Promotional products: keyrings, pens, gimmicky things or practical things. They only cost a few dollars each, which does add up, but if you consider it a conversation starter between an established customer and a potential customer – all happening freely without your knowledge – what price is that worth to your business?

This month is a weird topic, but stick with me: the challenge to you as a business owner is to find yourself a virtual salesperson. Let me explain.

A salesperson in *your own* business would be someone who goes out actively seeking customers and new sales opportunities – either in person, over the phone, or via the internet.

A *virtual* salesman is a person who is not employed by your business whatsoever, but has a vested interest in actively telling others about your business, your products, and the wonderful service you provide.

The trick is in finding them. They’re most likely a small percentage of your customers – your most loyal regular customers, who conversely, you probably have the least interaction with. They’re the 20 to the 80 that take up your time on small tasks. They’re the ones who are regulars who you know by name or by ‘nod’, but have probably never had to market to in any way.

They’re the ones who simply ‘get’ your business, appreciate what you do, and would most likely be very happy to tell others about your business. If only they knew what you wanted them to say…

“Stand back, she’s gonna blow!”

Famously, Seth Godin (internet marketing mega-guru) calls these sorts of people ’sneezers’ in his book ‘Unleashing the ideavirus’. He rides the metaphor that while ideas are valuable in themselves, only decent, simple ideas are worth spreading. You just have to tell the ’sneezers’.

Seth Godin nominates the perfect ’sneezer’ as someone who likes to be completely up to date with new info – someone who other people who are happy looking to for advice and recommendations. If ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ is important to many, then Seth Godin’s perfect sneezer is Mr & Mrs Jones.

That’s probably taking it a little too far: while having a virtual salesperson telling lots of others will get the word out, it’s generally quality you’re looking for, not necessarily quantity.

Where do I find/how can I make some virtual salespeople?

It depends on two things: 1) your ability to spot the 20% of your best customers, and 2) your ability to make it easy for them to spread your message.

Your ability to find the top 20%, 10% or the absolute best 5% of your customer base *should* be an easy task – you *do* measure key metrics against your customer base, don’t you? OK. There’s a good chance you don’t measure such things. There’ll be another column on measuring key data next time, but for now, look beyond WAGs (now there’s an acronym for you!) and begin documenting sales against customers. And if you don’t record your customers, begin a customer loyalty program. (Another column in and of itself right there…)

Once you have your top x%, make it super-easy for these customers to pass along your message.

My top 10 ways to make it easy for your message get passed on:

1) Make your message strong and simple. Use the tag line of your business, that’s displayed everywhere, as your marketing message. “The best X this side of Texas”. Imagine it being passed on… “Well, they say they’re the best X this side of Texas, and I’d say they’re just about right”. If what you do isn’t clear, or your message is too long, you’ll simply be asking too much.

2) Within your top 20% of your customers, hand-pick the enthusiasts or groups of enthusiasts. They’re the ones who would talk about you in the sleep or underwater. Every business has fanatics who love the industry you’re in. Sponsor some classes in your industry. Hand out free info on your web site to inspire budding… whatevers… Connect!

3) If you normally include a flyer/brochure/menu with every purchase, include 2 or 3 – to be handed out to others when the conversation arises. Very cheap and easy – you’re already printing them, and the price becomes more economical with quantity.

4) Two for the price of one special offers. Depending on if your customer can actually *use* both products/services or not (hopefully not!) it might be a way to initiate one-for-me, one-for-someone-else.

5) Customer clubs with membership benefits. Offer your best customers added benefits which they can either use themselves, or offer to new customers as (above board!) incentives. The CostCo ‘members only’ model comes to mind.

6) Fridge magnets. Big ones. Everyone has kids/grandkids/neighbour’s kids/overdue bills to keep somewhere prominent. Don’t skimp – big ones!

7) Invite 10 key customers to be ‘ambassadors’ of your business. You give them insider knowledge of new products and new direction, and they give you direct feedback on your business fro ma customer point of view. A bit of backscratching can help everyone, and allow your ambassadors to really feel like they ‘know’ your business – making firm friends, not just customers.

Promotional products: keyrings, pens, gimmicky things or practical things. They only cost a few dollars each, which does add up, but if you consider it a conversation starter between an established customer and a potential customer – all happening freely without your knowledge – what price is that worth to your business?

9) Loyalty cards: offer a good deal, not just an average deal. Make it worth talking about. Buy 3 and get your 4th free. Or let your customers stamp a new card for someone else. You don’t have to run the deal forever, but even so, you need to measure what a new customer would be worth to you.

10) Above all else, make sure that the message is being passed on for free – offering commissions sways people’s perceptions in a subtle but definite way. In just the same way as an article in a magazine versus an ad gives more (??) credence to the article, offering paid referrals instantly casts doubt on the reality of the offer and the genuineness of the business itself. If it’s genuinely worth talking about, it must genuinely be that good. Don’t muddy that with offers of money.

