With the growth of social media it’s easy to forget that social media marketing campaigns stretch far beyond the boarders of the United States. Twitter documented its growth as a “global information network” with a user base that’s geographically diverse. With 60% of registered Twitter accounts living outside the United States, we tend to think of campaigns only for the USA.

Social Media is a Global Phenomenon

It’s a People-Driven economy and The U.S. and Canada are great areas to look at to see what is and isn’t working and apply appropriately. While it’s a good practice to look at the more progressive countries, be careful, as it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.

With more then 70% of all Facebook users living outside of the US – Keep in mind International users in your next social media strategy brainstorm-sessions.

I recently had the pleasure to interview Adeel Raza – who is without a doubt, a very impressive entrepreneur! Founder of Donut Chat,  a very exciting media-enabled chat room for fun, work and collaboration. Beautifully embeds into your Facebook Page, Website, Blog, Bulletin Board or CMS and also integrates with all popular applications. Donut lets chatters share files and media from YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, etc within the chat room. And it also works on iPhone and iPod touch devices.

9 Reasons Why You’ll Love Donut Chat

1. Takes seconds, and costs nada.
2. Nothing to download or install.
3. Website, Blog or Facebook Page.
4. Connects with Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, etc.
5. It’s your chat, you’re in control.
6. iPhone / iPad / iPod Touch compatible.
7. Share files, photos, videos and documents.
8. Firewall friendly.
9. Speaks your language.

How did you get started in this business?

Our team has always been passionate about software, internet and the web. So we combined the three, and decided to provide simple web services to people

Is this your first business? Were you exposed to entrepreneurship as a child?

We have been in the consulting business for over 5 years with satisfied clients all over the globe. We decided to get into the products bandwagon in order to achieve a higher growth rate. I was exposed to entrepreneurship by friends and mentors, and it’s been a never-ending journey since then.

How did you finance your business?

We started the consulting business boot-strapped. The products division is self-funded.

How many employees do you have? Full- or part-time? What is an average workday like for you?

We are a team of 3 people working full-time. An average workday includes consulting work in the morning, lunch break and discussion/evaluation of new ideas, and the product development. During busy days, an average day could consist of 18 hours.

Who are your potential customers?

For Donut Chat, the potential customers are people with online communities who want to give their members a live chat system.

For our consulting business, the potential customers are firms who want to get things done efficiently. We love technology, and try to design every project with the best yet.

What are the most crucial things you have done to grow your business? What plans do you have now to expand your business further?

It’s a never-ending process. We just got into the products business. In future, we plan to build and offer more exciting products. We’re also in talks with some VCs for funding.

What systems have you used to automate your business to give you more time for business planning and development?

There’s always space for automation. For starters, we’ve automated our complete billing and licensing process. In future, we’re working on automating the customer support system.

What outsiders have been most important to your business success?

Customer. We love them.

How do you market your product?

Reaching out to targetted consumers is a hard task to do. Mostly, we use social media to market it.

What has been your most effective marketing tactic or technique? What’s the worst business advice you’ve ever received

The thing that works the best for startups is to get featured in blogs like TechCrunch, Mashable, WebWorkerDaily, etc. That works the best for us too.

What three pieces of advice would you offer entrepreneurs starting out today?

1. Have lots and lots of patience. It’s not just about good products, but good relationships.
2. Launching something on time is more important than development of new features.
3. Think in terms of business, not in terms of products.

If you were to start another business, what might it be?

It’ll be something related to technology for sure.

Do you believe business has any obligation to make the world a better place?

Yes, not only a business but every act we do as individuals also has an obligation to make this world a better place.

How does your business “give back” to the community or to society?

We love open source. Whenever we build something for internal use, we want other developers to benefit from it too. Whether it’s just a jQuery plugin or a rails gem that we’re using internally, we release it for the community.

Thanks Adeel for your answers, and I look forward to watching your success in the coming years ahead.

Do you replace twitter updates for your morning news and information over TV broadcasts? Do you update your status before you crawl into bed, and again once you wake up in the morning? It’s okay – you’re not alone. The latest Retrevo Gadgetology study asked social media users questions such as when, where, and how much time they spend on sites and services like FaceBook and Twitter.

