Make money doing what you love

Today you can get paid with doing what you like to do! There are huge opportunities out there and everybody can play the game, just do what you are passionate about and hustle. Hustle, work hard and give a shit. This is the most important message I could give you today.

You need to be visible and transparent, basically you need to brand yourself!

In the past it was necessary to invest huge sums in TV spots, radio casts, magazine ads to market yourself, in today’s world this isn’t necessary any more. Your customers are everywhere you just need to lead them to you, your products, your services and you need to care about them. Be supportive

Be Passionate, Be Patient

To succeed in today’s altered business ecosystem you need to speak with your customers by producing quality content about your passion. In a second step you need to listen to them and most essentially you need to give a shit about them. You need to care about them, you need to interact with them.

You need to be patient and work hard to succeed in this new business ecosystem called social media or web 2.0

To create a successful business on the internet you need to be everywhere, be passionate and patient, you need to work hard and hustle, you need to spend 80% to 90% of your working hours in the web to produce quality content – answer e-mails – post quality replies to blogs related to your activity or business.

What’s social media?

It’s word to mouth on steroids, if you have something to say and if it’s quality, because quality is always king, it gets expanded in so many directions and this is the real power of it because everybody has a voice and not certain select fields.

You need to treat social media like twitter – facebook – tumbler – flickr – youtube like a party and not like a presentation. You don’t use them to talk about business or pitch everybody. You try to get into conversation like you do on a party in the real world those media are just a translation into the virtual world and you should use it like that.

To communicate, just do it.

Traditional Business - The game has changed and you need to deal with it!

What people need to understand is that the way we communicate is so different.

Today’s traditional businesses need to understand that, you don’t control the message of the brand any more, users control the message and they are the one who talk about it and how you respond to them, that’s the game, not the other way around.

The idea is to listen to the users out their all the time. That’s the game and not what you tell them.

It’s all about listening, it’s all about caring but most of all you need to be good at what you are doing. Talk about your passion whatever it is and live in the communities where they talk about it to really get in their.

Find your niche if it is your hobby or whatever it is and communicate with people out their. If you put exciting, silly, interesting stuff out their that people like and it goes viral, let me tell you something, you will have hundred’s or thousand’s of people watching it and you can make ten or hundred of thousand’s of dollars with virtually everything.

With product placement on your video pod cast because everything what’s relevant in movies and television is relevant on-line, because if you get the eyeballs, and the only way to that is to have a lot of passion and chops for that subject matter, even a bottle of water can be monetized.

Just make the connection.

That’s the world we live in dude and to me that’s fascinating and exciting, but make no mistake it is hard work, hassle and about connecting.

Social Media and Web 2.0 Defined

You are not alone if you’re not able to define social media and Web 2.0 quickly and with confidence. In a survey conducted, over 70 percent of 10,000 plus respondents were not especially familiar with the term social media. Again, many people think they should know what the term means, but most are not sure. About the same percentage were not completely confident in defining the term Web 2.0 either. To be sure, the terms are closely related but not exactly synonymous. The reluctance to offer quick and confident definitions of these terms reflects the cautious and often confused discourse that many business people exhibit today when the topic of social media enters the conversation.

It seems as though people are living in a strange new ecosystem of innovative and highly disruptive applications. People tend to fear what they don’t understand. There is a lot to learn about this complex and rapidly evolving ecosystem – the social media ecosystem.

So Exactly What Is Social?

Social media refers to activities, practices and behaviors among communities of people who gather online to share information, knowledge and opinions using conversational media. Conversational media are web-based applications that make it possible to create easily transmit content in the form of words, pictures, videos and audios.

Most likely you belong to several communities and if you’ve ever used your computer or cell phone to read a blog, watch a YouTube video, listen to a podcast or send a text message to other members of your group or community, you’ve already ventured into the social media ecosystem.

What About Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is somewhat of a misnomer. It does not refer to a new and improved version of the World Wide Web, the information superhighway that’s become ubiquitous over the last decade or so. There really is no new phisical version of the internet. In other words, it’s not as thought the highway has been widened by four lanes. But, to continue the analogy, there are a lot more interesting vehicles traveling on the highway and some incredible places to stop along that highway, thanks to Web 2.0 technologies and the inventive people behind them.

Social media and Web 2.0 come together whenever one of these new technologies has as its primary goal to enable communities to form and interact with one another – to converse. This blog will not distinguish further between Web 2.0 and social media, because the terms are closely related and social media is the more important of the two terms. In fact, you’ll probably hear talk of Web 3.0 and Web 4.0 in the not-too-distant future. As such, it’s probably easier to think in terms of social media tools and applications

Lessons Learned at Starbucks

Starbucks, the Seattle-based company that has forever changed the way people look at a cup of coffee, to be paranoid. But they are, thanks to their employees and a blog-based web site that enables conversations among employees and customers. A quick visit to http://starbucksgossip.typepad.com/ reveals brief missives, musings and rants about company policies, practices, customer behaviour and just anything else having to do with the unique brand of coffee culture that Starbucks made famous. You won’t mistake this for a company newsletter.

