Using Social Media for Business. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more.

Authors: Matt Dotson and Brandon Kennington
Topics: Podcast, Uncategorized on Jan 31st, 2010 | View Comments

Businesses are starting to jump on the social bandwagon, increasing brand loyalty and expanding their reach to new customers.
Is it time for your business to join the party? How do you create a social media strategy? And, how can it be automated?
Twitter, Facebook, and You Tube are just some options available to businesses looking to keep their finger on the pulse and a hand outwardly extended to their customers. Brandon and Matt cover all the bases from reserving your brand name to going viral in this extra long episode!

Links from the show.

Transcript:

Welcome to Automate My Small Business where we show you how to set up and run your own automated business on the cheap. So get ready to take back your life and add a little spice. It’s time to build something automated.

MATT: Hello and welcome to episode #15 of Automate My Small Business. I’m Matt.

BRANDON: And this is Brandon.

MATT: And today we have a great episode for you about social media and we’re going go into why you’re doing it, what do you and what are all the different networks you should be on and how do you tie it all together and maybe integrate some of that to save you some time. But before we get into that, Brandon, what have you been up to?

BRANDON: Well, you know, just getting back and swinging things after the holidays that’s been kind of a catch up for me, just wanting to get back normal but I’ve kind of looking forward to the next weekend to get into the, to go skiing in Mammoth. That’s going to be fun. In fact, you and I are going to be going together and I don’t think we’ve been skiing together since what, four or five years ago.

MATT: Yeah. It’s been awhile. So it’s going to be a little rusty.

BRANDON: And you’re just coming back from Hawaii, right?

MATT: Yeah. I spent the weekend in Hawaii and that was really nice. I’m going from one extreme really nice warm weather to you know really cold nice snowy skiing. So I’m excited.

BRANDON: Yeah, that is going to be fun. I hear there’s going to be like five days of snow and then it’s going to break for us to go and it’s going to be just power packed. That’s awesome. So I’m excited about that. But on the business front, I’ve been kind of rethinking about some new models. You know, I have this way of kind of cycling the business model again and again. I think I kind of talked to you about this in the past where you know I feel like every notch in the belt for the business growing to the next level is kind of like a new cycle that I kind of rethink everything and kind of start from ground zero and see if there’s anything I am missing.

MATT: And you re-optimized the whole system, right?

BRANDON: Totally re-optimized from the ground up. I find it fun and interesting because you know that’s what we do and I like to build business systems and so every time I see a new opportunity to take it to the next level, it’s kind of what I do. So you know, I pull out my Mindmeister, put some brainstorming ideas on paper and kind of go over it. So the things I’ve been thinking about recently are just some new tools that I’m going to kind of consolidate with my virtual assistants to say, you know, these are the tools that we’re all going to be using from now on because these I believe are the best of the breed. I’m kind of leaning towards Skype being the number one instant messenger tool. Mainly because it also does voice and it also does screen sharing and you know I could do that with three other tools but why when I have one.

MATT: I hear they might come up with web conferencing in a few months so that would really unify everything for you.

BRANDON: Exactly. You know I thought a lot about this where Skype is one of those tools that no matter who you are around the world, it seems like all the virtual assistants that are on Odesk that I hire have Skype. You know that’s kind of the one tool that you kind of have to have.

MATT: Right.

BRANDON: And because of that, it’s an easy choice to go with instead of using Gtalk which I use a lot with everybody too and I’ve kind of gone through that phase two where I wanted everybody on Gtalk because I have that up all the time. So I’m instant messaging them through that but I’m going to pull away from that and try to stick with Skype so that everybody kind of in the same team. And then Odesk is really starting to become more and more powerful. I’m really excited to see some of the new transformations they’ve done. They have, well this has been up for about a month and a half, the new team 3 download that allows all of them to capture their screens. It is a beta but now instead of it just being for the providers, it’s used for the buyers and I get to use it maybe even to track my own time which could be a good productivity awareness on my part.

MATT: Now, I can keep tabs on you, Brandon.

BRANDON: Exactly. And it’s funny because you and I are in the same team room on one of our accounts and one day I’m just kind of playing around with it and you instant message me saying me, “Oh, I see you’re researching such and such,” and I’m like, “How the hell did you know that?” Yeah, that was funny but yeah, so I guess the thing I’m excited about Odesk is they have a lot more integration. Now they have their own instant messenger client built into the team 3 app so you can see who’s online, who’s offline, who’s working for you at the moment, who’s not and then you can you know, because they’re working for you, they’re pretty much available for you to chime in and instant message. So I feel more connected with the team on Odesk and not only the people that I hire off of Odesk but also the people I might use outside of Odesk. I invite them to Odesk so that they’re in my Odesk teamroom and you know they can interact and collaborate with the rest of the team even if they’re not on Odesk or at least not even being paid on Odesk. So I think that’s kind of neat. So I’m kind of going towards this whole centralized team view you know because there’s so many people that I’m now working with off of Odesk. I’m really excited to see kind of how it all forms together and I kind of report my findings and conclusions to all you listeners out there that I think are really interested on this stuff.

MATT: Yeah, one of the things I thought you did mention that was cool was you know after doing all our research for the last show on affiliate marketing, you looked into Post Affiliate Pro a little more and you might be using that, right?

BRANDON: Yeah, you know, I looked at all the different price points of the big guys like Commission Junction, LinkShare and now that Google affiliate network that’s out, they’re all pretty much priced the same. It’s about a thousand dollars to join although they do try to get you in at $2,000, you just got to tell them you want less and it will come down to about a thousand. And then they’re all saying the same thing about monthly minimums. They want a $500 monthly minimum which you know as long as you’re paying commissions to LinkShare or you know Commission Junction up to that level, you’re not going to be paying them anymore but they will ask for that minimum. And I’m also noticing that they want you to be in business for like you know a year at the minimum so they do have their own requirements, you know, certain level of sales you need to have and they are serious about that. I’ve decided, you know, I don’t want to pay 30 percent outside of my commissions to this network. I’m going to stick to my own network. I’m going to install Affiliate Pro on my own site and I’d go with that. I’m going to have my affiliate manager who is also doing my marketing, who’s a virtual assistant for me, kind of manage it for me so that’s another way that I’ve kind of tied it in. I had a good conversation about it with him and he’s up on it. You know all this kind of stuff kind of pulls together. It’s exciting because I’m actually learning and researching this and finding out more and bringing it out to you know Automate My Small Business because everybody on the question and answer site has been really excited about learning more about this stuff so I’m happy to bring it to them.

MATT: Yeah, I’ve been doing some revamping of my own. You know, now that Christmas season has passed, I’ve taken this opportunity to start looking around at different shopping carts again and one of the newer ones that’s only been around a year or two is Shopify. So I’ve signed up for their free account on that and I’m trying that out and I’m really liking it. It’s very good for like a really simple, easy site. It doesn’t have all the power of Volusion but if you’re just selling a couple of products, it has really nice integration of Shipwire and Amazon and I’m pretty impressed about it so far.

BRANDON: So what does it do differently than the other shopping carts?

MATT: It’s just a little cleaner interface. You know the integration is a lot tighter with Shipwire. Right now I have to you know tweak some of the orders that go in there because I don’t always pick shipping date out of Volusion so it’s just simple, easy, nice and it’s got a very clean interface, both on the administrator site and user site and I can manage it from my iPhone which is always a plus for me.

BRANDON: You know, I have to take a look at that. That sounds like a winner.

MATT: Yeah. So the other thing that I’ve been doing is working on the question and answer site. You know we’ve gotten a lot of good questions on there and people starting to participate and give all their answers and I’m really excited to see some of the users start building up reputation and really taking on leadership and asking and answering questions.

BRANDON: Yeah, it’s so exciting to see everybody collaborating with each other and I can kind of feel a vibe between us all, you know, kind of getting excited about certain tools that are really helping out others and giving good advice to others as we’re learning and you know the world moves so fast and you got to keep up with it and the best way to do it is just collaborate and you know learn from each other. So the more we can help each other out, the faster and more successful we’re all going to be so that’s great. I’m really happy with it.

MATT: Yeah, so as we start to build this community, I had to do a lot more research into social marketing and social media and how we’re going to tie you know this community that we’re building into all the different social networks and that’s kind of what this episode got born out of is I’ve been doing research for the last two weeks trying to figure out you know what is our social media strategy going to be for Automate My Small Business and you know, I had to look into YouTube, and Twitter, and Facebook and how we integrate all these things and how we tie them all together and you know, all this stuff. And out of all these researches come this episode so you know, we’re still learning about social media and we’re still trying to figure out what the right way to do things is. So this episode is all about us sharing our experience with you and telling you what we’ve learned and where we failed and we learned better from that, right?

BRANDON: Yeah, you know, social media and social marketing is still so in its infancy and is such the buzz right now. Everybody is going, hey, you got a Twitter page, or do you have a Twitter account or you got your Facebook account? And you know some people are on board and some people aren’t and some are passionate about it and some people are like I couldn’t care less, you know.

MATT: After reading all these, I think the experts don’t even know what they’re doing.

BRANDON: You know, exactly, that’s what I was about to say is that it’s changing so fast. I think people are using it in new ways that it wasn’t really intended to and turning out to be perfect for some uses and not others and you know. A lot of people have this impression that Twitter is the same thing as Facebook status, why would I use Twitter and then in some cases that’s true. But in a whole another way, it’s not. And we’ll get into that more about what are the right ways to use Twitter and what are the wrong ways to use Twitter and you know or at least our opinions on that.

MATT: Yes. So before we jump in too deep, let’s start with kind of a definition of social media and where it comes from, right?

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: So you know if you look at mass media over the past couple of hundred years, you basically have the printing press. You have radio, TV, and now you have the internet and social media and so if you look at printing press radio, TV, all that stuff is all one way like you know NBC sitting here and deciding here’s what you’re going to listen to and they’re going to stream out content to you and you’re going to listen to whatever they put out there. And because they do that, they make really generic content and it’s all designed to be one way like you have no way of communicating back across the newspaper or radio or print, your thoughts and having a conversation with whoever is putting that out there. I mean there had been a couple attempts by some of these media like you know letter to the editor section in the newspapers but its pretty poor social media and most of these have been you know strictly one too many distribution. And now, we get to social media and really for the first time, you have to many to many communication, right? So someone puts that out of blog and you can comment on at it and that comment shows up on their blog. You can Twitter back and forth to whoever you want, you know, Ashton Kutcher, you know, NBC or whoever it is. You can suddenly just get in conversation with them. It’s no longer just one person spilling out information and it never comes back. So I think the core tenets of social media are that it’s a two-way conversation or a many-way conversation and the second part of it is that things are viral and easy to share. So if someone sends me something and I like it, I can then share with everyone I know and that makes this really big network effect of distribution of content that leads to going viral.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: And I think on our last podcast, we had a question about how do I do viral marketing and I kind of took that into, as I was doing all these research as you know going viral was like the only thing that was viral, right, it was like once you hit 10 million views or whatever, that was viral marketing. But now that I look at it a little more, it’s really just that you make your content easy to share and I think now that I understand that a little better, you know, we also have some better advice around that.

