Bull Riding (copyright a4gpa under creative commons)

That worked well at the beginning when I had a lull in my workload.  I had the time to read lots of blogs and tweets and could engage with other writers and build relationships.  But when my workload picked up, as it did this summer, paid work became more important and blogging and social media went out the window.

My workload has let up somewhat, so now’s the time to plan how to keep engaged in social media, even when swamped by work.  I have no regrets about having jumped in the pool without a plan.  I learned a lot and I have been able to help other business people who are struggling to figure out what social media means for their businesses.

For a small business, engaging in social media can be a bit like bull riding.  It’s not a matter of whether or not you’ll fall off the bull’s back, but how long you can stay on before falling off.  Here are some new practices that I plan to implement in upcoming weeks to help me keep on the bull a little longer:

1. Create a social media work flow.
2. Not every blog entry has to be an opus
3. Create a publishing schedule for blog entries.
4. Create a backlog of blog entries.
5. Start automating a portion of my Tweets

Honoring rule number 2, I will go into more detail about these rules in upcoming posts.

In the meantime, let me know how you are dealing with the demands of social media.

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Yes, it’s important to realize that social media requires time and man-power to be effective, but for many small businesses it’s often easier to find time and manpower than money.  Advertising campaigns can be prohibitively expensive . A small business does not have to spend any money up front to be on Facebook or Twitter. The issue is how much time and manpower the business allocates to social media.

Social media plays to a small business’ strength: personal relationships. It is far easier for a small business to create a personal relationship with a customer or business partner than it is for a large business.  As any  small business owner can tell you, the distinction between personal relationships and business relationships is blurred. Many of the people that a business owner connects with in traditional networks - Rotary, Chambers of Commerce, charity work etc. - are the same people they associate with in their private lives.

A recent study indicates that small business owners handle social networking the same way they handle traditional networking: by blurring the distinction between personal and business networking.  According to an article on destinationCRM.com
the three many reasons that small business use social networking are:

• Cost: Social networks often provide free tools that can be used in place of traditional services for marketing or sales.
• Customer Engagement: Small businesses list customer engagement as the number-one priority in their use of social networks for business purposes. (The second-most-popular reason? Networking with peers.)
• Image: The majority of SBs feel that social networking helps improve their companies’ image. They think they appear more forward-thinking and innovative to customers and peers.

My experience is that many small business owners are not using social media because they don’t understand what it is.  The best way to find out about social media is to get your hands dirty.  Get on Facebook, get on Twitter. Find out who among your existing social networks are already there .  Make mistakes.  Make discoveries.  You’ve got nothing to lose but time.

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Part way through the presentation I had to throw away my outline when it became clear that my audience knew less that I expected.  Despite the innumerable articles on Twitter and Facebook in recent months, few of the participants had familiarity with social networking.  Even those people who had tried Facebook or Twitter hadn’t done much with them and weren’t very familiar with their features.

I pride myself on my ability to explain technical issues to non-technical people, but clearly I had underestimated the gap.  I promised the participants that I would get my presentation online, but I’ve decided to revise it a bit so that it addresses the gap.

Over the next several weeks I plan to publish some basic articles about different social networking sites.  I don’t believe every business needs to be or should be using social media.  But business owners need to know enough to make an informed choice.

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The business news has been full of stories about companies allocating a larger portion of their marketing budget to social media. Small business owners have been left wondering whether they need to join the social media bandwagon or risk being left behind.

* Are Twitter and other social media just a fad or have they become an essential part of business marketing?
* How can MY business benefit from social media and can the benefits justify the cost in both time and money?
* Are my current customers and potential clients using social media and how do I find them?
* Why would anybody want to use Twitter anyway?

These are some of the question that business coach Megan Oltman and web consultant Daniel Porcher will address on June 4 at a presentation called “Do I Really Need to Twitter? How to Use Social Media to Grow Your Business.”

Learn about the different types of social media and how other small businesses have used them to grow their businesses. Just because social media is hot does not automatically mean that it is the right strategy for every small business.

Live Seminar on Thursday, June 4, 6 PM
Hopewell Railroad Station
2 Railroad Place, Hopewell, NJ.
$10 Advance Registration, $15 at the door

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Helloooo! Bad PR lasts longer and carries farther than good PR.  This is  business 101.

Facebook and Twitter are two of the top social networks yet both failed to use their strengths - communication between people - to alienate their client base.  In the case of Facebook, they changed their format making familiar features difficult to find and making previously private information public.  To their credit, they responded quickly to customer outrage by making it easier for customers to change their format.  The next time they planned to make a change the solicited customer input with a notice at the top of the page.  (Guess what.  I didn’t take the time to respond to that notice so I don’t have any right to complain if I don’t like the changes.)

In Twitter’s case, they removed the ability to see @replies for posters you aren’t following without any input from their users.  No input causes outrage and outrage in the Twitterverse means a new hashtag: #fixreplies.

I don’t really care what Twitter’s reason for making the change was (you can read more about it at mashable.com).  What matters is they handled the change badly.  They failed to give adequate notice of the change and, more importantly, failed to solicite customer input.  They compounded their error by giving a reason (supposedly a customer benefit) that didn’t fly.

If their initial reason was correct -  they were creating a customer benefit - then soliciting customer input would have set them right or at least let them know they needed to provide an alternative mechanism for people to find interesting posters.  If their second explanation - technical issues - is correct, then the truth would have assuaged a lot of anger.  People have seen enough fail whales to accept that a feature might have to be pulled for the sake of system stability.  They might not be happy but they’d probably understand.

The problem with the Facebook and Twitter incidents is that their management act like big businesses when their products feel like small businesses.  Changing features in a social network I use without consulting me feels like they let themselves into my house and rearranged the furniture.  (Even big business can’t always do whatever they want: think New Coke.)

I’m left wondering whether the reason Facebook and Twitter are having trouble monetizing their platforms is that they don’t really understand what they’ve created.  Facebook tries to make money by selling advertising when many businesses are on Facebook to develop relationships because relationships are stronger than advertising.  A business has a much better opportunity to sell to a person they already have a realtionship with than a stranger.

My guess is that Twitter and Facebook users would like these platforms to make money because they want them to stay around.  But they also feel proprietary about these platforms.  Maybe these social networking companies should treat their platforms as an open commons and develop a business model similar to open source companies.  Using the platform is free, but have we got some great extensions for you.

I’m willing to bet that Twitter and Facebook have far more data available to them than can be garnered through their APIs.  Google makes money from it’s analytics package. Where’s Twitter Analytics or Facebook Analytics?

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At the best of times, web ads that make noise at me are an irritation, but they are particularly egregious when I am already listening to music. The idiocy of placing a talking ad on a site about music just compounds their miscalculation.  (And Earl Hines had such a sweet groove going when that ad came on!)

They are lucky that I was so busy trying to shut the stupid ad off that I don’t remember which air freshener I hate.  But if I see that ad again, believe me, I will hate them with a vengance.

Does it really need to be said, once again, that a negative experience has a much more lasting impact on a potential customer’s perception of a product than a postive experience?

Now there is nothing wrong with advertising.  As a business person I understand the need to get your message out.   If anything, as a business person I should be willing to give other businesses a chance to market to me.  

Like many other web users, I enjoy the availability of free information on the web.   But there is a cost to web servers and gathering the information to put on web sites and advertising is one way to help pay for those costs. 

The web is not TV.  I am not a captive audience.  When watching TV I can’t do anything about those annoying overlays television stations put on the bottom of the screen to make up for the fact that most viewers are skipping through commercials because they’ve recorded the programs on their DVR.

But on the web, I have any number of places to get the same information.  I can put on an ad blocker so I don’t have to see the advertising.  But I am willing to give advertisers a chance.  

I will tolerate sitting through a short commercial to see a Daily Show episode.  TV shows are not cheap to produce.  But I should point out that I tend to watch the Daily Show and Colbert show in long chunks rather than nightly and that seeing the same commerical over and over again is not conducive to friendliness.  (A couple of weeks ago I was ready to shove Mother Nature into her little red package.)

I have struck a mental bargain with web advertisers.  I will respect your need to advertise and won’t install an ad blocker, but you have to be respectful of me and not degrade  my web experience.

Spam is not respectful.  Advertising that interferes with my use of the web is not respectful.  Here’s a list of advertising practices that will drive me away:

• Pop-ups
• Pop-unders
• Ads that move across the screen
• Ads that enlarge when  I mouseover them to reach a menu button
• Ajax pop ups that ask me if really want to leave the page
• Ads that make noise at me, especially if there is no obvious way to shut them up 
• Ads that pretend to be error messages or virus warnings

There are so many better ways to take advantage of the web to sell products.  It just strikes me as lazy and unimaginative to do the same old thing.  For the amount of money they put into creating that Flash ad they could have created a viral video for YouTube.  They could be creating customer channels on Twitter and Facebook. 

You want to get my attention?  Don’t make me mad.  Get me interested. If I like your idea enough I’ll blog about it. Or Digg it.  Or post it to Facebook like I did with one of those JetBlue videos for “CEOs only”.

