The article was originally titled “Social media Training with Joe”, but for the audience it was changed to “Biznik Relationships- shaking hands to co-hosting” I wanted to share it with everyone here on Biznik because part of the story expands outside of my main readership and touches upon a key fact of building relationships with people within the community.
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My friend Joe Hage and I did a marketing workshop last night for a small group of professionals. Normally hosting a marketing workshop wouldn’t be a noteworthy event, but in this case it is a wonderful case example of starting a connection using social media and developing into a trusting business relationship.
Who is Joe Hage?
As a professional, Joe is one of the few marketers I have met that has an extreme grasp of both tactical and strategic marketing. He has a sparkling resume of working with companies like Cardiac Science, 1-800-Flowers, Kraft Foods, Jell-O, and Safeco. When he originally met me, Joe didn’t know a huge volumes about my specialty in social media, and he immediately rolled up his sleeves and began devouring information. In any line of marketing work, the ability to absorb new concepts and create new strategies is essential to exceeding expectations. From a business perspective- Joe is the “full meal deal” when it comes to marketing strategy.
How did we meet?
I originally met Joe by being a casual member of a local online community here in Seattle called Biznik. You can view both of our friendly profiles here - Joe Hage and Barry Hurd. In terms of the relationship between us, Joe and I would simply not have met in real life if not for Biznik. Realizing that two extremely busy professionals such as Joe and I can form a strong and healthy relationship using online networking is an eye-opener for other professionals like us.
How do we interact?
Joe and I use Biznik as a place to shed some of our daily job duties and dive into a creative problem solving mindset working with independent business owners. While I cannot speak entirely for Joe, planning the occasional workshop with a different group of professional personalities allows me to really flex my brain and bring my marketing mind to bear. While some topics in such a class may seem very “101″ to either of us, the unexpected difficulties and obstacles our attendees have require us to think outside of our own box.
What was our workshop about?
The official positioning statement: “To Biznik members in the real estate and related industries, Joe and Barry’s Real Estate Marketing Workshop is your opportunity to learn and apply strategies you need to better stand out in a market crowded with half-hearted real estate professionals.”
In our two-hour session, you will:
- Apply recommendations from the real estate marketing article to your own business.
- Share and learn best practices used by fellow Bizniks in the space.
- Get Barry’s counsel on which search engine optimization key words are virtually impossible to get.
- Walk away with some of Barry’s best tricks to get your name on the Google searches you are targeting.
What did people learn?
A lot more than those four bullet points above. The attendees had a chance to hear relevant and like-minded marketing problems analyzed and trouble-shot by two marketing veterans. However the real value only becomes apparent when the audience and the mentors agree to see things from different angles.
In the normal world most of us accept our problems and obstacles from our own point of view. When we see a wall in front of us, most of us see an option to steer around it or stop.
Joe and I do not see things from the same angle. Yes we are both marketing professionals. Yes we both have a lot of experience.
Yet we each have a fundamental viewpoint and core to the way our mind works.
In an interactive workshop, attendees have the ability to utilize the wisdom and talent of the entire group. Joe and I may lead the discussion, but we cannot see how anyone else perceives the same problem. We can only observe how we see it, along with how we view the interaction of the group members.
By utilizing skill, talent, experience, and different perspectives - a team of professionals working in unison can creatively offer solutions to maneuver around almost any obstacle. With only a few extra viewpoints, the team may also benefit from knowing what is behind the obstacle before they even decide to expend the effort to get around it.
Conclusion - What does this mean in regards to social media?
Simply put= When used correctly, social media allows any professional to use the wisdom and talent of the entire conversation. They may be smart and talented in respect to a certain field of focus, but the intelligence, talent, and return on effort is magnified significantly by the ability to accept that they may have a perspective that is hindering progress. (I.E. truly wise people can admit that they are wrong, not “the best”, or simply need help.)
As a professional who utilizes the online world, every day of my life is exposed to the benefit of having hundreds of experts in my network that serves as a sounding board to my own ideas. That exposure is not just simply readership and promotion for my business, but results in the benefit of my ideas interacting with the talented viewpoint of professionals like Joe and all of you.
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If you haven’t caught my main company blog at 123SocialMedia.com business social media promotion, I suggest you come on over and check out the original copy of this article Social Media Training with Joe and leave a comment on it (and visit a few other articles)
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I’ve been busy busy busy, and yes this blog has been left rather unattended- but for good reason. I decided to write more around an educational idea on social media @ 123socialmedia.com promotion and branding. My newer articles cover a wide range of different topics and I hope that everyone learns from my experience. In the past two weeks here are some samples of my articles:
Enterprise Social Media Measurement and Analysis - I receive plenty of feedback from peers in the social media space about “reporting and analysis” of the metrics behind online conversations. How do you measure buzz, authority, perspective, bias, trending, cost? All of the above? A mixture of it all?
