Are you a business owner trying to figure out how your profiles on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are going to create buzz for your business? Or, more importantly, are they going to create buzz that will lead to more business?

Social media is not a silver bullet no more than newspaper ads are or the 30 second radio or TV spot. Just like any form of advertising, the first thing you need is a strategy. You must use your strategy to help generate the keywords, titles & content that you will write in your profiles on all of these social media sites.

Lets start with a few questions:

• Who is my audience or who do I want my audience to be?
• What information will my audience be looking for and how can I supply that information?
• Who is my competition and how can I be unique enough to stand out?  EX:  How many other online wine retailers are there? Why does everyone know who Gary Vaynerchuk is and not them?
• What result am I looking to produce related to my presence on this site?

This is much easier if you do this before you start signing up for sites and filling in profiles but don’t worry if you have already signed up, most of these sites are easy to edit. Also, once you get this setup you can easily transfer this info to other sites so you have a consistent brand across the web.

Lets examine these…

Who is my audience or who do I want them to be?

Do you know who your audience is? Look at your product line and customer database and try to figure out who your ideal customer is. If you are happy with your current customer then focus on them. You already have the data, look at it and try to build a picture of your ideal customer. If you want to target a new customer the next question is very important.

What information will my audience be looking for and how can I supply it?

Create buyer personas (detailed descriptions, several sentences long, of your typical buyer) for each of your target markets. Depending on your product line you many have many of these personas.

Who is my competition and how can I be unique enough to stand out?

If you were going to buy a hybrid car, which one is the number one selling hybrid in the US? The Toyota Prius. Is it better than all the other hybrids that exist. Edmunds.com list 32 different models of hybrids from 14 different manufacturers. Yet one outsells all the others. Why? If you were going to compete against Prius you would have to be more than just another hybrid. What makes you stand out against your competition. Are you just another company performing the same thing or is what you offer unique and different.

What result am I looking to produce related to my presence on this site?

Why am I on this particular network. Is to build your brand? Connect with your customers? Drive traffic to your website that you can convert to sales? You need to give some clear thought to that and build your strategy around that. Understand that some networks are better at some of those goals than others. Some prohibit selling in their terms of service, others may not prohibit it but the members may not appreciate it and if you try that route you may have significant backlash from the community.

Just like the US Marines have different battle tactics for attacking from the water, in the mountains. or in the desert, you need to have different tactics in your marketing and you need to remember that social media is only one of them. Without a larger strategy to tie it all together you will likely invest a lot of time putting out an incoherent message that generates little to no results.

Christopher Johnston (@chrisjohnston) is 37-year old husband, father, christian, iPhone owner, and new Mac user. A recovering former financial advisor, passionate about the new green economy and how it will help my hometown, New Orleans, recover from Hurricane Katrina.

Image courtesy of  Pete Kim

I did an interview with, James, one of the founders of MenWithPens.ca. This organization epitomizes the lifestyle that Sparkplugging.com is focused on. Their four employees, one of whom is a woman despite the name, operate from four different locations in two different countries thousands of miles apart. We talked about what they do, remote work advice, free content, and what a new entrepreneur should focus on. Read on and when you are done please go check out their site at MenWithPens.ca

Would you say that you focus more on one particular topic between wordpress customization, web design, and copywriting or is it more evenly divided?

We began our venture with content writing services, but it wasn’t long before we’d expanded that to offer website content (our specialty) and copywriting. Design came along shortly after, but with WordPress gaining ground as a way to offer people affordable sites they can control easily, the move to include it into our service offerings seemed natural.

Now our business offers just about anything anyone needs for online business, from rockin’ copy to slick design to technology that makes everything a breeze. I really enjoy having a full-service business, too, because we can definitely help more people get ahead and achieve their goals.

How long have you been at this?

Harry and I began the business three years ago in 2006. Charlie came onto the team last year and Taylor was our most recent addition this year. But we’ve each been working in our respective industries for some time, and between us, we probably count 50 years of experience or so.

I noticed that you have a woman on your team. Is there any chance that you would rebrand the site to something like 3 Men and Babe?

