Social Media Examiner (SME) hosted an online webinar yesterday and described how 9 small businesses are attracting thousands of visitors and, in some cases, millions of dollars in revenue. Most of them have only been at it for two or three years. I have to say I was more than impressed.

Social Marketing Makes Dollars and Sense

In the opening slide, we learned why social media is essential for any business.

My key takeaways from the presentation were:

• Give away free content. I’m not talking about the content of your blogs. But useful stuff like Ana White, Carpenter, does — diagrams and detailed instructions, for example, about how to build a cabinet.
• Use very personalized images. In most cases, the business owners had several informal shots of themselves sprinkled throughout the site — with their spouses, holding their dogs, etc.. Photos give you an emotional connection with your visitors.
• Create and empower your community. For example, run a contest to engage your readers. If you have a photography business, you could invite your audience to submit their best photos, select winners and post them on your site.
• Enable readers to share your content. Be sure to prominently display social media buttons for social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ so that your followers can share your content with their followers, potentially drawing many more visitors to your site.
• Leverage social proof. If you have impressive followings on Twitter and Facebook put those numbers up on your site. Include testimonials.
• Choose the channels that work best for you. If you’re a small business, it takes time to be active on every social network. Experiment and see where you should place your focus. You don’t have to be everywhere.

I liked that he showcased offbeat companies such as Easy Lunch Boxes and Orabush tongue cleaner (don’t laugh, he’s raking in the money). I concluded from the presentation you never know when an simple idea will turn into a profitable business.

Lessons Learned

At the conclusion of the seminar, Michael Steltzner, founder and CEO of SME, summed up the key lessons in this slide:

Please share in the comments box how your small business is using social media to build your business. I’m all ears.

Imagine my surprise yesterday when I received the following email from The New York Times at 1:04 pm.

Not me. Of course, as you may have read, The Times committed a big boo-boo yesterday when it accidentally cancelled the subscriptions of 8 million print and online subscribers. The media and Twitter scribes were all over it in the intervening three hours before the Times sent out this correction at 4:19 pm:

The Correction

The Times did the right thing, of course, but I’d like to make a point about content and tone of the correction. Aren’t they in the communication business? Note the cold tone of voice and shortness of the second email. Why was the first email sent in error? How did it happen? Subscribers would have welcomed a more detailed explanation.

A Missed Opportunity to Engage Readers

A Forbes writer, who also received an email, tried calling the Times and kept getting busy signals. It’s a sure bet that many, many other subscribers had the same experience.

Sure, it was nice to receive an apology. But The Times missed a great opportunity to engage with its subscribers. The paper could have used some humor in its message and personalized it with the signature of an actual person.  Can a company write a letter?  Didn’t a human being write this missive?

The Times wrote a story online about the mistake at 2:29 pm and sent out this  message in its official Twitter feed, “If you received an e-mail today about canceling your New York Times subscription, ignore it. It’s not from us.” Oh, yes, it was. Turns out the email was sent by a Times employee, according to Eileen Murphy, a Times spokesperson. And why the delay of almost 90 minutes before the subscribers received the apology?

The Times Email Could Have Said –

Dear Valued New York Times Reader,

Wow, did we goof! We did NOT cancel your subscription. Please ignore our earlier email with the subject line, “Important information regarding your subscription.”

It was an honest mistake — someone pushed the wrong button and we had 8 million unhappy readers for a couple of hours before we fixed things. Your email was not compromised. Everything is back on autopilot. You’ll continue to receive your New York Times as you always have.

If you’d like to vent, we invite you to visit us on our official Twitter account at https://twitter.com/#!/nytimes. We’ll also answer any questions you have about your subscription or any of our other services.

Thanks for your patience and understanding. We value you as a New York Times reader.

Sincerely,

Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr.
Publisher

— now isn’t that better than the email I did receive?

PS – see the comment below. The email went to non-subscribers, too. What a goof-up.

Associated Press has issued new social media guidelines for reporters who are sourcing social networks and retweeting content. What got my attention is that AP cautions its reporters to fact-check the authenticity of a person/organization posting on social networks and the information posted and tweeted.

Image via CrunchBase

AP points out in its guidelines:

If you come across photos, videos or other multimedia content that you would like to use in your news report, you must verify its authenticity. You must also determine who controls the copyright of the material and get permission from that person/organization to use it. Phony accounts are rampant in the social media world and can appear online within minutes of a new name appearing in the news. Examine the details to determine whether the page could have just as easily been created by somebody else.

