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RTBot helps you find fresh information, fast

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

As the amount of information available to us continues to grow, it can be difficult to find what we want, when we want it. Luckily, clever people will continue to create new tools to help us find, sift, sort, consume, and share this information.

This morning I had a note in my inbox informing me about a tool call RTBot (Real Time roBOT). RTBot allows you to enter a topic title and instantly get related content from multiple sources.

I decided to test it out by searching for “duct tape marketing”. Here is a screen shot of the results (click on the image to enlarge):

As you can see, RTBot retrieved relevant videos YouTube. In addition to videos, RTBot returned:

Articles from Wikipedia
Images
Twitter messages
News stories
Documents (mainly pdf files in this case)
Blogs and
Weblinks

According to their website:

RTBot aims to simplify the access to information and content stored in different sites, reducing the time it takes to find relevant and fresh information on the internet.

Access the freshest information and multimedia content about almost any subject, person, place or event in one single place.

Complete research tasks quickly and easily.

Get a multi-perspective vision and real-time context for every topic.

Eliminate the need to visit different online resurces separately.

Obtain new information each day – even if you are looking at the same article.

Visualize multimedia and social-media content related to every topic.

Embrace a didactic, intuitive, holistic approach to learning.

Discover new, relevant content about your favorite topics and interests.

RTBot offers a fun and engaging learning experience.

Topics research is moving from being “stateless” to being very much in the here and now

I particularly like the 3 item – providing real-time context for a topic.

Their website also states:

RTBot provides content only for specific topics such as concepts, subjects, personalities, events, places, companies, products, etc., but not for broader, unspecific searches.

I haven’t had enough time to play with it yet to know how limiting that will be. I suspect I would still turn to Google for broad searches and use RTBot for either doing research or checking for “latest news”.

RTBot may also prove to be a good tool for small business marketers to get an overall view of their web presence from the point of view of their prospects and customers. Everyone has their preferred place to look for information and learn about solutions – will they find you where they are looking?

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Categories : Web/Tech

Tags : social media

LinkedIn – Why I Want To Talk Before I Link To You

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (5)

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

LinkedIn is the first online social networking site that I joined and it is still my favorite. I have met a lot of great people on LinkedIn and worked on some interesting (and paying) projects because of the relationships that started on LinkedIn.

Today I thought I would share some thoughts on how I approach making new connections on LinkedIn. One quick note – I’m not trying to say that my way is the “right way”, this is just that I use. It has evolved over time and is effective for me – your mileage may vary.

I want to talk to people before I connect with them on LinkedIn. I guess I’ve always assumed that if you are on LinkedIn, you have something you would like to accomplish by being there. I’d like to know how I can help you accomplish that goal.

This has pretty much been my “policy” ever since I joined LinkedIn back in March of 2004. It used to be that in the beginning, I was an early adopter, so I was the one inviting my contacts to LinkedIn (and explaining what it was). As LinkedIn has become more popular, I have received more invitations from people I don’t know.

When someone I’ve never met invites me to connect on LinkedIn, I send them a note that looks like this:

Thank you for the invitation to connect. I make an effort to know my LinkedIn connections so I can do a better job referring them, would you be open to having a brief phone call sometime in the next 2 weeks to chat?

Afternoons typically work best, but you can see my schedule and set up a time here – https://tungle.me/billbrelsford

If you send me your number, I’ll be happy to call you.

Bill Brelsford
913.962.9261

To be clear, I like meeting “strangers” on LinkedIn. I am always open to meeting new people, I just want to know 1) how I can help them and 2) how they may be able to help other people in my network.

I want to have a conversation for a number of reasons. First, I’m not particularly good at remembering names, companies, or titles without any context. I am very good at remembering conversations and stories. If I can’t remember you, I can’t refer you or refer people to you.

On a similar note, if we have a conversation, I put notes about that conversation into my CRM system. After I think “I talked to someone about 6 months ago who I think may be able to help you” I go to my CRM to find the name. I then go to LinkedIn to see if anything has changed in that persons professional life before I make an introduction.

Again, if I don’t know much about you, I can’t help you. Not only can I not help you, I’m doing a a disservice to the people that I do know. How many times have you asked someone for an introduction to one of their LinkedIn connections only to hear “Oh, I don’t really know that person, we’re just connected on LinkedIn.”? If I have to give that answer, I feel like not only have I wasted that person’s time, but I have probably discouraged them from asking me for help again – when I would be able to help them.

