Hey everyone, welcome to Social Media Hangout Time. So excited today, bear with us a little bit, we are here live for one of our first shows. We’ve tested the water before but we are here live. Usually these are pre-recorded and put on YouTube and a podcast but live, we’re testing the waters and thanks to Ralph for testing the waters with us.
Oh, did we lose Janet?
And she’ll be back if she can. You know that darn internet connection sometimes that’s the bummer of a live hangout.
That’s right. Let’s give her a couple of minutes and if she doesn’t come back then we’re going to take over the show. We’re going to hangout with her after the show.
We’re going to do that, that would be fun. Let’s just say, you know, it’s great to have you here. You know we love the fall colors. We’re out in Minnesota.
You’re in Minnesota?
Yeah, the fall colors are just absolutely glorious. We’ve got the reds and the greens and the yellows.
I’m in the garden state.
How about you?
We’re in the garden state, we’re in New Jersey. And we’re the same way here, everything looks beautiful. I’ve got the windows wide open. Hopefully we won’t get any construction or lawnmowers or anything happening outside the window.
That’s terrific. Well you know, in honor, because I know there are guests here, we’ll wait another minute because I know that Janet’s recording this.
She did say that before she started the show she was having some trouble with all the little widgets in the Goolge hangout. So hopefully she’s rebooting her computer. Oh, it looks like..
There I think she’s coming back.
There she is. Yey!
Hey welcome back!
You know what, would you believe it, my internet actually went down.
I believe it.
It never does, believe it or not it went down. So go ahead and you guys are probably moving along without me.
We’re just chatting about the beautiful colors so awesome.
Hey Janet, welcome to Live Broadcasting!
You know what, I can go with the flow. I’m like seriously what in the world. But yeah, thanks for your patience everyone and we got it going. So I’m going to go ahead and let you guys chat, go ahead and I’m going to set up.
Take it away Kimmy.
Alright. I am very happy here to introduce Ralph M. Rivera. And he is the founder of Rahvalor Interactive with his wife Carol Lynn. And they have a branded service offering called Web Search Social which provides web search and social marketing to small businesses. And Ralph M. Rivera is also the CTO of Triberr, one of our favorite services. And he teaches web development at Manhattan College in New York City. So welcome to the show Ralph!
Well thank you so much for having me. It was a warm welcome up until Janet left us in your care.
Ditched us.
Ditched us, right.
Yeah no kidding.
You know that’s absolutely crazy. I can imagine it’s just kind of the way it goes. I’m going to make sure that my link is properly in there now because somebody said they actually cannot view it. We will make sure it’s working properly. I’ll put it over there. But let’s go and get started. We want to talk about content curation.
Yey!
And we’re going to talk about content curation for small businesses in particular. And this is an area that, personally I believe a lot of businesses actually just don’t even want to do it. So what’s your thoughts here on content curation?
I am not going to robbed off my question. We can’t start the interview until I get my question first!
I got a great question for you. Come on Janet, get with the games.
Sorry.
Ralph I have to ask you have you ever been interviewed by a puppet?
Well, I’m glad you asked me that and of course I’m a fan of your show and I’ve been listening to it. And I have to tell you Kimmy, you actually have inspired me because every show that you do, you’re building a bridge between puppets and humans. And you know I’ve been giving this a lot of thought how I’m going to answer this question. I thought this show affords me the opportunity to be who I really am.
Oh that’s awesome!
So right here, live on your show I’m announcing that I, Ralph M. Rivera, I’m a puppet!
Oh no!
My new boyfriend!
Thank you for having me. Wait hold on a second, hold on. I’ll fix my human costume. Hold on.
Oh this is great!
Oh you’re the best!
My human costume messed up my hair. Okay, how do I look, am I good?
Oh my gosh I love your hair! You ought to come and sit on my chair some day. Oh fun! That’s great, I love it!
So I have to say this has been a long time coming. I’ve decided that on your show I’m going to say I am a puppet American.
That is awesome. Thanks for coming out, I love it!
Love it Ralph, love it!
Thank you guys. Alright so let’s go on with the show.
Okay.
Wait a minute, wait a minute here. I have to talk to two puppets now.
That’s right.
You’re so lucky Janet, I tell you.
