Creating a Social Media and Networking Presence
I just made my album. I did my best. And I uploaded the video just to YouTube. That was all.
—Park Jae-sang, better known by his stage name PSY1
What impact have social media and networking tools had on exporting? They are redefining the way we connect with people and how we innovate and conduct business across the world. Using blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+ to globally establish and build your brand on the Internet is a great way for customers to find you online—so that it doesn’t have to work the other way around. Once that happens, you can open the online door to export your goods to a worldwide customer base. You’ll see how here.
As little as five years ago, brick-and-mortar retail operations, such as specialty bakeries, dry cleaners, and businesses displaying their newest fashions in store windows, hummed along nicely based on a local community of loyal customers. When the customers fell short, the business owner ramped up his marketing efforts by way of telephone solicitations, direct-mail pieces, cross-promoted coupons, a big display ad in a telephone book, billboards, or in-store banners to get the word out to the neighborhood that the shop was not only still open for business but also had some very cool things that they had just gotten in for sale. That marketing effort, considered a staple back then, always involved the same customer base: a local one. The business owner had a single-minded view of the possibilities of where his customers could come from, and he didn’t have the means to go beyond those places to reach them. He also didn’t have the time nor the means to make a change that might lead to a brighter future.
Fast forward to now, when companies and individuals are making the big shift away from the old, entrenched way of doing things by offering goods and services to a new export market-driven way of creating growth by developing a digital presence. This digital presence has the potential to reach more than two billion people and save—across the all businesses that export—thousands of dollars in the costs of printing, real estate, education, distribution, human capital, and customer acquisitions.
The need for all businesses to have a digital presence is here to stay and will only continue to evolve and grow in new ways. Individuals and businesses who fail to adapt and make the big shift will fall to the wayside and become irrelevant. Those who embrace the shift, leverage it, and discipline themselves to stay one step ahead of technology will allow every aspect of their business to prosper. The digital world represents one of the greatest challenges and opportunities facing individuals and companies today.
Note Think of the last time you were at a formal business gathering and a discussion came up about Facebook or LinkedIn. Did everyone jump in to talk about it? Those who don’t are either shy or probably won’t be part of tomorrow’s workforce. Will that be you?
Thanks to digital tools and resources, anything—from a book, to a watch, to a political campaign—can be launched, produced, or exported worldwide fairly cheaply. More and more companies are therefore using the Internet, particularly social media platforms, to enhance the way their business is established, discovered, and operated outside their physical boundaries and, as a result, many are growing by leaps and bounds. After all, more than one-third of the world’s population is online.2 The same folks who have a big online voice are redesigning how their teams work, reassessing how to best serve their customers—no matter where they come from—and changing the very nature of their business.
What will your customers want tomorrow? Where will they be located? Provided you are curious and have the drive, the Internet allows you to find new customers, create the products they want, and export to them.
The Art of Getting Online Attention: Finding Digital Export Success
How do you make a digital dent in the online universe? Not everyone is as lucky as PSY, who had a music video in 2012 that exceeded one billion views on YouTube. Getting online attention (usually) requires not only one single act of greatness but rather thousands of attempts at greatness spread across many online platforms over a protracted period of time—that’s how you capture attention and develop a following. There is not a one-size-fits-all digital strategy. Succeeding in the digital world requires hard work, discipline, organizational skills, something remarkable to talk about, and a long-term view.
What’s digital-export success? It’s people worldwide finding you, opening their wallets to buy something from you, and you fulfilling their requests profitably. To be found, you must participate and be active on as many of the top online platforms as possible. To have customers open their wallets requires developing a relationship with them, garnering their trust, and offering products they want. That causes people to take action. Don’t think for a minute you can foster online success with a single stunning Instagram platform. It’s a start but must be supported with a Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+ presence. Putting all these social platforms to work in concert creates a winning online strategy, provided you stick to one topic or theme you are knowledgeable about. Think Mello Yello, Samsung, and Ford Fiesta—all good examples of companies utilizing social platforms with a unified marketing message.3
The goal is to have a holistic or big picture view of what you are trying to accomplish with your export business and make sure the right messages get in front of the right people at the right time. The beauty with this approach to online marketing is that any person at any age now has the capacity to create content, be consistent, control messaging, engage people’s hearts and minds to build a brand, integrate multiple platforms, and measure results—all things that are central to online success.
