Grow My Company

Are you a social media connector or a collector?

Social media is a set of communications techniques. It helps you to reconnect, strengthen, and establish relationships. To some, however, social media seems to be one big competition for who can establish the most connections.

Let's be clear though, in most cases, volume and quality are not necessarily congruent.

Connecting without engagement has little value. How many collectors are you connected to? You know the ones; they sent an invitation and then ignored your attempts to engage with them. They may or may not post content on their Facebook or Twitter accounts, but they certainly aren't interested in communicating with you. They're silent or they're preachers.

Social media is one of the most powerful networking tools at your disposal today. It allows you to meet people virtually that would have likely never crossed your path just 5 years ago. It can help you to educate your friends and family about what you do professionally. It provides venues for online collaboration that can speed up business processes. It helps you find a job or qualified people to fill an opening within your organization.

Collectors don't seem to care about this though. They just want more connections than the next guy. Or they just want to snoop on their old friends and acquaintances.

Don't be a collector, be a connector. Make an effort, and it will pay off with enhanced social media relationships that can help you fulfil your goals. Here are a few tips about how to be a connector rather than a collector:

1. Personal invitation:
   Personalize your LinkedIn invitation. Sending the stock invitation says that you're lazy and you don't care enough about the person to bother taking the time to address them personally. Facebook used to allow personalized invitations, but, sadly, they removed that ability, preventing you from reminding an old friend about who you are.
2. Follow up:
   Message the person after connecting. Thank them for the invitation or for accepting yours. 
3. Start a conversation:
   Or at least make an effort to get to know your new connection. Even it it's someone you've known all your life, the new social media connection may add an entirely new dimension and lead to opportunities down the road for each of you.
4. Read updates:
   Keep up to date on your connections' promotions, job changes, and new company affiliations. That IT specialist whose trust you earned with one company could be your next big account in his new capacity as IT manager at another company.
5. Respond:
   When someone takes the time to post or comment on your profile, Tweet @ or message you, respond. Unless you're a celebrity, there is no excuse for not responding. It's just plain rude.
6. Read about them:
   Read the information that people put in their About sections. When you connect with someone new on LinkedIn, they know if you've looked at their profile or not. Show some interest and possibly learn something new about that person on Facebook too. This prevents you from messaging someone from your past with the stock, "So what have you been up to for the last 20 years?," when it's all right there for you to read, had you only taken the time. This helps to demonstrate that you actually respected them enough to read their info and allows you to comment on something substantive that may open a meaningful dialog.

People who have accounts on social media, but don't bother engaging, miss opportunities. Don't be a collector, be a connector and start being a more valuable member of your social media circles.

 

 - Christine Pilch Mancini

Image credit: Public-Domain-Image.com

What's in a name? The name change conundrum in social media.

This may be more interesting to female readers than male ones.

When your whole identity is your maiden name, at what cost can you change your name? Will that brand be sacrificed when you get married and want to take your husband's name? That is the dilemma I encountered when I married last year.

I'm not in my 20s, or even my 30 for that matter. As a result,  I have a lot of equity in my name personally and professionally, especially since a lot of my income is generated by the recommendations and referrals that come via the social media sphere.

So when I married, I stressed over what to do with my last name, and thus, my identity.

I ended up adding my husband's name after mine, without a hyphen. That was the best solution for me, and most social media platforms made it pretty easy as well. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Slideshare, YouTube, and Google+ gave me no hassle at all. It was easy to find and configure the change on their respective sites. (Note: I am referring to display names only, not platform usernames. I see no reason to jump through those hoops.)

Twitter, however, was a whole other story. Twitter actually has a character limit on display names, and "Christine Pilch Mancini" exceeds it, so I am unable to change my name there. Yes, it is ridiculous.

Anyway, making the right name decision for me was a whole lot harder than the actual process of changing my name in the social media world. If only it was so easy to do everywhere else...passport, driver's license, bank paperwork, insurance, utilities...

