What Can We Learn From the Border's Bankruptcy?

What can we learn from the Border's bankruptcy? While there were many instances of bad management that lead to Border's declaration of bankruptcy and the beginning of it's stores liquidations tomorrow, one reason is important here.

Borders is in bankruptcy, in some part, due to its failure to keep up with and use internet marketing and sales opportunities. Worse than that, they actually fed the competition that help to squash them. In 2001, Borders placed its internet marketing and sales with amazon.com. Borders gave Amazon access to it's mailing lists, thereby feeding the giant that was responsible for the big box retailers demise. Borders did not retake control of their on-line distribution until 2008. By then it was too late. Amazon was a power player. Borders could not compete against the giant it had helped to create!

Don't do what Borders did. Pay attention to emerging trends and technologies, such as social media marketing. The internet is critical to your success. Do not turn your back on it as Borders did!

More Food for Thought

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best is now. Chinese Proverb

Part 2 of So What Comes Next - How to Market Using Social Media

You are at the point where you have a blog posting schedule. You are advertising your blog posts on FaceBook and Linkedin. You are also tweeting regularly about your blog posts, other interesting things and, of course, re-tweeting other peoples tweets. While you are accomplishing a lot doing these things, there is still a lot of Social Media Marketing to do.

All of your Social Media Marketing efforts are designed to drive traffic to your blog. Beyond FaceBook, Twitter and Linkedin, there are many more Social Media platforms and applications that you should be using to do the same thing.

First, you need to start with visuals. You should be using photos, drawings and videos in your blog to make it easier to read. Further the use of visuals, and especially videos, enhances the sales potential of your blog. Simply put, today, people are driven by video. They simply respond more favorably to a blog that has it.

Your photos should be included in your blog, and they should also be served through a photographic site such as flickr (which is free, by the way). Similarly, your videos should be included in your blog and served from a site like YouTube (or Vimeo if you prefer better video quality).

Once the photos and videos are set up, you should show them (or the link to them) on your Facebook and Linkedin accounts. You should also be tweeting about the visuals as often as possible. Don't go overboard here. Keep the material fresh. Two or at most three tweets of a single image, and then move on to tweeting the next image.

Photos and Videos don't necessarily have to have anything to do with your blog, even if you put them in your blog. The idea, again, is to get something out into the Social Media world that broadcasts your brand. I often tweet images directly from my iPhone to both my photographic and Social Media Twitter accounts, that are just nice, colorful pictures. Nothing to do with the blog or it's posts subjects. Tweeting the images keeps my name in front of people.

So now you are broadcasting your blog and the visuals that come with it. The next step in your Social Media plan are bookmarking sites. The top two bookmarking sites are Digg and Stumbleupon. With bookmarking sites you want to get someone else (say your best buddy or Social Media Marketing Consultant) to submit your blog to these two sites. You can submit your blog yourself, but the blogs credibility gets marked down and it gets seen much less often.

Once your blog is posted to a bookmarking site, other people will see it and give it a positive rating (negatives are possible too). The more positive ratings your blog gets, the more it gets served up and seen by other Digg and Stumbleupon viewers. The extra exposure is obviously a good thing.

You can also submit just your pictures (which is why we needed a flickr account) or Videos (likewise) to the bookmarking site. They too will be rated and can direct more traffic to your blog.

There are still more Social Media Marketing platforms and tools. I will write about more for you at another time.

Your questions and comments are always appreciated.

On Starting

"The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing."  
Walt Disney

Numbers

Tonights numbers show that I have close to one 1,000 (965 actual) Twitter followers across my three Twitter accounts. Just a few short months ago I had none. The business is growing, it is doing well. It requires a lot of work, but t can be done. A hopeful thought going forward. I think persistence, a positive attitude and quality content all help in my success. Would you like me to help with your Social Media Marketing?

