I’ve been providing social marketing services for three years now. Yet, one of the things I’ve seen a significant increase in this year has been the ability of social communities to rally together for a good cause. Whether it’s spreading news or raising funds, there is no parallel to how rapid a message can spread when shared over social networks.
In my local area, since August, lost dogs have been found, runaway children have been restored to their families, news of a long-time family friend’s passing quickly spread, a kidnapped child was returned safely to his guardians, and an online community formed to support two families whose lives were devastated by a home gas explosion.
When the tragic shootings took place in Sandy Hook (a neighboring community to where I live) on Dec. 14th, 2012, news spread like wildfire over the social networks. As always, I found Twitter to be the best source of news. Facebook couldn’t keep up with or spread the information quickly enough because of its closed nature. But with a few appropriately placed hashtags, I could find out everything I wanted to know as it was unfolding; actually, more than I wanted to know since my own children’s schools were also on lock-down until the situation was under control.
What I didn’t know until today was that the very next day, a colleague of mine suffered a tragedy in his own family. Robert Fleming is CEO of the eMarketing Association, an organization whose conferences I have spoken at over the past couple of years. It’s related LinkedIn group is the 4th largest group on that network, out of over 1.5 million groups!
On Dec. 15th, his 12-year-old daughter suffered an illness and was paralyzed from the neck down. Within 5 hours’ time, she went from being perfectly healthy to being completely paralyzed, unable to eat, speak or breathe on her own. She still remains in the ICU at this time. But is in good spirits. A website to chart her progress will be up and running in another day or two at rhanasjourney.com.
While the information I have is limited and the family deserves its right to privacy as it deals with these difficult circumstances, Robert is hoping to see good come out of this circumstance regardless. On LinkedIn today, he shared an announcement with the eMarketing Association Network group.
100% of all profits from conference registrations, certifications, sponsorships, memberships and ecourses will be contributed to a fund in [his daughter's] name, for her care, now through the end of January.
With this offer, you’ll be able to hone your eMarketing skills as you prepare for 2013, and know that you are helping a little girl heal at the same time. So, why not take a moment and make an investment in both her and yourself. See what the eMarketing Association has to offer today. And, as Robert finished his announcement, “Our best wishes to you for a fantastic new year.”
December 27th, 2012
Posted by
Tara Alemany |
Business, Facebook, LinkedIn, Marketing, New Beginnings, Relationships, Resources, Social Media, Speaking, Twitter |
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The following was written by Thomas R. Comer, MBA, JD, a partner in B2B CFO. Tom attended a talk I gave at a NetworkPlus event in Westport, CT, this spring, which just happened to be of the same name. It’s one of my more popular Twitter talks, “To Tweet or Not to Tweet: Whether Twitter is a Useful Business Tool or a Devious Distraction.”
Without knowing what the topic was that day, Tom had brought along this poem he’d written. With his permission, I share it with you. (Apologies from both of us to The Bard.) 
To tweet, or not to tweet, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of cyber-obscurity,
Or to take arms against a sea of competitors,
And by opposing end them? To log on, to search,
No more; and via Google to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural junk mails
That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To log on, to search;
To search, per chance a “hit” — aye, there’s the rub:
For in that SEO of hope what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this limited liability company,
Must give us pause — there’s the respect
That makes the value proposition so long.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of clients,
The promised referral, the proud man’s brochure,
The pangs of unreturned phone calls, the Internet’s delay,
The insolence of networking, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his laptop make
With a Facebook page? What would consultants bear,
To blog and sweat under a weary life,
But for the dread of something called LinkedIn,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus the hyperlink doth make cowards of us all.
What are your views? IsTwitter a useful business tool or a devious distraction? If you don’t know and want to find out, feel free to give us a call or book our talk for your organization.
August 7th, 2012
Posted by
Tara Alemany |
Entertainment, Facebook, LinkedIn, Social Media, Speaking, Twitter |
no comments
Are you an author? A speaker? A trainer? A marketer? All of the above? You know there’s a very powerful tool that’s often overlooked that we could be taking out and using more often; or at least I know I could. So, today’s post is going to cover some interesting examples of how you can use SlideShare to increase your visibility.
