If so, Social Media Examiner has some exciting news…

But first, much has been said about big companies such as Red Bull and Cisco, and how they harness social media to drive massive traffic to their sites and generate enormous sales.

But when small business owners are asked about social media, many have no idea how to use it in a practical way that can impact their business goals.

And frankly it’s hard for small businesses to get ideas from the big guys that seem to have unlimited resources.

Small Businesses Thriving With Social Media

Not knowing “how” to leverage social media is a huge problem for small businesses, because they typically get most of their customers through word-of-mouth referrals.

Savvy entrepreneurs are tapping the power of social media marketing.

Take Curtis Kimball, for example. In the Mission district of San Francisco where he’s known as the Crème Brûlée Man, Curtis uses Twitter to advertise his daily specials, “secret menus” and specific locations where his cart will be parked.

Curtis, who says he has no marketing budget, currently has more than 20,000 followers, many of whom literally follow him around from neighborhood to neighborhood to get a taste of his delicious custard treats.

And then there’s the story of Alex Morrissey. He leveraged Facebook to garner 500,000 fans and a very successful business called JamaicansMusic.com.

Responding to his social media experience, Morrissey said, “It’s better than traditional media or even advertising.”

What about you? Has your small business really tapped into the massive opportunities presented by social media marketing?

Small Business Social Media Stats

Here’s evidence of the opportunity for small businesses:

• Mass consumer adoption of social media: There are more than 800 million active Facebook users, 80% of all Americans use a social network and Americans spend more time on Facebook than any other U.S. website (Nielsen). Your customers are there.
• Small businesses see big results with social media: A significant 61% of small businesses are landing new customers through social media activities (CrowdSPRING). Plus, more than 70% of small businesses using social media see increased traffic and more than 60% improve search rankings (2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report).
• Smaller businesses find social media costs very low: Nearly 60% of small- and mid-sized businesses spend less than $100 to market via social media (Marketing in a Digital World, Zoomerang).

Are you “all in” with your social media activities? Want to fast-track your success?

Social Media Examiner Announces Small Biz Success Summit

Acknowledging the massive need to empower small businesses, Michael Stelzner (founder of Social Media Examiner) said, “It’s time to help ultra-small businesses really thrive with social media. Heck, we’re really small ourselves and I just don’t see anyone focusing on the needs of the small guys.”

Mike and his team recruited 25 of the world’s top small business experts with strong social media backgrounds for a brand-new summit: Small Biz Success Summit 2012.

If you’re not familiar with these events, they’re large online conferences (so you don’t need to travel).

Typically, thousands gather at Social Media Examiner Success Summits to discover new social media tactics, network with peers and discover how other successful small businesses are using social media.

Here’s what’s unique about this summit:

1. 100% small business focus: No big businesses and no speakers who target big businesses. This is fully for the tiny business.
2. This is totally new content: Broadcast new media, Google+, video marketing, blogs plus search and much more. Social media is always in flux and this event will cover what you need to know now about Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. If you’re working off what you learned six months ago or longer, you are ages behind.Need more??
3. Social Media Examiner’s biggest conference ever: Study the line-up—25 speakers. If you learn some useful new tactics, then it pays for itself.
4. Every presenter is a small biz owner. This is highly customized for you.

There's a free sample class if you click above and look for the yellow box near the top right.

All the speakers are themselves small business owners who are deeply entrenched in social media marketing. They include:

• John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing
• Anita Campbell of SmallBizTrends
• Jesse Stay, author of Google Plus for Dummies
• Hollis Thomases, author of Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day
• Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner
• Mari Smith, co-author of Facebook Marketing
• David Siteman Garland of The Rise to the Top
• Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute
• Brian Clark, founder of Copyblogger
• Ramon Ray of SmallBizTechnology.com
• Lee Oden, founder of Top Rank Online Marketing Blog
• Amy Porterfield, co-author of Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies
• Ed Gandia, co-founder of International Freelancers Academy
• Marcus Sheridan, founder of The Sales Lion
• And many others

Because this is a fully online conference, you don’t have to worry about missing a session. If something comes up and you’re not able to attend, transcripts and recordings are provided!

There also will be plenty of networking opportunities via LinkedIn and you’ll have access to thousands of people who are expected to attend.

Justifying Your Expense

Are you worried about getting funds to pay for the summit? It’s a valid concern.

Can you really afford to not give social media marketing a try?

If you land just one or two customers as a result of attending the summit, the investment may have paid for itself.

Even if you don’t need the summit for yourself, it would make a very special Christmas gift for a friend, son or daughter who owns a small business.

Here’s what Paul Rodriguez, an attendee at our previous summit, had to say:

“If you’re using social media to promote your business (and you’re crazy if you’re not), this summit is a must. The instructors and content were excellent!”

Tickets are currently on sale for 50% off if you act now. Click here for details.

What do you think? Is your small business struggling with social media? Share your story in the comments box below.

Want to win a free ticket to BlogWorld & New Media Expo 2011 in Los Angeles?

The entire Social Media Examiner team will be there!  Keep reading to learn two ways you can win a full-access pass to this mega-social media conference.

What Is BlogWorld?

The best way to learn about BlogWorld is directly from one of its co-founders.

