Blue Gypsy Inc. Blog

Social media, scuba diving, facebook fan page, Aggressor, what do all these have in common? They are the elements that make up my next great vacation...and my dream job!

During my diving days, I worked for a liveaboard dive boat called the Cayman Aggressor. Recently, while exploring job possibilities I did some preliminary chatting with a couple of liveaboard dive companies about doing their internet sales. I believe that my job as an online sales consultant for new homes, can easily translate into a valuable position selling liveaboard scuba diving.

In a nutshell, I currently find out what people want in a new home and then match their needs to one of our 14 communities and 88 floor plans. I keep in touch with them for weeks, months and years informing them of new offerings. Eventually, through a team effort with our site agents, we sell them a home. Inevitably I lose people along the way, but with a current average of 39% of overall sales for the company, I think I build more relationships than burn bridges.

In the course of talking with some of the liveaboard dive companies I found that they only wanted a social media person, and not someone to do internet sales. They wanted to leave sales in the hands of their reservationists. I found it interesting that in one breath they were ready to embrace new media, and in the next, they were stuck with their old out dated business model.

The key element of my current job is follow-up, follow-up, follow-up...it's a unique person who has the tenacity and the organization to be an online sales consultant. You continually build the relationship in the hopes that someday, when finally ready to buy, they will choose your company. Not just because of the amazing product you sell, but also because of the relationship that you have built. It was this idea that I wanted to bring to the liveaboard dive industry because I know it simply isn't their mode of operation.

Through personal experience with dozens of dive companies over the years, I know that follow-up is a key element lacking amongst almost all of them. If they don't sell you in the first week, then out of site out of mind. I never heard back from them on a personal level with mouth watering offers. They don't try to break down my armor and make me spend my money. There is no one building this kind of relationship with me. And with all the opportunities for dive vacations out there, it is the company who makes that effort that will win (39% of the time perhaps? Maybe more?)

Ironically it was this failed foray that made me take a deeper look into all things SM. I asked myself, "What is it? How is this better than what I already do?" I came to an interesting conclusion. While dynamically running across many mediums and possibilities, social media ultimately, at it's core, is a relationship building tool that compliments my current efforts. But does not replace them.

The way I see social media is that you are investing into a long term plan building recognition while hoping to capture attention and build relationships. It is great for diversifying your overall media plan, but why dismiss people who are calling in for information? Why not put them into a detailed follow-up system? They may not follow you on facebook and twitter, but they are already inquiring about your product. They just needs the right combination of factors to create a need to buy. You have no idea when the right factors will come together to make that expensive dream vacation feasible. But don't you want to be the one that built the relationship when they are ready to release those dollars to the seas? This kind of ROI is far more quantifiable than SM. While I'm enjoying using social media in my current position, I believe it's an additional layer to relationship building and not a replacement for good old fashioned follow-up.

But alas, in trying to convince liveaboard dive companies that they needed (Me) an internet sales consultant, it led me to explore and embrace Social Media. And in that effort I began following them on facebook and twitter and found the offering of an incredible deal aboard the Turks and Caicos Aggressor, a sister ship to my first liveaboard diving job a decade ago. Quantifiable ROI in Social Media! I really hope someday one of these amazing companies will change their mind, see the value in crazy detailed, personal follow-up and grant me my dream job of selling while implementing social media for a liveaboard dive company.

But for now, social media reunited me with my old family the Aggressor to take a killer vacation, at an amazing price. I can't wait for the first dive! Thank you facebook! Thank you Aggressor! Thank you Social Media!

Step away from the iphone...or any other gadget that distracts you while driving a car.

We've become such a tech savvy society that many feel the need to be connected at all times, it's like we need facebook and twitter to be intravenously fed into our veins otherwise we feel disconnected from our peeps. Or at least that's how it seems when you're out driving on the road. You look left, someone is on their phone, you look right, someone is texting. It's becoming out and out dangerous on the road, not because of the speeders and drunk divers, but because of all the technology being used while driving.