I am now offering Social Media Marketing consulting services. My services are affordable and the service is personal. Check out the Services page on this blog for more information. Or just call me at 203 909 0697. Cheers, Brad

Food For Thought

"There are a million and one ways to make a million dollars" - Timothy Ferriss 

Social Media Marketing and Search Engine Optimization

You can have simply the best web site or blog in the world. That will not matter if no one can find it. Social Media Marketing does a great job of getting your blog found. But if you leave your marketing to just social media you are not getting the maximum return from your web site.

To get the most exposure for your blog you should be using both Social Media Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (other marketing avenues such as newspaper and radio advertising, mailing lists and even handing out flyers should not be forgotten but are beyond the scope of this post).

Search engines (such as Google) are designed to return to the user the best return for the key word used.  Your job then is to develop tactics for your blog that will bring you as close to the top of the search engines rankings as possible for the keywords for your blog.

Choosing the correct keyword(s) for your blog is a huge topic involving statistical testing and analysis, using a variety of quantitative tools. As an introduction, you should keywords for your blog that you would use to find your blog. If you are a photographer, for example, you would use the simple keyword, photographer. But a word of caution here. If you use a simple key word like photographer, you will never be on the first return page and if you are not on that page you may as well have not bothered.

Think about how many photographer are out there with blogs and web sites. I just did a key word search on the word photographer and Google returned 332,000,000 results. Impossible. To get to the top of a Search Engine return you are going to have to dig deep into what it is that you are. For example, if you specify "Journalistic Style Wedding Photographer in Burlington Vermont" (if that is your speciality) you are competing with far fewer returns.

Once you have determined your keywords you take the following simple steps to get the best possible search engine ranking for your blog:

1. Use key words in your blog title. Journalistic style wedding photographer located in Burlington Vermont is too long to use as a blog title, but shortening it to Journalistic Wedding Photos could work. 
2. Create page titles for your web pages or blog post titles for your blog that have key words in them.
3. Have key word rich posts. There is a lot of debate on how many keywords should be used in which parts of your post. If you use too many, your writing is going to become unreadable, too few and you won't get a good search engine ranking. The old school line is that you should have many keywords in the first 100 words of your post. I think you should remember who you are writing for, an audience that you hope will one day buy from you, and write your blog posts first and foremost to deliver information to them. Don't count key words used. Just write for your audience. You can't go wrong when you do that.
4. Build back links with influential sites. When someone else puts a link to your blog in their site, they have back linked to you. The more back links you have, the more credible and reliable Google sees you as being. Further, the more influential, which is to say, the more back links the site linking to you has, the better it is for your search engine ranking.  There is an entire industry that has grown up around getting back links. I will post on this further at another time. For the moment, suffice it to say that if you are buying back links, they are not going to do you much good.
5. Always test and measure the effectiveness of your key words and their impact on your search engine optimization.

Focus on your Social Media Marketing, but do keep these actions in the back of your mind and implement them whenever possible. Combining Social Media Marketing withe Search Engine Optimization is going to increase your visibility which should in turn, increase your cash flow.

On Naming Your Blog and or Website

The name of your website and /or blog is important, in terms of both branding you as a professional and helping your site be found.

When you start your blog you will have to create a name that will read, "yourname.blogspot" if you are on Blogger or "yourname.wordpress" if you are on Word Press, where "yourname" is the name you choose. The .blogspot or .wordpress suffix makes your site name look unprofessional (at least by comparison to your competition) and makes your name needlessly long. Everyone is used to looking for website with a .com suffix. You will lose traffic when searchers look for your site, type in the .com address, get frustrated and move on to their next task. Attention spans are limited. Make sure you make yourself easily findable.

You should purchase a web site domain name, such as "yourname.com" and set up an automatic forward so that any time someone types "yourname.com" they are automatically forwarded to your blog. You then use the web site name in all of your promotional activity.

