Social Media Advisors

Breaking The Silence

It’s been almost three months since my last post here. I’m sure some that are subscribers to my blog thought that I may never write again. Some probably haven’t even realized that I have not added new content since March 8th, 2013 and that’s OK too. The truth is that since my last post, I’ve experienced some life changing moments in my life.

On March 22nd, I woke up and headed to my office just like I would any other normal day. I was a little extra tired this morning from driving back from Georgia less than 36 hours ago. I had gone to Columbus, GA for a social media speaker event where I was sharing on how to integrate video into real estate better. Since Columbus, GA is so close to Atlanta, my wife and the kids went along on this trip and visited her family while I went to the conference.

Back to Friday. As I had entered my office this morning to start working, my wife mentioned to me she was going to take the kids and go run some errands so that I would have a quiet house that morning to catch up on work. I had gone into my office and cranked up my music like I normally do to drown out the sounds of the kids in the house. After about 30 minutes into work, my daughter (almost 5) come barging into my office and screams: “Daddy, you MUST come right now! Jeremiah has fallen and is crying very badly”

I jumped from my chair and headed down the hallway to find my son (2.5 yrs old) standing in the kitchen screaming. As any normal parent would do, I quickly picked him up and did a full body scan looking for broken bones, bumps, bruises, or bleeding. I didn’t really see any and by this time I’m beginning to wonder where my wife is. It is not like her to let either of the kids cry without running to their rescue. At that moment my peripheral vision saw her laying on the floor leaned up against the door frame of the door to my garage coated in blood.

As she was getting ready to leave the house she noticed the suitcases sitting in the way in the garage and wanted to quickly put them away in the attic while the kids were inside playing. All of a sudden she heard our adventurous Jeremiah say: “Hi Mommy!” as he had climbed up the pull down stairs and was standing at the top. To try & keep him from falling, she went over and tried to pick him up (all 42lbs of him) and was going to start down the ladder first with arms around him for safety.

As she picked him up, she lost her balance from standing on rafters instead of plywood and both of them broke through the drywall and fell straight down approximately 9 feet onto the concrete garage floor. I took them both to the hospital, Jeremiah checked out fine (angels were definitely watching him). Katherine on the other hand wasn’t quite as lucky. She fractured her back in two places (t12 & L4). The L4 break they said would heal on it’s own, but the other fracture needed surgery. She also had a bad cut on her head which caused all the bleeding.

On Tuesday March 26th, she underwent two major surgeries. Because of the fracture of bone going forward, they had to first go in through her left side, deflate her lung and remove the piece of bone that was floating only millimeters from her spinal chord. Then, after that, they inflated the lung and inserted two chest tubes into her side. After this surgery was completed, they then made 4 incisions on her back and inserted a column implant to replace the missing bone in her spine. That is held in place by 4 titanium screws.

She spent the next several days in PCU (progressive care unit) recovering. During the first surgery she also got a corneal abrasion on her right eye. This caused her more discomfort than the incisions on her side and back. Every time she blinked, it caused extreme pain in her eye. Luckily this only last lasted about 36 hours, but those 36 hours felt like a lifetime.

She started healing, but it seemed to be going much slower than they imagined. They originally said surgery would happen beginning of the week and she would go home by the weekend. Well, after an additional week of being in there, they removed the second chest tube and we thought she would get to come home soon. All the doctors & nurses said that most patients go home within 24 hours of having the last chest tube removed.

However, when they ran some final bloodwork they found her white cell count up over 22,000. They said normally it’s between 5-10k for healthy people. Katherine had mentioned to me the night before this that she just felt like she had no energy and was fevered. As I left to go home that evening she started running a 103 temp. That fever continued all through the night.

The scans then started showing fluids building up in her lungs and chest cavity. So, on Saturday April 6th they did a thoracentesis to try & drain the fluids. Basically they took an extra long needle and stuck it in through her back above the shoulder blade into the lung and tried to drain out any excess fluid. Unfortunately this didn’t work. Her trauma surgeon then consulted with a cardiothoracic surgeon who said she would need more surgery to remove the fluid buildup immediately.

