Social Media

Hundreds of speakers and experts have submitted their ideas for SXSW Interactive 2012 sessions and the public at large can chime in until this Friday, Sept. 2. I proposed a panel called “Real Small Business Owners on Google.” I invite you log on to the SXSW Panel Picker, and give me a thumbs up! Click here to learn more and vote today. With all the buzz about Google+ and what it might do for small business, I thought it would be a great session. Here’s the deal: If this panel is selected, after Google unveils its business page for Google+ I’ll invite my Duct Tape Marketing colleagues to help me find four guinea pig business owners to use Google+ to grow their business. If you’re selected, I’ll chart your progress and invite you to submit guest blog posts along the way here at Marketing with Moxie.   And here’s the cool part, you’ll be able to share your story as a SXSW panelist.  So vote now, and invite your friends to vote too!  We could all be going to Austin!  (Well, I’m already here, but it’ll still be a blast to be a part of one of the best conferences in the world!)

I have been getting a lot of info about Google+.  For this edition of Stuff with Moxie, I’m posting some info worth checking out if you want to drill down a bit on Google+ for your business — and life.

Good “insider” interview with Google’s Joseph Smarr

What’s New in Google+

An easier way to invite:  Hey Everyone, We’ve heard that you want to invite your friends, but sometimes you don’t know their email addresses… or sometimes its not easy to find it. To address this, we’ll be rolling out a new feature over the next few days that lets you invite others simply by using a link.  Read more.

1.  Wow… this is cool.  Wish I could get in.  This is kind of like walking by a cool new store. I peer through the windows.  The lights are on.  But the doors are locked. Will someone invite me — please?

2.  Drat. I got an invitation, but Google is picky about who’ll they’ll let in. Pretty good marketing strategy – dangle the carrot.  That won’t work for most business launches, but Google is well, Google.  The buggers.

3.  Yes!  I’m in. I feel like a kid who was waiting in line to get concert tickets for a rock band.  Now what?  Act like I know what I’m doing, that’s what.  Act like Guy Kawasaki — I mean, he’s a newbie too, right?

4.  Pretty cool.  I get it. For the most part.  Sparks?  Wha?

5. Awesome… there’s someone I know.  Hey… hey John… over here!  How’s the water?  You know me, really.  Can I be in your Circle?

6.  Circles. Wow.  I get this. Actually, this makes sense. I’m gonna proceed cautiously here.  Wish I’d have been able to separate out interests and contacts like this when I set up my personal Facebook page, which is a mishmash of business colleagues, good friends, and people from high school I really don’t know any more.

7.  Wow… people are adding me to their circles. Wait, who the hell is THAT guy?  Should I circle him too?   Um, no.  Can I ignore him?

8.  Ah.. more people are coming in. Quick, Act like you know what you’re doing.  Share other peoples stuff about G+

9.  Do I write Google Plus… Google+  G+  ?

10.  Okay.  I’ll stay. Now, I just need to figure out a system to integrate all this into my social media routine.  Crap.  Google, I think you did this one right. I can’t ignore this one like I did Buzz.

I came across this interesting article on the Marketing Profs Blog about how to make your business cards do more work to promote your business. Tara Horner offers five great ideas, and I’ll add two more:

1. Be sure to include your social media links – your blog site name and your Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter profile names.
2. Got an offer, a free report or a newsletter sign-up form on your web site? Put a QR code for it on the back of your card. What’s a QR code?  With the rising popularity of smart phones, you’ll be seeing more of these box-shaped squiggly codes in ads and flyers. Similar to a bar code at your grocery store, you point your smart phone camera, enabled with a QR code app, at the QR code box.  Bada bing bada boom! Your mobile web browser goes to the web page you encoded with the QR code. Check out this article in Tech Crunch about how to make a QR code on Bit.ly.

If you’re an entrepreneur or small business owner in Austin, don’t miss this year’s RISE conference the week of March 7. Created originally in 2007 by Roy and Bertrand Sosa as a week-long, free “un-conference” for- and by- entrepreneurs in Austin, Texas, RISE has now grown into an ongoing annual program that leverages its proprietary web interface to provide one-of-a-kind resources and experiences to entrepreneurs worldwide for free.

There are dozens of sessions to choose from in locations all over town ranging from bootstrapping your business to sales training to the kick-off event with Robert L. Johnson founder of the RLJ Companies and Founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET).

Of course, I hope you’ll join me for one of three sessions I’m hosting on Monday March 7 at the Better Business Bureau Conference Room on La Posada Drive:

8-9:30 am:  Seven Steps to Marketing Success

10-11:30 am: The Social Media Pyramid: Unraveling the Mystery of Social Media Marketing

12-1:30 pm:  Winning the Local Search game PLUS Teaching Your Business to Market Itself with Referrals

See you there!

