Tag Archives: Social Media

Mobile computing will dominate your future — are you ready for it?

Remember all the years I’ve said every small business MUST have a website? It’s still true, except now that’s not enough. Today you also have to be ready for the mobile customer.

Once only wizards and fairies had magic wands. But in The Age of the Customer, hundreds of millions of Earthlings now have one in the palm of their hands. Here are the U.S. numbers:

According to Statista, this year over 180 million Americans will own a smartphone, and that number will grow by 10% to almost 200 million in 2016. That’s just about every American between the ages of 16 and 80. Here’s another way to say that: Essentially all of your prospects and customers.

In a recent online poll we took of our audience, slightly more than half either had a mobile site or were acquiring one. Good for them. But that means almost half didn’t and had no plans.

technology-512210_1280Tough love alert: If your business isn’t ready for mobile primetime, it’s a dinosaur waiting to become extinct. Any questions? But there’s good news: You can avoid death-by-mobile in less than a month. Stay with me.

Where we once converted our analog lives to the online digital world with a personal computer, the shift is now to the small screen of the smartphone. And we’re integrating these new light sabers into our lives and businesses even more than the PC including, but by all means not limited to:

  • Download and use productive and fun apps
  • Read newspapers – even books
  • Navigate on foot and wheels
  • Record and share our lives with photos and video
  • Connect to others on social media
  • Shop for, buy and pay for stuff

You can get ready for mobile customers with these two steps:

1.  Hire someone to help you get your online information optimized for local search. This is important for a comprehensive online strategy, but mandatory for mobile primetime. Mobile users are often literally trying to find your business.

2.  Hire someone to build a mobile site (might not be the same person as #1). When your URL is requested from a smartphone, the mobile site presents automatically with your regular website offerings netted out and with fewer graphics for the smaller screen – form follows function. Mobile sites cost less than mobile apps to create, update and maintain, and a mobile site icon looks just like a mobile app. Most small businesses don’t need a mobile app.

Here’s that good news I promised: You can complete these two tasks in a month. How much will it cost? Not as much as you think, but that’s not the question. How much will it cost if you don’t get ready for mobile primetime?

Write this on a rock … Mobile computing wasn’t any part of your past, but it will dominate your future.

Jim Blasingame is the author of the award-winning book, “The Age of the Customer: Prepare for the Moment of Relevance.”

Leave the Age of the Seller behind for the Age of the Customer.

Your customers kn

The best social media practices for the Age of the Customer

BLASINGAME'S LAW OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR-2

Ready, set, GO!

In the Age of the Customer, you don't-3

VIDEO: Allow customers to see your business’s authentic side

Age of the Customer author and Small Business Advocate Jim Blasingame discusses the importance of introducing your customers to your business or company’s authentic side and offers three suggestions to help you convey your vision and values to your customers. Content is King — and we’re consumers of many different types of online content — but most content lacks the necessary engagement customers are craving. Give them authentic words.

Click the image to start the video.

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Create online customer communities for your small business

A “craze” is something that takes popular culture by storm. A “fad” is a craze that doesn’t last. Social media is currently a craze, but it’s not a fad. And the question is not whether this craze will last, but rather, what will it look like over time and why should a small business care? Consequently, let’s establish a few “social media” points.

Strictly speaking, “social media” is the technology that makes online community building possible, not the community itself. It allows for the creation of and service to online communities, where dialogue and interaction among community founders and members are possible. Ultimately, the term “social media” in a business application should become the more accurate term, “online customer communities.”

Photo courtesy of MySocialAgency.com

Photo courtesy of MySocialAgency.com

In defining community, Webster uses words like association, fellowship, like-mindedness and shared interests. When building online customer communities, we should remember these words. Every small business should create online customer communities, of which there are two primary examples:

1. A company’s profile pages on sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Your company leverages these companies’ platforms. These sites are free but have limited flexibility.

2. Communities founded and hosted by your company, oriented around relationships with customers and prospects. An online community is established when customers subscribe to one or more of your channel offerings in order to receive your information.

A channel is a syndication tool or method of content delivery and service to a community. For example, real simple syndication (RSS), a blog, an email newsletter (ezine), a text blast and Twitter are channel tool examples, through which businesses and their communities exchange information.

Merely having a website isn’t practicing community building any more than owning a piano makes you a musician. But a website can become a platform from which you launch and serve online communities.

There is one critically important thing for a founding company to understand about both of the online customer community types: the company cannot control community behavior. Members – customers and prospects – control the community. A founding company can only create the community and influence it by establishing community values, then serving it via the channels and information it offers, which are requested by members.

Always remember: Customers control online communities, not companies.

 

The Age of the Customer®, Part 1: Can social media be dangerous?

Infographic courtesy of Digital Sherpa.

Infographic courtesy of Digital Sherpa

Can social media actually be dangerous to your small business? Absolutely.

“Blasphemy!” you cry. “Heretic!” you say.

Guilty as charged. Remember, Martin Luther was a heretic with a blasphemous message. Today’s heretic might be tomorrow’s prophet.

Being successful with any of the social media communities is as easy as falling off of a log – for individuals; but for small businesses – not so much.

The goals of these two groups are very different: Individuals use social media primarily to connect and share. Businesses participate in social media communities to pursue a marketing strategy in these target-rich environments.

For professional services providers, like consultants, trainers, writers or any venture that sells information and ideas, social media is pretty intuitive, completely logical and often highly effective. But many classicMain Street small businesses, like a restaurant, dry cleaners, contractor, etc., often struggle to create an effective social media strategy.

Unfortunately, some business owners, especially start-ups, get caught up in the social media whirlwind and, since it’s all the rage, actually believe that spending time “connecting” online will cause sales dollars to roll in. This is where the danger lies because social media activity can become a thief that steals time from effective marketing practices.  Effective means those strategies that are known to result in sales.

Even so, social media, with all the attendant sites and applications, may be a craze, but it isn’t a fad. It is real, and it will last. And just like the evolution of websites, in time businesses will figure our how to use social media as an effective tool. But for the time being, some businesses have figured it out, while many are still uncertain about how to produce a social media return on investment.

In order to actually have a social media strategy that isn’t dangerous, practice both/and rather than either/or. Continue to execute your traditional marketing strategy, while simultaneously getting involved in and learning about the 21st century social media universe.

Get a Facebook page and use it, but don’t live there. Acquire a Twitter and do some following, but don’t get sucked into the time drain. Link up on LinkedIn, but don’t forget to unlink.

Allow me to demonstrate that I’m an equal opportunity heretic: As obnoxious as it may be today, social media will increasingly become a significant element of any successful small business marketing strategy.

Write this on a rock… Use social media like any other business tool — prudently.