The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

When most people think about geolocation services they think about pinpointing a particular business or landmark on a map. To be sure, that is one method of geolocation. However, a new type of geolocation service is becoming more and more popular.

Since smartphones are gaining in popularity, many people are starting to use geolocation services that tell where they are located at a specific time.

For instance, if you’re sitting in a Starbucks in your town, you can use the geolocation service to tell your friends and fans precisely where you are. Then they could find you on their smartphones and meet you right there. Is that useful?

Yes, I think so. Not just from the perspective of a consumer or citizen looking to meet up with other citizens, but also from the perspective of a business owner.

If you own a business where people tend to congregate or meet in large numbers, then why not place a QR code in your store window so that people can scan it with their smartphones and make geolocation easier? Better yet, place an upright brochure on each table in your restaurant or at strategic locations within your business with that QR code prominently displayed and see how your customers use geolocation services to bring you more business.

All it takes is a nudge. If you simply offer your customers an opportunity to spread the word about your location and about your business, then you’d be surprised how geolocation services can give your business a boost.

Twitter Chat has become one of the most popular features of the social media service whose mascot is a funny-looking bird. The way it works is the moderator, or facilitator, of the chat creates a hashtag that all members of the chat session can use to keep up with the conversation. While the hashtag is useful for keeping up with the chat, there are some tools that you can use to make tweeting easier during the chat session. One such tool is TweetChat.

The benefit to using TweetChat is that everyone who is a member of the chat session can make their tweets via TweetChat and the tool itself will automatically insert the hashtag after each post. That’s important because many members of a Twitter chat session will often forget to include the hashtag when they post.

So what are the benefits of hosting a Twitter chat session?

First, you can use it to develop relationships with your biggest fans and customers. Set a chat session to discuss an important topic in your industry and see who shows up. You can also offer discounts on items to people who show up at the chat sessions, so you can use it as a marketing and promotional tool. The biggest benefit to hosting a Twitter chat session is that you can often find new followers due to the public nature of the chat sessions. Because they are public and not private anyone can see the chat in progress. That means anyone who is following your hashtag or who performs a search for keywords that any member of the chat session uses will see your chat session and possibly join. Followers of each member will also see the chat and may join in.

Hosting Twitter chat session can lead to more followers and more business for your brand. It’s a great social media tool.

Have you ever wanted the ability to make offers on your Facebook page? To offer discounts, giveaways, contests, and engage your audience in other promotions that lead to your benefit and theirs? Well, now you can. Facebook has announced that Facebook Offers is in limited beta.

What that means is that you can request the ability to make offers on your Facebook page if you request it and Facebook grants it. The best I can tell at this point, Facebook will grant the offer to anyone who asks.

So what can an offer do?

Facebook Offers is a lot like Groupon. You make offers to your Facebook fans that you hope they will take you up on. When they do you get increased exposure for your business, more traffic to your website, and more customers sending you their money. You can reach new people with your offers when your friends and fans share it with their friends and fans.

I think Facebook Offers is a great idea. I’d like a little more clarification on whether or not it is open to anyone who asks. If it is, then this is a grand opportunity for all. If not, then it’s a grand opportunity for a chosen few while the rest of us will have to wait a while. Eventually, Facebook Offers will be open to everyone.

Facebook marketing is getting better. Slowly. But it is getting better and that’s something to brag about.

If you are looking for a way to make yourself more popular on Facebook, some scientists in the Netherlands have the answer. You need sexier friends.

Two scientists conducted a study using 78 people and their conclusion was that if you want to increase your Facebook popularity, then you should have more attractive friends. Is that a useful study?

Social scientists have for years now said that popularity off line in part has something to do with how attractive you are or your friends are, but does that translate online? Maybe it does. But I don’t think a sampling of 78 people in a study is enough to make that statement definitive, do you?

Nevertheless, it’s worth giving it a try. Maybe you can go around looking for attractive Facebook people to add to your friends list. Then what?

