Social Media and the Franchise

Posted in: Business to Business, blog by CW on 4 November 2010 | No Comments

There are many books and websites dedicated to helping business owners use social media to their advantage. Zappos is often offered as a shining example of how to use the internet to spread your brand and reach new customers, and rightly so. As a company with a world-wide market, the internet is a perfect venue for Zappos. They have used sites like Facebook and Twitter to provide customer service, advertise specials and offer discount coupons and bolster their image as a hip, cool, 21st century retailer.

But what if your business is a franchise? The franchiser may have a global reach, but each franchisee is usually limited to a set geographic boundary. It isn’t directly profitable for me with my ABC Diapers franchise in San Diego to promote ABC Diapers nationwide. What value does it bring my individual store and my employees to garner a following of faithful customers in Baltimore? Conversely, of what interest is it to those folks in Baltimore that I’m running a “Buy 1 Get 1 Free” sale this weekend at my store?

All businesses in general, but franchisees in particular, need to ensure the time, effort and money they put into advertising are well spent. For a franchise this means making sure that your efforts are going toward reaching local customers and potential customers. This is all the more important if you do not sell your product online. Selling online increases your potential customer base and makes your business more like Zappos than my ABC Diapers service. At ABC Diapers I only sell to walk-in customers and those within  a reasonable distance from my store to whom I can deliver. Selling online provides your business with a nation-wide if not worldwide audience. For my ABC Diapers service, I am only interested in reaching local families.

So is Twitter and Facebook of no use to me? Is it a waste of my time to set up and maintain a Facebook page or a website specifically for my store?

It is a waste of time if you don’t take the time to plan how you are going to reach the audience you want and need to reach.

I would encourage any business, even a small home-based one, to consider buying a domain name (yourbusiness.com for example) and setting up a website that promotes your business to the internet audience. Websites cannot be as easily targeted as other marketing tools, but through the use of specific keywords and linkbacks you can ensure that the audience you want to reach has a good chance of finding your site. Mentioning your site’s URL on your business cards, answering machine message and in your email signature will help potential customers know where to go to learn more about your business. That’s a good start.

According to a lot of online pundits and “SEO gurus” (people who claim to have mystical knowledge of how to ‘leverage’ social media through the application of Search Engine Optimization, a field that has much in common with voodoo), Twitter and Facebook are “where it’s at” these days. What these “experts” often fail to mention (or perhaps don’t even take into consideration) is that not every social medium is the best possible venue for everyone.

While not targeted at a specific group of people or geographic location, Facebook does provide an excellent place in which to interact with your customers. They can comment on your product or service and recommend your page to their friends. A Facebook page can contain pertinent information about your business like directions, hours of operation and contact info.

Twitter offers far less in the way of publicizing your brand. What it does offer is an easy, almost “instant message” like means to communicate with your customers and employees. It’s a practical way to provide and follow up on customer service calls. While it does require your customers to register an account with Twitter if they don’t already have one, it doesn’t require them to download or install software on their computer. All your conversations can take place on Twitter’s website.

Still, neither of these provide a way to reach people specifically in your area, your potential and actual customers. You should consider complimenting your Facebook and Twitter accounts with accounts on sites that allow you to focus on your local area like Yelp and Google Places. In addition you can cross-link to other small and medium sized businesses in your area. Two ways to do this are to contact the person at that business and see if they are willing to host a link to your website if you do the same for them or to leave a comment on an story on their site making sure you provide a link back to your site when you register to comment.

It may not involve social networking exactly, but another easy way to ensure your business gets exposure are business cards. In this digital age business cards may seem old-fashioned but they still have their uses. Many local businesses around here have bulletin boards for announcements of local events. Pin one of your cards to the board. Scan your business card and include it as an HTML signature on your email. Exchange cards whenever possible with other local business people and try to set up a cross-referral program with them.

A franchise owner is the ultimate local business person. They are often restricted to a geographic area and are not allowed to advertise or do business out side it. It is vital to the success of their business to find ways to reach their local audience without wasting their time or advertising money reaching those whom they cannot serve.

