For the first time in my life, I have become the owner of an Apple product. Gee, it only took me how long since the iPods first arrived on the scene? read more…
Tech Talk
Is social media the best way to build a buzz?
Buzz buzz buzz
As evident from this website and the presence Directis has built through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, we’re believers in social media. Early adopters, you might say (definitely not innovators). Social media, networking and word of mouth have helped us build a great buzz around Directis. So I (Sue) often get asked if I teach social media, to which my usual response is “no… not really… sorta.” Allow me to explain what this answer means and why!
First of all, when building a brand it is very important to choose a focus so people can get a quick and accurate first impression of what you stand for. At Directis, our focus is strategic planning in small businesses and non-profit organizations. We focus on the big-picture issues of managing and growing small organizations. That’s what we write about, teach about and work on. Marketing strategy is a major part of strategic planning but it’s not the only part of the puzzle.
Social media is a really specific part of a marketing strategy. It’s one way that your customers will find you, but certainly not the only one or the best one. So when social media started hitting it big a few years ago, I asked myself if I wanted to get in on the gig of teaching people how to use these tools. It was tempting because it was an emerging market and the tools are generic enough to be useful to a broad customer base who would likely be willing to spend $100-200 per person to learn some new skills. Teaching is one thing I do quite well, and I’ve always been a bit of a geek. However, I knew there’d be lots of entrepreneurs diving into the “social media consulting” field and I have been right about that. Lots of them do it quite well. So I opted out of that line of work and have kept my focus on planning and supporting the overall strategy of a growing organization.
Social media strategy is NOT the same as marketing strategy or strategic planning. There are still plenty of businesses and business people out there who shouldn’t be spending their time on social media. Sure in a few years it’ll become de rigeur to have a Twitter account but it’s not the do-or-die thing that so many people are making it out to be. In the meantime, how are your human resources practices? Do you have a bulletproof capacity to deliver your product or service with 100% quality assurance to customers who’ve validated your offering by putting down their good money for it? If not, maybe it’s time to spend less time on Twitter and more time getting your ducks in a row.
On top of all this, recent relevations concerning Facebook and LinkedIn privacy have given me the willies. Yesterday I discovered Facebook had uploaded to their servers all of the phone numbers for everybody in my cell phone, without my knowing. The information was only visible to me when I was logged in, but the fact remains the data had been transferred to their servers and was sitting there for whatever nefarious purposes hackers might see fit down the road. Then later in the day, Ross Dunn tipped me off that LinkedIn’s default settings allowed it to take certain liberties with my name and profile picture in its social advertising schemes. Huh, I didn’t know that.
If being “authentic” in social media is the way to go (and it is), we have to realize that this authenticity can be exploited by the websites we’re using to connect. It’s that exploitation which made me wonder yesterday if it was time to bail out of Facebook. It’s not going to happen this time, but it might one day. There’s a cost/benefit analysis to be done here and even though I’m fairly immune to alarmist predictions about privacy invasions, things are starting to feel a bit uncomfortable.
Social media isn’t the only way to connect with people, and it’s becoming ever more apparent to me that social media cannot stand alone. You absolutely do have to have “offline” or “IRL (in real life)” connections with people because nobody’s going to buy from a profile pic. Discovering how to make those connections is still a vital priority.
This brings me full circle to teaching about social media. Will I? Not really. I’ve been asked to develop a program for a local business organization that focuses on how to build a buzz through networking, word of mouth AND social media. So, social media will be a part of the program but it’s not going to be about “how to get a Twitter account” but rather, how to develop a buzz around yourself or your business with a central focus. In order to know that central focus, you have to have done your strategic planning. What you want is to introduce yourself and have people say “oh, I’ve heard of you!” and be able to describe what you do, before you’ve even opened your mouth to do your elevator speech. That’s what I’ll be teaching. Details to come!
Website & Social Media Integration
This is a sequel to my post announcing the launch of the new Directis.ca.
No wonder people think social media is too confusing. To do it well, really well, in a way that actually supports positive results for your business, is complex and a bit exhausting. I say this after spending the past three-four days preparing this website and (today) trying to get as many social media integration tools as I can set up to maximize my leverage from the site.
