a large potential audience there for you.
The thing to look for when using social media to grow your online business is not how easy can you make it or how many possible places can you spread your message to, but rather what does each audience in each different channel want to communicate about. Tailor your content and your communication style to each audience and each channel in order to make your message as relevant and meaningful as possible.
Monitor the Competition
Social media is one of the best platforms to help in monitoring competitors without going out into the field to carry out a market research analysis of them. Your competitors will tell their customers what they are doing and, in turn, those customers will possibly say something about your competitors over social media. Such information is important as it will help you know what you competitors are up to and how other people are reacting to any new developments they have. From there, you can then adjust your business accordingly to keep abreast with the competition.
Use tools like Topsy, Social Mention, Twitter searches, IFTTT, and others to monitor what your competition is saying, what people are saying about them, and what people are saying about you.
Increase Search Engine Ranking
Prior to social media being widely accepted, search engines primarily used factors like inbound links and textual analysis in order to determine which pages should rank highest in search results. The problem with this is that very few people manage websites, so if you’re counting how many links a website has pointing at it as a sign of how popular it is, you’re missing all of the votes of people that don’t run websites.
Now that so many people use social media, social signals like tweets and Facebook likes act as votes of popularity and value. The more social signals search can see your website has, the better it will rank in search results.
Build Credibility
The key to building credibility in social media is to first build a trusting relationship with your customers. Once rapport is established, then your customers can feel comfortable including you in the constant information and feedback stream that is a Facebook, Twitter, or other social media feed. There are several ways that will help you be able to build your reputation and credibility for your customers to totally trust in you. These include:
Making sure that people are aware that you know what you are doing and that you are an expert in your area. In so doing, they can trust that you are aware of their specific needs. This means, if you’re a designer, talk about design. Sure, the odd football comment or random joke can pop in there now and then to show your personality, but if you’re a designer with a Facebook page and you want to use it to grow your business, talk about things related to your business that people will care about.
The information that you give to your customers should add value for them in some way. This information should be aimed at promoting shared interest. This means don’t talk about yourself all the time and don’t share something unless it’s really valuable to your audience. Something that isn’t valuable is just an annoyance, and every time you annoy someone, you make it easier for them to stop paying attention to you.
You should be dynamic enough to give each customer what they want by tailoring your products and services to be able to meet their specific needs. This means you should do your best to tailor your content to each channel and audience. Pay attention to whether your Twitter followers respond to the same language, content, and posting times as your Facebook fans or your Pinterest followers. There’s a good chance they like different things, so customize your content, as well as the products and services you talk about, to them.
Blog post and webpage headlines can make or break a visitor’s time on your website. A bad blog post headline is like an uninteresting email subject line, a boring book title, or a poorly written newspaper or magazine article headline. When those are boring, you don’t want to open the email, read the book, or look at the article, do you?
The same goes for your blog post and webpage headlines, but we have to add to this the fact that writing on the web isn’t just how humans. You also have to write with an eye for what people search for so that search engines know to match up your webpages with a searchers search results. You make this possible by using the language your customers use rather than industry jargon. If your customers say CD, you write CD and not album. If your customers say tennis shoes, you write tennis shoes and not sneakers.
Why? Because when I search for tennis shoes in Seattle, Google will show me the results that talk about tennis shoes and not sneakers.
How to Properly Write Headlines for SEO
How you write the headlines for your site has a significant influence on the amount of traffic that you’ll get. They have to be written in a way to attract traffic to your site now and must be versatile enough to attract traffic to your site in the future as well. Here are a few steps you can employ to be successful:
Include the primary interest you are looking to satisfy with your page. Do not keyword stuff by including everything and the kitchen sink. The more targeted you are, the better chance you stand of ranking well and also at converting website visitors.
Stick to the point by staying within a limit of 70 characters. After 65-70 characters, research has shown that keywords in headlines tend to have less of an effet on rankings. Long headlines can also appear to be keyword stuffing, which can have a negative effect on your rankings.
Write unique headlines for every page on your website. The choice of words for your headline is extremely important, so use words that will explain to your visitors what your site is about.
