An Exaggeration of How Much I Love This Book. But Not Far From the Truth

Human beings may have been creating organizations for thousands of years but that does not necessarily make these organizations particularly human.

Remember we’ve also been creating machines for thousands of years …. machines have been integral to our growth as a species as well in fact may have maybe they have been a little too integral.

From Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World, by Jamie Notter & Maddie Grant

In the science fiction television series, Battlestar Galatica, the Cylons are a race of humanoid machines, initially created by humans as intelligent machines built to serve humanity. A running theme throughout the show was that these new Cylons were so close to human that some sleepers lived as humans, and didn’t even know their true nature themselves.

We’re, of course, nowhere close to suffering this particular danger. Even in new media, it’s apparent which people are interacting with you in real time, which accounts are being run by an entity functioning as a team, and which ones are a mix of people and software updates spread out over time.

Though people don’t seem to mind whether a Twitter account is run by a company, a person, or a person assisted by software, we all like to know who we’re dealing with in this age of transparency.

One thing is clear though: people don’t mind getting their news headlines from a bot, but they want to interact with people. Seems simple enough, right?

But if it were, social media ROI (return on investment) wouldn’t be such a hot topic – the return on investment would be obvious, despite the fact that some of it isn’t measurable.

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© by Marion Doss

… Yeah. Not Bottlenose like a dolphin.

Bottlenose is a social media curation tool. It helps you zero in on just the content you want in the daily deluge of information from social media. You can even set it up to push content to you from accounts you’re not following.

I don’t much care to say there’s a wrong or a right way to use Twitter. I like to focus on what’s effective for a particular business. And if you’re following more than 25 people, especially for business purposes, it’s hard to keep that information organized.

Bottlenose has come closest to doing just that. It’s almost a substitute for some of the other Twitter clients out there, including the new web version of Twitter.

Have a peek at the video, and I’ll tell you some more of my likes and dislikes.

Pros and Cons of Bottlenose (The Short List)

In my pros column:

• As of today I’m able to post to Twitter using it.
• You can use it to spot trends at a glance
• You can use it to zero in on just the part of your stream you want to see at the moment – very useful if you want to see just breaking news, or are drilling down to find intelligence on a specific topic.
• It can push silos of content to you by type as well as topic from ALL of Twitter, not just your stream
• You can also see how popular certain content is with one quick look
• SONAR. I forgot to include a better example in the video. But it’s like being able to see your relationship to the content you discuss in an animated word cloud format that you can zero in on.

In the con/dislike section:

• It’s still in Beta – even after 5 takes, there was one thing in each take of the video that wasn’t working or was buggy.
• Little features of most Twitter clients that you may love aren’t all live (like the option to reply to everyone in a conversation or just one person)
• It’s overkill for people using Twitter to do just one thing
• You can’t untie Klout – it’s not a plugin, it’s part of the system
• Though the Mashable announcement mentioned Facebook, and the sign up page , the tie to Twitter is more prominent – not a huge con but Facebook drives more overall traffic.
• To get in, you either need a high Klout score or an invitation.
• There’s a few too many automated options for my tastes, like the ability to auto-like a post on Facebook using a custom filter. But that’s just because I think the whole like thing is too three-years-ago already.

Of course, many of those cons could get cleared up as the tool moves out of Beta or gains request for the addition or removal of certain features.

In Venture Beat, Nova Spivack, one of the creators of Bottlenose is quoted as saying:

“The stream is the next big problem after the cloud…”

You’d better believe it. As social media gains more user numbers, some of those folks are going to fall into your network. You may want to connect to more people, businesses and sources of information than before. And the problem with the stream of information we’re constantly having thrust toward us is how to manage it – how do we extract just the information we want that day without having to change who we’re monitoring so often?

Bottlenose may just be the answer.

Right now, you may not be able to gain access if you don’t have an invite or a high Klout score. No, I don’t have any, and I don’t know what constitutes a high enough Klout score. But try Mashable for invites, or tweeting  – people using Bottlenose to monitor for requests on Twitter  are sure to find you now.

Okay, so first?

It’s twittering. If it’s a word at all.

Secondly, it’s easy.

If you’re in  cubicle farm now, look around and tell me how many people you see who are Actually working.

If there are 25 people around you, I’m willing to bet that if you look closely, 5 people are working, 5 are doing something social that’s related to working, and 10 are just looking like they’re working.

Not because they’re lazy or stealing time from their company.

No. The people in the last two groups are doing something essential.

The human mind needs time to breathe between tasks.

I figured this out way back when I got the tapes, “Where There’s a Will, There’s an A”. I badly needed this course as a student when I came back from Africa for middle school. Because where in Africa, we learned things by understanding them, and then building on knowledge we previously had, it was different in the States.

Eventually I figured out that there was a reason why my grades had dropped  in Math and Science, even though we’d been ahead of those courses when we returned. The education system here ( which hasn’t changed in any other substantial way in 200 years – did you know that?) was more focused on the standardized testing system than it had been when we’d left.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. In the States we rely much more heavily on memorization as a teaching method than we should, due to standardized testing and its growing importance. (I’d be fine with that if we mixed in other learning styles and gave as much weight to creative learning as we do to technical learning, since the world we live in now gives its money to people who solve problems, not those who manage or process them. But I digress.)

the point is, I’d learned a different style of absorption, so I’d have to adjust. So I found the “Where There’s a Will” course and it really did help.

