I’ll be presenting “Escaping Social Media Madness“ at the Oakville Chamber of Commerce’s Small Business Week on Monday, Oct 17 at 11:30am.
Presentation highlights:
Social media for business is completely over-hyped. For most businesses social media should be way down on their marketing plan. They should have invested time and money in many other foundational places first.
Social media is good for certain things but it’s very time consuming to do well. You should skip social media as a marketing tactic if:
You don’t have time to maintain relationships online.
You just want quick wins.
You have a highly transactional business and you don’t really want anything except transactional relationships.
You have no digital assets (articles, photos, videos, podcasts), no interest in creating them on a regular basis or no cost effective way of getting them made for you.
I’ll be presenting a pre-launch workbook, checklist and a roadmap to guide you.
I’ll explain how tools like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Yoono and Twilert can help you.
I’ll explain how to use social media for competitive research.
I’ll give you my best advice on creating and promoting your content.
I’ll examine several common social media tactics including:
Following lots of people on Twitter,
Gated content and contests on Facebook
Starting LinkedIn groups
Foursquare, Google Places and Facebook Check-In.
You’ll leave with a much clearer understanding of social media and whether to invest your precious time in it or not.
A Toronto restaurant tweets limited-time menu items as well as “secret passwords” or “secret codewords”. People who visit the restaurant and mention the password/codeword get a free drink. They think their social media efforts have increased their walk-in traffic 20% in the last few months. I like the way this plays into the psychology of motivation related to “being special” or “being part of a special club” and “getting something because I know a secret no-one else knows.”
Social media expert Marc Gordon shared this example at the Constant Contact sponsored “Get Down To Business” Social Media for Small Business conference a few weeks ago in Toronto.
I attended the Constant Contact sponsored “Get Down To Business” Social Media for Small Business conference a few weeks ago in Toronto. social media expert Marc Gordon addressed this question:
How do I know my Social Media efforts are working?
ANSWER: Social media is working for you if it leads to quality face to face meetings with potential prospects or referrers OR, if your prospects are not local, then an email address and opt-in.
Nicely put Marc!
Therefore your website must capture leads with an offer and an email opt-in. I know you have heard this before but if your website still doesn’t have this then take the time to make a compelling offer (like a downloadable whitepaper or video) and put up a lead capture form. If you haven’t signed up with one of MailChimp, Aweber, MadMimi, ConstantContact or Infusionsoft then do so and use their tools to create the email capture embed code and put it into your site. If you use WordPress or Joomla, there are free plugins from these email providers that make integrating it easy.
Google has just introduced its version of the Facebook LIKE button and if you are looking for the latest tool in the battle for better search engine rankings, this should be on your radar. It’s called the Google +1 button and it launched in the US in March 2011 and has made its way into various popular plugins in the last few weeks. Google says “+1 buttons let people who love your content recommend it on Google search.”
It’s estimated that more than 50% of corporations don’t allow their employees to access Facebook from the office. But they do allow access to Google. So this could give the Google +1 button a huge advantage over the Facebook Like button.
I would be wary of immediately thinking of how you can get all your employees to like your company page and send it to the first page of Google search results. But try it I’m sure the google engineers are smarter than us and have or soon will figure out how to prevent people gaming the +1 button.
Quality content is still the key. That’s what intelligent people want from the web and Google only has value if it can keep showing you quality content and weeding out the junk produced by people hoping to just get traffic without real work or talent. The +1 button is just another tool that google hopes will increase it’s ability to show you quality content.
Expert articles on the implications of Google +1 for SEO
There is no support for the +1 button in Internet Explorer yet and I had some minor troubles viewing it in Firefox for Mac. It showed up fine in Chrome for Mac.
I am excited to announce that my website for Internet Marketing Courses in Toronto, Oakville is now live. People having been telling me for years that I should launch a formal training program to teach small business owners and marketers about internet marketing and there has always been a big project or business in the way. But I’ve finally done it.
I’ll be partnering with a well known GTA area online marketing expert to offer an amazing course for small business owners in November 2011. More details to follow.
American overconfidence vanishes once consumers try a new product, and it’s replaced with exaggerated self-doubt.
In a study published in the February 2011 issue of Journal of Consumer Research, Billeter reports something that he suspected all along: American overconfidence vanishes once consumers try a new product, and it’s replaced with exaggerated self-doubt. “The bottom line is that before people try a new product, they think that it will be easier than it is,” Billeter explains. “And after they’ve tried it once, they think they’re going to be worse than they actually will be.”
So how do you keep users from abandoning your new product before they get the benefits?
