Facebook And Twitter For Marketers

Willie Crawford And Leading Facebook Expert Mari Smith Explain How To Make A Fortune Via Social Networking On Twitter And Facebook
Copyright  2008 by Willie Crawford

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Copyright And Legal Notice:
This ebook is a transcript of a recorded radio show hosted by Willie Crawford, founder of The Internet Marketing Inner Circle. During the show, Willie interviews Mari Smith, one of the world’s leading experts on Facebook and marketing via social networks. Mari unravels the intricacies of networking and marketing on these sites. You can find out more about Mari and her teachings by clicking here. You are free to pass this ebook along but may NOT modify it in any way. Members of The Internet Marketing Inner Circle may change some links referenced to their tracking links. For information on The Internet Marketing Inner Circle, please visit: TheInternetMarketingInnerCircle.com This ebook is protected under international copyright law, and is Copyright  2008 by Willie Crawford. All trademarked terms are the property of their respective holders. This ebook is provided For Informational Purposes Only. We make no guarantee as to the results you’ll get from using the information provided in this ebook or the recording it was derived from. YOU assume all risk and responsibility for the results that you get from using this ebook. We make no claims or guarantees, and assume none of the risk inherent in your using this information. We make no promises that you’ll earn a certain income from using the information in this ebook, or even that you’ll earn ANY income.

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Willie Crawford:

Hello, everyone. This is Willie Crawford and I’d like to welcome you to another exciting edition of Willie Crawford Teaches REAL Internet Marketing. I am joined today by Mari Smith. Mari has been dubbed “The Pied Piper of Facebook” by Fast Company. She is a relationship marketing specialist and Facebook coach. She helps entrepreneurs to strategically grow their businesses using creative zero cost online marketing techniques. Her passion is teaching professionals how to develop powerful, profitable relationships using social media, particularly Facebook. Mari, welcome to the call.

Mari Smith:

Thank you, Willie. It is my pleasure to be here. I am looking forward to our chat. I am a big fan. I have gone through your course that I signed up for. I don’t remember the name of the platform, but I remember watching the slides and listening to the audio and thinking, “This is great,” and going and adjusting my Facebook profile and all kinds of things. I have been a big fan for a long time. I appreciate that. Thank you. I am glad to help. As the listeners join the call, I want to encourage the ones who want to phone in to go ahead and phone in. They can do that by dialing 347-215-8784, but it is just as easy to listen right over the Internet, and you can bring up the chat room on the Internet, on your browser and even type in questions and comments during the course of the show. Mari, first of all, a lot of our listeners probably aren’t familiar with Facebook. It is a fairly new phenomenon for a lot of them. Can you explain in simple terms what exactly Facebook is?

Willie:

Mari: Willie:

Mari:

Ok, sure, sure. People might have heard of MySpace or LinkedIn, or even if people are not super active on the Internet, they have been to networking functions, professional networking maybe like a

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cocktail mixer just kind of exchanging business cards and getting to know people. Facebook is an online platform where people can reach out and connect to others. It is really expanded beyond professional networking, and it actually started in college for college kids to keep in touch with each other and it evolved from there. It has business uses; it has personal uses. It is just a very powerful place to stay in touch and maintain relationships with people that you already know including friends, really close friends, family members, long-lost distant relatives, people you went to school with, as well as and more importantly what we are talking about today which is business uses. That would be to reach out and connect with potential customers and existing customers and build on those relationships, and reach out and connect with joint venture partners or get media attention, further your branding, positioning in the market place, and things like that. Facebook really offers an unprecedented opportunity to do that. I don’t really see any other platform matching what they do now. Willie: Excellent. I know when I first went on Facebook and looked around, it was a new experience for me, too. I was reading everywhere that it started out on the university campuses and they didn’t really appreciate us marketers there at first. Why has Facebook experienced such a rapid growth? I know all of my friends are on Facebook right now. Mari: I think one of them is the ease of use. They have a user interface that has a lot of white space. I find it gentler on the eyes than sites like MySpace. There seems to be a more mature vibe or conversation. It is actually quite easy to get into conversation with people. Also there are certain terms of use. For example you are only allowed to have one account. You can’t have multiple, duplicate, or

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fake accounts. The accounts have to be in your own personal name. There is also a lot of peer pressure to have a photograph there, ideally a good photo of your face, a head shot. It doesn’t have to be super formal; just an attractive photo of you. Then with the different feeds, it is great to be able to create a lot of visibility that way, commenting on different items. The rapid growth particularly came about about a year ago when Facebook opened up their user interface to developers. Third party developers could come along and create applications. All of a sudden it is the latest gold rush on the Internet. It really, really built the momentum. Right now, as of July ’08, they just released a new design which kind of plays down the applications a little bit. I know it is challenging to the developers and also to the users. Nonetheless, the growth really came about because of the expansion with the different networks and new developers, and then it just hit critical mass. Obviously there was a need for it in the marketplace with this more mature audience. MySpace or Bebo and platforms like that have much younger appeal. The average age is about 25, and I have even actually heard 35. More users on Facebook have college degrees. They are a little more educated, have more money, and things like that. It is a really great spot to position your business. It is becoming more accepted; it is becoming more of the norm in fact to have a more transparent position in the marketplace to be more available to your clients and prospects and to be more transparent, as I say. Willie: It is certainly a huge site, too huge to ignore. I understand that it is expected to be around 200 million users by the end of this year? That is right, Willie, 200 million by the end of this year, and then 500 million by 2011. That is what they are predicting. Wow. Yeah. It is pretty huge. You are right; you can’t ignore it.