Last time I checked, there's no such thing as autopilot for a car, and even auto pilot on a boat, when used improperly will slam you into an island. (Program your way points around the island dummy!) I've seen a boat up on a reef in the British Virgin Islands for this very reason. More and more as I see red flashing lights during the evening commute I wonder how much of it was caused by social media. Is there really something that has to be tweeted while your speeding down the road at 70 miles an hour?

Yesterday I was riding through one of our new home communities, and out of nowhere, out of a blind alley, a small child on a bicycle came darting out in front of the path of a moving car. My moving car! It scared the crap out of me. And I'm sure it scared the crap out of that little girl too. Luckily my reflexes were fast and I managed to slam on the brakes just before one of my worst nightmares was realized. I'm terrified of running a child over with my car. I'm almost certain if I was one of those people who texts and twitters while driving the outcome would have been somewhat different than having my heart return to it's normal cadence as I watched her glide into the opened garage in the next alley and quickly disappear into the house. it was such a sudden and near miss that I could easily have changed lives forever with my car.

I wonder how often this scenario plays out, without the positive outcome of my encounter yesterday. It's just a split second of inattention that can cause a horrific accident that can't be taken back once it happens. Is tweeting and updating a facebook status really worth a minimum of car damage, to a maximum of bodily harm and injury? I don't think so, that's one of the reasons I don't even have texting on my phone...removed the temptation.

So put the blackberry down, step away from the iphone and pay attention to the road when you're on it. Little lives may depend on your own due diligence.

While I know I haven't hit expert status yet, I'm just itching to start a social media consulting business. That, or at the very least, I'm ready to offer some free ideas to a few businesses that I've "fanned" because I think they may be teetering on the edge of losing their audience...

I've quickly noticed that many people are getting onto facebook and twitter the same way they started web pages 10+ years ago. Once upon a time businesses were told that in order to be successful, get a website. Now, the same thing is happening with SM. But many are still a bit foggy as to how to integrate any or all of these tools into a business plan. To use them as a place marker or billboard just wont work. I believe there are many bad websites out there because of this lack of vision and incorporation into an overall company plan and now the same goes for SM sites as they start popping up in my live feed.

My company is a bit guilty of this scenario with SM. As the online sales consultant, one day I came into work, pulled up the website and all of a sudden there were facebook and twitter buttons on our home page! Great! Our marketing company managed to win the battle to move us into the SM age, but no one told me... and I quickly gathered it was going to be my responsibility to run these accounts!

I walked in to talk to my boss with a big question mark on my face, and he said, "Give me a calendar of what we're going to do with it." I'm thinking a calendar? Am I going to have to run every article I want to post and tweet by this busy man beforehand? That's not going to work with the organic quality of SM. I also had to get him to understand we can't hit people over the head with our message, that's not what it's all about. Up until this point my company relied on eblasting our database on a regular basis. Too regular! I used to send out TONS of eblasts. And they were all about us. I did not want SM to become like that or it would be a failure before it even got started.

I quickly convinced my boss that a calendar wasn't really going to happen and instead I drew up a set of guidelines on how we were going to use social media. Having been thrust into the waters of SM I've had to learn to swim quickly. Luckily I caught on fast and had some great advice from folks like Mike Lyon, one of my mentors for online sales training, and Naoma Doriguzzi a great local social media trainer. I spend a lot of time combing for helpful articles and information about the industry, verses just talking about us. I'd love our home owners to post pictures and testimonials on our facebook page, but it's a slow evolution. The best part is, I've been able to cut back our eblasts from 2 a week, to 2-4 a month.

