Recent Articles
Rushing Headlong Into Social Media Risks Doing More Harm Than Good
When businesses rush headlong into social media to boost their marketing they risk doing themselves more harm than good. Social media is becoming all the rage for businesses as old-fashioned forms of marketing become increasingly expensive and less effective. But turning to Social Media without a game plan has it’s own perils, especially for businesses who assume that social media is solely for talking about themselves and their businesses.
Businesses need to be engaging their customers and potential customers as much as possible as this article appearing in the business section of The Gazette in Montreal discusses.
Small businesses rushing headlong into social media to boost marketing risk doing themselves more harm than good if they haven’t mapped out a game plan, according to industry experts.
While establishing a presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr seems like a no-brainer to get the word out about any kind of business — especially when it seems everyone else is doing it — it could all go for naught without establishing goals and targets, says Mhairi Petrovic.
Petrovic, owner of Vancouver-based Out-Smarts Marketing, teaches social media seminars for Small Business B.C. While 60 per cent of North American small businesses are using social media, many of them are “doing a really bad job of it.”
“Take a step back and understand who you are trying to reach and why are you using these technologies. Is it to build traffic to a website? Communicate with an existing network? Or reach a new audience? It’s important to understand these things before you start,” she said.
It can be “damaging if you do the wrong things.”
That includes establishing a Facebook presence, blog or Twitter account and leaving it dormant after an initial flurry of activity.
“It’s kind of like going to your office, turning on all the lights, turning on your flashing open sign and leaving for the day without telling anyone,” said Terri Davies, founder of Sociability.ca, a Victoria company that specializes in social-media marketing.
“Even if you’re not putting out great information every day and really maintaining it every day, which is the ideal situation, at least respond to people coming into your community and posting questions,” Davies said.
It’s the interaction with that community that’s at the heart of social-media marketing, and it’s where the traditional marketing methods of pushing out information and product gets turned on its head.
“Social media is more of a closed loop. It’s an interaction with your audience and you are building a community with people. If you do a good job they become your marketing department and help you to spread the word to new audiences and new profiles,” said Petrovic of the viral nature of social media that sees Facebook posts and tweets spread through long lists of friends and followers.
“It’s not about you and your company. It’s about how do you get people to interact and build community with you. It’s about your audience and how do you add value for them and stimulate conversation.”
And that is where social media takes the step beyond the simple web presence many small businesses have established. In many cases businesses are online, but there’s little more than a brochure and a contact email or phone number on their website.
Davies said unless that content is updated regularly and the site is engaging, it is static and unlikely to draw attention.
To start, Davies suggests a blog that can be part of a company website for those businesses looking at testing the social media waters
“It makes that (previously static) website more dynamic so you can keep it current,” she said, noting that a blog is the start of a dialogue to build relationships with customers and would-be customers.
Petrovic suggests establishing how much time and energy any business can devote to social-media marketing before taking the first step.
“It can be time consuming,” she said. “If you start a blog or Facebook page and then business takes over and you stop posting to it, that can be damaging. If a potential client finds your blog and sees you haven’t posted for six months, they may think you’re out of business. So it’s important to consider what you like to do. If you hate writing, a blog is not going to be a great way for you.
“If you’re very busy and have small windows of time, then Twitter might be a good tool for you as within 140 characters you can, with sharp, short bursts of information, get your message out.”
Petrovic said if your business has a more visual product or requires help with assembly or use then visual social networks like Flickr and YouTube may be the right avenue.
“Again, it’s about stepping back and thinking who your audience is and what your goals and resources are,” she said. “And recognize who your audience is and what social media they tend to use. Start using that tool and you are more likely to connect with them.”
Both Petrovic and Davies say the small-business sector is starting to get it. “Social media is just a tool like the telephone, the TV or a billboard. It’s a way to convey your marketing message to reach your target audience and build community with them,” said Petrovic. “It’s not a silver bullet or panacea, but it should be a component of your overall business strategy.” Montreal Gazette
All credit to the Montreal Gazette for getting the views of the experts quoted in this article. It certainly reinforces the fact that businesses should always tread carefully when venturing into social media and remain aware that it is far more than a mere advertising tool. Such a mentality would be doomed to failure. Don’t hesitate to let us have your take on this subject.
Business In The Twenty First Century: The Age of Entrepreneurs
These are troubled times for many of the World’s leading economies and certainly so for those who’ve been taught or trained to rely on either paid employment or a trade to provide for themselves and their families. Ironically for budding entrepreneurs, the 21st Century is also a great time for starting a business with minimal expense, thanks to the opportunities presented by the internet, reinforced by the availability of mobile technology and inexpensive marketing via social media. According to Jeanette Mulvey in this article in Business News Daily, we now live in “The Age of Entrepreneurs”:
All this protesting from Occupy Wall Street puts me in mind of the 1960s. You know, the Age of Aquarius and all that. This time, though, it’s not a celestial shift but an economic one, that’s going to bring about a radical change.
