Most Popular
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What are some tips to increase your websites community activity in the early days after launch?
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In the early days you probably don’t have may users so spend a lot of time with these folks. Pick their brains, tell them how special they are and work on developing real loyalty. This takes work but it is worth it and sure is easier with fewer customers.
s!
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I am going start up a mobile catering coffee and doughnuts and cup cake truck. I am desperate for a marketable name. any ideas. I would like it to be something totally random that is easy to remember and something that you can build a brand around (i.e. colors, logo, team shirts, etc.) Thank you so much for any help.
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Not sure if this is helpful but i love the name Patty Cakes. Other then that (stolen from Wikipedia) Doughnuts have a disputed history. One theory suggests that doughnuts were introduced into North America by Dutch settlers, who were responsible for popularizing other American desserts, including cookies, apple and cream pie, and cobbler.[citation needed] Indeed, in the 19th century, doughnuts were sometimes referred to as one kind of olykoek (a Dutch word literally meaning “oil cake”), a “sweetened cake fried in fat.”[2] Hansen Gregory, an American, claimed to have invented the ring-shaped doughnut in 1847 aboard a lime-trading ship when he was only sixteen years old. Gregory was dissatisfied with the greasiness of doughnuts twisted into various shapes and with the raw center of regular doughnuts. He claimed to have punched a hole in the center of dough with the ship’s tin pepper box and later taught the technique to his mother.[3]
You could create a whole brand around this history.
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How can I get my startup noticed?
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The easy answer is “Be Interesting” but that is easier typed then done. One way to get noticed is to have a product or service that solves a pain for the user. Once you are solving a pain you can cultivate a community of passionate users who will help promote your company on your behalf. This takes work but will have a longer lasting effect then buying attention too early.
s!
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Saul - you've done a great job building several impressive brands (Freshbooks, ZipCar etc) What have you found is the secret to building brands and whats your advice for other companies looking to replicate that success?
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Treat your customers better then they expect to be treated by a company and inject a lot of personality in everything you do. I hate to over simplify it but that is the secret.
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Who is responsible for defining customer service? customer or the company? We have seen situations where customer service is defined on the pages of Newspapers to mean the same as Public Relations or branding as it were, but you know what? It is only the customer/client that can actually say if the service so received is pleasant or otherwise. So let organizations stop enhancing service level via print media.
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Customer Service is defined by the company. Customer expectation is defined by the customer and when Customer Service is done well it meets or exceeds Customer expectation. How well and often you treat your customers is a choice that only you can decide and not worry about what the media or anyone says. It is common sense to over invest in Customer Service but again that is an individual decision.
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What are some tips for getting visitors to a brand new website?
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Honestly, it’s tough. I am in the middle of this with my new project www.urbandig.com and I am trying to be everywhere my customers are. Since Urbandig is hyper local I am focusing on geography instead of industry but I would suggest targeting your site and customers as niche as possible and go where they go. Build up a small following and them broaden your target a little more. Doing too much at once will just water down your messaging as well as cost you a lot of money.
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What's the key to a good Press Release? Anything that should be avoided?
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Press releases are a lot like resumes. Journalists, like HR people get a lot of them and most don’t get read. Because of this you need to stand out with your press release as well as answer any possible questions about whatever you are pitching in a short concise manner so you are not wasting anyone’s time.
Things to avoid are pitching people who don’t cover or are not interested in whatever you are doing. This will be a non starter, as well you need to follow up on all pitched but never be a pain to the writer because every pitch, even failed ones are an opportunity to develop a relationship with the writers.
s!
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Whats the secret to executing a great beta launch that gets lots of buzz?
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The real secret is to have a product worth talking about. Sadly this is the part most often skipped. Once you have the product getting it into the hands of people is the easy part. Look online for people who frequently talk about whatever it is you are launching and invite them personally into your trial. Give them time to play and then follow up and re-engage them by asking for feedback.
Fix the issues that these people had and go back to them to let them know they were heard and offer them 20 invites for their friends and give them the status of being the person who discovered your service first.
rinse and repeat.
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What are ways to brand yourself as a public speaker?
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I hate to be so simplistic in my answers but I am not sure you can brand yourself as a public speaker without being a public speaker. Once you are active in it make sure you film your talks and share them as far and wide as you can. Promote yourself and show people what you have to say and to what audiences you talk to and work will get out.
On a different note (and I know you didn’t ask) but if you are starting out with speaking don’t be a generalist. Pick a topic and own it. This is the best way to add momentum to your speaking career.
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Hey Saul, I hear web-based companies should focus on getting traffic and then figure out how to make money once they have a large user base as an asset. Is this standard advice for tech start-ups or are success stories like Google exceptions to the rule?
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Tech Companies should focus on making money and keeping the lights on. Delaying revenue and building traffic is one of many business models and no one can tell you what is right for you without knowing the goals set out for your business. Some companies want to sell a zillion products for a few pennies each and some want to sell a million dollar item to 5 customers total. Does the 5 customer company need traffic to accomplish this? Is the Zillion customer company profitable or are they just looking to be acquired?
Sorry I am not giving you a definite answer but in my opinion there isn’t one.
s!
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I'm looking for some good online resources or places in Toronto I can go to find out more about improving personal branding. Any suggestions?
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A good place to start would be http://personalbrandingblog.wordpress.com/ or just let your own personality out and let people in. Personal Branding is really just about creating some attention for yourself and backing whatever you take a stand for. Figure out the truthful parts of yourself you want to share and share them.
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How do you become an active blogger and twitter user, since I am new to both?
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Remember that famous quote from the movie Black Sampson where Sampson says “Best Way to start something is to start something”? Well that applies here too! There is nothing stopping you from blogging or tweeting. Dive in as quickly or as slowly as you wish but make sure you do it.
There are no barriers to entry on twitter and to start blogging just grab a free wordpress or blogspot account and say something interesting…and if you can’t think of anything interesting just make up movie quotes like I did here or Retweet stuff I say :)
Just do it!
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What are the best ways to promote an event that is 2 months away?
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There is no “best” way because it all depends on what kind of event and audience. For example i wouldn’t promote it online if all the people you want to come don’t own computers. Here are a couple of ways…if it is an online audience you can build a website, use event listing services like Plancast and Facebook Events. The thing is that these listing services will expose you to some people looking for your event or a similar event but the real way to promote stuff (and I say this in almost every answer) is find your audience and just flat out tell them about this. If this is a local community event then let people know about this in the community. if this is a march break kids oriented event then tell all the day cares services.
See what I am getting at?
Doing shotgun (or mass invites) is exhausting and wont get you the same results if you do a little homework first and target who you the event is actually for.
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You obviously take inspiration from all over, but if you were advising someone who is new(ish) to the online and WOM marketing world what resources would you recommend as the go-to's for staying up-to-date on tools, trends and general awesomeness? Essentially, what are your must-reads when you are skimming your aggregated RSS feeds?
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Inspiration is everywhere and you need to be open to it. I tend to find my inspiration off line and formulate a plan to bring it online. Things like someone important leaving you a voicemail saying they love you too (and than having them back pedal and say I heard wrong) will trigger more emotion, ideas and possibilities than reading the 129th blog post about Steve Jobs passing away.
So my advice when it comes to inspiration is look where no one else is. Stop reading business and marketing books (unless I write one) because they are all the same and you can get more from reading biographies of interesting people. Watch movies, read magazines and lots of them and draw little nuggets from those places because that is how you will be original and original ideas are the ones that people usually remember.
Now with all that possibly bad advice out of the way some of my favorite online places are Swiss Miss, Whoosh Whoosh, PSFK, Brand Flakes for Breakfast, The Beancast, The Fox is Black.
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Should I create a Facebook fan page for my startup?
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Can’t Hurt. My only disclaimer is that you need to stick with it because the only thing worse then a Facebook fan page is an abandoned Facebook fan page. Remember though that you need to find a balance (I say this a lot) between spending time with your fan on FB and getting your fans to your site or service because you need to know who your customers are and why they like you and as of now FB doesn’t let you extract a lot of info from your fan sites.
s!
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Where would I got to find advice on marketing to launch a new app. (first time) ?
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sprouter.com.
Here.
Ask questions to folks like Dan Martell and others who own this expertise.
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What are some example of creative marketing for financial software (complex, boring, blurgh) for consumers that have had success? or can you provide thoughts on how to make software in this space interesting & engaging?
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Interesting question. I work for FreshBooks.com and come up with creative ideas for our community all the time. Without giving you specifics (because there are too many and it will just sound like bragging) I will say be human. Most Financial applications assume that people are either too technical or don’t feel people need some human interaction with their language.
There is no reason to look at any vertical as complex and boring because if you are solving a pain in people’s life (like FreshBooks does) than you are not boring to the users. Put yourself in the users shoes and be conversational. You will be amazed as what you get back…..and if that doesn’t work, send everyone an abacus.
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What are the best tools for monitoring my online marketing efforts?
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Depends what your goals are and what you are trying to measure. Google Analytics is a must but others that are key include Hootsuite or Bit.ly to know if anyone is clicking on your links, SeoMoz and Raven Tools are great to make sense of a lot of things as well as FaceBook insights for FB tasks.
s!
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I use social media for marketing. I have a facebook page, a facebook fan page, and twitter. How do I link all of these together so I can make on post and it goes to all 3? Any other ideas to make social media marketing more efficient and effective?
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Try Hootsuite. You can set up a slew of accounts and cross post to all at once (if you choose).
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I'm launching a site that will allow users to ask "favors" within their social networks to get things done for free. For example, I need help moving this weekend. You post it on this site and friends sign up and get points for helping out. What do you recommend with the launch to get the word of mouth out?
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Highlight the funniest favours. Focus on some big ones like moving and focus on some small ones like a back rub. Spread the stories behind the favours. If you remember when A&E was the tattoo network and they had 2 reality tattoo shows they focused less on the actual art and more on the story behind the art. I am getting this dolphin because my mom died in hawaii swimming with the dolphins and I will look at this every day to remind me not to eat mahi mahi.
Got on a tangent but I think you get the point.
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We have developed this website <a href="http://www.technobits.net">www.technobits.net</a>, which I believe is useful for entire software development community. Considering we have very less advertising budget, please suggest any idea to promote this website, so that every developer tend to visit this website at-least once in a day.
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I get this sort of question here a lot and it is a hard one or an easy one to answer, depending on how you accept the advice.
Simply put (and this is over simplifying this) but go to where your target is currently reading their developer news and let them know you exist (through forums and comments and generally adding value). The thing with this is that you need to offer something better then what they are currently using. I looked at your site and may be wrong but it looks like a through news aggrigation site. If your goal is to lure people over to you and keep them you need to offer something they can’t get anywhere else.
This means interesting opinions and personality.
without either of these (or better yet, both) people will usually just stay where they are.
my .02
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Where do you get your shoes? The fuzzy ones.
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The internet. it isn’t just for music and movies with naked people anymore.
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Outside of Facebook and Twitter, are there other initiatives to be done on other social media platforms that can help business out? Do you have an example of one?
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There are a bunch but if I had to pick one I would say Sprouter.com Think about it. You are here already asking questions but are you also reaching out to people in your industry or possible customers here? You should!
s!
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If the domain I'm looking for is taken, is a .mobi a good substitute? Or should I seek a modified version of the original .com name? The domain will be used for a social media site with a mobile app extension released shortly after launch.
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I would always try to stick to a .com or at least a .net. A lot of people won’t recognize .mobi and it may cause you a lot of lost traffic.
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Which marketing risk or trick that you did worked the best? Which did you enjoy the most?
