Social Media Marketing Takes Creativity and Three Dimensional Thinking

Bill Rice — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 20:33:29 +0000

Social media marketing is a good old fashioned off shoot of offline networking. However, we often forget those skills and tricks in our online social media strategies. Your goal should be to create remarkable, extraordinary, and memorable engagements that drives interest in you and your product or service.

Masterful Execution

I witnessed a masterful execution of social media strategy at BlogWorld 08. Coordinated by at least two of panelist on the Making Money Online with a Blog session, Shoemoney instantly increased his Twitter followers by 200+ and piled in the links to his site.

Social Media Setup

This aptly named panel on making money online, was packed with the heavy-hitters in the affiliate marketing space: John Chow, Brian Clark, Zac Johnson, Jim Kukral, Darren Rowse, Jeremy Schoemaker.

As the panel begins the social media campaign creative kicks in. Jim Kukral, the moderator, draws attention to his frustrated wait for the late panelist–Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney). Despite his frustration he launches the session.

Call to Action

Now, as the session proceeds, Jim seems to again become agitated at the empty panelist seat. He turns to the audience of 200+ and tells them to use Twitter and tweet, “@shoemoney you suck #bwe08.” Of course everyone obliges. Instantly 100s of “@shoemoney you suck #bwe08″ tweets light up Twitter clients and Twitter search feeds for #bwe08.

This simple call to action instantly reached thousands both at and monitoring the BlogWorld conference. Bingo! Hundreds of follows and links.

The Social Media Play

Come to find out…it was all a staged social media campaign:

Brilliance! John Chow is infamous for clever social media and audacious social media campaigns. Anyone remember the “John Chow is Full of Shit” viral video test? That broad search returns 45,500 results–not a bad link building strategy.

Social Media Takeaway

So, what is my point to clients? Obviously, I am not advocating that you upstage your next conference panel opportunity or produce viral videos about your bowel movements. However, I am strongly suggesting you follow the key elements of these social media scoundrels:

be creative
think 3D (online and offline)
be interesting
take a few carefree risks

Have you witnessed any clever social media campaigns?
—
Bill Rice is the founder of RICEinteractive. We help clients design, execute, and make money with content and social media. Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/billrice. I would love to help you succeed.

Personal Branding-Build Your Personal Brand in 5 Days

Bill Rice — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 14:04:57 +0000

The Internet is quickly becoming the de facto authoritative source of record. It is your resume, your reputation, your credibility, and your performance. If you are interested in future success you had better own your namespace. That begins with personal branding and I am going to show you how to get a solid foundation with a 5 day roadmap.

Day 1: Build a Website (This is NOT hard)

This is your home–it is where people can find the authentic you. This is your safe place and all personal branding roads should lead back to this safe place.

I recommend this be your personal domain name. Hopefully, it can simply be your name. Start with .com, .org, .net. If necessary you can drift into .name and .me, but I suggest those only as reinforcing redirected domains if possible.

You can also effectively use a clever brand name you make up, but they may take a little longer and more creativity to build personal brand around.

My second recommendation for the home base is that it be a blog. It is fast, simple, versatile, and Google loves them. Remember our objectives are immediate search results.

Day 2: Build Your PR Engine

There are lots of ways to do this, but my recommendation is keep it simple and focused. Sign-up and complete your profile for the following services:

I will tell you how to use each in a moment. All you need to do now is sign-up and have your Web URL in each pointed at your home base.

Day 3: Brainstorm Your Brand

This is a critical step and where most stumble. I am going to break it into small concepts.

You are building a personal brand for a reason. Let’s write them down:

Defining who you are and what you are good at
Defining who you want to meet
Defining who you want to meet you
Make connecting as frictionless as possible

Turn each of these headings into 4-5 core brand concepts. Here are some examples:

Writer: copywriting, ghostwriting, speech writing, web content
Affiliate Marketer: ppc, seo, article marketing, affiliate programs
Mortgage Broker: mortgage rates, mortgage refinance, reverse mortgage, loan modification

From each of these personal brand concepts craft 10 long tail topics. More examples:

Writer: Copywriting-10 Secrets to Make Your Copy Sell
Affiliate Marketer: Article Marketing-Driving Niche Traffic to Your eBay Affiliate Store
Mortgage Broker: Reverse Mortgages-Helping Your Retired Parents Get the Right Mortgage

Day 4: Write–A Lot

A good personal brand only works if it has depth.

This 5 day process is going to immediately drive people to you. Make sure you look like you are open for business and it is clear who you are and why you are valuable.

So now it is time to open up the word processor. Write each of your list of articles. The list should have between 40-50 article topics. Yes, this is going to be a long day. Here are a few tips:

Each article should only be 300-450 words
Each should be informative or how-to oriented
Create a standard format that is easy to read: italicized introduction, sub-headings, and lists
Use keyword(s) in sub-headings and body of article, but no more than 2-3 times
Include a consistent “resource box” at the end of each–brief who you are, what you do, and website link

Look at this post as an example.

Day 5: Start Promoting

Okay. I know you are tired, but we are to the fun part–self-promotion!

Expect another long day. Do the following steps. Since we are compressing this into 5 days it is important to do this in order:

Post 10 articles to your blog (website): This should simply be a cut and paste exercise. One important trick to add a little apparent depth. Post date each but the final article when posting. I recommend spacing the post dating to reflect 3 posts per week, or whatever frequency you intend to post in the future. This isn’t intended to be a deceptive trick, but rather helps set expectations for your readers for the frequency of future posts.
Post 10 more articles to your blog (website): These are going to be posted with future dates. This will help make you ongoing personal brand maintenance less intimidating. You now have a good queue–keep it full.
Post 10 articles to eZineArticles: There are others, but this is the best. They have good rules, reputation, and traffic.
Hold on to remaining 10-20 articles: Chances are you didn’t write 40-50 anyway–I know you got lazy, didn’t you? I am your coach– I am going to push you harder than you think you can go. If you met my goal you have some extra juice in the tank to deploy or reserve your call. If you didn’t make it you need to work harder–this is important. It is your personal brand. It will make you more money!
Gmail: Add a signature block. Make it much like your article resource box, but add telephone number, LinkedIN profile and Twitter URLs. Announce your new website and expertise to 10 friends. Ask them to promote and link to you.
Twitter: Go to http://search.twitter.com. Search for your keywords. Reply–intelligently–to 10 tweets on things of interest and relevant to you brand. Follow 10 other people in your brand area that you did not reply to tweets from.
LinkedIN: Connect with 10 people you already know (load in address book). Ask them to endorse you.
MyBlogLog: Add widget to blog (website). Search for your keywords. Join 10 communities of people in your brand area.
Stumbleupon: Search for your keywords. Connect with 10 people in your brand area. Stumble each of the websites of the people you connected with on Twitter, LinkedIN, MyBlogLog. Stumble your most recent blog (website) post.
eZineArticles: Add widget to blog (website).

Take the weekend off. Rest. Then…

Repeat Weekly.

Good luck! Happy personal brand building.

—

Bill Rice is the Principle at RICE interactive, a leader in lead generating copywriting and social media. He is a frequent writer, speaker, and consultant on marketing and sales. He is passionate about helping organizations execute more profitable marketing and lead generation strategies.

If you have any questions–contact me: http://twitter.com/billrice