First, thank you so much for reading this blog – and for sticking with me for the past 18 months.  I’m truly honored.

I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you that my company Cloud Marketing Labs has launched a new blog:  www.cloudmarketinglab.com/blog.  We will be posting every Monday and Thursday.  I invite you to check it out and let me know what you think.

Thank you very much!

Greg

Paul Dunay is author of the marketing blog Buzz Marketing for Technology and Facebook Marketing for Dummies.  He is sharing with us his tips for marketing your business on Facebook.

What’s the difference between a Facebook Fan page and a Facebook group?

So some of the key differences between Facebook Groups and Facebook Fan Pages are that they are not indexable by the search engines since they are not public. Which means they are only visible to Facebook members. As the owner of a Facebook Group you can dictate how open you want your membership to be. You can chose to make your Group; “Open” to all Facebook members, “Closed” meaning Facebook members can see it but they need to have their membership approved by the owner or “Secret” meaning by invitation only and not visible to a search on Facebook for Groups. Another major difference is you cannot add applications to a Group like you can to a Page.
Groups have it a easier when it comes to recruiting other members to the Group. You can quickly and easily send out an invite to all your personal Friends in your profile to join your Group. And in turn its easy for your friends to send out an invite to all their friends to join your Group – giving Groups a leg up on some viral aspect where Pages have a more difficult time. It is also easier to send message to every group member which will appear in the members Inbox. Inviting the group to an Event is also easier but creating an ad for a group doesn’t exist like it does for a page.

When should you start a Fan page and when should you start a group?

So you may want to consider a Facebook Group if you want to have a serious discussion where members can really get involved, perhaps around a cause or a topical media issue that you want to enlist support on (a petition or human rights issue or something). You might be better off at the start to join a few groups and see how it is done before jumping in to start your own. Bottom line is for almost any business you want to have a Facebook Page think of the Group as an Association you would join or start to support your business.

For a new entrepreneur who doesn’t have much of an audience, how would you suggest building a targeted audience for your Facebook fan page?

I would absolutely start a page as a budding entrepreneur; which frankly is almost easier than building a website. The real question is should you build a website or a Facebook Fan page and which would you build first. For now, I would build the website but I can see a day when some firms will only have their Facebook page and no website.

The first tactic to consider is syndicating your existing content to create a steady stream of rich content and using Facebook as an outpost for that content. If you already have a blog, podcast series or video series you can effectively use Facebook to attract another audience to interact with those assets.

Another tactic is Facebook Events which are a great way of getting people together virtually or in person in support of your local business, brand or product. They are also a very economical way of getting the word out beyond your normal in-house marketing list by inviting the Fans of your Page. Fans can also help you promote your Facebook Event to their friends by sharing the event if it seems of value to a group of their friends.

You can also consider advertising on Facebook to build your fan base as well as more advanced tactics like creating a branded application like FedEx or Best Buy have done.

Many B2B companies dismiss Facebook as a marketing tool. Why is this a mistake?

Any company B2B or B2C can have a fan page. I think wherever you have sales of a product or service in either B2B or B2C you have the opportunity to create a Facebook Page and start having a dialog with your customers. I know a company that makes solder (clearly B2B) and they maintain 7 blogs, a twitter feed and a Facebook page. They engage their audience in how to use solder, best practices, ideal conditions to store and use their solder etc… If you have customers you have a potential audience to speak with socially and Facebook should be a staple of anyone’s social strategy because there is such a large audience there.

Where do you see Facebook marketing trends moving in the next two years?

Wow this is a big question - one which I blog about on my blog often (http://pauldunay.com).

First of all I think Facebook Advertising will take off – Last year Facebook saw their advertiser base triple! Facebook ads today remind me of Google AdWords in 2001 with low CPC’s on topics and segments many marketers will want to reach. I believe Facebook Ads will become the close “cousin” of Google AdWords – just with a more targeted and behavioral way to dial in your ads. BtoB Marketers should try it out for recruiting or even brand advertising – also don’t forget my book Facebook Marketing for Dummies comes with a credit for $50 Free Facebook ads

Second Facebook announced their Project Titan to the market on February 5th and  it is candidly thought to be a Google Gmail killer. But what does that really mean. Well first that means that Facebook will issue 400 Million email accounts – which is no small feat. Second those email accounts will be tied to your Facebook profile Vanity URL in my case PaulDunay@facebook.com. Third, Facebook says they will enable this feature for Pages (the business version of your Profile). And fourth those Page email addresses will be tied your Page Vanity URL such as Avaya@Facebook.com (which by the way they significantly lowered the minimum number of the Fans you need to get a Vanity URL from 1000 down to just 25!)

