WOMbeat! owes much of its early growth to LinkedIn.   We even credit LinkedIn for our success in winning the Idea Cafe’s “Innovation and Originality Grant” competition in January.

As their most recent grant winner, we now a regular contributor to their blog. Our most recent post “Tapping Into the Power of LinkedIn for Small Business” describes how business owners like you can turn LinkedIn into a powerful marketing tool for your business.

Benefits of LinkedIn include:

• Never need to look up a phone number again
• Find gold in your contacts list
• Connect with the influential with potential
• Expand your reach
• And more…
  

Click here to visit our recent blog post “Tapping Into the Power of LinkedIn for Small Business” and read the full story.

A good friend of mine, Joe Malinowski, is hosting a Blog Class on January 22nd and 27th, and I wanted to help ‘spread the word’!

Joe’s class is broken up into two sessions:

• SESSION ONE (Jan 22nd): Perfect for ‘newbies’ looking to explore the world of blogging, particularly as an affordable but powerful marketing tool for your small business.  This session will last about 2 hours and will tell you how to choose a domain (i.e., your blog website name), your theme, how to get it hosted, how to write and edit your blog posts, etc.  He will even walk you through some very cool “plug-ins” for your blog.  (Not sure what a plug-in is?  Don’t worry, he will go over this too!)
• SESSION TWO (Jan 27th): Perfect for people who have already started their blogs and are now looking for ways to monetize it or grow more traffic to their site organically. 

Both sessions will be at J Christophers on Dale Mabry from 11am-1pm,  Click here for a map.

The cost to attend the class is very affordable, with sessions 1 and 2 costing just $30.  The cost to attend just session 2 is $20.

The class is filling up fast since there were only 18 seats to begin with, so you should register soon online. 

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Still not sure?  Here is a commercial which will go over the details as well.  (If for some reason you have a problem with the link just type in Blog Class on You Tube and it is the 1st or second video)

Oh, there are dozens of sites collecting user reviews these days, so it is easy to do.  For most people, it is tempting to think that the ones with the most positive reviews are the better restaurants to visit, but people are much more likely to steer clear of those with many negative reviews.  

But what if you are the owner of that restaurant and you do not feel that these reviews fairly reflect your business?

First, it is important to recognize with the internet’s evolution, advertisers are losing their ability to influence.  Power has shifted to the consumer….get used to it!  People are tuning out the proliferation of advertising noise.  Instead, they want to know what other ‘real’ people think about a business.  And thanks to the internet and social media websites, it is far too easy for people to get these opinions.

Once you come to this important realization, the next step is to determine what this means to your business.  Hopefully, if there are reviews about your business online, most of them are positive.  However, you cannot simply expect that all reviews will continue to be positive…that is just not reality.  Smart business owners will instead incorporate these online review websites into their overall marketing and advertising plan.  How?

1) Monitor online review websites. You need to know what people are saying about your business online, so set aside one day a month (minimum) to get online yourself. Has anyone posted reviews about your business? If so, you want to get a sense of the percentage of positive vs. negative reviews. You will also want to get a sense of the negative comments – Which ones are legitimate? Which ones look like they were written by complainers, or worse…your competitors using some dirty tactics? What is the candid feedback that you need to hear anyway to improve your business? Regardless of what you find, you must not ignore these online opinions about your business, especially the negative ones.

2) Craft a strategy to encourage more “positive” opinions on these sites. This requires some creativity today (although in full disclosure, WOMbeat! is working on some new features for our website that will do just that legitimately for your business!). The good news is that in many cases, you can do this for free or “nearly free”. Start with asking friends, family and employees to post their opinions online…although we encourage transparency with these type of reviews. They should mention that they are related to your business in some fashion so as to appear very open and honest. Otherwise, you could be subject to backlash if users get wind of “fake” reviews. But also, don’t be afraid to find ways to ask your customers to post their opinions too.

3) Craft a strategy to combat any “negative” opinions or user reviews. While trying to increase positive reviews would make sense, ignoring negative reviews can be fatal. Again, the good news is combating bad negative reviews is often free or nearly free.

One tactic is to post your own comments on these sites for people to read that are in direct response to negative reviews.  Again, just be sure to make it very clear to everyone that you are the business owner.  Also, be sure to avoid trying to say things like “that review is not true or unfair”.  Instead, be tactful and include comments that describe how you resolved the issue and invite people to come see for themselves.  Often business owners win fans not by appearing perfect but by appearing to work hard to please their customers.

Of course, prevention is better than damage-control, so be sure you have business practices that prevent negative word of mouth in the first place.  Be sure to visit my other post “Turning Angry Customers into Your Best Evangelists“. 

Is all this worth it?

Youbetcha! According to Denise Shiffman of the Engage Daily Blog, a London School of Economics study found that, “Every 1% reduction in negative word of mouth correlated to .41% growth, while a 1% increase in positive word of mouth correlated to just .14% growth. In other words, reducing negative comments could grow revenue by 300% over increasing positive comments.”

Truth be told, you will not be able to make 100% of your customers happy.  If you have a great loyal customer base, a few unhappy ones won’t kill your business.  But it is worth your time to ensure those few unhappy ones do not get too big of an online audience if they express their opinions on one of these websites.  You don’t want to be caught off-guard, so have a good strategy in place, and you will be fine.

As you know, word of mouth (WOM) is extremely powerful!  Fortunately the internet and various online services not only allow you stay informed of negative WOM, you can combat it online and perhaps even use it to get great candid feedback from your customers.  Even better, the internet and these sites also now allow you to actually grow your business by generating more positive word of mouth – reaching hundreds or thousands more people than ever before.

So get online and use these sites to generate more WOM for your business!!

Benefits of Videos and YouTube for Small Business Owners

• Videos are much more powerful than words (wouldn’t you rather watch a short 1 minute video than try reading pages of copy on a website?)
• Videos are great tools for educating your current and prospective customers about the value of your business
• Videos that can be easily shared can become great viral marketing tools
• Videos are very cost-effective today (creating your own videos is extremely simple today with the new low-cost video editing tools and posting videos to sites like YouTube is free)

 Real-life example:  Your Chess Coach

Your Chess Coach is a small business based in Clearwater, Florida, that is dedicated to teaching young children chess.  The owners, Dan and Laura Sherman, are professional chess players that met and married while on the competitive chess circuit, and they have turned their passion for chess into a very successful business.

How?  Mostly through the use of a variety of online and email marketing tools.  They have also produced several videos that they have posted on their website to educate the current and prospective customers about the benefits of chess for children. 

How To Get Your Customers To Share Your Videos?

Simple!  Give them a great video that they will WANT to share and make it easy for them to do so.

Making Videos People Will Share

So the first, and probably most important, thing to remember is that people will not simply share your video with their friends because you ask them to.  Okay, maybe some will.  But if you create a video that has more “mass appeal”, people will share this whether you ask them or not.

And yes, you can create a video that has both “mass appeal” and demonstrates the value of your business.  Please see this sample video from Your Chess Coach to see what I mean.  (Don’t you just want to share this with a few people you know?)

Click Image To Watch Video - Your Chess Coach

Making It Easy For People To Share Your Videos

Of course, the real value to you in creating these videos occurs when people start sharing these videos with their friends (i.e., become your marketing team for you).  There are several ways to do this, but one of the most popular methods is to upload your video to a site like YouTube or Facebook, which gives their video a unique URL or website address.  When your video has its very own website address, it is simple for people to forward your video.  For example, Your Chess Coach created a video and posted it to YouTube.  They then shared their video with their current customers by including it in their email marketing campaigns, and the customers in turn began sharing this video with their friends.

Summary

Today’s small business owners have so much more opportunity than even just five years ago in terms of access to free or very cost-effective tools to market their business online.  To get the most buzz from your efforts, you have to keep in mind that you have to give your customers the reason and simple tools to spread the word for you.  Videos are just one of these very effective tools that many small business owners can or should use.

