Social media influence is powered by trust.  Many influencers are only as powerful or influential as the trust they have earned from their social media network.  In order to unlock that network and leverage the trust, you must first establish a relationship with that influencer.  They have to feel comfortable to allow you into their realm. Much like introducing your date to your family for the first time, you have to gain the trust of that relationship.  Once the relationship is established you will be allowed into their locked group, their network, their family.

The ultimate problem is once the relationship is established and once you have been introduced, the next step is obvious, you want to sell your wares. You have invested by establishing the relationship.  The issue is that once you make the pitch to the network, the relationship trust meter is drained of its power to some extent. You have leveraged their trust. From the opposite side of the coin, you have let them in, they have made their pitch, but now you have drained off some of the trust from your network.  Can you gain that trust back?  Are you now labeled as a sellout?

This is the dance that the triangle must dance.  You have the seller wanting into the locked network, the network that has been identified as the consumer and now pitched, and the social influencer now chasing the influence check.  Hopefully, they all have heard the music, loved the dance number and the group has been involved with a win-win-win.  Can the dance be established again?  Chances are if your trust was real, when it is used in these circumstances if can be and will always  be available again. The best way to keep the trust is authenticity and transparency.  if you have established true trust, that is something that will be understood by your network.

Leverage is a bad word and is derogatory when used with trust.  The two terms together are like an oxymoron.  Trust isn’t something that you can buy, sell or trade.  Social influence follows along in that vein too.   Influence is a currency. You can use it and earn it, but you can’t leverage your influence.

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WordPress users can jump right into the distribution of their content on the Amazon Kindle by installing the Send To Kindle plugin in the WordPress plugin catalog. It is a simple plugin to install and the settings make it easy to create the button and allow you to put the sharing button in the front of the post or at the end of the post.  I will begin testing the service by putting the button at the end of the content like the Twitter sharing function here.  I am not sure that is the best location for its use at the end of the content that you are expecting people to save and read later.  It may be better used at the beginning of the text of the content after the title of the piece.  This is a new application and the use of it and its functionality is still to be determined.  I think there are other similar apps on the market out there and I will be looking into this more since the reader from Google is changing how wee get our content into the hands of those that want to read it.  All in all, Kindle is allowing us here at One By One Media to be more social.

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If you are a medium to large sized company this is a little more difficult as you begin the process as each department within the company may have a different customer.  The shipping department customer has already purchased the product.  Their customer is the receiver of the goods. This is different than the marketing department.  The manufacturing department has a different customer as does the human resources department.  As a business owner or as the one that must drive growth of the company and sales and marketing of the products and services you provide, you have to boil the basics down to their beginning.  Each of the groups I mention above as examples have differing wants and needs within the business cycle, but each boil down to the basic of what the company has a mission and message and what they provide.  The perfect customer can actually be identified within each department after it’s boiled down.  This is one in the same customer.

Now that you have identified the perfect customer, the question to ask is why is “defining” the customer important? There are times when you stray away from what provides the best success as a business.  You can remember early if you are a small business who your perfect first customer was when you started. Getting back to the basics of getting that customer will help you get back to being a successful business.  Define that perfect customer and begin defining success.  How do you define success?  Start by defining the perfect customer.

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That may seem like a crazy question, but I can assure you I have been found by many customers over the course of the near 10 years I have been in business.  The spectrum of customers has been great long-time relationships and customers that have been such for about one phone call.  The problem is distinguishing those that make a good customer and those you would rather not have. How do you make it easier for those customers you want to find you?

You need to talk their language, and hang out where they are located.

You need to determine what your good customers represent.  They all have a demographic.  Perhaps your best customer is a small business or perhaps it is a very large corporation.  If you are not a B2B company and you want the consumer or individual, perhaps you want a certain age group or a typical man or a mother of 4 with income over a certain amount.  Only you know what your best customer represents. It’s one of the first things I ask new customers of ours. Who is your best customer?  With that said, and now that you have the traits of the perfect customer, you have to talk to that group and you have to make yourself more able to be found by that group.

If your perfect customer is men aged 18-35, are single and like to hunt and fish, you know their language. At least your should.  Most demographics can be found online and most of them hang out in certain circles and look for things a certain way.  Why spend time talking to Mommy bloggers on Facebook and Twitter, when you need to be blogging about how to survive in a forest when the temperature drops while hunting deer? Find out what your demographic is talking about and why they are finding you.  Then be more active in that area.  Your blog is an amplifier, your Facebook page a microphone and your Twitter stream is a personal note of 140 characters to the perfect customer.  Are you talking to your demographic?  If you are then your demographic will find you.  If you are catering to the perfect customer using social media, you will be found in social media by the perfect customer.