In this video, Michael Stelzner interviews Rick Calvert, CEO and co-founder of BlogWorld during their 2010 event.

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BlogWorld & New Media Expo is the largest conference, tradeshow and media event dedicated to blogging, podcasting, social media, social networking, online video, music, Internet TV and radio. With more than 120 educational sessions, this is THE event to attend for blogging and social media knowledge.

How Can You Win Tickets?

We are giving away two free tickets to BlogWorld’s largest event ever, valued at $1297 each!

Two ways to win: There are two tickets up for grabs and two ways to win:

#1: Twitter entry

Simply click the button on the right or tweet what you see below for a chance to win one ticket:

You can tweet up to two times per day. Each tweet is an entry to win. We’ll randomly draw the winner of a free ticket. All tweets must have the #winBWELA hashtag included.

#2: Written entry

Simply write why we should award you a free ticket in the comments box below (scroll down).

The judges (Mike Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner and Dave Cynkin, co-founder of BlogWorld) will select the winning entry. Their decisions are subjective and final.

What you need to know:

1. You can enter to win either or both prizes.
2. Tweets must contain #winBWELA.
3. The deadline to enter is Friday, September 9, and the winner will be announced shortly thereafter ON THIS PAGE.
4. If you’ve already purchased a ticket, no worries. If you win, BlogWorld will either give you a full refund or you can give your spare ticket to someone you really like who wants to come with you!
5. Winners must arrange their own travel and lodging.
6. No purchase is necessary to win.

We look forward to seeing your comments and tweets. Good luck!

Don’t worry. You aren’t alone.

I fought this battle also, and in the end I realized that I needed to drop terms like followers, retweets and status updates from my discussions in executive meetings. It was a tough conclusion, but I realized those metrics didn’t tell executives what they wanted to know.

This article will share 7 tips for getting executive buy-in for social media.

#1: Identify with the mindset of executives

It's important to work together to measure social media optimization.

Think about social media measurement differently. Try to remove all jargon and put it into a language that executives can understand and ultimately help tie results to the bottom line.

Executives think at a 50,000-foot view. Most of them aren’t looking at metrics like daily site traffic; they’re looking at sales reports. Their benchmarks are different than what we’re used to measuring ourselves.  It’s mission-critical that you align your benchmarks with theirs.

#2: Show them the money

Because social media is new territory for them, it’s too complex to try to teach them the “new” measurements and have them make the connection to what matters to the company on their own.

To be successful, you need to clearly make the connection for them. There is one way to do this and eliminate confusion. SHOW THEM THE MONEY! Yes, that is a shameless Jerry McGuire reference. But it’s extremely relevant.  Transform your conversation with executives about social media into how it impacts sales, revenue and costs.

These three items are at the top of every executive’s mind. They look at reports every single day to determine whether the company is meeting its sales and revenue projections and they watch costs like hawks to make sure profits aren’t being eroded.

Your challenge is to find a way to put social media into the context of how it impacts these core metrics, so you can finally break through and get your executives excited about the possibilities that social media brings to the company.

#3: Stop freaking out

Don't let fear prevent you from taking action.

Trust me, no-one knows more than I do that tying sales, revenue and cost to social media is darn near impossible from where you’re sitting right now. It sounds great in theory, but the execution is a whole different ball of wax. However, I will tell you it’s not impossible. With the right questions, the right tools and the right people in the room you can find a way.

#4: Understand what you CAN measure today

If you were to sit down and look at the three metrics—sales, revenue and cost—which ones can you measure today? I can probably answer this for you—cost. We pretty much all know what we’ve spent on social media in the last year and what we plan to spend this year.

#5: Know what you CAN’T measure today

Having clear and concrete goals is important in calculating your return on investment.

Take a look at your company’s executive reports. What metrics are your executives actually looking at? What metrics are you struggling to get data on for social media? Is it revenue and sales (units sold)? It’s okay if it is, but your goal is to find a way to add social media into the mix.

#6: Recognize what you’re dealing with

What systems does your company use to generate the executive reports? Typically, it includes a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, campaign reporting system, web analytics system and potentially an accounting system if that isn’t part of your CRM package. Focus on how your other online activities are tied into these systems.

For example, how do you know if sales are coming from Google Adwords or organic search? How is that tracked, what systems does it pass through and where does the data end up?

Then we get to the tough part. Can you leverage any of these systems to track social media traffic? If you can’t do it with how they’re set up today, ask what modifications need to be made in order to include it.

#7: Put together a plan for today and tomorrow

Your plan should include internal and external goals.

You’re probably going to have to do some work to get social media included into your existing metrics for the company. And unfortunately, that will take something we’re all lacking… time. But that’s okay because while you’re building for how you’ll measure in the future, you can also leverage what you know today. If you’re like me, that’s cost.

Here are three metrics you can probably get today. While they aren’t ideal executive metrics, they’ll tell a story that your executives will understand.

Cost per site visit

You can use the referring URL in your web tracking system to calculate the number of visits generated from social media channels and generate a cost per site visit to compare against other types of referrers.

Cost per impression

If your company is heavy on traditional advertising like TV and radio or public relations outreach, executives are used to looking at cost per impression metrics. You can use tools like TweetReach to get rough calculations for Twitter.

TweetReach generates reports with key metrics like reach and exposure.

Cost per subscriber

If you can look at the referring URLs for your newsletter or email subscribers, you can also calculate the cost per subscriber. Think of this in terms of the cost of getting the email address of a prospect. Social media can generate really low costs per subscriber, giving it a leg up on some other online channels.

As more executives become interested in social media, it’s our responsibility to show them that it isn’t fluff and that it does contribute to the bottom line. You can check out these 6 Social Media Success Metrics You Need to Track, 8 Social Media Metrics You Should Be Measuring and this Study Reveals Top 6 Social Media Goals for 2011.  You can also check out this 33 page step-by-step guide, if you’re up for the challenge.

Hopefully, these tips will help you get there.

How about you? What kind of questions are your executives asking about social? Add your thoughts and share your perspective in the comment box below.

All photos from iStockphoto.

What’s New This Week?

Facebook Deals Go Local: Businesses can now offer discounts to their local markets through Facebook Deals. And Facebook will be publishing these Deals stories in the Facebook feeds of your customers. This new service puts Facebook into direct competition with Groupon.

Local Deals start out initially in Dallas, Austin, Atlanta, San Francisco and San Diego.

Google Docs Introduces Threaded Discussions: Google has enhanced the discussion features on newly created Google Docs. Each comment now has a timestamp and profile picture. You can edit comments, hide them from the original document and reopen them. You can add someone to a discussion with an @mention. “For example, typing @eddy@altostrat.com in a discussion will send a notification email to Eddy with the text of your comment.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zmOYziFKZw

Twitter Makes Your Account More Secure: You now have the option of always using a secure HTTPS service when accessing your account through Twitter.com and the official Twitter applications for the iPhone and iPad. “Using HTTPS for your favorite Internet services is particularly important when using them over unsecured WiFi connections.”

Under the Settings tab of your Twitter account, you can now choose to view all of your tweets through a secured URL.

Twitter Celebrates 5 Years of Tweets: Twitter released the latest Twitter statistics on their 5th birthday. The past year has seen a 182% increase in mobile users. Check out the other stats here.

On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey (@jack) sent the first Tweet. Last month there was an average of 140 million tweets sent per day.

Here’s another social media tool worth a look.

Wishpond: A shopping engine to search local stores and find the best deals in town. You can Make a Wish on a product you like, and Wishpond will alert you when the price drops, find similar products that match your desired price and send you personalized deals from nearby stores that will match that price. Wishpond was also recently in the news for their participation in Crowdbeacon.

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And don’t miss this:

Social Media Examiner’s Social Media Success Summit 2011: Check out the largest online social media conference! Help your business grow with social media.

Watch this video as Michael Stelzner shares his story.

What social media news caught your interest this week? Please share your comments below.

In this interview we talk about what makes for great content, how he came up with the title of his latest book, what Enchantment means for business, why businesses need to embrace nobodies and how he promoted his book. (Be sure to listen to the MP3 of this interview below.)

Mike: Most of our readers are marketers and business owners. Can you explain what Alltop does for them and why they might find it useful?

Guy: One of the functions of marketers, PR people and social media people is they need to keep on top of things.

The vision of Alltop was that we should aggregate RSS feeds for people by topic and create essentially an online magazine rack so that you could go to one place and say, “Okay, these are all the social media blogs and websites aggregated in one place.” It’s the five most recent stories from each source, and we give you a preview of the first paragraph of each story so you can see if you really want to click through.

This way, if your audience went to social-media.alltop, for example, they would see several hundred sources aggregated in one place, the five most recent stories from each source, and in seconds they could scan through hundreds of stories and get a good feel for what’s going on. That’s the vision of it.

Mike: Now you can create your own custom Alltop, right? How does that work?

Guy: Yes. We have about 850 topics ranging from adoption to zoology. A person who has a greater interest than just social media might have a few favorite tech blogs. Maybe the person has a desire to adopt kids, is a foodie, is a Macintosh user and is a real hockey buff. So he or she would want a couple of hockey blogs, a couple of tech blogs, a couple of social media blogs, some food blogs, an adoption blog, and that would be the person’s custom magazine rack. What we let you do is select from any of the 40,000 blogs that are at Alltop, and you can create what’s called “My Alltop.” That’s your custom magazine rack.

The difference between us and Google Reader is Google Reader says, “We’re giving you a container. Fill it up.” We say, “We have preselected 40,000 blogs for you. Just click on a plus sign and you’ll subscribe and create your own shelf.”

Mike: Obviously, you’re looking at a ton of content, and Alltop is really not just any content—it’s from the best content providers. Thinking about content, in your opinion, what do you think makes good content? What separates the best of the bunch? What makes certain blogs stand out?

Guy: For me, one of the easiest, quickest and most effective ways to determine if content is really useful is if it uses either unordered or ordered lists; i.e., bullets or numbers. Maybe it’s just my mind, but whenever I go to a blog post and I see 1), 2), 3), 4), 5) or bullet, bullet, bullet, my mind says, “Better organized, better thought out, more easy to use.”