What is it about social media that causes people to spend so much of their precious time trading information with friends, family and even giant corporations? Of course, we already know the answer; it’s fun and can be rewarding both socially and financially.

Not only do social media fanatics check Facebook and Twitter throughout the day, almost half of the respondents said they check in on the social media scene in bed, during the night or as soon as they wake up in the morning. Naturally, younger social media users said they tweet by night more than those over 25.

Among social media users, it appears almost half are so involved with FaceBook and Twitter that they check in the first thing in the morning. With 16% of social media users saying this is how they get their morning “news,” could we be witnessing the first signs of social media services beginning to replace “Good Morning America” as the source for what’s going on in the world?

Need more evidence that social media can be habit forming? How about the fact that 56% of social media users need to check FaceBook at least once a day? Even more impressive are the 12% who check in every couple of hours.

What are your thoughts? Are we becoming a society addicted to status updates and @anywhere check-ins?

This past year Apple managed to get their product placed in over 40% of the movies that enjoyed at least one weekend atop the box office, Abe Sauer at The Awl reports in a great piece about Apple’s product placement success.

Down from the year prior when it was in 50% of the top movies, but it was good enough to make it the brand with the most product placements. What’s more impressive is the brands Apple beat out such as Ford or Pepsi, which have been atop the list in many recent years. As Abe points out, it’s especially impressive to beat Ford, since it’s easy to put a taxi cab with a Ford logo in a movie.

More impressive than all those product placements over its rivals is the price Apple pays, which would be ZERO. According to the Abe,“Apple does not pay for any of this exposure.” Set decorators want their sets to look realistic, so they need computers.

The problem here: 12% of the homes in the U.S. have Apple computers, says Abe. So, there’s clearly a bias. What’s more, Apple computers managed to find their way into places that just don’t have Apple computers normally, like hospitals and government offices.

These numbers also don’t include the mountain of other films and TV shows, from Macs on Regis and Kelly and Jimmy Fallon’s desks to the Mac grotesquerie of The Office and 30 Rock. Fruity logo out front, advertisement aglow.

For one month in 2009, product placement tracking service Nielsen IAG noted 62 total “occurrences” of Apple products, more than any other brand, including AT&T (59), Coca-Cola (55) or Ford (41). Playboy, even with a whole show crafted around its brand name, logged a comparatively paltry 21 occurrences.

Apple is essentially like Hollywood itself, beautiful, expensive and not at all representative of reality. And just like disbelief is suspended when Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt portray normal people, Apple product placement is dismissed as creative license.

I’m a PC.

With the economy and spending in decline small businesses are flocking to adopt social media marketing strategies to level the playing field in the local markets. With SMB’s social media usage increasing from 12% last year to 24% this year, common usage of social media among small business was a company page on a social networking site, followed by posting status updates.

As eMarketer explains: Most small businesses say they are just breaking even with their current usage of social media, but a solid one-fifth find it profitable already. Businesses are positive about the potential as well: Nearly one-half believe it will make them money in the next 12 months, and another 39% think they will break even on it. Just 9% think social marketing will continue to be a losing proposition.

Social media levels the playing field for small businesses by helping them deliver customer service.

Overall, more than half of all respondents felt that social media lived up to their expectations. One-half felt it took up more time than they realized, but only 6% claimed negative comments on social media had hurt their business.

How has social media affected your small business?

Using Plain Language to Increase Profits

“Plain language is the use of proven writing and design strategies that make it easy for your intended audience to understand and use your information.” – Deborah S. Bosley

After attending a recent Big Council meeting, Deborah S. Bosley, Ph.D., and Principal in The Plain Language Group, presented a variety of strategies for decreasing “communication confusion” by creating/displaying written information in plain language. This concept, basic at its core, is ever-so important in this socially responsible era where brands need to be clear in their messaging. Plain language makes it easy for people to do business with you — directly resulting in increased profits and trust in your company.

