Posts tagged business relationships
Business Twitter initiative in trouble? Here’s how to get it back on track!
Jul 16th
More thoughts from online marketing pioneer Dr. Ben Hanna from his just-published report on his first 120 days of social media experiences at www.business.com.
Research shows 60 percent of those who try Twitter quit in the first week. It can be an incredibly frustrating experience, especially if you’re trying to build momentum in a corporate environment. Thoughts on getting your Twitter initiative back on track …
Be tenacious. Twitter is a viable business communication channel, end of story – “From what I’ve seen in the past four months, Twitter has a role as a business communication channel for most B2B companies,” Dr. Hanna said. “Whether Twitter figures out a way to monetize its business or not is irrelevant because, if Twitter fails, some other micro-blogging platform will take its place. If you’ve already tried Twitter for your business and struggled to make it work, it’s most likely because the B2B social media rules are still being written. Don’t give up.”
Twitter for business should be approached as mass communication - Conventional wisdom among many Twitter-advocates is that you are building a “community.” That is not necessarily so, according to Dr. Hanna. “If you plan to use Twitter for business, and you have more than a few hundred prospects/customers/influencers combined, you’re kidding yourself if you think interpersonal norms can govern how you use Twitter or other social media for your business. Why? Because Twitter is incredibly inefficient for forming interpersonal relationships. For the vast majority of businesses out there, “mass communication” is the model you should follow as you plan your Twitter strategy.”
You have a business contact list, so use it – As a business on Twitter, you don’t need to build a following like an individual would. This is a key advantage for business Twitter users who have either have forgotten or, more likely, ignored, this advantage out of some combination of a misplaced desire to not disrupt existing communication channels and the sheer revulsion many B2B marketers feel when considering how a P2P or B2C trend may apply to their business. Get over it. Establish a basic Twitter presence, make your prospects and customers aware of this new channel, and let them use it.
Focus on tweet quality over tweet quantity – Research shows that tweeting interesting things (e.g., tweets with links that more people click on) has a much bigger, positive influence on follower growth rate than does tweet volume (e.g., making sure you tweet very frequently to keep your tweets in front of your followers). The best practice for getting people’s attention and interest on Twitter is the same as it is across other business communication channels – talk when you have something important to say. Blanketing your followers with tweets doesn’t work any better than does blanketing the media with press releases about non-issues or hammering a direct mail list with irrelevant offers — One more reason to look at Twitter as a mass communication channel for business rather than a medium ruled by strict adherence to norms of interpersonal interaction.
Six ideas to beat the social media time tornado
Jul 9th
My friend Joshua Miller was inspired by my blogs posts on social media exhaustion in two ways: He committed to take a hike in the mountains, and he sent me the following post from Abhijeet Mukherjee. Here’s an excerpt from Mr. Mukherjee’s insightful post on dealing with social media exhaustion:
The truth is that you need information. Avoiding reading feeds or logging into Facebook isn’t the solution to beating social media exhaustion. You need to filter and use information effectively. And that can only happen when you are more systematic in your approach towards dealing with the plethora of information you get everyday. Here are six tips to help you get started.
1. Know what’s causing the overload. Most people check emails 10 times every day without realizing that it is a part of the information overload they are facing. Analyze your work day and decide on the activities which are essential and the ones which you could profit from doing less. For different people, it could be different things. It could be Twitter for you and RSS feeds for someone else.
2. Tame your email. A lot of us are addicted to checking email every 10 minutes. I was once too. Here’s a tip – if you get less than 50 emails per day then check it three times per day and allot 20 minutes to each of those time slots. If you check emails every 10-20 mins, you’ll respond to each in some exaggerated fashion. If you check three times a day, and you need to process 10-15 emails at a time and necessity will force you to find a way to handle them each very quickly. Those who get more than 50 emails per day, set up auto-forward rule or train your virtual assistant. Seriously, if you are someone who gets more than 50 emails per day, you need to start looking for an assistant to handle them.