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I don’t consider anything I do risky or a trick. I prefer clever and helpful :)
One of my favourite things I did is one that didn’t get a lot of attention online but had a great impact for people and brand awareness.
You see last year at SXSW (a conference) I gave myself the challange of being the first “marketing touch” people would receive in a very busy and noisy environment.
To accomplish this I rented two greyhound sized busses and met people in the baggage area of the airport and gave 2000+ people free rides into downtown saving each person $40 and on the ride we were able to tell people how awesome FreshBooks is and they then went into the conference with a little extra money in their pocket and a cool story to share with people.
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I'm currently promoting a musical "Christian hip-hop" act who has just released new music for free download on their website. What are the best FREE ways to stir up hype online, and get lots of folks downloading the music? Thanks for you answers...
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Spend time with other Christians online and let them know what you are up to and see if they like the music. Focus most of your time in the beginning with the most targeted possible listeners and see where the obvious leap after that would be.
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On our B2C blog, we get lots of readers (many of them repeat visitors), but hardly anyone comments or shares our posts. How can we change this moving forward?
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Twitter has really changed the way people comment on things.
Before it was all on your site and now people may not comment but share instead (another way of saying this is valuable or that they agree with your ideas).
If comments on your blog are important to you, here are a few ways to spark this.
1-write open ended blog posts where there is not a fully formed opinion so people can add to yours and keep the thought going.
2-write hard opinions that people will be forced to agree or disagree with you.
and 3- as at the end of every post for comments. something like “Now you know how I feel, What about you?” End with a question so people are encouraged to answer.
Hope that helps!
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How do you qualify whether an idea has potential before you dive right in? Ask your friends? Surveys? Focus groups? All of the above?
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I will bounce ideas off a few people and when they say it is horrible I will no I am on to something and do it anyway. I know that makes me look like an ass but I have incredible intuition on what will work and what wont and when I have a great idea I just know it.
That being said not every idea I have is gold and I know that too but it isn’t like I run with horrible ideas often.
But to answer your question, I would say if you know your audience then you will know what works. I know my audience very well because I live among them but in absence of this knowledge I would encourage things like surveys and focus groups because essentially it is all about predicting outcomes.
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Starting an audio podcast next week for gay arts & culture and entertainment. Besides iTunes, Twitter, Libsyn, and the usual suspects-- any suggestions on how to drive traffic to the podcast?
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You have a lot of the online bases covered so why not try some good old fashioned outreach to the LGBT media as well as put some flyers around the LGBT neibourhood if you have one in your city and create an event around the recording of your poscast by doing it in a popular coffee shop in your LGBT neibourhood. Traffic will come from awareness and content will keep people coming. Now if you want to go back to your list of digital ideas you should be spending a lot of time in the comments sections of other LGBT themed podcasts in iTunes. Made interesting comments and add value. Once you have don’t that there is nothing wrong with promoting your podcast in your signature.
S!
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What are the best practices in generating Word of Mouth publicity?
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Watch this video. http://vimeo.com/10563345
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Have you had any success with Facebook contests? If so, do you have any advice for putting together a Facebook contest?
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I use Strutta.com (not a paid endorsement unless they want to send me something)
They take a lot of the work out it for you and there are a lot of tutorials on their site to answer a lot of questions for you.
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how to market my event management company with low or no marketing budget?
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I love the idea of “Show Don’t Tell” so, Show people why they should hire you. Host your own event and invite current, former and future customers. If your budget is low just be honest and say “We want to show you how to throw a great event on small budget”. At the event talk to everyone there, ask questions and maybe even answer a few and maybe just maybe you will leave that night with a few more bookings.
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How do I spread my business, real estate investing, like wildfire via social media, what to use, how to use for the best and effective online marketing?
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Watch this video http://vimeo.com/10563345
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What are the variables o factors for sure fire word of marketing?
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Stories. Human Connections.
I just used this in another answer but I look at things and ask myself:
Is it Real? Is it Relevant? Is it Beautiful?
Those are the things that get spread around.
