It's up to YOU. Lead the way!

How you show up online counts. Just because people cannot see your face, doesn’t mean they can’t SEE you.

There is more written and photographic evidence of you, your history, your behaviour, your everything online, than if you had a store that people only met you briefly off the street in.

“Every time you post a photo, or update your status, you are contributing to your own digital footprint and personal brand.” A.Martin

So I'm wondering...

How are you showing up? 

Are you showing up to serve your community?

Are you there to give?

Are you there to take care of the big and the small?

What is the digital footprint you are creating for yourself?

Are you showing up as a leader?

It may not seem like it, or it may not have occurred to you but your own leadership development is essential to your businesses success online.

Great leadership means you openly respect and show gratitude for your online community.

Great leadership means you appreciate the little things are just as important as the big things, and you don’t wait around for someone else to take care of them YOU take care of them.

Great leadership means you can articulate what’s valuable to your online community and share it with them.

Great leadership means you know how to manage your language and tonality through the tough times as well as the fun times.

Great leadership also means you have standards that you show up with, are a shining example of, and are uncompromising about.

What standards do you have in place for:

- Answering questions

- Expressing gratitude

- Celebrating your communities successes

- Respecting peoples beliefs

You are the leader of your online community. You set the standard. You teach everyone else how to treat each other. 

It’s up to YOU. Lead the way!

If you hadn’t thought about your position as a leader online then I trust this blog has inspired you to take a moment to reflect on how you are showing up and the standards you have in place for yourself and your community.

If there's anything you would like me to blog about to assist you in your online business developments then please leave me a message in the comments below.

If you find my blogs valuable hit the share button and help me reach more people.

With gratitude

Teash xx

Are you compelled to stop?

Are you trying to get people to STOP and look at your business by throwing it in their face?

CHECK OUT THIS COOL THING!!

HERE'S WHAT WE OFFER!!

STOP!!

LOOK HERE!!

In this day and age people using Social Media are absolutely drowning in a raging torrent of content before their eyes. Have you watched yourself as you scroll through your home page? Have you ever stopped to appreciate the sheer speed at which you process information? The only way to keep up with it all is to develop your “scanning muscle”.

You know what you like, the words, the picture, the expressions, the story, so you’re only going to stop scrolling when it catches your eye and compels you to stop.

For a business owner to compel you to stop long enough to “come in and stay awhile and get to know them” is a really tough gig.

That’s why this check list is crucial to consider. How you set up your virtual business environment is everything. 

Ask yourself these 4 questions

1. Are you driving your MISSION with burning PASSION?

2. Does your mission embrace others with a sense of BELONGING?

3. Do your followers feel as though they can significantly CONTRIBUTE to that mission?

4. Are you rewarding your followers when they do contribute and making them feel SIGNIFICANT?

Mission, Passion, Contribution, Significance, Belonging - these words alone create a compelling feeling inside of you - can you feel it?

Imagine the virtual environment you can create for your followers and the stories they would be compelled to share when they feel passionately about belonging to a significant mission that they contribute to.

I would love to hear what your mission is. Leave me a comment below :)

5 Simple Steps to creating your Advertising Masterpiece

Advertising is an art and the best ads really are like Masterpiece’s. You see it, you know it’s an ad, but you can’t look away. It sucks you in. 

There are top marketers and human behaviour specialists that have done extensive research into what languages, sounds and images to use for each product and person out there. They know what we want to hear /see and they set out to tell/show us exactly that.

For those of you just getting started on creating advertisements for your business, here is a great structure to get you started into creating great ads. This could be useful for brochures, flyers, online video ads…

So here are the 5 simple steps to help you create a Masterpiece Ad of your own.

1. KNOW who you’re talking to. 
- What picture or graphic is going to make them stop? 
- What keywords will spark their interest?
- What’s their main concern that if they had an answer to it all their christmases would come at once.

2. State the PROBLEM they’re experiencing.
- Don’t you hate it when…?
- Is this happening for you?
- Are you tired of…?

3. Demonstrate your expertise.
- Show them that you know what you’re talking about. 
- Give examples of the results you have achieved for others.

4. Present the solution.
- What’s your cool thing that will help them?
- Give them an opportunity to know if it’s a match for them.
- Let them know who it’s not a match for.

5. Call to action
- Show them how to find out more
- What do they click on next?
- Who do they call?

Have a closer look at ads next time you’re flicking past them on Facebook. Have a go at identifying which parts of the structure they’ve used.

What made you flick past it? 

What made you stop?

What sparked your interest? 

What turned you off?

Notices which ads have the most likes, comments and shares. 

Notice the colours that stand out the most.

Notice the emotional trigger an image gives you.

Which video ads get the most engagement?

There’s so much we can learn and model from what’s out there. Allocate some time especially to discovering what’s working and what’s not.

Observe, play with it, test it out, tweak it up, learn & grow.

Happy Creating!

Hater's gonna hate.

There are some really nasty people out there - as you know.

There are people who make it their life’s mission to misbehave on people’s Youtube video’s, Facebook Ad’s, Photo’s, Blog’s you name it they’ll defame it.

They’ll post nasty comments, dumb comments, death threats, pornographic pictures, bad reviews that you just cannot get rid of and sooooo much more, yep I’ve seen it all.

In some instances you can delete the comments and in some you can’t. 

I would highly recommend you take nasty comments with a “grain of salt” and where possible DELETE & BAN. Do not hesitate to remove them from your space and if they keep finding a way back in REPORT them. And if you don’t know what to do ASK FOR HELP.

If you cannot remove them from the space (due to restrictions from the site you might be on) then flat out ignore them. 

