I had the privilege of being interviewed by Deaf Social Media about my experiences with Synergetic Business Solutions. Below is the transcript of the interview (can also be found here):

DSM: Tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Synergetic Business Solutions.

Corey: I was born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago. After graduating from John Hersey High School, I attended the Rochester Institute of Technology and earned my bachelor’s degree in business management and master’s degree in business administration (MBA) with a concentration in marketing and sales management. After working for several years out of Rochester, NY, I decided to return to my roots in Chicago and focus full-time on Synergetic Business Solutions.

As the owner of Synergetic Business Solutions, I work with my team to tailor marketing strategies to help businesses connect with their customers. The focus is on integrating different components of businesses to increase profitability and efficiency. These include, but are not limited to the following: social media and search engine marketing, online advertising and branding.

DSM: How did you get started running your own digital marketing agency?

Corey: The decision to start my own digital marketing agency was quite simple – I saw a need and decided to tackle this by offering services I had a passion for. This need was explicit within the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community, and I was strongly encouraged to initially offer my services on a consultative basis. Since starting the business, we’ve created more than 15 multi-channel integrated marketing campaigns for a portfolio of business-to-business and business-to-consumer clients. I’m truly excited to see where the company will go in the future!

DSM: What are some areas in social media that you noticed most companies have been struggling with these days?

Corey: Engagement is critical. A number of companies struggle with this concept. It’s not about putting out information that is interesting to the person posting on social media, but rather posting content that is relevant and interesting to the target audience. Essentially, your customers are your brand. If you fail to deliver content they want along with the product or services they want, they may quickly go elsewhere.

DSM: What will it take to become a “Best in Class” digital marketer?

Corey: This is a great question! I think that in order to become a ‘Best in Class’ marketer, one needs to be able to be a Jack of all trades. While digital marketing is constantly changing, one should understand the intangibles associated with marketing and evolve with the emerging trends. All components of digital marketing work together and if one does not understand how one component affects the other, they can severely hinder their organization’s success.

DSM: NFL’s regular season’s starting tomorrow, how do you think your Bears would do this year?

Corey: I should have known you would ask me this question! I really think that if Brian Urlacher is healthy, the Bears have a chance to go deep into the playoffs. You heard it here first – Super Bowl Champions!

Thank you Deaf Social Media for this opportunity!

The post Exclusive Interview with Deaf Social Media first appeared on Corey Axelrod.

Last Wednesday I had the privilege of being on the LinkedIn Lady radio show. While regular host Carol McManus (@linkedinlady) was away at a conference, a friend and former colleague, Ken Herron (@KenHerron), was the guest host. I couldn’t turn down Ken’s request that I be his special guest on the show.

Ken and I talked in lengths about how small businesses need to incorporate social media as part of their integrated marketing mix, and I’m writing this blog post as a summation of the conversation we had during the show.

Ken opened the discussion by asking me which social media platform a small business should be on. Unfortunately, there is no right answer. Social media is not about you or your business, it’s about your customers, audience, and whoever you are trying to reach. Simply put, you go where your customers are. If your customers are on Facebook, you should be on Facebook. If they’re on Twitter or Pinterest, you should be as well.

Communicate with your customers to find out which networks they are on, as well as the type of content they want from you on social media. This will enhance engagement, a process critical to your success on social media.

The next portion of the show focused on standing out from the competition on social media. While one can go the route of focusing on the ‘trends’ (YouTube or other video platforms) or on ‘conventional’ social media platforms by going with Facebook and Twitter, my professional recommendation is to be on multiple platforms and simultaneously utilize video. Part of video’s appeal for social media is that it lets your potential customers see, hear, and “touch/feel” your business. These are all important ways that people can learn about you and your business. From there, you can take your videos and cross-promote these videos on other social media platforms. It’s essentially about tying all the social media platforms together while maximizing the tangible components of your brand.

With your presence on social media, it is always important to measure success. My definition of success is not measured by the number of followers I have. Instead, it’s how many people I engage with on a daily basis. It’s how many people are retweeting what I’m saying or responding to a tweet I’ve sent out.

Success on social media does not come overnight, instead, it’s a process that requires commitment and dedication to the craft, at least fifteen minutes twice a day to grow your business by interacting with your customers online. Small business owners are their own brand, and they should share their expertise with customers regardless of the social media platform they are on.

One way to measure impact on social media is by looking at one’s Klout score – Klout basically takes different components of your digital influence and tells you how much of an influence you have on your audiences. There’s a lot of back and forth between supporters and naysayers, but the algorithms Klout uses provides insight into your online presence.

While there are no magic tricks to improving your Klout score, there are a number of ways small business owners can be effective on social media. The first is to take their time to learn the different platforms. Take whatever time you need to learn a given social network before worrying about being on multiple sites. The savvy will come, just be patient and learn all the different ways to maximize the effectiveness of the network.

This experience can be enhanced by joining Twitter chats and reading blogs to learn from social media experts. Twitter chats are beneficial to users worldwide as they are a two-way street: either you learn or strut your stuff by sharing what you know. Twitter chats are essentially what you make out of them, and can help increase your company’s visibility. Here’s a list of 15 Essential Twitter Chats for Social Media Marketers: http://mashable.com/2012/04/11/twitter-chats-social-media-marketers/. Continuing on with the train of thought of learning, reading blogs are another critical component of being successful on social media. Below is a link to a list of some of my favorite social media blogs: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/top-10-social-media-blogs-the-2012-winners/.

