It’s true! Having provided training for major brands to one man bands I am offering significant insights coupled with practical implementation on how to use Social Media to drive business to your enterprise. I am aiming at a cross section of individuals, I explain more in this video:

To apply, click here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/396D8V9

You might find this video irreverent – well, to some, that is what short cuts are…

This Video was fun to produce although it has a serious message. I was marooned in Miami on my way back from Costa Rica.

Apart from the really nice people that I met, I found I was hearing the same stories, stories of business failure and difficulty. I also heard yet again how at least one of these businesses was saved. A familiar story to me, but I realise that so many people have not heard it so it is worth recalling.

On this occassion I also had the wonder of some fabulous backdrops. Also I found just a little bit of footage on YouTube that you just might recognise

I had the great pleasure of listening to Jessica Jackley at Undergound 6, in Washington DC this weekend and she explained how Kiva has been able to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty.

Take a look at Kiva where you will see through an through social media working toward providing real support for people suffering the effects of poverty being helped by Social Media.

The site itself deserves inspection, rather than a description here, the best thing you can do, is visit the site – and you can follow their success and fun on Twitter @kiva

Kevin Weil over at Twitter is reporting that they have a measurement Tweets Per Second. Right now they are showing over 50m Tweets per day! I make that more than 2 million Tweets an hour!

When we look closely at the TPS (Tweets per second) chart it reveals that about only six months ago the number was less than 10m Tweets Per Day, just half a million per hour.

By anyones count that is massive growth and just goes to demonstrate that you have to be in it to win it.

But of course, there is more to it than that. The TPS (Tweets per second) measurement does not account for Tweet deliveries which are a much much higher number because once created, each Tweet is delivered to multiple followers.

Then there is search, monitoring and so many other ways to measure and understand growth. watch this space folks.

Quix puts Bookmarklets on Steroids. Google Analytics for WordPress author Joost de Valk gives us Quix.

Quix is the latest in a generation of bookmarklet tools. Looking just like a bookmark on your browser, the tool offers integration with your Social Media and favourite bookmark software as well as SEO and Webmaster insights on any site you visit. It even offers a ruler, so you can measure things on screen, should you need…

It is easy to install and if you ever get stuck you just type in help and it takes you to a page that shows you all the commands that you can use.

Even I managed to install it, it costs nothing and has to be a hit! Find out more: Your Bookmarklets, On Steroids

Just in case you were still wondering if ROI – Return On Investment from social media was possible, this short video gets straight to the point.

The Video features loads of well known brands from Ford to Dell who have all used Social Media to generate sales and grow their businesses – using lower marketing budgets.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As the author of the video, Erik Qualman asks, “Why are we trying to measure Social Media like a traditional channel anyway? Social media touches ever facet of business and is more an extension of good business ethics”

“You can’t buy attention anymore. Having a huge budget doesn’t mean anything in Social Media. The old media parading was Pay to Play. Now you get back what you authentically put in. You’ve got to be willing to Play to Play.”
Alex Bogusky, Co Chairman, CP&B

“No more Spray and Pray” Gary Jennings, Weboptimiser.

“Think of Twitter as the canary of the coal mine” Morgan Johnston, JetBlue Airways

My favourite quote, apart from Garys is from MacDonalds, “our head of social media is the customer”

It seems a new world pattern is forming, more quickly than expected. One that we can’t ignore. It seems we are now not in a market where electronic marketing is not only more pervasive, not only more accessible, not only cheaper and faster, but that electronic business is the only, truly reliable mechanism under which we can actually do business now.

I am reminded of the early days of fax communications, at first it was unacceptable. Then fax became acceptable – by banks and now, just a few short years later though, fax is hardly used. In the ‘electronic world’ seismic shift comes often. We are fast to adapt. In the real world, these things are much slower. But, it seems that sadly, although probably at last we are truly seeing the turning point of a seismic shift that has been facing us for some time. There is a natural order to these things.

