With a struggling US economy, many entrepreneurs and sales people are finding that they need to change the way they market their business.
You yourself might be asking the question on how best to use the marketing dollars that you have in your budget. Where can you get the biggest bang for the buck?
I have some good news for you. And by the way, stick those marketing dollars back in your coffers, because the strategy I’m about to share with you is virtually free. Well… it is going to take an hour or two a week of your time, but other than that, it’s free.
I want to make the case for you, that spending time each week on your social media marketing, is very smart business.
So what is social media? Social media is an umbrella term that refers to the technologies and practices that are used to share information, opinions, and thoughts online.
Social media can take many forms, such message boards, blogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and videos.
With 70% of people researching online before buying a product or service (which includes local service businesses), and 51% of internet users spending most of their time reading and watching personal content that is created by other people, you’ve got to have an online presence. But, it’s not just about having a website. You need to make sure that your business is in the path of where your target audience is spending their time online.
Here’s another little known fact. According to ongoing research from the Online Publishers Association and Nielsen//NetRatings, US Internet users will spend less than 5% of their online time using search, versus nearly 50% of their time on content sites (social media). Yet, most marketers are putting most of their online marketing dollars into paid search.
Marketing Experiments did a 12 month study, in which they compared the effectiveness of a Google Adwords campaign, to a social media marketing campaign. They created several sites in different niches to gather data from. They compared:
1) Hiring an employee at $10/hour to blog, create content, and in to work to drive traffic to the sites.
-to-
2) Using Google Adwords to drive targeted traffic. (They paid up to .75/click in their adwords campaign).
Result: Social Media Optimization yielded a 1427% greater return on investment!
WOW!
The numbers speak for themselves. But before you jump into social media marketing, be sure that you do your homework. There is a right way to network, and there is a spammy way to network. You want to educate yourself so that you are being effective in the way that you use these online communities.
With the current economic conditions, it’s smart to put your marketing efforts where you get the greatest return on investment. Social media marketing may well be your solution.
——– Visit SnapMonkey.com for additional help in marketing your business.
As many of you know, Wordpress automatically is set up so that comment links are nofollow.
There are bloggers who feel that good comments should be rewarded with dofollow links, and I agree. I’ve now set up my blog where commenters can enjoy an incoming link back to their site.
There are some great plugins and hacks available that you can download to make your blog a dofollow blog. In fact, Andy Beard has made a great dofollow list of plugins
I was reading Andy Beard’s blog, and he mentioned that you can add your Twitter account to Technorati. Interesting. I did not know that was possible.
I gave it a try, and it works. This is what you need to do.
1. Log into you Technorati account
2. Go to your account and click the ‘Blogs’ tab
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page to where it says ‘Claim a blog’
4. Add your Twitter account ( in my case it was http://www.Twitter.com/Rita012 )
5. In your next screen you will have the option to ‘Use Post Claim’. Click that.
6. Technorati will give you a code. Copy that code.
7. Paste that code into the ‘what are you doing now’ box in Twitter and click ‘update’
8. Go back to Technorati and click the ‘Release the Spiders’ button.
9. You should have the ‘congratulations’ screen. Now go back to you twitter account and click the trash can next to your post to delete your twitter entry, since people won’t want to see a tweet with code in it.
I’ve been ‘twittering’ a lot lately. Lot’s of fun. I’ve also been following some people, such as Dave Taylor, BL Ochman , and thought I’d take a look to see if Guy Kawasaki was twittering. ( I love his book called The Art of the Start).
I then started to follow him, and now he is following me. Should I say something profound? lol
Actually, I’m currently one of over 9800 people he is following, so chances are he will never see my posts. Still, I think it is interesting that he is choosing to follow people who follow him.
I’m brand new to the Twitter concept. I was just on Lynn Terry’s blog, where she posted a Youtube video that explained how Twitter works. I thought it was very helpful, so I’ll go ahead and post it here:
I have no idea how well I’ll keep this updated, with my current crazy schedule, but I’ll test out the process.
Do you find that your business tends to attract a certain type of clientele? Does your business work with clients in certain industries?
My guess is that if your company is a B2B company, (where you sell your products or services to other businesses) you already spend much of your sales efforts working within specific industries.
A smart marketing strategy might be to locate an online group in your niche, and network with that group.
