Posts Tagged ‘social networking’
A living object lesson for entrepreneurs. That’s what Forbes columnist Steven Berglas is calling Charlie Sheen.
“With his foray into monology Charlie Sheen has become a living object lesson for entrepreneurs. In a matter of months he took a product, himself, responsible for the success of the #1 rated CBS-TV sitcom Two and a half Men, and destroyed the grip he had on a thriving customer base,” Berglas writes.
Of course, we know the story all too well. We also know how Sheen became an overnight social media sensation. Sheen is still making some news headlines by crashing Drew Carey’s improv show and heading out on his own tour. But his hit series Two and a Half Men, the series from which CBS fired him, ran for eight years and helped revive his celebrity. There’s no gaurantee of winning as he goes out on his own with his new attitude.
But as Berglas sees it, Sheen imploded—and there’s lessons in it for entrepreneurs. What were those mistakes? I’d recommend reading Berglas’ column to get the full story, but here is the take away in a nutshell: Sheen violated Peter Drucker’s marketing laws.
Here are some quotes from Drucker to chew on:
- “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
- “The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say ‘I’. And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say ‘I’. They don’t think ‘I’. They think ‘we’; they think ‘team’. They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don’t sidestep it, but ‘we’ gets the credit…. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.”
- “Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.”
- “Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.”
- “Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.”
- “The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.”
Check out this video where Sheen denies he’s bi-polar. He says he’s bi-winning.
Think what you want about Charlie Sheen. He’s dominating social media right now. The outspoken actor has surpassed Lady Gaga and President Obama in the realm of social networking followers.
Yes, Warner Bros. may have fired Sheen from his star role on “Two and a Half Men,” but the son of Martin Sheen is blowing up Twitter, mastering video and emerging as the talk of the Facebook world. Is there a social media lesson in all this for entrepreneurs? You bet.
Tell the world. At the time of this writing, Sheen has more than 2.3 million followers on Twitter—and he generated that number in a matter of days because he let the media world know he was tweeting. Your world may not be as big as Sheen’s, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t tell your world you are on Twitter. Post your Twitter handle or the little birdie on your Web site, your e-mail, online ads, and anywhere else you communicate with the public. Then tweet wisely.
Use hash tags. Sheen has got the hash tag game down pat. He promotes his videos on his tweets using the #Fastball hash tag, for example. A hash tag helps people searching Twitter find you based on the topic about which you are tweeting. If you are tweeting about a shoe sale, for example, you would put “#shoesale” at the end of your tweet.
Engage with your followers: If you want to build a relationship, you need to do more than push out social media messages. You need to talk back when people talk to you. That means you need to monitor your social media accounts.
If you don’t have a Twitter handle yet, get one now. Your brand name may already be taken, so you may have to get creative in choosing something that speaks about your brand. And, if you are too busy to keep up with your social media, do what Charlie Sheen is doing: hire an intern (or a virtual assistant).
You’ll find plenty of other blog posts with social media advice from Davinci Virtual Office Solutions with a quick search in the box above. And here’s a video with some more tips.
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