(Twitter friends will see an auto notify of this twice)

(if you follow me on Twitter, you will see this twice – once direct from Utterli and once from the blog)

My biggest word of advice for today is to consider how a question is being asked or a thought presented in social media. Often, I will ask a question of Twitter, or in my Facebook status. I do this publicly to not only receive help myself, but to have the help I receive also help others.

If you answer those public questions in a private manner, no one learns from our conversation. You are robbing people in both of our networks of information they may want or need.  So if you see me ask a question on Twitter out loud, and I don’t put “DM me” anywhere in the tweet, I want to be answered out loud as well so others can benefit.

The same applies to Facebook, or Friendfeed, or anywhere else I am online. I often use questions to start a learning process, and statements of opinion to open discussions to the world. I know I’m not the only one. So use that as a chance to be helpful, and to educate. Generate that social media knowledge base and trust network that so many of us are here to foster.

Some may say that’s noisy. It is, but it is useful noise. Useful noise is beautiful noise, and you can ride its wave to a new understanding of something, or someone. Sure, if you want to thank me for a RT, or for following you back somewhere, or for sharing something you wrote, those are fantastic examples of private conversations in which a Facebook message or Twitter DM may be better suited. But if I ask for local bands for a BBQ, replying in private message does nothing to help promote that band or share with us what makes them special the way a reply out loud would.

How are you listening, and are you answering out loud to build a web of trust?

I’m big on the idea of helping people and networking at a hyper local level. I also believe that your network is most effective if it also reaches far and wide – across borders of city, state, country and nation.

Think about it for a minute. If your network is made up of only your existing friends and family and a few existing coworkers, you have built a walled garden. What’s inside my be your own lovely garden, with prize-worthy flowers that are well tended, but any bad weather or difficult event can shake it up.

What happens if you move for an illness or a job? Have you built a network that will follow you? If your company is ready to expand, will you have the support outside of your existing world view to do so? What if the perfect job is a tweet or status update away and you miss it because your eyes aren’t open?

People often wall themselves off out of fear. Fear of change, fear of failure, fear of harm… there are a hundred different kinds of fear. Don’t let it rule you or your company. Add a gate to your garden and see who comes in. You’ll be surprised how it grows your network and where it takes you in life.

I’m fortunate in that I won’t take a client who is not enthusiastic about integrating social media into their existing marketing plan. For someone to try and engage halfheartedly is a waste of everyone’s time and effort, and has a negative effect on the measure of both monetary ROI and interest based ROI. Even so, some clients still struggle. There are several factors that may cause this struggle, and it’s important to have a social media strategy that is flexible enough to address potential problems and adjust to fit the client as you go forward.

Problem 1: The Learning Curve

I know – for those of us who live and breath social media, the learning curve problem seems like a moot point. To us, it’s easy. Remember, though, that your client most likely won’t find it as easy as you do. Make sure you address the learning curve thoroughly from day one. In this case, thoroughly researching your client’s habits and the habits of the person or people who will be manning the campaign is essential.

By having a firm grasp of how your client prefers to get and give information outside of social media, and how they interact with customers, staff, friends and family, you can help them pick better tools. When things have a high learning curve or require being added to an already busy day, choosing the right tools will make a huge difference in how happy the client is with the additional time they will be spending incorporating social media into a campaign.

Example: A busy CEO needs mobile tools. A person who spends most of the day at a desk may prefer desktop applications. People who don’t like to write and who might not keep up with a blog might do better with an audio or video tool, or a combination. Someone on the floor at a service business might have a lot of fun with “interview” style tools like Qik for generating content and getting real time comments. Every client will have a different need to match their habits and passions. In some cases, you may need multiple and different tools for multiple people manning a campaign.

Problem 2: The Intimidation Factor

I see this most often. A client, enthusiastic about social media and raring to go, suddenly realizes the reality of having the internet paying attention to their words, photos or other content. This can create instant “writer’s block” as they become frozen like a deer in headlights. They worry they won’t say the right thing, even as you tell them that there is no “right” thing, it isn’t a test. They worry that they’ll talk and talk and talk and no one will answer back. They worry about legal issues, privacy, being liked, and more. The first week of a social media campaign often makes people feel like the first day of school, or getting picked last in gym.

