You’ll find me blogging about business communications and social media at my very own domain, www.wordspring.ca.  Things are taking off for me and my clients as we create visibility, credibility and relationships together using the interactive power of the Web.  It’s very exciting! The only sad part is leaving this place behind, like an apartment that I’ve outgrown.   I’ve made some very good memories here.

For those who care about the technical details, it’s still a WordPress blog, only now it’s incorporated with the latest version of my website.  The “page” function of WordPress is one of the things I like best.

So bookmark the new site – add it to your favourite feed reader, comment and recommend it.  I love hearing from my readers, and creating community online.  Here is the link again:

www.wordspring.ca

See you in the new place.

Catherine

I am going through my “following” list on Twitter, and deleting one name after another. This involves reviewing my list, avatar after avatar, name after name and bio after bio, and assessing each for whether I want them to continue showing up in my stream or not.  I’m hoping to reduce my list from 1400-odd people I’m following to about half that.

When “Following” doesn’t equal “Friend”
I know that for many power Twitter users, 1400 people to follow seems a drop in the bucket.  Some people who want to build their following to huge numbers play the “following” game to great effect, picking up a hundred or so people each day, hoping to be followed back, then they trim back and add again, growing their list of followers in waves.   They can follow 200o people in less than a month, and as the number of followers they attract gets to about 1800, they can add still more people.   Twitter on “nutritional supplements” is how I think of it.   And if those people are chosen carefully, perhaps it can be a decent strategy for some.   While I love finding interesting new people to follow, this “forced growth” doesn’t seem like the strategy for me right now.

And I’m not “easy”, either
Autofollowing isn’t really doing the job for me, either.  Again, it’s not a strategy I dismiss entirely.  I like reciprocity as much as the next person.  But autofollowing does make me feel like an easy pushover for every marketing guru that comes along hoping to sell me something.  For the most part, it hasn’t enriched the quality of my Twitter experience.  It may have worked for Barack Obama, but even if he wrote his own tweets, I suspect his “people” monitored all the replies and direct messages he received.

Filters help, but can’t do all the work
I’ve got maybe 15% of the people I follow sorted into groups, which makes it easier to follow: local tweeps (for Victoria and Vancouver people) and Don’t Miss (for people both near and far that I’ve made a real connection with).  I could do more, but I feel like I have too many to sort! So I have decided that it’s time to simplify.

So over to my list I go, looking for familiar names and faces to hang onto.  Casually dismissing the spammers.  Agonising over “mom, runner, working from home, social media enthusiast” that I don’t recognize.  Is she using the service?  Is that enough in common to hang onto?  Am I dismissing a future friend or business partner?

Here’s how the cull works:

• If we have exchanged friendly shout-outs and even confided to each other in direct messages, you’re in.
• If you live in Victoria BC, you’re probably in.
• If something about your bio makes me say “oh wait… maybe not this one”.  You’re in.  For now.
• If you feed me wonderful content on a wonderful basis – news, links, terrific whitepapers and blog articles, you are in.
• If you are Ashton or Demi… you make me laugh.  You’re in.

The rest of you – well, you can @wordspring me.  Ask me to follow back so we can send direct messages to each other, then give me a little bit of yourself.  It doesn’t have to be much, just 140 characters of  The Real You.  Not your product, not your boss, your publicist or your intern.  Just you.  And I will follow you to the ends of the earth.  Or until Twitter is bought up by Google and the love is gone.

I fully expect the problem to be fixed by the end of today because the right people have been alerted – but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen blogs buried in the clutter of a website.  Another client currently hides the company blog deep in the sub-menus of their website, and updates it very rarely, even though this client is bubbling over daily with great ideas.  What a waste of a wonderful resource!

The way I see it, when you are blogging for a business, or to gain support for a cause, or just to share your ideas, why would you hide it where no one can see it?  Why not have a section on the home page that gives visitors one-click access to your latest helpful hint?  How about putting it right on the navigation bar throughout the site?

Because a blog is designed to be updated on a regular basis,  it can add ongoing freshness to your online presence.  It brings the aroma of fresh-baked goods right onto your site.  That’s attractive – people will go there to see what is new, and they will stay longer if they find news, thoughts, ideas or interactions when they get there.  Hiding your blog in the depths of your site is like having a storefront, and hiding in the back room with a “ring bell for service” sign out front.

Go stand in the middle of your shop, and interact with the people who come in.  Serve them your fresh goods with pride.

On that same note,  I am currently in domain-hosting purgatory, waiting for my blog to be united with the rest of my website.  Once everything transfers over, you – dear reader – will be the first to know.

