There are five steps in social media we always recommend to new clients who are just beginning to branch out online.

They are listen, assess, engage, measure, and refine/improve.

The Art and Science of Listening

While each step is important, the foundation to any online effort is listening. And it’s the one step you can do without any of the others.

Before you begin, think about the historically great communicators. They ask a lot of questions. They really listen to what you have to say. They get you talking about yourself. They inquire deeply into the answers you provide. And then they provide advice, counsel, and coaching — but only after they fully understand your needs. Continue Reading »

This first ran over at The Whale Hunters. It’s written with the business leader in mind, but the process outlined below works for anyone responsible for using the web.

Hell has frozen over!

Oh wait. The Cubs haven’t won the World Series yet. Never mind.

But it does seem that way, doesn’t it, with all the changes in technology? You run a business. You don’t have time to keep up. Does it feel like, somedays, you’re being left behind?

You’ve always been responsible for payroll and HR and legal issues and tax laws and retention customer service and innovation and managing debt. Now you also have to be responsible for Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Yelp and Flickr and Quora and blogging and Foursquare.

Where does it begin? Better, where does it end? Continue Reading »

As is becoming customary, we answered another question from our Facebook fan page via video today. Nick Nichols, of DesignInaBag, asks, “how do you sort through all of the information you get in your Google alerts to get what’s most pertinent?”

No hat today because the sun was shining so brightly that I had to swap it with sunglasses. Check out where we  are on location! Continue Reading »

Yesterday I spoke to the WIN Home Inspection franchisees at their annual conference. As is typical, I had a few people tell me before the session began that social media is for their kids and they just don’t get it. One partner even told me that I had better have enough energy to keep him awake because he was really tired and, besides, he has kids at home that do this Facebook thing so he doesn’t see the need for his business.

You know comments like that just get me fired up and I picked on him a good bit during the workshop. I love taking the cynicism and fear of a room and turning it into motivation and excitement. And that’s precisely what happened.

But that’s not the point of this post. The point is that some great ideas came out of our three hour workshop and I want to relay them to you here.

They were sitting at tables of 10 so, after the intro on social media, I had them work to come up with terms they could use for Google alerts.

I know, I know. Everyone has Google alerts, right? Um. No. They don’t. It’s step one in listening, which is the foundation to a great social media program, so we always start there…in understanding why they’re important and what to search in order to make yourself most efficient at listening to the online chatter.

Some of their ideas included:

1. Their name.
2. The company name plus the city in which they live.
3. Top producers in their city (I especially love this one because they work with real estate agents and this is a great way to target new prospects).
4. Local competitors.
5. The company name plus the word “sucks” (I’m reading “What Would Google Do” and Jeff Jarvis suggests all of us should be searching for our companies with the word “sucks” in it; i.e. Arment Dietrich sucks. No, there’s nothing in that search, but believe me, it’s an alert I have set up!).
6. Services they offer.
7. Local organizations they either currently support or want to support.
8. The names of the people at their competitor’s offices, not just the company names.
9. How-to or advice on keeping your home up-to-par so it’s ready for an inspection when you sell it.
10. Products that typically fail in homes.
11. Companies that sell products that typically fail in homes.
12. Industry organizations.
13. State regulations around home inspections.

Though some of these ideas are specific to their industry, they can be tailored to use for any company.

Be honest. Do you have Google alerts set up? Are they this detailed? What would you add to the list?

Sometimes you have to hit me over the head with a 2 x 4 to get me to realize what I do every day A LOT of people would love to know. That’s what Robin Scott did when she direct messaged me about a comment I left on Julio Varela’s blog this afternoon (watch his vlog here - it’s about the importance of commenting on other’s blogs – and read the comments, too).

She said, “You read my mind. Saw your comment on organizing blogs. Just what I needed!”

Well, duh. I’ll bet other people would like to know, too, mostly because people say to me all the time, “How do you read so much in a given day?” I wish I could say that’s all I do every day. But it’s not. Following is how I find great material, stay energized with fresh ideas, and organize my feeds for time efficiency.

1. Subscribe to SmartBrief newsletters. They have about a zillion different topics and they send you one email a day with the best of the best. They use the headline and the first paragraph in the email. You can quickly scan the listing to see if there are any stories you want to click on and read more.

2. Set up Google alerts and Blogsearch (and/or Technorati) alerts on topics of interest to you. This is how you’ll find new bloggers, reporters, and columnists to read.

3. If you’re on Twitter, scan your stream daily to see if there are interesting headlines of stories you want to read.

4. After you find you keep going back to the same Web site, blog, news site, reporter, columnist, or blogger subscribe to their feeds. You can do this by clicking the “subscribe here” or “RSS feed” button.

I, personally, don’t like using an RSS reader (such as Google Reader). I subscribe to everything via email. I know, I know. You don’t want to fill up your inbox. Hang on and I’ll tell you how I manage that.

5. If you decide to use a reader, just create an account and then you can send all of the articles you like directly there. Be sure you open your reader daily, though. You can set it as your home page so when you open your Internet, it automatically comes up and you can scan to see if there is anything more you want to read.

6. If you decide to subscribe via email (like I do), create an offline folder in your email software called Blogs (or something equally creative). Then create subfolders for the titles of each of the blogs, Web sites, or news sites. Then create a rule so that, anytime new information is published, the email goes directly to the appropriate folder. You’ll have to get the email the first time in your inbox. Just create the rule at that time, click the “run this rule on emails in my inbox” button and it will automatically transfer everything to the folder.

7. Create an Instapaper account for those articles or blogs you want to read, but don’t have time right at the particular moment that you’ve opened it. When you have the story open, you can click the Instapaper icon you’ve added to your bookmark toolbar (it walks you through how to do this when you create your account) and it saves it for you. The handy thing is that, if you have an iPhone, you can access the stories via the app, too. Love it!

There are steps I take after these, if I want to share anything I’ve read with my networks. But that’s for another blog post.

I didn’t do all of this at once. It’s been a culmination of several months, trying to decide what works best for me.

What works for you?