This is an interview from years ago! The actual transcript. Word for word. OMG. Oldie but goodie. I want you to get a cup of tea or a glass of wine and sit down with this one. It’s like being a fly on the wall to our hour-long conference call. This where my conversation with Felicia Davis was in 2011! Yep, and let me tell you. It’s the same ishh I’ve been telling people to do for years. Just think, if someone had listened to me and ACTUALLY did what I instructed where they will be now. I have had people that have coached with me and my programs and they skyrocketed forward – but don’t feel bad if you still feel behind. I lay out some gold nuggets here below – and if you still need personal help, visit my membership at Ready Set Go Speak and get going!
Felicia: Fabulous. You guys start writing your questions down as we’re going because Pam, she is ready to take them on the fly. I know you’re going to be sharing with us Seven Steps for Social Media Success, so why don’t we get started with step number one. What is step number one?
Pam: The first one, I always say that we want to make sure that we are watching, looking and listening at what’s going on. I call it putting your head in the game. In order to win the game you’ve got to put your head in the game, so you have to really look, watch and listen, take inventory of where you want to go. Social media can be very, very overwhelming.
What are you looking at? You’re actually maybe studying your competition; you’re looking at maybe the benchmark of some of the best blogs that are out there. You’re listening to what your target market is saying. You’re taking inventory of your whole marketing plan and how this piece will fit in with it.
It is not a standalone; social media, the magic bullet, rub the lamp the genie comes out. It is a part of another spoke in the wheel for your marketing. You want to make sure that you are doing that; that you’re doing the research, you’re doing the homework, that you are studying your competition to see what is going on in social media.
When I say in social media, across the board. You’re looking at their blogs, you’re looking at their Facebook, you’re maybe looking at some of their tweets. Because this surprises me, too, that even some of the clients that I coach, I say, “Who are the top three competitors?” and they’ll say it. I’ll say, “What are their websites, what are their Facebooks, what do their tweets look like?” “I don’t know.”
I’m like, “It’s open; it’s an open book now.” It’s so different from when I started 10 years ago. My company we had to be a detective but now you just go and click. You want to make sure that you look, watch, listen, take the inventory of where you want to go in social media. That’s step number one.
Felicia: Step number one. I want to make sure that we capture this. You said, what’s that question that you typically ask your clients? “Who are your top three competitors?”?
Pam: Right. “Who are your top three competitors?” And, “What is it that you want to accomplish with social media in terms of marketing?” Obviously in your business you have an overall marketing strategy. Social media is one of the spokes in that wheel. It is not the magic bullet that’s going to solve everything, even though it is the new cool, favorite thing to do, but it still will not replace all other marketing.
I want to let people know that; even though I’m a publicist by trade for 20 years, social media is just one tool because it really integrates with other PR. If I’m going to have a client that has an article written about them in a magazine, if it’s Ebony or whatever, Gospel Today, if it’s written about them there then I make sure that they leverage that particular traditional media into social media. Maybe put a copy of it up on their blog, maybe put another one in their Facebook notes, and that sort of thing. You leverage it back and forth.
Or if they’re on The View, even. If they’re on The View, make sure that you get a copy of it and then you put that on YouTube and you spread that around over the internet. What happens is even though there are a lot of viewers, maybe your target audience did not actually see you on The View. You want to make sure that you’re taking it and you’re putting it in the microcosm of where your customers will see it. You’re sending it directly to them; on your blog, on YouTube, on the different social media channels. You want to make sure that you are doing this. You’ve taken inventory, you’re repurposing things.
Felicia: Fabulous. Step one is watch, look and listen, basically.
Pam: And you need to know who your top three competitors are and what they’re doing, so that you’ll know how to position yourself in a space that you can attract your target market as well.
Felicia: What’s step number two?
Pam: Step number two, you’re doing this stop, look and listen thing and you feel like you’re going to be all over the place, but this is where you really just sit still and you hone in on what is your brand. You want to make sure that wherever you go and you put your digital footprint that it is the same brand all over. Whether you’re going to go over to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Blog Talk, that you are creating the same digital footprint brand all across the internet.
A lot of people get on social media and they slap it together and it’s like, “Well, I did it this way,” but it all has to match. When I say really know your brand, what do you want to stand for, and making sure that’s clear and consistent across every social media channel. That means on Twitter you have a background that matches your website; your website fan page matches as well; make sure your YouTube background matches as well; if you have a blog, that matches. You don’t have mismatching; you don’t have things that look crazy. You want to make sure that it is a brand.
You would never find, for instance, Coach, if Coach is on Twitter, if Coach has a blog, if Coach has a website, if they even have a YouTube channel, you’re going to believe that that brand is going to – you’re going to know immediately when you land on it that it is Coach, or whatever product it is.
Felicia: Tell me this, Pam, because we’ve had “brand” thrown out throughout the series a lot so far, why is this branding thing so important?
Pam: So you don’t confuse people. People are really, in this age right now, moving at a lightning speed. They are on ADD, they are…you know. If you can really capture their attention and within a split second – same effect with book covers – in a split second they know you, they get you. For instance, there’s a comfort level that they’re going to feel.
There’s a comfort level that if you like Starbucks, that you see that little green logo; or there’s a comfort level that if you’re out of town, if you’re in Paris and you’re not really sure about the food but you go to McDonalds, there’s a comfort level because you see those golden arches. You’re going to know immediately.
It’s not that it’s the brand, it’s the logo, it’s everything that is behind that brand that you have invested; all the time, all the trust, all the information that you have shared across years so that people know you, get you, and understand you.
The brand is you; it is what people come to know and expect. It’s really the promise-
Felicia: The brand promise.
Pam: Yeah. It is actually that. If I am Ministry Marketing Solutions and then you find me on Craigslist and I’m not really doing anything Ministry-related on Craigslist it’s like, “Ooh, what’s wrong with her brand? What is she selling?
Felicia: Right, people are confused.