AB out

Part Two

Last month, I outlined what social media is, and began to give you, the parent, a quick primer on some of the big players. We covered SMSs, MySpace and the wonderful world of Blogging, but we saved the best till last…

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Facebook

facebook.com overtook myspace in terms of millions of users in 2008, and hasn’t looked back. Beginning life as an online yearbook for university students, it quickly grew due to it’s more refined interface and (counterintuitively) it’s lack of graphical customisation. Instead, Facebook uses plugins called Applications, that allow the user to add unique games/quizes/audio/video/etc etc etc – there are tens of thousands of Facebook applications – a stratch for every unique itch.

Facebook is popular with a wider audience, generally teenagers through to baby-boomers. It’s not unknown for younger people to ’sign up’ their parents without their express knowledge, only to find that thier parents enjoy the experience just as much as the children.

In my experience, I found Facebook early on, and didn’t see much in it – simply because there weren’t many people using it at the time – perhaps only a million or so worldwide. But in recent years, I’ve been ‘friended’ by old school mates who have all been on it more recently, and I’ve been more thanb pleasantly surprised by the uptake of it by non-geeks – it’s the first big league sucess cross-over from a technical crowd to a mainstream crowd.

In the last few weeks, Facebook has been going down the path of Twitter, with more emphasis on making and keeping track of the ’status updates’ of your friends. This is exactly analogous to Twitter’s ‘tweets’, below.

Facebook has an impressive array of features and plugins, and everything you do can (and will, unless turned off!) be broadcast to your friends as a ‘life stream’.

Privacy rules require authorisation before full contact can be made with new people, but like all online web sites, it’s only as secure as a poassword. There have been many reports of user’s profiles being overtaken by third parties – usually due to password guessing or trojan horse applications asking for personal details. In these cases, Facebook’s ‘real-life’ staff are hard to get a hold of, with little or no chance of finding the offenders.

Twitter

Twitter is the latest entry in the world of social media, and it’s derived from the simple concept of ‘tell the world what you’re doing’. You only have 140 characters per ‘tweet’, which is a short message broadcast to all your ‘followers’. As a Twitter user, you can follow anyone else, thereby watching (reading) their stream of tweets.

The proverbial tweet is the one describing what you had for breakfast that morning, but once you get past that, Twitter is a great resource for either chatting with people in SMS-like increments, or for following what other inspirational or otheriwse interesting people have to say.

It’s also turned into a fantastic resource for tapping the collective wisdom of the ‘twittorati’, and for watching the *reaction* to events happening in the real world. If Google gives good search results from a day or two ago, Twitter gives a good ‘feel’ of the vibe of events happening – as they happen.

Twitter is currently attracting the 20’s to 40’s, and then, still a very internet-centric audience. It hasn’t turned into the mainstream like Facebook, but current growth rates suggest it will head that way.

MMORPGs

Into Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games? Join the 11 million online *right now* playing ‘Warcraft’, or the many millions more playing any of 100 other MMORPGs.

It might not be your cup of tea, but if it *is*, then it’s a highly addictive world of solo game playing, combined with community-based and faction-based strategy. Add to that some immersive worlds and a never-ending competition to be the best, and you’ve got yet one more way to spend hours a week interacting with the world, without ever leaving your chair.

Combining the best of the above two Social Media is the Farmville phenomenon: a free game within Facebook that lets you compete against friends and against the world to see who can build the biggest/bestest farm. It’s actually a lot like the MMORPGs, above, in that it’s incredibly easy to begin playing, but you get hooked very quickly – as there’s always a ‘reward’ if you play for that *little bit* longer…

The mobile/iPhone revlution

Everything is going mobile. With the surge in mobile phone ownership almost equalling current populations (and beating it in some countries!), the trend is clearly to be on the Internet where ever you are. Facebook and Twitter all have mobile-phone specific versions, and MySpace and blogs are easily accessed by the iPhone’s internet browser – the first to be (almost) as decent as a regular computer’s internet browser (save for the fact that it’s on a screen barely 4″ across).

For the first time, data over mobile phones is becoming cheap enough to use without worry about huge phone bills. To send this article via Twitter or via mobile phone data plan might cost only 1 or 2 cents, given an 8k file size. Compared to the $16 plus for an SMS, that’s hardly worth contemplating.

So – the internet, Google, and the world of social media is with us and our children, anywhere we go… so…

What should I do now? How should I react ot my kids using Social Media?

My suggestion: either ignore it or embrace it. It’s easy to ignore it, and write it off as *the fad* of the current generation. There’s an element of truth to that: many of these social networks won’t exist in two years, let alone 5 or 10. If you pick the ‘wrong’ social network it may die off over time, but it’s easy enough to spot the trend, and find another, more vibrant one to replace it.

But there’s also an underlying change in the way this new generation has grown up compared to our earlier generations: these technologies *are* the skills of this generation. This new generation does not *need* to know how to break down an engine block and put it back together – it does not *need* to know how to sew any more… the mastery of computer games, the knowledge of electronic devices, and the ability to adapt to new user interfaces are all highly sought after ’skills’ of a new workforce.

Just this year, the US Army advertised for more jobs as pilots of unmanned aerial vehicles than for pilots of jet fighters. The skills required are in computer systems, computer control, problem solving, and the ability to totally master an Xbox and/or Playstation.

It’s a brave new world.

I hope this has started some interest in learning the ropes – if prompted, I’ll flesh out more of the social media scene for you over the coming weeks and months.

