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The Count of Social Media

by Ron on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Imagine having that on your business card! In a world of Brogans, Vaynerchuks and Mashables there is no shortage of candidates worthy of the title, but this post isn’t about any of them.

Anyone who has kids, or who was one fairly recently, will remember Sesame Street’s Lugosi-eque math whiz, Count von Count. The Count would count anything, anytime, anywhere. And he was much better at it than, say, The Spanish Inquisition:

Imagine, then, what the Count – let alone the Inquisition – would have to say about this: a Flash-based application that provides a real-time count of Social Media activity. Courtesy of Gary Hayes’ Personalize Media blog, here is Gary’s Social Media counter:

Visit Gary’s blog if you want to know about his sources, but the details are almost beside the point. Spend even a minute watching the numbers cascade and you are sure to be convinced – if you weren’t already – that Social Media is a communications channel (or group of channels) that marketers cannot afford to ignore. If you are marketer with a small company and a small budget, Social Media is perfect for you. If you are just starting out, take the simple advice that you’ll get from everyone: listen first.

And if you would like to learn about a Social Media marketing program exclusively for local merchants, feel free to get in touch with us here at Zavee.

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Tags: Business, Chris Brogan, Count von Count, Facebook, Gary Hayes, Gary Vaynerchuk, Marketing, Mashable, Sesame Street, Social Media, Social media marketing, Twitter

Tape This to Your Fridge (or Maybe Your Monitor)

by Ron on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Maybe it’s a sign of our collectively diminishing attention spans, but magazines (and blogs) seem to run more and more articles that are basically lists. There’s even a term for it: the “listicle”. (Want to guess what the graphic equivalent is called? Right, it’s a “charticle”!) Listicles often reflect shallow thinking and lazy writing, but sometimes they provide tremendous value, collecting and condensing a great deal of knowledge into the kind of piece you want to print out and tape to your refrigerator door.

I’ve recently come across two listicles of the latter kind, both from sources every small business owner should be following. The first is from Mashable, which provides all sorts of valuable information about social media. This post by Ross Kimbarovsky, who co-founded an online community of graphic designers that now exceeds 43,000 members, offers 10 Small Business Social Media Marketing Tips. In addition to its overall clarity and conciseness, this post adds value in two interesting ways. First, it goes beyond Twitter and Facebook to explain some less widely known tools, including mobile/local social network Foursquare and brand consistency tools such as Namechk. Second – and at least as important – the post suggests both a basic and an advanced strategy for each of the 10 tips. This approach provides a road map for small businesses that are just starting out in social media or are unsure how extensive a commitment they want to make. This post recognizes that different businesses will have different needs and appetites for social media, shows businesses how they can mix and match different tools and provides a framework for increasing the utilization of social media marketing over time.

Deep in Conversation

The second post comes via the Conversation Agent blog: a compendium of 25 Must-Read B2B Marketing Posts. I haven’t read all 25 yet but so far every one has been thought-provoking and several have provided significant value to our business; I imagine you will feel the same way. Business-to-business marketing frequently gets overlooked in the rush to market to consumers, so it’s great that some of the best minds in the social media space are paying attention to the needs of the B2B marketer.

This is by no means an original observation, but it really is amazing how much useful material can be found just by spending a little time searching the Internet. It’s even more amazing how many talented people have done so much of the heavy lifting by finding, evaluating, collecting and editing valuable source material for marketers like us. We hope you find these posts as worthwhile as we have. Please let us know how they work for you.

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Tags: Marketing, Small Business

Unlocking the Twitter Toolbox

by Ron on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

By now you’ve heard of Twitter, the micro-blogging service that lets people write about anything at all in posts, called “tweets”, of up to 140 characters. Twitter has been in the news this year for several very different reasons. First, celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey have become very public users of Twitter. Second, Twitter users “broke” the story of USAir 1549’s emergency landing in the Hudson River in January. Over the summer, protesters in Iran used Twitter extensively to communicate with each other and with the outside world. Even the recent “Balloon Boy” incident was followed extensively on Twitter.

Businesses are using Twitter, too, and we will be blogging from time to time about how community-based businesses can benefit from the tool. Like any marketing medium, Twitter should be used as part of a comprehensive, integrated strategy. It’s hard to develop a strategy that involves Twitter, however, without some knowledge of what it is and how it works.

The Twitter logo

Our advice is to jump in and join up. Create a personal rather than a business account at first. Twitter lets you search for both people and topics. Usernames are preceded by the “at” sign (we are “@Zavee”). Topics are usually designated by “hashtags” consisting of the topic preceded by a pound sign (search “#balloonboy” to see tweets about the balloon flight and its aftermath). When you find a user whose tweets you’d like to see regularly you can click a button to “follow” that user. Other users can follow you, too, and will be able to see all of your tweets (there are privacy settings that let you control this). If you see a tweet you really like you can “retweet” it – it’s a little like forwarding an email. Remember, like all social media, Twitter is a public forum, so think before you tweet.