While you can read the entire book yourself, which I am sure is as fascinating as it sounds, here are a couple of great points from the book that Walter has highlighted on his blog site about popular misconceptions about WOM.

• It is not true that negative WOM is more common or more powerful than positive WOM;
• It is not true that most WOM is driven primarily by satisfaction or dissatisfaction (though these are often involved);
• It is not true that long-term customers usually recommend more than short-term customers.

For those of you who have heard me speak on this topic, this book helps to support my theories on WOM.

If you are a small business owner, what does this mean to you?

• Do not fear WOM
• Positive WOM is just as powerful, maybe even more so, as negative WOM
• Do not assume that satisfied customers will spread the word about your business (give them a reason to and make it easy for them!)
• All happy customers are potential evangelists for your business – not just repeat customers

Again, real WOM is a very effective tool for growing your business, and small business owners tend to know this best!  Plus, it generally is far cheaper than most paid advertising or marketing options.  Nothing beats the positive recommendation from someone you know for – restaurants, hair salons, auto mechanics, plumbers, lawn care, etc.  You know it, and several studies can prove it.  So put WOM to work for your business.

Coming soon, I will provide more information on specific tools you can use to help inspire your customers to spread the word and give them several easy ways to do so. 

Simply asking your customers to spread the word usually is NOT enough.  Even those with the best intentions to do so will forget – everyone has lives that are just too busy.

So what can you today to help generate more WOM for your business?  How can you attract great new customers? 

Keep this in mind: people talk to their friends about memorable events in their lives.  So stay focused on creating memories for your customers – give them something to talk about!  Impress them with great service, great conversation and/or great products.  And if you see a customer begin to express dissatisfaction, seize the opportunity to create a “WOW” moment!  Do whatever you can so that your business enters the conversations of that customer later in the day or week (with a great story to tell!).

However, how do you incentive other people to join your mailing list?

First, assuming you made your email enticing enough so that some of your recipients forwarded your email to their friends, be sure to include an “opt in” option on your email newsletter itself so these new readers can easily add their email address to your list.  Make it obvious and easy for them to find, and be sure to tell them that by adding their name to your list, they will receive more coupons or promotion announcements.  In other words, give them the reason to sign up.  Compel them!

Secondly, you can always give something away – a freebie – for anyone who signs up.  Then, simply advertise your give-away on your website or your email newsletters.  For some businesses, this can be a free white paper, ebook or other special offer that they cannot get (for free or otherwise) anywhere else except by signing up for your newsletter.  You can write the white paper or ebook yourself, but we know that is not possible for all business owners. However, you can talk to someone who is a writer or author and work out an arrangement whereby you distribute their work to people who sign up for your newsletter.  They get promotion on your website, as well as the credit in the white paper or ebook. 

Here is a sample from OddPodz:

So what kinds of freebies can you think of for your business?  If you are a restaurant, how about a small cookbook with some of your favorite recipes?  If you are a dog groomer, how about a dog-owners guide to grooming at home between visits.  I believe if you put your creative hat on, you can come up with several freebies that would be attractive to your target customer base.  Then, simply create the freebie yourself or run a Google-search to find someone who has something you can distribute for them (for free).

Remember, the point of incentiving someone to sign up for your email newsletters are:

• To stay “top of mind” with your customers (loyalty, repeat business)
• To inform your customers of important news (new products, sales, events, etc.)
• To encourage your customers to spread the word about your business

So if you choose to go the route with a “freebie” incentive to grow your email mailing list, be sure to think about incentives that your current customer base will want AND hopefully will want to share with their friends.  Use your email marketing campaign to drive repeat business and attract great new business through “word of mouth”!

Why send out email newsletters?   In one of my previous posts, I talked about the benefits for implementing an email marketing campaign:

· To stay “top of mind” with your customers (loyalty, repeat business)

· To inform your customers of important news (new products, sales, events, etc.)

