The marketers in question are the ones who say a person is defined by their shape; they should aspire to look like a stick insect in order to look and feel good.

But if you take a moment to look around; you will notice that everything that is aesthetically pleasing to your eye has curves, some examples are, the car you drive, famous architecture like the Sydney opera house or even the water and mineral bottles you use have curved surfaces. The ideas for the designs are taken from nature, for example coca cola bottles are in the shape of woman’s figure.

The reason for the curves is very simple; it is aesthetically pleasing to the eye and what is pleasing to the eye will be bought.

The marketers in question include but are not limited to the companies who market clothes, diet products, makeup and pharmaceutical companies, who take advantage of what today’s society are told they need in order to fit in.

The following is how the characters in the book fit into today’s world;

The emperor is the customer who believes he must have this magnificent new suit in order to be respected by his subjects.

The chamberlain, guards and subjects are the friends and colleagues, who don’t want to rock the boat by telling emperor what they really think.

The little boy stands for the consumers who are not taken in by marketer’s messages.

The marketers in the emperor’s new suit are the two scoundrels who persuaded the emperor that they had perfected a weave that was so magnificent it was invisible to anyone who is too stupid and incompetent to appreciate its quality.

The scoundrels had created a need through the fear of being considered stupid or incompetent, this of course didn’t matter to the little boy in the story, he was too young to care what other people thought of him and did what all young people do, and they say what they see. In this story the boy stood up and shouted for all to hear, “the emperor has no clothes on,” it was at that moment that the adults realised they had been taken in by a couple of hoodlums.

How many marketers use the same techniques today?

Dove recently became that little boy in their advertising campaign, as can be seen in the picture above; they used real people as models, a rarity in today’s world.

• Real marketing should be about satisfying needs and not about creating imaginary fears. The world will be a far better place to live when we have a lot more little boys, who are prepared to stand up and speak the truth regardless of what society thinks.

It is better to speak with one genuine person who needs your product or service, than 100,000 people who are prepared to listen; and that is my position when it comes to buying social media followers, you can purchase 100,000 followers but at what cost to your wallet and reputation.

It does not matter whether it is likes on Facebook or followers on Twitter, I cannot see any advantage to be gained for your business by purchasing a crowd.

But before I reached this position, I did look at the possible advantages of buying social media followers such as;

• It is a cheap way of increasing the number of people following you on social media platforms.
• On first impressions, you would appear to be very popular.
• More people will follow your profile due to your apparent popularity.

Those are the only three possible advantages I could identify; now I’m going to outline some the possible disadvantages of buying followers.

1. The followers you have bought might have no interest in you or your business.
2. The followers could be profiles set up by a computer better known as bots.
3. The followers you paid for will not be interacting with your profile, so that will make your engagement statistics look bad from an search engine optimization view point.
4. The content you create will be analysed to determine why you are so popular.For example, I visited a Facebook business page recently and the number of people talking about the page was impressive in comparison to the number of people who had liked the page. I decided to have a look a bit deeper at the content being posted and it didn’t seem good enough to warrant the attention it was getting, I clicked into the shares icon to see who was sharing the information and found that the same people were sharing every single post.
5.  Facebook and Twitter are constantly working on eliminating fake accounts.
6.  Your reputation will suffer if you are identified as a cheat.
7.  The genuine followers you have will unfollow or unlike you.
8.  Every time you look at your social media profile you will see yourself as a cheat.

As you can see, it was an awful lot easier to identify reasons for not buying social media followers, as opposed to reasons for buying social media followers.

Unless you are Justin Bieber, where if he could sneeze online, he would get thousands of likes, the content and the number of posts you share will determine the number of people who follow you; if the ratio and the quality of the content do not match the number of followers, everybody will know the truth about you.

*Growth happens because of quality not because of quantity.

*The only goal of your social media marketing should be to create a positive awareness for your businesses brand.
Start with the customers you already have and work outwards, building a meaningful platform where you can share your messages with people who have chosen to listen to you.

Please share this post with your social media friends.

• Your customers will only share information that reflects and enhances their public persona and personalities.

Time is also an issue that business owners will have to take into consideration, people are pressing the like button on more Facebook business pages every day, so that means it will be increasingly difficult to get their attention because of the increased number of posts flowing through their Facebook timeline.

• So how are we as business owners overcome this dilemma, the answer is pictures, they are the most liked and talked about posts on Facebook.

