Internet Strategist

My first Inc. 5000 conference experience began with a 2am arrival at Washington’s Union Station to a taxi line that snaked around the corner with not a taxi in sight. But everything was uphill from there. I shared a ride with one of the Inc. 5000 winners who showed a completely endearing excitement as he pointed to the brightly labeled Inc. 5000 van stationed outside the hotel. His excitement was contagious. Ted Leonsis - does happiness matter?I was blown away by some of the day’s presenters. Ted Leonsis spoke from the heart about being happy to be successful. He shared the harrowing story of being in a near plane crash and striking a deal with God. “If you get me through this, I will give back more than I take.” He told us he’s been trying to live that ever since. I’ll be checking out his new book when I get home. His key takeaways:Be an active participant in multiple communities of interest and activate communities of interest in your company. We are human. We need to connect. Make these connections around things you care about a central part of your life and enable the same for your employees.Enable your employees and customers to have high levels of personal expression. There is a reason why blogging and social media posting have become so popular.Have personal empathy. He told a great story about making a statement that he wanted his company to be “cleaner” and then splitting the day between sitting in the stadium with President Obama and cleaning the stadium (including the women’s bathroom) with the cleaning staff so he could walk in their shoes.Give back to the community.Articulate and believe that there is a higher calling. This can be religious or can be a larger goal that you are working to attain. He talked about Groupon’s higher calling being to help get customers for small businesses and to help people to manage their budgets. Ted’s presentation really inspired me. His ending point – be in pursuit of the “double bottom line” not just profit but social responsibility and social impact – including an impact on you. I Can Email You When I Post to this BlogClick here to get notified of new posts to The Internet Strategist by Email Barbara Corcoran challenges the attendees to be courageousBarbara Corcoran was a dynamo on stage – sharing her rags to riches story starting out as a waitress in pigtails. I’m proud to say that when I met her we hugged and took an awesome photo which I’ll share with you when I get my copy from the Inc. photographer!I am now a Barbara Corcoran fan. She embodied how scrappiness, chutzpa and sheer charisma were the cornerstones of her success and encouraged small business owners, who have so much less to lose, to be more courageous and take more chances in creating a brand for themselves. My favorite quote of hers “Perception creates reality”. Time and time again, she provided examples of how her merely suggesting the reality she wanted helped other people to make it real for her. I also appreciated her reminder about the “pressure of the crowd” in sales. Creating scarcity if used wisely can be an amazing sales tactic. Tristan & Daniel talk daily deals and local marketing Lastly – at a panel in the afternoon Tristan Walker, Director of Business Development for FourSquare, Marci Weisler of Tipping Point Partners, Daniel Kim founder of Red Mango and Inc. blogger Howard Greenstein tackled the hotly controversial topic of leveraging daily deal sites and tapping into local marketing. They shared excellent advice and ideas including: Know your average sale - don’t make the mistake of not knowing how much your average sale is in advance of crafting a discount deal.Count all of your costs when thinking about the profit of a daily deal i.e. franchisees have to pay 6% of revenues even for revenues from a daily deal.Eroding value - they all were concerned that the daily deal industry may in the long run hurt service based businesses like spas by creating a culture that in a sense commoditizes these services so that customers never expect to pay full price. They did suggests trying multi-package discounts. For example - a discount on three sessions instead of one so that customers build loyalty. Another suggestion was to create a mailing list of your daily deal customers and then run your own deals with discount codes so that your business keeps all of the profit.I also loved Tristan’s story about how vendor Jimmy Chu used FourSquare to get 4,000 people chasing the Jimmy Chu brand all over London for 3 weeks and drive a 30% lift in sales. I look forward to sharing a video where I talk more about this with Tristan.The panelists were hard pressed to come up with examples of location based deals for BtoB companies. If you’re a BtoB and trying to figure this out, you’re not alone.I also had the chance to interview Tristan and Daniel to get some insights to share with you including the backstory on Jimmy Chu. When the videos are posted I will share a few links.Throughout the conference I got to speak to several attendees. I was amazed at how consistently powerful their experiences have been and how much the companies who attend love the Inc. 5000 conference. Over and over again, they talk about the ability to really connect with other business owners which can be so easy to miss in today’s Internet driven world. My thought – too many people think of social media as an alternate to face-to-face connections. In fact, social media is about creating and enabling more intimate and face-to-face connections with people you might not otherwise have met. The goal is to get beyond the simple social connection and engage.Today was my chance to be in the hot seat. I engaged with Inc. 5000 attendees by conducting live critiques and giving answers to how they could use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social tools to build powerful marketing strategies and brands and drive business online. More soon!Re-Tweet, LinkIn and Follow!Click here to easily re-tweet "Live from Inc. 5000 & meeting Barbara Corcoran" to your fans on Twitter Click here to follow Maisha on Twitter at @maishawalker Connect with Maisha on LinkedInGet notified of Maisha's new posts via email Read Related Articles by Maisha:Online Marketing's Best Kept SecretUsing Twitter to Inspire Action6 Tools to Nurture and Engage Your Twitter FollowersBuilding Your Tribe - 6 LinkedIn Success Studies

