Archive for the ‘Best Practices’ Category

Axel Schultze* is a respected social media commentator. In a penetrating article in this week’s issue of CustomerThink he confirms what I’ve suspected for a few months now: that the social media bubble, like other bubbles over the past decade, is about to burst. The tell-tale warning signs are all there if you know what to look for.

People are recognizing already that the endless hours of watching the incoming streams from Twitter and Facebook or all the status updates on LinkedIn are hours wasted. All the paid tweets and people or agencies, who have been hired to tweet are not going to contribute to the bottom line. And the fan pages people build to get “fans, followers, connections” are just hopes that it will do something for the business – but it won’t.

Yet, there are businesses who not only survived during the economic down turn but actually showed significant growth. What did they do differently as most are also associated with the rise of social media? The answer is SO SIMPLE that most people will reject the truth and continue to look for the holy grail. The answer is “They become more social with their customers”. Socializing is work, it takes time and focus, discipline and a clear understanding [of] what to do and what not to do. And as 80% of humans continue to look for getting the job done automatically and get rich instantly, they will leave the social web because they just learned again and again – there is no free lunch.

He’s no harbinger of doom and gloom, however. There’s plenty to be optimistic about, provided you do the right things for the right reasons.

The biggest benefit of social media is to do more business with more people in a grander geography and in less time than ever before. But it comes at a price. And the price you pay is to be more open, more social, more connected, more interactive, more helpful and more conversational than ever before. And that means you cannot much longer be busy just slicing and dicing your data and aggregate information for even more knowledge about your demographics or aggregate more information to even better target your mail shots and advertising – NO you got to get out there and have a dialog with your customers. No time to do that? You will have a lot of time to think about it when you are fired or your business ceased operations. Being social is work – one customer at a time.

Can you automate?
Automation is sand in the social gearbox.

If you’re interested in social networking as the new Holy Grail of MLM prospecting and recruiting, it will pay you to read this article first before doing anything else — especially spending your money on some of the over-hyped, over-priced social networking courses currently on offer.

If you’re familiar with my 2007 Insight Report, “What the ‘Gurus’ WON’T Tell You! Facts, Fallacies, Fantasies, Fables and Falsehoods of Internet Marketing” (How to separate the ahah! from the rah-rah, ga-ga and ca-ca), this will all sound discouragingly familiar. If you’re not familiar with it, click here to learn more. (Scroll down the page.)

* Social media practitioner, CEO of Xeesm, founder of the Social Media Academy, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, book author of “Channel Excellence”, frequent speaker at industry events, and winner of the 2008 SF Entrepreneur award.

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This is a post for readers whose first language is not English. I’d like to try to clarify a couple of important points in online promotion using the English language.

English has its roots in several European languages as a result of repeated invasions.

The Romans, under Julius Caesar, invaded Britain around 2,000 years ago. So the original Celtic language became influenced by Latin.

The Angles, Saxons and Jutes from northern Europe invaded during the Dark Ages and Middle Ages, leaving a legacy that overlaid the language with even more tongues. The Vikings later added to the mix.

The Norman invasion under William the Conqueror also saw a heavy Old French layer added to the Saxon language in use at the time. It’s this French influence that I want to consider in this article, because of its impact on so many expressions linked to modern information technology.

Words like niche, cache and fiche (as in microfiche) are all in common use online.

What has complicated the whole issue is the most recent influence on the English language: US English.

Because America has played such a significant role in technological progress, most of the terms associated with it, including online coding and mark-up languages (like html) use US English, not UK English (used by everyone else, including Canada).

America, after the Revolution, decided that it would make English simpler for its citizens. So it introduced a whole range of unconventional spellings, despite it being the only English-speaking country to use them, even today. Words like center and meter replaced centre and metre. Jail replaced gaol. Z replaced s in many instances: realize replaced realise. And so on. (Although inconsistencies still abound. For example, surprise didn’t become surprize.)

But words like niche, cache and fiche — all originally French words — remained intact.

In French, these words are pronounced neesh, cash and feesh.

But English is a strange language, where spelling and pronunciation are determined by common usage, not by any formal rules. So it changes over time. But inconsistencies abound, and we now find ourselves being influenced by US usage…

Niche is now pronounced nitch, not neesh. But cache and fiche are still pronounced cash and feesh, not catch and fitch — although some writers claim that cache should be pronounced caish. (I have no idea why. I don’t know whether they insist on on pronouncing niche as n-eye-sh as in “eye”, or fiche as f-eye-sh.)

Confused?

If George Bernard Shaw were alive today he’d probably want to make them uniform so that the spoken and written language were consistent, as he did in this suggestion for spelling fish as “ghoti”:

• gh = f as in “enough”,
• o = i as in “women” and
• ti = sh as in “addition”.