Maybe I've just read a lot in the last several months about best practices, or maybe I just had more common sense and creativity to begin with, but now I'd love to use what I've learned to help local businesses and individuals tweak their media presence. I've already found that several pretty cool organizations have "friend" pages instead of "fan" pages. I don't know if this is because they started before fan pages existed, or because they didn't know how to go about setting up a fan site. Either way the time has come for them to migrate their contacts. The longer they wait, the more fans pile up in a system that is less than ideal. Change to a fan page as soon as possible. You may lose a few contacts, but do it, and do it now. It's too clunky to expect people to request your friendship when you are a business. I think in general people are more likely to follow through with a fan invite verses a friend request. And when someone becomes a fan it often shows up in your friends' feeds. It doesn't do that anymore when you friend someone.

I also see some great businesses out there that are right on with their fan page, and they have great information, but it's too much information. I really do want to read about what my friends are doing and not just the businesses I've fanned. One important rule I've created for myself on facebook is to LIMIT the number of posts a day, and spread them out. Really only 1 or 2 tops. You don't want to dominate someone's facebook feed, that's the best way to get yourself hidden or defanned. Twitter is a little more forgiving in volume but watch how close your tweets are too. Too many in a row look like spam.

Other businesses out there always send out the EXACT same messages on a daily basis. You need to mix it up. Find creative ways to pitch your business and not just by talking about the business itself. The 80/20 rule is all over the web. If you looked up a few articles on social media you'd find experts (real experts not just me) telling you to spend 80% of your time talking about other things and only 20% talking about what it is you are trying to sell. That doesn't mean those other things need to be mundane, "I woke up late today, missed my cup of coffee and now I'm on the move." I save those for my personal facebook updates. Your 80% can be related to your business, but it can be a lot of different things.

If your business is all about selling hammers, and you have a happy hour once a month to sell hammers, your fans are not going to want to read on a daily basis that, "back by popular demand is the Hammers Happy Hour! Come to a fun filled evening of hammers and hors d'oeuvres." There are so many other things you can write about during the month leading up to that event. You can post pictures of people who have happily purchased your hammers and found success with them. You can post their testimonials. You can post some little known facts about hammers that are interesting, anecdotal, or wacky. You can post pictures from your last hammer happy hour and show how much fun people had demonstrating hammers. Perhaps people were dancing on the bar top spinning hammers, now wouldn't that be a fun picture. You can post interesting articles about hammers that people (who are interested in hammers) will probably read. But there's no need to pound people over the head with the same hammer invite every day. That's the quickest way for people to hide you, or un-fan you and then you've lost your audience.

If I sound critical, I'm really not trying to be, I'm just trying to be helpful and share some of the knowledge I've gained from not just being in sales, but being a consumer too. I know I still have a lot to learn, and I'm always open to suggestions.

This is just a little free information as I explore and refine my own process.

After my last post about debates on facebook, I decided to see if it was possible to have a debate in 140 Characters.

The other day my cousin posted a ridiculous video in his facebook status update which sparked an intense debate between myself and one of his friends about the health care system. As usual my cousin posted something controversial but didn't, himself debate the issue. Sadly I don't believe it's because he's above having the discussion, I think it's simply because he doesn't have a concept of why he believes what he does. He follows his social circle of friends and religious underpinnings blindly, with no desire to hear anything contrary to his belief structure. Again, not to repeat myself from my last post, but if you are going to post something that may cause any discussion other than a thumbs up, I feel you should be prepared to discuss it, and not allow your friends to fight your battles for you.

Maybe it's easier in the Cyber world to throw your views up, or in my cousin's case regurgitate the sentiment of the masses, and think you don't have to defend them. That would never fly in a youth hostel anywhere in the world. When traveling, because you are thrust into a group of people from different walks of life and life experiences, you have to be prepared to have your sheltered beliefs shaken up. You do need to know what you are talking about if you bring something up that's controversial because people will challenge you. While it's easy to retreat on a computer and let your friends have at it, people will quickly find out you don't know what you are talking about when you are in an international group talking out of your @ss.