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There are many features that I like about TweetDeck and one big problem: it’s a resource hog.  This may not be such a problem when my laptop returns from repairs but on the older desktop that I am typing on right now, it occasionally becomes a pain.  TweetDeck recently patched a memory leak which definitely improved the problem but my CPU cycles still run too high for my liking.

Looking for an alternative to TweetDeck, I started using TwitZap, a web-based Twitter organizer.  There is a lot to like about TwitZap, and I definitely intend to continue using it, but it won’t replace TweetDeck yet.

What both applications have in common is the ability to follow multiple Twitter timelines, starting with your replies and direct messages.  You can also follow the timelines of specific search terms, such as a Twitter name or a hash tag.  Both applications frequently poll Twitter for updates which makes it far easier to stay on top of Twitter.

One way they diverge is how they organize these different timelines.  TweetDeck groups the information into columns that you can move  into different positions depending on what you are focusing 0n.  However, if you follow a number of timelines, as I do, many of the columns are off screen, requiring you to scroll to view them. You can resize the columns to get a couple more columns on the screen.

TwitZap organizes the groups by sidebar tabs.  You can only view one group at a time but updates to the other groups are indicated by a number on a group’s tab indicating new posts.  Both applications make it very easy to add or delete groups.

The primary feature that makes TweetDeck the winner for me is that you can create groups that aggregate selected people that you are following.  That means that I can separate the people that I follow for their social marketing expertise from those that I follow for their web development expertise from those that I follow as personal friends.  Given the volume of tweets that are posted by the people that I am following (and which only grows as I follow additional people), this feature is essential for making Twitter a powerful businesss tool.  Twitter further enhances this functionality by allowing you to filter a column by entering a search term.

I definitely plan to continue using TwitZap to monitor the most current posts when my computer is resource challenged, but TweetDeck remains my Twitter organizer of choice.

Update: Since I wrote this entry I have discovered a big plus for TwitZap.  Quite obvious, really.  Since it is a web-based app I can access it from any computer.  That way I can view Twitter with my preferred settings no matter where I am.

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I’d like to point out that the person they quoted for that alleged faux pas, @kmonson, is a New Yorker. As a native of that city I can tell you that as a rule, New Yorkers don’t have much patience  for small talk.  I can also tell you that if you travel elsewhere in this country you start to hear about the New York minute.  In fact, people in other parts of the country are often surprised that I was born in NYC, because I don’t “talk too fast”.  (I only talk fast when I’m trying to make a point, at which time I also tend to GET VERY LOUD.)

Talking about the weather or saying hello are forms of speech that are intended as a social lubricant to ease interactions between people.  In fact,  there is a word, phatic, that describes such communication:  “speech used for social or emotive purposes rather than for communicating information.”

Phatic speech exists everywhere but the form it takes may differ regionally. New Yorkers may disdain talking about the weather but they just use other empty phrases: “How bout them Jints.”  And if you’re in Florida during hurricane season, talking about the weather may actually impart important information.

When you are blogging or tweeting you are talking to the world and you cannot possibly tailor your speech to each region.  (And I do mean the world.  My wife, Megan, known to the twitterverse as @freemybrain, is constantly surprised at the number of people from India who read her blog posts on migraine management.)

What people respond to is authenticity.  People want relationship and that means you have to give them something to relate to.  Simply reporting about the weather is boring.  Talking about how the blooming red buds make you feel alive again is communicating something of yourself that other people can recognize in themselves. (And they don’t have to have ever seen a red bud tree to know what you are talking about.)

When I thank someone for following me - you do thank your new followers, don’t you? - I make a point of trying to find something in their profile or posts to reference.  I started this practice to indicate that a live person was responding to them and not an autoresponder.  An unplanned benefit has been that many people respond back.  And that could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Joel Comm recently broke the “food is boring”  rule when he twitted about donuts.  He has an excellent blog entry about the terrific response he got to this post and how the mundane actually builds relationships. Here is the heart of the blog entry:

Commonality in the human experience is a starting point for relationships. We are drawn to people who think the way we think, like the things we like and have been to the places we’ve been.

When I innocently made a tweet about donuts, I received a massive outpouring of interaction with other Twitter members. I tapped into a shared experience that so many people could relate to. Not only that, but they were EAGER to relate to the experience. Donuts! Yum.

So why is this imporant?

My mundane tweet was not about donuts. It’s was about connecting with a large number of people quickly and effectively.

It was about getting them to interact in a way that would endear them to me further. After all, if Joel Comm likes donuts, he must be a pretty good guy.

