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

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.

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?

St. Louis Missouri Small Business Owners Need to Know About the 4 Ways Social Media is Changing Business

Great article by Soren Gordhamer read the original here: http://mashable.com/2009/09/22/social-media-business/

Soren Gordhamer writes and consults on ways we can more creatively and effectively use the technologies of our age, including social media. He is the author of “Wisdom 2.0″ (HarperOne, 2009). You can follow him on Twitter at @SorenG.

Social media is helping to forge a new era in business transparency and engagement, creating both new challenges and opportunities. Gone are the days when companies could rely on carefully crafted press releases or flashy ad campaigns to communicate with their customers, often in an attempt to convince people that their products are the best in the field. In the age of social media, the rules have changed radically, and people today demand a more honest and direct relationship with the companies with which they do business.

Companies now face a clear choice: wall themselves in and become increasingly controlled and hidden, or use social media and other means to reveal their human side, welcome transparency, and forge new relationships with their customers. The old game is undoubtedly over, and the question now is, “what can businesses do to transition and succeed in this new era?”

Below are the top four broad shifts that social media is causing in business. Please feel free to share any others you have observed in the comments.

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1. From “Trying to Sell” to “Making Connections”

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In order to change the context of customer relationships from trying to sell to seeking to engage and connect with customers, companies need to use various means, including sites like Facebook () and Twitter (), to socially interact with people. The most popular brands in social media tend to post less about their products or services and more about things that help their customers get to know the people and personality of a company. Their goal is less about “selling” and more “engaging” — and, as a result, through such engagement people feel more comfortable doing business with those companies.

Jeff Swartz, who is the President and CEO of the Timberland Company, is a great example of this. Swartz uses his Twitter account to show his personality by tweeting about his life and the social issues he is passionate about, rather than the shoes his company makes. He also links from his Twitter bio to Timberland’s Earthkeeper project that supports environmental awareness, rather than to the company homepage, in an effort to make a connection with people around something that goes beyond just the products Timberland sells.

Lesson: Release fewer “official statements” and more personal ones that help you make a connection to your customers and audience.

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2. From “Large Campaigns” to “Small Acts”

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With sites like Facebook and Twitter, we all essentially have our own broadcasting network, and businesses are beginning to see that rather than spending millions of dollars on traditional ad campaigns, small acts can be more valuable because people will inevitably share such experiences through the social web.

In the past, if we had a very bad or very good experience with a company, it could take days or weeks to tell all of our friends and relatives about it. Today, in a matter of minutes, we can let all our friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter know about what happened. When every customer experience can be easily and widely broadcast, small issues become super important.

Loic Le Meur, CEO of startup software company Seesmic (), once told me that one of the most important jobs of a CEO today is to hear what people are saying about the company’s product across social media channels, and to respond to them directly. In fact, much of his Twitter stream is @replies to people commenting on his company’s product.

Bigger companies, such as Southwest Airlines and Comcast are using Twitter in the same way, making sure customers’ concerns are addressed. Because bad experiences are broadcast just as fast and just as easily as the good, it pays for companies to pay attention to the one-on-one customer relationships forged via social media.

Lesson: Instead of only relying on big campaigns, make authentic, helpful relationships and communication the new campaign.

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3. From “Controlling Our Image” to “Being Ourselves”

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Of course companies need to have employee policies, and there is such a thing as bad press, but look at the most popular companies in the era of social media, and you’ll generally find the ones that give their employees freedom to be themselves in online spaces. The goal should no longer be to create a very controlled and polished image that everyone in a company tries to reinforce, but rather to give employees the means necessary to be human beings that can put a friendly face on the corporation.

I am not sure how NBC directs the social media efforts of their employees, but in watching NBC newscaster Ann Curry (@AnnCurry) on Twitter it is clear that she is not simply trying to get people to watch her shows. Curry is someone who speaks out about women’s rights, deeply cares about justice, and likes to quote the Persian poet, Rumi — there is a person there, not a company representative, and as such, I am much more likely to pay attention when and if she does talk about any of her television shows.

John Nack, the Principal Product Manager for Photoshop at Adobe, offers another great example. Adobe is a company that smartly encourages and provides the means for their employees to blog, and anyone who reads Nack’s blog will notice that Adobe doesn’t put many restrictions on what people write about. Nack’s blog is focused almost exclusively on his area of interest — graphic design and photo manipulation — but he doesn’t post solely about Adobe products. Many of the interesting art projects and articles he links to have nothing to do with Adobe and some may even have been created using software from competing companies.

Lesson: Forget the unified company image, give staff the freedom to be themselves, and trust that the relationships that they build will help the company in the long run.

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4. From “Hard to Reach” to “Available Everywhere”

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To engage with customers, it is no longer enough to have an email address and customer service number on one’s website. Today, people want to interact with and engage businesses via their chosen means of communication, whether that is Twitter, Facebook, discussion forums, or a feedback site like Get Satisfaction ().

If I want to communicate with a company, I tend to look them up on Twitter first. Knowing that I can communicate with a company on the networks upon which I am already most active makes me feel more comfortable doing business with them, because I know that if I have an issue, there is someone at the company I can communicate with through those means.

Companies like Dell, for example, have fully embraced multiple channels of support. Their community site lists all the ways customers can connect with them through Twitter, Facebook, Flickr (), YouTube (), forums, blogs, email, and more. Dell wants people to be able to connect with them through whatever channel is most comfortable.

Lesson: Rather than expect customers to communicate through your chosen means, allow them to do so through their chosen means.

