This is the second in the series of seminars I will be doing for the Tuggerah Business Enterprise Centre this year.

In this two hour session, I will go through the benefit of having a structured social media strategy for your small or micro business. I work with small and micro businesses every day to put plans together to make the most out of social media and online marketing platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, email marketing and others.

This interactive and entertaining presentation is essential for any small or micro business owners who know a lot about social media, a bit about social media or nothing about social media but who want to find new and inexpensive ways to grow their business in the online space.

I will show you how to develop a social media marketing plan from scratch and the real life way each of these marketing tools can work in a step by step session that is interactive and fun.

When and Where?

This workshop will be held a week from today on Wednesday 4th August 2010 at 6:00pm to 8:00pm at the Zenith Business and Function Centre in the Tuggerah Business Park on the NSW Central Coast. The cost is just $55 and that includes refreshments and notes from the presentation.

Want to attend?

There are still some spaces left so if you would like to attend, go to the Tuggerah BEC’s events page and register or you can call them on 02 4355 4885.

It’s probably the oldest form of marketing and, apparently, still the most effective: word of mouth.

Ever since one caveman told another caveman that a mammoth cooked a particular way was the yummiest, word of mouth has always been the most trusted way to build a brand and build a customer base for that brand.

And, in some ways, it’s the hardest type of marketing for small businesses to reproduce. That was, at least, until the advent of Web 2.0 technology.

Now, it’s easier than ever for one person to tell their entire network of friends and family (and their friends and family) what they think about a particular product, service or brand. Blog posts, social media channels and the fact that more and more people understand how they can generate their own content and opinions online have all meant that businesses, and especially small businesses, need to have a better grasp on what people are saying and how to engage their community better.

In a survey conducted by Neilsen Company, and brought to my attention by Jonathan Crossfield from Netregistry, people were asked which means of marketing gave them some degree of trust in what they were being told. Click on the image to the left to see the full breakdown of the results.

Not surprisingly, ‘recommendations from people known’ came in as the number one most trusted for of marketing with 90% of respondents saying they had some degree in word of mouth.

Interestingly though, ‘consumer opinions posted online‘ (70%), ‘brand websites‘ (70%) and ‘emails signed up for‘ (54%) all ranked above 50% of users’ responses.

This gives weight to what we do with small businesses all the time in their social engagement strategies: build dynamic websites/blogs and keep a consistent contact through useful email marketing programs that aren’t spammy and annoying.

If you would like to find out how I can help your small business engage with your target market and the wider community better – and in so doing create a better word of mouth profile for your business – call me TODAY on 02 4324 2594.

Do you agree with the above findings? Do you trust word of mouth referrals above all other forms of marketing? Please let me know in the comments below.

A mate of mine is a Tupperware Demonstrator. She is great at it and has made a pretty successful little business out of it. Don’t worry, you don’t have to come to a party at my house.

I am interested in the business model because, although the world and the shopping mentality has changed dramatically over the years, party plan businesses still do well and Tupperware is one of the biggest party plan set up there is.

So why is it still relevant?

The basis of the Tupperware model (as I’m sure a lot of you are aware) is that a friend of yours invites you to a party, there is a Tupperware demonstrator there, the stuff she shows you is pretty nifty and, although you swore to yourself that this time you wouldn’t buy anything, you walk out of there with a whole load of stuff you never knew you needed.

It is actually one of the earliest forms of affiliate sales because the host, depending on what everyone buys at the party, is also rewarded with product and discounts for themselves.

In speaking with my mate about her business after she read my book, I got to thinking on how party planners could embrace social media to achieve greater social engagement, just like any other small business wants to do.

There are 4 social media platforms that every Tupperware Demonstrator or party plan consultant should be using to engage their community and grow their business.

Blogging

Although not truly a social media platform, blogging is an invaluable tool to party planners – particularly if they are involved in  selling more than one company or product.

A blog, literally short for web log, is a great way to achieve good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) by having regularly updated content. It also provides a more personal aspect to your online presence which people may be more likely to follow and want to be updated on.

The majority of party planners are mums and what better way to connect with people than to share some of your life with them, particularly if the content is stuff that your target market can all relate to: kids, families, juggling work and other commitments. You could write a post on the parties you have coming up that week, where they are, how much travel you have to do for them, how crazy your house will be when you get home, that kind of thing.

