Episode 116 - Bernie Borges on Social Optimization for SMB and Faith in Community

Transcript

Susan Bratton: Welcome to Dishy Mix. I’m your host Susan Bratton, and on today’s show you’re going to get to meet Bernie Borges. Bernie is the chief find officer at a company called Find and Convert. It’s an inbound marketing agency that focuses on search marketing and social media marketing. You know I love the intersection of search and social, and Bernie knows all about it and we’re going to talk about it today. And you’re going to be happy because we’re going to talk about it with a spin on small and medium business, not on the big boy brands that gots all the money. So Bernie has a lot of great clients and some amazing examples of search social strategies for small and medium business, and that’s going to be the bulk of our conversation today. I think you’re going to like it a lot. Bernie’s a podcaster; I’ve been on his show called Find and Convert. He’s a blogger. He’s a frequent speaker; I’ve seen him a lot. And he has a brand new book called Marketing 2.0: Bridging the Gap Between Seller and Buyer Through Social Media Marketing. It’s just out and I’m excited to be one of the first people to talk to Bernie about the book, and I of course have secured a couple of personally autographed copies for you, my Dishy Mix fans. All you have to do if you’d like a copy of Bernie’s book, and he will personally autograph it for you, is go to dishymixfan.com and write your desire, and Bernie and I will pick our favorites and you will get the book. So lets get him on the show because we’re really going to talk today about SEO becoming SO; you’ll find out about that for small and medium business. Welcome Bernie.

Bernie Borges: Well thank you Susan. It’s great to be on the number one marketing podcast in the planet.

Susan Bratton: Says Lee Odden…

Bernie Borges: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: Says Lee Odden’s poll.

Bernie Borges: And a few voters along the way.

Susan Bratton: A lot of you voters, exactly. Well that’s how you and I met each other. There was a bit of a run-off over the holidays…

Bernie Borges: A bake-off.

Susan Bratton: and we were both nominated. Well we were in a bake-off together, and you know what’s so funny, one of the things that I love about your book, Marketing 2.0, is that the little guys on the cover look like gingerbread men to me; it reminds me of the little gingerbread men in Shrek.

Bernie Borges: Okay. I didn’t have that in mind, but okay.

Susan Bratton: Anything with cookies is good for me Bernie. So I want to get right into this, this thing that you’re calling SO, because you have a point of view and it’s brilliant, I totally agree with it and you’ve changed my way of thinking. So tell me this SEO becomes SO concept.

Bernie Borges: Yeah, well everybody knows what SEO is, and of course, you know, SEO, the way companies get SEO results, we know what that is, you know, on page optimization, off page optimization, and that was, you know, really affective and, you know, relatively easy to do for, you know, many years, but then recently what’s happened is the web has gotten so broad with so much content that the way we’ve traditionally done SEO really isn’t good enough anymore because people don’t limit their searching and the information that they get on the web to just search engines. So now we have to do what we call, what I call creating a broad footprint to be found on the web, not just in place of like Google, Yahoo and Bing, but all the other places; Wikipedia, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Linked In, Face Book, other search engines like Cosmic and, you know, and bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit. So SO is really search optimization across the entire web with a broad footprint.

Susan Bratton: So it sounds like a daunting tasking. Obviously this what you do at Find and Convert; how does a marketer create this broad SO footprint?

Bernie Borges: Well they really have to have sort of what I call a different mindset, they have to think differently as a marketer, they really have to think like a publisher and they have to think like a collaborator, a relationship company. So as a publisher they have to think in ways that they can produce or aggregate lots of relevant content, interesting content, content that does what I call the three E’s; educate, enlighten or entertain. And then just produce a lot of that content, share that content, promote that content, propagate that content, and then by doing that consistently – and it does take work, there’s not getting around it, but it does take work – and by doing it consistently you create a broad footprint that can really attract people to your business across the entire web. But it is what I call a mindset shift.

Susan Bratton: So it’s really that mindset shift that you talk about in your new book, Marketing 2.0. Give us some kind of key takeaways from the book around this psychological shift that we’re going through.

