It's a Mesh: merging web, mobile and traditional marketing

Tuesday evening we were honored to have Andy Beal, renowned online reputation management expert and founder of Trackur, Skype-in to our blogging workshop and speak with the participants, taking questions and sharing his insights.  Thank you, Andy!

We live streamed the workshop and also videotaped it to make available for later viewing. Unfortunately, the next day we found that Murphy's Law took effect during Andy's speaking with us: we didn't realize the camera had accidentally been left on earlier when testing, and the battery died without our being able to video all of his segment. Ok, no problem; we had a backup plan because we were doing a screen capture of the Skype segment. Old Murphy struck again, though, and the quality wasn't good enough for use. Soooo, I apologize and will try to recap some of what went on. I'm sure I'll be leaving out a ton of good information, though, and am so disappointed :(

Tomorrow night marks our fourth workshop in the monthly series of free workshops we're doing for 2012 (the first one was in December, 2011), and we're excited to welcome special guest speaker Andy Beal. Not only will this workshop be recorded for online video, but we'll also be live streaming from the Mechdyne cave at Riverstone Energy Center.

Andy Beal, internet marketing consultant, award-winning blogger, professional speaker and coauthor of the critically-acclaimed book Radically Transparent: Monitoring & Managing Reputations Online will join us via Skype. Andy has appeared on ABC News, CNBC and NPR and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times , Business Week, Inc. Magazine, Forbes and many other publications - and now he'll be appearing in Riverstone Energy Center! He is considered “the Indiana Jones of reputation management.”

It's not easy to sit down and convince somebody who is trying to keep their small business afloat in a tumultuous global economy that they shouldn't always be concerned with the sale first when marketing to the modern consumer. Most people who don't have experience in social media just down-right don't take advice like that seriously. It's true, though.

Everyday, internet users are bombarded with people trying to sell them something, to the point where most of this marketing becomes part of their peripheral world. It's not hard to demonstrate this. Most of you probably have a Facebook. I want you to go use Facebook for 20 minutes (seriously, right now, before you make it past this parenthetical aside and spoil the point) and then come back and tell me 10 Facebook ads that stuck out to you. If you're like the vast majority of everyday browsers, you probably can't because you've developed a bit of an immunity to it. 

I know our clients get tired of hearing this, but I can't say it enough: social media is about networking and building relationships, not about broadcasting your own message incessantly.  Nobody cares about you and your product.  They care about how you can help them - whether it's solving a problem or just having fun.

My friend Ben Capozzi is a good example: he followed a link in an email to read a story by an awesome artist whose work he admired, then reached out in the blog comments section saying he enjoyed the story. Then he tweeted the story to his followers. Guess what?  The blogger followed him back after that, and Ben ended up being asked to participate in a project he was doing. You just never know who you might meet through social media, just like you never know who you might meet at a party.

Today we had a client who, in setting up her LinkedIn account, had accidentally invited hundreds of people to connect by importing her contacts. Panicked, she gave us a call wanting to know if there was any way she could withdraw some the invitations.

The good news is that, yes, you can withdraw invitations but the bad news is that you have to do it one invitation at a time so it's a pain if you have hundreds to deal with like her. Here's how to cancel invitations that you sent, keeping in mind that you can only do this If the person hasn't accepted your invitation yet: