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Small Business and Social Media II

Posted on May 5, 2013 by John F. Dini

Last week’s column generated lots of comments, and probably requires some follow up.

First, the army of social media fanatics that go ballistic at any hint that SM isn’t the be-all, end-all and answer-from-above for every marketing need on the planet are just wrong. “To every thing there is a season” (Ecclesiastes 8- Hey…do I get big SEO points if I put a link to the Bible here?) and that applies to social media as well. There is a time, a place and a purpose for any type of marketing, and trying to stretch one modality as a universal panacea for all marketing needs is foolish.

Second, there is a difference between social media and anything that requires typing on the Internet. As Al Bellenchia pointed out, I blog. (How about circular links? Do they count?) Is that social media? If the “social” in social media indicates interaction between folks, how many of the current 181,000,000 active blogs on the web are actually social? Don’t you have to have a conversation to be social? If a blogger is just blasting out personal rants to the great cyber-void, is that autoeroticism a social activity?

So the real question is whether participating in social media has any value if no one is engaged? If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear, does it make a sound? I think not. I just visited a local retailer’s Facebook site (which was in lieu of the business having a “real” website) and it has no picture, no descriptions, no postings, no friends and 5 “likes” in the last 7 years. Clearly that is worse than having nothing at all.

As David Basri pointed out in the discussion thread on this topic at The Alternative Board® Members Forum on Linked In, there is a difference between SEO and Social Media. I somewhat erroneously pointed out that adding multiple useless links to big social media companies would not serve to get me new clients. That isn’t SM, that’s SEO, although blogging may be one of the best tools for scoring on SEO, the two are very different.

Last week I said that linking to Google+, Baidu , Bebo, Orkit, Netlog, Stumbleupon, Blogger, Delicious, Friendfeed, Tumblr, Viadeo, MySpace, Reddit, Digg and Pinterest were pointless. Of course, if this post goes viral I guess the time “wasted” on building all these stupid links was worth it.

OK, I’m just playing with you. Endless site links to boost SEO, retweeting other peoples’ quotations from famous dead people, and weekly electronic “newsletters” that do nothing but flog discount deals are not social media. Anything works at the proper time and in its proper place whether it is “social” or not. Advertising is intended to get folks to listen to your marketing message. Your marketing message is intended to prepare them to buy. The sales process is to follow up on those influenced by your marketing message and close a transaction.

So here are my “rules” for marketing on the Internet:

It’s an advertising medium just like any other. You have to understand who you are trying to reach, and judge the return on your investment.
Time is money. The time you spend on building an internet presence is an investment, and should produce a return. Otherwise you should be spending it on something that does.
Just because you can reach a zillion people doesn’t mean it is a worthwhile effort. Suspects aren’t (necessarily) prospects.
Social media is for interacting with people. If you aren’t prepared to increase your levels of interaction and maintenance with every new success, don’t start.
Be consistent. Your business presence isn’t the place for your niece’s birthday party photos, and your personal sites aren’t for advertising special deals.
Be patient. The Internet is a big place, and it can take a long time to be found. Hoping that each new effort goes viral is like hoping to win the lottery every week.
Deliver value. No matter what you do to be “found,” it’s worthless unless you provide a reason to come back again.

Picture Credit

Posted in Marketing and Sales, Uncategorized | Tagged business ownership, marketing, media, sales, small business advice | 1 Comment

One Response to Small Business and Social Media II

Heather Stone says:

May 6, 2013 at 5:58 pm

Hi John,
You wrote: “Endless site links to boost SEO, retweeting other peoples’ quotations from famous dead people, and weekly electronic “newsletters” that do nothing but flog discount deals are not social media.” So true. Real social media, like real conversation, takes thoughtfulness, consideration and a real interest in listening to others and hearing what they are saying. Thanks to Christi Brendlinger for sharing this awesome post with the BizSugar community.

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Should Small Business Owners Embrace Social Media?

Posted on April 28, 2013 by John F. Dini

I order a package of vacuum cleaner bags online. The site cheerfully requests “Like us on Facebook!” Kobe Bryant announces that in order to help the Lakers, he won’t tweet during playoff games. A friend tells me that he is the mayor of a local lunch joint on FourSquare.

sm_overload This column features at the bottom not only the opportunity to tweet or like, but to share my weekly topic on LinkedIn, Google+, Baidu (does it translate it into Chinese?), Bebo, Orkit, Netlog, Stumbleupon (really?), Blogger, Delicious, Friendfeed, Tumbler, Viadeo, MySpace (THAT’s still around?), Reddit and Digg. I’m not sure why that share widget doesn’t include Pinterest, but we offer it separately. Good thing!

The traditional media reports celebrity tweets as hard news. Fast food chains start hashtag discussions about a new sandwich. My 17,000 Twitter followers are a nice number, but even if I was the Sheik of Araby I couldn’t marry a fraction of those followers who have suggested it (and I’m only including the ones who ask in English).

For a small business owner, the deluge of attention surrounding social media is confusing. You read about a food truck on the West Coast with 100,000 customers eagerly following their daily location tweets, and presumably flooding to patronize it when it’s in the neighborhood. When your business would be thrilled with ten extra customers a day, that kind of following looks might tempting.

Besides, social media is free. John Wanamaker, the Chicago retail magnate, once famously said “Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted. If I only knew which half.” When the money spent on advertising is zero, isn’t any return worth it?

This is a column for business owners. If your business is large enough to employ a marketing manager who has a social media strategy, have at it. If you use an intern from a local college who is free, or nearly so, let them fly. The question is whether you should be involved in a social media effort for your business.

Social media is a retail phenomenon. If you sell to the general public, are responsible for business development in your company, and have the time to spare, by all means tackle social media as an advertising vehicle. If you are sitting in your retail store between customers, boot up your tablet. If you are surfing the ‘net for half of the evening, get some plugs in for your business. Social media can do a few things well. It eases a potential customer’s risk tolerance by showing that lots of folks have purchased from your business before.

But I’ve stopped looking at ratings on Yelp, Urbanspoon, Travelocity or BizRate. Every feedback page has at least a couple of folks who say it was the best experience ever (friends of the owner?) and a couple who rate it the worst. I don’t know who these people are, or whether they have a clue about what a good meal or good service is.

If you sell to businesses, focus instead on your value proposition. I’m astonished at the number of B2B small business owners who think that a Facebook page can replace a business webpage. It can’t. It’s less organized, less focused and less controllable. The Facebook page for this column, which is the only FB presence I have, is “liked” by the National Rifle Association. Is that good for my business? I’m not so sure.

And by the way; I’m fully aware that I could have hugely raised my SEO score by linking all the websites mentioned above. I didn’t, because there is no chance that they would generate a new client. It would just have been 15 minutes of wasted time.

Picture Credit: Neocloud Marketing

Posted in Entrepreneurship | Tagged business ownership, marketing, sales, sales management, small business advice | 5 Comments

5 Responses to Should Small Business Owners Embrace Social Media?

Bob Dodge says:

April 28, 2013 at 12:59 pm

So, John, if you spent that fifteen minutes on Soical Media, it would no longer be “free.” I agree; have a college intern to it, but if it is the buisness owner, think of the other things not being done while he or she is maitaining the social networks (consistency and regularity are likely required) that would have positive impacts on revenues, cost, margin, qulaity, employee development, customer acquisition, etc.

As usual a thought provoking article. I “like” them, but I am not going to take the time to do the social media thing, however.

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Al Bellenchia says:

April 29, 2013 at 9:07 am

John, you blog. Often and well. Welcome to social media. Too many organizations, large and small, are mistaking medium and message. The question of whether to tweet, post on Facebook or pin on Pinterest is secondary to, as well as subservient to, where your customers are and the value you are providing to them through your marketing content.

If all you are doing is “tell and sell” marketing, then any new effort is likely to be wasted. It’s the 21st century equivalent of door-to-door. If you are providing value-added content, then the time to increase distribution via a few clicks is de minimis.

