Social Media Marketing Archives - Page 9 of 24 by Mark Murnahan

They Pay for Awesomeness, and Nothing Less!

People ask me all the time, for ideas about how they can make their business better, stronger, and more profitable. They want to know what will convince more people to spend hard-earned money with their company.

I usually have some useful tips for them. I love to help, and I enjoy the look on their faces when they say “Why didn’t we ever think of that?” It is even more adorable when they call me to tell me that they implemented the tip and it is working for them.

It feels great to be helpful, and it keeps me sharp with new ideas. It is also why I write this blog, and why you see my direct phone line at the top of every blog post with the statement “I am always ready for a brainstorm. Call me at *REDACTED DUE TO AGING WEBSITE*.”

One of my best tips, in a single word, is “Awesomeness”. I will explain this, and how you can create greater awesomeness for your customers.

Being Helpful Grows Awesomeness!

I want to explain a principle that may seem scary to some people, but it is one which has served me very well in life, and in business. It requires patience and practice, but it has never failed me in the long-term. In order to explain it best, I will use my own experience. I could explain it in some fancy theoretical terms, but this comes from real life … my real everyday work.

It is my job to provide answers for improving companies and making them more marketable. I do a lot of my work free of charge. Well, at least I try very hard to blog about it in ways that people can use it. I’d call that work, so yes, I do a lot of my work for free.

Since I only work with a very small number of clients, and because a company has to be pretty serious about their marketing to hire my services, I make many efforts to help others without digging into their pockets. Don’t worry, it is not some kind of Jedi mind trick (video reference), and I am not selling something here. Being helpful gives me good karma, mojo, luck, or whatever you want to call it.

Being helpful is a principle that is used in abundance by successful companies, and successful people. You really don’t have to look around very hard to see this in action. It is a principle that is even more important when applied to the Internet, and I’ll tell you why. When it comes to Internet dealings, people have a very strong filter for noise. I wrote about this a while back, in an article titled “Will Your Social Media Noise Withstand 2011 Filtering?” They are also commonly very skeptical. There is a lot of “crap” on the Internet to overcome, as a consumer.

Many companies use blogs and other social media tools to be more helpful and interesting to their potential market. When they provide useful information, it brings attention to their brand. It is a means to express a company’s awesomeness and to put their helpfulness to work, and their company culture on the front line. There are many good reasons for companies to have a blog, in fact, I can offer you 10 really good reasons to blog.

I could stop right here, but I just told you this as a preface for the real point of this article. You can stop here, add your comments, tweet it, Facebook it, blog about it, and etcetera, but there is more! Yes, it is lengthy, but that is why there is a play button on my blog (at the top). If you don’t have time to read it, at least care enough about your business to push play and listen.

What Do They Pay For? That’s Right … Awesomeness!

The principle of being helpful is only one piece of success, but a huge piece that a lot of companies totally neglect. Somebody has to pay for all of that helpfulness, or the company would go broke. So, a lot of companies are left with a question of who will pay for that? Can you believe it? Companies actually treat it as a “dilemma” of whether it is a good idea for them to be helpful. This is why I find that even when they are helpful, they seldom make it to “awesome” status.

The reason I mentioned this principle of being helpful is because I want you to pay attention without thinking I am here to sell you something. Call it a bonus, and whatever you do, please try to implement that tip. Be helpful … It is for your own benefit!

Now I am going to tell you what people actually pay me for, and explain ways you can benefit from it without having to pay me. Come to think of it, this may not go just right, but I am pretty sure I am not obsolete quite yet. In any case, I want you to use this for your own gain.

This May Not Be Awesome, But it is Helpful!

As a marketing guy, a huge amount of my work is not focused on helping companies with the obvious marketing task of getting their name in front of more people. Does that sound strange? It probably sounds totally crazy to a lot of people. In fact, you may be wondering, “Where in the heck do you find these idiots who pay you, Murnahan?” Yes, I am paid by aliens from another planet … but they are very successful Zarkmobians from Planet Narburloid.

