Crazy fun with Social Media - FaceBook for business?? Really?

This post is about using FaceBook (FB) for business. It's more about logistics than strategy. I thought I'd share some of my decision making process/experimentation here because I know other multi-talented business owners are also grappling with questions of how to manage online identities and how to use FB for business.

I've just set up two business "pages" for my businesses. I did that because I decided I really want to use FB mostly for keeping in touch with friends and family. Now when business contacts ask to be my friend on FB, I can say, "please become a "fan" of my business, I'm using FB for staying in touch with friends and family".

However, I may live to regret my choice! Keeping up with two profiles will be twice the work. I'm also an artist with a separate website for my pet portraits - so now three times the work. You see the problem!

First of all, FB was designed for you to stay in touch with friends and family. That is how FB wants you to use their service. If you solicit business directly, this will probably cause you to violate FB's terms of use, and they may well delete your profile - no questions asked, no warnings given. So keep that in mind. That being said, there are some recommended best practices about how to use FB for business. (In fact, let me give a shout out to Social Media Magic University (SMMU) and Jennifer Shaheen who teach this stuff).

Now, some people want to use FB exclusively for business. That means they use it for business networking. Their profile is more professionally focused. They aren't soliciting business directly as much as they are building relationships, demonstrating expertise and sharing information of value. For those who don't want to use facebook for keeping up with friends and family, the choice is pretty easy.

The issue that many people face howerver is - what if I want to do both - keep up with family, and also connect around business?? Like myself. Well here are some of our choices:

1. Use a single profile to represent yourself and your business. Intermingle business, family and friends and just determine in advance how you want to balance both and post to your wall with that in mind. You can use the privacy settings to help control what is seen on your wall and by whom. This option is recommended by many experts simply because managing a number of different profiles - one for personal and one for business can be hard to keep up with.
2. The next option is to use your personal profile for friends and family and set up a FB "page" to represent your business. Here are both of my pages for examples Carol Hillson Creative on FB and Carol's Pet Portraits on FB. To set up a business "page" click on the "advertising" link at the very bottom of the page, and then click on the "pages" link at the top of that page. (They don't make it easy!) This approach is actually what FB wants you to do with business. A "page" is a lot like a personal profile, except you invite "fans" rather than "friends" and it has analytics to help you measure the impact of your posts and or marketing efforts.
3. You can also start a group for your business - however, groups are meant more for facilitating discussions and there are no analytics. 

I'll keep you posted if I think I made the right choice. The jury is certainly out for now.

To be continued...

Dr. Riane Eisler speaking at the UN Sept 16, 2009

I saw Dr. Eisler speak in D.C., she was truly inspiring. I couldn't find a link with the information about her upcoming engagement in NYC, so I'm using my blog as a place to host the info and spread the word. If you can attend, you will be happy you did.

The Real Wealth of Nations: From Global Warming to Global partnerships
Sponsored by Grenada
In preparation for the One Day Summit on Climate Change

September 16th
1:15-2:45pm
Conference Room 1
United Nations Headquarters

Dr. Riane Eisler
World Renowned Speaker and Author

Dr. Riane Eislers’s newest book, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics – hailed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as “a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking,” by Peter Senge as “desperately needed,” and by Jane Goodall as “a call for action” – proposes a new approach to economics that gives visibility and value to the most essential human work: the work of caring for people and planet.

Please contact  Derek Nelson for registration at dnelson5@stu.edu or at 305-890-9349 (email preferred)

The dark (and bright) side to Social Media...

I met with a colleague the other day and we talked about Social Media Marketing (SMM). It is on everyone's minds these days. It promises great opportunity and also some peril. I'll give an example of each and suggest some tools I found that might help you manage some of the risk.

Here is an example of the opportunity:

Universal Orlando Resorts was launching a new Harry Potter theme park. They had an unlimited budget for getting the word out. But instead of spending tens of thousands of dollars on conventional marketing, the person heading the team invited 7 of the most popular bloggers to a private webcast at midnight and told them the news. Within 24 hours 350 million people knew about the theme park launch.
source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP4mwdMtlEM

Moral of the story:

1. Clearly, it helps to have the world's most famous wizard at your disposal!
2. SMM has a crazy powerful exponential factor that can work for large and small companies alike and save you a bundle.
3. SMM is built on word of mouth, which is so much more trusted and therefore powerful than "paid" advertising.

