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’ll share one of my idiosyncrasies with you, but promise you won’t laugh: Most people go to the library to find books — not me. When I accompany my kids to the library, I take my own books with me to read while waiting for them to finish.

Think that’s peculiar? I can assure you that there’s a totally rational explanation: It’s rare to find the trendy business books I like to read at a library. I’m much more likely to find them at a bookstore.

Still, my kids like to tease me about this seemingly odd behavior.

Imagine my surprise when on a recent library visit, I found both Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk and Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch Joel in the new arrivals section. Finding these books was a fluke, but nevertheless, I do plan to check back in that section in the future.

I read and thoroughly enjoyed Crush It!. The words of @garyvee helped to reinforce and refine my personal approach to business and social media branding. (I’m still in the middle of Six Pixels of Separation and liking it so far.)

Business developers are starting to approach me to explore joint ventures. They tell me how successful they are and then talk to me about changing my path, building a giant email list and making videos.

Gary, on the other hand, talks about building your personal brand through social media by being authentic and “delivering your content by video, podcast, or blog.” Being authentic guarantees to “differentiate you from everybody else, including those who share your niche or business model.”

Gary’s whole book resonated with me. However, his emphasis on building a personal brand around one’s passion got me to stop and reflect for several days about my own passion.

I realized that while I love social media, the web, and data crunching, I have a greater passion for helping people solve difficult problems. Throughout my career, I’ve been happiest when solving business problems has been at the core of my work.

Gary Vaynerchuk writes that loving your family, working super hard and living your passion are the keys to success. What’s your passion, and are you building your personal brand and future around that passion?

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Tags: book review, Books, branding, critical success factors, Gary Vaynerchuk, marketing books, personal branding, personal branding strategy, self branding, Social Media, success secrets, Success Strategies

People often ask me to have a look at brand new social networking sites. I typically decline, as I prefer to invest my time checking out social sites that have already gained acceptance.

However, this week, when my blogging friend John from EZGreatLife.com sent me to Hubze, a social media site that might help me brand myself and tie together Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking sites, I decided to investigate.

Accounting for my motivation was an expectation that the aggregation of social websites will be a major focus of 2010, as enabling technologies like semantic web come to the forefront. Don’t we all wish it would be easier to organize and streamline our many social networking sites?

The landing page provided little information. It did however indicate that I could become a beta tester if I joined by noon my time on the 13th, and I joined. John had told me that there would be gifts for the beta testers, but I’d have signed up right away in any case.

Hubze, Pronounced Hub-Zee, Formerly Moneza

Last night I attended a webinar to learn some details. I’m far from an expert, but this is what I learned:

• Hubze (formerly Moneza) is the name of the website, and it’s free to join.
• In my opinion Hubze and the Hubze Card are useful and timely ideas in their early stages of implementation, and I do not believe that Hubze is a scam.
• Membership includes your Hubze Card (which resembles Card.ly but is substantially more powerful). Your Hubze online business card provides your contact information, links to your active social sites and displays your live update feed (pretty much like Friend Feed does). The Hubze Card also displays how many people you are tracking (following) and how many you are tracked by (followed by), an indication of your social influence and clout.
• The Hubze Card is viral, as viewers are encouraged to get their own. When they do, they become part of your growing network, which expands outward from you at its center. This helps to grow your brand virally, but exactly how that works, I don’t yet understand.
• There will be a back office from which you’ll manage your Hubze Card and from which you’ll post updates to all your social sites at once (much as if you were using Friend Feed or ping.fm).

This is the Hubze Registration Page. Please join me at Hubze and we’ll build our networks there. Watch for the next Hubze webinar which will provide us with more details.

Coming in on the ground floor (as I did with both Twitter and Ning) will facilitate your community building process.

Read the comments below and leave one of your own if you like.

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Tags: hubze, Hubze Card, moneza, Social Media, social networking sites

Website widgets are commonplace in the world of social media. They tend to make interacting, marketing and web site tracking easier and more fun. Many types of website widgets are currently used on this blog.

However, don’t you ever question how safe website widgets really are? The use of website widgets and banner ads raises online safety and privacy issues for you and your website visitors that are worthy of consideration.

