social media equity Archives - Page 2 of 2 by Mark Murnahan

SEO and Social Media Reward: $5,000 for Introduction

Updated 13 June 2011 — This offer is re-opened through 30 June 2011.

I am going to give you an opportunity to pick up $5,000 just for making a simple introduction. This is not a hoax, and I really will put $5,000 in your sweaty palms for introducing me to “the right one”.

Great weather is coming, and I am pretty sure that most people can find a way to spend a surplus of $5,000 this spring. Cruise ships, sandy beaches, mortgage payments, utility bills, and many other amazing delights are right around the corner.

I hope that $5,000 will be worth a few minutes of your time to rack your brain, peel through your list of contacts, and think hard about whether you know this person I am seeking. Mostly, I hope that you will do it because I am a good fit for that acquaintance of yours, and because we deserve to meet each other.

So that you can have a better idea of who you are introducing, I offer you a link for more information about me, but you can come back to that part.

First, I will briefly explain why I am making this offer, what I offer, and who I am looking for. If you just want to skip to the details, click here.

I just reviewed the response to an engagement letter I sent out a couple days ago, and I almost wet myself with laughter and dismay all at once. I send out what seems like a squillion responses to companies that contact me hoping to benefit from my work, but this one was different. It was for a company that was referred to my services by somebody who was referred to my services. Somewhere along the line, it seems that I have picked up a reputation for what I do. This still does not mean that everybody I meet has a brain in their head, a dollar in their bank, or a sincere desire to improve their business.

As I have seen many times before, the recipient of my engagement letter hit me back with something resembling “Duh, wut duh ya mean … ya want us tuh pay fur it?” This was not their exact words, but that was my interpretation. To say the least, I am not very tolerant of cheapskates, or people who talk about action more than actually taking action.

It was after this response that I seriously realized that I had hit the wall at the end of my patience for dealing with this equivalent of The Abominable Snowman on Looney Tunes (video reference). As a husband and father of three, I am all grown up and reasonably mature, but if I must tolerate another of these abominable snowmen who insist I am a rabbit, I will likely use much stronger language than good old Daffy Duck.

Yes, I am a snarky guy, and I prefer to send a good booger from your nose to your computer screen than to make this sound too serious. After all, I am trying to put 5,000 bucks in your pocket, and that should be fun!

In this case, I am going to spell something out in sobering terms. I love the work I do. I help companies to be successful with their online marketing. It is an awesome feeling to see companies succeed. However, I must say this in true Murnahan fashion: “Business is great if not for all the damn customers.” Is that crazy? Perhaps, but it is very true. I am inundated by requests each day to offer my services to build an uncommitted company’s success for a fraction of what my work is worth.

The size of the company doesn’t matter. Building bigger and more profitable companies is my job. Even a small company with a focused desire for business growth can be extremely successful with a good strategy and a decisive marketing approach.

I broke my magic wand a long time ago. So, these days I build companies with other tools like market research, strategy, customer modeling, and well-crafted ideas to help companies look, smell, and feel like sex, bacon, and other things people crave. Yes, you read that correctly. In layman’s terms, my job is to make companies more like sex and bacon. You know what I mean, the things that people like.

That is how companies become popular. It improves their search engine rankings because all of the sudden the whole world wants to link to their website. Understanding their best value proposition and knowing the customers who want their “sex and bacon” improves their social media reach, and response rates. When it all comes together, it makes a lot of other great things happen for a company, including much higher profit.

Seeking a Frog Hair in a Fiberglass Factory

Although I am a very experienced and creative marketing guy, finding the best clients is like searching for a frog hair in a fiberglass factory. I sort through a lot of people rubbing their lamp and hoping for a genie, but a much smaller number of people are ready and able to put a signed check in my hand. They still want their fill of that sexy bacony stuff that comes when I rub a couple brain cells together, but that comes with money.

I have said it many times, and even blogged that “When I go to hell, they will have me selling SEO“. I say that, because I simply do not enjoy the selling process. Sure, you can search Google for How to Sell SEO and find me right up top, but the truth is that I love the work, and not the selling. This is why I am seeking an ongoing project, rather than the short-sighted marketing that many people ask for.

To make this fun for both of us, I am offering you a $5,000 reward to help me find that one special “frog hair in the fiberglass factory”. I want the one who wants the benefits that a great SEO and social media marketing guy can provide.

Claim Your $5,000 Social Media Reward!

