serious about camo

I see @claynewton over in Napa - geotagging your tweets and how it can help your small business

Yesterday I received this tweet:

I clicked on it and couldn't bring myself to install Silverlight on my Mac. Boooo. This morning, however, I realized I could install it in Parallels and that would be fine (which is a bit of a rationalization, but whatever.)

What I found was pretty amazing. Bing Twitter Maps.

I was a bit put off by the fact that you have to install a maps plugin to see this, primarily because this decreases the number of people who will use it significantly. But still, I think this can be an incredible tool for small businesses. 

If you are active in the community, running specials, advertising a new location, or planning an event, using the new geo-tagging feature in Twitter is a must.

This feature is off by default in Twitter, so if you want to leverage location aware tweets, you have to go into your Settings (here: http://twitter.com/account/settings) and "Enable geotagging". See below.

 

Take note you can also kill your location data later if you so choose.

Funny and informative, a near perfect preso on social media ROI

Wow, I really enjoyed this presentation by Olivier Blanchard on social media ROI. With amazing archives of photos, it shoots right at the heart of what you should be measuring and considering when investing any time or money in social media.

Free social media listening services

This post by Mike Fruchter, How Restaurants Can Use Social Media, helped me to realize that I haven't done a lot to talk about social media listening tools. One of the most incredible opportunities that social media gives your business is the ability to find out what your customers are saying about you in the wild.

Photo by Swamibu

You're likely familiar with Yelp, but there is an entire menu of tools out there that have been developed around social media monitoring. Many of these tools are either free to use or operate on a "freemium" model, meaning they have a set of core features you can use for free, with added value services that are available via paid upgrade.

Crowd-sourced customer support

Get Satisfaction lets you create a customer support portal in which you have an authoritative voice, but one of the most incredible aspects of it is that it also makes it very easy for other customers to provide comment an aid. 

Once you register your company, it's very simple to set up alerts so that you are emailed immediately whenever someone posts feedback. It's important to note that this isn't spam: they make sure that the people interacting are real people, so when you get an email, you know it's actionable.

Most impressively, Get Satisfaction enables you to add a feedback widget to your own webpage by using a simple block of javascript. This is huge because it allows people to give you feedback and ask you questions directly from your website, without you having to do a bunch of expensive modifications to get it implemented. 

Real-time web notifications

One of the things that's amazing about social media is that people comment on what they're doing as they are doing it. So it's not a crazy thought that someone in your store right now just tweeted that they were arriving. How amazing would it be if you could walk up to them and ask them about their sick dog (because they had posted previously that their beloved pooch was in surgery)? Instant connection. Two critical services you must use to make this: Google Alerts and TweetBeep. 

Google Alerts makes it super simple to set up very robust sets of terms you'd like to be alerted of as soon as a mention of floats across the internet. You can have Google Alerts email you as soon as the words are found, or just send you a nightly digest of the findings.

TweetBeep is built on top of the amazingness of Twitter Search. Twitter Search checks out what people are saying on Twitter and gives you to-the-second results. It's pretty incredible to see in action. What TweetBeep does is it makes this more of push: much like Google Alerts, it will email you hourly when it finds matches to the terms you have entered.

With the knowledge of what people are saying, you can respond to their support issues or thank them for the rave review. It's a great opportunity for you to extend your relationship with your customers and make a public display of your brand.

Worth the few minutes

Setting up you business on Get Satisfaction, Google Alerts and TweetBeep takes only a few minutes each. While you are munching on your lunch at your desk, click over to them and get started.

Number 1 of 5 Facebook apps for your Small Business: Polls

A very great way to engage your customers on your Facebook Page is to use the Polls app. You can add the app to your Page here. This will add the application to the options for Sharing on your Wall.

You can use this app to get direct feedback from your customers. When creating a new offering, are you curious what options your customers would prefer? Ask them directly!

Getting a custom Facebook URL for your Page

Once you have your Facebook Page set up, don't forget to do this very simple, but easily overlooked step: creating a custom Facebook URL. Having a custom URL is important in a number of ways. First, it makes it very easy for individuals to find your Facebook Page; second, it is one more way to layer on Google Juice.

