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In the last couple of weeks, a number of big businesses in Australia have demonstrated that their understanding of how social media and online marketing in general works, is limited at best.

Last week, a number of big retail businesses including Harvey Norman, Myer, David Jones and Borders, appeared on National TV shows and in print media to complain that much smaller online retailers from outside of Australia had an ‘unfair advantage’ over them because they didn’t have to charge GST in their pricing.

As Karen Collier from the Herald Sun reported:

Retail bosses say tens of thousands of local jobs are at risk unless the Federal Government bows to their demands to help all Australian stores and online retailers better compete against overseas operators.

Mr Harvey ignited the argument in yesterday’s Herald Sun , saying shoppers buying from overseas websites should accept the need to pay the taxes in the national interest.

Myer chief Bernie Brookes has called consumers upset about the campaign “short-sighted”, while retail mogul Solomon Lew says it is a moral issue.

Australians disagreed with him – in great numbers. In subsequent online polls, more than 90% of respondents supported smaller retailers being exempt from the GST.

In fact, there was such a backlash on platforms like Facebook that Gerry Harvey quickly retreated from his strong stance shortly after.

“It becomes me, Gerry Harvey and Solomon Lew – billionaires, greedy, ugly, old, out-of-date c—s, and the people writing this seem to think we have been ripping them off for years and that we deserve this”, he told the Herald.

Then today a new furore surrounding a major retailer in Australia’s social media blunder has emerged, this time Bing Lee.

In response to the devastating and deadly floods currently destroying large parts of South-East Queensland, Bing Lee promoted the fact that they would donate $1 to the Queensland Premier’s Flood Appeal for every user who became a member of the company’s Facebook Page, with an upper limit to their donation of $10,000.

The company’s Facebook Page certainly got a lot of attention quickly, but most of it was less than complimentary. Here’s a selection:

“Now’s not the time for social marketing, Bing Lee. Either donate or not, but don’t make hay out of it. Very poor and insensitive marketing.”

“$10,000 is 5 mid range flat screens. They’ll get that back from their first spam message to their 10,000 new fans. The rest is profit. Fancy trying to profit at a time like this! Disgusting.”

“I think Bing Lee can afford $10 per ‘like’ without an upper limit … Do that & announce deals for flood affected customers and I’ll ‘like’ you afterwards.”

“I’m just hitting like because you’re donating $1 to the QLD floods. As soon as it’s announced that the money has been donated, I’m hitting unlike. Shame on you for using social networking to gain fans with the premise of donating. Just donate and be done with it! You’ll get more ‘fans’ that way.”

“This is a pretty horrible concept, but if it’s helping those affected by the floods, I’ll like the page. It would’ve been more considerate to just donate the $10,000 that’s going to be raised, than to advertise your company first. NB I’m liking this for helping flood victims, I have no preference towards Bing Lee itself.”

It wasn’t all negative. The business had some support from the Facebook community as well.

“Way to go Bing Lee. I am happy at least someone cares enough to help them. Every bit counts and sending my prayers for all the people who are affected by this flood.”

“Wow, can’t believe all the crap that’s going on bcoz a business has decided 2 publicise their efforts 2 raise money 2 help those in need! Bing Lee could have completely ignored everything that is going on in Qld & just said that once they reach ‘x’ amount of likers they’ll give away prizes BUT they decided 2 use their advertising efforts 4 GOOD & they’re being criticised $ it?!”

One of the biggest complaints about the company’s Facebook effort was their lack of moderation during the discussion, particularly when it became abusive and intolerant. One comment was this:

“The language and aggressive posts on this page are appalling. I’ve now reported it for poor taste in marketing and for it’s lack of moderation of wall posts. Believing in something is one thing, but becoming violent & aggressive to those with a difference of opinion is another story.”