It is true, though, because a significant amount of my work involves making them more marketable. That means digging into who they are, as a company. They pay me to develop a strong understanding of who they are, and to uncover what makes them more like sex, bacon, and other things people love. My job is to get a solid grasp on their “awesomeness” by viewing the culture of the company from a unique perspective. With this, it is my responsibility to create their best marketing strategy.

You can get a better picture of your awesomeness by talking to people. Ask people you respect. Ask people you don’t respect. Ask people who buy from you. Ask people who don’t buy from you. Ask without a word, by researching your market, and uncovering the real forces that drive your market. Ask a lot of questions, and pay careful attention to the answers. This will help you to discover your best customers!

Discovering the Model Customer

Once I know a company’s best assets (their awesomeness), I can begin the research to build a perfect model of their customers. Knowing the right audience is extremely important, especially if you want a return on your marketing investment. I wrote about this a couple times recently, and I hope you read those articles. I will add some links below, but if you are not a subscriber, do it now … it is free. I will say it again, though … ask a lot of questions, and pay attention to the answers. Below are some links to help you with your customer modeling, but note that they will only help you if you use them!

How Does the Company Fit Into the Market?

After the ideal customer models are in place, I can accurately direct my clients as to how they fit into their marketplace. Then, I can also provide steps to better adapt to their market. This is when the real awesomeness is unleashed. It is completely different for every company, in every industry.

If you do not know your competition, you probably don’t know your market very well. You need to know your market before you can even begin to get ahead. If you learn the forces working against you, it will be a whole lot easier to overcome them.

Spend some time knowing your market, including your competition. Most companies do a terrible job of this, so it is like low hanging fruit for you. Pick it!

Producing Awesome is Not Easy!

Most companies simply cannot see their business clearly from a marketability standpoint, and it becomes their Achilles heel. This destroys many companies.

Even when they think they have a good grasp on their “awesomeness”, most companies do not express it very well. I have said a lot about good reasons to blog, and good uses for social media. None of it centers on the use of destructive interruption marketing.

The challenge here is to present your company in a way that it is appealing to the customer, based on what they want, instead of just what the company wants.

I return to the principle of being useful. Most companies, including your competitors, will not have the required patience to be useful and give their customers a reason to buy from them. Many will just hope to flash a sale price and scream their selling message, but only a relatively few will put aside the selling enough to understand what will inspire buying.

Most companies (yes, most) will choose to skip the important research. It is not easy work, and it bores a lot of people to tears. It becomes too much hassle to actually build their understanding of the customer. For a lot of people, it would be cruel and unusual punishment just to finish reading this article, not to mention actually implementing the suggestions.

Here is where the punishment really pays off: If you understand your customers’ motivations to buy, and address it properly, they will tell each other. Your job becomes a lot easier.

Delivering Awesomeness to The People

Once the marketability factors are perfectly in place, it is a whole lot easier to deliver it to the people. Delivering something marketable to the people is simple! Have you seen how many amazing tools there are for delivering a good message to people? Just think of the first ones that come to mind. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, blogs … and the list goes on.

You want some awesome? Check this out! Here is some unsuspecting awesomeness for you. They didn’t seem all that amazing to me at first, but you would probably never believe me if I told you how many times these made my phone ring. These are just a couple of many examples, but the articles below make a good point.

How To Become Popular on Twitter Without Actually Being Useful

Social Media and The Absurdity of Implied Reciprocity

So you must be asking, “How did these make the phone ring?” It was because those little pieces of awesomeness made people think. They made people laugh. They compelled people to share them with others, and they created a squillion new links to my blog. Bonus Points: They were also extremely relevant to my industry.

Those links enhance my SEO (search engine optimization), and reflect credibility to search engines by showing popularity. That credibility helps everything else I write about to rank higher in search engines. That is how SEO works! This matters far more than the mechanical approach to SEO. The trick is to be awesome as often as possible, or at least as a high percentage of your efforts.

