Mastering Marketing Using the Internet

What could you do with 35 more hours a week?

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A column in the August 2010 issue of Smart Money magazine caught my eye because it talked about the number of American households that have stopped watching television. No television?! That’s downright un-American, isn’t it?

Now before you think the folks at Smart Money and I have lost our minds, we know that the number of people who have given up TV over the last few years is still very small compared to the number of overall Americans. According to the research by The Convergence Consulting Group, less than 1% (800,000) of U.S. viewers stopped watching television over the past two years.  However, they do expect this number to double by the end of 2011. (Those who are continuing to watch TV are watching more than they ever have before, somewhere around 35 hours, but I digress…)

Some people have canceled their cable or satellite subscriptions due to the ever-increasing cost. I feel that pain! I have no premium channels, a couple DVR boxes and high-speed internet and my bill is a ridiculous $175 a month! But other people are not just dropping paid tv services, they are selling their televisions and unplugging entirely.  The column mentioned that people are getting more involved with hobbies, traveling and improving themselves and their personal relationships. The benefits to saying yes to more enriching activities seem to be boundless.

What would you do if you had 35 more free hours each week? Do you know anyone who has quit watching television? If so, why? Have you reduced your TV-viewing time in favor of building yourself or working on a business? Let me know in the comment box below.

I hope you are planning a POWERFUL day!

Birthing Your Dreams, Silencing Your Inner Critic

I hope that if someone you don’t like, respect, or trust tells you a lie about yourself, you reject the lie and keep believing in your dreams. But what do you do when the person telling you the lie about yourself, is you?

Bringing a dream to life requires clarity, purpose and persistence. There are so many people, places and things that can and will discourage you if you let them. But I believe that the greater danger or risk to you birthing your dream is the enemy within. When something does not go as planned how do you respond? Do you look at the situation, determine what you can learn and keep pushing toward the original goal? Or do you give up and decide it was not worth the trouble? How long does it take you to ‘get over’ it? If you spoke to your friends the way you talk to yourself in time of doubt or discouragement would you have any friends?

There is a certain comic (who will remain nameless, because I don’t want you to know I’m one of his fans!) talks about the need for all of us to be our own biggest fan, our own ‘star player’. (Gave it away, didn’t  I?) I believe him. I don’t know who said it, but in Mary Kay circles I always heard, ‘If you believe you can, you can. If you believe you can’t, you’re right.” Denis Waitley says, “If you believe you can, you probably can. If you believe you won’t, you most assuredly won’t. “ Your belief in yourself, in your abilities, in your possibilities, in your destiny, is critical to staying as inspired as you must in order to see your goals come to pass.

Motivation is simple, listen to a great song, attend a high-energy meeting, read a feel-good article, hear  a story about someone else overcoming obstacles and you get motivated. Problem is, motivation is temporary. Why do I say that? Because you have to keep getting motivated over and over again. Inspiration, on the other hand, lasts a lifetime. In tomorrow’s post I am going to look at several ways that you can get inspired to see your dreams come true.

For today, can we agree that you will work on becoming as good a friend to yourself and your dreams as you are to others?

I hope you are planning a POWERFUL day!

Are Tweets really worth $25,000? Ask Ochocinco

NFL Fines Chad Ochocino for Tweeting during a game—Free Twitter Tools to schedule your tweets

The NFL just fined Social Media champ, Chad Ochocinco $25,000 for tweeting! Aw man! The league has an electronic communications blackout policy which prevents players from using electronic communications devices like cell phones and computers beginning 90 minutes before kick-off and lasting until the end of their games. While Chad quickly responded that the $25,000 fine was about two months worth of vehicle payments for him (in other words, so what), he could have avoided the fine by using any of the following free tools.

These tools allow you to schedule tweets and other social media status updates for a wide range of sites including Facebook, Ping.fm, LinkedIn and Twitter.  The more advanced services allow you to track your activity across several social media profiles as well as setting up tweets/updates in advance and scheduling them for delivery whenever you like.

Hootsuite (hootsuite.com) is my personal favorite. Hootsuite offers versions of their service that you can use via your desktop computer, ( using their free downloaded software), a web browser or smartphones like Blackberry and iPhone.  They have recently introduced a new ‘freemium’ model where some more advanced features are now available for a fee but the free service works just fine for me. This tool is my favorite because it offers a very broad range of social media sites for integration, is simple and easy to set-up and allows me to update ping.fm which takes care of all my other social media sites with one click. It also offers the ability to schedule updates for individual specific sites as well.