BRANDON: Yeah. I think going into any social media, social marketing plan, you really do need to do exactly that. Put a plan together and kind of get an overview of what you’re doing it for and give yourself an idea of what is success and what is failure. You know there is this syndrome that I call the brightest bubble syndrome that you know you hear about this new social network Ming or this and that or you know ABC network.

MATT: New one comes out every day, right?

BRANDON: Yeah. There are actually websites that have them all listed and there’s hundreds and hundreds of them and you don’t want to go from one to the next, the next, you know, spreading your effort so thin that you’re never really getting any attraction on them so you don’t want to come down with the brightest bubble syndrome for sure. With that said, you know, you got your return on investment. You know there is going to be time that you need to spend on this and is there return on that investment of time. You know we like to talk about automating our systems here but unfortunately, when you’re doing a one to one…

MATT: When you’re having a conversation, it’s really hard to automate that.

BRANDON: Yeah. When you’re having a conversation and the person on the other line is expecting you to be that person communicating, you have a hard time automating that and we’ll go through some ways that we have found to automate certain areas of it but for the most part you can expect to have some time sunk into this but hopefully the return on investment is there. And in order to know if your return on investment is there, you need to set up some tracking tools, some monitoring tools to track the success of how many people are using your link to get through to your site and all that. And we’ll go over some of those tools that we know about and are using ourself.

MATT: And to use those tools, you really need to know what do I need to measure, right?

BRANDON: Yeah. So you know do you measure how many leads you get or how many sales you get from it? Do you measure how many people are linking to it or through your let’s say Twitter or Facebook. And yeah, so that’s all good to have and know what you’re looking at to measure your success.

MATT: That all goes into defining your goal. Why are we going to even do this social media stuff? Right?

BRANDON: Yeah. I mean a lot of people think that you’re doing social media to gain sales and that’s I think probably to be said because that eventually what you’re trying to do is to build the business up but how do you get that? You know there’s some intermediate stuff, you know, brand loyalty. You know, just wanting to get your customers a little bit better, maybe getting some feedback from them, reputation management and …

MATT: Yeah, and expanding your brand, right. So that viral effect of sharing that we mentioned is a great way to get the name of your product to your brand out there and expand that.

BRANDON: Right. So you know are you trying to get new customers? Are you trying to expand your brand awareness by establishing new relationships with potential customers? Or are you using that mainly to continue your strong relationship with your existing customers? And if you do, you know, you get to know a little bit more about your customers. Maybe they’ll give you some feedback. Hey, you ought to change this or you know, I like your product but it could be better in a different color.

MATT: So if we look at the two-way conversation that deepening of the relationship, developing that brand loyalty is really the two-way conversation part of what is social media, right? And the expanding your brand awareness and you know bringing you more traffic and that side of it is the viral and making things easy to share. So you can see how this mapping to the definition of social media. So if we just take brand loyalty for example, where you want to reinforce relationships that you have, build more trust on your customers, one of the metrics that you really want to look at is the number of responses you’re getting through your tweets or your Facebook fan page or whatever type of social site you’re working on. You want to see how much your customers are engage with that site and how much they’re engaged with you.

BRANDON: Yeah, because ultimately the more your customers engage with you, the more loyalty you’ll have and the more likely they’ll buy from you again and again.

MATT: Yeah, I mean if you like at kind of the, you know, I always like to use the bartender example, right. So you look at, you know, the small town bar. You go in and everyone knows that bartender and the bartender knows everyone and those people wouldn’t think of going to another bar because they know him. They go in. They talk to him and they find out what’s going on in the bartender’s life and he knows what’s going on in their life and you know there’s this deep relationship and there’s brand loyalty. And they’re just going to keep going back there and back there again and again.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: And that’s what you want to develop in your own business and until social media is going around, it’s been really hard to do in the internet.

BRANDON: That reminds me of a great story when I was much younger, you know, going to the bar scene in Los Angeles. I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out why I was so popular with the bartender because every time I walk into this one bar, he’s say, “Oh, come on over. I’ll get you a free shot.” Right and you know it gives me and my friends free shot every time I walk in. And I thought I was like the coolest guy in the world thinking that you know this bartender thought I was something special but then I realized after the fourth or fifth time that he did that with everybody.

MATT: He’s building brand loyalty.

BRANDON: Right and it turns out the free shots he was giving wasn’t anything great. It was just some sort of like jungle juice they pull together and you’re not going to turn down a free shot of course so you’re going to take whatever he gives you. And I thought to myself, now, that is a smart bartender, right? He’s engaging with you in getting you to you know feel special in some way.

MATT: Yeah and you can do the same thing on the internet with you know just giving little tidbits of information, right. You just give something that you know might not taking you very much time to write, like a Tweet or something, right? But it gives some valuable information to someone that really needs it, they really take that to heart and it builds loyalty towards your brand.

BRANDON: Yeah and you know the customers are kind of testing you as well. They’re trying to test your passion for the product or the subject or the service or whatever you’re promoting. You know, if they’re passionate about what they’re about to buy, you know, if it’s about wedding dresses or something, and they’re wanting the best in the business and they want to know that you’re also feeling like they’re important, you know. It’s an opportunity for both of you to kind of size each other up, right, you and your customers.

MATT: Okay, so let’s move on to one of the other goals that you might have which is expanding brand awareness. So in this care, you’re trying to get your brand name out there. You’re trying to get new customers or you can get your customers to introduce you to new customers. So the way that you’re going to try to measure this is you’re going to look at the number of followers that you have on Twitter or friends that you have on Facebook. You’re going to try to watch these numbers grow, the viralness, if you tweet something, how often does that they get re-tweeted and how many people are you reaching through all this.

BRANDON: Exactly. This is I think an area that everybody would like to see more of on any business is expanding their brand awareness and getting new customers but as you’ll see as we go through some of these tools, you feel kind of limited in certain areas because you don’t want to come across too promotional and then the internet it’s a give and take. So the more you promote sometimes, the less the following you’ll get. So that’s to be thought of too.

MATT: Yeah, so another place that you see companies using social media is in reputation management. So kind of for the first time companies can kind of see what their customers are saying about them. So if they make an announcement about some product, they’re going to release or they have just released, and all the customers around Twitter is saying this product sucks and it doesn’t do this, it doesn’t do that. You know, now, companies can respond directly to the customers and deal with those issues and you know maybe make things right or at least look at the information about what’s really bothering the customers.

BRANDON: Exactly. You know another goal I would have in using social media would be just to know my customers better. You know, what are they interested in? Maybe they’ll give you some feedback.

MATT: Yeah. When you’re building new product, you want to ask your customers, what do you want? You know, here’s what we have. What do you think about what we have? You know, what would you change about this? How would you make it better? How does it fit what you want better? Right.

BRANDON: Right. You know you do get that sometimes there are customer support but this new media is a new open platform for kind of more dialogue to happen especially in short form with Twitter or with Facebook, you get a lot more back and forth and you kind of get an idea and there’s some metrics that you can know about your customers. In Facebook, you know the demographics. The even give you the whole chart as to who they are. Are they women or are they me, you know, what age they are, so you get to know with their permission or without, I guess.

MATT: Yeah, I mean with the privacy settings they got to give permission but I think most of the default privacy settings give basic profile information like that.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: So yeah, definitely the metric for knowing your customers is the amount of information that you’re able to get from them both demographic and you know feedback and suggestions and that kind of stuff that you get from, right?

BRANDON: Right. And then finally I think the main goal for a lot of people using social media is to just drive traffic to their site, you know, and you try to do that tactfully without too much promotion but you drive sales.

MATT: For some people, they’re doing not so tactfully but still successful but…

BRANDON: True or not successful but yeah…

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: It’s a you know, drive sales, drive leads, you know, click throughs, convergence, you know, the whole thing. So…

MATT: Yes, definitely when you’re trying to drive traffic and you’re putting a link in Twitter or you’re putting a link on Facebook fan page or some you know the news feed in Facebook or you know even kind of putting videos on YouTube and putting links over there.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: You’re trying to drive traffic somewhere and so you’re going to measure that through the click throughs that you’re getting and hopefully you’ll be able to tag those click throughs with some sort of analytics so that you can track the conversions on that afterwards.

BRANDON: Right. So you know the ultimate question is can this be outsourced? Can this be automated? And I think we touched on that a little bit and it kind of depends. You know, if the product is you and you are the product and you’re maybe a consultant or you’re a personality or you’re a speaker. You know, typically, no. You can outsource that. Anybody you see on TV or on radio or they have to be there pretty much every day. I mean sometimes people take over for them but you know they are the show, so if that’s your case, then no you wouldn’t be able to outsource it. Now, there are other areas that I think you could. For example, if you had a blog and you want some generic content that just generate content that you know some tips or tricks for your product or in the area of your business, you can have a writer write that stuff up and do research on their own.

MATT: Yeah. So there’s some things you can do like you said the writing, responding to some forums, that kind of stuff. Maybe even the research for which you’re going to tweet about or you’re going to write about.

BRANDON: Or if you had a feed of news you know just some product related news that you just want to have a feed and a lot of your customers are interested in just that. Maybe that’s all they want. They just want to know what the latest features are or the latest versions of your product and kind of what you’re adding, which I follow a lot on you know like such as Google or you know what they’re doing so, that’s kind of where it stops for me. But you know, a lot of people are at that level.

MATT: Yes, I think kind of the answer is yes for content creation, no for conversation so that kind of sum it up a little bit.

BRANDON: I think you’re right about that. Yeah.

MATT: Okay. So social media has been all over the place. Oprah is on Twitter and you it’s in the main stream media now, right? So everyone is trying to race and catch up and I think it’s a little overwhelming what you’re getting started trying to figure out what all that stuff is and being afraid of, you know, trying to put stuff out in the internet and everyone reading it. What are some of the concerns that you had and you think other people had?

BRANDON: Well, I have a few concerns mainly on certain businesses that maybe have lot of competition. You know your competitors are pretty much going to be watching every word you say so you know here you are trying to be all chummy with your customers. You know, trying to be kind of an open book for them so that they’re feeling like there’s some trust there and you’re trying to show, “Hey, you know, here’s what’s coming up or I hate to hear that you have that problem but we’re working on that and we’ll have that released soon.”

MATT: Yeah, I know a lot of people just search on Twitter for their competitors’ names and then…

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: … when something goes wrong they swoop in and say, hey, we can offer you a better product for that, right?

BRANDON: Exactly. So your competitors are watching you so that’s got to be a concern.

MATT: And you should be watching your competitors, I guess, is the other side of that, right?

BRANDON: Yeah. So everybody is watching each other.

MATT: I think another part of the competitive stuff is that your competitors are not going to know who your customers are which traditionally they probably didn’t know that, right?

BRANDON: It’s true. So you know there’s knowledge out there that may have traditionally not been aware of before so you got to watch out for that. So you know, every time I’m Twittering or doing something and I’m thinking, hey, is this going to give away the formula for my competitor if I give this out so you know, there’s that. And then you know, it’s time consuming, you know, that’s got to be concern. How much time is this going to take? Can I hire other people to do it? Is this going to be all on my shoulders?

MATT: And another thing the time consuming thing would be bad if it was easy to measure what the ROI was, right? When you just get on there and you start Twittering and doing all these Facebook posts and making fans and friends and stuff, it’s easy to do and it’s easy to spend a lot of time on but without really coming up with a strategy and thinking about how you’re going to do all this, it’s really hard to know if what you’re doing is effective or affecting sales at all, right.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: So I think for the people that are just getting in and you know, they do a couple of tweets and they go how am I going to make money doing this?

BRANDON: Yeah and you know maybe you spend all this time inside the social networks and you find out, you know, your customers aren’t even on the social network. I mean, if you’re selling wheel chairs, 9 times out of 10 or maybe more, your customers probably aren’t going to be on Twitter, you know maybe 85-year old men and women.

MATT: I’ve seen some grandmas Twittering so…

BRANDON: Yeah. My grandma’s not, I’ll tell you that. But you know so you don’t give out information that is not going to ever be read by anybody and you’re just spending your wheels.

MATT: Yes, so you definitely have to look at the demographics on the networks that you’re targeting, right?

BRANDON: Yeah and you know you know your customers better than anybody so there’s really no right answer here. You just got to know your customers and then there are demographics out there that tell you who’s using Twitter, who’s using Facebook, who’s using all the others, YouTube and all that so…

MATT: Yeah, I think maybe one last fear is that if you don’t do anything, you fear that your competitors are going to do it and they’re going to take over some market share because of that, right. All the social pressure of hey, get on the social networks, get on the social networks and you’re kind of fearing should I do it just because everyone else is doing it or should I say no. And so I think if you at least come aboard the plan and know what those metrics would be and kind of what the desired outcome would be, you can at least make an educated decision to say yes, this is worth my investment to do it or no, it’s not. For my customers and my business, it’s not worth it.

BRANDON: Yeah, I mean all this stuff is pretty much free so it’s not a cost issue. It’s a time issue and of course time is money but that’s what you got to consider.

MATT: Right.

BRANDON: Alright. So what kind of social networks are out there? You know, we’ve been talking a lot about Facebook and Twitter.

MATT: It’s really kind of a bunch different types of social platform, right. So the most generic we’re going to start talking about is social networks and by that we mean kind of Facebook, MySpace, that sort of stuff. There’s microblogging . There’s media sharing sites. There’s blog platforms. There’s social book marking and voting, review sites, virtual worlds, forums, all these stuff, right.

BRANDON: But the one common thread is that it’s a two-way deal.

MATT: It’s two-way deal and it’s viral nature, right. Those are the two pillars of social media. So one of the things we’re going to say is we’re going to talk about all these things as we go through this podcast but don’t try to do them all at first. Take one or two platforms that you’re going to focus on. Maybe do a little bit research about what those platforms are and you know which do you want to choose but don’t try to do everything all over the place.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: Focus on one or two that you’re customers are on and that have a lot of people on them.

BRANDON: Yeah, and by all means you know jump in and get your feet wet for sure. Don’t be intimidated by it. You know some people recommend you know just kind of getting on let’s say, Twitter and watching for awhile while you’re getting on Facebook and watching for awhile and you can do that really just to get to understand the norms or the etiquette that you see on this platforms but you know don’t be intimidated. Just jump in and start using it. You’ll learn more. You’ll learn faster that way.

MATT: And yeah, I think maybe the first step is just getting account set up on all these things, right? You know, you’re brand is going to be your name on Twitter and your name on Facebook and all that sort of stuff. So there’s a really great too called KnowEm, knowem.com, which you can just go to one page and they’ll give you links to reserve your name on all the different social networks. If you get that set up, you know, be signed up, and no one can steal your name and then you can really focus on what do I want invested. So as we get into that, let’s start talking about social networks. So what’s the biggest social network platform out there?

BRANDON: Well, MySpace got overtaken by Facebook. So we got to start with Facebook. Facebook is got to be the biggest one out there. I’m surprised to see how many levels of generations are out there on Facebook. You know I got uncles and aunts and even some grandparents out there using Facebook which is surprising but I think it’s become very viral and it’s the thing to do so…

MATT: Definitely, I mean it’s so much like social focus and you know you can see what your grandkids are doing or you see what your friends are doing. You know I got my mom on there and she’s like, she’s taken over friends, the whole extended family, Facebook group and it really lends itself to kind of keeping up with lots of people and I think a lot of people are interested in that, whether you’re young or old.

BRANDON: Yeah, so you got to go out, create a Facebook page if you’re not already on it. Get a feel for what it is but you know it’s basically a way to communicate with your friends and the thing that sets Facebook apart from let’s say, MySpace was basically that the information you see is only available to view by your friends and now I know that MySpace has changed their privacy issues. Now, I think they’re doing the same thing but that’s the big difference between the two from the beginning.

MATT: Yeah and I think Facebook also is the first one to have a platform for applications. And so basically what applications are are some little piece of a site that is customized to allow you to share some information or play a game together or communicate in some unique way with some of your friends. So there’s like a favorite movies application where you mark and you rate all the movies that you watch and it says hey, you like the same movies as Brandon does and you don’t like the same movies as someone else does. And so you get to learn these interesting things about your friends and by entering more and more information into these different apps you find out more and more about your friends.

BRANDON: Yeah. On the business side, you’re going to probably set up a Facebook fan page.

MATT: Yes, so when you first set up, right, you get a page that is just your personal page so you want a fan page that is maybe some other identity that you have or if you’re a public figure, you don’t want everyone in the world to be your friend, do you want a fan page?

BRANDON: Right. So that allows you to gather people who are fans of your brand and start collaborating on that fan page and you know you start getting some involvement with your customers and that’s kind of the key to it all. So the things I’ve seen best to use for is to once you get your fan page up, for example, I ran a contest, send in the cutest dog contest, so all of a sudden people are going to the fan page and thinking that they got the cutest dog and they want to put their dog up in the contest and so now people are involved and feeling like they want to come back to it and see if they won and they’re passionate about you know being the dog about being the cutest. So you got to come up with some ways to use it to really make it valuable for them to come back to.

MATT: Yeah, it’s a great way to get customers involved is during those contest I think that’s a really good story of that. You know on the viral aspect of the fan page, when someone signs up as a fan for your fan page, that goes into their news feed that all their friends see it say so and so has become a fan of Automate My Small Business and so now anyone else that sees that might go, hey, what’s Automate My Small Business and click on that and they would go to the fan page. And so you get that final nature where it get shared the more things they do and the more apps and things that you have running on that fan page, you know, valuable apps, the more things that might get posted in that news feed and expand the reach of your brand. Another thing that you want to do is start putting content up in that fan page. So you want to pull in some blog feeds that you have or your podcast or whatever other content you have and start pulling you know little snippets or pointers to go find that content somewhere else because ultimately you want to have people converse with you on fan page and then move on to your real site and you get the full amount of all your information. So you need to know how to try people to your fan page and then provide information on the fan page and then give them the information to move on to your site, right?

BRANDON: Right. There’s a great story about Coke and they had an opportunity to take over another page that wasn’t theirs.

MATT: Yeah so you know a fan page is a page for fans and it may not always be started by the company or the person that is represented by the fan page, right?

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: So Coke was a little late to the game and some fans have Coke they really like, Coca-Cola went out there and built a fan page and they got millions of followers on the Coca-cola fan page and then the Coke marketing team came along and said, well, should we take this over? What should we do? And I think they made the right decision. They embraced the fan page and they let the fans keep running it instead of trying to take it over from them and so they had such engaged fans of their product that they’re building the fan page for them. You know they were doing the work of the social media for them.

BRANDON: You know that’s great. You know and they’re probably still the top most visited fan page out there so …

MATT: Yeah, so the more participation you get by your customers and fans of your brand, it’s easier it is for you to be able to do this. So when we said, can this be outsourced? No, it can’t be outsourced. But can it be crowd-sourced? Yeah, if you can get your customers to be creating content and adding to your fan page and adding to whatever social areas on your site you have, you can definitely crowd-source it.

BRANDON: Yeah. Now, despite the fact that you know your business probably isn’t going to have the number of customers that Coke has so…

MATT: But even if it had you know you had 20 people on there all talking, I mean, we don’t have that many people on the question and answer site yet but they’re conversing back and forth and you know that’s kind of the same principle, right, that crowd sourcing of you know people want to meet other people that like things they do and they like to talk about the things that they like. And so we you feel that they’re excited about a topic, your brand or you know the topic surrounding your brand, they’re getting great content, they’re going to converse and that’s going to drive more people and draw more people to your fan page or to your site or whatever.

BRANDON: Right. So Facebook has another capability of creating apps for the Facebook. Matt, with your background, you probably know more about how to create one. How do you go about creating an app for Facebook?

MATT: Yeah, so it basically is just a webpage that has just some unique mark up in it, it’s called FBML which is Facebook Mark Up Language and that’ll allow you to pull in contact lists and you know show a list of friends or pull in information, that sort of stuff. You’re really creating website and hosted on your own site and just kind of pulled in by Facebook and then render to the Facebook website. But you can do a lot of interesting things with that. You can create little games that reinforce your brand. You know Burger King had a really interesting Facebook app where they would give away a free whopper to anyone that unfriended 10 people. And Facebook actually had to shut down the application because it was so popular that millions of friends are being deleted from Facebook because everyone wanted their free whopper. So they were just trying to show that you know how much is a whopper worth to you? Is it worth 10 friends? Would you unfriend 10 people? And millions of people did.

BRANDON: I wonder how they track that. Did you know?

MATT: I think the app tracked it. I think the app lets you do it.

BRANDON: Oh I see. So it was built into the app. Genius marketing there.

MATT: And another example is just in December there was this little small business. There was a kid making t-shirts that were a rip-off of the North Face. And he called it the South Butt. And he got sued by North Face because he basically reversed their log upside down and he said North Face of the mountain, the South Butt of the mountain and he got sued and he took this app and made this great Facebook app is Can you tell the difference between a face and a butt? And so he dubbed his pictures of really super zoomed in and you know you go through it and say yes or no, trying to mock North Face a little bit more saying hey, you know, we’re not infringing on your brand. We’re the South Butt, you’re the North Face. And it got you know tons and tons of people using it. It expanded the reach of his brand and you know he sold a lot of shirts and sweat shirts and I bought one because I want to support him so…

BRANDON: Yeah and your order what, order number 3800 or something, right?

MATT: Yeah, like two days into it. I was order like 3800 so that’s the effect of viral marketing and the kid is 18 years old. He’s got it.

BRANDON: That’s great. Yeah. Alright. So there’s Facebook and we mentioned MySpace. I’d stay away from it. It’s kind of on its way out.

MATT: Unless you’re a small band. If you’re a music band then MySpace is great for bands. They have really good music integration but beyond that…

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: I think it’s dying.

BRANDON: What else? Linked In I think was basically a network for professionals and you know you can upload all of your past work experience and you know you connect with past co-workers, and bosses and such and so it’s a great way to connect to further your career by networking on Linked In.

MATT: Or restart your career, right? In this economy when people are getting laid off, having all those connections where you’ll be able to go back through all the people that you know might be the difference between being unemployed or finding some work somewhere, right.

