The Publicity Hound’s Blog  

Thousands of people who are being downsized, right-sized and capsized during this bad economy aren’t waiting around for a job offer. They’re looking to the Web for their next career—and maybe even riches.

Enter e-Riches 2.0–Next-Generation Marketing Strategies for Making Millions Online, a new book by Internet success coach Scott Fox.

If you’re one of the victims of this economy and you want to start selling online, or you’re new to Internet marketing, you can learn all about the basics of what it takes to create a successful business online. If you’ve been selling online for several years, the book will bring you up to speed quickly on how to add social media to your marketing mix.

Here are Scott’s 10 recommendations on how to use social networking as a marketing tool.

1. Invite a half-dozen or more friends to get your network started. Practice using the tools of the social network to communicate with them. For example, you can “add” friends on MySpace, “poke” or “write on the walls” of Facebook connections, or respond to some questions in the LinkedIn “Answers” section. (See Social networking ROI: A testimonial more valuable than an ad.)
              
2. Start engaging, publishing, and interacting. Get to know some people—that’s  why you’re here.
       
3. Be authentic. A big part of being authentic is letting the “real you” out to play. Nobody wants to play with a “suit,” so don’t be afraid to be yourself (within professional and legal limits, of course). Mixing the personal and business sides of your life is more common than it used to be.
       
4. Only try to connect with others with whom you really do have common ground. Indiscriminate friend requests are “friend spam.” They are  no more appreciated than email spam or junk mail in the real world. (And if people you don’t know starting linking with you, your own network will soon be less valuable, too.)
                
5. Ask for help. Most social network users are online to be social, and most are happy to help by sharing their knowledge about how the systems work.
              
6. Use feeds to keep up with your friends’ activities and broadcast your own. Posting your own status constantly and cleverly is a great distributed engagement marketing tactic. This is one of the “missed opportunities” I discussed during the teleseminar I hosted this month on 11 Ways to Avoid Missed Opportunities on Facebook. 
      
7. If you have a blog, feed its posts into your profile page. This will automatically help keep your pages fresh and share your writings with a new audience, too.
      
8. Join some groups—learn the lingo and the tools of the network by using them and observing how others use them, too. Joining groups will also begin to create a natural dialogue with other users that will grow over time.
      
9. Be a good and involved citizen in those groups to cultivate new friends. There’s no better way to gain the respect of any community than adding value by sharing info, support, or companionship—and these tools will amplify the effect. If you are an expert, social networks are a great way to spread your reputation cloud for that expertise.
     
10. Create your own group. Once you are comfortable, start a group around your product or brand. Position yourself as an expert resource and offer to help and facilitate community. Members usually proudly display the names of the groups to which they belong on their profile pages. This can lead to lots more clicks (and members) as others see your group’s name or logo on friends’ pages and in their feeds.

Scott’s book includes more than a dozen examples  of real-life Internet marketing success stories, from a North Carolina furniture store that profitably captures high-end customers using pay-per-click search engine text ads on Google, Yahoo! andMSN (Chapter 21), to the article syndication strategy that has helped a Christian stay-at-home mom to attract lots of profitable traffic for her blog (Chapter 16).

The book  is $25 and published by AMACOM, the American Management Association.

Posted In: Authors & Publishers, Blogs, Business Promotion, General, LinkedIn, Publicity on the Internet, Social media marketing, Social networking, Writing Articles, YouTube
posted On: 6/30/2009: 7:59 am: By Joan
Comments: 3 Comments

Shane Gibson’s list of 20 social media tips under 140 charcters is a handy reminder for social media newbies as well as veterans.

Reading the list, I thought of four common mistakes people are still making, based on the questions I’m receiving from people who read my newsletter and comment here.

If you think of social networking as a giant backyard barbecue, it will be easier for you to realize immediately when you’re making a mistake.

How many of these mistakes are you making? 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

—You’re  more obsessed with racking up huge numbers of friends, followers and connections than talking to them. This is like having a Rolodex that you never use.
                                   
—You don’t understand that spending just a few minutes a week at sites like Facebook and LinkedIn and updating their status is a way of connecting with your friends. LinkedIn and Facebook both announce status updates to Friends and connections.

—You’re still using social networking sites as places to broadcast a steady stream of free commercials for whatever you’re selling. Glance at your Facebook feed and this may become painfully obvious.

