Legacy Marketing Services

Let me preface this by saying that this post is a little bit of a rant.

Let me also say that I know if you are a small business owner, that there is a lot of “stuff” that you probably never thought you’d have to deal with when it comes to marketing your business on the internet.

I know when I went to business school, this wasn’t part of the curriculum.

Then add social media into the mix and it can be overwhelming, I get it.

But this is one of my pet peeves:

Profiles are for People

As in, a Facebook profile is for a person, not a business.  If you have a business or web site you want to promote, you need to create a page, not another Facebook profile.

This is a pretty simple concept that a lot of people don’t seem to understand.  I get Facebook “friend” requests all the time from businesses.  I am not a “friend” with the the business, I am a friend of the business owner.

Do I accept them?  Actually, if they are local, I usually do.  It irritates me, but at least they are out there trying.  I’m not going to get snippy about it.  One example of this is the Humble ISD Education Foundation.  I’m not going to give the school foundation a Facebook snub just because the person setting it up didn’t know what they were doing.

So I usually just mumble a little under my breath and make a note to have a talk with the sender the next time I run into them.

But today I got a “connection” request on LinkedIn from “Texas Social Media Expo.”

I almost can’t even explain how stupid that is.

Again, profiles are for people.

What makes it especially stupid on LinkedIn is that the whole purpose of the platform is to connect with other people that are maybe a little further out of your immediate sphere.   Do you need to make a contact with someone at a particular company and need an introduction?  If you have a friend of a friend of a friend that has a connection, LinkedIn will identify it.

The whole point is that LinkedIn networks you through the companies in your current and past work history, education, and any associations.  Creating a new profile for every single business you have defeats the whole purpose of that.

There are company profiles that interact with the personal profiles.  You can create events on your personal profile and invite people to them.  You can also create a LinkedIn discussion group for a particular topic.

Who is this person who sent me this?  I have no idea.

The craziest thing about this is that it is for a social media expo!

Does anyone else see the problem with this?  Does this seem incongruent to anyone else?

I am assuming that whomever sent this must be the organizer of the event.  If they have so little understanding of the basic principles of social media, what does that say about the credibility of what they are presenting as a whole?

We stand in a tumultuous time.  there is upheaval in the world, in our nation, and often in our community.  There is political acrimony and financial uncertainty.

It is a combination of forces that we in the U.S. have not experienced for several decades, and to this degree, in several generations.

In the midst of all this, life goes on. 

We get up each day, raise our families and run our businesses.

While we are impacted by the ongoing crisis in many ways, from rising costs, to more regulations and other business challenges; in a way, the issues at hand can seem divorced from us.

We look at the decisions being made as someone else’s responsibility.  Someone else’s fault.

We are just here, running our little business.  What do the problems of the world have to do with us?  What can we possibly do about them?

The other day I was watching a clip of Ronald Reagan’s last presidential address.

When Reagan first came into office, we were in the middle of another dark time.  Unemployment was high, gas prices as well as everything else was skyrocketing, the term stagflation was coined.  Our economy was really a mess, much like today.

To add to that, we were in the middle of the Cold War with Russia with a constant fear that a button would be pushed and a nuclear World War III would begin.  Not to mention the fanatical Ayatollah calling for the death of all infidels and the 52 Americans who were being held hostage in Iran.

I was just at an age when I was becoming aware of what was going on in the world beyond my immediate circle and I remember it as a scary and dark time . . . much like today.

Regardless of what you think of Reagan’s politics and fiscal policy, the thing he brought to American was encouragement.

He believed that it was Americans who made the U.S. the greatest nation the world has seen.

In his farewell address, he attributed the success and prosperity that the U.S. experienced in his two terms in office to the industry of individual Americans, not his policies or initiatives.  He credited Americans, not the government, with creating 19 million new jobs and propelling the U.S. out of the recession of the late ‘70’s and early  80’s.

I think that is what we have lost, that belief that “We the People” are the ones that make the difference.

It’s not even a matter of just job creation and economics either, it’s about building a community.

When I think about our local community in Kingwood and the Lake Houston area and who makes things happen, it’s not the big corporations with huge budgets, it’s the small business owners and individuals.

it’s Rick pulling out his BBQ and feeding hundreds of his friends and neighbors.  It’s Tony turning Town Center into a community gathering place five times a year.  it’s the trifecta of Karen, Donna, and Gwendolyn seeing a need and filling it.  It’s Suzanne and Ellen with a heart to help each in their own way.  It’s a group taking their love of nature and sharing that beauty with the community.

