Monthly Archives: May 2013

7 Simple Ways to Improve Popular Social Network Websites

See on Scoop.itEnterprise Social Media

1. Twitter — Tweet Timeout   2. Facebook — Snopes Filter   3. Yelp — Review Filters   4. Tumblr — Allow Responses to Comments, Like a Normal Website   5. Reddit — Reality Check   6. Instagram — Add Dragons Filter   7.

Mike Ellsworth‘s insight:

These add-ins can definitely improve your social experience. I love the Snopes Filter. Wish it worked on others’ posts as well.

 

Via @msmir

See on dashburst.com

ALL Selling is Social | Darren Hardy, Publisher of SUCCESS Magazine

See on Scoop.itSocial Selling for B2B

Today and more and more in the future, all selling is social and the connection points to all your relationships will involve a component of online. To thrive in the future you will need to learn to connect, network and foster relationships online.

Mike Ellsworth‘s insight:

Key stat quoted in this article: " 34% of medium size businesses and 27% of small businesses report the successful use of social media as their number one competitive advantagein capturing their competitive marketplace."

See on darrenhardy.success.com

Building Your Community

Building Your Community

In our previous post, On Beyond the Major Social Media Sites, we wrapped up our look at the major social networking sites and recommend some other sites and social techniques for you to use.

In this post, we begin a series on building your community by giving an overview on what an online community really is.



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Building Your Community

“Community happens when people feel
they’re among like-minded others and when
they feel their contributions matter.”

Social media expert Chris Brogan

OK, you’ve slogged through all the advice we’ve blogged in our “Be A Person” series, and you’ve decided you’d like to create a standalone online community for your enterprise. Well, we’ve got bad news for you: You can’t.

Sorry. We hope we haven’t led you on by titling this post as we have. Community is not some­thing you can create because a community belongs to its members and, as Chris Brogan’s quote says, community happens. You can start a community, but the members will create the con­nections that build and sustain it. You can nurture a community, but the members will decide how long it lives and where it goes.

It’s like a party.Three Guys Bored at a Party

You can invite the guests.

You can provide the venue, buy the food and drink, hire the band, and send out the invitations.

But you can’t make them have fun. The way that those who show up interact will determine the party’s success, not you.

Sure there are things you can do to increase your odds of a successful party: fly everyone to Paris; hire Cirque du Soleil to perform; and give everybody a Dolce&Gabbana bag full of expensive gifts. But you can’t ensure that everyone will have fun. And you can’t ensure that the party will never end.

It’s the same with community. People come of their own volition, share only if they’re inclined to, and will leave if the conversation gets boring.

One of our favorite thinkers about community, Amber Naslund, Director of Community for Radian6, lays it all out succinctly:[1]

You cannot create a community. It creates itself.

Strong community leaders, in my view, are there as the experience architects.

It’s our job to translate, to interpret, to build bridges and give them chairs to sit in. But ultimately, the community builds and sustains itself, with us nurturing it along the way.

If you’re ready to move beyond your need to control your community, the next step is to decide what it is you want to build, um, architect.


Building Your Community is the 155th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’ve been doing this since 2011 and we’re just past page 393. At this rate it’ll still be a while before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances


[1] Quoted in the comments of Chris Brogan’s seminal 2009 blog post, Audience or Communitybit.ly/cs2ogx

On Beyond the Major Social Media Sites

On Beyond the Major Social Media Sites

In our previous post, Promote Connections, we finished our series about blogging by discussing how commenting can get your blog found in the sea of millions of blogs.

In this post, we wrap up our look at the major social networking sites and recommend some other sites and social techniques for you to use.



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On Beyond

OK, over the last 153 posts, we’ve covered the major social media sites and given you lots of advice about how to use them for your business. But there are tons of other sites out there that you may find useful. If you don’t believe that, mosey on over to KnowEm and feast your eyes on the more than 550 sites they can help you sign up for automatically.

Not only are there scads of interesting social sites out there, but here are a few utility sites and techniques that you can use to improve your usage of blogs and your other social media efforts.

