MONTHLY CONTEST!
…Now That’s Determination!
For the last couple of years The Denver Health Foundation puts on a cool shindig called “Hot Rocks Griller Challenge,” where celebrity chefs from various Denver restaurants tantalize the crowd with amazing sliders and sides- all in competition for the winning slider of the night. All chefs’ join together for the cause of helping raise support for men’s health awareness. Since my sister-in-law is the event planner, I of course am gently coaxed into volunteering for the night.
Who could refuse since there is the opportunity to indulge in the best eats’s that Denver has to offer, and to rub shoulders with some wonderful people (OK there are a couple of celebrities there)!
My brother and I were assigned the task of manning the basketball station. In 30 seconds you were to shoot as many baskets as you could into a miniature hoop with three miniature basketballs. The prize? A men and women’s Tag Heuer watches kindly donated by Hyde Park Jewelers (trust me, I was looking at that women’s watch with mother of pearl face and diamonds with wanting eyes). Ervin Johnson, the former NBA player who played for the Denver Nuggets and then moved on to be the captain of the Milwaukee Bucks was our celebrity.
You could hire Ervin Johnson for $15 dollars to shot for you, or you could pay $5 to shot on your own. What a deal right? $15 for the opportunity to win a $1500 watch- a no-brainer!
Jeff, an attendee at the event was our first customer. He scored 48 hoops on his first try. He was the one to beat.
Ervin Johnson couldn’t believe that someone shot 48 hoops in 30 seconds, and was calculating how to beat Jeff’s score. The night went along with Mr. Johnson playing for those who were desperate to win those watches. He was great, gently working the crowd to come shot some hoops with him. He even got me play- which was totally humiliating and fun at the same time. He didn’t care, he was just there for a good cause.
It didn’t take Ervin Johnson long to beat Jeff’s first score of 48. Jeff soon found-out about his defeat, and paid for another round. He beat Ervin’s top score.
Jeff soon reached celebrity status, and was hired by women in the crowd to shoot for them. His top-score? 67 baskets!
Ervin Johnson was going to beat Jeff’s 67 baskets- no matter what. He persisted with more vigor. An hour and a half after he was scheduled to leave, he was still shooting hoops trying to beat Jeff’s score- and with dogged determination.
The Denver Health Foundation closed the booth down for the night, and Jeff’s skills won a lucky girl and himself the coveted watches.
The point of this article is not about the watches, and it’s not about Jeff’s amazing miniature basketball shooting skills. It was Ervin Johnson, who was resolute in beating that score of 67.
It made me think about my determination. How many times have I walked-away when I thought my time was over, not realizing that there was still time left in the game? I think I am single-minded in my pursuits, but watching Ervin Johnson, made me wonder. …Just something to think about.
By the way, Ervin Johnson would have beat Jeff’s score of 67… he just needed more time.
Just in case you were wondering what it means to raise awareness around men’s health issues it’s about preventing unnecessary and premature death in men, and to get men to work with their doctors to stay healthy and prevent, detect and intervene with any health conditions they may have. …A lofty goal indeed, and a plug for The Denver Health Foundation!
Social Media And The Need For A Home Base
Social media is affecting every aspect of a consumer’s decision-making process, making it impossible for businesses to ignore. Today’s savvy consumers are demanding social media from businesses because they want information and people are searching for information because they need to find results. This demand is changing the way companies are doing business. In order to give consumers what they are looking for, businesses need to participate in social media forums such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn etc.
Social media will help your business increase your digital footprint. Social outpost can reach those people who need your services, and can have a greater reach than many advertising mediums. Success in social media comes from interacting in a genuine effort by offering company insights, discounts, answering specific questions, and thanking fans. These types of exchanges allow for consumers to engage with a business, get to know them, and feel comfortable hiring them for their services.
Social media strategies should have one goal in mind; that is to drive business and consumer awareness around your brand. Creating a home base is essential, and will aid in the success of connecting with consumers, and increase your conversion rates.
Your corporate blog should be your home base, and be a device that is responsible for managing and dispersing all information. The goal here is not to drive your traffic to Facebook, Twitter, or other social networking platforms that act as outpost for your business. Social outpost is where initial interactions should take place, but should have a clear focus on driving consumers back to your blog.
It’s your corporate blog that can be controlled completely, and can offer additional information along with site-specific content, which will move customers to action.
So how do you guide your followers back to your blog? The best way is to create new content, or blog post on a consistent basis. Just make sure to include links back to your blog in your Facebook and Twitter posts. It’s as easy as that!
Side note:
Customized Facebook tabs and landing pages are a great idea, and will help consumers connect with your brand. Since Facebook is a social outpost, then importing your blog and Twitter feeds into your Facebook page should be avoided. After all, the goal is not to keep people on your Facebook page, but should be to drive people to action by brining them back to your blog.
