In this era of social media and our ability to effectively connect and build relationships with so many folks around the world, why do some people think that by filling out my contact form, I would ever consider outsourcing client work to them?
This is a really big pet peeve of mine!
A few times a month, I get several emails similar to the following from people using contact forms on my web site. Some come from freelancers and some from college students looking for work.
This bothers me because it’s:
Totally impersonal and solicitous, showing no interest in me or my business other than looking for work
Inappropriate since my contact form is meant for people who may be interested in my services, not the other way around (if I were hiring, I’d have a careers page)!
(Bob Smith is an alias so sorry any Bob Smith’s out there!):
email: bobsmith@bobsmith.com
first: bob
last: smith
company: bobsmith.com
telephone: 508 555 5555
message: Dear Team Vista, (Really personal greeting)
I am contacting you to offer my services as a Freelance SEO Copywriter.
My name is Bob Smith and I’m based in Boston. You can view a few writing samples on my website here: http://bobsmith.com/
I am very dedicated and available to start work immediately.
I can write any type of SEO article that you may need me to write and I can also include screen shots and images via Flickr’s creative commons in your articles if you so desire.
My rate is US$35/article for any article between 300-1200 words. I also write blog posts of the same length for US$35/blog post. Please feel free to mark my rates up to your clients.
Let me be very clear - this does not build trust or make me want to partner with you. Most business owners are careful about who they select as subcontractors because it reflects on them. I’m sure this person is a very good writer, but it shows no initiative to build a relationship with me.
Before you will ever get people to trust you enough to hire you as a subcontractor, you need to first develop a strong personal brand and make yourself visible to me via social media.
Find out more about me by visiting my LinkedIn profile (it’s clearly posted on all my web properties).
Start reading my blogs to understand my areas of expertise to see how you could add value.
Join my community via MyBlogLog, follow me in Twitter and take an interest in what I do.
Start writing your own blog and make your knowledge and expertise visible.
Comment on my blog with intelligence and relevancy.
Develop a relationship with me first and then, maybe if I need a writer for some client work, I will seek YOU out.
Social media makes it so easy to develop relationships with people anywhere in the world who could potentially send business your way. Don’t turn them off by taking this shotgun, impersonal, almost spammy approach. Take the time to learn about that person, what they may need in the way of resources for their clients, engage in a conversation and develop trust and a relationship that will help both of you in the long run.
Someone on LinkedIn last week asked the question about the difference between push vs. pull marketing. The definitions posted for push marketing by various marketing folk were pretty consistent.
Push marketing is when you use various activities to get your message in front of your ideal client. The marketer is in control of what the message is, how it is seen, when and where.
Ok so that coincides with what I term traditional marketing activities. Doing things to make sure your target audience sees or hears your message.
However, I was a bit surprised at some of the answers when it came to pull marketing. First my definition of pull marketing:
Marketing activities that encourage your prospect to seek you out and find out whether you have something of value to offer them. Pull marketing activities build relationships and can include blogging, podcasting, article marketing and networking (both on and offline). Pull marketing uses the law of attraction, incorporating all the components of your personal brand to attract and retain these people as your biggest fans.
But as I read the various definitions of pull marketing, I realized that social media has changed its definition, and probably for the better. Today, pull marketing is about developing relationships that attract your ideal client to you. It shows the value you offer to these prospects so that they naturally are attracted to your products and / or services.
Before social media, pull marketing was viewed quite differently. In an article from MoreBusiness.com dated August 2006, it states that:
Pull marketing is where you develop advertising and promotional strategies that are meant to entice the prospect to buy your product or service. Some classic examples are “half off!” or “bring in this coupon to save 25%” or “buy one get one free”, etc.
With pull marketing, you are trying to create a sense of increased, time limited value so that the customer will come into your store to buy.
And although that last statement may be true, I view this type of marketing as push as the promotional strategies are still controlled by the marketer, not the target market. Offers such as these should always be included in your marketing activities to draw people in. But they are not pull strategies in my mind.
True pull marketing is based on us being visible where your ideal client hangs out and becoming part of their communities. Greg Verdino says it well:
Pull is not about pulling consumers in; it’s about giving consumers a reason to pull us in. Remember truism #1 - they’re in control; they (not we) decide where they go and what they experience. We’ve lost the right to pull consumers anywhere (if we ever really had that right at all.)
Pull means that we to go to them, join their communities, give them reasons to voluntarily draw us into their personal media experiences. We’re not interrupting them. They’re opting into us.
