BHS Please Pay Here sign © by exfordy

They have simple messages: here is the line. Here is where we make the food. Here’s where you pay. If we’re not ready when you are? Here’s where you wait.

And I’ll tell you why.

Our business is going through a growth stage, but not one big enough to address with staffing yet. For now we’re addressing with technology. I know what I want, I’m ready to buy, and I’m not interested in foreplay.

And I’m astounded by how many pages won’t just let me give them my money.

If we have to have a consultation before I buy a product, you lost me.

It’s one thing if you’re selling me consulting services, seo, writing, editing, anything where the cost will vary according to labor, difficulty etc. But for a product? I was ready to click buy. And now I’m not coming back.

If you give me too many options and none of them meets my needs, I’m audi 5000, G.

You can’t have a package for a solo entrepreneur, priced accordingly, then have the next tier of services make absolutely no sense. I want a non-free chat function for the site for myself, my two partners, my assistant and their interrn/part-timer/what-have-you to use.

The one I liked the best had options for 3 people, then the next level up was 7. Only the option for 7 was triple the cost of the one for three people.

Wouldn’t you make more sales pricing the next tier up for people who fall in-between, but see going up as a better value?  Nonsensical. I ended up going with another company whose prices make actual sense.

Who knows what problems I’ll face with a company that can’t master basic logic?

If you approach me in the wrong way or at the wrong time, you’ve lost me.

When my friend and I are talking about how to fix my problem with the iPad I already own, that’s the wrong time for you to send me a public message telling me I could win a free iPad by filling out the 47 page form on your site.

When I already have one.

Spammer.

If spam made sense? Half of it might actually be effective. But no, it’s always some idiot with a grand scheme to send 10,000 messages to get one sale, when with slightly more effort they could have gotten 100.

If we’ve agreed on a price, I’m ready to pay and you complicate things, you’ve lost me. Unless we’re really good friends and I owe you a favor.

One huge thing that kills so many fledgling businesses is making the process too complicated. I know because I’ve done it. I’m not perfect – I still do it sometimes. But I own it, I work on it and I get better every day.

If you’re making it too hard for people who want to give you their money, you’ll never get the people who are on the fence. And you may not get the people who’ve already given you that money back again. And it’s the repeat customer or client that builds you a business rather than a profitable hobby.

It’s almost as bad as letting rapid growth drown your company. Which we’ll talk about another day. In the mean time, just remember. People want to give you their money. Make it as easy for them to do it as you reasonably can.

That doesn’t mean force your services into a template if you have a business where you have to give a quote each time. I don’t want all my plumber friends going broke.

It means, it would almost be better not to have a website than it would be to make it confusing how to get in touch with you. That is, if you actually WANT business. There are a few circumstances where you should make yourself less available, like when the last thing you need in life is a new client or customer.

But that’s another story for another day.

I won’t lament about how they made it worse with a sadly backhanded apology or the Qwikster brand failure. And I don’t need to guess why Netflix screwed this up so royally- other have also speculated on the brilliant possibility of an Amazon- Netflix deal.

In fact, others smarter than me have written about all of these things already.

I’m just going to explain to you how a bit of social media finesse could have avoided the entire episode, if Netflix had been so inclined.

A look at the Netflix situation is a case study on what not to do – and from their mistakes, and other company’s successes, we can learn how to insulate our companies against a similar fate.

Community Around Netflix – Not Just Movies

People were passionate about Netflix – people are Still passionate about Netflix, just no longer in a positive way.

We customers were growing to love the experience and options Netflix was giving us, and those feelings were translating to its brand identity. Netflix had the technology to create the review systems, and partnered with Ning to create a film community.

Why not take those throngs of people and start having conversations with them?

Ask for community suggestions and let the community know when you implement them.

Communicate when there will be an outage on pages everyone views, such as the film queue. Or put a ticker across the top of the page when there are unexpected problems.

Hire customer service people to assist in on-site chats, and to write in the blog. And put them and other Netflix personnel from all parts of the company on Twitter, Google+ (under personal accounts of course), Facebook, Slideshare, YouTube – how was the video  apology the first and only YouTube video of a company centered around film?!

Please tell me I’m missing something and that a company that deals in moving images has another long standing YouTube account that I just couldn’t find.