You could read about the Starbucks barista from Minnesota who was fired for trying to unionise employees. Not to worry, though: he got his job back. Starbucks officials were quoted on the site as saying that the termination and reinstatement had nothing to do with the effort to unionise. It may, however, have had something to do with the coverage the event received on the Starbucks gossip blog.

This story demonstrates what employees and customers can do when they decide to huddle together for a little conversation about your company.

What did Starbucks learn from this experience?

They received a fast lesson on the first three rules of social media for business.

It’s unique to Starbucks or is it happening in other places, too? It’s happening everywhere. A quick click to www.glassdoor.com or www.jobschmob.com and you’ll see restless, wild or world-weary employees ranting about their bosses and the working conditions at their companies. What you say inside your company is never too far away from becoming a feature on someone’s blog.

The Two Sides of Social Media

Did you hear the story about the extremly paranoid guy who can no longer go to football games because he can’t stand the thought of the players talking about him in the huddle? In the new world of social media, this kind of paranoia may not be as extreme as this old joke would have you believe. That’s because pleople are talking about you. They are talking about your business, your brands and your products, too. What’s more, you can’t stop them. In fact, there are thousands of social media tools and more on the way – that enable conversation among the masses of humanity with internet access who may want to talk about you.

So be careful of what you do and of what you say and whom you say it to. Learn to live with the idea that it’s nearly impossible to hide from friends, employees, customers and others who are motivated to talk about you. People are going to talk and gossip and complain. This behavior is human nature and in the new world of social media, you have virtually no control.

Now let’s consider the bright side of social media. If you’ve got a great product or service in search of more customers, you want people talking about you. There’s nothing like word-of-mouth to take your business to the next level. If your company has won an industry award or enjoys a reputation as a great place to work, you want people talking about you. In other words, conversation about you, your business or your brand is not inherently a bad thing.

You may not have control over these conversations, but if you have a social media strategy and can get comfortable with some basic tools and tactics, you can use social media to your advantage. Really. You won’t have total control, but you can have considerable influence and influence is the foundation of successful relationships with customers, employees, vendors, family and friends.

You have just learned the first three rules of social media for business:

• Social media is all about enabling conversation
• You cannot control conversations, but you can influence them
• Influence is the bedrock upon which all economically viable relationships are built

To this list, you could perhaps add a fourth rule:

• Paranoia has a purpose

What is Social Media?

Social media is one of those phrases that many people think they should know because it combines two familiar words. You know what social means. After all, people are social beings, relying upon one’s abilities to interact with and influence others in order to survive. As a kid, your mother may have told you to”go outside and be social”. To be social is a desirable thing. The word connotes something good.

Now take the word media. In a traditional sense, media includes things such as newspapers, magazines and television. You might think of the NewTorkTimes, BusinessWeek or CNN, three media giants with a tremendous amount of influence in society. While the word media does conjure up images of news organizations, it also brings up impressions of how the news is delivered: via print, audio, video and photographs. Each is an important medium used to engage an audience by telling a compelling story or sharing important news.

Since the focus of this blog is business and not journalism, stop the train here for a moment, just long enough to point out that there has always been a powerful relationship between the traditional media and business. The media has always been particularly good at gathering people to read, watch, or listen to something of interest. Whether it is sports, finance, fashion or international politics, traditional media has something to offer you. Enter the people who advertise their products and services via commercials and print ads that accompany your favorite source of news. These advertisers use print, audio, video and photographs in an attempt to influence our behavior. They rely upon the traditional media to help them get closer to you and your money. It’s a symbiotic relationship that is generally accepted without question. You expect to get a sales pitch on every page and half a dozen commercial breaks during a broadcast.

Words, pictures, video and audio can inform and inspire, just as they can influence and incite. Humans like to know about the good, the bad and the ugly side of people, places and situations, as well as to share this information with others, often as quickly as possible.

In the past, neighbors, would meet on the corner and coworkers would meet at the water cooler to talk about and share what they read in the morning paper, heard on the evening news or learned from a friend of a friend at a party. Sometimes the conversation assumed life-and-death proportions and sometimes it was simply about a sale at a local store. But whatever it was, people listened and often responded.

Modern technology hasn’t obviated the need to meet on the corner or at the water cooler, but it has greatly increased the amount of information available to share. Most importantly, technology has allowed everyone to participate in creating and delivering information to family, friends and colleagues. Everyone has the ability to function as citizen journalists or market mavens. That is, you can capture a robbery at a local auto dealer on your camera-phone and send it to your local TV station within seconds. Or you can snap a few shots of the sporty new hybrid on the showroom floor and send it to your brother who’s trying to reduce his carbon footprint.