Four strategies to help companies improve product adoption rates:
Billeter recommended four strategies to help companies improve product adoption rates:
1. Design products to feel familiar,
2. Hire a guide for your demo,
3. Take advantage of technology and timing, and
4. Buy time with bundled pricing incentives.
These might sound a little fluffy but read the details of their points – they have some very good ideas many companies could copy.
I love a good 60 second screencast on a product
Related to their points 2 and 3, I think software products and web tools should all have very well made screencast videos that act like guides to walk consumers through getting past initial setup and usage confusion to the wins. Even relatively simple products can benefit from one.
If you are leading a startup you will at some point have to decide how to compensate your team. Who do you give equity to? Do you do profit sharing for the team, or just bonuses? Or should you just give a plain old vanilla salary.
Many of the CEO’s I have worked with are fundamentally sales guys. Not always, but often. They were frequently phenomenally successful sales guys in the past and their lone-wolf talents sent them off to start their own business which, because they could sell, avoided bankruptcy, beat the odds and became very successful.
Not surprisingly most of them love incentives and bonus plans – because most sales people are paid some sort of commission. They figure that since it worked for them it should work for others. And it’s an honest mistake – one I’ve made. But I have often had this nagging doubt that just because it worked for this person in that circumstance, something doesn’t add up to it working now, in this role. But I could never convince myself and so I often lined up behind the driving force of the sales guy CEO.
I’m leading a startup at the moment, a B2B SaaS product. We have a staff of 4, soon to be 6, and 3 shared resources. So I’m thinking about compensation and incentives at the moment.
His thesis is that consistent data from reputable universities shows that while incentives may work for well-defined, linear, mechanical roles, they are counter-productive for roles that require creativity and problem solving or have high degrees of ambiguity. Now I’m not a genius but I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen a startup whose work is primarily linear and well-defined. In roles that require creativity and problem solving and that operate in ambiguous circumstances, Dan argues the 3 key motivators are: AUTONOMY, MASTERY and PURPOSE.
Whether you go with Dan’s top 3 or the Gallup Q12, incentives or monetary rewards are strangely absent. So what is the leader of a start-up to do?
My plan for motivating my software startup team:
Here’s where I think I’m going as far as my plan for motivating my team:
Make sure they have great front-line manager. For now that’s me but we’re hiring a new team leader so I can transition into an advisory role and I have to make sure I get them a first class, Gallup Q12 style manager. And while I’m their manager I need to focus on the next 3 items: (I have to admit that even as I write this I’m thinking that I need to lift my head out of preparing the VC presentation and running financials and make sure I am doing what I just wrote.)
Make sure that each of them is operating in their areas of talent and passion. Which means you had better have a way of figuring out their talents and passions.
Set clear expectations. In writing, because the spoken word gets forgotten and becomes vague over time.
Make sure that each of them know that I care about them personally. Which takes time doesn’t it. You have to slow down long enough to ask questions and listen and remember.
Pay them well enough that money isn’t an issue. I generally aim for 70-80% of the salary range for that job in that market (assuming you can get your hands on a recent compensation survey report.)
Give equity to the most senior leaders so that their success become inextricably linked to the long term success of the business. Where necessary give equity to some of the key people who take risks and sacrifice early on.
Avoid a short term focused bonus or incentive plan.
If the business generates profit, pay out decent bonuses to your team, but don’t link it to a linear “if you do X I’ll pay you a bonus of Y”. In fact, because of this TED talk, I don’t think I will promise a bonus at all. Instead I’ll be talking about “the team achieving its goals” and how we’ll all feel when we do because being part of a talented, successful team is very fulfilling for the kind of people I want on my teams. So when we do generate some profit (and we will), we’ll share the wealth in an appropriate way, but it will not be a focus of how we motivate it our team.
If you are leading a startup I’d appreciate your thoughts on the subject. Thank you for visiting www.strategycube.com
For the first 5 months of 2010 I was working 2 days a week for Sanjay Singhal, the CEO of Fusenet, an innovative tech incubator in Oakville, ON with a staff of 60. I was helping with general business strategy, business process development, online marketing training and leadership development. In May of 2010 Sanjay had a new SaaS business that he wanted to get up and running and he didn’t have anyone internally who was the right fit to lead the project, so he asked me to. The Fusepay business is a new subscription billing software service for small digital businesses.
Over the 7 months from May – Dec 2010:
I led a cross-functional team in creating the dynamic business plan. We wrote it on a wiki rather than in Word.
I led the competitive research and industry analysis.
