Reputation Management | Professional Blog Service

Not Every Social Media Consultant Knows What They’re Doing

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

I was tweeting with my friend and fellow social media consultant, Dana Nelson, a couple nights ago about a business presentation she was sitting in, when she quoted this piece of advice from the presenter.

“Posting your business on other business sites is lame – tagging business/ cross marketing does not work.”

Wait, what? Who said that, the business professor from Back to School?

Cross-posting doesn’t work? Creating visible partnerships is lame? Creating a referral network is ineffectual?

Look, there are a lot, a lot, a loooooooot of social media consultants out there. And they don’t all know what they’re talking about. It worries me that these people are spreading poor information out there. It’s like a volunteer sheriff’s deputy telling people you can’t be arrested for drunk driving if you’re wearing your seat belt. (Caution: You can be arrested for drunk driving, even if you are wearing your seat belt.)

And this 16-word piece of misinformation is a doozy, and so wrong in so many ways.

It’s a widely accepted fact in search engine optimization circles that promoting a business site on another site is going to give me some big search engine juice. Anyone who understands basic SEO knows that backlinks are what give your site a high search engine ranking.
Coke and McDonald’s would disagree with your views on cross-marketing. As would Pizza Hut and Pepsi. Or any movie studio with Happy Meal Toys and Burger King Kids’ Meal Toys. Or BarnesandNoble.com and Amazon. And any sponsors of any NASCAR or Indy Car racing team.
People buy from people they like, and accept recommendations from people they trust. If Dana recommends a good restaurant to visit, I’m going to believe her. Why? Because I like her and trust her. It’s the same with businesses. If a business I trust recommends the services of another business, I’m going to believe them. The smart thing for small businesses to do is to team up with allied businesses.
There are more business networking experts than there are social media experts (as hard as that is to believe). Nearly all of them will shout the praises of networking, referral sharing, and cross-promoting. And I’ll believe business networking experts who measure their experience in years and decades, not weeks and months.

This is just one of many reasons why you need to screen your so-called social media “expert” before you hire them. Especially if they blather on with inane bits of advice like this.

About the Author: Erik Deckers
Erik is the VP of Creative Services for Professional Blog Service. He has been blogging since 1998, and has been a published writer for more than 22 years. He is a newspaper humor columnist, appearing in 10 papers around Indiana. He has also written numerous business articles, radio theater plays, and stage plays. Erik helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies, and is currently working on Branding Yourself: How to use social media to invent or reinvent yourself, which will be released in December 2010 by Que Publishing. He is writing a third book on social media and networking. Erik frequently speaks about blogging and social media.

Tags: cross-promoting, networking, Rainmakers, referrals, small business, Social Media
Posted in Marketing, Networking, Reputation Management, Social Media | View Comments

Why I Trust User Comments More Than Marketing Copy

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

I love my Moleskine notebooks.

I’ve been using them for over five years, have gone through at least 10 of them, am a regular visitor at Moleskinerie.com and Moleskiners.com, and know that it’s pronounced Mole-eh-skeen-eh (no, seriously).

Pilot G-2 .05 mm pen with my Moleskine notebook

When I got my first Moleskine, I knew I had a special notebook, so I wanted to get a special pen to write in it. I did a quick Google search for “best pen for Moleskine notebook,” and the top result was a discussion on the Moleskinerie website (in fact, that’s how I discovered the site in the first place).

The number of comments that all touted the Pilot G-2 outnumbered all the other pens other people were recommending, so I took a leap of faith, and bought a small pack of Pilot G-2s, without ever testing a single one.

The writing was so smooth and the pen just glided across the page. I was immediately hooked. It felt like I was writing on butter with more butter. Since then, I have used nothing but Moleskine pens for all my writing. In fact, the one in the picture is the same pen I’ve carried for three years, I’ve just refilled it several times with barrels by cannibalizing a box of other G-2s.

My point is that I bought this pen based on user recommendations, not marketing copy, not magazine ads, not even the Pilot website. (Although, ironically, I bought the notebook because I liked the description on the little card about the history of the Moleskine.) I trusted the opinion of several strangers more than I trusted the opinion of a professional who is paid to tell me what is so awesome about their pen.

That’s what social media has done for us. It has changed marketing so that we no longer believe the professionals as much as we believe our own friends, or even strangers. I’ve had other people buy Moleskines just because I use them. And I was evangelizing about my pen to a friend of mine yesterday morning, and she probably had her own set by the afternoon.