To get your ideal client to discover you, develop a marketing plan that combines a strong personal brand and word of mouth marketing tactics (both online and offline) to increase your exposure as an expert in your discipline. This will help you attract them to you and make them your true fans.
I answered this question on LinkedIn so I thought I would share my answer here with you as well, but with a bit more elaboration.
The way to gain visibility for your blog is to make it an ongoing marketing project. Do all the marketing basics that you would do for any activity:
Pick your target audience
Understand what they need and how you fulfill that need
Speak to them in terms they understand
Provide useful, relevant information
Just as with all marketing, it takes time for you to build momentum and get the recognition that you want. Remember the three phases of relationship marketing: VCP model (visibility + credibility = profitability - defined in your terms of success) and apply that model to your online and social media marketing effort. Your blog is the medium to use to develop relationships with your audience, letting them get to know you, your expertise and your passion. It’s your “home base” for developing a strong personal branding and you need to put in a quality effort so that people can form their opinion of you based on what they see on the blog.
Post regularly (at least 2-3 times a week) with relevant content. Create a plan to get you on track and make a list of topics that you can write about if you find yourself with writer’s block. Just as I did here, use the questions on LinkedIn as food for thought. It’s always easier to write when you have a question posed to you. It’s the conversation starter!
Once you get the blog going and get beyond that first couple of posts, here are things you can do to make your blog more visible and stand out from others.
Comment frequently on other blogs and add value to the community so you get noticed.
Submit your blog to Blogged.com and use the rating to evaluate how you are doing against other blogs in your space.
Create a community on MyBlogLog, add the widget to your site.
Make sure you adhere to good SEO practices on the blog - if you use WordPress, install the All In One SEO Pack plugin
Include video and images as well as text content. If you don’t create your own videos, link to others that are relevant.
Include a link to your blog in every profile you create and in your email signature and make sure your blog is fed to all of your profiles in social networks.
Design your blog to appeal to your target audience, embracing your personal brand identity.
But on top of it all, keep at it with consistency. When you think you are only talking to yourself, all of a sudden your MyBlogLog starts filling up with little images, people visit and comment on your site and you start to feel like you truly belong to a community.
Please add your comments on your favorite activities for gaining visibility for your blog. I’ll take them all and create a checklist for folks to use.
In the workshop I gave last week: Personal Branding: Promote Your Expertise using Social Media, we discussed the importance of being authentic and transparent when developing your personal brand. With the ease of social media, you do exposes a little bit more of your personality each time. You no longer can put on a false face and get away with it. You need to manage your online reputation to ensure you always come across to others as you want to be presented. In this world of always connected, everyone is important, every email is important and everyone who visits your blog or social network profile needs to see the authentic you.
Listen to Gary Vaynerchuk in these two video blog posts. The first is on the importance of listening and responding to everyone in today’s word of mouth on steroids world.
Gary is authentic. His Wine Library TV shares his knowledge of wine in an upbeat, easy to understand way. He lives and breathes his personal brand as viewed in his blog GaryVayerchuk.com where he shares his secrets of word of mouth marketing for his personal brand. This video blog is one of his secrets to a strong personal brand.
Watch one of Gary’s videos and you will view a strong personal brand in action.
There seems to be a bit of a debate surrounding the really silly, although somewhat humorous Microsoft video on YouTube called “Rockin’ Our Sales” (see below). This video reminds me of those multi-media productions that I viewed at annual sales conferences. The difference between what we saw in private hotel ball rooms and this is the effect of social media.
Reviews of this effort are very mixed. CK’s Blog post Dear Microsoft: Please stay dorky. It’s who you are…and it works, CK gives Microsoft credit for showing their “dorkiness” in this video rather than put on the staid, corporate boring presentations. In her words:
Ah, that’s much more in-line with a brand that will always be associated with America’s #1 Geek Bill Gates.
On the other hand, Drew McLellan was a bit more concerned about the perception it gives to the world that may not understand the reasoning behind making the video in the first place. In his post, When an internal corporate video goes terribly wrong, he feels that:
In “today’s world, you can’t really afford to be this lame, even if it is a joke.”
My personal opinion is that this video is absurdly funny if you just view it as it was probably intended. And I truly believe that Microsoft knew this video would get out onto YouTube and probably did it on purpose. Look at the attention Microsoft is getting for Vista SP1. Nothing goes viral faster than something that is supposed to be “for internal use only”. Someone in Microsoft marketing took a chance and brilliantly got their message out.
