Posted on February 15, 2011 by Deb Posted in Brand Marketing, Brand Strategy, Clarity Posts, Entrepreneurial Marketing, Featured, Social Media
More accurately, the question for me lots of times is “to retweet or not retweet” “reply or not reply.” Last fall, ShaunaCausey came in to speak to my undergrad UW class about social media. Among loads of other good stuff, Shauna talked about the difference between lifecasting and mindcasting.
Every quarter when I survey my students to see how many have accounts on which social media networks, at least one person always explains not being on Twitter by commenting that they really don’t care what other people had for lunch. You know what? I don’t either. Not unless you’re giving me a great new restaurant recommendation. But I’m very interested in what smart people think, what they mindcast. It’s interesting to me that there are always so many among my bright students who see no distinction. It’s not like it’s new. I recently dug up an LA Times story on it from March ’09.
I’m relatively new to Twitter. Took me a long, long time to get with it. Clarity_Comm is a business account, not a personal one. My intent is to mindcast on topics related to my business. If it’s not somehow related to entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial marketing or environmental marketing, it doesn’t technically fit. I’m fully aware you have to be a real person on Twitter and share personal views to be at all interesting. I just doubt my newly relaunched business benefits if my tweets are all over the topical map.
But now that I’ve got this platform to this generous little audience, this little soapbox available to me, I sometimes find it tough to “stay in character,” as I referred to it recently in a confession a very social media savvy friend. I find it tough to stay focused. Some of my clients are bound to find that funny since I practically preach focus.
Yes, I know I could open another account. Lots of people have several. According to a report on small business social media management that Mashable tweeted the other day, 31% of small business owners have 2 or more accounts on Facebook while 10% have 2 or more on Twitter. It doesn’t specifically say the two accounts are personal and business, but they could be.
The personal and business accounts would of course need to be aligned in terms of values. But why wouldn’t they be? I don’t personally know any entrepreneurs whose personal values are misaligned with those of the business they created it. I don’t even know how you’d live like that. But I can clearly see how having a personal account would let me stick my nose into conversations around all my other areas of interest. Like music and the arts. Big fan. Got nothing to do with my business focus.
But here’s my sticking point: when you’re a solo practitioner, there’s no separating your personal brand from your corporate brand. There’s a big fat = sign between them. I don’t need to spend time managing multiple accounts. I need discipline.
Posted on February 11, 2011 by Deb Posted in Brand Strategy, Clarity Posts, Entrepreneurial Marketing, Featured, Marketing Strategy
Nearly five years ago, I met Robert Scoble and Shel Israel who’d just written the breakthrough business blogging book Naked Conversations. I loved that they wrote the book on their blog, posting chapters for reader comments. Loved the name. Who wouldn’t? I totally bought into the idea that businesses should blog. Especially young businesses.
Just not my business. It seemed like such a commitment. And how to decide what to say? I followed their advice to read a bunch of blogs before starting to blog. I read. And read …
One of the blogs I read belonged to Dave Schappell, founder of TeachStreet.com, a very cool dynamic site that brings “motivated learners and talented teachers together” with classes on everything from bagpipes to, yep, blogging. Two of the top subjects right now deal with test prep classes and fitness classes (New Year’s resolutions, anyone?).
As I struggled with my very first post, I thought of Dave’s pre-launch strategy and called him to get advice. But first, his strategy.
In 2007, TeachStreet had a classic chicken-and-egg pre-launch situation. Potential students wanted to see potential classes. Potential teachers wanted potential student traffic. What to do? Dave’s answer: start blogging.
“The company was going to be about lifelong learning,” said Dave. “We researched the top topics, picked our top cities, set up the blog and started writing.”
For eight months before the site launch, Dave blogged his interviews with teachers, sharing their thoughts about a lifelong learning marketplace. He linked to them in the hopes they’d link back. “The idea was to get people — and Google — to notice we were constantly publishing content so they’d both start consuming the site.”
And it worked. The day TeachStreet’s site went live, its Google page rank was three or four, as Dave recalls, and it quickly rose to a six. Nice strategy.
Did I have a strategy, Dave wondered. “It’s always hard to start. Especially if you think about it deeply because you want a theme.”
Did I have a theme for my blog?
Yep. I give environmentally focused entrepreneurs and nonprofit groups the tools and techniques they need to out-market their competition. And I want them to be able to do it without me within 3-6 months. It’s a crazy business model but I like it and its a great investment for them.
Both these groups lack enough money, people and time to do what they want to do. Yet they urgently need to spur folks to act. Both likely have to deal with science. Why not learn from each other?
Why not do some of that here? I’m sure to flail around a bit, but my intent is to stay focused on profiling people doing smart marketing on tiny budgets, sharing what I’m learning myself and occasionally critiquing and commenting on what I see in the market place and in the news. I’ll learn faster with readers who’ll teach me.
It took me five years to do it, but, Scoble and Israel, I’m finally following your advice. And Dave’s. Thanks, guys!