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For many companies the email marketing campaign has become the cornerstone of their outbound marketing plans. This type of campaign coupled with other marketing tools help compete for sales and a better bottom line. Email marketing has changed significantly as it has become easier to procure email addresses with the implementation of social networking programs, acquiring email addresses at point-of-sale in retail locations, optimized landing pages, and with most customers participation on the Internet.

Many companies are putting a large amount of resources into designing email templates, generating the best possible content and procuring email addresses and storing them in categories and lists that have meaning to their marketing vision that allows them to convert the email into a customer.

In many cases the company has very large programs that are dedicated to this process and rely on this for their bottom line and how they see an increase in converted sales in their sales cycle.  Problems arise when their conversion rates are not steady and they are not seeing much of an increase in open rates and deliverability during the campaigns they run. Deliverability of the sales message is important to the process.

Return Path recently performed a study that showed that nearly 25 percent of all emails are not reaching their final destination and are not actually landing in the inboxes of those intended recipients.  This can be for a number of reasons, but the main reason most controlled by the sender of the email is the data verification process.  Email verification is sometimes overlooked in the process of email procurement. Companies gather the information and never perform the next step of verifying that the addresses procured are actually deliverable.  This changes much of the email marketing program’s success.

In order to illustrate the example here, in every 1000 emails sent from the company 250 of those are not reaching their intended recipient according to the Return Path study.  If a company realizes a 10 percent conversion rate or 10 conversions for every 100 recipients, they are losing a large amount of conversions or customers by simply not delivering their message. If your email campaign is sending 500,000 to 1 million  emails in a campaign, the numbers can be staggering.

Imagine if your sales cycle could deliver 25% more emails to the intended recipient and then increase the open rates of those email campaigns?  This would eventually increase the conversions seen in the sales cycle.  This may not increase your bottom line 25% or in some case it may actually be more, but the bottom line is delivering your sales message will never increase sales if you are not verifying the data you control.

~ Justin Helmig
Email – justin.helmig@strikeiron.com

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Google Plus is the new darling of social networks and it is the latest in shiny things that we social media people love to jump in and declare ourselves as early adopters.  We get to try it out and pick it apart piece by piece and provide feedback and add our 2 cents.  I’m somewhat behind that game as this is my first post about the new network.  I must admit that I have been on Google Plus now since I could get an invite when it first launched and tweeting every article I can pass along that I have read on the subject.

Getting back to the issue at hand, Google Plus originally opened up the invitations to its “field test” of their network to the user that had an invite.  This made the invites like the gold standard for a while and everyone in social media was calling all their friends to get in on the gold rush of invites.  Most of my colleagues were in and salivating on the new toy, and I heard tell of brands that were also jumping in and being a part of the fun, the point there is to be an early adopter and get a jump on the competition as we are all seeing how the past rolled out with Twitter and Facebook.  This ended for businesses however as Google pulled the plug on the ability for businesses or brands to sign up on Google Plus. Google went as far as to  suspend those brands they could hunt down and find on the network.

Now enter the folks at Mashable.  The thrive on the metric of eyeballs.  They are a media property that tries to gain as many eyeballs as possible for the businesses that pay them for distribution of their posts.  They are known for reaching millions of readers and have mastered every trick in the book for having those million readers share and re-distribute their content.  Enter the next distribution system in Google Plus and its already exponentially  more than 10 million users and you have yet more metrics and eyeballs to add to your existing pitch of being the most read media property in the world of social.  Last time I checked, Mashable was a business and therefore according to Google, unable to have a presence on its new network.

There are always those that are jail breaking iPhones and those that are gaming the system to get more followers and every other loophole that can be found to get the upper hand.  This apparently is not much different with Mashable and their having a presence on Google Plus.  The route they took?  We will take our leader, Pete Cashmore, and his Google account and use it as a distribution channel.  He is a person and not a business and therefore his account can be used for us here at Mashable.  Is this a gaming of the system?  Are other businesses and brands using their “ambassadors” (Thanks Chris Heuer for that Tweet) to get a jump on the competition and getting an early look as a business on the network?

I have an admission myself, I have not used my Google account for much other than Google Buzz or Wave or whatever else I have needed to use the account for and I suppose my company is getting a leg up on other companies that don’t yet have a Google Plus account, but I am actually at the helm of my account.  I am not sure Pete is the one that is sharing each of the Mashable…err Cashmore shared posts on Google Plus.  It did strike me as funny that they would use advertising space to increase the eyeballs of the Pete Cashmore account.  Are they gaming the system?  Probably.  Do I blame them?  Not really, but I do blame Google for not having a plan on how to better handle this and how they might unfold Google Plus for Business.