When I go to a blog post that’s just paragraph after paragraph with nothing in bold and no sort of navigation tips, it’s hard to find the value. The ones I hate the most are “How to Be a More Effective Social Media Marketer” and you go to the post and it’s just paragraphs. There are no bullets. So you have to dig out of each paragraph what the tips are. Where are the tactical, actionable items? I think one very good indicator of a good blog post is, “Is it in bullet list format?”

Lots of people say, “Guy, that’s such a superficial way to look at things,” and “It’s not my style to write in bullet points,” but try looking at the world through the bullet point filter, and I think you’ll see that the best information is bulleted.

Mike: I’ve often said that I think the path to the mind is through the eyes, so if you can get the attention of an eyeball through formatting, then ultimately you can ensure your content makes its way into the minds of people. I think what you’re saying resonates true. It’s all about the way it’s presented, first and foremost. And you know, if it’s crappy content, then people won’t pay attention to it, but if it’s great content and it’s presented in a way that accommodates the eye, then I think you’ve got a magic formula.

Guy: With a bulleted list, I would make the case that even if it’s crappy content, it will be easier to determine it’s crappy with a bulleted list because you won’t have to dig through the crappy paragraphs to determine it’s crappy. You could just glance at a bullet, which is much faster.

Mike: Most of us are becoming inundated with content, so we have to make it easier for people to digest, and that’s where bullets come in.

Guy: I think a second and related point to this is that the greatest headlines to me are “Top 10 Tips…”, “How To…”, and “The Art Of…”. It happens that I’m a very tactical, action-oriented person. I’m looking for ways to do things better. Just give me what to do, tell me the 10 things to do.

Mike: Let’s talk about your story a little bit. Let’s talk about Enchantment. What is that word in your mind? What does it mean? Why did you choose it for your book? It’s quite an interesting word.

Guy: Well, I came at it from two directions. One very pragmatic, which is I needed a word that Guy Kawasaki could own in the same sense that Tom Peters owns the word excellence and maybe Geoffrey Moore owns the word chasm and Clayton Christensen owns the words innovator’s dilemma. Everybody has his or her word, and I needed a word.

The genre of this kind of writing is influence or persuasion, and those kinds of things.

Mike: Cialdini has the word influence, right?

Guy: Right. Cialdini owns influence. He’s also my friend, so I’m not going to try to steal the word from him. So when it came right down to it, coming from that pragmatic direction, enchantment was the word.

Coming from the other direction, which is a more philosophical direction, I wanted a word that went beyond influence and beyond wooing and beyond persuading. I wanted something that took it to the next level. It’s one thing to influence another person—it’s another thing to enchant the person.

Mike: What does that mean, especially for a business?

Guy: I think that a business that enchants a customer has a customer who’s beyond loyal. It’s delight. You can influence me and you can woo me and you can persuade me, but when you enchant me, that means that I’m head over heels in love. It’s the difference between like and love.

Mike: I think of Walt Disney World fans. People who are fans of Disney are enchanted, and they’ll do anything to participate in any of those kinds of activities endorsed by Disney because they’ve been enchanted, right?

Guy: Yes, and of course, the greatest example of all is Apple. What other company gets people to buy a phone that can barely go one day without charging, and that has the worst (until a few weeks ago) carrier in the world exclusively? That’s the power of enchantment. Anybody can sell a great phone with a great carrier.

Mike: What’s the benefit to a business of enchanting its customers?

Guy: Two levels. One is loyalty, repeat business, forgiveness at times. It just makes sense to have this relationship, this Nordstrom-esque kind of relationship with your customer. So that’s an obvious sort of business return, bottom-line answer. But I also think there’s a higher-level answer, which is that it’s a lot more fun to have a customer relationship based on enchantment rather than arm’s-length, sort of tit-for-tat, quid pro quo. I think that permeates the entire organization.

That’s a very different attitude than, “Oh, let’s just get up and see what our click-through rate is, and can we get a better CPM deal? How are we being rated in a statistical survey?” It’s a very different outlook on life.

Mike: Well, in Chapter 4 of your book, since we’re talking about Apple, you say the following about Steve Jobs: “Steve Jobs can enchant the shell off an egg without disturbing the yolk. But without Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, or iPad, Steve wouldn’t have anything to sell.”

You worked for Apple and you worked with Steve. Can you talk to me a little bit about the connection between being enchanting as Steve Jobs is, as you talk about him in your book, versus having something that is enchanting? What’s more important?

Guy: Neither, or both, actually. A great enchanting person with nothing to sell has nothing to sell. And a great product, without people who can enchant people and evangelize people to embrace, it is also a half-completed project.

Apple has this sweet spot of a CEO who really can enchant people with just his keynotes alone, and he has an enchanting product. So if you said to me, “Guy, you can either have an enchanting person or an enchanting product. Pick one,” I would pick the product. I would say, “Give me an enchanting product and then I can train people to be enchanting with it.” Whereas, if you give me enchanting people but a crappy product, it’s a lot harder to fix the product.

Mike: What makes an enchanting person?

Guy: I think an enchanting person starts off with a fundamental basis of being likeable. If you think about it, have you ever been enchanted by someone you can’t stand? Probably not.

The second component is trustworthiness, because you can like a person—you can like a Hollywood star, or their persona anyway—but that doesn’t mean you trust them. So the second component is trustworthiness.

