Our Reluctance To Market Ourselves
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jan 7, 2012
I love social media. I love how there’s just so much going on and so much information being shared by so many people. I love sharing information myself, which is why Twitter is my favorite place to be, because you never know what someone will share there and there’s lots being shared.
 |
You know what I also notice? I notice that there’s not as many people actually sharing their own stuff. I’m guilty of that myself. I often believe that since my blog articles automatically post when they go live that I don’t have to do anything else to promote them, hence, I don’t have to do anything else to promote myself. Man, how wrong I am, and those who believe as I do are.
I first touched upon this question back in May 2008 when I asked the general question How Far Are You Willing To Go For Promotion. That was based on something a local guy did (he’s now retired) where he wore certain types of clothing and a gold badge everywhere he went to always be promoting himself, and I wondered if anyone else would ever have the guts to do that. Seems the answer was no.
Over the years I’ve asked a lot of questions about marketing. I once asked if we could stomach sales. I once asked if we hate marketing so much because of what we’ve seen others do. I’ve talked about reasons why we don’t trust salespeople, and thus don’t want to become them. I once even announced that I was about to step up marketing efforts; that didn’t last, if it ever came to fruition or not.
What turns out to be interesting is just how little most of us end up marketing ourselves. A funny story from last week is that I was talking to my buddy Beverly Mahone about writing something for her that would help promote both of us. I put it together and sent it to her, exactly what she asked for. The next day she called and said I didn’t write a bio; I said she hadn’t asked for one. She also said I didn’t add a title page and I said once again she hadn’t asked for one. In essence, what she was saying to me is how could she promote both of us if I hadn’t given her anything to promote myself. Now that’s a shame.
I tend to believe that many of us miss opportunities to promote ourselves, our blogs and webpages, and our blogs. If you ask me, I think a lot of people end up doing it wrong on social media when they go through social bookmarking sites like Visibli or BlogEngage before trying to push their content themselves first. Just asking, but how many of you have forgotten about pinging your blog posts?
None of us likes pushy; I think that’s fair to say. We don’t want to get hammered daily, sometimes even once a week, with a sales message to buy something. I was reading yesterday where Sharon Hurley Hall wrote that she was unsubscribing from a number of newsletters that no longer suited her purpose. Probably a lot of those newsletters were marketing something on too consistent of a basis; that’s why I’ve unsubscribed from so many.
But there are some truths. One, we all need more outlets to advertise or market ourselves and our wares, and we have to be willing to do it. If you can’t advertise in your own space every once in awhile, if not have something ready on a 24/7 basis, well, how fair is that?
I have some products on 4 of my blogs that anyone can buy if they so choose at any time; is it wrong for me to want to have the ability to make money here and there? To the right, by the picture of me and the bird, I have links to some of my other pages where I’m selling stuff; will people hate me for having the audacity to try to make money that way?
Let’s talk about blog posts, or articles. How many times to you promote your own articles and posts on Twitter, where there are literally millions of people saying stuff every day, we have at least hundreds if not thousands following us, and yet we all know that the same people on at 10AM are probably not always the same people on at 8PM, or even 2PM. Who says you can’t pop your own links out more than once?
If you have a Facebook page, are you taking advantage of it by sharing your content, or every once in awhile sharing a product of yours? What about your Google+ page? None of these things are aggressive enough for anyone to gripe. Now, if you’re doing it once an hour or more, yeah, that will get irritating pretty quickly. But here and there… do you really care if a few people begrudge your opportunity to make a living?
Quick story. I was telling Beverly that I knew a local TV news personality but felt strange talking to him about things I do because I felt it might be manipulative in some fashion. She said I should contact him because people in the news are always looking for experts in different fields. I figured I had nothing to lose so I sent him a private message on Twitter, telling him I do things with blogging and social media and could possibly offer an older point of view on these things. He wrote back thanking me for telling him because he hadn’t realized that I did this type of thing. Will it end up with me on TV? Who knows, but at least I’m now known by someone in a prominent position for this sort of thing.
Most of us have to be ready to talk about ourselves, share our links, sell our products, let people know we and those things exist. I’m just as bad so this is a joint project. Sometimes we can do it while we’re supporting others; do you think I didn’t feel I was getting some benefit when I was helping John Garrett market his book How To Deal With Stupid Clowns? What about when I helped Beverly market her book Don’t Ask, or my artist friend Isaac Bidwell market himself and some of his art? Anyone see how that kind of thing helps me and them at the same time?
We can get this done. We can double our efforts, which pretty much means if you’re not doing it already anything you do will be a major step forward. Even if you’re not trying to sell something, if you’d like more visitors to your blog, go ahead and put your link out there somewhere, in a space you have more control over, and get yourself known.
And I’ll try to do it as well. 
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Mitch Mitchell
Social Media Marketing Is Just Marketing
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 8, 2011
Last night I was at the top grocery store in my area and ran into someone that was at the conference I got to present at last week. We talked a little bit about some of the programs that were put on, and then we talked about his general opinion of the event.
 |
He mentioned that there was so much going on that he knew he’d be skipping some things here and there, like my presentation, because he wanted to take in as much as possible about things he didn’t know much about. He said that he talked to a lot of people who seemed confused at the end of the day, which I knew would happen because if you don’t know a lot about something going in and get inundated with lots of information there’s no way you can retain it all.
What he also said was that as he listened to a lot of the presentations he came to this conclusion; social media marketing shouldn’t be all that much different than traditional marketing, as it’s only a new platform and not a new way of marketing. His point was that the idea of marketing is to attract someone’s interest, get them to at least look at everything you have to offer, and then hopefully buy something before leaving. This takes research to figure out just what you have to offer a potential buyer and then figuring out how to make your message stand out to encourage that buyer to become a customer.
I couldn’t disagree with his general premise, yet I felt he was possibly missing the bigger picture. The reality is that social media marketing gives one the opportunity to branch out beyond their local area and reach a much larger audience in a lot shorter time. With the proper connections, I can talk about my latest project (which, by the way, is my editing a book of early newsletters from my primary business at the moment) and if I get the right audience to notice it the message can be seen by thousands is less than a day. Other than buying a commercial to show during a prime time TV event how many other ways are there to reach that many people? And the costs… forget about it!
Social media marketing also doesn’t have to be that direct to work. In the past I’ve mentioned that any major business not following their name or industry on Twitter is doing themselves a disservice because it’s not giving them the opportunity to either thank people that say nice things about them or correct something that a customer has complained about. These days it’s incumbent to address issues sooner than later because, though one can recover from bad press, it can be harder to do so. Just the other day I had someone comment on an old post of mine complaining about a particular affiliate that didn’t pay me; even when someone might think an issue is gone, online it’s never gone, especially if the company didn’t fix the issue (weasels; still never paid me).
Overall he’s correct; social media marketing is just marketing. But it’s also so much more, and anyone that doesn’t believe this will eventually run into the wall. On that day I hope they call me or someone else to help them get out of it, and then hope it’s not too late.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
This Week, I Cut Back Some
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jun 6, 2011
About six weeks ago I wrote a post talking about when people disappear. I wondered at what point people miss you, and then at what point it’s done and over and we’ve moved on with life.
 |
Not that this is necessarily an experiment to see who might miss me in some places but it’s more of an experiment to see what I will do with my extra time. For the next week I don’t plan on checking on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn to see what’s going on. The only time I’ll be on any of those sites is to respond to something if someone uses my name. I’ll know when that happens because all of them send emails when someone has said something directly to me.
Most of you don’t know this but Mitchell Allen and I have been working our way through this plan from a book called Get Clients Now by C. J. Hayden. Its basic purpose is to help you get clients, obviously. But it’s secondary purpose is to help you get things completed that have been on your list that will help you in some fashion. It also helps to do it with someone else to help keep you accountable, which is what we try to do for each other.
I’ve had a couple of things on my list for the past couple of months that I haven’t even started. I’m not sure that if I have more time to dedicate to it that I’ll get to either of them. But what I do know is that the marketing part is definitely something I need to do more of. I actually have gotten at least one new client over the past 3 months, so my efforts haven’t gone in vain. But I need to do more. This isn’t a vacation or a rest, but a re-dedication of work priorities, not including my blogs.
So, until Saturday at least, I’ll have my blog posts and be responding to people that post a comment here, but I’m not doing anything beyond that and what I’ve mentioned above. As for the blog posts, y’all know I write these things in advance, so that means I won’t be taking any time out to have to write anything new this week either, as it’ll already be written. I’ll either be working or relaxing some; I could use a bit of each.
That is, unless something big happens; please don’t let anything big happen. 
