I just had an epiphany.  I was checking my @ replies on Twitter and saw that Michael Reynolds who owns an awesome Indianapolis web company called Spinweb had retweeted one of my recent posts.

I thought to myself, “Man, he helps me promote my posts all the time!  Why haven’t I been reciprocating?”  I’m a big fan of referral marketing and I believe that you have to give a little to get a little.  Plus, it feels great to help others.  

What would it be like if everyone on Twitter decided to only promote other people’s content and ideas.  That would be an awesome community.  I’m going to make it my mission to always give more than I take from now on.

On that note… I can personally vouch for Michael Reynolds and Spinweb.  They are a first class web company.  They’re especially good at building sites for membership organizations and manufacturing companies.  If that’s you, you should definitely shoot him a line.  You should also check out Michael’s blog at zenbox.org.

…is the one that works for you.

I’m a bit of a minimalist.  If I spread myself too thin everything just starts to get crazy.  I use Facebook for personal contacts, LinkedIn for business contacts, my blog to get my ideas out there and Twitter for information gathering, promotion, and relationship building.

I’d love to see how others are tying different social media services together to create a network that makes life easier, more productive, and more profitable.  Please share in the comments below.

It seems like every marketing professional I know of is saying, “You can’t ignore the internet, any more.”  I think it’s obvious that I believe online tools hold endless potential for marketing, but I’m willing to concede that it’s not the only way to get your message out.  The problem with offline marketing is that in order to be effective and measurable in the same ways as online marketing, it is often expensive and time and resource consuming.

1. So you don’t want to blog. Not a problem.  A great alternative would be to put out your own print magazine once a month.  You could have all your employees write articles with helpful tips and best practices for your industry then send it out free of cost to all your customers.  They’ll be extremely impressed that you’ve gone to the trouble of providing them with excellent information in a readable format.  The only disadvantage is that this approach is going to be ridiculously expensive and time-consuming.  You’re not going to want to go with cheap printing or graphic design.  Bottom line – it’s going to eat up a sizable chunk of your marketing budget.
2. You’re not interested in generating leads from online sources. Just hire a salesman to go out and cold-call people.  Phone cold-calling is pretty tough these days, but there’s no reason you can’t send someone out door to door.  You’ll probably want to send your new salesperson through some training courses and you’ll have to provide a vehicle and gas.  You’ll also need to shell out a decent salary (commission only salespeople rarely succeed – too much pressure – they won’t bring you good clients).  If you’ve got 70-80 grand to spare in your marketing budget, this might be an option.
3. You don’t need to use online tools to establish yourself as an industry expert. Why not just go to trade shows?  You’re probably already doing this and not getting as much out of it as you should be.  Studies have shown that as many as 80% of leads generated from trade shows get lost in the mix.  You’re going to want to invest in a new customer relationship management software system if you really want to make a dent through trade shows.  Plus, you need to hit ALL the trade shows, not just some.  If you’re not properly staffed to do this, you’ll probably need to hire more people, plus there’s the cost of travel, print materials, SWAG, and of course a nice display so people know you are serious.
4. If you want to create buzz around your message you don’t need to be using social media. Just hold an event!  Rent out some convention space, pay some industry leaders to speak, serve food and refreshments, and watch the cheddar roll in.  The first thing you’re going to need to do is dedicate someone from your staff to doing nothing but event planning for at least a month before the event.  Make sure all your people are promoting the event to your customers.  Be careful not to annoy them, though.
5. You’ve got plenty of ways to educate your customers without using social media. You’ve got a customer service department don’t you?  They answer calls all day long.  There’s no reason to invest time and resources on an online campaign while this system still works.  There can’t be that many dissatisfied customers or else you wouldn’t still be in business, right?  Just to be sure you might want to send out surveys in the mail and hope that some of your customers will fill them out.  Don’t forget to follow up with them by phone.  Remember that it’s costing you money every time one of your people has to pick up the phone.

The key value in marketing through social media is that it fills so many needs at once while being cost effective at the same time.  I urge you to consider the real costs associated with running your business and think about ways that some of them might be circumvented through using social online technologies.

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I was just having a conversation with the extraordinary graphic designer, Austin Wechter, about how sometimes all I feel like doing in my blog posts is RANTING!  That’s where my head was at this morning, but I decided that it might be unproductive.  Instead, I’ve chosen to turn things around and share some of my favorite things!  That’s a happy topic, right?