On Tuesday April 9th, early in the morning, Katherine headed back to the operating room. This time they made more incisions on her side, deflated the lung, went in and scraped out as much of the infection. What they found is that the buildup was more in her chest cavity than in her lung and all this buildup was making it almost impossible for her lung to fully inflate.

This time Katherine was given three chest tubes and spent the next several days in CVICU (cardio-vascular Intensive Care Unit.) This floor only handles heart and lung patients. It was kind of interesting because the nurses there say they rarely have patients under the age of 50. They also looked at me funny when I brought her Mc’Donalds milkshakes because her Dr said she needed to consume anywhere from 5,000-6,000 calories/day while her body was fighting the infection so that it would use the food for energy source instead of her tissue. After CVICU, it was another trip back to PCU.

Because of the amount of infection that was found in her body, she then was given her 5th Doctor. He was a Doctor of Infectious disease. After several days of cultures, they discovered the infection was a staph infection. He began aggressively treating it with some of the most powerful antibiotics known to man. At one point we thought she may have to stay in the hospital another several weeks to treat the infection, but luckily they were able to diagnose it and send her home with a PICC line. Finally, around 8:30PM on April 18th, she was discharged from the hospital. I then gave her daily an IV bag of antibiotics through her PICC line for another 12 days.

Monday April 22nd we took a trip to the suture clinic where they removed the rest of her staples from her side. Between all the surgeries she had well over 85 staples in her side (50+), back (35+) & head (2). May 1st was the first time in almost 6 weeks that she has no sort of needle in her arms or neck for an IV.

Even though she spent 27 days in the hospital, had 5 rather in depth procedures/surgeries, an ambulance ride, some of the strongest antibiotics known to man, probably over 100 x-rays/CT scans, 4 blood transfusions, 50-60 tubes of bloodwork taken, 5 chest tubes, and a giant black back brace that she’s been sporting, she is still smiling and bringing joy to the whole house. All her nurses commented on how sweet and pleasant she was and how much they enjoyed having her as a patient. It just goes to show that her little light of joy shines bright and touches more lives than she realizes.

The house is starting to get back to normal, the kids are adjusting, and I’m slowly getting back into a work groove. As her pain levels continue to decrease she has been able to slowly deal with discomfort with just Tylenol which has allowed her to begin driving again and become more mobile. Still she cannot bend, twist, turn, or lift anything over 10lbs. Hopefully in another few weeks she be able to take off the back brace and return to normal living.

Also, while Katherine was in the hospital, both children had been sick with Fifth disease, my mother-in-law who came and stayed for almost 8 weeks to help out had a major sinus infection, our dog ripped one of her claws completely off while in the back yard, and my grandfather was in ICU after having another heart attack. Needless to say the month of April was complete chaos around my home.

How Are Things Now?

With two children under the age of five, my time has been pretty well tied up the past few months with parenting, having to do extra work around the house that my wife would normally handle, and taking care of her more than normal. This continues to be the case, but I’ve began to learn better how to manage all of this. I’ve designated Saturdays as days off of work to spend on projects around the house.

Business on the other hand has been rather hectic lately. One of the main reasons I haven’t blogged in almost three months is that in addition to all that has happened in my personal life, I have been extremely busy building custom WordPress sites for clients to help cover the extra expenses. But, things are almost caught back up, so I am hoping that will allow me to get back to more of the things I love doing like blogging and spending time communicating on the social networks. Just this week I’ve booked two more speaking engagements and several new clients for sites.

Thank you to everyone who has offered help to my family during the past few months. The meals, monetary donations, lawn service, cleaning the house, child care, and prayers have been truly overwhelming to both my and my wife. You have all truly blessed our family greatly with the outpouring of love. We hope that one day we will be able to return the favor.

Now it’s time to break the silence and get things back to normal!

What Is Your Online Shelf Life?

Social Media Advisors

Social media is beginning to play more of a role in the online marketing of your business if done correctly. Unfortunately though, too many times we get distracted by social media tools that end up becoming our main focus for our business online. Which is why one of the topics I love to speak on the most is the importance of your website, or online home base.

