NFL’s Facebook Message to Fans Example of Social Media Fail

By Stephanie Stradley FanHouse Writer 

Why is it that so many large corporations are so bad at social media? The latest example of social media failure is the NFL’s recent use of Facebook to communicate with fans. On Tuesday, the NFL used Facebook to get Roger Goodell’s message out to fans about his desire to get a labor deal done by March. Most fans agree with this point of view. However, the Facebook message went beyond that and added an ill-advised question:

“A message from Commissioner Roger Goodell on a new agreement: “This is an opportunity to create a better future for the NFL, to improve the game for our fans.” How would you like to see the game improved?”

Uh oh. The number one response by far seems to be some variation of “Fire Roger Goodell” and calling him various mean things, sometimes referencing private anatomical parts. After that, the majority of the sentiments include no lockout, no 18-game season, and not screwing up the game with other seemingly arbitrary changes.

Trial lawyers know that the first rule of asking questions is to be cautious in asking an open-ended question where you may not like the answer. That’s not a bad guideline for corporations to follow when using social media. In addition, most fans are cynical enough to know that the NFL isn’t really interested in what fans have to say, and to pretend they are is an insult to them. So asking disgruntled fans what their opinions are to see the game improved is an invitation for online abuse. In which case: mission accomplished.

Social Networking Etiquette: Mind Your Manners to Grow Your Business

Social media marketing is hotter than a firecracker, and growing hotter every day as online entrepreneurs realize just how effective this particular marketing technique can be.  If you aren’t using social media marketing—you should be. 

However, a word of caution: Use social media wisely or you can end up doing more harm to your business than good.  There are certain, basic, unwritten rules of etiquette that apply to social media.  Before diving into the deep end of the social media scene, familiarize yourself with these rules of etiquette so that you don’t jump in there and start putting your foot in it. 

There is a lot more to social media marketing than joining Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin and trying to get friends or followers.  First of all, don’t rush in and start requesting friends like somebody that’s been stranded on a desert island alone for the past 10 years and is desperate now for companionship of any sort.

Take your time. Go slowly. You’re impatient, that’s understandable. You have probably looked around and seen some of your competitors with 3000 friends and/or followers and you want to catch up.  But, quality is actually much more important than quantity, anyway. 

Think of your social community friends sort of like traffic to your online store. You want traffic, of course. But you want the right kind of traffic, not just a torrent of visitors who are not ever going to become buyers.  This applies to your social media friends, too. Be a bit selective about who your friends and followers are and aim for quality. 

A big No-No is to go through your online address book and send friend requests to everybody on it. You will not win friends this way. In fact, you will antagonize many of those people to the point where it will damage any existing relationship you have with them. 

The correct way to go about letting folks know you now have a page on Facebook or whatever is to announce it on your website, or in an email newsletter, or in your email signature.  This way, your contacts who want to participate will, and the others who don’t want to—won’t.  You don’t want them, anyway. 

Although you don’t want to bombard anyone you’ve ever emailed with friend requests, you do want to connect with net workers who approach you. If it seems like a real, live person and not a spammer, then friend them. Not to do so would be offensive and against the social media etiquette rules. 

Be professional at all times. Don’t tweet messages from Twitter that would offend some of your followers, for example. Remember that you never know who will read a message you post online or send out in a tweet!  

Don’t be too sales-y with your new friends, especially at first. People don’t like to feel used and it’s bad social manners to give someone the impression that you only want them as a friend to try and sell them something.  You do want to build your business, naturally.  But be tactful about it! 

Mind your manners in social media marketing and watch your business grow!

