Outside Advice for your Small Business and Social Media Tips

Greetings folks and welcome to the small business show@businessshow.co episode number 37 from Wednesday, October 21, 1985. No, 2015. It's not back to the Future day here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.

That's awesome. Hey, Dave. This is Shannon Jean coming from Lafayette, California.

It's a pleasure to meet you, Shannon.

Yeah, that's good. I was so thrown off by the Back to the Future comments. Yeah, that's great.

You know, I didn't mean to say 1985, but I've been seeing it all day that it rolled off the tongue and I figured I'd go with it.

So is today the day, Was it yesterday or something?

No, today's the day into which they, they there. It was the future into which they went.

So it's nice. I'm, I'm very happy to report that I have actually driven the, the DeLorean time machine car and.

That's right, you drove it into a Mac World Expo.

Yeah, we had it in our booth one year for, for Tech Restore. And I actually posted on Facebook today a picture of my, my mom sitting in the car. I said, hey, you know, show me how many pictures of your mom in the the time machine.

So yeah, I think you win that particular one.

Yeah, yeah, I was trying to. Any chance I can get to one of people, I can take that, but it's good. Yeah, I've been seeing all those references today as well, so.

Yep, yep.

Yeah, it's so today's first time in a while we haven't had a guest, an interview so we get to talk for a while. So I don't know if that's good or bad, but I'm looking forward to it.

You and I haven't really had a chat like this in, in a month. And yes, you know, it's part of why we do this show.

That's true. That is true. That was one of the impetuses of this, if that's a word of getting together to do it. So I think it's great.

Yeah.

And you know, talking about communication, we've had some great interviews the last month and some excellent quotes and comments that you could tell have had a deep impact on these business owners. And if, you know, like some of the, you know, don't make fear based decisions. I remember really strong was one of them, you know, and I think we're talking about communicating and together and everything. And lately. So one of my companies has been going through a bit of a struggle and I find myself or I Found myself kind of in this one spot where I was just kind of revolving everything in my head, not listening to all this great advice that we've been getting and finally opened up and started communicating and talking about some of the issues that this business is facing and getting another perspective. And I just want to take a few minutes to reiterate the importance of getting that someone from the outside or a partner or a spouse or anybody, even if it's just sharing it with us on the small business show, and we can be glad to keep it anonymous. But having someone to try to lend a different perspective to what's going on, it really opened up this problem that, that, you know, this business is facing and allowed me to look at it from a totally different perspective that I believe is going to solve the issues. And I think part of it is as a small business owner, one of the biggest challenges I've always had is my emotional connection to the people that work for me. Yes, it is a wonderful, wonderful thing 90% of the time. But when you have to make, and it's not maybe not fear based, but emotional or not to make emotional based decisions, sometimes you really have to, or often, you know, making these decisions solely based on numbers.

Yeah, you have. Right. You have to make good business decisions. And emotions can get in the way of that.

That's right. And, and you're thi. And I found myself doing that. I found myself going, oh, you know, I do this, I can do that. And not until I really opened up and started talking to someone else and presenting all these, you know, things that on was I able to come. Come full circle. So I just want to put it out there that, you know, if you don't have anyone, you know, if you're going through stuff with your, your business, whether it's you just getting started or been doing it for years, I guarantee there's thousands of people listening to this show that have gone through the same thing or would love to chime in with their perspective and, and we would love to share, you know, that your stories, whether it's a great success or something that you're struggling with. And again, we'll anonymize it and it would, it would benefit everybody. We had another interviewer on that, you know, again made a comment of, you know, we're not alone. There's times in your business when everybody's, you know, concerned or scared I think might have been the term that he used. And you know, that's totally true. And when you get a chance to talk about it, and get it out there. And I, and I, I find myself not wanting to talk about it because I always think, well, that I'm, you know, this is a failure.

It's a weakness of mine. Right.

So we. Sets of weakness. And really, you got to have the right sounding board. You want that person that's going to go, oh, man, let me, let me look at this thing. And have you tried this? Have you tried that? And you want a positive, you know, some positive feedback on different ways that you can get through these issues that you might be going through.

