Who Are You? Who Who, Who Who…

We’ve just started working with a new client, taking their site from an old blog style layout to a more modern look and feel. Towards the end of the initial consultation, I asked the owner the question: “Who are you?” This flummoxed him for a minute – “Good question” he says, “No-one’s asked me that for a while!” [flickr]http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarchi/567321168/[/flickr]

Now we’re not talking about some existential ego trip here, what we’re talking about is your brand. When a customer comes to your website, they will form a view of your business within the first couple of seconds – even before they read a word of your text. The layout of your front page, the colors used, your logo and where it is, any images on the page and the navigation – all of these will be taken on board and evaluated against the thousands of other websites that the customer has seen.

Your website is a reflection of you, of your business. So, what kind of a business are you, and we’re not talking: “I am a Plumber” or “I own a series of Laundromats” – we want to know what kind of a plumber you are – are you efficient, are you always on time, do you use the latest gadgets to get things done quicker and cheaper than your competition? Are your Laundromats clean, do you invest in the latest technology, do you offer extra services, and are you running a current deal for students?

When you work with Kilted Chaos we will listen to you and incorporate who you are into how your website looks and functions. That way, when a potential visitor arrives at your website, they will see you for the dedicated, passionate and outstanding business that you are. Well you are, aren’t you?

Photo Credit: Sarchi on Flickr

Making Social Media Easy for Small Businesses

Social Media is many things

but in essence it is about Information: it is about how information is created, how it is distributed and shared and how that information causes things to happen.  The information that we’re talking about at Kilted Chaos is Information about your business.

When we talk about creating accounts with services such as Twitter, Flickr, Disqus, Facebook and Gmail, we’re talking about setting you up with services that will enable you to create and distribute information about your business – they’ll also help your customers create and spread information about you too. We’ll talk with you and agree on an avatar, a visual image that will be the same across all sites where you have a presence – your “digital footprint,” if you’re a one person business, this will probably be your smiling face!  We’ll agree on a company statement that will work for each network.  We’ll help to ensure that as you expand your online presence, your message remains clear and easily recognizable.

We talk about making it Easy for the small business owner and in our book – making it easy is saving you time.   None of the above is rocket science and you could no doubt do it yourself – but we can do it a hell of a lot faster than you – we’ve been doing this for a while. If you’re new to Social Media and Social Media Marketing – you might want to start here: What is Social Media What is Social Media Marketing

For an easier introduction to how Social Media works check out the following 4 minute video.  To see how it can work for your business, contact the Chaos team here.

Small Business Owners – It’s easy to be found

So you run a small business – maybe it’s a restaurant or a store, maybe you offer a service like an accountant or a plumber. You know a little about online marketing, you might even have a website that hasn’t been updated since you paid an SEO consultant to get you on the “front page of Google!” You’re good at running your business but think you don’t have the time or budget to market yourself properly online.

HELLO – It’s 2009 – things have changed.

It is easier now for people to find your business than it has ever been – the development of tools such as blogs, texting, smart phones and yes, Twitter have resulted in a stream of information that is constantly being updated and accessed by your competitors and your customers. If your business competition is within 20 miles and you don’t have an updated dynamic website, then you are going to lose to the business owner who does.

Click here to read more on how small business owners can effectively use Twitter – this post is less about what it does and more about how you can do it. We know as small business owners ourselves that incorporating a new system into daily business operations is a challenge. If it isn’t easy to do then it gets put on the sidelines like many other things.

Kilted Chaos’ approach to social media and online marketing is to make it as easy as possible. We deliver budget conscious yet professional websites that integrate with your social media marketing. We then show you how easy it is to create a business oriented Twitter stream and encourage you to write occasionally about your business – and that’s it. That’s all you need to start with.

If you get hooked and find that investing more time in social media marketing is improving your bottom line (and we think it will) then we’ll show you how to take it further. Contact us.

Twitter is a Broadcast Medium

You run a small business; you want new customers to find you and you want existing customers to come back. You’ve heard that Twitter is some kind of social network that helps you “have a conversation” with customers, but you can’t see how it could add value to your business.

STOP!

Stop thinking of Twitter as some kind of newfangled social media / social networking tool and start thinking of it as a broadcast medium.

Here’s a quote from a pretty successful CEO talking about how he uses Twitter:

“I use it to spread the word when we announce a new Alltop site. Twitter for me is a broadcasting tool. It's not a "social medium" at all.” Guy Kawasaki, Alltop CEO

This is how we think small business owners should be approaching Twitter. The social element absolutely exists, but it only happens as a result of your initial broadcast – it happens when somebody, a potential customer perhaps, finds and reacts to your message.

Your tweets are not only accessible to people on Twitter - your tweets are indexed by the search engines and therefore available to the 300 million searches that happen on Google every day.  At Kilted Chaos we say that "It's easy to be found" and we truly believe that.  It is easy to take 2 minutes in your day and write a tweet from your phone or your computer saying what you are doing - it is - it is easy!  We will show the tools to use and how to go about it - it is not rocket science and you don't need to read a manual.