Pam: It confuses them and it destroys your brand. You put a lot of equity into building a brand, a lot of time, and you can destroy it overnight by really doing something that is offbeat. You want to make sure that you know your brand. What do you want to stand for? You really have to take inventory of that. What do you want to be known for?
You hear this whole time, “Be known as an expert, be known as an expert.” If you’re in business, you are in business to really provide people with your expertise of whatever it is that you’re in business for, so you want to make sure that you’re known for that.
The main thing is just to share your information over and over again. Not to sell to them, but just to share to them your expertise, your brand, so that they can trust you.
Felicia: Fabulous. This is good because we also talked about the no lack in trust factor, which is something I’m going to be talking about on our bonus call, and how critical that is to get people to come into your community, into your space, is that you have to have a way to create that no lack in trust factor and that branding piece has a big part to do with it.
Pam: It is, it is.
Felicia: Let’s talk about step number three. What’s step number three?
Pam: It’s probably my favorite part just from my background, journalism, public relations, is creating good content. Good content. You hear the term “content is king”, well it is. That’s one of the ways people are going to get to know you. You don’t sell the people; people don’t follow a salesperson, they follow someone who is providing good content, someone who is providing value.
You want to create good content, but one of the ways where the content can be found in the searches, primarily in Google, is that you research keywords. When you are doing this content creation, whether it is a YouTube and you’re doing the title of the YouTube or you’re putting in the tags in the YouTube video, you look and you research keywords.
This is a little area that I find that a lot of my clients, which are authors and nonprofits, they’re just really clueless about keywords. They have a lot of words, they have a lot of content, but they don’t know what keywords. What are the words people are looking for? It’s really, really simple.
The psychology of it is just these are the keywords. If someone were to look for Felicia Davis, what word would they look for? What would be her competitive keywords that she wants to dominate when someone goes to their Google search engine, they put in “business coach”, they put in “life coach”, they put in “motivational speaker”, what will they put in?
There’s certain words they put in, maybe the state, “Arizona motivational business coach”. That’s a long tag keyword, so hopefully you would have come up on page one preferably, page two maybe; if you go past page two people really stop looking and put in another keyword. That’s where you go and you make sure that you find those keywords.
Creating good content, obviously you want to add value to someone’s life, you want to make sure that they understand you, get you. If you are a dentist, that they know that you know what you’re talking about. You’re providing good content, whether it’s tips or it’s a list of things, but you want to make sure that you’re doing that.
When I say provide keywords, people say, “Well how do you find the keywords?” There’s a little tool that Google uses that is free which is AdWords.Google.com and basically you can really search the word. It’s a real simple too; it’s free, giving you good keyword ideas. Actually click on Get Keyword Ideas once you put in your particular word, say if it’s “business coach” and then it’ll give you other keywords, too.
The keywords, you can use in your content, you also want to make sure you’re using them in your website, metatags, that sort of thing. Your web designer obviously should do that, but this I’m talking about just in terms of social media. This is where SEO comes in really to play.
Felicia: When you’re making your pulsar, if you’re doing articles or if you have even your own community in these social spaces, when you make these things you need to first do your keyword search to make sure that you’re including some of those keywords in that content.
Pam: Yes, and you can have maybe a couple of pages of keyword phrases and things like that that you have handy, that you know there are the words that you want to dominate. For me, one of my keywords is “PR Coach”, so I want to make sure if someone puts in “PR Coach” for Pam Perry – obviously you want to make sure that your name comes up, too, so that when they put in “Felicia Davis” or they put in your name that you come up and not some other person.
Someone else says, “My name is Carlos Johnson, it’s just a common name so when someone puts that in Google, these other come up.” I said, “That’s what you’re competing for, then. You’ve got to add more content in the internet world so that your name can come up, so Carlos Johnson can come up. That’s it. You’ve got to make sure that you put in enough content so that Google can ping it and actually put it on page one.
Thank goodness no one’s name is Oprah, right? Then you’d be fighting with her. It’s like, “I don’t think I can win this battle.” But with another name, you can. When I say putting content, tweets count as content because it’s a link there; anything that you do online; your digital footprint, that’s what that involves. I tell people to be active online.
Providing good content, great content. People love people that provide information. One of the things with authors, obviously they have a book; they can provide the content. Seth Godin did this: he provided his book as an e-book free before his hardcover book came out. He provided a whole book. You would think, “If he give away that whole book then people won’t buy the book.” Well his book became a New York Times Bestseller anyway, because people loved the book and they said, “I still want my own copy.” They want their own for their library. You can give away as much content, you can post it every day on your blog.
People say, “People will take all my content and they’ll have my book and they won’t buy my book.” I said, “If people are that cheap then let them have it, bless their heart.” Most people will know that they want it. It’s going to take a lot of work to pull it all together; spend $20 on the book or whatever it is and just get the book all in one spot.
You can’t give away too much content because if it came from you authentically there is more where that came from. People always say, “You give away a lot of information.” I say, “There’s more where that came from.”
Felicia: Exactly. Every time you give away something you get a new download. I know that’s how I feel. I give away something; I’m being blessed with another download, so I’m not concerned about it. Listen, I like this thing that you say when you say the digital footprint because that brings to mind when you talked about the social media space is not the only space. When I say that I mean that it’s not just about Facebook, it’s not just about Twitter; it could be about writing articles and things of that nature too, right?
Pam: Exactly. Exactly. Podcasting, video; anything that you across the internet. Because the whole thing is run by search engine optimization, SEO. For instance I did an email marketing campaign today; I did it with AWeber and it went out as an email to my email list. They have a thing where they can archive it, where it’s actually a URL now and that actually went to Twitter, went to Facebook.
That actually counts as content now because even though I wrote that email once and you would think, “If someone deletes it, it’s gone,” no it’s not gone. It’s actually now sitting on a server on AWeber as an actual link that is there. If people were to click on it it actually opens up like a webpage. Those are new things, and the content within that page or that email counts. Everything that you do on the internet counts, you just have to be very strategic with it which is why I said you should stop, look and listen and take inventory before you actually jump in.