SocialOomph (socialoomph.com) offers many of the same services as the other tools but also has additional integration tools for Twitter. You can use this service to automatically follow everyone who follows you as well as sending an automatic direct messages to your new followers if you like. This is another mixed-model service with some additional functions available for a fee but you can certainly try the service for free first.

Two more limited services are LaterBro (laterbro.com) and CoTweet (cotweet.com).  LaterBro offers integration with Twitter and Facebook only but if you are only using those two social media sites, it might be worth a look.  CoTweet (cotweet.com) integrates with Twitter and Ping.fm only so you will need to schedule any other social media sites through ping.fm if you select this tool.

If you only want to schedule tweets you can try Future Tweets (futuretweets.com), Dynamic Tweets (dynamictweets.com) or Tweet-U-Later (tweetulater.com). While these three Twitter tools are very similar, Dynamic Tweets will let you create a file of future updates and upload them at one time.  And TweetULater will let you schedule Direct Messages in addition to tweets.

Do you use any of the social media automation tools? If so, which one is your favorite and why?

I hope you are planning a POWERFUL day!

How Big is Social Media

I saw a blog post recently on Nielsen.com that blew my mind. I loved the post because it gave the hard numbers to the fuzzy ‘social media is huge’ debate that has been going on for quite a while. According to The Nielsen Company research, ‘for the first time ever, social network or blog sites are visited by three quarters of global consumers who go online, after the numbers of people visiting these sites increased by 24% over the last year’. Wow. In addition, people now spend 1 of every 4.5 minutes online visiting/interacting with social media. Wow again.

Visit the post to see how much time the average person is spending on each of their identified social media sites. It’s no surprise that people spend the most time on Facebook but you may be surprised by some of the other ‘sticky’ sites. Then ask yourself if you can afford to ignore the reach of social media when you are thinking about marketing your own brand, products or services. If consumers are spending more time on social media than they are on television or radio, you might want to think about adding it into your marketing mix.

How do you add social media to your marketing plans if you have no idea where to begin? You might consider getting some help, social media managers are adept at helping you evaluate your current plans and developing a strategy for moving forward. But on your own you can still decide which tool makes the most sense for you based on where your audience is likely to be found. Then get really good at using that tool to ENGAGE and create relationships online. After you have that tool mastered, you can then consider picking up a second tool to duplicate those efforts. There will be future blog posts shortly addressing this issue.

What do you think? Do you believe the Nielsen study? Are you in the process of trying to add social media to your marketing plans? Feel free to comment and share this with others.

I hope you are planning a POWERFUL day!

Get Yourself a Bitsmith

I love the Harvard Business Review (HBR) Management Tip of the Day email newsletter, if you are not subscribing you should be; it’s free and I find many of the tips quite valuable. On July 8 the Tip of the Day introduced the concept of a “bitsmith” to me. The premise is basically that ‘to succeed at anything, you need to have the right tools for the job.’ Simple enough, right? It goes on to say that with the speed of technology, especially information technology, it is really difficult to keep up with all the advances in order to make sure that your current tools are the best tools for the job. The article goes on to suggest that people need to find someone who both understands the business goals and the available technology to create good solutions. They are calling that person a bitsmith.  Bitsmiths speed up implementation of solutions and provide much-needed input and ideas to your team.

While the rest of the blog post is about knowledge workers specifically, it made me think about the wave of social media managers cropping up now across industries. After a long (not that long) career in traditional marketing communications I became fascinated by the rising importance of digital communications and the change in communications channels. Fewer and fewer people are watching TV, listening to the radio, etc. while more and more people are getting their information from the internet. So the increasing importance of social media in marketing campaigns created a situation similar to the one described in the HBR article. The proper tools, methods, measurement and applications of social media are changing rapidly and in order to implement them quickly it’s likely that many companies will need to find a ‘bitsmith’ to help them get up-to-speed quickly and reach their business goals. Where should you begin?  Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? Whatever is coming next?

