Imagine Your Reality

My blog is now on Alltop. You can find it in the Marketing section. You can also find it on social media today and a number of other blog directories. Each time I learn about a new blog directory or resource site, I get my blog listed on it as soon as possible, in order to build up backlinks to the blogs, and also to expose it to a wider audience.

If you post on a regular basis and you think of your blog as a professional platform, it’s worth your time to get it listed on different blog directories. Not only does it build up credibility for your blog and your professional standing, but it can also help you get more readers and followers who find your blog on those sites.

I already mentioned backlinks, which are related links that push a website or blog’s rankings up on google, Bing, and other search engines, but something you can also do is add your blog/business website to local search engine directories as a way of building those backlinks and also making it easier to find your presence on the web.

What’s key is that you get active about getting out your blog out there so that other people can find it and read it. You can’t expect that readers will come to you, if you don’t make your blog available on different sites beside the one its hosted on. And also make sure you post your latest entries to your social networking site. The more consistent you get about it, the easier it will be to attract readers and develop interest in what you are doing.

I’ve been keeping an eye on Google Buzz and I’ve realized its the social media equivalent of the Google chat function that comes with Gmail. The only difference is that its billed as social media and it doesn’t show up in your inbox if you miss part of the conversation. That doesn’t mean Google Buzz is useless. If anything, its quite useful in terms of what it can offer to users, but it does make me question how it’s any different from all the other Google tools people can use, and I’ve come to the conclusion it really isn’t.

I’ve noticed that people have started using Google Buzz to start collaborative conversations with each other, which is similar to Google Wave. I’ve also noticed that some of them use it like a chat, which is just like the chat box that Google offers with Gmail. And I’ve noticed that some people are using it to post status updates, which is perhaps the only difference from the other tools I see.

I think Google Buzz is useful. It’s another medium that can be used to touch people, but there is something to also be said for over saturation, and while Google Buzz does offer another medium of communication, it also lends itself to over saturation of Google’s services. It likely would’ve been better to have incorporated Google Buzz as strictly part of Google Wave, in order to encourage people to use it. Instead it’s part of Gmail, where everything it does is already offered in Gmail.

What do you think? is Google Buzz useful in Gmail or is it over-saturation of the same services?

There’s so much positive hype about social media that sometimes its easy to forget the importance of maintaining perspective about it. Recently an acquaintance of mine stopped using Foursquare when she was pranked by several people who told her they were going to rob her house. Because Foursquare is used to indicate where you are, it was for them to know that she was at a restaurant and not at home. Fortunately she wasn’t robbed, but this story is illustrative of how social media can be used for more negative purposes.

Another issue, which is occasionally brought up to me, is in regards to identity theft. I don’t think that social media significantly lends itself to identity theft. If anything online shopping puts you at more risk for identity theft, but all that said, its important to recognize that you are putting details on social media sites that people can use against you.

My recommendation is to never put any information up on a site that you wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing in public. By choosing to be selective about the information you make available to others, you also make it much easier to protect yourself from unwanted attentions or actions, such as what happened to my acquaintance.

As with anything else, it’s important to maintain proper perspective on social media. Just because its available, doesn’t mean we have to post every detail. And sometimes its better not to.

Last week, I met some interesting people and decided to see if I could find them on Twitter. The only problem was, when I went to search, I saw the following message: “Twitter can’t search because it’s bit stressed out from all the tweets.” I felt stuck, because I wanted to start following the people, and get in front of them as well. My room mate suggested that if I knew there user name I could simply use twitter.com/username and then add the people.

This turned out to be a very workable solution and I was able to add the people I wanted to connect with, but it also helped me realize that it’s sometimes too easy to get stuck using the obvious tools that an interface provides. Just because I couldn’t search for people, didn’t mean I couldn’t find those people if I had their usernames. But because the obvious tool wasn’t working, I had to find a workaround.

With any social media site, not just Twitter, there will be times when some kind of functionality isn’t working because the site is being improved or because it’s being overused and the functionality has to be shut down. It’s important to develop workarounds so that you don’t have to wait until the site is repaired. For twitter, it was fairly easy to just use the usernames after twitter.com. For other sites, there will be similar workarounds. Don’t let yourself get limited because the obvious interfaces don’t work.

In this video I discuss how customer service can be proactive on social media and what the benefits are.

A brief announcement about my available services

I have changed my services for social media. While I still offer some training, the majority of what I offer is social media management. For more information about social media management and my prices for it, please go to my website.

I met with another entrepreneur, who like me, offers social media consulting to businesses. And I learned a really good lesson. He had with him a flyer and he was going to spend the day walking around PDX handing that flyer to businesses to advertise his services. And initially all I could think was, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

The reason: I’ve gotten so used to social media, and even the phone that it hadn’t occurred to me to think about using his approach. He also has a decided advantage of being about a decade older than me, and so his experience includes that concept of taking a flyer and walking door to door with it.