Mari:

Willie: Mari:

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Willie:

It also makes it very important for you to actually put your picture up there and brand yourself. I know that your face is to me very recognizable – that smile is magnetic. I think that is probably a part of your branding at this point. Well it is, Willie. You are right. That is why I really encourage people to invest. It is really not a lot of money depending on what photographer you go to. Maybe a couple hundred dollars, and you get a nice photo shoot that is not super formal. You don’t necessarily need to be in a suit and tie or anything like that. It depends on your business of course, and the image that you want to project. Nonetheless, get with good photographer who knows how to take good photos for the Internet. Usually a white background is better than dark. Usually you can get several shots of the same photo shoot and then really use them all over in your blogs, your Web sites, and all over the different social networking platforms that you have a profile on. I do recommend that people have – even if you just have a profile on a lot of these different sites but then due to time constraints, you want to pick and choose the one or two that really works for you. Twitter and Facebook seem to be a great combo and also friend feed because you can just set that up and use it. I don’t use it a whole lot, but it looks like I am very active because it is pulling in all of my different feeds from all of the different platforms.

Mari:

Willie:

I do the same thing. I am on Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace, LinkedIn, and a bunch of sites. I have friends who are on dozens of sites, and I wonder how in the world they do that. We have to pick and choose the ones that make the most sense for us, and a lot of people don’t know which ones are best. How is Facebook been different from the other social networking platforms such as MySpace and LinkedIn?

Mari:

For me on MySpace I kept trying to get into it with the years. I had a profile up there. For my personality style I found it a little too

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busy and chaotic. I couldn’t really get into it. I didn’t find it very productive. I do have a profile there. I haven’t looked at it in a long time. LinkedIn, same thing. I had a profile there. It was sort of at the other end of the spectrum. It is a little more static. I mean not as many tools for instant interaction and connection. Definitely much more of a mature audience. It has a reputation for positioning for professional use. That would be whether you were an employee or entrepreneur or employer that it does definitely have its place in the marketplace. I recommend that if you are in business for yourself or you are in – you want to have for professional purposes a profile on LinkedIn. The difference with Facebook is the platform is a lot simpler to use. I find anyway that there are certain features that are not intuitive to some, but maybe that is because I am more technically minded. It does have that different energy, that different vibe of people having more conversations. You can see different postings on people’s walls to become someone’s friend, and the next thing you know you are exchanging wonderful information with each other, getting to know each other and building that rapport. With the feeds, too, it really is – a mentor of mine calls it intellectual voyeurism. We can be a fly on the wall and observe people that we admire and respect in regard to the marketplace, maybe people in our industry, industry leaders, and we can actually observe what they are doing through these feeds. It really gives us a better sense of them even before we reach out to connect with them, so it is really important, I think, to be able to do some homework. If you have a big, powerful player in your marketplace that you want to connect with that you can read up a whole bunch of information about them on their Facebook profile and then a cross over if they are linked to Twitter in their blog and things like that. Also there is an element to Facebook that is really fun. Back in the day when the only provider was AOL, America Online, and it was “You’ve got mail!” We would get all excited and run to the
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computer. “I got an e-mail!” Now it seems to be like friends: “You’ ve got friends!” Not just any friends, but with 90 million users currently, that is a lot of users to choose from. When you can reach out and connect, strategically connect with people that maybe you had not been able to reach otherwise, people that you have admired a long time, and be able to begin to build a relationship with them, that is just powerful. I haven’t seen anything like that happen before to this kind of medium. Willie: Excellent. I know I am very active on Twitter, on Facebook, and a lot of other places. I enjoy all of them, but like you said, with Facebook you can actually be a bit of a voyeur to see what people are talking about, what they are doing. It is a lot more organized. For some reason MySpace has become too spammy. You are just bombarded with messages from anybody and everybody inviting you to be their friend or to follow them or to go visit their site or whatever. I like Facebook a lot more. Do you think these social networking platforms are changing the way that we do business online in general? Mari: Absolutely, Willie, one hundred percent. What is becoming the norm is people really want to be listened to. There is a conversation. Back in the days when we had Web 1.0 it was very flat. It was one way, like sitting watching television. You can’t really interact, but you can talk to it, shout at it, throw the remote at it, but you are not going to get a whole lot of response from it. That’s how a lot of static Web sites were like, just putting up a brochure or a business card. Then blogs really changed all of that and got us into Web 2.0 with a lot more conversation going on. People could leave their comments and get involved in the dialog. Even moving on from there to social networks, there is a lot more transparency going on. Authenticity is absolutely the norm and expected. People can really feel when things are off, and there is nowhere to hide. You can’t conduct yourself one way in one circle and in a totally different way in another. People will sense that there

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is an incongruent behavior there. People have come to expect that. We want people to be themselves. That doesn’t mean that you have to absolutely reveal everything about yourself, your private life. There is still a line to be drawn there that I always say that the personal and professional worlds, especially when you work for yourself, are very much blended, and that is fine. You can reveal however much you are comfortable. You must maintain a sense of privacy and keep certain information about your life private so that you don’t feel too naked. Then the consumers are becoming more wise. There can really be a choice of where to find you and follow you. They can watch your Twitter stream and interact with you in Twitter. They can be your friend on Facebook. They can read your blog. They can go ahead to anywhere that you have a presence, MySpace and sites like that can actually get a better sense of who you are and what you offer through your business., We are really moving away from the information age and into what is being called the recommendation age. How do you build up that recommendation? How do you get a tribe of followers who love you so much and love what you do in your message and your services that they will go out there and rave about you to their communities? That is what we call the recommendation age. How you do that is you show up consistently and congruently and adding value and joining the conversations and listening to your marketplace and really coming from win-win. Willie: I think when I tune into people on Facebook and watch the feed streams, I get a very real feel for who people are as I watch maybe when someone will maybe respond to someone else’s post on their wall or something like that, and I can tell if the person has a positive personality and if they are someone that I want to deal with just by the way that they interact on Facebook. People do get a real feel for who you are just from those

