It isn’t too late for entrepreneurs to become early adopters of social media. Use of the social web is still trying to find its way into mainstream business culture.

I first learned about Web 2.0 from Time Magazine’s historic December 2006 cover story, Time’s Person of the Year: You. Then, after much preparation, I launched Online Social Networking in November 2007.

Looking back and recounting my earlier discovery, I wrote in a March 2009 article, Social Media One Bite at a Time, that “I saw that while I could no longer be one of the earliest adopters of social media, it wasn’t at all too late to position myself at the forefront of an enormous trend.”

I now realize that I was one of the earliest social media adopters, especially within business circles. Entrepreneurs have been very slow to embrace the new media.

Consider two stories both appearing this week in established publications. Entrepreneurs Question Value of Social Media appeared in the Wall Street Journal, and Is Social Media Worth Your Time? appeared in Inc.

These articles are indications that skepticism and misunderstanding remain pervasive, particularly among small business owners. The key concerns seem to be ROI and the time burden imposed by social media.

I’m not going to confront those issues in this blog post. Instead, I’m helping you see an opportunity. If you’re already sold on the long-term potential of branding yourself and your business using social media, you can get a good head start on most of your competition.

If you’re not already sold, read the two books I mentioned in Are You Building Your Personal Brand and Future Around Your Passion?,  Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk and Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch Joel. Before you finish both books, I predict you’ll be a firm believer.

If you’re on your way, or if something is holding you back, in either case, I’d love to hear about it.

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Tags: Books, branding, business branding, marketing books, personal branding, ROI, Social Media

I obsess over my website search engine ranking and check my keyword search engine rankings more often than once a week. After all, who doesn’t want to achieve higher search engine rankings and get more web site traffic?

However, top search engine ranking isn’t everything. There is much more to search engine optimization than merely increasing a website’s search engine ranking.

Your website can have a top Google search engine ranking yet not receive its fair share of traffic or receive insufficiently targeted traffic, which is also bad.

As I pointed out in a comment on 5 Steps to Make Wordpress an SEO Beast, an excellent article on the StylyzedWeb blog, you can be at the top of the search engines, but if too few people click through to your website or the wrong people click through, you can’t say that your site is search engine optimized.

A page’s title and description in its header often determine exactly how that page will appear in the search engine results and how likely searchers will be to click through to it. Header tags need to be optimized not only with search engines in mind but with people in mind too.

Search engine marketers are keenly aware of this issue, and search engine optimizers need to be equally aware.

Furthermore, if ample targeted visitors do come to your website, but your site is ineffective because of its content or design, then all your efforts to attract search engine traffic or any other traffic have been for naught.

Optimizing your website’s keywords to obtain a top search engine ranking is important, but the appeal of both your search engine listing and your actual website to your target audience are at least as important and should not be neglected.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated as usual.

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Tags: Get More Web Site Traffic, keywords, Search Engines, SEO, target, Targeting

You want to market on the web and take advantage of the vast potential of social media. You start your blog, create your Twitter account, launch your Facebook fan page, and you’re ready to go.

Or are you? Have you missed any crucial first steps?

Sandy Abrams, begins her new book, Your Idea, Inc., with words that have been attributed to Mark Twain:

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking down your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”

This quotation presents three problems, which I believe ought to have troubled Samuel Clemens:

1. Isn’t “breaking down your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks” itself a step in the process?
2. Aren’t understanding your needs and clearly defining your objectives vital preparatory steps as well?
3. How do we determine the optimal sequence in which to execute all the small manageable tasks?

These are three aspects of planning.

Planning is not popular, which explains the all too common lack of direction and focus in social media work.

Lack of direction and focus impedes progress and can cause frustration.