It's very simple, but there is a catch. Navigate to this address http://www.facebook.com/username. You will be able to set a custom URL for your personal profile, and for all of your Pages. The catch is that in order to set up a custom URL, you must have a minimum number of Fans. 

As of today, the minimum number of Fans required to create custom URL for your page is 100, but that could change at any point.

Creating a Facebook Fan Page for your Small Business

You are now ready to create a Facebook Page. Excellent! I will break it down to the absolute basics. We'll return to this topic later to cover some ways to spiff up your Page and make it really powerful, but for now, let's just get one created (don't worry, you can iterate on it prior to publishing it to the whole universe.)

Photo by Curtis Gregory Perry

Where to go

Navigate to http://www.facebook.com/pages/manage. This is your portal into all of your Facebook Pages. It may not be readily apparent why you'd want more than one, but we'll dip into that later.

"Create Page"

First you will have to select what category your business falls under. It's most likely you'll want to select something under the "Local" set of categories. Then, provide a name for your business. 

Choosing a name is fairly straightforward (in that you've probably already named your biz!), but you may want add some additional terms to help in directing search traffic. For instance, if you run a bed and breakfast called "Hilltop Acres", you may want to name you Page "Hilltop Acres, a luxury bed and breakfast in the Napa Valley". 

Once you click "Create Page", your page will be set up, but it will be unpublished.

Edit your Page

Now that your Page has been created, you need to add information. You can set page image by clicking on "Change Picture" when you mouse over the grey "?' image. An interesting thing to note is that the optimal image for this is going to be a skyscraper: 200 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall. Don't worry, you can also edit the thumbnail to look the way you want it to.

Now add some details. On the Info tab for your page, click on the "Edit information" link. That will open up a form that will enable you to add all the basic information about your business. Fill this out with as much information as possible. 

Skip this step if you don't have HTML skill

Now comes a special part, which adds some real overhead, but can be very useful for you. It involves creating a custom tab that will be used as a landing tab. If you know how to write basic HTML, you should be able to pull it off, if not, move ahead to the next section.

I am going to defer to Nick O'neill's description of how to create a custom tab for your Page. You can se it here, just skip down to Step 3: Configure a Landing Page/Tab.

You are ready to publish

Once you have completed filling in your basic information, I would go ahead and do one more thing prior to publishing, share a link to your web homepage. It's simple and will get you past the feeling of having a blank page. 

Now click the red link at the top of the Page "publish this Page."

Get some content in there!

Spend a little time populating the Page with addition links and content. Do you have photos of your business? Post them and create an album or two. Videos that promote your business? Share those too. 

You want to have your Page look chock full of information and excitement before your take things to the next level which is inviting folks.

What's next

Upcoming will be a series of short posts that will give you quick and dirty, five minute or less tasks to promote your Page, increase your Fans, integrate external content like Twitter and your blog.

Twitter Kickstart: a guide for small businesses

At its most basic, Twitter is a communication tool based around the sharing of short status updates, or tweets. Tweets are 140 characters or less, but don't be fooled by their terseness: the range of possibilities for how you can utilize them is incredibly rich.

 
Photo by Noël Zia Lee 

Because of the potential for digressions, at this point, I am going to focus primarily on three main things around Twitter: 1) initial set up; 2) three and a half killer apps; 3) 7 tweets examined.

Initial set up

In many ways, Twitter is a "set it and forget it" system. You choose a username, tweak basic settings, choose some followers and move on. But that short list betrays the difficulty of decisioning. Here are the basics you should have at hand before you start:

1. Username - Choose either a derivative of your real world name (@claynewton), the name of your business (@sonsofthewest) or an evocative word or phrase (@tastybit).
2. Bio - 140 chars or less that describe you, your interests or your business. Have fun with this.
3. Location - Use something relevant, like your hometown or the region you service.
4. Profile image - A headshot or avatar. Real is better.

Once you create your account, import your email addressbook and add everyone who has a Twitter account, also add some of the big names that they suggest up front. This is critical for you: if you follow less than 100 people, you will have a pretty boring feed and you won't see the value.

