Some people are buying into the idea that you MUST participate in this recession thingy.

Personally I’m not. It’s not that I don’t think we are experiencing weird economic times…we are. I just have been blessed with paying clients…too many in fact. Well to be more exact, too many that are too far away.

I have been lusting after one thing — local and regional clients. How nice would it be to not have to do skype calls and white board presentations in the middle of MY night? How great would it be to meet a client for lunch…YES actually meet in person… and develop more of a long lasting relationship. You know the kind…where you invite them over to your house for Super Bowl parties, or you bring them to Chamber of Commerce functions or Meetup meetings just to get them out of the office or store? Real world “stuff”… the kind of ”stuff” that makes a CONNECTION.

“But waaaaiiit,” you say, ”I thought this social media stuff was the end all, be all for business?”

Nope.

You take social media for what it should be: blended into your marketing efforts. You don’t stop advertising or doing traditional marketing and replace it with social media… not unless you’ve got lots of money and resources to throw at it. Let me give you the analogy I give my clients…

It’s alot like the card game of poker. You don’t win with just ONE card in poker; I don’t care how good that card it. It’s not how it’s played (unless you’re playing one card poker: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ggordon/poker/.)  Instead, you win with a number of cards that work together. Synergy.

The unfortunate rub in this is most advertising is bad. Clients forget the rule of advertising:

It’s what you say times how many times you say it times the quality of the people you say it to.

What you say is the ad. Most advertisers have no budget — or for that part,any idea how to test their advertising. Most just “wing it.” And they usually experience FAIL ad results.

How many times you say it if the repetition factor. But a bad ad repeaqted over and over  still doesnt get you results, or the results you desire. 

Which leads us to the last part of our equation: the quality of people you say it to. If the target audience or demographic of the viewer/reader/surfer is not YOUR target audience, then you FAIL again. Fourteen year old skateboarders do not buy Lexus’ cars. It wouldnt matter how many times you repeat that message, even a good message to them, it still is a FAIL with the audience.

What’s this have to do with social media marketing? Many clients do the same FAIL habits with social media as they do traditional advertising. Get the first one right and repeat it on the second one. Clients from all around the world sometimes need the same hand-holding to change marketing habits as so the local and regional clients do. In fact, I’ll venture to say it’s harder with a client around the other side of the world. Sometimes being able to sit down with the client, shake their hand, look ‘em in the eye and tell it to them straight is the best way. It’s that CONNECTION I talked about.

I want more local and regional clients. I want to make a difference in MY community, MY state, MY country.

What does this have to do with social media? For me it’s the answer to “what’s my responsibility to help in these strange economic times?” For me it’s this. How can I help, who can I help? What can I do that’ll make a real world difference?

I told my plans to a good friend of mine. He blurts out, OK… but is there a market locally and regionally?” Well I am situated ideally between about 10-12 million people within a 2-3 hour drive. So I’m not too concerned about that. But even locally, I searched LinkedIn.com and found:
 28,083 results within 25 mile radius
64,779 results within 50 mile radius
985,204 results within 100 mile radius

I was slow out of the gate to use LinkedIn.com due to my use of Twitter and various other social media and social networking sites. But I have fallen in love with what LinkedIn.com offers a small business person like me. So if I was a betting man, I’d say the odds are in my favor that I’ll replace that revenue quickly.

My point is: opportunities are all around. Most business people drive by more business on a daily basis that they could adequately handle. You must get rid of what you don’t want (like the “driftwood” in your life and business) to make room for what you truly desire and want. So my question to you is: do you have any clients you SHOULD fire?

G. Wayne Clayton is the founder and Chief Visionary Officer of Integerol LLC  along with SocialMarketingExpert.org.  He’s a former newspaper publisher and investigative journalist. He has been seen seen and heard on CNN, Fox News Talk radio, quoted in The Toronto Star and is a Guest Blogger on FastCompany.com.

Ethical automation morphed out of work I’m doing on the creation and launch of a new software program called Social Buzz Me. It will help any size business to use The Social Web to build up their brand, generate leads, or make sales.

However, there is more than just the software, there’s also the PROCESS,,, and THAT is what makes Social Buzz Me so special and really the engine behind the concept of ethical automation.

More in the next day. I’ve got to get back to finalizing the launch of Social Buzz Me.

Twitter

A new and improved version of Twitter, dubbed Twicco, rolled out with the highlight being the group and community feature that allows users to create and follow the tweets of a group rather than an individual account.

Groups are important for many reasons.

Clay Shirkyon states on What businesses need to know about social media… “What do businesses need to know: Businesses need to know that the old simplicities of dealing with their customers are disappearing, because customers are now able to coordinate their actions in groups. The old model of engaging with your customers involved two modes — en masse and personal. Messages were sent out over mass media, in hopes of affecting the behavior of individuals.

Now, thanks to social media, customers are part of active groups, groups that form and dissolve quickly in response to people’s interests or needs — most messages in this media flow within social groups, rather than from businesses to individuals.” 

Twicco fits that space very comfortably. Try it out sometime.

Twitter launches groups in Japan

So it’s nice to get a nod from your peers…some type of recognition. I have received some recognition that I am very honored to have. Ron Hudson came out with the companion to his 50 of the Most Powerful and Influential Women in Social Media with the …wait for it… 50 Most Powerful and Influential Men in Social Media list.

I snuck in and made spot number 50. I will be the first to say that there are a number of people that should’ve been on that list that aren’t…but hey, Ron went throught he same “Monday Morning Quarterbacking” on the womens list.