These kinds of studies don’t do businesses much good at all. You are looking for customers, people who will interact with your brand and purchase your products or services. That requires a certain level of targeting. If attractive people are your target market, then by all means seek out the most attractive people you can find. But if attractiveness has nothing to do with who is in the market for your goods, then don’t consider it.

Facebook is a place where people go to meet new friends and interact with their current friends. Don’t overcomplicate your social networking. Just do it.

It appears that large companies have given up their blogs and flocked to social media instead. The reason they’re giving up is because they say that social media is easier to manage than a blog. But is it?

I love this paragraph by Cynthia Boris:

Just remember that if you want your social media outlets to benefit you, you have to do more than just keep the lights on. You have to provide meaningful content that engages your audience. In that respect, it’s just as hard as blogging, but most people don’t see it that way.

Not only that, but …

What blogs give you that you don’t get with social media, is a chance to communicate without all the noise. On Facebook, you’re one of a dozen posts competing for instant attention. An hour later, you’re off the front page and forgotten.

What Cynthia Boris doesn’t say is that your company blog also provides you with search engine optimization benefits that Facebook and Twitter don’t offer. OK, Twitter does offer a little bit of SEO juice, but it’s nowhere near what your blog has to offer.

Every blog post you write is another chance to be seen in a search result. Your blog itself increases its SEO chutzpah with longevity. And you can build invaluable internal links with a blog. Facebook has blocked Google so your posts aren’t going to be indexed and your links back to your site won’t be seen. Twitter is in bed with Bing, not Google.

I’m not saying don’t use Facebook or Twitter. They have their place. But having a blog is one of the best SEO tools you can have. If you have trouble coming up with content, maybe you should think about hiring someone else to manage your blog.

It’s been talked about before, even predicted. TV is going social. But I think TV is going social in a way that wasn’t foreseen. Cynthia Boris at Marketing Pilgrim talks about it.

It seems that 64% of TV watchers have seen a social symbol appear on a program they’ve watched. Cool. But then she goes on to report that 33% of them acted on that symbol.

This is all great. What she’s really saying is that TV programming executives are now adding Like buttons, QR codes, and other social buttons on the moving images on the screen. So viewers are using their smart phones to interact with their TVs, Liking TV shows, and performing other tasks as well. That’s it?

OK, so I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t that enough? I mean, social TV has arrived.

Yes, it has. But I think the bigger question is how many TV programs actually employ the social buttons?

If you consider that the average TV watcher spends 2-5 hours watching TV during a 24-hour period, how many shows will they watch during that time? And only 64% of them saw a social button.

Let’s figure 30 minutes per show. A 3-hour-a-day viewer will watch 6 shows. Let’s say she’s a part of the 64%. She saw the Like button on one of her favorite shows. That’s 1 show in 6. Less than 20% of the programming.

Don’t get me wrong. I think social TV is a big deal. I think it will be even a bigger deal in 10 years. In fact, I expect that the “social” part of TV will become even more social, allowing TV viewers across great distances to interact with each on their TV screens while they are watching the same show. I can imagine people using their televisions as a sort of social network in itself.

We’ve only touched the tip of the pond with this social TV thing. Sure, it’s something to get excited about. But let’s hold onto our hats. It will get better. Don’t you think?

A discussion with another Internet marketer about the growing popularity of Pinterest led to a disagreement over the value of its traffic. The other Internet marketer exclaimed, “You can’t get any traffic from it and if you do it won’t be valuable traffic.” I disagree.

Evidently, I’m not the only one.

A WebProNews article indicates that Pinterest traffic is up 3.6% from December last year. Not only that, but the guide also tells you how to make the most of your Pinterest social networking activities.

Pinterest is a unique service in that it relies mostly on graphic content, unlike other social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Google+ comes close, however, Google+ also provides benefit for video marketers and textual content publishers. Pinterest is almost exclusively graphic in nature. But it is social. You could say it’s more like Flickr or Photobucket except that the social features are much more enhanced.

Because it is social in nature, one of the most important parts about Pinterest to keep in mind is to make friends. That means follow other people’s Pinboards and connect with them over your tastes in graphics. But you should be careful not to violate anyone’s intellectual rights, and you should spend considerable time sharing your own graphic content as opposed to just pinning others’ graphics. Mix it up, in other words.

