Grasshopper.com is the company behind the below videos.  They are entertaining, but they also subtly promote the company.  But why did they work?  Typically advertising would have spent 30 to 120 seconds pitching the company or a product and as is traditional would have been on TV or radio.  These shouldn’t be effective at marketing Grasshopper.

You might be asking, what the heck is Grasshopper?  Grasshopper.com is a virtual phone system for small businesses.  You promote one number and can have the calls going to anyone in your business or to any one of your phones–mobile, desk, home, or voicemail.

Being a virtual system, it makes sense to market to people who are online.  But instead of just doing some banner ads or Google AdWords, they put out these viral videos, which have gotten hundreds of thousands of views.  To buy that many clicks they would have spent at least a couple hundred thousand dollars.

Their videos connect with the entrepreneurial desires felt by their market, which has helped get the videos passed along over and over.  And here I share them with you because you can emulate them and do your own viral videos to brand your business.

Enjoy.

Go here to see a presentation by David Hauser of Grasshopper.com where he explains the marketing approach behind the “Entrepreneurs can change the world” video. http://b.lesseverything.com/2009/12/16/david-hauser-of-grasshopper-com-at-lessconf-2009

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Q: Do you have any Best Practices for dealing with negative online reviews or negative search engine results?

A: I feel the best way to handle negative reviews is to address them immediately and honestly. Acknowledge the problem and the customer’s feelings. Offer additional insight (your side) in a respectful manner, and a solution or next action step for resolution. Thank them for their input.
Becca Slaton

A: I’ve built minisites for clients that have done the trick, of course I’ve registered many social media profiles and have built links to them to push down negative results too.

One thing which has been successful recently has been to utilize social media monitoring tools to respond quickly to negative opinions coming from influential sources. In all cases, directly contacting the person and “making it right” has always resulted in a removed review or post.
Nicholas Herinckx

A: Negative Reviews:

I agree with the previous posters that addressing the issue ONLINE is the way to show potential clients you care what they have to say. The tone of your communication is key when addressing these issues, always have a few people outside of your business look over the response prior to posting it.

Negative Search Results:

The best way to address this from a brand perspective is to make use of social media profiles. For example a business could rank in the first position for a brand related search followed by a negative review. by simply filling out a Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter & a few others you can push that negative review onto the second page of results. And the side effect is more exposure for your business, not to bad.
Chris Gauron

A: I’ve recently dealt with a competitor posting negative online reviews for a client of mine in Google Maps.

For online reviews – yelp, citysearch, etc, keep it short, simple and professional. Apologize for the experience they had and ask them to contact you directly (as owner or manager) to resolve the situation as you are committed to customer experience. Whatever you do, do NOT get into back/forth banter as tempting as it can be.

Most people realize that there will be some people you can NEVER make happy. (Another client was a restaurant that got a 1star review because the patron’s GPS gave her wrong directions.) But if you have a pattern, it’s certainly something to pay attention to.

I had my client do a campaign to get happy customers post reviews directly on that site to ‘dilute’ the negative review. Instead of a flurry of reviews in a short time, I encouraged to have the reviews posted consistently (rather than 15 in one day – it looks questionable)

I generally encourage my clients to have a system to encourage quality online testimonials so that a stray negative review won’t require damage control of catastrophic proportions. It’s easier to do it proactively than reactively.

Reactively, I also encourage having alerts set up for the business name and competitors so that you’ll be able to respond quickly to an ‘opportunity’.
Leslie-Anne McAllister

A: This question has a ton of great answers already. I do want to jump in and contribute that these negative mentions or search engine results are often an opportunity to prove yourself, and the first step is often reaching out and asking how you can help. We deal more with the social space, but a lot of the same theories/best practices apply to sites like Yelp!.

I’ve linked a blog post my fellow Community Manager wrote on the subject in case it’s useful. http://www.radian6.com/blog/2009/10/what-is-the-best-way-to-handle-negative-comments/
Katie Morse
Those were some great responses and I hope you, dear reader, will make good use of such golden advice.

