I like Posterous. It’s incredibly easy to update and create a quick and effective blog setup. Sounds ideal!

But I’ve made the call to move away from Posterous - at least from the perspective of building the MyProjectTracker on-line profile.

Why?

The posts I was putting up there were doing nothing for the MyProjectTracker rankings.

The original decision to create the second site was to facilitate pure project management type posts on the primary blog and to pop other “stuff” on the Posterous site.

Within 3 weeks, the MyProjectTracker alexa ranking had dropped like a stone. The site stopped appearing where once it was ranked on page one for certain key searches relevant to our business.

Simply put, Google lost any interest that it had – and it took a long time to start building this up.

Also, on Posterous, we don’t really own the data. It sits on their servers and is controlled by them.

The posts we put up on our blog are our thoughts and musings. You may like them, you may not – but they are ours and we would prefer to control and “own” them.

So we swapped back again to putting everything in the one place.

Google is starting to care about us again.

As a business that will be selling its products on-line – this is kind of key!!

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;

1. Understand what it wants out of social media e.g. customer updates, sales, product information, revenue generation, customer service….
2. Create a plan of approach on how you are going to achieve this.
   1. Who is going to engage in the space on your behalf?
   2. What can they say or more importantly can they not say.  Are you happy for it to be a fully “open” space where everything and anything can be discussed in relation to your business? You need to find the right person who can engage to talk the language of your business without sounding contrived.
   3. Which tools are you going to use and how are you going to use them? There is a myriad of tools available to you, but not all are appropriate necessarily.
   4. If you are going to need some guidance, there is lots of reading out there in blogs and books. If you are really not sure, then make sure you have a bit of cash to go and get some help. This is your business image!
   5. Include ROI measurements otherwise you won’t know whether it’s working or not.
3. Ensure that the person/people chosen to present the company in social media understand what is expected of them and that they have the time to engage properly.
4. Review and measure constantly.

These are just a few considerations, there are plenty more.

The point is to treat your social media marketing as seriously as you treat other marketing activities if you are going to engage in it.. otherwise you will flounder or worse – create a bad reputation/image for your business.

What else would you add to this list?

Photo:KevinDooley

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.

Marketing and Sales : Start early to raise awareness?

Conscious of the fact that marketing and sales are different functions, for the purpose of this article, I am going to discuss the two under the umbrella of “awareness”. For the experts in either – I apologise in advance for any misrepresentation.

I had an interesting chat with a colleague today about his previous life in a major start-up in the late 1980′s/early 1990′s. When they started out, the company had thirty people working for it all of whom were told to say absolutely nothing to anyone about what they are doing.

There was no marketing. Sales meetings with potential targeted clients were undertaken without fuss. This tactic was continued until the company floated in the stock exchange 10 years later and they are now making revenues of about $500million/quarter.

Essentially they operated black box and managed to grow without shouting their names from the roof tops when they were in start-up mode. They built a strong business by creating a very definite set of rules on their approach and sticking to their guns.

This contrasts strongly with the shout it from the roof-tops (e.g.  social media marketing) approach. This tactic is about raising the product/service awareness to as wide an audience as possible. Many newer businesses, ourselves included, have raised awareness even before commercial launch as a way of generating interest that will (hopefully) be converted into sales post launch.

So which is the right way to go?

For us, the decision to start our marketing and sales in advance was made for two reasons;

Firstly, to start generating an engagement with possible clients so that we were not starting blind at commercial launch.  Secondly because we are an open company and are happy to share our experiences as we progress with people who might be interested in such things. Openness is good currency in my view.

This does not necessarily make the decision we made the “right one” though. We are open for criticisms, potentially showing our hand to competitors etc. We are happy we made the right call for ourselves, but this does not make it right for you and your business.

What are your thoughts on when the right time to start marketing and sales is?

Photo : Suneko

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.

So what should I put in this blog plan?

When you consider this, having a business plan or set of goals for your blog is critical to your success. It needs to answer the following questions at a minimum;

What exactly am I trying to achieve?