PSY, of course, is a rarity. He came out of nowhere with his YouTube video sensation (refer to Footnote 1). After being propelled to global stardom, he must now harness the attention and energy of Internet users worldwide, sustain the momentum—even raise the bar—and turn his stunning one-hit wonder into a profitable enterprise that supports his goals and values in life. It took Madonna decades to reach her pinnacle of global superstar success. Had she had the luxury of the web at hand when she started out, she could have shortened the discovery of her talent to that of PSY’s. When it comes to stardom, the Internet gives equal access to everyone—of all ages, backgrounds, and ethnic nationalities—and can make success happen overnight, provided all the social platforms are put to good use.
Caution Don’t underestimate the power of the unexpected. Clayton Christensen, one of the most influential business theorists of the last fifty years, coined the expression “disruptive innovation.”4 An example of disruptive innovation is Coursera, which offers high-quality courses online for anyone to take for free, which is beginning to impact the education industry and could demolish the status quo. Disruptive innovation can blindside your business and tear down whole industries. Be on alert for every new online tool that comes your way, keep an open mind to it, and master it to strengthen your export business.
The Internet: The Social Capital of the Universe
Which social media platforms are best for getting your message across and motivating your audience? All of them. However, if one platform is more widely used in a foreign market, such as WeChat in China (http://www.wechat.com/en/) or Facebook in India (http://www.facebook.com/FacebookIndia), that’s where you should take your messaging. Tell your remarkable story across multiple social media channels so that you can gain followers, retain those followers, and move a social media conversation to e-mail, the telephone, or direct conversation for further business development. Your first step, if you haven’t done so already, is to establish accounts on several different social media platforms.
When you set up accounts on different social media platforms, ensure that each reflects your brand (whether it’s you or a company) and be consistent when you complete your profile on each platform. Use a real name when possible to ensure transparency; add a nice photo of yourself (or logo of your company if that’s your brand); select a gorgeous background design that’s in line with your profile; include a URL link to your most popular online location (Web site, blog, or LinkedIn); and declare yourself the go-to person on a particular subject matter.
In my case, each of my accounts—on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter—shows a photo of me, says that I am the president of GlobeTrade.com, features a background design image that reflects my experience doing business around the world, includes a link to my Web site, and indicates my passion for helping entrepreneurs and small businesses go global. That way, people clearly understand what I do, expect me to stay focused in that area of expertise, and, thus, know who to turn to when they need a resource or help on going global. This clarity of purpose also helps for SEO purposes.
For example, if you run a bakery that makes exotic cakes, you should state on your Twitter account, for example, that you’re the CEO and include your photo or your company’s logo, have a beautiful background design of one of your most popular cakes, include a short description explaining what your bakery does, include a link to your Web site, and share that same information across all your social platforms. If you are a mechanical engineer who designs, develops, builds, and tests airplane engines, insert your photo, show a cool engine you built as a background design, write a nifty bio about your talent, include a link to your Web site or blog, and start sharing success stories about your engineering capabilities. How else will Boeing, Airbus, or Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China find you? This same practice holds true for building working relationships with journalists and pitching stories.
Become a Digital-Export Rock Star
As you establish your online-platform accounts, stick with using the same profile information about yourself, as mentioned earlier. Consistency matters. Focus on this question: where do you want to go with your export business? Take your messaging to where social platforms are used the most in overseas markets.
Let’s take a look at the top social platforms on the web—which I’ll call the magnificent seven—and see how each is vital to setting the world stage for becoming a digital-export rock star.
Considered the world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com) is a social Web site service used for professional networking and showcasing business talent. As of 2013, LinkedIn had more than two hundred thirty-eight million networked business-oriented members in more than two hundred countries and territories and in twenty languages around the world. The membership grows by approximately two new members every second.
In second quarter 2013, the countries with the most LinkedIn users were:
- United States: eighty-four million members
- India: twenty-one million members
- United Kingdom: thirteen million members
- Brazil: thirteen million members
- Canada: eight million members
The fastest-growing countries using LinkedIn are:
- Turkey
- Columbia
- Indonesia
The fastest-growing countries using LinkedIn via mobile are:
- China
- Brazil
- Portugal
- India
- Italy
Tip Map out where the LinkedIn users are in your export strategy. If you plan to export to Mexico and find there are no LinkedIn members there, that will indicate a piece of your online export pie doesn’t exist! Go elsewhere with your online social strategy—try Turkey, for example, which is one of the fastest-growing countries using LinkedIn.
