First we examined how to write a call to action in Susan’s Your Social Media Messages: Strategic or Waste? The next step was to understand what to say and where to find that content. Now it is time to examine how to vary your message.
The worst mistake companies make, across social networks, is to hard sell everything. These companies push their products, services, and ideas non stop like a used car salesman. The following should help you avoid this fatal marketing mistake. Let’s take a look at this from a winery’s perspective.
What is Signal?
Signal are messages you deliver, within your social networks, that provide value to your audience. Signal should never be a sales pitch. These messages have the following characteristics:
What is Noise?
Noise are messages you deliver, within your social networks, that provide your audience a sales message.
Become a Go-To Source of Value
The most critical reason you must vary your message, with more Signal messages, is to create value for your audience. By creating value for your audience, you become a go-to source of valuable information. Wineries, or any companies-entrepreneurs, that position themselves as go-to sources of information create:
Lost in Space Wiki: “Doctor Smith”
Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester analyst and social media thought leader, provides an in depth look at the wreckage that can accompany the work load of social media “Looking Behind the Curtain on the Social Media Stage: Humans Don’t Scale.” Peter Kim highlighted Jeremiah’s post as a point in an even bigger issue within social media: social media’s changing culture.
3 Reasons Why Social Media’s Culture Is Changing
According to Peter there are three points to this changing culture:
Social Media Strategy: How to Stop Begging

One of the biggest and most image tarnishing mistakes people make in social media is the blind collection of numbers. Whether it is collecting meaningless followers on Twitter or blatantly soliciting people to “friend” a Facebook page, the idea behind such hard sell activities is to artificially increase the number of people “using” a particular network. The motive behind these activities is the idea that the larger a person’s follower base, friend base, or Linkedin connections are (no matter who they are or where they are from) the more valued or validated that person is as an expert or authority on their subject matter.
Collecting numbers, you can buy 4,000 followers on Twitter for $12.95, is simply just that-a collecting of numbers. The worst scenario of all for “false expertise” through collecting of numbers is the collection of Linkedin recommendations.
Quality Over Quantity
The number of people that recommend a person is not a perfect indicator of that person’s abilities, expertise, or authority in their niche. It is more meaningful to acquire, without blatantly soliciting, solid recommendations from people with expertise, industry authority, or well respected people
3 Steps to Quality Linkedin Recommendations
My goal as I set out to write today’s article was to spotlight a company using Web 2.0 tools that isn’t a household name. After all, it’s more challenging for lower profile businesses to build an online following than those who already possess a lot of juice. One business that hit my radar and caught my attention was AccuQuote Life Insurance. Why does AccuQuote stand out to me? Because they are attempting to integrate numerous Web 2.0 tools in their engagement strategies. While some of their individual strategies may need some tweaking, they’ve built a foundation using the key tools and that’s more than most service providers are doing.
What AccuQuote is doing well:
AccuQuote is using these tools to:
While AccuQuote has done a good job with getting equipped with these tools, they can improve the effectiveness of how they’re using the tools with a few tweaks:
AccuQuote website banner

AccuQuote blog banner

AccuQuote tweet stream

AccuQuote Facebook Page
Would you like to share your experiences of what’s working to engage customers and prospects in your Web 2.0 strategies?
My business partner, Dean Guadagni and I speak to groups about social media on average twice a week. Invariably the question comes up with each group, “How much time do you spend on social media?”
This question was raised again this morning from the back of the room, and a voice near the front of the room yelled out, “It’s a time suck!”
My reply: It is if you let it be. You can avoid the time suck by having a strategy.
Clara Shih, creator of the first business application for Facebook, refers to Facebook as the new CRM and describes social networking sites as relationship tools that allow us to be both more aware and better able to engage with our outer networks.
I spent 20 years in the world of CRM, first in magazine circulation, then in catalog. It was a direct mail world where the costs to connect were in our face. We spent many hours strategically planning who we’d mail, when, and what to meet our particular business goal. If the projections we ran on a particular customer or prospect didn’t appear to meet our objectives, they were eliminated from the mailing. After all, we couldn’t afford to waste our resources.
This is how any business needs to approach social media. Time is just as much a commodity as the checks you write to printers, list brokers and the U.S. Postal Service.
How to invest smartly in social media:
Photo credit: fjny