Yeah, it's. It. Well, so there's a couple of things here. Positive or negative, it's good to get that feedback. Right. And it's funny, I went through something similar with my brother today. He and I don't work together, and I was talking to him about a thing I'm dealing with, and there's two, there's two facets to bringing in or just consulting with someone. I mean, it's almost like therapy. Right. You know, it's. It. One part is you're explaining you've lived with whatever this issue is. You've lived with it in your own head for a long time, but the process of getting it out and articulating it for someone else often helps you answer those questions anyway. Right. Even if the other person doesn't say a darn thing.

That's a, that's a very good point. Yeah.

Right. Because it, you know, you see it in a very different way when you try to present this to somebody. And often it can be frustrating. You're like, wait, I don't know what I'm saying. You know, let me back up a little bit. I'm not saying that. Right. You know, that kind of thing can happen, so you need sort of the freedom to just speak. You need someone that's not going to, you know, it's not going to be overly judgmental in the wrong way. That. But, yes, but at the same time, when you're finished speaking, it is very important to stop what you're doing and listen, truly listen to what this other person's going to say because chances are they're not going to just tell you what you've been thinking the whole time. Right? Yeah, but they might. I mean, you, you know, if you, if it's that you need to let somebody go, which was not the issue I was talking about with somebody today. So nobody that's working for me needs to work.

Me neither. Yeah, me neither.

But, but, you know, sometimes, you know, you say, I think I Let this person go and you list out all the reasons and the, and the person to whom you're confiding this will say, it sounds like you know the answer. Right. But other times they're, they're going to tell. And this happened to me today with my brother. He was telling me stuff that I hadn't even considered because he has a whole different perspective, and some of it's not easy to hear. And the, the initial kind of the gut reaction, at least for me, is to just interrupt him and say, well, that's not what I meant. And I worked very hard and I think I was successful at it. Tempering that and actually continuing to listen, you know, like, okay, just. Yep. I'm gonna ignore my thoughts right now. I'm just gonna let this other information pour in. Yes, it's. I'm, I'm. I'm physically resistant to it because it's not my ideas, but that's sort of the point of talking to somebody else, or at least half the point of talking to somebody else.

Yeah. And that brings up another good issue. And part of the reason I think that I find myself in this position is because I'm such an optimist that often. I wouldn't say often, but sometimes that optimism can really over shadow some areas that you need to address.

Yep.

And I'm such a positive person, and it's had such a great impact on my life personally, professionally. But I also been known to just like, oh, no, no, you know, that we'll get that turned around. Things will pick up. This, this business unit will do better. This is the reason, and kind of rationalize things a bit. And relying on my optimism too much, like it's going to just generate something out of the ether that's going to solve this problem. And, you know, there's a fine line, I guess, between your, your optimistic outlook and your positive, you know, view on things and not having that turned into a negative.

That's right. Yeah, you're right. You need that optimism. Otherwise, I mean, you just crater your business because you won't have the drive to do that next thing. You won't believe in yourself if you don't have that optimism. But, yeah, you need, you know, it's, I mean, really what we're talking about here is an informal board of directors type of scenario. Right. These people might not have a vested interest in the business itself. If it's a friend or a family member, they have a vested interest in perhaps seeing you happier. So.

Yeah, right.

You know, but, but otherwise it's I mean, it. You're essentially creating a, you know, a board of directors kind of things, people you can talk to that are going to give you honest feedback, and you're going to take the honest feedback. You're not necessarily going to do everything with it. In fact, when I got to the end of the conversation with my. My brother, he said, I've given you a lot of advice here. Use it to paint the walls that need paint, but don't necessarily do the whole room.

Oh, I like that. That's pretty good. I know I'm gonna use that.

Oh, yeah, it was, but it was. I mean, it, you know, it was a really interesting thing. He sort of identified that he'd given me like, all of this massive advice, and it's like, wait a minute. If. If this guy does everything I just told him to do, it'll probably ruin everything. Sure. You know.

Yeah.

Yeah. It was very. It was very astute of him, I thought. Yeah. Yeah.

That is awesome. Yeah. So I just want to. Again, I just want to mention. I want to talk about it. You know, we. For whatever it's. It's worth just discussing it. You know, we certainly don't portend to have expertise in everything or. But just sharing with your business peers. And we'd like to consider ourselves, you know, to be your. Your peers. You know, send an email to feedbackusinessshow.co. there's no M on the end of that. We're too cool for that. So it's business.