Felicia: Right. Wow, this is good stuff. I hope you guys are taking great notes. We’ve talked about creating good content and what that means in terms of keyword research, leaving your digital footprint. We talked a little bit about SEO and definitely you want to go into Google AdWords and figure out the keywords for your particular industry or your particular area of expertise.
We’re what, 20 minutes into the call and Pam has already given us tons of nuggets that we can actually go out and implement as soon as you hang up this phone. Let’s go to step number four. What’s step number four?
Pam: Step number four, I’m going to call this – is there anyone that is on the call right now and they are on Twitter or they are online, that they go to Twitter, let’s say they have a Twitter account, and they do #BizBreakthrough? Just do #BizBreakthrough. What that’s going to do is give everyone an isolated conversation with each other on Twitter with their friends. I have roughly almost 20,000 people that are following me on Twitter.
Step number four is engage. It doesn’t matter that you and I talk; we have to engage, we have to include the other people that are on the line in the social media space. Engage. You have to create a community. That’s what people say, “I don’t get Twitter.” Think about it as little isolated conversations that people are having.
That hash tag, #BizBreakthrough the same link that you used to get on here, on the call, use that as the hash tag. If you hit that link, that hash tag, while you’re on Twitter, you’ll see everyone else on the call. You can actually tweet back and forth with them directly, and you know how to do that with the @ sign, you can see who else is on Twitter, and then your friends and followers will also see that as well and maybe they’ll jump in and say, “Hey, what is that?”
It’s all about engaging; creating community. It’s not about going out marketing, selling, how many people I can amass; it’s all about just engaging and influencing and really making those connections with relationships. When people join your Facebook page, yeah it’s cool for them to join but if they never come back and look at it or even leave a comment, or you don’t speak to them and they don’t speak to you, that’s like…
Someone said, “Well I went to high school with them but then you never talk to them again.” So what? You went to high school with them. You know them but you don’t really know them. The point of it, even for business, you have to make sure that you are engaging.
Obviously sometimes if you’re just at the stop, look and listen stage and you’re checking out things, you don’t have to engage. Before you enter their conversation you stop, look and listen, but if you are actually full-fledged in this, in your business, and part of your marketing strategy is that you are networking. That’s all it is, is just a networking event, just on steroids; it’s online.
You’re putting your best foot forward, you’re creating community, you’re showing manners, you are actually – really at this point people are looking at you, you’re looking at them, and they’re deciding whether they want to do business with you or not.
You don’t know it. I know for me personally, 90% of all my clients come from online. I don’t even know who’s looking at me, who’s watching me; I have people just give me checks for thousands of dollars because they’ve been watching me for three or four months.
Felicia: This is a thing that I just absolutely adore and love about you, especially when we talk about this engage thing, is that you have the most powerful and authentic ability to engage people by creating that trust and promoting other people essentially. You’re very sticky; people really stick to you.
Pam: I would think being in this space for so long, and I love information so in this age that we’re in, the information age, I’m like a kid in a candy store because I love information. Some people feel overwhelmed by it; I love it. My main MO, even when I was in college and even before that is that I was a person that shared information; I reported information.
That’s what I did in high school, in college, I did it out of school. I love reporting information so this is just natural for me. It may not be natural for everybody. If you’re a dentist doing social media, it’s not going to be natural for you obviously; it’s going to be a little bit of a struggle. But for me, I love doing that.
The only thing I wish is that people would read. Say, for instance, I send you an email, Felicia, and I say, “Sign up, get on the call, whatever, whatever,” you get a Facebook invitation, don’t send me back an email saying, “What’s the number?” Then you’re going to get a slap down from me.
I will not tolerate – it’s a good thing I’m not an elementary school educator – I will not tolerate any type of people that are over a certain age acting like they don’t get it. I give everybody the respect and honor that you can get it just as much as I can; you’ve just got to put your head in the game.
Felicia: This is what I’d like for you to share, because I know that for some of us it may not come as naturally as you, but we’re all in business to make money and if anybody’s on Facebook who’s on this call who has a business, that should be part of your agenda, to convert some of these folks who are following you into clients, to get them into your funnel.
Give us some tips for those of us where it may not come as naturally, where they’ve got to figure out this whole engage thing, especially when they’re on Facebook and they’re just posting stuff here and there. Just a few tips around how they can really get a handle on that.
Pam: Like I said, the main thing is that you understand what it is you want to do in terms of your marketing strategy. You want to make sure that you’re known as an expert of that. Step number five is really getting the right tools, we’ll kind of go into that. Some of the main things that you can do is really making sure that you give out enough content.
It’s almost as if you’re explaining to people that – people only pay for things that they need solved; they pay for you to solve a problem. You have to make sure that the content that you give out is the solution that they know that you’re the person that can provide the solution for the question or the problem that they’re seeking.
Whatever you’re doing, if it is plumbing, they have to know that you know that not to promote that I’m a plumber but maybe provide how to take care of your pipes in the winter, whatever it is, if you have an older home. You’re providing content with that. That’s going to be a little bit of strategy because it is the word “social” media. You’re going direct to the consumer, or if you’re business-to-business, straight business-to-business, depending on which social media.
You want to make sure that you sign up, you brand yourself, you have a website that works, because it doesn’t matter if you get all this traffic and everything, you get search engine optimization, you get traffic, if they go back to your website and then you don’t convert them.
Meaning that you don’t capture their email address, meaning that you don’t continue to communicate with them, that your website is crazy and they can’t understand what it is that you do once they do visit your “home”. You want to make sure that those things – that’s one of the main things you want to have to make sure you have a very, very good – it doesn’t have to be fancy, doesn’t have to be singing and Flash, just a very simple page.
Felicia: Right, right. Good. I love this. You guys got that, if you’re not as charismatic and as good and this stuff doesn’t come quite as naturally as it does for Pam, you have to figure out what works for you. The key thing is, I call it education-based marketing. You’ve got to be giving good content that educates people and don’t be afraid to do that. And what I always, always talk about, and I’m going to teach you this on our bonus call, is how do you capture that name and that email address? What you need to do to become an attraction magnet. This is essential. Pam, this is great stuff.
