Cafe Blog Reviews

There is a massive argumentative and substantially humorous conversation circling the steel and glass of corporate culture. 1. When should we jump into social media?  Loaded question. 2. Should the CEO have a blog? Should upper management have a blog? Maybe even the peons?  Yes. Yes. Yes. 3. Should the blog be Internal or External or BOTH!?  This is all dependent on your strategy. 4. How do we combine a work tool with a social tool? Check out Social Media Tool’s for Work and Learning and also Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation. 5. Should Sharepoint be used as a social media tool?  HELL NO. Do you have a paper towel? I just threw up on myself. Okay.. maybe I am over-reacting. You get to it Microsoft! Don’t take my word for it… read this from ReadWriteWe b. 6. How do we manage and protect proprietary information on social media platforms?  You can’t. Unless you control the social media platform (refer to question 4). It is extremely important to start building out policies that relate to the use of social media for internal communication (as well as external) There are, of course, hundreds of questions that follow the simple ones listed above. The biggest problem corporate America has with social media is not necessarily managing and building of the platform… it is the beginning. How do we get in and utilize social media? What is the best way to enter the information flow? Should it be a corporate strategy or a marketing strategy? Doulgas Kar r does a great job at answering this question: I advise that social media and blogging are not a marketing strategy, they’re a corporate strategy. It’s not simply putting yourself out on the market to jump on the latest band wagon and consumers will flock to you. Social media takes time, a strategy and the right resources (both tools and people). As one of the leading GENIUSES behind Corporate Social Media, Douglas knows what he is talking about. Both Douglas and I have written extensively about being authentic when writing a blog or getting involved in a social media community. Also from Doug:  You must involve all the leaders in your company – those who own the strategy of the corporation. Strategy and Marketing should go hand-in-hand when debating whether to enter the social media world. This message is not only catered to corporations it should also be the focus for small businesses. Do not throw yourself into social media (whether blogging or networking) if you do not have a sound strategy. Without a social media plan/goals your productivity will plummet! You will be inundated with thousands of pieces of information and overwhelmed (as will your employees) Strategy. Content. Participation. Authenticity. Social media can be a fragile world, an extremely narrow path, proceed with care. Most of all, HAVE FUN! This isn’t a corporate board meeting with Fiji water bottles. This is the information highway BABY! Take your time, hit it hard, and reap the benefits of open-communication! Related articles by Zemanta Search & Authenticity Are Key to Corporate Blogging (kylelacy.com) HOW TO: Use Social Media to Connect with Other Entrepreneurs (mashable.com) Best Buy seeks marketer with at least 250 followers on Twitter (brandstrategy.wordpress.com) Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch (socialmediatoday.com)

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Involving Your Corporate Culture in Social Media

We have talked about the value of turning customers into evangelists when using social media . I wanted to give you a few pointers on how to accomplish the task. 10 Steps to Encouraging Your Customers to Become Evangelists 1. First. Make sure you prepare yourself for the focused effort of turning happy customers to loyal promoters and evangelists. Prepare your mind. Maybe yoga? 2. You have an email list right? Use your email list to make sure you are connected to your customers on the social sites you use frequently. Importing and Exporting Contacts Using: Facebook , LinkedIN , Twitter , and Plaxo . 3. After you have imported your contacts into the social media sites of your choosing… make sure you add and contact them through the sites. 4. Once you have connected to most of your customers start communicating on a daily basis with them. We are not talking about sending sales information or product information but asking about their day… etc. 5. Create a list of your high level and value customers. It helps to have a list in place to set some goals toward customer evangelists. Start out with 5 people or companies. 6. Set up Twitter Searches for your valued client’s industries or services. For example, if you have an accountant as a valued client make sure you setup a Twitter search feed for accountant or tax advice. When someone ask for advice make sure you reccomend your client. Disclaimer: You do not have to always monitor the Twitter search but it is good to have around. I know we all have about 5 mins of free time a day. 7. If the client has an event or seminar coming up in the area make sure you share that link with the multitudes of your followers online. Share it as an RT in Twitter Share it on your Facebook Wall Share it as a status update on LinkedIN 8. Recommend your client on LinkedIN . Why recommend on LinkedIN? It is simple. If you want recommended by a client on LinkedIN it is always better to recommend first. Do it and see the benefits. 9. Share an exciting story about your client’s business to your contacts. It is important to share the quality information even if it does not relate you your business. 10. Ask for the recommendation. It never hurts to ask. Encourage your best clients and friends to tell YOUR story across the masses. Remember it is important to give before you receive. If you help your clients become thought leadership in their industries or grow their business using the Internet they WILL become your evangelists.

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10 Steps to Encouraging Your Customers to Become Evangelists

This weeks guest blog post is by  Becky Robinson , a social media consultant and blogger for Mountain State University .   (Do you want more than that?) If so: She is also the mother of three daughters and currently lives in Chicago, IL. This week marks the one year anniversary of my entry into the social media world. I am going to say something bold (and risk sounding corny, too): SOCIAL MEDIA CHANGED MY LIFE. I am still the same person at my core: my values, my beliefs, and my purpose, but becoming involved in social media has changed my habits, my activities, and my aspirations. I have a new career path and every day brings new relationships and opportunities. My social media involvement started with Facebook, last New Year’s Day. Less than a month into my Facebook experiment, I reconnected with lots of old friends. Then one day, a high school classmate I hadn’t talked to or seen in more than twenty years posted a status update looking for freelance writers. I have always wanted to write. At age 8, my friends and I created newspapers and went door to door trying to sell them. As a preteen, I filled a series of flannel covered journals with lines of poetry and stories. I majored in creative writing in college but after graduation I got married, went to grad school, and got a job (not writing). After several years of 9 to 5, and 12 weeks of maternity leave, I wanted nothing more than to stay home with my daughter, so that’s what I did. Three daughters and 8 years later, I had a store of creative energy waiting to be unleashed. Being involved in social media has given me an outlet for creativity and means for connecting in relationships with people all over the world. On a personal level, blogging, Facebook, and Twitter are just plain fun. Professionally, though, social media has provides an amazing platform for building not only my personal brand, but also the brand of the university that I represent. My old friend John, who got me started with freelancing, works for the marketing department at Mountain State University. When I became a part of the team there, we started to explore the impact we could make with social media. We started with a  blog . To the blog, we added a  Twitter presence . Then we started to experiment with expanding the university’s Facebook presence. The whole point of social media for Mountain State – for anyone – is relationships. We are finding new approaches to connect with current students, new ways to make our brand known to potential students. We are finding new methods to delight and engage our students, and new avenues to involve them in community with each other. And you know the best part? It’s really just plain fun. Related articles by Zemanta Try a Slow Media Diet for 2010 (lifehacker.com) Got Caught With My Pants Down and My Ink Dry? What’s My Next Move? (agentgenius.com) Avatar Makes a Billion Dollars (mashable.com) Social Media: More Than Meets the Eye? (myventurepad.com)

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Social Media Changed My Life!

Last night, I was talking to Jeremy Derringer, owner and absolute SEO genius over at Slingshot SEO … we were discussing the idea of taking the “leap” and taking the chance when running your own business. Going @$#@ to the wall and dominating! Shouldn’t that be the way of thinking for every business owner? When did rules ever apply to the art of running a business? Let me preface this post by saying that I do not mean moral, ethical, or legal rules. There are rules that each person has set aside for themselves whether spiritual or from the laws of the land. I am talking about business rules. They are the rules predestined and applied by business owners, scholars, and business minds throughout the centuries. Rules on innovation and marketing that if applied correctly will help you run a business but… Times are trying/changing and individuals/companies are scraping to stay ahead of the competition and make a little bit of cash on the side. I am reading the book First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman and it had me thinking about the rules we apply to business marketing and thought-leadership. I am sure you are thinking of typical rules that you apply on a daily basis in your business. What are they? Where did they come from? Why don’t you just break them? My favorite example is from the minds that brought us Quicken and Quickbooks : Intuit. In the early days the founders were struggling to produce demand for their product. Distributors would not pick them up because, frankly, they were the 47th or so product on the market. They decided to take every cent of their budget in the bank and invest it in marketing directly to the consumer and not the distributor. We are not talking about 10% of their budget or a small portion of the revenue… they bet everything on this ONE idea. The rest is history. They broke the rules and changed the mold of how sass products were sold and distributed. What is keeping you from breaking the rules? What is keeping you from adopting a social media strategy that could revolutionize the way you communicate? What is keeping you from starting a blog or starting a Facebook group? Is it fear? Is it understanding? Is it resources? To this I say, break all the rules. Live out your business and revolutionize the way you reach your customers. Empower your company to defeat fear and rise above the rest. If you would rather lay in the trenches… don’t waste my time.

