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Apr 12 2013
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J2 Marketing

Why So Many People Resist Networking and Miss Out

Networking

Every year, more evidence comes out on the success people have using networking to grow and promote their businesses. But I still see so many people who, for one reason or another, continue to resist networking. I began to wonder why so many business owners were still not sold on networking as a way to grow their business, given that marketing and advertising is so cost-prohibitive, whereas networking provides a great return for a much smaller monetary investment.

I decided to turn to my own network and ask why business owners continue to resist what is so widely known to work. I received more than 100 responses and the answers were really insightful.

There are four major reasons business owners resist the benefits of networking, according to what I am hearing in the field:

1. You’re not confident.
This was the most popular reason to resist networking, according to respondents. There were quite a few different ways that “lack of confidence” was described as keeping people from networking. For some, the thought of interacting with strangers is paralyzing, while for others a mix of low self-confidence, shyness and under-estimation of what they can contribute were cited as reasons to avoid networking. Some respondents mentioned a fear of rejection as the reason.

Giving into these fears is just plain bad for business. A successful entrepreneur is not blocked by fear. In fact, most people find that once they actually venture out to meet people in a network setting, they not only build their businesses — they actually have a good time.

Related: What Would-Be Entrepreneurs Fear Most About Starting Up

2. You’re too busy.
Not having time to network is another excuse I hear a lot from people when I suggest they get involved in a networking organization. People either don’t think it’s worth giving up something else to network, find it causes stress on top of their other obligations or simply believe they don’t have time.

But using “too busy” as an excuse means they are not clear on what they want to gain by directing time toward networking. Once they learn that breaking out of their routine is an enriching experience, they can find ways to make it work into their schedule.

3. You’re impatient for results.
Often people don’t network because they expect immediate results. They deny the fact that networking works because they personally don’t follow up with the people they connect with and get no results. They are impatient and don’t understand the value of taking the time to build fruitful relationships. It hasn’t worked for them in the past, because they go for the “close” as opposed to establishing trust and the relationship first.

We live in such a rushed society these days, expecting — even demanding — immediate results for our efforts. Networking is not a “get-rich-quick” scheme. As I’ve often said, a successful networking effort is much more like farming than hunting. We have to cultivate good relationships that pay us back over the long term, year after year.

Related: Richard Branson on Building a Strong Reputation

4. You think networking is selling.
People often resist networking because they are frightened about being sold to or don’t want to pitch their sale in a room full of competition.

What they don’t realize is that networking is not like “cold-calling.” It isn’t something you do to someone — it’s something you do with them. It’s a conversation. It involves more listening. If both parties keep that in mind, they will be genuinely interested in the other person as they get to know each other. This interest leads to comfort, and that comfort leads to opportunities to provide referrals as they arise and those referrals lead to business.

Related:How to Get Ahead by Being Generous
 

Read more stories about: Networking, Fear, Growing a business, Relationships

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Apr 01 2013
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J2 Marketing

10 Laws of Social Media Marketing

Social Media MarketingLeveraging the power of content and social media marketing can help elevate your audience and customer base in a dramatic way. But getting started without any previous experience or insight could be challenging.

It’s vital that you understand social media marketing fundamentals. From maximizing quality to increasing your online entry points, abiding by these 10 laws will help build a foundation that will serve your customers, your brand and — perhaps most importantly — your bottom line.

 

1. The Law of Listening
Success with social media and content marketing requires more listening and less talking. Read your target audience’s online content and join discussions to learn what’s important to them. Only then can you create content and spark conversations that add value rather than clutter to their lives.

2. The Law of Focus
It’s better to specialize than to be a jack-of-all-trades. A highly-focused social media and content marketing strategy intended to build a strong brand has a better chance for success than a broad strategy that attempts to be all things to all people.

3. The Law of Quality
Quality trumps quantity. It’s better to have 1,000 online connections who read, share and talk about your content with their own audiences than 10,000 connections who disappear after connecting with you the first time.

4. The Law of Patience
Social media and content marketing success doesn’t happen overnight. While it’s possible to catch lightning in a bottle, it’s far more likely that you’ll need to commit to the long haul to achieve results.