A sputtering job market and the availability of mobile technology and inexpensive marketing via social media are swirling together into a perfect storm of opportunity for workers in all trades. For anyone who’s been itching to set out on their own and create a business, this is a great time to take advantage of this alignment of the entrepreneurial planets.
In this new economic age, being an entrepreneur doesn’t have to mean running a full-fledged corporation or even having employees. In the “freelance economy,” as it’s been called, working for yourself can simply mean doing what you’re good at and getting paid directly by your customers rather than working for a company that takes a cut.
In recent months I’ve met many new entrepreneurs, who, with nothing more than a laptop and smartphone have managed to build businesses that can support them and, at the same time, give them a greater chance to achieve that all too elusive state of work-life balance.
One such new entrepreneur, finding herself without a job, decided to put a sign on her lawn advertising her services as a “private gardener.” Within a week she had more customers than she could handle. Armed with little more than a trowel and a pair of gardening gloves, she tapped into a market opportunity few others have. She weeds the flower beds of busy folks who don’t have time to do it themselves. At $20 an hour, with no overhead, she’s doing all right for herself.
I’ve met others, too, who have decided to forgo the traditional “career” and, instead, work for themselves. Tutors who use the public library to give $40 an hour private tutoring sessions, a fluent Spanish speaker who is charging $40 an hour to doctor’s offices to make phone calls to Spanish-speaking patients, freelance writers who work for all manner of customers who need writing work done.
I’ve met virtual assistants, who do freelance “office work” from home, pet sitters, musicians who give private lessons, handymen and landscapers. The guy who fixes my washing machine needs little more than a pickup truck and an answering machine. There’s really no end to the work you can do for yourself. And there’s little reason to do it for someone else when you can be your own boss and control your schedule and your income.
What about health insurance, you ask? Yes, health insurance is a nice perk of working for a larger company. But, the fact is, you can buy an individual health insurance policy for $600 to $800 a month. While it’s not cheap, if you work it into your business plan from the beginning, you may still be able to swing it. If you’re currently working at a full-time job, you should consider taking advantage of the company’s COBRA offering, which will give you many months to get your business on its feet before you need to start buying your own health insurance. You may also be able to get a discount on health insurance by joining an industry or freelance trade organization.
I’m not suggesting that the road to working for yourself will be easy. You’ll surely work long hours and lose a lot of sleep along the way. But, if you’ve ever had the urge to leave the 9 to 5 world behind, the time has never been better. So, as they said in the ’60s: Let your freelance flag fly. Or something like that.
Jeanette Mulvey is the managing editor of BusinessNewsDaily. She has written about small business for more than 20 years and formerly owned her own e-commerce business. Her column, Mind Your Business, appears on Mondays only on BusinessNewsDaily. You can find more information and other interesting articles on this subject at Business News Daily
This article certainly confirms a lot of my own thoughts on this very topical subject. One thing for sure is that anyone who trusts to things returning to what they were before is simply burying their head in the sand, but what is your take? Do send us your comments.
Why Doing SEO Is Not a Long Term Strategy (by “Darenet”)
The goal of SEO is to quickly gain a high ranking for your site on the search engine pages by finding that magic keyword that will rocket you to the top. But, contrary to the guarantee by Get Rich Quick schemes that they will optimize your site in a few short steps, slow and steady is the real strategy that works. Excellent content, organic link building, and a user friendly site are what will move you up in the ranks.
Expand Your Keyword Philosophy
Relying totally on quick SEO is proving more and more disastrous, as Google and the other SE’s improve their algorithms so that they can now spot pablum more quickly. Instead, focus on your longtail keywords first, since you probably do not have enough content to rank for the most popular keywords in your field. A cooking site, for example, would have a difficult time with the keyword “recipes”, but may have more success with “mideastern recipes”, or “peanut butter recipes”.
You should also continue to refine the process. Once you have built up and narrowed down your keywords to the more popular ones, consider what will happen to them in the future. Always continue your research, even after you are ranking well, so that you have new keywords in the offing in case algorithms change once again, or new competition pops up.
Build Content
Content is king, and the more relevant, quality content you have, the better you will rank with the engines your topic. Continue to create pages constantly. If you get an idea for a page, write it, and worry about the keyword research later. Google places a lot of value on new content. You can always revisit and add focused keywords at a later date. Just remember that your page is in the index, being looked at by the SE’s.
Beware of Aggressive Link Building
Another mistake new webmasters make is link building too quickly and aggressively. Ironically, when Google sees what they consider unnatural link building practices, they actually penalize the site. Instead, build relevant links slowly and organically, concentrating on true value for your site.
No, man does not live by SEO alone. Finding the perfect keywords in the first place is a arduous and tricky business, and even the most ideal supply and demand numbers does not guarantee results for you. You have to keep you bag of tricks fresh and new by expanding your idea of keywords, building content and managing links sensibly.
