Getting Bloggin’: Customers Trust Transparent Experts

via Small Business Trends by Lisa Barone on 2/9/10

Every year Edelman releases its Trust Barometer report (Executive Summary) to measure consumer confidence in business and, if we’re taking a cue from Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, identify the biggest ‘trust agents’ helping them to make their decisions. This year the findings are getting some people wondering about the overall impact on social media.

Social media has always “worked” because people trusted the advice and recommendations of people ‘like them’ over the cold marketing they were accustomed to. They trusted that their friends and people who valued the same things were better able to help them make decisions than the absent CEO or marketing department of a company. However, thanks to the flood of noise and the emergence of large, impersonal social networks, people are losing trust in social connections and those ‘like them’. Instead, they’re leaning more towards experts, with a strong rise in the transparent CEO.

[click to enlarge.]

What these findings tell me is that the huge growth in social networks and “fake friending” have caused consumers to trust these circles less. Trusting your Facebook friends was a lot more certain when your network was made up of everyone you went to high school with. Now, we friend brands and people we just barely know in order to not appear “rude” and grow inflated friend networks. Naturally that’s going to corrupt the circle.

As a result, we’re looking more toward ‘experts’ to help us make decisions and, increasingly, toward the new CEO who has likely embraced the Social Web and become more open.

How do you take advantage of both of these?

You start blogging.

Blogging as a small business owner allows you to make yourself an expert in your field and also allows you to take advantage of the perks of being a transparent CEO. By allowing your customers to see inside your organization and what you’re about, you allow them to trust what you’re doing and become better acquainted with your brand. You bring them into your story and your every day. And that’s what customers are looking for. In the Executive Summary for the report, it’s noted that this year’s finding proved that trust and transparency are MORE important to corporate reputation than the quality of products and services. Yes. It is more important that you are open with customers than how well the product actually performs. Chew on that for a moment, will you?

If consumers are looking less at one another in order to build that trust…then it’s up to you as the small business owner to build it yourself by establishing yourself as an expert and letting people inside your organization. What better way to do that than with a blog?   If you need some blogging ideas, we can help you with that, too.

The survey does cast an interesting picture on social media, in general. If more and more users are becoming distrustful of the medium then it’s going to be interesting to see how this will affect the medium as a whole. Will review sites start to fall out of favor and become more suspect? Will people be less accepting of marketers in social media? Interesting implications all around.

From Small Business Trends

Getting Bloggin’: Customers Trust Transparent Experts

SEO 101 in 60 seconds

via Local Internet Marketing for Small Business by scott on 2/5/10

SEO is marketing.  You are merely marketing a business using a digital medium, rather than a traditional offline medium. A component of Marketing exposure.  SEO is about creating exposure. A business exposing themselves to the right audience, buyers, where the business product or service solves a buyers problem, yields the best conversion from a lead to a [...]

80 Ways To Use Twitter As A SMB Owner

via Small Business Trends by Lisa Barone on 1/12/10

It’s pretty common. A small business owner comes to us looking for help promoting his or her business. We suggest using Twitter as a way to find new leads, build relationships and as an overall way to cost effectively market their business. The small business owner then turns around, tilts their head and responds, “Twitter? What can Twitter do for me?”

Well, I’ll tell you. Below are 80 ways a small business owner can use Twitter to build and market their business.

Just like last time, hit print.

Build Credibility

1. Answer common customer questions
2. Share insight and opinion
3. Pass on interesting links/posts
4. Tweet links showing your company featured on other Web sites or mainstream media
5. Tweet often to keep your brand in customer’s top of mind
6. Share high quality content that is relevant to your customers needs
7. Share information about your organization that customers, colleagues and others may be interested to know
8. Promote competitors when they deserve it
9. Tweet links to Slideshare presentations or videos of speaking engagements.
10. Promote upcoming speaking engagements
11. Mention awards you’ve won or accreditations you’ve earned
12. Be the one to break the news in your industry
13. Livetweet events

Market Your Business

1. Talk about company culture and values
2. Let people know the events your company will be attending this year
3. Offer discounts, coupons or special offers to customers who find you via social media
4. Offer discounts on conferences for folks who come to hear you speak
5. Show your human face
6. Talk about what you’re doing
7. Talk about who you are
8. Talk about why you do what you do
9. To get blog subscribers
10. Direct traffic to your site
11. Find referrals
12. Offer referrals
13. Connect vendors to one another
14. Hold contests
15. Highlight employees
16. Publish your Twitter handle on all direct mailings, email newsletters, on your Web site and all other marketing channels. Put it everywhere
17. Promote your latest blog posts and newsletters
18. Share reviews people have left about your site that made you laugh. Or smile
19. Tweet when you do something cool
20. Admit and apologize for flubs to help neutralize the impact
21. Be excited about your week
22. Ask for votes on social media sites (use sparingly)