5. The Law of Compounding
If you publish amazing, quality content and work to build your online audience of quality followers, they’ll share it with their own audiences on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, their own blogs and more.

This sharing and discussing of your content opens new entry points for search engines like Google to find it in keyword searches. Those entry points could grow to hundreds or thousands of more potential ways for people to find you online.

6. The Law of Influence
Spend time finding the online influencers in your market who have quality audiences and are likely to be interested in your products, services and business. Connect with those people and work to build relationships with them.

If you get on their radar as an authoritative, interesting source of useful information, they might share your content with their own followers, which could put you and your business in front of a huge new audience.

7. The Law of Value
If you spend all your time on the social Web directly promoting your products and services, people will stop listening. You must add value to the conversation. Focus less on conversions and more on creating amazing content and developing relationships with online influencers. In time, those people will become a powerful catalyst for word-of-mouth marketing for your business.

8. The Law of Acknowledgment
You wouldn’t ignore someone who reaches out to you in person so don’t ignore them online. Building relationships is one of the most important parts of social media marketing success, so always acknowledge every person who reaches out to you.

9. The Law of Accessibility
Don’t publish your content and then disappear. Be available to your audience. That means you need to consistently publish content and participate in conversations. Followers online can be fickle and they won’t hesitate to replace you if you disappear for weeks or months.

10. The Law of Reciprocity
You can’t expect others to share your content and talk about you if you don’t do the same for them. So, a portion of the time you spend on social media should be focused on sharing and talking about content published by others.  

Read more stories about: Social Media, How To, Social media business growth

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Feb 12 2013
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Photo Sizes on Social Sites

Photo Sizes on Social Sites

Photo Sizes on Social Sites via Entrepreneur.com

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Feb 06 2013
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J2 Marketing

Startup Split Up

Startup Split UpMost startups fail. That’s not surprising. What is surprising is that so many of them fail not because of competition or failure to build product — they fail because of co-founder conflict. If you don’t address the key issues openly you are likely to experience as many challenges with your co-founder(s) as you are with the business itself.

The following are some of the most important questions that should be resolved as early in the process as possible. In most cases, these issues only get more difficult over time, the sooner you can address them, the better off you are.

Critical Co-Founder Questions

1. How should we divide the shares? There are actually multiple parts to this. Here, I’m primarily interested in the economic impact. Basically, the question is really simple: Who gets what percentage of the company? This question is often the most difficult to answer (and the right answer is rarely “divide them equally amongst the co-founders”). 

2. How will decisions get made? This may be tied to the number of shares (from #1 above), but not usually. You can have voting and non-voting shares. You can setup a board. You’ll need to decide what kinds of decisions get made by the board, and which ones don’t. Common areas to address are decisions around capitalization, executive hiring/firing, share issuance (dilution) and M&A. 

3. What happens if one of us leaves the company? Though it may seem like a bad idea to be talking about this when you’re starting the company – it’s not. In the evolution of any startup, there will be good times and bad times and there will often be times when one or more co-founders are simply not happy and not committed. You should decide how to treat this situation early (when it is easier and everyone is at least semi-rational). The last thing the company needs is a co-founder that is no longer engaged but is hanging around out of guilt or ambiguity. 

4. Can any of us be fired? By whom? For what reasons? Yes, that’s right. Even co-founders can be let go. Too many people mix the notion of being a shareholder in a startup and having an operating role. These two things should be thought of as somewhat separate and distinct. The company should have a mechanism for gracefully terminating the operating role of a co-founder if that’s the right thing to do. This is often not fun, but should be discussed up front. 

5. What are our personal goals for the startup? Though this can change over time, its helpful to at least get a sense of what each of the co-founders wants to get from the company. If you have one co-founder that wants to build a sustainable business that is spinning off cash and run it forever and another one wants to shoot for high growth and some type of liquidity, it’s better to get that out in the open early and talk it through. 

6. Will this be the primary activity for each of us? Lots of co-founder conflict can stem from misunderstandings around how committed everyone is. Will one of the co-founders be keeping her day job until the company gets off the ground? Will one be working on another sideline business? Is one staying in school to finish up a degree?