I could go on.

When things need done, they step up, dig in, and and they make things happen.

That is what makes our community special.  It is not government programs or legislation that create that, it is about individuals stepping up and answering the call.

That is the way it is here.  If you are reading this and live somewhere else, I’m pretty confident that if you stop to think about it, that the same thing is true in your community.

Who are the people that donate to the community events, the school carnivals, the charity fundraisers, and the sports teams.  Who is it that is stepping up and making a difference in your community.

I’m sure that you will se the same thing that I see here.   It is the same people, small business owners and individuals, that step up over and over again.

Maybe you are one of the community builders, the World Changers.

If so, I want to give you a phrase from one of my favorite verses, 1 Chronicles 28:20:

“Be strong and of good courage.”

The words in the original Hebrew mean to be “steadfast and single minded” and to “fix upon or to seize.”

I’m not an economist, but I think we still have some rough waters ahead.  Sometimes circumstances can seem overwhelming, like you have to do more and more with less and less.

Persevere, be strong and of good courage, because your actions do matter and they do have an impact on others.

You are making a difference.

If you aren’t one of those people yet, if you are someone who is focused solely on your own business and affairs, here is a thought I would leave you with.

You may think that you’re “just” a plumber, or a hair stylist, or an accountant, or a retail store manager, or whatever it is that you do.

There is no “just.”

You play an important role in your community.  You can make a difference.

In your business you impact people on a daily basis, even if it is something as simple as a smile and encouraging word for a customer as they check out.

Your business can play an important role in your community and be someone that people know that they can count on for honesty and fair dealing.  It may sound basic, but it is not a small thing.

If someone has a car that needs repaired, they want to know that the shop they go to is going to tell it straight and isn’t going to pad what needs to be done.  Of if someone needs a plumber on a holiday weekend or their air conditioning goes out in one of our record breaking hot Houston days, they want to know they can trust the business they call.

As a business owner, you not only create jobs, but you have an impact on the lives of the people you employ.

My very first job working for someone else was at the local Dairy Queen when I was 16.  Some of the things I learned were:

• How to multitask.
• How to deal with difficult people with a smile.
• That it didn’t matter what my coworkers did, I was responsible to do my best.
• To look for what needed to be done and do it without being asked.
• If there was a task I didn’t like, to learn to do it really well.

The DQ wasn’t a glamorous job, but I learned from it.  And I learned from every job and every boss I had.

Honestly, not all of those lessons were positives one.  From one, I learned that there is occasionally sexism in the workplace and that equal efforts doesn’t always result in equal pay.  But even that in itself was a lesson for it taught me that it was my responsibility to go out and find a job situation that was more just.

They all had an impact on me and I’ve brought something from every job I’ve had to what I do today.

What is the impact you are having on your employees?

Are they leaving you a better person than when they started?  Are they learning that ethics and fair dealing pay off and are rewarded or are they learning to cut corners and skate by?

Is the example you are setting, both in the way you treat customers and the way you treat them, congruent with your expectations for them?

You also make a difference in your community.  As I said at the beginning of this post, we may think of the huge corporations with the big money as the ones that matter, but it is the small businesses that make the big difference.

Are you doing your part to make a difference in your community?  Are you investing back in the community that supports your business and helping it grow or are you simply taking what you can get?

Are you pitching in and helping in community efforts or do you stay holed up in your shop absorbed in your own “stuff?”

If your business closed tomorrow, would anyone besides you and your employees care or would your former customers just go to the competitor down the street?

In this struggling economy we find ourselves in, I’ve seen some great businesses go under.  Some I didn’t see much of other than an ad here and there.

But there have been some, one in particular, that was just heartbreaking to see close.  The owners were such a part of the community, always giving and always supporting.  When that business closed it wasn’t just their loss, it was our loss.  The community was diminished because that business wasn’t a part of it any longer.

All Congress can do is moderate outcomes, the power to change comes from us.

“We the People.”

You as a business owner have the power to impact and change lives:  for your customers; for your employees, and for your community.

Are you?

Are you doing what you can to make a difference?  If not in money, in time?

If you have your health and a way to make an income, you are blessed.  Are you giving back?  Are you doing your part to bring light and relief where you can?

The next time you are tempted to complain, to blame this party or that politician for the economy and the rest of the issues we face today, step back and ask yourself, “What am I doing to make a difference?”  and “How is my business making an impact?”

Because the change comes from you.

