How important is Networking to you and your business?
by Hazel of Assisting U Virtually

Why?
* to grow your business
* to connect with the right people
* to create a support network around you.

There are a number of ways to network but you need to find out the best way for you and your business.  Whether it is online via social media or face-to-face in networking groups, or both - there are so many options.

Networking face-to-face is important because you can form a relationship which is based on both of you making a commitment to help each other grow and a trust forms.  This will not happen overnight  but if you connect at a networking function, you should ensure that you commit to continue to keep in contact, not to bug the other person but to slowly build up a rapore.

There are a number of options of networking groups, you can join your local Chamber of Commerce, women's groups, organisations have their own groups and breakfast groups exist.

Social media is the way of the future too in terms of networking - you can build up a following by offering advice to followers on the various forms of social media.  As an expert in your field, by posting updates and posts, you will offer realistic advice which will eventually lead to a growth in your customer base and an acknowledgement by the community that you really are an expert in your field.

Don't sit back and think that the world of networking is scary - instead, back yourself and your business and promote it - know your worth and let everyone know.  Be happy to network for others as well because this will increase the trust between yourself and others too.

Assisting U Virtually

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Every effective website has a mission. Something it needs to achieve above all else. Even if your website mission is not formally understood, or often discussed, it still exists. Generally, your website mission is the measure by which you will decide whether your website is a success or a failure.

A website mission can be anything, but for most Australian businesses it will fall into one or more of the following categories:

• To generate leads
• To generate online sales (i.e. sales from the website itself)
• To generate offline sales (i.e. sales that are completed away from the website)
• To improve or streamline customer service
• To build a strong brand or presence
• To distribute information
• To attract site visitors and generate advertising revenue

There is nothing very new in the above list. So why is understanding your website mission so important? The answer is simple - once you understand what your website really needs to do for you, it will assist you in making clear and constructive decisions now and in the future.

Here are a few examples:

• Before adding anything to your website you should assess whether it will help (or hinder) you achieve your website mission. Only include elements of real value.
• You should explore websites with a similar mission to yours so you can understand what makes them a success or a failure.
• You should analyse the potential financial gains from achieving your website mission. This should help you understand the appropriate budget for your website and its marketing.
• Speak to your (current or potential) web designer about your mission and get a feeling for the solutions they suggest. Assess how they can help you achieve your website mission.

If you do not yet have a website, make sure you clearly understand your website mission before you get started. If you already have a website, then I urge you to spend some time thinking about how your website can best serve your business. Which parts of your website are working for you? Which are simply filling space? Which are actively working against you? Make sure your website and your website mission are on the same page.

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Given the rapid pace with which things change on the internet, it is not uncommon for techniques or devices that were once regarded as best practice to quickly move to being considered worst practice. Outlined below are examples that we believe in the vast majority of cases will decrease, rather than increase, a website's chance of success:

1.Splash Pages: Remember when almost every website made you view an image or animation before you got to enter the site? Such splash pages frustrate users and significantly decrease website conversions. In almost every case a splash page is a terrible idea.

2.Large amounts of flash: Flash can add visual impact to your site. However, this needs to be balanced with the fact it is not properly indexed by search engines, cannot be viewed on iPhones or iPads and can be slow to download. Never place anything important inside flash.

3.Bulky Images: Not everyone has a great internet connection or a huge screen. Keep your image sizes small to ensure the majority of people can enjoy your website.

4.Graphics for site navigation: If you are serious about search engine optimisation your main site navigation should be text rather than graphics based.

5.Too much animation: Movement attracts the eye but can make reading difficult. Don't let too much movement impact on the ability of a site visitor to understand your message.

6.Bleeding edge technology: Avoid technology that requires users to download special software or acquire new skills. Often, they will do neither, and your website will be less effective.

7.Being unique: Your product, design and content can be unique. Your site navigation and the way people use your website should not be. It is vital to stick to website conventions. Confusing people will affect the success of your website.

8.Tricks to fool search engines: It can be tempting to bend the rules and artificially manipulate a search engines' view of your site. However, any short term gains will likely be more than offset if you get caught and your domain is demoted or worst case, entirely removed from Google altogether.

9.Background music: Making an impact with your website is a good thing. Annoying your users, embarrassing them at work or severely slowing down the browsing of your website is not. Very few websites benefit from background music or audio that launches automatically.

10.Automatic pop-up windows: No-one likes websites that create automatic pop-up windows. While there is a chance that pop-ups can convert some site visitors you need to balance this with the larger number of people who will be annoyed and driven away by them.

There are aspects of this list that are subjective and I can begrudgingly admit that there are possibly some items above that have a role to play for some websites. Does your website contain any of the above? Do you know for sure whether they are helping or hindering your online success? Make today the day you take a fresh look at your website.