Pam: I’m going to stop this. I asked everyone if they were online to do the #BizBreakthrough. I just did it a quick second ago. Execumamma, she did; she understood; she’s a get it girl as well, Felicia. Execumamma, she wrote it in a tweet so that way we have the isolated conversation. We made it blogalicious. She said, “Thoroughly enjoying straightforward approach, giving information. Retweet 2011 for Biz Breakthrough.” If you don’t understand what I’m talking about just retweet @PamPerry because the # sign is in there. Now that we know Execumamma is on the call in Twitter. It is that way.
Felicia: I see you and Execumamma and you now. I’m trying to multitask while hosting, getting all this stuff from you, and make sure I’m being interactive. But I see you out there.
Pam: Yeah, but Execumamma, now it’s like I’m in the little search with BizBreakthrough2011 and then I go over to see what Execumamma does and I can hit her link. The main point of it is how do I monetize this? Execumamma put that out there on Twitter so now at this point I can go over to Miss Richards’ – I can’t pronounce the first name – Execumamma’s website and now I can learn more about her. She actually then says, “Connect With Her”, tells you about what she does, this and that.
That’s the beginning, that’s the entry point. It’s the same way where you’re going to network. You’re not going to walk up to a client, say, “Hey, here’s my business card, give me a check, I’ll be half an hour;” you develop the relationship. When you are in business for yourself the majority of your time should be spent really marketing or networking for new business.
Obviously everybody read Michael Gerber’s book, The E-Myth, that you’re not the main one that’s doing all the tasks all the time but you are the visionary and you are the one that is the brand so you need to be the one that is marketing and doing the networking. The best way to do that is really online, especially today.
Felicia: Really creating.
Pam: Obviously if you can go to a lot of networking events, that’s fine; that take a lot of money and time to do that. The quickest way right now is I connected right quick with Execumamma just by her putting a hash tag. It’s just really simple. Now I can click and go to her LinkedIn, her Facebook, her Twitter, and I could even find more information about what she’s about day to day on her blog if I want to.
Felicia: Okay, Execumamma, this is Felicia. I’m going to follow you, too. There we go. This is good stuff. What’s step number five, I think we’re on?
Pam: Yeah, it’s really getting the right tools. Getting the right tools could include an AWeber or a ConstantContact, or iContact or even MailChimp because if you have the website obviously that’s the main thing. You want to have a blog because that’s going to be where a lot of your social media stems from.
I’m not going to argue with people, “I don’t need a blog,” yes, you do. I do believe it. That’s one of the things I coach all my clients on is getting a blog. Web 2.0, that’s really was the starting point of it. It doesn’t make sense if you have a Facebook and you don’t have a blog, or if you have a Blog Talk show and they don’t even have a blog. I’m like, “Duh, it’s called Blog Talk. Don’t fight the blogging thing; don’t be a blog hater, get a blog.
One of the main things you want to make sure is you use – obviously you have the website – you want to use an opt-in box on the website so that people can connect with you. Like I said, MailChimp, you’re going to do that in the bonus call. The other thing they want to do is they want to have some kind of analytics. Google Analytics is free; anything Google is good, especially if you want to be found in Google. You want to actually go and get as many Google products as you can. YouTube is one, Google Analytics is one.
Felicia: What is Google Analytics?
Pam: That will analyze where your traffic is going, how long they’re staying on your website, on your blog site, it will give you the analysis of so many different things. You need to measure what you’re doing in social media and you’ll be so surprised. You’ll say, “Wow, 50% of my traffic is coming from Twitter, 35% are coming from my blog.” That’s what Google Analytics will show you.
Felicia: So you just go to Google and put in Analytics and sign up for that?
Pam: Yep, it’s free. You can put it on your blog or website very easy and there are tutorials that will show you visually if you need to see that through YouTube and that sort of thing. One of the really simple things that people need to have, because I see that a lot of people aren’t tweeting so I don’t want to make an assumption that people are further along than – there’s some more tweets there – I don’t want to make an assumption that some people are further along than I believe.
One of the things that you need today is high speed internet. I remember I was coaching someone and I said, “Let’s do Skype, or let’s do OoVoo,” and they were like, “I don’t know if I can get that,” because their computer was not in the right space to really do the things that they need to do. That’s really simple.
The other thing that’s really going to be needed, especially in 2010, is some kind of webcam and doing video. If you get something like Camtasia where you actually can record your screen if you don’t want to physically record yourself, but doing some type of video would be very good.
You can do a video from a webcam, a webcam is $30 to add to your computer, or you can do an actual flipcam or you can actually have a physical camera, digital camera – I use it a lot, too – where I actually take it and put it on the part that says Video.
So many people have it on their camera and they never use it. That’s just a really cool plug, to do a video, put it up on Facebook. It just adds interest to your content. As one of the tools people will ask me, “What’s going to be the hot thing?” Video, because people are visual; they’re using the computer, internet more and more for their recreation. Less and less with television; more and more with the computer, so they’re spending more time with video. You want to make sure that you’re in that space and not be behind the curve.
I am so tired of people saying, “I’m older.” Don’t. You heard it from me. Get it now. Mine it. Don’t be behind the curve five years later saying, “I think I heard about…yeah, I’m going to get it now,” as opposed to when I said, “I told people three years ago to get on Twitter.” What is going on? Finally they’re trying to get on there, it’s like, “I can’t get anybody to follow me.” Well you waited three years too late.
Felicia: Right, right. It’s so funny when you talk about being behind the curve. I think I made a post, I think it was last night, that talked about innovation trumps imitation or duplication or something, every time. The whole premise around that was just to encourage people that you have to stay ahead of the game in your industry.
If you want people to see you as the expert you have to stay ahead of the game. The only way that you do that is to stay vested. Keep learning, investing yourself, and so on and so forth. I’m glad to see that that’s one in alignment with something I’ve shared out there recently.
This is good stuff. I’m out here doing all these follows; I don’t know how this is working. Everyone that comes up I’m clicking Follow This Person.