Bernie Borges: Yeah, well one of them is that a lot of businesses – and I kind of geared the book toward small/medium size businesses, and the reason is through a lot of my speaking engagements, often times most of the audience that I speak to are SMB’s, small/medium business executives. And I’ve noticed, I mean even now, we’re recording this podcast late in August 2009, there’s still a lot of people in the SMB space that haven’t quite really, you know, come to understand what you and I and most of your, all of your podcast listeners understand as social media marketing. So there’s this big gap out there and they think, they’re still thinking sort of the old way. The problem is buyers have changed, buyers don’t think the old way. You know, buyers conduct research on the internet, they ask their friends for recommendations, and then they can filter out sellers messages very, very easily, but then buyers, a lot of sellers are still selling the old fashioned way. So there’s this gap and they have to think differently. Sellers need to adapt this new mindset shift and think like a publisher and focus on building relationships. Another problem Susan is that they think in terms of old style metrics; “I need to produce leads. I need to produce sales.” Of course they all need to produce sales, but, you know, they, they’re focused on the tactics that only produce that outcome as opposed to now engaging people on the web through great content, building great relationships and then measuring the outcome of those relationships. You can still put campaigns in place, but you’re not selling, you’re building relationships, again, through education, through enlightenment and entertainment.

Susan Bratton: What’s a good way to create content and generate a lead from it? What’s the most common that you’re seeing that works well, that’s easy to implement?

Bernie Borges: Well that kind of leads me to a process that I talk about in the book and that we use with our clients, and, you know, I call it old school meets new school. You know, new school is this new mindset shift of Marketing 2.0. Old school is that, you know, you have to develop a plan, and to develop a plan – and by that I mean a strategy – you’ve got to do your homework, you’ve got to do some research. So what we recommend doing is, you know, first of all, you know, identify all the basics of your business, you know, your strengths, your weaknesses, opportunities, threats, you know, who your competition is. Then take your most desirable keywords and limit it to a list of maybe, you know, fifteen or twenty, not two hundred. Take those keywords and then do a bunch of research across the web and organize your research across the platforms like Twitter, Face Book, Linked In, blogs, forms, directories, video, photos, podcasts, and then create another category that we call ‘rockstars’, okay. And do a bunch of research, and first really just assemble all this, you know, data, if you will, like organize it, literally in a spreadsheet – that’s why I mean old school meets new school is really the process that I’m speaking to here – and then do a deep dive on what you’ve assembled and see what you learn. So once you learn what’s going on in these communities then the light bulbs start to go and the type of content that a business should produce, okay. Can I give you an example?

Susan Bratton: Please.

Bernie Borges: Okay, so a company who makes enzyme products, and they’re very successful, and so we helped the develop a social media strategy and they wanted to do a blog and we thought it was a great idea, so we went out and did this research and what we found was that there were two sort of communities out there; there were a clinical, there was a clinical community, which is a group of people who are very sort of technical and were interested in enzymes at a very detailed, you know, medical, technical, clinical level. But then there was a community mostly of moms, and the moms were the people that, you know, go to the store and make these purchase decisions. And the moms were hanging out in forums. So by doing this research we were able to advise this client to develop two blog strategies; one very clinical, targeted to that community, and one very consumer oriented, targeted to that community. And had we not done that research, if the company just said, “Lets put up a blog” they probably would’ve mixed the two together in one blog and they wouldn’t have had an effective blog because they wouldn’t have been able to appeal to one single community.

Susan Bratton: Got it. So essentially all of this analysis that you’re doing, where you come up with your keywords and then you go to all these places just to see what the conversation is about it, that’s the audit; that’s the audit for not only what’s out there, but what people aren’t talking about that might be the opportunity. And then your rockstars are the people who are having the conversations.

Bernie Borges: That’s exactly right. Say that we were marketing some kind of a marketing oriented product and we discover that Susan Bratton is a rockstar in, you know, New Media Marketing. So then we would look…

Susan Bratton: Interview techniques; I’m a rockstar in interview techniques.

Bernie Borges: There, you absolutely are.

Susan Bratton: Or working on it.

