The Data You Can Gather On Facebook

Rodney from FaceReviews has some interesting things to say here about what the astute business user can learn about his fellow contacts by paying close attention to their datastreams on Facebook.

People have asked me, “well, Andy, have you done any deals now since you’re on Facebook?” to which I answer “no, but I know a heck of a lot more about my business colleagues than I ever imagined knowing.

It’s far better than any Rolodex could ever be. You know about the significant people and events in their life, their family life, their interests, their hobbies, their related business pursuits, etc.

And for the people who really manage the data they put out on Facebook — like Robert Scoble — they do a great deal to build their personal as well as their business brands.

He’s teaching me something!

Anyway, enjoy the video and have a great weekend…

Andy

Today I got a great article in my email from Perry Marshall, a leading internet marketer and adwords guru.

It hits on something I have found to be so true: any time I haven’t listened to my gut feel, it’s gotten me in to trouble.

Here’s his piece:

Recently, I consulted with a student who had invested heavily in a business which was now making money but involved dealing with seedy individuals.

He was very conflicted about this. He’d put quite a bit into this venture. It was profitable, thus doubly hard to walk away from. But he didn’t feel good about what he was selling or who his customers were. His head and his gut were duking it out.

I don’t like just coming out and telling people what to do in situations like this. Here’s what I did say to him…

One of the most valuable skills I’ve honed is the ability to listen to my gut.

I learned this the hard way. There was an investor in the company I worked for who I personally liked but every time he’d call I’d feel a subtle, almost imperceptible wave of fear. Only much later did I realize his mission was to slice my fingers off one bloody joint at a time.

My head didn’t know it, but my gut did.

Ignoring my gut was a costly mistake.

Your gut can signal good people to you, too. When I interviewed Mendy Butler, who is now my Most Excellent Customer Service Person, I didn’t know her at all. My head just wasn’t sure about her. But as she got up to leave, a cool song started playing in my head. “Time and Motion just cranked up, that means we likes Mendy.” I did follow through and check all her references to be certain, but hearing that song in my head was the green light that she was the right gal for the job.

At my Chicago seminar, David Bullock stole the show. I got waves of raves about his presentation about Taguchi and online testing and tracking. He was totally tuned in with great information. He was entertaining, fun, even arresting.

You know what?

He’d never had any speaker training.

He’d never spoken to a seminar audience before.

He’d never even been to that kind of seminar before.

But I made him my keynote speaker and he totally rocked.

My gut told me to feature him.

He’s now got speaking invitations from major seminar promoters all over the biz.

It’s not easy at first to discern the conflicting voices inside. But little by little you begin to see through the haze and hear that inner voice more clearly.

I told my student that if he ignored his gut today it would be harder to detect its voice at all tomorrow.

Never disconnect your most reliable instruments.

I think he’ll do the right thing. And in the process he will teach his Inner CFO a lesson: We’re in charge of the money here, boys. The money is not in charge of us.

Small seeds grow and multiply. Little hinges swing big doors. Seemingly insignificant choices have far-reaching consequences. A decision to heed your best instrumentation and become even more reliant on it instead of less, benefits you in unforeseeable ways.

Listen to your gut.

Perry Marshall

Check this site out: http://www.trafficregenerator.com

Have you ever been to a site which makes it difficult to leave? It pops up windows at you? Peels back the corner of the page with a message for you to stay? Offer enticements to stick around?

Might that have been a porn site?

Most likely…

Well, the sleazy tactics of the porn merchants are now being marketed as legitimate business tools for internet marketers to use in their efforts to get people to stay on their sales letter pages.

I guess it’s not good enough to have compelling prose, a unique and enticing offer, a video which really draws you in to the product…

No, you have to use desperate tactics like implementing Traffic Regenerator so that morons who don’t know how to close out a window will be hooked back in to the page, and somehow compelled to buy the product in question.

Go figure.

I’m an internet marketer and have been one for the past 12 years, but I’m ashamed to be affiliated with people who market sleazy approaches like this.

All I can do though, is to do my marketing cleanly and ethically, and be able to look at myself in the mirror in the morning knowing that I’m doing the right thing by my customers.

Nuff said about that…

In today’s Business Week, blogger Jeff Pulver wrote a thought provoking article on why he switched from LinkedIn to FaceBook appropriately titled “Confessions of a LinkedIn Dropout”

Having recently made the switch myself, and finding Facebook to be a particularly friendly environment for me and my fellow business associates, I took particular interest in this piece.

Out of the box, FaceBook is primarily for social interactions. Enhanced with a number of the zillion applications they offer with it, it’s a Godsend to those who might want to use it as a connecting point for their biz connections.