LinkedIn makes it easy to connect and stay connected with everybody all over the world—old friends, colleagues, suppliers, vendors, employees, independent contractors, classmates, people you meet during international travels—in order to spread the word that you are looking for a serious business opportunity. It also offers multiple ways to keep in touch with your global base—from your own LinkedIn feed, to posts and comments of groups that you join, to direct messaging and group conversations. It enables powerful introductions to valuable new contacts and even allows you to give and receive endorsements. If you use it in a meaningful way, you can channel the activity to benefit your export business.
LinkedIn allows you to set up a company page that is static until you change it. Visitors can click on tabs to access the sections of your company page they are most interested in. Think of it as another mini Web site—furthering building your brand. It helps others learn more about your company’s job opportunities and products and services.
LinkedIn also supports the formation of special interest groups. In March 2013, there were 1.5 million such groups, with membership varying from 1 to more than 744,662. The largest groups are related to finding employment; however, all sorts of professional and career issues are central to LinkedIn’s focus. Joining a group is a great way to make connections peer to peer, share tips and experiences, ask and answer questions, and be on the lookout for customers and potential partnerships worldwide. Choose a group that is active and is central to your export business. A couple of groups that I belong to:
- China Trade Group
- Global Intellectual Property & Business Lawyers
- Global Sourcing
- Global Trade Central
- Go Global—Internationalization Forum
- Import/Export Global Trading Group
- International Business
- International Entrepreneur Club
- International Trade Network
- Trade Professional.Net
- WAIB: Women of Academy of International Business
- Web Globalization
- World Entrepreneurship Forum
Tip If you can’t find a group that interests you, start your own! It’s a great way to declare your authority and develop a following. Whether through your own individual LinkedIn account, a company page, or a group membership, maintain a daily and consistent presence.
Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) is known to be one of the fastest-growing and most popular web activities in the world. As such, it has been able to reach nearly 90 percent of the entire Internet population. Facebook was founded in 2004 with the mission “to make the world more open and connected.” People use Facebook to connect with friends and family, to comment on and like activities, to discover new things in the world, to stay relevant, to pass time, and to share and express what matters to them.
As of June 2013, Facebook had more than 1.15 billion active monthly users,5 of which approximately 80 percent resided outside the United States and Canada.6 As a whole, 12.1 percent of the entire world was using Facebook.7 So, Facebook alone offers more than billion users a month that your export business can reach.
Facebook Users
The following shows the number of Facebook users in each region and the penetration rate (the percent of population that uses the site).
- Europe: 233 million users (29 percent of population)
- Asia: 195 million users (5 percent of population)
- North America: 173 million users (50 percent of population)
- South America: 113 million users (28 percent of population)
- Central America: 41 million users (27 percent of population)
- Africa: 40 million users (4 percent of population)
- Middle East: 20 million users (9 percent of population)
- Oceania/Australia: 14 million users (38 percent of population)
- The Caribbean: 6 million users (15 percent of population)
Tip Facebook is the force to reckon with in North America, but there are other social networks that play in the same space, including Orkut (http://www.orkut.com) in India (owned by Google); mixi (http://mixi.jp/) in Japan; CyWorld (http://www.nate.com/cymain/?f=cymain) in South Korea; and Wretch (http://www.wretch.cc/) in Taiwan (owned by Yahoo!). It can’t hurt to look into these and, when you are ready, become a part of them through an intermediary who knows the lay of the land and the language.
YouTube
YouTube (http://www.youtube.com) was founded in 2005 with the sole intent of helping people broadcast themselves or their business. YouTube is an online place to share videos with friends, family, colleagues, and the world. By subscribing to a channel, you can connect with an individual or a company you are interested in and keep up to date on their activities.
YouTube Viewership
Now owned by Google, YouTube gets more than one billion visits each month, with 70 percent of its traffic coming from outside the United States. YouTube is localized in fifty-six countries and across sixty-one languages. In 2011, YouTube had more than one trillion views or around 140 views for every person on earth.8
Currently, the site has more than one million creators from more than thirty countries around the world. Thousands of channels earn money from their YouTube videos by becoming a YouTube partner. When you become a YouTube partner, you can display ads on your videos, and when people click on those ads, you earn a percentage of revenue. By the time you read this book, that number will have multiplied exponentially.9
There is a bit of competition to YouTube. French company Dailymotion (http://www.dailymotion.com/fr, or in the United States, http://www.dailymotion.com/us) also lets users share videos. It competes against YouTube. Yahoo! is looking at buying a stake in Dailymotion.
Tip To earn money on your videos, you must setup an AdSense account (http://www.google.com/adsense).