With a little strategic planning mixed with creativity and innovation, your social media efforts will drive more traffic to your blog and website, and will aid in the conversion of customers that have been educated by you through your social media efforts.
Speed Dating and Websites
When you think about it, speed dating and websites have a lot of similarities. Both activities are actively engaged in looking for a potential mate. So how does one become victorious in this quest? …Making sure all the right ingredients are there to ensure immediate success and satisfaction by either website conversion, or landing someone’s phone number.
If you do not meet certain requirements, your petitioner is likely to say “next!” Because there is plenty of other websites and men/women who do met the checklist. The tricky part about this scenario is that the competition is just a click away, or at the next table.
THE NEED FOR SPEED
Let’s face it- speed dating and online shopping saves time!
For speed dating you can meet 10 or more people in 1 hour. For websites, that number increases drastically. We can go through a lot of men/women/websites before committing. And in a few seconds we determine if there is any chemistry between the two parties.
In speed dating choices are made within the first three seconds of meeting, for websites it takes approximately 15 seconds for the average person to browse your main page and determine if the proper chemistry is there and if they will explore your site further.
That doesn’t leave you with a lot of time to grab someone’s attention!
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Trying to grab the attention of your ideal follower can be daunting.
After all, first impressions really are everything. Even though we tend to demote its importance because it sounds superficial. Physical appearance and chemistry do play an important role.
Here are a few things you can do to increase your first impression and conversion rate- mostly for websites.
*Give them eye candy! Make sure at first glance you’re the sexiest thing they can find. Then give them content to support that.
*Target specific promotions or services you wish to attract your courter, and do it to right away.
*Write compelling content with value that is updated and refreshed- this will help in the swooning process. Make sure the content is organized and easy to understand. Keep in mind that in order to write compelling content you have to know what your visitors are looking for. Sometimes it helps to look at your competition.
*Give them a reason to want to come back or explore more.
*Make sure your site is easy to navigate. Not everything has to be on the home page or displayed openly.
*If you have a video or music, make sure that the adherent has the choice to play instead of auto-play.
*Keep your fonts simple and minimize the number of fonts used.
*Make sure there is a call to action that is simple and easy to understand.
These suggestions are simple things you can do to keep wooing people to come back for more. They will also help you to settle-down into a long-lasting relationship.
That’s Amore!
“Hi! My Name is (insert name here) and I am desperate for your business!”
Every month the same hand written note arrives in the mail- “Here is a little useful information” (the useful information changes from month to month). “Oh, by the way, if you know of someone that could use my services, can you let me know? I am NEVER too busy for one of your referrals!”
Mind you, I really enjoy getting hand written notes in the mail, and this article is not a rant against someone taking the time to write me. But this scheduled note, which says the same thing every month, lacks sincerity! It’s like someone went to an inspiring seminar held at a hotel on how to get referrals the “easy way”. To me it’s desperate. Doesn’t everyone know that desperation isn’t an attractive trait on anyone?
Businesses can’t afford not to be actively engaged with potential clients. Applications such as Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and LinkedIn have taken engagement to the next level. No longer is it about a unilateral conversation- like in the example above. Businesses have incredible opportunity to interact and educate.
Social media engagement can reach far beyond scheduled hand written notes, and can contact those who are actually interested in your services. Because people want results and information, they are searching. All we have to do as business owners is demonstrate that we have something of value. We need to engage in a way that says we hear what you are looking for, and understand the challenges you are facing. We need to earn respect.
So how is respect earned? Here is a small list of how to be cool and collected while engaging in social media.
#1 Be cool and real. We all want to date the hot guy/girl in the bar. Be that hot. Have real conversations with people that show your personality. No one wants to interact with someone who is sending out scheduled tweets without some kind of engagement.
#2 Write your own content. I think it is great to send out other people’s wisdom, and to re-tweet. I do it all the time. However in the mix, make sure you include some of your own blog articles. After all, you want to be known as an expert.
#3 Don’t follow everyone. Be strategic on who you would like to follow and follow you. We’ve all seen the people that have sent out 2 tweets and are following 1,200 people. Where they have a couple of hundred followers themselves. I never follow these people. Make sure that your ratios are in balance. I personally feel it is important to have more people following you than the number of people you are following. Remember you want to be the hot chick.
Don’t become the Arsenio Hall, The Carrot Tops, or the Vanilla Ices of social media. Their cool was short lived. Become the Sean Connery or Denzel Washington’s of social media- where they are known for just being cool. Just look at Chris Brogan- now that’s cool.
I don’t know about you, but I like to be on the winning team and am attracted to people that are successful, (or faking that they are successful). Don’t act desperate. Desperate ill-fated attempts always fail. Plus, it’s just lame!
