Social Media Today reports that a state law in Missouri, which would have prevented teachers and students from communicating privately over the Internet on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter was temporarily blocked, but if the injunction is lifted, it could have national implications. The law, also known as Senate Bill 54 or the Amy Hestir Student Protection Act, aims to fight inappropriate contact between students and teachers, including protecting children from sexual misconduct by their educators and is named after a Missouri public school student who was repeatedly molested by a teacher several decades ago. Oh, dear…

I once read a Facebook Note where some teachers actively use Facebook to connect to their students, seeing that social media is an extension of the added responsibility of being a public figure. Though many stay away from Facebook for fear of ethical, moral and often times the fear of even very ridiculous allegations, one workaround I kept reading is to accept only graduates or those who are over the age of 18.

Of course, the online social media relationship has to stay online. Teachers must not invite students, graduate or even above eighteen, for example, to a dinner party. Facebook today has given us the ability to set privacy settings all the way to each message or link we share and post on our wall. One way is to use (friend) “Lists,” though having existed for quite some time now, has been elevated and placed at the left-column list above the Group and Page lists. Teachers can sort their friends according to user-defined lists, whether as generic as “students” to more specific like “Biology 101 SY2009.”

Long before the internet and the World Wide Web, teachers going beyond their normal paid hours to help lagging students have always been the best hero example for young minds. In primary and middle school years, just seeing my teacher staying in school to help my best friend improve his math skills was a very, very positive image that has stuck in my mind until this day (and learning later in life that those sessions were unpaid hours). Now that our world has expanded the use of the internet into social media sites like Facebook, why do people want to bar its use to enhance the ability of those “heroes” doing what they love to do without having to stay late at night in school?

I believe these naysayers are those who have not looked into social media in-depth before coming up with their conclusion that Facebook is bad for their children, and staying up until late evening in school with a teacher conducting extra remedial lessons is good. I’ve seen many similar instances in small and mid-sized businesses where the boss and owner bans Facebook because he thinks it decreases productivity. The word “think” is actually a public relations mockup; the real word the boss meant was “guess.” Ignorance of the law is not an excuse, as we have all been told. Is ignorance of social media an excuse?

I’ve encountered marketing groups of both big and small businesses setting up their Facebook Page and realizing later they have to disable wall posting from their fans (people who clicked the “Like” button) because many were reading the complaints of a few. “Huh? You’re scared of that? That only means you believe your business has crappy products and services, or everyone in your company doesn’t have the common sense and good judgment to answer back amiably, respectfully, correctly and every postively-enforced “ly” word we can both think of.” Don’t you know Facebook is actually one of the best, cheapest, unpaid means of delivering great customer service and care right smack in the eyes of thousands if not millions of your fans, another freebie for awesome public relations? Facebook and the rest of the social media sites are not print media to market and sell your product and service to the entire world; it’s a targetted, supercharged “Word of Mouth” medium that either creates or extends both social, educational and professional relationships outside of the coffee shop, the work place or the school.

If you’re a teacher, a school head, an academic institution owner; heck! If you’re even business owner, the head of a department, part of the strategic or executive committee driving and steering your organization – heed the voices of your customer. They’ve already been using Facebook and other social media sites long before you’ve even realized they’re there. They’ve gotten so comfortable with Facebook it’s now part of their everyday life; the use of broadsheet publications and TV has probably gone down BUT (strong emphasis on that word) these have not disappeared.

Are you waiting for your competitor grab the “first mover advantage?” Worst, are you waiting for someone to impersonate you, gain all your would-be fans before you enter the digital social world? I know our local, major utility company is scratching its head trying to figure out how to kick the living hell out of the the several impersonators who now have thousands of followers; only now did they realize and decide to create their Facebook Page. Sheesh!

Let’s go back to the school and their teachers. Would you rather your students learn stuff from other people? Right or wrong, Facebook can lead them to the wrong path, much like the impersonators we’ve all seen before (so far, only Twitter acknowledges legitimacy of individual and organizational accounts in its microblogging site if you can prove to them who you really are). Is leading them to the wrong path just the parents’ fault or is it also “YOUR” fault? I honestly believe the teacher, that greatest public figure of young people who adore their moms, dads and (secretly, usually) their teachers, should begin to learn and equip themselves with the benefits, advantages and power of social media as an academic tool so that they can bring their social responsibiliy in the physical world to the social media realm, where their students wouldn’t stop bantering and swapping information, more so, asking school-related questions.

There’s an impulsive way of entering social media for the educational and business organization, and there’s a more proper way of doing so. The challenge is finding that proper and right way of doing so; and the million Dollar question is will you decide to do so?

Sources: Social Media Today | The Facebook Blog | National Middle School Association

Photo above by clarkstown67 at Flickr.com

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I got to this topic after I read the blog of a former office colleague which I never knew he had one. I gave him some tips but noted that I could actually give him more based on my personal experience of experimenting and maintaining my blogs through the years. On a number of occasions, there have been surprising results and obvious mistakes I learned from.

I’m not a blogger who struck it rich by selling advertising space or being a luminary in the speaking circuit. In fact, I’ve turned down every “advertising for peanuts” request in the past all the advertisers had nothing to do with my blog’s theme, the topics I wrote about or even my intended market (of readers.) Those boxes to the right are all my personal ads or messages which relate to my blog categories. Maybe when the right one comes along, I’ll succumb to it. For now, I keep it to myself.

So, in the spirit of the “Hacker Ethic!” (read the Steven Levy book, “Hackers,” and you’ll know why I say it so), here are my top 10 suggestions to maintaining a good blog.

1. Focus and Stay with One Theme or Topic.

Our mind is a chaotic mix of thoughts, ideas, experiences, wants and needs. If you were to outline everything down, you’d probably need weeks or months to do so. Categorizing it is another task. There are just too many topics you’d like to express. That was my dilemma. I just loved expressing many things, not just one. I wanted people to know who I was through my writing.

The solution was to look for a blog theme that allowed me to display, in standard menu web site formatting, the few topics of interest I wanted to express and share. At the same time, I also wanted the normal menu options of “About” and “Contact Us” that you see in most web sites. This is because I always believe that habit is such a hard thing to change in people. The general public has been used to the standard look and feel of web sites, with their menu items at the top and summaries down below. Our eyes continue to use habitual methods of reading – start from the top-left and work your way down with a left-to-right scheme. Anyway, it took me a few days until I chose this blog theme which is something you can use only if you have your own web hosting package; this is not available in the free versions of blogging.

But before the “look and feel” issue was resolved, I already had general idea of why I was creating my blog: I wanted my clients to get to know more about me through my writing. For example, my business network in LinkedIn was able to read a few of my blog posts which enticed them to make the first move to inquire about my products or services. So, my blog is my marketing tool; at the same time, it also allows new acquaintances to get to know me and old friends to learn more about me. This is my main intention and the path to which my blog will continue to exist.

Workshop: Spend some time addressing this question: what do I intend to achieve through my blog? Once you’ve got the answer, start listing all the topics you’d like to express in writing with the answer in mind. Then, categorize these topics or, better yet, choose about two or three categories only excluding the usual “About Us/Me” and “Contact Us/Me.” The “look and feel” you choose will also speak out how you express yourself – choose what you like, not what others do. The rest follow – choosing a blog name, buying a domain name, deciding on free or not-free hosting, learning how to use your blog administrative functions and features, learning some basic HTML codes like centering and hyperlink-referencing. Practice makes perfect.

2. Allow Comments to Create a Conversation

When I started experimenting on blogging, I allowed anyone to write a comment without approval – it just got posted right away. Then, when my blog probably became more visible in search engines or people saw precisely which country was reading my blog the most, I suddenly started seeing comments that had nothing to do with the topic; in fact, most were just message-advertising their product, service, web site or worse, porn sites.

I quickly enabled moderation of comments on my blog and subjectively decided which to allow or trash and delete. For a few where the comments were good but included HTML snippets like “<a href”, I simply erased the code, retained the phrase beside it, and approved the comment. Because of this, I had to reserve at least fifteen minutes a day to manage the pending comments.

In addition, I also realized that there were probably “bots” (web-oriented programs acting like robots inserting predefined comments into blog sites) that were maliciously and automatically pasting comments on my blog posts without human intervention. So, I decided to add a Captcha plug-in, an HTML snippet you can plug into your blog setting or profile to make sure all the comments are being written by human beings, not a bots.

On the brighter side of comments and in the spirit of the slogan to which I named my blog, “The Internet is all about Conversations,” I managed to make a few new friends by way of a string of responses originating from the reader’s first comment, sharing and expressing one’s thoughts, ideas and even principles in life regardless if it were conflicting with me, and allowing other people to learn from the comments and responses the get to read at the bottom of the blog post. So, always respond back to the person who wrote a comment, regardless if it is a praise, complaint or criticism. “After the storm comes the rainbow” speaks well of cordial and respectful responses to even irate or critical comments; you’ll be amazed your once critical reader will suddenly become one of your most loyal subscribers.

This is the major reason why blogs became popular. There were many diary-formatted types of web-based user applications in the past but Blogspot (and its predecessor) forced the issue about comments, and that paved the way to a lively, very real interaction between the reader and the writer. Without forcing bloggers to allow comments, blogging wouldn’t have been that popular.

3. A Picture Paints a Thousand Words

Newspapers have been around since the early 17th century. In the 20th century, photographs have always played a key role in its popularity. After black and white editions came colored versions of the newspaper. In the advent of the Internet, web sites are often a replica of publications – words with pictures. Today, blogs also mimic the newspaper or magazines. Relevant ones, that is.

I also chose the blog theme to which I’ve been using since Day One because it forces me to place a photo or image at the start of my blog post, automatically resized if it doesn’t have the perfect dimensions. If I don’t have the right image, I usually edit one before I come up with the final version. In every photo or image I use, whether I need to or not, I always credit the owner by his, her or the entity’s name, and the reference web site address, i.e. Flickr.com, Facebook.com. Where do I get these photos and images, you ask?

• I source out publicly-available photographs in the internet that doesn’t need licensing;
• I use my personal photographs or images;
• I borrow someone else’s with their permission;
• I use the ones that come with programs and applications I buy and own, i.e. Microsoft Powerpoint comes loaded with photos and images;
• I buy one from the stock photo suppliers in the web if it’s affordable.

Pictures don’t just lure your blog visitor to read your posts; they are also important when you or your social media network share your blog post in social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, and social news web sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, to name a few. When you or your readers share the link of your blog post, the photo or image inserted in your blog post forms part of the shared link. Hence, the same effect of “a picture paints a thousand words” lures the person to click on the link and read your blog post.

4. Tags are Important for Future References

Tags are index terms that search engines and social news web sites use to discover your blog. They index it (or tag it) so when that tag item is used for listing or searching the tag, your blog comes up in the list. The more hits your blog receives for particular search engines or social news web sites, besides tagging, the higher the ranking of your blog post in its list. So, tags are important. My rule of thumb for tags is that if the word of phrase doesn’t exist in my blog post, it doesn’t get tagged. This, however, is not a strict blogging rule.

