Illustration by M. Scott Ricketts
Illustration by M. Scott Ricketts
Social Media Acrobatics
Does every business really have to engage in social media? Could you mess up? Is it worth it? Rich Brooks, Lynnelle Wilson, and Nancy Marshall all say “Yes. Yes. And, yes.”
The you-know-what hit the fan for anyone in social media denial in February 2010. That’s when the news came out that Facebook had surpassed Google in generating online referrals. It became official: Marketing your business on the web could no longer be solely about optimized websites or having a killer email list. Browsers were going places, not because they read your Constant Contact email blast or were drawn to your site’s seductive set of keywords. The most web referrals occurred because other people suggested them.
This is bad news for the 30% of the population who are introverts. (The percentage goes up as IQ rises; maybe that’s why 70% of CEOs self-identify as introverts.)
On the flip side, when the Facebook-Surpasses-Google headlines came out, the “people-people” in the office could legitimately tell their shrinking violet supervisors, “See? I told you, this social media stuff is not a waste of time—and it’s not going away.”
Luckily, there are experts out there who can help businesses walk the tightrope. Rich Brooks, Lynnelle Wilson, and Nancy Marshall are three of them. Brooks’s company is the most web-centric—virtually everything he does for himself and clients involves being plugged into digital devices. Wilson’s consulting work, though definitely web-focused, is broader: She is just as comfortable recommending other strategic solutions, from business sponsorships to new price structures. Nancy Marshall’s company, one of Maine’s top full-service communications firms, not only recommends both web-based and traditional solutions, her in-house staff can create and fully implement them.
All three are alike in this way: They don’t try to convince businesspeople to embrace social media. Too busy. But they are happy to help the converted create tailored strategies that meet defined business objectives.
Still, if you are one of the few business Luddites out there clinging to an analog-only existence, read on. You may decide to step out onto the tightrope after hearing what they have to say. If so, just don’t look down.
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Rich Brooks • flyte new media – President & Founder
Rich Brooks is a nationally recognized expert on Internet marketing. President and founder of flyte new media in Portland, Brooks is also an expert blogger at fastcompany.com and a popular speaker on Internet marketing and web design. Here in Maine, he is a featured blogger at mainetoday.com and is the tech expert on 207, an evening news program on WCSH-6. Not surprisingly, Brooks is very active in social media. Follow him on Twitter at therichbrooks, or his company at flytenewmedia.
How did you get into social media?
When I originally started developing websites back in 1997, people asked how they could appear on the first page of Alta Vista, which certainly dates me. That got me interested in web marketing, starting with search engine optimization, then email marketing, then blogging, and most recently social media. It’s just an extension of what we’ve been doing all along: helping businesses understand and use the online channels available to them.
Despite all the buzz around social media, many decision makers reading this may not get it. What are some of the objections to, say, creating and maintaining a blog? Your reply?
People are always concerned that they won’t have time to blog. I always ask: Did you catch American Idol last week? Or Lost? Or watch the Sox? Then you have time to blog.
Blogging is marketing. Blogging is search engine optimization. Do you have time to market your company? If you blogged twice a week for a year, about 45–60 minutes per week, at the end of the year you’d have over 100 keyword-rich articles that would help you rank for some of your most important keywords, attracting prospects every day, day and night, to your website. The question is, how do you not have time to blog?
Do you have any rags-to-riches/home run stories about the power of social media?
There are certainly a lot of famous stories of social media success. The Will It Blend? video series; $3 million in computer sales through Twitter for Dell; and I was impressed by how Domino’s handled the negative PR of the YouTube video of a few of their employees doing disgusting things to a pizza they created a video in response and posted it right to YouTube.
At flyte, our highest converting traffic at our website comes from our blog. The second-best group comes from another blog I write for fastcompany.com. Blogs and social media make up the 10 best referrers to our website currently, and prospects often cite “Twitter” when we ask how they heard about us. Our videos on YouTube bring in another audience, and our activity on LinkedIn increases our visibility there.
What’s the downside? For example, do you know any businesspeople who got into trouble with unwise posts on social media sites?
In our own local Twitter community, the majority of active Twitter users were “No on 1” people, meaning they supported gay marriage. An active Twitter user ran a local restaurant and was tightly associated with the restaurant, even using its name in his handle. Many people in the Twitter community ate at the restaurant regularly. He sent out a tweet that marriage is between a man and a woman, period. Immediately there was a backlash against him and the restaurant, including one person who swore she would never eat there and would tell her friends to stop eating there as well.
There’s nothing wrong with expressing your views on Twitter; that’s what it’s there for. However, you have to be aware of the consequences. You also need to be aware of the benefits and drawbacks of associating yourself with your company or brand. Personally I have two Twitter accounts: one for myself and one for my company. Although there’s a lot of overlap, my personal account is much more lively and random.