My most important lesson from it was that you remember most the last thing and the first thing you read. I have no idea if there’s any science behind this but it definitely worked for me:  To achieve more retention of the facts you were memorizing, the theory was that you need to make the opportunity to remember information happen more often.

And it was then I learned to chop my learning up into smaller tasks. If I read a chapter in a half hour, I’d remember the beginning of the chapter and how it ended. But in small enough chunks? The  beginning was so close to the end I even though I couldn’t quite remember clearly, nearly all the important parts were accessible at testing time.

Read five pages. Take a break. Review the high points, next five pages.

Of course, this carried over into my professional life. It’s helped me absorb a great deal more information despite having the crappiest memory of anyone I know. And since I have this horrible tick about wasting down time (long story for another day), I had to figure out – what can I do while I’m letting my mind breathe?

When I worked in a corporate setting, that was easy.

• Get up and talk to a co-worker,
• see if my boss needs anything,
• visit another department
• and reinforce my alliances.

But the last two offices I’ve had it’s been either just me or me and one other person.

And there’s only so many times you can say hi to your one co-worker who works eight feet from you – or your own reflection – before you start to seem like a lunatic.

I prefer that no one happens upon that information before I’m ready. You understand.

Anyway. Now that most of my co-workers or people who work for me are in other states or countries, I visit them online. Which is where Twitter, Facebook, etc comes in.

You see, being able to spark acquaintances online is an ongoing task, and will take continuous follow-up on your part. However, you don’t have to feel like you have to spend an hour on each site for these connections to take place. There are plenty of tools out there that can help you automate the supporting tasks, or let you know that it’s time to follow up- including Twitter itself!

We’ll chat more another time about how to have meaningful discourse on multiple mediums without spending your whole day networking online.

If you can’t see the video playlist, you can click here to make the magic happen.

I spent about half an hour this weekend updating my privacy settings in Facebook this past weekend.

I’m not a complete freak about keeping my data private – mostly because, due to snafu or acquisition by a less than sympathetic company, I assume that all of what I say online will be public one day no matter what one company or another may say, or sincerely intend.

However, there are some things I do on Facebook that I feel contribute too much noise to the stream or that I am happier keeping to myself. Examples: a game on Facebook that I play as a guilty pleasure – not Farmville. In fact, I’m so ashamed of this secret, you can only find out by watching the videos closely.

Another example: I love Spotify. And putting Spotify in my Facebook is the best idea since putting peanut butter in my chocolate. The only problem is that it broadcasts every single song I play on my playlist. Facebook touted this in their F8 announcement as a feature, rather than the bug I believe it to be.

When I was 19, sure, I wanted to share every waking moment and incident with my friends. Khadijah Ali-Coleman, who I am still friends with since we went to college together, can attest to the 20 page letters we would write back and forth despite the fact that we both lived on campus within walking distance.

But now that I’m about to skid around the corner to 40, I enjoy a bit more mystery. And whether it was Facebook’s intent or not, it’s clear from the update that they assume we all think like we’re in our late teens or early 20s, or they want us to adopt that thinking.

Thank you, no.

What might be fine when I’m listening to classical music is not so much when I’m in the mood for hardcore hip-hop, or some “make a baby” ballads.

Happily, during my time tweaking privacy options, I discovered that there are some settings you can tweak without removing the app. What I found out is on the playlist too.

However, there’s sadly no setting for deciding whether to publish on a case by case basis, or if I just want to broadcast the name of a playlist, manually.

Here’s a descriptive list of the videos in the playlist, so you can skip to the one that suits you:

1. How to Control Who Sees Your Public Updates in Facebook
2. How to Set Up Your Default Post Settings in the New Facebook
3. How to Set Your Profile Visibility and Privacy Settings on Facebook
4. How to Control Apps Posting Behavior And Protect Your Privacy from Apps on Facebook
5. How to Control Who Can Connect to You on Facebook and How
6. How to Stop People from Tagging You in Photos You’re not in
7. How to Keep Your Facebook Timeline from Being Completely Public
8. How to Block People or All Application Requests of a Specifc App on Facebook
9. How to Hide All of A Certain Type of Update (Like Tweets) From Your Facebook Stream, (or keep from broadcasting certain updates, like who you’ve friended)

Deb writes in her post “You’re Not as Famous as You Think You Aer“:

Frankly, I’m tiring of the discussions around this space arguing over who is worthy of fame or an “expert” title. Who are we to judge? Very few people with a heavy online presence are famous outside their blogs or social media conferences, anyway. In the general scheme of things, none of this really matters. We’re dealing with tsunamis, poverty, cancer and terrorism, so for us to spend so much time worrying about Internet fame is kind of dumb.

And I partly agree with her, on the branch of internet fame.

The Internet Fame Discussion and the Expertise Question are Different Topics

Somehow, the argument about expertise has gotten tied up with the discussion of fame. It made it very easy for me to dismiss the whole thing as silly, despite my previous rants about expertise. Let’s talk about fame for a minute though.

Being famous on the internet is not being famous at all.

Then again, I know a lot of people who are *actually* famous, and ironically it’s largely because fame doesn’t impress me at all. Intelligence does. Bring me a geek who invented something or my favorite author if you want to see me act like a tongue-tied, starstruck fool. But meeting TV, film or even radio celebrities is not a big deal to me.