Let’s start with some online services

1. Cli.gs - My favorite url shortener.  Great analytics and tracking.  I know lots of people are using bit.ly right now, but I’m a CLIGS man.
2. Digg.com – I could spend days there.  I know, rumor has it that it’s mostly spammers, but it’s still a social tool and there’s still a ton of great content there.
3. Friendfeed – New friend feed is really cool, though I havn’t had much chance to play with it (read my review).  The thing I like most about it is that you can use it to combine all your feeds.  Very zen-like.
4. Rhymezone – Great rhyming dictionary that I’ve been using for years.  Also has thesaurus and definitions.
5. Google – Yes Google I love everything about you.  Don’t change a thing.
6. Twitter -  Nuff said.
7. Woothemes, Elegant Themes, and IThemes – The absolute best sources for premium WordPress themes.
8. Youtube – The king of viral video sharing.

My favorite blogs.

1. Livecrunch – For my money it’s the best up-to-date info on what’s going down in the tech community.
2. Kyle Lacy’s blog – My boss and mentor.  Brilliant.
3. Seth Godin’s blog – Every adult in the workforce should be reading this blog.
4. Chris Brogan’s blog - Fantastic social media insights.
5. Cracked – Hillarious.  Some of the funniest stuff out there.

Now some simple offline pleasures.

1. The smell of freshly cut grass.
2. Grilled cheese sandwitches with bacon and tomato.
3. Opening a brand new can of coffee.
4. Relaxing by the pond behind my parent’s house.
5. Playing music with my friends.
6. Watching movies in bed.
7. Finishing a good book.

And some of my favorite TV shows / Movies.

1. The Office –  A consistenly hillarious show.  Cudos to you Mr. Scott.
2. Arrested Development – Why they ever took that show off the air is beyond me.  Damn shame.
3. Boondock Saints - A fantasticly violent delight.
4. All of Wes Anderson’s movies – The Darjeeling Limited is my favorite followed by The Royal Tennebaums.  They’re all great though.
5. The original 90210 – I just can’t get enough of Dillon, Brandon, Brenda, Kelly, and of course David Silver.
6. High Fidelity - My favorite movie.  Jack Black and John Cusack’s best work.

My favorite books.

1. The Catcher in the Rye by JR Salinger – The original book about teenage angst.  
2. Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut –  One of my favorite authors.  I’ve read most of his books and this is my fav.
3. A Moveable Feast by Earnest Hemmingway – A gorgeous book from a bygone era.
4. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy – What can I say?  I was a history major and this book helped me understand why the world is the way it is.
5. All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin – This book was the paradigm shift that made me fall in love with marketing.
6. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby – The book that inspired my favorite movie.

Chris Baggot of Compendium Blogware wrote a post at Imedia Connection last month discussing some predictions for the next 12 months of corporate blogging.  One of his arguments was that you should only focus on search as a traffic source to your corporate blog.

When you consider the three main traffic sources to corporate blogs (direct navigation, referrals, and search), search is the only measure you should focus on because it’s the only one you can control and, more importantly, scale. You can’t increase the number of referrals or direct navigation; it either happens or it doesn’t. But on the other hand, when discussing search, if you want more organic traffic, you simply have to add more blogs targeted specifically to your keywords and write more content.

I found this interesting, because I’ve been using referral traffic as my primary measure of success for a while now and I’ve found that it is a much more active way to generate traffic to your blog or website and it causes the other two sources (direct traffic and search) to increase as a byproduct.  Here’s why…

• I set up my blog posts to feed to various social networks.  I engage with other users on these social networks.  I direct all traffic to my most recent blog post.  Sometimes just to get some additional data I’ll even use a url tracker/shortener like http://cli.gs so that I can get additional data about who is clicking through to my site.  I can use my analytics numbers to figure out which referral sources are paying off and which are not.  I can increase activity on a network if it’s generating significant traffic.
• This helps increase your search traffic.  Everyone says content is king for search when what they should be saying is Content was king last year!  Just like linkbuilding was king 3-4 years ago.  Search changes all the time!  Right now Google and Yahoo are giving more cred to sites that not only have lots of content, but also good content that actually means something to people.  How many people are searching for your company name?  How many blog comments are you getting?  These are all results of how active you are on the social web.  If you focus on referral traffic, your search numbers will naturally improve and you’ll build a heck of a lot of brand awareness which means more people will type your company name into the search bar.
• Direct traffic is the best kind.  Would you pay a bunch of money to get your listing in the phone book if your phone was already ringing?  Of course not!  That’s the goal right?  If you’re focused on broadening your footprint on the social web, you are increasing awareness of your site which means that more people will come to you directly if they are interested in what you’re saying.  Then you don’t have to work so hard to get traffic, but you have to do the leg work to get the thing going in the first place and doing it through search alone is a slow road.  Why not take an active role?

Bottom line… it’s a lot more interesting to generate your own site traffic than to wait for big results from just the search engines.  Building a network of referral links on the social web WILL help you win searches as well as get more direct traffic.  If you have three areas available to work on, why not work on the one that improves the other two?

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