5 Dumbest Social Media Mistakes Businesses Make Every Day

1. The no strategy mistake. Some dumb idiots shoot out posts and Tweets without having commercial goals, without segmenting their market, and without understanding the buying process for what they sell.

2. The same dumb idiots don't invest in good content. Your content strategy will be as thin as air if you don't invest in it.

3.  Dumb idiots aren't unique, either. People with imagination and great writing skills, who can write different, new posts, are needed, badly. If you can write a  stunning post, do it. If you can't, please don't bore us with faded copies of the worst post we read in 2010.

4. Those same dumb idiots don't get social. At all. For God's sake, there's no point in having a Twitter feed and Facebook page if you don't respond to people who contact you that way. 7 days a week too. Wake up. M-F 9 to 5 will die. Your customers are online 24/7. Can you not at least be there 12/24?

5. And they don't ask customers anything and don't adapt to their needs. If you are targeting a group, get their views, find out what they want, and deliver it. How hard is that? You should know what's trending in each segment, and what value you can deliver for free, too.

Don't expect miracles, either and don't get conned into promising them, This stuff works, but it's based on building a reputation, delivering value, and nurturing the leads you accumulate through your email and blog sign up systems. With that in mind, please use the button on the right to follow us.

There's lots more posts like this coming. Stay tuned.

Supercharging social media with storytelling techniques: Raising the Stakes

Raising the stakes is a classic technique for raising interest in a story. If you make things important for the characters, make it a life or death situation or, more realistically, make what will happen have an impact on people lives, then more people will be interested in your writing.

But can we use this technique in social media?

Yes, we can. We are not all involved in saving lives or ground breaking research, but you can find ways to raise the stakes in everyday situations too. Here are some examples:

1. If you're a cake company you can post/Tweet about an anonymous client who bought a cake for a birthday celebration with a new boyfriend.

2. If you sell wine you can post/Tweet about the anonymous client who bought 20 bottles, which you recommended, for the engagement party of his only daughter.

3. If you're a bank, you can post/Tweet about an anonymous and unidentifiable client who was helped expand by a loan to cover an order for a new client, which was negotiated in 48hrs.

4. If you're an artist you can post/Tweet about how you try to capture beauty or reality in each painting you create.

5. If you're a shoe designer you can post/Tweet about how your shoes make your customers feel confident and gorgeous.

In each case the stakes are about more important things than the world is about to end, they are about our family, our business, our urge to create, and the importance of feeling confident.

Supercharging social media with storytelling techniques: Characterization

Another storytelling technique you can use to build social media engagement is characterization.

Characterization builds empathy between the reader and your post or feed/series of posts. But how do you do that?

Characterization is built by revealing personal details. It's in the advice to "be personal", but we can expand on that idea to give real depth to a personal or business brand. You can give your brand a character. You can reveal its struggles, its growth pains, its strengths.

The keys to fast characterization are markers:

Where are you based, how old are you, who are your members, what do you do, how do you enjoy life, what do you value, what do you wear?

These are just seven markers of a character. Think about how you can use yours to give your posts character and supercharge engagement with your followers.

Don't forget to follow this blog on the right. There are a lot more posts coming like this.

The Social Media Puzzle: Piece #2 How can you use social media to build customer loyalty?

 Here are five ways you can use social media to build customer loyalty:

1. Improve your product or service by listening to negative sentiment or suggestions posted on all relevant social media channels. People who say negative things or post about you will mostly have something valid to say. Why not listen to them, examine their issue, and fix them as soon as possible? A responsive firm fixes things. Most customers are aware that some things take time to fix too. As long as they know something is genuinely being done many people will accept the situation until then.
2. Ask people to recommend or retweet or re post something from you. People talk about "net promoter scores" as a key metric for understanding customer loyalty, but the percentage who are willing to take action to recommend or retweet should be a more reliable figure, as it’s not about stating your intentions, it’s about actions. You may say you will promote a service, but not actually do it. I suggest actions speak louder than words.
3. Offer updates & special offers to people who sign up to receive posts or Tweets. By making people feel part of a community in some way you will increase engagement and loyalty. Highly engaged customers become advocates too. A high percentage of them will recommend you to others. Your Facebook page can provide special offers and your Twitter & Pinterest feed can too. You can also make these offers and updates local by getting each of your branches or divisions to take part in this campaign, so that customers are building relationships with the nearest branch.
4. You can track if customers achieve their objectives using your product or service using social media. You can do this buy asking them direct questions, via surveys, and by monitoring any posts they create on the subject. This is being proactively interested in how your customers get on with your service. You may only be able to do this with a select group of customers, but the lessons learned should be applicable to all similar customers. Achieving objectives is a critical issue to remaining loyal and placing the maximum amount of business with you. If you are afraid to ask hard questions then your business will eventually have big problems.
5. Communicate the benefits of your product or service, not the technical features. This is an old adage salespeople use. Sell the sizzle not the stake. It’s true for social media too. Don’t focus on how to get button A to perform service B. Tell people how service B will benefit them. Then tell them how to get it to work.

My guide to social media is available from Amazon. Enjoy!

The Social Media Puzzle: Piece #3 Can you apply the Socratic method to social media?

The goal of this blog is to stimulate thinking about social media. I believe the Socratic method is an interesting tool for communication. It must therefore have applications in social media.

Here's my thoughts about using the Socratic method in social media:

1. Take a stance of skeptical ignorance. Enquire about others views on a subject.

2. Be conversational, but keep probing assumptions. 

3. Require definition of terms. This is where conversations often go wrong. Ask what people mean by X.

4. Use experience. Refer to your own experiences.

5. Draw implications & consequences. Talk about what will happen if X occurs.

Socrates was a classical Greek philosopher who proposed asking questions to test people's assumptions as a way to debate the truth of an assumption and to stimulate thought. 

Getting someone to see the problems with their assumptions was one of it's goals. It is one of the methods used in education to get engagement from reluctant learners and to test critical thinking skills.


For detailed info on Socratic method, as used in education and philosophy see here.

My guide to social media is available on Amazon. Enjoy!

How to Learn Digital Marketing Online

I have been appointed Head of the College of Digital Marketing. Here's a short animation of our mission.

If you want to attend any of these courses - in person or online - and learn how to market yourself or your organisation with this software click here.

The Social Media Puzzle: Piece #1 What are your goals?

Social media can be viewed as a series of puzzles.

When you first start in social media it seems that everyone knows what you don't. The mysteries of social media are revealed slowly as you browse and experiment and learn. This series of posts will explore some important pieces of the social media puzzle, of relevance whether you're new to social media or an old hand.

The 1st puzzle I'd like to explore is, what are your goals for social media? The reason this comes 1st, for me, is because how you answer this will affect every social media action that you take.

If your goal is simply to increase sales of your paintings or widgets or nuclear reactors then there will be a series of steps you need to take to build relationships with people who might be interested in what you are selling.

This will however be rather a restrictive use of social media. It would be like installing a telephone in your offices and only using it for sales calls.

Every aspect of your business can be impacted positively by social media, if you let it. Human Resources, purchasing, accounts, shareholder relationships, PR, marketing, sales, service and R&D can all use social media tools to connect with people, listen and communicate.

You can use social media as a creative tool too, to allow you to express whatever you want; your love of fly fishing or photography or ball room dancing. And you can use social media to build relationships widely.

So when you are thinking about goals for social media, think about the other sides of this puzzle piece, think about the hidden layers that social media can bring.

This is the 1st in a new series of posts. In the series I will explore various hidden and puzzling aspects of social media.

Your thoughts, comments and reactions will be gratefully received.

To support this site - over 100 free posts so far on social media for you to explore - please buy one of my novels, The Istanbul Puzzle or The Jerusalem Puzzle or my guide to social media. And enjoy!