Use relevant words. Be sure that you understand your audience and create headlines that will convey a complete message about what your site offers.
Keys to Writing Solid Headlines
The headline (also known as the title tag) tells the search engines and readers what your website is about, so it must contain some elements that are related to your business and subject matter. The title tag will help readers decide whether to visit your website or not when it shows up in their search results. For a title tag to be effective, you should consider the following when writing it:
The length which should not exceed 70 characters, including spaces.
The most relevant keywords should be forwardly placed in the title tag, with less significant words at the end.
Keep the important phrases short and simple– do not make them read a full sentence.
Place the company or website name near the front of the title tag if it is related to your keywords; otherwise, place it near the end of the tag.
Create a different title tag for every page, of your website. Make sure that you do not duplicate, that each title tag is relevant, and briefly describes the content in the page.
Research from SEOmoz and several other companies has shown a strong correlation between optimized headlines and increased traffic from search engines, social media, email, and other channels. The reasons for this are that optimized headlines are easier for search engines to relate to a searcher’s intent, and they are more attractive for people in any channel to click on.
Last year at TED, Eli Pariser gave a talk on how Google, Facebook, and other internet-based services are increasingly filtering the web to only show up things that we generally agree with and are interested in.
In a world increasingly concerned with happiness and relevancy and speed, how do you learn something new if information is constantly being filtered for you?
You look like the sum of your actions.
I’m a married, middle class, liberal, educated, white guy, marketer that runs, rides bikes, and plays guitar now and then, so what types of things do you think I Google? Here are a few examples from the last few months:
Change a rear derailleur cable
New Balance Minimus
Stratocaster history
Obama’s staff
Average MBA age
Twitter press releases
etc etc etc
And, what kind of people do you think I friend on Facebook and what type of statuses do I tend to like, share, or comment on more than others?
So, you can see that, even if I wanted information outside of my comfort zone, Google and Facebook would be unlikely to give it to me because they want to keep me happy with their services and therefore try to keep them as relevant as possible by showing me what they think makes me happy. Let’s say that my colleague implores me to learn more about the Republican presidential candidates because he believes I should be more open minded, so I google them. More than likely, Daily Kos will outrank Fox News in my search results even if Fox News has the overall better page for my search. Why? Because, Google thinks I’d be happier with their service if I get a search result that suits my interests.
So, maybe I avoid Google and post a Facebook status, “Can someone please tell me about some good ideas the Republican presidential candidates have?” Which of my friends are more likely to see my status and even be able to respond? The ones that have the most in common with me, which Facebook judges based on whom I interact with most frequently, and if my conservative friends aren’t as likely to see my question, I’m not likely to get the best possible answer, but I’ll never know that because I don’t know what I don’t know. I can’t see the missing information. I only know that, when I get an answer, I get an answer – not whether or not it is THE BEST answer.
via paul-simpson.org
Let your thoughts be your actions.
Most of us spend 8+ hours every day in front of a computer screen. If we sleep an average of 8 hours every night, that leaves at most 8 hours for commuting, eating, exercising, spending time with family, and everything else, so if we’re really lucky, we might get one or two hours every day where our information sources are not being actively filtered – one or two hours every day when we can see billboards, commercials, magazine articles, friends, and more that bring us new or conflicting ideas. But, do we go out of our way to find competing opinions and ideas, to introduce ourselves to something outside of our comfort zone? No.
Yet, we ask ourselves questions about other’s politics, their religious beliefs, their sexuality, their cultures, and more. We’re just too busy and not really interested enough in spending the time to learn about them, and this leads our information gateways – Google and Facebook – to increasingly believe that we are what we do and not what we think, but we can change that.
Try this exercise for one day – just one day.
Whenever you think about anything around which you have an opinion, write in a notebook, make an evernote, send yourself a text, or somehow otherwise make note of it. Later in the day, do both of these things. Go to a search engine you never use – Bing, DuckDuckGo, Blekko, etc – and learn about an opposing opinion AND ask the most informed person you know for a 2 minute CliffsNotes version of the other side of the story.
That day won’t be too extremely shocking. It’s the next day or week that really starts to open your eyes.
