Benefits of Social Networking

Benefits of Social Networking for
Subject Matter Experts and Info Marketers


This is a transcript of a teleseminar at IdeaMarketers.com
To listen to the recorded call, go to
http://www.ideamarketers.com/experts/calls/socialmedia.cfm

Building Relationships and Extending Your Reach
Michele PW : “They’re a great way to be building relationships with your leads
that will eventually lead to sales. For some of these platforms, they even bypass
an E-mail. People are checking their Facebook, checking their MySpace, over and
above checking their E-mail. Social networking is a great way to really build
these relationships and be in a medium that allows you to actually to touch your
prospects, people who have agreed to want to hear from you. This is the ultimate
permission marketing.”
Jeff Herring: “For me, it’s a great way to extend your reach, because you’re able
to get your name and information to different sites and reach people that you
would not have otherwise.”

Investment of Time and Effort
Michele PW: “You are reaching people and giving them a chance to get to know
you. Unlike Pay-per-Click (ads on the right side of the screen for Google), which
has its place and is a wonderful place to get traffic, this is warm. People have
already experienced you somewhere else—they’ve been on your profile, they’ve
gotten to know you, they’re interesting in what you’re selling. It doesn’t happen
overnight. You have to be willing to invest in it to get these relationships.”
Jeff Herring: “There’s no ‘get rich quick.’ You can get rich over time, if you stick
with it and build your platform and build your reach there.”

How to Build Your Business with Social Networking
Nancy Gerber: “And I think that’s a really important point. What’s really
important is that it’s an investment of time and effort, more so than money.”
Nancy Marmolejo: “The investment is how important a relationship is to you. So
for some people, that’s going to take some time. It’s really looking at the final
outcome of what you want to get out of it. It’s the relationship building that leads
to the quality sales and the quality web traffic. When you have a social
networking page, it’s like this wonderful at-a-glance view of who you are, what
you’re doing—as opposed to somebody going to your website and having to
click around. You can go to somebody’s Facebook page, you can go to
somebody’s MySpace page, and get this at-a-glance idea of who they are, who
they associate with, who they consider important. It’s everything under one roof.
It came from the younger generation, and that’s how they operate. They don’t
want to sit around and click to these various pages.”

The Major Social Networking Sites: Which Site Is For You?
LinkedIn, MySpace, and Facebook:
Michele PW: “LinkedIn is more formal, more corporate. It has résumés for places
you work. There are lots of business owners on there, but it does have more of a
corporate feel to it. Interaction between people is a lot different. You really have
to know people to invite them to connect with you.”
Jeff Herring: “I think Facebook is much less formal. It still has a professional look
to it like LinkedIn, but you can write on people’s walls virtually. You can send
little notes. It’s an awesome place to have a presence and build lots of friends and
connections. Not more than a few weeks ago, it was featured on 60 Minutes, as an
up-and-coming site that started in the college networks and then burst upon the
scene.”
Nancy Marmolejo: “MySpace is probably the least formal of all of them, because
you can customize the look and feel. It is primarily geared toward social reasons,
although the business use of it is increasing more and more. MySpace really lets
a person see who you are as a person. There are just a lot more gizmos that go
with it. Facebook, however, introduced these outside applications. It tends to
create clutter and a little bit of overwhelm on the user’s part. You can send
virtual flowers; you can send virtual karma. I think that is still working itself out.
MySpace doesn’t have outside applications. You can import certain things from
other programs—but, for the most part, you get what they give you. Facebook,
right now, is really the hot place for business. Everybody wants to make sure
they have a Facebook page up, and I think you want to also have a MySpace
How to Build Your Business with Social Networking - 4 -
page up because of the impact it has on your web traffic. You might make more
personal contacts through Facebook, though.”

Amazon
Michele PW: “Amazon.com did a study as to where people were spending time
on the Internet and where marketers were actually marketing. What they found
was that 29 percent of web traffic goes to Amazon. Only 10-12 percent of
marketers were spending any amount of time on there, so there’s a huge
discrepancy. Reversed with that was LinkedIn—something like 20 percent of
marketers were focusing on it, but in terms of traffic, it was only 5 percent. If
you’re trying to reach a specific, targeted niche audience, it’s not a bad place to
be, and it doesn’t require a lot of extra work. Facebook and MySpace are better
for those kinds of purposes.”
Nancy Gerber: “Amazon is starting social networking, and there’s a way of
getting in there to start networking with other book lovers, which might be great
if you’re an author.”
Michele PW: “One thing to think about when you’re considering where to spend
your time: if people are on Amazon, they’re looking to buy. If they’re just doing a
search on Google, they’re just looking for information or pre-information. If
they’re actually on Amazon, they’re considering purchasing that information. If
you can get them as a lead then, they’re willing to spend money. They’re higher
quality leads. You don’t have to have a book. You don’t have to be an author.
You can set it all up for free, and you can still do the social networking part.”
Nancy Gerber: “We need to pay attention to what people are doing, rather than
what we might think people are doing or what the marketers are doing. We want
to get to places where people are hanging out, not where marketers are hanging
out.”
Michele PW: “Always remember: you are not your target market. Just because
you think it’s a good idea to be on LinkedIn doesn’t mean that’s where your
target market is.”

