Here's the topline from Hubspot's recent webinar, Social Media Optimization is the New SEO With Brian Solis: engage influencers with multiple social objects optimized with metadata.
According to Brian's list, social objects include:
Pictures in Flickr
Videos on YouTube
Events in Upcoming
Updates in Facebook
Votes in Digg
Check-ins in FourSquare
Docs in Scribed
Reviews in Yelp
Subject matter in Ning
Thoughts shared in posts or comments
Metadata is used for:
Titles and Headlines
Descriptions
Tags
Syndication
Links & Views
Or, for more detail view an audio-enhanced presentation here.
Let's say that you have a new service to offer-Vendor Managed Inventory-and you'd like your customer to use it. How should you introduce it?
"May I tell you about...?"
"Would you like to know about...?"
"Have you heard about...?"
Most likely these questions will generate a quick "no" response.
Here's a better way to avoid "no" and move to genuine interest:
1. Identify an area that your customer has a great interest in and for which your service provides a benefit.
2. Ask for examples in the customer's own workday where that is relevant.
3. Expand on that area with additional interest areas.
4. Ask the question that the customer has already answered i.e. that he/she has interest in.
For Example:
1. Identify an area that your customer has a great interest in and for which your service provides a benefit.
“How does managing your cash flow impact on your purchasing decisions?”2. Ask for examples in the customer's own workday where that is relevant.
“What are some examples of that impact?”3. Expand on that area with additional interest areas.
“How do your inventory levels figure in that process?”4. Ask the question that the customer has already answered i.e. that he/she has interest in.
“What would be your interest in getting some help on that for your packing and shipping supplies?”
These questions open the door to an offer of your service because you are enabling the customer to help him/herself in a manner already expressed as desirable.
(Thanks to my partner and sales pro Joel McFadden at Kraft Associates for this selling tip.)
No-not to lose weight, but to learn an integrated marketing system that can result in higher long-term profitability and return on marketing spend.
What Small Companies Lack
Large companies with large marketing teams typically have an established system that has been refined to ensure maximum effectiveness. Small to mid-size businesses typically don’t. So, if your business doesn’t have an established marketing program and you’d like to elevate the results your marketing team produces (even if it is a team of one) then learning from Weight Watchers* can be very profitable.
Why Weight Watchers Is Worth Watching
Weight Watchers is largely associated with weight loss, but it has a greater mission: to promote a healthy lifestyle with food that contributes to long-term health and happiness.
The corporate equivalent is this: to promote an integrated system of disciplines, measurement tools, continuous learning, and best practices to support long-term profit maximization and return on investment. Where the results of Weight Watchers’ program are most noticeable at the waistline, applying the Weight Watchers’ principles to your marketing will be most noticeable on the P&L line.
What You Can Learn From Weight Watchers
Here are some of the lessons your marketing team (and business) can learn from Weight Watchers:
- Identifying and reinforcing good habits
- Value of constant learning/education
- Importance of an up-to-date marketing toolkit
- Newness: constantly refreshing messages
- Consistency: not altering the primary mission
- Measurement and analysis: the use of measurements to gauge performance
- Track record: building upon success
- Testimonials: promoting your business
- How to build a brand
- Generating growth by extending the product lines
- Refining your selling message with selling scripts
- Goal setting
- Communicating with customers on their terms
- How to effectively use trial and error and experimentation
- Maintaining a relevant message to counter competitive threats that promise faster results with less effort
- The importance of positive reinforcement
For more ways to grow your business go to:
*WEIGHT WATCHERS and POINTS are the registered trademarks of Weight Watchers International, Inc. and are usedunder license by WeightWatchers.com, Inc.
For total optimization, every web page must address these four questions. Place yourself into the role of a potential customer and ask:
1. Do you feel my pain? Does the viewer sense that the webpage identifies with his problem or need?
2. Do you have a solution for my pain? Does the viewer believe that you offer a credible solution to her problem or need?
3. Why should I buy your solution and not one from your competitors? Does your webpage establish a unique and compelling value/selling proposition?
4. What can you offer me in return for my continued interest? What value can you exchange for contact information and permission to communicate?