So while I think it’s true that we do have more important things to worry about, I differ with a lot of folks on what those other things are. For example, it’s important to note that there’s a connection between improving the world and wealth – it’s harder to affect change in the world without at least the basic level of comfort the equivalent of an American middle class lifestyle can afford.

The ability to gain expert status is tied to that because some people are using using that power for ill, and making a lot of money at it off people who are none the wiser. Not most people. Not even 99.9% of people. Not even most of the people in social media who call themselves gurus. But enough that it’s disconcerting.

So I don’t think the debate about expertise/experience is about fame at all. I believe that’s a red herring, (to borrow Geoff’s term) designed to make it easy to at first dismiss the discussion as being very high school, to the point of being irrelevant.

What’s The Big Deal About Expert Status?

If you look closely though, it’s really about not standing by silently while you see people being defrauded.

Most of the time, that’s not the case. But when someone strays close to that line, it is difficult, if not impossible, for me not to interject.

There’s a population of people who have learned that the title of expert helps sell things better, because after all, in a world of the blind people, the one-eyed person is king. In and of itself, I don’t find anything wrong with making money from teaching people how to do things – as long as the experience, expertise and results are there to back it up.

However – and here is the problem – we’re entering an era where none of those three elements are present.

Thought leadership has become tied to popularity instead of influence (Another reason why pop influence needs to die as a metric of measuring effectiveness, but that’s another blog post).

In a Washington Post article, Francisco Dao writes:

Consider our heroes. Even a cursory glance at most conference lineups reveals a host of speakers whose actual accomplishments are flimsy at best and whose primary skill seems to be self-promotion. (Should a first-time entrepreneur really be dispensing “knowledge?”) And yet we rarely stop to ask ourselves why we look up to those we’ve chosen. Instead of recognizing the entrepreneurs who have quietly risked it all to build something lasting, we get caught up in social media popularity contests and Twitter “influencers.”

We too often ignore the men and women who have built companies that provide livelihoods for their employees while we fawn over self-help gurus offering four-hour short cuts. And although we act the part of intellectuals and world changers, most of us are so reliant on social proof that the first question we ask when considering a conference or event is, “Who else is going?”

The article is called “Tech Community Are We MTV or TED?” You should go read it. He makes some excellent points.

Why ARE we worshiping people whose only achievement is popularity?

It’s great to be able to promote yourself, and yes, that’s a large part of what this site is about. But if you’re promoting the fact that you wrote a book based on no real-world knowledge of the problem and how to solve it, why are we listening to you?

We wouldn’t pay to go to a university and learn Computer Science from a well-known biology geek who can barely turn on his computer.

What’s the Harm? Why You as a Consumer or Tech Thought Leader Should Care

Some would ask who it’s hurting, and rightly so. The harm is that the last time this happened, it took a whole industry down with it, and a lot of innocent people got hit by the shrapnel. That online industry will never be what it was.

Yes, that could happen to the tech community if we aren’t more diligent.

It happened in the search industry, but education and information from our community of thought leaders thwarted the potential disaster. There was a time when Google actually put on its site that you shouldn’t hire search experts. Now they speak at search conferences, and share their own tips.

Sadly, there is a precedence for this with which we can see the dire consequences clearly.

The biggest reason that the group I’ll refer to never fully regained a good name is that most of the influential people who saw the abuses happen either

1. decided it was none of their business,
2. were too timid to talk, or
3. didn’t have the platforms of blogging, and other social media tools that we have today to spread the word more effectively.

To be very clear, I find there’s nothing wrong making money from knowledge sharing, not at all.

But when people outside this bubble are routinely being defrauded often enough that they’re starting to see everyone in search or marketing or technology as crooks, that affects my business. When people stood by and said nothing in internet marketing, and frequent fraud became an open secret, that’s what happened. There’s now an institutional bias on the federal level because of that, as well as in financial institutions.

What Do You Think When You Hear the Term Marketer Online?

If it’s something negative, you’re about to find out why.

The internet marketing community was once much nobler, and in places like the Warrior Forum, grievances were often aired and resolved.There are plenty of reasons why it is so much harder to make money as an internet marketer. But the widespread problems with false claims, product theft in its many forms, and silence in the face of many dishonest dealings were certainly the nails that are keeping the coffin shut.

One small crop of vermin has managed to scar the reputation of the entire business – to the extent that they rant against people who have excellent reputations for being honest business people, on and offline, just because they say they are marketers. I’m well versed on what the difference is, but even today, when someone claims to be an internet marketer, I have a question at the back of mind of whether I can trust them. And that’s as a consumer who knows what protections exist if they aren’t.

That can and will happen to the social media circle, and the larger tech community it is a part of, if we continue to marginalize people who say things like “that’s enough” or “this is fraud“, or simply disagree with the popular people.

It may feel like high school at times, but it’s not. Or at least it doesn’t have to be. Just because you’re popular, doesn’t mean you’re right. And if you put yourself in the public eye, you should expect disagreement. Disagreeable conduct in response to valid questions is a sad attempt at bullying.

Either the shield of popularity is pierced — and soon — or all our businesses will be marred with the resulting chaos, which will in turn affect our clients and customers. One or the other will happen.

It’s only a matter of time.

Thank you so much for reading this. It isn’t the normal blog post that comes out of this site, not by far.

