Beau Mueller

If you are a charity or other group,  a politician, or otherwise have a cause or event that you want to generate awareness for, get STOKED on social media.  Use it, love it,  actively participate and engage.

Here are five specific ways to create awareness by optimizing your social media efforts.

1) Yes, we can … with social media.

While John McCain had a few more than six Facebook friends, it is true Barack had way more going on throughout the social media landscape. He had more friends, more followers, more mentions,  more engagement and more activity by far. Check out this fascinating, Barack Obama vs. John McCain Social Media & Search Engine Scorecard.  To anyone starting an awareness campaign: study and emulate what the Obama campaign did with social media.

2) Generate Buzz

Social media in the form of communities such as Facebook, microblogs such as twitter, and video sites such as YouTube are the perfect mediums for buzz generation. Also write articles and press releases and submit them to niche, relevant social media venues.

 3) Put a lot of resources into online reputation management

Social media for awareness and reputation management go hand-in-hand.   Manage your organization’s reputation online.  The very act of generating awareness will bring to light your organization’s good, bad and ugly.  See my previous posts for some tips as to the hows of managing your reputation.  Often, just by engaging in social media you will be managing and improving your reputation.

4) Go viral

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

You might not have George Clooney as your spokesperson, but you can put together something that people want to share with their friends.  Make it interesting, funny, unique, or otherwise worthy of being shared.

Notice in the video that it said nothing of what he was doing in Chad, the problems there, etc.  Just the fact that he was there and being his wacky, charming self was enough to generate substantial buzz about the cause.

5) Educate/inform

Take a look at my social media tips for small business post for some ideas on how to educate/inform with social media to generate buzz.

I posted my second set of SMO tips, this time for individuals,  on local tech social networking site Techhui:

Five Social Media Optimization Tips for Job Seekers/Professionals

Funny thing is that I wrote the entire article without a shift key … thing popped off my laptop!

Until next time…

OK, so in my last post I promised I would post a summary of social media optimization tips.   In my SMO presentation, I broke down my tips into four groups of five tips each for: small business, big business, awareness and for a job seeker/professional.  I’m going to experiment a bit and post the tip sets one by one, here in the blog … there … everywhere!

Here are my five Social Media Optimization tips for small businesses:

1. Create a loyal following
2. Market exclusive offers via Social Media
3. Incentivize reviews
4. Manage your reputation
5. Educate/Inform

1. Create a loyal following

Social media has the power to create and retain loyal fans and evangelists of your business. Tap into the big name sites (facebook, myspace, youtube, twitter), as well as niche communities and social media venues such as ActiveRain (if a Real Estate Professional) or TechHui (if a Techie in Hawaii).

2.  Market exclusive offers via Social Media

While expedia is no means a small business, I  encourage any business to take note of expedia on twitter.  They do a great job of mixing excellent travel tips with deals/exclusive offers.  Note the frequency of their tweets (about 4 or 5 times a day on average).  Contact your followers, friends, fans, or whatever a particular social media site calls them and show them some exclusive love.

3.  Incentivize and encourage reviews

You need to engage your customers in constant conversation.  Getting reviews (good or bad) will prove invaluable towards that aim .  Bad reviews will help you improve your business (if you choose to learn from them).  You don’t need to bribe your customers, but a survey, review or questionnaire completed for a small incentive or chance to win will bring invaluable, actionable data into the light.  Also, good reviews will do wonder for the next tip….

4.  Manage your reputation

Online Reputation Management is a buzzword these days and should be paid great attention to. Of course you should be regularly checking google and the other search engines for your names and products.  Beyond that, constantly monitor sites like yelp for reviews and feedback.  A powerful tool we went over in the workshop was twitter search combined with getting RSS feeds for related queries.  If you were Hawaiian Airlines, for example, you might want to conduct the following twitter searches:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=hawaiian+air

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=hawaiian+airlines (Smelly lounge? - What would you do if you got a similar post for you business?)

Search these type of brand terms and any keywords relevant to you (airfare hawaii, travel deals, etc.) and subscribe to the rss feeds for each query … magical stuff this, as it will let you know anytime anybody tweets anything about you!