  • Google AlertsA Google Alert is a saved search that you can set to periodically email you results or, if you prefer, you can subscribe to the results via RSS. Set up Google Alerts to track terms related to your product category and your target prospects’ names, for example. You can set various preferences such as the type of item (news, blog, video, and so on), the frequency of notifications, and how many results to send.
  • Social Bookmarking Sites — Use Reddit, delicious and Digg to bookmark interesting sites you come across. This is useful especially if you use multiple computers, but an added benefit is you can make your bookmarks public, thus increasing the odds of attracting like-minded people.
  • FriendFeedFriendFeed, now owned by Facebook, helps you keep track what your friends are posting on several online media. It allows you to create private groups to share information, pictures, and videos with.
  • Expert Sites — Consider joining expert sites such as Squidoo and About.com to build your reputation as you share your expertise. These mostly volunteer sites are a treasure trove of tips and tricks on pretty much any topic. They are great places to showcase yourself as an expert.
  • Curation Sites — Curation is one of the hottest trends in social media today. Sites such as Scoop.it, Paper.li, Storify, Pinterest, and others enable you to collect and comment on articles and images you find interesting. Martin Smith of Atlantic BT has a nice roundup of interesting curation sites. The key to using these sites is to be able to tell a story. Just reposting  material without creating a narrative adds little value and will deliver little value for your business. Karen Deitz is a master at telling stories. Her motto, expressed in an article on Paper.li, is Whoever Tells the Best Stories Wins.
  • Location-Based Sites — Sites like FourSquare and, to a lesser extent, Instagram aim to exploit the benefits of local social networking and mobile computing.[1] Some may find them creepy or dangerous, but they are a growing segment of the social computing universe.
  • International Social Sites — We’ve been talking about the top sites for the US, but there’s a whole world out there that isn’t American, and lots of people flock to sites like Orkut and Qzone.

    • Orkut, owned by Google, is extremely popular in Brazil — making up 52 percent of users — while roughly 20 percent are from India and 18 percent from the US. Orkut’s age demographics run young. More than 70 percent of users are 18 to 30 years and a whopping 57 percent are in the 18-25 age group.[2] Orkut has roughly 33 million users.
    • Qzone is a Chinese site founded created in 2005. Although there is a free option most Qzone services are not free. In 2012, Qzone had 597 million users.

There’s lots, lots, lots more out there that we could discuss, but let’s turn the last, and perhaps most important, posts in this series — all about building your own online community.

Next up: Building Your Community


On Beyond the Major Social Media Sites is the 154th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’ve been doing this since 2011 and we’re just past page 393. At this rate it’ll still be a while before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances


[1] Mashable’s section Location Based Social Networksbit.ly/9AK7Vh

[2] Orkut demographics  www.orkut.com/Main#MembersAll

Promote Connections

Promote Connections

In our previous post, Write to be Found, we continued our series about blogging by discussing how content can get your blog found in the sea of millions of blogs.

In this post, we look at now commenting can increase readership.

Tips for Commenting

In addition to the techniques we’ve discussed in the past few posts, another way to promote your blog is to pay attention to the people who take the time to comment on it.



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You should regularly review your comments, and:

  • Respond to all commenters
    • Acknowledge the comment
    • Add your own comment if appropriate
    • If the comment is negative, encourage further discussion
    • If the comment is spam, feel free to delete
  • Click on commenter’s links — when they check their referral statistics, they’ll see that you visited their blog
    • They may be more likely to return to your blog
    • They may start commenting more
    • It helps draw them into a relationship 

Next up: On Beyond the Major Social Media Sites


Promote Connections is the 153rd in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’ve been doing this since 2011 and we’re just past page 393. At this rate it’ll still be a while before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances

Write to be Found

Write to be Found

In our previous post, Publicize Your Blog, we continued our series about blogging by discussing how to get your blog found in the sea of millions of blogs.

In this post, we look at the content of your blog can increase readership.



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Content is King

As we have mentioned many times in previous posts, the best way to be found is to write content that appeals to your community, as well as to search engines. First decide on the keywords that your community might use to search for your post. Then, use those keywords throughout the post. Use them in the title, the first few lines, and throughout post.

Another good idea is to use images liberally in your posts. Believe it or not, for some blogs, most visits come from Google Image Search.[1] If you’re not familiar with Image Search, it’s easy to try it out. Google anything. On the top of the page, to the left, you’ll see a list of links, beginning with Web, which is the default Google search type. Click Images. Not only do you see a page full of images that match your search terms, but you can choose from several ways to narrow your search, by size, type, and color. When you mouse over an image, Google displays its size and the site it’s hosted on. Click on an image, and Google sends you to the site.

