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Tamara McCleary: How to Get Your Staff to Use Social for Your Business – and Do it Right

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There is no better marketing tool than your own employees. 

Not only are they your biggest fans (if not, you have probs!) but they’re also the most knowledgeable about your business — and hence, the most trustworthy.

But how do you convince them to use social media to promote your business AND do it right?

Tamara McClearly, one of the top social media influencers in the world, tells all on our next edition of Lately Live.

About Tamara McCleary
Tamara McCleary is CEO of Thulium, a global social media analytics and consulting agency, driving Smart Social through proprietary data analytics and award-winning storytelling. Tamara ranks in the top 1% in influence globally. Named the #1 most influential woman in MarTech by B2B Marketing, recognized by Entrepreneur Magazine as one of 10 Online Marketers to watch, and named a Top Digital Marketer by Brand 24 in 2019. Featured multiple times in Forbes for her pioneering influencer marketing strategies on social media for B2B and Enterprise, Tamara serves as a unique advisor to leading global technology companies such as SAP, Mercer, Marsh & McLennan Companies, Cisco, Dell, AWS, RSA Security, IBM and Verizon Enterprise.

In short: she’s a total badass. And we are THRILLED to have her as our guest.

DO. NOT. MISS. THIS.

Neal Schaffer: Social Strategies for Business – What Really Matters

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Is your social strategy stuck? Wondering what to prioritize? Confused about what REALLY matters to your bottom line?

Enter Neal Schaffer, the leading expert on helping businesses implement sales and marketing social media marketing strategies, influencer marketing campaigns and social selling initiatives that CHANGE. THE. GAME. 

Don’t you want to know how to maximize social media ROI, understand the impact of mobile and leverage employee advocacy to drive your brand?

Heck yes you do!

Neal Schaffer is a leader in helping educate executives and professionals on social media as well as in implementing successful social media strategies for businesses. CEO of the social media agency PDCA Social, social media educator at Rutgers University and the Irish Management Institute, social media keynote speaker who has spoken at hundreds of events on four continents, and author of three social media books, Neal is a true innovator and influencer in the growing world of social media for business.

Mike Gingerich: How to Leverage Social Media for Lead-Generation

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Amazingly, loads of businesses STILL think of social media as just another way to “get the word out,” when it’s actually a powerhouse for finding and converting leads. Case in point: we here at Lately switched to only organic social media and in six weeks, increased our leads by 200%. 

How? By being uncommon and adding value. Just like our next Lately Live guest, Mike Gingerich, recommends. Join us on Thursday, July 18 at 12 PM Eastern/AM West when Mike pops by to share the tips and tricks he uses when it comes to harnessing the true value of social media for your business. 

Mike has a proven track record of providing innovative strategy consulting for businesses. He is President of a web development & marketing agency, and the co-founder of a leading Facebook Page app service for lead capture. He is a noted Facebook Marketing speaker, a blogger forSocial Media Examiner, an international business consultant, an author, and all all-around great guy.

Todd Wilms: Championing Startups, One Founder at a Time

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Are you a visionary? A trailblazer? A founder? Or maybe you have dreams to become one and are just looking for the right encouragement? 

As a CMO-turned entrepreneur, Todd created FoundersPlace.co to champion startups. Hooray! He also podcasts, speaks, and consults with companies around the globe to help founders find their market, grow, and add value. Todd’s first book, Beyond Product, an entrepreneur’s marketing handbook, is a true layman’s guide with insights and best practices from over 70 founders… including Kately! 

Is Bad Writing Costing Your Business Big Bucks?

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Chances are, the answer is HECK YES.

In fact some experts say that bad writing costs businesses nearly $400 billion each year.

Why? Let’s do a quick run-through of the skills you need to run a successful business – project management, financial know-how, sales, marketing… You know, stuff folks get degrees in.

But writing? That’s something everybody can do, right? It’s one of those ‘soft’ skills people talk about. I mean… English majors? What a joke!

Erm, except that this joke’s on you :-).

Because good writing is faaaaaaaar from easy. But it’s also the one skill that every single employee needs to do well – not only to do his or her job well, but so that others can do theirs well, too.

It’s all about communication. And these days, communication mostly happens in the form of good ole writing (texting included).

Which means that whether you’re communicating internally to colleagues or externally to customers, being understood and getting people to do what you want them to do, is critical.

Then why are so many people so bad at writing?

The good news: you’re NOT alone. Companies spend more than $3.1 billion each year on remedial writing training for employees. Obviously, that’s also the very bad news.

Because that’s just the basics. Forget the crafty, purpose-driven, high-quality writing required for marketing and sales teams to be even remotely effective.

Whether it’s basic writing or advanced, overwhelmingly, folks just plain HATE doing it.

Partly because we’re all a wee bit lazy. Writing takes time. It takes work. You have to practice at it.

But also, writing is hard. English language grammar rules are exceedingly unclear, with so many exceptions that one wonders why there are any rules at all. And as technology has morphed the way we communicate and the way we write, the rules have evolved in practice but in a way that no one actually teaches.

