Social Media and You

Are you selling locally?  Is your market defined by a geographic area? If so, are you tuned into your LBSNs?

That’s what my amazing social media marketing teacher calls them.  Sites that celebrate and offer opportunities for local businesses are location-based social networks, or LBSNs. Yelp.com; FourSquare; Open Table; Groupon; Loopt and the like.

It’s fun learning about these multiple channels that truly help bridge the communications gap for brick-and-mortar enterprises. It’s a thrill to examine the brass tacks of what social media is becoming for Main Street. I work with these people, the small businesses who are the lifeblood of all commerce.

It’s also a remarkable privilege to receive these teachings through Craig Cannings through VAclassroom.com. The guy is nothing short of brilliant, as an observer and even more as a teacher. The sheer volume of info he conveys digitally is awesome in itself; but the efficiency as well as sensitivity with which it’s delivered is especially rare.

I interviewed Craig for the Virtual Assistant Forums a while ago, if you’d like to read more about him.

Isn’t it divine? Through the guidance of a guru from across the continent, I’m brought closer to businesses in my own community.

True confessions time: I no longer make use of my Google Reader. There are thousands of unread posts in there.

Somehow, about six months ago, I stopped culling RSS feeds and following certain people. Now, I just go to Twitter and follow tempting links from there. I cannot tell a lie: it’s so extreme a change that I’m not even faithful to Seth Godin anymore.

If I had more time, every day, to spend reading posts, it would be wonderful to keep up with everything. As it is, however, going fishing on Twitter (and sometimes Facebook) for an hour or so is all I can afford. Oh yes, and LinkedIn group discussions enthrall me for some time every day as well.

This keeps me up to date on many things, though the process mostly lacks the in-depth study that’s available through a Reader.  In-depth is best when you have a chosen a path for learning; but using social networks and grazing blogs and articles relates well to plain old daily life.

It stumps me that we’re all urged to post to a blog daily, but no one really has all that much time to read. How can these opposites attract?

Twitter users are divided on the issue of pre-scheduled tweets.

Do you use SocialOomph or Twuffer to set up messages that will post sometime in the future? Or do you view such tactics as heretical, diametrically opposed to what Twitter’s all about?

The beauty of Twitter is its emphasis on the here and now, with authentic, nearly real-time communications between real people. In such a context, pre-scheduled tweets seem not much different from billboards.

Some people will only do in-the-moment interactions on Twitter.

Others use pre-scheduled tweets in various ways. I’ve noticed some who respond spontaneously on a regular basis, but also run branded pre-arranged tweets just as regularly. Others aren’t shy about having almost all their tweets pre-recorded. The most famous twitter gurus don’t run these kinds of tweets, but I’m not sure that means they’re ineffective (the pre-mades, not the gurus).

Though I likened them to billboards, these aren’t really ads. They’re more like announcements, updates, information. I come from a non-profit background, so it’s not hard for me to see the difference. On Twitter or any social network, the PSA (public service announcement) is perfectly acceptable, but the advertisement is verboten.

What’s your take on the issue?

There’s no denying I’m an oldster, one of the many 40-60 year-olds who comprise the fastest growing demographic on Facebook. But there’s good reason to fall in love with this capricious new friend.

I joined up a couple years ago, and have been slow to acclimate to Facebook. But in the past 6 months, it has solidly advanced to become a favored retreat. Like that song, Up On the Roof;  like that place “Where everybody knows your name.” Exactly like that, customized to me.

Do you know people who don’t have Facebook accounts, yet it’s sure they would revel in it? We’re human, we’re sociable, and our relationships over time and distance can easily be maintained through this amazing tool. To 50 plussers, this is miraculous.

I love the Like option, so you can just give thumbs-up to someone. Isn’t this what the world needs, this kind of affirmation of one another on a constant basis?

Lately, I’ve made use of the chat option, which is pretty wild if your dialog is with someone you haven’t seen or talked to in 40 years.

Facebook is definitely growing on me, I’m ready to admit. It’s a warm fuzzy kind of feeling.

How I decide who to follow on Twitter.

• Does the email notification I receive from Twitter show a person or a business? If a business, is there any compelling reason to follow?
• Has the person tweeted very much, or is s/he at just a couple tweets so far?  If you’re not already out there with your content, I’ll probably decline.
• Do you have 73 thousand follows and 3 followers? No thanks.
• When and if I click through to your Twitter page, do you have name, location, website, and description reasonably filled out?  Good, because if any of these are missing, it’s a nix.
• Is the look of your Twitter page repulsive in any way? Forget it.
• Do you tweet nothing but one-liners from motivation coaches and Ghandi? Oh, please.
• Do you duplicate the same tweet over and over? It’s just not worth it.
• If, when I look at your profile page, I don’t understand a single tweet, you’re outta here.

