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!

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.

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.

Search Engine Traffic vs. Social Media Traffic? Which is Better?

It’s important to understand and know what is best for you and your blog, when you start blogging and invest your valuable time writing for your blog, you want good return over the time you have invested. The way you will gain your profits is by getting more and more visitors to your blog. Now which is better way to gain visitors social media or search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and other.

Social media traffic – Positive side:

• It can bring huge amount of traffic to a blog or website in a very little amount of time.
• Your blog get exposure to new visitors, readers and advertisers.
• It also gives you rise in your revenue sometimes.
• A popular story on Digg, Stumbleupon or Reddit makes people link your story with their blog or bookmark in other social media websites like Delicious, Netscape and more, which helps in creating backlinks to your blog.

Social media traffic – Negative side:

• To bring traffic from social media you need a network of friends active in social media which demands lot of time investment, it completely depends on you if you want to invest your time to build a network in social media.
• Social media traffic is not reliable because some day you might get peak in traffic and the other day you might get nothing also social media will only give you traffic until your post is popular and visible to mass audience.
• Don’t expect social media traffic to click on anything else on your page, majority of traffic will not even bother visiting any other web page of your blog which will lead to high bounce rate of your blog.
• Eats up lot of bandwidth with almost nothing in return other than lot of page impressions and large spike in increased traffic.

Organic Search engine traffic:

• Search engine traffic provides targeted traffic to your blog, your visitors will look for more similar stuff on your blog if they like your posts and also will subscribe to your blog and more over spend time on it, all these factors will result in low bounce rate of your blog.
• Gives you a moderate traffic but the traffic is steady and you will not face ups and downs in your traffic unlike social media traffic.
• Search engine traffic pays you in long run.
• Money makers: Search engine visitors are those visitors who come to your blog looking for something that they really want and if there is something you have which is useful to them then they would even wont mind paying money to get it.

Social media has evolved as a very powerful tools in recent times and the traffic from social media is very tempting to every one and to achieve that level of traffic people don’t mind spending hours getting their story voted by others to make it popular.
I can only say that both the channels have their own power and importance in blog promotion. I prefer search engine traffic over social media traffic but also I like sharing some unique and interesting stuff with my social media friends once in a while because it also keeps my blog visible in social media also.

You can’t just focus on either one of the channel’s because you will be missing out on potential visitors from the other channel, so it’s ideal to manage social media and search engines on regular basis and you can do this by optimizing your blog regularly for search engines and also chipping some posts for social media freaks to gain benefits from all the available resources available to generate traffic.

Do Your Homework Online Before Meeting Someone New

Admit it, you’ve Googled someone before. Maybe it was someone you were dating. Maybe it was someone you had a crush on.

But how about when you have a sales meeting and are about to meet a new prospective client?

If you are an experienced salesperson, I’m probably preaching to the choir. For those like me who are in the consulting & services business and relatively new to the sales role, I have this to say:

Do your homework whenever you meet someone new.

This applies all around the sales cycle. From following up on leads to meeting other stakeholders to getting their team introduced with yours. Throughout this process, you are likely to meet several different people (or one person fulfilling all of these roles):

• Primary stakeholder – the person with the budget
• Influencers – other stakeholders who have a say in this decision
• Project manager – the person who coordinates the work between your client and your team, also often the main point of contact
• Workers – employees from your client’s team with whom your team will have to interact

Do your homework on each of them. For a service organization, all the members of your client’s team are important and critical to your success.

Why?

The goal isn’t to stalk the person. It’s to find meaningful connections. If the person likes the San Francisco Giants, and hey, so do you, then bring it up. If you’re not a fan, then keep your mouth shut. Don’t be insincere with these connections. Use them only if they honestly exist. Otherwise, you might find yourself in a TV sitcom where you’re trying to lie and squirm your way out of a totally alien discussion. And all without a laugh track.

If there are no connections, consider identifying a key achievement that person has made and offering congratulations. Perhaps the person started a company that launched a successful product in the past. Perhaps the person wrote a book or article you’ve read. Again, don’t be overtly insincere, though a little flattery can get you a long way.

It also helps to understand the person’s background. If he/she comes from a technical background, then you can tailor your sales pitch to a more technical audience. If he/she comes from a marketing background, then emphasize potential branding and identity benefits. Use key terminology from their background.

So far, I haven’t had a case where a person has been offended or frightened by this research. In fact, many seem to be flattered by it, even expect it. Some don’t care though; they’re more interested in the deal and how it can help them.

All of this assumes you’ve already done your homework with the company, their department, and their needs. Don’t even bother researching the people if you haven’t researched their business.

Ultimately, you want to form a connection with these stakeholders. If they feel they can relate to you on a personal level, and they feel you can sincerely understand them on a professional & personal level, then they are more likely to sign a contract with you.

How?

Here’s what I do:

1. Google (GOOG) – I start with a good, old-fashioned Google search. This usually gives me most of the information I need, such as links to a blog, Twitter account, resume, etc.

I always start with the blog, if one exists. This gives me a good overview of the person and his/her personality & interests. Does the person have a sarcastic sense of humor? A dry wit? Does the person have any hobbies or interests with which I can relate? Has this person done anything notable that I want to call out?

1. LinkedIn.com – If the previous search doesn’t turn up a LinkedIn profile, then I perform one specifically on this site. Most people in my industry have a LinkedIn account.

This gives me an overview of the person’s education and career path, which tells me the language he/she speaks (technical, marketing, design, financial, etc) and how I should tailor my sales pitch.

1. Others – I know some salespeople go further and check out Facebook, MySpace, and other similar sources. Personally, I don’t. If you aren’t a member of that person’s Facebook network, then you won’t be able to see deeper details. Also, the interests and photos included on Facebook don’t help as much as a blog or personal website. It’s tough to form a connection on a favorite TV show, especially if you don’t know how much they like it, or if their profile has been updated recently. My experience, anyways; some still do this research all the time. And practically no one in my industry uses MySpace (that I know of).

Once you have this information, share it with your team. Help them to understand the client better. This can strengthen the relationship on both sides.

There will be a few cases where such web research doesn’t help because the person keeps a private offline life. That’s fine. That’s where you’ll need to muster up your interpersonal skills and form a connection the old fashioned way. These tips just offer an extra advantage. If the information is out there, why not use it, right?