Grow Ears

1. Track conversations about your brand for online reputation management
2. Track your most important keywords and subscribe to an RSS feed
3. Listen in on conversations about your general industry
4. Do free market research to see what people want/don’t want
5. Conduct Twitter polls to quiz consumer opinion
6. Learn about what’s working/not working for your competitors
7. See how your competitors are interacting with customers
8. Find out who your competitors are talking to and do some competitive intelligence
9. Track conversation patterns for your industry to determine when people are most active online
10. Identify Twitter trends or hot topics related to your industry
11. Find ways to connect what you do with what’s already trending on Twitter
12. Ask people for their opinions. Listen to them
13. Notify customers of any holdups, mishaps or things that may affect business

Grow Your Online Network

1. Connect more personally with contacts from other social networks
2. Use relationship building instead of cold calls and cheesy flyers
3. Use Twellow or Listorious to find people with common interests
4. Fill out your Twellow and We Follow profiles to make it easy for people to find you
5. Use Twitter search to find relevant conversations you can jump into
6. Find guestbloggers for your blog
7. Find guestblogging opportunities for yourself
8. Meet influencers and your ‘industry famous’. Talk to them
9. Mend fences with angry tweeters by following the conversation and offering to help when possible
10. Host weekly Twitter chats to bring your community together and meet new folks
11. Connect your Twitter account to LinkedIn. And to your Facebook account. And to your Web site. And anywhere else you can to make your site more social
12. Participate in Follow Friday to meet new people…and to encourage others to recommend you, as well
13. Use services like bit.ly to see how people are interacting with your content
14. Discover what actions cause an increase in followers and are important social metrics

Grow Your Offline Network

1. Hold tweetups and introduce your community members in real life
2. Find new customers by using the Advanced Search to track down local conversations
3. Use Twitter Search to track when potential customers mention a competitor…and then reach out to them
4. Offer coupons to encourage community members to make purchases instore
5. Tweet about products just arriving or hot food coming out of the oven
6. Throw a Valentine’s Day party for your Twitter followers
7. Ask Twitter followers to leave testimonials on your site
8. Find new employees

Have Fun

1. Become a better writer
2. Share content that makes you laugh
3. Find content that inspires and motivates you
4. Learn new things, related to your industry or not.
5. Make friendships, not just professional relationships.
6. Create injokes with community members
7. Find new blog topic ideas
8. Get out of your marketing shell and be yourself
9. Use it as your office watercooler if you work from home
10. Make it your own coworking space

From Small Business Trends

80 Ways To Use Twitter As A SMB Owner

More Trouble In Google’s Local Biz Center

via Small Business Trends by Lisa Barone on 1/13/10

Another week brings some more troubling news for small business owners and the state of their Google Local Business listings.  There are two somewhat concerning stories that have sprung up as of late that you should be aware of. If only so you can make sure you haven’t been affected.

Here’s a look at both.

Google Sends Potential Competitors Your Analytics

Late last week many small business owners and those that work with them began receiving emails about their local business results for the month of November. The emails contained  information about where the business ranked in Google’s local index, how many users clicked on the listing, how many users clicked through to the Web site, how many clicked on ‘more info’, and how many went looking for driving directions. This is all super important information for any small business owner to know and can be used to make sensitive decisions. Problem is, business owners were getting emails about businesses they had nothing to do with. Basically, they were getting other people’s site details. And if you’re getting someone else’s analytics data, well then, who’s getting yours?

Obviously, small business owners were concerned and a little upset. Mike Blumenthal covered the situation, as did search marketer David Dalka, Search Engine Roundtable and The Register. When asked, Google responded that it was “a glitch” and that less than one percent of Local Business Center users had been sent the affected emails. Of course, we don’t really know how many people “one percent” really accounts for.  It’s scary when you don’t know who has access to your information. It’s also potentially dangerous should it fall into the wrong hands.

Google Lets Competitors Hijack Your Listings

Just as small business owners were wrapping their heads around their private information being leaked, search marketer Lisa Myers showed how easy it is for a competitor to hijack your listing in Google Local Business. And she knows how easy it is because she watched it happen to one of her clients.

In her post, Lisa breaks down the exact steps that a competitor would need in order to hijack your listing. Scary is that it doesn’t seem that difficult. Just create a new listing with someone else’s company name but your address, claim and merge the listings, and then verify it via the mail. Once that’s done, any time someone searches for you, instead of seeing your real listing, they’ll see the one for your competitor and be directed there.  And just like that, your search traffic is gone. It’s just that easy and so far Google doesn’t seem to have a solution.

