5 Rules of Social Media for Your Business

The most common things I hear about people who are trying to figure out social media (blogging, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube) are: “I don’t get it.” and “Do I have to?”. These are the sounds of change, of lasting change, of change that isn’t just a passing fad. The most effective way to understand this change, however, is not stare at the social media tools themselves – they’re just the tools – they aren’t what’s driving it, and they’re not what it means. Understand first, then go back to the tools, and you’ll see them making sense. Here are the five rules:

1. Marketing your business now is about what you contribute, not what you’re selling. Yeah, I know that sounds like hokum, but that’s because this is change. Before, marketing was an elite activity. The mysterious priests of marketing dispensed the wisdom of what works, demographic charts in hand. And it did work – it usually worked better than just randomly trying things. But watch now as those same marketing gurus try to make corporate blogs work, and you’ll see they too are trying to grasp a change that they themselves are not driving. Marketing your business now is about what you contribute. In other words, don’t say “I offer this product or service. If you want this, pick me.” That lowest common denominator panhandling never really was marketing, but it’s less so now than ever, and it’s downright offensive in social media environments. Want to ruin your brand, pitch underhanded. Watching people try to grasp this change is interesting – it’s requiring more people to take their work more seriously. What is a contribution after all? It’s insight, expertise, opinion, advice, education, analysis, explanation – but it’s not thinly veiled sales pitches – let me explain 3 benefits of picking us. The best marketing in social media never mentions ‘us’ or ‘me’. It talks about the world around us – it looks with the community out at something, instead of trying to funnel the community down a chute like cows to slaughter. The quickest route to failure is having nothing that interests you and nothing to say. This is, of course, daunting for those who chose their profession solely to pay bills rather than for the love. But even that can be an angle – one way to capture people’s interest is to talk about the boat a lot of people are in, to express that dissatisfaction and angst. It may not be your way, but it’s one way.

2. Being genuinely gregarious and amiable is attractive where trolling for clients is offensive. I say this as someone who in some ways is more of a brown moth than a social butterfly. I’m not the guy with 3000 contacts, who is the center of parties. Those guys are social anchors, and they truly have it made. I am connected with a few dozen social anchors, though, each with their own community. And I’m connected with lots of other people who dig what I’m putting out. Effectiveness, for me, comes from including people, inviting people to connect, and generally making that small effort that brings people into my orbit, without ulterior motives. In a way, you have to like being connected to people. And again, I’m not selling them anything or pushing product down their throats. I like certain movies, and share them. I like certain wines, and share them. And when I say something related to internet marketing, as I do frequently, people know it’s free information and it’s coming from a certain degree of experience. I share that experience consistently, and so people refer me and consult me, and I get some benefit from being considered by some a resident expert. If I were a landscaper, I wouldn’t say “call us if you need your lawn mowed”, I’d say “To protect your lawn in this heat, prefer one long watering per day over two short ones, for maximum ground penetration”. or “Fall is coming – time to start thinking about what trees you’ll plant – but resist the tree sales at your big box store – it’s really too soon.”

3. Your reputation is already public – you either add your voice or concede it to others. One question is what if someone says something negative about the company? It happens. You’re not a serious enterprise unless someone doesn’t like you. If one disgruntled client (or ex employee disguised as a client) makes you want to hide in a hole, then obscurity is in your future. It’s rough, but getting past five stars to 4.5 is worth the journey, because that’s when your orbit is pulling in enough people to sustain you.

4. You will adapt to the new social media, or your business will die or begin to die in the next few years. It’s not a passing fad. Some businesses can still grow by handing out flyers, or with a phone book ad, for a while. And traditional marketing isn’t dying – it’s evolving. Event marketing, for example, is more powerful than ever. But effective event marketing requires effective use of social media. After all, how are you getting out the word about your event, and to whom? If you have a big announcement, and haven’t already cultivated an audience that respects you, attendance will be limited. Even if you hand out flyers or placing a paper ad, isn’t your web site or facebook page at the bottom? If not, you’re missing takers. But as media is transformed, clinging to the old way, if coupled with failing to grasp the new way, is a sure recipe for decline. Adapting will mean revising an evolving internet marketing plan that places a strong emphasis on social media tools, but will be effective only with a social media mentality.