Darren writes on many topics including technology, free people search, social media and social networks.
Omar Martin’s Death Of A Sales Letter
Ever since marketing online took off there’s been a generally accepted formula for selling information products based around sending long sales letters but in recent years it has become increasingly clear that this formula is no longer the most effective method of marketing online. Omar Martin is an Internet Marketing coach dedicated to training and developing people who want to make money online and is a sales expert dedicated to training and developing high performance sales leaders in every industry. Here is his take on this crucial subject for all online marketers:
Ever since I started marketing online there has been a set “formula” for selling info products. However that formula has kinda “morphed” over the last few years.
Now don’t get me wrong, selling is selling, We all know that. The message has to deliver value, it has to be compelling and it needs to call on the prospect to take action. That’s all fine and dandy. But, The thing is.. the message can be delivered in several ways right…
– A long form sales letter with a call to action at the bottom of a page that scrolls all the way down.
– A sales video with a timed order button that pops up at a specific part of the video.
– A hybrid with a video on top and then a moderate sales message and product description beneath it.
– And naturally… a webinar. (can’t forget those)
So let me ask you this… in your opinion, with the advent of #2, 3 & 4 do you feel that #1 is dead?I mean really? Have long form sales letters seen their day?
Personally, I think that “WE are not our customers.” Everyone is unique and has their own preferences for the way they absorb information.
While the great majority of people are going to respond well to videos over reading a bunch of text, there are still some people that would like to read the words or maybe even print the page to read it later.
Due to iPads, tablets and smart phones.. I know that not many people print things on paper anymore cause they can just read them on the go now a days. I think that video engages the prospect more because it can trigger several parts of the brain simultaneously. A video can follow a story line with pictures thereby connecting words with images and sound. This combination draws the viewer closer than just a written letter.
One of the biggest shortcomings of the long form sales letter has always been the ability for the prospect to scroll. Many studies have been done on this, and in most cases the user begins scrolling down almost immediately after landing on a website. It’s almost like they want to just go see how big the page is before they actually dive in. The challenge here is that this action typically ruins the “big reveal”. It shows the viewer the price long before having a chance to explain the value. Now the visitor has pre-judged the product on price alone and IF they still read the page the sales process has become about justification instead of impulse.
You see there is a big difference between retail selling and conventional selling. In retail, the products are each laid out with price tags on them and the viewer is “shopping”. They are here to make a choice on a product, they have already decided to make a purchase long before they went shopping. But in conventional selling… the prospect sometimes doesn’t even know they need the product, they must be educated first. That’s where real “selling” comes in. And in REAL selling you simply can’t lead with the price if you want to be successful. The prospect can not control the pace of the presentation in real selling. Just like you can’t go to college and skip to the end of the lecture, if you want to pass the test you have to take the class at the professor’s pace. One bit of information is introduced after the other to comprise the complete lesson.
Sales videos allow us to control the pace. We can establish the need and then educate the prospect feature by feature, benefit by benefit thereby building VALUE before the big reveal. This brings up another important point… “The Transport Bar” You know, the little controls at the bottom of the video that allow you to pause, rewind and FAST FORWARD. So, knowing what you know now… do you think that a SALES video would be as effective if it allowed the viewer to Fast Forward to the end and see the price? Of course not. That’s why the EFFECTIVE sales videos of today do not have a transport bar on them. Does this upset you? Well.. if it does then the chances are that you were not going to buy the product anyway. You are probably watching the video through the impatient eyes of a marketer or competitor not the needy eyes of a prospect. WE are not our customers.
That being said… a video should always be “pauseable”, that’s just common sense. In case we have to step away from the computer we should be able to click the screen, pause the video and return later. But, from a marketing perspective, allowing the prospect to control the pace of a sales message is a big NO NO. The salesman sets the tone, the salesman presents the pitch, the salesman closes the deal when the prospect has been primed and ready to commit.
The question I pose before you is this…
“Can a long form sales letter still deliver business value in today’s day and age?”
I would love to get your opinion on this sales letter that I recently created myself : “Read More And Reply Direct To Omar Here”
So that is Omar Martin’s informed view on “The Death Of A Sales Letter”. It certainly confirms a lot of my thoughts and experiences regarding sales letters but what is your take? Do send your comments in the comments box below.
Why Your Business On Facebook Needs A Facebook Business Page
Fortunately I quickly noticed that these so-called strategies are very unpopular and don’t work. I never intentionally do it. The vast majority of Facebook’s almost 800 million users regard their Facebook personal profile as exactly that, personal. Worse still is when that person posts a link directly on their new friend’s Wall which isn’t a welcome or appreciation message but a link to a sales page! The vast majority of people are not primarily on Facebook for business purposes and even those who are don’t want to see their page being hijacked by uninvited strangers. When they see such posts appearing on their newsfeed, or worse posted directly to their Facebook Wall, it will be viewed with the same disdain and distaste that they show towards junk mail, generally addressed as “Dear Homeowner” or “Dear Occupier”, which piles up on the doormat or in the mailbox and then gets sent unopened to the trash bin – who wants to do business with someone who can’t even be bothered to find out your name or what your interests are?.