I’m not sure what the “fix” is for either of the issues discussed (Google hasn’t even addressed the latter). To be honest, I don’t think there is one for now. It’s disheartening to see so many issues with spam and hijacking (which sometimes happens accidentally) coming out of the engine’s local indexes with no real action taken.  I often wonder if Google’s policy of no response would be the same if it were bigger brands feeling the impact. Regardless, as a small business owner the best you can do is to be vigilant about monitoring your local listings and reporting anything that looks weird.  We’re louder in numbers.

From Small Business Trends

More Trouble In Google’s Local Biz Center

How to Make Your Homepage Copy ‘Pop’

via Small Business Trends by Lisa Barone on 1/14/10

One of the most frequent requests I get from content creation clients is to make their site copy ‘pop’. And I’ll be honest that I still don’t really know what that means. I think it means that they want their pages to grab someone’s attention. They want their content to stand out and to be compelling enough that it encourages potential customers to dig deeper into the Web site. That’s the goal of any great home page. But how can you accomplish that?

Below are a few suggestions for sites that want their content to ‘pop’, whatever that really means.

Make the content scannable: It’s said a lot that people don’t read on the Web and that they just bounce around from site to site until they see something that finally forces them stop. I’d argue there’s a heck of a lot of truth to that, which is why creating scannable content is essential in getting people to take notice of your site. How do you make your content scannable?

• Use bullet points
• Implement proper use of bold and italics to highlight the terms they’re looking for
• Use both headers and sub-headers to break out topics
• Write short paragraphs
• Leave lots of white space
• Use links

Put your call-to-action above the fold: If people are just scanning your content, then sticking one call-to-action at the bottom of the page probably isn’t a good marketing strategy. You don’t know they’re even going to make it that far! Instead, find natural ways to include multiple calls-to-action so that you’re guaranteed people see them. Use one at the top of your page with a graphic, put another at the bottom of your first paragraph and then put another down towards the end of the copy. Litter them throughout the page so that they’re guaranteed to get visibility. After all, your call-to-action is the thing that’s going to get your visitors to do what you want them to do. Make sure they see it. If you need some help with call-to-action best practices, Smashing Magazine has a killer article on the topic.

Make it readable: Have you ever tried to read your Web site copy aloud? If not, I dare you to give it a shot. If you have a hard time getting through it, then it’s safe to assume that a potential customer is facing the same difficulty. Many business owners will attempt to ‘impress’ their audience with big words, industry jargon and other comprehension roadblocks. Lose all that. Instead, write your home page as if you’re talking to the customer standing right in front of you. How would you introduce yourself and explain what your business does to them? Find those words and put them on your Web site. Use the words they would be most likely to use. Leave the impressive jargon for your competitors that you don’t really like anyway.

Be visually appealing: If your home page isn’t appealing to the eye, customers aren’t going to stay on it too long. They’re going to find a site that is. Things like site animations, videos that play automatically (and scare people) or huge, never-ending blocks of text are all things that may send a potential customer running. Instead of sending people out, use images to draw people in, lots of white space and some of the different scannable text strategies like the ones mentioned above. When someone lands on your site, they should feel confident that you’re trustworthy and not get bogged down in what’s happening on the page. Make your home page inviting.

Look to the present: Talking about yourself in the past tense is boring. It’s passive and it makes it really easy for a visitor to scan right over your content without stopping. Instead, switch over to the present or future tense to add some extra oomph and excitement to your words. It’s a very subtle change that can make a big impact.

Watch page length: Though the Internet gods have blessed us with the scroll bar, don’t make visitors scroll on for days. Because the truth is, they won’t. They’ll get bored and head somewhere else. You’re far better off creating shorter, easy to digest pages that will capture a visitor’s attention and encourage them to dig deeper into the site to learn more. After all, the goal really isn’t to keep them on your home page –it’s to get them into your site and onto a conversion path that you defined.

Watch your language: People land on your site with a mission. They’ve performed a search looking for information or the answer to their question – your home page should take that into consideration. This is where keyword research comes into play. You want to use the exact words and phrases on your site that a user would type in to find you. The more your site ‘matches’ what they were searching for, the more they’re going to consider you relevant to their needs. And they’re going to stick around to learn more. You want to write content that shows that your site has the answer to their problem. If you don’t know why people are landing on your Web site, then you need to first do some market research. However, hopefully you’ve already done this as part of your keyword research strategy.

Those are some very easy ways to add some power and ‘pop’ to your home page. What’s worked for you?

From Small Business Trends

How to Make Your Homepage Copy ‘Pop’