But as I said, there are some perils (and a few horror stories too!) Here's an example of one of the perils:

The colleague I visited told me a story about a well known construction company in NYC that had a fine reputation among the general public for years. Though among other construction professionals, their work was not known for being of the highest quality. This company was early in their industry to embrace SMM, and perhaps it was a bit easier back then to manage and even remove negative publicity if and when it did surface. So their reputation, among the general public, remained intact. Well, as SMM has grown since then, it's become harder to manipulate reviews posted online. Apparently, not too long ago, a few negative posts from the general public began to surface about this company. Today they are facing an avalanche of bad posts and their reputation is getting slammed.

Moral of the story:

1. Most important – provide quality products and services!
2. Deal with complaints proactively
3. Make sure part of your ongoing SMM strategy includes the ability to monitor and manage your reputation online

And as I promised, here are some tools to help you do that.

Google alerts - lots of people use this and its pretty simple, straight forward and free. You can enter a phrase for it to search, and when the phrase shows up in Google, you get an alert in your email. However, I tested it and it failed to track a twitter post in real time, so I decided looked at some other tools. However, there is a great article here that helps you determine which keywords you might want to track. The principles apply whichever tool you choose to use.

http://steprep.myfrontsteps.com - I LOVE this tool! What I love about it it's free, easy to use and very robust - you can REALLY manage your reputation, not just monitor it. I also love how I found it – I didn't! It found me. I tweeted about some of the other reputation management tools I had looked at, and StepRep tweeted me and invited me to check them out. Now that's SMM at its best! I investigated and I'm really happy I did. It's a GREAT tool. Go and see for yourself!

http://www.trackur.com - they have range of price points that's quite reasonable for small businesses and nonprofits. Using them is pretty simple and they have a 60 second tutorial. Also they rate the posts on the internet (about your company) as good, bad and neutral. This helps you see at a glance if there's anything to deal with.

http://www.buzzaround.us - this is a very cool, easy to use tool. Not a lot of bells and whistles, but you can add it to your tool bar and see who's talking about you very easily. And its free. Always nice!

So don't be afraid of SMM (its too late for that anyway - it is already here!) Do some research, take it in small steps and learn what you can to be prepared. Then go and have fun!

Who's your audience - humans or spiders? SEO tips.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - everyone with a website wants it - but do you know what is it? Or how to get started? Below are some tips that I hope will help demystify the process.

Why SEO?

The goal of SEO is that when someone does a search on a product or service you offer, your website appears in the results of that search. And ideally it comes up on the first page of Google. (The reason you want to come up in the first page is because few people click beyond that.)

What is SEO?

SEO is to websites, a little like what Public Relations (PR) is to print marketing. SEO is often referred to as "organic" marketing, meaning you don't "pay" to advertise your site per se. And Google searches sites using "spiders - or bots" (short for robots) using a certain algorithm meant to encourage the best sites to rise to the top and other sites, well... not so much.

How can you make your content more Search Engine Friendly?
First and foremost, make your content meaningful and interesting to your human audience. They are your PRIMARY audience. The spiders are not your audience, they are how you reach your audience. That's key. Then, beyond that, there are some tips below. 1 through 4 are ones you should be able to do yourself, assuming you have a website you can edit.

1. keywords in page titles: that's considered one of the most important place to put keywords, in the page title. Here's an article about this with some more detail and how to.
2. keywords in head lines: And also consider your headlines - its a great idea to start those out with a couple of keywords, so that's a bit different than writing for humans.
3. keyword frequency on a page: There is no set standard for how frequently to use key words within text - though unlike ordinary writing - repetition of keywords is a good idea. Some experts recommend 4 or 5 keywords within each 100 words of text. Others suggest using keywords or key phrases at least twice for every 400.
   
