I have not been myself for some time and after some reflecting , I have  reviewed my personal conduct toward some of my local SM peers.

I have been quite humbled by my own misguided anger and communication.

I do not retract the entire scope of the message, however I called out some specific groups of people, this was careless and thoughtless on my part. Many people in these professions have plenty to offer and have proven to be quite adept at what they do, rolling them into one negative grouping was poor judgment on my part.

My sincerest apologies to those hard working and knowledgeable people I have offended.

I am trying to take some actions outside of strictly an apology to make it up to those who would provide the opportunity, but there are no expectations, this is just an open apology to those I may have offended to whom I have not or will not be able to address directly.

Craig

After signing up for these tools, they have come to my classes to learn how to use these tools. Many are looking for advanced ideas of using Twitter and Facebook as they are savvy with the functionality and are no longer bound by the beginner label.

I will challenge these users, though, that if they don’t have a PLAN OF ENGAGEMENT, they have not truly started harnessing the power of these social media tools.

You might be thinking, “I have lots of followers! I talk to them and they talk to me; we share ideas. Isn’t this engagement?”

Well, first tell me what you are trying to achieve!

You often see people in social media “call for followers.” I believe this is the single most overrated statistic in all of social media. Why? Because it’s just a number that doesn’t truly define your level of engagement.

If you have 3,000 followers, how many of them are really following what you have to say? How many are following you because they just want a follow-back? How many are following you because you’re their competition and they want to keep an eye on you?

If we put those 3,000 followers in a room with you, how many of them would know who you are? If they are there for a follow-back, they don’t know you. If they are there for competition, they aren’t your audience. If they are there to increase their popularity, they don’t care what you have to say. Translation – they don’t know or care who you are.

These followers’ might recognize your name and perhaps even your face, but that isn’t actual engagement. A truly engaged following will not only recognize you, but will understand who you are and what you represent. Without this sort of relationship, there is no business.

How often do you re-Tweet information that came from an untrusted source without checking for more details? I do re-Tweet information from followers, but only those who are trusted sources, someone I actually have a relationship with.

Would you recognize your followers in this same room? All of them?

If you are planning on building business using Social Media, the relevancy of your followership and the relevancy of those you follow is important. In order to build a relevant followership, you have to have  an action plan… it doesn’t happen by accident.

About a year ago, I was pushing the 5,000 follower mark and was following almost all of them back. I wanted to test the theory that many of my followers were only there for a follow-back. I started to mass unfollow the people I didn’t recognize or those I had no need or desire to engage with. I love to chat in social media, so the group I unfollowed was largely those with whom discussion never formed.

My theory was right… as soon as I wasn’t following them, they unfollowed me. I was left with a lot fewer followers but A LOT more engaged conversations with the group I had remaining. These are the people who can help grow my business. They are interested in me, and I am interested in them.

What I am suggesting is that if you spend your time developing an audience who is actually listening, your chances of growing your business will increase dramatically. After all, what do the people who are not engaged really bring to you?

In this field we are always learning from each other. Things change on a frequent basis and in order to keep up with the times I plan to test the waters on occasion. Please help me understand you, my audience of readers, by taking this quick multiple choice online survey about your use of Social Media. I will give back to my community by sharing these results in a couple weeks. My goal is to have at least 100 entries to get a good strong sample, so please feel free to ask others to take this as well. It will help us all!

Click here to visit the survey, and thank you for your time!

I also am involved in communicating on Twitter as often as I can. About 50% of the time I am watching and responding to things I read, and the rest I might comment about business, talk about coming work or more often just rattle off a thought I have at that moment because of something that has impacted me with the hopes I might help others in the same predicament.

I read a lot about the “Experts” issue, because I don’t have much choice, the group I follow are collectively people who are involved in Social Media in some business manner, but prefer that people not refer to themselves as experts. I am on the fence on this issue, primarily because noone knows who gets to set the criteria for the so called “Expert”, but there are many compelling ideas behind the concept. Do you have to be a marketing professional already? If not would some of these people qualify?

I know I am not a Social Media expert. How? Because my peers do not communicate with me on that level. In fact I don’t believe I rank on anybodys scale as a person knowledgaeble on this topic. But still, I do offer classes on the subject to local Small Businesses and I do make a small profit doing so, because my time is still worth money to someone. And more importantly, I do this for a good reason, someone needs to do it for a couple of reasons:

1. If you jump into this eyes closed, you can quickly become overwhelmed or underwhelmed. If you don’t know what to expect and some of the rules you are expected to follow (and yes folks, there are rules even if they are not posted anywhere on the sites for these tools) you will give up quickly having accomplished nothing and likely not to see the value it can bring to you.
2. I have goals that are much broader, I want to further the cause of Small Businesses like mine. It is a real struggle and has some very large ups and downs and education is a big part of how I feel I can offer something back.

Hey, I don’t have all the answers. But I’d rather do my best than do nothing. I want to believe I can help you, and I know that is a mix of my ego and my desire to be humble all jumbled up into one.

I know I have helped people, and know that I will continue to learn and pass that information forward as I can. I also believe that there is no “right” way to get involved. I teach an approach, be yourself and learn to build value to others. That is how I have grown my business before I knew a thing about Social Media! So really, I’m teaching a marketing class, or am I just teaching a class in common sense? Sometimes others just need to hear someone else say its ok before they act.

Im involved in Social Media, and you should be too. Follow the path that got you to where you are. It’s Ok!

It went very well, mixed bag of people who knew some of this and some who never heard of it. So there was some great open communication from the group after the “lecture” just as I had hoped.