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Break All the Rules or Don’t Waste My Time!

The wonderful people over at the ISBDC (Indiana Small Business Development Center) are sponsoring a 12 part seminar series over Twitter through the state of Indiana. I am blessed to be presenting for the serminar series to support my book ( Twitter Marketing for Dummies )! If you can make it out to any of the events that would be awesome! Here is the basics of what we will be talking about: —————————- Increasing Sales and Revenue through Twitter WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT? Building an online presence is a great first step, but how do we use that presence and use social media to make money? Using Twitter you (and your sales team) will have the ability to increase close rates and sales by building new connections and strengthening existing connections with your prospects! It doesn’t matter if you market to farmers, stay-at-home mothers, or C-Level employees, Twitter gives you the tools necessary

What is the one thing that comes up time and time again in our educational sessions at Brandswag? B2B use of social media . I have heard plenty of reasons why social media could not… should not.. be used to sell the B2B world. What do many B2B companies do right now for marketing? Direct Mail? Newspaper Advertising? E-Newsletters? Many of the outbound forms of marketing still work for B2B sales but blogging (in my mind) has taken a mainstream stance when building trust and thought-leadership in a specific industry. There are some truths to the thought that content can build trust between individuals. Many of us look at B2B marketing as fundamentally different from B2C marketing. Honestly….. (in my humble opinion) there is hardly any difference. We are selling to people. Business to business based companies are still selling to people. The CEO of a distribution company is still a person despite the fact he deals with companies instead of an individual. If you are sitting at the helm in a B2B company remember to start a blog that contains content, daily interactions, client thoughts/opinions and industry news. Your purpose is to create an informational powerhouse that keeps people reading… And involved them in your story… your brand… your legacy. Related articles by Zemanta Social Media: More Than Meets the Eye? (marketingpilgrim.com) John Jantsch on “how to get your customers talking” (thecustomercollective.com) Creative Marketing Associates, Inc. Achieves a Consistent Flow of New Clients with B2B Customer Centric Marketing Program (prweb.com) Why B2B Companies Should Be Using Social Media (thenextweb.com)

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B2B Marketing through Social Media and Blogging

I have been searching for books that contain leadership information and content that I can use on Twitter when it comes to sharing information about leading companies. Kevin Eikenberry , renowned author and speaker, recently sent me a Twitter book that fulfilled all my desires. The book is called #LeadershipTweet and is filled to the brim with noteworthy leadership quotes to get me through the day. (I’m not kidding… I did love the book). I thought I would write a brief review of the book while listing some of the leadership tweets he has documented over the past couple of years. The book breaks down into 4 sections plus a short foreword by the one and only, Chris Brogan . The sections include leadership actions, thoughts, inspiration, and how we can learn from one another to become better leaders. I wanted to list 15 of my favorite leadership tweets from the book. 1. Remarkable leaders translate vision into reality 2. People don’t resist change; they resist being changed 3. Want better ideas? Create MORE ideas 4. Strive to be a leader who learns and a learner who leads 5. Remarkable leaders have formed a habit of doing things that average leaders don’t like to do 6. Remarkable leaders are willing to make bold decisions 7. Make a choice to make a different. Make a choice to lead 8. Great listening starts with an open heart and a curious mind 9. Your belief in someone’s potential is the first step towards helping them develop it 10. Be authentic–you will be a more successful leader (and person) 11. Remarkable leaders are network builders 12. Remarkable leaders are accountable for their actions 13. Remarkable leaders communicate with others in a way that is best for the other person 14. Remarkable learders communicate powerfully through stories. 15. Resistance is energy that leaders use to move change forward. As you can already tell… the book is packed full of great ideas for leadership for 2010! You should definitely go check out the book. Follow this link to read thoughts, ideas, and inspiration from Kevin Eikenberry and the world of Twitter! Related articles by Zemanta Social media needs fewer rockstars, and more rockstar ideas (socialmediatoday.com) How to Create a Meaningful Following on Twitter (mintzwordz.com) Book Review – Dan Zarrella – The Social Media Marketing Book (broadcasting-brain.com) Are Tweedledee and Tweedledum on Your Twitter List? (socialmediatoday.com)

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140 Bite Sized Ideas to Help Your Business