AB out

Part One

Baby-boomers, Gen Y, Gen X, Gen *whatever* – one thing I know for sure is that the generations are slowly becoming separated by the tyranny of new technology – more so by the pace at which new technology evolves.

• 30 years ago, I was the ‘digital clock king’ in my family – the only person able to navigate the weird button-presses required to move the time forward and back at daylight savings.
• 20 years ago, I was the ‘computer-wizard’ – the young adult who everyone in the neighbourhood turned to to figure out their new-fangled Macs and PCs.
• 10 years ago, I was the mobile phone wizard, the internet guru, and the ‘web address memoriser’.
• And in the last 5 years, I’ve been keeping up to date with more than a dozen technologies/programming languages; been using about 4 or 5 different communications tools for business and for personal use; and I’ve been meeting people online in well over 50 or more online communities and social media networks.

If you’re keen, and if you’re able, the pace of technology has allowed people to keep up to date with others from around the globe, instantly, 24×7.

The benefits of almost limitless knowledge, efficient communication and speed of response are enourmous, but the downsides of the pace of technology are equally enourmous:

• Have we lost the ability to talk to people face to face?
• Does all communication from here on in have to be online?
• How do we control what’s said about us online – and who polices it?

These are some of the issues facing the internet in general, and social media in particular.

For parents, the issue is two-fold: 1) where are my children going on the internet? and 2) what harm/good my children be able to do?

So, what is Socal Media?

A great definition of social media is: “A category of sites that are based on user participation and user-generated content”.

That is, sites on the internet that rely on people to *be* the reason for the site. As opposed to an ecommerce type site, which exists to sell goods or services, or an information/news type site, which exists to inform/entertain, a social media site exists to connect people, and to allow the users to interact with each other via text, images or video, for the purpose of creating a ‘community’ or ‘network’.

There’s many and different variations in the social media theme, and sure enough, this advice will be out of date within months/weeks/days, but the essential component is the *social* aspect. Anyone who would have enjoyed chatting, gossiping or just ‘hanging out’ in real life would most likely find a social media network that they’d enjoy.

A truism of the internet is that you’ll always find a group of people who share your exact same (and slightly eccentric) passions. Social media then allows for that group of people to share their passions (yes – even paper-clip collectors!)

Who are the big players?

SMS

Yep – the perennial favourite. In short 160-character bursts, you can have the most stilted and abbreviated ‘conversation’ possible with someone, 25c at a time.

Reach for the phone? Nope. Send 5 SMSs, and make sure that your last text asks one more question, forcing the other person to reply.

This is one area of social media that even *I* don’t get – why people constantly reach for the most expensive way of communicating ever invented. I do not know. To send this 10,000 character article via SMS, for example, would take 63 SMSs, and would cost around $16, if at 25c per text. Ouch.

MySpace

myspace.com is/was the first big mover in social media. The site lets people create their own page, and share their interests. You can link to other myspace people as ‘friends’, thereby establishing relationships and networks. The initial growth in myspace.com caused lots of problems, showing up as technical glitches and hacks that made it a little less than refined, however, it’s still strong in the under 25’s age range, as it’s very easy to get used to, and the page can be changed graphically to suit the user’s personality.

The blogosphere

The ‘blogosphere’ refers to the world of blogs and blogging. Blogs are/were online diaries (weB LOGs), that grew into more fully-grown information sites and written word content. Most of the time, it’s a one-way communication – just like a newspaper mostly publishes information, but doesn’t insist upon much communication back in the other direction. Real-world letters to the editor take the shape of ‘comments’ on a blog, whereby visitors to the site can respond back to the author/s of the blog, and take part in a delayed-response, post-it note style conversation.

Blogs are a great way of promoting a community around a person, business or topic. They’re generally long-form in the written word, with articles/stories/information of decent length, and they generally invite some form of community to take shape, but a fairly passive one. The inmates can’t run the asylum, so to speak!

—–

Next month in Part Two, I’ll outline the other big players: Facebook, Twitter, massively-multiplayer-online-games, and the biggest one of all: the mobile phone…

Until then, have a lovely Christmas!

AB out

Passwords, PIN numbers and security access codes – they seem like the bane of 21st century living. It’s so easy to forget which combination goes with which web site or with which credit card. Remembering passwords is almost a skill in itself.

But with more and more of our lives going online, the first and foremost line of defence against unwanted intruders is the strength of our passwords.

DON’T PANIC

I don’t want to scare you regarding the security of passwords – they’re essentially as safe as you want them to be. Short or long, guessable or random, it’s up to you to

While it’s true that most web sites can be hacked by what’s called a ‘brute force’ or ‘dictionary’ attack (where the attacker simply tries thousands of thousands of different password combinations), the truth is that you’ve very very unlikely to be targeted specifically. In fact, you’re more likely to have your passwords guessed by those close around you than by someone anonymous over the internet.

Attacks to try to gain access to web sites do happen every hour of every day on the internet, but the best defence is simply to use a strong password that’s committed to memory. 99% of these attackers aren’t real people, but other computers, so once they hit a time limit without success, they’ll move on – after all, if the password you use isn’t an obvious one, hopefully the next person on their list will be using an obvious one. The internet is a big ocean to fish in.

