Personalities of the social web »» Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}

Social media truly levels the playing field

Feb 6th

If you can’t see this video, click here: Anne Reuss on social media and accessibility.

Stop what you’re doing and watch this short video. In under two minutes, you will receive a very powerful message.

When I first connected with Anne Reuss on Twitter, of course I didn’t know she was deaf. But I did notice that she was looking for a job, so I did what I could to help her. Connecting Anne to my friend Sean McGinnis led to her first big social media networking event in Chicago. She later told me that she was nervous about being deaf at a business event like this but felt immediately comfortable when she realized that everybody had their head down, communicating to each other through Twitter! Twitter. The great equalizer!

For Anne, and many with disabilities, social media has become an amazing connection point. And ever since I was introduced to Anne, I have been trying to see the social media world through the eyes (and ears) of the disabled … How would this work for a deaf person? A blind person? Not always easy.

“I’m working in Social Media because being deaf is not detrimental in the wide world of the web,” Anne said. “I’m madly driven and focused despite what may be noisy settings for other people!”

I invited Anne to make this video for you so you will begin to think about accessibility issues too. She put a lot of work into making this video for {grow}. Please tell her what you think in the comment section.

social media and disabilities

Pinterest drives enormous blog and business success

Jan 23rd

61 comments

Guest Post by {grow} community member Lauren Schaefer

This is Kate.

She’s a hairstylist, jewelry maker, and all-around crafter based in North Carolina. Kate started her blog (thesmallthingsblog.com) exactly one year ago. And like most of us, it was a labor of love without a whole lot of “community.” In fact, for the first eight months, she had a grand total of seven readers. But between August of 2011 and today Kate has had over 10 million page views! How did she achieve this amazing success in just five months? Pinterest!

Pinterest is the hottest social media platform around right now. Created in March 2010, it’s still only available by signing up for a waiting list. Pinterest is probably best described as a “virtual pinboard.” Based on the idea that many people have magazine clippings of their dream vacations, weight loss goals, or perfect weddings, Pinterest allows users to create “boards” and share content by uploading images, “pin” from other sites, or “re-pin” from other user boards.

And there is an important social element too as you can comment, like, share, email content, and search based off of your customized interests.

If you snoop around Pinterest, for a little while, chances are you’ll run into a high-quality image of a beautifully coiffed hairstyle from Kate. “My whole goal behind the blog was to share my ideas and information,” she said, “so I thought Pinterest would be a great way to share video tutorials of my hairstyles.”

“I pinned a photo of a completed style, which directed Pinterest users back to my blog to watch the tutorial video. And then I sat back and watched as the numbers rolled in. I was stunned as I watched my blog quickly approach the first 100,000 page views! My husband and I sat at the computer, hitting refresh over and over until it hit 100,001. We were amazed.” Since then, Kate’s success with Pinterest has continued to skyrocket. Thanks to Pinterest, Kate has now gained 16,000 blog subscribers and 14,000 Pinterest followers in just a few months.

“Almost daily I get a comment or email saying ‘I found you on Pinterest!’,” she said. “My top 10 traffic referring URLs are all Pinterest.”

Kate believes her success comes down to a careful balance between her original content and self-promotion for her blog and business.

“I think there is a fine line between self-promotion and obnoxious self-promotion. I decided to only pin hair photos to my own boards [from her blog], and a maximum of two per week. The rest of the week, if any blog readers want to pin things from my blog, it’s up to them.”

“What I don’t want is for my 14,000 Pinterest followers to log on to Pinterest and see all the photos from my blog. I think that would be obnoxious,” she continued. “I had one instance where I was following a blogger on Pinterest and she would pin things from her posts multiple times a day. I stopped following her.”

Beyond the blog numbers, Kate is also obtaining new business due to her Pinterest success. In September, she took on her first blog sponsor. She also has had interest in her private hairstyling business. “It’s brought so many people to my blog who now want to be my clients!”

One of the reasons for Kate’s Pinterest success is that her hairstyling photos create intrigue. If you pin an image of a dog, you know it is a dog. But with a hairstyle, a recipe, or a DIY project, there is a backstory. You need to keep digging if you want to know how to do it. That “intrigue” is an opportunity to drive people back to your blog or website.

How about you? Do you have an opportunity to create intrigue for your blog or business through Pinterest?

Lauren Schaefer is a recent college grad, NYC resident, and nonprofit event planner with an interest in all things social media. She documents her new journey as a young professional at her blog From the Fifth Floor. Twitter: @leschaef

This is why you’re not Seth Godin.

Jan 11th

111 comments

Seth Godin is an insanely successful entrepreneur, marketing author and speaker. Is his social media model of broadcasting without engagement scalable for you too?

I recently received this inquiry from a friend:

I launched a new blog on Sunday. It’s sort of a quote of the day/micro blog for entrepreneurs. It posts each morning at 9:00 and I have it auto-tweet so people can follow it that way.

My question is: Should I begin to follow a bunch of people on that account or should I just use it as a way to have people learn about the blog? My model is Seth Godin’s blog. He has over 137,000 followers but that Twitter account follows 0.

Well, if it works for Seth, why can’t it work for you? Let’s take a look.

To be successful as a social media marketer, you have to find a way to move your content through an engaged network. To achieve this, you need a) a content strategy and b) a network strategy.

Seth certainly provides interesting, consistent, and relevant content and let’s assume my friend does too. In this way, they both have a content strategy that could attract readers.

The second critical issue is “network strategy” … we need a place for all that cool content to go.

Seth Godin is a rare commodity on the social web: A true celebrity. Like Lady Gaga or a famous athlete, Seth has an engaged network purely because of who he is.

If you are reading this blog, I’m guessing you are not a celebrity. If you are, please let me know so I can tell my mother. She doesn’t get the Tao of Twitter thing at all!

So without a built-in network, we have to earn our tribe the old-fashioned way — by actively seeking those who would be interested in us, consistently engaging with those folks, and being authentically helpful. It’s difficult to do this by auto-broadcasting blog post links from a standing start. In fact, it’s probably a recipe for failure.

People don’t want auto-tweeted ads for your blog. They want you. They want to make friends and build new business relationships. And then, maybe, just maybe, they will read your blog posts.

“Seth Godin” is not a scalable business model for new bloggers and there are no shortcuts. To build social media success from scratch, you have to work hard at it — one connection, one blog post at a time.

Right?

The social web. Where dreams really do come true.

Jan 9th

13 comments

This story starts with a song. A sweet, funny song. To understand this post, you should really hear it. By the time it was over, I had a lump in my throat. Here it is:

(If you cannot view this video, you can see it HERE.

My daughter Lauren is friends with Chelsea Gill, the young lady in this video who admits her fondness for writer/producer/actor Jason Segel, and she alerted me when the video started going viral.

But that was just the beginning. It was a wild week for Ms. Gill:

Jan. 03: Chelsea posts her video (link) on YouTube and all her friends spread it through Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Jan. 04: Chelsea is featured on Buzzfeed and various other websites and Jason Segel tweets in response to the video.

Jan. 05 10:30AM: Chelsea’s story appears on the front page of Huffington Post Entertainment and she is interviewed by news shows.

Jan 05 2:30PM: The songstress is featured on Entertainment Weekly online and Perez Hilton’s site. The video tops 40,000 views.

Jan. 06: Video now has 80,000 views on YouTube.

Jan. 07: Less than a week after the video was posted, Jason Segel takes Chelsea and her twin sister to the Chicago Film Critics Association Awards (Where he won the Commedia Extraordinaire Award). The actor tweeted a backstage photo with his dates: