LinkedIn | Purple Stripe Productions

The Right Tool For The Job

June 29, 2010 By Purple Stripe Team 1 Comment

Part of what the Purple Stripe training team teaches in our Small Business seminars is finding the right tool for the job. In this case, finding the right social media platform for your company’s marketing needs. For now, everyone has their eye on The Big Three (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) but we are quick to show that there are hundreds more tools available (and hundreds that have gone away…) Each tool has it’s own way of working, both technically and culturally, and each requires a unique approach to get the most benefit.

Twitter has evolved as a great place for news, entertainment, updates, and general chit-chat. Facebook is great for forming (or rekindling) relationships, social gaming, and socializing. LinkedIn is all business networking and job fulfillment. What goes on in one platform is generally ill-received on others. For example, Farmville would not be tolerated at all in LinkedIn and similar games have failed in Twitter. Connecting with coworkers, past or present, may be frowned upon in Facebook where things stay fairly personal, but on LinkedIn not only is it expected, the platform actually helps you locate, connect and recommend each other.

Outside of the people you connect with on a social platform, the content you share should be unique across the networks. Twitter excels at sending text messages and links because of the text-only media and character limitations. Facebook is amazing at sharing multimedia content such as pictures or video – in addition to text and links. LinkedIn is wonderful for sharing text and links in a professional business networking capacity. The problem with these tools is that sometimes they are used to promote exactly the same message to very different user populations.

Just because you CAN doesn’t mean you SHOULD.

It is very easy to post the same message to all three platforms. But should you? Are you really serving each community to the best of their needs? [Read more...]

Filed Under: info Tagged With: #in, facebook, Farmville, Foursquare, Hootsuite, LinkedIn, Netflix, twitter

LinkedIN Bergen County Networking Event

May 16, 2010 By Lynette Young 1 Comment

Lynette is scheduled to sit on a panel discussion about LinkedIN regarding business and job hunting. The “Linked-N Bergen County NJ” group with over 1600 members and has meetups attracting upwards of 100 attendees each. Register for the LinkedIN Social Media Discussion Panel Bergen County Networking Event.

Crowne Plaza Hotel
601 From Road, Paramus , NJ 07652
Tuesday, May 18th. 6:30pm – 9:00pm
Cost: $12 / advance, $15 / door

Registration will be from 6:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m with networking until about 8:15 p.m. Catering by Bone Fish Grill (cash bar). For questions, please contact the LinkedIn group organizer David Katz.

Scheduled panelists for the discussion are:

Karen Levine – @KarenLevine
Lynette Young – @LynetteRadio
Judy Moriarty – @realestatechick
Chris Kieff – @ckieff (moderator)

Filed Under: appearances Tagged With: Bergen County, LinkedIn

Culture Cliques

April 18, 2010 By Lynette Young Leave a Comment

It’s been said time and time again for a business to succeed in social media, they need to understand their customers. Designing and incorporating a strategy for social media isn’t a checklist, it’s an evolution. Jumping in and talking is fine if you are a person, but as a company, there are some things to consider first.

It’s important to understand the culture of the platforms you are interested in engaging on. Fark or Digg has an entirely different persona than LinkedIn. If you are interested in talking to college-humored males with a penchant for Photoshopping funny pictures – Fark and Digg are the place for you (hey, they spend a lot of money…) Looking for sales professionals? LinkedIn is where you need to be. Know your audience, know your platform.
Don’t start with the technology – start with the goals. Just this week a project came across our desk from a company looking to enter social media. They had already determined what technology and social media sites they wanted to be on, without having the slightest idea who they wanted to talk to, what they wanted to talk about, and who actually hangs out on these sites. Backwards. Goals first, tactics second.
Don’t just talk about your business. Be a person first and have fun. While it seems counter productive to chit-chat about personal items on company time, the fact that you present yourself as a human being goes a long way to building trust. No one is saying tell everyone what you eat for lunch every day, but sharing some volunteer efforts your company engages in or publicly thanking co-workers for decorating your office (and sharing a quick picture) for your birthday shows you aren’t just about the end sale.
You have to be a listener, not just a broadcaster. Ever take part in a conversation where the other person talks about themselves for 20 minutes, and when you finally get a word in, they are gazing over your shoulder looking for the next person to pitch to? Try practicing ‘active listening‘ on the social channels before starting to start your own agenda.
Does it blend? How does social media fit with your entire PR & Marketing plan? Social media marketing is a subset of a larger comprehensive plan to launch your company into a new era of customer communication. Abandoning everything that’s worked in favor of something you know little about is a guaranteed failure. Stick with what works, and add to it.