Who are professionals whose approach you admire?
Locally, I love Braden Buehler’s tweets at narrativedesign. It’s a mix of positive reviews of other people’s work and very funny thoughts on motherhood. I thought Chrystie Corns’s “365 Things to Do in Portland, Maine” page on Facebook was some great marketing for ReMax by the Bay. Everything Amanda O’Brien over at Hall Marketing does is great, from her tweets to her blogs to the way that she is constantly promoting other people and businesses, including her competitors, like us.
What are the best ways to maximize each blog post?
Half the battle, maybe more, is in the title. Every blog post, every article, must have a keyword-rich title that is compelling to both search engines and your end user. Keep in mind that most people don’t read on the Internet; they skim, so write for skimmers. That means lots of white space, short sentences and paragraphs, plenty of big bold headers and bullet points. Finally, don’t forget your call-to-action. A great blog post or article is wasted if you don’t tell the reader what the next logical step is, whether it’s to fill out your contact form, pick up the phone, or buy now.
Also key to making social media worth the effort is having it be “search engine friendly.” Again, it starts with the title. But actually, the first step is a keyword analysis. You need to write using the words that your prospects are using at Google. If you’re a plastic surgeon and you write a great blog post about rhinoplasty, but everyone’s searching for “nose job,” it doesn’t benefit anyone.
The other piece of the puzzle is inbound links. Search engines see inbound links like votes of confidence. There are a lot of tactics to getting more inbound links, but it all starts with crafting compelling content.
Now video—what are ways to use that successfully?
Videos now show up on page one of Google. Behind Google, the second most popular search engine is YouTube. I suggest people create videos that answer questions their customers and prospects are asking.
At flyte, we created a series of videos that help people understand how to use Google Analytics. The people who write the official Google Analytics blog found them and asked if they could feature them in their blog. Um yeah! They linked directly to the videos on YouTube and we ended up getting hundreds of subscribers to our YouTube channel in just a few days.
Give some of the benchmarks you use for measuring success. What, for instance, is a respectable number of followers for Facebook or Twitter?
There’s no one number of followers on Twitter that’s right. People should be focused on making deeper, more meaningful connections, not getting into some sort of Twitter arms race. Same for Facebook, YouTube, or LinkedIn. I’d rather have five blog subscribers that end up hiring us than 5,000 that never pay attention at all.
That being said, there is some “social proof” in having a big following or network, and there are benefits. But having a big following is not a business goal. You need to keep your eye on the prize, whatever that prize is for your business.
You must get asked all the time to predict future trends on the web. Do you have any for us?
I’ve never been good about predicting the future; the first time I saw email I said it would never catch on.
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Lynnelle Wilson • Bold Vision Consulting & Marketing – President & Founder
Lynnelle Wilson is the president of Bold Vision Consulting with headquarters in South Portland. She has over 25 years experience developing and managing sales, marketing, and complex strategic projects. Originally from Texas, Wilson moved to Maine from New York City in 2003, where she was vice president for J.P. Morgan’s Global Investor Services. Over the past year, Wilson has launched boldbusiness.tv, and orchestrated The BIG Conference: Business 2.0, which brought together some of the brightest minds in the U.S. and Canada using social media as a business tool.
After 9/11, you decided to leave New York and come to Portland. How did you get into social media?
In New York—I worked for J.P. Morgan Chase—I would go into investment organizations and look at the communication and technology flow, where things fell to the floor, or where there were breaks, and where we could bring our products and services in to fix it. But it was really a strategic review, and I enjoyed that.
So what could I do here? I was sales, I was marketing, I was big picture strategy, looking at small businesses and asking them, What are you trying to accomplish in the business? What are you doing? What’s not working? What can we do to fix it? This was in 2005. At that time there was a lot of social media going on, but not much for business. Facebook was getting a little more popular, Twitter had not come out yet, but that’s how I got into it.
A lot has changed in five years. Blogging has become a key business marketing tool; now people are using their phones to access information. How do you keep up with all this new technology? It sounds exhausting!
It is exhausting. But it’s like anything else, you’ve got to focus on what is your objective, what is your specialty, your focus? My focus is not technology. I don’t need to be on the cutting edge of everything from a detail perspective, just aware of the directions that things are going. It’s so important for businesses to, if not adopt, at least understand these new ways of communicating. So when you do spend that technology dollar in developing your website, for example, you make sure you address the mobile aspect of it. It’s an awareness as opposed to understanding exactly how the technology works.
What are some of the reasons businesspeople give you for not wanting to invest their time or money in, say, creating a blog? How do you answer them?
