The Argument For Apps, Should You Have One?

By: Lisa Wynn

It seems there is always something new we “should” be doing for our business. How can we keep up?  Walking around Barnes & Noble sipping my coffee, I saw it. Everywhere. Move over Twitter books, enter the new competition lining the shelves seemingly screaming.. “How To Make Money With Apps.”

OK kids, I’m exhausted. I just got my own blog and websites updated and tweaked, embedded social media icons, sharing options, RSS feed, bought a video camera and have spent countless hours building all my social media profiles. Now seeing the app craze, this was suddenly reminiscent of the time I cut my long blond hair off in eighth grade in favor of the Dorthy Hammel cut, only to read an hour later that long hair is “in” for spring.

Now this?

I reluctantly sat down with the latest pile of app books. I’m just looking, right? By the end of my second cup, a scone and three screaming kids sitting next to me, I had an entire iPhone page of notes. (How cool am I?) Here are some of the arguments for an app. It does get me thinking. A quick Google search shows several app do-it-yourself programs for about $99. Beyond designing it, I haven’t looked that far. I’m still looking at the pretty colors. But I did come to the realization that an app is basically a link to more content with GPS tracking and other assesability features to reach your customers any where anytime. Here are some points that stuck out for me..

1)Placing an app on Facebook and allowing for iPhone/iTunes download. This allows you to promote your own special content where users are already in the environment.

2) An app is an entry portal to your business to expand customer base, as Facebook and iPhones are at the heart of the social media world in its new incarnations. Its cooler to have a YE app on a iphone than go in and subscribe to a newsletter. People want an app they can push with a pod cast alert vs an IN box full.

3) Apps are a HUGE image update as you can give away your app for free. (Link to your site and to itunes to download)

4) The cost of entering the app world is reasonable and low cost compared to traditional advertising.

5) Smartphone users are more affluent therefore apps may appeal to an audience with more disposable income.

6) FB and iPhones all have stake in your app running well on their platforms. They even give free code samples so you dont have to be a program wiz.

Anything new is worth looking into. Not sure if I am apt to get an app, but Ill keep you aptly posted. Chime in…your thoughts?

How To Get Exposure For Your Company In Ten Minutes A Day

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I spoke at the Greensboro Meetup Group last week regarding a DYI integrated marketing exposure program that anyone can do in just 3 hours a week. This topic, by far, has been one of my most popular for several years now. Using the word FREE, DYI and THREE HOURS, is all they need to hear and they can’t sign up fast enough. Not to mention the talk itself was free. I cannot stress enough the importance of sharing real content. Give something away. Something that works, Something that anyone can do. Something that will not cost them cash-out-of-pocket, unless they hire someone to do it for them, but still, a small price to pay. So read below and see what Mashable had to say about this very thing today…I love reading Mashable – for me it’s like potato chips. I can’t read just one. Before I know it half of my morning is gone.

The first step to using social media effectively is sharing your content. Begin by taking an inventory of the type of content your company produces. It is important to be as efficient as possible in repurposing content. The idea is to promote the articles, videos and photos that you currently produce, instead of creating new content specifically for your social media presence.

If you are an online news site, you will have an endless feed of articles and blog posts, but you may also have an array of video and photo offerings. Once you have a grasp of all of the various types of media that your site produces, you’re ready to take a look into which social media platforms may be best for you.

Most brands should start with Twitter () and Facebook () at a minimum. Both platforms can easily be set up for manual or automated updates. As a start, use these platforms for sharing links to your most recent articles or blog posts. If you also produce videos and photos make sure you share those too. For video producers, YouTube () is an obvious option, as it’s the most popular online video community in the world. Depending on the type of videos you produce, you may find a valid fit on Vimeo (), Hulu () and Blip.tv, among others. And for photos, Flickr () is the go-to service. Just make sure you are following their terms of service, as brand promotion can be a touchy subject within the Flickr community.

Keep in mind that users react differently to various types of media. You’ve probably noticed this on your website, and it certainly applies to media posted on your social sites, as well. Diversifying your content can help you get a better idea of which type of content does best or promotes certain actions (comments, shares, click-throughs, etc.) on various social platforms. As a starter, test the grounds to see how your Facebook audience reacts to different types of posts, including status updates, photos and videos.