PS. I would also like to thank the following for their answers on LinkedIn. Their answers were just as good as the above, but I couldn’t include all of them without this post being very long.

Hugh Macken, Jr.
Brian Olson
Eric Seymour
Peggy Schoen
Varad Kamini
Melih Oztalay

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Bad Reviews Can Feel Like This

Online Reviews Can Be So Inconvenient

I stopped into a convenience store this weekend for a fountain drink (Rooster Booster Lite since you were wondering) and I overheard a guy talking to someone else in his company. I couldn’t help overhearing since he was quite agitated and speaking into a bluetooth earpiece.

He was complaining that he lost a prospect because of a really bad review. Unfortunately, he didn’t say the name of the review site while I was in the area. From what I gather, this review was over a year old (he said this several times) and it is near the top of their reviews. Anyone coming to this site looking at his business is going to see it. And it must be a real kick in the teeth if a prospect would point out that review. Most just wouldn’t contact you if they were turned off by the reviews they saw.

Some reviewers have ‘just cause’ in the reviews they post. Someone in your company falters, could even be you, and the customer doesn’t feel heard so she goes to her favorite review site such as Yelp or Angie’s List and says how horribly she was treated by that so-and-so at your company.

Watch Out For Drive By Reviewers

Then there are times when a customer had a bad experience, and instead of mentioning the bad experience to anyone at your company (people who could actually help fix the situation), he goes to his favorite review site such as your Google business listing and posts a scathing comment about how you and everyone at your company is vile and despicable.

He probably doesn’t have a real beef with you. His experience may not have been that bad. He just likes doing Drive By Reviews. Shooting bad comments as he passes by, you just happened to get in the way.

In a moment, I’ll give you some tips on dealing with bad reviews, but first let’s go into a horror story that has a worse villain than a Drive By Reviewer.

Online Reputation Terrorists

This villain I like to call Osama bin Blogger. OBB for short. OBB can be a man or a woman or even some 13 year old kid in his room with nothing better to do.

OBB doesn’t just hang out in a blog cave in the mountains, oh no, OBB travels to forums, review sites, makes Youtube videos and sometimes does press releases. OBB is on a crusade to destroy the Great Satan (that’s you or your company or both). OBB can’t be satisfied with an apology and a refund. No, OBB wants nothing less than total destruction.

Think I’m being a bit dramatic? It’s actually worse. A friend of mine put on a brilliant event a year ago. I’m going to purposely be vague on some details because I want to bring back the horror for him online. Insert tangent here: search engines are great at connecting relevancy. If I was to put several details into this article, it is possible that Google will connect them with the same details from the tragedy that happened a year ago. I’ll skip the details on how it is possible, but it could then bring back one or more of the online reputation terrorists. Kind of like hitting a hornets nest with a rock. Just not gonna do that to my friend.

Online Reputation Terrorist Cells Do A Lot Of Damage

So this event was insanely awesome and a bit expensive. A percentage of people who attended didn’t have a good experience and some missed out on some of the activities for this multi-day event. Complaints came in and they tried to handle them, but the complaints were just the start. There were many people who jumped into the fray. In time, my friend found out that most of those didn’t have bad experiences, they just liked joining a mob. In reality there was just a small online reputation terrorist cell running the terror campaign.

They had set up their own forums, they commented on other blogs, they sent press releases and eventually, the FTC got involved. Note: the FTC can shut your company down and seize all your assets until you can prove you are innocent. Many business owners are given the opportunity to forfeit their money in exchange for not going to jail or admitting to any wrongdoing. This can be cheaper and easier than trying to prove you didn’t do anything wrong. A lot of business owners don’t know that this kind of shake down can happen in the States. My friend knew it was possible and was really worried about losing his company he had built from nothing.

My friend has a successful company that had over a 20 year history of creating great events with thousands upon thousands of happy customers. Not just happy, but fanatical evangelists for his company. He is also one of the most caring and generous people I have ever met. But if you had read what this terrorist cell was saying about him and his company, you would have thought he was the Great Satan.