Web site domain names are easily purchased with prices ranging from $5 to $15. Automatic forwarding should be done for free by the company you purchase the domain name from. If it is not, move on to another company. There are hundreds. I purchase all my domain names and set up forwarding from www.GoDaddy.com. If you prefer, this is a task I can do for you.

Ideally, The "yourname" section of your blog address will match that of your web address. For example, if you want your blog name to be XYZCompany.blogspot.com then your web address should be www.XYZCompany.com. You may need to search around for different names depending on their availability.

Your site name should fit three criteria:

1. It should be short,
2. It should not contain hyphens, and
3. Description is more important than cuteness.

Short names and names without hyphens make your site name easier to remember. A description of what your site is about in three words or less will attract more readers. Further, the descriptive words should be keywords for your site. This will help with your Search Engine Optimization and lead to more traffic (SEO is a huge topic that we will get to later.).

Your web site name will have the option of coming with a number of different suffixes. You should choose a .com, .net or .org. These are the three most used in the USA and, reportedly, these three get higher rankings in Google searches (although Google denies this). I only use .com. and suggest that you do as well.

Finally, while you are about buying domain names, you should buy the domain name with your name as well. If you are, say, Susan Martison, you should buy the domain name, www.susanmartinson.com. If that name is taken, you may wish to consider www.suemartinson.com or www.smartinson.com or some other variant thereof. Purchasing your name as a domain name will open many options for you as you build your business.

Blog Writing, Part 1 On Form

Your blog post must be written to catch the readers interest within the first sentence or two! Your opening must be compelling and well written. Remember that your blog reader is always crunched for time and bombarded by other media. Respect your reader and given them your information in a concise and readable format.

At the same time, while respecting your reader, you should be writing for them at around the sixth grade level. Your average reader, like the average newspaper reader, has the reading skill and attention level of a 6th grader. People have come to expect material to be written for them at this level.

Your blog should be between 350 and 400 words. The average newspaper story is about 550 words. This size is not an overwhelming task to read or to write.

Keep your paragraphs on the short side. Aim for three to four sentences. Using more, while necessary at times, will decrease the readability of your post.

Whenever possible, break up your text with visuals. A graphic or photograph will make your text more readable. A quote from the text works too. Never have one long dense block of text. No matter how interesting, the average reader is just going to pass on it.

The visual does not necessarily have to relate to the post, but if it can, so much the better.

Along the same line, lists and numbered items help move your readers eye through the text, while at the same time breaking the text into readable pieces. Numbered items also provide your reader with a specific end point, so they can know how much time they will have to allocate to reading your post.

While your information may be extraordinary, if you present it to your reader in a format they find difficult, the information will not get read. Keep your form simple. Keep your ideas readable.

So What Comes Next

You have your blog started and an account on FaceBook. Your Twitter is set up and your picture has put the final touch on your Linkedin profile. You are ready to go, to start your Social Media Marketing effort. So now what the hell do you do? Perhaps a more daunting task even then setting up your Social Media Marketing platforms, is figuring out what to do with them when they are set to go.

Step by step, here is what you should do:


1) You are going to need content for your blog. Your blog content needs to be informative, well written and brief enough to be wholly consumed in the short time that most blog posts get from their readers. I will have more on guidelines for the forms of blog posting later, but for now, aim for about 350 to 400 words. You should post a minimum of two blogs per week. More is better, but don't burn yourself out too quickly.

2)  Once your blog is posted, Tweet about it.  Tell all your followers in 140 characters or less about the great information you have put out on your blog. The purpose of the exercise, remember, is to funnel traffic to your blog.  Always Tweet with your blogs, but find other times to Tweet as well. A great tool to manage your Tweets is TweetDeck.

3) Post information about your blog to your Linkedin account. Linkedin is a bit of a stuffy place, so choose carefully which blog posts to tell your Linkedin followers about and what form you let that information take.

4) Facebook, perhaps that should be in all CAPS. Facebook has 500 Million users. Let them know as well about your blog post. Put a summary of your blog post up on your Facebook account. The summary can be up to 400 characters long, but keep it shorter. Tease your reader here and entice them to click through to your full blog post. Remember to have a link to your blog visible and easy to click.

5) Any photos or video that you have that help tell your story should be freely used along the way.  You may have to open a YouTube account to help with the video, but the extra effort is so very worthwhile. Statistics show clearly that visuals and particularly video, command attention.

6) You must be Retweeting. Retweeting is an art form and as such, gets a whole blog posts to itself

New and Amazing YouTube Numbers

The Official Google Blog has put out some pretty outstanding growth numbers for YouTube.

Yesterday, more than 48 hours worth of video (that is two days worth!) were uploaded to the YouTube every minute. That represents a 37% increase over the last six months and a 100% rise over the past year!

Think about that for a moment. That is a lot of video to watch.

And ... Over last weekend, YouTube viewers drove this Social Media monster past the 3 Billion (that is Billion, not million) views a day mark. That represents a 50% over last years.

Google happily provides the following information to put that 3 billion views in perspective:

That number of views is the equivalent of nearly half the worlds population watching a YouTube video every day, or its is equal to each and every citizen of the USA watching at least nine videos a day.

These are the kind of numbers that I find staggering.

Getting Started in Social Media Marketing

Just have a look at that photo to the right. It is filled with the labels of just some of the organizations, business and web sites that are involved in the Social Media Marketing world. Just some! And then they all have interconnections. Seem impossible? It did to me when I first started doing Social Media Marketing. But I took the time, approached the project step-by-step, and am in the process of mastering the challenge.

You can do that, or you can make your life simpler, focus on your business and hire me to do all that work for you. (Yup, that was a plug for me, it is my blog after all and this is what I do for a living, so I had to throw one of those in somewhere).

But whether you use my services or take the do it yourself route, you are going to have to break your Social Media Marketing campaign down into small, doable steps.

The first step may seem ridiculously simple, but taking the time to think about it now will save you grief later. That step is choosing your name.

The choice of your name is critical because what you choose to use as your name is going to represent your brand. It is going to be used on all of your Social Media Marketing platforms to tell the world who you are, what you are about and where you want to go with your viewer.

It is said that the first impression in business is made during your handshake and that you have only 5 seconds to make that impression good. The same applies to your brand name. In this day of information overload, your efforts are going to often be judged by your brand name. Does it reflect what the viewer wants to find? If it doesn't, they are moving on fast.

Sometimes your name is the best brand name. For my art and photography site, I use just www.bradrickerby.blogspot.com.  You might wish to use your name and a professional accreditation. My mother would love it if my brand were, say, www.drbradrickerby.com (alas for her, that brand does not exist). Or you might want a brand name that is memorable, perhaps silly or whimsical and talks a little about what your brand is about. I just opened http://muttsmuttsmutts.blogspot.com.  I'll bet you know what that one is about!

Your brand name should also be short (a rule I violate frequently) because a short brand name will be more memorable and easier to type. And you should be sure that your brand name is available across all the platforms you will be using (typically a blog, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter).

It really is not as complicated as it sounds and you should be able to come up with a brand quickly. But is is important to give it just a little thought.

Next, you need to define the goal of your Social Media Marketing Campaign. I will go into that next.

Finding Twitter Followers

In Twitter there are a number of ways of finding people and of having them find you. First, there is the whole following dance, which will follow shortly. The second is through keywords, which are called hashtags (#) on Twitter. The use of hashtags is a fundamental formatting thing (one of the things I am going to write about in my Twitter usage guidelines. 


But for now ... after the message of your tweet you should put a number of keywords in that Tweet. These keywords are formatted so they read, #keyword, or #marketing, or #landscapephotography (Tweeter only reads the first word after the #, so two or more word keywords have to be compressed) or #Hypnosis or ... well, you get the idea. 


