Using Social Media in your Business
Imagine millions of potential consumers around the globe united in one place, sharing information, photos, videos, links, ideas and concepts. All your target audience located a few clicks away and your products announced in a very effective and instantaneous manner. The same results that traditional media allows for a high cost, are being accomplished by online media, with much smaller budgets and a more targeted delivery. That’s Social Media in a nutshell.
This article offers a five-step approach on how to start on the social media world.
1 – Create a Facebook page for your business
Facebook is unarguably the place to start, with more than 800 million active users, more than half of whom log in on any given day, it’s by far the single biggest social network in the world. You may already have a personal Facebook profile, but it’s important to note that it’s against Facebook policy to use your personal profile for a group, organization, or business.
Once you created your business page, make sure you update your status regularly. The updates can be informative, educational, promotional, or just plain fun.
2 – Start tweeting
Twitter has 175 million registered users who tweet 95 million times per day.
You can use twitter to meet a variety of needs, from customer service to brand awareness. Setting up a twitter profile takes only a few minutes. The bigger challenge with Twitter is finding followers. The best way to gain followers is to tweet and retweet (repeating other people’s tweets) regularly. Specially retweeting tweets from industry leaders.
3 – Posting videos on YouTube
YouTube is the 2nd most popular website in the world, with 790 million unique monthly visitors and 100 billion page views. Besides its popularity, YouTube offers a tremendous opportunity to gain a foothold in Google search results.
Setting up a YouTube account takes only a few seconds, but you need to make sure you choose a username that ties closely to your business identity, so people can find it when they search for your business. Thanks to modern technology, making digital videos is easy, with an abundance of tools available to edit them.
4 – Social media aggregation
So you are on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. Maybe you took a step further and signed up for LinkedIn and Google+. Now you’re faced with keeping them all up-do-date.
It’s simple to connect your Twitter to your Facebook and LinkedIn, so whenever you tweet something new, it gets posted to your wall on Facebook and becomes your latest status update on LinkedIn.
An even better solution is to sign up for a social media aggregation site such as TweetDeck, HootSuite or FlipBook. These display all of your accounts on a single page, allowing you to update your status and easily track them all.
5 – Online reputation
As social media becomes more and more popular, reputations are increasingly being built and managed online. But considering the velocity at which information spreads on the internet, this can either be your worst enemy or your best friend. Take advantage and publish and promote your brand online.
The very first steps to be taken in establishing a proper online reputation is to have a presence on all well-known social media platforms, which will go a long way towards driving down unwanted search results. Also, setting up a Google alert utilizing search terms that identify your business as well as any other keywords you feel are important.
Social media is about people, it is about relationships, and it is about communications. A social media presence is about educating, engaging, and growing your audience, and potentially improving the bottom line of your business. If you haven’t started using social media as a marketing tool for your business, the time is now.
You may be asking yourself why would a generally business based blog be warning its readers about a Zombie invasion. Well, on Friday the 13th, our sister company, Xoobis, will be releasing our first game since the merger with Status Not Quo. It is the best Zombie Shooter Game I’ve ever seen – the graphics and story line are amazing!
Zombie Wonderland 2 will be available on the iTunes store for iPhone and iPad this Friday (actually, it’ll be available on Thursday, but Friday the 13th sounds so much better for a Zombie game don’t you think?). The game will arrive very soon after for Android users as well.
Check out the trailers here:
Happy Hunting!
Pam
Fare thee well 2011
As we approach the New Year, I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you for visiting our Blog throughout the year. During the past year Status Not Quo has had tremendous growth and prosperity and we feel extremely blessed. We have more than doubled in size, opened two new offices, and entered a new industry: Mobile and Gaming Application development. It’s been a “whirlwind” to say the least.
During the past year, we have enjoyed many exciting and challenging engagements and have reveled in the professional and individual growth these have fostered. We pride ourselves in the relationships we have built with our clients and are incredibly blessed to have become good friends with many of them over the years. We are so thankful to our clients who continue to partner with Status Not Quo in their business success.