Promote your business with direct mail coupons

Posted in: Business to Business, blog by CW on 13 September 2010 | No Comments

One of the best ways to generate and maintain interest in your business is to keep contact with your past and present customers. More than half of our monthly business comes from return customers. Nearly all our advertising consists of word-of-mouth recommendations from our current customers. Our customers are the greatest resource we have as a small business.

Because our customers are loyal and say nice things about us, we want to find ways to repay them for being our customers.

One way to do that is to have a sale. Currently we are running a “Buy 4 Get 1 Free” sale which allows our customers to buy any 4 cartridges, ink or laser, and get a 5th cartridge of equal or lesser value free. But how can we show our appreciation to those customers who may only need to buy one or two cartridges?

Offer coupons for so much off the cost of a single cartridge or the total cost of their purchase. Savings coupons can be for dollars off or a percentage off. Coupons can be a part of a monthly newsletter (this is the way we provide our customers with coupons for 10% off their next purchase/order) or they can be directly mailed to your customers who provide an email address.

If you are a Cartridge World franchise and would like to explore a drop-dead easy way to send out coupons to your customers on a regular basis check out CWSign-Up.

Email Coupon is sent out automatically around the 1st and 15th of each month.  Once you signup, you don’t have to do anything else.

Customer can opt to get an email only once per month instead of  every two weeks. (this is really a great feature!). You can upload your existing email list.

You’re provided a link (cwsignup.com) to a web based signup form (looks clean and professional). You can continue to collect emails on list in your store and just key them into the web based signup form yourself.  You don’t have to log into any account or anything.

Or, just pass the link along to customers and prospects and they signup themselves.  This allows you to constantly build your list.

In addition to their regularly scheduled coupon, customers get a birthday greeting and coupon one day before their birthday. (We capture DOB on signup form and the birthday email is automatic)

We use Constant Contact to mail out our monthly newsletter, but perhaps a twice monthly coupon mailed directly to your customers is more practical for your business. I would not recommend looking for a free mass-mailing service. One of the primary advantages to a paid mailing service is that they do not get tagged as spam by your customer’s email filter. A professional solution both looks nicer to the customer and will keep you out of trouble with your ISP. It’s worth the money to ensure your mailings get through to their intended audience.

Whether you decide to send out coupons or mailers/newsletters containing coupons, offering your faithful customers an extra savings is one way to keep your business forefront in their minds.

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Creating a basic SOHO website Pt. 2-templates and FTP

Posted in: Business to Business, blog by CW on 25 August 2010 | No Comments

Now that you have a domain name for your business and a hosted website it’s time to think about what sort of site you want to build.

This tutorial is intended for those who, like us, want a basic website that provides information to your customers and provides a means for them to contact you for more, should they need it. That’s not to say that we want a boring and dull site. It should be interesting enough to catch the attention of web surfers who are looking for the type of service or product you provide without overwhelming them with music, flashing banners or slow page loading times. I’ll be using the experience of putting CW San Diego together as a guide throughout these posts.

The first order of business is to decide which type of platform you are most comfortable working with. There are many choices, from the complex and highly customizable (Drupal and Joomla are two of the more popular in this category) to the simple and easily constructed (like most of the “site builder” applications offered by web hosts). I like to compare Drupal to Cisco. Both allow you to do the same thing less complicated solutions do but offer a ton of options the others don’t. The tradeoff is that their systems are so complicated that you need special training to set them up. Cisco offers training to become “Cisco certified”; Joomla and similar frameworks do not offer specific training. If you decide to go the Joomla route, or if you want to have a website with a lot of flash content, you’ll need to track down a web designer with expertise in those areas. You’ll probably pay quite a bit to get decent results.

Perhaps you don’t want to put together your site, though. Maybe you have an employee, friend or family member with the skills to build the site you envision. Just remember, beyond the initial setup of a website there’s the sometimes daily need to refresh the content and keep the site interesting and attractive. Maybe you’re willing to pay a substantial amount every month to someone who will maintain your site for you, we weren’t. We wanted an option that allowed us to learn how to create and maintain our site ourselves.