Over the last few months we've been working with a number of our clients on establishing and growing their email marketing strategies. We helped one client send out an email for the first time and saw conversion rates that were 2-3 times higher than their Web site conversion rates. I mean conversions from subscribers to buyers which meant real dollars in their pocket.As we start 2011 and face the hype over new tools and new ways to use "old" tools like Facebook, this is an excellent time for you to consider the importance of Connect with Maisha on LinkedIn Get notified of Maisha's new posts via email Read Related Articles by Maisha 6 Tools to Nurture and Engage Your Twitter FollowersUse Twitter to Inspire ActionShortlist of Twitter Apps for Your DesktopPick the Right Twitter Tool: Mobile Apps8 Types of People on Twitter

Over the last 3 weeks I've been part of a 5-week, 5-city speaking and book signing tour sponsored by Deluxe Corp called the Small Business Heroes tour. I'm excited about our next stop tomorrow which is Orlando and I've been thrilled to connect with and provide advice to many businesses in Denver, Portland and Austin. I was also thrilled to make my broadcast television debut with an interview on NBC news. I can never get over what a goofball I seem to be on camera but I was thankful for the opportunity and humbled by my interviewer, journalist and fellow entrepreneur Gregg Moss telling me he's a big fan of this blog! Thank you! While the Deluxe staff on the tour are giving free presentations on many topics I've spoken and written about including Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, building Web Sites and lots of others, my presentation for this tour is on "local marketing" - how you as a small business owner can easily use the Internet to *successfully* gain visibility and sales within a local area at very little cost. I am currently working on a whole series of articles around this topic and if you have a local marketing success story, I would love to feature your business here! So if you have a local marketing success story to share you can tell me about it here. One of the most successful tools to market locally is - surprise, surprise - Twitter! Small businesses all over the country are successfully using Twitter to win customers. How are they doing it? Examples abound. There's the Chicago based Domino's franchisee who sends personalized videos (think Old Spice Guy, but less naked) to people who tweet both praise and complaints about his pizzas, getting him praise on 87,000 Web sites and fierce loyalty from his customers. There's the Santa Monica Hotel lounge that got 250 people into its lounge one night (to spend $$ on lots of other things) by offering free bubbly to it's Twitter and Facebook followers for "friending" them and then accessing a secret passcode. I Can Email You With the Next UpdateClick here to get notified of new posts to "The Internet Strategist" by Email There's the San Francisco massage and wellness spa that regularly fills it's open, unused appointments by offering last-minute, deep discounts to twitter followers. The bottom line is - it works. But you have to know how it works and when it works -- Twitter isn't great for everything. How can you make Twitter work for you? All of these examples fall into the category of "remarkable" content either as: 1. An offer they can't refuse - deep discounts & free champagne sound like pretty sweet deals. So sweet that they grab your attention and make you want to patronize the business if for no other reason than to check it out. Of course it's up to the business to turn those newcomers into loyal customers but getting people in the door is far, far more than half the battle. The trick is to find an offer that is exciting, relevant to your business and affordable. 2. Content that is highly Personal and/or Strikingly Unusual - Ramon the Domino's pizza franchisee didn't have to spend a lot of money or offer deep discounts, he won loyalty with a secret weapon that is hard to copy or steal - his charm and personality. This is one of the areas that scares business owners the most - the kind of committment that Ramon shows to having a highly personal, highly communicative relationship with his customers. While this can be a home run for people who are lucky enough to have that personality, many business owners wouldn't want to go down this path. However here's another example of a business owner who uses her personality and passion in a far less overwhelming way. The Pink Cake Box makes "extreme cakes" and the business owner simply posts photos of her cakes to Flickr. But the cakes are so remarkable and she's been doing it consistently for so long (years) that she has built a Flickr following that now drives 10% of her Web site's traffic. The path you take depends on you. Yes - you! And what resources are available to you including your own passions and skills. When you think of what to offer is it your personality (very time consuming) or a great deal (more of a financial investment)? What can you do or offer? Who is it exactly that you're trying to reach and for what purpose? Getting new customers? Keeping old ones? Make sure you figure out the answers to these questions first. If you're not able to answer these questions, move on to something else. Perhaps local marketing and/or Twitter are not right for your business!Discuss These Topics LiveIf you're in Orlando on October 5th or Charlotte, North Carolina on October 12th, you can see me walk through these topics in more depth in person at noon. I've also been known to sign a few copies of my book as well as sit down one-on-one with businesses for a bit of highly personalized advice. I hope to see you there! Follow me on Twitter@maishawalker and join me at the Small Business Heroes Tour in Orlando on October 5th & Charlotte, North Carolina on October 12th. Read Related Articles by MaishaShortlist of Twitter Apps for Your DesktopPick the Right Twitter Tool: Mobile Apps8 Types of People on TwitterYour Social Media Marketing "Killer App"

Last time I was discussing the challenges in deciding which Twitter tools to use once you've decided you're going to use Twitter at all. And when I say "use" I'm focusing on your role as a distributer of content.I want to reiterate that this isn't as big a decision as, say, choosing blogging software. If you decide to change blogging software it can be a real pain (and expense) to do so. But Twitter management tools tend to have three things in common that make them wonderfully interchangeable: Free Versions - pretty much all the tools have a free version that will work for the majority of people. You don't have to make any financial investment to try the tool out.Low Learning Curve - the tools don't take a lot of time to learn how to use – so you don't have to invest inordinate amounts of your time to discover if one of them is going to work for you.Won't hoard your content - because the tools are basically taking content from Twitter itself (and just displaying it in a more useful way), your core content is on Twitter, not stuck inside the tool. You can even use more than one tool to read the same content in different ways if that's what works for you.So it's not that hard to switch between them or even to use more than one tool at the same time! While I offered some hints last time on mobile tools, this becomes more relevant as we look at the tools you'll consider for desktop usage.In fact I actually use four or five different tools to manage my Twitter accounts. Between active posting, list management, direct message conversations and statistics, there isn't one tool so far that has met all my twitter-ing needs. While this obviously isn't ideal from an ease of use perspective, it is great that I at least have the option to use as many tools as work for me i.e. using Co-Tweet to answer all of my direct messages or using HootSuite to publish all of my posts. This is only possible because the tools happily pull all of the relevant content *from Twitter* instead of storing it in their own database. So I never actually *have* to choose.Here is a breakdown of some of the available tools that I think are worth checking out: I Can Email You With the Next UpdateClick here to get notified of new posts to "The Internet Strategist" by Email TweetDeck - known for it's desktop version but also has a mobile version. You can monitor multiple accounts, tweet from multiple names, and setup pop-up alerts. There's also an iPad version.CoTweet - great when you'd like to give multiple users access to the same Twitter account or even assign specific posts to an individual user to respond to. Because of it's multi-user and assignment features it's a great tool if you plan to use Twitter for customer service and has attracted large brands like Starbucks, JetBlue, and Coca-Cola. They do offer a feature-rich free version. As of the writing of this article it is desktop only. Twhirl - like CoTweet and TweetDeck, Twhirl can handle multiple accounts and has all the features you'd expect. Note Twhirl was acquired by Seesmic in 2008. HootSuite - a great tool (and my personal favorite) with a user-friendly interface. All the standard Twitter functions plus the ability to track keywords and trends, post directly to Facebook, schedule posts, put followers into groups and the ability to manage multiple accounts. You can also track clickthroughs on your embedded links. HootSuite has both desktop and mobile versions. Twitbin - Twitbin is actually a Firefox extension that allows you to view your Twitter accounts as a sidebar in your browser. This setup allows you to easily keep a constant eye on what's happening on Twitter. Wonderfully convenient. For those who want to make Twitter a central communication tool holding real time conversations and posting multiple times per day this "always on" setup may be the tool for you! SocialOomph - people really debate the automated direct reply issue. I like it beacuse although it can be annoying having to delete DMs that aren't very useful, it can also be a quick way to learn more about the person you just followed -- what someone puts in their direct message, and sends to every single person who follows them is telling. Or if you ask a good question in your own automated DM, it can be a way to learn something about the person who just followed you. SocialOomph has a good tool to enable you to create an automated DM as well as lots of other features. Which Twitter desktop app do you use? Did I leave yours off of the list? Have you had any great or challenging experiences with any of the tools above?One of the most important things you can do on Twitter is actually engage other users. While the list above tackles some of the basics of posting, next time I look forward to getting into tools for engagement and for measuring your success. Follow me on Twitter. Special thanks to Dave Clarke, Communications Strategist at Churnless, for his excellent help in compiling the data for this article! You can ask Dave about his favorite Twitter tools at @thedaveclarke or ask me more about mine at @maishawalker. Read Related Articles by MaishaPick the Right Twitter Tool: Mobile Apps8 Types of People on TwitterYour Social Media Marketing "Killer App"A Guide to Social Media Tools and their Uses