Password styles from bad to good – where do yours stand?

• The worst type of password is to use some variant of your name – it’s convenient, sure, but it’s also easily guessable.
• The next level of bad passwords are the ‘default’ ones. Ones like: ‘default’, ‘password’, ‘123456′, or even ‘letmein’. Sure, they were once cute or memorable, but they’re now prime targets.
• A single English word. A ‘dictionary attack’ literally goes through the dictionary of common words to see if one works. Choose some weird old words or some scientific ones – anything totally unique to you and you alone – and you should be OK – but steer clear of football teams or the street you live on. Please…
• An English word with a couple of numbers tacked onto the end. Getting better, for sure. Adding two extra digits to a common word will make for another 100 possible combinations to try per common English word, so you’re getting there. Don’t use your birth year, though – very common!
• Semi-random numbers and letters. We’re getting decent now. Anything that makes sense to you and you alone is AOK: 3bm3bmshtr (Three blind mice!). Don’t use your car license plate, though!
• One assigned to you that you can’t change. Actually, the most painful, but also the very best ones to use. I still use two old passwords assigned to me at Uni waaaay back – they were hard to learn, but they contained numbers, letters and punctuation, and are now committed firmly to memory. The first step’s a doozy, but totally unguessable – only by brute brute force could one be discovered.

How to make passwords complex, yet easy to remember

A realy simple way to make a semi-random password using both numbers and letters is to make a *pattern*. Rather than memorising a random string of characters,  devise a repeating pattern on the keyboard. Play hopscotch down the numbers row, or hit keys in triangles or squares or circles until you have enough characters to fulfil the length requirement.

Don’t believe me? Well then, see how easy it is to type 4rfvgy7 or 12we45ty, yet see how random they look on the surface. Simple and memorable, yet semi-random!

A good plan: build a hierarchy of passwords

My best piece of advice regarding the use of passwords is to keep one as a ‘good’ password – make it a really long pattern – and use it everywhere that you need a really secure password.

Then over time, maybe after a year or so, you’ll notice that you’ve been using your super-secure for, well, web sites that didn’t really need to know your super-secure password. See – you really shouldn’t be logging into the local pigeon fanciers web site with the same password that you log into your bank with, but that’s just how it happened.

So… break out a new top-level super-secure password, and begin using that for all mission-critical stuff and for all new password requests. Keep your former super-secure password, but it now gets relegated to second spot in your security ladder.

Then when you go to a web site that you should have access to, and your password is wrong, all you have to do is remember the most recent two or three ’secure’ passwords you’ve been using – it’s sure to be one of them.

In this fashion, you’ll end up with a small number of places using your top-level, super-secure password; a wider range using last years’ secure password; and a whole plethora of old web sites using your old password.

The most important sites you visit will have the least known password, whereas the pigeon fanciers’ web site can survive with the old fallback.

I guess in the CIA, it’d be called compartmentalisation, but for folks like you and me, it’s just easier to use two or three passwords for 95% of the many hundreds of web sites we use, than remembering many hundreds of passwords.

—–

Need more help? Let me know if you need to know more on this topic, and I’ll do my best to either answer your questions directly, or I’ll compile them for a follow-up on another aspect of online security.

Stay safe!

AB out

I know for sure that my experience, while broad (and hopefully fairly deep!) is partly due to my insatiable need to learn. If I’m not actively working on a client’s project, I’m ‘working’ on my knowledge – talking to other like-minded souls, or surfing the internet, reading or watching those who inspire me.

I’d suggest that as an individual, we don’t need to be able to amass 100% of the skills we need all by ourselves – in fact, we simply can’t – and that apart from the odd moments of epiphany, we gain our skills and experience by absorbing information from other rich sources – our own stable of mentors.

So – who are my own ‘rich sources’ of pure gold? Who are my mentors? Let me introduce you to a couple…

——

Seth Godin (http://sethgodin.typepad.com)

Seth Godin is the master marketer of the internet. And if that title isn’t enough, I’d also add that he’s the master of *common-sense* marketing. Full stop.

Sure, ‘marketing’ can be both an amazing mix of art, science and manipulation – a force used for good as well as evil – but Seth manages to come up with daily insights of such clarity and common-sense as to be virtually indisputable. It’s hard to argue against the obvious. In that regard, he’s the Jerry Seinfeld of the internet/marketing worlds.

Take these gem, from just the last week:

—–

The hierarchy of success by Seth Godin

I think it looks like this:

1. 1. Attitude
   2. Approach
   3. Goals
   4. Strategy
   5. Tactics
   6. Execution

We spend all our time on execution. Use this word instead of that one. This web host. That color. This material or that frequency of mailing.

Big news: No one ever succeeded because of execution tactics learned from a Dummies book.

Tactics tell you what to execute. They’re important, but dwarfed by strategy. Strategy determines which tactics might work.

But what’s the point of a strategy if your goals aren’t clear, or contradict?

Which leads the first two, the two we almost never hear about.

Approach determines how you look at the project (or your career). But as far as I’m concerned, the most important of all, the top of the hierarchy is attitude.