Encourage comments, interact with those who comment and hey presto, your blog is up and running!

Facebook Events

Companies like Tupperware are for some reason pretty paranoid about their employees having their own Facebook Pages, but surely there is no reason why you couldn’t list upcoming parties on your own Facebook Profile as Events.

Facebook Events are simple to set up, invite your Facebook friends to and, most importantly, link back to a blog post on your new blog. Include photos, videos, exclusive offers, the opportunities are endless.

The party’s host can also list the party on their Facebook Profile as well as interacting with your event and grow the exposure for your parties and your business that way as well.

YouTube

Wow, the possibilities that spring to mind for party planners utilising YouTube are almost endless! Think about what you do at every one of your parties – get people gathered, go through the products displaying your expert knowledge as well as the amazing features and benefits of each and then in the end, close the sales by asking for orders.

Everything you could do in a YouTube video, but without necessarily having to have a group gathered in one of your mate’s lounge rooms.

There are more than half a billion videos viewed on YouTube everyday and it is the second biggest search engine in the world. Your video can be viewed by a local (or much wider) audience who can then choose to leave a comment about it which might also contain their profile information including contact details. Think about all of the new people you could add to your database this way.

YouTube videos can also be ‘embedded’ in your blog (see above) so that you can link directly to your video from your free online presence. This not only makes your blog look so much more professional but again it is totally free to do so.

Email Marketing

Again, I just think this is something that party plan consultants have to be doing! How easy would it be to grow a database of clients who are actually interested in your products, especially if you have a new range or updated stock available?

All you have to do is gather the email addresses of anyone who is interested in going on your database list (making sure they agree to receive information from you periodically – don’t spam) and then utilise a very cheap email marketing platform such as the one I can put together for you and future parties could be a whole lot easier to plan.

You can always just send out new catalogues or product updates and get bookings and sales without even having to put parties together! And the best part is, it’s really cheap. Let’s say you had a database of 100 people who you wanted to email once every month with a newsletter you have put together with updates or new offers. With my email marketing platform, this would cost you $73 per month, just over $2 a day or less than $1 per customer.

If you would like to see how I can help you grow your party plan business using any or all of these applications for a free obligation-free consultation for your business, or a free 30 day trial of the email marketing software, call me TODAY on 02 4324 2594.

Have you had success growing a Tupperware or party planning business with social media? Do you have any other suggestions that I have missed? Please let us know in the comments below.

This is part 2 of my series on what every small business needs to succeed in 2010 (see Part 1 : A Dynamic Website by clicking here). In this post, I will discuss how having a sound social media strategy is vital to ensure a small business’ social engagement with their community and therefore their ongoing growth and success.

I have previously published a post about really believing in a social media strategy and not just adopted one because you think you should. This is still very true but we should take a step back from that and see what constitutes a sound social media strategy for your small business.

So firstly, which social media platforms are appropriate for your business? When I do comprehensive social media audits for small business clients, this is one of the first things I look at. What is the business’ target market? What is the person responsible for the social media strategy going to be able to cope with in terms of functionality and time allowed, and lastly which social media platform ‘fits’ that small business and their brand most suitably.

Which of these platforms best suits your business, your target market and most importantly, best suits you?

Facebook

Facebook has become the most important social networking site in the world very quickly and has just topped 400 million users worldwide. It is also the number one referrer of new clients for my businesses. It is the most popular social networking platform in Australia, with more than 5 million users in 2009. In fact, globally if Facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd most populated in the world, ahead of the USA.

Facebook enjoys widespread popularity in the small business community because of the functionality of using Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups and Facebook Ads to grow your brand awareness online as well as target your market very specifically through utilising the information that people share on their Facebook Profiles.

Twitter

Twitter is the biggest mover and shaker in the social networking world right now and is another free site that has helped my websites’ readerships increase dramatically in the last year. In Australia, Twitter had one quarter of a million people join up in the first few months of 2009. That represents a growth of 1067% over the previous year.

Twitter is a way for individuals or businesses to keep people up to date with what they are doing currently. These are called ‘tweets’. Each tweet can only be 140 characters maximum (the similar number originally allowed for SMS’s on mobile phones). So how long is 140 characters?

“This sentence is 140 characters, it’s not that many but it’s still enough to get your point across, you just have to be succinct & focussed.”