It revolves around our Postal Services. It has become conspicuously and now regularly unreliable. It can no longer be regarded as a failsafe method of important document delivery. The loss associated with errant mail is too high. Missed payments, late payments, payments never materialising, both inward and outward makes this the case.

Interestingly, resolution -i.e. when a payment is late/lost/missing is most often resolved in my experience, electronically by email and sometimes fax (we still have one of those machines). Payments are made electronically, copies of documents are scanned and forwarded. An email, like a fax was is now considered a legally acceptable document. Someone was actually served in the UK recently by Twitter…

Wow! This is a seismic shift, this is the reality of where we are now. Not based on what future technology will do, but based on what current technology – and human beings are doing already, today. We have to operate this way, we have no choice when we are let down by the traditional service providors. This is much bigger than simply that the online advertising sector is bigger than television. Although that is big.

Online services are now more effective in real world scenarios than multiple countrywide postal systems and 10s of thousands of people. I think we can forecast that the effect of the postal strike will help companies hasten their transition to online systems and more readily sign up for digital supplier services, whilst consumers will order for christmas early and do so online.

Meanwhile it becomes obvious that less of us will use the post office – how long to the demise of the printed Postcard? It is already online…

Last weekend I spent Saturday in the Drill Hall, just off Tottenham Court Road and amongst other presentations, there was one on time management. I think most people dropped off, but I found it interesting as I was listening to it with an ear for Social Media.

Amongst other things, it was said that the deliberate contraction of time caused you to complete tasks in the time allotted and all you needed was the time and space to not be interrupted in order not to be distracted, so that during that time, nothing else can get in. I liken it giving up smoking. In my case I was clearing an addiction and I cleared it by deciding to smoke at given times and then having smoked telling myself that I could smoke again, but at an alloted time. It worked for me… So it does with Social Media.

It all revolves around having a plan, even if you don’t have a plan for Social Media, you can still plan time to investigate with the objective of determining your plan. So where to start with so many ‘Social Media’ opportunities?

You have to start with planning your time. You are in business to do business, you must do whatever you do to stay doing business, of course. But your time is yours, you own it, you control it, what you do with it is yours. We know you will be more productive if you plan your time, so your first plan must be to plan in some learning time.

Now, in the case of Social Media, you cannot do much until you have set up accounts, accounts require you to complete a profile, and that is the first thing you must do. You also need to think about your personality and your voice – what you want to say. These should be easy to work out in the beginning – act naturally, and focus on what you already do! there is no need to suddenly become an extrovert party goer, and we er, don’t really want to hear about bowel movements… So this is as simple, at least in the early days as keeping congruent, say who you are and be who you are.

So the first thing you must do in terms of time is look at the media you fancy – twitter? facebook? linkedin? they tend to be the top three. Open an account with each.

By doing nothing, you will get followers and this may be odd, but it means that people have found you as a result of your profile and they want to hear what is going on… You perhaps do not want to tell them everything… You would not have time for that, but you may have a thought for the day. Start there, start with ease, start gently, but only in the time you have allotted.

You could easily allot no more than 10 minutes at first. However, you now have followers and those followers were interested in you purely because of your profile – look at them, they may be clients or even, prospective clients. You now have the opportunity to talk… You would like to talk to prospective clients…

Major social media applications have millions of users and are still growing fast, but everyone needs to start somewhere – you have to be in it to win it as they say. Social Media is closely tied to e-mail, which has already presented major challenges to professionals in time management. Like email, the skills required for Social Media are about keeping an appropriate focus in their work and life.

Meetings can wasteful if not managed correctly and we know that random web surfing or Facebook socializing can be productive, if you are achieving something you want.

The strange and ‘new’ thing for many about social media is its immediacy and to some this is a bit scary. I can take a photo in Finland as I did last week, upload directly to FaceBook and Flickr and someone in London has commented it before I have had time to look at it myself – now that is scary – but nice. It is great to get instant feedback. Online we are more real, more  transparent, connected, with both immediacy and intimacy. Key attributes of quality relationships—something humans crave at a basic level – and totally necessary in business.

