Web Savvy Marketers

Social Networking IS Your On-Line Referral

I had a meeting last week with a potential client that sells to consumers. We spoke a little about social networking (ie: FaceBook, Linked-In, etc.) He made it very clear that he had no interest in doing anything in that realm. He then went on to tell me a story about a customer that would only purchase his product once they found someone they knew who was using it and happy with it. They had checked the company’s references, and although they were all very good, it wasn’t until they spoke with someone they knew that they decided the product was good for them.

This is an example of social networking, except that it was done over the phone instead of the computer. Now, imagine you could create this kind of referral that would go out to many people instead of just the person on the other end of the phone. That is what social networking can do for you.

Networking Isn’t a Dirty Word!

I remember when I first started my own business and began attending networking events. I was so overwhelmed by the number of people who would tell me that I needed what they had for sale in spite of the fact that they hadn’t taken the time to find out anything about me and what my needs were. On occasion, I would meet someone who would ask me what I did, tell me about their company and talk about a way we could work together. They are the people who I still work with today after several years because we have a relationship.

The same problem occurs with on-line networking. Some people see it as another place to advertise their business. Too often, people use social networking groups to promote their business when they should be building relationships. It’s like any networking group. If people are genuinely interested in helping each other succeed, everyone wins. However, if everyone is just selling at each other, the group won’t last and no one will benefit.

Remember, no matter how you network, be it on-line or in-person, the important thing to remember is that people want to work with and buy from someone they trust and with whom they have a relationship. Approach it any other way and although you might get the initial sale, the chances of retaining the customer are poor.

Getting By “On the Cheap” Can Cost You

I visit a lot of websites. Many of them represent small businesses. And what I see resembles those TV commercials for car dealers featuring the dealership’s owners and employees: a lot of puffery about the business’s owners and their integrity, poorly delivered in a manner that cheapens the reputation of the business itself. In truth, many of these websites, because of substandard design and numbingly boring content, say more about the penny-pinching behavior of the business owners than about the products or services that their business provides. Such a harsh conclusion can be interpreted as an anti-business screed, but that is not my intention.

I am well aware of the economic difficulties facing small businesses during the continuing recession on Main St. (Wall St. is another matter!). To hold costs down, small businesses often resort to stretching or reducing their marketing expenditures. And one way to do that is to accept a cheap, or even free, web development and hosting package that allows a business to establish at least a modest web presence. Such packages come with ready-made templates to which a business owner contributes his/her own content. How can I tell? Because the design and the content together resemble those awful TV commercials. In any event, these websites generally prove to be ineffective. The search engines can’t find them, and customers who stumble across them have difficulty locating the information that they seek.

Website Marketing BudgetThe good news is that remedying this situation does not require a business to pay for the services of an expensive media marketing firm that caters chiefly to large corporations. There is no need to acquire a fancy website with a lot of Flash video (search engines hate that anyway). But some expenditure is necessary in order to create a website that is professionally designed so as to make browsing and navigation a pleasant experience. And provison of well-written content that directly meets customers’ most pressing needs will attract more visitors to the site and, therefore, more business.

Consider for a moment how most of us are willing, sometimes desperate, to pay for the best medical or dental expertise that we can find. We recognize that an undiagnosed ailment or an untreated tooth infection can kill us, and we decline, therefore, to rely on self-treatment. “But,” one might object, “a professionally created website is not a life-or-death matter.” Really? When some 80% of all potential customers conduct online research before entering a store or contacting a provider, how can a business continue to live without an adequate presence on the internet as part of an effective marketing plan? And if a business dies, how do its owners eat?

Because of this situation, those of us who design or create content for our clients’ websites must do a better job of marketing our own services to those small businesses nearby who are struggling. Our doing so is not only good for our business, but also a way to meet our social responsibility to our business community. And businesses who wish to attract more customers should carefully reconsider their marketing priorities.

I’ll take a virtual test drive but I’m not in the market for a new car

I’m not in the market for a new car. But when I heard that the Mitsubishi Outlander was going to be offering the first online virtual test drives–I had to check it out. So I went to their website and signed up and while I was there I checked out the Outlander website and the car I would be test driving in November.

The website and the car have some cool features. On the website you can virtually walk around the car and view it from every angle. When you turn the car so it faces you, the video background behind it is in sync with the car’s direction. As you mouseover the car, little blue bubbles pop up and show feature specific details.