Advanced setup (optional): customize the look and feel of your profile page. This means changing the background image and colors. It's not critical, but it's something you probably want to do at some point. The easiest thing to do is to select one of Twitter's custom designs, and it's fine to leave it at that for the foreseeable future.

Note: DO NOT protect your tweets. It's an unnecessary barrier for people finding out about you. There are some cases where having protected tweets is a good idea, but they are few and far between. The biggest thing about social media is the idea that you are opening up your world to a broader audience and protecting your tweets blocks that.

Two and a half killer apps

Twitter has a very robust API (Application Progamming Interface), which means that external applications can be created to run on top of Twitter and perform close to all of the core functions of the Twitter.com website. This has led to an absolute explosion of applications that integrate with Twitter in crazy ways. You'll likely learn of more as you begin to use Twitter a lot, but for now, here are two and a half that you should use.

Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is an Adobe Air application (meaning it will work on your PC or Mac.) It's free and it works very well. It supports multiple accounts, and allows you to monitor specific search terms easily. This means you can enter in a search for terms related to your business and all related tweets will show up as they happen. It's pretty incredible.

Tweetie
Tweetie is another desktop application (but only for Mac). More importantly  it's a very clean and easy to use iPhone application. Though it's a paid app, it's totally worth the small investment.

Bit.ly
Bit.ly is a url shortening and analytics service. It's actually Twitter's default, which is great, but you can interface with it to track who is sharing the links you *or other users* create. I'll get into some Twitter tactics in a subsequent post, but suffice it to say that being able to access details about who is sharing what links is very powerful.

*Note:* If you want to see analytics for a bit.ly url, just append a "+" to the url, e.g. http://bit.ly/2WgfSr+.

7 tweets examined

You can do so many things with tweets, it's better to see some examples in the wild and discuss their distinct attributes.

google Introducing Google Checkout store gadget in Labs — set up your own online store in minutes http://bit.ly/oYSTu

This is a very standard product introduction tweet. Notice the use of the bit.ly url, this will allow the GOOG marketing team to analyze the effectiveness of this announcement, measured by clicks and RTs (retweets.) 

traction Traction CEO @adamkleinberg's article beat iMedia record for traffic in 1st week: 7 reasons your employees hate you http://om.ly/?CRFW

Here, Traction is reposting a link to an post that their CEO posted on an industry website. This is great because it's creating a good amount of Google Juice, and encouraging even more people to click thru to an already popular post. You can do this multiple times across a period of days and you will only gain readers.

eatrealfest Brush up on ur skillz for our canning exchange on 8/28 RT @NaomiStarkman: Civil Eats, The Art of Canning, a How-To http://bit.ly/35uwyo

Cross posting relevant content, sharing links to posts that peers have made and sharing Twitter friends all in well. Posting links to other people's tweets using the "@" convention provides an viral and unintrusive means for people to learn about other Twitter-folk.

baratunde tell us what you thought of #FutureOf episode 1 here on twitter or on facebook! http://bit.ly/9ysPF #feedback

Baratunde is a total expert at using social media. Here's a good example of his use of hashtags, and engaging his audience with a request to give feedback either via Twitter or through a discussion on Facebook. You'll notice that with Tweetdeck, when you reply to a tweet that contains a hashtag, your reply will have the hashtag in it automagically.

laughingsquid > @yumfactory is having a solo art show "Antidote" opening this Friday at @1am_sf gallery in San Francisco http://bit.ly/1AOij

Posting event details for a peer. Another good opportunity to cross-pollinate friends, but Twitter recently made a change to the way they deal with "mentions": if you start a tweet with "@username" it will only be pushed into the stream of people that are already friends with that user. Here, by adding the the ">" before "@yumfactory", Scott Beale has employed one of the workarounds that will share the tweet across all user's streams.    

xenijardin From Howard Rheingold, beautiful photo of a peyote flower blooming! RT @hrheingold Lophophora williamsii - http://mobypicture.com/?jf3i24

A great employ of the retweet, and a more natural workaround for the issue with mentions.

bikebasketpies I'm at San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (995 Market St #1550, 6th, San Francisco). http://bit.ly/mDUZt

Here, Bike Basket Pies uses Twitter to announce their location and details about what they will be selling. It's roving food!