Regardless of its intentions, Bing Lee couldn’t take a trick. In the end, they removed the promotion and donated the money anyway. They made this comment on their Facebook Page:

“Thank you for supporting. We have now donated the $10,000 to the Premier’s Disaster Relief Appeal. If you would like to donate, here is a link to the fund. Our thoughts are with those during these difficult times.”

These are certainly not isolated incidents in big business. In fact, worldwide there is plenty of evidence to suggest that some big businesses either don’t understand social media, or just don’t respect its worth to their consumers. So why, when the rest of the world – and certainly small and medium-sized businesses – are getting their heads around these platforms, does Big Business not seem to understand it?

It’s A Brave New World

While these big businesses are still doing very well of course, and their business model is obviously quite sound, it’s the consumers that are changing.

They value and trust personal recommendations (76%) much higher than ads (14%).  They want to be able to voice their opinion, leave an online testimonial and make their choice from other peoples’ online testimonials.

And most importantly, they want purchasing choice. Some big businesses seem to think their consumers just want to be screamed at in TV ads, or look at brochures or full-page ads placed in (declining circulation) major newspapers.

Social Media Is Supposed To Be Social

If a business uses social media platforms to blare out sale after sale, special offer after special offer, and never engage their consumers or ask their opinion or seek their testimonial, they are not engaged in social media – that’s traditional media.

There has to be some element of personalisation in a brand so that its consumers can speak to it, ask questions of it, let it know when they are not happy as well as praise it when it gets it right.

While a lot of big businesses now at least monitor their social networking presences, they are mostly just doing this for negative damage control reasons and most still do not truly engage their audience.

As Miikka Leinonen from Project GoodMachine says, “Companies can’t participate in a dialogue. Only people can.”

It’s Cheap So It Has No Value

Television, print media and radio advertising costs a lot of money. Big businesses, particularly retailers, could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars each year on advertising in these spaces.

And they could give you a breakdown of profit and loss and return on that investment to the dollar.

But because social media marketing is relatively so much less expensive to engage in, the perceived value of it is also so much less. This is not just a problem of big business, small and medium-sized businesses also fall into this trap.

This is also a problem for bigger businesses who, because of the inexpensive nature of a lot of social media marketing campaigns, simply give it to a junior member of their marketing or sales staff to look after, instead of engaging an expert to oversee their campaigns for them.

“We get Nathan to look after our Facebook Page. He is 19 so he knows what he is doing”, is something that I hear all too often – not just from bigger businesses.

Date: Wednesday 4th August, 2010
Time: 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Venue: Zenith Centre, Tuggerah, NSW, Australia
Cost: $55 including refreshments

In this two hour session, presented in conjunction with the Tuggerah Business Enterprise Centre, I am going to go through the benefit of having a structured social media strategy for your small or micro business.

I work with small and micro businesses everyday to put plans together to make the most out of social media and online marketing platforms including Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, email marketing and others.

This interactive and entertaining presentation is essential for any small and 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 show you the real-life way each of these marketing tools can work in a step by step session that is interactive and fun.

Tickets are going on sale next week but if you want a ticket before they go on sale to the general public, leave a comment below or email me at nick@thebowditchgroup.com.

This is the fourth part of my five part series of posts on the 5 Rules of Social Media Marketing.

Promote

Online promotion might seem an obvious application of social media but it never ceases to amaze me how many people get this fundamental component wrong, and Twitter is the main culprit for this.

Every minute of every day on the home page of Twitter, you will see people doing shameless self-promotion of their business or service while offering nothing in return. Now this is fine if the product or service you offer is 100% unique and really compelling, but if you work in an overly-crowded market like I do, this is a sure way to put you on the wrong side of  Tweeters.

If you follow me on Twitter, you will know that I occasionally have tweets go out about a particular sale or special offer – something that could be considered self-promoting. If you are a follower of mine, you will also know that the great majority of stuff that I promote on Twitter is actually other peoples’ stuff or information and articles that are pertinent to my business markets rather than my own products and services.

