social media | Small Business Marketing Consultant

A Social Media tip you won’t hear anywhere else

hamilton — Wed, 18 May 2011 16:19:25 +0000

I have to thank David Sr., as he’s called at the company he owns with his son, David Jr., for this social media tip.

They manufacture big pumps and mixers for general construction, which, in Arizona, has been an industry on its back (to put it mildly). I’m their “marketing guy.”

I hadn’t been around for a while, but had been doing small tasks for David Jr. “until things picked up.”

I decided to stop by and say hi on my way back from another appointment. “Well, looked what walked in the door,” was my greeting from Senior (he’s pushing 80 and can verbally spar with anyone). He walked over to me, shook my hand, looked me in the eye and said “How are you going to help us if you’re never around?”

Great question and lesson. This isn’t about Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook or who does or doesn’t use them. The lesson for me: social media includes the social medium of face-to-face.

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Everybody just take a breath

hamilton — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:54:12 +0000

Every time something big comes along and starts to change things, like social media, the internet, television, radio all the way back to that trouble-maker Gutenberg and his press, people announce the death of the thing that it replaces. Or more accurately, the thing they believe it will replace.

With social media, everybody needs to just take a breath. And remember: social media is important; you need to understand it and use it; but you can’t afford to take your eye off the other ways you communicate with your customers and prospects.

Don’t forget email. And if you aren’t getting much traction from email, you need to start. Email is still the preferred methods of communication in the business world. Don’t forget email.

And don’t forget print ads or trade shows or good ol’ fashioned telephone calls or face-to-face meetings. An offline presence (actual human contact!) is a good thing.

Just because something is exploding, and social media is certainly doing that, doesn’t mean it extinguishes everything around it. Nowhere is that better demonstrated than in this chart by Thomas Baekdal. (He’s a smart person you should follow). Look at each medium, when its influence is the strongest (widest on the graph) and the natural weakening as newer media become popular. But weakening takes time; decades. So don’t drop anything. Simply add social media. And everybody just take a breath!

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Your Mother Was Right

hamilton — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 13:40:26 +0000

Remember your mother nagging you to spend more time around smarter people? “Why do you spend time around __________? He isn’t going anywhere!.” And “Why don’t you ever play with little ________, he/she is so smart?”

As a marketing consultant I have a similar message for clients:

Follow the smartest people in your field, and use social media to do it.

And that’s the beauty of social media, it makes it so easy to spend time with people much smarter than you. Heck, you can (and should!) spend time with your competitors.

Then go to someone’s account and take a look at the people they follow and where they’ve left comments. But you must first subscribe to their feed (a single click) in order to see who they follow and where they’ve commented.

Then click on “subscriptions,” the people they follow, and check out some of those people by hovering your mouse over a person’s icon to see a short blurb about them. Go to their feeds and subscribe to them if they seem interesting.

Next click on “comments,” which shows you what they’ve commented on. The thought here is people leave comments on the people’s feeds they are most interested in. So, comments are a direct line to the people they think are smart.

Yep your mother was right, and social media makes it easier than ever to spend more time around smart people.

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Your Social Media Mantra: It’s the Message, Stupid!

hamilton — Sun, 17 May 2009 18:22:25 +0000

Remember the old political quip from Bill Clinton’s first campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid”? It was written throughout his HQ to remind everyone the economy was the central issue of the campaign.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for linking to Thomas Baekdal’s post Where Is Everybody? in which Baekdal creates a graph (reproduced here) that shows how much how we communicate with each other has changed. It also makes my marketing quip, “It’s the Message, Stupid!”, even more obvious.

My point: don’t forget your marketing message!!

Everybody’s all hyperventilated about whether they should focus on Twitter, continue to blog, give more time to LinkedIn, Facebook, FriendFeed, DIGG and on and on and on. The same way I imagine they hyperventilated about newspapers, magazines, radio and TV, as the electronic word began to overtake the printed word.

It’s the message, stupid! Yes, be mindful of how you communicate. No, that isn’t enough to be successful. If you have nothing to say or a me-too product, you simply won’t get much traction or notice or attention, regardless of which social medium you employ.

Does the medium change the message?

