Internet Sites

Chris Brogan has a simple but powerful message to small business people, in this case a Realtor.

It is simple in that all he is saying is if I were a Realtor I would:

I’d write a blog about the location where I was selling.

I’d take tons of pictures and post them on the blog.

I’d shoot walking tour videos all the time with a Flip camera and post them.

I’d shoot interview videos with people from my community.

I’d host meetups and tweetups for local residents, inviting people who are house hunting.

I’d find various niche communities (developers, stonemasons, parents) and start community platforms for them on Ning.

I’d empower as many local businesses onto the Net as I could, and help them get successful.

I’d encourage as many people in my community to join Twitter as possible, and I’d bundle them into a list.

Great Advise Chris!

So if your reading this right now, if I were a gambling man, I would bet that you are also an entrepreneur or are contemplating being one. I’ll guess you also know about Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, and other Internet sites useful to business.

There is one thing I can almost guarantee, is there are local businesses that for one reason or another recognize that social media is viable for expansion of their businesses. In fact, it can be much much more effective than printed advertising. In some cases they may already have some type of local networking going on right now and all that would be required is to plug in the social media portion. But they may not know exactly how to implement it.

What I’m driving at is it could be YOU that shows your local businesses how to go about doing this. Show and teach them about attraction marketing. Show them that VALUE means a lot to people. Teach them that Personal Branding will separate them from their competition. Teach them how to blog, how to set up newsletters, how to tweet, how to set up a Business Fan page. You see if they already have an advertising budget, all you have to do is say, “How would you like to learn how to cut your advertising budget almost in half and eventually double your business.” Make sure you have a business plan to be able to present to them, make it a fair price, and you will get customers. You can make money on the training and coaching, on potential products related to internet business, and the business model will not be much different from business to business. So once you get it under your belt, it will be easy! So for 2010, what say you? How many businesses will you help?

Good evening everyone. Well I have a dilemma that I have to deal with over at Facebook. Well over on Facebook you have the option of not hiding your birthday. Well I have quite a few Facebook friends, 3000+ and I had quite a few people wish me happy birthday. I was given virtual flowers, chocolate, gifts, and even had some people make videos. It was quite overwhelming. This morning I wrote a note thanking around 200 people and I still had some to go. This evening I decided to respond to the messages I received. I wrote up a standardized thank you and commenced answering what I would figure 50 messages. A few minutes into doing that I got a warning message that I was doing something against their terms and to stop. OK. I stopped. Well I also had over 25 friend requests so as I usually do, I accept and put a welcome message on their page. I was into about 10 of them when I got a message saying I was suspended. No account, a lot of hard work over the last year, and I hear Facebook is hard to deal with.

I guess I could panic and be mad, but their system has no way of knowing whether something is legitimate or spam. I kind of wish they had that policy instituted on Twitter. I grumbled a bit and then crafted a letter simply explaining what I was doing. I’ve heard that they will re-instate after a while but it could range between a few days to a few weeks. That’s all I really can do. Now I’ll have more time to spend on this blog. This is a lesson we all can learn from. When you rely on other internet sites to carry your message you need to be prepared in case they simply suspend you or drop off the earth, whether for a valid reason or not. You need to try and get in a position where you host all your own content or as much as possible yourself. You also have to be looking for the next social medium that will replace some of the old and be able to easily adapt.

So as Yogi Berra once said “I made a wrong mistake.”