Category Archives: Social Media

Social Media

Protecting Your Social Media Presence By Not Being Stupid

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Who remembers the name Anthony Weiner? In 2011 he was an up and coming democratic senator from New York who had given a wild and woolly speech at a fundraiser for President Obama and he was being touted by national news sources as the next big political star. He was married to a woman who was Hillary Clinton’s second in command when she was secretary of state, they were young and relatively photogenic, and he was on top of the world.

Day 23 - Addicted
nataliej via Compfight

A few months later he was notorious for being stupid by being found putting nude photos of himself out to young women (insert your own joke here) and hitting on them on Twitter and a few other online places, and of course someone knew who he was and outed him. Career gone, late night jokes aplenty, with a pregnant wife who, luckily, was able to hold onto her job because it turns out she’s good at it. And he couldn’t stop himself, getting into more trouble while trying to run for mayor of New York City.

There are many people who are scared of being on social media because they’re afraid that people are going to find out things about them that they’d rather not be known. It’s true, social media can be a frightening place when it comes to your privacy. It doesn’t even have to be you violating your own privacy; get caught doing something a bit off color somewhere and you can bet someone took a picture of it, will probably upload it, and will tag your name to it, even if you had no idea it happened.

Having said that last part, it should become clear that without being on social media you have no control whatsoever, and thus it becomes imperative to have a social media presence.

First, it’s not as bad as it might seem. Most people, if they’re your friends, will respect your privacy.

Second, you will get to work on controlling how people see you by putting up and then putting out only what you’re not scared to share. If you’re in business it’s a great way to help advertise what you do and keep abreast of what’s going on in your industry.

Third, if something shows up that you’d rather not have out there, you can always contact that person to ask them to remove it, and if they don’t then you have an opportunity to spin it your way into something positive; that is, unless it was also on the nightly news.

In today’s world, treating social media like an ostrich with its head in the ground (by the way, that’s not true, but it’s a great metaphor) can only hurt you if you allow someone else to define who you are without giving yourself a fighting chance. You don’t want to put out anything that will show you in a bad light, but if you do, at least you can fix it if you’re a part of it all.
 

Research, Social Media

Promoting Yourself In Social Media; My Personal Study

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I began the year with a couple of goals that I thought I needed to work on to help increase both my business and my web presence.

OU Learn About Fayre 2014
Chris Valentine via Compfight

What I realized is that, even though I’ve been online for a whole lot of years, which includes hitting 10 years on my business blog and 7 years on this blog, overall I’m still an unknown entity. I’m not sure if it’s because my name, Mitch Mitchell, is the same as Jimi Hendrix’ drummer’s name, or whether my writing style isn’t enough to capture enough people’s attention, or maybe all those times that I’ve been out of town and haven’t commented on as many blogs as I used to in the past, has stripped me of any name recognition.

Either that or people just don’t like me anymore. 🙂

In any case, I knew that I had to find ways to get noticed a lot more than I’ve been noticed lately. So I decided to start what I felt like was a more aggressive online strategy of promotion. This post is going to talk about things I’ve done and how they’ve worked out.

Let’s start with Twitter. I’m pretty active on Twitter already, reading a lot of people’s links, commenting on those links, sharing those links, and often finding people to talk to, though pretty late at night. What I realized is that I didn’t share my own stuff enough. So what I started doing is posting links from this blog on Twitter at least five times a day. The way I was doing it initially was kind of problematic, because most of the links I posted were at night instead of during the daytime when there was a possibility that more people would see them.

I did that for about a month and took a look at my analytics and saw that Twitter was now the number two referrer to the blog. However, I didn’t really notice all that much of a difference in traffic to the blog. Still, I’ll take what I can get.

Then I watched a video by a young lady named Amy who has the channel she calls Savvy Sexy Social. She offers all types of marketing tips, especially online, and in this particular video ( I can’t remember which one now) she talked about scheduling tweets during the day. I had never thought about doing this before, but she mentioned that Tweetdeck allowed you to schedule tweets and showed how it works.

