Marketing Talk

When you are involved in the world of Social Media, it’s easy to get enveloped in the “let’s hold hands and treat each other well” blanket. I often wax poetical (or maybe just wax) about how important community is. I talk about how strongly I feel that chats are important because they help you meet people.

What I don’t talk about very often is how to use Social Media to make money. There are several reasons for this. First, even though I am out here learning so that I can help support our clients, many of our clients are not using Social Media right now. This is because a lot of our clients are in niches where there just isn’t a lot of Social Media activity. As I have stated often, if we feel like Social Media isn’t a good idea, we don’t shove it down anybody’s throat. Also, I am not here to make personal profit. I am an ambassador for Clayman Advertising. Am I hoping to meet people who might want to work with us? Of course! But that’s very different from trying to get people to purchase a product.

The question pops into my head now and again…is all of the talking I do about community, helping people who are new to Social Media, saying thank you, promoting others…is that all relevant to someone who wants or needs to make money using Social Media?

My answer is that it is.

The new kid on the block

The thing is, a lot of people who have been navigating these waters for awhile have an understanding that there are unwritten rules. I don’t expect anyone in my community to randomly send me a tweet saying, “Hey buy this now!!” They would not expect the same from me. I don’t expect anyone in my community to send me a link that randomly leads me to their e-commerce store. They would not expect that from me. In short, as you develop your own community in the world of Social Media, using all of the best practices that you hear about everywhere, you become like a group of really good friends. You evolve to the point where you know that this person tends to blog at this time. This person always seems to help you promote your blog posts. The community develops a rhythm.

If you are using Social Media to make money, it would be easy to think that you can get started right out of the gate. In fact, though, if you are not careful, you can end up looking like that darned person who always seems to crash gatherings of good friends. Nobody really has a lot of patience for that kind of person, and more often than not, you’ll find that the doors and windows will be locked, the shades will be pulled all the way down, and you won’t get anywhere.

Buying is based on trust

Another reason why I think it’s essential to wait a beat before trying to sell is that people in the world of Social Media are not going to click anything unless they can generally trust you. There are too many phishing schemes. There are too many spam attacks and bugs. You have to make a name for yourself, prove that you’re not a bot, prove that you can be trusted. Only then will people begin to say, “Oh, ok, let’s see what this person has to share with me now.”

Developing that kind of trust takes a long time. It takes a daily, consistent effort of supporting other people, showing that you can help other people, showing that you know what you’re talking about, and showing that you are a good resource. Doing all of that requires, it seems to me, all of that gooey and mushy kumbaya stuff.

Many would find this frustrating

I know that if you are looking to make money, this is not the message you want to hear. It’s easy to dismiss us “community” folk as kind of the Social Media flower children. You might be saying, “That’s nice and all, but this is the real world, and the real world is about profit. It’s about driving people to your site, where your buy now button rests comfortably in your side navigation.” I know that this is an entirely new facet to marketing that we haven’t had to worry about. You didn’t have to build a relationship with a magazine for them to place your ad, right? You send them an order, you send them money, and boom, your ad appears.

And yet…

Is this really so different? Doesn’t business in the offline world also have its kumbaya contingent? You know, the people who do business based on handshake agreements? The people who excel at customer service? The people who will help you on the business front but then will also recommend a really great musician for you to listen to? And speaking of placing ads, isn’t it true that if you have a really good relationship with your contact at the publication, you can negotiate better placement and maybe even better prices for yourself or your client?

Would you randomly go up to a customer in real life and say, “go to my website and buy something, please”?  I doubt it. So, why approach Social Media any differently?

Start before you start

If you think that you are ready to jump into Social Media to make money, my advice would be to start building your community 3-6 months before you hope to start making sales. That’s not to say that you stay mum about your endgame, but what it does mean is that you don’t do any hard-selling. You need time to find your voice. You need to make sure that when you are ready to sell, there will actually be people following your tweets. You need to make sure that some of those people will click the links that you post.

