5 Reasons You Need A Social Media Manager

Image by fredcavazza via Flickr

Business owners around the globe are asking themselves whether or not they need a social media manager. However, more and more of them are noticing the popularity of social media, but don’t know how, where, when, or why they should jump on the bandwagon themselves.  They notice their colleagues, peers, friends, children & family have jumped on board, on a more personal level. But, what so many of them fail to see, is that their present and future customers have jumped on for a ride too!

Right now, as you read this, your customers are flying down the road going mach 5 with no end in sight. They’re enjoying themselves too while reading/writing reviews, articles, comments & opinions on your business. They’re chatting amongst themselves (and to the rest of the internet world) about their latest visit, what their experience was, and even how it bugs them that Sally the cashier always seems “nice”, but never says thank you when they are leaving.

Wouldn’t you love the opportunity to be in that cart flying down the road too? Do you want to know what your customers are saying about you? Do you want to be able to effectively converse back with them? Wouldn’t you love to hear, first hand, about their experiences? Wouldn’t it be great to know how they felt about Sally so you could enforce stronger cashier policies?

Go to the source if you’d like to get the 5 reasons: socialmediatoday.com. h/t @tommytrc.

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How Marketers Can Keep Brand Fans on Board

Go to the source to read the article: emarketer.com

8 Best-Practices for Small Business Websites

Image via CrunchBase

Everything you “know” about social media for small business is wrong.

Small businesses—accountants, lawyers, and brick-and-mortar shops—don’t need 5,000 Facebook fans, Diggs, or blogs that are updated daily. They need business. You know, clients, customers, shoppers, or whatever you want to call them.

How do small businesses use social media to get more clients and customers?

It’s much easier than you think, and to demonstrate that, I analyzed 10 of my most successful small business clients, and discovered these 8 best-practices. Oh, and the best part is this: you can implement most of these tips in a long weekend.

Now let’s dive in…

via diythemes.com

You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’d like to dig a little deeper…

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The Future of Business is Social

You can read the original article here: Best of 2010: The Future of Business is Social.

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4 Predictions for the Future of Politics and Social Media

Show me a modern political candidate who doesn’t understand television, and I’ll show you a loser.When TV became the dominant medium for Americans to consume news and entertainment, political candidates could no longer be successful without looking polished in televised debates, appearing on talk shows and spending big on commercials.Like the television boom of the 1960s, we are standing on the precipice of a big shift in how public figures are perceived and how campaigns are conducted. Our frontier is social media, and its impact on mainstream political culture is coming on fast.While my colleagues have been making their predictions about what’s on the tech and social media horizon in 2011, there will be no major U.S. elections next year. Here, we’ll be postulating about social media’s impact on the more long-term future of American civics.

You can read the rest of the article here if you’d like: 4 Predictions for the Future of Politics and Social Media.

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Correcting One Thing at a Time

Corporate athletes have recently (in the last decade) been schooled in the concept of working on strengths and exploiting them to gain leverage in their careers (via such books as Now Discover Your Strengths).  In our early careers, we were likely (at least I was) told to work on our weaknesses. It was a challenge to always be focusing on the negative, to say the least.   Thusly, a strengths-based approach made sense.We know that top athletes have almost always worked on their strengths to the level of exploiting them for extraordinary gains. To be fair, they also work on their weaknesses, but when you look at sports like cycling you see climbers become better climbers, sprinters getting faster and more explosive, time trialists becoming increasing dominant in their discipline and so on.  I think that you get the point. More specifically, great athletes focus on winning at one thing first, and work on weaknesses and secondary strengths after they’ve honed their strength.

via Social Media Breakfast New North | Blog | Winning at One Thing First Correcting One Thing at a Time.

When Dana VanDen Heuvel talks, I take notes. You can follow the ‘via’ link above to go to the source and read the rest of the article if you’re interested in learning more…

Reflecting on 2010 – The Year the Customer Became King

Image via Wikipedia

“I came. I saw. I conquered.”

Were Julius Caesar a B2B online marketer in 2010, his words may have more appropriately been:

“I created. I shared. I conversed.”

Even five years ago, the concept of engaging the customer in dialogue, let alone allowing the customer to drive the conversation, would have been both foreign and frightening.

Today, marketers that are actively engaging their customers and their communities through social media and sharing relevant, meaningful content with them are leading the charge toward a new era of online marketing – an era in which the customer, not the brand, is King.

And, no longer is a solid brand message and well articulated value proposition enough for our King. When it comes to learning more about our brands and products, our customers don’t just want a message, they want a conversation.

via blogs.business.com

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Consumers More Likely to Use Businesses Active on Social Media

Image via CrunchBase

Seven out of 10 consumers are more likely to use a local business if it has information available on a social media site, says a new study.