So I will just say THANK YOU Ron and those who nominated me and voted for me. I will continue to strive to learn and grow and help others. It’s an industry tha is filled with many amazing people. ANd frankly I’m glad to be in the group.

So here’s the list of the 50 Most Powerful & Influential Men in Social Media:

1. Michael Arrington | www.techcrunch.com
Rank: 4076 | Linking in: 26,705

2. Pete Cashmore | www.mashable.com
Rank: 6,977 | Linking in: 15,105

3. Darren Rowse | www.problogger.net
Rank: 45,859 | Linking in: 8,734

4. John Dvorak | dvorak.org/blog
Rank: 46,169 | Linking in: 2,009

5. Frank Kern | www.masscontrolsite.com
Rank: 69,096 | Linking in: 180

6. Aaron Brazell | technosailor.com
Rank: 78,019 | Linking in: 1,123

7. Jason Calacanis | calacanis.com
Rank: 87,831 | Linking in: 2,813

8. Steve Rubel | www.micropersuasion.com
Rank: 87,428 | Linking in: 4,232

9. Willie Crawford | williecrawford.com/blog2/
Rank: 90,848 | Linking in: 387

10. Jeremy Schoemaker | www.shoemoney.com
Rank: 101,291 | Linking in: 3,153

and 50. G. Wayne Clayton | socialmarketingexpert.org/

To see number 11-49 visit 50 Most Powerful and Influential Men in Social Media list.

Then along came this thing called Social Media - Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. A funny thing happened while this phenom continues to grow right before our eyes, e-mail has all of the sudden become “better.” To prove the point, please read this post by Nicholas Einstein with Datran Media.

As Social Media Grows, Effective E-mail Thrives
Over the past two years, the rapid adoption of social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace has transformed the way many consumers interact on the Web.

Some customer segments, especially younger ones, now spend an increasingly large percentage of their online time on these sites and primarily use them to communicate with their peers. These same consumers, according to a recent report from JupiterResearch, are apparently spending less time in their e-mail inbox and may be paying

less attention to the messages they receive there. This shift is causing some to question, perhaps prematurely, the future of e-mail as the dominant social networking tool.

In his report, The Social and Portable Inbox, David Daniels quantifies this shift in alarming detail and, according to Jupiter, it may not be isolated to younger segments. Nearly one-quarter of e-mail users reported using social networking sites in this way. Fifty-three percent of respondents age 18 to 24 reported doing so, and 42% of those 25 to 34 also reported using social sites instead of e-mail for personal communications. The reason for doing so was consistent across segments: Too much irrelevant messaging in the e-mail inbox.

I believe that e-mail marketers who ignore social media, especially those that target younger audiences, may be missing a real opportunity. As it turns out, the social sites are excellent places to share information with friends, family, customers and prospects — the trick is to communicate with them openly, honestly and in a human voice. If relevance is the key to e-mail marketing, authenticity is the key to marketing in social media. Social initiatives that leverage messaging interpreted by audiences as fake or overly promotional will never get off the ground and, worse, may negatively impact brand equity.

Marketers who are able to add value to the conversations within the social sites and who can forge honest, genuine communication streams that empower users to interact with a brand on their terms, however, will be well positioned to benefit from the social shift.

Is e-mail dead? Far from it. The future of e-mail looks quite bright. Daniels acknowledges that e-mail specifically remains the primary reason that consumers connect to the Internet. For many customer segments, e-mail is still the social networking vehicle of choice, and it shows few signs of abating. Publishers who deliver highly relevant communications through the e-mail inbox increasingly command premium CPMs from advertisers who realize excellent returns from their investments.

The recent sale of Daily Candy to Comcast for a whopping $125 million is just one of a myriad of signs that e-mail is alive and well. The social networks are helping to foster new conversations online, for sure, and I believe they can be extended and enhanced through e-mail – a ton of transactional e-mail messaging is already coming from the social networks in the form of updates and such things.

Consumers haven’t given up on e-mail; they’ve just given up on bad, irrelevant e-mail. So, while launching engaging, authentic social media messaging programs is an excellent idea for many online marketers, the other near-term imperative is to allocate the resources required to drive truly relevant, timely email messaging based on data intelligence. Incorporating demographics, click-stream data, e-mail response history and other behavioral factors are good places to start.

The era of batch and blast is officially over. With the conversation spilling out of the inbox, it’s no longer good enough.

Nicholas Einstein is director of strategic and analytic services at Datran Media.

“You can put lipstick on a pig,” Obama said to an outbreak of laughter, shouts and raucous applause from his audience, clearly drawing a connection to a previous Sarah Palin joke. “It’s still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It’s still going to stink after eight years.”

If I called my competitor a pig or fish, would my customer/prospect think that it was witty or would they take it as the insult it so obviously was meant to mean?

We must remember you never get looked down upon for taking the high road. Some comments are hard to live down years later…remember Jesse Jackson and his “Htmietown” slur?

An article in the Washington Post on Feb. 13, 1984, had Rick Atkinson reporting Jesse Jackson as saying, “the most attempts to disrupt this campaign have come from Jewish people.” At the end of the article Atkinson stated that “In private conversations with reporters, Jackson referred to Jews as ‘Hymie’ and to New York as ‘Hymietown.’ ‘I’m not familiar with that,’ Jackson said. ‘That’s not accurate.’ ”

That was twenty four years ago! Have we not learned anything?

See the pic on Flickr

Here is the link at Flickr…