Networking

Social Networking Through Social Media

by Admin on June 21, 2011

social networkingEver heard someone say they don’t like social media- Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter? Have you heard them say, “I don’t know enough people to be a part of those groups” or “I don’t know what to talk about”? Well, what they don’t understand about social media is that it’s like a big networking party 24/7. You start with one or two connections and go from there.

You’ve heard the saying that it’s not what you know, but whom you know, or whom you know who knows whom. And that’s what networking is all about- getting to know people and getting introduced to the people they know. People don’t do business with businesses, they do business with people. And they like doing business with people they have something in common with such as a friend or business associate.

When you are in need of a new product or service, isn’t the first thing you do is try to think of someone you know who can provide you with that product or service? And if you mention to a friend that you are looking for that product/service and they suggest someone who can provide it, aren’t you likely to at least contact that someone to see if they can provide what you need? That’s what social networking through social media is all about.

We have gotten numerous opportunities for our business from social media. People have contacted us because:

  • they were friends or connections on Facebook or LinkedIn,
  • they were a friend of  a friend or a connection of a connection on Facebook or LinkedIn,
  • they saw that they went to the same high school/college as we did,
  • they grew up in the same city as we did.

In other words, we were somehow connected. And while not all of these opportunities came to fruition, many did; and we did get an opportunity that we probably would not have gotten without social media.

So the next time you think all of this social media talk is just hype, remember there are people using it to get business. But it does require effort on your part. Just like any networking meeting, if you stand in the corner by yourself and don’t engage, you won’t make any connections. After all, the first word in “social media” is social.

Let us know how social media has benefited your business.
Get Your Social Media Report Card

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How to Sell? Talk to People You Can Help!

by blogmistress on June 16, 2011

Need Sales?We have recently been participating in a great sales course by Frank Belzer and Rick Roberge for Kurlan and Associates. This program was offered to Certified HubSpot Partners. It has been quite a learning process for us. We have lots of experience with marketing, but not so much with sales. This 12 week course has taught us a lot about how we can do a better job defining what problems we can solve for our customers.

Rick Roberge recently wrote a blog article that struck home with me. He was talking about how often we tend to like to stick with people with whom we are familiar and comfortable. We want to talk to people who have the same problems as we do.

I’ve seen this many times at networking events where everyone from the same company sits at the same table and talks only to each other instead of talking to people that they might actually be able to help. I bet you have seen that too.

I’ve also seen that same problem online. Every industry seems to have its own jargon and special ways of communicating. Sometimes we use that same language on our websites, forgetting that people in our target market may not understand what we are saying.

Rick has five ideas that might help:

  • Quit some of your industry groups and associations. Join some of the groups and associations that your customers join.
  • Quit hanging around with people in your industry all the time. Go where your customers hang out.
  • Quit talking to people that have the same problems and issues that you do. Start talking to people that have problems and issues that you can fix.
  • Quit talking to people that have the same problems and issues that you do. Start talking to people that can help you fix problems and issues that you have. Read that again. It’s not a duplicate.
  • Quit stalling and procrastinating. Module #3 addresses identifying, finding and attracting PEOPLE THAT WANT TO BUY WHAT YOU HAVE.

Good advice from Rick for any business. As he said, “It’s not rocket science, it’s sales.”

Frank and Rick are offering this same 12 week course as an on demand webinar series. The course is designed for Value Added Resellers  /  Individual Salespeople  /  Entrepreneurs / Owners  /  Channel Sales  /  Distributors / Dealers  /  Independent Reps.

The 12 week course costs $199. However, if you say that you were referred by Christi Wharton, they will give you the partner price of $149.  Email me christi@wharton-marketing if you want to take advantage of this great opportunity to learn from some of the best in the business, and I’ll send you the link to sign up!

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Reconnecting With Your Customers to Beat the Recession

by blogmistress on February 16, 2009

herb-lawrence-asu-sbtdc-center-director2Another great post from ASBTDC Directory, Herb Lawrence


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Where did my customers go ?

As small business owners continue to deal with the ongoing recession, many are asking “Where did my customers go?” Plummeting 4th quarter sales will continue into 2009. Don’t expect to see any relief until possibly the 4th quarter of 2009. So what are small businesses to do? Sitting back is not an option, most of them don’t have enough cash to “turtle down” until the recession peters out so it means either go ahead and close the doors now or learn how to reconnect with your customers and keeps your business growing despite the economy.

What I Can Live Without

The other day I received an excellent 4 page report entitled, “Cash-Strapped Customers Are Cutting Back on (Almost) Everything” by Susan Reda, Executive Editor for NFR’s Stores an on-line marketing news service. The study, conducted by BIGresearch and Stores is a must read for every small business owner shedding light on what your customers are thinking about. Great information about what consumers consider “must keep” and what “I can live without”. If your holiday sales were less than hoped for, this report will not only tell you why customers stayed away and why they will not be rushing back anytime soon. To read this article go to http://www.stores.org.

