With the mid-term elections in the US now less than a week away, I thought it would be a good time to look at the growing importance of social media in politics.  By now, most major political campaigns are active, to some extent, on social media.  And while it’s difficult to find a Congressional or Gubernatorial candidate who doesn’t have at least either a Facebook or Twitter profile, it’s also just as difficult to find candidates who are actually using these platforms to their full potential.  As time goes on, look for this to change.

SmartBlog’s Jesse Stanchack recently posted some very insightful information into what the future of politics holds for social media…

“A recent GWU/Politico poll found 89% of respondents said they had never directly interacted with a politician through a social network — compared with 2% who say they did once, 7% who say they do it occasionally and 2% who say they do so frequently. GWU professor Matthew Hindman noted that he expects these numbers to increase by 2012, as more young people who grew up with social technology reach voting age.

But Facebook’s Adam Conner says asking about direct engagement is deceptive. Rather than asking how many people have directly engaged a candidate through a social network, Conner says it would be better to study how many people have gotten information about a candidate through their Facebook newsfeed because one of their friends supports that candidate. “That’s where you get the viral feedback loops,” he said.

Most campaigns are spending less than 5% of their budgets on their online efforts, said EngageDC’s Mindy Finn, who served as Mitt Romney’s online strategy head for his 2008 presidential campaign– though for some ballot initiative campaigns, that number can climb as high as 15%.

Part of the problem is that right now most social-media efforts for campaigns are just “window dressing,” said Hindman. Candidates have Facebook and Twitter accounts just so they can say they have them — not so that they can accomplish any specific goals with them.

That could change, however, as more candidates who are personally comfortable with social tools run for office, noted Finn and Conner. Finn pointed to Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who has a personal Twitter account, but also has an official campaign account run by staff. This allows Perry to have an authentic voice on the network. At the same time, his staff members have a channel for pushing out their updates in a transparent way.”

This is in-line with what legendary marketing guru Seth Godin recently posted on his blog…

“When TV was king, the secret to media was money. If you have money, you can reach the masses. The best way to get money is to make powerful interests happy, so they’ll give you money you can use to reach the masses and get re-elected.

Now, though…When attention is scarce and there are many choices, media costs something other than money. It costs interesting. If you are angry or remarkable or an outlier, you’re interesting, and your idea can spread. People who are dull and merely aligned with powerful interests have a harder time earning attention, because money isn’t sufficient.

Thus, as media moves from TV-driven to attention-driven, we’re going to see more outliers, more renegades and more angry people driving agendas and getting elected. I figure this will continue until other voices earn enough permission from the electorate to coordinate getting out the vote, communicating through private channels like email and creating tribes of people to spread the word. (And they need to learn not to waste this permission hassling their supporters for money).

Mass media is dying, and it appears that mass politicians are endangered as well.”

Moving from Toy to Tool

Most politicians, probably due to their age, have very little to no understanding of what social media is or what it’s good for.  Combine this with the fact that the “chore” of running the campaign’s social media profiles is often delegated to the intern and what you have is a completely ineffective social media effort that accomplishes nothing.  Moving forward, things should be changing.  As voters, and campaign managers, become more familiar and more comfortable with social media, we should expect to see politicians start using social media more intelligently.

Why?  For starters, social media allows a brand to build relationships with a target demographic and to infiltrate their social circle.  Listen, people spend a LOT of their time on social media.  This year, for the first time ever, porn was not the number one activity on the web.  Social media was.  That’s huge.  Think of the impact of someone logging onto their Facebook account and seeing that four of their friends have “liked” a particular politician or political cause.  All the political ads and lawn signs in the world wouldn’t achieve that kind of influence.   Social media’s ability to forge and leverage relationships is something that no serious political candidate can ignore.

Additionally, social media is much more cost effective than traditional media.  A budget of $10,000 can achieve huge results in social media, but barely gets you noticed with traditional media.  This is because new media allows a marketer to intelligently target and speak to a very specific audience.  That’s not possible with traditional media like television, radio, or print.  With that type of media, a marketer has to spend a small fortune to broadcast a message to the masses and hope that enough people tune in and connect with the message.  The fact is that people are increasingly paying more attention to social media and their social circles and less attention to old media ads.  Political campaigns will (eventually) realize this and adjust their marketing budgets accordingly.

