Even though my monthly AllBusiness.com article is targeted toward the franchise market, the rules apply to any business.

How can you use media relations to build your businesses’ brand and help increase sales? You don’t necessarily need to hire a publicist, but it is going to take some time and patience.

To read my six steps for using the power of media relations to grow your business, click here.

It’s a snowy day in Chicago…it finally looks like winter. I don’t mind the cold, as long as there is snow to accompany it. AND it’s time for the winter Olympics to begin, my favorite games. With that, let’s look at five of my favorite people on Twitter, along with reasons I think you, too, should follow them. Continue Reading »

Last January I had to make a really tough decision – keep people employed for a few more months and close the business or lay them off right then and save the business. Then (last year sucked), when we realized the business model was completely changing, I had to make another hard decision: Keep people who I really liked having around or let them go so we could hire experts in digital communication. Continue Reading »

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from my friend Arik Hanson. He had an idea that he thought would help out-of-work PR professionals network with the jobs that are becoming more readily available at both agencies and companies.

The big idea:

On Friday, February 19, from 10 am – 2 pm CT, PR bloggers, agency leaders, and PR professionals from across the country will donate their time and talents to help fellow PR pros connect with employers as part of the first-ever “Help a PR Pro Out” day. Continue Reading »

Last week we launched a Facebook fan page contest to create a new tagline for our newly designed Web site, set to launch late this week. We’ve had some great entries, but want to also open it to our blog readers.

Following are a couple of our favorites. But they are totally unprofessional, which is why we need your help.

* Arment Dietrich. Better Than Sex.

* Arment Dietrich. The Only Thing We Spin Is Our Bike.

The winner not only gains fame, but will have the tagline (with credit) on our home page. Heck, we might even have a t-shirt or mug to give the winner.

Before we changed the business model our tagline was “Service. Results. Spirit.” Boring, right?

But with the new Web site and our new business model (don’t know about the new business model? Read more here), we figure it’s a good time to get rid of the boring and introduce something really good.

So…I leave it in your hands. What tagline do you think best represents Arment Dietrich?

Yesterday I was friended on Facebook by someone I don’t know. We have a lot of mutual friends, so the friend request makes sense, but I don’t like to let people on my personal Facebook page who I don’t know in real life.

This happens often, especially because of all of the speaking that I do, and I always thank the person for the invite and suggest, instead, they become fans of Arment Dietrich, where I spend a lot of time engaging with clients, prospects, potential candidates, and our employees. I know some people are put off by this because it sounds like I’m promoting the company. And, I guess I am. But it’s less to promote the company and more to engage with people I don’t know in a place that feels safe to me.

But for some reason, yesterday’s request is bothering me. I think it’s because his  response was, “thanks anyway”, which makes me believe I left a bad taste in his mouth.

If you know me well, you know I want to be liked by everyone. And you also know I have trouble saying no. So when I perceive I’ve hurt someone’s feelings or left a bad taste in their mouth, I wonder how I could have handled the situation differently. At the same time, I am (in my wise old age) finally learning I need to have some boundaries.

Right now, my boundaries are as follows:

* On my personal Facebook page, I have to know you in real life (which is why, Dave Van de Walle, I don’t have very many friends there).

* On the Arment Dietrich Facebook fan page, I will talk to anyone there, even if it’s negative. This is where we’re building our culture and building relationships with people we might like to work with in the future (as well as people we work with now).

* On Twitter, as long as you don’t look like a spammer, I will follow you back and I will get to know you. My friend Nancy Lyons always teases me because I will talk to anyone on Twitter. It’s true. I will. I love Twitter and the relationships I’m able to develop using that tool.

* On LinkedIn, I will accept your connection IF you tell me how we know one another. The “I’d like to add you to my personal network” invite doesn’t work for me, unless I truly do know you. I never click “I don’t know this user,” but I do often just hit “archive” instead of “accept.”

What are your boundaries? How would you have handled the friend request I mention above?

*Photo courtesy of GeekSugar

Before the holidays, we spent some time here talking about blogs – how to create them,  how to attract readers, and how to optimize your content.

One thing, however, we didn’t discuss is how to promote and publicize your blog posts, after they’ve been published, in order to attract readers who don’t yet know about you.

This is the process I follow every time I hit publish:

1. Go to Delicious and create an account, if you don’t already have one.

Save your blog post, with the original link (not a shortened link), as a bookmark. I have our Delicious page set up to automatically feed my FriendFeed and Twitter accounts after it’s been posted. To learn how to do that, Scott Hepburn has an easy-to-follow blog post on the topic here. He even goes so far as to suggest you do this with Google Reader. I don’t do that because I want to have read the content I tweet before I actually distribute it.

It takes a couple of hours for Delicious to feed to FriendFeed and Twitter, so I do this late at night (after 9 p.m.) in order to hit the people up, and on Twitter, around midnight.

2. Go to su.pr and create an account, if you don’t already have one.

I love this URL shortener because it:

* Adds your content to StumbleUpon (which helps with SEO AND attracting new readers);

* Gives you times of each day that your tribe retweets you most often on Twitter (so you know when to post);

* Shows you all of the retweets each post has received and who did the retweeting; and

* Gives you pretty accurate traffic information you can then overlay with your Google analytics.

I don’t, however, like to use the timed feature in su.pr because it tends to act wonky at least once a week and it sometimes “loses” your links. So I go there only to shorten the link so I can use it in other places.

