Category Archives: Social Media

Marketing, Social Media

Social Media Marketing Has Its Limits

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This past weekend I went to a local seminar on motivation. I don’t get to things like this all that often, but every once in a while it’s a good thing to go hear someone else talk on a subject that you also talk about because, when all is said and done, even those who motivate others sometimes need a bit of motivation as well.

It wasn’t a bad turnout, but the group was very diverse, to the point that I’m not exactly sure the presenters got who they hoped to get to come. Still, it was an interesting day, and I got out of it what I think I needed to get out of it. I knew one of the presenters, and had seen enough pictures of the other presenter that I felt I knew her as well.

During the seminar, when it was my turn to speak the lady that I knew threw out a statement saying that maybe I hide behind my social media activities when it comes to doing business. I agreed with her on that, although in my mind I was thinking how I have so many more connections through social media than I do live. But she continued by saying that we should talk after the seminar and I quickly agreed.

When it was over she and I walked across the street to a park and sat down on one of the stone benches. She then told me that out of all the people that had shown up, I was the only one that had come because of social media. She had put out the event on Facebook, and out of the nine people that said they were coming, I was the only one that actually did. Everybody else who was in the room was the result of either a book signing that she did or came because of a couple presentations she had put on locally and mentioned it.

In one way I was shocked, but in another way I wasn’t. I ran into the same thing last year when I tried to promote a local four hour seminar that I was going to put on. I reached out to all of my social media contacts, and I reached out to an overwhelming majority of other people through e-mail. In the end, I had to cancel because I only had one person who had signed up for.

At the same time, there was another event last Friday I found out about that was being held at a hotel about 10 minutes away from me. The guy who worked at the hotel had put it up on Facebook, but really hadn’t invited anybody. So I went through the process of inviting a great number of people who I knew lived in the area, many of whom I knew wouldn’t be able to come but I wanted to give them the opportunity. Just by doing that at least 9 or 10 people showed up that wouldn’t have if I hadn’t reached out to them on Facebook.

Still, her point was valid. Even though social media is the fastest growing medium for people to connect with each other, there’s still something about face-to-face communications that seems to help to encourage people to interact more with you. It might be because, though social media is easy to say something to make someone feel good, just as it’s easy for people to say bad things because they’re hidden, they can say something and not have to follow through. In being truthful, I hadn’t decided I was going to the seminar until the Monday before, even though I had known about it for three weeks. I had put a “maybe”, which is mainly a noncommittal way of saying no, before changing my mind.

Social media marketing is definitely an important thing that all of us need to get used to. But at this point in the decade it’s still not strong enough to really get people juiced up to do anything. You might be able to get people to come to your website, or to read an article or blog post you’ve written, but getting them to take action is still going to be really tough to do. We all need to acknowledge that in order to figure out ways of getting people’s attention, especially if we have as an intention the hopes that we will possibly generate some kind of income from our actions.

How do you see your social media marketing initiatives going?
 

Social Media

Creating A Facebook Cover Photo, Mitchell Style

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I have to face this fact; I’m not the most creative guy in the world. I know what I like, but I’m bad at figuring out how to create images and the like. Heck, it took me more than 2 years to figure out a title for my first book. I can write almost anything at almost any time, but I do have my limitations.

Thus, I came into this thing about Facebook, timelines and cover photos with a lot of trepidation. Lucky for me, my personal page hasn’t gone the timeline route yet, but my business page had. And when one came to it and looked at it, there was this major gap in the upper middle that just looked horrible.

I knew I had to take care of that at some point so last night I decided it was time to try to do something. I had saved a great number of pages that all said they were going to teach me how to create a cover photo, which you’ve probably seen on a lot of pages already, but every page was lacking. Most didn’t have anything at all for me. A couple mentioned to use Photoshop or Adobe something, which I can’t remember since I don’t have those programs. And one other site said I could download a template to help me, but only if I subscribed to a newsletter; that wasn’t happening.

So I used Microsoft Publisher to help me out with it, and I’m going to tell you what I did. First, let me show you the image I created:

It might look a little strange, but the explanation is coming.

I opened up my Publisher program, and instead of going through all the gesticulations of trying to remember how to landscape the thing I just made it bigger on my screen. I initially set it to a 150% view, which helped me to start putting things together.