Perhaps the most important part of Pinterest is your ability to group images by category. If your categories are interesting, then you’ll stand a much better chance of gaining new followers and by doing so you’ll get the referral traffic you are seeking. Like any social network, be interesting and people will follow.

Are you a CEO? Do you have direct access to the CEO at your company? If so, then you should do everything you can to convince him or her to open up a Twitter account and start tweeting.

According to the latest survey, 77% of consumers and 82% of employees trust a company more when its CEO tweets.

Tweeting puts your CEO on the front line of customer service rather than hiding behind a desk on top of a 700-foot ivory tower. That spells “inaccessible,” and in an age of expected accessibility it is the cardinal sin. Your entire company will benefit if your CEO isn’t afraid to get his social media hands dirty.

That doesn’t mean he should just jump in without getting a primer first. Certainly, you should have your PR or marketing consultant discuss the pros and cons of Twitter and develop a social media strategy.

I wouldn’t stop at Twitter either. Try out Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn as well. All of your top executives should have a social media presence.

It’s hard to ignore social media in today’s world. It’s so expected that if you ignore it you will be relegating your company to the trash heaps of history. And there are enough companies heading in that direction without yours joining them. The best part about social media is that you don’t have to spend all day working it. You can have a viable plan with just 15-30 minutes a day.

If you’re a CEO, work out your social media plan now.

For awhile webmasters were stuck on buying paid links. But link networks have pretty much gone by the wayside and I think the reason why is because their business model has been destroyed.

Google has built a great system for detecting bogus links. There are tell-tale signs that a link is a paid-for link and not a natural link. For instance, if you have the perfect anchor text for “viagra” on a website about pet ownership, then there’s a clear indication that you have a bought link.

There are other signs as well. Link sellers generally spin their content. So if you find articles online with similar content over and over again with a mix of irrelevant anchor text links, that’s likely a link seller’s page. Google Panda took care of a lot of those.

And then the big kicker. Google operatives.

Imagine trying to sell links to an unsuspecting webmaster, but that webmaster turns out to be a Google employee. Bam! You’re dead.

It’s much like the way drug dealers and law enforcement personnel work. The dealer tries to find strung out peeps to sell his drugs to, but he has no way of weeding out the real fiends and those playacting. Law enforcement actually has an advantage. They work undercover pretending to be the type of customer the drug dealer wants. When an offer is made, bam! Snagged.

Google has its undercover agents as well, and they’re pretty good. If you’re still buying paid links, you’re throwing your money away. You’d be better off buying content the old-fashioned way and marketing through high quality content that builds your reputation and your SEO.

When filling out your social media profiles, should you use keywords? I don’t see why not. In fact, I would encourage you to do some keyword research prior to writing your profiles and using the most popular and profitable keywords within your profile.

I’m not talking about spamming here. I’m not talking about excessive use of your keywords or inappropriate use of them either. I am talking about effective marketing.

Your social media profile on most of the social networks are crawlable and likely will be indexed in Google. So why not use your keywords? If those keywords are important to you in search, then they should be important to you in your social media profile.

For instance, let’s say you are filling out a LinkedIn profile and are the creative director in a theatre. What keywords would you use to describe what you do? Here are a few:

• Creative director
• Theatre
• Entertainment
• Media

If a particular job description entails the use of a specific keyword, then you want that keyword used in your social media profiles. You want to use it on any social media where you network with other professionals. So, if you use Twitter and LinkedIn for professional social networking but not Facebook, then you don’t need to worry about using your keywords for Facebook – but you do for the other two networks. If you decide that you want to use Facebook for professional networking, then use your keywords on Facebook.

Social networking is not an exact science. But it does impact search in some ways. Use your keywords.

Pinterest is the new kid on the block and already it has surpassed Twitter in traffic numbers. But don’t get excited just yet.

We’re only talking about one month. Was that a fluke or is Pinterest still trending upward? Will that trend continue over time?