With all of the social media options out there, business owners are often confused on what to use, how to use it and how often.

Who has time to sit on the computer posting updates from site to site?  I know I don’t.  I have work to do!

So you want to make the most you can out of every online effort.  The report I wrote, “10 Steps to Success with WordPress” covers just that.  How to make the most out of the content that you publish on your site.  You can download the report for free here.

If you’re more of a visual person, I’ve recorded a short video with step by step instructions on how to connect your site to automatically publish on your LinkedIn profile, which is one of the recommendations in the report.

To recap, it is just two steps:

1. Add the web site url to your LinkedIn profile.
2. Add the Bloglink application to your LinkedIn profile.

Congruence. 

It’s a word that has been on my mind recently.  It’s an interesting one.  It means “the quality or state of agreeing or corresponding.”

In geometry, congruent is  “coinciding at all points when superimposed.”

In other words, do all the elements of a picture align when you put them together?  Do they match up?

Being congruent is important.  I know there are a lot of people who subscribe to the belief that you can have one persona at home, one at work, and one at church.

But looking at that belief logically, the situation described above could be taken from a psychiatric diagnostic manual as evidence of a personality disorder.

I just don’t agree with that philosophy.  Character matters and all of your actions define you . . . not just the ones when you put on your Sunday face.

It matters in our personal life and it matters in our business.

Congruence.

In a world that tries to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator, where there are no absolutes, where one thing is not necessarily better than the other and everything is relative, many have lost the ability to discern between truth and a lie and between good and bad simply because they refuse to acknowledge that there is a difference between the two to begin with.

That is a problem.  If you don’t know how to discern between the truth and a lie and how to apply standards, you are at the mercy of every con that comes along.

How can you decide who to put your trust in, who to confide in, or who should advise you if you have no idea whether or not the person is worthy of that trust?

The first step in developing good judgment and discernment is to recognize that there is a standard that we should aspire to and that some actions do have a higher value and are more desirable than others.

It’s not a crapshoot.  People show us who they are every day.    To tell whether or not the persona someone is presenting is the truth or a façade, look at whether their words and actions are congruent.

Do they match up?  Does every area of their life tell the same story about who they are as a person?

Congruence in Business

The divorce of character and accountability from many areas of business is disturbing and, in my opinion, a large factor in the decay of the business landscape and the economy as a whole.   Cutting corners in exchange for short term gains and petty deceptions that build into widespread corruption of corporate culture aren’t isolated incidents.

What we are experiencing now in our current financial crisis is the bitter fruit of those actions as a consequence.

Starting From a Firm Foundation

Just as it is important for us to have standards of behavior in our personal life, it is also important to set standards of practice for a successful business.

The core of that starts with a company mission.  Why are you in business?  What value does your company bring to your industry, to your community, to your employees, and to your customers?

How does your company make a difference?

When you can answer that question, then the rest will fall into place.  It will be a guide for what services and markets to go into.  It will help in decisions on which vendors and suppliers to use.  It will illuminate the best hires.  Your marketing message will fall into place.

Because when you start with a firm foundation and keep your focus on that, it is easy to be congruent in every other area.

Lead by Example

While you can create reams of policy manuals the most effective way to inculcate a strong corporate culture is leading by example.

Don’t expect employees to treat customers with respect if you don’t treat them with respect.  If you want your employees to be good representatives of your company, start by being a good one yourself.

You can’t get upset about a questionable comment they made on their Facebook profile if you have a habit of getting drunk at a local restaurant after work every Friday night.  Don’t expect honesty from your employees and then go home and cheat on your spouse.

It comes back to congruence.

When you have a small business, for better or worse, you are the face of your company and the one that will have the most impact.

Lead by example and demonstrate the character that you want your business to be known for.

Last night my community enjoyed the Second Annual Tasting the Town, a food festival held at the Humble Civic Center.  I wasn’t able to go until later, but even at 8 pm with only an hour until the event closed, it was still hopping, so I can only imagine what it was like earlier.

The event is organized by Lake Houston Area Events, which is the team of Jennifer Jozwiak (aka the Coffee News lady) and Tiffany Bauer of Power Promotions.  I am actually working with them on a web site for a new event they are launching in 2011, the Lake Houston Area Home and Garden show.

Besides the fact that the event was an opportunity to get together with friends and enjoy great food from area restaurants, the thing I loved about it was that it was a great marketing opportunity for businesses . . . and not just food related businesses and restaurants.