What makes a great corporate logo? Test yourself against logo experts selected by Business Week in Experts Critique Business Logos. Do you agree with the experts? Do they a
gree with each other? Who should you trust?
As a business owner developing your own corporate logo, you may ask yourself "Who should I listen to?"
This article raises more questions than it answers, and its bottom line is that developing a corporate logo is a difficult process. It's good to work with professionals, but with which one, and who should you believe?
For small and midsize business owners, there are four strategic moves you can make now to change the business game in your favor.
- Resolve to change the game. Create new rules that favor your business style and strengths. (a)
- Break from the competition by reconstructing market boundaries. (b)
- Recognize how the rules of marketing and pr have changed, and incorporate them. (c)
- Simplify your business life and gain time to think by using a fully integrated system to manage your online presence. (d)
These four moves are based on timely and valuable insights from the authors of the following four books. Mine these books for details, or contact me.
Books and Authors
(a) Trust Agents, Brogan and Smith
(b) The New Rules of Marketing & PR, Scott
(c) Blue Ocean Strategy, Kim and Mauborgne
(d) Inbound Marketing, Halligan and Shah
As small and mid-size businesses dig their way out of the recession, they will be faced with this decision: should they rebuild in old ways or new ways? Will it be business as usual, or can the business plan be changed to produce better outcomes? There are compelling reasons to rebuild in new ways to produce better outcomes.
WHAT HAS CHANGED?
The digital revolution through the Web is changing business in powerful ways. The fundamental change, when you focus away from the distraction of technology to what technology is enabling, is how people connect. Some of the key expressions you will hear are that surround this change are:
- Transparency: The Web makes more things visible, like competitive pricing and product descriptions
- Relevance: customers are searching for what is relevant to them, and filtering out the noise of unwanted messages
- Social Capital: the new coin of the realm is social capital and it is the value and trust a business creates
New tools enable new connections. The most significant of these tools involve Social Media. Blogs, podcasts, online video, and sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are all part of the Social Media landscape.
THE NEW REALITIES FOR BUSINESS
- The new reality is that power in shifting into the hands of the customer to gather information (formerly controlled by Sales), screen out unwanted messages, and manage the pace and form business conversation.
- The speed of business has speeded up, and all businesses are, in effect, open 24/7.
- The economics of the Web allow businesses to replace money with brainpower. This bodes well for business and helps offset the power shift into customer hands. A relevant idea facilitated through social media connections can reach large audiences for far less investment than traditional media.
THE BUSINESS MANDATE: CHANGE THE GAME
New realities, new ways to connect, and new tools of conecting offer businesses unprecedented opportunities to change the game in their favor. In other words, now is the ideal time for businesses to rethink the rules and systems they play by, and restructure the game in their favor.
EXAMPLES OF GAME CHANGERS
- Apple changed the game of music sales by introducing the iPod (which simplified downloading, storing, and playing music) and enabling its distribution with iTunes technology.
- Gary Vaynerchuk changed the way wine is sold by changing how people learn and experience the world of wine. His change vehicle is the video blog called Wine Library TV, which has a cult-like following of more than 80,000 viewers a day. It is as far as you can imagine from the stuffy world of “conceited sommeliers, snobby shopkeepers, and mystical conventions. His business grew 10 times in 5 years to over $50,000,000 largely through his only efforts.
- eBay changed the way buyers and sellers collaborate. No longer do you need auction houses like Christie’s. Live auctions are held online and even the smallest items can be exchanged.
Even the smallest businesses can produce superior results when they commit to changing how their game is played.
BUT NOT EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED
In the midst of change, the imperative to manage your business vs. being managed by it has not changed. Yes, there are different issues, such as:
- Direct mail or email
- Direct sales or online sales
- Cocktail networking party or LinkedIn
And there are new expressions such as Tweet and Search Engine Optimization.
But the way to manage business has not changed substantially. These fundamental practices still apply:
- Management By Objective (MBO)
- Managing with values and beliefs
- Using systems like The Four Cornerstones of Business to organize efforts and make decisions
- Building excellence throughout the organization
- Committing to continuous improvement
BALANCE
The successful game changers will balance the new realities of the digital revolution with proven management techniques. Side-by-side we will see:
- The person who manages your social media profiles will also be taught how to close the loop to ensure that ideas produce effective action.
