I did coaching over the phone with a Baltimore area businessman who had a Do It Yourself Business Website that he discovered had suddenly crashed. He had saved a lot of money by struggling with the technical difficulties of creating, launching, and maintaining his business website. He thought he had derived value by doing his business website by himself. Then, he discovered that he could not fix his defective do it yourself business website because he lacked the experience in diagnosing and repairing websites.

Don’t Let This Happen to You

You may think that you’re sensible to save money by having a do it yourself business website. In today’s reality, however, you should learn from other people’s lessons: Saving money in the short run with a do it yourself business website can cost you money later. This lesson is real. This lesson is no exaggeration.

Don’t let this happen to you and to your business website. Unless you, personally, have over 5 years of hands-on business website creation, launching, and maintaining, you should never do it yourself.

Brand Damage

The strongest danger in a do it yourself business website is brand damage. That business website that you saved money on by doing it yourself just may be causing serious damage to your brand. You may have brand damage to deal with if your business website that does not work properly, look visually appealing, and have specific content that is adapted to your target audience.

Brand damage is very difficult to repair. The best advice is: Don’t allow your brand to be damaged in the first place.

Trust a Professional

You can save yourself potential brand damage and costly website repairs down the road if you just make the correct decision: Don’t do a business website on your own. Trust a professional to help you succeed with your business website. You will end up saving money by wisely avoiding the dangers in do it yourself business websites.

Certainly one of the most profound of all the many, many lyrics written by Carly Simon is “We Have No Secrets” from 1972. In this poignant poem set to an irresistible melody, she warns of the sweet perils of being too honest in life.

I think that members of the younger generations who post on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and whatever other social media channels today need to memorize the entire lyrics from “We Have No Secrets” and maybe even learn the entire song to sing it themselves quietly and softly while they spend so much time online.

The wisdom that seems to evade most who post on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. (and not just members of younger geneartions) is that too much telling about yourself online can bring you troubles in the physical world we all live in. For example, a very hilarious commentary online, 5 Ways You Can Lose a Job on Facebook focuses only on Facebook and only on what you can post that will almost guarantee you lose your current employment.

But, telling too much about yourself online is not only an easy way to jeopardize your professional career and credibility. In general, you should aim for a healthy awareness about the risks of having no secrets online. I’m not advocating paranoia. Yet, I shall never forget a silly little rhyme that my late mother used to say to me in my childhood days: Fools names and fools faces always appear in public places.

Restraining yourself while you are posting commentaries about yourself and your life on social media channels is a sign that you have a keen mental health. It certainly may be fun to release your emotions online while revealing too much information about yourself. But, there is always a risk that someone you really don’t want to know what should be your secrets will happen to read what you posted.

So, I want you to go online today and buy Carly Simon’s “We Have No Secrets” so you can have that wonderfully wise song to guide you. While you are risking your credibility online as your fingers madly strike the keyboard, you need something to keep you from self-imposed danger.

I previously ran every day. So, I guess I can claim to know a few things about running shoes. I do know that buying the correct shoes for running or for any other athletic activity can mean the difference between physical injury and physical health. Choose to ignore this wisdom at your own peril.

As someone who has built websites for others since the 1990s, I can claim to know a few things about marketing using the Internet. And, it may surprise you to learn that I see a relationship between buying shoes for running and buying into the current craze about getting into social media.

Here’s the truth: You would never believe any person who told you that all you need to attain physical health is to buy the latest running shoes. Buying running shoes only gives you the ability to run while avoiding physical injury to your feet, your legs, and your entire body. But, the elusive reality is: You can buy the most expensive running shoes, yet the results that you can get from using those expensive running shoes depend more on what’s in your brain than what’s on your feet.

The same is true about the relationship between succeeding in marketing using the Internet and your use of social media, blogging, microblogging, and all the other wonderful things that you can do using the Web these days.

You could choose to believe all that hype online today and you could decide to start using Twitter or Facebook or Tumblr or WordPress or fill-in-the-blank this very afternoon. All of those are merely tools to help you interact with other people. The most important word in that sentence is the sixth word—tools.