Bernie Borges: So then we go, so we identify that Susan Bratton is a rockstar. So now we go and using certain tools, and there’s a number of tools that we use, and we find where Susan Bratton is on the web. And then we go study the content that Susan Bratton is not only producing, but also interested in, and we basically begin to, you know, learn what makes Susan Bratton tick. And then we look for ways to engage with Susan Bratton through content and relationships building. Not through a sales pitch, not through a phone call, you know, the old way; but, you know, looking for ways to engage Susan Bratton the way Susan Bratton wants to be engaged because we’ve done our homework.

Susan Bratton: That makes a lot of sense. And then creating that content and then putting it maybe not on your blog, maybe in different places.

Bernie Borges: Exactly.

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Bernie Borges: Exactly. We refer to that again as creating the broad footprint, because, again, if you have a blog and a Twitter account and a Face Book fan page, as you know, there’s lots of ways to spread that, and one of those ways is through bookmarking, you know, where you can bookmark content across a number of sites and it’s amazing how that can have such an exponential affect. I was recently in a presentation, I showed a slide that showed some analytics of traffic coming to our website at Find and Convert, and Digg was one of the top ten traffic referral sources for this period of time. And even though it wasn’t in the top five, it was closer to the bottom, it had the best performance because the people who came from Digg had the most pages viewed and had the lowest bounce rate, and also amongst the highest time spent. And so again, it’s just an example of how when you bookmark content, which is just another one way, one of many ways to spread the content across the web so that you can be more easily found and engage with people who are interested in engaging with you and your content.

Susan Bratton: I don’t really understand how it works Bernie. So lets just say you use Stumble Upon or Delicious for bookmarking; what exactly are you doing? Are you going out and tagging all of the content about a particular subject?

Bernie Borges: Well it begins with the basics of registering, setting up an account with each one of those, and I say that because that alone is tedious if a business has not done that before, so that’s point number one. Then once you’ve got your account set up with each one of those, then you take your contents selectively – it may not be every single piece of content; it may be, you know, a blog post or just some kind of a link to some content that you have – and you submit it to each of those so that it gets basically registered with that content sharing site. So once it’s registered then it’s there, and whether people click on it and find your website that way, as in the example that I gave, or it just simply has the ability to be indexed and, again, create that broad footprint to allow your content to spread as much as possible so that as many people that have interest in it can find it.

Susan Bratton: So you create things like a blog post, a white paper, a place on your website, and you register at Stumble Upon and Delicious; are there any other ones? Or are those the two big ones?

Bernie Borges: There’s Read It, there’s a whole bunch of them. We have a list of about thirty of them.

Susan Bratton: Okay. And is it worth, is there a point of diminishing return where there’s only two or three that make a difference if we don’t have a lot of time?

Bernie Borges: There are the top, you know, three or five, but when we’re engaged in a full blown social media marketing strategy we’re going to go after about thirty of them because, again, we really want to create a broad footprint.

Susan Bratton: Okay. I know you keep coming back to that…

Bernie Borges: Yup.

Susan Bratton: which is good, it helps to keep, you know, putting that down, broad footprint, broad footprint, I’m getting it….

Bernie Borges: Exactly.

Susan Bratton: So then I have this content that I’ve created and I go to these sites three or thirty and I essentially post them up to those sites. Then what happens?

Bernie Borges: Then they get indexed by the search engines and they get found by people who are spending time across the web…

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Bernie Borges: So, the point is that’s just part of the strategy, you know…

Susan Bratton: I understand, it was a part I didn’t understand though, so….

Bernie Borges: Yeah, yeah. But it just, it really contributes. I guess the point that I want to emphasize in case I wasn’t clear the first time I said this is when you do bookmarking that way, the exponential spread, the exponential broadness to the footprint is really impressive.

Susan Bratton: And when you say the exponential broadness what you’re saying is that you’re getting more search results, you’re, more people are finding that particular piece of content because you’ve submitted it to all those sites.

Bernie Borges: That’s right, coming back to the whole SEO is really, has become SO, search optimization, because when you spread your content across as many places across the web as you can… You know, we got into this discussion of bookmarking on content sharing sites like Digg and Read It, but, you know, there’s Face Book and there’s Linked In and there’s blogs and forums and of course there’s Twitter, and so there’s many different ways. You know, I was talking to a client just earlier today about a case study that they’d written and he was showing me the PDF, and then we talked about ways that we can take that one case study, that one PDF and upload it into Scribe Share and, you know, tweet about it and of course create a blog post about it and then do all that bookmarking. So here’s one little case study that’s four pages long, it’s a PDF, and we talked about ways to just really spread that content, you know, exponentially across the web so that more people can find it and it can create more SSEO value in terms of linked use value back to the website.