Ning - www.Ning.com
Jeff Herring: I discovered Ning sitting, in of all places, in a Starbucks here in
Alpharetta with Mike Stuart—the Internet audio and video guy—and his
daughter, whom I was teaching about article marketing. He told me about Ning,
a site where you can create your own MySpace under your control in your niche.
You invite people there, they become members, just like MySpace. For instance,
How to Build Your Business with Social Networking - 5 -
my direct Ning site is ArticleMarketing.ning.com. This is the first domain name I
ever bought—within an hour, I had a site set up just like a MySpace, but in my
niche, under my control, for members. You can have blogs and discussion
boards. We ask people questions, they start discussions. Basically, they’re
building your website for you and forming a social network right there on
Ning.”

Alexa Rankings - www.Alexa.com
Jeff Herring: “Alexa ranks the traffic of different websites. Unlike Google page
rankings, where the higher you are the better, on Alexa, the lower you are, the
better—so number one is the best. That’s Yahoo. Number two is YouTube right
now. Anything ranked under a million is good. If you’re ranked in the top
500,000, that’s better. Anything ranked 250,000 or lower is doing real good.
100,000 or lower, you’re doing great. All of these different social network sites
that we’re talking about are ranked in that top 100,000. Go to Alexa and type in
the name of the social network site—or any site, for that matter—and you can see
the traffic rank based on the last week and over time.”

How to Get Started as a Social Marketer
Nancy Marmolejo: “First of all, what I suggest to all of my clients is that they
choose one or two of these social networking sites and just work on those for
now. You don’t have to be on all of them. I always tell people to put 70 percent of
your energy into one of these sites, and 30 percent of your energy into the other
one. I spent an enormous amount of time developing my MySpace page, and it’s
pretty much running on its own right now. So now, I’m pretty much on
Facebook about 80-90 percent of my social networking time. You need to give
yourself permission to set limits around this. It can be very addictive. Keeping
up with social networking is not about keeping up with the Joneses; it’s about
working from a place where you’re going to have success. Find out where you
can delegate this. Ask anyone group of people under the age of 18 to help with
Myspace, and they’ll do it faster. They grew up with keyboards in their hands.
We need to take advantage of that. If a teenager wants a really cool job they can
do whenever they want, that is a great job for a college student or a teenager to
earn some extra cash.”
Jeff Herring: “My 13-year-old son, Jonathan, who taught me how to do
PowerPoint, has started his own little MySpace business among his friends.”
Michele PW: “If you really feel like you have no time to do this, I invite you to
look at your priorities. The more time you’re going to devote to marketing, the
more you’re going to get out of it—and the more you’re going to see the results.

How to Build Your Business with Social Networking
later in terms of sales increase, increased leads, increased clients, that kind of
stuff. I know it’s hard, but I’ve found it can develop a momentum of its own.
Look at it as making an investment in your business.”


URLs for Panel Experts’ Social Networking Sites
Nancy Marmolejo: http://myspace.com/2comadre. One little tip: on MySpace,
you customize your URL. Try to use the same one consistently on all of your
social networking sites.
Michele PW: “Facebook does have an application that you can do that will point
you right to your Facebook page. Mine is http://profile.to/michelepw. It makes
it very easy. My Twitter is the same; my Myspace is the same.
http://myspace.com/michelepw.
Jeff Herring: “I want to back up a second, because I did a little bit of research
while you were talking on Alexa. Every single site that we’re talking about is
ranked in the top 1,000 websites. Ning is 965, Squidu is 743, Twitter is 646,
LinkedIn is 215, Digg is 160, and Facebook is ranked number 7. MySpace is
ranked number 6. I direct people to http://articlemarketingspace.com—that’s a
redirected domain name to my Ning site, where you can check out what you can
do with a Ning site for free within an hour.”
Nancy Gerber: “I just want to make sure that the listeners heard that there were a
few more sites that Jeff just mentioned that we don’t have time to discuss right
now, but that you’re certainly welcome to check out. Twitter, Squidu, and Digg.
All of those are also social networking sites.”

How to Profit from Social Networking Sites
Nancy Marmolejo: “In the first 90 days of really diligently working on MySpace,
I had $10,000 worth of new business. That was getting new clients, people who
had gotten my E-book, and we just got connected. I used the social networking
pages as a way to share information and build the trust, to build the likeability.
There was even one person who likes the song that I had on my page. She said, ‘I
already know we’re going to connect.’ Whether you want to measure it in dollars
or the value of the relationship, you need to look at it from all of those
perspectives. If you get more traffic, you get more business.”
Nancy Gerber: “You already had some kind of product to offer people, even if it
was just a little free E-book or E-zine—you had something that people could
become even more connected with you once they initially connected.”

