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Archive for the ‘Online Social Media’ Category

Twitter Training - Getting started with Twitter Twitter is just another example of the light speed at which communications are catapulting forward, and corporate America (as well as home business online marketers) should do our best to keep up. Social Radar, a research group reporting on activity and trends in social media, ranked Twitter number one in June 2009. Close on their heels were iPhone, Google and Facebook. Yes my friends, there were more “tweets” (140 character exchanges on Twitter) than there were searches on Google.

Let’s start with the basics. What is Twitter? Twitter is a text only platform that launches discussion and banter with a basic question, “What are you doing?” The answers must be 140 characters or less and are sent via the web, mobile texting, instant message and or a variety of applications.

Because Twitter combines elements from many applications in the digital world, many say it was the logical extension of what had developed electronically thus far. For example, Twitter uses some of the elements of instant messaging (IM), some of chat rooms, some of blogs, and of course, it is actually a member of the entire social networking family of sites. It’s like a chat room in that it is an open forum, like instant messaging in that tweets are bite-sized core thoughts, like a blog in that it allows for moment to moment updates with people of your choosing, like a website in that profiles can (and should) convey a specific “feel” and or character, and definitely a social networking site enabling fun or passionate communication either continually, or in whatever timeframe fits each user.

But what is it really? Depends on who you ask. To some, Twitter is a fun escape from the doldrums of the job, home life or commute; to some it is a way to feel close to friends, family and associates (divided by schedules or geography); to some it’s an instant communication and information dissemination device; and most importantly to home business professionals like you, Twitter is the one of the most powerful, real time marketing system now in play.

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Author: Gary S. Spirer

Do you want to maintain your existing customer base rather than incur the expense of attracting new consumers? The solution has never been easier with social media. Here’s what to do.

Step 1. * Find out what your customers are really saying through social media *

Find out what customers say about your business to others using sites such as Buzzmetrics and Umbria. LinkedIn has a company buzz application that lets consumers express their real opinions of products, services, and the quality of service at companies. By joining these social media, you can find out how your customers feel and pass on to other potential customers.

Step 2. *Select the right social media *

Reach the most customers by using the right social media platform. To immediately reach customers and interact with them, micro-blogging is optimal. An example of such media is Twitter. To actively engage with customers over time and discover what they think of products, then use social networks, such as Facebook. Maintaining a constant dialog with your customers enables you to really reach them. In addition, you can attract new customers to your company web site.

Step 3. * Engage your customers *

Develop a more interactive website now that you know how your customers feel about your business. Set up a special page that enables them to rate products and leave feedback and future suggestions. By doing so, you can actively interact with customers to find out more about their tastes. Allow customers to rate all aspects of your products and all sections of your website. Be sure to leave room for comments in addition to a 1-5 rating scale.

Step 4. * Converse with your customers *

Converse on an ongoing basis with customers be establishing a brainstorm section. By inviting customers to suggest ideas for products or tips on how to improve existing products, you can keep them happy by making such changes.

That’s it! Remember by understanding what your customer needs and knowing their tastes you can better cater to them. It is much cheaper to maintain existing customers rather than gain new ones. Please visit for more great business advice.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gary Spirer holds a bachelor’s degree in Literature from New York University graduating magna cum laude, and an MBA in Finance from Columbia University.

Mr. Spirer began his career at the prestigious investment banking firm Lazard Freres, where he worked at their real estate affiliate. Subsequently, Gary founded his own real estate company, Capital Hill Realty. In real estate Gary has developed, syndicated and invested in properties that in today’s value, aggregate over $500 million. Gary has raised over $60 million dollars from individuals and small funds with 100% success.

For more on Stepsto, check out our website StepsTo at http://www.stepsto.com

by Marsha Maung

I have been receiving SMS messages from this beauty center that I go to this month and it’s amazing that they keep doing that. You know why? It must be costing them a bomb to just send out these messages through the conventional text messaging system. They could be saving themselves tons of money every month if only they knew more about things like Twitter and Facebook.

Sigh….

Online social networking is the new word of mouth marketing, albeit, in the electronic format. It is like you giving your friends a call and telling them about the amazing beauty treatment that you just got or you could be telling them about this amazing promotion going on…all free of charge, except for the amount that you are paying for your internet services.