And finally, political campaigns will begin taking social media more seriously because they won’t have a choice.  Social media in political campaigns is no longer an interesting little experiment.  It has achieved proven results.  Regardless of your political loyalties, you have to be impressed with what the Obama campaign was able to achieve with social media.  Campaign managers and party bosses around the country took note of that success and will be implementing the lessons learned in their own campaigns.  Candidates who aren’t good at social media will be at an increasingly massive competitive disadvantage to those who use it intelligently.

Conclusion

Social media is changing the way political campaigns are fought.  The importance of winning at Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube is becoming increasingly clear to political operatives.  The ability to spend huge sums of money on television and radio ads no longer represents a sure-fire path to victory.  Voters are increasingly tuning out traditional media advertising and are much more interested in what is going on within their own social media circle.  Old, traditional media doesn’t have that kind of reach.  Simply put, political campaigns that don’t take social media seriously will be, in the very near future, steamrolled by campaigns that do.

-Dan Cheek
LaserBurnMedia.com
dan@laserburnmedia.com
Twitter.com/laserburnmedia
(570)795-9467

Dan Cheek is the president and co-founder of Laser Burn Media, a full-service social media marketing firm located just outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania.  Dan has over five years experience in working with social media as a marketing platform and has a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Wilkes University.   A veteran of the United States Army, Dan lives with his wife, Krissy, and his step-dog, Molly.

The Growing Importance of Social Media in Politics is a post from: Laser Burn Media

We’re really excited to announce that Laser Burn Media is now offering website design services.  We’re excited because, after a lot of time listening to small business owners, we’ve put together a collection of affordable website packages that make it possible for any business to afford a website.  In today’s business environment, having an online presence is a necessity.  Businesses that don’t have a website are at a competitive disadvantage to those that do.  With our new website packages, many more businesses can now afford to have a professionally designed website.

All of our website packages are built on the WordPress platform and include one year of hosting and domain name registration (via GoDaddy).  Additionally, we’ll do all of the work, setting up the site, uploading pictures and video, and building a website that will look good and help achieve the online goals of the business.  And when I say that these packages are affordable, I meant it.  Our Basic Package starts at $250 (plus setup fees) and our most comprehensive package, the Advanced, comes in at only $350 (plus setup fees).  We even offer a Monthly Service Package, costing $35/month, that takes all of the work out of maintaining and updating the site.

We decided to begin offering these packages because we want Laser Burn Media to become the go-to online marketing agency for small businesses.  Now, we can help these businesses with everything from getting online, to online advertising, to using social media platforms to develop and leverage relationships with their target markets.  Having a professionally designed website shouldn’t have to cost a small fortune.  And now, with our website packages, it doesn’t.  If you’re business needs a website, feel free to contact Laser Burn Media and we’ll sit down with you and help make it happen.

-Dan Cheek
LaserBurnMedia.com
dan@laserburnmedia.com
Twitter.com/laserburnmedia
(570)795-9467

Dan Cheek is the president and co-founder of Laser Burn Media, a full-service social media marketing firm located just outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania.  Dan has over five years experience in working with social media as a marketing platform and has a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Wilkes University.   A veteran of the United States Army, Dan lives with his wife, Krissy, and his step-dog, Molly.

Laser Burn Media Now Offering Website Design is a post from: Laser Burn Media

Using Facebook to promote your business and interact with your customers is a great and easy way to get your business online.  However, before you go rushing into setting up a Facebook account for your business, you need to stop for a moment and consider a few things.  Otherwise, you’ll end up making critical mistakes and wasting your time.  Here are 5 rules that you should adhere to in order to help make your Facebook effort worth the time.

1. Your Business Needs a Page, Not a Profile. This is a common mistake that many businesses make.  Don’t create a new personal account for your business.  You should be creating a page.  Why?  For starters, Facebook’s terms of use prohibit the use of personal accounts to be used for businesses.  Theoretically, if caught, your business profile could be deleted by Facebook for violating these terms.  Second, Facebook puts a limit on the number of friends that a personal account can have (1,000), however, there is no limit to the number of fans that your Facebook Page can have.  Finally, you can’t promote your profile with Facebook ads, but you can use ads to promote your page.  Therefor, by setting your business up with a Facebook Profile, as opposed to a Facebook Page, you’re really just setting yourself up for failure.
2. Have a Plan for Your Facebook Page. So you’ve set your business up with a Facebook Page.  Awesome.  Now what?  You need to have a clear understanding of how you are going to use your Page to promote your business, interact with your fans, and add value to your audience.  If you don’t know how your Facebook Page is going to factor into your overall marketing strategy, why are you even bothering to set it up in the first place.
3. It’s Not Just About Numbers. If your goal for your Facebook Page is to simply reach X number of fans, you’re doing it wrong.  Yes, while having a large number of followers is, potentially, a good thing, it’s certainly not the only thing.  It’s not even the most important thing.  Social media is all about relationships and engagement.  Having a million Facebook fans means nothing if none of them actually care about your business.  “Quality fans”, or people who actually have an interest in your business, are infinitely more valuable than the people who simply click “Like” on your page just because they’re bored.
4. Make the Time. Using social media to build relationships with your target audience is a time-consuming thing.  If you don’t make the time commitment to your social media, you might as well not even be doing it.  Understand ahead of time that you will need to dedicate multiple hours a week to your Facebook Page and find the time to honor that commitment.
5. Tell People About Your Facebook Page. Don’t think that the only place you should be promoting your Facebook Page is on Facebook.  Tell your customers about your Facebook Page as they checkout at the register.  Put a link to the Page on your website.  Ask your Twitter followers to “Like” you on Facebook.  Put it on your business cards.  If you’re already following the previous four rules, following this rule help will ensure that your audience has a good reason to friend you on Facebook.  Make sure they know about it.

