Social media is about engagement, so if I know you, but see that you have a profile with no picture, no bio, and you’ve never Tweeted, I am going to assume you aren’t really there to engage, so I won’t follow you back. And a big part of this is because there are limitations on the number of people you can follow, so each connection should be with someone who is engaged in Twitter.

If I don’t know you, but I like what you’re about (based on your bio and/or tweets) I will very likely follow you. If I see that you like to rant and use profanity, there is a good likelihood that I will soon unfollow you. As I engage in social media, I like to connect with those who share my core values which doesn’t include publicly using profanity… unless it’s warranted.

What about you? Do you have rules for following or unfollowing people on Twitter? Let me know in the comments below.

P.S. – Feel free to follow me at @AnthonyKirlew or @oldschoolseo. I look forward to connecting.

If you happen to get selected and want to come back a guest post about it, I welcome that. For now, I will leave you with Sergey Brin’s New York Times article explaining Google Glass.

When posting on social media channels – whether personal or professional – we need to use wisdom and discretion. None of us are perfect, and we’ve all seen “those dialogues” on Facebook. They can be awkward, uncomfortable and make us cringe. One of my personal rules is that I don’t judge people or say things like “man, I can’t believe they did that” because those kinds of things can come back to bite you. And yes, it happened to me recently. I made a foolish decision to share a post which was off color. It wasn’t pornographic, it did not have swearing in it, but it was intended to poke at political and media leaders (who are very often the subject of poor humor.) We all make mistakes, but sadly for me, I offended a family member and that’s just something I never want to do.

Here are three great questions to ask yourself before posting to any social media profile:

1. Why am I posting this? We often post things that are humorous, but we need to ask why we care enough to share what we are sharing.

2. Who will see the post? If you are connected with your coworkers, colleagues, or clients, be careful not to reveal any information that might come back to haunt you. And if you are thinking about this too often, you might want to decide if they need to be Facebook friends (see my prior post on good reasons to unfriend people.)

3. Who (if anyone) will be offended? If the answer is “anyone at all” the response should be to not share it – end of story.

I hope this helps someone not experience the frustration – and damage control – of making a mistake as I did. And if you have an issue, don’t blame Facebook Take ownership of your actions, clear the air, and move on with life. Life is too short and too precious.

As I looked at those I was connected to, I decided to drop a few people from the list and here is my list of reasons why people might not have made the cut.

1. I don’t actually know you. There was a time when I was connecting with people that I really did not know, either for business reasons or because they knew someone I knew. I no longer do this and I like to keep my friends circle confined to people I know “in real life.”
2. You are so into you that I don’t need to be. Facebook will let you know who needs attention. I love you, but I get tired of seeing those “look at me” posts and I pray that mine are never perceived as such. My wife might think I cross the line here, who knows.
3. You are inappropriate. We can be friends and I won’t judge you, but I won’t allow you to post obscenities on my wall. And if your avatar (or photos) make you look like a porn star… well… not appropriate, and my wife appreciates my stand on this one.
4. We’ve drifted apart… and that’s ok. Just like in the real world, there are people I used to hang out with, call, email, etc. If we aren’t hanging out in this season of life, it’s ok, we probably don’t need to be Facebook friends, however.
5. You are in the witness protection program. Or so it seems, since you have abandoned your Facebook page and the only posts I now see are viruses – for which you don’t even come back to post the oh so common “sorry, if you if saw something inappropriate from me, I was hacked” apology.
6. We’ve dated. I am married, and that would just be awkward.
7. You are shady, or connected to shady people. I don’t hang out with shady people… or people who do. Hopefully, you know your Facebook friends well enough to know if any of them are shady. Remember, you become who you hang around… and trouble find shady folks, so I’d rather they not find me through you.
8. You are in jail. I read a story about how prisoners are now using Facebook and learned that they pay big money to get people to smuggle smart phones into jails so they can do all kinds of stuff including using Facebook. I probably don’t need to go any further with this one. And don’t read into it, I don’t have any Facebook friends in jail either.
9. I realize that I hesitate to share things because you will see them. Do you ever find yourself pausing before you post because someone might see what you write? If you do, it might be a good thing, as it may save you some embarrassment, but if you get concerned about how one or two people might judge you, remember, you don’t need to be Facebook friends with them.
10. You are a client of mine. I don’t post anything inappropriate, and of course, my friends have also become clients, but I like to maintain a line between personal and professional when it comes to Facebook. Why? I am opinionated and I will talk about religion and politics, for one.
11. We work together. This is a curious one, because I am actually now connected to most of the people I work with. I own my own business, but in the past when I was an employee, I had a policy of not connecting with my coworkers. You never know when you will say the wrong thing about your job and have someone connected to your boss read it. Trust me, it happens.
12. You clutter my news feed with game updates & invites. If you want to play games all day, that’s totally fine, but I really hate getting the invites to play AND of course, we never actually communicate because you are always playing games.
13. You’ve left Facebook. This one should be obvious, but currently, anyone who has left Facebook still shows up in your friends list. Check it out and you might want to unfriend those stray profiles. I believe they keep them active so people can reactivate them but most people (not knowing they can reactivate) just start over.

I hope you enjoyed this as it was done in humor and most of all, I hope you don’t think I am arrogant or really into myself, but if you do… oh well (just kidding)

Happy New Year!

We’ve all seen lame status updates, and of course, would never want to be guilty of writing one. Here are a few tips for not writing a lame Facebook status:

The next time you go to post a Facebook status, write it out and then ask yourself what you would think if you read that from a friend. You might even LOL at yourself

The next time you go to post that picture. Ask yourself why? Some people really need affirmation and they think it’s a secret… then they post a “hey guys, look at me and like my picture to make me feel good” photo. You know… you’ve seen them. If you still think you should post it, invite a few friends out for coffee, then pull the picture out and pass it around. Ask people to write their comments on the back of it, along with a plus or minus, you know a like or neutral. Sounds silly, doesn’t it?