Pam: We see GodsElectLady, we see PicturesByPam, we see TMWPublications, The Modest Woman. The other thing too, just a quick thing about branding because I see the tweets.
GodsElectLady, that’s a good name, but as much as you can unless you have a trademark name like Execumamma] you want to use your name. You want to use your name and your company name as well. GodsElectLady, you have beside your name, GodsElect. I want to know your name. I see your face but I don’t know your name.
The same thing with TMWPublications, The Modest Woman, that’s okay because now I know what TMW stands for, The Modest Woman. PicturesByPam, you need to use your first and your last name.
Each one of the tweets are like little mini websites, so it’s isolated by itself. It is like a standalone microsite – they call it microblogging. A blog is like a website but it’s 2.0. It’s microblogging, so as much as you can, treat it like that. Add as much information to it as you can.
Felicia: I think what I want to do, I just want to make sure that we bring this home and full circle so that people understand that this stuff is not in vain; this all leads to you creating the opportunity for people to come into your community, right, Pam?
Pam: Exactly.
Felicia: Then you get them into your community, hopefully off of Twitter and Facebook, but also into your own email list eventually, which is where you can start to develop those more personal and intimate relationships with them where you educate them and start to make conversions. I just want to make sure, for those of you who are really, really, really, really new at this stuff, it does make sense. There’s a method to the madness.
Pam: I didn’t want to really go through the whole point of the social media work because it is a whole mode or movement. Time Magazine, Mark Zuckerberg, Person of the Year; Facebook: The Accidental Billionaire, right?
We realize that you don’t get on Facebook and you play games. I never get on Facebook, I’ve never signed up for Farmville, Mafia Wars, none of that; that was not what I was going to do. That’s not my personality anyway. I don’t have a lot of game playing time. With friends, maybe on the weekend.
You go and you have a mission in mind of what you want to do, how do you want to be known, and that’s where all of this comes into play. I have someone actually that hired me – I can’t disclose their name but I do their ghost writing and things like that for them, but they are a major person and they had been watching me for three or four months doing tweets and that. I wasn’t doing a whole lot of crazy stuff; I was very serious about what I was doing online.
While I’m online sometimes I just tweet what I’m researching; that’s a really good thing to do as well. As you said, Felicia, sometimes you tweet other things that aren’t yours. Sometimes I’m doing research so I may tweet their things as well because I know mine will be different but I’ll still tweet the source where I’m doing the research from. Again, 90% of my business comes from being online.
Felicia: Hope you guys got that number; 90%. That’s conversions. For those of you who see Pam Perry all over the place, this is why I wanted her on the call because I know she knows how to monetize this stuff. 90% of her business comes from all this stuff that we see her being online. Please take good notes around this stuff.
Pam: I think five years before this, primarily it was from trade shows, from people meeting me; that’s what it was from. It was five years before I was really doing a lot of online things. It came from trade shows, and then I think maybe before that you would just have to make sure that you meet people in your community. Now 90% of my clients have never met me personally.
Felicia: This is not to say that 90% of your clients need to come from online. This call is meant to say, if you’re online and you’re doing it, which you should be, you need to figure out how to monetize it. Maybe most of you still get out and go to the networking events; you should have multiple strategies for what works for you. But if you’re online and you’re doing this stuff I want to see you guys start making some money from it.
Pam: That has really, too, the solution, the idea of making money but making the connections that lead to the money. It’s the same thing as an author who just released a book. If they just released a book and the first time I’m hearing about this particular author is because they released a book, I’m not going to be interested in it because I know they want to sell me.
You build a relationship – and this is for all authors – you start that platform at least a year before your book is out; at the minimum six months before the book is out. Because you then want to let people know who you are, what you’re about, and that you’re not just looking at them as a dollar sign.
Obviously you want people to do business with you but this is what we call attraction marketing. You just go about doing what you do best, you share the information, it’s falling off you, it’s dripping off you, all the information, the solutions, what everybody wants is dripping all over you. Then at that point people are like, “I want to connect with you. I know where to find them. I remember that girl, she was a PR coach,” put it in Google and it’ll pop up.
That’s what you really want to do, you want to make sure that you are in that position where you have the mindset that, “I am attracting the right clients,” that you have in your mind your overall marketing plan and then social media is just part of that as well. You can monetize. There are some people that just make money online and that’s internet marketers.
That’s the people that will sell affiliate links. They may sell the things that people are looking for right now. January will come up and they might start selling diet pills or How to Lose Belly Fat. I’m talking about people who are in business that have an expertise. There are internet marketers that will make money on anything because they know how to work the internet; I’m talking about really being a master of your own area, being the expert in your area. That’s how you make money because that way people know that you know what you’re talking about.
You’re hanging out – which goes to number six, is really there’s so many social media tools that people can actually take part in. Depending on the audience that you want to reach that’s where you’re going to decide where you’re going to spend most of your time.
If I tell you that you have to blog and you really hate writing then obviously you’ve got to do something else. Maybe you have to do a video blog, like Gary Vaynerchuck or Shama.TV, she does a video blog. I just started a video blog on social media PR, just doing that because some people just take it by video. Or if you want to talk maybe you do Blog Talk Radio; take those blog talk shows and put them on the blog. You don’t have to write.
Or you can just do a blog where you do reviews or you could do interviews of experts. It’s your world; you can blog like you want. Treat it like a magazine. Pick three that you master, that you’re comfortable with, that you know, that you know that you’re going to be consistent with.
There’s nothing worse than going to a blog and someone hasn’t posted something in over two months. It’s like going to somebody’s house and it’s boarded up. It’s like, “Ooh.” Then what happens, no one will go back to that blog anymore because they say, “Oh, they abandoned their blog.” Take it down if you’re not going to do anything with it.
Decide if you’re going to LinkedIn – a little more personality difference with LinkedIn than versus Facebook. Facebook is a little bit more personable; LinkedIn is a lot more professional. Twitter, we have seven new tweets right now; that’s just really quick. We see Terasita, she just got on and she’s saying this is great information. MonicaMichelle. There’s just shout-outs, just headlines, so obviously it’s different.