How to Build Your Business with Social Networking
Michele PW: “I was contacted by three different people to do teleclasses, which
did result in more sales, and I also reconnected with some people I had met a few
years ago at an event. They bought my books, and one of them actually became a
client. It’s more than just new people. It’s also reconnecting with old people.”
Jeff Herring: “On the Ning site, you invite people from other sites or your list.
They become members and create their own page, just like you would on
MySpace, and Ning has this nice function where you can mail out to the
membership of your site. Every Monday, I have my Monday Morning Madness
session. It mails out only to the people that are on my Ning site, and it’s usually a
discount on one of my products. Only if you’re on that Ning site can you get that
discount. So I send two E-mails, the first one to the Ning people. The second Email
is to everybody else on my list encouraging them to come join that so they
can get the special. I ran that for awhile, so every Monday morning, there’s some
income from this. One Monday, I forgot about it, and by about 2:00 that
afternoon, I was getting E-mails. ‘Hey, where’s the Monday Morning Madness?’
So it builds that wealth, you build that following, and it gets people to
demonstrate buying behavior and they get to experience your products and get
on the rest of your lists.”
Nancy Gerber: “Once you’re connected with people, couldn’t you do surveys to
find out what kinds of products in your genre people want and would be willing
to pay for?”
Jeff Herring: “Absolutely. On a Ning site, there are blocks for a blog, a group
discussion, and forums where you can do surveys. I’ve asked them to help me
name things, or asked them their biggest challenge to help me create products.
It’s a wonderful way to build loyalty, and it’s a great ‘stick’ strategy to help
people stick around. It’s a great way to build community.”

IdeaMarketers creator and author Marnie Pehrson: “Last week, I set up a page
for the IdeaMarketers site. First, I invited the experts to come in and set up an
area to promote all of them, and then I sent an E-mail to our main list saying
‘Come be our friend, come get on the fan page for IdeaMarketers.’ This one lady
asked to be my friend, and just as I was accepting the invitation, she called me on
the phone and said, ‘I want to be your expert on this subject. I just want to go
ahead and pay for the whole year.’ As we were talking, she said, ‘I noticed that
you’re promoting your experts on Facebook.’ It’s not that she came from
Facebook originally, but because I was active on Facebook and actively
promoting the experts on there, she saw that as a perk for being an expert. It
helped me get an easy sale right there.”

How to Build Your Business with Social Networking
Social Networking Etiquette: Do’s & Don’ts
Jeff Herring: “One of the things you see often is somebody joins and immediately
begins to sell and market. At the very least, that’s going to turn off everybody
there—and, on some sites, that will get you booted out right away. So go slow.
Network, connect with people, have discussions, join in the party before you
begin to market and sell. Build your presence. You’ve got to think long-term
here. Spend a month getting known, answering questions, developing a
following and connection.”
Nancy Marmolejo: “There’s some subtle ways you can at least get some of your
information out there, even in your signature where you link back to your
website, so it’s not quite so blatant. On MySpace and Facebook, when you want
to invite somebody to be your friend, you have the option of sending a little
personal message. That’s always a really nice thing to do, because you’re
showing them that you’re not just out there trying to amass friends. Put a little
personal touch to it. On these social networking sites, you create your own blend
of the personal and professional. You have the option to put in some personal
information. Just be wise. If it’s anything that’s polarizing, stay away from that.”
Michele PW: “Facebook was designed to augment offline relationships, where
you actually knew the person. LinkedIn, as well, is like that. You need to be
careful that you know what’s accepted and what is not accepted. You can get
banned or kicked off, which is also a problem.”
Nancy Marmolejo adds, “Keep a relationship-building mindset throughout.
Don’t get them with your big banner ads saying ‘Click here’ or ‘Buy this.’ You
want to really be of service. Give information, give support, show interest in
what other people are doing. It’s not just ‘me, me, me.’ When people see that you
aren’t just pushing all the time, they become more interested.”
Michele PW: “Don’t be too quick to start selling. Put the relationship first; let the
selling come later. Think of how you would approach somebody offline. If you
keep that guideline, then you’ll be fine.”
Nancy Gerber: “Everybody has been to the networking meetings where the
person goes around just shoving their business card in your hand whether you
want it or not.”
Jeff Herring: “A great way to think of that is: Don’t propose marriage on the first
date.”

Jeff Herring: “Number one: get started. Number two: pick one to get involved in
and build it up. Get it to where it’s managing itself, basically. Then, step three:
pick another one, and do the same thing again.”

Panelist Websites- Visibility expert and entrepreneur Nancy Marmolejo -
www.VivaVisability.com
- Article marketing expert and Internet marketer Jeff Herring -
http://greatarticlemarketingnetwork.com
- Online marketing expert and direct response copywriter Michele PW -
www.michelepw.com
- Communications and relationship specialist Nancy Gerber -
www.sstones.com
To listen to the recorded call, go to
http://www.ideamarketers.com/experts/calls/socialmedia.cfm . On this page
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IdeaMarketers.com experts.