Regardless of the social networking platform, it is important that you are a good online citizen. It’s important that people see that you are generous and supportive of other members’ content and interests, not just someone who goes the hard sell at every opportunity.

Having said that, social media marketing can be a very effective tool for promotion of your business or yourself, but there are several things you have to keep in mind when using the medium for promotion.

People want to feel engaged. They want to know that their investment of time in these platforms isn’t all for nothing. They have to feel that some value has been added to their online experience, not just that they were bored or just being sold to the whole time. As I mentioned before, it’s easy to engage people initially in these conversations but a lot more difficult to retain them for the long haul.

People want to feel important. The growth of blogging and social networking has been due in large part to people wanting to have their voice heard. Blogging was once the ultimate medium for crazy people to have a rant about their conspiracy theories or people to tell you about the secret life of their cats, but these days it has a lot more credibility and more and more legitimately interesting blogs are emerging. If you help someone promote their own content, it makes them feel good, it makes them much more interested in your own content, and it also has the bonus product of making you a better online citizen.

People want to be listened to. If someone has told you already that they are not interested in a particular product or service that you offer, don’t keep promoting it to them. It sounds so simple and yet so many people do it, including a lot of the bigger players.

A telecommunications company sends me information almost every week about deals on international phone calls. Not only am I not a customer of theirs anyway, but I have told them on three separate occasions that I am very happy with the service of my current provider, and anyway I use Skype for most international calls. Three times I have told them this and they keep sending me their spiel.

They couldn’t have made me less interested in ever engaging their services if they tried.

If you would like to see how I can help your business’ social engagement strategy through any of these means, 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.

Big claim I know. And many people would be saying, “What’s FourSquare?” But you won’t be saying that in 12 months time.

So what is 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.

However, as more and more users adopt the application and, more importantly, as more and more vendors and marketers see the possibility in it, FourSquare will take off, if not to the same huge degree, much the same as Twitter has.

And that is FourSquare’s great strength. As an online marketer, I can see a myriad opportunities for local small businesses – who make up the majority of my clientele – embracing location-based social networking and making a killing before the rest of their town gets on to it. And here’s how.

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A practical example

Let’s say you own a cafe. It’s in a pretty good spot and you serve great coffee. And two doors up from you, there’s another cafe, that also serves great coffee and is obviously in the same great spot.

If you list your cafe on FourSquare – and publicise the fact offline – you will potentially get a whole lot of new business but also a good hit of the business currently being served next door because, with FourSquare, you can offer them rewards and incentivise them to return. The way FourSquare does this is by providing a series of badges that can only be ‘unlocked’ through more use as well as bestowing mayorships on customers.

I know, I know … but stay with me.

The “Mayor’ of your cafe is the person who ‘checks-in’ at your premises more than anyone else in that 60 day period. They Mayor can be ousted by somebody else visiting the same place and checking-in and so on. This creates a kind of viral aspect to it because it brings out the basic need in a lot of us to compete and gain personal exposure.

If I was that cafe owner, I would work out an offer or a discount only available for the Mayor, such as 2 for 1 meals, free cake with a coffee or even free coffee! Imagine how many times some coffee devotees would come back to your cafe if they knew they had a chance to have their coffee for free.

I would also design specials for all FourSquare users, not just the Mayor and, most importantly, I would promote the specials (and in turn that I was a FourSquare venue) very publicly offline – in posters near the entrance, decals on the shopfront window and so on.

This is precisely the kind of social media integration I have successfully put in to a couple of my clients’ food outlets already.

You might be already using it

The other thing to remember is that if you are a small business owner providing a service or product and you have an existing clientele, your business may already be on FourSquare and not even know it. If a user tries to check-in to a particular venue, and that venue hasn’t already been added to FourSquare by the proprietors, then the user can add them. This is why it’s important that all small business owners check if they are already listed on the application and the spelling and brand identity is correct.

