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.

An agency can help guide you in the process and bring you up to speed on the technology. Yet, every organization needs to make a commitment to their social media presence. Unless you create your relationships, craft your relevant message and respond timely to critical questions online, people are not going to trust you. I wrote a post on the Sm@rt blog about relevance of message and the value of relationships. You can check it out the Sm@rt social media for business website. An agency can help you establish your plan, explain the tools and how to use them, set up your platform correctly and guide you through the process. An agency cannot and should not act on your behalf as the voice of your company. You will lose the trust of your customers very fast. Today, trust between customers and your brand is worth more than gold.

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink it. Dedicate the resources and commit to spending the time online in-house. Otherwise, you won’t have a dialogue with your customers but a monologue, you won’t have a social media presence but a marketing campaign.  The choice is yours.

I’m sure there are great agencies out there right now crafting super creative, viral and trustworthy campaigns. I think that’s great. But you also need to dedicate the time to build real relationships, talk to your customers and respond to their inquires. Let’s stop talking campaigns and start talking relationships. It’s the future of real honest marketing.

Your turn? Have you seen a well executed social media strategy by an agency? Which one?

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.

1. Video – YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Hulu has grown from 63 million streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009. (from Social Media Revolution video). 77% have watched an advertising on YouTube. (from Razorfish Digital Report 2009). 13 hours is the amount of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. 412 years is the amount of time it will take you to watch every video on YouTube. 100 million is the amount of YouTube videos watched daily. These and more interesting stats from What The F**K is social media presentation.  Video is here to stay. You can use it to sell your product, explain your idea, showcase your property. People prefer to watch instead of reading.  As a business, figure out how to embed video on your website, use video to sell your product or service, use video on online ads, explain your product and make sure your video is compatible on mobile phones.
2. Mobile - According to the Mobile Marketing Association total U.S. spend on mobile marketing will grow from $1.7 billion in 2009 to $2.16 billion in 2010. More and more companies are looking for ways to get to consumers on the only device they always carry with them – their cell phone. According to the Razorfish Digital report 2009, 57% access the Internet from their phone, 50%  have downloaded an app for their phone and 30% have interacted with an ad on their phone. Two major trends for mobile marketing this year are going to be Mobile Money and Mobile Ticketing. You will be able to send money abroad from your cell phone as well as purchase airline and other tickets on your phone and not have to carry paper print out with you. Mobile applications for businesses are huge – from text messages for your business to iPhone apps, this is going to be an exciting year for mobile marketing.
3. Location/ Social Networking – this trend focuses on geo enabled games and software from companies are Foursquare and Loopt. Social network sites where people (and companies) are going to be aware of each others surroundings. People are going to be able to connect with friends near you and companies are going to be able to provide relevant coupons and messages. You will be surrounded with information stream that is relevant to your behavior and current location. Twitter may be overtaken by these technologies in 2010 as companies try to attract people who are physically closer to their location. A very interesting and somewhat scary trend to watch in my opinion.

I promised a few people in the UNR social media class that I will make the stats available. So here you have it. Your turn. What trends and interesting social media or online marketing stats do you want to share?

Click Here to See the Video

In summary:

1. Decide faster. People are making decisions a lot faster than they used to. Instead of booking their vacations 6-8 months in advance they are waiting to book up to a week in advance. Vail Resorts experienced a boost in their lodging occupancy from 50% to 80% in just one week before Christmas. As a result, they decided to change the way they advertise the mountains as well. Good thinking!
2. Adapt or die. Vail Resorts realized that they need to adapt together with the consumer or face the consequences. People want to receive information faster, make decisions faster, get the deals now. Instead of committing to messages 6-8 months in advance, it’s smarter for a business to wait and see what message they want to put out there next week. It will be more relevant to your guests, more real and more in line with the state of the economy. You don’t want to leave money on the table yet you need the business.
3. Traditional media is being replaced by social and online marketing. Vail Resorts reduced their print budget by 80%. Wow! They are still planning on spending it just in different places. I hope they do because now is the time to build mind share. Be smart about your marketing, stay aggressive and continue to remind your guests about your brand. The companies that manage to do this wisely will win when the economy improves.
4. Work together as a team. By getting the message out online and in social media you can constantly change it to report conditions, tackle slow periods, get the word out about a special event you didn’t anticipate having. Get your departments to work together as a team to have one consistent message. Your social media, PR department, web department and marketing department need to work all together to produce one strong and memorable message. Smaller businesses have the advantage of being able to coordinate this faster as they don’t have that many departments to begin with.
5. The importance of the message. Brand advertising is being replaced by a shorter term, more sales oriented message. People are interested in deals and having a more retail approach is key in this economy. Incorporate your brand with the message and always have a call to action in it.