—–

Dang, he’s a smart guy. The author of and the many best-sellers in the fields of internet/marketing, such as: Permission Marketing, Small is the New Big, Purple Cow, and most recently, Tribes.

From his web site, http://sethgodin.typepad.com/, you can get daily nuggets, and you can also follow links to download *free* ebooks – free in exchange for permission to email you, of course. But what awesome emails!

—–

43 Signals

(http://37signals.com with their free ebook at http://gettingreal.37signals.com)

These guys/this company is the author/originator of the Basecamp.com family of web sites – web sites aimed at filling the gap between full blown ‘project management tools’ for huge projects, and ‘mountainous piles of paper’ for the rest of us.

They single-handed created the niche of small-group management tools; they inadvertently developed a massively popular web development tool called Ruby on Rails; and they are proponents of their own theory of building businesses (especially internet-based businesses) called ‘Getting Real’.

Their ebook is free to read online at http://gettingreal.37signals.com or you can pay a tiny fee to download it and/or print it out as a PDF.

‘Getting Real’ details the most common-sense approach to keeping your business lean, in profit, and focussed on single goals at a time – as opposed to the alternative of ‘building it and they will come’. They outline the initial starting phases of finding and defining a problem that your business will address, right through to pricing models, publicising your business, and on into growth phases of your business.

—–

If you haven’t figured it out already, the common thread between these two of my mentors is their unarguable common-sense. What they point out so clearly is just so plain *obvious*, that it elevates them to ’super-guru status’ in my opinion.

So – who are your gurus? Who are your mentors? Care to share a couple? Leave your thoughts in the comments, and we’ll see if we can ’share the love’.

AB out

This first contact is often called the ‘elevator pitch’ – if you only have 30 seconds to explain your business to someone you’ve never met, how would you do it?

All it takes is a little navel-gazing, a little pre-planning, and some guinea-pigs to practice it on… Ready? Let’s take a quick look!

Don’t have an elevator pitch? Get one.

There’s no crime in not having a good opening line to explain your business, but it’s nice to have one or two up your sleeve. And by ‘one or two’, I do indeed mean ‘more than one’.

Different situations call for different explanations: in social situations; with family & friends; or indeed with ripe plum prospective customers, who can already talk your lingo – each case needs a different approach.

The bare minumum is to at least communicate your core business competencies and at least some aspect of a location or region that you operate in.

“I run a florist business in Drysdale” would get you a passing mark, but not an A or an A+. It would tell your prospective customer both *what* do you and *where* you do it, but the person who you’re talking to may be able to get far more information from your business card than from such a simple opening line!

Too short/too boring? Spice it up!

OK – imagine you’re in a wonderful situation: either all your marketing and advertising has worked, and you’re now talking to a real, live prospective customer – or you’re now talking to a potential lead in a business networking environment. In either case, you’re a real, live human being who is passionate about their business, talking to another real, live human being – let’s go to the next level and communicate some of those passions, ey?

The go the next step in explaining what you do, expand on your core competencies, and add in your value proposition. Yep, marketing speak alert: ‘value proposition’ is simply the combined benefits of what your *customer will get*, as opposed to *what you do*.

So instead of saying “I’m a builder in Ocean Grove”, you can now approach it from your customer’s point of view, and say “I help people build their dream home in and around the Surf Coast.”

You’ve killed two birds with one stone: you’re coming across with passion and enthusiasm, as well as expressing the *benefits* of what you do in real terms.

Is it too long winded? Try the Twitter-test…

Don’t go the ‘other direction’ with your elevator pitch, and turn your quick summary into a short speech – there’s a reason the Good Lord gave us two ears and only one mouth – an opportunity to speak with a potential customer is actually more about listening than it is about speaking.

Practice your opening line, refine it over time, and slowly try some variations to see what brings that spark of understanding the quickest – but if you see their eyes clouding over, then apply the ‘Twitter Test’.

Twitter, like an SMS, only allows a certain number of characters per message. For Twitter, it’s 140 characters, for an SMS it’s 160.

So fire up, Twitter, or your mobile phone, or even Word with a word/character count turned on, and try to write a summary of your business that’s *exactly* 140 characters long. No more, no less.

It’s a process that forces you to pick and choose your words extremely carefully, to swap out the less important filler words for more dynamic adjectives and verbs.

Let me have your best 140-character business summary and I’ll promote them on my web site and pick a winner to publish here next month: tweet them to @allroundniceguy, or leave it in comments on my web site.

I’ll compile them all on the comments to this article on my web site as free advertising – so fire away with your best business pick-up lines, and I’ll pick the best one to win a prize…

AB out

In the real world, business systems and CRM tools can give us as many reports as we desire about the conversions of ‘potentials’ into ‘customers’. And online, web site statistics can give us live feedback on how many people enter ‘the sales funnel’ and how many people end up completing an online ‘goal’.

Reports on conversions are essential resources for every modern business – but on a higher level, they’re simply not be able to tell you just *how* to turn a visitor on your web site into a real-life customer.

Ready for a psychology 101/marketing 101 lesson? Let’s talks needs.

In 1943, Abraham Maslow proposed his “hierarchy of needs” – a series of 5 levels that were the building blocks for every human’s existence (indeed happiness).

