Notes from the Hive

When I think about those in business I want to learn from and admire most, I realize it isn’t about how big their company is or what they created or discovered. The common traits that catch my attention are generosity and humility as characteristics I find most appealing.

Great thinkers and determined innovators are certainly worth paying attention to but they may not whom I admire.

The internet has changed the world in so many ways that I dare not attempt to cover them all in this post but what I do want to point out is how it has changed marketing and movie stars.

I lump these two very different entities into one sentence because there is almost no difference today. For the first time in our history, there is a wide range of CEOs, from large companies and small, that have as much star power if not more than most movie stars.

You may have read about a CEO in the business section of a newspaper in the past but more than likely you saw a movie star bigger than life across the silver screen acting in some role that either you identified with or romanticized about. Today, CEOs can take on that same power and build their brands through digital stardom.

Between Youtube, Digital News, blogging and micro blogging, news travels fast and everyone is fair game for exploration and exploitation. The bottom line is that your life is revealed on line with or without you.

As I speak with clients, prospects and audiences about reputation management and social media marketing, sometimes it rings a bell with them and some run for cover. And just so you know, with the Internet in play, there is no cover.

Only revealing the polished version is what holds respect and admiration is a bygone belief. Allow me to share two examples of individuals I consider well worth admiring.

Last week I ran into two individuals at the New York Enterprise Best Advisors Awards event.

Norm Brodsky is not only a successful business man, he is also a best selling author of The Knack and a regular contributor to Inc. magazine with his column Street Smarts. Just before he got up to address the audience at WIBO’s Annual Awards Event, a cap on one of his front teeth fell out. He could have feigned illness and left quickly but instead he chose to stand up and make the best of it. My admiration for this man quickly magnified. He not only shared his challenge but wove it beautifully into demonstrating the meaning in his speech and sprinkled in humor fueled by humility. This made him more lovable to the audience and was a picture perfect example of Grace Under Fire. I was never more motivated than I was that evening. I knew right then and there that what was important to this man was not how he was perceived but what he contributed. This is someone I want to learn from – this is someone I admire and could trust.

A little later that same evening I ran into another individual whom I admire and respect, Matt Weiss. Matt is a successful lawyer who has embraced social media. I believe initially he engaged social media to grow his business, and as a leader in EO (Entrepreneurs Organization) to connect, share, and learn. Matt blogs regularly and some of his posts were inspired by being a father (getting to movies like Toy Story 3 and making the connection to best business practices) and a more controversial post on getting a colonoscopy. Both posts demonstrate fresh thinking and a commitment to being true to himself.

A lawyer discussing a child’s movie and a medical procedure might seem unprofessional to some, but these posts earn him greater respect and admiration. When you decide on who you would want as your lawyer, having someone who communicates that they are in touch with the same world we live in and is open to share challenges in a positive light, well this would be my lawyer of choice.

Why? He demonstrates two key characteristics through his blog posts. First he ‘gets it’ and isn’t that nine-tenths the challenge when we want to communicate an issue or concern and second he reveals himself with honor and integrity.

Now, if only I needed a lawyer.

If you are a CEO or entrepreneur who is in hiding from the world or keeps their company under the digital radar, the only question that comes to mind is just what are you hiding? Are your services or products sub par? Is your company being run poorly? Are you the type of person only your mother could love?

No company is perfect and no human beyond reproach. So if you are committed to being a good business citizen and have some redeeming qualities, you might want to share those so that when there is a mistake or a problem you have a platform to move through it and earn back what ever you may have lost or are at risk of losing.

Get on board, be real, be transparent and lead the way.

Because I spend my days working with social media I sometimes forget that the rest of the world isn’t seeing what I see and so I am always brought back to reality when I hear “I’m B2B so social media isn’t for me.”

I believe that most people in business are aware of the value of social media to engage consumers but haven’t made the leap to understanding the value to business clients. I say ‘leap to understanding’ because as a B2B business (business-to-business) we think of our companies as a body of products or services as it relates to the value of another company. This is where the shift and leap occurs as social media brings B2B into P2P (People to People). Social media puts us in the right places to begin building relationships with the people at those companies that are either making the buying decision or influencing the purchasing process. These people are our consumers.

So, let’s take a quick look at how social media does in fact play a role in the B2B market.