I thought that was pretty neat, so I decided to employ that as a strategy. Over the last 10 days I’ve been scheduling tweets to basically run throughout the day, in general covering the period between 9AM and midnight. I figured that anything else I post between the other period I would post live, since I tend to stay up late. I set up my tweets to go live between every 25 to 35 minutes throughout the day, with one exception I’ll mention later.

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Dave Thomas via Compfight

I also decided that I had to add some other things to the mix. So, I added links to my business blog, some links from a couple of other blogs, and actual quotations that I have made on my business blog over the years. It turns out that every one of us is actually quotable based on things we’ve written, and if we go back and look at that stuff we will find quotes that are pretty good.

I decided to start with my oldest blog posts and work forward, and at this point I’m through June 2008, so I have another 6 1/2 years worth of posts to look at. Whenever I post a quote I’ll pop it in within 13 to 17 minutes of the previous blog link, then I can post my next blog link a bit earlier, though sometimes I just start the period at another 30 minutes. Every once in a while I also add a video link.

In just 10 days the traffic to this blog has increased about 15%. I’m thinking that’s pretty good. My Alexa rank (which some people put down, but it’s not a bad thing to look at as a higher level thing) has gone from 378,000 to 308,000 in that period of time; nope, not mad at all. The traffic to my business blog has also increased, but that’s where things get slightly more complicated and I will tell you why.

Around the beginning of the month our buddy Beverly Mahone happened to mention to me that I should think about writing some articles on LinkedIn. At first I was hesitant but then decided what could it hurt. Instead of writing a brand new article, I took an article off my business blog that I had also used on my consultants group blog, made some modifications and put it up. I was amazed at the response it got. People I didn’t know saw it and liked it, a few people shared it to Twitter, some people commented on it, and some of those people started noticing that my business blog links showed up in my profile and they started reading them there and commenting there on them.

I figured that was pretty amazing, so I started writing more articles on that site. To date I’m up to 10 articles, including one I wrote last Friday. That has resulted in about 50 new people wanting to connect with me on LinkedIn, and I’ve had conversations with three people on the phone. It hasn’t generated any real business, but anytime you can make business connections on the phone and you didn’t have to reach out to someone first, it’s always a good thing. So I thank Bev for that recommendation, and I would recommend LinkedIn in a heartbeat.

The other couple of sites I’m on?

Facebook turns out to be a disaster. It seems that they have determined that fewer than 10 people should be allowed to see anything I put on my business page there, even though I have close to 360 people that have subscribed. A couple of times I resorted to putting my link in other groups and on my personal page, where I saw that it got a couple more views generally, but Facebook is a different animal because the way it counts views doesn’t necessarily mean that someone clicked on it. Thus, I have shown no increase in traffic from Facebook, and am very disappointed in it.

Google Plus? Before I came home I was spending a lot of time on Google Plus, mainly sharing things other people put up and occasionally posting something I did. Whenever I do a video it automatically pops up there, but that doesn’t mean it gets all that many views. Those also don’t drive traffic to any of my sites, but possibly to YouTube, and when I checked those analytics I’m not seeing all that much happening either.

So, it means I have to recommend that if you’re going to put out things that you want people to see you should probably be using either Twitter or LinkedIn. Oh yeah, I should quickly mention that I have stepped up my blog commenting again, and as you know I always say that tends to help drive more traffic to your blog or website.

As I wrote last year, if you’re willing to put in the work you can get more traffic and get more people to know you. I figure this is only the beginning for me in some ways, but I’m willing to put in the work.

What about you?

Social Media

5 Ways To Be Better On Social Media

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We all know that social media is here to stay. What those of us who actually look at what’s being said and shared on social media see is a lot of people making mistakes that should be fairly easy to overcome. I use “fairly” because all of it takes some action, and some of that action takes longer than others, and some is more risky than others. And yet, if done correctly, or with the proper frame of mind, it all helps greatly.