Additional reading

Recently, Twitter released it's own Twitter 101 for businesses. It's really excellent! There's a ton of content, but I recommend focusing on the lingo, best practices and case studies.

Content strategies for small biz

What is the core competency of your business? It's probably not content, otherwise why would you be reading this blog??? Your business may be to deliver a product or service, regardless of the actual stuff you ship or if you ship at all for that matter, you are an SME (Subject Matter Expert.) Your content should be centered around establishing and maintaining that fact. That said, it doesn't all have to be laser focused on industry insights. In fact, it shouldn't be. I'm going to run through some core content types that you should focus on to create a website that will get you kickass search rankings, engage your audience and maybe even make you feel like a bit of a rockstar.

 
Photo by 10ch

Content: variety rocks

An important thing to consider is that your blog content comes in forms and types. A content form is the How: the method the content is inserted into the site. Content forms include posts, pages, comments, widgets and imports (including syndicated imports and pushed imports). I'll talk about comments, widgets and imports in subsequent posts, for now, let's focus on posts and pages .

The distinction between posts and pages is a bit nuanced, but there is a fairly simple way to think of them. Typically posts are listed in your site's archives, whereas pages are a part of the primary navigation. A good rule is that you should not have more than five pages. Content that is very temporal in nature (like a press release or event update), content that expoundatory, tangential or industry related should all be put in a POST. Content that describes your core offering and content that is you want to call out to all visitors to your site at some point should be put in a PAGE.

There are three core content types when it comes to your business blog:

Industrial content is used to set your business within the context of the greater field. Examples include your About page, posts that go in depth into a specific aspect of your field, reviews of content on other websites, services or products (like a restaurant review if you are a winery,) and links to related industry content.

Illustrative content is your opportunity to give out free tidbits of interesting fact or opinion. This might include a page that gives a high level deep dive into your process, a post that describes a critical differentiator of your product or service, an aggregate summary of a number of other illustrative posts on other sites, or a link to similar content on another website.

Emotive content takes your business and personalizes it in a way that engages your customers. It's a great way to establish or maintain your brand in the electronic space. This can be really fun stuff to find and write! Generating this content is best when you basically write for yourself and your peers. Make a page of your site your Mission statement, or if you have a great story to share about someone using your product or service, write a quick post. Found a funny or compelling video on YouTube? Post it! It doesn't all have to be directly related to your business, it can be about something tangential or even a non-sequitur.

Take it easy

It's totally overwhelming to consider all of the options about this: don't be put off or stressed about it. You don't have to release all your content at the launch of your site. It's best to have some: I recommend having a page or two and maybe three posts at the point when you start trying to draw people to your site, but you can launch with effectively nothing. The key is to post things regularly. If you can get new content of any type above on your site 3 times a week, you are looking good. More than that can be very effective, but it's not worth stressing about. Just get in there and do it.

Queue it up

I recommend that people maintain a rich list of topics on an ongoing basis. This should be chunks of info to start new posts, ideas for posts, concepts for extended posts (such as my Social Media for Small Business series which this post is a part of,) and products that you are keeping an eye on in the industry. You should also write in bursts: write three or four posts, and then schedule them for release at times that you know people are visiting your site the most. How do you know that? In a subsequent post I will talk at length about optimizing your use of analytics tools. 

For now, just use 10:30am - 1pm Monday thru Friday as a guideline. If it's Monday thru Friday between 10:30am and 1pm, post it immediately. If it's before or after that window, schedule your post to go out in the subsequent window at roughly 10:30am. It's a timeframe that people are typically online and reading stuff. 

Categories and tags

Create your own set of categories that make sense for your business and industry. Always use them. They are a great way for people to discover new content on your site by allowing you to establish vertical pathways across similar posts.

Post-post

Writing the post is not the end of the process. Once you write the post, you have to make sure that it gets push-syndicated. If you haven't linked up a Facebook and Twitter account to your blog yet, you can do this manually. 

