It was the mid 70′s… a gawky teen standing in front of the mirror being critical of his body for the hundredth time… destroying what little self-esteem he had.  His nose was too big, his ears were too weird, his hair didn’t lay just right.  And his eyes!  they were just… wait a minute… his eyes… they were… kind of… cool.  Yes they were different, but that difference was kind of cool.

Fast forward a few years.  That teen is a young adult just getting out of the military.  The color of his eyes no longer fascinate him, but what his eyes see fascinates him.  The future lays in front of him… and it thrills him.  That new vision propels him through a computer science bachelor’s degree in two and a half years.  It pushes him to move into management positions in several companies, and then to start several businesses of his own.  Today, I’m even more fascinated with my vision of the future.

What vision do your eyes see?  Do you see a future where you are making a difference in the world?  What is your passion?  Does it stand out?  To make a difference, your vision needs to grow legs… to be talked about.  Seth Godin talks about sliced bread.  Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa, invented the machine that creates sliced bread in 1912.  Not until 1930, did Wonder Bread’s marketing of sliced bread really the idea spread.  The vision was great, but no one knew about it.

As a side note, during WWII, the government banned sliced bread for a short while, and the outcry was massive!  Here’s an excerpt from a letter appearing in the New York Times:

“I should like to let you know how important sliced bread is to the morale and saneness of a household. My husband and four children are all in a rush during and after breakfast. Without ready-sliced bread I must do the slicing for toast—two pieces for each one—that’s ten. For their lunches I must cut by hand at least twenty slices, for two sandwiches apiece. Afterward I make my own toast. Twenty-two slices of bread to be cut in a hurry!”

Now there is a committed customer!  She wrote to the New York Times begging that the ban on sliced bread be lifted.

How can we spread our ideas now?  How can we compete in a world full of glitzy ads backed by millions of dollars?  TV shows like The Biggest Loser and American Idol, may give us a hint.  I watched The Biggest Loser for the first time this last season.  A friend begged me to watch it when I told him I wanted to lose a few pounds.  I found it not very professional.  I found the drama over the top.  I also had a friend talk me into watching American Idol… with similar reactions.  Why does America want reality shows?  I think it is because America is tired of polished pablum… they crave reality, even if it is not so professional… the connection to real people matters more than the professionally created fluff.

This is great news for normal people that have cool visions for the future.  You can reach out through social media and connect with people.  Openness and trust are more important than polish and perfection.  Caring matters more than ever.  People can sense who you are through your twitter feeds, your LinkedIn activity, your Facebook page, your blog and your YouTube videos.  Your sincerity will show… even if the glitz does not.  People will know you better than they have ever been able to know you before… and that is a good thing.  They will trust you because you are real, and because you will help them.  Just get out there and be heard.

I just presented a “How to use LinkedIn” to a church group yesterday.  There were 50 – 60 folks there I guess – If any of the attendees are reading, thanks for attending, I hope it was helpful, and contact me anytime.  The questions I got form the folks both during the presentation and after reminded me of my journey in Social Media, and I thought I might share my insights along the way.

I started getting LinkedIn invites from friends many years ago… and I ignored them for a while.  Then I finally accepted one and put together a VERY limited profile.  At least I could accept invitations… what good that would do for me was unknown at the time.

Over time, because I continued to get invites, I decided to update my profile a bit and add some real data… again, with no understanding of what it would do for me.

Then I watched a PBS special called Six Degrees, where an experiment was conducted to see how many steps it would take to get packets that were placed in several very divergent locations all over the world back to a professor’s office in the US. The professor knew none of the people or places that the packets were placed.  It took on average six steps before the packets made it back to the professor… even from African villages and South American jungle communities.  That program struck a cord with me and I started researching all I could about social media.

I read several books about connectedness, social network science and then started drilling into books and blogs on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and others.  I have spent two years studying and using these and other social media… and have formed some opinions along the way.

For businesses that want to talk with other businesses, LinkedIn is THE way to do that.  LinkedIn also helps business owners connect with others in their field to brainstorm marketing and operations ideas.  LinkedIn also helps create a base of trust for others who want to know more about who you are.  LinkedIn is my main area of focus because I work with other business owners, namely dentists.

