Taking advantage of Black Friday/Cyber Monday

I'm rarely taken in by these deals, as I keep hearing 'its only a bargain if you needed it'.  So that's a mantra that works well for Michael.

But .... I did take advantage of some Black Friday/Cyber Monday (or more accuratley the weeks before and after that weekend;) ) offers.  I'm always, always, looking to 'sharpen the axe' for new books, material, trainings.  And this last week has been excellent for 'sampling' some good and not so good online content.

Many of the people whose work I admire have had 'tripwire' deals where you can sample there content, courses, metarial etc, for a month, for a drastically reduced fee - usualy $1.

Brilliant.  Now, I know I will run the gauntlet of their Infusion Soft, or <insert as apllicable>,  follow up emails, but that's 'mostly' cool as I say, I like their work so why not truly follow them?  And, there's always the options to unsubscribe / divert to spam if they start taking advantage of my audience.

I am not advocating dive in with a view to never purchasing!!  In fact I'll issue a health warning, if you like someones work, you'll probably like their on line content (they know this hence the trip wire 'try before you buy' deals). Having said that I have experienced some woeful material. Oh, and before engaging, bear in mind the regular fee and your budget, you may fall in love with someone's style, content, methods etc then find you need to raise $3000 to complete the course.

So, get a wiggle on, go check out those mentors, thought leaders and people whose work you admire, see if they have a low cost (sometimes FREE) 30 day offer and try before you buy.   Some people have deals that are always available, but Black Friday / Cyber Monday seems to focus many more on the opportunity to gather more followers.

Mick

Lets connect - 
I am on LinkedIn here - www.linkedin.com/in/mickholloway

I am on Facbook here - www.facebook.com/mick.holloway

I am on Twitter - @mick_holloway

www.24-7.so

Fancy a different One to One Strategy?

                                           
                                                Fancy a different approach to your One to One's?

Its no secret (or shouldn't be if my marketing strategy is working :D ) that I am an advocate of Social Media.  Social Networking, Digital Marketing, the whole 'in bound', permission based marketing model.  While I have lectured, presented and trained thousands of people on how to add Social Networking to your marketing mix...  I am also big on 'get it off the screen', the whole people buy from people mantra.

If you ever find yourself attending one of my meetings, the 2nd slide you see will ask .. "Have you had a one to one ?".  I aim to have two a week, trying to lead by example, they never a waste of time because I choose carefully, do my due diligence before hand, so I am sure there's most likely going to be a real expectation of an ROI of the hour we spend together.

I have blogged about having one to one's before - you will find that article HERE

                                                                         Have One to One's


With this blog, for those that are new to networking - I would like to document and share a one to one strategy that I have used recently to spectacular effect...

If its the first time you have met - spend only 10 minutes each talking about you, your business, what motivates you and what type of contacts you are currently looking to meet - be sure to share your 'WHY'...  If its not the first time you have met, and you know each other's business well - spend 5 minutes each updating on what's new...  Remember - you should have both researched each other before the meeting, and be familiar with their business (good old LinkedIn, Facebook and Google).

And that's it with the 'let me tell you in ever more detail how great my business is' time.  Because this is where the meeting could slide into 'sales pitch' territory, this one to one is too precious, your time is too precious, to waste on a futile sales pitch.

Be sure that you go first, and lets reverse the dynamic, no more talking in terms of 'me', 'I', 'we', you now stop talking about your business and focus on the other person and their business. If you have chosen your one to one partner well, (and you are getting on as people!  As if you don't like each other that's a bit of a show stopper), this focus on THEM will be make them feel great, and feel good towards you, which is handy as next up its their turn to think how they can help you. Try it, it works.

Try a Different Engagement Strategy For Your Next One to One Click To Tweet 

Take turns, first YOU simply spend half the time working out how YOU can help the other person. Really, genuinely work at this, try to see how many ways you may be able to help. Then, all grateful and inspired - its their turn to spend half the time working out how they can help you.

And by 'help' I don't mean whether you can use/buy their products/services yourself (that's a short term bonus if you can).  I mean - think -

• Who do you know that might be interested in them, their products or services?  
• How could you, your business or anyone in your network help them grow their business?  
• Could you work together, maybe on joint ventures?
• Who do you know that might be able to work with them on a joint venture?
  ...etc

Its clearly far more strategic than hoping to get lucky and meet someone that could end up buying from you, far more productive and respectful than pitching or being pitched.  And a fabulous way to start or maintain a mutually beneficial relationship.

