Marketing with Moxie

I'm talking to a Greater Austin Chamber "Building Blocks of Business" session today about social media. It's so tempting to get into tactics right away.  I typically get questions like "How often should I blog?" or "What should I tweet?"  I believe small business owners and marketers need to think strategically about social media before they ever start to discuss tactics.

1) Integrate – Don’t treat your social media activity as something separate from your other marketing initiatives. Feature links to your social media profiles in your email signature, on your business cards, in your ads, and as a standard block of copy in your weekly HTML email newsletter. In addition, make sure that links to your educational content are featured prominently in your social media profiles and that Facebook fan page visitors and blog subscribers are offered the opportunity to subscribe to your newsletter and attend your online and offline events. Make your social media profiles a part of your address copy block and you will soon see adding them to all that you do as an automatic action.

2) Amplify – Use your social media activity to create awareness for and amplify your content housed in other places. This can go for teasing some aspect of your latest blog post on twitter or in your Facebook status, creating full blown events on Eventful or MeetUP, or pointing to mentions of your firm in the media. If you publish a bi-weekly newsletter, in addition to sending it to your subscribers, archive it online and tweet it too. You can also add social features to your newsletter to make it very easy for others to retweet (tweetmeme button) and share on social bookmark sites such as delicious and digg. I would also add that filtering other people’s great content and pointing this out to your followers, fans and subscribers fits into this category as it builds your overall reputation for good content sharing and helps to buffer the notion that you are simply broadcasting your announcements. Quality over quantity always wins in social media marketing.

3) Repurpose – Taking content that appears in one form and twisting it in ways that make it more available in a another, or to another audience, is one of the secrets to success in our hyperinfo driven marketing world we find ourselves. When you hold an event to present information you can promote the event in various social media networks and then capture that event and post the audio to your podcast, slides to Slideshare, and transcript (I use Castingwords for this) as a free report for download. You can string 5 blog posts together (like this series) and make them available as a workshop handout or a bonus for your LinkedIn group. Never look at any content as a single use, single medium, act.

4) Lead generate – So many people want to generate leads in the wide world of social media, but can’t seem to understand how or have met with downright hostile reactions when trying. Effectively generating leads from social media marketing is really no different than effectively generating leads anywhere – it’s just that the care you must take to do it right is amplified by the “no selling allowed” culture. No one like to be sold to in any environment – the trick is to let them buy – and this is even more important in social media marketing. So, what this means is that your activity, much of what I’ve mentioned above, needs to focus on creating awareness of your valuable, education based content, housed on your main hub site. You can gain permission to market to your social media network and contacts when you can build a level of trust through content sharing and engagement. It’s really the ultimate two step advertising, only perhaps now it’s three step – meet and engage in social media, lead to content elsewhere, content elsewhere presents the opportunity to buy. To generate leads through social media marketing, you need to view your activity on social sites like an effective headline for an ad – the purpose of the headline is not to sell, but to engage and build know, like and trust – it’s the ultimate permission based play when done correctly.

One glaring exception to this softer approach for some folks is twitter search. I believe you can use twitter search to locate people in your area who are asking for solutions and complaining about problems you can solve and reach out to them directly with a bit of a solution pitch. People who are talking publicly about needing something are offering a form of permission and can be approached as more of warmed lead. The same can also be said for LinkedIn Answers – if someone asks if “anyone knows a good WordPress designer”, I think you can move to convincing them that you are indeed a great WordPress designer.

5) Learn – One of the hangups I encounter frequently from people just trying to get started in social media marketing is the paralysis formed when they stare blankly at twitter wondering what in the world to say. The pressure to fill the silence can be so overwhelming that they eventually succumb and tweet what they had for lunch. If you find yourself in this camp, I’m going to let you off the hook – you don’t have to say anything to get tremendous benefit from social media participation. If I did nothing more than listen and occasionally respond when directly engaged, I would derive tremendous benefit from that level of participation. In fact, if you are just getting started this is what you should do before you ever open your 140 character mouth. Set up an RSS reader and subscribe to blogs, visit social bookmarking sites like BizSugar and delicious and read what’s popular, create custom twitter searches for your brand, you competitors, and your industry, and closely follow people on twitter who have a reputation for putting out great content. And then just listen and learn. If you do only this you will be much smarter about your business and industry than most and you may eventually gain the knowledge and confidence to tap the full range of what’s possible in the wild and wacky world of social media marketing.

Do your eyes glaze over when someone mentions social media as a way to promote your small business? Could this quote be you:

courtesy newmediachatter.com"What, me? Write a blog? No way. Facebook already makes me crazy, and Twitter?  Don't get me started."

But here's the deal.  Social Media as a marketing tool is here to stay. If your company is not doing something online -- besides having a static website, you're losing customers -- or worse, your competitor is getting yours.  

Following is a guest post by Duct Tape Marketing founder John Jantsch. John refutes the idea that social media is like taking a dose of medicine.  Yes, it's work, but what about marketing isn't?

