Over at the Twitter feed today there was a great link from the Mashable folks. Here is the link for you to clickie for the full story (it is worth the few minutes it will take to read if you find the video below interesting, even more great data there).

Some researchers performed a word analysis to follow the mood of the Twitter users throughout the day. They matched up with tweets with data from the US Census Bureau, Google Maps and More. Using about 300 million tweets over the course of three years (and the above data) they were able to build a map of the US showing the mood of the country shift during the course of a day.

If you’re in the US, how did your state fare? (Here in IL we stayed on the Red(ish) side most of the time, no green ever.)

And, here is the video below:

As more and more people use social media, business is trying to catch up – and they haven’t been able to. A great report over at www.web-strategist.com discusses this issue. Here are some highlights:

Companies are unable to scale to keep up with the social phenomenon. We know that customers are using these social technologies to share their voices, and companies are having a very difficult time to keep up.

•For companies, real time is not fast enough. Companies need to be able to anticipate what customers are doing to say and do, in order to keep up. Although Motrin responded to angry mom’s within 24 hours –it was too slow.

•Companies are unable to scale to meet the needs of social. No matter how many community managers Dell and ComcastCares hires to support, they’ll never be able to match the number of customers happening. They need tools, and they need them now.

•Customers don’t care what department you’re in they just want their problem fixed. Dooce’s support problem with Maytag quickly became a PR nightmare –had the support group known she was an influencer (and what it means), they could have serviced her better.

This report is designed to be used, not just read. There are 18 use cases, with problems and goals defined for each. Lastly, there are solid recommendations for these 18 cases, so you can take this knowledge and put it to practical use. This is one report that is worth your time.

As the world gets more and more integrated online, businesses searching clients and clients searching businesses has become the normal way of life. Anytime I need to search out something now, off to the search engine I go. Phone books and yellow pages are no longer even present in our home.

One company we all know and love is merging the offline and online world even more with a new announcement: Facebook. They are at it again. This time they are providing window stickers to businesses, to advertise their Facebook page on the window of their storefront. Now where you see the credit card stickers, you can expect to see savvy business owners adding the Facebook sticker.

Facebook is clearly getting very serious about local business. They know this is the future. Those business owners who are building a social media presence today are giving themselves a leg up on their competition. Not long from now, you will either be taking advantage of all the Internet and social media have to offer, or your business will go the way of the buggy whip industry.

While the sticker itself isn’t going to be a game changer for any single industry, it very clearly illustrates the trend. And the organizations that are using this sticker are reporting positive results. In the letter from Facebook below, you can see a great proof: Businesses that promote their Facebook page off Facebook tend to see a 20% or greater increase in connections.

Facebook has over 400 Million active users, and some are currently arguing they will be the company to overtake Google. With the sticker and letter above you can see that Facebook is going after local business owners, and they are spending their dollars to build up this market.
It is possible that before long, for any local business, being found on Facebook will be more important that being on page 1 of Google.

Google may have finally met its match!

Although we are focused here on working with small and mid sized businesses, we keep our eyes open on what the big guys are doing as well. Some great stats came out recently about social media at the Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies.

The study was done by PR firm Burson-Marsteller, and they studied the largest 100 companies on the Fortune 500 list. What they found was that nearly 80% of them are now using YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or corporate blogs to communicate with their clients, customers, partners, and shareholders.

For these top 100 companies, Twitter is the most popular, with two-thirds of them having at least one company Twitter account (on average they have 4.2 Twitter accounts per company). Over 50% of them have at least one Facebook fan page, 50% have one or more YouTube channels, and about a third have at least one corporate blog. Just under a fourth of the top 100 use all four of these platforms.

They found some regional differences. Those companies that are based in the US and Europe use Twitter and Facebook more than corporate blogging, while in the Asia-Pacific region the corporate blogs are used more than other forms of social media. An interesting note here is that some Asian companies seem to have a split strategy, where they use tools like Twitter and Facebook when dealing with their audiences in the US or Europe, over the more traditional blogging for their Asian audiences.

You can download the full report here: http://bit.ly/d9b81i (It is a long link, so bit.ly shorter version here. Will go to the main Burson-Marsteller site.)

So even though we’re small, the Internet has taken the whole playing field and put our smaller business on the exact same level as the top 100 companies of the Fortune 500.

In a March article, the folks at eMarketer.com have presented some great research found in “The State of Small Business Report“. The original report is from Network Solutions and the Center for Excellence in Service (found at the Univ. of Maryland School of Business). This research is showing that once small business owners get on board and utilize social media, that they are satisfied with their results. Seeing as how so often entrepreneurs and small business owners are not so satisfied with other forms of marketing, this is a great development.