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I make videos to help
my social media presence

With that said I’m giving 5 ways here, only because I’m hoping to keep it simple. It’s my intention in 2015 to talk more about social media theory, presence, networking and theory on this blog than anything else, and this is the first article of 2014, as I took a nice long break. So, here we go:

Gravatar – Gravatars have been out there for more than a decade now. Basically a gravatar is that little image that you see next to people’s blog comments; on other platforms it’s just called an image. Last April on a different blog I talked about 5 reasons you need a gravatar. The main reason is that your image helps people associate a face with the comment, and that identity is strong in making connections. People remember faces more than names, and images more than, well, nothing.

Promote others while promoting yourself – If I took the time to mention you while sharing something you did on this blog, would it make you feel pretty good? If so, think of how others might feel if you reference them here and there in your space, whether it’s on your blog or retweeting something they’ve shared on Twitter or just sharing something someone else has done on other social media platforms.

These don’t have to be famous people, and truthfully it’s probably better that it’s not them, at least most of the time. In that vein I’m going to promote a young man named William Haynes, who’s been putting together a wealth of topics on all sorts of both social media and being social in general that are pretty funny on his YouTube channel and deserves a bit more attention if you ask me. The kid makes me laugh. 🙂

Be present – If you want to be a presence via social media and be found by others who might need or enjoy what you have to share you actually have to be out there pressing the digital flesh.

Alex Eylar via Compfight

I have 4 blogs (actually 5 again) and try to make sure I have at least one article on 3 of them weekly. I’m on social media every day, even on days I’m traveling, for at least an hour. I try to mix it up among all the social media sites I’m on and I try to be engaging with people; I may not be famous yet but I have people sometimes surprised to hear from me because they think I’m big; all that and a bag of chips gets me on almost no lists, ever. lol Still, there’s nothing else like that in the world.

Don’t look curmudgeonly -Trust me, I understand now that I’m in my mid 50’s. Society feels like it’s changed so drastically. People use a lot of foul language, don’t seem to know anything about history, and are always flitting around onto the “next big thing” (still have no idea what Tsu is; not interested) while the big thing is still pretty viable. If I wanted to I could spend entire weeks hating on every single blog post I come across; how well do you think that would work for me?

We all have to be ready to step back and see what others are doing, evaluate them for ourselves, and then decide what we want to do or say. Having an informed opinion on something you don’t like is way better than hating something just because it’s not what you used to like. Of course if you only spend time hating things you’ll look like a jaded old person, even if you’re young. So find good in things as well; trust me, there’s a lot more good than bad.

Be willing to be confronted, but not condemned – So many people play it safe; sigh… There’s nothing wrong with being cautious because you’re afraid of saying the wrong thing. I’m of the opinion that if you’ve given something a lot of thought and have something to say, even if you know there will be someone out there who won’t like it, say it anyway if it’s honest.

You might not like the concept of political correctness but it’ll help you get your message across way better when you’re not constantly defending yourself from negatives messages that you generated. People like knowing that others aren’t afraid to have an opinion that’s well reasoned, and that just might be your unique selling proposition that helps you get fans and customers.
 

Social Media

What Are You Willing To Risk Your Reputation For?

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In May 2013 there was an incident online that culminated in a fairly well known online personality losing her gig as a spokesperson, two other people losing their jobs, and a fairly well known conference losing its luster. In the long run everyone was tainted, everyone was to blame, and it ends up giving us some lessons to learn about just how powerful social media can be. And, for once, it involved someone I know, so I hope I present this as fairly as possible.

Reputation
F Delventhal
via Compfight

Here’s the general overview. Two guys were at a conference sitting in the audience and saying some things to each other that weren’t quite proper in public. The person in front of them heard it, didn’t appreciate it, turned around and called them on it. They apologized for it and maybe all should have been over then and there.

But it wasn’t. The person in front, who happens to be the person I know, turned around and took a picture of the two guys and uploaded it to Twitter, with a brief report. That’s when things got out of hand.

The two guys were representing a company that was advertising at the conference. Once they were recognized they were fired.

The person who took the picture was representing someone as a personality who was sponsoring the event. Many people felt she went overboard with the picture, especially since the two guys had apologized, and that made the sponsor genuflect and relieve her. And since a lot of what she did involved some of the talent of the conference, the trickle down meant having to now scramble for someone else to handle what she’d been doing, someone not as well known and not as skilled.

