The list of social sites that I use is getting long:

Twitter

Facebook

Google+

LinkedIn

Spotify

StumbleUpon

This Blog

SparkPeople                                                                                                                       * image by Patrick Hoesly

Goodreads

 

Believe it or not, each of those sites offers individual benefits, and I use them to meet different needs. If you were so fanatically impressed with my amazing writing skills that you wanted to connect with me in all of these different places, you would rarely, if ever, see the same content duplicated. I do provide links to my blog from several other sites, in the hopes more people will come here, but that’s about it.

 

You may be thinking, “That’s a LOT of content.” You’re right, it is, and sometimes I struggle with what to post where. Would this link work better on Twitter or Facebook? How many more people are likely to respond to this question on Google+ than on LinkedIn? Where should I share this in order to provide maximum exposure?

 

The thing is, I’m not really normal – in the way that I use social media. It is part of my job to offer my clients insight and advice regarding these various platforms. If that weren’t the case, I’m not sure I’d be active in quite so many places. Also, if I had a job that didn’t involve marketing or social media at all – if I were still a teacher, for instance – I would certainly be slower to get involved.

 

This run down of my own social media habits has a point: Any normal person would be overwhelmed.

 

That overwhelm usually leads to a handful of reactions. People link their feeds together so that the same status update or link or whatever appears everywhere at once. Sometimes, business owners simply ignore the latest and greatest and stubbornly stick to whatever has been working for them (know anyone still relying on the Yellow Pages?). Other folks just hire it all out to an agency.

 

Linking your profiles and pages together is a bad idea, for several reasons. One is that you miss out on the particular benefits each platform offers. The reason all these sites can coexist is that they don’t do the same things. The jokes and chatter that work perfectly on Twitter fall flat on LinkedIn.  I’m certainly not the first person to offer this advice, but I do think the temptation to link accounts will grow along with the number of platforms that could be linked.

 

Not taking the time to even learn how the next big thing works is a mistake, too. You need to at least have some idea of what each of these sites can do before you can decide where your business should be. Twitter might not be right for your business, but if you never check it out you will never know. Lots of businesses have found new customers through Twitter that never expected to be able to. Lots of others have tried and flopped – either because the people they were looking for weren’t there, they lacked an understanding of how that community works, or they were inconsistent or impatient.

 

Hiring an agency might seem like a good idea, especially if you listen to a well written and delivered pitch. But, unless you or someone who is extremely knowledgeable about your company works closely with the agency, it could be a disaster. In order for marketing through social platforms to work, you have to be personable and responsive to what your customers want. A representative from an agency cannot do that nearly as well as someone who lives and breaths your business. I’m not saying that an agency is NEVER the right idea, but you (or someone you trust) will have to spend time making sure the agency knows your company well enough to represent it.

 

I’m curious as to how the people who read this blog handle the overload. Do you wait to see how everyone else is going to use the latest new thing, or do you jump right in? Do you link your profiles together? Do you use different platforms to share different sorts of information or is one place as good as another?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Yesterday I was pleased to attend an event hosted by the Social Media Club of Chattanooga.  It was at my favorite coffee house and lots of friends were there, so it would’ve been fun regardless of presenters or speakers or whatever. However, it would be hard to describe watching a “live” (by Skype) interview with someone like Guy Kawasaki as a bonus.

 

The interviewer was John Martin of the Small Business Round Table, and he conducted the interview for his Internet radio show SBR with John Martin. Each week, John interviews small business owners, successful entrepreneurs and others who have wisdom to share with those of us working to build profitable businesses. John asked Guy questions about failure, venture capital and much more as we all looked on, listened and learned.

 

Guy Kawasaki is successful and excellent at what he does. He also seems to be a genuinely nice person who is interested in helping people, sharing his knowledge and teaching others how to be…enchanting. I think, though, that some of the things he said during the interview should be put into perspective.

 

For example, John asked about the way that Guy uses Twitter. Now, Guy has been scolded many times for posting too often, using a team to post under his name and other practices that some people view as “bad” or “wrong.” The thing is, it’s working. For Guy.

 

Guy has two accounts on Twitter, and if you follow both of them, you are probably seeing his name pop up quite frequently in your stream. He says that he posts each link that he wants to share four times a day – twice on each account. Now, if I re-posted things four times a day, people would get irritated really quickly. But Guy has something like 400,000 followers between his two accounts, and they are all online at different times. Some might check things in the mornings, others in the evenings – and that’s not to mention time zones. So, if you have 400,000 followers it makes good sense to share the same thing four times a day.

