Social Media Douche

[flickr size="small" float="left"]http://www.flickr.com/photos/21896484@N02/2726201320/[/flickr] When technology disrupts the traditional way of doing things, the small business owner can be at a distinct disadvantage. If like the majority of our clients you don’t have a technology team or a dedicated marketing department – all you have is you – then how do you find the time to learn all this new stuff?

By now you’ve seen the benefit of having an easy to update website and you’ve heard of Twitter and Social Media, but how do you incorporate all this into your daily operations without going crazy and throwing the computer through the screen?

Simple – you hire someone (preferably us) – and as usual you should hire the best expert you can afford. But before you start the hiring process, check out this beautiful paragraph from Wikipedia on Snake Oil Peddlers:

The snake oil peddler became a stock character in Western movies: a travelling "doctor" with dubious credentials, selling some medicine (such as snake oil) with boisterous marketing hype, often supported by pseudo-scientific evidence, typically bogus. To enhance sales, an accomplice in the crowd (a "shill") would often "attest" the value of the product in an effort to provoke buying enthusiasm. The "doctor" would prudently leave town before his customers realized that they had been cheated. This practice is also called "grifting" and its practitioners "grifters".

Now, with the above in mind and to help you in your decision making – Alex and I compiled our personal top 5 tips on what we look for in Social Media Consultants:

Alex:

1

Be real – people tweeting the same banal shit as everyone else aren’t exactly adding to the conversation – you might not want to use the F word in a corporate stream but blandness is almost as bad!

2

Sure re-tweeting adds value but if someone’s stream is nothing but re-tweets then you gotta wonder if they have anything of value to say themselves.

3

Come on – if it looks like a douche, tweets like a douche and reads like a douche – then it’s probably a douche. Check out @snipeyhead for an example of what a good consultant looks like!

4

Just ‘cos you know how to do something doesn’t make you an expert. Tools like Twitter are constantly developing and changing – it’s perpetual beta all the time – beware the Expert.

5

Sure you can talk about the importance of having a blog – but do you have one – and if you do – is the content worth reading?

Andrew:

1

How can you be an expert in this if you've only be doing it a couple of years - go read what Malcolm Gladwell has to say about the whole 10,000 hours thing

2

Working with 140 characters is one thing - actually writing something of length that has value - well that's another thing entirely.

3

The title Guru should be reserved for those teaching Tantric Sex. Nuff said.

4

I can't believe that these single page supposed sales funneling techniques are still used - even if it is "by internet marketers for internet marketers". If you see something like this - run - run away, fast.

5

This one is common sense - if the people you are thinking of hiring have a crap website - what makes you think they'll be able to make yours look any better?

Photo Credit: virtualreality on Flickr

Making Social Media Easy for Small Businesses

Social Media is many things

but in essence it is about Information: it is about how information is created, how it is distributed and shared and how that information causes things to happen.  The information that we’re talking about at Kilted Chaos is Information about your business.

When we talk about creating accounts with services such as Twitter, Flickr, Disqus, Facebook and Gmail, we’re talking about setting you up with services that will enable you to create and distribute information about your business – they’ll also help your customers create and spread information about you too. We’ll talk with you and agree on an avatar, a visual image that will be the same across all sites where you have a presence – your “digital footprint,” if you’re a one person business, this will probably be your smiling face!  We’ll agree on a company statement that will work for each network.  We’ll help to ensure that as you expand your online presence, your message remains clear and easily recognizable.

We talk about making it Easy for the small business owner and in our book – making it easy is saving you time.   None of the above is rocket science and you could no doubt do it yourself – but we can do it a hell of a lot faster than you – we’ve been doing this for a while. If you’re new to Social Media and Social Media Marketing – you might want to start here: What is Social Media What is Social Media Marketing

For an easier introduction to how Social Media works check out the following 4 minute video.  To see how it can work for your business, contact the Chaos team here.