· To encourage your customers to spread the word about your business

But you cannot start your campaign without at least some email addresses to send your newsletters to.

How to build your email mailing list.   Some of the best sources for email addresses include:

• At the physical point of purchase (either with a fishbowl or a registration book with a place for email addresses)
• During the online purchase process (typically you ask for the customer’s email address for sending receipts and other purchase or shipping information)
• At networking events (collecting business cards)
• On your website (add a “Sign up for our free newsletter” link)

Be sure people have “opted in” for your email newsletter.   Nobody likes spam, including you.  So being too aggressive with your email mailing list can turn some people off to your business and devalue the power of your email marketing.  Thus, it is important to be sure that everyone on your list has “opted in” for your newsletters.  At a minimum, you must respect any request from people who ask to “opt out.”

There are several ways people can “opt in” for your email newsletters.  You can place links or forms on your website asking people to submit their name, or you can place fishbowls or other means of collecting business cards or email addresses at your register or physical point of sale.  In either case, the “opted in” status is quite easy to document.

During the online purchasing process, you can place a box on the online order form for the customer to indicate their desire to receive emails from you.  We have all seen these – sometimes the online store will even default this box to be checked for the customer, forcing the customer to deselect the checkbox if they do not want to receive your emails.  Either way is completely acceptable, but you should carefully consider whether or not to default this checkbox.  (Remember, you can want to create “Positive Memories” with these customers.  But even more so, you do not want to create any “Negative Memories.”)

Finally, there are those business cards you collect at the various networking events or in the every day course of business.  I like to remind people to think about why they have someone’s card before they simply add this email address to their mailing list.  Preferably, when you took this person’s card, there was a conversation about your business and some indication from the person handing you their card that they would be interested in your business.

Just ask!   Personally, when I am handed someone’s business card, I have found it very effective to simply ask them – “May I add your email address to our mailing list?”  Overwhelmingly, the response is very favorable.  Usually, people are shocked and tell me that no one has asked them that question before. They are so pleased that I asked, because I showed them some respect, they are happy to say “yes”.  Plus, I’ve noticed that these people tend not to opt out of the email newsletter later on.  (Note:  This is consistent with some of my other postings in that I created a positive memory with this person.  Creating positive memories is key to growing your business and promoting word of mouth!)

Confirmed opt-in.   Another practice to consider is called “Confirmed opt-in (COI)” sometimes also referred to as confirmed subscription or closed-loop opt-in.  The logic behind this practice is that no email newsletters are sent to anyone until that person has taken an action to indicate their desire to receive future email mailings from you.  In the situation I described above, where someone has handed you a business card, you would not add them to your mailing list automatically, even if they said yes after you asked for their permission.  Instead, you would send them a special email with a link in it or simply ask them to reply to the special email in order to indicate to you that they have “opted in” your mailing list.  Many email system administrators and non-spam mailing list operators will require this in order to keep your emails off their blacklists.

With confirmed opt-in practices, you may end up with a smaller mailing list.  However, the mailing list you will have will contain a much more engaged audience – including people who are more likely to forward your emails to their friends.  (Can you say “word of mouth”??)

What to do with all those business cards and email addresses??  Well, if you are looking for the fastest and easiest way to get those email addresses into your mailing list (whether it be Outlook or an email marketing service), that will be the topic of an upcoming post.  Stay tuned… 

According to Dr. Paul Marsden, WOMM/Viral/Buzz are all same thing, namely network enhanced Word of Mouth.

But after doing a little digging, I came across someone named Keith Bates.  Keith Bates is one of the leading authorities on all things related to Word-of-Mouth, Blogs, Buzz and Viral Marketing (visit www.kbates.com).  In his white papter, Keith uses these definitions:

• viral marketing leverages digital networks;
• buzz leverages media networks; and
• WOMM leverages social networks.

Viral marketing can employ either an ideavirus or shockvirus approach, while social networking is typically managed as influencer relations. Keep in mind that pure word of mouth has no limits on distribution vehicles.

So what do these nuances mean to you if you are a small business owner?  Probably not much.  But the mere fact that these national consulting firms spend so much time and money on these definitions must tell you that Viral, Buzz and Word of Mouth marketing can be very, very powerful. 

Whether you run a restaurant, hair salon, or hardware store, you know that not all of your customers will walk out of the store with the same experience or feelings no matter how hard you try to ensure “great customer service” for all. 

Generally speaking, there is a “Customer Word-of-Mouth Spectrum” that ranges from Evangelists to Negative, but the vast majority of your customers will fall into the terrible gray zone of “Neutral” (something like 80 to 90%).  Meaning, some of your customers will have such a great experience with your store or services that they will want to tell their friends and evangelize your business for you.  Of course, there will always be a percentage of customers who, for some reason, had such a poor experience with your business, that they feel the need to sound the alarm to friends and others. 

Then there is the giant neutral zone.  Within the neutral zone, you may have both satisfied and unsatisfied customers, but even those who were generally satisfied enough with your services to return are still not spreading the word about your business.  For some reason, the goods or services they received were simply not memorable enough to make it into their everyday conversations with friends, family or neighbors.

The key here being the word “memorable”.  Memorable experiences, whether positive or negative, are the ones that make it into your customers’ everyday conversations.

So what if you could give an unsatisfied customer – even an angry customer – a positive “memorable” experience before they walk out the door (or shortly thereafter)?  Chances are that you converted this customer from the Negative end of the spectrum, but not into the Neutral territory.  On the contrary, you will have completely flipped this customer from the Negative end straight into the Evangelist end of the spectrum.

Creating more evangelists for your business should be one of your top goals, because these people will do your marketing for you…for FREE! (Or perhaps, because you gave them a small token or coupon in order to win them back, but wasn’t it worth it if they tell 3 more people??)

Thus, by trying to “win back” an unhappy customer, not only can you stop one person from spreading negative word of mouth.  You are actually creating a brand new evangelist and hopefully attracting some great new customers through them too.

Sounds like a win-win to me!

So the next time you see one of your customers begin to express dissatisfaction, remember you have just been presented with the precious opportunity to create an evangelist.  Don’t run from it, run towards it!  Seize the day!

There are a variety of RSS feed widgets on the internet if you search around, but I found this one fairly easy to use.  It was called Push and I found it on the SpringWidgets website:  http://www.springwidgets.com/widgets/view/33225/false/true?rl=widgetize/33225

It was super simple to do, so I know you can do this yourself too.  Here is what you need to know:

1)  Delete PUSH’s own blog feed here

PUSH MySpace Blog RSS Feed - Delete PUSH feed

  

To replace the PUSH logo with our own WOMbeat! logo, I used the “Link to Image” feature and pasted the URL for our logo from our Flickr account.  (If you are unfamiliar with Flickr, you can find the URL for your uploaded images by clicking on the “All Sizes” option for any image.) 

4)  Preview the widget with your logo (see image below):

PUSH MySpace Blog RSS Feed Widget - Customized Logo

5)  Add widget to your MySpace page!  Once you complete all the customizations to this widget, you are ready to add it to your MySpace page.  Simply click on the button called “Options” below the preview of the widget box.  This will display the Share this Widget box (displayed below).

Click on the MySpace icon:   This will display the HTML code needed for your MySpace page.

HTML for SpringWidget PUSH Blog RSS Feed Widget (MySpace)

All you need to do now is click the word “Copy”.  Then immediately go to your MySpace profile, be sure you are in the “Edit Profile” mode, and paste this HMTL code anywhere on your page that you want.  If you want to see an example, feel free to visit our MySpace page.

TIP:  Copy this HTML and save it somewhere such as in an MS Word file, Outlook, etc.  This way, you can always save it and retrieve it later if needed.

This was free and easy to do.  As always, I am open to other tips & tricks or comments by readers. 

Live well!