UPDATE:  Upon further view it appears that Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land already discussed this in his post and updates.  It appears that Mashable is now just blatantly advertising the fact to get more followers on the account for Pete Cashmore.

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Branding to me is making sure that at every turn, your community is reminded of your existence, be it your name, a logo, or something that can identify you as the expert in your field, the product that all must have, or a service people should love. We all know when I say Nike, Pepsi, Ford, that all of these bring an image to mind or a thought or something that stirs our brains to think of the company. That is branding. In the sense of the online world, we must always look for ways to have that in place, be it a link, a banner ad, a mention, or in the case of this post, a social share. Making sure your social sharing is also branded where possible is one more way to make sure you are always putting your brand out front.

The example I have seen and been privy to over the last couple of days has been sharing on Twitter. I read a large number of posts daily. I am constantly consuming information and then sharing that information with my community. It helps the person that has produced the content for me to share and it also informs my clients and others with whom I provide the links. It is a win-win for everyone. I also note that when I share information, via the in post applications people use, they have not branded their default settings.

One such instance this morning was sharing a news item from Media Buyer Planner. No I am not picking on them but it was what spurred this post. The have the sharing buttons as everyone on their news item that can be shared via various networks. I hit the Twitter share button and up popped the Twitter window for me to share with my followers, and I saw the title of the post, and the link and then i saw “via @AddThis”. This is the name of the application and not the name of the Twitter handle of the company where I found the article. They have missed an opportunity to brand @MediaBuyer. Many companies don;t put anything in the spot they can for branding. Make sure you are taking every opportunity to brand your company.

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I am passionate and this brought me to being a Daddy blogger and business owner.  It was that passion and interest in the world of blogs and parenting that brought me to BlogHer a number of years ago.  I was sitting next to the pool in California with a few other dads, and we all said that it would be great if we had a conference for us guys to call our own.  We all chuckled then and rolled our eyes and asked who was buying the next round of beers?  Fast forward to early  2010. In February of 2010, I had an initial conversation with one of the organizers and founders of the Modern Media Man Summit.  At the time it did not have a name or a face a logo or anything more than a good idea of the person on the other end of the chat and they wanted to try a new company.  They wanted a conference for men and for dads.  This was after all, “The Year of the Daddy Blogger.”  I agreed to help be a part of what I thought would be a winning idea.

Having worked as the conference director and social media director for BlogWorld and New Media Expo the year before I thought I could provide some much needed expertise as well as some good business contacts and connections that I felt was needed to make the project a success.  It was agreed that we would go forward with the project.  Like in all of my endeavors, I threw my heart and soul into the success of the company and the project was underway.  I set aside most of my other business duties and began concentrating on what needed to be accomplished.    I reached out to some of my most trusted friends and the people I knew would give me some guidance.  They agreed to help and some of them became members to what would become the Advisory Board.  I reached out to another friend who I knew would be good to help with the coordination of speakers and content for the conference portion of the show.  I contacted all of my business contacts to let them know about the new project and that we wanted to give them the opportunity to partner with a great idea.  Some of them jumped at the chance and we signed a few sponsors and companies to being a part of the program early.  Things were progressing nicely and we were on track to making the conference a hit.  The 20 hour days of working by all the founders was paying off.

During the middle of March, 2010 there were differences between myself and another founder, and I decided then that we needed to have someone leading the charge that could be the head of the organization to keep it running in what I thought needed to be its direction.  We were about to sign our first big sponsor and we needed to focus and have a face and a personality of the business.  In my mind we needed a person to make the tough calls and a place where the buck stopped.  Being a man, and a father, I felt right in line with our target market and the best representative of the people we wanted to reach.  I volunteered to be the head of the organization, but indicated then that I needed to be able to run things the way I saw fit on issues of day to day decisions.  If it was going to be my neck on the line I wanted to control my own fate.  It was agreed that I would be the front of the organization for that purpose and business continued as usual representing to all that I was the man in charge.  On March 31, a little more than a month into the project I was told that the legal documents had been filed and that we could begin operating the business as a limited liability company in the State of Georgia.  I was a 1/3rd owner and was told that I was budgeted to receive a guaranteed sum of money for my work.  I began pushing to get contracts entered into and  started working hard to get to a finished product.  My vision of what an awesome conference for men and dads would look like was taking shape.  2 weeks later after what I felt was a grueling work schedule and having been criticized for nearly every decision, I made what would be my last decision on a matter that would be the best direction for the company and the conference.  It was met not with criticism this time but complete resistance.  I decided then that I could no longer lead the charge but that I would do everything in my power to contribute what I could.  Two days later I woke to check email only to find I had been blocked from the company email account locked out of the site and was told that I would not be contacted or spoken to unless I had signed a Nondisclosure Agreement that had contained a restrictive non-compete clause.  I inquired as to why, as an owner, I would be contracting not to disclose information with myself and not to compete with myself?  No response was forthcoming.  I made one final attempt to reconcile with the founders and again it was given complete resistance.  I reached out to a lawyer at that time to get some advice and was told not to sign any such agreements nondisclosure agreements and that any signing of agreements may supersede any previous agreements of the founders.  I then found out that no documents had ever been filed on behalf of the Modern Media Man Summit, LLC.  I was told next I was not to be a part of the organization.

