Step back from social media for a moment and think about conversations you have in person. What do you do when you see a good movie? You share, right? Or if you read an article that makes you think? Again, you share and talk about it. When you hear a friend is sick, you reach out with encouragement.

All of these things work in social media and should be part of a good presence. Remember my post where I talked about “1/3, 1/3, 1/3?” Let’s apply that to conversations.

1. About You

In a networking conversation, someone might ask what you do. Or you might want to share a recent accomplishment. But you won’t spend all of your time talking about yourself, at least not if you want anyone to continue talking to you.

If you spend about 1/3 of your time talking about yourself, that’s not a bad ratio, in both social media and face to face.

2. About Other People

Again, at a networking event, you might hear a need and connect two people who can help each other. You might talk about another networking event or a great book you just read. It might be appropriate for you to make a plug for one of your trusted vendors.

You can do all the same things in social media, where you share articles, refer others, promote vendors or other great accounts to follow.

3. Conversation

Okay, I’ve been talking about conversation in this post, so what do I mean here? I mean just talking. Did someone just win an award? Congratulate her, just to be friendly. Ask a question. Answer a question. Tell a joke. Laugh at someone’s else’s joke. Discuss something you really enjoy. Chat about a movie you just saw.

Some people tell me that they want an absolute barrier on social media between business and personal. Why? Ultimately, we do business with people not businesses. Why can’t we learn a bit about you as a human being? Use some sensible discretion. Don’t over share, but it’s okay to give us a view of who you are. If we like you, we’ll do business with you. If we don’t? Well, we won’t, and that’s okay. We probably weren’t a good client anyway.

So what do you think? Ready to go out there and have some conversations, both online and in person?

“Some porn account just followed me on Twitter. What should I do? Should I protect my tweets by locking down my account?”

Short answer. “No.”

Longer answer.

Look, those account are all over the Twitterverse, and they aren’t going away. We all know they exist, and we know they are going to follow you. Guess what? We don’t care.

Who follows you isn’t nearly as important as who you follow. You choose who you follow. You don’t choose who follows you. So if someone is going to check out your online reputation, they are going to focus on the accounts you’ve chosen to follow.

But, let’s face it. Most people who check you out online aren’t even going to look at the list of your followers. It takes too much time. We’re going to look at your content. What do you post? Who do you retweet? That says lots more about you than some random people who spam-botted your account.

Remember, Twitter isn’t like Facebook. Those folks aren’t going to show up in your main feed, and you’re probably the only person who knows they are following you. If they really bother you, report them as a spam. Then they’ll go away.

By the way, speaking of content, tune in Wednesday when I’m going to do a whole post on good social media content.

Turns out he has a second business, and he has very clear goals of who he’s marketing to, why, and the value for individuals in that market segment. Turns out I am marketing to the same segment (real estate agents), and when I mentioned that, he pulled out a flyer specifically showing how his product can bring them more business.

How cool is that? I’ve got several referrals I can work on for him, and I’m excited to get on with it.

The lesson here? Know your market. Know why you are marketing to them. Have a plan to approach that market and have key value statements. It won’t just make it easier to refer you. It’ll also give you clear actions to take to approach and sell to them.

Well, I need to get to work. I’ve got referrals to arrange!

I even heard recently of applicants for social media and other marketing positions being told not to send a resume. They just send their name, and the employer checks them out online, presumably looking for Twitter accounts and blogging activity.

Sound intimidating? Sure it does. Having a good resume isn’t enough anymore. You’ve got to pay attention to all these other areas.

But the good news is that one fact still remains. Networking will still get you in the door. It won’t land you a job if you’re not qualified, but knowing the right people at your target companies will get you past the automatic filtering.

By all means pay attention to the technological changes in a job search, but do not ignore the human element. Do your research. Find your target companies. And then use your network to get personal introductions.

It’ll be a long time before those strategies go out of date.

Given that it’s so important and shows up so high on search engines, it’s insane that people don’t give their profile the time and attention it deserves. I’m going to talk about a few areas I usually see lacking.