 

But if you don’t have that many followers? If you only have a measly couple of thousand? You are probably alienating people by repeating yourself so frequently, particularly if you are posting links to your own stuff (Guy doesn’t do that, by the way). Most of us can get by with posting something twice, but that’s about it.

 

Guy does something else that probably wouldn’t work for the rest of us: he uses social media like a billboard. He broadcasts on Twitter, which is why he wants tons of followers. For him, a follower is a set of eyeballs that might click on a link and look at an ad – and might even click on the ad.

 

He almost never retweets anything, mostly because he says he pays no attention to his stream. He is not using Twitter to engage in conversations. This works for a man who is hanging out on the NY Times Best Seller List, owns a couple of companies and is a respected authority in his field.

 

It probably wouldn’t work for you, and it definitely wouldn’t work for me.

 

Small business owners need to be having conversations on Twitter and Facebook. We need to be talking to people, and participating in useful discussions. You know, being authentically ourselves and stuff. For the business owner with a small reach and even smaller budget, real conversations with real people who spend real money are the power of social media. We can talk to people, make them love us, find out exactly what they need then sell it to them.

 

I would never presume to say that someone like Guy Kawasaki is doing it wrong. I will say that most of us cannot hope to do it the way he is and be successful. Do you follow Guy on Twitter or like him on Facebook? How do you feel about his tactics? Would you ever try to replicate his success using his tactics?

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A few days ago, one of my clients mentioned that his blog didn’t feel “bloggy” to him. Since I write

most of his blog, I started asking questions, trying to find out if it was a good thing to not be bloggy, or if being bloggy was the goal.

 

Most of the time, when my clients come to me, they only know that they need to be publishing a blog or they need to be on Facebook or they need to be sending out newsletters. They don’t really have any specific plans or goals for ROI, they only know they don’t have time to do them or that they need to be doing them more consistently.

 

The first few newsletters or posts or whatever are pretty easy because the overwhelmed business owner has a backlog of ideas. After a couple of months, though, it often becomes a little harder for them to figure out what they want me to write about. Then, with some content in existence and some feedback from readers, it is time to create a strategy.

 

Most of the experts say the strategy should come first. For bigger companies that already have several advertising avenues or that have been publishing content for awhile that is good advice. Most of my clients don’t fit that description. My clients usually don’t have much, if any, content already developed, and when I ask questions about strategy, they get overwhelmed.

 

Back to the non-bloggy-feeling blog. I asked my client what he meant. He said he didn’t know. So we talked about what he wants his blog to do – drive more traffic? generate comments and reader engagement? drive conversion? be a resource for customers? – and how we could measure those things.  We talked about goal setting and direction and how to tie his blog to his other business goals. In short, we talked about creating a strategy to guide the future content of his blog.

 

For a blog to be successful, it has to have both content and strategy. It is okay if you create some of the content before you start building a strategy, because there is some content you know will be part of whatever strategy you end up with. At least one of my clients hired me to write several posts before he decided if he was even going to have a blog. He knew he wanted some information available on his site, whether it ended up being a part of a resources page or part of a blog.

 

Of course, having high quality content is completely useless if you don’t eventually make some decisions about how to use it, so the strategy part of the equation must be addressed at some point. It just doesn’t necessarily have to be the starting point.

 

 

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Last Thursday, I was lucky enough to have time to participate in the Hub Spot webinar, The Science of Email Marketing. I say “participate” because Hub Spot did a great job of integrating Twitter into the experience, encouraging people to comment and ask questions using the hash tag #emailsci.  The information presented challenged much of what I have learned about email marketing, both through experience and from other sources.

For example, way back, a whole 2 years ago, when I first started writing email newsletters, the company I worked for presented statistical evidence that the best day to send marketing email messages is Tuesday. Mondays are too busy, they said, and on Fridays everyone is bored and tired of working, and obviously, no one is working on the weekends.  Hub Spot, though, surveyed 95 million email users and found the highest click thru rates occur on the weekends.

In my experience, the best day to send your email is different and it totally depends on  your audience and your business. For example, I have one client who builds custom furniture and sends out a monthly newsletter. His open rates are much higher if it goes out on the weekend. However, I have another client who sells plants wholesale to garden centers, landscapers and the like. He sends out a weekly newsletter. His open rates tend to be better during the week.

It should be noted, however, that the Hub Spot statistics focused on the click thru rates, not the open rates. Obviously, if your recipients are clicking on your links, they are more engaged and that is great.  But my own experience – personal and professional – tells me that it’s the open rate that is more important here.