The example I cite in the book of trustworthiness and competence and likeability is someone like Terry Gross of NPR. I don’t know her personally, but in listening to her on Fresh Air, you have a very good sense of her that she really is competent. She really can conduct a great interview across many, many subjects. She’s laughing, she’s teasing. You have a sense that she’s just not reading off a teleprompter that some producer put up 30 seconds ago.

So it’s between likeability and trustworthiness and knowledge and competence. And the difference between knowledge and competence is that knowledge is what you know, competence is the ability to apply it. A knowledgeable, competent, likeable, trustworthy person is enchanting.

Mike: Now let’s flip it over to the enchanting product. What are some qualities of an enchanting product? Can you give us some examples?

Guy: Sure, there are basically five or so key elements to the product. The first is depth—a product that is feature-rich. It does a lot.

The second thing is that it’s intelligent in the sense that its makers have intelligently figured out the customers’ problem and a solution to their problem, maybe even before the customers have.

The example I like to cite is that Ford Motor Company has a product called MyKey. What that enables you to do is program the top speed that the car can go. Imagine if you bought a really hot Mustang and you had to loan the car to your teenage son. You could program it so that the car could go no more than 60 miles an hour. I think that’s a really brilliant idea!

The next quality is completeness. Great products, enchanting products, they’re not just a physical entity and they’re not just a download. There’s a totality of the experience, which would be a string of enhancements, online documentation, technical support, all the good stuff. It’s not just the car. It’s the totality of the experience.

Another quality is elegance in terms of user interface. Someone has cared about the interaction between you and the product. That’s where Apple really shines.

The last thing is that I think enchanting products are empowering. That is, they make you feel better about yourself. A Macintosh is enchanting because it makes you feel more creative and more productive. Some computers you fight and some computers make you better.

Mike: I like the way you’ve analyzed that. I think a lot of businesses can really be thinking about this when they’re developing their products and services.

Guy: The acronym is DICEE. It’s deep, intelligent, complete, elegant and empowering.

Mike: Let me switch into a totally different discussion. You talk about the importance of embracing nobodies in your book. I’d like to explore this a little bit with you because so many people simply go after who they think is the highest profile individual when it comes to trying to get endorsements or support. I like the fact that you’re kind of going countercultural here and saying maybe you should not just look at those people. Can you explain what it means to embrace nobodies and why it’s important?

Guy: My theory is that nobodies are the new somebodies. In the old world, information came down from the mountain and trickled down to the masses. You had to look up at the mountain and see god, and god was the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Fortune and Forbes, Wired and CNET.

So in a world dominated by gods or goddesses on a mountain, you had to suck up to the gods and goddesses, hoping that they would like your product so they would tell the great unwashed masses, “We, the gods, have decided that you should like Facebook, and you should like Twitter, and you should like Macintosh, and you should like Shutterfly, and you should like Delicious.” I guess Delicious is a bad example now.

That’s the old world. In the new world, with blogging and tweeting and Facebooking and all the other stuff, I think it’s just as likely that someone you never heard of who has absolutely no platform compared to any of these publications will love your product and spread the word.

LonelyBoy15 on Twitter might tell 200. But it may be that LonelyBoy15 who is really a database administrator telling people about your product is more powerful in aggregation than this godlike person on the mountain.

I’m not telling you to ignore the gods, what I’m telling you is that the LonelyBoy15s and the Tiffany65s, they all add up.

Facebook grew because nobodies signed up for it and these nobodies created this total force. Now the somebodies have to say that Facebook was interesting, and they had to cover Facebook because if they didn’t, they’d look stupid.

My theory is that you don’t know who LonelyBoy15 is. It’s not like there’s a LonelyBoy15.com that’s ranked according to Alexa or Compete in the top 500 sites on the Internet. What you have to do is plant a lot of seeds, and you just hope that some of them are LonelyBoy15s.

Mike: What kind of practical tips would you give to your fellow marketers who want to try to plant seeds with nobodies?

Guy: The more seeds you plant, the more likely some will take root. With my book, the typical business book rollout involves inviting a few hundred reviewers. Obviously, you try to get The New York Times and The Washington Post and whatever. That’s the traditional method.

I happen to have a very valuable asset that’s kind of unique in the world, which is I’m the co-founder of Alltop, which has 40,000 blogs created by 20,000 people. I sent an email to all 20,000 saying, “I’m coming out with a new book. Would you like to review it?” Of those 20,000 people, roughly 1,200 said yes, so 1,200 people are going to review this book.

In a perfect world, I’m going to send out all 1,200, so on or about March 8, there’ll be 1,200 reviews of Enchantment. I don’t think that all 1,200 are going to come through, but let’s say 500 do. I don’t think there’s ever been a book that rolled out with 500 reviews, to put it mildly.

One of them might be Silicon Valley moms blog, or it could be the homeschooling blog because I have homeschooling.alltop, so homeschooling bloggers got my email. If they responded and said, “Yes, we would like to review your book,” then my book might be reviewed in Homeschooling World. Homeschooling World might only have 1,000 readers, but God bless them.

Mike: And they’re probably very influential people, I would imagine too.

Guy: In homeschooling, absolutely they are. So do I care if the person who’s the homeschooling main blogger tells all the other homeschoolers, “You have to read this book”? That is my best-case scenario!

