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.

Full Speaker List

You can download a brochure of all the Oakville Chamber’s Small Business Week speakers here.
You can read more about the Oakville Chamber’s Small Business Week here.

Where is it?

The event is at the Holiday Inn Oakville Centre – 590 Argus Road, Oakville.

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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.

Thank you for visiting www.strategycube.com, an innovation and strategy consulting firm in Burlington and Oakville.

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.

Thank you for visiting www.strategycube.com, an innovation and strategy consulting firm in Burlington and Oakville.

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

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-1-and-the-rise-of-social-seo
http://www.searchfuel.com/2011/04/how-google-1-could-impact-your-seo/
http://www.findandconvert.com/blog/2011/google-plus-1-big-news-for-seo/

Implementing the Google +1 sharing tool

You can implement the tool from google directly, but you have to know how to implement a code snippet: http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/

WordPress Plugins for adding the Google +1 button

My personal favorite social sharing plugin is the AddThis Plugin and they just added support for the Google +1 button.

Google +1 integrated into AddThis WordPress Plugin

Google +1 in the AddThis WordPress Plugin admin

Some stand-alone WordPress plugins:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/plus-one-button/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/plus-one/

Known Issues

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.

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.
• People like short, succinct stories.
• You can view my profile here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/001jonathanburns I’m not by any means suggesting it’s one of the best but it may give you some ideas.

Do I need my photo on LinkedIn?

• 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.

More LinkedIn training

If you’d like in-depth training on how you can build you personal brand online, consider attending one of these full day courses in Internet Marketing in Toronto or Oakville.

The Situation:

The client, Traditional Life Sciences Inc., was looking to start an online business in the health and wellness space, targeted to Boomers. They wanted a starting-point e-commerce, content management and marketing system that could be managed by 2-4 people but that could handle sales of $5-10 million a year before it required a major overhaul. We were asked to recommend an overall technology strategy and then to submit a proposal for executing the work.

Our Strategy:

1. Use an inexpensive open source CMS. We contemplated WordPress but eventually went with Joomla.
2. Instead of building out all the desired functionality using custom code, we recommended “renting” the functionality by using SaaS applications (also called hosted or cloud applications).
3. We used our Canadian designers to design the Joomla site but then we had it built by overseas coders to keep the cost down.

The Execution:

We call it a web ecosystem because calling it a website is a bit misleading (at least we think so). The ecosystem consists of:

1. A Joomla front-end which manages all the pages, article and the merchandising of the products.  The products are managed through a powerful Joomla component called Virtue Mart which acts as the product database.
2. Infusionsoft is the real power behind the system. Infusionsoft manages the email marketing and marketing automation, the CRM (user/customer database) and the e-commerce. All the actual transactions are processed through Infusionsoft and then sent electronically for order fulfillment. It also provides all the e-commerce sales and order reporting.
3. Customer Hub is an Infusionsoft add-on that allows customers to do self service on their account like updating their credit card information and seeing their past orders.
4. Get Satisfaction is the ultimate in web 2.0 community based support and it powers the support forum.
5. Google Analytics gathers all the visitor and conversion data and allows the client to do detailed conversion and ROI analysis.

Most people working in e-commerce have figured out that building a nice site is just the beginning and that most of the effort actually needs to go into driving traffic to the site, getting visitors into some kind of marketing automation sequence and then testing different offers until they convert. Then you up-sell and cross-sell them, also using marketing automation sequences. So how do you do this with a staff of 2 or 3? If you try do it using Constant Contact or aWeber or any other stand alone email tool you’ll be importing and exporting data every day and spending your life trying to get it to interact with your shopping cart and your customer database. Infusionsoft is really the only application on the market that allows you to manage this kind of marketing automation engine and it’s built for small companies with limited online marketing resources. It’s CRM + email marketing + marketing automation + an e-commerce cart, all in one, all pre-connected and ready to roll.

Cost Savings:

The client mentioned that they had our functionality quoted by an agency that would have built them a custom solution. The quote was for more than triple what they invested using our approach.