There are many good reasons for your business to be on Facebook.  If your business is considering such a move, following these five rules will greatly increase your chances of achieving success and meeting your marketing goals.  Just remember, like anything you do with your business, marketing on Facebook should be a carefully considered, thoughtfully executed strategy.  Your business can benefit from Facebook and these rules can help ensure that you do.

-Dan Cheek
LaserBurnMedia.com
dan@laserburnmedia.com
Twitter.com/LaserBurnMedia
(570)795-9467

Dan Cheek is the president and co-founder of Laser Burn Media, a full-service social media marketing firm located just outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania.  Dan has over five years experience in working with social media as a marketing platform and has a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Wilkes University.   A veteran of the United States Army, Dan lives with his wife, Krissy, and his step-dog, Molly.

5 Rules for Using Facebook for Your Business is a post from: Laser Burn Media

Once considered a wacky obsession of geeky Internet people who probably had a sad, lonely social life, blogging has now become part of the mainstream. Almost, if not every, Fortune 500 company has some sort of blog that is used to disseminate information, interact with customers, and help solidify and strengthen the online presence of the company. Indeed, there are several reasons that a business should be using a blog. If your business isn’t yet blogging, here are 10 reasons you should be….

1. Blogs build an audience. A static web page is all well and good for providing people with information that they’ll need once.  A telephone number, where your business is located, what products you sell, etc.  However, static web pages are not very good at keeping an audience engaged because these pages are not frequently updated and there is little to no interactivity built into these static sites.  A business that uses a blog to keep customers up to date with the latest information, industry news, and other useful information is providing something of value to the audience.  Keep giving your customers a reason to keep coming back to your site and they will.
2. Provide an online voice for your business or brand. A blog, if used correctly, can serve as a sort of “online spokesperson.”  With consistent, timely, and well written posts, your blog can become one of your most effective methods and distributing information directly to the people who need to have it, when they need to have it.  There are millions of people using the Internet everyday.  A blog is an excellent way to speak to at least some of them.
3. Capture important feedback. A blog is an excellent way for you to provide your customers with a way to express their feedback about your business, their wants and needs, and their questions and concerns.  Pay close attention to the comments that are left in response to your posts.  Take them seriously.  Essentially, your blog audience is a really big, informal focus group.  What they’re saying matters and a blog, perhaps better than any other social media platform, is very well suited to encourage and collect that feedback.
4. Help your customers decide to buy. Everyday, people use the Internet to search for information to help with a buying decision.  As a business owner, you should absolutely share your expertise, your offerings, and your assistance with helping make those decisions.  A blog provides an excellent platform to provide the valuable information that potential and existing customers need to make their purchasing decisions.
5. Secure your reputation as an expert. By posting well written and insightful blog posts, you can go a long way to building a reputation as an industry expert.  That’s a valuable thing to have, my friend.  Being able to speak to an audience as a trusted and respected voice of expertise allows you to greatly influence how people view your products, your industry, and the value that you and your company can bring to the table.  You’ve worked long and hard to build your expertise and knowledge.  By blogging, you get to share it with a much larger audience and that could pay huge dividends for you and your business.
6. Your competitors are already blogging. So why aren’t you?  By not establishing and maintaining a blog, you are leaving a lot of opportunity on the table.  I can almost guarantee that no matter what industry you are in, at least one of your competitors is using some form of blogging strategy to connect with customers.  Now, I’m well aware of the, “If my competitor jumped off a bridge, should I do that, too?” argument, believe me.  However, if your competitor(s) is using a blog to build relationships with customers and participate in online discussions, shouldn’t you be a part of that?
7. Get more eyes on your business. A blog can help you do that.  You will get traffic from search engines.  You will get traffic from social media.  You will get traffic from people recommending your blog to others.  A well written blog gets attention and, in turn, this will generate interest in your business.  If you take the time to say what you have to say, and to explain what you have to offer, people will listen.  And once you begin to generate this interest and build this audience, you can then begin to work on converting these browsers into buyers.
8. Blogs serve as a base for you social media efforts. When done correctly, a blog is a very powerful social media platform.  That power can be easily amplified by using it in conjunction with other social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, etc.).  By linking all of your social media platforms to your blog, you can use them to build relationships with a target audience and then help move them from the crowd of Twitter or YouTube or Facebook and into the much more intimate and focused setting of your blog.  Once here, you expose this traffic to all that you can offer, with detailed blog posts, pictures, video, etc.
9. A great way to capture information about leads and customers. Once you post something, take the time to determine who is reading it.  Where did they come from?  What search term did they use to find that post?  How many people read that post as opposed to your other posts?  Did they leave a comment?  If so, did they register with an email address or Twitter user name?  By taking the time to answer these questions, you begin to get a much more detailed picture of who is taking interest in your site and why.  Knowing this, you can begin to use this data to mine for leads.
10. A blog can be adapted to your strengths. Many people think that because they’re “not good at writing” that they can’t or shouldn’t have a blog.  Wrong.  If you don’t feel that the written word is your strongest form of communication, use a blog that is built around pictures, video, or audio.  A blog can easily be tailored to your strengths, allowing you to interact with your audience in the way that best suits you.  Because a blog is so adaptable, there are few better ways to move the personality of you and your business into the online sector.

Obviously, the decision to begin blogging is your own.  However, I hope these 10 reasons that I’ve briefly discussed will help you realize the benefits of blogs and blogging.  A blog is a great, fairly easy way for you to help your business grow.  Just remember to post quality over quantity and on a regular basis.  These are my thoughts on using a blog for business.  What are yours?

-Dan Cheek
LaserBurnMedia.com
dan@laserburnmedia.com
Twitter.com/LaserBurnMedia
(570)795-9467

Dan Cheek is the president and co-founder of Laser Burn Media, a full-service social media marketing firm located just outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania.  Dan has over five years experience in working with social media as a marketing platform and has a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Wilkes University.   A veteran of the United States Army, Dan lives with his wife, Krissy, and his step-dog, Molly.

10 Reasons Your Business Should Be Blogging is a post from: Laser Burn Media

LinkedIn is one of the most powerful, yet most ignored, social media platforms out there.  Designed to be a site to help professionals network, LinkedIn represents 75 million members spread across 200 countries.  The site is chock-full of high and mid-level decision makers from thousands of companies.  Despite this fact, when looking to design and execute a social media marketing strategy, it’s common for businesses to overlook or under utilize LinkedIn.

Here are five ways that you can use LinkedIn to build and grow your business…

1. Create a LinkedIn profile for your business.  While you may have a LinkedIn profile for yourself, it’s also important to ensure that your business has its own profile, as well.  This allows other LinkedIn to learn more about your company, what it does, where it is, and to better understand how your products or services can be of benefit to them.  Not only will this allow you to reach potential customers, it will also expose your company to potential employees, helping build relationships with key talent.
2. Join and actively participate in some LinkedIn groups.  By joining in a few relevant groups and actively participating in the discussions, you can begin to build relationships with potential clients, suppliers, and employees.  Becoming active in these groups is perhaps the quickest way for you to begin building a strong network across LinkedIn, one that could pay dividends in the real world.
3. Actively promote your LinkedIn profile.  The most effective way for you to build your network on LinkedIn is to reach out to the people who you encounter on a daily basis.  Your customers, your employees, your suppliers, and the people who visit your website.  By adding as much of your existing network to LinkedIn as possible, you are better able to organize and contact the members of that network.  Also, this allows you to begin to build stronger relationships with these contacts and to potentially expand your reach into their networks, as well.
4. Actively participate in the Answers section of LinkedIn.  Answers (LinkedIn.com/Answers) is a feature on LinkedIn that allows you to ask a question to ask a question and have it answered by any number of subject matter experts on LinkedIn.  Additionally, it allows you to answer the questions of others.  This is a great way for you to build your reputation as an expert in your industry and to build relationships with others who are in or are interested in your industry.
5. Actively request recommendations.  Make it a routine part of your followups with clients and suppliers to ask them for a LinkedIn recommendation.  These recommendations help build credibility for you and your business, something that will come in handy as you actively try and build and leverage your LinkedIn network.