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I recently spent the day with the amazing team from the RedKite Foundation discussing social media strategy. Yes… a blatant plug, but they deserve it!

We covered a lot of ground, but their CEO, Jenni Seton posed a very interesting question that I felt was worth exploring. The question went along the lines of figuring out how to remain relevant in a time when people tend to be narrow-casting.

Narrow-casting by definition is when people selectively tune out what they do and don’t want to know.  For instance, I don’t want to see advertisements for hamburgers, so I fast forward those ads on television. I unsubscribe to newsletters that don’t provide relevant & timely information and block people on Facebook & Twitter that don’t add value to the conversation.

And therein lies the key. Relevance and value. 

Without sounding philosophical, we tend to get caught up in our own world and/or the product we represent. Admit it…. nothing is ever as important as our own product.

Social media represents an opportunity for you to talk about your product to an ever-present and growing audience. And that conversation will be sustainable and rewarding, so long as you keep those magic words top of mind; relevance and value.

Using social networks as a sales and marketing tool requires you to interact. Gone are the days when you could send 10,000 glossy brochures to your entire database. Today, the key to using social networks to promote your product or service is to create a conversation. Think of it as bit like going to a party. You can’t just rock up to the first person you see and yell “You’ve got to buy my widget. It’s only $9.95.”

Instead, create meaningful content – or a relevant conversation if you will – about your product. Create posts that add value to the lives of the people you’re mingling with online. Try to solve their problems or offer solutions.  

Connect with people genuinely and listen to the conversation. Respond to their requests and monitor the discussions. If you strive to remain relevant and valuable, being outcast by the narrow-casters will be difficult.

Listen, interact and respond. You might just discover your audience’s burning needs and be able to create a window for your wares.

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By far one of the funkiest ways to harness the ‘power of the people’ is via the web and mobile application called FourSquare.

Foursquare is a mobile-based startup that lets people "check in" at bars, restaurants, hotels and other attractions through their smartphone. They’re a leader in combining social networking with location, allowing users to earn discounts and prices for showing up at thousands of venues worldwide.

While this might sound like a fabulous game appropriate only to your 12 year old, companies and advertisers are taking massive advantage of the start-up as a way to reach consumers – of any age - when they're close to their stores or businesses.

One of Foursquare's challenges is to stay on top of its growth. In the last 3 months alone, Foursquare has more than doubled its registered users from 750,000 to over 1.8 million users. This is the sort of phenomenal growth that twitter experienced.

So what’s this mean for you?

Firstly, FourSquare is a free application. You can sign up, add your venue and then add promotions or loyalty discounts for your venue. Let me give you an example..... Say I own a coffee shop in Newstead. I add my venue and promotion. My customers are driving around, looking at the FourSquare application on their smartphone and see that my coffee joint is close to them. They also see my promotion and decide to stop in. It attracts new customers and also drives loyalty in existing customers. Promotions could range from ‘buy 2 coffees & get the third free’ to ‘check in 5 times and we’ll shout you coffee & a muffin on your 6^th visit’ to crowning ‘mayors’ of your venues.... it’s all up to your imagination.

Foursquare's ability to attract a large number of businesses at such an early stage in its evolution has already attracted venture capitalists to the tune of $20 million. The simplistic model is one that users and businesses love and I believe it will monetize better than many of the other social networking products out there.

No related posts.

I subscribe to The Web Showroom blog and can't get enough of what they have to say. The latest instalment is an article on whether your website visitors are contacting your business and if not, what you can do to fix that. See below what David Lawrence has to say. 

I was working with a client last week who didn't want us to put their phone number and address in prominent places on their website. They felt that "if a customer wants to contact me, they will find my contact page". There are certainly websites where this approach is appropriate, but the chances are that if your website needs to generate leads for your business then settling for a simple contact page is probably not going to do the job.  

For a lead generation website my advice is simple, you shouldn't be afraid to heavily promote the various ways that website visitors can contact you. A good case study in this area is our own website. By clicking through our site you will see we have saturated it with contact details and calls to action. These include:   

• A phone number on the top right of every page
• A phone number as part of the main call to action on the homepage
• A 'quick' contact form on every page of our website
• A standard contact page which is referred to throughout the website content
• Most pages ending with a phone number (1800 981 442) or a link to contact us

We don't do this because we think our site visitors won't know how to find the 'Contact' page within our site navigation. Rather, we take this approach because we want to make contacting us as easy as possible and to make sure it happens as frequently as possible. Different visitors will prefer different contact methods. Put simply, the more options we give people, the more leads we receive. The more often they are asked to contact us, the more likely it is that they will.   