Are you getting it yet? A little bit of awesome carries a long way. I don’t make “awesome” happen every time, and you will not either. I know when it is needed, how to do it, and why it matters. That comes with practice, so start practicing!

How much more can I say? I gave you a lot of good links within this article, and I did not include a single one to waste your time. I just gave you tools to learn and implement excellent marketing. I hope I have encouraged you to take the same approach of researching your market and to provide value to your potential customers.

I suggest that you give in order to receive. As an example that I mean what I say, I am giving $5,000 just to receive an introduction to somebody interested in paying for my services. That pretty well covers the “awesome” and the “helpful” in my book.

Of course, companies pay me for a lot more than what I included here. If you have the time to exercise your patience, and put some practice to use, you will find a whole lot more free assistance in my blog archive. I do it to be useful, and that works for me. I believe it will work for you as well.

I will allow you this moment to practice being helpful and awesome. This is your chance to add your helpful comment, and share how you apply these principles, or how you feel you could do better. If you want to get outrageously helpful, give this a tweet, a Facebook like, a stumble, a digg, or whatever it is that you do to share helpful things with others.

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Target Your Marketing and Love Your Customers Again

Do you sell something that has a potential market of “everyone”? Maybe you sell widgets, doodads, or gadgets that everybody in their right mind should own. If you treat your marketing that way, you are probably pretty frustrated.

I learned this the hard way, many years ago, by thinking that “everybody” was my target market. I remember when I sought out my market with thoughts like “Who wouldn’t buy my stuff? They must be crazy if they don’t buy!” Then I parked my bicycle and quit my paper route.

I learned what it meant to target my marketing. I stopped wasting time and money trying to reach everybody with a good reason to buy my stuff. The result was that I sold a lot more stuff.

When I stopped viewing everybody as a potential customer, I also stopped seeing them all as the “deadbeats” who wore me down and just wouldn’t buy. I started loving them more each day, and it turned out that my business grew massively.

Carefully conceived targeted marketing is a huge factor of success in a business. I don’t just mean targeting your market for every customer who will buy, either. I mean targeting your market for the customers you want, and who will help your business to grow.

I want to help you to avoid this common oversight, because it is in the top five most costly business errors. It runs close behind killing a hooker (and getting caught), or naming your child Bernie Madoff.

If you try to market something by believing your ideal target market is “everybody”, it is like hunting elephants in a termite mound. You will find a lot of termites there, but very few elephants. Many people only believe this after a “less-than-ideal” profit and loss statement proves it to them.

Marketing to Morons, Idiots, and Fools

Sure, I still think that most people are just totally insane if they don’t write me a check, give me their credit card, or provide me the passwords to their massive offshore bank account. They should at least send me a box of cigars and a bottle of Bourbon to butter me up. I mean, after all, I know it is mathematically factual that I sell something which returns more money than its cost. What kind of moron can’t see that?

Let me tell you something you you probably already know. There are a whole bunch of crazy, “idiots, morons, and fools” out there who will not buy what you sell. Even if you are selling the cure for cancer, free money, or a magical 24 hour orgasm, it will not sell itself. It will also not sell to “everybody”. Marketing to “everybody” as a prospective buyer would not even be a wise marketing approach if Coca Cola, McDonald’s, and Microsoft merged.

When you consider it closely, maybe they are not all such idiots, morons and fools. Instead, maybe it is your lack of targeted marketing, using data-driven customer modeling and calculated market segmentation.

Targeted marketing is exactly why I don’t write this blog for idiots, morons, and fools. I write it for people like you, who will appreciate good marketing ideas, pass them along to others, and add to the conversation with your comments. Actually, I don’t rely on the blog comments so much, because my target audience is pretty shy, but they do share a lot.

Target Market Segmentation Challenge

My challenge to you is to take the time and effort to segment your market more carefully. Start thinking in terms of demographics, psychographics, geographics, and who your best customers really are. What spins their fan, and what can you do to make your brand more like sex, bacon, and other things they love? Where will you reach them, and what will inspire them? Use what you know, expand what you know, and get creative with your marketing.

