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Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Doing Social Media without Overdoing Social Media

I’ve noticed a lot of advertisers are now using Social Media – we received a Pottery Barn and a Victoria’s Secret catalog in the mail the other day, both touting to ‘Follow Them on Facebook’ – They get IT!

Dell has been involved with Social Media for quite a while and they have had great results. All of the tv networks are now on Social Media – you can now follow updates for your favorite shows.

The best way to do your social media presence is to not overdo your social media presence.

Let me explain – first, on Facebook follow someone like Ellen or Jay Leno – see how they post their updates on their shows. It’s not all about how they can “SAVE you MONEY” on EVERY post or how “Restaurant Voiceover Artists are SO Freakin’ Important.” They talk about what is relevant – a funny comment that so and so made or who is in their audience – Ellen asks to you ‘tag’ yourself if you are in an audience photo – not only is this a great way to be interactive it’s GENIUS!

We need to be more interactive with our audience and less SHOUTY. The shouty is what is making people not understand why it’s not working. If you think your going to make a quick buck by posting the same thing about how your “Waffle maker also makes Coffee, has a built in radio and also cleans the cat box and your selling it for only $49, with 5 cats free” over and over. Try another tactic – take a picture of it making coffee and waffles and submit a post to Twitter with a pic that says ‘Got Breakfast’ – just don’t post a pic of the litter box by mistake.

I always welcome your comments below – feel free to start a discussion.



If you are looking for a voice for your product, business, presentation, or voicemail, feel free to visit my page at http://justinphillips.us for my demos, and more about me. I have over 15 years experience in the commercial radio industry and I am also available as a social media consultant.




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Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Twitter is Like Car – if proper maintenance is done, it can be maintained at peak performance

First off, let me say that I can completely understand why people stop using Twitter shortly after starting – they either don’t get it, don’t know how to use it, or they just get frustrated throw up their arms and say screw this I’m done.

Twitter is like a car – you need to do maintenance to maintain it. Friends and followers are a great thing to have, however how many of them are listening to your ‘Tweets.’ There are a lot of tools out there that can tell you this information, which I will go over in a later blog post. In doing some maintenance of my own recently I noticed that over 15% of the people I was following hadn’t posted ‘Tweet’ in more than a month – if you haven’t posted in more than a month you have been unfollowed. This is the rule that I have for my Twitter accounts. I have also unfollowed those who are pushing spam, that have gotten through my ‘Vetting of Followers’ on SocialOomph. (they hold followers for 72 hours and if you don’t ‘vet’ them within that time, it goes into automatic – which is fine. I don’t always have time go get to the site to vet my followers so some of the moron accounts get through.)
You can use software like TwiPing to help you with you Twitter account(s). This program can show you when someone last sent a Tweet, as well as other parameters, so you can cut down on your moron followers.
I use the above program once a month for my Twitter maintenance purposes. If you have some other sites or programs that can help ‘Vet the moron followers’ feel free to share them below.

The one problem with Twitter is there are so many people out there, some pushing their business, others talking personally, and then there are my favorites – those watching the Phillies or Penn State sports and posting updates and pics of what is going on with the game. (the Big Dance should be fun in the coming days.) The best way to get past the ‘clutter’ of Twitter and Tweets is to stop, take a breath, have a little patience, add some focus to your Twitter profile message, and talk about more than your business when sending a Tweet. Stop the endless message of how your ‘selling Donkeys 2 for 1 for the Circus for only $99 with the purchase of two clowns and a pooping elephant.’ Be yourself, if your at Starbucks and you got great service, tell us about it. If your in traffic, tell us about it – you never know who your going to help – if someone does a search on Traffic in your area, you may make their day as they can plan an alternate route to work. Social networks are meant to be ‘social’ – so say hello to your followers on occasion to show them that you care about their messages, respond to their ‘tweets’.
  Become more interactive, that’s what is fun about Social Media.

Justin Phillips works as a Voiceover Artist and Social Media Guru. He is available for consulting your Social Media project. If you would like to set up a call (via phone or Skype) email him at your convenience.

justin.phillips@live.com

Justin can be found on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn with daily updates. For more on Justin click here


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Friday, March 5, 2010

My Social Media Use: TWITTER

First off here is a list of the Social Media programs and websites I use each week(a few are for maintenance and are less often.)
Tweetdeck and Hootsuite allow intergration of different types of Social Media Accounts such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
Tweetdeck – I don’t think my ‘Social Media’ life would be the same without this amazing program, that is updated regularly with new tools you can use. It does everything for me but make my coffee in the morning. You can set up columns with each Twitter account(if you are like me and have more than one), have columns for different keyword searches, even include Twitter lists. Tweetdeck constantly updates which means you won’t miss anything. It even offers a login via email incase your computer crashes it saves a backup of your setup so you don’t lose anything.
Hootsuite – I always have this program (web based – for me) running via Google Chrome – it’s similar to Tweetdeck in that it has columns, but I can access it via my phone. It’s great if you have multiple accounts and similar to Tweetdeck in ease of use.
SocialOomph – this webbased service is amazing – my main use on SocialOomph is to Vet My New Followers. It holds new followers for a 72 hour period which allows you the time to look at who is following and determine if you want to follow them back. With some setup, you can also have it send out an automatic Direct Message to those you follow. Like the above, you can setup multiple accounts. With SocialOomph has a lot of tools other than what I mentioned above – You can post Tweets that can be sent later, Unfriend EVERYONE, and see some metrics of who is following you. There are a lot of things to like about SocialOomph and a lot of ways you can use it. This is one site I would definitely check out.
These are just a few of the services out there, I know there are a lot more – feel free to let me know what works for you. I am always interested in working with new networking tools.
Thanks for your time today,
  --Justin

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