AP gives this example of not giving an implied endorsement of a tweet.

Bad: “RT@jonescampaign smith’s policies would destroy our schools”

Good: “RT Jones campaign now denouncing smith on education: @jonescampaign smith’s policies would destroy our schools

Image via CrunchBase

There has been a lot of commentary about the new guidelines. New York Times media reporter David Carr @carr2n added his two cents in his own tweet: AP to staff: Don’t retweet anything with an opinion. http://bit.ly/rKbgDE Good luck with that. I believe what he meant is that so much of what flows through social media is opinion that it will be tough to enforce that guideline.

Am I Spreading Misinformation — and Are You?

That got me thinking that I post retweets without checking the authenticity of the information. I feel I’m on pretty safe ground if I’m retweeting articles from reputable publications like the Times, or business colleagues on Twitter that I know and trust. I also avoid content that defames others or seem suspect. But surely some of my RTs  could be questionable. So am I spreading misinformation?

And do you “like” a blog post, RT a tweet or give a +1 to an article without checking the source or accuracy of the information?

There is no doubt a great deal of misinformation circling the globe on the back of RTs and “likes.” What are your thoughts on this problem? Do you have self-imposed rules about the information you’ll help to go viral?

Here is a copy of the AP guidelines. You’ll need to save it to your computer as a PDF to open it.

AP SocialMediaGuidelinesNov.2011

Image via CrunchBase

When I read in a Nielsen study that Tumblr ranks third in time people spend on a social network, after Facebook and Blogger but ahead of Twitter, I decided it was time to learn more about it.

Sure, I’ve had an account for quite a while, but that hardly counts as being active.  I’m a regular blogger on my own self-hosted site, post to Twitter and Facebook daily, and I’m very involved with the LinkedIn community. Isn’t that enough? Maybe not. So I wrote my first blog on Tumblr, which I describe later in this post with screen shots of how you do it.

Next Great Social Network?

Tumblr is a blogging platform but much more. The power of Tumblr resonated in a post on Pro Blogger about how a single Tumblr link drove a blog post to the top of Google search. Tumblr says it’s had close to 10 billion total posts and almost 20 million total blogs, more than WordPress.com.

Social media maven Steve Rubel, in a recent post entitled Tumblr is the Next Great Social Network, described it this way, “Tumblr, to me at least, isn’t a blog platform but something new entirely — a social network for both original and curated content that is longer than a tweet and often more visual in nature. It’s a hybrid.”

Through the Tumblr dashboard, you can post text, photos, quotes, links, dialogues, audio, video, slideshows, and more, creating a network effect like the one that drove the Pro Blogger writer’s post to the top of Google search.

How Does it Work?

I decided to write my first post, learning by doing. If you’re new to Tumblr you should first sign up. Here is how the registration page looks (with sample blogs). You simply enter your name, email address and URL from your website at the bottom in the rectangular windows.

Next, you click on “start posting.” You will be taken to a dashboard. Note that at the top of the dashboard there is a Chat icon which allows you to have conversations with other members. You can also upload audios and videos. I added my Tumblr account to my Facebook news feed so my blogs will be automatically posted on my wall. I also chose the option to post them to my Twitter account. Here is the dashboard:

You’re given the option of uploading an image from your own computer or another site. Tumblr has a neat editing program for images, and a variety of blog templates. I initially uploaded an image thinking it would be my blog header, but it ended up at the bottom of my post so I’ll need to figure that out. But if you want to keep it simple, you don’t even need an image. Here is how my plain vanilla post looks:

If you are a new blogger, you might find your first attempts at writing a blog, inserting links and uploading images a little intimidating. I didn’t see any detailed instructions. I’m sure if you do a Google search you can find how-to articles. And, like other social networks, there are discussion forums where you can ask for help.

While Tumblr is growing in popularity, it is still a bit of a mystery to many people, what with Facebook and Google+ hogging most of the spotlight lately. But that’s going to change with Tumblr nipping at their heels in its race to be the leading online community where people spend the most time hanging out.

So are you on Tumblr? How would you compare it to your experience on Facebook and Twitter?

As a New Yorker, I am feeling sad and subdued today, the 10th anniversary of a “day that will live in infamy,” to quote President Franklin D. Roosevelt, another New Yorker.