Hence my headline which, if we apply the pattern of niche = nitch, would logically be pronounced “Scratch that itch before you catch a twitch!” (At least in the USA.)

After thousands of years, we now have a language riddled with inconsistencies and which, at times, means we can’t always write what we can say — and vice versa.

For example, if you were to dictate the next sentence, people would find it impossible to tell which written version would be correct:

“There are three ways to write two.”

It gets even worse when you try to pronounce word-endings like “ough”…

• Is it “uff” as in tough?
• Is it “oo” as in through?
• Is it “owe” as in though?
• Is it “ow” as in plough?
• Is it “off” as in trough?

And it gets worse…

• Is it “off” as in trough?
• or is it “owe” as in trough?

(Local usage can be either, depending on where you live.)

If it bothers you, get over it… you can’t change it any more than King Canute could stop the tide by yelling at it.

As always, it’s a case of “English as she is spoke”.

There are four types of management approach in small and home-based businesses, shown here in order of prevalence:

#1: The Lemming Approach

This is Management by Imitation. You do what everyone else is doing, which is a variation on playing safe (“there’s safety in numbers”). Yeah, right. Tell me again… when research shows that 90% or more FAIL in small and home businesses, how is doing what everyone else does a safer approach?

#2: The Reverse-Russian-Roulette Approach

This is Management by Guesswork. Instead of putting a pistol with only one chamber loaded to your temple and pulling the trigger, only one chamber of the gun is empty. (It increases the certainty of the outcome, but not much else.)

#3: The Ostrich Approach

This is Management by Wishful Thinking. You hide your head in the sand and hope that any risks or threats will simply go away. Meanwhile, you leave the most tender portions of your anatomy exposed… then wonder why you get bitten!

#4: The Intelligent Approach

This in Management by Know-how… you know the right things to do to succeed and the right reasons for doing them. You obey the Law of Success — and you succeed! (Unlike the 90%+ who obey the Law of Failure by default — yet expect to enjoy success).

Life is tough and unforgiving…

It requires that we obey laws of all kinds in order get predictable, desirable results. Yet so many of us become victims of “Blowfly logic”, our dreams strewn like lifeless husks along the windowsills of life.

The Law of Success is simple, but brutal and unbreakable. You can never break it. Try, and you end up breaking yourself against it. Most people have heard of this Law, but never recognize it for what it actually is. They think it’s a noble sentiment, then revert to their default setting from birth… the Law of FAILURE.

(They never recognize this Law for what it really is, either, so at least they’re consistent.)

There are solid reasons why the Law of Success says “do only the right things for only the right reasons.”

For a start, if you obey it then you can’t make mistakes. (Not won’t. Can’t.)

Why?

Because you KNOW the right things to do and the right reasons for doing them. No guesswork. No mindless imitation. No hiding your head in the sand.

The Law of Success requires knowledge. The Law of Failure doesn’t. That’s why it’s the human default setting. We’re all born ignorant — devoid of knowledge.

The Law of Success is also a succinct description (not definition!) of integrity — the attribute of character that’s indispensable to your success. (Click here to discover why.)

Notice something really important about the Law of Success?

It makes no mention of HOW to do all the right things!

Surely, if this is the Law of Success, it should tell us how we should do the right things?

Not really. The simple truth is that when we understand what needs to be done and why, we understand the cause-and-effect process involved in creating the desired result. We can actually create our own how — the structures and procedures we need to use to produce that desired result.

It’s intelligent use of leverage to do what someone else has already created in the way of models and methods. But the danger for us is very real and very simple: how can we be certain that they understand and obey the Law of Success?

This is why so many people who simply imitate others ultimately FAIL: they’re imitating someone who took a GUESS!

They’re following the illusion of success — which often takes time to reveal itself.

Study this article to discover how YOU can stay safe from scams and illusions — real or unintended. Both will ultimately lead to failure.

I rarely bother attending free webinars these days. Apart from not having the time (or the ability to sit through sessions up to 3 hours long), most are little more than poorly-presented pitches for new products or training programs.

But tomorrow (Wednesday in the USA, Thursday in Australia and Asia), Better Networker is presenting a free webinar by Katie Freiling, a genuine whiz at building FREE network marketing leads using social media like Facebook and Twitter. She has the runs on the board over the past year to get my attention, very firmly. She’ll be outlining her exact formula in an in-depth interview by Tim Erway, Mike Dillard’s partner.

(Sorry… the webinar is now over.)

That’s 10am Thursday for anyone in Eastern Australia. (Time zone finder here.)

Yes, there’ll doubtless be a sales pitch involved, but that’s fine… fair exchange. (It’s only when a webinar is all feathers and no meat that I lose interest, fast.)

Details and registration are at http://getwwn.com/.

This has nothing to do with network marketing directly, but it’s a problem that just keeps growing and interfering with your ability to build your business using email.

