Phony Followers and Limp Likes

Imagine that you decide to have a party at your home and you invite 1000 people you have never met, who may or may not speak the same language as you do, and who will never have anything to do with you again once they have stopped by at your house. Oh yes, here's the kicker – you pay to have them come to your house.

Sounds crazy doesn't it? Why would anyone do such a thing unless all they wanted to say was, “I hosted a party and a thousand people showed up!”

Sadly, there are companies who take advantage of people's ignorance of how Social Media / Digital Advertising works, and sell them a bill of goods claiming to be optimizing their product or service for search engines by selling “likes” or “follows” on every Social Media Application imaginable. In fact, all they are selling is a set of “Emperor's Clothes” to businesses naive enough to buy into their illusion. What the algorithms that drive search engines get “tickled” by, more than a 1000 Facebook likes or Twitter followers, is the interaction or engagement of users with these sites.

Of course, if all you're setting out to do by having a Facebook page for your business is to appear to have thousands of people who “like” you, the illusion is right there for you to buy. But if that's how your business is going to use Social Media, you may as well get a guy to walk around with a sandwich board advertising your rates. You will likely get a better return on investment!

Phony “followers” and limp “likes” will not interact with your posts, tweets, photos, or blogs. They are robotic, one-time, clicks. Single, imaginary visitors to your feed, that will never come back again. The worst of it is, if you are actually analyzing the stats generated by tools like Facebook's great new page insights, or Google Analytics – the data generated by fake followers will be misleading and useless. “Garbage In – Garbage Out”.

There are much better ways to enhance your visibility on Social Media. If you really want to spend a few bucks, tools like Google +AdSense or Facebook's adverts for business pages, can make you much more findable to the people that really count – your prospective clients! If you want to enhance your website for search engines, get someone who knows what they're doing to imbed code and plan your strategy for back-links.

But if you're hell-bent on wasting your money, it's your party and you will eventually cry (even if you don't want to!) by paying for false friends and phony followers.

For a confidential consultation and to find out how your business can best harness the power of Social Media, contact us at www.roambusiness.com.

Labor Day for Social Media Marketers

This blog spot is written exclusively for those in the business of Social Media Marketing. Whether you call your self an Internet Advertising Specialist, Social Media Marketer, Interactive Media Professional, Digital Marketing Expert, or however you define yourself in the online world, as Bud says : “This one's for you!”

As you find yourself explaining landing pages, back-links, analytic software, or maybe just the difference between RAM and ROM to a prospective client, take a deep breath. On this Labor Day Weekend, it's a good time to reflect on what you may have recommended to some of your clients. UNPLUG the hardware and take a break!

Don't buy into the myth of being able to do it all. Software doesn't sleep, but you have to. Take some time to connect with friends, meditate, exercise, or whatever gets you away from the office (virtual or real) and cut yourself some slack.

Connecting with the real world gives us all a chance to re-evaluate what's really important in our lives. Real time, face-to-face human contact is essential to maintaining perspective. There's something exquisite to your “reach” being limited to only one, or a few real people in a room with you, and the idea that organic growth is only important to agriculture. It's nice to stop and realize that “going viral” is only critical to immunologists.

When you settle back into your workspace and hone your skills, who knows? Maybe you'll even have something to blog about! Happy Labor Day!

www.roambusiness.com

Social Media - Home on the Range!

The myriad channels of Social Media allow businesses the opportunity to make more consumers aware of Brand Identity than at any other time in history. Brand awareness is important but it is Brand Management, the art of creating and maintaining the Brand, that can make a Brand one of the most valuable advertising elements a business can own.

Unlike the Good 'Ol Boys putting their mark on the herd in the image to the left, the task of developing and maintaining the image of a product or service and associating it with the image or experience that makes it “special” or “unique” are not as simple as a quick round-up and a hot iron!

A business must decide on a target audience for the product or service it offers, understand the expectations of that audience though market intelligence and orient its image towards those qualities.

Social Media allows for constant feedback and ongoing improvement in reaction to the expectations of the marketplace. Using that intelligence to better maintain a Brand and improve its recognition can mean the success or failure of a product or service offered.

Many companies have an “advertising department” and implement a policy of brand orientation in their organizational image. Some even use the tools available to gather and analyze the vast amounts of data that can be collected from monitoring Social Media campaigns. For the small to medium-sized business, however, the cost and time involved in assembling the teams of personnel and software to carry out these tasks are too challenging and the result is a website with a half-baked presence on Facebook or Twitter in the hope that people may be able to “find” them.

Happily, there is a solution allowing small and medium sized business to take full advantage of Social Media's broad range of marketing and advertising opportunities. There are a number of reputable firms specializing in Digital Marketing and Online Advertising and that are experienced enough to use the tools of analysis to monitor and optimize your campaigns and exposure. Roam Business is one such firm. We can offer you the time and attention necessary to understand the image your business wants to convey. We can effectively reach your target market and provide the real-time interaction that Social Media necessitates. Visit our website at www.roambusiness.com and contact us for a confidential assessment of your Social Media Brand Management.    

R.N.

Web Analytics : Vulcan Right?

     Analytics are amazing. The results of people viewing one image can be broken down into a demographic, “click through” ratio that would knock the socks off Mr. Spock!

