Your brand is not in your hands anymore.

The internet possesses powers that can turn you into a celebrity overnight. But the great god that giveth, doth also taketh away. In other words, deal with your business honestly or you won't own a business anymore. Think this sounds dramatic? It's true.

Take the example of Brian King. Brian is media editor (video mostly) and also a podcaster. He's a freelancer. He lives in LA and does great work. Brian had the opportunity to help someone who needed, more-or-less, a quick and dirty video done. Cheap, fast, you know the drill. Brian had some connections and offered to work on the project. After multiple editing rounds, the client paid. Well... kinda. Brian got a letter from Bank of America saying the client in question had stopped the check. It wasn't for a whole lot of money, but Brian had paid out of pocket to use facilities and now he was in the hole. Of course, the amount isn't what matters, its too small of a check to bother hiring a lawyer, but its the principle of thing. So Brian decided he wanted payment, and he was going to do what it took to make that happen.

Brian turned to the internet. First he bought a domain. It just so happens that his client does not own his-name.com: philconti.com Then he promoted the page to his blog. Then he posted it to twitter. Within 2 days he had over 100 retweets and dozen of people making comments on their own blogs and personal websites. If you now google performers Phil Conti & Marlene Arden, mostly negative press shows up.

I found out about Brian's plight from a webcomic I read: Candi by Starline X. Hodge. She posted about it in her daily update because,

"He's a good friend of mine, so when he posted it on his blog, I decided to help. I just didn't like hearing that he got ripped off. Figured if more people knew about it, then maybe they'd pay him for his work."

I contacted Brian and asked if he'd tell me a little bit about why he chose this course of action (putting pressure on the client through the internet). He said

"They're entertainers, and I know that entertainers' web presence is extremely important. If they realize that the internet dislikes them, and their google/twitter/whatever search results are negative, they're going to have problems."

Which I agree, it'd be a problem for anyone! I asked Brian what kind of outcome he hope for. He said he'd just like to make up the difference, if they pay in full, he'll pull down all the pages he wrote mentioning them.

Brian is just one freelancer in California and he completely changed the personal brand of Phil & Marlene. So the next time you deal with a customer or hire a company, be above board. Make sure you hold the keys to your company's image. Never underestimate the power of the internet and what that means for your brand.

So what do you think? Do you think smearing someone's brand is justified? Is it too much? Not enough? Have you seen the internet eat another business alive?
If you agree with Brian's approach be sure to spread the word, ReTweet, blog, link on Facebook. Show his site some love. And Starline too!

Image by AndYaDon'tStop

Twitter made some subtle design changes recently and I couldn't help but comment on them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all about sleek designs. Except the new bird is kinda weird. But here's my problem: why is Twitter spending money on a redesign when they could put that cash towards greater/smoother functionality or finding a monetization strategy? Or, you know, adding a "ReTweet" button, like other apps have (TweetDeck, Tweetgrid, so on...). That'd be cool. Hello?? Twitter? Are you listening?

What awesome feature would you have spent Twitter's money on?

(Also, go rate that video. I lost the password to my YouTube account and I can finally get on it after a year! I need some love.)

Wanted to do a quick blog post. Last week I was a panelist at the Dallas SEO/SEM Meetup along with Damian Skinner & Erick Osia. We discussed a number of topics from social media to viral video to Blackhat SEO. I posted a recording of this event on the Meetup's Upload section here.

Feel free to go listen to it. I know some of the questions are hard to hear but the answers are great. (If anyone knows how to edit audio, feel free to fix it!) Some examples of questions answered:

• How do I use social media to make money for my business?
• What should I use for my business on Facebook: a profile or a fan page?
• Does Wordpress index its pages?
• What does "Black-hat" mean?
• Should I use forums as part of my social media outreach?

Also wanted to give a shout-out to all the Twitters there!

Panelists:

@erickosia - Erick Osia

@damianstweet - Damian Skinner

@Veribatim - Kat Rice

Our Awesome Guests

@blueprintrealty - Bill Nicholson

@mktgmaster724 - Scott Saldinger

@smartacusguys - Rudy Lopez

@gushin - Dennis Guten

@natefalconer - Nate Falconer

@Andiqa - Andrea Duncan

We had more guests, so if you attended and would like to share your twitter, please leave it in the comments below! Be sure to check out the Dallas SEO/SEM group. Its a fantastic group. And I'm not just saying that because I'm an organizer. Check them out, and consider attending once a month with us.

