Every day — sometimes more than once — I am asked the difference between a profile page on Facebook and a fan page. Or, more accurately, people say how the $#@%^$#! do I put up a business page on Facebook?

The answer is really quite simple, but no thanks to the wonks at Facebook.  In his blog post on Hubspot, author Dan Zarella says:

People have profiles. Brands have pages.

Social networking profiles represent people. From your Facebook profile, you declare personal relationships, grow your network by manually accepting friend requests, and discover other people in your network to add as friends.  Your Facebook profile includes facts about you including your favorite movies, what schools you went to, and your favorite quotes.

Your brand isn’t a person. It doesn’t have a favorite quote or book. You can’t friend a brand, and it certainly can’t friend you back. Brands don’t have friends. Brands have fans. Fans have discussions about your brands, share news about them, and share information about your brands with others.

Now, if only building the Fan Page were that simple. Why does everything worth doing in the realm of social media require an entire IT department?

The social media site, Mashable is just invaluable for letting me know — in a very un-wonky, non-techie way — what I need to understand about digital and social media. Today, for instance, their headline story is “Most Fortune 500 Companies Don’t Get Twitter.”

What caught my eye is the last sentence: that big companies don’t “display any personality in their tweets.”

Big business may be able to get away with being bland but small business can’t. If you are going to spend the time and resources to use social media in the first place, especially Twitter, then you absolutely positively unfailingly have to have a style, a recognizable voice and character, a PERSONALITY in order to stand out from your competition, not to mention build your followers and your fans.

• What constitutes a Twitter personality?
• A great picture. Not your dog or your nursery school wallet snapshot.
• Original material — it’s great to retweet, but only if it absolutely has bearing on your business and your industry. Do not do what so many Tweeters do these days –simply regurgitate other’ people’s stuff.
• Be contrary, be funny, be thoughtful and have something to say.
• Point your followers towards sites or posts that you’ve found particularly useful and tell them why.

Ask yourself whether what you’ve written about is just same old/ same old or if it truly adds to the conversation that you’re having with your customers, clients and friends. If you’re on the fence, wait until you have something add.

I agree with much of what PR blogger David Goldberg has to say in his recent post, The Reluctant Social Media-er. In it, he combs through the new PR Week’s 2009 Social Media Survey to find the most significant outcomes.The survey measures just how pervasive social media has (or hasn’t) become among companies as a marketing communications tool.

I read his comments with an eye toward what small businesses could learn from the data. I applaud his approach. Instead of a finger-wagging at entrepreneurs, solo practitioners and small business owners –already way over-stretched for dollars not to mention time — for not adopting these often mind-numbing technologies overnight — he urges patience and a realistic one-step-at-a-time approach. Just my kind of guy.

In response to the #1 reason (lack of time) that 53% of the responding companies do not use social media he counsels:

“…….getting started with, and stewarding a social media program doesn’t really require much time or energy, at least as compared to some of the other grueling, time-sucking things we marketers do. Suggestion: start slow and small. Try, learn, try more. In the case of social media knowledge is definitely a good thing. But you don’t have to be a social media guru to achieve success (despite what the many social media gurus out there would have you believe). It’s like deciding to try sailing but thinking the only way you can is to go out and buy a 53 footer and sail across the Atlantic. Try dinghy sailing first, then step it up. (The emphasis is mine).

And he concludes (and I couldn’t have said it better myself) with an uber-answer to all who express reluctance to using social media:

“Again, there are many reasons not to get involved in social media, but your reputation is everything and any tool that helps you adeptly manage it blows them all away.”

Way to go, Dave!

A torrent of comments lately from small business owners and entrepreneurs telling me how overwhelmed they feel when trying to learn how to use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to market their businesses.

Amen. It’s like one of those dreams where you’re running as fast as you can and suddenly realize you haven’t moved at all.  Or reaching up to a high shelf and having everything fall on top of you.

Hang in there. Like anything else in life, effort in equals benefit out. All of a sudden when you least expect it, some of the pieces will start falling into place and you’ll realize that you actually know how to post something on Twitter that will be retweeted or how to link your blog posts to your Facebook fan page.

Here’s some advice from someone who’s done it the hard way:

1. Don’t try to conquer the entire social media universe all at once. Start with one application and get up close and personal with it — either Facebook or LinkedIn. Leave Twitter for later.

