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Social Media Today Group News | LinkedIn

Social Media Today Group News | LinkedIn.

Top 5 common social media mistakes.

What the heck does a VA actually do for you?

A social media virtual assistant can really help take the load off a business owner by handling the grunt work of posting and handling message traffic and that is a great service by itself. But is that all they should do? Should they be just another marketing expense?

A good one will do all that and more. They can actually be a profit center for your business by helping to build branding and providing customer support to your existing customers. A good SMVA should be able to really get into your business mindset and understand the goals and philosophy of your company. They should have a “marketing mindset” that helps move your business forward. If they are treated as “doers” rather that both “thinkers & doers”, you will not get the best that a good one can offer. Allow them the freedom to create for you, it’s their job. The old saw “I don’t pay you to think” and “just do what you are told to do” is dumb and restrictive.

If you just grabbed some warm body from the advertising department or your ad agency and said “you are now the Social Media person”, you have made a big mistake in most cases. You may get lucky and find someone that can really take the bull by the horns and run with it but that is not very likely. If you micro-manage them to death you are wasting both your time and theirs.

Open up and let them know what you expect from a social media program. If they are any good, they will tell you if your expectations are realistic or pipe dreams. They might even be able to surprise you with methods and concepts that had never occurred to you that can garner huge results. It could happen!

Every day, I find new tools that I can employ to help my clients. To do so requires that I have my finger on the pulse of the Web and be able to look over the horizon to see the trends and new connections that are possible and be able to decide if this is the right tool for this situation. Not all are useful, depending upon the desired result or particular program I am running for them.

Here is a little anecdote from a friend I have learned a lot from. It illustrates the sometimes obscure trail in linked social media that can lead to customers and sales.

She was checking her Twitter feed one day and caught a tweet that linked to mention in a blog post about some beautiful artwork the blogger had seen. She followed the link in the blog to a YouTube video about an artist and his work. She loved the pictures she saw and followed the YouTube link to his website where he was offering a course in painting and a companion book. She proceeded to buy the book and to pass the word on to her circle of friends and added it to her Twitter stream as well. This resulted in even more traffic to his website and likely more sales for him. Sweet – social media at work!

This is how it works. It is not our father’s way of doing business. It IS the way that works today. Old school methods are not very effective any more. All the major players are using Twitter, Facebook Fan Pages, MySpace, Blogging and other non-traditional forms of promotion to engage their audience and building a huge following because of it. You should be looking at rethinking your advertising program and considering at least adding a social media component. Also consider adding a SMVA to the mix to make it happen. You might be surprised!

Too busy to get started in Social Media?

You have probably heard that social media is about authenticity, sincerity, and transparency.  To get the most out of your efforts takes a time commitment.  Possibly a time commitment that you are not willing to make at this point.

The answer might be working with a Social Media Virtual Assistant.  (SMVA)  I know, you aren’t looking for someone to go out and impersonate you on line.  That just seems wrong.  You want to be the one that maintains control over your image, your business or your brand. And that’s the way it should be.

The beauty of using an SMVA is that your image and message can be authentically yours while someone else takes care of the routine tasks and chores of social media.

There are no hard and fast rules about what an SMVA does for you.  Depending on your level of participation and your personal need to be “hands-on”, the SMVA can:

• Set up your social media profiles, such as a new Twitter account, Facebook fan page or LinkedIn profile.
• Cleanup and optimizing an existing  account, fan page or profile.
• They can “vet” followers and friends on the various platforms and weed out the spammers and lurkers, while solidifying the connection and adding value for your customers.
• The SMVA can do research, such as finding groups for you to join and questions to answer for these groups to help establish you as an “expert” in the area. They can research where your target audience might be hanging out online, find and follow industry trends by monitoring websites and blogs.  They can also set up systems that track what your competitors are doing.
• Blogging: if you enjoy writing, blogging can be fun. If you hate writing, it can be a chore and something you just won’t do.  That would be a mistake, it’s an important component of social media.  The SMVA can help you find content, suggest ideas for you to blog about, proofread your content, enter it into the chosen blogging platform, format it, find images, and links, categorize and tag it. In short, they do the grunt  work for you and you look like a star!
• Using available tools, the SMVA can set up a system for tracking how well your social media efforts are doing.
• Using some automation tools such as SocialOomph, they can automate the posting of your content to many different platforms and even set up schedules for postings in the future.

If you have given up on the idea of using social media for promoting your company or brand because you thought it would consume way too much time, you can find people that actually enjoy doing this kind of stuff and would love to help you move forward.