Open Dialog and Transparency

Okay, let’s say Netflix was able to put together a social media strategy, and execute it well on multiple channels – (as well as using it internally, and tying it to CRM, oft-forgotten steps).

Stopping there is just asking for trouble if you don’t tell your public what is going on within the company, when those changes may directly affect the products you’ve sold them and the expectations you set for them. Why ask people to come to the table for dinner, if there isn’t going to be any food?

For example, remember when the first round of really vocal dissatisfaction started, back when Netflix lost the ability to stream The Social Network, even though it was on Starz?

If they’d had a better relationship with their customers, and informed them each step of the way the issues that were coming up, the users still might have been angry.

But it’s possible that instead of directing that anger at Netflix, it might have been directed at Starz, Sony, even the film industry. It’s even possible that Netflix could have spearheaded a public, vocal movement to make more films accessible to more people.

Which technically?

It already did. It’s part of the Netflix story that they helped push legal online streaming ahead in a way that film companies did not see as a threat. But it wasn’t public, vocal, or connected to a community. Could the Starz-Netflix deal gone differently had there been pressure for Starz to stay at the negotiating table? Possibly. Especially if it came from actual customers who intended to walk should talks crumble.

Speaking of the benefits of having a relationship with your customers that goes beyond sales and customer service: that goes to the heart of why the “apology” resulted in such strong reactions – seen particularly in the Facebook comments at the end of the blog post.

This act of contrition was almost universally deemed a failure in the press and it’s not just because it was too little, too late.

Never mind the fact that the apology didn’t feel like one to a great deal of the audience. This apology violated the first law of apologies – successful apologies take place in the context of successful relationships.

Making 11th hour regrets by saying “I’m sorry that you don’t like what we did” not only missed the point of apologizing in the first place, it misses the aforementioned concept to expressing regret that is so basic and central to making “I’m sorry” work, that, most people – and companies- are blind to it.

Had Netflix cultivated and nurtured the long-standing loyalty and perseverance of its most dedicated fans, even if it had still come down to an apology, their audience would have stuck by them with devotion rivaling that of the Apple brand fans.

Successful social media channels give you the opportunity to have that authentic connection in place before you screw up, and the goodwill in the relationship bank for the overdraft protection you’ll eventually need to keep it from feeling hollow.

The Love, Care, and Feeding of Your Evangelists

With a little advance notice even just to various film bloggers with varying sizes of audiences, they could have used the blogosphere and social media to tell their side of the story in the Starz negotiations.

Maybe even without Netflix needing to directing the conversation. They could have just said, “this is what we think is about to happen. Here’s why we want to prevent that. What do you think?”  With minimal prompting, I’m willing to bet that the community would have done one of two things.

The bloggers, and/or the audience that reads them. would have made a public appeal to Starz about why they should come to the table, possibly even threatening a boycott or buycott if Starz didn’t agree.

Or, worst case scenario, if Starz still didn’t agree to continuing the contract, the public would have heard and understood that Netflix did all they could, and sided with them in the agreement. There might even have been a mass exodus from Starz instead of Neflix. If you don’t believe me, just read some blog posts that oppose stunts Apple and pulled, and read the comments from the Apple fans. I’m an Apple fan, I disclose, though I don’t go as far as to defend their mistakes, I am the exception.

Much better than a mass exodus and negative public outcry, yes?

So what’s the lesson in all of this?

Use social media tools, community, PR, even search and marketing, together in one systemic plan to not only guard against issues that may come up when your company is hot water.  But to please your customer so much that you don’t get into trouble in the first place even if you screw up and are clearly in the wrong.

People can be understanding, or even excuse your mis-steps, if they feel trust that your company has open lines of communication, and does what they do with the intention of serving their customers through improving their products. Work with your client base to find out what they want, how to deliver it to them, even to crowdsource ideas of how to overcome problems, and come up with new services.

From the Sony deal forward, Netflix could have dodged this bullet completely, just with better PR, community and better incorporation of social media tools.

This afternoon, I was reading an article at KikScore about the Better Business Bureau. I’ve heard many complaints about them over the past few years. Personally I don’t know what to think, as I’ve only been on the consumer end of using them as a point of research.

Here’s what Raj wrote that inspired me to write about this today, in his post entitled “Better Business Bureau – An Accreditation Process Based On How Much Money Your SmallBiz Pays?“:

Remember the Better Business Bureau?  Do you use it? Do you like it? If you found it helpful…well it might not be as helpful as you thought it would be.

According to MSNBC, the BBB’s accreditation process might be based purely on money. Criticism is being directed at the BBB’s aggressive membership sales process.  The BBB has admitted to making mistakes and said that they have reviewed the 16 factors that they consider when deciding whether or not give a business accreditation.  MSNBC’s post goes on to say that it’s better for consumers to solicit opinions on Social Media platforms on the business that you are interested in as opposed to specifically relying on the Better Business Bureau.

This is not the first time that there has been some criticism of BBB as we previously covered news reports by ABC News of BBB allegedly selling grades for small businesses.

The thing that alarms me about the BBB is that they seem to be taking an 20th century view of how to handle an upset customer into the 21st century. I wouldn’t argue against needing a place for people to complain and be heard once they exhaust all their other resources.

But part of me wonders why they never took the opportunity to paint a full picture. The BBB could have been the leaders at taking a neutral stance, and organizing a balanced picture of a company including the Entire social media picture of the company (%positive vs %negative, not just quantity of followers/connections/retweets/likes).

Because companies like Amazon have taken the way we view criticism to a new level. We mistrust products that have 100% positive reviews as much as we mistrust the ones that have 50% negative. We’re learning to accept that everyone doesn’t get along, and that sometimes it’s not that the company is a bad one, it’s that there was a bad fit.

It’s like when I’m reading movie reviews and I find one bad one – a lot of times someone who likes romantic comedies will give an action picture a bad score because it was an action picture.

But that’s not about quality of the product, that’s about expectation and preference. Just because you don’t like that kind of movie doesn’t mean it’s a bad movie.

Not to say that I’m advocating the right to just ignore pieces of information that we perceive as negative. It seems unfair that a person or company can say whatever they want to about another company or person without the other party being given equal time. Rip Off Report has rebuttals, yes, but have you ever given the weight of a rebuttal equal time in your mind on those sites, as a consumer? And is being on the defensive the best way to present yourself in a positive light?

Another way to view this is in the case of a bigger company trying to swallow a smaller company. If there’s no regulation beyond suing for slander or libel, then a big company could theoretically hire individuals to post negative views, or even help fund people who have grievances to attempt to pressure the small entity to sell, and not even know it was happening. Common, no, but not unheard of, not by a long shot. In that case is it really fair that the company with the larger resources wins?

Yes, with social media and proactive reputation management, the smaller company can persevere. But how many small corporations know to be proactive? I just read on Small Business trends that 47% of small business still don’t use social media! What will you defend your good name with if you don’t have these channels set up and active in advance? It is a long, hard, uphill struggle to build a good reputation on top of a bad one. There’s much less effort to ward off attacks from a strong offensive position – you may even have your fans rally on your behalf.

But never mind being subtle – to be blunt you need to set up your social media channels now if for no other reason than to be prepared for an attack on your reputation. No matter what great footing you may have now, one slip-up by one employee, or one comment taken out of context can screw up years of unblemished conduct if you don’t have the tools ready to fight back.

First understand that a reputation breach is ANY incident that smudges the image you want to project of your company.  These aren’t always originating from outside the company.

For example, if you want to project the image that you’re a company that listens, but you never answer your blog posts, that’s still a breach.

They’re also not always hostile or malicious. If your customers are unhappy because you changed something they like about your product, and they say so on your Facebook page – a lack of response is also a breach.

But of course, these breaches also include times when you look up your company name and find spam sites listed.

So what do you do?

1. Handle the Incident Directly and ImmediatelyThe second you see a breach, it should be addressed. Make sure someone in every level of your organization is empowered to speak on behalf on the company within an hour of a breach, even if it’s just to say “thanks for pointing that out, we’re having an internal discussion about that, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
2. If you’ve made a mistake, own it.Saving face is 20th century. Own up to mistakes. Simply having a person in power say “We’re sorry. What can we do to make it better.” is enough. In the case of a breach of your search results, skip the finger-pointing stage. Everyone involved in working on the web side of the company identity should accept responsibility for preventing future breaches, and get to work on making existing owned and leased web properties more appetizing than the spam results or false information.  Go back over suggestions from internal staff and service companies – recommendations that may have seemed trivial at the time may have been made to prevent the situation you’re in now. If you have those minds in place already, eat the humble pie and get those brains back on your side.
3. Take action not just to recover from the current breach, but to prevent future breaches.Why did this happen? Were you looking at competitors in terms of making a better product, not just having better marketing? Did you attempt to build a better mouse trap without including the input of present mouse trap owners?  Is the community angry because they asked you to keep the one feature that you changed? Where is the bad press coming from? Is it one company responding to your success or is this an industry-wide problem that other companies like yours are facing due to public fears?
4. Implement a test bed.Of course, you don’t want to post negative commentary against your own company to see how it holds up. Even when things don’t pop up in search, they can spread quickly in social if you don’t have some kind of strategy in place to address false rumors and the like. What you will want to do is continue to publish articles, images, videos, etc, on properties you own (your blog or press room) as well as those you only own a piece of (YouTube, Facebook), and pay attention to the traction they get naturally, in contrast to the results from an organized effort to have published items disseminated. It’s useful to understand how these communities work and what the signs of viral spread are, as well as to monitor your company and product name using Google and Yahoo alerts.

Reputation management isn’t just about keeping inaccurate data from false representing your company. It’s about presenting the best picture of your company that you can, and quickly addressing all the alternate views that may present themselves.

Better yet, just what in the heck am I even talking about?

Managing your reputation online.

It’s one of the fears that executives at successful companies have about the internet – anyone can say anything about any person, place or thing on the web, and it can go completely unchallenged as long as it doesn’t rise to the level of libel (or slander in the case of video or audio.)

And that’s one way to look at it. But what’s missing is that search and social are the ultimate referees.

The assumption is that what ever information out there is

1- find-able,

2- usable,

3- relevant and

4- thought to be so by search engines and people using social media.

This assumption is fueled by the fact that is it technically correct sometimes. However, it isn’t always practically so.

Just because another company can say – or has said – something bad about you doesn’t mean that item is going to appear whenever your name is mentioned. If you know to look for a particular article by a specific name, then yes, that article would be much easier to find, assuming the people who published it know how to bring it to a search engine’s attention, or at least to the attention of someone who uses social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

On the other hand, people may just be looking up your company name to make sure you aren’t running a scam, or to find positive reviews about you before they buy. If that’s the case, a lone article against you may not show up – IF the other hundreds of positive commentary is already at the top and well-supported.

What if it does? Well, there are defenses against that, but I’m writing about the offensive today, so we won’t wade too deeply into those waters now.  (If you have an emergency, feel free to call me.)

A Good Offense is the Best Defense

Who hasn’t heard that one a dozen times? Yawn, I know. Another boring thing you don’t want to hear: you keep hearing it because it’s true and it works.

Being prepared for the eventuality of bad press or negative customer reaction to an isolated incident is just good business. If you’re successful enough, you will have opposition.

Sometimes it will be from customers trying to make a good thing better (they wouldn’t be your customers if you hadn’t made a positive impact on them in the past).  They wouldn’t yell so loudly if they were sure no one would listen.

Other times, competitors have been known to be cut-throat, floating falsehoods out there in the name of getting on top or staying there.

But what does it actually mean, in terms of preventing some lie from the competition being planted to breach your wall of accuracy and (hopefully) truth?

It means that if your blog community is strong enough, your fan base may come to the rescue before you even know there’s a problem. Very strong advantage to building a community.

And whether it is or not, just being present and answering all feedback right away is your best weapon against things spinning out of control. Don’t be afraid to respond. Be afraid of what happens when what could have been a short discussion with a group of customers becomes a PR nightmare about how much you and your company failed to respond.

It means that if your search results are well-insulated, a few amateur attacks won’t bear much fruit beyond a day or so of bad online press. if your search results can’t be breached – it’s like throwing spitballs at a flame-breathing dragon. You, as the dragon, won’t feel a thing.

Most companies simply don’t have strong enough defense against outside attacks, because they are focused on the part of search that yields sales.

And in the short term, rightfully so. There’s no budget to secure company search results if the company isn’t making money. On the other hand, you don’t want to suddenly lose revenue because of a reputation attack. Some of these folks are clever -  if the story is technically true enough to get a case of slander thrown out, then fear of litigation isn’t a deterrent to a reputation attack, particularly one that isn’t a manageable side effect of regular company business, as a poor customer reaction to a new feature in a product.

But as soon as your company is on firm footing, no matter how small or large you are, you want to leverage whatever input you have about the perception of your company as best you can.

Having a Good Offensive Strategy for Reputation Management

Reputation management is a tricky thing to write about, because people who are seeking to damage another entity’s reputation will read these articles and blog posts, and use the advice we give you against you. If you can, you’ll want to retain a professional’s advice. Look that professional up and investigate them and their company, beyond what you can find in Google and reading online. You’re looking for positive feedback that you can verify. Do their testimonials give websites and company names? Do they have a list ready for you when you call and ask?

Once you’ve got that person, here are some of the things you’ll want to have them examine – again, this won’t go into too many details, but it’s enough for you to get started on your own or take to a professional.

1. Is your site submitted to the proper positive and neutral directories in its category? There are probably more you’re eligible to be listed in, but be wary of the sites that claim to submit you to 3500 – there are nowhere near that many good ones.
2. How close are the ties between you and your online community? Best case scenario is an active community that is willing to spread the word about you when directed to do so. Worst case is not the absence of one, it’s having one that your competition has found and is influencing to your detriment.
3. Are you leveraging both inside and outside customers to your advantage with simple calls to action?
4. Are you serving your community or are you mistaking a list of customers as a community?
5. Is the information on your site up-to-date, truthful and clear? In other words, are you vulnerable to attack by having old information on your site that is no longer true or accurate, which could be twisted into a weapon against you?
6. Does the information on your site flow into the conversation stream of your intended audience? An example: if you sell lemonade, your blog posts should be in the neighborhood of lemon, lemonade and related things like lemonade pitchers. You can get away with up to 15% of your content on other topics. But if you’re not writing about what your customers want to learn about, someone else is. And that someone may be stealing the audience you’ve built, even feeding them bad data.

Next time – Handling Reputation breaches

A snapshot from my response:

My opinion – technically, we don’t “need” any of this stuff. They all have their uses. If you have enough money to advertise, and can also hire a PR firm to create the necessary goodwill and press opportunities to get you where you need to be, who needs blogging?

It’s not a need, it’s an option.

It’s an option for people who want to

• directly reach their customers, instead of paying for advertising,
• reach them through relationship marketing and/or expertise marketing, while they are more open to whatever solution you want to present
  shorten the sales cycle,
• have better search engine traffic,
• have a new opportunity to rank for or maintain 1 – 11 additional search terms instead of just one,
• reach their peers for affiliate and JV opportunities in a highly effective manner, and,
• find new, more affluent clientele that are more willing to pay a premium price for the products and services you offer.

Now, some of that you can get with advertising. Some you can do with podcasting or Facebook. But there’s no where else you can get all of that in one place, at the price of your time (or a writer’s).

Actually you don’t need to write that well. If you can write an email, you can write a blog post. If you hate writing you can hire ghost bloggers, who take your ideas and turn them into blog posts. Or you can create an audio or video series.

To move on to Twitter – again, it’s not a need. It can help you get your blog posts, ideas and links in front of a wider audience doing keyword searches or looking to connect to experts at a low time and cost. But you can do that with YouTube, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Amplify, and now, Google+.

The key is to find one or two social media sites where you feel comfortable spending an hour or so each week, split into a few minutes throughout your day or in 15 minute blocks. Some of the major sites you can occasionally repeat the same content in, though not all the time.

There’s no law that says you have to do all of them, or any of them, really. But if you want the results that come with them, try thinking of them as business tools, and treat them accordingly.

I once had a friend who said they hated Twitter. I told her that she didn’t have to fall in love with it. She just had to determine if it had a use that applied to her business.

 

If you have advice for them, do share. I’m thinking of putting together a list of links about this subject.

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of attending another Women Grow Business Pay it Forward event, How to Promote and Track Your Social Content, featuring Priya Ramesh. The video footage is of her presentation, which I greatly enjoyed and was honored to be invited to play a minor role in.