I led a cross-functional team in scoping the initial releases of the product as well as a 12 month-out feature set.
I oversaw our 6 person Development Team which built a from-scratch working beta of the software in 4 months.
I managed the overall project through weekly team meetings and made sure we hit our key release dates.
In Oct 2010 we went live with our first internal customer, a startup within the Fusenet parent company. We have been processing live transactions for them for 3 months now.
I built a very complex financial model that allowed us to fully model the business from an investment and return perspective. We also used it to model the impact of different pricing strategies.
I met with several potential investors to discuss a potential Series A round of VC financing.
Despite Sanjay’s offer to have me run the business, I knew that I wanted to keep building some of the other businesses I’m involved with and I also felt that the project needed a leader with more SaaS Product Management experience than I have. I spent the fall of 2010 interviewing candidates for this plum job – and got to meet some excellent people in the Toronto and GTA tech community. In early January 2011 we hired the former GM of e-commerce for Grand & Toy as our new CEO. I will be spending the rest of January onboarding him and transitioning out of the project. I’ll miss the team – they were a great team to work with – but I know they will go on to build an amazing business and I’ll enjoy watching from the sidelines while I move on to put my energies into the other businesses I am building.
Many CEOs and small business owners ask me – “how can I use social media to grow my business?” The cheapest and fastest strategy is to maximize your use of Linked In, personally if you are a sole proprietor or thought leader, or corporately if you are the leader of a larger organization.
Here is a simple roadmap to get you off the ground and starting to use LinkedIn to build your personal brand or the brand of your business. If you are a sole proprietor then you will need to do this yourself. If you are the leader of a larger business then your thought leaders, marketers and sales people need to be doing this. And you can’t force them to because their LinkedIn profile is theirs, not a corporate asset, so you’ll have to cast a compelling vision as to why they should do this that connects your company’s interests to their interests.
Get your LinkedIn profile up to date
It should not read like a resume. People don’t expect it to be quite so formal.
Yes but make sure you don’t put up a bad photo. No photo is better than a bad photo. But a good photo makes you more approachable and helps you to stand out in lists.
A good photo: Consider black and white or sepia – it can look very professional.
A bad photo: blurry, cluttered background, too dark, back-lit, too many colors.
Build your network on LinkedIn
Define who is a good network prospect for you: a potential customer, someone who could refer people to you, someone influential who could write a recommendation about you.
Go though your mental Rolodex (or whatever equivalent you use) and write out a list of your past contacts that you’d like to connect with on LinkedIn and begin inviting them. Write your own invitation note – don’t just use the default.
Every time you meet someone who is a good network prospect, invite them on Linked In within hours, definitely within 24 hours. After I go to an event the first thing I do when I get back to the office is sit with a pile of business cards and invite people on Linked In.
How to write a good LinkedIn Status Update
Write out what brand you want to personally own in the minds of the members of your network.
Pretend that you are a colleague you worked with 10 years ago and haven’t seen since. They reconnect with you on LinkedIn and begin seeing your status updates. Based on those updates they form an impression of who you have become and what you are doing now and what your niche or specialty is. What impression do you want them to have of you?
Suggestions:
Give mini press releases when you have an announcement you want them to know about.
Ask for help or advice. People like giving advice and on LinkedIn it’s quick and easy. This can be for you personally or on behalf of a member of your group who needs help.
Setup a twitter account and check the “Publish to twitter” checkbox
If you have a website or a blog and you care about its organic search rankings then use carefully chosen keywords that you are trying to rank for in your status update
Examples:
American overconfidence vanishes once consumers try a new product, and it’s replaced with exaggerated self-doubt. 4 tips for improving new product adoption from Marriott School professor Darron Billeter. http://lnkd.in/Q3mume
Excited to announce that FusionCom (one of my businesses) has just hired a new CEO – Mark Taylor from McKinsey.
Heading to SXSW Conference this week – anyone else from Toronto going? Ping me!
Trying to find an affordable ad agency with specialty in clean tech – any suggestions?
Watchouts:
Confidentiality is a cornerstone of business. You can’t violate that here – so stay away from including details when you think the people involved would not want you to.
However, it’s the details that often make the posts more interesting so ask the relevant people for permission so that you don’t become “the bland update guy” on LinkedIn.
Recommendations on LinkedIn
Don’t ask unless you recently got great unsolicited feedback from someone – then it’s OK to ask them.
Give to get. Start by writing recommendations for people from whom you’d like to get a recommendation.