Thus, from a business perspective, social media is about enabling conversation. It is also about the ways that this conversation can be prompted, promoted and monetized. Definitions of social media and its cousin web2.0 appear later on this blog, but first we will take a look at the darker and brighter sides of social media.

Remaining Relevant, Competitive and Alive

Social media is a relatively new phrase in our all business vocabulary. It's probably at the same point in its evolution from jargon term to everyday word as the term e-commerce was in the mid-90s.

At the time many of the world's best business schools changed their curriculum and even their school names to reflect the impact they thought e-commerce was heaving on the world of business. There was a scramble to understand how to harness the power of e-commerce. You could hear the heartbeats of entrepreneurs as they ran toward this new frontier. There was discernable fear among the established brick-and-mortar folks. There were sages and cynics. It was an exciting time to be sure. What did all these people have in common? They wanted to make sure that their organizations remained relevant and competitive in a world where the rules were changing.

So here we are with social media and the same thing is happening!

There's a scramble to understand. But social media encompasses a much broader range of players, activities and rules than e-commerce ever did. Arguably, e-commerce is a component of social media. In a survey conducted nearly 2/3 of the people surveyed did not feel as thought they could offer an exact and meaningful definition of social media. Practically all of them felt that social media was going to impact their lives and the way we all do business.

It doesn't require an MBA or years of business experience to conclude that when people can't define something, but overwhelmingly believe it will impact their lives and the business environment around them, perspective becomes crucial to success.

So how do we aim to offer you perspective?

By organizing ready to go packages and a companion web site that will help you digest the basic facts, terminology and applications of social media. We will help you develop and implement a social media strategy that is customized for your organization.

Ready To Go "Packages"

Improving Profitability via Social Media

Compared to making money, saving money may not seem like fun. Saving money, however, is what successful businesses do when they strategies to maximize their profitability. If your business can implement ways to reduce your operating costs, you'll be able to keep more of every euro that comes in the cashier.

Can social media help you save money? Absolutely yes!

We instituted a company wiki to help geographically dispersed teams share insights and best practices. The wiki has become a training tool for new employees and contractors, but it also has functioned as a virtual water cooler where people meet and share ideas.

Has it saved the company money? You bet!

We were able to take on more clients with fewer human resources, our initial training time has decrease considerably and our employees feel a collaborative spirit that has positively impacted moral. It's great to see talented people collaborate to identify and solve problems that, when left unsolved, cost time and money.

Social media is impacting all of these functional groups and more within our organization.

Increasing Your Revenues via Social Media

The primary goal of any business is to make money. This generally means selling more goods or services to a growing customer base. Selling, advertising and promoting what your business does, is crucial to your success and you'll find hundreds of helpful hints, tactical tidbits and expert advice in these areas. Making money also depends on creating innovative products or offering compelling services that solve new problems or old problems in a new way. Developing, positioning and perfecting products and services requires something different from sales and advertising, it requires good marketing. Too often people confuse marketing with advertising and sales.

There's more to it than that . . .

Introduction to Social Media Marketing

I found this video from Perry Belcher he lives in Austin, TX but was born in Paducah Kentucky. He is a marketer and help people sell things. He sells things on the internet, he sells things by mail order and he sells stuff. Information products, physical products, things that solve problems for people that’s pretty much what he does. He has been becoming pretty well known as an expert or guru in this field of marketing. He knows a lot about direct marketing, he studied with some of the best people around in the business and he really enjoy what he does. He actually loves it. He wouldn’t really want to do anything else.

The Ultimate Guide To Social Media Marketing

The NELSHOND SOCIAL MEDIA BLOG will show you how to build or transform your business into a social media - enabled enterprise where customers, employees and prospects connect, collaborate and champion your products, your services and your way of doing business.

Social Media at it's best

If you want to grow your business, you need to stay connected to your stakeholders - whether you're a big corporation, a small business or even a non-profit. The Nelshond Social Media Blog will show you how to harness the collective wisdom and viral value of your stakeholders and stay ahead of your competition.

Prepare to Explore the Social Media Ecosystem

The debate about social media's impact on society and business will continue. Social media, like many tools and appliances in our lives, can be used for perpetrating both good and evil. However you choose to use these tools, we advocate on behalf of good, ethical behaviour, but you can already find plenty of examples of "the good, the bad and the ugly" within the social media ecosystem.

In this blog you'll learn more about the functions of social media and be able to explore applications associated with them in more detail. You're about to begin a fabulous journey. We begin with a closer look at the social media ecosystem and its components.

Join me inside . . .