Marketing Experiment Gone Wrong

I was experimenting with my website tracking software. I wanted to determine whether it would work on websites not belonging to me. I installed the required tracking code in a blog post on a Ning site and on my Ryze profile.

I very quickly uncovered a major obstacle. The JavaScript, a key element in the tracking code, had been stripped off by each of the social networking sites. All that remained was a link to a very tiny and invisible image hosted by my tracking service.

I decided to continue the test in order to see the outcome. I invited friends to visit the test pages and inspected the resulting traffic data. I saw the IP address, ISP, location, operating system and web browser for each person who had visited the test pages — and all it took was embedding an invisible one pixel by one pixel image on those pages.

Privacy and Security Implications

When you install a banner ad on your blog or other website, and that banner ad is hosted on the advertiser’s server, not yours, you give that advertiser identical information about your visitors as I was able to obtain about mine; your visitors don’t even need to click on the banner ad to make that happen.

Once an advertiser obtains an IP address, they may obtain more sensitive information as well. Some offline merchants sell data about their customers. Why not assume that some online merchants and social networking sites do the same?

They have some amount of personal information matched to an IP address, and may decide to monetize that private data. They might even state that in their privacy policy.

When you install a widget or ad on your site that contains script, the effects are more far reaching. The company that provided you with the widget code can obtain information about the source and actions of each visitor. Scripts can even be malicious, as in the case of poisoned banners.

Your Due Diligence Can Help

You are responsible as a blogger or web site owner to protect the privacy of your visitors as best you can. Use web widgets from reputable sources and banner ads, too. If practical, host the image on your own server, as I myself generally do.

Hopefully, data that reputable third parties obtain from you and your visitors will be used for reasonable purposes, and their widget code will perform as specified. You need to take care that all third party widget code you embed in your site is from a reputable source.

Your turn for questions or comments.

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Tags: advertising, Measurement and Tracking, privacy, security, Social Media, Web Analytics, Widgets

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

I’ve written about list building extensively in connection with social media.

It’s time to revisit social media list building once again. In this article, however, I focus more on where to build lists than how to build them. In other words, I focus on social media list building destinations.

A few remarks are in order before I address the where-to of list building.

Importance of List Building

In List Building Using Twitter, I discuss the importance of list building in marketing. List building is equally important in PR, CRM and other types of communication.

Reach is the quantity of people your message reaches, while frequency is the average number of times each person is reached.

Frequency builds trust and drives your message home. Advertising without frequency is rarely effective. Marketers rely on list building to repeatedly reach their audience and achieve their target frequency levels.

New List Building Paradigm

In List Building Paradigm Shift, I discard the stereotype of list building as “a well-written lead capture page linked by a web form to an auto- responder” and redefine it as the process of acquiring and nurturing followers.

More precisely:

List building is the process of subscribing members of your target audience, in order to engage and nurture them and brand yourself and that which you represent.

This definition leaves plenty of room for creativity and customization of the list building process, yet it defines our objectives: engaging, nurturing and branding. Prescribing our objectives enables you to gauge the relative merits of each list building venue at your disposal.

List Building Destinations

These are my five favorite venues for list building. They are just as useful to owners of static websites as they are to bloggers.

I use all of them and let people choose for themselves which they prefer.