It’s vital that you recognize this and help your client through it. Take a case in point, the client of mine who inspired this post today. Rick’s Restaurants is a NH business run by a nice family. They serve good food, they have loyal staff and loyal customers, but they need to draw in more business since the two restaurants are located in a bedroom community without a large shopping center or other tourist draw that only has about 5000 or so people living there. That number of people in a community can’t sustain a business. It’s vital that Rick’s Restaurants become a destination for more people in neighboring towns and people passing through.

They decided that social media in addition to their existing radio campaign would be helpful. We got them set up on a variety of networks after determining where their existing customers were and where they could reach new customers. The people manning the campaign are enthusiastic, but think they have nothing to say! Keep in mind, people want to see them on social media – their first week out they got a Twitter based reservation for a group of 36 people on a Saturday night at their Grille location on Main St, and since then have gotten several chef’s table bookings from it as well, so this is an intimidation problem they are having in spite of seeing measurable financial results, quickly.

We’ve been trying a variety of solutions behind the scenes for them, and I think that today we may have found a keeper. Going with the family feeling of Rick’s Pond View and Rick’s Cafe and Grille, we’re bringing Rick’s actual family on board to help. They have NO trouble talking about their son and brother and his restaurant and all of their friends who are regulars there. They want the Rick’s family to grow, because to them the customers are all part their family too. So after bringing them up to speed later today, you’ll see that Rick’s accounts are being manned by Rick (chef/owner) himself periodically, with help from Kim Boetti (his manager), Katie Hayes (bartender) and his parents, George and Joyce. I’m excited, and they are so happy to be involved. You’ll see them posting to the FaceBook Fan Page and Twitter to start, then we’ll bring them into the other social networks gradually once they get used to the extra time commitment (they have a company of their own that they run, after all).

Problem 3: Time, Time Time

Did you give your client an accurate picture of the time required to maintain a presence and listen and engage in social media? Did you take the time to go above and beyond simple training to help them make a schedule and learn to fit it into their day? Have you helped them create a good system so that they don’t feel like they are drowning in notifications, updates and reports? If the answer is no to any of those questions you did your client a disservice. If the answer is yes, and your client still struggles with time management, take your mentoring up a notch and help them review and revise their interaction so they don’t feel so overwhelmed by it all, so chained to their social tools. Maybe they need to implement a system like GTD. Maybe they need to delegate some tasks. Make it a point to find a way to help them be more efficient.

Problem 4: Changing Tools

Sometimes, a client finds a tool they like and use well, and the tool changes (or, as is often the case in social media, disappears altogether). This is out of their control, of course, but is something you can plan for in advance as their strategist. Always have a back up plan! If your client embraces a service like Utterli or Qik as a tool for content generation, for example, make sure you set them up on a similar tool from the beginning. Explain why.

A good company owner is going to embrace the idea of having a back up plan or insurance against problems out of their control. If the service lets your client back up the content they generate, do it! If not, perhaps reevaluate it until it does. An example here is Disqus. I didn’t recommend it to my clients as a comment tool for a long time – I was waiting for it to offer better options for backing up comments in the event of down time. Now that it offers better import and export tools for insurance, I can recommend this powerful comment service with confidence, AND teach my clients ho to back up their system regularly as part of their social media and online maintenance.

•••

What have your clients struggled with? I’m fortunate to have had many successes and happy clients since I started doing this, but I embrace the few that struggle also. Those are the ones that teach me the most about being ever better at this job I love so much. Never stop learning.

Personal Profile Pages

Before Facebook changed its interface to be more like an aggregator or life stream (FriendFeed) and microblog (Twitter) plus personal network, there was a bigger difference in how personal profiles and fan pages worked. Now, they look and act in a much more similar fashion. This means that the only real difference between them is in how they limit your brand growth on Facebook. Personal profile pages can only have 5000 friends. This isn’t a big deal to the average person, but it is if you are Gary Vaynerchuk, Robert Scoble or Jeff Pulver and others like them where your name IS your brand, so to speak.