3. Go to SocialOomph and create an account, if you don’t already have one.

I like using this service to time my tweets (I do one an hour from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. CST) Mondays through Thursdays (I don’t tweet news on Fridays because of #FollowFriday).

Based on what su.pr tells me, I schedule our blog post (using the su.pr shortened link) to tweet three times the following day. For instance, I know on Tuesdays, 9 a.m., noon, and 3 p.m., are the times I’m retweeted the most. So I set up our blog post to be tweeted at those times every Tuesday.

For every other tweet during the day, I set up news, articles, and blogs I read that support my thinking, but aren’t self-serving (i.e. not information coming from Arment Dietrich).

Keep in mind that you can not use the same copy for the multiple scheduled tweets. They must be different copy or Twitter will consider it spam.

So this is what my scheduled tweets looked like yesterday:

4. Go to Facebook and, using the original blog link (not the shortened one), I let our fans know what they can read about on the blog.

5. Go to LinkedIn and, again, using the original blog link, update my status to drive my connections to the post.

6. Answer all comments you get on your blog. I typically answer on the blog, but also send an email to the commenter thanking them. This not only makes people feel good, but sometimes creates an offline conversation that builds my relationship with that person.

Rinse and repeat each day. I know this sounds like a lot, but I timed it when I wrote this post. It took me eight minutes.

Are there things you do to publicize your blog posts that are not listed here?

Alright. I know this isn’t a typical blog post for me. But I need some help. And I thought, “Who better to ask than the blog readers?”

I was in Atlanta last week. I rented a nice little Nissan Altima. It was a hybrid car. I liked it. But I’m having a problem with the car keys and I can’t get past it.

The car doesn’t have a place for you to hang your keys. You tap the on/off button with the tip of the key, put your foot on the brake, and push the button. The car starts. And you throw your keys in the cupholder.

First time I thought, “Okay. I can deal with this. If I have to use the keys to turn off the car, I won’t leave them in the cupholder.”

WRONG!

You don’t have to tap the button to turn off the car. You just push the button and off it goes! Yes, you do have to have the keys in order to lock the doors, but most human beings (at some point) will get out of the car in a hurry and rush off without realizing they don’t have their keys and didn’t lock their door.

Are automakers trying to get us to change our habits, in an effort to become more secure? Or am I totally missing the point?

I wrote this for a client today and thought it would be valuable for you.

The do’s and don’ts of social media, according to Gini Dietrich.

DO

* Target your market to follow the right people.

* Offer actionable advice.

* Use your time wisely.

* Have an offer and call to action.

* Define your goals.

* Track results.

* Be respectful.

* Submit original content.

* Participate actively.

* Be open-minded about other points of view.

* Be honest.

* Be authentic.

* Be transparent.

* Be human.

* Be consistent.

* Use pictures, videos, and music.

* Scratch other people’s backs.

* Build a community.

* Listen!

DON’T

* Be too sales-y.

* Be too anxious.

* Be afraid to offer information, knowledge, and wisdom.

* Be self-serving.

* Post news releases.

* Shy away from connecting and engaging.

* Get your feelings hurt when people unfollow you.

* Spam.

* Stalk people.

* Accept friend requests from people you don’t know or barely know.

* Be negative.

* Engage in dubious behavior.

* Try to maintain more than one profile for your brand (either personal or company).

What advice do you give when talking about the social media do’s and don’ts?

Yesterday I spoke to the WIN Home Inspection franchisees at their annual conference. As is typical, I had a few people tell me before the session began that social media is for their kids and they just don’t get it. One partner even told me that I had better have enough energy to keep him awake because he was really tired and, besides, he has kids at home that do this Facebook thing so he doesn’t see the need for his business.

You know comments like that just get me fired up and I picked on him a good bit during the workshop. I love taking the cynicism and fear of a room and turning it into motivation and excitement. And that’s precisely what happened.

But that’s not the point of this post. The point is that some great ideas came out of our three hour workshop and I want to relay them to you here.

They were sitting at tables of 10 so, after the intro on social media, I had them work to come up with terms they could use for Google alerts.

I know, I know. Everyone has Google alerts, right? Um. No. They don’t. It’s step one in listening, which is the foundation to a great social media program, so we always start there…in understanding why they’re important and what to search in order to make yourself most efficient at listening to the online chatter.

Some of their ideas included:

1. Their name.
2. The company name plus the city in which they live.
3. Top producers in their city (I especially love this one because they work with real estate agents and this is a great way to target new prospects).
4. Local competitors.
5. The company name plus the word “sucks” (I’m reading “What Would Google Do” and Jeff Jarvis suggests all of us should be searching for our companies with the word “sucks” in it; i.e. Arment Dietrich sucks. No, there’s nothing in that search, but believe me, it’s an alert I have set up!).
6. Services they offer.
7. Local organizations they either currently support or want to support.
8. The names of the people at their competitor’s offices, not just the company names.
9. How-to or advice on keeping your home up-to-par so it’s ready for an inspection when you sell it.
10. Products that typically fail in homes.
11. Companies that sell products that typically fail in homes.
12. Industry organizations.
13. State regulations around home inspections.

Though some of these ideas are specific to their industry, they can be tailored to use for any company.

Be honest. Do you have Google alerts set up? Are they this detailed? What would you add to the list?