Twitter then takes all the hashtagged words and compiles a list of them. You can look up everyone who is tweeting about marketing or hypnosis or anyone of more interest to you, like everybody who has used a hashtag in your client demographic (we have to talk about client demographis one day soon). 

Knowledge

"To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease". Lao Tzu.

9 Business Leaders in Social Media Marketing

The 9 top business Tweeters and Social Media Marketing users are all Fortune 500 companies. The following is a list of those companies (ranked in order of Twitter followers). This list was created by Fortune magazine and reported by www.cnnmoney.com with further research by me.

One of the main things to be taken from what follows is the level of use of Social Media Marketing platforms by corporate giants. If they are so committed to their use, these platforms should also be useful for much smaller businesses, professionals, artists and so on.

#1, not surprisingly, is Google. Google is #102 on the Fortune 500 list. They have 3,012,238 Twitter followers and 2,925,995 Facebook Fans.

#2 is Wholefoods. Wholefoods is 284 on the Fortune 500 list. They have 1,916,179 Twitter followers. They also have over 300 Twitters accounts and over 250 local stores with their own Twitter accounts. Wholefoods also has 575,020 Facebook fans on their main page and scores of local store and specialty pages on Facebook.

#3 a tip of the hat to Dell. They are the 38th largest company in the USA according to the Fortune 500 list. They have 1,584,837 Twitter followers, track over 25,000 conversations per day in 11 different languages and created the Social Media and Community University. Dell also has 549,525 Facebook fans.

#4 Southwest Airlines. SW air is #229 on the Fortune 500 list and have 1,107,156 followers on Twitter. This goes along with 1,390,581 Facebook fans. That is a lot of Social Media!

#5 Coca Cola  The 72 largest USA company according to the Fortune 500 list, Coca Cola has 254,618 followers and a whopping 26,466,498 fans on Facebook.

Coming in at #6 is another airline, Delta. They are the 84th largest USA corporation and have 180,000 followers on Twitter.

Number 7 is one of my favorite places to shop, Target. Target is #30 on the Fortune 500 list and has 126,563 Twitter followers. Target also has 4,321,438 Facebook fans.

#8 is American Express. At 88 on the Fortune 500 list they have 120,343 Twitter followers. On their main Facebook page they have 590,725 Fans. American Express also has a Facebook page called "Small Business Saturday" with 1,484,696 fans. Actually, that should be 1,484,697 as I just joined!

And finally, #9, we come to at last. McDonalds, the home of the Golden Arches and the Big Mac is ranked number 108 by Fortune and has 120,277 Twitter followers. McDonalds also has 8,155,792 Facebook fans.

All in all that is a lot of fans and following. Keeping in mind that there are over 100 million Twitter accounts and over 500 million Facebook accounts, there are a lot, literally hundreds of millions of reasons that both these corporate megaliths and you should be using Social Media Marketing.

By the way, the Fortune 500 listing is a list of the top 500 companies in America. It is put out annually by Fortune magazine and ranks the companies by revenues and profits. The total revenue for these 9 companies, in millions of $'s is $238,742. That number is too large for me to contemplate. The dollars in profit for these 9 companies, again in millions of $'s is $27,068. All I can say is that that is a lot of profit.

Startling Facts 3 - YouTube

Some startling facts about YouTube, the video sharing site that is the third most visited site on the internet. This data is all as of late 2010.

In November of 2006 Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion (that would but a lot of videos. It would also buy five Boeing 747 airplanes with enough left over to buy a country or two).

According to Alexa.com YouTube is the 3rd most visited website in the world (The #1 spot belongs to Google and #2 is FaceBook).

Facebook has 500 million users, YouTube has 300 million users and Twitter has around 100 Million users (although I have recently heard the number 200 million users - I will stick with the 100 million number for now. Either way, it is a lot of users).