In my case, I had blogged and tweeted for about 5 months before I added a link about our ClayComm 2.0 services to my blog site. I don’t point to it a whole lot, but it’s up there. I didn’t start pointing out what we can do to help companies market until I showed, through persistent interaction, that I knew what I was talking about when it came to the big picture and to some minute details. I am still not hard selling now, but if I was trying to sell a product, I would know how my community would want me to proceed. I would know how to avoid becoming that “annoying” salesman.

So what do you think? Can kumbaya and making money co-exist? In the movie Austen Powers, Austen represents the kind of naive flower child while Dr. Evil represents (funnily enough) profit and capitalism side of the equation. They are enemies. What if they could help each other out? Maybe that’s just me being kumbaya again.

1st Image by jorge vicente. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/jmjvicente

2nd Image by Rob Owen-Wahl. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/lockstockb

Normally, I like to think that I am reasonably stable mentally (don’t we all). However, ever since I joined Facebook, I’ve had some doubts. I’ve had a horrible relationship with Facebook right from the very beginning. I didn’t want to join at first because the site wanted my email password, and it wanted me to post a picture of myself, and it seemed to want to broadcast that information all over the place. Eventually though, I got hooked. Then lots of privacy confusion happened, and I decided to quit. But my friends did not engage in a mass exodus, so I was lured back in. Back and forth, back and forth.

Two weeks ago, I gave notice to my friends and family that I was going to be deleting my personal Facebook account, which I had always kept “locked down.” I started a public/professional Facebook account not long ago, and I was going to just use that going into the future.

As you might imagine, a few folks asked me why. Well, here is my answer.

Private is not really private

Every time Facebook makes changes, you find a slew of posts and announcements about how to lock down your information. When the “open graph” launched a few months ago, it became apparent that even if you lock down everything in your account by customizing all of the settings, your information could still be spread just by your connection to friends who get involved in applications. In the latest news, which Tommy Walker posted about here on Sunday, Facebook released the news that apparently some applications were selling information to advertisers.

In my personal account, I was not saying or doing anything to be ashamed of. It just was kind of a safe haven where I could talk to family and people I’ve been friends with for over 20 years in some cases. It seemed like a nice little village where we all could get together. It gave me a false sense of security.

Keeping it on the straight and narrow

When I joined Twitter, I knew that everything I said was out there in the open. Whether I am just tweeting to myself or whether I am tweeting in response to someone else, I know that anyone who wants to see what I am saying can and will. This gives me a constant sense of caution and responsibility that I did not have when I felt like I had some small measure of online privacy.

Now, with Facebook, I am out there in the open just like I am on Twitter. I have asked my friends and family to pop on over there so that I can remain in contact with them, but I will not stray far from what I would say to a stranger at a trade show, for the most part, because I no longer have the illusion, or false sense, that what I am saying on Facebook is protected.

My word of caution

Lately, the fact that online communication is out there for everyone to see has been in the spotlight, most often in negative ways. Take, for example, the gentleman (?) from Arkansas who proclaimed that homosexual kids killing themselves was a better option than wearing purple for a day. That man has now lost his job, and he will forever be known as “that guy who.” That kind of thing can happen to anyone, no matter how locked down you think you are. On Twitter, you can be retweeted. Links you post to Facebook can be shared. Status updates can be spread far and wide. There is not really such a thing as “personal” or “private” in this brave new world of Social Media.

This is not to scare people away. This is not to dissuade you from enjoying your Facebook and Twitter accounts. It’s just to say that you are not in the privacy of your own home or the home of a friend when you post out here. Anything you say can and will be used against you, either in a court of law or in the court of the general public. Be watchful. Be careful. Be warned.

Last week, I read two posts on the topic of following on Twitter. First, Mitch Joel wrote a post noting that being a snob on Twitter is a good thing. In response, Mark Schaefer wrote a post called Bringing Down the Twitter Snobs. I commented on both posts. Both posts were insightful. Both posts presented their perspective well. Mitch Joel essentially argues that “The only people you should follow on Twitter are people who are immediately interesting to you or people who might become interesting to you.” Mark Schaefer retorts: “You never know who will connect with you, you never know how they will connect with you, and you never know where it will lead. So why would you exclude ANYBODY?”

