This is on the money. The old BS marketing model is dead. Long live relationships! I recently had a web marketing and social media client in Miami ask me how they could get their niche business to have thousands of followers on Facebook or Twitter. I told them to stop making B2B technology products and to start selling coffee and then they can have as many social networking friends as they are good at recruiting. The important social networking tactic for them is to build relationships with clients and their friends in their market.

Such attributes don’t sit well with brands in a hurry but thats the point. The fastest way to get “there” whatever the magic number may be is to focus on being “here” listening and talking to the community in front of you. Any other shortcut may create the appearance of a community with high membership numbers, but you wont have any influence over them, loyalty wont increase and efforts wont translate to the bottom line.

via Where to Start if Your Brand Wants to Build an Online Community | Fast Company.

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I just started subscribing to Howard Givner’s posts and already found value in the first article alert I received from him. While he is involved in the events industry primarily with his work, this piece on why some small businesses fail is excellent. I’ve seen it time and again, that someone is excellent at the service they provide, but horrible at running and marketing their business. Its a totally different set of skills and we are running into small business and other corporations here in Miami and all over South Florida that desperately need help with financials, technology, operations, marketing, the web, and sales, but can deliver the service they are good at doing. Its the never ending story.

Gerber’s tenet is basically this:  There is a big difference between being good at a craft, and being good at the business of selling and providing that craft. Too often people assume that if they’re good at being carpenters, or event planners, they should be able to run a business a carpentry or event planning business.  Sadly, those skills do not run hand-in-hand and are completely unrelated.

via The E-Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Fail, & What You Can Do About It » HowardGivner.com.

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No real surprise here, but it tells you where you better be spending your time and energy if you believe in building relationships instead of BS marketing. Yes, you still need advertising venues to get attention on the web and off, but you better be investing time or hiring someone to invest the time to build relationships via social media on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

Of course, the first social media you must embrace is email. I have a client prospect in Hollywood, Florida selling over $600,000 per month online exclusively of high ticket items and they don’t yet have a newsletter, much less a presence in social media. It’s truly insane. Get the basics together or hire us to do it for you, but do it.

According to the Nielsen survey, Americans today are spending nearly a quarter of their online time posting comments, pictures and video on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, making it the most popular online activity among Americans.

Image via CrunchBase

via Social media sucks up 23% of time online – Computerworld.

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One of my favorite ads is this curious little classified ad alleged to have appeared in a London newspaper around 1914 to recruit crew members for Ernest Shackleton’s famed expedition to the Antarctic:

This ad was targeted squarely at men of adventure willing to risk life and limb to earn fame during the era of the great explorers. It has clear, dramatic benefits, filters out the faint of heart and has an implied call to action of applying at Shackleton’s residence. Any online ad that can capture the same passion and energy as this offline ad has done will certainly perform well.Well-crafted online text ads share a number of common characteristics:Well-targetedSpeaks to audienceClear, dramatic benefitsFiltering languageSuccinct headlineSimply stated offer

via Back to School Time: A Refresher Course on Writing Great Ads.

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This is a great success and perseverance case study and its a great marketing technique on Twitter to get a mass of followers and attention.Unfortunately, they company’s products is a web site builder that builds web site completely based in Flash, which is a huge no no for SEO and usability purposes.

That said, I love this Twitter promotion method and thinking now about how to use for clients.

So what’s the best way to re-invigorate an internet brand after 10 long years? Get trending on Twitter, that’s how. So Moonfruit has been giving away 10 Macbooks for every year of their operation, beginning this week. The result is that it has become the top trending term on Twitter three days in a row, as all people need to do is add the hashtag #moonfruit to their tweet. An algorithm is randomly choosing a winner. There are five days left. By the second day this week it had reached 2.5% of all twitter traffic

via Why is #moonfruit trending on Twitter? It’s the rebirth of a startup.

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This article includes a phenomenal list of tools to help you customize your Facebook social media tactics for your business. My team is going to begin implementing those social networking tools in this list that can have the greatest impact on our company. and can help us build new likes and followers on Facebook.

When a service such as Facebook limits users’ creative freedom, it is inevitable that other add-on services will overcome this limitation. This is why then, we see more and more Facebook tab apps that give us more control and freedom when it comes to customizing a fan page or a personal profile.

I can’t really understand why Facebook doesn’t create an editor that lets users create a super fan page. I can only guess they don’t want to deal with it and prefer their uniform design, which may be boring but at least it is consistent and familiar. Instead, Facebook lets other people get creative and offer an array of Facebook related apps built on the API. In any case, you must know this by now: A personalized page can drive more attention and probably, more traffic to your brand.

The 12 Best Ways To Customize Your Facebook Pages.

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Why Social Media Projects Fail?! – A European Perspective.

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Decide the basic profile for your average client. Where would you place them in terms of education, interests, use of technology, and time spent using social sites?

Hopefully you already have this one under control if you are an existing business. If not its time to go back to marketing 101. That said, as I consult with clients on their web marketing and social media here in Miami, I find that businesses that have been around for 20 years still don’t have any idea who their customers are or how they got them in the first place. You can get away with that when all you need to do to build your business is know people, but if you need to grow on the web, then you are going to need to analyze your customers and who they are in a very detailed way.

#2: Address Your Audience’s Top Issues

Some good suggestions in this piece, but the key suggestion missing is to understand how you can build a relationship with your clients with whatever tool you are using.  You must be genuine an real and compelling.

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Frankly with my current endeavors, I am betting they are more important than ever, but when it comes to big company branding, I can obviously see the extension in value. At the end of the day everything is just a tool for establishing relationships. Building traffic to your site or to facebook or anywhere else must be about building a relationship with existing and prospective customers. Which tool works for you is up to you, but web sites are not going away, they are becoming mroe powerful relationship builders and integrated with more tools.

But before you start penning the “ditch the brand website” memo, hold your tweets for a moment. Websites are not going away — they might be more important than ever — but they serve a different and evolved purpose today, especially in this new “social” context.Think wholesale, less retail. Think distribution, less destination.

Think serving, less selling.At the end of the day, brands today live a decentralized, if not fragmented, existence. The brand “home” has line-extended itself into a network of smaller residences and rented apartments — or what we might call “brand stands” — all primed for meeting and interacting with the consumer at various stages in the purchase, loyalty or advocacy cycle. A Facebook fan page is a classic brand stand.

via Do We Still Need Websites? – Advertising Age – CMO Strategy.

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Guerilla Web Marketing – Fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization(SEO), Search Engine Marketing(SEM), and all other aspects of effective web site promotion(click here for larger version):

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