And I guess that’s why others started jumping in. People who read a one-sided article started giving their two cents. They weren’t even customers and until that moment had never even heard of the company. Why did they think they had the right to spew venom? Maybe they felt they were helping all those ‘victims’ they just read about.

Many marketers like to talk about things going viral. Their only talking about the positive aspects. Viral, as in virus, can and often does go the other way. My friend’s company did go viral. It looked like this virus could actually kill his company. If you did a search on his type of company a year ago, you would find all sorts of results that mentioned the Great Satan. And if you searched his name or his company’s name, you would have sworn evil incarnate walked the earth.
Eventually, my friend was able to put out the firestorm, but there will be smoldering ashes for years to come. All the bad stuff said about him and his company will exist for as long as the Internet exists. And that online reputation terrorist cell will probably continue looking for any opening to strike at him again. These terrorists, who weren’t going to be appeased by anything less than destruction, cost my friend several million dollars in lost revenue, legal fees and in emergency online reputation management services.

The War on Online Reputation Terror Continues

Since this article is really long, I’m going to put some best practices in dealing with online reviews and online reputation management in part two later this week.

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If you can’t get big opportunities handed to you, then make your own.

Steve Nash, point guard for the Phoenix Suns, is a really good basketball player, but…

Nash wouldn’t get picked for a full-blown campaign as a superstar pitchman for a big shoe company. Names like LeBron and Kobe get put on shoes, clothes and hundreds of other products and commercials with big advertising budgets.

Instead of whining about not getting multi-million dollar sponsorship deals (Nash used to shun sponsorships), Steve Nash created his own deals. Mr. Nash is turning into a top-notch entrepreneur with some serious marketing chops. At 36, he is pushing the retirement envelope for professional basketball. If he stays healthy, he could probably make it to 40. But then what?

Steve’s answer: Steve Nash Enterprises, the umbrella to dozen business ventures such as Mission Skincare and Meathawk Productions. As to the sponsorship deals, Nash pitched NIKE on a web video campaign. For Vitaminwater, Nash has created a very successful viral video campaign online. Nash pokes a lot of fun at himself while pitching products.

NIKE Trash Talk

— Article continues below –
Vitaminwater

What does this have to do with you and your business? Plenty. First, look to the future. You probably won’t be playing the same game you’re playing now. Second, be fearless. Try new ventures. Create new marketing. Third, lighten up. Let people see that you’re human and that humans work in your company. Laugh at yourself. That way when others start laughing they’ll be laughing with you and not at you.

~ t

For great articles on Steve Nash from Fast Company and more video links: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/142/transition-game.html and http://www.fastcompany.com/article/baller-steve-nash-scores-web-video-three-pointer

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Lately, I have been getting asked by small business owners about LinkedIn. It usually starts with the question, “What do you think about LinkedIn?”

And before I can get past my stuttering “uhhh,” out pour more questions about how useful it is, whether any customers can be generated with it and much more.

Here’s the thing. I’ve had an account on LinkedIn for about 3 years, but I haven’t really used it except to connect with people I know. Even then, I don’t communicate with them through LinkedIn. I use, in this order, email, phone, Facebook and finally Twitter to get a hold of them.

I have never tried to get any clients from LinkedIn nor have I ever tried to gain employment through it. I don’t have any first hand experience to share with others, which is strange since I tend to run business experiments to find out for myself if something will work the way others say it will.

I’ve done experiments with driving traffic from Web 2.0 publishing sites such as Squidoo and Hubpages. I’ve tested Twitter for click-throughs, viral messages, getting assistance with questions or problems. In over 3 years, I haven’t conducted any experiments with LinkedIn.

Since March has 31 days, I am officially starting my 31 Days of LinkedIn Business Experiment. I’m using the term experiment quite loosely here, but here is the goal. Within 31 days I intend to gain one new client. Hopefully, this client will want to rebrand his/her company website and implement conversion and follow-up systems, but getting a search engine optimization contract or even developing a single print ad will be acceptable for this ‘experiment.’

Note: I currently have 77 connections on LinkedIn and my profile is 85% complete, which means I’m not starting from scratch. But, that’s all I’ve got. I’ve never participated in a group or answered or asked a question on LinkedIn.