Before we concluded, Ken and I quickly touched on GM pulling their advertising money from Facebook and the implications this has on online advertising from here on out. The one important nugget I’ve taken away from all of this is that you need to ask yourself the question of whether paid advertising will work for your business to reach your customers, regardless of whether it is through Facebook, Google AdWords, etc. You cannot answer this question without trying, and it is worth your time, money, and effort to determine if paid advertising is worthwhile for your business. GM determined that it was best not to pay the $10 million towards Facebook and instead continue to grow the presence of their branded pages on Facebook, an initiative they’ve poured more than $30 million into during the last year. GM found something that worked better for them and it’s important that you do the analysis and allocate monies/time towards something that will maximize the effectiveness of every dollar invested.

To listen to the free LinkedIn Lady Show podcast featuring Ken Herron and Corey Axelrod, visit iTunes at http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-linkedin-lady-show/id433664232.

The post LinkedIn Lady Show Guest Appearance: Streamline Small Business with Social Media first appeared on Corey Axelrod.

Yesterday made for an an interesting day for Facebook. First, technical glitches delayed the start of Facebook’s trading by half an hour and then the company didn’t perform as well as expected in the stock market as it closed at $38.23, a 23 cent uptick and an increase of six-tenths of one percent.

I believe the reason the stock did not perform up to expectations is deeply entwined within investors’ fears of companies pulling their advertising money from Facebook, much like General Motors (GM) did earlier this week.

GM spent an average of $30 million yearly to build and maintain their pages on Facebook compared to $10 million for advertising on Facebook. Now that GM has pulled the money from Facebook, Facebook won’t see a piece of the pie. If other companies follow suit, this will be an issue severely hindering Facebook’s growth projections and is another issue Facebook faces, especially as they have not found a way to capitalize on mobile advertising.

While Facebook attempts to figure out what is wrong with the system they have in place for advertising and why GM pulled out, my inclination is Facebook will start charging companies of all kinds to have brand pages on Facebook. This is something I believe should have been done a long time ago regardless of the risks associated with charging for ‘real estate’ on Facebook. Facebook is losing money from GM and needs to find a way to minimize investors’ concerns.

The Axelrod proposed plan for branded pages on Facebook:

Companies should be charged for their usage of branded pages. This rate should be a fee combining companies’ levels of engagement with fans and the amount of pages companies have on Facebook.

The reason I propose this combination is because Facebook needs to focus on giving businesses an incentive to interact with their customers. The longer people stay on Facebook, the better it is for brands and Facebook. For the latter, the longer people stay on Facebook, deductive reasoning suggests a higher propensity of clicks on ads. Nonetheless, as I’m not privy to internal information, this is something Facebook needs to analyze.

In the midst of all of this, the one thing Facebook should keep in mind is that they cannot jeopardize their small business segment. It’s a fickle balance between making money from branded pages and advertising. Hence, this is where the levels of engagement factor comes in – the more companies engage with their fans on their branded pages, the more they should pay. As these calculations can be derived from branded pages’ insights, this tiered plan should be a formidable approach that can help offset Facebook’s losses in advertising and ensure Facebook continues to get its piece of the pie.

The post GM Pulling Ads from Facebook: Implications first appeared on Corey Axelrod.

I attended Imagine RIT: Innovation and Creativity Festival, a campus-wide event that showcases the innovative and creative spirit of Rochester Institute of Technology students, faculty and staff. More than 30,000 people were in attendance to see the various exhibitions, demonstrations and live performances – at times, there were so many simultaneous displays, it was actually a bit overwhelming! But, it’s important to note that each of these technological advances is an important stepping stone in pushing the technological advances envelope.

I remember saying to a friend during the festival, “They can make these things, and I’ll just put them out on the market and sell them.” Spoken like a true sales person, right? I’m not an engineer, a chemist or an artist. I’m not going to come up with the next revolutionary piece of technology, at least not in the near future. Instead, I’m like the majority of Americans, using the technology invented by these fine people.

Take Twitter, for example. For me, a person that likes to consume technology and is a sales person/marketer by trade, daily personal interaction with others is very important. That’s why I’m a big fan of this social media site, using it on a consistent basis. In fact, I actually handle several different Twitter accounts – one for personal use and a number for the rest of my clients.

On a personal level, Twitter offers instant emotional gratification, one that can be shared by micro-blogging in messages containing 140 characters or less. People say I can get the same type of interaction on other forms of social media like Facebook, but I really can’t. This is because juxtaposed alongside Facebook, Twitter is a sophisticated, scaled-down version of Facebook. Twitter drives the notion home that you need to be precise with your messages, and takes the conversation to the next level. On the other hand, Facebook’s “like” feature takes just seconds for a person to click, and does not encourage intellectual stimulation and conversation.

On a more professional basis, Twitter enables me to put meaning and a personality behind my clients’ brands. I have found business to business marketing to be especially intriguing, and Twitter has been a platform that has enabled interaction with many people at one time, instead of one by one. While this type of inbound marketing has been proven effective, I’m excited about what the future holds as there is so much potential that hasn’t been tapped into or explored yet.

Last, but not least, I do want to point out that while I understand there are negative implications associated with social media, I don’t feel the need to hide behind a smoke screen. I’m grateful Twitter allows me to put myself out there and interact with people on a daily basis. Twitter has essentially become like a pair of glasses, I’m lost without mine.

***Disclaimer: This post is a re-posted blog post written by Corey Axelrod on June 15, 2011 for the Purple Communications blog.

The post Making a powerful, positive impact in 140 characters or less: Why I love Twitter! first appeared on Corey Axelrod.