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I listened in on a recent Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) webinar in which John Moore, of Brand Autopsy stated:

Social Media helps small businesses seem big and big businesses act small

Knowing the psychographics of your customers can help you not just act small but be small and have one to one level conversations with them.  This is exactly what will ignite positive word of mouth for your business!

According to Forrester Research, 94% of consumers trust Word of Mouth and 84% of business buyers say Word of Mouth has the greatest influence over their purchase decisions, far surpassing any form of paid media. Nielsen, the market research firm, recently called Word of Mouth “the world’s most powerful sales tool.”  Social media only amplifies word of mouth.

What information helps big business create profitable small talk?

• Knowing your client’s contact sphere

Get to know where they spend time.  It could be with an organization. It could be within an industry specific association.  It could be where they find the latest information for their profession.  Knowing your client’s associations, will help you understand the current conversations they’re participating in and what matters to them.

If you would like to jump in on the conversations, be in the know and genuinely care what’s new for your client’s or what’s causing the most pain – find out their associations and set up a Google alert to give you updates on the latest information posted to the web.

Now, you can engage your clients about what’s on their mind, engages them and incites action.

• Know your client’s circle of influence

Do you know who they influence or impact?  It could be students, people they mentor or people they’ve helped.  Often when you make a difference in the life of someone, they feel such tremendous gratitude.  This gratitude influence them to assist in a way that makes them feel that there’s balance between what you received and what you eventually give them.

Know who they are “the best customers” for. If you follow the checkbook, you’ll see who your clients directly influence through their livelihood.  This “food chain” can reveal to you who your client’s influence.

What a tremendous way to engage in one-to-one conversations that are meaningful and presented in a manner that is comfortable and familiar to them.

Find out:

• What they like to read
• Where they spend their lunchtime
• Are they members of:
  • Social service organizations
  • Industry associations
  • Reunion event or educational
  • Volunteer organization

Author: Maria Elena Duron | chief buzz officer, speaker and coach focused on helping you move, touch and inspire others to action and speak positively on your behalf at buzz2bucks | word of mouth firm

You’ve seen people with thousands of fans and followers on Twitter and Facebook. You’ve heard stories of people selling services and products and making money with Social Media but you haven’t been able to get any significant amount of followers or generate any interest, much less income, using these tools. You may be ready to shrug this Social Media thing off as a fad.

There are over 300 million users on Facebook alone, with the largest growing demographic being 35 and older.  It stands to reason that many of the people who are interacting or have to potential to encounter your brand off line are already on line.  Before you throw out this strategy as a complete waste of time, you may just need to tweak a few things to make your brand more attractive and draw people to you.

What separates brands that succeed from brands that fail is the ability to connect and engage.

Here are 3 ways to attract people to your brand:

Build Relevant Content

People don’t care about your brand, unless they feel that your brand cares about them. Position yourself as a resource to your Social Media friends, fans, followers and community by talking about what’s important to them, as it relates to what you do.  Successful brands take the talk beyond the product and branch out into conversations that relate peripherally to their brands.  Beverage companies talk about parties, insurance brands talk about safety and protecting what you care about most, PR brands talk about how to shine in the community. Social Media is a huge data mine. That’s one of it’s most amazing benefits. Not just data in the traditional sense, of how many people are looking at a site, but relevant data about how people think and feel.  If you listen carefully, you’ll be able to build content and have conversations that build trust and make you memorable.

Connect With Communities

To expand your network, so let everyone you know that you’re on Social Meda.  Promote your presence on your business cards, websites, other social media sites.  Let people know where they can find you.  Follow and engage your customers and people on Social Media.  Social Media is about conversations. Talk, listen, learn and respond.  Talk to people. Share what you think and know, as well as your content, products and services.  Balance sharing with promoting.  Listen to your customers and respond, show interest in what matters.  By interacting and engaging, you’ll be able to make the transition from a company on the outside; you’ll be a trusted member of the community.

