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TWEET THIS     QUESTIONS?

Our 2014 Social Media classroom series here in Jefferson City, Missouri has taken off with flying colors…along with learning, sharing, problem solving, Likes, Shares, and Retweets.

Join us for one, or all four, of the classes in this series to help your social media efforts be more successful. Hit the links below for information on what each course will cover and to register. All classes are held at The Space co-working complex here in Jefferson City and begin at 3 PM and end at 5 PM.

I won’t leave until all of your questions are answered!

Gus Wagner is also available for private training sessions for individuals and groups as well as public and private speaking opportunities.

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Several small businesses recently closed their doors in mid-Missouri, and the news spread like wildfire on Facebook. This kind of social media marketing happens many times each day all over the world, but the buzz that businesses get on Facebook after they’ve shut down always makes me shake my head.

After the doors have closed, it’s too late to lament the loss online. To paraphrase the famous line in Airplane: “Smoke ‘em while you have ‘em.” 

Facebook fans generally love to promote their favorite small businesses. Today I want to tell you why likes might be the easiest way to interact on Facebook, but that they’re not actually always the most effective way to support small businesses.

There are three ways to engage on Facebook that are far more powerful than liking a business page:

1. The Share
2. The Check-In
3. The Comment

The woefully under-utilized Facebook Share button allows you to add your ringing endorsement or pithy comments to the Facebook Timeline of your favorite brands and businesses (and friends).

Shared content is published on your timeline for all of your friends and subscribers to see. This is just one way social media content goes viral. (Think of all of those funny vintage greeting cards you’ve shared about wine, parenting, and politics…it works the same way when you support your local winery, BBQ joint, or clothing store.)

Facebook Check-Ins are another great way to engage with small businesses. When you physically go to a business, you can check in at their location on Facebook. This interaction shows up in your Facebook timeline, allowing your friends and subscribers to see your real-life support of your favorite Missouri businesses.

Leaving comments on Facebook business pages is another way to promote businesses on Facebook. So the next time your favorite store or restaurant gives you a great product or service, stop by their Facebook page and give them a virtual pat on the back.

The Share, the Check-In, and the Comment all supersede the Like in Facebook influence and viral power, so the next time you want to help a favorite Missouri business, engage with their Facebook page by sharing, checking in, or commenting.

Are you a Missouri business owner or membership organization? You can use what you’ve just learned to encourage greater Facebook interaction with your customers or members. Check out this post, “On Facebook, Do What Works” for some specific tips.

Keep in mind that social media is a constantly evolving set of tools, and that you should be constantly testing methods, content, and even times of day to see what works best for your business.

There are so ways for customers and businesses to communicate using social media. The first step to making the most of Facebook business pages is to quit just “liking” things, and start sharing, checking-in, and commenting.

Gus Wagner of The Rocket Group on the 24/7 nature of social media marketing.

Fast Company magazine recently published an almost-entire issue about Social Media. One of the more notable pieces of the magazine was an infographic called “The 36 Rules of Social Media” (shown and linked to, below).

I thought I would share some thoughts on what these rules mean to small businesses in Mid-Missouri and offer some advice and insight on applying these principles to your social media plan.

The video above discusses Rule #7: “Social is 24/7. Not a one-time stunt.” This advice comes from David Wertheimer, president, digital, Fox Broadcasting.

Enjoy the video, and as always, thanks for the time.

-Gus

Recently we completed a marketingnpackage for a first-time author, Tim O’Neill.

Tim has written a book about hisnlife’s journey and having to defend that journey at the pearly gates. The bookngoes by the awesome name of “Tobacco is Not a Vegetable.”

To promote the launch of the booknand to help drive recognition of Tim’s efforts to key audiences, we developed anSocial Media plan based on key quotes from the passages of the book andndesigned graphic images for Facebook page content. We also produced a couple ofninterview videos with Tim which can be seen here: http://youtu.be/o1JmhgOpSKA and http://youtu.be/Eh1ko8OHv_E

Highlights of this Facebookncampaign can be seen below. We were able to grown Tim’s audience from zero to ancouple of hundred by the end of the campaign, raise local media attention andndrive attendance to his book signings, and help him to peak in the top 2000 ofnbooks sales on Amazon.com.