Technorati Tags: social media,Virtual assistant,promotion,advertising,SMVA

NFIB SmartBrief article from: MasterofBuzz@gmail.com

Dana (MasterofBuzz@gmail.com) thought you might be interested in checking out an excerpt from NFIB SmartBrief. Sign up for your free subscription today.

Designed specifically for small and independent business professionals, NFIB SmartBrief is a FREE, daily e-mail newsletter. It provides the latest news and best practices you need to run your business. Sign up today to receive NFIB SmartBrief. SIGN UP TODAY to receive NFIB SmartBrief.

4 ways smart social-media use helped a jeweler boost revenue 30% Effective use of social media has helped Oklahoma City-based Samuel Gordon Jewelers cut marketing spending from $500,000 to $50,000 while increasing revenue 30%. President Daniel Gordon cites highly interactive promotions through the company’s website and blog along with a willingness to experiment with different social-media platforms. BNET/Owners Only blog (9/28)

Social Media is Not Free

Yes, I said it, Social Media is NOT Free!

I have said in the past that Social Media is “Free Advertising.”  While the many platforms that comprise a social media arena may be free to use, it still takes time and engagement to make it work for you.  The time involved in crafting and implementing a social media campaign does divert resources from other things.  Resources such as time, talent & technology.  One needs to weigh the costs in these areas, versus using those resources or other aspects of your business.  In order to show a good “return-on-investment”, ROI, it needs to pull its own weight.  The focus of most social media campaigns is to generate somewhat intangible results, including word-of-mouth, “Buzz”, “Customer Engagement.”  The bottom line is that these intangibles are NOT money.  Only money is money. Tracking the metrics of a social media campaign is a tricky prospect.

Since most social media campaigns are multi-pronged and use multiple platforms, it is difficult to sort out what is working and what is not and make any needed adjustments.  This is where experience comes in.  An experienced social media manager/consultant is able to sort through the chaff and noise in the field and find those platforms, venues and messages that will work for your situation.  There truly is no “one-side-fits-all” solution.  Each effort must be carefully planned, researched and tailored to reach the intended target audience.  This is where the social media manager earned their keep.  They should invest a significant amount of time behind-the-scenes researching you, your product, your company, and maybe most importantly, your competition.

Who are the actual consumers of social media?

According to data presented at Buzz2010, from Charlene Li: ( http://smartblogs.com/socialmedia/2010/08/30/build-your-social-community-with-passive-users/ ), the largest groups by far are sharers and watchers. These are people participating in social media by reading, watching and learning, who may or may not share a link with someone else but who you are reaching nonetheless but will NEVER hear from. They are the folks, reading this discussion right now, who never dare to chime in. And though they may not chime in, they could be linking someone else to your content or they could be gaining trust or a favorable impression of you, enough to check out your blog or business and enough to pass on your information to a friend, colleague or family member, should they need that kind of expertise.  Your social media efforts may be gaining huge traction with this “under the radar” audience and there’s really no reliable way to measure that.  Since it’s not in their nature to directly respond, there is no way to “tag” what they saw and identify their demographics.  There is usually no direct cause-effect relationship. It’s maddening, at least for old-school types who don’t understand the dynamics of social media and the Internet.

Part of the problem I see is that if you come into the realm of social media with expectations of what you will or won’t get out of it — you’ve already failed. First and foremost, social media is about the SOCIAL aspect. It’s an opportunity to get to know people, share your expertise, help each other out and learn something new. It’s also an amazing opportunity for you to control you brand’s image while staying in touch with the people who make your company a success. Allowing you to address issues or concerns that your client’s may have, while educating them on your business or product and helping them solve a problem they may have. It’s the ultimate in customer service — when done right.

Are You Using Social Media?

Are You using Social Media? If not, WHY NOT?

Social Media has the reputation of being “just for kids” to keep in touch with their friends.  When it first hit the scene that may have been the case.  Currently, that viewpoint is far from being accurate or at least is not the full story .  Did you know that if FaceBook were a country it would be the third largest in the world?  FaceBook currently has over 500 million users!  Even “micro-blogging” platform Twitter as over 75 million users that, by the latest figures from February 23, 2010, send over 50 million “Tweets” per day. That’s a HUGE amount of communication going on.