Of course, we all like pictures (along with bunnies and shiny coins), so here is the main graph from the research:

A whopping 75% of respondents are using Facebook or LinkedIn, and nearly 70% are posting updates and other information to their profile or fan pages. Had this been a cross section of all business in the US, the numbers would be much lower since most businesses have yet to embrace social media. In their research, they noted that social media use is now up to 24% of all business, up from 12% one year before. That is an amazing growth rate.

Along with the previous information on how business is using some of their social media sites and services, owners were asked about their expectations. Specifically, they were asked if the expectations of using social media were in line with the actual results they achieved. There is a gap between expectations and reality in terms of identifying and attracting new customers. I would like to see a follow up study to try and determine if the expectations were too high, or if the strategy wasn’t in line with what owners were hoping for. Here is the main graph from this section:

Interesting to note that customer engagement, and collaboration issues were close in line with expectations. This leads me to believe that the initial thoughts on what social media can do, in terms of new customers, were a bit too high and not in line with reality. Social media is a tool, to be used along with, and in line with, the other business strategies. It can easily take six months to get an effective social media strategy in place.

Lastly, it is worth noting that most businesses say they are break even with their expectations, and one-fifth have found it to already be profitable. Almost half feel social media will make them money in the next year, and around 40% on top of that feel they will be break even. Only 9% feel that by the end of the next year will they have lost money with their social media efforts.

Let’s check back in a year and see to what level small business adoption has grown! Will it get to 36%?

An interesting post at Maria Gudelis blog got me thinking about this topic. I’ve decided to post here for folks as well. I know it isn’t exactly Social Media (although I fit a few points in there), but we can all use some insight into selling, no matter our industry. So, here are my thoughts on what we can learn from children about selling…

As a father of four, I’ve been able to watch this up and close for years. I’ve actually thought about this lots so I’m going to do my best to limit my comments here – or this will quickly get too big!

Children have yet to learn to be fearful of being told no. As adults we have learned to be fearful of the answer, “They might say no!” Yes, and? So What? Get over it. Move on. Kids know that, we forgot it.

Virtually all of the toys or other “stuff” that children want matters little a few days (or even minutes!) later on. They have a target, a desire, and go after it. If denied, they don’t spend the next week going over every detail of why they didn’t get it, and it sure won’t prevent them from asking again. (Kind of like when Dad says no, the kids go ask Mom.) They get over it, and move on to the next hot item. We should learn that lesson. Go after the potential client. If that client says no, go ask another client!

Along with the above, kids are great at asking for the close. When was the last time a parent went to the store and the kid (in a somewhat subtle manner) quietly suggested that perhaps that new candy bar might be a welcome addition to the shopping cart, but only if Mom or Dad felt it was appropriate for today, and the right budget, and within the time constraints of the shopping trip? Um, no. Kids simply tell you what they want, direct and to the point. They go for the close. They don’t hint. Often they’ll just throw the thing in the cart on their own! We need to learn this, to go ahead and move past the discussion and ask for it. Kids know: if you don’t ask for it, you won’t get it.

One thing all kids use is social proof. (Ha! Look at me fitting in all the terms the cool kids use!) All parents are very aware of hearing, “Well, Suzy’s mom let’s her.” or “All my other friends do it.” And so on. We get testimonial after testimonial. Sometimes the kids even bring the other kids along to tell us their testimonials in person. Forget video, how about in-person testimonials! We have learned the power of testimonials from our own children.

As the kids get a little older, they learn the buttons to push and boy do they do that well. For any of us who are fathers of girls, we know instantly what is coming when the question starts with “Daddy” versus “Dad”. You know what? Even though we know it… it works! Because by using that not-so-subtle shift in words they have been able to appeal to the emotional side we have as men of not wanting our daughters to grow up and away from our control, so we’ll give in to keep them young and close. (All along we know it is a sales pitch, but we let it work anyway.) We want to be sold. We want to hear Daddy instead of Dad, and the best sales folks use the language the client wants to hear.

My quick summary. From my kids I have learned that they ask for what they want, and they ask for the close. They love using social proof, and are really good at adjusting their language for the client. If we all did those things in our businesses (any business really), we would all be more effective – and much happier with our results.

Now go learn from your kids!

Ask why. The why is important. The why is king.

We get asked often “Should I be on YouTube?” or “My CEO told me to start a blog, which platform should I use?” or even, “Twitter is hot, I need to be on Twitter, can you set that up for me?” If those are the types of questions you’re dealing with now, stop.

Stop thinking about the technology, stop thinking about the platform; should it be Twitter, should it be Facebook, etc… Just stop. Take a step back and start to ask, why?

The questions should instead be, “Why should we have a blog?” or “Why do we want to get involved with Twitter?” Basically, why do we want to be involved in social media in the first place?

Hurrying up to do anything usually is a bad strategy in business. Yes, there is something to be said about being the first to market, but be first to market with a purpose rather than simply first to market! Making the leap into the world of social media is a leap that should be done with intent, with an understanding of the why.

