In my post last week (Would you pay for Twitter?) I got a comment from a reader who asked:

“Here’s my question, if you are a business and offer a lot of things for free, how do you parley that into appropriate revenue without disengaging your audience?”

That is a very good question, and one that every business (or would-be business) should be asking. I started thinking about this a couple of years ago, posting this article (How Can You Measure the Value of a Conversation?) in October ’08. Here is the heart of the message:

Make money “because of”, not with

The “because of” effect is much more powerful than the “with” effect. One of the commenters on Jason’s post, Mack Collier (The Viral Garden), hits the nail on the head with:

…companies that are NEW to social media, wanting to use metrics and measurements that they are used to when using TRADITIONAL marketing methods to ‘get their message out there’. Their thinking is ‘how do we make money from this?’, whereas companies that have been active in this space for a while, such as Dell, understand that by PARTICIPATING that they will make more money as a BYPRODUCT of their efforts. Dell has been in the game long enough to see the impact that their efforts are making, and as a result have shifted away from the ‘how do we make money with this?’ mentality.

Attempting to DIRECTLY monetize social media efforts is the quickest way to ensure they fail. But companies that aren’t familiar with this space don’t know any better. In a few years, after more companies are more familiar with these tools, I think we’ll see them looking to INdirectly monetize their efforts, while putting the focus on SM as a way to DIRECTLY connect with their customers.

One of the best lessons that I learned from the SOBCon event that I attended in May was that blogging (and Social Media in general) should be treated like a business. That business is the marketing of your products and services & establishing yourself/your business as an authority. The goal of that business is to make money because of your blog (or Social Media efforts), instead of with your blog.

Let me repeat that for you – “by PARTICIPATING [you] will make more money as a BYPRODUCT of [your] efforts”.

Money as a by-product of participation

How exactly does this work? Well, it is both easier and more difficult than it sounds. The very first thing that your business can provide for free to its customers is Value. Something above and beyond the products and services that gives your customers a reason to visit your place of business or website, or follow you on Twitter, or friend you on Facebook (this list goes on and on).

For a real-world example, using a “place of business”, look at Starbucks. The mental images of the starving artist or writer slaving away over a venti latte, or the entrepreneur using Starbucks as an office are so common as to be a cliche. But they are a cliche because Starbucks offers something that places like McDonald’s do not – a welcoming atmosphere with music and ambiance, access to coffee and snacks, and typically like-minded folks to chat with. That is the value. That is what makes people come back.

Now, this example is not representative of what you can do with Social Media, or is it? Imagine that your blog or website is the Starbucks, how do you go about inviting people to come and hang out there? Give away some cool, free stuff. I’m talking about your blog posts, or FAQs on your industry, or whatever it is that draws people to your site in the first place. Give them the answer or information about the solution to the problem that they have, then give them even more. Add value.

Then add an opportunity for your visitors to have a conversation.

If you let them speak they will come

Online communities are exploding in popularity and will continue to grow. As Clay Shirky discusses in his book Cognitive Surplus (review here Thoughts on Cognitive Surplus) people crave community and the online space has the lowest barrier to entry, ever. Letting your customers talk to you and to each other gives you a Starbucks-like place for your potential marketspace to congregate. Then, and only then, can you get involved in the conversation – providing that added value, building your credibility and authority, and finally creating a rapport that invites your community to ask to buy something from you.

Jeffrey Gitomer says “People hate to be sold, but they love to buy”

In his Little Red Book of Selling (which every blogger and business person should read by the way) Gitomer says, “If they like you, and they believe you, and they trust you, and they have confidence in you…then they may buy from you.” That is what you are doing when you build the community and marketspace. Do ask compelling and engaging questions. Don’t sell your product or service.

Ask the community what they think. Talk about profit and productivity. Remember, they are taking the time to be involved in their community, not your community, it all needs to be about them.

I trust that this has given you some ideas for your own business and how to apply this concept to create more sales as  by-product of your Social Media activities. If you still have questions and are interested in being the feature of a case study on this topic (to be published for free on this site), please send me an email and we can talk about your situation.

One of the first questions that people ask when they are setting up a blog for their website is, “Where do I get content?” The answer is often right in front of their faces, in the form of their existing press releases, brochures, and other printed materials. Mequoda.com has published an excellent style article for turning this printed content into a blog post or page. I am going to elaborate on some of their points:

Titling, categorization and tagging rules for online publishing with WordPress blogs

When publishers pull apart their archived content and start putting it up on their blog, they have a variety of style options to choose from when posting.

We recommend taking a little extra time to optimize your old articles (whether they are evergreen or not) in order to make that content as valuable to your blog (and audience) as possible.

The following style guide for unleashing your print archives into a blog is specific to WordPress in terms of folksonomy, but can be applied to any type of blogging platform.