Twitter (http://www.twitter.com), established in 2006, is an online social networking and microblogging service compromising of a global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What’s important to you? You can answer that question via your phone or right on the web with an instant text-based message of no more than 140 characters.
Tip Link your Twitter profile to your other social media accounts and apply the use of hashtags to better organize and cement brand loyalty. A hashtag is a # symbol used before a relevant keyword or phrase with no spaces to make up a Tweet. It’s used to categorize Tweets and help them show up more easily in a Twitter search. For example, “#globalsmallbiz” is one I use often in my Tweets; it relates to expanding globally. If people do a search on “#globalsmallbiz,” my Tweets will show up.
Twitter Users
Twitter has surpassed more than five hundred fifty million registered users located in nearly every country in the world. The service is available in more than thirty-three languages. The countries with the most Twitter users are10:
- United States: 140 million users
- Brazil: 40 million users
- Japan: 35 million users
- United Kingdom: 32 million users
- Indonesia: 29 million users
To see who’s tweeting right now, visit A World of Tweets (http://aworldoftweets.frogdesign.com/). Twitter is a great way to quickly share information and make strong global connections.
Instagram (http://www.instagram.com), established in 2010 and subsequently sold to Facebook in 2012, is a free, fast, and easy way to share your photos with friends, family, suppliers, colleagues, and prospective customers. You can snap a picture and then post to Instagram, where you can filter it several different ways to transform its look. You can easily share posts to Facebook and Twitter, too.
Instagram has more than more than 150 million global users. Sixteen billion photos are posted to the site each day. The site has one billion likes happening each day.
Launched in March 2010, Pinterest (http://www.pinterest.com) is a content-sharing service that allows members to “pin” images, videos, and other objects that interest them to their virtual pinboard. It is a tool for collecting, organizing, and sharing things you are passionate about.
Although Pinterest’s global reach is not as strong as Instagram’s, it is still the sixteenth most popular Web site in the United States. Furthermore, nearly half of all Pinterest users are Americans.11
With Pinterest, you can browse other pinboards for inspiration, re-pin images, like photos to your own pinboards, and find a new and a more passionate audience to build your brand.
Established in 2011, Google+ (https://plus.google.com) is a social networking and identity service owned and operated by Google that gives you yet-another unique way to build a social network, share information, and connect with people all over the world.
According to Google+, the site is the fastest-growing online network. More than 500 million people have upgraded to Google+, 235 million are active across Google (whether it is doing “1+-ing,” or giving your public stamp of approval on something by the click of a button; using apps; using Google Play; hanging out in Gmail, Google’s e-mail platform; or connecting with friends through a search). Of them, 135 million are active in the stream, which is centralized hub where all the people you are connected to along with the content that they share can be monitored.12
Your Google profile is what people find when they search your name (mine is: https://plus.google.com/104048968164947147038). You can include a brief bio, picture, links to other online platforms, and so forth. It becomes your online calling card to the world.
The concept of Google+ Circles is a major benefit to using Google+. This is where you choose who you want in your contacts. Circles lets you compartmentalize and keep the silos of your life separate. You can have a friends circle, a family circle, a colleagues in Japan circle, a suppliers in Korea circle, a customers in Germany circle, and so forth. Google+ allows you to share what you want with whom you want, making the control issue a major boon to this social platform.
Google+ has additional features, such as Sparks, which lets you select content on topics that you find interesting and potentially spark a conversation as you share what you’ve found within your circles. When you want to see what is going on in the world that is related to your interest, you can click on the Spark interest area and you will get a page filled with news, posts, and information. A Spark topic of interest for me is anything related to “Going global” “Expanding internationally,” “Global small business,” and even “Laurel Delaney,” the last allowing me to stay up to date on information about me that spans that Internet. Through Sparks, you can share a breaking news story with your suppliers in Korea, for instance, that relates to a new product idea you are currently at work on. But this news story may not be something you want all your other Google+ followers to know about.
Another great feature of Google+ is Hangouts. As the name suggests, Hangouts provides a virtual place for you and a group of up to nine people to hang out. Through your computer or mobile app, the group can talk and see each other. This works great for impromptu gatherings or scheduled meetings to discuss status updates from around the world.
All of these Google+ tools and resources—from the Circle, to Hangouts, to hosting virtual meetings—allow you to reach a global audience and better manage your business relationships as you grow your export business.
Remember the export business plans we covered in Chapter 2? My Laurel export business plan included a section on information technology and asked you what technology you will use (order taking, mailing lists, social media, finances, or e-commerce sales) and how you will use it. Let’s take a moment to map out your social media and networking strategy. It might look like the following list, using the airplane engineer we talked about earlier as an example. Don’t forget to assign someone to champion the cause—that champion can be you.
