I'd like to share a personal story of how social media recently came to my rescue, highlighting an important opportunity for all you small businesses out there.
This Friday was really stressful. I was up at 5:30 a.m. to prepare for the movers to come, followed by my cleaning service, all to turn my condo into a state fit for my new tenant in 24 hours! That stress only increased when the cleaning service, slated to arrive between 3 and 5 p.m., still wasn't there at 4:50 p.m. Their office couldn't get in touch with the ladies scheduled to clean my home and could give me no real assurance that it would even get done.
Friday, 6:30 p.m. Once I had the movers trollying my stuff into storage, I called the cleaning service to get an update. I was dismayed to reach their voicemail. Knowing this particular service didn't work Saturdays, I was in a bind. First I Googled while shuttling furniture with the movers, but then I thought better of it and posted this update to my Facebook feed. Surely, someone in Austin had an idea for me?
*Note: The cleaning service is blanked out and the last names of my friends have been omitted for privacy. Jackpot! 3 minutes later ...
Friday, 6:57 p.m My friend Theresa posted a note about her favorite cleaning service, Austin Maids.
Perfect! I checked out their site, and it seems fine. I called their number, and naturally, on a Friday night nearing 7 p.m., I got their voicemail. I left an informative, if distraught message, not expecting any return call until Monday, then headed out to a dinner party. So much for research.
Friday, 8:35 p.m. My phone rang. Michael from Austin Maids got my message and said he could have a team available on Saturday afternoon -- I can call to confirm on his cell as late as I want. Now that's service.
Saturday, 12:00 a.m. We went to my condo after dinner and, it turns out, my original cleaning service did show, despite total lack of information and communication. All ended well, but you can rest assured that next time I need a cleaning service in Austin, I am getting in touch with Austin Maids. Why? Because my friends told me to -- via Facebook -- and they were right.
A lesson for SMBs:
This weekend reinforced the idea that all types of small businesses can benefit from monitoring social media sites, like Facebook, to be at the ready during a potential customer's moment of need. While my friends were the true heroes of the situation, had another maid service in Austin been monitoring the conversation, they could've jumped in and offered their services as well.
What else? The power of word of mouth in social media was extremely evident. Social media facilitates referrals (as well as negative opinions), so make sure you're paying attention to what others are saying about your business on these sites.
So, SMBs, if you aren't already, consider monitoring the conversations surrounding your brand. There are tons of free social media monitoring tools out there you can take advantage of, so what's your excuse?
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Think Facebook is just a tool for your kids in college to organize parties?
Think again.
HubSpot's new State of Facebook for Business report, released today, shows that brand- and product-focused pages represent 39% of all pages. The brand/product category is the largest single category of Facebook pages. Pages for local organizations and public figures each represent about 30% of the total Facebook pages.
The State of the Facebook for Business report was compiled from data collected by Facebook Grader, a free tool from HubSpot that helps businesses assess the marketing effectiveness of their Facebook pages.
Other key findings of the report include:
- About half of all Facebook pages have less than 500 fans.
- Only 0.3% of Facebook pages have more than one million fans.
- In aggregate, musicians and local businesses have the most fans.
- Although they have fewer overall pages, Italy and the U.K. have more fans on a per-page basis than U.S. pages.
The report data encompasses 120,000 Facebook pages and thousands of companies.
Free Report Webinar - Wednesday, December 30 - Only 1,000 spots available!
To review the findings of the Facebook for Business Report, join us for a live, 30-minute webinar on December 30 at 2:00 p.m. Presented by HubSpot's Rick Burnes and Jeanne Hopkins, the webinar will offer deeper insights into report's findings and cover several case studies of businesses using Facebook successfully.
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Quick! What are the four most frequently used words by B2B marketers?
Give up? Here's the answer: "But I'm a B2B Marketer."
How many times have you heard that refrain? Inspired by a great marketing campaign, you come up with a way to adapt it to your B2B marketing mix -- except when you pitch the idea to your boss, a horse with blinders on, she objects: "But we're a B2B company -- that won't work for us!"
How lame.