2. Look for great online how-tos. My recommendation is that you go immediately to Mashable.com. They have become my new BFF. All of their incredibly useful guides are free, are written in plain English, and actually work. There are others, too. You’d be surprised what typing “build facebook fan page” into Google will yield.

3. Don’t worry about making mistakes. The beauty of the digital world is that everything can be taken down. Everything can be corrected.

4. Hire someone to consult for a few hours or to take over  your social media marketing for you. There are lots of reasonably priced solutions cropping-up.

Let me know what’s working for you. What advice do you have for all the small business owners out there who are learning how to use social media by trial and error?

Technorati Tags: Facebook, google, internet, social networking

Okay, so blogs still scare you and you let your enewsletter gather so much dust you’re embarrassed to send out another one. In fact, you’re beginning to think that all this digital and social media stuff is all much ado about nothing. You’ve spent your hard earned money on a passable small business website that your friends compliment you on, so get off the case about everything else you should be doing, right?

WRONG. Go ahead. Stick your head in the sand. But you might want to surface just long enough to think hard about creating a Facebook Fan page.  Some tech pundits believe that FB fan pages will soon replace static websites–but I won’t go there yet. But take consider this example from a must-read article in yesterday’s New York Times, “How to Market Your Business with Facebook.”

Mr. Meyer, a wedding photographer in Woodbury, Minn., had had little luck with traditional advertising. A full-page ad in a bridal magazine generated zero leads and a trade show yielded only four bookings, barely covering the cost of his booth. But Facebook proved a digital bonanza.

Mr. Meyer aimed at women ages 22 to 28 who listed their martial status as engaged in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. He estimates that he has spent about $300 on Facebook ads in the last two years and has generated more than $60,000 in business. He says about three-quarters of his clients now come to him through Facebook, either from ads or recommendations from friends.

So, avail yourself of all the how-tos out there.  One of the best is Mashable’s How to Set Up a Winning Facebook Fan Page. Or hire someone to do it for you.

But, as the Nike tag line says, Just Do It.

While much of what is being written in blogs and in various forms of digital and social media is just recycled advice and information, every once in awhile you stumble across a piece that  really gets to the heart of the matter for small businesses trying to market themselves.

I’ve been making time lately to read everything I can on digital and social media as it applies to small business marketing and branding. Trust me, it is like scaling Everest — one step forward and twenty steps back. For every creative, well-written and informative post you find, there are hundreds that simply re-gift it.

Most of it is just recycled. People blogging about same old/ same old or, in Twitter language, re-tweeting other people’s stuff. I have no problem with re-tweeting — in fact, it is great to be able to share the really original and useful bits of information one finds floating around in the cyber sphere.

This morning I happened upon a blog post that truly stands out, one that I’d like to tie my clients to a chair and make them read. In the always-interesting Hubspot blog, there’s a piece called, “Ten Ways a Start-Up Can Use Social Media to Market Itself.”

While each of the ten points is well worth taking to heart, here is the first, to which I say, hallelujah!

Craft a brand position rooted in a customer benefit.

An awful lot of young companies do a good job of describing a product’s features rather than synthesizing them into a single benefit. A simple handle, either expressing what a brand stands for or declaring its point of difference, will serve you well in everything from appearing in search results to being remembered.

If you read nothing else today, read the whole article. And then start applying it to your small business.

Technorati Tags: branding, marketing

Here’s a marketing riddle:

What’s fast, easy to use, incredibly inexpensive, and has the potential to reach millions of new customers instantly?

Answer: Social Media. But you knew that, right? Then what’s the hold-up? Why are small businesses so slow to adopt these power-packed marketing tools?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. You plan to incorporate Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn –  even a blog! — into your marketing mix next year!

Have a look at these stats, according to the Social Media Examiner’s published results of a BIA/Kelsey report:

When asked about their current social media experiences, results showed many businesses are slow to adopt social media:

Have used Twitter to market in the last 12 months:  9%

Have used social sites in the past 12 months:  23%

Have incorporated video into their website: 16%

In addition, according to the survey results, adoption of social media by small- and medium-sized business is more prevalent among younger businesses:

Businesses 3 years or younger: 16% report using Twitter

Businesses 11+ years:  2% report using Twitter

We small businesses are supposed to be nimble, agile, resilient and strong — able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Why are so many of us afraid to learn new marketing tricks?