Be sure to read to the end of this post to learn how you can save $100 on a workshop that will make you a Social Media Pro in 2010!

1) Listening is the best way to develop strategy

Everyone knows they should develop a social media strategy before diving into to every network they can. The problem is, few can tell you how to do this because any real marketing strategy is highly personal and involves your customers, market, competitors, suppliers, products and services. The best way to approach discovering a strategy for your social media participation, and perhaps all of your communications, is to listen really, really well. Social media is one of the greatest listening tools on the planet. Your customers are telling you about their fears and hopes, they’re telling about what they like about your products and dislike about the competition, they’re telling you what they wish someone would make – and now you can hear it. If you do nothing but set-up listening stations, using free tools like Google Alerts and Twitter Search, you can get an enormous return on your time invested.

Once you spend time listening to your market, understanding how people use blogs and just what seems to work and not work onLinkedIn you may be more prepared to develop a marketing strategy, once that based on achieving marketing objectives, than ever. Don’t skip this step for tactics!

2) Nobody really wants to read another blog

I’m fond of telling anyone that will listen that every small business should have a blog. I don’t say that because I think your customers are itching to grab a cup of green tea and fire up what you wrote in your blog today. In fact, if you polled most of your customers and inquired as to whether you should write a blog, most would tell you no. But, those same customers go to search engines like Google andBing every second of every day looking for answers to questions, suppliers in their town, and ways to solve pressing problems. And when they do, guess what most of them find, that’s right, blog content!

I’m not saying you shouldn’t write incredible stuff, with a long term goal of attracting lots of readers – when these readers start linking back to that content your search results will soar – what I am saying is, write what people search in your market and your town, educate with your posts and you blog will pay off faster than any other online play.

And it that weren’t enough blog software, like WordPress, is so user simple and feature rich that it’s the best way to run your entire web presence.

3) It’s kind of a real estate game

While I started this post off talking about the virtues of a solid strategy, there is a bit of a real estate grab that comes on the front end of getting value from social media. There are many profiles that you can claim and optimize, even if you don’t quite yet know what your development strategy is, and you should claim them. Creating spokes of branded and optimized content in sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Slideshare and YouTube has become standard SEO practice, but don’t forget about taking the time to build very rich profiles on sites like Biznik, BusinessWeek’s Exchange, OPENForum, and BizSugar. (Disclosure: I write for OpenForum)

Your profiles in these outposts will serve as content real estate that you control and can help fill in the gaps when someone Google’s You.

4) Sell awareness and the money will follow

A lot of people will tell you, and perhaps you’ve experienced it first hand, that you can’t sell using social media sites. Let me ask you this, have you ever really have much luck selling anything to anyone just because they happened to be standing in front of you. The only difference is social media makes it easier to stand in front of someone. You can’t really sell anything to anyone until you’ve built trust. The most effective way to build trust in any setting is to show someone how to get what they want and allow them to come to the conclusion that you have something they might want to buy.

Social media, just like the most effective advertising, is a great place to build awareness about your content: blog, white paper, seminar, workbook. If you do that, and your content builds trust, social media is a great place to make money – think of it as another version of  2-step advertising.

5) Networking hasn’t really changed

I really believe that  effective networking on social media sites like Biznik, Facebook, or LinkedIn greatly resembles that of effective networking at in person Chamber or Association events. The key difference being one of a style of engagement and perhaps a different set of follow-up steps.

Before you do, act, or respond in any manner on a social media site, ask yourself if it would be an effective response to a prospect you’ve just met at an business event? You know, you wouldn’t go shirtless, with beer in hand to an association meet and greet, why would you post the same on your Facebook profile? This varies to some degree, but not that much.

6) It makes your offline play stronger

One of the things I don’t hear enough people talking about is how much social media can impact your offline efforts. Most business is still done across a desk, but starting relationships on LinkedIn and then building them much deeper over lunch is the killerest combination.

Social media also allows you to more easily and more consistently stay on top of what’s going on in your customer’s world. A growing number of CRM tools, such as ACT2010! and BatchBook make social media activity a part of a contact’s record.

7) A system is the solution

A well run business is a collection of systems. Marketing is a system and one of the best ways to keep social media participation from becoming your full time job is to create systems and process for how you participate.

I know you see people that spend their entire day on Twitter, but you must understand that they fall into two camps a) people who make a living teaching people how to use Twitter, b) people getting ready to go out of business.

It may seem a bit robotic to talk about social media and engagement as a process, but scheduling routines for your blog posting, commenting, tweeting, fanning and friending is a must, just as scheduling the appropriate time for selling, training employees and meeting strategic partners.

 --Guest Blog post by John Jantsch, Duct Tape Marketing

Ready to start making a system that works for you?  Register by Dec. 31 to save $100 on tuition for a Social Media Pro Workshop from Moxie Marketing and Duct Tape University.  Make a New Year's Resolution to become a Social Media Pro in 2010!