Then a local, well known I might add, Real Estate Agent asked this question as it pertains to her business:

“Craig, (insert Brokerage Firm name here) has decided to completely stop using the newspaper as a source of advertising and are moving solely to the web, but I do not know nor do I really have the time to get involved in Social Media, I have an assistant who is in charge of that for me. Also most of my clientele are over 50 and not the predominate demographic for using the web to find out about things like Open Houses, and the local newspaper will not even call me back to place ads with them at this point, what do I do?”

She also brought up about how she posts houses for sale in her blog.

This was an excellent question and immediately I started to think about the following:

Right or wrong, I tried to work through these issues with her one at a time.

I suggested to her that I felt it was an error on the Brokerage firms part to just stop using other traditional forms of marketing outright without at least pulling back slowly (the reason for the change was because of the dramatic increase in paper advertising costs) and using the opportunities to educate the customers about the transition to web. However we were told that the local newspaper will not post the Real Estate company’s URLs anymore (there are competing with there own home listings website, well maybe not competing so much if others can’t post there own stuff.)

So my thought was this, use direct mail postcards to those clients for those Open Houses and be sure to educate the people that the website would have more information, use the postcard as a lead in. Use sources such as salesgenie.com (If you have a better one, please post!) to find customers in your demographic for the mailing.

Now the assistant writing articles. I explained that I felt that she needed to be the one sharing the message, and the message needed to be more about her knowledge in her industry and her own thoughts about certain topics in general. I have seen other Tri-Cities, WA Real Estate Agents who attended classes start doing this as well. I feel that she could use the assistant as an editor, by providing some bullet points and then proofing before posting so the article is essentially hers and not her employees. She had a concern about time, and I mentioned how I use Dragon Naturally Speaking to dramatically cut down the time necessary to do this. All things she hadn’t thought of.

What I wanted to get across to her, was that people can learn ABOUT what she does and about who she is and that she already knows that relationships are what builds business opportunities in any service related business. People that get to know her will learn that she has a website dedicated to selling houses, her blog can demonstrate her personal expertise in the housing industry and how she thinks about business in general. No need to blog about a HOUSE.

I don’t know that I could cover everything in 2 hours, but did my best.

What do you think? Have some thoughts about this? Please post!

Connecting the Global Community

I’ve read lists that go on to describe what people should look for in a Social Media expert. But really, is anybody an expert at Social Media? I think what it boils down to is simply this, people and their communication. Who is an expert? Anybody who chooses to take the time to contribute to this global informational community.

I think anybody who chooses to put themselves out there, share their thoughts, feelings and concerns takes part in this huge pot of information. It takes a lot of guts for people to share with others they don’t know and sometimes more with the people they do. I think it allows those who would normally be much more introverted to share some of their brilliance, and provide a much-needed outlet for the extroverts.

There are tools that encourage social media, and ideas that help mold and define it, ultimately it’s my opinion that there is no hard and fast definition. More likely is the idea that like anything you do in life, there is a learning curve. There are veterans who have been communicating online for many years and they have helped establish some basic guidelines, because they’ve been through many of the challenges that people new to the community will experience on their own.

I’ve seen these people challenged, which has its ups and downs. Those of us new to the game can learn some lessons. This does not mean you need to follow, nothing progresses without fresh input and ideas and a willingness to both invest in them and accept critique.

The most important lesson I’ve learned in social media is nothing more than what you would expect in life! If you expect to get something, you must first give. This is true whether your intentions for social media are strictly for personal enlightenment or more business-oriented. If your expectation is just to throw out information like a fisherman on a boat casting his line hoping for a bite, you may catch a goldfish but you’ll never catch the shark.

It’s really not that difficult folks, everybody wants to know they matter, even those that profess that they don’t care. Communication is the method by which you can help your self and others feel like they matter. If you treat people as if you could care less, you will get nothing more in return. So treat social media like you would treat your friend or your customer if they were standing right in front of you, not as if they were thousands of miles away. Care about the people and the people will make the rest happen.

But that’s just my 2 cents…

He is dead on, it is the 2 way communication that makes Social Media and Marketing so much different than the traditional uni-directional methods. At Learn About Web I talked about how the phonebook is becoming the dinosaur because of how little information you can learn about a business with a smiling picture and some words. Think about that, what do you actually learn from that? Only that company X either has more money or wagered more money that the phonebook could drive traffic to them.

I know, I was recently a gambler!

But a customer in the Web 2.0 world sees things differently. But what about those not familiar with it?

How do we get our customers involved in Social Media?

Now I know some of you people in larger towns may not see this as a relevant issue, but in small towns like ours.. it’s half the battle at least! I am telling Small Business they need to use Social Media, but how do you educate those customers or people in general who know little or nothing about it? The ones not interested in coming to see a Conference on their dime because they don’t understand its merit?

Challenging Question – perhaps it’s been answered, but here are some thoughts I have, and perhaps you can add something to this?

The most obvious – Word of Mouth – Tell them! Talk to them about the benefits you have gained from Social Media and the tools they can use to get involved. Point them to your blog.

Bring a friend/colleague/customer to the speaking portion of a conference, let them learn about about why they should be interested, and perhaps they will join in. Don’t try to take them to training session on their first trip out, the idea is to get them some exposure.

Write about them! Why not have a featured customer blog post and ask them to read it? They would likely share it with all of the people they know and so on!

A discount if they add themselves to one of your Social Media tools? Added value for you and your customer!

Using 2 way communication to gain the attention of people not involved in Social Media seems to be the smarter strategy, after all, we should practice what we preach right?

I’d love to hear if you have anything to add to this list or comments about the idea in general…