4. text length: And a well optimized site should have between 250-500 words of text per page. Though be mindful, robots like text and humans like pictures. If you're trying to attract both types of visitors, you need a design that balances both well.
   
5. keywords in domain names, site folders (for html sites), meta tags and links: These are tasks that will more likely have to be done by your web designer.
   

What should you expect from your SEO efforts?

1. Using good SEO techniques should help you increase your web traffic.
   
2. SEO doesn't guarantee you a top page ranking on Google, (which is usually the allure. ironic eh?)
   
3. SEO is an ongoing process not a one shot deal.
   
4. The one-time-only part would be more properly described as making your site Search Engine Ready. That means your web designer did few of those special things mentioned above. But the internet is an ever evolving beast. Key words can be fluid things, what got heavily searched last month, may be less relevant this month. Or perhaps the key word you're hoping to be searched on has too much competition to be effective. Or perhaps you've got a new product or service to introduce, and new key words to go with it... The point is, SEO is something you need to keep up with if you want results.
   
5. Making your site Search Engine Ready is an important function website design. And keeping it Search Engine Optimized - is actually a function of - marketing.
   

Can you do it yourself?

Sure. Do you want to? That depends on your resources, technical curiosity and patience.

Many people suggest that paying a company to do SEO for you is a waste of money. I'm not so sure. Whether you do it, or you hire someone to do it, it takes some time and effort. For some small business owners, its a great hands-on way to learn more about your audience, how to improve your website and how better to serve your target market. For other business owners, its time sapping activity and ultimately a poor allocation of resources. A few business owners I know who "did it themselves" found out first hand just how much time and effort it can take. That's because its not magic, its marketing.

In case you want to try, or just better educate yourself on it... here a few good articles to get you started

1. About creating a key word strategy
2. And the importance of link building
3. See what's really involved in terms of time and money

A few FREE Keyword Resources

1. Google’s Keyword Tool
The Keyword Tool provides keywords suggestions similar to the terms you entered. You can also see the local and global search size on Google. And you can check out what your competition is expected to pay for cost-per-click (CPC)

2. SEMrush

Type in some key words or key phrases and see who how many people search on that phrase and also what your competition is paying for CPC.

3. Key Word Density tool - this tool analyzes key word density of your site

My best advice:
Design a web site keeping the focus on your human audience (and us some of the principles mentioned). Then create and implement a smart targeted marketing strategy and the robots will naturally find you. As your business grows, begin investing in some mix of SEO, SEM and/or Social Media Marketing (SMM) using a professional designer to help you really reach your audience. Then begin to shape your brand.

Twitter comes with instructions

My toothpaste still comes with instructions:

"for best results squeeze the tube from the bottom and flatten as you go up"

One of my great annoyances with new technology (sometimes a tad more complicated than a tube of tooth paste) is how few new gizmos seem to have any instructions at all!

Well, apparently that is a marketing niche opportunity for many. If you don't yet know how to work with twitter... guess what, someone has come up with some instructions. http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/

And if you already "drank the koolaid" but still feel like a newbie - here's how to customize your twitter background http://mashable.com/2009/05/23/twitter-backgrounds/

As with all products...

"For best results, read and use sparingly.
Warning: Social Media can be highly addictive!"

Is Facebook using YOUR photos in other people's ADs?

Facebook has agreed to let 3rd party advertisers use your posted photos without your explicit permission. If you want to avoid this, click on SETTINGS (located on top of page in blue bar, next to logout); select PRIVACY SETTINGS; select NEWS FEED and WALL; select the TAB that reads Facebook Ads. There will be a drop down box; Select NO ONE!

This tip came to me via several different people - it has the viral vibe! Thanks Internet!

Peace poster appears in Washington Post

Great "product placement"

An article in the Washington Post features a photo of Congressman Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress and the first African American to represent Minnesota in his office. Just behind him to the left is a poster I designed for the Peace Alliance, promoting the campaign calling for a federally funded Department of Peace in the U.S. government.

Now that's gratifying!

Here is the poster. If you are inspired, you can purchase one here. All the proceeds will support the campaign for a Department of Peace.