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interactions. Mari: That is so true. On that note, we have to be mindful even when commenting on a blog post or commenting on something on Facebook and we think we are only commenting to that one person. Potentially all eyeballs could read that. My rule of thumb is never put anything on the Internet anywhere even behind a password on a member-only site that you wouldn’t want on the front page of the New York Times. I take it you do consider it important for business owners and professionals to participate in social networking? Very much so, and now what is becoming more and more of a challenge for busy professionals is that time. I think a lot of it comes from the people who have a lot of available time, they may spend two or three hours a day on the computer. In addition, adults who have perhaps teenage children who spend an inordinate amount of time on the different social networks as well, so they haven’t fully seen the vision of what is plausible for them in terms of business use. “Oh, gee, why should I be on the different sites such as Facebook and Twitter?” A lot of people say to me, “I don’t get Twitter. It seems like a waste of time. It does take a little while. I recommend people get an account and start to participate. Give yourself a good couple of weeks before you go, “Okay, now I get it.” It is really powerful in that sense. Absolutely, it is important. If you don’t have presence in one of these major social networks, you are absolutely missing out. You are behind. You are seen as antiquated, dated, and this goes pretty much for any business out there. Some of my clients are attorneys, for example, and attorneys are looking at social networking and going, “How can I be transparent? How can I not disclose too much about myself and my business? I have to have privacy.” It is a whole new area. We are evolving into a whole different way

Willie:

Mari:

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of doing business, and it is important for business owners and professionals to stay on top of what is happening so they don’t get left behind because with the 90 million currently moving towards 200 million, moving towards 500 million – that’s half a billion people. That’s an enormous amount in your potential marketplace. It is already out there looking for your services, possibly talking about you somewhere. If you don’t know how to use these sites, you are not able to engage in that conversation and actually potentially grow your business and make a lot more money by knowing what you are doing. Willie: You mentioned earlier joint ventures which is one of the things that I do. That’s how I grow my business, and I actually broker joint ventures for clients. I am shocked at how easy it is to get in touch with people that I would not normally have access to through Facebook and Twitter, how just a little note to them when normally I would have to get past the gatekeeper, and it just goes right into the in box. It is amazing. That is very true. I have conducted interviews with some very, very successful multiple seven figure Internet marketers who have told me point blank, “You would not be doing this interview with me if you tried to reach me any other way.” They have their e-mails, phone calls, snail mail, and faxes all going through two or three filters before you can get to them, but for some reason they are checking their Facebook e-mail. You can ignore it and not respond to it right away, but people seem to respond right away, so it is very powerful for that reason. Is there a right way and a wrong way to use these social networking sites for business purposes? For sure. I am glad this is coming up because in my experience a wrong way would be to get in there and start to post large signature files on walls, for example, putting on a lot of links and things like that. Another way Facebook allows you to message up to 20 friends at

Mari:

Willie:

Mari:

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once, and they call them friend lists or you can just type them in there. I have seen quite a few people use that and abused that feature and sent out multiple recipient e-mails, and the message would be very promotional and aggressive: invitations to look at the latest venture they are involved in. They don’t even have a relationship yet. I might be friends with a person, but I don’t have a relationship with them yet. For the first communication, that is off-putting. There is no context there. There are many demands of my time. Why should I go and look at your link, your blog, your venture? It is seen as a little intrusive to do that as the first point of contact and things like that. Be careful of over-friending. It is frowned upon adding too many friends at once. In fact, you will get a spam warning and run the risk of having your account deactivated if you grow too fast. It is not fully determined exactly how fast is fast. I have seen people add 1400 friends in a month and get deactivated, and I have seen big Internet marketers add 5000 friends and not get deactivated. There are a lot of variables there. Willie: My friend John Reese is trying to get them to up the limit from 5000. John really sent a precedent with getting those 5000. What John really did is to bring in a lot of the new Facebook members, and he may even have checked with Facebook first to make sure they knew he was doing that. People who have big, big followings, they for sure want to up that 5000. The only way around it currently is either to have a group and/or a fan page where you can blow right past that limit. We talked about you have to be careful, that you can’t just post blatant ads or whatever. Can anyone market their business on Facebook? Is it just open to anyone doing that? Right, we were talking about right ways and wrong ways. Those were some of the wrong ways. Well the right ways would be to

Mari:

Willie:

Mari:

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strategically hand-pick your friends. At first I used to be really diligent at looking exactly at who these people were, but my friends list has really grown organically. I do a lot of it intuitively. Actually, let’s talk about friending in a moment. I want to address what you said about marketing. Actually that is one of the top questions I get asked a lot. People come to me and say, “How do I make money on Facebook? Where is the money on Facebook? Back up a second. Facebook is a medium. It is like a blog or an ezine or teleseminars. It is a medium through which you can let other people know who you are. Obviously it has more advanced features like the ability to connect one on one and to develop a stronger sense of intimacy with these people. First of all you really need to have a product or service. You need to have systems in place. You can’t just be born yesterday and come to Facebook with an idea. No friends, no nothing, no business model, no revenue model. I suppose you could do a big promotion using an affiliate. You don’t necessarily have to have your own material or your own program. I would say that most people can market a business using Facebook provided they are willing to invest a little bit of time to build up those relationships. In fact, that is one of the things that I do address in my course, in my Facebook for Professionals course is the ability to use Facebook for five minutes a day and delegate the rest. You really do need to have, if you are serious about your business growth using social media, the services of a good virtual assistant. She or he can go in there and manage some of your e-mail. The more you have, the more e-mail you are going to get. Make sure that if you have a page or group to moderate that. Make sure there is no inappropriate content and also with your profile. Be adding friends, accepting friends, clearing out application requests, and just general housekeeping that would be really useful. But also if you have your written-out friending criteria that you could have a VA to be actually finding specific connections for you, but then that you would be able to manage. It is like the 80/20 rule. You want to be able to hand-pick your top 20% of your key
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contacts and you manage the relationships for those, and then there are ways that you can connect with the other 80% without having to drain all of your time away every day. Willie: Right. I struggled with that. I am on a lot of different sites. I like to know who my friends are, who my followers are like on MySpace and places like that. I don’t want to accept a friend and then find out it is a porn site or something like that. I tend to want to click through to the profile to make sure it is something I want to be associated with. I sort of wondered how people with huge followings manage that. So you are saying that often it is a virtual assistant? It could be. I know a few busy professionals have a VA in there just because if you really value your time, it is important to do it that way. In the end not everybody is necessarily going to be a good JV partner or turn into a top-paying client, so it takes too long to be nurturing relationships. Actually studies have shown that the number of relationships any individual can manage is about 200, 200 to 250, in your whole entire sphere of influence. If you are a natural connector like Malcolm Gladwell talks about in his book The Tipping Point, then you may be double that number. You probably manage about 500 relationships. You can’t manage 5000; you can’t know all 5000 by name and know all the information about them. You can’t hold that in your brain unless you are a memory expert. You just have to be discerning and really focus on what is important to you. Is your purpose to make money on Facebook or use Facebook as a medium in your integrated strategy, or is it to further your branding or grow your subscriber list? Have an objective. Willie: How do you decide who to accept as a Facebook friend or to ask to be a Facebook friend? It is like you were saying, too, proceed with caution. “Gee, all I know about this person is their name and maybe a picture here.” A lot of that I do myself intuitively, but nonetheless there is a science

Mari:

Mari:

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to it to accept friends that for sure if they have put a comment in that actually included a personal message and they say to me where they found me or who recommended, or anything like that, just something to show that they have read my blog and know a little bit about me, then that is instant accept. I like to see a picture. I rarely accept friends who have a question mark or actually if they have replaced it with the little silhouette. I like to see that we have at least some mutual friends. The more mutual friends the better especially as you grow your network. The more friends you have the more likely that new friends will have shared friends. I like to see that they have joined a network. That is about it. Willie: I get a lot of friend requests that say, “Hi, I noticed that you are a friend of so-and-so, so we may as well be friends, too.” That doesn’t sound like much of an invitation to be a friend to me. I get a lot of those. I guess they sift through other profiles and see who their friends are and start inviting their friends. Is that a good way to do it though? There is that, too, Willie, but there is also on your home page of Facebook, Facebook really wants everybody to be well-connected, and they actually have this little “Friends you may know.” I don’t know what algorithm they are using. “People you may know,” it is called. Rarely do I see anybody that I really do know, or it will suggest friends for you and then there is apps. There are apps that you can install to find more friends. I don’t care for that particular approach either. “Facebook says we should be friends.” Okay, so what? I like to see something more to show that a person has maybe looked at my blog or has seen me somewhere on a wall post. Having said that, probably only about 20% of people actually know to take that action step to put that personal message in. I think people don’t know to click that little link that says, “Add Personal Message.” They don’t realize the importance of that. I am on a crusade to educate people. Always include a personal message

Mari:

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when you are sending a friend request. Willie: Mari: I am guilty of not doing that. Uh-oh. We’ll have to teach you. What I do now though is I pretty much accept about 90% of the incoming friend requests, even 95. Then I will be reverse-picky. The minute someone is inappropriate and posts something on my wall or sends me an inappropriate e-mail, it doesn’t happen all that often, but I will go ahead and remove them as a friend. That is the beauty of it. With millions and millions of members, you can be pretty darn picky about who is in your network and who is not. Willie: I have noticed that, too. If people post what I consider inappropriate videos or something like that on my wall, I know that my business is seeing those things. Maybe it is something that they thought was humorous or maybe too sexual in nature or too violent or something, and I wonder, “Why did you post that on my wall?” That is one of the things we can not control other than deleting them as friends. That is right, and I am wondering if what you are talking about is the apps called Super Wall or Advanced Wall? It is Super Wall, yes. I tend to uninstall them. I am not a fan of those apps. I much prefer just plain old wall because you are much more in control of what can be on your wall. You never know who is going to be looking at your profile. Maybe some people like those apps. Being an Internet marketer, my marketing has mostly been e-mail marketing. I build a mailing list, and I send them things to remind them of who I am and to come back to my site. A lot of us Internet marketers view Facebook and MySpace sort of like building a mailing list with then a wall city, if you will. Does the friend list on Facebook really have the same value as an opt-in e-mail list?