Talking about the mundane is not necessarily boring. Even repetition is not, by itself, boring (Let’s go Mets!).  Inauthenticity and withholding yourself: that’s boring!  I may be using a computer to communicate, but I want to be dealing with a real person on the other side.

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You also have the same variety of goals in online networking as you do face-to-face, including:

1. Meeting potential clients
2. Promoting a product or service
3. Developing  referral partners
4. Establishing your expertise, credibility and trustworthiness
5. Keeping on top of developments in your profession

There are some people who take a burn the bridges approach to networking.  We’ve all met networkers who come up to you, slap their business card in your hand and launch into their sales pitch. (They might for appearance’s sake ask you about your own business, but they are not listening. They measure you up as a potential sale and quickly move on.

The Twitter equivalent are people who follow you but either never tweet or only tweet about their own product.  All they really want is for you to look at their profile and follow their link.  I will follow almost anybody who follows me so long as their tweets seem related to topics I am interested in.  Nor am I offended by people who follow me as a way of introducing their Twitter stream.  Who knows, I might be interested in their topic. But if someone’s Tweets clearly indicate they are only interested in pitching to me, then they are wasting my time and I won’t follow them in return.  Unsurprisingly, those Tweeters unfollow me after a short time.

Social networking does differ from face-to-face marketing in one important way.  Because your interactions with Twitter followers and Facebook friends create a sense of intimacy, it is easy to forget that they are still mass media.  The fact that they are mass media has pluses and minuses:

1. Your idea or product has the potential to go viral, far outreaching what you could achieve face-to-face.
2. Negative publicity can also go viral.  Just look at the recent firestorm Amazon.com faced with the creation of the #amazonfail hashtag on Twitter.  (See Anatomy of the #AmazonFail protest )
3. Anyone on Twitter or Facebook (depending on your privacy settings) has access to what you say, so be careful.
4. Customers have public access to you for both commendation and complaint. You know which of the two has the most impact so be prepared to handle grievances quickly.

A major focus of this blog will be how to use social media to create mutually beneficial business relationships, whether with a potential client, customer or other business.  Hence the name, “It’s called Social for a Reason”.

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Is it possible to explain how to promote a book on Facebook and Twitter in a 500 word article? Five hundred words, that’s more than 15 tweets.  No problem.

Many of you may already have LinkedIn profiles, and if you have older children, you have had to deal with their usage of MySpace and Facebook. Of late, more and more adults have joined Facebook, swelling its membership to 175 million users worldwide.  How many of these people do you have to interact with to successfully promote your book?

Social networking is just that, a social activity, and most of the basic rules of social interaction apply here. Facebook users are looking for a relationship with you; they want be able to ask questions and get answers.  Most of you are interested in publishing a book or article because you have something to share with the larger world. For some, the book is the end product, for others, it is a tool to promote a business by establishing your expertise and credibility. Facebook permits you to further establish that expertise by interacting with a self-selecting group of people.

Promoting your book on Facebook:

Depending on what you intend to promote, create a Facebook ID for your book or for yourself. Search for people you already have relationships with and “friend” them by inviting them to join you by e-mail.

As you start posting entries on your Facebook page, the entries will also appear on your friends’ Facebook pages where their friends can see them. Facebook users will often declare themselves to be your fans (a status setting, not a verbal pronouncement) which will also be posted on their page.

• Create an interest group. This is a particularly good strategy if you are attempting to establish your credentials as an expert.
• Link your blog to your Facebook ID. That way any entries in your blog will automatically appear on your Facebook page and drive traffic back to your blog.
• Update your Facebook page regularly to keep it fresh.  Interact with your fans.  Be interesting and informative and provide them with reasons to come back

Tweeting on Twitter

Twitter has only 5 million users, but appears close to the tipping point. Some people have likened Twitter to an enormous cocktail party in which there are too many conversations for you to follow, so you eavesdrop on various discussions until you find ones that engage you.

Tweeters don’t have “friends,” they have “followers.”  Before you can be followed on Twitter you must first follow other people. While Twitter etiquette does not require you to follow everyone who follows you, many people will follow you in return.  “Retweeting” a message will also encourage fellow tweeters to support you in turn.

Tweeters are looking for relationships, not marketing.  If your are interesting, informative and entertaining and if you are willing to interact with your followers, no one will mind the occasional plug for your book, your website, your Facebook page, or your blog. Just don’t do it too often.

To help you find Tweeters to follow, follow MrTweet, who will provide you with a list of 200 tweeters with shared interests. Or use Twitter’s keyword search to find tweets that reference a specific keyword.

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