 

 - Christine Pilch Mancini

Social Media 101: covering the basics in early 2012

I can't tell you how often people ask me what they really should be doing to cover their bases these days from a social media perspective. Often these conversations start something like this:

"Should someone like me really be on Facebook?" with a wrinkled nose," That's not really my thing."

"Not really your thing?" I counter, "What do you mean? Marketing yourself and your company isn't your thing?"

"Oh, then what should I be doing?" is a common follow-up question.

Social media is constantly evolving, and there is no mix that is right in every situation and every company, but what was once the essential 3: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, has expanded to include YouTube, Google+, and Pinterest these days, depending upon what you are selling.

There are plenty of others too, but let's go through the current recommended basic social marketing hexagon, one-by-one.

Facebook:

Everybody should have a personal Facebook account, if for no other reason, to educate your friends and family about what you do. Sure, your cousin and college roommate likely know that you're a lawyer, but can they tell a friend what kind of law you practice and possibly refer business to you? Believe me, all my Facebook connections know exactly what I do, and yes, they do refer business my way.

It's a common and legitimate concern to worry about mixing personal and professional connections and have clients see vacation and family photos, but Facebook has extensive privacy controls that utilize lists, and a single account can satisfy an infinite variety of people in your life by simply controlling what they can and cannot see. If you need assistance setting this up and understanding how to use these controls, I would be happy to help you.

A Facebook Page for your firm is another no-brainer. Anybody can do create one. Facebook offers step-by-step instructions. Just fill out all the requested information completely, upload your logo or photo, post some content, and invite your personal friends to like the page. That's all you have to do to get started, and there are lots of ways you can use that page to market your firm later.

You might also find use for a Facebook Group within your business. This space could be used to collaborate and share information with specific people. Unlike Pages, Groups can be private, where non-members can't see content, or secret, where nobody outside of members even know that the Group exists.

Facebook ads are another possibility. Since Facebook collects lots of information about its users, it is capable of extreme targeting with its advertising. This is not a no-cost option, but it is worth exploring at the right time.

Twitter:

Twitter seems odd and uncomfortable for most users when they first check it out. How can anybody market in 140 character bursts? Well, Twitter is very much about developing relationships, which are likely the lifeblood of your firm, so sign up and start talking to others in your geographic area. Yes, you can discuss your field of expertise a bit, but don't preach, and above all, just be friendly. If you need help getting a feel for Twitter, give me a shout.

LinkedIn:

You're a professional right? Well, a LinkedIn presence is expected for all professionals these days. In fact, LinkedIn is so powerful that often your LinkedIn profile tops your own web profile in search results. Let me also assure you that LinkedIn makes it really easy to find your competitors, so if you're not there when a prospect searches for you, you just might lose business to competitors who do take this platform seriously. Can you afford that risk?

Sign up and go thorough the process of building a 100% complete profile. Be prepared to spend a couple of hours gathering and inputting all of your information, and go way back throughout your entire career and school days. Most everybody in your past is a potential referral source, aren't they? The best way for them to find you is to identify yourself with all of your past jobs and education. Don't skip sections, but do use action words and proper grammar and spelling. This 24/7 web-based resume is not the place for typos and tense issues. If you don't have the time, patience, or inclination to write a proper bio for yourself, I would be happy to help you. In fact, one of my clients currently hears from at least 2 recruiters per week because of the profile that I created for him.

YouTube:

YouTube is a no-brainer for professional service firms that want to position their lawyers, accountants, etc., as qualified and knowledgeable experts in their fields. Grab your iPhone, Andriod phone, Flip, Kodak Zi8, etc, light yourself, get an inexpensive lavaliere microphone, and start talking. Do a few takes if you need to and edit to whatever degree you are able. Or hire someone to do this for you. It may be a bit pricey to hire a professional videographer, but there are also plenty of multimedia college grads who are unemployed and/or need to build a resume. They would likely work very reasonably. Have them come in and shoot a dozen videos at a time that they can take back to their studio and edit for you. Then use your videos on your blog and website in addition to YouTube.