The New York Times does a great job of not only diversifying which platforms they are on, but also mixing up their content. You can find The Times on Facebook (where they have over 30 fan pages), Twitter (where they have over 200 feeds), YouTube, Vimeo, Foursquare () and Flickr. Because they have a range of content types, they are able to serve up videos, photos, tips, discussion questions, and simple updates across the social sites that they are active on.

Figure out your audience’s preferences and needs when it comes to frequency and timing. When posting, try not to overwhelm your audience with updates that are too frequent or lengthy, and make sure you’re updating at times when your readers are most active. When it comes to timing, look at your audience’s behavior patterns. When do they comment or click-through to your site most? If you plot out the number of comments and click-throughs by the hour for your Facebook page, you’ll see a pattern. Concentrate your efforts in the hours where users are more active.

Lastly, keep your updates short. Get inspiration from Twitter’s 140-character model. You have a limited amount of time to catch a reader’s attention. Make it quick and include a link to the article or post. For keeping it as short as possible, use a shortened URL, using services like bit.ly () or ow.ly.

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2. Curate Conversations

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Some brands look at social media as a way to simply promote their content. While it’s a great way to promote media, it’s so much more. When evaluating the effectiveness of your social media strategy, you should be able to at least answer one question: What value are we bringing to our audience?

In fact, you should be able to answer that question with every strategic business decision you make, above and beyond social media. If you can’t answer that question or your answer seems a bit shallow, you should rethink your strategy.

Naturally, your audience craves the latest news, not just from you, but from around the web. It’s not enough to simply self-promote, as eventually your audience will need to go elsewhere for news. It’s impossible to create all the news, so why not curate it?

Strive to be the news source with the go-to list of top sources for particular coverage areas. Create Twitter lists for important topics in your industry, or for breaking news events. Many news sites, including The Huffington Post, CNN and the New York Daily News, are on the ball with Twitter lists. Check out Mashable’s () Twitter List Directory for a look at some of the top lists in specific categories, including Tech & Science, Sports and Business.

Once you have the hang of Twitter Lists, try pulling the data into a visualization on your website. For example, The New York Times features its curated lists on nytimes.com/twitter. And on Mashable, we integrate an entire Twitter List Directory within our site. Take inspiration from these curation ideas and brainstorm how your site could begin implementing valuable resources like these.

Another way to curate news is to share breaking news and interesting articles from other news sources on your social sites, giving appropriate credit, including @mentions on Twitter and Facebook. After all, what’s more important: providing your followers with a timely update or waiting until your writers have a post on the story? Once again, it’s about creating value for your fans and followers.

Do You Use OPC?

Profiting From Other People’s Content And Staying Out Of Hell

Duct Tape Marketing

Don’t be alarmed by that title – I’m not talking about stealing content for gain, I’m talking about adding the filtering and aggregating of content to your content consumption, creation and sharing routine.

Pretty much everyone has bought into the idea that they need to produce lots of valuable content in order to build the trust and search engine eyes of today’s online prospect. One way to supplement your content strategy while still providing lots of value, is to get good at finding and filtering other people’s content that your prospects and customers will find useful as well. (Done right, the “other people” will thank you for giving a wider audience to their content)

It should go without saying that giving credit to the original source and full attribution to the author when appropriate is a must.

There are a number of ways to think about this idea

Make yourself a better resource

Creating a habit of filtering content related to your industry, products, competitors and customers will make you better at what you do, allow you to keep up with trends and give you data to help you build deeper relationships with customers.

Share content to draw attention

Pointing out useful resources and good finds is a great way to build your social media and blog followings. Consistently sharing relevant links and sharing them on Twitter is a strategy that many find helps them be seen as follow worthy. Creating a once a week blog post roundup of good stuff is a great way to add content and keep readers engaged.