You may have heard that wise old say about using the right tool for the job. If you are like me and at one time or another you may have tried to remove a nail tightly inserted into wood by using a pair of needle nose pliers, well, you know what I mean here.

Buying running shoes will not make you successful at running. Buying into social media, blogging, microblogging and whatever will not make you successful at using the Internet for marketing. That simple truth is right in front of most peoples’ eyes today. Ignoring that simple truth is so easy to do because of the sexy promises being made about the hottest new social media channels.

Because I understand that simple truth, I can save you a lot of money and wasted time. I can advise you about how to use the right tool for the job when the job is using the Internet for marketing.

My professional life drew inspiration from the writer that Ted Sorensen was. Although I never met him, I find that I am saddened today that he is gone.

There will be many words written about Ted Sorensen by others great and famous. I only want to pay my sincere respects today to his family, and to urge other writers to remember this man and to study how he wrote.

I would select one especially important work of his as a starting point for such remembrances and studies of Ted Sorensen:

He made crucial contributions to the crafting of the 1961 inauguration speech by President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. That work—considered one of the greatest presidential inauguration speeches in American history—contained simple, yet commandingly powerful words that floated like magic into the air on that cold January day in Washington, DC. So it was that words from a speech were elevated in importance due to their clarity combined with pinpointed accuracy. So it was that we saw well chosen and skillfully delivered words morph into an iconic signpost for the Kennedy presidency and that long ago era of youthful optimism:

“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”

Before business became as Web-centric as we now know it to be today, first came the late 1980s and PowerPoint. Since then, PowerPoint has revolutionized how business presentations are made. As the Paul McCartney lyric has taught us, “There is good and bad in everyone,” and this is certainly also true of PowerPoint.

The good traits are well known to everyone who relies upon PowerPoint: This amazing presentation software enables users to create image-based pages (slides) that easily can be shared by someone using a computer, projector and a screen. PowerPoint presentations also can be printed on paper and handed out. It also is very common to email a PowerPoint presentation to recipients so that they can view it on their own computer and print it if they so choose. These attributes of PowerPoint make it very popular in business, especially.

I believe that there are not necessarily accompanying bad traits to PowerPoint, itself. I have learned from professional experience, however, that bad things frequently can happen stemming from the misuse of PowerPoint. This combination of good and bad is a simultaneous outcome that delivers both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

PowerPoint came to be before the widespread use of the Internet for business and before Web browsers. So, it is tempting to think of this powerful presentation software that came to be in the offline environment as being separate and different from the online experience.

But, in reality, there are core similarities between Web pages and PowerPoint pages: Both can present words in text form along with images on pages, and both can give an audience audio and video content that easily can be replayed by the user at their convenience.

These capabilities are at the heart of the matter of why bad things can happen to good people who use PowerPoint. The most common negative outcome when using PowerPoint (and also Web pages) is what happens whenever the writer is not sufficiently skilled or talented.

The problem is not with Microsoft or with PowerPoint. The problems begin with any person who uses PowerPoint incorrectly. It turns out that not knowing how to write and produce successful PowerPoint presentations can create very serious business problems.

The most common business problem is PowerPoint presentations that contain pages upon pages of too many words. There can also be too many images placed into PowerPoint pages. The purpose of PowerPoint is to enable the sharing of visually powerful presentations. So, why oh why is it so prevalent that people put too much information into PowerPoint pages?

We have all seen PowerPoint presentations that run 20 or 30 or more pages. We have all attended presentations in meetings where the speaker will actually say, “I apologize to those of you in the back who cannot read all the words on this page.”

Verbally saying something does not change the audience experience. In fact, as soon as the presenter says something about what is wrong with the PowerPoint presentation’s text or images, the audience immediately will focus upon those deficiencies.

More to the point, there should never be any need whatsoever to apologize aloud to anyone in the audience during a PowerPoint presentation. The time to think about the audience and the viewing experience is during the writing and creation of PowerPoint presentations.

