Online, reputation is everything. It drives you professionally, personally and algorithmically. Have a good reputation and your efforts will be rewarded through growth and customer loyalty. Develop a bad one and you'll spend precious time and resources trying to recover lost market share. While it's impossible to monitor every venue open to public opinion, you can work to protect your reputation by registering your known brand/name with as many social media, forums, and discussion sites as you can, especially the popular ones in your niche....
Can you tell someone how many visitors your blog gets every day? Do you know how many people access your blog via a feed on a daily basis? If so, great, but that's only the surface of understanding your blog's traffic.
I think more people are beginning to understand the value of using Twitter during conferences to keep up with the conversation around the event and for meeting people at the show, but I think a lot of people are still failing to grasp the benefits of tying every day Twitter use to post-show networking. After attending Podcamp Ohio this past weekend, I'm reminded of just how useful Twitter is AFTER the show.
Think all you have to do is create great content, and readers will beat a path to your blogging front door? Think again. One of the best ways to grow your blog, is by participating on other social sites.
More businesses than ever are exploring the possibility of using social media tools and sites to help grow their business. But many of these efforts aren't very effective, and I think that is due to many businesses simply misunderstanding what social media is, and why it's so important.
Thanks to the lowering cost of technology, it's now possible for any small business owner to create and share videos with current and potential customers online, for less than $200. This also gives small business owners several exciting new options for growing their businesses.
When I teach Social Media classes to small businesses, I can always count on someone in the audience to ask a question that goes a little something like this: "I've got limited time to invest in social media, but there seem to be a million sites out there. How do I know which one is worth my time? If I only have time for one, which one should it be?" Well I generally try to weasel out of that question by telling them I'd use both LinkedIn AND Twitter, the truth is if I had to pick just one, LinkedIn would win, hands down. Let me tell you why.
Sage highlights the Harvard Business Review blog, Conversation Starter. The post, "How to Be a Social Media Change Agent" features an interview with Josh Bernoff, author of The Groundswell Effect. The book provides case studies of what people are doing in the business world with social media. As one of the leading business publications in the world, the Harvard Business Review adds legitimacy to social media and internet industries as a whole by its coverage both online and in its print publication....
More than ever, sites are popping up that let customers review everything from restaurants to daycares. And while many small businesses cringe at the thought of receiving a bad review, here's a few reasons why even a negative opinion from a customer can be a good thing!
This weekend I was reminded of how quickly ideas can generate buzz and discussion on social media sites when a blog post I wrote immediately sparked conversation on my blog as well as two other social sites.
I have lost count on how many times I have heard business owners say "I know I need to be blogging/on Facebook/MySpace/Twitter, but what I don't know is how to get started?' When I ask how they KNOW that they need to be using these tools, I am answered with either a blank stare, or a 'well everyone else is using them!'
Sage highlights Jennifer Laycock's article "How Social Media (Didn't) Change Business," in which she uses her grandfather as an example of what business is really all about, and that's PEOPLE. Jennifer's grandfather was an insurance agent who delayed his retirement for a year to personally take care of all his clients' claims after a major tornado struck the area.
I'm continually amazed at how people go barreling into social media sites like a bull in a china shop and then wonder why they aren't well received. They hear social media is changing the way people do business and they make the mistake of thinking it's changing it to something "new" instead of simply changing it back to the way things used to be. (Yes, I know Twitter is new, I mean in spirit.)
While we're starting to see a shift toward more and more people understanding and embracing the idea of social media, there are still quite a few folks out there that simply don't get it. That's not to say they don't understand what it is, it's that they don't understand why it's so important and how it can impact their business.
Don't you? Have you ever heard a client say they wanted a viral video? Have you ever told someone to make you a viral video? There's just one problem; you can't make a viral video.
At the first Small Business Marketing Unleashed, one of the case studies I explored was how Stormhoek involved bloggers in the marketing of their wine. Stormhoek now has its sights on Twitter users as marketing partners, and small businesses looking to explore social media should pay attention to their efforts.
We've probably all heard the horror stories of people whose articles hit the front page of Digg and their servers crash under the strain of all the traffic this generates for them. Want to ensure this doesn't happen to you? Follow the steps in this handy (tongue in cheek) guide, and I can pretty much guarantee you'll never have the problem of too much web traffic from social media sites....
When you do what I do for a living, it's a constant battle to remind yourself that not everyone lives and breathes online marketing. The true challenge of small business education isn't really in teaching people what they need to know...it's in convincing them they need to know it. That's why I couldn't resist writing a rebuttal to an article over at Anita Campbell's Small Business Trends site by John Mariotti called "Ten Reasons I Won't Use Social Media Sites."
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