A call to action makeover, why your business should be on facebook, and the best way to grow a business top the weekend edition of Marketing Stuff with Moxie – my semi-weekly compilation of three compelling or noteworthy marketing tips, tools or tactics I’ve come across in the past week.

Five Signs your Call-To-Action Needs a Makeover

Do you even have a call to action on your web site or landing page?  A compelling offer or clickable link for people to get to know like and trust you?  You should.  Hubspot’s Diana Freedman discusses a few ways you can tell that you need to makeover your site’s call-to-action.  Read more.

Eight Reasons Your Business Needs a Facebook Fan Page

If you’re like many small business owners, you’re just not sure about jumping into the social media fray.  A lot of my clients suffer from Facebook Fan Page Fear.  Here are eight compelling reasons from MySEMExperts blogger Harry Huxford that might help you overcome your fear.  Or you could go to your Fear Coach and pay a lot of money. Read more.

The Best Way to Grow A Business?

I’ll bet you could come up with the answer on your own.  Yup, it’s word of mouth, or basically referrals. Think about the favorite, easiest deal you ever closed – the one where the prospect practically said “let’s get started!” before you could even ask for the sale. It was probably a referral. Here’s a nice blog post by WinWeb’s Stefan Töpfer about a recent Linked In survey T-Mobile conducted.  Read more.

A side commentary on that list tip. I read a number of stories this week about the small business bill Congress sent to President Obama.  One congressional critic said, “Small businesses don’t need more credit, they need more customers.” Amen.  Don’t expect Congress to help you get more customers. You’ve got to do that on your own and word-of-mouth is the easiest, cheapest and most effective “small business stimulus plan” ever.

I'm amazed at the incredible buzz that flight attendant Steven Slater's "take this job and shove it" stunt on a Jet Blue airplane created. There's even an animated video out there depicting the event because no one (at least that we know of) captured the incident on their mobile phone.

It's a lesson for businesses large and small that in this era of social media, a story about your company can go viral before you even have a chance to decide what to do.

I'm often asked by clients or workshop attendees about using a blog to manage crisis communications. I'll turn to what Jet Blue did in this situation as a case study. Their blog post helped stem a tide of negative online buzz according to a Fast Company report.

Here's the Blue Tales Aug. 11 post:

Sometimes the weird news is about us.

It wouldn’t be fair for us to point out absurdities in other corners of the industry without acknowledging when it’s about us. Well, this week’s news certainly falls into that category. Perhaps you heard a little story about one of our flight attendants? While we can’t discuss the details of what is an ongoing investigation, plenty of others have already formed opinions on the matter. Like, the entire Internet. (The reason we’re not commenting is that we respect the privacy of the individual. People can speak on their own behalf; we won’t do it for them.)

While this episode may feed your inner Office Space, we just want to take this space to recognize our 2,300 fantastic, awesome and professional Inflight Crewmembers for delivering the JetBlue Experience you’ve come to expect of us.

Short. Sweet. Simple.  And it even had a bit of an attitude and a dose of humor.  Brilliant.

I recently posted a comment and a question on the popular video blog, shama.tv, asking Shama Kabani to comment on the ultimate blogging question I regularly get asked.  "How often should I blog?" (Truth in the room: I actually teased her about not updating her own blog as often as she advised on her web site.)

Shama has become a popular online marketing "guru." I tend to use that term sparingly, because there really are very few such experts in the world, but I think my colleague Shama is one of them. So it was an honor that she answered my question on her show. But now, it's pretty clear from the date of this blog post that I'm a blogging slacker too. Busted! Or, am I?  Hmmm.

Click on the image below to see her answer at shama.tv and tell me what you think!

I'm talking to a Greater Austin Chamber "Building Blocks of Business" session today about social media. It's so tempting to get into tactics right away.  I typically get questions like "How often should I blog?" or "What should I tweet?"  I believe small business owners and marketers need to think strategically about social media before they ever start to discuss tactics.

1) Integrate – Don’t treat your social media activity as something separate from your other marketing initiatives. Feature links to your social media profiles in your email signature, on your business cards, in your ads, and as a standard block of copy in your weekly HTML email newsletter. In addition, make sure that links to your educational content are featured prominently in your social media profiles and that Facebook fan page visitors and blog subscribers are offered the opportunity to subscribe to your newsletter and attend your online and offline events. Make your social media profiles a part of your address copy block and you will soon see adding them to all that you do as an automatic action.

