The 2009 Small Business Survey found that social media adoption by small businesses has doubledfrom 12% to 24% in the last year, according to a study sponsored by Network Solutions® and the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business.
The report also found that investments in Web sites and social media will be large growth areas in technology over the next 18 months. These changes are coming as small business owners try to be more innovative and successful in the marketplace.
Most often, social media is used for external marketing and engagement. Such as finding new customers, building awareness or staying engaged with customers.
Thirty-seven percent of small businesses still rely on traditional print advertising to get the word out. After advertising, the second-most popular form of marketing is e-mail (24%), followed by social media (19%).
Social media ranked about even with cold-calls (18%) and direct mail (17%), suggesting that small business owners have yet to discover the true potential of this technology. For example, the ability to collaborate with suppliers, partners, colleagues or staff.
Yet, this type of innovation is what separates the small business winners from the losers. Besides working capital, the authors found that marketing and innovation were the two largest indicators of small business success.
“There may be a vast untapped potential for using the medium to link members of the supply network, colleagues and staff to gain advantages in creativity and productivity. Such internal uses are harder to imagine and in their infancy, but have the potential to unleash a vast reservoir of creativity and joint problem solving as social media users grow exponentially. Examples of such uses are developing a new product or service, finding low cost resources, teaming to pursue business opportunities, or leveraging an expert source to solve a special problem.”
The 2009 Small Business Report goes into more detail about how the report was compiled, provides more detail on what characterizes a successful small business and provides a year-over-year Small Business Success Index. If you work with the small business community, it’s one of the most useful and fact-filled reports you’ll read all year.
Sometimes you need to replace something in your document that takes several keystrokes. In this video, I show you how to copy something to your keyboard, then how to use those clipboard contents in a global search and replace.
This tip has saved me hours and hours (and hours) of time!
What has been YOUR most useful Word 2007 tip ever? Leave a Comment to let me know!
“Being a Fan, Follower or Friend does not mean they opted in to have advertising blasted at them.”
– Michael Donnelly, Worldwide Interactive Marketing
Nearly six thousand times a day, people talk about why Coca-Cola is their brand. They do it with creative content that gets noticed and demonstrates an authentic LOVE for the brand. Some of these conversations are a natural outgrowth of Coca-Cola’s brand, others happen because Coke asks for it:
“Where have you had a Coke lately?”
“Coca-Cola invites you to upload a photo of the next Coke you drink.”
“Coca-Cola wants to know: What’s your favorite time of day to enjoy an ice-cold Coca-Cola?”
Coke’s brand managers track these conversations, finding the most-used word with “Coke” is “LOVE.” How do consumers come to “love” a brand?
Coke is one of the few brands that have been present throughout several generations, and will be for generations to come. It’s reliable. Dependable. Always there. Traveling to Indonesia, I went through Taiwan, then to Bali. Then to the island of Sumba. Then to rural villages, where livestock shares the road. In every stop, there was Coke. Then finally to a place too remote for electricity. Then even further to villages where currency takes the form of livestock and cigarettes. Coke has literally “painted the world red.” It’s natural that Coke will be where people are online as well.
Mr. Donnelly, the architect behind the world’s largest social media campaign, says that his team’s social media strategy is to put fans first. “Less about us, more about them.” As a result, Coke fans interact with the Coke brand and each other more than any other online brand. Donnelly says traditional marketing campaigns ”abandoned the audience” after completion. Campaigns based on sustainable relationships “leverage the existing audience and grow it for future use.”
To create even more highly compelling content, Coca-Cola will soon be embarking on a world “Expedition of Happiness,” taking a crew to 206 countries in one year to see first-hand how Coke brings happiness throughout the world. “We will be everywhere our consumers are in an authentic, member-of-the-community, non big brand way,” Donnelly said. He summarized Coke’s social media strategy this way:
Fish where the fish are
Integrate ‘common social solutions’ into existing campaigns (Facebook, Twitter)
Optimize functionality that already exists (Event invites)
Create new functionality, if needed (Web and iPhone apps)
Have clear principals to insure everyone and everything is aligned
In Summer 2009 Facebook was #5 or #6, then they moved up to number #4 just before Christmas. Now they are #2. Can you guess who’s first?
Of Facebook’s 400 million active users, 50% log on to Facebook on any given day, and then spend about 55 minutes on the site daily. Of those, about 35 million people post a status update, and more than 3 billion photos are uploaded each month–making Facebook the largest photo-sharing site on the Web.
Why is this important to you? Because when Google ranks Web sites, it takes into account the PageRank and value of other sites linking to yours. With Facebook as the #2 site in the world, no other site besides Google has the power to lift your search ranking as much as Facebook. That means every link from Facebook to your home page or blog lifts the value of your blog. Are you beginning to see the possibilities?
Facebook is a popular marketing tool not just because it has large numbers of users and niche marketing possibilities, but also because its indexed and ranked into Google’s proprietary search algorithms.
For these reasons, small businesses are increasingly making Facebook Fan pages their primary hubs on the Internet. I don’t recommend this, because I still think Facebook users prefer entertainment to business. But, for those without a lot of marketing resources, Facebook can be an attractive choice. It’s easy to set up, it has a captive and loyal audience, and it’s relatively easy to manage. But if you go with Facebook as your hub:
Tie your page to one or more promotional campaigns and get your first few hundred fans quickly.
Stay focused on the goal of converting visitors to fans.
Offer incentives and rewards for becoming a fan.
Engage with people on a regular and consistent basis.
Are you leveraging the full power of Facebook in your online marketing strategy? Let me know if you’d like a worksheet to help move your pages from “static” to FANtastic.
George del Barrio has been working with music brands on O‘ahu for more than 20 years.
Here, he talks about a course hes providing on O‘ahu that shares his methodology for social media optimization. I want to share this as an example of how videos can be an important part of your marketing toolbox. Videos are powerful branding tools, help increase search rankings and boost overall social media effectiveness. They can also reduce your administrative overhead costs and free up time within your organization, especially if your team spends a lot of time responding to the same 10 or 15 questions.
George also talks about using Facebook as a social media hub. That’s not a bad strategy considering Facebook is the #2 ranking site on the Web. However, I recommend companies focus on their Web site as their core hub instead. I say this because Facebook users prefer entertainment to business, and small business sites are struggling to get fans. Stand-alone Web sites tend to do better overall, especially if they are home to a successful blog.
Like George explains, you need video to let your audience “meet you,” gain familiarity with you as a problem-solver, and understand more about your background and where you’re coming from. Emotionally, videos connect to people. The outdoor setting George uses in this example carries unspoken messages about “success,” “values,” “lifestyle,” and “kama‘āina.”
What are your videos saying about you? Are your videos consistent with your brand? Do your videos support your key messages, or undercut them? For a consultation, Contact Me, or share your link in the Comments area below.