Starting with a base of physiological needs, without which no human can survive: breathing, food, water, sleep, shelter.

On top of that, Maslow added the needs for safety (personal security/health/employment/etc), then the need for belonging (social/family/love), then the need for esteem (respect and confidence), and finally, and only if everything else was in place, the need for self-actualisation: creativity, morality and other aesthetic needs.

It’s both amazingly complex yet intuitive at the same time – a series of needs which must be fulfilled before the next level of needs can be even contemplated.

In terms of turning visitors on your web site into real-life customers, all we gave to do is bend the five levels into more web-centric concepts.

So out go the five concepts of food, safety, love, respect & acceptance – instead we’re talking “AB’s hierarchy of internet needs”:

• discovery
• interest
• proof
• trust
• action

First step – get discovered

I can’t say it any simpler than this: Google loves words. Sure, Google also loves images and maps and RESTful APIs, but 99 times out of 100, people use the Google search box looking for phrases of *text*. So… how about we give the people what they want, ey?

By adding new content to your web site/blog (articles/stories/case studies/etc) on a regular basis, you’re essentially beginning to write a book about your business. A book that’s online 24×7, and when found, provides deep and informative content about your business to anyone who’s asking.

If it’s your aim to provide that deep information on your business for the benefit of your customers, then Google seems to match that altruistic goal with a matching reward of placing your web site higher in their search results pages.

Sure, there’s a whole pseudo-science to it, but it’s almost that simple: if you plan to put your customers’ needs first, then you’ll get more ’search engine love’ from Google et al.

And with such an informative web site, your word of mouth will spread faster, too – you’ll probably have other businesses linking to your content as ‘extra resources’. You may or may not get you more customers directly on day one, but it’s all adding up to making your web site a ‘go to’ site for your industry.

Next, create interest

Ask any internet marketer how long you’ve got to make a first impression with your web site, and you’ll get an amazing array of very small numbers.

The consensus is that you have about 10-20 seconds or so – after all, the thinking of the average joe is that “if this web site doesn’t solve my problem, there must be another one somewhere else that can”. We’re all guilty of that: we’re all information-starved and time-poor.

There’s thousands of ways to create interest for your web site visitors, so that they stick around long enough to read a bit deeper. There’s: design aspects (colours, styles, fonts); offers & promotions (free stuff, limited time offers); technical wizardry (way cool flashing thingies, etc); and many more.

One powerful way to turn a quick visit into a long visit – is to be *current*.

There’s nothing worse that a web site that doesn’t change from year to year: ” last updated May 2005″. Ouch – quite possibly a waste of time.

Business blogs aim to show off the most recent content first, with typically a long list of ’summaries’ of the most recent 10 or so articles listed on the home page.

This list of recent articles should take precedence over what were formerly the most important pages on a web site: the ‘about us’, ‘contact us’ type pages.

These supporting pages are important for *real* customers wanting to find a map to your premises, but the currency and relevancy and the *vibrancy* of fresh content shows both your old *and* new customers that you’re passionate about your business, and that you have new things to say, and new things to offer.

Provide social proof

Anyone can claim anything on the internet. It’s a by-product of the anonymity of the technology involved, that can lead to over-eager claims and wild statements.

Even if you’re not actively trying to tell porky-pies (‘lies’ in Cockney English, for my non-Australian readers), it’s still very easy to stretch the truth – or, at the very least, to over-state the situation.

Visitors to business web sites need some sort of *proof* before they can commit to trusting you or contacting you.

So *prove* that you know your stuff. *Prove* that you have other customers who love you with regular testimonials. *Prove* to me, the skeptical internet-savvy potential-customer, that what you’re saying/writing about, is also actually true.

It’s not too hard to think of ways to demonstrate your competency, and with a business blog, the actual writing about it and getting it up onto your site is dead-easy. If you’re at all used to Microsoft Word, then you’re set. If you have any sort of smartphone, then you’re equally ’set’, plus you can add new ’social proof’ where-ever and whenever you find it – with a photo, of course!

Earn trust

Apart from the ‘interest’ and the ‘proof’, to get to a point where we can think about earning a customer’s business, we have to go one level more, and earn a customer’s trust.

One of the best methods of earning trust via a web site, is to commit to the master plan of your business blog/web site, and keep plugging away at writing short or long articles of content relevant to your target audience.

Built into every blog is the concept of subscribing. Either via RSS Newsfeeds (go re-read my ‘a Coffee and a blog for breakfast’ article!) or via automated emails, potential customers can subscribe to your blog, so that they get every article you write – as you write it.

That way, if we’ve been discovered, created interest, and given proof, but not needed to be of services yet, it’s only trust that is earned over time that can convert a potential customer into the final stage… the call to action!

Call to action

Whew! We’re finally here – we’ve brought a customer to your door, created interest and shown them proof – and now they’re ready to call you/email you/buy from you online/whatever it takes.

Sure, there’s much more work to be done during and after the transaction – but I think I’ve shown you the light: if you want to turn visitors on your web site into real-life customers, begin building an authentic web site with reference to the five needs of every internet users.

