FreshNetworks Blog

This week we have been looking at social media for small businesses. Ways in which they can use the social media tools that exist to build their brand, engage their customers and learn about their brand, market and competitors. It is as important for small businesses as it is for large brands to build a social media strategy. And there are many different ways that you can start to use social media to get these benefits.

And social media strategy should be based on what your brand is looking to achieve. Only when you have established this should you start to experiment with different social media tools and will you be able to measure the success of what you are doing. This need not be an expensive and elaborate implementation, some great tools exist for small businesses to use to help achieve their aims with social media and this week we looked at four of them:

1. Social media monitoring and buzz tracking: Any social media strategy should start with a thorough process of social media monitoring. Listening to what is being said about your brand, competitors, market and customers. There are a range of free buzz tracking tools available and setting up some simple monitoring tools is something that any small business should do.
2. Twitter and targeting customers: Twitter is a very flexible tool. Some people think that it is most useful when you are following and being followed by very large numbers of people. But this is not always true and it can be particularly powerful with small groups. You can build a small community of people online who are interested in the same issues and use this to engage customers or potential customers. Better to target and engage a smaller group of people than to try to appeal to everybody.
3. Blogging and brand building: Blogging is a great tool that any and every brand should consider. For many small businesses, blogs are a tool that can help them punch above their weight. The content, themes and information that they share can lead them to be thought of as much larger or much more established than they really are. Blogging provides an easy way for organisations to share their thoughts and their content. And people will respect you for this.
4. Foursquare and customer engagement: Foursquare is just one of a number of mobile-enabled and geo-location social media tools that are being developed. They allow people to connect and share information based on where they are. Foursquare in particular offers great and exciting opportunities to brands. You can find out who is visiting your shop, store, cafe or building and then work out ways to engage them and turn them into loyal customers

These are just four ways in which small businesses can use social media tools as part of a social media strategy. They are all free tools to start using and the posts linked to above contain more details about each of them. Using and experimenting with social media tools need not cost money. The important stages are in the thinking and planning about what you are looking to achieve and so which tools are most appropriate, and then in how you manage and grow your activity in any tool you choice.

Small businesses can benefit hugely from a social media strategy. Plan what you are looking to achieve and how you will measure success, and then experiment!

You can read all our posts on social media for small businesses here

Imagine if you could know who visits your cafe or shop on a regular basis. You will, of course, recognise many of these people. The man with the glasses who comes in most mornings for a flat white (that’s me by the way). The two women who always have lunch on a Thursday. Or the family who bring their children on a Saturday. You will recognise some regulars and you will no doubt speak to them and start to get to know them. Social media can help you do this more, and can, perhaps importantly, help you target people who visit sometimes but not yet regularly. This is where geolocation-based social media tools such as Foursquare come into play.

Foursquare is social media tool that lets users say where they are by ‘checking in’ at locations. You earn points for doing this and can see who else has checked-in here. If the location you are at is not yet on Foursquare then you can add details about it and plot it on a map. You earn points and get badges (status) the more times you check in and the person who visits somewhere more regularly becomes its Mayor.

I have been using Foursquare recently and, for example, might check in to the Fleet River Bakery just round the corner from my office when I get breakfast in the morning. Or I might check into Selfridges on Oxford Street in London when I’m shopping at the weekend. I am not yet Mayor of anywhere, but could become the Mayor of any of these places if I visit it most regularly. This is a small but growing tool, and it being joined by more and more geolocation-based social media tools that can be a real benefit to businesses.

Let’s take the Fleet River Bakery as an example. As a small bakery and cafe in central London they face a lot of competition (there are probably about ten similar venues nearby) but they are very popular with queues round the corner at lunchtime. Some people will be regulars and other will visit from time to time. On Foursquare, Fleet River has a profile, whether they set it up or not, and people who go there can check in – putting their details on this profile. For the guys at Fleet River this could be a powerful data resource. If they can attract people to visit them and check in on Foursquare then they can start to see who is visiting them, how often and when. But it can also be a powerful peer-to-peer marketing tool. On Foursquare your friends are told where you are. So when somebody checks in at the cafe their friends will learn where they are and so learn about Fleet River, where they are and what they do. They will also know that their friends go there and, as we know, peer-to-peer recommendation are much more important than anything a brand can say.

