The Revolution reaches the New York Times

We've been announcing the social media-driven business communications revolution for nearly a year, and we're pleased that the New York Times has finally noticed it's arrival. For nearly a year, we've touted the combination of Twitter and a blog as the most effective and affordable marketing tools for small-to-medium businesses. Let's face it, when the communication tools are "faster, cheaper, and deeper", then the game shifts dramatically. These new communication forms reward agility, personality, and heartfelt communications -- this benefits small businesses not faceless corporations. The ripples from these changes will be felt for some time as the traditional media forms continue to shrink, shrivel, and, in many cases, disappear.

By all means, read this New York Times article about Social Media and some of the ways they see it benefittiong the Mom and Pop operators. The article is well written and the points are right on the money. The revolution is in its early stages, so we will continue to offer our seminars: Social Media for Business Executives/Owners. As with all communications, the message is the key. We continue to emphasize that nearly every business can benefit from the FREE tools known as Social Media, but you should not be cheap in your approach.

We encourage you to "Get it right the first time" -- Start with a plan, a message, and a strategy to enhance your brand. Then use the free tools to delivery your message using effective "social media speak". Social Media is very fast as well as low cost. You can be outperforming your website in a week -- that's right, we can open the curtains and reveal to you the "faster, cheaper, and deeper" marketing offered by Social Media. Don't be late to the Revolution!

Colleen's shameless plug

Here is a post with pictures and links...

We have the privilege of having Eric from Shirlaws with us to share the message of social media.

 

 

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I am here at the Harbor Club having a wonderful time with lots of very interesting and insightful people.l

 

 

FREE Social Media Seminar - First 5 get to attend!!

Today might be your lucky day. Tomorrow morning, July 22nd, at 7:30am at The Harbor Club in Bellevue, we are giving one of our 2-hour Seminars, SOCIAL MEDIA FOR LEADERS AND BUSINESSES - sharing our insights into what Social Media means for business managers and leaders.

We've just had a group of executives notify us that a crisis came up in their business and are now unable to make it tomorrow. The good news is they paid and are willing to allow us to fill their spots with others. So, if you are available and one of the FIRST 5 to Direct Message me on twitter (@blainemillet) or send me an e-mail (blaine@someexec.com), you win a spot. We'll be providing a continental breakfast and free parking in the Symetra building, where The Harbor Club is located.

If you are a lucky winner, you can skip the payment process when you register. Good luck and we hope to see you tomorrow morning.

You may be on top of this rapidly emerging form of business communications, or you may need to be introduced to this “Social Media Revolution”. Tomorrow’s seminar will give you just that – a good introduction of Social Media, strategies for using its tools, and ways businesses can market themselves for little or no cost. And when it is used correctly, it can change your business faster and with more impact than anything I’ve seen in years.

Blaine

Yodio - El Gaucho Bellevue - Directions to the hidden gem

Who speaks for your company -- CEO or intern?

In our seminars we run across many companies who assume that young people are social media experts. We are the first to acknowledge that many young people are effective users of social media for their social lives, but we also note that most of them have given little thought on how to use these same social tools for business communications. And very, very, very few of these youthful digital natives have experience being effective users of social media for a business. And their strategic outlook is woefully lacking.



An article about Pizza Hut and its "twintern" prompted me to write this post. It raises some good points to consider. "As more people join Twitter, its marketing potential is becoming more obvious to businesses. Pizza Hut is not the only company that has tasked an intern with diving in. The trade-off: With the assignment comes a branded megaphone and the power to produce a public relations disaster."



My point -- do your best to avoid trashing your brand. Our core point in our "Social Media for Executives" seminar is that social media enables you to communicate faster, cheaper, and deeper than traditional media. Take this social media stuff seriously. Combining rocket-fueled communications power with inexperienced youth cries out for supervision; however our experience suggests that top management's attention is too often elsewhere -- where their comfort level is much higher. Thus the 33 year old marketing person is the supervisor, and frankly our experience suggests that the marketing person in their 30's is the biggest barrier to successfully embracing social media. This age group completely missed the social media revolution -- they were already out of college when facebook and MySpace came along. Thes marketers ose in their 30's are typically clueless and insecure when it comes to social media. Tough choice between the intern and the marketing person in their 30's -- we've lived in this social media world for several years as business executives, and we offer the strategic business point of view to fellow CEOs. There should be no doubt about the answer to the question -- Who Speaks for your Company -- the CEO or an intern?

We wanted to share photos on Twitter

As we were preparing for the first ever Taste and Tweet event at El Gaucho Bellevue, we realized that it would be nice to share photos from the event. We'd seen a number of ways to embed photos in tweets, but we'd never been serious in our observations.

We selected some of the most popular to test drive. They included: pic.im, mypic.me, twitpic.com, yfrog.com. We looked home pages of the following but did not give them a test drive: pixelpipe.com, tweetphoto.com, twitsnaps.com, snaptweet.com (We would welcome your comments on any of these untested services.)

To cut to the results quickly: we chose to use pic.im for our photos. And we are very pleased that we did. Our testing notes - good image size, allows comments, includes STATS. Supports iPhone to Twitter (pic.im/website/iphone )

mypic.me -- did not fly with us, because it did not support photo names with spaces, no stats, and no commenting

twitpic -- offered direct post to Twitter which is good. Also accepted commenting. Didn't care for the advertising that came with the service

yfrog.com -- allowed comments, allowed sharing, and gave a fairly good sized photo display; however the resolution was not very good in full screen display. But at least they allowed full screen display.

Just a note as CEO of Yodio, we store photos in the size submitted. So 8 MB photos blow your socks off when shown in our full screen mode. We're disappointed to see services like yfrog.com who take a compressed version of a photo and then push it to a blurry full screen display. We'd like to see photo quality benefitting from the full screen.

You can see the pic.im links in the posting history for @ElGauchoBell or @TasteandTweet.

The pic.im metrics for viewing were real time and very good. Pic.im proved very user-friendly at the Taste and Tweet even when the users were under pressure, and we appreciated the tracking results as the photos were RT'd (re-tweeted). It gets thumbs up from us.

Added note: The pic.im is associated with the URL shortener tr.im which we tried and really liked. tr.im offers a nice option for customizing your shortened URL.

Session hosted by Zino Society

Today we are presenting to a very special group of people, sponsored by Zino Society and hosted by Davis Wright Tremaine – we sincerely appreciate their “forward thinking” and vision to the future for getting engaged in Social Media. Stay tuned, big things will be coming out of both organizations in the area of Social Media.

Two of our attendees, Brad Toner and his son Justin, from Conover Insurance, are pictured here listening, learning and enjoying (hopefully), the “2 Suits, No Tats, All Business” guys (us). Thank you for attending.