So for those travel destinations, restaurants, and specialty brands who are still relying on traditional marketing to tell your story, divert just a little bit of your marketing budget to social media. Create a place where your fans can talk about how awesome you are, and can share those good experiences with their friends. Let other people do your marketing for you.

How about you? What makes you decide what to buy, where to eat, where to go on vacation? Do you visit the website or look at review sites like Yelp and UrbanSpoon? How much of a factor are user recommendations?

Tags: Moleskine, pen, user generated content, websites
Posted in Lead Generation, Marketing, Reputation Management, Social Media | View Comments

5 Photo & Video Sharing Sites Travel Destinations Should Use

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

Yesterday, I talked about the 5 Reasons Why Travel & Tourism Destinations Need Social Media, and how social media is being used by more and more people than you may have realized.

Social media helps people share news about their lives with their friends and family. Not only are they telling people they went on vacation, they’re able to show them where they went, what they did, and all the good times they had. They’re especially doing it on the photo and video sharing sites. Here are fives sites you should use to promote your own travel and tourism destination.

YouTube (VIDEO)

What it is: This is the website everyone knows when it comes to video sharing. According to one source, there are 1,500 years worth of videos on YouTube right now. But that’s because they make it so easy.
Get started:Go to YouTube.com and set up your account. If you already have a Google account of some sort (Gmail, iGoogle, Google Docs), you already have an account, because Google owns YouTube. Start finding other friends and guests by importing your email address book. Then follow the instructions to upload your videos.
Strategy: Encourage guests to upload their own videos and tag your destination in it. (This helps you get found for any searches on YouTube.) Upload your own videos (regular or HD) and embed them in your blog or link to your Facebook account.

Vimeo (VIDEO)

What it is: Vimeo is another video sharing site that’s not nearly as big as YouTube. The benefit to you is that you get to be a bigger fish in a bigger pond. According to their website, it was originally “. . . created by filmmakers and video creators who wanted to share their creative work, along with intimate personal moments of their everyday life,” so there tends to be more of an artsy feel to it, but you’re not limited to only being a filmmaker or artist.
Get started: Go to Vimeo.com and set up an account. Import your email address book (Google or Yahoo), and make connections with your guests.
Strategy: Same as Facebook. If your guests use Vimeo, encourage them to upload videos and tag your destination in it. Upload your regular and HD videos, and then use the embed code to place them in your blog or link to your Facebook account.

Flickr

What it is: Flickr is one of the two most popular photo sharing sites. In fact, by strict definition, it’s a social network centered around photo sharing (actually, all the video and photo sharing tools are considered social networks). You upload your photos and share them with your friends, embed them in blog posts, and link to them in Twitter messages.(Note: Flickr has begun accepting 90 second videos for uploading. While they won’t give YouTube a run for their money, they are making it easier for Flickr fans to keep their video in one place too.)
Get started: If you already have a Yahoo account, you have a Flickr account. Otherwise, sign up, import your email address book, and then start uploading photos. If you have an iPhone or Android, you can also upload photos directly to Flickr from your phone. There is also a digital camera storage card called the Eye-Fi that will not only store your photos, but upload them whenever you’re in a wifi hotspot.
Strategy: Hold a best photo contest and encourage guests to upload the photos to Flickr and Picasa (next section), and then embed the photos in the comments section of your website or your Facebook page.. Post the entries to your website, and allow voting for the best photo (use SurveyMonkey.com). Use the best photo(s) on your promotional materials. Also, consider using a Creative Commons license with your photos (this lets other people use your photos as long as they give you credit), and let them use photos that link back to your Flickr page.

Picasa

What it is: Another photo sharing site, but this one is owned by Google. I like Picasa a little more because it’s easier to integrate with a Blogger blog, plus they have different paid subscription levels. You can get 20GB for $5, or 200GB for $50.
Get started: If you have a Gmail account or a YouTube account, you’re all set. Otherwise, go to picasaweb.google.com Next, go to Picasa.com and download the Photo Uploader. This will let you upload photos in batches, rather than a few at a time.
Strategy: First, don’t worry about whether you can upload videos to Picasa, because you can also use YouTube. (Remember, they’re both owned by Google.) Next, just like with Flickr, hold a photo contest, and use the best photos in your promotional material. And consider using a Creative Commons license with your Picasa photos.

Facebook

What it is: The biggest social network in the world. We talked about it previously.
Get started: Hopefully you already started a Facebook account, but if not, go to Facebook.com and start an account. Get comfortable with it and then start a business page (what they used to call a “Fan Page”) for your own business. Invite friends to “Like” your business page, and do it more than once (people need reminding).
Strategy: While this won’t be the hub of your social media campaign, it needs to be a major part of it. Facebook will have more of your guests and customers on it than any other social network. This is where you need to push a lot of your marketing message, which will drive people back to your main website or blog.