Targeted marketing seems very foreign to many people, but the good news is that this includes your competition. Just like everybody is not a customer, everybody is not a marketing genius either. Understanding a market requires marketing talent, which comes with practice, accurate data, and the right set of marketing tools. Unless you are willing to hire a professional, you will need to practice, and practice a lot.

I think of it like a trip to the gun range. Sure, I like to bring a lot of ammunition, but it is even more important to use the right gun, and learn how to aim it well. A sniper rifle is best, but many people fear that level of commitment to their marketing. So it is best to at least learn how to aim what you have.

A Lot of Ammunition is Good, But Sharper Aim is Better!

Practice Targeting Your Market

Maybe you believed that optimizing your marketing reach would be easy in the beginning, but you surely know better by now. Look at your market penetration and consider these questions:

Are getting all you can (or at least all you want)?
Are you getting huge buyout offers?
Are you expanding your company at astonishing rates that would make Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg blush?

If your answers are “no”, then you need more practice to hone your skills. It will not kill you, and in the off chance it does, it was nice knowing you. If you are not afraid of dying, keep reading for thoughtful encouragement.

Practice your creative thinking. Practice your analytical thinking. Figure out who wants what you have, and what they will respond to favorably. Don’t try to reach them all. I know that it is hard to overlook all of those potential customers, but you will reach a whole lot more of them if your marketing is targeted appropriately.

If growing your business really matters to you, be ready to lose some sleep for it. Perfect customer modeling takes a lot of marketing talent and creativity. These are things you can improve, with enough effort.

Back to the gun analogy: You can make a lot of noise and scatter a lot of lead with a 12 gauge shotgun. It is particularly good for scaring your customers away, but not very good for hitting them in the heart, where you want your brand to penetrate. When you hit your market in the heart, you will find a lot more love flowing in both directions.

Shotgun Marketing Scares More Birds Away

If you don’t have the time or skill to become a true marksman, it is best to either rework your schedule to develop your abilities, or find a good hired gun.

I will part with some articles related to targeted marketing. There are more in my blog archive, and more yet to come. Check them out and subscribe for more bits of marketing brain food coming soon.

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Ray Skillman, Indianapolis Car Dealer Review: Bad Social Media and SEO

If you are marketing something online, give me a moment to show you how to screw it all up. Since I know a lot of people shudder at all the sacrifices associated with marketing done well, I want to show you an example of how badly it can go wrong if you succumb to being shortsighted and misinformed.

This exemplifies so much of what is wrong with today’s Internet, and why Google keeps splitting skulls on worthless website owners. It shows a downward spiral of desperation of a car dealer, and a trend that is so widely followed in other businesses that it relieves me of wondering why companies suffer from dwindling market share.

This really should open your eyes if you are trying to take the quick and easy road to your SEO (search engine optimization) and social media marketing. If this example does not show the pitfalls of shortcuts and the benefits of playing by the rules, nothing will. I know that you will probably not finish reading this, but then, that is exactly the problem … shortcuts are popular. I made an audio version, in case that will help.

In this case, it involves a car dealership in Indianapolis, Indiana that operates by the name Ray Skillman. For all I know, this fella may be a delightful car dealer. He may even be the kind of guy I would personally like, enough to buy a whole fleet of cars. In fact, his story sounds really great, but it seems that this guy has a reckless streak of delegating his business future.

On the surface, it appears that whomever is making their marketing decisions has chosen to believe an “easy money” approach to SEO and social media, or otherwise perhaps just wants to damage the company deliberately. My guess is that they simply believed a good pitch of SEO lies from a bad search engine optimizer, instead of using diligence. I could make guesses all day long, but I want you to give you what I know about the Ray Skillman auto dealerships, and help you to figure this one out.

I previously wrote about the high level of absurdity of car dealers using social media, and it really is a worthwhile read. This Ray Skillman Auto Group seems to be trying to set the bar at an all new low. Low enough that it seems they are quickly dropping off the net, despite all of their frantic actions.