- You will still need interviewing skills, training techniques, and team development skills, whether for an online marketing manager or a warehouse foreman.
- You will listen to the voice of the customer through Google alerts and Twitter search, as well as from the actual words, questions, and expressions of your customers as observed by cashiers, truck drivers, and fulfillment specialists.
Now is the opportune time for owners of small and mid-size businesses to change the way they do business by embracing the new realities of the Web and balancing them with time proven management practices.
Your website is your most valuable piece of real estate.
Real estate can refer to more than a physical address. For example, I’ve used it to describe storefront real estate- the amount of window display space. I’ve also used it to refer to the space on a restaurant table- tabletop real estate. Both usages mean that however the expression is used, real estate is valuable.
David Scarlett talks about website real estate and claims that “Centimeter For Centimeter, Your Website Is Likely To Be The Most Valuable Piece of Real Estate You’ll Ever Own!” I agree. And to support this statement, he sports a 6 minute and 3 second video describing what to do to maximize this real estate investment. It’s a video worth viewing. Follow his post here, and the video here.
In her post on USA Today, Rhonda Abrams discusses the need for small business owners to reinvent themselves, and provides 5 strategies for change.
“What do you do when everything in your industry turns upside down? When your consumers dramatically change? When new technology pushes out traditional business methods? Now is a time of great transformation for most industries. Some changes have been brought about by economic conditions; some by technology; some by new competition.”
Here are her five strategies:
1. Recognize opportunities. One keynote speaker at the Tools of Change conference was Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, a successful online news and opinion site. She chided the audience “Don’t look back to a golden age; the golden age is now.”
2. Reinvent yourself and your business. Recognize you’re doing something very new. As Henry Ford pointed out, he was building a car, not a faster horse. Understand that you’re going to have to develop new products or services. It’s not the same stuff in a different package.
3. Leverage your current assets. Transformation is different than starting anew, so use your assets, such as current products, services, customer relationships, a terrific team. You can start ahead of the competition.
4. Learn to juggle. One major challenge of transformation is you often have to run your current, diminishing business while building a new business. Another speaker, Dominique Raccah of SourceBooks, addressed exactly the question of how do you run, essentially, two businesses. Develop a strategic plan to help you shift your resources.
5. Consider investors. Because you are growing a new business, you are going to be strapped for cash. That may mean you need to find a new source of capital. If you have a compelling business opportunity, it may be appropriate to seek investors.
As a final note, Rhonda suggests that you change your vocabulary along with your attitude. Switch from learning how to “adapt” or to “accommodate” change. Instead it’s time to “embrace” the “renewal” and “reinvention” you’re experiencing.
Are you ready to re-write the rules of your small or midsize business and begin playing by your standards? Doing so can create new opportunities and favor you over your competitors.
Here are 9 reasons that you are ready.
- You focus on creating uncontested market space and making competition irrelevant (a Blue Ocean Strategy) rather than on beating the competition. (a)
- You understand and are ready to play by the new rules of marketing and PR. (b)
- You want to hear the voice of the customer and have already deployed free “listening posts” throughout your company. (c)
- You know the power of technology and how to leverage it, but realize that business is about people first.
- You have strategic frameworks to create new customer value and to reconstruct market boundaries in your favor. (a)
- You are prepared to “be there before the sale” to gain trust with prospective customers as a first step to doing business. (a)
- You use a proven, integrated methodology that ensures your Internet efforts drive visits and convert to leads then customers.
- You realize that you and your customers both have in common the scarcest resource-attention-and will tailor your selling efforts to this fact. (b)
- You understand that by executing against these points you gain an immense advantage over your competition.
Would you like to share your ideas, or learn more about how to re-write the rules of your business? I’d like to hear from you.
References:
(a) Blue Ocean Strategy, Kim and Mauborgne
(b) New Rules of Marketing and PR, Scott
(c) Trust Agents, Brogan and Smith
(d) Kraft Associates