Google+:

I must admit that I am still not a big G+ fan. I find it somewhat redundant and can't break the feeling that it's just another social media that I have to check, so I neglect my account. There is one feature that I use regularly though, Hangouts. Hangouts allow up to 10 people to videoconference, unlike Skype, which only allows multiple parties to videoconference within the paid model. I am currently working with a group of 4 others planning PodCamp Western MA 4, and we haven't had a single in-person meeting. All planning is being conducted within a private Facebook Group and weekly Hangouts.

There are a couple additional nice features that are worth mentioning. On Google+, updates are editable. How many times have you posted on Facebook and wished you could change something retroactively? Google + is also integrated with many of Google's other products. I especially like its integration with its Picassa free photo app. And I love that all of the photos I take on my Android phone are automatically uploaded to my G+ account. That's free automatic photo backup! If you have additional favorite features of Google+, please add them in the comments below.

Pinterest:

This blog covers marketing for essentially professional service firms, but I do plenty of marketing for other kinds of companies that have products to sell. And, let's face it, your service is your product. The true marketing potential of Pinterest is still being discovered and tested, and its core strength is in its visual advantage, so its value to you may not be as readily apparent as the above tactics, however; I like Pinterest because it displays the human side of me and helps people get to know me, so they feel better about reaching out to me. Remember too that Pinterest will climb in search engine rankings as it becomes more popular, so it will help you to populate that critical first page of search results with your own content.

In closing, it is important for you to understand that there is no cookie cutter social media strategy that suits everybody. However, the above includes what I am finding especially useful in my own and my clients' social media toolbox lately. What are you using that I haven't mentioned?

 

 - Christine Pilch Mancini

 

Photo credit: Best Design Options

Netflix: An exercise in social media backlash over business decision

A 2:21PM on July 12 I received an email from Netflix informing me that my $9.99/month subscription for 1 DVD out at a time + unlimited streaming is going up to $16.99. That's about a 60% price hike!

My stomach started to churn. I'm a long-time customer. I signed up before they even had local distribution channels. It used to take about 10 days from the date I mailed back a DVD to when I got a new one, but I stuck with Netflix because I believed it was an overall great value.

My opinion never wavered when they eventually dropped the price of my 3-DVD out at a time plan, when I realized that I wasn't watching enough movies and dropped down to the 1-DVD out at a time plan, and when they added a rather sad assortment of B and C level movies for streaming.

But this...a 60% price hike...made my blood boil. And I've only streamed a handful of titles in the last several years.

So I tweeted it, and followers retweeted it. And other Netflix subscribers tweeted it. And Facebook members posted complaints in their status updates. And the Netflix Facebook Page lit up like a Christmas tree with 41,000+ comments on the announcement from angry members, plus countless Page posts raging against Netflix's move. And the Netflix blog received 5000+ comments on its post about the fee hike. "Dear Netflix" is trending at #5 in the top 10 on Twitter. Several of my social media friends have shared a link to a blog post called, "Mad About Netflix Prices? Here Are Some Alternative Services."

This is all within the just last 26 hours.

So, what did Netflix do to quell the social media storm? Nothing. Not a peep from them in response to their angry customers. 

Netflix has been known for its exemplary customer service and brilliant business planning for many years, so they likely anticipated the backlash. But did they expect the volume and the venom? Only Netflix can answer that, but they're not talking. 

Perhaps they're attempting to wait out the storm and hope that everything just goes back to status quo. Maybe they're waiting to gage just how bad things get, as in how many people quit Netflix. Maybe they just don't care. They've made a business decision, and the heck with customer backlash.

In any event, it seems bad business to have not anticipated the storm thundering over Netflix right now. And the past has proven that brands are made and broken in social media. Time will tell if this is one of the all-time-great examples of social media failure or a brilliant move by a company running one of the largest-scale research projects of all time.