Here’s the gist.

I put together a new package featuring new way to find your most targeted audience on Facebook worth $200, on sale for $7.77 at this writing.

I priced it at less than $9 until I go to Africa this coming week for two reasons.

1- I want you to buy it now not later, because
2- I want to stay longer and not have to work during my first real vacation in 12 years, therefore,
3- Rather than beg for money, as always I’d like to trade value for value. And I like to overdo it on my end.

You probably already have a Facebook Profile, and if you’re a part of my audience, you’ve probably already picked up my guide Fast Facebook Traffic.

(A guide to getting more traffic and leads with your Facebook Profile without violating Facebook’s rules. Or acting in a way that lead people to think you’re a jerk.

Also less than $10 if you don’t have it!)

There are many effective ways to grow your audience through Facebook without doing that used salesman kind of pitch – which we all know doesn’t work anymore.

But you know all that, so why wouldn’t you have a Facebook Profile? Of course you do.

Facebook is an incredible resource for connecting to people who become customers. They drive more traffic than Google now, and with 600 million people using it, not being on Facebook isn’t the best idea a person has ever had.

It’s a shame that, with a personal profile, there are so many extra steps to get people to engage with you. I believe in engagement before lead capture, but Facebook is really making it harder than it has to be.

And yes, my new guide overcomes that, so you can get access to more new people in a way that has them to connect to your page And your newsletter within minutes of first encountering you. But let’s talk about how involved the Facebook profile engagement process is.

First you have to set up your profile so that people know where to go to learn more about you, and hopefully, one day, visit your site and sign up for your products and services.

The solution to that used to be easy – just use a Facebook plug in to put a sign up box in your sidebar. Of course, Facebook put an end to that.

But you can still push news and updates from your profile that will encourage people to get into your sales funnel. If you know how to set up an engaging blog that converts visitors to newsletter sign ups, the cycle will be longer, but there’s still a chance that you’ll get it done.

If only the work were over then. And granted, the process isn’t dull. It’s fun even. But parts of it are inefficient.

For example, let’s say you’ve set up your profile to talk about business to fellow business people, and have a filter for stuff that is directed to family and friends.

Now, you have to go and find out where people are and draw them to you. One common place is a Facebook group. If you know which ones to go to and where to post to get the best results, and how to figure out which ones are active, again,  super.

Of course, Facebook went and changed Groups too. Except they didn’t change the old groups over to the new format. Not that you always want it to, but now you don’t have a choice. (The hell?)

So, okay, you’ve set up your profile properly, you’ve gone and found people to interact with, they click on your profile and join… great, some of the new people are coming. But what happened to the old people?

Aw, nuts! Facebook made yet Another change, and if you haven’t directly interacted with people lately, you aren’t showing up in their stream. Unless they do a series of funky adjustments that most people can’t and won’t be bothered with. So the people you worked so hard to recruit aren’t getting your updates any more, unless you knew the secret to getting in that group in the first page.

So what now?

Well, what if you could set up a page on Facebook with an irresistible feature that made people want to connect to you?

What if having them sign up with you let you contact them through their news feed, through their Facebook messages, and through your newsletter?

How would you like it if you were exempt from the rule that if you haven’t directly interacted with someone in the past few weeks, they couldn’t see you? What if your special status made you visible to them?

What if that didn’t even matter because they were on your email list?

Suppose that through this special page, you could contact people several times a day, or outsource the job to someone who could send out messages on your behalf several times a day?

And wouldn’t it be fantastic if you also got a whole new place to browse and connect to new people in order to find your audience?

I have great news for you.

Facebook just made an update that allows you to do all of the above.

The catch is, it only works this way under specific conditions, with a technique I’ve just put together. At this writing, I’ve only been using it a week.

In that week, on the days I do it, I get 10 new fans in 12 hours, or up to 20 in a day.

In the first five day period I had a spike of 100 new fans.

They aren’t the kind of passive fans that you can buy from various services (some of them spammy, none of them worth $200!) . They are people who are leaving more wall posts, sharing more links, and just overall interacting more than ever.

Even people who had already joined my group are coming back to talk!

My technique exploits a new Facebook feature, in combination with some existing tweaks that allow you to

- turn your Facebook Page into a landing page
- set it up so that people in your target audience have a reason to like/join your Page
- gives them an immediate reward for doing so
- can be set up so they follow up that action with joining your newsletter (Facebook can’t ever affect Those leads)
- bypasses the “you haven’t contacted me lately” filter
- allows you to publish frequent updates to their news feed, including notices of sales, blog posts, helpful tips, or questions
- lets you build a community, complete with discussion board, video, link and photo sharing, for free, and,
- gives you a whole new way to find new prospects and draw them to you.

That’s what my new resource “Fast Traffic from Facebook Pages” tells you about. In it I teach the technique that in 15 minutes of work brought me 20 new subscribers to my Facebook Page and newseltter over the next day.

It works best under certain circumstances, but a fellow entrepreneur just showed me how to make it work for Any type of page, though arguably not as well as my current preferred page.

It’s less than ten dollars, and you can pick it up here:

Here’s what Jim Zaccharia had to say about it:

“WT_? Ok, I Shouldn’t Tell Anyone, BUT, Tinu Abayomi-Paul has come up with a Facebook Traffic plan ‘offer’ for < $10 That’s Too Good To Pass up – IF you Want LOTS of Facebook Traffic, that is. You’ll be Blown Away by the Bonuses. Really.”