For most B2B products/services, Facebook provides little return…but

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Harry says:

April 29, 2013 at 12:58 pm

John – You have some good points here. However, for every research that shows the failure of social media to bring new business there is a counter-point showing how social media has helped improve the business. I don’t think social media can help you sell if you don’t have good products and value proposition for your customers to begin with. It can however, reach existing and new customers through additional channels and for that I think it’s worth spending your time on that. You do have to be judicious in how much time and effort you spend.

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Andrew Baird says:

April 29, 2013 at 10:41 pm

We use Facebook for B2B, both for sourcing and working with partners and for leads, opt ins (and yes) clients.

People are often surprised by this, but a significant portion of these come from Facebook (and not the normal b2b suspect LinkedIn – although we do get results from it as well).

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Webdev1 says:

May 4, 2013 at 4:25 am

Social media may costly but for me it really helps to gain costumers. But it is necessary to maintain the high quality. Me as a consumer, I rather choose good quality than popularity.

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Does Technology Help or Threaten Small Businesses?

Posted on April 14, 2013 by John F. Dini

A small computer service company wants to sell Microsoft software licenses to its customers. They send an employee to become certified in licensing. (Microsoft offers some 600 variants.). As soon as they purchase a license, however, Microsoft begins soliciting that customer for other software, add-ons and renewals.

Amazon is building ten distribution centers of 1,000,000 square feet or more. Their professed strategy is to deliver most products, from flowers to televisions, anywhere in the continental United States within one day of the order being placed on the Internet.

A small creative agency has for years made its living doing logos and websites for local businesses. Now logotournament.com can provide 20 or more designers and hundreds of concepts for a few hundred dollars. GoDaddy.com will host websites starting at $2.99 a month, or a full year for what it costs the local shop to pay a single developer for an hour.

The Gini Coefficient measures the disparity between rich and poor in a nation. A coefficient of zero means that everyone has exactly the same. A coefficient of 1 means that a single person owns everything. In the US, the coefficient has increased by about 20% over the last 30 years, meaning that more wealth is concentrated in the hands of fewer people.

Some politicians point to that shift as de facto evidence of the evil greedy rich amalgamating wealth at the expense of the common folks. In reality, the addition of a few score billionaires has relatively little impact on the largest economy in the world.

Studies show that the disparity is increasing in all of the developed countries, and one of the biggest culprits is technology. Desktop computers have eliminated the typing pool. All-in-one printer/copiers have crippled the small print shop industry. Email and online document storage are chipping away at the employee populations of UPS, FedEx and the Postal Service. Millions of jobs that paid middle-class wages without requiring extensive education or skills have been automated and eliminated.

The same thing is happening in the battle between small and big business. In the quest for increased revenue, big business keeps moving to fill the entire space between the product source and the end user. Wal-Mart started by corralling the consumer, then worked its way back up the supply chain to eliminate distributors, consolidators and finally, the manufacturers themselves.

Amazon is doing it by replicating the convenience of last-minute local purchase. Microsoft is using technology to approach millions of end users individually. Internet disrupters like LogoTournament are commoditizing personal services by creating global access to low-cost providers.

In the battle for customer relationships, small businesses are also utilizing technology. Inside sales departments can touch accounts more frequently by telephone and email without the expense of paying someone to drive from customer to customer. Electronic newsletters and on-line ordering reduce the cost of transactions. Dependence on technology, however, puts a small business in the same sandbox as the giants. What is the difference between ordering hardware on-line from the local fastener jobber, and doing the same thing on-line with Amazon, if both can deliver the next day?

Eight-five percent of face to face human communication is non-verbal. Relationships are built by human beings looking at each other. For decades advisors have told small business to differentiate with service; that closeness to the customer is the ultimate trump card over the faceless technology of giant competitors.