Don’t get me wrong. I would love for The New York Times Book Review to say, “Everyone should read this book,” but that’s highly unlikely. On the other hand, I think I’ll get a lot of homeschooling blogs, I’ll get travel blogs, I’ll get mommy blogs, I’ll get food blogs.

Mike: And social media blogs.

Guy: Social Media Examiner. And they all add up.

Mike: Just a few closing comments. I was skeptical at first, I’ll be honest with you, because I wasn’t sure what you were trying to accomplish with the word enchantment. But having read through it, I believe that it’s really powerful what you’ve done here, and I think that time will prove that what you’ve done is created your next bestseller, so congratulations.

Guy: Thank you. Everybody has to have goals. Do you know the book How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie? That book is totally awesome. It came out in 1937, and it has sold roughly 15 million copies. If you go to Amazon today, you’ll probably see that it’s in the top 200 sellers to this day. That’s kind of my goal.

Mike: You want it to be a timeless book.

Guy: Yes.

Mike: That’s awesome. I want to close with this last question. If folks want to learn more about you specifically, and your book Enchantment, where would you like them to go?

If you want to find out more information about Enchantment, go to Facebook.com/enchantment. It’s a fan page where I post all my information. Mari Smith opened my eyes to Facebook and she introduced me to the Facebook programmer who did my custom work. She also introduced me to Wildfire, that is doing an Enchantment quiz for me.

Mike: Guy, thank you very much. I know that you’re a busy man and I greatly appreciate your taking the time out. We look forward to seeing more great things from you very soon.

Guy: Michael, I know you would do the same for me!

Mike: You know it!

Listen to our complete extended interview (below) to hear some of the interesting ways Guy promoted his book, as well as the dark side of enchantment.

Click here to download MP3.

What do you think of Guy’s ideas? Leave your comments in the box below.

As of March 2011, Social Media Examiner has 59,000 email subscribers, 33,000 Facebook fans, over 60 writers and half a million page views per month.

In addition, the site has generated almost $2 million in sales; ranks among the top 12 websites on two Technorati lists – business and small business; and ranks among the top 1,500 websites in the entire United States, according to Alexa.

“We didn’t do anything unique,” Stelzner said. “We simply employed great content with smart social media marketing and our community did the rest. And any business can achieve great results.”
Listen to Michael share more of the story.

Here’s How Your Business Can Thrive With Social Media

Would you like to learn the tactics of social media from pros like Stelzner—all from the comfort of your home or office? If so, keep reading.

Imagine how much it would cost you to attend a week-long conference with 22 different experts in a faraway city. The conference fee, airfare, hotel room, rental car and restaurants would set you back several thousand dollars.

But you can attend an online conference with 22 different social media pros for a fraction of that cost.

Yes, we’re talking about Social Media Examiner’s upcoming third-annual social media conference, Social Media Success Summit 2011.

You may have been one of the 2,500 attendees at last year’s summit and now you’re wondering if you can skip this one. We don’t recommend it!

“LinkedIn and Facebook have gone through many changes just in the last two months,” Stelzner said.

If you’re one of those 59,000 Social Media Examiner subscribers, you already know that, right? Because you’ve read the following stories:

• 8 New Facebook Page Changes: What You Need to Know
• What the Facebook Message Platform Means for Business
• 8 New LinkedIn Features Worth Exploration
• How LinkedIn Apps Can Promote Your Business

All of these articles were published in the last two months.

Learn What Works in Social Media Marketing

“We have a whole new lineup this year,” Stelzner said. “And the major emphasis in this summit is monitoring and tracking your social media marketing results.”

Nearly all of the presenters have either authored a social media book or manage social media programs for well-known corporations.

You’ll hear from Boeing, Verizon, Intel, Citigroup and Cisco. Here’s a partial list of the 22 presenters:

• Jeremiah Owyang, Altimeter Group
• Brian Solis, author of Engage
• Mari Smith, co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day
• Frank Eliason, Citigroup
• Mario Sundar, LinkedIn
• David Meerman Scott, author of Real-Time Marketing and PR

And here’s a sample of what you’ll learn: Facebook news feed optimization, how big B2B brands are using social media, how to use LinkedIn to grow your business, how to attract local customers using Facebook Places and the 6-step process for measuring social media return on investment.

Last year’s attendees included General Mills, American Express, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, 3M, Kellogg’s, General Electric, MetLife, Fox TV, U.S. Army, NCR, Ben & Jerry’s, Xerox, Capital One, Disney and thousands of small businesses.

There are only 2,500 spots and a lot of them have already been taken. Grab yours before it’s gone!

Sign up here to see a FREE sample class or take advantage of the half-price sale. It’s only available for a limited time! Last year’s summit sold out.

Did you attend last year? What did you think? What are your social media plans? Please leave your comments in the box below.

What’s New This Week?

Facebook Upgrades Comments Plugin for Websites: Did you know Facebook allows you to add comments to any web page using its platform? Facebook now allows readers to have their comments published in their Facebook news feeds. And when friends comment back in Facebook, the reply will show up on your site. This is something all bloggers should check out.

This is how the comment I left on a recent TechCrunch blog (with the new Facebook Comment plugin) is published on my Facebook Profile wall.