Finally, I want to take a moment to say a very heartfelt thank you to both our employees and partners. We have such an amazing team and words can’t express what it means to us as a company to know that all of our team members are willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done right.
May all of you find many blessings in the New Year and Prosperity to us all!
PS (Ok, so maybe it’s not a post script yet) – We’ll be launching our new Game for Mobile Devices on Friday the 13th! Look for Zombie Wonderland 2: Outta Time! in the iTunes store and the Android Market. It’s amazing!!
Warmest Regards,
Pam
The Ethics of Being a Manager
We hear about ethics in business all the time. We talk about doing the right thing, about making the right choice, dealing with that hard decision. We require classes that teach how to evaluate decisions and arrive at the ethical decision. But we seldom talk about the ethics of being a manager and how that impacts our interaction with people.
We joke about being in management and getting those so-called big bucks – but there’s a reason we have that title, and there are responsibilities that go hand in hand with it. Sometimes it sucks, and seems the rewards are few and far between. But that’s part of the job. As the manager, our responsibility is managing our team, and reviewing their work. If something goes wrong, it’s our job to step up, take responsibility and then ensure that it doesn’t occur again. We don’t throw the junior to the wolves, and blame them. We have the final responsibility to make sure it’s right. And that means making the ethical, responsible choice to suck it up and take responsibility regardless of the fact that we didn’t actually make the mistake – bottom line, it’s our responsibility to manage the team in such a way that the mistakes get caught before they get out of the department.
And when things go right? We give credit to the team members who delivered. Always. Say thank you, and then highlight the players. Never take credit for someone else’s efforts.
Think about the type of manager you’d want to work for, or the kind of colleagues you’d want to work with on a project. Your colleagues, your team and your executives are aware of more than you may realize – and the respect you garner as a mentor, a team player, a great manager and a trustworthy person by acting in such an ethical manner is worth more than words can say – because actions always speak louder than words.
Adobe Flash and the Mobile Web
A little while ago Adobe announced that they are officially pulling out of the race to be THE platform for delivering rich content to mobile browsers. This means that the old standby of the PC era, Flash, is being effectively abandoned when it comes to the mobile browsing experience. Of course, in a very real sense, that decision had already been made for Adobe. The fact is that the #1 and #2 best-selling phones in the world are still the Apple iPhone 4S and the Apple iPhone 3gs, and neither one of those phone supports in-browser Flash applications (not to mention the dominant leader of the tablet world, the iPad). So, as a developer, if I intend for my website to be visible and useable by someone on a mobile device, I simply can’t use Flash as the delivery system for that content.
So the next question is, does this mean the death of the Adobe Flash platform completely? Well, Adobe is trying to make sure the answer to that question is “no” by taking two pretty important steps. First, they have released a new, free tool, that will translate animations created for Flash into HTML5. This is huge because it allows Flash developers to work in their favorite environment, but the results of that work can still be delivered to Apple devices. Second, Adobe has launched their FlashBuilder platform, which is an application designed to build iOS and Android apps using a Flash-like interface, and the familiar scripting language behind Flash, ActionScript.
This is a very savvy move by Adobe. Not only does it extend the life of Flash technology in general, but it also opens up a new market to developers like me, who prefer to program on a PC (as opposed to a Mac). Also, and let’s be honest here, Objective-C, the primary object-oriented programming language for the iOS, is pretty clunky. Now, with FlashBuilder, I can do just about everything the Mac-based programming environment would allow me to do, at least within the realm of mobile devices, without having to use Objective-C.
Now, that’s not to say that the Flash environment, and now, it’s bigger brother, FlashBuilder, don’t have their problems, too. Ultimately, I think that Apple made the right move by restricting Flash from their devices. The argument Apple has always made is that Flash isn’t stable enough to use in an environment with such limited resources as a phone or tablet, and that Flash security is sub-par. I agree completely with both of those points (especially the security one – I once had my World of Warcraft account hacked and stolen because of faulty security programming in Flash).