Remember first that Facebook users use their personal profile for social use, to chat to friends and family when they are away from home, to keep up with people they’ve met whilst travelling or who they’ve formed friendships with in the past. They may well wish to post vacation pictures or family photos for their friends and family to see, and to keep up with what their friends are up to.
More seriously for your business, not only does this mean that are you using a great social tool for something it’s not intended for, Facebook personal profiles are also FAR LESS effective at promoting and selling online. You can only have 5,000 friends anyway. That may sound good to start with but what about the longer-term? Are you just going to settle for 5,000 business contacts and that’s it? That doesn’t sound like a great plan, especially when fan pages are unlimited! It will ultimately get tedious just going out and friending everyone and also sending them a personal message, unless you share a mutual interest with them and are likely to come into contact with them from time to time. Not only that, “real” friends will soon get annoyed when receiving endless marketing status updates from you. Using your personal profile as an outright business page is contrary to the nature of social media, which is after all, to be social.
It’s certainly great to connect with likeminded people through your personal profile, provided that contact through that profile is largely confined to freely sharing information and ideas with them and maybe organising get-togethers and other genuine networking. I enjoy learning from new contacts and keeping up with their news. If there are no strings attached, I’m also happy to share that on my Social Media platforms and am pleased if that helps them a little, especially if they reciprocate and do the same for me. The new “Lists” feature on Facebook will certainly enhance that, but attempting to sell directly to your contacts through your personal profile or aggressively adding them to groups without asking them first and then bombarding them with those same spammy affiliate links is just wrong. If people don’t leave those groups it’s likely to be only because they ignore what’s being posted to them from those groups anyway.
Facebook’s Terms and Conditions expressly prohibit personal profiles being used for direct business use. If flagged up, there is a strong danger that Facebook will close your page down. They can and have done this overnight if they interpret that a page is being mis-used. All the connections to that page have then been lost unless you’ve found a method to back up all those names.
Far better then to leave business activity to your Facebook business page, or pages (more commonly still referred to as fan pages), the place Facebook intends it to be in and where people will expect it to have business content. It’s way more effective and it lets you separate business and social life…which is hopefully a goal that you have in the first place.
Facebook have now made it very easy for users to switch from their personal pages to their business pages and back and post your updates. Simply go to your business page and on the top right side there is an option to use Facebook in that business’s name. You can click that option and then you can use that business page to post updates in that name, reply to comments about your previous posts and choose other pages for your business page to “like”. When you’ve finished there’s an option in the same place to revert back to your personal profile. From there you can go to your other pages and post in those names and choose which other pages to “Like” should the need or wish arise or proceed with using your personal profile.
It’s great to have your own Facebook personal profile if you have an online business. I certainly am very reluctant to do business online with anyone who is invisible on Social Media. But if you want to put Facebook to work properly for your business you need to go a stage further. So if you want to create the structure to put Facebook to use properly for your business, and haven’t yet done so, take that step now and create a Facebook Business profile too.
StumbleUpon – Are You Active On StumbleUpon?
Are you active on StumbleUpon? If your answer is no you could be missing out on a major source of referral traffic.
Which of the main Social Media platforms sends the most traffic to the rest of the internet? Have you assumed that it is Twitter or Facebook? Is it Linkedin? Youtube, surely? Maybe Google Plus, Tumblr, or Posterous? Well if you answered yes to any of them, you’d be wrong. In fact the answer is StumbleUpon. According to stats available from webtracking service Statscounter for the first half of August 2011, StumbleUpon accounted for over 50% of all referral traffic on the Web, comfortably beating Facebook, which accounts for almost 40% of referral traffic, into second place. The rest, including surprisingly Youtube and Twitter, come well behind with less than 4% each!
StumbleUpon often gets overlooked when it comes to deciding which Social Media platform or platforms to be active on and it is difficult to understand how just over 15 million users on StumbleUpon can drive more traffic than Facebook’s 750 million users. It also has it’s critics who state that most StumbleUpon users stay on the site for a minimal period of time. But there are also users who claim that they get all of their traffic from StumbleUpon and that it has been a great traffic generating tool.
Perhaps it’s supporters have achieved their success by understanding how StumbleUpon is structured. StumbleUpon’s own user guide stresses the importance of categorizing each site or link properly.
When you submit a site (which serves as a link on StumbleUpon to your page when listed) , one of the things you’re asked to specify is an interest. There are 4 main reasons why categorizing a site properly is very important:
1) Proper Distribution: The interest determines to whom we’re going to recommend a page. If you correctly categorized a recipe as “Food/Cooking” and StumbleUpon had 5 million users subscribed to this interest, there would be the potential to stumble it to all of them.