The traffic on YouTube is 22% from the USA and 78% from the rest of the world.

A more detailed breakdown provides this information: User %

• 22.6% USA
• 6.7% Japan
• 4.8% Germany
• 4.8% India
• 3.7% United Kingdom
• 3.7% Italy
• 3.6% Brazil
• 3.6% Mexico
• 3.3% France, and,
• 2.7% Spain

(Looks like YouTube, in addition to being a very effective marketing tool is also great for reach an international audience.)

If you sat down to watch all YouTube content previously uploaded, it would take you 1700 years to watch it all. It is a safe bet that you would need to take a nap at some point during your viewing.

A full 24 hours of video is uploaded every minute.

That works out to 10 videos being uploaded every second, and

829,440 videos uploaded every day.

In addition to the short videos (they average about 2 minutes and 46 seconds each),

150,000 full length films are uploaded every week.

YouTube gets 10% of all internet traffic, that is 1 out of every ten visits to the internet is to YouTube.

YouTube get 2 Billion views per day (that looks like this, 2,000,000,000 views per day)

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world (behind only Google).


And finally, all that traffic to YouTube breaks down into the following traffic by age percentage.

• 3 to 11 years is 3% of the traffic
• 12 to 17 is 19%
• 18 to 34 is 35%
• 35 to 49 is 23%, and,
• 50+ is 19%

Thanks to www.go-gulf.com for the statistics

Social Media Marketing Basics 1

While the number of people participating in the world of Social Media is staggering (about 500 million for Facebook, 300 million for YouTube and say 100 million for Twitter) there seem to be just as many choices to be made, platforms to be considered and tools to be mastered. It is a lot to take in, and learn and try.

Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin all acting as funnels to pass
people through to your blog.

But it really is not as daunting as all that (yes, I just set up my own straw man so I could knock it down). Really, to start, there are only four platforms to consider. These are your blog, Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.

Your blog is your main site. It is where you tell people about you, who you are, what services and/or products you offer, how to find you and your store (either on the web or brick and mortar or both). The blog is the cornerstone of your virtual empire. It is your location on the internet.

There is a lot more to come on your blog and blogging in general.

The other three platforms, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are all conduits. From each platform you are looking to gain Contacts (Linkedin), Followers (Twitter) and Friends (Facebook) or to be Liked (Facebook again).  Once you have made the connection on these platforms you try to move them to your blog. Once there they can discover the complete you and, hopefully, sooner or later, make a purchase of a product and/or service or add value in some way to your business.

This is not as cynical as it sounds at first read through. Business in general is about developing relationships. Twitter. Linkedin and Facebook are simply means to develop a relationship. Moving that relationship to your blog is simply further developing that relationship. You can make a sale at any point in the relationship and there are some relationships that will never lead to a sale.

The first step, therefore, on the road to Social Media Marketing is setting up your blog and accounts with Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook. In order to set up your accounts in the most efficient manner possible, you are going to need to define what you hope to gain through your Social Media Marketing efforts (making millions, while an understandable end, is not a great goal to start with). You are also going to need to determine what I will call your voice. Your voice is a coherent, systematic and consistent appearance across all Social Media platforms. Another term for Voice is Brand. I just find the term Brand a little more intimidating.

I will be going through specifics on your blog, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and your Branding or Voice in upcoming posts.

What is Social Media Marketing?

Many years ago, one of my first jobs out of college was as an insurance salesman for Met Life. My sales manager sat me down one day and drew me a picture on a yellow legal pad (the iPad of the day). Basically it was two half circles facing each other. In the lower part of the half circle he put a dot. It looked sort like this:

.) (.

But bigger.

"Brad" he said, "those half circles are bellies and the dots are belly buttons.  All sales and marketing comes down to putting your belly button next to a lot of other belly buttons, and then getting personal". 