Wow! It has a 40GB Navigation/Music server with a stunning, full-color LCD touchscreen! And a USB port and bluetooth capability. I don’t have that in my 97 Acura. Too bad I’m not in the market for a new car.

It’s shown in a Leguna Blue, but you can easily change the paint color with a click of the mouse. If I were in the market for a new car I think I’d like the Leguna Blue.

The Mitsubishi Outlander virtual test drive campaign is web savvy marketing. The virtual test drive concept intrigued me enough to go to the website and register for a drive even though I’m not in the market for a new car. The website does a good job of presenting the car’s features. I can visualize myself in an Outlander. I just hope the virtual test drive is not too much fun because I’m really not in the market for a new car.
http://www.outlandersport.com/

The 30-day blog challenge!

Today, I committed to the ultimate blog challenge – blogging every day for 30 days.   This will be a challenge!  And I came late to the game, it started October 1, so I’m not sure how that works.  Do I have to double up on posts in order to complete the challenge?  Or does my 3o days start now?  I’ll deal with that later, for now, it’s time to start blogging.

My friend D’vorah Lansky invited me to participate in this 30-day challenge.  D’vorah is an active blogger and recently wrote the book , Connect, Communicate and Profit.  The book is all about building successful relationships online and I highly recommend it to anyone with questions about using social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, or about blogging.

I’m always on the lookout for materials that inspire me with new ideas and one of the perks of signing up for the challenge, is that you get a free booklet, 7 Ways to Get Your Blog In Motion.   In the booklet, the first thing they suggest to fend off the fear that you won’t have anything to write about is to make a list of things you know about–just a quick list of things that pop into your head.  So here’s my quick list:

  • web design
  • image editing
  • SEO
  • E-commerce templates
  • WordPress
  • Google Checkout
  • Google Analytics
  • Website traffic statistics
  • Dad’s 93rd birthday today.  Happy Birthday Dad!
  • 30 day challenges
  • Facebook movie – I gotta see it.
  • Homeaway.com
  • web hosting
  • e-mail marketing
  • the 10 pounds I can’t lose (another 30-day challenge?)

So in the next 30 days I’ll be writing about some of these things and some other things that pop up in my world of web design and internet marketing. I’ll also try to answer any questions that come my way.

My hope is that in the next 3o days, I’ll become more efficient in my blogging practice, and that I’ll provide a valuable resource for readers in the process.

Resources:

Five free things you can do to promote your small business

Times are tough.  Marketing budgets are tight.  Here are five free things you can do to bring traffic to your website and to your business.

  1. Google Places – (used to be called Google Local) it’s a free listing that you can enter by going to www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter.   You enter your web address, physical address, a description of your business, your contact information, hours– you can even enter photos. Your listing will show up on a Google Maps when someone searches for your business type in your area.
  2. Bing Local – Same concept as on Google Places only it’s on Bing.
  3. Facebook and other social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter.  If you’re not there you should be — it’s word of mouth advertising. I’ve seen small business really benefit from communicating with their network (friends, fans…whatever you want to call them).  It’s a great place to promote your business events, specials promotions and communicate with your clients (friends, fans, etc).  Just remember like all networking activities you’ll benefit more from giving then selling.  Provide  information, tips, advice, and special deals, spread good will and your friends and fans will remember you and spread the word about your business.
  4. Update your website regularly.  Install a content management system like WordPress so you can update your website on a regular basis.   Set up a blog that feeds through to your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts so you reach out to all neighborhoods of your virtual network.
  5. Google Analytics – You don’t really know if anything is working unless you have a way to track your traffic.  Google analytics provides lots of statistics about traffic to your website.

What Does Quality Web Copy Mean Today?

The days when web copy, especially SEO copy, could focus merely on getting higher rankings from search engines are over. The game has shifted from high page ranking to actually getting found. For example, recent research indicates that people are searching increasingly for longer phrases, not just simple keywords. In SEO jargon, the keyword tails are getting longer. And this means [Read more…]

Social Networking – Resistance is Futile

I frequently encounter professionals who are resistant to online social networking. It’s puzzling to me.  They’re often very social in “real life”.

I don’t get it.  Is it really that scary to tap into the network of friends from around the globe? Has the separation between friends, family and business become too blurred?  Is the technology too frightening?  Is it the changing paradigm of communication that freaks them out?