BRANDON: Yeah, you know, now the best applications I’ve seen in Linked In are you know people who are let’s say, investment bankers or mortgage brokers who are constantly always trying to put their fillers out and tap into their network of people to you know drum up new sales and it’s a great way of you know reaching out and saying, hey, you know, here’s what I do. If you’re interested in you know termite insurance or something like that, contact me and there’s a lot of people that will give you good reviews and say hey, this guy is the best insurance broker there is out there. I really enjoyed working with them. So it’s really focused on business whereas in Facebook you’re always kind of intimidated to talk about business because it’s on a personal level whereas Linked In it’s purely business. So you can really get into that side of your network.

MATT: Yeah, it’s great for networking like you mentioned, if you’re really good if you’re a professional of any kind, right. If you’re a consultant, anything that provide some sort of service, it’s a great way to network and get more people. I’ve also seen some small business owners looking for advisors and mentors through Linked In. Just going and searching for people who have relevant experience and what they want to do and just communicating with them. You know starting up a conversation and saying, hey, what do you think about this and getting into finding advisors for their small businesses.

BRANDON: Right. You can tell with the quick search, who’s an entrepreneur and who connected to certain entrepreneurial groups and let you know Linked In has all sorts of groups you could subscribe to.

MATT: And you can see their résumés, what other business they’ve started and all that sort of stuff.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: Right.

BRANDON: Yeah, it’s a great network. I think it’s definitely one to have beyond on a personal level much less on a business level so it’s worth getting on for sure.

MATT: So one of the last ones we have, there’s tons of these out there but you know the last really important one is I think is meetup.com. Do you want to describe that one a little bit?

BRANDON: Yeah. I recently learned about meetup.com, only about 8, 9 months ago and it’s actually been around for awhile but it’s become very popular as a site to go to to find others who are interested in similar topics that might be in your area or in your city or your town that maybe decide to meet up on an occasional basis. It could be every week, it could be every month so you can sign up to meet at a certain meet up meeting, you know, one time or multi-times and there’s a certain number of spaces maybe and the person who’s running the meeting can basically set these limits and you can converse before and after the meeting. You can get the people’s information that went to the meeting without having to necessarily go coming home with a handful of business cards so it’s a great way to find others that are interested in similar topic that you are.

MATT: Yeah, I mean, I initially did it and I went out and you know I’m really into photography and so I went out on some photography shoots with the people from Meetup so we’d go out to a festival or something to take pictures but more and more I see people that are trying to teach different things like I see SEO meetups where someone’s going to come speak and you’re going to go watch that person speak. So if you have that information that you want to distribute or you want to get more people bought into whatever you’re delivering, maybe setting it on Meetup and having people come out and listen to you speak because it’s a great way to get started on that.

BRANDON: Yeah. You know I went to a meet up once and it was not one that I particularly enjoyed because it was very promotional but there a lot of people who set up these meetups and you know they may teach you about your example of an SEO company. You know they may have somebody who’s an expert in SEO stand up and talk to the group or you know maybe it’s more of a back and forth conversational group that everybody is participating in but either way the expert is conveying his knowledge about a particular topic and you learn a lot by going to the meetup but at the same time you’re wondering, gosh, this guy knows a lot. I wonder if he can do that from my side or …

MATT: Maybe I should just hire him.

BRANDON: Yeah. Or maybe I should hire more. Maybe I should use his services. So if you’re that company who has a service that you think is a great service and you could, you know, maybe wet the appetite of certain people out there wanting to learn more but aren’t really ready to make the dive in, you know this is a great way to kind of say, hey, here’s what I can do and if you want to know more, if you want me to do that for you, contact me after the meeting. So…

MATT: It kind of reminds me like a time share sales.

BRANDON: Yeah, it is kind of, which is kind of one of the reasons why I didn’t like the meetup but there are a lot of people that do and they like to go to these meetups and learn about it. And you do learn.

MATT: If you can just say no, you’ll get a lot out of it, right.

BRANDON: Yeah, you learn a lot. I mean I learned a lot when I went to it and so I Just don’t like to be pitched, that’s all. Maybe that’s just the whole point of it I guess. It kind of got me down but you know it is something to consider.

MATT: Okay. So for the social networks like we said Facebook is the biggest, over 300 million people are on it right now. So that’s probably the one you want to focus on if you’re looking for kind of general consumer customers. If you’re a professional and you do professional services stuff then maybe Linked In is the social network that you focus on and if you have some service that you deliver and you want to get people pulled in and talk to them directly in person, meet them face to face, if it’s something that you know just isn’t delivered well in the internet, then maybe meetup.com is the way to find the people to bring them into your session and do it face to face, right?

BRANDON: Yeah. So that wraps up social networks but there’s a lot more to go. We got microblogging which Twitter is got to be the biggest out there at the moment.

MATT: For all ends and purposes, it’s the only game in town now.

BRANDON: Yeah. I mean there are others but let’s just stick to the one that’s going to work for you. So Twitter has got an enormous following all of a sudden. I mean when did Twitter come around? I mean was it 2007?

MATT: Yeah. Something like that.

BRANDON: I mean, god, it’s just huge now and everything has got Twitter integration. It’s amazing how much pull they’re having.

MATT: It’s really morphed from what it started out as into what it is now like we put it in the microblogging category because that’s where they started out as. But as you’ll see as we talk about this, it does microblogging. It does notifications. It does kind of instant message communication. It does broadcasts. You know it has become this big platform because it didn’t force you to use it any one way so people invented different ways of using it and now there’s 15 to 20 different ways to use Twitter.

BRANDON: Yeah, I think it was initially designed to use over a mobile device. That’s why the character limit, what is it, 140 characters?

MATT: Yeah. It was started by the guys who started Odeo that web based podcast client which was basically dying and so they start it and they saw it’s kind of way broadcasting text messages kind of what they’re trying to do and it was supposed to be basically a Facebook status, what are you doing right now?

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: And that’s where you’re supposed to share and I think when people hear about Twitter, that’s what they think of and then I think that turns a lot of people off because you know why do I care if you’re brushing your teeth right now? What does it matter, right?

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: And we’re going to tell you that that’s not the way to use Twitter anymore, really, right.

BRANDON: Yeah, that might have been the initial reason why it got started but that definitely not where it is now so…

MATT: Especially as a business.

BRANDON: Yeah, especially for business purposes. So quickly just go over some of the tools that Twitter works on. If you have iPhone, there’s a great application called Tweetie. In fact, I just started using Tweetie too, which I think is a good one. It’s pretty straightforward and basic and still has all the features and Tweetdeck is common favorite because it allows you to set up searches and you know you set it up so that’s kind of like a deck of cards, right? You’re looking at a deck of cards and you can kind of flip through them for different purposes.

MATT: It’s really just columns right. You just have these different columns of streams, the things that you said, the things that someone else said, the things that are on the list, the things that match some search or some # tag.

BRANDON: Yeah. Well, the reason I like Tweetdeck from the beginning was the ability to set up a search and that was even before Twitter had native search built into it.

MATT: So yeah when we talk about set up a search which is really a permanent serach. So if you put your brand name in there and you want to watch whatever people say about your brand name, you’ll just have a column in Tweetdeck that all says about the tweets about your brand.

BRANDON: Right. So you can kind of keep an eye on your reputation out there which is you know what we talked about before.

MATT: Should we maybe explain some of the terminology around Twitter?

BRANDON: Sure.

MATT: Okay. So a tweet is any message or post that you post. That’s the 140 characters that you type in there that you say, right? But on top of that is this whole, like you said Twitter when it first started didn’t really have any way that will force you to use it so people invented stuff, so one of the things that they invented was trying to refer to other people on Twitter. So if I want to talk about Brandon, I’d use his username, prefix by an @ symbol, so @innovate4fun, if I put that you know in the middle of the message I’m mentioning him but sometimes he’ll do a tweet and I want to reply to him and so any post that starts with an @somebody’s username as the first word on that tweet is a reply to someone and then I think the last time we should probably explain these retweets. So one of the other things that happened is because your tweets only go out to the people that are following you, the people that have subscribed to your tweets, there’s no way to really send that directly to one of Brandon’s friends. So if I tweet something interesting, Brandon can retweet it so he basically, it’s a button that copies my original message and then sends out to his or her friend. That’s the viral nature of it. So you have both the conversation, the two-way, you know, sending messages to Brandon, he replies back to me and then also the retweet, the viral nature of Twitter. So you have both elements to that social media.

BRANDON: And there is one hybrid to that. You could do a direct message which allows you to talk to somebody else directly through Twitter but not have the public see that message. So you now Twitter is a very public platform. If you want to keep secrets or you know there is certain information you want to kind of not let out, Twitter is the wrong platform to use. It’s a very public platform and everybody can see what you’re tweeting.

MATT: Yeah. Except for direct messages, everything is pretty much public so…

BRANDON: There is a toggle that you could go into the settings and actually make Twitter completely private but if you do that, it kind of defeats the whole purpose so not many people do that.

MATT: Yeah. I mean one other things to say is while in Facebook when you friend someone, you both subscribe to each other, right. It’s a two-way friending system. On Twitter, the friending is one-way. On Twitter, you follow someone. I may follow Brandon but that doesn’t mean that Brandon is following me.

BRANDON: Or that I have to approve that you’re following or you know there’s no approval process. You can block somebody from following you. Not many people do that but …

MATT: I didn’t know you can do that.

BRANDON: Yeah. I’ve actually been blocked from my competitors.

MATT: Well, there you go. So your competitors are trying to follow you, block them.

BRANDON: Not that that means anything because you can always jump on their Twitter page and see what they’re saying so at least you don’t get it directly to your Twitter feed.

MATT: You can also set up to get instant messages from certain people I know. Whenever Brandon shares something brilliant and I want that sent to my phone, so I have him set up to for that tweet directly on to my cell phone, SMS.

BRANDON: Yeah, I think that’s pretty powerful because you think to yourself, how the hell am I going to keep up with 400 people that I’m following and there are some people that are following thousands of other people and I don’t understand that but you know what I’ve done is basically selected 5 or 6 of them that truly want to know everything they say and I’ll have those tweets forward to my phone.

MATT: The other thing Twitter added recently was list and so this is really helping people deal with the following thousands of people is that you can put 10, 15 people on the list that you really care about and you can make that list in one of your columns on Tweetdeck and so you don’t have to watch all thousand or you can segment them into different things you want to look for in them. Definitely look at list and public list, you can follow other people’s list. You know we’ve set up a list on the automsb Twitter account of different Twitter accounts from tools that we use like Shipwire and all those sort of things to keep up to date on what they’re doing, what they’re tweeting about so if you guys want to follow that, we just keep adding more and more tools to that Twitter list so it’s amsb small business tools list and so you can kind of follow that list and see what Amazon.com is saying and Shipwire and Tweetdeck and all the tools that we use. You know we follow what they twitter so we know what’s going on in their products.

BRANDON: Yeah, that’s a great feature. I like that. That’s really coming in handy. So how do you use Twitter? How can you use it most effectively? Is it worth doing and what’s the best use for? I honestly think Twitter is best used just to build trust. I feel that’s not good to just use as a cold sell.

