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Blog by Kevin O'Keefe, "Real Lawyers Have Blogs," on the topic of the law, firm marketing, social media, and baseball, February 23, 2014. O'Keefe reviews a study by Gerry Moran on using social media to teach, not to sell. Other key points that O'Keefe makes: Build a large social network of people modeled after your customers and their influencers. 75% of B2B decision makers use social media to learn. (wonder where this stat comes from?) Pass on valuable information. Don't use your social media and networking channels to promote yourself. You want to be known for handing out knowledge and not brochures. Use social so that people will want to visit with you in person. 73% of customers are willing to engage with you on social media, so the opportunity is there. Use social media to teach, not sell. Selling is best done face-to-face. However, Social Media Today reports B2B buyers look at an average of over 10 digital resources before ever making a purchase. Since customers need to learn before they buy, use this opportunity on social media to connect. Teach and connect with today's technology. Connect and get on the radar of your customers and potential networks by retweeting, sharing, commenting and favoriting others' content. Develop Insights. Before you teach and connect with your customers, you need to listen to the customer and their customers. Social is an excellent listening tool. Be a publisher. In addition to curating and passing on the great content to your network, create your own assets on a blog. Organizations who blog get clients. Later Excerpt: Over the years LexBlog as been all about helping lawyers understand how to use the Internet in a real and effective fashion so as to grow their practices. By sharing information from third parties along our own insight via blogs and other social media we established a reputation as trusted advisors. Even when I reach out to meet with lawyers and law firms I have never met f

""Women small business owners are not just more optimistic about their own businesses, they're also more bullish about the prospects for female entrepreneurs who are just starting out," said Billie Dragoo, national board chairwoman of the National Association of Women Business Owners. "With a positive outlook and strong entrepreneurial spirit, women business owners continue to be a driving force of our economy." The research also gauged how female business owners are using social media to help grow their companies. While 85 percent of the women surveyed believe social media is important for building customer relationships, only 67 percent currently use social media to connect with customers. The study found that just 25 percent of female business owners are posting on social media at least once a day, with 23 percent rarely posting at all. When they do use social media, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube are the preferred platforms."

Blog post by Sylvia Browder at the Story Exchange--where women mean business. "Challenge 2: Undefined Niche To Niche or Not to Niche…that is the question. What is a niche? A niche business is one that targets a very specific group of people with specific shared interest. A business with an undefined niche is like a ship sailing in shallow water. By creating a niche business allows you to market to your ideal clients. For example, if you were a behavioral psychologist targeting teens, you would market your services in places where parents are likely to find out about you; such as advertising in parent magazines, providing resources to local middle and high schools or joining organizations geared towards parents. Solution: By understanding who and where your ideal customers are; it is easy to craft a marketing plan to target them. Here are three easy ways to target your potential clients: * Improve your website's SEO with specific key words * Generate exposure locally and virtually with professional speaking, seminars or publishing a book or articles. * Craft a clear message that speak at the heart of your customer " Challenge 4: No Social Media Plan Random tweets and meandering Facebook posts will result in a lot of time devoted to zero results. Before making another useless post, sit down with pen and paper and make a list of what you want to achieve from social media. To which social media do you belong? What are some social media marketing strategies that you have noticed from other companies? What do you have that will offer value? You may find that your company is spread a little too thin across the social media spectrum. Quality truly is superior to quantity in this respect. Solution: Create a social media marketing plan and stay the long haul. Establishing a strong presence can be a very time consuming process. It is unwise to expect your list of fans, followers or subscribers to grow overnight.

Blog post by Gerry Moran, 3.9.13, at Marketing Think on how to calculate your Facebook and Twitter success Excerpt for how B2B brands need to use social media: Amplify: Increase the awareness of the brand story and solutions. Engage: Drive customer and prospect engagement with related content. Convert: Provide a way for the customer to convert interest after they become aware and have consumed enough content to move to the next step in the buying journey. To help you understand if you are reaching your goal, it is important for you to understand the right questions to ask to get the right social media measurement. Marketers need to map key social metrics to strategic questions vs. just measuring and blindly reporting how a channel performs.

From ReferralCandy.com on the difference between social networks and social media. Examines the history of using these terms: prior to 2010, social network was more widely used. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter were just trying to connect people together. However, after 2010 both FB and Twitter started to become news and resource sources and the emphasis changed from connections to content. An example from Twitter: Used to ask - What are you doing? Now ask - what is happening?

blog post by Clive Andrews at NixonMcInnes, creating meaning in business. 9/26/2013 on using immediacy of messages being shared on social media to make operational choices.