Rather than explaining tags comprehensively, it’s best you read more about its intricacies. Try reading about tags in Wikipedia, especially section 4 entitled “Advantages and disadvantages.”

What tags have done for my blog is bring it up higher in the food chain of the search engines, so to speak. Today, my top three popular tags to this blog are “call center,” “Kunnect,” and “Pekson.” In my other blog, www.miniphilippines.com, 11 percent from the thousands of total hits this blog has encountered all originate from the search engine phrase “philippines typhoon.” This is because in 2009 I blogged so much about typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng that I ended up with thousands of hits per day during those separate yet unforgettable events. So today, every time someone searches that phrase, the blog post about either typhoons comes up on the list of top links. Not that it’s relevant today but it catches the attention of a first time visitor which may lead him or her to browse or surf my blog for any post of interest.

What you can do that I’ve never attempted (yet) is to approach companies or organizations and offer them line advertising, graphical box advertsing, or even a box advertorial inside your top blog posts. Again, it’s your call if you’d like to impede something outside the theme or topic of your blog posts.

5. Add a Social Media Plug-in

There’s a famous phrase about Facebook which I’ve used in my social media training poster. It reads, “If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan.” I wrote that last year and I don’t know if it’s overtaken a few more countries in the list; I’m guessing it has.

Adding a social media plug-in like AddToAny.com allows your reader to share your blog post across the dozens, if not hundreds of social media and social news web sites. Doing so also increases the popularity of your blog post, not to mention the number hits.

6. Add a Visitor Counter

On top of what your blogging application provides you regarding statistics, I also find it good to know where my readers are coming from. I got stuck using FlagCounter.com because I didn’t have time to go looking for something better; FlagCounter suited my needs. The only thing I did was reduce the size of the FlagCounter HTML snippet to 18×18 pixels, small enough not to be noticed but big enough for me to click into it when I need statistics by country.

Today, this blog gets read by 34 percent coming from the USA, 30 percent from the Philippines, 4.9 percent from Canada, and from 66 other countries. Though I sometimes pinpoint the Philippines as the place of my professional or personal experience in many of my blog posts, it is also my writing intent to try to be geographically unbiased so that people from other countries can relate to my words. Hence, more people outside the Philippines are actually visiting and reading my blog posts. That’s good because that is my intent and it is not a surprise to me. The same holds true for www.miniphilippines.com which gets 50.2 percent from Philippine-based visitors and 49.8 percent from 152 other countries (25.6 percent are coming from the USA and 6.8 percent from Canada, as the top two countries below the Philippines.)

7. Advertise Your Own

As I mentioned in the beginning of this article, I’ve only placed personal ad lines and boxes in my blog because any of these always relates to the theme, categories and topics of my blog site. I have had little less than 10 percent of my visitors clicking on these ad boxes for which I have no idea why they do – I can only guess interest or appeal of graphics as two probabilities. Yet, ten percent of the thousands of hits reveal some hundreds of clicks – which is still a good thing!

So, if you do some type of business or work part-time or otherwise, you may want to advertise those on your blog. In the past, I’ve advertised my high school’s events, my friends’ blogs and events, even my ex-wife’s business, and maybe a funny quip or two to let my readers know, “Hey! I can also be funny!” Just make sure it relates to you as the owner of the blog, or the blog’s theme, category or topic. Anything out of context can confuse your reader or worse, alienate people not to go back to your blog anymore.

8. Create a Facebook Page or Group

What’s the difference between a Facebook Page and a Facebook Group? Read my previous post, “Facebook in the Middle.”

Whatever your decision is, the reality that more and more people are starting their day with Facebook is something to consider. This social media behemoth has now replaced many of the habitual news web sites we used to start our day with, like Yahoo.com or some specific news web site. The joke goes that, if before, when people wake up in the morning it’s the newspaper and a cup of coffee; nowadays, it’s Facebook and anything to drink. LOL!

Search popularity of being on the top list as a Facebook Page or Group still belongs to normal, everyday words used in the name or label of your Facebook Page or Group plus the number of fans or members. So, name it as how it relates to your blog. For example, one of my business web sites is www.kunnectph.com and this relates to a WordPress blog site. However, the battle-cry I’ve used for this freelance business has always been “Talk is Cheap!” So, I’ve aptly named or labeled the corresponding Facebook Page to “Talk is Cheap!” while retaining the Facebook Page’s username to simply “Kunnect”.

In the past, I thought of marketing myself by creating a Facebook Page which bears my name in both the label or title and the username. Guess what? I had about five fans over the course of a year. You think I’d be famous right away? The point is it was a wrong move. Last month, I deleted the Facebook Page that bore my name and created a new one using “The Internet is All About Conversations” as the label or title, and the username is shortened to “internetconversations.” Today, I have dozens of fans without any marketing; just the simple interest of people liking my Facebook Page. It’s a good start!

9. Create a Twitter Account

I have two Twitter accounts – one each for MiniPhilippines and Pekson.com. Anything that has to do with the Philippines or Filipinos anywhere in the world gets tweeted in the former. Anything else I would like to share to the world uses the latter account. Then, I add icons or buttons on my respective blogs to link either Twitter accounts – but not both! Again, don’t confuse your visitor or reader. If they land on your blog, show them the way to the right and appropriate social media site, like your Facebook Page or Group, or your Twitter account.

Why Twitter? Thousands, if not millions of people are actually using Twitter to search specific words in tweets (or those 140 character messages) and hashtags. If you happen to be one of them, there’s a good chance that a Twitter user will click on the shortened hyperlink found in your tweet and land on your blog. You can also install a plug-in (called a Widget) that lists the latest tweets you’ve sent on your blog page.

10. Adjust but Don’t Quit

Like any successful endeavor you or other people have done with their lives, both professionally and personally, intent, focus, desire and the will to succeed forces you to continue despite any setback. It’s same goes for blogging. Even if you shifted jobs and are now neck deep in work with your new employer, find the time to keep adjusting, enhancing and writing for your blog. The moment you stop, you will begin to lose your followers or readers.

I’ve had a few false starts with blogging. I think there were about two blogs I started with gusto but failed to motivate myself to continue and lost the interest. But here’s another surprising story – it is (again) about MiniPhilippines. There was a time not too long ago that precisely as I had described in the previous paragraph, I was neck deep with work that I didn’t post anything for three weeks. Yet, this blog site kept getting the number of hits I didn’t expect. Why? Because I’ve had the blog for a little less than two years and with so much content and tags filed and indexed in cyberspace, the number of daily hits didn’t drastically fall. It was still being visited especially by the new ones. After seeing this, I began cornering myself to start posting again.

In Summary

There are thousands of more tips and suggestions on the web on how best to maintain your blog and make it successful. Google it and you’ll be overwhelmed by it. My intent is to let you know it can be done even with as little as a few hours per week. Just don’t stop if it means well for you to start expressing yourself in writing; and blogging is the easiest way to publish yourself for free. What I wrote is based on my experience, not someone else’s. Others will have many more to add to my list.

In closing, my peers and I, young or old, would always tell each other in the past that once we retire, we will either teach or write a book or do both. Now that you have this online activity called blogging and the resources for blogging abound like fresh water in Canada, wouldn’t you think that everything you write today can actually be compiled to resemble a book in the future? All you need to do is to start writing it.

Ahh, blogging. There comes a time when “you can’t live without it.” So, have fun expressing yourself or your business!

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If you and your business or organization would like to learn how to engage using social media networking and marketing the right way, I conduct a four-hour crash course entitled (click) “Social Media for the Workplace.“

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If you take a stopwatch and record the time you spend on web sites, you might notice that Facebook takes an unprecedented amount of time you spend on the Internet over the rest of the other web sites combined. Indeed, Facebook has now topped the charts in terms of daily usage (see Chart of the Day: Facebook’s Unbelievable Effect On The Rest Of The Web). Of course, there are contraries to the rule where a rare few of our friends even bother to browse their Facebook account on a regular basis, much less join the social media behemoth. Still, it is very certain we will soon be communicating and collaborating altogether through Facebook.

So, in the spirit of old “Hacker Ethic” of sharing information to everyone else, here are a few things you may want to consider using to fully utilize it as your means to creating conversations with your network of peers and acquaintances without having to use other applications, cloud or otherwise.

Your Facebook E-mail Account is Now Available

One of the last vestiges of online tools outside the purview of Facebook is everyone’s ability to send and receive messages by e-mail to each other. Now, Facebook has opened that gateway, giving all its users an @facebook.com account, and completing the list of online messaging tools for networking, communicating and collaborating with family, friends and acquaintances.

This means you do not need to get out of Facebook to conduct your e-mail activities. You can send messages with file attachments (though I have not tested the maximum file size that you can send). It’s funny that Facebook has decided not to allow you to encode the “subject title” and just uniformly entitles every message that you send to an e-mail address as “Conversation with <Your-Facebook-Profile-Name>”.

For now, I suggest that you keep your business and professional life outside this e-mail tool. As Facebook has been since time a memorial, you can use your @facebook.com account within the bounds of your social life.

Please go to the Facebook Help Center to learn how to set up your @facebook.com e-mail account.

Groups and Pages – Which One Is Better?

The answer is “both.” After going through so many changes and iterations over the years, today’s Facebook Group and Facebook Page work so differently from its inception. Let me explain the differences and how you should and can use these for your marketing intentions.

First, memorize this:

Facebook Group is to a “Country Club” as Facebook Page is to a “Celebrity.”

This is my personal description because this is exactly how you are going to use either community tool as a means of networking to the entire Facebook world without having to be their “friend” in Facebook.

When you are trying to market yourself or your entity, it is better to create a Page so people can “Like” your page and follow every post you make, akin to a celebrity status. You give the freedom of choice to all Facebook users to “Like” your page, and promoting it is your followers’ decision to do so or not. A virtual “Word of Mouth” marketing transpires within your page as you bellow out announcements and campaigns that drive enthusiasm and excitement about you or your entity. Whether you’re a real celebrity or not, your every move in your Facebook Page should be to act like you are a real celebrity. Not doing so defeats the benefits of maintaining a Facebook Page.

Now, the Facebook Group is a different animal altogether. That’s why the analogy I’m asking you to use is that of a “Country Club.” This is a members-only community inside Facebook where people who form part of the group share a common interest. But instead of the freedom of join the group, members can add their friends without their permission. It’s like pulling your friends into the registration desk through a proxy signup. Once a member, the vertical menu items to the left of their Facebook home page lists the groups they belong to and a highlighted number displaying the total new posts posted in the group.

Where in the past you can message-blast using Groups, that function has now been transferred to the Facebook Page. Rather, Facebook Group members are notified of posts in the left-hand vertical list, including on-page and e-mail notifications, while both Facebook Group and Page posts will appear on your wall.

A word on the power of “The Internet is All About Conversations”: the moment you remove your followers or members’ ability to post messages, links and photos on the wall, you may lose their following or membership, not unless you already think of yourself as too famous a celebrity or a powerhouse business behemoth it doesn’t matter if they follow you or not.