The following is a collection of the pictures I have posted on my own Facebook business page that created the most engagement.

                                  Being positive works for most businesses.

Value your customer’s time as if it was your own.

            Spreading happiness is always good for business

          Motivation is a good trait to be associated with your business.

Every brand should have a sense of humour.

                                           Helpful hints are appreciated.

                                                Laughter is universal

                                                            Believe in your destiny.

I hope you enjoyed looking at the pictures, please share them with your social media friends so that they can enjoy them too.

If you would like to see more of my work please visit and like my Facebook page.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post.

                                                                     Great advice

Great advice never goes out of date and what’s more, the best advice will be as relevant to the business world as it is on a personal level. I have listed below how I have interpreted Hemingway’s advice from a business’s point of view.

1. Listen to customers and learn from their answers.
2. Hesitate before responding to that e-mail.
3. Investing in stocking shelves with products nobody needs will not pay the bills.
4. Empathise before you criticise.
5. Focus on your goals but be flexible in how to reach your goals.
6. As long as air circulates around your body; never give up.

Good advice is all around us if we take the time to notice the information, and there is only one thing that should be done with good advice; yes it should be shared so everybody can benefit from it.

Hindsight would be a wonderful gift.

In the business world, the rear-view mirror is always clearer than the windshield. ~Warren Buffet.

The gift of hindsight to is not ours to give, so we will just have to do as much research as possible before making decisions regarding the future.

We will now look at what happens when a business owner uses a personal Facebook page for business purposes.

• The business owner sends out posts and the only way they know if anybody has read or even seen the post is if they press the like button on the post in question. The business owner may have thousands of friends on Facebook but, if the like button is only pressed by 15 to 20 people, as far as they know, they are the only people who have seen the post.
• You have spent an hour preparing and sending a post on Facebook and the only people who have liked the post are not even your customers, they are your personal friends.
• You have posted on Facebook and nobody has responded, was it not seen?
• The investment of your time has not paid off this time, I suppose you can always try again, but as Albert Einstein put it, the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.
• Promoting your business on your own personal Facebook page is not going to give you the accurate feedback a business needs in order to make the correct decisions for future promotional work.
• You can easily add up to five thousand friends on a personal Facebook page, but you will have no way of knowing, if or when they are seeing any of the messages you send.

There does not appear to be any good reasons for doing business from your personal Facebook page especially when it is free to set up a Facebook business page when you set it up yourself.

And there is one very good reason for setting up a business Facebook page, it’s called the insights page and I will explain all the benefits of this page next time.

*When you have the necessary information, your decisions will be easier to make.

Any business that is involved with social media marketing needs to realise this valuable piece of information.

“You cannot sell on Social Media.”

I could write a lengthy article to explain what I have stated above, but I believe in this quote, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” ~ Arthur Brisbane. In this case I’m going to show you the equivalent of a small book.

We build a complete picture of a brand by adding up all the information that is shared by the brand; the total is often referred to as brand value.

Let’s look at the pictures below and see if the right message is being projected in order to achieve a positive brand.

A sense of humour is important.

I believe that all brands should have a sense of humour, just look at Coca Cola, their messages always contain the fun element that they wish to be associated with their brand.

Positive.

When you promote positive messages, the positiveness will be associated with your brand.

Respect

Your word is your bond, and a respectful one is always appreciated.

Motivation

Motivation is a great attribute to be associated with any brand.

Success & Maturity

Sharing successful quotes and stories will always be seen to be positive.

Gratitude.

Manners is the most important attribute to be associated with your brand, to this day I do not know anybody who likes people who cannot say please and thank you.

*When your customers see your brand containing all of the above attributes, they will be loyal to your brand.

We learn by association, so always associate great messages with your business.

Social Media

“What you get for nothing is exactly what you will think of it, nothing.” ~Alison Shark. And that is the biggest problem facing social media marketers today.

The social media platforms are free; a lot of small to medium enterprise owners have the necessary time to be social on these sites, and these business owners have acquired enough knowledge to be able to post a photograph or share somebody else’s post on Facebook, or write a tweet on Twitter.

Well???

But as stated in the opening line, what is free is often taken for granted. How many Facebook business pages have you visited where their timeline is like that of someone who visits from another planet every now and again to say hello, or a Twitter profile that is like a deserted western town with the tumble weeds blowing down the main street as it has been so long since they tweeted anything.