What it means to a business is that you can only get 5000 friends. Businesses need to reach, listen to and engage far more than 5000 people on a social network to achieve measurable results. This makes the personal profile an unwise choice of message delivery, listening and engagement for a business or brand – it is like putting a cap on your own growth. That leaves you with two options: the fan page and the group.

Group Pages

The group page works very well if you are an organization, brand or business who is trying to get controlled discussions going and go viral to a target audience. The group interface makes it easier for people who belong to it to see where to put their content, how to set up a new threaded discussion or view ongoing ones to add their two cents, upload photos and more. Like all things in Facebook, groups share similar content capabilities with fan pages and personal profile pages, the user interface is just slightly different.

One key benefit to a group page that a fan page lacks is the ability to generate viral marketing. Not only can you bulk invite and bulk message in a group – your group members can bulk invite as well. This makes it much easier to populate a group with people quickly, generating almost immediate activity. It also makes it easier for a good, fun group to become viral. This makes it key to keep adding fresh content and topics to your group, and to encourage your group members to participate as well. Word of caution: be careful how many messages you send! Too many will have people unfollowing your group because it is spammy.

Groups have some fun participatory features that encourage involvement. Once of these is the ability to make people “officers” of the group, publicly recognizing their contribution to your brand without having to give them administrative privileges. This goes a long way toward encouraging goodwill (and on some group pages, the titles chosen are also a way to inject some humor into the page, like a roast). Other features that encourage involvement, like adding links and photos, can also be found on fan pages, though they get their own very easy to locate sections on the group pages for reference later. In fan pages they are part of the larger stream of information that is more relative to what’s going on in the moment.

Fan Pages

Fan pages are important if your brand needs to be indexed on Google. Currently, fan pages are the only Facebook area that can be fully seen by the search engine crawlers, so if you are looking for more exposure for your brand outside of Facebook as well as inside of Facebook, a fan page is the way to go for SEO. Fan pages are not quite as viral as groups: the invite feature limits the admin of the page to a few invites at a time, and does not let fans do much in the way of sharing the page at all. Also, you can’t make fans into officers to show appreciation on fan pages.

A fan page works a lot more like a profile page now that Facebook has made the changes mentioned earlier. This means that information goes to the wall or stream for continuing, real time updates similar to sites like Twitter. Not only that, it gets sent to your fans’ streams as well, just like a personal profile page would. You can add a small box to your sidebar to show photos and links, and a box for information on your company, such as business hours and similar hard info; however, not all people think to look there, whereas in the groups the design draws the user’s eye naturally down the page to the various categories.

Currently, fan pages are also the only way to get an URL (web address) that isn’t an atrociously long set of random numbers and letters. While it is imperfect still, the fan page URL does have your fan page name in it, so name your page well. As we watch Facebook roll out vanity URLs to some major users like Ashton Kutcher, we can’t help but think that soon people and businesses may have a way to get better URLs on all Facebook pages, though it isn’t clear if they will offer it for free or a fee.

While there are many things that are similar between group pages and fan pages, there are two things that make fan pages slightly stand out. One is the ability to add applications that are relevant to your business. For example, if you are a restaurant, Facebook fan pages let you integrate your existing Open Table account, as well as Zagat reviews and similar tools. Groups don’t integrate like that with applications. The other is the ability to offer tabs (like personal profile pages) across the top of the screen, to make it easier for your fans to navigate, then associate various fan levels with a landing page (for example, non-fans can be set to land on the tab for your detailed information, including hours of operation, while fans can be sent over to the live stream).

Other Issues To Think About

• Both group pages and fan pages offer event integration, though it is key to note if you use an outside service like EventBrite or Amiando to charge for tickets you may run into snags with people thinking that by signing up on Facebook to get your event added to their Facebook calendar application they are fully signed up for your list. It takes some finesse to direct them from the event on either style of page.