I don't often say "wow" out loud when I read about a new social media gadget, but today I did when I spotted Contrad Hall's blog post on Technorati about "Gist," 

As they say on their "About" page, "Gist is an online service that helps you build stronger relationships. By connecting your inbox to the web, you get business-critical information about key people and companies."  These Seattle boys and girls are being kind of modest. This is a jaw-dropping online service that allows you to see how your contacts fit into the social media world, and how you connect to each other.  I signed up and took a test drive. Say I want to know what you've been up to lately.  After I enter you as a contact, I click on your name on my Gist dashboard.  It shows recent content about you, including news, blogs, twitter... automatically collected, ranked and grouped.  Here's where my jaw kind of dropped. You can also sync Gist with your Outlook or Google account, and it will record every email and attachment we've exchanged.  It also links to SalesForce online CRM software and you can download a plug-in for Outlook so you don't have to go to the Gist website.  It's all right there in Outlook.

Imagine what having this kind of information will do to help build and manage your business relationships.  "Hey Bill, I just saw the online news post a few minutes ago about your promotion. Way to go!"  Think of the value in not having to sift through reams of emails to find that document attachment Bill sent you five months ago.

Give Gist a try.  Maybe I'll see you there.

I think I've reached the point where I need a family intervention. I can't stop attending webinars, reading blogs or clicking on tweets with tiny url's that laud Twitter as the holy grail of marketing. I'm simply fascinated.

But, let's face it. Twitter, or the generic term "micro-blogging," is NOT rocket science. But with the Twitter buzz reaching a fever pitch, you'd think the civilized world had discovered a secret formula to save the planet 140 characters at a time.

If you tweeted your way to this blog, you may have a problem too. Take this little quiz:

• Have you downloaded twitter apps to all your computers and personal electronic devices only to fear that something new will come along at any minute to make Twitter even better?
• Do you worry about whether it's rude not to follow someone who has started following you?
• Has your spouse or significant other given you "the look" when he or she spotted you sneaking a peak at a tweet on your Blackberry or iPhone when they came back from the restroom during a date?
• Have you felt uncomfortable when a certain co-worker, friend or boss started following your tweets? (Oh crap, I don't want HER to follow me!)
• Have you agonized over the decision to unfollow, or worse (nah nah nah) BLOCK that person because it could hurt their feelings?
• Do you wake up in the middle of the night worrying "why the hell is that guy from New Zealand following ME?"
• Have you set up a Twitter account in your infant child's name to be sure they'll be able to use it when they grow up?

If you answered yes to three or more of these questions, you may need to join a recovery program. (Please Lord, let me find an app for THAT!)

Okay.  So you're a twitterholic.  Admitting it is your first step.  But, should Twitter be the center of your small business's marketing universe? Unless you're Guy Kawaski, no. (Did you know that Guy hires ghost Twitter writers to tweet for him?) And what about all those other Web 2.0 shiny objects -- blogging, search engine marketing, pay-per-click advertising, Facebook, LinkedIn? They're all good. But traditional marketing tools and tactics are not dead. The internet, and it's various by-products did not kill them any more than radio killed newspapers, or television killed motion pictures.

But don't let the hypersonic speed of technology run over your strategic marketing building blocks. I like the way Duct Tape Marketing author John Jantsch defines marketing: "Getting people who have a specific need or problem to know, like, trust, do business with, and refer you to others who have this same need or problem."

To do that, depending on the nature of your business, Twitter can help. But you'll still need a high quality logo, product sheets, brochures, or maybe print or broadcast advertising. Develop and stick to a strategy with effective tools and tactics that help you accomplish your marketing goals. Understanding your audience and how they access information will be a key to success.

Twitter along with other social media, can be one of those tactics, if you know how to use it.  I think small businesses are slowly figuring that out these days. Restaurants are tweeting dinner specials. Chiropractors are tweeting about procedures to help relieve pain. Bars are tweeting about live band performances. Free marketing!  Very cool.  Be sure the information you tweet helps meet a need or solve a problem. Be interesting. Make sure your tweets build up your brand.  Don't mix scary personal tweets (I got sooooo wasted last night) with business tweets. Not every tweet has to be promotional. I follow some Twitters who intersperse inspirational or humorous messages.

Like all marketing tactics, Twitter and other social media are not for everyone. It takes time and attention to do it right, and to be consistent. There's nothing worse than an abandoned blog or dormant Twitter account. It looks like you've locked up your store and gone on a holiday. Hire someone to help write for you if necessary. For local business, Twitter should not be a numbers game. It does not matter how many followers you have if they are not able to help you meet your marketing goals.

You don't HAVE to be everywhere on the Internet. Pick one or two social media approaches and stick with them. If they're not working, make some adjustments. But be sure they fit into an overall marketing mix that makes sense and generates business.

Oh, and stop worrying about that guy who follows you in New Zealand. He's probably wondering why the chick in India is following him.

Update on Friday, May 8, 2009 at 12:05PM by Rick

If you're in Austin and have some thoughts to share about Twitter and social media marketing for small business, please come to my Biznik "Tear 'n Share" event on Thursday, March 14 at Progress Coffee.  RSVP here.