Monday, March 4, 2013

The Best Ways to Get Unfriended and Unfollowed on Facebook,Twitter and LinkedIn

join my network by Tom Fishburne Join My Network Courtesy of Tom Fishburne

I guess it had to happen.

People heard that there were a lot of consumers using social media, and perceived that those consumers had gotten together for the sole purpose of moving forward the business agendas of anyone with a computer or smartphone. Sadly for those of us who were exploring this new frontier, a whole new raft of socially unacceptable behavior was about to be born.

Using social media for business purposes is a balancing act, trying to increase your acceptance and build trust with an online community while advancing your legitimate business purpose. Like anything worth doing, its worth doing well, but if it isn’t done well, it can boomerang and actually decrease your standing with your community or their desire to listen to any of your communications. Here are a couple of things that tend ot drive people crazy online

  1. Automated responses - When people tweet or connect with others online  they aren’t looking to connect with an automation – they are looking for a real personal connection. A response that is obviously an auto-responder causes an almost immediate disconnect – leading may people to block, unfollow or unfriend the person who thought they were acknowledging the new connection. When people take the 2nd day of the e-Pro course, at one point the tweet out to the e-Pro team. We will respond personally, because that’s what there effort was a personal effort. Its no a lot of effort for the positive responses it brings us.
  2. Thoughtless Broadcasting- I get a lot of unsolicited requests on LinkedIn, a network that I keep the closest watch on and am most protective of. For example, I rencently got a request from someone in my marketplace that said “Find out why I use LinkedIn. Stay in touch and build your professional network.  - (Name Redacted) .” Seriously? I don’t even know you. Why would I care what motivates you? Even in this smaller social space, we constantly get messages from people promising us things we don’t want or need, indicating they have no idea who we are or what we are interested in. These folks don’t take the time to cull their list and be sure that the message they were sending is at least potentially appropriate for the recipient. Direct mail marketers are more considerate than that – but then again they have to pay for stamps.
  3. Careless Commenting - I’ve always felt that we have two reasons and one mouth for a reason – listening is at least twice as important as speaking, and thoughtful speaking is far more important than speaking at all. People often feel the need to speak first and think later – but when they do that online, they create a permanent record of their thoughtlessness. Just as people need to wait before they send an emotion filled email, they should wait before posting an emotion filled response on Facebook or on a blog post. And if you are the target of such a response, remember that there are those online who live for the controversy. They make themselves appear larger by being the center of controversy because they have little or nothing of value to add to the conversation.

Interested in building a network online? Its very simple and can be explained in just a few words. Be Transparent, Be Genuine, Be Consistent. When people know who you are, know what you care about, and know that they can rely on you, they want  you as part of their network. Upon reflection, it seems so simple, and yet, for many its so hard. I hope that it isn’t hard for you.

Reprinted from the SMMI Blog

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Labels: reputation management, social media
Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Hucksters, Hype and Honesty

“The Large Print Giveth” by Tom Fishburne

Everyone wants (or needs) to be a marketer in today’s world and they all seek different roads to success. Not all of those roads are effective, and many of them can be downright counter-productive. Being a member of a social network, or using the term social media doesn’t mean you’re using social media effectively,and you can as easily be a social media abuser as you can be a social media user.

Hucksters are, by definition abusers of the social space.  They are all over you waving their products and disrupting the online conversations of every community they participate in. Whether they didn’t read Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing , or they didn’t get the memo that marketing is conversation from the Clue Train Manifesto, these broadcasters are the online equivalent of the loud speaking movie goer or the person who spends the entire evening at a party talking to you about why you need to buy their product.  This annoying tribe is huge, comprised of people who see social spaces as a blank billboard for there personal use, and not a place where communities grow and prosper. The real estate agent who pimps their listings or open houses, the tech company that promotes their product or sales pitches thinly disguised as webinars , are seem by the overall communities online as old fashioned pitchmen or snake-oil peddlers, and have to interrupt huge segments of online communities in order to get a small number of people to respond.  Its been 119 years since  E. St. Elmo Lewis defined this process by his AIDA model, and yet for some people, this is how marketing works.