What’s Does The Expiration Label Say?

A study done by URL shortening service bit.ly shared that on average, the shelf life for most links shared on either Twitter or Facebook is around 3 hours. That means that most content you would share on social networks will only survive around 3 hours before it loses it’s power.

So, before you begin building a strategy of using a Facebook page as the hub for your business, consider the fact that if you aren’t constantly updating this page every few hours, you are not getting your message, your product or service out in front of consumers. Sure, you could set up a bunch of scheduled post updates and monitor things all day long, but is that the most effective way to run your business? Personally I’m not a fan of things with such a short expiration date.

Push Versus Pull

While Social Networks have the ability to grow a huge community of followers, the only source of traffic is that social network. So, if you have 2,000 followers on Twitter, your audience is just those 2,000 people unless you get lucky enough for someone to re-tweet you. Facebook, is pretty much the same way, your content getting shared beyond your sphere is dependent on a viewer sharing it for you. So, you must keep pushing the content in hopes your sphere will also push it beyond your page to others.

While some think this may be the absolute best way to run your online presence, I prefer going with a pull process instead of pushing. What I mean, is that I prefer focusing my time and effort on creating content on my actual website that I own. That way, I can drive my Twitter followers, my Facebook Fans, LinkedIn connections, G+ Circles and other social connections to my site. But, in addition to pushing that traffic to a site, I also can pull in traffic, a new sphere of potential clients and more all through the search engines.

Take a look at this chart showing traffic sources driving visitors to my site:

As you can see in comparison to all other sources of site traffic, Google alone is sending over 68% of the traffic to my site. This traffic are visitors who are typing phrases into the search engine looking for answers and finding my site in the results. You can see Facebook, Twitter and YouTube do a good job of driving traffic to my site, but they are not anywhere near the amount of traffic that comes from search engines. This traffic is being pulled in by me writing content they find instead of me pushing something down their social streams.

To make sure it wasn’t just my site that had these types of proportions of traffic, I then decided to look at the data for a few of my clients that I work with closely as their social media advisor to see what their traffic source breakdown looked like.

Take a look at the charts below that represents sources of traffic to two of my clients sites:

As you can see, both of these clients had almost the same identical percentage breakdown of traffic sources into their site. While social networks push a good amount of traffic to their site, they cannot compete with the amount that is pulled in from Google and other search engines.

Creating A Lifetime Warranty

When you focus your online marketing efforts on creating good content on your own site and not hours on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking strategies you can create content that can last a lifetime. When you begin to blog or create pages of content, you need to make sure you are answering the questions that your readers want answered. For example, a post I wrote in June 2011 on Tracking Your Images Through Google has consistently remained one of the top viewed posts on my site.

In fact, this past month it received more traffic than even the home page of my site. Other posts that I wrote on another site back when selling real estate over four years ago still to this day generate leads and make my phone ring. This work is the kinds of work that you only need to do once and you can reap the rewards from it for years to come. The beautiful part is that if I begin to notice a slip in my rankins, I simply write another post on that subject, link back to the well ranking post and it will start to climb back up.

I don’t spend buckets of money each month on Google Sponsored Ad Placements, or on other Pay-Per-Click campaigns. I simply find terms applicable to my business and then generate content that helps my site to rank on page one of Google for those terms. While it may take my site a little longer to garner the results I want, the big difference between ranking organically and with PPC is that the minute I stop paying for an ad campaign (PPC), I also lose any source of traffic and leads as my site will disappear off of the first page of SERPS. If you start paying again, you come back up and the minute you stop, you drop again. Personally, I’m not a fan of my site acting like a yo-yo.

If you rank organically for a term and don’t do it through shortcuts, you shouldn’t ever see a sudden dip in how your site ranks on certain keywords. You may from time to time see things drop maybe one or two places. This is more than likely caused by your site sitting dormant or a change in Google’s algorithm that determines how things should be ranked.

When this happens, if you simply go back, write some new content, link to the page that was ranking well and possibly give that well ranking page a slight content refresh, you should be able to climb right back up the search engine ladder. In essence what I have done is created content that can generate leads for a lifetime versus a social network in which you must continuously feed new material to reach that audience.