Communicate with Consistency

Building and maintaining relationships requires consistency.  Once relationships are established, consistent communication within the communities is needed.  Be sure to communicate with your Social Media communities regularly.  This can be via a status update, blog post or content from other sources.  Setting up profiles and then going silent will cause followers to shift to more engaging brands.

About the Author: If you’ve ever wondered how you’re going to build your brand using social media, then pay attention to our our guest columnist today.  Staci J. Shelton is a social media expert and blogger who specializes in building and maximizing online relationships.

I’ve always been a big fan of the TED Talks. TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) is a invite only conference that is held in the Bay Area every year. The attendees are some of the smartest minds in the world and they present. This particular video caught my attention – He talks about how humans make decisions – “Default behavior” etc.

If you are into any sort of data-collection human subject (soliciting feedback) research – I strongly encourage you to watch this embeded video (link to the video below just in case the video does not show up)

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html

Today’s guest post is by Zane Safrit, CEO and small business expert.

Look at those words in the title. Do they appear as an anagram? Find the word or phrase hidden in these letters…

Maybe. Maybe the problem is my reading list. I never see them used together in sentences.

Never say never someone’s dad always said. So, let’s say rarely. Rarely do I see them in a sentence together. Rarely do I see them together in an article or blog post.

Do you?

Why is that? Who is afraid of using them together?

The client? I’ve been a client as a CEO of a small company.  Cash-flow was my Holy Grail. Cash-flows kept me and all small businesses king of our domain.

And marketing agencies would never, ever, (no, really…NEVER) mention cash-flow. I even helped their prospects when I told them my Holy Grail.  Cash-flow is my Holy Grail. Find me more and I’m yours forever.

The silence was deafening after I said that. In that silence, I was reminded of another similarly awkward silence.

I  dropped the F-bomb in polite company. I was in my backyard on a summer afternoon.  Early ’70’s. North Carolina. I used it in a sentence with a neighbor.  With, not at him. And, that was a key difference, I thought. Still, the silence before the storm previously known as my mom, was…deafening.

There was no difference with the client.  The only difference was my F-word then was replaced with the C-word. Cash-flow. Equally as obscene to the agencies that approached me.

The storm that had been the agency was predictable. There were cries of conversation and clicks, page views and forward-to-a-friend,  we can only send you traffic, we can only do so much…

That was The Holy Grail if you will of their services. Ironically, their cash-flow needs were addressed with an upfront payment. I say ironically, because their Holy Grail of ‘the conversation’ and ‘community’ was pre-eminent in all its freeemium purity. My crass cash-flow Holy Grail was sufferable only with held noses and plugged ears.

Has much changed? No. Maybe it’s worse. Google the phrase “cash-flow + Social Media”. You’ll find 1.3 million results. But look closer. Here’s what you find in the first two pages with 20 results:

• 8 were about Facebook finally reaching cash-flow positive
• 1 about Mashable doing the same
• 1 about Hi5 and their game that helped improve cash-flow (theirs)
• 3-4 general articles that include cash-flow as a keyword only
• a few with broken links or unrelated content.
• 1. Mine.  A guest post at SmallBizTrends…same topic.

The point here, and there is one, is this: Why? A HUGE opportunity exists for social media agencies, social media as a resource/strategy/tactic to work with small business to create the growth that creates the jobs that create our economic recovery. No. I’m not overstating the opportunity.

Social media is the ultimate playing-field leveler, ideally suited for small businesses. Social media and its minions are filled with creative, passionate, brilliant people dedicated to the power of social media to connect and inspire with its transparent, open, personalized tools and resources.

Small business is a target-rich environment of clients with unique and personal purposes, communicated through the dedicated efforts of its stakeholders who sustain a personal connection to the  company.  There is no better resource to accelerate the spread of a company’s message than social media tools and resources. Oh. And these tools are easy-to-use, very affordable, easy to personalize, easy to scale, and easy to adapt.  Even interns can do it. Though, don’t use them.