I had brought all of their existing sponsors on board and was in line to speak with four others.  I had made promises, had discussions, made representations and risked much of my reputation, much of my social capital and invested nearly three months of a difficult work schedule.  I sit here 3 months later and look back wondering what has happened.  I see some of the work I have done and work that has not been done.  I continue to get calls from sponsors, from friends, from potential speakers and many that have no idea that I am not somehow still involved.  I only recently found out that the founders have not disclosed any of the above to some key sponsors and other parties.  For that I wanted to get this out in the open. I have not been involved with the organization on any level since May 17, 2010. Any decisions, representations or otherwise have not included me nor have I had any direction in how the company would proceed.  I have not received any  form of compensation for the time spent on this project.  I am not at liberty at this time to discuss my future with the organization, any liabilities I might have or the remedies I have before me, but I want to make it clear my involvement.  The costs have been great not only in the time and energy and effort spent, but in some friendships, some contacts, some reputation and many other intangibles.

I want to apologize to the people that have been harmed by this.  I have tried to reach out to some and offer a personal apology.  I may not know all that has occurred but I can assure you that I am truly and sincerely sorry if there has been a problem.  I can only hope to regain some of what I have lost.  I continue with my vision that we can have an event for Dads and for men.  It may yet prove to be the M3Summit.  It may be other projects and it may be someone that can lead that focus.  I will forge ahead and continue.  If anyone has any questions that I may be able to answer or if you want further information please feel free to contact me.

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Those of you that have been following along here over the last 5 years know that from time to time we tend to make some sweeping changes to our look and feel of the web site and blog (terms I believe are synonymous).  This is the latest look and feel that we have made and I believe I can now blog better, write better, speak better and everything else has been taken up a notch.  Like that kid that could run faster and jump higher, I feel invigorated.  We will continue to always be testing new widgets and plugins and every tool out there, but for now it is clean and tidy here and I love it that way.

I have Debbie Lawrence of Lagniappe Marketing to thank for the new look and feel.  She is amazing and allowed me to participate in what she calls the “Sausage Making” process of watching the new design come together.  We are using Brian Gardner’s template and I recommend all of his work as he has some great themes to work with and to make your own designs.  In fact, Debbie was the designer and coder and all-around sausage making queen for the site over at the Modern Media Man Summit which is another of my latest projects.  That site is also a Studio Press theme.  Thank you Debbie!

I expect things to pick up here a little since I have this new running faster and jumping higher ability.  Take a look around and tell us your thoughts.

You can also see that we have added to the home page our sites at Bloggers For Hire and at Social Mediasphere TV.  We will be picking up the pace there as well so feel free to grab those feeds too.

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I recently helped present a series at my son’s school on “Cyber Safety”.  In addition, local law enforcement also presented on the dangers of the world of social networks and what our children are doing online and the predators that are out there and their methods.  It was very sobering to figure that there are that many people out there trying to harm our kids via the Internet and social networks.  An yet, we are all flocking to these networks as our new playgrounds and the place to be and all from the safety, or so it may seem, of our own homes.

I am particularly interested in geo-location or geo-tracking applications that are becoming more and more popular.  Twitter themselves have opened up location based Tweets so that people can determine your whereabouts as you click away at 140 characters.  These software applications are so new that they have yet to become mainstream uses for evil but it can only be a matter of time until we begin to hear of predators using them and suddenly you will hear of their evil deeds on the prime time news.

Is privacy going away?  Is our notion that we are protected by privacy laws and common sense enough?  Have you read the terms of service of each and every software application that you are using today?  Perhaps you have agreed to give up your rights to a private life by participating in that latest cool place to hang out on the Internet?  In 2009 I deemed it “The Year of Listening” as that was the new marketing mantra.  If that were the case, we should probably listen to what I am now calling “The Year of Privacy.”  It could turn out that our privacy will then turn into the “Year of Living Dangerously.”

photo via Alan Cleaver_2000

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I was recently aware that Pepsi has decided to go in another direction for its advertising that normally takes place during the super bowl.  Many other companies are now getting online as well.  I think we are about to see this as a trend.  What is it that is capturing the hearts, minds, and most of all the attention of the public?  Facebook.