The Power of Who Author and Eastman & Beaudine CEO Bob Beaudine on The Chris Treece Show

Please Join The Chris Treece Show on January 31, 2011 at 12PM EST as my guest will be “The Power of Who Author and Eastman & Beaudine CEO Bob Beaudine.  Call in number is 347-633-9495. www.blogtalkradio.com/Chris-Treece

Bob Beaudine, CEO of Eastman & Beaudine, manages the nation’s leading executive search firm in sports and entertainment. Bob has helped shape the leadership teams of some of the world’s most innovative and dynamic businesses- NBA, Major League Baseball, Hockey, Tennis, Rodeo, PGATOUR, Arena Football, US Olympics, NASCAR, Horse Racing, and Ultimate Fighting Championships. He has interviewed & coached Senators, Governors, Generals, CEO’s, University Presidents, Top Athletic Coaches and Studio Presidents. Bob also works with major college athletic programs and has placed 33 Athletic Directors at major universities across the country as well as 24 Head Coaches in Football and Basketball. Bob’s leadership also extends into the local community. He recently served as Chairman of the “Doak Walker National Running Back Award”. He is on the Board of SMU’s Cox School of Business. He is a graduate (1977) of Southern Methodist University with a bachelor of business administration degree.

How to Manage Your Online Reputation

If you’ve ever Googled your name, you know how important managing your reputation online can be. Each day, thousands of individuals are searching online for information about others simply by searching on Google or other leading search engines. With information being so readily available, managing your reputation is more important than ever.

How to Manage Your Reputation Online

Fortunately, managing your reputation online isn’t all that difficult, but it does take work. Here are 7 basic steps you can take to ensure that your reputation doesn’t become negatively impacted by what’s being said about you online.

1. See where you stand. Start your reputation management initiative by Googling your name. Try it with quotes and with out (first and last name together). Look through each of your results on page one and page two of Google. Are there any negative items you wish to remove?

2. Set up a Google alert. Visit Google and set up an alert for your name. After setting up the alert Google will send you and email to confirm that you wish to receive the updates. Accept the alert and each time your name is published to the Web, you’ll know about it.

3. Contact website owners for name removal. If there are sites that include your name and commentary that is less than desirable, contact the appropriate websites requesting that the information be removed. More often than not, website owners will agree to remove your name and/or inappropriate information.

4. Purchase a domain with your name. Add sites and WebPages associated with your name and watch negative search results get pushed lower on Google rankings. Visit GoDaddy or another provider of website URLs and hosting, and purchase a domain that contains your name. Even if your name is rather common, experiment with variations until your name can be established in the form of a dot com. Once you own a domain, publish a webpage with your personal profile.

5. Start a blog under your name. Blogger is a great tool for setting up your own blog which can be used to publish information about yourself. Popular blog sites are often picked up by Google and you can control the content. Be sure to sign up for Technorati after your blog has been published. Submit your blog for review and its popularity will increase, improving search rankings and continuing to push down negative search results.

6. Free press release. Use free-press-release.com or a similar free press release site to publish favorable information about your and your reputation. This form of reputation management is easy and costs nothing. Be sure to use your name throughout the release and in the release title.

7. Author articles in your field. Publish article relative to a particular topic or area in which you’ve done some work or have experience. Use article distribution services to build online references to your content. Make sure your articles contain an about the author section that links back to your main website.

There are a variety of strategies you can use to manage online references about you, your family, or others that need to manage their reputation online. Other online sites like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, and Squidoo, offer ample opportunity to deliver favorable search results that can push unfavorable results down in search engine rankings. The key is to start today – proactively manage your reputation and put yourself in a favorable light.

Why Isn’t My Business’s Social Media Following Growing?

There are a ton of reasons why your current social media strategy may not be serving you well. Here are a few possibilities — take a look and see if anything sounds familiar to your business:

• You update your page too often or too little. There isn’t an exact science to figuring out when you should send out a tweet, post to Facebook or update other social sites, but you should figure out some general guidelines that fit for your company. Try to update your social sites at least a few times a week and daily if possible. If you notice that customers are complaining about frequency, adjust accordingly.
• Your messaging is too promotional. Your followers and subscribers do not want to be “sold” or bombarded with marketing messages. Your audience is used to being barraged with marketing messages from all angles — in their homes, at work, on the street. The last thing they want is to opt in to another marketing message from a brand that they trust and enjoy. Keep the promotions to a minimum and try to provide meaningful and useful content to your followers.
• You don’t offer value to your followers. Also related to messaging is the possible lack of value propositions. Set up a clear idea of how you will use each social site and what type of value you’ll be providing. Then, communicate it clearly. Most people follow brands on social sites to get deals and discounts. Make sure you understand your consumers’ motivations for following you and respond accordingly.
• You aren’t promoting your social profiles enough. “If you build it, they will come.” That old adage may be true for baseball fields, but it’s not true for social media profiles. You need to get the word out that you’re using certain social platforms. While some dedicated fans may find you via search or by perusing the web, others need a bit of encouragement. Utilize your website, businessplace, flyers and even business cards to get the word out.
• Your need to interact more. Social media is, well, meant to be social. If you aren’t responding to questions or engaging with your followers, chances are they think you’re just a blank-faced marketer or an automated feed updating your company’s social sites. Give your social profiles a face by engaging with the community.

“Lipstick, Laptops, Life” Author Angela O’Mara on The Chris Treece Show

Please Join The Chris Treece Show on July 14th, 2010 at 1PM  EST as my guest will be Author Angela O’Mara.  Call in number is 347-633-9495. www.blogtalkradio.com/Chris-Treece

Author of Lipstick Laptops Life: The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of a Modern Day Business Woman, and Lights! Camera! Action: The Power of PR, Angela O’Mara is President of The Professional Image, Inc., a PR firm that has been involved with the media for over twenty years. Born and raised in Manchester, England, Angela moved to the USA in 1980. A frequent lecturer on how to effectively market a business, Angela specializes in strategic marketing and public relations campaigns for small and large organizations. She also teaches Media Hot Seat, a one-day media training course, and Get Inspired About Your Business!, a one-day 7-step program to help entrepreneurs fall back in love with themselves and their business. She resides in Southern California with her family.

Social Media Marketing – Are You Doing It?

 Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing, which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks like You Tube, My Space, and Face book, social web application like dig, delicious, reddit, Wiki. The goal of each SMM program varies from business to business, but mainly involves building of brand awareness, increasing visibility and through this, sells a product or service. 

Social Media Marketing is becoming an essential marketing tool for connecting with customers and optimizing online presence. Social Media describes the tools and platforms, people use to publish, converse and share content online. Video, pod cast, blogs, discussion boards and social networking sites are all tools, online businessmen can use to build relationship with their customers and keep them on websites longer. Social media provides more opportunities for organizations to present optimized content that can be indexed by search engines and ultimately improves site rating. 

To implement some of the social media elements, it is first important to evaluate your customers to create an effective strategy. If your consumers are professionals who commute, then pod cast can be downloaded and can be very effective. Posting video content on YouTube is a unique opportunity to improve your position in Google’s universal search results. WithYouTube, customers can visit the site, view your video and easily post to their own blogs, social networking profiles or websites. YouTube is a great way to reach a broader viewer and generate buzz around new products, especially if your product has a visual appeal.  Building healthy relationship with the customer, that last is an on-going process for a businessperson. Social media takes this a step further by making that relationship personal through blogs. It tells about you, not only about your product or service.  A blog, which includes video, pictures and text, can build interest and loyalty among customers and a new way to search engine optimization. Create a page dedicated to community with website visitors and this will be interactive. 

Social media encourages social visits to your site. Keep adding content to encourage customers to return regularly. With the advent of social media, consumers have become contributors, contributing to brand messaging. SMM is related to other online tactics such as SEO, SMO. It has a more active planned role in directing, influencing and suggesting the community members.

3 Ways to Build a Social Network Community

Establishing your own social network community online is a common goal many share either personal or financial reasons. As social media use soars in popularity so does the traffic that can be found at these sites. As a result online marketers have targeted these communities and have taken to using social networking sites as promotional platforms for their businesses. Well like in most everything else there is a right and wrong way in which to approach any social networking community with the goal to market goods and services.

Here are 3 tips all online marketers can use to get the most out of their time and effort when using social networking sites for promotional reasons.

