March 2010

Mar 2010

30

What if everything is wrong right now?

by Allen Voivod

Over in the self-help and personal empowerment sections of the library and the Internet, gurus strive to give people comfort and assure them that everything – EVERYTHING! – in their life and business is, at this moment, exactly right.

Heck, we even espouse that kind of idea on our popular “What if…”?” poster.

A lot of people have trouble believing everything is right, though, and that probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you. After all, would there even BE a market for personal empowerment books, products, and coaching if people inherently, instinctively believed in the right-ness of their situations, no matter what they were?

So, people don’t always believe they have the right conditions or knowledge or tools available to them to move in the direction of their dreams.

But what if we took it to the extreme?

What if we assumed that absolutely nothing was right? Or, to co-opt the Zen proverb, “Open your mouth and you’re wrong.” You’d expect to fail in everything you did.

So….what would you do? Would you be frozen? Or would you be released? To paraphrase Byron Katie, “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be free?”

Lani wrote a great article about failure once upon a time, and I just had the pleasure of re-reading it. (Isn’t it awesome to come across something you once admired – especially from a loved one – and still find it admirable?) One of the points I got out of it today is that the only road to success runs through failure.

GeorgeGranted, there are caveats, like not making the same mistakes over and over. But when you learn from them – and even better, in our Brave New Social Media Infused World, when you’re transparent about your mistakes and how you learn from them – you can actually turn them to your benefit.

Look at it another way. One of the most hilarious episodes in the Seinfeld canon is The Opposite. George, convinced that everything he instinctively does is wrong, takes Jerry’s advice and does the exact opposite of what he would normally do in a given situation. The results are roaringly successful – he dates a beautiful woman and lands a dream job with the New York Yankees.

He assumed that everything he did or thought was wrong, accepted it, worked with it, and took the actions necessary to create success.

So, even if you think some or all of your personal or business situation is wrong today…can you still take action toward creating success today?

It’s not a rhetorical question. :)

Mar 2010

28

Facebook Pages vs. Profiles: Don’t Make the Wrong Choice

by Allen Voivod

Rodney gets the bad news from Allen about using Facebook Profiles instead of Pages.

Rodney gets the bad news from Allen about using Facebook Profiles instead of Pages.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s to be the bearer of bad news. Okay, I know, who actually likes to be the bearer of bad news, aside from your gossipy Aunt Edna? But I digress.

We (Lani and I) have had more than a few businesses and organizations reach out to connect with us on Facebook recently who have set their business/organization up as a personal account, known in Facebook parlance as a “Profile.” These are well-meaning folks who have amassed hundreds of connections – “Friends” – and I’m just going to be blatant and capitalize the terminology for ultimate clarity.

These businesses/organizations are at risk to lose all the equity they’ve built on Facebook. Immediately, suddenly, and without prejudice.

You see, Facebook’s rules say “Profiles represent individuals and must be held under an individual name, while (Fan) Pages allow an organization, business, celebrity, or band to maintain a professional presence on Facebook.”

So if you’re using a Profile to represent a business or organization on Facebook, you’re violating their Terms of Use, and you could have your Profile – including all Friends, content, and customization – deleted without warning.

Now, what are the chances you’ll get found out in the sea of 400,000,000 users? Maybe not huge. But for what it’s worth, we know firsthand that it’s not an urban legend. It happened to a client of ours, on a product line in which we’re not involved. Once we got wind of what was going on, we warned them of the risk. They didn’t take heed, and their account got found and axed within the same week.

Thankfully, they hadn’t gone too far down the Facebook road on that account – they lost a couple of months of activity and less than 200 Friends. But ones who have reached out to us in recent months have many more Friends, and years of content that could literally disappear overnight.

If you use a Profile to represent yourself as a professional associated with a business or organization, you’ve got no worries. (Unless you maintain a second Facebook Profile for your personal life – that’s against Facebook’s rules, too.)

