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Posts Tagged ‘social media tools’

The social media consultant trap

Sunday, May 22nd, 2011 by shahar

You probably noticed that there is a new social media marketing consultant born every minute, if not every second.
Sometimes it feels like everybody that knows how to add Facebook friends is becoming a social media expert.
This causes problems to both sides, clients and consultants. It is not because there is a lot of competition.

The client is in a trap because he cannot tell who really has the knowledge to help him, cannot tell if the person really understands marketing a business, ends up making a decision based on price and regrets this decision over time; besides the fact that he never gets the business results he was looking for at the beginning.

The new coach or consultant thinks this is the shiny thing to be in and to make a lot of money fast, focus on learning more and more tools and not marketing concepts and fails to realize that positioning himself as a social media expert will not lead to long lasting prosperity.

Social media is just a small piece of marketing. It is not isolated and will not work as the only form to market a business. Yes, social media marketing is important, can bring amazing results and can be very cost effective but is just one piece of the puzzle.

Besides, focusing only social media tools can turn a consultant into a glorified assistant and not into a solution provider. Failing to understand business and marketing strategies can make this disaster even bigger.

Good coaches and consultants train themselves to see the big picture for their client, a big picture that can be achieved, pin point gaps, bring new forms of revenue and have a structured process to do so. They also understand the need to mix online and offline marketing strategies. When it comes to social media tools, they understand the use of those tools from a marketing perspective, how to generate more awareness, sales and leads. It is way more than telling a company they need to be connected and transparent.

They also need to understand positioning and online optimization.

Unless they love to go from new thing to new thing like a monkey jumps from one tree to another.

Tags: social media consultants, Social Media Marketing, social media tools
Posted in Social Media Marketing | No Comments »

Social media marketing- How to use Quora

Thursday, January 27th, 2011 by shahar

This looks like it is a tool that will catch on and have some very good uses for businesses.
This post from Ben Ayers gives some very good tips:

1. For a snapshot of recent notifications, hover your cursor over the home link at the top of the page (if you see a red notification count). You’ll see a few sentences of highlights (as shown in the above screenshot).

2. Questions can be voted up or down. Voting a question up makes it appear in your stream against your profile.

3. Voting a question up also shares that question with your followers.

4. To cancel out your vote up, click the up arrow again. Do not click down to cancel the up, this will in fact collapse the question meaning it will not appear in your stream.

5. You can be public or anonymous on a thread. The option to do this is in the top right of the screen when you are looking at a question. If you choose to be anonymous, all of your interaction with that question will be marked as ‘anonymous user’ instead of linking to your profile. Anonymity does not follow through to other questions though – it’s a question-by-question option.

6. You can link to topics or people simply by typing in speech marks in your question or answer, like this link to Public Relations. As you type, the options appear for your link.

7. Follow people and topics that are of interest to you as this will make your Quora browsing experience infinitely more personalized and useful.

8. For privacy, you can ask Quora to not allow search engines to index your profile – i.e. your name. This is simple to control, under settings at the top of the page. Also simple to find in the same section is the ‘deactivate your account link’ should you want to do that.

9. Quora is very democratic – answers to questions only appear in reverse-chronological order by default. As soon as they start getting votes from readers, they move up or down based on popularity. So always try to say something useful as opposed to braggy, and it will do the site and your usefulness on it wonders.

10. Fill out your profile in as complete a way as you can, because it is very search engine friendly. After under one month on Quora personally, my profile already appears in Google’s front page of search results for my name.

Tags: how to use quora, quora, social media tools
Posted in Social Media Marketing | 1 Comment »