Integrating certain ones, depending on which ones that you want, you can integrate Twitter within Facebook, you can integrate Facebook within your blog. There’s a lot of overlap there so you’ve got to pick three that you say, “I will master. I will do.” The one that people use the most because it has the most mobility is Facebook, because you’re not at the computer all day. People can Facebook from their phone. Or Twitter; people use that a lot because they can do that from their phone.
People use FourSquare, especially if you’re a retail business. That a very good one to use, FourSquare.com. They can do that from their phones. LinkedIn, depending on you go on LinkedIn Answers, there’s so much information out there about how to use LinkedIn. There’s a gentleman I just put on my blog today, Lewis Howes, I think he was in New Zealand, because he’s the LinkedIn expert and he’s a millionaire making money off LinkedIn. For him, it works. LinkedIn works for him and he actually teaches other people how to use LinkedIn.
I want to open it up for questions because I feel that I could answer a question based on a situation. I’ve been talking real general but if you give me a specific situation I can probably tell you which one would probably be best. Then the last step is measure the results and adjust accordingly. That’s it.
Felicia: Measure results and adjust accordingly. I was just going to make a comment when you mentioned something about pick three and master it. Don’t get overwhelmed; pick the three that you know you’re going to use the most. I know for me, personally, I have – and I can’t even remember how I have this set up but I do know that it’s working, that whenever I post on Facebook it goes to my Twitter somehow, and that keeps me from having to-
Pam: Probably TwitterFeed.com.
Felicia: TwitterFeed.com, you guys. That keeps me from having to log on to Twitter and Facebook; I just post a Facebook and everything goes to Twitter. Also through AWeber, that you mentioned earlier, there’s an option in there where you can actually have it go out to Facebook and Twitter and all of that good jazz. There’s lots of stuff. Don’t want you to get overwhelmed, but you have to pick a few and I like to say, “Do the do.”
What I want you guys to do, Pam has graciously offered to answer your questions on the fly. So that we can keep a clear call – I’m so glad that we have this fabulous technology – if you have a question that you’d like to ask please press *2. When you press *2 I will see that you have a question for Pam and we will unmute your line.
Pam: I’m sending out a tweet here to the seven or eight that are on there and basically what I did now, Felicia, is that everyone who is in your BizBreakthrough2011, you can go and hit that hash tag and you can see like, Angela just joined us now. She said, “It’s your world, you can blog how you want.” I know that’s right. We got the social media swag, we can do it like we want to do it. Make it un-boring, make it eye-pleasing. Notice the blogs that you follow, they have nice pictures, they’re simple. I don’t want to make this a blogging thing but blogging is really where you can show your personality.
Felicia: Personality. We have some hands going up. I am going to unmute, I see, Simonia, I think that’s your name. I’m going to go ahead and unmute you, Simonia and then you can give us your question. There you go, Simonia, please ask us your question.
Simonia: Hi, Pam, how are you?
Pam: Good, good.
Simonia: That’s great. My question is, I deal with computers and do things all the time but to be honest with you this technology is kind of overwhelming to me. I see myself on Twitter but I have no idea if anyone can see me. What would be some of the learning tools that you would actually give to some of us who we’re not really good on Facebook and Twitter and those things, not because we don’t know how but it’s just because we’ve never been on it and we really don’t know how to use them efficiently?
Pam: You’re on Twitter now. Have you ever used the tool Search.Twitter.com?
Simonia: No.
Pam: If you go to Search.Twitter.com, and say, what’s your field? Who are you trying to connect with on Twitter?
Simonia: Motivational speakers, teachers; that type of people.
Pam: You’re trying to connect with them or you are one?
Simonia: I’m a minister, actually, so that and teaching and speaking is all wrapped up in one for me.
Pam: Alright, so you’re not trying to hire or connect with motivational speakers, – you are one as well. You just maybe want to follow someone like Les Brown or T.D Jakes. — that sort of thing. Obviously they probably won’t follow you back because they’re out there. As a motivational speaker, the main thing that you’re going to be doing on Twitter consistently is what? Providing motivation.
Felicia: People love motivational speakers.
Pam: if you do that consistently and if your content – obviously because it’s raw coming from you; I provide motivation, too, but I usually quote other people because that’s not my thing. I may do one or two, but you’re going to do that consistently. It’s not going to happen overnight; it will take some time, but do it consistently.
I have a good example of a client that I coach right now, her name is Deanna Murphy. She is a life coach and a motivational speaker and that sort of thing. She’s rebranding herself, Dr Murphy, but she has done that and she says, “It doesn’t seem like anybody’s listening, whatever, whatever;” she still provides the information to people.
Somebody’s looking, they just want to see how consistent you’re going to be. When you don’t just go out there and put your quotes out there but you retweet something, then you encourage people, you inspire, you’re going to do what you do in the space where you are. In your ministry you understand this, whether you’re going to minister to 10 people or 200 people, your message is not going to change; you’re going to always stay on point, correct? It’s going to grow by being faithful with it.
Search.Twitter.com will just allow you – there’s a keyword maybe, if you’re looking for people in a particular state, maybe Ohio, you can just do Ohio and see who are in Ohio and maybe connect with them. That’s what Search.Twitter.com lets you do; find out who you want to connect with. I personally have a little list. I have some of my PR friends that I follow so I look whenever people talk about PR I look on there and people are talking about PR then I’ll follow them.
The point of when you follow people is that then you’re going to retweet what they say, you engage with them. The more you engage with people, other people on Twitter will see you engaging with people. If I go to your particular page right now and see that all you’ve been doing is talking, meaning you’re not engaging, you don’t retweet, you don’t say @ sign like – who said something, MonicaMichelle or Execumamma] is really good at that. She will say @whatever. If I go on your page and I see that all you do is talking then I know that you’re not really engaging. Twitter is used to engage people. Then you can tell is you’re being retweeted.
People say, “How do you get more Twitter followers?” Provide the content, tell people you’re on Twitter, give them your Twitter handle, have a nice background on Twitter. You can go to Tweetbacks.com, I believe it is, and you can get a Twitter background. A lot of people say, “How do you make a Twitter background?” I think it’s Tweetbacks.com and it’s free.
Simonia: You said Tweet?
Pam: Tweetbacks.com. I’ll put it in Google while we’re on the phone but I know it’s something like – even if you put in “Twitter background”, there’s several other ones. I don’t want to say I’m using one more than the other but, yeah, Tweetbacks. Tweet, like a tweet, not Twitter. Tweetbacks.com. Basically I put that in there, and there’s some other ones as well, but Tweetbacks is one of the ones that a lot of people use.
Felicia: Thank you so much for engaging and bringing your question up. I’m going to unmute the next caller. Yetta, I know this is you, so Yetta, I’m going to unmute your line so that you can ask your question.
Yetta: Alright. Hi, ladies. Thank you do much, this is awesome, awesome, awesome. Great job, Felicia, and thank you for introducing us to Pam Perry.
Felicia: Absolutely.
Yetta: My question is, it’s time for me, I am maxed out on my Facebook page and I haven’t moved to Twitter or anything like that, I’m just trying to get in my comfort zone with Facebook, but I’m maxed out now. I want to move to a fan page.
I’m an executive producer, I’m a director, I work with celebrities, my productions have been seen on TV throughout various cities. I know you just said you want to brand your name but I want to keep my name and my company name, YYP, together so that if I’m in the middle of a production one goes with the other. How do I do that?
Pam: Alright. You said that you maxed out on your personal page and now you could start your fan page. You don’t necessarily have to wait until you max out in order to start your “like page”. You can have as many “like pages” as you want based on different parts of your business. You can have a general equipment page and you can have one just for whatever, whatever.
How do you get people over to your “like page”? You tell the people that are part of your personal page that you have one and what kind of content you’re going to be putting there. For me, on my personal page, it is a lot of personal stuff. For people that want to know some personal information about me there’s some information there. It doesn’t really add anything to your life but if you just want to get to know me personally that’s good.
But on the PR coach page, I give you nothing but content. It is straight up, if you follow me safely in a year you will probably know as much as I know because it is straight up all the resources and everything that I’m discovering and finding out and putting up via blog.
You want to let people know what it is that they’re going to have on this page. As you look at your competitors, what do their fan pages look like? Look and see what they’re doing. Do they have a splash page on their fan page? Do they have video on their fan page? You want to know you’re adding that. You can’t add particular things to a personal page; you can only do it with the fan page or the “like page”.
Yetta: I guess the question that I’m trying to ask is should I use “Yetta Young”, “YYP”, or “Yetta Young, YYP”?
Pam: What is your website? What are you branding?
Yetta: My production company. I produce and direct. I get a lot of questions about, “How do you put on this event? I’d love to pick your brain about how to get celebrities for an event or how to do an event.”
Pam: That’s it. You just answered your question.
Yetta: Yeah, it’s almost like I saw someone on Facebook the other day and they said they were opening a Twitter account and they wanted to know what their name should be. They’re a business person obviously and then they had some funky name, FunGirlinLA and I’m like, “Is that how you want people to find you? People that you want to find you, is that how they’re going to find you?” It needs to be tied to something in a way for how you want people to find you, how you want to be known in that space. Is that what you’re saying, Pam?
Pam: Yeah, and it seems like if they are coming to you personally, that’s different. You’ve got to then brand your name over and over again. Like I said, you can have more than one page so maybe you can do a test; start them both. Start one with just your name, just your brand name, and then start one with your company name.
But if I were you, because you are a company, people probably feel on certain level that they’re going to have their productions and things like that through a company versus just a person. As a person I would say it would be really good for the minister that called, if someone is a coach, because you’re working with that person. Whereas a company, you’re working with the company.
Yetta: Got it. Thank you.
Felicia: Is that clear, Yetta? Okay.
Yetta: Yes, thank you.
Felicia: Fabulous. Okay, you guys, I know we’re coming up on the hour. Pam, how much longer are you willing to stay on board? I want to respect your time but I know that people are loving this because I haven’t seen one person drop off the call.
Pam: Yeah, I love answering the questions. There’s one little tool that I just did for Execumamma, I just tweeted out her website. If you are not using Firefox – I love Firefox, it’s not like I’m paid by Firefox – Internet Explorer is cool, we all probably get it if we have a PC on our machine, but if you can download the tool Firefox, that’s one that I use a lot.
Basically once you get Firefox you add a tool that’s called Shareaholic. Shareaholic allows you to, wherever you are, to share whatever page you’re on. Say, for instance, someone just asked me about TweetBacks. I go to the TweetBack website now and I can hit Twitter This and I can also blog it, I can put it in Delicious which is a bookmarking site, I can put it on FriendFeed, I can email it.
It allows you to share wherever you are on the internet very simply, with a click. I can put it in MySpace, Ping.fm which is a really good site if you want to do everything all at one time. I tend not to do that a lot because I like to really just target.
For instance, I’m now doing that right now and I’m doing Twitter Background Gallery is just basically going out now in Twitter by me actually being on the site, by using that particular tool. That is just downloading Firefox.com and then actually adding another tool within Firefox, Shareaholic.
Felicia: Okay. Wanda, I see your hand up. I’m going to go ahead and unmute your line, Wanda, and you can ask your question. Wanda, your call is unmated. What question do you have? Wanda? She still has her hand up. Maybe she’s trying to get on Twitter or something.
Wanda: Yes, yes. It is such an honor to meet all of you ladies. Thank you, so very much. I’ll make it quick here. I am an author and I am presently on Facebook, Twitter, the Link, everything. My question is what Pam was just mentioning a few minutes ago, I want to be able to duplicate or to share all of my information with the click of a button instead of the duplications are everywhere. That’s my concern.
The other thing is that I am concerned about the newsletter for 2011, that’s one of my goals, and also the YouTube. Help me out as much as you can for the time frame that you are working with, please.