MATT: Yeah, I agree with that. I think you know you have these little micro conversations that build up as you tweet back and forth or respond to people’s conversations so I think the building the trust and getting to know people is one of the really strongest parts of Twitter.

BRANDON: Yeah, you know, I’ve seen it happen where there’s a marketing manager somebody in the company that says oh, we got to get on Twitter. And you know all of a sudden they’re throwing up stuff on Twitter like come to our page, we got this new product and you know all it is promotional stuff. And all they’re doing is selling their product. The problem with that is nobody is going to follow you if it’s all just promotional. I mean that’s like you wanting to get junk mail in your inbox all day long. I mean nobody wants that.

MATT: Yeah. I set up my TeVo to only watch commercials.

BRANDON: Right or all these paper junk mails in your mailbox out in front of your house. I mean because nobody wants that so why would you sign up for that. So that’s a good example of how not to do Twitter and unfortunately, there’s a lot of people doing that and they’re wondering why they only have three followers.

MATT: You know I mean there are some of those that work like I can think of like Deal Time and some of those people that just kind of tweet about all the sales that are going on and they’re putting affiliate links out there and they’re getting credit for that and I think some of those are successful. If you’re an aggregator and a filter of content writer, they’re looking around and they’re finding information that’s useful to someone even if it is promotional in nature.

BRANDON: Well, you know, I’m going to kind of jump ahead here and talk about Dell. I think Dell has done it right and if you do want to promote, and you know customers are interested in certain promotions such as coupons or something like that you might set up a separate Twitter feed for that. I think the way Dell is doing it is they have about 9 or 10 different Twitter accounts and you choose as a consumer or a customer of theirs which ones you’re interested in. If you’re all about coupons and getting Dell coupons, you can follow the coupon Twitter account. I think it’s Dell outlet or if you just want to know about what’s going on inside of Dell and what the newest products are, there’s a whole another Twitter account for that. So you know that’s a great strategy I think is to set up multiple accounts for different needs and so the consumer or the person following you has a choice.

MATT: Yes. So we kind of took a page out of that and so that’s one of the things that we’re trying with the Automate My Small Business account, right? So we set up a separate account which is automsb and we’re going to use that just for kind of automatic notifications so you know that’s a robot sending out things. It’s always going to be a robot and for personal kind of interaction and communication back and forth to us, we’ve been using our personal accounts for that, right, so…

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: So you kind of know what to expect when you’re signing up for these different accounts.

BRANDON: Right. And I think that’s important because if you try to mix it up too much, you probably will end up disappointing a lot of your customers because they were kind of expecting one thing and you’re doing another.

MATT: Yeah. If I expect to talk to a person and I get a robot, that’s a big let down, right?

BRANDON: Right. And you’re going to end up you know unfollowing if you don’t like it.

MATT: Yeah, so that kind of brings up strategies for building followers and getting people to follow you and I can tell you from experience one way not to do that is just to go out and try to follow a bunch of people then try to get followers back. You know when I first got on Twitter, I saw post somebody said, hey, here’s how you can get a thousand followers in a day and yeah I got a thousand followers but none of those people cared a lick about what I said. So I might as well have one follower that you know really cared. That was even more productive than a thousand followers that couldn’t care less about what I say.

BRANDON: You know that’s funny because you probably read the same article about all those other 400 people that tried to follow me but I have no idea where they came from. They had some Twitter account that had no history and they followed me and they have like 700 followers and I’m thinking, how does a Twitter account that has no post have 700 followers and pretty much what they’ve done is that exactly what you said. They follow you and then hope that maybe you’re going to follow them and they do a hundred thousand times and they end up with 700 followers but what’s the point, right? It’s just a dead end.

MATT: Yeah. They don’t care about anything they say and so…

BRANDON: Right. It’s just a dead end. It’s ridiculous.

MATT: I deleted that Twitter account after about a week. I realized I totally screwed it up and you know, don’t do that. Learn from my mistake.

BRANDON: Yeah. That’s not the way to go.

MATT: Yeah. So now we’re trying to build up our followers more organically and slowly and making sure that we get people that are really interested in what we’re saying but it’s a slow process. You know when you’re first starting out it’s hard to get those first people. You know after watching a couple of people do this, I know once you get some momentum it starts to grow exponentially. But getting up to 100 or 200, that’s the hardest part after that it starts to grow on its own.

BRANDON: Yeah. So getting back to what is really best for, building trust with your customers, having conversations with you customers and that could be in a couple of different ways. It could be in a kind of a customer support level where maybe a customer sends you a Twitter or mentions you in the Twitter sphere or your brand and you happen to catch it on the search and so now you can interact with them or answer a question that they had. Matt, you did that recently for what?

MATT: Yeah, so like we’re just talking about Twitter clients. I was trying out Seesmic which is kind of new Twitter client for the PC that’s very similar to how Tweetdeck works and I kind of like it better than Tweetdeck and so I was using it but it kept crashing and using up on my CPU so I just put out a Twitter that said basically Seismic sucks and it’s taking up all my RAM and using it on my CPU and within a couple of hours, I got a response back from Seismic saying, hey, you know, I’m here to help. What’s going on? How can I fix this for you? And so they were really responsive and now it was really you know positive spend even though I was having issues with the product, I wasn’t happy, they kind of eased the pain and that’s the reputation management that we’re talking about before.

BRANDON: I see that as a great example of Seismic being one step ahead of everybody else and well, the fact that they’re a Twitter client probably means they’re all over Twitter so they know what they’re doing but you know if that was a normal, mediocre business, I would be impressed by that that they were searching the Twitter sphere for that mention and jumped on the opportunity to answer your question and maybe ease your disappointment with them if you had some sort of complaint.

MATT: Yeah, I think the biggest success story of that has been Comcast. I mean they are the prototypical reference story whenever anyone brings this is up is that they had awful customer shares. If you ever had Comcast, you try to call them, you know, it’s a nightmare. But you know someone in their customer service got on Twitter and started responding to all these complaints saying Comcast sucks. This is awful about Comcast. And the only bright spot in their marketing of their whole company right now is their Twitter presence is incredible and they’re getting praise from everywhere about how they’re doing customer support and reputation management through Twitter.

BRANDON: Yeah, now I would have to say taking it to the next level, I would not broadcast Twitter as your customer support platform. I don’t think it is the best platform to do customer support.

MATT: Right. And even once you find these people, you probably want to move them off on to what your real support platform whether that’s Zendesk or whatever you use, right.

BRANDON: Yeah. Something like even email or calling support if you can avoid it but you know probably email or chat is a good one I mean you kind of want to move them off to Twitter anyways because it’s public so if you can get…

MATT: Although you definitely want everyone see that you responded and you resolved their issues so…

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: … maybe next tweet to be in is it says hey, you know, I’m glad we’re able to resolve your issue.

BRANDON: Right. So you know the lesson here is being reactive to a post about you or your brand is by all means a smart thing to do as a business. You need to do that just to manage your brand and your reputation but to use it as a platform to do customer service, I don’t think it’s the best platform though.

MATT: Yeah, you may want to move them off.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: One other thing that Twitter has become, I don’t know maybe in the last year or so, I’ve seen it turn more into a social bookmarking site. So social bookmarking is really, traditionally you had your internet explorer and you hit bookmark that site and you save it. If you ever want to share that site, you had to copy the link and send it off to your friends. Well, social bookmarking Delicious and Digg and all those sort of things are ways to share those links with lots of people and now I see Twitter is becoming almost like a social bookmarking site. So you tweet, somebody says, hey I found this cool site. Here’s the link. Here’s what it’s about. And the tweet this buttons that you see on lots of pages, you know, we use this on, I mean it’s all business. You see an article you like or a podcast you like, you know there’s a tweet this button and it retweets right onto your account and it says, hey, everyone, check this link out and it gives you that viral nature.

BRANDON: Yeah, though it’s kind of this is cool factor. You know this is a cool thing, check it out, you know.

MATT: Yeah, I know we both use our personal accounts kind of that way as we deal with researcher stuff, right.

BRANDON: Yeah. You know and that kind of brings up a good point. I mean if you find something neat, you know, entertaining or something like a piece of knowledge that you really want to get to people that are interested, maybe it’s something that’s just off the presses. You know it happened 10 minutes ago. Twitter is awesome for up to the minute information. It’s probably the most fast from the source to the masses platform out there. I mean that you thought CNN was fast. Twitter is by far the fastest way to get information so…

MATT: Yeah. I mean living in LA there’s always these earthquakes and so your house shakes a little bit and you go, was that an earthquake? Am I feeling dizzy? What’s going on? You know, it used to be like you’d wait until the next day, look at the LA times, you go, oh yeah, we had a 3.2 magnitude earthquake. Now you get on Twitter like as it’s happening, people like earthquake, earthquake!

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: So it gives instant content about whats going on

BRANDON: Yeah, so if it’s an earthquake or even if it’s, even you had a tradeshow or something and you want to know what’s the latest events at the tradeshow are, jump on the Twitter sphere and search for the you know hash tag, like CES just happened a couple of weeks ago.

MATT: Yeah, I did know where I have been on a session and I’m like this session sucks, right. What else is going on? I got on Twitter and I look and they’re all tweeting like hey, this is the greatest session. So I just leave that one and go to the other one.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: Getting even that localized very niche information or just brought information.

BRANDON: Yeah. So I guess you know we forgot to mention one other term, hash tag.

MATT: Oh, yeah, yeah. So hash tag is basically a topic. It’s the number sign (#) on your keypad so # and some word, whether that’s CES if you’re at a conference, right? People put that #ces to say hey, this tweet is about CES. So you can search on those and another thing that just Twitter users came up with and they started using…

BRANDON: Yeah, if you have noticed that we put a hash tag or Automate My Small Business is #amsb and anything that goes through the Twitter sphere with the hash tag shows up on the website so if you have any tweets that you want to put out there that you think would be great for the website, throw on that hast tag.

MATT: Yeah, and so one of the other aspects of that real time mode that we’re talking about a minute ago is search engines are starting to integrate that more and more into their search algorithms. So you know we recently had that earthquake in Haiti and Google’s algorithm is now monitoring how many people start searching for something immediately. So if they have a real spike in searchers for a certain term that they normally don’t have searches for, within like a minute or two, they’ll switch into this real time mode where suddenly they’ll start showing all the Twitter tweets at the top of their search results so being in on a real time news can really kind of drive more traffic and get you more followers and get people to click on the links because you’re going to be at the top of Google when people are searching for that and that’s going to drive so many people.

BRANDON: Right. So it’s important to know how this works with Google. Google is now posting results of leads on Twitter or post on Twitter but they do not follow the links. So it may get you a place at the top of Google for a second or three seconds…

MATT: Until someone tweets over top of you.

BRANDON: … until somebody tweets over top of you but that is in anyway affecting your page rank.

MATT: Yes so it doesn’t affect your SEO and your organic rankings but it might get you click for a couple of seconds while you’re out there.

BRANDON: Right. So don’t think that you know as I think there are a lot of people out there thinking that this is working for them but so don’t make this mistake.

MATT: And it may not always be up there like we just mentioned it switches into real time mode for certain things so …

BRANDON: Right. So don’t feel that by posting your website on Twitter that you’re somehow going to get more link back credit or what they call Google juice. You’re not going to get more Google juice by having your link out there on Twitter. It’s just not going to happen so putting your website up there a thousand times on Twitter is …

MATT: Going to piss everybody off.