1. Autoresponders - Reports of the death of email have been greatly exaggerated. Everybody receives email and knows how email works. Every website should provide email subscription. Emails sent to opt-in subscribers will have an open rate of about 30% and a click through rate of approximately 10%, which is excellent. The downside of email subscription in general is anonymity, lack of interactivity and changes of address. I use an autoresponder service to maintain my database and deliver my email. My service has a high delivery rate, many important features, good customer service, and it integrates with Google’s FeedBurner RSS if you have a blog.
2. Ning Social Networks - You can connect with members of a Ning network, interact with them and broadcast messages to them as the site creator, as an administrator, as a group creator and as a friend. They all work. However, only as the site creator do you actually own their data. My primary Ning sites are Beyond Business Coaching and Let’s Follow Each Other. Subscription through Ning can be powerful, but it takes much more work to join a Ning site than to opt into an email list. A big problem with Ning is that if somebody joins more than one site or group of yours, they can receive duplicate mail from you. If you’re already established on Ning, incorporate it in your list building strategy. If not, to Ning or not to Ning will not be an easy question to answer.
3. Facebook - A Facebook fan page widget lets Facebook members register for your page with one click. Based on my experience, response to posts runs at around 5%, about half the rate of email, which is good. The quality of traffic is superb with high average time spent on site. Your posts on Facebook can promote interaction and draw comments themselves from the members of your page, which helps you brand yourself. The potential also exists with Facebook pages to benefit from viral effects.
4. Twitter - Posts on Twitter, or tweets as they’re called, can easily be retweeted and spread virally throughout the site. In a future post, I might list the reasons why, not withstanding the viral effect, I like Twitter much less than I like Facebook for list building. Nevertheless, I’m very happy to make Twitter subscription available, and I love all the traffic it brings me. (I’m @larrybrauner.)
5. Google Friend Connect - This is Google’s attempt to add a social element to every website.  I doubt that it’s very successful from a social perspective, but it’s from Google, so I’m in. If Google uses or will use GFC membership to assess the relevance of websites, I’m covered. One nice feature of GFC is its newsletters. Make sure you enable them and use them to email your GFC subscribers.

I also use RSS subscription for my blog, but it doesn’t support interaction, and I believe that the response rate from RSS is very low.

If you’re not yet a subscriber, please choose a destination and subscribe.

Your comments about list building or social media list building destinations are welcome.

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Tags: autoresponders, Blogging, email marketing, Facebook, Google, List Building, Ning, Social Media, target, Twitter

I spoke on December 9 with Rohn Robbins, Vail, Colorado attorney and the host of Community Focus on The Zephyr, True Local Radio, KZYR 97.7FM.

During the hour-long radio show, Rohn and I  discussed social media, online social networking and the most popular social networking sites from social, cultural, political, security and privacy perspectives.

While I continue to analyze the sites posted on my Facebook page during our website promotion event and social media party, pour yourself a drink and listen to the podcast online or download it to your iPod or MP3 player for offline listening.

You can find additional interviews and press coverage on my Media Buzz page.

Please share your thoughts about the world of social media and social networking sites, using the handy comment space provided below for your convenience.

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Tags: Facebook, online social networking, Social Media, social networking sites

Our website promotion event and social media party was an enormous success. Hundreds actively participated, introducing their web sites, engaging in dialog and making new connections.

Fortunately, the time frame for the networking phase of the event is open-ended, so drop by my Facebook page any time to meet some new people and check out what they’re up to. I’ll be busy working on the page for a few more days, reviewing web sites I haven’t yet visited.

Our four-day event was in part an experiment, as Tom Woolf pointed out. A key takeaway for me is that many people are promoting their products, services, companies interests and causes but not sufficiently promoting them- selves.

Keeping a low profile may occasionally be appropriate. However, in general, self-promotion is integral to social media marketing and public relations.

These are eight reasons why self-promotion and injecting yourself into your content are very important:

1. You transcend your interests.  No interest or group of interests, no matter how passionate you are about them, can fully define you as a person. Admittedly, this point is too existential, so…
2. Your subject matter might lose relevance. For example, your product can be discontinued or your company can go out of business. Your content will become irrelevant with no residual benefit from the effort you put into creating and promoting it. However…
3. You’re always relevant as a person. You have inherent value, and you’re completely portable from one venue to another.
4. You and I are unique. People aren’t interchangeable, but products, services and organizations tend to be.
5. You and I are memorable. People will come to remember us and our faces once they see us a few times.
6. People prefer to do business with people they know, like and trust. It has always been that way, even before Al Gore allegedly invented the Internet. You and I can relate to people and build solid social capital.
7. Synergy. Our diverse interests and content work to build a bigger and more insightful picture of us.
8. Social media is uhh, social. You and I are social. Our jewelry and weight loss products merely facilitate social interaction. People relate to people, and their relationships are ongoing.

More about promoting yourself and personal branding in upcoming articles.

At this time, you can probably suggest additional reasons for keeping it social, and I expect that you will.

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Tags: branding, Facebook, personal branding, Promoting Yourself, Public Relations, self branding, Social Media, social media marketing

As we begin 2010, I wish you real success, both online and off, in the year ahead.

