Digital Marketing Specialist, Social Media Consultant,
and Tech Geek at Heart

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Connection: Social Media’s Special Gift

January 26, 2011

When the Cluetrain Manifesto was published in 1999, it signaled a paradigm shift: markets are conversations. Today, the online space and affordability of web hosting and domain names has helped create billions of conversations about your brand, your industry, and critical key players in your space.

It’s up to you to capitalize this and leverage it effectively.

I asked a big brand on Twitter for help and they gave me a canned response. I miss the days when social media was more personalized.

A big US brand with over 100,000 Twitter followers has run into the problem that I tweeted about above. To this well-known retailer, social media has become just one channel of many where they need to offer customer service without any care in the world for the people they’re engaging with. This thinking unfortunately minimizes the potential of true and far reaching social media strategy, creating the ability to truly connect with people and build bonds with constituents that can help them evangelize your brand and create passionate advocates.

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3 Golden Business Rules for Social Media Engagement

August 25, 2010

If you’re doing social media for your business, there’s nothing better than to do it right. Many companies partake in this “shiny toy syndrome” and do it all without a plan or strategy in place. Worse, many don’t really understand what to do once they start. They hear about tools, put forth a miserable effort, and are either too busy or just lazy.

With social media, an abundance of resources are at your fingertips. However, without a successful plan and any adequate preparation, your social media efforts will fail. Here are three dos and don’ts you should think about before you move forward.

Don’t self promote.

Okay, so this should be obvious, but there are so many businesses that don’t get it. On a particular forum I am active on (yes, I still use them!), I noticed someone asking for advice. A response came from a business owner who had the perfect answer on her website and directed the original poster to the website for a detailed reply. Sadly, this person’s post was pulled by the strict moderators on that forum; the post was purely self-promotional and nothing but. When I reviewed the poster’s account, I understood why. I noticed that she had done the same thing on other discussions on the same forum over a period of several months and all of them were pulled!

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Social Media Strategy from A to Z

May 28, 2010

Social media might be old. It might even be a dead buzzword. That’s why you need to paint a picture that’s more meaningful and encompasses what “social media” as a label really is.

Some of us have been thrust into social media simply because the online landscape showed potential for online conversations. Others have been there for over a decade. Regardless of the many years of experience you have in the online space, the ideas behind social media and social media marketing are applicable to everyone. Let’s take a look at some lessons, takeaways, and tips.

Always be Listening. Social media rocks because it’s one of the most amazing tools for “free” market research. Your investment is merely that of time. Take the time to hear what people are saying about your business. If you’re the frugal type, take advantage of the free alerts from Google, YackTrack, Social Mention, BackType (which gives you alerts from blog/article comments, which other services do not include), and Trackur.

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How to Use Facebook for Business and Marketing

May 5, 2010

Welcome searchers! If you’d like help with your social media strategy, including Facebook and Twitter outreach, please feel free to contact me for social media consulting.

As much as Facebook may not be kind to businesses, it’s still a tremendously valuable business tool. After all, Facebook could eat the web. In fact, you’re likely spotting the shift; instead of companies posting their URLs on television commercials, they’re asking their followers to join them on Facebook. Therefore, it’s a force to be reckoned with. Let’s just take a look at the potential of Facebook for business for a moment here and review the various options business owners have in order to be effective with Facebook business marketing.

Profile Page versus Fan Page

The average Facebook user uses Facebook not for business but for personal communications. I am one of those users. In fact, I explain my Facebook usage by stating that if you want to follow me in a professional capacity, you can use one of my two fan pages. Simply stated, for a business, you should create a Fan Page. Want one? Go here. If you are officially representing your company, you’d want to create an Official Page.

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The Best Marriage Proposal Ever

February 7, 2007

Engagement RingBy now most people know the identity of JP, the mystery man behind MySuperProposal.com. JP is, in actuality, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.org, a blog that I happen to read religiously. Since most of the blogs I read about are not romantic in nature, the post that initially grabbed my attention kept a hook on me due to the sheer uniqueness of the idea: a very bold guy (who is obviously madly in love with some very special girl) was looking for help, donations, and hype in trying to air his marriage proposal on one of the highly coveted commercial spots during the Super Bowl (and therefore, in front of the largest audience on American television).

I followed the story and Joe’s (the marketing man behind the plan) reports intently. I watched the various times that JP was interviewed on primetime television, with his voice digitally altered so as not to break the secret early. I read the blog posts and heard about the reactions from women nationwide who were hoping that their boyfriends was actually JP. When the SuperBowl came, I was sitting with tremendous built-up excitement (even though I’m already married) and I stared at the TV with my husband and friend who just so happened to be watching with us. Every time a commercial aired, I told the two guys to shush. They weren’t going to interrupt this moment I’d been waiting for.

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