Marketing and Selling in Facebook

If you are using both Facebook and LinkedIn, you should have come to the conclusion that Facebook is social and LinkedIn is business. But why is it that businesses still create Groups and Pages inside Facebook knowing it’s nothing more than a very huge cocktail party? Precisely because it is a very big cocktail party that many individuals of those business groups and pages want to get into the social networking and begin cold-calling, marketing and selling their products and services. Do you think LinkedIn is also a gigantic cocktail party?

Here’s the clincher: it is the individual, who works for the business that owns the Facebook Group or Facebook Page, that markets the products and services of the organization (non-profit institutions also need to market themselves). If it is the individual, then why bother create business-like Facebook Groups and Pages? The answer lies in community-building.

Communities are groups or clans of people with similar likes. Through human history, clans have developed organizational hierarchy to administer how the community should operate and collaborate. So, the more freedom you provide, the bigger your Facebook Group or Facebook Page grows. In contrast, the more policies you institute – barriers to open collaboration – the smaller your clan will be. Free will, freedom of choice, democratic values and all that jazz have been the founding pillars of the Internet and the World Wide Web; no one person or entity owns either. It is a collaborative effort to make the web work as it is today. So, why institute restrictions and barriers in your Facebook Group and Facebook Page, like not allowing members and followers to post messages on the wall or administering who should join (for Pages)?

Regardless of the Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages you created and manage, the idea behind using social networking to market is the sincerity of the individual to represent yourself or your entity so that members and followers develop “trust” to continue being part of your community. You have to be “real” when it comes to social media. You cannot be yourself in the real world but then become someone else in Facebook; that lie and deception will catch up with you and may spring the end of your long-term relationship with everyone – a list of members or followers which took you months, if not years, to build.

Facebook is Now Called Middle Earth

A huge caboodle of today’s online marketing happens in Facebook. From Groups and Pages to Apps and Links, most successful individuals and entities have realized the beckoning of this social media behemoth as the center of the online world. Fine if you have a web site that links each other, but run your web statistics over and over again and you may come to realize a lot of the successful campaigns have started to emanate from Facebook. Once in a while people use Digg or StumbleUpon to, well, stumble upon your web site. But the lure of clicking that square-shaped, blue-colored capital letter “F” on a web site is more enticing than today’s RSS Feed or LinkedIn link. People have begun relying on Facebook as the single source of information that is relevant, useful and trusting. It is trusting because friends recommended it. Even the rare spam and virus-laden links from friends come up to be trusting, though wise friends immediately post a disclaimer, writing, “That wasn’t me!”

But be careful not to hard-sell or short-change people. Again, much as traditional advertising built brands out of trust so, too, shall your Facebook profile, Groups and Pages be built out of trust and sincerity. Market yourself as an expert on real estate, not repeated posts on the thing or item you are trying to sell. Market yourself into one specific business category. For example, many people who know me associate the phrase “call center” to my name. Most don’t know what it is about call centers I do – they just know this simple equation: Raffy Pekson = Call Centers. If you keep marketing yourself, your Facebook Group or your Facebook Page upon endless streams of many categories, people will get confused. Once confused, there goes your market. So, be extra careful.

As more people make Facebook their breakfast cereal and midnight snack, the entire world is now revolving around it. It is not an addiction – it is the new world order to which information is now being passed around. People of the older generation will disagree; however, statistics is already proving how Facebook is fast becoming the real portal to culture, ethnicity, habit and lifestyle. Though Google is trying to pounce on Facebook with its recent introduction of Google-Plus, I still believe the Facebook habit is one that’s as human as ice cream – habits die hard!

Are you taking part in the biggest cocktail party in the world? Have you established your real estate space in social media? Heck! Are you still relying, hoping and praying that people will visit your web site “FIRST” before Facebook?

I kid you not. Facebook is now the central habit of so many people today. Facebook is their early morning news show, daily newspaper, gossip columns, corner coffee shop, community center and park. It’s the early-morning tête-à-tête with BFFs and a lot of LOLs, and the noisiest after-office cocktail party with the who’s who and who’s not. To be seen and heard is now more important than to see, read and listen. Social and professional opportunities will not anymore happen out of hope or coincidence in the social media world – you have to take part, be seen and be heard.

It’s not too late to start. But start correctly. Ask advise from people who you perceive are doing it properly. Investigate profiles, groups and page, and see who does things better than others. Experiment as I did since 2008, creating so many groups and pages, buying too many domain names, blogging left and right, and so on. You will find for yourself and from others what will click for you or your entity, and what won’t. Learn, adjust and continue.

And good luck, too!

One of the new things I recently did that’s been in existence for some time now is to get a USA telephone number, particularly a particular New York area code, so that my Mom can call me anytime using local toll charges. It took me about ten minutes to do it, only because it was the first time I did so. Now, people who probably wanted to talk to me from the United States can now do so without thinking out loud how much it would cost them to call me long distance. The hesitation to talk to me is gone!

Social Media is a great tool to market yourself to the global community. From LinkedIn to Facebook and Twitter, to name a few, it’s easy to use but not so easy to master. “Mastering” social media isn’t about the keystrokes, clicks and web pages you need to know to use; it’s knowing how to use it, sort of a “rules of engagement” kind of dos and don’ts in the social media realm. Examples would be the limit of Tweets or messages you post periodically (daily and weekly), the type of status messages and links you share, and so on goes the list. Before you embark on your social media spree, ask yourself this question: who do I want to be in the social media sphere?

Be yourself. First rule of social media is not to hide who you are – it’s to enhance the positive attributes about yourself. No one’s perfect in the world but if you lock your positive attributes to someone else, chances are there’s bound to be some compatible traits. LinkedIn allows you to create your professional credentials that permit people to conclude if you’re worth the employee or the business partner they’re looking for. It’s very easy to create a long and wonderful list that may eventually bore the reader; or using terms and descriptions that nobody really understands and, thus, not easily searchable. It becomes more difficult to create your persona on a medium such as Facebook because it is a very social channel rather than boasting your professional triumphs. Then, there’s LinkedIn Group, Facebook Pages and a whole caboodle of things to create. Read my “Social Media – If You Build It, They Will Come!” post to learn more about building your social media profile correctly.

After all the building and marketing in social media, what happens next? People usually search you out and begin the conversation with a message – or vice versa if the messaging begins with you. Here’s the clincher to a successful sale – stop the messaging! People are (generally) by nature devout conversationalists who seek verbal words over written ones. Our history is filled with stories of (flea) markets as the center of sales and marketing that necessitates conversations over written messages. The Cluetrain Manifesto describes it best: these markets are conversations. There are those who just can’t seem to express their thoughts and ideas on paper (digital or otherwise) and a verbal conversation becomes the key essence to striking a deal.

People will not even search the net to find out how much will it cost to call you long distance. The second best approach to a conversation is to call the person in his (or her) country of origin. The best is to establish a local telephone number in that country. As I mentioned above, I use Skype to lease a New York area code telephone number (called Skype Online Number). You can get metered charging from Skype for every call you make or every call made to you, or get an unlimited call package – that’s up to you and the volume of calls you might be doing. If I use my Skype to call a US number, my New York number becomes my caller ID, which is now an easy way for anyone to call me back. This scenario is a one-is-to-one means of using the “cloud” to create conversations to develop a business relationship.

But how about your business that needs a calling platform for your entire office, not necessarily called a call center, but a VOIP-based PBX system that’s also cloud-based and can be leased on a monthly basis? Easier said and easier done. Cloud-based customer contact solutions such as Kunnect have been giving both contact centers and non-call center companies – vertical markets as they are often called – the ability to manage incoming and outgoing calls from anywhere in the world – with the ease and convenience of the web. From intelligent routing of calls, interactive voice responses and auto-attendants, fully recording all calls, monitoring everything from the ease of a notebook while sipping Mai Tais on the beach, providing other cloud-based solutions that help manage your workforce to become better productive – the list goes on and on. So, instead of buying hardware and software that need years of return (on investment) for a business that caters to seasonal sales, marketing, service and support campaigns, it’s best to start with a leasing solution, a pure operational expense answer to your customer contact needs.

The point of all these is your ability to make it very easy for your customer, prospect or existing, to start having a conversation with you. Then, you need to make it very easy for your customer to continue the business relationship. The end of it all is to make it very easy for your customer to earn or gain from all these. The key to succeeding is to engage the conversation all throughout. So, stop those useless messaging; not everyone can write and express themselves in words like you – let them talk to you. “Talk is Cheap!” has been my battle cry slogan since I started using the cloud as a means to create conversations globally. Nothing that generates profit is free; you have to spend a little to earn a little, or more.

“The internet is all about conversations” and to begin the conversation means allowing your target market to have that one-click-fits-all method of calling you anytime, in his own sweet time, and his waking hours, not yours. Create the conversation immediately, not just for you but for your entire workforce, be they sales, marketing, finance, HR or a host of other work they do for your business, department or group. Because if you continue to dabble on pure messaging, someone else will already be talking to your customers. Don’t miss out on it.

I have been in love with technology all my life because my dad was a Mechanical Engineer by profession and at home he was Mister “Fix It!” As his only child, he made sure I was part of his everyday routine of fixing things in the house. Came the introduction of computers to me, I was blown away. From DEC PDP-8 teletypes and IBM System 360 to Sharp MZ-80A, Commodore 64 and Apple II+, my world of technology changed. While my career shifted from I.T. to direct sales and media publishing, down to broadband internet, telecommunications and, today, call centers, I will stick to the old adage of habit: once a geek, always a geek!

Fast-forward to 2010. After a challenging 2008 and tumultuous 2009, the end of 2010 became a career-turner, from a semi-entrepreneur type of work style back to the multinational corporate world. The latter is not a downside – it’s in fact a blessing both financially and professionally. And the one thing that helped me get to where I am is using social media as a means to market myself in parallel to marketing the products and services I (used to) represent.

You see, if you market a product or a service using your personal profile in Facebook and LinkedIn, people are also looking at who you are. If you take care of how you strike a conversation in the online social media sphere, you will do well promoting yourself. In the end, when things go haywire with the organization you work for or represent, you can always use “yourself” to find the next big thing. Be it another job, another client or love interest, online social media marketing and networking truly does wonders and behind all the things that people say good and bad about it – it really works!

Since 2009, I started experimenting in online social media, trying to understand how to use the “dang thing” for business, especially the small business. As some of my profiles will read, I am fanatical about small businesses, cloud computing, customer contact solutions, and social media. As a Country Rep in the Philippines of a Canadian hosted call center solution, I understood its market to be small and mid-sized outsourcers who need the cost-effective model of a cloud-based solution and its quick implementation method. I used the major online social media platforms a lot, including blogging, to market the solution and got many responses from it along the way. During these years, I also developed the knack to create and maintain other blogs that focused on my interests while continuing to use the power of online social media networking as a means for face-to-face networking.

Here are some key insights into my experience using social media that worked to my advantage:

Tasting the snowflakes in Salt Lake County, Utah – “They’re not salty at all… LOL!”