Well, we're too efficient for that, Shannon.

We save the M. I like that. That's great. That's great. Yeah, so that's good. So anyway, that's. That's kind of our start. And then we. We thought we'd talk a little bit about social media today. Right.

I like social media. Yeah. I know it's frustrating sometimes, but. Yes, but, you know, that's right.

Yeah. So I wanted to get us started with asking. We have. Because we have a big difference in the way we handle social media. One is at least, I think, and you can tell me whether I'm incor. Sure. You tend to be mix your personal and professional social media much more than I do. I do. Okay, so talk about that for a minute.

Yeah.

The pros and cons, that kind of thing.

Well, you know, I think it's certainly intentional now, and I'm aware of it now. Initially, though, it was just sort of a natural thing, and I think it grew out of years and years ago. I had multiple email addresses for everything, and I Still, actually, that, that, that's still the case. I have a zillion different email addresses, but I actually had like a personal email account that went into a different inbox than my business email accounts. And I really compartmentalized everything and I liked it from a, you know, OCD efficiency kind of, you know, compartmentalized thing. But then I kind of realized that I was driving myself crazy with it because even if it was 11 o' clock at night, I was still checking just as much as my, I was checking my personal email. I would check my work email to make sure there wasn't stuff going on. And I finally realized, wait a minute, I'm one person. I actually only need one inbox, you know, and, and I think when I got started getting involved in social media and you know, Twitter happened and Facebook happened and all of that stuff, I just, that same thinking kind of translated. There was like, I'm just one person and I do all of these different things. And really there was no easy way for me, especially with Twitter, I think. I guess Twitter happened before Facebook for us. Right. It was happening on college campuses. I think it was the reverse. But Facebook was not public, so I had, there was no easy way for me to say, well, I'm going to have, you know, my, my business related tweets here and my personal related tweets there and my music related tweets over here. It's like I'm just going to be Dave. And, and I found that that served me really well because presented people with this honest picture of who I am now. Do I tweet about and post and Facebook post and blog about everything that's going on in my life? No. It might seem like I do, but I don't. You know, there are some things that I keep private. You know, if I'm having an argument with my wife. Right. You know, I mean, but seriously, I'm not going to post about it. Just like if I'm having an argument with my, one of my business partners, I'm not going to post about it. In fact, that one show that we did over the summer where I was having an issue with a contract thing and you and I talked about it, that was a real departure for me, you know, to take kind of dirty laundry ish and make it public. That actually turned out to be a really good thing for me. Yeah. Thank you for that, by the way.

Yeah, that was great. Oh, it was great. It was a good show.

Yeah. But, but other, I mean, but that's, that's, you know, there are these exceptions to the rule? But for the most part, not everything is public, you know, and, But I, But I do mix them, and I. It seems to work. I mean, it's interesting. I was, Last week, I was down with playing some music with some friends that I've. I've known for decades. And, you know, one of my favorite things about being a musician is that I wind up interacting with people from very different demographics. Right. You know, these are folks that, were it not for our shared interest in playing music together, we probably never would have even met, let alone enjoyed each other's company and all that stuff. Right.

Right.

And one of them said to me, he's like, yeah, you know, he's like. And we're friends on Facebook, and he's like, that tech stuff you post, he's like, man, that is so far over my head. He's like, I don't even really care about it. And he didn't say it in a negative way. He's just like, it's just totally out of my. My ballpark. And he was just acknowledging that, you know, we each have these very separate parts of our lives, but. But they're who. It's what makes us who we are. And so. Yeah, I, I. Yes, a very long way to answer your question.

No, it's good. Yeah, it's. It's a lot of good information, and I think that it's. It's a different way to look at it, I guess. But your brand is. Is really me. You. I mean, yeah, you have these different entities, but. And, and you've been doing that for a long, long time. Where? I think from where I started, when I came from, the brand wasn't me. It was the business. Right. Or the, you know, the website or the show or whatever it is. And we. We came from there. But I, I would argue that your method is, even for, you know, straight business owners, that the brand is the business. Your method is far more effective on social media than if you just try to present it from a. From a business perspective. And I would say, I mean, from my experience in the newsletters and email newsletters used to be just a huge traffic driver for us, and it's kind of dropped off as everybody's gotten overwhelmed with that and moved to move to social. Sure. But I used to do a very similar thing, and maybe it was a little more calculated. Well, maybe not calculated, but controlled, where, you know, you would share. It was almost like there was a monologue.