Your Social Media Plan

Before you jump into social media, devise your social media marketing and PR plan. Here are 16 key areas that might factor into your social media plan:

1. Understand your business and objectives.
2. Think about your products and services, what makes each special and their respective market segments.
3. Develop positioning strategies for each market or program.
4. Compile a list of your online competitors for each market.
5. Identify suitable social media, such as social networking sites and social bookmarking sites, for both your vertical and horizontal campaigns.
6. Identify desirable directories and other sites that might link to your content.
7. Research and evaluate the extent and quality of industry-specific online content.
8. Devise strategies and techniques for developing and promoting your content.
9. Define a policy for governing your employees’ interactions with the public through social media.
10. Study the online methodology of competitors and identify their search engine keywords.
11. Analyze and critique your existing web presence.
12. Gauge your competitors’ online success based upon their standing in search engines, the number and quality of links to their site, and estimated traffic.
13. Identify opportunities to outmaneuver your competitors.
14. Use a process called keyword discovery to develop a potentially useful vocabulary that will attract targeted search engine traffic to your content through SEO.
15. Analyze keywords to determine which ones ought to be emphasized, based on the frequency of search and the amount of competition for each keyword phrase.
16. Create a lexicon as an output of your keyword research and as an aid to your content development.

Action is Everything

You need not be concerned about every one of these areas. Use your judgment, since these are more suggestions than requirements. Certainly, do not use the length of my list as an excuse not to take action.

Action is everything. However, action begins with planning.

What are your thoughts?

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Tags: keyword research, keywords, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Public Relations, SEO, Social Media, social media marketing, Web Marketing

A few days into 2010, I launched a major publicity event in connection with my upcoming 58th birthday. The event will take place right on my Facebook fan page.

This event’s premise is that each guest will post a link on my Facebook fan page, visible for all to see. They may link to a blog, a website or even a profile on one of the major social networking sites. I agreed to follow their link with the intention of commenting, sharing the link, or submitting it to social bookmarking sites.

When I undertook this unusual event, I was aware that I would be busy with it for weeks. I planned it very carefully with seven key objectives in mind:

1. Win Win - I wanted each event participant to benefit, not only me.
2. Interaction - I wanted to interact with each participant and start or nurture relationships. Community engagement is always a challenge.
3. Meeting People - I wanted to expand my network and connect with new people.
4. Collaboration - I wanted to share my expertise and influence. I believed that a good number of participants would want to do the same. Collaboration is a primary theme for me in 2010.
5. Branding - I wanted to demonstrate that I could conceptualize and implement a creative and meaningful social media event as part of my overall walking the walk strategy.
6. Leverage - In 2009 I reached out to many people. I wanted to do something that would include them and permit them to support me.
7. Momentum - After a slow 2009 holiday season, I wanted to build new momentum. Last year’s momentum was sustained by the articles I wrote and the growth of my network. This year’s momentum will be sustained by community-oriented projects as well.

The initial reaction to my event on Facebook, Twitter and blogs has been very encouraging.

• Tom Woolf, author of The PRagmatist, was enthusiastic: “I want to give Larry Brauner a nod for trying a different kind of social media experiment.”
• W. James Wright in Tweet it Toronto lamented “This is one for the ‘Wish I Woulda Thoughta That File.’”
• Rachel McAlpine in Contented Blog said “How quickly the shiny- new Facebook became boring-boring same-old same-old. I’m happy to say that Larry’s virtual party has already seeded my brain with other social marketing ideas.”

As I prepare to publish this article, 260 people have indicated that they’re “Attending” and 165 that they’re “Maybe Attending.” Entries will be accepted until the end of the event on January 14. I cover the details in 4+ Day Blog and Website Promotion Event and Social Media Party. It would help greatly if you could tweet that article (using this pre-formatted link).

If you could Digg this article and share it with acquaintances in the media, you’d be doing me an enormous favor.

Before I go, I must not forget to mention that there will be door prizes. The prizes and the winners will be announced some time after the completion of the event. Also, in case you’re new here and wondering, subscribing and commenting are the accepted norms.

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Tags: Facebook, Larry Brauner, Public Relations

As the year and the decade draw to an end, success is a topic on most people’s minds.

