MyProjectTracker – The Blog

While browsing Smallbiztrends yesterday, I came across an article from Lisa Barone on myths that she has observed in businesses small and large in the area of social media engagement. In a nutshell, the focus was on the areas of;

1. Who undertakes the activity in the business i.e. making sure that the person can correctly represent your company in the space and has a social engagement competence!
2. That community building is about off-line as much as on-line.
3. That you don’t have to be friends with everyone – just the people who will benefit from engaging with you and visa versa (it’s about developing your business). Getting lost in inane babble that is not relevant to you or your business should be avoided!
4. That even if you’re great at social media, you can’t present a poor product or service to the market. Too right! Social media will work against you if you try.
5. That to seriously engage in the use of social media can and should determine the way that you operate your business.

All in all, this article was about handling social media as an integrated and planned part of your marketing activities. It is simply no use engaging with your community on a fire and forget basis.  Your business needs to;

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Marketing and sales, the key functions of any business to generate the revenues to keep you in operation. But when is the right time to start marketing and sales activity when you are a start-up business?

This question needs a bit of thought. When you are ready is the right answer, but what on earth does that actually mean?

Are those who shout their intentions from the roof-tops and let the world know that they are coming before they actually do correct?

Or is it more appropriate to stay quiet working away diligently in a “black box” only targeting a selected audience to achieve your purpose.

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I was perusing the Small Business News earlier and came across this post on business planning and how it applies to your blog and/or website. I have to be honest, the concept of a business plan for the blog was something that struck me as being slightly over the top.

What was actually being suggested was ensuring that you have goals and plans set for your business blog rather than the full scale monster business plan that we are all familiar with.  This made complete sense to me.

Unless your blog is a hobby and you are literally writing purely to share your ideas/views with the world, then the chances are you are hoping that your blog will bring customer traffic to your site. If this is the case, then the message that you need to put on it should be relevant and compelling to the person reading it – especially if you are going to convert them into a paying customer.
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This post will only make sense if you arrived from or use twitter or indeed like the Follow Friday pushes that happen on twitter. It supports my #ff choices for this week.

A little mix of some of the people who keep me informed, thinking and smiling with the odd bit of quirkiness.

@ali_davies : writes some great advice for those amongst us who are mostly home based and/or working in single-person companies. Easy to read and digest.

@CindyKing : who tweets and writes about the very broad and sometimes complex world of international sales and marketing.  She’s a bit of a twitter lover as well

@destraynor : One of the great team at Contrast who keeps it real. He likes all things web-apps and does the UX work (UX=user experience).  Pings out sage advice, some really serious stuff and then tops it up with tweets like;

“There’s 3 billion males in the world. If I could just get 1%, just 1% of that market, <insert silly business plan> and we’ll all be rich!” ….. (( funny because it’s so true!))

or

Sesame street for big people – made me smile too, but then I’m a little odd!

That’s all for today folks.

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I read a great post from Chris Brogan the other week about using a blog post to be able to share more about why you recommend following someone on Twitter. I thought it was a great concept – so here goes my little lot for this week – hope you find some merit in them.

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Twitter. The Pandora’s box of social media marketing? or simply an inane babble that takes time out of your day to the detriment of your business.

Views on twitter are mixed from my experience, from the avid fan to the “hmm,  I’m not sure it’ll work for me” type to the “total waste of time and effort” brigade.

Where am I in this mix. Probably erring on the side of avid fan and can absolutely see where Twitter fits into our social media marketing and engagement effort.

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