2) Keep Your Favorites Organized: If you like different genres of music or different sports and you submit a lot of interesting articles about them, categorizing them properly will help you find them easily in your own tag cloud. Make sure you keep those Bicycling, Tennis, Yoga and Running pages correctly categorized, instead of just submitting them to the more generic interest of Sports.
3) Get Thumbs Ups (And Not Thumb Downs!): By adding a page to the right category, the page gets the best potential ratings. Imagine if a page on cute animals is stumbled to someone who isn’t subscribed to Animals and is much more interested in tech and news articles. That page could easily be rated with a Thumbs Down, even though it may be a great stumble – just not the right one for that user.
4) Help Get Yourself Traffic To Your Site: If you own a site or a blog and submit articles from it to StumbleUpon, make sure they’re properly categorized! If it’s not in the right interest, people who stumble it may thumb it down just because it’s not what they were expecting to see. You want to avoid that as much as possible.
What cannot be denied is that StumbleUpon user numbers have been steadily growing – 500,000 new users signing up each month for most of this year. So why not put aside a few extra minutes to submit each new posting or site update for your business on StumbleUpon (it really is that straightforward to use), make sure you include a StumbleUpon button along with your Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus etc buttons and see for yourself if it really will generate you more traffic?
Mobile Marketing – The Future Of Digital Marketing
Since their launch in the 1980s, mobile phones have come a long way, to such an extent that mobile marketing is increasingly becoming seen as the future of digital marketing and it’s most important area. This would not have been possible if mobile phone useage had not become so widespread and the phones themselves so sophisticated and flexible.
Users now come from every part of the demographic spectrum; from teenagers to senior citizens and from new employeees to senior managers and business owners. Increasingly what is termed Mobile Commerce or “m-commerce” is taking over from Electronic Commerce or “e-commerce” as the preferred choice of purchase for consumers. Research by eBay has revealed that mobile shopping could receive a £4.5bn boost in the UK alone by 2016, rising to as much as £19bn by 2021.
This research also revealed that m-commerce is on the verge of a potential four-fold increase, increasing to £6bn over the next five years, as consumers become more accustomed to shopping from their portable devices.
Consumers in the USA check their emails more from their mobile phones than from their laptop or PC. The UK, Europe and Australia are increasingly set to follow suit. The infrastructure for mobile marketing already exists, as does consumer demand for it, so m-commerce must surely continue to expand exponentially.
Mobile phones are the most direct way to communicate, more so than land lines, laptops or computers, for reasons that speak for themselves. Surprisingly, at least to older commentators, mobile users also consider that mobiles are non-intrusive. Mobile marketing is 100 per cent opt-in, so consumers do not regard mobile communications as being pushed on them.
One in five smartphone owners now use mobile apps to shop and more and more businesses are launching fully optimised mobile sites. The profitability of this sector can only continue to expand. Spending on mobile advertising more than doubled in 2010.
Mobile vouchers have a much higher redemption rate than printable ones. They can be targeted to be more relevant to consumers. Marketing that makes use of “Geo-targeting” will become increasingly possible thanks to the tracking technology now available – many people never leave home without their phone – so different offers and content based on the location can be made available to phone users as they go online via their mobiles. This can be used to offer short-term deals, maybe only for a few hours, based on where a user is visiting and delivered directly via their mobile and personalised to take account of the user’s buying and search history online. This will be able to lead to a higher level of engagement with the user and bring a much better chance of more click-throughs and sales.
Surveys reveal that apps are the most popular m-commerce purchase online with almost 40 per cent of shoppers recently buying one, followed by music (30 per cent), clothes (25 per cent) and e-books (23 per cent). Men are more likely to buy apps or take-away meals from their mobile and women are more likely to buy clothes. Older people tended to buy e-books, younger people apps (especially in the 18 to 34 range) and music.
When asked why they had used their mobile over other purchasing choices, over 50 per cent said they did so as it was the most convenient. For the mobile marketer, this reinforces the notion of the “always-on” consumer. There’s no need to wait for users to check emails, log into Facebook or Twitter, pick up the landline or open their post, the mobile gives a direct route to the pocket!
The full effects of this mobile revolution on the digital world remains to be seen. As the technology evolves, the mobile will become increasingly pervasive and marketers seeking to maximise their revenue and maintain their competitive edge will have to evolve with it. All that remains is for marketers to utilise the technology that will be available or be left behind.
The Launch Of Google Plus
The launch of Google Plus has not been without it’s ironies. Whilst the identity of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s account in Google’s social networking site Google+ (Google Plus) remained a mystery until Google launched a verification procedure, this account easily bagged the most number of early followers. As of 21st August, the Mark Zuckerberg account in Google+ stood at over 470,000 followers whilst that of MySpace founder Tom Anderson, despite Anderson being an active poster on Google Plus, stood at a mere 109,000. Zuckerberg has achieved this without posting a single public post on Google Plus, thus possibly marking the final victory of Facebook over Myspace!