Obviously there is a lot of powerful information in the report and I will be sharing it with my small business clients at the Small Business and Technology Development Center. But in addition to the nuts and bolts of what they are buying and what they are leaving on the shelf, the article brings out three very specific concepts I feel are just as important.

These three “nuggets” go way beyond the statistics in the report

First: Consumer attitudes and spending behaviors are not static or chiseled on stone tablets. Goods and services that were considered “must have” two or three years ago when the economy was rocking along are suddenly on the chopping block.

  • Median income households then thought the only way to keep in shape was to buy membership at state-of-the art fitness centers.
  • Middle income women thought nothing of adding upscale handbags to their accessory collections on a regular basis, and
  • Eating out at nice restaurants with $30-50 entrees was given at least once a week.

So owners of fitness centers, boutiques and good restaurants built their business models around these consumer attitudes, and three years ago these were valid assumptions. But as this study points out, guess what consumers have decided isn’t as important anymore? You got it…they can save money by:

  • not renewing their membership to the fitness center and just work out at home,
  • while they still buy apparel they are hitting the local discount stores instead of the boutiques, and,
  • Many consumers are renewing their love affair with the drive thru window at local fast food places instead of the full service restaurant.

Bottom line, what was a valid assumption three years ago is no longer correct in today’s economy. Consumer behavior is NOT static, it changes based on outside factors and the small business owner must be able to read these changes and adjust to meet these new realities.

Second: Because consumer behavior is not static, small business owners must learn to continually be scanning their environment for changes. Before launching your new venture you spent hours, days or even months studying the feasibility of your project to ensure the best probability of success. You studied consumer attitudes about your product or service, you analyzed the market and your competitors to learn all you could before launching that fitness center.
But then you stopped doing your homework, became complacent and your consumers have switched gears on you. The lesson here is that a small business owner can never stop getting updated information necessary to make changes to his business model as his environment changes.

Keep up to date

I received this Stores report the other day in my in box from my e-mail. It is just one of a dozen daily e-newsletters I receive electronically on a variety of topics that are important to my clients. I dedicate a minimum of one hour a day just reading these articles to find items that are relevant and then pass them on to my clients or filing away for a future article or seminar and to ensure I am up to date on latest trends.
A small business owner needs to do the same. You don’t have to get dozens of reports daily like I do, but you need to find one or two that are relevant to your industry or your market, subscribe to them (most are free) and discipline yourself to read, think, and act on the information that will affect your business.

This is one area that many of my small business clients do not do as good a job at as they should. They are so busy with the day-to-day operations that they don’t take the extra hour in the day to gather intelligence to help them plan for what will be happening next month or next year.

Of course thanks to the Internet (more on that further on) you can easily be completely overwhelmed by the volume of information that is available, so it is important to decide what sources you need to have and what you do not. If you are a small retailer or service business I would strongly suggest that you start with your trade publications or association e-newsletters. Another excellent source that we use at the ASU SBTDC comes from an on-line e-news service called SmartBrief. The service provides free, e-mail based news summaries and other content for industry associations, professional organizations, advocacy groups and their constituents. You can chose to subscribe to any of dozens of special e-newsletters in that impact your industry at no charge. To search for free subscriptions relevant to your business, go to www.smartbrief.com and sign up.

As with any information it is only valuable if you actually use it. That means subscribe, discipline yourself to read regularly, consider the information and then act on the data.

Internet = Absolute Necessity

Finally something that may be a shock to many small businesses was that the vast majority of the consumers surveyed in the Stores study said that Their Internet service was an absolute necessity regardless of other cutting back on other expenses. 86% of the consumers (regardless of age) polled said that they would continue to pay to stay connected to the web. Of course if you are an internet service provider or sell computer hardware or software this is good news, but it has a much more far reaching implication to virtually every business owner who is reading this article regardless of the business you are in.

Because the internet is where your customers live and it is the new medium that you must use to communicate with them. It’s not just where your teenagers talk to their BFFs on MySpace, not just where grandma goes to do her genealogy. Or those sites dad surfs at night when he thinks everyone is in bed. Across the board in virtually all age categories the Internet is where they seek to do business with you.

Although some consumers prefer to make their actual purchase inside a store, a majority do their “window shopping” on-line first. Your customers were spending their time on-line searching for information about products or services that they want to buy, looking for the right features, prices and discounts. Once they found what they wanted, they then search on-line for the stores in their area that carried it before they set out to make the actual purchase.

That means if you don’t have a website for your business, you were virtually invisible to these potential customers. It is no longer a question of “should I have a website? In the 21st Century marketplace it is an absolute necessity even if you don’t actually sell your product or service on-line.

Internet marketing can take on any number of unique opportunities for you to connect and build relationships with the consumers you want to attract by sending e-mail messages, using e-coupons, providing them with information, and more.

At the ASU SBDTC we have virtually abandoned newspaper advertisement for workshops and drastically cut back on the number of training calendars we print and mail through the post office. Instead personalized messages are sent out to our clients by e-mail about specific workshops that we think would be of interest to them. Our training calendars are e-mailed on a quarterly basis with updates and the cost of e-mail postage is…zero.