Recently Mashable posted a great blog giving 5 examples of B2B companies that have had great success using social media. These companies range from aviation maintenance, equine dentistry, commercial paper supplier and a paint manufacturer and are successfully using platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Not the sexy stuff you are used to seeing in headline news is it? Your business doesn’t have to have sex appeal to have social media success. You also don’t have to go for hundreds of thousands of friends, followers and fans to be successful – you just have to get the attention of the eyeballs of those that matter.

This is where strategy becomes important in gaining some traction and success using social media to generate leads and grow your business. Not sales and marketing strategy but engagement strategy.

A client of ours who is in the B2B service industry has been experiencing success getting in-person appointments with key decision makers by first connecting and engaging on Twitter, as well as using video creatively to break down the barriers and getting him invitations into accounts where in the past they never had success. Their activity on Facebook and Twitter as well as video blogging helps to keep their web site at first or second place in Google searches, which in turn generates leads.

Still not convinced?

Recent Hubspot studies support companies that use Twitter have greater success with their blogs, and companies that blog regularly have better results with search engines and those that use video do even better. The power of Linkedin is often times under rated by companies and underused.

There is no silver bullet and no single activity or platform that will bring instant success. It takes time and effort, and like any other form of communications and marketing, the quality of your message and your presence will be the final kiss of glory or death. These are tools – and in the right hands are quite powerful. The better you understand each platform, the better you are at using them, the better you know the audience, the better your chance of engaging with them to earn their attention and their trust, which increases your rate of success.

So get out there and blog, vlog, tweet, post, comment, friend, follow, like, digg, and link and we’ll see you at the top.

Backlinks are often overlooked as a critical part of getting your website to rank well organically. Search engines use a multitude of factors when rating a page for relevancy in response to a search query and backlinks are one of those factors – a rather critical one actually.

Search engines often use the number of backlinks that a website has for determining that website's search engine ranking. Google's description of their PageRank system notes “Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.”

With this bit of awareness, a zillion gurus and companies emerged promising to deliver tons of links back to your website for a monthly fee. Seems simple enough. Lay your money down and sit back and wait for inbound links and SERP success. Well as soon as these internet wheeler-dealers figure something out Google is already 10 steps ahead of them. So before you plunk your money down, investigate thoroughly what you are going to get for your hard earned cash. Google does not like link spam.

What Google wants to know is: Are the links relevant to your business? Are the sites that are linking to you reputable? What you need to know is: will a rapid linking campaign trigger a negative message to Google that you are buying credibility rather than earning it?

I am not a backlink guru and I don’t offer backlink acquisition as part of our business model. I do study the topic and stay abreast of the trends in order to offer my clients some best practice advice and assistance. So I am pleased to share with you some suggestions and information.

First, I recommend that you check your backlinks on a regular basis. There are a few websites that offer a free backlink checking service and here are two that I use.
http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker
http://www.backlinkwatch.com/

A neat feature of iwebtool is that it also gives you the page rank for the site that is linking back to you. I find that backlinkwatch often provides more linking data than iwebtool.

Another way to check your backlinks – free of charge – is to use Google. Google can be searched using link:yourdomainname.com but Google only shows a small number of links pointing to a site even though it credits more backlinks than it shows. You can use this same feature “link:__” on Yahoo as well. There are some sophisticated paid services but for starting out these free sites should do just fine.

Obtaining valued and authoritative links should be part of your ongoing marketing efforts. What determines the value of a backlink? When both sites have content geared toward the keyword topic the backlink is considered relevant and believed to have strong influence on the search engine rankings of the webpage granted the backlink. Search engines consider this an editorial vote. An example would be if your website content and keywords are centered around “software solutions” and you have a backlink from “softwarestandards.org” (I am making this up) then that is both a valued link and has higher credibility as a result of its standing as a “.org” site.

Even more impressive to a search engine is anchor text backlink. Anchor text is the descriptive labeling of the hyperlink as it appears on a webpage. Search engine bots (i.e., spiders, crawlers, etc.) examine the anchor text to evaluate how relevant it is to the content on a webpage. So if we go back to our example above and on the make believe site softwarestands.org there is a paragraph that uses the term ‘software solutions’ and that is a hyper link back to your site, well you have just earned yourself big points with the search engine-rating machine.

Other sources of valued backlinks are professional associations, respected media with press releases, business directories such as chambers and the BBB and even some Internet directories.