Susan Bratton: I totally get it now. That was what brought it home for me. Thank you. So Bernie, one of the things that you’ve done is your homework for this interview, which I really appreciate, and that is that you’ve brought some case studies of small and medium businesses and examples of how you’ve created or they’ve created their broad footprint in this new SO strategy. I want to get into these; GCA, Indium, Batch Blue, these sound so interesting to me. We’re going to go to a break, and when we come back you have some really concrete examples of strategies and I can’t wait to hear more about that. We’re going to go to a break to thank our sponsors. I’m your host Susan Bratton. We’re with Bernie Borges; he’s with Find and Convert, and we’ll be right back with some case studies.

Susan Bratton: We’re back. Bernie, tell us a really good story.

Bernie Borges: Okay great. First of all, we call these results in motion because they are in motion and constantly moving. So the first one I’ll tell you about is a company that’s actually a client of ours, they’re called GCA Technology Services. They’re about a thirty person company, so they’re, you know, small to midsize, and they provide hardware and software training and consulting and their CEO, a fellow named Jim, I had been kind of preaching to him for quite some time about, you know, kind of getting on the bandwagon of this new mindset shift in Marketing 2.0. One day he literally came to me Susan and said, “Bernie, I get it now”, okay, after lots of resources that I’d given to him. And to kind of fast forward on what they’ve done is he literally turned over his marketing department; now he only had three people in marketing, but he turned them over, and he brought in four new people who have a real, you know, affinity towards social media marketing and that had proven that they’d had experience in it. And now they’ve developed a whole new website in addition to their corporate website that’s, you know, theme specific. They’re developing a blog, they’re developing a video, and again, it’s a result in motion. I mean they’re in the early stages, but the action that they’ve taken is really impressive. The other one that I’ll tell you about is actually, it’s not my favorite but it’s very close to the top. It’s a company called Indium Corporation. They’re a 75 year old manufacturing company, so obviously they’ve been around, meaning they’ve done sales and marketing the old fashion way for many years. But about five years ago, which makes them kind of an early adopter, about five years ago their Marcom director, a real smart guy named Rick Short, started blogging, and he eventually invited another engineer to start blogging who was initially resistant to do so. And I should tell you that they make a very technical product; they make solder paste and they sell solder paste to manufacturers around the world that make electronic assembly equipment, and the sale is a very technical sale – in fact Rick says that most of the time they’re selling to PhD engineers, so it’s a really technical sale. And so Rick started blogging, he invited an engineer to start blogging and then soon other engineers started blogging, and fast forward five years later, they have ten blogs. They have fifteen people, fourteen of which are engineers ‘cause Rick is the other one who blogs on marketing stuff. They also produce entertaining video; they thought, you know, “Can we do entertaining video and, you know, appeal to PhD’s?”, and the answer is yes. So their strategy has been so successful for them; they’ve revamped their whole sales and marketing process, they’ve restructured the way they sell, they have cut marketing costs dramatically, their SEO results – meaning where they rank in Google for desirable keywords – is very high because of all the content that’s being produced on blogs and video. They get invited to speak, they get invited to write, you know. And when they go out and travel around the world, ‘cause they sell around the world, what they hear over and over again from their prospects and customers is, “You guys are everywhere.” So they have created Susan this broad footprint in a technical B to B niche market, so anybody who says, you know, this stuff is not for B to B, they need to go check out Indium Corp, and it is indium.com, and check out their blogs and learn more about them ‘cause they’re getting outstanding results.

Susan Bratton: That’s a really good story. Yes, if solder paste can use social media, anybody can.

Bernie Borges: Exactly…

Susan Bratton: I love it.

Bernie Borges: Exactly.

Susan Bratton: What else do you have for me? I think these stories are the most interesting.

Bernie Borges: Yeah okay, so a really cool company in the New England area called Batch Book; their product is called Batch Blue, which is a software product, and it’s a CRM software product….

