Social Media: Creating a Good Routine

Good morning! (Wanted to start with that...)

So I'm sitting outside with my laptop responding to a few emails, etc. this morning, and I got a message from a friend mentioning that she is starting up with doing a little Social Media, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. She has a great website that encourages people to navigate successfully through their midlife years with a variety of tools such as e-books, audio interviews and blog posts. Check her out here at http://www.midlifeunlimited.com/.

Anyway, since I am very big on Social Media I decided to give her some unsolicited advice about how to go about it successfully. Below is the message I sent her:

Social Networking: I recommend the book The Zen of Social Media Marketing, by Shama Kabani. I got it from the library last month and am just about done with it. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are all discussed, and ties in the importance of your website as the place where you want to attract people.

15-30 minutes a day in the morning, you should start by posting a status update, and then reach out to your friends, colleagues, clients and consumers (in that order) by simply saying hi and responding to their posts. Then, every week make sure you have a compelling offer that people see on their social about you...such as a sale, a new product or service or a new blog post / whitepaper. Add the link to your website or blog to bring them there and talk about it.

Wow that was so good I think I'll expand on it in a blog. Go tohttp://blog.rocklandwebdesign.com/ in like 15 minutes.

Aside from the last admittedly A.D.D. and slightly arrogant line, the information is sound. See, the problem with Social Media is that it is so easy to get sucked into it the wrong way - and instead of connecting with like-minded people that you can help and they can help you, you end up playing Farmville for 49 hours a week, and become addicted to responding to people that are ROFLing while 'doing laundry'. Oh the mirth of it all.

So what do ya do? Well the advice above, broken down a bit more, goes like this:

1. Every week, start out with a plan to offer something new and compelling - a sale, a blog post, an e-book, a video, something that you feel will benefit others, and to a small degree, yourself. (Note: As I get older, I realize it is not a bad thing to offer something that benefits oneself - However it should always benefit others as well. If it is not a mutual benefit, do not offer it. Uh, did I stress that enough? :-))
   
   
2. Now - go to your favorite Social site: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and start off the day with a nice basic post about something that is going on in your life. I don't recommend starting off with the offer. Hold it in your hand, like a good curveball that you can use when the time is right. So put something out there that is fun and interesting - not just doing the laundry. Post it across all Social Networks.
   
   
3. Here is the important part: After you post, go to your news feed of where your friends and colleagues are posting, and respond back with genuine interest. You don't even have to say anything intelligent, you can simply 'like' their post, which is similar to voting in their favor. And truly empathize with people if they are having a difficult time. This should only take 10 minutes or so.
   
   
4. Throughout the day, you'll get a smattering of emails here and there, with post updates from those you've commented on. You don't need to respond to all of them - just hit delete - but if there's any that you want to further the conversation on, click on the link to reply back.
   
   
5. Sometime in the week, you will want to use your curveball. I can't explain exactly when the time is right...everyone has their own unique instinct to feeling out when it is right. All I can say is that when you feel the time is right, don't hesitate. As the late Patrick Swayze said in Point Break, hesitation will make your worst fears come true. Just do it, gosh darn it!
   
   So...curveball = post the message about your compelling offer. For instance, right now we are offering a new service at Rockland Web Design: Digitize Your Business Documents. However the time isn't right to mention it right now, perhaps sometime this week! ;-)
   
   Oh, one more thing...as Shama says in the Zen of Social Media (great book), "Always attract people back to your website." That is the end point where you want people to be.

I am so glad I saw my friend's message today. She gave me the inspiration to write this new blog post. I hope it is useful to her, and others that happen to come across it.

Tom Ossa

Rockland Web Design

(845) 877 - 7333

P.S. If you want an early preview of the Digitize Your Business Documents Service, contact us by going here. Mention your interest in the comments area. Thanks!

The Book of Eli: The New Matrix for Business Owners

Last night I had the pleasure of catching up with my friend Joel Wachtel from Computer Troubleshooters, and after a great barbecue (thanks Joel!) we sat down and watched The Book of Eli. I gotta tell ya, this movie has it all for me; a plot that is a bit out of the ordinary, plenty of action, but most importantly...a message.

