Small business resources: in-person networking opportunities

One of the biggest opportunities with social media, in my opinion, is building on a relationship you recently formed in person.  For example, you meet two people at a local networking event in the pring and then see them both again at the same networking event in the fall.  

You remember talking to the first person and maybe even think you remember what they do, but you don’t remember their name.  You smile and awkardly tell them it’s nice to see them again and wonder if someone else will walk up so that you can hear this person introduce themselves to that person so you don’t have to admit you can’t remember a thing about them.

The second person tweeted you that very day to tell you it was nice to meet you and then connected with you on LinkedIn within 48 hours.  Since then you’ve chatted about some of the articles he’s shared and he’s asked you a few questions on what you do based on your tweets and LinkedIn activity.  When you see them again, for only the second time ever in person, you feel like you know them well.

Today I’m sharing three ideas for ways you can get out into your local business community to meet other small business owners and potential clients.

Networking clubs

You can join a networking club.  Some require weekly attendance, and some don’t.  These types of clubs give you the opportunity to really get to know a group of business owners so you can build a network for referals.  Each club will never have more than one person in your industry which means you aren’t competing agaisnt a lot of other people doing exactly the same thing as you do.

While these clubs don’t work well for every business owner, there is a lot of opportunity for business owners who can work together (mortgage brokes, insurance, realtors, home inspectors, etc) to find a a real resource, and it can also be great for someone who works in a less common field (like social media) because you can visit other chapters and promote yourself.

A few examples of these types of groups include BNI, SSN and GR Networking (we’re a member of GR).

Special interest networking groups

There are a lot of groups that cater to smaller interests.  You can find women’s groups, tech based groups, community based groups, industry based groups - the options are limitless!

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Meetup.com has great events just about everywhere.  (We often attend Third Tuesday)

Eventbrite has become a go to place to sell event tickets and is therefore a great resource for finding events to attend.

Women’s networking groups.  Almost every community has them.  We’re a member of a few including the Women in Biz Network and the Women’s Business Network (they’re all called really similar things so good women’s business network and your city and you’ll probably come up with something!)

Your local Chamber of Commerce

Karen and I are both members of two of the Ottawa-area Chambers of Commerce.  I’m a member in Orleans and she’s a member in Kanata. By getting to know other business owners you create relationships that open the doors to not only more customers but more publicity and potential partnerships.  

Right now we’re nominated for a Business Excellence Awards with the Orleans Chamber because of our involvement (and we’d love for you to take a second to vote for us too - we’re in section 14 :)

Where do you like to go for in-person networking?  Leave a comment and let us know!

Small business resources: Marketing blogs

Small business owners have a lot on their plate: from day-to-day operations of their business to the marketing and promotion to administrative duties. The list could go on and on. There are two priorities for every business owner - to increase revenue or decrease costs. The only way to increase revenue is by getting your name out there effectively and efficiently, but not every business owner is an expert marketer. 

However, these expert marketers have blogs that are tailored to the small business owner. The wisdom, insights, and practical advice they provide can absolutely help you grow your business.

Duct Tape Marketing

I started following John Jantsch (Duct Tape Marketing) when I found his Duct Tape Marketing podcast about 7 years ago. One of the things I really enjoy about John’s content is that he has a good mix of marketing wisdom, practical tips, and innovative tools - all tailored to small business. Every now and then he tries out certain tools and his overviews have convinced me to try a few myself. Busy small business owners need content that is quick to read, easy to absorb, and painless to action - you’ll get all three from John consistently. The resource page alone contains enough value to make it worth your time to check out what he’s recommending. Besides, don’t you just love the name!?

The Marketing Spot

The Marketing Spot blog is a recent discovery of mine, but after browsing through some of the content, I quickly realized that I really enjoy Jay Ehrat’s style. In amongst solid advice is a lot of education about marketing principles that can help guide decisions - particularly when the answer may not be clear right away. For business owners that want to dig deeper into the critical role that marketing plays in growing your business, this blog is one you’ll want to follow closely.

SmartBlogs (by SmartBrief)

SmartBlogs is not necessarily specifically focused on small business, but I think a lot of the content is definitely userful for small business owners. There are a variety of topics covered - my personal favourites are social media (of course), leadership and I also like to watch the finance blog. I’m not a huge fan of email newsletters (they’re an awesome tool, but it’s not my preferred method of getting news most of the time), HOWEVER, this is one of a few blogs that I invite into my inbox. The emails are easily skimmed for quick tidbits I want to read further or I move on quickly. You can also subscribe to the feeds via RSS. For small businesses using social media to market their products and services, I think the social media feed is definitely worth subscribing to.