This appears to be a jobless economic recovery. Data points to job losses continuing with small businesses. Historically, every economic recovery to-date, an economy emerges from a recession when small businesses begin to…ADD jobs.  Small businesses can do this with cost-effective (cash-flow positive) strategies, tools and tactics to spread their message.

Enter…Social Media.

So…social media agencies. You want more clients, right? You want more word-of-mouth, right? Talk to your clients in their language. Translate your world, conversations and clicks and community, into language your clients (their decision-makers) will understand: cash-flow, from lower advertising costs and greater results with more qualified referrals and higher customer loyalty scores with more upselling and cross-selling.

So…clients. Insist your social media maven/agency understand your need for more cash-flow. If they cannot or will not…keep looking. Oh. And, do not wait.

• Start a blog.
• Get on Twitter.
• Get a Facebook page.
• Subscribe to Google Alerts.
• Read a few blogs.
• Use RSS feeds to read them.
• Any of the above.
• Not sure what these are? Ask your intern. They can get you started.

But the key word is YOU. You get started today. Then you will know the right questions to ask. Your questions will help those agencies better understand your needs.

Together, we can meet our companies’ respective needs, grow our companies, add jobs, find more customers for our businesses…add jobs and drive our economy out of this recession.

Let’s start using social media and cash-flows in the same sentence. Here’s a start. Social media’s reach and acceleration of a brand’s message can translate into positive cash-flows for that brand’s owner. Here’s how: …

How ’bout it?

About the author: Zane Safrit’s passion is small business and the operations excellence required to deliver a product that creates word-of-mouth, customer referrals and instills pride in those whose passion created it. He previously served as CEO of a small business. Zane’s blog can be found at Zane Safrit.

If you’ve been in the market or customer research business for longer than 20 years, then you remember when gathering data to come up with relevant information that you can make some decisions with was both an expensive and extensive proposition.  You had to have access to sample and respondents, you may have had to either do a focus group, use the phone or mail your survey.  Each method had its good points and bad points – and none are all that appealing, especially if all you wanted was a little insight and direction as to what areas of research to allocate your time and your money.

The internet has not only increased the ease and lowered the cost of getting to secondary information, but has made getting your hands on primary and demographic information just as easy and inexpensive.  As a disclaimer, I’m not advocating replacing your good research practices for the methods I’ll cover here.  I’m sharing some creative ways I’ve used to get to decent, usable information that has helped me pull together better surveys, and get better information.

You may not expect to find valid and representative sample on social media sites, but they are there.

Facebook

The fastest category of Facebook users right now is women over 55.  With that juicy statistic, let’s take a look at how much more demographic insight we can get from Facebook:

• Facebook has over 300 million users that are relatively evenly distributed.  You can’t say it’s just kids anymore.
• You can collect basic segment data from Facebook instead of using Nielsen! Click on the “Advertisers” link at the bottom of every Facebook page and go through the steps of placing an ad.  You’ll get the opportunity to enter specifics about the segment you’re interested in and finally get an idea as to market size.  Again – not perfect, but a good start.

LinkedIn

I like to use LinkedIn like a focus group for my business-to-business and industrial research.  Use LinkedIn Answers to ask about anything from segmentation to sardines.   Simply log into your accounts and click on the “Answers” link.  Ask your question, target the audience that you want to respond and let it fly.  In addition to getting some exceptionally insightful answers for FREE, you’ll get the added benefit of building relationships with experts in the areas you are interested in.

LinkedIn also has a “LinkedIn Polls” feature that allows you to poll your network and post the results.  This would allow you to create a conversation around a specific topic of interest and get additional “color commentary” around your research topic.