BE YOURSELF. Who you are in real life must equal who you are inside the online social media world. The moment you become someone else online, your real life friends and acquaintances will start questioning your sincerity. Remember, the world is getting smaller and you will never know who knows who until you meet them online, especially the friends of your friends. But don’t overdo things, like changing your status every five minutes because you’re moving from one place to another. At the onset, your network may find it entertaining. Before the hour ends, you’re becoming an irritant. Too many YouTube links or Facebook App updates also spoil the real you. Being a funny in real life is posting a joke at most once a day, not every hour.

Once in a while every week, I post a nice, cute, mind-boggling or plain-cheesy quotation, something I can say out loud to my friends and they will not find me queer. Once every two weeks I share a YouTube link – not music videos but something still relevant to me, my work and my interests. Every day I share a website or blog link that’s related to work or something about general business, cloud computing, outsourcing or social media.

BE CONSISTENT. My online network knows me consistently. In my LinkedIn Groups, I’ll never share a funny YouTube video or an obscene Flickr photo; rather, it’s always an article or blog about what I do or related to the Group’s interest or theme. The same goes with my Facebook friends and the Fan Pages I manage. There is never anything that’s off-topic. If it happens that human nature forces me to post something irrelevant, it will occur “once in a blue moon” and never repeatedly; at least, I know my network of friends and acquaintances will forgive me for doing so because it’s just too funny or too important. Behind all these consistent things I do, people who have never met me will find out that their perception about me online is almost the same as when they finally meet me. So, there’s no surprise to new, “real life” acquaintances and they have to adjust to the “real me.”

ALWAYS REPLY AND COMMENT BACK. When people post something on your wall, reply or comment back. It’s just like in real life: if people say hello and you don’t respond back, you’re a snob. There is nothing so different to online social media life and real life. People are human beings and by the natural course of things, they live life pretty much the same online and off. However, be careful not to publicize private matters. For example, if your friend posts, “I’m in love,” you don’t go commenting back “Jack is lucky SnOB!” not until your friend mentions the name. Reading behind and around the words, your friend is only being childlike or comical. If you’re itching to know if that’s really about Jack, send a private message instead. Again, put yourself in real life. Hearing your friend say those words in public doesn’t mean you have to shout your response; whispering your query is the same as a private message.

Commenting, replying and messaging is a perfect way of igniting good conversation with your online network. The rule of thumb is, much like in real life, try to have the last response; but my recommendation is “try,” not force the issue you must have the last say. Going back, I always describe the internet and online social media as all about conversations. Repeatedly having good conversations with new acquaintances is a business or job opportunity lurking in the back you will never know until you actually do something about it.

Seriously at work while in Las Vegas. Seriously?

RESEARCH BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE. There are people who would like to be my friend in Facebook. If I don’t know the name from Adam or Eve, I check the common friends we have. If the list is all over the place, I Google the person. If it still doesn’t ring a bell, I message the person and politely ask where we’ve met. If I don’t hear back after three days, I click “Ignore.” The point is, take care of your online social media profile. It has never been about the amount of people you are friends with online yet never have one single conversation with them.

I know of one person who kept accepting friend requests. Being popular, he used his personal profile as a means to fill up his network. In reality, he wanted followers, not friends. Today, he’s managing two or three personal profiles, with some followers belonging to two of his three profiles. He should have had the insight to create a Fan Page and allow people to follow him there. Only after creating the second personal profile did he think of creating his Fan Page. So now, he has four profiles in Facebook to manage; and all his Facebook profiles are mixed with real friends, family and strangers.

In LinkedIn, I usually always accept requests for networking because I’ve never had any experience to excessive spamming. Most of the people I don’t know who I network with are usually in LinkedIn for the same reasons I am: business opportunities, knowledge-sharing, job hunting or anything that has to do with each other’s profession or industry. The only one irritant I encountered was someone who kept commenting unrelated messages in my posts to the Groups I belong to. Ninety-nine percent of the time he wrote things about himself so (he thought) that people who read it will be enticed to hire him on the spot. In a cordial manner, I warned him to stop and he quietly did.

Remember, you carry your personal profile “for life.” Regardless if you change jobs, careers, companies or even spouses, your online social media identity remains the same until you die. Deleting your profile and starting from scratch is like going back to the day your started your Facebook or LinkedIn profile – a slow climb through the years and something I myself wouldn’t think of doing.

Lastly, I only accept friend or network requests from people with real names, real profile pictures and at least a few dozens of friends already. If they were my real life friends and were just starting out, I’d have no problem accepting them right away. Personal profiles with company names get ignored in Facebook or the Facebook and LinkedIn Groups that I moderate. I have no choice with Fan Pages – they work just like Twitter.

IN SUMMARY: My boss (today) hired me a few months ago because he knew exactly what I was doing. He saw it in Facebook and LinkedIn. Some people in the same industry we belong to already commented (to him) about the brand of product I was carrying, which they saw, read or heard from the hundreds of posts and blogs I’ve shared in the past. He read the successes I made. The job he and his boss offered me was a blessing because it and they came in the right time. “Hope is not a method” is the title of a book I once read yet rings very much true in today’s everyday life. Prayers and your faith in God help but I know and believe God also wants me to do some action, not lay down on the bed the whole day praying.

Everything I did with my online social media profiles made it easier for people to find me and offer me a business opportunity or a job. It also allowed my kids to know what I was up to everyday without talking to them. Case-in-point, my entire high school batch relates my name to the phrase “call center,” with most of my network in Facebook and LinkedIn doing the same. Some friends already started to relate my name to the phrases “social media,” “Facebook,” “LinkedIn,” “cloud computing,” and “small businesses.” If there is an opportunity to meet face-to-face or call, I will attempt to do so only if the background of the person has something to do with what I do. Transforming online to real life is the final step to breaking ground on doing business together.

Bloggers Unite!!! At the inContact head office with Marketing Communications Director, social media guru and blogger, Heather Hurst.

Today, I work for a publicly-listed American company called inContact, Inc. (Nasdaq: SAAS, www.incontact.com). inContact provides a suite of web-based, subscription-based, in-the-cloud contact center solutions for every size and every kind of business, globally. Six weeks after being hired, inContact sent me and my colleagues to Salt Lake City, Utah, for a week of intensive training and meeting everyone at head office. Then, it sent us to Las Vegas, Nevada to attend their annual start-of-the-year sales kick-off conference, done at chic Red Rock resort-hotel, casino and spa. It was easy for me to accept inContact’s offer because it had everything I was looking for from my previous Canadian employer, in terms of the way they want to do business in the region.

The power of online social media marketing and networking isn’t just about companies, brands, products and services. The biggest impact happens to the person doing it. So, if you’re not in it, everyone else doing it is your competitor in life and job opportunities. If you’re in it, do it right. Good things from online social media won’t happen overnight – but, trust me, it will happen!

Online social media marketing and networking – “If you build it (right), they will come (for you)!” – it’s (right) (for you)!

Today’s times call for more creative ways of marketing your business, whether you’re direct selling for a conglomerate or running your own small business. People nowadays mention Facebook and Twitter as if it were already part of the dictionary. To wit, ever notice that writing the word “Facebook” in your Facebook wall-post results in a red-underlined, misspelled word? Yes, totally “Duh?”

But, as a small business owner, how do you market your product or service today? What medium should you use to generate the most of “value for money?” What’s better – online or offline marketing? Let me write my discourse in small business marketing through a series of questions that have been asked by many small business owners and their peers. Before I start, let me also offer my disclaimer: “Please note I am not a famous author of marketing books nor am I a coveted marketing guru consulting for industrial giants. Like you, I am a small business owner who has street-smart knowledge of marketing a business with a few books read on the subject matter.” Just making sure you know where I’m coming from.

Where Do I Begin?

Let it be known that I began my story with the theme song from a classic, all-time favorite movie. LOL! Continue the lyrics to the song for the next four words and you’ll get the hint of what I’m about to explain as one of the most vital component to marketing your small business.

Besides the fancy business plan and long-thought strategies, first things are always first: you’ve got to draw and describe the person that buys your product or service. Creating a generic description of your market that you guess will purchase it is not the best way, even if you’ve read 1,500-page text books about guerilla marketing and the like. You have to describe a very specific person, not a community of people. The moment you’ve consumed everything from your brain (and that of others) to describe this person, immerse this person into your business vision, mission, values and goals, and see if it fits. If not, you’ve got to rehash things with your sales, marketing, service, support and overall customer strategies to fit this person into everything that you do for your product, service and company.

I remember consulting for Planet Philippines, an entertainment and lifestyle, tabloid-sized newspaper that’s circulated to migrant and overseas Filipinos in 10 countries once-to-twice per month, for free (it derives revenue purely from advertising.) Planet Philippines is not a single corporate entity that prints and exports newspapers; rather, it is a franchised business where the owner of the brand provides content to its global franchisees, the latter of which locally prints and distributes the finished product within its community or city. Continuing on, I ventured to describe for Planet Philippines who exactly the reader of the newsmagazine is and came up with “Maria.”

Being female, Maria is 32 years old, married with two young children, ages 10 and 12, respectively, and living in the United States, specifically the city of Fontana in California. Both Maria and her husband are regular employees of their specific profession – Maria is a retail clerk at Walmart and her husband works as an X-ray technician at Kaiser Permanente. The daily work schedules of Maria and her husband is always different from each other so that one can bring the kids to school and the other one picks them up – Maria’s husband takes the early morning shift, ending at 3:00 PM, while she take the late shift, starting at 11:00 AM and ending at 7:00 PM. Maria and her family migrated to the U.S. when her kids were still very young, and they have been living in the U.S. for the past seven years.

Through the years, they’ve assimilated the culture of their new community but remained to have the heart of a Filipina and that of a Filipino family. They continued to speak in Pilipino (or Tagalog) in their rented house with their kids understanding what they’re saying but having difficulty uttering complete sentences. They met other Filipinos through their church and kids’ school, and expanded their network of other Filipino-American families as the years went by. Maria, typical of the Filipino mother, has always been busy multitasking for her family, from doing groceries to attending to the medical needs of her family and even making their weekend and vacation plans. The husband takes care of their cars, repairs of the house, and other “manly tasks” as Maria often quips.

Maria knows when Planet Philippines is available at the nearest mall and picking up a copy is part of her twice-a-month routine. She actually gets two copies and gives the other to her neighbor and best friend, also a Filipina-American but who never gets chance to grab a copy because of her off-hours work schedule as a nurse. Maria loves to read a printed copy rather than go to the internet, surf and read. For Maria, the internet is usually just for e-mail messaging with her relatives and friends in the Philippines, and for Facebook updates. She also subscribes to TFC only because of Wowowee (and that’s another story now that Willie is doing it in another channel). Maria and her husband can only afford to visit the Philippines every four years or so; with the other summer breaks her kids have, they try to tour some of the cities in the U.S. where they have relatives and can get free lodging from them.