A much more practical and easy-to-work-with framework for a SOHO website is WordPress, the software that powers CW San Diego. WordPress occupies the middle ground between the technically complicated Drupal and the totally unsophisticated and limited “site builder” type applications. Most of the templates available for the WordPress platform are feature-rich enough to use as is but also flexible enough to allow for a lot of customization. If you’ve ever used a desktop publishing application to create your own Christmas or birthday cards on a computer, you most likely have the skills necessary to build a reasonably effective website using WordPress.

The biggest advantage of using WordPress is its fan base. So many people use WordPress (WP) that they are constantly creating new themes and submitting them to the WP community and that community has a forum in which they offer advice to new users. The number of  plug-ins, little bits of additional software that provide a specific function to your WP site are as numerous as the themes. Currently the official WordPress site offers 10,932 plug-ins and 1,217 themes. Plug-ins and themes allow you to make your site as simple or complex as you desire. And the ease of installing and deactivating themes and plug-ins means you can experiment and try different configurations without having to start from scratch every time you want to make a change in either the layout or functionality of your site.

There is an official collection of WordPress themes here, and you can Google “WordPress themes” for even more. Most are free but there are premium themes available that cost from $20 on up. Select a theme that has the overall look you’d like to have on your site. You can always customize it later after it has been installed.

One last comment about WordPress. It comes in two “flavors”. You can download the software and install it on web space you are renting from a host (called “self-hosted”, this is the option we’ll be using for the rest of these tutorials) or you can let WordPress host your site on their servers. There are several reason that this is a less beneficial solution for a business site, none of which I’ll go into right now. Considering the low cost and flexibility of having a self-hosted site, I think that’s the best option for the SOHO business person.

Download and Upload WordPress

The next step, now that we have a domain name and webspace, is to download the WordPress software and install it on our website. Downloading is easy enough. Go to http://wordpress.org/ and click on the “Download WordPress” button. Pay attention to where your browser is downloading it. Once the download is complete, browse to the folder where you downloaded it and unzip the file. (Note: if you aren’t sure how to unzip a file then trying to install and maintain a website, no matter how basic, is probably beyond your skill set. Best to ask someone more comfortable with operations like zipping and unzipping, up- and down-loading and FTP to install and maintain your site for you)

Now you need to move these files from your hard drive to your webspace. The best tool for this job is a stand-alone FTP application. “FTP” stands for “File Transfer Protocol”, the standard for uploading and downloading files from the internet to a local computer and back. I have two favorite FTP applications, which one I recommend depends on the operating system on your computer. If you use a Mac or any version of Linux I’d suggest using Filezilla.  It’s versatile, feature rich and perhaps best of all, it’s free. If you use Windows you, too, can use Filezilla, although the shareware WS_FTP has even more features than Filezilla.

You’ll need to read and follow the specific directions for using either Filezilla or WS_FTP, but the basic idea is that you want to move the unzipped WordPress folders and files from your computer to your webspace. You’ll also want to check out WordPress’ installation instructions before you upload anything. There is a particular file you need to fill with information from your webhost before you upload to your site.

Now, providing you followed the directions from WordPress and used your FTP client correctly, you should have a basic website at your domain’s URL.

Next time we’ll consider content and SEO.

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Creating a basic SOHO website

Posted in: Business to Business, blog by CW on 19 August 2010 | No Comments

I was recently speaking with the owner of the restaurant where I go for breakfast during the week. He’s interested in setting up a website for his restaurant but has no experience with that sort of thing. I assured him that he wasn’t alone, many owners of small and home businesses lack experience at putting together a website and usually turn to a professional or talented friend or family member to do that for them. He understands the benefits of having a site and has some good ideas about what he’d like to feature on it.

I don’t claim to be a professional web designer. What I do claim is years of experience with setting up a domain and adapting WordPress templates to meet my needs. Because I’m not a rich corporation my overall goal is to do as big a job as I can on as small an investment as possible. Besides saving me money, building my own sites has also taught me a lot about HTML and CSS and gives me a feeling of control that having a professionally maintained site wouldn’t.