However, I also think that Flash still has a place in the world of the modern web. For example, HTML 5 has a very nice new tag that allows me to display and control video files within a website. The tag, very appropriately called <video />, can be set up to use multiple file types, and will play the first one in the list that the browser is capable of interpreting. It even has a section for displaying alternate HTML if the <video /> tag isn’t supported by the user’s browser. That’s all very clean and cool. But, it’s not very customizable. What if my client doesn’t like the way the HTML 5 video controls are displayed? What if I need some special functionality, like an overlay that will pop-up over part of the video playback at a certain frame? If all I have to work with is HTML 5, I’m either out of luck, or I need to do some pretty sophisticated Javascript acrobatics to accomplish my goal, but with a Flash movie player, all of those tasks become simple. In this scenario, even if my user’s browser supports the nifty new <video /> tag, I’m likely to try to get them to display a Flash movie first, and then fall back to HTML 5 if that’s my only option (i.e., on Apple devices).
Also, the last I read, the Flash platform achieved better than 99% market penetration for desktop and laptop computers that are web-enabled. That’s just staggering, and frankly, there are plenty of applications I can think of that can make good use of Flash simply because the intended audience isn’t using the application on a phone.
Here at SNQ, what all of this comes down to is that nothing has really changed. We’ll continue to evaluate the available technologies with each new project we face, and just like before, if that project will have a mobile audience, Flash won’t be our first choice, but that doesn’t mean that it’s time to throw away all of the knowledge and expertise we’ve worked so hard to gain, either. We take pride in never letting the technology drive the direction we want to go with a project – rather, we look at the goals and decide on the best technologies to serve the need. With that perspective in mind, I’m sure I’ll be running Google searches on some obscure ActionScript command again before too long.
The Facebook fishing pole
Today we launched our first WordPress “plug-in” named “Social Dragonflys!” – essentially it’s a cool little tool that allows a WordPress user to easily create a Facebook company welcome page using WordPress – very quickly and painlessly – and very inexpensively.
We created this based on a growing demand for companies to have a corporate Facebook presence. People often mistakenly think that a company presence on Facebook needs to pertain to selling or doing something on Facebook. Not true. The real reason is very simple – expose your company to the millions of Facebook users who probably wouldn’t need your company’s services while they’re playing Farmville, but may need you when they get back to their “day job”. Once you’ve gotten their attention, the company page just needs to get them to visit your primary marketing asset – which is your corporate web site.
All interesting, but why did I name this entry “The Facebook fishing pole”? Glad you asked. We also created a Facebook sponsored ad campaign to promote the plug-in. If you haven’t worked with one of these before, it’s very interesting. Our first ad targets Facebook users who “Like” WordPress and PhP (which is a web language with a connection to WordPress), live in the United States, and are over 18. Apparently this ad targets 140,600 users. That’s a pretty big pond. And with that, we cast out our line.
Time will tell how this method works, but I absolutely know it requires fine tuning – the demographics, the interest filters, and even the geographic focus. However, I can say that within 30 minutes, the ad had been seen by 3,840 users, and even clicked through 4 times. Not a great ratio, but nibbles none the less. Stay tuned, and if you would like to make our day by checking out the plug-in, here’s the ultra-colorful website – with lots of fun mascots. Thanks!
Scott Capistrano
President
Status Not Quo
Thank You For the Teaching – Fare Thee Well “Character Counts”!
Dr. Seuss Quote: “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened” – So sorry to hear that Michael Josephson will no longer be heard on KNX 1070 radio 
Thanks for the wonderful Character Education throughout the years! (Quote borrowed from his blog)
Scientific Gaming
“Video games will rot your brain!” How many times did I hear that as a kid? Ok, probably not that many but it did seem to be a kind of mantra for adults who thought kids spent too much time playing video games. Personally, I owe much of my professional success to video games. They were the means by which I learned about computers, they introduced me to programing, and perhaps most importantly they helped to teach me how to think and solve problems for myself. Of course I cannot “prove” any of this but it is my personal experience and the experience of several of my friends as well.