Yeah.

And you would talk about what was going on in my Life, whether it was on a trip I was on or something with my kids. And you know, I'm one of the best, you know, results. Most highly popular news, I'm just used to go out like 8 or 10,000 people was when I talked about my 3 year old kid that was, he wouldn't stop eating his boogers, you know, and it was just one of those. That was the first line.

Yeah.

And, and, and it was like the response we got was just hilarious, you know.

And so that person, it humanizes you.

Correct?

Yeah, that's right. And that, that's sort of. Yeah, that, that's sort of the whole point of it for me is, is it's, I, it, it's okay that the people that listen to my podcast, you know, my Mac Geek Gab podcast, don't have to be interested in small business. They don't also don't have to be interested in the rock band Rush. But occasionally I'm going to mention these other things because they interest me. Not going to make the show about it. Just like I'm not making this show about, you know, answering people's tech questions on Mackey Keb. But I'm okay talking about it because now somebody will say, oh, that doesn't interest me, but it interests him. And it, you know, it rounds me out.

That's right. Yeah, it rounds you out. And I would say that people are interested in what's going on in your life, whether it's related to one of those things or not. At least a certain part of the population, I would say a large one likes that. To your point, you know, that rounded out view of, oh, this is, you know, the guy I listened to for this or I, you know, do this and now he's at this Rush concert or he's on this trip. And so from us, from a small business perspective, if you can, or if you're comfortable, I would say that is the way to do it in because I think it's easier to get attention that way. And that doesn't mean that you're going to pitch to your friends all the time, because that doesn't work. That doesn't work either. And you're not going to try to sell something every time you need to become a resource and you know, like just like you do Dave, and posting articles or links or that kind of thing. And that resource is going to be useful to different people at different times.

That's right.

And you know, we had one of our, I don't know how long ago it was, but we had the RJ Waldron on the Outdoor Guide, and he had talked about posts, and I'd noted that, you know, he had, you know, just tons and tons of followers, thousands of followers. When. And I had made the mistake, I thought that was his business account, but he has that as well. But the problem now with, you know, with, like, Facebook in particular, is unless you're paying to boost those posts, your business posts on Facebook are not being seen by very many people.

That's right.

Anymore. But your personal posts, if you connect to your customers. In this case, RJ was, you know, he's a fishing guide and this kind of thing, getting people to connect with him. And he would post to his personal account on a daily basis, and it worked out really well for him.

Yeah, it does. You know, the thing. And Facebook, really, they've never said anything about this, but clearly they know this, and I think it's what they built their whole platform on. But the concept is. And this is going to sound weird to a lot of people, but you. And I mean this as you, the listener, just like you, Shannon. And the same is true for me. Each of us is a rock star to someone. What we do is amazingly interesting to someone. Not necessarily everyone. Not even necessarily lots and lots of people. Right.

Yeah, right. Right.

But it is. It is true. I mean, you know what I get to do, and I mean, I get to do these podcasts and I run these businesses. That's interesting to people. People. You know, there are people that wish they could have that in their life, and I get that.

And then you have the same. There's some other people, whether it's the absolute Pocket Pocket man or whatever that you follow, you know, that. That you were like, oh, man, this guy's a rock star.

Yep.

Yeah.

And. And it never before was that clearer to me than when I had Pilot Pete, who's somebody that joins us occasionally for Mac Geek Gab shows here in the office. He have. Or in the studio. He happens to live nearby. And I said to him, I said, he's like, man, it's so cool what you get to do all day. And I stopped, and I'm like, wait a minute. It's cool what you get to do all day because he flies for a freight carrier, you know, he flies huge planes all over the country. I mean, it's just fascinating to me. And, you know, I'm a wannabe pilot, and so we would live vicariously through each other's stories.

Yeah.