Maria’s social conversations with other Filipino-American spouses are always about celebrity news and major events in the Philippines. Community news comes second, American entertainment news next in line, while sports and politics, regardless of country, always fall last. However, her husband loves to keep tabs of Philippine sports news and events, especially his school and college sports accolades, and Planet Philippines makes sure there an item or two about sports and politics in its content.

I can go on forever in describing Maria as the ideal customer of Planet Philippines but I won’t. The point is, this detailed description of Maria makes sure the newsmagazine’s content is focused on Maria and her family’s information needs; also, all the succeeding marketing efforts are always geared towards that description. Anyone reading the newsmagazine other than Maria is gravy. If there is a story that doesn’t really conform to Maria’s personality or her family but is interestingly popular, Planet Philippines makes its earnest decision to print it or not. If the newsmagazine has a new applicant for a franchised publisher, it evaluates the applicant’s city and its population, and interviews him on the merit of his intent why he would like to distribute Planet Philippines in his community. Everything that Planet Philippines does, it does so on the merit of Maria’s needs. In five years or so, it will have to decide whether to recreate Maria as the same 32-year old migrant Filipina-American or continue on with Maria’s life; or create a new newsmagazine for another Maria while continuing on with old Maria as she ages.

It is inevitable that you create the ideal buyer of your product or service and hone your efforts to effectively market and sell your product or service to this specific buyer. It is not the other way around. In my case, I market and sell a hosted call center solution in the Philippines from Kunnect.com. I don’t attend conferences and events where the big players of my industry go to because they are not my ideal Maria. I know very well that Kunnect in the Philippines is more relevant and meaningful to the small business call center – my Maria – the less-than-100-seats of voice-based outsourced call center companies. Paying large sums of money just to attract the big players will never be Kunnect’s cup of tea; just gravy. But I still touch base with the big call center companies through direct yet informal means only because they are still the pillars of my chosen industry; however, dreaming of many big, closed sales coming from this “large business” market is, well, a dream. Kunnect can’t deliver complex after-sale services that large enterprises require of an expensive purchase (i.e. 24×7 onsite support). It can, however, deliver simple, 24×7 “remote” after-sale services, much like many of the SaaS-oriented (software-as-a-service) and cloud computing providers out there. Though I am the official in-country sales and marketing rep of Kunnect, I can’t be all over the country physically presenting Kunnect to every prospect while managing a cadre of support engineers that can be whisked to a client’s site in less than an hour. Again, that’s too expensive to do. That’s why I developed my own simple website to be able to present Kunnect directly to my Maria in the Philippines (and Asia), the small business call center, without onsite intervention. The phone and the web are my best friends. I provide the “product + service” combination to my Maria at dirt-cheap, affordable rates but with a stable, simple-to-use product that doesn’t need too much client hand-holding during its set up and implementation, and has a good help desk system that’s remote, not onsite.

I also think of my alma mater, Avon. Direct selling for Avon means thousands of people starting out as independent, non-salaried dealers during the time they do not have much cash, and ending up to become successful millionaires. Avon sells its products through its network of dealers and distributors, not by way of retail malls and superstores. Though they attempted retail in the early nineties, it wasn’t a successful endeavor and they knew it wouldn’t be. The retail attempt was (and still is) a way to glamorize their products, not really make tons of money selling it there. Its marketing and advertising strategies may look affluent but that is its intention, being an “aspiration” than being direct to the market. That kind of marketing helps their dealer-network push their products to the latter’s customers beyond their social class and helps create more buyers. From Tweety de Leon to Lea Salonga and Angel Locsin, the celebrity-laden endorsers are all aspirational users of the Avon products that reflects what the customers of their direct selling network is. But inside the Avon company in the Philippines is a huge sales support structure very much knowledgeable of its direct selling network – what it wants and what it needs.

Do I Develop a Brand or a Product?

“Isn’t a product a brand?” Well, the soothsayers and naysayers will all have their book-length descriptions of product and brand, and both groups are still correct in their own thesis. However, for the non-advertising geeks of the world like us, product (or service) is the thing we manufacture and perfect while brand is the label we put in the product. Nike built a product first before it became a brand; Coca-cola did the same. Almost every large, successful entity today with a global brand started out perfecting a great product. Even Microsoft, at one point in their product-oriented life, built then marketed a stable MS-DOS operating system (the granddaddy of today’s Windows 7) long before it started its pooh-pooh “market then build” business way or so fashionably called “vaporware” – software that were not yet finished but were already being marketed as if it already existed.

Everyone wants to be popular but immediate popularity for a small business means lots of cash to gamble. Instead, as a small business owner, you should develop and perfect your product while marketing it directly to your Maria. Geographically, isn’t it more cost-effective to find Maria within your community or city before you attempt to go outside of it? I remember a few small business entities I joined that over-reached the limits of their marketing efforts to far flung places of outside the scope of service convenience – totally wasted money. For the few that were open-minded, we got back to basics and told ourselves, “Hey! We should first be the best supplier at our own community before we even trek outside it.” If you hold office in Manila, you should first saturate and own the City of Manila, so to speak, before you start spending valuable money marketing outside it.

One of the best examples of a large company in the Philippines that does this is BayanTel. You can easily subscribe to BayanTel’s internet plans within Quezon City and get better internet connection than getting it from their competitors. In fact, they can install your E1 line (a full 2Mbps bandwidth usually subscribed by multiple user companies) within 3 days, way faster than their nearest competitor’s timeline of 30 days. Go outside Quezon City and internet connection with BayanTel’s competitors (probably) becomes better, say Globe within the Makati CBD. The point is even if BayanTel doesn’t taunt the idea, they know they provide the best product with the fastest service within Quezon City.

Here’s a bit of trivia before I end this section. Did you know that Phil Knight, founder of Nike, and his merry band of offbeat co-founders used to buy and sell the Tiger brand of rubber shoes in the United States, exclusively manufactured by Onitsuka of Japan? They only sold rubber shoes solely for track and field sport and its (then) new lifestyle equivalent, jogging. Eventually, they came up with the Nike brand and Swoosh logo but still relied on Japanese technology to produce their new branded rubber shoes, still only for track and field, and jogging. Maria, to them and then, was a track and field, and jogging enthusiast! The rest, as they say, is history.

Do I Market Online or Offline?

I’m going to assume you’ve got your product and service strategies perfected to a tee with the perfect description of your Maria, and you have all the internal processes needed to continue to enhance your “product + service” combination all through the life of your corporate entity. If you are dependent on someone else to manufacture and service the product you are selling, let’s assume they are doing the same thing with their product that you’re reselling. If not, better look for another product, lest you fail because despite your creative marketing prowess, your product still, well, “sucks.”

Many online soothsayers of the small business industry say that being on the web puts you at level with the large enterprises – everyone has the same footing in terms of marketing messages and graphics. But despite that, it still boils down to how conveniently accessible is your product to Maria. Can Maria call, order and have it delivered within the hour? Can Maria find it in her favorite mall? Can Maria surf the internet, find your website, and buy online? Online marketing may be the cheapest way to market your product but beware of cheap activities – they also tend to deliver cheap results. Think about the online matchmaking sites. If it’s free, you get lots of obtrusive flack; if you have to pay, you get nearer to the right partner you’re looking for. The more you pay, the better the kind of person you’re matched to. I know of a friend who found the love of her life at Match.com and, after a year of courtship, have recently married each other, not for money, but for real love. The thing is, they both paid for the service.

Let’s talk about the world. If Maria is a person who lives outside the Philippines (or your country for that matter), marketing your product in the World Wide Web will be more cost-effective than having to go through tri-media means (published media, television and radio) in foreign soil. But also consider the limitations of internet marketing and social media networking and marketing. Single-digit-percentage results from the numerous online “hits” you have is something common when you advertise with Facebook or Google. (An exception is being geographically located in a First World country like the United States.) Online advertising is not a one-time deal; there is a learning process you have to develop, especially the first time you use it, and you have to tweak your ad copy until you develop more prospects out of the hits. For example, when your Facebook ad is clicked, will you get better results when your prospect goes to your website, blog or Facebook Fan Page? Again, personify Maria and see how she reacts to either three. But then, social media marketing is not a one-time thing – it’s an ongoing, daily activity planned out in the beginning and adjusted through the period of execution. There is no start-and-stop activity to social media marketing, not unlike telephone marketing campaigns that run for a month or so then you evaluate and proceed with next-steps activities. Social media marketing also has its business partner – social media networking, a daily, continuous activity done not only by a few of your marketing reps but your entire organization, even your lowly accounting clerk.

If your product is for local consumption, say the Philippines, rethink your online marketing strategy. Though internet penetration in the household has gone up over the years, still, many people access the internet in their workplace or the internet cafés. The affordability of buying and leasing an internet system for the home – computer plus ISP connection – still rests in the middle-to-upper class of the country’s social spectrum. Even if there are about 18 million Filipino users in Facebook, overall activity is still not that high compared to First World subscribers. Traditional media, mobile text-messaging and the telephone are still the popular means of prospecting in the Philippines. Even if you consider the social class of Maria, you will eventually need to conduct a combination of offline and online marketing for your product – you will still need to bridge the gap between the traditional and social media.

For online marketing, there is web marketing and there is social media marketing. Web marketing simply takes your corporate or product-oriented website to the mainstream of the World Wide Web while you devour search engines and news sites for footprint presence, paid or otherwise. This is where SEO activities (search engine optimization) comes into the picture, a pursuit that’s not a one-time endeavor but altogether an ongoing web activity of competitive comparisons and website tweaking. If your product is more global than local, then the effort to conduct yourself in the web becomes bigger. For local presence, the smaller the type of market, the smaller your effort for web marketing becomes. A sari-sari store (a home-based, very small, over-the-counter retail store by the street in the Philippines) is simply an offline market than online. A door-to-door delivery of your product is more open to online marketing.

Social media marketing, on the other hand, becomes more content and conversation driven than web marketing, though sometimes web and social media marketing overlap especially in a pure online business venture. You connect, network and socialize with your chosen web networking sites, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, in the guise of marketing your product. In my humble experience doing the above, I’ve concluded that many of my prospects were not my friends in these social media websites I actively participate. It is the network of friends and acquaintances of my friends, sometimes leaping two hops or more that become my Maria. This meant I should market my product to my friends in Facebook or the like in a very subtle way than being face-to-face direct.

But which social media website do each of us choose to use to effectively market our product to our Maria? Let’s take my chosen industry as an example – the almost half-a-million call center workforce in the country. Their online presence began with the height of Friendster as a popular social media for the young and yuppies-at-heart (I had to use that term to include myself – LOL!) If you think Facebook is their primary means of social media activity today, think again. Mom and Dad actually invaded Facebook earlier than they did, or the parents were more active than the kids. Also, many Friendster-savvy call center agents still cling on to their first social media love simply because it’s too darn difficult and time-consuming (or totally blind as a bat) to transfer their photos and profile, and begin anew with links, testimonials and a host of other features that Facebook may have. For Maria being a call center agent in the Philippines, if I had to choose just one social media website to market my product that’s most appealing to call center agents in the country, I’d prefer Friendster over Facebook. It’s not about the popularity of the social media website – it’s where Maria actually spends more time.

