photo by randysonofrobert 

If you want to use social media for your business, you’ve got to be consistent.  Your social media presence is a garden and if you want your garden to look good and grow, you’ve got to routinely maintain it. 

You need to water your garden, trim and prune the plants, create new beds, add more plants – there’s lots of work to do.  But to keep that garden healthy and growing, you can’t do a burst of work, then wait a month before you do something else and expect to have much staying alive.

The first thing you have to do is have a social media plan that you can live with – don’t sign up for more than you’re going to be able to live up to on a regular basis.  The other thing you need are some tools that can help you stay on top of things.  The good news is there are a lot of tools that can help you maintain that consistent presence.

Here are a couple that I use:

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   illustration by Geek and Poke 

We have officially turned the corner on Social Media…it was only a year or two ago that Social Media, Facebook, Twitter and related stuff was almost exclusively the province of 20-somethings or technology geeks.

However the big news came out just last week…Twitter is the top word of 2009!

According to the Global Language Monitor, which examines language usage across the world, "Twitter" beat out "Obama," "H1N1," "stimulus," and "vampire" to take the crown. Interestingly, "2.0" came in at sixth place.

I’m not sure what that means for society in general (isn’t there something else to talk about?) –  however as someone who’s done more than 20 social media workshops in the last year or so, I can tell you there may be a lot of people talking about Twitter, but a lot of the conversations are along the lines of: ‘Twitter – I don’t get it, why would anyone care what I had for breakfast?’.  (hint – they don’t).

If you’d like a starting point – here’s a quick Twitter guide that can help you get started or you can check out one of my up coming workshops (always fun for the whole family).

Now that Twitter and Social Media are mainstream – what does it mean to you?  Are you using Social Media for your business?  Share your thoughts below.

Shawn Kinkade   Kansas City Business Coach

  photo by fotologic 

There are a lot of people actively using Social Media, but there are still many, many, many more that aren’t and they don’t really understand the whole thing. 

The biggest issue that I hear over and over again?

“Who has the time for all of this stuff?” – generally followed closely by the observation that they are currently getting swamped by email, phone calls and all sorts of other time killers.

There are two issues at work here – the first one is that a lot of people need a better handle on time management (check out 3 ways to create more time).  The second issue is that people really don’t see the benefit to Social Media – by many it’s still viewed as the province of kids and online marketers (not necessarily exclusive groups…) 

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  photo by respres 

Twitter - it’s everywhere. 

Ashton racing CNN to get to 1,000,000 followers.  Oprah’s on, along with lots of other celebrities.  Growth for twitter the last year has been 2565%.  It’s even being used successfully for business – here’s a great Forbes article on a CEO that’s using it for her business.

The number of twitter profiles is now over 18 Million.  I think it’s safe to say that twitter has hit a tipping point.

But if you’re like most people that I know, the first question is ‘What is Twitter?’ followed closely by ‘What is the big deal and why should I care?’.

The reality is that if and when you go out and try twitter, you are extremely likely to shake your head, look confused and shut your computer off in disgust trying to figure out what all the noise could possibly be about.

One of the secrets about twitter that’s not obvious is that www.twitter.com actually sucks right now when it comes to using twitter – that’s what most new users try to use and justifiably walk away frustrated and overwhelmed in a very short time.

Twitter’s not for everyone, but read on and see if some background and suggestions on what everything means and tips on how to use it might help change your perspective.

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I’m a big proponent of Social Media – to me it’s pretty clear that it is the wave of the future that will eventually knock down old-school sales and marketing techniques.  In a world of active Social Media, you can’t hide from your customers or prospects – people will say what they think and the best way to generate positive feedback is to deliver quality and value (and isn’t that really the point anyway).

Blogs, professional social media sites and Youtube all have a fairly clear place in an online marketing and Social Media strategy.

However I will admit that to this point I’ve been stumped on how to really view the value of Twitter. 

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