 

 - Christine Pilch

Friday Favorites: 5.20.11

Here are 5 of my favorite or most helpful things I read on the web this week:

1. 10 Best Tips for Creating a Mobile Site:
   Are you thinking about mobile marketing yet? If not, you're a little behind the curve because smartphone use and mobile traffic are growing daily. This article offers a brief, plain English overview of best practice for developing a mobile site.
2. The Most Complete Twitter Application List Available - 2011 Edition:
   No explanation needed here. This list rocks! You might want to bookmark it.
3. 5 LinkedIn 'Must-Haves':
   LinkedIn has developed into a serious business tool, and this article offers solid tips about getting as much as you can out of the application.
4. New Facebook Promotions Guidelines:
   This is certainly not the most exciting item on this list, but it may be the most important. Facebook is serious about reducing their own liability, and a lot of the things people ordinarily do when they run a promotion on their Fan Page is actually against Facebook's terms of service. Read these guidelines and respect them, or you just might find your Page disappear one day. Remember that this is a free platform and Facebook can do whatever it wants, leaving you with little to no recourse.
5. How to Build a Free Social Media Monitoring Dashboard:
   Yes, you can track your social media activity without spending big bucks with expensive monitoring services. Here's a step-by-step guide for all you do-it-yourselfers. 

Well, that's it for this week!

- Christine Pilch

Determining who to follow on Twitter

I've done this post before, but it's been a while and it's worth revisiting now as I am going through a backlog of people who have been kind enough to follow me on Twitter. I'm @ChristinePilch, by the way.

I rarely seek out new people to follow any more. I used to when I started a few years ago, but I'm currently following too many people already to read every tweet, so it seems silly to actively pursue new tweeps. However, if you follow me, I will look at your profile and make a determination whether or not to follow you back. (It may take a while, but I'll get to it, so please be patient.)

There's no right or wrong follow process. It's all personal choice, but I'm looking for people who will add value to my Twitter experience. I like to reach out to my Twitter community when I need help, and I'm interested in meeting new people who will educate, inform and entertain me daily.

Here's my own strategy.

I use TweetDeck as my preferred Twitter client. So the first screening is what I can see there.

1. Your photo matters: If I see the egg, that tells me that you don't care or aren't serious enough about Twitter to bother, and I won't look further.
2. Your bio: No bio is a stop sign for me. It's not difficult to add a couple lines of text about yourself, so if you haven't bothered to do it, I won't bother to look further.
   
   The first 2 tests happen in a second or so, and if you passed them, I click over and check out your page on Twitter.com. The first thing I notice is,
   
   
3. Your background: It's okay to use one of the stock Twitter backgrounds for a little while when you're getting started, but if you're still using it after 1,000 tweets or so, although it's not a knock-out factor, I notice and file it in my mental follow-criteria folder.
4. Location: The next thing I notice is where the person is from. I almost always follow back people from Western MA, as that's my backyard, and I like to be friendly. If it's someone I know personally, they get an automatic bump into my local favorites column in TweetDeck, and I add newbie strangers to a second local column that I keep an eye on. I move people between and in and out of those columns regularly as I constantly re-assess value. Reading tweets is time-consuming, so I want my favorites to be prioritized.
5. The numbers: I look at the total number of tweets against the number of followers and following. If I see a disproportionately small number of tweets and a large number of follows, I know that user is a celebrity or just followed everybody on someone else's list without any thought at all, and oftentimes, many of those people auto-followed back. That's not my style. Again, this isn't a knock-out factor, but it's added to the follow-criteria folder in my head.
6. Tweet stream: While I pretty much automatically follow back local people, all the rest are screened by their tweet stream. This is one of the most significant factors to me. I don't bother following people who preach, that is, if I don't see a balance of unique content, @Replies and retweets, I won't follow, regardless of the value of the content. Twitter is, at its core, a communications platform, and I'm not going to bother with someone who has no demonstrated interest in an exchange of ideas.

So, that's how I make my decision whether or not to follow back someone who followed me on Twitter. Do you screen differently?