Where should you start?

While there is a chicken and egg question about whether you should join social networks first or start with photo and video sites, it ultimately doesn’t matter. It will take a few days to get everything ramped up. Focus on one video site and one photo site. Pick the one you like the best, and the one that is easiest to use, and just start using it.

At the same time, pick the social network you want to start on (I recommend Facebook, since that’s where everyone is), and work on that one as well. You’ll ultimately spend more time on Facebook than you will on your photo and video sites, so consider these sites as supporting sites for your social network.

Tags: facebook, Flickr, Picasa, social networking, social networks, Vimeo, youtube
Posted in Facebook, Lead Generation, Networking, Photo, Public Relations, Reputation Management, Social Media, Social Networks, Video | View Comments

5 Ways to Build Your Online Personal Brand Without Being Boring

Monday, July 12th, 2010

I was having lunch with a friend last week, and he posed an interesting question: “how do you build your personal brand without evoking a ‘who cares’ attitude?”

Unfortunately, as people start growing their personal brand via social media, they’re just boring the bejeezus out of the rest of us. Here are five things you should be doing to avoid boring your network, and earning the reputation of “oh jeez, not this yawn-fest.”

Dude, you're boring!

Post things as they are happening. Give your content stream a sense of immediacy, to help people feel they are really there. Don’t tweet that you got stuck in traffic two hours after you got home; send a tweet that traffic is bad on a particular road (only if you’re completely stopped, please). Tweet about your experiences at a conference as they happen, not afterward.
Blend your personal and your work life. Rather than limiting yourself to being all work or all play, be both. No one truly expects you to only focus on work things, or expects you to only play and spend time with your family. Anyone who gets annoyed that you’re merging the other into your social media stream has unrealistic expectations, and is probably not worth staying connected to. It’s okay to tell your work friends when you have a personal victory you want to tell them about, and it’s okay to tell your social friends when something great happened at work. By blending the two parts of your life, you’re showing you’re a whole person.
Don’t focus strictly on one issue. If you decide not to do the work-life blend, at least make sure you’re not talking about the same thing over and over. We like that you’re sharing the joys of your new child, but we don’t want to see every single photo you take, to hear about everything the baby did, or how much you love your new bundle of joy. Similarly, don’t tell us about that one work or industry issue, every single meeting you have about it, or every journal and blog article you read about it. If you tell us about your personal life, tell us more than what your children are doing. If you tell us about work, tell us more than that one big issue you’ve been dealing with for six months.
Share, share, share. While it may seem easy to promote yourself and all the cool things you’re doing, if you spend all your time doing that, then you’re just as boring as that date you went on when the other person kept talking about themselves. Instead talk about other people, share what they’re doing, promote their ideas and their blog posts, and retweet the interesting articles they’re reading (retweet this article while you’re at it). Tell us what you think is cool, what you find interesting. The people you’re talking about will take notice and do the same for you.
Just accept the fact that you’re always going to bore somebody. I’d love to think that people hang on my every word, and eagerly await every tweet, blog post, and Facebook update, but they don’t. My personal friends don’t care about my work content, and my work friends don’t care what I do with my kids on the weekend.

Photo credit: Samael Trip (Flickr)

Tags: personal branding, Reputation Management, Social Media
Posted in Communication, Facebook, Networking, Reputation Management, Social Media, Twitter | View Comments

5 Questions To Ask After Your Social Media “Expert” Has Started

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

We’d all like to think our social media consultants — any of our consultants, actually — know what they’re doing, and have our organization’s best interests at heart. But there are times that, despite all the good they promised, things don’t go the way we had hoped or were led to believe.

Too often, organizations don’t realize they were sold a bill of goods until after the campaign has ended, and they try to figure out what the ROI on the entire project was. That’s when they have the horrible realization they just spent thousands of dollars on a project and got almost nothing for it in return.