Social media is incredibly powerful and it can make an enormous difference to a business; in some instances could even be the deciding factor between success and failure. However, like the other critical aspects of the business, social media needs to be implemented properly. It needs to be implemented with a plan and with a reason.

The starting point needs to be looking at the business, on the whole, and understanding the strategy for using social media in the organization. Examine the goals of the company, to determine where it is that you hope to grow in the coming year, or where it is you want to learn from your customers and clients. Social media should be about enabling the business to have a two way conversation with those people who care about your brand or products.

After this high level analysis, then you can start to build your specific strategy. For example, perhaps yours is an organization that produces physical products and you wish to demonstrate those products to your customers for their feedback. While you can implement Twitter to receive comments and have a discussion, obviously you can’t actually show the products there. In this case a YouTube channel makes sense, you can visually show and discuss the products to receive comments/improvements/feedback. You may choose to integrate Twitter and YouTube, but you should only do that if it works for the overall business strategy.

Once you have the platform of choice in place, then you need to monitor it, improve it, and continually make sure that what you are doing is staying in line with the strategy. All too often, it is easy to build the platform and forget about it – in social media that is a common and dangerous decision. You must be active, listen to the comments, genuinely respond and join the conversation. When you receive good feedback (and that doesn’t only mean positive comments), respond. Participate.

At the end of the day, you need your social media strategy to work within the context of the overall business strategy. With the strategy and plan in place, why has become king.

Does Your Advertising Get You More Business Than You Can Handle?

If not, opportunity is passing you by…

We can show you how to use our powerful Social Media and Internet Marketing systems to increase your business. These systems open your business to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and allow you to attract more sales with your existing and new clients.

FACT: Consumers are not spending money the same way they used to. Advertising in newspapers, phone books, magazines and television has become a waste of advertising dollars.

When you spend your money on advertising, you better not just hope something happens. You need a tangible result of your expense.

FACT: The Internet’s growth rate is incredible – there are over 1.5 Billion people on the Internet. By the time you finish reading this page, new potential customers are online for the first time, how will they find your company?

People are buying something online right now. Is it your product or service?

A decade ago, many people wondered how the Internet might change business, and even many pundits never guessed how far we have come. Today without email, many businesses would no longer exist. Today customers expect to not just buy a product from a company, but they expect to interact with that company.

If your business is not on the Internet, and not taking advantage of all the marketing opportunities, it is likely that your business is on the road to failure. You can change that course right now.

Someone else, some other business, will come along and sell the same products or services online, and since that is where people are now looking for thier purchases, if you are not online you aren’t even competing for that business. It won’t be long before your competition has control of your market.

That hurts. But, that is reality.

FACT: Last year nearly $200 Billion (USD) was spent online!

Intelligent advertising means being where your customers are, when they are there, and giving them what they want. That’s the simple strategy, but most business owners are too busy running their business to consider how to follow that strategy.

Intelligent advertising means being in complete control of each dollar that goes into your ads, and then getting responsive data – data that tells you what works in your advertising and what doesn’t, and data that gives you the information needed to achieve results.

Remember, the Internet is just one big bunch of connected computers. Everything can be tracked and monitored.

• You can see where customers came from (From country to city)
• You can see how long they read your ads
• You can see what they clicked on, on your web pages
• You can see if they are using a new or old computer
• You can see if they have a big or small monitor
• You can see which price point is effective through tracking results
• You can see which ads perform best

FACT: You know how to present your business better than anyone else, running your business is what you know best.

Imagine that you had advertising that wasn’t limited to one static 30 second television spot. Imagine that you had advertising that wasn’t one printing of postcard mailers, sent out and gone forever.

Imagine instead that your advertising could be like a wonderful educational journey, where your customers learn about you and your business over time, all because they want to know about you and your business.

Imagine advertising that actually inspires loyalty in customers.

When you teach your customers about your business over time, and you serve them well – you provide what they want – they will become loyal to you. That means they will ignore your competition, because they like you better! That, is what intelligent advertising is all about.

Building loyal customers over time is like building an army of volunteer salespeople, who advertise for you because they like you, they like your products and services, and they want you to succeed.

Intelligent Advertising Increases Sales

• No more overpriced newspaper ads
• No more overpriced radio ads
• No more overpriced (and rarely used) phone book ads
• No more coupon books that might get a customer, but decrease profit
• And so on… you get the point…

Why spend money on advertising methods that can’t report back to you to tell you how well the advertising is working for your business?

That’s like throwing money out the window!

Your customers are smart. Your customers want to know about your business, and they want more than a static 30 second commercial, they really want to know. Your customers are willing to give you their precious contact information … if you know how to ask them correctly and have something of true value to offer in return.

You can’t get better than customers wanting to hear from you!

To learn more about how 430 Marketing can help you:

1. Increase Sales
2. Decrease Advertising Costs
3. Build Customer Loyalty
4. Develop an Online Brand
5. And more…

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