- Christine Pilch

Photo credit: geek&poke

10 ways to insult, irritate and get dumped by your social media connections fast

Here are a few things I've learned during my last few years in social media. If you want to keep your friends, I suggest you avoid the following:

1. Spend all your time pitching your own product or service. Very few companies are successful directly selling in social media. Use this space to communicate and build relationships. 
2. Be rude and use foul language. If you don’t speak that way face-to-face, don’t do it here. 
3. Pick fights. Openly challenging peoples’ opinions, insulting, & antagonizing them puts people off.
4. Be selfish. Using social media as your personal pulpit to preach your message without answering questions, helping, or engaging doesn’t work. 
5. Retweet or repost others’ links without crediting them. It is proper social media etiquette to credit the source when you share something from a friend’s Facebook page or retweet a link.
6. Forget to thank people. Remember your basic manners. 
7. Stalk people you barely know. When you Tweet @ people incessantly and comment on every photo, status update, and link they post on Facebook, and you’re just a casual acquaintance, that’s creepy. 
8. Drunk post. If you must jump on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter when you’ve got a few drinks in you, you would be wise to refrain from communicating. 
9. Insist that you’re right and everyone who disagrees is wrong. Speaking vehemently about your religious or political beliefs, parenting style, or favorite sports team, then arguing with, belittling, or insulting anyone who expresses a contradictory opinion, turns people off. 
10. Post information that should remain private. Betraying confidences and airing dirty laundry proves that you can’t be trusted.

What can you add to this list?

- Christine Pilch

 Image Credit: Microsoft

Friends, followers, and fans...quality or quantity?

I check out every new Twitter follower and make a personal decision whether or not to follow that person back. Sometimes I do and sometimes not, but auto-follow is not part of my strategy. However, many people do, as is evidenced by some of the numbers.

When I Iook at someone's Twitter profile and see a couple hundred tweets accompanied by large follower and following numbers, unless they're a celebrity, it's pretty obvious that they went to someone else's list and followed everybody on it. Many of those people then reciprocally followed back. That's all fine and good if all you care about is numbers, but they don't necessarily tell the whole story.

Most people reach a tipping point where they can no longer read all the tweets of everyone they follow by the time they're following about 100 people. To resolve this, they build lists of favorites on Twitter or start using an application like Hootsuite of TweetDeck, where they build groups.

But people who have little history and who may not necessarily have gotten into a groove of delivering content that many people find interesting are probably not going to end up on one of those lists that people actually read regularly, so despite big follower numbers, very few people are actually paying attention to what they're saying.

A similar argument can be made for Facebook and LinkedIn. There are plenty of collectors out there who make it their mission to have as many friends and connections as possible to build their egos. But is there any quality to these "relationships?" Are these relationships at all?

Everyone has their own idea of how social media works best for them. Some use it personally, some professionally, and for many people, it crosses the lines of both. 

For me, it comes down to community. I am interested in a building community of quality people that I can bounce ideas off of, share resources with, learn from, collaborate and laugh with. This community becomes my cheerleader when I do something good, and it pumps me up when I'm nervous or blue. My social media community is a very powerful resource.

So, I have chosen to select people who help build a community that is useful to me. I regularly move people in and out of my favorite lists, and I pay close attention to a handful of people who provide the greatest value to me. I'm pretty sure that none of those people have just 100 tweets and 4000 followers.

- Christine Pilch

 Image Credit: Microsoft

Social media is a communications platform, not a pulpit

I recently tweeted that brands need to preach less and communicate more on Twitter, and my friend, Erica Friedman, tweeted back, "It's a case of "when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Marketing is one-way communication, so Twitter must be." 

Brilliant! This is a perfect analogy for the problem many brands create for themselves in social media.

Traditional marketing involves sending out messages intended to get your customer, client, patient, etc, to take some action that will ultimately result in a purchase of your product or service. It is indeed mostly one-way communication, as Erica said. Historically, very few marketing campaigns were intended to develop a free-flow of information back and forth between the brand and it's customers. However, that's what social media does. That's the whole point.

One of the first things I share with my clients is the simple fact that social media is a communications platform. It is a means to build relationships with customers, prospects, and others. It is a universally accepted fact that people generally do business with people they like, so social media facilitates that. It adds a human face and voice, one that can be compassionate, caring, and helpful. It helps connections, friends, fans, and followers feel like they know a little bit about you and/or your company, so they are more inclined to use you as a chosen resource when the time comes. 

