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January is over, but business boot camp isn’t.  Is your business feeling fit yet?  This week we’re teaching you to slim down – teaching you how to get your business lean and automated – just like ours.  So let’s get connected!

Just like cutting out junk food, tabloid magazines and junk mail, we’re going to get your communications in order, streamlining everything from social media to websites to newsletters. The best way to succeed is to get your message heard. The goal of this step is to gather your Unique Content and put in a place where your market will get your message.

Do you “connect” to your market on the internet?  Like really connect? Look at what’s evolved in this area in the last few years, and the social media “treadmill” you’re trying to keep up with:

• Facebook:  500 million users most of whom log on every single day
• Twitter: 190million users (unofficial data) sending 65 million tweets a day
• LinkedIn: 90 million registered users, 21.4 million unique visitors every month
• YouTube: Hosting 14 BILLION videos as of May 2010
• Flicker: 32 million users and 5 BILLION images as of September 2010

Of course, there are all sorts of other places online: Orkut (100 million users), Reddit, Digg, Myspace (mainly musicians now), specialty services like Last.FM and Hype Machine… not to mention all the content sharing and blogging platforms like Blogger, Tumblr, Wordpress, and the specialty social networks like Active Rain (real estate), Medscape (doctors), Martindal-Hubbel Connected (legal professionals), DeviantART (artists), the INVITE ONLY social networks like aSmallWorld and the millions of RSS Feeds out there filled with unique, interesting content…

How do you keep up, and how on earth can you make money while spending all this time on social media?!

That’s a lot of communication spots, and this list is abbreviated! If you want to get really overwhelmed, look at the Wikipedia list of social networking sites (and don’t forget that Wikipedia itself is a hub of social activity for its editors…)

If it’s a challenge to keep up with Twitter and Facebook, what about the specialty networks that speak directly to your market?  How do you control all of this data?  More importantly, if you’re saying something, how does your customer know where to go and see you?

In a world this connected, keeping up with EVERYTHING is impossible.   It would be like trying to run up a downward moving escalator that is constantly increasing in speed - even if you’re trying to stay in shape, eventually you’ll end up flat on your butt!  So how do you get off the treadmill of trying to connect everywhere, and move smoothly through the spaces that are really important?

What if all of the critical spaces were organized, in a hub? Posting content there would be like doing your fitness routine in the gym (not just updating - there are plenty of tools to do that already), but a hub that actually put all your content together for your market, fans, customers and viewers in one place!

That’s why we developed 1to1Social Space Hubs - Social Spaces for short. We were sick of spreading our content across the web and just hoping people would see it. Visit our Social Space to see what we mean.  Our Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn profile, YouTube videos and blog are all together. With a Social Space you can aggregate your own content and even curate together the content you want to see from other business as well. Soon, when you have a Social Space, you’ll be able to follow other companies as well.

With Social Spaces, there is finally one destination for you to manage connections and communications with your customers and prospects.  Those connections and communications fuel “Conversation Marketing” - the kind of marketing where people find out what your business stands for in your “social” voice.  Conversation Marketing isn’t about advertising; it’s about engaging and connecting.  Putting your Unique Content where people can see it, read it and follow it to get a holistic view of your business makes it much easier to engage your audience.

Too often social media is like throwing bait into the pond, without a fishing line or fishing pole. Putting everything together in a 1to1Social Space Hub is like upgrading to a commercial fishing boat.  Your Social Space creates a net for the interested fish to come right into.

Sound good? What could make this sound better? How about free? You can sign up for a free trial of 1to1Real™ and set up your Social Space right now, no charge to you. You can have your own hub for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, your blog… whatever you want to create, and however you want to connect – your unique content will be in one place, ready to connect you to your market, and to success.

Happy Connecting,

Tim

PS: See you next week for Boot Camp Step 4: Collaboration Workspaces – making effective, secure teamwork happen for your business, instead of endless email chains!  We’ll explore this in more detail next week when we focus on getting your market, your team, your business fully engaged and connected to one another.

Image: Sinkdd