1. A Good Summary

Your Summary should be the last thing you write. It’s a synopsis of you as a person, and it’s the tease that makes us interested to read more. No, it should not be the “summary” section of your resume. No “well-organized business professional” type language. That’s good for getting in the door on a job search, but it doesn’t make us want to connect to you. What’s in it for me to connect to you? Tell me that. Or why might I want to use or refer you? Tell me that. Shine. Stand out!

2. Too Much Resume Language

Lots of people cut and paste from their resume to create a profile. That’s okay for older entries, but make the newest positions in your profile snap and sparkle.

3. Incomplete Profiles

Need I say anything about this? LinkedIn prompts you on exactly what you need to complete a profile. Follow their suggestions and get it to 100%.

4. No/Few Recommendations

You need at least 3 to get your profile to 100%, but really, you need more than that. Your profile is a huge part of your reputation online. The more recommendations you have, the better. And absolutely get at least 2 (preferably more) for your most recent position. We’re going to make decisions about you based on that. Make sure we’re making a good one for you.

I could say a lot more about this, but those hit the biggest points. What are you waiting for? Go look at your profile and make it shine.

Need help? Creating/updating/fixing profiles is one of my services. Email me, and I’ll help you out.

Of course you want to use strong passwords most places online, especially on any sites with financial information, but it seems like lots of people use any old password for social media.

Bad idea!

Social media is your identity on the ‘net. It’s a reflection of you as a person and as a business person. Sure most people will understand being hacked, but followers who are new to social media may not understand and might unfollow you because of an ill-timed hack tweet.

A good way to create strong passwords that are easy to remember is to use a mnemonic like this. Think of a sentence that you can remember. Example: Oprah Winfrey is my number one favorite celebrity (not true by the way, in case you were wondering).

That’s 8 words, which turns into the following 8 characters by creating a password from the first letter of each word, mixing upper and lower case:

OWimNofc

See how it works? You can make it stronger by using characters instead of the first letters. Try this:

OWim#1Fc

All you have to remember is the sentence, what letters you capitalized and any character/number substitutions. That’s a pretty good 8 character password that’s easy to remember.

No, it’s not one I’m using, so don’t try this on any of my accounts.

Anyone else have good password techniques to share? Or, if you had a social media account hacked, what you did to recover from the experience?

While the series is specifically aimed at the Senior Move Manager community, the content will be relevant to any small business wanting to learn more about social media.

We’ll be covering a number of topics, including:

1. Why social media might be good for your business
2. How to build a following and monitor your brand online
3. How to hire and train a social media intern

And more!

Here’s the link for more information on the series and how to sign up.

http://spthinking.com/social-media-webinar-series-overview.html

Hope to “see” you on the webinar!

I certainly see this several times a week. Do I connect on Facebook? Usually not. Why? Because most of the time, there’s exactly the same content in both places. Why should I see the same content twice?

Disclosure. I do post the same blog content in both places, but I’m not really using or growing my Facebook following. You’re better off connecting with me on Twitter than Facebook.

So what should you do? If you want to use Twitter to grow your Facebook following (and it’s a good way to do it), post different content in both places. Start conversations on Facebook and use Twitter to suggest people join in. Post unique content on Facebook. Make your followers there feel special by connecting with you there. Do you offer specials? Post a different special on Facebook than Twitter. It makes your Facebook followers feel appreciated, and it allows you to track your social media return on investment.

Using different social media channels can be an effective way to grow your business. But keep the content different in all your channels.

Lots of people in social media pay attention to their brand and message for posts they create, which is good. And then they sink themselves with an ill-considered retweet or share on Facebook.

No, I don’t mean porn or anything that obnoxious, although I’ve seen that too. I mean the seemingly less damaging post, generally around religion, politics or entertainment.

What’s the harm, you ask? This year politics is going to be a hot topic. Why not share? Plus it’s 2012. Lots of good fodder there for humor.

