Robert Beadle's Social Media Marketing Blog

So you have a great product or service that you’re just dying to get into the hands of new customers.  But on a last check of your Google Analytics (you have this installed on your site, right?) traffic is way down.  So how do you get people to visit your site to see how great you are?

1. Have a website worth visiting
If your site is unprofessional (for example, has display errors, hasn’t been updated since the 1990s, or fails to answer customer questions, etc.) visitors aren’t going to stay very long or share it with their friends. However, a site that is engaging, speaks directly to your target customers’ problems and gives them something to share, will help you earn more business.

2. Write an e-book or “free report”
Most businesses fail to realize one simple principle of sales – it’s not about you… it’s about your customers! Your customers have problems and loads of questions, some which may not even have occurred to them yet. An expert marketer will develop a PDF, report, or handout that demonstrates the expertise of the business while solving common customer problems.

3. Start a blog
A blog is an excellent way to build a lasting relationship with your customers by fulfilling your promise to help them with their problems. And blogs don’t have to be boring! Keep it lively with personal stories, but also keep it informative by updating your customers with developments in the field. Once again, it is not about you, it’s about your customers.

For tip numbers 4-10, download my free report “10 Tips for Driving Traffic to Your Website.” There is no e-mail or registration requirement to download this free report.

You can download more free reports and slide shows from my product page at http://www.northeastpr.com/products.

“Are you kidding me?  Kill my e-mail?  You must be joking..”

I agree.  Sounds a bit drastic, doesn’t it?  That’s what I thought when I first read about this concept in Brian Solis‘ book, Putting the Public Back into Public Relations.

With 80 percent of Americans now online and social media sites creating fast and easy ways to manage your personal and professional networks, e-mail is starting to become an outdated concept.

For one, e-mail is meant to be private, one-on-one communication.  But I will wager a guess that the vast majority of your e-mails do not NEED to be private.  In other words, there are ways you and others can gain from making your conversations public and have other people in your network listening in and participating.

The true benefit of social media doesn’t come from the sites and tools themselves, it comes from the conversations you create with your network.

The next time you’re getting ready to send an e-mail, go through the following thought process:

1) Is what I’m sending REALLY confidential?

2) Would others benefit from listening in on this subject?

3) Might I benefit from hearing other opinions on this subject?

4) Might there be potential new business that could result from this online discussion?

Here’s a real world example:

My friend and fellow entrepreneur, Bryna Rene, is a ghost writer, publisher, Web site designer and yoga instructor at Raffa Yoga.  During a lunch we had together last week, she invited me to try yoga, since it’s something that’s been on my list to do for some time, but I didn’t quite how to jump in.  She recommend I take one of the drop-in classes she teaches.

Later that day, we discussed the schedule by e-mail.  But I realized that other people in my network and her network might be interested in taking a yoga class too.  So instead of replying to her e-mail to confirm which class I was going to attend, I posted a note to her Facebook account.

Robert Beadle – “Hey Bryna, I’ll join you for your beginners yoga class on Thursday at 7.  Looking forward to it!”

Bryna Rene – “Hooray! So happy you’re coming.  See you then!”

Now both of our networks have learned the following from our public conversation:

• Bryna teaches Yoga
• I’m going to learn Yoga
• Bryna has a class on Thursday at 7 p.m.

And could this attract more people to Bryna’s class?  Most definitely!

This concept of taking your conversations public can apply to almost any business, as long as the nature of your project isn’t confidential or proprietary.

And its use is not limited to Facebook.  Instead of using Twitter to update people on what you’re doing all the time, use it re-tweet other people’s posts and comment on them.  As a result you can expect an influx of new ideas and eventually, new business opportunities.

At the “We Mean Business” Expo held yesterday, I had the pleasure of hearing Bill Rancic’s keynote speech on entrepreneurial success. For those of you don’t know him, he was the first winner of Donald Trump’s “Apprentice” reality show.

But before his trip to stardom, he was a successful entrepreneur, having launched Cigars Around the World, a monthly cigar-by-mail club.  He lead us through some entertaining tales of his childhood and his early experiences trying to grapple with, but ultimately rejecting, a life in the corporate culture.

His abilities to recognize opportunity, to take calculated risks and to ignore critics, were all instrumental to his success.  But simply having a good idea, such as his cigar club, does not ensure a money-maker – you still have to get the word out.  Indeed the turning point for his fledgling company and entrepreneurial career came from a single brilliant PR idea.

