Brightfire

Thanks to everyone who came along to the GoGetters presentation in Glasgow this morning. Video content and a full run-down will be posted over the next few days, but for those of you seeking something more immediate – here’s a wee recap:

What do you know about your business audience?

Do you know exactly who your business needs to be talking to?

Do you know what your audience really wants to hear?

Do you know how and where your audience wants to hear it?

You need to deliver the right message to the right audience through the right media. At the heart of an effective communications strategy lies the ability to speak to your audience in a language they can relate to and through the channels they are listening to.

For many businesses the challenge is made harder by variations across the business audience. Of course no customer is ever the same, but what about the customer purchase process?
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A big misconception with online marketing is that social media is only for large brands. However, from experience we can tell you that even a small business that invests its time wisely can improve customer (or client) loyalty and traditional word of mouth marketing efforts.

Social media is useful for almost every type of business: Bars and restaurants, retail stores, even professional services can build their online reputation and increase trust. By taking advantage of social media, businesses can make themselves more accessible, more personable, and maintain long term connections.

For a small business looking to increase referrals, social media can be a powerful tool.

The best way to illustrate why small businesses are using social media is with a story. Think back to the days of the wild west. In those days, towns had one general store, and the store owner knew everyone. People trusted him and knew what they were getting. Enter the industrial age, and efficiency trumped personalization. People didn’t mind where they bought from, as long as goods were cheap.

Now, that mentality has changed. Consumers are once again reverting to a need for personalisation from businesses large and small. The need has been rekindled by the Internet and our ability to find anything we want, as well as a mistrust of advertising (think: used cars salesmen).

Use Social Media

The consumer wants to know the store owner’s name and that he can be trusted. Small businesses need to look beyond their aspirations to grow into corporations, and focus on their core customers instead. Thanks to social media, we’re able to foster these relationships quickly and easily.

Here are five ways small businesses can capitalize on this new form of marketing:

1: Twitter

Everyone is talking about Twitter. So why is it a big win? It’s pretty simple really: it connects you with your consumers in real-time via the web, desktop applications, and even mobile. Finding a way to offer value while humanizing the business can lead to a stronger following and increased word of mouth marketing.

With Twitter, business owners are able to cater to their consumer’s needs instantaneously. In a world where everything needs to be done yesterday, a quick response can create a lifelong customer.

2: Blog / Social Hub

When most businesses begin a social media campaign, they tend to focus on Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites. They usually forget to incorporate their own site and tie their social profiles together. Our second big win, is the creation of a blog or social hub. Why push your consumers to connect with you on other sites, but not give them a reason to visit yours?

Building and writing a blog may be time consuming, but it creates a way to connect with users on your own website. Additionally, creating useful content such as how-tos or industry insights can keep customers engaged.

For business owners that don’t have the resources to update their blog regularly or can’t think of what they’d write, we suggest building a “Connect” page. A connect page, or social hub, offers readers a way to find your business’ most active profiles and join you on those social sites. The page could also include a short bio or how you use each social site.

Giving consumers a reason to visit your site is extremely important. A blog or social hub can pull consumers to your site and into the sales funnel.

3: Facebook Fan page

Another major social site to target is Facebook. Creating a Fan Page is simple, but truly utilizing it to its fullest potential takes some guidance.

A Fan Page allows a business to visualize and build a community, similar to Twitter. However, unlike Twitter, you can add and customize a great deal more.

At the very least a business should update their Fan Page “status” to keep consumers informed and engaged. A more advanced technique would be to add things like coupons or Googlemaps directions to the shopfront. These kind of resources give consumers a reason to visit the Page and interact with the brand.

4: Custom Wiki

Use a custom wiki , which takes advantage of a phenomenon called crowdsourcing . In other words, use your customers to give information to other consumers.

The easiest way to do this is by creating a wiki for your FAQ or Customer Service knowledge base. Let your consumers enter the problems they’ve had via a public forum (the wiki), and provide your responses publicly as well. Although showing problems may seem backwards, it’s a very effective way to retain customers and generate new sales.

Consumers aren’t stupid, they know that mistakes happen. Instead, they want to see that their questions will be answered quickly. Also, with a public wiki, customers can see if a concern has already been addressed, saving time for both you and the customer.

With minimal moderation, a wiki can build trust in your business and make your customer service more efficient.

5: Go local

For local businesses with a storefront, sites like Yelp can make a real impact. Yelp allows businesses to create listings with all the necessary information for a consumer to find you, while other customers can review and comment on your business. Many of these sites will let business owners “claim” their listings and add information, such as phone numbers, store hours, menus, etc.

Consumers use local social networks to find businesses, but also to get social proof when making a decision. They use comments and reviews to go with the “best” listing. Because of the demographic these sites target (people ready to make a decision) small businesses can see a great return from local social networks.

Once you’ve used Twitter for more than a couple of hours, you’ll have probably already seen a tweet or two containing a word with the hash symbol (”#”) attached to it.

Twitter users call these “hashtags,” and at any given time at least one of them can usually be found among the trending topics on Twitter.

So what exactly is a hashtag?

Essentially hashtags are a simple way to catalog and connect tweets about a specific topic. They make it easier for users to find additional tweets on a particular subject, while filtering out the incidental tweets that may just coincidentally contain the same keyword. Hashtags are also often used by conference and event organizers as a method of keeping all tweets about the event in a single stream, and they’ve even been used to coordinate updates during emergencies.

Hashtags were first popularised during the 2007 San Diego wildfire, when the tag #sandiegofires was used to identify tweets about the natural disaster.

You can create a hashtag simply by appending the hash symbol to a word, like this: #hashtag.