One Step at a Time

A common miscue many make when using social networking sites for business is that they attempt to work too many sites at the same time. Although this may work well for time efficiency it will not be effective! These communities are based upon socializing and this is not something you can ‘outsource’ or do quickly. To be effective YOU must show up and invest the time to ‘win friends and influence people’ in order to achieve your business goals.

It is recommended you focus on a few communities that work best for you and develop your networks there. In this way you will be more effective and will not be jumping from one site to the next which will result in much wasted time and effort.

Establish Relations First

Once again you are in a community founded for socializing and that is why most everybody frequents these sites. One of the best ways to turn people off is by immediately and continuously promoting your business. These people will only consider purchasing from you if they are familiar with and like you. Building relationships and gaining trust is not something you can do quickly but instead will require time and patience. And along those lines…

Focus on Relationships

Put away the ‘numbers’ mentality you bring with you thinking you need a large following to successfully promote when using social networking sites.. If your focus is primarily on building a large group of followers it will be reflected in your relationship building efforts or lack thereof. Build solid and meaningful relations with those people with whom you have established contact. If your efforts are successful these same people will refer their friends and you will build a large and solid foundation for your following.

By taking the time and patience to gain followers in this manner your future marketing efforts will be much more effective and your followers will remain loyal.

Building your own social network community is a tact that many online marketers are using to help build their businesses. The more that social media use began to soar the more inevitable it became that this traffic would eventually be targeted by merchants. The key to any effectiveness and efficiencies when promoting within any social networking community is the approach and patience. The 3 tips offered here addressed these points and suggest that greater results will be experienced with the use of subtlety and of course as already mentioned, patience. It becomes a matter of applying your ‘green thumb’ to growing a network that will yield you a bountiful harvest, just do not expect it to bloom overnight!

Is Video Marketing An Effective Marketing Tool?

In the era of the internet marketing and search engine marketing it has become really important that we adopt good strategies to promote our products, services or other offerings. Web has become a great medium to popularize whatever we want to reach the mindset of masses or selected target audiences. However, people pay more attention to visuals than the written text and hence video marketing has become more popular than the articles.

In the era of web2.0 it is more important to use the resources in a correct manner. Nobody would sit and watch your videos if they are plainly filled with the pushy statements and connotations that “You should buy my product, it’s the best”. You need to create videos that educate the audience, tell them what’s great about your product in a convincing manner and if you manage to do that then certainly people would be awed by your creation and promote it further.

You can create videos in variety of ways and they can be simple video landing pages, webpage with streaming videos, downloadable files or customer reviews etc.

Visual communication is always more impacting and influential than the written. It is rightly said that a picture is worth a hundred words because it helps to communicate an idea in a more precise and correct way without need of excessive explanation or detail. On the other hand if the picture or visual is not intelligently crafted than it may fail to give the real explanation and thus the thoughts and ideas may be mis-communicated. So there is need to create videos for video marketing in a clear and correct manner.

The creativity and ability to innovate is the key in this field. You may go in for animated videos or real life videos. It can certainly be used as a powerful medium to attract interested buyers into your market base. As per the statistics more than 9 out of 10 people would want to watch videos rather than reading articles. And another survey reveals that video marketing has more than 60% of the customers than the other channels of communication in the internet marketing.

It is important that the videos which you create are made in good quality and correct format. There are a lot of social video sharing sites like Yahoo video and YouTube by Google group which can create a lot of hype about your videos. You just need to share and upload your videos on these sites, If your videos have good content and are affirmatively educative and interesting, people would be more than glad to share them with others. In this way there would be immense popularity of your video. The more number of people watch your video greater would be the sales of your product.

Viral video marketing is indeed a great way to proliferate the sensitivity and idea behind your product to larger to a wider audience.

You Still Think Facebook and Social Media Is A Fad For Business? Think Again.

So do you still think Facebook and Social Media is a FAD!!!  Today’s business is moving at the speed of light, so it can be hard to keep up. Should you incorporate social networking into your business and if so, then how do you make that happen? I recently ran across a very interesting video that may help you think about Facebook and Social Media in a new way!  Are you ready to jump in?  Don’t get left behind.