Now before you jump on all the social sites spewing out canned marketing messages in the vain hope people will see them and flock to your business let me reiterate. They couldn’t give a flying crap about your marketing message. A social business could be most simply defined as a business which engages with it’s customer base socially. It used to be all businesses were social. You made friends in the neighborhood and responded to their interests or you failed. Today we may think it has to mean they use social media, but there’s more to it than that. MORE >>

To me it seems like a marketing ploy to put the reach as the one big graph in your “insights” tab and not the “people talking about” tab. A client contacted me this morning, upset because her “reach” seems to be  seriously declining on Facebook. For For some reason Facebook chooses Reach to be the metric graphed on the insights page, and it’s little understood, so here’s the long and the short of it. Here’s how Facebook defines reach. People might see your content through more than one of these channels. So let’s say you run some “story” ads. How bogus is that? MORE >>

Understands competitors their products and markets. Willing to listen to what the market wants and what their issues are. Understand competitors, their products and markets. Listen to what the market wants and what their issues are. This is different than knowing what you want to sell to the market. I love dealing with a talented sales person. Sometimes I’ll buy from them just because they are so good at their job I just want to support them. will choose a store, a vendor because of the caliber of sales. What are the traits of a good sales person? MORE >>

She’s smart, she says it like it is, and her insights on business and marketing are spot on. Naomidunford Naomi is one smart marketer. She calls herself a “micro business marketing consultant”meaning she loves to help small companies get the most out of their marketing without spending a ton of money doing it. She blogs about real estate at TalktoCj where she shares everything from Silicon Valley market info and tips on marketing a home to local events and politics. Shelly owns marketing and branding agency V3 Integrated Marketing. MORE >>

Lots of people will tell you  ”Social Media Influencers” are the  key to social media marketing  but what does that really mean? Is influence based on number of connections? Klout , Peer Index or Kred score? combination of all of the above? How do you identify them and what do you do with that information once you think you know who they are? The short answer is all and none of the above. Refine this as finely as possible so you don’t have to filter though too many false leads in broad categories. Did they only write one post that is relevant or do they have several? MORE >>