Ray Skillman Dropping Off the ‘Net?

Based on statistical data, it appears that Ray Skillman Auto Group has messed up bad enough to get virtually slaughtered online. It was bad enough for it to hit my RADAR, and it gave me adequate material to send a warning slap. I will tell you why, but better yet, I will tell you just how badly they are ripping themselves a virtual new orifice when it comes to website traffic, and future search engine rankings. It will be even more obvious as they endure the effects of Google’s Farmer Update of late February 2011, just in time for the car industry’s busy spring and summer sales seasons. Google’s “Farmer Update” was designed to wipe out website farms, and this one will probably yield some pretty bad crops from Google.

Before I show you the company’s new orifice, let me explain that they seem to actually want to reach the auto buying market of the Indianapolis area. Although they are very misguided, I think they comprehend the importance of the Internet for their business, just like you. In fact, it only took me a moment to find that they have a unique domain name for each of the entities as follows:

Ray Skillman Auto Group
Ray Skillman Ford
Ray Skillman Chevrolet
Ray Skillman Buick
Ray Skillman Northeast Buick GMC
Ray Skillman Buick GMC
Ray Skillman GMC
Ray Skillman Classic Cars
Ray Skillman Collision Center
Ray Skillman Hyundai
Ray Skillman Southside Hyundai
Ray Skillman Hyundai West
Ray Skillman Kia
Ray Skillman Auto Center
Ray Skillman Shadeland
Ray Skillman Kia West
Ray Skillman Mazda
Ray Skillman Northeast Mazda
Ray Skillman Mazda West
Ray Skillman Mitsubishi
Ray Skillman Suzuki
Ray Skillman Buy Here Pay Here

Is Ray Skillman Playing Too Much Defensive SEO?

I understand the importance of “defensive SEO”. Heck, my examples in this area are the subject of case studies. Ranking for your own brand name, in multiplicity, is important. Nobody wants to become a “Suture Express” case (yeah, Google it if you are not sure what I mean). The problem here is that it seems they are using frantic tactics for defense, and abysmal strategy.

There is little or no tangible value for the consumer being expressed in their visible efforts. Even their “Happy St. Patrick’s Day” update to the 55 fans of their Facebook page was just another sales pitch to chime in with “It’s going to be a beautiful day… a perfect day to come out and look around!” They should really take the time to read this article about Facebook marketing titled “Facebook Marketing: Pages, Customer Modeling, Promoting, and Awesomeness“. Their Twitter usage is just as bad, too. They are still trying to use interruption marketing rather than building equity in social media.

So, Skillman, do you want me to have a happy holiday, or do you want me to come out and have a crappy time with a pushy car salesman? Don’t tell me your salesmen are not pushy, either. When I get spammed by you from The Philippines, a logical assumption is that it is in your company culture.

Skillman Auto Group and The Philippines?

My introduction to Skillman was in a spammy comment on my blog. The comment originated in Makati, The Philippines.

The commenter whipped out a blurb of horrible English to tout the value of social media for car dealers. They claimed to have shopped at a dealership in Indianapolis, Indiana, so I thought that was a kind of long trip from Makati, The Philippines just to buy a car.

Not only did they shop for a car thousands of miles away, they used a URL from Ray Skillman’s website as their own URL in the commenter profile. They must be a big fan, right? Otherwise, the comment seems a bit fishy? Well, I guess maybe they swam from The Philippines to go car shopping and they picked up a little fishiness along the way.

Sure enough, I was right … that is a really long trip! Check it out on Google Maps and see for yourself.

View Larger Map

Look, if this guy is pulling in customers from clear across the Pacific Ocean to buy a car, and use his website address when they comment on blog articles about auto dealer social media marketing, more power to him. According to what I see from his dwindling SEO and social media results, this is not likely the case. Instead, it looks like a cheap and easy way to get penalized by Google and other search engines, and to annoy people with more spam (as if we don’t already have enough). Let’s also not forget that a blog is social media, and social media is often very unkind to spammers.