Filed Under: info Tagged With: Digg, facebook, Fark, goals, LinkedIn, social marketing, social media, Strategy, technology, twitter

Show Me The Money

April 13, 2010 By Lynette Young Leave a Comment

This article is part of a series on social media success.

So you’ve got a decent handle on listening and your ‘fans’ and followers are interested in what you have to say. Then the dreaded ROI (return on investment) phrase starts coming up from management. Sale numbers that have a direct line back to social media output is demanded. Just when you thought things were humming along, you’re told to PROVE your time and their money have brought a significant increase in the bottom line. Before we go any further, one question needs to be answered.

What’s the ROI of your telephone?

Your phone is a critical tool to communicate and listen, just like social media is a tool. Who ever said that social media is a direct pipeline of prime leads for your sales team? Twitter isn’t a fat database of people sitting around waiting for you to pitch to them. Facebook is not an e-commerce site. Yes, you can make money from social channels (Dell claims $3 million in sales from Twitter alone). When planning your entry into social media, items like ROI need to be addressed early and revisited often. On the other hand, we are not saying that efforts in social media shouldn’t earn money. How you earn (or save) money for your company should always be taken into account, but sometimes items like brand awareness, employee retention, idea generation, or customer satisfaction don’t have hard numbers or formulas to follow.

So how do you make money from social media? It depends on why you use social media. If you are using it as a customer service outreach (Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us is an amazing book on the topic) then not only can you save hard money on the cost of an employee’s time picking up the phone, but the frustration and negative word of mouth so rampant with bad customer experiences. How much money does it take to win back (assuming you even can) a customer that you’ve lost due to poor service? How many customers do you loose even before the sale due to weak brand awareness or negative word of mouth?

Utilizing social media for sales generation? Be there *before* the sale. Offer help even if it means suggesting a competitor’s product. Ask questions. Listen. Do more than sell – do anything but ‘sell’. Be human. Be well-rounded and showcase other facets of your company. Talk about philanthropic efforts. Provided your product or service is top-notch, all this is building trust between you and “people that may-or-may-not someday purchase your product or refer someone to you that might.” Funny thing is, social media being structured the way it is, everyone gets to witness your efforts online and draw their own opinions on your company based on interactions they see you have with others. In the past, the sales transaction took place ‘behind closed doors’ and not many people outside of the people involved saw the process. That means a very limited amount of people could form their own opinions on your company outside of their own experiences. Now the entire world can see how you treat customers, before, during, and after the sale. The idea is scary to a good number of companies that aren’t used to operating in the new social economy. Those companies that ‘get it’ realize that you could never put a price on (let alone actually pay to have done) the amount of positive exposure you get on social platforms.

How about using social media for talent acquisition? Product research and development? Competitive analysis? Each group has very unique goals and should have very different strategies to using social media.

Sometimes the goal isn’t even to make money, but to save it. Pepsi saved $20 million dollars on the 2010 Superbowl and put it towards the year-long Pepsi Refresh Project. PepsiCo is getting much more than $20 million dollars in media coverage from the move. Pepsi can afford to take chances like this, but can your company? Social media is supposed to be a supplement to already successful outreach programs. Dropping newspaper ads (if they work) to launch a Facebook Fan Page is not a smart business move. Dumping your email campaigns (if they work) in favor of Twitter is a setup for failure. Incorporating social media means having to take a good hard look at what you are involved with right now and cutting every single item that operates in the red. For example, car dealerships may cringe at the thought of abandoning newspaper ads. Just because your company (or your industry) has always done it a certain way – doesn’t mean you need to keep doing it that way.

End result, if you don’t know what your goals are, you will never reach them, social media endeavor or otherwise.

Filed Under: info Tagged With: facebook, LinkedIn, social media, success, twitter

Publish SOMETHING!

April 9, 2010 By Lynette Young 4 Comments

This article is part of a series on social media success from Purple Stripe Productions.

Without a tangible status update and ‘friends & fans,’ it feels like there is no *proof* of our social media efforts. The sooner we can hit ‘publish’ – the sooner management sees we are actually working and not playing around all day on FarmVille.

Taking a step back, listening, and learning are all nice in theory, but ‘lazy’ in the business world. Action produces results. Listening is inaction. We define success in how quickly we rack up the number of fans, friends, status updates, ‘likes,’ and re-Tweets. Numbers we can count and reproduce on a chart. How can you be considered successful if you gained less fans this week than last? How can you justify to your management that your efforts are successful if you LOST a few followers?