We thank Tim for hiring us tonmanage his online success story and recommend the book to everyone as well.nCheck out TobaccoIsNotAVegetable.com for the Amazon sales site.

As we’ve traveled Missouri on the #SocialIRL Non-Profits tour, something has come up that we need to address: Companies that partner with NPO’s to get like’s for their business Facebook pages in exchange for monetary contributions to the NPO they’ve partnered with.

The words I have used publicly about this practice are “STOP THIS!”, and the words I have used in private are more colorful.

LikeAPaloozas are a bad idea.

Here’s why:

First, and most importantly, the LikeAPalooza is a violation of the Terms of Service both your non-profit and the other company agreed to when each of you established your brand’s Facebook pages. There are a lot of underlying rules about this, but the bottom line is that you are not to trade likes for money or product.

Second, wouldn’t you rather have 500 new Facebook fans for your non-profit than $500? Won’t sharing your good news story with those 500 new fans be more valuable to your cause in the long term than having $500 in your pocket in the short term will be?

Facebook audiences are not looking to connect with brands (including non-profits) without a call to action. Customers are motivated to connect with brands because there’s a benefit in it for them; whether that benefit is a coupon for a pair of Levi’s or a sneak peak of a new product or service.

LikeAPaloozas are a bad idea for your non-profit. It’s more valuable for your non-profit brand and for your supporters when you use your Facebook page to share your mission than it is when you use it to host TOS-violating Facebook LikeAPaloozas.

Questions? Drop us a line at the contact link above.

See also: STOP LIKING THINGS ON FACEBOOK

What do you want to findnunderneath your Christmas tree and what do you really need?

Now that all of the BlacknFriday’s and Cyber Monday’s are over. I would suggest you should ask Santa fornyour name. Well, at least your online one.

You have probably Googlednyourself before to see what the internet has to say about you but have you evernlooked up to see if your personal name (Gus Wagner for example) is available asna domain? Chances are it might be available and, if so, you should grab it nownas an investment in yourself.

Most registry services, we currently prefer GoDaddy, allow you to register your domain name for around $10 a year.nIt gets more affordable as you add years to your subscription as well.

Owning your own name also allowsnyou to have a truly personalized email address like, Farrah@FarrahFite.com ornsimilar. It’s the 21st century and you shouldn’t be using AOL, Gmail, or Outlook.com for your professional email address. TWEET THIS

What else can you do with yournpersonalized domain? You can create your own website about yourself and yournprofessional or personal achievements or you can point the domain to go to yournLinkedIn or Facebook account thereby making it easier for people to find you.

So unless you want your name tonbe owned by someone else with your name, or someone that just wants to own yournname, be sure to ask Santa for your domain for Christmas. TWEET THIS

Or just buy it for yourself!

It’s no secret around these parts (I might have watched too many westerns recently) that our favorite Social Media platform is twitter.

We’ve been involved with twitter since 2007 and heavily invested in it since 2010 as a primary source of information, marketing channels, and chuckles.

I will admit twitter is not for everyone, or every business, but if you are looking for a way to get real-time news about the world or your areas of interest and wanting connections with voices of influence this is the platform for you.

A few things you need to know about twitter to help you ease into your new best friend:

Hashtags: You see these everywhere – on TV, at conferences, I have even seen them on food packaging. When you place a hashtag (#) in front of a word or joined phrase (#hamburger or #icantreadthis) in your tweet it becomes a hyperlink. Clicking that hyperlink will take you to all the real-time conversations about that hamburger, conference or TV show on twitter. The # is an indexing and search tool for the conversations on twitter. It gets abused on a fairly regular basis by users noting the punch lines to their jokes but when used correctly it is one of the most powerful tools on the internet. #OnToTheNextSubject

See also: Breaking Down Hashtags on Facebook

Tweeting: You only have 140 characters to share your wisdom with the world. The previous sentence was 66 characters so that gives you an idea how short these messages are. Now here are two curveballs: 120 > 140 and 80 is really the sweet spot. Messages of 120 characters or less are prime for your followers to retweet (RT) you and still fall under the 140 character limit. When someone RT’s your message your twitter handle (ex: @RocketGroup) is added to the message as an attribution and eats up more characters. Also, studies have shown that messages of around 80 characters are the ones with the most interaction from readers. It takes a little bit but writing short pithy comments will come naturally to you in no time. Promise.

