A year ago I embarked on a new journey with Out&About Marketing. The results have been very,very positive. I accomplished many of the goals I set for myself and learned a few lessons along the way. Overall, I have no regrets and I’m proud of the accomplishments.

Thank you to all of my clients who keep me on my toes, open my horizons and challenge me to learn more. You are all the best!

Thank you to all of my readers who visit my website, read and comment on my blog. Let’s keep the conversation going.

I learned so much throughout the year thanks to all of you – my clients, my readers, my social and real life friends and the hundreds of new friends I met online.  It’s been an absolutely incredible and motivating journey. Here are 10 lessons on starting a business, marketing for small businesses and social media marketing a year later:

1. The busier you are, the more you learn how to prioritize and optimize. I learned how to filter and aggregate content and how to go from spending hours online to only a few minutes a day. Social media can be a huge time investment. Learn how to manage your time and balance your day. And the most important skill of all is to learn to balance work with life. I have to say I managed to stay sane and have sufficient time to play and enjoy my life outside of ” computer time”.

2. Learn to elliminate 80% of the time you spent on unnecessary and non-important tasks and concentrate your effort on 20% of the things that are truly important for your business and for your life. It’s hard some days but you can do it. Limit your time to what’s truly important and get rid of everything else.

3. Social networking is great and really works when done correctly. One of my biggest appeal to social networking is the opportunity to make friends in real life. It’s rewarding to know you met someone on Twitter first and eventually you got to shake their hand in person. Introduce people to each other. Never forget that the Internet just opens the door for real relationships and true networking.

4. Never stop learning. Pick a tool each month and learn it. Maybe it’s WordPress, FourSquare, Evernote, Dropbox or Groupon. Whatever it’s the latest and greatest tool, invest time in learning it and seeing how it applies to your digital life or business. Don’t jump at all tools at once.

5. Every 6 months revisit your business plan/social media/marketing strategy and adjust as necessary. It’s one thing to have a plan. It’s different to actually follow it, measure your goals and adjust your strategy. Don’t be afraid to make a mistake. Learn from it and keep moving. Don’t waste too much time on worrying about being perfect. No one is.

6. Celebrate. Small things matter. Set monthly and weekly goals that you can measure and when you achieve them, congratulate yourself. Set the bar higher for the following month.

7. Create a compelling story. People don’t care about your product. They will identify with a good story and if they believe it they will consider purchasing your product. Don’t just sell them your stuff. Provide interesting and engaging content. Ask yourself not what you are going to gain from social networks but rather what are you going to contribute. What’s your story? How do you fit it?

8. Find your niche. Find your niche and your voice. What are you knowledgeable about and have an expert opinion on? What do you know that people want to know? What can you be the “google” of? Without a very targeted niche approach your marketing will get lost. Start small and think big.

9. Before jumping in social media – educate yourself. Read blogs, learn new tools, develop a strategy and adapt it. After a few months revisit your measurements and adjust as necessary. Start small and grow your efforts as you become more proficient with each network. Social networking works. Period. But don’t expect to see overnight success in terms of sales. Be patient. You didn’t wake up one day to a full house of kids. Or maybe you did. Most likely you went through the dating stage, the wedding, and eventually the kids. It’s the same with social networking.

10. What are you passionate about? Do you have passion for what you do? Can you carry your passion online in your blog, tweets, Facebook updates? They say Content is King. If you don’t have passion, content will be a chore. If you have passion, get yourself a Flip camera, start a blog and start producing quality content. You will start building an audience. Just remember #8. Find your niche.

What would you like to get from Out&About Marketing? How are you using the site? What advice do you have for the blog and for me? What is your biggest marketing and social media challenge?

Thank you for your feedback and for your time. Now I’m going to celebrate being one year old!!!