Rule #1: Include at least one primary or secondary keyword phrase in your blog titles and subhead.

Why? Because blog titles are so specific, you might choose to use a secondary keyword in your title (like “repurposed content” in the case of this article) and a primary in your subhead (like “online publishing”). If you want to get ranked on a keyword in search engines (and you do), this is your prime real estate to display them.

Keywords are very important, and the search engines parse your posts looking for the most important words in the text. It is important to highlight them. Which leads to:

Rule #2: Make sure your blog is set up to define your title and subhead in H tags.

Why? H1, H2 and H3 are highly regarded by Google as defining what a page is “about”.

In your “writing page” in WordPress there is a button in the menu bar titled “Paragraph”. In the drop-down menu you will see Heading 2 and Heading 3. I recommend that you use Heading 2 no more than once per page, and Heading 3 for your sub-headings. Edit your CSS to make these headings “pop”.

NOTE: Never use H1 in your content! That tag is reserved for the title of the page and you will be penalized by the search engines.

Examples:

This is H2/Heading 2

This is H3/Heading 3

Rule #4: Assign posts to a single category.

Why? From testing, it’s become abundantly clear that assigning single categories to articles boosts ranking on the category title. Hopefully your categories (or topics) are named as keywords that you want to be ranked on. This can also avoid duplicate content.

You should also keep in mind that your blog should have a few, very focused categories. If you write about cars, for example,you might use categories like Sedan, Coupe, Convertible, then use Tags for more specific topics like Corvette, BMW, and so on.

This is really great information for people that are looking to optimize their online content, and for more information like this, including audio and video with step-by-step instructions and real-life examples, see Writing for the Web, Inside and Out, by myself and Brad Shorr.

On 28 July 2009 a company named Horizon Realty made some big news on Twitter, namely that they were suing a former tenant of one of their apartment buildings for an allegedly libelous tweet. I first noticed this news via one of the people that I follow on Twitter who pointed to a post about it at Mashable: Woman Sued for Tweet:

The Tweet, posted under the now defunct user name @abonnen, was the impetus for the libel lawsuit filed at Cook County Circuit Court, seeking $50,000 in damages. And although the Tweet and username are now deleted, accessing the account via Google ()’s cache shows it has around 20 followers. While the numbers could have dropped since deletion, it doesn’t appear the message would have travelled far. @abonnen wasn’t a particularly heavy Twitter () user, either – she posted somewhere between 1 and 5 tweets per day and often didn’t post for 2 or 3 days.

After this, things started to get out of hand. The massive crowd of early-adopters on Twitter, as always tuned in to anything Twitter-related started to spread the word (of course Mashable has over 1 million followers and nearly 300k blog subscribers…) and by mid-day “Horizon Realty” was a trending topic on Search.Twitter.com.

And other bloggers started talking about it too. In fact, my friend Sonia Simone, writing at Copyblogger has an interesting comment about it:

It’s not about what you think is fair

Horizon Realty might be the most loveable, fair, decent and true company in the world. Right now, their name recognition has about as much appeal as Saddam Hussein. With mold.

Whether fair or not, Horizon has made a worldwide name for itself virtually instantly, connecting its brand with callous disregard for its tenants, or worse.

(Yes, there is such a thing as bad publicity. This is what it looks like.)

Do social media users read all the facts carefully before flaming? Of course they don’t. Are there dozens of inaccurate accusations about Horizon flying around Twitter at the moment?

Absolutely.

Is that fair? No. Then again, filing a $50,000 lawsuit against a customer for a snarky remark made to a friend isn’t going to strike many as entirely reasonable either.

I have written about Responding to Negativity before, “You should definitely respond to negative posts. In fact, you simply must respond quickly and carefully. Say you’re sorry, offer to fix the problem, and provide contact information. ”

Of course, Horizon Realty has a bunch of lawyers and such hanging around, waiting to jump on people that get in their way (that’s how things work in Chicago), they even said “We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization.” Now that is acting stupidly.

How Should Horizon Have Handled This

They could certainly still sue the tweeter, but could have avoided a massive amount of negative press, by simply getting out in front of the issue. Instead of waiting until it was too late to issue a press release like this one, they could have (and should have) exercised a little more intelligence in dealing with the client in the first place. The client filed a suit of her own last month, which Horizon Realty believes is without merit, so I suppose this is a way of “getting back” at the former tenant.

If Horizon Realty felt that it was too late for any customer service opportunities because the tenant had moved out and filed her own suit against Horizon, perhaps a reply to the tweet, and a polite letter asking her to delete it, would have been a better way to start the process. Remember, the word-of-mouth potential here is enormous.

People who have a bad experience tend to tell more people about it than people who have a good experience. Add in an element of schadenfreude on the part of people who like to share stories like this and BAM, millions of people hear about your customer service fail.