Since this project hasn’t yet begun I thought it might make for an interesting series of blog entries: Website design on the cheap from day 1.

Before you can start doing anything about a website you need to register a domain name, preferably one that reflects your business name. Unique domain names are getting harder to find for a .com domain so you may need to investigate what’s available for .co or maybe even a domain like .us. If your business name ends in “us” or “co” this could be an ideal solution. There are other domains that might apply to your type of business, like .biz, .org or .tv. To see if the name and extension (.org or .co, etc.) you want is available, go to the homepage of any domain name registrar to check. Registrars like godaddy.com and 1and1.com allow you to freely check the availability of domain names and if the one you want is available, they’ll also offer you web space on which you can build a website for your new domain. These packages (domain name+web space) are not expensive. We pay approximately $10 a month for our domain package.

Once you’ve decided on a domain name you need to decide which package works best for the site you want to build. Do you want to sell items on your site? Then you should look at business packages that come with “shopping cart” functionality built-in. This will save you a lot of time and effort trying to incorporate payment methods and SSH (secure shell access, also known as “https://…”) into your site.

Do you want an informational site only, no selling or need for secure access? Then many home or personal packages may be just fine.

No matter what sort of site you plan to build, the package you select should contain a few basic and necessary items: only consider a plan that offers at least one PostgreSQL or MYSQL database, ftp access (file transfer protocol, necessary for uploading files to your website) and email so you can have a yourname@yoursite.com email address. In the business world it’s more professional to have an email address on your domain than to have an AOL, Hotmail or even Gmail address. Look over the list of benefits to each type of plan the different registrars offer and pick the one that provides the features you need at a price you can comfortably afford.

So now you have a name reserved for your domain and a host for your website. In the next installment we’ll roll up our sleeves, go template hunting and learn all about the file transfer protocol.

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Control costs in a SOHO business using Google

Posted in: Business to Business, blog by CW on 5 August 2010 | No Comments

It can be expensive setting up a small or home-based business. There are supplies to buy, equipment to purchase or lease and infrastructure to put into place. You could easily spend thousands of dollars on new computers, copiers and printers, a faster internet connection, desks and chairs, lighting, office supplies like pens and paper and all the other bits and pieces that are required to run a business day to day.

Once your office is ready to go there’s an often unforeseen cost that may not pop up until you log into your computer. You want to present a professional appearance to your potential customers. On the internet that means having a domain name for your business and an email address that reflects the name of your company. Business people these days are not taken seriously if their business doesn’t have at least a rudimentary website or if they have an email address that ends with “hotmail.com” or “aol.com”. Most domain registrars offer low cost packages that include a domain name, web space and email to and from that domain for a relatively modest monthly or annual fee. With any luck you’ll have a relative or employee who will be willing to put together a website for your business.

There is a no-cost alternative that might fit your needs.

Google offers a suite of applications for domain owners. Google Apps for Domains consists of a Gmail account with your domain name (i.e. Sally@sallysdecor.com), an associated Google Site (a simple website), Google calendar and Google Documents. Google Documents includes a word processor (like Microsoft Word), a presentation application (like PowerPoint), a spreadsheet composer (like Excel) and apps to create forms and drawings. Google’s apps are not as robust or fully-featured as what is offered in Microsoft Office, but they are about $400 cheaper. They are certainly capable of performing the basic tasks an average SOHO business needs to accomplish. If your business requires more features, there is a paid version of Google Apps that offers more for only $50 a year per user.

A big benefit of using Google Apps over Microsoft Office is that your information is available anywhere you go as long as you can access the internet, even on your smart phone. It’s a mobile office in the cloud. This may present a security risk if your business involves classified documents or communications. But for the majority of us it’s a solution to the problem of having to be tied to your office computer to check or send email or update customer and client information. Even if your personal computer crashes or is stolen your email and data are safely preserved on Google’s servers.

You can spend $400 plus on Office and another couple of hundred dollars for CSM (Customer Service Management) software, but why should you when there’s a free to low-cost alternative that offers benefits those expensive suites lack?