If you open social media communication channels, and you just scream from your pulpit, you don't understand social media, (with a few exceptions.)

So, let's get back to my original statement that brands need to preach less and communicate more on Twitter. Smart companies use Twitter as a customer service function, as a sales tool, to build a community, to manage their reputation, to educate, to troubleshoot, and to build trust, among other things. All of these are facilitated by responding, engaging, and building relationships through communication. You can't do that if you ignore your followers and preach all day long. You're not fooling anybody but yourself if you refuse to participate in the very engagement that fellow twitter users expect.

Go ahead and take a look at your own twitter stream. If you don't see any @s, RTs and DMs to your followers, chances are you're missing the point, chasing away followers, and forfeiting a wonderful opportunity to grow your company.

- Christine Pilch

 Image Credit: Microsoft

Hazards of Social Media, Part 2: Online reputation management - protecting yourself when someone puts you in a awkward position

You have likely worked hard your whole life to be perceived a certain way, and this has likely transferred from your offline to online life. You're probably careful about how you speak to people and the things that you say, so they are not misconstrued. You likely have your own personally acceptable code of conduct.

But what if somebody else threatens the reputation that you so carefully guard? What if someone asks you to do something that makes you uncomfortable and could possibly threaten your reputation?

I recently encountered a situation on LinkedIn where a connection of mine wanted to be connected to an author who was connected to someone that I am connected to. So the request had to follow this track:

My friend > Me > My connection > His connection

This is a relatively common request on LinkedIn, and in the spirit of the community, I didn't think twice about forwarding it to my connection, who was a LION (LinkedIn Open Networker.) Such people connect to as many people as possible on LinkedIn for the purported reason of being a resource to the LinkedIn community.

But it quickly became clear to me that this particular LION wasn't interested in doing a good deed without payment. He asked that I write a recommendation on his LinkedIn profile commending his willingness to forward the introduction request.

Huh? This guy wanted me to commend him for doing something that probably happens 10s of thousands of times daily on LinkedIn by people who are just acting in a decent human fashion, doing a favor? After all, this only requires the click of a button, not much effort.

I was uncomfortable with this request because if I recommend someone who treats others this way, then my reputation is tarnished by association.

I tweeted about his request, and once reinforced that indeed, this was an unreasonable request, I messaged him via the LinkedIn network that I only recommend people that I have worked with extensively and know well. But he wouldn't let go without two return emails.

In the first he mentioned that he has 2,500 recommendations from people like me that he has helped. And he's very busy running his own business, yet he still makes time to help others. "Okay," I'm thinking, "Just like all the rest of the LinkedIn community." And I didn't bother to respond.

A couple days went by, and a received a follow up email from him, stating that I must have misunderstood his request. "I was not asking you to recommend me as a person you know or trust, but "my service" as pay-it-forward advocate who helps others."

I still didn't respond. He apparently has a different view of courtesy than I do, and there was noting to be gained by pointing that out.

In another circumstance, one of my clients had one of his LinkedIn connections request that he pass along a introduction to one of my client's connections. His connection was in the professional services field and he wanted to position himself as a resource. The problem was that my client didn't think very highly of this person's skills, and he didn't want to forward the introduction, thereby associating himself as an inferred reference. I told my client that his instincts were probably right, and he should trust them.

In both of these scenarios above, requests were made that could have potentially damaged someone's reputation simply by association. The people making the requests didn't seem to have a problem doing so, and they obviously had the confidence to do so, but they had not successfully impressed those to whom they made their requests.

The message here is to not allow anyone to bully you into doing something that makes you uncomfortable online any more than you would allow it to happen face-to-face. Like it or not, your reputation is affected by those you associate with, and a false recommendation can certainly come back to bite you.

by: Christine Pilch
Christine@GrowMyCo.com
On LinkedIn
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 Image Credit: Microsoft