But we all have internet services nowadays anyway, so the extra cost is basically ZERO.

The cost comes in the form of the number of seconds it will take you to type out your message on the online social networking website and then clicking the submit button. That is it.

In fact, online social networking is so incredibly powerful and cheap that more and more companies are beginning to hop onto it for the sake of their businesses. The downside to that is that not many of the businesses know how to optimize the full potential of such online social networking sites. What they are doing is keep telling their friends to visit them, telling them about a promotion…using the old method of pushing products and services instead of pulling.

A balanced method of using the push and the pull marketing on online social networking sites is the only way to do it. People are smart and they don’t like it when others talk about nothing but just ‘buy me, buy me, buy me, I am good, I am good, I am cheap, I am cheap’.

Boring.

Online SOCIAL networking is a social site. You need to socialize and make friends. That way, you win fans, you win friends, you win business. There’s nothing, like they always say, like doing business with someone you like and know.

Why do I Twitter?

Well, there are a number of reasons, but let’s take a look at a hard core business marketing reason.

Paraphrasing an oft-used line from the political realm, “It’s all about the blog, stupid.”

Let me digress … I provide media replication and related multimedia services. I have been to several networking events of late and in discussions with others have asked, “So, have you been delving into Social Media any?” The answer has usually been something like, “Yeah, I have a Facebook and LinkedIn. I do keep up with Facebook,and less so with LinkedIn, etc.”

I then ask, “Are you Twittering?”  The answer has been pretty much along the lines of, “Whew, I wouldn’t be able to keep up with that!”

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Most people concur that writing is not always easy – especially when you’re not wired that way. Most people would imagine TALKING a much better, more convenient form of communication. It takes effort to write. But for strange, weird people like me, writing is easier. That is….before this whole online social networking thing took it a few steps deeper.

Writing, for most writers today, is a form of promotion for ourselves. The more we write, the more we get out there, the more people we reach, the more people get to know about it. If you do a credible job, you invariably will attract a few fans and followers as time goes on.

With the online social networking phenomenon, it’s no longer the case.

Writing is the easy part….the physical part of typing the article out, editing and proofing them. And THEN comes the hard part. I know some people are thinking, ‘That’s it, right? You’re done! You get it published or send it out or something, right?’ WRONG.

I said ‘promotion’ up there and an article does not promote itself. You need to push it out there, hence, the work AFTER the writing is done. First, you’ll post it up, of course, then you put it up on your Facebook account to let all your friends and family members know that you’ve just written some masterpiece. And you get on Twitter and tweet about it to your followers so that they can get a read of it too. It’s not a prerequisite but some people repeat their tweets (RT – ReTweet) the same link with different write-up….just in case someone missed it. Some people do it up to 8, 9, 10 times a day. Sometimes they do it the next day, next week…well, it’s up to you how much you want to annoy your followers, really.

Done? No. Don’t forget to plug the story into article directories too and that’ll take a bit of time but you’ll chill while waiting. And of course, you’re going to have to place some links in your Facebook group walls and also in your blog to let readers know the article is there.

Done? No. Don’t forget the online bookmarking sites because lots of people go through them and an extra link can’t be a bad thing. So, you go into your digg.com, stumbleupon, Yahoo! buzz, propeller.com, delicious.com, furl.net…and stick the link up there with a short write-up to….yes, to let people know the article is there.

See? One article and tons of work after that. You see why writing is the easy part now? I might just start thinking that talking is way faster some day.

There’s something really fantastic about what Dunkin Donuts is doing with their online social media marketing effort through Facebook; it totally threw me off. Don’t get me wrong, this is not the first time I’ve heard of such campaigns and I sometimes try to get my clients to go along with it but….well, skeptics abound. Somehow, there’s something really endearing about the way they’re going about it.

How are they going about it?

First, let me get this out of the way before I explode. For the life of me, I cannot understand why Starbucks is not catching on?! Don’t they know enough about online social networking to be in it already – or at least, do it the right way?! Starbucks, surprisingly, is still stuck in the middle of nowhere….literally….trying to combine their offline and online social media marketing thing together and achieving….not much. They SHOULD be frustrated.

They should fire the advertising company doing it for them. Sending cups of Starbucks coffee from friend to friend can only do so much knowing that most of us Facebook users are already quite tired of adding applications to our already mashed-up Facebook profile page.

