maine web development, web design, internet marketing

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?

Oh competitors… you can’t live with them and you can’t wish them away to a magical land far, far away. We all have competitors in our jobs and in our life. It is a part of life.

We could drown keeping a constant eye on what our competitors are doing. We could also veer away from what it is we do best trying to keep up with them, we could add services we don’t excel at, we could lose our focus.

Trust me… I could spend all day, every day online gasping, complaining and whining about what other people in my industry are doing, but who does that really help? Not me. What many of us need to do is think back to our school days when Ms. Ross would say ‘Amanda keep your eyes on your OWN paper’ but maybe you didn’t have Ms. Ross (lucky) and maybe your name isn’t Amanda.

Match your competitors but don’t follow them – Something makes you unique from even your closest competitor. Is it customer service, like Zappos? Is it that your employees are more dedicated? Do you have a unique software? Whatever it is, recognize that your differences are also your strengths. If you spend all your time watching what your competitor is doing and then following them, soon you will be way off the path you started on. Sure, you can be as good as them at some things, but be better at the things that make you unique.

You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going,
because you may not get there. – Yogi Berra

Use proper ‘Netiquette’ when interacting with your shared space online – With sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn it can seem impossible to ignore what other people are doing. When you do stumble across a blog, interview, post or update that irks you, it is usually best to leave it alone. If there is something posted about your company or service, you should consult your social media policy on how to handle reactions to content.

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you respond to it. – Lou Holtz

Focus on what people are saying about you, not about them – Trust me, I know how frustrating it can be to see other people talking about your competitor and not about you. Jumping in on the conversation can be tacky though. Pay more attention to what people are saying about you and react and reward them as necessary. Set up things like Google Alerts to get notified when your company is mentioned. Social networking sites got you down? Tired of seeing your competition being tweeted about and to? Here is one thing I have learned – sometimes some people are better at Twitter than they are at business. Ignore it and focus on what cool things you have going on instead. Do you have a Twitter account? Take a minute to review the ‘Lists‘ people have categorized you under. I think Twitter lists are a great dipstick to see how people view your content.

Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope. – Josh Billings

Measure against yourself and your goals – We need to stop upholding ourselves to other people’s expectations. We need to measure our own success against ourselves first. I recently read a great blog post, Run Your Own Race, that really ironed this out for me. As many of you know, I recently became a “runner”. My first goal was a half marathon. I run very slow because I never want to run out of gas by mile 6 or 12. I felt pressure to run faster because whenever you tell someone you ran a race they ask ‘what was your time?’ It took me until just recently to not care about telling people my time. I am running these races for my health, to spend time with friends and mostly, so I don’t go insane. It doesn’t matter how fast. It just matters that I am doing it. The same goes for my work. I measure the things that are important to reaching Hall’s goals. Not just measuring all the things that we are able to measure.

If you’re looking sideways all the time, you’re very likely to miss the opportunities, paths, and people that are right in front of you. – Amber Naslund, Brass Tack Thinking

It is a big world out there. We should all be able to coexist, but too often I see people who are obsessed with what their competition is doing. Remember the things that make you different and focus on those. By keeping your eyes on your own paper you will find opportunities that are inline with your strengths and goals. By copying the other guy, you are straying from what it is you have set out to do. Know what makes your competitors different from you as well. It may not hurt to recognize what they flourish in too and if there is a project that is better suited for them, are you comfortable enough to hand it off to them?

Photo credit: aboveallprecious

You may have seen them leaving off-color remarks on blogs, or always being negative on Twitter but Internet Trolls can be serious business. If you haven’t run into them first hand, you should probably be prepared to and have an idea of how your business will deal with them.

What is an Internet Troll?

Internet Trolls are internet users who find enjoyment in attacking and criticizing other people’s content. Their mission is usually to get a reaction from the person they are attacking or from their network.

An internet troll can be found in the comment sections of blogs, on social networks, in message boards and more. Their protocol is usually to comment on someone else’s content or profile in a negative and sometimes controversial manner to try to get a reaction.

Where the damage can occur to your business is in how you react to an internet troll. Your comments are as much of your marketing as your original post or profile.

Wikipedia Defines Troll (Internet)
In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.

As you become an authority in your industry, you are more susceptible to trolls. Remember when your mother told you that kids were mean to you because they were jealous? Well the same applies here but with grownups and new tools for malicious behavior. As you establish yourself as an authority and broadcast to your network what your point of view is on a topic, you have put yourself out there and need to be prepared for trolls to try to get a rise out of you.

Sonia Simone from Copyblogger had a great post called The Dark Side of Authority where she explains that we all know being an authority in our industry is what we want, but trolls are one of the downsides of being an ‘expert’. She goes on to say that it is human nature to admire authority, but it is also human nature to for some to resent authority.

How to Deal With an Internet Troll

First things first, an internet troll is looking for a reaction so carefully consider your response or your decision not to respond.

Here are a few tips for dealing with internet trolls:

• Have a plan first – As with all things we talk about with internet marketing, it is important to have a plan first. This could be a conversation with anyone who is participating in your business blog and social networks or an official policy on how to respond to off-color comments. Going into the situation blindly without considering the possibilities means you could be more prone to having a gut reaction, and giving the troll exactly what they are looking for, attention.
• Approach each comment as constructive – As many of us have learned the hard way, there is no tone in written text. You cannot tell when someone is being sarcastic, or trying to be funny, maybe had a typo, or shouldn’t have read your blog after that martini and they misunderstood your content. Treat each comment like it had good intentions. Some will be very easy to tell that they are malicious but if it is borderline, treat it like it had the best of intentions.
• Delete content that hurts your network – I think leaving negative comments on your blog or profile is usually ok, if not good. It shows debate or lets you realize how other people view your opinions and you can have some really great conversations that help you grow. You should delete content that attacks another member of your network, has profane language or that you find offensive. You don’t want to be the arena that one of your readers gets into an argument with a troll.
• Say ‘Thank You’ – If there is a comment or a tweet that I think is malicious but I don’t have anything constructive to add, I will just say a simple ‘thank you for your comment’ or ‘thank you for your perspective’. That way, they know they were heard but they did not get a big reaction out of me.
• Follow up – On at least a dozen occasions someone has said something hurtful about me, my work or my company I have followed up and made a relationship out of it. A few have even become partners I refer work to. A whiny tweet could just be someone else who provides similar services but thinks their way is better, a cry for attention to view their work or a faceless crime and when you meet them face to face they are guilt ridden for their comment.

Dealing with internet trolls or off-color remarks is definitely a case by case and company by company basis. You need to do what is best for your business, your employees, your network and you. If you are prepared beforehand, you will probably have better results versus a petty battle of words in the comments section of your blog.