Social Media Douche

[flickr size="small" float="left"]http://www.flickr.com/photos/21896484@N02/2726201320/[/flickr] When technology disrupts the traditional way of doing things, the small business owner can be at a distinct disadvantage. If like the majority of our clients you don’t have a technology team or a dedicated marketing department – all you have is you – then how do you find the time to learn all this new stuff?

By now you’ve seen the benefit of having an easy to update website and you’ve heard of Twitter and Social Media, but how do you incorporate all this into your daily operations without going crazy and throwing the computer through the screen?

Simple – you hire someone (preferably us) – and as usual you should hire the best expert you can afford. But before you start the hiring process, check out this beautiful paragraph from Wikipedia on Snake Oil Peddlers:

The snake oil peddler became a stock character in Western movies: a travelling "doctor" with dubious credentials, selling some medicine (such as snake oil) with boisterous marketing hype, often supported by pseudo-scientific evidence, typically bogus. To enhance sales, an accomplice in the crowd (a "shill") would often "attest" the value of the product in an effort to provoke buying enthusiasm. The "doctor" would prudently leave town before his customers realized that they had been cheated. This practice is also called "grifting" and its practitioners "grifters".

Now, with the above in mind and to help you in your decision making – Alex and I compiled our personal top 5 tips on what we look for in Social Media Consultants:

Alex:

1

Be real – people tweeting the same banal shit as everyone else aren’t exactly adding to the conversation – you might not want to use the F word in a corporate stream but blandness is almost as bad!

2

Sure re-tweeting adds value but if someone’s stream is nothing but re-tweets then you gotta wonder if they have anything of value to say themselves.

3

Come on – if it looks like a douche, tweets like a douche and reads like a douche – then it’s probably a douche. Check out @snipeyhead for an example of what a good consultant looks like!

4

Just ‘cos you know how to do something doesn’t make you an expert. Tools like Twitter are constantly developing and changing – it’s perpetual beta all the time – beware the Expert.

5

Sure you can talk about the importance of having a blog – but do you have one – and if you do – is the content worth reading?

Andrew:

1

How can you be an expert in this if you've only be doing it a couple of years - go read what Malcolm Gladwell has to say about the whole 10,000 hours thing

2

Working with 140 characters is one thing - actually writing something of length that has value - well that's another thing entirely.

3

The title Guru should be reserved for those teaching Tantric Sex. Nuff said.

4

I can't believe that these single page supposed sales funneling techniques are still used - even if it is "by internet marketers for internet marketers". If you see something like this - run - run away, fast.

5

This one is common sense - if the people you are thinking of hiring have a crap website - what makes you think they'll be able to make yours look any better?

Photo Credit: virtualreality on Flickr

Small Business Online Marketing Plan (Restaurant)

Having run a small business we know how essential it is to develop a useable marketing plan. It doesn’t matter how fancy and detailed the document is – if it isn’t easy to execute – you get lost in daily operations and your business doesn’t grow. Having an online marketing plan is as easy as talking to customers about your product and services (you are good at this yes?) but instead of talking, you are writing.

When you get a small business website from Kilted Chaos we use a tool that makes it easy for you to add content – what we would call a “post” - to your website. It really is no different than using a word processor; there’s a small learning curve as you deal with things like tags and images – but basically – adding content to your website will be as easy as creating a new flyer, adding an item to your menu or writing text for an advertisement.

We’ve been on a restaurant kick for the last couple of weeks so let’s see how adding new content can drive a restaurant’s digital and physical marketing:

1/ Every week write a new post about a different menu item
2/ During that week, reduce the price of the menu item by 50%
3/ Have on-table flyers promoting the item with a photo, price reduction and your website details
4/ Encourage diners to comment on the website – every week 1 commenter will win a free entrée
5/ On payment hand every diner a business card with the web address on the front and comment competition details on the back.

