Business Coaching

Google used to have just two competitors...that number has grown.

Google reported just two competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft, in their 2008 10-K report. For 2009, however, their number of competitors grew to 10.

Facebook, Twitter and Yelp are listed as Google competitors, as well as specialty search engines like WebMD.

Google probably didn’t anticipate social networking sites or specialty/specific search engines being their competitor, but that’s a fact. As Google stated: “Our filing reflects the reality that we compete against a number of alternatives, including traditional search engines, e-commerce and specialty search sites, social networks, and other forms of online and offline advertising.”

Something like this that’s happening to Google is important to keep in mind for any business. As times change, new competitors in various niches can pop up…and your business should be prepared for anything.

In business coaching, business owners will hear often that they should always be prepared. If the recession didn’t teach it enough, it rings true; more competitors in seemingly different niches can come up, as is the situation for Google, or with technology advancements, what many businesses found during the recession.

To see if your business might benefit from a business coaching session, take our Business Health Check. A healthy business makes for a happier business owner.

PleaseRobMe.com is meant to get Twitter users to be careful what they Tweet.

Many people think a plus to social Media sites is that anyone and everyone can find you for networking opportunities or to get back in touch, discover where you work, who you’re dating and Pictures of your kids, dogs and cats. It’s all accessible, depending on your privacy settings.

A con to social Media? Anyone and everyone can find you and get back in touch, discover where you work, who you’re dating and Pictures of your kids, dogs and cats.

Why are the pros also cons? If people with good intentions know most of your info, people with bad intentions out there in the blogosphere and Twittersphere do, too. People know what your plans are, where you’re going and why, if you’re vacationing somewhere exotic or if you’re home sick from work. This can lead to making yourself a victim of burglary.

Mashable reported about a possible Twitter-related burglary, and a site called Please Rob Me was started to get people to be more careful about what they’re announcing to the world. It has a live Twitter feed that mainly features accounts of people who have theirs linked to FourSquare or Gowalla, sites that publicly tweet where a person is.

For the record, if used mainly for business, sharing advice and networking, this doesn’t really apply to you. But when you start tweeting about being away on a business trip or attending a business conference in another city, just be careful what you say!

Marla Erwin helped Whole Foods master social Media.

Think you’re busy trying to constantly update your own Twitter page? Imagine handling more than a million Twitter followers.

Marla Erwin, Interactive Art Director for Whole Foods, is credited with Whole Foods’ social Media success. In its first year on Twitter, Whole Foods gained a million followers. Since starting with Twitter, Whole Foods now has several separate accounts for users who have more specific questions about the store’s products — a Twitter account for cheese, one for Whole Foods recipes, etc.

How did Marla garner so many followers? She incorporated user-generated content onto Whole Foods’ Twitter and Facebook accounts. Recipes, product ratings and reviews and comments on the Whole Foods’ blog all went onto their Twitter feed.

Marla then went on to use Facebook and Twitter for different uses: Facebook she uses for more editorial content and to start discussions among fans and friends (since users can see others’ comments on Facebook, it’s easier to have a discussion), and Twitter she uses for Whole Foods promotions, information for customers, to answer customers’ questions and tweet out links to Whole Foods’ blog.

Read the whole article here,  and see if any of what Marla did for Whole Foods’ Twitter and Facebook can be used for your business.

As with traditional marketing, it’s all about opportunities. When you find opportunities to sell your products and services, you don’t shy away, do you? You take advantage! The same with online marketing – find opportunities to get the word out about what you’re promoting. However, with online marketing, it can be trickier. Where do you find these opportunities? And with social Media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, sure, you might have 500+ followers/friends, but do they really care about what you’re promoting?

If you’re lost in terms of online marketing, you need to be able to first find opportunities which you can expand upon in terms of marketing. Don’t know how to start? The following tools will at least give you a good idea of what’s being said about your company or industry online, and where users spend their time:

• Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) emails you whenever a chosen
keyword (e.g., company or product name, CEO name, campaign tagline,
industry term, etc.) is mentioned in any form of online content.
• Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com/) scans the blogosphere
for any keyword or phrase you type in.
• Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com/) scans all Twitter posts for your
selected keyword or phrase.
• SiteVolume (http://www.sitevolume.com/) reports how often keywords or
phrases appear on Twitter, Digg, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr.
• SocialMention (http://www.socialmention.com/) enables you to search
keywords and phrases by specific channel category (blogs, images, news,
video, etc.), or as a whole, and to receive email alerts when a new mention
is posted.
• Socialcast (http://www.socialcast.com/) offers real-time analytics on microblogging
and other social activities and identifies individual users’ level of
activity. Unlike most tools, it also can quantify the value of “lurkers” who
aren’t visibly posting comments, but by how often they frequent a site.