What Is Your Online Shelf Life?

In closing I want to leave you with this question: What is the shelf life of your online presence? Is it something you are building to last forever, or is it something that spoils faster than a loaf of bread?

Feel free to contact me if your website has been lacking and we can discuss strategies to turn it into a long time source of revenue to your business.

The Best Tweet Of 2012- Congrats @AMCTheatres

Social Media Advisors, Social Media Speaker, Twitter

As the year is winding down I thought it was a good time to share one of my favorite tweets that I saw this past year posted by a major brand. In September, The major cookie brand Oreo sent out a tweet to it’s 50,000+ followers asking:

Ever bring your own Oreo cookies to the movie theater?#slicksnacker

Now, I understand Oreo was trying to be cute and humorous in their tweet to their loyal fans. But, the response that followed back from AMC Theatres was great.

NOT COOL, COOKIE. RT @oreo: Ever bring your own Oreo cookies to the movie theater? #slicksnacker

— AMC Theatres (@AMCTheatres) September 25, 2012

Yes, the tweet back from AMC Theatres was clever, witty, and definitely one that made you chuckle. But, to me, what makes this tweet one of the best of 2012 is much more than the humor side of it.

As I travel around the country as a social media speaker, I often teach classes on how to use Twitter. During those presentations, one of the key points I always try to stress is that Twitter is much more than just a way to advertise your new product. In fact, I normally spend twice as much time covering ways to monitor things on Twitter because I think there is much more value in it.

What excites me more about the response from AMC is that they didn’t just sign up for a social network and started selling, they are actually listening and engaging in conversations. Services like Twitter Search and Tweetgrid are tools that every brand on Twitter need to be familiar with and use on a regular basis to monitor their brand to accomplish this.

Going The Extra Mile

What I found even more amazing with this story is that AMC is going the extra mile in their online monitoring. Many brands might set up alerts for when someone mentions their name, or a product they may sell, but they obviously were also monitory other keyword phrases like movie or theater. To me, this is one of the best ways to effectively use a social media network like Twitter. If they would not be monitor those types of terms it would be almost impossible to see when others are mentioning things directly related to their industry.

While selling movie tickets is part of the revenue AMC Theatres generated, my guess is that sales a concessions generate twice as much revenue as the actual ticket. Think about it, when you go to a movie, do you buy snacks? If you do, you can easily spend twice as much at the concession stand as you do on that ticket. The real question I’d like to know, is if I can find an Oreo cookie at the counter next time I visit an AMC Theatre.

Unplugging For The Next Month

Social Media Advisors

This may be one of the most emotional posts I ever write here on this site. I write this post with tears streaming down my face. I just packed up my two amazing kids and dog in the van and the wife just headed out to take them to her parents house in Georgia for the next month. As I shared here a few weeks ago, my wife Katherine & I are leaving on a missions trip Monday morning.

I know that we are doing what we are supposed to by taking this missions trip. We have worked so hard to prepare, but never once did I think how difficult it would be to say goodbye to your babies for a month knowing you will be thousands of miles away, in totally different parts of the world with very minimal ways of communication.

I’m hoping that through technology like Skype, Facebook chat, and Google Hangouts to at least be able to talk to them and see them some while on our trip. Of course, that is all dependent upon us having some sort of internet connection.

What does this mean for my business while I am gone?

Well, with us being out of the country means my cell phone will be shut off. International rates are astronomical and would cost entirely too much to call clients while I am gone. By now, most of my clients are aware of me being gone, and know to contact by email any emergencies. If and when I get a connection, I will try to respond to those in need. If you are inquiring about hiring me to speak, consult, or build a website, I will be returning all those calls starting November 19th.

I know this is a long time for everyone to have to wait for responses, and for those of you who know me, have worked with me in the past, you know I’m almost always available. This will definitely be a test for me to be unplugged for the next month.

For those of you who may wonder where I’m going, or want to follow along with our trip, I hope to update our missions site internet permitting. Or, you can visit http://sendustosouthafrica.com.

See you all in a month!