And if it does, will traffic from Pinterest convert?

It’s best to understand that Twitter and Pinterest are two different social networks and therefore have two different sets of demographics. That might make it unfair to compare the two.

For instance, Twitter is mostly women and mostly younger people. Twitter, on the other hand, is mostly male, but only slightly. Twitter is also heavily used among the African-American and Hispanic demographics. It’s also a mostly younger crowd.

Any time you use a social media site you should take some time to study their users. Who else is using that site? If your targeted audience doesn’t use the site, then it doesn’t matter how much traffic you can potentially get from the site.

If your target market is mostly women, then Pinterest is a good bet for you. That’s not to say that you can’t use Pinterest if your target market is mostly men. But you have to understand how to reach the men who are using Pinterest, so familiarity with the platform and its limitations is also necessary.

Most marketers can effectively use Pinterest and Twitter side by side, but don’t try to use them the same way. They are different social media services and your audience will require a tailored approach.

Late last year Facebook introduced Timelines for personal Facebook accounts. Now, they’re introducing Timelines for brand pages.

This is going to be a good deal for businesses. That’s small businesses as well as large brands. For one thing, the Timeline format is more attractive than the traditional wall. And secondly, you and your page visitors can see a history of your brand at a glance. That’s cool!

Practically, you have a lot of control over your Timeline. You can pick your header image, which means you can make your Facebook brand Timeline an attractive marketing tool. You can also add key dates to your Timeline to show key events in your business’s history. You can also choose the content that is featured at the top of your Timeline – social apps and whatnot. And finally, you can feature any social media campaigns you happen to be running.

So, the question is, how will Facebook Timelines for brands work for brands. And the answer is, pretty much like they always have. Except now they’ll be more attractive.

With your own Facebook brand Timeline, you can position your company and all of your products brands to an ever-growing Facebook audience. If you engage your audience meaningfully through your Facebook Timeline, then you can parlay that into more traffic for your website and more sales conversions. You can take orders right from your Facebook Timeline.

If you’re ready to embark on a real Facebook marketing campaign, then you should consider a Facebook Timeline for brands. If you already have a brand page, you can convert it to a Timeline now or wait until it happens automatically on March 30.

Selling isn’t bad. Without salesmen, there might not be any marketing going on, or certainly not any buying. But there is a time and a place for every purpose. Facebook is a place for sharing. Not selling.

There are plenty of reasons why you should spend all of your time trying to sell on Facebook, but there’s really just one overriding reason. It’s still considered personal space.

If you’re old enough, you’ll remember those pesky door-to-door salesmen. They showed up at your home to try and sell you a vacuum cleaner. Right when you were busy doing something far more important. Fast forward a few years and telemarketers were the ones who called – just as your family sat down to dinner.

The truth is, many of those salesmen were successful as selling – door-to-door and over the phone. But they sure annoyed a lot of people doing it.

If you spend all your time trying to sell on Facebook, you’ll end up annoying your potential customers. And unlike door-to-door salesmen and telemarketers, you could end up getting kicked off of Facebook. Get enough reports that you are harassing people with marketing messages and you’ll have your account discontinued.

A better way to approach Facebook is to share your expertise with people in a non-threatening way. Make your Facebook messages about things other than yourself.

If you can downplay the hard sell and just interact with your friends and fans to earn their trust, they’ll eventually see you as a viable merchant to buy from. But you’ve got to be patient, not pushy.

Leave it to Marketing Pilgrim. On one day they’re asking if Facebook Stores are a failed experiment. And the next day they’re announcing Timelines for Brands.

Here’s the question: Do you think Timelines for Brands will change anything?

Many a company has tried to sell through Facebook. Personally, I think it works better for smaller companies and solopreneurs, who can maneuver easily as individuals on Facebook and sell without actually marketing. But that’s just me. Nevertheless, Facebook does have something to offer for brands.

One of the new products, and it hasn’t actually rolled out yet, is Timelines for Brands. These won’t be just like your personal timeline, but they will be a little more eye appealing than the current Facebook page layout. That’s a good thing, right?