Of course, I haven’t had the opportunity to do business or personally experience the service of everyone that I am connected to in LinkedIn. That’s not any different from the connections I have in “real life” – people I know from chambers of commerce and other networking groups.

But if I talk to someone, I try to learn about what they do and how they really help their customers. I get a sense of what type of a person they are – would I want to work with them? These are things I would share with you if you asked me if I knew someone or not – whether I had met them online or offline.

And if I invite you to meet and you don’t respond, or you miss our appointment and don’t follow up, well I’ve still learned something, haven’t I?

That’s what works for me when it comes to managing LinkedIn connection requests – what works for you?

P.S. – Feel free to connect with me – www.linkedin.com/in/billbrelsford

Comments (5)

Categories : Marketing, social media marketing

Tags : LinkedIn, social media

Monitoring Social Media With NutshellMail

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

As social media continues to mature, new tools continue to be developed that aim to help us manage our various social accounts and the plethora of updates and messages we receive from them. One such tool that doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention in NutshellMail from Constant Contact.

I started using NutshellMail shortly after Constant Contact bought the company, which I believe was in mid 2010. For a while I used it sparingly because I was using RSS and other tools. Now that Twitter no longer provides RSS feeds for saved search results, I’ve been using NutShellMail more.

Basically, NutshellMail delivers your social media updates to you via email – so if you spend most of your day in your email inbox, I recommend taking a look at this tool.

NutshellMail is a free service. Currently, you can use NutshellMail to connect to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, Yelp, Foursquare, and Citysearch.

For each service, you have a good deal of control over the type of information you want to receive and the maximum number of items you want to receive in an email. Here is a screen shot showing some of the configuration options for Twitter:

You also have a good deal of control of how often you receive an email from NutshellMail. Here is a screen shot of the screen where you can set your delivery options:

Another benefit is that since NutShellMail pulls results from the searches you save in Twitter, you can take advantage of Twitters special search criteria like “near” and “within” for finding messages within certain radius of your zipcode – something you can’t currently do in popular tools like HootSuite and TweetDeck.

Once you receive an email from NutshellMail, you will see buttons below each status update like the ones below:

that you can use to join or continue a conversation.

NutshellMail can be a great tool to help you stay on top of your social media conversations and for monitoring your brand.

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Categories : social media marketing

Tags : social media, social media for professional service firms

Starting Conversations on Twitter

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

We hear a lot about using social media for listening, starting, and participating in conversations, but how do we actually get a conversation started?

One way to start or join a conversation is to answer questions for people. During my presentation at the Constant Contact event last week, I talked briefly about using Twitter’s advanced search function to look for people asking questions about your area of expertise. For example, if I own a barber shop or hair salon, I may want to search Twitter using this search phrase:

“hair cut” near:66219 within:15mi ?

to find and join conversations relevant to my business.

One of the challenges you may run into using Twitter search this way is it can be difficult to separate all of the people trying to sell products and services (other providers) from the ones who are looking for solutions (prospects).

For example, if I was an estate attorney and I search for:

“need a will” ?

using Twitter’s advanced search, I will find a lot of messages from attorney’s who want to sell their services.

One way to address this issue is to use Google to search Twitter. Back in March of 2010, John Jantsch wrote a very useful blog post titled 7 Insanely Useful Ways To Search Twitter for Marketing. In his post, John gave an example of how to use Google to search Twitter for profiles containing the word “attorney” – intitle:”attorney * on twitter” site:twitter.com

You can also use the search operators that John describes to exclude items from your search results. I query below, I want to find the phrase “need a will” from pages on twitter where the word “attorney” is not in the profile:

“need a will” -”intitle:attorney * on twitter” site:twitter.com

The minus sign in front of “intitle:attorney” is what tells Google to exclude those items.

One quick note, you can’t combine Twitter’s special search terms with Google’s, which is why you don’t see the “near:66219” in the Google search above.

Take a look at John’s post referenced above and play around with using Google to search Twitter to help you find relevant conversations with people who need your products and services.

Leave a comment and let me know your favorite way to start conversations on Twitter.

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Categories : Marketing

Tags : social media, social media for professional service firms, twitter

Social Media Strategies for Professionals and Their Firms

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (3)

Thursday, April 28th, 2011

Social Media Strategies for Professionals and Their Firms: The Guide to Establishing Credibility and Accelerating Relationships

This book review is way over due. I actually pre-ordered it, so I’m a little embarrassed that I’m just posting about it now. But I’m going to blame it on Michelle (the author, Michelle Golden) for writing such a damn good book. It seems like every time I pick it up to write a review, I get caught up in re-reading it and run out of time. Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

This is easily the best book about social media that I’ve read. I haven’t read them all, but I’ve read a lot of them. I promise this is a book you will dog ear and refer to over and over again.