In 1,000 True Fans, Kevin Kelly develops a marketing paradigm for artists of all types, including musicians.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version.

Focus on connecting with people. Convert 1,000 lesser fans into true fans, which is all you need to earn a living.

In First, organize 1,000, Seth Godin generalizes the model and applies it to politics and business, “1,000 people voting as a bloc can change local politics forever. 1,000 people willing to try a new restaurant you find for them gives you the ability to make an entrepreneur successful and change the landscape of your town.”

Again, the focus is on connecting with people, “You don’t find customers for your products. You find products for your customers.”

Connecting with People through Social Media

What I really love about social media, in particular, blogging and social networking sites such as Facebook, is the facility with which they enable me to connect with people.

I can write an article or post a link that sparks a public conversation. Some remarks can then lead to private discussions via direct messages, email or telephone. If I help somebody or solve a problem, I now have a true fan.

Why 1,000 True Fans?

Don’t attach importance to one thousand. 1,000 is a round number, chosen arbitrarily, to take the number of fans or customers needed to earn a good living — which is fairly abstract — and make it more concrete.

Unfortunately, the emphasis on 1,000 true fans might lead us to “see the forest for the trees” but to lose sight of each individual tree. However, each individual we touch is, somewhat paradoxically, as important as the overall group.

Impact the life of even one true fan, and you have achieved a measure of success.

Real Social Media Success

The changes made possible by technology and social media in the ways we communicate and conduct business have been phenomenal. How glorious it would be if we could witness corresponding improvements in the human condition.

Sadly, the opposite is true. Technology and social media are used for evil as well as good, and our world and its peoples continue to have little respite from their fear, pain and suffering.

Our world is made up of individuals. We, as individuals, must seek ways to bridge our differences, to heal our conflicts, and to ameliorate our Planet Earth. We, as individuals, must connect with other individuals, through our businesses and otherwise, and help them improve their lives.

It would be super if, in our businesses, we could look beyond the bottom line and use social media to make the globe not only smaller, but kinder, saner and safer as well.

That would be real social media success.

May we all achieve success in 2010. Have a happy new year!

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Tags: critical success factors, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Seth Godin, Social Media, Success Strategies

Ivana Taylor, consultant and author of the marketing blog, Strategy Stew, presented 10 Must-Do Marketing Tips for 2010 in the OPEN Forum Idea Hub for Innovation.

Reading through Ivana’s tips, I stopped at “Productize Your Services: It’s much easier to understand and purchase something that looks like a product.” This task has been on my list for a while, but now I feel compelled to tackle it sooner rather than later.

During 2009, I focused on researching, analyzing and blogging about social networking sites and social media paradigms. However, I’ve already formulated some key objectives for 2010, which include closer collaboration with peers.

Here are ten of the many ways we might be able to collaborate in the year to come:

1. Brainstorming - Teaching each other and working together to find creative solutions to problems. I currently brainstorm a lot with close friends.
2. Masterminding - Forming mastermind groups to help each other reach our goals by overcoming obstacles and remaining accountable.
3. Networking - Sharing contacts, either directly, through new social networking sites or via other business networking groups.
4. Lead Sharing - Providing each other with business or job leads.
5. Blogging - Group blogging is a proven concept.
6. Strategic Alliances - Combining our skills and resources to create synergies.
7. Team Projects - Pure team collaboration, i.e., working together on projects together as a group.
8. Blog Promotion - Using our influence to promote each other’s blogs and other content.
9. Fan Page Promotion - Inviting our Facebook friends to join each other’s Facebook fan pages.
10. Content Promotion - Bookmarking, linking to, commenting on, and retweeting each other’s content.

I can envision collaboration strategies such as these benefiting teams in a corporate setting as well.

Please share your ideas below before you go.

If you’d like to collaborate, send an email with “Collaborate” in the subject to collaborate at braunersolutions dot com. I look forward to hearing from you.