This behaviour reflects on the business, and not in a good way; the business owner would be better off closing down the social media sites altogether rather than let them sit idle for everybody else to see.

For business owners who wish to continue using social media platforms to interact with their clients and customers, they need to find answers to the following questions; does our social media activity reflect our brand values, are we targeting the right people, and do we know enough about the social media platforms to use them efficiently and effectively?

Answering these questions is where a social media marketer’s true value is to be found, they spend vast amounts of time analysing social media sites, identifying what works for different brands; and they understand how to make the most efficient and effective use of each social media platform, which allows them to targeting the right customer with the right message.

It pays to have quality on your side.

Every business owner has the capacity to be social on social media platforms; so the question remains, why pay somebody to do something that is free? And the answer is;

*Social media is about socialising while social media marketing is about making money through socialisation.

That is the Question.

What is Social Media? Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks. ~ Andreas Kaplan.

What is Social media Marketing? Social media marketing refers to the process of creating awareness and funneling prospects to company websites through social media sites. ~Alison Shark

Time, knowledge and a social media platform is all you need to put together an effective social media marketing campaign, isn’t it?

Now, can you guess which of these is free? They are all free you say, and you may be right, but let’s take a closer look at each of them.

Social Media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress and Tumbler are all examples of social media platforms, and yes you can set up a profile on each of these social media sites without paying one Red cent of actual currency,  you could definitely say, they are free for everybody to use.

Time: Your time is your own, isn’t it? The free time you have, when you are not in your place of business is yours. So you can say that your time is free also.

Knowledge: You have accumulated a lot of knowledge about marketing through running your own business; you know how to create an advertisement that will get your client or prospect’s attention. You already have the marketing knowledge you need, so you can say that is free as well.

Have we determined that Social Media Marketing is Free? I believe the answer to this question is no, and in my next blog I will outline why.

I would love to hear your opinion? please leave a comment.

Kind regards,

Brendan Dunne.

The hands on my watch never stop, they continue on their never-ending journey into time yet to pass; and yet there are some people in the business world who believe that time has stopped for them, they believe that every interaction they have with their customers and clients regardless of the location has to be sales orientated. When they cannot see direct results from their marketing activities, they believe that particular marketing activity should stop.

They are of course correct but, business owners need to look at the big picture especially when dealing with social media platforms; not all sales activities begin and end on the same day or in the same place for that matter.

Social media platforms are the equivalent of networking events, they just take place over-time on the internet instead of in a hotel or The Waterford Crystal visitor centre, where I had the privilege of attending a networking event last evening.

Let’s look at a couple of examples of using social media, the first example is going to be from a business that wants to use social media platforms to be social and the second is going to show a business that wants to use social media platforms to sell. They are taken a little out of context but, the message is clear.

 Using Social Media to be social

Jim looks happy.

Jim walked up to where a girl was standing in a public house and said “Hello, how are you?” The girl replied, “I’m feeling great, thank you for asking, and how are you?” The conversation continued and Jim found out the girl’s name was Jill; he also found out that they had a great deal of interests in common. At the end of the night, Jim asked Jill if she would like to meet again?” to which she replied, yes; so they agreed to exchange telephone numbers and stay in touch. After meeting socially on a number of occasions, Jim decided to offer Jill a lift home? To which Jill replied, yes please, so they got into Jim’s car and headed off down the road.

 Using Social Media to sell

Jim walks into a public house and notices there are a number of women who appear to be on their own. Jim walks up to the first women and says, “I want you to be the mother of my children.” The woman looked at Jim as if he had two heads, and then proceeded to call over the Bouncer to have Jim evicted from the premises.

• Jim did well when he acted appropriately, he got his sale but, when Jim acted in an inappropriate manner, all he received was his marching orders.

Why use Social Media

Communication has the key to Success.

There is always the right time and the right place to interact with your customers and clients, and when it is done correctly, social media platforms will provide your business owners with the following:

• Connection to customers and clients
• Building your brand
• Brand loyalty
• Promotion
• Building credibility within your industry.
• Keeping an eye on the competition
• Inviting customers and clients to visit your other online sites, where sales can take place.

Social media platforms are a great way for business’s to interact socially with their clients and customers. The question every business owner needs to ask before they stop using social media marketing is;

* If I don’t inform all those people who are using social media platforms of where my business is and what we provide? Who will? 

* Sales will be generated as a result of using Social Media, not because of using Social Media.

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