Have you heard yourself saying or thinking any of these statements?

1.  Social media costs a lot of money. Let’s get this out of the way right now. It doesn’t cost any money to establish a presence and a marketable following on the social networks. There’s an investment of time, for sure. But as far as your marketing budget is concerned, there doesn’t have to be any impact.

2.  Social media marketing doesn’t apply to my business. To understand the opportunities that exist with social media, you have to know that social media doesn’t mean just hanging out on Facebook. While Facebook may be the leader of the pack and most popular social network, there are other platforms and strategies to consider depending on your business, market, and goals. Let’s put it this way, if your company has a web site, there’s social network marketing to do.

3.  Social networking is a fad, so I’m not going to invest the time. Denial about how social networking is effecting the Internet, and therefore effecting business, is not going to serve you well in the long term. The population of Facebook users makes it the 3^rd-largest nation on the planet, and its reach is very quickly becoming integrated into all other social networks and Internet marketing applications. If you’re not represented in this nation, you can kiss your business growth goodbye. This is not a drill, social networking is here to stay.

4.  My assistant/brother-in-law/teenager can do it for me; they’re always posting and tweeting. Herein lies the biggest mistakes companies make when they decide to set up shop on the social networks.  The activities of playing on the social networks as an individual or consumer are not the activities necessary to incorporate social media into your company marketing plans. Think of your most-travelled highway as a sea of your target market (social network users), and your business’s social media efforts as the billboard you put up to capture the attention of the traffic.  Does it make sense to ask one of the drivers on that highway to create your billboard for you? Does driving a car on the highway daily make him qualified to create and design an effective marketing message?

This age of social media is an amazing era for entrepreneurs and business owners. The advent of social networks has leveled the marketing playing field for you and handed your company the opportunity to compete locally, nationally, even internationally. I am VERY passionate about transforming local business owners from social media doubters to enthusiastic opportunists. Do you need a transformation? Talk to me about private coaching for you or on-site training for your team. Take a look and see if this is for you. You are always free to email me if you have any questions: mary@marypetto.com

Like many other business owners, I’ve had plenty of proposals rejected on price. And like those other businesses, I know that there will always be someone less expensive than me out there, and there are plenty that cost a whole heck of a lot more. I tend not to focus on these losses as losses at all. I know in my heart that they’ll get what they pay for, and of course that I’m worth every penny (solid recommendations and testimonials will prove it).

However, today I hung up with a friend who was pitching me to a senior partner at his company. He wanted to give me the inside scoop on what was happening. Apparently, management had gotten a bid from another vendor who came in about 30% lower than I did and, in his words, “offered the same exact service. It was an apples to apples comparison.”  As he was my friend, he answered my questions about the competitor. “They’re our web site development company,” was the response. I questioned the qualifications of this company; it’s difficult to be in the graphic design/web engineering field and also in the copywriting/social media marketing field, unless they’re a larger, full-service agency. I couldn’t find anything substantial about social media services on their web site (though their site design portfolio rocked), so I headed to this company’s Facebook and Twitter profiles to see what they were up to.

My discovery? They had no profile image on their Facebook page other than a logo, their posts were infrequent, and every other one had typos. I went to Twitter and was even more shocked to discover that in the past five months they had only tweeted a dozen times, and each tweet was a sales message about their own services. The icing on the cake? They only had 16 Twitter followers.

Now I KNOW that social media is a new world, and it’s hard as a business owner to even understand the language, let alone know what questions to ask. But what my friend thought was an “apples to apples” comparison was not one, in any stretch of the imagination.   My gift to my friend and to you, a busy business owner with little time to do research, is a list of questions to ask social media strategists and service providers, BEFORE you sign the dotted line and questions to ask yourself during the campaign once they’ve started working for you:

“Before” questions:

1.      Is your background technical, design, marketing, or copywriting?

2.      What social networks do you think I should be on, and why?

3.      What would your goals be for my social media campaign?

4.      How often will you post on each of those platforms?

5.      When might I expect those posts to happen each day?

6.      From where will you get content?

7.      Can you give me a few samples of posts you might use?

The answers you receive will help you determine a few things. A, if they know what they’re doing. B, if they are marketers or technologists. C, if they understand the platforms they are using to promote your business, and D, how they compare to other service providers. Most importantly, you’ll illustrate that you know a thing or two about social media.

Here’s the other gift. Once you’ve gotten your consultant posting for your company, ask yourself these questions:

“During” questions:

1.      How’s the messaging online?

2.      Do the posts have publicity/share-ability built into that?

3.      Is there original content from your company on the social networks?

4.      Is there sharing of others’ content?

5.      Are you/ your company being positioned as an expert?

6.      Are the profiles optimized for the search engines?

7.      Are contacts being converted into sales and inquiries?

8.      Are the posts generating good feedback numbers and high impressions?

9.      Is traffic increasing to your site, services, and products every month on a consistent basis?

I know I’m good at what I do; my clients tell me so. And I also know that budgets are real and everyone wants a fair deal. As far as that other proposal goes that my friend received, clearly he’d be overpaying at that price, even though it was 30% less than mine.