I’ve found many current and former business colleagues on Facebook and have made connections, but am finding myself having to convince a number of skeptics that it’s a great place to be.

I’m sensing a big shift there, and wouldn’t be surprised to see FB emerge as the primary business social networking platform in the not too distant future…

One of the reasons I am glad that I never moved to Silicon Valley — which I had a couple of opportunities to do some years back — is because it is so damned expensive to make a living out there.

Proof of that can be found on this video from the New York Times and the accompanying article.

The article tells the story of Hal Steger, a Silicon Valley engineer worth over $3.5M, who owns his home free and clear and doesn’t worry about what it will cost to send his kids through college.

He feels broke and has an underlying anxiety that the money he’s worth just isn’t enough…

Strange thing is, I know how he feels.

I’ve made lots of money, lost lots of money and made it back again. When you don’t have it, you feel extremely insecure. When you do, you feel like it could all slip through your fingers because it has before.

Funny what money anxiety can do to your overall level level of happiness.

Having a lot of money certainly is a whole hell of a lot better than being broke, but it’s weird how even billionaires can feel a sense of unease with all that money…

Take some time and read the article. I’m sure you’ll find it to be quite interesting…

I am a regular participant in the Warrior’s Forum, an online discussion board for up and coming as well as established internet marketers. You’ve got a mixed bag in there in terms of quality of content, but I’m always coming across some real gems by some very wise marketers.

A few minutes ago, I ran across a particularly good post by Paul Hancox, who has a blog called The Smart Web Letter put up a post called 7 Reasons Why the Best Internet Marketers are Bloggers.

It was great stuff, well worth the read and I’m copying it here for your edification…

Enjoy!

If, like me, one of your self-proclaimed titles is an “internet marketer”, then you’ve probably asked yourself at some point,

“Why would I want to blog anyway?”

That was me a while back, asking the same question. I’ve sold software and ebooks on the Internet for many years now, and up until recently I held off from blogging because, quite frankly, I couldn’t see the point. I didn’t want to be sitting at a keyboard typing up blog posts, when I could be doing more productive things like writing a forum post or an ezine to my mailing list.

Oops, big mistake.

If you’re an internet marketer, here are the reasons you must be blogging, or “bad things” will happen to you (let’s just leave it at that, eh? ):

(1) A blog can establish or enhance your ‘authority’ by showing not telling

In sales, there’s a well known mantra: show, don’t tell. You say you’re the expert on Combustible Widgets, but what do your visitors care about your claim? Everybody says they’re the leading expert in whatever they’re selling. When was the last time you went to a site which said,

“We don’t know very much about Combustible Widgets, but we’re hoping you’ll buy from us anyway.”

A blog gives you a medium to demonstrate your knowledge (i.e. to show rather than tell), and so show your claim to be the “leading expert”.

(2) What you say on a blog can echo around the blogosphere

The deeply insightful post you just wrote here the forum will, I’m sure, be popular with other Warriors, and the search engines will probably pick it up too, but what you write on a blog can not only be transferred to a forum, but your blog post can also be picked up, quoted from, and linked to by other bloggers who absolutely love scooping, quoting and linking to others - the collective “blogosphere”, as it’s known.

Plus, how many newsletters, ezines or forum posts have you written, that are now languishing in the “archives”? That great post on “How To Tell a Combustible Widget From A Lame Non-Combustible One” may have been manna sent from heaven to the 1,762 readers of your Combustible Widgets Weekly ezine when you posted it in 2005, but who’s reading it now?…

Chances are, if it’s in the “archives”, nobody. Chances are, if it were a blog post, quite a few, because of…

(3) The smartest bloggers know a good post when they see one, and love to link to ‘em!

Bloggers are smart, and love to link to the hot posts of the day. That’s how your older blog articles can attract eyeballs for months or even years to come.

Yet how many people are linking to the latest article you sent out by email? I’m guessing - at a confidence level of 95% with +/- 3 degrees of accuracy - the answer’s zero. That’s because it’s email!

Just think if it had been a blog post…

What about your sales letter - who links to your sales letter at the moment? I bet 95% of them are affiliates, aren’t they? Of course, that’s no bad thing.

It’s just that you and I know that affiliates aren’t impartial. They’re basically motivated by the little green pieces of paper.

If you’re writing a blog, people can quote you and link to you just because you said something they found useful, with no monetary incentive. How crazy is that?

I know it’s a radical idea - but wouldn’t it be nice to have somebody link to you just because you have something worth reading, and not because of that 75% commission you’re offering?