This is amazingly simple to do and to manage. The only time consuming thing is to produce the on-table flyers – but it’s definitely worth it in order to drive awareness of the menu, create customer generated content on your website and bring diners back. If you have 100 menu items – there’s 2 years of online marketing – already planned out!

A couple of points to remember: When you write the post – don’t just describe the dish – get someone you know who absolutely loves it to talk about why it is so good – make the description so tantalizing that people have to try it. Also, take your time to produce a good photograph of the dish – you’ll get better at this over time – but a simple camera phone with a good background can suffice – make it look appetizing – if it looks crap – don’t post it.

Quick and dirty sure but amazingly effective and you’ll be astonished by how much you learn about your menu. This approach can be used by any type of business and modified depending on what products and services they offer. Want to get started? Contact Kilted Chaos now and we’ll show you how.

Don't Call it a Blog...

Call it whatever you like!

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If you think of your website, you’ll need an about page where you talk about your business, what it is you do, where you are, etc, you’ll want a contact page – let people know where to find you and how to contact you and then you want an area that reflects the changing priorities and offers that you want to show your customers. You can call this anything you like – Promotions, Newsletter, Announcements, Current Specials, etc – you could even call it a blog!

When we think of the word “Blog” we think of left wing media, self-obsessed egotists and unreliable information – certainly having a “Blog” is not something that’s high up the list for a traditional small business – however…

Forget the name!

Think of the underlying principle! The reason there are so many blogs is that they are seriously easy to use. It’s just like using a word processor except you are doing it online and when you hit save, it is published to the Internet. If you, as a small business owner stop and think for a minute – this is a fantastic tool for you to promote your business. It makes sense to have an area on your site where you promote what is going on – it’s no different than if you are running a promotion in your store – you want to have signage that  tells the customers what is going on. If you are a restaurant, you need to have your Menu online, if you run Auto services, what about your pricing list?

When is a blog not a blog?

If you think of your website, you’ll need an about page where you talk about your business, what it is you do, where you are, etc, you’ll want a contact page – let people know where to find you and how to contact you and then you want an area that reflects the changing priorities and offers that you want to show your customers. You can call this anything you like – Promotions, Newsletter, Announcements, Current Specials, etc – you could even call it a blog!

Everyone’s different!

Some Small Business Owners will get addicted to writing on their website – comments from customers are like candy to a baby and writing a regular update can be rewarding to your bottom line. Other businesses may be content with writing up what this month’s specials are, the current promotion or service that they want to feature. The bottom line is: there's no right or wrong way to go about it, only the way that works for you and even more importantly - your customers!

Trading Up...

We think that once you get the hang of regularly updating your website you will want to move forward with other social media tools. Check out the Social Media Business package  for more details.

E-Mail Marketing

I still speak to business owners who believe that if they can only get a big enough mailing list, they’ll be rich.  The last stats I heard were that the pill spammers were hitting a level of 1 purchase from every 12.5 million emails sent.  If you know a hosting company that will blindly send out 12.5 million emails with no questions asked – well – English probably isn’t your first language.

Kilted Chaos recommends that you only email customers that have chosen to give you their email address.  The idea of blasting your message to as many people as you can is absolutely short term and counter intuitive to growing your business.  E-mail is the best way you have to communicate your message to your customers.  E-mail is not a conversion tool – it is not a way of getting new customers – it is a way of keeping existing customers.  Once you wrap your head around that – everything is easy.

We strongly recommend that you use a 3rd party to manage your email campaigns.  Sure if you know what you’re doing, understand the implications of the CAN SPAM act and know how to throttle your server – go ahead.  We prefer to pay a few bucks to a company that will deliver our campaigns professionally on trusted servers and who handle   the whole sign up, subscribe, and unsubscribe malarkey.

Companies that we have worked with and can recommend are:

AWeber Constant Contact Emma Campaign Monitor

Of course, if you need help contact the Chaos team here.

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.