All Shapes and Sizes

Guest post by Social Media Consultant Colin Clark

I spend the majority of my day every day thinking up creative ways for businesses to use social media tools to improve their bottom line.  The one thing that I’ve found is that if I put together social media action plans for 10 different companies, all 10 would be very different, even if they were in similar industries.

The reason for this is that it’s extremely important to look at all aspects of your business before delving into social media, because once you do you’re baring your soul to anyone who you interact with online.  Since every business is composed of different types people, every strategy must be optimized to ensure those people will be successful in communicating with people online

So many consultants are saying ‘You must blog’ or ‘You must have a presence on Facebook‘.  It may or may not be the case.  The only ‘must’ is that you ‘must’ use good judgment and good marketing fundamentals to put together a strategy that’s going to be successful.

10 Small Biz Social Media Tips for Today

Chris Brogan had a post this morning called 10 Things You Could Do Better Today. It was pretty inspirational to me… on the level of a good pump up in the morning. I have always been appreciative of people who can elicit some type of emotional response in the morning.

I thought I would also give you a list of 10 Things… for all of you small business owners out there who are using social media marketing tools.

1. Start a Facebook fan page for your business. It is a great way to interact with your personal connections on Facebook.

2. Join a local social network. If you are a Indianapolis native… join Smaller Indiana. A local social network is a great way to connect with other like minded people in your geographic area.

3. Write a blog post about another business owner in your location. Give back to your clients. Give back to the community. Prop them up!

4. Comment on 2 blog posts for today… and maybe tomorrow? Keep it rolling.

Two blog post you might want to comment on:
Angels Are Still Investing by David Castor
Reminder from an Anonymous Coward by Peter Kim

5. Send a hand written note to 5 contacts in your social media realm. You will surprise them with the notion. Make sure you pick strategically but still honestly.

6. Respond to three questions on LinkedIN. Never heard of questions on LinkedIN or getting leads from LinkedIN? Check out this link.

7. Send a Direct Message in Twitter to 5 followers and ask them how you can help them today.

8. Send thank you emails to everyone who has posted a comment on your blog in the past 5 days.

9. Make a list of things you need to do, read, or experience in order to make your social media marketing tools work for you!

An example from my list: 1. Read Second Life for Dummies by Sarah Robbins

10. Be as honest and as open as possible with everyone you come in contact with both online and offline.

Switching from Function to Feeling

We are into the 7th of 10 Commandments for Using Social Media. We have been investigating using personality and transparency when using your social media tool… We are going to continue that beautiful trend.

From Function to Feeling

It was hard to relate this commandment to the one Marc Gobe uses for his book, Emotional Branding. In the book the seventh commandment is related strictly to product design and sensory experiences.

I wanted to shift your focus from the “use” of a social media tool to the learning process surrounding the tool. Many small business owners focus solely on how to use a tool and then forget that a strategy needs to be in place in order for return on investment to be realized.

Learning the functionality of a tool like Twitter or Facebook is the first step towards success. We all know that… You have to be able to function around a tool or product in order to make it work. Common sense will prevail.

Now… where should you be spending the majority of your hard-earned knowledge and time: feeling. How are you going to be make social media a success? Personality. Emotion. Transparency. Be human.

This is especially true for the owners or sales people surrounding a service company. When you are selling your expertise do people buy for functionality or feeling?

Feeling. Always. They are buying into YOU as a business owner or marketer.

The important thing to remember when using social media as a marketing tool… never focus too much on the functionality of a service… you will learn as you go…

Always focus on how you can recreate yourself, your personality, and your traits in the online environment.

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Quit Listening to Your Competitors

Continuing in the tradition of the Keith McFarland world today I wanted to write about another quote that is taken from a past CIO at the SAS Institute.

“Our biggest risk is that we start listening to our competitors and stop listening to our customers.”

Why is this an amazing quote? It shows the mindset of a leader and a successful company. The last thing you need to do is react as your competitors change and move in your market. This is not saying that you should not react but it is not the first thing to focus on.Your customers (both past, present and future) are who you should be focusing on.