BRANDON: It’s just going to piss everybody off, right. So don’t think that’s going to get anything for you.

MATT: Okay. So we talked about Twitter as a microblogging platform, a social bookmarking platform, a way to send out alerts to people or notifications, a way to do brand and reputation management, all kinds of different results, the different clients that are out there. I think we’ve pretty much covered Twitter.

BRANDON: You know I got to throw out this one more example that we’ve said I think in our previous podcast but it drives home another point, the Taco truck. Using Twitter, I think is a brilliant idea.

MATT: Oh yes, that’s really a notification, right?

BRANDON: That’s a notification. That’s basically telling your customers what is going on right now because they want to know it. For example, there’s Taco truck or there’s a Korean barbecue truck that’s like a catering truck that drives around and it’s got a huge following. There are all sorts of people out there that just think that this is the best stuff ever.

MATT: I’m one of them.

BRANDON: And they search out, I’m not a big Korean barbecue fan myself but I do like a good Taco Truck every once in a while. And you know they search out where this Taco Truck is on a daily basis. So when lunch break comes around, they’re thinking, I got to go get my Taco fix. And the follow the Taco Truck Twitter so the Taco Truck pretty much at around 11:30 every day will put on their Twitter feed that they are at the corner of you know Melrose and La Cienega and that’s where all their customers go so it’s great with broadcast to your customers what’s going on. So that’s a good example.

MATT: Yeah, you reminded me of one of the ways that we’re using the alerting system like that which is every time someone asked a new question on the community Automate My Small Business site, we’re actually feeding that in this Twtiter so that if you want to answer but you don’t want to have to keep going back to the site, you can follow automsb then you can get tweets whenever someone ask a new question to go read about that question and answer it or see the answers that are already there.

BRANDON: Yeah, and you know another way that we started thinking about using Twitter for ourselves is the fact that as a live broadcast what might have is a callers call in, they get to say what they want or you know suggest certain things, well, because this is a recorded episode, we don’t get that benefit. But what we can do is Twitter to our followers out there saying hey, this is the topic we’re about to begin recording and if there’s anything out there you guys want to know more about or is there a special question on this topic, you know, for us to be sure that we cover, that’s a great way for us to get feedback almost immediately before we start recording any of our session so watch out for that. You’ll know exactly when we record.

MATT: I was supposed to do that this week, wasn’t I?

BRANDON: Yeah, well, next one.

MATT: Next week we’ll do it.

BRANDON: Next week we’ll start. This is a new idea for us. We thought this was a good way to get it out to you guys so bear with us.

MATT: Yeah, we definitely want to get more replies from you and if you did go to the website and you follow either me or Brandon, make sure you shoot us a message saying that you know you’ve heard about us through the podcast and you know introduce yourself and we’ll be sure to communicate back to you.

BRANDON: Right. So that covers Twitter pretty much from A to Z.

MATT: So we got the two major sites, Facebook and Twitter now covered. I think the third corner of that triangle is YouTube. So let’s talk about media sharing sites.

BRANDON: Yeah, YouTube, I’m sure everybody is aware of. It’s great because you can use the rich format of video to get your brand out there or you know any information out there. And you know we all know YouTube and we’ve seen it and use it but it really is a great way to get more customers through either viral videos or even just SEO, your website becomes much more attractive because of it and Google also acknowledges that by giving you a little bit of Google juice for it. They think that having videos posted on YouTube gives you more credibility.

MATT: Yeah. So we go back to our two pillars of social media which are, it’s really easy to share, it’s viral, right? So sharing videos is super easy. You can you know send them to your friends. You could email them. You can embed those videos on your own website. So sharing, they’ve really nailed on that. And then the two-way conversation, so for every video you put out there, people can post comments about that video and then you can even post videos back. So unlike TV when someone puts a video and send it down the pipe over the antenna or through the cable to your TV, with YouTube people are sending videos almost both ways. So someone will produce the video. Someone makes the video response and post it on the comments. You get that two-way and group conversation so you definitely have both aspects of the social media formula here.

BRANDON: Yeah. Matt, you told me about the story of how Blendtech put their video out there. I thought that was amazing.

MATT: Yes, so I think the quintessential success story of YouTube is Blendtech. They are commercial blender company. They make these really expensive for $400, $500 blenders that will blend anything, you know. If you own like a smoothie store and you’re going to blend a hundred thousand smoothies a month, well, then you’re going to buy a Blendtech.

BRANDON: Kind of a boring product.

MATT: Yeah. Not what you would think of as taking over the social media market but what they would do to test their blender which they throw a 2 x 4 in the blender and blend it. Well, someone saw this and said you know, we should put this on YouTube. So they put it on YouTube and they started getting followers and people saw the video and they liked it and they started suggesting, you know, hey, can you blend…

BRANDON: An iPHone.

MATT: … an iPhone or can you blend some marbles or can you blend whatever, right? And so they started making this whole series of will it blend and the fans have write in the comments, hey, blend this or blend this or try this. Blend a bebe gun. Blend an iPhone whatever. And so they have this whole series of videos and they’ve been seen by millions and millions of people.

BRANDON: Great idea. Great way to market and get viral traffic.

MATT: Yeah. So that means this commercial blender company that no one has ever heard of is now selling these $400 blenders in the people’s homes because of these YouTube videos.

BRANDON: You know it makes you wonder, it’s starting making me think, god, what video could I do that would start a trend that’s an entertainment factor.

MATT: Man, you got puppies. You got it taken care of.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: You got to come up with something good. People love puppies.

BRANDON: I know. You know if you can get a good video of a puppy doing something cute, you’re golden. Yeah.

MATT: Yeah, you can also set up YouTube groups where you can have different people posting into a group a shared kind of area so maybe you can get your customers posting videos of their puppies and stuff like that, right?

BRANDON: Yeah, all sorts of good stuff, though. It’s food for thought, worth thinking about. But yeah, that’s a great story. Loved that one.

MATT: So I mean YouTube is definitely the Bohemia of the media sharing world but not too far behind will probably be Flicker. So YouTube is video and Flicker is really focused on images and pictures and things like that although they’re starting to get into video as well. Are you on Flicker, Brandon?

BRANDON: I’m on Flicker, yeah, and I did post a few videos and it’s good. I like it for more of a personal site but I haven’t used it for business yet.

MATT: Yeah, unless you’re a photographer. I haven’t really seen people to be using that for business.

BRANDON: It’s a good way to kind of get your photos off of your shopping cart, right, so you don’t pay so much bandwidth because Volusion I know rates you on bandwidth, at least, they do for me. So anyway, I can get the photos off of there, post onto something else. I mean that’s a good way to use it. I could use it for that or you know there’s other ways to do that thing, but, yeah, so Flicker is good to use just for storing bunches of photos and organizing it. It’s really good for personal use.

MATT: Yeah, one other thing I kind of start using for personal use off of your recommendation was Tumbler. I signed up for it a couple days ago. I have been playing with that and it’s kind of a mesh of blogs and media sharing where you can post video on the side or do like almost like an old mini blog entry. That’s kind of cool for personal use too. I think some people are trying to use it for business but I haven’t seen too much around that yet.

BRANDON: Yeah, you know, it’s all about just showing that you’re passionate about what you’re selling and sometimes you don’t have to be promoting your product and if you’re just getting the word out about some good information, you know, sometimes you just have to count on the fact that your customers will build the trust up with you because you’re sharing information with them that may or may not be exactly your product but could just be something invaluable to them. So you know Tumbler is good for that. I think if you’re passionate about you know wine tasting or something and you know you’re a wine seller and you sell wine, you can talk about different areas of the world that they make wine and here’s some photos of me visiting France and here’s me at the vineyard and you know, all of a sudden, you’re just interacting with a lot of people that are really passionate about particular subject and then once that conversation begins, you can throw out you know, you ought to check out this one and that we happen to sell it, you know, so…

MATT: That really leads into the blogs really well because you reminded me of a story about the whole food squad. So I mean who would ever think of following a blog of what the grocery store had to say, right. But Whole Foods, they’re Cheese buff who travels around Europe, to, you know, France, all this different farms, started blogging about all the different cheeses he was trying and you know the different farms he was going to and posted pictures about the farmer and their family and how they made the cheese, all the great stories and it’s a hugely followed blog now from people that are really you know cheese enthusiast.

BRANDON: And they can get that cheese at Whole Foods.

MATT: Exactly.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: Yeah, at the end of the post, he says, this will be in your stores in a week.

BRANDON: Yeah. That is great. You have to be a little creative on that stuff, you know. Not everybody can just come up with this.

MATT: People like hearing stories about worth the things that they like come from, right.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: You know if you’re passionate about our product, you’re probably going to want to know a little bit more about how it was made, or where it came from or you know the story behind it.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: So blogs are a great way to communicate that about where the product is coming from, what you’re doing to build it, all that sort of stuff.

BRANDON: And if you’re really vain, you could do kind of like what the CEO of GoDaddy does. He’s got his own blog and talks about all the great things he’s doing like you know the yachts he’s on. I don’t know why people follow him but he’s got this blog and you know he’s become kind of a celebrity in many people’s minds because he was on…

MATT: Here’s overdoing with your 749 for the domain name.

BRANDON: Exactly. You know so actually he’s got a video blog of videos…

MATT: A blog?

BRANDON: A blog going around the world doing different things but if people are interested, they’ll follow your blog and they’ll you know, you’re associated with your brand and so you know that’s the connection you need.

MATT: Yes. I think blogs are one of those things that kind of get forgotten in some of the social media stuff because you can blog and not be social about it. So I really want to call some of the social features of blogging. One of them is definitely the subscription, right? So you want to make it easy to share your content and so giving people a way to subscribe to that is the kind of viral nature of subscribing. One other point of that is giving people links to people’s blogs that you read. So this is the blog equivalent of friending. So the blogger always have the list of all other blogs that you might read and then the communication aspect of it comes when people have comments at the bottom of your blog or when people post on their own blog. I don’t think a lot of people know that if you’re on one blogging platform and you do a post about some other blog put somewhere else that someone else wrote, there’s this thing called a track pack where it actually post a comment or something similar to a comment on their site saying, hey, this article was mentioned by you on your blogging site. Those are some of the social features of a blogging that if you’re just getting introduced to blogs you might not recognized it as being the social aspects of it.

BRANDON: Let’s talk about the link backs and whether there are no follow links and things like that in blog.

MATT: Yeah, I think we mentioned some of that from our SEO podcast but basically all the comments and track backs and things like that are on the false and they’re not giving you any extra SEO benefit on 90 percent of the blogging platforms and that really helps you keep down spammers and get more real comments. One of the things that we might talk about a little later is taking your blog comments and making them a little bit more social and making it easier to share those on Twitter and share those on Facebook. There’s a tool called disqus, and it’s d-i-s-q-u-s, I think, which pulls comments from all over the web and yeah, pull them back in as if they’re comments made on your blog and it allows people to share whatever comments they made and post those up on Twitter and Facebook and things like that. That’s really good integration tool and it’s something that we’re considering using on Automate My Small Business at some point. So you may get firsthand experience with that.