The next day, skip reading your normal news or listening to your normal radio station and go back to those websites and friends that gave you answers and now read about and ask about more and different topics. Even if you don’t agree with the viewpoints you’re given, you’ll find yourself more informed and less filtered by what a machine thinks you want.
I tried this while living overseas in 2004 – though I’ll admit that personalization at that point was very minimal – and I’ve never gone back. Sure, I use Google while logged in without being too concerned, and I have largely friends like me on Facebook, but I no longer rely on the filters to bring me the best information. I now have a habit of going to websites I don’t agree with to get their point of view and asking friends I might have otherwise just dismissed or argued with to help me understand the full picture better.
via denn
Be deliberate and diligent.
In Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, both authors discuss that deliberate practice – and lots of it – is often one of the largest contributing factors to world class achievement. Much the same, the development of your mind and life – such that you are not a filtered, sheltered, and biased human being – depends on you taking the approach above and applying it every day.
Don’t like bleeding heart liberals? Fine, but how will you ever know why if you don’t stay informed (outside of your bubble) about them. Hate the Defense of Marriage movement? Fine, but have you gone outside your liberal village to find out what really drives those people? If you don’t ever do that, how can you make an informed decision about why and whether or not to hate?
This goes beyond politics.
Politics is obviously an easy example, but progressing in music, sports, your career, and other things hinges on two things:
Your ability to go outside your comfort zone.
Your ability to stick to it when everyone else gives up.
Nothing more and nothing less will ensure that you learn something new better, faster, and more effectively than anyone else around.
People managers and anyone interested in interpersonal communication.
When?
Put it in your queue.
Why?
Drive is a fascinating book.
Best Quote
The monkeys solved the puzzle simply because they found it gratifying to solve puzzles. They enjoyed it. The joy of the task was its own reward.
Review
I loved this book in part because it gave me such an interesting look into what motivates me, my colleagues, my family members, and even my clients and customers. Having worked in marketing in several different verticals, I found some of Daniel Pink’s analysis and stories matched perfectly with what I have experienced. For example, let’s say that my employee is doing something they enjoy, and I want to reward them for it, so I give them a little bonus. They’re super happy and start working even harder, and I see that, so I resolve to give them a bonus every time they do that one thing.
After a while, they come to expect the bonus and therefore think of they activity in terms the money it results in and not the pleasure that it previously produced. So, what happens? At some point, they get decreasing marginal returns and decide that it’s not worth doing that activity instead of other things unless they get paid more. In this case, paying someone for doing something they enjoyed actually results in worse performance because, as soon as you introduce money into the equation, they start to think of things only in terms of money.
Of course, this is a greatly oversimplified example of one aspect of Daniel Pink’s Drive, but it really stuck out to me, and as I do work in a business that frequently deals with rewards, I found it highly relevant.
Last Word
Drive is a great book about what really motivates and demotivates people. Buy it.
You should read this book if you’re interested in people, power, and politics.
When?
I would be interested to find out what a high schooler thinks of this book, but in reality, it’s probably best for someone early in their career.
Why?
Read this book if you want lots of historical examples of failed and successful power games.
Best Quote
Playing with appearances and mastering the arts of deception are among the aesthetic pleasures of life. They are also key components in the acquisition of power.
Review
The 48 Laws of Power sits best with readers that view life and relationships as more about power than about goodwill, karma, or doing what is right. That being said, the examples that Robert Greene gives are really interesting and educational for anyone looking to improve their standing in personal or professional relationships. You can easily take the stories from ancient China, or Italy, or other places and apply them to your every day life.
I caution readers of this book though that a lot of it comes across as heartless and honestly not a good fit for how I see the world. Nonetheless, there is a lot to learn…especially when you recognize that Robert Greene even states in the book that a leader is doing the best for himself and others when he uses all of his skills to his advantage because he can improve not only his own standing, but theirs as well.
Last Word
Read The 48 Laws of Power if you are interested in power games and how to improve your standing with power, attention, deception, and any other talents, but if you can’t handle a heartless read or an amoral examination of relationships, skip the book. It will be too hard to get through.