At the event, I learned about several resources I didn’t know about before, and also got to enjoy some advice from Shashi Bellamkonda, Network Solution’s Social Media Swami. If you want to see how to connect social media to in-person relationships, Priya and Shashi are great people to learn from online and well as off.

Below you’ll find her slides from the event. Over the next few posts, I’ll zero in on some of the highlights of the evening, along with some video I shot myself.

Because I’m a proud member of Network Solution’s Social Media Advisory Board, you might be thinking, “well, of course she’s going to promote the events they put on.” But I have to tell you, you’ve got it backwards. I accepted a position on their board because of the many ways they are constantly giving back to the small business community, online and off.

These events, free or not, virtual or physical, enrich the lives of small business owners everywhere. As you’ll see when you watch the video, they aren’t the typical, dry workshops you may have paid thousands to attend in the past. They’re vibrant, peer-driven discussions where most of the people attending get value out of the experience, or are welcome to add their input and experience.

If you can ever attend, virtually or not, you’ll find that time well spent. Hope you enjoy the resources, and please share any events, groups or meetups you feel as passionately about.

Tomorrow I’ll be back with more to share and some insights.

Thanks so much to Women Grow Business and Network Solutions for having me!

Getting search engine traffic without the SEO pains

Am I going to tell you to get ranked for lots of terms that get no traffic? Nope, sorry, not that either.

Here’s what you need to do. You need get someone to help you find a traffic-ready content deficit that matches your industry, and learn how to exploit it. Now, normally exploitation is a bad thing – but in this case, there’s a specific party that Wants you to do it. You’ll never guess who.

No it’s not me. Yes, I do hope you ask me to help you find your content deficit one day soon. For now, I’m just happy you’ll know what to ask for, and glad to help you shave a year off your learning curve about search engines.

So who wants you to exploit content deficits?

The search engines. Yes, Google, and Bing actually would love to give you a first page ranking. So why don’t you have one?

Because you’re probably trying to bend the search engine rules to fit your site in, instead of bending your search strategy to fit the search engines. That, or you are attempting to win a race by starting at the finish line.

There is No Spoon, Neo…

It’s time to change the way you think about search.

Most people will think, “I want to rank number one for marketing.” They’ll find out that top sites ranked for marketing get around 3,878 visitors per day and proceed to direct every waking moment to capturing this term at any cost. They think if they make their site SEO-perfect, the visitors will follow.

The belief is that ten times more traffic from “marketing”- or only optimizing your pages for “marketing”- will equal ten times more clients. And even if this weren’t a highly inappropriate, unlikely term to capture, that ratio probably isn’t true in this case. General terms tend to bring browsers instead of buyers.

Be the person who thinks “I need 4000 more visitors this month – what are the best ways to get them.” not “I must rank number one for this, and only this term.” You’ll likely make more money and have fewer headaches to boot.

In case you don’t know what hashtags are, Twitter says “The # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages.”

Here’s a quote from the article:

With on-screen hashtags, networks are tapping into existing conversations. TV shows regularly appear in the Twitter trending topics during prime time. Special events, such as awards shows (#oscars) and sporting events (#sb45), are especially popular for live tweeting.

My comment:

Cable networks with smaller audiences like Bravo have been heavily promoting hashtags, and have gone so far as to have 15 – 30 second spots during commercial breaks featuring what was taking place in the Twitter stream during the commercial, as far back as 2009. And though it seems like it’s not a significant enough portion of America that uses social media at that level, the viewers who gather around those hashtags make much more of an impact on the shows with smaller audiences.

But it’s even deeper than that. A few short years ago, if network executives wanted to take the temperature of the market, they either had to

• wait for the market to respond – usually in an unfavorable way,
• organize in-take research such as focus groups, or
• get third-party data from organizations like Nielsen’s TV Ratings

The one thing all these research methods have in common is that there is a time delay.

With hashtags, even if the segment of the market they’re measuring is small – they can now get immediate feedback. People will tell them how they feel about the show while they are watching.

Think about how valuable it would be to your business, to get access to real-time research on what your prospects and customers think about your product and services as they are using it. Think about how much faster you can improve your products, make changes, provide support, respond to, or even predict market trends.