While not meant to be a complete and comprehensive guide to using LinkedIn for your business, following these five steps will certainly put you on the right path.  Remember that a successful LinkedIn strategy, like any other social media strategy, involves building and leveraging relationships across your network.  When used properly, and on a consistent basis, LinkedIn can definitely help you grow your business and build solid, valuable relationships.  Give it a try, and while you’re at it, feel free to add me to your network.

-Dan Cheek
LaserBurnMedia.com
dan@laserburnmedia.com
Twitter.com/laserburnmedia
(570)795-9467

Dan Cheek is the president and co-founder of Laser Burn Media, a full-service social media marketing firm located just outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania.  Dan has over five years experience in working with social media as a marketing platform and has a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Wilkes University.   A veteran of the United States Army, Dan lives with his wife, Krissy, and his step-dog, Molly.

How to Use LinkedIn to Build Your Business is a post from: Laser Burn Media

After serving four very exciting years in the United States Army, I came back home to Northeast Pennsylvania.  Still adjusting to civilian life, I began to take an interest in the Internet and social media.  I began working for RCN, where I spent my days troubleshooting high-speed and dial-up Internet connections for customers.  At RCN, I learned a lot about how the Internet works, the mechanics of a network and how to maintain it.  And in my free time, I became increasingly interested in building websites.

I wasn’t then, and am not now, a programmer.  I know very little about working with CSS, Python, or Java.  I can do basic things with HTML, but that’s the extent of my coding prowess.  However, thanks to the many powerful website publishing software platforms out there, WordPress being chief among them, I was able to create websites without having to know how to program.  For me, this was huge.  I began building sites for me, my friends, and family.  Most were short lived and just for fun.  It wasn’t long before I began to pay attention to how many hits those sites were getting and how the tweaks and changes I made to the sites affected traffic levels.  I didn’t know it at the time, but I was beginning to learn the basics of search engine optimization.

I also began promoting some of these sites on various social media platforms.  It was also about this time that I left RCN and enrolled at Wilkes University.  In exchange for my four years of military service, the Army had agreed to help me pay for my education.  I took full advantage of the GI Bill and became a full-time student, majoring in Business Administration.  The business program at Wilkes is very forward thinking and hands on.  During the freshman year, all the business students are put into groups and told to form a business.  The first semester is spent planning the business and the second is where it is executed.  Any profits made by the business are then used, at the end of the Freshman year, to fund a public service project.

My group decided to create an advertising booklet that we would distribute all over the area.  We pulled some strings at the school printing office and got them to agree to print all of them for us at no cost.  We may have forgotten to tell them we were looking at two runs of four thousand copies each (each copy contained about 10 pages), but whatever.  Agreement in hand (we made them put it in writing and the suggestion of one of our business professors), we began to visit local businesses, asking them to place an ad in our book.  The prices for ads ranged from $25 to $100, depending on the size and location of the ad.  With no production costs, everything we made was profit.  In the end we grossed over $2,000.

As I progressed through business school, I decided that I wanted to make a career out of marketing.  I was also becoming more and more involved with social media and website design.  I became interested in local politics and decided that I would use the Internet and social media to take on a mayor who was running for Congress.  While this mayor was wildly popular, he struck me as a bigot and a moron.  I set up a blog and began to promote it via social media.  I read up on SEO and learned how to build quality back-links to increase the site’s performance in search engines.  I learned how to write good content, how to partner with other bloggers to spread my message, and how to move my ideas across various social media platforms.  That site, which I still run today, attracted quite a bit of attention from local, state, and national media.  I achieved a number one search ranking on Google, ahead of the mayor’s own campaign website.  The mayor lost that election (although he is running again, which is why the site remains active).

I graduated Wilkes University in May of 2009.  I graduated into one of the worst economies the nation had experienced in a long time.  Jobs were hard to find.  Many companies weren’t hiring.  I tried getting in with several local media and marketing firms, unsuccessfully.  When I ran out of marketing firms to apply to, I decided to form my own.  I partnered with one of my classmates at Wilkes, John Botch, and we formed Laser Burn Media.  John had interned for a long time with a local online marketing firm and was Google Adwords certified.  He knew all about designing and executing online search marketing campaigns.  I knew quite a bit about building blogs, using social media as a marketing platform, and how to use the Internet to build relationships with a target audience.