AB out

The world of business – and especially small and solo businesses – desperately needs a couple of dozen ‘one percenters’ to be pointed out and dealt with. In most cases, the points on the list below should be very easily corrected, for some very quick gains! See how many your business does/doesn’t do…

Get a domain name *before* you print business cards

That way, you email will be you@yourdoamin.com.au, instead of you@yourisp.com.au. $50 for a domain name for 2 years – even for the smallest of businesses – is the ante to play in the business world. To not have a permanent online prescence doesn’t help your percieved stability nor your longevity.

Use your domain name for your email address

Now that you have a domain name, use it! Your ISP-based email is now only for recieving bill from your ISP – nothing else. Using you@yourdomain.com.au promotes your web site, promotes your name, and doesn’t promote your ISP.

No phone number/email on web site contact page

Make yourself available by whatever means you wish, but match it to the medium: for a web site, at least give an email (because your customer is currently online!); for a business card, at least give a phone number. Be responsive on those contact points – replying to emails and responding to calls/voicemail.

Using a contact form on a ‘contact us’ page

An email form does help to ’suggest’ to your customers what they might like to contact you about. But 9 times out of 10, it’s a restraint that no-one will appreciate. Give an email address, make it a clickable link, and let them write/ask/order what they want.

Having a ‘contact us’ page at all

If you only have one ‘contact us’ page on your web site, is it easily found? Is it linked to from *every* page? Better still, do away with a ‘contact us’ page, and put your contact details on every page, in plain sight. Apart from the convenience, Google can then match your page for location-based searches, eg: ‘my product, victoria’.

Common branding, marketing and advertising

Branding is the long-term campaign – it doesn’t change from month to month, but it can evolve from year to year. Marketing is the middle-term strategy, it’s the same message for a season or two. Advertising is the short-term tactic – it’s the right message to promote a product of service to a particular customer.

Change your advertising headline regularly, and change your marketing plan to suit the climate, but don’t change your branding on a whim: if you have a logo, use it in a standard fashion, every time. If you have corporate colours, use the right ones for the right media, every time. If you have corporate fonts, use them, every time.

Simplify your products or services

If you don’t fully understand the ins and outs of your current ‘offer’, then chances are that your customers won’t understand it either. Simplify how you offer your products or services by categorising them into ‘good’, ‘better’, ‘best’, or by reducing the add-ons or upgrades to the bare minimum. Don’t offer complex price savings measures for multiple purchases – unless that’s your only point of difference to your customers. Go for clear features/advantages/benefits and clear price points.

AB out

From a phone interview a couple of months ago, Barrie Smith has compiled a two-part story outlining my approach to purposefully being a ‘jack of all trades’ – intertwined with the history of how I got into photography as a teenager – and ending with my thoughts on the state of digital photography and technology in general.

The next part will be out next month, and focusses on one of my technology startups: My Perfect Camera. More info when that issue hits the shelves sometime in May.

The following are a couple of  short excepts from the part 1 of the article – for the full text, subscribe to ProPhoto magazine online at avhub.com.au

The Digital Guru

Operating a business from a town outside the perimeter of a capital city would seem a serious challenge — and even more so in the challenging world of photography and digital imaging. Barrie Smithh talks to another digital guru.

There are those individuals who manage very well and run their enterprises from centres outside of the mega populations of Sydney, Melbourne etc. The trick may be to accept all challenges, offer diverse services equal to any in the capital cities.

Andrew Ballard runs his business from Geelong in Western Victoria, barely 100kms from Melbourne. It’s hard to pin him down precisely on the specifics of what he does but one thing that is certain is that he qualifies as a digital guru, wearing many hats but with a heavy concentration on digital image capture, coaching and tuition.

Problem Solving

Admitting to not having any formal photographic training AB explains he is an engineer by trade.

“But that sort of fits my background in that it’s a multi-skill role, blending technical and problem-solving. So, in that regard, it’s a great base for the sorts of things I do now.”

Digital Training / Digital Coaching

Another element of Andrew’s business is provding tuition in photography or, more specifically these days, digital imaging.

“Certainly it’s more common to discuss with people how to manage their digital workflow than to actually teach them how to work their camera. That’s certainly been by view of the last ten years’ worth of talking to folks in this part of the world. They are proficient in their own photography skills, but the task of how to manage a digital workflow is really a brand new skill for most of these people.”

Lens Concerns

A question often asked of our ‘Digital Guru’ subjects concerns where most people go wrong when they start in the imaging business.

“One of the first ‘crimes’ that I continually see is people keep their ‘free’ lens they get when they buy a D-SLR. There’s been the lovely boom in the low and mid range D-SLR market, but people think that the kit lens bundled with the camera body is the best they could possibly find.”

Andrew contends that all too often these ‘kit’ lenses are inferior as far as resolution, optical performance and a decent working maximum aperture goes. He advises that intending buyers should, at first instance, investigate the purchase of a “niece piece of glass, and see what a medium range lens does for them and how wonderful their camera can be when coupled with lenses of this quality.”

