Recently in social network Category

I'm in Atlanta at the Microcorp event to moderate a round table for agents centered around sales and marketing. The title is Personal Branding. How do you promote your personal brand? 

When selling replacement commodity items, your brand may not be that important. However, when using the Consultative Sales approach or looking for the sweet spot in the role of Trusted Advisor, it is about your knowledge, skills, and reputation. In a nutshell, that is your brand.

A brand is the 1K of space in a prospect's memory that contains everything they know or fell about you or your company or your service. In many cases, that 1K is empty because they have no idea who you are. (What would they find if they Googled you?)

Your brand online is a summation of what the search engines contain about you (or your company). 

There are many places today to build a brand online: your website, blog, LinkedIn, Facebook, Squidoo, Twitter, Slideshare, YouTube and a host of other platforms. You see, before you had to take out an ad or a billboard; today, that ad or billboard can be online in the 21st century printing press of the Web and its publishing platforms (social networks). The whole revolution that we see online today is due to tools, software platforms, and user interfaces that created what is referred to as Web 2.0. Web 2.0 allowed for User Generated Content (UGC) by making it very easy for a consumer to add content / comments / thoughts to various websites, like TripAdvisor, Amazon, BizRate and others. 

That was the genius of Web 2.0. Social networks just took that a step further. But all of this means that it is easy for people to comment on your service or business. It's also easy for you to tell your story. 

Personal Branding starts with you telling your target audience the story of what you can do for them. How can you help their business get productive or efficient? How can you help them communicate to their customer better? Tell those stories. And you have a host of platforms to tell them on. Get started!

Later this week I will be in Atlanta for a FISPA meeting. One of the sessions I am presenting is Social Media in a Nutshell. This follows my Marketing in a Nutshell session.

The slides are here for your pleasure.

If your model is free, how do you pay the bills? How do you pay for the infrastructure - the servers, switches, collocation, bandwidth, labor, etc.? How do you pay developers and engineers to scale it and keep it up?

Twitter is still free and so is Facebook. Popular too. But both have issues with keeping it running. 

The funny part is that the longer it is free, the harder it will be to charge for it. 

The only app I can think of that transitioned to paid was Google Apps and Gmail for Business.

Recently, a Twitter app for Blackberry, UberTwitter, (that is free) decided to try ads with its update. OOPS! (Read it here). Was it the way the ads were presented ( with no lead up or announcement)? Or is it the Entlitlement mentality of most Internet users? 

There's a group on Facebook literally with the name We Won't pay for FB. I was told recently that FB's revenue is about $550M. How? There aren't that many ads running. And how much do you think it costs to keep Facebook and its CDN running? I would image over $1 million per month for bandwidth, gear, salaries, collocation, and the like. 

Advertising doesn't even bring in that much. The online advertising spend is much less than what marketers pay offline (like for print or billboards). So how will all these free apps survive?

Last night was the WITI Tampa meeting with two social media experts - IBM's VP Sandy Carter and Tampa Bay's own Shawna Vercher.  

Sandy walked the audience through some social media lessons, including some homework on your Brand 2.0: Post 2 presentations to SlideShare; join LinkedIn and Facebook and connect with 50 people; and join twitter and tweet. Your brand is about experience, connection, promise and interaction. Social media helps you to give your audience (or marketplace) that. It can't replace face-to-face, but, as Shawna put it, it's a nice placeholder for you until you see them again. It's a way to stay top of mind. It's all about what you want your brand to be - offline and online. 

Other ways to utilize social networks to boost your brand are becoming an expert on LinkedIn Answers; creating how-to videos on YouTube; and increasing your search engine results with tagged video and photos (especially with a Flickr account).

The one thing about social media that many brands haven't gotten is that social media is like dating. It should be treated just like face-to-face networking. People say stuff on Facebook and Twitter that they would never say in person. 

If you met Guy Kawasaki in person and all he did was talk non-stop about his Alltop project, wouldn't you walk away? 