Measuring ROI is important, even in the middle of the campaign. But about a month after your campaign has kicked off, start asking these questions:

Does your social media consultant avoid using Twitter or other social media tools? Ask what they think about these tools. If you hear “I don’t use _____ because I think it’s stupid” or “because no one uses it,” ask them for data to back up their statement, and a better explanation than “it’s stupid.” The question is not whether they think it’s stupid, it’s whether your customers do. If your customers are on there, then it doesn’t matter what the consultant thinks.
Who are your social media followers? Are they your target audience, or are they filler followers? (Filler-wers?) Some disreputable social media consultants will fill a company’s follower ranks with spammers, high school students, or offshore account holders, none of whom are your target audience (unless you’re selling stuff to spammers, high school students, or offshore outsourced workers). Pay close attention to your followers, and see if they’re the kinds of people you normally do business with. Ask yourself the likelihood of being followed by several hundred high school students, when you normally sell stuff to their parents. Or by computer experts from the Philippines, when your customer base lives within three miles of your store.
Does your social media company have a strategy, a look, a campaign that is unique to you? Or does it look exactly the same as everyone else’s? Does it involve some new thinking and challenges for you, as a way to reach a new audience, or is it just an online version of what you’re doing offline? While a social media campaign won’t reinvent the wheel, it shouldn’t just be a retread of your old campaign. It’s also a good idea to avoid the “everyone else is doing it” type of program, like free giveaways to site visitors. While that may bring in visitors, they may not really be potential customers (see the previous point).
What do you know about the business or the people at the business that you have entrusted with the reputation of your company? What is their reputation around the community? Do they hold to your business ethics, or do they do some things that you disagree with? While you can expect some disagreements politically — that sort of thing just happens, and is a poor excuse to not do business with someone — you should make sure that the person’s personal brand and reputation matches your own. For example, would you want an avid hunter representing your animal rights organization? Should a mixed martial arts fighter be a spokesperson for your pacifist organization? And do you want someone who tells racist or sexist jokes to represent your third world relief organization? You can find things like this on someone’s Facebook page or blog, and they should be a serious cause for concern.
Would you hand your social media consultant a microphone and let them tell the world they are representing you? In essence, are you comfortable saying, “this is our employee. We trust her enough to give her money and speak on our behalf.”
If you’re having problems answering the first four questions, the answer to this question, I hope, is “no.” Your consultant is an employee, albeit a temporary, part-time contract employee, but they are your representative nevertheless. And if you can’t trust them with little things like not hiring a bunch of offshore freelancers to create hundreds of fake social media accounts, you can’t trust them with big things, like telling members of your community that you hired them.

I realize I’m picking on my own industry, but it’s necessary to be proactive, and to point out some of the scams and poor practices that exist. Most real social media professionals do everything we can to help our clients, and do what we promised them in the spirit of the agreement, not just the letter of the agreement (that is, when we say we’ll grow their network, we grow it with likely, real customers, not people with a pulse).

We make sure we do it ethically, and that our own personal and corporate brand is something another company is pleased to be associated with.

So it’s incumbent upon the social media industry to police ourselves, so charlatans and snake-oil salesmen don’t ruin it for those of us who are actually doing it correctly. All it takes is for one person to smear the industry’s reputation by totally screwing a small company out of thousands of dollars. Then the honest professionals suffer for it.

If you find you’re being given bad information by your consultant, speak with another social media professional you trust, and get a second opinion. Find out what questions you should be asking, and what answers you should be getting. Then, double-check your information, speak to your hired consultant, listen carefully, and be prepared to cancel the contract if need be.

Yes, it’s harsh, but it’s your organization’s budget, reputation, and brand on the line. They’re counting on you to not tell anyone else about it, so they can continue to leech off your community or your industry. Protect yourself first, and make sure you’re getting what you should be.

Tags: facebook, followers, Social Media, social media campaign, social media expert, twitter
Posted in Blogging, Facebook, Reputation Management, Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter | View Comments

NOW I’m an Expert: I Was on FOX59 News Last Night

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

I had the opportunity and honor of being on Fox59 News at 10 last night, as a social media expert, to talk about how Generation Y is beginning to take their online reputation and privacy more seriously than they have in the past.

According to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, Reputation Management and Social Media, young people have surpassed the Baby Boomers in taking care of their online reputation. They’re hiding their negative photos — the so-called “Spring Break” photos, untagging themselves when they do appear online, and even practicing reverse search engine optimization to push their negative content off Google’s front page.

I was particularly proud that they used one of my favorite lines, one that I use at all my talks about reputation management: If you don’t want skeletons in your closets, don’t put the bodies in there in the first place.

Big thanks to Kyle Lacy for referring me to Tisha Lewis. And big thanks to Tisha “actually it’s TEE-sha” Lewis, her intern Andy, and her shooter (cameraman), Adam, for making the trek all the way out to the hinterlands of Fishers, Indiana to do the interview.

(As soon as the video becomes available, I’ll link to it here.)

Tags: Fox59, News, Reputation Management, Social Media
Posted in Facebook, Networking, News, Reputation Management, Social Media | View Comments

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