- “Facebook—post once a day”: You might post a daily photo you’ve taken of one of your most successful projects, such as a shot of the latest airplane engine you built, and include a short paragraph on why it’s unique to any others on the market.
- “YouTube —feature one video every month”: An informative video that you could come up with in a month would be one that shows a complete installation of an airplane engine, where you talk about what could have gone wrong technically but didn’t because you conducted five thousand hours of research beforehand.
- “Twitter —post three times a day”: In order to get three Tweets up a day, you might first tweet about your upcoming presentation on how airplane engines are developed nowadays to optimize and reduce fuel usage. Then you can tweet about a dramatic improvement on your airplane engine. Your last tweet can be about a survey that was conducted on airplane engines manufactured in China and should include a link to the survey results.
- “Instagram —post once a day”: A daily Instagram photo might feature an airplane engine you spotted in an open lot that was ready for the trash bin.
- “Pinterest —post once a day”: A post for Pinterest might be an infographic on how a clean airplane engine performs more efficiently than a dirty one.
- “Google+ —post twice a day”: Using Sparks, you could post a couple of related articles each day, the first could be about airplane engines, describing the maintenance and offering the contact information for your supplier in Korea; the second could be an article about airplane engine efficiency, which you send to all of your Circles.
- “Blog —post three times a week”: You might make blog entries on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday sharing your own original content on designing, developing, building, and testing airplane engines. Your blog will allow you to intersperse your posts with other articles from outside sources that support your message.
You can understand why it’s important to be passionate about what you do—because you must sustain the communications across all the social platforms for a very long time and never tire.
Tip Posting on a blog, whether once a day or once a week, counts toward your digital road map. I’ve always felt that blogging is the real meat and potatoes of your digital marketing strategy.
Summary
Your social media and networking presence will allow you to broaden and deepen existing relationships, attract new prospects around the globe, build thought leadership within your industry, create strong brand awareness, and grow your business. Once you’ve mastered the basics, you are ready to use eBay, Amazon, Etsy CafePress, and Zazzle—and even the popular Chinese site Alibaba—as stepping stones to exporting.
1 Jae-sang is a South Korean singer, songwriter, rapper, dancer, and record producer, who is often considered the most famous Korean in the world. Jae-sang’s hit single “Gangnam Style,” which went live on December 21, 2012, exceeded one billion views on YouTube, becoming the first—and only—video to do so. As a result of his popularity, Jae-sang was invited to perform at the White House’s Christmas concert in 2012 and at South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s inauguration ceremony in 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psy.
2 “Internet Users in the World: Distribution by World Regions—2012 Q2,” Miniwatts Marketing Group, Internet World Stats: Usage and Population Statistics, last modified June 30, 2012, http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm.
3 “6 New & Innovative Social Media Campaigns to Learn From,” Erica Swallow, Mashable, last modified June 7, 2011, Swallow, http://mashable.com/2011/06/07/innovative-social-media-campaigns/.
4 Disruptive Innovation, Clayton Christensen: http://www.claytonchristensen.com/key-concepts/, accessed October 25, 2013.
5 “Key Facts – Facebook’s Latest News, Announcements and Media Resources,” accessed October 23, 2013, http://newsroom.fb.com/Key-Facts.
6 “Newsroom: Key Facts,” Facebook, accessed October 23, 2013, http://newsroom.fb.com/Key-Facts.
7 “Facebook Users in the World: Facebook Usage and Facebook Growth Statistics by World Geographic Regions,” Miniwatts Marketing Group, Internet World Stats: Usage and Population Statistics. Facebook Penetration Growth Between 2011-2012, accessed October 23, 2013, http://www.internetworldstats.com/facebook.htm
8 “Statistics,” YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html, accessed October 23, 2013.
9 “Statistics,” YouTube.
10 “REVEALED: The Top 20 Countries and Cities On Twitter [STATS],” Shea Bennett, MediaBistro: All Twitter; The Unofficial Twitter Resource, last modified August 13, 2012, http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-top-countries_b26726.
11 “How Popular Is Pinterest Around the World? [Infographic],” SocialTimes, Devon Glenn, last modified March 26, 2012, http://socialtimes.com/how-popular-is-pinterest-around-the-world-infographic_b92472.
12 “Google+: Communities and Photos,” Google Official Blog, last modified December 6, 2012, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/google-communities-and-photos.html.