Oh well okay. We will get on the little more serious note with my two social media puppets here, how fun! So let’s go back and talk in to content creation
Yes.
Content curation, is that, well, it’s kind of similar but let’s talk about this and particular for small businesses. And focusing on like the salon owner with Kimmy. We would love to teach Kimmy, she’s getting to be probably one of the smartest social media puppets out there but.
The smartest.
Now I’ve got competition.
So let’s go into it. Let’s start talking. What’s your first thought that comes to your mind Ralph?
Well, I’ve written a lot about this and I’ve had a couple of interviews and debates about content curation. And it boils down to one thing, content curation for business sucks. Thank you.
Oh that’s a quick interview.
Thanks for having me.
So what do you think is the biggest challenge?
Alright, so here’s the thing. Let’s put this into context first before we get too deep into this. So first of all when I’m talking about content curation, I’m talking about content curation specifically for business. I’m not talking about the average person or someone who has a solo or like a coach or anything. I’m talking about small business, a business who has maybe 5 or more employees and they want to have a social program. That’s the context in which I’m talking about. And those businesses are universally told that they need to be publishing content in an 80:20% ratio online. And to me, that’s just dumb. And I talk about a lot in my article. I had a couple of debates online, I have one with Ryan Hanley and Dino Dogan. I had a lot of discussions about this with Mike Brooks, all who are fans of puppets, by the way. And they all agree with me that for a business to do business online, they have to be focused on one thing first above all else. And that is closing business, making sales, generating leads. That’s what’s important. And this 80% ratio or 80-20% content curation doesn’t seem to do that, it doesn’t seem to build relationships like we’re told it does. So I’m not a big fan of content curation and people misread that sometimes when I say that. They’d go, they’ll say something like, “well people should be able to publish content that isn’t their own.” And I’m not saying that’s not the case. What I’m saying is that the 80-20% ratio is not self serving and not in the best interest of the business. Does that makes sense?
Yes it does, it makes a lot of sense.
So this called content curation thing, the whole reason it got started is because, I, and it wasn’t even something related to my job. It was mostly something that happened just out of the blue that was out of proof of nothing. I met a business that was a law office and they were publishing tons of content. And to be honest I don’t remember how it got started. But I liked their page and I set notifications to on and started watching their stream. And over the next few weeks what I found was I had no idea what that attorney did. I didn’t know if he was a divorce attorney, if he was a children’s services attorney, if he was… I had no idea. And it’s because they were publishing so much content that was curated but curated poorly. And they weren’t really building a relationship with me because all that content was third party content, it wasn’t about them. So this happen on and on. We’re probably talking about 6, maybe 8 months ago. And that’s kind of what lit the fire for me because I thought to myself this person is doing this because they’re being told that you have to go out there, you’ve got to post and post and post and post and post. So this way you’re making noise. And all that does is create this giant whirlwind of noise that nobody could see through. And it’s the reason why EdgeRank, and I don’t want to single Facebook out here, but it’s the reason that EdgeRank has become so aggressive that now business posts are only being seen by 2% of people that liked that page. So all of these content curation, all that it has led to is noise that now needs to be mitigated at the framework level by Facebook and Twitter and all the other social platforms.
Ha! Yeah, I mean that makes so much sense – the noise. It’s like this person’s noise, this person’s noise wants to talk over this person’s noise wants to talk over this person’s noise…
Right.
And all it does is get noisy and that’s actually what our motto is. What is going to make this person, your business, all business, let’s just say it’s Kimmy’s business different. What’s going to make her stand out more and not just be noisy?
Well you have to, you know, there’s a very simple answer to this which is this: listen to your customers. What are your customers talking about? What are they complaining about? What are they happy about? What do they compliment you on? What do they complain, oh I already said that. Anything that your customers are talking about, that’s what you need to highlight. That’s what you need to convert that into exceptional content. Then that’s only half, that’s 50%. The other 50% is people who aren’t your client but are your prospects, they’d probably giving you some pretty good feedback. If someone hires you, that’s great. They become your customer. But if someone doesn’t hire you, you have to ask yourself why. Why didn’t they hire you? Was it cost, was it value, was it something else? And then you can address that as part of your social media campaign. Because at the end of the day your social media campaign, it’s about business. And one of the things that a lot of people in our industry do is they say that social is about building relationships. It’s about tying together social relationships between you and your customers. And that’s not necessarily wrong but having a social relationship with someone doesn’t put money in the bank. Having a sale does. So you want to always remember that the ultimate goal of all of your social programs and campaigns all have to end with a sale.