Client Feedback:

Getting to the final product as specified, on time, and on budget should be “price of entry”, but in a fairly sophisticated integration like Zwell, cost overages and time creep is likely more often the rule than the exception. Jonathan and the Strategy Cube team hit the timeline, delivered against the budget (while still indicating where options and upgrades were possible), and delivered a result that exceeds our expectation.  Communication throughout was efficient and solid.  We are delighted with the result, and recommend Strategy Cube without reservation.

Rob Carscadden, President & CEO of Traditional Life Sciences Inc. and zwell.ca. June 29, 2010.

The site went live in June 2010. You can visit the site at www.zwell.ca

Screenshots:

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7systems is a small firm run by several athletes who manage the business in their personal time – they all have pretty impressive day jobs. They wanted to run a contest to build awareness of their excellent product among non-users and so they designed a contest that would encourage athletes to tell their story online and then have their friends and family come and vote for them. 7systems didn’t have the budget for a full custom voting application so they asked us to build some inexpensive voting functionality. One of the reasons we love WordPress is the availability of free plugins. We researched and found the WP-Post Ratings plugin and then customized the look & feel as well as the functionality to suit their needs. You can visit the 7systems website here but the voting pages have been removed as the voting period ended June 30th.

Screenshots:

Thank you for visiting www.strategycube.com

I get asked this question by CEO audiences a great deal. It seems that somehow many CEOs have been told that Twitter is big so they had better get on Twitter. In my informal survey of CEOs that I know, most cannot name one valuable benefit they have gained from being on Twitter other than being able to brag about their hipness to their YPO, TEC or PEO group.

So what advice do I give?

For CEO’s of large firms:

• Most CEO’s of $100 million+ organizations do not need to get on Twitter themselves. Twitter represents a powerful new social phenomenon that is part of the whole user-generated content revolution (also called Web 2.0) but you can read about that here without wasting your time joining Twitter and then racking your brain every day for something to post that your General Counsel won’t freak out about.
• You should be blogging before you get on Twitter, either to an internal audience to help with vision casting or to an external audience for thought-leadership.  If you use Twitter as a way to share your blog posts externally then fine but do it in that order.
• You should ask a marketing savvy thought-leader in your organization who is 1) under 35 and 2) already on Twitter to come back to you with a recommendation on how your organization could use Twitter to grow its business. There is probably a subject-matter expert or thought-leader within your organization who could command an audience on Twitter but in all but a few cases that’s probably not you, the CEO.

For CEO’s of small firms and sole proprietors:

• Sure – get on Twitter – but don’t waste a lot of time on it. Twitter can be effectively used to grow your digital footprint. Make sure you fill out the short bio section CAREFULLY!! It’s what will show up in a google search. This is test for people who can’t articulate their value proposition in a succinct way.
• Focus on getting yourself a large network of potential customers and influential referers on LinkedIn and Facebook first. Then figure out how to use the status updates on Linked In and Facebook to position yourself to your network the way you’d like to be seen, without annoying or alienating them.  Then get yourself a blog and learn to use it. And then you can add Twitter to the mix as a way to repeat your status updates to another audience or to point to your blog posts. But do it in that order.
• Make sure you figure out how to write posts and status updates that accomplish what you want them to. Try role playing being a person reading you on Twitter, or via your LinkedIn or Facebook status updates. What will the reader want to read? What will they find useful? What will cause them to think of you as the __________ person? You get to fill in that blank with what ever brand you hope to own. Take a look at this humorous list of the “12 most annoying types of Facebookers” before you start.
• Use tools like ping.fm and friendfeed to automate your posting to multiple networks to save you time.

Thank you for visiting www.strategycube.com

I am hoping to be one of the lucky ones to get a google Wave invitation in the next few days from a friend (one of the special 100,000.) From my experience with google so far I am eager to see what they have put together here. I am hopeful that it will be the game-changing collaboration application that some are speculating it will be.