Pam: The one little tool that I really, really love is HootSuite, and you’re going to say, “What is that?” Hoot, like an owl, hoo, hoo, hoot; Suite, not like candy sweet, but suite. I’ll tweet that as well. HootSuite allows you to add, wherever you are on the web, so that you can go to one particular dashboard and click of a button, share everything everywhere. That’s HootSuite.com. It’s free and they have a professional version as well.
I have the professional version because I have a lot of different clients that I use the HootSuite for because now I can see the home feeds for every client, I can see the mentions for every client, the direct messages, the tweets sent, I can schedule tweets later. It’s, “Oh, you sent a tweet;” we schedule them. We schedule a lot of these things; it’s not always that someone’s actually there. HootSuite you will really love if you’ve never heard of it before; it’s really cool.
Another one people like – I personally don’t like it as much as HootSuite – is Ping.fm. People like that. You can go and put in everywhere you are on the web and then you can go and do a status update quickly into Ping.fm and everything will go everywhere. It’s okay. I like that. It’s okay.
Wanda: And the newsletter?
Pam: What about the newsletter?
Wanda: Recommendations in what instructions to just begin a newsletter. Is there a particular site that you know of that I would be able to get immediate instructions? There are a lot of things out there and I wasn’t sure.
Pam: Do you have a blog?
Wanda: Yes, I do.
Pam: Put your content on the blog for now. What you need is actually a list. Either you use AWeber, which Felicia and I, we use AWeber, or Active Campaign or any of those type of services where you can produce a newsletter in, but until you have a list and have a following…I don’t want to say this but for the most part people don’t read the newsletters as much as they did. That’s almost like that’s old school.
Not to say anything to anybody; if you’re still doing a newsletter, that’s fine. I find that people like to go to the blog when they can and it’s not clogging up their email box; they can just do it in an RSS feed and that’s cool. Whereas a newsletter it’s like, then you’re stressing yourself out, “I didn’t do a newsletter this month,” you know. Do the blog where they can actually then have SEO juice to it.
Go to my website, MinistryMarketingSolutionsBlog.com. Take the Googlicious test; it says Are You Googlicious? That’s just a way to, without me actually going over everything, I don’t want to overwhelm anyone, but just take the Googlicious test. It’s about 25 questions and if you answer yes to 15 of them you’re pretty Googlicious. If not, you know where to start.
What that is is basically what we’re doing right now only I will actually take you behind the curtain to show you, as I’m working on different particular websites and things like that, that you would see it as well. It’s a webinar where you will actually see, you can ask questions; it’s interactive.
Not only will you get the session, say if we do a session on blogging, but once we do the session you can go and try and do it on your own and then come back with your questions because what happens is, it seems crystal clear when you’re with your trainer, right? It seems crystal clear when you’re with the coach and then you turn your computer on, it’s like, “Uhhhh, what did she tell me to do?”
That’s what I’m doing; it’s called Solution Driven Workshops and it’s to provide solutions. That is the whole part of really what I want to help people get. Whatever they have that is a problem, I want to provide a solution in the workshop. It’s going to be online and that’ll be coming. . If you’re already on my mailing list you’ll get information on it, but that’s coming up soon.
Felicia: Thanks, Wanda, for your question. I’m going to go ahead and mute you out so we can have a clear call and then we can wrap up. I’ll mute you. Thank you so much for your question.
Wanda: Thank you.
Felicia: Alright, Pam. This has been absolutely fabulous, fabulous, fabulous. I know that we’re going to be overwhelmed with information flying across Facebook, Twitter, all kinds of stuff tonight when we get off this call.
Pam: I know.
Felicia: Before we hang up, I know you have a free gift that you’re going to be extending to everyone. I know it’s the Synergy Energy e-book. Tell us a little bit about this book and then we can tell folks where they can go pick it up.
Pam: Okay. It is actually a Synergy Energy project. It was done with some actual other people as well, so I’m really true to doing that. I wrote this book with Crystal and Anthony Obey. Basically the book is how to use the power of partnerships to market your book, grow your business, and brand your ministry.
I’m really, really big on that social networking, social media; all of that has to do with growing. We are not to be islands by ourselves; we are to really partner together. The book, they’ll really discover publicity ideas, how to really put together joint venture strategies kind of like Felicia and I and Andrew; that was a joint venture strategy.
That’s a joint venture; everybody pulling together for one particular cause. It’ll talk about positioning message and then also some systems that people can use to make them money, as well as resources and things like that.
The book is free; it’s an e-book. There’s actually a physical book, as well, but it is an e-book that I’m offering free. The theme of the book is a Zig Ziglar quote that says, “You can have everything in life that you want if you just help enough other people get what they want.” That’s the whole premise of Synergy Energy, for really just getting that mindset.
I find sometimes now in this information age people are so selfish, selfish, and working everything by themselves. I’m a boomer so I’m from the 60s; what happened to the social thing that we’re supposed to be doing? That was really the whole point of it; really partnership, especially in the economy and things like that, it’s more economical to do that.
They can go and actually get the book free. I’m going to offer just up until Christmas because then it’ll go back on its regular price. If they go to PamPerryOnlinePR.com and just hit the little button that says Synergy Energy button, and then just check it out. When they go to check out it’ll zero out. Right now it’ll say its regular price at $15 but if they actually go now, the Synergy Energy book by Pam Perry, they’ll actually go and click on it, it’ll zero out when they go to the checkout.
Felicia: Branding Accelerator Program. All of us should be in that class. This has been absolutely phenomenal, and I’ll tell you, Pam, you are my buddy, my colleague, and I really, really appreciate you sharing your wisdom with us tonight. I know that you have a ton of things going on so I am so appreciative of you and I just want to say thank you and I know I’m expressing that for everyone that’s on this line this evening.
Pam: Thank you. It was fun. I love sharing. If there’s any questions people can always email me, as well. That’s not a problem. Just go through the website, PamPerryPR.com and I’ll answer your questions and things like that. That is not a problem.
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