People who visit your brand’s timeline will be able to see at a glance the various features of your Facebook marketing offerings. They’ll be able to see your contests, coupons, featured items, and other timeline features at a glance. But will that matter?

I’m not one to pronounce an Internet marketing strategy dead just because no one has figured out how to profit from it yet. How long did it take for companies and brands to take to social media to begin with? How about video marketing? And mobile marketing?

There is a lot of opportunity in Facebook if you can figure out how to leverage your efforts. Hard selling doesn’t work. People go there to hang out, not buy stuff. Still, that doesn’t mean they won’t whip out their wallet for the right item.

Online marketers differ as to what constitutes good marketing and whether or not specific types of messages are spam. When it comes to social media marketing, the lines get blurrier and grayer. The lines are blurred even more by the differences in policies at the various social media websites that people use.

One of the most important questions any marketer will have to answer about his or her marketing efforts online is, What makes a good social media marketing campaign?

Indeed, what?

Here are a few ideas I’ll let you chew on.

• Your campaign is cross-platform. What I mean by this is you don’t limit your social media marketing to one service. Post to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. You might even try a few specialty media services. But don’t post to just one.
• Modify your messages across the platforms. Just because you are posting to multiple social media services doesn’t mean you should post the same message. Get to know your audience and tailor the message to your audience.
• Develop a long-term social media vision. Don’t think in the short term. Know what you want your social media marketing strategy to do for you in the long run, and play to that.
• Assign your social media marketing to one person. Make one person your social media manager and let her run the program. Too many fingers in the pie will spoil the berries.

Social media marketing is not an exact science. It’s a people business. Your marketing should be focused on delivering content that people want. Otherwise, you’re just spitting into the wind.

Two days ago Facebook files papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission to make an initial public offering (IPO). That means the company is committing itself to making its profit and loss statements public for the rest of its life. But will that change the way the world networks?

Likely not.

Facebook has already become the 800 million pound gorilla (it has 800 active million users worldwide). It will likely grow and the money it collects from its IPO will likely help it reach some strategic goals, but the core aspect of its product will likely not change much if at all.

Maybe it will get better and maybe it will get worse, but change? Let’s see …

• Facebook offers personal profiles to anyone willing to sign up for an account and provide certain specific private information to the company based on its user’s term of service.
• Companies can set up a brand page and promote themselves to users through that page.
• Developers can build apps that interact with Facebook and allow users to engage with marketers, businesses, and savvy development agents.
• Facebook also offers paid advertising models for businesses wanting to reach new prospects.
• You can interact with Facebook through you desktop computer, laptop, smart phone, or tablet.

What else could Facebook offer? What else likely to be offered as a result of the private company becoming public?

Of course, new technologies could lead to Facebook expanding its offerings to its consumer base, but that would happen anyways. The company already has made billions of dollars so the money it collects from the IPO will not likely give it much more financial clout that it already has. So why go public?

It is likely that investors and shareholders realize that certain information is going to end up public anyway so why not be the first to make the disclosure? It’s a good political move for Facebook to go public, but don’t count on the IPO changing the service in any drastic way. Social networking will continue as it has for the last five years.

McDonald’s decided to spend its money buying a hashtag on the popular social media website Twitter.

First, I’d like to know how you can buy a hashtag, but that’s an aside. The real issue is what happened after McDonald’s changed its hashtag from #MeetTheFarmers to #McDStories.

The original hashtag was meant to introduce McDonald’s Twitter followers to the company’s promotion of fresh produce. It worked well. Then, in a flash of brilliance that turned out to be not so brilliant, the company’s social media manager decided to open the door to the universe by expanding its Twitter promotion. Enter #McDStories.

Who doesn’t have a positive McDonald’s story, right? Indeed. And who doesn’t have a negative one. Duh.

You can probably guess what happened next. Followers started using the new hashtag to relate their own McDonald’s stories – chipped molars, regurgitation, food poisoning …. The list goes on.