Take those questions to your proposal reviews. I have several clients that have come to me after rejecting my proposal and hiring another team to do the work based on price. The difference that they discovered immediately upon engaging my services made them regretful that they had turned me down in the first place.

Does this mean that I’m the answer for you? Not necessarily. But I’m a righteous chick, and I want you to get a fair deal, no matter who you hire. And you can always reach out to me for advice or with questions. Let me see what you’ve got going on. You already know you get what you pay for, but you may get more if you ask the right questions.

(or How to Monitor and Engage on Social Networks)

If you were at a cocktail party and overheard someone mention that they were looking for a product or service in your industry, wouldn’t you step over and introduce yourself? Ask some questions to get a feel for what that person was really in need of, and then explain that you can help? Now wouldn’t it be cool if you could eavesdrop on the millions of updates and posts on Facebook and Twitter to find conversations there that you could introduce yourself to?

Well hold on to your hat! You can do the same thing on Twitter and Facebook that you do at cocktail parties! Monitoring the world-wide conversation and poking your head into the room is perfectly legit, and a great way to gather future customers. Here’s how to do it:

Monitor Twitter:

Search—You have two methods to search on Twitter:  1. the search box that’s right on your home page or  2. the url: http://search.twitter.com/. The key here is to search for phrases.  For instance, if you’re a career consultant, you could search for “need help with my resume” or “I need a new job.”

Engage—When you find the right status posts to reply to, you can get their attention with an “@reply” post with a response. An example would be “@Susie246 I can help you with your resume. Do you want to talk?” Be sure to also start following this Twitter account if you aren’t already. If they already follow you there’s the option of sending a direct message (DM). I actually prefer the public response because I find these get noticed more quickly than the DM. Now be sure to watch for an @reply back, or they may reach out to your business email .

Monitor Facebook:

Search—Search for key phrases in the Facebook search box. When the results come up, filter them by then clicking on “Posts by Everyone,” which can be found in the left-hand navigation area of the search results page. Here you will find all relevant status updates posted by anyone who doesn’t have privacy settings set on their wall.

Engage— Next step, click over to that Facebook user’s page. Even if you aren’t “friends,” you can click “Send a Message” which can be found right under the Facebook user’s profile picture. Now you have an opportunity to say anything you want via private message. But be careful not to come off as the eavesdropper you are and don’t come on to strong. Try this for a subject heading: “I may be able to help you with your resume.”  As far as the message goes, be honest:  “Hi, Jeffrey. I’m a career consultant and while doing a Facebook search I came upon your post about…” Be humble and helpful, not sales-y.

Tools for monitoring it all:

Of course, with every need to work better and smarter on social platforms comes an app that fits the bill. Kurrently (http://www.kurrently.com/) is a simple and straightforward website that lets you plug in the phrases you want to search and then it searches both Twitter and Facebook simultaneously to provide you with results for both! The best part is that each poster’s ID is a live link and takes you directly to their Facebook profile or Twitter page to begin the engagement process.

So, pretty neat, huh? Now you know why social networks are so cool for business, and how to really start to leverage them for building your empire.  If you feel like you just found a little hole in the wall for eavesdropping, or like you developed super-hero powers for listening to every conversation going on in the Twitosphere, good for you!  It was my pleasure to be the one to let you in on the secret.  Let me know if you need help  : )

We all need a break once in a while, but your social media strategy really ought to be contuing even if you’re on the other side of the world, feet in the sand, drink in your hand. But if the rest of the social media world goes on without you, how do you not skip a beat? Well with a little planning and some free ninja-trick application shopping, you’re good to go!

Step 1: APPLICATION SHOPPING: If you’re not in on this secret, you’re just going to love me! Did you know there are web-based social media management applications that allow you to not only permanently search and monitor your industry within social media platforms and post from there, but that also allow you to schedule your posts, tweets, status updates, etc. for a future date and time? There are some that are free and others with fantastic analytics capabilities that you’ll appreciate for sure with a price tag attached. My two favorites are HootSuite (free) and Objective Marketer (fee-based). Once you find one you like, sign up and play!

Step 2: POST PLANNING: While of course your posting strategy is always mapped out in advance (isn’t it?), a few days before your bags are packed, plan out the types of tweets and updates you would post if you weren’t going away. Consider what is happening at your company, in the industry, or promotions you have going on. Here are some examples for a local business owner vacationing July 3 – July 10:

Facebook:
Day one-   1 fun store happening post
Day two-   1 holiday message/office hours
Day three- 1 promo reminder
                 1 funny staff member quote
Day four-  1 how-to link
                 1 industry bite
Day five-   1 promo reminder, etc. etc.