                                                      Try a new approach to one to one's

OK - I sense the need for some anecdotal evidence - which of course I have plenty and happy to share them with you... I know !  Lets have a one to one, face to face if you are in the South East UK, otherwise no excuses we can do this on line as I also have :-
     Skype                       michael.holloway1
     Google Hangout      mickholloway@gmail.com

Remind me to tell you the one about the multi £Bn UK PLC, or the Driving School, the Photographer, and I must share with you the opportunities that came from a one to one with a s/w house discussing ways to help them launch a radical highly disruptive product - that resulted in us having to re-think our whole business model...

Hope to talk - Soon.

Mick

Lets connect -
I am on LinkedIn here -  https://uk.linkedin.com/in/mickholloway
I am on Facebook here - https://www.facebook.com/mick.holloway
I am on Twitter here -    @mick_holloway

www.24-7.so

Are Facebook bullying us by restricting our post reach?

You think Facebook are bullying us by restricting our post reach?

When presenting on the subject of Facebook for business, I am often asked about Facebook's strategy for throttling back the number of people that will see your post, the reach, its now down to a few % of your followers.

Many think this is Facebook bullying us into paying for adverts or to boost our posts.  While I agree that it does seem like facebook have moved the goal posts and are then monetizing their position - particularly when many have been investing a lot of time, effort and money in growing their followers. 

But, apologies to those that like too bash Facebook, this isn't what is going on here - Facebook are merely giving 'their' customers what they want, a good experience.  Which is a timeline of content they are interested in.  And they are right, Social Media is, and should be, all about focused, interesting, organic content and an engaged audience.

I admit to being disappointed that Facebook seem so ready to compromise this insightful strategy - in that you can pay for an advert or boost the reach of your Post...  

The thing is, this is how Social Media is going (tribe led) and all the platforms and tools are at it - so don't think you can swerve this and bungee off to carlos-fandango-NET or google+.

If you want to read more here's a good article on how, more importantly WHY, Facebook are managing what posts people see. The Guardian http://bit.ly/1uQOSIE

Are Christmas Cards - Ghosts of Christmas Past ?

I read a recent head line suggesting Christmas Cards, your proper paper/card ones, are 'Greetings Cards' Ghosts of Christmas Past, and the email / landing page / PDF / animations etc are taking us all digital...

Interesting hypothesis.  Begs some other questions, do people under 30 send cards, or have they outsourced this to Facebook or compressed Christmas greetings into 140 characters and a bunch of followers?

Having a technical bias I got to thinking where's this going?  Indeed, what would the 'Greetings Card' Ghosts of Christmas future look like?

Tooled up with me Galaxy tab, Google, mince pies and a neighbours home made 'Mulled Port', off I went.

As an aside - a quick word on this 'Mulled Port'. DON'T! I know, I know - it's not big and its not clever, and I should have know better, etc etc, but its Christmas my shields were down, and he was SO sure this batch wasn't toxic... what could I say.

Anyway - off I went.  Did you know 20% of all searches on Google are unique!  You think that's impressive... quite soon ALL of mine were unique, typo's, fat thumb syndrome and Mulled Port Chuckles really nail it to Google.

By the way, is Port a hallucinogen?  Because it wasn't long before I was seeing 'Greetings Card' Ghosts of  Christmas Future everywhere.  But, remember, I am a techy, and I tell you, I have seen the future!!

Its .... '3D' / Hollogram cards, that's where its at, trust Michael.

Don't believe me?  Well - check this bad boy out I brought this classic Santa comedy routine  back from the future, if you're reading this blog on old an '2D' medium, trust me this is HILARIOUS, and remember you saw it here first !

I got quite carried away with all this - I was going all in with this one, even had a brand name all ready to go.   iHollo.way    How cool is that !  Has a certain subliminal message an inevitably successful future acquisition perhaps?

Anyway - like many a good idea, turns out I wasn't first to pick this one up.  Aha - you thought this was rambling nonsense.  iHollo and Future communications with 3D / Hologram technology, well - seems I have been beaten to it I am afraid.

Don't believe me? Well I wonder who else had the idea.... go on, Google 'iHollo.way' or Click HERE

Ho hum, back to the day job ... want help with these Twitter Christmas Greetings ?  :D


Here's wishing you a merry Christmas and I hope you have a fabulous time and if you like Port, maybe get to drink some of what I have been drinking ;)

Mick

Me - a 'Fearless' Keynote Speaker ! How did that happen ?

"Unaccustomed as I am ..."

This time last week I was looking forward to giving my first presentation as a Keynote speaker.  I was nice and early, all set up … even the projector linked to the PC (phew) and I was catching up on some emails and Social Media while I waited for the audience to gather …

An Oasis of calm.

That I was ‘looking forward’ to the presentation, ‘genuinely’ looking forward to addressing a room full of people, all strangers of unknown mixed abilities, some who would be cynical – hostile even – regarding my message, that I was looking forward to this is a staggering indicator of the journey I have been on over the last couple of years.

I have always been a techy, and my presentation - on how to make the most out of that LinkedIn account you opened but have done nothing much with – is a subject I know well, and my technical knowledge allows me to talk on Technical, Social Media, WEB, Cloud or IT matters very wide of the core subject being discussed.   And in the Engineering and Technical sales/marketing phases of my career I was at ease presenting complex technical matters to both technical and non technical audiences.

What was so different here then? I guess you can see it coming … it was the public speaking, not so long ago I was FIRMLY in the “Fear Public Speaking more than Death” camp.

Driving to the venue I confess to wondering why I was so calm and whether I would be OK when the time came.  But those thoughts didn’t take hold, I didn’t allow them too – some simple NLP stuff I picked up on this journey.

It dawned on me that personal development comes in many guises, reading, mentoring, coaching and training for sure, but also in my case it was the ‘doing’ that has helped.  While this was my first key note speech, over recent years I had presented many tutorials and training courses on Social Media and Business Development – and I guess all that practice gave me confidence.

So – my blog message – to all those I have trained, mentored or coached – the most important thing and the new closing message for all my training… “Now go do it”.

Well – Whatever next ?  As I find myself saying more and more…

24-7’s philosophy on Social Media Training..

24-7 Business Networking help Small Businesses and SME's... create more LEADS, and make more SALES, using SOCIAL MEDIA!  We do this through high quality training showing you how to use Social Media and how to link Social Media into your marketing strategy, you grow your business in a focused way. 

This training is delivered as ‘byte’ sized tutorials in our Fortnightly Meetings and through a growing portfolio of Training Courses.

When it comes to Social Media Training, for the Cautious or the Capable, our constantly updated tutorials and training courses take you beyond your self taught knowledge, and shield you from the existing, changing and emerging technologies. 

We keep it SIMPLE, we keep it PRAGMATIC we show you HOW, and we HELP you to make the most of Social Media, quickly taking you from Cautious to Capable.

Our training is structured around our Social Media - Success Circle…

We have a strong and growing portfolio of Tutorials and Training Courses covering each of the five elements in the Success Circle.

Our Social Media Phylosophy can be explained using our 'Success Circle' ...

24-7 Success Circle

At the heart, before anything else (inclulding developing your business goals and strategies), you need to have a complete understanding of your Brand.  If you need help with this - give Mick a call, or seek out a good business mentor / coach.  You could also try reading a highly recommend book - Simon Sinek's "Start With Why".

Once you understand your brand, then you can work on your goals and the business strategies that you are going to deploy to achieve those goals.  NOW 24-7 can start working with you and putting together a Social Media Strategy that supports your Business Stratagies in achieving your Business Goals.  There has to be a clear tangible link between what you do in your Social Media and achieving your Business Goals.

Why do it? What do I want?  We help you consider the VALUE of what you are looking to achieve in your Social Media and how that will support your wider Business Goals.  Are you goals to get:

•          Leads

•          Sales

•          Known 

•          Web traffic

•          Increased profile

And we help you determine how much time, or resources, you can devote to achieving this.

Who do I need to connect to?  Having worked What you want from your Social Media te very strategic question 'Who do I Connect with?" should be fairly easy to answer.  Visualising your ideal client, developing the persona of the people that will help you achieve your business goals should be straight forward IF you have a clear understanding of your brand.  If you are struggling with "Who do I need to connect to?"  its very likely you haven't fully defined and understood your brand.