When I thanked him for the comment in Facebook, he said:

“I could hardly Believe my Eyes_when I Saw How Much You Provided ! Glad I took you up on your offer Before you came to your senses and raised the price! It’s Easily Worth 10X what you’re asking.”

The price has gone up a buck, but is still under $9 because I’m looking to raise cash for a trip to Africa in a few days. I just learned that I may not be able to work steadily while I’m there, and that I might be able to extend my trip.

(I was prepared for frequent power outages, with backup generators, but not for the potential shortage of the fuel that powers the generators.)

It won’t stay under $9 forever – I’m leaving in a few days. Get your copy now.

Just in case Facebook Pages, or Facebook marketing is new to you, I’ve set up the following bonuses, available until I leave for my trip:

1. FanPage Dollars
2. Fanpage Dollars 2
3. Facebook Profits
4. Facebook Fanpage Warchest
5. 27 Facebook Fan Page Templates
6. Viral Fan Page Script
7. Facebook Ad Explosion
8. Facebook Fanpage Blueprint
9. Facebook Ad Miracle
10. Facebook Social Ads Exposed
11. FB Profit Secrets
12. FB Viral Script Pro 2.0
13. Facebook Marketing Uncovered
14. Facebook Rockstar System

This is over $200 in additional help with Facebook, yours free for investing less than $10 in Fast Traffic from Facebook Traffic.

Get your copy of Fast Traffic from Facebook Pages today. And thanks as always for your support.

I hear so many people, so often, talking about how much they hate Twitter when I first ask them if they’re using it.

Then I introduce them to a couple of neat people or ideas, and when I hear from them a few months later, all of them rave about it, and laugh at how they were using it wrong.

And I laugh with them, because I made the same mistake they did. My story is just like theirs: A friend (@Rumford) told me about Twitter.

I went there, I didn’t get it, I began to hate hearing about it all the time.

Another friend enlightened me and  I love Twitter now.

But loving it or hating it really isn’t the point when it comes to your business, is it?

The bottom line is, can Twitter help enhance the bottom line of your business? The answer is yes.

You can hate Twitter, you can love Twitter, but that’s not the issue. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again- Stop tryng to fall in love with the various technological wonders and start learning how to leverage them for your business, or have someone else in your organization get on it.

Now.

It doesn’t have to take up a lot of your time, either, if you opt to do it yourself, which in my opinion is the best option.

As an entrepreneur, you can get away with being on Twitter for an hour or less a week, and still get pretty impressive results in terms of traffic, sales increases, customer service, and pre-sales connection building.

Here are seven reasons you should take a look at developing a Twiter strategy immediately.

1. Tweetchats.

Industry leaders get together and put on free text seminars. It’s basically free training.

2. Hashtags.

Twitter is organized in a way Facebook isn’t.

You can get news and updates about a topic by following a unique identifier called a hashtag. If you blog or are in a time sensitive industry, it’s critical to get news and developments first. Even if you just want a leg up on your competitors for marketing, it’s so important.

3. Pre-introductions

One of the best ways to connect to someone at a conference, meet up, expo, or networking event, especially if they’re well-known, is to be able to say “I follow you on Twitter” and reference an interaction you had.

When people came up to me at BlogWorld 2010, this was the thing that turned acquaintances into mutually profitable relationships the most.

Lots of people know me on Facebook or through Facebook – but the people who I met, who became customers, clients, friends, helpful peers, or peers I helped, were the people who knew me through Twitter.

4. Follow bloggers, not just blogs.

Want fellow bloggers to link to you?

Want them to write about you?

Thinking about starting a blogger campaign?

Use Twitter to make initial contact. It’s a non-intrusive way to begin the types of bonds that result in that last-minute favor at crunch time. Don’t know what to say? Retweet a link to one of their blog posts.

5. Exposure

Speaking of retweeting, Twitter is one of the easiest and fastest ways to spread a link. Get retweeted and you can get massive, immediate exposure.

I’d say with Tweetmeme, it’s the biggest reason why Digg.com is dying- you get more top stories with the option to ignore the surrounding chatter on Any topic, not just technology. Tweetmeme embraced the very people Digg was rejecting, and Twitter only filters for spam. Even light-handed commercial messages are okay, and get passed around.

The folks who couldn’t figure out newsreaders and RSS feeds are there, receiving the benefits of this technology without knowing how to use it.

6. Your competitors.

If they’re on the social media sites, they’re getting access to your customers who are on it as well. Some people think having your audience visible and accessible on sites like Twitter and Facebook threatens the well being of your business.

But that’s only true if you aren’t in there building the relationship, providing resources and being of value to them. The kinds of customers that aren’t loyal, or are primarily price-conscious aren’t the ones you want anyway. They’re often the hardest to please.

Your competition is going to have access to your audience whether or not you’re on the social media sites, whether or not you advertise or market yourself. The key is that this access not be exclusive to them, and your presence ensures that they know there is a better option: you.

7. Your customers.

Twitter has a small audience in comparison to Facebook.

But the part of your audience on either doesn’t necessarily overlap. And the audiences that are using Twitter and Facebook are getting the same benefits of you – fast news, free resources and training, and the other items I’ve listed here.