Twitter

Twitter is an interesting tool to use for research.  It’s not as targeted or focused as either Facebook or LinkedIn, but it has its own benefits.  One of my favorite ways to use Twitter is to collect secondary research.  I use the “search” function and type in a phrase I’m interested in and then track to see what articles have been getting the most tweets around that topic or who is Tweeting about that topic.   Because Twitter is a free-flowing conversation, I like to start my exploratory research there.  I look and see what topics are trending and then read the articles associated with those topics.  Once I have my questions or ideas formulated, I’ll go to LinkedIn and ask a question.  Another way to use Twitter is to send twitter messages that drive an audience to a web site or blog post that might have a survey or poll attached to it.

Overall, it’s hard to ignore the fact that budgets and time-frames are tighter, but the need to get access to actionable information is even more important than ever.  And with the social media user demographics broadening to include populations beyond the youth market, it’s the obvious choice for savvy researchers who need access to information quickly.

About the Author: Ivana Taylor is CEO of Third Force, a strategic firm that helps small businesses get and keep their ideal customer.  She’s the co-author of the book “Excel for Marketing Managers” and proprietor of DIYMarketers, a site for in-house marketers.  Her blog is Strategy Stew.

So we’re finally back from Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C. We had an amazing time meeting many of you and talking about the exciting opportunities ahead – Both for IdeaScale as well as many Federal and State/Local agencies feedback and crowdsourcing efforts to make Goverment a Platform. I wanted to distill some of the conversations that we’ve had with many agency representatives and give all of you an idea of where we are and our future direction.

Free License for Civic Engagement We’ve decided to formalize and operationalize an IdeaScale License tailored and designed specifically for Gov Agencies – Federal, State and Local. So far we’ve made this available on an Ad-Hoc and case by case basis, but as of today we will allow any Gov Agency to use IdeaScale for free – We are calling this the IdeaScale Civic Engagement License. Most of you on this list already have this license – but just in case details on this : http://ideascale.com/opengov

Open ID – Single Signon – Integration A recurring theme has been around OpenId/Single Signon using OpenID and Drupal. I have had personal conversations with many of you around this and want to let you know that we take this seriously. We will be putting our heads to work over the next couple of weeks to come up with a series of solutions. Our initial goal is to make IdeaScale work seamlessly with a Drupal Installation so users do not have to login multiple times. We will also be working on integrating with other OpenID providers (Google, Yahoo etc.) as well as other social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Best Practice and Recommedations One of the themes that I heard was to create a specific set of guidelines and recomendations for best-practice for launching crowdsourcing initiatives. We have some internal recomendation (that work on the commercial side) but then like all good things – Gov Initiatives have their own set of challenges. I have talked to Lena Trudeau (NAPA) about sharing such details with with the rest of us so we all can learn from it. Here are some brief issues that we all should consider:

• Moderation Policy – Have a clear moderation policy and explain that to the end-user.
• Seed Ideas from an internal audience before launch
• Phased Rollout – Invite key (and trusted) members of the communitty to begin the engagement process and then roll it out to the larger userbase (blog post, twitter/fb update)
• Enable Twitter integration and create/resuse a hashtag. Monitor the twitter hashtag very closely.

Moderation Vs. Speech Suppression This is obviosly a very sensitive issue and there are a few enhancements that we think we can do to make life easier for everyone:

1. Have a link that displays all the ideas/comments that have been “flagged” – this will allow users to get to the flagged ideas, but they will not be visible on the front page.
2. The same can apply to comments also.

Upload Vidoes / You Tube Integration Another idea that was discussed was the ability for users to upload videos as part of the idea submission process. YouTube has an API and we probably can piggy back on that to allow for that functionality. Some Implementations Here are some links to implementations of IdeaScale that are live – this will give you an idea of how agencies are using IdeaScale. We have a few other projects that are on track, but since they are not public yet, we can’t share more. We will share more of them on next month’s update.

