Holistic Technology Enabled Internet Marketing Solutions

Photo credit: Hamed Saber

I am not going to lie everyone, I have had a rough couple weeks in this old internet space. Things not going the way they planned, people who I thought would be good business partners ending up being 3 headed monsters, my Google Reader is so out of control I don’t know where to start but with the ‘mark all as read button’, and on and on.

What I needed to do and many of us probably need to do is take a step back and remind ourselves of our goals, our tactics and strategy to reach those goals. I needed to realign myself and find a better stride than the one I was carrying on with. So I did some revamping and I am optimistic about the rest of the year. Here are a few key points I took away on determining my social media stride.

Pace Yourself – When training for an athletic event there is a small window of effort you are supposed to try for. Train too lightly and you aren’t building the muscle or stamina you need. Train too hard and you may get injured or burn out. The same goes for your social media presence. Too little and you won’t even feel like you are seeing return out of your efforts. Too hard and just maintaining your social media presence could be a full time job and your actual responsibilities (like running a business) will suffer. You need to find that balance so you are pushing yourself strong enough to grow but without burning out.

Discard bad relationships – This is hard for many of us to do in business. We feel every relationship has a monetary value to it. Unfortunately, some of those relationships take more than they give. This goes for your online network as well. Sometimes an online relationship that you think will benefit both of you ends up being negative. No matter how many Twitter followers or LinkedIn contacts they have, if they are not in line with your business goals but instead are detracting from them, you may need to step away. If you have thousands of Twitter followers but still find no value in Twitter you may have focused on the wrong things when growing your online network.

Remember why you are here in the first place – I think I say this at every event I speak at but you need to set your goals before you start participating in social media and you need to constantly be checking back and seeing if you are achieving them. It is very easy to get distracted with what competitors are doing, or the biggest social media experts are doing but you joined social media to build relationships for your brand and not to be the next social media expert.

Goals aren’t static – Yes, I am a goals freak but even I know as your business and technology changes your goals need to change too. Sometimes things happen in your industry or your local space that aren’t threatening but are worth realigning your goals to make sure your business will thrive through the coming years.

No one can do this for you – I am not talking about the debate over ghost bloggers or ghost tweeters, I am saying no one can decide for you what you are going to do in this space but you. No one can determine how much time you spend with it and what kind of return you get. If something isn’t working you may need to change your stride. You need to find a rhythm that works with you and your organization that shows you some kind of return.

Of course there are lots of other factors, like the tools you choose, for determining your social media stride. I am looking past tools and to goals, relationships and time. Is there anything you would add on finding your social media stride?

I don’t really consider myself a social media expert. I DO use the tools social media has given me to promote our business, help our clients grow their businesses, connect with people who will help me make things happen and to build better relationships in my personal life and business life.

I also have no problem talking to people about how I use these tools. I have talked to large and small groups about how they can use social media in their line of work. I have no problem educating people on how I use social media as a tool. Much like how we don’t charge for webinars at Hall because we feel it is better for us overall, if we educate people more on the recent advances in technology and internet marketing. I don’t keep my Twitter strategy or how I use LinkedIn close to the vest. I want you to know too. I think we all can learn from each other.

Social media is like a mullet

Photo credit: heyjohngreen

News flash – Social media is fun. There is nothing wrong with participating in something fun but for some reason we all feel guilty doing it. We have to constantly verify to our peers, bosses and friends that we are working when we use social media. We assume we can’t use something for work and have fun, or can we?

I connect with business partners, share our content and have made some perfect business connections thanks to social media. I have a larger business network, we have more inbound links to our site and we have made sales from people we connected with on social media sites, showing me that this is effective for our business.

More than the business part, social media is fun. Users connect with friends, share pictures, tell stories and tell everyone about fun and exciting things they are doing.

I usually keep these two aspects of how I use social media (work and personal) clearly defined. For example my LinkedIn account is for business – I list business books I am reading, post links to our blog and share company news. My Facebook account is much more personal – I share news about my friends, events I am attending, races I am registered for, photos etc.

So social media is a little business up top, but it is also a pretty big party in the back.

Social Media Agencies, Experts and Gurus – What did you do before?

In my travels over the last few years, I have met and stood shoulder to shoulder with lots of social media experts and business professionals. One thing I am noticing is as companies get into using social media, they are slowly morphing into social media companies. I have seen software consultants blogging about Twitter, retail outlets posting about their favorite Facebook tips and more.

There are lots of pieces to running a business; marketing and networking are big pieces. My concern is that too many people are turning into social media experts and less experts on what it is they joined social media to do in the first place.

You created a Facebook fan page to direct people to your website that sells widgets. Now you are posting about social media tips, people are going to your website and businesses are shocked that no one converted and bought a widget! They didn’t want a widget – they wanted that social media tidbit you teased on Facebook.