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Tags: business networking group, collaboration, Ivana Taylor, Marketing Strategy, mastermind groups, Social Media

In Social Marketing Leverage, I stated that the Internet gives us the ability to transfer information with relative ease and enables a great variety of online tools to provide us with a virtual type of leverage.

In this article, I discuss another physical phenomenon, that of momentum, as it applies to the non-physical social marketing process.

Momentum is the impetus of an object or a process, its tendency to remain in motion. If you’ve ever skated or cross-country skied, you’ve enjoyed momentum or gliding.

When riding in a car or bus that stopped short, you were thwarted by momentum as the vehicle stopped, but you kept going.

Most of the time, we don’t want to lose momentum. We’ve worked up some speed, or we’re highly productive — and we want it to continue.

Losing Physical Momentum

In the physical world, these factors can cause us to lose our momentum:

• Collision - Its outcome is generally hard to predict and is often catastrophic.
• Friction  - Air, water and even our own brakes slow us down or stop us completely.
• Turning - To avoid collision, negotiate speed bumps or alter our final destination, we must brake partially or completely to change our direction.

Losing Social Media Momentum

In our non-physical social marketing work, the same factors contribute to our loss of momentum and productivity:

• Collision - Hitting the proverbial brick wall. A major plan is flawed, we accidentally delete all of our Twitter followers, or our Facebook account is phished. My advice in Social Marketing Leverage to “develop good contingency plans for when Murphy’s Law does strike” applies here and to all aspects of our lives.
• Friction - Indecision, multitasking, working at home while the kids are seeking attention, working at the office while a co-worker in the next cubicle is blabbing, slow social networking sites, associates who don’t keep their word, etc. These all tend to slow us down.
• Turning - This is huge. Abandoning a blog, changing our branding strategy midstream and other false starts lead to directional changes that slow us down and cost both time and money.

Social Marketing Prescription

What is my prescription for preserving social marketing momentum?

Planning, focus and consistency.

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Tags: consistency, focus, Internet, Internet marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, social marketing, Web Marketing

A lever gives us the ability or leverage to move heavy objects with relative ease. Metaphorically speaking, the same is true of any tool that can empower us to perform a function more effectively.

The Internet gives us the ability to transfer information with relative ease, and it is also enables a great variety of online tools to provide us with virtual leverage.

Web-Based Tools

Here are six web-based tools that we’ve come to rely upon to save us time or money or to help us be more effective:

1. Internet-based mail - e-mail, autoresponders and PDF Files
2. Live communication - VOIP phone, chat and webinars
3. Digital media - websites, blogs and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter
4. Social networking sites - Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn, etc.
5. Content sharing sites - YouTube, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, etc.
   
6. Search engines - Google, Bing, etc.
   

I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve had some experience with each of them, and this is a very partial list.

What Can Go Wrong

I probably don’t have to tell you that things don’t always go right. Here are the three obstacles that can most easily sidetrack you:

1. Using the wrong tool - Download a large file using dial-up Internet, and by the time it finishes downloading, you’ll forget why to wanted it in the first place. Use a shabby autoresponder, and most of your e-mails will end up in recipients’ spam folders.
2. Using the tool wrong - Social media tools and search engines have steep learning curves, and learning how to use them properly is typically a big undertaking. Misunderstand or misuse social media or SEO techniques, and your work can be set back by months.
3. The tool breaks - Your Internet connection goes down for a week, your Facebook gets phished, or your blog gets corrupted. You’ll be pulling out your hair, unless of course you’re fortunate enough to be bald.

Many marketers contact me for help because they’ve been using the wrong tool or using the tool wrong.

An Ounce of Prevention

So — choose the right tools, learn to use your tools properly, and develop good contingency plans for when Murphy’s Law does strike — because it most certainly will, and at the worst possible moment.

What do you think?

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Tags: Internet, Internet marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, social marketing, Web Marketing

Social media marketing requires a markedly different mindset than traditional print, broadcast and direct mail marketing — or even PPC or e-zine marketing that use online media.

Marketing Paradigm Shift

Social marketing is not so much about lead development and customer acquisition as it is about brand development, relationship and community building.

