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Proceed with Caution, Speed can Kill

As we repeatedly say in our seminars for business executives, social media is much faster, cheaper, and deeper than traditional media. These changes create game-changing opportunities for business.

These same attributes give mis-guided people the opening to totally trash their brand in minutes. For example this article on a well known UK company, Habitat, demonstrates what happens when a company doesn't have a plan for how they'll use social media. It is difficult to image this same company launching a marketing campaign using traditional media without first mapping out a plan. This article demonstrates that Twitter offers such immediate message delivery that you can do real damage in minutes! This affirms the basic message that we offer in our seminars: mesh your social media efforts with your existing strategy, identify what you want to accomplish, then determine the best way to do it with those speedy social media tools.

In the right hand column, you can see the schedule for our seminars, "Social Media for Executives". Speaking from our seasoned business executive viewpoints, we present the promise of social media, and we discuss why it is pushing much of the traditional media aside, because it is "faster, cheaper, and deeper". Attend one of our seminars to learn how social media might benefit you.....if you employ a plan.

We'd like to thank UK Habitat for making the point that employing social media without a plan offers a fast and cheap way to trash your brand. In the matter of a few hours, Habitat became globally known for the wrong reasons. The article suggests practical actions that they could have taken to mitigate the impact. This article is a good read for any business on "How not to use Twitter".

El Gaucho serving TasteTweets next week

Social media offers many new ways to get people's attention to promote your business. I'd like to share our experience with one of our more innovative projects. Working with Mackay Restaurants - the owners of El Gaucho - we have developed a social media-based campaign for a "Taste & Tweet" virtual tasting of items from their lunch menu.

The event is being promoted through traditional PR channels as well as being "tweeted". Twitter users are invited to apply to be on the tasting panel. Those selected will be tasting several new luncheon items as well as a few traditional. After all, how could you have a tasting at El Gaucho without at least one steak serving?

Anyone can apply to be a taster. Just "follow" @ElGauchoBell on Twitter, and do a REPLY to any tweet by El Gaucho to indicate your desire to be a taster. Since the idea is to taste, enjoy, and tweet your impression; your odds of being selected as a taster could directly relate to your number of followers (who will be receiving "tweeted tasting notes").

El Gaucho is using high tech communications to sharing the tasting experiences beyond their four walls. You can learn more about the luncheon items being served to the "tastetweeters" by visiting their new blog. It's a nice looking blog -- even if we do say so ourselves. As part of the campaign, we worked with the El Gaucho to create the blogs and coached their team as they developed content for their blogs. You may wish to visit their other blogs for the BAR and FOOD.

You can follow the tasting comments by adding @ElGauchoBell as a "follow" on Twitter. This is a historic event -- traditional steak house extends their message through elecronic personal messaging. Be part of history. You can participate by following the tasting comments -- just add @ElGauchoBell as a "follow"in your Twitter account. What? No Twitter account. It's free, so just go to http://www.twitter.com/ We welcome your thoughts and questions about this innovative "taste & tweet" by El Gaucho.

Big News - Your Facebook Account can have Your Name

Big News on Facebook. Beginning June 13, Facebook gives you the opportunity to own a customized Facebook URL. Why is everyone going to be jumping on their computers to grab theirs? Glad you asked: My friend, Janelle Elms made the following points in a recent message.

It's easier for your friends to remember and use your URL that is your name. And even more importantly for on-line commerce, the customized URL's provide your on-line buyers improved security and confidence when they can see a familiar name that they can relate to. Wouldn't your customers rather be directed to a page that said Facebook.com/YOURNAME instead of where you currently have to send our customers which is http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/profile.php?id=757659047&ref=profile (this links to my friend Janelle who originated much of this post in a message to me. She is a wealth of information.)

And if you need more practical reasons, how about these?

• Customized URL's rock for branding purposes


• Customized URL's fit on a business card!!


• Customized URL's are good for optimizing search engines (seo)

Janelle reports, "Facebook has hinted that whatever name you pick will be used for 'other things' down the road...yum - all promotions are good promotions. And probably the most important reason that you want to grab yours is so your competitor doesn't! eeks! Oh, and BIG hint...Facebook will recommend you use your real name, but...isn't there another name you would like to promote?" (Can you tell that Janelle is a high level coach for eBay sellers?)

