Women
As you build your 2010 Marketing Plan remember to include networking. Networking is still a key strategy to start conversations with other professionals, industry experts and potential customers.
- Research local networking events based on 3 focus areas: professionals in your business, industry experts and potential customers
- Set up a networking calendar for the next 3 months
- Create a networking follow-up plan
1. After you have identified your 3 focus areas research sources for current events and association event listings. Your local Chamber of Commerce is a good place to start. Also look online for industry groups and forums.
2. When you start to set up your networking calendar decide on a goal for each networking event. Do you want to: meet potential customers, talk with other industry professionals to learn new industry updates or do you want to be seen as an industry leader. Going to a networking event with a predefined goal will help you make the most of your time spent. It will also help you prepare for the event. If you want to be seen as an industry leader you could research a new article on your industry to share at the event when you are talking with others. As you exchange business cards write down the event name, date and a quick note about the person who gave you their card. This will help you with following up in a more personalized manner.
3. Creating a follow-up plan will help you maximize your efforts. Before you attend the event if you already have a follow-up letter outlined you can easily send a thank-you, or enjoyed meeting you follow-up note, card or e-mail the next morning.
At the Orange County Cool Twitter Conference on November 5th they will be doing a Twitter crowdsourcing project to help a non-profit find solutions to their four major challenges. The non-profit is HomeBase Kids After School Program out of Anchorage, Alaska.
The selected project is The HomeBase Kids film project, a documentary film HomeBase is producing to document the stories from their journey to Ghana Africa. The unique learning experience, the cultural exchanges and the friendships they made are a powerful story they want to share.
Follow along as our Twitter community helps find solutions to their challenges so they can keep this project moving along and the film produced. You will be able to follow along using the Twitter #homebasekids or you can visit the CTC website
An interesting case study to follow is the Huddle House restaurant chain. Over the last six months they have been aggressively moving in to the online space. With a target market more comfortable in the digital communication arena they realized they needed to bring their message to the preferred communication tools.
Focus: Target market – Gen Xers, Gen Y & and Tech-savvy baby boomers
Listen: The identified preferred method of communication is Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook
Share: Huddled created a presence on the social network sites and started building relationships through conversations, videos and contests. Examples – I Love Huddle House Video contest
Grow: The results are coming in… They have 1,762 fans on Facebook and 2,259 followers on Twitter.
What happens when companies participate and listen to the various social media networks? They gain customers and more importantly they gain loyalty and word of mouth marketing. A good example was posted on Zig Ziglar’s Blog. He talked about his experience at the Chicago O’Hare airport and his difficulty with www.Boingo.com to find the local hotspot . After some frustration in not being able to connect he tweeted his frustrations. Within 10 minutes he received a direct message,DM, on Twitter from Boingo asking him to call the number and they would hook him up.
Their timely response has definetly created a strong relationship between Boingo and this customer. Personal focus and quick action is valued by today’s consumer. When you value your customer this much it shows - quickly addressing their concerns will produce a story that will be stronger than any “canned” marketing message. For the full story
An important step to duplicate this type of customer service is to keep a close ear to the conversations taking place on social networks regarding your company. There are many tools available to follow conversations - You can set up Google Alerts for your company, you can search your company name or products on search.twitter.com, you can do a search on blogs using Google’s blog search.
Best Buy is currently running a television commercial with their @twelpforce Twitter account URL showing at the bottom of the ad. This is an example of bringing together different marketing channels and increasing the potential reach of each message. By showing the @twelpforce on the ad they provided users with a place to go for more information. The advantage of having the ad direct traffic to Twitter is the live conversations and two-way communication opportunities. Best Buy now can talk with their customers and learn from them, answer their questions and share new promotions.
Best Buy started @twelpforce in June and already has over 7,400 followers.
Twitter has just made getting started with Twitter for businesses simple. They posted a great guide that tells you everything you need to know to get started and utilize the power of Twitter to grow your business. It has instructions on how to set up an account, examples of “Twitter best practices”, how best to “tweet”, and suggestions for growing your business with Twitter.
Another helpful section shares case studies; both for large businesses and small businesses. Read the full guide.
At the Cool Twitter conference in San Diego we launched an experiment to find out if it was possible to build a business plan around Twitter. The concept was to provide an experience and experiment for the attendees.
The business concept was introduced along with 20 questions that would typically need to be answered to complete a standard business plan. The group took the questions and started to tweet out the requests for information. Throughout the day “tweets” came back with some responses and more questions.
The experiment is a work in progress.
I was looking at various case studies for small business success stories using Twitter. I kept coming across restaurants using Twitter to increase their business. The interesting part is how they are all using the tool differently.
One restaurant in Boston used Twitter to start building a following while the restaurant was still under construction. They updated their growing followers on the progress of the construction and tempting them with upcoming menu ideas. When the restaurant held their grand opening it was a packed house and the owner attributed half of the customers from Twitter.
Other restaurant owners show pictures of their new dishes. An ice cream shop owner tweets the ice cream flavor of the day. Another innovative owner, Rush Street’s Nick Kaufman likes to reward people who tweet while they are dining at the Culver City eatery with things like free drinks.
Please share any stories you hear about creative, innovative uses of Twitter by Restaurants.
Always follow up your sales with a thank you for your purchase and ask if they were happy. Make it comfortable and easy to contact you and tell you if your service or product was not 100% to their satisfaction. It is easy to assume your customer is happy with their purchase if you don’t hear from them but many times they are not 100% satisfied and are not telling YOU but telling their friends.
One way to prevent this negative conversation is to ask for their feedback. This one conversation has the potential to turn an unhappy customer in to a happy customer for life, a raving fan and possibly get ideas on how you could improve your service or product.
There are news and posts everywhere about the Federal Stimulus programs and the potential dollars available to small businesses. Marketing to a government entity requires a little more homework and patience. There are many resources available online to get you started.
Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, billions of dollars in “shovel-ready” projects are planned in every state for infrastructure, energy, education, healthcare and technology…where do or where could your business fit in to their plans.
The recovery government site lists projects by state -
http://www.recovery.gov/?q=content/state-local-tribal-and-territorial-resources Or go to the main site: http://www.recovery.gov/
Another source not related to the government but a good resource is fedmarket.com