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how to attrack male client to get spa pedi when they think spa pedi is for girl only?
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Pedicures are fun. I get them and I know a lot of other men that get them. That being said I agree that some people feel it is a “girly” activity. One thing you can try is to have a “mans night” similar to ladies night at a bar. Pick whatever your least busy night is and promote it as a “men friendly” environment. Offer Cigars, have the tv showing a sporting event or theme it like Mad Men or something…but don’t take it too far. Don’t hire pretty women and make it trashy cause men are not going to me comfortable in a pretend strip club while getting their nails done. Pedicures (male or female) are fun because of the conversations. Try a 2 for 1 and have the guys bring a friend so they can have some “guy time” and catch up. By offering the real experience you will win real customers and not people who will only come during a promotion. Not sure if this is what you where looking for but it might be worth trying.
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What is your greatest strength when it comes to being Canada's Best Word of Mouth Marketer?
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My greatest strength is trusting myself and my ideas and knowing the customer and target so well that I have blind faith in my ability to make an emotional connection.
I guess what I am trying to say is, smarts and confidence.
…and good looks.
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I'm an experienced marketer who has been in charge of global campaigns for previous employers. However now I'm striking out on my own as a consutant, I'm not sure what I should charge for my hourly rate and what expenses I can claim from clients. Any advice from anyone?
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The truth is that you should charge as much as someone will pay you. Here is a better explanation. http://t.co/eaXHTtUl
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Hey Saul! We recently launched an online store for natural supplements. We are focused on building a community with plenty of content on our blog, podcasts on iTunes, and upcoming video reviews on YouTube. Our target market isn't particularly internet savvy, so we've been struggling to convert them into paying customers. Do you have any advice on how we can empower our community to help each other through the fears of buying online?
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If your community is consuming your content and retuning for more then chances are the do have a semblance of savviness in them.You may need to educate them not only on your products but also the safety of doing business with you through actual testimonials from real customers and such. You could also do some in person events and allow people to put a face to the company and products to ease their apprehensions.
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With word of mouth marketing, is it a good idea to reward your greatest advocates? If so, what are some easy ways to do that (if it's possible to answer in a generic way)?
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Yes and Yes. Rewards can be anything from a new car to a hand written thank you note. Don’t get hung up on the what and just make sure you are always saying thank you and showing appreciation.
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How have you approached building your own personal brand?
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My Personal Brand approach has been very unmanaged and poorly thought out. What I mean is I let the real “Saul” shine through in most everything I do and while that may seem like good advice it is also confusing to some people who are looking to categorize you as a “marketing” guy or a “social media” guy. I can be all over the place because I have many interests and sometimes I get inappropriate because that is part of my personality and subsequently part of my brand and I have to assume that has held me back in some situations but I do it this way because there are many sides to my personality and on top of that I have a poor memory so if I dont sensor myself I never really have to remember what I can and can’t say :)
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I have a solving problem business, I know where I want it to go and how it can help the community. But I am not a software programmer and I am struggling to find one. I do not even know where to start. Please any hints
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Depending on what city you are in there are probably many technically get togethers that you can find on meetup.com or through twitter etc. Find one and get out and chat to people. If you don’t meet anyone personally that can help you I bet you will meet someone who knows someone who can help!
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What are some of the ways that you've built brands?
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I like to build brands by not thinking of them as brands. I think of them as private clubs that are so interesting that people want to join. This is obviously not the conventional wisdom but if you treat your product as the secondary reason for people to engage with you and the primary one if based on a relationship or an emotional connection then chances are they will less swayed buy a competitor and see themselves as part of your mission.
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What Can Small Businesses Learn from Intel’s Social Media Strategy?
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There is always something to learn from everyone. I haven’t studied Intel specifically but small business can learn amazing lessons on structure and discipline for their social media strategies as well as when to confront problems and when to shy away. Social Media is a great playing field leveler but the big boys still know what they are doing so play attention and steal ideas whenever possible.
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