Right.
Yeah, yeah. And it makes a lot of sense and I do think what’s been happening out there specially lately is that the noise has overcome the end-all goal and I really like what you just stated.
Yes.
The issue with one of your prior guests, there was someone on your show a couple of episodes ago and that person you asked that person well what can someone do to cut through the noise. And that person said well you should really do is post more. Maybe because you’re not posting enough. And that’s completely the wrong answer. The right answer is post better. Not post more, post better.
I like it.
You know and great content, really, if it’s adding value and it really is when you post good content that’s valuable to that audience, to your market, that’s what helps get it to go viral. People will like it, they’ll love, they’ll share it. And then you start gaining that visibility because of what other people are doing for you, not necessarily how much you’re doing for them.
Right. I mean, yes, I love the way that puppet brain of you works. That’s absolutely right. No one is ever going to close a sale because you posted something awesome from Forbes. They’re going to post something because they read something that you posted, or they looked at an image that you posted, or they watched a video that you posted. And that content serve a need that they had that they are willing to exchange money for.
You know and when we talk about content curation, let’s talk about some of the areas to post it on because I know that with some of the clients that I cut hair of, they’re in business and they talk about not getting any results from maybe it’s Facebook. But it’s typically because they’re on Facebook so much but none of their customers are. So you know taking that content and knowing where to post it.
Yeah. And a lot of people do on Facebook. I know I talked about Facebook before, not that I single Facebook out. But the other thing that people do a lot of times is that they’ll post to Facebook using their personal account instead of their business account. And that’s a real, that’s kind of self-defeating because having a personal account it has certain barriers that are good from a personal perspective. But from a business perspective you don’t want those barriers to exist. I know a local business and they post only through their personal account and then they post very little on their business account. And what ends up happening is they get a lot of momentum on their personal account and then they have a skewed perspective because they start to think, “well this means that my personal account is better.” But I’m willing to bet you that if they put as much energy into their business account as they do their personal account, they’d get that same energy happening on their business end.
Yeah, that’s always been a battle of mine, too, is like you have the personal, specially when you’re running a business with the same name. And so do you, but you can’t have the apps, you can’t have all the stats. It’s not the same and people, it’s not just the same thing. I completely agree with you as a local business, they’ve got to be focusing on that page.
And you need to, as a business, you need to establish some thresholds for your time. In other words you need to set up time, dedicated time to sit down with all of your social properties and look at the metrics. Look at your Facebook stats, look at your Google analytics. Really make some decisions based on what you think what is working as opposed to what you think is working.
Correct. Absolutely! Well the analytics, too, from the website. I mean you want the traffic to really go through the hub, which is your home, your foundation. So if you’re posting tons and tons on Pinterest and you’re not getting anywhere, you really need to take a look at those stats.
Right. And that’s the part, it can be the part that’s very time consuming because as you know posting something to your social properties specially if you’re using some kind of a scheduling tool, can take very very little time. And that is the allure of content curation. It’s so simple because, let’s face it, creating good, quality content that is specific to your business and meets the needs of your customers and your potential customers, that’s really hard. That’s really time consuming. And content curation solves that by making, giving you a simple answer to a complex solution, which of course is the wrong way to go about that. But on the flip side to that when you’re doing your, when your posting to social or creating landing pages or your tying in a social campaign or perhaps Facebook ads or what’s the other thing?
Google ad words or Twitter ads…
Google ad word and that kind of stuff. So all that stuff ties in to but you have to look at the analytics. We ran a campaign the other day, we ran three different campaigns against our marketing game-changer kit which is a free downloadable resource that we make available through Web Search Social. And the three campaigns that we ran did nothing. They under-performed where we wanted them to perform. So what did we do? Well the one thing we didn’t do is we didn’t run the exact same ads again. We fine tuned them and we tweaked them. And that’s a big piece of the puzzle for small businesses is that they have to be willing to adapt and change as they go and not just post off haphazardly. That makes sense?