Mari:

Willie: Mari:

Willie:

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Mari:

Not necessarily the same value, but they do have inherent value separately, but you can use them in conjunction. First of all, I totally agree with what you are saying that as an Internet marketer it is really important to have a list. It is like gold because people opt in. They have given you their permission. They have said, “Yes, Willie, put me on your list. Send me your e-mail updates, send me your ezine, and I am okay for you to send me promotions. In fact, I want you to send me promotions.” That is really what the essence of an e-mail list is whereas over on Facebook or on any of these social network sites, people have agreed to be friends. First of all there is a mutual agreement there. That part is similar, but it is not an agreement to receive e-mail outside of Facebook. That is a no-no. If you go in and grab someone’s e-mail address off of their profile assuming they have it revealed through their privacy, I choose not to, and then you start sending your information, they have not given you permission to use that e-mail address. Other things that might be inappropriate may be adding them to a friend list and then e-mailing them inside of Facebook. The better way would be to have them join your group or have them become a fan of your page and then ultimately you want to be migrating your Facebook friends over to your blog subscriber list, sign up for your ezine or your white paper, or whatever it is that you have to build your list so that there is an overlap. What Facebook allows you to do is deepen that sense of connection, that sense of intimacy. Previously it was one-way. They received an e-mail in their in box. Now they can really interact with you and get a better sense of who you are as a person and quite possibly become even more of a client, to be a raving fan, to endorse you, to commend you, send business your way, and things like that.

Willie:

I suppose the thing I like about Facebook and Twitter is that it gets around the e-mail filters. A lot of times I will send out an e-mail newsletter and realize a certain percentage of people on certain ISPs

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aren’t going to get my e-mail, yet I know if I tweet or send a post via Facebook, it will at least get into their in boxes within those social networking sites. Whether or not they see it or not is a different matter, but I know it is getting through that way. Mari: Exactly, that is correct. I have seen some conversations out there like, “Oh, no! Is e-mail dying? My open rate is going down, and my subscription rate is going down.” I say hang in there. We are just readjusting. We are just evolving the different ways that we market. You do need to still have that opt-in list and talk to the people on your list. Survey them. Ask them, “What would you prefer? Is my ezine too long? Would you like some more tips? Am I sending e-mail too often?” Don’t be afraid to ask them, “Hey, come follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook.” That way you can be more engaged with people on your list. Every single name represents a real person; profiles, too. Willie: That is what I like actually about Facebook and Twitter. We can talk about applications, but one of my favorite Facebook apps is called Entourage, which lets me display like hundreds of pictures of my friends on Facebook. I am constantly overwhelmed actually by people inviting me to accept an application and install that on my profile. How do you choose? How do you decide which ones to choose? Mari: I tend to ignore pretty much all of them. I have noticed over the last year that I tend to use the Facebook default apps much more than any of the other ones. I like just the straight Twitter app. It has a recognizable blue branding and people can click off that and see my latest tweet, and they can click off that and go over to Twitter to follow me. Twitter Sync is a good one. A lot of people like to use Twitter Sync because it pulls in your tweets as your Facebook update. I also like apps that show the little logo, icons, with the site. For example there is one called Web Presence. I can list out, “Here is my LinkedIn profile. Here is my YouTube. Here is a friend feed in Twitter,” and have a list of different places where people can also

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connect with me, follow me and interact with me. I recommend using the ones that pull in like I say those recognizable logos. When you see that little blue, light-blue T, you know that is Twitter. When you see the little, red YouTube logo, you know that is YouTube. I like that. I like Business Cards because people recognize the format of a business card. Top Friends is another one, and you can use that strategically. Then there is one called My Box or HTML, and it allows you to put HTML onto your profile. You can even pull in an opt-in box so people can actually fill in their name and e-mail, click subscribe, and they can pop right over to your regular opt-in list. That is a perfect way to use that app. Here we are right in the midst of this transition so it is going to be interesting to see how we evolve with the apps and the positioning of them because people have to physically click onto a tab that says, “Boxes,” and then see your apps and scroll through them. Previously we could see everything in one run-on page which I found a bit more advantageous. Willie: I did, too. You mentioned a lot of applications there, and I wanted to point out to our listeners that if they missed one and they wanted to check it out, they can listen to this recording again later in the archives. At the same time I imagine you mentioning a lot of this in your courses on your site. For people who wanted to maybe go visit you on your site, would www.Facebook4Pros.com be best? Mari: Yes, www.Facebook4Pros.com is the number four, Facebook, and the number four and pros. I have a complete multimedia system with videos and audios, and then there is a 250-page guidebook there. There is an appendix at the back with a large list of applications that specifically have business purposes that I highly recommend. Another one is actually Podclass.com. That is the app where I have my course materials.

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Willie: Mari:

That is the one I tapped into. Yes, so anyone can do up a course on that, and when you do and you add to it, it actually pushed out into a feed, your news feed on Facebook, and your mini-feed. That is a good one. Yes, www.Facebook4Pros.com so you can find more information there and a lot more suggestions in the entire program.

Willie:

One of the things that actually concerns me because I run so many Web sites that I am dependent on for my income, is security. When I am looking at the applications sometimes I wonder, “Well, how do I know if these applications are ok?” I imagine that is something you also teach in your course? In fact, when you install an application there are all these different check boxes, and they have recently changed. They are doing some different systems there. You can actually interact with an application without having to actually install it. Some of these features are working and some are not as we are in this transition phase. Nonetheless, when I install an application, I have several rules about it. I never invite my friends. I just don’t because I never respond to application invitations myself, and I don’t want to clutter up my friends’ request pages with application invitations. Occasionally I’ll come across something that is so awesome that I’ ve got to share with people, but that has rarely happened. What I want to do is I want to get in there and interact with the application, test it myself, see how good it is, see how effective it is, and then I am going to tell my friends about it. I might do it more in a blog post or in a note using the posted items to share something or tweet about it or something like that. I am not going to blanket invite all of my friends that I haven’t even installed or checked out yet. On that note what I will do is I will uncheck most of the default settings when you go to install it. I don ’t even publish stories about it in my feed, my mini feed or my

