Edelman survey: Trust in all media plunges!

You can read more here.

Quite simply it makes me so sad: sick to my stomach in fact.The results of this survey indicate that the vast majority of people operating online have encountered liars. Damned liars in fact.

Why can’t more of us be truthful? Why don’t we care about our own personal reputation and that of our clients? When working online (or anywhere else for that matter) the most important thing to me is that I am dealing with others honestly, and that they do the same in return.

Is this what it’s come down to?

The following findings (along with a lot more) are sad testimonials to the number of people who look upon their friends and associates as just someone else to make a quick buck off.

- Trust in information from friends and peers, “people like me,” dropped by 20 points, from 47 to 27 percent.

- Trust in information from digital media–blogs, social networks, and free content sources like Wikipedia or Google news, remains low: only between 11 percent and 22 percent of respondents express trust in information about companies from these sources.

Are you just another person who’s building a brand on a lie? It can’t last and it won’t. We should all do our bit right now to stop the lies. Stop misleading people and learn to think long and hard before we print anything online. Our livelihoods may depend on it.

You can fool some of the people all the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all of the time. My apologies to Abraham Lincoln but that’s almost a universal formula.

Building Your Brand in an Environment of Trust

Building trust is (or should be) a very serious business. Here are a few rules to make sure your trust-meter remains intact:

• Never lie or misrepresent yourself or a product or service.
• Never back up someone you know is lying, either in words or by endorsing them via social media.
• Don’t be afraid to call someone out if you know for sure they’re lying.

If you don’t do it, perhaps no one will. And it’s an interesting thing that if you show some courage and stand up to someone who’s doing something you disagree with, very often others will support you: they agree with you but they don’t have the personal courage to do what you’ve just done! You don’t need to do it publicly either. You’ve still done the job if you contact someone privately if you know that they’re contributing to the growing environment of mutual mistrust because they’re not operating ethically in whatever way.

Consider also that creating a fake Twitter account to air your views might just be another part of our problem. Too many people are hiding behind fake social media personas where they feel it’s OK to do and say things that they’d probably never consider doing in real life. But then again, maybe they would if they knew no one would find them out and that’s the root of the problem we have here.

It’s a well known cliche that in war truth is always the first casualty. Let’s work to make sure that in years to come our grandchildren don’t say ‘when the Internet was born truth laid down and died.’

That was my periodic Rant. Consider it over.

I am dismayed at the number of Twitter users who are openly using my favorite networking implement as a spamming platform. They are seemingly unrepentant and unapologetic. They can’t possibly be profiting from it: I know I’m not alone that I will NEVER retweet a spam tweet. I will NEVER follow an obvious spammer.

There have been many blog posts recently about the events over at Twitter: How #FollowFriday has degenerated into a spam exercise.

I have noticed a steep decline in the general quality of new users following me, with tweets like:

Hello Please Check by Free Earnings report ! Make money online with me

and

Get start in online business – sell more products and get rich . Check my free raport about it

The problem is, these people are misguidedly under the impression that they are engaged in Social Media Marketing. They are nothing but spammers, pure and simple.

Social media marketing is all about building relationships and trust. It’s all about providing useful information and assistance to your network: in short it’s about making the Internet a better place to be–not creating a cyber-hell on earth.

For Heaven’s sake: Next time you go to tweet something that most of us will regard as spam, stop and think. Would you want to receive 100 tweets just like it? If not you probably need to stop tweeting, stop blogging and read. Read the blogs and tweets of people like Lee Odden, Darren Rowse, Andy Beal, and David Risley, to grab just a handful of good Twitter people off my timeline.

What can we all do to keep Twitter and the Internet spam-free? Don’t encourage spammers. Don’t follow them, don’t engage with them, and if they bother you, block them and tell your timelines why you’re blocking them. Be loud about it.

CPA Marketing for Social Media-Savvy CPAs

Accountants can make great use of social media for business networking. In particular, Twitter will get your brand just where you need it–right in front of the kind of small business owners and freelancers who are most likely to be in need of an accountant.

How do people locate accountants?

Most of us don’t make finding an accountant a priority, unless we’re looking for a forensic accountant for example, or unless it’s tax time and we’re way behind. The rest of the time, we do know we need a CPA–but never get past the thought. But if we were to run into one on our social media travels, we’d be more than likely to say ‘hi, I was thinking I needed an accountant….’ or ‘hey I’ve been looking for a CPA…’

How CPAs can locate clients at no cost…

Social marketing in general is perfect for all kinds of CPA marketing. But Twitter is great for this kind of informal encounter because there’s no crushing obligation on either side. The meeting is purely non-committal and that’s exactly why potential clients are more than willing to make the first move. Twitter users can even seek out contacts based on keywords such as certified accountant, or CPA, using one of several Twitter tools such as TweetScan.