5. Those who adapt their assumptions will find social media a windfall. That’s true whenever this kind of cultural change occurs. In this case, adapting assumptions means neither trying to ignore social media, nor trying to treat social media as the old kind of marketing. The list of things that are so basic that they aren’t changing is getting smaller. People don’t respond anymore to “agreement by a panel of experts” – or they respond by asking their friends and checking ratings. The customer process is social. The business process is social. Change sometimes causes people to get scared, and scared people act in a variety of ways – some shut down, some pretend the wave isn’t coming – cling to what you’re doing and hope, and there are lots of other ways. But here is the last rule: you can learn to use social media effectively. You can adapt. You can “get it”. It may be that, when you do, you won’t like what it means. “Do I have to?” The new marketing requires actually working at it, not just throwing money at it. Most people don’t want to do new things. Social media is asking you to do different things. If you don’t want to be the person in your company that thinks about and connects with community, then the different thing is identifying and empowering the person that’s passionate about it. Before, you called an agency and tossed them some cash, and you were done. They’ll still take your cash, but those days really are over. That said, if you need help learning how to use social media effectively, we’re happy to help.

Where is Everyone? Try Facebook!

Ask yourself, “where is everyone these days?” When I was a kid, groups and social networking was extremely popular. It’s not something invented in 2004, despite the constant regurgitation of old articles and news vignettes about how networking is helping job seekers and career folks to get opportunities and small businesses to grow. We used to meet at everything from the Rotary Club to Toastmasters. And not to knock those cultural institutions – they’re still  popular, and I’m sure they’re still effective. We’ve even seen reported growth at such gatherings, and new groups forming, in the wake of the current economic situation. But it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the growth of social media, often for the exact same purposes.

“Pssst! There over here, in Facebook!” I’m  betting there are more conversations happening in Facebook every hour, on the average, than in all of those in-person social networks put together in an entire day. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Craigslist, MySpace… that’s where the people are. They’re in social media.

Some would decry this and say it’s depersonalizing everything, and undermining the growth of local cultures Sure, maybe some. Those are reasonable points. But it’s also doing things that weren’t happening before, and which occasional national conventions didn’t solve. It’s letting people in outlying towns, neighboring states, or half way across the globe connect, interact, and yes even exchange referrals and do business. And there are plent of local and regional groups, pages, and entities in social media. Social media is also rich. It maybe isn’t the same as a handshake, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily less substantive. The plethora of new kinds of exchanges in social media – from sending someone a virtual beer or flowers, to starting an instant poll on something you said, to tagging one of your photos with commentary and sharing it with one’s own audience (people you had no access to before), social media is like handshaking on steroids. It’s the grip that keeps on giving.

It can water down some kinds of relationships - some business owners find that people coming in off of Facebook, Twitter, or Craigslist can be more savvy and informed, more immune to persuasion, more price and comparison driven, more exposed to a variety of competitors, and often they have a bottom line they’re aiming at that’s already well defined. We get the same kind of traffic at times here at Market Moose. Someone who e-mails “quote me a price” without even a clear idea of what they’re pricing – “for what, exactly?” Often when we suggest an initial consultation to understand their needs, they just move on. Good riddance. Seriously, it’s not Burger King vs. McDonalds. If that’s what you want, go someplace with a virtual drive through – they are plentiful – it’s just not our niche, and not every client is our client. But we do get just as many people who appreciate the difference of a custom fitting over suits off the rack. And if you use social media to inform, advise, offer insight into that difference – if you can make a convincing case, without pitching everyone, without sounding like an ad, for a different kind of service, then you can really see your business grow from social media.

If all you’re offering is, “Hey, I’m in Facebook too. Buy my stuff.” you’re going to get a steady stream of “Why should I pay you more than the next guy’s bottom dollar?” I mean seriously, do you look left and see gas at $2.49, look right and see the same gas at $2.09 and think “same difference”? You’ve either got to *be* different, and communicate the importance of difference, or you’ve got to run out to the sign and slap a zero over the four, and then it’s just you and them and a price war. It’s like the housing market is right now – you’ve got to throw in a flat screen TV to bribe the buyer, because listings are everywhere and, often, it’s all being presented as just square footage – it’s a commodities market.  Your services are going to be a commodities market, too, if you don’t set yourself apart. We’ve written before about “marketing differentiators“, so we won’t go into it again here.