What did you do before you added social media marketing to the mix? That should be your goal still. This could be website traffic, building your business network, selling more products, getting more people to your events etc.

By focusing on being a social media expert you are hurting your business

Photo credit: ilovememphis

Constantly remind yourself what goals you had in mind when you joined social media sites. Staying on message should equal more conversions because you have a network of people interested in your products and industry, not social media.

Building a business around social media or morphing your current business into a social media boutique or consultancy has the same benefits as calling yourself a high end salon that specializes in mullets. You are hurting your business by putting too much energy into a tool like social media that changes hourly, how it is used is case-by-case by organization and that doesn’t put money directly into your bottom line.

Mullets happen every day. Someone, somewhere walks into their barber shop and requests their hair to be short up top and longer in the back. Is that what you are going to do? Build a business (reminder – businesses are supposed to make money) around a tool people use for marketing that is mostly personal and has some business usefulness? Or should you stick to what you came to do and be the best widget seller who uses social media for their own marketing efforts?

Sorry I missed my weekly recap last week! I hope you didn’t feel totally in the dark! So this week some of the news will be from two weeks ago. Being sick in the summer is the worst isn’t it?

Here is the tech news I felt fit to tell you about from the last two weeks:

Facebook changing layout of fan pages, removing boxes – This is important if you are the administrator of a Facebook fan page! Facebook is changing the layout of their Facebook pages on August 23rd. If you have your page set up in boxes you need to take that content and move it to custom tabs. If you are the admin of a page, you should see an alert on the top of the page and the option to see what your page will look like when the changes take place (see below). The new width for custom pages will be 520px, which is significantly smaller than before.

Google Wave, Waves Goodbye – Google wave came out last year and while some loved it for its ability to collaborate on big projects, most were just annoyed with this product. Google announced that they are not going to be sinking any more resources into Google wave and it may eventually come down. The product “has not seen the user adoption we would have liked,” says Google. For more information about the end of Google Wave check out TechCrunch’s post or you can read CNNs post on Why Google Wave’s demise is good news for Facebook.

Facebook makes browsing photos easier – Perhaps taking a page from Google’s revamped image searches, Facebook has redone how they display photos on profiles. In creepier news, they also added ‘face detection‘ to make tagging easier. I have seen this on my home screen of Facebook a few times in the last week and I was surprised. I get what they are trying to do but it has a hint of creepy, if you ask me.

Delta lets you buy airline tickets right from Facebook – As the lines from social media sites and business get blurred, this new feature from Delta shouldn’t be a surprise but it caught many of us off guard. As of this past week you can now purchase airline tickets right from Delta’s Facebook fan page.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Beta coming our September 15th – Microsoft will launch the public Beta of IE9 on September 15th. Internet Explorer has quickly lost power to other browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Will this new version pull them our of the mud? We will have to wait and see.

Links I liked:

• The numbers don’t lie: Mobile devices overtaking PCs – CNN Money
• Connect Your B2B Customers with Social Media Profiles – socialmediab2b.com
• Are You Sure You Want That Social Media Job? – Brass Tack Thinking
• Why Do So Many Companies Suck at Social Media? – TopRank Blog
• 28 Awesome B2B Social Media Statistics – socialmediab2b.com
• The 4 Hottest Social Media Marketing Trends Explained – Hubspot

LinkedIn is a powerful business networking tool. If you are one of the many who have heard this before but still don’t “get it”, here is one way to utilize LinkedIn better so it fits into your work day.

Use an RSS Reader to stay on top of LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn Answers are great! You can drill down into the topic your industry is in and find questions people are asking daily. Taking the time to answer some of these questions in and around your industry is a great way to establish yourself as an expert. As you answer questions it also shows up on your LinkedIn profile and in your network’s activity stream. Letting people know you are the go-to in an industry leads to referrals and business.

Many of us are not on LinkedIn all day though. So by the time you remember to check LinkedIn Answers, there are too many to sort through and if you did answer one, you might be the 50th person to give your opinion and it gets lost in the noise.

By subscribing to LinkedIn in your RSS reader you can scan through Questions as they come in. Using a more central location like your RSS reader makes it more timely, easier to scan and alleviates the need to log into LinkedIn multiple times.

Below is a video showing you how you can quickly subscribe to a LinkedIn topic that interests you:

Not a video person? Here is how you subscribe to LinkedIn Answers

• Go to LinkedIn Answers you can either follow this link or pull down the More menu on the LinkedIn Navigation to get there.
• On the right hand side, browse and select a category that interests you.
• If possible, go back to the browse category and drill down to a more specific topic.
• At the bottom of the browse section, click on the Subscribe to new questions in: link.
• Choose your preferred RSS reader