Before I talk about what’s in the book, I want to talk about why I think Michelle was able to write such a good book about social media. It’s because she get’s it. Sure, she’s a good writer, obviously brilliant, and did great research. But she also “walks the talk” using social media to build and nurture relationships.

How do I know this? I often refer to Michelle as “my favorite person that I’ve never met”. We’ve never met in person, but I feel like I know her. We connected primarily through social media (we may have exchanged emails early on), having brief conversations over time. I would recommend her without hesitation to anyone in my professional network. My point in sharing all of this is that if you follow the recommendations in Michelle’s book, you too can build strong relationships with potential customers and referral partners whom you may never have met without social media.

Ok, enough of my gushing <g>, let’s take a look at the book. It is divided into four main parts – What, Why, How, and Tips.

The first section explains “What” firms need to know about social media and includes a chapter on establishing firm policies and guidelines. Personally, I’m not a big fan of creating policies for social media (I view them as regulating talking), but I accept the reality that firms want policies. If you must set policies, the process outlined in chapter 2 is the most reasonable approach I’ve seen. I love how it starts with an assessment of your firm’s risk tolerance and builds from there.

The second section dives into the “Why” of social media. Actually, section two is just a wonderful section about marketing professional services in general. In my opinion, this is exactly how it should be. I’ve been arguing for some time that “social media marketing” isn’t a thing; rather, social media is a set of tools for communicating. Marketing messages are just one type of message we can convey using social media. Of course, the book makes this point far more eloquently than I do.

The last chapter of section 2 relates some case studies demonstrating real life examples of professionals effectively using social media to grow their practices.

Section 3 covers the “How” of social media. How to set up and the most common social media tools – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. The chapters in this section will walk you step by step through each tool and give you some helpful tips about how to use the tools once you get them up and running.

The last section of the book contains tips for helping you get the most out of social media in your practice. Tips include how to be effective online, how to write for the web, social media etiquette, and other best practices.

Whether you are a social media newbie or veteran, you will find helpful, practical advice in this book that will help you build relationships and grow your business.

Go buy the book now.

Comments (3)

Categories : Books, Marketing, social media marketing

Tags : professional services marketing, social media

Is e-mail dead?

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

I’ve been noticing a lot of talk about how email use is on the decline (some say dead) and how it is being replaced by social media tools. Of course, a lot of this talk comes from folks selling products and services related to social media so it needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

If email use is going down, does this mean it is dying? Or could it be that is it being used in more appropriate ways?

You’ve heard the saying that when you’re holding have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I think email was our communication hammer for a long time. Social media doesn’t give us a bigger or better hammer; it gives us a more diverse set of tools.

These tools also come with a sense of place. This sense of place means we need to consider the appropriateness of using them for different types of conversations. If you are my attorney and I run into you in the grocery store, I would feel perfectly comfortable telling you that I need some of your time next week to discuss an issue. I do not want to stand in the aisle and discuss my situation in detail.

Our setting can also influence the level of difficulty in carrying on a conversation, regardless of the subject matter. Just as it can be difficult to have a conversation at a concert or in a night club, it can be difficult to carry on an extended conversation using a tool like Twitter.

The trick for professional service providers will be moving between tools and keeping track of the conversation while doing so. A conversation may start with a question on a social media channel, be followed up on via email, and then discussed in detail on the phone or in person. Follow up from the face-to-face conversation may take place via social media again. Your customers will expect you to remember all of the conversation, not just the parts that occurred in your favorite setting.

How is this working in your practice? Are you seeing conversations spread over different mediums yet?

photo credit – cambodia4kidsorg via Flickr

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Categories : Marketing Strategy

Tags : social media

Metrics For Measuring Marketing Insanity

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (0)

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

As a recovering CPA and a “systems guy”, I like metrics. Metrics can be helpful in helping us understand what’s happening in a system and may even help us set priorities and make decisions.

But sometimes, we can go a little crazy with them. Sometimes, I think we have metrics for the sake of having metrics.

A while ago I posted about Crazy CRM Math and how metrics like “expected revenue” have become standard even if though they provide no real value and may even be misleading.

