2009 January | Tribeswell

The only way to really truly succeed in social media marketing is to learn to be selfish. What I mean by that is that you’ve got to learn to love it. Luckily it’s an easy thing to love (for a lot of people).

I talk to business professionals every day about how to use social media as a vehicle for growing your business. A lot of people think ‘Oh I have to do this and that and I have to do this as well and….’ The problem is that people often look at it as a burden. If this describes you then you need a paradigm shift right away.

When I really started delving into social media I did it slow. There was no way I was going to start using Twitter, Friendfeed, read 50 blogs a day, enter all my contacts into linked in, experiment on some niche social networks… you get the idea. There’s so much to do that it makes no sense form a strategy standpoint to try to do everything at once.

In my case, I started with a blog. Then I joined a niche social network for business professionals in Indiana. I moved on from there to everything else. As I eased my way into social media I slowly began to love it, and that’s why I’m so active in social media today. I don’t necessarily do it to build my personal brand, or promote my company, or anything else. I do it because I truly love it. I do it selfishly. If you can get to the point in your life where the things you HAVE to do are the same things that you LOVE to do, then you’re doing very well indeed.

1 Bee

This is how it starts. One buzz. One follower. One idea. But, bees are not solitary creatures. A few of your followers start talking and your message spreads, or no one says a word and it shrivels up and dies. This has been the way of the world since the dawn of civilization.

In the 17th century coffeehouses were banned in France. Why? Because people talk. The monarchy considered coffeehouses to be subversive because when people get together ideas always spread. People talk even faster under the influence of caffeine.

The advent of the printing press was the second most important technological development of all time (I’ll talk about the first in a second). Suddenly the speed at which ideas could travel was dramatically accelerated. One idea, duplicated thousands of times, spreads through the populace. But it still took time. Printing and distribution limited the speed at which information could travel.

Fast forward to the present. The social web. The most important technological development in the history of the world. Ideas spread instantly. Communities of followers emerge overnight. Your success hinges on 2 factors and 2 factors alone. 1) Is your idea good enough, original enough, and groundbreaking enough to inspire people to follow? and 2) Are you utilizing the tools available to allow your idea to ignite?

One follower becomes two. Two becomes 4. Your hive grows and grows. Lets go harvest some honey.

bee_swarm

This is becoming more and more true and it’s only going to become more widespread in the next few years. The ‘informational website’ is going to go away and give rise to websites that are a lot more like software applications and a lot less like press releases and information packets. Asp.net, php, ajax, and javascript are already beginning to replace html web pages. In this new age of complicated scripts and high-tech interfaces, people will come to your website to DO things instead of merely gather information. They’ll get your information from your blog.

In the next few years business blogging will become ever more important. In fact it will be critical. There will simply be no way for anyone to find your business or organization without a blog that is updated relatively frequently. Now is a golden opportunity to get ahead of the curve. Right now it’s possible to jump on the bandwagon and enjoy a few years of success before your competition tunes in and eliminates your monopoly of the market.

So, what do you do with your website? Be creative. What services can you make available to your customers? How can you make it easier for people to buy from you? Do you do ecommerce? Should your customers be able to view their account online? What makes sense from a customer service standpoint. These are questions that even the most technically backward companies are going to have to acknowledge in the coming years.

The fact is that the only things that are valuable on the Internet are content and services. Content tells people what they need to know and services let people ‘do stuff’ to make their lives easier or more fun or whatever. My recommendation is to provide both, and to do it now and not in five years when you’ve already missed the boat.

1. You don’t care about anyone else’s blog. There’s kind of a karma effect in blogging. If you don’t read and comment on other people’s blogs then people don’t know what you do or even that your blog is out there. Say you have a gardening blog. Find another gardening blog. Read a post that interests you and write ‘nice post blah blah blah I too have a gardening blog blah blah blah…”

2. You’re not working to broadcast your message. The most obvious place to broadcast is on twitter. Since twitter is up-to-the-minute, people can check out your latest post as soon as you post it. Also you can find people who are talking about similar things that you talk about.

3. You haven’t done the basics. Have you registered your blog with feedburner and technorati? Are you set up with Google Analytics? These are things that must be done. I’m not saying that these things will get you traffic, but they’re basic and easy to do. Just do it.

4. You’re not leveraging social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Stumbleupon, Digg, and Reddit. An associate of mine had 40 thousand hits the other day because of a random post he submitted to Reddit. There are similar success stories all over the web. These sites are where people who want to read good stories go to find them. It’s your job to start showing up. If your stuff is good, there’s a lot better chance that you’ll get site traffic.

5. You don’t post often enough. I once heard someone define the word ‘blog’ as, ‘a crappy website that someone started with good intentions and then abandoned’. Every once in a while I’ll find a story that I like on some random blog and I’ll decide to subscribe only to find that they only update once every 3 weeks. Why would I go to the trouble of checking your feed every day if you don’t even have the decency to put up a new post 2-3 times a week?

I think it’s obvious to anyone living in the Indianapolis area that it is EXTREMELY snowy out right now. When I realized how incredibly snowy it was I realized that if I didn’t stock up on some supplies we wouldn’t survive the blizzard. I am the man of the house after all (I live with my fiancee and my sister), and I have a responsibility to provide for the women-folk.

So, we all got bundled up and made the 4 block trek to our friendly neighborhood Walgreen’s pharmacy. Hey, it’s not a mega-mart, but I don’t think we did too bad.

Snow Day Essentials