Sharing controversial topics isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Just do it with caution.

Take me, for example. I have strong political views, and I’ve basically made up my mind how I’m voting this fall. I’m disgusted with some of the antics in government, but I don’t think its appropriate to share that with the social media world. I can and have worked with people of all political and religious stripes. I really don’t want to piss off people who don’t share my views. I can work with them as clients and compartmentalize my own views.

If you are in public policy or your work is religious in nature, your guidelines on what is appropriate to share may be different than mine, but I’d still recommend following the advice that “if you can’t say something good about someone, say nothing.”

Civil discourse does not have to descend to name-calling and insults. You can disagree with an opinion in a respectful fashion.

Remember, you are judged as much by what you choose to share as by what you write.

The biggest advantage to working with a publisher was having someone else project manage all the stages. As a self-published author, all that falls on you. Beyond the writing, there are several other steps you’ll have to handle yourself. None of them are terribly difficult, but you’ll have to carve out time to manage them.

1. Hire an editor (assuming you want your book to read professionally)
2. Hire a cover designer (assuming you want your book to look professional)
3. Hire a designer (assuming your book is going to be released in print)
4. Hire someone to format your book for digital distribution (assuming your book is going to be released as an e-book)

Technically, you can do any of these yourself, but in most cases, your book will suffer for it. Unless, of course, you are a graphic artist in addition to an author. Even if you are a good editor, you can’t edit your own work. Trust me. I am a trained editor, and another set of eyes always finds things I missed.

Haunted Vampire has not been released in print, so I was able to skip #3. I found an excellent e-book on formatting your book for Kindle, so I handled #4 myself. There’s one small formatting error, but I’ll fix it in the second edition.

I hired both an editor and a graphic designer for the cover art. In fact, I recently wrote a post about my designer. Go ahead. Read it. I’ll wait.

You’re back? Okay. So project managing all those steps is the biggest drawback to self-publishing. Then why do it?

Simple. Time and money.

Time is a big one. For most authors, especially new ones, there can be a delay of years between the writing of a book and its publication. First an author has to go through the lottery of finding an agent and/or publisher. (No, it’s not a literal lottery, but I’ve been told the odds are close.) Assuming you can find a publisher, there’s often a 12-18 month delay before the book is published.

That’s a long time to wait! I didn’t get Haunted Vampire out quite as soon as I’d wanted, but most of the delays were within my control. And even with delays, the book was published a few months after it was finished. The next one will go faster, now that I’ve learned a few things.

Now what about money? Earlier I mentioned a lot of things you need to pay for. So how is self-publishing good for the money?

The first thing you need to realize is that self-publishing isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon. Because you control the book, you control where it’s published, meaning it never needs to go out of print. Traditionally published books often have a limited shelf-life. That’s why the initial promotion is so furious. If a book doesn’t sell well in the first couple of months, it’s history.

Not so for self-published books. They can be in print (or electrons) forever. Sometimes it just takes time for a book to find its audience, and when it does, it can sell very well. Here’s where the royalty differences are huge.

I’ll get a 35% royalty for Haunted Vampire. I get 6% for Enthusiastic Networker. Because of how I’ll price the sequel to Haunted Vampire, I’ll get a 70% royalty on it. So 6% of $16.95 or 70% of (probably) $3.99. Do the math. And the $3.99 book will be followed by another, and another, as quickly as I can write them and get them online. I should have three books in my fiction series published by the end of 2012. And all three of them will be up as long as I like. If Amazon stops being the distribution channel of choice, I’ll switch channels. I have that power.

Considering those numbers, paying for editing and a cover is small potatoes.

See how it all works? I’m not sorry I worked with a publisher for Enthusiastic Networker. But for my fiction? Self-published all the way!

I hope that answered a lot of questions you might have had. Have more questions? No problem. I do offer consulting services to get you familiar with everything you’re going to need to consider before you self-publish your own book. All my contact information is at the top of this page.

Feel free to ask quick questions or ask for clarification of any points in the comments.