Bill told us the story of how he wanted radio programs to tell their listeners about Cigars Around the World, but he didn’t have enough money for advertising.  After a few fruitless attempts sending letters to radio producers, he came up with the idea to send his letter in a box with a few cigars.  However on the top of the letter, he placed a pair of dime store glasses with a note for the producer to “take a closer look at my idea.”

One Chicago radio station brought him onto the show to talk for five minutes about his product, but five minutes turned to 30 as the host got more excited about his new idea.  When Bill returned to his office, his phones were ringing off the hook with subscribers.  His popularity propelled his business onto more radio programs and the orders continued to fly in.  And this event occurred in the early 90s before the Internet was mainstream.  Think about how his approach may have been different today.

Here are the keys to Bill’s success, as he put it:

• Find an unserved market and strive to fill that niche.
  
• Don’t succumb to analysis paralysis.  Figure out how to open the parachute on the way down.
  
• Have a strategy going in, but be flexible.
  
• In order to remain successful, you must constantly evolve and adapt to world.

His last point is my favorite.  Any business that sticks to the old ways of doing things will soon become obsolete.  In his example, the dot com boom inflated advertising prices greatly but some cigar distributors decided to keep advertising in the same places.  As a result they went out of business.  Bill shifted his PR and advertising strategy as the market changed and he stayed in business.

Would Bill’s original PR gimmick still work today?  I highly doubt it, as producers are flooded with silly packages from marketers every day.  It worked in the early 90s when such a technique was rare.  But the media was really the only way to get in front of large numbers of people.  Today we have not just the Internet, but a world of online communities just itching to get their hands on the next new product or service.

What are some things that you can be doing today to rise above the crowded marketplace? Tell me what you think in the comments.

If you have a marketing, PR or social media question about your business, come out and chat with me Thursday, September 9th from 10am-4pm at the Renaissance Hotel in Providence for the “We Mean Business” Expo.

I will be giving out a free guide entitled “10 Tips for Driving Traffic to Your Website.”

Stick around because there will be a special keynote address by Bill Rancic at 4:30pm at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium. You might remember this gentleman from the first season of Donald Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice.”

Here’s the link to the Expo: http://www.everycompanycounts.com/

Yesterday, I was browsing iTunes and discovered one of favorite bands had released a new album.  I downloaded Divided by Night by Crystal Method and cranked it up while I left the room.

A few minutes later I returned to my office and was hit with the stench of burning plastic.  I shut off Crystal Method and put on some lighter music.  Judging by the garbled sounds now flowing through the speakers, I determined my old Altec Lansing unit was fried.

So I tweeted about it:

“I just fried my Altec Lansing computer speakers while playing Crystal Method on high volume. My office now smells like burnt plastic…”

Later that afternoon I logged onto my TweetDeck, a free dashboard application for managing Twitter, and found this reply from Bernice Cramer, VP Marketing and Product Manager at Altec Lansing (Twitter screen name: Alec_Bernice):

“@robertbeadle Yikes, that should not have happened. Which model Altec speakers do you have?”

I got into a brief conversation with Bernice at Altec Lansing and learned that a new set of speakers (model: MX6021 200W) due out in September, would be more appropriate for my music listening habits.

How cool is that?

So how does this apply to your business?

Twitter enables you to listen to your customers and respond in real time.  This improves your public relations and opens the doors to new business opportunities you would not otherwise catch via sales and traditional broadcast marketing.

While the more obvious use for Twitter is to broadcast messages to your followers, the most successful Twitter users are those who understand that Twitter is often more effective as a listening tool.

I admit, the Twitter interface alone is pretty crappy and useless.  That is why I’ve installed a free dashboard application called TweetDeck which helps me extract the business opportunities from Twitter.

Follow these simple steps for building your Twitter listening tool.

I’m going to assume you already have a Twitter account.  If you do not, go to Twitter.com and sign up first:

1) Download TweetDeck – There are several Twitter dashboard applications out there, but TweetDeck is one of the most popular because of its ease of use.

2) Configure TweetDeck – Follow the directions to link TweetDeck to your Twitter account.  You will need to log in again.  Start to play around with the various buttons and features to get a feel for how it works.

3) Create live searches – This is the important part.  Twitter is useless unless you are monitoring it daily.  To get started with searches, click on the magnifying glass and input your search terms.  Search terms should include: your name, your company name, key terms that apply to your business.  I’ll give you an example.  I search for: Robert Beadle, Northeast Public Relations, social media PR and social media marketing.  Now if someone mentions me or the topics I’m interested in, I can comment in real time, thus expanding my business opportunities.