BRANDON: Yeah. So that pretty much covers blogs. I think it’s probably at the top five things you got to do to really hit the social marketing aspect hard.

MATT: Yeah, and the number one tool for that, that we failed to mention, we of course, have WordPress but there are other things out there.

BRANDON: Yeah and you don’t necessarily have to install it on your own hosting site although it adds more features to it but you know Blogger is a good one I think if you just want put something up there because Google clearly will be following their own product so it’s a good one to use.

MATT: Yeah, I mean whenever you do a post on a blog, there’s this pinging service, where it will ping different platforms like Google and Yahoo and Bing that’ll say, hey, come, call this content. The same thing happens with those track backs. It post off to your servers as hey, I just commented about you. So the servers are talking to each other about the blogpost that are out there.

BRANDON: And if it’s Google inside of Google then it’s probably going to happen more reliably.

MATT: Yeah. So social bookmarking and voting, I think is our next topic. So these sites are sites that allow you to you know mark sites as hey these are cool. We kind of mention this earlier with the social bookmarking aspects of Twitter. But the sites that really started this whole revolution were like Digg and Reddit from a social voting where people are posting an article then they get votes up and say hey, I also like this article and the more votes you get, the more prominent you get on Digg. So you hear something called the Digg effect whereas if you get on the front page of Digg, you’re going to get hundreds of thousands of clicks all sent to your website and you know people that aren’t ready for it and have kind of maybe a shared hosting plan. You know a lot of the servers go down when the Digg effect comes. So we can give you some tips for all the membership sites about how to harden your site and make it more performative if you’re expecting that but that’s a good problem to have.

BRANDON: Yeah. So Reddit is a good one. Delicious is spelled funky way. IT’s hard to pronounce.

MATT: Oh they finally bought Delicious because they had one of those you know web 20 names, where they have you know four different parts of the domain or whatever.

BRANDON: Oh, they did. So you can just type in delicious.com now.

MATT: Yeah, they finally bought it so…

BRANDON: I didn’t know that

MATT: And Diggo is kind of a social bookmarking site where you know you have all your bookmarks and then you can also add notes and snippets from different pages. That’s the one I use for my own personal social bookmarking.

BRANDON: And then we got to cover review sites you know the review sites like if you’ve ever been on Amazon and you check out a product, I tell you what, everybody looks at the reviews before they buy. It’s important, so…

MATT: Yeah. I think the most social of all the review site platforms is really Yelp. They have some more conversation and they really encourage lots of comments and different ways of voting and things like that. But yeah Amazon reviews, especially the viral nature like the one that comes to mind when I think about Amazon reviews is the three wolves t-shirt. If you haven’t seen this, go on Amazon and search for like the three wolves t-shirt. You know there is absolute hilarious saying, you know, like this is the best t-shirt ever and like these outrageous claims is a total joke but it’s got thousands reviews and become the number one selling piece of clothing on Amazon.

BRANDON: That’s funny. Is there a reason why that one became or was it …

MATT: Just people like you know they wanted to follow on to the great hilarious review it got from the very beginning and so they post a review that readers will respond to it and it became this like running joke. So much so that the company that made the t-shirt, they had another t-shirt that had just like one wolf on it and when they pushed their product up there, they put a review and it said like this t-shirt sucks because there’s only one wolf for the same price you can get three wolves, if you buy this other one, and it started all over again.

BRANDON: That’s great. So the one wolf t-shirt had all these negative reviews and the three wolf t-shirt had all these positive reviews.

MATT: Oh they have both like these mixed set of like joke reviews and it became this huge kind of …

BRANDON: Competition.

MATT: Competition and like if you ever had the t-shirt it was like this inside joke, right, so you tease someone with the t-shirt and you just like they’re in the club. They know what’s going on.

BRANDON: That’s hilarious.

MATT: Well..

BRANDON: So Citysearch is a good one too, if you’re definitely a local business. We talked about a lot of this on our local search podcast episode. So we won’t cover them into much detail but those are the ones you got to monitor to kind of watch your brand and your reputation.

MATT: Yeah, I think one of the ones I kind of really go into too much is Virtual World so things like second life, there’s a whole set of ways to advertising and marketing within Virtual World, setting up your own little store in there, that kind of stuff. I think that’s the topic for another day. I really haven’t done too much of that.

BRANDON: Yeah. I’m not really a big fan of Second Life. I think maybe if you caught a good day, you know, you’ll suddenly have a trigger a viral effect but I think the virtual worlds are kind of worth spending too much time on. I think it’s more about the conversation in the Virtual World than the viral effect of the social media stuff.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: So I don’t know.

MATT: I reserve judgment. I don’t know enough about it to comment on it yet. So I think the last kind of area of social networks that we haven’t covered yet is forums and that’s really kind of the traditional way of communicating with your customers and having your customers communicate with each other.

BRANDON: So the question you know, here we are, we’re Automate My Small Business and we have all these social marketing platforms that you could use. Now, because we’re Automate My Small Business, we’re going to try our best to tell you how to automate some of these to you know make the best use of your time and money to really help you out. So Matt, there’s a lot of integration tools. Tell us about them.

MATT: And this is some stuff that you know we’ve been researching over the last couple of weeks to try to do this for ourselves. So one thing that we noticed with all these different social networks is that when we post something, we don’t want to have to go to each site and post the same thing if it’s something that we want to share with all the different social networks at Facebook fan page and Twitter or whatever. We probably have different people following us on these different sites. We want to make it easy for us to distribute content to these. So one of the tools I found to help do this is Ping.fm. This will basically let you make a post and push out to different networks. So you can say when I send this type of post to Ping.fm, I wanted it to push it out as a tweet. I wanted to put a message on the Facebook fan page. I wanted it to go to all these other 10 social networks. And so that might be able to be easier to update some of these things for you. Another thing that I found is Twitter feed which is a way of pulling RSS entries like your blogpost or frost like the questions on our question and answer site and feed those into Twitter or you can actually have Twitter feed Ping.fm so the set up that we came up with was we had our blogs feeding in our Twitter feed then we have the question and answer site feeding into the Twitter feed and that feeds Twitter and it feeds Ping.fm and that’s how we can update our sites.

BRANDON: And then if we have a Facebook fan page, how would that work?

MATT: We do have Facebook fan page.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: And it comes through Ping.fm for the kind of comment tweets, the things that we want to post out to all the social networks. Now there are some things that you may want to post to one social network and not on another and so for those, we’re still just going to the Facebook fan page to post or going to Tweetdeck to put on Twitter.

BRANDON: Yeah, you know, I think it’s important to say that even though you can integrate all of these, it’s not necessarily the best way to do it. If you want to have different types of customers on different platforms, you might have you know a great post that you could put on Facebook but it wouldn’t necessarily even fit on Twitter because it’s not under a 140 characters so just because you have one group of information or something that you feel is valuable doesn’t necessarily mean that you couldn’t kind of propagate evenly across all the platforms.

MATT: And maybe you want to post that huge post on your blog and you just want them put a link up to the other social networking areas, right, so those are the things that you might be able to automate.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: One of the other things is letting people connect to your site will their logins from Facebook or Twitter. With Facebook, it’s called Facebook connect. I think the Twitter one is like log in to a Twitter or something like that. But basically this letting people come to your site and not have to register with the new user name. They can just log in with the username they have from Twitter, from Facebook, or from Google or open ID or any of those things and it makes it a lot easier for them to sign up to get into use your content, makes it easier for them to participate on the conversation. I think this is really the way you want to be building your apps and it’s something that you know we’re working on going forward just trying to integrate Facebook log in and Twitter log in and all these into all the different sites that we build for you guys.

BRANDON: Yeah, you know we’ve talked about some password managers in the past. We use Lastpass and I’ve talked about Roboform in the past too. You know there’s all these passwords and log ins that you’re juggling all the time. In 10 years, I kind of think that that’s all kind of all going to be going away. Eventually, I think the internet will come to the conclusion that we need to have more of a network of the passwords for two reasons. One is it’s just easier to have one or two usernames and passwords that would let you into all of those sites that you have an account with and secondly, it’s actually more secure because you know if you sign up for a website that you know don’t necessarily know or trust, that password you put in there, I bet you more than likely is the same password you use in a lot of other sites. You know you may think that that website is encrypting that password but I tell you being a webmaster for a number of e-commerce sites, I’ve used shopping carts that do not encrypt the password and allows the administrator that password to really kind of know what everybody who’s signing up for your site is. So I could take that information and go to another site, you know, Facebook and you probably have an account there, and you know that kind of stuff worries me. So over the long run I think it’s a little bit more secure.

MATT: And that’s a legal liability, right? I mean if one of your employees or someone took those passwords and did something, you’ll be liable for it.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: So integrating with Facebook connect or Twitter, you don’t get their password, you just get this little token that says the other Twitter user and this is who they are.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: And so you know you don’t have to worry about managing their passwords. You don’t have to deal with when people lose their passwords, helping them recover their stuff. So the more you can integrate these stuff, I think the better. I‘ve let them sign in with some credentials that you don’t manage.

BRANDON: Right. So that kind of wraps up integration.

MATT: Well, I think one of the other things that we should talk about is some of the widgets that you can add into your sites right. So if you go to the automatemysmallbusiness.com website, you’ll see that we have a Twitter site bar that’s pulling live feeds off of Twitter and showing those on a website so that you can see what we’re saying and go and follow people that are talking about Automate My Small Business. It’s a great way of kind of integrating Twitter into your site and driving people to follow you on Twitter. There’s all kinds of badges like every social network wear some sort of badge that says become my friend or my fan on Facebook. You can get fan page badges. You can embed YouTube videos. I think that’s one of the best widget where you get a lot of value out of it. You can just take a video on YouTube and embed the player right in your blog or your webpage and you know suddenly you have video on your own webpage.

BRANDON: Yeah. There’s thousands of those widgets out there that do all sorts of embedding and Facebook badges. I mean a great example that you could relate to is if you have an iGoogle page which has all those kind of Google widgets on one page. It allows you to have a Twitter feed and it allows you to get the weather and it allows you get the time and it gives you a clock and all these other things that are good for a lot of things. But there’s so many of them you kind of have to patchy them all and make it easy to…

MATT: Yeah, the tweet me button, I think, like all the kind of social bookmarking buttons are good widgets. The thing we talked about earlier where you post a button on an article that you want people to tweet about and it will automatically post in their Twitter if they click on the button, the tweet me. Reddit and Digg both have the same sort of things. So you want to encourage people to engage with you to the social networks using those widgets and getting them involved.

BRANDON: Right. So you know we mentioned before about reputation management and it’s important that now that everything is out there on the open that you kind of know what people are talking about you and if it’s something you know that you can fix or if it’s some sort of feedback that you could use. In order to automate this, it just takes a few simple tools. The number one tool I use all the time is Google alert. I put my brand name in there. I put my competitors brand’s name in there. I put anybody who I’m interested in knowing more about that I wouldn’t necessarily know where to go to get the information but it may be somewhere out there in the internet. Go to Google alerts, I think we’ve mentioned this before, set up some sort of keyword phrase and every day I get an email from Google alerts telling me that such and such has been mentioned here or your brand name is mentioned on this website. I even keep track of all my affiliates that way because I know who’s using the coupon codes and where they’re using them and I know if they’re using them under the guidelines and policy that I set and if they are outside of the guidelines, I let them know that they need to get back in. And so you know it’s funny because a lot of people feel like oh, if I just put this out in the internet, nobody’s going to know because you know why would they ever check this website. But the truth is you can set up alerts to let you know. So it’s really…

MATT: Google will find you.