Filter personalized content

A more advanced strategy is to use your filter skills to create your own industry research briefs. If you specialize in several market niches you can create laser specific new pages and email newsletter roundups that feature the best of what you find each week. You can even use RSS technology to deliver dynamically changing web content password protected for your best clients.

Some of my favorite tools for finding other people’s content

AllTop – This site collects what it believes is the all the top blog content on a large number of topics and displays the last posts from each of these sources. This should be a daily stop for most. You can also build your own custom page here and use this as your RSS reader.

Delicious – This is my favorite bookmarking site. As I surf the web I mark sites here with tags that I define. It’s a place to categorize content, find new content and create custom RSS feeds of the content you find. If you are trying to create pages for customers you simply define a tag for the customer and then set-up an RSS feed that streams your hand picked content.

StumbleUpon – A service that helps you stumble upon content related to topics of interest that you define. Browser toolbar makes it very easy for you to go looking. I’ve used this technique on numerous occasions to find unique content to share on Twitter.

Business Exchange – Business Week’s community platform allows users to submit content related to specific topics.

Kurrently – Once of the first search engines that allows you to find what’s being said on Facebook

Twitter Advanced Search – Using the Twitter advanced search function you can set up a search like this: “small business” OR entrepreneur OR “start up” filter:links to bring you tweets for a specific topic that contain links. This is a great way to keep up with what’s being shared on a specific topic and since the search produces an RSS feed you can send it to your Google Reader or even publish it to an HTML page.

Google Reader – Subscribe to relevant industry blogs and have a library to read any time you have some down time. You can also set up a custom TwitterFeed to tweet your shared Google Reader items adding a hand selected way to share more content as you read.

Google Alerts – Create custom searches for things like brands, people and products and have any mentions delivered to your inbox or reader.

Google Insights for Search – With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties

Instapaper- A simple tool for saving web pages to read later but in a nice custom newspaper kind of format. Phone, Kindle and iPad apps available.

Feedburner – This is Google’s tool that allows you to enhance your RSS feeds. For purpose of this post I point to the Feed feature that makes it very easy for your to take and RSS feed and publish to a web page. Here’s an example where I’ve take hand selected delicious feed mention of my book, The Referral Engine, and streamed them on a web page. Bonus: Notice the RSS feed of Twitter mentions doing the same thing.

Company  Turnover Alert!

The Lost Art Of The Hire; Prepare For And Integrate  New Hires For Ultimate Success.

Sitting with friends over dinner one night, we were  sharing our job hiring horror stories,  griping about our bad hiring and/or training nightmares.  Thinking back to  my first job (doing dishes at Lee’s Village Inn at age 14) up to my last marketing  position- it seems most every  company I have worked for didn’t  have a protocol in place to hire, prepare for, welcome or train new employees. This is a recipe for failure, extra work, time lost and lots of frustration and turnovers in the end.

Problems will manifest on both sides when a new hire is not fully integrated and given clear expectations (company goals anyone??) with the other departments AND supported by ALL management and staff.

For example, one company I contracted for had absolutely NO idea how to guide or train a new hire  in order to integrate them into the company providing a cohesive department that was part of the team. The hiring process should have been my first clue. It was  disorganized, took too long  and was basically a scattered mess of communication for about 2 months. The owner (one of three) was “on board” with implementing a marketing person, but the other two thought hiring someone to do marketing was a waste of time and money, and thought social media just a fad. (It’s always been there – only the name has changed. Lets just call it prospect communications) I wanted to be an employee, not a guinea pig. This should have been my second clue. If you do not have the full support at hire of all the owners or decision makers – you are basically on trial and you may as well be looking for another job during your lunch hour.

I didn’t and that was my next mistake.