After organizing an event myself for six years, I know that the key to enduring success for an event is not just the attendees but the businesses that participate and sponsor.  It is so important to create an environment at the event where businesses can connect with new potential customers and strengthen ties with existing ones.    Your event’s success hinges on the success of your vendors and exhibitors.

That was the motivating factor behind all of our decisions for the event that I managed and it is obvious that Tiffany and Jennifer have had that in mind as well at Tasting the Town.

This event was a no brainer for area restaurants; however, they also created several marketing opportunities for nonfood related businesses which I think were absolutely brilliant.  Nonfood related business could have a table in the entrance hall to the event, they could sponsor one of the seating areas, and they could also be a sponsor for one of the beverage booths.

Events like these are a chance for a business to capitalize on an audience that they wouldn’t normally have exposure to.  However, while some of the businesses did a better job of engaging attendees than other, there wasn’t one that didn’t fail in least one of the three critical points to connect with customers.

But here are some good examples of small business marketing at the event.

Serna Insurance was one of the sponsors of the beverage booths where they staffed the booth and handed out the drinks.  Their method of getting their information in the hands of attendees was to secure a promotional pen with a band around the drink bottle or can.  It was an ingenious idea.  I would have liked to see them also have a method of collecting names and addresses, like a raffle, drawing, or a Facebook contest, but they did do a good job of sending something out that had their company information.

There was another restaurant, I couldn’t tell you which one though as they didn’t make it over to me, that had servers circulating through the event with trays of samples and inviting people to visit their booth.  They were being proactive about getting people to come to them.

The Winery of Kemah was there with a booth in the Wine Walk.  They were the only exhibitor that I saw that had a sign up for an email newsletter.   Having a newsletter sign up was good; however, the signup was just a blank notepad with a pen and absolutely no explanation of what it was for.

Also, it was just sitting there.  No one was encouraging people to sign up and there was no mention of any benefits to do so.  When I went through about a half an hour before closing, there were only about 15 names on the list.  Now I will sign up for it because I look for things like that and I want to see what people are doing.  But in general, you need to be a little more proactive than that.  I also recommend following up with people after an event and thanking them for stopping by your booth.

The other place where I think the Winery of Kemah may have lost new business opportunities that while they had several different marketing pieces available for people to take, not all of them had their web site listed on it.  This is a huge mistake.  People aren’t necessarily going to take every single item you have laid out.  I know that I didn’t.  If you don’t have your contact information on every single piece, how do you expect people to contact you?  Don’t make them track you down.  Make it easy for them.

(After I published this, I went through and visited some of the company sites.  The domain that I found on one of the marketing pieces for the Winery of Kemah that I linked to above actually goes to an error page.  I did find another piece with a second domain name . . . but as I’ve said before, this is one of the worst things you can do.)

One of the areas that I saw that the majority of restaurants failed to do was make it easy to tell what they were serving.  There was a lot of great food there, but most of the time you had no idea what it was.

For example, HEB had a huge spread with three different entrees, wine samples, and several different desserts.  I am assuming that all of the components are available to purchase at the store, but I have no idea what any of them were. There were no labels, no menus, no suggested shopping lists . . . nothing.  The only thing I saw was the weekly circular.  The wine they were sampling was amazing (I like sweet wines.)   I asked the lady giving out the samples if she had something with the name on it.  She didn’t, but suggested that I take a picture with my phone, which is a resourceful suggestion . . . but come on . . . seriously, make it easy for someone to be a buyer.

The Chinese restaurant, Grand Garden, was the only one that I noticed that clearly labeled the entrees they were serving.

Also, there was a huge opportunity to get customers for the holiday entertaining seasons, which I think was largely missed by the majority of businesses there.  The only businesses I saw promoting it were catering businesses . . . and they didn’t have any sort of contact capture system in place.

This is the end of September.  People are going to start making plans for their Thanksgiving, Christmas, and holiday parties.  Besides the catering, I know that many of the businesses that participated in the event also have event and party rooms.  None of them were promoting it.

in general, these types of missed opportunities are very common at events like these.  The primary reason I offer my Exhibitors’ Edge seminar is to teach small businesses on how to make the most of their participation in events and festivals in their community and the best way to include events in their overall marketing plan.  I will soon be launching an on demand version of the seminar, sign up for my mailing list for advance notice.

All in all, it was a wonderful event and I hope that the participants are able to benefit with new business from the attendees that Jennifer and Tiffany worked so hard to attract.