5 Benefits to Monitoring Your Social Media Presence
Are you one of those people that think that just because you don’t pay attention to it, your company doesn’t have to worry about someone slandering your online presence? Think again. With web-based review sites like Yelp, Insider Pages, Zipingo and Angie’s List, consumers are constantly talking about your biz online – whether you know about it or not.
There has been a shocking increase in major brand names being smeared though even the wimpiest (and I mean that in terms of the simplicity of the site) of all social media sites: Twitter. A hashtag stating how much your customer service sucks from one consumer-gone-bad goes out to a couple of hundred people, and suddenly you have 5,000 responses chiming in about that time you didn’t give Sally a refund on that broken glassware she returned or how your cashier isn’t peppy enough at 8am. As menial and harmless as these things seem, their effects can snowball into a massive negative PR shitstorm.
But many companies have gotten wise to these tiny kindles and now are focusing on having a dedicated person – and sometimes an entire team – putting out these flames before they morph into an unwieldy wildfire.
Social media monitoring isn’t a new concept. Publicists have been doing it since, well, the beginning of the public relations industry. It’s just that now we’re dealing with a new medium – same dog, new tricks. But the differentiating factor is the more highly efficient terrain that we’re working in.
Social media monitoring can be easily done in just a few hours each day, as long as you know:
*What Google alert keywords to target
*Which sites to monitor
*How and when to respond to complaints (Hint: you respond to all of them)
*How to efficiently juggle multiple social networks
Monitoring your social media accounts has many benefits – the most important being that you can keep that brand name you worked so hard to cultivate clean. A brand is a powerful, powerful thing, and the tiniest besmirch can blow up into a huge issue and ruin a once strong household name.
While many people will give vague reasons for why social network monitoring is such an important part of online marketing nowadays, there are a few more specific benefits to keeping a strict eye on your online presence:
*You have the ability to turn complainers into repeat customers (everyone wants to be special and covets one-on-one attention)
Discover trends on favorite and most talked about products
*Pinpoint people who influence your brand and engage them more often (this would be that Twitter god who has 25,000 followers that bow to his every whim)
*Build and nurture relationships with other key industry players and with your consumer base
Social media monitoring isn’t just some meaningless corporate jargon like “rightsizing” and “proactive solutions”, it’s a real process that can save your small business’s reputation. By keeping on top of the chatter your company is generating, you can have full control over the conversation and steer it where you see fit.
The Visible Benefits of the Invisible Ghostwriter
Ghostwriting is a peculiar thing, and one that most small businesses don’t realize the importance of. But if you look towards the multi-million dollar mega-corporations, you’ll realize that they’ve not only recognized the power of a potent content cocktail, but have embraced it with open arms and pay heavy salaries for the ghostwriters that produce their money-making website and marketing copy.
However, since ghostwriting isn’t something that’s on the forefront of most business owner and manager’s minds, it’s an easy thing to overlook when vamping up business efforts in the marketing and development areas. But overlooking the words that connect your audience to your services is something that most companies can’t afford to ignore – including those with tight marketing budgets.
Whoa – slow down there. What exactly is ghostwriting?
Ghostwriting is when a company hires a writer to write for their company – be it the marketing copy on the sales page of the website or the CEO’s weekly blog post. The writer creates content anonymously, meaning he or she doesn’t take credit or get a byline for their work, so that it seems as if it is coming directly from another source.
Ghostwriters write speeches for political figures, take care of blog posts for executives who either don’t have time to write or don’t have a compelling writing style, and write memoirs and books for celebrities – amongst other things.
It’s just a website. I wrote a bunch of awesome papers on the merits of Tennyson’s poetic works in college. Surely I can write my own copy, right?
Wrong. Writing isn’t a talent that everyone is born with. It takes practice – lots and lots of practice. And lots and lots of editing. Molding words into powerful descriptions of your business and products is a key component to selling, and it’s far too often a skill that’s most commonly overlooked.
Even as I took a break from writing to catch up on my latest issue of Inc. Magazine, I flipped it open to a story about – you guessed it – how companies are increasingly losing their voice because of banal and generic content. Or in laymen’s terms, bad writing.
This is becoming a major issue because with commerce and marketing switching to an online format, the written word is usually the sole factor that makes your business stand out from the rest – especially in search engine listings. Jason Fried at Inc. Magazine said it best when he stated “When you write like everyone else and sound like everyone else and act like everyone else, you’re saying “Our products are like everyone else’s too.””
I’m not trying to publish my memoirs or write a strongly persuasive speech. How would a ghostwriter help out my business?
Oh ye of little faith. Ghostwriters can provide a much needed service in almost every area of your business. A few key roles that can be performed by an experienced ghostwriter are:
• Creative website content developer
• Copywriting for products
• Executive biographies
• Funny, informative and interesting blog posts
• Social media updates (status insights on Facebook, connecting with consumers, Twitter updates)
• Writing engaging ad copy for online and print
Never underestimate the power of a few cleverly crafted sentences when trying to persuade your consumer base to buy, promote or follow your cause. Whether it’s revamping the marketing copy for a website or crafting the perfect tone for a Facebook fan page update, words are an invaluable component to every business, especially in the digital age.