If you are on LinkedIn, connect with me. Please make sure you put LMM in the invitation so I know you are awesome and not just a spammy networker. You can find my LinkedIn profile here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/tim411. If you are a member of a group or created your own group, please invite me to join.

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I was tasked to first get them to outrank their Etsy competitors on the search engines and in less than a month I got them ahead on one keyword and right next to their competitors on several other keywords. They sell fabric covered magnetic bulletin boards. That’s a mouthful, but as you can see in the photo above, really cool stuff.

What makes them different is they are the only producers of uniquely shaped fabric covered magnet boards. Everyone else does rectangles and squares. Sometimes you’ll see a circle. The problem for their competitors is they have to cut the sheet metal by hand. Susan, one of the co-owners, was able to tap her husband’s machine shop which has a laser cutter. They create the design, it gets put into the CAD software and Bam! a unique design is cut.

Because of this machine, they are able to take custom orders, too.

As a search engine optimization client, my long term goal for Half Moon Originals is to get them showcased on fashion, style and home decor blogs and to get them ranking against boring old magnetic boards that get sold at office supply stores.

I’ll up date you with their progress. Half Moon Originals is run by two great women with awesome products so they totally deserve to succeed.

Check them out and buy one or two of their designs at http://www.etsy.com/shop/halfmoonoriginals.

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In the last week I had conversations with two prospective clients and I shifted their mindset so they could see how to create a breakthrough in their businesses.

The first prospect was interested in doing Internet marketing for his business, but before I would go any further with this topic I needed to know more about his business and what he was doing to get customers now.

In the process of telling me his story he complained that he was just buried in work and his business just wasn’t growing–it was feast or famine. I asked the most logical question when someone is having ups and downs, which is “Who is doing the labor in your business?” He said he was doing everything.

He then told me that he had been fired from his previous job because he kept making too much in commission checks as a salesman. Next logical question, “If you’re such a good salesman, why are you wasting your time laboring in your business when you could be making more sales to pay people to labor in your business?”

I’m glad to say the lightbulb went on in his head. His breakthrough was realizing that as a business owner he should work on his strengths and his most high-dollar activities. When he closes a sale, he can make thousands of dollars, which gives him the money necessary to hire people to do the labor in his business such as all the administrative work.

His business will see dramatic growth after this breakthrough.

Prospect #2 was telling me her business story and I mentioned that I outsource different tasks and jobs overseas where I can hire an expert for less than a novice in the US. To make the idea real to her, I said that when I had my pool company my office manager was in another state.

Her question, “How does one manage an office from another state?” Here’s the questions that I asked her and you can ask yourself:

Of the administrative tasks that your company needs accomplished must be done in a physical format?

What administrative tasks require a person at a particular location?

What tasks are you requiring someone do at a location and in a physical format that actually could be done electronically?

My pool company had to have actual labor performed at the customer’s home where the pool was located. However, there were no other tasks in the pool company that required people to be in Arizona. Bookkeeper and CPA were in Illinois. Office manager was in Florida. I was frequently on vacation. A business is a machine that works for you not the other way around.

I explained to her that she could hire an assistant from the Philippines who was fluent in English and had a college degree in Accounting or Business Administration for $5 per hour and could eliminate nearly all of her office tasks so she could concentrate on what she should be doing–marketing the solutions her company provides.

For those thinking that she would be taking jobs away from Americans, let me say this–WRONG. She had a similar concern, but here is how it works out.

An assistant in the Arizona will cost about $20 per hour including taxes and other expenses. This person will most likely not have a bachelor’s degree in business or accounting or a degree of any kind. Weekly cost is $800.

If she hires a Philippine assistant for $5 per hour her weekly cost will be $200 per hour giving a difference of $600. With the savings she can hire a laborer for her construction crew at a cost of $480 per week. The $120 per week could go towards the bottom line or reinvested into equipment to make her crew more productive.