But once you’ve decided on your niche, your market, and made yourself unique, it’s time to make yourself the obvious choice, and that means getting into social media and creating a culture and a following around your ideas, your difference, your independence from the commodities pricing that’ll kill your competition, while your difference insures your survival and growth. Do participate in in-person social networks, if you’re a locally based business (that’s *participate* not show up and hand out business cards). But if you really want to reach numbers, use social media effectively, and you can often connect with a bigger set of prospects in an hour than in a month of hand-shaking. Again, not knocking the Rotary Club, but some of them get this fact and are adapting for precisely these reasons. If you’re in Facebook, for instance, check out the Rotary Club of Santa Paula, California.

Video: Web 2.0 Internet Marketing

In this video, Daniel DiGriz explains Web 2.0 internet marketing. Touching on social media, blogging, and how business sites remain competitive in a Web 2.0 environment, Daniel presents the information clearly and concisely.

Hi. My name is Daniel DiGriz. I’m president of Market Moose Internet Marketing. I’d like to talk for a minute about the new social marketing or the new Internet marketing versus the old-fashioned marketing that we’re all used to. I think it’s best that we talk a little bit about what has changed.

In the past, marketing and advertising were largely confused. Marketing was something that you did to try to bring people in to try to buy the product or the service that you were offering. Now, of course, we all want that. If we’re running a small business or a medium-sized business, that’s ultimately our bottom line or our goal. But the way that we go about it has really had to change.

Just take Twitter and Facebook, for instance. Twitter and Facebook are now burgeoning sources of business revenue for small and medium businesses, as is social media in general. But it doesn’t work by simply going in and spamming everyone. We’ve all been through the era when small businesses came out on the Web, and we started filling up our inboxes with spam. We have developed pretty sophisticated ways to ignore that stuff. Facebook and Twitter are much the same way. If you want to alienate Facebook and Twitter audiences, just keep posting over and over how much you’d like their business, what your prices are, and “please buy my services today.” That just doesn’t work.

So, what’s effective in social media and in Internet marketing? In social media, what’s effective is giving away value or adding value at no charge. Believe it or not, it’s counter-intuitive. Instead of charging for your information, your insight, your analysis, your understanding, and your expertise, you give it away. The difference between that and advertising is that this new marketing allows you to build a tribe, an audience, a group of people that stay within your orbit. You sort of earn the right to attract that business. You earn the status of resident expert in these venues. You draw clientele off of that.

Let me give you an example from traditional marketing. In the old days, we all probably knew some individual in our lives who was “the friendliest person that you ever met.” No one had a bad thing to say about them. Oftentimes, he or she was an insurance agent. I always knew an insurance agent in every town in which I’ve lived that was just wonderful with people. This person shook your hand, brought you soup when you were sick, called you on holidays and sent you cards. The person usually didn’t have a hard sell. They didn’t go around saying, “I really need you to sign up for a policy. Don’t you want to sign here? Please buy my stuff.” Instead, they achieved the status of the person that everyone likes, the person with expertise. So, when we felt that we needed to protect our families better, who do you think that we turned to? Do you think that those guys really had trouble getting clients and growing their businesses? The answer is no. Well, that hasn’t changed a lot. It’s just changed venues.

So, again, marketing is not advertising. Marketing, in some ways, is what it always has been. It’s just that a lot of professional marketers were engaged in advertising, and so, sometimes we think that’s what it is.

Now, marketing has been returned to the hands of you and me and the ordinary small business person in venues like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. A lot people think, “Gee, I’m a small business – do I really need a blog?” Of course you do. You need a blog because part of adding value to your community is giving back your information, sharing your insight, providing answers to commonly asked questions, clarifying and correcting frequent misconceptions, talking about little-used services that actually benefit the public and why they’re there, but not necessarily constantly badgering people with a price sheet and an invitation to buy.

Make your presence known by contributing something to the community. You’ll build your tribe. You’ll grow your orbit. Your business will grow, and you’ll attract clients. Keep in mind that that is the new marketing. That’s the meaning, really, behind Twitter, Facebook, blogging, and all of the new social media. After that, it’s just about finding your own particular direction for growing your brand.

This is Daniel DiGriz, Market Moose Internet Marketing. Hope to hear from you soon. Have a great day!