On my first day I was introduced around and then given an “extra” office which was full of the last victims notes and papers, quite possibly cryptic codes begging for escape. Then I was moved to another gloomy windowless space that had been a storage room, with florescent lights akin to an operating room. Not one person had shown me how to use the phone system,  copy machines or codes or where the bathrooms were.  I had no business cards. (but I was expected to go to networking breakfasts and make contacts)  I had to ask how to put my time down in order to get paid, how to log onto our blogs, websites, newsletters , and constantly requested information  needed for case studies, press releases, and “what the company offered.”  I asked why they had an edge over their competitor?..well turns out they didn’t. They just wanted a pretty annual marketing plan.  I got little help, and it took weeks to get this information. Not only did I feel like an idiot asking for what most of it should have been in a nice neat employee packet, the other employees had no idea what I was doing there,  what the companies  goals were in hiring and creating this new position, and how I needed their input. (Naturally I started calling meetings, creating handouts and sending email “updates” of our exposure growth and tactics, (from 19 hits on their blog to 7000 in 21 days) and never heard a thing. No one cared because the new “marketing department” wasn’t integrated, introduced or supported.

Everyone at the table had almost IDENTICAL stories.

Why does this happen again and again? Because most small companies don’t know jack about the “art of  the introduction”  and have poor communication skills  with their employees.  (but oddly enough think they can sell it to their clients..harrow??)  Owners  can  seriously underestimate the power of new hire preparation. They will spend more time prepping their yard for mulch than they will  a new employee that they are about to invest money into. They cannot communicate because they are not born leaders, but rather managers or widget salesman.

To communicate your leadership character to others, you must be a patient teacher,  be present, be visible and be available – and for Gods sake suck it up and get employees some business cards.  Shed all traces of detachment, irritation and arrogance and take the time to talk to your employees. Grow a pair.

Showing interest in and respect for your employees will help you make the emotional connection that is so important in effective leadership and ROI. It will show that you care about those being led and that you have an interest in the organization and were PREPARED for their arrival. It is also an effective way to get to know people as human beings, make them feel significant from day one, and quite possible allow them a spec of joy in coming to work to make you wealthy. I know I felt embarrassed and “in the way” on some of my first days asking for a desk chair and door key. Really? Like really? Yuck.

So what does a leader’s communication style say about his or her character? Listen to some other behaviors that effective leaders exhibit:

• They handle resistant audiences well.
• They listen to individuals from all levels of the organization.
• Effective leaders encourage direct and open discussion.
• They initiate difficult, but needed, conversations.
• They are clear about expectations and ask good questions.
• Effective leaders also involve others before developing a plan of action.

So think not only about your words, but also about your attitude and actions when dealing with your employees. It will make a huge difference in your business and your relationships and overall reputation with them. Most managers that I talk to recognize that continuous learning in today’s marketplace is essential and they are all hot about getting on the new media/web/video deal . They know they are in the “Information Age” (just don’t say “information highway” OK?)They want a competitive high performance organization but they just don’t know where to begin. There are key reasons why managers don’t train their employees and they fail and marketing staff gets let go.

1) They Don’t Know What Material to Use…There are literally thousands of books, and videos available to companies for training purposes. So, which ones do they choose? This is why my management, sales, and motivational materials are so valuable.

2) They Don’t Know How to Follow It Up…One big concern many mangers express is they don’t know how to measure the value of the training that their employees receive, or expect them to change the world in a few weeks. Remember, they are implementing a new program OR fixing your F*&% ups of years!

3) They Don’t Know How to Get People to Apply the New Skills Learned…Again, the way to justify the investment in training employees is to measure the results, but give them no tools to succeed. Business cards may be a start.

4) They Don’t Know How to Do It…Many managers are confronted by employees who want training. These people want to develop their skills and help their companies succeed. Their managers just don’t know how to respond. So, like many people, when they don’t know how to do something they will avoid it. They need a trainer – oh no, more money? Even if this trainer is an inside job – its the bridge a new hire needs. can we say mentor?

What happens to a company in today’s competitive marketplace who doesn’t continually invest in upgrading the skills of their employees? It’s the same thing that would happen to a championship football or baseball team that doesn’t practice every day. Soon, they are no longer a winner.

OK, so blow your money and keep running the lap track. That’s why we always see your job ads…

TURNOVER SPECIAL: Sick of waiting for the “web guy” to change something on your company website then bend you over with the charges? Let me do a custom content management website for your business – $300 if you mention “turnovers.” Includes a phone training session so you can take it over. Can’t beat that..you be the boss.