In a video I’ve already already shown you, marketing expert Darren Rouse, author of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, explains in detail his blog-centric approach to building a web presence, in which his blogs are his home base, and social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube are his outposts.

Some readers have questioned the necessity of starting a blog, since a blog can consume more time than a business might be prepared to invest in their social media initiative.

I agree that starting a blog is not absolutely necessary.

Businesses can choose among various alternatives when establishing their social media home bases. However, these alternatives are less ideal than a blog for one or more of the following reasons:

• Inadequate Control - When a site is owned by someone else, they modify the terms or remove users arbitrarily, not caring at all that it’s your home base.
• Inadequate Communication - The site’s features don’t sufficiently enable two-way communication between you and your community members.
• Inadequate Flexibility - The structure, linking or other features of the site are too rigid.
• Too Resource Intensive - The expense far exceeds the alternative cost of starting and maintaining a blog.

These are some major alternatives to the blog-centric approach and the reasons they are problematic:

• Static Website -Inadequate communication and flexibility.
• Your Own Ning Network or Facebook Page - Inadequate control and flexibility.
• LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Squidoo etc. - Inadequate control, communication and flexibility.
• Self-Hosted Social Networking Site - Too resource intensive.

Note also that search engines are consistently receptive to blogs, and that some social media sites and Facebook apps cater to blogs and bloggers.

If I couldn’t use a blog for whatever reason, a static website (equipped for lead capture) coupled with a Facebook Page or perhaps my own Ning (or SocialGO) social networking sites might be workable, but…

There ain’t nothing like a blog!

Start 2010 off right: Subscribe and leave a comment.

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Tags: blog, Blogging, Social Media

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

I’ve bookmarked and skimmed a dozen or more articles that project the path of social media in 2010. Collectively these articles represent many days of researching and writing.

Search Social Media 2010 on Google, and you’ll be able to compile your own social media 2010 reading list. If the information in all the articles isn’t sufficiently comprehensive, a list of 44+ social media books to buy and read can help fill the gaps.

Not that I don’t like reading about trends and innovations — I do. However, I learned long ago that the bleeding edge cuts both ways, and there’s merit in waiting until the timing is right.

Blogs and Facebook have been around for years, yet only recently have they emerged as key tools for main- stream businesses.

I suggest that we watch and see how social media and technology play out in 2010, but that we focus on the basics and build our web presences right now using techniques and resources at our fingertips.

Here are my eight social media basics for building a web presence 2010:

1. Core Marketing and PR Competencies - Analytics, branding, communication, competitive intelligence, design, list building, market segmentation, marketing research, targeting, etc.
2. High-Quality Relevant Content - Producing and sharing articles, videos, podcasts, pictures, conference calls and talk shows.
3. Search Engine Optimization - Social media and SEO complement each other. Read Social Media vs. Search Engine Optimization and Website vs. Web Presence.
4. Blogging - Also in Website vs. Web Presence, Darren Rouse, author of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, shares in a video his blog-centric approach to social media marketing, an approach to which I subscribe.
5. Social Networking Sites - Nearly any social media site can present opportunities to network. By social networking sites, I mean sites that exist primarily for networking rather than content sharing.The principal social networking sites for business are LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. You can also throw into the mix Ning and other niche social networking sites.
6. Content Sharing Sites - Two of the most popular content sharing sites are YouTube and Flickr, but there are many more.
7. Social Bookmarking Sites - There are hundreds of business and social bookmarking sites. Two of my favorite sites are Business Exchange and StumbleUpon.
8. Blog and Web Site Networks - There are many blog and website networks. My favorites include Entrecard, NetworkedBlogs,  Technorati, MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog and Google Friend Connect.

With these social media basics, you can build a huge web presence in 2010. It’s not possession of the latest technology or an inside scoop on a new FB app that’ll enable you to soar in 2010. Your success will depend largely upon your own creativity, skills, efficiency and inner motivation.

I hope you have already mastered the all-important skills of subscribing to blogs and commenting on blog posts. 

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Tags: Blogging, content sharing, SEO, social bookmarking, Social Media, social networking sites, web presence

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

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