If Maria likes to read interesting content in the web or at social media sites, then “interesting” also has to be “meaningful” and “relevant” to her lifestyle, be it work or personal. You can’t push your product to the face of Maria – she’ll eventually snub you on day-one. Rather, write or blog the generic equivalent of your product while placing it at the sidelines of your blog. I call this MGB – Marketing in the Guise of a Blog (okay, so I invented the acronym – we all do it all the time.) The same goes for Facebook; rather than label your Fan Page “The Best All-in-one Glorious Toothbrush,” name it as “My Toothbrush, My Teeth” or anything that describes it as a special interest group who adorns their teeth and the toothbrush that most appeals to them than a bunch of people who will (future tense) love to use your new yet publicly unknown “Glorious Toothbrush” product. The more generic the phrase or title, the bigger the possibility of people joining your Facebook Fan Page without even directly marketing the existence of your page to them. But remember the time your Maria has with the internet – it’s not as if she’ll be online all day long. Go back to how you described the personality of your Maria down to her daily schedule of activities in life. That schedule becomes your embedded routine when you interact you’re your Maria.

In the End, a Conversation Still Wins Over Messaging

My personal website – this blog – is plastered with the word “conversations” between the title, sub-title and most of my posts. That’s because I am a strong believer that no matter how the internet was invented and is used today, the winning formula for online success will always be the site that provides a more convenient means of developing real conversations with its community of visitors, loyal readers or members.

If you Tweet something, be prepared to respond back to every direct message (called “DM”), especially a simple “thanks” for re-Tweeting (labeled “RT”) your Tweet. If someone comments on your Facebook post, comment back all the time. In Facebook, you’ll notice that the more comments you have, the bigger the chance of that post appearing in the “Top News” stream of your member’s wall, the default wall when one opens his or her Facebook for the first time. The same goes for Friendster testimonials, LinkedIn comments, Plaxo replies and a host of many other social media websites. The conversation you create with a single person becomes more meaningful and relevant to him because he knows that the next time he comments, he expects a reply from you. People are still people even with their online self. When they say something to someone like you, it means well for them to receive a reply.

But why stop at just writing messages, comments and replies? If you can create a face-to-face conversation, won’t you grab that opportunity? Last year, I experimented upon messaging and responding to those who commented on my posts at LinkedIn by asking fifteen minutes of their time to meet me at the Starbucks nearest to their workplace. Half responded positively, and then half of these I actually met for coffee (see my story why I chose Starbucks as the best venue for meeting). I usually offered a my service to them, to find out if I could re-market their product for free on my blog or become an independent reseller paid only by commission when I close a sale (or as an affiliate marketer.) During the face-to-face conversation, I of course introduced what I was doing as a freelance entrepreneur, including a show-and-tell of my product.

Many of these fifteen minute conversations turned out to be half- or one-hour discussions. I included a “who am I” story-telling section so that my new acquaintance gets to know me better, expanding from the web profile they read. I made sure I presented only one core competence, say networking marketing, and one product, like Kunnect, the hosted call center solution I’ve been marketing in the country, that I valued more than the others. Choosing one or two competences and products made it easier for them to remember me; presenting a mother load of capabilities will make them forget me – “what the heck does he do again?” Quaint chances of messaging each other in the social media websites after that meeting made them good referrers and reference people to their own network – they always knew what I was all about. Even my high school batch mates relate my name to the term “call center”; when in need of advise regarding the industry, “talk to Raffy Pekson.” Awesome!

Your online conversations, multiple instances of comments and replies on several topics, have to be transformed to a face-to-face meeting. Only then will your social media acquaintance be transformed into a real transaction. Marketing’s overall goal is to generate sales. Marketing without the intent of a sale is an expensive hobby and not reality. Somewhere along the way, there is always an opportunity to monetize what you market.

If my social media acquaintance is not in the country, I call them up. I balance the cost to call overseas versus the benefits I derive from it, be it a short-term advantage or a long-term gain. For example, I’ve had an online acquaintance that started back in 2002 when the term “social media” didn’t even exist and kept my using my BMW (another acronym? Click here to find out what BMW means) to make sure I was abreast at what we were both doing in life. I kept in touch with him at least twice each year. In 2006, I e-mailed him to introduce what I was doing – setting up an 80-seat call center in the Philippines. Lo and behold, that e-mail message turned into a telephone conversation which led me to get Reed Business Information (or RBI), the largest trade publication company in the United States, as my most prestigious client for the call center. As it turned out, the VP for Operations of RBI was his good friend. Whodathunk? Yes, who would think that a casual acquaintance through the web and very rare telephone conversations turned out to be a huge transaction four years later.

Turn your social media conversations into real, face-to-face or verbal conversations. Gut feelings and intuitions always come in to play when two people are talking to each other, and those factors tremendously add to the emergence of a viable transaction – the introduction of your Maria to you by your acquaintance. Whether it does or not, that person will be glad to have talked to you directly and, in earnest, he or she will keep you in mind when an opportunity for your product falls on his lap or even just passes him by. The personal and professional “you” always do mix all the time, even way back before the advent of social media networking and marketing. Even your primary education classmates may now be primed up to be your customers, or their friends, thereof, only if you kept in touch with them and they know what you do.

Thank goodness for Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Wozniak, Mark Andreseen, Jerry Yang, eGroups.com, Plaxo, Ryze.com and a host of others who became first in their fields so that we now have MacBooks, FireFox, Google, Yahoo! Groups, Facebook and LinkedIn in the internet and the World Wide Web.

In the continuing legacy of the internet, it is and will always be about conversations. The better conversation is verbal. The best is face-to-face.

Photo taken from the Facebook profile of my niece

Haven’t you noticed that it takes an effort to find a job using LinkedIn.com? Lucky for those whose credentials almost match the requirements of companies and headhunters looking for a qualified applicant. Besides really fixing-up your LinkedIn profile, you’ve got to be awesome in copywriting, corporate correspondence and carefully marketing yourself to attract the best employer or headhunter. But what if we turned the tables around and had someone else job hunt for you?

My niece, and also my god-daughter, recently graduated from a hotel and restaurant management course. She text-messaged me last week asking my help with her job hunting. I started going through my mind who to contact. Geez! I really didn’t recall that many people from the industry since I never worked in a hospitality company. I did message the only two people I knew, one of who was working for The Peninsula Manila and another, a schoolmate, has been running his own tailoring shop inside The Shangri-La EDSA Plaza Hotel called The Hampshire Place. But besides them, who else?

Being a social media nut, I turned to LinkedIn and started searching people working in the Philippine hospitality industry. In my first pass, I found about ten people who had an influential-sounding position, based on their corporate title, and who also either had an e-mail address or I could easily message inside LinkedIn without having to pay for InMail. Then, I set about messaging each of them with a subject title like “LinkedIn.com Member;” I thought of using this kind of title so that I don’t sound like a sales pitch or spam message is the intent of my message. For the text of my message, here is a sample that I used:

Hello <name-withheld>.

(I started with some introductory sentence I have something in common with the recipient, like being in the same LinkedIn group, having attended the same university, or both knowing someone.) I’m helping my niece and god-daughter find employment in a hotel and thought to look in at LinkedIn.com for people like you who are working in the hospitality industry.

I have attached her CV/resume and she would be ecstatic to go through the normal channels of tests and interviews should her qualifications warrant it for <hotel name withheld>. She is a HRM fresh graduate from <name of school withheld>. Any help you could afford her would be very much appreciated.

Thank you for your time and warmest regards,

Raffy

Note that for messages sent using LinkedIn, you can’t attach files in the message. So, I uploaded the resume of my niece in the web and provided the link to the recipient. I have a hosted site where I uploaded her file; however, you can always use something free like MediaFire.com if you don’t own a hosted website. Don’t ask for their e-mail address – chances are they won’t respond back. Giving them a self-service way of evaluating my message and the resume of my niece tells them I’m not being insistent but suggestive.

Now, imagine yourself in the shoes of a Human Resources head of a hotel and you’re reading an e-mail coming from an uncle who is helping his niece find her a job. How totally weird, funny, cute, amazing and humbling, to say a few descriptions, is that? From that initial salvo of messages I sent in an hour or two of searching, writing and sending messages, I immediately got four responses saying they will be happy to accommodate my niece for interview. One of them even asked to which department or division does my niece want to apply for; another mentioned “how cute of you to be doing this for your niece.” Still, another said to tell my niece to personally bring a printed copy of her CV or resume to him so that he can endorse my niece to the human resources head, in person.

My niece and her Dad are not influential people in business, especially in the industry she’s trying to apply. She must have asked other people to help her. But my age (not too old, not too young; just about right – LOL!) and LinkedIn profile probably helped my job hunting activity for her. My LinkedIn profile is complete and publicly available so that people can view it without having to connect to me. My surname is probably all over the web that ties me to what I’ve done and what I’m doing today. If I continue to search the web, I’m sure I’ll find more people I can personally message (and I’ll be doing that soon).

You can also use your Facebook network to do the same thing if you find a company name, job title and (lucky you) e-mail address; but a lot of Facebook users keep those information private or unlisted. Maybe Multiply has something, too. Maybe the friends of your Facebook friends work in the industry. However, LinkedIn is still a social media for corporate people and professionals, and is still the best place to begin your search. From the little information you find in LinkedIn, you can expand your search through the popular search engines.

I am sure you can derive many other conclusions to my story; and I am “laughing out loud” now because I’d like to tell the young graduates out there to ask their Aunts and Uncles to help find them a job for just an hour or so of their time using social media. The effect to the people who received my message helped my niece get in line – without cold-calling or “cold-applying,” if ever there’s such a term. Now, the rest is up to her. Good luck, Mai!

Photo of WorldLink88 call center I managed

Many people have asked me for advise on setting up and operating a small business call center. That’s been my niche – always the small business advocate even with call centers. The industry has many descriptions of how many seats a small call center has to have. In my personal opinion based on experience, small means no greater than 100 seats. It’s a number that’s easy to manage even by yourself. Beyond that, I call it mid-sized all the way up to 999 seats where you now start setting up a more formal management team.

From the various informal Q&A sessions I’ve conducted over the past years, I decided to write down some of them in short snippets as my young and agile mind could recall.

Q: How much does it take to set up a call center?

This is always the first question asked when I’m with a group of entrepreneurs interested in operating a call center. There are two ways of setting up a small business call center: (1) buy, build and operate, and (2) lease everything and operate. The major difference is the amount of money you need to shell out. It’s like buying a house to live in and furnishing it with the fixtures you like; or renting one fully-furnished and making-do with what you have. So, if you have the cash to stay in business for more than year despite the usual income cycles of a startup business, then go for the “build and operate” model; this way, you spread your ROI which doesn’t force you to generate a high revenue. However, if you are not 100 percent sure of being in business for more than year, lease as much as everything you can. You can plan to move out in a year’s time to your newly built call center after accumulating enough cash from your income.