Utilise existing hashtags

Because hashtags tend to spread quickly, and because Twitter users often search hashtags for content from people they aren’t following, using hashtags can be a great way to extend your reach on Twitter and connect with your current audience in a more meaningful way.

There are a wide variety of already established hashtags — and new ones being created daily – that you can join.

However, you need to be careful that your use of hashtags is consistent with both your brand and the tag itself. Unfortunately, as hashtags have become more popular, they’ve also become a vehicle for spam.

You should never use a hashtag on a tweet unrelated to that tag, and you should never stuff your tweets with currently popular hashtags with the sole purpose of appearing in Twitter search results.

Proper etiquette dictates that users should only use hashtags if your tweet is actually relevant to the tag’s associated meme or topic.

So which tags should you participate in?

That depends wholly on your business and your purpose for using Twitter. For example, it’s probably a bad idea to participate in the #robotpickuplines hashtag if you own a health club and use your Twitter account to offer customer service to members.

However, if you are in a music-related industry then you’ll more than likely want to join in the #musicmonday hashtag, in which people tweet about what music they’re listening to and suggest other musically-inclined users to follow every Monday.

Use sites like Twubs, a hashtag directory, and What the Trend? - a wiki that attempts to explain what certain hashtags (and other Twitter trends) mean, to locate and identify hashtags that make sense for your business.

Take heed of tags being used by your followers and search for them on Twitter to see what sort of tweets are associated with those tags. If it makes sense for your business to jump on board, compose tweets that are on topic and compatible with that hashtag.

Start your own hashtags

While you certainly shouldn’t use hashtags to describe all of your tweets, they can be very helpful for small businesses as a way to track social media campaigns or create memes that help establish a sense of community and build your company’s mindshare among your core customers.

The first step in creating a hashtag is deciding on the tag word itself. You should pick something memorable, easy to spell, and perhaps more importantly, as short as possible.

Remember that Twitter gives everyone just 140 characters per tweet, so no one wants half of it to be taken up by an unwieldy hashtag.

Once you’ve figured out the tag itself, the next step is simple: start using it and promoting it. Make sure your tweets using the hashtag are worthwhile and add something of value to the conversation.

Promote your tag or the social media campaign that uses the tag via other social media channels, such as your blog or email newsletter. Tweet out calls to action explaining your new tag at regular intervals (but don’t overdo it!).

Keep track of hashtags

Once you have people using your new hashtag, you’ll need to be able to keep on top of it so you can respond to participants. One of the easiest ways to track hashtags is by using Twitter Search. You can watch people using your hashtag (or any other tag you want to track) in real-time, and subscribe to an RSS feed of the results. Monitter and TweetGrid are two other good web-based dashboards for performing real-time Twitter searches of hashtags.

You can also use the built-in search functionality of popular desktop clients like Seesmic or TweetDeck, or set up alerts on business-oriented Twitter dashboards such as HootSuite or CoTweet.

You’ve heard it before and you’ll here it again (next week if you come to the Brightfire event) – you don’t control your own message, your customers do.

Whilst we can give you a number of examples where this has been proven to be the case, many traditional brands are still reluctant to embrace the ideology. However, some interesting new data on search from 360i might help to sway the argument.

In their recent whitepaper (November ‘09), 360i looks at the landscape of natural search, and suggests that a majority of social media search listings that appear for brand-related queries are created by individuals not affiliated with the brand.

To be specifict, “77% of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook listings that appeared for brand searches were controlled by a party other than the marketer.”

In essence what customers, fans, and such likes are posting to social media sites is what really dominates the brand name search experience over social media content created by the brands themselves. The research clearly creates a solid case for brands to be proactive with their social media presence, as participating in the exchange about their brand should improve the quantity and quality of customer-created social media content that searchers will happen upon.

360i also recommends that brands “cross-link owned domains and social media destinations. This creates a search ecosystem that will allow PageRank, domain history and strength to permeate.”

If you’re interested, you can access the entire whitepaper from the following link: http://www.scribd.com/doc/22677572/360i-SearchWhitePaper09-111709

Just when you might have thought Microsoft was turning a corner in its battle for world dominance with google, Twitter is this evening awash with news that Google have acquired mobile advertising giant AdMob for $750 million in stock.

Aa mobile advertising marketplace that connects advertisers with mobile publishers, AdMob allows advertisers to create ads, choose landing pages and target their ads with plenty of detail. Ads can be targeted to locations, carriers, phone platforms and phone manufacturers.

Google’s reports: “Mobile advertising has enormous potential as a marketing medium and while this industry is still in the early stages of development, AdMob has already made exceptional progress in a very short time. AdMob is the quintessential Silicon Valley startup — generating impressive year on year revenue growth — and we’re excited to welcome this talented team to Google.”

AdMob further elaborated: “We’re proud of the progress we’ve made towards accomplishing this goal, and joining Google will only accelerate this process, ultimately leading to very real benefits for end users around the world. As publishers and developers generate more revenue from their mobile products, they will invest more, and their mobile offerings will become richer, more creative and more robust.”

The acquisition will add considerably to Google’s reach into the mobile realm – one of the few remaining digital areas where Google does not yet have a dominant prescense.

And what about AdMob? Well, it was founded in late 2006, so the company is only just turning three years old! not a bad run for a startup?

According to today’s press release from Google, “The deal will help Google in its efforts to develop more effective tools for creating, serving and analyzing emerging mobile ads formats. As this ecosystem continues to grow, the company expects these new marketing media to offer significant benefits.”

Google has provided an image that summarises quite well just why Google wanted to expand with AdMob. At first vantage it looks like the two companies focuses were quite distinct indeed:

Watch this space….

Quotes courtesy: Google press release.