Social Media Marketing DIY Tip - Do You Ever Look at Yourself?

Social media allows you to "touch" your network

I had cause to conduct some business with a real estate agent recently and stumbled upon some social media phenomena that gave rise to this article. My experience with Molly (not her real name, of course) was entirely positive. I would recommend her highly to anyone and hold her in high professional esteem. You need to keep this in mind as I break down a few elements of social media presence for your benefit and self-improvement, using Molly's presence as illustration.

I came to know Molly in a decidedly old school fashion, by coincidence. I did not "discover" her through social media, Google, or an advertisement. It was only after I had committed to doing business with her that I decided to take a tour of her social media presence as an academic exercise related to my marketing work. One point stood out in my mind as I threaded my way through Molly's social media pages.

Your social media presence leaves a more lasting impression than a face to face meeting.

Think about this a minute, as it struck me initially as counterintuitive. However, while face to face interaction remains a most powerful means of communication and impact, it is a non-repetitive occurrence. Even if you meet with someone multiple times, they appear and act originally each time. On the other hand, every time someone views your profile picture you look the same (at least until you change it). Those repetitive identical impressions can have the effect of etching that image into memory.

In addition to the profile picture's visual aspect, consider the profile summary or bio. It sinks deeper into a reader's mind than many may suspect. The presentation of the summary, its writing style, subject matter, grammar, and spelling, all have impact on the reader. Note also that spelling mistakes, improper grammar, and awkward style may leave a stronger impression than the positive attributes of the summary. The reader expects a positive commentary and views negative attributes as extraordinary, possibly creating an indelible impression.

Once you make an impression on someone, it is difficult to "unimpress" that remembrance. It follows that keeping your social media presence brightly polished is an important component of your professional success, the success of your business. Here are some points to stimulate your own consideration of how well you are maintaining your social media presence.

Any image of you should be perfect in every possible way.

The importance of your visual presentation cannot be overstated. When a prospective customer, employer, friend, date, or whatever finds you on social media, they cannot hear you, smell you, touch you, or be impacted by your body language. All they have, initially, is your picture. Make it count.

If you are not sufficiently skilled at producing high quality images to use on your pages, pay someone to do it for you (outsource). Image attributes that you should pay attention to include...

• Dimensions - Edit images to match the size requirements of each site with which you are working. Spend enough time on this to get it perfect, not just good.
• Definition - Avoid all but the sharpest, most in focus, images. 
• Color - Distinct and vibrant color rendition will make a photo stand out. I suggest avoiding black and white unless there is a compelling reason to use it. 
• Facial Expression - Present a facial expression that is appropriate for the target audience and will be perceived as neutral or positive by the greatest number of viewers.
• Clothing and Appearance - Dress and adorn yourself appropriately for the type of work at which you are representing yourself as a competent professional. Keep the target audience in mind. If you catch yourself trying to standout from the crowd by appearing "individual", you may want to reassess. 

Know what you look like.

After you post any image of yourself, review it using more than one device. Make sure it appears the way in which you intended and delivers a positive impact. It is not a bad idea to get a few confidants, those who tell you the truth even when it hurts, to provide a critique of your image.

Check your social media pages periodically, making sure your image appears as you intended. The providers of our social media environment, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others are continuously tinkering with the applications and may make changes that impact your online image.

Below is a screenshot of one of Molly's two Google+ landing pages. Do you think she intended to use her torso as the background photo for her landing page? If so, what was the plan, the intent, the rationale behind its deployment. I cannot get this out of my mind and will likely forever remember Molly as the perpetrator of this faux pas. I did some research and discovered that it was not Molly's intent. Google released a new version of Google+ that sort of "re-cropped" Molly's original image. The screenshot below shows what the image looks like with the new Google+ app. If you view the same page with the old version of Google+, which is still in use, Molly looks just fine with a head and shoulders shot. The lesson is to check all the different ways in which your target audience might view your image, making sure that all are presentable and deliver the impact you desire.

Was this intentional?

Edit for success

Most are familiar with the expression "dress for success". Your social media images are important because they are your appearance and that online image of you will likely be what is remembered. Potential customers or employers will make decisions based upon your images, making them worthy of your valuable time spent producing perfect pictures. 

Your social media presence is not a "set it and forget it" proposition.