Duplicating the technology of the giants isn’t getting you closer to your customer. Look over the list of your best customers. How many have you seen face-to-face in the last three months? In the last six months? If it is longer than that, you may be holding your own in the technology battle, but losing the war.

photo credit www.amazingbusiness360.com

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Marketing and Sales | Tagged business strategy, entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, small business advice | 2 Comments

2 Responses to Does Technology Help or Threaten Small Businesses?

Jim Marshall says:

April 14, 2013 at 12:31 pm

I agree with the well stated information about how big business is encroaching on small business and stealing market share. I also agree with the need for small business to exploit its potential advantage of face to face contact and potential relationship building.
I feel, however, additional articles ought to deal with what local business people need to do with those opportunities for face to face contact. Too many businesses make the contact with meaningless, and time wasting efforts instead of those which can add value.

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French says:

April 16, 2013 at 12:28 pm

Digital “relationships” are rapidly replacing face-to-face interaction. We’ve heard all the excuses… plane tickets are so expensive… it’s so easy to just sit at my desk and send an e-mail… with social media I make them come to me, etc… I addressed this subject recently in a blog.
http://bigskyassociates.com/2013/03/look-me-in-the-eye-and-say-that/

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1,2,3 Red Light!

Posted on April 7, 2013 by John F. Dini

Last week I was a guest on Jim Blasingame’s Small Business Advocate show. The topic was a riff on my article of a couple of weeks ago about excising infectious employees. One of the issues that we discussed was identifying a toxic employee who is a model performer to your face.

Jim asked (not because he doesn’t know, but because it’s his job to ask) “How do you know if an employee is behaving badly behind your back?” The answer is to seek feedback from other employees whom you trust.

As a business owner, how often have you terminated an employee while wondering what kind of issues it would cause with the rest of the staff? Then you were surprised when the reaction from his or her coworkers was “What took you so long?”

Your reaction was probably some variation on “Why didn’t you tell me?” It’s a valid question. When employees see a coworker who behaves duplicitously, showing one face to the boss and another to the team, why don’t they come to you and discuss it? Don’t they trust you? Is your employer-employee relationship so shallow that they don’t think you are really concerned about performance? Do they think the core values or mission statement on the wall is just BS?

It’s probably some of each of those things, along with a bit of maneuvering by the problem individual. Those folks seem to have a knack for claiming your name as authority for their actions.

If you have a very trusted employee, one who serves the function of the grizzled sergeant in the platoon, you may have the problem licked. If not, you’ll need to find a way to get honest feedback from your employees about each other. In a small business, a full 360 review, one that asks questions about performance and behavior from superiors, co-workers and subordinates of each employee, is cumbersome and time consuming.

On Jim’s show, I brought up a “Stop Light 360” that I’ve used in the past. I didn’t invent it, but like any good consultant I saw it or read about it somewhere and incorporated it into my tool kit. It’s fast, simple, and can give you startling information about what is going on in your company.

Here’s how it works. List all the employees of your business (or of a department if you have a larger company) on a sheet of paper. Distribute one such list to each employee. This isn’t anonymous, although you will keep the results confidential. Ask only one question, which should be printed on the form to reduce misinterpretation.

The question can vary, depending on the results you seek. It might be “How do you rate your working relationship with each employee?” or “What do you think the chances are that this employee will be here a year from now?” They answer for each person with a “stop light” methodology. Red for bad, or no chance. Yellow for maybe or I don’t think so, and green for yes or no problem.

When collected, the answers can be transferred to a spreadsheet. It should look like a map book mileage chart, with employee names down the side and across the top. The results are often very surprising.

An employee you thought was popular draws red universally, or one you thought was a top performer is all yellow. Often employees whom the boss considered marginal performers get green lights from everyone else. Of course, this isn’t something you can share, but it can be vital information for you.

Managing people is the most important part of an owner’s job. A Stop Light 360 helps you understand what happens when you aren’t watching.

Posted in Leadership, Management | Tagged business ownership, employee performance, employees, leadership, small business advice | Leave a comment

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Why Great Salespeople Make Lousy Sales Managers

Posted on April 2, 2013 by John F. Dini

It’s been said so many times that (at least I hope) it is a business axiom on the same level as “cash is king.” Promoting your best salesman to sales manager is guaranteed to cost you a great salesman and leave you stuck with a lousy manager. The belief is so widespread that I’m amazed that owners keep doing it, and yet owners keep doing it. Why?

