Get in the conversation!

REALLY ???

Do me a favor and look back at your day when you are ready to wrap things up. What did you just say over and over and OVER again to people you talk to on the phone, in your shop, or even by email? Now, can you put that in writing and post it to a blog? (hint: what’ya think I am doing RIGHT NOW???)

Guess what? by the time you read this, I have posted it to my blog, and it automatically propagated to my fan page on Facebook, and from there it automatically created a tweet for people to look at this exact blog. And my tweets are automatically visibly on LinkedIn too.

And next time I have to email someone the same story, I can just point them to this blog entry in a tenth of the time it takes to write it all over again in Outlook. Can you be more effective that way? Can you reach more people? YES

And it took five minutes flat to create this blog entry.

NOW – tell me that you don’t have tome for Social media.

Yoram

I hear you… you are concerned that putting in yourtime, efforts, thoughts and energy will be just a waste of your ‘all-of-the-above’.

In short, company presence on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can:
• generate qualified leads
• allow you to listen to and interact with your community
• put a personality behind the brand
• expand relationships with other businesses and professionals
• build general awareness of your brand and product
• promote special deals to targeted groups
• enables you to keep a finger on the pulse of trends in your area of business
• keep an eye on the competition
• create a new channel for customer service
• drive traffic to your website
• help establish you and your business as thought leaders in the channel (and beyond!)

The key to success with any social media platform is not to inundate your community members with sales message after sales message. Make sure your messaging is not all about you. Post educational content, industry news and include your marketing messages in there as well. Social media management is an emerging art form, really, and timing and frequency of posting play a huge factor in how successful a small business can be online. Some of the main reasons cited for UNfollowing businesses on social networks include over-communication, under-communication or lack of updating, irrelevant status updates, only talk about yourself, and do not engage in conversation with the community.

Be our friend, and we’ll be yours.

Social media has been the new rage in marketing. It sure feels like hype but let’s have a look at what it really is, what it should mean to you and, if there is any money in it for your business?

First thing to understand: Social Media is not just Facebook. There are tons and tons of social channels that are not related to Facebook in any way at all. Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn are just some of the better known names. But there are hundreds more. YouTube has become a de-facto TV channel for small and large businesses, and if you are into marketing you’d notice that there is a shift in the way marketers think. No longer do they try to get YOUR message to the TARGET MARKET. Now they try to get the TARGET MARKET to engage in a conversation and talk back to you!

There are three steps to Social Marketing:

1. Talk to the market in a way that allows them to answers. Technology takes care of that. It is readily available, inexpensive and allows for quick set up. Now you can tell very quickly if they are interested. Do you know how? If they answer, they are…

2. Start a conversation with your market. Now that you talk to them and they can respond, get in a conversation. This allows you to find out what the market wants, realize quickly when their tastes change, and test your products and services to see if they like what you have.

3. See if you can get them to talk to each other about you. Then you know you hit home. you can tell when people are “re-tweeting” about your stuff, when a couple of page “likes” turns into an avalanche or when your video on YouTube goes viral.

The more people talk with you and amongst themselves about you and your product or service the more you will sell. IT IS THAT EASY. If a hundred people talk about your product some of them will look it up on your website, and some of these will buy. How does that compare to not having anyone talk about it? I thought you might think that way…. That’s it; that is what Social Media should mean to you.

There are many companies and individuals who can help you start, do it for you, or teach you how to do it. Yours Truly is one of them. Find the one you think would work the best for you and don’t wait, just do it; why? NO – Not because everyone else will and you will die of starvation. Not at all. The reason is actually that it is easier than you think and you are just wasting your time not doing it because a baseless fear of what you don’t know about glues your wheels to the ground.

Just start with one little thing. You’d be happy you did.

Yoram

In his article “Ten Entrepreneurship Rules for Building Massive Companies” Reid discusses some of the most profound principles of entrepreneurship and one of the best I like reads:

“Rule #6: Launch early enough that you are embarrassed by your first product release.
With my first startup, Socialnet.com, it took us nine months to launch the first product. That was a disastrous mistake. We wanted to have all the detailed functionality right away, including social controls to people could decide to connect or not with the people in their networks. We wanted everyone to “Ooh” and “Aaah” about how terrific the product was. We wasted a bunch of time and it put us months behind on more important problems that needed to be solved, such as how to get our product in the hands of millions of people. From that I learned, if you are not embarrassed by your first release, you’ve launched too late!”

You do NOT have to be perfect. Just get on with it. Get into the habit of causing ACTION because it will create a result and you’d be further along the way – and in 99.9% of the cases you’d be enough on target to correct any errors you made and improve your version 2.0.

The full article is at http://greylockvc.com/2011/03/22/ten-entrepreneurship-rules-for-building-massive-companies/