Have you seen the Coolatta sweepstakes ran by the Big Donut recently on Facebook? They don’t have as many fans as the Twilight series (yet) but they’re quickly catching up with eight-hundred-thousand fans of their Facebook page and counting. Accordingly (I’ve not tried this for myself), you can upload a photo of yourself on the Donut’s Facebook wall with a Coolatta and then add a caption to it. After that, it will be a BINGO moment for you – wait for them to go around on a random-selection process and BINGO, it’s either you get it or you don’t.

The kind of prizes that they’re offering are stuff like TVs, iPhones, wardrobe, flights….etc. Really cool stuff, I have to admit…for a chance to win that all you have to do is to get one of those Coolattas and snap a picture of yourself with it? Man, you can even borrow it from the guy behind the counter and have your instant Coolatta picture taken, does it matter? Not really. Sale is the last on their minds at the moment although this side benefit would have been good. There’s bound to be a spike in sales.

Anyway, the main purpose is to get people to spread the message and encourage action….and it’s the perfect way to enhance branding compared to Starbucks’ meek effort in getting people to pass Starbucks coffee around. Most of the time, for your information, I ignore these cups of coffees (sorry friends, but I prefer REAL coffee) and sadly, it does nothing to people like me.

It’s not targeting the target market properly and not encouraging any form of active participation at all….and the keyword would be ACTIVE PARTICIPATION….and AHEM, it does not include spamming or asking fans of the Facebook page to circulate a message to as many of their friends as possible. That’s viral and in case you don’t already know, viral marketing is a big turn off, does NOT work on Facebook…or any other online media marketing sites available to us at the moment.

Good on Dunkin’ Donuts. Now I am off to see if I can photoshop a picture of me with that Coolatta thing and win myself an awesome holiday.

It’s been a long but enjoyable day. But before I pull the plug on this tremendously relaxing Saturday, I would to share something with you and it’s got to do with how people are going about this whole online marketing thing wrong.

It’s my personal opinion that there’s one way to turn people off online. The only surefire way to lose the fight in this very tiny battlefield is to stick to a formula that you know works. The old method used to work well, I know, but with the economy down in the gutter, everyone’s using the same formula. PLUS, the same formula is costing us too much money.

So, the traditional way of marketing is to knock down every single door you see and shove your products and services into their faces and refuse to leave until they succumb to your harassment. You could advertise in the newspaper but it’s getting expensive. You could hire a new marketing guy but it takes time to train someone new and you can’t exactly afford to hire anyone new at this point in time. You could revamp your brand but every single idea you’re going to have involves spending money.

The logical thing to do is to jump into the internet marketing bandwagon, right?

That’s the right thing to do, I am not saying you’re wrong, but don’t do it blindly and don’t just hand THE FIRST PERSON you know to do the job. You can’t because whatever they do online (and they can do this without waiting for a memo to be passed during a Board of Directors’ meeting) will affect your image! Hire the wrong person and you’re screwed.

In online social media, or the Web 2.0 as some people prefer to call it, it’s imperative that you sell yourself correctly. But you’re not selling your products and services, you’re selling a brand. You’re promoting loyalty. You’re encouraging people to get to know you better. You want to create a personality….a sort of stickiness on the internet that helps people remember you and come back for more.

With more and more people with the same social media marketing modus operandi, you can only create awareness by selling YOURSELF as a brand. You connect with people. You make yourself heard. You make friends and help people understand what kind of person YOU ARE before you get them to understand what you do for a living.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a business or a freelancer! You’ve got to make that CONNECTION with others in order to get online social media marketing to work for you. Shall I say it again for good measure? OK. CONNECTION!

For a business, you can hire someone (or use someone who is currently on your payroll) to create an online persona for your business. And this personality is to connect with people, share his or her experience (on a personal or professional level) with people he or she knows.

It’s plain and simple.

The old method of PUSHING no longer works. Writing notes or blog posts about how WONDERFUL YOU ARE and how amazing your products and services are, shoving your potential clients’ faces into the brochures, flyers, profiles….they don’t work anymore. Blow your own trumpet and watch flocks of potential customers run off in the opposite direction!

It’s now time for some PULLING instead. And friends….the only way to pull is to attract. The only way to attract is to get personal.