I’ve given a few recommendations here, but I’d love to hear what blogs you like to follow for marketing advice. Tell me in the comments some of the sources you find helpful!

Is giving away your expertise for free a bad idea?

I was having a chat with a client recently who isn’t a social media user. They willingly admitted that they don’t really understand it or how on earth a business can make money by spending time posting to social channels.

We were on the phone, so they couldn’t see my big grin - I knew I could help! No, I wasn’t seeing dollar signs dancing all around. What I saw was an opportunity for this business to achieve greater success and I would get the opportunity to have a small role in that!

In order to give this client some insight on how it could work, I began to throw out scenarios that applied to their business. 

• You can share tips on how to do _______________. That’s something that individuals can do themselves and they probably don’t even realize or know how.
• Write up some information on ______________ way of doing _____________. Include some pointers for who such a method would work best and maybe caution against it if there are those it wouldn’t work for.
• Answer the common questions your clients ask.
• Write up the reasons you would recommend or not recommend something. 

See what’s happening? There’s enormous value to the audience in these types of content. There is helpful advice, concrete learning, best practices and questions answered. 

Won’t it hurt my business to give away so much information?

That’s highly unlikely. 

I have a personal and extremely amateur interest in photography. I subscribe to a couple of photography blogs like Fstoppers and Digital Photography School and a couple of others. I also know quite a few professional photographers. While some people may follow the pros and gain some insights and then launch their own business, most will not.

If I want professional photos of my family, I will call up one of the many pros that I know and book a session. Partially because I don’t have the eye of a pro, but also because people aren’t really my favourite photography subjects.

Here are a few other examples: 

• A real estate agent that shares tips for prepping a house for sale isn’t going to lose business, because the real value is in the contacts, knowing the market and being able to market the house in appropriate places - not to mention good advice about pricing.
• A graphic designer that shares good graphic design principles and samples isn’t going to lose business because let’s face it: most people are terrified of opening up graphic design software.
• A consultant/coach that shares how to do things they specialize in isn’t going to lose business because the time it takes someone to catch up to their level of knowledge is prohibitive to getting real work done.

This is how expertise works. We hone in on an area, learn as much as we can, work with that knowledge and then we start that cycle all over again. Social media can be a vessel for you to showcase your expertise in practical ways that build trust, awareness, and eventually new clients.

Even if you share how-to content that you offer as a service in your business, that is proof of your abilities. The DIY crowd was going to do it themselves anyway and they can find out how from others in your industry that are sharing on social channels. Your market? The ones you want as customers? They need your help because they don’t have the time and other resources to do it themselves.

Can you name a business(es) that has become successful by sharing its knowledge and expertise?

To tweet or not to tweet during tragic breaking news

Last week, when news broke on social media channels about the Boston Marathon explosions, there was nearly immediate pressure for brands, businesses and individuals to cease all prescheduled content, though a quiet minority advocated business as usual. A number of different reasons were expressed for or against continuing business content. Most the views were pure black and white - either business as usual or pause all business promotion.

Tweeting through tragedy - perspectives

I prefer a moderate approach, but I’d like to offer a different perspective on each of the arguments I encountered.

1) Promotional content was seen by many as insensitive in light of the Boston Marathon news. Others felt that Twitter needed to be an open channel for communications; turn off all the promotional noise.

Twitter is always an open channel for communication. It’s also always a repository of noise. (Most) savvy users know how to control the volume through the use of hashtags, lists and unfollows.

2) Many felt that since tweets don’t stop when thousands are dying every day in civil wars across the world, then there is no reason for them to stop for Boston.

It’s true - the tweets don’t stop for so many other tragedies around the world every single day.

But isn’t it possible that the businesses geographically close to those tragedies ceased communications? Boston is close to home for those of us in North America and people travel from all over the world (thought primarily North America) to participate. I would not blame one single person in Europe, Asia, Australia and other places for continuing their day as usual.

3) Alongside pleas for sensitivity were complaints about those complaining about scheduled content.