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news feed. I may not even necessarily want people to know that I added it because I want to test it out and interact with it first. Willie: Yes, and basically you are not recommending something before you know that it works, and it is not going to be more problem than it is worth for your friends. Exactly. Well-said. As a marketer, again, we look at the social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and we think, “Well, how can I make money from these?” I know when I first started reading about Facebook, one of the first things was “create your own application and it can make you a million dollars,” or whatever. If someone had an idea for an application, do you think it is worth their while to invest resources to build one? Mari: Maybe. It depends. Possibly. Perhaps. Seriously, it really does depend because for every application developer who has a brilliant idea and they are able to monetize it, there are probably hundreds and hundreds of developers that their ideas are just not going to fly, or they don’t have the marketing funds, or they don’t have the support team in place. There is help, though. Facebook just had their conference last week, and they awarded I think it was ten companies picked out of a thousand and they awarded them grant money, so they have their FB fund. There are also a lot of investors out there who are more than happy to invest in a good idea. There are certain criteria. It has to be a really hot idea, a viral idea, something that will go viral pretty quickly that people will tell their friends about, something that will add value. I would personally like to see more applications that save time, save money or make money, or things like that, or that create more visibility, branding, and help to propagate my blog more. There is an app called Blog Friend, and you can actually see your

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blog featured on your friends’ profiles, and for some reason Blog Friend didn’t survive. I would like to see something replace that. Most applications are just pretty much frivolous. It could be hard to monetize. I also heard from some developer friends that it is actually quite difficult to find really good programmers, I mean really good programmers who know what they are doing and will create a great app for you and that are available, that are not booked up for months on end. Willie: So Facebook has basically set up the platform so it is easy for the programmers and developers to interface with it? Yes, pretty much. If they know what they are doing, absolutely. If you are already a programmer or application developer there are several people I know who have done extremely well in that area even into the seven figures. They have been able to monetize into seven figures. You can go and check out the Lotto. I know the guy that developed the Lotto app, Jason Beckerman, and his company is call Dank Apps. He has done real well. He just found out a formula that works, and he has created a lot of different apps and has done well with them. He would be someone to watch, to check out, and to emulate some of his ideas because clearly you want to model something that is working. Willie: Right, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. Is that something that you touch on in your course? A little bit; not a lot. I don’t profess to be an application developer at all. I really focus more on getting your message out there and branding yourself, building your community, your network, reaching out to joint venture partners, and also getting media attention such that you actually end up with a waiting list of clients. I actually, as I get more and more involved on Facebook, Twitter, and also this radio show, I am amazed at the number of raving fans I am developing. It is very powerful, and it makes your marketing

Mari:

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almost effortless. It is a lot of fun, too. Mari: Exactly. I like how you put that; it is effortless and it is fun. I mean, I spend a fair amount of time in front of my computer, but I love what I do. Right. Now you talk about spending a fair amount of time in front of your computer. Facebook and Twitter can be time consuming. I know people that are online it seems like all of the time. Is it really worth it to invest the time? That is the thing. In terms of a time management viewpoint, it is important to carve that time out, to make that time in your schedule even if it is like I say a five-minute deal in the morning, you want to pop into Facebook. Actually in my program I have a checklist of minimum daily activity, and they are in hierarchical order of importance. What you always want to do is update your status update, and from there you can check your friends, accept friends, write on walls, post some items, set up a Google alert for keywords related to your industry, and find good information on a regular basis, every day, every other day, maybe a few times a week, or something like that. Post out and share information that is not always your own, such as someone’s news item, blog article, a new tool, or something that helps people make or save money, or make or save time. Willie: That is very important that you just touched on there. So many of us marketers in particular so often think, “How can I make this activity pay off for me?” I actually spread as much time trying to spread the word about things my friends are doing or resources I found when I am posting to Facebook or Twitter. I want to point out useful resources. Right. You can really be seen as a thought leader, someone who adds value, and it is very much a reciprocal. They are happy to help you when you need support and maybe a promotion or something like that, or you are working on a new project. It is just really a

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powerful two-way relationship. With regards to the time conversation, it is a minimum of activities, and there are also ways you can leverage because we can pretty much do everything on our mobile devices. If you have a mobile device and a service like Pingfm, that will update your Twitter tweet, your Facebook, and any other sites you are on like LinkedIn, and Plerk is another one. I don’t use it all that often. You can pull that into FriendFeed. You could be driving to the airport, being driven to the airport – don’t do it while you are driving. Willie: Mari: Sitting at a traffic light. Yes, sitting at a traffic light. You are waiting at an airport, you are in between appointments and you have a few moments, and you can just pop onto your mobile device and tweet, or you can use Facebook for Mobile, and things like that. Don’t put it off, and I am speaking to your listeners, because you think, “Oh, my God, I just don’t have time. I need hours and hours to do this.” No, you can actually integrate into your daily activities a few minutes here and a few minutes there, and then leverage through some of these platforms that will actually pull in feeds from blogs, for example. I am working with one of the top coaches in the country, and we are showing him how to pull in his blog feeds, and he said, “I want to be able to leverage what I am doing already.” Perfect! Social media is ideal for you then because you just pull in your blog posts, and you get more subscribers and readers that way. Then also we are seeing that it is really important to use the services of a good professional, trained virtual assistant. She or he could be just a boost to your company. Willie: I guess some people would think, “Okay all my listeners or my