I want to point out how useful and important it is to have a forum like Social Media Club for discussing strategies, tactics, “best practices”, smart solutions, slimy ones, product reviews, integration, aggregation, filtering and so on.

Go West, Young Marketer!
We’re at a juncture, it seems, in the social media “industry”.  The early adopters have cut a nice trail through the wilderness, and now the gold rush is on, with all the carpet-baggers, snake-oil salesmen, gurus, wide-eyed disciples and “best-kept secret” sellers jumping right in.    Or at least, that’s how the early adopters see many of the marketers that have appeared overnight on the major sites, especially Facebook and Twitter.

I’m a marketer, or a “connector” anyway, and my entry into this world was, frankly, because I followed the lead of other marketers.  In California, where Social Media Club started, the marketers were some of the first people to say “Hey, let’s meet and figure out some standards for how we work in helping our clients reach their customers using social media.”  They’ve been big advocates of the Social Media Club purpose.  And I am truly thankful, because the coder-ific early adopters are – to a certain extent – right.

LIONs and Tigers and Magpies?
Almost as soon as I landed in Twitter’s birdbath, I was asked if I wanted to “be a magpie” and sell 10% of my tweets (posts, or updates to the uninitiated) to people who want to pitch my followers.  Not long after that, I was told that I could get up to 20,000 “instant” followers by participating in some chain-letter-style Tweetergetter scheme,  if only I retweeted a certain little phrase.

For me, that crosses the boundary into unethical or ill-advised practice.  So does handing over your identity to a ghostwriting tweet – at least without disclosure that you are doing so.  But surely there are 100 wonderful, ethical ways to connect with people who want to buy stuff.  That’s why I’m excited about the Social Media Club.  I want a place to hash through these issues.  I want it to be local, as well as global.  I want the conversations to happen online and in person.   I want to learn, share, and connect.  And I want to take everything I learn and share it with business people, who are desperate to find better ways to listen to and serve their clients, more efficiently and cost-effectively than in traditional media.  (OK, the business people I want to work with are, anyway.  The rest won’t stay in business long anyway.)

So Kristie Wells and Chris Heuer, thank you for a great idea,  and for putting an excellent international framework together.  Rebecca Grant, thanks for being a terrific hostess and point-and-click facilitator.   Paul Holmes, thanks for grabbing my hand in this crazy crack-the-whip game of social media marketing.   Let’s all hold on tight and skate faster!

More Marketers Welcome
Oh, and if you are in communications, marketing, PR, social media, technology or just like this stuff, please join us in the David Strong building (room tba) the fourth Tuesday of each month.  We start promptly at 7 pm.  The coffee’s great.  The conversation even better.  And I really want the industry as a whole to get better, which means I don’t want to be the only marketer in the room.

Whose dorky idea was that??

I’ve tossed my land line, so I’m less likely to get those recorded announcements, but I suspect they have mostly gone to the Lousy Marketing Ideas graveyard anyway. Why were the recorded phone broadcasts so terrible, compared to getting ads in the newspaper, on TV and in the mail?

Here’s the reason: the telephone is an intimately interactive medium. It demands a speaker and a listener ON BOTH ENDS. Even when one side is carrying on the bulk of the conversation, it’s the job of the speaker to check in with the listener, who indicates their engagement with the “Yeah…uh huh” interlocution (now there’s a big linguistics word from my past) that we all come to expect on the phone. It’s why we tend to bristle at the automatic phone tree when we enter corporate telephone systems. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that if I want to do business with a machine, I’ll use my computer. If I’m on the phone, I would really like to talk to a real person.

And guess what we are discovering on the social media networks, particularly Twitter? It, too, is an interactive medium, where we expect conversation, or at least a sense that the person sending the updates and the tweets is a real person, as interested in what you have to say as in what they have to say to you.

So is there room in the social media universe for a “recorded announcement”? Heaven knows, you can even set these up in advance with tools like HootSuite and Tweet Later. These are very fine tools if you don’t want to hang out in the Twittersphere all day just to be visible. You can actually automate some of your communications while you are away, getting work done.

The answer is yes, there is room – BUT you have to be very careful how you use your automatic tweets (and updates – this applies to places like Facebook and LinkedIn, too). It’s better if you are sending a bit of news or a helpful hint that your followers might actually like to hear. You can schedule these ahead of time if you like, but please mix it up with real-time conversations with the people whom you find interesting, and vice versa. I try to spend a short burst of time in the morning, mid-day and in the evening for my Twitter conversations.