I never know how to take tweets that are complaining about someone complaining, but in this case a friend made a good point. She stated categorically that they were annoying when she found it quite easy to ignore the scheduled content. (See? Savvy users get good at filtering, even on the fly.)

4) There were folks who felt there was no reason for any business or any individual to change social network activity, because life goes on.

Life does go on, but in the hours just after tragic news breaks, the openness of the audience has to be taken into consideration. From a purely selfish perspective of wanting their eyeballs on my content, are those hours the best time to continue with the status quo?

That answer might be very different depending on the locale of your audience. In the case of the Boston Marathon, many North Americans were riveted to the news for hours after it broke. 

5) You can’t spend all day watching the news. Distractions are healthy.

This is true, likely even more so when the enormity of the news is so hard to comprehend.

What’s the right answer?

All these concerns leave businesses with the dilemma of what to do. It also re-ignited the never-ending debate about scheduled posts. (This debate is exhausting…maybe we should just agree to disagree.) Those against scheduled content cited the Boston Marathon as a perfect example of why it’s a bad idea to schedule. Whether I put content in an editorial calendar or book it to go from Hootsuite, it’s still planning. There is no way to anticipate in either circumstance what could potentially happen in the world. If we worried about how every tweet was going to be perceived in light of the breaking news, we’d never tweet anything.

Whether you have scheduled posts or not, it’s possible to remain ignorant of the news even if you’re actively using a channel. Personally, I was monitoring a conference feed when the news broke. Had I not flipped over to Facebook, I wouldn’t have known and likely would have tweeted seemingly frivolous live content.

Large corporations have more resources than small businesses. They may schedule content, but there is greater capacity to monitor. Keeping tabs on breaking news is likely included in their monitoring practices (to some degree). This is rarely possible for small businesses. In light of this, there needs to be some understanding of the challenges of being a small biz in particular. However, let’s not crucify big businesses either. No business can have someone watching everything on social media 24/7/365. 

Listen and Act

The ultimate barometer for your choice is your audience:

• Are they tweeting about the news constantly?
• Do you see complaints about promotional content?
• Have they specifically asked you to stop?

After considering all of those things, what does your gut tell you to do? Do that and you’ll make the right choice for your business.

What else do businesses need to factor in when deciding how to manage social media activity during breaking news? And how did you respond to the news out of Boston last week?

Who is watching you? You'd be surprised!

When we try to figure out the value of all of our social media efforts, we look at the numbers.  Who is commenting, who is sharing, how many people are clicking….

Those are all valuable metrics, there’s no doubt, but sometimes we get overly discouraged when the numbers aren’t what we hope they would be. We all need to remember this: a fraction of the people seeing your message are reacting in a way that you can see.

Engagement is always what we most want, Edgerank on Facebook has made particularly sure of that, but even so, we often forget that most people don’t react to everything that they see online. That doesn’t mean they aren’t seeing it.

I recently had a friend tell me that her husband works with someone I worked with years ago. When I asked how they had possibly figured that out it was because they were talking about Las Vegas and both said they knew someone who had recently been.  Aside from the fact that it was very cool that they figured that out, what was most interesting to me is that this friend who I used to work with - I haven’t interacted with her in almost two years, not even on Facebook. Except I have, because she knew I was in Vegas because I talked about it on Facebook. What may have seemed like an interesting tidbit in her feed became significant later. And the whole time I had no inkling that she knew what was happening in my life.

Another example happened this week.  Karen and I were in a coffee shop when someone we hadn’t seen in a couple of years walked up and said hi. I have barely seen anything in my feeds from her in the last while but she knew just what Karen and I were up to, including the conference we’re planning. What’s more, she owns a local business that I follow (though I had no idea it was her) and she’s exactly the audience we hope is seeing our content. 

So, what’s my point?

Keep producing good content.  Keep sharing it and keep talking. People are listening, even if you don’t know who.

I’ve had people reference a blog post I wasn’t sure anyone had read,  and tell me that they finally got in touch after following my tweets for over a year.  I know people who don’t use Twitter but follow people’s Twitter pages, people who have their email readers set to not let your newsletter software count their open, and there are so many more examples. Only a fraction of the people out there are ready to tell you they’re there. Sometimes it may feel like you’re talking and nobody is listening - but you may be surprised just who actually is watching you. 

Do you have any examples like these? Share them in the comments!