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followers see me and they think it is me when it is really my virtual assistant.” I guess that is really training your virtual assistant really well to represent you and what you stand for, I guess. Mari: Willie: Go ahead. I was going to say and clear away the clutter, get rid of the messages that you don’t need to respond to. Right, there is that point. One other point I want to make, too, is that your VA can simply be another set of eyes for you such that she or he can be sitting on top of something that is really cutting-edge. Say there is an e-mail that just came in. You are out and about and haven’t checked your Facebook e-mail, and there is a speaking engagement or a TV interview or a huge person you have been trying to reach for ages and finally he responded. Your VA can be in there and alert you and call you on your cell phone. “So and so just responded,” and you can be able to act much more promptly and not have it just get lost in the morass of messages that are sitting there. Willie: Some of the listeners who are brand new to Facebook, they are going to go and log in, start creating their profile, and basically are going to become overwhelmed. They are going to say, “Where do I start?” Where do they start? If you don’t have a profile yet, you go to www.Facebook.com, and you are going to be asked a few things, one of which is your full date of birth including your year. Don’t be put off by that. You can change it later. They just want to make sure that you are over 13. You will verify it but this is through a confirmation e-mail. One of the first things you will want to do is upload a photograph. If you don’t have a super up-to-date, professional head shot, semi-formal, don’t worry about that. Just put in some picture that represents you well. Edit your privacy settings to your liking. Make sure you are okay

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with that. Put in your links over to your blogs, add some content, pull in some photos, maybe if you have any videos especially if they are already on YouTube or something like that. Import your blog through the Notes app. Those are all just getting it set up. I recommend setting aside 45 minutes just to get things set up. There is a wizard that is going to get you to add friends. I recommend that you set up shop first, and bypass the request to go out there and get all of your friends, and set it up to your liking with some content. When they come to your profile, they can get a sense of who you are, what you are about, what you do, and things like that. Then from there you can start to invite friends you know, and you can do that through importing an address book that you already have or just typing their name into the search box, and then you can from there go out and seek new friends. You can do that by joining some groups. That is a great way to narrow down people with like, similar interests. Then I recommend giving yourself a couple of weeks. Log in every day for a few minutes, and just scope it out and get a feel for if it is a good fit for your business. Then you can determine your use of it. You could use it primarily for personal. I know some Internet marketers and they choose to use it – they upload pictures of their family or things they were doing over the weekend. They will connect with people and acknowledge birthdays, and things like that. They don’t really use it a whole lot for business purposes, but it overlays because what they are really doing is showing their marketplace a little bit more personal information about them, and that enables you to deepen that relationship. Willie: You mentioned joining groups. There are potentially thousands of different interests on Facebook. No matter what you are interested in, you could probably find groups that are related to that. I also like starting my own groups. I guess it makes you in charge of the group, if you will, and then you invite others to join and control what is posted to your group to a certain extent.

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Mari:

Yes, that is a terrific way. It is also a great way to be seen as a leader, to be a thought leader. In fact, I was just reading up about Seth Golden. I appreciate his marketing style. I don’t always agree with his approach, but I just love his out-of-the-box thinking and marketing style. He is working on a new project and it is called Tribes and is about leaders; we need you to lead us. I definitely agree with what you are saying, Willie, that you can definitely go in there and set up a group. There are three types of groups. Open is the default; anyone can join. You can do a closed group, which is invitation-only. I tried that, but it actually became too much to go in there and keep approving members so I just opened it up. The third type is kind of interesting, and it is called secret. Only members know that it even exists. It doesn’t give you any visibility because nothing goes out into feeds, but a lot of companies are using that secret group as their intranet. They are able to actually use all of the features of Facebook, but it is completely private.

Willie:

I saw that a lot of companies are using Facebook and Twitter as their company intranets. In fact, when Twitter was having so many problems off the air being overloaded, companies were bouncing off the walls because they couldn’t communicate with employees. You are using a free platform to communicate with employees. I hear what you are saying. It is such an effective medium, and you can protect your updates and similar things to the private groups. I know I do a number of things where I specially set up groups. What also happens though is that as you get group members – you were talking about how time consuming say a private group is – I look for leaders to evolve within the groups and then let them do the moderation of the groups the same as I would a forum. That works beautifully for me because again it is almost like building a list on Facebook, isn’t t? It is; it really is because these people have opted in. They have a similar interest. They want to be led. They want to have information

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Willie:

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from a powerful person who can lead but still be able to interact. They still want to be heard and have a place where they can post their own thoughts, ideas, and share resources. That is a great idea. That is a great example there of being able to leverage. You go in and it is in your name and you are getting the visibility, but you are not the one who has to do all of the moderation. Willie: Maybe even you post your face as the logo for the group or something like that so again, you are spreading your brand. Definitely that is a good way to do it. I wonder where Facebook is headed. Where do you see Facebook in a year’s time as far as business users are concerned? I think we are going to see more features by Facebook for more business-related, more niche ways to connect with people in a smaller fashion, in a more niched fashion. For example like on friends feed you can have rooms which are similar to groups. But who knows? We’ll see how all of that evolves. I think we are going to see more tools for advertisers certainly for monetizing. I know they are working on a system to be able to send and receive money like a Paypal system so you can actually do some e-commerce right there on Facebook. I think we are going to see business apps more readily available. I think the application developers are going to get quite creative and come up with some really cool things. There are major companies, major players like the Visa business network, which they gave away $100 of advertising credit just for joining their network. I haven’t seen a whole lot of value from that just yet. Even when you install their app, it just puts this big blue banner on your page. We’ll see, but nonetheless, it is interesting to see these big players just come along and get involved. For sure it is only just going to get bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