Well this was done in fun, but hopefully it saves someone from private humiliation. What is private humiliation? It’s the comments your friends are making outside of Facebook, with each other. They sound like this:

Who does she think she is posting a picture like that?

Yeah, right… that outfit works for you…

Wait, is that the same guy from her last timeline photo?

The statuses I am most guilty of are the non status statuses. They look like this

I was going to post something, but I decided not to.

You would be amazed at how many people actually respond to that. And I don’t do it for a response, I do it because I have been known to be controversial on Facebook and that equals lots of time responding to comments, which I don’t always have.

That all for me, but do look for my next blog post “Why We Aren’t Friends on Facebook.” You can subscribe to my blog via email or RSS to get notified of updates.

So can Justin & Company do it? I’d say they have a shot. For one, he is much closer to the social media demographic than Murdoch, and let’s face it, old school media companies, still don’t get a lot of what is going on in the online world, as evidences by the fact that they think people will pay for the news online. Perhaps, we will get there someday, but I don’t believe it will be anytime soon.

What do you think? Will you re-engage on MySpace anytime soon?

P.S. – I didn’t think I would be doing a positive MySpace related post anytime soon

Her goals included having a mobile friendly website and just having a more moderns look and feel. I discovered that they were not capturing any prospects (developing an email list) and their customers were also not getting immediate responses to their inquiries. After the redesign, I started to get notifications of their inquiries, so I knew at least that was working. I discussed what seemed to be a positive trend with customer inquiries, and at first she said it seemed to be about the same, but by the end of the week, she admitted that she had a great week, with several new customers on board. I always love to hear success stories from my customers.

This clients website happens to get lots of search engine traffic. We discussed the fact that the rankings would change, but that we would help them make adjustments after everything settled. What this client notes was that “although our traffic went down, our inquiries and sales are up during a season that is typically slow.” I had discussed conversions with her, so she gets it, but the simple math looks like this:

Poor Converting Website
5,000 monthly visitors
0.5% conversions = 25 customers

Site With Good Conversion Rate
2,500 monthly visitors (Assume a loss of 50% traffic)
2.0% conversion rate = 50 customers

In the end, it’s not always about traffic, so if you are seeing visitors come to your website (in Analytics) but not seeing the percentage of those visitors convert, you need to ask why. If you don’t know the answer, you need to contact someone who can help you. And by the way, I can certainly help you.

I had another client this week whose website does not get a lot of traffic, but it was also not converting. I made some edits to his home page and his about page, and over the next week, he said he saw an increase in calls, and actually wrote some new business. His comment was “did you do something to my site last week after we spoke?” And I reminded him of the content he approved.

While the intent of this search engine technology is to weed out spam (or those who abuse the guidelines), no technology – not even Google’s – is fail proof. This means that even if you are not in violation of the rules, you could suffer a ranking penalty; at least that is the concern among some Internet Marketing professionals.

My advice:

1. Stick to the basics. This includes adhering to Google’s guidelines.

2. Don’t rush it. SEO is not a sprint, it is a journey. It’s those tactics that seek to get quick results that often get people in trouble.

3. Know how much social media engagement impacts SEO. For one, keep in mind that Google now has a social network (Google Plus) and it has a big impact on how sites are ranking in Google.

Keep in mind that in addition to SEO there are dozen of ways to generate business, both online and offline, so make sure you are engaging a holistic marketing campaign so that your business does ont rely exclusively (or predominantly) on one specific marketing tactic.

Think about your company. Do you have the right person, team, or company in place to create or maintain the public image that you want? If not, now is a good time to think about it. If you are marketing with the wrong message, you are wasting time and money, and missing out on opportunities. Stop and ask yourself how you are represented in the following areas:

- Press & Media Relations
- Social Media (blogs, social networks, etc.)
- Email Marketing

It’s not practical for the business owner to be involved personally in each of these aspects of marketing, but it is critical that a business owner, know that his or her company message is being created for the right audience at the right time and through the right channels.

If you need professional help or an analysis of your current strategy, I’d love to help you. Feel free to contact me for a consultation to see how I can help you increase your profitability by having solid company communications.

1. They did not read the requirements. If you have a section on your blog where you solicit guest blog posts, you need to spell out exactly what you are – and are not – looking for. If you get a request that doesn’t meet the requirements, save yourself some time by deleting it.

2.The request had poor English. If you can’t type a compelling guest blog request email, complete with proper grammar and typos corrected, then I won’t hold out much hope for the end product.

3. The post was off topic. Take this blog for example, the target audience is people with an interest in online marketing. If you send me a blog post about “How to save money on car insurance” I will assume you did not read the blog, you were high, or that you aren’t competent to think that a blog post about car insurance belongs here. And folks, I am not making that up to be funny. You would be amazed at the kind of emails I get as blog post requests.

4. I don’t want to link to the site you are proposing. The primary goal of guest blogging is exposure to a new audience. One of my requirements is that you tell me in advance what website the blog post is going to link to, so I can make sure it’s something I want to endorse (because linking to a site is pretty much an endorsement.)

Don’t let that discourage you. Guest blogging is a great way to get in front of a new audience, just make sure you know the rules of the blog you are seeking to make a guest appearance on. There are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, so I know you can find one to post on. If you need help finding great blogs to posts on, I recommend checking out these two resources:

www.BloggerLinkUp.com
www.MyBlogGuest.com

If you have never been a guest blogger, make it a goal to do it this week. Have a great day!