I will focus towards an old business adage: The customer is always right.

The customer should be the first person you communicate and learn from… Social media marketing tools give you the ability to create strategies that surround your customers with a two-way communication model. This simple means that the customer is forging a relationship with you (your company) and giving the information needed to step to the next level.

As a business owner you should always be listening… listening to the conversations happening between your customers and potential clients..

What makes them tick? Do you know?

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Get Intuit With 2-Way Communication

I have learned something new.

Keith McFarland wrote an excellent book called Breakthrough Company. I am becoming literally obsessed with the contents of the book and am starting on my 5th straight read. Now the only question is: How do I relate this to social media marketing for small business?

There is a point in the book where Keith starts talking about the concept of relying on outside influences to grow your company to a new level. I have always believed in using mentors and outside consultants to help with the things you are simply… not good at…There is one reference in the book that hit me pretty hard on a social media level:

“We found that breakthrough companies are also adapt at using advisory boards… investors… consultants and advisers. What sets these companies apart is not that they have the support structures but the optimal manner in which they learn from them. Just as breakthrough companies invested heavily in their employees… they have equally high expectations of outsiders in whom they come to depend. The comparison companies we studied on the other appeared to be less eager to form real partnerships with entities outside of the firm. For example, while some of the companies we studied formed customer counsels these meetings seemed to be highly scripted broadcast events that involved ONE way communication.“

-Keith McFarland, Breakthrough Company

We are talking about HUGE breakthrough companies here: Intuit, the SAS Institute, Polaris, and Paychex (to name a few). The beautiful thing about what Keith is explaining above is the concept of listening to outside forces to grow in considerable ways as a company.

It is important that (as a small business) you start to transition and learn about new ways to communicate with customers. The companies listed above KILLED it in large part because they actually participated in TWO way communication with their customers. Imagine that… two way communication. Stop talking to a brick wall and start communicating on a level that your competition hasn’t touched.

Listen to outside influences, customers, and lastly: your competition.

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Hey Mediocrity. You can eat me.

Mediocrity- a disease that is spreading slowly through the ranks of small business owners across the country. It is infiltrating employees, products, services, and marketing…slowly dissecting and eating away at what YOU have worked so hard to build.

I see it happening on a daily basis (even in my own company at times). We get bogged down with everyday occurrences and it is hard for us to see weeks, months, or years into the future. It is hard to balance the daily routine when you (as the business owner) are so focused on growing the business in terms or revenue and new clients.

This post really has nothing to do with social media marketing… other than it is a new form of marketing that could differentiate you from the competition. It is more about being focused and understanding that NOW is the time to take risks.

NOW is the time to not hunker down …but to get PUMPED up for the day ahead. Your competition is hunkering down. Other businesses are cutting their marketing budgets and giving way to mediocrity. Now is the time to take advantage of the market and to move your company to new heights!

Position yourself as the business that is NOT going to give in to everything raining down on the economy. By the way… I would rather not hear the excuse that you don’t have a choice… that your market is suffering because of this down-trend.

Where there is a will… there is a way and mediocrity can shove it.

(Thanks to Mark Hayward for his post 10 Tips for Blogging Your Way to Small Biz Success which gave me the idea for this post)

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We Are All Recognized. Be Remembered.

I kind of fell off the Social Media Commandment horse (or mule) the past few weeks (happy Monday by the way). Now is the time to get back to where we left off. Some of you may remember the last few commandments but for those of us who can’t remember past yesterday morning… here is the list so far.

1. From Consumers to People

2. From Product to Experience

3. From Honesty to Trust

4. From Quality to Preference

5. From Notoriety to Aspiration

The commandments are based off of Marc Gobe’s commandments for emotional branding from the book Emotional Branding which he published in 2001.

Now that we have that out of the way… time for the sixth commandment:

From Identity to Personality

“Identity is recognition. Personality is about character and charisma!” – Marc Gobe

There are plenty of ways you can start to relate this sixth commandment to social media. There is a huge aspect of social media catered to the ego of an individual… that is where recognition plays a huge role. It is fun for users to gain 2000 to 4000 new followers. It is awesome when Chris Brogan or Robert Scoble mentions your name in a post or through a feed. The reality of all of this is that it doesn’t matter. You may gain a few new followers because of the endorsement but relationships still have not been forged.