Today, Laser Burn Media is one of the few online marketing firms operating in the Northeast Pennsylvania area.  John and I know we operate in a rapidly evolving industry, where things are constantly changing.  We spend a lot of time keeping up with all the latest ideas, strategies, and news related to online and social media marketing.  Both of us are determined to become the very best at what we do.  We want Laser Burn Media to be the go-to online marketing company for small and medium sized businesses.  We take what we do very seriously, put in a lot of hours to get better at what we do and how we do it, and are determined to earn the trust and respect of our competitors, our clients, and our community.  I co-founded Laser Burn Media because I want to be the absolute best at what I do and I want to do it on my terms.

See also: What I Learned at Toys R Us and Best Buy

-Dan Cheek
LaserBurnMedia.com
dan@laserburnmedia.com
Twitter.com/LaserBurnMedia
(570)795-9467

Dan Cheek is the president and co-founder of Laser Burn Media, a full-service social media marketing firm located just outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania.  Dan has over five years experience in working with social media as a marketing platform and has a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Wilkes University.   A veteran of the United States Army, Dan lives with his wife, Krissy, and his step-dog, Molly.

Why I Co-Founded Laser Burn Media is a post from: Laser Burn Media

Every social media platform (Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, etc.) has it’s own “culture.”  Each of these platforms has it’s own language, its own customs, and its own personality.  Paying attention to these cultures is critically important to anyone looking to use these social media platforms for marketing or brand building.  Ignoring, or not properly understanding, the culture of a particular platform will make your marketing efforts suffer.  And you’ll look silly, and will be ignored, in the process.

Understanding the culture of a particular social media platform is no different than understanding the culture of another group, city, business, or country.  By that, I mean that it requires a lot of listening and observation.  When I was in the Army, I was stationed in South Korea for fourteen months.  During my time there, one of the most valuable lessons I learned was how to appreciate a different culture.  There were many things about the South Korean culture that, at first, didn’t make any sense to me.  For a 21 year old kid, it was a lot to take in.  Over time, however, I did learn to accept and appreciate the culture there.  Once I decided to make the effort to learn and experience as much as I could about the South Korean society, my time there became much more rewarding and enjoyable.  It’s no different when it comes to understanding and operating on a social media platform.

To give a better idea of what I’m talking about when I refer to a social media platform’s culture, let’s use Twitter as an example.  Twitter represents a community of 200 million users who communicate with each other in 140 characters or less.  Certain symbols and abbreviations (@, #, RT, etc) have taken on special meaning and they have adopted unique customs like Follow Friday and Music Monday.  The communication across Twitter is rapid-fire, with many users sending multiple updates an hour.  Compare that with Facebook, where most users rarely post more than three times a day.  Someone who’s attempting to use Twitter to market a brand or business had better be well versed in the culture of the platform.  Otherwise, they will be quickly ignored for the same reason that telemarketers are widely ignored.

So does this mean that your marketing department needs to enlist a sociologist to help you navigate social media?  No.  However, it does mean that before any campaign is launched across any social media platform, time and care must be taken to understand the culture of that platform.  Anyone looking to use any social platform for marketing purposes needs to understand who uses that platform, how they use it, and how best to interact and build a relationship with its community.  Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting a lot of time with little to show for it.

-Dan Cheek
LaserBurnMedia.com
dan@laserburnmedia.com
Twitter.com/LaserBurnMedia
(570)795-9467

Dan Cheek is the president and co-founder of Laser Burn Media, a full-service social media marketing firm located just outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania.  Dan has over five years experience in working with social media as a marketing platform and has a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Wilkes University.   A veteran of the United States Army, Dan lives with his wife, Krissy, and his step-dog, Molly.

Understanding the Culture of Social Media Platforms is a post from: Laser Burn Media

The above video, which does an amazing job of explaining the power and importance of social media, was put together by the fine folks over at Socialnomics.  Social media, as pointed out in this video, isn’t a fad.  It’s a shift.  Social media, like it or not, is going to affect every aspect of our businesses, our politics, and our lives.  The businesses and organizations that embrace this change will stand to gain a huge advantage over those that don’t.  Sadly, many businesses, brands, and organizations will realize all of this after they’ve already fallen far behind the shift.

Many business owners think that social media is about Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.  Not true.  Social media is about relationships.  Building relationships with a target audience and then leveraging that relationship into something powerful.  Traditional, old media (TV, newpaper, billboards, radio, etc) can’t do that.  Old media is about broadcasting.  And while broadcasting will always have a place in marketing, it will have an increasingly smaller role.