1. Photo: Upload a professional looking personal photo. I know this is a no brainer but I still see some people with no avatar on their profile. I wouldn’t want to connect with faceless person, would you?
2. Profile: Fill out your profile completely. Try to avoid copying and pasting from your resume. If you want to show up on search engines, make sure to use keywords that describe what you do and what you want to appear for on Google. List all companies you have worked for and all schools you have attended. You will grow your network faster if you do. Search Engine Optimization works on LinkedIn if you fill our your profile with selected keywords.
3. Grow your Network. This one is the most important step. After your profile is complete, start growing your network. Connect with all contacts that you would like to from your existing contact list in Outlook or wherever you are keeping your contacts. Keep in mind that LinkedIn can act up sometimes during the upload. I hope they fix that issue soon. As you meet more people, check to see if they are on LinkedIn or periodically upload your contacts and see who you are missing. Networks take time to grow so be patient but at the end it’s worth it. It’s all about who you know, right? Just make sure you are connecting to people you actually know and want to be connected with.
4. Groups: A great way to meet more people from your industry is to join groups on LinkedIn. There are thousands of groups in each industry. Find some that look interesting and ask to join. I have never been denied participation in any group, but I’ve mainly joined marketing and internet groups, which fits my profile. Be careful with how many groups you join as you may get bombarded with emails if you opt-in for the daily digest. You can choose weekly or turn off all emails. Groups are great way to meet more people, keep an eye on trends, post articles you’ve written, ask questions and respond to questions that you have expertise in. Please, make sure you provide some value to the group.
5. Keep your status update fresh. If you are on Twitter, you can update your status from there. I use HootSuite to update all of my social networks.
6. Recommendations: Recommend some people you have worked with and ask for some recommendations from people who know you well. Please, make sure you don’t always have the same recommendations written for you as the recommendations you have received. It looks way too cheesy.
7. Applications:  LinkedIn comes with some great third party applications that will help keep your network informed about your interests and activities and keep your profile fresh. For example, I use their SlideShare application to display my PowerPoint presentations that I have made available online, WordPress plug in to show my latest blog posts, Reading List on Amazon to display what I’m reading and my recommendations of that book, TripIt to show my trips to my network and see who’s close to me if I want to connect in person while on the trip.

What’s the value of LinkedIn? Personally, I have found it to be a great network to stay in touch with people I have worked with in the past and present who I may not necessary want to friend on Facebook. It keeps contacts up to date and it’s a valuable tool for putting people in touch with each other and letting your network know your latest activities. I have found people I need from my network.  I have received recommendations on potential vendors and stayed in touch with people. The latest LinkedIn development is that now you can subscribe to company’s updates, making following a company look a lot more like your experience on Facebook.

LinkedIn is useful only if you use it right. What experience have you had with LinkedIn?  Are you still using an old style paper resume or have you completely moved to using LinkedIn for it? Any other tips you’d like to add? What mistakes to avoid? See this post from Neal Schaffer. And finally, let me know if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn.

1. I enjoyed David LaPlante’s presentation.His passion for technology, social sharing, video, content and skiing is addictive and make a big impact on everyone who’s ever seen him speak. On the forefront of technology, geek by heart and skier for life, David talked about the past, present and future of technology. A lot of change is coming to us and it’s happening fast. Stay with the trends or be left out in the cold when it comes to how you do business online.
2. Jim Scripps gave a great overview of blogging – what it is, how to do it and best practices. It’s quick to set it up and businesses can use to engage online, deal with a PR crisis, help improve their search engine rankings, provide timely updates, use it as a hub for all of their social media efforts and engagement with bloggers.
3. Michael Kelly from ClickMail Marketing gave an extensive overview on how to best utilize email marketing for organizations with a ton of statistics and best practices. Knowing that the average value of an email address is $120 puts a different light to the email database list of any size.
4. Jake Fields, from Treeline Interactive spoke passionately about mobile marketing: iPhone apps, mobile advertising, text messages and various applications. Mobile holds a lot of opportunities for the future. As companies enter this new field with many unknowns it’s good to partner with someone that understands it and does it on a daily basis. Treeline Interactive seem to be completely at ease when it comes to speaking mobile advertising.
5. Finally, here’s the presentation I gave on Facebook and Twitter for business. Someone asked about social media ROI. Here’s a good video touching on the ROI question.

Today, I want to share with you some even more amazing statistics pulled again from the same website, Quantcast.com. This time, I looked at the most visited websites online. I’m surprised to see that Facebook.com is showing as Number 3, just past Google.com and Yahoo.com and ahead of MSN.com, Live.com, Microsoft.com, Amazon.com, eBay.com and even Craigslist which is probably the Number 1 website to find a job and a lot of people right now are doing just that on a daily basis. Here are the top 10 websites in terms of traffic:

There is only one point to make here – if you are not considering Facebook.com to promote your business, why aren’t you? You can get the word out about your products and services, all at the fraction of what you will spend in traditional marketing and even online marketing? There’s very little investment cost involved in having your business presence on Facebook and you will be reaching 104 million people monthly living in the US, compared to 120 million people on Yahoo and 141 million people on Google. Facebook has become a website and a marketing vehicle that you can no longer ignore for the cost that it takes to be on it. Can you say Free? Is your business on Facebook yet?