More seriously, is Google Plus the real deal after several false starts by Google in it’s efforts to be a major social networking platform?
Prior to the launch of Google Plus, all the momentum seemed to be with Facebook. Facebook effectively launched its own email address option for users with it’s facebook.com address option for messaging and also was expanding it’s quasi search-engine capacity in what was seen as an attempt to push further into Google’s domain. Facebook ads have also become an increasingly popular alternative to Google Ads for online advertisers. Facebook has also announced the launch of a Video Chat feature on its platform with the help of Skype, one of the most popular internet telephony services. According to Facebook’s own stats, it now has over 750 million active users. As is often said, if Facebook was a country it would have the third largest population on the planet.
Under such an onslaught, it would have been naive to expect Google to remain passive. It has certainly hit back hard with Google Plus. At it’s initial launch, which of these major internet platforms had the most sign-ups in the first month?: 1) Google Plus; 2) Myspace; 3) Youtube; 4) Facebook; 5) Ebay; 6) Twitter?
Well, despite being an invitation only platform, Google Plus hit 20 million unique users around the world within it’s first three weeks, according to figures from online measurement company Comscore, making it the comfortable winner and was topping 25 million users by the first week of August. Of course that still leaves Google some way behind its social networking rivals. Twitter has more than 300 million users and Facebook’s 750 million. Even the more exclusive Linkedin reports it now has 120 million members.
Google Plus has easily been Google’s best attempt to establish itself as a major Social Media player with some saying this will be the beginning of the end for Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. But after an explosive start, latest reports suggest a slowing down in the pace of Google Plus’s expansion. The fact that Google Plus’s success continues to be measured against that of Facebook is part of it’s dilemma as it cannot truly be viewed as having succeeded when it is continually being compared to Facebook rather than being viewed as an entity with an identity in it’s own right.
Google Plus has certainly tapped into a strong current of dissatisfaction with Facebook over issues such as privacy, some spammy applications which can bamboozle all but the most informed of it’s users, it’s attitude over allowing users to be randomly added to groups without their consent (groups that can then spam your wall without your knowledge or permission until you block them) and some very intrusive adverts. Time will tell whether this will be looked back on as just a protest vote against Facebook for it to get it’s house in order or whether this will mark a seismic migration from Facebook towards Google Plus.
Critics of Google Plus state it is a rip-off of Facebook, but is that really so? Being a late comer has it’s advantages. Perhaps Google Plus is successfully combining the best features of Facebook and of Twitter. This is most obviously the case with Google Plus’s Circles feature which enables users to choose who they want to connect with (as they can largely do when choosing who to follow on Twitter), rather than waiting to be approved as a friend thus ending the requirement for mutual “friending” for access to profiles and posts. The Circles feature is also easy to use when a user wants to limit a post to a selected group or groups of connections.
A further not inconsequential factor is the effect of a Google Plus presence, allied with the use of the Google Plus +1 share button, on search engine optimization given Google’s power in this sphere. If it’s impact is going to be stronger than that of Facebook then this could give Google Plus an edge over Facebook – websites would be incentivized to integrate +1 buttons more than Like buttons if that provided the bigger boost to search results. Better search opportunities will be at the core of any business’s choice over whether to be more active on Google Plus or Facebook. After all, the most important thing about online marketing is attracting traffic to your site and businesses are said to be eagerly anticipating the next phase of Google Plus’s expansion.
Does this paint a dark picture for Facebook’s future? A small but influential number of internet marketers and analysts have proclaimed this to be the beginning of the end for Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. Some have even closed their accounts to move over to Google Plus, but Facebook still has a lot going for it.
Although some Facebook apps are discredited many important ones are not. NetworkedBlogs, for instance, is the cornerstone of any serious Blog’s options for being seen and read beyond it’s immediate circle of subscribers. Additionally, businesses and individuals who have invested so much time and effort building their presence and identity on Facebook such as through the use of Facebook Business Pages are unlikely to just close down and move to Google Plus.
Google Plus may have been able to tap in to a wave of dissatisfaction with Facebook from some of it’s users but any advertiser who has been on the receiving end of Google’s notorious slap will hardly look upon Google as a benign and benevolent operator. Nor has Google Plus appeared to have made much impression upon, far less replaced Facebook, in the consciousness of Facebook’s massive teenage user base.
There will be plenty more to come. It was only a matter of time before Google started to integrate Google Plus with YouTube. A new feature that Google has recently built into YouTube allows instant firing up of an online viewing party between you and your nine closest friends or associates through the Google Plus Hangout feature. That’s all thanks to Google’s integration of Google Plus Hangouts directly into YouTube’s video sharing functionality. Over time, as Google Plus expands, you can be sure that the vast array of Google tools will be increasingly added into the Google Plus platform.