I have heard social media sites compared to billboards along the highway. In some cases this may be true, but it should not be that way for you. Remember the purpose of  your social media endeavor. You can watch a short video about it in a previous article. Here are some valuable goals for your personal or small business social media activities.

• Get discovered by individuals and organizations important to your business
• Develop a presence in your field
• Demonstrate your involvement in relevant activities
• Show you are knowledgeable and current
• Present yourself as someone that can provide value in a business encounter

You will not achieve these goals with a static social media presence. Look at your social media pages. If your last post or share was a year ago, a month ago, you are not following a social media plan that will lead to success. Learn about how to use Twitter, LinkedIn, and other sites that appeal to you. Develop a plan that has you devoting the necessary time to find or produce relevant and useful content and share it on your sites. If you cannot execute a useful plan on your own, outsource it, or reduce the number of sites to a level you can manage. My friend Molly had more than eight profiles on various sites, in some instances more than one on the same service. A look at the posts reveals that she only maintains two of them regularly. Some of the sites had not been updated in more than two years. These stagnant sites can provide negative impressions. They are not harmless.

Your social media sites that do not appear current and active are more likely to make a negative impression than one that is positive or even neutral.

Social media marketing, done right, is no trivial undertaking. It takes time and effort to develop proficiency at producing and locating useful content, then sharing it in a manner that will get the exposure and results you deserve.

Follow, comment, contact me with your questions. I can be contacted directly at CMS4i by putting @TomO in the message section. At CMS4i, we are here to help you make things work, so contact us anytime.

Making the Social Media Investment Work - The Data Obsession

How applicable is your data to real decision making?

As small business operators, we continuously look for answers, confirmation that we are doing the right thing. In today’s climate, metrics are ubiquitous. There is a push to assign a number to every aspect of the business, compare some measure of performance to a benchmark or goal. When it comes to digital marketing and social media activities, it can be difficult to draw a straight line between impressions, clicks, or page views and revenue generating results. This is particularly true if your website does not have a commerce component where customers can buy your products. It is even more true when your scale is small, where a relatively limited number of outcomes can have a large impact on the data picture. Data is best for decision making when there is a virtual mountain of it. In any other case, treat it as informative, but not indicative enough to direct the helm of the company.

What is important, is that you see something happening in your social media and other digital marketing that can be considered positive progress in areas that lead to opportunity and revenue. 

Clicks and page views are not orders, and assigning some cooked up dollar value to them in order to judge performance may not be the best way to make marketing decisions. Most page views are potential customers checking you out, looking to see if your company appears to be one worth doing some business with.

You are in the sales and promotion business. You have a certain amount of intuition that relates to your field; otherwise you would probably be in another. Be careful about letting data overrule your intuition. Data is not inherently better than intuition; it’s just a different methodology for decision making. Data is useful when working to bring others into agreement with your view of things, to “bring them on board”.  When there is data, everyone can look at it and agree. You don’t need to have faith when there is data.

In recent decades, we have been increasingly indoctrinated to worship data. In many cases that adoration is well deserved. However, if you are not a statistician, or one with a firm understanding of statistics and how to determine the validity of a data sample, caution should be your watchword.

At its simplest, validity relates to whether data, and the research used to obtain it, is really measuring results related to some target aspect of your marketing program.

Is it really measuring what you think it is measuring, or are you just gathering numbers. If you are using your intuition to assess the validity of a data set, instead of statistical methods, be very cautious about making big moves based upon that information.

Don't overthink your website analytics reports

Another question related to your quantitative measurements is how reliable the collected information may be.

Reliability relates to how well the method of data acquisition leads to consistent results. 

For example, if you are looking at the monthly stats on your website analytics report, how do you determine if the deductions or decisions you might make based on that data would apply to every month, or a larger group of customers with a more normal distribution (sorry for the statistics lexicon). Essentially, are you seeing things that relate to just the group of customers contained in the data, or can what you see be applied to your entire customer base? There is a substantial amount of math involved in answering that question, not intuition.

Large marketers, with substantial brand recognition and market penetration, have to struggle with statistical validity and reliability continuously. Their challenge is to squeeze some incremental increase out of a market where they already enjoy a significant presence and share.

Here is the good news.