Ah, the eternal question (and the answer to your question is no, unfortunately.)

While we expected the business to stay smallish, the potential for growth quickly became apparent. We wouldn’t rebrand, as our brand has a strong reputation for great work, top-notch service, and expert skills, all with a relaxed, friendly and casual attitude. We just make sure we work with a team that supports our brand image, mission and philosophy, whether they be women or men.

You are also all pretty dispersed geographically, was that a conscious decision from the beginning or did it just happen out of necessity?

Our geographical locations were born out of necessity, but also conveyed that almost anything can be done from a distance and fully online. Our business model shows other entrepreneurs and freelancers that the sky is the limit.

I admit I’ve tried to get the team to move to Canada, but they seem to think it’s too cold up here…

What advice could you give to others working virtually that could ease any potential problems they might encounter. How can they learn from your mistakes?

Learning from other people’s experiences is one of the best ways to learn. We built our business the hard way, with knocks and obstacles, overcoming each one. We like to share those learning and life experiences at our blog, so that other people don’t have to go through what we did and get the fast track to success.

There are two pieces of advice I’ll share with your readers:

1) Use systems to streamline how you work for the most efficient process you can create

2) Believe in yourself. There are going to be all sorts of bumps while building a virtual business, and the self-confidence that you can get through it is crucial to success.

Some would say that giving away all that content (i.e. knowledge) is foolish but what do you think?

Good question. I recently blogged my thoughts on free content and how it affects business.

Many people have appreciated the post’s message and have found that it’s turned their business model upside down – in a good way.

Has it been effective for you as a business generation tool or more as a brand-building tool?

Both. While our blog isn’t our main source of business, it has allowed us to establish our expertise, share with others and build the Men with Pens brand. We let our personality show through on the blog, and we consider it our home. Our readers are more than welcome to come hang out in the comment section, too, and I think they get a good taste of our brand each day.

What would you say is your brand, if you had to describe it in 2 – 3 sentences?

Our brand is all about giving our clients sexy, elite design and content that lets them get ahead in life – while experiencing great service on a platter. If I had to sum it up even further in a few words, I’d say our brand is “casual, confident success”.

Where would you tell a new entrepreneur to focus: his blog, lead generation or brand building?

Definitely lead generation. It isn’t a business if it isn’t getting sales. The brand should really be built and established before a blog or business even gets started. It’s part of the foundation. Once a blog or business is launched, the brand permeates everything and the main business focus becomes converting consumers to clients.

While it has never been easier to start a blog, the competition for eyeballs has never been greater. Do you think a great looking blog with great content is enough today?

That’s never enough. You can have the best-looking blog and the best content in the world… but if you aren’t giving people what they want, then you won’t reach success. What you put out there doesn’t count. Giving people what they want is everything.

So before you open a blog, before you start putting work into your business, figure out what need you’re responding to. Do people want what you’re going to offer? Can you do it better than the competition? Or differently? What’s going to make people want what you have – and what can you give them that they want?

Then get a design that gets their attention and copy that hooks them in, keeps them reading and compels them to take action. The combination of all these creates success.

Christopher Johnston is 37-year old husband, father, christian, iPhone owner, and new Mac user. A recovering former financial advisor, passionate about the new green economy and how it will help my hometown, New Orleans, recover from Hurricane Katrina.

Follow Christopher on Twitter: @chrisjohnston

I saw the neighborhood I grew up in and places I used to ride my bike as a child being destroyed. While the damage was widespread and devastating things were set in motion that day that forever changed the city I call home.

Hurricane Katrina was one of the largest natural disasters in American history. I also think it was one of the best things to ever happen to New Orleans.

Now before I get hate mail let me clarify one thing, I wish it never happened, but since it has New Orleans has become a very different place and I think for the better.

Kids from colleges like Harvard, Yale, Brown, and MIT came here on their semester breaks to build homes for people they didn’t know. They could have been on a beach in Florida or Cancun trying to get on an episode of Girls Gone Wild but they were ripping out wet sheetrock and shoveling mud out of homes.