If you have a SOHO business and haven’t yet found an affordable software solution for customer contacts and your web presence, you owe it to yourself to check out Google Apps.

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SBA Tools for Small Business

Posted in: Business to Business, blog by CW on 20 July 2010 | No Comments

Image via Wikipedia

On their website the Small Business Administration offers five free on-line tools to help you market your business.

“The SBA is primarily known for making loans to small-business owners, but we also offer free tools on our website, www.sba.gov, that entrepreneurs can use to promote their businesses.”

Here are five free online tools from the feds that you can use right now to market your business in a recession.

1. Access Google’s free marketing portal — Did you know that Google has teamed up with the SBA to create a dedicated marketing portal for small-business owners? Called Tools for Online Success, the portal was launched in May. The site (see box for address) features tutorials and tips about how to leverage the Web to build a strong business. With free advice on everything from how to build a website to social media marketing, this site is must visit resource for small business owners.

2. Get free online training — You may not have the time or money to spend on taking marketing courses. Instead, log on to the SBA’s website and take free courses like Strategic Marketing — How to Win Customers in a Slowing Economy and Marketing 101: Guide to Winning Customers.

3. Use SBA’s online small-business planner — You’re trying to navigate through a recession and for your small-business marketing, PR and strategic planning are the keys to success, right? Then use the SBA’s online small business planner and download such white papers as 100+ Marketing Ideas, Marketing Basics and 15 Foolproof Ideas for Promoting Your Company. You’ll also find podcasts, Web chats, resource guides and videos from top experts.

4. Get free online advertising advice — Thinking about advertising your product and service online but now sure how? The SBA, in partnership with the U.S Department of Commerce offers free advice on the rules and regulations governing online advertising and what to do when you’re ready to make your first ad buy.

5. Make use of free templates — Ever wonder how to write a marketing plan? What about a business plan? The SBA has sample plans and an online primer describing exactly how to write essential business documents.

For more information read the article at: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/07/12/1723818/use-the-governments-free-tools.html#ixzz0uGZSTUfW

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Introducing the CW San Diego B2B Community Forum

Posted in: Business to Business, blog by CW on 13 July 2010 | No Comments

After several months of planning and preparation we are pleased to announce the opening of our B2B Community Forum.

We hope that the forum becomes a hub of information and shared ideas for the San Diego small and home business community. There are literally thousands of small businesses and people working from home who have no central resource from which to get new and better practices, no place to share ideas, no source of productive software.

Our intention is to encourage the free exchange of best practices and the hardware and software that make them possible. We have included a section devoted to computers where those with questions and suggestions can post them. Of course we have also included a section for discussing printers and cartridges. I plan to make use of experience on the Gateway Computers helpdesk and many years on various on-line tech forums to provide support to those with questions. I also worked on the helpdesk for D-Link networking products, and networking questions can be posted to the computer section where I’ll do my best to provide practical answers. This will all be made easier when the membership grows. More members means more input. I’ve met many folks in my years at CW San Diego with much to share about computers, printers and small business. I want to encourage them to join the community and share their expertise.

Forums grow slowly at first. As more people join they recommend the forum to their friends and co-workers. The more content added to the forum by the members, the more value it has to the small business community at large. Though our primary focus is on the San Diego area, we welcome anyone who works from home or in a small business anywhere.

Please click on over to the forum and register. Contribute your questions and/or solutions and help us turn the forum into a valuable resource for us all.

Social networking and the small business

Posted in: Business to Business, blog by CW on 11 March 2010 | No Comments

Image by Damon Duncan via Flickr

The Better Business Bureau has put together a list of 5 considerations for small businesses as they get involved with social networking.

Five Tips for Ensuring Social Media Success in 2010

Better Business Bureau recommends that small business owners ease into the waters thoughtfully when planning to launch a social media strategy; otherwise, they risk abandoning the ship in frustration.Small businesses are shifting their marketing strategy away from expensive ad buys and are increasingly looking toward social media engagement as the less expensive alternative. According to a recent survey by VerticalResponse, Inc., 70 percent of small to medium-sized businesses plan to increase their use of social media in 2010. At the same time, 79 percent say they will not run television ads and 70 percent say they will not make radio buys.