3. Contain RSS feeds. The main intent behind the invention of RSS was to let people have access to information in one place and save them time. However, too many feeds can easily turn into a source of information overload. When it comes to managing RSS feeds, prioritization is the key. Here are 8 useful tips to manage and avoid RSS overload. If you are a Google Reader user like me then here are some more tips to make you more productive while using it.
4. Set time frames. Use a timer — it’s really easy to lose track of time when you get sucked into one of the myriad sources of information on the net. It happens to me when I am watching YouTube videos. I’ll vow to do it for 10 minutes and end up spending an hour. Sound familiar? Set firm time frames for work and play and use a timer. It could be a physical device or software like this one.
5. Avoid immediacy. It’s easy to get distracted by a random source of information like a Twitter message, breaking news, or an excellent article we come across. These things tempt us to give them immediate attention. And that’s what we need to avoid. Learn to save it for later.
6. Don’t suck up every source. Filtering information sources is an important step toward beating information overload. Identify the type of information you enjoy and associate one major source with it. For example, I have stopped reading newspapers and watching news channels. I have identified certain sources on the Internet where I read all the news I want. Get the picture?
Have some other great tips to deal with information overload ? Let’s hear them in the comments.
Social media imperatives for small businesses
Jul 1st
My friend Nathan Egan recently gave an interview to Business Week describing the imperatives for small business to engage in social media marketing. Here are some of the highlights:
1) Social media is new but it’s not going away. It’s a valuable new extension of traditional business communication. Jump aboard!
2) Your competition is going to be doing it, if they aren’t already. You need to make a start and take the time to learn it, now!
3) For many small business owners, social media is an excellent way for virtual networking, providing a highly-efficient method for finding new customers and business contacts.
4) Social media is highly-customizable to fit your business needs. It’s not just about getting a Facebook page. There is no cut-and-paste blanket strategy. Tailor to your existing communication strategy and customer needs.
5) Take a slow, strategic, approach. Before you begin, take some time to learn. See what’s out there. Monitor activity. Listen before you start engaging. Set aside at least 10 minutes a day to read and become familiar with your options.
6) Set up RSS news feeds to help you define your strategy and learn about what’s going on.
7) Setting up social media initiatives takes time, but keep an eye on the long-term costs-savings. A highly cost-effective way to go to market compared to traditional media.
8) Take advantage of short-cuts and automated systems. There are many free applications to help you work more efficiently once you get started.
More from Nathan Egan:
Lessons from a marketing strategy gone wrong (mine!)
Jun 29th
The theme for the blog this week is “strategy” and the first thing I needed to do is turn the microscope on myself.
It’s ugly. I have not been following my own rules … but let’s see what you might learn from my mistakes.
Something I have preached relentlessly: When you start a social media strategy, it needs to be integrated into your overall business objectives … which hopefully are aligned with customer wants and needs. Remember, social marketing is still MARKETING. Same fundamental rules apply.
My traditional core business is providing low-cost marketing services to businesses in the Southeast U.S. When I started this blog a few months ago, I had that objective and those customers firmly in mind. But then it all went wrong.
Here’s what’s happened:
- Over time I have been writing less about small business marketing fundamentals, and more about B2B and social media. It’s what’s interesting to me right now, so I went with it!
- The people who read my blog and follow my tweets now come from all over the world — relatively few from my core market.
- Based on my social media presence, including the blog, Twitter, and my web page, I am getting new customers from California, Switzerland and Australia — not what I originally had in mind.
In a matter of weeks, my core business competency and customer base changed dramatically, because my message and audience changed dramatically. Isn’t that interesting? I wasn’t consistent and now I’m challenged to match my STRATEGY to my inconsistent MESSAGE!!
How did this happen? I lost sight of my core mission because writing the blog became so much fun. I wasn’t “marketing.” I was being me. And it worked out fine. I didn’t choose my audience. My audience chose me.
What did I learn? Perhaps in social media, “being me” IS the strategy.
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Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here.
-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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