With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy…if you paid good money and any of the latter applies to you, you might be a social media redneck:
- If you have paid a “social media consultant (SMC)” for the sole purpose of creating a Facebook Page and it doesn’t look as spiffy as this or this, you might be a social media redneck. For those of you who are considering this, please just download Hanbery Marketing_Facebook 101. I offer it freely because it isn’t all you need to succeed, I authored very little of it and the part I did write will hopefully help to send some of these hacks back to the used car lots from whence they came.
- If you hired a SMC and he did not attempt to train you on strategy as well as functionality, you might be a social media redneck. Owning a standard transmission Testarossa if you only know how to drive automatics is a bogus proposition…and it’s much more likely that this guy left you with a Pinto.
- If you have a social media profile that has not been optimized for keywords, you might be a social media redneck. Depending on the consultant and what you paid him, he should suggest and/or conduct a keyword discovery exercise (that can then be deployed throughout your marketing collateral, Internet-based and otherwise).
- If you have paid a SMC to set a blog up for you and he set you up on a free blog service (e.g. Blogger/Blogspot) rather than add a blog page to your website, you might be a social media redneck. In order to receive the famed search ranking benefit promised by the blogosphere, the blog needs to be an integral part of your website.
- If you paid a SMC to build a LinkedIn Profile for you and your URL doesn’t have your name in it, and/or your “Professional Description” doesn’t employ keywords, and/or your “Professional Summary” isn’t keyword-optimized, and/or your links still say, “My Company” rather than the name of your company, and/or you don’t have a professional profile picture, and/or he didn’t offer to create a profile for your company for little or no extra cost, you might be a social media redneck. With an hour, you can figure all this out for yourself. The least a consultant can do is do these things and more for you, preferably while he shows you exactly what he’s doing and explaining why.
- If your LinkedIn status updates every time your Twitter status does, you might be a social media redneck. LinkedIn’s culture is too buttoned-down and restrictive to tolerate the frequency and range of updates for which Twitter is often, effectively and quite correctly, employed. Setting your LinkedIn status updates to automatically post to Twitter, we like. Again, it’s a “culture” thing.
- If your website can’t be found by search engines, you might be a social media redneck. Many businesses spent good money five years ago to build Flash websites. Five years ago, this was the right thing to do. The rules have changed, i.e. better tools have availed and the webcrawlers know it. We like WordPress best but acknowledge Drupal and Joombla may be best for some users.
- If you have a Twitter page for your business and it doesn’t have a custom background, you might be a social media redneck. This is a branding and marketing opportunity, and just like with using Vista Print for your business cards and an email address that doesn’t include your company domain, using the free stuff makes you look small time or, worse, temporary. We like TwitBacks and other similar services for stopgap measures, but a custom background—which should be themed consistently with all your other marketing collateral—can be created for a very reasonable fee. Alternatively, again, this is something you can learn how to do yourself with another hour of Internet research.
- If you don’t reply to comments others leave for you, you might be a social media redneck. Not validating your content contributors with replies is a great way to find yourself broadcasting to an empty channel. It’s also forfeiting the opportunity to learn and develop how others perceive you, which is one of the golden nuggets of social media.
- If you don’t know today what you plan to blog/tweet/post about next Tuesday, you might be a social media redneck. 90 percent of blogs and self-managed social media campaigns fail. Why? Tune in next Tuesday. There…see how easy that is?
If you might be a redneck, don’t fret and please don’t turn away from this powerful medium. There are white hats. They have marketing and/or public relations backgrounds, they read and learn constantly and they’ll give away the easy stuff. They get not just that social media is about relationships, but that business is in general.
The market will weed out the rednecks and the redneck makers. Don’t y’all be either, you hear?
Do you have “social media redneck” criteria? We’d love to hear them.
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