This is the question I still get after 10 years:

Where Were You on 9/11?

Image by Vincent Desjardins via Flickr

In my office, at Citigate, the PR agency where I held my last job working for an organization before hanging out my own shingle again. As an agency, we had a large TV monitor hanging from a wall to keep up with the news.

I remember someone calling out, “Come take a look — a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center!”

I immediately called my husband to turn on the TV, just before we lost all phone service, which was down for days afterward. We stood glued to the TV, watching the unimaginable happen before our eyes. A young woman in our office lost her 26-year-old husband in the conflagration.

I had a lunch date with a former client, who was flying in from Toronto. She had left me a voice message that she had landed at LaGuardia Airport and was in a taxi on the way to Manhattan. She never made it. She later told me she could see the smoke from the burning towers. Bridges and tunnels were closed, so her taxi was turned away. She went back to the airport, and, as all flights had been cancelled, she tried unsuccessfully to find a room at an airport hotel.

She still had her taxi, now a very valuable asset, and a young man approached her. Would she drive him to Long Island? She did, registered at a motel around the corner, and spent the afternoon in front of the TV with his wife and two young children. It didn’t seem bizarre. In those dark days, lifetime friendships were forged with strangers. We became part of an extended family of survivors — those who personally lived through the experience.

For three days she holed up at her motel, watching TV and eating meals with her new friends. Finally, she found a limo driver who agreed to drive her clear across New York State — a 12-hour trip — to Buffalo. Her husband drove from Toronto to pick her up. Later I learned that three of my office colleagues, stranded in Los Angeles, had rented a car and drove across the country back to New York.

Dear friends, who lived in my building, put together an impromptu dinner for everyone who was around. We ate and watched more TV with replays of the horror of the buildings collapsing and people jumping from the World Trade Center rooftops rather than die in the flames. Our friends had visitors from Florida who drove their car back to Florida and then sold it for them. True story. It took months for life to return to the new normal. The new normal is life after 9/11 because life changed forever after that dreadful day.

Where Are We After 9/11?

The world is a changed place. Iraq. Afghanistan, an African-American President. But, most of all, the rise of social networks has revolutionized our lives — and was the catalyst for the Middle East uprisings that gave new hope to the oppressed as they fought for their freedom and better lives.

Social media has enabled people to communicate with each other, build relationships and forge communities with common goals. Think of these developments since 9/11:

LinkedIn — founded in 2003: 120 million members

Facebook — founded in 2004: 750 million members

Twitter — founded in 2006: 200 million members

There are 156 million blogs — 156 million! Everyone is a communicator and amateur journalist now. How wonderful.

A global village

I haven’t tuned in to watch any of the 9/11 commemorative ceremonies. After 10 years, it’s still too painful to watch. Instead, I’m at my computer, engaging with my families on social media. That’s what we are –  families that include friends from around the globe. Mine include Susan from Australia and Catarina from Sweden. We’re in touch regularly. I feel that I know them personally.

We’re all connected. This one big global family that will hopefully build a better world.

Is paid advertising dead? To hear the experts, it’s certainly on life support. Inbound marketing is all the rage.

HubSpot is credited with coining the term inbound marketing and the company makes its living by selling services to help companies figure out ways to get customers to come to them instead of the other way around. HubSpot describes it in this diagram:

It’s true that consumers are tuning out paid advertising and more often finding you by searching the web – your blog, through your participation on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and now Google+. Those of us who write blogs are continually fretting over key words and SEO. We distribute our content to a wide range of social media networks. Build it, promote it, and they will come. Or, maybe not.

Inbound Marketing Campaigns

Thing is the companies that are reaping the rewards of inbound marketing are spending millions on inbound marketing campaigns. They run sneaky display ads to get you to their Facebook pages and corner the market for keywords by bidding up the prices of Google ads that will get you to visit their sites. More power to them.

So the notion of inbound marketing being “free” is a misnomer. Of the hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, many thousands never receive a visitor or get a comment. A lot of marketers are sitting around still waiting for their first visitor.

Going Offline

I may be in the minority. But going offline has me intrigued. You remember offline don’t you? That involves calling a prospect on the phone and making an appointment to discuss your business in person. Two live people in an office talking to each other. How novel!