In fact there are already several CPA networks in existence on Twitter, such as #AAMAustin: it’s no secret that professionals of all stripes are discovering the amazing potential of Twitter for professional networking and client outreach. As an experienced Twitter user, and one who has seen Twitter evolve into the friendly marketing machine it has become, I see it as the perfect medium for all kinds of CPA marketing and business opportunities for CPAs.

Reputable professional organizations like the Association of Accounting Marketing are starting to use social media to network among each other and be more accessible to customers. You can use the hashtag #aam to see what some trail blazing CPAs are talking about on Twitter right now. And if you check out the AAM Summit 2009 bundle, you’ll see that they’re advocating the use of social media such as Twitter too.

Are you in the market for a CPA marketing package?

I feel there’s a need for a specially targeted CPA info package explaining exactly how to use social media, and specifically Twitter, for CPA marketing. If you’re in the market for such an information product, please use my contact form to let me know specifically what information would be useful to you if the poll below doesn’t quite cut it for you!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

]]> http://www.wellwrittenwords.com/why-twitter-is-a-great-cpa-marketing-tool/feed/ 13 http://www.wellwrittenwords.com/failproof-facebook-strategies-for-growing-your-business/ http://www.wellwrittenwords.com/failproof-facebook-strategies-for-growing-your-business/#comments Thu, 12 Mar 2009 06:55:36 +0000 Patricia Skinner http://www.wellwrittenwords.com/?p=515

It’s time to start taking social media seriously if you haven’t up till now. I’m going to take a look at all the major social media sites in a new series: Social Media for Business.
As I predicted at the beginning of the year, social media is becoming more and more important as a business tool and you ignore it at your peril.

First up is FaceBook

Personally I find FaceBook extremely time-consuming but I have to concede that it can be a powerful business tool when used properly.

As with all social media its greatest benefit is that it allows you to have a greatly extended reach: your profile can potentially expose you to thousands of visitors online. If you do it right and that’s a big if.

FaceBook Demographics

If you’re wondering exactly what is the potential for extended reach, consider that FaceBook has a whopping 175 million users: only 50 million of them are in the US and 9 million in the UK. So if you’re an international outfit, you need applications like FaceBook to make sure you’re getting the potential international coverage you need.

“Yeah, but all you get on FaceBook is kids obsessed with games and music…” Not so! The fastest growing demographic on FaceBook is the 33-40 year-olds, but the over 55s are close behind them. Those are powerful demographics for the business crowd aren’t they?

There are three very important rules you need to follow if you want to be a social media success: I’ll be repeating this later because it doesn’t just apply to FaceBook:

• Never, ever be aggressive or rude. If you wipe someone out on FaceBook chances are it will go viral because everyone loves a fight. But you will put people off doing business with you for good. Always be nice even if you disagree.
• Keep your readers engaged: include interesting stuff for them and…
• Give people something to take away. Nothing creates likeability than solving another person’s problems for them–for free. It is a great concept that John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing talks about in detail.

You need to spend time connecting with people on FaceBook, and once you’ve done that you need to spend more time engaging with them. If you’re not prepared to do that then perhaps Social Media in all its glory simply isn’t for you.

Engage with your customers on a personal level

One of the hugest advantages of engaging with your customers through social media is that they get to see a side of you that they normally wouldn’t: you become a friend to them and everyone loves to do business with a friend. Successful FaceBook users, or Power Users, find that their business grows virally because they’re giving people what they want or need, so those connections go away and tell other connections to go check it out.

If you ever run into reputation problems online (if, in other words, you have someone publishing unpleasant stuff about you), a strong FaceBook presence can be a wonderful ally in your reputation management strategy. You can also use FaceBook for proactive reputation management. Which is basically making sure that the naysayers can’t get a foot in the door.

So what can you do to make sure that visitors find your FaceBook page engaging and useful?

• Industry news (trade shows, exhibitions, product recalls…you get the idea)
• Tips on using your products/services
• Stories about how your producst/services have helped people
• Stories about your employees and your customers
• Special offers
• You can link to or provide product reviews

One more very important point: you can also advertise directly on FaceBook. With numbers like 175 million and a great demographic you can be sure that your ads will come up in front of the right people. Highly targeted marketing like that is hard to come by.

You might find some useful additional points in this article:  How to develop a FaceBook page that attracts millions of fans.