With the new laborer out in the field, the skilled craftsmen can become more productive because they don’t have waste their time on low-dollar value, but important tasks such as site cleanup. Now the skilled craftsmen who cost as much as $30-40 per hour are getting the job done faster allowing her company to take on more projects, which means she can hire more people to work on the job sites.

All this from learning to use outsourcing appropriately.

Prospect #2′s breakthrough is much like that of prospect #1. High-dollar value activities are being put off or not done at all because low-dollar value tasks are being given priority. What is worse is they were assuming they had to do these low value tasks. This assumption was hindering their business growth.

In one week Prospect #1 has spent more time selling, which he is good at, and outsourcing tasks to subcontractors. He has already seen a sizable increase in his business and he is optimistic about being able to keep this trend going.

Since I just met with Prospect #2 yesterday, I’ll have to fill you in if she starts to implement outsourcing in her business.

Identify your high-dollar value tasks and your low-dollar value tasks that you are doing or should be doing and give the tasks to the appropriate person. Eventually, you’ll hire yourself out of job and your company will become a real business where you give it direction and vision and, best of all, you collect a check.

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Q: Should I be marketing online or offline?

A: You should be marketing where your prospects are.

If your prospect reads a particular magazine, you should have an ad in it.  If your prospects use Google to find products and services, then you need to rank on the first page for the keywords they input into Google.  Aside: the listing in search engines should be seen as advertising and to get a highly ranked listing you are going to pay with time, money or both.

There shouldn’t be any discussion of whether to use online or offline marketing.  You’ll find that your prospects are to found in both places.  Approximately 70% of people will use the Internet to research a product they buy offline.  That’s a huge opportunity for a local business.

When making your annual marketing plan, you should research where your customers are coming from and to find out this information, you should do a survey.  If you know a larger portion have found you online then you may want to invest more resources toward the marketing that gets the best results.  If you are one of the rare businesses that still gets a lot of customers from the yellow pages, then you should look into ways of maximizing your results.

After your research, you’ll most likely find that 30-50% of your time and budget will go to online marketing and the rest will go towards traditional marketing.

What I find interesting is that many local businesses do almost zero online marketing even though they know they aren’t getting the hundreds or thousands of prospects that are looking for their type of business online.  Some think it’s expensive while at the same time paying $4000 a month for yellow pages ads that get them little to no return.

I had a prospect that thought a $1000 a month quote I gave was expensive yet he was planning to continue spending $3000 a month on radio advertising even though he didn’t know the ROI.  With the work I was proposing, he would know his ROI to the penny.

This year, please plan out your marketing campaigns, find where your prospects are and then market to them.

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This is a quick video showing how fast a video can hit page one of Google. Online video is one of the best ways for a local small business to compete online–it gets rankings and builds your brand. In this video, I show how I repurposed a TV commercial for online marketing for an Arizona-based plumbing company.

Search engine optimization is a must for any business and mission critical for small local businesses. It gives one of the best returns on investment of any marketing medium. Online video marketing does SEO, but it also builds brands and attracts customers. Check it out…

Update: Video is ranked Number 1 on Google for Peoria Plumbing.
In less than 48 hours!

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Thank You Small Business Owners and Employees Everywhere.

You work hard and many of you do dirty jobs that the “gurus” look down on. There is a lot of business gurus telling people to follow their passion and they’ll be happy and wealthy. I know from experience, and I bet you do too, that sometimes–many times–rolling up your sleeves and doing the things that others won’t do is a path to wealth and happiness.

In celebration of you, small business owners and employees, is this video of Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs. It’s 20 minutes long, but so insightful that I recommend you watch it all the way through.

Let’s welcome the New Year and when you run into other small business people shake their hands and say, “Thank you.”

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This spoof ad is for an old media company who, in a fun way, has illustrated why it is still relevant based upon features people want not on what the paper thinks people should want. Note: this video (commercial) has gone viral and is flying around the Internet.

If you have a ‘traditional’ business from an industry that existed before 1995, you should re-energize your brand by focusing on the value you provide that people truly want. If you have felt the impact of the Internet on your business, you should make sure people know what the benefits are of doing business offline. Though, you’ll need to go online to tell them.