So… what is Twitter? Ah, the multi-million dollar question… Perhaps it’s easier to answer what Twitter is *not*, first:

• Twitter is not exactly like a chat program (MSN, iChat, Skype, etc), but it does let you communicate back and forth with friends
• Twitter is not exactly like sending an SMS from your phone, but it does let you broadcast news and other messages to many people
• Twitter is not exactly like a blog, although it does let you get to know people over time
• Twitter is not exactly like Facebook, although it does let you find people and see what they’re up to
• Twitter is not just a fad – it fills the otherwise empty niche of ‘real-time written communication’ – although it seems to be the mainstream media’s darling this year!

What Twitter *is*, is a free system of writing messages of no more than 140 characters, composed from either the twitter.com web site or any host of mobile devices or desktop applications, so that anyone in the world who is also on Twitter can *follow* you, and thereby follow the stream of messages you’re writing.

The individual messages (‘tweets’) can be about any topic you choose – where you currently are; what you’re currently doing; or what you had for breakfast (the clichéd first tweet!) – or they can be more meaningful short bursts of wisdom – or they can be links to web sites or photos or commercial endeavours – essentially anything that might be communicated on a blog or in an email, but in a vastly shorter format.

Depending on what you tweet about, other people find you and if they think that what you have to say has some personal relevance to them, then they *follow you* – it’s as if they had subscribed to your blog or ‘chosen to watch your channel on TV’. From when they follow you, they now get what you have to say in their main flow of tweets in their own Twitter program. Similarly, you can follow others, and the tweets from those you follow appear in *your* main Twitter screen.

Why join Twitter?

For personal use: Like anything on the Internet, even if you have the most eclectic of hobbies or interests, you’re sure to find someone else who shares your passion. Go to http://search.twitter.com and search for something, well, eclectic. Chances are that someone in the world has tweeted about it in the last hour or so. Click on their name to go to their home page (it always looks like http://twitter.com/their_username) and see if they always talk about what you like, or whether they just mentioned it in passing. Follow them, if you like!

For business use: not only will you find gurus giving away free advice, you’ll also have access to some pearls of wisdom from political leaders, media outlets, industry thinkers and even some competitors. In return, you can offer a Twitter ‘feed’ as one more way of being contactable, this time in *real time* and *public for all to read*. For some businesses, that’s a negative; for others, it’s a challenge; and for some, it’s a rare chance to ‘be real’ and interact with real customers, one on one in a public forum.

How to get started

OK – this time, it’s super-easy – no major hoops to jump through or anything – just head to twitter.com and click on the ‘Get Started’ button. You’ll be prompted for your full name, your email, plus a username and a password.

Your Twitter username must be unique, but it’s also what you’re known by within Twitter, so pick a decent username – and the shorter the better, if possible. Of course, pick a secure password – anyone who can guess your password can grab control of your Twitter account. Not good.

In the sign-up process, Twitter may suggest a few people to follow. Feel free to follow them, or just ignore it. You can always unfollow later on. Twitter will also prompt you to fill out your profile page – your home page on Twitter. Choose a background picture or upload your own, and fill out your bio and your location. When you fill out your location, you can find other Twitterers near you, and likewise you can be found by others, geographically. Nice.

For your first couple of tweets, we’ll just use the twitter.com site. There’s a big empty box up top of your Home page asking the eternal question: “What are you doing?”. Feel free to type your first tweet, and watch the number of characters count down from 140. If you go over, it’ll let you edit your tweet before sending – that’s half the fun, actually, trying to be concise yet clear, yet still have some element of personality in an individual tweet. Consider it like a written Suduko.

Each tweet you make is time-stamped, and they appear in backwards order, just like a blog. This means that the most recent float to the top. Find other people via surfing the net, via the search.twitter.com feature, or via any one of a dozen new Twitter-friend-finder type web sites, and press the ‘follow’ button under their name on their home page to choose to read what they write. If you change your mind, go back to their home page and press the ‘unfollow’ button.

Tweeting more seriously…

Conventions: Fitting your message into 140 characters is the name of the game, so shortcuts have developed:

• use the ‘@’ symbol like ‘@username’ to reply to someone and ensure they see your message in their timeline,
• use ‘D username’ to send a direct (private) message to someone, and therefore hide it from the public,
• use/make up/search for ‘hashtags’ to mark tweets as being on a particular topic. Eg: #F1, #bushfires, #GFC, etc
• use ‘RT @username blah blah blah’ to ‘retweet’ someone’s tweet to your followers – it’s a way of relaying on good info from one circle of friends to another.

Use a dedicated Twitter application: rather than using the twitter.com web site to tweet (it’s a great fallback, though), there are dozens of programs listed at http://twitter.com/downloads to suit any computer or phone. Most are free and the rest are typically less than $20.

The Twitter ecosystem (the ‘Twitterverse’): there’s no shortage of add-ons and extensions that help make Twitter more than just what I’ve described above. http://twtbase.com or http://twitdom.com list many hundreds of ‘helpers’ that people have added to Twitter to make it even more relevant.

Real-time news: with Twitter on smartphones so prevalent, Twitter is often the first source of news from around the world – to find the latest trending topics, try something like http://twopular.com or http://twitterfall.com

(And if you haven’t noticed, just replace the first few letters of any normal word with ‘tw’ to ‘twitterize’ it.)

I’d suggest to give Twitter a try for a month, and see if you come to use it as a daily tool like I have. Follow me on Twitter at @allroundniceguy to let me know how you go!

AB out