Tag Archives: Social Media

Social Media

5 Things I Do Well Online

20 Comments

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

Time To Start Talking About Marketing – Real Marketing

11 Comments

I’ve written around 1,250 posts on this blog since 2007. It’s been a wild ride, and I’ve had a lot of fun. I’ve touched upon some topics often, and one of those topics is marketing. It turns out I’ve written 115 posts on marketing, and my very first post on the subject came in October 2008 when I first started marketing my ebook Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool.

Mitch Mitchell
This guy is serious!

However, that was internet marketing, and as I took a look back through the archives I realized that most of the time I’ve talked about marketing as it relates to making money online. I’m not even including the posts where I’ve talked about affiliate programs; we’d have to add another 43 posts into the mix.

I did write an article on the reality of making money by blogging, and it turned out to be quite a popular post, at least by readers, even though it didn’t get a lot of comments. And yet, even in that post, where I got real in telling people how one really makes money blogging, I realized that I missed something, something that many people probably both think about and don’t think about at the same time.

That “something” is marketing, plain and simple. What’s funny is that I actually wrote a post back in November, around the same time as the post about making money by blogging, titled Social Media Marketing Is Just Marketing, and even in that post I didn’t talk about marketing, or the reason why marketing is important. I almost feel ashamed; almost that is. I tend to believe that all of us get to a point where we suddenly begin focusing on something, and when that happens it’s time to take steps forward, time to do something about it, time to talk about it. And as I went through a period last year when I was talking a lot about influence, I’m going to be obsessive for a short period about marketing.

Here’s the reality. Many people probably aren’t going to be interested in this series of posts coming up, which is why I’m writing this preamble on the topic. Let’s talk about who these posts probably aren’t for. If you have a job and you’re happy with that job, these posts won’t be for you. If you’re not running a business, consulting, small, medium sized, these posts probably won’t for you. If all you want to do is affiliate marketing and nothing else, these posts won’t be for you.

But if you want to work on your overall business, no matter what it is, and you want to read about the trials and tribulations and ideas and, hopefully, successes of marketing, and I do mean marketing, not sales, since marketing leads to sales if you’re lucky, and I mean sales of all kinds, then stick around with me on my journey, which can become your journey. I have big dreams to fulfill, things I want to do, need to do, and I can’t do any of them if I don’t step up my marketing, my real marketing, marketing mainly for my offline businesses, some of which can be done online, some of which can be done offline.

It won’t be all I write or talk about; after all, this is I’m Just Sharing, right? But it’s going to become the next focus, and quickly. Are you with me?
 

Black Web Friday

Black Web Friday – 3/9/12

12 Comments

Welcome to Black Web Friday; is the message starting to spread yet? I have to say that February was interesting because I saw a few more people across the web that were highlighting black social media people or bloggers and that was pretty neat. Of course, it was Black History month as well, and so far I haven’t found anyone who’s written about it in March except for me, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening, so if you find another list anywhere be sure to drop me a line; if my name is on it let me know sooner! 🙂

Black Web Friday

Here we go, and today might as well also be called Ladies Day. I’m starting off with my buddy Vernessa Taylor, who writes Local Business Coach Online. She talks about business development, both online and offline, social media, affiliate marketing, blogging, and a whole lot more. She also created the neat covers for my book on management and my management CD set which you see there on the left (go ahead, look at it, click on it to learn more, and then think about buying; I dare you lol). She also does business coaching, and has her categories lined up pretty neatly in the header. You’ll learn a lot from this blog with a standard commenting system.

Next we have the blog eponymously named Marlee Ward, and she talks about business; being in business, making business decisions, business motivation, etc. She gives a lot of tips to people thinking about working for themselves and man, is this a blog I need to read every once in awhile for a pick-me-up. I loved her post on figuring out when you’ve made it; great stuff. She also does business coaching, and one of these days I just might have to look her up for that.

The next blog is LogAllot by Sonia Winland, and it’s also a blog about business and business tips. She also talks about blogs and blogging design, as well as travel; that’s somewhat different from the norm. She’s got great taste as well as she included me in on her blogs of the month series in February. You might think this is a bit of quid pro quo but she was already on the list to be highlighted.