Google image search

Use Images in Your Blog — Google Image Search

Google bases its search on the content of the page containing the image. Including, and captioning, images in your blog adds another way you can be found.

Next up: Promote Connections


Write to be Found is the 152nd in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’ve been doing this since 2011 and we’re just past page 393. At this rate it’ll still be a while before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances


[1] According to the blog Pictures of Cats org: Google Image Search builds Trafficbit.ly/dCwj1p

Social Media Alters Buying and Selling Behavior – Social Barrel – Social Barrel

See on Scoop.itSocial Selling for B2B

Social media has changed the way we buy and sell. According to Dan Pink, author of To Sell is Human, what customers have little of in the past is information.

Mike Ellsworth‘s insight:

Daniel Pink crushes it again. 

 

"Determining the fair price of a product in itself is quite difficult to achieve before, and the sales persons would even make it hard for you to gain valuable information.

 

With the internet, the situation is quite different now. One can simply go online to determine the fair price of a certain product, which depends on certain factors that affect its price. Customers have this capacity in their belts right now as they decide what to buy. As such, selling has changed."

 

This is the focus of our book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for B2B Sales Success – Sales Person Edition   http://bit.ly/InfPipeCh1 Click the link for a free chapter.

See on socialbarrel.com

Marketo’s Jason Miller On Facebook For B2B: Why So Serious? – AllFacebook

See on Scoop.itSocial Selling for B2B

AllFacebook
Marketo’s Jason Miller On Facebook For B2B: Why So Serious?

Mike Ellsworth‘s insight:

Sure, your business is serious, but as a person, you’re not always serious, are you? Our mantra is Be a Person on social media, so don’t be afraid to loosen up a little in your social media communications. This interview will give you some ideas.

See on allfacebook.com

Publicize Your Blog

Publicize Your Blog

In our previous post, Getting Your Blog Found, we continued our series about blogging by discussing how to get your blog found in the sea of millions of blogs.

In this post, we take an in-depth look at how to publicize and advertise your blog in an effort to increase readership.

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Publicize Your Blog

In addition to the general recommendations we made in the series of posts beginning with Get Found you should:

  • Add links to your blog on your Website
  • Add your blog to your LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook profiles
  • Add your blog address to all your communications
  • Embed videos from your YouTube channel in your blog
  • Run a contest on your blog
  • Ask your supporters to blog about your blog

Publicize Your Blog — Techie

If you or your staff is a bit more technical, try these ideas:

  • Add your blog to blog directories such as:
    • Technorati
    • Daypop
    • Blogdex
    • Popdex
    • Blogrolling
    • blo.gs
    • weblogs.com
    • pingomatic
    • Robin Good’s list of blog directories[1]
  • Enable each post to be its own page
  • Set your blog to send pings to search engines via Ping-o-Matic[2]
  • Install Email This Post or other plug-in that enables readers to send the post to a friend
  • Turn on your site RSS feed and encourage your community to subscribe to it
  • Be search-engine-friendly

Advertise Your Blog

There are lots of places to advertise your blog on the Web. One that is quite affordable is a site called StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon belongs to a category of sites called social bookmarking services. Others include delicious and Digg.

StumbleUpon has more than 10 million members who use the site to, well, stumble upon new and interesting sites they might not have otherwise found. Members can rate pages, and when you use the site, StumbleUpon delivers pages or emails that have been explicitly recommended by friends or members with similar interests.

That’s great, and it’s a great site to subscribe to so you can find interesting topics to blog about. But you can also use StumbleUpon to place your blog or Website in the recommendations that members see.

You can create a StumbleUpon ad campaign for your whole blog or a single post. You can target the audience by selecting dozens of categories, various demographics and/or geography. When users click on the ad, the traffic comes directly to your site. It’s a pay-per-click service, which means you pay only for actual views of your site. You can also set spending limits to control your budget, and there’s no minimum spend requirements.

What’s even better is the cost: 10-25 cents per visitor.

StumbleUpon reviews all ads and accepts only those that meet their content guidelines.[4]

Next up: Write to be Found


Publicize Your Blog is the 151st in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 386. At this rate it’ll be a while before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances


[1] Robin Good’s blog list: bit.ly/aynbLz

[2] Ping-o-Matic: bit.ly/9LO88F

[3] Hubpages’ Advantages and disadvantages of each blogging platformbit.ly/8YOKCy

[4] Stumbleupon’s content guidelines: bit.ly/oIh3Ac