We’ll come back to that momentarily. There’s another point we have to review first.

Through developing Twitter communities, Bravo is also developing more rabid fans – there’d be a furor if any of the Real Housewives shows were to go off the air unexpectedly. (Well, except Miami and DC. Boring incarnations – but again, guess how they figured out the market reaction.)

Twitter is how they found out what the viewers were thinking. And don’t think Twitter doesn’t know how powerful the hashtag is for TV.

Hashtags give the television industry a tool they didn’t have before – a real time barometer of what’s happening. It’s likely an inexact measure, sure. But a real time feedback loop is a tool to be reckoned with, one that was not available to businesses before, and isn’t on the radar of most business owners today.

Think about how you can use hashtags to enhance your business research – or in the case of a tweetchat, community – today.

Yesterday, I had the honor and the pleasure of being a floating expert at What’s Next DC. I was invited by Vanessa French at Jill Foster‘s suggestion. Basically that meant I got to help people start implementing solutions and ideas during the conference – and not have to pitch anyone.

(In the proper environment, I will do a pitch and have an elevator version, but I’ve never thought conferences were the right venue.)

This is the first year of this conference, but after reading the site (and a few posts that had me under the mistaken belief that there’d been one before!), I thought I knew what to expect.

It wasn’t quite what I expected, but still much better than I had hopted.

On all fronts, What’s Next DC was an overall win with minor mini-fails that I’ll write about later on in the week. Overall though, especially for a first conference, The Green Buzz Agency did a fantastic job.

If you missed it, or are looking for key resources, I put together a Storify embed that I’ll be updating over time to help you find things. Should you want to add things, just @ me with the link on Twitter (@Tinu), and I’ll take a look.

Some highlights:

The What’s Next DC Website
Rand Fishkin‘s presentation on Slideshare. (Just adore him and SEOMoz. Great search tools, smart jargon-light man.)
@Captico‘s What’s Next DC Twitter List

The “Social Media: Changing Business” slide from @Shonali‘s fantastic presentation.

For now, let’s talk about the new 4:30 am news broadcast.

The article I’m clipping from was both in the Metro print version of the Washington Post, as well as the online version. It’s entitled “A plethora of local news for early risers.”

The more news a station produces, the lower the overall cost of its news operation becomes.

“It’s one of the more efficient things a station can do,” said Allan Horlick, WUSA’s general manager.

And, when a station airs a syndicated show, say “Cops” reruns, or a network-produced news program at 4:30 a.m., typically it has to turn over a large chunk of the advertising time available in the show to the company that has provided the program to the station.

But when a TV station airs a locally produced newscast at 4:30 a.m., it gets to sell all the ad time in the show. Ka-ching!

And local newscasts attract more viewers.

This immediately brought three questions to mind.

1. Why are people waking up so early?

4:30 is the actual butt-crack of dawn. I know because when I was an assistant teacher at a day care in Fort Washington, that’s what time I had to wake up if I was going to get out of bed by 5 am for my 6 am to noon shift.

2. Is there an opportunity here to explore great advertising rates for the types of businesses an early riser would typically run into?

Breakfast diners? Coffee shops? Perhaps even targeted to people who leave work early due to getting there early? Or to folks who are probably getting online early as well?

3. What am I not doing in my business that could increase revenue with just a little effort?

One of the things I learned last year is that sending out a newsletter more often – even one that doesn’t sell every time – increases sales, even though I often forget to link to a sales page or even mention one.

It doubles my blog traffic to tweet out a link from a blog I wrote for that isn’t connected to Twitter for auto-updates. And adding my blog to Facebook ensures a steady stream of often responsive visitors.

There have got to be other places a small change can make a big impact.

We’ll talk about these points and others as we go on to discuss how the offline news impacts us, and how we can impact it, throughout the month of January. In the meantime, read that article. It reveals some of the marketing ideas behind network news choices. Feel free to share anything that you find helps your business.

Safeway stopped delivery in our area with very little forewarning — it was the only grocery delivery service that came to our area. It’s not a bad area, nor is it sparsely populated. A driver I ran into, who didn’t know they were going to stop making deliveries to our area, told us they send more groceries with higher grocery totals to where we live, than to the rest of their route, which they will be keeping.