Using Plain Language in your Marketing Message

How does language affect your bottom line? Stated plainly: people are 84% more likely to trust companies that use jargon-free language. In the world of Internet Marketing acronyms are common jargon. From CPC to PPC to SMM to SEO, we sometimes forget that our readers do not always know what you know (content), understand words/vocabulary (define), know what to do (process), or feel comfortable (emotionally) especially with new information.

Direct Benefits for your Marketing Materials:

• improves communication
• builds trust
• saves time & money
• more likely to be read / responded to
• clarifies issues / fewer questions
• tells readers what they want to know

Memorable quotes:

Complex writing makes smart people look dumb.

No one ever complained that a company’s information was too easy to understand!

Sell customers what they need, not what you want them to buy.

Communicate unto others as they would communicate to themselves.

As Stuart Foster states; established and recognized brands have pre-existing beliefs, feelings and ideas around them. After all, they’ve spent millions of dollars pushing their message on consumers to think a certain way about their company.

What makes you think you can change perception without a conversation strategy and creative concepts acting on behaviors?

Solution: Simplify your messaging, offerings and marketing. If someone can’t grasp the basic concept of what your brand stands for in 140 characters? It’s time to get out some scissors.

Expect your content to be remixed, just make sure it doesn’t lose its meaning and power.

How do you use language in your marketing materials? What businesses use plain language well?

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil – Truman Capote

I am just now diving into the breadth of the report and wanted to share some of my favorite excepts helping marketers like myself how to employ social media marketing more effectively.

As described: What is Social Influence Marketing? Social Influence Marketing (SIM) is about employing social media and social influencers to achieve the marketing and business needs of an organization. Social Influence Marketing is about recognizing, accounting and tapping into the fact that as your potential consumer makes a purchasing decision, he or she is being influenced by different circles of people through conversations with them, both online and off. It is not enough to market to the consumer anymore; as a marketer you also have to market to each individual’s social influencers throughout the marketing funnel…

Takeaways:

• Social Influence Marketing touches every part of marketing and every dimension of an organization
• Brands must socialize with consumers
• Brands must develop a credible social voice
• Brands must provide a return on emotion to their consumers
• Brands aren’t connecting enough with consumers in a social environment

Closing thoughts: Rethink how you engage with consumers and their influencers. Engage with them in ways that they want you to engage with them. Reflect on whether your marketing department is structured for this new ecosystem. And start managing your efforts against your SIM Score both online and offline if you can. Marketing has changed forever. Have you?

Today is my first day of attending IM Spring Break.

Today’s agenda was focused on Search and Social Media, with panelists from every aspect of the search field.

The keynote presentation was given by Chris Winfield – President of 10e20

How can Social Media help my Business?

Chris presented a short version of what Social Media is: A Giant Conversation Online

Why do you want to be involved with Social Media?

1. Easy way to achieve recognition with a wider audience
2. Create/improve reputation
3. Enhance credibility
4. Attract evangelists
5. Public relations
6. Link attraction
7. Traffic

Social Media is more then Twitter – It’s Networking, Online Videos, Forums, Photo Sharing, Review sites, Wikis, Bookmarking etc…

He covers all the basic info as well:

How to be more social? – Find where your customers are: Ask them!

Let your customers know WHERE you are: add social links to email signatures, include social networks in mailing lists and create pages on your site to let fans/customers know where you are.

Final tips:

• Promote GREAT content
• Build out your networks
• Contribute to the communities
• Make the sites work together
• Have good hosting

Any others you would add to the list?

1. Born a Masshole, wicked pissah I know.
2. Grew up on the Coast of Maine, ayuh.
3. Now a Southerner by choice, ya’ll.

I am an Internet Marketing Consultant in Charlotte, NC – I have been helping clients for over a decade and love the challenges companies face in today’s ever-changing social networking landscape. I hope to keep this blog full of things I find useful or interesting in regards to social media, search engine marketing and consulting. I encourage your comments as I get this started.

My pitch:

I am a speaker, educator and Internet marketing consultant for companies interested in leveraging social media communications and Internet technologies for their business.