For all these reason I am always pleased when I find some something that supports my view that video game can have a positive and important role in people’s lives. A couple weeks ago one of those friends I mention above (whom I also work with at SNQ) sent me this link: Online gamers crack AIDS enzyme puzzle. Go on… Take a moment to read it… It is fairly short.
Wow! How awesome is that? A game designed to discover and map chains of amino acids, the structure of proteins. Leading to data that can help save lives by developing new drugs to fight things like AIDS! And it makes perfect sense to me! As a gamer I understand the drive to, find and uncover every nuance of a game, the desire to explore every nook and cranny, or in modern game terms to “get all the achievements”.
I truly hope that creative application of gaming can lead to many such discoveries in the future.
Jeff
Rest In Peace Steve Jobs
October 5th was a sad day. It started out rainy and cold here in Southern California. Late in the afternoon I heard the news that Apple announced the death of co-founder Steve Jobs. While he certainly had his share of negative press, he cannot be denied the gratitude of our society for the many great changes he helped bring about especially in the area of technology.
I wanted to share two famous quotes by Mr. Jobs:
– BusinessWeek interview, May 1998
That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than
complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.
But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move
mountains.
– Interview with 60 Minutes, 2003
My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s
kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total
was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things
in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of
people.
I hope that you stop and take a minute today to just ponder how profoundly the world has changed in the past 30 years and know that with perserverance, the next 30 are even more promising.
Rest In Peace Mr. Jobs. We truly thank you!
Status Not Quo and Xoobis
The True Value of Customer Service
One of my favorite things about living in what I consider a small community is the personalized service I have received over the years from various companies I frequent. This past weekend I was greatly impressed when a season ticket sales representative for the LA Galaxy contacted me and asked if we could meet to discuss our needs and how they might help us meet them. I had had good customer service from their organization previously, but was impressed that this person was willing to take the extra step and meet with me personally to show us how we could benefit from their offerings. Although we were already partial season ticket holders, the organization was willing to make the extra effort to keep our business and make me feel like I was an important part of their success.
So, this great customer service experience made me want to share with you my thoughts on what it means to provide great customer service. Let me start by sharing a list of the basic customer needs and expectations I recently found in an article by Mary White on the Love to Know website in the business section:
- Personal recognition: Customers want to be treated as valued individuals. No one wants to be treated like they’re “just a number”.
- Courteous treatment: Treating customers courteously is something that should be a given without question. There’s no excuse for being rude, particularly to someone who is considering doing business with you.
- Respect: While it’s a fact that customers are not always right, it is also true that there is no situation in which it is acceptable to treat your customers with a lack of respect.
- Empathy: Customers appreciate it when you take the time to try to look at the situation from their perspective. If you really want to define customer service in a manner that’s specific to your business, step back and look at your business processes through your customers’ eyes.
- Understanding: Customers need to be understood. The best way for you to demonstrate understanding to your customers is to listen to them. Don’t interrupt when they are trying to explain their needs to you. Demonstrate
respect by listening and trying to understand. - Patience: Being patient with customers is a great way to demonstrate respect. Stay on task, but don’t rush them. When a customer is in front of you, he or she deserves your full attention.
- Professionalism: No matter what kind of day you might be having, your personal issues are not the concern of your customers. Remain positive and professional in all customer interactions. The way you act when you’re with your customers will have an impact on how they judge the professional tone of your company as a whole.
This list covered many of the qualities that I find vital when dealing with my clients. One of the most important things as a consultant is creating a relationship with your client. Get to know what is important to them. How can you accomplish this? Start with listening and stop trying to get the “hard sale”. Treat your clients with respect and they will be more likely to respect you back. And most importantly, always be professional. In our society where business suits and conference rooms are quickly being replaced with jeans and Skype Video Chats, we need to remember that when we are dealing with clients, they are always still the client and it is your reponsibility to treat them as such.
So today, remember if you provide excellent customer service, the true value will come in knowing you have done the best job you can!
Thanks for stopping by our blog. To learn more about Status Not Quo, visit us at www.statusnotquo.com
Pam
