Now I am all grown up:

So what to do? You are now a serious business person, or an upstanding member of the professional community; or perhaps even a celebrity. There are companies out there, that for a fee, will work to eradicate any negative internet footprints of your past. No guarantees, but they can improve things considerably in certain areas. Images and comments they will hunt down and kill on your behalf. This has the somewhat grandiose term of Online Reputation Management.

The importance of ORM

This is important. Reputation is as essential online as it is in the offline world. Building relationships on LinkedIn, will be hindered considerably for example, if (and they invariably do) clients and prospects google you, to find out more about who they are talking to. If they discover you dressed as a goat stomping along the promenade at Blackpool for your mate’s stag weekend, it will undoubtedly present an obstacle in their minds, when you apply for a job with them or to prise some of their precious budget away from them in return for your product or service.

ORM tips for you:

On a personal level, start doing some of your own Online Reputation Management. Untag those photos on Facebook, and delete previous wall posts. Or if you are that concerned about it, don’t participate in social networking.

And for your business:

On a corporate level, use  Technorati to see where you are mentioned within the blogoshere, or go to relevant forums and see what people are saying about you. If you can’t delete previous threads, you can definitely go a along way to restoring and managing your ongoing online reputation.

Clients begin by telling Lab42 about their products and their target consumers. Lab42 then helps to craft a survey, with the option of focusing it based on gender, age, location, lifestyle and interests. Next, Lab42 takes the resulting survey to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and smaller niche social networks, using highly targeted incentives to garner attention and responses while consumers go about their day-to-day activities. Two packages are available from Lab42: a premium one for $ 500, with results in three days or less; and a preliminary one for$ 300, with results in 5 days or less. Custom arrangements are also possible.

It’s always refreshing to see services that have traditionally been performed slowly and expensively rethought and remade to reflect new technologies and new societal shifts. Perhaps this is one to try out when researching your next big thing…? Early feedback suggest that people enjoy giving their opinions and can share these with their friends, thus providing you with potential real-time feedback.

The flipside is that Social media marketing can be so compelling and addictive that if you are not careful an hour is gone and you haven’t done a thing. Friends and colleagues often make the observation that there is so much valuable information  and tempting headlines that compel us to read and view that like the temptations of the mythoglical Greek Ulysses ‘Sirens’ who lured away away ancient mariners we too can be turned from away from our destination.

So how do we keep on track so that the ‘Sirens’ of Ulysses don’t distract us to destruction and ensure we meet our goals?

1. Check your goals

Why did you set up your social media marketing channels in the first place? Is what you are currently doing on social media moving you towards those goals. Some goals may be quite specific such as to to increase inquiries by 20%. It may be a more general goal such as to connect, engage and communicate or create more brand awareness. It may be to write one blog post a day.

2. Get Focused

You have now checked back to your original goals and now you need to refine and continue to determine what are the most important and prioritize them. For me one major goal is to write our  blog post on a daily basis.

3. Set a Schedule & A Routine

Providing yourself with a schedule and a deadline can ensure.. mostly… that the activity is done and then you can move on to the next task.

4. Planning , Creating and Developing Content

To ensure that we have information to place on the social media channels that we are using we need to be constantly brainstorming and keeping an eye out for content to  post that provides value to your clients and answers their questions and helps solve their problems.

5. Optimizing your Channels

So you now  have the content on your social media platforms….are they set up to ensure that people will find them online and when they get there they will find it easy to view and read. A blog may need some search engine optimisation tweaking and with the changes to Google’s search with the recently announced ‘Google Caffeine’ having more recent content on your web presence is more important than ever. Do you have your LinkedIn profile public and do you have your website, blog and facebook pages entered in the page?

6. Promoting Your Brand on Social Media

A lot of people think that once they have published their blog or posted that the online world is just going to turn up… they won’t .. so you need to tell the world. Tweet it (a few times). Place your content on as many channels as time, money and resources allow. Take your eNewsletter and embed social media buttons at the top and the bottom of the email and also place buttons and links to your blog.. email can be integrated into your whole social media activities.

7. Measuring and Monitoring

Set up measuring and monitoring tools and use them as these can provide the feedback on what is working and what isn’t,

8. Analyze and Adjust your Activities

You now have the numbers on your different activities…. use this tweak and fine tune your activities to ensure that they are producing the best result for the least effort.

9. Communicate and Engage with your Social Media Tribe

Ok .. so you have had your head down and tail up, pumping out great content and doing fantastic things  but you haven’t had time to listen and engage. You need to ensure that you are not just doing but also connecting otherwise one day you will look up and the tribe has dissappeared

10. Help Someone in your Social Media Community

Take time to promote and help someone in your online community achieve their goals and you will be find that reciprocation is often forthcoming and your efforts will be paid back in spades.

