Tag: marketing

Employee engagement in small business

Blogging helps small business tell their story and improves staff morale

Earlier this week I was asked what tools small business could use to increase employee engagement.

My reply was a simple one; start a company blog and let staff contribute to it. Letting workers tell stories of why they enjoy their work not only gives them a feeling of being recognised as part of the team but also shows the human face of the business.

That latter part is an important point as too many small businesses try to sound like Exxon-Mobil when they present their company face when in actual fact most customers are after the human touch.

It’s a simple thing, but showing your business’ human face is not only good for staff morale but also good as a marketing tool as well.

 

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Business benefits from blogging

Blogging can be useful tool for a savvy business

This post is the final of a series of four sponsored stories brought to you by Nuffnang.

Boring is the comment often used about business websites, however smart companies are using blogs to spice up their sites and boost marketing, customer retention and employee engagement.

A blog can make a company’s website more dynamic and a destination for visitors, it’s an opportunity for an organisation to demonstrate its depth of expertise and the qualification of its staff.

Best at this are the big global companies like GE, Cisco and IBM that have large pools of experts who can contribute to the company blog. These enterprise blogs are sprawling sites that cover multiple markets and industries which the companies operate across.

More than a marketing tool

For smaller tech companies, particularly Silicon Valley startups, their blogs have become vital marketing platforms where they often describe the company’s journey and new features being added.

Some companies, like Uber and Nest, use the company blog as their press channels with entries acting as media releases. This is particularly useful for smaller businesses without a PR agency or in house communications people.

At a more tactical level, blogs can be used as a weapon in a fight for marketshare. One of the toughest battles on the internet at the moment is going on between accounting software companies MYOB and Xero and their blogs are at the forefront of this fight.

In this battle MYOB are the incumbent with over a million users in the Australian business accounting market and a small army of Certified Consultants to help clients with using the software while Xero is the well funded cloud computing service that grew its Australian customer base by nearly 50% to 147,000 so far this year.

Small business thought leadership

So the battle is intense with both companies using their blogs to show their thought leadership in the small business space. Both of the blogs illustrate each company’s strengths and weaknesses.

MYOB’s blog is the longest standing and is more of a generalist overview of small business and accounting issues while Xero’s focuses on the new features being added to the product, both have fiercely passionate followers which shows in the comments fields of their blogs.

Blogs though need not be about pure marketing or advertising functions, in fact the best small business ones are those that just tell their customers what’s on. These are particularly good for the hospitality and retail industries.

One plus with business blogs is they help employees understand their business better, particularly when staff are invited to contribute.

Blogging isn’t just about lonely geeks or bored mums sitting in their spare rooms. A well thought out business blog can be a great tool for engaging existing customers, motivating staff and building new markets.

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Googling your business

Despite Google’s new small business service, the space remains a great opportunity for a disruptive entrepreneur.

Google’s small business services have been a constant irritation of this site, with the view that local listings have been a missed opportunity for the service.

Overnight, the search engine giant has launched their new Google My Business site to bring together the disparate services offered to local enterprises.

At first look it’s a fairly slick way to get new businesses signed up, albeit dependent upon Google+ for the initial login. For businesses with existing Google small business accounts, the site directs you to the revamped Google Places administrator screen.

The immediate observation is that Google+ integration is a weakness as it relies on one ‘real person’ account to administer the listing; this will create problems for business as staff leave and founders retire.

Black Box Verification

Another problem is the black box verification process still remains – it’s hard for businesses to keep their listings fresh and up to date when there’s a risk doing so will see their entries might be suspended for violating some vague rules.

For local businesses it’s essential to have the search engine listing and the Google My Business site makes it easier to get it running, however the problems with Google’s local business strategy remain.

With Google, Facebook and the other online empires neglecting small business, this market is still a great opportunity for a disruptive players.

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Three business lessons from the New York Times

The New York Times Innovation study has important lessons for all business owners and managers.

“The New York Times is winning in journalism,” starts the newspaper’s much discussed internal Innovation Report. Then in great detail it goes on to describe how the audience is being lost to upstarts like the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed.

Given the number of digital forests that have been felled discussing the report in the last week, it’s not worthwhile giving an in depth analysis of the study – particularly given Nieman Labs’ comprehensive dissection of the document.

What does stand out though are a number of over-riding themes that apply to almost any business, not just struggling traditional media outlets.

Being digital first

A constant mantra in the NY Times report is about being ‘digital first’ – if you’re thinking about that today, then you’re probably too late in your industry.

Every industry is now digital: If you’re designing widgets, you’re doing it on CAD system; if you’re selling real estate, you’re listing online (one of the great killers of the old metropolitan newspaper model) and if you’re selling doughnuts, you’re placing your suppliers’ order electronically and maybe 3D printing your icing patterns in the near future.