The point here for B2C and B2B Marketers is that as Facebook makes their platform rich in interaction and captures more users and hence more conversations about your brand – you will need to be there and engage with their user base. I still get questions from firms asking if they should start a presence in Facebook and the answer is unequivocally YES.  Facebook should be your social media hub of everything you have from company news, announcing events, offer tutorials, highlight videos, conduct polls and create community around discussions. But now with this new email feature you can upload your email lists and invite them to truly engage with you on Facebook.

Lastly if Facebook can create this type of rich interaction with their Fan Pages and now their email systems – then why would you need an external email vendor? Did I forget to mention all of this is FREE!

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Please join our newly formed Cloud Marketing Labs Fanpage on Facebook.

I was reading a blog post by Rich Millington, 8 Ways to Merge Your Online Community with the Real World, and as I was reading it, I became excited at the prospect of sharing it with my community on Twitter. 

He gives simple, but powerful advice on how to make your community members feel special.  Phone calls, text messages, a print news letter… All things that you can do offline to engage them.

But then I got to thinking, how many of these things do I do?  How many will I do this year? 

Think about it:  How many times do you read a great blog post, but forget about it by next week?  If you are like me, this happens all the time.  People read hundreds, if not thousands of posts per week.  There’s no possible way to remember all of them, let alone implement all of the ideas.

What say you?  What do you do with a blog post after you’ve read it?  What do you wish you could do?

The other day, thought leader David Meerman Scott wrote a blog post on Brand Journalism.  To David, Brand Journalism is:

 “the creation of Web content—videos, blog posts, photos, charts, graphs, essays, ebooks, white papers—that deliver value to your marketplace and serve to position your organization as one worthy of doing business with.”

David’s use of the term Brand Journalism is an interesting one.  He doesn’t say “Corporate Marketing” or “Marketing Communications”.   Why?  Because journalists have a way of telling stories that people want to read – and if you’ve seen websites run by the traditional marketing department, you know exactly how boring they are.

Why Your Business Needs to Be in the Journalism Business

Look at the average corporate website.  The content is created by the marketing communications department and is written with a thesaurus.

10 years ago, my marketing firms website would have read “we create a communications platform that enables your company to engage your users through faster technology, excellent service, and 25 man-years of internet marketing experience.”

That’s how the mission statement in most businesses read.  Let me ask you this:  When was the last time you went to a networking event, approached a fellow attendee and recited your mission statement?  If your mission statement sounds like the one above – probably never.  Why?  Because it’s boring and doesn’t really mean a lot.

And that’s the secret:  “Brand Journalism” FORCES companies to speak in a manner that is interesting to your prospective customers.  Try blogging for a year using only corporate clichés and speaking only about your products and services.  One of two things are going to happen.

1. You will eventually run out of things to say.
2. You will not have any readers except for your employees

Just like a journalist, you constantly need to find refreshing stories and points of view that your consumers want to read or watch or listen to. 

We feel an emotional connection to certain journalists, be it Charlie Gibson, Dianne Sawyer, etc… because they constantly give us interesting stories to consume and think about.  How many times do we hear the term “We allow them into our living rooms.”  Be a journalist and have your customers invite you into their lives too.

Neil Patel is the founder of Crazyegg and Kissmetrics, marketing analytics firms that helps small businesses increase customer conversions.  His blog Quicksprout is a startups handbook.  If you want to know how to recover from losing millions of dollars – Neil talks about it.  If you want to know how to market your business – Neil talks about it.  If you need to know how to navigate the web to build your business – Neil’s blog will show you.

1.You are a very well known entrepreneur with a very popular blog.  If you were starting today as a new entrepreneur with a new idea and no audience, what would the top three tips to get your inbound marketing strategy started?

I would do the following things:
A.  Create a product or service that solves a pain. The most successful web companies tend to be the ones that are solving a problem. Creating another me-too company makes marketing difficult, while creating a company that solves a new pain is easy to market.
B.  Blogging is a great way to drive leads. When blogging just don’t talk about your product or service, but talk about the pain your potential customers are experiencing and how they can solve it.
C.  Writing whitepapers and free guides are a great way to collect email addresses. You can then use those email addresses to then market your product or services to.

2.Many social media experts say that in order to succeed in business today, you need to produce great content.  However, there is a lot of great blogs/websites/etc that no one reads.  What content distribution and PR advice do you have for both startups and mature companies that want to grow?

I would use Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon as they are very popular social sites and they are easier to leverage than sites like Digg. The easiest way to leverage these social sites is to:

* Participate in the community. This way you can learn and understand what social users like.

* Write really good content because crappy content doesn’t do well on the social web.

3.  Crazyegg and Kissmetrics are in the very competitive analytic niches.  How much of your time and energy is focused on your competitors?  As a follow up, you’re new venture, Kissmetrics seems to be taking on Google’s free analytics tool.  What advice do you have for taking on the 800 pound gorilla?