How do you keep focused?

Social Commerce is defined as the relationship and fusion of eCommerce and social media together to help buyers and sellers make better purchasing decisions online. This combination is the next generation of interaction between buyers and sellers.

Take a look at these studies and see for yourself what respondents had to say.  And then ask yourself if you feel the same way.

According to Bazaarvoice:

“81 percent of respondents said they’d received advice from friends and followers relating to a product purchase through a social site; 74 percent of those who received such advice found it to be influential in their decision. 90% of consumers online trust recommendations from people they know…

Friends still play an important role in influencing consumers; 83 percent of online shoppers said they are interested in sharing information about their purchases with people they know, while 74 percent are influenced by the opinions of others in their decision to buy the product in the first place…

Users put great trust in their social networks…respondents said they considered information shared on their networks when making a decision…

Facebook, blogs, Twitter and customer reviews are considered the most effective tactics for mobilizing consumers to talk up products online…

Recommendations from family and friends trump all other consumer touch points when it comes to influencing purchases …Consumers trust friends above experts when it comes to product recommendation”

Users are finding the value in sharing online. They feel safer and they can trust that their friends can help them make better buying decisions. Helping a friend and/or follower make a purchase online is one of the best ways to build advocacy online and throughout your social networks. Try sharing one of your listings with your Facebook friends or Twitter followers and watch the interactions that happen. People are interested in what you are buying and selling and if they need it they are going to feel more comfortable buying it from you. What’s even more powerful is sharing a purchase you made with friends, pointing them in the right direction for the next purchase they may make online.

People love to share themselves and share their experiences with those who care to listen. It is human nature. In the eCommerce space buyers want to feel comfortable buying from sellers and sellers want to feel confident that they are targeting qualified buyers who want what they have to sell. Being uncomfortable has been one of the most important inhibitors that have existed over the last 10 years in the e-commerce space.

Your Homework for the Weekend: Ask a friend online or follower for some advice on a purchase or a product and see how they respond. Check and see who else responds too.

It’s entirely possible for one person to keep an eye on things. If you set up a solid routine, monitoring your online presence doesn’t have to be a hassle at all.

Here are five free, easy steps you can take to get things started. Do each task in the morning when you start work, and you should be good to go.

1) Check Twitter for chatter about your company (2 minutes): Use tools like Tweetdeck or TwitterSearch to monitor conversations about your company in real-time. To check once a day, set up an RSS feed for a specific Twitter Search to go straight to your Google Reader. Do this by clicking the little RSS icon after you complete a search. Now, ongoing search results will be sent to your reader.

2) Scan Google Alerts (1.5 minutes): Check your Google Alerts for your company name, products, executives or brand terms. To set this up, enter your search terms and select to receive updates as they happen or once daily. Now, when people blog about your products, an alert will be sent to your inbox. You can read the articles and respond right away!

3) Check Facebook stats (1 minute): Visit your Company Page Facebook Insights. This can be found by clicking “more” under the page’s main photo. Scan your fans and page views count. If you are a member of a group, check to see if any new discussions started.

4) Answer Industry-related LinkedIn questions (3 minutes): Look for questions on LinkedIn that you or members of your company can answer. You can set up an RSS feed for specific question categories to go to your Google Reader as well. When you find a relevant question, respond and include a link to your website.

5) Use Google Reader to check Flickr, Delicious, Digg and others (2.5 minutes): Also set up RSS feeds for searches on your company name and industry terms in other social media sites. Similar to monitoring LinkedIn and Twitter, your Reader will serve as a great place to centralize your other searches too!

You can have the largest network around, but if you are not engaging in conversation, little fruit will be borne out of your efforts.

Social media can expand your freelance network exponentially and yield opportunities that you’d never find elsewhere. But just like knocking on doors in the traditional way, it takes investment, hard work, and time.

Perhaps the most obvious advantage of social media is connection building. As a freelancer or a small business, you are your brand, and like any social marketing campaign, it’s not about racking up followers or flooding the space with links. It’s all about the conversation, that will generate ultimately pitches and then business.

In each type of social media where you participate, you should have a core group of friends who you talk to regularly. The primary way to get to know others through social media is to respond to their comments with questions.
It does require consistent effort and ability to monitor and focus on which methods are giving you the biggest feedback.

Social media offers small businesses the chance to compete with large ones online; but your must be prepared to invest that most precious of resources..time.

Some of our clients have acquired business via Twitter, and others through LinkedIn.

How have you managed to use social media to generate business? We would love to get your experiences to share with our customers.

You can “engage” with us via the routes you would expect:

Blog Feed, Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook.

Ask us questions, give us a hard time – whatever you like except for a shed load of spam obviously!

We look forward to hearing from you!