eric rochow : social media handyman

This is one of those things that happen rarely, social media tools affect you in real time.

I was at the Tilzy.tv NY Web Meetup last night, listening to Matt Bledsoe and Troy Hitch of You Suck at Photoshop talk about their show.

I’m sitting in a chair and I checked Twitter on my iPhone. Paul of For Your Imagination had just sent out a tweet on the @FYIStudio Twitter account:

I see this tweet, and I’m not sure who this is. I’m thinking this person might be from Justin.tv or some web show.

So I google the name on my iPhone, and click on the link to Wikipedia. Up comes the Justine Bateman listing ( I learned she is a famous actor ) with this picture filling up my iPhone screen:

From a group of women sitting behind me is a voice, coming over my shoulder, “What are you looking at?”

I  didn’t turn to see who it was, I just kinda half turned, ( can’t turn well with a ruptured disc ) and said, “I’m looking at Wikipedia”  and then went on to check my other messages.

After the presentation ends, ( and it was really good BTW ) I ask around to see if someone can point out to me who at the meetup is Justine Bateman. And sure enough, it was the woman who asked me “What are you looking at?”

Thinking that must have been a pretty creepy moment for her, I walked up to her and explained that I had seen the FYIstudio tweet and proceeded to look up her info.

Can’t blame her for the look she gave me, but at least I tried.

I’m not a TV star, but I can empathize a bit, as people know a lot about me from watching Gardenfork.tv.

I just thought it an interesting example that shows how information can fly pretty fast, and how it can cause awkward moments.

Sorry for the weirdness Ms Bateman.

Twitter made some changes recently and one is when a new person follows you, you can opt to get an email telling you this.

The email shows a avatar-picture or whatever you call it of the person, and how many people they are following and how many are following back.

This doesn’t help me much decide whether to follow the person. Except for if I see they are following 10k+ people, i don’t bother.

What would be much more helpful AND save people time, is to list the person’s profile in the email. I always read what the person has written about themselves. ( if they’ve written nothing, i don’t follow back )

So, put in some bio info, and it would be a big help here. Just my 2 cents here, but then , it is my blog here…

I haven’t posted anything here for quite some time. I created a site for my handyman - contractor business, HandymanEric.com , where I’ve been posting photos of the work I do for people. 

“Your Handyman Blog was the smartest thing you’ve done” is what yesterday’s client, a PR executive said to me. 

And the blog has worked out really well, I don’t advertise, most everyone finds me on the web here or thru referalls. I participate in the forum section of Brownstoner.com, answering questions people post, and I get a lot of work from that effort. So thank you Brownstoner for that. 

When i get a minute i will go into more detail about how i’ve used social media to grow the biz, but for now go check out the site. 

I’m all about being practical, and most any time I am with social media people, I make the comment that most social media people spend a large part of their time talking to other social media people about how great social media is.

Today in Liz Strauss’ blog, Succesful Blog, she wrote post, The Real-World Social Media Heroes List. She asks, ” have we lost track of how few of us there are [ in social media ] and how small our conversation really is? ”

Yes.

Liz goes on to ask ” Who are the folks using the tools to make a difference in the world?”

My answer on her blog is The Home Depot, on Twitter known as @TheHomeDepot . Sarah from their Corporate Communications department manages their Twitter account, and I learned about their Twitter account during the Hurrican Gustav.

During Gustav, several Social Media types on Twitter set up a ning.com site to help out, what help it did I don’t know, but I saw a ton of Tweets about the site. I gave it a look and one conversation thread was about whether the site should be a social network or a wiki. Once again, social media people talking to social media people, not the people who really need the info.

But social media did help. We can’t measure the impact in a concrete way, but Sarah at The Home Depot did a brilliant job of sending out relevant information about what stores in the storm’s path were open, what supplies one should have, etc.

I don’t think a ton of people saw these Twitter posts, but some people did, and I’m sure they then passed this information on to friends and neighbors. Which location had generators? Sarah told people.

I am really glad she mentioned the following. While one would think this is obvious, you’d be surprised how each year people die of carbon monoxide poisoning from running a generator indoors.

Sarah’s real person writing style is great, this is not corporate speak, its a real person who works for a real company, but clearly someone who cares. A very smart move by The Home Depot to post this information on Twitter, and a very good example of social media used in the real world.

Andy Sernovitz invited me to attend the Word of Mouth Crash Course put on by Gas Pedal. Its a one day course on how to get people talking about you and your business.

I love word of mouth marketing. Its how I’ve gotten work all my life. With the rise of the web as a tool for people to communicate, word of mouth marketing has gotten even more fun.

But, as Andy points out in the first 10 minutes of his course, not all Word of Mouth Marketing has to involve the internet.

The Layout:

When you’re asked ( or told by your boss ) to attend a one-day class, the usual drill is you go to a hotel conference room with bad lighting, uncomfortable chairs, and that ever-present hotel meeting room aroma.

Gas Pedal’s one day Crash Course is the polar opposite. I have never been in a conference room like the one we were in. It was just a fun room, a mash-up of Pee Wee’s Playhouse and Southwestern design. Casual furniture, small tables, plenty of snacks, nice lighting: a very comfortable place to spend the day.

And the food was great too. Healthy plus some decadent snacks.

The Presentation:

What immediately struck me was the lack of pretension Andy Sernovitz has. There’s no MBA, PhD, etc. on a powerpoint slide. Its just this regular guy who clearly enjoys talking about Word of Mouth Marketing, and the concepts and ideas just roll out of his head.

Lots of interaction as well. In the class was an eye doctor, and during the course of the day Andy and the group came up with several very cool ideas for his practice.

The day was broken up by several exercises we did as small groups. Normally there is a lot of eye-rolling when you are asked to do this sort of thing in a class, but this was fun. I learned stuff.

And what we learned you can put into practice in the Real World. Andy calls them the Five Ts:

Talkers : find out people who will talk about you

Topics: Give people a reason to talk

Tools: Help the message spread faster and farther

Taking Part: Join the conversation

Tracking: measure and understand what people are saying.

I’m always thinking of how someone or a business can improve their marketing, so now, I’m always walking around thinking ” OK, who are the talkers for this business”

I had dinner with a friend who is doing marketing for a Cosmetology school. And the first thing I asked him was ” Who are their talkers?”

We came up with 2 quickly: those who are enrolled or have completed the school, and beauty salons that have employed people from this school.

I suggested my friend buy Andy’s book and take the Word of Mouth Marketing Course.

Getting ready for the day of the class I attended, I actually came prepared. I brought a pen and a pad to take notes ( its unusual for me to be this prepared ) But Andy is 2 steps ahead of me, he has a clipboard, a cool course book, and a bag of swhag with my name on it. And the swhag is smart shwag, stuff you will use, like a cube tap, which is a hot item in an airport when you’re delayed for hours.

The course book includes all the powerpoint slides and plenty of room to take notes. Its now a great reference tool for me.

Andy pushes the idea of thinking out of the box, your talkers are not always the most obvious ones.

A good example he brought up in class was Las Vegas Casinos. Who are your talkers? One might say travel agents, websites, friends who gamble. Andy told us of one I did not think of: taxi drivers. You get in a cab, want to go to a casino? the cab driver makes a suggestion.

How to get the cab drivers to talk about you? One casino, before their grand opening, invited Las Vegas cabbies and their families to stay at the casino-hotel for a free weekend. It cost a bunch of money, but those cab drivers, when asked which casino they like, will remember which one they stayed in for free. And they will remember that weekend for years.

Andy also talks about marketing on the web. One of the things he said that sticks in my head. ” Email is the only advertising we ask for ” wow. never thought of it like that. All the people who sign up for the Gardenfork - Real World Green newsletter are asking for info, but expecting advertising as well.

Another point Andy makes: Make it as easy as possible for someone on your website to tell a friend about you or your site. YouTube has 13 ways to tell a friend on each page; put a Tell A Friend button on each of yours, and include one in your emails as well.

The Gardenfork - Real World Green email newsletter has a big ” Forward to a Friend ” button at the top of the email.

Andy also has a blog with a bunch of fun thoughts and picts of the way people market and do things thoughts. I’ve put it in my Google Reader list.

In short, this course is a must-take for people looking to grow their business. Its down to earth real world marketing ideas. You will have a lot of ” ah ha! ” moments during Andy Sernovitz’s Gas Pedal Word of Mouth Crash Course.

