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Social Media Overwhelm?

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Mar 12, 2011

A few days ago I was once again the radio guest of our friend Beverly. We talked about the subject of social media overwhelm, as well as social media in general, and it was pretty neat. If you wish, you can listen to the interview through this download. Oh yeah, while I’m at it, I was also interviewed by Karen of Blazing Minds for her blog, so you can check that out as well.

Overall the topic is an interesting one because obviously I do believe some people suffer from this, even people who haven’t started using it yet. It was just under two months ago when I wrote the post titled Social Media Isn’t For Everyone after all. In that post I was talking about the reality that if you don’t have the time or if something can’t help you out if you’re only using it for business purposes don’t even get started.

However, the topic of overwhelm is something different entirely. With the exception of LinkedIn I have gotten obsessed for at least a short time with most of the social media sites I’ve participated on. I was initially obsessed with Twitter, even though I didn’t write all that often, because it was just amazing seeing all those messages and seeing all the information that seemed to be available. I was initially obsessed with Facebook because of all the games and the groups. I was initially obsessed with Ryze for the groups. And I was obsessed with YouTube because, well, all those videos, not only music but the goofy stuff people put up.

At a certain point one calms down and gets back to business; at least we hope so. True, I haven’t given up on blogging, but I have that as more of a purpose thing than an obsession. I do think that the major appeal to Facebook has to do with all the games that people can play, because overall I still don’t think Facebook is all that social. Twitter is much more social if you connect with the right people. I talk to people all the time there, sometimes for upwards of an hour or more, though it’s usually late night. I haven’t had chats like that since the old days of ICQ; who remembers that?

If you start feeling overwhelmed with social media, take a step back, take a deep breath, and try to think of what you feel your needs really are. If you like playing the games, go for it. If you feel the need to be, well, needed, whether it seems that you are or not, that’s something you now have to deal with. If you’re using it to get lost from the real world and find it hard to leave, that’s an even bigger issue to deal with. And if you feel overwhelmed but have never done anything with it… well, just remember these words from President Franklin Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Social Media | 17 Comments

Don’t Mix All Your Social Media Stuff

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jan 29, 2011

Last week I wrote a post saying that social media isn’t for everyone. Well, some folks have found their way into the social media world and have gone gangbusters with it. This is both good and bad; I’m here to talk about some of the bad.

Without a doubt, the big 3 of social media right now are Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Depending on your business, embracing one of those 3 will definitely help you get a lot of visibility. Some folks new to social media, yet very enthusiastic about it at the same time, have gotten into all 3 and are really feeling it.

However, there are some downsides of it for the rest of us. Here are a few things that I believe we don’t want to encourage all that often.

1. Don’t put all your tweets on your Facebook page, and almost none of them on your LinkedIn page. I’m not going to lie; I cringe when I see all those Twitter messages showing up in my stream on Facebook at the same time. Not like there isn’t enough to go through already, right? Especially from people who tweet a lot; it just becomes overwhelming. Some tweets definitely work in both places.

The same can’t be said for LinkedIn. LinkedIn is business networking; it needs to be held to a different standard. There’s nothing saying that something you posted on Twitter might not be legitimate to post on LinkedIn as well. It’s just that the way the message is delivered needs to be different. After all, Twitter is set up for very short messages; how do you convey yourself as a business professional on LinkedIn if you’re trying to do that same type of thing?

2. Be relatively discreet if you’re going to try to drive people to one of your other social media areas. Don’t keep putting a message out on LinkedIn to join your Facebook page; it totally takes away from attracting people to just join you on LinkedIn. The same goes for Twitter. It doesn’t hurt to mention here and there that you have a Facebook business page or a LinkedIn account, but doing it over and over diminishes the business aspects of each.

3. Be really discreet in whom you’re inviting to your Facebook account. Let’s face this fact; almost no one only has business messages showing up in their Facebook stream. Unless you block your wall entirely, which one of my Facebook friends has, you’re going to end up having messages show up that you might not want everyone you’re courting for business to see. As you notice on this blog, I have that Facebook badge directing people to my business page on that site. I don’t have anyone going to my main page, although they may end up there eventually.

4. Remember that you’re presenting yourself differently in each media. Your LinkedIn profile should be different than your Facebook business profile, and certainly much different than how you present yourself on Twitter.

Your LinkedIn profile should read more like a resume of sorts. You want to highlight things you’ve done as well as your business. The idea is to get people to contact you for business, pure and simple.

Your Facebook business page, if you have one, will only talk about the business or businesses you presently have and nothing else. You will pop information in there to help lend credence to your authority and hopefully try to get people engaged. LinkedIn isn’t great for engagement unless you join a separate group of some kind.

Twitter, for a business sense, is where you get to show some personality while highlighting some business issues, specials, etc. Done properly, you’ll show a nice mix of engagement and information, and hopefully people will pick up on it and then visit you in some capacity.