Of course social marketers want to generate sales. That’s a given. However, the social marketing medium requires a new and more social approach to the whole marketing process.

Social Media Marketing Flow

Social marketing has its own characteristic flow. Strangers gradually become followers, friends and fans looking to engage with you.

They become increasingly receptive to your ideas and messages. Many eventually sell themselves on your products and services without your intervention. Others may require a little gentle persuasion.

Social media marketing is the art and science of using social media sites to create and nurture social marketing flow.

At the Core of Social Marketing

Social media sites offer the enabling technologies and infrastructure that define the social media marketing platform, but social marketing is centered around people, not around websites.

Furthermore, in social marketing it’s not companies but real people who communicate with people.

Personality, thought leadership, sensitivity, protocol and well-written content are social factors that foster relationship with your market and community participation. Think of social media marketing as charisma marketing.

A community in social media can be built around a blog, a group you start on a social site, or an independent online social network that you create.

The key is to use your personality and your content to give people in your target market compelling reasons to follow you online and to subscribe to your blogs or join your social networking sites.

Then you can speak to your new friends as a group as if they were sitting in your living room and leaning forward to make sure they catch your every word. You won’t need to use old media to yell.

Are you leaning forward?

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Tags: branding, Marketing, social marketing, social media marketing

Throughout history social networking has been practiced at religious institutions, business associations, conventions, membership clubs and yes, pubs.

The ancient Babylonian Talmud^[1] describes the Great Synagogue of Alexandria which was destroyed during the reign of the Roman Emperor Trajan roughly 1900 years ago. This synagogue was one of the most magnificent edifices ever built.

When a poor person entered, he would recognize masters of his trade, and he would turn to them. That is how he would support himself and his family.

The Babylonian Talmud itself appears to be an early example of social media. It was compiled with source material, interpretations and arguments from notable scholars living in different places and in different periods of time.

I wouldn’t be surprised to discover plenty of additional examples from other religions and cultures.

Coming back to the present, all of us are familiar with social networking at parties, the work place or business mixers. Aren’t we?

How about public bulletin boards? They’re a common form of social media. People tack up or tape notices on them.

Letters to the editor turn pages of newspapers and magazines into social media.

What is new is Web 2.0, social networking sites and other social media sites. The advent of online social networking and online social media has revolutionized social networking, social marketing and publishing.

Online social networking and social media are global. They’re instantaneous. The “paper” and “postage” are essentially free. The “playing field” is level.

Now that’s real freedom of speech.

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Tags: online social networking, social networking, social networking sites, Web 2.0

I revisit the 80/20 Rule (about which I wrote last September) because of something that I alluded to in my interview with Stacey Chadwell.

Web 2.0 is a virtual candy store, and our eyes, so to speak, are bigger than our stomachs.

Every day new social media sites crop up. We’d love to try them all, yet we can only hope to master and stay on top of a very small fraction of the myriad sites that are already available to us.

The 80/20 Rule to Our Rescue

The 80/20 Rule applied to social media sites would state that 80% of all results can be achieved with 20% of all sites.

However, the 80 to 20 ratio is no more than a concept or a rule of thumb. The actual ratio is quite often greater than 80 to 20. With respect to social media sites  the ratio could be as high as 99 to 1.

The 80/20 Rule applied to social media sites might be called a 99/1 Rule. We can accomplish almost everything we might want to accomplish with only 1% of all the social sites in operation — and almost everything is really enough!

I regularly use only a modest number of social media sites:

1. Online Social Networking (my blog)
2. Twitter
3. Facebook
4. the Ning family of social networking sites (especially Beyond Business Coaching and Let’s Follow Each Other)
5. Entrecard
6. BlogCatalog
7. LinkedIn
8. Digg
9. Delicious

You’d hardly call me an expert on social media sites, but the few sites I do use, complement each other in my social media marketing model, and I use them effectively.

Could I use more sites?