No doubt the battle will be joined as both Google Plus and Facebook seek to improve their users’ experiences with both attempting to learn from and outdo each other. For the time being it is to be welcomed that social media users once again have a serious choice of social media platforms instead of the monopoly which had the field virtually to itself until recently. A foot in both camps remains the best option for the foreseeable future, though in the longer term there will come a point where one of them will have the upper hand.
Migrating A Facebook Personal Profile To A Facebook Business Page
Although Facebook was initially intended to be a social network, it’s value for business purposes has quickly become apparent. As is frequently and correctly stated, if Facebook was a country it would be the third largest in the world, behind only India and China. Further, the way Facebook advertising can be structured according to demographic information such as age, gender, location and the interests of each Facebook member, allows for advertisements to be much more specifically targeted than many other advertising options. Not having a Facebook account would be a big own goal for any business or person looking to promote themselves.
A big drawback for businesses is the 5,000 friend limit on personal accounts. Facebook also takes a dim view of businesses outrightly promoting themselves and their products from their personal accounts and reserves the right to close these accounts. Facebook warns that having a personal profile for anything other than a single individual violates its guidelines. Facebook suggests converting such profiles to business pages, or else risk being banned for policy violations. In any event, people who’ve opened personal accounts will quite soon object to having their newsfeeds assailed by constant updates from business users which are intended for their own financial gain. Facebook will investigate complaints about “spam” and close accounts. Even if they don’t, friends will “unfriend” in droves to avoid such “spam”.
Facebook therefore launched “Pages” for business users analogous to the “profiles” that personal users have. For the business world, profiles became pages and followers became fans. It is very much “best practice” to promote your business, product, brand etc from business pages and never directly from your personal profile.
Further, there is no 5,000 follower limit for business users. You can build an unlimited number of fans for your page, eg the Manchester United Professional Sports Team page has over 16 million “Likes” and the Justin Bieber page has over 31 million “Likes”! This option has given business owners and entrepreneurs a dilemma – do they choose to build a business page or a profile? Or should they do both?
In the case of major organisations, sports teams and entertainers, the answer to that is easy. The numbers involved are simply too vast for meaningful social interaction away from that organisation or brand. Also, the higher the profile, the more selective they will usually want to be with what they wish to share. Users entirely looking to use their account for business purposes will not be looking for social interaction away from news directly related to that business. But for those with an intermediate level of contacts such as Internet Entrepreneurs there is much more of a dilemma. Is the best policy to abandon their existing Facebook profiles and build a new page, to have both a page and a profile, or even to look for a way to migrate their existing profile into a business page? Facebook now allows this option. If you have both a personal Facebook profile and one or more business pages there is an option on the top right hand side of each business page offering to use that page as your Facebook page.
You will be taken to a page titled “Profile to business page migration”. Various categories of business options will be presented to choose from. Please note this is the same option you get when creating a business page from your personal account. If you go ahead with the migration option do note that ONLY your profile picture and friends move with you. Everything else will be lost. There are limited back-up options but you run the usual risk of losing data.
This is an improvement on the situation which previously existed which meant converting your Facebook profile into a business page also meant losing all the friends linked to the personal account. In effect, migrating to a business page was the same as starting all over again. Well known people could get away with it but the risk was that past friends connected to your personal profile would not notice what had happened and could forget about you, thus throwing away relationships so carefully developed prior to the switch.
Now that friends can be carried over with the migration, is such a move now a good idea? The arguments against it should be carefully weighed up:
1) You will no longer have automatic access to your friends’ updates and events via the newsfeed. Your “Wall” would revolve solely around activity on your own page and any interaction that takes place between your followers on that page.
That might help you keep your “focus” but is it genuinely “social”, in the way social media is intended to be.
2) Will your friends appreciate now being categorised in effect as followers. Some could view it as a change in relationship and quietly opt not to continue to follow your page. After all, if they perceive you are not genuinely interested in them, why should they be interested in you?
3) The account associated with the profile you previously maintained will be converted to a business account, which will be the sole admin of your new Page. Some options available to personal profiles are not available to business accounts. For instance, pages previously “Liked” from your personal profile will no longer be “liked”. Photographs other than your user photograph will also be lost as there is no facility to carry them over with the “migration”. Old wall posts will disappear.
4) There have been concerns over the performance of the migration tool.
5) Migration is basically a “one-way street” – if it doesn’t work out it cannot be automatically reversed, although Facebook have now instituted an appeals process, reinstatement cannot be guaranteed.
Although more administration is involved, the option of retaining the personal profile and continuing to operate your business pages as extra pages would appear both to offer the most flexibility and to be the safer option. It avoids jeopardising the results of what has been built up already. Relationships with contacts can continue on a level playing field and your credentials for being genuinely committed to social media will be retained. The option to encourage and/or induce friends to “Like” your business pages will be retained and allow them to do so voluntarily. Keeping business matters and promotions to your business pages will also make it far less likely that you will fall foul of Facebook’s user policies. You will also retain the option of selectively sharing posts on your business pages into the newsfeeds of your friends via your personal accounts when you wish to do so.