Taking a break from our regularly scheduled Top 10 Ways to Ruin Your Website series, I recentlt was emailed a question I wanted to share.

Most business people have heard of Twitter, but still have no real sense of how to use it to promote their business. So why should they add this to their daily PR & marketing activities?

And here is my response:

I get asked these questions all the time by clients and when I’m speaking. “Right, I know Twitter is supposed to be the new shiny thing but I just don’t see what it can do for me.” This is usually followed by some comment like: “I don’t care about what someone eats for breakfast” or “no one wants to know about my personal life”. I used to spend a whole lot of time answering the question and explaining, but I’ve gotten down to saying just this:

Let me give you the top 3 reasons you should be using twitter for your business*:

1. Industry Pulse.

2. Polling.

3. News.

1. Imagine having the ability to put your finger on the pulse of your industry.

There are 3 groups of people you need to follow. Don’t follow the people who talk about their coffee break!

• Follow your perfect client, anyone from your target audience. Find out what they are thinking, what matters to them. Ask them questions! (And I mean really ask them questions, not: message me if you have a question about such-and-such)
• Follow your competition. Get in touch with what’s going on in your industry. Learn from their mistakes and advice. This alone makes Twitter invaluable to me.
• Follow people who are movers & shakers in your physical area. Search by city and find out who knows what’s going down. Then you can know and get involved if it helps you business. And, it’s incredible when you become one of the people who others ask: where should I be this week?

2. Polling.

Once you’ve followed the big 3, ask them questions. Smaller companies can’t afford focus groups and big surveys. So do it on Twitter. Ask about products, what they do or don’t use and why. Ask what they think of work you’ve done, etc. I poll before I speak so I have immediate feedback about my topic before I even say a word. Then I know where to focus.

3. Relevant, Fast, News:

My example of the overwhelming ability of Twitter as a news source was the terrorist attacks on Mumbai around Thanksgiving last year. I had CNN on my TV and Twitter streaming live on the Mumbai topic on my laptop. I was getting news on Twitter 30-40 minutes faster than through the television. In fact at some points CNN just read off Twitter and blog entries or used photos/video posted there from people in the middle of everything. But that’s not even the part that hit me hardest. It was that people were using Twitter to find their loved ones. A list of missing people went up on a blog and people forwarded it along through twitter and when someone was found they’d update the list. The news couldn’t even keep up with that, they just listed the website.

If that’s not reason enough to consider spending ten minutes on Twitter while you’re having your bagel in the morning and then ten minutes when you’re winding down from work, I don’t know what is.

*Exceptions are: Twitter is not your target audience. Seriously, research it. I can tell you really quickly who twitter attracts, if that’s not your market don’t waste your time. But since Twitter normally attracts business owners, moms, baby boomers, early tech adopters, bloggers and male executives… that relates to most people on some level, so this disclaimer is mostly just to make naysayers feel better.

I realized after attending the Microsoft SparkStart event that I often repeat the same advice over and over again, just with a new angle. So instead of doing that today, I'm going to point you to posts I wrote over the last year that still make sense right now! Believe it or not, the social media game hasn't changed that much in a year. In fact, marketing as a whole hasn't changed that much, we just use a different medium.

So here are some posts that might be relevant for you today:

Why Social Media is important:

• Social Media: Personal Touch in a Virtual World
• The Business of Social Media

The Facts:

• Facebook: Making the Rest of Us Look Bad
• Tools for your Belt: Demographics & Surveys

The Etiquette:

• Top 5 Ineffective Social Media Accounts
• Social Media Compared to Offline Networking

A lot of the truths of marketing still exist in the digital age. Are there any principles you use over and over again in your own marketing (online or off)?

No one is arguing anymore about the power of Twitter. After Ashton Kutcher's showdown with CNN and the appearance of Oprah, Twitter has pretty much hit mainstream. However, its not often that a company gets to feel part of something even bigger.

We've done some consulting and design work for the Dallas County Young Republicans, and run their Twitter account. The DCYR took a keen interest in supporting the much-blogged Tax Day Tea Parties. Here's what WFAA has to say:

I got some time during the filming (which took way longer than I realized it would) to chat with David Schechter about what he thought of Twitter, personally. He told me the potential for having twitter and traditional news work together was incredible and he was excited to be a part of it. We're excited to be a part of it too.

If you are interested in using social media to further your business or movement, Veribatim is offering a number of classes right now in the Dallas area and we'd be happy to send you more information: contact@veribatim.com

This is my very first Vlog. I've not done it for lots of reasons, but because I'm speaking more and more I decided to share it with you!