In all 3 cases, they need to be “you”, or a representation of your business, yet you should set about presenting yourself differently to fit the medium.

By the way, I will say there’s one thing where you should be linking the 3 in some fashion. If you write a blog, you need to find a way to make sure your blog posts show up on all 3 sites somewhere. That’s not quite linking these 3 as much as linking to all 3, but I wanted to get it out there because I think this is an important way to drive traffic to your business.

And there you go; my thoughts on it at least. How are you using these social media outlets, and are you trying to be different, or just pumping information out to see what catches on?

Social Media | 34 Comments

Social Media Isn’t For Everyone

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jan 18, 2011

Last week I was having an interesting conversation with someone who’d been sent my way to talk about social media. She was trying to learn new ways of promoting her business and she wanted to do it via social media. When I asked her why she stated “my friend said I have to be on social media to actually get any business.”

The Social Butterfly
by Ric Nagualero

Strangely enough, this isn’t the first time I’ve had someone say this to me. I keep talking to people who I could potentially be making some money from asking me to help them spread the word through social media circles. Many of them know the names of the outlets, yet have no real idea why they should be on them, let alone how to use them.

Back to the conversation the other day. I asked this person what she was already on. She said she was on all of them, but hadn’t done anything with any of them other than create an account. She hadn’t filled out any of her business information on LinkedIn; she had never sent a single tweet; she had created a Facebook page but set it up as a private site, with no one linked to it yet; and she’d had her Blogspot blog turned into a website, yet all her posts weren’t hers, thereby linking everyone away from her site.

In other words, kind of a mess of sorts, I hate to say. Yet she wanted, needed, to be in social media. I asked her why again. She said because she wanted to have an outlet where she could advertise her services, or talk about seminars and webinars she was going to put in through her company. In essence, for advertising purposes; nothing wrong with that.

I asked her what kind of time she had to devote to any of it, and she said almost none. I asked her what kind of money she was willing to spend towards it and she said very little because she was just getting her business up off the ground. She said that’s why she wanted me to help her, but to offer her ideas that wouldn’t cost her a lot of money because she had to get it done.

Here’s the thing. Social media is obviously the wave of the future, but it’s still not for everyone. Or at the very least, all of it isn’t for everyone. It’s kind of like Mitchell Allen’s post You Suck At Marketing, when he talks about people who buy all these books and programs that purport to teach them how to market online, yet either don’t put anything into practice or don’t even take the time to read them. Just knowing some big time names won’t make you a dime; putting something into action will. And not everything you read from everyone; you have to try something first, then if it doesn’t work move on. Even then, you have to be willing to give things time to develop or not without changing them too much.

Two weeks ago I wrote a post on work/life balance. Well, there also has to be a work/work balance. No one gets anything without a little effort. If you don’t have the time to devote even 5 minutes a day to a social media pursuit, it’s not for you. If you don’t have 30 minutes a week to devote to writing posts for your own blog, it’s not for you. That is, unless you can pay someone to do it all for you, and even with that, you’re still going to have to contribute in some fashion.

If it’s not for you, don’t feel left out. The fact that you at least know about it puts you ahead of a lot of people. Your time may come; don’t push it too much for now if you’re not ready for it.

Social Media | 26 Comments

Social Media Marketing Won’t Work If…

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Sep 3, 2010

I’ve talked a lot lately about social media marketing and influence. Overall, comments have been positive, but fairly minimal. Not that I’m searching for big numbers of responses to the topics (okay, I am) so much as thinking that, as we move into a new age, this should be a pretty big topic for a lot of people to be both thinking about and talking about.

What occurred to me yesterday is that the topic is out there, but not really all that big to the group that I’m marketing to the most. That group are people between the ages of 35 to 65, people with established businesses who I thought might be ready to learn more about how to market to people. What I’m realizing is that there is a definite generational difference between the people I’m marketing to and the people who literally already get it. I’m marketing to a group that’s missing it, that can’t see why they’d even want to get started, let alone want to learn it.

I actually understand this. I’m the same way in other areas. On Wednesday a group called Lady Antebellum was in town, and I had, and still have, absolutely no idea who they are. Justin Bieber was also in town; him I’ve heard of, but I couldn’t tell you a single song. Without having kids, I haven’t tried to keep up with the pop music scene, and thus I hear songs that for the most part I don’t like and names that mean nothing to me. Out of the names listed for the next reincarnation of Dancing With the Stars I had to look up 6 of them to see who they were; these are stars?

I get it; we concentrate on what interests us at all times, and even if something might be in our best interest for our business, if we can’t fully embrace it then we feel we don’t need it. So I decided to list 5 things that indicates why social media marketing won’t work for you.

1. You don’t have time. I keep hearing this one over and over, and frankly, it’s both a valid concern and nonsense at the same time. It’s hard for people to squeeze more things into their schedule if it’s booked tight and you’re working all the time. The reality is that no one is booked all the time and no one is working all the time. We all waste time during our workday; if we didn’t, we’d go crazy. My belief is that even if all you decide to do is 15 minutes a week, just to establish a presence somewhere, you do yourself a world of good. If you could find an hour a week you could write a blog post, maybe post a link on a Facebook business page, do an update on your LinkedIn page, respond to one group post on Linkedin, and send out a link or message on Twitter regarding a business, a retweet, whatever. When you have more time, do more; just do something.

2. You don’t have the money. How much money does it cost to do social media marketing? Depending on what you do, nothing or just a little bit; way less than any other type of marketing you might do. Twitter; free. Facebook; free. LinkedIn; free. Email; could be free, and with an autoresponder less than $200 a year. YouTube; free. Blog; free, or if you pay someone to write it then that could get pricey depending on how much you want written.

3. You don’t understand it. Most of the time when people say this, it means they haven’t even looked at it. If you sign up for LinkedIn, it pretty much tells you what you need to do step by step. There might be some intricacies for real business benefits, but in general, you’re done. Same with Facebook; probably the day you sign up you’re going to have invitations already there from people who’ve been wondering where you’ve been. YouTube isn’t as easy, and though Twitter seems pretty easy, I could see where someone could get confused early on. But I run into almost no one (had to add the “almost”) who’s signed up for a Twitter account and says “I just don’t know what to do” without meaning “I don’t have time”.

4. You don’t even try. Michael Jordan says he’s never made a shot he didn’t take. Whereas many people have thrown up a website, they haven’t taken the time to determine whether it represents them well or not. “Close” doesn’t get it done when you’re hoping to get business from someone that’s thinking about paying you thousands of dollars and your website looks cheap. “Close” doesn’t get it done when you’ve written one blog post in a year. “Close” doesn’t get it done if you create a Facebook business page and done absolutely nothing with it. As with anything else, you have to at least take some kind of consistent action, even if it’s once every two weeks, otherwise it’s best not to even start.

5. You’re not social. And there’s that word again, “social”. Social says you interact with someone instead of “at” them. Social says you respond to comments or email here and there. Social doesn’t say you have to tell everything about yourself, or deal with people who upset you or irritate you in some fashion. It does mean you have to be ready to participate in whatever you start, and it can’t only be about you. And trust me, on Twitter, if all you’re doing is putting out links and retweeting people all the time, it’s viewed as you being all about you.

I can’t remember if I’ve written stuff like this before, but I’ve certainly brought it up in workshops, and I plan on always bringing it up whenever I have the opportunity to talk about it. No one has to do it all; but if you want it to have the chance to work, you still have to do it.

Marketing, Social Media | 21 Comments

Do I Know Social Media Marketing?

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Aug 10, 2010

You know, often we think we know something but we’re never really sure. I did that workshop on social media marketing in July, and I have another one in 9 days. Still, I acknowledge that I have a shortcoming or two.

photo by birgerking

Actually, my main shortcoming is that I don’t know about all the technologies that are out there. For instance, there’s probably 50 different applications that can access Twitter, yet I found one that I liked and I’ve stuck with that one. There are many websites that one can sign up for that can access all your social media accounts, but that type of thing isn’t quite my style so I haven’t kept up with them. In other words, some of my technological knowledge is lacking.

Last Tuesday I found myself at a business meeting with an organization that I’m putting together a website for. Actually, it wasn’t quite confirmed that I was doing it, but I went to the meeting thinking that we were going to be talking about something else. Instead, the website and I turned out to be the topic of the entire meeting, especially talking about social media marketing. For 90 minutes I held court, giving advice and answering every question that came my way, and finally the guy who’d invited me told everyone there that they had just gotten a large amount of free advice that I could probably have charged big bucks for. One other guy there said that I had given him more information in 90 minutes than he’d been able to learn in 3 years. I also got some other platitudes later on; I just wish businesses realized that not everyone drinks coffee, so I need to remember to bring my own drinks.

So what did I tell them? Wouldn’t you like to know? lol I’ll give away a couple of things. One, I told them that trying to do a social media marketing plan takes time, no matter what type of plan they go for, and as a consortium of independent business people, they were going to have to agree on a plan and who would be doing what.

I talked to them about blogging and how it’s kind of a community, but that there are many ways to build your community. In their model, they’ll be sending out a once a month newsletter and a once a week email, so they can put links to blog posts there. I also told them how they could post their own article via the “pages” option within the blog, and that I would take that link and add it to their articles page. The blog will be put into a subdomain on their website. I recommended at least one post a week, and when asked what would happen if all of them wrote articles on the same day, not only did I say I didn’t see it happening, but that when they went to write actual blog posts that they’d see the previous blog articles with date and time, and could postdate articles so they’d post at another time.

And of course we talked about LinkedIn, Twitter, webinars, forums, etc. I don’t see them doing much of any of these things, but one never knows. Meanwhile, I felt good about myself as I left; it seems that I do know some of this stuff, and I’m happy about that.