Business is the theme today and that brings us to the last person being highlighted, Pamla Whorne. Her blog is also about business and business tips, as well as marketing, publicity, blogging and being online. She does consulting, speaking, and teaching, has courses, and is a published author. She considers herself a social media junkie and technology geek; aren’t we all? 🙂 This lady knows how to market; I definitely need to study her lessons better.

That’s it for this week; have a great and safe weekend.
 

Web Stuff

What It Takes To Play Empire Avenue

28 Comments

Back in October, I wrote about this kind of interesting online stock market type of game called Empire Avenue. It’s like playing the stock market, only it’s based on social media, or some of it. At the time I had only been playing a couple of weeks, so the jury was still out. I thought it was time for a follow up on the whole thing.

Basically, this is how the game works. You are judged based on how you participate in social media. When I initially joined, I thought that a part of its purpose was to help you make connections through your social media outlets; that’s not quite true unfortunately, although I have made some. Instead, there are things you’re kind of expected to do in order to get your stock price, since everyone has a price, to go up, thereby encouraging others to invest in you, which is also what helps your price go up.

A bit more detail. When you create an account, the expectation is that you’re going to link to all of your social media outlets. This means Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, your blogs, and other accounts if you have them. This is how they track how much you’re participating in social media.

They also then track how much activity you have on the game itself. This second part doesn’t seem to impact your growth at all, but instead impacts whether you’ll fall or not. By this I mean that it helps the worth of your account, which they track in eaves instead of a true monetary thing, go up or down. You can acquire great wealth in game terms; I’m worth more than $3.5 million at this point, but its virtually meaningless because wealth is only how you get to gauge yourself; it’s not anything that people use in evaluating whether or not they should buy your shares.

What makes you valuable? How much you participate in certain ventures. Blogging on self hosted platforms means virtually nothing because, like Klout, they don’t have a real way of evaluating its importance. For instance, I have 5 blogs and occasionally I’ve had 5 blog posts on the same day. But it’s not counted for almost anything so I could pretty much eliminate my blogs from consideration without having it affect the game. However, if I had a WordPress.com blog, or a Tumblr blog, for the game those can be measured, and thus people with those platforms get a lot of juice; the same probably can be said for Blogger blogs, but I’m not as sure about those.

What I’ve noticed is that if I post a lot of things on Facebook my growth the next day is, well, growth, and good growth. This more I post, the higher it is. Posting things on Twitter don’t count as much unless you’re posting things and including their name in on it; that’s why you see so many people with these things flying on Twitter all the time; it promotes the site, they like it and reward you for it. I’m a big user of Twitter for the most part, and thus you’d expect that my score would reflect that but it doesn’t unless combined with a lot of things being put on Facebook.

I have to do that because I don’t have a lot of activity on LinkedIn, I don’t have a Four Square account, I don’t have a Flickr account and I don’t have an Instagram account. Other than Twitter, I’m really not someone out there posting stuff just to be doing it, and I only know about the Facebook thing because I did an experiment. Truthfully, if you participate minimally on Empire Avenue but a lot elsewhere, you’ll benefit a lot. Actually, the game pretty much ignores LinkedIn as well unless it doesn’t have anything else to look at; that’s in their rules as well.

A prime example is the account for Chris Pirillo, who many people know as one of the top social media personalities in the country. I have him on my watch list because he’s in the top 3 for highest stock price, and is almost always in some manner of growth. His most recent week (as of Sunday) looked something like this:

* 31 Empire Avenue Actions this week

* 81 Facebook Posts, 1393 Comments, 2866 Likes this week

* 214 Tweets posted this week

* 4 upload sets to Flickr this week

* 63 Videos posted to YouTube this week

* 42 blog posts this week

Notice that he barely participates on the site? But look at everything else; which of us as an individual could even think of coming close to doing this much stuff? I can match the tweets, but that’s about it.