I think the big lesson here is not how to respond to negative reactions on Twitter or some other social media site. Rather, the real lesson is how to prevent it from happening in the first place. This all could have been prevented had McDonald’s not insisted on opening the door to the universe. All they had to do was keep running the promotion that was working.

When things are going well, don’t change them. Rule #1. Rule #2 is, always ask what might go wrong.

Had McDonald’s social media manager lived by those two rules we wouldn’t be talking about them right now. That second question is particularly important. In social media – and on the World Wide Web in general – once something starts spiraling out of control, it’s hard to get a handle on it. If it’s out there, it’s out there. So put some thought into your moves before you make them. Ask, what can go wrong with this? If the answer is something too big to control or too embarrassing to let go on, don’t make your move. Do something else, or nothing at all.

Online coupons are starting to become a big deal. They are much like their off line counterparts, but they have the potential to be found online by casual searchers using a search engine or social media. That’s a good thing for you, the business owner.

Like old-fashioned coupons, you can use online coupons to drive new business to your storefront or website. And it works.

One of the things that makes it work is social media. If your offer is so good that your prospects want to share it with their friends, then they will share it will their friends. They’ll share it on Facebook, Twitter, and through e-mail. They’ll share it on any social network where they have a presence, and they’ll use it too.

Online, you can offer the types of coupons that you can off line. You can offer 2-for-1 deals, minimum purchase discounts, coupons that are good only for certain days, perpetual coupons that are good any time of the year, and you can be as creative as you can be with your traditional off line coupons. Your customers can print the coupon and bring it to your business, download it to their mobile phones, tell you the coupon code when they call in their order, or enter the coupon code into a field on your website form.

If you think it through all the way, you’ll see that online coupons are another opportunity for you to reach new customers and increase your business. And they’re as social as other online tool.

On February 1st, you’ll be able to buy yourself a Twitter brand page – if you have $25,000. I don’t know about you, but that price seems a little steep to me.

Twitter had originally accepted a minimum of $2 million from 20 large companies on the scale of Coca-Cola and Disney for the privilege of being the first companies to have brand pages on the microblogging platform. The pages look quite nice.

The big question is, when will the rest of us gain access to Twitter brand pages and how much will it cost us?

It’s obvious that Twitter is using this opportunity as a way to raise operating funds. But the problem, as I see it, is that the companies spending the most amount of money and getting in earlier will have an advantage over companies with smaller pocketbooks. They’ll effectively be the Twitter users that set the policy for the rest of us. They could use Twitter to shut the door on their competition, and may already have.

Has Twitter sold out to the highest bidder? Has it become a haven for big brands? Will it go by the way of eBay and alienate its smaller, less wealthy users?

Only time will tell or provide any answers to these questions. Meanwhile, if you’ve got $25,000 in your pocket, then you can buy yourself a Twitter brand page. Someday, you might be allowed to establish a Twitter brand page for your company for a monthly or yearly fee. Average that over a lifetime and you could very well spend $25,000, or more, for the privilege of tweeting 140 characters at a time.

Let’s hope that Twitter doesn’t become the social media website of the rich, for the rich, and by the rich.

You’ve likely seen those social media badges on your favorite blogs and websites. Facebook has the Like button. Twitter has the Tweet and Retweet button. And Google+ has the +1 button. Except now, it just got better.

That’s right, Google+ has improved its +1 button.

The new options include:

• Choosing a width for your Google+ button that works for your website’s design
• Finding a badge that works with the dark background of your website
• Using a badge that also shows your Google+ profile’s circle count

Google+ pages can also display a Google+ badge, which makes them a lot more attractive as well.

It’s already been proven that websites with social media badges get more shares, Likes, tweets, and +1s. Social media sharing is a great way to connect with new followers and potential customers. Google+ is a new social media site that also carries search engine marketing benefits so you can no longer discount it. I highly recommend using it.

Another thing you can do through your website that you should do is encourage your website visitors to add you to their circles on Google+. It’s easy to do and it carries a ton of benefits. I think those benefits are going to get better.

If you’ve been wondering about using social media badges on your website, start with a Google+ badge. Work your way up from there.