More important, don’t let an autoresponder be your first interaction with a new person in your Twitter network. I tried this for about a month, and got rid of it. It sends the wrong message, even if that message isn’t all about you. Mine said “Thanks for following me. I’ll follow you back, and I look forward to your tweets”. Innocuous enough, but I actually got replies of “Thank You!” when I announced that I was shutting it off.

Everybody wants to feel appreciated. Social Media is a place for that appreciation and engagement. It’s not for the “push” marketing message.

Does it seem like a ridiculous question?

Up until this past year, I’m sure the standard answer would have been, “My telephone is an essential business tool.  Social networking – you mean Facebook? MySpace?  They’re a total waste of time, and I don’t let my employees use them at work.”

How things change, and yet remain the same. Think back to the tv series of old, where the boss says “Miss Smith, take a letter.”  That directive comes from a time when telephones were seen as a less-than-concrete way to do business.  If the order wasn’t in writing, then how could you be sure it happened?  Right through the 50s and 60s, telephones weren’t an obvious feature of every employee’s desk.  If everyone had access to a phone, then how could an employer be sure that Fred in accounting wasn’t spending precious working hours talking to his girlfriend?

Eventually, the business case for telephones trumped any fears, grounded or not, about their potential for misuse at work.  And this is the stage we are at with the adoption of social media tools for business right now.

Business owners know that people are spending less time in front of the TV, or at least being captive to the ads, and more time in front of the computer screen.  And that screen time is, more often than not, tied in some way to the Internet and the many interactive ways that we use it.   It’s where we go when it’s time to get a movie or a restaurant recommendation.  We log on increasingly to file our tax returns, to look up information on our children’s schooling and our parents’ aging.   The internet is the place where we spend our social time and do a ton of shopping.  And increasingly, we are sharing that information with friends, followers and connections on social networking sites.   If social networking sites are where customers are hanging out, then you can bet that business people looking to build relationships with their current and potential clients are going to want to meet them at those hangouts.

Put that way, it seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it?  As important to business as a telephone? That day may well be here.  But using social networking sites efficiently for business is an art, much like the business use of a phone.  More on that in my next post.

“Sea Change” requires a name change
I’ve had this little blog since the end of November, and its existence has coincided with a fascinating sea change in the way I do business.  What started out as a vaguely self-absorbed exploration of my own life coming to terms with and even thriving with ADHD (yes, grown women can have it too) insisted on evolving into a place where I could talk about my business.  At the same time, I went from de facto employee with one major client and a couple of side projects to full-time business writer and PR and Marketing consultant.  In December, I thought this blog was going to be about the area of expertise where I’ve always had a sharp edge: getting your message out to the right people, at the right time, in the right language.

I had no idea that social media was going to become such a huge part of the picture. (See “Social Media: My Christmas Project Run Amok” for my initial thoughts as I dove into the pool).  But here I am at the beginning of March – and helping clients get a feel for social media has become as much a part of what I do as the actual writing and editing consults.

Time to take action
Then this morning on Twitter, one of my good buddies ADHDParenting (actually, Debra Sale Wendler) asked which pitch was more interesting: “Kids w ADHD 5 conditions under which child can pay attention. OR, 5 things that MUST happen B4 discipline works”  Forgive the formatting folks, she only has 140 characters to pose the question.

Well, give me the “5 Things That MUST happen” even better – “5 Things You Can Do”.  Why?  Because it’s information you can act on.  I’m always harping on about how “what X is” messages pale next to “what X does” messages.  And it’s time to apply that message to myself.

What X Does > What X Is
“The Message Maven” may be what I am.  Actually, I’m kinda tired of the term “maven” – so even that may need a facelift. You’re going to be more interested in what I do – even better, what I do for you, or what I wish we could all do a bit better.  And the answer to that is in one of my favourite literary quotations, from the novel Howard’s End, by EM Forster.

Only Connect.  That’s what we are aiming for each time we reach out to friends, potential clients, mentors, whoever.  It’s the bedrock philosophy behind everything that happens on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube and any number of other social media sites, blogs, bookmarking services and what-have-you on the Web.  It’s a second-person imperative, for you grammar geeks out there.  I’m asking myself and the whole world to do something, and something good: to touch people with our messages.  To affirm the community that we are a part of, online and off.

Thankfully, the URL and feed of this blog will stay the same, so I don’t have to rewire all the places that I feed this blog.  It’ll still show up on Facebook, LinkedIn, MetroCascade, and feeding to my Twitter Account through Twitterfeed.  Yes, if you want to turboboost your blog in the same way, I can help you…

I hope you like the new name, the new focus and the new energy that comes with it!

A good laugh with my meeting makes it so much better...

Alright, here’s a provocative post written some months back by a man whose tag line is “Relationships Through Social Media Marketing”, Jacob Morgan.