—You’re still taking Twitter’s question “What are you doing?” literally and write tweet after tweet about when you’re walking the dog, eating lunch or closing up shop for the day. Your efforts would be better spent passing along helpful tips and advice, or trying to help people solve problems. LinkedIn’s Q&A section is an ideal place to find people who are asking pressing questions about your area of expertise.

Bookmark Shane’s list and revisit it periodically. It will keep you on track.

Posted In: Facebook, LinkedIn, Social media marketing, Social networking, Twitter
posted On: 6/17/2009: 7:36 am: By Joan
Comments: 3 Comments

If you own a restaurant, bar or nightclub, don’t miss the fabulous tips from Restaurants & Institutions on how to participate in social media.

Senior editor Alison Perlik offers sound advice on how to do more than just create a presence on Facebook and Twitter. 

Her tips are so valuable that they can be used by the owners of almost any business, not just restaurants.

She got me thinking about other ways restaurants can participate in social media. Some of my ideas also apply to owners of bars and nightclubs.
 

Go ‘behind the scenes’

• Use your Facebook Fan Pages to offer a few recipes from your kitchen. You don’t have to give away all your trade secrets, but your Fans would appreciate knowing that you’re passing along a recipe for your popular Sour Cream Apple Pie just to them. This is a great way to create Fan loyalty. And it’s a super way to start accumulating lots of Fans.  (See 11 Ways to Avoid Missed Opportunities on Facebook.)
       
• Ditto with mixed drinks. If your bartenders notice that customers are wild about your ice tea-based cocktails, for example, offer a recipe.
                
• You can also use your Facebook Fan pages to offer customers special coupons.
                   
• Share trends. Let people know what trends you’re seeing in your business. This article in New York magazine is a good example of cocktail trends that customers might want to know about.  
                
• Share with your customers and others what your chefs eat at home. Do they plop in front of the TV with a big bag of Doritos after a long shift? Or do they have a special healthy snack they can whip up in five minutes? If so, provide the recipe!
         
• Interview customers about what they like about your food and drinks, and upload those  videos to your Facebook Fan Pages.
         
• Upload photos of people having a good time (with their permission, of course) to photo-sharing sites like Flickr and PhotoBucket.
     
            

Make it easy for customers to find you

• Let customers know where they can follow you on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other social networking sites where they congregate. Print this information on your menu, in your paid ads, on flyers they can take with them, on direct-mail advertising, on coasters at your bar, and on signs in your window.
             
• Offer this information online, too—at your website, at your blog, in your email signature, and in videos.

Connect with journalists and bloggers

• Many journalists are now on the social networking sites, particularly Twitter and Facebook. If you’re dying to get in front of a particular journalist, Google their name and see if you can find them on a social media site. I Googled ”Allison Perlik” and found her on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
     
• Check out Harry Hoover’s wiki of media people using Twitter and media outlets using Twitter.

       
Ask your customers for suggestions

Your customers might have some great ideas for ways you can interact with them on the social media sites. But you’ll never know unless you ask them.

For more ideas on how to generate publicity in traditional media, see Publicity Tips for Restaurants, Chefs & Foodies.

Posted In: Business Promotion, Facebook, LinkedIn, Photos & Graphics, Publicity on the Internet, Social media marketing, Social networking, Video
posted On: 6/9/2009: 4:34 pm: By Joan
Comments: 2 Comments

Several readers responded to the item I posted in yesterday’s publicity tips newsletter about how Facebook is expected to announce this week that it’s offering vanity URLs.

“What’s the big deal?” one reader asked in an email. “Anyone can already do a short URL—yours would be http://profile.to/joanstewart.”

She’s right. Facebook already has an application lets users adopt a short URL for their Profile, Group or  Page. 
    
   
Two problems with those URLs

Lots of people use those shorter versions, but I don’t like them for two reasons.

First, they aren’t memorable. A URL for a profile looks like this: http://profile.to/joanstewart  A Group URL looks something this: http://groups.to/doglovers. And a Page URL looks something like this: http://pages.to/publicityproducts.

That’s too confusing to remember. How many people, off the top of their heads, would remember the “to” part of the URL? Not many.