Is all this harsh, in your estimation? You bet it is. With auto-following programs polluting the process and spammy laziness a human condition (it seems), you can’t mess around. Be selective in your social media liaisons. Life’s too short for misalliances.

In my update course on social media marketing, we were talking about writing up a bunch of tweets for a client’s account, and helping them finesse the writing to make the tweets appropriate for the medium. Inevitably, social media and each of its channels has its own lingo or rhythm of speech and vernacular, which is a big part of its strength.

The respectful participant will observe and listen for a while before jumping in. They’ll ask the advice of experts.  They’ll take steps towards learning the language.

While blogging is often promoted as central to online presence, many people still wonder what exactly blogging is supposed to be. It’s a web journal, okay.  How intimate, how professional? Should it be personal, technical, or journalistic? It’s not easy to decipher blogging’s culture.

May I offer the thought that blogging is the articulation that comes when you’re  looking out a window. Blogging is looking out through a window on your subject.

Unlike journalism, it’s a dance between your real self and the panorama.

Unlike a diary, it’s as factual as possible.

You are on one side of the window, your subject is on the other. And your reader is the glass.

At a workshop yesterday on computer maintenance, the instructor emphasized the importance of organization. If you keep data on your computer in neat order, filed appropriately and stored logically, you’ll have a far easier time of it whenever your machine needs repair, re-installment, or replacement.

For those who are naturally not-so-neat, this is disturbing news: your messiness can threaten the health of your data. It can be a liability in other aspects of life online, too: like social media and inbound marketing.

Yes, I’m talking to the millions out there (often including myself) who are willing victims of the internet’s boundless wealth. We get online and want to consume it all! We distantly sense the days turning into nights and back into days as the thrall of all that entertainment and enlightenment moves us from site to site to site without end.

The hard truth? You’ve just got to get organized. You have to set limits. You must make choices and stick to them. Join a very few social networks, not every one that looks cool. Read for a strictly observed amount of time. Get a grip.

The internet is a tool, remember. It is not an end in itself!

In a recent LinkedIn discussion, someone complained that members were blatantly advertising instead of introducing discussion topics. The commenter pointed out how this destroys the confidence of other participants – in the advertiser, and in the integrity of the discussion forum itself.

In this particular group, the shameless self-promo does indeed seem a bit out of control. Some users are relatively new to social media, and perhaps not so well versed in the platform’s mores. And some, no doubt, are plain old dedicated spammers.

While I agree with that commenter, and deplore the heavy handed push posts, I would like to point out that the presence of black hats has one redeeming quality: it serves to accentuate the opposite and at least equal presence of white hats.

Though the garbage created by spammers of every stripe seems up to our ears, at times, it’s worth the trouble to pause and think about the vast numbers of good, smart, fair, energetic, compassionate, and helpful people who actually drive the internet and make cyberspace go round. The ones we have met here who touch our hearts and minds daily. It is to those amazing beings I send this Valentine. I love you!

I’m doing a mini-series on how to make your writing for online publication more attractive.

When something’s hot, in our lingo, it’s attractive; it draws attention. But like fire, it’s beautiful yet can also easily offend. So setting the dial to red-hot is not always in your best interest. The solution is a custom mix of hot and cold. All your internet updates operate on a hot/cold continuum.

(Note that dead center, exactly inbetween hot and cold, is where much writing lies, inert.)

In the effort to avoid middle of the road writing, decide the proper synthesis of hot and cold, and then write to the allowable extreme of hot. Here’s a sample tweet (the audience is internet marketers):

1. (Dead Center) Digging Ingram Hill on Pandora… Worth the $36 for the year just to hear music that’s not on the radio here!

2. (Cold) Ingram Hill via Pandora.  Unusual radio fare. Glad I bought the subscription.

3. (Hot) Ingram Hill ecstasy. Kudos for playing non-mainstream stuff, Pandora! (Worth every penny of $36 a year).

4. (Best solution) Listening to Ingram Hill. Kudos for playing non-mainstream stuff, Pandora! (Worth every penny of $36 a year).

Make sense?

Social media is a good place for writers. It can be a bit of a challenge for non-writers. You can produce content using other media besides text (e.g., video or audio); that’s the best way to get around a distaste for writing. But if you choose to write for the internet – most everyone does write at least Twitter and Facebook updates – consider some ways you can help yourself and your rankings by making your writing better.

By better, I mean more accurate, more appealing, more evocative, more powerful.

There are as many tricks for beefing up your writing as there are people. If you seem to be blogging to a vacuum, if your comments get no reactions, if nobody ever re-tweets you – would it help if your writing was more attractive?

What does that mean, more attractive writing? It’s a question of fine-tuning the temperature, adjusting either up or down, according to the tastes of the reader you wish to attract.  So, for example:

• Start with: We went to the movies.
• Make it hotter: We saw a cool flick.
• Make it cooler: We took in a film.

More to come soon on this theme.