Altec Lansing “gets” social media.  So what could they have done differently?  Perhaps they could’ve offered me a coupon or free shipping for the new speakers in order to solidify the customer relationship.  If a company goes out of its way to show it really stands behind a product, it can turn its customers into “brand ambassadors,” or people who are impassioned to spread the company’s message and recommend it to their friends.

Take a moment today to run a name and keyword search on Twitter.  You may be surprised by what you find.

UPDATE:

Bernice contacted me after seeing this blog post and is sending me a product sample of the MX6021 speakers to test drive.

Just a quick post today to let you know that my podcast interview has aired on 88.7 FM in Chicago and is available for listening at my homepage http://www.northeastpr.com.

During the interview, I talk about concepts such as “thought leadership” to build a company’s reputation in the business community and offer a few tips and personal reflections for running a small business.

BusinessMatters.net offers a regular podcast and radio program to discuss strategies for business success.

Let’s do a little health check on your business PR and marketing effectiveness.  It will take 3 minutes or less, I promise.

1. Enter your first name and last name into Google (or if you’re not the CEO, enter his/her name).

2. Enter your company name into Google.

3. Enter two or three key words that explain what you do, followed by your home state. (example: “social media consultant Rhode Island”)

Examine the first page (10 results) of each search.

How did you do?

Visibility: How many times did a positive result for your business appear during each search?

Ranking: How high did your listings appear in the search result order?

Search Result Quality: How many of the results are:
*positive news stories
*your news releases
*links to your online profiles (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc)
*links to your products/services
*links to your free reports/e-books/videos
*positive reviews
*negative reviews

This is how the world sees you.  Any time a prospective customer is Googling your name to do some background research or simply looking for companies that offer the service or products you deliver, this is what they find.

Do you like what you see?  Is it easy for someone to find you and start a relationship with you?  Or are you invisible (or worse, being trashed by others)?

It’s no longer enough just to have a website.  You need to be marketing yourself online and promoting your expertise to make it easier for people to find you.

Start off by taking a few simple steps:

1) Discover what is unique about you or your company.  What special insights do you have that might benefit someone else with a problem?

2) Package your insights into an e-book or free report and post it to your website as a free PDF.

3) Use social networks and wire services to promote the link to your e-book.

This is just one effective way, out of many, to improve your online visibility.

Drop me a line and let me know how you scored.

I get questions daily about social media, but Twitter seems to make up the vast majority of them.  Here I’m going to answer some questions from a lovely young lady who wrote me on Facebook.  (BTW – these questions are real, although I admit to cleaning up the grammar and I’ve removed names for privacy..)

Hey Robert!
I have a question..how you can use twitter to advertise?
Also I just got a request follow from a company named amerigolanguage.com but it’s from Tehran, Iran..not sure what to make of this.

Thank you!

Hey there! Let’s take your questions one at a time:

1) First the advertising one – The answer is “no,” you can’t currently advertise on Twitter.  In fact the site hasn’t figured out a way to make money yet.  But I’d say Twitter advertising isn’t far off.

Sometimes people use the term “advertising” when they really mean to say “marketing, public relations, publicity or self-promotion.”  Advertising happens whenever you give money to someone who then designs an advertisement and places it in a website, newspaper, TV channel, radio station, billboard, etc.

However, there ARE ways to market yourself on Twitter.  And that’s what one of the things I do – I help companies understand how to use Twitter and other social media sites to accomplish their marketing and PR.

2) Let’s tackle your second question.  You just got a follow request from someone you don’t know.

I did a little digging and found out that amerigolanguage is the Twitter account for amerigolanguagesolutions.com a professional translation service firm based in North Little Rock, AR.  I don’t know why he has Tehran, Iran listed as his location.  Maybe he’s really there or maybe not and he’s trying to capitalize on city’s recent media attention surrounding violent demonstrations.  Who knows?

But his follow request isn’t important.  What you need to decide is whether or not to make your Twitter account “public” or “private.”  This depends entirely on your goals.  If your Twitter account is intended for only people you know, then you shouldn’t let others follow you who are not in your network of friends and colleagues.  However, if you’re using your Twitter account to make more connections around the world, then you will want to increase your followers.

In order to do this, you should tweek some of the settings in your Twitter account or all the follow requests pummeling your e-mail inbox will drive you mad.  Go to “settings” then uncheck the box that says “protect my updates.”  Then click on the “Notices” tab and uncheck the “new follower e-mails” to preserve your sanity.