I am not a lawyer, but it also seems to me that if you are going to file a lawsuit re: libel, perhaps you should include a little more background and information in the filing. You can read the original PDF here. They included a “definition” of Twitter and a couple of paragraphs lauding their own good standing, but nothing to affirm their claim that the “statements in the Tweet concerning plaintiff were and are wholly false“.

Seriously.

How about if point 10 had been:

10.          The defendant’s apartment was inspected on such-and-such date, 2009 by So-and-So Environmental Company of Riverwoods, IL and the apartment was found to be free of mold. A copy of the report is attached to this filing.

Of course that might have been too obvious. And I suspect that there is still more to this case than we know about. Stay tuned, we will find out if there really was any mold there…

Michael Martine pointed to this video from Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz.
Michael says, “The one thing I find really interesting in his thoughts is the growth of search verticals and the possibility of optimizing for them.”

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – The Future of SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

I would agree that optimizing for search “verticals”, such as Craigslist, Zillow, and cars.com is going to become much more important. More than just creating listings on those sites, SEO practitioners will need to develop methods of tying all that content together.

Your thoughts?

Geoff Livingston Will Be Outlining an Optimum Integrated PR / Marketing Plan

We’re pleased and delighted that Geoff Livingston, top blogger in the communications space and author of the popular 2007 social media book, “Now Is Gone” has agreed to lead the Saturday afternoon Models and Masterminds session on “An Integrated Offline / Online Marketing Customer Outreach Program.” He’ll be answering the question: What are the parts and proportions of an integrated overall online and offline marketing and pr plan?

Read more –>

This is the third post in a series about Social Media Strategy. You can read all of the posts here: series one – social media goals and tactics. Dosh Dosh ran a series on the Fundamentals of Social Media Marketing late in 2007, and I believe that it is worth taking another look at it in light of the changes that the Social Media marketspace has undergone since then.

The goal here is to positively influence the way a potential and existing customer/audience perceives your brand. Work of this nature is less push-orientated and may involve the creation of social media profiles and wikis that rank well on search engines for your brand name. This also includes monitoring public forums and feedback channels to track and address what is said about your site. Some view this as social media optimization, although I would classify it as pull-marketing. [from Dosh Dosh]

Reputation Management and Reputation Monitoring

Keeping an eye on what people are saying about you online is an important part of your marketing effort. Ideally this job is handled by someone at your company that surfs the internet and looks for mentions of your company, good and bad. When they find a compliment, they thank the person and add them to the overall conversation. If this employee finds a complaint or negative comment, they must be empowered to get the complaint fixed and trained on how to respond in a positive way (see a little history at “Responding to Negativity“).

Reputation monitoring is made fairly easy by the use of Google Alerts:

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

• monitoring a developing news story
• keeping current on a competitor or industry
• getting the latest on a celebrity or event
• keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

You can sign up for as many Google Alerts as you would like, using your Google Account. Search for your name, your company name, any other appropriate keywords, and your competitors.

The benefits of getting involved

First, the people writing and posting about your company are not always going to be the big names. Most of the time they are going to be “regular” customers and they will be thrilled that you took an interest in what they had to say, good or bad. Especially bad. Thanking people for compliments will build up its own reward in loyalty and goodwill, but fixing a problem for a customer pays even greater dividends.

Irate customers can become brand evangelists if they are handled properly. And by properly I mean with respect, courtesy, transparency and professionalism. There is an old saying that goes something like this:

“Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” ~ Mark Twain

Well, today, all of our customers can buy “ink by the barrel” in that they can publish something on a forum or blog and (theoretically) everyone in the world can see it. If you work hard at making ethical behavior the foundation of your business you will be able to earn trust and respect – the most valuable currency in the internet community. (I wrote about this a while back – “The importance of trust in the Web 2.0 economy“) and my friend Dave Seah made some great points and describes a five-point evolution of this process:

1. Trust has always been part of any successful social endeavor.
2. Our naïve trust in organizations and what they say has been eroded over the past 30-40 years because what they have stood for and said was good for Americans has proven to be a façade built from special interests.People have had to adapt by separating trust from authority and success, whereas before trust was automatic.
3. Trust is the “gut check” that people are now applying to their daily interactions, and they are growing increasingly canny. Kids today, for example, are incredibly media-savvy compared to their grandparents. The emphasis has shifted from “I trust that company” to “I trust what that person is saying is true”.
4. The next stage of actualization would be, “I trust that person to do what he says” followed by “I have seen what he said and did, and it was good.”
5. Companies that reach to consumers have had to adopt this model, an interesting combination of business brand and public relations work.

Culture serves as a beacon to more easily find a certain type of trust and compatible mindset. The social need to flock together, however, is what Community is all about. Culture is the surface expression of values, and community is the underlying sense of belonging. That’s my hypothesis, anyway.