I’m being a little facetious, I know, so please forgive me. But it’s important to re-evaluate how we communicate with our customers and how we sell to them. There are too many social media “gurus” out there who are selling programs that promise to “monetize” your blog. Take their advice and rake in the money from products and services you sell directly to consumers. Web searches will lead them to you like the Pied Piper.

What Works For You

Can we all take a breath for a minute and think, really think, about how we’re going to build our business? Inbound marketing is great and growing but it’s not the whole story. I have a friend whose husband is a lawyer with a special niche. She spends $100 a month for a local Google ad that’s always at the top of the page and that’s how he gets all his leads. Paid advertising.

Some people do make a nice living monetizing their blogs. But others use their blogs as brand builders and as portfolios of their work.

Find what works for you. Don’t be embarrassed just because you found your newest customer next to you in line at the movies or in an elevator leaving a networking meeting, like I did.

Each day, we speak with people who inquire about social media, and the question more often than not is this “Is it even worth pursuing the use of social media as a part of our marketing plan?” 

In our opinion, the answer is “Yes!”  Social media marketing for both small and large businesses is a must.  New media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, You Tube, Google+ and the use of smart phone technology) is going to bec0me increasingly important to enhance your business and the relationships you build online. Take the short quiz below to assess your progress. On completing the quiz, you will be directed to a page, “How did you score?”

[gravityform id=2 name=IsYour Company Social Media Savvy?]

Bea Fields is President of Bea Fields Companies, Inc., offering leadership coaching and training for high growth companies.  She is also the founder and facilitator of the highly popular program Become a Blogging Maniac, which transforms novices into skilled bloggers and communicators.

If you would like help with your social media program, contact Jeannette Paladino.

I promised myself that I wouldn’t write about Google+ because didn’t I say just a few posts ago that I don’t have time to hang out on any more social networks? I’ve changed my mind. (I’m allowed).

For starters, I want to point out, if you look to your right, that I not only did I join Google+ but you can follow me by adding me to one of your circles. This takes some explaining if you haven’t yet joined Google+ or are just getting your feet wet, as I am.

Google+ Circles

One of the big differences between Google+ and Facebook is that you can segregate your connections into separate categories. Google+ calls them circles. It’s so simple to add people to your circles. Google+ has nicely started four for you called Friends, Family, Acquaintances and Following. You can add more circles and name them what you want – college alumni, cooking class, celebrities. You get the idea.  I’ve included a screen shot of my circles shown at the left.

This is where I think Google+ has a big edge over Twitter and Facebook. If you’re on the receiving end of a friend’s stream, you will only receive updates that are relevant to your circle. You don’t need to know what his Aunt Tilly ate last night for dinner. Also, you can restrict what you say within each Circle. This allows for private conversations that you can’t have on Facebook.

Hangouts

This is another neat feature. You can start a hangout – a sort of chat room – where you can sign in Skype-like and a live video of you shows up. If your friends are also hanging out you can have a conversation.

I’ve filled out my profile, and my stream is filling with updates from people in my Follow circle who are mainly social media mavens that I also follow on Twitter. I need to start posting more content and adding people to my circles. Of course, it all takes time. But I find Google+ more user friendly than Facebook and I think it will be more useful to my business. Specializing in social media communications, I need to know about this newest network where clients and prospects may be hanging out. So I need to hang out, too.

Have you joined Google+ or do you plan to? What do you think of it? The service is still by invitation-only as they roll it out. Let me know if you would like me to send you an invitation and I will. Oh, and if you enjoyed this post, please click on the +1 to the right. It’s the equivalent of the FB like.

I’ve haven’t entirely given up on having some privacy left in my life, but it is getting more difficult. Once you’ve grown up and gotten a few credit cards, then the three major credit rating agencies follow you around forever with a score on your financial reliability. Miss a monthly payment. Bingo! It goes on your record.

Now we’re being rated on our sociability by new scorekeepers. Not how friendly we are, but our influence on social media networks. Scores are weighted heavily based on your Facebook and Twitter activity. My primary social networks are LinkedIn and Twitter. My blog is my home base where I spend most of my time. I’m much less active on Facebook, so this will no doubt affect my scores – and maybe yours if you decide to try these out.

Thank you, Website Grader

Image via CrunchBase

I have to admit I haven’t bothered with these scorekeepers before, with one exception. HubSpot, which sells an inbound marketing software platform, also ranks websites on their traffic and social media popularity with its Website Grader. I consistently score from 96-98 out of 100 so, of course, its badge of honor is on my website.