If you are trying to figure out what it is then this video from MG Siegler at TechCrunch might help.

http://g4tv.com/videos/41821/Google-Wave-Makes-Waves/

Thank you for visiting www.strategycube.com

Since February 2009 I have had the privilege of speaking to over 80 CEOs of Canadian firms through the Presidents of Enterprising Organizations network, the CEO Global Network, the Women Presidents Organization (WPO) and the York Technology Association on the subject of Web 2.0. The companies whose executives have seen the presentation include Lyreco, Energizer, McMillan, Toronto Board of Trade, Consumer Impact Marketing,  Melitta, Tree of Life, Kids Help Phone, Tyco/DSC, Swiss Natural Sources/Swiss Herbal, Wardrop Engineering, Jan Kelley Marketing, Marsulex, Kinectrics, Progistix Solutions/SCI Group, Peerless Electric, Pathway Communications, Glenway Golf & Country Club, Junior Achievement, the College of Massage Therapists of Ontario, RHR Canada, Triumph, Summerlea Office Solutions, LaserNetworks, Soft Care Corp, HostMySite.com, Aseco Integrated Systems, Greenblue Systems, Skyway Wind Energy Group, Torino Drywall, 360 Visibility, StaffClick Personnel, Blazing Design, Amer.com, Beneplan, Blake Jarrett & Company, NCI Marketing, Maracle Press, Melmart Distributors, Freedom 9, National Logistics Services, Industrial Thermo Polymers, Nealanders International, Atria Networks, End to End Networks, The Climate Change Infrastructure Corp. and The DOUG Agency.

Most CEO’s have heard of web 2.0 but they don’t really know what it is. When I ask them they say “it’s Facebook and Twitter and all those kind of web programs my teenagers use.” At the start of every meeting I ask them to share how Web 2.0 makes them feel.  From younger groups (CEOs in their 40s) I hear “exciting, opportunities, possibilities, connections.” From older CEOs (50+) I hear “it’s weird, my kids are into it but I don’t get it, an invasion of my privacy, I feel left behind, I feel a loss of control, I feel overexposed, it’s a big waste of time.”

The big idea I share with CEOs is that Web 2.0 is fundamentally about the shift from publisher generated content to user generated content. Leveraging web 2.0 for your business means harnessing the incredible power of user generated content. But it requires a huge paradigm shift and many companies are getting left behind.

In a July 2009 global survey of 1,700 executives on Web 2.0 by McKinsey & Company “69 percent of respondents report that their companies have gained measurable business benefits [from Web 2.0], including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.” Click on the chart to the right to see the details of this.

I quickly realized that the technology aspect of Web 2.0 is of secondary importance and it’s rarely why the implementations fail. The primary issue is always people and their work processes or online habits. The introduction of internally facing web 2.0 technologies into a workplace is fundamentally about changing people’s work processes, the way they get their work done. And if it it’s not planned around and integrated into the way users currently get their work done, then you have a sure recipe for failure.

The other observation I made is that internal web 2.0 applications are often brought on by the IT department to solve a particular problem and are rarely considered in the broader context of the firms business model: how they are organized and how they make money.  Yet when you consider how you might leverage the power of user generated content in the context of a firm’s business model you open up the potential to enable significant profit growth by making strategic changes to the actual business model.

Because of these realizations I have partnered with John Sutherland, a business model design and innovation expert and together we have put together a Web 2.0 consulting offering that is being very well received. We have begun consulting engagements with a number of the firms whose CEO’s saw the Web 2.0 presentation and wanted to go to the next step.

Today most small and mid-sized firms will be able to find ASP/SaaS (ready made) solutions for their Web 2.0 needs. We have spent time researching and engaging with the top ASP/SaaS solution providers for implementations for 5 users all the way up to enterprise installations for thousands of users so we can recommend the best solution for your specific needs. We have also researched the best technology partners for customized solutions if you want to build off your existing Microsoft Sharepoint platform and get more functionality than the ASP solutions provide.

Companies that are finding our services most useful are $10-500 million Canadian companies where the leaders are aware of web 2.0 but don’t understand the opportunities it presents or how to move forward to capitalize on them. Our particular specialty is guiding management teams through the discovery, decision and implementation phases built on a mutual understanding of the firm’s business model.

If you know anyone who fits this description we’d be happy to have a chat with them.

Thank you for visiting www.strategycube.com