Most debates that I get into on my cousin's facebook post go something like this: I read it, I get annoyed, and I then read it to my boyfriend Chris and say, "Can you believe this crap he's putting out there!" then I begin typing furiously. Before I hit reply, I read my response to Chris, to make sure it sounds intelligent and not emotional, I get his feed back because he's one of the most intelligent, informed and rational humans I know, and then I post it. If I don't read the source of my annoyance to him first, and he hears me typing furiously, he knows it's either a reply to my cousin or an email feud with my mother on similar topics - but that's another story.

After several posts back and forth with some friend of my cousin's on health care, my boyfriend simply said to me, “Is health care a right or a privilege?” I thought this simple question was a good one. I had not heard back after my last point on my cousin's status update so I figured I'd "won" that debate. I'm constantly trying to figure out how to open up conversation on twitter, which in my opinion, is much more difficult than on facebook. In the spirit of trying to open up a 2 way dialogue I thought I'd bring the debate to twitter so I posted, “Is health care a right or a privilege? I believe it's a right. What do you think?”

I then got into this short dialogue with one of the many faceless people on twitter. (Literally she has no picture up on her twitter profile and is not someone I know, as I would say I know the people I’m friends with on FB) The first response I received was, It's ur duty to provide for ur own family - not mine or gov RT @gypsealeah: Is health care a right or a privilege? I believe it's a right. My response was @facelessfollower if it were that easy for everyone to provide health care for their family don't you think they would? So to my question she replied @gypsealeah should obama provide me college edu with ur tax dollar n give me house to - What good is health care if i'm living on the street. Why did she jump to education and housing from health care? No answer to my easy question, does she really think it’s that easy for everyone? She changed the subject from health care to education and houses.

How can I respond in 140 characters? I cheated, my response was about 280 characters and I didn’t even address the fact that health care is a lot more necessary if you are living on the street with no roof over your head, or no job. My expanded 2 tweet response was @facelessfollower/competition to inflating HC rates, a single payer option may allow money for U2 pay EDU and keep U off the street @facelessfollower U think basic health care is luxury like college edu and house? there are inexpensive ed options, + U can rent. But no cheap HC. And her reply back was, (Now don’t be surprised that she jumped back to my original question is it a right…without giving me an answer to my last query) @gypsealeah - are you saying health care is right under the constitution that the government is obligated to provide for us?

Well now come on, I’d think it obvious that I’m not saying it’s a right under the constitution. I do think we all have a right to affordable health care. So again I patiently reply not worrying about the fact that we’ve changed tangents again. (And this time expanded another 140 characters on top of my last cheat.) Triple tweet @facelessfollower no not saying right in const..saying in an enlightened society when countries less fortunate then ours have HC 4 All Y don't we? @facelessfollower I'm saying that the current system needs looking at when rates continue to rise above that of pay in this country. @facelessfollower R U saying HC is like a Yacht U shouldn't have it unless you can afford it? Plenty of hard working people can't afford it.

Well, my 420 characters were too much for the debate tactics of twitter because I never heard back. But I found it interesting that even in 140 characters the opposition still jumps to information irrelevant to the actual conversation, i.e. changing to education and housing when the questions was about health care. And there are no real answers to my questions, just reactionary garbledeguke.

I don’t know that too many people really want to debate anything. They don't want to ask questions because they don't want to listen view points of the opposition, they just want to shout or stick their fingers in their ears saying, "La La La I can't hear you." Instead it seems that the interactive dialogues many want to have through social media are either on a business level, or a very impersonal level. It is not nearly as social and interactive is sitting around a room with a bunch of international travelers and talking about real issues.

I guess you can’t have a debate in 140 characters.

In social media, interacting though facebook, twitter and the like can be a dialogue. I see people updating most often with the literal, “what they are doing.” (I do this as well) But less often status updates express thoughts, ideas and beliefs. It’s as if for the most part no one wants to rock the boat and put something up that “friends” or “followers” might not find agreeable. And when we do post something controversial many expect that everyone will just give them a “right on,” or a "Thumbs Up," and aren’t prepared for a disagreement.