The frugal set up cost is about $1,500 per seat (or workstation), inclusive of every machine, furniture, fixture, painting, construction, etc. It costs more if you decide to use expensive but aesthetically good-looking materials. For leasing, expect to spend about $200 per seat, per month, but this not only includes everything you need to set up a seat but also operating expenses like rent and all utilities.

Q: How many seats should I set up or begin with?

Many people think that starting small and building or getting more seats later on is the ideal way to operate a call center. In fact, the magic number I’ve heard is five seats. This is actually unproductive and may pin down your hopes of growing in the long run. Many foreign clients want to outsource part of their business operations with no less than 10 seats. If you only had 5 or 10 seats, how would you determine if a new, prospective client’s program or campaign is better than the one you’re currently running? However, if you had 20 seats and was looking into a new campaign that required an initial requirement of 10 seats, you could test the new campaign with, say, 3 or 5 seats for a few days or a week to see if it fits the skill-set of your workforce and your revenue projections; and you can do this without any major effect on your existing client’s campaign. After a week, if the new campaign proves to be a whole lot better than the existing one, you’ve got a great problem: which do you choose? That scenario differs a lot if you only had 5 seats. With that little, it won’t make you grow – you might just get stuck where you are because you have no room to test and in effect grow your income stream to build or lease more seats.

The other opportunity when having the capacity to add more seats that in about 2 or 3 years time you’ve accumulated hundreds of seats performing beautifully, there’s a bigger chance for a foreign player to buy you out at a substantial amount. Many mid-sized call centers have been bought out in the past not only because of the operating size but the skill-set of the workforce and the types of campaigns and clients you maintain fit well into the foreign buyer’s business model.

Q: What kind of program or campaign should I get?

Most small business call centers run performance-based telemarketing campaigns. Though people always think that fixed-income, inbound-oriented campaigns like customer service and technical support are better, the reality is you have a better chance of making more money in performance-based campaigns. What people don’t realize is that inbound-oriented campaigns have more metrics that the call center must achieve; if you don’t hit your client’s metrics, you actually don’t get paid for those failures. Therefore, inbound-oriented campaigns are also performance-based. The major difference with inbound-orietned campaigns is you don’t get more money if you do better than the metrics. For telemarketing-oriented campaigns, the more you perform (i.e. selling a product), the more you earn. Whether the campaigns are easy lead generation or a full cycle, cold-calling up to closing the sale type, managing a call center that’s running sales-oriented campaigns is akin to operating a direct selling agency or group – it’s fun, involves lots of cheerleading and sales activities, employee tenure is based on pure numbers (no subjective evaluations required), and so on. And ordinary business-people and entrepreneurs understand selling a whole lot better than the intracies of inbound campaigns (what the heck is an AHT?)

Q: Where do I get campaigns?

One of your roles as a small business call center owner, delegated or done by yourself, is to keep looking for campaigns even if you’re happy running the current one – on a daily basis. Call center clients and campaigns come and go, much like any kind of business client who will favor you today but not for eternity. You have to be ready for that inevitable time when your client suddenly bolts out for varying good or bad reasons. So, business development is an ongoing, 54-week job for you; and the internet is aswarm with brokers and direct clients always looking for the right call centers to run their campaigns. A huge number of them cater to the outbound-base, sales-oriented campaigns.

When you find a prospect in the internet, establish the initial e-mail correspondence but find a way to talk to each other. Don’t e-mail each other to death. Verbal communication is always a great way of getting your gut to tell you “This is great!” or “Something’s wrong here.” You can find prospective clients and brokers in social networks like LinkedIn and its many industry-related groups, Yahoo! Groups, Google-ing specific clients and making the pitch, and so on. Like a good salesperson, ask your happy clients if they can refer you to their peers without sounding like it’s going to affect your current business relationship with them. Also market the past campaign experiences of your workforce even if they’re newly hired – these kinds of information give you tremendous weight in the type of campaigns you can get your hands on. For past and current clients, ask their permission to post their company names, logos and short testimonials on your website (yes, you definitely need one.) Alliances such as technology providers are also a good public relations items to post in your website, i.e. Dell for your computers, Cisco for your network, Microsoft for your O/S, etc. Whatever it takes to build credibility as immediate as possible for your startup call center.

Q: How do I recruit good people for my startup call center?

The fastest way to recruit is by advertising in the dailies but that’s way too expensive to do for a small business call center. Online job boards like Jobstreet.com and JobsDB.com provide less expensive ways (the last I paid for Jobstreet.com’s service was 5,000 Pesos per position). However, one online place I go to to recruit experienced agents, team leaders and supervisors is Friendster.com, not Facebook.com. Friendster.com allows me to search specific call center companies written in user profiles and message each of these people invidivually using Friendster.com’s messaging system. However, before you attempt to do this, make sure you complete your Friendster.com profile as expansive and detailed as possible because your recruits will first look at your Friendster.com profile before they answer you back. Don’t recruit blindly – place your full name, company name, full addrress, landline and mobile phone numbers, and e-mail address (for the latter, get a company domain name – only costs $11/year at GoDaddy.com and getting GMail to host your @domain.com e-mail account is free). There are hardly any agent in LinkedIn.com and way too many managers and expats who you don’t need for a small business call center. Facebook.com isn’t recruitment-friendly. Some Yahoo! Groups where call center agents congregate can also help you recruit good people.

Q: How much should I pay my new recruits?

I’ve managed telemarketing-oriented call centers and here’s my commonsense answer to this question. For me, the reason I pay someone a basic salary is for that person to hit his or her quota or functional objectives. Anything beyond that is commissionable, so to say. Now, remember that the Filipino culture has always been employee-oriented and fixed-income salary-based. So, the higher the basic pay, the more enticing you are to them. Match your breakeven levels and margins to the basic pay of your workforce. For example, if a basic pay of 13,000 Pesos equates to $30 per day, per seat, a breakeven level that includes everything from leases and amortization, up to the salaries of your supervisors and manager, add no less than 50% margin or $45 per day, per seat, that’s not bad considering that many telemarketing campaigns pay a lot more commissions than $45 on a per sale basis of their products and services. Your agents might think P 13,000 is low but the amount of sales they need to generate is also pretty low. Then, incentivize their pay with commissions beyond their quota. I usually reserve no less than 25% of margins above my $45 mark for workforce commissions; giving more becomes enticing for them. If you can show them exactly what you’re talking about on paper during the final interview of your selected few, I’m pretty sure you’ll be a great call center to work with. The bottom-line is not to be greedy and your workforce will reward you for doing so.

Now, if your call center is in the boondocks far away from the nearest 711 convenience store and accessible public transportation, you have to increase your basic pay to entice experienced people to come join you despite the location. To arrive at how much should higher pay be, go back to the equation above and determine your breakeven level, margins and the rest of the projections.

Q: Should I set up beside existing call centers or somewhere where I am the only call center in that area?

There are two things you need to consider when choosing your location: (1) available internet bandwidth, and (2) access to experienced people. For the second part, I think I’ve answered the solution to that if you are locating yourself away from major thoroughfares of public transportation (see “How much should I pay my new recruits?”) In addition, I made sure to write “experienced” because you will not have the time, money and patience to teach newbies how to sell. For the first consideration, you need to make sure that your internet service provider (ISP) in that area can bring you to the internet cloud in the smallest amount of hops as possible and in the most stable way it can. Try testing your ISP’s connectivity by using SpeedTest.net and connecting to a server in Los Angeles. If you have access to a VisualRoute software or a similar solution, the better for you to determine everything you need for your voice-oriented internet connectivity. Lastly, it’s inevitable that you provide the expected basic amenities of a call center office: unlimited hot and cold drinking water, microwave oven, a place to wash and store their eating utensils, clean restrooms, bright lighting, comfortable workstations, and a host of many minor things that make a difference.

So, location is dependent on internet access and access to experienced employees. Everything else is replaceable with something similar.

Q: What kind of technology should I get?

Technology here means the kind of tools your workforce will be using when calling or receiving calls. It is what makes your entire call center productive or otherwise. It only means that besides the skills of your workforce and the nice campaigns you’re able to get, technology is the third important piece of the trilogy of major factors that will make or break your small business call center.

Here’s where I become biased. I’ve experienced hands-on installation, implementation and operation of enterprise call center solutions, those that physically resides inside your call center network (also called “premise-based),” and I’ve used hosted call center solutions or technologies that are not residing inside your network but are accessible through the web. For a startup small business call center, I recommend going for the hosted solution because it is subscription-based – you lease the service rather than having to buy the software (which is usually expensive) and the required server-hardware (also expensive) plus the telecommunications costs of calling landline and mobile phones in the country to which you are subcontracted to call. As you work your way up to the comfort level of the day-to-day grind of call center operations, you begin to realize what it takes to make it successful and falling in love with what you do – or not. Leasing is an easy get-away solution just in case your call center operations withers away due to many reasons. Buying software and hardware is like buying a car – only after a few months, the purchase price depreciates plus the next buyer has to acquire the same maintenance agreement with the software and hardware providers you bought them from without any discounts.

Between the few players I’ve encountered in the market like Five-9, Drishti, Touchstar and many others, I’ve found Kunnect to be the most cost-effective solution that gives me about 80% to 90% of what I want (and need). Kunnect is also very user-friendly, meaning I didn’t have to hire expensive IT experts or engineers to manage it (like VicciDial and other Linux-based systems which are usually free but takes several IT people to manage it; and you can’t afford these people to be late or absent – so, you hire more as idle backup). It takes a 3-hour remote training session to learn administration and 5-minutes for the agents to understand it. With Kunnect, I was able to hire home-based Quality Assurance (QA) analysts; that’s less seats to pay for. I didn’t need a report analyst to generate half-day, end-of-day, end-of-week (and so on) reports I’m required to submit to my clients. Because Kunnect was simple to use, I sat down with my team leaders and supervisors for an hour and taught them how to manage the dialer and create the Excel-based client reports on a daily basis. If I was sick at home or vacationing in Boracay, all I need is internet access to monitor the call center, because it’s web-based. I can go on and on – the point is, it fit my bill. After 3 years of using it, Kunnect offered me to represent them in the Philippines and Asia. I accepted only because I knew how effective it was for a small business call center, I knew how to use it (even knew the shortcuts on an operational standpoint) and I just loved their solution. So, there – that’s why I wrote “Here’s where I become biased.”

If you have any further questions related to this post, please go to my Contact Page to write down your thoughts and I will try to answer it as soon as I can.

Original B&W photo by defrostca at Flickr.com

When I read this article entitled “Sell Online Marketing to Your Boss: 7 Euphemisms Everyone Needs”, I had to laugh out loud (LOL?) Yes, I can just imagine myself looking like a dimwit if I reported to a boss who says he has no time for Facebook and LinkedIn. “Tweet me? What the heck is that? Sounds gay! Are you gay?”

The generation gap is all around us today, especially in the workplace. Men (and women) of the rolling 60′s and 70′s (and I’m guessing the reason why they named it “rolling” was because of a popular plant) have hit the ceiling fan on today’s fourth medium of consumerism – the Internet. The only thing they know about it is e-mail and Google, the kinds of mainstream users who still type the URL or web address inside the Google search box rather than in the browser’s address bar (see ReadWriteWeb article.)

