There’s free wi-fi here at the McDonalds in Portland, Michigan and I’m trying to upload a blog post from my iPad.  I’m using the post editor Blogsy purchased from the App store.

How far can I take it?  How do you add links?  Can you text wrap photos?

THIS IS IMPORTANT BOOK

I’m sitting in a McDonald’s in Dewitt, MI and I’m re-reading Gary Vaynerchuck’s book, The Thank You Economy.  This is probably one of the most important books I’ve read in recent years outside of the Bible.  Why?

Why would I make such a strong statement about a book written by a thirty-something wine merchant from New Jersey?

WHO SHOULD READ IT

He has good, necessary answers for anybody who relies on communicating a message.  Who would that cover?  Small business.  From the person with a local lawn service to the person who sells Great Lakes Red.  From independent local restaurants to the small auto repair shop.

Who else?

Local churches and ministries who rely on dealing with real live people to local city council and township board members who form the bedrock of our governmental system.

Do you fit into one of these categories?  And how do you deal with the people you serve?  Do you rely on phone calls, mail, websites, face-to-face contact?  What else?

SHARE MY NOTES

As I re-read Vaynerchuk’s book, I want to share my notes and point out his important points.

Open up Chapter 1 and read the few pages and you get his major point about the importance of having relationships with the people you serve.  He says relationships are central to life and a metric for the quality of your life is the depth and quality of your relationships.

EXAMPLE FROM CAPITAL HONDA

Think about what that means.  For me, it meant that the car dealership that sold me my Honda Civic almost three years ago bent over backwards to fill a car need that I had before my wife and I went on a short vacation this summer.  Capital Honda in Okemos, MI, could not figure why a set of CDs of sermons that I got from my church would not play on the car’s CD player.  They would play on other Honda models at the dealership.

Knowing that I was leaving on vacation the next day and that I really wanted to listen to the CDs, they picked up the discs from my home, researched the problem and burned the sermon recordings in a format that my Civic could handle.  They met me to see that I got them in time.

They went out of their way to help me.  Did that help my relationship with them?  You bet.

Vaynerchuck’s point in the first 15 or so paragraphs is that business is built on personal relationships.  And that doesn’t happen with one way communication.  The same goes for the other organizations I mentioned.

How do you maintain this kind of two-way communication with large numbers of people.

He points to social media which he describes as more than neat computer tools.  Social media, Vaynerchuk says, represents a big cultural shift in the way we interact with each other.  It’s a mindset.

That’s the very first section.

More notes to come as I re-read more.

Discussing social media with my business partner

Some important questions:

Do a survey of Lansing, East Lansing and the rest of mid-Michigan about the difference that social media has made in daily life and what would you find?

How has social media affected the Michigan Legislature? Members of the State House and State Senate?  Interest groups?  Voters?

Has it been a difference-maker for businesses in the state? Manufacturers?  Auto parts suppliers?  Insurance agents?  Retail stores?  Restaurants?  Lawyers?  Real estate agents?

Have local units of government been able to grab onto social media and get citizens involved and keep them informed about issues that affect people right where they live everyday?  City councils?  Mayors?  Township boards?  County government?

What about churches in the area? Do they use social media and how do they do it?  Have pastors embraced it, as well as members?

Why the questions?

I’ve been watching social media grow from just about nothing in this area when I started taking it seriously in late 2004.  When I met an old work crony after I retired, he asked me what I was doing.  When I told him that I was blogging and that I was helping others learn it, he laughed and suggested that I get serious about using my time.

That was more than six years ago and I’ve tried to stay with the changes in social media.  There were audio podcasts, video podcasts, Twitter, Ning, UStream, Tumblr, Skype, Facebook, along with many, many more.  The changes and the transitions just keep coming.

So what?

That’s the right question and it’s one that I want to take a look at in this blog in the weeks and months to come.

Is social media making a difference right here in the middle of the Great Lakes State, an area where communication and community-building has never been more important.

As I post about this, I invite your feedback.

In our neck of the woods, central Michigan, more and more businesses, local officials and governmental units, politicians and churches are moving towards using Facebook Fan Pages.

Then after a period of time of gaining fans and posting pictures and items to their wall and asking for comments, they let them drop.

Can a Facebook Fan Page make a difference?  Check out this blog post from “All Facebook-The Unofficial Facebook Resource-about a study which showed each fan to be worth $3.50 for the subject company. Why so much?  Think of all the eyeballs that can be reached with a little planning.

What’s your experience been with Facebook Fan Pages?  Do you read them?  Do you read any of the items from these pages in your Face Book news feed?

Do you send out or are you planning to send out e-mail newsletters.  There are federal rules and regulations for doing this and big penalties for violating them.  Here are links I found on Google providing details about what to do and not to do

• E-mail responsibly blog: Here are the basics of what to do and not do.
• BBros.US blog: CAN-SPAM best practices.

First, read this Time magazine essay about how the news cycle has changed for the White House with the web and it’s ability to get info out as it happens.  Contributing to this is cable news channels with their wide-variety of choices.

This means that politicians need to be constantly monitoring what’s said about them in all these different places all the time and they need to be able to respond.

But read down a few paragraphs in the essay and you will see that Obama has created his “own media empire” with the 13 million he has on his e-mail list and who subscribe to his periodic e-newsletters.

The lesson: Politicians and political candidates need to be collecting e-mail addresses from people.  They can be gold if they’re used properly.

How many of you already do this?  Do you ask people for theirs?

Here in the heart of Michigan it’s eye-opening to see the number of local businesses, churches, politicians and other groups on Facebook.  They have FB pages, groups and fan pages.  Why?  Check these stats from Steve Rubel on his blog, The Steve Rubel Stream:

All at once, businesses large and small are increasingly recognizing that they need to go where the people are.

And with 100 million Facebook users in the US who spend an average seven hours on the site each month (Nielsen), it’s surely a no-brainer.

When your local pizzeria is promoting their Facebook page at the register, as mine does, then you know that marketing has changed. The same applies to Twitter and YouTube.

Facebook is where large numbers of people hangout online in all geographic areas and by a wide-range of demographic groups.

Do you have any examples of locals trying to use Facebook to help build their business relationships?  Share the links.  Leave a comment.

Lansing (MI) Mayor Virg Bernero is mulling a run for Michigan governor on the Democratic ticket.  He’s also head of the State’s Capital city which is facing a huge budget deficit that threatens basic city services.

He’s using Twitter during a time when communicating with constituents has never been more important.  Politicians can use Twitter as a means to purvey fluff or they can use it to seriously communicate what they are doing and who they are.

How would you rate Bernero’s Twitter use and what suggestions would you give him.  I welcome your comments and I’ll be sure to see they are passed on to the mayor.

Communication between the government and the governed has never been more important.  Check out this official website of the city of Grand Rapids, MI. It includes a blog and a focus on usability.  What U.S. cities do the best with the web, including blogs and other social media?

I’ve only scanned this link to a blog post from “Jeff Wong Design” where he shares his notes from a web designer’s point of view after reading “What Would Google Do?” by Jeff Jarvis.

At first blush, this seems like good commonsense stuff that’s so easy to ignore and often is.

I will read it more carefully and share my observations from what I learned.

Has anybody read the book?  What about Jeff’s observations?  Agree?  Disagree?  Are they helpful?