Sure. But only the scale, you still need a message that resonates with your target audience. Imagine yourself a marketer in 1967 tasked with selling Admiral refrigerators. You just finish this nifty full-page ad in Life magazine and they want you to do a TV commercial. How do you cram all that information into a short TV spot?! Good question. And actually, the answer is you don’t. You need to take the core of your message and work with that.

Fast forward. . .you can’t even fit that nifty headline into a 140-character tweet!! How about a 95-character Adwords ad!

Be where your customers and prospects are going for their information. Clearly, that includes social media. But make sure you also focus on the message. Being at the right place isn’t enough.

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Why Social Media is Making CRM Obsolete

hamilton — Mon, 11 May 2009 12:37:32 +0000

All of us have used CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. Its goal: to increase sales by automating/managing relationships with customers and prospects. Social media is increasingly changing how we communicate with prospects, rendering CRM in this context obsolete. Think of CRM as the horse stable a day’s ride away from town when what you need is a gas station a day’s drive away from town.

So, what’s happening? The horse-car analogy is more obvious. As social media grows we’re transitioning from transaction-based marketing to more relationship-based marketing. A hundred internet years ago The Cluetrain Manifesto got it right: marketing is a conversation. And the conversation went from one-sided and event-oriented to fluid and always-on. CRM software is great for one-sided, event-oriented marketing. With fluid and always-on marketing, not so much.

One-sided and event-oriented marketing:

You buy a list or input a group of people you met at a trade show and start banging away, generally by mail, with your CRM software keeping score and reminding your salespeople to make those phone calls next month. Each “touch” was planned (letter, mailer, email, phone call, mailer, letter, etc.). As generally practiced, most of the time the content reflected the traditional “Hey, here’s why we’re different or better, buy from us.” At its best, the touches became more value-added (less pitches, more knowledge and advice offered).

Fluid and always-on marketing:

You become part of a larger conversation about your slice of the world. This extends far beyond even the most dynamic websites. Your internet footprint is a large one. You’re commenting on posts, creating video content, and sharing interesting articles, news and websites via a variety of vehicles, including FriendFeed, DIGG, LinkedIn, Twitter and all the rest. It necessarily gets woven into the fabric of every day. CRM software doesn’t have a chance!

What I find interesting is less about CRM and more about the nature of marketing. Like all changes, it happens slower and faster than you expect. Slower, in that traditional event-oriented marketing isn’t going away. But it will erode. Faster, in that those of us who are jumping into social media now will have a head start. If you aren’t playing with social media now, you may feel it passed you by six months from now. Mainly because it will have passed you by.

So, bottom line, jump in. If you don’t have a Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn or DIGG account, set them up and start watching. Then start doing. If you already have accounts, use them.

In fact, a great way to start? DIGG this post by clicking on the second icon below this sentence. It’ll take you about 3 minutes to set up the account. Think how much cooler you’ll be in three minutes from now?! Go ahead, DIGG it!

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“Google is every brand’s home page now.”

hamilton — Mon, 04 May 2009 19:20:42 +0000

“Google is every brand’s homepage now,” said Steve Rubel, a senior vice president at Edelman Digital. If you do nothing else from reading this post, follow him. He is one of the VSPs I follow (Very Smart People). The headline, the quote, is from Steve’s remarks at a pow-wow on “Social Networking 101,” sponsored by the Financial Communications Society, featuring speakers from Conde Nast, General Electric, Edelman and the New York Post.

What I take from it is a great website is now longer enough. You need to expand your “footprint” on the net. Why: because more and more, people are accessing you via Google. That means they’re accessing everything else that’s related to you; your footprint outside your site (or lack thereof) and a handy list of firms just like you. That means you need a presence outside your website to stand out.

That means: post videos on video sharing sites; make comments on blog posts; write and publish articles; and become active on a handful of social media sites.

That means, and this could be the most important part of this post, you first and foremost need to have something to say. If you’re on Twitter or Facebook and your content is heavy on “Had great Thai food for lunch,” or “At opening day of Wolverine,” not much will happen. It’s a little (or a lot) like going to a Chamber of Commerce mixer and not talking to anybody.

Your passion got you where you are today. Show that passion and you will find something interesting to say.

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