As much as Twitter is stressing “relationship building” in their new Twitter for Business Guide, this concept should be taken with a grain of salt.
The reality is that value of Twitter, over let’s say a Facebook, Linked In, or Referral Key, is that on Twitter you can share information with a larger group; more rapidly, repeatedly, and with less restrictions. If you are successfully using Twitter for business, you will have to get very creative to refute that.
Fact: Twitter is a great way of communicating with a large number of people.
Fact: For some business models, it is even a viable method of disseminating coupons, news , and receiving feedback.
Fact: Twitter requires a serious investment of time and for some business models, this just isn’t an effective use of resources
In an attempt to solve user retention issues, Twitter has launched Business 101.
“We know that Twitter’s is rising rapidly in popularity. We also know that a huge number of Twitter users don’t stick around. So what’s a company with a user retention problem to do? Launch a guide to using its own product, of course.”
The beauty of Twitter lies in its simplicity and if some business aren’t finding the value that companies like Dell and JetBlue do, it may not have to do with awareness, but rather relativity. Twitter is very straight forward; a 140 character message can be seen by anyone that subscribes to it.
This may be a case of handing a hammer to an accountant and then trying to explain the value of a hammer in hopes that he’ll use it for business.
There were a couple of examples in the guide of small businesses successfully using Twitter but again, these companies (wine distributor, coffee chain etc.) benefit from casting a wide net. Furthermore, because most businesses still aren’t using Twitter, the value is much higher than those who are. Once, every pizza place in town is monitoring Twitter for the word “pizza”, the outcome certainly won’t be as significant as being the first business in town to implement a two-way mailing list.
Are sole practitioners like attorneys, accountants, real estate agents, financial planners, mortgage brokers… finding Twitter to be an effective way to drive more sales leads?
According to a study conducted by email marketing experts Constant Contact, 70% of small business owners anticipate moderate to significant growth 2009. Several organization worked in conjunction with Constant Contact to put together the “Small Business Attitudes & Outlook Survey”. These companies included the American Chamber of Commerce Executives (ACCE), SCORE and the Association of Small Business Development Centers (ASBDC).
In 2009 do you expect your business to?
If growing significantly or moderately, do you plan on hiring additional employees this year?
How has your cost of doing business changed in the last 12 months?
In which areas of your business have you seen an increase in costs during the last 12 months?
Have you taken any of the following actions in response to the current economy?
Do you conduct outbound communications with your customers on a regular basis?
If yes, what avenue do you use to conduct your outbound communications?
How do you feel you are keeping up with technology?
Are you using any of the following online tools to market your product or service?
*Results from more than 3,000 respondents were recorded. This survey was conducted from April 30, 2009, through June 12, 2009.
As you may know, Referral Key is a part of Constant Contacts partner program. Consider a combined marketing effort for 2009. Referral marketing, combined with email marketing will ensure you generate sales leads even in a downed economy.
There are an infinite number of banner ads to click that promise a ton of leads. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. Downloading a list of contacts is a very passive and ineffective strategy for generating sales leads. Working from a base of existing customers is a much more effective approach.
Leveraging your existing customers before seeking new ones is a basic rule of marketing followed by successful businesses of any size; sole proprietors to Fortune 100 companies. The difference between existing customers and strangers on a list of leads, is that existing customers are people who you’ve worked with; people who know the quality of your services first-hand.
“A study, co-authored by Shawndra Hill, Wharton professor of operations and information management, found that consumers are far more apt to buy a company’s product if they are ‘network neighbors’ with existing customers.”
If you are providing quality services, your clients will naturally be inclined to advocate for you. These natural referral systems reward professionals that go out of their way to provide outstanding services. Creating the “WOW” effect for just ten of your client’s will do more for you than and excel file full of cold leads.
To bring customer advocacy full circle, you should consider rewarding clients that go out of their way to send you new business. Run a promotion campaign and offer a gift to let your clients know that you appreciate their positive referrals. Rewarding your clients is one of the easiest ways to say, “Thanks for spreading the word, keep sending me qualified sales leads.”
The digital age has created a number of creative marketing challenges as well as a flood of service providers eager to establish themselves as experts. SMO (Social Media Optimization), ORM (Online Reputation Management), and SERM (Search Engine Reputation Management) are just a few of the “buzz” services you may have heard of lately.
Just because someone adopts a trendy acronym doesn’t necessarily mean they are right for your small business.
Broken down to its most basic principle, we outsource work to service providers because they have a particular expertise that we do not. We hire an attorney because of their understanding of law, a programmer because their understanding of computer languages, and a Realtor because of their understanding of housing markets. Theoretically, their fees should be proportional to the energy and time it would take to acquire that expertise ourselves.