Sliding on The Cheap turned to Out&About Marketing for help with social media. Kevin Tinto, a great businessman and founder of Sliding  on The Cheap could see the potential for using social media for his business. His website, http://slidingonthecheap.com offers discounted skiing and snowboarding lift tickets, ski&stay packages, ski deals, ski shop sales,  ski resort events and killer deals from around the country. Sliding on the Cheap has solid email following (30,000 subscribers+) and many businesses report a spike in phone calls the minute their newsletter goes out. Kevin, who lives part time in the Bay Area and part time in Truckee is a hard core skier and really passionate about skiing, snowboarding, motorcycles, wakeboarding, biking and anything outdoors. He’s determined to spread discounts and insights from the ski resorts to his loyal followers and help making skiing and boarding more affordable – a great idea in this economy. If you are not already a fan of his newsletter, join today and watch for it to hit your Inbox – you are guaranteed to read something that you will like and use for your next ski/board adventure.

Here’s what Kevin Tinto said about this custom created social media strategy for Sliding on The Cheap:

“As one of the largest Ski/Snowboard informational services with more than 30,000 weekly email subscribers worldwide,  we sensed that Social Media was critical to the continued growth and success of our business, but had no idea how to implement on a large scale.  With limited knowledge of this new medium, we turned to Milena Regos.  Her charge:  Develop in a matter of weeks, a complete and professional Facebook and Twitter Strategy. Within two weeks of launch we had 345 Facebook Fans and we are adding new Fans and Email subscribers daily.  We fully expect to add thousands of email subscribers by season’s end, and expand our business in directions we couldn’t have even contemplated just six months ago. As Managers, you have two choices: use Out&About Marketing to work on your Social Media Strategy, or find yourself  outgunned in a complex and changing Internet environment”.

With the launch of Sliding on The Cheap social media strategy, they are off to a great start. Within days, they accumulated 345 Facebook fans and continue to grow fast thanks to an easy and engaging Facebook contest.

It’s the perfect business to engage on social media with their fans. People love discounts and freebies and they will help spread the love from Sliding on The Cheap. Fan them on Facebook or start following them on Twitter today. Although, we can’t disclose the specifics of their social media strategy, here are some tips that any business can utilize to become successful:

1. Create a solid word-of-mouth campaign. Word of Mouth is your best marketing vehicle. If you have happy customers, they will talk about your business to their friends and spread the word for you – for free. If you need help creating your Word of Mouth campaign, Out&About Marketing can help.
2. Explore the possibilities of social media. Find the networks that make the most sense for you. Not everyone needs to be on Twitter and not everyone needs to be on LinkedIn. With more than 300 million active users on Facebook you can’t ignore it but you still need a plan on why and how you are going to engage. Have you heard of Foursquare? It may be the next Twitter.
3. Understand that once you commit to being on social media, you need to keep your content fresh and engage with your followers. There’s nothing worse than seeing a blog that hasn’t been updated for a year or going to a Facebook page that’s been non-existent for months.
4. Think of fresh and engaging content. Make sure you provide value and not just sell your business.
5. Listen to what your customers are telling you and address their requests in your business. Use social networks as a research tool to make your business better.
6. Adjust your strategy as you learn more about the social media environment. You will make mistakes. Apologize quickly and publicly when you make a mistake and move on.
7. Hire someone with experience that can help you get your social media off the ground. This new marketing medium is changing too fast and you need someone who’s staying on top of it, understands how it all works and can recommend the best approach for your business. You are probably not going to hire someone full time to learn and maintain your social media effort, but you can outsource some of it and commit to doing some of in in-house by spreading the responsibilities to people within your company. Social media can be very powerful if used well and any company can benefit from it. Social media does take knowledge and time. The knowledge required is not just about social media, but also about online marketing in general and how customers behave online. If you get stuck, Out&About Marketing is here to help you!

Share some excellent social media stories here or tell us what you need help with. Do you know someone who wants to explore the endless possibilities that word-of-mouth and social media present? Send them this post today. (Full disclosure: In case it’s not clear until now, Sliding on The Cheap is my client).