Just a thought.

Plus, as well as links from your fellow bloggers, don’t forget that…

(4) Search engines have a terrible habit of sending people to content, not your sales pitches

A shocking and terrifying fact about Google searchers is that too many of them are not looking to buy my latest product!

Apparently, most of these fools are doing something called looking for information - can you believe that?

Given that we’re not likely to change these fools behaviour patterns until we get the implants rolled out, here’s my workaround…

Blogs. On a blog, see, you can post lots of information, which is apparently what these fools are looking for. Then, when you’ve hooked them on the great quality information you’ve shared with them, apparently they’ll be more receptive to hearing from you again.

They might even buy from you.

It’s worth a try, at least until the implants arrive. Now, what about this for a reason:

(5) How many people StumbleUpon, Digg, Sphinn or PlugIM a forum post or a sales letter?

If you’re looking at that last sentence and thinking, “Paul has forgotten his medication today”, then you’re wrong. The supervisors won’t let me forget.

But let me explain: StumbleUpon, Digg, Sphinn and PlugIM are what we call “social bookmarking” sites, where you can basically bookmark a site and show the rest of the world that you’ve done so. The rest of the world then either sticks a thumbs up to your site (by visiting it in bucketloads), or a thumbs down, by ignoring it completely.

(That’s the short and pathetically abbreviated version of “social bookmarking”.)

Anyway, to go back to the question of how many people StumbleUpon, Digg, Sphinn or PlugIM your forum post or sales letter? I’m guessing the answer is, something close to nobody.

Yet as I type up this post, someone’s just “stumbled” a blog post of mine on the “law of reciprocity”, and already in the space of an hour 40 visitors have arrived as a result of the “stumble”. (Thanks, stumbleupon.com users.)

So am I telling you to stop writing forum posts, or sales letters? Of course not! It’s just that as you continue to read this post, hopefully you’re starting to realize the incredible benefits of that medium known as blogging. And here’s another…

(6) Instant feedback, reciprocity and commitment

Blogging is an integral part of Web 2.0 because of its interactivity - people can give you instant feedback on your articles and posts, and you can even start debates on your article that can end up spanning the blogosphere!

However, don’t make this particular mistake…

I went to one famous internet marketer’s blog just the other day, saw a really great article, and I wanted to post my genuine praise and add a few extra comments. The blog said I had to log in to post a comment. Vrroosh… I was gone.

As a marketer, I understood what he was trying to achieve - he wanted people to sign up to his newsletter before they could comment.

I don’t believe that’s very effective. All I wanted to do was make a comment. It was a hoop through which I was unwilling to jump.

Turn your comments on, don’t make people jump through unnecessary hoops (although there are times when hoops are useful), and actively encourage people to give you immediate feedback!

Leaving a comment is your reader’s way of thanking you for the content (see my Internet Influence Magic post on the law of reciprocity), for contributing to the discussion, and for new readers it’s the first small commitment to your site. Plus, if you make it a habit of responding to your reader’s comments, they may come back later to see your response to their comment - and maybe to read your blog further.

Don’t underestimate the power of the comments feature on blogs.

This last one is very important…

(7) RSS Feeds

I know as marketers we’re kind of wedded to our double opt-in email subscription forms and our “squeeze” pages, but blogging has yet another killer advantage… RSS, or Really Simple Syndication.

It basically allows people to subscribe to your content without email! Now, wait a minute… I know what you’re thinking… how are you going to be able to push them the latest “Earn $1 Million In 65 Minutes From An Adsense Loophole That Will Last 3 Days” promotion, that you know deep down you’ll never actually read or use yourself?

Here’s a radical thought… you don’t. Instead, you build up your blog’s readership, authority, reach and influence through quality blog posts… and then you start selling your own products and services that you genuinely believe will really help your readers!

Quick Tip: make acquiring subscribers to your RSS feed as important as acquiring email subscribers.

If you haven’t convinced yourself by now that blogging is For You (TM) or a Good Idea (TM), then I’d love to hear your reasons.

If it’s just the technology, then fear not. (For a small fee I’d be happy to install you a blog, set up all the “plug-ins” you’ll need for a quality blog, and I’ll even set up 10 of your articles as blog posts, just to get you started.)

Either way, it’s time to get blogging! And if not… why not?

Paul Hancox

I sometimes feel sorry for myself, feeling limited because my heart condition “limits” me from doing all the things I’d like to do.

This guy didn’t let the fact he has no arms hold him back from playing a pretty decent guitar!

I’ll have to remember him the next time I try to have a pity party…