Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing
Archive for March, 2009
How to Get Friends on any Social Media Network Such as Stumbleupon, Digg, Etc.
“Prunch” @ Atrocial.com
We are now venturing in a Grey ethical area once we approach this subject. Social networks in their purest forms are intended for the natural interaction of real friends with the opportunity to make more. Any promotion of a piece of media should strictly make its way to popularity on its own merits with no real active attempt of the submitter to “make it popular”. The truth of the matter is that if you have a submission into Digg, for example, it has a slim to no chance of making it popular without some attempt to at least push it to some prominence in the upcoming section. The same to lesser or greater degree can be said for almost all other networks.
If you wish to use social media to promote your work, you face an early decision with respect to this – are you going to pay your dues by developing a network that will support your work because the common element here is that “the other guy” promoting your work without a question will be coming back to you for the same with “no questions asked”. Since this amount of back-scratching is going on, you are somewhat doomed to failure unless you embrace it until such a time as you have a respectable readership that will give natural promotion of your work.
Now that you have addressed that ethical dilemma for yourself, away we go ….
The best analogy for a social media network is walking into a party where you know very few, if any people
If you just sit in the corner, you may get into a conversation but for the most part you will be sitting in the corner holding your drink. So just like a party or other similar social event, you gotta get out there and make a few friends by good old fashioned communication. Lets start by one of the most genuine methods of making friends – using the network the way it is intended. Get out there and look at the media and when you find an entry you like give it an upvote (I will use this as the generic term for promoting a social media submission) and send a message to the submitter with a “Nice find, added you to my friends” or some other acknowledgment. Concurrent with that message send your friend request. You will find a respectable percentage will “friend” you back. When the person “friends” you back, send another message acknowledging this and add the following to your message – “Thanks for friending up and send me anything you want me to look at anytime”. This will let the new friend know that they can send you an article of theirs that they are interested in getting promotion without retribution and that you will probably upvote it.
This is a numbers game in that the more you do, the more you get. The amount of friends you need will be close to whatever votes you observe that is needed to either “go popular” or in a more honest method, enough to propel the article to enough prominence in an upcoming section so that others will at least see it to get “organic” votes. I recommend the latter since your content should carry you to prominence rather than your network but I guarantee there are people who are using the former.
Now before you go spamming your new friends for upvotes you still have some work to do. I covered the method to submit an article to social in another post called How to Submit a post to your social media network. Right now we are still in the mode of making friends on your chosen social network so lets stay in that mode for a while. After all, if you met a guy at a party and after 10 minutes of conversation he tried to sell you a used car without any indication from you that you wanted to buy a car, you might be put off to say the least.
OK, so now you have a few people who are willing to receive communication from you. Next thing is to get to know them a bit. Read their entries, comment on their blogs, profile pages, entries and generate some dialogue with them.You will start to receive personal messages from your new friends to “look” at their submissions. If you decide you want to support this new friends submissions with the understanding that they will help you in the future, upvote the article and send a message back to the person indicating you did support their article. They will remember you for it and you will need them to remember it for the future.
From this point on you keep doing this while consistently increasing you circle of friends and soon you will be ready to show them your work.
Finding Diamonds through Market Testing
Skip Shuda, Team and a Dream
Team and a Dream spent last Friday morning at the Mid-Atlantic Diamond Ventures (MADV) investor meeting. MADV is a business cultivator that provides support to early-stage high technology businesses. Seven companies were presenting, including current and former clients Healthy Humans and Vienna Human Capital. Since we believe strongly in market testing your idea, our team thought it would be fun to see how well these companies have validated their business models. What techniques have they used to gain insights into their market? How well do they understand their competition? What feedback have they received from their potential clients?
Healthy Humans (recently launched into Alpha mode). We know that Healthy Humans has performed a competitive analysis and has done market testing using Google Adwords (because we helped them on those fronts). Healthy Humans also conducted some early focus groups to help validate and expand their market concept. The best way to validate a concept is to gain direct feedback with some version of the product. Since the team has launched in Alpha mode, they can now validate their conversion rate from their free offering to the paid offering. With their initial Alpha test group of a handful of consumers they reported seeing 100% conversion. This conversion rate is not likely to carry forward, but the interest and energy is a powerful indicator of how well Healthy Humans may perform.
Another MADV company that presented was Life-Pack – Born out of the pain of 9/11, the inventor went to firefighters and asked them about their concept to have a “bail-out system” for people in high rises. The firefighters asked for a smaller product to help them. When escaping a fire, firefighters reported “All I could think about is living” – so they developed a product that only required that a firefighter to “hook and jump.” They have created an advisory board of “fire rescue” people. It is clear that the Life-Pack team have co-created their product with their target customers.
On Sept. 23, I had the pleasure of hearing Mr. Joe Douress, Vice President of Content Operations for LexisNexis, talk about his role in creating Lawyers.com, a directory and resource for finding attorneys. Joe was speaking at the Innovators Club. Joe is a huge proponent of market testing. They did an enormous amount of research through the evolution of Lawyers.com. For example, early on their research revealed that there are 4,000 categories of businesses in the Yellow Pages, but lawyer listings account for 1/15th of the total revenue! Lawyers REALLY want to be found! But they didn’t stop with market research. Joe’s team met with attorneys, directory companies and affiliate partners to understand what the market needed. They test market different promotional mechanisms – from coffee cups to television advertising. The huge success of Lawyers.com can be largely traced to this investment in market testing and concept testing.
These are just a few stories ranging from established successes to emerging successes. Understanding your market, testing your concept and adjusting your message are key steps every e-Business startup should consider.
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