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Amber: Small Business Social Media Myths Destroyed

The thing that I'm gonna kind of talk about today is less about. You got all of the download on Twitter and Facebook and Google Plus and YouTube and all those things. And today I'm going to sort of wrap it all up into a nice, neat package so you won't hear me talk a lot about the tools and the tactics, But you're going to hear me talk about his strategy. So here's a little bit about where I come from, so you know why I'm qualified to even talk to you about these things. So my business works with companies on their social media strategy. But I got started in social media, probably back in around 2006 when I started my first blawg, and my first couple of blog's went nowhere when absolutely nowhere. But after a while, I sort of started to learn how things worked. And a lot of the strategies I'm going to teach you about today were ones that I used myself to build my own platform for the businesses that I worked for previously and the one that I own today. So it works. I promise you it's wo...

rked in practice but I'm really casual and easy going. So if you guys have questions along the way, I would love for you to just pop your hand up so that we can don't hesitate to interrupt me and don't hesitate to ask questions as they come up. I know the ladies will be helping with the Internet, so that's fantastic. But really ask as many questions as you can or as you want to. So don't be afraid. No question is too simple or too basic. So don't be afraid of that, either. Ready to get started. We're going to start talking about the myths around social media because what was surprising to me is that social has been around now in a legitimate way, I would say for a few years, but what's fascinating is there's still a lot of misconceptions around what social media is and can dio and can't dio. One of the biggest ones I hear all the time is that social media is just a fad. Now a lot of you that air here and watching today are probably not in that camp because obviously you believe there's something of substance here, but one thing to keep in perspective if you're talking to your friends, customers, clients, colleagues is that there were a lot of times in our past history where we went through similar evolutions. And there's a story I'm going to tell you about a company that got this Bryn new amazing technology and they put it in the middle of their office. And everybody was totally fascinated and terrified at the same time because they weren't quite sure what they were going to do with it, how it was gonna work. And plenty of people were skeptical, saying, Now this stuff isn't business related. I don't know what we're gonna do with this. What a waste of time. All of the people in our company are gonna be so distracted with this that they're not going to be doing their jobs. Now. You might think that I'm talking about social media, but I'm talking about the telephone that was the year 1900 people were still freaking out about this newfangled thing that they didn't know how they could use it for business. So you can imagine that all of these things have at one point been a fad or we thought they were, I still I'm amazed at how many companies need to be convinced that they need to have a Web presence. So all of these things kind of go through their adoption cycle. And social media is on a hype curve right now. But believe me when I tell you it's here to stay, so it's worth investing time and for your business, because it's not going anywhere anytime soon. This is another one of the biggest mess. You'll hear socials free because it's free to sign up for Facebook, and it's free to be on Twitter, and it's free to be on Google Plus. But you know what's not free is your time. And any of you who are in business for yourself running a small businesses or freelancing know that your time is money. It is the only thing that you have that you cannot renew, and Social media takes an inordinate amount of time to do well. So one of the biggest challenges most people have with the social media revolution is that it takes an awful lot of time. And the dichotomy, of course, is that the Web is fast. But doing this is not so The Web moves fast, but it takes us a long time to invest in these things. So know that when you're making an investment, you're making a commitment as well. Because social media doesn't go backwards very well. The next one is that social media is only good for marketing now. I know you probably were enlightened yesterday with the idea that social and marketing go together like peanut butter and jelly, and they totally dio. But social actually touches just about every area of our business. So social is related to sales. Social can be related. Teoh human resource is in bigger companies. It's even things like legal compliance. So social is really a layer underneath business that touches everything. So when you're thinking about the plans you're making for social strategy, try to think about beyond just marketing what other sorts of impact points can you see and feel, because it's amazing that we have technologies like the phone or email, and they're really pretty inert. They don't have a purpose in and of themselves. It's how we use them that matters so social is very much the same way. The tools aren't telling us what to do with them. We can be as creative as we want about how and where they can impact our company. So there's tons of potential. This is one of my favorites. We touched on this in pre, So don't be selling and social, and I don't believe it. Now here's the trick. There is a way to sell with social that is different than what you might expect, because it's not the same as going in and talking to somebody and just saying, Hey, by my stuff, here's my stuff by it. Here's my stuff. Please buy it. No, really pleased by my stuff. So what really has to happen in socialist sales happen naturally through community, and what happens is it's ah, it's a pull