use this as an idea, what have you changed in how you do business on Social Media to generate the activity that you want?

Well I am a Boomer (and an earlier one at that-I’ll claim Medicare in a year and a half).  Points don’t drive my actions and don’t really mean much to me.  I create a topic when I feel I have the need to create one.  I respond to a topic if I have a question or something to offer.  Maybe it’s my generation, and no I didn’t get into the hippie movement.  The job in and of itself was my reward.  I also don’t do contests unless they are a by-product of an action I choose to do.

My customer base is pretty much the same.  Because of our products I don’t sell online, but instead mostly provide information.  So I suppose I’m an aberration.  What I do to draw people to my website — I recently posted a message on The Combine Forum about our STS Combine training videos.  All those youtube videos are accessible on one of the pages of our website.  I have had 680 views of that webpage since July 10th and about 870 views of my 8 videos.  These are the type of stats I strive for.

Just ramblings of an old lady.

@annfurnivall @richardmclaughlin

Running a series of small-budget test ads on some of my clients’ Facebook pages to help them get the word out about their brands. So far, we’re seeing good success. Better than I expected.

Love SME’s point system… ever-changing… reminds us all to keep stirring things up and trying something new…

Personally, for the last six months I’ve focused more on writing and producing content products, but recently jumped back into video marketing and (reluctantly) creating basic websites out of necessity for several vertical markets. I’m finding more and more with my video marketing services that certain vertical markets just don’t have websites… very strange… so in order to sell the video services, I have to build the Wordpress site for them. Pretty easy, peasy… but the reason I mention this is because I’m finding EASY rankings for videos I market and pain-in-the-butt rankings for normal website SERPs. I’m finding that all-out optimization of videos ranks sites faster, with almost opposite results if I start with the site. I woke up, took notice, and am focusing almost 80% of my time in feeding the Hungry Video Market whether through writing, production or creating PLR for it. For now, it’s almost like the websites are in the way of video channels, beating them in ratings and ease of ranking. Don’t think that will last — another change-up will come for sure — but for right now, it’s my lead gen tool of choice.

So for me, with all the fallout from Panda and Penguin, it seems everything’s a new ballgame. Kinda fun that way! Like SME and their point system, Google’s always changing, too. Make’s SME the perfect fun training ground to learn how to stay grounded, learn new ways for interaction that’s both enjoyable for all and productive for rankings, and keeps us all on the cutting edge.

Mike and the Gang’s just been brilliant about staying timely, fun, and relevant and I think the points-game has added a lot to those feelings. @richardmclaughlin 

Ann, thanks for sharing those specifics. Looks like your making headway with a lot of creativity. Now I see where your daughter got all her smarts and creativity. The moment I discovered Pinterest, I though of you two and wondered how yall would make it go pop! Lol! @annfurnivall

And Trudy, OMG, I’m counting my blessing! Combines? You GOTTA be creative… totally customer focused and VERY creative.But that’s where corporate video was born… and I’ve never met more creative, more talented videographers than in the corporate video industry marketing high end very NOT glamorous products and services. They always had their trade shows and conventions in conjunction with the TV broadcasting industry and from visiting both worlds at once, corporate video screenwriters were the best storytellers by far. @trudyd1474

@annfurnivall @prestonodenbrett @atlantarobin

The combine class was conducted by one of our Service Managers with about 50 customers in attendance.  I video taped the presentation and cut it up into smaller sections.  I promoted the videos on our monthly direct mail, created postcard size cards for the counter, made a 1 minutes video promoting the videos for our showroom displays and posted the information about the videos on TheCombineForum.com.  What I promoted was our webpage that has all the videos imbedded.  YouTube takes the counts even if viewed from our webpage.  Our YouTube channel has our website, but that reminds me I need to put our website in the description for each video.

I really don’t get many references to our website from YouTube.  Just a bit about our business:  We are limited to selling new equipment only to our 5 local counties and have about 70% of the market.  We can however sell used equipment wherever.  For that we use a couple of tractor marketing sites like tractorhouse.com and John Deere’s machine finder.com.  Our turnover in used equipment is at least 4 times a year.  Right now we have an average of 160 units, but in the fall and winter it grows to 300.  We have several large businesses that turn over their fleet of tractors, etc on a yearly basis. We receive them in November (presell them) and generally have them 90% sold by February.