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Probably a lot of people are going to experience a bit of overwhelm and what is called Facebook Fatigue, and that is where I just really say if you are just getting started on Facebook and really starting to feel that fatigue, really, really ignore about 90% of that noise. Just take 60 seconds and glance through the news feed. Take 60 seconds in the morning or a couple times a day at the news feed. It is a great way to stay on top of trends and just keep abreast of what is happening. Don’t go down too many rabbit holes and click on this, click on that, or you will find yourself getting really scattered. Willie: You are right, and then you find yourself getting nothing accomplished. Exactly. I think really what Mark Zuckerburg and his team of amazing people behind the helm here of Facebook are building the most powerful database of intentions, motivations, desires, wants, and needs that have an inordinate amount of value for marketers, for research, just for watching, taking the pulse on the economy, the community, and the world at large by being able to have that enormous amount of information available at our fingertips and searchable, too. I think we are going to find more refined features for users. I would like to see a more powerful search. Currently you can only search profiles within your existing friends and/or your own network, whatever networks you belong to. You can not do a profile search advanced search where you can search for keywords, interest or position, activities of all the millions… Willie: Location, maybe looking for people in your city or something like that? Yes, you could look for people in your network with specific keywords in an advanced search. That is a powerful feature, actually. You can always start local and think global. That is very powerful. I just look at what is happening with

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Facebook. We talked about 300 million users by the end of the year, and then soon half a billion users. I can see companies looking into Facebook and tapping in to that pool of people somehow and marketing to them because that is what businesses look at doing: how do we get out message out to people. What you are teaching us to do is to first of all acknowledge that these social networking platforms are for people to connect one on one, so when you go in there and start marketing, you have to do it in a way that doesn’t offend. That is very powerful. You do coaching, too, don’t you? Mari: Yes, I do, and consulting: Facebook coaching and consulting. I do have a private Webinar room. I often work with very high-level coaches, consultants, entrepreneurs, and professionals just teaching them the basics of Facebook. Then also we develop an entire integrative strategy of how to pull in their blogs and to do Internet marketing in general: how to build their list and what they are actually going to be selling and offering. I help people to increase their rates, actually. Most people make a lot more money after working with me. A lot of people undervalue their service. Especially when you are trading time for dollars, you are actually a consultant or coach yourself, the first thing you should do is go out and raise your rates. A lot of people have a fear around that. “Oh, no. People won’t be able to afford me, and I am charging too much,” and it is actually the opposite. Willie: Right, when you raise your rates people who are your ideal clients who need what you really have to offer, your top-end services, gravitate to you. It is very true, so I teach the mechanics and basics of Facebook. I bring in some Twitter platforms as well, including YouTube, LinkedIn, and FriendFeed with an overall business strategy in developing a business model and a profitable revenue model and things like that. Those wanting to check out your consulting services would go to

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www.Facebookcoach.com? Mari: Yes, you can get some more information there. I am just getting ready to relaunch my blog site which will be my main hub at www.MariSmith.com. It is not quite up just yet. There is just a fill page there, but it will be live in the next couple weeks. My computer is flashing at me telling me that we have a minute left to go in the show. You have thrown so much information at us that I wasn’t paying attention to the time. I will let you offer any closing comments that you would like that I didn’t get a chance to ask or whatever. What would you say to someone who was just discovering Facebook perhaps? Well, just hang in there. Get as much support as you can. If you can go over and read some information at my blog at www.WhyFacebook.com, and if you are not on Twitter, go ahead and set up an account. You can follow me at www.Twitter.com/MariSmith and you will get some Facebook tips there, too, if you are following me. I would be very happy to interact with you. You can reach me at various different methods, and I will do my best to respond. I hope this interview today has gotten you excited about Facebook whether you are just getting started and you haven’t gotten an account yet, or you are already a ways down the road. I trust that people learned some value today. Willie: I am sure they did. I hope that the ones who joined who aren’t on Facebook begin to realize to realize that they are some of the last people on the planet who aren’t. It really is a fun platform, and to me the power again is like we talked earlier with both Facebook and Twitter, you can reach people that again you couldn’t get past their gatekeepers if you tried to reach them through the phone or e-mail or even snail mail perhaps. Yet if you send them a message on Facebook, they respond. I am shocked by these seven figure earners that are following me on Facebook for example or are my Facebook friends.

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Mari: Willie:

Right. It is very powerful. It is exciting. We are running out time, so I want to wrap up by thanking you, Mari, for joining us on the show today. I am sure our listeners did get a lot of value out of it. They will be able to listen to the recordings in the archives, and I encourage them all to go check out your blog. What is your blog address again? www.WhyFacebook.com. With that I would like to thank everyone for joining us. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Mari: Willie: Mari: Willie:

Additional Resources
Audio recording of this call: http://BlogTalkRadio.com/WillieCrawford/ While on that site, please bookmark the show as “a favorite.” Communicate With Willie In Real-time On Twitter http://Twitter.com/WillieCrawford Easy Pushbutton Traffic - Use to automatically submit your videos to over 30 video sharing site. You’ll find Easy Pushbutton Traffic at: http://EasyPushbutttonTraffic.info Viral Document Toolkit - Used to create this PDF and to make it rebrandable. You’ll find VDT at: http://ViralDocumentToolkits.com The Internet Marketing Inner Circle http://TheInternetMarketingInnerCircle.com Mari’s Facebook Persuasion Course

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