Placeholders
These are people who have registered and set up a profile on social media sites but they don’t interact with anyone on the social media sits so their profile is nothing more than a placeholder.
Pontificators
These are people who get accounts and then start saying a bunch of stuff that nobody gives a shit about. People don’t really want to interact with them.
Players
These are the people who connect with a specific market with their social media profiles. You have to be ready to give a specific market intriguing and interesting messaging that they want to interact with. If you don’t, don’t even bother having a social media account.
At best, you’re gonna be able to really kill it on 2, maybe 3 places – for example, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
You can think of your social profile page like restaurants – people want to eat at popular restaurants where people consistently have great experiences at. Well, people want to interact with popular social media accounts where people are consistently having a great experience.
This is why speaking bullshit no one finds interesting is a dead end and just having a dead on arrival ghost town social media profile doesn’t work.
You need to figure out ways that you can be interacting with your perfect prospects and customers and having a great time with them online.
And you shouldn’t be at the point where you’re asking if you need a social media presence. You do.
Look at sites like Yelp, where the wrong disgruntled person can bring an absolute shit storm upon the head of a business owner.
In a situation where you’re being attacked online, your best defense is an active fan base that has been wowed by you that will mobilize and beat a hater into submission ON YOUR BEHALF.
But this will NEVER happen if you’re not on a channel connecting with people meaningfully and gaining their loyalty. If you have ZERO presence in social media, you’re going to get body slammed.
You need to warm up to the fact that you have a new responsibility that involves monitoring and maintaining your online presence. Over. Period. Done.
And getting loyalty comes down to two things – Being Interesting and Being on Point. Forget anything else that dissipates from these two pillars. Be interesting and bring wisdom.
Which Media Works Best For You?
Are you a writer? Are you good in front of the video camera? Do you speak well with pictures?
Next, you want to think about what you’re going to bring that people want to engage with. Is your profile going to be a serial story? Is it going to be you speaking to topical events?
You have to think about this someone as the person who’s publishing a successful magazine would. You need to know exactly who you want to be publishing content for. You want to keep things simple, track your results, and test new ways to get people excited about tuning into you.
And you’ve got to be careful because can waste an incredible amount of your time if you’re doing it wrong.
You need to know how to infiltrate a social media channel, become one with it, and figure out how to leverage it into a useful outcome for your business.
And relative to outcome, you need to be crystal clear on this. What are trying to do? Build an audience? Get leads? Or are you looking to sell directly via social (very hard to do)?
Do You, Yourself Have To Be Continual Fountain of Wisdom?
Nightingale Conant did this with audio tapes back in the day and Huffington Post has done this on the internet.
Nightingale Conant didn’t generate content. They found experts who had content and recorded it in their studio and published it and sold it. And they sold all kinds of different flavors of self help that suited the unique preferences of the self help junkies.
Arianna Huffington isn’t generating all the content for Huffington Post. She has assembled a team of authorities and THEY speak to topics people are all lathered up about.
If your community is more than you, you’ve got a better chance of connecting with more people on your channel.
Look at some people LOVE Tony Robbins but they hate Zig Ziglar. Or how some people can’t listen to Deepak Chopra but can spend hours a day listening to Wayne Dyer. It’s all great content, with the same ultimate purpose, but delivered uniquely.
People who become an access point and assemble great teams can tap into the narrower preferences of their market.
Who Are Great Role Models On Social Media To Pay Attention To?
Richard Branson is a master at leveraging social media with video. Mobile and video are already evolving into two of the most powerful marketing channels ever. This means you need to be thinking apps and video so you don’t get your ass left behind.
Watch what Twitter is doing. These are the guys who made 140 characters and the idea of being on point, relevant in a major way. Keep your eyes on what they’re doing.
Chris Anderson and his agency. These are the guys who achieved the Herculean task of getting the nobody OBAMA elected and then re-elected with MASSIVE help from their one-word driven social media efforts – Change. These guys know what they’re doing with the internet. And it doesn’t matter if nothing changed and you hate Obama. Politics are irrelevant to the discussion of the underlying communication factors that inspire audiences.
Different people are crushing it online catering to different markets.
There is no one-size fits all model that has direct carryover of everything they do to everyone. But that doesn’t mean that if you see someone crushing it in an industry that has nothing to do with yours, that you don’t ask yourself how you can adapt what they’re doing to what you’re doing.
You want to look at how your association for you niche interacts with their members online. You want to see what they’ve figured out.
If they’re getting a shit-ton of interaction, you want to look at how often they’re posting content, where they’re posting content to (blogs, tweets, Facebook, etc. – the channel their audience prefers), what they’re posting, etc.
You need to know what’s ALREADY landing correctly on your audience and what they appreciate.
Next, you want to look at what authorities in your niche are doing to keep the attentions of thousands of eyeballs and ask the same questions as you would for the association.
A simple way to get in front the eyeballs you want is to go guest blog/contribute content for sites that have them. This could even be in the form of commenting on blog posts of theirs or to Twitter and Facebook conversations.
The biggest mistake you can make with social media is to make too big of a deal about it being new technology. Being in sync with your market is the most important thing you can do for your business. These channels let you do this at a higher level and they make it easier to do so. That’s it. Don’t make it rocket science.
Cox Cable Company has a better pulse at what’s going on from their social media channels than they do sometimes with their help desk. People go to their Twitter page or their Facebook page and leave messages about outages, problems, etc.
Also, if you have
interns working with you, GET THEIR FEEDBACK on what to pursue for social networking and how to do it and be appealing with it. Young people live, breathe and sleep social networking and if you don’t, they have something to teach you about how you can maximize your exposure with it.
One of the worst things you could do if you’re looking to make an impact with social networking is to surround yourself with people who are cynical of it a.k.a. afraid of it. They are the wrong people to get input from about using this technology that is evolving forward day-by-day.
Quick Way To Get Into A Business
Traditional approaches to starting a business involve people going out and finding an office space to rent, furniture to put in it, phone systems, computers, hire receptionists, hiring a salesperson, and then let’s get a product put together to sell, then let’s get marketing going.
That approach is a gamble that can cost you tens of thousands of dollars and months or years of time.
Why not test a concept and make it prove itself small and then bigger and bigger and bigger before ever committing vast resources to it?
One way to do is to become an affiliate for a product that is similar to what you want to sell, put up a one-page website in one day, buy $200-$400 dollars in Pay Per Click traffic, and see if people will buy this person’s product.
This is an experiment based approach to starting a business.
You want to bootstrap, test your assumptions and make them prove themselves viable and build up according to bigger and bigger experiments that you conduct. And you buy and invest in office space and anything else you need according to the business’s growth demanding you do so; not on your preference to look the part and look like a big boy with your business toys.
Don’t fall into the trap of wanting the successful business life if you don’t have the tested and proven business that supports it.
That’s what going out and begging for money from venture capitalists is – wanting the lifestyle with nothing to support it but your wanting it. This is no different than the people living beyond their means with credit cards, living a $100,000 dollar a year lifestyle when in reality they earn a $42,000.00 dollar a year lifestyle. Base your actions on reality; not delusion!
The start of any business should revolve around having an offer that resonates with a market and being able to be in front of people who can and want to give you money if presented with an attractive offer.]]>