The possibilities with Twitter are endless and its only drawback is that you need to be very regular in updating your status to keep you front of mind with your followers.

For a great introduction to using Twitter to grow your small business, check out my e-book, “34 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started on Twitter”.

MySpace

MySpace was one of the very first social networking platforms and both Facebook and Twitter owe a lot of their structure and success to it. Almost half of MySpace users are under 25 years old. MySpace’s females outnumber males in Australia and less than 19% of users’ income is more than $100,000.

Some businesses are still quite suited to engaging their target market on MySpace: bands, artists, performance based businesses, and those whose target market is teenage through to early 20′s.

Linkedin

Linkedin is like Facebook or MySpace but for business people. It’s often referred to as ‘Social Media for Grown-Ups’.

This free service is all about building a network of users who can recommend you to others and also relies heavily upon you keeping your status up to date (similar to Facebook and Twitter).

One of the more useful parts of Linkedin is Linkedin Answers. Similar to Yahoo! Answers, this part of the site allows you to ask, and more importantly answer, questions of the entire network.

Check out my previous post on Social Engagement for Small Business using Linkedin: An Interview with Iggy Pintado.

YouTube

YouTube is one of the internet’s and Web 2.0 great success stories. The user numbers of this video sharing platform are staggering. 13 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. To watch every video on YouTube would take you more than 412 years. There are more than 500 million videos viewed on YouTube every day and it is always one of the ten most viewed internet sites int he world.

It’s also now the world’s second largest search engine, behind its owner, Google. This is a pretty powerful tool that your business should be taking advantage of, particularly because it’s free!

Check out my previous post on Social Engagement for Small Business using YouTube.

FourSquare

In a lot of ways, FourSquare represents the next generation of social networking. It combines the standard fodder: friends, followers, reviews and status updates with geographic and location-based features.

Users ‘check-in’ at different locations around a town or city, update their following where they are and what they are buying or doing and leave a comment or suggest a tip for others when they are in the same place. It sounds really geeky but until you use it, it’s difficult to really grasp how powerful this application could be.

And why do I think it’s the next best thing? Before Twitter became mainstream (before Oprah and Britney) it was widely mocked and laughed at as being solely for the ‘nerdarati’ and FourSquare is currently enjoying the same sort of derision.

Which platform suits you best?

They are just six of literally hundreds of social networking platforms out there today.

The thing to keep in mind is that which one best suits you and which one best suits your business is no less important than which one of them best suits your target market. A sound social media strategy integrates a little bit of a few of them without putting all of your eggs into one basket.

If you would like to see how I can develop a sound social media strategy for your small business, call me TODAY on 02 4324 2594.

In your experience, which platform has best suited your business. Are there some of them that you would like to try but haven’t yet? Please let us know in the comments below.

A lot of small businesses in Australia start up and then fail in a relatively short time. Some are mismanaged, some have too narrow (or wide) a focus and some are just unlucky.

A lot of established businesses are failing, however, because of their inability to adapt and change to a new business – and new consumer environment in 2010.

People want to shop online, they want to review products and services online and they want to be listened to online. In short, the clever and successful businesses understand that social engagement is the way to build the brand and the customer base.

So what does every small business need to succeed in their social engagement effort in 2010? Four components: a dynamic but simple website, a sound Social Media Strategy, an old school component, and a consistent contact with your existing and potential database through email marketing that’s not spammy or annoying.

A Dynamic Website

You may already have a website, you may not. If you do have one, chances are you had it built by somebody else and it is from a template that is tried and true – and which you probably thought you paid way too much for. Regardless, a website is probably the most necessary online tool your business needs – as long as it does what you want it to.

There are a few things that each small business website must definitely have. The first is functionality, it must be easy to use.

There is a great temptation among small business owners to make their websites full of great graphics, flashing images, galleries and flash pages that take thirty seconds to open even on the highest speed broadband.

All of this might look great and make you feel great about your site, but they really annoy everyone else – particularly your customers who need to find something quickly on your site and are forced to endure a whole lot of time-wasting features first.

So if you have a website, take a good objective look at it. Does it load up straight away, does it have any graphics or sound which might be annoying, especially if people view it from their desk when they should be working, and it is generally easy to navigate around with the most obvious sections people go to websites for – the contact details and topical updates – clearly visible and easy to find?

If the answer to any of that is no, then do something about it now. And if you can’t physically do the changes yourself without the help of your webmaster, think about changing to a platform that is easier for you to update and make changes to yourself.