There’s not a one-size-fits-all. Number one, I think every business should have a presence in the social element, no matter what kind of business it is. It doesn’t have to be a blog, it doesn’t have to be Facebook, it doesn’t have to be Twitter. Perhaps it’s a review site, like yelp.com, or maybe it’s on StumbleUpon, or a video, maybe it’s on YouTube. There’s not one formula. But I do think that the way people communicate and the way people get information has changed forever. If you’re not out there, your prospects aren’t seeing you.
Do you have any rags-to-riches or home run stories about the power of social media?
I think that’s been a problem, those rags-to-riches stories, because that’s not real life. It’s like being discovered in the diner and becoming a movie star or getting picked on American Idol and getting a billion dollar record deal. That’s not the goal for most businesses or why they should invest in social media. They should invest in social media because that is a smart, important part of doing business. The focus should be providing valuable information, adding value to your target market or your customer’s experience, developing an online community, and providing a venue to share or get information.
Any suggestions on how “personal” businesspeople should be on social media?
The question is, what do you want your online presence to be? Social media is about developing personal relationships. It’s also about providing value to the people who are following you or fans of you or whatever. So there is a fine line, and it depends. I post things about my dog.
Really, there’s very little difference between the way you put yourself out there online and the way you put yourself out there when you walk through the door at the women’s luncheon or a chamber after-hours.
Still, can’t businesspeople get in trouble because of what they put on social media?
Look at the CEO of BP, what’s happened to him. One of the things that continues to aggravate an already horrific situation is that the things he’s saying are repeated in video online and reposted on Twitter and forwarded through Facebook.
You can’t sweep things under the rug anymore. It’s fortunate and unfortunate at the same time. There’s very little room for forgiveness or escape from being stupid, because everybody knows. And I think our expectations are different now because of what’s available.
Can you name some professionals whose approach to social media you admire?
What I really like is when companies approach it from the perspective of their target market and their business objective. One of my favorites and everybody’s favorite is Chris Brogan. His focus is around providing value and helping others figure out what they’re doing in social media, and helping them along the way. I’ve learned a lot from him.
I think from a business perspective, there are so many of them. I really like JetBlue’s approach to using Twitter. I like the way that Laurie Brooks started to use Twitter at L.L. Bean here in Maine. She is interacting, she’s doing it right. I don’t know that she’s doing anything terribly unusual, but she’s doing it right.
The foundation to the content you and your clients provide is the written word. What are the qualities of good web writing, specifically in a blog? What do you keep in mind when you write blog posts?
I don’t think that there’s one rule, necessarily, other than be engaging. The biggest mistake I see people making with the blog isn’t really how it’s written, it’s that they put the blog post out and someone will make a comment or ask a question, and they don’t go back. It just hangs out there. Yet the purpose of the blog is the dialogue, to get the engagement going.
How about web videos? Is it something businesses should invest time or money into?
Again, what is the objective? If you’re a speaker, have someone video you and put it on. Not only would they see your eloquence as a speaker, but the information is being shared to many more people. If you do training, having a video of a training workshop would be extremely helpful. That would draw people to you, it would establish you as the expert, and provide value to your online community. Those can be done inexpensively and easily.
If you could predict the future five years from now, what do you see happening in communications?
Look at kids now who are graduating from high school. That’s who you’re planning for. Do you know that the people coming out of high school now don’t even have email addresses? Anybody who’s doing business needs to understand that.
Facebook is coming out, I’ve heard, with their own email platform. That might be good for individuals, but it will be a little scary for companies who perhaps won’t be able to access people by email unless they’re a fan of their page.
How do you convince people how important this all is?
I don’t even try to. That’s not my job. But that’s also not someone that I can work with. Because even if I did convince them, they would be expecting me to do something, not for them to do something.
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Nancy Marshall • Nancy Marshall Communications – President & Founder
Nancy Marshall founded Nancy Marshall Communications (NMC) in 1991, creating and implementing strategic public relations programs, primarily for tourism and recreation companies. NMC has won top awards from the Society of American Travel Writers and the Maine Public Relations Council. Prior to starting NMC, Marshall worked in public relations for PBS television and Sugarloaf/USA. In 1993, her agency was awarded the first marketing services contract issued by the Maine Office of Tourism; in 1996, NMC also won the contract for the Office of Business Development.
You come at this with a long view, since you started your company in 1991, before the Internet. In terms of business, how do you see the Internet’s role now?
I think right now social media is being perceived as sort of a magic bullet. A lot of people who don’t even really understand it think, “Oh, I gotta get me some o’ that social media,” like it’s going to immediately make them rich or successful.
I see social media as just one means of communicating or one means of driving traffic to your website. But it’s time-consuming to engage in all of these networks and be continually engaged. It’s similar to joining the chamber of commerce. If you want it to be successful for you, you have to volunteer on committees, serve as an officer: You really have to engage. Whereas with cost-per-click advertising, you spend money on it, but it’s not going to take as much of your time.