1. Listening tool: It creates online space for people to interact with your brand. They can leave comments on your posts and allow you to get feedback. Although there are better ways to listen to what people are saying about your business, your own blog provides one more channel to receive feedback.
2. SEO: A blog can help you with search engine optimization. By continuosly adding engaging and fresh content, while still incorporating your main keywords in your posts, your positioning on the search engine will improve. Google, Bing and Yahoo will rank your website higher with your blog (make sure your blog is connected to your domain) thanks to your content and it will improve your overall search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
3. Create a vibrant online community. By providing interesting content, uploading videos and photos and writing often about topics of  interest to you, you will create loyal readers on your blog. By building trust with these people, they will be most likely to purchase from you than from a competitor business that doesn’t show interest in engaging with their customers.
4. Expert positioning: By writing a blog about the topics you are knowledgeable and expert in, you will position your business as a leader in the industry. You don’t always have to write about your business, products and services. If you represent a hotel, you can write about the surrounding areas, special events and happenings, local tips, shopping places, ways to save when you travel, and anything else related to general travel or the activities that your customers mainly engage with why staying at your  place. You can highlight your chef’s specials, contribute some specials recipes and cocktails and make people feel at home before they have even arrived. When people start looking for a place to stay,  they will consider your hotel first because of the existing relationship they already have with you.
5. Engagement & Transparency: You are not afraid to put yourself on the web and open up to people’s feedback whether that’s positive or negative. You embrace the fact that people now have a lot more control over your brand than they used to. You are open to receiving feedback, you are listening and hopefully making changes to your business based on customer feedback.

These are my 5 reasons why a business can benefit from a blog. There are many more reasons why a business blogs. What are yours? What do you think abusiness blog can do for the bottom line of an organization? What are your favorite blogs? Why?

I’m very excited to announce that Out&About Marketing is now live. I created this website and blog to help people in the travel and tourism industry learn about successful marketing strategies and tactics, social media and Web 2.0.  New media emerged and changed marketing forever. Customers expect companies to communicate with them on a whole new level, engage with them in places that are new and exciting.

I want to share my passion for social media and marketing with focus on travel, tourism and the outdoors with anyone else who shares the same passion or makes their living in these industry. I wasn’t able to find a good resource on the web so I created one.

I hope marketers and business owners with remarkable products and services will find my website and blog useful and use it as place to engage in discussions relevant to the tourism industry. If you are interested in becoming a guest writer on the website, please, let me know.

Also, please, let me know if you find something on the site that needs to be fixed. It’s a new site and may have some glitches or spelling mistakes.

I would love it if you sign my digital guestbook. It will help me learn more about my readers and write posts that are relevant and interesting to you.

I will update the blog as often as humanly possible after my full-time job and my love for the outdoors. If you want to stay current, make sure to subscribe to the RSS feed and every time I write a post you will get automatically updated either on your reader or email. If you prefer, you can sign up with your email address directly.

Enjoy your stay and thank you for visiting!

Leave it to my Australian friends to create a useful and practical free resource for tourism web marketing. Funded by the Australian State and Territory Tourism offices and created by the National Online Strategy Committee in Australia this comprehensive online marketing ekit is for the tourism industry and covers off a variety of basic and advanced topics. The free web marketing for tourism eKit covers fundamentals and advanced topics to get your tourism business off the ground or refine your existing strategy. As the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse  says on their website, this e-kit was “Written by experts but understood by everyone”.

The e-kit includes various topics that you can download by themselves if you are not interested in the entire package. It also gives you approximate reading time for each.
Topics include:

* Step-by-step tutorials on e-marketing
* Hundreds of online marketing resources
* Social Media marketing
* Pay per click campaigns
* Email marketing
* Tracking and reporting
* Online distribution

You can download the e-kit from the ATDW website here. Leave me a comment and let me know how you used it and what you liked about it. Have you seen something similar in the US? Please, let me know and enjoy your reading.

Here’s a practical resource guide on how to find out what people are saying about your brand. Listening to what   people are saying seems to be a hot topic right now but most people don’t know where to start. There are some very good software companies that will help you achieve your goals but they can get expensive or simply are not in your budget especially when there are so many free tools already. I will share with you great tools that will do the job and are free. It will take you some time to set them up and see what works for you but you can’t ignore the conversations on the web. Listening to what’s happening is important because it will help you understand better what your customers want.

1. Google Alerts – free tool that allows you to subscribe for specific keywords and topics of interests. You get an email delivered to your inbox automatically when your search terms get ranked on Google. You need to sign up for this tool. You can monitor your  company, your competitors, any trends that you may be interested in, news or your own name. This one is a must!

2. BackType – another powerful free tool that tracks comments on the Social Web and emails you results. Every time someone mentions your company in a blog or a social news site you get an email. Another must if you want to save yourself time and want the essential information delivered to your inbox. You can view all conversations based on a trend, topic or an article and receive notifications whenever a conversation that you are interested in becomes active. Check it out and sign up today!