I ask you the following question - are you speaking with as many of your website visitors as possible? Or are you expecting clients to work a little bit harder to become a genuine prospect?

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If I were to ask you to think about the saying, “you only get one chance to make a first impression” and visualize it playing out between two people, many of you will form a picture in your mind of two people physically meeting for the first time.

Maybe you get a picture of two people shaking hands for the first time, or hear the small talk as they greet each other or maybe you imagine the interaction going smoothly or poorly. No matter what you see, the vast majority of you when asked to do this exercise will think in physical dimensions – you will picture two people physically meeting for the first time.

But, when taken in the context of building and promoting your personal brand you need to flip this convention on its head.

You need to think in digital dimensions.

Imagine somebody going to their laptop, typing your business name or a search term into Google and then clicking on any of the first five links that appear. This is the way that people meet in a digital economy.

The information that is found in those first five links is the digital first impression that others will form of you. This information and how it affects others’ views of you is what shapes the perception of your personal brand – and perception is reality.

Now spend some time going through the first five search results – if you try this out, you will find the names and related content from the individuals with the strongest personal brands for that search term. And, if you didn’t notice, you’ve actually just met someone and formed a digital first impression of them.

How many people are exposed to you digitally and ultimately end up forming their digital first impression of you? It’s hard to say how many for sure, but it is far more than the amount of people you will meet face to face in your lifetime.

This is a by-product of our digital economy — the majority of the people you meet are from your social networks or through people finding you on social networks, the web or through search engines.

These changes in the way people meet have many advantages for those who have positioned themselves favourably through building their personal brands.

You only get one chance to make a first impression. I believe in that statement now more than ever because people have the ability to find you online without you agreeing to it. If you have a strong personal brand you can influence a good digital first impression. If you do not have a strong personal brand, well, you will go largely unnoticed and find doors shut where others find doors open.

If you’re anything like me, you don’t like running into shut doors – you like them open with opportunity. If you think of it in this sense, creating your personal brand is much like having a set of keys to unlock closed doors.

How are you going to influence your personal brand today?

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Last week we detailed several reasons for a business to develop a Facebook Fan Page. With over 350 million ACTIVE users on Facebook at any given moment, you can imagine that the potential to tap into this market is enormous.

But I often consult to clients who have either been advised or started a Facebook page and then wondered why it hasn’t worked. Facebook Fan Pages, as with any marketing collateral or resource, require attention to work. Very rarely do we find any success in gathering a heap of random names and sending out random information and hoping someone might buy. A great example of this is direct marketing or mailbox drops. If you don’t provide a valuable message and subsequent follow up, you are doomed for failure. Facebook Fan Pages are no different.

So to save you some heartache, here are several things you need to be aware of before you develop a Facebook Fan Page.

Continuity = Success

Just like any conversation you engage in, you need to keep the sentences flowing. My definition of social media is a big collection of online conversations and connections. When you create a Fan Page, you need to be updating and creating content continuously to achieve success. How much?  I think it’s reasonable to post 3 to 4 items a day. Sounds like a lot doesn’t it? But we’re talking about 4 sentences – or thoughts – being uploaded to Facebook throughout the day. Don’t let the process consume you though.

Monitoring

Because we’re talking about creating a conversation, you need to spend some time monitoring what your Fans are doing and saying. If you don’t, you’re really just engaging in a one-way conversation, and there’s little value in this. True, it’s branding to have your logo seen continually, but true success on social media is found in creating the conversation.

Who and Why?

Define your target market before asking everyone to be your fan. The value is not in the ‘volume’ of fans but ‘quality’ of fans. I’d rather have 50 fans who are qualified buyers than 500 fans who are all there just to blast their own message.

So once you’ve worked out who you want to target and why, set about finding them on Facebook. Look at people’s profiles and conversations, judge whether they might be interested in getting to know more about you and you about them. Don’t dismiss the power of referral or the fact that fans may pass on positive things about you and your product to their friends.

Commitment

All the above points lead to my final point. Know that creating a SUCCESSFUL Fan Page takes commitment. It’s not a happenstance tactic. If you’re worried about having the time to do it properly, then don’t do it at all, rather than making a botched and frustrated attempt at it.

If you don’t know what you want to talk about or who you want to talk to, then again, don’t do it until you figure out these important details. Don’t be sucked into the trend of starting a Fan Page because everyone else is doing it.

Maintaining a Fan Page should take more than 30 minutes a day, and then maybe once a week, spend a little time crowd-sourcing for fans.

Make the commitment to engage your fans and provide meaningful content. Cant think what on earth you’d say 3 or 4 times a day? Surely you have an interesting service or product? Again, think of using Fan Pages to begin a conversation with your audience and you’ll quickly discover interesting things to talk about.

