Online Buzz: How To Profit From Social Media By Exploding Your Personal and Business Brand Online
This 59-minute Maestro Month event recording will turn your social media world upside down. Be prepared to start getting results you never believed possible. Learn how to use MINIMUM time to earn MAXIMUM profits from your social media activities.
What You’ll Learn:
How Social Media Impacts Sales Results
Branding, Buying and The Bottom Line
Why Most People Fail At Online Marketing — But You Needn’t
The New Science of Micro-Branding
How To Define, Locate and Dominate Your Online Tribe
Creating “Niche Fame” With Social Media
How to Synergize Your Personal and Business Brands
Why Twitter Matters More Than You Thought
The Hidden Money in Online Video (It’s Not Where You Think)
In case you missed the seminar during Maestro Month we have added the recording below. Don’t miss out on this timely education.
To download the audio recording directly to your iPod or favorite MP3 player, sign up on the left to Blaze Your Name Live
Lee Lefever has created another excellent piece on getting the basic idea of social media.
For all the fancy widgets and techniques for blogging, podcasting, linking, bookmarking and more – it comes back to basic principles to get your ideas out to others. The New Internet is about people connecting, sharing their experiences and tapping into the many ‘water cooler’ conversations around us.
This is one of a series from The Common Craft Show that is also featured on The Society For Word of Mouth. (Yes, you can join!) A previous feature of Lee Lefever’s work on this blog is here. You can learn about news blog readers and RSS.
Who would have thought that the local Shell gas station could support the local knowledge marketers?
Yesterday I was filling my car with gas, and above the pump was – yes – a TV monitor – all wired in to cyberspace giving me real time updates on local traffic, weather conditions and news. Of course there was also the ads cycling through – many of which had an easy to remember domain name for me to go to later.
Did I remember to visit this new domain-name-in-my-head? Nope. (I’ll pay more attention next time when I go back for episode two!) But it did strike me as a smart way to keep me engaged for the 4 minutes it took to fill the tank. 4 minutes is a long time in this A.D.D. world — a lot longer than the four seconds you have to engage someone’s attention when they visit your Web site home page. And also a lot longer than the average time QVC has viewers watching its shopping channel, which is just 8 seconds!
It got me thinking…
Where else can we take advantage of a captive audience – and add value to them?
If you engage someone with useful and relevant information they will stick around for more. (I’d like to know if Shell sells more gas this way.)
It is tough to get someone to remember a domain name – unless they really need to.
Is your elevator pitch ready?
Maybe filling the gas tank should be just a quiet zen moment anyway – with no TV!
If you want to know what really happens when people visit your web site, invest in this remarkable service: UserTesting.com At a surprisingly low cost you get a handful of smart people to go over your site and give you candid feedback.
Specifically, you get a video that shows the user’s cursor moving around your site, while a voice quietly feeds a stream of (probably devastating) comments. You will never see your site the same way again — guaranteed. Here’s a synopsis of what I learned about web site visitors:
They do NOT read copy. They SCAN the page and grab bits of information
They will MISUNDERSTAND anything that isn’t spelled out in the simplest terms
They DON’T KNOW what you think they know
They will COMPLETELY MISS important information that isn’t thrust at them front and center
You won’t get this from my saying so. You have to experience the reality of watching people crawl your site. Be prepared for some knock-you-off-your-chair education!
There’s a growing recognition in the marketing community of the power that flows from a “maven status”.
Something about human nature is at play here. We all tend to place our trust in “experts”. Given the choice, we’d prefer to have our heart treated by the cardiology professor and our stocks managed by the TV investment pundit and our marriage counseled by the woman who wrote the book.
The marketing implications are that as you build “maven status” in any field of business, your perceived value to potential customers rises.
So where to start? Publishing a book may still bestow the ultimate kudos, but Web 2.0 allows you to jump into the maven game at a much lower level, and still make waves. One baby step is to become a prolific contributor to the various “Answers” services on the Internet.
Here are three to consider: LinkedIn, the burgeoning business network, has one of the most active and valuable “Answers” programs around. Yahoo Answers draws huge crowds from a wider demographic, and then you might take a look at WikiAnswers for more opportunities to play.
There’s really nothing to lose. Go looking for questions pertinent to your field, and seize the chance to flaunt your expertise. You’ll be on your way to a reputation as The One Who Knows.
That’s good for your brand, good for traffic and good for sales — no matter what business you are in.
In recent weeks I’ve been following the work of Chip Lambert, a business development consultant and LinkedIn maven. A recent post on his blog, which happens to reference people I know, makes a powerful case for the connective power of the high-end network. My name for this kind of thing is “Leveraged Serendipity”. When you go networking online, there’s an element of chance in what shows up — in fact, that’s where the fun lies. The power of the new media is that you can amplify this random factor in quite extraordinary and beneficial ways. The challenge is that because you can’t predict the outcome, online networking can seem like an extravagant use of time. The message from Chip’s blog is that the investment is worth making. From my own experience, I heartily agree.
I’m asked whether to use Blogger or WordPress. Short answer: WordPress, with your own URL. There are so many creative minds putting energy into WordPress, you don’t want to miss out on the possibilities growing there. I just adopted a template for my Marketing Action Journal which has a “blogsite” character — a blog that [...]
A question comes to ne about “the importance of social media in the greater scheme of things in the world of media.”That’s such a big question, I may be missing the intention behind it. Taking that risk, here are a couple of thoughts.There’s a constant subtle ju-jitsu between marketers and consumers. Marketers seek a kind [...]
Working with the wonderful participants of the Blaze Your Name training, I have learned that most of us need to focus on the basics of social media. There is so much exotic new stuff coming out every day, if you don’t master the fundamentals, you will simply get overwhelmed and give up. I’ve been posting [...]
Most business is NOT internet marketing. For your normal bricks-and-mortar operation, the web site is just one tool of many, and blogging can seem like supplementary activity of questionable value. In reality, the evidence is mounting that blogging and effective use of social media can reap huge benefits to every kind of business. Often, though, [...]