7. What part of our plan are we each unwilling to change? Not all startups need to change their plans during the course of their evolution. Just the ones that want to survive and succeed. Having said that, there may be elements of the plan that you don’t want to change. This could be around the product being built, the market being addressed or some other aspect of the company. For example, if one startup is fanatically obsessed with wanting to create an enterprise software company, then friction may be created if the model needs to shift to a consumer product. 

8. What contractual terms will each of us sign with the company? One of the best examples of this is a non-compete agreement. Will each of the co-founders be signing some sort of contract with the company (outside of the shareholder agreement)? If so, what will the terms of this be? 

9. Will any of us be investing cash in the company? If so, how is this treated? It is very likely that one or more co-founders will be putting in some cash in the early stages of the company. It is critical to decide up front how this cash will be treated. Is it debt? Is it convertible debt? Does it buy a different class of shares? 

10. What will we pay ourselves? Who gets to change this in the future? This can be a touchy issue. Risk tolerance varies by individual, and it is a good idea to factor this into determining the compensation plan for the founders. The issue can be clouded sometimes when one of the founders is investing significant cash into the enterprise. (Though in theory, it shouldn’t matter where the cash came from when determining comp. plans).

11. What do we want our core values to be? How will we define and develop the culture? This is a tricky one because so few entrepreneurs even think about culture and values in the early days (they’re rightfully busy trying to build a business). But, it’s critical. You should decide what kinds of people you want on the team and what kind work environment you’re looking to build.

You likely won’t be able to answer all of these questions — they’re hard. The important thing is to at least have the conversation. Just like other kinds of relationships, communication is key. Once you start exploring these topics, you’ll find it surprising that things you took for granted may not be the way your co-founder thinks about them at all.

If you’ve experienced co-founder conflict, or have questions you’d add to this list, please share them in the comments. This is a topic that is rarely written about or discussed — but it should be.

This is Version 2 of the article: “10 Questions Co-Founders Should Ask Each Other“

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Feb 01 2013
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J2 Marketing

Eleven things organizations can learn from airports

Marketing-lessons-from-airports-J2[Of course, this post isn’t actually about airports].

I realized that I don’t dislike flying–I dislike airports. There are so many things we can learn from what they do wrong:

  1. No one is in charge. The airport doesn’t appear to have a CEO, and if it does, you never see her, hear about her or interact with her in any way. When the person at the top doesn’t care, it filters down.
  2. Problems persist because organizations defend their turf instead of embrace the problem. The TSA blames the facilities people, who blame someone else, and around and around. Only when the user’s problem is the driver of behavior (as opposed to maintaining power or the status quo) things change.
  3. The food is aimed squarely at the (disappearing) middle of the market. People who like steamed meat and bags of chips never have a problem finding something to eat at an airport. Apparently, profit-maximizing vendors haven’t realized that we’re all a lot weirder than we used to be.
  4. Like colleges, airports see customers as powerless transients. Hey, you’re going to be gone tomorrow, but they’ll still be here.
  5. By removing slack, airlines create failure. In order to increase profit, airlines work hard to get the maximum number of flights out of each plane, each day. As a result, there are no spares, no downtime and no resilience. By assuming that their customer base prefers to save money, not anxiety, they create an anxiety-filled system.
  6. The TSA is ruled by superstition, not fact. They act without data and put on a quite serious but ultimately useless bit of theater. Ten years later, the theater is now becoming an entrenched status quo, one that gets ever worse.
  7. The ad hoc is forbidden. Imagine an airplane employee bringing in an extension cord and a power strip to deal with the daily occurrence of travelers hunched in the corner around a single outlet. Impossible. There is a bias toward permanent and improved, not quick and effective.
  8. Everyone is treated the same. Effective organizations treat different people differently. While there’s some window dressing at the edges (I’m thinking of slightly faster first class lines and slightly more convenient motorized cars for seniors), in general, airports insist that the one size they’ve chosen to offer fit all.
  9. There are plenty of potential bad surprises, but no good ones. You can have a flight be cancelled, be strip searched or even go to the wrong airport. But all possibility for delight has been removed. It wouldn’t take much to completely transform the experience from a chore to a delight.
  10. They are sterile. Everyone who passes through leaves no trace, every morning starts anew. There are no connections between people, either fellow passengers or the staff. No one says, “welcome back,” and that’s honest, because no one feels particularly welcome.
  11. No one is having any fun. Most people who work at airports have precisely the same demeanor as people who work at a cemetery. The system has become so industrialized that personal expression is apparently forbidden.

