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Why you need to be marketing via Social Media

Do you need to get into Social Media Marketing (SMM) – Almost certainly YES because a) the other approaches don’t work so well anymore, and b) because it offers a much wider reach, to a more closely targeted audience. And it’s free.

a) Other approaches don’t work any more:

• Cold calling on the street – when was the last time anybody got invited in to make their pitch?
• Cold calling on the phone – talking to voicemail isn’t fun anymore.
• Print and other broadcast media – far too expensive and unproductive.
• Email – authorized sender lists and other filters send these to Trash.
• SEO your marketing site – Google ranks advertisers first and content (in blogs) next.
• Adwords – cost per click is driven up by big brand budgets and only Google makes money.

On top of these is the resistance we all have to intrusive advertising. Our brains, our Firefox or our Tivo, allows us to filter it out.

b) Social Media platforms aren’t intended for marketing, but do help us get messages out there, to people interested in the subject. The creators built these systems so communities could interact, on the Internet. Members avoid advertising like everybody else, but as in other social places, they are open to meeting people and learning and sharing. Participating in these communities, we can meet people who are buying what we sell.

Social Media Marketing is:

1. More effective
2. Wider reach to people who are interested
3. Free!

The Seven Secrets to Being Welcome

Getting started with SMM can appear intimidating. All of these places seem full of experts who use their own special languages. We have to write and publish stuff in ways people want to read. Most of all it seems to take up so much time.

But actually it’s easy, provided we stick to the fundamental principles:

• Avoid Internet Marketing Experts like the plague. Sites are dominated by these characters trying to drive readers to their blogs, in the hope they’ll click an Ad. They know less about SMM than we do, or they wouldn’t act the way they do.
• Find some genuine (there are a few) SMM experts and read what they generously share in their blogs. A great starting place is chrisbrogan.com. Find Chris’ paper “Fish Where the Fish Are” for the most clear explanation.
• Sign up to sites where your prospects, or people they know, hang out. Be social. Fill out your profile as if you’re joining a club. In Social Media, members like to know the person behind the business. It’s just like meeting people at a cocktail party.
• Write blog posts on stuff you really understand. Make these posts short, to the point, and offer genuine expertise. The objective here is not winning a Pulitzer Prize – it’s sharing your expertise. Don’t pretend to know something. Frauds are exposed in a heartbeat.
• Write comments in forums, sharing what you know with people who don’t. Answer questions posted with short comments directly on subject. People interested in the same subject watch the answers to questions. The question becomes the focal point of a mini community. Here you can answer one question and have ten people recognize your value add.
• Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Bad news about a product or service will be around the world in a nano second and consign the perpetrator to oblivion.
• DO NOT SELL. There are plenty of fools who do, but they’re noticed as Spammers. There’s no need to sell. When we know what we’re talking about, people in the market will want to buy.

Anybody following these rules will be welcome on discussion forums and other meeting places.

Easy Steps to Global Presence

We need to think of the Internet as a spinning plate. We can stand in the middle and not move while it goes on around us, but we know there’s stuff going on out there. The perimeter is moving much faster then the center. It’s all a blur.

To join in we’ll need to move toward the outside and be prepared to move more quickly. The further we get out there the faster we have to think, and move. What’s happening isn’t near the center, it’s out there on the edges. In today’s world it’s a case of “be out there, or be square”.

In B2B, the good news is we don’t have to get to the extremes of what the gurus are dreaming up. Our audience, being more focused on business than redefining the world, congregates in places where it’s easier to play a part. Not that far from the center. Further out there will be opportunities in the future so we should stake out a place, but we probably aren’t going to do business there – yet.

Most of the sites out there have been started by people wanting to get paid for advertising, one way or another, and run the site for their own benefit. Why not start at Front Office Box User Group ?- it’s run for your benefit. You can manage your own communities, get all your blog posts automatically sent to content distributors. Get your profiles indexed by Search Engines, and advice from the Social Media Marketing group.

At WeCanDo.Biz create a profile in the directory, receive endorsements from customers and business partners, contact other members via messages and post any business needs to the community. Coming soon will be a business forum.

At implu.com find up to the minute details of 167,000 company officers, create a personal profile and share your “stories” about corporate America. There’ll be blogs and a forum coming soon.

Not many people know but you can set up a business profile on Facebook go to Mari Smith for a guide.

Next go to to Linked In. Here we find 25+ million professionals, like us, wanting to connect for business: reconnect with past colleagues, receive job offers, get help from their peers. Linked In has 1,000s of special interest groups and posts questions and answers in 100s of categories.

Growing fast is a host of special interest sites using Ning and Collective X software. Both offer directories of their sites. There are 1,000s of Ning sites, some with 100,000s members, focused on special interest or geography. Ning makes it particularly easy for us to set up our own, and keeps a consistent profile of us and our “friends” across all of it’s sites. Find some interesting groups, join and join in discussions. You’ll be familiar with the way it all works- the user group’s a Ning site.

Spread your Internet footprint by submitting content at Ezine Articles. From December 2008 join AddsYou for more of the same opportunities. Post the same content in Squidoo lenses and Google Knols. Contribute to Knols Debates. – researchers use these like encyclopedia. 
Get a Google account. Post content in your Blogspot blog, publish it in Google Sites pages, make videos and publish on You Tube.

Answer others’ questions anywhere you find them – particularly at Linked In, Yahoo Answers and Knol Debates. People appreciate the help, and Google is watching – by now you’re becoming a world authority on your subjects. (worth remembering 99% of the content on the web is regurgitated garbage – if your stuff is good it’s easy to stand out).

Microblogging and What We Can Do With

At the extreme edge of our plate we come to microblogging with Twitter, Pownce, Yammer, Plurk and a few more – on the face of it the most meaningless service imaginable, with broadcast publishing limited to 140 characters and a host of complimentary software/services adding value to it. The number of people joining Twitter is growing at a blinding rate, because the members are creating purpose for it as they go along. With Twitter the lunatics really have taken control of the asylum.

Even further out we come to Twingr. This is a site/service letting people create their own communities, just like Ning but limited to the 140 character post size. (It’s brand new so might need some time to fix a few things.)

Why limit messages to 140 characters? Because it cuts to the mustard. People out there want to benefit from our insight, not out literary skills. The limit focuses minds on the meat. Readers can scan hundreds of posts in a few minutes, choosing ones they want to know more about.

Microblogging started with simple status updates – what I’m doing now – between friends. Then it exploded with users and innovation.

Now news services monitor Twitter posts to find out what’s happening. Journalists monitor them to find out what people are thinking. Politicians are doing the same, and engaging a new public with their own ideas. Software companies are publishing service notices to their users. Brands don’t need customer surveys anymore, they just monitor Twitter.

Sales guys are monitoring Twitter to find out who’s interested in what, and what’s being said about their competitors. This is the new source of sales leads, and we don’t have to look for them, they come to us.

More than a million early adopters are publishing news and opinions to the rest of the world. The service is so successful, developers everywhere are writing programs to add value – including Twitter Search, monitoring keywords and sending every post using them to our RSS reader, and Twellow, a directory of Twitter users with more than 620,000 entries.

With Twitter we can find new friends and colleagues anywhere in the world. We can learn of a new opportunity, evaluate and decide within just a few minutes.

We can be so much more productive, because we’ve got access to so much more information and support. It’s the ultimate question and answer service.

What’s Next ?

Beats me! We just need to keep up with pace.

Many people around the world are draw into social networking sites that allow them to pour out their emotional and thoughtful input throughout the online world. This creates a feeling of self-importance that can truly empower the ego and boost personal image in individuals with the need to have attention. This is also a great way towards influencing others as well, as people know that media is very influential with certain groups. Microblogging through video would only reach more people, as it is a popular thing to upload video nowadays throughout all age groups, but especially the younger audiences.