Take note of what’s being said about your company or whatever keywords you search, whether it’s positive, negative or neutral; what people
are passing along to friends; and if there are any particular needs or customer
segments that aren’t served. These are all opportunities for marketing…

See? He's got the hang of it.

To everyone who says they “can’t Twitter” or “don’t get it,” look — it’s so easy, a dog can do it.

No really, a dog can Twitter.

Mattel has come up with something called “Puppy Tweets.” If you think your dog could tweet some worthwhile nuggets of wisdom, sign Fido up for his own Twitter account, then pay $30 to buy Puppy Tweets, a plastic sound-and-motion sensor that clips onto your dog’s collar and sends out several pre-written tweets.

For example, “YAHOOOOOOO! Some days you just gotta get your bark on.”

Since anyone – or any animal – can tweet now, there’s really no excuse for anyone to not be an active tweeter.

Social Media gurus don't look like this guy.

In this day and age, with social Media marketing taking off like wildfire, social Media consultants and gurus are popping up just about everywhere, ensuring that if you hire them, they’ll make your social media presence well-known faster than you could do it yourself.

But how credible are these “gurus”?

If you’re considering hiring one of these consultants to help you out, a piece of advice: check out their experience and make sure they have evidence that they helped increase sales for a company with their social media expertise. Because the trend of people branding themselves as “social media gurus” is not slowing down; The WhatsNextBlog first examined Twitter bios in May 2009 and found 4,487 people claiming to be social media experts. This month they examined Twitter bios again, and found 16,000 claiming expertise.

It’s true that social media marketing will help with business coaching, and also with business coaching clients. But with 16,000 experts online, be careful who you trust – and more importantly, who you pay to market your company.

Not all Tweeters wear trench coats, but it's an option.

So hot, that a few Tweeters with upwards of 24,000 followers have been featured in February’s Vanity Fair issue. And only one of them is an actress.

Of the six women featured, most were writers or marketing strategists, and gained their thousands and millions of followers by constantly tweeting. Every day and well into every night, these women might as well have their phones attached to their hands. But by Twittering interesting 140-character posts just about all the time and engaging with other users and followers, they’ve become Twilebrities. It means exactly what you think it means: a Twitter celebrity.

The article does point out the downside to all they do: they don’t receive a dime in terms of getting paid to actually tweet. In fact, even though Twitter is worth $1 billion, it has very little revenue and absolutely no profit.

But, with thousands to millions of followers, these women do gain exposure to whatever they’re tweeting about. And that’s the easiest way to market anything: tell people about something great, and they’ll be sure to tell others.

Side note: judging from the photo of these Twitterholics in Vanity Fair, tweeting consistently apparently gives you great gams. So, there’s that to gain from tweeting, too.

Social Media marketing is how many companies market campaigns today.

Regardless of whether you read BusinessCoaching.com regularly or not, unless you’ve been under a rock this last year, you should know that social Media marketing efforts have increased — and have reaped great rewards. Track how many sales or clients you get from Twitter, APP, drive traffic to your website and ultimately, market yourself via the Internet and social media sites. Social media marketing is a great business coaching resource.

But if you’re still overwhelmed by how to market your company with all the sites and strategies out there, hopefully these five tips will help make it a bit clearer. You don’t have to use all the sites out there to market yourself.

1) Thoroughly explore your options: You don’t have to join the big sites like Facebook and Twitter to have an effective social media marketing campaign. There are several smaller, lesser-known sites that cater to specific niche audiences. For a list of these sites, click here.

2) Tailor your efforts to each site: It’s important to remember, especially if you’re marketing via niche sites, to interact with users in a manner they’ll relate to. Customize your message to every different audience you’re contacting so you’re “speaking their language.”