I was talking to Dr Ruth Renkie at Kingston University recently she  asserted that as time progresses the Internet is becoming more human.  When we look at the key factors of influence – key to selling and business we can prove that on line is the very best place to be in order to get your message across.

So is Social Media a waste of time – I think not – it is the most compelling thing to do. You must engage, failure to engage will end up in failure, others will pick up the baton. It is why Social Media is growing like topsy. We have no choice but to engage, it is where the people are and none of us can endure failure.

Long gone are the days when you could deal with letters, emails and phone call messages when the time was right for you. Now you have to respond instantly to market changes, developments, complaints and cries for help…

You would respond at a time to suit you, once you had researched the problem and perhaps found the solution. Now with instant messaging systems that are public – like Twitter, you have no choice, complaints can be made and charges levied and the longer you are seen to reply the more you are seen to be in the wrong.

You have an opportunity now to say something like @complainent, got your point, thanks for letting us know we will try and resolve this for you. Call 0800 614421 for immediate help.

You might just get a response @complainent thanks for your help, I called and all is resolved, thanks: @company

That would demonstrate your brand values immediately and in the minute. It would also gain you more followers and more followers is what you should want if you know what is good for you. To ignore these opportunities is to deny yourself, in all my years in Internet Marketing, we have seen this time and time again. That is the only cost this time, time itself – someone needs to focus on this stuff – but luckily you can buy time – so no real problem?

Now Twitter needs no more than 140 characters, so that cannot be that much time. A response on you fan page can take minutes too. This has been made even faster now that FaceBook has made sweeping design and functionality changes.

This positively affects brands that want to connect to their customers. Under normal circumstances, I tend to say that the same business principles apply. But, in this case: most brands need to change! In the time that they do not change, they leave the door open to the more flexible, nimble, perhaps smaller business owners who can be more responsive – start monitoring your competitors – it can be interesting – you might be the first to know of issues and know even before them! Indeed you could even fix the problem before them and gain a new customer in the process…

Customers demand that you support them, they expect it and in return give you business, so we should view Social Media as the sales funnel. The days of completely self service websites are not over, but the days of customer support are returning – and those that recognize this are rewarded – big time. As a brand owner – all you have to do is listen – as a competitor all you need to do is listen – wherever you are whatever you do you can gain a lot from just listening and responding to these open channels.

A word of warning about listening and responding: strangely, in the UK at least, although I am not lawyer, you cannot hire an agency to represent you unless you tell your customer that is what you are doing – and that is probably ok. It seems to me that this smacks of being less than genuine with the big brother connotations.
In any case, customers nowadays want to hear from no one less than the CEO. As all others it seems cannot be trusted, as it is illegal for someone to be hired to represent the CEO – unless you tell them that you are the Spokesman for the CEO – which is not ideal…

However, this should not be a problem, the CEO should be the ultimate spokesman of the company, as distinct from a publicity seeker, the CEO should have a need to speak to clients, to staff, to make sure that the vision is being carried out and being understood, providing a path of least resistance and feedback – just the things required in effective Social Media campaigns…

This is the opportunity, this is where we are, it is more about being human and starting the dialogue. The Internet is increasing becoming more human, it already has several billion neurons, it is able to communicate good and bad and it really talks to people – it is where the people are. You will know it is too late if you need to communicate a message urgently and you haven’t established the appropriate channels.

Without followers, fans, subscribers, or people consuming your feeds — what you do have is a mailing list, perhaps a list of telephone numbers and less still, an email list. It is likely that none of these will be comprehensive.

Technology is empowering it offers humour and intelligence. It is possible to tune it into a highly effective resource of influence. You can make software widgets – tools that work with FaceBook or Twitter that can bring more orders into your business – even if you are just selling pizzas.

The winner is the one who is more accessible. Accessibility is even enshrined in law! You need to get creative and remove the barriers.

You can get involved today, all you need to do to start is open accounts at the various websites like twitter.com, or facebook.com. It is quite easy to do, but you need to be the one doing it for most dramatic effect in the bottom line of your business. Failure to get involved leaves the door open for your competitors to take your clients – without any friction!