So far as I can tell, that is what Social Media Marketing does. It enables the user to connect with a lot of other belly buttons. Except, instead of a smile and a hand shake, there is the Tweet, Follow, Like and Friend. The method of connection is a variety of internet tools. All the rest is just detail. 

I will get more into that detail soon.

Startling Statistics 2 - Twitter

Today it is Twitter's turn. More numbers that verge on the unimaginable! Again, my thanks to www.kunocreations.com and www.mashable.com for these statistics.

As for Twitter then:

Twitter has more than 106,000,000 users. One Hundred and six million, a huge number.

These 106 million users send out 640 tweets per second. That equals 55,296,000 tweets per day and more tweets per year than my small hand held calculator can calculate (I will get a new calculator, but for now you get the idea).

There are more than 300,000 new Twitter accounts set up every day.

While not as overwhelming as Facebook numbers, clearly Twitter is huge in and unto itself. Statistics like these demand attention. More, Twitter as a micro blogging site can be used for many and different purposes  than can Facebook. If nothing else, consider Twitter your announcement to 106 million users that you have a Facebook account.

More Startling Statistics - Facebook

More startling statistics on Social Media. This time just on Facebook (check back for Twitter tomorrow). The numbers are staggering, sometimes so large that they verge on incomprehensible. By the way, these numbers came, in one for or another, from www.kunocreative.com (I tip my hat to you!) who got many of them from www.mashable.com (another tip of the hat!).

We know already that Facebook has 500 million users. But did you know that 50%, that is 250 million, of them log on every day.  WOW!

Further, that 500 million users of Facebook translates to about one person out of every 14!!!

40% of the Facebook user base is age 35 and up.

One out of every eight minutes on line is spent on Facebook.

34% of Facebook users are from North America, 32% from Europe, 20% from Asia, 9% from South America, 3% from Africa and 2% from Australia.

US Internet users spend 3 times more minutes on blogs and social media than they do on emails (okay, that wasn't about Facebook, but I thought I would slip it in anyway).

Think about the potential for reaching and engaging with people based on these numbers. The potential is amazing.

Great Reading

Two great books that you have to read. Both are great motivators and both have great tools for you to use. (and yes, if you click on either link you will be taken to Amazon. The first book I have read and reread. It is a great motivator. It is by Timothy Ferriss and titled, The 4-Hour Workweek.

Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk is another excellent read.

The Power of Social Media

Why is Social Media so important to your business? It is not just that there are 500 million users signed up to Facebook or 175 million registered users on Twitter that you can try to get your message to. Rather its is that the buyers of your products and those that follow or friend you can communicate back to you about your product and that you can then engage them in a discussion. The possibility of engagement is where the real power of Social Media lies.

Traditional advertising is like a one way street. You throw out your message via TV or print ad and hope that it gets heard and then sticks.

Social Media on the other hand is a two way street. You put out information. Your customers and prospects put out information. Then both of you interact with each other about your respective information. Sometimes this two way street may seem more like a 25 lane super highway with no speed limit. But it is manageable and once managed, can be very lucrative.

The Biggest Shift Since the Industrial Revolution

Last week I attended SMACC2011 (#smacc2011). It was a conference at the Newhouse School of Communication at Syracuse University on the blending of Social Media and A Cappella singing. There was a lot of singing, but I spent my time in Social Media Marketing seminars. One seminar started on the phenomenal growth of Social Media. Some of the statistics and thoughts they revealed were, I thought, astonishing. Here are some of those revelations (the source of most of them are a book titled, Socialnomics dated May 5, 2010 - also found at www.socialnomics.com).

First, Social Media is called "The Biggest Shift Since the Industrial Revolution".