Twitter isn’t complicated, but it takes a little getting used to. One unusual aspect of Twitter is the wide variety of third-party applications that make Twitter easier and more productive to use. The most helpful discussion of these applications that we have seen is this summary of 63 tools and applications from Valeria Maltoni’s always thought-provoking Conversation Agent blog. For a truly staggering compendium of information about Twitter and how to use it, check out the indispensable Mashable. @Mashable should also be one of the first users you follow on Twitter.

We are big believers in Twitter’s potential for marketing and customer engagement. We invite you to follow @Zavee on Twitter and hope that our experience using Twitter for our business helps you use Twitter for yours.

How is Twitter working for you?

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Paperless Business Cards (Really!)

by Ron on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

If you’ve seen this commercial for the Apple iPhone you probably noticed two iPhones exchanging information by being bumped together. It’s an application called, reasonably enough, Bump. And it’s far from the only way to exchange contact information without using traditional business cards.

With so much innovation surrounding what has become known as the “Real Time Web” it isn’t surprising that someone came up with an online alternative to exchanging business cards. What may be surprising is how many alternatives are out there, and how quickly they have caught on with mainstream business users. For proof, look no further than this article on CNN.com, which claims that there are more than 20 such applications and takes a look at eight of them, including Bump.

We have been experimenting (OK, playing) with a couple of these applications and haven’t settled on one yet. We actually like Bump’s technology but we don’t like to think about what happens after an over-enthusiastic bump (hint: it’s not covered by insurance). beamME is another app that exchanges info using an iPhone. It lets you beam without the bump. And since we are talking about iPhone apps, the iPhone’s contact manager lets you share information via email or MMS – no third-party application required.

Awww!

Our sentimental favorite is Poken, which is also mentioned in the CNN article. It isn’t very corporate-looking and has some technical hurdles to overcome but it’s a great conversation starter. It’s also a whole lot cuter than any business card we’ve ever seen. Will the Poken ever replace the business card here at Zavee? Probably not, but we just can’t keep our hands off the little pandas, ninjas and geishas.

Poken Pulse

Perhaps with a nod to that commercial reality, Poken has just come out with a product targeted to business users called the Pulse. It looks very stylish (if not as wildly adorable as the original) and we can’t wait to try one out. By the way, if you are interested in the Poken – or just want to see how a business can be built almost exclusively using social media – it’s worth checking out Poken Girl, a young entrepreneur who is a Poken distributor in South Florida.

So, trendy gizmo or the future of information exchange? Give some of these business card alternatives a try and let us know what you think in the comments.

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Tags: Smartphone, Technology

Phoning It In

by Ron on Thursday, October 1st, 2009

Zavee recently moved into our first real office, and one of our biggest challenges was to figure out what kind of telephone system to use. We have only a handful of full-time employees right now, but we will be adding staff rapidly, especially on the sales side. So we needed a phone system that met today’s requirements, but also was easily scalable; didn’t require a lot of time, money or overhead to maintain; and didn’t conflict with our extensive use of technologies such as mobile and Skype. Obviously, cost was also a big factor.

We considered a wide range of options. The three main technologies we looked at were:

Telephone company services
Physical private branch exchange (PBX)
Virtual PBX

Image via Wikipedia

The local phone company could have provided everything we wanted, including maintenance. We could have had an unlimited number of lines, voicemail, call forwarding, conferencing, etc. However, the phone company services were very expensive and configuration was not quite as flexible as we wanted. We probably would have wound up with more landline capability than we needed given our reliance on mobile for inbound calling and Skype for outbound. Still, for a business that has limited needs and a growth path that is well-defined, the phone company might be an option.

We didn’t spend much time considering a physical PBX. A PBX can do everything the phone company can do and more, but they are not cost-effective for small businesses – at least not for this one. Thanks to technology and competition the initial costs of a PBX are trending down, but the total cost of ownership, including maintenance, put a PBX well out of our reach.

We decided to use a “virtual PBX”, which is a Web-based telephone system that provides PBX-like services in a hosted environment. We have multiple lines and several local phone numbers, fax service and full call switching capability without having any hardware (other than handsets) in-house. We use a company called Ring Central but there are many companies in the virtual or hosted PBX space. In addition to much lower costs than either the phone company or a physical PBX, we only pay for what we need. The service is easily scalable, since there is no hardware to replace. Obviously, we don’t have to perform any system maintenance.

With our phone system in place at a manageable cost we feel better about investing in mobile. All of our sales reps will have smart phones as well as wireless-enabled laptops. All of us use mobile as our main phones as well as Skype. Skype is a Web-based application that supports free computer-to-computer voice calls and inexpensive computer-to-phone calls. These two technologies let our sales reps operate from anywhere – they aren’t tied to the office.

What technologies do you use for voice communication? Have you tried Web-based voice applications? Let us know in the comments.