The annual study, called Local Search Usage Study: Bridging The Caps, From Search to Sales, is a joint effort of comScore and TMP Directional Marketing, a local search marketing firm. It includes an online survey of some 4,000 consumers, plus data gleaned from observing one million consumers who agreed to have their online searches monitored anonymously.

Having a page on Facebook is a start, but it’s not a one-time effort: 81 percent of consumers using social media say it’s important for businesses to respond to questions and complaints. And for the record, you do need to worry about reviews and ratings – 78 percent said they’re important when deciding what to buy.

What else do you need to be doing with social media? Nearly four out of five (78 percent) of users want special offers, promotions, and information about events, 74 percent want regular posts about products, and 72 percent want posts about the company itself. (Wondering about posting those photos of the company office—or picnic? Two-thirds of those surveyed want to see them.)

If this all seems too daunting, the survey also suggests a simple starting place: make sure there is correct information about your business in as many places online as you can (Google, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Social networkers are 67 percent more likely to buy something than general searchers, but one in six searchers is frustrated by the lack of reliable information about small businesses on the Web – either it’s not there at all, it’s incorrect, or it’s confusing or disorderly. One third of searchers give up on a business when they can’t quickly find the information they’re looking for.

via inc.com

Wow. Just wow. You can follow the ‘via’ link if you’d like to read the rest of the article. Comment, call or use the contact form to connect and discuss how this applies to your business. Thanks to Dana VanDen Heuvel for tweeting this…

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7+ Tools for Turning the Tide

I had the honor yesterday of team teaching a social media ‘bootcamp’ with super smart social media guy Dana VanDen Heuvel [I know! Why was I team teaching with him?!]. Apparently Dana finds some value in my ‘practical, tactical’ approach to social media implementation so he asked me to share it with the class…

Me? I think people who believe that social media marketing could be valuable for their business are immediately faced with the question of ‘how do I add social media to my overflowing plate and still get home for supper?’. If that’s true then we need a simple toolbox to help us go from being overwhelmed by data to effectively managing and producing it. This is my current thinking about the ‘7+ Tools for Turning the Tide’ [the plus is for retail destinations that would also benefit from location-based social media]…

http://www.mindmeister.com/maps/public_map_shell/71029957/7-top-tools-for-turning-the-infotide?width=550&height=400&zoom=1&live_update=1

Before you tweet back that this is way oversimplified, remember where most aspiring thought leaders are at! That’s why I use three maxims to guide my choice of tools:

• “Things must be made as simple as possible but no simpler.” Albert Einstein
• “Never use two tools where one will do.” Paraphrase of Thomas Jefferson
• “The tools must be ‘good, fast and cheap’, completely cross platform, and available anywhere/anytime [which means they are web and mobile based].” Todd Lohenry

This mindmap is a revision of my now ‘world famous’ series ‘The Top 10 Tools for Tightening your Tribe‘ — the missing technology toolkit for Seth Godin’s book ‘Tribes‘. You’ll see that some of the tools have changed [I’ve moved to Chrome from Firefox, for example] but the principles are enduring and many tools have stood the test of time over the past year — a lifetime in the social media space…

Questions? Feedback? Comment, call or use the contact form to connect so we can talk about how this applies to your business…

Can You Have Thought Leadership Without Thought?

Image via CrunchBase

Having worked in PR for more than a dozen years, one of the unkillable buzz-phrases has been “thought leader.” For PR clients, it’s a simplified expression for being known for more than self-promotional reasons. rather than shilling your product or company (there is always a place for that), show expertise in a topic, and get media coverage, and industry recognition, and the resulting boost in credibility helps bring credibility to- well, your shilling of your company and product.

Fast forward to social media days, where the push and pull between communications consulting (PR, marketing, and even advertising are being bundled up in social media, confusing matters more) and brazen self-promotion has become more fierce.

See, as a PR flak I took a lot of pride in being behind the scenes, making clients famous. I guess I was the same way in my media days as well, preferring the role of editor and producer to that of on-air personality or bylined reporter. As my work moved more towards, social media, many of us made the unaccustomed move to be out front, blogging and Tweeting  and making all sorts of media that other people can see. This process has created a lot more visibility for many of us, and that’s great as far as it instructs in how to make the people who pay us famous.

Again, we  come to the push/pull between consulting and self-promotion. I tend to tread lightly, because many people I consider friends have gotten”social media famous” or whatever you like to call it. However, determining the difference between people enjoying the sound of their own voices and those who are genuinely making contributions has become harder to discern in the flood of social media publishing (and I use that term in its broadest meaning, not just books).

via doughaslam.com

With the thoughts I’d be thinkin’ I could be another Dana VanDen Heuvel if I only had his brain — he’s the best resource on thought leadership marketing I know…

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