How is your business changing to the economy and the recent marketing developments? Are you adapting or getting ready to close the doors? If you were the Vail Resorts CEO what would you do?

If you liked this post and don’t want to miss any future ones, why don’t you sign up for the emails now.

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?

1. Traffic – eMarketer just came up with a new report called “Data on Twitter Decline Stacks Up”.  The report talks about declining Twitter traffic in the past few months. If you were watching Twitter closely this past summer, you probably remember reading about it experiencing traffic surges upwards of 1,500% at some point of time. eMarketer reports a decline in traffic from Sep to Oct anywhere from 2.1% to 27.8% depending on the service reporting the traffic.

I still think Twitter is a good tool to have in your bag for reaching out to your customers, building brand awareness and responding to questions. Even with this decline, eMarketer projects a continued increase in Twitter usage over the next year.  If you haven’t decided whether you should be on Twitter or not, start by reading what companies are already on this digital space and how they using it effectively to build their brand. Twitter has become instrumental in some Fortune 500 companies in their efforts to respond to people and improve their customer service. Which brings me to second point.

2. Customer service on Twitter – USA Today recently released “Social Media like Twitter change customer service“. I had my own experiences with big brands on Twitter. I made a complaint to United Airlines on Twitter about how horrible their telephone customer service is. I didn’t barrage them with tweets like some people do, I only tweeted them 3-4 times before I gave up. I still haven’t heard a response back and most likely I won’t. I complimented WholeFoods on Twitter as to how pleased I am with their local Reno store. I heard a response back from them within minutes.  I tweeted Tony (the CEO of Zappos before their sale to Amazon) and asked him a question. Quite honestly I didn’t expect a response. He responded within 48 hours and put me in touch with the person within the company who could answer my question. I’m still awaiting a response from that person via email but in my mind, Zappos did the right thing.

Twitter can be a very powerful tool for people to connect directly with companies and vice versa. As a business, you need to decide if you have the human power to respond to every Tweet and complaint and if you don’t you need to think how you are going to handle this in your overall communication and customer service strategy. What I don’t want to see happen is every company with a Tweeter account that no one is checking and responding to. If you do this already with an 800 number, why bother going to Twitter? save yourself time and frustration down the road.  United Airlines is obviously not going to improve their customer service with Twitter or without. Are you?

3. And finally, Twitter recently changed their question from: “What are you doing”? to “What’s happening?” Brian Solis wrote an excellent post about this subject. What is happening right now? Here’s the Twitter feed regarding the 3 mile island leak that just happened. Yes, it definitely answers the question of What’s happening? much better than What are you doing? I like the change. Do you?  Are you using Twitter for business?Are you using it to respond to people’s questions? How are you finding the time and resources to keep up with the time demand?

How I use Twitter for business:

1. Connect with people

2. Help spread the word about the business

3. Answer questions

4. Get news

5. Research

6. Listen

7. Provide value

How about you? How are you using Twitter for business?

Photo credit: Stephen Oachs

How do you measure social media? There are many ways to measure your efforts. How much time do you have?

There are free and paid ways to measure your social media marketing.

Here’s a good post on the topic from OptimizeThis who lists some valuable tools. What do you think? How do you measure your social media efforts?

Have you decided to cut on efforts in other areas? For example, I pulled out of trade shows. And you? Where are you finding the extra time?

Are 5 lines blogs the next step to our attention problem?

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?