You, my small business friend, can ignore the statistical details and focus on things that will generate revenue. By that, I am suggesting that most of you are probably in the early to middle stages of implementing a digital marketing or social media marketing plan. For now, and probably quite some time into your future, bigger gains will be reaped from focusing on implementation and procedure, than data gathering and analysis. Put some reasonable assets and activities into action and get some results.

In order for your data to truly be useful, it must expand to a volume that will produce verifiable and reliable results. There are plenty of orders to be closed between now and then, so let’s focus on that.

If you are still with me here, I hope you are more astute and comfortable with the statistical aspect of your digital marketing and social media efforts. Those analytics that show how many visitors came to your website, pages they viewed, and how long they lingered are interesting and useful as gauges of activity. The desired long term trend of activity indicators is upward, with flat being acceptable, and negative giving cause for concern. No matter the case, don't stress about it

My next post will bring some insight concerning what you should expect to gain from your social media presence and Internet footprint. As always, comment or contact me with your questions. I can be contacted directly at CMS4i by putting @TomO in the message section. At CMS4i, we are here to help you make things work, so contact us anytime.

Making the Social Media Investment Work - Part One of Infinity

Continuously Re-examine Your Methods
Improve Your Process to Improve Your Outcome

I've been on board here at CMS4i for a few months now, generating content, taking in the things that are happening around me, trying to learn a few new skills and make good use of the old ones. My personal objective for this new position is to keep my head down, do some good work, stay employed. No lofty goals for this guy. Be peaceful, avoid confrontation, go with the flow.....smooth sailing all the way.

There are moments when I long to be the person I just profiled. That individual is comfortable. There are likely moments when you long to be that person too, bereft of doubt, without the pressures of risk, time management, cold calling, presentations, cash flow management, expense reports, or any of the other business activities that make us squirm and itch in our professional pursuits. Of course, the profile I gave you is total fiction, except for the "few months" part. I squirm and itch about much of the same stuff as you.

Sales and marketing is a career path of risk and uncertainty, that's why the potential rewards are high. Performance is all that counts, no matter the economic or market conditions. If you work on commission or operate your own a business, you know all about risk, uncertainty, and the importance of performance. If you work on salary, you likely know all about performance metrics (formerly called quotas) and the implications inherent in failing to meet them.

Whether you ended up in the sales game by design or default, you are faced with the same challenge. How do I make this work? How do I meet my targets? How do I succeed? Your real challenge is...

"Without any more hours in the day, how can I produce just a little bit more than yesterday?"

I am not going to tell you how to sell. You already know. Throughout this string of articles, I intend to help you figure out how to increase the number of opportunities you get to sell. Getting orders is not your true challenge. Your challenge is being known, getting considered and given a chance to make your pitch, prove your value. I am going help you leverage your time, the one thing you cannot possibly get more of, to produce just a little bit more results than yesterday. This is not about personal time management and scheduling. I am talking about increasing the number of times when you are in touch with the right person at the right time. That is what has the highest potential to generate revenue.

In successive blog posts, I will break down social media marketing into small understandable topics and, most importantly, provide actionable advice you can use to increase the number of opportunities you get to sell. As my catchy title implies, this is a never ending process of learning, applying, and assessing your sales and marketing related activities on the Internet. Follow, comment, contact me with your questions. I can be contacted directly at CMS4i by putting @TomO in the message section. At CMS4i, we are here to help you make things work, so contact us anytime.

We're Going to Need a Bigger Boat

This post title is taken from Jaws and that famous scene (above) where Roy Scheider is at the stern of the Orca and gets his first glimpse of the worlds most famous movie shark.

The job Scheider was relegated to you was "chumming". For anyone who has never fished, this is the process of spreading cut-up and ground-up chunks of bait fish over the sea to attract game fish (sharks in many cases). Its not a very glamorous job - it smells bad and there's lots of blood and guts - but its quite effective for catching fish.

Whenever I explain to a client the why's and how's of content marketing, it can get pretty wordy and maybe even confusing. Worse yet, it can sound like more Internet "black magic".

Then just this morning, it dawned on me content marketing might be more easily understood by using the chumming metaphor where the sharks are prospective customers, the "chum" is the quality content, and your blog, social media outlets and press releases are your "chum slick". The bigger the slick, the more sharks you'll attract.

There's a whole lot more to it - and we all know the magic is in the uniqueness, relevance and quality of the content. But it's nice to sometimes use a simple picture to explain a complicated process.