Seattle SEO and search engine optimization? - So many companies are trying to get on top of Google for different keywords, and I have often pondered the great question of “is it worth it?” All too many companies want to define themselves by phrases such as “Seattle SEO” or “Seattle Search Engine Optimization” but the truth of the matter is that less than 20% of our traffic comes from keyword search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Sure we may be in Seattle, but SEO is only a small fraction of what we do.
Social Media Measurement and Brand Control -Social Media Measurement usually refers to tracking online communications and networking patterns that occur on blogs, podcasts, videos, social communities, and the various commentary that exchanges between them. Many companies are struggled with the task of analyzing when and why people are talking about them online, or if there is something a company needs to be aware of relating to the industry with competitive companies and products.
Social Media Influencer Marketing - Influencer Marketing is the act of targeting specific thought-leaders, critics, industry giants, celebrities, and just plain interesting personalities. Wikipedia currently has it defined as “a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole.
Ethical Media Consulting - As a marketer I am responsible for helping my clients promote themselves, as a public relations contact I am responsible for helping them strategically maneuver, as a professional I am responsible for making sure that I do not sacrifice my clients well-being for my own, and as a thoughtful human I must hold myself responsible for everything else.
December 1st, 2007
Interesting Sites
My brother runs a site that covers motorcycle events and news in the Northwest called www.biker-events.com
Many of his articles are not in my niche, but one struck me as I hadn’t heard the news Evel Knievel died last night at the age of 69.
This was a guy who, whether he was an entertainer or just a motorcycle rider, touched and inspired millions of people who sat in the audience and witnesses a man that redefined the limits every day of his life.
In all my efforts, I can only hope that in some strange way my life interacts and influences so many people. To have a talent to inspire the crowd, to leave them in awe, and to believe that something impossible really is possible.
As my brother says “Check out his website www.evelknievel.com and take a moment to send a thought to him and his family on this sad weekend.”
A lot of people ask me things like:
When was the last time you used the Yellow Pages? Probably never.
Simply put, the bricks and mortar business model is changing. I spent a good portion of my career at the largest directory company (Verizon), and was constantly examining how social networks, business networking groups, home office technology, video conferencing, inexpensive video blogging, and the general acceptance of online and virtual companies was forcing everyone to reconsider basic business models.
The branding and reputation is moving more and more online: Google, Facebook, Digg.com, YouTube….
Consider this brand new networking group we are starting here: all that is required to do so is a website, a club membership (The Columbia Tower Club provides us with all the faciltites necessary to do business, not only in Seattle, but in any major city, at a small fraction of the cost of an office) and the search engine placement that we already have after just one week:
Seattle Networking Club Google Search
Seattle Business Club Google Search
Seattle Networking Google Search
This is the new model:
- You join the Columbia Tower Club (I have the premium membership which makes all Club Corp clubs worldwide available to me!)
- You have search engine placement and placement in social networks which feeds you business
- Your office is a website, your meeting place is online and at the club and at events, your books are online; CRM…
- You work from wherever you are, at any time of day and night!
As business professionals, many of us have extremely busy and sometimes hectic lives. Our daily routine usually involves handling the immediate tasks at hand, overcoming the “here and now” obstacles, and depending on our workload- some of us manage to make time for a networking event: sometimes ranging from a casual friendly dinner or an intensive conference.
The end goal of these events: finding new clients and professional contacts.
The problem: there are only so many hours in the day.
In the real world, many of us would be happy to have a professional dinner where we have the chance to share who we are with twenty-five professional contacts or prospects.
Imagine if you had the power to spend the same one hour a week sharing that information with a hundred, or even a thousand contacts and prospects. Suppose for an instance you could take the greatest party of your life and share the detailed conversation you had with that one lucky person with everyone who attended…
That is the “Economy of Scale” found within social media and online conversations. Professionals of all types (not just real estate professionals) are multiplying intellectual and conversational communication a hundred-fold by using community oriented online networks. Rather than coordinate new groups or shaking hands in the physical world, professionals are marketing themselves in digital communities and social groups. For some, this simply has the benefit of having more informational available to qualify an introduction, with such basic features as profile information. For others, they understand the online power the communities have in search engine marketing and other online marketing efforts.
An additional benefit of this online version of networking is historical conversation.
Historical conversation is what happens when an article is taken from a social media site and is indexed by the major search engines. Very popular phrases and search terms used in a conversation will continue to pull up an article that was written years ago; along with all the commentary and discussion surrounding it. These phrases and search terms can be very precise or sometimes be two to six words in length. Marketing professionals refer to longer search phrases as “The Longtail” of searching.