The social media revolution isn’t coming.  It’s already here.  It’s time to start acting accordingly.

-Dan Cheek
LaserBurnMedia.com
dan@laserburnmedia.com
Twitter.com/LaserBurnMedia
(570)795-9467

Dan Cheek is the president and co-founder of Laser Burn Media, a full-service social media marketing firm located just outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania.  Dan has over five years experience in working with social media as a marketing platform and has a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Wilkes University.   A veteran of the United States Army, Dan lives with his wife, Krissy, and his step-dog, Molly.

The Social Media Revolution is a post from: Laser Burn Media

Twitter represents one of the most dynamic and powerful communication tools currently available to the masses.  The service makes it easy for almost anyone to quickly share information with large numbers of people.  It allows for a dialogue across continents, government censors (sometimes), and platforms (web, phone, app, etc).  Updates are sent and received in real time, allowing for communication at a speed that, when you think about it, is really amazing.  All of this said, Twitter remains a tool.  And, like any tool, the user needs to take care not to misuse it.

This is especially true in marketing.  Yes, when used correctly and intelligently, Twitter can represent a hugely powerful marketing communication tool.  However, it’s easy to go the other way, as well, and really end up screwing yourself and your brand.  In an effort to help you avoid this disastrous fate, here are some tips that should be followed to keep you and your brand from falling into common pitfalls.

• Don’t spam people.  If you want your audience to quickly ignore and block you on Twitter, just send out endless amounts of links across Twitter.  People don’t like that, they don’t fall for it, and they aren’t going to take you seriously if you do this.  It’s better to not Tweet at all than use it as a mass spamming tool.  Just don’t do it.
• Don’t blindly follow thousands of people hoping they follow you back.  This little trick might get you a few dozen, maybe even a few hundred, followers.  However, they aren’t going to be quality followers.  Chances are, they’re either spambots or people trying to do exactly what you’re doing.  Either way, these type of followers aren’t going to be paying attention to what you’re Tweeting and they’re just going to clog up your Twitter feed with useless jibber-jabber.
• Send Tweets that people can understand.  Many people and brands, in an effort to stay within or under the 140 character limit, will shorten words by replacing them with symbols or think it would be smart to remove all the vowels from every word.  And while this might result in a Tweet that meets the character limit, it also results in something that no one is capable of understanding.  At least not easily.  And people aren’t going to waste time trying to figure out what the hell you’re talking about.  Again, you’ll be ignored.
• Don’t overuse hashtags (#).  Yes, adding a hashtag to your Tweets can sometimes make it easier for other to stumble across them and make them available to a larger, ongoing conversation.  However, adding more than two hashtags makes your Tweet look stupid, spammy, and mindless.  If your Tweets are relevant, people will notice.  Over-hashtagging just comes across as amateurish and annoying.  Don’t do it.
• Don’t RT someone’s RT who is sending a RT from someone else.  You know what this is?  It’s the equivalent of getting an email that contains the subject line of “FW: FW; FW: FW: FW: Funny Picture!”  I don’t open those emails because I know it’s probably not that funny and possibly a virus.  I don’t put much value in tweets that contain multiple “RTs”, either.

These are just some simple rules that, if followed, will help ensure that people take your Tweets a little more seriously.  They will also keep you from getting a reputation as being annoying or a spammer.  As I said, the upside to Twitter is massive and if used correctly, it can add great value to your marketing efforts.  You just have to think before you Tweet.

-Dan Cheek
LaserBurnMedia.com
dan@laserburnmedia.com
Twitter.com/LaserBurnMedia
(570)795-9467

Dan Cheek is the president and co-founder of Laser Burn Media, a full-service social media marketing firm located just outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania.  Dan has over five years experience in working with social media as a marketing platform and has a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Wilkes University.   A veteran of the United States Army, Dan lives with his wife, Krissy, and his step-dog, Molly.

How to Not Use Twitter is a post from: Laser Burn Media

While I was still in college, between my junior and senior year, I got a Summer job at Toys R Us.  Right after I graduated college, I began working at Best Buy.  I learned a lot from both companies.  I learned about leadership, the selling process, team work, and customer service.  I also learned valuable lessons about marketing, customer service, and running a business.  These are the lessons I want to talk about now.