Here are other  services that companies are using to rate your “influence” online. Social media popularity will enable marketers to target influencers for promotions and maybe even whether you get that next job you want.

Image via CrunchBase

Klout. I just learned I have a score of 44 out of 100. A Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence. They say I’m influential about writing, blogging and entrepreneurship. Wow, that makes me happy because that’s where I’m toiling. Should I be embarrassed by my score, though? According to an article on this topic in the New York Times, 44 is actually pretty high, with a strong but “niche” following. LinkedIn is my primary social network and Klout is just starting to rank LinkedIn, so maybe my score will rise. But I’ll never be a Justin Bieber.

PeerIndex. PeerIndex is a reputation and authority rating platform. My score is a chintzy 15. But, wait. PeerIndex claims, “If you have a blog, linking it to PeerIndex will enable us to improve the accuracy of our authority calculations for you.” Only problem is the link didn’t work so I couldn’t add my blog and, as I told you before, blogging is my principal social media activity. So, I’m scratching that score.

Image via CrunchBase

Alexa. Owned by Amazon.com, Alexa measures the popularity of a website. It is somewhat controversial because you can only get ranked if you download the Alexa toolbar to your website. I haven’t done that because I’m still deciding on its efficacy. But it’s a good source for what’s being searched right now, the top ranked Alexa sites by traffic, and hot products.

Social Media Index.  I am absolutely nowheresville on this Index, developed by Technobabble 2.0, a blog by Johnny Benwood, a social media analyst with Edelman PR. It’s an index of the top social media blogs and mavens, and an interesting read.

My Opinion

These indexes have flaws, so it worries me that they are becoming so popular. As I said, the most influential one, Klout, is just now starting to factor in LinkedIn usage, and blogging is not considered as influential as the social media sites. Now that Google+ has arrived with a bang — 10 million users in its first two weeks — how will they score participation in that new network?

Companies are making marketing decisions based on these rankings, so we can’t afford to ignore them. How much heavy lifting would be required to raise my scores a few points? I don’t know – all these secret algorithms are impenetrable to mere mortals.

I’ll just keep on trying to do my best in providing you, my valued readers, with information that I hope you find useful and entertaining.

What do you think about these ranking agencies? Are you using them? I’d love to know. Just leave a comment below. Thanks.

Connect with Skype

I know some people will think it’s heresy that I’m wondering what all the fuss was about when Facebook announced its deal today with Skype to offer video chatting. For several years, consumers have been using Skype to connect with each other when personal meetings aren’t possible. It’s particularly useful when you’re in the U.S. and you want to talk to someone half way around the world. And it’s wonderful for families to connect with their loved ones in the armed forces.

Great for the Social Networks

But do you notice that a lot of these new “innovations” are great for the companies – another way for Facebook to attract more users and advertisers – and customers for its corporate clients. But they don’t much matter for people like me. It just means more choices to get the services I can already access elsewhere, thank you very much.

Microsoft’s purchase of Skype solidifies its position in social media. Google+ has entered the fray with a Facebook-like service. Many reviewers of Google+ raved that this new service includes video chatting for up to 10 people in an area of the site called Hangouts, which is not possible on Skype. Yahoo News! took a more solemn view that Skype on Facebook the End of Online Privacy as We Know It. Well, that does seem a little extreme.

Social Media Fatigue

Suffering from social media fatigue

I don’t know about you, but I find I have less and less time to “hang out” on social media and interact with other people hanging out. I’m suffering from social media fatigue, are you?

Just how many social networks can we belong to and participate in a meaningful way?  There are literally millions of blogs floating around the Internet that haven’t been updated in years. Many companies have dormant Twitter accounts and when I went to look at one major law firm I got this message, “@Nameofcompany hasn’t tweeted yet.” LinkedIn profiles are incomplete, and many Fan pages on Facebook have few friends (I’m guilty).

My Advice

So, here is my advice: Relax. Set your priorities of where you’re going to spend most of your time on social media. Develop really deep and meaningful relationships with people. A dollop of social media is only a taste. You’ve got to make a real commitment to the social networks that will work best for you and your business.

Flitting from network to network and leaving barely a trace isn’t my idea of fun. Excuse me while I turn off the computer.