Twitter:
Day one-   2 local happenings posts
                 4 following re-tweets
Day two-   3 holiday info re-tweets
Day three- 1 promo reminder
                 2 industry content links
                 4 re-tweets, etc., etc.

Step 3: SETUP, SEARCH, and SCHEDULE:
Log in to your chosen social media management app for your vacation posting. Start typing up your originally-authored posts and schedule accordingly throughout the vacation week. Remember not to neglect any of the networks you are active on, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ping, etc. You can even automate your WordPress blog posts and Foursquare updates with HootSuite.
     Most apps have a search box for industry content posts and retweets. Simply search on a phrase and all recent posts with that phrase will show in a column (that you can—and should—make it a permanent search column if it’s relative to your business). Select content you want to share and schedule it! Select tweets to re-tweet and then schedule each one!

While this strategy is fantastic for keeping your business in the loop and staying in the newsfeeds of your followers, it’s a good idea to take a peek at your notifications halfway through your trip or ASAP when you return to make sure you don’t let any un-responded-to engagement opportunities slip past you.

Bon voyage!

I’m talking about Twitter, silly! Businesses jumping on the Twitter info stream, particularly in the beginning, often believe that without a significant number of “followers” they can’t make a significant impact. As this platform matures, it is becoming apparent that other factors–such as who your followers are, your posts, and how you build relationships on Twitter–are what really matter as far as your business is concerned.

     I present to you an article by Catharine Smith, via The Huffington Post, that proves, scientifically, that the size of your following doesn’t really matter:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/07/twitter-followers-number_n_567746.html

If you’ve got a Facebook fan page for your business, you’ve probably noticed that rather than clicking on “Become a Fan,” your page visitors are now clicking on a button that simply says “Like.” Facebook has done this as part of a much bigger empire-growth scheme that allows them to eventually take over the planet, but within our own smaller agenda of social media engagement, they may have just rocked our world.

It’s good, but it could be bad.

So, from an optimistic standpoint, there is something much less psychologically committal about saying you like something than saying you’re a fan. Apparently, Facebook has already proved this with their market analysis. So that’s good, right? More people seeing our news feed, more people to potentially engage with. My hunch, however, is that many Facebook users aren’t taking it seriously. I can’t tell you how many of my own personal friends are now “becoming fans” of the silliest, most useless, controversial, and downright raw pages. Do they know this is coming up in my news feed? My conclusion is that for the past two years, the action of clicking on “Like”  has simply been our way to acknowledge a tongue-n-cheek status update without commenting on it, a way of pointing out that we’ve looked at a picture that was posted, or appreciate someone’s political satire post from a news source. So whereas we business owners and marketers know that this button is just a replacement of the word “Fan,” users overall just don’t recognize the difference.

So it’s bad?

Well, it feels bad. It feels like, at least when it comes to the viral newsfeed phenomenon, Facebook has diluted the power of the fan page and the overall willingness of our fans to ultimately engage with us. My hope is that Facebook users will catch on to the various meanings of the word “Like” throughout the network and adjust back to being more particular about the business pages they want to follow.

Let’s wait and see.

With every change comes opportunity (see last blog post), so let’s work with this. Facebook has given us an opportunity to coin a new term to replace “Become a Fan” in our marketing. I loved this, because it is so actionable! How can we use “Like” in an action statement that doesn’t seem needy? Let’s hear it!

Taking your company’s Facebook page to the next level doesn’t have to be a challenge. Here are five easy ways to take your business from simply having social media presence to being a relevant and savvy brand.

1. Auto-feed your blog. With Facebook’s NetworkedBlogs app, every time you add a new post to your blog, it lands on your fans’ newsfeeds. (Bonus: you can also add a “blog” tab to your page once you connect with NetworkedBlogs.)

2. Create Custom Tabs. It takes a little finagling or a friend that speaks html, or fbml, but with compelling labels on unique tab content you’ll be the coolest biz on the block! Consider different tabs for different product lines, target markets, locations, etc.

3. Record video right to your page. This is some serious immediate gratification when you want to communicate directly with your fans, and in seconds! Click on the + at the end of your tabs and drop down to “video.” Record right away with your webcam or upload something cool from your files. Don’t forget to post about it!

4. Run a contest or sweepstakes. There are apps available that create these classic promotional tools and then publish them to your fan page. This is a fun way to get your page viral. Check out www.wildfireapp.com. It isn’t free, but you can pull it off for as low as $5 a month.