Links: Of course you will want to have links in your tweets that go back to your blog, your website, or interesting content you have found online. Putting a link such as /blog/how-to-successfully-upload-multiple-photos-to-facebook will chew up all of your characters so what are you to do? URL shorteners were invented for just this purpose. Twitter has a tool built into its program, We represent Hootsuite.com which is a great tool for managing twitter, and bit.ly is the original tool on the market. Using one of these tools takes the original link above and creates http://ow.ly/fDN1c which still drives you to the right place. The internet is awesome.

A few other quick tips:
• Fill out your profile completely with a nice photo of yourself, your geographic location, and links to your website or other important pages to you.

• Quickly find subject matter experts to follow or people in your local community with a tool like twellow.com– which advertises itself as the “Yellow Pages of twitter”.

• What to tweet? Just start and you will find your voice very quickly. Not sure you want to tweet? That’s cool too. 1/3 of the twitter audience drives the conversation while 2/3 of the audience has limited or no participation but they are logging in frequently. Kind of like real life.

• When sharing others content either RT them directly or add a citation in your post (via @emarketer) to keep things honest and to show the original author who is sharing their content.

Ready to make the leap? Give us a follow (@RocketGroup is our handle) and tell us you what you thought of this post.

See you in less than 140!
Gus Wagner

 

 

Video: Gus Wagner, speaking at #140Conf in Des Moines, Iowa, on engaging public officials on social media.

We live in a time when only 45 out of 435 members of the U.S. House consider themselves ‘rural enough’ to be members of the Rural Caucus. Those numbers aren’t getting better for those of us in most Congressional districts in the states right now, and that covers most of us in the Midwest.

Consider for a moment that in addition to the shrinking representation and influence agribusiness and rural concerns receive in government and in real life, that in the Midwest, we’re lagging in social media, as well.

According to the current HubSpot Twitter Grader, the Midwest is falling well below the national average for use of Twitter (Missouri is 42{628954cb2bad821921117287c23504a7919be1893c483613421612ad8712cddb} below the national average, and Iowa and Wisconsin are both 14{628954cb2bad821921117287c23504a7919be1893c483613421612ad8712cddb} below it).

If, in Missouri, we want to relate to our 390 Congressional City Cousins to engage on our issues, we must impact them with our #AstroNetTurfRoots — using truth and transparency.

This post is inspired by the opportunities I’ve had to do public speaking and marketing training for membership organizations, nonprofits, and advocacy groups along with my public service to the state of Missouri as a Chief of Staff in the State Senate.

I’ve been on both sides of the lobbying and advocacy pitches and I believe I know what can help you.

When working with membership organizations, I try to put things in perspective by asking members if they have ever had a face-to-face lobbying or advocacy meeting with:

· A local official from one of the 19,000 municipal governments in America?
· An elected official from one of the 3,141 county governments in America?
· Someone from one of the 99 House of Representatives or State Senates in America?
· A Governor?
· A United States Congressman or United States Senator?
· A President?

I have met with and addressed issues with all of the above.

I then ask members if they’ve ever had a personal social media conversation with an elected official about an issue — without blasting press releases at them or throwing a stack of talking points their way.

What I’ve discovered is that if membership groups can organize and mobilize their dozens, hundreds, thousands of members as social media advocates, that they can take real world actions using social media tools.

Increasingly, elected officials at the local, state, and federal level are active on Twitter or Facebook (or both). Their staff employees and other government influences are active on social media as well. Membership organizations need to take advantage of this social media presence in order to communicate effectively outside of their membership silos.

I suggest that membership organizations across the Midwest, especially in capital cities like our home base of Jefferson City, aggressively and positively communicate with members and elected officials using social media.

Here are two more of our blog posts written with membership organizations like yours in mind:

17 Ways Membership Organizations Can Practice #AstroNetTurfRoots 

Top 6 Things to Avoid in #AstroNetTurfRoots