Just in the last couple of days there’s been reports in the news about Facebook having lost lots and lots of customers recently, lots and lots of members that is, somewhere in the order of 1.6 million in the last quarter. This may or may not be accurate, certainly there is some fuzzy math going on there—those who calculate this are using an internal tool that the advertisers have access to for projecting media reach across the globe for Facebook and they’re extrapolating some numbers from that to try to estimate the North American membership. They’re probably not accurate, but there are some other things going on in social media that’s worth mentioning at this point. So let’s talk about three things; Facebook in general, a tool for marketing on Facebook called NorthSocial, as well as an up-and-coming blogging tool that allows you to broadcast from a blog to the rest of the social media called Posterous. First of all Facebook.

You’re not going to set up a company website or web profile on Facebook and get bulldozed with customers—not going to happen. If you’re in a business that needs to stay in touch with your prior customers and potential customers and remind them to stay in touch with you, Facebook might be a good tool for that. Certainly you don’t want to expect to get much more than that out of it. You can do things like contests and group coupon kinds of things through Facebook, but not directly. That’s a violation of Facebook’s terms of service and they are cracking down on that. So when you hear the local TV. station or something say “enter a sweepstakes by liking us on Facebook”, that’s not allowed. There are tools to help you do that and, as I said, NorthSocial is one of those. They have a number of tools, they’re kind of a Swiss army knife of Facebook marketing. They allow you to do contests and group coupons and mailing lists and reminders and volunteer forms and other kinds of tools through Facebook that help you keep in touch with your clients. It’s a pretty good tool, it’s not expensive to get started—I think they’re somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 a month for a starter account, well worth looking into. The next thing is a blogging tool called Posterous. That is one where you can set up your posts there, you can even use them to run your website although it’s not really designed for that; it’s really designed as a blog.  You can email things into them, they will format them for you and post them to your blog, and then you can use the tools that are already built into Posterous to send all that information you uploaded to your blog, out to your social networking sites. So whether you use twitter or Facebook or any one of probably two dozen other tools to reach your social networking goals you can do that all through Posterous if you’re so inclined. All those are very new tools, they’ve been around for a little while but they’re just now getting enough traction to be noticed, and getting all the bugs out. So, I definitely recommend these three: Facebook, which you’ve obviously heard of; Posterous, which you probably haven’t heard of; and NorthSocial, which is a great one-trick pony for marketing on Facebook.

I know I’ve been on a rant lately about things you shouldn’t do. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to do one more this week, and that is because an outfit in town did some things they should not have done and knew better. If you’ve been to any of my classes or watched very many of these internet tips, you know that we never name names of somebody who doesn’t quite get it right. Anyone who’s learning how to do this marketing thing properly, we don’t pick on. But in this case, it was a company that did something they shouldn’t of done and knew darn well they shouldn’t be doing it. So we’re going to call them out on the carpet for it. It happens to be one of our competitors, an outfit by the name of Colorado Springs Marketing. They went on our website as a guest and wrote a reply to one of our articles, which we allow and we encourage. But when you see what they did, you’ll understand why this is bad behavior. First of all, let me just read yo the reply that they left on our website:

“Thanks for the post, guys. Colorado Springs is an interesting market. Since becoming a Colorado Springs property owner, I have seen highs and lows. There was the boom of high-tech in the seventies; and then record foreclosures in the early eighties. I saw the Condo across the street, sell for $36,000, which has been appraised at $130,000! No longer true. With the military away, this negatively impacts the Colorado Springs rental market; and with real estate market generally sluggish, and foreclosures rising, we face challenges with Colorado Springs property rentals in 2007 and 2008!”

I’m not sure that 2007 and 2008 has to do with it because obviously they posted this in what is now June of 2011. We’re not in the real estate market, they’re not in the real estate market. It didn’t take us any time at all to figure out what they did. We looked up the IP address of the computer that left the message on our website and it was an IP address in the Philippines, even though we’re talking about a company here in Colorado Springs. Clearly what they had done was pay someone in the Philippines to surf the web, find websites that talked about Colorado Springs and marketing, and put up a fake message about real estate so that it would trigger the search engines to rank their website higher on the terms “Colorado Springs” and “marketing”.

If you take our internet class, you know how this linking key words thing works and they’re obviously trying to get their page to rank higher on the search engines like Google and Yahoo by having their site linked to a website that talks about Colorado Springs and marketing—even though their fake message was about real estate. Now, they clearly know this is wrong; and this is as ridiculous as me going into their company and nailing a sign on the wall that says, “Shop at my company.” Bad manners, bad behavior, and something they shouldn’t be doing. And now you know as well this is no way to carry on a marketing campaign, internet or otherwise; something to keep in mind. This is Lance Haverkamp for Topline Marketing in Colorado Springs. We’d love to see you at an upcoming workshop. You can find us online at toplinecolorado.com or just pick up the phone and give me a call at 359-5501. Thanks a lot.

The Very Best, FREE Business Networking and Referral System for Your Business.

Hi, this is Lance with Topline Marketing in Colorado Springs.  Today’s tip is actually kind of a story.  Several months back I started looking around for one of the old lead exchange or business networking programs that were popular 20 or 30 years ago.  Back then everybody was involved in some kind of exchange program to building leads, to get more business connections.  I looked around at the library’s activity list and the newspapers and the community bulletin boards on the web—did not find anything that looked like the old free exchange of leads that they used to have.  I did find one listed somewhere, but it was something that they charged people to attend every week–certainly not something I was looking for.  I did find a reference to one thing called Team 100 somewhere online, but very little explanation to what it was about or where to find more information about it—a footnote here, a brief mention there.  I did find a list of about 100 occupations, but no explanation to know what to do with it and where to go with that tool once you had it.

Eventually, some of the experts at our global headquarters of Topline came up with the rest of the pieces of the puzzle and it’s actually a program initially designed by the late Thomas Leonard, the found of Coach University.  He put the program together, our experts at Topline have expanded it and built on that program.  We now have a package  with 14 pages full of information on how to set it up for your own business and build your own referral leads.  It’s a great program—probably the best referral building system I have ever seen.  What you do is take that list of 100 occupations, find professionals to fill those slots, and go interview them—talk to them about your business.  Tell them what your business is about.  Find out how their business works and use that as a tool to build a relationship with 100 different professionals in town to get referrals.  It’s a great system, I know you’ll love it.

We have it available for free on our website.  You can go to toplinecolorado.com and look for the Team 100 tab.  From there you can download the entire packet and we’d love to see you at a workshop, a free workshop, as well.  Those are coming up soon.  We do hand out these packets very often at those free workshops.  You can learn more about those and the Team 100 program itself at toplinecolorado.com or you can reach me directly at 359-5501.  Thanks again.