Second, those URLs don’t have the word “Facebook” within them. Facebook FINALLY got smart and decided to offer easy-to-remember vanity URLs that, I hope, look something like this, and are so much easier to remember: http://www.Facebook.com/joan-stewart

We won’t know for sure whether those URLs are free, or if we must pay. And we won’t know for sure exactly what they look like until we see them. Even so, they’ll probably be a whole lot better than the alternatives—the current app, or the long, unsightly URLs you’re assigned when you create a profile. It looks like this: http://www.facebook.com/people/Joan-Stewart/541605146   
       
      
Facebook teleseminar tomorrow

Speaking of apps, When I host tomorrow’s teleseminar on “11 Ways to Avoid Missed Opportunities on Facebook,” we’ll talk about a variety of apps, features and tools that many newbie Facebook users aren’t aware of. I get so  many basic questions about how to use Facebook, and many of them deal with the same things, like the confusing user interface,  that caused problems for me when I created my own profile. 

My guest, Christine Buffaloe of Serenity Virtual Assistant Services, creates and manages Facebook for many of her clients and will share lots of tactics and strategies she uses to find friends, save time, spread the word, and promote products and services the RIGHT way, without getting slapped by Facebook. 

We’ll cover things like the best way to promote events, how to create and promote Fan Pages, and how to use Facebook in conjunction with other social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Plaxo. You’ll also learn about a few simple things you can do to give you massive exposure.

The teleseminar is from 3 to 4:10 p.m. Eastern Time. If that’s inconvenient, you can listen to the MP3 recording you’ll receive within 24 hours after the call.

Register here. Hope to see you tomorrow!

Posted In: Facebook, LinkedIn, Social media marketing, Social networking, Special Events, Twitter, Video
posted On: 6/3/2009: 4:18 pm: By Joan
Comments: 2 Comments

If you’re unemployed and desperate, it’s time to muster a little creativity, stage a kick-butt publicity stunt, and call on your LinkedIn connections to help land the perfect job.

Enter Beverly Shepard, who has been job-hunting for 16 months and jobless since January when The Virginia-Pilot newspaper eliminated her job as marketing manager and her entire department.

Here’s her offer: Find her a job and you could win up to $6,000.

That’s what she paid a professional search firm when she started job hunting. But the company failed to generate even one interview.

“I’ve paid strangers,” she said. “Why not pay my friends?”

On March 15, she emailed her more than 200 connections on LinkedIn with the offer. The fee is based on a percentage of the salary for the job Beverly accepts.

A $120,000 job pays 5 percent, or $6,000. An $80,000-a-year job pays 1 percent, or $800. She has placed several conditions on the offer. It applies only to full-time positions (40 hours with benefits) and she must actually accept and start work on the job.

She’s willing to move anywhere in the U.S. and she’s open to a wide range of jobs in marketing, business development or public relations.

LinkedIn email pays off

Within 15 minutes of emailing her LinkedIn connections, the leads started pouring in. When her friend, Publicity Hound Gail Kent of The Buzz Factory, heard about what she was doing, Gail offered to write a press release. That led to an avalanche of publicity.

The ABC affiliate in nearby Norfolk called for an interview. That sparked more publicity from FastCompany.com, BlogTalkRadio, TheEbonyNetwork.com and BlackAmericans.com. A friend who’s a college student posted the Norfolk TV interview on iReport.com, the citizen journalist website for CNN. The biggest media hit was an interview on CNN network news April 18.

“I’ve gotten so many leads, I’ve stopped counting,” Beverly says. “I’ve even heard from an old boyfriend who said he’ll keep his eyes open for jobs for me.”

So far, she’s had one job interview as a result of the “Woman for Hire, Will Pay for Work” campaign, and another interview later this month.

She has even heard from Kathryn Troutman, The Federal Resume Guru.

“Kathryn heard about my campaign, emailed me and said she’ll keep me in mind,” Beverly said.

LinkedIn, it turns out, is a super tool for job-hunters.  Scott Allen, a LinkedIn expert who I interviewed last year during a teleseminar on How to Promote Anything on LinkedIn—Ethically & Powerfully, said connections are usually willing to help you promote something, even yourself, as long as they know you’re sincere and that you don’t abuse your relationship with them.
More about Beverly Shepard

Interested in promoting or hiring her? You might want to know:

• She has also worked for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Cox Enterprises, Inc.
• She’s the vice president of marketing for the American Marketing Association for the Norfolk, Va. area and the former president of the Atlanta Association of Black Journalists.
• She’s an award-winning marketer with 20 years in newspapers, and degrees in journalism and law from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Email her with leads.You can also find her on Facebook. Find her a job, and you’re in the money.

Posted In: Citizen journalism, Facebook, LinkedIn, PR Consultants/Publicists, Social networking
posted On: 5/5/2009: 10:04 am: By Joan
Comments: 2 Comments