3. Getting Started: Are you ready? Where are you at right now? What are your “Guiding Principles?” Creating a meaningful Mission Statement
4. Getting Started: Are you ready? What does success look like to you? Barriers to your success Does your business plan hold the answer?
5. Getting Started: The basics What you know, what you don’t know, and knowing the difference Research – formal and informal Using what you learn
6. Getting Started:The basics Market intelligence Leading with your best foot forward Image building – defining your brand and your reputation
7. Getting Started:The basics Setting objectives and goals Metrics to gauge success Course corrections – refine and retool
8. Getting Started: Who can help me? Help is just around the corner – literally Key vendors, business partners Industry resources, colleagues
9. Getting Started: Who can help me? Paid resources Free or low-cost resources Staying true to your business plan
10. Getting Started: Putting it all together Share your vision – strength comes from within Seek and pluck the low-hanging fruit Casting your net – what IS my prize catch?
11. Getting Started: Putting it all together Delivering your key messages Focus – strategies vs. tactics Choosing the right vehicle to drive your key messages
12. Getting Started: Summary Honesty is the only policy that matters Keep it real – especially with setting goals/objectives Measure, refine, retool Flexibility: times change, so can you!
13. Thank you for your time and attention Please welcome Paula Williams, co-owner and consultant, Aviation Business Consultants International, Inc.
14. What Can Social Media Do For You? Paula Williams, PMP Aviation Business Consultants Online Marketing for the Aviation Industry
21. Search Engines What words will people use when they’re searching for the product or service you sell? Pretend you’re “in the market” for the product or service you provide and have never heard of your company. What words would you use?
38. Brad’s Objectives Promoting a product or service (Airport Business Magazine) Building a professional network Obtaining ideas for future articles
39. Action Items Look for your company, product or service on Google Resolve to make your company, product or service easier to find! Use the tools that work best for you. Register your name, company name, and product names on every platform you can. Consider a Social Media policy. Email Paula@AviationBusinessConsultants.com for a site audit.
42. Thank You! Want More? Connect with ABCI! www.LinkedIn.com/in/PaulaWilliams www.Facebook.com/PaulaWilliams www.Twitter.com/paula_abci Visit Our Blog Subscribe to our Email Newsletter www.AviationBusinessConsultants.com
Notes de l'éditeur
I met Brad at NBAA last year, and we’ve been keeping in contact through Social Media. He’s a reporter that writes great stuff about Social Media. You should subscribe to Airport Business and read Brad’s column.
Let’s talk about Quality of contentMost of us would have a hard time doing business without a telephone. That doesn’t mean that every telephone conversation you have ever had was meaningful to your business and an excellent use of your time. Let’s talk about functionalityThere are fancier telephones than this. Just like some phones let you do conference calls, there are speaker phones, etc. etc.There is nothing particularly magic about a speakerphone, or a cell phone, or whatever it just lets you do some different things. A phone is a phone is a phone. There are fancier web sites and tools. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, all those things are just fancy web sites that encourage interaction.
Social media is not magic! Anybody who tells you you’ll go from zero to millions of dollars in sales overnight is full of hooey. Anybody who tells you that they can make you number one on Google is full of hooey. (Google changed its algorithm on December 4, 2009 so that search results are personalized and local.) Anybody who tells you that you can get 10,000 followers on Twitter in half an hour is full of . .. Hooey. And even if you could get 10,000 followers, it’s probably because you’re offering something for free. As soon as you start trying to do business for real the freebee seekers will leave and you’ll be left with a tarnished reputation and a flattened wallet. Social media is not exempt from the laws of business, gravity and physics. It’s just a tool.
Most of us are promoting a product or service. Most of us are selling something. Even indirectly. Most of us neeed other people to do our jobs. It’s nice to have smart people you can call with a question or to ask for a referral. Most of us need information of some kind.
Starting with selling. You’ll find a version of this in most marketing textbooks, it’s called a “sales funnel” or some other weird name. Basically, it’s a series of interactions that people have with you in the process of buying your product or service.
This is the top line of the funnel.
We’re in Las Vegas, you’ve all seen the billboards. They spend a LOT of money on these billboard- they’re like giant big-screen TVs. What would happen if you spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a billboard like this, and put it next to a dirt road in Kansas? You’ve wasted your money. Google has indexed tens of billions of websites. To find yours, you have to put it in the middle of a busy stream of traffic. Just like having a telephone number doesn’t mean people will find you by randomly typing in numbers, just having a website doesn’t mean people will find you by randomly typing in URLS.
You retain control of your content. If you write a bunch of articles and publish them on LinkedIn or MySpace, that’s like gardening in your neighbor’s yard. Of course, if your neighbor is supplying water and fertilizer and is willing to do a lot of the work for you, then it’s a great idea to have joint projects together. But if you publish a blog, you own the contents of that blog and you’re just publishing copies to these other places. You keep you original investment.
Blogs can be anything. They’re just a website that is built with software that lets non-programmers update it. They often have features that encourage interaction, like buttons to publish articles to other social media outlets, a way for people to leave comment, etc. Like we said before, a blog is just a means of communication. What you put in it can be high-quality content or it can be useless blather. Grab URLs, Twitter names, and Facebook names for yourself, your company, your products, anything else of value that you want to have control of. This is the blog of a different Brad McAllister
After blogs, the first social media channel that I recommend business people check out is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is like Facebook for serious professional people. All 500 of the Fortune 500 are represented in LinkedIn. In fact, 499 of them are represented by director-level and above employees.People with more than twenty connections are thirty-four times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than people with less than five.I’ve found new clients, gotten referrals, referred other people, and sold products based on LinkedIn connections and profiles. We’re not going to go into detail because of time, but there’s an article in your book with some great information about how to Build a Personal NetworkMake ConnectionsPromote Your Product or ServiceBreak the Ice with potential customersGet questions answered or share informationDo Research on people/companies, perform background checks
Depending on the demographics you’re needing to reach, Facebook has some amazing statistics. The demographics on Facebook are getting older and more affluent as people grow up, get their parents and grandparents onto Facebook, etc. Facebook also allows quite a bit more flexibiility in posting different types of material. If you have a product that can be demonstrated by images or video, Facebook is great for that. If nothing else, it’s a great place to publish those articles you worked so hard on, because Facebook gets a lot of traffic. Again, on Facebook, there are two main types of pages - personal profiles (for people), and fan pages (for products, companies, etc.)
Twitter can be very powerful. At a minimum, every company should be watching Twitter to find out what people are saying about their company or product (or group of products.) You can’t buy this kind of market research. Twitter as Market Intelligence – Find Out What People Are Saying About Your Company and Products Twitter as a News Feed – Publish information about your company and productsTwitter as a Conversation Lots of CEOs twitter. Richard Branson – Virgin GroupGeorge Colony – Forrester ResearchJohn Battele– Federated mediaMark Cuban – HDNetBob Parsons – GoDaddyAlex Yoder – WebTrendsTony Hsieh – Zappos’Michael Hyatt – Thomas Nelson PublishersJonathan Schwartz, Sun MicrosystemsA lot of your senators and congressmen. How do they find the time? They don’t! They have “ghost – tweeters!”