Personally, I read lots of emails but don’t always click the links in them. Professionally, I send email newsletters for a wide range of businesses and some of the most successful sales campaigns have happened through newsletters that didn’t get a lot of clicks. Of course, my clients generally have very small lists so my observations apply to really small companies. Hub Spot probably consults with much larger companies.

Another interesting conclusion of Hub Spot’s survey was that 88% of those surveyed do not separate work and personal email, which seems connected to the previous statement about click thru rates on the weekends. I don’t care how many people they surveyed – I doubt the veracity of this one.

People who work for corporations, as administrative professionals, or other sort of “regular” jobs do not like working on the weekends, even if that work is opening emails. I know this because I’ve had a good many of those jobs. When I was an administrative professional, I spent the weekend trying hard to forget about the office entirely. As a teacher, I worked on the weekends, but it was grading papers and writing lesson plans, and definitely NOT checking work-related email.

Finally, Hub Spot showed statistics that seemed to say there is not much risk of sending out too many emails. My issue with this one is purely personal. I will unsubscribe from any list that over-sends. The only exceptions (for me) are LivingSocial and Amazon. With LivingSocial, I knew I was signing up for daily emails, so that makes it okay. As for Amazon, I want certain things and to get them I have to put up with receiving a whole bunch of crap I do not want – especially at Christmas.  And to tell the truth, I delete 95% of the email I get from those two companies without looking at it.

One of my clients suffers from serious email overload. He wakes up to 100s of emails just about everyday, and feels that just about the only thing he has time to do is respond to email. In order to get that person to read your marketing email, you better be offering something he needs desperately. It seems rude to me to send something “just to keep your name out there” to people like him weekly or even daily.

What are your email behaviors? Will you click all the links? Do you separate your work and personal email? Do you prefer weekend emails? Is it possible to over-send to you?

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Most of my clients run businesses. Unlike my online friends – there really should be a word to describe these virtual relationships – they are not attuned to every change from Facebook or Google. Most of them have ONE email address, or one for work and one for home. Many of them ask me why they should have a Facebook Page, or what what’s the use of a blog.

These people are smart people. They are also busy, running real businesses that support them, and often a few employees. They simply don’t have the time to learn what one needs to know in order to use the Internet efficiently for business. It’s not that they cannot, it’s that they choose to do other things during the very small amount of time they are not in the throes of entrepreneurship.

As my comfort level with the Internet has grown, so has the number of email addresses I have.  There are lots of reasons for someone like me to have a bunch of email addresses. I need to test email campaigns, use one email address strictly for newsletter subscriptions, use one just for notifications from various social media sites and so on. If I did something else for a living, I probably wouldn’t use quite so many email addresses as I do.

One big mistake that several of my clients make is to have their only, or their main, email address be what is known as a “role based” email address. Role based email addresses begin with something like info@ or contact@ or admin@. If there are several people in an office that handle general inquiries, they fill an administrative role, hence the name role based. These kinds of email addresses are supposed to be for roles, then, and not individuals.

Small business owners usually fill several roles, and are often the only person filling any of those roles. So it may seem to make sense to be info@mybusinessname.com, because YOU are the one with the info, right?

The thing is, you need to have an email address that shows you are a human, too. If you have a problem with a company and you want to send an email to express your problem, are you more comfortable sending it to info@ or john@? Do you really feel like a human being is going to receive and respond to your problem if you send it to admin@?

When I send an inquiry to a role based address, it feels like tossing a message in a bottle into the ocean. I rarely expect a response. Contact forms on web sites are just as bad or even worse because with those, you can’t even see an email address at all and you have no record of having sent anything.

Role based addresses are not bad, and there are plenty of situations where having one is the best option. But please don’t use it as your primary email account. Give your customers or clients a human to complain to, or to send compliments to, or to ask questions of.

The phrase “relationship marketing” has been overused and is trite, almost cliché, but building a good relationship with customers is a proven way to increase profits. How can you build a relationship if you are not willing to share your name?

If you are reading this and thinking “But I’ve used the same email address for 20 years! I can’t switch now!” don’t worry, it’s much easier to change your email address than you might imagine. The hardest part will be managing two email accounts for a little while. After you set up your new address, simply start using it.

You will be surprised how many people will just hit “reply” when they send you an email. If they are replying to something you sent them (from your new address) you will have switched successfully. When you send someone an email for the first time, use your new address. Keep checking your old address, but try to send everything from your new address. After a few months, you won’t get much email at your old address.

While you are making the switch, it’s a good time to differentiate between emails that only you can handle (those should the address that demonstrates your human-hood) and emails that anyone familiar with your company could handle. That way, if you ever hire an assistant, or an intern or whatever, you can give that person control of your old role based account if necessary.

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