system as much as a push system. So it's not just about us as businesses getting our stuff out there for people to buy. It's about creating a sense of urgency for people. Toe want to be closer to what we dio. So the investment we make in social as a community is really our currency for being able to sell later. And have you guys heard the term inbound marketing right So the idea is creating things that are so compelling and so interesting around your business that people want to come to your doorstep and find out more about what you dio so you can absolutely cell using social. But social isn't a great direct sales channel. It's sort of enhances all of your other sales. Efforts will actually talk about that in more detail later today. Have you heard these social media doesn't work for business to business. Social media doesn't work for freelancers. Social media doesn't work for independence. Social doesn't work for photographers. I've heard it all, and I think it's all baloney, because social is actually one of the more revolutionary and flexible things that we've ever come across. And don't underestimate the fact that this is truly an evolutionary shift of epic proportions in business, and we feel it is individuals because suddenly our families air on Facebook and we feel like we need to be on Twitter and Pinterest to doing all those things. But Social is actually being used in a remarkable diverse industries. Pharmaceutical companies, health care law, higher education, nonprofits, So if they can do it, you can do it and we can do it. And I actually happen to think that smaller businesses an independent, freelance kite work have an advantage because you're nimble. You're not dealing with layers of management where we have to get lots of red tape approvals and things like that. So I think there's a huge advantage for smaller companies to actually be using social. One thing that happens a lot in social is that people start to build their profiles and they put up their Facebook page and wonder, Why am I not famous yet here that happens all the time and people get really discouraged. They'll put their first video up on YouTube and be like, I got four views and then all of a sudden they throw the baby out with the bathwater and say, Social doesn't work. You know, the truth of the matter is, social takes an awful lot of patients. It really does. It's one of the things that is a long, slow burn over time, so my encouragement to you is never to give up at just the first sign of that didn't go the way I wanted it to, to be very truthful. When I first started building some of my social profiles. I wrote block posts for No. One. I wrote them for me. I wrote them for the air. I wrote them for my dog, but for a long time nobody was reading and nobody was commenting, and nobody was liking my stuff on Facebook and in overtime. Gradually, one person would find it and they would tell a friend, and that friend would come and leave a comment. And then that friend would come back and read again, and then they'd go to my Facebook page. So it is an eager system that works very much like that. But it's like planting a seed and expecting to have a redwood. You have to take the time to nurture this in a really big way. This is another mantra that we hear a lot in the social world. Quality is always more important than quantity, and the Church of Social Media will tell you that the only thing that's important is the quality of your fans and followers. It doesn't matter how many you have, it's that they're all amazing, perfectly targeted. Well, it in a perfect world, that's great, right? We'd all love for all of our fans and followers to be the core of our audience. But the truth is that if you are building a social media presence, you need reach to. So I don't believe sort of the purest mantra that says everything is all about quality and not quantity. It's a balance off both of those things. You need both of them in order to make sure that your great awesome content is actually being seen. So it's a It's a methodical balance of building both reach and quality of targeting, so that you can, over time, grow an audience that's really relevant but also gets bigger. We wanted to get bigger, but we just we don't want to collect people like like bottle caps for no reason whatsoever. But it's important to get out there and try to expand the base of people that we talked to you because really all of us are in business to make a difference in somebody's lives. Somehow, for me, it's business for you is giving people healthier lives. Reaching more people is important to what you dio. So don't be ashamed of that fact because it's it's easy to buy into the social media kind of mantra that it's all about quality and not quantity. But as with all things, everything in moderation, it's all about the conversation. How many times you guys heard that phrase alive? It's all about the conversation. Here is my business Woman hat reality check. What this is about is building your business, and I would love much as the next person for this to be all come by and Teddy bears and we all get to hug and hold hands, and it's wonderful. But conversation does not pay my bills. The results of those conversations pay my bills, so over time I need those conversations to be purposeful. I need to know where I'm spending my time and energy so that it's well spent. And there's incredible, inherent and intrinsic value in conversation. I'll never diminish that, but it's really important to recognize that conversation alone isn't what you're after, because you could spend all day long on Twitter having conversations with tons of random people, and it will never move a needle for your business. So it's really important that we keep that in perspective. All these makes them so far. Sound familiar? Yeah, things you heard the ladies over there like we've heard it 1000 times. Now we get into territory where once you start getting overwhelmed, the first thing you think of is what can I do to make this easier? Where is