One directory that had an excellent reputation is DMOZ, or the "Open Directory". There is a lot of controversy with DMOZ and its value, but that aside, it is still worth submitting your site. Be patient as it takes a long time to get listed. Best of the Web (BOW) is another valued site to list your website with and don’t forget the Google and Yahoo directories.

Most are free, many are not, and some require membership so factor these expenses into your budgeting.

Another way to build backlinks is to use Social Bookmarking sites. Some examples are StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit.

Also pay attention to Rating sites such as Yelp – these not only offer backlinks, but as a business you will want to pay attention to any positive or negative feedback and respond quickly. To viewers this will reflect positively on you, and besides it’s just good customer service.

Backlinks are easier than ever now to obtain by engaging on social media sites and blogging, so be sure to incorporate these into your overall marketing strategy. What is important to note, using social media plays a strong factor as search engines are now rating real time search and recency of a link with more weight.

So if you are going to invest in on line marketing you might want to consider this as a higher priority than obtaining oodles of irrelevant links from link farms.

Let me know your thoughts and feel free to share some of your linking strategies and successes.

It takes too much time. There isn’t enough time. I’m running out of time. It’s time to make the donuts.

When I talk to companies or groups about implementing social media as part of their marketing efforts I am always hit with the objection that it takes too much time.

Yes, engaging in social media does take time. There is the time to research and figure out where to put your efforts. There is the time that it takes to set up accounts and profiles. There is time for the learning curve of how to use the sites. There is the time to building up content and time to find things of value to share. There is the time to find the people to engage with and then of course there is the time it takes to keep up the conversations.

Yes, it takes time. There is no denying that fact. So let’s talk about ROI. There are tons of tools out there that allow you to monitor, track, research and update all of your social media from a single point. These tools number in the thousands and while some are more popular and robust than others I will talk about a few of them in the next blog entry.

So let’s talk about ROI. Marketing, no matter how you do it, takes time. It used to be that you needed 3-5 touches before a buyer would engage. Then it dragged out to 5-7 touches. Now with the deafening noise of marketing both traditionally and digitally, it can take 9-12 touches. How many cold call phone calls do you have to make to get to actually speak to a qualified buyer? How many networking events do you have to attend and how many people do you have to meet to make a solid connection? All of this takes time.

So what is the point of social media? There are a couple of home runs with social media.

First is that in an unthreatening environment you can connect to people that you might never have had the chance to meet otherwise. In a more casual way you ‘connect’.

Second is that you become part of a community. Today, more than ever people look to their groups and connections first for resources and you stand a better chance of getting referred or having someone point an interested buyer your way.

Third it reaches further than other methods and is permanent. Think of throwing a stone in a pond. The ripple of water at the point of entry keeps going out further and further reaching beyond the point where the stone landed. And the stone is now a permanent piece of that pond. It will always be there to be found. What other forms of marketing can do that for you?

Another compelling reason to get involved is knowing that everyone is talking about everything and so that means you or your company is going to come up somewhere at sometime and shouldn’t you know about that?
Think about how much time you can save by cutting a problem off before it snowballs. Think about how much time you can save by responding to a need before your competitors catch wind. Think about it and then get started.

If you don’t know where or how to begin it might make sense to hire a professional in this field that can save you time up front to get you started and coach you and your team toward success. Trust me – you’ll be thrilled you did.

Let’s face it, when it comes to marketing don’t we want to be where the action is? If we want exposure then it only follows that we go where the eyeballs are. Given the finicky and fast changing trends today on the internet it pays to keep an eye on where the traffic is flowing.

Think back only a few short years ago. Twitter was not a well known property and yet seemingly overnight it became the hottest topic on everyone’s mind and the rush to join created a landslide of followers. Although Twitter has remained a hot property for connecting, research, search and creating awareness, many have become disillusioned with the volume of noise and the crowding of the space making it harder to sort the spamming riff raff from genuine folks to connect with. Twitter is still a valid arena but the attention and explosive growth now turns to Facebook.

Comscore recently released the December 2009 metrics. Comscore is best known as the industry barometer for the digital world and source of digital marketing intelligence. According to Comscore, Facebook more than doubled its U.S. audience from 54.5 million visitors in December 2008 to 111.9 million visitors in December 2009. It went from being the #11 ranked property to the #4 ranked property. It now accounts for 7% of all time spent online in the U.S. Read this report in its entirety.