I won't go too deeply into the movie itself, but I highly recommend it to anyone that doesn't mind watching some controversial content in order to get to a truly inspiring message. But what I do want to emphasize is something that I happened to notice throughout the movie - a correlation to one of my favorite all time classics, The Matrix.

If you recall, Neo is given the opportunity to see the world as it really is, and ultimately learns the arts, skills and techniques necessary to accomplish his unique mission. The real world is a post-apocalyptic hell, in which most would fade from the challenges in front of them. Yet Neo through his journeys ultimately finds the confidence to carry on his mission, in the face of certain death. I won't tell you if he lives or dies - I don't do spoilers. But the bottom line is he fulfilled his mission.

In the Book of Eli, I see the same similarities. Eli, played by Denzel Wachington navigates through a wasteland, in which you see elements of past movies such as Road Warrior, 300, etc., but most importantly at the beginning of tense fight scenes you see the confidence of a man who truly believes in his mission, to carry a Sacred Book to an unknown place where it will be safe.

If you are a business owner that truly believes in what you are doing, you might be walking through what feels like a post-apocalyptic wasteland of a dying business environment, wondering how "The Formula" is going to work for you. What's funny is that you have already have the God-Given tools to accomplish the mission you've agreed to take on. All you need to remember is to Keep the Faith, Walk the Walk and Believe.

Nothing more to say here. If you kind of, sort of understand what I'm saying here, I recommend you pick up the Book of Eli. You won't be disappointed. Have a wonderful weekend. :-)

Tom Ossa

Rockland Web Design

(845) 271 - 4488

P.S. Check out this great post from another Blogger I found if you want to learn more about the movie and stuff

Facebook: "Likes" will replace "Links"

It's so cute, isn't it? :-) The little button to the right of this blog...that teeny tiny little 'like' button that makes you want to say "Awww! You are so CUTE! I just wanna take you home and squeeze you and love you and kiss you and push you until you like me back!" (Flashback to Elmira from Animaniacs, Gen-Xers)

Of course I'm exaggerating, and of course your feelings for the like button are not that deep; they are more akin to Sarah Palin - nice woman but a few bricks short of a henhouse. But you gotta admit, it is kind of cute (The like button, not Sarah...focus people!). You wanna push the button. Just so that you can join the others that all say that they like something, anything that validates our collective existences, right??

There's a lot more to Facebook's little like button than meets the eye. I watched Mark Zuckerberg's presentation at Facebook's F8 convention on the new Open Social Graph, and his plans to make the web a more social and connected society can indeed come to fruition, especially since he's got help from heavy hitters in the industry such as Microsoft and others.

Now that Facebook has over 400 million users (more than the U.S. Population, at least prior to results of the 2010 census), it wields a great deal of influence over the web. Sure, Google is the place to seek information, but when you're looking for a really good movie, aren't you going to also want to ask your friends, who have actually seen that movie? Or better yet...what if you went to the Iron Man II website, and actually saw right there that your friends like that movie? Wouldn't that give you a little more rationale for going to see the movie?

Facebook's boldest web strategy yet centers around this little like button, and the implications of it are as far reaching as Google's original strategy to organize the world's information online. I must admit that this is the first time in my life that I have been both excited and worried about a new online technology. In a nutshell, the reasons are these:

1. The button gives ordinary people with little or no knowledge of web development the ability to rank and organize the web according to its usefulness (Yay! Excited)
2. Businesses have a new social tool that allows them to gain popularity very quickly, as well as learn more about their user's interests (Yay! Excited)
3. However, Facebook now has a method for collecting immeasurable quantities of data on each user its social networking platform, no matter where they go online (Um, worried)

I'll explain each a little more in detail.

1. Ordinary web users can now rank and organize the web.

In the early days of Search Engines, it was recognized by web developers like us that one of the best ways to help our clients show up on Google, Yahoo etc. was to call up other businesses in their communities and ask them to place a hyperlink (www.example.com/etc) on their website to our clients. The concept, openly divulged by Google, was that the more high-quality links placed on other websites that point to a client's website, the higher it will rank with respect to its peers in the same category in its search engine.