You know, and that's when I realized, wait a minute. You Know, we all have this aspect to us, every single one of us, whether you realize it or not. But. And you can. You can choose how much you want to capitalize on that, but it does it. You know, it's like Facebook and Twitter and all of that are like getting on stage. Every time you go and post something, you just have to be confident that what you're about to post matters to other people.

To someone.

To someone. Right. Not all the people. You know, you. Right. There's always going to be people that. The bigger a stage you're on, the more people that you will find that are going to dislike what it is that you do.

Yeah. And that's fine. And you've always been really good at that. And I can remember when we. One of our first businesses that we started together, and I can remember getting some negative comments and you're like, oh, that's great. Because then, you know, if you get one or two negatives, that there's at least 100 people that are happy with it. That's a great way to look at it.

People will rarely. Do you hear from folks that are ecstatic about what you're doing. Sometimes you do. And that's awesome. Awesome. And we've had some of that with the show. And it's, It's. I mean it, you know, that means more to me than. Than anything. I just, I love it for sure, but. And it's humbling and all of that, but I know that most people that are happy with what I do don't bother to tell me that they're happy with what I do. But almost everybody that's unhappy does. And I see that as humbling, too. And I've written longer emails, I think, in response to people who have told me they hate everything I do and are never going to listen or read or whatever, you know, me again than I have to anybody else, because it really is humbling. Here's this person that's decided, I can't take it anymore. I don't want to ever listen to this guy. And now I'm going to write him five paragraphs about all the things he does wrong. I mean, that's a huge emotional investment. And I don't say that tongue in cheek. I mean, I really mean it. It's like, whoa, you took the time to do this. I better take the time and thank you for this. And, you know, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't necessarily change all the things that they live.

Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure.

But, yeah, but as long as it's not intended to be. I mean, there's some level of it that's probably a little bit hurtful, at least in terms of its intent. But as long as somebody's not overly nasty about it, yeah, I'm happy to reply, you know, and not. Not get into the nitpicking of it. Just thanking them, honestly, for the, for that. Yeah, yeah, but you gotta get. But you, you know, if you're gonna put yourself out there, you have to be ready for that.

You have to have thick skin, right?

Yeah.

And yeah, some people are gonna come back and say, you know, hey, I don't want to hear about this. Well, then you just, like you say, respond to. Well, you know, you can either hide or unfollow me and, you know, that kind of thing. It's no problem.

When we started macgeekab, we had so many people that wrote to us. Here's what you need to do with your podcast. And they would list all these things, say, whoa, this is awesome. We actually really like what we're doing with the show. And. But your idea is great. You should start your own show. And I, you know, it wasn't like, ahaha, you know, I turned the tables on him. It was. I honestly mean it. You've put all this thought in. This idea shouldn't go to waste. You know, this is a good idea. You should. You clearly want to listen to this. That means other people do go.

Yeah, well, as we all know, you know, it's. Ideas are, Ideas are worth the paper they're printed on. Yeah, it's, you know, execution is the key part of these things. And, you know, it's. That's. What is it? 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.

I always said if you want 100. If you wanted $100 idea, write it on $100 bill.

That's pretty good. I like that.

Guaranteed somebody's going to pay you 100 bucks for that.

Yeah. So, yeah. You know, and for anybody out there that's. That's had success or, you know, or not so much success on social media, we'd love to hear about your meth. And, you know, we only covered one little aspect of it today, talking about mixing your personal and professional and, you know, we'd love to hear from you what's. What's worked for you.

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, it's fun stuff. I. There's so much of it that I could be better at, but. But that part of it I think I'm okay with. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think that, I mean, because Obviously, we go into a ton of it today. But the key is, you know what I always ask myself is what, what value are you adding? You know, what, what piece of information are you providing that's. That's useful? And I think we, and I like, you know, your comments is you can scale that down to any, any part of it. If you're posting something that's authentic, that, you know, it's transparent. Yeah, those are good things. You're not just trying to shill some product because nobody is going to look at that and it just doesn't, it just doesn't work very well.

No, but you can do it occasionally. I mean, hey, look, I do this for my business and we created this awesome thing and I'd love for you to take a look. You know, that's cool. If you do that every day, people probably unfollow you.

That's right.