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Am I Using Twitter Wrong?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Apr 26, 2011
By now there’s no question that I enjoy being on Twitter. I’ve written about it enough and talked about it enough and even given tips on how to use it for business. There’s really a lot to Twitter that can work for us, even though I still say it’s probably not for everyone.
 |
However, I’ve been having this feeling lately that I’m not quite using Twitter properly. Of course some might say there’s no proper way of using Twitter and I may or may not disagree with that. After all, I’m the guy who wrote on the mix of sociability and business on Twitter as well as telling a story about the power of Twitter.
According to all the sources that give Twitter reports and the like, I’m considered an almost perfect user. I have the mix of being social as well as sharing information. Klout, which I’m still unsure about, lists me as a thought leader, saying I understand what my audience wants to hear. And according to Twitter itself I’m in 244 direct lists, which means that many people are actually looking to see what I have to say and want to participate with me. Out of around 2,800 followers, that’s somewhere around 5%; I’ll take that.
It’s the first point up there that I’ve been wondering about, however. Business and sociability. I know I’ve got the sociability part down, but the business part bothers me. I’ve started wondering just what type of business stuff am I doing that could either drive people to my websites or get people to communicate with me to possibly work with them.
What am I doing? Well, let’s see… Every blog post from all of my blogs shows up on Twitter; that’s a little bit of marketing. That might work for my business blog but it doesn’t do anything for any of the rest of my blogs. I talk about all types of concepts and stories on the other 3 blogs, but none necessarily help me hype any business I might do. Every once in awhile I post a link to a page on one of my websites highlighting a business process I can perform, but that’s really rare, as I’m not one of those people who’s popping out “me-me-me” every 5 minutes; ugh!
This leads to the question of how one can do a proper mix of sociability and business on Twitter using the same account, because some people get around this by creating two accounts. What happens with that for the most part is that people either forget which account they’re on when they communicate with someone or they end up posting everything twice because they remember and then switch to the other account because it might have different followers. I know some people that have 4 or 5 Twitter accounts; I figure I’m schizophrenic enough having 4 blogs.
Probably the best thing I could do for business would be to follow certain hashtags, as I talked about when I wrote on Twitter chats. It’s the major recommendation for large businesses, that they follow not only their business name but whatever their industry happens to be to see what people are talking about.
I don’t follow any hashtags consistently, but have mainly stuck to seeing what’s going on in my community unless there’s something big going on in the world. I need to think about which 3 hashtags I should be checking on a more consistent basis that makes sense.
For instance, it would make no sense following the term “writing” because that can be used so many ways that it would become a major mess. I could follow the term “blogging”, though, not necessarily because it would lead to business but because it’s a topic that would be easier to follow and would lead to a lot of blogs that write on the subject, giving me more opportunities to spread my influence.
Just to mention this, I have gotten work that came directly from Twitter. There was one person I was consistently writing for last year, and I got a minor speaking engagement, locally so it was free, from it as well. I’ve also been interviewed many times by my friend Beverly because of our Twitter conversations. So I’m not totally deficient; I just feel I can step it up.
If you’re of a mood to be using Twitter for business in any fashion, what do you think of my beliefs in the process of hashtags? Are you doing something different, or are you even trying to use Twitter for business in any fashion?
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
Why It’s Hard To Trust People
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Apr 17, 2011
On this blog and my business blog, I talk about the subject of “trust” often. It seems that I’ve referenced the word 118 times on this blog, 136 on my other blog. Specific blog topics on the two blogs have ranged from my asking What Does It Take To Obtain Trust, talking about When Trust Is Violated, Figuring Out Who You Can Trust, and one article I wrote where I first announced that the three main virtues I judge every person I meet by are loyalty, trustworthiness and honesty.
 via Imagekind |
In this particular case I’m going to revisit a subject I brought up in a post I wrote here back in January titled Why We Don’t Trust Sales People. The quick update is that this guy representing a store we go to often (didn’t work at the store, but the store, BJ’s Warehouse, contracted with these people to offer something special to their customers), sold us a picture window for our living room that, in my opinion, wasn’t giving what he’d said it would give us. Then, 10 days later when he came by to inspect it, I told him I wasn’t sure it was doing what he said it would, to which he replied 12 million people can’t be wrong.