So where do I stand with this? I have all of the respect in the world for Mitch Joel, but I can’t really get to where he is in his head on this issue. So let me talk about 2 reasons why.

I don’t have 500,000 people asking to talk to me

I know, I don’t understand why either, but it’s a fact. I think that folks like Mitch, members of the “Twitter elite,” if you will, experience Twitter in a totally different way than folks like me do. Twitter for them is a relentless pull on their experience, their knowledge, their time, and their tweets. People like Mr. Joel do speeches, they’ve written books. They’ve hit it big time.

In that kind of scenario, I can understand how it would be difficult to keep up with everyone who follows you. The time it takes to sift through real people versus the spam bots would be extremely demanding. And let’s face it…if you are in that Twitter elite, you have a lot of people who are asking to pick your brain. You have people throwing fits if you don’t respond. So I get wanting to be selective. Still though, how do you determine who is “interesting”? Mr. Joel talks about looking at a person whose “follow” list was about 400 people, all of whom were “A-list.” What does that mean? How do the Twitter elite define “interesting” or “A-list”?

Why do we talk about “following” like it’s a big job?

Here’s what I really don’t understand about the “Twitter snob” stance. Why miss all of those opportunities? I mean, when you were in high school or college, did you say, “Woah, I can’t meet any more people because I mean, how can I keep track of everyone?” Probably not. You were interested in meeting more people, in befriending more people. Well, that’s how I feel about Twitter. More to the point, if everyone eventually evolved into a “snob,” how could anyone new find their way in Twitter?

When I got started, people took a chance on me. I didn’t have an “A-list” of followers. I didn’t have a high Klout score (so I’m told). I had under 100 followers, and I probably was following more people than were following me. But guess what? People began to follow me. They took a chance. I am forever grateful.

Now that I have a more pleasant foothold in Twitter, I actually seek out people who don’t have a lot of followers. I look at what they are trying to do with their tweets, and I reach out to them. I introduce them to people.

You can’t judge a person by their followers

In real life, you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who thinks it’s a good idea to judge people by how they look, right? If you say, “Oh, anyone who wears jeans isn’t my kind of person,” you’ll get raised eyebrow kind of looks. Well, I react that way to the “Twitter snob” concept. How can you tell who is “interesting” if you don’t take a moment to try to get to know people?

I enjoy reaching out to people. It’s what I enjoy about Twitter. I enjoy being, well, social. Sure, there are tons of reasons why I am using Twitter as a marketing professional. But I don’t view following people as a job. Yes, it takes time to make sure you’re not following a spam bot. Sure, it takes time to see if someone is giving a true effort. But you know what? I’m happy to do it, because to me, and to a lot of the people I hang out with in the Twitter world, that’s really the whole point.

So, where do you fall in this argument? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

image by Luca Cinacchio. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/cinacchi

If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you very likely have seen me mention Blogchat, a Twitter chat that happens on Sunday nights. There is good reason to talk about Blogchat often. Blogchat opened my eyes to all of the potential that Twitter carries. Blogchat introduced me to many people whom I now consider friends. All of that, of course, is in addition to the fact that I have learned an incredible amount not just about blogging, but also about networking on Twitter, sharing on Twitter, and how to meet new people with similar drive and interests.

I am not the only one who will praise Blogchat and its founder, Mack Collier. It is the largest chat on Twitter and perpetually attracts new people, which is awesome.

So understand that when I say there is one thing I am worried about, the intent is not at all to smack down the whole concept. It’s more like expressing concern about a job choice a relative is making – when you’re not quite sure if they’re going the right way.

This issue really came to light for me a couple of weeks ago. The topic was how to promote a brand new blog, which opened the doors for lots of people who were new to blogging and who were perhaps also new to Blogchat and/or Twitter. My hope and expectation was that there would be a lot of questions flying around from new folk, and that some of the Blogchat veterans would be sending answers back.