There Is No ROI from Social Media

Go read it in a new window, and come right back.  Or if you don’t have time for that – here’s the recap:  you can’t put a dollar value on the relationships you create in any number of online communities.  It’s a quality thing, not a quantity thing.

Clearly Morgan believes in Social Media Marketing, or he wouldn’t use that tag line right at the top of his blog.  But if I’m interpreting him correctly, his message is that you can create Facebook pages, upload videos to YouTube, recommend others in LinkedIn and tweet all day – and none of those things will result in a direct monetary transaction.

Fair enough.  There is no “buy now” button in any of these venues, and thank goodness.  I’ve always been a bit suspicious of the long, long “squeeze page” online that tries to talk you into a purchase at first glance.  This is a long-standing form of internet marketing that builds on the AIDA model: attention, interest, desire, action.  It’s all there in one marathon sales pitch, and in that formula, it really doesn’t matter whether you like the product maker/service provider or not.  It’s all about features and benefits – if you want the benefits badly enough, you may read to the bottom and hit the “buy now” button. The formula has made multi-millions online, and I’ve written a couple, myself.

Social media, on the other hand, embraces a longer sales cycle – one that’s built on people coming to know, like and trust you.  Isn’t this the strongest basis for any business/customer relationship?  The results are much more difficult to quantify, but that doesn’t mean you won’t see any.   It’s just more indirect, and more like the way most of us have always chosen who we do business with.  It’s who you know, and who you know that cares about you.

That’s the route that I want to take as I bring my services online.  If I have to track the circuitous route for each of my clients from Twitter follower to email correspondent to proposal writer to contract signer to happy customer to loyal advocate and referral source, so be it.  The cycle starts at relationship.  That’s a sales cycle I’m quite happy to track, even if it is more difficult to quantify!

1. Send follow-up social media package proposal, as requested, to client who won my Facebook Fan Page service
2. Finish communications plan for local client.
3. Email strategic partner about social media strategies for local tourism campaign
4. Make follow-up phone calls from networking meeting (there are around 6 of them!)
5. Talk to another strategic partner about writing services for his established internet marketing business
6. Publicize local “pilot” workshop on social media
7. Work some more on my own website
8. Publish first e-newsletter

There’s a mix of preparation, implementation and communication in all of that work, and it’s important to get the balance right.  I also hope to pass on the results of some of the research I’ve been doing in the off-hours.  So what can I do to stay productive and on top of the “social media” scene at the same time?  I can use some cool tools.  Here are a few of my favourites:

Mozilla Firefox Browser: This is one powerful browser, and I’ve customized it with some helpful plug-ins, including Shareaholic, which lets me bookmark, tweet, or post some of my findings to Facebook, as I find them.  Now I’m researching and communicating at the same time!

TweetDeck: Frankly, I couldn’t manage Twitter without this incredibly useful tool from Adobe.  Now that I’ve got a Twitter community of hundreds – and that’s actually modest compared to some users who have been around longer and working it harder – I need a way to sort my “tweeple” into groups, keep track of important conversations and keywords that have my attention, and basically see what I need to see all on one screen.

Ping.fm: When I really don’t have time to get sucked into the social media vortex, but still want to touch base with my networks, Ping is incredibly helpful.  Add all your social media sites here.  Write your status update once, and show up all over the place.

TweetLater: I’m still in “courtship” mode with this service – I tend to be an “in the moment” type of person when it comes to Twitter, but I can completely understand the usefulness of planning ahead.  You can share some of your favourite resources with the Twitter community while you are offline, and be seen by a broader range of people than your usual “early morning” crowd, if that’s when you tend to be online.  Heck, people have parcelled out their little nuggets of wisdom many days and weeks in advance.  If you’ve got good content, and people are giving you positive feedback, then it’s a good idea.

Another feature of TweetLater, and one I am still toying with, is it can automate your follow-backs – that is, when someone follows you, you can add them to your own “following” list.  The advantage of this function is that Twitter rewards reciprocity.  The more people you follow, the more they let follow you. (Some people say there’s a 2000 follower limit – in fact, that doesn’t apply if you’ve got no more than a 10% gap between who you follow and who is following you. ) My worry with this function, though, is that it does leave you open to some spammers and ‘bots who are increasingly present on the system.  I may have to eventually block some of these people, and much prefer manually following (good feeling!) to manually unfollowing (bad feeling!)

Those are four that I like – in fact, there are dozens – no, hundreds – of tools on the Web that help you optimize your time using social media. Another time I’ll look in my “favourites” file on TweetDeck and post some of the articles that list more of them.