The need is very simple: If everyone in the intended audience cannot easily and quickly read all the words and see all the images on the page so that each person processes the intended meaning or messages on the page, then there is a fatal flaw built in to that PowerPoint page.

Such fatally flawed PowerPoint pages should never be presented in public. The problem is compounded by those who print and hand out PowerPoint presentations with too many words and images on too many pages. An unforgivable outcome is if someone emails you their PowerPoint presentation that is such a large file it clogs up and slows down how your email inbox performs.

These traits related to excess are easily preventable. The solution is only to trust people who have skills and talents in writing and creating PowerPoint to do this important work. Just because PowerPoint is relatively easy to use does not mean that everyone should use it in the business world.

Contact me if you want professional assistance in creating PowerPoint presentations or Web presentations and I will enable your own thrill of winning over your target audience while sparing you the agony of failure.

If you remember nothing else about social media, you should keep these things in the front of your mind:

1–First and foremost: Know exactly who your audience is. Understand at a very deep level what members of your audience expect to receive from you in online presentations. Once you know this, only then will you be able to create meaningful ways to develop relationships with the people who are in your target audience. You cannot rely upon software to help you. You need to be someone (or hire someone) who knows how and why people relationships work as they do.

2–Adapt ALL of your intended messages to appeal to your target audience based on your deep understanding. Don’t just write stuff that you think should be conveyed to your target audience. Be CERTAIN what you write for online presentation is adapted specifically to win over your target audience to your point of view if they are not already believers. Being “relatable” to people in your target audience is crucial. In other words, do what it takes for you to create successful relationships with people in your target audience so that you can win them over by meeting the needs and desires that they have.

3–Submerge your own ego. You must always focus first on how you can adapt what you post on social media to win over your target audience. What you get out of the writing (ego gratification and money) should not motivate you or your will fail.

4–Measure the impact of your efforts! Measuring what has happened (as opposed to just guessing at what has happened) is vital if you are to succeed in strategic communications online. There are many different ways to measure your impact on Twitter and Facebook.

I can help you make your social media usage effective for your business. Just contact me to get started.

If you do not already have a free account on Twitter and Facebook, go today to their websites, and sign up using your real first and last name. With Facebook, you have many options of what you can use their services for. With Twitter, you are limited to posting text messages that run no more than 140 characters including punctuation and spaces. There are now ways to “cheat” that 140-character limitation so you can send audio and video using Twitter. Tumblr is a very useful social media channel to use because this one gives you more capabilities compared to what you get with Twitter without sacrificing simplicity and ease of use. Plus, you can feed Tumblr into Twitter and Facebook so that you only need to enter your posts in one convenient place online.

If you already have video that you can use to promote yourself and your organization, you should also consider using YouTube. But, do not invest money to have someone produce videos for you.

The other sound business purpose for using Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook (and perhaps also YouTube) is to swim in the same waters as the users of those social media channels. You can and will learn many things from spending time with social media that you otherwise would never learn. Think of using social media channels like these as the least expensive kind of audience research available to you today.

Journalists are using social media for a variety of purposes that you need to know about if you are involved in a business that needs to control branding, reputation management, and outreach. Those who write and produce the news for mainstream media channels like newspapers, radio, and television are already researching topics using social media.

Don’t Be Invisible

If you do not have a social media presence right now, you run the fatal risk of appearing to be completely invisible in today’s world. Don’t let this happen to you or to your organization or business. The reality is that the only “cost” for you to use social media is time and energy. The three most tangible business benefits of using both Twitter and Facebook (creating buzz online, driving visitor traffic to your website, and, conducting audience research) make your need to jump into these tools a top priority if you want to become successful in using the Web to reach your target audience.

I have a closing suggestion for you: Pay attention to “Ten Essential Rules for Brands in Social Media” for practical advice in marketing your brand using Twitter and Facebook. Then, go out there and be highly visible today! If you need my help or want to draw upon my professional experience helping others attain relevant visibility online, just contact me and I will share what I have done that worked for others.