Absolutely, make a plan.
Yes.
Absolutely. And it’s check and adjust making sure that things are working but not changing completely the entire plan. Sometimes it’s just the headline they need to switch off.
Right.
Or a picture. Yeah.
Right. And people often, the other thing is that people often think that creating content is, people make it harder than it needs to be. Content does not need to be a 2,000-word post. Content can be a 7-word sentence that you post to your social channels. It can be as simple as that. A 7-word post can be just as productive for your business as a 2,000-word blog post.
You’re right, you’re right. As long as it’s getting across the points that you brought up earlier – that it’s not just for noise.
Right.
Because that’s where people are sometimes with those types of posts. You know, ‘hey let’s just get something out.’ I’ve been guilty of it on Facebook. Now am I guilty of it on Google+? No. So let’s talk about those different platforms, too. I mean, what do you think about the differences with the new Google+ algorithm vs the Facebook algorithm where we’re battling for attention so badly?
Well, here’s the thing, Ryan and I, we’re going to, Ryan Hanley of Content Warfare, we started this conversation on the web with social marketing podcast and we actually got a little long-winded. We’re actually going to have that conversation again. By the way Ryan Hanley secretly a puppet, did you know that?
Oh no.
No!
Secretly a puppet. That’s a whole costume. If you look at his podcast, his Content Warfare show. If you look real closely when he looks to the right or to the left, you can actually see the seams on his costume.
That’s awesome.
Look next time.
So we got to have him on the show with all the puppets.
Yeah. Well what you want to do is want him to look to the left or look to the right and you will be able to see the seams. Anyway, Ryan, of course, loves Google+. He’s a big Google+ fan.
Yes.
I don’t dislike Google+ but I have one thing to say about Google+ which is this: of all of my clients, people who pay me money to do what I do, none of them are on Google+. So for me what is my incentive to be on there? And let’s say that’s an unfair question because that doesn’t mean that I can’t open up other opportunities on Google+. But Google+ isn’t any really any different than any other platform. So I guess to answer your question, Janet, Janet’s your name right?
Yeah.
Because there’s no lower third so I’m not really sure.
We’ve major issues today, I know.
Okay. So to answer Janet’s question, I don’t have a preference on social platform. I think the question goes back to what I said before which is who are your customers and who are your potential customers and where are they? Because if your customers are 80-year olds then you shouldn’t be on social media at all, right?
Well I don’t know because we have this lady in Minnesota, she’s a 113 years old and she had to lie to get a Facebook account.
Really?
And literally she was just on the news. It was so funny because she’s trying to learn Facebook to connect to her family. She was a 113 years old and her 85-year old son was teaching her how to use Facebook.
Wow. Well that’s the point there, that’s the hook there – using her Facebook account to connect with her family, not necessarily to look for ads or business.
You know Janet just went on lala-land again.
She did, didn’t she? I’m beginning to think that Janet doesn’t like us. Hey while Janet’s gone do you want, since you and I are both here and we’re both puppets, do you want to talk about who else is secretly a puppet?
Who else is secretly a puppet?
So you remember you interviewed Dino Dogan from Triberr?
Yes, is he now a puppet?
Do you think he’s a puppet?
I think he could be a very good looking puppet.
He’s definitely a puppet. No human can have a goatee that good.
I know, he’s great. I love watching his posts, too, he’s lots of fun. And what typically what happens is these puppets are having a lot of fun.
Right.
And you know there’s a lot of things that we can do as puppets that we can get away with.
That’s right.
That real person can’t, so it’s kind of fun.
Oh that person’s back.
And it was funny because I became the puppet because by accident we were just going to do some videos and some still photos to create content, you know, for some of our channels. And it was I want to hep Janet off and here I am. She’s like, “you’ve got to be on our show.” So we’re working out pretty good.
Well you know what, you got to be on our show and talk about it a little bit more.
You bet.
Yes, yes. We’ve got a few more minutes so let’s definitely get into that… And I didn’t lose my internet this time, I think my computer, I don’t know, it’s just a bad day, it doesn’t like live I guess.
Well welcome back Alice.