Are they afraid of  becoming the Borg?

Will we all eventually be assimilated into the massive social brain of Facebook?  Controlled by our smartphones as they alert us to tweets and texts?  Well I suppose if you let it control you, but used wisely it allows you to communicate and stay in touch with more people with less effort than ever before. Resistance is futile.

Tips & tools to help you broadcast to friends, fans, and followers

The last year has seen the continued rise of the social network phenomenon. If you’re like most business organizations, you’re got at least a Facebook page, Twitter account, LinkedIn profile and blog , not to mention your real-life networks with the local chamber of commerce and trade organizations.  All these social networks are designed to help you maintain an open stream of communication with your business network, but it’s a lot to manage.  Oh and by the way, you have a business to run too.

I’ve found tools and tricks that  make  my social networking life simpler.  I hope you’ll find them helpful too.

For posting to your networks and monitoring posts:

  • Lately I’ve been using the tool HootSuite to broadcast posts to one or all of my networks. Just sign up and set up your account to link to your other social network accounts and then when you make a post you can choose to broadcast to any or all of your selected networks.  You can also monitor your SM feeds with the HootSuite site–click on my LinkedIn tab and I see my network status updates; click the Facebook tab and I see my Wall; click the Twitter tab and I see my twitter feed.  And with the Twitter feed you can set it up to monitor various topics.  For example, I have it  set it up to show feeds about SEO; another tab monitors pilot supplies, and yet another tab shows my standard Twitter feed.
  • TweetDeck is another application I’ve used in the past.  It’s similar to HootSuite but  allows you to connect to FaceBook, Twitter and/or MySpace.  Since I have a LinkedIn account, but not a MySpace account, I find HootSuite works better for me.
  • If you’re a smart phone user, there are apps for managing your Twitter and Facebook accounts while you’re on the go.  I’ve tried Twidroid and Twirl on my Android  and I have Facebook mobile set up too.

Social Network Feed Cycle

Use your blog to feed your networks:

One of the smartest things you can do to minimize your workload and maximize the effectiveness of your blog posts is to feed them to your social networks.  All the SM sites have the capacity to take a blog feed in some form or another.  Here are some tutorials to set up feeds to some of the  social media sites.

  • Facebook – http://www.ehow.com/how_2031209_import-rss-feed.html
  • LinkedIn – Open up your profile to edit and click on Applications where you’ll see a WordPress tool or a BlogLink tool.  Both tools will pull your blog posts into your profile.
  • Twitter – Go to Settings > Connections and you’ll see a couple of apps, FeedBlitz and TwitterFeed that will help you feed your blog posts to your Twitter account.

It may take you a few minutes to set up your feeds, but once you’ve set it up you’re done.  Now whenever you make a blog post, it posts to your blog and all the networks you’ve set up to receive it.

It’s been a year since I first stuck my toe in the twitter water and honestly I wasn’t so sure that I’d find Twitter to be a useful tool.  But I’ve found that it can be a very useful tool both as a a customer service tool and marketing tool.

For example, Monday morning I came into the office to find that one of my managed servers was down.  Not only my server, but it looked like the whole data center was down.   Not a good start to a Monday.  My first reaction was to call the data center’s technical support for answers but while on hold with the 20 million (give or take a few million) other clients I realized I might find answers more quickly on Twitter. I typed in a search and instantly knew what was happening without having to talk to anyone.  With a couple of 140 character posts, the hosting company answered my initial question (what the heck is going on?) and assured me that the problem was in the process of being resolved.  Within minutes, life was back to normal.  As a wholesale customer I was relieved to find the answers and be able to provide answers to my customers quickly.

Twitter also makes it extremely easy to post status updates to my website or to the other social networks.  I’ve setup my website  to always show my most recent Tweet.  It’s right there in the middle of the home page, so when someone comes to my website they always have a snippet of current information, even if I haven’t had a chance to update my website information in a while.  I try to tweet about things that my client base might find useful. Currently, there is a post linking to an article I read earlier today entitled “What SuperHero Are You?” It’s about defining your unique value and creating a good elevator pitch.  But once I publish  this to my blog that headline will be replaced by the headline for this article as it’s set up to post to my blog, my Facebook, my LinkedIn, and my Twitter account.  And the Twitter post will post to my home page, so there will be a link on my home page that links back to this post.  It’s a happy little circle.

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