My 12-Month Social Media for Solo Professional Service Firm Experience

December 13, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Leave a Comment 

RedShift:12-Month Social Media Experience

RedShift:12-Month Social Media Experience

I realized that its been exactly 12 months since I decided to get involved with social media. I’d already been blogging for a number years, but prior social media experiments were disappointing. Its good that I gave it another chance.

There’s so much out there about how to use social media for professional and business benefit. It can be daunting to find the right information that you can relate to if you’re a small business or professional service provider just getting started. That’s why I wanted to present my experience as a story and a picture. I didn’t follow a plan; I just dove in.

The experiential, test and learn approach worked great for me and it was right that I waited until the social networking applications allowed users full control. If I made a mistake, or changed my mind, it was easy to edit or delete. I needed that.

I didn’t have a plan beyond wanting to connect with people and bring my content to a higher level, and I think that was a good thing. I developed my own social media models and tools as I learned and gained experience. The more I learned, on my own and from others that I connected with, the more clear I got about where I was going with social media and how it integrated with my my business. It was an iterative, not linear, progression. That’s typical for me, but that’s me. Success in social medial looks and feels different for everyone and there’s nothing wrong with figuring out what’s most valuable to you as you work with it.

My only strong recommendation is to not get bogged down in a lot of advance research or planning, or wanting to be like others. That’s because of the sheer volume of information out there and the huge numbers of people involved. Just start. You’ll figure it out as you go along.

I think that iterative processes and learning are better expressed in visuals and I’m hoping readers will relate to some of my activities and milestones in the diagram and hopefully can imagine their own. I’ve tried to illustrate how my social media experience for a small professional service firm is an ongoing, fluid work in process.

I’m pleased that I’ve built a good foundation and platform for growth, have new relationships with excellent people, and have expanded my personal and professional influence. The biggest return at this point is the content I’ve developed and integrated through repeatedly expressing my ideas, insights, beliefs and observations for my small, high quality and growing community.

The only cost was my time and its been well spent. In fact, after only 12 months, my social media experiment has morphed into my most important small business system. Its become the cornerstone of my intellectual and social capital development and hopefully, in the near future, a driver of increased awareness of my brand by people who need what I offer.

For small businesses and professional service providers in the connected and conceptual world, social media can definitely add to the Value of You!.

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Filed under: SEO/SEM, authenticity, differentiation, direction, global microbrand, mind mapping, personal brand, self-expression, social media, social networks, solo psf
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RedShift News

August 20, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · 1 Comment 

RedShift Web 2.0

I’ve recently made significant changes (yup - again!) to my web site and blog and it may be of interest to those of you who are starting a new business needing online content or who are thinking of bringing your existing site(s) to another level. I’ll try to explain in the simplest, non-technical language as possible.

I decided 2 weeks ago to migrate to WordPress and to self host my blog. I’d previously used TypePad, a blog service. I was so impressed with its capabilities, that I decided to integrate my web site and my blog, bringing them both together in one WordPress site. Not only is it more professional looking and integrated, but it also provides a greatly enhanced architecture for Web 2.0 trends and search engine optimization. On top of that, its easier to maintain, manage and update, and its cool and fun which I like to be. Its no longer a big deal to add additional functionality (calendars, forums, social networking….you name it) and the capabilities are extensive.

Custom web design and programming is expensive for solo’s and small business and often does not really serve the purpose of building community and relationships. On the other hand, standardized applications, developed specifically for Web 2.0, provide a pre-built structure for doing just that. When business owners don’t have to deal with the mechanics, they can focus on education, collaboration and relationship building - the things that keep people coming back for more. Another huge advantage is that WordPress sites are developed to maximize search engine placement.

Although I’ve resisted doing Web site work for clients in the past, I believe that these great new web tools, combined with my strategy, writing and coaching skills, allow me to offer “my kind” of creative program that provides clients real value for a very reasonable investment. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions!

I still have a few things on my new site to fix or complete. But I’m trying to adhere to a mantra that someone I respect recently posted: “better done than perfect”.

RedShift on Twitter

I’m now on Twitter and send out very short posts - information, ideas, inspiration. If you’d like to check it out, or if you’re interested in following me on Twitter, you can get my little snippets by email or on your cellphone. You may want to experiment with Twitter yourself. Like most Web 2.0, its very simple concept providing a lot of community development potential.

As always, thanks so much for your time, interest and feedback!

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Filed under: Markets, Natural influence, SEO/SEM, convergence, design, going solo, integral, self-expression, simplicity, social capital
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Four Prerequisites to Content and Search Optimization: D.I.C.E.

January 31, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off 

In my previous post I described the major content optimization work that I’d recently done on my web and landing pages, using a concept map as a guide.

Before moving on, I wanted to answer the question: what content is worth optimizing? I came up with D.I.C.E.:

Distinctive - Content that supports a marketing strategy that positions for uniqueness in the industry and differentiation from the competition.