At 24-7 we help you consider…

•          What type of people are best positioned to help with your objective?

•          Which Social Media platforms are they on?

•          How can you connect to them?

•          Work out what they are interested in?

•          Work out what can you do for them?

Where do I find them?  Now you understand 'who' you need to be reaching out to, attracting, engaging and networking with you can consider where these poeple will be - online.  Which platforms is the obvious starting point.  But within the platforms, where do they go?  Do they read news, attend to their time line or maybe hang out in groups, in whihc case ... which groups?

•          Which platforms are they likely to be on?
•          What are they interested in?

•          Search your existing connections

•          Which Groups, Pages, forums etc

What do I say to them?  As your networks grow what you say becomes increasingly important, we help you consider …

•          What your network are interested in?

•          What your personal brand should be?

•          Where you can find interesting material for your network?    (Curation)

•          How you can easily share that material with them?

•          How you can write interesting material for them?      (Content)

How do I organise them?  Now you are growing your Networks in a targeted and focused  way, we help you consider …

•          How to manage your network using LinkedIn Groups, Twitter Lists,
      Google+ Communities /Circles to manage your network.

•          Automation tools to help you engage with your networks

•          Tools to find appropriate material to share with

•          How you can manage and listen to all that NOISE

How do I know it’s working?  With your social media campaign under way – like all strategies - you need to measure to ensure how things are going, we help you consider …

•            What was the objective?

•            How can you measure your Social Media against your objectives?

•                Followers and connections

•                Interactions

•                The results of it all?

•            How do you adjust what you are doing to improve it?

And at the heart of the circle sits your Brand and Business Strategy - everything you do Social Media wise must be consistent with achieving the Business goals and objectives.

We are always looking to improve 24-7's support for Small Businesses and SME's, we have Social Media Training on hand with a growing syllabus of courses.  But what other training do you think Small Businesses and SME's could do with to improve their businesses and achieve their strategic goals and objectives?

Does Santa use Social Media?

Does Santa use Social Media?

Looking at the evidence I would say so…  Social Media helps with -

Networking – Everyone knows Santa, what he does and when he does it.  How he does it is the closely guarded secret…

Brand Awareness – Santa is one of the most successful globally recognized brands.  And he doesn’t advertise, no flyers, no call centre’s, no TV – and how his clients flock to him!  Has to be his Social Media, google ‘santa’ and you get over 2Bn results… 

In Bound Marketing - Given one of the goals and major benefits of Social Media is 'In Bound' marketing.  Where clients and prospective clients come to you.  Santa's historically been THE master of inbound marketing...   Because of Santa’s strong Brand Awareness?

Improved Communications - With millions of children, and some 39 year olds, regularly writing to him, despite sending the letters via the chimney, Santa gets every single letter.  But now Santa’s simplified it all and you can email Santa, Directly Message Santa on Twitter and even post on his Facebook wall.

So how would Santa use Social Media

• List’s.  With Social Media Santa research’s his market.  Learning people’s desires and what they have been up to.  So he can check – “Who has been Naughty and Who has been Nice”, and its digital so EASY to check twice.
• Follow trends.  Santa knows whether he’s getting  mince pies or stolen cake (cookies and milk are so last year).
• Recruitment.  Santa needs more Elves and Toy Makers, there are 176 vacancies for ‘Santa’s Helpers’ on LinkedIn…
• Following trends he knows peoples wants and needs.  So Santa’s good at logistics, from Sourcing gifts online to delivering millions of presents World Wide in one night, and we can track his route – check out the excellent Santa tracker at http://www.noradsanta.org/

Then he brings it all together on his website http://www.northpole.com/

HAPPY CHRISTMAS

Mick

Finding Time to be Social

Finding Time to be Social

We’ve covered a lot ground in the last 9 articles, and the most common question I get asked is “how do you find time for all these platforms, followers, blogs, updates “ etc etc.  This month we look at 4 tools for Managing your Social Media.   LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+…  logging in to so many accounts can be daunting and time consuming.  Let me introduce Social Media aggregation and dashboards, apps to help you manage your Social Media, BufferApp and Hootsuite.

