SATURDAY PROGRAM --- DESIGNED TO SELL YOU Personal and Career Development AUTHOR:  Lisa Ann Landry -- IDG Trainer/Speaker (Social Media Subject Matter Expert)

If you’re following the series on SMART Guidelines for using Social Media this post elaborates on the “S” in the SMART mnemonic - Strategize about the goals you want to accomplish with Social Media. These goals vary depending on where you stand with your business interests. Business owners often see social media as the ideal place to do the hard sell. What you will find however is push marketing in social media turns people off.  You’ve seen those status updates or tweets “Win a free iPad,”“Get 10K new Likes/Followers.” How do YOU respond to such content?  I know what you do because I do the same thing block them so we don’t have to see that crap! Or report them for spamming hoping they lose their account. See why you want to avoid the hard sell strategy?  I understand businesses want to SELL it’s just the hard sell is not the way to go.

        Whether you’re a corporate employee or SBO you want to achieve credibility, influence & trust with the intention of creating raving fans, or customers who buy your products services and tell others. So how do you make that happen? By using the Baskin Robbins method of education based marketing. At Baskin Robbins there are baskets of little pink spoons (LPS) all over the store.  They’re there to entice you to sample the flavors in hopes you buy a gallon or 31.  Never have you been at Baskin Robbins and been told “You've reached your limit I'm cutting you off.” Make it your goal to use this method to education your target market and entice them with juice morsels of valuable relevant content.

One of the easiest places to do education based marketing is through blogging.  Think of your blog as the gallon of ice cream. Creating content is time consuming, once you put in the time why not leverage it by sprinkling LPS of juicy morsels of goodness around to your other social platforms?

I see blogging as the foundation of our social media work because it also helps achieve PRESENCE. Presence helps us get found by the people who are willing to pay for what we have to offer. The reality is we can only be in one place at a time but our blog gives us:

·       International presence -  24/7

·       A platform for education based marketing

·       A place to build credibility, influence, & trust

·       A unique time stamped & dated URL for every post (Search engines love URL's)

To drive home the my point I heard a story told by David Meerman Scottabout Cindy Gordon, VP of marketing at Universal Orlando Resortwho was responsible for promoting the Harry Potter Theme Park.  She invited 7 highly influential Harry Potter bloggers and the award winning British production designer (creator of the Harry Potter sets) Stuart Craigto a midnight webcast were the bloggers were able to talk and quiz him. Of course they blogged about it and within 24 hours 350 million people learned about the new theme park.

Come on back for the next post in the SMART series as we move on to the “M” managing time. Stay tuned and in the mean time tell us about your social media strategy?