Your site should have the ability to display fresh and dynamic content, or at the very least link out to your blog directly from the menu. This helps with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as well as providing a more engaging experience for your site’s visitors. If a website looks exactly the same and has exactly the same content on it every time a visitor looks at it they will stop looking pretty quickly. Wouldn’t you?

The exception to that are straight e-commerce sites with a ready made audience which just needs the facility to purchase a certain product.

You should be able to embed images or video easily into the front page which should also be dynamic and constantly changing. This helps to provide a much more engaging experience and also allows you to show some of your own branding and individuality on the web page.

There should be some availability to include affiliate advertising somewhere on the page or in its sidebars if you want to. These are advertisements by other businesses whereby when a visitor to your site clicks on the ad and then goes through to the advertiser’s site and makes a purchase, you get a commission from the sale.

These can be a very handy secondary income stream to a fledgling small business but you should be careful not to turn your website into a cluttered billboard of other people’s ads, this can be very off-putting for your readership and sometimes smack of desperation.

I believe the three most important inclusions on any small business website, however, are clearly visible links away from the site to social networking platforms that you participate in, a database inclusion form, and a link for your readers to subscribe to your Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed.

Social Networking Links

You should try to make it as easy as possible for your readership to be able to interact with you and the easiest way for them to do that is through the social networking platforms that you participate in. Including a badge that links to your business’ Facebook Page or your Twitter feed is simple and can be quite unobtrusive. You should try to find a way to make it more compelling for your readership to follow you on social networking sites and one of the best ways to do that is by promoting them directly on your website.

Database Inclusion Forms

These can be seen by some as a sinister and unsafe thing to fill in. Conspiracy theories abound that the government is going to get your hotmail address and somehow use it to launch missiles etc. etc.

You should really want to grow your database though, so you should try to make your database inclusion form as benign and simple looking as possible, maybe just ask for people’s name or email address only.

Also, think about something cheap or free that pertains to your business or market that you can give away in return for people signing up to your database. An email newsletter, a free e-book or white paper works particularly well.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

I believe RSS is one of the of the most under-used and under-valued applications available to online business owners today. RSS is basically a way for your readership to be automatically updated, either into their email inbox or into their RSS Reader, that the content on your site has changed, for instance with a new blog post.

There are two things that you should keep in mind when trying to encourage people to subscribe to your RSS feed: hardly anyone knows what it even is, and people are even less likely to see the value of it without you showing it to them. Make the link to the RSS feed very obvious, not tucked away at the bottom of the page. Also consider having a bit of text above the link explaining just what RSS is and how it would help your readership keep up with any changes they might be interested in so that they don’t miss anything.

In the next installment, I will go into detail about the importance of a small business having a sound Social Media Strategy.

If you would like to see how I can help you improve your current website, or show you how to build an impressive but simple and functional website for your small business, call me TODAY on 02 4324 2594.

Do you agree or disagree with any of my advice in this post? Do you have any other tips or suggestions to share with my readership about building the perfect small business website? Please let us know in the comments below.

Bonus Interview

I interviewed Justin Roberts and Dean Collins from Big Click Studios about whether a small business really needs a website. You can check out the interview in full by clicking here.

Does your email signature just say your name, your job and your phone numbers? What other things would you like every person you email to know about you? Could you include a current special or a new service you have just started offering? Are you a member of any professional associations or groups that your customers might be interested in?

Is there something else you could include to further establish yourself as an expert in your field?

You have to provide a point of difference in everything you do – including your email signature.

Be careful that you don’t have too much information or clashing colours or images in it, but take the opportunity to really position yourself well in the reader’s mind when they get to the end of your email.

Another thing I have had some success with in creating another revenue stream is to sell an ad space at the bottom of your email signature. I sell a banner space that is 468×60 pixels and, if anyone knows the amount of emails that I send and receive every day, it is a great value ad position!

If you would like to see how I can help your business’ social engagement strategy through better utilising old school techniques or reviving your tired old business cards, call me TODAY on 02 4324 2594.

This article appears in full in my book, The Business of Being David – How to use social media to make your small business big. To read the sample chapters and to purchase your own copy, click here.

Have you got an interesting and engaging email signature you would like to share with my readers? Do you include your social media addresses and contact details in it? Please let us know in the comments below.