Like Facebook or not, the appeal is that you have more control over your conversations and with who you connect on line. You are not limited to 140 characters and you can upload videos, pictures, have lists to manage personal and business separately and the opportunity to create group and fan pages to be a more interactive extension of your website. Facebook is not without flaws but it is growing in popularity. One aspect that I enjoy is having a closer look at how and with whom my friends are connecting and what they are sharing. With LinkedIn you can see who is connected to whom but you can’t really see how they are interacting. Twitter and LinkedIn lack the intimacy that Facebook affords.

Growing a friend following and a fan base may take a bit more time with Facebook, but given the trend it would only make sense that this is a marketing focus that you might want to pay attention to. Less formal than LinkedIn, your corporate culture and personality have an opportunity to take root and the opportunity to be more creative and experimental with how you reach out and connect and attract. With discussions, events, videos, photos, and a wealth of widgets you are now only limited by your imagination to making marketing fun. That’s right – fun!

One other enticement to get involved with Facebook – if you want to try your hand at advertising to specific people who are the most likely potential customers, well, Facebook's advertising is a smart system. Facebook collects an awful lot of information about members and they offer amazing controls and options to insure that your message is seen by those who are most likely to be a match. Sure beats search engine plans that in comparison could seem willy nilly. If you don’t have the marketing budget to pay for tire kickers and accidental clickers cruising through the digital divide then give Facebook a try.
Become a fan of Bumblebee Design & Marketing LLC and let’s explore the possibilities!

I spent last evening at an EONY event where Gary Vaynerchuk spoke. I really wanted to see Gary speak, as he is a marketing person that I respect, primarily because he is a trailblazer and mold breaker. Second reason I really wanted to go is because after reading his book CRUSH IT I knew his vision and wisdom were not to be missed.

Gary’s energy is a turbo boost of reality delivered in passionate and caring verbal smack downs. I absolutely love it! He has a get real attitude about understanding and verbalizing what is in play now and although it might be hard to hear, it is the bucket of ice water that we all need flying in our face.

I want to share some of the points that he made so that you can understand the brilliance of what he has to share. I know that you may not want to hear some of these and may not agree with some of his views but maybe it will sink in enough that you can begin to incorporate this into your marketing and businesses. Also please understand that I am paraphrasing but I am making an honest effort to share his message.

1. SEO is dead and a waste of time. I know that seems hard to believe and you might not just disagree but be bewildered by such a statement and yet if you look at what is going on in the SEO world, it is in complete turmoil. Read my blog post on Google Caffeine.

2. Customer expectations are increasing and customer service is the game changer. Gary speaks to the amazing story of ZAPPOS and how that model of creating a culture where customer service is first and foremost built a business of an unlikely solution – selling shoes on line – to a billion dollar business in less than 9 years.

3. Word of mouth converts 80% while traditional marketing converts at 12%. I have not personally researched those statistics but from my own business experience I know that I close sales faster and more often when it is a referral over any marketing efforts.

4. Small Town Rules is a phrase he used repeatedly. Get up close and personal with your customers and prospects. Treat them well; remember their name, respond, share, and CARE.

5. The Internet is dominating. If you are marketing then you want to be where the eyeballs are and they are on the Internet. He gave an example that if you buy ad space on bus stops; look at the people walking by or standing waiting for a bus. They aren’t even looking up – they are on their mobile phones either emailing, texting, tweeting or doing facebook updates.

6. Mobile marketing has started to take hold and he projects that this is the next big play. This comes as no surprise and yet designs and applications are only now just beginning to emerge to address this issue. Just as interesting, no one ever asks us ‘so how does my website look on a mobile device?’ And few if any folks are getting ready for mobile marketing and advertising in their planning. Yet, look around you and what do you see? That’s right – everyone is on his or her mobile phones.

7. Content – create content daily. He urges that you follow your passion and your brand DNA. If you are a good writer, write a blog daily and write anywhere and everywhere you can. If you are better at talking then it is time for you to start a podcast or video blog. He assures the audience that it is not about the polish it is about the passion.

He passionately urges everyone to start now building your content. He notes that this shift is being underestimated and that if you don’t go out and get it – someone else will!

8. He is driven by gratitude. Be grateful for everything, be open enough to share your gratitude and make it apart of your brand experience any way that you can and instill this into your corporate culture. Not insincere gratitude but genuine passion to care for the customer more than anything else.