But I do agree with Drew on the lesson that should be learned. In today’s social media world, everything you create can and will get out into the public and will take on a life of its own. When you create something that you may think is only for certain eyes, think again. Those who see the video will judge you on their perception of how you should behave and a harmless joke might harm your brand.
One of the hardest exercises for business owners is to determine where they should focus and what they should abandon. Whether it’s determining their ideal target market, outsourcing tasks that don’t drive revenue or eliminating processes that take time and add no value, we all are guilty.
In Valeria Maltoni’s post “What Would You Give Up to Get Back?”, she got me thinking about what I’ve given up to get back some time. When she says:
For your brand, it’s not trying to be all things to all people. Instead, being more focused on the personality it already has and potentially aspire to the one it can achieve.
Business owners are sometimes afraid to focus for fear of leaving money on the table. But to try to be everything to everybody, you never achieve your true purpose, loving what you do and working with those who appreciate what your offer them.
We all make this mistake, usually in the early days of your business. The good news for me is that I tend to be pretty good at turning off the distractions so I can get the client work done (it pays the bills) before I work on my social media marketing plan. So although I’m not turning off Twitter or other social media tools, I do need to work on other areas that by streamlining or eliminating can add more hours to my day.
Here are some areas where I’ve eliminated the clutter and distractions so far this year:
Eliminated formal contracts for an engagement letter. I recently converted my marketing services agreement to a client engagement letter. It covers the important aspects of my relationship with my clients, but it is much simpler.
Focused my service offerings by developing value added packages. By offering value added packaged services, you make it easy for clients to select what they need and simplifies the engagement process. In addition, I’m transitioning my business to more of a coaching / mentoring service with selective consulting engagements giving me more control over my time.
Reduced the amount of subcontracting through me. Sometimes you just have to subcontract out various efforts, but rather than invoice through my company, I’m trying to enable the subs to invoice the client directly. This will happen on a case by case basis depending on my working relationship with the other person. One of my differentiators is to not uplift other people’s rates for my clients, but this sometimes led to me invoicing a client where I didn’t make a dime.
Unsubscribed from many email lists. Sorry folks, but my inbox has been reduce substantially. Offer an RSS feed option to your newsletter so that if I thought it was worthy of keeping, I could convert it over. My goal is to make email primarily a communication vehicle between me and clients. That way I can check email regularly, but avoid the distraction of reading “news”. I schedule some time throughout the day for that.
Reduced in-person meetings with clients. Teleconferences work just fine for most of my client work. The value added service packages above are primarily delivered through teleconferences.
Share your suggestions about how you plan to recover a few more hours each week. The more the merrier because I need a few more hours available each week to work on my passion, get ready for the golf season and stay healthy and happy while doing so.
Imagine my delight when my own golf course’s professional staff sent an email announcing their video of the week! Marlborough Country Club in Marlborough MA is venturing into social media. I believe they meant this only for their members, but lucky for them, I’m a member! So enjoy their first video of the 2008 season.
Now I just need to get Peter, the assistant pro onto Twitter!
I have immersed myself in social media over the past several months to learn the tools and understand how they can be used to effectively market your business. I thought I’d share the benefits that I have experienced using these tools.
Developing Relationships with People You’ve Never Met
Although I tend to be much more low key than others, by using the tools of social media, I’ve connected with many people I’ve personally never met. I’m waiting for the event that I can attend where I will meet these people in person. For those of us who may not be outgoing with people we don’t know, social media has enabled us to “get to know” people through their blogs, profiles and Twitter posts that will make in person meeting a much more comfortable place. I highly recommend associating a picture with your various profiles to helps put your name and face together. I love seeing people come by my blog and leave behind their MyBlogLog image.
Expanding Your World Beyond Local
You might be asking why this is a benefit of social media. When I worked in corporate America, I traveled a lot and met many interesting people all over the world. When I quit my job to start my business, one of the things I lost was the ability to connect with people worldwide. Social media brings that all back with a lot less jet lag and wear and tear on my body! Different cultures with differing views add to your knowledge with a perspective that your local resources may not be able to. Take advantage of the ever shrinking world and “meet” people who can help you expand your horizons.
Increasing Our Ability to Learn More Things Faster
Subscribing to feeds of those within the community and using a feed reader that allows me to scan quickly, has enabled me to learn about the tools, practices and behaviors faster than if I had to research everything via a Google search. After watching Chris Brogan’s screencast of Google Reader, I decided to give it a try. Of course, that led to iGoogle, gadgets and a whole lot more learning, but it certainly made it easier for me to scan, star, share and save the information I wanted. I’ve embedded the video here, but here’s the link to the screencast posted on Blip TV for better viewing.