Ok, you are reluctant to jump right in. You want more information. Then you are in luck, because PC World has written step-by-step instructions on how to do this. http://www.pcworld.com/article/166611/personalized_facebook_urls_10_important_points.html
Make sure you read the details (especially for Facebook pages) and then get on-line to grab your newly-available, customized, Facebook URL!

Yodio - "Business Off the Beaten Path" Blog Talk Radio

Rich Media Rocks on Blogs

Blogging is much easier than a website, and it's ease creates more opportunities to be personal. We are up to our elbows in media, and the results from using content tools like Yodio are clear.

When people add rich media to their blog content -- the results rock. With Yodio, I provide a very easy way to combine voice with photos, the result is Your Blog with a ‘Face’ - one of the main benefits that I’ve noticed about these "rich media" postings is that they give your blog a more personal edge.These people visiting your blog get to do more than read your prose, they get to see and hear what you’re like, what gets you going, and why you care.

These blog visitors can come away from their engagement with you (via your blog) feeling a different kind of connection than they get when merely reading your comments. Whether it is Yodio or YouTube, these forms of rich media create more connection with your visitor's other senses. Our goal at Yodio is to make this remarkably easy to accomplish -- you are ready to publish rich media to your blog if you have a cell phone and a digital camera along with your internet connection.

We encourage you to put a little "face" on your blog. Be authentic, be interesting, be real.

Twitter's Follow Limits

The entire Twitter system is built to be very fast -- in fact it is literally real-time messaging in many cases. This "speed of delivery" can be very attractive to the proverbial spammer crowd, so I appreciate that Twitter has built in some limits that encourage the social messaging nature of Twitter while discouraging the abusive spammer elements.

In a nutshell, Twitter likes to see that people are not only following a large number of people, but they also like to see that you are participating on Twitter to the degree that you are also attracting a comparable number of followers. This "balancing" seems like a very good system to insure that Twitter participants are contributing meaningful activity as well as viewing the activity of others.

I found it helpful to read posting on the Twitter forum that explains Twitter's Follow Limits in a bit more detail. A quick summary of the Twitter limits follows:

1,000 updates per day
1,000 direct messages per day
100 API requests per hour
Follows limited after 2,000 (balancing begins to apply)

What are your thoughts on these Twitter limits? good? bad? And why? Are there other Twitter policies that you feel others should be aware of?

Brislawn Lofton gets intro to Social Media

We enjoyed a morning at the Harbor Club talking about Social Media and how it can help businesses improve market awareness, improve customer relationships and ultimately bring in more revenues.

One of the attentive attendees enjoying a cup of wonderful Harbor Club coffee was Cami from Brislawn Lofton, PLLC. Enjoy!!

Blaine

Seattle Yacht Club Twitters Real Time Racing Info

TWEET:

Good morning regatta fans. The SYC RC is prepping for another great day of racing!8:20 AM May 16th from web

When coaching business executives about Social Media, we’ve found one of the most attractive, yet disruptive, traits of this new form of communications is ability to share information on a real-time basis. Recently one of the CEOs in our “Social Media Executive Peer Group” was inventive with his own implementation of Twitter-based, real-time, information distribution.

Dave Ferguson of Click Engineering spotted the opportunity, and quickly set up a Twitter group for the Seattle Yacht Club’s Racing Committee. Skippers on their sail boats could “follow” the @SYCRC account on Twitter via their laptops or cell phones. With these phones all of the “following” skippers could receive virtual information via the “tweets” that reported on the conditions, progress in race, and notices of boats rounding their marks.

For the competitors, the information was coming from the eyes of the Race Committee (on the committee boat) to supplement their own real-time view. One recent weekend, the wind conditions proved to be problematic, and the Twitter notices were able to keep the skippers informed of conditions, delays, and rescheduled starts.

Since most skippers elected to forward their @SYCRC messages directly to their smart phones, most of the fleet was gathering information via their SMS (text) messages.
Dave also added streaming video for several marks on the course. He chose to use uStream for his video streaming. Follows is an example of a Twitter message that included the embedded link to the uStream URL where a video stream of the racing activity could be found.

TWEET:

We are under postponement waiting for a consistent wind to fill. (Broadcasting live at http://ustre.am/2KdP)9:11 AM May 16th from web)

Our compliments to Dave. This is an excellent example of using social media tools to capture real-time information then distribute it for free to participants in an event. Variations of this real-time broadcasting could be used for low-cost, information updates from one source to many followers. With Twitter it could just as easily be shared many to many. For us, it is rewarding to introduce Business Executives to the possibilities that social media offers to businesses like theirs.