Susan Bratton: So Bernie, I have to tell you I talked about Batch Blue last week on my show. I did a like Susan Bratton solo breakout show last week, and Batch Blue, I’d heard about it from when I interviewed Chris Brogan, I interviewed him a couple weeks ago and he told me about Batch Blue ‘cause I was bemoaning the whole, like, you have to take your business card from somebody and type it in and then go link to all these different places and it’s such a hassle. And I really love the product so far. I’m a brand new customer. And so it’s so funny that you’re using them for a case study for a small business using SO.

Bernie Borges: That’s right, that’s right. Well first of all, I hope you didn’t forget Susan that I’m one of your, if not your biggest fan, one of your biggest fans, so I heard that interview, so I already knew that you had become aware of Batch Book; I knew that, I did my homework…

Susan Bratton: Thank you very Bernie.

Bernie Borges: But yes, they’re in my book because they’re really doing some effective and cool things in what I call Marketing 2.0. First of all they’re a young small company, and they think Marketing 2.0; they have this mindset and it permeates not only in their culture, but in their product. And so their product is a software product, is in itself very social, it’s very culturally driven that way. So they’re very, very active on, you know, all the social platforms; Twitter, Face Book and Linked In. But one thing they do in particular that is impressive – they have a great blog by the way, a fantastic blog, and they have a great newsletter. So they’re doing all those things really well, but every other Tuesday night from 8pm to 10pm…

Susan Bratton: Oh yeah.

Bernie Borges: they have a Twitter stream that’s called @sbbuzz, and they invite any small/medium business to join into that Twitter stream and just get engaged in the conversation. And so they’re simply out there both creating content and engaging people in a really human and available way and it’s working; they’re successful, they’re growing, their brand is building. You know, the rockstars like Susan Bratton, you know, are becoming aware of them and using them and here we are talking about them. And so it’s just a great example of a little tiny company who can have a broad footprint and can have, you know, a big impact on their market share and their growth.

Susan Bratton: I really love the idea of that, and I know they’re doing some webinars too, and I was thinking that a lot of people are creating webinars, especially for example in the information product world, they’re creating webinars and then they’re recording them and then they’re making them available at a virtual, you know, in a virtual way. Wouldn’t it be interesting if you could replay a webinar and then while your webinar was kind of replaying, playing back, you could be Twittering or live chatting with everybody as they’re listening so you could be fully present to the chat stream or the Twitter stream that’s happening while they’re listening to something you’ve prerecorded?

Bernie Borges: Yeah, yeah.

Susan Bratton: That could be kind of cool.

Bernie Borges: Well I’m sure they’re going to listen to this podcast, so I think you’ve just given them a great idea.

Susan Bratton: There you go. Always got as many of them for free as you can  have…

Bernie Borges: That’s right.

Susan Bratton: So tell me if you’re, you know, the brand called You, and a consultant, an individual, a web celebrity, you know, how do you recommend that some… Do you have any good examples of someone who might be a sole, you know, a sole proprietor or something like that who’s using SO well?

Bernie Borges: Yeah, I’ll give you a couple of examples. You know, I’m located here in beautiful Tampa Florida and I’m very active in local community, so I’ve gotten to know a local attorney by the name of Brent Britton, and he’s in my book and I call him Attorney 2.0. Now he’s with a firm, but nonetheless what he does really well Susan is he brands himself like no one I’ve ever seen as an attorney. He has a blog, he’s very active on Twitter. He podcasts regularly, he’s done some video. He’s, you know, a very frequent user of most of the popular social networking sites. He speaks frequently, you know, he’ll meet you for breakfast, you know, whereas most attorneys – and he’s very successful. Most attorneys, you know, won’t talk to you or meet with you if it’s not in their office and, you know, generally on the clock. And then the other thing that he does that is really effective, which is to me totally unheard of, is that he’s going to give you a certain amount of advice for free. In other words, he’s going to share with you some of his intellectual property – and by the way, he is an intellectual property attorney – so he’s going to share some of his own intellectual property with you through his blog and through his tweets and, you know, over coffee sometime, and all of that comes back to him tenfold Susan, and he gets that and that’s the whole point, that he has that mindset, he understands that. I think he’s rare as an attorney and I think very few attorneys have the mindset. So that’s one example. Another example is a real estate agent who coincidentally is located also here in Florida, although not here in Tampa. And again, it is a coincidence because I was looking for somebody in real estate and this was the best example that I found: a gal named Chris Griffith. She is a content machine. She has three websites Susan, three websites, one blog, she’s a guest writer in a local publication in her market, she’s very active on Twitter and Face Book, and the result for her is that if you’re looking for anything related to real estate or community related in her area, Bonita Springs Florida, I mean you can’t help but find her and once you see her content you’re going to want to work with her. So the result is she is by far the number one realtor in that marketplace and her business in 2008 was three times what it was in 2007, and I want to remind you that in 2008 the real estate market in Florida, as well as some other markets but particularly in Florida, was one of the hardest hit and yet her business was up three times over what it was in 2007.