• You may want to consider having both a group and a fan page, if you have a little time to spend maintaining both, or if you have help from multiple admins. That way you can link between the two, sending fans and group members to both places. It also lets your brand reap the individual benefits of both styles – viral and indexing. It does increase your maintenance time, which is an issue for brands pressed for time.

• The last issue I’ll address is one with Facebook itself. Currently, when you are the administrator of a fan page, you do not show up as yourself when posting. This poses two issues. number one, it makes your stream look like a rolling advert with nothing but your logo making post after post, when in fact you are just conversing. Two, it doesn’t allow for differentiation between several admins, meaning they all look the same and fans can’t tell which company rep they are talking to unless the rep remembers to sign their update with some kind of identifier like ^lp, etc. it would be beneficial to see that change, reducing the confusion and annoyance it causes and allowing admins to show as their own profile image from their personal profile instead of the logo.

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I realize I only skimmed the surface of the capabilities of fan pages, group pages and personal profile pages. I didn’t discuss some of the finer points as this was intended as a quick sketch of why you might choose each one. More specifically, it was intended to show why choosing a personal profile page may be a bad choice for your business. I’ll go into some finer points of using Facebook in a separate post.

I don’t post more often because I like to put most of my ideas into action instead. I am a woman of big ideas, a connector, and I try to enact as many as possible, as quickly and as well as I can. I don’t like a good idea to die on the vine. A lot of these big ideas involve connecting the real world with the online world. The value of social media to people and businesses is in the connectivity it brings, and the doors that opens. This means I believe just as much in the value of face time as I do in the value of online time, and I try to instill that belief in others by building powerful real life networks.

I’ve been putting these thoughts into practice with Social Media Breakfast NH, Podcamp NH, in-person relationship building, client coaching and strategizing, writing books to make the concept easier for others like Twitter for Dummies (co-author with Laura Fitton and Michael Gruen), investigating co-working spaces like the upcoming Port Forward, real life networking whenever possible at events like NH and Boston Media Makers, local off-web events like Chamber meetings or last night’s Extreme Website Makeover event, one-on-one time with my colleagues and friends whose minds inspire me, and more. There is something about translating connections between the tangible and the intangible that makes the ideas much more vibrant and that makes the connection adhere more fully.

How is face time important for your business? Simple: it brings the human element into your brand. You can attempt to engage people online until you are blue in the face. You can throw money and resources at social media until you go broke. But if you can’t translate that rapport and effort into time off the screen somehow, you’re missing a key component to your overall social media and business development strategy. It’s not your 100 or 100,000 or more followers on various platforms that counts, it’s the number that come to your movie, attend your event, support your cause in person, talk about you to their friends, go to your concert, use your service in their homes or businesses, drink your wine in real life… you get the idea.

Never underestimate the value of face time. How do you employ face time in your business or life?

Also, please note there is NO Topics on Fire tonight!

POSTPONED Continuing the focus on hyper local learning and real time reaching out, we are starting Lunch and Learn sessions on some of the topics we get asked about the most. The first of these is on April 18th at Rick’s Pond View (no walk ins, EventBrite signup or email me if you need to pay cash at the door), and is a class on how to keep your kids safe online. (Hashtag #KIDSAFENH)

Also in the hyper local category is the next Social Media Breakfast NH on April 17th (no walk ins, EventBrite signup only). University of New Hampshire (UNH) has generously offered to sponsor this event. This, the third Social Media Breakfast NH, is all about education and social media. We will have two speakers, and then instead of a third speaker we’ll do an open Q&A that will allow the educators present to pick our brains and learn from us in real time. (Hashtag #SMBNH)

Another upcoming event is the next podcast: Topics on Fire, Episode 15: Inbound/Viral Marketing. That will be on TalkShoe next Sunday 4/19 at 10:00PM EDT. You can follow the call here to get a reminder when it will start sent to your email inbox. (Hashtag #TOF)Last Topics on Fire Episode was on Music and Social Media. Have a listen:

There are more classes in the lunch and learn series coming, and more events planned. Stay tuned as we keep finding ways to share knowledge with you and foster connections.