Pulling prospect lists using LinkedIn
The advanced People search allows you to pull all the people with “the likely title of your ideal prospect ” (or whatever) in their title who are within X km radius of a given postal code/zip code. This is an extremely useful feature.
LinkedIn Groups
Consider making a LinkedIn group for a group of your prospects as long as you have a clear vision of:
What this group of people have in common in terms of interest and needs
A clear vision of how they will be able to and WANT TO help one another
A clear vision of a role you can play that adds value and positions you how you want to be seen
If you ask your group members whether they want a Linked In group, most will say they don’t know what they would use it for. You’ll have to show them how you intend to use it so that they see the value. Some groups may not engage and then they won’t get value from it.
Establish a clear purpose for how the group will be used and how to keep it from become useless in the eyes of your members.
Make it invitation only.
Commit time to moderating it. Read what’s on it. Use what you read to help the members.
Pick up the phone and call a member based on something they wrote in the group’s Discussion section. Show them that you are reading and responding.
Doing research on LinkedIn
Once you find a prospect you may want to find a list of their coworkers using the Company tab. The Company tab also gives you some rich detail about the company that might be helpful, especially new hires and recent alumni. People are often much more open to talking to outsiders when they are new in a role.
I finally got fed up with using a text file on an encrypted disk image to manage all my passwords. I figured that there must be good Mac software for managing passwords and I figured it might even sync with my iPhone which could come in handy when I’m on the road. Sure enough there are many, but one of them costs a fair bit more than the rest. Being a believer in “you get what you pay for” and figuring that the cost of losing one of my or my clients hosting control panel passwords would be pretty huge, I went for the most expensive one, 1 Password. It also had the best reviews. I did the 15 day free trial and I was not disappointed. This app ROCKS and once you’ve used it you will wonder how you lived without it for so long.
When I was a Windows user I tried using Outlook’s Task feature. It never quite worked for me the way I wanted to so I often went back to managing my to-do lists in a Word doc or an Excel spreadsheet. But then I switched to Mac and saw an ad for Things and decided to try it. I have never looked back. The interface is beautifully designed and the Cultured Code guys really understand how a busy person thinks as they are trying to organize their lives. For example I love that there are Areas of Responsibility that you can create like: Personal, Job 1, Job 2, Sports Association, Father, Husband, Church etc. These are different from Projects which can overlap with Areas of Responsibility. I also love the Today, Scheduled, Next and Someday buckets. A pretty key feature is that it syncs with my iPhone so I can organize my life on the go or make lists on my Mac and then have them with me when I’m out.
I often want to grab a section of a webpage or an image, add a note with say an arrow pointing to something and then email it to someone. I need to do this a lot in developing websites: fix this, move this, make this white, delete this etc. Skitch is the best way to do this that I’ve ever found and the free version is what I use. If you are a Windows user try Jing.
I’m a consultant so I use Billings every day to track all my time, billable and non-billable, and then do all my invoicing to clients. I use a bookeeper so I don’t need my own accounting program, but I do need to track my time and invoice clients and Billings does it perfectly. It has beautiful templates for invoices and reports and it has a nice iPhone version as well. I tried Freshbooks for a while but for a one-time cost of $50 and the ability to use it without a web connection, Billings was better value for me.
Daylite is the CRM program I use for managing my sales funnel: prospecting phone calls, meetings, opportunities, revenue forecasting etc. It’s like salesforce.com except much cheaper and with nicer interfaces. It’s a very powerful program and I use only a fraction of what it can do. It fully integrates with all things Mac like iCal and Mail in a very slick way and it has an iPhone version as well. It will also do Project Management.
I used Cyberduck, a free Mac FTP program, for 2 years but I recently switch to Transmit because I use FTP so much and all the Mac web developers I work with use it. The main feature I’ve discovered that I really like is the ability to edit remote files right in Transmit (sweet!). So I can navigate to a .css or .html file, open it in Transmit without downloading it, make a change, hit Save, refresh the browser and voila – done!
I use Jungle Disk to manage remote backups of my Mac Laptop to a Rackspace cloud account. It costs me about $3.50 a month to backup around $10GB of my most important files. They are fully encrypted and the backup is incremental. I looked at Moxy but liked this because of the pricing and the security of going with Rackspace vs an unknown. You can also back up to Amazon S3.
Disk Space Manager (when you run out of disk space and need to delete files)
Have you ever run out of space on your harddrive and wished there was a way to look into your harddrive, see what’s taking up all the space, and be able to easily delete what you don’t need? This is what you need and it’s free.
I’m sure the google engineers are smarter than us and have or soon will figure out how to prevent people gaming the +1 button.