How Video Microblogs Work

A video microblog will allow users to upload small video clips of them selves talking about whatever they please. These microblog messages on video are easy to access and are provided, packaged with the necessary software to play the videos right on the site. Advertising and other materials could be placed within the videos through logos, or simply getting the microblogger to mention a product or service. Many people even have a fan base of thousands of viewers every day. There are serious applications that could use such amounts of influential power, especially through micro blog outlets allowing video with users having thousands of viewers.

Popularity Amongst the Population

Microblog sites are popping up everywhere and allowing users to produce materials by themselves through web cam and uploaded video content. Although many users will abuse this privilege and break the terms of service for the sites, a majority of the users will play by the rules as to not be permanently banished from the site and lose all of their important contacts and networking that they have spent many hours building as a user. Loyal microbloggers will continue to use such services as provided and continue to use the site until it no longer is popular. The likeliness of the sites losing their popularity is very low, but other sites may pop up with better incentives, causing many users to convert, or double dip into both systems, and more if available.

Networking and Connecting to Other Users

The networking aspect of microblogging and other types of blogs will always keep users signing up for service. This allows many of the new users to have their own face time with their peers and create a sense of importance, even if they do not have the self-esteem to do so in person. Microblogs also allow people with similar interests to interact, creating a virtual playground in which they can exchange messages and provide each other with entertainment and other various forms of leisurely experience.

Providing the ability to upload and send microblog messages on video can easily boost any website up from lower level popularity to high-end potential. Many sites such as those who pioneered networking aspects to young adults and teenagers are beginning to incorporate video function into their sites. The resulting wave of video microblogging made it easier and quicker for people to express their opinions and relay their personal messages that take longer to type out and compose normally.

Before you start to write a blog, you should seriously consider the topic you’re going to cover on it. Lots of different blogs offer information on the technical aspects of blogging as a business: these are mostly people from the IT and advertising worlds who are very good at understanding concepts like SEO (Search Engine Optimization), keywords, traffic, and ad revenue.

These blogs– which can be found by a simple search engine that will provide you with more how-to articles than you can ever read in a lifetime– are geared towards the business-minded individually who will see blogging, first and foremost, as a business. This has been my essential problem when looking for advice on how to start a blog for profit: On the one hand, I’ve enjoyed dozens of blogs over the last decade that both engaged me as a reader and reportedly have made a significant income for their creators.

The thing that drew me into blogs like dooce.com, Daily Dish, DailyKos, or Awesome Zara had nothing to do with my perception of their business models, and that’s one of the trickiest parts of starting such a successful blog. The interest I had in any of these blogs was their engaging content. Dooce.com, for instance, was started by a graphic designer who was frustrated with her job working for a PR firm in Utah. She set up the blog essentially as a way to vent her frustrations about her job, and gained such a following that her boss fired her for it.

Within a year, Armstrong was able to leverage revenue created on her blog– where she chronicled her struggles with depression over losing her job, coupled with the stress of being a new mother– into covering the costs of the mortgage she and her husband had previously been paying through each of their jobs. While it’s true that Armstrong had knowledge of the tricks and blips to keep her site going without having to invest in it herself, what drew me and countless others into her readership was her ability to tell storie4s about her life that kept us wanting to read more. Daily Kos’ unique community of people, while they seem to share a certain political perspective that gained massive popularity during the end of the Bush years, has much the same draw: at the root of it, the writing on both of these sites is what increases their traffic and keeps me as a loyal reader.

Both of these sites are centered around strong, unique content. In Armstrong’s case, she found a passion in juggling the duties of being a mother and being a businesswoman with a flair that caught on among the circles of women who found reflections of themselves in her story, which she told with such a dizzyingly honest and abrasive tone that she kept the readership entertained and concerned about her. In the case of Daily Kos, the writers there all had significant and topical things to say about the way the bush administration was running our country into the ground, they marketed their viewpoints through networking, and have since become one of the go-to sources of political blogging on the web.

They key to these blogs’ successes was primarily a matter of the passion with which their contributors told their stories and expressed their viewpoints. So while , yes, technical notions of how to optimize on popular themes and incorporate them into your blog are important, the first step to starting a blog for profit is finding something about which you’re passionate that you think others can be passionate about, too.