Very little effort is focused on our competitors. Instead we focus on building a good product that solves our customers problems.

Taking on an 800 pound guerilla is never easy, but the thing you need to do is find their weaknesses and turn them into your strengths. For example Google moves slow because they are a large company… so we try and move quickly which helps us meet the current market demands.

4.What marketing trends do you see on the horizon that small business owners should keep an eye out for?

Freemium models are starting to really take off. In today’s world there are a lot of options for people so you have to give something away for free. You don’t have to give away the farm, but if you build some trust and show that you have a good product or service, you can get people to upgrade for more features.

5.And finally, what is the biggest mistake that entrepreneurs make when they are marketing their products and services?

They don’t track conversions! If you are advertising in 10 different channels and your revenue starts going up, it doesn’t mean everything is good. You have to figure out what advertising channels are profitable and which ones aren’t. This way you can increase your ROI by spending more money on channels that are working for you.

Build Solid Relationships

When I found out that PR Expert Elena Verlee built a sock distribution company (yes, her million dollar company distributed socks…) with only PR, I became intrigued and bought her book: “PR for Newbies”.

One of the first steps in the book is to build solid contacts (read relationships) with those in the media who are likely to write about your product or service.

When a company is marketing in the 21^st century the first bit of advice they receive is to start a blog.  Why should they start a blog?  The blog itself isn’t important – but the relationships that the blog cultivates are the lifeblood of your business.

For the longest time, PR has been like magic to me.  I had no idea how to acquire it.  But then I started to break it down:

With PR, you are selling your business/product/service to the press or bloggers.

With Marketing, you are selling your business/product/service to your potential customers.

Either way, you are selling your business.  The difference amounts to who you are selling your business to.

Enter HARO

Helpareporter.com (HARO) is a PR service that connects reporters to sources.  You, yes you, can be a source or expert for someone’s story.  I highly recommend signing up TODAY.

My new “friend” David Siteman Garland did a video about how to get your businesses story to the sources in Helpareporter.com.  He emphasizes relevance and brevity.  Make sure your story is what the source is looking for, and make sure that the source can read it in a few seconds.

In Conclusion:

By leveraging powerful relationships with relevant members of the media, and becoming a trusted source on HARO, your business will be able to generate publicity without the help of an expensive PR firm.

Your turn

What are some tips that you have to help entrepreneurs get exposure to the press that they deserve?

As some of you know, I’ve been fairly active on LinkedIn.  It’s a great resource for meeting new people, learning about your filed, and building strong connections.

However, I’ve started to notice a trend.  Many people will invite me to connect with them.  For the record, I connect with everyone who asks, whether I know them or not.

Once they invite me to connect, I usually respond with something along the lines of “Thank you for connecting with me.  If you need help with anything please let me know.”

I’m not sure if this is a bad response, or what, but the majority of people never respond.  It seems to me that many people are simply looking to increase the amount of connections that they have.  Is it vanity?  I’m not sure.  But what I do know is that they are missing out on a great opportunity to meet people who they can help and can help them.

The amount of traffic my blog receives has much more to do with my efforts on other sites than it does on my own.

Brian Clark and the Copyblogger team have shown us how to write headlines that attract readers to your blog.  Starting the headline with “How to” or “5 Steps” are good ways to get your audiences’ attention in search and in places like Alltop.

However, there is another search that you should keep in mind… Twitter Search.

For instance, I’m hoping that this headline gets read by people searching for the term “Entrepreneur” and could use help with marketing (or writing headlines).

I could have easily written “How to optimize your headlines for twitter search”, but from experience, I know that few people search for any of the terms in that headline.  Tons of people search for the term “Entrepreneur” or they keep a feed open on Tweetdeck.

Also, because few people will actually take the time to modify your headline, try to keep it under 140 characters.  Keeping your headline under 120 characters would work even better.  This way when someone uses your retweet plugin, the headline will not be shortened.

How about you?  Have you had success optimizing your headlines for Twitter search?

The other night I was watching a documentary on the Vietnam War.  Here’s what I found interesting.  American commanders determined the success of a battle on whether or not the kill ration was in their favor.  In other words, if they suffered more fatalities than we did, then the battle was successful.

On the other hand, Vietnam commanders watched an entirely different number.  They were far more concerned with the popularity of the war amongst the US Civilians than they were with how many men they lost in a given battle.  They understood that when the war became unpopular, the American army would eventually leave.

Ultimately, the Americans never lost a single battle.

How about your business?  Are you measuring the right stats to ensure your success?  Or are you measuring things like hits, traffic, and @mentions?

What are some statistics that determine whether or not your business is succeeding?