It used to be that the television was the pinnacle of the advertising world, and for the most part it still is, but that trend seems to be changing.  With Facebook now entering the hundreds of millions of users, brands are beginning to rethink their use of their advertising dollars.  In addition, the target is more precise and they are getting more conversions.  I have been try8ing to understand the metrics behind the idea of television advertising as well.  We used to hear of the millions of viewers that this show garnered, or the numbers of people watching each show, but there was never any real metrics to determine other than polls and ratings.  With Facebook and other applications, we can see the clicks, the landing pages, the exit pages etc.  It has a more precise feel to the campaign.

This is the way ot the future as it relates to advertising, and once the Facebook’s of the world can get millions of dollars to get your attention for 30 seconds, the next big thing will come along.

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In the tech world online and in social media circles we have been trained that we can do a whole lot of things for very little, and in most cases, everything we want to do has a “Free” application associated with it.  Things like YouTube, Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and a plethora of other things we “sell” to clients and companies that come in our toolkit we obtained for free or for very little investment.  Our investment at this point has been the time it takes to understand and implement the use of such tools.  This has been a very lucrative part of being a social media consultant and I suppose why you cannot swing a dead cat in a room and not hit one or two of the “experts” in our business.  Free is always easy to sell.

I have talked before about “The Problems of Free“, and I also talked about how companies are using free as a business model. I want to turn back to the discussion or debate related to Comscore.  We have begun to expect companies to provide services online for free or for very little cost, and as I see it that proposes a problem somewhere in the chain.  Comscore cannot compete with Free.  Someone has to pay for free.

If you are providing a service online, or if you have the latest cool application and you offer it to your users for free, how do you make money?  I often ask many of the startups that come to me what their revenue model is and how they plan to make money.  This is usually followed of course with “How are you going to pay me?”  I am not yet providing “Free” for my own services.  Many companies have long drawn out plans with “ad revenue”, affiliate marketing”, or worse yet I get a blank stare of “we have not yet come to that part of the business plan.”

In the end, you have to pay for the service you provide, be it your time, servers, salaries, and long lunches at In-N-Out.  Comscore is having the problem explaining that they have to pay their bills.  We have to give our stockholders a piece of the pie and we have to pay our salaries and everything associated with the costs of giving you what you want.  They are not able to barter it all and they certainly cannot ask their employees to do it out of the goodness of their hearts, so they have to charge.  I am not sure whether Jason or anyone else has really come up with an alternative to charging for Comscore’s services, other than perhaps the aforementioned ad revenue or the like.  Someone has to pay for the free in the chain of the exchange.  The problem that I see is that Comscore is asking the customer to pay when others are offering it for “free”, but even in that instance, someone is paying for the free.

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I was great meeting new friends while in Hawaii, like, Chris, Christine, Bruce Fisher and his wife, Neenz and Noe and Melanie, Marijane, Mark, and Aric, and Leah45 and Sheila and well you get the idea, it was a year of gaining friends and experiencing life.  Most of all it was becoming a part of a new community.

jim turner on ‘[re]think:hawaii’ from aric s. queen on Vimeo.

I will be recapping much of 2009 and some of what we accomplished as a company and will cover some of the initiatives for clients and how we grew in the world of social media consulting and social media management.

We will be soon relaunching Social Mediasphere Radio, with some new friends, which will also be a part of SMTV.  We are also going to have a new site here soon and we will refocus our efforts to be a trailblazer in the world of social media.  I have some events I will be speaking at soon and I will do a list of those so we may perhaps be able to meet and I will get a chance to make friends in another community.

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The same should be for businesses that are already established.  We have been told the quote “innovate or die.”  We heard it as recent as the opening keynote at CES.  That is a mantra that all businesses should be paying attention to in the future.  Innovation is key to keeping your product or service fresh.  People will want to continue to buy if it changes and is better or changes their lives for the better.  I think Ford is doing that with its own innovations in vehicles.

I hope that in the coming weeks, we will be creating some “wow” moments for our clients and business partners.  We can use the “Wow” we are seeing as innovations and implement them into our daily routines to help clients and others change and make their own “wow” or awesome sauce or whatever buzz phrase you choose.

Stay tuned for some magical moments here at One By One Media, as we start on a mission of creating “Wow” and innovating our services.  I challenge all of you to have your own mission of creating “Wow!!”

photo via puliarf

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