If you ARE using a Facebook Profile against their Terms of Use, however, here’s what you should do:

1. Create a Fan Page for your business or organization. Also referred to simply as a “Page,” that’s the functionality Facebook created just for folks like you.

2. Send a message to all your Friends. Tell them you’re converting your Profile over to represent you as a person by a certain date, and refer them to your newly created Page to continue to interact with your business/organization. In fact, give yourself time so you can send 2-3 messages. When’s the first time you remember taking immediate action on something yourself?

3. Follow through. Even if you think you have no use for a personal Profile on Facebook (you do, but let’s not get into that right now), don’t waste the equity you’ve already built up. You’ve done your due diligence by letting your Friends know multiple times about the change. So make the change, and let your Friends do what they will in response. It’s an opt-in/opt-out society.

Good luck with the conversion, and if you have any in-the-trenches stories about this issue, or other related tips ‘n tricks to share, we’d love to hear ‘em!

Mar 2010

8

3 Top Things to Consider for Social Media Strategy – an ADD Info Summit

by Allen Voivod

The Deal: Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) Info Summits – short blasts of info for adventurous entrepreneurs!

Time: 2 minutes, 58 seconds – give it a listen with the Audio Acrobat player below. (Can’t see it? It happens sometimes. Click here instead.)

Featured Expert: Our own Allen Voivod, Certified Social Media Strategist and Co-Content Lover in Chief.

Summary: Allen recently spoke to a couple of undergraduate business classes at Southern New Hampshire University about social media and its place in the broader marketing planning and business planning picture. Post-lecture, he took a moment to riff on three top things to consider for social media strategy.

Teaser Quip: “This doesn’t always look like money, exactly – it’s not necessarily a straight A-to-B link.”

Idea Path: Integrating social media strategy with a marketing plan and a business plan  >> 3 top things to consider >> who/where the audience is now >> who/where the audience will be >> search engine optimization >> Google and Bing indexing full feeds of Facebook and Twitter >> Universal Search Placement (USP) >> return on investment (ROI) >> David Meerman Scott putting his pants on >> other ways to look at ROI

For More Tips, Tricks, and Occasional Falsetto Voices: Join us on Facebook!

Mar 2010

5

Our Path to Social Media Certification

by Allen Voivod

Last week, I had a conference call to discuss a potential series of social media workshops we might have done with Leslie Poston, of NH’s Uptown Uncorked and the co-author of Twitter for Dummies.

However, Leslie found out earlier that morning that Lani and I are members of the International Social Media Association (ISMA). As a result, she said she couldn’t do any workshops with us or be seen as being associated with our business because of our relationship with ISMA.

thepathThat, shall we say, took me a bit off-guard. :)

Now, I knew that there had been a brouhaha in the blogosphere about ISMA back in December, but I hadn’t bothered to read anything about it. As I’ve told a number of people then and recently, I’m content to let ISMA handle ISMA issues, and focus on my own business. In retrospect, though, I probably should have paid a little closer attention.

Turns out Leslie also has her own specific concerns about ISMA, and she and I had a great conversation (really!) after the initial surprise wore off.

She asked me – and I’m paraphrasing – what I could tell her about ISMA to change her mind, because other people had already tried unsuccessfully to do so.

The rest of this post mirrors what I shared with her in response, which has little to do with ISMA and much more to do with our own business and the reasons for the decisions we made, which are four-fold:

1. Previous corporate experience.

2. Ramp up our learning curve for to serve our audience in general, and our clients in specific, much better.

3. Long-term trust in Mari Smith.

4. Global masterminding opportunity.

And up front, I’ll ask you the same questions (also paraphrased) I asked Leslie before I told her the story:

Based on what I’m about to share, can you see how we logically came to be involved with ISMA from a business perspective? Can you see why it makes sense that we as business owners made the decision to go through Mari’s program?

I’ll keep this short and to the point. Promise.

cia1. Previous stuff. Way back before the dawn of time (1998-2001), I worked in corporate America as a bank auditor. Me? A bank auditor?! Yes, you read it right: A bank auditor. And one of the expectations of the job was to work toward the “Certified Internal Auditor” (CIA) designation offered by the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA), a professional association for the industry.