the easy button? You know, I want the thing that says Aiken, pull it up and push a button and it all does it for me. I don't know if you guys have watched a lot of what happens on the Web, but events unfold in a crazy, fast fashion. So there's a few downsides to things like automating content. We're trying to automate your conversations. Now. I will be the first to tell you that I do schedule posts to go out once in a while. But I hold their hand out into the world because I never scheduled things more than a day at a time, and I'm always there. So when they're out in the world, if I need to pull a post down, I need to respond to a question or a comment I'm still watching. It's not like I just set it and forget it. Who is that? Ron Ron Po, pay Pompey, Whatever you know who I'm talking about, right? The rotisserie chicken guy. Set it and forget it doesn't really fly in social on. One of the more sobering things to think about here is social, really is kind of one big, messy community that has lots of different niches and pockets. But this year we've had a number of tragedies. We've had things like the Boston Marathon bombing. The shooting is in Newtown tornadoes, and here's what happens. You automate your social media, people say, Oh my God, a bomb just went off downtown Boston People don't know what's going on, and suddenly you're like free for four days. Our social media book on People are just jarred when they see those kinds of things. So automation takes a very careful and attentive hand because it's not that you can't do it, is that you need to be really careful about how you do it, because there are times and places where you're gonna want to push the stop button and make sure that you're not pitching your webinar in the middle of the royal baby being born. This is something that I think a lot of independent folks tend to think crisis is not gonna happen to me. I'm not a big company. I don't have a PR department. We're not gonna put out a press release that make somebody angry. But if you're Anthony Weiner, you might disagree that you can't put out something to the world that doesn't constitute a personal crisis. We all miss Post. We sometimes use poor judgment. We sometimes get called out in a post of somebody else's that we weren't exactly sure was coming. So I don't mean to alarm you, but I think it's really important that when you delve with excitement into the world of social media that you also have a plan for how to handle that. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in detail. But the idea is to anticipate that these things can and and may very well happen to you because the the Internet is a weird, fast moving crazy. But we get our Gmail hacked. You never know what's gonna happen and explode, and you need to be ready to respond to that in the moments notice, because your social presence becomes very much a currency in an investment in an asset for your brand in your company, and it's so critical that you protect it. And by protecting it, I mean planning for the what if scenarios that we may not like to imagine, but could very easily happen unexpectedly. You all are feeling this right now. I must now be on every platform everywhere. So I'm gonna get a Google plus page that I'm gonna get a YouTube channel. I'm going to tweet my Facebook to my Pinterest page while I instagram my I think I missed one. Anyway, you can't do this Realistically, we can't be everywhere. We can't. And we want Teoh because everything is new and shiny and fund and shiny object syndrome is a very riel riel affliction to those of us that love the web. And I've been as guilty as the next person, you know, I I think I have an abandoned instagram account with, like, two pictures of my dog and my dinner, and I've never taken a picture sense on. And so there's times and places to kick the tires of everything. But when it comes to trying to tie this to your business, you need focus, which means pick a platform that's really relevant to your audience or pick the one that you like and are comfortable with. And that interests you because it's not going to make or break your company that you're not on Twitter. If you don't like being on Twitter, you're going to be lousy at it anyway. So there's no point in trying to be on all the networks. This is a related one. The myth is that we will be on social and we will be awesome. I will. I will put up my Facebook page and I will have three million likes and everybody will show up and I will be an Internet god for a day. And that's just not This isn't how it happens. It really isn't. And the truth of the matter is, if you were a really amazing company doing amazing things, social will showcase that and shine a spotlight on. The amazing thing is that you're doing now. It is a business. You don't quite have it together yet or you've got a product problem or you have a customer service problem. Guess what we see. That too so social becomes an amplifier for the good, the bad and the ugly, which means that being on social does not absolve you of all of your business sins. Fundamentally, we have to make sure we have a really strong sound, interesting business that warrants that kind of attention. Because once you start building a community on social media, there is no reverse gear. You don't suddenly stopped the car and go, just kidding will go fix this and we'll be right back. Hang on. So we have to make sure that our businesses air fundamentally sound before we think that social media is going to be the savior that takes us to a whole different level. Do you struggle with this one personal professional? We have seen that every day for the past two days, but we see that in almost every creativelive workshop because so many of us are solo preneurs and yeah, small businesses. And it's that how to separate We were talking or do not. Yeah, well, here's my answer is you can't whether you want to or not. It's we can mentally separate in our heads. That's my business account. This is my personal account. The problem is, the