Tag: social media

Engage on Social Media

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Social Media Sites:

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Google+

Social Media Sites for Book Lovers:

Social Media Sites Have Become Mainstream in People’s Lives:

  • Surveys reveal that 78% of the U.S. population has a social network profile.
  • Using social media to connect with consumers is now an essential part of any good marketing
    campaign.
  • In fact, 91% of retail brands use two or more social media channels to connect with consumers.

Social Media Site Content is Bite-sized.

  • People are using micro-moments to check their social media feeds.
  • Facebook says that readers spend only 1.7 seconds on a Facebook post when using a mobile device to access the site.

Next, we will look at using video and audio to engage an audience.

Photo Source: Pixaby

Exciting and Sad

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Bewildering StoriesI live in the Dallas Fort Worth metropolitan area of north Texas. The area includes 12 counties, over 9,000 square miles (larger than the states of Rhode Island and Connecticut combined), with just fewer than 7,000,000 million people, it is the fourth largest metro area in the USA. Only the New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago metro areas are larger. It’s big!

The blast furnace has returned to north Texas. After a week of overnight lows in the lower 60s I awoke to 77 degrees at 5 AM. Ugh, that is hot. Heat is on the schedule the rest if the month. It is August, so we should have highs around 100 and low temperatures around 80.

The last week has been exciting and sad. Let us look at the sad first. Another of my high school classmates passed away. Her name was Deborah. She went in for routine surgery on August 13. There were complications. She died on August 15. She was a sweetie. She loved her children and grandchildren. Her funeral was Monday August 19.

On Sunday evening I found out my friend Christy (Judy) had passed away from pneumonia. I had only known her eight years. I met her through Yahoo 360 and then became friends through Multiply. She was only a couple of years older than me. When I worked in Los Angeles last summer she was a great help. She told me which places to see, visit (like the bookstores), and I even made my way out to Simi Valley.

The exciting is I had a short story come out this week in Bewildering Stories. While it has been over thirty years since I had my first writing sale, I still get excited seeing my by-line and reading my articles and stories. You can check it out by clicking HERE.

Your Online Presence: You as a Brand

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Social MediaRecently I reread an article by Tom Peter that appeared in Fast Company magazine in 2007. The article’s title is “The Brand Called You”. You remember Tom Peters don’t you? He wrote the big business books of the 1980s and early 1990s. Books like “In Search of Excellence” (co-written with Robert H. Waterman, Jr.), “A Passion for Excellence”, “Thriving on Chaos”, and “Liberation Management”.

His article had me reflecting back more than a decade to online marketing guru Seth Godin and his associates at Fast Company magazine. They are the first persons who floated the notion of “the brand of you.” The real premise of “the brand of you” was a theory that to get ahead in the Internet era we should look at ourselves as “a brand.” And as “a brand” we need to market ourselves in a way that shows the image we want others to see. In today’s connected age with Internet social networking like Facebook, WordPress, Blogspot, Multiply, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and others you should pay attention to what Godin was sharing.

Hopefully you realize your online identity is the first thing prospective employers see. Failure on your part to build your brand, massage the image you are crafting, and keep up your brand focus can do harm to our “brands” and lose us potential jobs or contracts.

For “the brand of you” you should behave consistently. What I mean here is everything from your voice mail message to your blog to your tweets must have a consistent tone. You can’t be wild and crazy in one place and dead serious in another. If you are doing a blog on political commentary from a liberal point of view you should stay on task. If you are doing a weblog on writing and publishing it should be limited to those themes. If you are doing a blog on military history books reviews you should not have commentary on your life or a review of your favorite restaurant show up in the blog. You get the idea.

Another problem is not keeping your blog or website current. It you commit to a blog, you need to have regular input and updates. The opposite is also true. Do not over do it. While regular entries are critical, too frequent entries cries out that you are spending too much time blogging.

Remember before you promote yourself as a brand online you need to answer three questions. In the immortal words of the rock band The Who has yourself, “who are you?” Next think about and answer the question “what is it you want?” The third question to answer is “what it is you have to sell?” Is it goods (a product) or services? Go through that exercise first.

Almost all major companies include an online search for your name as part of their hiring and screening process. Many companies also do online searches for your name when you are being considered for a promotion. Be careful who you allow to be your online friend. Some businesses have employees send friend requests where they can get access to you personal things like blogs and pictures. You think you are safe because you have limited access to contacts, but then you let a potential employer have access without even realizing what you have allowed. The “Seattle Post Intelligencer” ran an article warning about companies peeking into Facebook to screen potential employees way back in 2006. You can read it by clicking HERE.

Finally, I suggest you do a simple Google search of yourself and see what you find. Why not spend a few hours to clean up and enhance your online presence?