There was a little bit of that, but there were also a lot of people tweeting out very wise information, but not directly at anyone. With the usual retweeting of great information that happens, I fear that a lot of the newer folks were intimidated by the speed of the chat and didn’t really get to have a lot of their direct questions answered.

Remember what it’s like to be new

I would like to toss out a little thought for those of us who have been participating in blogchat for awhile. All of us, at some point, were new to the chat. All of us, at some point, decided to dip our toes in for the first time and ended up making a habit of it. Every week, the pool that new folks are dipping their toes into is getting deeper and deeper. There are more and more people who have been coming every week. Because the chat is getting so large and is attracting so much attention, it is attracting more “big hitters,” which in turn gets even more people using the hashtag for the chat.

I want to make sure that people who start coming to Blogchat now have the same powerful opportunity I did when I first started participating. I want them to feel welcome and important. I want them to be able to toss out questions and get bombarded with answers to their direct attention. I want them to learn what they are hoping to learn. I want them to come back.

I am going to try harder in the coming weeks to seek out question marks and people who say, “Woah, this is really intimidating,” or “I’m new here.”

I think that networking with those people is where the popularity and power of Blogchat rests. I’m a little worried that we might stray away from that a bit as people realize that their chances of getting attention and retweets are pretty good on Sunday nights. The essence of Social Media, and the true essence of Blogchat, is to lift up and help other people who need it.

I’m going to do a better job of sticking to that from now on.

Image by sanja gjenero. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/lusi

A lot of what I talk about these days narrows down to how to be a good citizen in the world of Social Media. So, for this weekend’s presentation, I thought I would tell you about the 10 rules I try to follow to make sure I am living up to my own standards of citizenship. I have gotten more rewarding experiences and more enjoyment since I started following these rules. I hope they work for you as well!

Well, I have to say, I am pretty excited about how this week’s #30Thursday turned out. There are a few resounding themes, and I’d love to say that I planned it this way, but this is just what people are writing. They are writing about bullying and why they care. They are writing about how to be the best you you can be. They are writing about how to lift others up.

Pretty amazing, huh? I think so too.

And no, I probably won’t make all of the titles of my #30thursday posts rhyme – but it’s fun in the meantime. Please enjoy these fantastic posts!

1. The first post this week comes from @LouImbriano, who notes wisely that our focus should be on building, not selling. Scott Stratten of Unmarketing would adore this post 🙂

2. A very thoughtful post by @Juliemangano called “I was bullied.” I think a lot of people will be able to relate to this post. It reminds us that bullying, whether online or offline, can leave deep scars that are hard to forget and hard to ignore.

3. Mike Myatt wrote one of the best definitions of influence I have seen. How to create lasting influence – a post that shows influence is probably more than just about numbers and who clicks what.

4. My friend Paul Konrardy sent me this post from ProBlogger Darren Rouse. It’s from 2007, showing that the problem of online bullying has been going on for quite some time. Check out What A Buddhist Monk Taught Me About Blogging

5. This post created quite an uproar across Social Media sites. Great post by SME Examiner regarding three myths about guest posting. Lots of actionable items to think about here!

6. My friend @CelsiusMI brought this post from, well, MediaPost, to my attention: “Why Marketers Shouldn’t Give Up on Twitter,” by Jessica Michaels

7. This was a really interesting post by Alan Belniak for MarketingProfs (The Daily Fix). I saw Jason Falls tweet it out. If that isn’t a clue how great this post is, I don’t know what to tell you 🙂 So check out Are you really marketing or just advertising?

8. My friend David McGraw has a great idea for the month of November – remind yourself of why you should be grateful every day, all month. It’s a project called 30 Days of Gratitude. Are you in? Because I sure am!

9. My new friend @Greetums, who has been a major supporter of my efforts in the Social Media Safety project, wrote a beautiful and insightful post called Confessions of a Bully. A must read for sure.

10. @melissa_ful tweeted this post to me by Ezra Klein, and I think he has a great message: Why it gets better. Neat way to piggy-back on the “It gets better” campaign.