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EXCELLENT IDEA, NOT SO GOOD EXECUTION

A local small business, a pub near my home, sent out a direct message (DM) on Twitter to come join them for a beer. I just so happen to like beer, especially Guinness, and was driving near them when I received the DM. I pulled into the parking lot and what did I find? A ‘closed’ sign in the window, no lights or cars in the parking lot.

Not exactly the greeting I expected after having just received a DM saying to come in and have a beer with them. When I got home minutes later, I tweeted about the experience and made sure to @ reply the pub so that they would get notified of what happened. I still haven’t gotten a response.

TWITTER FAIL

Good use is sending the DM that gets me to stop. Bad use is not being able to fulfill the promise of the tweet. Fail is never responding to a prospect or customer who has a poor experience with your company.

I made sure they had the ability to know what happened by including an @theirname reply in my tweets about my experience. A simple thing they could have done was apologize. They wouldn’t need to offer something special, but since it was a pub they could easily say get half off an appetizer and let us say sorry in person.

Not only would this turn one prospect into a customer, it would also endear the company to those following the Twitter conversation.

Marketing mistakes are great opportunities to show your market how awesome you really are.

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I’m frequently asked by prospects if I can guarantee them a number one ranking in the search engines.

The prospects who typically ask for a guarantee have run into disreputable SEO companies.  The SEOs know that the layman wants to rank #1 so that is what they pitch.  The prospect, not knowing enough about SEO to make an informed decision will base their decision on price plus promise of #1.

During the consultation I have with prospects, I tease them a bit saying I will guarantee them hundreds of number one spots; however, they may never see any traffic from those rankings.  Just because your number 0ne doesn’t mean anyone is searching for that particular phrase.

Good SEO companies typically get many number one rankings for their clients, but they do it for targeted traffic without doing “black hat” tricks, which could get your site banned from the search engines.

THE KEYWORD SOLUTION

Good SEO is all about getting targeted traffic from keyword phrases that have search volume.  Targeted traffic is searchers looking to buy your type of product or service or researching information on your type of product or service. Getting traffic from people looking for Tiger Woods gossip won’t do much if anything for your business unless you sell Tiger Woods paraphernalia.

Once your targeted keyword phrases are identified, you need to determine if they have enough volume for the effort required to rank.  Volume is very important since SEO really is a numbers game (get more targeted visitors to your site you have a greater chance of making more money).  Usually, but not always, the higher the volume of searches of a keyword phrase the more effort you should put into ranking for that term.  If you have a choice between getting 1000 visitors per day or 100, you should work on the phrase that gets 1000.

Here’s where the but comes in.  If there is a lot of competition for that phrase, denoted by the number of pages returned by the search engine, you may have to work too hard to rank for those 1000 visitors where as it might be easy to rank for 10 keywords that each get 100.  For local businesses, I typically try to rank my clients for keyword phrases that have less than 350,000 pages returned before going after more competitive terms.

Note: The right mix of keywords, competitiveness and volume differs based on the client. For national clients these phrases would be more long tail/third tier keywords that we would go after much later, but for local clients there is little need to try to rank for highly competitive/high volume terms with searchers from all over the country or world (ie. not targeted).

I hope this helps you get better grasp on search engine optimization and helps you make a knowledgeable decision when you hire an SEO firm.  Any questions?  Please connect with me through the comments section.

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What can I say? As Roseann Higgins, of Entrepreneur’s Forum & Women’s Power Lunch, says, “Phoenix needs a rebel like you.”

Here’s my rebel yell…

There are basically 4 types of social media users:

• The Twitterati Seeker: builds attention & leverages it for some other monetization effort.
• The Expert Follower: Says whatever is the prevailing social media mantra or whatever will get her hired to train you on how to use Twitter.
• The I Digg It: People just enjoying the technology to stay connected to their niche of interest and chatting with friends and family.
• The Skeptic: Skeptics are interested in getting some real benefit from using social media. These tend to be business owners who have limited time or money to throw at new marketing tools. There are a few SM experts who fall into this category.