Of course I could. However, the point is that I don’t need to use more sites, at least not right now.

Other Aspects of the 80/20 Rule

The 80/20 Rule also applies to you as a person, to the people who follow you and to how you approach learning.

Rather than re-hash what I’ve written in the past, I refer you to my previous article, The 80/20 Rule, which elaborates on these issues in some detail.

In Conclusion

My advice to you is to:

• determine what you’d like to accomplish
• devise a plan that uses a modest number of resources
• learn to use those resources reasonably well
• and apply yourself with great determination and enthusiasm

People will look to you as a leader and a source of inspiration.

I’m @larrybrauner on Twitter. I look forward to your tweets.

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Tags: 80 20 Rule, Blogging, Digg, Ning, Social Media, social networking sites, Stacey Chadwell, Twitter

In List Building Using Twitter, I discussed the importance of list building and the ease of building a list on Twitter.

In this article I focus on building your Twitter community — people who relate to your niche and who share some of your interests — people with whom you can network and who also extend your list in a more targeted way than previously outlined.

Is Twitter Past Its Prime?

Twitter will not last forever. However, I’m hoping that Twitter will have a strong future. Many new applications are currently being developed and launched “on top of” Twitter using the Twitter API.

If Twitter was on its way out, it’s highly unlikely that such substantial resources would be invested to build upon the Twitter platform. If my theory is right, then what we’ve seen so far is only the tip of the Twitter iceberg.

Building Your Twitter Community

Twitter has a tool for searching tweets. It can help find people in your niche or who share you interests. You can also use Twollow which bases its searches on the contents of tweets.

I prefer searches based on profile, because they’re more robust. Twitter Grader Search searches profiles. It also identifies the best people to connect with, ones who are active and successful using Twitter. I plug in search terms and back comes a list of Twitter users along with their Twitter Grader ratings and their complete profile information.

Another resource to look at is Twitter Groups. This new tool brings people together based both on common interests and geographic location and is worth exploring.

I’ve already built a following using the procedure I outlined in List Building Using Twitter, and my profile highlights interests relevant to my niche, so the people I follow tend to follow me back.

Keep your eyes open for news about other useful tools. Using the tools available to you, you can build a community of friends just as you would at social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace or any of the Ning social networks.

Networking with Your Twitter Community

Every social networking site has features that permit members to communicate with each other, and in this respect Twitter is no different. Here are your basic options on Twitter:

• Updates are best used to reach all your followers who are monitoring Twitter at that moment — consistent with a list building strategy rather than an online social networking strategy. However, you can view any Twitter member’s past posts by visiting their page, as long as they don’t have their updates protected. If they are protected, you will need to request permission in order to browse their updates.
• Replies are updates that begin with @username, public messages addressed to a particular member. Members don’t need to be following you to receive a reply, but if they’re not following you, they can safely choose to ignore you without appearing rude. If you’re having a long conversation which others might find annoying, avoid using replies — use direct messages instead. Annoy people, and they will stop following you. Use replies specifically when you want everybody or a group of people included in your discussion.
• Direct messages referred to as DMs are private, and they’re the closest you can get to e-mail communication using Twitter. Use direct messages when it’s inappropriate to reach the community-at-large. Direct messages are very rarely ignored, and they’re essential to cultivating one-on-one relationships using Twitter.

Here are a few more things to keep in mind as you begin to network on Twitter:

• You don’t need a large number of followers to network on Twitter. You only need one follower to start.
• You aren’t the only networker with an agenda. To be very successful help your networking partners advance their agendas while you advance your own. If you want people to be interested in you, be interested in them. See the site map for a listing of articles I’ve written about online social networking and other topics.
• You should never ever spam. If you’re thinking of using Twitter (or any other social networking site) to spam (or to advertise) rather than to network with other members, please check out How Do You Like Your SPAM? and Social Networking vs. Advertising.

I’d love for you to follow me.

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Tags: niche, online social networking, social networking sites, social networking strategy, SPAM, target, Twitter, Twitter Tools

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