      That being said, a worthwhile Social Media campaign, as with any successful process, must begin with a plan. That plan must begin with certain objectives in mind: What is a business seeking to discover or achieve with a social media campaign. Looking for a wider audience for a product or service? Trying to improve or replace the current customer service system? Establish a new image (brand) with the next generation of consumers or reinforce an established image with clientele through new channels?

    

      It is only when a business has ascertained what it is seeking to gain from social media exposure, that the task of collating data to measure the success or failure of these goals can begin. Utilizing the fallout of information that returns from the explosion of Social Media exposure is a daunting task. The tools for measuring (and they are numerous and bewildering) are only as good as the people using them. As with surgeons' scalpels, they can be used to heal or misused to harm.

      

     I read a job posting for the position of “Social Media Manager” the other day. The alphabet soup of prerequisite diagnostic knowledge was enough to make anyone's head spin. What I didn't see in the job requirements was the ability to translate empirical data into what could be clearly understood by people who had a marketing plan in mind, but weren't interested in SEO, SEM, SERP, PPC, CPC or any of the other acronyms which seem to appear almost daily, and are only understood by Social Media Marketers and Vulcans!

      If you are interested in laying out a plan for using Social Media to enhance your marketing strategy, contact us at www.roambusiness.com We can meet to discuss how we can put your plan into action and measure the results in plain language.

R.N.

The Elusive ROI : The Answer is Blowin' in the Wind!

      When it comes to a business using Social Media to market products and services, the one, seemingly elusive, factor is ROI (Return On Investment). Sure, there are all kind of metrics and performance indicators. There are analytics tools that will measure buzz, virality, re-tweets, shares, comments, and all sorts of data that can be interpreted in any number of ways. But the bottom line, the real question at the end of fiscal period, is: “Does the time and money spent on Social Media ad campaigns increase net income?”

      Every good Social Media Marketer is really an old fashioned salesperson at heart, and every salesperson likes to have a presentation to make a point. Pie charts, power point presentations, and all sorts of trendy buzz-words can make an impression on the uninitiated, but serious business owners want to see the return in black ink, on an income statement.

     Fortunately, the answer to the question of ROI in terms of Social Media marketing is simple. A professionally managed campaign, taking into consideration the realistic expectations of the Business Owner will always show a positive return on investment. Think of it in terms of the wind. Wind is in a constant flux, it can be overpowering, it can be soothing, it can be freezing. Wind-power can be harnessed to power a machine. Nature uses it for seed dispersal, and that is how a well managed Social Media campaign can sow the seeds for ROI. As with Social Media campaigns, wind can also be measured in many different ways but the net effect of dispersing seeds and propagating growth can only been seen once the fruit is born.

     If you are interested in leaning what difference a professionally managed Social Media campaign can mean for your business, visit our website at www.roambusiness.com and contact us. We promise there will be no “long-winded” explanations, just results!

R.N.

Sunshine on a Cloudy Day

 It used to be that when someone said, “Get your head out of the clouds!” they were telling you to stop dreaming and be realistic. Today, forward thinking business owners are using the “cloud” to organize, share and generally manage links, files, folders, presentations, email alerts and any other data that was previously shared through an “in house” file transfer protocol. In an increasingly mobile business world with all sorts of competing technologies being used simultaneously, using a cloud based platform to exchange and manage information is not only sensible, it's the wave of things to come.

You may think, “This is fine for huge companies with employees scattered all over the map, but what does this mean for a small to medium sized business?” The truth is that every business reaches a point where larger storage devices must be purchased in order to store and keep track of information. More salespeople, more decision makers and more data means hiring more IT people just to keep the hardware working properly. The need for a system that allows an administered, secure, and versatile platform for information exchange within a company becomes obvious. Companies such as Box.com and Dropbox provide these cloud based services and more and more businesses are realizing the savings and accessibility advantage of online, cloud based information management.

If you are interested in learning more about how your business can “get into the cloud” and start saving time and money, visit our website at www.roambusiness.com and contact us.

R.N.

Super Bowls of Cookies!

A small business owner I met recently told me he didn't think he needed to use social media to attract new clients because he relied on "word of mouth" to let people know he did good work.  After stopping to grab my jaw before it hit the floor, I asked him if he knew what social media was.  "Yeah sure, Facebook, Twitter and that kind of thing,"  came the reply

I don't want to write a term paper about why some "small businesses" will always remain "small" but it should be clear to anyone following this blog that we believe any business that does not realize the potential of social media will never realize its potential business.  Social Media in 2013 is "word of mouth"!  The beauty of these media is that a business can now take part in the conversation and, through its interaction with existing clients, stimulate conversation with potential clients.

For my money, the biggest play in last weekend's Superbowl came when the lights went out.  While it's true that Oreo spent a lot of time leading up to the game developing a Twitter following, when the power failure caused a temporary partial-blackout in the stadium, seven little words, "You can still dunk in the dark", went viral and got Oreo the kind of attention that can't be purchased. That wasn't a stroke of pure luck.  Oreo had a professional ad agency handling the Twitter account.  That agency clearly demonstrated the two aspects of social media use that make it vital.  1) The message was immediately relevant. 2) It sparked the use of the brand name and lit a fire.

While your objective may not be to have your ad in the Superbowl, there is no reason why you can't use social media to make you the M.V.P. in your market. Visit our website at www.roambusiness.com and ask us how we can help get you there.

R.N.