Web doesn't distinguish, and when people like when people get on the web and look for you or look for your company. Google does not discriminate, so they're searching for you. If you go and put my name into Google, you will find my Blawg, my Facebook, my Lincoln, my Twitter account, my company. And then you'll start finding things like pictures of me at the beach. So even though I wouldn't prefer you to see me in a bathing suits, what happens is the peas always touched the mashed potatoes like that. You can't undo that sort of thing. So the reality is you have to kind of be conscious of the fact that you can physically separate those things if you prefer to, but know that the association is always going to be there. So you can't disavow the fact that you're affiliated with something else and socialist tricky that way because it's like, Do I do this on my personal account? Do I have six Facebook pages? And you know, the answer really isn't a standard one. I happen to use all of mine as blended. So my amber Cadavra twitter handle I use for business for personal. When I worked for ah company called radiant six. I use that for business as well as my own personal use, which necessarily means that I have to watch it on both sides so I don't get just free rein. Teoh make my personal account like a litany of profanity and dirty jokes, which, if you know me offstage, is much more like me. But the truth of the matter is, I have to edit, and I have. You do have to make some choices and sacrifices about how you want to be perceived on the Web. And for the most part, a lot of these things are going to sort of blend together over time. And as you build your platform and as you increase your social media presence for your business, you're going to find that it's really hard to keep it all separate because, especially now it is with Twitter clients that allow you to tweet, for instance, from more than one handle at a time. I think every one of us has seen a misfire where there's an incident where you mean too sweet from your personal account. But oops, I just did that from my business account. There's actually been a couple of really fun examples of that. The thing American Red Cross has great humor, and I will always respect them for this because one of the one of their employees type something about getting slaves erred on the weekend. Like I'm gonna go out and get totally slows erred. But they did it from the American Red Cross account. So all of a sudden, everybody's going right. The American Red Cross is going out this weekend to party, and to their credit, the American Red Cross came online inside hoops. You know, sorry about that. That was somebody missed tweeting from our Twitter account and from for weeks afterwards, in a joking way, they would use the hash tag, slows erred, you know, like to make fun of themselves a little bit. But a lot of companies aren't quite that forgiving, you know? So the reality is, when you're doing, our lives are complicated, our lives air dimensional. We have lots of things going on. And when we venture into the web, all that stuff sort of gets mixed up together. So it's okay to consciously plan to organize things, but you can't keep them separate. Now, when you're thinking about why I'm doing all this, and can I possibly even keep track of what I'm doing? Whether it's working, I hear a lot from people that you can't measure social media you guys threw that one to on the when people are talking about it like it's impossible to measure, there's no way to measure this on. Hey, yeah, So I'm gonna have a little stump speech for a minute about our away because our why is one of the most misunderstood metrics in business because we use it is sort of the catchall phrase for is what I'm doing worthwhile. But our ally is really a very specific financial metric. It's. Did I make more money or less money for the money that I spent? So that's but that's only one way to look at success. And when it comes to social, there's a 1,000,000 different ways to look at success. Did I grow my audience? Did I engage my audience? Did I make sales that I get repeat sales? Do I have the loyalty of my audience and my customers? Did they refer other people to me? So there's a whole litany of metrics we'll actually talk more about metrics in our next segment, but you absolutely can measure social media. The problem is that we tend to measure it by the things that people hand us. I have 30, Facebook fans, right? And when it comes to business, we don't know what that means. How does that help me? What are those 30,000 fans doing for my business? What are those 10 blog's readers actually meaning in terms of that? Is there hanging out, or did they also sign up for my email list? And then now, can I send them information via email on a personal 1 to 1 communication? So it's really important to measure the right things, and the right things are always the metrics that line up with your business goals. So if my goal is right now to grow audience reach, the only metrics I should care about in social are the ones that broaden my audience base. But if I'm more interested in actually ringing the cash register, then I need to be worried about making sales. And none of those things have anything to do with Twitter followers or YouTube views. Those in and of themselves are not enough. We need to tie those metrics to things in our business that actually matter. So sociales overwhelming and you guys over the last two days have probably had brain explosion, that's for sure. Yeah, I really it's a lot to take in. I mean, you're basically talking about five years worth of kind of media and communications evolution in three days. So, yeah, that's alive. But it's really important that you walk away from this not just looking at Social Media as a box to tick on your to do list. And here's what I mean by that. Once upon a time he has ever watched Madman madman I'm madman. They have the old school typing pool. So when one of the partners want something typed, he walks it over to