Marketing today requires creativity, and creativity requires creative stimuli. If you're trying to come up with new ways to do B2B marketing, but only follow B2B marketing examples, you'll find yourself stuck in the same old B2B rut.
In order to do remarkable work, you need to draw on a range of different media and marketing campaigns. This is particularly true of social media applications like Facebook. For example, here are five Facebook pages that aren't run by B2B companies, but that are still highly instructive to B2B marketers.
Nick Kristoff (>140,400 fans) -- Nick is a New York Times columnist. He posts his articles on his Facebook page, but instead of just posting the headline, he posts each with with a sentence or two providing some context. The effect is a more conversational, intimate page, with more engagement.
B2B Lessons? Share content, have opinions and give people a reason to be passionate about your page.
ZipCar (>27,500 fans) -- ZipCar is an urban car-sharing service. They have a lot of fun with their page and experiment with different ways of engaging people. They put a particular emphasis on contests. They hold new-car naming contests, they had a contests to pick their holiday card and they've given away gift certificates.
B2B Lessons? Have fun. Experiment.
Boston Logan International Airport (>1,200 fans) -- Logan is Boston's main airport. Among other things, the airport posts weather updates, delay information, security announcements and airline promotions. A handful of threads on the page have produced comments criticizing the airport management, but that's actually a good thing for the airport. They responded, and showed that instead of operating behind closed doors, they're trying to be transparent and engage with their customers.
B2B Lessons? Don't just run contests and share content. Use Facebook pages increase transparency and provide practical information, too.
All Things Jeep (>2,300 fans) -- All Things Jeep is an online store for Jeep clothing, jewelry and all other things. It's a small business with a very active community of fans. Their page puts particular emphasis on photos. They have a fantastic fan photos section. They're also very active in the comments of the page. In fact, their engagement might be part of the reason the community is so willing to share photos.
B2B Lessons? Engage with your community, enable them to create content.
Threadless (>100,000 fans) -- Threadless is a community-powered online t-shirt store. Like many of the examples here, they have an active community on their page, where they share a lot of content. However, Threadless does more than the typical page -- it makes it possible for people to actually purchase shirts on their Facebook page, and share their purchase history.
B2B Lessons? Facebook is a robust, flexible platform. If you're having success, take it a step further.
What are the sources of your new B2B marketing ideas? What inspires you? Do you use exclusively B2B marketing examples, or do you look to a wider range of sources?
Photo: beketchai on Flickr
Date & Time: December 22, 2009 at 2:00pm
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This morning I was pleased to see that Google’s real-time search has finally arrived in the terminal. Now, the question is how Inbound Marketers are going to entertain it once it rolls out of the gate for everyone.
What’s Streaming in Real-Time Search Results?
According to Mashable, the real-time search feature will tell you what’s happening right now by streaming real-time tweets, news articles, Yahoo answers, and even web pages. You may also remember that Google created partnerships with Facebook and MySpace earlier this year, which means content from your company’s Facebook Fan and MySpace Pages will be streaming real-time in search results very soon.
If you're like me and have yet to play with Google search results in real-time on your browser, take a look at Google’s very whimsical, Harry Potteresque video about it:
Marketers Need to Start Thinking in Real-Time
Now it’s more important than ever to produce remarkable content consistently every day. You want to produce content that's not only optimized to GET FOUND in the top ten Google search results, but you also want to be a thought-leader in your space and produce timely content that will appear in Google's real-time stream. Though it might take many months for your blog to rank highly in Google for a specific keyword, you can still produce timely content that grabs the attention of your prospect using Google's real-time results.
Also, take an inventory of how many sites you currently use that are part of Google's real-time stream. If you’re on Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace it’s becoming even more important to consistently and periodically update your streams everyday. The benefit is two-fold. Your subscribers and followers on these social networks have the potential to become more deeply engaged with your brand within the network, but you’ll also have the added benefit of leveraging Google’s massive search audience (many of whom do not know your brand already.)
Don’t Let Real-Time Make Your Company Seem Out of Date
We’ve talked a lot on this blog about how the marketplace is evolving. Every day search is empowering more and more people to discover products and services on their own. Now, Google’s real-time search has just made easier and simpler for customers to find out what’s going on with your brand right now – good or bad.