5.  Educate/inform

Use social media to educate the masses about your industry, your specialty, niches relating to your business, etc.  In the workshop I recently gave, we used the example of a Hawaiian Taro Chips company looking to bring its chips to a broader mainland market.   The group tasked with coming up with a social media strategy for this imaginary biz hit the nail on the head with the following education/information ideas:

• Post fun, viral videos about “Taro the Purple Chip” on sites like youtube and metacafe.
• Get on facebook, myspace and other communities and create or find Hawaiian culture/food groups to educate about taro and keep in the know about your purple chips.
• Write and post articles about the history of Taro chips, the taro chip making process, or even general Hawaii themes (tying taro in somehow).
• Post pictures of taro/taro fields on flickr,  a taro chip presentation on slideshare, etc.

To conclude, I’m convinced that social media optimization can benefit any small business who creatively and actively uses it.   Get started, get those fans, and have fun!

 ”Boost your Traffic and Success Online with Social Media Optimization (SMO)”.  This is the title of the workshop/lecture I gave at The UHM Outreach College Pacific New Media yesterday.  I uploaded a copy of my powerpoint to slideshare.  I welcome your feedback and review.  Will be posting a summary of the 5 tips sections soon.

Despite my crazy fear of public speaking … I did alright and was over the butterflies as soon as the class laughed at my first goofball joke.  In fact, I think the class as a whole enjoyed and learned a lot from the workshop.  I was surprised when I got to see my evaluations and got all 8/10s or better from the 20 or so students!

More than anything, the class inspired me to practice what I preach and engage in social media more.  I got myself on twitter (I’ve been one of the  naysayers, but my research/preparation for the class converted me).  I plan to blog and tweet regularly and am excited to otherwise start making my mark on the social media landscape.

It was an exhausting day, with the SMO workshop in the morning, bodyboarding all afternoon and wedding invitation/reply postcard making, printing etc. into the wee hours of the night.

There’s a bit of a south shore bump and the waves were fun.  Had  a secret spot right in Waikiki all to myself for most of the time I was out.  Amazing that there are still such spots in town.  Don’t ask me where, I won’t tell you :)   The UV index was off the charts yesterday and despite my thorough lathering up,  I got zapped hard by the sun.

My fiancee, Kat and I decided to do our own wedding invites this year.  It’s been slow going (mostly my fault) , but the end result going out tomorrow is quite cool.  Funny thing was it took me like 50 tries to get one piece aligned/etc. in photoshop so that it printed right.  I’m glad I didn’t get into the printing industry… I can do some cool stuff in photoshop, but combine it with printing an odd shaped piece of paper and I’m clueless…

An exciting new marketing partnership between Axiom and WinCubic, the operators of the most highly trafficked and popular Japanese site in Hawaii, aloha-street.com, is in the works.

Background of YourSensei.com

Basically, YourSensei.com allows Japanese students, tourists, expatriates, etc. to search for local English tutors in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.  Once a student finds a suitable tutor, they can order their contact details from the website.  There are two sides or ‘faces’ of the site – the Japanese side and the English side.

Read more about the YourSensei.com story in an article from the University of Hawaii student paper.  A correction, though … we didn’t only help design the site … we conceived, designed, marketed, and otherwise brought the site from a drunken idea to where it’s at now.

But the site has been badly neglected for over two years…. basically, ZERO updates have been made to the site, marketing efforts have been at a minimum, and since our host has recently updated their servers, bugs and glitches have run rampant on the site.

Goals of our partnership with WinCubic include:

• Fixing what’s currently broken
• Marketing the Japanese-side of the site extensively using online and offline mediums
• Redeveloping and adding attractive content
• Developing new streams of revenue from both sides of the site
• etc.

I am extremely stoked about what’s happening with YourSensei.  It is highly in keeping with our new strategic direction at Axiom of focusing heavily on building and monetizing our own sites.

Plus, it’s my baby and I’m eager to see it finally grow up.

Links:

• YourSensei.com - In Japanese
• YourSensei.com/Sensei - The English Side
• WinCubic- Company Motto … Win, Win, Win!
• Aloha-Street.com - In Japanese … good luck!

This is a first post and first real attempt ever at blogging. This might sound strange coming from someone who is an active web entrepreneur and internet marketer, but its true. I think that I’ve avoided personally blogging in the past for a few reasons, not the least of which it always seeming to me to be an exercise in narcissism.

It’s only when I realized a few things about blogging that I considered doing it.

• Writing a blog can be a way to help, enrich, educate and possibly inspire others.
• Keeping a blog can be a way to educate, enrich, and inspire yourself through researching the topics you are blogging about
• Blogging can be an outlet or provide stress relief
• Blogging can be fun?

We’ll see about the fun part…