Yeah.

Like, I mean, for Tech Restore, we post, you know, information obviously about the Mac or the iPhone or iPad. Here, make sure you update this or don't do this, wait for this. And we also do. Okay, here's a repair guide for when, if you want to do a, you know, an iPad repair yourself, check it out and you can go post or we've got it on Instructables. Sometimes we post that, hey, we were featured today and this thing is really popular and come look at it now. If that takes the next step and turns into a revenue event because somebody buys a part from us, that's great. But it doesn't have to be. It's still a good resource and hopefully you've connected with that person that's going to find you someday.

I will say one thing, and I think you could probably speak to this better than I, but you mentioned that business posts tend to be deprioritized in people's Facebook feeds unless you pay to promote them. Most people, I found, most business owners even, are still very much philosophically against paying to get this Facebook promotion that they used to get for free. And therefore, what that means is those of us that are willing to look at it and reserve our emotions, tying both of these topics from this show together still can get Facebook promotion really, really inexpensively. So it's totally worth doing.

I think it's worth doing, too. And I think it all comes down to what value you put on being in that feed or getting that like, and it's also what we find is it's a great barometer for, you know, because if you boost the post and nobody likes it or you just have a really. Nobody shares it. I mean, those are all really good gauges of hey, this is something worth promoting.

Yeah.

Versus putting stuff there. And it is relatively inexpensive, you know, for how long? I don't know. It's like I can remember back in the day when AdWords on Google first started, we were really buying words for a nickel.

Yeah, right.

And quickly. I mean, a lot of those words that we don't buy anymore are 15 bucks, you know. And I remember, you know, not to segue, but we were in the, doing data recovery and you know that that keyword, data Recovery is a $25 keyword per click. And it's a high margin business, you know, but on, on Facebook you can get in front of people and, and boost that post. And for a small business it's awesome because you can manage your budget on a daily basis and you're really paying, you know, still you're kind of paying pennies for, for exposure. And you get those likes and sometimes you get those people to follow you and build up to your, you know, your presence. I think it's very useful.

Yeah, it's, it is useful. Yeah. You, but you can be smart about it. You can target it down to, you know, groups that you think are, you know, related, but perhaps not the very group that you target. And then that way you can sort of pull people in and broaden that audience, which is a good thing.

Yeah. If you're going to do boosted post, you definitely want to do as much, you know, ab testing as, as you can, you know, change things up a bit. And the, the great thing about, you know, Facebook is that of course they have all this data about us. And as an adv, you may not realize this as just a user, but as an advertiser, when you go in and start drilling down, I mean it is, it's pretty imperial scary or impressive. Depends how you look at it. You can drill down in the demographics and you can really fine tune where you're trying to focus your add on or who to. So you definitely want to try different things, find what works and then focus on that area.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, you're buying into the creepy machine that is Facebook. So you've got to decide whether or not that works for you philosophically as well. But if it does, then yeah, then there's.

Well, and as a personal user, I would encourage you to look at the stuff that's showing up in your feed, the sponsored post, the things that you don't immediately Just try to hide or say, oh, this is worthless. Something that looks kind of interesting. Well, that's your model for how you want to present your information. You want to stand out a little bit. And if you're a landscape contractor, you want to talk about, hey, we're coming up on the winter here in California. We're supposed to have this El Nino, and this is. These are the things you need to look for. Da, da, da, da. You know, not necessarily going to pitch, hey, we're going to come take care of your. Your garden for X amount. And here's a deal.

Yeah, and here's your deal. Yeah, you can. You can do that. You know, I mean, I don't know what the magic number is, but I feel like it shouldn't be more than, say, one out of five. Right. You know, here's four informative posts. And now here's my pitch.

Here's four.

Yep.

8020 type thing.

And, yeah, that's a good place to start. You feel it out for your business and your customers and all of that.

I agree. I agree. Well, good. I think we covered a little bit of it. We can probably spend another few episodes on social media and talk about, you know, different things, which we will certainly come back to. And again, we'd love to hear your stories feedbackusshow. Co and let us know what works for you.

Thanks, folks. Thanks so much for listening, folks. And mind your business.

I guess that's it. That's great. All right, take care, everybody. All right. Bye. Bye.