BUFFERAPP.COM – If you are relatively new to social media, bufferapp is a nice, easy to understand, easy to use introduction to managing your social media.  Buffer users a straightforward, intuitive interface to schedule tweets, and gives some simple analytical data.

SOCIALOOMPH.COM  - A cloud based twitter (and facebook / blog if you subscribe) management tool.  Social oomph will also help you schedule tweets, but it has some clever extra functions like helping you vet new followers, spot keywords people use to find you, analaytics and you can set up ‘auto responders’ to automate thank you’s / replies  when someone follows you etc.

TWEETDECK.COM – is a social media dashboard for twitter and facebook, very useful for quick overview and monitoring of multiple accounts, or running continual searches.  Easier to use than Social Oomph, but with fewer features, and FREE.

HOOTSUITE.COM  - If you are more experienced with Social Media, you should look at Hootsuite.  A social media dashboard that helps you monitor, post and explore ALL of your social media activity and only needing to login to one place.  Comprehensive connectivity with just about every social media resource you could wish for, and custom analytics that can tell you how things are going.  A basic hootsuite account is FREE.

Introduction to Pinterest

In my 8th blog in a series introducing Social Media I would like to introduce you to Pinterest.  

      

Pinterest allows you to share pictures or videos, like an on line picture board, or “pinboard”.  These may be your own pictures and videos or they may be pictures and videos you have found and wish to easily and quickly share with others, like visual bookmarking.   

Social Media is about getting your messages found by others.  So when a platform like www.pinterest.com  arrives making it easy to publish and share your visual content, positively encouraging others to share your content – and when this platform enjoys a meteoric rise in popularity – its time we had a looksee.

Lets deal with the terminology.  An image or video added to Pinterest is called a ‘Pin’.  Pins are added to a ‘PinBoard’, which is a collection of Pins with a common theme.  The act of sharing a Pin on a PinBoard is called ‘Pinning’.  If you like someone else’s pin and decide to repost it, this is a “Re-Pin”.  And finally, there’s the “Pin It Button” – this is a button placed on a website making it easy to share content onto Pinterest from the website – Pins added via the Pin It Button carry back links to the originating web site, which is good, very good. 

 

Take Social Media statistics with a pinch of salt, suffice to say all the charts and infograms are showing Pinterest has established itself in the top Social Networking sites.   Pinterest has the ability to take your message viral in hours, and Google is full of case studies - Googling “Pinterest  Success” and I received 25,400 results.

Finally - Pinterest is about to enjoy an explosion in popularity because until very recently you could only join Pinterest by invitation.   Now anyone can open a Pinterest account... so if you have visual content to share - now you have the means and ... its FREE.

YouTube for Business

Hello, and welcome to our Seventh Social Media Blog.  Today - we are getting all creative and going multimedia.  This time we look at YouTube for promoting your business.

YouTube is a video hosting web site that will host up to HD quality videos up to 15 minutes in length, longer if you validate your account – and all for FREE.  Once your video is uploaded to YouTube, you can easily share this content via your social media channels, attach video’s to your LinkedIn Profile, company pages etc.  And easily embed your video’s on your websites.  Moreover – viewers can easily share your video too.

Why host your videos on YouTube ?  Well....

1.  YouTube is the world's largest video sharing website (300 hours of video loaded every minute)

2.  YouTube is the world’s second largest  search engine.

3.  YouTube is owned by Google

4.  It’s FREE, and you get analytical data on views, demographics, sources etc

Why use Video for Business?  Using video allows you to engage with clients allowing them to get to know you and your business.  Using video turns a static website, or profile into a dynamic, multimedia presence.  Video makes a viewer use more of their senses making your message more memorable.  And right now it is unlikely your competitors will be using video – so you can grab competitive advantage.

If you’re Worried who would watch you video, here’s some tips

1.  Introduce yourself and your business

2.  Make your video informative, educational and engaging

3.  DO NOT simply sell

4.  Consider offering training or instruction / user guides

5.  Close with a call to action and don’t forget Links to your web site

And finally – there are SEO benefits from using YouTube.  You can add keyword ‘tags’ to your YouTube video, these tags are indexed by search engines, remember Google own YouTube, which greatly enhances the chances of your video being found, not forgetting to use those important links back to your web site.