A new visitor finds the conversation by looking for a phrase in a search engine and finding the article. When a new visitor arrives and reads it for the first time, they have the ability to add additional remarks to the previous conversational thread of the article. In the conversation system (blogs, forums, as well as the search engines), this new comment resurrects the old article and brings a discussion ‘back from the dead’.
Many popular bloggers note that very popular articles continue to pull in high amounts of traffic six to twelve months after they were written. By noting what articles tend to draw visitors, you can watch your stats and when the article seems to be forgotten you can even resurrect the conversation yourself by writing a more current article that links back to points in the older article. This allows visitors to benefit from past experience and conversations, and it saves you from rewriting the same idea over and over again.
If you have ever heard or witnessed “the perfect conversation” in real life, you can understand the value of being able to browse through the best of the best conversations you have been involved in and using them as points to leverage for your business. With the right steps, a professional can perfect an ordinary idea they had into an ever-evolving conversation that becomes better and better with time.
To learn more about leveraging your conversations, see 3net Search Engine Marketing Blog
About the author:
Barry Hurd is president of Social Media Systems, an online marketing and advertising consultant group working with search engine marketing and leveraging social media communities. He has over 15 years of entrepreneurial Internet and online marketing experience. As an author and prolific blogger, he has reached online audiences around the world. Since the mid-1990s, Barry has been involved in numerous efforts to bring forth technical innovation through online business models. Past projects have included NIKE, REI, TMP Worldwide, Monster.com, Verizon Superpages, Intuit, and RISMedia.
For more information, visit www.socialmediasystems.com.
October 2nd, 2007
Featured
I have actually decided to move a majority of my professional thoughts over to my other two blogs at www.socialmediasystems.com/blog where I will talk about various advertising ideas and impacts, and socialmediakit.com where I will talk about the “online 101″ items and reviews that I wander across.
Technical Disaster will be put on the back burner for the next few months as I examine some projects and figure out which one works best here.
Having been involved in blogging for years… I’ve been challenged by the numerous changes to electronic communication, the ethics behind the words, the emotions that underlay the ideas, and the personalities that are introduced.
In the 80’s and 90’s I was an active member of multi-line bulletin board systems (BBS) and I was one of the first adopters of the net when things went visual. The years of 300 baud dial-up modems vanished to the world of high-speed multi-page online browsing enhanced by wireless communication of video commentary and nearly instant relay.
So a few years ago I wrote the Blog Manifesto, a series of thoughts and ideas that were inspired by the Cluetrain Manifesto. Having been written before the age of the recent online social revolution, I thought the Blog Manifesto was something that detailed how I felt.
I now realize that within a few short years that many of the things I wrote about have indeed materialized in one way or another. I think that is amazing.
I also realize that the Blog Manifesto is already coming and passing- it may indeed be outdated already. Scary how technology and society can move so quickly.
I have been reviewing a good number of Google and Yahoo marketing campaigns, along with several other services like Idearc, InfoSpace, and a pile of others.
One thing that I have been finding more and more distasteful is that the largest online marketing and search companies out there tend to be the ones that are bending or breaking the most rules (perhaps being the engine themselves, they believe there are no rules?)
As part of a series of articles I’m doing over the next month, I’m asking some tough and hard questions about what online marketing should be about and why “the fine print” in the “big boys” of online marketing tend to be so cluttered with bad clauses.
I released the first one today Google Adwords Qualified Company- Fraud or not? and hope to get some input on it. The Biznik community seems to have a different vantage than many clients I deal with and I wonder what perspective everyone has here.
After reading my article, I would love to converse about what things business owners see when they see a “certified by X” brand.
Does it hold any weight in your buying decision? is this type of thing fraud in your eyes or merely deceptive marketing?
I am not really lost in SPAM, unless you count the fact that on an average daily basis I receive about 125 SPAM comments on this blog. Lucky for me, I know how to defend myself automatically by using scripts and little elves who closely monitor the validity of commentary here. (I do fear that the spammers know something I do not, because I keep getting comments for a new job or for personal “growth” products.) One of my technology co-workers actually wrote a blip about SPAM a day or so ago SEO Advice - Learning from SPAMMERS.
In reality my thoughts are just a little quieter here because I’m fully enthralled in a love of labor with my new company at SocialMediaSystems. Our team there is doing some wonderful things, changingsome very old-school industry trends, and having a great time doing it.
I promise to post here more often now. This will continue to be a personal yet professional site, covering some of the topics that may not always refer to social media and online marketing. (If you want that, go to SocialMediaSystems.com!)