In the long run one has to determine what they’re playing the game for. If it’s to try to get a really high score you might have to think about what else you’re willing to give up to get it done. I have read where some people say they spend 3 to 4 hours a day working on trying to get their stock price up; that’s just incredible. I almost dropped this game a month ago because I was thinking that it’s way too much work. I mean, I play games to win, and now that I know the commitment it would take to win this game, I know I’m not up to it. After all, I have to try to make money right?

I have connected with a few people, but I think I’ve only really talked to 2 of them. As I stated in the previous post, conversation on the site is pretty much nonexistent. I did join a community here and there, but either the group was fairly dead or it involved people mainly posting links here and there but not getting any comments and not commenting on anything. Frankly, I’d rather take my chances with the blogs. 🙂

What will I do? It’s something I have to consider within the next couple of weeks. I do have some fun, but now that I know that participating in the game as far as buying and selling shares of others really has no impact on my price, and knowing that I’m tired of posting things to Facebook just for the sake of raising my score on Empire Avenue instead of because I found something in my travels that I think others might want to see, it might be time for it to go the way of Klout for me and just stop playing and take my attentions elsewhere.

Definitely something to think about. After all, I have gotten some Twitter followers out of it, and about 75% of the meager number of people subscribed to my YouTube account came from this game. But without any interaction is it really reaching my objectives for the amount of time I’d have to put into it? If you play, do you have any thoughts on this?
 

Social Media

Your Profile Is Missing

22 Comments

Last week I highlighted Wayne Sutton of Social Wayne on that week’s Black Web Friday post. Earlier that week Wayne had put out a shared circle on Google+ of nearly 400 black participants, including me, such that if any of us wanted to hook up with that circle we could, and then if we wanted to hook up with people in that circle individually we could do that as well. I thought it was a great idea and I know it had to take him a long time to put it together.

I hooked up to the circle, then started looking at some of the names and checking out profiles of many of the people. I stopped after about 25 people and was somewhat dismayed. That’s because out of the nearly 25 people, only 4 of them had completed profiles on G+. Some of them had links to their Twitter accounts or Facebook accounts, but no other information about them.

I thought that was a major waste of resources, and I didn’t even consider adding any of those people to my personal stream. I mean, how long can it take to fill in some business information, which I assumed was the reason they signed up for it, or to put a link to a website or blog and get some link love or publicity from it?

I have to admit that I’ve wondered about this sort of thing for awhile; why do people create accounts on social media sites and then never complete any information on them? This isn’t only an issue with G+; there are many people on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter that don’t put any information in either.

Now, Facebook I can kind of understand because people worry about the privacy aspect, and although it can be used for business many people don’t use it for that purpose. Facebook is really more for personal use, and if people just want to connect with their friends and nothing more, so be it.

Twitter and LinkedIn are another matter. Let’s talk LinkedIn first. It’s for business networking; there’s no other reason to sign up for an account. If you don’t want to network with other business people, then why are you there? No one wants to hook up with anyone that hasn’t completed their business profile, and if I don’t know who you are I’m not hooking up with any account that doesn’t have some kind of picture either.

Twitter is a duplicitous animal. I almost never reach out to anyone first on Twitter these days; it’s hard enough trying to get people I am connected with to talk to me. Twitter allows you to put a brief bit of information about yourself in your profile, but it also allows you not to put anything in.

If you’ve created an account only to talk to specific people, and you’re protecting your account, I can understand why you don’t put in any information. But if you write anything that looks like you’re in business, why don’t you have a link of some kind, and a legitimate one at that? What’s the purpose of cloaking your link? I’m not clicking on any cloaked links, and thus I’m not following you. And if you haven’t put any info in except a link, I’m probably not following you either. And sans image; nope, I’m moving on.

Here’s my point; nothing says you have to be on social media to begin with, but if you’re going to participate at least do the bare minimum of participation in whatever platform you’re creating an account on. Just like I say about people who create blogs and then abandon them, you look worse creating a profile and not doing anything with it than not creating one at all.

At least those are my thoughts; am I alone here? Come on, someone try to justify why you think this is a good thing to do.