It is certainly possible to find a social media bitsmith within your company or to grow someone into one. There are, however, a growing number of individuals and organizations,, who prefer to outsource these functions to specialists who are qualified to work with their traditional marketing teams/plans. Here are some of the things you might want to look for in your social media bitsmith:

• Someone who is not just curious or interested but is passionate about online communications and making valuable connections.
• Someone who has invested in the training necessary to become skilled at creating social media campaigns that deliver results.
• Someone who is very good at using online tools and technology who can quickly size up all the tools available and recommend the best solutions for your specific needs.
• Someone with a system for getting the word done quickly and correctly.
• Someone with the time to devote to your social media efforts so that you can focus on other things.

I hope you are planning a POWERFUL day!

I’d love to hear your thoughts and feel free to share this using the links below.

Facebook now has 500 million users | How to become 500 million + 1

Facebook just announced that they have signed up their 500 millionth user.  That population is ‘larger than the United States, Mexico and France combined’.  Still think it’s a fad?  Even if you do not currently have a Facebook account (really?!) and are not really interested in opening an account, it’s hard to ignore a marketing tool with that kind of reach. Especially when it is free!

It is really remarkable that this social media site has grown this quickly in just six short years.  While it took about four years for Facebook to reach 100 million users, from 2004 to 2008, it has taken half that long to reach 500 million.  So it’s big and getting bigger. Have you noticed the increase in television or radio ads that encourage you to find or ‘like’ their company on Facebook?

So, if you are thinking, ok, enough already, let me at this Facebook thing, where do you begin?  I would give you this advice:

1. Decide whether or not you want your Facebook profile to be available to public searches.
2. Remember that anything you post online is going to be there for a very long time, and don’t post anything that you wouldn’t want your colleagues or family to see.
3. Start by building a personal profile and  go slowly.

Read more »

Who is using social media | Restaurants

Order up! I am starting a series of posts about ‘Who is Using Social Media’ by taking a look at restaurants at what some of the leaders are doing with social media.

The National Restaurant Association hosted a panel in May 2010 during which several speakers said they were using social media to ‘increase loyalty, enhance the reputation of their business, and increase the bottom line”.  How? By building relationships, engaging with customers, supplementing their traditional media efforts, and getting people talking/starting conversations. Sounds like what most people are doing with social media, so what specific things are restaurants doing? The activities run the gamut from bare minimum activity (creating a Facebook fan page) to more intensive integration (Pizza Hut created an iPhone application which they credit with over $1 million in sales).

One thing that some restaurants are doing to incorporate social media elements is modifying their websites to become more interactive sites that are updated regularly. While some eateries are starting blogs or incorporating blogs into their main sites, some are doing things as simple as updating their websites regularly with new and valuable content, i.e., a recipe of the week from one of their chefs. If web visitors can easily comment on the recipe, ask the chef questions about preparation and let their friends know they tried it and what their results were, you can see how a richer, deeper conversation can take place than someone simply visiting a website to view what amounts to an online brochure.

One restaurant in New York, 4food, is letting customers place orders using their iPads. The customers can even personalize their orders giving their items a name and posting them to Facebook or Twitter. If the customers place their orders at home, they can create commercials to post on YouTube. Ninja! 4food also has TV screens in their stores with connections to Foursquare to tie it all together. You can check out a recent story in the Wall Street Journal for more on the innovative marketing ideas being employed by this new restaurant chain.

Many eateries are creating Twitter accounts to encourage interaction with customers. I like the immediacy and ability to localize followers that Twitter provides. What do you suppose will happen if they tweet about a new line of menu items they are thinking about adding? Would that real-time feedback be helpful? What if they have a minor catastrophe, (their refrigerator goes on the blink or their distributor accidentally delivers double what they ordered) and they tweet about a special they are having on calamari (one of my fave foods) to keep the food from spoiling?

For any social media tactic to work you have to be willing to start a conversation with folks and not just start spamming people with your sales messages. If you leap into social media talking only about your deals, coupons, etc. people will turn you off. Answer questions, participate in conversations that interest you, establish relationships. Listen to what people are talking about, find out what they are interested in and then help meet the needs that you discover. And sometimes what they need is food! But if you are providing entertaining and valuable information 80% of the time and targeted promotions 20% of the time you are likely to get a better response.

What do you think? Let me know using the comment box below.

I hope you are planning a POWERFUL day!

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