The Twitterati Seeker is someone seeking Internet fame through social media tools. This can work, but with all forms of celebrity only a few ever make it. Gary Vaynerchuk falls into this category. I respect him as a business genius, but where I think he falters is his touting of the “always on” approach to social media.

There are some high-profile social media gurus speaking at conferences and corporations and getting paid big dollars who spread this crap about being as connected as possible. Well, it worked for them, right?

The reason I think it’s crap is that if you are not trying to be Internet famous, you have little reason to be an always-on personality. They are preaching what worked for them to gain their guru status, but not the things that have seemed to work for regular businesses.  Real businesses actually need their leader leading and not twittering the day away.

Oh, and when they do mention real life examples of getting a return on investment it’s usually a regular business that they had nothing to do with. The poster child for this is the Korean BBQ truck that tweets out its location and people flock to it to get some grub.

Broadcasting, which is what this BBQ company does when tweeting, isn’t “having a conversation” or “engaging” with people. It is advertising its location. But the Twitterati Seeker will tell you that broadcasting/advertising to your followers doesn’t work. Well, they are right. It doesn’t work when you are trying to build a fan base to launch a book or speaking tour or get people to watch your video podcast.

The Expert Follower makes up about 99% of social media experts. I bet most have never run a real business before their debut as social media gurus, read more than 2 books on marketing or do any testing to see if what they are saying works in the real world.  Since they are trying to make a living from social media consulting, they are trying to make it sound harder than it really is.  Talking to people, even with 140 characters on Twitter, isn’t difficult.  Time consuming, but not intellectually challenging.  These people will cost you a lot of time and money and probably ruin you on social media, which would be a shame for your business.

The I Digg It isn’t that important to this discussion except that you may find quite a few customers in this group.

The Skeptic is what you should be with all of your business initiatives. You need to test. See if the idea actually translates into results out in the real world.

Tactics that seem to be working for more than just a few lucky gurus and attention whores is customer service, reputation management and highlighting promotions & business communications such as blog posts.

But the notion that businesses are building relationships is a dodgy one.  Most people are not that interested in having a relationship with the people they do business with.  Though I think if you can develop connections with some of your customers they can become huge brand evangelists.  There is some real promise in this.

There is a lot of hoopla about Twitter.  A lot of people trying to make money off of you by claiming their expertise and telling you it is really difficult and you need to invest time and money into it.  Keep the following in mind when planning your social media efforts:

• 69% of American adults (probably your market) don’t know what Twitter is.  That doesn’t mean 31% are using Twitter–they’re just aware of it.  Worldwide there are anywhere from 20 million to 50 million active Twitter users–Twitter doesn’t distinguish between spammers, people with multiple accounts and individuals.  50 million is a big number, but that is worldwide.  The odds are small that more than a few percent of your market is on Twitter.
  [edit] Just found an article from Mashable posted in September that estimated total US adult Twitter users by end of 2009 to be 18 million or about  7% of adults in the US.
• You can participate on Twitter by broadcasting useful & entertaining tweets and by ‘listening’ for conversations related to your business or areas of interest.  You can chime in with helpful suggestions and just to participate much like you would at a networking event.  If you straight out pitch people, they will be turned off by you–you’ll get the opposite of your desired result.  [listening is setting up Twitter search feeds so you can be alerted to these conversations]  By listening, you don’t have to be always on.
• Followers on Twitter are not the same as prospects and customers.  Many people who are following people are just hoping you follow them back.  We are still in the early spam stages of Twitter much like the early days of email marketing when huge lists were thought to be valuable.

You may think I’m down on Twitter, but I actually do like it and find it somewhat useful though not the panacea or even a game changing innovation.  You should make sure you test Twitter in your business with a sound strategy on how you intend to monetize your efforts, which could be to increase customer service, drive people to your store or website or generate brand awareness.

Here is an interesting article that may be a bit more balanced than my take on Twitter: Copyblogger.com

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What if there was a way for you to get more than the average 50+% of visitors from a number one Google ranking?