Here is a quote from Google Webmaster Central about using comment spam as part of a strategy. Yes, this is actually in Google’s words:

“Comment spammers are often trying to improve their site’s organic search ranking by creating dubious inbound links to their site. Google has an understanding of the link graph of the web, and has algorithmic ways of discovering those alterations and tackling them.”

Here is a link to the full article: “Hard facts about comment spam”

As long as Skillman is actively offending people with their social media efforts with pitchy crap and spamming blog comments, there is no wonder why they are so busy playing defense with their SEO efforts.

Ray Skillman Auto Dealership Websites Sinking in The Pacific

Let me share what I discovered when I looked at just a couple of third-party resources for Ray Skillman’s dealership websites. I will show you results from Alexa.com and WebsiteGrader.com. I chose these, because they are well known measures of websites, and they are easy for people to understand the results.

What Does Alexa.com Say About Ray Skillman Dealerships?

Alexa ranks websites according to their known popularity, and the smaller the number, the better. Google is number one, Facebook is number two, YouTube is number three, aWebGuy.com is somewhere in the 130,000’s (still top 0.45% most trafficked), and etcetera. Alexa is not perfect, but it is pretty compelling when you see multiple of Skillman’s websites dropping in ranking by a million points or more over the past 30 days, and seven of them disappearing completely. This is a bad sign of doing something seriously wrong.

I took an average from 22 of Ray Skillman Auto Group websites and here is what I found:

90 Day Average of Ranked Domains:
9,498,928 average across 16 domains (the rest were not measurable). The best rank was 1,477,739 and the worst rank was 11,867,267

30 Day Average of Ranked Domains:
8,491,088 average across 11 domains (half were not measurable). The best rank was 2,766,597 and the worst rank was 21,187,719

So, are they moving up or down? If you look again, you can see that on a 30 day basis, even their best individual ranking was worse by 1,288,858. Worse than that is the disappearing act of seven more domains. Yes, there were seven of them which dropped completely off the RADAR!

I’d call it a game and throw in the towel before I threw another single dollar at the horrific tactics and utter lack of strategy that the SEO working for Ray Skillman Auto Group is using. My experience says that it will cost them many times whatever they are paying the search engine optimizer.

What Does Website Grader Say About Ray Skillman?

Website Grader uses information about the website to assign a numeric grade. It is explained on their website as follows: “The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data , website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.”

For the Ray Skillman Auto Group websites that I checked on Website Grader, the results did not look so good. Of course, I am a master of understatement. Fine, it looked like a murder scene, OK? Here is what I found from the websites:

Highest Grade: 86

Lowest Grade: 21

Average Grade: 64.6

The results are not just bad, but it shows a huge shortcut from trying to do things well. A website should be ready before it is ever even marketed … even in spam. For comparison purpose, and of course never to brag, this blog has a ranking of 99.8.

Ray Skillman Can Still Win!

With all of these business entities operating under the Ray Skillman Auto Group umbrella, just consider this: If they could increase their profit from SEO and social media marketing by just $1,000 per company, per month, it would add up to $252,000 per year. Even with a miserably low goal like that, they could expect a much greater increase in following years. That $252,000 per year could help them to afford a good SEO strategy, and improved social media marketing reach and response rate.

The trouble seems to be that they may not yet realize that a higher return on investment requires a responsible investment, first.

That, my friends, shows the difference between doing something, and doing something well. Rip me a new one if you like. My ears are wide open.

One more thing! Don’t take this wrong, because I love cars. I love them enough to drive them at over 200 miles per hour, race them at tracks all across the USA, and slap those who abuse them with terrible marketing shortsightedness.

Here are some other automotive-related articles from my petroleum-guzzling marketing head:

Photo Credits:
Bent screw by stevendepolo via Flickr
Screws by aussiegall via Flickr
Xray photo by Laurel Fan via Flickr

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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!

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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.

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