A few months or years later when they graduated a strange thing started to happen, they moved here…
NOLA Y.U.R.P.
They formed a loose organization and called themselves the New Orleans Young Urban Rebuilding Professionals (NOLAYURP). They had a few meetings, a Ning site, and an intense desire to effect change in New Orleans. They were young, well educated, and optimistic about the future here. When many of them couldn’t find jobs they started companies.

Here is a partial list of the startups in New Orleans that have begun since Hurricane Katrina.

• Trumpet – marketing firm
• Receivables Exchange – accounts receivables trading
• Wilson-Register Property Management – real estate
• Zymeaux – SMS marketing
• Launchpad NOLA – coworking space
• KODA – a new to think about HR
• WorkNola – online job board
• PolicyPitch.com – crowd-powered platform that allows ordinary citizens to pitch new policy ideas
• Cool Hand Nuke – job board for nuclear industry professionals
• Deltree – Webby award winning video production company
• Dirty Coast – think New Orleans version of Threadless

The geeks unite
In Silicon Valley there is event called Tech Tuesday’s. Every Tuesday people in the tech community get together at a different bar and network. Really its hanging out with your friends and having a few drinks but you can call it networking if you want to. About nine or ten months ago a group of 30-40 people in the New Orleans tech industry got together at a bar in downtown New Orleans to create our version of this event.

We are different in that we only meet once a month and at the same place but we are a force to be reckoned with. Let me give you an example.

One of our members, Chris Schultz of Voodoo Ventures, was asked to speak on a panel at SXSW. Another member, Andrew Larimer, thought it would be fun to take a road trip and go to SXSW to support Chris. This enterprising group thought that we could turn this trip into a tool to recruit and attract business to the area. They got a Greyhound bus, put a wrap around it, got sponsorship from the the Downtown Development District, The City of New Orleans, New Orleans Rum, and a few others and were off to Austin, TX. They had a booth at SXSW and used it persuade conference goers that they should consider moving their business to New Orleans.

They had representatives from the city and the business community that went along with them on the trip. They promoted our very low cost of living, access to over 1,000 restaurants (not including national chains), some of the best food in the world, Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, an occasional Superbowl, a NBA team, NFL football team, a minor league baseball team, and excellent nightlife. Educational opportunities abound here, we have two law schools, two medical schools, six universities, one small catholic college, and two community colleges.

Oh, and I forgot to mention they planned, funded, and executed this with less than two months of planning. This little group of 30-40 has grown to almost 200 in less than a year and I consider myself lucky to be a part of it.

Going forward
I’m confident that this group of young idealistic entrepreneurs will forever change New Orleans. They saw Hurricane Katrina as a tabula rasa rather than a terrible disaster. They look at the city’s problems as opportunities and look toward a better future and leave the past where it belongs, in the past.

While I have talked a lot about the young in this post I think that entrepreneurs of any age should consider New Orleans when thinking of place to start your next business. You have a unique opportunity to help rebuild an American city and have a direct impact on the future of that city. There a very few times in history when people have been given an opportunity like that. Don’t let this one pass you by. Come on down to New Orleans, we’re open for business.

Christopher Johnston is 37-year old husband, father, christian, iPhone owner, and new Mac user. A recovering former financial advisor, passionate about the new green economy and how it will help my hometown, New Orleans, recover from Hurricane Katrina.

Follow Christopher on Twitter: @chrisjohnston

I could say that it started when I first got on the Internet using an Apple IIe via a dial-up in 1994.

I could say it was when I took part in the 2nd 30 Day Challenge 2 years ago and made my first few dollars online.

I guess those things, and many others, played a part in it, but I think the idea was crystallized in December 2008 when I purchased an iPhone and started the laborious process of moving my contacts from Google Contacts and Outlook to my phone.

I discovered that I had quite a few numbers for businesses and government agencies in my contacts that I no longer needed to keep because of the capabilities of the iPhone.  It was much easier to use the voice search feature of the Google app or just call Google 411 to get those numbers when I needed them rather than scan through the 2,800+ contacts in my phone.