Would you say that everything that could go wrong went wrong? Who’s at fault here? Is this cut and dry, or is it pretty complicated?

It is and isn’t complicated. Let’s run down a few things here.

1. In this day and age, people tend to believe they can say whatever they want to say whenever they want to say it. The loss of decorum is problematic, but that’s a separate issue.

2. The real issue is that almost everyone has a smartphone with a camera, and they could have been recorded being stupid as well as having their picture taken. If you’re in public, even if you’re not well known, you can’t afford to be saying overtly stupid things. We never found out if it was sexist or racist, but if this person I know reacted that badly to it, it had to be one of those, as she’s a black female.

3. Based on what was said, did she go too far, not far enough, or not in the proper manner? It’s hard to say. As I get older I let more of that type of thing roll off my shoulders, though I’d have said something, but when I was younger I’d have gone for the jugular, knowing I was right whether I was or not.

4. Still, being in her position, she had to know that something was going to happen, at least to the two people. What she didn’t count on was the reaction of other people to what she’d done. Do apologies overcome all bad behavior? Not even close. Is there a time and place for everything? Absolutely.

5. The thing is that even being known by people at that event, she wasn’t on the level of a TV or movie celebrity where everyone would have immediately sided with her. Even so, do you think if it had been someone like Selina Gomez that she’d have been treated much differently?

6. The company that fired her; did they over react or do the right thing? They were not being tainted by bad publicity but did they stop to consider her feelings? Should they have? Did they consider the consequences of how it could affect the conference? Did it matter?

At this point there are no more answers to be found. The two guys were fired and their 15 minutes are over. The person I know has gone into a self imposed exile for awhile. The buzz has died down so the sponsor is probably going to be fine, and the conference will probably survive for another year but it’s been diminished a bit because even though there were some people who felt what the person I know did was wrong, there were a lot of people who said they’d have done the same thing.

The major lesson is that if you’re representing someone, even just yourself, in a public space for business purposes, your decorum has to be higher than normal. Even if you’re in the right, you could end up on the wrong side of things in the long run. Think about this cautionary tale; what are you willing to risk your reputation for?
 

Business, Social Media

10 More Business Social Media Tips In 2 Minutes

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Back in October I wrote what turned out to be a popular post, if you believe Analytics, 10 Business Social Media Tips. I knew it would be popular because people love list posts. It was also relatively short; sometimes that works well.

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About 5 minutes ago I wrote the follow up post to that one; then it totally disappeared, and I actually know the reason why and I’m not going to get into it right now, though I suspect alligators. lol However, it wasn’t bad, and I sat here thinking for a couple of minutes wondering if I wanted to try to recreate it or just let it go and move onto something else.

This is we’re talking about, so I’m going to go ahead and write it anyway. Course, with this preamble it now might take 3 minutes for you to read it, but them’s the breaks.

1. Don’t sign up for all social media accounts and services if you’re not going to use them.

2. You don’t have to be a great writer or speller. Be a good writer and use spell check.

3. Blog commenting is the best way to drive traffic to your website or blog; trust me on this one.

4. Make sure you share the links to your websites and blogs as often as possible, wherever you have the opportunity to share them.

5. Don’t always agree with people just to be polite. If you disagree with something say it; just don’t be too aggressive if you can help it.

6. Give people a chance to share your content. Notice that with this blog you can share it on Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus.

7. Whether it’s your opinion or not, make sure you know your facts first. You can bet someone will know the facts and won’t hesitate to tell you.

8. Never forget to share other people and their links with your readers if they’re the inspiration for what you’re writing.

9. Don’t be afraid to make videos. Remember, what you see in a video is how people see you in real life.

10. It’s okay to ask people to follow or connect with you sometimes, just don’t overdo it. Every once in awhile people need a bit of encouragement to participate.

Whew; I had problems remembering two of the things I originally said but came up with 2 more instead. Now go enjoy your weekend, and don’t forget to give me a thumbs up.