Relationships First - Business Comes Later.

How do you make money from social media? This is a question which I get asked continually.

The short answer is you don’t…well at least not directly. Social media is all about being just that – social. As soon as you try to overtly use it to push products down people’s throats you will fail.

However, social media is still very powerful for businesses. Let me give you an example.

As many of you would be aware, I have been involved in the golf industry for many years. I have a network of golf related websites that sell online training, golf training aids etc – these are my “money” sites.

I use a “two-step” social media strategy to promote these sites i.e to send traffic which converts to real dollars.

Step 1

I recently set up a Twitter account specifically aimed at the golf niche. You can view it here at TwitRGolfers. At the time of writing I have 6238 followers on Twitter. This will grow over time, but now starting to achieve some critical mass.

Step 2

I then link my Twitter account to my own dedicated social media network in the golfing niche. I have used a product called Ning to set up my own network – a sort of Facebook for golfers which I am able to control myself.

Here is the link to that network – TwitRGolfers – for golfers who Twitter

When I socialize amongst golfers on Twitter, I frequently include links back to my own social media network. I then build up a community – or as marketing visionary, Seth Godin calls it a “Tribe”. It is early days, but my Tribe has become quite influential. I don’t market to them – I communicate with them. I build relationships with them. They are my customers and my potential joint venture partners. Many of them are very active marketers in their own right.

Because I now have a trusted relationship with my Network,  they do not feel threatened by my occasional product promotions etc. I put the good of the Tribe first. I do my best to provide value to them and treat them as real people – not faceless online prospects.

That is how business is conducted in the real world. When you meet someone in a social situation, you don’t immediately move into sales mode. You strike up a conversation, build up a relationship and lay the foundations for perhaps doing business later.

That is my view of one way to make money from social media. It can be applied to any business, or any niche.

I hope you found it useful.

Anyhow, Henry has now got a real job

“I’m not saying I beat the devil …but I drank his beer for nothing” – Kris Kristofferson

It is not for me to validate or otherwise the persistent rumor that Rupert Murdoch is in fact the devil incarnate. However, he is certainly accusing Google of drinking his beer for nothing.

It appears, according to Rupert, that every time Google index his content in their search engine, they are behaving like “content kleptomaniacs.”

“The aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement towards paid content, it will be the content creators – the people in this hall – who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph,” – Rupert Murdoch

Of course, you have to ask yourself the question: Why doesn’t Murdoch just request the Google spiders not to index his content in the first place? A few simple edits to any website  is all it takes. Any tech savvy 14 year old kid could do the job. Perhaps News Corp should hire one and that would solve the problem.

No. there must be something else going on. This whole thing doesn’t make any sense.

Others are falling over each other to get displayed prominently on Google. In fact, a whole “search engine optimization (SEO)” industry has being spawned to help companies do just that.

And here is Rupert saying that he wants none of this. He does not want searchers to find his content via Google. He is not interested in the 100.000 clicks per minute that Google can send his way. Very strange.

My instinct tells me that when something doesn’t make sense, you just have to walk around it and walk around it …and look at it from every angle, until it does make sense. It eventually will.

In the words of yet another rock icon.

“It all makes perfect sense expressed in dollars and cents…[and] pounds, shillings and pence” – Roger Waters, Pink Floyd

Yep, showing my age yet again. But that is another story.

Getting back to Rupert. It is clear that there is something else going on.

The man is not silly. He didn’t get to be  a billionaire – the “man who owns the news” by being dumb.

Admittedly, there are times when smart people do dumb things.

Or maybe he is just misinformed about how this whole search engine thing works and how he can use it to his advantage. This doesn’t seem likely. I am sure that he has a lot of very savvy advisors, tearing their hair out, hoping he will see the light. If anything, it maybe that he is just not listening.

Or could it be that he has teamed up with that other alleged force of evil – Microsoft?

Now if that were the case, it would be hard to pick, which was the devil and which was the one doing the deal. In the eyes of the masses, they both have pretty impressive track records when it comes to being the “evilist” empire of all. Again, not for me to judge who would win that little duel.

But, at least on the surface, a deal with Microsoft would make some sort of marginal sense.

News Corp attacks Google but quietly does some sort of backroom deal with Googles’ nemesis, Microsoft.

Yes, maybe there is the guts of a deal in that one.

But,  I am not buying it. At least not yet.

My money is on the theory that Rupert is just being plain bloody minded. I reckon he is just not listening to his advisors. The man is 78 for chrissakes – he has earned the right to just dig  in and be downright unreasonable.

He has done his shirt on MySpace. This whole Internet thing has been a total pain in the butt.  Now is the time to take a stand – he would be thinking to himself.

Pity the poor advisors – scurrying off to work out some sort of battle plan that will make him happy -  and still have some remote chance of working commercially.

“We’ve got a plan…a cunning plan…a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel” – Rowan Atkinson

Sooner or later a cunning plan will emerge – as if they had planned it all along.  They will have to come up with something – if for no other reason than to save face.

I think you will find that the devil is in the detail. I just don’t think that Rupert’s boys have worked out the detail yet.

What do you think?

Breaking News: Confirmation that a deal with the devil may be underway. According to the Financial Times – 22 Nov 2009

Microsoft and News Corp eye web pact

By Matthew Garrahan in Los Angeles, Richard Waters in San Francisco and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in New York

Published: November 22 2009 23:01 | Last updated: November 22 2009 23:01

Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company’s being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.

So there are you are. We were on the right track with today’s earlier post.

So what do you think now? Does Murdoch have any chance of making this thing fly?

Latest Update – Nov 23rd 2009

Trust Seth Godin to come up with the absolute best blogpost on the Murdoch/Microsoft farce

Rupert Murdoch has it backwards

“You don’t charge the search engines to send people to articles on your site, you pay them.

If you can’t make money from attention, you should do something else for a living. Charging money for attention gets you neither money nor attention”. – Seth Godin

OK. So you are not big on website stats.

If that is the case, I encourage you to focus on just one metric – BOUNCE RATE. This is the percentage of initial visitors who leave your site (or bounce away) without visiting any other pages.

This is costing me money!

In my view this is a much more useful metric than UNIQUE VISITORS.

This is particularly true if you are spending money on Google Adwords or other forms of advertising. The “bounce rate” metric will instantly tell you if your landing pages are working.

If prospects arrive at your website and they leave straight away, without taking your call to action, you will have a high bounce rate – maybe 80% or more. You need to fix this, otherwise you are probably wasting money.

A high bounce rate shows that your visitors are simply not engaging with your site. It is irrelevant to their needs.

Your goal should be to get your bounce rate down to 50% or better. Some experts would argue that you need to get your bounce rate down as low as 20% to 35%. However, this depends upon the type of site and type of traffic. Blogs, for instance generally have higher bounce rates than traditional websites.

When you make a change to your website you should always check the impact on your bounce rate.

Here is a great article on on bounce rate by Avinish Kaushik. If you want some further detail, I think you will find this article very useful.

Also, check out the above video for a great explanation of the importance of bounce rate.