I don’t know about you, but I really dislike paying a lot of money to advertise my business (or that of my clients) only to have my direct competitor’s ad show up right next to mine. Every directory that you’re business is listed in also has your direct competitors, too. In most advertising venues that get a lot of “eye balls”, you’re going to pay to show up next to your competitor’s ad. This, frankly, stinks.

But there is a new way to market your company that keeps your competitors at bay. But first let me give you some background knowledge first.

LOCAL SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Google and other search engines want to offer searchers relevant results so that the searcher keeps coming back to their search engine. SEO is the process of manipulating content on a website and on other websites to get top search results. I’m not going to go into the mechanics of SEO or I would be cranking out a book and Larry is probably thinking this article is a bit too long already.

As local business owners, we have a window of opportunity in the search engine game. The reason I say we have just a window is that large national companies are just now waking up to the power of local search and only about 50% of small businesses have websites. Of the small businesses who have websites, most have nothing more than an electronic business card that is lost in the wilderness called the Internet.

Right now you can use search engine optimization to out compete big corporations and your local competition on all your local keyword search phrases and your brand phrases. But here is what is so amazing…you can dominate those local phrases to the point where your competition won’t show up on the first page of the search results—you can own the top ten.

There are two exceptions to you owning all of page one of Google and those are Google’s Lucky 10 (or soon to be 7 in all markets) Local Results box at the top of searches that have geographic modifiers and in the sponsored ads at the top and right. To dominate these you have to do some black hat techniques and I don’t recommend you try them because getting delisted by Google won’t help your business any.

At the time this screenshot was taken, this fitness trainer owned the entire page for his city. The only place he didn’t have a listing was in the right hand sponsored links. You can see he even got two double listings.

DOMINATING LOCAL SEARCHES ON GOOGLE

First you need to do basic search engine optimization on every page of your website. Next build optimized pages for your major local keywords and include semantically related phrases on those pages. Talk to me about getting this done for your site.

Next, set up a Google Local Business listing so your business can show up in the Google Maps local results box. Fill it out completely. Add the videos, pictures and get reviews from your customers. You should be putting almost as much effort into this one tool as you do for initially optimizing your website–it’s that important.

Your goal is to get your main website (your money site) into the top 3 organic search results before you start on the next steps. Doing everything at once will dilute your efforts. I’ll say it again. Make sure you are ranking in the top 3 of your ten most important keywords before proceeding.

The next step is to get as many double listings as possible. To get a double listing, optimize two or more pages on your site for the same keyword. With a double listing for a geo-targeted keyword, Google frequently returns 8 organic search results instead of the normal 10. That means you need to work to own at least the remaining 7 results.

You’re going to build a content network using Squidoo, Hubpages, Youtube, WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and Posterous. There are more, but you’ll start here. You or your SEO will have used some or all of these sites to create some links to your main website to get it to rank.

Now, we want the sites in our content network to start ranking for our major keywords so we have to do all the same steps we take to rank our main site to get each of these pages to rank. See the diagram for a simplified outline of what your content network will look like.

In the Content Network Snowflake you’ll see your main website in the middle surrounded by support sites that in turn are supported by auxiliary sites. Each of these sites are content sites that reinforce the relevancy and authority of each other. What you don’t see in this diagram are the inbound links that support each of these sites. This is nothing new in SEO, but it is new for the purpose of ranking multiple content sites for the same keyword to prevent competitors from ranking.

The reason we are doing all this is to take up as many available organic search results as possible. Don’t allow weak competitors to show up next to you in the search engines. This is the only place I know of where some good ol’ fashioned elbow grease will keep your competitor’s ads (search listing) away from your ads.

In all of your content on your content network, you need to have conversion tools in place. This will include links to free reports, email opt-in boxes where possible, phone numbers, contact forms, your business location and any other way you can think up to get people to leave your content network and connect with your business.

Being better and smarter will pay off in you dominating page one of Google. Once you have control, visitors will have no choice, but to choose you.

I know this was a lot to throw at you and I left out a lot of details on how to do local search engine optimization, but please feel free to ask questions in the comments and I would be happy to answer them.

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