Fires can only burn where fuel is provided. Douse it quickly, with your silence.

You owe them nothing.

You also cannot SAVE them.

Save your energy for those who are genuinely looking for your help.

If the haters want saving they will be inspired by your graceful example of calm leadership and they will come to you. 

Not sure which course of action to take?  Sometimes you need to:

Need further advice? Send me a message on my page Social Vibes. 

How a Rockstar was made.

Ok Ok not really a Rockstar LOL It's just me...Teash...the one they say rocks and they call Star...It's my journey from zero belief in myself to a list of skills I could never have imagined possible!

It was about 12 years ago where it all started for me. I was a single Mum with one child on the pension and it was challenging. I did not think I had any REAL skills, you know the ones that could offer me employment in anything other than waiting tables, washing dishes or cleaning hotel rooms.  

However a friend of mine saw the potential in connecting me to the world wide web and bought me a very basic computer for $200. To say I was grateful would be an understatement.

Life as I knew it completely changed from that moment. The first thing I did was enrol myself in a distance education course studying Information technology. In my holidays I would enter competitions to win my son the toys that I couldn’t afford to buy him. In 2 years I spent about 9 months of that entering competitions (I did quite well by the way, around $8000 in prizes).

What that gave me was so much more than some cool prizes. There was a massive online community around 20,000 people who were registered in the forum. I was really fired up and passionate about helping people succeed in that space. I would help people in the forum, teach them what they needed to know, make their lives a little easier and I did it because I loved doing it.

It didn’t take long for the team running the site to invite me to join the team and become a forum admin. I absolutely loved doing that and found I had lots of opportunity to use my new skills from my course in IT to assist the users and I loved being a part of the team keeping the site running smoothly, archiving old competition listings and moving things around if they were posted by a user in the wrong place. 

I completed another IT certification that was specifically for IT Support and then moved up again to the next level of certification and almost finished that too (life kinda found a new priority for me just before I finished the last module so I chose to let it go) then when the space was clear to study some more I found The Coaching Institute and enrolled in the Diploma of Life Coaching. 

That was 4 years ago now and at that time TCI did not have much of a presence on Facebook. One weekend a couple of us enthusiasts that were longing for the connection of other coaches gathered together and with the inspired challenge from Sharon Pearson to fill a Facebook Group with 1000 coaches in 3 days we set to work, and yes, by midnight Sunday we had filled the group.

Again I had a platform to do what I loved which was to help people get the most out of the space and connect them with the resources they needed. Within around 6 months of just being me and doing what I loved - helping people, I was invited to join the TCI Team.

Fast forward 4 years and I have been blessed with the incredible mentoring, teaching, opportunities and support of being a team member with TCI and employed to do exactly what I love. My skills have increased exponentially to include successful strategies in Social Media Marketing, Community development, Leadership development, Team Culture development, Brand Culture development, Content curation, production and design. TCI's Social Media presence and the standard it is delivered in is as world class as the service it provides. 

Now the space has opened up for me to do something more, I now have an opportunity to teach people these awesome strategies and help people learn and get the most out of Social Media for their businesses so they too can have outstanding results. 

And so Social Vibes has been born and with this new platform I want to help people create a business environment that cares for their clients no matter how much distance is between them. As the world becomes more digitally focused we must focus on learning how to draw our attention in even closer to serving from the heart even when it cannot be seen, heard or felt in real life. 

Via Social Vibes service I will do that by assisting small business owners to begin their social media platforms with great strategies in place that allow that servants heart to shine through setting up standards in communication and service delivery and bringing a Virtual WOW element in all they do. 

I will teach this without the overuse of tech jargon and make it simple and easy to do, no matter where they’re at, in terms of marketing or IT skills.

Using the hashtag #BuildTheTribe the tips out there are available to find easily if you know how (if you don’t know how to use hashtags or what they are you can find it out in my very simple explanation blog right HERE).

I look forward to making many many lives so much easier. Perhaps even YOUR life :) Please feel free to connect with me on Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, Pinterest & Twitter. 

Chat soon!

Hashtags - What are they and what's the fuss?

You’ve heard about them. 

You’ve seen them.

You may have even tried to USE them.

You’ve probably seen them OVERUSED. #afullsentencehashtag

What on earth are they???

Well…let me explain.

I’ll leave the jargon right out of it too.

A hashtag is a word, any word or string of words, that has a # symbol in front of it. 

Anyone can decide which word or topic they want to use as a hashtag. 

You’ll find hashtags used on places like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google + and Tumblr (just to name a few) and the idea is that, if you post a post and include the hashtag in it, then when you go to the hashtag stream, you will see all the other posts on, let’s say Facebook, that everyone else has posted, who also used that hashtag in their post.

Let me give you an example to make that even clearer. 

 I use #BuildTheTribe on some of my posts and my mission is to build up a whole bunch of useful tips on how you can build your tribe on social media. So rather than you having to scroll through my Social Vibes page to find all the great tips, all you need to do is type #BuildTheTribe into the search bar at the top of your Facebook page.

Then what you will get is a whole stream of posts that have used that hashtag.

Have a go right now.

See it?

Cool huh? :)

The other way to quickly access the hashtag stream is to click on the hashtag when you see it. Have you noticed that the word is blue when it’s a hashtag? That’s because it has turned into a link, like the same as you would see a link to a page on the internet. 

You will notice there are people you don’t know in that hashtag stream. This is your opportunity to check them out, like a networking event for Social Media :) You might like what they do and want to connect. Boom. Virtual Networking.

Like anything it’s very easy to use once you know how. So go ahead and click on the next hashtag you see..you won’t break the internet! 

Happy Hashtagging folks :)