Not only did I earn that one, I was about six months away from earning my “Certified Information Systems Auditor” (CISA) desgnation from yet another association, the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA), before I switched careers.

cisaThis wasn’t a matter of ego, stacking all the acronyms behind my name. This was a professional expectation, laid down by the AVPs, VPs, and SVPs who managed the auditing departments of two banks for which I’d worked as an auditor.

So when someone talks to me about the professional benefits of certification – regardless of how many organizations in the industry are doing the certifying – it’s an idea I can get behind.

2. Ramp up. In 2007 and 2008, we were getting more and more questions about social media from clients. Hey, when you handle blogging and online content strategy, it’s a natural leap.

We’ve been blogging since 2006, on Facebook since 2007, and Twitter since 2008 – imperfectly, in the trenches, learning as we go and figuring things out the way most small business owners do. But as the questions started coming faster, and became more pointed (i.e., “Can you help us?”), Lani and I knew we needed to get into a focused training program. We highly value education and professional development, and we looked to a source we already knew and trusted to get it.

lanimari3. Mari Smith. We’d been following Mari for about a year when we had the chance to meet her at an event in November 2008. You know how sometimes you meet someone in person and they’re not the same person you’d been reading, listening to, and watching on YouTube? Not so with Mari. She was exactly as genuine, generous, and transparent in person as she was online. What a relief!

Mari announced in March 2009 that she was going to be rolling out a six-month intensive training program – not just on Facebook and Twitter, and not just her! She brought in Lou Bortone (another NH guy) to teach about online video, Jesse Stay (the creator of Static FBML), Nathan Kievman on LinkedIn, and a few others, too. It was a virtual program – with live content delivered via webinars – and that fit in perfectly with our married-with-business-and-two-young-children lives.

Plus, she had even bigger plans. She intended the program to be a certification-level thing. She intended to launch a global association at the end of this inaugural program. And when she talks about “Radical Strategic Visibility,” she walks the walk.

We believe Mari, we believe IN her and the purity of her intentions, and it was the right program at the right time for us. Not to mention…

4. Masterminding. This is one thing I didn’t share with Leslie when she and I talked, but it’s very relevant (and particularly so for Lani). You know the benefits of collaborating with like-minded entrepreneurs. It’s why you go to networking gigs, attend regular events in your industry, and other business-focused get-togethers in your corner of the world.

But how often do you get the chance to participate in a six-month social media intensive, sharing resources, brainstorming new opportunities, and making valuable connections, with 50 business owners in six countries (US, Canada, UK, Italy, South Africa, Australia)?

Answer: Once in a blue moon. We’d have been silly to pass it up. So in April of 2009, we said “Yes” to Mari. And there you have it.

Now, here we are, 11 months later. Are there other social media certification programs out there? Yes. Are any of them perfect? No. Mari herself regularly notes through her own channels and with comments on other folks’ blogs that there’s room to improve ISMA, and she’s consistently working in that direction.

And there are the “other” questions. Can social media practitioners authentically be certified in the first place? How can a new professional body, with the same intentions as other well-recognized associations – like, say, the American Marketing Association (AMA), the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) or the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) legitimize itself? What’s an appropriate investment for in-depth social media training? Are direct marketing tactics relevant for the social media space?

walkthepathThose “other” questions go well beyond ISMA, and to my mind, focusing on ISMA in answering them is the equivalent of ignoring the forest for the trees. So in future posts later this month and year, I’m going to start throwing my hat into the larger, more relevant fray and answer these larger questions.

In the meantime…

For Epiphanies Inc. in specific, in my conversation with Leslie and reputationally in our corner of the world, the real issue boils down simply and only to those two questions I asked her (and you) earlier:

Can you see how we logically came to be involved with ISMA, from a business perspective? Can you see why it makes sense that we as business owners made the decision to go through Mari’s program?