“Small business owners are taking a hard look at their marketing budgets and traditional advertising is becoming too much of a burden in these lean economic times,” said Sheryl Bilbrey, San Diego BBB President/CEO. “Adopting a comprehensive, but manageable, social media strategy can be an inexpensive yet effective way to improve customer relations and spread the word about your business.”

We’ve posted before about how small businesses and home businesses can use social networking sites to their advantage. It does require an investment of time and dedication as well as patience. Results won’t be seen over night. It’s a commitment we make with the understanding that involvement with the community can yield positive results if we engage our customers honestly and transparently.

BBB offers the following advice to small business owners who want to start promoting their company online through social media:

Don’t Get in Over Your Head - If you’re a small business owner who is also the marketing department, the worst thing you could do is launch a large, unmanageable strategy that takes up too much time and ends up neglected. You don’t have to do it all at once.

Create and Share Information – Social media is about engagement, and creating and sharing content is key to connecting with customers and other industry leaders. You may not realize it, but you, as a small business owner, are an expert and have sound advice and informed opinions to share.

Keep everything connected – Once you’ve created your page on Facebook, or established your blog or Twitter account or other online presences, cross-promote your content so that the same message is going out across every site. (This is very easy to do as the ability to share your content with each platform is built right into Twitter and Facebook – Jack)

Engage in the Conversation –An online conversation is taking place right now about your business, your industry or issues affecting your community.

Engage with Customers – Your customers are talking about you online whether you like it or not on their blogs, consumer-focused Web sites and on review sites like Yelp, Yahoo! Local and CitySearch.

Read the full article and see other helpful tips for the SOHO business owner at the Better Business Bureau’s site.

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Creating a successful company blog

Posted in: Business to Business, blog by CW on 1 March 2010 | No Comments

Image by GRP Partners via CrunchBase

Mashable is a site I read nearly every day. It always has great tips for bloggers and web content producers.

Mark Suster,  a Partner at GRP Partners, a Venture Capital firm in Los Angeles, posted an article today that should be read and considered by every SOHO business person. He offers good points to ponder if you’re involved with or considering starting a blog for your business. Below are his primary points, but you really should read the full article.

1. Be authentic

You need to find a “voice” that is authentically yours.

2. Be transparent

The best way to establish your voice is to be transparent. Be willing to talk like a human being.

3. Get inside your readers’ minds

…you need to think about who is in the audience and what they want to hear.

4. Solicit feedback

…the best way to build an audience over time is to engage with them…

5. Don’t be offensive or take big public risks

…unless your company revolves around taking stands on controversial issues, it’s best to leave your political commentary at home.

6. Have fun

…if writing a blog becomes a chore for you it will show.

You might want to sign up to follow Mashable on Google Buzz or Twitter or Friendfeed (they practice what they preach) so you can keep up on what’s happening on the networked web.

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Push or Pull

Posted in: Business to Business, blog by CW on 28 January 2010 | 2 Comments

In discussions of on-line content you may frequently encounter the terms push and pull. These are more than catch-phrases. They reflect two totally different philosophies employed in sharing content with your audience, whether they are reading your posts on-line or employees at a company meeting.

Pushing content has become the traditional method for delivering a company’s message to customers. We tend to call our customers consumers because that’s how companies see their customer’s role in the business cycle; consumers are expected to swallow what’s fed to them, be it products or propaganda. In the words of industry analyst Jerry Michalski, a consumer was no more than “a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash.”¹ This business model creates a wall of separation between the business and it’s customers. We are telling them what we think they need to know about us and our product. It’s a one-way form of communication, one that discourages feedback from our customers. When we deny them the opportunity to provide us direct and instantaneous feedback we run the risk that they will find other outlets for their comments like blogs and community forums. These sites are not under our control and correcting misinformation or offering clarification is often impossible, even on those few occasions when we’re  aware that we’re being discussed outside of our own website.

Content that pulls customers in and along, on the other hand, provides a means for them to engage and converse with us. The conversation may not always be pleasant or productive; there are times a dissatisfied customer simply wants to vent and ignores any attempt of ours to become involved in a conversation. But if we’ve pulled them into our venue, our website or blog, we have the means to turn their comments into a conversation with other customers even if the original customer never responds. We can’t always control the conversation but we can always become engaged in it. When we pull our customers into engagements with us, we can be aware of what’s being said about our company and products and respond in a timely manner.

To pull customers we need to provide interesting and informative content and most important, a way for them to post their comments on our company and products. The best option for a company website is to provide for comments right on the site. Deflecting comments to a third-party site or only providing an opportunity for email contact detracts from the immediacy and transparency of our communications. As Doc Searls and David Weinberger remind us in The Cluetrain Manifesto:

The Internet is a place. We buy books and tickets on the Web. Not over, through, or beside it. To call it a “platform” belies its hospitality. What happens on the Net is more than commerce, more than content, more than push and pull and clicks and traffic and e-anything. The Net is a real place where people can go to learn, to talk to each other, and to do business together. It is a bazaar where customers look for wares, vendors spread goods for display, and people gather around topics that interest them. It is a conversation. At last and again.

In this new place, every product you can name, from fashion to office supplies, can be discussed, argued over, researched, and bought as part of a vast conversation among the people interested in it. “I’m in the market for a new computer,” someone says, and she’s off to the Dell site. But she probably won’t buy that cool new laptop right away. She’ll ask around first — on Web pages, on newsgroups, via e-mail: “What do you think? Is this a good one? Has anybody checked it out? What’s the real battery life? How’s their customer support? Recommendations? Horror stories?”

“I’m in the market for a good desk dictionary,” says someone else, and he’s off to Amazon.com where he’ll find a large number of opinions already expressed:

I love the look of this book, and the publisher did a great job; but I made the mistake of buying it without realizing that it was first published over 7 years ago….

I’ve had this book for two days and I keep going back to it. I may not be typical since I collect dictionaries and wanted this when I heard about it last year, but….

Ugh, they don’t have “aegritudo” but they have the “modern” definition of “peruse”….

These conversations are most often about value: the value of products and of the businesses that sell them. Not just prices, but the market currencies of reputation, location, position, and every other quality that is subject to rising or falling opinion.

It’s nothing new, in one sense. The only advertising that was ever truly effective was word of mouth, which is nothing more than conversation. Now word of mouth has gone global. The one-to-many scope that technology brought to mass production and then mass marketing, which producers have enjoyed for two hundred years, is now available to customers. And they’re eager to make up for lost time.

If we do not engage our customers in conversations, if we fail to talk with them, we can be sure they will be talking about us somewhere else.

These days the easiest way to begin a conversation with our customers is to take advantage of the many social netowrking platforms available to everyone on the internet. Create a Facebook account for your company, set up a Twitter account and start a blog. You don’t even have to spend a lot of money buying a domain and setting up a fancy website. Begin with a Blogger account and a Gmail address in your company’s name.

Once you’ve set up a place for the conversation to take place, initiate the dialogue. Start posting and Tweeting. You may not get much feedback at first, but don’t let that dissuade you. Mention your blog and Facebook page in your email signature and on company advertising. Make sure your customers know you are there and willing to respond to their comments and questions. Keep your content up-to-date and informative. Eventually your customers will respond.

When they do, treat them as if they were at the counter or front desk of your place of business. Don’t be dismissive or rude. Don’t treat them any differently than if you were both face-to-face. Use these opportunities to converse, to educate, to correct misconceptions, to build relationships with your customers. If you impress them as an open and honest business person willing to take suggestions and even criticism, it won’t be long before they are recommending you to their family, friends and co-workers. And as every small business owner knows, personal recommendations are the best advertising money cannot buy.

¹ The Cluetrain Manifesto Chapter 4 Copyright © 1999, 2001 Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger. All rights reserved.

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