Conversely, most of us don’t outsource the task of driving to work because we understand that the difficulty of driving does not offset the cost of a chauffeur.
For auxiliary services like SMO (Social Media Optimization) it can be a very difficult decision whether or not to outsource. If you’re paying someone hundreds of dollars just to add your company’s key words to “YouTube” tags then you may want to reconsider.
New media sites like Referral Key, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter may seem a bit intimidating when approached as a whole, but you’d be surprised just how short the learning curve is when you delve into the mechanics.
These tools were developed with the lay person in mind, so watching a few tutorials on YouTube will familiarize you with a site’s features, capabilities and limitations. After you understand the mechanics of a new tool, your strategy is just a matter of deciding which features you want to use and how much time you want to spend on each one. Since you know your own business best, you’re in the best position to effectively communicate your brand’s value.
The Golden Rule for Small Business SMO
The goal for the small business owner is to keep a consistent message on every social media platform you engage. Develop a short paragraph explaining the value of your products or services, choose about a dozen keywords that describe your services, and save this file as a master template.
Yes, there are people who will aggrandize their social media services but the fundamental strategies are very simple:
Create a template paragraph that best describes who you are and what you do
Identify keywords that describe your services (i.e. a Realtor may try “Minnesota Realty”, “St. Paul Homes”, “Luxury Condominiums”, “Midwest Real Estate”…)
Paste this information where applicable and tweak it to fit the particular community you’ll be interacting with. Perhaps for your Facebook profile you want to tweak the message to appeal to homeowners, while on your Referral Key profile your goal may be to exchange sales leads; you’ll want to appeal to other service providers such as mortgage brokers.
While there are more complex strategies you can try, communicating a consistent brand message is about 80% of what an SMO specialist is going to do for you.
This isn’t to say that some people aren’t better suited to take advantage of emerging social mediums but this is the question you need to ask, “Is it worth hiring a marketing consultant if I can be almost as effective myself?”
However, if you think you need an SMO specialist, a qualified small business directory is a great place to begin your search.
You consider yourself a fairly internet savvy small business owner, don’t you?
You know what a Tweet is, you’re swapping sales leads on Referral Key and you think MySpace is “so last year”. But, have you studied your social media demographics lately?
Every marketer knows that it’s important to understand the demographics of your target customers. It’s also important to understand the demographics of the people whom use the medium through which you deliver your message. Ask Proctor and Gamble to tell you about the people who watch the shows in which their commercials air and you’d be surprised just how much they can tell you.
Social media, as a marketing tool, is so new that there aren’t any definitive demographics.
Over the next few days, we’ll be discussing the future of demographic trends in social media.
Men and Women
According to a study conducted by Cone, a well-respected Strategic Consultant Agency, Men are twice as likely as women to interact frequently (one or more times per week) with companies via social media (33% to 17%, respectively).
“The ease and efficiency of online conversation is likely a draw for men who historically do not seek out the same level of interaction with companies as women.” says Mike Hollywood, Director of New Media at Cone. He goes on to say, “The ease and efficiency of online conversation is likely a draw for men who historically do not seek out the same level of interaction with companies as women.”
The benefits of marketing through social media is still a hotly debated subject but if you do find social media is worth your time and effort, then you’ll certainly want to consider your demographics just like you would using any other marketing medium.
Are your networks mostly made up of men or women?
Who do you interact with more often, men or women?
Is your product/service gender specific? If not, could your message be tweaked to more intimately appeal to a specific gender?
Is it possible that you could be alienating or even upsetting a particular gender and not even know it?
Are you making sure you’re networking with your target market, not just the kinds of people you personally find easiest to interact with?
The best music resonates with people who can directly relate to the lyrics. Identifying with your favorite music can be a very powerful feeling. Good music can also be very true to life and surprisingly applicable to referral marketing.
The Beatles have had the secret to generating more sales leads since 1969 and it can be heard on their final album, Abbey Road. The closing line, of the Beatles last song on Abbey Road is, “And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make”. How true when it comes to getting more referrals for your small business!
Getting more referrals is easy. The key is to be the first one to give a referral. The people who you regularly do business with are more likely to send you a new lead after you have sent them one. If everyone plays by these rules, referrals will be passed around like a hot potato in your business referral network. Lead generation is just that straightforward.
If you’re sitting around wondering why you aren’t getting any new leads it’s probably because you haven’t been giving any. Once you stop being selfish and start spreading the love around, you’ll generate tons of referrals, leading to new business landing right in your lap.
Which artist do you think has the best referral advice?
We often think of an optimal referral relationship as an arrangement where you and another professional both benefit by exchanging an equitable number of qualified sales leads.