Using Twitter, you can provide maximum customer experience is minimum time through sending out resource links in a readable style, providing customer service, or taking hashtags to the next level with a sense of community.

At some point, having a presence on the top social media sites is not going to be optional for successful companies, just as having a website and a blog is considered the rule rather than the excepiton. Nowadays, people are putting their Twitter handle on their business cards.

If you use web technology in your business in any way, including simply for publicity or having a website, having a Twitter handle isn’t just a good idea anymore. It provides a competitive edge.

(Sound problem on video has been fixed.)

It’s a bit more clear how Google Social Search Impacts Your Business with visuals, as the video above “How Google Social Search Gives Your Social Media Efforts More Impact” will show.

Here’s a quick summary of what you’re looking at, followed by a few points I didn’t make in that video.

In the video I compare the search results without being logged in to Google to the results when I’m logged in. We take a look at the social circle page too. When you see the results live, you start to understand that just by participating in social media and including social links in your Google profile, you have given the people you are directly connected to, as well as the people they are publicly and directly connected to, another way to find you – in Google search.

Now it’s true that at least for now, these results are at the bottom of the page. But if people know they are there, and they feel that people they know are giving them personal suggestions for where to look for content, I believe they’ll make the effort to look at those results – ESPECIALLY if they haven’t found what they’re looking for in regular search.

I know I’d rather get David Bullock’s or Brent Leary’s suggestions on social media for business or social CRM than Google’s.

And what I didn’t say in the video, in case you didn’t piece it together, is that Google social search effectively gives you another shot at being exposed in searches you may never come up in on your own. There are only ten top organic spots for social media in the former, regular version of Google search.

But with these new results, you have three more chances, through social search, news and blog results.

Sure, not everyone is logged in when they search in Google. But they never had a good reason to do it before.

And that’s the wrong way to look at it anyway. I’m more focused on how, if I have 10,000 connections in Twitter, who each have about 100 connections, how much bigger my Google audience can potentially be from just that one social site addition to my social circle.

If for some reason, you aren’t already getting amazing results from your social media participation, this should be new incentive for you – more free traffic from Google is rarely a bad thing.

In a future update I’m going to do a longer free video, for newsletter subscribers and my Warrior forum friends only, about some things you’ll want to do in order to get in on this action. It won’t be in the blog, so if you want to know about it and you’re not a warrior, click through to the site and subscribe in the box below where it says “free ebook’ or send any blank email to 0-gridlock@aweber.com.

Have you ever fast-forwarded through a commercial?

Have you ever used an ad-blocker?

Have you ever changed the radio station because there was a commercial on?

We’ve all done at least one of these three things.

Now think about this.

What if you are at a coffeeshop, talking to one of your friends, and they suddenly, out of nowhere, started talking about how much better Microsoft Windows 7 is going to be?

And what if they went back to what they were saying, without telling you what that comment was about, then suddenly interrupted another stream of thought with an ad for a MacBook Pro?

You’d think they were nuts, right?

Now, have you ever been tempted to sponsor someone’s tweets to reach more people? Or to take sponsorship in your own twitter stream?

Pete Cashmore would tell you not to do it, and here are some additional words about why not – the folllowing is a quote from his recent post about Twitter Ads:

That’s the exact same outdated model of interruption-based advertising that we’ve been trying to block out with a TiVo or an internet ad blocker. We don’t want it. We’ll ignore it.

And he’s right. We often fast forward over commercials – sometimes we don’t even notice them. (Notice I said “sometimes”, that will be important later.) We even intentionally block them from being shown to us.

Given that buying your way into the stream could  further alienate you from your customer base– what are you supposed to do to engage in social media, what do you do in the new model to get and keep customers?

We’ll talk about that shortly. First, let’s look at what the old model was.

Content is created. It’s made popular, and then access to the people that have been viewing that content is then sold to advertisers. Those advertisers pay a certain amount of money and they get attention.

That model is dead, hence the early boom and bust of the banner ad. Banner ads still work to a certain degree, but not the way they did in the old version of the static web.

It was problematic model to begin with on the web because there are so many ways to block out the intrusion of advertising. And yes there people out there who are still making money doing this with AdSense and Clickbank ads and the rest.

But it’s the way that that advertising is integrated into their message, making it more popular rather than an interruption, using it with the content ,rather than making it completely un-targeted and a blatant interruption that jars a person out of their lowered shield of trust, that makes it acceptable.

Not necessarily respected, admired, or desired, mind you. But it is acceptable to have your content sponsored if you do it the right way. That’s not what I’m getting at.

Any way you look at it, intrusive advertising is dead.

Does that mean we should stop advertising? No.

Some advertising gets through and if it’s the right message, to the right audience, at the right time, conveyed the right way, it’ll get through. But content has to mimic, even actually BE content now, because that’s now how it’s received.

In the time the old model was born, advertising was often the only way your items could be discovered. They had to be inserted into content like radio shows, movies, billboards, newspapers, magazines, and television, because that’s how new items were discovered.

Now, you have direct access to the people you want to reach through content. That doesn’t mean advertising is dead, simply that it is evolving.

Not only should we not stop advertising- if you’re in trouble, the fastest way to get you back out is advertising. A joint venture may take as little as a one hour phone call to set up, but a Google ad can be live in 15 minutes. You’ve got to advertise on some level – and you should.

