Let us help you setup a social media marketing plan, build your blog and teach you to use social media tools effectively to cut costs and increase relationships!

Get Setup ($50 one-time fee) includes:

A Social Media Optimization Plan for your business
Detailed training and instructions to social media
WordPress Blog & Email Setup with Instructions

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$50/month includes:

Blog and Email Hosting
Weekly Conference Call training
Monthly Insider Instructional Newsletter
Access to our forum for expert advice and peer support
In-person training events (pay only for food or materials)

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$150/quarter includes:

All above monthly services for 3 months
A personalized one-on-one coaching session ($75 value)

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$550/year includes: 

All above monthly services for a full year
A 10% discount for the year
5 personalized one-on-one coaching sessions ($375 value) 

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Want to cut marketing costs and earn credibility with new leads and clients?

Social media are just tools for marketing and publicizing your business on the web. If you optimize your time and energy in the right way you can grow your small business. You aren’t meant to be an expert in the social media field! But you can continue to be an expert in your own field and use social media experts to make a smooth transition from industrial media to the infinite possibilities of publicity that the internet offers.

What is the Social Media 101 Coaching Group?

Jennifer Mills and her team at Expressions Laboratories has partnered with ShoutOut Marketing to get you the most in-depth coverage and coaching help with your social media marketing available. 

Through one-on-one coaching with the experts, you will develop a social media marketing plan for your business, get help building a blog, and get access to all conference calls and group coaching sessions available.

Check out the Social Media member website with upcoming training and information >

A Commitment to Growing Your Business:

The Social Media 101 team will match your commitment to growing your business. By teaming with us in our 3 month coaching commitment – we will get your business moving. 

Contact Jennifer to get started! >

This two-hour coaching lab will get you started with a marketing plan for 2009!

Social media are just tools for marketing and publicizing your business on the web. If you optimize your time and energy in the right way you can grow your small business. You aren’t meant to be an expert in the social media field! But you can continue to be an expert in your own field and use social media experts to make a smooth transition from industrial media to the infinite possibilities of publicity that the internet offiers.

Learn how to use social media tools to cut costs and increase your organization’s reach. We will take you through the necessary steps of creating a social media optimization plan specific to your niche, products and services.

When: February 5 @ 2:30-4:30
Where: Hilton Garden Inn, Lynchburg VA
Cost: $49 for non members
Discount: SM101 Members pay $20 for food and materials

You Will Learn:
Defining Social Media
How to Make Social Media Work for You
How to Integrate Traditional PR Strategies
How to Put Together a Social Media Optimization Plan
Which Social Media Tools to Use

REGISTER NOW

Remember those chain letters you used to get as a kid? “Copy and mail this letter to 6 other people and you will get 1 million letters in return!” Ok, well, BrandonINK introduced me to a new kind of chain mail! 

First, I list 6 random things about me. Then, I link to 6 other bloggers, and those bloggers have to follow the rules! 

RANDOM THINGS ABOUT ME:

1. My first love was my small dog, Domino. She is 12 lbs and looks like an Ewok (half Cocker Spaniel half Shih Tzu). No, she’s not annoying like most little dogs. 

2. My favorite music is trip-hop. Um, what is that? Exactly.

3. I can’t stand the mall.

4. I moved from California to Virginia. Most people ask me “WHY?!?!”. Go ahead… ask!

5. I used to be homeschooled (gasp!)

6. I love Multi Level Marketing (MLMs). I have done Pampered Chef, PrePaid Legal and now Xango. Never made a lot of money doing it, but enough to cover my own expenses to buy the products. 

YOUR TURN:

1. My partner: aarondm
2. My realtor: nannettesaunders
3. My side project: successbyaccident
4. An industry leader: chrisbrogan
5. An industry rockstar: garyvee
6. A client: dougwead 

Okay, for those of you tagged, here are the rules:
1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post.
5. Let each person know they have been tagged.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

So what are six random things about you? Can’t wait to see them!

The holidays have made me stop to think about relationships. Because Social Media has become my focus in my professional life, I have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about the imaginary line between my personal life and my professional life. In social media, the line is much thinner. 

This is a good thing. Why? Because people can see pieces of who you really are and you become a real person. You have a personality. You are unique and not like any other person in your profession. 

This is a bad thing. Why? More people know more about you. You can’t protect your personal life as well. And who wants to be two different people in real life and on the internet? No, you WANT to be the same person. So of course you are going to be more transparent. 

I wrote a ‘note’ on my Facebook account today that was very transparent. In the past Facebook was always a personal tool to get you connected with new and old friends… but over the past few months it has become another tool to promote your profession. So I felt like I had to draw a thin line in my note as to just how transparent I would really be. 

My social media network consists of family members, friends, clients, colleagues, potential clients and a mass audience of random social media users. I think the only answer to this puzzle is to be yourself. You can still brand yourself for a specific niche audience, but in order to communicate with your whole world you are going to be forced to be yourself. 

The question still remains: where do you draw the line between your professional and personal life in social media? How transparent should you get?

Ok, so first I tell you that you need to tweet more… now I am telling you to tweet less?! (If you don’t know what tweeting is go here). 