And, in the meantime, buy a copy of Andy’s book, Word of Mouth Marketing, How Smart Companies Get People Talking.

I’m sorry, but this drives me up the wall. And its not just the Foundation Center that does this, but we’re going to use them as an example.

The Foundation Center is a great organization, they run a number of free resource libraries where you can get all sorts of information on grants, fundraising, etc. They also offer classes and have great online resources.

They are also prolific at sending email if you subscribe to one of their newsletters or set up a search criteria. Their emails offer classes, services, news, etc. Its all good, but to me, its too much, and grant writing is no longer something I’m interested in.

I’ve tried to unsubscribe from their lists several times, but they don’t make it easy. They want you to log in to unsubscribe. Here’s the problem with this.

• First, one should not have to log in to unsubscribe. People who want to unsubscribe probably lost interest in your newsletter long ago and no longer remember their log in information.

• Second, to make it difficult to unsbuscribe can make the person frustrated, and lose any goodwill you might have with a potential donor or user who might in the future want to return to your site.

Like myself, many people subscribe to news using an email alias, and other sites have something like this at the bottom of the page “To unsubscribe to this email, reply to this email with ‘unsubscribe’ in the subject line” That does many people no good, as your email alias is not used by your email program.

So, to not frustrate people, and keep the goodwill and trust you have built with a user, make it REAL EASY to unsubscribe. Feedburner and Constant Contact both use a one-click unsubscribe, and so should everyone else. Keep that goodwill, keep people like me from blogging about your poor unsubscribe method.

Just a quick thought here. Today I spoke at SocialDevCamp Chicago on creating niche social networks. I was asked by an audience member how she could get people who use their website to start taking part in conversations, interacting.

My answer was that she herself was probably not going to get more people to interact, but I suggested she use her talkers. Talkers are people who spread your message for you. In this case the talkers would be people who already interact on the site, they can get others to take part because the targeted people see someone like themselves who is participating; its a peer to peer thing, rather than the webmaster trying to get them to particpate.

I learned a ton about this at Andy Sernovitz’s Word of Mouth Marketing Crash Course, which I will talk about in a separate post.

I’m not a great text blogger, I’m just not good at it. So I’ve decided to talk about social media the way I do best, and that is with video. This is the first of my new video blog posts of how people and companies use social media. The focus of many of these videos will be about people outside the Social Media Fishbowl, regular people who use social media tools.

Carol Wallack and Valerie Sanchez of Sola Restaurant in Chicago were nice enough to sit for a moment and allow me to ask them about how they use a weekly email and their website to keep in touch with their customers. Their use of social media to connect with their customers has been very succesful, watch this video and you’ll learn what they did right and wrong as they started to use these web tools.

I get emails all the time from people want to use Real World Green and Gardenfork videos, but this one stood out yesterday.

The big red flag for me here was the person did not say what company he worked for, and in his signature line, it didn’t list the company either. It did list his email address, I immediately recognized the domain name as a children’s modeling agency.

When you talk to me about attracting children to your site, and don’t tell me who you work for, there is no way I’m going to get near you.

I wrote back telling them I would not allow the shows on their site.

I’m big on gut feeling, though I have been wrong at times, more often your gut feeling is the right feeling.

Andy Sernovitz of Gas Pedal and the blog Word of Mouth Marketing wrote about this in relation to marketing today, he calls it Honesty of Identity:

Trust your gut if you get the slightest feeling that something isn’t honest. If you have to ask — don’t do it.

I know this word is used to death, but Transparency is paramount when using the web. Maybe we should use the word Honesty instead.

Have any good examples of non-honesty you’re run across? Tell us.

Just heard about SocialDevCampChicago from TechCocktail, and I have signed up for a slot to talk about “What’s it like to create and manage a niche social network” . I’ll talk about how I decided to create The Green House, and what I’ve found works and what doesn’t, and more as I think about what I’ll say in 25 minutes.

I’m a veteran speaker from several PodCamps, and I love the un-conference model. I’m also talking with several people in Chicago about having a MediaCamp, a mash up of a PodCamp and a WordCamp, and whatever else we throw in. Interested? let me know here. eric — at — ericrochow.com

photo by Steve Garfield