In addition to expanded use of e-mail we are exploring internet marketing through social media networking. I write articles for blogs like this one that not only provide information of value to the reader but also markets our services and training because every article includes information about the ASBTDC and how to contact us electronically. I also maintain profiles on several social media networks such as FaceBook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Twitter as ways to connect and communicate with potential customers. These are just a few examples of internet marketing opportunities that more and more small businesses are learning to take advantage of to grow their businesses.

If words like viral marketing, twitter, search engine optimization, and social media networks sound like Greek to you, don’t despair there is plenty of help available to bring your business on-line in nice easy baby steps. But the most important concept here is that it is absolutely vital that your small business start to develop an effective web presence and to start to take advantage of the tremendous marketing opportunities available through the Internet. I guarantee your competitors are already there.

I try to keep my articles to a maximum of three topics to ensure they are easily digestible by readers so it is time to bring this to a close. The most important idea that I hope any small business owner takes away from this is that it is not enough just to unlock the front door of your store, flip on the “Open” sign, throw some advertisements at the local newspaper and then sit back for customers to beat a path to your door.

To remain competitive in these difficult economic times small business owners must:

  • Understand and adjust their business to the new economic realities of consumer spending. What worked last year is not going to work now.
  • Commit to continual education and research of news affecting your business is vital to adjusting your business model and developing effective product or service mixes that will appeal to your customers
  • Embrace the new realities of the electronic age where every business owner must not just accept the Internet but learn to take advantage of the tremendous marketing potential it provides to them to communicate with customers on a personal level never before possible.

For many small business owners these may seem daunting tasks but survival in this new economic landscape will not come from “business as usual”.

Mountain Home Chamber of Commerce has partnered with the ASU Small Business and Technology Development Center to provide its membership with free and confidential consulting assistance from marketing, market research, cash flow planning to e-commerce. The Chamber and the ASU SBTDC are offering a variety of short 3 hour seminars in the Mountain Home area over the next three months covering topics vital to your business success such as Simple Market Research Tools, Recession Proofing Your Business, E-Commerce and Web Design, Guerrilla Marketing and much more.

Thanks to a partnership with The Baxter County Library, Community First National Bank, First National Banking Company (FNBC), and Liberty Bank of Arkansas your chamber is able to offer these invaluable seminars at significantly reduced rates and even better discounts for its membership.

For more information about the Chamber-ASU SBTDC consulting services and workshops call the Arkansas State University Small Business & Technology Development Center at (870) 972-3517 or e-mail [email protected] to give your business the edge it needs.

Coming Recession Proofing Your Business Seminars:

  • Mountain Home – Tuesday, February 17th 6-9 pm Baxter County Library 424 West 7th Avenue
  • Batesville – Thursday, February 19th 6-9 pm UACCB Independence Hall Room 104

Call the ASU SBTDC (870) 972-3517 or e-mail [email protected] to register for any of these. Batesville and Mountain Home attendees ask about Chamber membership discounts.

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Do You Care?

by blogmistress on February 4, 2009

eddie-web


On my other blog A Southern Life, I recently wrote a post about my father and some of his sayings. My father died at the age of 54 of cancer. What amazed me about that post was the response from people who either knew him or someone like him. The impact he had on other’s lives was because he cared about people.

I’m writing about this on this blog because it has a business application. The impact you and your business have is directly related to how much you care.

Here is an example. My husband and I recently went out to breakfast at a new restaurant. The waitress was friendly and did a good job. Unfortunately, the cook (who was the owner) didn’t really care. The food did not look at all appetizing and didn’t have anything about it that was at all special. Basically, the owner didn’t care. We were disappointed and won’t be going back.

What your customers want is to know that you care enough to offer them a service that is worth something. We know that when we go to a fine dining establishment that offers impeccable service and excellent food we will probably pay more but it is okay because it is worth it.

Is the product or service that you offer worth what you give in return? Do you care about your customers and try to offer them a good return on their investment?

Learn a lesson from Daddy. It pays to care.

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24/7 Networking

by blogmistress on January 14, 2009



Networking is probably the oldest, most accepted and least expensive way to market. *Professional Power CEO Lynn Gabrielson defines it like this: “Networking is demonstrating that you understand and care about people. It’s the soft intangible factors that build powerful alliances”. Okay, so it is a given that networking is powerful. Now, what about taking that to the next level. In today’s market, social media allows you to network with people you would otherwise have never met, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are no constraints of time and space. We are no longer confined to standing around swapping business cards with the same people month after month. We now have the ability to exchange ideas and information with people everywhere.

What is your business doing to take advantage of this networking opportunity? Do you have a blog, a facebook page, a linkedin page? Do you twitter (tweet) or flickr? This week, make it a goal to explore at least one social media opportunity. Feel free to friend me wherever you find me. I think once you see the power of social media networking, you will be astounded. Let me know about your social networking experiences.

*From the book 101 Ways to Promote Yourself by Raleigh Pinskey

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