According to an iProspect study, 51% of people spend their time online watching and viewing content that is created by others. In fact, 1 out of 3 internet users at this very moment, is reading about something that someone else has written, and it is impacting a buying decision right now.
WOW! Think about that for a moment. That’s a lot of people, and that’s a lot of opportunity for you! You can make a post or enter into a conversation, and in many cases what you write may be read by countless other people.
Before you begin actively networking in your selected online community, it’s very important to first take some time to observe the rules of the group, and the culture of the group. If you do not conform to the rules and the culture, you’ll just create a bad reputation for yourself, and most likely be booted out of the group.
I run several niche online communities, one of which is a place for professionals in the gift basket industry to come together. It’s mostly comprised of women. Many have been part of the community for years.
The rules in this online community of gift basket professionals are pretty basic and common. We don’t allow spamming, badmouthing, and we have select areas where suppliers to the gift basket industry can advertise their services.
The culture of the community comes out when you read the posts. What you would find is that all the members have a common interest. They are entrepreneurs who make and sell gift baskets. When these gift basket professionals come to our online community, they find that they:
Meet other like-minded people
Find answers to questions they have
Discover new and better ways of doing things
Receive quality feedback on ideas they might have
Celebrate their wins with their peers
Support each other during down times
Network with each other, and refer business to each other
Discover suppliers that carry certain products
Develop friendships
I think you would find this list to be common among many industry groups, and it’s the reason why many businesses join associations. The community plays an important role in helping them with their business.
Let’s say your company makes a specialty food item, such as salsa. Let’s say that you wanted to tap into the gift basket market, and network within the online community of gift basket professionals.
Once you have observed the rules and the culture, and have decided to conform to those rules, you might first decide to make your post in the allowable area where suppliers can advertise. But there would be more opportunities for you as well.
How can you do that, without spamming the community?
First of all, in most communities, you can add a signature and a short tagline. Usually, you can set this up in your profile, and it would automatically show up each time you post a comment. This signature might have your name, your website, and your tagline on it. Your tagline might say something like “The best salsa company in Texas.”
Now let’s say a member posted a question to the community, and was asking for help in finding a supplier who sells black and white wicker baskets. Or, let’s say someone needed help on what to put in a 50th birthday basket.
You can go ahead and chime into that discussion, as long as it remains on topic. You might share a supplier that you know of who sells wicker baskets. Or, you might give some ideas on what to put in that 50th birthday basket, even if it does not include salsa.
The point is that you are engaging in conversations, staying on topic, and being helpful by providing and sharing ideas, resources, and expertise, while not really promoting your product. People will see your signature, and they’ll get to know you.
Try to visit your community at least once a week, so that you can build relationships. People will start recognizing your name, and will judge you by your interactions and the quality of your posts.
Remember, people do business with people they like and trust. It’s all about building relationships.
Is the online networking you do really so different from good old fashioned networking? Sure, we may use words like ‘social media’, or ‘blogging’, or ‘online communities’, but I think after reading this article, you’ll find that online networking is really just dad’s Oldsmobile with a paint job.
I decided to interview networking expert Chuck Cory, to get a good understanding on how to effectively network offline (meaning in person), to see what the similarities were. I’ve known Chuck for many years, and I would consider him to be a master networker. Chuck is an entrepreneur, and on the side he runs a popular breakfast business networking event in Denver called NewBCI. Let’s see what Chuck has to say about networking.
INTERVIEW EXCERPTS:
Rita: What does the word networking mean to you?
Chuck: Networking, specifically B2B networking to me is a business marketing tool that can be used to build business relationships no matter how many people are present, regardless of the scenario and with various levels of complexity depending upon the circumstances, the culture and the environment in which the networker is marketing.
It means the opportunity to meet new business people and explore the possibilities for mutual satisfaction. By opportunities, I mean the building of a relationship that can result in a sale (which is what most people think that networking is all about), or creating a mutual referral source, or creating an asset.
The sale aspect is fairly clear cut and when people treat a networking opportunity as just a “sales lead”, they are missing a lot of opportunities. Building solid referral sources and mutual win-win situations takes time and work.
An asset can be a product, service or individual that acts as a resource in one way or the other. My lawyer, my CPA, my Banker are all knowledge assets; but my Banker is also a monetary source, and hence an asset.
Rita: What has networking done for your business?