Here’s a list (as far as I can remember) of all the ways this website is, or will be, integrated into social media: read more…
Unleashing the new Directis.ca
This weekend I have lived the programmer lifestyle: alongside planning and running my son’s 3rd birthday party, I’ve completely redone my company website. It wasn’t quite as easy as picking a new WordPress theme and installing it, though. Oh no. I picked a custom professional theme, but then implementing it brought me into the world of custom post types, custom page templates, custom menus, shortcodes, plugins, widget logic… OH MY HEAVENS. I figure I’ve put in about 24 hours of time working on the website, and it’s still not perfect the way I want it. But it’s close.
A short laundry list of the things I’ve been working through:
- Set up Advanced Events Registration plugin, and then hacked it like crazy to make it Canadian (it was all states and zipcodes) and include an attendee’s company name in their registration. Sure I could have paid for the pro version, but still had no reassurance it would do what I wanted, so I just dove into the code and rewrote the event registration form, the way it listed attendees, the way it presented a list of events in a category. Still to do: change how it shows upcoming events in the sidebar widget.
- Created various custom post types to try to get testimonials and featured projects to show the way I want them to.
- Re-installed Download Manager to handle my premium content (easy!)
- Installed Pie-Register and configured it to accept more fields on the user registration form.
- Changed my newsletter hosting over to MailChimp because of the availability of scripts to automate subscriptions
- Moved this whole site from the working directory where I was testing and working all weekend, to the main directis.ca site where you see it now. Boy was that nervewracking!
There is much more I want to do with the site, and tell you about in terms of why I’ve done all these changes and what’s coming in the future. However it’s now 11pm and I have to rise at 5am for rowing practice tomorrow.
My latest Twitter time-suckage
This morning I took on the task of sorting the 300 people I follow into user lists. Along the way I unfollowed about 25 of them, mostly because I couldn’t think of why I’d followed them in the first place and because I didn’t have a good list to put them on. It took me just a little under two hours.
It shocked me that nobody has invented a tool that allows you to batch-edit your followers and following lists to assign them to lists etc. Wouldn’t you consider this a fairly basic utility?
Now that I can view my Twitter lists in Seesmic Desktop (my Twitter application of choice), I have this vague expectation that Twitter will become more useful to me. The jury is out on that. Maybe I’m missing something but there doesn’t seem to me much going on out there that’s very important to me.
On another social media note… has anyone figured out what to do with LinkedIn yet? Aside from getting connected with everyone you know (and apparently a bunch of people you don’t know, if the trickle of invitations from total strangers is any indication). I joined a few discussion groups and have plenty of connections but I’m still waiting for the A-HA! moment and the value to be realized. Please, if you’ve got some secret to making LinkedIn more than just a business-oriented, slightly less-annoying Facebook, please comment!
Getting real with social media
There are lots of VERY GOOD reasons why business people are jumping on the social-media bandwagon. I’m not going to rabbit on about those, but rather touch on something subtle I’ve noticed throughout the last year about social media and how it changes the nature of business relationships. read more…
We all just need to RELAX.
I had a rowing coach a few years ago whose favorite word was “RELAX.” His crews actually made him a t-shirt with the word “RELAX” written across the front. The funny thing is, he would call it out when the boat was feeling pretty tense, and half the people would inevitably do the OPPOSITE of relax because being yelled at to “relax” is not the most relaxing thing in the universe.
Ergo when I read this funny blog post (“Your anus is too tight“) about the need to just relax about social media in order to get good at it, I had a bit of a cynical chuckle. For the people most likely to be tense and uptight about what to post on Twitter or the rules of blogging are the least likely to be able to follow the instruction to relax. Still, it is good advice!
And then there’s the question that still lingers for me: is this social media thing really that big of a deal? It’s brought me some new friends, a fantastic sense of community, but as some of my finance-geek friends would like to remind me, WHERE’S THE ROI? Oh I know, I know, I should be looking at the ROI of building my brand and developing relationships, etc. I guess that’s where the value is, and nobody should confuse social media with a real sales funnel. This is NOT a way to get new customers. Oh that may happen, almost by accident, but if you’re on Twitter or Facebook or anything else looking to “land a sale” you will not only disappoint yourself, but you may turn others off. Personally I can catch a whiff of desperation from several IP addresses away.
So onward I go… I will continue attending the occasional social media event here in town, and blather on about the pros and cons of social media, probably until the next “big thing” hits us. If you’ll come and keep me company, maybe I can get to know you and send a few referrals your way. *ding*
Social Media WINS
I’ve been a Twitterer since 13 Jan 2009 17:44, says my profile, although I’ve really only been active for the past month or so. As I close off this month I thought I’d take a moment (borrowed from my bookkeeping time) to reflect on how social media has helped me this month.