Using new and growing tools like Foursquare can be really powerful for small businesses. And if you work with these tools you will get even more out of them. Perhaps on the boards outside Fleet River they should say who the Mayor currently is, and perhaps even offer him or her a free coffee when they next come in. Or maybe offer exclusive discount, or a free cookie, to anybody on Foursquare who checks in.

There is a lot you can do to help people market your small business for you. Much of it free and just making use of the social media tools that are out there.

You can read all our posts on social media for small businesses here

Many small businesses are unsure about what to put on their website beyond their services team and contact details. They know they need a website but don’t always have the time, resources or content to add to it on a regular basis. It can be daunting for them, and the website can quickly become out of date. Too many websites for small businesses can date and look stale. And this is easy to recitfy.

Blogging is a useful tool for any business. It can help you to show your expertise on a topic. It can provide a less formal way for you to share your thoughts, experiences and ideas. And it can allow you an easy and versatile way to add up-to-date content and thoughts to any website. For any small business this can be a useful tool.

Imagine you run a small chain of hairdressing salons. You are busy, as all small business owners are, but understand the importance of your online presence to attract new customers to walk through your doors. Any organisation, however small, will have things that it is passionate about, and things that it can talk about in social media. In your role as owner of these hairdressing salons, you spend your time split between working in store and visiting suppliers, competitors and events and trade shows where you see the latest techniques and the latest products. Rather than have a simple, and soon dated, website that just states where your salon are and when they are open, you could use blogging to share these experiences and to share your passion for hairdressing.

You could blog each week about the latest trends, you could encourage a trainee in one salon to write about their experiences, you could review new products or highlight new haircuts. Writing a blog is easy for any business, it just needs structure. Our salon could include a review every Monday, highlight new trends on a Wednesday and have a trainee’s diary on a Friday. Every week. Easily and quickly you can start adding 1,000-2,000 words of relevant and interesting content being added to your site each week. Rich in keywords that will help people find your site more easily (and so lead to more people visiting your salons). And showing your thought-leadership and knowledge in the market.

For many small businesses, blogs are a tool that can help them punch above their weight. The content, themes and information that they share can lead them to be thought of as much larger or much more established than they really are. Blogging provides an easy way for organisations to share their thoughts and their content. And people will respect you for this.

You can read all our posts on social media for small businesses here

Twitter is a great way to reach and engage people online. Many people think that Twitter is a number’s game. That the more people you follow, and the more people that follow you, the better. This can sometimes be true, it very much depends on what you want to achieve with social media. For many small businesses, Twitter can be a great way to engage niche or smaller groups that you might never otherwise have been able to, or been able to afford to, reach.

Twitter works well with large groups but it can be particularly powerful with small groups. Imagine you are a small firm of accountants in a large city. You have a certain set of potential customers but there are people that are never going to be right for you – either because they are too small, too big, too spread out or for other reasons. Any business knows its target customer base and then wants to find ways to reach out to them.

Twitter lets you target these people via shared content. Taking this small accountancy firm as an example, their customers will all share some things in common. They are all likely to be in the same region, of a similar size and potentially in the same industry. They are all facing some of the same issues and our accountancy firm will help them all in similar ways. Twitter lets you bring people together who share similar issues like this.

Small businesses like this can start using Twitter, not to tell us what’s happening in their office (to be fair there is only so much of interest to the outside world there) but to talk about these issues. Provide a small but powerful resource of links to news stories, events, discussions or pieces of advice on these topics. Then start to promote it. Run your feed of your tweets on your website and in the email signatures for all your employees, put the details on your business cards and your notepaper and other marketing touchpoints. And talk to people about what you’re doing. If you meet potential customers tell them you bring together issues that might be of interest to them on Twitter and send them your way.

Slowly but carefully you will start to build a following of people who are interested in these issues. And if you have chosen issues that are of interest to and unite your target customer base you will be beginning to engage new customers. You will be providing  a real service to them and have a reason to speak to them, in our example, about your accountancy services too.

You can read all our posts on social media for small businesses here

I was in a race yesterday – a 10-mile road-running race. During the run, I remember a point (approximately half way round) when my mind turned to considering selling inspirational social media solutions. The run was going well – I was feeling inspired – and I had one of those “I can do anything!” moments that fellow runners will recognise.