My clients (dentists) mainly focus their marketing efforts on Facebook, because their current and potential patients are found there.  They need a LinkedIn profile for patients to be able to look at and to interact with other dentists.  Customer facing marketing is done through Facebook.

Dentists have other options for communicating with other dentists… and they have some significant weaknesses when compared to LinkedIn.  Dentaltown is by far the largest dentist focus forum in the world.  There are many tens of thousands of dentists that check in regularly, and that is the biggest advantage it has over LinkedIn.  Dentaltown has several disadvantages:

1. Members are dentists only, patients can not see your profile to get comfortable with your credentials, references, and background.
2. Members use handles other than their names.  This makes it difficult to build relationships and creates a sense of anonymity that lends itself to caustic flaming of innocent questions.
3. Connections are made only within the dental world, limiting the value of networking
4. Connections are one-to-one instead of three layers deep, like in LinkedIn.
5. Dentaltown has the classic Innovator’s Dilemma.  It was there before LinkedIn and was built on technology from a different era.  To bring it to a true social media would confuse its loyal customer base.  This means its success forces it to stay with the past.  For instance, there is no way that Dentaltown could open its doors to an audience outside dentistry to become a true social media… it is outside it’s mission of having forums that large numbers of dentists read (and that makes banner ads worth running … yes banner ads – so 1990′s).

So Dentaltown vs. LinkedIn?  They are not the same thing.  As a dentist, I would have my foot in Dentaltown.  It’s a great place to research problems that other dentists have had and the responses they got.  For more clinical information along the forum style service, I would also join Dr. Bicuspid.  BUT, I would spend the majority of my time on LinkedIn.  LinkedIn’s universe is much larger, the service is much more polished, the openness creates a sense of helpfulness that is sometimes lacking in identity obscured forums. And, for patient facing marketing efforts Facebook.

I have been out of town for more that a week, and had shut down the AdWord campaign the day before I left.  I have now analyzed much of the data from the first couple weeks.  The first week was based on my first effort.  The second week was based on Google’s campaign.  As I mentioned, the Google guy, Jason, was very helpful.  Google support put together a second campaign for me, based loosely on the campaign that I had put together.

The comparison is very interesting.  I had focused my key words on very inexpensive “Long-Tail” keywords (Long Tail example vs main stream: “recently graduated dental student wants to buy a dental practice” vs “dental practice for sale”).  Google suggested more main stream (and much more expensive) keywords.  The click through rate was not significantly better from either, but by testing what worked on mine, and what worked with Google’s suggestions, I have created another round. They suggested that quality click through(CTR) matter more than quantity CTR.  I am still looking over the idea of paying $4 per click for a better CTR, compared to paying $.25 for one not quite so high a quality.  I can afford 16 lower quality click throughs for the price of one.

This round, I am also trying something I read in Seth Gogin’s “Purple Cow”.  He suggested that aiming at the mass of my potential clients is a bad idea.  He suggested a narrowing of focus.  The mass of people that would find my services compelling is huge… maybe 50% of dentists based in the US.  I will limit the people I am talking to three very narrowly defined groups of people… over the coming weeks, I will report the difference in the response for those narrowly focused groups compared to the wider marketing efforts I have been conducting.

I will be interested to see if talking to a very narrow portion of my potential clients is more effective than talking to the whole group.  Local dentists can do the same thing.  Seth Godin suggests that to be remarkable, you must focus on small areas of you potential market.  Within that narrowly focused niche, you will find less noise from those talking to the universe of potential customers.

Within the niche, more one-on-one happens, which suits me just right.  I am not a shout into the void kind of guy.  I have been talking to the masses, but many of them are not ready to make the commitment yet.  Given enough time, my message would become accepted by the masses.  It has to… the trend is in place.  Dental practice brokers are too expensive and just cannot compete long term with social media and the trust it engenders.  As I said in a previous post, Match Makers like Yenta have no appreciable market in most of the world today… and over the next ten years, I hope to speed the movement of practice brokers into a similar state.

I am taking Seth’s path by sharing more data that I feel comfortable with, because I hope someone out there gains valuable insight from my experience in these campaigns.