Hype is almost as annoying – people that make amazing claims and proclaim everything with excessive excitement based on nothing but their desire to be the center of online attention. Its not an uncommon type of promotion, and in fact Gartner even developed a graphic showing how it impacts the introduction of new tech products with their famous Hype Cycle that showed products moving from a “peak of inflated expectations” to a “trough of disillusionment” before reaching enlightenment and then productivity.  I’m a fan of genuine excitement, but you just can’t be excited about everything. Its the social media equivalent of typing with the Caps Lock on. when you spend all of your time SHOUTING, and everything you shout about is AMAZING, you lose the ability to emphasize anything. And after a while people just stop listening or paying attention to you. Add to that the disillusionment and disappointment that follows most hype, and it becomes an even worse choice for your online marketing.

The sweet place in social media – the place you want and need to be is where you earn the right to speak to people about your business because you have earned the ability to do so through an open honest dialogue that has created a relationship with them. To quote a line from Godin’s blog  ”Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.” People want to like you. They want to be connected with you – not your product, not your service, not even your company, but because they like you. The social objects that connect you to others are the places where you can build connections in a community online that wants to hear what you want to share, and in that place, you become the advocate for your service or product that the hypsters and huckster think they are. You become the real deal, not just the appearance of the real deal. It takes a little longer, but the positive impact lasts as long as you maintain your open dialogue.

Reprinted from the SMMI Blog

Posted by:  Bill   comment
Labels: reputation management, social media
Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Three Tools to Unlock Business Success

Antique Locks and KeysThe are lots of tech tools that are promoted as being the one thing you need to make your business better, but many of them require you to change the way you do business to employ them effectively, or are aimed at redesigning your entire workflow. Some of them may work for you, and some may not, but I wanted to suggest a few tools that anyone can fit into any existing work flow and will , by using them increase their efficiency and potentially their income through their utilization. I use all of them, so I’m a little bit prejudiced, but I would suggest that at their very simplest level each of these tools could be adopted by anyone of any level of tech skills, and integrated to their current workflow with immense benefit. Without a lot of fuss and bother, let’s take a look at my trio of business helpers.

  1. CardMunch – is a smart phone app which turns your smart phone into a business card scanner. The best part of it is that after taking the photo of the business card, it is transcribed in to a contact base, and can even be used to establish a LinkedIn connection (since the app is owned by LinkedIn) .
  2. Evernote – If you’re note using Evernote, you’re missing a great opportunity to work more efficiently. Evernote acts as a combination file cabinet and notebook, allowing you to synchronize your data across computers, iPads,   e Pads  and smartphones. The note can be audio, photos, or text, as well as web clipping interesting websites you visit. You can organize your notes through tags and notebooks, and in the paid version can share notebooks with others. Some real estate agents use Evernote for creating and sharing transaction folders with their buyers and sellers, and in combination with electronic signature vendors like Docusign, share documents and obtain electronic signatures through this Swiss knife of an application.
  3. DropBox.  No list of great business apps would be complete without Dropbox. This cloud based file saving and synchronizing platform is worth its weight in gold if you work with a team for your business, or if you want to share photos or date with others in your company. The program is simple. You save files in a folder marked “My Dropbox” and it synchronizes across every platform you have installed the app on. Your iPhone, iPad, PC, Mac, android phone or tablet – everywhere you have an internet device you have access to your files. Just this morning I was working on a BPO for a client in Dallas Texas, when I noticed that the photos we had in our Dropbox file were not recent enough for the report. I called my assistant in Philadelphia who ran out to the property and uploaded new photos of the listing into Dropbox. I was able to view them in Honolulu (where I was taking a short vacation) almost simultaneously, I was able to view them on my iPad while I uploaded them to the BPO on my Mac to send to my client in Dallas Texas. By simply having Dropbox installed on each device, I was able to view and upload at the same time using different devices. The possibilities are endless. Share a file of receipts with your accountant to make keeping tax records easier. Create as many folders and sub-folders as you wish and share them with whomever you wish, keeping the other folders completely private.

Next time – I’ll tell you about a couple of great tools for working on that glut of email you deal with everyday. Until then – try these and see how they can help you do what you already do, but do it just a little bit better.

Reprinted from the SMMI Blog
Posted by:  Bill   comment
Labels: mobile technology