If someone asks a question on Yahoo Answers, you need a social media plan in place that allows for someone on your team to quickly answer that question. If people are having a conversation on Twitter about your brand or industry, you need to chime in and give insightful answers. You also need to be creative and offer current information. As you can see from the video, real-time search isn't just limited to news stories - you can also gain insight into local information (such as ski conditions).
Now that Google real-time has arrived, I leave you with one bit of advice. Keep working to transform your company website from stagnant pages into a mini-publishing house that produces timely, interesting content that your prospective customers are searching for right now, at this very moment, somewhere out there
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Being a tech guy, I deal mostly with the nuts and bolts of daily internet life. I've always been the sarcastic IT guy in the corner, never focused on internet marketing.
That was until I came on board at Hubspot a year ago. Spending every day at the epicenter of inbound marketing, I quickly realized the importance of social media, and Facebook in particular.
But as much as I've learned at HubSpot, it was an experience with one of my favorite musicians that made me a true inbound marketing convert.
Here's the story: I began posting links to my favorite music videos from YouTube in my status updates. (Yes I'm that guy). One of my favorite YouTube video's is "If Heartaches Were Nickels" by my favorite Blues guitarist Joe Bonamassa.
A week wouldn't go by where I wasn't posting another video of Joe on my Wall or referencing some lyrics in my status. I became a fan of his page, and joined any groups I came across pertaining to him, even following his tweets @jbonamassa.
After a few months of continued posting, I received a message from a member of Joe's Management team. The message thanked me for my support by posting all of the videos, and exposing so many people to Joe.
At first I was surprised. I hadn't done anything but post my favorite videos and hope other people would enjoy them as much as I had. After conversing back and forth for a few messages, they offered to set me up with a meet and greet with Joe before his upcoming show as a thanks for being a loyal fan.
I was shocked and couldn't wait to be able to meet someone that had just finished playing with Eric Clapton at a sold out night at the Holy Grail of venues The Royal Albert Hall in London.
The Show of a Lifetime
From the moment I arrived at the show, Joe and his management gave me the red carpet treatment. They treated me to a first class, once-in-a-lifetime night that any music fanatic would appreciate.
I arrived to Joe eating dinner with his crew and was able to sit and talk with them before they had sound check. Joe's manager Roy took me to the sound check and I watched as the band worked through songs and jammed -- just me and Roy standing there in a big room watching Joe shred on guitar right in front was unreal.
After the sound check we went and checked out the tour bus and what life on the road was like. I got to check out the equipment trailer, which was by far the best part, as we got to talking about all of the guitars, and gear, that Joe has had over the years and the stories behind them.
We made our way back to the tour bus and caught some Sportscenter on the TV while the band got ready for the show. It was surreal to be surrounded by them before the show and I couldn't believe what was happening.
I went in, caught the show and watched as he brought the house down with his guitar playing. After the show I met up with Joe and Roy backstage to thank them again for the unbelievable experience they showed me. We hung out and talked a few minutes before they had to board the bus for a gig in Pennsylvania the next day.
This was by far one of the coolest experiences ever. I came back and couldn't believe the kindness and generosity of Joe and his team. He is the best kept secret in music and is still working to grow his following.
Joe's Grassroots Music Movement
The evening also made the power social media clear to me. Without the help of a major label, Joe and his team have been quietly growing a huge following throughout the world. Such an impressive feat for an independent label run by a small group. They have been using experiences like mine, along with social media, to help create a grassroots movement big enough to project his last three albums to the number one spot on the Billboard Blues chart.
Joe's personal touch is still an integral part of the Bonamassa movement. Roy told me that in a way, Joe began his career with "social media" in its rawest form, by meeting the fans.
This relationship with all of his fans has been fostered since his early days playing with B.B. King. By staying after shows, signing autographs and taking pictures until there was nobody left. Sometimes two or three hours after the show had ended.
Soon, he was not just their "favorite musician", he was one of them. In this mindset, they supported and actively promoted his music within their social circles of family, friends and co-workers. Just in the ways I had, and that is why they valued it.
Who would have known all this was made possible by plugging my favorite lesser-known musician on Facebook!
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