Making it Easier for You to Share
There are so many tools available that allow you to share your knowledge with others and give back to the community who shares their knowledge with you. Blogging and Twitter give you both the ability to share quickly and write more thought provoking posts. SlideShare helps you share your knowledge anywhere, not just through local presentations, by making your presentations with synchronized audio available for people to watch at their leisure.
How does this help you market your business?
The philosophy of BNI (Business Network International) is Giver’s Gain, the cornerstone of successful networking. The premise is that those who give unselfishly will, in the end reap the benefits of helping so many succeed. Social networking is built on the same premise - the more you share, the more you get back. Sharing knowledge not only helps the others learn, but helps the them learn about you - who you are, what you know, and what value you offer to your clients. Being authentic and transparent also helps people determine what you are like and whether they can trust you.
Social media has a major place in the marketing plans of independent professionals, entrepreneurs and small service businesses. It opens up a world to you that you would normally not experience. Social media - embrace it, use it and reap the benefits for your business.
I am hosting a three hour live workshop to help independent professionals, partners in professional service firms, small business owners and entrepreneurs understand social media and how to use it to develop their personal brand. I am sharing many hours of learning with my audience, helping them bypass the learning curve and get started on their social media strategy quickly.
The details of the workshop are:
April 22, 2008
9 a.m. - 12 noon
Key Executive Offices
33 Boston Post Road West, Suite 270
Marlborough, MA 01752
Registration Fee: $50.00
I’m excited about giving this workshop as it will help these business owners start to do something in their businesses that make them stand out from the crowd. If you live in the Marlborough area, I’d love to see you.
For many thinking of starting their own businesses, the fear of finding clients can paralyze them enough to sabotage their efforts. Cold calling prospects can make some of us break out in a cold sweat. One of the things that I learned early on in my business start-up days is that there are other ways to find clients. When you have worked in corporate America for your entire career, one of the skills you didn’t learn was how to network. As a business owner, networking is one of the best ways to get clients and today, adding social networking to the mix makes your ability to find business that much easier.
One of the first things I did when I launched the business was to join BNI (Business Network International). Some people feel that it doesn’t work, but when you are starting a business, being busy meeting new people, gaining a support organization and having a place to test your marketing message is really a valuable exercise. The next thing I did was to take a course on networking. The course taught me the basic principle of growing your business, called the VCP model - Visibility + Credibility = Profitability. Dr. Ivan Misner developed this three phase relationship development model: Visibility–Credibility–Profitability or VCP, to help business owners understand how to generate profitable relationships.
Visibility - Be seen otherwise out of sight, out of mind.
Credibility - Develop the relationship so that people understand your value and how to refer business to you.
Profitability - Cultivating relationship with the right referral sources will result in profitable business relationships.
The principles of networking transcend to social networking. How does the VCP model work in social networking?
Building visibility and credibility using social media takes time but is worth it as it provides the venue from which you can create visibility and demonstrate your expertise. In many ways, it’s easier to develop this reputation online since the tools enable you to build your reputation on a daily basis. In person networking events happen frequently, but not 24×7.
Where to begin?
Create a blog and write relevant posts;
Create profiles on social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MyBlogLog and other social networks that relate to your area of expertise;
Link your blog to your profiles and look for other opportunities to get link love;
Comment intelligently on other blogs;
Submit your blog to Technorati and Blogged.com;
Answer questions on LinkedIn;
Share presentations on SlideShare with linked audio if you have it;
1) It’s just a whole lot more fun to pick up the phone and have someone on the other end go on about all the great things they have read, seen and heard about your products and services.
2) (And I think this is a really big point) Prospects that come to you by way of your information machine, that have logically progressed down a path of education, are probably ten times more likely to be ideal and equally more likely to close than those that you go out and try to convince to buy from you. In fact, your marketing system can be one of the greatest ways to qualify leads - if a lead won’t go down your education path, that might be a red flag that they won’t be an ideal customer either.
What other ways do you recommend people get visibility and credibility using social media?
In this era of social media and our ability to effectively connect and build relationships with so many folks around the world, why do some people think that by filling out my contact form, I would ever consider outsourcing client work to them? 
Just as with all marketing, it takes time for you to build momentum and get the recognition that you want. Remember the 