More:

Over 50% of the world's population is under 30.  96% of them have joined some form of Social Media

Facebook now tops Google for weekly traffic in the US

Social Media has overtaken pornography as the #1 activity on the web

Radio took 38 years to reach 50 million users

Television took 13 years to reach 50 million users

The internet took 4 years to reach 50 million users

The iPod took 3 years to reach 50 million users

Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year

If Facebook were a country it would be the 3rd largest country in the world

China would be first, India second, Facebook third and the USA fourth

Facebook has more users than there are people living in the United States

80% of companies in the US use Social Media for recruitment

95% of these use Linkedin

The fastest growing Facebook segment is 55 - 65 year old women

Generation Y and Z consider email to be passe

YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world

There are over 200,000,000 blogs

34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.

(34% of 200,000,000 is a very large number)

Only 18% of traditional TV ad campaigns generate a positive ROI (return on investment)

90% of viewers skip TV ads completely by means of Tivo/DVR

where as, 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations

(such as they get on social media)

and only 14% trust advertisements

On Facebook, there are over 60 million updates a day.

And, a couple of quotes:

"Social Media is not a fad, it is a fundamental shift in the way we communicate".

and

"The ROI of Social Media is that your business will exist in 5 years".

(These are powerful words - and the emphasis is added).

These numbers are compelling evidence that if your business is not involved in Social Media, at the very least, it is missing a huge opportunity to be more profitable.  Further, this opportunity exists for every type of business, be it professional or store front or creative.

Social Media A Cappella Conference

Having just returned from the Social Media A Cappella Conference (#smacc2011) My excitement about the potential for Social Media Marketing has increased ten fold. I will, as soon as I get my notes sorted out, share many of the ideas, information and statistics learned there with you.  Until I have those notes sorted out, think about this, Social Media has now passed pornography as the number one use of the internet.

Objective. Purpose. What on Earth am I Doing Here.

For the past 20 years or so I have run a wildly successful small business as a photographer and artist. Prior to that I worked at a Wall Street firm, The Dreyfus Corporation. I got that position as a result of getting my MBA at a top ten business school (at least it was then), Duke. And way in the past I ran my own business as a financial planner. I'll post my artistic bio and CV under the "About Me" tab.

It does not take much searching to find that Social Media Marketing is not just the hot new way to bring your goods to market, but the origin of a fundamental shift in the way marketing and even business will be done going forward. Some have even called Social Media Marketing the biggest shift in business since the industrial revolution. Ponder just this: Facebook alone now has over 500 million subscribers. 500 million!! Were Facebook a country it would be the 4th largest nation in the world.

I am now offering consulting services in the areas of Branding and Social Media Marketing.  I have the educational background, small business experience and entrepreneurial spirit to get the job done. I figure I can share my knowledge with the so many people out there who are looking to remake themselves as a result of the poor economy.  Too I can help existing enterprises increase existing client engagement and with the development of new clients.

I am happy to help clients from all the worlds in which I have been involved, from small business owners to artists and musicians to professionals and corporations.

So sit back, relax and lets get this show started.

SMACC

WHAT IS SMACC?

Social Media A Cappella Conference

April 1-3, 2011
Syracuse University

SMACC is a three-day conference that fuses cutting edge media and contemporary vocal music.

It hosts speakers from around the country who are building the foundations of a more connected world through their web based entrepreneurial endeavors. As society adapts to the digital revolution, it becomes ever more crucial for organizations and individuals to take advantage of emerging forms of communication. SMACC offers an opportunity to learn straight from the creators, how to best utilize these tools.

SMACC offers workshops led by individuals who are revolutionizing the constantly evolving, forward-moving genre of A Cappella. These pioneers are challenging the barriers of studio recording as well as live performance. They are pushing the boundaries of the human voice. Collegiate and professional performances enhance the conference by showcasing recent progress in the industry.

SMACC is a unique event that inspires students of all ages, professionals in all industries, and a population in which these two fields of social media and A Cappella are becoming ever more present.  

Check this out, a conference that combines art/music and social media marketing. This is a conference that does what I need to do, goes where I need to go. It is next weekend and you bet I will be there.

http://www.smacconference.com/

And So Let It Begin

Starting now!