Don’t be like the mass companies that produce mundane, generic content and think it won’t affect their bottom line. Make sure your copy is succeeding in its mission – creating new customers.
SEO, Social Media & Skinny Jeans
SEO efforts have long been about content – blog posts, website content, paid and organic search. But with new real-time search results from Google, social media is jumping into the mix. And companies had better be ready to step up their SEO action plans to take full advantage of the plethora of marketing opportunities that this lays out before them.
No longer is social media just the “cool thing” to do – like rocking an 80’s inspired flat top hairdo in 2010. Social networking now has a definitive effect on your SEO efforts, and as such, it must be monitored closely. While previous social networking efforts were generally tied to connecting with a business’s customer base, Google is now including real-time social media into their search results – resulting in increased (and practically effortless) SEO opportunities.
Twitter and Facebook has always needed to be somewhat strategic for businesses, but now it’s more important than ever to have social media content that utilizes strict SEO guidelines like potent keywords, pertinent links and updates ripe with useful content and hashtags.
Real-time social media search results are also strategically placed on the first page of Google search. These real-time updates are not only pulled from Twitter, but will soon be streaming data from Facebook and Myspace as well (as long as the content is open to the public, and not private). This means that any status updates, wall links, and posts can – and will – be picked up by Google’s search algorithms to add to their search listings.
What this means for companies is that social media is a much more integral part of search engine optimization, and where some companies chose to forgo the Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, they can no longer ignore the colossal impact that these tools now have on online marketing efforts. And instead of using social media and SEO as separate marketing tools, these attempts will need to be combined to work together for optimal performance.
While still new, it’s important for companies to jump on board quickly as companies will soon be syncing their social media efforts with SEO practices and by taking advantage of this now, small businesses can possibly get prime search page space by utilizing carefully crafted keywords and targeting popular subjects in their social networking efforts.
Social media has always been a great way to connect with consumers and get the word out to large base of people, but never has it been so integral to online marketing and SEO efforts. And it greatly increases the possible ROI for business social media endeavors.
Saying “no” to social media may have been a semi-acceptable response in the past for businesses – especially ones that cater to other businesses rather than the general consumer. But with these recent game changing real-time results, it’s opening doors for SEO that weren’t previously open. Social media and SEO now go hand in hand – like a skinny jean wearing hipster and Brooklyn. Don’t be the square that falls behind.
140 Twitter Characters
Recently I saw a retweet on Twitter about “5 ways to Tweet more than 140 characters” and it occurred to me that the author (and retweeter as well) seem to be missing the fundamental concept of Twitter.
Dom Sagolla recounts that 140 characters was settled on because it was shorter than the 160 character limit for phone text messages, and shorter was better in order to keep SMS costs down with early versions of Twitter.140 characters was settled on because it was shorter than the 160 character limit for phone text messages, and shorter was better in order to keep SMS costs down with early versions of Twitter.
We don’t worry about SMS costs any longer because Twitter is web-based. However, the 140 character limit still stands, and I think it should be adhered to for a few reasons:
1. Twitter is not your blog. By all means, use your blog to flesh out your thoughts on anything you’d like – much like I’m doing here. But send people to your blog with a short headline and a link, don’t try to cram an extended thought into 140 characters. Also realize that engaging with your followers on twitter means limiting your conversation with readers to 140 characters at a time, which also doesn’t allow for much thoughtful discussion. Ask people to comment on your blog and try to keep the discussion there.
2. Twitter is not your Facebook page. Facebook is a great place to post pictures of your recent product launch party, or show a video of your office walkthrough. Twitter is a great place to write a short message with a bit.ly link directing people to that post. (Added bonus of signing up for a bit.ly account – you can track statistics of click-throughs as a way to see where people are arriving from and what days they clicked the link.)
3. Twitter is also not instant messaging. I have seen people have lengthy conversations on Twitter, and while a bit of back-and-forth is good engagement, all parties need to have a sense of when it’s time to move the discussion to e-mail or IM to continue the conversation.
4. There is much to be gained by being brief. But not by trimming letters from every word in your post. If you need extra space, take a hint from above and post to your Facebook page or your blog, but don’t redirect me to the last 15 characters of a 155-character tweet – it’s annoying and wastes people’s time. Use your writing skills to edit, censor, rewrite and cut your words down to the 140 character limit. It’s liberating, really.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery said it best: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
April monthly contest for $50 BIG ONES!
Just post your response on our blog, Twitter or Facebook!
Here are some submitted answers-
…the rump of an ox!
…the nose of a frog!
…than the wart of a witch!