BRANDON: Google will find you. They always do and sometimes it’s a few days behind so they may have posted it on a Tuesday and I didn’t get the alert until Friday.

MATT: Another tool that I find out while I’ve been running my research is Social Mention which basically looks at all the different blogposts and blog comments around the internet and Twitter and all these things and kind of pulls all that back in for certain keywords that you’re monitoring. You know there’s millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of blogs out there that you know they could have comments anywhere and they can be really hard to find even with Google alerts. You know so Social Mention is a good way to look at that and pull those in one place. And we talked about tool earlier that is kind of both integration tool and might help you with monitoring which is Disqus, which will pull those comments from all those other blogs and actually make them comments at your own blog.

BRANDON: Yeah. And effort still on monitoring I think the tool that I use that I like is Exclaim track which is a Gtalk robot that you connect with them as if they’re somebody who you would instant message with on Gtalk and instead of actually having conversations with it, it’s a one way deal. They will send you a instant message anytime a particular search keyword term or phrase is mentioned on Twitter. So throughout the day, you might get a quick, instant message saying somebody is talking about you. So that’s kind of similar to what you could do with the Tweetdeck or any other Twitter service.

MATT: Yeah, that’s cool. I mean one of the things you’ll see is that most of these monitoring tools will let you export the monitoring as an RSS feed and I’ve seen some people take like 10 RSS feeds you want to merge those into one RSS feed that you can just follow and you can maybe feed into something that sends you a text message when there’s a new item in that RSS. And so if you have a bunch of RSS feeds that you’re trying to manage out all these things, you can combine them all together with Yahoo pipes which basically you just kind of drag them all on this little work service that looks like Visio. You say, just merge all these feeds into one and then you have one feed to you know get text messages or instant message, whatever you want to do with it.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: So that’s a great way to automate some of the monitoring so you’re not always having to search and go out there and try to find manually what people are saying about you. You know use tools to do these monitoring for you.

BRANDON: Yeah. So we also talked about the ROI and knowing whether you know it’s worth your time to be doing all these social marketing. You know so you got to know is this working?

MATT: I think this is the critical one that gets left off and this is why people have no clue of their social media campaigns are successful or failures.

BRANDON: Right. And if you used Google analytics in the past, you know how valuable it can be. But pretty much you’re using these tools to track how much traffic you get or you can even know how much traffic your competitors are getting.

MATT: Yeah. So with Google analytics, when you’re doing this off site campaigns, there’s this feature inside of Google analytics called campaigns where you can set up these special links where they have certain parameters that anything after that question mark in the URL that will tell you a little bit more about where that link came from. And so you can set up things like Twitter feed to be adding this campaign identifier into the links that it’s creating which is then shortening using Bit.ly or whatever URL shortener you want to use. So when someone clicks through, you’re actually seeing that they came from this Twitter feed or they came from this post and once they’re identified with that campaign, you can then track them all the way through the conversion. So not just the click through that you get with Bit.ly but you’ll get what they did on their site after they went there. Did they you know just bounce right off or did they you know click through some pages and eventually buy something? You can really quantifiably measure the ROI of those links.

BRANDON: So for example, you would say, put a tweet up on Twitter and you would include a short URL that you use through Bit.ly.

MATT: Before you shorten that URL, you’d add these special Google analytics tags to it and so you have that extra information about this post or this URL that’s part of this campaign and so that’s how you’re going to track it. And there’s some services that will do that for you automatically. I’m still getting into this as far as us using it so I’m still learning about it. So I haven’t found the right tool to automate everything about it but right now, that’s something I’m looking into more.

BRANDON: Tell the listeners about your URL shortener you’ve come up with.

MATT: Yeah, so one of the things, you know, we use Bit.ly and I know I’ve recommended Bit.ly and I think it’s the best of the hosted versions but one of the things that we want to be able to do is to change the URLs later on and Bit.ly won’t let you do that. So if you know your URL moves, we’ve been using this short URLs over the place we posted so, we wouldn’t want to go update the 50 places we posted this URL. We want to update our shortener and say now redirect these people somewhere differently. So I found these URLs which is yourls.org that will let you host your own URL shortener. So I think I tweeted a couple of weeks ago that we bought our own URL two letter domain name and one of the cool things that happened with this is we get really short URLs because no one else is using it.

BRANDON: Yeah, you don’t have like a 16 character keys at the end.

MATT: Yeah, you don’t have like 6 characters of you know the random numbers being your identifier. You know our first post was 1 and…

BRANDON: 1, yeah.

MATT: Our two letter domain name slash 1 so you get really, really short URLs and we used to, I want my name I think to get that.

BRANDON: iwantmyname.com

MATT: Yeah. I think that was it. We’ll post the links on the show notes.

BRANDON: Yeah. You know Do.my’s I think was a good one too, the kind of URLs that you like. I don’t think, yeah, they do short URLS.

MATT: I can’t remember if they shorten all the short URLs or not. Once you get below three characters, things like GoDaddy and some other things don’t work very well so you have to find someone that specializes in two-letter domain names and international domain names because you want something you know, our was a .gs name, which I didn’t even know what that is but it was short.

BRANDON: Yeah, so our URL shortener is g0.gs…

MATT: Yup.

BRANDON: … slash and then whatever number. Yeah. So it’s a good way to put URLs that are short in Twitter and track them the way you want them. Bit.ly is good too so if you just want a quick way to do it, Bit.ly is the way to go.

MATT: Bit.ly is cool because it integrate with a lot of schools like Tweetdeck and things like that, right. So another tool that I found out that haven’t really started using yet is Quantcast and Quantcast is a way of getting demographics about people that are clicking on your links on Twitter and things like that.

BRANDON: Even coming into your website.

MATT: Even coming into your website which I thought would be a great way to figure out what types of people you’re attracting from your social media campaign.

BRANDON: It’s pretty pricey though, right? What were the prices?

MATT: I think they have some free stuff but I’m not sure. I’m still looking into that.

BRANDON: It’s a great way to do it. I don’t know the technology behind that to make it work but it’s impressive.

MATT: It’s all those very fancy tool bars that people install to their browsers that collects all that information so…

BRANDON: Oh.

MATT: Thank you every one who has installed their tool bars that we know who you are now.

BRANDON: Yeah. That’s funny. Yeah, so gosh, lot of options.

MATT: Yeah. I mean I really think that the measuring pieces are really critical. Google analytics campaign is a good way to do that. We’re still looking to more tools and we’ll definitely post that and the membership site, I think is we get more and more how to use and setting that up because I think that’s key to really defining whether you’re being successful or failing on that. So we get any news?

BRANDON: Yeah. There’s some good stuff that’s come out this past week. Google docs now has the ability to store all file types. I thought that was pretty interesting. They’re rolling that out. I just tried it a couple of hours ago. It didn’t work for me but I think they’re kind of slowly rolling it out. And that’s a big deal because their biggest, number one request was the fact that they wanted all the file types to be able to be stored and uploaded and shared and up until now it’s just only been Google word or Google excel. Basically, they’re versions of those and pdf’s and a few other file types but you couldn’t put a zip file up there. You can put a jpeg up there if you wanted to.

MATT: Yeah. That was always really annoying.

BRANDON: Yeah, I mean here they are trying to advertise that this could be switched over from any enterprise level, you know, file sharing. I just don’t see how that could be. I mean they offer a lot of good features but Google doc definitely had that problem. So now that they’ve closed that gap.

MATT: Yeah. They’re definitely getting better. Those are big week for Google. They also finally released the SSL version of Gmail out of Google apps. I think that’s available for everyone now, right?

BRANDON: Right. So more secure, that’s good, and they go their Google voice application on Nexus One. The Nexus One tone is pretty big. It has got a lot of buzz going around it.

MATT: That’s the Google phone, right? The made by Google phone.

BRANDON: Made by Google and I think it’s unlocked so you can use it with any carrier.

MATT: Right. So they don’t sell it on a carrier, right. They sell it direct.

BRANDON: Yeah, although I did notice that the pricing is somewhere between a $150 and $600 so there must be some sort of subsidizing going on different levels. I’m not sure.

MATT: Oh I’ve heard mentioning of like subsidizing it with ads on the thing.

BRANDON: Oh, maybe that’s why. So it’s pretty sexy. I’m impressed with it. I have heard some people say it’s not an iPhone killer. So it probably does have some short falls but for the first version, I’m impressed with it.

MATT: That’s cool. That’s something to look up for. Maybe Nexus II is the killer.

BRANDON: Yeah. I’m sure. Facebook does have some privacy updates I think that came …

MATT: That have been awhile ago. You just haven’t signed into your Facebook account for quite a while.

BRANDON: I think they happened, what, December?

MATT: In November or December maybe.

BRANDON: Yeah, they came out the ability to post your status to just your friends or to friends of friends or to everybody, some privacy issues that’s going to make it even more powerful.

MATT: Yeah. So I think that’s about it for the news. Make sure that you rate the podcast or review the podcast in iTunes or Zune or whatever you’re listening to us in.

BRANDON: Yeah. If you want to come visit the community, we got a great question and answer site at ask.automatemysmallbusiness.com or just link to it from the home page.

MATT: And you know I want to give a shout out to Wayne this week because he had the most point for answering questions last week and asking good questions so thanks, Wayne.

BRANDON: Nice, Wayne.

MATT: Yeah, you put more information on your profile like your business and stuff. We’ll save that for whoever is you know our next week’s most points person. So thanks for participating, not just Wayne but everyone that ask the question or answer a question. We’re really trying to build this community site so that it helps everyone. I’ve already learned a bunch of stuff from just questions that people posted and things that they’re researching. So thanks a lot to everyone that has posted up there.

BRANDON: Yeah. Thanks for collaborating. Alright, we’ll see you next time. Thanks for listening.

You’ve been listening to Automate My Small Business. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To get a list of the links we’ve just talked about or download more episodes and How To videos, go to automatemysmallbusiness.com. Thanks for being with us and catch us next time on Automate My Small Business Podcast.

Podcast music features, “Nothing’s Got Me” by Big Bad Sun, distributed by Magnatune and licensed under Creative Commons. The Automate My Small Business podcast is engineered by Vincent Furlong and transcribed by Flo Umali. And licensed under Creative Commons Attribution No Derivative Works license and may be freely distributed to share with friends, co-workers and strangers.

Sign up for the Automate My Small Business Newsletter and receive a list of the tools we use to automate our small businesses.
Name:
Email:

We will never send you SPAM or share your information with anyone. You can stop receiving our emails at anytime.

Using Social Media for Business. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more.

Links from the show.

Transcript:

Leave a Reply

Listen To The Podcast

Ask A Question

Subscribe to the Newsletter

Social Networks

License