If you met a blogger and all they did was discuss their blog posts, number of readers, famous people who commented, etc., would you want to run into that person again?

Then don't be that way on Twitter or Facebook. 

Shawna talked tactically about ways to use these technology platforms to gain business. It's a way to reach out to your audience and let them get to know you before you do business together.  To do that well, you need to have a social media plan.  What is Your Goal? How much time will you put into it? What will you say? Who are you talking to? Shawna recommends that "You map out your sales cycle."

Ideally, you want to give the preception that you are the best or an expert in your field. To do that well, you would ideally announce (whether on LI, FB, or twitter) about your speaking gigs, industry news, client proposals, worthy works, congratulate people, case studies, etc. It doesn't have to be about what you had for breakfast or what your cat did.

Remember that social media is the virtual date. Shawna says that Facebook is like meeting for a cup of coffee and Twitter is that blind date. Either way: dress appropriately and act accordingly. It's about interesting conversation first and foremost. You can't engage by puking marketing material on them or being all Me-Me-Me. Again would you do that in a face-to-face encounter?

Lastly, this stuff is permanent! It's like herpes, your digital history will last forever.

HyperOffice is holding a webinar about Email and Productivity. It follows up on the LinkedIn Poll that Shahab Kaviani, VP of Marketing at Hyperoffice, held last week on reducing your Inbox with Online Collaboration.

This is of interest to me because I get so much email, including listserv messages and social networking notifications. There is so much noise to filter through - Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, email, IM/chat, voicemail, and text messages - it is becoming overwhelming.

There are days that it takes 6 hours to shuffle through all this communication. I think this hyper-connectivity is a bad thing. Notice how people in a restaurant or a bar spend more time on their phones than actually talking / interacting with the people right in front of them?

Crackberry was a joke, but it turned out that it is very difficult for people to unplug. I successfully did that for a couple of hours each day this weekend, but then right back online to see what I missed. It's nuts. I'm going to start a 12-step program.

Are you overloaded with email / communications? Is email bankrupt? (After getting 500+ spam messages this morning, I think the answer is obvious, except that email is primary communications tool).

Obviously, there are tools that can be used to make business communications more efficient, but some that I have tried slow down Outlook so much or eat up so much memory the laptop slows down that I had to delete them. Suggestions are welcome.

1. Are you overwhelmed?
2. Can you un-plug?
3. Do you un-plug?

A productivity consultant I know, Matthew Cornell, says that he has a zero inbox. I can't even envision that because some projects, like a fiber build, can result in over 400 emails. I leave them all in the inbox until the project is finished, so I can search in one spot. That's probably not the best way, but I also go through both my sent folder and my inbox monthly to make sure that I have contacted people regularly.  Again, I would be happy to hear of a better way.

Do you know what twitter is? It's the text messaging to the masses application platform. Officially, I think it is described as a micro-blogging social networking platform, but huh? The idea with twitter is to update a group of folks about what is of interest to you.

I'm on twitter and so are many TMC folks, like Rich, Tom, and sales guy extraordinaire Anthony; so is the TMC news service.

There are some telcos on twitter like Embarq, CenturyTel, and Windstream. The two companies merging do nothing with there account; it's a place holder. Windstream however just started up and they are doing a good job of it as far as I can tell. It's about interaction and they are being interactive with their customers, which is the example set by companies like JetBlue and Zappos.

The cable company with a bad service reputation took to twitter months ago and has been winning back it scustomers One at a time. That's right, Comcast is doing it the old fashion way, reaching out to help customers one at a time.

TWCable has an account with protected updates. Bright House Networks has one employee who is just underway.

In the VoIP world, there are plenty of folks on twitter, including Dan York from Voxeo, Garrett Smith of VoIP Supply and FreedomVoice. Actually there are too many to mention in VoIP.

Is your company interacting with its clients and target marketplace? Take twitter out for a test drive -- or watch what other folks are doing and copy it.