3. Tweetbeep – A free tool that works pretty much like Google Alerts but it searches the conversations on Twitter. Every time someone mentions your name, your product, your company and anything else you want to track you get an email. If you are in Twitter, you need to sign up for Tweetbeep. If you are not on Twitter but you want to know what everybody else is talking about on Twitter, again, you need to sign up. Another way to search the conversations on Twitter is with Twitter search.

What about searching all the blogs that are becoming extremely popular these days? Do you know that there are 2 new blogs being created every second! Here are some free tools to help you understand and track what’s important to you on the blogosphere.

1. Technorati – you can search the entire blogosphere with this tool and see what blogs are writing about you. For example, I just searched for “Lake Tahoe” and the site came back with 2,377 results for this keyword. You can also compare the noise about your brand with a competing brand and see who’s getting more exposure. Neat!

2. Google Blogsearch – another free tool for seeing what people are saying on blogs. On my search for “lake tahoe” it returned 297,428 “lake tahoe” related searches.A lot of blogs to go through!

3. BlogPulse – this is a free blog search service provided by Nielsen BuzzMetrics. You can search by keywords or URLs. You can create trends, check out popular trends, follow onversations or go deep into your favorite sites and authors. My search for “lake tahoe” brought back 14,181 results. I have the opportunity to see who’s talking about lake tahoe and I can track the conversation or see the blog’s profile. I really like the trend tool and I can see a lot of useful applications for it in the future.

And finally,there are aggregators that allows you to follow the conversation across various platforms.

1. Friendfeed – It searches across blogs, Twitter, Flickr and 50 other social sites.

2. Spy – Spy is a great tool that allows you to listen to tconversations on the web. It actually aggregates the comments from Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, BackType, and more social websites and RSS readers. Lois Gray wrote a nice article on Spy.

3. Trendrr – if you are interested in tracking trends, I would recommend Trendrr. You can create up to 20 trends for free. Lois Gray wrote another great article about Trendrr on his blog.

4. Socialmention – An excellent tool for monitoring your social exposure. They even give you a social rank and you can subscribe to daily email alerts.

Do you have any favorite tools that you use? Please, share.

Interested in more resources. Check these out:

Top 10 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Brand’s Reputation – a great list from Mashable

Twitter aggregators

How to get the most out of Friendfeed

How to measure online influence

1. In an exciting presentation named ‘The Power of Storytelling” Michael Perman, Senior Director, Consumer Insights, Levi Strauss & Co talked about how to use experiences and memories to create a story about your brand and bring it to life. Have your employees and customers share a story of how they used your product. What memories do they have? What feelings and emotions your products created in them. Post these stories via a blog, a photo, a video and you will bring your product/service to life. People will relate it. They will remember it. And they will buy it. Stories will help you invent the future. Use your imagination to get there.

2. Another good session was presented by a a good panel. The good people from oDesk – Brian Goler, Yield software - Derek Gordon and A&R Edelman – Todd Irwin. They discussed Crossing the Chasm 2.0: Product Marketing in the Digital Age. The phrase was coined in 1991 by Geoffrey Moore in a book titled “Crossing the Chasm”. The panel applied the concept in today’s world with questions like: Has Twitter crossed the Chasm? Most people said no, but the majority agreed that it has crossed the Chasm when applied to business and marketing. Has the iphone crossed the Chasm. Most people tend to think that it has mainly thanks to the iphone applications. How about Facebook? Yes, the audience said, Facebook has crossed the Chasm. Great session and very interactive.Good lessons and take ways for how to break into the digital world with your product.

To illustrate better what the Chasm looks like, I have added the following picture:

3. The third session that resonated with me was Shelly Palmer’s Digital Power User Boot Camp. I was only able to attend one session and I went to the final one. I was very impressed with the amount of information presented and the overview he gave of what’s needed to survive in today’s world: from scanning every paper in your office and creating a searchable PDF, to backing up your computer on a daily basis. He also presented solutions for what cell phones to use, recommended Google apps for a way to allow a group to share documents and calendars, how to create powerpoint presentations and in summary: How to live in today’s digital world. Great info, lots of tips and advice and a good presenter.There was only one thing I’m not sure I agree with. He emphasized the need to update your blog daily. An absolute must he said. I don’t necessarily agree with this statement. One, it’s too often for people to read your blog. Who has the time to read 10-15 blogs of their preference every day. Two, who has the time to update their blog every day. It does take a lot of time.  And finally, I just visited his blog and it hasn’t been updated for the past 5 days. I think that proves my first two points. All and all, great job Shelly. I’ll join in the conversation from your website / blog.

Additional Resources on the topics above:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rethinking_crossing_the_chasm.php

http://www.shellypalmermedia.com/