3) Track your efforts: It’s easier to do than it sounds. Incorporate shortened URLs when you campaign on each site. TinyURL, bit.ly and owl.ly are great free services that allow you to shorten a normal URL (key for Twitter, where you can only post 140 characters at a time), making it easier to share links, encourage others to spread the word, and make it easy to track your efforts, providing in-depth stats like where users who clicked the link are located and how many times each link was clicked. Then all that’s left to do is see what’s working, what’s not, and alter your campaign as needed.

4) Keep it real: No one likes spammers, shameless self-promotion or trained parrots. Don’t keep repeating the same things over and over again, or you won’t sound genuine at all…more like a repetitive ad. Also take into consideration that usually if you’re a big brand, you’ll be targeted more harshly. So be careful, but also be honest, be real, be interesting, and don’t insult people’s intelligence. The easiest way to do this is to touch on hot topics in the news, or newsworthy stories and issues that relate to your business and industry. These will attract attention, start conversations and will eventually relate to your message and draw even more attention to your campaign.

Last year was a huge year for social Media. All sorts of sites gained massive popularity – Twitter and Digg, for example – and

Now that it’s 2010, let’s look back and see how social Media sites changed the way some things were done:

sales: Dell has tracked over $6.5 million in revenue to Twitter. Yes, it’s possible to track sales from Twitter…but Twitter is still in its infancy; Dell earned $61 billion last year, so its Twitter sales aren’t that much in the scheme of things…however, it does prove that social media is having an effect on sales — so much so, that companies can now track sales that stem from Twitter.

Local marketing: How did you find out about that restaurant? Did a friend share it as their Facebook status? Were you walking down the street with your iPhone out and saw it on Yelp’s Monocle or Urbanspoon’s Scope? Did someone Twitter about it, and their Twitter feed is linked to their Facebook and LinkedIn statuses, so all those networks saw it? Social media greatly helped people find out where people were, and it also helped people find local hot spots. The fusion of mobile, social and local started to create real opportunities to change consumer behavior. What was true for early adopters in 2009 will apply in the years ahead…and new applications and ways to market various products and services will probably pop up, too.

Death: We now mourn in public. Michael Jackson inspired millions — billions? — to grieve openly. Friends and strangers opened about Brittany Murphy, Billy Mays and DJ AM.

news-sourcing: As early as 2004, journalists were embracing blogs as a legitimate news source, and not surprisingly, they were among the first to embrace Twitter. Will they similarly lead the charge with every latest and greatest social media platform? Using these platforms as sources and to find and get news opened the door to ways for the media to interact with their audience.

Celebrity Access: In January, Ashton Kutcher joined Twitter. He was followed by Ellen DeGeneres,Oprah, wife Demi Moore,. We got to see what they saw, from Chris Brown’s view of 90,000 fans in Manila to Chad Ochocinco’s view of his opponents’ football field. Vin Diesel posts a couple of times a month on his Facebook page, where he has over 7 million fans. And after Kanye West grabbed the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards, he apologized on his blog. John Mayer moved on from constant MySpace updates to constant tweeting. Yes, there are ghost tweeters and plenty of opacity, but now that fans have this direct, personal, and even unfiltered access, it’s not going away.

Mari Smith, Social Media Marketing Specialist Extraordinaire

Then meet Mari Smith.

Mari Smith is living proof that social Media strategies work – she has only been active on Facebook and Twitter since 2007, but already has well over 8,000 friends and fans and Facebook, and an astounding 40,000+ following on Twitter.

She is a Relationship Marketing Specialist and Social Media Keynote Speaker, Trainer and Consultant. Dubbed the “Pied Piper of the Online World” by FastCompany.com, Smith helps independent professionals, entrepreneurs and business owners accelerate their business profits using an integrated social marketing strategy, with particular focus on Twitter and Facebook.

Her mission is to engage and educate CEOs and executives about social media to increase their skills, knowledge and integrity about social media, how to develop powerful profitable relationships using social media, and how these can help them. Business development coaching via social media is just what Smith specializes in.

She is an in-demand speaker for good reason – and she’s featured on Brad Sugars’ “Master Mentors” this week. If you’re still skeptical about whether social media marketing can really improve your business, listen to her audio interview here.