Sociatic

Posts Tagged ‘business’

Posted on July 29, 2010 - by Kwame

How to Effectively Communicate Your Online Brand

Do you know that communication can make or break your business? Many people think business communication is easy but it really isn’t. There is more to it than just words.

Communication is an essential tool for building your business and brand online. It actually has a direct relationship with content development and content marketing.

If you have an email list and social media community, you’ll need to know how to communicate with them.

In order to communicate effectively, there are nine questions you’ll need to ask yourself:

Who is the message for?
What relationship do you have with your target audience?
What is the actual message?
Will your message be useful to your audience?
Is the timing right?
What barriers are you likely to encounter?
What communication channel will you use?
What feedback are you likely to get?
How will you work with the feedback?

Basically, there are 4 characters involved in the communication process; the sender, the receiver, the message itself and channels.

Many people assume communication as a system that only has to do with words

The roles of the sender include:

Developing the appropriate message/content for his audience: I once came across a college Twitter account with an update that said something like, “Get 1,000 followers in not time. Click here” or so. Please don’t do this. I was shocked when I saw it.

Identifying channels for content distribution. Channels include: e-mail, social media and video sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, etc., whitepapers, ebooks, etc.

Identifying barriers that may hinder the purpose of the message. Likely barriers include email filtering (to prevent spam), nature of your list (e.g. demographics, income levels, etc.) and language.

Analyzing response: The kind of feedback you get will let you know how effective your message was. This is an essential part that is actively being considered by both new and old businesses.

As the sender, you have many tasks on your hand and you should make sure to follow through the above roles if you want to be effective. For example, once you identify appropriate channels for certain types of messages, you’ll not have to worry about what type of message to communicate and how to deliver it.

The receiver’s roles include:

Consuming message
Sharing message to other people who may be interested
Giving Feedback
Doing any other thing the message asks them to do.

The receiver has the magic wand when it comes to sharing and acting on your content.

Your message could be any of these types:

Newsy
Sales pitch
Survey/feedback request
Tips/tutorials

Messages can serve the following purposes:

Inform
Educate
Convince

Messages can be converted to the following formats:

Video
Audio
Document files; .PDF, .doc, .txt, etc.
Graphic; .gif, .jpg, .png, etc.
Regular text/ undocumented text
Regular speech

Channels are paths for communication; email, social media, telephone, TV, Radio, etc..

The channels I currently use to communicate Sociatic are Q&A sites, Twitter, LinkedIn, Junta42, Social Media Today, Bizsugar, Delicious, Google Buzz, blogs (via this blog and via guest posting on other blogs) etc.

When you identify and recognize the communication process like this, you can easily convince and convert your leads into sales.

Let me know if I left something out.

Posted on July 23, 2010 - by Kwame

Reasons Why Your Customers Should be Your Brand Ambassadors

All too often, businesses choose celebrities to be ambassadors and evangelists of their products. Celebrity endorsements can mean more sales for you but I think it is a short sighted way of marketing because it has some limitations.

I have two reasons why I think of celebrity endorsements as short sighted marketing.

1. People have their celebrity favorites. If you let celebrity “A” endorse your product, I may not be a fan of him and I won’t be moved to make a purchase because celebrity “A” is not my favorite celebrity and I don’t care what he has to say.

Give me celebrity “B” and I’ll buy your product, period! Can you afford to sign a contract with celebrities “A”, “B”, “C” to “Z”? I guess not.

2. Most people know that celebrities are paid to endorse products regardless if they like the products or not. Most of them do it for the money. You’ll have to use another strategy to convince them. I am this type of customer. Give me some real endorsement and I’ll follow you forever.

The best way around these two problems is to use your real customers and regular users of your products as ambassadors and endorsers of your product.

Here are 4 reasons why you owe your customers the ambassadorial right:

1. They give you their money. That’s how your business keeps growing remember?

2. They do your marketing for you by referring their friends to buy your products. Yes, you got that right; it’s called word of mouth marketing.

3. They help you improve because they give you their feedback. The awards for “quality”, “best product”, et cetera, was made possible because of them.

4. They use your product. They bought from you because they trusted you. You also owe them some trust and need to appreciate them. Fair right?

Why do you think Facebook is asking us to share our Facebook stories? Most of us have been evangelists for them and even continue to be. Sharing stories on Facebook means bringing back memories. Memories carry emotions along with them. Emotions sell. It means you’ll be promoting Facebook even more.

I read some people’s stories on Facebook and I thought to myself, “This site is really changing the world in other areas too, apart from business”. I think Facebook made their stories application public (you don’t even need to sign-in or sign-up to read people’s stories) in order to make us all see how they are changing the world and also encourage others to join. That sets our emotions in because they are not things Facebook is saying, it’s what ‘we’ (the users) are saying about what Facebook did for us.

My point with Facebook is that, they have created a category for their loyal fans (or evangelists) to share their stories. This has gotten blogs and other news media to talk about their (Facebook’s) new innovation and more people will jump on board to see what people have discovered/achieved through Facebook. It will also increase loyalty among current users.

Planning Your Company’s own stories:

So how do you choose ambassadors from your customers? Use the people who have already bought from you as your brand ambassador. Contact them and tell them you want 1, 3, or maybe 5 of them to be ambassadors of your brand. Tell them about the benefits and exactly what you want them to do to be considered. Whatever you do, don’t tell them to send an application in.

Tip: Instead of telling them to send in an application with a resume attached, you can organize a short quiz of say 10 questions and ask them to head towards there and answer the questions. Don’t forget to collect their names; email or phone numbers after the quiz so that you know who answered what. This whole process will let you assess the strengths of your ambassadors-to-be before you choose them.