First, I think the participation in my Business Leaders Summit tomorrow would be about half of what it is going to be if I hadn’t spread the word via Twitter and Facebook. I’ve got a nice lineup, blending entrepreneurs and agencies, and just recently heard from the publisher of Victoria’s SNAP Magazine who’d like to come to participate and cover the event.
Traffic to this site was actually higher in February according to Google Analytics, but I think that may be due to my slower posting here this month (due to high volumes of work being done), and partially due to getting a Feedburner feed that works (or not, since there seems to be only 2 subscribers to the RSS feed… gotta work on that). I need to sort out a way to combine my Feedburner stats with actual site traffic to give me a clear idea of how many people are reading, and how often.
The BIG win, however: Just this morning I came in to the office to find a voice mail from a new prospect who saw my ad on Facebook, clicked through to my website, then followed up with a phone call to me. That’s the FIRST time I’ve actually had a directly attributable response from an advertisement. Then again, I have only placed maybe three paid ads in my entire 6 years of being in this business, as I much prefer the public relations approach to getting attention… media coverage and writing columns. But still… Facebook Ads for the win!
While keeping up with the Twittering and Facebooking, I’m going to try to add another web-based business tool to my repertoire this month. I’ve long needed a proper CRM system to track opportunities connected to contacts, so I’m shopping around for a web-based CRM system. So far I’ve tried BatchBook which is very nifty as a contact management tool, but lacks the opportunity-management functionality I need. I’ve looked at SugarCRM (because I love things open-source) but it frustrates me that they haven’t got a free single-user web-based account. The Community Edition seems to need me to download it and install it on my OWN webserver, but I want it to be hosted for me, because who has time to manage their own damn PHP servers these days?
Okay… I’ve probably bored y’all silly and you’re asking “Where’s the next graphic facilitation?”. It’s coming. Patience, grasshopper.
Social media… legit business tool or runaway technology?
I’ve been a blogger for over ten years now, starting with a site on Angelfire where I posted really bad poetry, going through stages of FrontPage, two or three domain names, and am now fairly comfortable with the two blogs I run. Blogging is something I am comfortable with. I have gone through the inevitable ups and downs of publishing personal thoughts and opinions on the internet, been reviled for them, lost friends, made friends, etc. etc.
I’m also learning to like Facebook, mostly for its social benefits, as I have been able to keep a running message thread going with two mom friends who live in Vancouver. That friendship is still as strong as the day I moved to the Island because we have shared so much of our lives on this 3,000-post message thread.
Recently, however, I’ve been starting to pay more attention to the concept of social media as a marketing tool. Local advocates of the trend include Darren Barefoot and Shane Gibson, both of whom I respect highly. So I’m starting to check out this whole idea of having a Twitter identity as well as a Facebook page (LOVING the Facebook ads, by the way – well worth checking out for your business or non-profit), on top of my blog here.
Shane Gibson asked recently why we (the Tweet-o-sphere) felt that Executives were resisting the social media trend. I responded initially that it’s because I felt my target market wasn’t participating, so why should I bother either? His response to that was smart: by being an early adopter I can become a leader when the rest of the folks get on the bandwagon. Okay. I’ll bite.
My other beef with this concept of social media marketing is this: It’s hellishly distracting, and it requires me to keep on top of a whole other stream of consciousness, when my head is already quite full thank you very much. I’ve got my existing clients, my family, my hobbies, and god forbid I should wish to take some time for myself to read a book or just contemplate my bellybutton. Now I have a nagging voice at the back of my head suggesting that to be successful at social media, I have to use it all the time. I don’t have a mobile device that handles texting (because I loathe people who text in company) so I have to do this all when I’m sitting at a computer – which is when I have plenty of other tasks to take care of!
And then there’s the other layer of it – applications which I download on my computer to help me “manage” my Twitter life better. The last thing my poor beleaguered computer needs is another background process. TweetDeck is sitting there collecting feeds while I force ol’ Veruca here (my computer) to crunch numbers or draw flowcharts in Visio. I feel sometimes like it’s just too much.
So, my question for anyone reading this blog (is there anybody out there? nod if you can hear me!) is this… what social media tools do you use, and how do you keep it from detracting from the activities you actually do to make money or have a life?