I haven’t seen the movie Pirates of the Caribbean in a while, but I sure remember and love this quote:
Elizabeth: Wait! You have to take me to shore. According to the Code of the Order of the Brethren…
Barbossa: First, your return to shore was not part of our negotiations nor our agreement so I must do nothing. And secondly, you must be a pirate for the pirate’s code to apply and you’re not. And thirdly, the code is more what you’d call “guidelines” than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, Miss Turner.
Too many times people want the how-to rules for marketing online. The truth is they want a way of holding the person who told them accountable for whether or not they fail in their marketing campaign online.
But Johnny said that if we Twitter or Facebook like this… we’ll get tens of thousands of followers that will buy our product…
This of course is complete crap. The only thing we have to judge results by is past actions. Meanwhile, internet marketing changing daily. Some of the topics and posts I wrote about two years ago are completely worthless now. This results in having to change your marketing tactics and strategies constantly with the landscape. Anyone who sells you a sure-fire method for anything online is a snake oil salesman. Period!
Instead, look for the people who are preaching methods, not metrics. If I ask you how much each customer is worth to you, you should be able to tell me. Or at least you should know if you are running a successful business. Say you give me the response of $75. I would ask you what your time is worth per hour. Perhaps $40/hr. Now you have all the info needed to make the most of your time online.
You can safely spend 1.5 hours of your time converting 1 person online into a customer. If not, a least a person willing to turn around and refer you to others looking for your service. This can be over any medium you’d prefer: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Blogs, Forums or anything else you can think of. This is so simple in theory, yet people only want a magic formula. There is not magic formula. If there was, everyone would be doing it and then it would blow up.
Look for measured results based on the time involved for you to interact with others. Then, know how much time you can safely spend per person. You might find that you only need to find and interact with 500 people to double your presence and business online. Then you can nurture those relationships until the day you die and still have plenty of business. If you’re in a bigger market this may require more time and effort to reach your target goal. In the case of Dell or Best Buy, a whole army of people work to help those online with their needs like finding a computer. Dell wouldn’t go out and hire 100 people to Tweet and Facebook if it didn’t make them money. The same applies for small businesses, just on a smaller scale.
Know what the value of each customer is. Then interact with them on their medium and 100% genuinely and you will successful convert online users into friends and patrons. Talk to everyone like your spouse or kid and give each person the level of dignity and respect they deserve. Then you won’t have to worry about the rules of social media but rather how to meet people’s needs better. Listen and listen well. People will tell you exactly how you can serve them better.
If you’ve spent any time researching online strategy or social media marketing, you know that everyone who has ever flexed a profitable mouse button or massaged a keyboard for money will tell you to get a blog for your company website. Even Google has stated that blogs help in search rankings. But why, how, when and which kind? …and more importantly, who is gonna build it and keep it updated? …to what end?
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In addition to being all happy and huggable in the blog and social media spaces, the two combined can and will help you dominate search results in Google, Yahoo and Bing. That is what we call Search Engine Optimization, and, oh yeah, we are experts there too. (our backs hurt from all the patting we do, don’t worry, we’ll be fine 
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