In the never ending quest of businesses and organizations to build traffic to their web site, and in turn, hopefully increase revenue, many are increasingly expanding their promotion to social networking and 2.0 sites.  Everyone has heard of MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter.  In fact, they have become so entrenched in the fabric of our culture that references are made to them in TV and movies and even the most staid of traditional media, newspapers, have capitulated to the online tsunami by feeding their news stories to Twitter and Facebook accounts.

The majority of the Westernized world knows what Facebook is.  The majority of businesses believe that they need to utilize it in some way.  This belief is true.  As a matter of fact, in March of 2010 Facebook surpassed Google in number of weekly pageviews.  Considering that Google still makes up 65 percent of total search traffic, this is something that every business that has customers that use the internet should take note of.

Social media in general and Facebook specifically have seen a huge growth in usage just in the past year.  Being competitive online is not just a matter of ranking organically in one or two search engines anymore.  As the internet expands and becomes ever more niched, it also increases the number of online fronts a business has to participate in and compete on.

Facebook is one of those major players.

However, even though most small business owners know they should be on Facebook, there is still a lot of confusion on how to use it.  Below are a few basic principles for businesses using Facebook.

Take Care of Your Own House First

Before you worry about which social media sites to participate in, you should always make sure that your own business web site is squared away first. 

If you have an old static site that hasn’t seen an update in this millenium, addressing this should be your first order of business. 

You should have a strategy for your site, know your optimal target keywords and have landing pages for each before you run around on multiple 2.0 web sites throwing your business information out there.

Your site should be the focal point for all of your online efforts, not some minor page on a mega social network.  When you create profiles on other sites, the goal should be to direct them to your business site and to funnel them into your lead generation system.

Never, ever put yourself in a position where you are relying on income and leads generated on a platform that you don’t have control of.  Keep in mind that you don’t have a right to those profiles and pages.  At any time, your account could be shut down or deleted and then where would you be?

Every other online hub that you make should be viewed as a support for your own site.

Direct them to your site and get them on your list.

That should be the goal.  And if you don’t have a list . . . well that is something else we need to talk about.

Accounts are for People.  Pages are for Businesses

Facebook accounts are for people, not organizations or businesses.  Every week I get “friend” requests from organizations and businesses.  I am not friends with the business, I am friends with the person that owns it.

A person can create Facebook pages for any number of businesses, organizations or web sites.  For example, I have set up Facebook pages for Legacy Marketing, my daughter’s blog (I see I need to teach her how to use spell check ), and the Picnic on the Park event.

Each of these pages has their own set of fans, integrated RSS feeds, and settings. 

One of the benefits of using pages for businesses and organizations (besides the fact that that is what they are designed for) is that you can add other people as administrators to the page.  Whereas if you set up your business as a Facebook account, the only way you will be able to have someone update it is by giving them full access to that account itself, which isn’t a good thing to do for security reasons.

Also, you can’t promote your Facebook account with those cool Facebook widgets like you can with pages.

Facebook is Not the Be All to End All

I know this may sound like heresy to Facebook fanatics, but this is the truth.  The amount of potential Facebook has for your  business really depends on the type of business you do and who your audience is.  As I mentioned in a LinkedIn discussion yesterday, I have clients who get their best targeted traffic from Facebook.  I also have clients with sites that get most of their referral traffic from Twitter.  My site gets good traffic from LinkedIn.

You just have to find out where your potential customers are and focus on those platforms.

Increase Your Efficiency by Integrating Your Web Site and Profiles

Sometimes when I talk to people about using social media, I can see that they find it overwhelming because they think it is going to be just one more thing on their To Do list. 

It doesn’t have to be an extra effort.  Your web site and social media profiles can be integrated so that any update to your web site will automatically be posted on your social media platform.  Assuming you have taken care of item #1 and have a web site on a modern CMS platform, it is just a matter of connecting your RSS feeds.

I cover the specific steps to do this in my free report “10 Steps to Success with WordPress.”  If you aren’t on WordPress, but are on a platform like Joomla, Drupal, ExpressionEngine, etc., you can still accomplish the same results, the specific steps will just be a little bit different.

Whatever online marketing steps you take, always look for a way to maximize your exposure and streamline the process.  Another example of this is Aweber’s feature of publishing notification of your email broadcasts to your social media sites that I explained in a previous post.

While today’s online landscape requires small businesses to become increasingly adept at promoting their business on a variety of platforms, a focused strategy and marketing plan can yield maximum results with a minimum of effort.  If you need help streamlining your promotion efforts, start with our Networked Site service or contact us for additional options.