For Twitter, I usually include the title in sentence form and blast a tweet with a link to the post. Use bit.ly as your link service. It's the easiest and has awesome tools for getting analytic info. For Facebook, I usually share the post and include a little blurb with meta- thoughts on the post in the share comment. You should just use the official Facebook Share bookmarklet.

Here's the bookmarklet: Share This On Facebook! <-- just drag that up to your browser bookmark bar. Click it and it does the magic for you.

Here's a kicker: retweet it and/or re-share it in the afternoon, between 3 and 4pm. This is critical because it will get back in the face of people who didn't see it earlier, or who did and didn't have time to read it. A major objective here is to get OTHER PEOPLE to retweet and re-share you. That will expand your reach greatly and likely lead to new followers.

If it is a particularly popular post, tweet about it again on subsequent days.

Next up: the Twitter

In my next post, I'll give you a Twitter Kickstart.

Social Media for small (& local) businesses

I work with a number of clients who all want to try to harness some of the power of the social web, but the array of options, the workflow and the complexity of the offerings are completely daunting. It doesn't have to be so scary. I've created a step by step process that will allow you to assess your needs, the assets you have at hand and your own life and create a social media program that will work for you.

 
Illustration by Matt Hamm

First: why spend your time on this? Small businesses have limited advertising spend and somehow have to compete with the big fish. This is going to be an issue whether you are a local restaurant, a niche internet retailer or a craftsman. 

Case in point: Kogi BBQ. Just look at the GOOG News results for "Kogi BBQ". 

Kogi BBQ is a great example of a small business using social media to ratchet in on customers. They've received tons of attention for their work. Newsweek: Now 4 Restaurant 2.0. One of their success tactics was to give out discounts or free food for people who tweeted about Kogi, which generated both buzz and awareness. Twitter is just a first step.

In order to get rolling, you should set up the following accounts. 

1. Blog
2. Twitter
3. Facebook Fan Page 
4. Flickr account or group
5. YouTube account

Over the next few posts, I'll step through how to configure each of these to optimize your cross pollination and interoperability, first I'll talk a little about your Blog.

Your website should be a blog. No exceptions.

This is perhaps the most critical thing for your business. Ditch your static website immediately, regardless of how much money you've poured into it. That doesn't mean you need to ditch the content or the design, that can all be repurposed for your new blog, but you must ditch the way it's set up. Most often, small businesses either hack something together in-house or hire an expensive and spotty "webmaster" to create and maintain the site. This is pure folly.

There is a common misconception that blogs are either about news-related topics, or a soapbox for folks with niche interests. In reality, modern blog systems are simple yet robust content management systems (CMS.) 

CMS is the defacto standard in the enterprise world. Though I don't have actual numbers, it's very safe to say that upwards of 90% of Fortune 1000 company use CMS. Your website is your face to the world. You need to have absolute control of its contents. If it takes more than ten minutes for you to update your homepage, you won't do it as often as you should. With a CMS you can update content in ten minutes or less.

There are tons of options for blogs to use for your website. Without question, you should use Wordpress. It's free, easy to set up, highly customizable, open source, widely accepted. There is a massive developer community creating Themes and Plugins that can extend the capabilities of your website quickly and easily.

Photo by Eric Martin

You might say, "But, Clay, why are you using Typepad?" I've long used Typepad, and don't intend to change. Though Typepad works fine for me, I honestly wish I could move over to Wordpress, but the switching costs are too high.

You should dip into Wordpress immediately. Transitioning your site, however, is scary. Here's what I would recommend: go to Wordpress.com and sign up for the $30/year package. You can use that system to start setting up your blog. If you already are paying for a hosting solution, almost every hosting provider offers a FREE Wordpress install on their servers. 

Here's the Wordpress getting started guide. It's worth your time to read through this. Pay particular attention to section two: Make a Plan.

Next steps: Get some content in there

I'll follow up this post shortly with some concepts and guidelines about content.

UPDATE: Here's a link to my latest post in the Social Media for Small Business series, Content strategies for small biz. Enjoy!

Scoble interviewing Fred Wilson, talking the 2010 web

This is a great informal chat between Fred Wilson and Robert Scoble.

It's an inspiring set of thoughts on where we are going.