People often wonder, “why do I have these random people and companies following me?”  The answer is simple – they are trying to sell you something.  This is why a user’s “follower” count doesn’t impress me – spammers and bad salespeople do not represent qualified followers.  I would be more impressed with someone who has a smaller number of followers but has CEOs, decision makers and journalists on their list.

I hope that answers your question.

For my other readers, please comment on my blog if you have more questions or would like to shed some new light on the subject.

Pitching your press release to reporters is so yesterday.  If you’re still relying on newspapers to cover your company news, you’re not realizing the enormous potential of what a “wire” press release offers.

Today, you have the option of posting your news release directly to news sites – that means no more begging reporters to cover you.  And the more times your release is posted with your company’s URL and keywords, the higher your Google ranking will rise.

So how do you do it?  The answer is wire services.

There are bunch of wire services out there, the most prominent being Business Wire, Market Wire, PR Newswire and PR Web.  They all have different pricing plans and options, but the most important benefit is search engine optimization (SEO).  Every time you issue a release through a wire service, your release will be sent to targeted sites on the Web, all linking back to your company Web site.

But now these services are making your news release even more powerful by giving you the option of using anchor text to boost your SEO even more.  Anchor Text refers to the hyperlinked words you click on that tell search engines what the page is about.

To create anchors in your news release in Microsoft Word, simply highlight the word or phrase you want to link, right click and select “hyperlink” from the dropdown menu.  Then type in the URL or website you want to link to and you’re done.  The word or phrase you highlighted will turn blue with an underline, indicating the link is hot.  Then when you upload the release to a wire service site, the hyperlinks are maintained.

Make sure when choosing words and phrases for your links, that they are keywords people look for when searching for your company on Google.  It’s also a good idea to put in some non-anchored links in as well, because not every news site out there accepts anchor text links.

I recently posted a release on Market Wire (set to fly on June 24) and you may use mine as an example of how you should create your anchors.  As you can see, my key words are: public relations, social media, marketing, Robert Beadle, e-books, seminars.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:

Robert Beadle
Northeast Public Relations, Inc.
401-632-6573
Robert@NortheastPR.com

ROBERT BEADLE NAMED 2009 RHODE ISLAND AND NEW ENGLAND YOUNG ENTREPRENEUR OF THE YEAR BY
THE U.S. SMALL BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (June 24, 2009) – Robert Beadle, president of Northeast Public Relations, Inc. (NEPR) (http://www.NortheastPR.com), was named 2009 Young Entrepreneur of the Year for Rhode Island and all of New England this month by the U.S. Small Business Administration.

“I congratulate Robert Beadle on this achievement,” said Mark S. Hayward, director of the SBA Rhode Island District Office.  “Through his seminars and e-books, Robert has helped many small businesses understand how to better market themselves by utilizing public relations and social media tools.  He is an accomplished business leader in the community.”

Beadle has developed and implemented public relations and marketing programs for over 40 companies, non-profit organizations and government entities in New York, Massachusetts, Vermont and Rhode Island including Arpin International Group, the Boy Scouts of America and the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council.  His company specializes in social media applications for public relations and marketing.

Beadle also anchors the Arpin Broadcast Network (ABN), an Internet-based television network and Web portal dedicated to the moving industry.

Outside of NEPR, Beadle currently serves as president of the Southeastern New England chapter of the Public Relations Society of America, a group which provides professional and educational programs for members and works to strengthen and advance the profession of public relations in the local community.

He is a master’s graduate of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, the top public relations program in the Northeast. Beadle served in the U.S. Air Force Reserve as a staff sergeant and provided active duty mission support for Operation Noble Eagle in response to the 9/11 attacks.

Beadle is a regular speaker for the R.I. Economic Development Corporation business development program and offers public relations information to the wider community through personal appearances before groups of all sizes to explain emerging trends and the importance of PR to their organization and membership.

About Northeast Public Relations, Inc.
Northeast Public Relations, Inc. (NEPR) is a PR and marketing consultancy providing businesses with greatly increased visibility by connecting them with consumers via the ever-growing Social Web.  For more information, visit http://www.northeastpr.com or read Robert Beadle’s Social Media PR Blog at http://www.robertbeadle.com.

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This is a really quick post. But I wanted to let my readers know first that right now you should go up to http://www.facebook.com/username and secure your unique URL for your account. Mine is http://www.facebook.com/robertbeadle as an example.

The reason to grab your URL now is to prevent someone else with the same name as you from grabbing it first. That way it is much easier to share your Facebook profile with others.  Now you won’t have to be “JohnSmith#45879.”

By the way, if you have a group or company page on Facebook, you can also grab a unique URL, but you must have 1000 fans or more to qualify.