There is a really good cafe near where I live called Taste Gourmet Grocer and Cafe. Recently, I have checked in there on FourSquare but it wasn’t easy to find them at first because obviously another user had added them – and misspelled their name. On FourSquare, they are listed as ‘Taste Gormet”.

Now, this isn’t a major marketing disaster (after all, even I found them) but if your corporate identity is really important to you as a small business owner, and it should be, then you should check how other people might be listing you on applications like this one.

So, if you are a small business owner and are looking for different ways to engage your community, FourSquare is a good way to do it.

If you would like to see how I can help your business’ social engagement strategy through using FourSquare, both on and offline, call me TODAY on 02 4324 2594.

Do you think FourSquare is a passing fad or do you agree with me that it might go the way of Twitter? Are you using it to better engage your customers? Let us know in the comments.

Click here to listen to my podcast about FourSquare for my Online Marketing Easy Program members.

Today, I have launched our very own Social Networking Platform, similar to Facebook and Twitter, but specifically for owners of small businesses.

Here you can sign up, ask questions, answer questions or just participate by helping other small business owners engage their community better.

Got relevant links, online resources, helpful information– or just want to shamelessly plug your own business? This is the place to do it.

So sign up and get started!

Under the Pages menu to the right, click on Sign Up. See you in there!

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in seeing with new eyes.” Marcel Proust

You can follow everything that I suggest you in my book. You could spend hours and hours every week updating your Twitter page, sending out email newsletters, making your Facebook Page the most spectacular one on the net – but if you don’t know what the return on that investment is, then you might as well have done nothing at all.

You need a plan and you need to keep five very important things in mind while you are doing it – my five rules of social media marketing: Listen, Integrate, Engage, Promote and Measure.

Listen

If you were having a conversation in real life and someone just busted in and started banging on about their own interests and what they did for a living you wouldn’t be too impressed. It is no different with a conversation happening via social networking.

Actually in the long run listening in the initial stage of social networking is also going to save you a lot of time and effort as well.

If you own a steakhouse, there is probably little gain for you in interacting with someone who is well known as a vegetarian (this isn’t always true of course – even vegetarians have friends!). You have to first listen to people, see what social networks and conversations they engage in and who with, and also try to gauge their level of social activity – do they have thousands of followers, are they saying insightful things, are they a generally positive person for you to interact, and be aligned with?

As well as listening to individuals, listen to the wider online community as well. Is your product or service being talked about, and if so, is the conversation positive or negative? Which social networking platforms discuss your type of business the most and who are the movers and shakers in that community?

Search platforms like Facebook and Twitter for your own name and business if that’s appropriate as well as your market, the competition, and relevant keywords to your business and market, as well as potential customers.

Social networking platforms are already set up to help you do this. Twitter Search, for example, makes this kid of market research very easy. Let’s say you run a fast-food restaurant. Chances are the bigger players in your market are being spoken about – both good and bad – all the time in social media platforms.

By listening to this chatter, you can get a better idea of how the social media participants view the big names and their service, as well as the type of things that these people would rather those big names did better. This is fundamental focus group marketing but without the huge costs.

The best thing about this kind of search facility is that you can customise it to search for chatter only from your local area of about your own service.

There is a great example of this in a Domino’s Pizza franchisee in Chicago, USA, who has become the master of monitoring social media mentions of his product in his local area.

Ramon de Leon owns several Domino’s Pizza restaurants in the Chicago area. He discovered back in 2005, that in social networking platforms, he had a new line of communication directly to his target audience and with virtually no advertising cost to his franchises.

Ramon uses both Facebook and Twitter to boost his businesses’ profile as well as doing something that would have been considered crazy in the past: openly apologising when he or his staff get it wrong.

Ramon watches platforms like Twitter closely through their search facilities and when he sees that somebody has been unhappy with the service from one of his restaurants and mentions their unhappiness on one of their social media sites, he immediately and quite openly apologises for the mistake and also offers a big discount or free pizzas to the unhappy customer. And he does all of this in clear view and very much out in the open on Twitter and Facebook.