It’s certainly bad enough that they ended a service that we need, with no notice or request of what we think. Some people think that because the change doesn’t seem to make economic sense, that it may be racially motivated.

I doubt that but I can see why it’s coming up. They kept the “white” areas and stopped delivering to the “black” areas, even though the “black” areas make them more money.

But if it was racially motivated, I believe the move would have happened a long time ago.

There’s no getting around the fact that Safeway made this move with very little class or finesse. But it didn’t seem like a big enough issue to make noise about. I just don’t shop at Safeway anymore. We have a big family and I could easily spend $1000 a month on groceries if I was the only one shopping. But I guess they’re a big company and won’t miss me.

However, it was in exceptionally poor taste for Safeway to then send me a coupon asking me to come back.

Isn’t smart enough to know why I’m gone?

I recently wrote an article on my flagship site called “4 Quick Tips for Dominating the New Google“. It’s actually just a small sliver of information telling you how to you can get great rankings in the New Google and keep them for years even when the search engines inevitably change the way they rank sites.

The overview video was just uploaded to our Kyte.tv Web Traffic Channel, and you can watch it free from any page of the site. It’s the first part of our “Dominating the New Google” video series that’s currently on sale.  Enjoy!

Why constantly chase algorithms and tweak your site to pursue a single number one page ranking for a specific term, when you can rank on the first page for the entire keyword tree of several hundred keywords, with less effort?

This is the technique we employ at Leveraged Promotion. The irony? In the long run, you get those first page and number one rankings anyway…. and many of the rankings in-between. We’ll show you how to turn that traffic into more sales.

Have you seen the new commercial from Office Depot about the Barber? It was recently featured on AdWeek, and made me think of how much we all have to offer in our businesses.

Recessions and other hard times we control come and go and the first thing many entrepreneurs want to do is cut their prices. Some of my partners on various projects wanted me to, just like the barber in the commercial. But I know what it costs to do a quality job, and our margins are thin enough already. If anything, we should be raising prices, but I refuse to do that until we can’t help it, at least until we’re clear of the recession.

So many people think you have to cut prices to compete, but experience has taught me that people who are only concerned with cost are not the greatest customers in the world. Not to mention that most of the time, to cut costs, you also have to cut quality.

If you want to compete, there are other things to compete on besides price. Like what?

Well, if you didn’t watch the commercial above, let me explain what it was about and you’ll see for yourself one obvious place. Quick summary: a local barber is charging $15 for quality haircuts. A chain moves in offering $6 haircuts across the street from him. He creates a banner to hang on his shop that says “We fix $6 haircuts”. The competition is run out of business.

You got it: quality.

You can compete on quality, speed, customer service, variety of selection, personal service, automated check-out, catering to certain demographics like Work at Home Moms, or personality types, like techies who don’t want to stand in line at the store and can order your widget online.

The only problem you may have is in finding that audience. If you do, call us up. Or email. Or reply to the blog post.

You get the picture.

From “Internet Branding: The Corporate Image Challenge of 2006” :

Author Naseem Javed goes on to point out the major areas that corporations need to work on to stand out online.

	Internet Branding: The Corporate Image Challenge of 2006
	Read the full article here
	http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/ORyedXsfsM2vUm/Internet-Branding-The-Corporate-Image-Challenge-of-2006.xhtml
	Give Your Site a Distinct, Branded Personality
	Contact us for assistance with enhancing your online brand, and stop getting lost in the crowd.

]]> http://leveragedpromotion.com/internet-branding.php/feed 0 http://leveragedpromotion.com/interesting-article-on-branding.php http://leveragedpromotion.com/interesting-article-on-branding.php#comments Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:09:16 +0000 Tinu http://leveragedpromotion.com/?p=332

In it he says:

While I don’t necessarily think a Super Bowl Ad is a bad purchase (ask Bob Parsons), I agree wholeheartedly that you can’t buy a brand… or else every company with the moolah would have a successful one.

It fits so smoothly into the mission of a blog as well. Definitely worth a read.

	Link to Main Page of Guy’s Blog
	http://blog.guykawasaki.com/
	Drag this link into your reader to subscribe to Guy Kawasaki’s Blog

]]> http://leveragedpromotion.com/interesting-article-on-branding.php/feed 0