The listening precursor is a real sticking point in a good number of companies. You can see the results of not listening in multiple facets of a company. Customer Service is reactive to problems and always on the defense. The Sales team struggles to keep up with unique product offerings until the demand of customers hits the tipping point. Research & Development work in silos far removed from end users. Marketing follows a safe and predictable path that fits nicely within the niche and genre of their industry. Human Resources is seen as the ‘heavy’ in the company. Information technology departments treat employees like teens that cannot be trusted with the Internet for fear of rampant porn viewing and personal online socializing resulting in millions of dollars of lost revenue due to unproductive worker bees.

The bottom line – handing in a status report with slow-gaining numbers is perceived as a failure in Corporate America. Fast. Quick. Instant. NOW. Because the technology (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.) produce instant content, the perception is that success should be instant as well. Trust takes time.

Solutions are easy to identify, but hard to implement. Change is hard. It’s disruptive. It’s unproven.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: info Tagged With: facebook, Fiskars, LinkedIn, social media, success, twitter

Secrets to Success on Social Media

April 7, 2010 By Lynette Young 6 Comments

The answer is simple – BE SOCIAL. Now of course if you get that part, you won’t need my company’s help or to even finish this article series. For the rest of us that realize we are learning every day no matter how successful or experienced we are – read on…

It’s 2010 and while it may be old hat for some, most companies had technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn on their radar at least from last year (other companies realized the revolution started in 1984). Wait it out, be safe, see what others in their industry are doing (and if it works…) Without realizing what goes on behind the scenes and viewing only the tweets and status updates, many are tempted to jump right in. Show progress, DO SOMETHING. Great from a personal perspective, but it doesn’t fare as well professionally.

After working in this field for well over a decade, we are finding patterns in the resistance, adoption, and implementation to social media. Understandably, not all companies are set up to be ultra-progressive and on the bleeding edge of technology. The thing is, the curve is starting to see the crest, and holding out any longer puts you on the dark side of the slope. Even a 70 year-old brand can adapt. Hell, a 360 year old company can adapt. If they can – YOU can.

There is no more ‘wait and see’ in this economy. Results are proven, so long as you are not expecting social media to be a direct line to your company’s bottom line. If you treat social media as a telephone, and not a sales database, you will see results.

Becoming engaged in social media doesn’t mean a mad rush to smash on the ‘publish’ button and produce content. A good part of the ‘need’ to get on social media platforms is a result of several factors, in a very predictable course. With each step, there are traps to avoid and strategies to accomplish goals. The dangerous part? The process that leads to success and the (multiple) ones that lead to failure look very similar to the untrained eye. Trying to tackle social media endeavors using the same tried and true tactics and initiative you’ve used in the past will FAIL. In the past being active looked like productivity. Activity = Progress. Not so anymore. Sales people thought that the way to make more sales was to call more people. The game has changed, and fact is, you need to learn the new rules (or make your own) – but it is NOT the same as it’s always been.

Over the next few days the Purple Stripe team will be publishing the following articles related to the different steps involved in developing a social strategy.

Publish SOMETHING!
More Friends Please
Show Me The Money

A few additional topics may surface as well. We welcome your comments and thoughts, and hope that over the next week we can help you find some soft spots in your social media plans and set the course straight!

(Be sure to subscribe to get the articles as soon as they are published!)

This article is part of a series on social media success from Purple Stripe Productions.

Filed Under: info Tagged With: facebook, LinkedIn, secret, social media, success, twitter

A New Way To Tweet

September 9, 2009 By Lynette Young Leave a Comment

The private alpha launch of oneforty, a site dedicated to being your one stop resource for all things Twitter, is well on it’s way. Twitter is considered one of the Big Three in external-facing social media communications platforms (the other two being Facebook and LinkedIn) While the premise of Twitter is simple, you answer one question, “What are you doing?” by typing an answer in 140 characters or less, the platform’s use and meaning goes way deeper … Grand Canyon deep.

Using Twitter from it’s website actually limits you in what you can do (and gain) from the service, but luckily the founders have allowed access via APIs (hook in and out of the data) that let third party companies build tools and utilities. This allows you to use Twitter exactly how you see fit. So far, oneforty has cataloged over 1,200 applications for Twitter. This shows not only the undeniable draw of Twitter for personal and professional communications, but that the community drives a need for using the platform in different ways.

I highly recommend visiting oneforty and putting your name and email on the list. So now that oneforty has your back on finding the best tools for your needs – are you ready to get engaged with the community out there? No? We can help.

Filed Under: breaking news Tagged With: facebook, LinkedIn, oneforty, twitter

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