Chuck: Since the facilitation of networking events in one of my major tasks, networking has expanded my business beyond belief. Even if there are only 50 – 60 individuals at an event, each individual there has their own contacts. This has caused my business to expand beyond my capacity to handle it.
By applying the principles of referral networking, New Business Connections (NewBCI) has grown as have my other endeavors. There are a lot of people for instance that are sending people to a NewBCI Breakfast event that I have not talked to for a long time – or for that matter even know.
Rita: Why is it important that people go out and network for their business?
Chuck: Personal contact – plain and simple.Networking should lead to personal contact at the local level, and with the sophisticated tools we have today (including video websites) virtual personal contacts are possible, but it is not the same as human interaction.
Humanitizing the business contact is becoming more and more important as more and more people use technology to conduct their business. Pressing the flesh (offline community activity) may seem less efficient than online community involvement, but it is generally more effective for a lot of people. Online perceptions about an individual can be completely reversed once you meet someone in person.
Personal contact is also still necessary for the human psyche. While transactions can be started, processed and completed completely online – human interaction is the best way to start and maintain a business relationship. At least in my opinion.
Rita: How is offline networking similar to online networking?
Chuck: I define offline networking as those networking activities that do not occur on the Internet, from Chambers of Commerce, to business exchange leads groups, to BNI, NewBCI or One Business Connections for example. Online communities consist of Ryze, Linkedin, Fastpitch and others. Wikepdia has a tremendous list: List of social networking websites. Doing a wikepdia search on Online_communities will reveal a well organized virtual list of online communities.
To answer your question, in the beginning, you do not know who you are dealing with. Through either kind of networking, you are gathering perceptions, facts, and nuances about each other.
In either case, you need to know what you are going to do before you get to the networking event or online community. Preparation is key, and your goals should be reviewed before each activity.
I’m sure you see people who go out with the intention of networking all the time, who ultimately do a terrible job of it.
Rita: Give us some examples of what you commonly see out there.
Chuck: There are more examples of bad networking than of good – and the definition of bad is mainly in the eye of the beholder. If your intent is to use networking to gather a lot of sales leads and then use a systematic follow up plan (one that had been thought out before the event), then that may just be your style. I disagree with this style, but if it is handled in a professional manner and permission to follow up is obtained, it may work for some. This style is used more by people who do not know how to effectively network and build business relationships. We have all seen the impatient business card stuffer – the one whose eyes shift constantly, business card at the ready, only paying attention when they think they are registering a “pain” point, so they can show you how they can “solve” your problem. They then ask only superficial questions and then launch into a elevator pitch right out of the can to “convince” you that they have a solution for all your ills.
There are the more sophisticated, skillful bad networkers who get you excited about how they can help you at the beginning of your conversation with them, but upon being queried as to how they can “actually” help – end up selling you their product or service – or worse yet will only buy from you if you buy from them. Then they will build a “relationship” with you. This group is worse than the first because they give business relationships, networking and referral based marketing a bad name.
Rita: What do you think they should be doing differently?
Chuck: LISTENING! Genuinely caring about the other person – building a relationship – or not. You may not be able to connect with the other person at any level and you need to develop the skill to know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em. Throwing good time after bad time is a waste of time. Disengaging politely takes experience and patience.
Rita: Explain the concept of Pay it Forward
Chuck: Pay it forward or paying it forward refers to repaying the good deeds one has received by doing good things for other unrelated people.
In Ryan Hyde’s book and movie it is described as an obligation to do three good deeds for others in repayment of a good deed that one receives, and that such good deeds should be things that the person cannot accomplish on their own. In this way, the need to help each other can spread exponentially through society, creating a social movement with the hopes of making the world a better place.
It is also sometimes described as being “good for a favor”, meaning a willingness to help others (even strangers) on the expectation that it will all come back around in the end.
When I talked to you in the past, having not studied this book, seen the movie or read the hype, I meant that my “pay it forward” philosophy was based on a couple of philosophies. One, that “what goes around comes around” IF YOU JUST DO GOOD THINGS FOR OTHER PEOPLE, GOOD THINGS WILL HAPPEN TO YOU! If you do to others what you would have them do to you, your life will be more fulfilling. My philosophy does is not or was not based on others doing something good for me. I have a lot of people to “pay back”; however, since that is not possible in all cases, you could say I was paying back by paying forward all the time.
Rita: So to sum up, what are the top 5 tips you would give a new networker.