I must tell you, it was and still is a tedious process. Calling the right people, asking them to place a link on their websites, and often walking them through the process of adding that link takes an enormous amount of time. No complaints, but there had to be a simpler way...

Enter Facebook.

Now, simply by finding and clicking the little like button on any website , you or anyone can instantly make any web page more popular, simply by clicking 'like'. In the short term, this will not do much except raise the number of people that like a given page. But over time, Facebook and partners will be collecting that data, and my hypothesis is that they will be creating a new 'social search engine' that ranks websites according to their popularity from the average user.

This also means that as a business owner, you can more easily spearhead a web campaign to get followers simply by having the like button placed on all your web pages, generating just a little online buzz, and letting it steamroll from there. If the content you are trying to get liked is of good quality, then the buzz will spread, and more and more people will be inclined to push the like button. The content will spread on its own.

But that's not all...

2. Businesses can use this data to find out what appeals to consumers.

Now fast forward a few months after putting some content out there on your website. You have 205 people that like your article on spaghetti, and 12 that like your article about wanting to do some oil-surfing in Louisiana (best example I could come up with). Using that data, you can get a clearer picture of what is wanted and needed by your target audience.

Additionally, you can get a much more accurate picture of who your audience is. If those 205 people that like your article on spaghetti happen to be people who like gourmet cooking, then you as a business owner can refine your future content to attract more of that demographic. In essence, the like button is a very powerful tool for focusing a business' marketing efforts in a more effective manner.

But, there is a price to pay...

3. Guess where all that data goes?

Here's where it gets tricky. In order to create Zuckerberg's vision of a social web, somebody's gotta retain, centralize, and crunch all that data. You can be certain it's not going to be Xerox.

I'd like to pose a hypothetical situation. Let's say your 10-year old kid goes through a phase of finding a lot of, well...controversial stuff on the Internet. And on each site he finds, he clicks on the like button, to let his online friends know that he is interested in this material.

A few websites may not hurt...but over the course of months or years, Facebook could theoretically collect this data, and offer it as marketing data to their 3rd party companies. Even at this point it may still be innocuous, but the point is that now the data has left its home base. And the fact that this information is out there for use by various companies could - in the long run - have as damaging an effect as a bad credit report. In short, it could be very harmful to click on various likes across the web without taking a moment to think about what we are placing our stamp of approval upon.

Conclusion

Facebook's vision of a Social Web is a grandiose one. However I think that it is entirely plausible. Social Tools such as the like button will give ordinary users the ability to give their votes of approval on any content that exists on the web. Within a few short years, the like button will hold as much power as a link from one website to another. It has already begun.

Businesses will be able to capitalize on these new features, beginning simply by having them installed on their websites, and finding what works best for their target audiences. If you would like assistance with adding these social tools to your websites, call Rockland Web Design at (845) 271 - 4488. Most plugins can be added within an hour's time, so it is a fairly simple and straight-forward process for most client sites.

But just as much as we advocate the usefulness of the Facebook Social Plugins, we subsequently argue that consumers will need to be educated on them as much, or possibly more than businesses. I think the greatest danger is to future generations that randomly surf websites and like, like, like, all day long. There needs to be some sort of safeguard, to protect them from being stereotyped as an advocate or purveyor of damaging, harmful or offensive information.

I for one will be researching Facebook's new social plugins, especially the like button, very intricately. I see enormous potential for these tools, especially for businesses, but as mentioned above I do believe that the general public needs to be educated on how to use them properly.

Speaking as a single man without any kids, I am looking ahead and imagining that I will need to make the time to consistently teach my future children (God willing) that they need to make intelligent choices when going online for any reason, and much like Stephen Covey's explanation in the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, let them know that there is a space between stimulus ("wow this is a cool website!") and response ("I'm going to click on the like button") that gives them the freedom to make the right choices. And that choice can be as small as pointing a mouse toward the like button.