Facebook Likes Button Clicks Go to News Feed: When your readers Like something on your website, this now generates an update on their news feeds that looks like Facebook Share. It appears as if you’ll only need one Facebook button on your blog or website in the future: the Facebook Like button.

I Liked these pages on these websites and this is how the updates show up on my Facebook Profile and in my friends' news feeds on Facebook.

LinkedIn Groups Guarantee Relevant Jobs Listing: The Jobs tab in LinkedIn Groups is now tailored specifically for the group. “All these jobs are either shared into the group by its members, or match keywords specified by the group manager, so they’re guaranteed to be relevant.”

LinkedIn Group managers can improve the experience for their members with job listings more targeted to their group.

Google Enhances User Profiles: Google Profiles have been around for a while to help you “connect to other public online services and improve your search results.” The new design lets you “highlight the information that’s most important to you.”

Check out the latest options to present yourself on Google Profiles.

Here are a few new social media tools worth a look.

Spreaker: an audio platform that allows anyone to create, broadcast and share a personal radio show across the Internet in a simple and accessible way.

With Spreaker, casual podcasters and bloggers have an easy way to keep in touch with their audience by audio.

fflap: a social selling tool for eBay to help sellers reach more people and sell their items faster.

Social shopping tools like fflap help businesses leverage their social networks.

uQR.me: you can create a unique QR code and a profile page where you can easily change, update or replace the code’s content any time you want.

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And don’t miss this:

Social Media Examiner’s Social Media Success Summit 2011: Just announced, this online mega-conference will help you business grow with social media.

What social media news caught your interest this week? Please share your comments below.

Chris shares the story of how he took advantage of cheap airplane tickets to hold roundtables in various cities to start the Social Media Club and how it has evolved since then.

You’ll also find out what businesses are doing wrong in social media today and hear how Chris sees human nature impacting the future of social media.

Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn:

• How the evolution of the web has influenced social media
• Why consumers need to know how to filter information
• Why social media is about being a rockstar
• Whether good content is all you need to be heard
• How the “long tail lengthens and the head strengthens” and what this means for your social media strategy
• Why Facebook is a great tool to bring people together
• How enterprise social media uses either “social” or “leading” tactics

Watch the video to find out more and then connect with Chris on Twitter @ChrisHeuer and check out Social Media Club.

What were your takeaways from this video? How do you see the evolution of social media? Please leave your comments below.

Chris shares the foundation pieces you need to build a successful business blog and explains how to create killer content to engage your audience and get the results you want from blogging.  Chris also talks about the role blogs play within a good social media ecosystem and how this helps you connect with your audience.

Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• Know why you want to blog, who you’re creating the content for and what you want to get out of it
• Target your customers when you write because if you simply write in general about your topic you’ll only attract your peers
• Take advantage of the popularity of list posts
• Use stories because they never go out of fashion
• Draw from real experience to show more emotions and engage readers as a person so they can connect with you on a human level
• Don’t give up too soon
• Grow a thick skin and learn how to deal with the personal attacks that come with blogging and putting yourself out there

Connect with Chris on Twitter @ChrisGarrett, on Facebook and check out Chris’s blog.

Do you blog? What tips do you have to share about blogging? Please leave them below.

If you’re looking for a social media monitoring tool, you’ve probably noticed that it’s quickly becoming a confusing landscape. For those who are new to social media and looking for tools to manage their presence, it’s difficult to know how to compare one vendor to the next. Here’s the skinny on where Radian6 fits into the picture.

Where does Radian6 fit into the social media measurement landscape?

Radian6 helps brands ensure that no post is missed.

We offer unequalled coverage of the social web and provide metrics to measure what is being said, and by whom. —David Alston, CMO Radian6.

Primarily, Radian6 is a monitoring tool. It can help you monitor brand mentions across the social landscape and the new Engagement Console offers you an end-to-end presence management tool.

Radian6 Dashboards

For consideration: Think about how much “noise” you have in your space. In order for monitoring to be actionable you want to keep in mind that for industries and brands that are targets for spammers it can take a considerable amount of work to filter and find the “meaningful” conversations. I experienced this problem myself, as CareOne and the entire debt relief industry are hounded by spammers and it required intervention from Radian6 to get it in line.

Tip: Many people start by putting in keywords that are used in SEO and paid search. To narrow your results, sort them by comment count. Because comments indicate more engagement, it’s more likely that the conversations are meaningful. Look for other words that are used frequently with your keywords and add them as modifiers to narrow your results to conversations, rather than spam bots.

The Engagement Console is a real-time social web client—more complete than Twitter.

What are Radian6′s greatest strengths?

“Radian6 offers users comprehensive coverage of discussions on the social web, covering hundreds of millions of blogs, comments, the public Facebook API and the full Twitter firehose. In addition to this coverage, Radian6 is scalable within an enterprise, allowing online comments to be assigned within the business, to customer service, sales, marketing and so forth. Radian6 also integrates with other enterprise applications like Salesforce.com and analytics like Webtrends, Omniture and Google Analytics.” —David Alston

You can scour more than 150 million public sites and sources including blogs and comments, forums, mainstream online news publications, public photos and videos.