So I think social media really has to be looked at as part of the marketing mix, which is going to include public relations, direct sales, special events, your website. In Seth Godin’s book Meatball Sundae, the premise is you’ve got to have a great website, and then social media goes on top of that. If you just do social media but you have a lousy website, it’s like putting meatballs on top of ice cream. It’s not going to be very good.
How did you get into the social media field?
In the 1980s, I was lucky enough to work at Sugarloaf for Chip Carey, who was then director of communications and later became vice president of marketing. He taught me that you always need to be looking ahead at how to use technology to supplement your communications.
At that time, fax machines were the big thing, so we were faxing out results of ski races. We were also shooting three-quarter-inch VHS video. We’d make dubs, and get in the car and drive to Bangor, then to Portland to get news footage on the air from Sugarloaf. Chip also taught me about the value of using databases to segment media lists, so we had really good lists of people who were interested in golf, people who were interested in freestyle skiing, alpine skiing, and cross-country skiing.
So you have to use the current tools to your advantage. Yet a significant number of businesspeople still don’t get social media. What are some ways to motivate businesspeople to, as you put it, engage?
Well, I can understand why people are afraid, and in some ways it’s good to be a little bit cautious.
There are lots of reasons for engaging. It can definitely broaden your network of contacts beyond your immediate neighborhood. I mean, if you just want to connect with people in Augusta, the Kennebec Valley Chamber of Commerce is a great way to connect. But I’ve created a network for me personally that I use for my business that spans the globe, really. I have over 1,000 contacts. You have to look at it as a way to connect with people. It’s a lot like meeting face to face, as you and I are meeting and making a connection today—and I’m glad, and hopefully we can keep our relationship going through social media. Sometimes it goes the other way, you meet someone online first and then you connect in person. I don’t ever want to see social media replace the human connection, although I’m nervous that a lot of the younger people are more comfortable being on a date, right next to each other, and they’re texting each other instead of talking! [Laughs.]
Another reason I think it is good to be cautious is that so many people start blogs and then a month or a year later abandon them. Same with Twitter. I think if you start a blog and decide can’t keep up with it, you have to take it down, because people are going to be judging you now by your online profile. You should Google yourself regularly to see how you appear online. When I get a phone call from someone now who I’ve never met, I am holding the phone in one ear and I’m Googling them, checking them out, and if they’ve got a blog or a website that hasn’t been updated for a year, it colors my opinion of that person.
In marketing, you have to spend time or money or, ideally, both. If you’ve got a lot of money but not a lot of time, I think you should stick with paid advertising. If you have time but no money, then social media’s a good thing. But whatever you get into, you should stick with. I used to have a MySpace profile and I lost interest, so I took myself down. I’m active on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook; I have a blog; and I have an e-newsletter, which I also consider social media. So whatever I commit to, I stick with, which is what I try to do in life, too.
Tell us your worst horror stories about businesspeople who got into trouble on social media.
I had a client who wasn’t keeping his virus definitions up to date, and somehow somebody hacked into his Facebook account and sent a porn video around to all his followers, which was very embarrassing for him. So I advised him obviously to send a message to all of them saying, “Sorry about that, I didn’t send that, don’t click on it.” So I guess it is a lesson—you have to be careful with keeping your virus definitions current!
Can you name a professional whose approach to social media you admire?
Peter Shankman is a guy in New York City who I admire, and I actually just blogged about him on my own blog, maineprmaven.com. He started this service a couple years ago called HARO, Help A Reporter Out. It’s a way of connecting reporters with sources, whether they’re experts or PR people like me. For example, if a reporter at the Wall Street Journal needs an expert in tarantulas, he’ll send an email to Peter, who broadcasts it out to his network. This is a service that had been done for pay previously, but he’s made it free and it’s subsidized by advertising. And he was so successful that a PR company called Vocus just bought him out.
What are your thoughts on LinkedIn, which is specifically for business. They charge money, right?
Yes, if you want to use all of their features. Linked-In is a good, safe social network for professional people to start with. And I think it’s worth it to pay for the advanced features if you really want to use LinkedIn for your business.
We worked with an engineering firm from Saco that was having a really hard time hiring young engineers. This was a small engineering firm and they were trying to compete with some of the big Portland firms, so we set up the CEO of this firm with a LinkedIn account and helped him connect with young engineers who had some connection to Maine. A lot of them were living in Boston or New York. Through connections, we eventually found two young engineers who were dying to get back to Maine, and he was able to hire them. And he didn’t pay for that, he just used the basic features. I consider that a success story.
Does your PR background help you with social media?
I’m a part of a national network and most of the other agencies across the country are ad agencies. They’re having a really hard time keeping up their blogs and Facebook pages because they feel the need to create something finished and beautiful—whereas I’m used to banging out press releases. I find PR people are some of the best content creators. And content is king.
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