As we see at many organizations that end up like this, the airport mistakes its market domination for a you-have-no-choice monopoly (we do have a choice, we stay home). And in pursuit of reliable, predictable outcomes, these organizations dehumanize everything, pretending it will increase profits, when it actually does exactly the opposite.

Original post by Seth Godin

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Jan 23 2013
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Mobile Tips

Mobile Facebook Ads and What You Should Know

Not only did Facebook hit the one billion active user mark last year, but the number of people accessing the social site primarily over mobile devices also skyrocketed, to about 60 percent of total users. And co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has said that mobile users are 20 percent more likely than desktop users to go on Facebook on a given day.

What business owners should take note of: Mobileadvertising on Facebook is said to be producing better results than ads that appear in the right-hand column or in the news feeds for desktop-only users. And click-through rates on Sponsored Stories have been, on average, 12 times higher on mobile devices than on desktops, according to Marc Grabowski, COO of Nanigans, a firm that buys Facebook ads for its clients. If there was ever a time to start testing mobile ads, that time is now.

 

But setting up mobile-only ads isn’t as straightforward as using Facebook’s self-serve ad manager. You can’t just click a button to make your ads accessible on mobile devices. Instead, you need to reach mobile users through their news feeds because they cannot see the ads that appear in the right-hand column on Facebook.

Related: 5 Tips for Getting Started With Mobile Advertising

Getting to know the Facebook ‘Power Editor’: Unless you’re using the Facebook API for ad management, the only way most business owners will be able to set up mobile-only ads is through Facebook’s free Power Editor, a Chrome-only plugin. To get going, open Chrome, install the Power Editor, and access it here. Select “all” accounts when prompted so you can get your past ads — these can come in handy when creating new ads and tracking results.

For newbies, the Power Editor can feel more difficult to navigate than Facebook’s self-serve ad manager. So, Facebook has created a guide to using it. It’s worth getting to know well enough to leverage its more advanced tools, including the “placements” feature that enables you to create ads that go to the news feed on desktop, news feed on mobile only, or both, or right-column only ads. 

Four ways to get your ad into mobile news feeds: Once you set up Power Editor and are ready to create an ad for mobile users, decide which ad type you want to test. There are four primary ways to get into your fans’ mobile news feeds:

1. Page post ads, when set up with Power Editor, appear directly in the news feed and, as a bonus, can be targeted beyond fans and friends of fans. They can include photos, offers and more, just like a normal page post ad, and usually show up with a “sponsored” or “suggested post” label. Here’s an example from Country Outfitter, an image captured on my mobile phone:

What You Need To Know About Facebook Mobile Ads

With page post ads, you can reach users via mobile, desktop or both. (But note that the new Facebook ad guidelines state that text in any news feed ad is limited to 20 percent of the total ad image area.)

Related: New Facebook Rules Limit Use of Text on Images

2. Promoted posts look exactly like page post ads in the news feed, but you can buy these ads through the promote button in the status update box on your page or use Power Editor — and they always go into the news feed. The main difference between page post ads and promoted posts is that promoted posts can be shown only to fans and friends of fans, whereas page post ads can be targeted to non-fans as well.

3. Sponsored Stories show in the news feed under the heading “Pages You May Like,” and are used to promote activity to your fans’ friends, with the intention of attracting like-minded people. These ads promote activity such as a fan liking your page, claiming an offer you created or commenting on one of your posts. As always, take care with how you target these to get the most engagement and likes. These can also be targeted to mobile-only, desktop or both, with the Power Editor.

4. Mobile app install ads can be a fun way for companies with registered apps to prompt users to go to their app download page. You can even choose what kind of operating systems and mobile devices your targeted audience has, which is useful if you have, say, an iPhone-only app.

For small-business owners new to mobile ads, it’s best to test a few different news feed ads and target them carefully. Don’t abandon desktop-only ad strategies that are working. Instead, find a way to integrate mobile into your overall strategy so you can compare results, test, track — and test again.

Related: 10 Quick Steps to Creating a Facebook Ad Campaign

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