Yesterday variations of “No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick,” were being posted in status updates across the United States. It amazes me how much this upset people. Many people can read all day long about how someone’s small child pooped in the toilet for the first time, or about the current meal another is preparing, but as soon as a controversial update goes up people get inflamed. I had one friend write in her status update, “How many times do I need to get the same Health Care Post...I have my opinion and so do you...go to one of the many town halls and do it that way, watch the Presidents speeches and do it that way, but please stop sending it to me!”

Well first off, in social media, unless someone sends you a message to your inbox, an @whoeveryouare, or a direct message, they aren’t really targeting you. If you choose to take it as an attack on your beliefs then perhaps that’s the time to open up a healthy debate. I really try not to get into too many disagreements on facebook. I do debate an issue with my cousin from time to time, or more accurately, with his friends. He knows many people that only think the way he does, I want to shake up his world now and then to remind him that there are others that don’t. But I rarely do this otherwise on facebook I really wasn't even going to respond to my friend. But then I wanted to see what would happen.

My friend’s rebuttal when I posted, “No offense, but I don't think people are specifically sending it to you, it's just how they feel and they are posting their feelings and thoughts,” was, “I know you and I disagree Leah which is what makes this country great, but when it is not a personal posting (in the status) but rather a chain letter style of posting, it does make one feel bombarded. Cutting and pasting for a post is not how I use the status section of FB.” I disagree with the chain letter comparison. I think yesterday's post was such a simple statement and easily captures the essence of what many people are feeling. While some versions said if you agree with this, repost it in your status update, it neither said you will receive 7 years of bad luck if you don’t repost this, nor did it say please send this to 10 people you care about or the opposite of your wish will come true. That, to me, would be a chain letter.

Many people started debates with their friends through this posting. It naturally brings out mixed emotions and opens up a conversation. It also shows solidarity in a belief (on the behalf of the posters). If you feel strongly enough to post something controversial, then you should be prepared to debate the issue. I don’t think my friend was upset because someone copied and pasted the post, it’s that a group of people she knows oppose her opinions. Through repetition they are making their point with this statement. I think many people live in a bubble thinking that everyone they know shares the same opinions they do, especially if we only talk about poop or recipes in a status update. As soon as someone upsets that balance and forces us to come out of our chit-chat to talk about real issues it can either push our limits of understanding or cause us to bury our heads deeper into our own belief structure and not listen to the voices of others.

I definitely had a very sheltered view of the world when I first took off backpacking. Through the encounters that I had, and the spirited debates that I participated in, I learned a lot about the world, other cultures and other people. Most importantly I learned that there are always two sides to any debate and both believe they are right or they would not be debating the issue. Listening was key in all these interactions because each person I met had a completely different life story and experience than I did.

I remember walking into a crowded pizza restaurant in the old city of Jerusalem. It was probably the only pizza place for miles. You sat where there was an open seat. No table or personal space could be had in this tiny, busy, cramped restaurant. I ended up sitting next to two young burqua clad girls in their late teens. As we began talking they were excited to learn more about America. I wanted to learn more about their culture. Our conversation was only in the infant stages of getting to know each other when they asked a simple question, my name. I of course said Leah. They immediately backed off and said, “Are you Jewish?” Not being a good liar, I said, “Well yes, but I am not religious.” All true, but irrelevant, and the conversation stopped, the two young girls immediately rose and left the table.

I feel too many people are rising up from the table and leaving before the conversation even begins. Or they focus on the thing that bothers them most, in the pizza parlor incident, my religion, in my friend’s case, the fact that the post is cut and pasted. By being distracted by the trivial or inconsequential, we will not even hear what the other side has to say.

If a debate is hard to have on fb, is it impossible in 140 Characters?