In the landscape of monitoring tools, while competitors are on the rise, Radian6 has had a very comfortable and secure position in the market. I think this is because of two things. First, they entered the market early and got popular social media bloggers to test them out and recommend them. Second, they quickly gained popularity among enterprise organizations with big brand names as being the go-to choice.

For consideration: Radian6 is a very comprehensive tool that gives you a one-stop shop for engaging on your social channels. The workflow aspect is a key consideration for enterprise-level organizations. However, for smaller businesses or teams with one or two people it may be overkill. Additionally, their pricing model can get expensive quickly for larger teams. It starts at $1k+ per month.

Tip: Take advantage of the free tools out there for a while. See what you like best about them and see what they’re lacking. Create a list of absolute must-haves and nice-to-haves. When you’re looking at different providers you can use this checklist to make sure they have what you need. Anything they’re offering that isn’t on your absolute must-have or nice-to-have lists will likely end up being an unused feature.

If Radian6 is integrated with Salesforce, Webtrends, Omniture and Google Analytics, can they provide ROI data?

The short answer is no. Based on the integration David described to me, there’s no way to follow the conversation back to the revenue. The integration was mostly done from a customer service perspective.

“For Salesforce, it’s designed in such a way that, for example, if you find a customer service issue in Radian6, you can link the record of what you find in Radian6 back to the customer record. In terms of Google Analytics, Webtrends or Omniture, you can create an XML report of the 10 terms that get captured in Webtrends that you want to import into Radian6. You can then overlay the Webtrend data on those keywords with the information inside Radian6 and do kind of a pivot to sort by items like time on site.” —David Alston

For consideration: The level of conversion tracking was described by Alston as items like lead forms that are set up as goals within your web tracking software. In my experience, this type of conversion data is nice but unless it was an online sale it doesn’t attach to revenue.

Tip: While Radian6 doesn’t provide ROI data within its interface, it doesn’t mean that you can’t get to it through other channels. You may need to work with a consultant who can help you quickly identify where to connect the pieces to get to revenue.

What are Radian6′s biggest weaknesses?

There are a several things that I think Radian6 could do better.

Up-front Effort for Workflow Features

From a workflow perspective, it’s great to be able to assign tasks and tags to posts; however, to be effective, you need to create a system of tagging up front or you’ll end up with a large clean-up effort later. It was a great improvement when they released the Engagement Console which allows you to write macros. This cuts down significantly on the number of clicks it takes to assign a post and tag it. But it does take a lot of forethought and setup to get that working well.

David acknowledges that this can be a challenge.

“Because the Engagement Console was designed to optimize usage in a team environment, it requires users to think through the tagging, classification and macro systems they would like to use in advance. This takes an investment to create (we call it a “playbook”), but it’s definitely worth it once it has been set up. The latest addition of administrative functionality in the Engagement Console means a single super-user can help pull this all together for the team, thus saving more time.”

Two Interfaces

As a user you’ll find that there are two interfaces for you to use. The Engagement Console is where you manage your social media channels, tag posts, assign them and so on. I liken it to your HootSuite or TweetDeck interface on steroids. This is what you’ll likely use every day. Then you have the Radian6 dashboard which aggregates all of your stats into pretty little charts and you can get data based on specific timeframes.

I found it awkward that the Radian6 dashboard is web-based and the Engagement Console is a desktop app. I would have preferred to have them both as web apps.

No Smart Phone App

For those who manage their presence on the go, there’s one big missing piece of the puzzle. You can’t use Radian6 on a smart phone because there is no app. I asked David about this and he said to “stay tuned” but I’ve been hearing that for over a year now so I’m becoming a little skeptical on their ability to make it happen in the short-term. If I were at Radian6, this would be my top priority. For users, it creates a disconnect from presence management and forces us to use other tools on our phones.

I’d rather look for all of my stats on my smart phone, and using the Engagement Console means I have to get reporting in two locations, which is not my preference.

Pricing

There are three fees. One is a per-seat license. The second is a per–topic profile fee. A topic profile is where you tell it what data you want to pull in. If you want to separate data, there is only so much you can do within one topic profile. An agency managing multiple clients would need at least one topic profile per client and it’s the most expensive item on the list. The third fee is based upon the volume of posts that come into your topic profile.

While the initial volume range that comes with your topic profile is reasonably high, you’d be surprised at how quickly you can exceed it. You can use keyword refinement to bring this down. These are all monthly fees that make up your core price. While I think Radian6 is certainly the Cadillac in the space and their price indicates that, it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth the money.

Summary

Radian6 is a great platform that’s equipped with a lot of bells and whistles. From my perspective, it was clear the company is dedicated to continual innovation of the tools. To decide if it’s right for you, you’ll need to look at your list of absolute must-have and nice-to-have features and see if buying the “whole farm” makes sense for your organization. My feeling is that for most one- or two-person operations it may be a little overkill and pricey, but for corporate marketing teams I think it’s a reasonable choice.

Read these posts for more on measuring social media and its impact on brand awareness, looking to track social media metrics and 5 ways to use social data to grow your business.

What do you think? Are you a Radian6 user? If so, what would you add to the list of strengths? How about weaknesses? Did you switch from Radian6 to another tool? If so, which one did you pick and why? Please join the conversation and leave a comment in the box below.