Toys R Us was, hands down, the worst job I ever had.  The pay was horrible, the management and store leadership was incompetent, employee morale was non-existent, and customer service wasn’t even a consideration.  I ended up working there a week and then, disgusted, I just stopped showing up.  I received no training (well, I did watch a video explaining how to clean up blood and spilled cleaning chemicals), no one showed me around the store, and store management treated me as if they didn’t care if I showed up the next day or not.  It was common for employees to argue with one another in front of customers, for leadership to scold employees in front of other employees, and for managers to argue with one another in front of all of the above.  In one week, I learned a lot about how to not run a business, how to be a horrible boss, and how to be a lousy employee.

Upon graduating business school from Wilkes University, I found myself trying to get a job in one of the worst economies in a long time.  I had a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration, with a concentration in Marketing, and I couldn’t find a job.  I had also, right after graduating, gotten married and moved into a new apartment with my wife.  I needed a job…quickly.  Best Buy provided me that opportunity.  My only other experience with retail was at Toys R Us, and as you can imagine, I was expecting the worst.  Best Buy, however, was an entirely different experience, for the better.

I worked at Best Buy for about six months, the whole time selling computers and computer accessories.  Unlike Toys R Us, which was about as unorganized as possible, Best Buy was very structured.  I received constant training on selling, customer service, merchandise, and store policy.  Every morning, everyone in the store was briefed about the sales goals for the day, week, and month and provided an update with how we were progressing against those goals.  We knew how much we were selling, what we were selling, and who we were selling it to.  We knew which items provided the highest margin for the store, and which items we made almost no profit on.  Store leadership was engaged, led by example, and ensured that everyone was on the same page.  I enjoyed working there and learned a lot from the experience.

As I work with clients and help them with their online and social marketing efforts, I am constantly remind of what I learned from my time as an employee of these two retailers.  Here are three examples of what I learned and how I apply it today at Laser Burn Media….

• Best Buy taught me the importance of building relationships with customers.  People could buy computers from a lot of different places, including the store right next door to Best Buy.  So why did they buy from us?  Because we were trained and encouraged to develop relationships with our customers.  We took the time to find out what they needed and then found solutions to meet those needs.  One time, I was talking with a customer for over an hour about her computing needs and what options she had available and what would work best for her.  She then told me that she had just purchased a computer from one of our competitors, but after talking with me, was going to go return it, come back, and buy a computer from Best Buy.  And she did.  When done right, that’s what social marketing can do.
• Both Best Buy and Toys R Us taught me the importance of being an expert at what you do.  At Toys R Us, I remember feeling overwhelmingly frustrated about the fact that store leadership would, at random, assign me to work in a certain department without taking the time to ensure that I knew anything about what I was supposed to be selling.  Customers would ask me questions about this toy or that video game and I would just kind of have to fake my way through it.  Sometimes I was able to help the customer, most times I wasn’t and just ended up looking stupid and useless.  I never want to feel that way again and am dedicated, every day, to learning as much as I can about online marketing and social media.  And with as fast paced and rapidly evolving as this industry is, this is something that is critical, in my experience.
• At Best Buy, I learned the value in building your business around the customer.  Everything we did revolved around the customer.  Making them feel welcome, identifying their needs, and then having the knowledge and products to meet those needs.  Toys R Us provided an example of what happens when you build a business around a product.  Their strategy seemed to be stuff a big store full of toys, hope this generates traffic, and then hope that enough of that traffic is converted into buyers.  This type of marketing strategy struck me as wasteful and highly inefficient, leaving a lot of opportunity on the table.  Marketing efforts should be built around the customer and her needs, not around a product and its features.

Best Buy and Toys R Us provided me with two very different experiences and presented two very different business philosophies.  In my opinion, Toys R Us is lucky to still be in business.  I would never shop there unless I absolutely had to, as my one week of working there was enough to make me never want to step foot in any of its stores ever again.  Best Buy showed me, first hand, the power of relationship building in business and how important it is to focus on identifying needs and developing solutions to meet those needs.  I’m glad that I had the opportunity to work for both of these companies, as it provided me with more than a paycheck.  Both employers provided me with valuable business and marketing skills that I use everyday at Laser Burn Media.

-Dan Cheek
LaserBurnMedia.com
dan@laserburnemdia.com
Twitter.com/LaserBurnMedia
(570)795-9467

Dan Cheek is the president and co-founder of Laser Burn Media, a full-service social media marketing firm located just outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania.  Dan has over five years experience in working with social media as a marketing platform and has a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from Wilkes University.   A veteran of the United States Army, Dan lives with his wife, Krissy, and his step-dog, Molly.

What I Learned at Toys R Us and Best Buy is a post from: Laser Burn Media