Chuck: Have a plan, set goals, be specific but flexible, before each networking event. How many people will you try to listen to? Who are you looking to partner with, etc. Networking is work – it should be fun – but it is work!
Buy Bob Burg’s “Endless Referral” book, or better yet get his CD Set “Endless Referrals” and learn how to work a room. Or any other “networking Gurus” plan on how to work a room. Practice this before hand and modify it to meet your needs, but don’t just go to an event, spread your cards and pray. Find the centers of influence, learn how to approach them, maximize your time.
Listen, listen, listen – find opportunities for others and they will find them for you. Show a genuine interest in the other person. If, for some reason something about them turns you off, move on, graciously to be sure, but move on.
Be yourself – learn from experience – and watch what others do.
Speak slowly, distinctly and passionately about what you do.
I found the interview with Chuck to be fascinating, in that online networking is actually very similar to offline networking. The thoughts that came to mind for me were:
The purpose of networking both online and offline are basically the same for most business people. The goal is to develop contacts to build mutually beneficial relationships.
I fully agree with Chuck in that we need to humanitize relationships, whether they are created online or offline. If you meet someone online that you really want to network with, get to know that person, listen, and be genuine.
When Chuck talked about the systemized approach to following up on leads ( autoresponders, bulk emails, etc.), I thought about how we really need to further define online ‘networking’, as it is not the same as online ‘marketing’. Online networking is about building mutually beneficial relationships. Online marketing is more about the sales process. I’m sure many of you are on emails lists, and receiving daily or weekly emails from marketers that add a personal ‘flair’ to their message. It might sound personal, but it’s typically a one way street. That marketer does not even know who you are. He knows nothing about you, other than that you may be a potential client. You are part of a list. It’s not networking. They are not going to make a personal introduction for you to their network.
It’s important to have a plan when you network online too. Which online social networks should you network in? Who do you want to meet? Who are the centers of influence?
When Chuck mentioned some examples of bad networking, such as the person spewing out that elevator pitch and passing business cards to every person they see, I immediately thought of those folks who try to spam online communities. When you see a post of “This is my product, please buy from me,” it is pretty unattractive. It will turn people off. Instead, it might be better to provide helpful information, and attract people to you instead through your signature and tagline. You want to stay on topic to other people’s discussions, and comment in a way that adds value to their conversation.
I love the pay it forward concept. It works online too. Look for opportunities to help other people. Things come back around in their own way.
Whether networking online or offline, good networking comes down to building mutually beneficial relationships. It’s all about listening, learning, and being genuine.
I thought I might share with you my personal experience on creating a social network on www.Ning.com . Ning is a social networking platform in which anyone can start their own unique online community. As of the time of this article, there are over 100,000 social networks on Ning, with 70,000 of them having been created in just the past seven months alone.
I actually just stumbled upon Ning this summer. I immediately fell in love with the options it provided for someone who wanted to start their own community. It’s an easy way to start an online community for your leads group, your business, your church, or other group. Ning is free to use.
I started a community which you can view at www.PetBoogaloo.ning.com , which is a social networking site for pet enthusiasts. In my easy-to-use control panel, I could create my desired color scheme and graphics. I wanted to provide all the members of my community the ability to add and share their pet videos, pet photos, and to blog about their pets. I also wanted my members to be able to participate in forum discussions, and create to their own groups within the PetBoogaloo community. Every member also has their own profile page, which they can customize even further. Members are able to actively network with each other if they want to.
Adding these features onto PetBoogaloo was easy. I simply selected the features I wanted to provide to my members, and clicked and dragged them to where I wanted them placed on the PetBoogaloo site.
You can also select whether you want your community to be public or private. I’ve noticed that public communities rank very high in the search engines, which is a huge member benefit, particularly if you have business members who want to increase their own website’s search engine rankings.
If you want to get more technical, you can. Ning offers the ability for you to control your own source code. If you or your webmaster wants to further customize the site, you can request and then alter your source code. Initially, I planned on doing that as I loved the option of complete control, but what I found is that once you order the source code, you don’t benefit from all the new features that Ning is constantly providing. With all the current available options, and with the Ning programming team constantly delivering new state of the art features, I decided to go back and have Ning manage the source code instead.
You of course still need to market your community to your desired audience, so that they know you are there. For tips, check out The Dollars and Sense of Online Communities