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You cant talk marketing at the moment without mentioning the “F” word. And by that I mean Facebook.

The vast majority of people – over 70% in fact – maintain a presence on Facebook, and now if you have a business, you should consider creating a Fan Page. So what’s a Fan Page? Facebook originally created Fan Pages to allow celebrities and large corporations to connect with more people. After all, your personal profile only allows you to connect to 5,000 of your closest friends! However ‘stars’ like Ashton Kutcher and Kevin Rudd have hundreds and thousands of followers.

Here are some pros and cons for creating a Fan Page:

Branding

Unlike your personal profile, Fan Pages allow you to use your business name, logo & any other branding around your business. You can customise pages so they look similar to your website, Twitter page or YouTube Channel. This allows you to keep a consistent image between your Facebook page and any other online presence you have.

By having a Fan Page, you can differential between the personal you and the business you. This can be particularly important if you have family and friends connecting with you and you want to maintain some privacy.

Google

Fan Pages are the only part of Facebook that is fully indexed by Google. What does this mean? Anything you post to your Facebook fan page will be found by Google. Items on your personal profile or in groups will not. This means if you have a Fan Page, you increase the chances of your business being found online, not just by people on Facebook, but people throughout the Web.

Not only that, Facebook has an Alexa ranking of two. This means Facebook is the second most trafficked site on the web (second only to Google). Therefore, links from your Facebook Fan Page to your website will increase the importance of your website in Google’s eyes.

Instant Access

Unlike a group, people do not have to be a member of Facebook to view your Fan Page. If your fan page shows up in a Google search or they click a link from your website, people can look at your entire Fan Page even if they are not members of Facebook.

Interaction with Your Audience

Your Facebook fan page allows you to have a more personal interaction with your fans than you might have on your website. True, you can set up forums and discussion rooms on your website, but many small businesses have a limited tech-support budget. Therefore, including this feature on your website can be difficult or expensive.

With your Facebook fan page however, all the functionality is already there. Fans can post on the wall, upload photos & videos and ask questions. By allowing interaction you are building relationships with your audience. And because you’re creating a two-way conversation, their relationship with your brand will become stronger. Also, by having your fans interact with your fan page, you motivate them to return.

Multimedia

Facebook allows you to upload videos, photographs and audio - all for free. This means you don’t have to worry about using up bandwidth on your own website. Not only that, but by adding multimedia to your Facebook Fan Page you are increasing the richness of your fan’s experience. You are deepening their connection with you and increasing the likelihood that they will become customers.

Regardless of how many people you connect to on Facebook, whether you are an absolute newbie or a veteran Facebook user, if you have a business you should weigh the pros and cons of developing  a Facebook page. Next week we explore the cons to creating a Fan Page.

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Recently we  discussed six great reasons why your company should have a blog.  We now counter some of the objectives raised when developing a company blog and how to overcome the reluctance.

Despite these six very good reasons why companies should be blogging, the same 2 objections surface time and time again:

1- I Don’t Have Time to Blog

The truth is you don’t have time NOT to blog. You probably already write blog articles, you just don’t call them that. Blogs are the new email newsletters. Most anything that could go in your newsletter can go in your blog. You can still send the content out via email, and readers can subscribe to your blog to get posts via email.

Portions of white papers can also make excellent blog articles. But a blog is better than a newsletter or a white paper because readers can join the debate and be positioned to respond to other “calls to action” you may place adjacent to or within posts. In addition, readers will be able to navigate your blog to read older articles that would otherwise be in a deleted newsletter or white paper. Best of all, each blog article you post will provide lasting benefit because it is a web page that can be optimized, indexed, and drawing natural search traffic for you ad infinitum.

In addition, quality blogging engines can support multiple authors, so more than one leader in your organisation can post articles. This takes the pressure off any one individual. And remember that a good blog post might just draw a parallel between two or three recent articles, or suggest an explanation for a puzzling industry phenomenon. A good article doesn’t have to be a PhD thesis.

2- What if My Customers Actually Find Out What I’m Thinking?

Some professionals don’t like the idea of blogging because it means relinquishing control over some elements of the corporate brand. A blog is less formal than a press release or an official marketing message, and the comments left by readers cannot be predicted. The point here is… too bad! In today’s world, consumers have access to thousands of opinions about your brand, and thousands of articles, commentaries, product reviews, etc. that will certainly impact the buying decision. The idea that you can control exactly how your brand will be perceived or keep consumers in the dark is outdated. The truth is your best option is to engage customers in an honest, open dialogue. Be confident that transparency is the best policy, and customers will reward your candour.

In closing, get out there and blog!

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