While it maybe true that a good percentage of this communication is between groups of individuals just keeping track of who’s dating who, what they thought of the latest movie, or who’s coming to the party this weekend,  it is also true that major companies are spending some serious money to generate “Buzz” on the various platforms like FaceBook and Twitter, among others.  Pepsi, certainly a major player in the advertising game, will not be spending their millions on ads for the Super Bowl, but instead have dedicated a part of their ad budget to social media.  This is no small thing, not a flash in the pan experiment.  Companies like Pepsi-Cola and others have multi-million dollar advertising departments and agencies that they use to keep their name in front of the public and generate more sales.  They have determined, through careful study of the metrics, that Social Media is a place to put their money.  There are even major retail brands that are paying Celebrity Twitter users to generate “followers” for them.  As the saying goes,  “Money talks, BS walks.”

A wise person once told me, “If you want something that someone has, you must do exactly what they did to get it.”   What is the safest way to cross a mine field?  You walk in the exact same footprints as someone who has successfully crossed it!   Duplicating efforts should also duplicate results.

While the concept is simple, the implementation is not always that simple.  Big companies spend thousands, even millions of dollars on their ad campaigns.  They staff entire advertising departments with dozens of people, hire outside advertising agencies, and generally approach it in a professional way.   It is a matter of scale.  If you have a national or even international company, your potential client base will be in the millions.  To reach that client base, they need to commit some serious capital to the effort, and they know this.

You, as a small to medium-sized business owner or individual entrepreneur, you likely do not have the resources to fund such a massive effort.  Even if you did, if successful, the influx of new customer demand might totally destroy your business.  Strange as it may sound, too many customers can be just as bad as not enough.  You need to temper your efforts based on your ability to deliver what you’re offering.  Word to the wise – Stand by for heavy traffic if you do start a program.

Contact: MasterofBuzz@gmail.com

Help! My Advertising is NOT working!

Why isn’t my advertising working?

You may have dumped many thousands of dollars into various advertising programs only to come up with little or no results. You are not alone my friends.
I have fallen victim to the game of using print ads, Google ad words, Facebook paid ads and others.  It generated almost no additional traffic to my various websites.
What it did do was to empty my bank account!  Great promises were made.  Fantastic “examples” of results from other sites that had used the medium were presented.
The net result was they had more money and I had less!

Is this you?

As the old saying goes;  “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”  Are you still trying hard to get your business seen by doing the same things that used to work but no longer do? have you been spending money on Yellow Pages, Newspapers, radio spots, cable TV ads, flyers, vehicle lettering and the like?  Are you cash strapped but still need to advertise?  There are ways my friends, there are ways!

For the last few years I have been studying alternate forms of promotion for my businesses.  I’ve tried my hand at the arcane arts of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)   “Just when you have figured out the answers, they change the questions” would be a good statement here.  The 800 pound gorilla in this room is Google of course and millions of dollars have been spent trying to divine the the secrets of the algorithm that Google uses to rank pages and put your website at the top of the search results or down in the back of beyond with the rest of the chumps.
Many will claim to have the answer, few if any, actually do.  And even if they do stumble on the right tweaks now and then, Google unilaterally changes the game and you are back to square one.  That carefully crafted campaign that cost thousands to produce and implement just went in the crapper!  Pony up some more money and start over.

There is a Solution!

One solution that I have found to work and one that costs very little to implement depending on your skills is Social Media.  Yes, that’s right!  That Facebook page that your kids produced, the Twitter account that they never seem to stop using (called micro-blogging), blogs, user forums etc all get significant traffic.  My blogging contents very often show up in key word searches for my business area.  They put me on the first 2-3 pages in Google’s “organic” results consistently.  Organic search results are those that are NOT paid for like the ones you see at the top of the page.  Statistically, these organic results get more click-through traffic than the paid ads.

How can I take advantage of this?

You can do as I have done and spend countless hours learning the ropes, trying different tactics and just pounding on it until it generates some results on a hit or miss basis.
Even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then.  Or, you can use a “Social Media Consult” to put together a program and monitor it for you.  Depending on your personal participation, it can be a lot less than you are spending now or have in the past.   Time is money and the more time the consultant has to put in, the more it will cost.  But in any case, it will likely be a lot less that a traditional advertising package will cost and those don’t even work.  Social Media does.  Most if not all of the platforms are free to use.  The cost comes from the social media manager or consultant crafting the program for you and keeping it up to date.  The more you are “hands-on”, the less it will cost you.  Just let the consultant design and set up the program for you and teach you how to use it and away you go.

Contact Dana at MasterofBuzz@gmail.com for more information.