The details are easy: If you introduce me to my special someone who is ready to take their marketing to a new level of success with a minimum six month engagement of my SEO and social media marketing services, you get the money.

This could be either contract work, or in-house, working directly for the company. You can introduce me by email, telephone, blog about it, tweet about it, direct them to my resume, or whatever you like. You only have to be the one who brings us together, and the money is yours. I just need to know that you are the actual person who introduced us, so I welcome you to contact me.

When do you get the money? I am sure you were thinking that, right? I will pay the $5,000 reward within ten days of my acceptance of a paid contract, or within 30 days of joining with a company full-time.

This is a limited offer! This is limited to just one … my special one. I don’t take on a lot of clients, and if somebody wants me enough to make me their Marketing Director, that is clearly a one-time offer. I am also limiting it in time, so stop dilly-dallying and claim your five grand!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Least Expensive Hour in Social Media: Study Time!

Have you ever wondered what is standing between you and a more successful social media marketing campaign? I am not going to read your tea leaves or make a bunch of speculation here, but I will tell you where a lot of people fail miserably.

I want to relate this to something that should get your attention, and that is cost. Have you ever considered the cost of social media marketing? We can break this down in many various ways, but the fact is that social media will have a cost, whether you take action or not.

If you don’t take action with social media, it will cost you lost opportunities and dwindling market share, and that is usually the biggest cost of all. You probably understand this, or you would not be reading my “SEO and Social Media Marketing Blog”. So, I am going to take a big leap here, and assume that you intend to take action. Maybe you are already taking action, and in that case, you probably want to do it even better.

Many business people choose to spend more time than money in their social media marketing efforts. I guess they feel like the cost of time is less than the cost of money. The fear of monetary failure hits a lot of people harder than the fear of lost time.

Since your time and money are both valuable to you, I want to help you discover the least expensive hour in social media. That hour is the one spent taking in knowledge. No, not just seeking knowledge, but finding it and absorbing it. That means you will need to prepare yourself to fight the boredom and be ready to work hard at learning from others’ work. It means it is time to go back to school and treat it seriously. Just like most schooling, you will not be interested in everything you need to learn in order to be successful, but it is still there for your benefit.

I may never understand why so many people try hard to become a social media expert, but it is the way of today. I can’t fight that, and I don’t try to. I can’t understand a father studying dentistry to fix his kids’ teeth, either, but if I had a dentistry school, you can bet I would try to help them.

The Cost of Social Media: Time and Money

When you take action with social media, it will cost you time and money. You can weigh them out and spend more of one or the other, but in business, nothing comes from nothing. Regardless what you may have read somewhere on a marketing blog, success does not just come out of nowhere. Success in business comes from taking action. Not just that, it comes from taking well-calculated action.

That means you will need knowledge to balance your expenditures of time and money. Good, reliable, factual, knowledge will take the edge off, regardless how you reconcile your time and money dilemma. Think of it like a shot of whiskey before the surgeon starts cutting.

Unless you are some kind of gifted alien from another planet, or simply do not care about your business, time and money have heavy influence in your decisions. Time and money are both very precious resources to a business, and so they must be allocated with diligence.

Stop Chasing Wild Geese!

Now consider that since you don’t know it all (none of us do … even Google), knowledge is an important building block. It is why we tell our kids to go to school, and it is how we begin our careers. It is hard to dispute the value of good information, but yet, it is easy to neglect it. The Internet also makes it extremely easy to lose your attention and assume that maybe there is something even better “over there” behind the next flashy, blinky, brightly colored link.

Maybe there is something better over there, but it is even more common that it is another “wild goose chase” that will send you chasing in circles. This makes it more important than ever that once you find good and reliable resources, you hold on to them and use them and stop the goose chasing.

What is the cost of sitting in front of your computer learning? Sure, you can waste a whole lot of time. There are some astonishing statistics on how much time people waste with social media. For example, did you know that Zynga, the company that produced Farmville and Mafia Wars was recently valued at over ten billion dollars? Seriously, let’s look at that valuation in numerical format … $10,000,000,000! That says a lot about the time spent in social media websites. If you are in it to help your business, avoiding the time-wasting, and finding good resources will be essential. Ten Billion … seriously, can you believe how much time people are spending playing games? That probably includes some of your competitors, so while they cultivate their Farmville farm, you should be studying!

If you are concerned about wasting time, as I am, I hope that you will take a serious and sincere approach to this. It is easy to get caught up with the mystique and the unrealistic hype of the Internet, but if you take it seriously as a business, the results can be astonishing.

The whole thought of this occurred to me when I read and commented on a friend’s blog. My friend, Mark Harai wrote an article titled “Social Media Tire Kickers – Dead on Arrival“. It reminded me of things I tell people when they ask me about my work in social media. I will share a portion of my comment, but you may read the rest on Mark’s blog.

“I tried the approach of common sense, and appealing to a brain in their heads, but it is tough for people to jump over their own barriers. Ages ago, I quit trying to sell the SEO and social media marketing services that I provide (I still sell the services … I just quit “trying”). I found that many people worry about the cost more than they consider the return, and fears devastate their business hopes.

I often suggest to potential clients that if they don’t have enough desire to build their business to spend an hour or more in my blog archive to understand the benefits of my work, they are not ready.”

Within the context of Mark’s article and with the complete comment, I think it makes sense how much I really believe in sharing ideas and helping people create value for their business. I don’t always put it in nice and comfortable terms, but you can bet that I am very dedicated to sharing good information.

There are a lot of others out there who adhere to similar values, and I want to share a short list of them with you. If you truly want to enjoy your least expensive hour in social media, do yourself a favor and spend an hour in the archives of each of the blogs listed below. I am just going to get you started with a small selection of people I respect and trust. I have a longer list, but I would like to see yours. Who do you pay attention to, and who do you think belongs on a list of good thinkers who can help progress your efforts rather than distract you? Add your comment with a link to your favorite social media thinkers who inspire you.

I included a link to the latest article from each of these blogs, but don’t assume their latest is their greatest. Take some time to learn from them and use the knowledge they have worked hard to produce for you.

I have said it before that a small amount of good information is worth a lot more than the whole Internet’s worth of bad information. Once you get the good stuff, it is likely that your money and your time will both come into a much greater balance. I hope that you will spend some time in my blog archive as well. I have written about an extensive list of topics relating to search engine optimization, social media, and other marketing issues. They may not all interest you or inspire you, but I can say without a doubt that if you take it seriously, your time will not be wasted. I am confident that you will find useful information that you can implement to benefit your business.

Some of the best lessons in social media are the ones which inspire your own thinking and your unique adaptations to their successes. When you find those, you will be far closer to your own success.

Once more, here is the link to my archive. Don’t assume it was all written just for the sake of my own ego. It is there to be helpful.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Building Equity in Social Media vs. Interruption Marketing

Interruption Marketing vs. Social Media

I know this may seem impossible in 2011, but I discover many companies that do not yet fully appreciate the value of social media and the long-term equity it can build for their business.

A lot of companies understand the value of their brand being visible in many places online, and some will understand the value of those people who help to grow its visibility. Only a relatively few actually look forward beyond the horizon to understand the greater value that social media represents over an extended time.

When I hear people say things like “we just don’t have time for all of that” or worse, “we don’t have the staff for that”, it always leaves me shaking my head. It reminds me why only a small percentage of businesses account for the lion’s share of their market. It is explained well by Joseph Juran’s well documented “Pareto Principle” named for Vilfredo Pareto. Many people know the Pareto Principle as the 80/20 Rule.

Consider the Interruption of Marketing

Think as a consumer for a moment, and consider the way you shut down to marketing. Think about how your brain just goes in another direction when companies interrupt you with their marketing and try to sell you stuff. We are each inundated by a constant barrage of commercial information about everything from A to Z in our daily lives. This is why we fast-forward through commercials on television, we screen our telephone calls, and we are seasoned to ignore advertisements on websites.

Interruption Marketing Train Coming Through

Unless you are really tired and vulnerable, you probably don’t stay tuned to that late night infomercial about something you really never knew you needed. Although, I can almost bet that you can remember a time when you thought “why in the hell am I still watching this?” Perhaps you can even remember thinking “Holy crap … I was about three seconds from picking up the phone to buy one of those” or even “Damn, I bought this … why did I buy this?!” It happens, and we each have our weaknesses, but let’s face it, we are far better adapted to turning away from all the hype. Otherwise, if marketers had their way, you would own one of everything, and you would have worthless crap in every nook and cranny, and stacked to your ceiling.

For the most part, we consumers make efforts to avoid these awkward moments which compel us to buy things. Why? Maybe it is just because, deep down, we hate saying “no”. If we can avoid the pitch, we can avoid wanting something, and thus, avoid saying “no” to our own urges, and the urges of those squillion salespeople out there.