So, how do you sell social media and internet marketing to your “rolling 60′s” boss? Try these euphemisms as suggested in this article:

1. Instead of “Blog,” use “Content Publishing Platform.“
2. Instead of “RSS,” use “Syndication and Subscription Technology.“
3. Instead of “Social Media,” use “Real-time Media.“
4. Instead of “SEO,” use “Unpaid Search Engine Traffic.“
5. Instead of “Social Network,” use “Online Communities.“
6. Instead of “PPC,” use “Click-based Search Engine Advertising.“
7. Instead of “Landing Page,” use “Lead Generation Page.“

It’s not that your boss is having difficulty in trying to understand what is happening in the social media world. It’s actually your job to jumpstart him into the new yet confusing world of social media networking and social media marketing. Fine, he knows what e-mail and websites are; but to go into Facebook and “socialize” virtually? That’s a mighty big leap from his comfort zone. Not only won’t it happen overnight, he may just resist doing so.

Don’t underestimate your boss. He has his strengths, and the general reason why he’s your boss is because he’s still a whole lot better than you when it comes to running a successful business or company unit. But what he doesn’t know is what he’s missing out on the most active medium of business and personal communication so alive since the telephone was invented. There are gazillion of conversations being conducted every so often, and your entire group will be left behind on the opportunities that everyone else is hitching a ride on.

But take heed – many in the younger generations are computer driven and internet savvy, and in no short amount of time will you be able to virtually recreate your boss to believe in the World Wide Web. You, as a matter of fact, also don’t have the time to keep tweeting, wall-posting, blogging and plurking, to name a few of the new verbs of everyday life. You have your real-world responsibilities at work, like meeting your clients face-to-face, conducting Powerpoint presentations, brainstorming and planning, managing your people and host of many more traditional functions.

Old World Meets New Age

Some time not too long ago, I created and developed the customer service department in a company where old-world telecommunications met the Internet. One of the objectives of my new, small group was to empower itself with customer information beyond the everyday trivial ones. To do that meant asking people for endless streams of pocket-sized information each day. If you’ve met a top-seller salesperson, one thing you will notice is that he (or she) generally hates paperwork. No amount of incentives will make a salesperson, much more the top-seller, sit down in front of a computer for endless hours and type the stories of his daily encounters with all his customers. “Information is power,” so they say; in truth, it really is. That was the challenge – how to get the smallest information of daily activities and common yet unasked data from the salesperson into a digitized database that everyone in the company can have access to?

The solution was simple and traditional – buy a help desk solution with good knowledgebase features and hire assistants (with experience or college units in database management or statistics) whose job was to receive calls from the salesperson to help build a power database of bits and snippets of customer information. We had salespeople calling these assistants everyday – every hour if needed – to dictate what had just transpired during their meeting with a customer. No paperwork – just call the Help Desk and yak on the phone about it. In no time were we able to build a growing yet useful knowledgebase, information now relevant to the different groups in the company, like:

• Marketing used it to Wow! the market;
• Sales used it to surprise the customer;
• Finance used it to adjust projections to smaller margins versus what was actually going to happen;
• Human resources used it to manage and re-train salespeople on time management and other soft skills training; and
• General Management used it to adjust corporate polices and business strategies.

And the funny thing about it? The solution was all about recording the “conversations” into digitized and usable data formats, or what I kept mentioning as the knowledgebase. Old-world traditional means meets the new information age.

You Can’t Tweet All Day Long!

The point I’m making in relation to the social media and internet marketing hullabaloo is you still need traditional means to make it work. Someone has got to be doing all the tweeting eight hours a day; someone has to be managing the Facebook Fan Page everyday; someone has to be writing endless amounts of articles to be posted in the corporate blog everyday; someone has to be comparing the company’s multitudes of web pages against competition; someone has to be developing content for the corporate YouTube account; and in this eternal list, everyone is having (or trying to have) a conversation with your customer. The result of these efforts come back to old-world traditional activities with your customers – events, visits, mailers, phone calls, meetings, presentations, lunches and cocktails, and (again) an eternal list of functions that make your customers loyal to the brand, the people and the company.

If you are going to be doing all these internet-related activities while doing what you’ve been doing before social media networking and social media marketing came into the picture, then start worrying about job security because in a few months, sales will go down, revenue will go down, customer complaint will go up and resignations galore will happen left and right.

Social media networking and social media marketing are not quick solutions to your business problems in sales, marketing, service or support. They are not golden dreams of creating corporate wealth, be it in the number of loyal customers you develop or a gateway to increase revenue. Social media is, however, a growing popular medium you cannot turn your back away from anymore. In each country, millions of people have joined Facebook without really knowing how the social media arena is going to help them with their lives except bumping into old classmates or flames, and sharing thoughts, ideas, suggestions and a whole barrage of nonsensical banter. It is the ultimate “new media” in people interaction today. It’s a whole new ballgame and to make it work, you need a good social media plan. But the benefits, nevertheless, are also amazing. A smaller amount of cash (than traditional means) is all you need to get your message across your specific target market where common interests by the end-users police their own ranks to keep the subject matter banter alive and kick out those who have no business being part of it. Now, that’s customer loyalty at its very peak!

It’s A Question of “How?”

Entering the social media field today isn’t late in the game. The entire world is still building the social media road. You can still join in. The question isn’t what you’re going to benefit from it – you know there are advantages in social media networking and social media marketing, and profits to be made out of it. The bigger question is “how” to do it.

After-Message

I have begun offering myself to small businesses or small groups and business units by way of training the people in the workplace how to best use social media networking and social media marketing mixed in with old-world, traditional business methods in sales, marketing, service and support operations. My introductory on-site training takes up four hours of your people’s time while advanced training and in-depth consulting add up more hours up or days, depending on the depth of your needs and wants. Mixing my old-world corporate-driven experiences in selling, marketing, servicing and supporting customers to hands-on personal experiences in social media is what I offer. Of course, I have partnered with many experts in the social media field that deliver specialized work to attain the overall objective.

My professional and personal information are found in the “About” page while you may contact me anytime using the information and form found in the “Contact” page.

Photo by fbouly at Flickr.com

Everybody’s gotten into the social media bug. Even grandparents have asked help to be taught and grandchildren painstakingly trying their best. Moms and Dads have gone awry on the social media bug. What was once the private realm of teens and yuppies has now been invaded by their parents, Uncles and Aunts. If e-mails and websites successfully made the world a smaller place a decade ago, social media networking sites have compounded it o a two-block radius.

I asked the once-dominant Friendster people, a lot of who I talked to belong to the call center industry, if they had a Facebook account. “Of course, I have” was the common answer, succeeded by “Who doesn’t?” But the answer to my next question surprised me. When I asked which social media website were they spending more time interacting, and not playing games, they blushingly quipped “Friendster.” Why is that, I asked. “Because Mom and Dad are in Facebook!” came their funny reply. However, others also mentioned that they already created a great network in Friendster and it would just take too much time building the same network in Facebook. Yet, a resounding reason were the pictures – tons of it uploaded through the years that many have no idea how to move or copy it to Facebook that doesn’t require too much time and effort; not to mention the testimonials. Kids! Haha!

Of course, I only talked to a few who represents a few hundred thousand or so people working in the industry (versus 92 million population figure) whose “investment” of time and effort in perfecting their profile pages, posting their hundreds of pictures and keeping intact their (inbox) messages with Friendster is tantamount to building and maintaining a three story house through the years – you can’t easily sell and transfer all your treasured belongings to a new abode overnight. I looked at Merriam-Webster for the synonyms of investment and I found beleaguerment, leaguer, siege, baptism, inaugural, inauguration, induction, initiation, installment (also instalment) and investiture. I also found related words such as containment, confinement, segregation, enlistment and enrollment. So much for the dictionary.

As we invest money in our home and family, transportation, career, probably our own business, education of the kids and more, so have we also started to invest time and effort in our preferred social media websites. I’m talking about our personal knowledgebase of interests, notes, shared items like links and pictures, likes, messages and comments, social groups and many more in Facebook. If you began building your Facebook social profile in 2006 like I did, you must have accumulated close to 5 years of so much “stuff” (and I can’t find any better word to describe it) inside that now-popular online community. You dread moving out of it and into a different one because it will take so much of your time or the next big thing in social media networking is something so enticing you can’t resist just moving into it and just leaving everything in Facebook.

Here’s my million Dollar yet generally-speaking observation to social media investment of my friends, family and acquaintances: the way they invest their time and effort into Facebook is almost the same way they value money and how they invest it. Think about it – If you’re a miser, you probably don’t have that much friends in your online social network and are cautious posting and sharing stuff. If you’re a spendthrift or worse, a squanderer, chances are you have tons of friends in Facebook and post, play games so much and share stuff without thinking about future repercussions. Though “character” also flows naturally in the way you use Facebook – who you are in real life or imagine yourself to be in real life is who you personify in Facebook – but that’s another story. (In fact, character is the main reason why some of you are not even using Facebook – LOL!.) What I’m expressing is putting financial investment and social media investment in a similar or equal reaction to how you conduct yourself with one and the other.

Photo by dborman2 at Flickr.com

Now, I wrote “generally speaking.” The paragraph above is not an absolute statement. There are exceptions to my generalization like celebrities, politicians, and every person who is widely known to a mid-sized or large community or the general public, and are always much talked about. There are always exceptions to many rules in life and this is one of them in my topic.

But it’s funny to note the parallelism of investing your money and investing your stuff in Facebook; and notice I only touched on the extremes: the miser and the spendthrift. I know many of us consider ourselves in the middle – not a cheapskate or extravagant. Just about right. If that’s the case, then good for you! You may be doing a good job in both your personal finance and your investment in Facebook without going to the extreme of things. And if your character is about as good as the good cop on television goes, then that added factor makes you use Facebook more wisely than many others. Lucky you!

“What’s the point in all these?” Simply, realize it; then, adjust and change the way you do things to your liking. Plan how you’re going to use Facebook the way you plan (or want to plan) to use your money. If impulse buying is a hard habit to break, then impulse posting, impulse sharing, impulse uploading of photos and everything else you do in Facebook follows your style when you go shopping. If you spend too much money on big ticket items that you can’t even afford, chances are you’re spending too much time on Facebook, too; time that has been allotted and should be devoted to your profession and your family. It’s “sky’s the limit” on many other parallelisms to how you invest your money and the same way you use Facebook.

The good changes you do in the way you invest and use your money will most definitely trickle down to the way you invest and use your time – and stuff – in your online social networking. If you need to schedule your expenses, then so must you schedule using and the way you use Facebook. Real life and virtual life do mix a lot today, and they’re one and the same – like it or not. It’s your life; and with your God-given “free will” and your faith in Him and your family’s support, you can “realize it and change it.”

Money and Facebook – how we (generally) use one is (usually) the same for the other.

Whoda thunk it?