2) Amplify – Use your social media activity to create awareness for and amplify your content housed in other places. This can go for teasing some aspect of your latest blog post on twitter or in your Facebook status, creating full blown events on Eventful or MeetUP, or pointing to mentions of your firm in the media. If you publish a bi-weekly newsletter, in addition to sending it to your subscribers, archive it online and tweet it too. You can also add social features to your newsletter to make it very easy for others to retweet (tweetmeme button) and share on social bookmark sites such as delicious and digg. I would also add that filtering other people’s great content and pointing this out to your followers, fans and subscribers fits into this category as it builds your overall reputation for good content sharing and helps to buffer the notion that you are simply broadcasting your announcements. Quality over quantity always wins in social media marketing.

3) Repurpose – Taking content that appears in one form and twisting it in ways that make it more available in a another, or to another audience, is one of the secrets to success in our hyperinfo driven marketing world we find ourselves. When you hold an event to present information you can promote the event in various social media networks and then capture that event and post the audio to your podcast, slides to Slideshare, and transcript (I use Castingwords for this) as a free report for download. You can string 5 blog posts together (like this series) and make them available as a workshop handout or a bonus for your LinkedIn group. Never look at any content as a single use, single medium, act.

4) Lead generate – So many people want to generate leads in the wide world of social media, but can’t seem to understand how or have met with downright hostile reactions when trying. Effectively generating leads from social media marketing is really no different than effectively generating leads anywhere – it’s just that the care you must take to do it right is amplified by the “no selling allowed” culture. No one like to be sold to in any environment – the trick is to let them buy – and this is even more important in social media marketing. So, what this means is that your activity, much of what I’ve mentioned above, needs to focus on creating awareness of your valuable, education based content, housed on your main hub site. You can gain permission to market to your social media network and contacts when you can build a level of trust through content sharing and engagement. It’s really the ultimate two step advertising, only perhaps now it’s three step – meet and engage in social media, lead to content elsewhere, content elsewhere presents the opportunity to buy. To generate leads through social media marketing, you need to view your activity on social sites like an effective headline for an ad – the purpose of the headline is not to sell, but to engage and build know, like and trust – it’s the ultimate permission based play when done correctly.

One glaring exception to this softer approach for some folks is twitter search. I believe you can use twitter search to locate people in your area who are asking for solutions and complaining about problems you can solve and reach out to them directly with a bit of a solution pitch. People who are talking publicly about needing something are offering a form of permission and can be approached as more of warmed lead. The same can also be said for LinkedIn Answers – if someone asks if “anyone knows a good WordPress designer”, I think you can move to convincing them that you are indeed a great WordPress designer.

5) Learn – One of the hangups I encounter frequently from people just trying to get started in social media marketing is the paralysis formed when they stare blankly at twitter wondering what in the world to say. The pressure to fill the silence can be so overwhelming that they eventually succumb and tweet what they had for lunch. If you find yourself in this camp, I’m going to let you off the hook – you don’t have to say anything to get tremendous benefit from social media participation. If I did nothing more than listen and occasionally respond when directly engaged, I would derive tremendous benefit from that level of participation. In fact, if you are just getting started this is what you should do before you ever open your 140 character mouth. Set up an RSS reader and subscribe to blogs, visit social bookmarking sites like BizSugar and delicious and read what’s popular, create custom twitter searches for your brand, you competitors, and your industry, and closely follow people on twitter who have a reputation for putting out great content. And then just listen and learn. If you do only this you will be much smarter about your business and industry than most and you may eventually gain the knowledge and confidence to tap the full range of what’s possible in the wild and wacky world of social media marketing.

While speaking to groups and clients about the value of blogging for business to draw prospects to their web site, there is always a point in the conversation when about half of the audience suddenly gets a look of panic or fear on their face — or their eyes simply begin to glaze over. It's not that they don't get the value of blogging, or understand how to technically get a blog article posted, or realize that search engine spiders love information-packed blogs.  

The yellow blog stripe they feel crawling up their back is being fueled by fear. Fear that they'll never be able to write something that people will actually want to read.  The invisible thought bubbles above their heads are practically shouting, "What will I say? Who will care? I don't have time for that. Can't I pay someone to do that for me?" The answer to that last question is, yes you can.  But if you're the owner or top manager of a small business, you're missing an opportunity to engage your customers in a way that was never possible back in the days before the Internet.  

So, what to do? There are countless articles on how to write effective blog content. It can be daunting just sifting through blog posts about writing blogs. It's a blog world gone crazy. I finally found an article on the Small Business Trends Blog that made sense. But before you click here to read it, consider this: God didn't give everyone the gift of writing. And there is a lot of great content already out there that you can comment on and share with your readers. Just like I just did by including that link. You're an expert in your field. If you're not feeling inspired to write, search other blogs in your industry and post a comment there. Link and comment about them on your blog too. Rave or rant. Start a conversation. Your readers will probably jump right in, and before you know it, you'll have blog post with more than 350 words like I do right now.  There.  See?  I'm done with my blog!