Maybe you are different, and you enjoy that marketing interruption, but in that case, you are not like most people. I am addressing most people.

Marketing Got Sneakier With Social Media

Since there was so much information out there interrupting our days and nights, as a collective group, consumers became more cautious. We decided to make companies earn our business. Of course, the economy of the past few years has helped this along faster than ever. The timing was perfect for social media marketing to explode like a shot from a gun.

Maybe you like it, or maybe you don’t, but let’s face it, marketing got a whole lot sneakier. It became more targeted, and marketers became better spies. Effective marketing today utilizes more information, better strategies, and just a bit of James Bond 007-style of thinking.

Marketing Became Targeted and Marketers Became Better Spies

As consumers, we became more cautious and protective of ourselves. We got really smart and created clever ways to filter our television ad consumption, filter our email, and filter our social media.

In order to effectively reach us consumers, marketers have been forced to provide a greater value proposition. This is a hard concept for many companies to grasp. Today’s successful companies are giving before they take, and the ones giving the most are receiving the most.

Today, people are more likely than ever to make purchasing decisions based on trust, reputation, and a good old fashioned sense that the company gives a damn about us. We have come to expect it, and whether you feel this way yet or not, it is a sweeping trend. People want to do business with people, and with brands represented by people. The world is building relationships with brands, and those relationships are worth money … a lot of money. Missing this fact is a very costly mistake.

You can consider it sneaky, or you can consider it a welcomed gift, but brands are in our lives to stay. We will always need to buy things, and we buy from the companies and the people we feel good about. When the brand is there to help us with information, and with a legitimate desire to help us make good decisions, they win, and we buy.

Shortsighted Brands Damage Their Social Media Future

A huge obstacle which gets in the way of social media marketing is time. Companies want everything, and they want it right now. It is understandable, but when companies forget the importance and value of longevity, and when they feel the breath of their competitors on the back of their neck, they can be quite irrational.

Smart Companies Have a Social Media Vision

Smart companies look far ahead into the future. Rather than take a reactive and panicked approach to a weak quarterly report, they work with an eye toward longer goals. Strong companies can look farther ahead, and that is why they succeed farther into the future. Applying this to social media marketing means doing business the right way, and not simply with the urgency of trying to force a brand down the consumer’s throat. This means doing business on the customer’s terms and timelines, and not only in a one-way company-centric method of the past. Consumers respect companies for this, and they return with even more consumers following closely behind them.

What About Social Media Marketing Equity?

I know that for some people, it is easy to look at social media as a bunch of time-wasting crazy people who believe that somehow the world’s consumers will come flocking to their front door just by using a nice, soft approach and patting everybody on the butt with nice words. Well, maybe yes, and maybe no, but there is a very significant value in a good reputation. Reputations do not just happen … they are built. It takes a lot of effort to build a good reputation, and it takes both words, and deeds.

Anybody in business today should understand the value of word of mouth. What people say about a company, whether good or bad, forms consumer’s perceptions of a brand. More than ever before, they are not just picking up the telephone and talking to a friend, or talking about companies at a lunch meeting. They are talking about them in large groups such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and etcetera.

Whether the perception is good or bad, they will be talking. Either outcome cannot be controlled by a company, but when a company is not involved in their own brand message, they are missing huge opportunities. Even a negative statement made in social media is an opportunity to make things better with customers, and other potential customers who are silently watching.

People really do notice what companies are doing online. I realize that for a lot of companies, this just seems impossible, and they do not have a good grasp on how to track their reputation. Just because a company does not really “get it” does not keep them out of trouble. This would be about as silly as trying to talk your way out of a speeding ticket just because you didn’t read the speed limit sign. It just doesn’t work that way.

If you feel a bit lost about the value of social media, it is time to read the signs.

I will leave you with a video which I believe makes some very good points. I believe that this video titled “The Thank You Economy: How Business Must Adapt to Social Media” is well worth your time and consideration.

If you feel like you still have more to learn, please subscribe to my blog, and as always, feel free to email me or ring me on the phone. I am always happy to hear from readers and to brainstorm.

I hope that you have found this useful, and I would really appreciate your comments.

Photo Credits:
Skyline photo by Hackfish via Wikipedia
Train Crossing photo by Paul Heaberlin via Flickr

Podcast: Play in new window | Download