And so I suggest you buy his book CRUSH IT and check out his blogs – he has several. Just Google his name, Gary Vaynerchuk and you will find them all. Let it sink in and then pull out your keyboard or your flip cam and get started right away.

One evening, two great Social Media Marketing talents. This past Thursday night I was privileged to be a guest at EO24 where Chris Brogan and Peter Shankman sat in overstuffed living room styled chairs and spoke to a group of entrepreneurs from NY’s Chapter of EO.

Chris and Peter have such different styles that at first I was surprised to see them together but they worked really well with one another. It was apparent that they trusted and respected one another and I can only assume that they know each other personally as well. Chris is Mr. Mellow and Peter is – well, Peter is Mr. Hyper, both are polite and considerate, both have a wonderful sense of humor and generous mindsets, and both are icons to everyone in the Social Media Marketing and PR worlds.

Chris’s recent book co authored by Julien Smith, TRUST AGENTS is one that I put on the must read list months ago. I have given this book out to clients, prospects and attendees at my workshops. Social Media is so misunderstood and misused and this book is one of the best that I have read that delivers the message that the key ingredient to Social Media – is the SOCIAL! If misused as a broadcast system, you are sure to be frustrated with lackluster results and can even risk being shut out all together.

Some of the highlights or key points that they drove home last night are:

GROW BIGGER EARS. You should be listening to what is being said about your company, your competitors, your clients, and your industry. Peter shared a story about being stranded on a Delta flight and although he tweeted continually, called and reached out, no one from Delta was listening or concerned. However, Southwest contacted him and got a bus over to move the passengers to their flights and honored their tickets. So who do you think all of those passengers are going to book flights with next?

GIVE FIRST. Chris and Peter both encouraged that you give first and give value. If you want to attract attention your generosity needs to be real. Helping others is an open invitation to engage and build trust.
FORGET B2B or B2C. This is about people, not companies. Be a person, talk to people. It is people that make decisions not companies.

RESPOND. If you are listening, and people reach out to you, you need to respond. Developing relationships requires dialogue. Be polite, be real, and be gracious.

WE ARE ALL CITIZEN JOURNALISTS. Peter used this term and it is a powerful message. News is now transmitted instantly by pedestrians and product and service reviews are instantly generated by customers. Are you listening?

These are just some of the key notes from last night. To learn more – read the book TRUST AGENTS. I promise you it will be worth the read.

As this year comes to a painful end we prepare for the battle toward success in 2009. Where do we invest our time and our challenged resources? What do we focus on to move our companies and brand into the buyer’s mind’s eye for sustaining and growing our companies? How do I create a ‘strategy’ for success in this market? Where is this market going?

There are so many questions to ask this year with less information to actually predict and project. One thing is for certain, 2009 will stand witness to mass mergers and closings, especially in small to medium sized companies. This, you can bank on. If you have cash and are in good credit standing, you will be in a position to buy out your competitors if that is a smart move, or you can just raid their customer base, picking and choosing which customers you want to serve.

Besides buying your way to the top, there needs to be a strategy for your own organization to grow and serve customers. Is social media for you? The answer to that question is that it has been ready, but are you? There has been such a rush around social networking and media that for many, it has been too overwhelming to understand, let alone begin to implement into our business marketing efforts. You may remember a book that came out years ago by John Naisbitt called “High Tech High Touch”. If not, it is still available and what he had to say so many years ago, long before facebook and twitter came into our world, is proving to once again be true. The bottom line to the findings in this book is that the more techy we get the more we long for the human touch. With the rush to massive on-line marketing through internet media and social networks, there was at first a kind of special connection only to quickly become diluted as the numbers became so massive that statistical measuring became a fruitless endeavor, and needless to say, the ‘relationship’ aspect got lost in the volume.

2009 will be about relevancy and meaning – and meaningful connections. The warm hand that touches you in the cold techy world is the one that will be heard. Customer Service will continue to rule as the number one factor that creates fans, blowing away content as KING. So it is not going to be how much you say and to how many people you say it, it is going to be what you say and to whom, and how quickly you respond after you’ve struck a nerve.

If you want to learn more about the predictions, there are innovative frontrunners in this industry that have shared their knowledge and views as well as their predictions. It is well worth reading. We are providing you a link to the article and the pdf which you can download here, courtesy of Peter Kim.

Or view the article online here: http://www.beingpeterkim.com/2008/12/social-media-2009.html