- Start first with the increased exposure that posting presentations to the SlideShare site itself gives to you. Developing a strong presence on the site, with a complete profile, suitable keyword tags for each presentation, etc. will allow others to find, appreciate and share your material and samples that much more easily. It also provides a great place to send event planners, training coordinators, etc. who want to see a bit more of what your work looks like. According to the SlideShare website:
SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. With 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million pageviews, it is amongst the most visited 200 websites in the world. Besides presentations, SlideShare also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars.
- Jazz up your LinkedIn profile by incorporating the SlideShare app into it. To do so, in LinkedIn, select the More menu, followed by Get More Applications…, and then select the SlideShare Presentations app to add to your profile. Configure the app to connect to your SlideShare account, and then visitors to your profile will be able to see the most recent presentation you shared. If they click on the app logo, it will take them to an expanded version of the SlideShare app where they can explore other presentations as well.
- Embed a presentation on your website. If you have a presentation or two that you want to highlight for your website visitors, SlideShare provides you with the necessary embed code to be able to do that. Here’s one that I just uploaded from a talk I gave last March.
- Pin presentations from SlideShare to Pinterest boards. I recently got into a debate with someone about Pinterest and its ideal uses. They saw it as a place where women share recipes and post inspirational quotations. The thing is, Pinterest is such a powerful site and has an incredible level of engagement. So, why wouldn’t you incorporate it into your business strategies, marketing tactics or even your job search? Here’s a great SlideShare presentation on creating Pinterest resumes. The same concept can apply for various speaking topics, book subjects, training courses, etc. Be imaginative!
- Periodically share your presentations in your status updates on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Create a few pre-crafted posts that you can add to your editorial calendar and keep continuing traffic coming to the presentations you want to have the most visibility. Schedule these posts in your post planner (I use Hootsuite), so that they run on auto-pilot.
- Remember to craft your presentations well! A well-crafted presentation will catch people’s attention, prompting them to share it with their networks as well. Consider adding video to your presentation or an audio track, wherever appropriate, to bring the presentation to life.
- Generate leads using SlideShare. If you upgrade your free account to the PRO version, you can use LeadShare to enable viewers to contact you directly, right from your presentations! With a LeadShare campaign running, a lead capture box is displayed after the first 10 slides, at the end of the deck, or by a permanent display button on the player. To learn more about Leadshare, click here.
What are some of your favorite ways to use SlideShare?
July 24th, 2012
Posted by
Tara Alemany |
Business, Employment, Marketing, Pinterest, Publicity, SlideShare, Social Media, Speaking, Writing |
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Photo courtesy of Photobucket user l5gcw0b
A friend of my mine shared a link to an article on Facebook this morning. The title caught my attention. “Happiness, joy and big fat Klout scores.” Hmm… I had to click on the link and see what that was about. (If you’re still with me at this point, can you wait until you’ve finished reading this post before abandoning it to go read that one? Or at least come back here when you’re done? Thanks! )
The author, Mark Schaefer, makes a very good point, and it’s well worth reading in his own words, even though the post is almost a year old now. The message is still timely.
Are you using social media to create happiness, joy or a big fat Klout score? These are three major distinctions, and your purpose has a lasting affect on how useful your marketing will be.
Let’s look first at the Klout score, because I know so many people like to see how they can manipulate that score and others like them (Kred, PeerIndex, etc.). Your Klout score is based on an algorithm that looks at how influential your social media presence is. It’s not a bad thing to be aware of to see if your strategy is accomplishing what you’d hoped it would. But I see it as a yardstick to measure effectiveness, not as a goal to be achieved. No one is ever going to praise you at your funeral for that awesome Klout score you had.
The next one we’ll tackle is happiness. Everyone would agree, happiness is a good thing to share within your social networks. Just to be clear though, as Mark puts it:
… There is a difference between happiness and joy. You can be happy about a hamburger. You can be happy about a song. Happiness is temporary. Joy is peace.
Within your social marketing strategy, happiness would be offering that free sample of your book, or a discount code for your product or services. It’s a temporary thing that people are happy to share with their friends and connections, but it has no lasting effect.
