St. Louis Missouri (MO) Small Business Social Media Marketing

Join us for a Webinar on December 3

Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/777444579
Thursday December 3, 2009, 7pm Central Time

Valerie VanBooven RN BSN, owner of SeriousSocialMedia.com

Social Media Marketing for Business Owners- Local and World Domination is Possible

Please attend to learn more about:

*What social media marketing “is’ and what it means to for small business owners

*How social media marketing can decrease the cost of your current marketing budget by decreasing reliance on print and pay-per-click campaigns.

*Which accounts you should sign up for, and which ones you should avoid.

*See actual screenshots of what it looks like when your business dominates the first page of google naturally! (all a result of social media marketing)

*How much time and skill it takes to set up a good program.

*Learn from the pros- one hour of amazing content that will show you how to get the most attractive lead generation website ever put together for your Home Care, Elder Care, or Senior Service  business (or maybe you need more than one!).

*Learn the secret search engine optimization techniques that will work for any website that you currently own.

*Learn why web masters are TERRIBLE about making changes to your site, take way to long, or never respond at all- and what you can do to change all of that once and for all.

*Learn about the “new” websites that allow you to make some changes on the fly all by yourself, and meet a web designer who is not only a sales professional like you, but is obsessed with great customer service.
Title:           Social Media Marketing for Business Owners- Local and World Domination is Possible
Date:         Thursday, December 3, 2009
Time:         7:00 PM – 9:00 PM CST
After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

System Requirements
PC-based attendees
Required: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista
Macintosh®-based attendees
Required: Mac OS® X 10.4 (Tiger®) or newer
Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/777444579

Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media are catching up to traditional websites as a marketing mechanism for small businesses. That’s the takeaway from a just released survey of 2,000 small businesses by research firm Internet2Go. That could be bad for Google (GOOG), which has a virtual monopoly on small-business online advertising, and for Adobe (ADBE), which has a real monopoly on software tools used to build websites.

According to the survey, which ran in mid-September 2009, 45 percent of small-business owners have Twitter or Facebook accounts. That’s astonishing considering that today only 44 percent of all small businesses have websites, according to some surveys. Remember, the Internet is over a decade old, but social media is really only two to three years old, if that.”We’ve known anecdotally that small businesses are using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, but these numbers are surprising,” says Greg Sterling, an Internet2Go senior analyst.
What’s going on here? First, the survey covered small companies that are active online, so they’re more likely to be early adopters. But I believe something deeper is happening. Plainly put, social media offers most of the benefits of a website with few of the headaches.

Business owners can easily float offers on Twitter that are quickly searchable. They can also easily interact with their customers and spot trends that could be useful in marketing. Facebook’s small-business users can build a fan page that provides most of what they get with a standard brochure website, but at a tiny fraction of the typical $500 cost. Contrast that to building a website. You can either do a very cheap one that costs $50 to a few hundred — and looks like it. Or you can pay at least $2,000 to have a designer build one for you that’s really good and includes a minimal amount of functionality.

Then you need to deal with a content management system to update the site, hosting costs and other time-sinks. “biggest complaint” small businesses had regarding online marketing was that it was “too costly” (26 percent). In the survey, 80 percent of the companies reported having marketing budgets of less than $5,000. Of course, the difficulty small business has with traditional websites is no secret. Google, Local.com, MerchantCircle and numerous other companies offering online marketing services to small businesses provide simple online placeholders that contain key company information and can serve as landing pages for online ads.

That said, 90 percent of survey respondents also had their own websites. Also, respondents didn’t claim to be overly satisfied with social-media marketing mechanisms versus other types of online marketing.

And a competing survey by Citibank found the opposite result: that small businesses are largely uninterested in social media. (Of course, that was a telephone survey, and you know how Twitter and text users feel about actually picking up the phone.) Therefore, the jury is still out.

I personally think that verdict will come in shortly — and social media will be a big winner. In doing research into Facebook advertising, I tracked a small but growing number of small businesses that were skipping websites entirely and going exclusively with Facebook, Twitter or some combination of the two for online marketing. Others just put up blogs rather than websites and used that as their web presence.

In fact, Sterling himself is a case study. He became self-employed several years ago and started to build a website. He had problems finding a designer he liked at a price he was willing to pay, so he launched a generic WordPress blog instead. Now that blog has become a key part of his online presence, and Sterling has no interest in building a site that costs a lot upfront and requires serious care and feeding.

So what does this mean? For Google, which has long held a hammerlock on Internet advertising, this could mean far more competition for marketing dollars as social-media marketing grows in acceptance and begins to encroach on text-based search advertising and display-based contextual advertising.

Google beat Wall Street’s earnings estimates on Thursday and wowed analysts with 14 percent year-over-year growth in search-based advertising. But that growth is very low compared to several years ago and suggests a rapidly maturing market in Google’s search-ad stronghold.

For companies that make software tools to build websites, such as Adobe, the message could be even more dire. The death of the pretty-but-useless brochure website may be close at hand. That means less work for Web designers catering to small busineses and less demand for Adobe’s expensive site-building tools. But for small businesses, it creates a more level playing field and lower barriers to entry to online publicity and marketing.

Alex Salkever is Senior Writer at AOL Daily Finance covering technology and greentech. Follow him on twitter @alexsalkever, read his articles, or email him at alex@dailyfinance.com.

