Business Coaching

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.

Beetles have survived centuries by adapting.

It’s a new year, and if last year taught us anything, it’s to always be prepared for whatever the economy has in store, good or bad. It’s a basic law of Darwinism: adapt, or you won’t last through the winter. The survival of the fittest is precisely why some companies have gone under (resistant to change, stuck in their ways) in these times… but others haven’t.

Financial Times published an article early last year that still applies now about how surviving the recession could be compared to Darwinism and how animals that adapted to their conditions survived. The Financial Times is quick to point out in the article that “It is not the strongest species that survives, or the most intelligent, but the ones who are most responsive to change.” Know what the most adaptable being on earth is?

The beetle.

Beetles are some of the most adaptable living organisms in the world, and have survived centuries because of their talent for adapting as the times change. Companies have to sharpen their points of difference to survive.

Bears are strong, but now endangered. Eagles are smart, but now endangered. The beetle, however, is still around, due to its adaptability. It’s something for business owners to think about, especially since the recession is still very much here for many businesses. Being stubborn, resistant to change, or just plain being in denial won’t help you or your business through a recession.

How is your business doing? Fill out the Business Health Check and find out if your business has what it takes to adapt with any and every market change.

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.

When it comes to search engines, do you use the reliable standby Google, the newer Bing, or any of the other search engines out there (Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, etc)?

Here’s something interesting that may sway some die-hard Google users to start using Bing: On New Year’s Eve, Times Square was evacuated when the bomb squad was called to investigate a suspicious van. Don’t worry – it was nothing. But what was interesting was what the two search engines turned up as people in the city were scrambling about for information.

Search engines pull up all sorts of websites depending on keywords, including results from Twitter and Facebook. Simply typing the generic “Times Square” into Google turned up news results that were two days old about New Year’s Eve events and preparations for the upcoming festivities. When typed into Bing, however, yielded real-time headlines from various news outlets like ABC and CNN, thus giving the scrambling Internet searchers information they were looking for.

Now, this isn’t to discredit Google at all. In fact, Google was showing real-time results, too..theirs were just hidden. Google’s real-time updates page under “show options” and then “updates” with any search, had all the good stuff; headlines, tweets, everything that described what was going on in real-time was on that page.

If Google just moved its real-time results to its main search page instead of hidden on another page, it’d not only be better for Google, but it’d be great for search engine users: less frustration because they find what they’re looking for.

Use this Google/Bing example to think in terms of your own business…is there anything that your company could improve upon and beat competitors to?

We just found out that ActionCOACH was ranked No. 1 in Entrepreneur’s Franchise 500’s Business Coaching category again!

The company also ranked No. 65 out of 500 franchises…up substantially from its ranking of No. 103 last year!

ActionCOACH has been ranked number one since January 2004 … so congratulations TEAM for continuing to maintain leadership in the category!

Every year, the New Oxford Dictionary chooses a “word of the year.” The word is usually representative of the times, and is a new addition to the dictionary.

How fitting that this year’s word of the year is…unfriend. Social media has taken over! Whether you’re using it for personal use or business use, just about everyone has joined LinkedIn, Facebook and/or Twitter to promote themselves.

According to the New Oxford dictionary: “Unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook. As in, ‘I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.’”

The finalists for word of the year are also telling of the times, as many of them have to do with the more rampant use of technology, social media terms, and the economy:

sexting – the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cellphone

hashtag – a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets

intexticated – distracted because texting on a cellphone while driving a vehicle

netbook – a small, very portable laptop computer with limited memory

paywall – a way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers

freemium – a business model in which some basic services are provided for free, with the aim of enticing users to pay for additional, premium features or content

funemployed – taking advantage of one’s newly unemployed status to have fun or pursue other interests

zombie bank – a financial institution whose liabilities are greater than its assets, but which continues to operate because of government support

Funny that “business coaching” wasn’t in the running…it is the second-fastest growing industry in the world, after all…and is especially relevant in today’s economy.

Are you familiar with these new words? Better get familiar…especially if you plan on promoting yourself with social media sites and being social media savvy.

Fall is approaching.

With the change in weather, often this is the time of year when most people get sick. And even worse this year, in addition to viruses running rampant, a pandemic is going around, too.There have been about 70 deaths from swine flu in the U.S. so far this year, and people are taking precautions against the pandemic. Sometimes it takes a pandemic like the swine flu to force people to really take care of themselves; 40,000 deaths per year in the U.S. are from seasonal flu.

This can actually be compared to business. Let’s say an aspect of your business gets a “fever” – maybe you’ve never kept track of your numbers and it’s catching up to you – your business is at risk of getting sick.

Just like not getting enough sleep will eventually catch up to you and cause your immune system to weaken, not keeping all departments and business systems in top health will eventually catch up with your business.

Your company will be “sick” until you work to make it better. And that’s never good – sickness can slow any business down, and even cost it in sales, marketing or budget.

If your business gets a cold, treat it. Because if you let it go, before you know it, it could develop into something worse – like the swine flu.

And even worse this year, in addition to viruses running rampant, a pandemic is going around, too.

There have been about 70 deaths from swine flu in the U.S. so far this year, and people are taking precautions against the pandemic. Sometimes it takes a pandemic like the swine flu to force people to really take care of themselves; 40,000 deaths per year in the U.S. are from seasonal flu.

This can actually be compared to business. Let’s say an aspect of your business gets a “fever” – maybe you’ve never kept track of your numbers and it’s catching up to you – your business is at risk of getting sick.

Just like not getting enough sleep will eventually catch up to you and cause your immune system to weaken, not keeping all departments and business systems in top health will eventually catch up with your business.

Your company will be “sick” until you work to make it better. And that’s never good – sickness can slow any business down, and even cost it in sales, marketing or budget.

If your business gets a cold, treat it. Because if you let it go, before you know it, it could develop into something worse – like the swine flu.