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The New Business Paradigm in the Age of Social Media

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In this new era of social media, companies are asked to be increasingly transparent and personal. Of course, traditional advertising and press releases will still have their place, but social sites such as Twitter and Facebook allow a whole new type of communication to take place that has previously been unknown to most businesses. Possibly more important for businesses than getting a large number of followers on social media sites, is following through on the opportunity to forge more genuine and direct connections with their customers.

Businesses who choose not to adapt to the new culture will be at an increasing disadvantage, as their customers slowly build personal relationships with their competitors. We are now in the age of open communication, engaged dialogue, and transparency, and business success may now have less to do with the size of ad budgets, but on the quality of interactions with customers.

I love sharing other posts from some of the most brilliant minds in social media marketing. Samir Balwani is one of those people!
Enjoy this great article, the original can be found at: http://mashable.com/2009/09/30/small-business-strategies/

5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

September 30th, 2009 | by Samir Balwani

Samir Balwani is an emerging technology strategist at Morpheus Media, a firm specializing in Social Marketing, SEM, and SEO. You can follow him on Twitter @leftthebox and get his newsletter.

Social media marketing and the businesses that utilize it have become more sophisticated. More small businesses are beginning to understand how to best leverage online tools to build a community and recognize that engagement and interaction are the foundations of social marketing, but most don’t know what’s next.

What follows are five advanced strategies for small businesses that may already have small online communities and understand how to create an online presence, but don’t know what to do next.

What Is An Advanced Strategy?

The definition of an advanced social strategy is a technique that goes beyond the normal social media presence. It introduces or reinforces a marketing message while pushing a user to another profile or business site. Before moving forward with an advanced strategy, it’s important that your business understands social marketing, has experience engaging consumers, and that you possess a basic understanding of online marketing.

Strategy 1: Multimedia Usage

The term “A picture is worth a thousand words” has never been truer. Consumers are now using the web to look for product pictures and videos; they want more information and want to see what they’re considering buying. The good news is that it’s easy for a company to create and publish videos and pictures.

In addition to taking photos of products, you can also take pictures at office events as a way to highlight company culture. This not only helps convince others to work with you or to buy from you (consumers see that you are down to earth and one of them, instead of a stuffy company), it also helps your HR department recruit new employees. Who doesn’t want to work for a company that celebrates birthdays and has a good time?

Videos are useful for explaining complex how-tos or concepts. Showing step by step directions can have a greater impact than even the most well written article. Businesses don’t have to invest huge sums of money to create good videos, either. I highly recommend the relatively cheap Flip camcorder, which takes great videos and is easy for even a non-technical marketer to use.

Multimedia can break down the faceless business-to-consumer sales flow and make your company appear friendlier. Use videos and images to show that your business is fun, you care about your employees, and most importantly, that you care about your customers.

Example: WorldMusicSupply.com

WorldMusicSupply.com, an online retailer of musical instruments and accessories, has used YouTube (YouTube) to build a strong online community. Their channel has built over 7,000 subscribers and has over 260,000 views.

Strategy 2: Integrate Offline and Online Advertising

Many small businesses do some sort of offline advertising, whether it be radio, print, or cable. Social marketing allows a business to extend their offline sales pitch.

Including your Facebook Page or blog URL in offline ads act as social proof, inviting potential consumers to see your community and increase trust in your business. Not only can integrating online and offline advertising help the conversion process, but it can also help build your community. Introducing potential consumers to your social profiles means they may join your community now and buy later.

Strategy 3: Message Adaptation

As businesses start to become more sophisticated with social media they are starting to leverage more online platforms. However, most deliver the same message over multiple platforms instead of tailoring communications for each individual site.

Social platforms each have an ecosystem of their own. What might be acceptable on Tumblr (Tumblr) might be considered spam on Facebook (Facebook). A specific style of writing might spread on Twitter (Twitter) but fail on FriendFeed (FriendFeed). Understanding that each site is different and then customizing your message ensures they do well on each respective site.

Not only does customizing messages across sites help the message spread but it keeps users from receiving multiple identical communications. Be sure to maximize your potential by sending a user that follows the business on Twitter and Facebook two different messages, instead of the same thing.

Strategy 4: Local Social Networks, Beyond Yelp

For a small business, local search can be a big win. Being visible to consumers looking for a business in their area is extremely important. Make sure your site is included in local business directories in order to help ensure that consumers find you when they need you. Sometimes finding that many sites can be difficult, however.

First, make sure you check your competitors. Where are they listed? Check their inbound links to check for business directories you can add yourself to. Also, make sure your business has been added to Google Maps (Google Maps), using the Local Business Center.

Take the time to include all the information you can and update any old news. For many consumers, this will be their first interaction with the business.

Example: Bella Napoli in New York

Bella Napoli is a small pizzeria in New York that has done a great job of making sure they appear in as many local searches as possible.

Strategy 5: Contests and Discounts

Building a community is only the first part of social marketing. Using that community to drive sales, propagate marketing, or crowdsource operations is the true power of social media. One way to excite the community is to collectively do something to create a contest or offer an exclusive discount (i.e., the contest can create competition between users). Not only does a contest build buzz organically but if contestants need to, for example, publish an article that gets the most comments in order to win, the contest itself becomes viral.

A good social media contest should include some sort of sharing or virality as a requirement for winning.

Discounts are also a great way to connect with your community. By giving exclusive coupons to your social community, you’re rewarding and reminding them that you are not only a brand to engage with, but also to buy from.

Example: NetFirms.com

NetFirms.com decided to make it easier to register a domain by allowing people to do it via Twitter. Those who participated or spread the word by tweeting, were also entered into a prize drawing.

Conclusion

Creating a basic social media presence is easy enough, getting your community to actually do something is more difficult. Taking advantage of these strategies can help you build your community, make your marketing more effective, and incentivize buying.

Social Media Marketing – St. Louis Small Business Owners View This Great Video!