Sometimes, advertising is consumed as content, and that should be your final objective with advertising, which changes the way we make it, and how it is distributed. Create your ads to be mini-versions of content already being consumed.

In those circumstances, they will continue to be passed along through trust circles, and make a lot more money for you in the process.

I’ve loved an ad so much I tweeted a link to it. (Another thing to love about Twitter. All I had to do to find that tweet from July was Google my Twitter account for the Recession Aggression bag.)

Take a look at the Recession Aggression bag video below, then let’s see if you can answer the next question yourself.

Why did I tweet it?

Because it wasn’t just an ad to me.

It was funny.

It grabbed my attention.

It spoke about an issue I was interested in.

I thought it would be useful to others, at least as a smile, at best as a resource (see the link at the end of the video.)

How can we apply that information to our own businesses?

What you want now is first, a hyper targeted audience. It’s hyper targeted advertising to an audience that, really really really wants it and not only as a last choice.

Secondly and most importantly, what you primarily want is a vehicle by which you can get your message as content into the eyes of people would previously could only be reached by advertising.

The reason why you want to consume the content is because content is more pervasive than advertising,and it is far cheaper to successfully market content than it is to buy advertising in the mid to long term.

Remember the cycle above in the old model? Content is created, then it is made popular. You don’t have to work as hard to get content popular, and the price is lower. A popular website or other online media channel is much cheaper to create or advertise on than a popular TV show, and in many cases has a bigger audience.

Enter social media. Advertising on Facebook is in a way like advertising during your desired demographic’s favorite TV show. I can have my “ad” displayed to hundreds, even thousands of people. Now will all the people who see a Burger King commercial run right out and buy a burger? No.

But enough of them will be exposed to Burger King that this is where they’ll know it is a choice when they do want one.

To take it a step further, becoming the content on Facebook or Twitter or StumbleUpon or other social media sites is the wave of the future. Turn your ads into content and display them directly to the people you want to reach, people that want your message.

We already know where they are – they’re reading the news, doing a search, checking their email or on a social media site.

Social media can help you be visible in all four of those locations as content if you let it.

The big question is – And then what?

You get their eyeballs. How do you get them to stay long enough to listen, and want to come back badly enough to subscribe? And how do you up that desire enough to want them to buy.

You have to trade in social currencies to achieve that objective.

As Peter Cashmore has pointed out money’s not the only one. There’s attention. There’s trust.

This week, I’ll I’ll list the social currencies in a series that talks about why you must being trading in social currencies and how you can capitalize on each one of them.

Then we’ll have a wrap-up article that lists what they all are, with examples of resources, sites you can go to, and tools you can use, in order to get more information about how to capitalize on all of them without alienating your customer base.

In the meantime, understand this. You can’t ignore social media. And you can only game it once. A much more cost effective solution that are respective of your time, too. To get at them, you’ll have to learn about social media, and how to trade in the social economy’s various currencies.

Next time, we’ll talk about what social currency is, why your company needs it, and why it would be foolish to ignore it, or social media for that matter.

First, let’s define the term Explosive Results for our usage.

When you visualize something exploding, you think about a burst of energy, often associated with fire for some reason – probably the fault of our favorite action pictures.

I love to see things blow up as long as I know no one really got hurt – not just in movies but in website promotion. And an intelligent social media strategy won’t just get you several thousand links from various social sites. It can bring you premium web visibility, more targeted visitors, and bring you closer to your existing audience.

An standard social media campaign helps spread the word about you and encourages other people to as well.

An explosive social media campaign has inherent viral exposure, inspires community driven communication, helps make the web a better place, and even brings joy to people, however fleeting.

When you share in social media, if your goal is just to get more people to see your links, you’re on the right track, but at the same time, you’re limiting your potential. You may think that getting explosive results from social media will take more time, energy and money, but this doesn’t have to be the case.

If you’re a business owner, you know that working harder doesn’t necessarily mean better results – what if you’re working hard on the wrong thing?

Sometimes the remedy is working smarter. Here are a few small changes you can make to your social media approach that can propel your social media results from lukewarm to smoking hot.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #1 – Hot Content

The cornerstone to any social media campaign is the content. If you get this component wrong, it doesn’t matter if all other elements are perfect. Study what’s going hot in your targeted topic and find a unique angle to fit your content into what people already like, without stealing their ideas.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #2 – Niched Network Nuances

The more tightly focused your submissions to social media sites are, the more likely they are to go viral, whether they are links you share by other people or your own. Here’s the logic.

People follow other people with similar interests. They’re on sites like Google, Yahoo, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Digg actively looking for new content. Put those two things together and you have a whirlwind of clicks happening. The only question is, will it be your link that gets clicked or passed over?

Having 5000 connections on Twitter or Facebook is useless if you are connected to people who don’t want your broadcasts, and you’re just as useless to them if you don’t want theirs. If my interest is in improving my existing business and you’re trying to get me to sell your network marketing products, it doesn’t matter how many times you ask me. If I’m not interested, your continued broadcasts will be ignored, or worse yet, blocked completely.

It’s about the perfect balance of quality AND quantity.

And if I’m not paying attention to you, I can’t and won’t spread your message. If you are in network marketing, why not go after people who love the network marketing concept but can’t seem to find the right company? That’s a perfect match, and can dramatically cut down your search for the right partners and prospects.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #3 – Simplify Sharing

It amazes me how many people miss this one.