The truth is, there is no specific magic formula for twitter. So, we have to look at two things:

1) The purpose of twitter: you can’t reach a goal if you don’t have one, and

2) What other people are doing: its like what my father told me once, “Sometimes you learn from people who do things the right way… other times you learn from people who do things the wrong way.”

…

Lets start with drafting a goal. For business professionals, the purpose of twitter is, to name a few, to 1) prove credibility through sharing knowledge and thoughts; 2) gain trust by showing your human side; and 3) gain new leads by networking, making friends leading them to your website/blog/email/convergence method. 

How can you reach any of these objectives without first getting people to read your tweets? Right? This is, of course, after they are following you.

1) It depends on the number of people they follow. If they follow 10 people, chances are they will read all of your tweets. But if they follow 300… chances are its impossible. Especially if they are busy people. 

2) You write something that catches their attention. They need to notice you – write something that they can relate to, that is unusual, or something they are interested in. 

3) You build a relationship with them. @ Reply to them, direct message them and mention their twitter names in your twitter feed. Have a conversation with them through twitter!

Ok, so once you have their attention, you need to keep it. This is where overtweeting comes in! If you under tweet, they won’t notice you. But if you overtweet, they will get annoyed and stop reading your tweets, or stop following you altogether. 

The issue of device following

One of the biggest problems with overtweeting is that when you do have people reading and paying attention to your tweets, sometimes they follow you via “device updates.” Device updates allow you to follow tweeple via SMS. The tweets come as text messages! So, you can just imagine, that if you overtweet… people are going to be looking at their text messages EVERY time you tweet. I can just hear them now… “Oh, ANOTHER tweet from xxx…” 

So, my lesson for today:

Twitter strategically. Give people value, show them who you are, but do it effectively… don’t give them more than they can handle at one time. 

Social media tools arent’ just about networking. They are about making life more efficient… and sometimes fun. Last Christmas I sent out a holiday newsletter for my company, Expressions Laboratories. Instead of giving people more information in an already busy holiday season, we decided to give everyone a little gift: we elf’d ourselves. Along with hand written cards (nothing beats a personal hand-written note) we plugged our faces into elfyourself.com and made fools of ourselves. It was a hit. 

This Christmas I wanted to renew the gift. Here is me and my two favorite men (David and Kaleb, 5) in a holiday dance: 

What did I learn from this experiment? 

1) People want to see your sense of humor. It makes you a real person. That is part of what social media is all about… showing people that you can relate to them on more than one level. 

2) It saved time sending out extra hand-written cards. I sent the ones I wanted to send, but I didn’t have to spend an entire afternoon writing cards… or spend $100 because those little boxes only hold 10 or so. 

Make some of your own: jibjab.com

‘10 Twitter Agendas – What’s Yours’? was published by @snowvandermore. 

She did a good job of summing up the different kinds of tweeple. But, truthfully, she did a better job of making fun of everyone (other than herself) than really defining a purpose for Twitter. 

She pointed on the people who are just on Twitter to get a date, versus the twitter giants who have a million and one followers, news publishers who tell us what is going on in the world, and my favorite the “Combo Meal” which she defines as “achieving total Twitter nirvana” which is basically a mix of all the different Twitter agendas pumped into one 140 character message. 

A lot of what she said was true… most Twitter users fall into this category: “You establish a comfortable group with whom you have regular conversations, albeit in 140 character segments. It’s fun, entertaining and you manage to pump up each others’ egos one tweet at a time. They read and comment on your tweets and blog posts, and vice-versa. You feed off of one another and there is little risk involved.”

Who is she forgetting? 

Those of us who strive to use twitter in the most effective way possible for its “social media optimization” purpose of “generating publicity through online communities.” We are out there to build relationships, yes, but in a more profound way: achieving success with the holistic method of combining our personal lives with our business lives with every other vision and passion that drives us.

Twitter is a place to bring all worlds together – while having an agenda! 

For those of us who fall into the “forgotten” category there is risk involved. Relationships. But its worth it. 

“…They’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours.”

Business Week said this in 2005. Now just think… with the evolution of blogging, twitter and other social media in the past 3 years – what has changed? 

Business week addresses that here:  http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_18/b3931001_mz001.htm

“…It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite. (And yes, that goes for us, too.)”

Being a good Twitterer (on Twitter, of course), I was doing my daily research on new people to follow. As I found new locals and professionals to follow, I kept getting new Direct Messages from my new follows. 

I love direct messages! But something was very fishy about the messages I was getting… 

“Hi. Thanks for the follow. What have you been working on lately?” Then the next message… “Hi. Thanks for the follow. What have you been working on lately?”

Ok… what are the odds that I am going to get the exact same message from several different people? Knowing that these were automatically generated direct messages… what do you think my thought process was?

1. What is the point of twitter if you aren’t going to have personal contact with the people on it? Otherwise it just becomes another tool for spamming or mass messaging… I thought the point was to create relationships? 

2. What will the response be if I send a Direct Message back? Will it be read? Will I be noticed? 

3. Should I start using Automatic Direct Messages (ADMs)? Will it put people off, like I was? Or will people be impressed that I direct messaged them among the crowd? 

Please correct me if I am wrong, but my conclusion is that 1) ADMs eliminate the purpose of Twitter and I don’t want to be just another among a crowd. Yes I want to stand out but 2) I want my DMs to be real and true, so 3) no, ADMs are a bad idea.