11. @galactic sent me this extraordinary post from August Turak at AdAge.com. In What Bolsters the Bottom Line? Selfless Marketing, Turak invokes Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s spiritual journey and what advertisers can learn from the success of movies like Devil Wears Prada. Read this extremely interesting post, and you won’t regret it!

12. My friend Heidi Cohen got published at Clickz.com. Her post, titled Stop Experimenting with Social Media, offers some fantastic actionable items for integrating Social Media into your marketing efforts. Some of the comments she received are a bit shocking as well.

13. This was a fun post that my friend @gagasgarden recommended. By Clint Franzen, “It all started with a call to a local guy offering guitar lessons in piano” notes the wonder of seeing a student exceed expectations and head right towards the pinnacle of great success.

14. Speaking of my friend Gaga, she has a delightful little post this week about greenhouses, tequila, and how kids will hold on to the strangest sayings 🙂 Check out OUI Built a Prefabricated Greenhouse for $142.00 by this lovely lady.

15. Is “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” the best approach? Carol Phillips tweeted out a post by Mariam Shahab that ponders this question, and whether it’s just Generation Y that doubts this old adage.

16. My friend Tommy tweeted out this very useful post from Hubspot.com called 6 Easy Ways to Get More Visitors To Your Blog. A must-read!

17. My friend Allen Mireles tweeted out an interesting post written by Erica Naone for The Technology Review. The post is titled Social Coupons: Good for Business? The answer might surprise you. Then again, it might not 🙂

18. My bloggy bff @pushingsocial said this post was a must-read. I would tend to agree, although again it might be a bit self-serving posting a link to this from #30Thursday. Still, the info is great! Curating Information as Content Strategy, by Valeria Maltoni

19. Jordan Cooper (@notaproblog) wrote an outstanding post for Jason Falls’ Social Media Explorer called Community Managers: Whose Best Interests Do You Serve? The question extends to any portion of the marketing world these days. A lot to ponder here.

20.  Chris Brogan introduced me to a fellow named Jim Mitchem, who wrote a FABULOUS post on the bullying issue, simply called On Bullying. Jim comes at the issue from a logical space, and he creates a great read.

21. An amazing Vlog by Keith Ferrazzi called Your Turning Point. Who was there at the moment in your life when you needed someone the most?

22. Suzanne Vara’s fantastic post of the week for me was 8 Tips for Embracing Change in Social Media. Suzanne and I agree that a lot of what advertising taught marketers can be carried over into the world of Social Media. She details why, beautifully as always, in this post.

23. Sure, I’m biased, but I think this post by Jay Baer rocked the house. The 7 New Roles Agencies Must Play to Survive Real-Time Business. For insights into the ever-changing world of us agency folk, go here!

24. Megan Knight hits another one all the way out of the ballpark over at DawnWesterberg.com. Expanding on her original post, which I highlighted last week, Megan details how nonprofits can use Facebook, and best practices. Tremendous information!

25. @tommyismyname notes that we seem to be heading to a world where Minority Report seems kind of feasible. Normally, this would scare my wee pants off. However, Tommy writes about The Future of Marketing so well I’m almost kind of excited about it. Almost. 🙂

26. This post by Mark Dykeman is really really interesting – a game of “Where’s Waldo” with truly severe societal ramifications. Check out Develop your observational skills by spotting the photoshopping. Great post!

27. Jason Mikula did not rest on his laurels after last week’s fantastic post about Apple and customer service. This week, Jason analyzes a spectrum of Twitter customer service, then explains how companies can use Twitter to respond the right way. Give part 2 of Customer Service in the Social Media Era a read!

28. My friend Patrick Prothe wonders if there is room in business for kindness. This is a very detailed post, a mixture of helpful information and the human touch.

29. One great thing about my friend Maya (@MayaREGuru) is that she makes you want to jump up and save the world with her posts. Point of Ignition is no exception. I love reading uplifting blog posts like this!

30. I really thought this post by Chris Brogan, called Move On, was interesting. What is kind of a thorn in my business side (Social Media conferences) is like the kitchen table at home for him and many others. And yet, we all have a kitchen table somewhere, don’t we? What really matters, though, is what you do beyond it.