If the purpose of your social marketing is to create “happy customers,” you’ll be engaged in a constant quest to find that next thing that will spark them to action and brighten their day. Offering them the same thing repeatedly will eventually lose its charm and appeal.
However, when you understand the reason for the journey you, personally, are on, and the difference you want to make in the world around you, you understand your why. It becomes easier to make business decisions because you have something to navigate by.
I recently had the opportunity to speak on a topic that I have the knowledge and skill to speak on, but it’s not part of what I’m trying to accomplish with my life and my business right now. When I was still unclear about my why, I would have taken the speaking opportunity even though it was a bit in left-field. Yet, now I could see that it wasn’t relevant to what I’m working to accomplish. I was able to offer up another topic that was in alignment with my purposes, and that was suitable for the audience. It worked out incredibly well. However, even if the speaking engagement had fallen through, it would have been alright because I wasn’t chasing down a rabbit trail that distracted me from my purpose.
When you know your why, you feel joy in your work and it’s reflected in your social media activities. Joy is lasting. It’s contagious even! When you are joy-filled, others want to be around you, and they want to learn why you are the way you are.
It’s often said, “People don’t remember what you say, but how you made them feel.” When you engage in your social marketing activities with joy, people that want what you have naturally start appearing. The message spreads, not because of what you’ve said, but because of how you’ve made them feel. No discount coupon or Klout score is ever going to accomplish that for you.
So, what’s your WHY? What energizes you about what you do, and makes you ready to get up each day to tackle it again? Share it below. We’d love to hear about it.
July 3rd, 2012
Posted by
Tara Alemany |
Business, Marketing, Relationships, Social Media, Speaking |
3 comments
Carmine Gallo | Photo credit: Gallo Communications
Communications Coach Carmine Gallo shares tips on how to craft your business story so that it can be shared in 60 seconds or less in this Entrepreneur.com blog post from January 2011. He says that there are 4 questions that need to be answered in one sentence each. They are:
1. What do you do?
2. What problem do you solve?
3. How are you different?
4. Why should I care?
The same 4 points are critical when looking for endorsements for your latest book, when you’re trying to secure speaking opportunities at new venues, or when you’re looking for media opportunities.
The people you’re engaging with are oftenbeing bombarded with information every day. It comes at them through the phone, the TV, the radio, the internet, their inbox, their mailbox, their iPod, their iPad and more!
To deal with the information overload, we’ve become dependent on receiving byte-sized pieces of information, or snippets, that enable us to quickly process whether the conversation is something we want to pursue further.
In my earlier review of Bill Schley’s book “The Micro-Script Rules,” we talked about the importance of creating a compelling story; something that people want to repeat.
The same concept applies here. When you’re working on presenting your topic to a publisher, celebrity endorser, journalist, event organizer, etc., keep your information clear and concise, but make sure that the idea sticks in their mind.
Consider rephrasing Gallo’s questions for your topic.
1. What’s your topic?
2. Why is it relevant?
3.How is it different?
4.Why should my audience care?
Answer each of these questions in one sentence or less when you present your topic for consideration. To these, I would add one final question, and that is:
5. Why am I the one who should present it?
Keep your responses short and to the point, but make them memorable. Jane Perdue of the Braithwaite Innovation Group recently told me in conversation, “Be brief. Be bold. And be gone.”
The people whose attention you’re trying to catch are being sought out by hundreds, if not thousands, of others; all of whom are hoping to catch their attention. To promote your ideas, you have to be the best at communicating them quickly, easily and in an engaging manner.
Remember this quotation from Albert Einstein. “If you can’t explain it to a 6-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.” The same applies in presenting your ideas and topics. If you can’t explain them succinctly, you don’t understand them yourself. Give enough information to spark curiosity without going into great detail about everything and, if your contact is interested, they’ll request more information from you.
Thanks to @carminegallo for inspiring this blog post. If anyone wants to practice being bold and brief, share your ideas below! We’d love to hear them.
June 19th, 2012
Posted by
Tara Alemany |
Business, Marketing, Publicity, Speaking |
one comment