Susanna Gebauer talks about Germans but the same misunderstanding may exist here about the usefulness of social media for increasing one's influence. Certainly, the more retweets, followers, favorites, comments we get, the more we get known.

Guy Kawasaki has an enormous following on Twitter and is recognized as a social media guru. In this article, he describes the steps he took to make a small event stand out on social media. " I learned that it's possible to ensure that an event is covered in social media -- even trending as a hot topic with an event with only 100 attendees -- if you know what you're doing. Here's how."

good article on using social media to achieve goals

"Small businesses are eager to find valuable tools that take a lot of the time and trouble out of social media marketing and that do so without costing an arm and a leg. I think we'd all want tools like that, right? Well, I went searching for just this kind of simple, easy, cost-effective tool, and I came up with 61 that made the cut. I tried out more than 100 in total, and I'm sure I missed a few along the way (please tell me in the comments or on Twitter which ones deserve a look)."

Very interesting blog post at Meetingsnet.com on how to create a viral spread of ideas/content/connections at meetings. Written by Alison Hall, August 5, 2013. Stresses that millenials, the focus of many women's organizations recruiting efforts rely on social media and technology to get through each day. They are completely connected, which has implications for how organizations need to use content generated in f2f meetings to attract engagement by people well outside the event itself. Excerpt: 12 Tips for Share-worthiness 1. Think from your audience's POV: What will they find interesting? What will help them prove the value of their industry, or their position? 2. Entertain. Infographics, photos, and (appropriate) humor have great pass-along value. 3. Feel good. What will make the world better? Emotional content spreads because it moves people. Find a way to make your content connect on a deeper level. 4. Plan your meeting with the idea that all content (with the exception of content at proprietary meetings) will be shared. 5. Loop in your presenters. Get their key insights ahead of time so you can "lock and load" content that's ready to go in real time. 6. Remember that real-time marketing only works if your audience can connect. Work diligently with your venue to ensure Wi-Fi is accessible and bandwidth is sufficient. Consider (sponsored!) charging stations to keep attendees powered up throughout the meeting. 7. Lead the way. Sharing will be (and should be) organic, but you need to be the guide. Start promoting hashtags and social channels at your event Web site and in your online registration process. On site, brand all event signage with the hashtags and channels. 8. Talk back. Hear what your audience is saying and participate in conversations. Deliver social value back to them by retweeting or sharing their content. 9. Make it easy. All content should have a one-click sharing option. Don't rely on the audience to cut and paste. Videos and phot

Pinterest site by Lori Taylor who puts up a lot of social caffeine infographs on social marketing, social media, and infographics.

Wonderful infographic on how to market your business, posted December 6, 3013, Michael Nelson on Social Media Today, with examples of these rules.Well worth taking a look at. 1. Keep it simple 2. Be unexpected 3. Be concrete 4. Get Credible 5. Be emotional 6. Tell a story

Really good article by Kerry Butters on measuring roi on social media, June 13, 2015.

Great, as usual,blog by Beth Kanter. She reproduces TopNonprofits list of social media tips for marketing your message. Simple, good graphic icons, easy to use.

Good article on marketing online with social media, The Social Ms by the Gebauers, March 15, 2015

"7 Steps for an Optimized Content Marketing Strategy" post by Pam Dyer on SocialMediaToday, December 3, 2013 on content marketing. Blog uses an outline array of information followed by an infographic depicting the same information

Interesting working paper by Annie Feighery, on Participatory Epidemiology website, asserting primary value of Facebook and Twitter. Note this example of virtual penetration for mobile phones below. Does this threshold hold true for social media use? "Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, now has a majority of countries with populations whose mobile phone market is at the level of virtual total penetration. Virtual total penetration is reached when more than half of potential mobile phone owners have a mobile phone. "

Talia Shani from 2010, Kissmetrics, writes about tools that enhance the Twitter reach: bitly, Buffer for scheduling and spreading out tweets, Cotweet for marketing, Hootsuite for managing multiple social media, scheduling tweets for later release, tracking results, and multiple collaborators. Paper.li for curating tweets into newspaper format. SocialOomph for scheduling tweets, tracking keywords, extending Twitter profile, and more. Triberr is an invite only community of like-minded bloggers. Tweetdeck--similar to hootSuite but now part of Twitter. Twitterfeed uses RSS feeds to automatically share your blog and others every time there is an update to them. Visibli shares any links you want along with custom share bar and ability to customize.

Although this article concentrates on content curation for marketing, there are some great tips to remember such as identifying your audience, focus your sharing, make sure your curation is of impeccable quality, curate consistently, brand yourself not your company. Love this quote: " Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer publicly states his Twitter strategy is "find good shit and share it.""