Increase in sales, brand awareness, product awareness, customer information portal… Once you have determined this, then the next question you should try and answer is;

What message am I going to put out there?

Demonstrating subject expertise is the number one reason for blogging in business. Show what you know, help people out and let them find you if they want more of your help (product or service).  Make it relevant to your product and/or service without doing a sales pitch.

Some examples; Jim and Danny are a couple of experts at doing this. They don’t ram their services down your throat, they let you know what they know about and give you the opportunity to find them if you are interested in working with them.

How do I construct a decent blog post?

The first thing that I would say is “be yourself”. Use your own language and phrasing and don’t be forced. If you are, it comes through over time and people will stop reading you.

If you’d like to read a seriously detailed and relevant (I thought) “how to” on writing a blog, check out this post from Lisa Barone who knows a thing or two on the subject!

How am I going to measure its success?

There are two matrices that are relevant from my perspective;

1. Increased readership.

2. Click through to the place on your site where they spend money directly or that will lead them to spending money!

Build into your plan how you are going to measure these things and what actions you will take to ensure that both things are happening. Remember, it’s a slow process and things may go wrong.

Don’t worry, it will pay off in the end if you stick to your plan.

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.

@jimconnolly – the guy gives very generously his thoughts and expertise on differing aspects of marketing. His posts are easy to read and always have more than a couple of pointers to give you food for thought.

@bloggertone – ok, a little bit bias on this one as I contribute, but still worth following for some great chat and articles about many things business.

@badbanana – found this one thanks to Chris actually. It’s my kind of humour.  Slightly off-base too. Thought it might appeal to some of you. Suss out the blog link. Oh, and I like his ideal – just become a handsome billionaire !

That’s my little list for next week.  Following lots of great people so hopefully you will enjoy some/all of them that I pop up over the coming weeks.

Photo : Todd Barnard

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.

So what have we (@barneyausten, @eoinredmond and @myprojectracker) learnt as we developed our profiles?

Lesson 1:

When we started, it was all about the numbers. We signed up for all those silly auto-follower type applications and essentially swamped ourselves with meaningless drivel for the most part.  Because we ended up following up such a huge number, we were losing the quality items from people we should really have been following in a variety of fields.

If we were starting out again, we would take our time and use the various twitter search capabilities to enable us to identify and follow people who we were interested in. Which reminds me, must do a cleanup!

Lesson 2:

Because we ended up following alot of the wrong people, our ability to actually converse with them along with the ability to sent quality “RT’s”on was seriously diminished.

So assuming you are now following people of interest you now need to

Respond, engage, shoot the breeze, banter…. Yes, you need to take the time out to talk to the people you are following and who are following you.  You never know when it can pay dividends.

Again, there are some mixed views on whether you should tweet your life out there. For us, we are not afraid to put a bit of ourselves out there a bit (Eoin and his penchant for Liverpool FC and Golf!, me with my slightly obscure musical tastes and venting the odd frustration!). Why – because we think it makes us more real.

Lesson 3 :

The company twitter account. We started sending out all sorts from it. Now we hardly send anything, most people will not engage with a company  (yes, there are exceptions I know) and it is not the appropriate address to be sending personal items from anyway.

The plan for the company twitter account now is for product notifications and support. We will encourage new sign-ups to follow us so they have one (of a few) locations to go if there are problems or they want to keep in touch.

Lesson 4:

Self promotion. Using the medium purely for self and company promotion. This is a big Yawn and people won’t follow. What did we learn? Mix and match. Some promotion is ok and will generate leads and contacts etc.  We are just trying to get the balance right.

So  what – you’re using Twitter – wahoo. What are you getting out of it?

Lots actually. Business contacts, beta testers (90% of them) and loads of really useful information from tweets about articles. Chances are you came to this post via Twitter. Oh and some great humour when things are feeling grim in the office!

Twitter works however you want it to. It just takes a bit of getting used to and I would not admit to being an expert - simply someone who wants to share his experience with the medium.

Does twitter work for you and your business? Share your story with us.

Photo : JMiles on Flickr with thanks