I started with a text box and elongated it into a triangular shape. You’re trying to get to an image size of around 851 x 315, which is odd, but that’s Facebook for you. Then I went to the picture box and selected my business logo to start with because I thought that would work well. The problem is that in reality it’s only 639 pixels wide, and if I was looking at a 100% normal view it would look great. However, at 150% it was smeared and looked lousy, so I knew I wasn’t going to be able to use it.

I deleted the picture box and decided to just type in my business name in my business title font, which is Imprint MT Shadow. I added my favorite color, then increased the size. I centered the image as well because I needed to make sure that once I copied and pasted the image into my photo program that I wasn’t going to have to worry about those editing lines that always exist in Publisher.

Once I did that I did a screen print and copied it into Microsoft Photo Editor, the program I like to use for pictures. I cropped around it so I only had my business name showing, then I saved the image. I did that because I figured the first thing to do was see if I could get close to the width required by Facebook. It was way too large, and I had two choices; reduce the size of the font or reduce the size of my view, since I was doing print screen images.

I decided to reduce the size of my view, and I dropped it to 125%. When I tested it again, the images was around 830; I figured that was pretty close as a starting point.

Next, it was time to add images. I knew I was going to frame the bottom with two professional images I have of myself, but wasn’t sure what I’d put in the middle. I tested the two images first though, putting each one on the outside, and then did a series of tests trying to get close to the 315 width. I had to alter the size of the images about 5 times, but I got it to 302 and figured that was close enough for the moment.

Now, which other two images? As you can see, in the end I decided on one with my dad and one which was an actual image that I “cartooned up” to create something different that I liked from years ago. I saved and tested everything, then decided to increase my view size from 125% to 126%, a very minor increase but it brought my image to 852 x 314; almost perfect! Just to let you know in case you don’t already know this, when you save the image you can look at it in Explorer, hover your mouse over it, and it’ll tell you the dimensions. That works for all images on your computer, just so you know.

Now it was time to upload my image to my Facebook business page, which I did, but it didn’t work out. Why not? Here’s the original image:

The problem is that Facebook business pages have this logo box that pops up to the left side. If you don’t have an image in there the box remains with a big question mark, so you have to put an image there. With that box, it completely covered the bottom half of my image; that wouldn’t do. So I had to come back to the drawing board and resize an image, and I decided I didn’t want to shrink my professional image, done by my friend Kelvin by the way, so I reversed the order of the first two images and shortened the cartoon version instead. Here’s what it looks like on the page now:

There you have it. Now, you can obviously go your own route in the type of image you wish to use, but I found for this task that Publisher worked well for me, and doing screen prints also works well for me. Of course, if you have those other fancier programs you can go a much different route. It’s even possible that if you don’t have those programs OR Publisher that you could do the same thing with Word. The problem with Word is that it doesn’t have the image or text boxes to help you out.

There you have it; a true tutorial, even if you can’t use it. Good luck!
 

Social Media

5 Things I Do Well Online

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I was over at Peggy Baron’s blog called Adventures In Internet Marketing where she wrote this interesting little post titled 5 Things I Do Well With Internet Marketing. I thought it was an interesting idea to pursue, only I’m not going totally on the internet marketing piece.

I figure that I’ve got a long online history and there’s some things I’ve gotten right in spite of lots of failure. Yeah, I know, I’m the guy who wrote a post saying that it’s never really failure, so I’ll modify it and say there’s a lot I haven’t done right for one reason or another. But I have had some successes and there are some things I do well, and thus I’m going to share these 5 things with you.

1. I have my business website listed on more than 10,000 sites and directories for the term “diversity”. Even though that term scares a lot of people in this country (it does!), it’s important enough for me to be listed all over the world for it because one never knows. The thing is, I can’t tell you how I did it, but if it got picked up it’s all good right?

2. I have a lot of articles on the internet. With my own 5 blogs, lots of other blogs I write for, some guest posting, interviews, and articles in many places, I’ve made sure to get my name out there. It’s still hard to overcome Jimi Hendrix drummer and this reporter for the Ft. Worth newspaper in some respects but it all builds up not only a following but a profile. And it gives me a lot of material to turn into something else, as I’m working on the editing of my next book, which is a compilation of some of my early newsletters and blog posts off my business blog.