A big misconception among inexperienced referral networkers is thinking that clients are passed back and forth between businesses. Potential clients are not poker chips and the idea isn’t that you need to draw them into using your colleague’s services. In fact, most people don’t need to be sold on being referred at all; they prefer it!
“The advantage to working off a referral is that your realtor will receive a referral fee from the new realtor. This reinforces the notion that they will have a vested interest in finding you someone you can work with. They will also keep in touch with you to ensure you are satisfied with the referral instead of you having to deal with problems on your own.”
As intimidating as investment bankers may seem, they can be a key resource in your referral network. Although you may not see it now, investment bankers are good people to know especially, if you decide to sell your company. Here is just one example…
Network Wisely
Terra Kinder of First Choice Business Brokers in South Carolina is a business broker who happens to get many of her referrals from small investment banks. Just walking through the doors of an investment bank can create unexpected opportunities for mutually beneficial referral relationships. Your investment banker knows brokers like Terra Kinder and when it comes time to sell, she is the kind of player you want on your team. By working together, Terra and the banker help generate quality sales leads for each other while at the same time helping you, the small business owner, achieve your goals.
Building the Right Referral Relationships
Networking with a professional at a boutique investment bank, who often works with other small business, can be a hub of referral activity.
Building referral relationships with a banker early on, can lead to a better deal with a broker when you need their services.
Many members know that our case studies at the Harvard Business School have been instrumental in shaping Referral Key into the powerful tool that it is. Located in Boston, there are many points of connection between us and the institution.The HBS has strong insight into growing your small business and we often check in on them when we can. We came across a great article today on the Harvard Business blog entitled, “ Big Company Lessons for Small Businesses“. In this article, CEO of Cue Ball investment firm, Anthony Tjan, interviews Dick Harrington. What’s particularly interesting is that Mr. Harrington has made the transition form CEO and President of the world’s largest media company, Thomson and Reuters, to working with early stage and small businesses.
Rather than regurgitate an already great post, I thought we could frame some of the points in the context of relationship based business growth, referral marketing.
Mr Tjan: “After spending about a decade running a Fortune 500 - the world’s largest information media company - what motivates you to now work with early stage and small businesses?”
Mr. Harrington: “I get excited about having the opportunity to mentor them and hopefully share some lessons.”
Referral Key: No matter what stage of growth you are in, never forget to leverage your most valuable asset. Sharing expertise with other small business owners is a great way to lay the ground work for a strong relationship. It’s rewarding, cost effective, and could make a huge difference to your associate. Your expertise is your most valuable asset so don’t hesitate to barter a little knowledge.
Mr Tjan: “Give some examples of how you are applying big company lessons to the small firms you are investing in today.”
Mr. Harrington: “We all must understand our customers and the markets we serve, put the right people in the right places, and be sure the
organization is aligned to deliver on our goals and objectives.”
Referral Key: Who are your people? Are they in the right places? Are the people that help you grow your business merely the small team inside your office or do your trusted colleagues and clients beyond your walls actively advocate for you? Be sure to define your objectives. If your goal is to make 2009 a year of growth, put it down on paper. Fill in the blanks by asking, “What am I going to do to make my goal a reality?”, “What am I going to do different this year to create the difference in results” , and “How can my network help me get there?… How will I help them?”
Mr Tjan: What strengths shold entrepreneurs focus on?
Mr. Harrington: “They know their business and customers better than anyone else, and this knowledge can be hugely leveraged with the right operational practices. I am a huge believer that customer-driven strategies win over the long run. ”
Referral Key: You know your clients better than anyone. You know what they like. You also know that with the right motivators, they’ll become your biggest proponents; far more valuable than any magazine spot or newspaper plug. Good service and the right incentive can be all it takes to generate all the qualified sales leads you can handle. Try running a referral offer, focusing on what your clients really want. If your clients are a fan of the arts, send them to a show for driving new business your way.
Mr Tjan: What is the most significant challenge facing small businesses?
Mr. Harrington: It’s important for entrepreneurs to realize that one person can’t control everything, that they can’t be VP of marketing, sales, operations, etc. That kind of mindset just won’t work in the long run.”
Referral Key: Mr. Harrington is referring to hiring within your own company however, the same laws of codependency can certainly be applied within a network of small business owners. Again, this is why you’ll want to occasionally share your expertise with your network. Becoming a valued contributor of knowledge can make you an invaluable part of others businesses. This ensures the success of their business is contingent on the success of yours. Surrounding yourself with other motivated professionals can create an incredible upward thrust for everyone.
Select a Cash Bounty Amount
Consider setting up a Cash Bounty that you'd be willing to pay to people who send you new business. It's free to setup and you control whether to issue the cash.
The best music resonates with people who can directly relate to the lyrics. Identifying with your favorite music can be a very powerful feeling. Good music can also be very true to life and surprisingly applicable to 