Things to be considered as useful strengths for brand ambassadors are:

Good communication skills; language, grammar, etc.
Knowledge about your products
A little time to spare after their day job or on weekends.
Feedback givers or readers of your blog

After choosing your ambassador, send a message to your other customers and prospects and let them know the criteria you used in making the decision.

Get your brand ambassador(s) a blog on your domain to share experiences with your product and interact with other customers.

Do any of these to allow customer interaction:

1. Allow comments on the blog,

2. Get a Twitter account for ambassadors only,

3. Get a number for them where other customers can reach your ambassador. If your ambassadors are extremely busy during weekdays and can’t take the phone, allow calls only on weekends.

Just get creative. Play with ideas (gosh, I like saying this a lot ).

Treat your ambassadors like celebrities and let them show on their special blog. Put your product ambassador’s picture on your home page and link to their blog from there. Other customers will definitely like to be treated that way. This will increase customer loyalty.

Let your brand ambassador(s) work with your marketing team. They should report to the marketing manager or whoever you deem fit.

Some brand ambassador responsibilities include:

Gather feedback: let your ambassador(s) help you gather feedback
Organize meetups with other customers to talk about your product or show off their versions or models of your product. Note that this works best with physical goods
Report on product updates based on the feedback he or she delivered
Share their own thoughts and experiences with your products
Tell other customers what they are enjoying as ambassadors to your product.

Your brand ambassadors should be paid for all their work.

You can pay them back by:

Giving them the biggest discounts on your products
Giving them some cash benefits
Giving them some of your products for free
Letting them choose a cause they will like you to donate some of your products or cash to.

Try a combination of these payment methods or add your own.

Five benefits of using real customer(s) as brand ambassador(s) are:

Okay, let’s slow down for a bit. The four reasons I stated for why you owe your customers the ambassadorial rights are the first four benefits you will get from your customers if you make them brand ambassadors.

The only difference is that, there will be more of it; more money in your bank (sales), more referrals, more feedback and more trust. So the last benefit will be:

5. It creates new buzz for your business. People will talk about what you are doing regardless of them being customers or not. Just like what is happening with Facebook stories right now.

Even though you have all these ideas to try out, make sure your brand ambassadors approve of what is included in the contract.

Do you already have a customer strategy? What would you like to add or subtract?

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Posted on July 21, 2010 - by Kwame

Download: Sociatic Brand Communication Resource

Hello everyone. I have packaged some of my best blog posts into a tidy PDF so that you could read them offline and share them if you want. Yes, it is just for you so go ahead and download your copy. It is FREE.

The PDF shares 10 posts from this blog. All articles talk about marketing; branding, social media, etc.

It is easily sharable (incase you want to show it to your friends or colleagues) so go ahead and share it as much as you like. Your audience will thank you for giving them a valuable resource.

Click on this link to start your download.

P.S., I am available for hire if you want to have something like this for your blog or business. Get in touch.

Posted on May 24, 2010 - by Kwame

Do You Need Experience Before Starting Your Business?

So many people have the mindset of getting some experience before starting a business. When I first told my friends about my idea for Sociatic (which is still evolving ), they said I had to have some writing experience and get published before I started my own blog; ridiculous right?

I told them I had all the experience necessary to start my Sociatic. I mean, I have been writing essays and comprehension all my life at school so what other experience do I need?

I know most of you also have gotten that kind of “get some experience first” comments from your friends. We are going to straighten things out today, me and you.

What job experience did Mark Zuckerberg use to start Facebook? He was still at Harvard when he started Facebook right? Yes he was!

What job experience did Larry Page and Sergey Brin use to start Backrub (now GOOGLE)? Larry had already started working on Back Rub when he met Sergey. They met at Stanford University and decided to partner up to work on Back Rub.

What job experience did Matt Mullenweg use to start WordPress? He was still in school when he started working on WordPress. He later went to work for Cnet where he was allowed to work more on WordPress. Now, it is the most popular publishing software in the world.

So what did all these people have in common before starting out their ventures? They all had knowledge, a plan and a strong passion to succeed. Yes, I can hear some people say, “they also had funding”.

Well, that is true but it is not true for all entrepreneurs. There are certain entrepreneurs who have bootstrapped their way to success. The most important thing is not the funding. Some people get funded but still their businesses go into bankruptcy in no time.

What you need to have is a very strong knowledge of what you want to do and also have a plan and a passion to succeed.

This doesn’t mean you should be ready to do everything by yourself. Kevin Rose hired a programmer to work on a core area of Digg and he paid the programmer $200. Imagine that! Most of us know Digg’s success after its development.

Many entrepreneurs started business without any experience in their chosen business field. They just had strong business strategies that proved to be effective.

Sometimes, you will need help. You will need to integrate this part of business into your idea’s plan. You should be ready to seek help when you need it. Sometimes, you can ask your friends who have knowledge in what you are doing to help you.

If you don’t have anybody to help you, you need to be ready to use some money to outsource that part of the project to another professional. Sites like Elance and Odesk have great freelancers who can help you with your project.

I have worked as an import and export outsource agent for about a year and I didn’t have to import or export anything. I just read lots of books and asked other outsourcing agents what worked for them.

I have also given marketing and technical advice to some entrepreneurs and they always thanked me for working with them because my advice worked for them.

All I am saying is that, nobody should stop you from what you want to do. If I listened to people, I would not have been able to start this blog to share my experiences with you.

If you have a business idea, learn more about it, start it and don’t forget to continue learning. Educate yourself anyway you can; whether it involves certification or not. Education is the key to success whether it is academic or self-study.

You deserve success so just go for it. Like Nike says, “Just do it!”.