This is part one, there will be more to come:

SMX Israel this past Sunday:

1. First of all, as in all events of this genre, the keyest takeaways are the emails of some new people you made contact with during the seminar. I have been using – or abusing – (depending on if you ask me or them) the privilege of correspnding with some of the true
professionals that I have run into there, to my great advantage. Having a fund of high-quality cutting edge knowledge an email away is worth the cover price of the seminar, in of itself.  (The takeaway in that fact is that you ought allow no one to talk you out of attending on the grounds that you will have wasted time and money…

2. I learned a lot about Social media. Probably because I’m seldom on Social, I needed to hear the obvious from others. I had been using Twitter, Facebook and Google+ as a bulettin board to announce my blog posts. That is all wrong. (- though I wouldn’t put any money down on my changing….)

First of all, Social is a conversation, a dialog. A blog post is a presentation, lecture or filibuster – whatever. What it is NOT is putting something to other people to respond to.
Yet that is exactly what Social is.

Moreover, the dialog changes with the platform. Just as locker room banter is not ballroom repartee, nor bar jokes, so too the people and tenor of Facebook are not that of Google+. Its different.
(To me, Google+ seems more proffesionaly oriented than Facebook. Not the platform – the tenor of the posts.) So instead of sharing the same content on all the platforms, it needs to be tailored to each group seperately. Otherwise no one will engage. This is the second reason why indescriminate posting will lead nowhere.

3. Don’t buy Facebook ‘like’s. The most common way of buying ‘like’s is by raffling off an iPad, a tactic worn down almost to sea level. The problem with it, besides being seen as a scammer, is that every ‘like’ you gain decreases your relevancy score. Next to your ‘like’s is another metric ‘talking about you’. When your likes are 10k, and ‘talking about you’ is 50, that means people find you irrelevant. Facebook cannot serve your ‘like’ers every post they
‘like’d, -there are too many – and they need to choose the most relevant posts. If you have too many ‘like’s you have labled yourself as irrelevant. And it cost you a good iPad to boot.

3. Creating ads for Facebook, Adwords and Bing:

A. Find your customer’s concerns. If you are selling piano lessons, put ‘piano lessons’ into your keyword tool and check out what is being asked.
B. Get the five biggest questions. Go answer  those questions with your web copy.
C. Then design your ad as a question. If you are discussing price of piano lessons, ask ‘Are piano lessons cheap?’. If you are discussing if they are difficult; ‘Are piano lessons easy?’.  Make multiple landing pages, one for each question. The ad for cheap piano lessons goes to a page where you emphasize price, the one about ease goes to another where you talk about how quickly they will catch on to playing piano. You get the idea.

4. Where to advertise? Adwords and Bing, of course. But there is another kid on the block too. His name is CPV. ‘Cost Per View’ is surprisingly working. Google for the top ones. It may be far more economical than Adwords.

5. Are ads on Adwords and Bing identical? Pretty much so, however the crowd on Bing is an older and less sophisticated crowd. Temper your ad text accordingly, please.

6. How can you get an actual response from the Facebook customer service? The simple answer is that you can’t. Thats what usually happens. The alternative path is to use the advertising form instead of the general contact form (-AKA The Cemetery…) and hiring a Social Media Consultant. The only thing the consultant has that you don’t is connections at Facebook. Thats why you hired her, of course.

This also works when you need special favors, like moving or merging from one Facebook account to another. (Lets say you started with it all under your name, now you want something more professional).

7. Want to know how to do it right? Look at these guys’ FB page: Beauty Addicts (Preen.me). Their Facebook audience is massively engaged and its all business – every ‘I would’ leads to their website, Preen.me, which sells cosmetics as an affilate. Lots of business, in fact.

8. Think AROUND your topic; if you are selling bicycles open a cycling group on LinkedIn. If you are a public charity, discuss some general charity issues. Keep away from your parochial purview.

More to come…