5. Create a Fan Badge. Visitors to your website or blog don’t have to leave to become Facebook fans with this cool widget. To get one: click “edit page” from your fan page and look for a link to create a Fan Badge. In three steps you’ll magically have a “Become a Fan” shortcut on your web site.

Since the release of my last article about why you should get your business rolling on Twitter, I’ve received many questions about how to climb out of the info-pile dump and keep on top of the feeds.

My answer: TweetDeck. If you want to make sure you can find all the topics, people, and feeds you’re looking for in real time, get TweetDeck in front of you. There are mobile versions for your phone, but it is best viewed on your PC, at least until you understand what you are looking at and have it customized for your needs. Here’s why you need it:

You’re the Captain. It may be hard to believe, but with TweetDeck you’re in charge of what you see on Twitter. The system is based on columns. Each time you open TweetDeck, you’ll be presented with column after column of tweets categorized by what you’ve chosen to see. Everything from standard Twitter info, such as replies and direct messages, to categories pre-compiled by TweetDeck to topic searches or groups of people that you have pre-determined. You’re the captain, and this is your helm!

No Flipping. If you get frustrated by the surf that is twitter.com (you know, an intriguing retweet compels you to click on the user, which compels you to click on a link, which compels you to go back to twitter for a search, and you forgot to DM someone but now you have to flip back to find them), you’ll be relieved to know that with TweetDeck’s column view you don’t lose where you are, you just get more places to go! With the magic search icon, a new search appears as yet another column now permanently set up for your viewing pleasure until you remove it.

Magic Mouse Action. Okay, so it’s not the mouse, but it’s the options you have with each avatar that feels like magic. When you hover, you’re presented with the usual options to retweet or direct message, but you also have bunches of other options for dealing with the tweet itself and/or that user, including translating, viewing a complete profile (in a temporary column), and even emailing the tweet! If you discover a new user to follow and want to add him to a particular category you’ve columned, just click!

SuperPost Power. I don’t know about you, but I have a really hard time with the 140 character limit, especially when a url is involved. TweetDeck can do wonderful things while you’re keying: alert you when referencing a username that doesn’t exist, automatically “tiny” urls, shrink your tweet, translate it, attach photos and video, and remind you of recent hashtags you’ve used.

Add Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. That’s right, once you’ve become addicted and don’t want to be separated from your TweetDeck columns ever again, you’ll be pleased that you can add columns for your Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace management, too!

Ahh, necessity really IS the mother of invention. TweetDeck is such a blessing for the Twitter superhighway that Twitter itself has finally caught on and launched a new “lists” feature and some hover-type tools. To begin, just go to www.tweetdeck.com. Oh! And don’t worry about TweetDeck portability, because when you load the mobile version it will populate with all of your columns. Did I mention you can minimize TweetDeck but have it chime when a new post comes into one of your columns? (I only recommend you use chime if you rely on real-time tweet scanning for your business; this could be too much of a good thing).

The question I am most often asked regarding social networking and ways to leverage social media to market a business is “How can I possibly add this to my already overscheduled daily task list?” Of course, this question comes from those who currently use social media for their personal use and have experienced the time-vacuum phenomenon that often accompanies it. I’m not denying it’s easy to get swept out with the tide; however, with a little bit of will power and the following tips, you’re sure to improve your social networking productivity for your business and see results:

1. Compartmentalize.
Set aside just a few minutes each day to log in and catch up with your SN (social networking), using a timer if you have to. As an alternative, set aside a larger portion of time on a less-frequent basis. Watch the clock, and get out and move on to your real-world tasks when time is up!

2. Keep it filed, not pouring in.
Set SN settings so that notifications do NOT come in to your email inbox. Getting these in real time is not productive and it’s distracting; you’ll see them at the designated log-in time. If there is certain SN info you want to see in real time, such as LinkedIn correspondence, consider using your email system’s push feature, which allows you to set up and name folders in your inbox and, based on where the emails come from, sends the messages directly to those folders, where you can see them waiting. This keeps you organized, too. If your webmail doesn’t offer this feature, consider a desktop program like MS Outlook that can handle it.

3. Complete your profiles.
Make your profile pages on each networking site as complete as possible. By doing so, visitors to your page can have many of their basic questions answered and you’ll have less back-and-forth to tend to. Also try to keep as much profile info as public as you’re comfortable with.

4. Be Decisive.
Respond to connection requests, event invites, and business inquiries during the allotted time on the clock. Be sure to transfer commitments to your calendar immediately.

5. Pick up the phone.
When you come upon important correspondence on your social networks during your allotted time, set up an appointment to speak on the phone (and of course transfer that appointment to your calendar immediately). Whether for business or personal relationships, using your actual voice is the most effective way to connect meaningfully and efficiently.