Susan Bratton: What if you’re not a good writer? ‘Cause so much of this is about content creation and then creating that broad footprint.

Bernie Borges: Yeah. Well there are a lot of groups that already exist in social networking sites like Linked In and Face Book of course and there’s a lot of content that other people produce and share on Twitter, so you can aggregate and re-purpose content; so you don’t have to be a good writer, you don’t have to be a blogger, you can find blogs that you subscribe to and then go and become active. Again, it comes back to identifying the community that’s relevant and looking for ways to engage with them. You know, as I used that example, if we were marketing something that Susan Bratton was someone that we wanted to connect with because Susan Bratton is very influential, then we’re going to look for ways to reconnect with Susan Bratton, whether, even if we don’t have blog content, you know, maybe we send you a link to this really cool video – we didn’t produce it by the way, but it’s a cool video, and you’re just going to remember that Bernie Borges sent it to you if that was the case, okay…

Susan Bratton: Got it.

Bernie Borges: And then maybe the next time, you know, I send you something else, and then all of the sudden, you know, like, I’m all on your radar because I send you relevant content.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, so you might not be a writer but you can be a curator.

Bernie Borges: Exactly, exactly.

Susan Bratton: Got it. So when I asked you what other profession you would’ve liked to have had if you hadn’t been this SO expert running your national agency and authoring books about Marketing 2.0, you told me that you would like to be a college professor. I know you love to educate people; what do you think that is? What is it that you get from doing that?

Bernie Borges: I get a high from it. I love to speak. And, you know, I generally get good feedback when I speak because what I really focus on is connecting dots. You know, ultimately what I set out to achieve in my book Marketing 2.0 was to connect dots because when I speak on the subject I speak to audiences who often times, you know, have not connected the dots. So to your question, you know, if I was a college professor that’s what I would really, you know, get out of it is the high of really helping people learn something, you know, subject matter that I’m teaching.

Susan Bratton: You know speaking of school, school’s really been important to you and I loved what you told me about what you thought your greatest achievement was. Would you tell us that story?

Bernie Borges: Yeah. I put myself through college, and I self funded my college education through a private university, not a state university, and I did it at night, and I did it twelve months a year; the only break was labor day weekend because I went Fall semester, Spring semester and then Summer session one and Summer session two and then it was Labor Day and then the Fall semester started all over again. And I was working full time at the time. And so, you know, it was a long, at the time it seemed like forever, you know, seven years, especially when you’re young and you’re in your 20’s and, you know, most of your friends are going out partying after work and that kind of thing. But, you know, I really stayed focused and committed to my goal, and I just kept at it. And when I did – and I had a lot of doubters in my life. I mean even my parents were kind of, you know, a little bit doubting that I would finish, mainly because of the, you know, distractions all around me – but I did and I really took a valuable lesson away from that, and that is, you know, if you are really committed to your goals, you know, you’ll work hard… It taught me that I can really work hard and accomplish whatever I set out to accomplish.

Susan Bratton: Here’s another question for you too: you told me that the trait that you most value in your friends is love. How do your friends show their love for you?

Bernie Borges: You know, the subject of love is one that I think that most people don’t talk about, especially in a business setting. And so, but your question is how do my friends show love, and, you know, I think it’s mostly through availability, you know, just demonstrating that they’re there and demonstrating that, you know, if I need them they’re going to be there for me, and that’s how I try to demonstrate my love as well.