My inspirational thought on the run went something like this:

So, we know that social media offers an unlimited range of diverse solutions. These solutions will never adapt to a “one size fits all” approach, and every client will adapt a social media solution that is unique to them. Therefore, while some unfortunate organisations get constrained by such aspects as, for example, their web technology that is available, or perhaps the budget, or maybe the management resources, or countless other restrictions, we know that the best solutions are those that are driven by inspiration without constraints. For example, think MyStarbucksIdeas or Amazon.com or LinkedIn for inspirational and unique engagement ideas for communities that have revolutionised their online conversations.

Getting the inspired social media solution for any organisation is like getting the right ingredients for the Perfect Cake. Not too much sugar or vanilla, otherwise people won’t eat it, and get the correct quantity of self-raising flour so that the Perfect Cake will rise.

In social media, the right solution ingredients might include targeted blogging, mobile interaction, comments, polling, digital file sharing, online debates, ratings, forums, etc. But which of these ingredients would be right?

I truly love selling social media. I visit my clients with a blank piece of paper, and I let the inspiration flow, asking lots of open questions and delving deeply into the business needs. I don’t talk technology at that first meeting, it’s not allowed!  The best specialists, such as FreshNetworks, design and build inspiring solutions with exactly the right ingredients …. to bake the Perfect Cake!

As Mumsnet celebrates it’s 10^th anniversary an article in yesterday’s Sunday Times titled: The bullies hiding behind Mumsnet’s skirts discussed how some members of the Mumsnet community have become “spiteful and cliquey” along with obscene language that now “peppers the website”.

As any parent knows (I certainly do to my cost) that if a parent allows one perhaps questionable aspect of their child’s behaviour to be acceptable that particular behaviour is soon learnt by that child’s sibling(s). This could not be truer when translated to online communities.

An established support community whether run as a not-for-profit or as in Mumsnet case on a commercial basis play a vital role in bringing together isolated people seeking answers to questions. With the wisdom of crowds phenomenon, communities help individuals with the most complex problems and in the process create a valuable asset for the organisation running the community.

Online communities’ need experienced community management from the start if their community is to grow into a vibrant, healthy and nurturing environment. By following a pre-agreed launch and community growth strategy the tone and etiquette of the resulting community activity also reflects the overall culture of the organisation hosting it.

This isn’t just about moderation. In fact moderation is rarely necessary where an effective community manager runs the community. They can recognise the patterns of behavior indicating potential problems in the future. These patterns are largely predictable in the path they take so that path can be shifted or influenced.

In the absence of proactive online community management, two less desirable outcomes are most likely:

1. No one will come and because of that no one else wants to come.
2. The community starts well but then is taken over by a few members selfishly for their own ends. Which if left unchecked can be extremely damaging for the organisation behind the community.

Perhaps some rocky teenage years lie ahead for Mumsnet?

It is important for any business to keep up-to-date on what people are saying about them, their competitors and the market they are in. Social media monitoring can play an important role here – letting you observe and then analyse what people are saying about these topics online and in social media. For small businesses this can be a powerful tool for research and for competitor intelligence.

We’ve previously posted a list of free social media monitoring tools, and how you can use tools like Twitter Lists to help keep a track of what is being said about you online. There is a lot that can be done here and setting up some simple monitoring tools is something that any small business should do. For free you can learn what people are saying right now about you, your competitors and the market you are in.

Imagine a small but growing emergency plumbing business that operates in a large city. You have a handful of competitors from one-man-bands to big plumbing firms. You are interested in what your customers are saying about you, about them and also about the plumbing needs that they have. Monitoring online can help you begin to understand better your competitors and your customers’ needs for minimal effort and no real cost. The key is to choose your keywords carefully. In this instance you could choose your own brand name and the name of the plumbers that work with you, your competitors and some key products you work with or services you offer. You might also choose to look for some bigger terms and topics concerned with DIY and other related issues.

Monitoring terms in this way is a useful mechanism for knowing what is going on and what is being said. Seeing when people refer to you, or the plumbers who work for you, and then knowing if they are happy or not with you. This gives you the information you need to change things, react if appropriate or just know that people are spreading the word about the good work that you have done. You can also gain competitive information on your competitors in the same way and start to learn where they are strong and weak.

But social media monitoring will help you in other ways. One example would be to help you develop new products and services. By monitoring what people in your area are saying about their DIY or plumbing needs, or telling their stories of what happened to them when things went wrong at home you will be able to start to explore and investigate potential new areas where you could help. Simple, free tools offer the chance for you to be more informed and then give you information for you to make the most of.