Share your thoughts in the Comments.

This is the second post in a series about Social Media Strategy. You can read all of the posts here: series one – social media goals and tactics.

Content can be created and spread through social media to improve public perception of your brand by evoking specific qualities which make it distinct from others. For new websites or businesses, this pervasive visibility generates brand familiarity. Social media channels can rapidly generate word of mouth and buzz for most brands.

Having a brand-name, whether it is a logo, image, or simple text is extremely easy to create and showcase in the Social Media marketspace. A fun place to look at how people are using and experimenting with brand images is at Twitter. Take a look at some of the avatars that people use to identify themselves:

(Get your twitter mosaic here.)

Images get noticed

Mostly faces, with some logos and artwork. Some of these folks change their avatars from time to time (or daily like Chris Brogan seems to do) for special occasions, marketing programs, or just for fun. If you are beginning to use Twitter as a tool for your business, it is best to choose an appropriate avatar and stick with it until people learn who you are by name.

Use the same avatar everywhere you go, and on every social network that you join. You can even go to gravatar.com and enter the image there in order to spread it around on blogs that enable the service in the Comments area. Then you have the ability to present a consistent branded image everywhere that you get involved with your clients and peers.

If you decide to use a picture, you can simply choose one from your collection. If you prefer a logo, be careful that it can be re-sized and still be recognizable. Whichever image that you choose you should go ahead and upload it to your flickr account (in appropriate sizes) so that the image is readily available to you wherever you are.

Be more than the image

The second part of increasing your brand awareness has to do with what you are saying and how you say it. Your avatar and your name should be enough to let people know who you are (in terms of your business), don’t turn your Tweets and comments into sales pitches with links to your sales page. People get involved with social networking sites for the conversation, for the discussion. You can and should “share links to recent news and updates, but it needs to show that a real person is sharing something of value. Contextualize it. The link is interesting only if the person posting it is credible, and is showing that they are making a judgment call about what is or isn’t worth posting. [from Mashable, ed.]”

Tweet example

In this example Kelly Olexa had shared a blog post that she found, then I “re-tweeted” it after I read it. It was a very good article, and I quoted a little piece of it above. As I told a client earlier in the week, “Don’t get sales-y, just pass on some value or say thanks.”

Focus on building awareness rather than leads

By building your credibility and value as a source of information you will increase the visibility of your brand and enhance its reputation. Let the power of the network work for you in bringing in new leads and potential clients. Get involved, create a conversation, and the business will come.

The next post in this series (social media goals and tactics) will look at reputation management. You can subscribe to these posts by RSS or via e-mail.

I thought I would share this post today, from tagsmith.org – the cyberworks of Matthew G. Knell – » Blog Archive » Protecting the brand that matters most: your own

The words people choose to say (or not to say), are the hallmark of this personal brand, clearly. And the words people choose to communicate about themselves publicly often help you to understand a person well before you’ve ever met them “in real life”. Laura Fitton likes to say, “the best thing about Twitter happens off of Twitter”, after all.

But, what is also clear that, in the same way, you can’t control what people say about your company, product or brand, you can’t really control what people think or say about you either. Trying to manipulate this sort of thinking through channels (public, private or covert) just doesn’t help the situation.

So, what to do. Well, allow me to wax poetic about what I’ll dub “Matt’s Golden Rules for Personal Brand”. This, are of course, just one man’s opinion, based on my personal experience, but hopefully they are helpful to someone, somewhere!

1. Remember everyone has the right to their own opinion. Even you. People aren’t always going to agree with you, but they have the right to say what they wish. And, it sometimes will not be something you like.

2. You can always choose who you engage with. This is why Twitter has unfollow and block tools. You don’t have to engage with everyone. And, in many cases, things are better just left alone. Karma has a way of working these things out. But also, remember, you ever even attempt to change people’s opinions without engaging them. So, consider this when thinking about it. But, it shouldn’t be viewed as a personal thing if people just aren’t interested. They can “opt-out” of you as well.

3. Watch the fine line between opinion, attack and slander. Just because someone expresses an opinion based on their own personal experience, don’t assume it’s an attack. The written word is horrible for context and tone, and anyone who thinks can understand tone through the written word is kidding themselves. There’s a large amount of misunderstanding possible. Opinions are rarely attacks and even more rarely slanderous.

There are 4 more points, read them all.

My friend Phil Gerbyshak – the guy that knows everybody – recently gave a presentation to the Wisconsin Business Owners Network on building your personal brand. The video is about 20 minutes, and has some fantastic advice.

Get out your notebook, and get ready to learn:

[display_podcast]

My favorite line: “Products are made in the factory, Brands are built in the mind” (Walter Landor)