So social media expert, Chris Brogan, blogs about Michael Goodspeed being wronged by YouTube. Since Google owns YouTube, this is the beginning of Google becomes the Evil Empire.  I've been watching this happen for a while. When GrandCentral was upgrading to Googel Voice in waves it was a bitchfest on Twitter because people had to wait. *gasp*. They had to wait like 10 days to get access to an upgrade to a free service. WTH?

I just don't understand the issue with entitlement in this world.

It's like the people who have sued Google when Google makes changes to its algorithms, causing their business to fall off. Or when Google started charging for Google Apps and Gmail for businesses. People were not  happy. (What will they do when Google Voice comes off Beta and has a price tag? Voice has a cost).

I now understand why businesses fail: lack of common sense; lack of business sense; no knowledge of business or contract law; and entitlement.

Google, YouTube, Flickr, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Twitter, and Facebook are free to use. If your account gets deleted like Goodspeed's did, it is a bad day. You have back ups, right? But is Google evil because the account was deleted? I don't think so.

If you base your business on a free software platform and that company changes something, you better have plan B. What if the government decides to take ARPANet back for government use only? Or Net Neutrality policy fails so that you only get content form your ISP?  No more INternet as we no it. What then? You better have a Plan B.

I understand that Goodspeed is upset his account was suspended, but it happened on Thursday, March 26th. It's only the 31st. Google isn't set up for customer support to consumers on its free services.

And he forewarned people that this could happen. How did he know?

When twitter is slow, people complain all day. There's a Facebook group titled I will not pay to use Facebook - Keep it free. I just don't understand the mentality. It costs big dollars to provide these platforms and keep them running. And to do it for free is unheard of until the Internet came along. It's the Generation of Entitlement - and it is annoying. No one owes you anything.

IBM

Image via Wikipedia

has a study out about how Social networking has co-opted many minutes of traditional talking.

 

People are communicating more things to more people than ever before, and not just by phone anymore. Internet-enabled communication models are gaining audience, attention and market share at the expense of traditional telecommunication providers (Telcos). Can Telcos fight back and find new growth opportunities in this rapidly changing ecosystem? The challenge is not just in understanding the technology, but also the unfolding fundamental shifts in human communication behavior.

Facebook, SMS, twitter, LinkedIn, Ning, YouTube, Ustream, and all the rest of the social media strata are where people are communicating. IM/chat like Skype, Google Talk, Yahoo, and MSN also have taken some minutes out of the system.

If you look at usage of cell phone minutes on the youth, you will see very little talking but lots of texting and web access. (Maybe charging per minute caused that). The primary communication method is social networks not telephony.

Telcos are losing landlines, mainly to cellular replacement. Certainly, cableco bundles have taken some landlines, but studies show that in this economic mess folks choose the mobile phone over a static line. Add in the fact that the next generation doesn't eat up minutes means that long distance revenue will be dipping as well as landline counts.
 

This presents a problem for telcos because the content folks don't want to share the revenue, which in many cases they don't have. Twitter, Facebook and Hulu are all having a challenging time monetizing a rapidly growing platform.

People are communicating in new ways -- and none of these innovations came to you from Ma or Pa Bell. Surprised? I'm not.

If there was ever a demonstration of how a government could use Web 2.0 (user generated content), it has to be the Obama group. Here's 10 Online tools that the Obama Administration is using to connect to the People.  I can see why he wants to keep his Blackberry.

On Twitter this morning, someone asked about the Cluetrain Manifesto. (I had to look at Wikipedia to remember what the main points were). The Internet will change every business.  "The authors assert that the Internet is unlike the ordinary media used in mass marketing as it enables people to have "human to human" conversations, which have the potential to transform traditional business practices radically."  We see that happening in quite a few verticals. It has changed the newspaper, music, entertainment, retail shopping, and telecom industries. It will likely change even more.

"The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery."  Certainly, this quote applies to 3 Detroit CEO's.