There are several reasons. First, an ambitious salesman (or woman) wants to get ahead. In most organizations, “getting ahead” means promotions and titles. It’s natural, actually inevitable, that they seek recognition as the “lead dog” on the team.

On the owner’s side, he is discussing it not only with a high performer whom he wants to keep happy, but one who can sell. If the salesman is truly gifted, he probably has developed a pretty cogent argument as to why he is the best candidate for the job.

The salesman will argue that he can lead by example. From the owner’s perspective, who could be better to show the other salespeople how to sell than the one who does it best? Even if his message is no more than “watch me” it has to generate some positive effect.

In addition, there are the issues created by promoting someone else, or hiring from the outside. If your top performer is resentful or uncooperative, there could be dramatic consequences.

So the owner makes the move, with the usual stipulations. “Bob, you’ve never been great at paperwork, but you will now be responsible for tracking everyone’s activity. You will be expected to develop plans and procedures, and you have to follow our HR policies when dealing with your direct reports.”

The salesman, knowing that he is a hair’s breadth from closing the deal, of course agrees to everything.

The new sales manager starts off great guns. He has team rallies, and implements a new incentive program to reward high performance. He travels with the other salespeople, showing them how he does it by closing their biggest prospects for them, and upselling their marginal customers on additional lines.

Here is a menu of general variations that may happen next.

The manager will tell his people “I’m not worried about reports, only results.”
The salespeople will complain that the manager is giving special deals to their customers that they can’t duplicate.
The sales manager will start to irritate his management colleagues by showing up late or being unprepared for meetings. (He is always late for his own sales meetings.)
Department turnover will increase as salespeople are being chastised by the manager for “making me look bad.”
The manager will start ignoring direct reports whose performance is mediocre.

Great salespeople are egocentric, adept empathizers, and skilled improvisers. There is nothing wrong with those traits, but they aren’t core competencies for someone who needs to teach, manage and develop others. Often the owner winds up stuck with the managerial tasks of running the sales department, working around the gaps in the manager’s performance.

That doesn’t alleviate the pressure on an owner to satisfy the top salesperson. Compensation isn’t enough, it has to be recognition of his special status in a way that doesn’t undermine the person he reports to. If you can’t navigate that minefield, you will wind up wasting resources circumnavigating the resulting issues.

A title with limited responsibility, participation in higher-level discussions, special status symbols such as a separate credit card where the employee keeps the points, or an automobile may do the trick. But for heaven’s sake, don’t make him a manager.

Posted in Leadership, Management, Marketing and Sales | Tagged employee performance, employees, management, sales, sales management, small business advice | 3 Comments

3 Responses to Why Great Salespeople Make Lousy Sales Managers

Edward Dimmer says:

April 20, 2013 at 12:19 pm

Interesting article! We as so many other small business’s are always looking for what we believe will make a great sales manager. We usually do not give enough recognition to our top performers, but will seek out rewards for them.

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Mark says:

April 20, 2013 at 2:56 pm

Unfortunately, you are spot on here…in most cases. A better alternative than promoting top salespeople into management could be creating a mentor program where the top salesperson is more of a “Team Leader” who mentors new salespeople for a slice of their commissions. Doesn’t cost the company a dime, give the top salesperson a promotion and title and disseminates best sales practices throughout the team. As a new salesperson, I would take that deal all day.

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MM says:

April 24, 2013 at 3:12 pm

This viewpoint may work from a 10k ft view, however; each situation needs to be looked at on an individual basis. For example, I have always been in the top 5% of every sales team I was a member. One of my clients enticed me to take over a struggling sales team due to his promoting the #1 salesperson into managment. While having my own growing pains, I soon discovered the key to success in transitioning to management was to alter my “mindset”. All of a sudden my ego needed arrested and I had to get my “kudos” for watching others grow due to my leadership. All of a sudden I was a member of the support function and whether during “ride along” sales calls I may have done the entire process – when I got back to the office I put the salesperson out front and said “look what they just did”. Most successful salespersons cannot stand the hit to their ego. Here is one that successfully made the switch.

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