Spammers discovered long ago how to use the ignorance, inexperience, laziness and thoughtlessness of other people to build their illegal mailing lists.

They do it by starting all kinds of viral email messages — jokes, weird photos, cartoons, music clips, etc — that other people will mindlessly forward to their friends and colleagues, continually adding to the list of fresh, valid email addresses listed in that ever-expanding message.

The spammers can then harvest and add them to their own mailing lists — and sell them to other spammers.

What most people who forward messages so thoughtlessly fail to realize is that they expose themselves to prosecution and heavy fines for breaching most countries’ privacy laws.

Discover why — and how YOU can prevent it — here:

http://suckerbait.info/how-YOU-support-spammers

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Michael Stelzner has long been regarded as the #1 “go-to” guy for expertise on marketing using white papers, with very good reason. He’s savvy and talented. He gives advice that gets results. For the past year he’s also been publishing outstanding content on using social media for marketing and business building in his excellent “Social Media Examiner” newsletter and blog. If you’re using social media — including social bookmarking and social networking — signing up for Michael’s FREE newsletter (and visiting his super-useful blog) could be the best move you make in 2010. You’ll find them here…

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com

Do yourself a huge favour. Visit soon!

Here’s a rare opportunity to see me in action, live, in a 12-minute interview with George Fourie, founder of my favourite on-line network marketing community, http://thatMLMbeat.com.

(Are you a member yet?)

It’s rare on several counts:

• I look almost respectable and reasonably well-groomed.
• I’m live (well, recorded live. Next best/worst thing.)
• I don’t dribble or spit for the entire interview.
• I’m surprisingly coherent.
• I don’t bite George.
• I smile occasionally!

(I’ll leave it to you to sort out which are true. Or not.)

But the interview does manage to give you some sense of where I come from in terms of training for network marketers. You can view it here.

There are plenty of prospecting tools available. There are even a few good “funded proposal” products to help you recover your promotional costs. But there are none like this one!

How do I know?

Because I created it to be very different — starting with this 97-page, FREE Insight Report from The Profit Clinic (my main business). Not only can you download this free of charge and learn things you don’t know yet, but you can also share it with your downline team members and prospects.

Seriously, this is extremely powerful. Not only for answering most of their concerns and questions about network marketing, but it can help create a strong emotional bond of trust and credibility between your prospects and you — which can lead to measurably higher conversion rates and sponsoring. Then compound that kind of impact with the fact that this authoritative, hard-hitting — but overwhelmingly positive — Report is also available to them and you begin to catch the vision of just what’s possible for your business.

Yes, you can download your own FREE copy of the Insight Report right now and see for yourself what’s causing people around the world to comment like this…
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The name of the game is BALANCE

When it comes to evaluating network marketing opportunities, it’s not which company, which compensation plan, which products, which support systems or which upline team is the best that really matters. If there’s not a workable balance between all five criteria, real leverage will be almost impossible to achieve.

The five critical criteria you need to consider when analysing and evaluating network marketing opportunities are:

1. The company – always the Number One risk factor for network marketers.

2. The compensation plan – can you make money, especially as a part-timer? Is the company siphoning off windfall profits through high breakage? This is the bottom line of any compensation plan.

3. The products – are they MONTHLY-consumable, in-demand, safe, effective and outstanding value for money? (Value… not cheap!)

4. Support systems – from the company and the upline team to make the opportunity 100% duplicable and to save time and effort.

5. The upline team – do they value people and use money, or is it the other way around? Will they actively support, train and encourage you? When YOU need it?

Most opportunities excel in one or two criteria, but fall down badly in others. Typically, they have excellent products, but the reward plans are geared against the part-timer. Or they have excessive breakage to the company because of high group volume requirements.
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You’ve probably seen and heard the regular “Guru” pitches about how copywriting is the most important skill you’ll ever use in your online business.

If you’ve been a follower of this blog (or any of my other small or home-business sites and articles) for any length of time, you’re also aware that my typical response to such claims is a blunt “hogwash” or “horsefeathers!”

Those claims are ALWAYS made by someone who wants you to BUY something from them… usually an over-priced copywriting ebook, course or program of some kind.

I realize that the word “ALWAYS” may seem a bit of a stretch, but after 40 years as a professional copywriter, working in the trenches in ad agencies, media organizations and for my own marketing clients, I can tell you, unequivocally, that NO professional copywriter with any degree of honesty and integrity will make that claim about copywriting. And anyone who does make it falls into one of just two groups:

• They don’t know what they’re talking about.
• They DO know what they’re talking about — and they’re willing to LIE to you in order to get you to BUY from them.

Neither of these groups inspires me with enough confidence to part with any money to learn from them. I suggest that holding onto your money when these characters pitch their copywriting courses, reports, etc, at you is your smartest move.
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