First, the update. The window looks good; I’ll give that to everyone. My wife says she thinks it’s stopped all the leaking we had; I still have grave doubts about that. Maybe air isn’t getting in but the window still gets cold right now, which means it radiates cool air into the house. We had one very weird day last week when the temperature suddenly shot up to 85, breaking a record, before falling back into the 50′s the next day, and on that day the living room was really hot; the new window was supposed to stop that as well.
Then there was this thing about a rebate we were supposed to be getting back. This guy told my wife that she’d be getting a check. Then he told her it would come back through her taxes. I told her it wouldn’t come back through her taxes because one, we’re still paying on some back taxes anything that came would be absorbed into it, and two, he said it would be $900 and I said there’s no way that much would show up. I suggested to her that she tell him she wanted a check from the company, since that’s what he initially told her.
On that day she told him that, and supposedly he went to make a phone call and told her that a check would be coming within a couple of weeks. Fast forward to now. Not only did she never get a check from the company but she could never get this guy to call back from the few times she tried to reach him after that. And when taxes were done, not only did the amount end up being less than half of what he’d stated but I was right, it immediately went to our back taxes. She felt demoralized, and I didn’t feel vindicated in being correct; to me, it really wasn’t a win in any scenario.
Why is it hard to trust people? Because of things like this, where someone sells you a bill of goods that you might not know how to check up front and then end up with something that didn’t give you what was promised later on. Why do many of us have our Spidey senses up all the time? Because we have this fear of being scammed by someone else and none of us wants to be made to feel like a fool.
 via Imagekind |
In my mind, one of the best things about blogging is that it gives you an opportunity to try to build people’s trust in you. By being open and honest over the course of time, your hope is that people will come to respect you, and thus if you have something you want to market or a service you provide, people will look your way because you’ve established yourself and shown people what you’re all about. You’re now one of the most trusted authorities because of your social media presence, right?
Unfortunately, not even close. As I touched upon in my recent post asking if anyone’s listening to you on Twitter, the only people that might trust you are those people who know about you, and in the scheme of things, for most of us it’s not that many people. For someone like me as a for instance, blog is ranked well, over 1,000 posts, put myself out there for the world to see, but with under 200 RSS subscribers and a relatively small cadre of blog comments on a consistent basis what would make someone who’s not a consistent visitor here decide to trust me? For that matter, think about your own circumstance; what do you think could compel people to trust you?
I thought about this a little bit when there was a brief tet-a-tet going on at Tristan’s blog based on a guest post with a title that was, well, kind of inflammatory. Now, the post turned out to be kind of inflammatory as well, but it turns out that the post author hadn’t initially wanted to use that as the title. The title in the end was exactly what the post was about, so it hit it on the nail, but in my mind it brought up this thing about trust once again. I mean, Tristan had to trust the guy to write a post that he thought would be good. The guy had to trust Tristan that the title would be good. In the end I’m not sure that both guys got exactly what they wanted, but each guy got something out of it. But do they specifically trust each other anymore?
Frankly, as I commented there, I’d have never written the post to begin with and certainly didn’t like the implication of the post, but at the same time I’m not sure I would have wanted someone to rewrite my topic line either. I wrote a post on one of my other blogs called I Hate Syracuse.com, where I lamented the comments that newspapers and news sources online allow these days. I then had a long conversation with someone from that website who said he didn’t like the title or the implication, though he agreed with me in principle as to why they allow what they do. I said my title was no different than what newspapers have done for years and he said it was in their best interest to get people to the story, but mine seemed misleading since I didn’t actually hate the entire site. I was thinking that was “pot calling kettle black”, and then thought about the trust issue overall once more. I stuck with my title, as you can see, and they’ve stuck with the trash comments they allow.
Why is it hard to trust people? Probably because we don’t always trust ourselves to make the right decisions either. At least that’s my thought on things, as I think about all the people we’ve allowed into our home over the last 10 years that have given us a bill of goods that haven’t panned out. But maybe I’m being a bit cynical on this Sunday morning; not sure. But if anyone has a different viewpoint on it all, I’d love to hear it. And while you’re at it, if you’ve been coming to this blog for awhile I’d like to know if you trust what I’ve said in the past and why; if not, I’d like to know that as well. And we’ll still be friends afterwards; trust me.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
I'm Just Sharing is where I share my thoughts on internet marketing, writing, blogging and many other things. You never know what I'll be posting on. So keep coming back, read, enjoy, and buy something! ;)