I also realized that with more and more smart phones coming on the market this was going to become commonplace. If you are a small business owner and your business doesn’t show up in those results your potential customer is just going to use the other business that does.

I firmly believe that Google, Facebook, and the rest of social media will be the Yellow Pages of the future. Already people under the age of 30 turn to site like Yelp!, Amazon, and Epinions rather than Zagat or Consumer Reports when they want they want  a review of a restaurant, store, or product.

I want to take part in that revolution and I want to do it by helping companies get their brand online.

As I write this I am one day from the end of my first class, Introduction to Internet Marketing, and I have to say that I have enjoyed it.

Our textbook for the class was The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott and it was an eye opening look at how marketing and PR are changing from the perspective of someone inside the industry. You also can’t argue that any book that has a foreword by Robert Scoble has to ‘get’ social media’ and power of going online.

My entire degree will be completed online.

That’s right, I will never set foot on a traditional college campus* for the duration of my degree. The complete program will take 24 months. At a traditional college you take 3-4 classes a semester, which is about 4 months long, and then you have breaks in between each semester and longer during the summer.

In the program that I’m in, we take 1-2 classes at a time and they are one month in duration. When a class finishes on say the 31st, the next one starts on the 1st. There are no breaks. No spring break, summer break, holidays, etc… That is how I can get a traditional degree that would take typically four years done in two years.

The real reason I did it.

I love the web and the possibilities that it provides. I enjoy surfing the web and playing around with every new social network that comes along. I enjoy creating videos and content and putting it online. I already have a lot of the knowledge that I’m learning in my degree program, but now I have some way to validate that to an employer. When I create a business, or find a job, doing this on a daily basis I will have to keep pinching myself to remind me that it is not a dream, I’m actually getting paid to do what I love.

Christopher Johnston is 37-year old husband, father, christian, iPhone owner, and new Mac user. A recovering former financial advisor, passionate about the new green economy and how it will help my hometown, New Orleans, recover from Hurricane Katrina.

Follow Christopher on Twitter: @chrisjohnston

The initial statement on the Twitter blog explaining the change was:

We’ve updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies. Based on usage patterns and feedback, we’ve learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it’s a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option.

Here is an excerpt from Techcrunch that does a little bit better explanation of the change:

The basic premise behind the @reply system is that it allows you to create a semi-public conversation with another Twitter user. To prevent you from having to listen in to conversations you might not care about, the default setting has long been to only show these @replies if you were following both people in the conversation. And that’s the choice most people stuck with.

But there was an option to receive all @reply messages from any users you were following. This led to an increase in noise, but it also exposed you to new Twitter users and conversations that you might have otherwise missed out on. I’ve had it turned on for over a year. But apparently that option has confused too many people, so Twitter is killing it.

This caused quite a backlash on Twitter and lead to some eventual backpedaling by @biz and the Twitter team.

So here’s what we’re planning to do. First, we’re making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account. This will bring back some serendipity and discovery and we can do this very soon.

Now at this point I was thinking that it was awfully dumb for Twitter to remove this feature and cause such a big ruckus so I dug a little deeper. I was wondering if there was a solid engineering reason as to why they made the change.  After a few Google searches I came across this very good explanation at Dare Obasajo’s blog. The important thing here is the update at the bottom of the post.

Without making this too technical it seems that the @reply feature as it was implemented was simply not going to scale well. With users like @aplusk, @TheEllenShow, or @oprah the amount of overhead on the system when they reply to someone is huge. This alone would not be a problem but when you aggregate with all the other users with 2k, 5k, or 10k followers it could bog the system down until it becomes unmanageable.

My personal opinion is that I liked the feature and was one of the 3% of users who actually used it. I think they should find a more scalable way to make the feature work and bring it back.

What do you think? Were you even aware the feature existed until it was removed? If so, did you use it? Leave your comments below and tell me what you think.

Christopher Johnston (@chrisjohnston) is 37-year old husband, father, christian, iPhone owner, and new Mac user. A recovering former financial advisor, passionate about the new green economy and how it will help my hometown, New Orleans, recover from Hurricane Katrina.