Then there are emojis. Love them, admittedly. But let’s be frank… Thanks to emojis, the majority of our communications have been reduced to a one tap, pictorial “grunt,” which often boils down to:

  1. patronizing dismissal (thumbs-up = no thoughtful response required),
  2. disingenuous expression of affection (c’mon, who doesn’t “heart” everything?) or
  3. over exaggerated reaction (really, are you really crying with laughter?).

3 Ways to Improve Your Writing Right Now

1. Do Unto Others

For gosh sakes, have a little compassion. Remember that the person on the other end of that email or Slack thread is busy, like you. They don’t want to spend a long time reading and trying to figure out what you’re really saying.

Take, for example, meeting scheduling convos with team members in other time zones… Do them a favor:

WRITE THE TIME IN BOTH THEIR ZONE AND YOURS.

Save them the confusion of calculating (c’mon, we’re all crap at math, too). Even better, preempt their response and prevent additional back-and-forth. Chances are, they’ll accept. Like so:

Hey Jim! Would 12 PM Eastern/9 AM Pacific work for you? I’m sending along a calendar invite now. If that doesn’t work, let me know what does and thanks!

2. Don’t Bury the Lede

In school, we a were all taught to warm folks up with a long preamble, setting the stage for what would come next.

STOP THAT.

Because the more time peeps have to spend reading, the less time they’re spending doing work.

Get to the point faster by merciless editing. Start by writing as you normally would. Then, go back, read everything you just wrote and identify the extraneous. Hack the fluff. Get ruthless! You can do it.

#ProTip: Look for passive voice and rejigger to active, i.e., “The bone of the dog” becomes “the dog’s bone.”

See?

3. Write with Your Eyeballs

The same way we eat with our eyes, we read with our eyes; it’s a visual experience. Which means how what you write looks, matters.

Think spacing. Think, bold, italics, all caps. Think numbers, exclamation marks, question marks, percent signs, semicolons, colons, en and em dashes, parenthesis, ellipses – and yes, even emojis. Anything that stands out from the norm, that breaks up the text… that shizzle is your friend!

Make smart use of this tool kit. Because how you arrange your words can make what you’re trying to communicate more, erm, digestible.

For example, see all of the above :-).

Most importantly, loose the jargon. Acronyms, cliches, biz blab… BLEH. That stuff is a communication killer. Your readers will thank you.

Jon Ferrara: Putting the Social in Sales

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We were stoked to be joined for Lately LIVE by Nimble founder and one of our fave people, Jon Ferrara. For Nimble novices out there, it’s a super sales app that helps you manage customer relationships and grow sales – we use it right here at Lately. In fact, Jon says using Lately and Nimble together is just like peanut butter n jelly, yum 😊

Jon’s a pioneer in CRM tech, so we sat down and chatted about start-up life, Nimble and what’s important in life.

Helping others grow

Using your energy to grow others and help lift people around you is what it’s all about, according to Jon and we whole-heartedly agree.

When you’re present and truly connecting with others in business, there’s no better high.

Listening, learning and adding value doesn’t happen in an instant – committing to conversation and the long-haul with someone is how you can both grow. During our chat, Jon got his smartphone out and said that we feed more and more into our phones to generate validation when we’re starved of it elsewhere, but that shouldn’t be what life’s about.

Idea behind Nimble

99% of CRMs aren’t built for the user, it’s basically for the person that manages you, cos it mainly acts as a reporting tool. So, Nimble is more of a contact management tool to get you connecting with customers, which should be at the heart of CRM!

And that’s why Jon built Nimble. To help people connect and dream-build. Nimble’s philosophy is very much built on the power of people – heck yeah.

People buy when they trust people and that’s at the heart of the company. Nimble is fixing CRM.

Because Jon has “suffered” through being a salesperson, he knows what’s important. Most CRMs are a dead database and make you do the hard work anyway – Nimble helps you foster and build thousands of connections and gives you that nudge to reach out.

It unifies business apps into one system and gives you a 360 view of your contacts, wherever they are in your business.

“Money ain’t it”

Jon takes us back to the beginning. He worked in aerospace tech after graduated in computer science. He didn’t enjoy it much, so started working at a start-up and quickly moved to sales, where he’d cold-call IT professionals to sell software and would make detailed notes about customers and schedules along the way.

Jon spotted a gap in the market for a CRM and quit his job to start up his own company, Goldmine. Jon likens launching a business to jumping off a cliff and building an airplane on the way down! He was pretty good at it though and Goldmine got super successful and bought out when Jon was 39, but he’s passionate about the fact that money isn’t what fulfils you, it comes back to helping others to grow.

And being in the moment and present is a big part of being happier too. If you accept that life has highs and lows, you won’t always be “winning or losing” then you’ll be happier.

Social Selling

If people are gonna buy off you, they need to trust you. Jon always taught salespeople that if they want to know about someone, look at their walls. And in 2019, that means your digital footprint – someone should be able to see what you’re like and all about from a quick check online.

Social selling is really just selling. “When something becomes ubiquitous, it disappears”, so social selling will be a bit like the internet…it’s so big, it’s everywhere and loses its definition.

“Life is social and business is social” and everything’s still based on the promises we make and the experiences we deliver.Make sure you listen to the end of the talk as well and you might be in for a super cool surprise from Jon 😉