I've been looking for a simple analogy to social media for a while. Then I realized that most business people are trained at some level to network in real life. Social media uses those exact same principles, just online! So the point of this video was to compare offline networking to your online presence.

The poster in the background looks like this:

Twitter should give me a paycheck. Seriously. I might as well be a rep, for how much I talk about them. I've brought them at least a dozen new users in the past month. But even though I feel that the potential of Twitter is limited, they could still stand a lesson or two from Facebook.

Can you Hear me Now?

My last few blog entries have revolved around Facebook and some of its new updates. Facebook has spent a long time listening to its users and then implementing their suggestions. I think its fantastic.

We all know how great it feels when someone takes your suggestion and puts it into action. I remember once suggesting a new approach on a friend's website. I wasn't getting paid, it was just friendly advice. I remember my friend came back ecstatic that she got so many compliments and it just felt good to know I helped.

The opposite is also true. When you try to offer thoughts or suggestions and someone isn't listening, it hurts. Especially if they blatantly ignore you.

Twitter has some growing pains but its important, even during these times, to listen to your customers. Twitter has a single major avenue of communication: email. And right now if you email them a question it takes up to two weeks for a response. Even then, your response may be: "Please check with our other open tickets."

Hopefully Twitter will realize the importance of listening soon. I already know people who had a question or couldn't retrieve their password and stopped using the service because they never received an answer.

Have you contacted Twitter before? Was the experience positive or negative? Did it impact the way you use Twitter?

Image by DuChamp

Love it or hate it, MySpace did one thing right: it paved the way for facebook.

A few weeks ago I spoke to a group about social media, concentrating on Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In. At that time, I gave Facebook a very basic review and moved on. But after hearing about the changes being made to the site I started to do some more research. It blew my mind what Facebook was doing. So much so that I'm going to devote this week of blogging to comparing Facebook to what I believe are the other top two social media sites: Twitter & Linked-In.

Disclaimer: I am not saying these three websites are the same. In fact I think most businesses should establish a presence on all three. This is more about me organizing them by greatest  business potential.

Today I want to talk a little bit about some of the exciting stuff happening behind your Facebook profile and the key to what gives Facebook such awesome potential. Last week I covered the exciting new Facebook pages and if you regularly check your profile, you've probably already noticed the changes to your news feed. So, let's talk about lesser-known gems that you might not have heard about unless you religiously read Facebook's company blog.

Somethings you might not know:

• Facebook is available in Hebrew and Arabic. (70% of users are not from the U. S.)
• Facebook Causes have raised $4.5 million from 90,000 unique donors. (How's that for making an impact?)
• Facebook has a wiki just for developers.
• Facebook book is listening. There are multiple ways to give them feedback.
• Facebook puts all their statics on their site.
• Facebook does a ton of research (with your permission). You can participate even if you don't have an account!
• Facebook has made a ton of its coding open source.
• Facebook Connect allows you to integrate information on Facebook with other websites.
• It took me 5 minutes to find all this information.

Most of us log on Facebook, respond to mail, update our status, play around a bit and we're done. But there is so much more to Facebook. By looking a little deeper I realized that Facebook was listening, truly listening to what its users needed. The number one question I get from business owners is "But how do I use Facebook for my business?" And the answer has always been somewhat convoluted. Facebook heard that question and said, "Hmm... how can we make this better for businesses while still making the same social impact?"

They've done a ton of research on their new ideas. I know, I know, a new homepage makes most of us balk, (what? I have to think before I click?) but I have faith that the Facebook team picked what they felt would be the most intuitive and simple solution. In a month we won't even notice.

Facebook's philosophy, however is what really makes them stand out from other media. Share and Connect. That's powerful. And they are actively pursuing it in visible ways. I couldn't tell you what any other social media site's mission even was.

So what do you think? Do you hate the new layout? Did you learn something new from my little list? Are you ready to be in up in arms defending other social sites this week?

My good friend Steve wrote an article I'd like to showcase today. He and I know each other through the Dallas SEO Meetup (where I will be speaking about Twitter next week). Please take some time to read his article. He is a relatively new Twitter user and another one of my "success" stories.

The best advice I ever received regarding Twitter was “Do not try and sell on Twitter”. Now what does that statement really mean? Well the point of the statement is use Twitter to introduce yourself or your company to the Web and share knowledge. Exchanging helpful links to sites of mutual interest or giving out free advice to relevant topics is the key. The end result hopefully being gaining beneficial contacts and possible sales. - Click for More