Author Archives: Todd Hyten

08.13.10
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Found Friday: 3 posts on how to use social media for branding

Branding ideasThis Friday’s “Found Friday” items are a grab bag in three areas, but they all deal with using social media to get real-world results for your company, your brand, yourself (or all three). Enjoy

9 Tips For Building, Branding and Maximizing Your Profile And Exposure on LinkedIn

This post from Stephanie Frasco on Social Media Examiner is a very thorough and concise guide on how to spruce up your LinkedIn profile to make it as friendly as possible and easy-to-find by peers, prospects, clients.

HOW TO: Get Tweetable Moments from Your Presentations

Found on Mashable, this post by HubSpot’s Dan Zarrella is another great idea from this walking research laboratory. Here Dan talks about a great way to get people to Tweet from your presentations.

Facebook Pages Become Customer Support Centers

Everyone repeat after me: Don’t blink, Facebook changes every day. And here is a short post from Mashable about a new app for Facebook from Parature that turns Facebook Pages (business accounts) into customer support centers. The new app interfaces with Facebook to create a user-friendly “Support” tab which features monitoring tools for admins. How great is that? Think this will help people remember your Facebook page? You betcha.

08.11.10
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Answering the big “Why?” question of social media

Photographer: Francesco Marino

I’m often interested in the big “why?” questions. One of the things I’ve noticed about social media is the big barrier that exists with people who don’t understand it.

Their most common questions are: But why would someone want to follow my business on Twitter or Facebook? Why would a burrito business have thousands of followers (like Boloco)? Why would a T-shirt company have a million “fans” on Facebook (like Threadless)?

Why?

It’s actually a good question.

For people who grew up in pre-web age, their frame of reference for marketing goes something like this: marketing = advertising, and advertising = TV/radio/print. So advertising is about getting your attention when you are in the act of doing something else (watching a TV show, listening to radio news, reading a newspaper article). The consumer has no interaction with the ad – and it’s usually just a distraction. Most of all, it was one-way communication. No feedack or interaction allowed. “Me big advertiser speak: You puny customer listen!”

The huge shift that’s hard for some people to see is that now consumers are no longer passive. If you grew up with a phone in your hand, you know the world isn’t about passivity, it’s about reaching out, interacting, and giving your opinion.

About everything. Even brands and products.

Thanks to the web, now there’s a “place” for you to add your voice: to directly communicate with a business; to rave about a product or service; to get rewarded for your input (with responses and discounts).

So, this is all new, right? Actually, in some ways — no it isn’t. From the business owner’s perspective it is the same old game of age-old advertising. It’s about being seen. It’s about being seen by today’s consumers. And if you’re not being seen, you are invisible:

  • If you don’t have a web page  you are invisible.
  • If that web page is not updated frequently (like with a blog)  you are invisible to Google.
  • If you don’t have a Facebook page you are invisible to the 500 million on Facebook.
  • If you don’t have a Twitter account you are invisible to savvy potential customers.

And if you aren’t communicating to your customers by demonstrating your knowledge and expertise — you are invisible to the customers you want.

That’s the big “why” of social media: To be seen. By people who want to interact with you. It’s not as different as the old world of advertising as you think.

It’s much, much better.