These are a few of my concerns over “migrating” – perhaps others have a different view? Let’s also remember that Facebook is a constantly moving feast and its policies and procedures are constantly changing.
Experience as a Founder, the early stage of development of a platform like Bewords.com (by Mathieu Maréchal)
Genesis.
It is always difficult to identify the very beginning of an idea or innovation. Thinking back to the time when we first started talking and brainstorming about BeWords, I believe that two main observations came to us: the first was the value chain of the translation business. The second was our experience as language service providers (as a translation agency in other words) and the difficulties we had to face everyday for every scattered quotation request, one-shot customers (with limited budgets, etc.).
Let me come back to the first observation: typically, the value chain is organised as follows: Customer > translation agencies > independent translators.
Translation agencies have the capacity, experience and tools to manage multilingual translation projects, deal with multi-format files or data, and to insure the final quality of the translation (by basically providing proofreading carried out by a second translator). Basically it’s a “unique provider” which is capable to help customers in “great need”.
And they also have the power, tools and processes to market/sell their services and find customers.
But, and this “but” is according to me the key, two trends that can be observed are: 1 – crowd translation, which is the translation by the fans or the community 2 – Internet and the capacity of a single translator (or any expert), based “where ever he/she likes” to be visible and to be reachable by any prospect (anyone can contact/work with anyone else).
So an observable tendency can be summarize as follow: Customer < > independent translators (translation agencies)
PS: Of course, not all types of companies or customers are willing to be in direct contact with the translators. The life of LSP’s (Linguistic Service Providers) is not endangered (or not yet at least…).
Let me describe now the second observation: for a common LSP, to handle small requests, with limited budgets, no-name and scattered prospects and individuals is a real pain, to talk plainly and straightforwardly. One page or less, multiple requests of quotations for a single project and for less than 50 Euros (this is not the margin of the project, but the turnover/amount of the sale …), is a loss of time for a LSP, because LSPs are more in search of recurring business, multilingual projects and basically large volume of source words.
And we observed the same thing for TradOnline (www.tradonline.fr) my translation agency. When we first created this company, we made sure to answer any incoming request and did everything we could to get the project. Then, a bit further along, we announced a “minimum fee” for any project (representing a minimum of 500 words, then later 1000 words…) and we ended up by declining some requests, for which it was just not profitable to spend time handling the project. What a shame, right? Declining incoming business…this is not acceptable…And so we created www.Bewords.com: our solution to 1 – surf on a new trend in our business and 2 – capture the scattered business, the thousands and more (probably millions) of small business and individual translation needs/projects and 3 – please our community of translators (that we wish to cherish).
The early stage of the development
The development of the platform was more difficult than we expected. One reason was our low experience, limited budget and wishes to provide everything from the day one of the opening (I must say that we failed in this goal).
The second reason was that we also had to drive the development of our translation company at the same time…and as we are neither hundreds of people on the team, nor even dozens of collaborators, the load of daily work is far more than 35h per week.
Many of what are called “details” (I would say hassle…) appeared very quickly. This is the drawback of wishing to do everything by ourselves…due to our limited budget and a bit also by “pride”, will of controlling everything and building a strong and real asset (depending on any SAS solution, external code, etc.).
I don’t remember all of them but let me think…
– The terms of use…what a fight…it is not that our lawyer was not as good as we would have needed but the process of describing every detail of the platform and what it does, doesn’t, can not do, should do if, won’t do unless…., every little detail of the features, trying to anticipate every misuses of it, etc…I let you imagine what have been our dreams/nightmare at night…
– The translator database : how it is structured. How to build the algorithm of searching among translators (why translator X appears before translator Y, what are the levers we want to give to the translators to allow them to appear among the first providers in the results, in other words, the structure of the ranking, etc.). How to invite translators to join Bewords? Etc.
– The long road to determine the best compromise between offering a lot of features and keeping the simplicity of use. A daily concern for our team.
To conclude, it has been a very rewarding experience. Bewords is growing day after day, we’ll keep working as hard as we have done until now to bring clients and translators together, the challenge has only just begun!
About Mathieu Maréchal:
An entrepreneur with a passion for the Web and languages, Mathieu Marechal has lived in several countries (Belgium, United States and now France) and has launched the translation agency Trad Online, which is headquartered in Paris and also has offices in 4 other countries in Europe.
In 2010, Mathieu launched a totally new and innovative concept which aims to revolutionize how business is done on the translation market: www.bewords.com
BeWords is a marketplace enabling translators and customers to work together directly, with no constraints. The site includes community features, a personal profile for each translator, a project management tool, online payment, etc.
About Bewords
BeWords.com is an innovative, open and community-oriented translator/customer market place. The idea is to give clients requiring translation services for their documents (such as web pages, presentation documents, etc.), the opportunity to find translators on their own and work with them “directly”. In this way clients can save money and quickly find professional translators for free. If you are looking to expand your activities you can get the best value out of using this service.