one of the adorable women in the middle of the office and hands it to her. And they have this pool of people in the middle of the office. That type, that's their job, is to type now. Could you imagine typing being a job today? It doesn't work that way, so Social is on sort of a nascent curve, but in reality it needs to become a skill that we employ across the board, not just a job that we dio. Does that distinction make good sense? Because right now, you you look a around it cos we have community managers, we have social media coordinators and all that sort of thing. Over time, those jobs, they're going to go away because we're just gonna have everybody is going to be socially enabled. We're gonna have and learn how to use these tools to our benefit. So you use email differently than I might use it. You might use the phone differently than I use it. We all touch it, but we leverage it in different ways, and social is going to move in that direction. So as you start to adopted and kick tires and try new tools, keep in mind that it shouldn't just be a I did my Facebook page for the day because really, the framework you want to be thinking in is Facebook just enabled me to do what with my business. What was that post driving that I should care about? Because eventually very truthfully, Facebook will probably disappear. Remember MySpace, Friendster? You know all of these, these things are very temporary. And do you realize it was less just over a decade ago that Yahoo dominated search? Yeah. I mean, it's crazy how fast this stuff moves. So to put all our eggs in the basket and say my job today is to do Facebook is looking waves. You narrow because when Facebook pulls the carpet up from underneath you, you have to have a sort of sustainable strategy. That means you can swap in a new tool for the old tool and keep moving forward. Like I said, Social is not Facebook sociales, not Twitter is not YouTube. It's not any of those things because of what I just said. The tools will always and constantly change. And I think that's one of the things we get hung up on because we fall in love with a particular tool or platform or technology and figure. It's going to be around forever. So we build. Our strategy is around various specific things that then become completely obsolete. In six months, we have to do it all over again. So my encouragement to you is to do what I call agnostic strategy, which is to build a plan that doesn't specify tools in a dependent way. The tools are merely the means and the mechanism to get things done. And we're gonna talk about building strategies and roadmaps today. And the important thing to note is that they are not dependent on one tool. You can swap out Google Plus for Pinterest, for instagram for Facebook, because if you know the one that's gonna achieve your goals and why it's going to achieve your goals, it doesn't matter. And that's an important thing to keep in mind. You don't need to be social media famous. More importantly, you do not want to be social media famous and this is it. This is kind of a funny thing to me, the Internet fame world, and I have to be honest that I have spent the last five years in an on social media and by some people standards. They would look at me and say, Oh, she's one of those Internet rock star people. Lord, help me, I don't want to be an Internet rock star. I want my business to thrive. So for me, being a being having a great strong presence and great platform on social is all about enabling the growth of my business. It's not because I want people to walk down the street and go. That's Amber Cadavra. God help me if that ever happens, I actually had a guide. An event introduced me as Miska. Deborah So yeah, exactly. Lots of people don't mind my real last name, so I guess I can't change it now. But really, the goal of all of this long term is that you want to build a great business. You want to build a great hobby. You want to build a great presence so that your business can thrive. Not so that your job becomes making more awesome YouTube videos, which is great if you're the kind of person who is independently wealthy and you have a trust fund to live on and you don't need to make any money. It's totally cool to be Internet famous for a living. But what we're really here to Dio is figure out a way for this to grow our business in a tangible, sustainable way so that the time that we spend doing it is all worthwhile last. Anybody feeling this nobody feeling the whole Oh, I'm about ready to lay down and quit at this point. Anybody feeling that now? Well, the truth of the matter is, of course, you can do all this. And it's a lot like my guy. Yeah, e don't know. I mean, a hamster lifting weights. How can you not think that's awesome. Anyway, um, so, yes, you can do all this, but you don't have to do it all today, and you don't have to do it all next week. I started with a block that nobody read and I got on Twitter and was like, This is silly. 140 characters. Oops. Too many hoops. Too many. Now I think I speak in 140 character segments. Um, but you don't have to do it all tomorrow. And look, the reality is our interview, like brain surgeons or heart surgeons or anything in here. That means that we're not saving lives. We're not out there, you know, curing world hunger or any of those kinds of things is important, is all those causes are it's okay to just sort of take your time and realize it's just social media, you know, it's just the Internet. It's just a little bit of marketing for my business. It's a little bit of this. You can read and take in some of the hype sometimes and believe that it's absolutely crazy upside down. And then I had to rush out tomorrow and figure all this out. I must do this, but it's not gonna happen. And so give yourself a break and realize that it's okay to build this in bits and pieces because that's how everybody builds their business. This is just one more facet of all of the things that we need to dio to progress what we dio. But it's one piece, only one piece.