What does it cost to think?

The Original Post: What is the cost of thinking? Can be found at: http://www.relationship-economy.com/?p=5232

Your boss says”Our competitors are stealing our customers using this social media stuff. We need to use this stuff and do it better than our competitors and we need to do it NOW!”

You are then tasked with “doing it” but you have no experience or knowledge of what to do. So you look for help and find an outside resource whom supposedly has the experience and knowledge to know what to do. You bring the option of hiring this person to your boss and they ask about the cost and what will they get from using this resource.  You tell your boss the cost but aren’t sure exactly what it is you’re going to get. Then your boss says “I know we need to do this but I don’t know what it is or what we’ll get from it”.

How can a company put value on something they don’t understand?  How can they understand if they have no reference to “think about it”?.

What Is Required To Think?

Thinking about social media cannot increase understanding without the appropriate knowledge. Anything new or innovative takes time to understand and determine how to use it effectively.  In order to think effectively one must first acquire the knowledge necessary to think about using social media strategically, tactically and with specific purpose. Without the knowledge thinking will only produce the wrong outcomes because your thoughts are limited to what you know, not what you don’t know.

The reality is that learning to leverage social media requires people and organizations to reThink everything. This thing everyone calls social media has serious strategic implications and to just “do it” without gaining the knowledge to think about what needs to be done is a sure disaster.

Think About This

A business runs on communications. Without being able to effectively and efficiently communicate you end up wasting time and money. Money represents time and cost in rework, fixing misunderstandings, setting the wrong customer expectations and  not effectively and efficiently communicating to your employees, customers and your market.

The cost of not thinking about these issues is increased cost. However being able to “think” about these issues may require the infusion of new knowledge which may not exist in your organization. W. Edwards Deming once said “knowledge required to change the existing system to a better system must come from outside the existing system”. Why? Because the existing system is blinded by its own thinking. Get it?

Thinking About Social Media?

Who isn’t? The Corporate Executive Board said “Most companies are embracing social media—but too many are wasting their efforts through sloppy management”

More than 70% of companies are already using social media; many are planning to increase their spending on social media across the coming years. Whether for learning from customers, building their brands or a range of other hoped-for outcomes, companies are clearly diving in.

If you dive into the social media water without knowing its depth or where the rocks are you are likely to break your neck.  To avoid breaking your neck you should first get the knowledge about that which your about to dive into.  Without knowledge people, and entire organizations, perish.  Think before you jump. But before you can think effectively you must first get new knowledge.  Social media knowledge doesn’t come from self appointed gurus or experts who know how to get you followers and traffic. The cost of thinking increases when you don’t think. Get it?

What say you?

Jordan Julien got it right when he wrote this article- see it here: http://socialmediatoday.com/SMC/121581

He also made another statement that I think provides the most clarity of all when it comes to social media marketing:

“…Individuals NEED to infuse their personality/ beliefs into their brand to create a corporate brand that deserves respect.

I agree, that brands built from the bottom-up, should consider my advice as a progressive goal. Many brands, at this point, have tenants in charge of marketing. (People in charge, who simply want to make things a little better than when they first came into the position; CMO’s, CEO’s) Rather than those, who have invested their personal identity into their business.

These are the people that need to invest, and re-invest, into creating a brand that will promote confidence; and a brand that can be identified with.”

5 primary models a brand can use to communicate with its audience via social media.

I suggest there are 5 primary models a brand can use to communicate with its audience via social media. (These models can be applied to other media as well, but some work much better, and are much easier to execute using social media.)

1. Direct Communication
2. Communications Catalyst
3. Cooperative Communication
4. Participatory Definition
5. Brand Embodiment

Direct Communication: Occurs when a brand communicates its message directly to the audience.

Timeline: Instant

Participation: Minimal

Example: Youtube Video (Dove Evolution)

Communications Catalyst: Refers to a brand that encourages or provides the means of communication between two or more customers.

Timeline: Short

Participation: Minimal

Example: Crowd Sourcing (Best Buy IdeaX)

Cooperative Communication: Is a type of participatory marketing, where the brand proactively participates with its audience.

Timeline: Intermediate

Participation: Results proportional to participation

Example: Dynamic Facebook Page (Dew Labs)

Participatory Definition: The opening of a brand to influence, or re-design by its audience.

Timeline: Intermediate to Long

Participation: Minimal, but ongoing for better results

Example: Customer-Generated Branding (Doritos Undefined Flavour)

Brand Embodiment: Happens when an individual, or group of individuals, develop such a strong affinity for the brand that they will recommend it without being prompted. (Of course this also means, that if prompted they’ll recommend the brand, and also means that it’s their brand of choice.)

Timeline: Long

Participation: Substantial, and ongoing

Example: Apple* (Check out the # of related videos & comments)

*Note: Apple isn’t the best example, because they didn’t strictly use social media to follow this model. A better example might be Best Buy.

It’s important to know what model you plan on following, and map out the way to achive your goals. The knowledge that there isn’t just one way to participate in social media can help you plan the most effective campaigns. (Many brands follow the ‘Cooperative Communication’ model, but might achieve a higher ROI using a different model.) It’s also important to note, that multiple models can work together to provide a higher ROI; especially when dealing with different types of content.