You are unique. The personality that you were gifted with needs to shine through when using social media tools. We are all an “identity” when first introduced to another on social media. We are all just another small 100 x 100 pixel face on Twitter until we create an emotional response… until we share some insight and join in the discussion.

Only then can we move from an identity to a personality..

and be remembered.

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You Want to Drive Traffic? Ask. Ask. Ask.

(via Darren Rowse @ ProBlogger)

The same question always seems to resurface at every seminar or class we (Brandswag) give: “How do I drive traffic to my blog?”

We try to give the best answers and there are a couple of ways to do this through social bookmarketing, social networking (Twitter), linking… blah blah blah..

There is another way to drive traffic both through Twitter and through a single blog post: Asking Questions.

Mr. Rowse has some great points to asking questions, asking for advice, and asking for tips. If you ask a question there is more of a chance that you will be  able to drive conversation and in turn traffic to your blog post. This also gives you (the write) the ability to create relationships with the people/readers who are contributing to your post and answers the questions you presented.

Twitter traffic can be driven (even using your status updates in other social networks) to your blog through asking the same question in you Twitter Stream.

Example:

What do you think about the new MacBook Pro? Http://www.tinyurl.com/woej2

There are plenty of ways to drive traffic to your blog. I would encourage you to keep reading and educating yourself. Some of the best blogs to do this are Chris Brogan, Darren Rowse, and Liz Strauss.

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Baby Boomer Me Up. The 43+ Revolution.

How many times have we heard the negative remarks surrounding social media marketing sound something like this:

“I don’t feel like I need to invest our time and resources into social media. I don’t think our Baby Boomer demographic will relate to that type of technology.”

At Brandswag we hear this all the time. It is a concept that has been etched into the mind of small business owners who cater to the baby boomer generation. They have a hard time connecting the importance of social media to their niche clientele. This is because of the overwhelming MYTH that social media is only for my generation, the millenials.

The shift has slowly started to take form. The paradigm shift between social media being a “bright shiny object” and it actually become a viable marketing tool. The time is not to stop ignoring and start implementing into your marketing strategy.

ReadWriteWeb’s Sarah Perez has a great post entitled, How to Reach Baby Boomers with Social Media. In the post I found the following image below… which gives an inside look into the social technolographics of the Baby Boomer generation:

Here are some stats to show you the potential of using social media marketing with the baby boomer demographic.

In 2007, the percentage of Boomers consuming social media was 46% for younger Boomers (ages 43 to 52) and 39% for older Boomers (ages 53 to 63). By 2008, those number increased to 67% and 62%, respectively.

This is some huge growth! The potential of using a blog, wiki, podcast, or social networking site to reach the baby boomer generation is something that cannot be ignored by YOUR business.

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Use Your Company Personality. It’s Still There.

Direct mail… Yellow pages… Many traditional marketing concepts have killed the personality of your company. They have taken the story you had at the beginning… that wonderful plan to rule the world and do it with your mind.. and yes they trampled it. Do you find yourself asking the question.. “How did I get here?”

How did I become part of the pack? Doing the same marketing and communications strategy as everyone else..

It is interesting to read blog post like the one by Jay Baer at Convince&Convert called Marketing Sideways to Win at Social MEdia, that call for companies to start marketing their personality instead of something NOT interesting.

Times are tough. Marketing is tough. Competition is fierce. You have to dig down deep to reach the personality and the interesting world of what makes you DIFFERENT from everyone else.

Use new tools like social media. Social media has the strength of bringing your personality out of your company. You deserve to find that personality again. You deserve to connect with consumers on a level that has never been touched in the world of traditional marketing.

A world that is controlled by the consumer but when you crack it… when you become a part of the community.. the flood gates will open and you will find your personality again.

Unless you never had one to begin with…

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