That’s a first. I think I was called Farah before but Alice. So let’s talk about your show. What made you decide to launch it? Tell us the format and all about what people can hear there.
Sure. So we just launched the Web Search Social Marketing podcast. It’s been on-air for couple of weeks now. We hit episode 18 today and we just got listed in Apple’s new and noteworthy for marketing late last week. We’re really, really, super excited about that. And we actually, we’ve been talking about during a podcast for like a bizillion years. And some time ago we were in New York with our friend Cynthia Sanchez and I was telling her all the reasons why we had some kind of a barrier to create the show. And she just kind of looked at me and went, “yeah, stop talking about why you can’t do a podcast and let’s focus on why you can and just do it.” And that kind of really kicked us in the rear and got us motivated. A lot of people helped us along the way. But our podcast, it’s about web search social marketing and what we want to do is we want to challenge the status quo. So when we hear the things like hey 80% of your content should be curated and not about your business, we want to push back against that and help people figure out how to use web search in social marketing to generate business, generate leads and make money.
Yeah, so what’s that, what would you say in the next 24 hours? Somebody could do, because I love how you say you want to go against the status quo. And there are so many marketers out there that just say the same, exact thing over and over because they heard it from that marketer over there.
Yep.
So what is going to make somebody stand out? What action steps could our audience take in the next 24 hours?
Alright, I’m going to throw you a curve ball here because it has nothing to do with, well, it’s kind of like related to social media. But here’s what everybody who is watching the show live or in the replay should do in the next 24 hours. They should go online and go to every search engine, not just Google but Google, Yahoo, Bing, every search engine and search for your name. And then make a list of every place that you appear and make sure that every place you appear is identifying you properly. So there’s lots of people that I know that if I googled their name I get their job from their last two jobs but not their current job. Or maybe their email address is wrong or their phone number is wrong. These are channels that people are using to contact you and if those channels are wrong, you’ll never going to know it. So you should make it a point to periodically google yourself and Yahoo yourself and bing yourself and find out what people see about you because in your mind, I’m using the universal ‘YOU’, not you Janet… but the universal you, in your mind, all of your information out there is perfect. But I find that most times that’s not true. So that’s my tip.
That’s an awesome tip!! And it’s simple. People can easily take action, probably take 15-20 minutes of their time to just check out how they look online.
That’s right.
So you have a free giveaway. Can you tell us a little bit about that as we finish up?
Sure. So if you go to Marketing Game Changer Kit, we have compiled over the years all of the resources we use, resources like our LinkedIn profile worksheet, our social media calendar and a ton of other stuffs — marketing plan/guide, stuff that we ‘ve used or used for clients and people have said, “hey this is really nice. Can I get a copy of that?” We’ve compiled all of that stuff and we’ve uploaded it to Marketing Game Changer Kit and you can get it for free.
Wow.
That’s so kind, thank you. Those resources are so valuable.
And we update them all the time, too. So, as a matter of fact if you go there and you’re looking for a specific resource and we don’t have it, shoot us an email because that’s how we add resources. We add resources when people say, ‘hey, I’m having this challenge or I’m having a potential problem with search or social or whatever it is. And then we’ll make a resource. If we think there’s value in us having a resource like that, we’ll create it and we’ll publish it for free.
Wow. Well that’s great. So yeah, definitely everybody needs to go down on the resources.
And don’t forget to go to websearchsocial.com/podcast, we’d love for people to listen to our podcast and rate and review it on iTunes. That’s one way that it can help us kind of get our podcast in front of people and getting people listening.
Yeah, excellent, excellent. And Kimmy why don’t you finish up with your boyfriend here.
Oh yeah! Hey Ralph M. Rivera we are so happy that you are on our show and it was really a nice surprise that I actually have someone that now I have connection with. Well you don’t have pink hair but you know you got of a cool curl going there.
I don’t have pink hair today, but tomorrow you’ll never know.
Stop in and we’ll take care of that for you.
Nice.
But I just want to say thank you so much for being on our show. We’ll post this where people can download the content with your links coming up in a couple of weeks. We’ll do that and then we appreciate it so thanks for coming to the Social Media Hangout Time.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks Ralph.
Bye, see you!