I recently made a presentation on social media marketing where I presented the following as the formula for social media marketing success…

P⁴ + V = V^x

Where the components of the social networking equation equal:

P = passion, the passion for your field, expertise, life. If you lack passion it will show!

P = presence; you have to fully inhabit the social media space to fully benefit. It doesn’t mean that you have to stake your claim on every social network space available. But you do need to be on the ones that matter in your field and to the audience you seek to connect with.

P = participation; you can’t just lurk, you have to join the conversation and not just to say Hi! You need to add value. You need to say, “… great post/comment/tweet have you considered this/here’s 3 more items to add to the list/I totally disagree and here’s why…” Otherwise you’re just a ‘yes’ person and a waste of comment space.

P = persistence; you can’t tune in every now and again, post a few blogs, tweet a few posts, you need to be there on a regular and consistent basis or you’ll be ignored. The good news is that there are plenty of gadgets, tools, plug-ins and mashups available to help you in this task.

V = value; this is the key, the more value you add to the mix, the more value you’ll receive in return which is why the result of the formula is V^x where ^x is a variable that’s determined by the value you’ve contributed to the social media conversation. The more value you add, the more value you’ll get in return. It’s an exponential thing!

Need a Math Tutor!

I advise clients on social media networking and how to give in order to get. Contact me if you need a social media tutor. Contact with me at 303.882.8252. Email tom.gray[AT]gemsolv.com. Connect to me on LinkedIn or follow me at Twitter.

Comments Please

What’s your formula for social media networking success? Leave your 2 cents below!

Image Credit: Superbokehtheorie : Originally uploaded by eriwst

Whether you sell products or services you can steal a page from OpenTable.com‘s approach on how to follow up with your customers.

OpenTable is the leader in providing online restaurant reservations. They do an excellent job on the front end whether you know where you want to dine or are looking for suggestions.

We had an opportunity to use them to book reservations for Fathers’ Day brunch. After the event they did something that all of us who use the web to promote and sell our stuff should do … they followed-up!

A day after our reservation I received an email asking about our experience with the restaurant we dined at (Duo in the Highlands area of Denver – I highly recommend it!). Such a simple idea but too often overlooked. When you sell a customer a product or provide a service how about inviting their comments and feedback after they’ve had an opportunity to use the product or once the service has been delivered. Why? Well for one, your customers appreciate it. It sets you apart as too few vendors ever take the time to do this. Second, it allows you to be a hero instead of a zero. (My friend and client, Mark Sanborn, talks about the hero/zero choice in a November 2007 post at his blog.) You’re a hero when you find out that your customer’s experience with your product or service was less than stellar and you take the necessary steps to positively resolve their issues.

Third, and the final piece in the OpenTable follow up experience, is that you have an opportunity to ask for more business. In OpenTable’s case once you’ve provided your feedback they send you to a thank you page that has a list of restaurants that other Duo patrons dine at with the call to action to make your next reservation now. Hmmm. Great idea, don’t you think? After all if your customer liked the gadget they bought from you don’t you think they’d be receptive to more of the same?

So here’s the methodology 1. Sell something 2. Follow up 3. Sell something else. 4. Repeat. Simple, isn’t it?

Time magazine (June 16, 2008) has an interesting article about a fast food restaurant in Russia which, in the last 10 years, has grown to be the 4th largest fast food chain in the country and the only home-grown entry on the list. The chain is called Teremok and they’ve grown by focusing on blinis – the traditional Russian thin pancakes (think crepes). They serve them with everything from butter to smoked herring and caviar.

What captured my attention in the article was the founder’s, Mikhail Goncharov, approach to problem solving. The article states:

…All of it is learning by doing. “When I see a problem, ” Goncharov says, “we buy books on the topic, then we read, then we decide.”

Wow, how simple can you get and, by following this approach, Teremok has grown to $110 million in revenue (including a huge increase of $47 million over last year). So here’s the methodology – 1. Identify the problem –> 2. Search for solutions –> 3. Investigate the solution –> 4. Decide on a course of action and –> 5. Implement the solution.

With 400,000 books published last year and millions (billions?) of blog postings on every topic imaginable, you think that you might be able to find the answer to the problems you face in your business.

I originally reported the following data on the growth of the blogosphere as part of a post I was writing about a year and 1/2 ago. As sometimes happens, it got stuck in draft world and I never completed it. A couple of items recently came to my attention that motivated me to revisit this…

The first was the report I cited yesterday from businessandblogging.com that spoke of the million small business blogs out there and the tremendous, cost effective, marketing opportunities blogs provided for small business (referencing a New York Times article on the topic.

The second was my curiosity about how big the blogosphere has become. I zipped over to Technorati to take a peek at the number of blogs they’re tracking:

Currently tracking 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.

…

The World Live Web is incredibly active, and according to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.

Compare this to the data below from April 2006 when Technorati reported tracking over 35 million blogs with 75,000 new blogs created each day. So just in the last 20 months we’ve seen an 321% in the number of blogs tracked and 233% in daily postings.

(They say baseball is awash in steroids. I think that the blogosphere is juicing big time! How soon before Congress calls hearings to investigate the real story?

The blogosphere, social media, podcasting, vidcasting,/YouTube … all interconnected channels for business of all size to get the message out. In this wired and wireless, information-flying-all-over-the-place, low cost and no cost of production world it’s inexcusable not to be using any or all of the above to promote your message!

My Original Post

By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.

Blogging continues to move into the mainstream as a.) more folks blog and b.) more folks read blogs. According to a phone survey of over 7,000 people conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project…

• About 57 million Americans are reading blogs, up from around 39 million in 2004.
• 12 million Americans write blogs up from 8 million in 2004. As an aside, Technorati reports that they are tracking over 35 million blogs and that over 19 million blogs continue to be posted to 3 months after creation. Further they state that 75,000 new blogs are created every day and the blogosphere continues to double every 6 months (from State of the Blogosphere, April 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth)
• 84% of bloggers are under 49 and 54% are under 30. They tend to be avid consumers and heavy internet users.
• Bloggers are passionate about what they write. Only 7% state that their principal goal is to make money from their blogs. Most blog to document & share their personal experiences while a substantial percentage use their blogs as a teaching tool…

Access Pew’s Reports on Blogging…

What’s a transactional email, you ask? Well it’s an email message that you send to a customer as a result of a transaction – an order confirmation, a shipping notice, thank you for buying/subscribing/registering etc.

maildogmanager.com reminds us to …

Mind our Ps and Qs when it comes to transactional emails… Here’s a list of the tips they offer for using your everyday, transactional messages to best advantage:

• … keep the subject line strictly transactional
• … transactional content must stay at the top of the email and be most prominent
• Jazz up the typical plain text email with nice formatting including HTML graphics …
• Add a few soft sell promotions … towards the bottom, including tie-ins to your existing promotions, email newsletter and more
• … add links to bring them back to your website or a place to contact for more information

Thanks to Mail Dog for reminding us that we should never pass up an opportunity to promote our products and services and what better place to market than under the rosy aura of a successful transaction…