3. I’ve got commenting on lots of blogs down to a science without realizing it. I have a large group of blogs that I visit regularly and yet just last night I commented on 4 or 5 new blogs I’d never seen before. I’m not sure I’d ever commented on Peggy’s blog before last night. I think it’s important because it means that every time I do that I have the possibility of reaching a new audience in some way.

4. I talk to a lot of people on Twitter, including some famous people. In my post yesterday about Twitter I mentioned a couple of ladies I think are spectacular from my past that I’m connected with. I’ve talked to other famous or well known people over the years as well, including having the opportunity to help Guy Kawasaki edit his book once. I’ve also helped other people edit their books and read some books that were sent to me to do reviews on here and there. I think that’s pretty neat; it shows that I’ve earned at least enough respect where people trust my opinion and, oddly enough, my perceived “clout”.

5. I respond to people who are “real”. I think that’s important, and it’s also an important distinction. Back in February I talked about bad blog comments being like spam and how if I didn’t think the comments were good comments but weren’t bad enough to send to spam that I wasn’t going to respond to them. In essence that means I respond to a lot of people, and they seem to appreciate it. I’ll often follow those people back based on what CommentLuv says they’ve written about and if I leave a comment, I’m sure they appreciate that as well. And I do that for all 5 of my blogs; that’s a lot of writing and following.

There you go; now, what can you say are your top 5 ‘whatever’ as it applies to being online?
 

Marketing, Social Media

Marketing – Facebook

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I wrote a post titled Getting More Eyes On Your Facebook Business Page. That post talked about the kind of time it might take to keep one of those pages going and the commitment overall it takes to have one. I always believe, just like I do with blogging, that if you’re not going to add new content to it don’t even start.

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Daniel Kulinski via Compfight

Of course the overall question is whether Facebook is a good marketing tool or not. I tend to think “no” overall, and I’m going to tell you why.

First, initially the only people you can invite to your Facebook page are people you know. How many of you have loved ones or close friends that often read your blogs? Very few people do, and it’s the same with a Facebook page, for the most part. I was lucky enough to get 26 people to initially sign up so I could create that little widget over there to the right that I could put up on this blog, a couple other blogs, and one of my websites.

To date, that little widget has driven 3 people to sign up on that page. That’s not all that good when you consider I’ve had that page up over a year, possibly longer; I’m not sure where I created it exactly. I’ve promoted it of course but it’s one of those strange conundrums where you’re asking yourself if you want to drive people to your Facebook page or your blog.

At this point I have 204 people subscribed to the page. Most of the people I’ve invited through Facebook, and I’m happy they’ve signed up. There’s a good number of people who signed up through Empire Avenue, of all things, although I’m not sure if they signed up directly because of that page or because I asked some questions on the Empire Avenue Facebook page. It’s my assumption that anyone else who’s signed up might have seen something in the stream of someone they were following and decided to join, but truthfully I’m not really clear on that one.

What kinds of things do I put there? I post a lot of links from 3 of my blogs, but mainly from my business blog. Occasionally if I find something that pertains to a business issue I’ll post it there as well. I also occasionally ask questions, trying to get a conversation started.

How successful am I? Every once in awhile I’ll get one response; makes me wonder if people even see the content all that often, since Facebook’s timeline moves pretty fast, especially if you’re connected to a lot of people. Frankly, there’s a lot of effort for very little active return.

Is it a good marketing tool for me? I’d have to say no. Can it be a good marketing tool for others? Actually it can, and that’s proven by one of our local TV news stations. They’re pretty big on Facebook. They ask “the question of the day” and will put some of the responses on TV; people love that. They’ve hooked up with their own Groupon-like deals thing that they push through Facebook and people love that. They promote the page often during newscasts, even more than their own website, which has news but isn’t really all that interactive. And one of their top news announcers, a guy named Matt Mulcahy, has fully embraced social media as he’s also on Twitter, writes a blog, and shows up at a lot of local social media events when he doesn’t have to do the news.

For my purposes, it gives me backlinks to my blogs. Other than that there’s no real marketing on my end; nothing I can really do. I’m not sure what others think, but maybe if you have something more to offer you could share it here.