Social media monitoring is a powerful tool for any business or brand, large or small. One of the benefits of social media and online communities is that what people say is visible to others. When people talk about you, your competitors or their needs you can see this. And you can use this information to act and improve your own business.

You can read all our posts on social media for small businesses here

At FreshNetworks we work with a lot of large brands and organisations, helping them to use social media and online communities to engage their customers, stakeholders and other people. Small businesses often think that they don’t have the resources or the demand for a social media agency or to even need to engage their customers and other online. This is very often not true, in fact more often than not the opposite is the case.

Small businesses can benefit hugely from using social media to engage people online. It can help them to reach people in a very cost effective manner. It can let them have a presence online that is bigger than their size might suggest they are. And it can let them have a voice and share their opinions and knowledge on subjects relevant to their products and services.

We’ve written before about how any business can get started in social media, about the four steps any brand should do when they are getting started in social media:

• Step One:  Do you know what people are saying about you? Buzz tracking, social media monitoring, the power of understanding who is talking about you where and why, and some great free tools for any brand to use
• Step Two: What do you want to achieve? Working out your brand’s aims and objectives (and making these measurable) is the single most important factor in a successful social media strategy. Do this before you think about technology.
• Step Three: Have a go and experiment with social media Once you have clear objectives that are measurable it’s time to get going. Try things out and experiment, but make sure you do them where you know you will have the greatest chance of achieving these aims and engaging the people you want to engage.
• Step Four: Track and evaluate the success you are having When you are using social media tools it is essential that you are measuring and tracking your performance against these aims. Measurement is critical and assessing the benefit you are having will help you to refine and improve your strategy overall.

The same is true for small businesses, they should know what is being said about them, plan what they want to achieve and then experiment and measure success. Over the next week, we are going to discuss four different tools that small businesses can use. All of them free and all helping in different ways to meet different aims and objectives. From blogging to  Foursquare we’ll give real practical tips on social media for small businesses.

You can read all our posts on social media for small businesses here

The Matthew Effect dates from the 1960s. It is the theory, first expressed by sociologist Robert K. Merton, that those who possess power and economic or social capital can leverage those resources to gain more power or capital. Put simply: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Or as it is expressed in the Gospel of St Matthew, from which the effect takes its name:

For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

So what does this have to do with social media? Well this great presentation and video from Torsten Henning Hensel explores the power of linking online and how the Matthew Effect can help us to understand how things become viral and spread online and in social media. As Hensel explains:

Thanks to the Matthew Effect, the already famous get more famous, the often quoted get more and more quoted…

It is easy to see how this transfers into social media – the more something is spread the more it will be spread even further by word of mouth. Imagine two pieces of content of equal quality, interest or importance. It is the content that has been linked to, retweeted, forwarded or otherwise referred to that is more likely to become viral. For Hensel, “Social media is a linking machine” and the more links you can get to a piece of content the more likely that content is to become viral when compared to a similar piece.

This is an interesting theory and a great attempt to deconstruct and to understand what makes something go viral. The presentation is Required Reading this week at FreshNetworks as it reminds us all of the importance of links.

One question brands frequently ask themselves is why should people want to discuss their brand online in social media? With some brands that is true, certainly if they want to develop a sustained online conversation over time.

Corporate and Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives using social media are not new. Brands that have aligned to a pursuit or a cause have found that the online conversations are more purposeful as their brand is seen in a new light.

Recently Pepsi has caught the attention of social media commentators by going one step better and much bigger. By shifting $20m of event based traditional advertising budget (from the Superbowl) Pespi launched the Pepsi Refresh Project.

Bonin Bough (Global Director Digital and Social Media at PepisCo.) described it on Beth Kantor’s non-profit focused blog:

For those who don’t know, the Pepsi Refresh Project is a new effort to empower individuals to make a positive impact on the world.  We’ve pledged to award more than $20 million to support innovative ideas that move communities forward. Anyone can apply for a grant and the public decides who wins.

Each month, Pepsi will award grants up to $1.3 million to the winning ideas across six categories, including: Health, Arts & Culture, Food & Shelter, The Planet, Neighborhoods and Education.

The interesting question is that Pepsi has first mover advantage is repeating this type of campaign possible in the future? i.e. can they (or for that matter anyone else) do the same sort of crowd sourced campaign next year and expect to get the same media exposure?

The longer term impact of the Pepsi Refresh Project partly depends on whether the causes that benefit will talk or continue to talk online about Pepsi.

This is our first post in a new series on social media and not-for-profits