Armed with a smart phone that has a decent video camera in it, Ramon records a quick video apology mentioning the unhappy customer and complete details of their complaint and what he is going to do to make it right. He then uploads this video not only to his website but also his social media channels and as a direct message to the complainant. You can see an example of this here.

This kind of customer service, in both its immediacy and directness, is something conventional marketing and customer service could never achieve. It’s not really the same as a tiny apology printed in the local newspaper two weeks later is it?

One thing I suggest you don’t do when monitoring this chatter is jump in every time there is something negative said about your competition and try to grab that business for yourself.

For instance, I track what is being said about the big players in retail travel, companies like Flight Centre, QANTAS and CoverMore Insurance and so on, as research for my travel business, Nick Bowditch Travel.

Sometimes social media participants might express why they are unhappy with something that one of these companies has done to them. It is tempting to reply directly to that person and agree that said company is totally rubbish and next time they should book their travel with me!

But it looks really bad.

In fact, it looks like something that the bigger players in each market might do. As a small business owner with integrity and professionalism, I hope that nobody does their marketing this way.

Instead, I might say to them that I understand their frustration and ask if there is anything I can do to try and fix the situation with the company they are unhappy with.

By offering to be a go-between for the unhappy customer you can achieve two things: the bigger company will respect you for not trying to poach their customer as well as trying to help their own business, and the unhappy customer will remember what you have done for them next time they want the same service.

There is no better way to get to know your customer than to first listen to them, and no quicker way to alienate them than NOT listening to them. Social media marketing makes this interaction with your market so much easier, but despite this ease, it is still something that most of us are very poor at.

Check out upcoming posts for the next 4 rules of social media marketing and please let me know in the comments below if you agree or disagree with how I think small businesses should be doing their marketing online.

If you would like to see how I can help your business’ social engagement strategy through any of these means, 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.

“It’s just called “The Bible” now – we dropped the word “Holy” to give it a more mass-market appeal” Hodder & Stoughton, Publisher

Social media and social networking change so quickly and so often that I was worried about writing this post, fearing that by the time you read it, everything I say in it will already be obsolete.

Twitter has only been around since 2006, Facebook only a bit before that. Google has become one of the largest and most important online tools but only as far back as 1995, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hadn’t even met yet.

Blogs and futurists’ websites are full of “the next big thing” but even a lot of them didn’t even see a success story like Twitter coming.

David Silver, a venture capitalist and author of 30 books on entrepreneurship and finance, in his book “Smart Start-Ups” write, “I’m not at all optimistic about the staying power of MySpace and Facebook.”

He goes on to say, “Other than providing a playground for young people to meet and communicate, I question the economic durability of MySpace and Facebook, which need to segue to a mobile phone-based model pretty soon, before a newcomer captures that highly lucrative market from them.”

That was published in 2007.

Silver had it half-right. The social networking sites DID need to morph into a mobile-ready platform which they have done, but I think few would doubt the economic viability of an entity like Facebook today.

Not only that, but social networking has now become so much more than a ‘playground for young people’ with people aged from 50-65 being one of the fastest growing demographics for Facebook.

My point is that David Silver is not a mug. He is an astutely clever man who is a world-renowned expert in futurism and know what is going to work.

But just a few years ago in 2007, not even he could have seen the growth in relevance of social media.

So, if you are part of the online marketing community, what will be the trends you will need to know about in 2010?

Mobile Marketing

Whether it means including a plug-in for your website that makes it more visible and more usable on a mobile device, or changing the functionality of your site altogether to include features that can only be accessed using a mobile device, you are going to need to embrace mobile marketing if you are to compete.

In an era where more than 60% of businesses are banning social networking applications in their offices and on their computing hardware AND when every other person seems to have a smartphone or other web-ready portable device, mobile marketing is now more important than ever before.

Competitions and marketing devices aimed solely at users of mobile devices are becoming more widespread and this could be a great way to capture that mobile market in 2010.

Localised Applications

The natural flow-on from this kind of accessibility is more localised applications and local adaptations of currently available platforms.

For instance, Twitter, which has 80% of its usage happening on mobile devices, has recently introduced regional trending as opposed to a blanket world-wide trending feature on its platform.

This basically means that as well as knowing what people are talking about on Twitter world-wide, you can also now see what people based in your own country – or even in your own city – are talking about.

A great new example of a local application is foursquare and it is rapidly gaining popularity.

foursquare works by adding an application to your smartphone (or you can use the web-based version if you don’t have a smartphone) and then letting users ‘check in’ or in other words, telling the application exactly where you are at that moment.

Users can then recommend a local cafe, restaurant or business where they currently are, which in turn allows your friends who are also using the application to learn more about the places you visit.

foursquare’s plan is to build a database of knowledge on local areas so that when you follow someone’s recommendation and go and visit that place as well, there are already a list of other things to do: parks to check out, cafes to eat at and so on.

The application also rewards its frequent users with a series of badges and points that they accrue the more often they visit certain places in certain towns.

You can even become the virtual ‘mayor’ of a certain town, precinct or business. This basically means that you have checked-in at that place more than anyone else and you can retain the title until someone else visits more than you.

In their own words: “It may sound a little silly until you see the list of places that are offering freebies to our mayors – free coffees, free ice-cream, free hotel stays – it pays to be a foursquare loyalist and check-in whenever you go!”

Portable Identification

With people signing up to more and more different social networking and online applications, it can get pretty difficult to remember your username and password for each one. Particularly when one app will let you use all letters for your password and others require you to use letters and numbers and so on.

Thankfully, there are a few different applications now that let you sign in to them using your log in ID for another application. The two most famous of these up to now have been OpenID and Google (the fact that Google seems to own everything these days helps that a lot also).

With an OpenID you can log in to thousands of different websites without the hassle of having to remember multiple usernames and passwords, instead signing in using the same information.

Another big mover in this space in 2010 will be Facebook Connect, the application within Facebook that lets developers access Facebook users’ identity, social graph and activity stream. Facebook boasts that when website owners integrate Facebook Connect into their own website the results are pretty impressive. They claim websites can get 15-20% more comments, 15-20% more registered users, up to 15% more traffic and up to 20% more time spent on their site. Facebook Connect is also free.

* In a recent address, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberh announced there would be some changes coming to Facebook Connect this year but at this stage it is still functioning as it always has been.

When you combine that information with a service like Gravatar, you can also control how the world sees you, literally, when commenting on blog sites and so on.

You upload a picture of yourself and then when you make a comment on a blog or other interactive site using the same log in details, that picture automatically becomes your avatar on that particular site.

All the tweets, posts and updates in one place

One of the annoying things about social networking, and in particular participating as a member in multiple social networking platforms, is the magnitude of the information that each platform processes – let alone trying to read it all.

In 2010, the emphasis will be more on combining all of your news feeds into one place, similar to how I use FriendFeed.

With the FriendFeed site, you are able to make user lists and discussions, but without restricting it to just one platform.

On my FriendFeed page, I see people’s updates from Twitter, Facebook, Ping.fm and more. It can be very useful once you have a lot of friends and followers on other sites and want to keep track of a more intimate number of them in one place.

I think in the future, there will start to be more aggregating devices like this as well as alliances between some of the bigger social networking sites to make better and even more targeted ways to keep track of your followers.

If you would like to see how I can help your business’ social engagement strategy through any of these means, 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.

Do you use Facebook Connect, Gravatar or foursquare? Or do you have any other opinions on what will be the big changers and important platforms to stay up with this year? Let us know in the comments below.