And it makes me realize as well that it’s rather easy to discount tried and true methods of marketing when we have the glamor of new technology in front of us. Don’t get me wrong: social media has value and can do a lot for your marketing, but as I’ve advocated before it needs to be complemented with traditional marketing. I’ve done that with written letters and cold calling, but actually beating the streets with a flyer? It’s not something you see as much anymore, and yes that’s what makes it precisely so valuable to do. When people aren’t doing something, and yet it can be effective, its worth your time to do it.

I consider this a lesson learned for me, as well as a valuable recognition of how important it is to meet with other people and learn what they are doing, that you could also be doing. Find out what other businesses do to stand out and see if you can adapt what they do to your own methods. You’ll be surprised at how well some of it will work and also how you’ll continue to be challenged in all the right ways to improve your business.

I’ve heard some pretty interesting claims that email will eventually go away because of the emerging technology that is providing us access to quicker ways to get information. I’m not sure I really believe those claims, if only because I think email is a fairly useful communication platform and something that provides some level of privacy that social media doesn’t provide. Something which surprises me is how many bloggers don’t include a subscribe by email form on their blogs.

I think more bloggers should include this service because it allows people to get the latest blog entries in their email. I recognize that people can also use an RSS reader or a tool such as yahoo pipes to accomplish, and some of it may even reduce the amount of email in your inbox, but not everyone wants to use those tools. Some people, myself included, like using email. A subscribe by email form allows me to get the blog entry in my inbox, without having to go anywhere else to look at the information.

I don’t think it’s ever wise to to write off one form of communication in favor of others, mainly because there are people who will prefer to be communicated with the technology they already use. This is why, for instance, I believe in the power of a hand-written card. Some people will prefer, even as others prefer phone, RSS feeds, or email. For a blogger, I think it’s essential to make email subscriptions available t readers so that they can increase the readership and enable potential commentary. I read the blogs I email subscribe to and sometimes comment on them as well.

Also from a marketing standpoint, providing multiple means of disseminating information can only improve how that information is received and dispersed by others. An email subscription form or link isn’t hard to set up, and very likely could improve the number of reads your blog gets.

Carri Bugbee pointed me to this article about the suckiness of Facebook customer service, when she noted on her twitter stream recently that they had yet again complicated the User Interface (UI) by requiring users to add a plug-in in order to upload pictures. My guess in regards to the plug-in is they want to get more data, but needlessly complicating the UI in the mix just seems to create more problems and potentially gets people to leave Facebook. So why doesn’t Facebook care about what its users have to say?

My guess is they’ve gotten too big and like many other big companies they don’t think what the user has to say actually matters. It seems rather odd that its a social media company that thinks this way, if only because social media has proven that if enough customers speak out, the company will feel the pain and pressure. Than again, for that to occur, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s important to get enough people with substantial social influence to speak out, so that their followers accordingly bring the pressure to bear on the company.

At some point, the continued changes that Facebook makes to the user interface, which are done in a manner that inconveniences the user, will catch up to Facebook and more people will leave then join. It might be useful for Facebook to remember that if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it, and to also remember that good customer service engenders the loyalty and trust that keeps people using the site.

Realistically, customer service can’t solve or satisfy every customer, but ideally the majority of people should come away feeling that the problem was addressed in a manner that showed them the company cared. When companies don’t handle customer service responsibly, it may for the moment cause the customer to leave frustrated, but in the age of social media, it can bring the torches and pitchforks to the gates, while causing current customers to start questioning whether they will really be taken care of.

Hopefully Facebook will appreciate that and improve their customer service, especially as there business is based on the very medium that so many people are starting to use to get their voices heard by big companies who’d rather ignore them.

I’ve been discussing goals for social media a lot on this blog, and it’s because I think that one of the biggest hold-ups for people, when it comes to social media, is not developing attainable goals that allow the person to benchmark how useful social media is for them. An attainable goal is one you can accomplish, that also allows you to measure how that goal effects everything else you do for your business.

An example of an attainable goal for social media, is optimizing your social media presence on any given site you are on. This involves uploading a photo to your profile, completing your profile as completely as possible, and learning to use the different features of the social media site so you know which ones you need, and which ones you don’t need. The results will be that you develop strategies for using each site efficiently and can also minimize your time on those sites, while still having an effective presence.

Another attainable goal could be to get engaged in three discussions a day on a site such as twitter, by making a reply to someone. The metrics for that would be that you would develop closer connections and/or direct the person to your website after several replies.

Each goal, with social media, needs to account for the limitations of the technology, as well as the desired result you want to achieve. An attainable gal is one that you know you can realistically accomplish, with the time you have, that also produces a definite benefit if you do the action.

What are some of your goals for social media? Are they attainable? Can you measure your success in achieving them?

In this video blog, I discuss the connection between social media and customer service.