• http://broadband.ideascale.com (FCC)
• http://healthcaredebate.com
• http://opengov.ideascale.com (OSTP)

TOS Agreement with GSA I know some of you are aware of this, but I wanted to point out and reiterate that IdeaScale and many other Web 2.0 sites – Flickr, YouTube etc. have signed a Terms Of Service Amendment Agreement with the GSA as a template for engagement with Federal Agencies. If your agency does not already have this executed with IdeaScale we’ve put a very simple and effecient process for doing this : Please send an email to usgovernment@surveyanalytics.com. So far the following Federal Agencies have ToS agreements:

• Executive Office of the President (EOP)
• General Services Admin (GSA)
• Federal Communication Commission (FCC)
• Department of Energy (DoE)

Apart from these Gov specific enhancements, we will be making many other enhancements from our own IdeaScale site (http://ideas.ideascale.com) – if you have ideas on improving IdeaScale please feel free to share them with us. Finally, I want to thank all of you who have supported us through Gov 2.0 and for the wonderful conversations we’ve had. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Today’s guest post is by Patti Renner, a direct marketing copywriter who is known for getting readers to do what she asks.  She’s got some great writing advice that will help you write better copy and increase your response rates.

Messages that are “good enough” no longer are. In today’s business environment, every impression counts. What you say, and how you say it, reflects back on you and your business.

Knowing this, you’re missing a great opportunity when you settle for the canned, pre-programmed “template” messages for your survey invitations or thank you messages. Even a survey report is still a communication that should be relatively fun and easy to read! You can do better than basic.

For starters, let’s have a look at what you’re already sending out to people. (This includes emails, survey reports, thank you pages, etc.) Is it warm and friendly? Does it reflect your values as a company? If you were the recipient of the piece, would you enjoy reading it – or at the very least, be interested in reading it?

(Note: If you answered “yes,” you can stop reading here. But if you’re using standard templates, or if you want your messages to be even better, read on…)

Now, let’s quickly see how we can do better than those pre-programmed options. Here are the four rules for stronger results.

1) Be authentic – Your marketing message doesn’t end with your Web content and brochures. Your corporate “voice” should permeate everything your send out — from the survey request to the “thank you for responding” page… from the results to the summary. Keep a consistent tone and style. Motley Fool, Apple, and Ben & Jerry’s all do an excellent job with this. You should too.

2) Be clear – Make it easy for people to “get” what you’re talking about. The easiest way to be understood is to write like you speak. Use shorter sentences and simpler terms. When you read back through your work, focus on the core message and edit out any of the “three-dollar words” and phrases that don’t add to that message. Also, keep industry jargon to a minimum. (Note: There’s a difference between sounding professional and sounding pretentious… don’t confuse the two.)

3) Be generous – Too many pieces out there are written from the standpoint of what the company (or person) wants the other person to know, instead of what the other person wants to hear. Put yourself in the recipient’s shoes, and craft your message around them. Instead of saying: “Thank you for helping XYZ Company better serve its clients.” you would get better results by putting them first: “Clients like you are the reason we enjoy coming to work each day. We appreciate your business, and your help!”

4) Be real - When you’re buried in work and under deadline, it’s easy to forget that there are real people behind each of those emails on your list. Many take valuable time out of their day to help you do your job and give you their feedback. It’s only fair that you treat them like a person… not a number! The survey invitations and thank you messages are an excellent opportunity to build rapport, to help you get better responses and stronger results.

Now, I know what you’re thinking… you sometimes just don’t have time to do much else than plug in the template and crank it out. When that’s the case, just find the template closest to what you need, then revise it with the four rules in mind. Consider it three minutes of tweaks well spent.

Fact is, surveys and statistics can often inspire a collective yawn. But there’s no need to put people to sleep with your survey results, using flat, bland language. Instead, create reports and other communications that are steeped in authenticity.

You already know that every email, report or letter — every client “touch” — is an opportunity to build stronger relationships and to further your branding. Keep a close eye on the tone and style of all your communications.  Keep things real for better results.

__________________________

Patti Kuhar Renner is known for her no-nonsense approach for effective marketing messages. A direct response copywriter, she specializes in helping small business perform better online. You can reach her at patti@pattirenner.com.