Susan Bratton: Have you ever heard of this notion of relationship values?

Bernie Borges: Sure.

Susan Bratton: There’s this thing where your relationship values for your relationships, whether it’s with your wife or with your friends, people that you love or your family, your children, what you want in the relationship is very different than the way that they want their love, you to express their love, your love to them, and I always think that’s so interesting when you get into that exploration of well how do you, “What is it that makes you feel loved?” “Oh, what is it that makes you feel loved?”, and they’re totally different things…

Bernie Borges: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: And being focused on giving a person what it is that makes them feel love is always very interesting…

Bernie Borges: That’s right.

Susan Bratton: That’s why I asked you what it was that, you know, made it that you noticed that your friends were showing their love to you, like what was the thing that picked up for you? And it was availability.

Bernie Borges: You know, and I mean it’s simple things like, you know, if someone, if a good friend puts a call in to me, you know, I may not call them back even the same day, but I’m going to call them back within a day or two, as opposed to, you know, you put a call in to a lifelong friend and you don’t hear back from them and a month later you’re saying, “Hey did you get my message?” “Yeah, I just haven’t gotten around to calling you”, you know. To me that’s a demonstration of love. If you’re a lifelong friend of mine and you really mean that much to me, then I’m going to call you back; it may not be the same day, but I’m going to call you back promptly.

Susan Bratton: Absolutely. And I wanted to also, I forgot to ask you something. We were talking about, you know, social marketing and community and things like that; you’re very active in your church and you’re working on some strategy for them. I think a lot of people would be interested in helping their church, if they are a churchgoing person, do that. Tell us a little bit of the story about what, about your church and what you’re doing.

Bernie Borges: Yeah, happy to do that. The church that I belong to is called Generations Christian Church, it’s in Trinity Florida. We have a very progressive pastor who, by the way is in his early 50’s and just to look at him, you know, he’s just a really cool guy, and he is all about, you know, delivering, you know, the Christian message of the gospel, but using any and every contemporary channel and platform that’s available to us. So I gave him a copy of my book and not a week later he was, you know all over it and he was actually messaging me on Face Book. And so, you know, he’s asked me and I’m obviously extremely excited to help them develop a strategy. They’ve already created a Face Book fan page and a Twitter account, but there’s really no plan behind it. So we’re going to put a strategy behind it to really help, you know, promote the church both locally and even globally because my church is really big on – in fact fifteen percent of all funds that come into the church go outside the country to missions around the world. So we’re going to leverage the web, both locally and globally, and, you know, in a Marketing 2.0 way and I’m really excited about it.

Susan Bratton: So if you as a listener are thinking about not only yourself and your business, what I think is really the neat thing here is that Bernie’s applying his Marketing 2.0 to his faith and to his relationship with God, which I just think it’s really commendable Bernie, that you’re, you know, obviously you’re running a small business, it’s hard to do that, and you’re helping small businesses and you’ve got a lot on your plate but not so much that you can’t put your energy and your technical and marketing expertise towards something that is a really core part of your life, which is very inspiring.

Bernie Borges: Absolutely. I mean, you know, we’re all asked to give of our time and talents, and if this is a time and talent that I can share, you know, for God’s sake, well absolutely, I’m going to do it.

Susan Bratton: That’s great. It’s awesome. Well thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming on the show. I loved how tight and helpful you were in explaining things and giving excellent examples. That’s what we need and you definitely set yourself above the crowd by going that extra mile to give that to us today. Thank you for that.

Bernie Borges: Well thank you Susan. It has been fantastic to be here.

Susan Bratton: We always like being together, don’t we Bernie?

Bernie Borges: Absolutely.

Susan Bratton: As much as we can.

Bernie Borges: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Hey, don’t forget that if you’d like to have a personally autographed copy of Bernie’s book, Marketing 2.0: Bridging the Gap Between Seller and Buyer For Social Media Marketing, all you have to do is post your desire on the Dishy Mix fan page in Face Book. Just go to dishymixfan.com and tell us why you should be the lucky recipient. We’ll pick a couple of people and  make sure that you get one. Alright, I’m your host Susan Bratton. Have a great day.