Integral - Content that evolves and increases in value through links, core elements, overlapping themes and descriptions, and a shared purpose.

Credible - Content that backs up, supports and is aligned with the desired, and implicitly promised, user experience.

Educational - Content that reflects a generosity of spirit and authentic desire to share learning.

It helped to make a mindmap first. D.I.C.E._SMALL.png
(click the graphic to enlarge)

Interestingly, a friend commented today that she saw me moving away from my coaching and soft skills work, and more into strategy and technical, with all this “optimization stuff”. I responded that clients will need a great of deal of facilitation, coaching, project alignment, talent recruitment and leadership support when they undertake large scale content and search optimization initiatives; its a natural fit with my differentiation strategy. Its also a good example of how professional services firms can evolve and be poised and ready to catch the next wave of unmet client needs resulting from rapid change.

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Filed under: Consciousness, Markets, SEO/SEM, career, differentiation, going solo
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Optimize your content in the dead of winter

January 31, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off 

So this is a good example of how things evolve for a solopreneur. A few weeks ago, in response to some inquiries I had about the complexity of a generalist’s web site architecture, I wrote a blog and included a concept diagram using my web sites as an example. Note: I’m a firm believer in never waiting for a client to test a new idea; I always use myself and RedShift as a case study.

Around that time I was trying to get a handle on SEO/SEM, not so much because I planned to delve into it in a big way, I just have that kind of “need to know” personality, and I like to learn fast, in an experiential way. So, by extending the web architecture map, I was able to quickly get a good “view” of how my collection of online content could be optimized for SEO/SEM, both natural search and paid advertising. Coincidentally, I was contacted to do a paid (confidential) interview on SEO/SEM strategy. I pay attention to these kinds of synchronicities. As solo’s, we often have little else to help us sense we’re on the right track.

Well here I am three weeks later, having invested a great deal of time and effort, and happy with the results so far. I’d describe what I’ve accomplished, as critical “prerequisites” to the actual mechanics of SEO/SEM. And there’s an inherent paradox to these prerequisites and optimization: the more content you have the worse it is and the more content you have the better it is. I’m a generalist offering a range of programs and services, so I have a quite a bit of content. So it was a big job. But without depth of content, the opportunities for SEO/SEM are limited or non-existent. My #1 recommendation: content is king, create often, think iteration, not perfection.

The following broadly summarize my experience completing the prerequisites, although there was a lot of additional detail work.

1. Plenty of my content had to be written, re-written, cleaned up, tightened up and re-organized. There’s no shortcut; its just a lot of hard writing work.

2. My landing pages were not good, heinous actually, and what I expected them to do (i.e. conversion goals) was pretty ridiculous. They needed major re-work and re-thinking, but the writing was not so difficult and the concept diagrams provided a good guide.

3. Links matter, and I tripled mine by better linking all my web content assets together.

4. As the optimization work progressed, things that did not integrate tended to jump out. Some needed to be trashed, some needed to be re-grouped, some need to be re-placed. This was fairly major, affecting the programs and services that I offer. They were weaknesses that I knew existed but had pretty much ignored. I think making the changes was easier as part of the optimization prerequisites process.

So a colleague was shocked when I told him that I’d still not determined that small professional service providers with optimized content could get to the top of search rankings, or if paid search ads even made sense for solo psf’s. But you want to have the option because the potential for a more even playing field is still an unknown. An even more important, although unexpected result, is a body of content that’s now aligned with my business purpose and business model. And even better than that, I have new content, frameworks and programs to offer, based on what I’ve learned and the experience I’ve gained.

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Filed under: Belief, Consciousness, Creativity, Natural influence, SEO/SEM, alignment, career, going solo, integral, shift
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SEO/SEM for the independent professional service provider

January 14, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off 

Search engine optimization is an area I’m finally getting to. I think like any other “latest big thing”, its difficult to wade through the hype and the thousands of people who profess expertise with little to back it up, except what sounds to me like, hype regurgitation or a strategy to “beat the system”.

But I do have a gut sense that the time has come, and for a professional service provider, “what you don’t know you don’t know”, could bite you in terms of cost of doing it wrong, or cost of not doing it at all. I’m still in early experimental stage (Google AdWords only) and very much a neophyte, but I’ve learned quite a bit.

Since I’ll do just about anything to avoid wordy reports or spreadsheets, I’ve attempted to diagram a high-level evaluation and decision-making framework for SEO. I used my business, RedShift as the case study and found it useful to extend the web architecture diagram that I included in a previous post.

(click to enlarge)

redshift_web_expanded_small.png

So now that I can “see” the steps and choices, the big question is: how to increase the probability of success of an SEO or AdWords campaign? Maybe even before that, the right question is: Does this make sense?

I’m not sure it makes sense for every professional services provider, but there is opportunity to reach more prospects and learn a great deal with a small investment.

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