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Managing Your Social Networks

December 31, 2008 By
tubemogul

In the previous post we outlined a few things to consider when choosing social networks to participate in. Now that you’ve made your choices, it is time to manage them.

Step 2: Managing Your Social Networks

To start, you’ll have to manually add all of your profile information. You can begin with the basics and fill each of these out over a period of time. Ideally, you want to be updating all of your social profiles about once a month. As you get involved with each social network you will see what type of profile information is necessary to attract the best relationships.

Try making a spreadsheet of all your social networks. Your column headers should be the social network name and URL, your user name, password and finally, the last date of update. It will help you stay on track of all of your profiles.

TIP: Be sure your profiles are similar on each network you choose to participate in. People are leery of chameleons who have a different “facade” in each community. Also, I think it is important to get connected to services that essentially become “profile aggregators” like Disqus, Gravatar, BackType and coComment. These services collect your various presences, show how actively and intelligently your social participate is and are quickly becoming important as credibility tools.

Now, here are some tools you can use [Read more...]

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Marketing on Social Networks: What You Need to Consider

December 30, 2008 By
search-engine-optimization-and-web-of-today

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Creating Content Isn’t Sexy, Just Critical

December 29, 2008 By
typing

Look at any Search Engine Optimization (SEO) course or checklist… you’ll find content freshness to be a key line item.

Read almost any social media plan… you’ll see that you have to have content to feed that huge network of friends, contacts and buddies you are creating.

Brush up on a few blogging how-to’s… you’ll find it’s all about content.

So, if content is so important, why do business people invest so little time in creating it?

Since starting Professional Blog Service, I’ve learned a little bit about why business people struggle with content:

typingWriting just isn’t urgent enough. Most business people are stuck in a reactive mode (much to Stephen Covey’s chagrin) where they deal with the most urgent task right now. Writing content is important, but it isn’t urgent.

Business people look at writing as something anyone can do well. My friends in the copywriting, legal and journalism professions know this isn’t so. Good writing isn’t easy to find. It takes time. And usually the person who has the time isn’t the one that can write the article.

Content creation isn’t fun. It’s fun to create campaigns, videos, and diagrams but writing content just is not most people’s idea of fun. It’s homework. It’s not sexy. But now more than ever it is critical to your marketing’s success.

Filed Under: Business Blogging Content Tagged With: , , , ,

Should I Start My Social Media Program With A Blog?

December 27, 2008 By
chickenegg

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Branded Social Networks

December 26, 2008 By
networking

One of the chief features of social media is the ability to participate in a larger community without needing to reinvent it. The idea with social media marketing is that your reach can be extended by publishing on existing social sites.

Post a question on your website, you get a few responses. Pose the same question to LinkedIn you get many, many more answers. [Read more...]

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What We Are & What We Aren’t

December 23, 2008 By
carpetbagger

carpetbaggerTop 25 Ways to Tell if Your Social Media Expert is a Carpetbagger”.

On Beth’s blog, she posts: “7. Will ghostwrite blog posts and other social content for you.” as an indicator that your social media expert may be a carpetbagger.

At first, I was offended. After stepping back and reading it again, Beth is right. If your social media consultant is being paid to advise you and tells you to have them ghost write your blog, the consultant is a douchebag (with apologies to douchebags).

See, a consultant has a responsibility to disclose conflicts of interest or to avoid them. If that consultant doesn’t than “carpetbagger” is a nice way to describe them. “Snake in the grass” may fit better. You see, there’s no integrity in being paid as an impartial advisor, only to turn advise buying services from your own company. Your client wanted an advisor, not a salesman.

Which leads me to a little clarification about our company – Professional Blog Service:

We are not social media consultants. We are not social media experts for hire who will analyze all kinds of problems and provide impartial advice. We’re downright biased. If you want impartial advice, talk to a non-carpetbagger consultant (there’s maybe 10 in existence).

If you want a blog and social media program and don’t have the time, skill set or just have terminal writer’s block, we are a good fit. We do the work so you don’t have to. You inspire, we perspire. We do the grunt work so you can get the glory.

We happen to believe in business blogging, we believe in social media, and are very, very good at it. Some people might even call us experts. But the truth is we would simply love to have more happy customers that use our service.

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LinkedIn – Do’s and Don’ts

December 23, 2008 By
plusminusdodont

SN reviews

Don’t: Use Your Work or Primary Home Email as Your Public Email
Get a Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail account, unless you really like spam with your email. LinkedIn provides some protection to your email address, but it does give your email to first degree connections and the owners of groups you join.

Do Understand How LinkedIn Search Works
LinkedIn has millions of users.  LinkedIn’s search system is critical because it is what helps you find people and what powers the “people you may know” tool. The search tool is limited to:

  • First level connections – your friends.
  • Second level connections – your friend’s friends.
  • Third level connections – your friend’s friends friends.
  • People in groups with you
  • A random sample of the rest of the database – and you do not get to see names.

In short: the more connections you have, the easier is to find people you are not connected to.

Do Have a Strategy
Quantity over Quality
The idea here is to connect with as many people as possible so you have access to as many LinkedIn users as possible. This generally means accepting connections from anyone who wants to connect with you.  If you are a marketer, serial networker or recruiter, then the quantity should trump quality.

Quality over Quantity
If you don’t need max our your visibility of LinkedIn’s database, then the best way to use LinkedIn is to focus on quality. Connect with people that you know or who have a reason (beyond being a prospect) to know you.  If you do purue quality, you should connect with a few “superconnectors” (people with thousands of connections) to gain access to more people in LinkedIn’s database.  It will be very hard to find people you know if you only can see 23,000 people compared to 453,000 people.

Do: Join groups
Groups allow you to find people with simmilar interest quickly.  Joining in discussion is a great way to meet new people.

Don’t Spam Groups
On LinkedIn there are two kinds of spam: blatant self promoting advertisements and blatant attempts to get more connections.  Take a minute to look at a discussion group before your post a message and make sure the group has posts like the one you want to make.

Do: State that you are open to connections if you are.
If you want to grow your network quickly, tell people that you are an “open networker,” or even become a LION (LinkedIn Open Networker).

Don’t break Outlook with your fabulous name.
LinkedIn allows people to download their freinds and their friend’s email addresses.  If you make a fancy name like “>>>Bob “The NetworkGuru” Smith<<<” it will make a first impression.  But the second impression will be that you can’t be found in outlook because your first name doesn’t start with “>” it starts with “B.”

Filed Under: Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Social Media, Social Networks, Tools Tagged With: , ,

The Indiana Social Network Use Survey

December 15, 2008 By
linkingindiana

Professional Blog Service, an Indiana based social media and blogging agency is pleased to announce the results of the first annual Linking Indiana Indiana Social Media Use Survey. The survey was commissioned to determine how Indiana businesspeople use social networks.

Important Conclusions

  • Social networking sites are widely used by Hoosier business persons. Less than 3% of those surveyed indicated they did not use social networks.
  • 42% of Hoosier business persons use social networks to find new business contacts.
  • LinkedIn (28.9%), Facebook (34.7%) and MySpace (28.1%) get roughly equal use.

About Linking Indiana
Linking Indiana is a Indiana based social networking group that exists on Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, FriendFeed and Twitter that lets people quickly connect to others from Indiana. Information on Linking Indiana is available at LinkingIndiana.com.

Filed Under: Social Networks Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Should You Stop Your PPC Now That SEO is Working?

December 12, 2008 By

The thought process around PPC vs. SEO makes the assumption that PPC and SEO are zero sum game where a click to a natural link is the same person that would have clicked on a paid link. BAD ASSUMPTION. The math doesn’t add up. Canceling one source of traffic may save money, but it will not result in growth. Why? Because at the end of the day, if you are getting 10,000 visits from PPC, then add 10,000 visits from seo, you are getting 20,000 visits.

PPC (10,000) + SEO (10,000) > SEO (10,000)

Any way you cut it, stopping PPC just because you are successful with SEO doesn’t necessarily result in anything other than losing your PPC traffic. The question is, will stopping PPC because of SEO success really help you? Most likely here’s what happens:

  • The quality of your traffic goes up or down a little bit.
  • You lose the traffic PPC contributes. Despite what a lot of SEOs claim, you get what you pay for in traffic. Free traffic isn’t always good traffic.
  • Your sales probably will go down at least a little bit.
  • Your boss, who learned his lesson when he killed the yellow pages when a radio campaign got leads for cheaper will either fire you or get to teach you a marketing lesson.

That’s it. Oh, and if you use content networks (ads on non-search websites) with Google, killing your PPC will 100% certainly result in reduced sales. Which brings me to Mike’s Law of Marketing:

NEVER EVER BUY INTO A CAMPAIGN WHERE WE ARE USING A SMALLER SAMPLE OF THE SAME MARKET AND COUNTING ON HAVING A BETTER CONVERSION RATE.

Why is this true? Because at the end of the day, if you don’t change the makeup of the market (i.e. better targeted demographics, change keywords) you rarely will get better sales. Why? Because your market is a big part of dictating your conversion rate. The old replace PPC with SEO scam usually breaks Mike’s Law: you aren’t changing your market – people still find you for the same keyword, except you shrunk your market because those PPC ads ran all the time, and on more sites than just Google’s search engine!

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Enter The Conversation

December 8, 2008 By

People’s lifestyles are changing. Gone are the days of people mindlessly watching TV. Newspapers are dying. Radio no longer delivers the soundtrack of our lives. Somewhere along the way, people decided the remote control wasn’t good enough.

What’s left? The Internet. Portable Media Players. Video Games. Cell Phones. TiVo… Devices that give people back control of their life. Devices that people control the content on, and have firm control of the power switch.

What does that mean to your marketing? Opportunity. And it’s not about branding. Or your image. Or even engagement. It’s about starting a conversation. It’s about helping people find what they are looking for. It’s about taking what you do, what you make and letting people discover, desire, own and control it.

Take a hard look at your existing marketing and ask yourself a few questions:

What do you do that helps customers understand your brands, products and services?

What do you do that helps you understand your potential buyers?

Are you talking? Are you listening?

Or are you entering into a conversation?

Positive relationships rarely happen without conversation. Negative relationships happen easily and often without dialogue. The question is, do you have an ongoing conversation or are you just one more reason to turn off the tv, put down the newspaper, silence the radio and fire up the iPod?
Discussion:

What have you done lately to strike up a real conversation with your customers?

Filed Under: Blogging, Social Media
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