You’ve got great content. You’ve got a massive, niched network.

Why feed them content that’s hard to share? Does that report have to be in PDF format? If so, does it have to be behind an opt-in wall if you’re spreading it among people who have Already opted in? Anyone connected to your business through its Facebook page, or your Twitter stream is also part of your opt-in list. Yes, it would be best if they were on your email newsletter list, but what faster way to get them there than to show them you don’t need to hold them prisoner there?

If your whitepaper is of such high value that you don’t Want it to spread, well, that’s something different. But if you’re sharing it so other people will spread it, make it easy for others to share.

Send your su.pr link so all they have to do is click the Thumbs-Up button.

Put a few sharing links on your page.

Make it easy for them to Retweet.

The easier it is for them to share, the more likely they are to do it.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #4 – Consistency

And now we come to the area I fail at the most. It’s one of the things I know I need to do, but I haven’t quite gotten the hang of how to brainstorm, create and distribute quality content consistency, and still give them best possible service and support to my customers and clients. I always err on serving people who have bought from me, figuring that next blog post can wait until tomorrow.

Then at some point, I noticed a decline in return traffic – people weren’t coming back because they’d already heard everything I had to say. The solution? I got help for my content creation process. The ideas are still mine, but I was able to barter help for research, transcribing, and editing. I am also able to get audio and video polished much less expensively than I thought, though I don’t always use this option due to time constraints.

The other thing that helped a lot was getting over my perfectionism complex. Release your content as soon as you can. I can’t tell you how much money I’ve left on the table from my old fear of the typo and grammar police. Not to mention the fact that I felt like I was leaving my audience hanging.

You subscribe to something because you want to get regular updates. If your favorite daily news show started coming on once a week, you’d probably switch channels. If you’re inconsistent without explanation, your audience numbers will drop and your network will fade.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #5 – Think Engagement

Measuring your results by page view alone is a thing of the past. When the web was mostly text and images, it made some sense that how many pages a visitor viewed at your site was a true measure of engagement.

Nowadays this isn’t the case. You want to look instead at how long people are at your site. The exception, of course, is when customers are coming to your site to buy, and the order processing system takes them off your page. But if people aren’t leaving your site because they’re ready to buy or subscribe, you truly must look at why they aren’t paying more attention to your content, and what changes you can make to get them to stay.

This is critically important in understanding which content will go viral naturally. What posts are people staying on your site to comment on? When do they take a few extra seconds to retweet? Are they watching your videos all the way through?

Once you know the content your audience is most connected to, and why, you can make more of it.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #6 – Three-Way Connection and Communication

That’s not a typo. Three-way communication is when the way you conduct yourself online is observed to a third party, who is also indirectly being addressed by your manner or statement. I wish I could credit the proper author of this, but I just don’t remember who it was who first observed that three people are positively affected by an act of kindness – the person giving, the person receiving, and the person observing.

One example of this in action is having a conversation with a peer about their new product on a social media site. Your friend is probably Dying to tell someone about the testimonial they just got, but don’t want to be rude or are too humble to brag. Ask them in front of your audience, and the conversation is exposed to your connections and re-exposed to theirs.

Connection is just as important – if communication is the conveyance of information, connection is doing so in a way that bonds. A several hundred closely bonded contacts will spread your message faster and farther than several thousand distant aquaintances.

Explosive Social Media Tactic #7 – What’s In It for All?

In the 80s, we all thought about what was in it for ourselves. In the 90s we decided to focus on others, hence, what’s in it for them. Today, we’re in the age of the win-win-win situation. Tell them how you benefit and tie it to their benefit.

Want someone to help you spread your stories? Make sure they know how important it is to you, why you came to them for help, and how they’ll be perceived for being the bearer of your good news.

You may look at the list above and feel that it’s intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Focus on doing just one of these things better each day for a few weeks, and before you know it, you’ll be doing them habitually. The results you’ll get will help these new habits stick.

Here’s a link to the su.pr traffic video if you are viewing this post via a syndication channel and can’t see the video above.

The video above is some of  StumbleUpon traffic, specifically the traffic I drove using su.pr. In the example above, the numbers average to about 5000 Stumbles a week, and I’m not a Power Stumbler by any stretch.

That’s not even traffic I got for myself, it’s for other people.

My personal record is 27,000 visitors. I had a product up about it on Tuesday at a sale price for  24 hours, for my newsletter subscribers only.

Everyone who signed up for the 27,000 visitors before I took it off the bonus list for the Social Media Success Package has probably noticed by now that Devon Brown has a new product up at http://27kvisitors.com/ – and if you’re saying to yourself… “hmmm…” you’ve got great instincts.

But no, he didn’t rip me off (bad paranoia! bad! lol)You’d be making a mistake in thinking anything Devon has done or is involved with isn’t above board. Which is why I’m always honored when he works with me or gives my products positive reviews.

Devon got a copy of the update, as he’s one of the ones who got the original package (that’s his testimonial at the top of the Social Media Secrets page that used to have this as a bonus).

And he let me know exactly how insane it was to sell it for less than $97 for more than a day. I agreed and it’s off the server and onto the http://27kvisitors.com/ site. All that’s on the page is a quick 14 minute video explaining how it helped him, and at the end, an order button.

If you pick it up. let me know. I have a special surprise upcoming for people who buy from that site.