There isn’t one industry that isn’t being radically changed by digital technology.

Breaking down silos

One of the areas that’s been most resistant to digital change, and yet is the most threatened, is management.

Silos within organisations are a triumph of management power and make it difficult for a business to be dynamic when it’s necessary to negotiate with different fiefdoms just to change the colour of paperclips.

Those silos are fine when industries are cosy and there’s little competition but when disruptors enter the market those management empires become a dangerous, and expensive, weakness.

The New York Times study spends a great deal of its pages discussing how to break down silos within its own organisation and this is something every business owner or manager should be exploring.

With modern communication, information management and workplace collaboration tools many management roles are no longer needed.

For smaller businesses, this is the greatest strength when competing against larger corporations as Huffington Post, Buzzfeed and Business Insider  have shown in stealing the market from the New York Times.

You need to be found

One of the toughest conclusions from the NY Times study is that the quality of content actually doesn’t matter in the marketplace; The Huffington Post and Buzzfeed do an excellent job of taking the NYT’s work, repackaging it and redistributing it in a way readers prefer.

That might be a transition effect – it’s hard not to think that should original content creators like the NY Times be driven out of business then Buzzfeed will have to start employing more journalists and Arianna paying her writers – however right now gloss beats quality.

Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post are attracting audiences because their stories are easy to find online and their headlines almost beg you to read them.

For non-media businesses, the lesson is you need to be found; you may be the best restaurant, electrician or accountant in town but if you’re on the fifteenth page of Google in search results for your industry and suburb then you’re doomed.

The New York Times faces its own unique set of challenges, as do the publishing and media industries, many of the lessons though from the NYT  Innovation paper though can be applied to many businesses.

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Renaming places

Is Madrid renaming a metro line as part of a sponsorship deal a good idea?

Madrid have renamed a subway station to Vodafone Sol and plan to rename an entire metro line as part of a corporate sponsorship deal.

Personally I think renaming places changes the culture of place; something well understood by dictators but possibly not so well by corporate marketing people.

Do you think this is a good idea?

Picture of Madrid Sol station courtesy of Zaqarbal through Wikimedia

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Facebook’s advertising struggle

The next few years promise to be interesting for everyone in the social media industry, particularly Facebook’s shareholders and advertisers.

Facebook is further restricting the reach of brands on their social media platform reports industry news site Ad Age.

It’s not surprising that Facebook is doing this seeing their stock is currently trading at 120 times current earnings and sixty times estimated revenue. The income has to come from somewhere to justify those prices.

The social media service is quite blunt about it’s objectives in making brands pay more to get their message out on Facebook as Ad Age reports;

“We expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site.”

Facebook’s idea of a meaningful experience though might be very different from its users, who are showing their irritation with the service messing around with their news feed. It remains to be seen just how interested those posting on the site are in clicking on sponsored or promoted posts as opposed to finding updates from those they care about.

For smaller businesses, Facebook’s moves make it harder to use the service as an effective marketing or engagement platform as it means stumping up substantial amounts of money to get your messages in front of your customers and friends.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this pans out for Facebook and the social media marketing community. It may mean that social advertising is monopolised by big brands while small and local business finds other channels to get their message out.

One thing is for sure though, the idea that social media would replace the news media is beginning to look shaky as people’s feeds start to be dominated by messages they don’t want.

The next few years promise to be interesting for everyone in the social media industry, particularly Facebook’s shareholders and advertisers.

For smaller businesses, it’s clear that Facebook is no longer a cheap marketing platform.

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As seen on TV – where are today’s trusted sources

As seen on TV was a great way to sell in the 1960s, is it still valid fifty years later?

In a local shopping centre over the weekend this business was selling massage tables using the fact they’d been mentioned on TV to enhance their reputation.

Citing an appearance on TV in the hope of improving your credibility is very much a mid-20th Century way of doing things. In the 1960s or 70s an enthusiastic mention from a TV host was the way to get the punters beating a path to your door.

Today, things aren’t quite the same. TV was on a decline as a trusted medium – despite the successes of talk show hosts like Oprah Winfrey – long before the internet arrived. The web bought social media and now buyers can consult their friends and peers before deciding to buy.

What was interesting about the sign was there was no indication of a social media presence or web page and that in itself showed how old school this business’ advertising was.

For the business owner, it would have been hard work getting a mention on TV. Space isn’t cheap to buy and getting a mention on a current affairs show requires either the services of an expensive PR agency or many hours of bugging producers and not a small degree of luck.

Then again, maybe a complete lack of online engagement didn’t matter. The shopping centre I was in would have an average customer age well over forty and, most of the market the business was aiming probably comes from the sizeable retirement village across the road.

How this business ignores modern communication channels is instructive about the generational change in business and society, particularly on how different age groups find their trusted sources.

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