Social Networking 101

I found this post online. It echos what so many small business owners are feeling at this moment in time:

Over the past couple of months I have been muddling my way through setting up a social media marketing “strategy” (both personally and corporately) here at SamePage. Currently, my strategy resembles the equivalent of a bunch of “digital post-it notes”:various bookmarks, URLs, links what-have-you scattered across my desk(top), browser, iPhone, etc. How do you scrape all this together into a coherent, useable, package? RSS, Twitter, tehnorati, ning, FB….a couple of times I have literally deactivated my FB account because I felt a responsibility to maintain it even though I found most of the content completely irrevelant.

IMO, there’s no one answer, or a single course of action that’s guaranteed to bring marketing Nirvana. What seems to apply best to small business marketers is outlined here:

1. Make your blog the centerpiece of your social networking strategy.

A “well connected” blog can feed content to other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, and do so automatically. Fresh content on your blog has the added advantage of improving ratings on search engines such as Google. Google loves fresh content, that is rich in relevant keywords. From a larger picture/strategic standpoint: the blog is the a natural place to generously share your expertise with the world and create a network of fans.

2. Tie your blog closely to your website and overall web presence.

The best thinking about the new web puts you in the middle of an online community. Websites built to function only as an online brochure likely won’t do much to generate buzz about your products and services.

3. Don’t start until you have something worth talking about.

No amount of clever online strategy will create buzz if your product or service itself is boring, commonplace or irrelevant to the world. As master marketer Seth Godin says, being remarkable is at the center of it all.

The Secret and Marketing Presence

A lot of folks treat marketing and advertising as a form of insurance, a sort of protection against the crisis day when the phone stops ringing and the nobody walks through the front door. In fact, that dreaded day came for many a business over the past few months; frequently their insurance policy failed to pay off.

Some wait until their showroom floor resembles a morgue before thinking about doing any marketing. They’re thinking: “Dear Lord, what will we do if this offer doesn’t pull in some business.”

Will your work be creative and innovative while a cloud of doom hovers over your head? If you’re advertising under duress, the universe responds in kind and brings you what you dread the most. It’s as if your customers can smell panic.

On the other hand, if you enjoy the marketing process, stay the course through thick and thin, proceed with positive long term expectations, keep a calm and quiet mind, and focus on remaining thankful for the myriad gifts we so often overlook, the universe will bring you more to be thankful about.

Here’s the math: Q=SM2. The quality of your work is geometrically proportional to your state of mind. It’s the Secret Formula for Success. Along these lines a quote from Eckhart Tolle:

When you are present in this moment, you break the continuity of your story, of past and future. Then true intelligence arises, and also love. The only way love can come into your life is not through form, but through that inner spaciousness that is Presence. Love has no form.