Small businesses make up a large proportion of New Zealand businesses. But make no mistake, though these businesses may be small in the number of employees they have, they are in no way small in their business objectives and follow through.

Everyone from insightful mothers, style conscious women, to men who are sick of working for the man are turning their hand at creating and growing companies that have 1, 2 or 3 people on the books. But what may be taking some multinational companies by surprise is that these little guys are blowing them out of the water when it comes to online presence, social media and building relationships with their clients. These 3 things are creating dollars for small businesses that used to reserved for the big guns.

Case in point are Facebook Fanatics Belly Beyond and Vlogging Bag Diva Floozy. Both of these New Zealand based (and female owned businesses) are making use of the real-time web and interactive competitions to get client interest and keep it. So how is it with less than a handful of staff members these companies manage to do what some of the “bigger” brands cannot even wrap their heads around? How do they create successful social media campaigns to propel their brands to the forefront?

I originally wanted to speak to Lou at Belly Beyond at Kate at Floozy and do a little bit of a case study on each of them, but I have had little chance of doing that, and from their online activities I am sure they have been busy too…hopefully they will stop by and add their 2 cents as to what they think makes them successful social media divas

But here is my take on some of the winning ingredients of what these ladies do best as part of their social media marketing.

• On Belly Beyond’s Facebook page, you feel as if you are part of a greater community. Its not all just sell, sell, sell and promos (which are still good, but in moderation…). By adding a personal touch with discussions about baby names, wedding and baby photos, I feel as if I am part of a community of like minded mothers sharing information and having fun – you forget you are actually there to buy! The great part is that not only do they ask us to share personal tidbits, they also share behind the scenes photos and blog posts with us. Research shows that people are more willing to spend money with brands they  trust. How much more trusting can it get than buying from someone who is willing to share family photos and embarassing moments with you.
• Kate brings her collection of bags to life via video and you can’t beat seeing her love of all things bag-tastic as she pulls them apart and peeks inside. I love hearing her accent, makes me feel like I “know” her. I am also defnitely more tempted to spend after watching one of her videos.
• We talk, they listen. Its easy to get in touch with both companies as they have a presence across Twitter, Facebook and You Tube. They want to know what we want to buy. Does it make sense to stock what we actually want? They find out what we want, and stock it.
• Most importantly, they have their own company hubs online that are irregardless of any 3rd party platforms. Though they make great use of social media platforms, they are not at their mercy. Each has a solid websites, blogs and even wishlist facilities.

Once you can create that feeling that you understand your clients and what they want/need you are so much more likely to convert your fans into purchasers.

The flexibility that small business like these two have means that they are more intune to what their clients want and what is important to them. To cut through the marketing and advertising clutter, they are able to react fast and be more personal without a top heavy management team.

Its nice to get a personal shoutout from a business that you spend money with wanting to find out how your weekend was or if you’ve had your baby yet. Maybe the lack of a central social media peep makes it harder for bigger businesses to get to know their clientele. Don’t get me wrong, some big businesses are doing it right, but some could definitely learn from small businesses.

Being social media saavy isn’t just about setting up Twitter and Facebook – their are a huge number of platforms that you can use to help get your company name out through social media. But its best to choose only a few and to use them well.

Something that people also forget is the “SOCIAL” part of the equation. The key is in actually being social – creating conversation and connecting with people.

In an economy where their are at least 3 companies just like you, sometimes even just in your city -  you have to find a way to stand out above the rest.

These small businesses use social media to their advantage, what other businesses do you know of that are making good use of social media to market their business?

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Brands that have been in the social media game for a few years understand how to best use the internet to showcase their brand and grow a fan base. But what about brands that are now scrambling to be part of the buzz and grab a share of the social marketing pie. Often they see bloggers as an easy and cost effective way to get incredible spread of information about their brand across the interwebs.

Is working with a blogger or a group of bloggers the right fit for your company, and if so, how best to engage with them? If your company follows a few simple guidelines, the rules for engagement are really not that hard.

1. Any blogger worth working with as part of your social media plan is not a hobbyist, and as such they do not want to be treated as one. Allocating enough funds and making them an integral part of your social media/marketing/PR team insures that they will put aside the time, energy and creativity to work towards your company’s success.
2. Respect bloggers. This is so easy, yet so many PR companies and marketing reps often do not. Sending out pitches to anyone and everyone that is on your mailing list hoping for a writeup is not the way to go. If you identify a blogger that you want to work with, the best respect you can show them is to get to know what they are about, get to know their voice online and then and only then send them pitches that you feel may interest them and their readers. From past experience I can tell you there is nothing worst than opening an email that is a press release with not even so much as a hello. Furthermore, the press release has absolutely nothing to do with what I write about over at Girlstoys Revue. In no other profession, do people get contacted for something that they are so unsuited for. When was the last time you heard of a doctor being contacted to complete someone’s income tax?

How can you work with Bloggers?

Product reviews are a simple first step, but don’t be afraid to think outside the box. Many bloggers are not only great communicators via written word, some use video as well as other imaginative ways to engage their readers. Respect the bloggers knowledge and insight into their readers and how best to get your message across. Armed with this information and a well thought out plan of action, you can be rest assured that you can monitor any campaign you enter into with a blogger for successful outcomes.

Bloggers have spent time creating a trusted network of readers as well as other bloggers and as such they will want to work with you to make sure they are providing quality information and resources to their readers. From my perspective, I will only work with organizations that I can stand behind – after all, it is my brand, my voice that is at stake. And for that same reason, you can expect only the most professional professional service from me and any other blogger that I put you in touch with.

If you are interested in working with one or several bloggers to launch a product/service or act as an ambassador for your company, feel free to contact me to direct your blogger outreach efforts as well as to design a campaign.

You can call them brand ambassadors, evangelists, endorsers – the title is not as important as what these people can actually do for your brand. Big business has long used the celebrity endorsement to get people to think “I want to be like Ms Hollywood Celeb, so if she uses it, I’m using it too”. The Foot Soldier is someone outside your company, that uses their influence to spread your brand message.

As social media continues to become a key part of the marketing and PR bag of tricks, many companies have come to appreciate (and use) the more grassroots approach to celebrity endorsement, or as I like to call them, the foot soldier. These soldiers are everyday people who are already doing all the legwork and talking about your brand. Foot soldiers have established their personal brand and use their chosen platform to influence others. Nowadays, these soldiers are as good as rockstars – they spread a brand message to their thousands of followers on Twitter or add their personal recommendation to your product via their well read blog. The Foot Soldiers who walk amongst us are our respected friends (for the most part), therefore we trust and respect what they endorse.

How to spot Accidental Foot Soldiers for your brand?

Sure someone may write or tweet about your product or service because they love it. But if you want this to be an ongoing gig that evolves and actually gets you more clients, fans or subscribers to your list, you really have to look at making the Accidental Foot Soldier a purposeful part of your team – a true Foot Soldier. Depending on the length of engagement of your Foot Soldier with promoting/endorsing your brand, you need to compensate them accordingly. Sometimes free product will do but remember, you get what you pay for. More and more companies are creating Ambassador (Foot Soldier) jobs that are paid “regular” jobs.

Some duties of the grassroots Foot Soldier include:

Of most importance is that your Foot Soldier is armed with all the necessary tools to promote your brand. If you are serious about enlisting someone as a face for your company, you want to make sure they are consistent with your brand culture. Remember, they are adding value to your brand’s message, so make sure they have the ability to do this properly. A proper Foot Soldier is a solid investment in your brand.

Did you know that Social Media is a great way to get a feel for what your market is thinking? You can create a specific campaign to gather information as well as monitor your brand on the interwebs. The 2 really work hand in hand – what people are saying about you can and should affect how you engage with them. Here are a few quick steps that you can follow today:

1. Listen for your brand being mentioned across the web. Services like Google Alert and Saved Searches in Seesmic for Twitter make it easy to view a running thread of what others are saying about your company name.

2. Set up something apart from your business as usual website – think blog, Facebook Fan Page – great place to ask your fans questions. Conversely, encourage them to leave feedback good, bad or ugly. Generally, as long as you deal with it timely and effectively any and all feedback, even the bad stuff doesn’t have to be detrimental to your brand.

3. Remember that people will talk honestly and openly about your products and services in open forums. Get out there and find out where these forums are. You may have to go off the beaten track – there is more than just Twitter and Facebook. Some of your raving fans (or even haters, see People of Walmart) will setup their own groups on blogs and Ning platforms- its worth doing a search there.

The proactive person will not only monitor brand mentions, etc..but will respond and engage with the community as well as refine processes where needed. Remember to be transparent at all times. If you are going to jump into a forum discussion, make sure to say who you are – don’t just get in there and gloat about what a fantastic company you have.

How are you using web 2.0 to find out what your market thinks about your brand? If you aren’t using this method yet, how could you?

Facebook announced on November 4 new guidelines for how administrators of groups and pages can promote competitions and/or sweepstakes.

For alot of smaller to medium sized businesses this will have a huge impact on how they are already interacting with customers through Facebook. I won’t go into the finer points of the new changes, but here are a few of the points that really stick out and that you MUST take note of.

1. You will need written authorization from a Facebook account manager BEFORE you administer the promotion

2. All promotions must be on a 3rd party Facebook platform (more on this later)

3. And under Section 4 of the new lengthy rules, a prohibition that I already see alot of my friends infringeing on :

4.2 In the rules of the promotion, or otherwise, you will not condition entry to the promotion upon taking any action on Facebook, for example, updating a status, posting on a profile or Page, or uploading a photo.

This rules out the company that has established their Facebook presence as the main place to meetup with their fans and offer incentives and comps. So what kind of competitions does this rule out:

- Upload a photo to Facebook as entry to a competition

- Get your friends to join your fan page or refer others in exchange for the chance of winning a prize

- Add a comment to a fan page or group as entry to a competition

If you are running any kind of competition like this on Facebook, you’ll need to cease and desist or face the suspension of your group or fan page. The only workaround is to work with a 3rd party platform (such as Wildfire, which would be pricey for a fan page with less than 500 fans) or by creating your own Facebook application to run the promotion through.

I suggest you read the full guidelines as specified by Facebook and err on the side of caution.

This just serves as a subtle reminder to not to put all your eggs in one basket. As Facebook fan pages have increased in popularity, so have their uses gone beyond the imagination of even Facebook. This recent move allows them to indemnify themselves of any wrong doing you may cause via your sweepstake.

You are still allowed to promote on Facebook any competition you are running outside of Facebook, say on Twitter or your own blog.

For more information and to hear how others weigh in, see:

Official Facebook Promotion Guidelines

Thinking of running a promotion on Facebook? Think again?

Facebook Marketers Beware – New Promotion Guidelines Released

How is this going to affect how you use Facebook for business?

CLARIFICATION :

This rule change mainly affects people creating a contest BASED ON the Facebook platform or which directly asks people/fans/friends to do something on Facebook in order to win. So, if you ask your blog readers to upload photos on your Facebook Fan Page in order to be in to win, this would be a no-no unless you had prior written consent from your Facebook account manager (getting an account manager is another story and not really an option for most small-medium sized business I deal with unless you have a minimum 10,000 USD budget to spend on Facebook).

If you create a competition on your website, blog, Ning that is irrelevant of Facebook – but you link to it from Facebook, that is fine. Just do not mention Facebook in the promotion on your site or else this could be in infringement of the rules. For example if you placed a post on your blog that said, “Refer your friends to my site using Twitter, email or Facebook” – mentioning Facebook is an infringement.

Hope that clears up some of the questions I have received today.

With the recent change of Facebook’s News Feed and the reintroduction of the Live Feed, seems alot of people are even asking what the heck am I even doing on Facebook. Take a deep breath, calm down and sort out your feeds, setup groups to help you better visualize all your friends and their updates and then read this.  According to a recent study outlined at Mashable,

Facebook provides the most loyal visitors, with 20% of those that originate from the social network in turn visiting the site they landed upon four or more times in a week. Among other social media sites, Digg traffic produced loyal users 16% of the time, while Twitter traffic was only good for 11% loyalty.

If even a fraction of your time on Facebook is for business, then you need to have a presence there. If you still need convincing, here are another 5 reasons you should add Facebook to your Social Media mix.

1. You can easily import your blog posts to your feed using Networked Blogs to auto-publish (or choose when you want to publish). With your published blog feeds your friends are then given the option to be taken directly to your website to read the full article, the usual “like” feature, to share it on their profile, tweet out the post or even follow your blog through networkedblogs – what better way to build up your readership.

2. Minimal ads in compared to other social networks like Bebo, MySpace and even LinkedIn, your browsing experience is much more lightweight, nuf said.

3. Great tool for storing and sharing photos. With no specific limit on albums, why not load them up, tag people in them and share them on your profile. Though no album limit, there is a limit of 60 photos per album.

4.Following on from the last point, tagging is a great networking feature of Facebook. You can tag notes, photos and now with the @feature, you can mention people in your status updates that will provide a link to their profile.  Tagging is a brilliant way to see who is connected to your connections – closing the gap on the six degrees of separation (or 2 in NZ). Isn’t it true that if someone is a friend of a friend or fan of something you may well be interested as well?

5. Lastly, the Fan Page is an excellent business tool for funneling people to your business site and promoting your expertise – whether it be to promote a product, service or coaching based business. I have a Fan Page for #RSG Twitter Parties and Social Media and Business Advocacy for women, be sure to join up if you haven’t already just by clicking the “become a fan” button on the widget in the sidebar. Use Facebook Fan pages to generate ideas, get feedback and good ole enthusiasm about your brand on one of the fastest growing social networks out there. There are various ways to set your fan page apart, think back to that added value service you can create within your fan page that screams uniqueness – registries, regular tips, advice – the list is endless.

With these newest changes to Facebook, do you find yourself on it less?

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Just recently I was hoping to pitch for a small project consulting a company on their social media and online experiences as I had had dealings with them in the past on other initiatives. I was surprised to find that they were ahead of the game and had just hired an online community manager.

To my second surprise the skillsets of that individual seem to be lacking on the social media and community management side of things, but extremely well versed in the content matter of the community they are to manage. That lead me to wonder, who makes the better online community manager – the person experienced in building communities and leveraging social media, or the person who knows the community’s main point of topic inside out?

I believe that even with all the knowledge in the world, a content expert has little to no hope of making the most of social media if they are not inclined to find out more about how to use the tools at their disposal. I’ve seen it happen, where the knowledge expert creates the Twitter profile and starts up a Facebook Fan Page, but then what? And were those really the best avenues for them to use? The creativity, targeted solutions and ability to analyze and tweak campaigns is where the experience designer or social media expert comes into play.

On the other hand, I have seen content experts who have applied themselves and really engaged with their fan base, created awesome campaigns to grow their community and created added value experiences. But, be forewarned, its not everyone that can do this. Like any other part of your business, consider getting in expert help to create your strategy and help you implement it. You wouldn’t drudge along as your company accountant it if you knew you didn’t have the skills, it would negatively affect your business and take away from all the other good things that you can do in your business, would you? Same applies here. As long as the person responsible for your Social Media plan is committed to understanding and taking part in your company culture – this has the makings of a win-win relationship. You get to focus on the aspects of the business you are good at, and an expert gets to drive you business forward in an area they are good at.

Either way, as long as the experience is transparent and the audience knows who they are dealing with their can be wins if done correctly. Interested to hear your opinion – do you believe that a consultant can be your brand’s social media expert, or do you feel it is more logical to give a content expert the job even though they may not know how to use the tools?

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Seems every business owner and their dog is blogging. That is probably because the benefits to your company can be vast if done properly. If you are already blogging, I’m sure you’ve read about how it is good for driving traffic to your site if update regularly (for starters, Google loves all the new content). But what if your blog is just not bringing the sizzle and it does not actually have any readers. Have you assessed who you are trying to attract, is it inline with what you are blogging about? Are you giving them a reason to actually visit your blog?

Often times people forget what I like to call the 1-2 punch of blogging. First, through your blog you want to evoke an emotion or a feeling from your readers. The second part of the punch is to add value above and beyond your normal product offering.

A great reason to blog is to give personality to your comapny or brand. This is a space online where you can explore not just what your company does, but what feeling do you want your business to evoke in people. Take for example if you own a clothing business for kids. The fact of the matter is that you create clothes to clothe people, the squishy feely part of the business is that you create clothes to keep precious little people safe and protected from the elements. How could you turn an emotion such as “safety” and “protection” into a blog post that will attract your readers? Remember, people are often driven by emotion when making a purchase. How can you drive that emotional pull through the roof?

Ok, so your an online shop selling the same goods as about 25 other bazillion shops around the world. With your blog, you can set yourself apart by adding an extra service such as a regular how-to feature (care for, clean, match, etc…), downloadable ecards, other uses of your product, client testimonials and success stories are all great uses for your company blog. If your regular feature is engaging enough, it will bring people back, um, regularly of course. Leave the selling of the product to your actual product website. Don’t forget to get your readers involved – polls, requests for feedback and other interactive elements also make a successful blog.

Think about a feeling your business can evoke in others. Can you deliver the 1-2 punch through blogging?

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In order to create a successful online community, you have to give people what they want, and what they DON’T want is a hard sell. For this post, when I talk about an online community, I am referring to Blog followers/regular readers, Facebook fans, Twitter followers and set community groups such as those built on platforms like Ning.

People join a community to be part of something, not to be just another number in line, a code in a database or a bum on a seat. I have spent several years building up communities for our own online games and for other brands. The common thread in successful communities is the experience that is built into the community. An online community that is successful for both the business at the helm of it and the fans that are part of it, is a community that is engaging and offers above and beyond what the fans expect.

Here are a few examples of how you can create an experience that will make your fans even bigger fans, create new fans, and keep you top of mind in the marketplace.

• invite client feedback about products: make sure you have a community manager that can respond swiftly to negative comments. Even the most negative comment if dealt with correctly can put you in good stead with your fans.
• Don’t enforce too many rules on your community: Be ready to govern, but let nature take its course as well as you will no doubt have a few standout fans that will make the place even more interesting
• Make your fans part of your company culture, show them what you live: share photos from after work drinks, share special events dear to your staff i.e birth of the VPs first child (of course you’ll want to keep photos respectful, only those that invoke good vibes and won’t slander the company)
• Host online (and offline is a good idea too) events that compliment your business: webinars, twitter parties, anything that lets your community connect to each other

Remember, its about creating an experience that reminds your fans as to why they love you and enticing those on the outside into wanting to be on the inside to something great. What are you doing to make your online community a great experience?

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