Today I was reminded of one of my pet social media metric peeves when I read

“There has been a lot of debate in terms of the ideal following-follower ratio”

Seriously? Why?

We all remember that social media is a set of tools for communicating, right? If you are reading this post, I’m going to go way out on a limb and guess that you have been communicating for at least 50% of you life, fair? Have you needed this metric to decide who to talk to in your daily life? Or do you rely on things like what they say (content) and how they say it? Maybe how well they listen? Can they disagree without being disagreeable?

Here’s one of the nice things about Twitter and social media – you don’t need a ratio to gain insight into peoples’ behavior because you can observe the behavior directly.

You can see the conversations they are having. You can determine 1) if they talk about things you are interested in and 2) the likelihood that you will have a conversation with them in the future.

This idea of finding the “ideal following-follower ratio”, reminds me a lot of what goes on with search engine optimization (SEO). People who produced useful information received lots of attention (links). That attention led to success. We all want success, so we try to figure out their “secret”. We see they had lots of links, so we try to find ways to get lots of links without having to do the work of being helpful and creating useful information. Then Google makes a change and … is this sounding familiar?

IMO, if you are approaching social media purely from an SEO point of view, you are missing the point and wasting your time. If you want to be successful with social media, try focusing a little less on the math and more on the conversation.

Comments (0)

Categories : Marketing

Tags : Marketing, metrics, social media, social media marketing

Intuit 2020 Report on The Future of The Accounting Profession

By Bill Brelsford · Comments (1)

Thursday, February 17th, 2011

Intuit recently released their Intuit 2020 Report on the Future of The Accounting Profession. I was drawn to the opening sentences of the report:

“Imagine a World Where…
Accounting firms are not spending their time on gathering and entering client data.”

The reason this sentence caught my eye is because this was the same issue I was working on way back in oldie times (late 1980’s and early 90’s). People often ask me how I went from working as CPA to a software developer and then to a marketing consultant. I can tell you that the first leg of that journey happened because I hated having to gather (copy) and enter client data. While I was doing my impression of the Xerox monks (here’s a video for the kids http://bit.ly/e4MeAE), there was a computer sitting right there with all of the info I needed. I decided that if I could learn to program I could spend less time copying an more time being an auditor. I’m glad we are still moving towards that goal, but I digress.

The report identifies four key trends and explains how they will impact the accounting profession. The four trends identified are:

Shifting Business Environment Creates New Opportunities – Automation and access to cheap foreign labor is causing a drop in the demand for low level services. At the same time, specialization and collaboration are leading to increased opportunities for accounting firms. While low level work will continue be outsourced to cheaper foreign labor, there is another side to the globalization coin – as more and more U.S. small businesses sell their products and services overseas, there will be an increase in demand for accounting firms with global experience.

The shift to a workforce comprised of freelancers, contractors, part-timers and temps who are moving away from traditional employment will also change the way small businesses and firms are managed.

Demographic Shifts Change the Face of Professionals and Clients – Changes in demographics will influence how accounting firms interact with both their customers and their employees. An aging population needs specialized skills in areas such as financial, retirement, and estate planning. More people are starting their own businesses and need accounting services related to starting and running their business.

Demographic shifts, lifestyle changes, and technology will continue to change how we connect and communicate with customers and employees.

From Data to Decision Making, Technology Changes the Accounting Profession As technology expands and the amount of data that is available continues to rises, the demand for consulting to analyze business information, support decisions and provide strategic advice will also rise.

High-Tech Enhances High-Touch Client Outreach, Relationships and Service – Technology, social media, and mobile technologies will continue to become ubiquitous. Members of the accounting profession will need to change the way conduct business and attract new clients. This quote from the report will sound familiar to regular readers of this blog:

“This shift will make an accounting firm’s online presence critical and its mobile presence crucial, especially in efforts to market itself. Just as consumers use websites and social media to compare and review products, potential clients are already going online to choose their accounting service providers, a trend that will undoubtedly become the norm in the next 10 years. Firms and professionals who use online content to demonstrate experience, domain knowledge and thought leadership will be at a competitive advantage.”

As I implied at the beginning of this post, the trend may be slow moving, but it is moving. Prepare for your future success by identifying the high value services that your ideal customers need and create education marketing material to promote your expertise.

You can download the complete report from Intuit at http://about.intuit.com/futureofsmallbusiness/

Comments (1)

Categories : Accounting

Tags : accounting, intuit, Marketing, professional services marketing, selling professional services, social media

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