In cash you haven’t noticed, there’s a gold rush on these days.  It’s called social media and everyone’s rushing to the river. I get dozens of questions a day, varying in degrees of sophistication, about Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Most people are apologetic — as if they should “get it,” as if somehow they’re supposed to understand this increasingly complex and ever-changing maelstrom that’s swirling around all of us.

It seems to me that folks just can’t grab the social media products off the internet shelves fast enough –whether they understand how to use them or whether they’re right for their business or not. They just plain have to have them!

My advice: slow down! Take a deep breath and stop trying to make the problem fit the solution. Yes, eventually we will all be adept at our usage of Twitter, but for now it is still in the early adopter stage–meaning, it’s not as mainstream as everyone thinks it is.

I tell me clients that they need a brand — for themselves and for their business — before they even think about going more than ankle deep in the online social media waters. If Twitter only gives you 140 characters (not words–characters, including spaces) you better have the right words, the right memorable words,  that are going to immediately identify you bobbing amidst the tsunami of other people who are vying for their place in the social media sun.

And speaking of beginning at the beginning, click here for a terrific “how-to” for getting started on Twitter by Scott Kirsner of The Boston Globe.

Technorati Tags: branding, online branding, personal branding, scial media branding, scott kirsner, the boston globe, twitter

Enough about you. Let’s talk about ME.

That’s certainly the take-away for many people dipping their toes into the raging Twitter current.

According to a recent study out of Penn State:

The researchers examined half a million tweets during the study. The team looked for tweets mentioning a brand and why the brand was mentioned — to inform others, express a view on the brand or something else — and found that people were using tweets to connect with the products.

There is a trend when it comes to micro-communication and what it is used for, according to study author Jim Jansen.

“Businesses use micro-communication for brand awareness, brand knowledge and customer relationship,” he said. “Personal use is all over the board.”

That is putting it mildly. The urge to self-purge is so great in micro-blogging (Yawn, another day…Just grabbed some coffee….Gotta get home and let the dog out….) that The Wall Street Journal asked yesterday, “What Kind of Twitterer Are You?”

Are you a an Informer or a Meformer? Citing a new Rutgers University study, the Journal says:

“…..four out of five Twitter users are the [meformers], posting updates mainly about themselves. The remaining 20% are “informers,” tweeting information, such as links to news articles.

They coined the term “meformers” to describe users whose tweets could frequently be categorized as “me now” — what they were doing or how they were feeling. These updates do serve a purpose, they said. “Although the Meformers’ self focus might be characterized by some as self-indulgent, these messages may play an important role in helping users maintain relationships with strong and weak ties.”

I’m trying not to choke with delight on my Cheerios.

As evangelists of our own brands, we should strive to be informers — giving and sharing information, responding to others with more information, commenting on relevant postings and the tsunami of information coming at us every day. While it may humanize me in my followers minds to learn what kind of dog I have and whether I believe Starbucks can really make an instant coffee that tastes like fresh-brewed, at the end of the day it none of that really matters.

It’s like the small talk before the meeting begins.

Necessary, hard to do well, but not the real business at hand.

Technorati Tags: branding, personal branding, tweets, twitter, twitter and branding, twitter for business

This, my friends, is the key question. Take it from someone whose business is branding but who has managed to find a truckload of reasons to ignore Twitter for way too long. (Too distracting. A time-sink. Don’t care what someone I don’t know had for breakfast).

Oh, I dabble in it. I can even tell you how it works. I advise clients on whether to use it or not.

But, praise the Lord, I’ve got religion. And I’ve got it with the zealotry of a Janey-come-lately. There is crucial information for everyone in this sea of bobbing souls, but you gotta believe — AND — you’ve got to do more than just jump in and hope the current will carry you to some useful place.

If more convincing is needed, check out this piece called \”Did You Know?\” on YouTube.

OK, nervous about YouTube, too? Digest this little  preview:

Americans have access to:

1,000,000,000,000 web pages

65,000 iPhone apps

10,500 radio stations

5500 magazines

200+ cable television networks

In the last 5 years, readers of online newspapers were up more than 30 million.

The clarion call for having a clear, compelling and memorable online brand has gone out. You cannot ignore it. Well, I guess you can if you don’t want your corporation,  professional service business, or job search to succeed.