Tweet Globally. Reap Locally

Twitter can be a great tool for brick and mortar businesses looking to drive traffic into the store. Many small local businesses have been slow to embrace the online world, figuring it’s a waste of effort to reach millions of people who aren’t in their neighborhood. We’ll address the local/global issue in a minute.

But if you own a local hair salon, wine shop, pizza parlor, etc. and are interested in social media, Twitter might be your best first step. The short “microblog” messages are perfect for the type of announcements you might put on a poster in your window or on a sandwich board out on the sidewalk. “Thursday Special: Cavitt Pinot Grigio $5.99!” Twitter conversations move pretty quickly so they are well suited to getting immediate response to short-term “one-day” promotions. If you are a restaurant owner, for example, it’s ideal for your daily specials. If you don’t have specials everyday, but have an event planned for the weekend, you can promote it daily in advance, and post pictures afterword.

Now, what about the global aspect? Twitter is about more than just one-way status updates. It is also social. Conversations around your business and products, no matter where they come from geographically, make them more interesting and helps to gain and keep customers. For example, if you are a wine merchant advertising a new Malbec you have on sale, you may attract the attention of other wine merchants or wine fanciers online who don’t live in your area but would share tweets that reinforce your message with comments like “Wow, that’s a great price for a great wine” or links to a reviews around the Web.

I know many small businesses also struggle with finding the time to participate online, another reason Twitter’s short message format is an attractive option to start with. But there are also many tools to help streamline content management for social media, as well as companies (like mine) that can help set those tools up, or take managing all of the mechanics so you can focus on the message.
Please feel free to contact me via my website http://www.bmindweb.com with any questions.

Facebook’s Name Game

When you enter Kennebunk, ME on Route 1 driving North, you are greeted by a sign that says “Welcome to Kennebunk. The only village in the world so named.”

While Kennebunk may not need to worry about its identity, many companies are very concerned about making sure they have control over use of their name, and related brands. Up until now that hasn’t been so easy on the social networking site Facebook.

At the end of May, that changed somewhat as Facebook announced that they would allow users to set up “vanity URLs” for their profiles and pages. There were some restrictions though. The profiles needed to have been established before the announcement, and they needed to have acquired at least 1,000 fans/friends by May 31. The signup would be available to qualified profiles at midnight on Friday June 12th. Subsequently Facebook announced that there would be a second round of registrations available later in June for everyone else. As it turns out there was still a 100 fan/friend limit on these and the signup again became available in the middle of the night.

Compared to sites like MySpace and Twitter, Facebook seems to be creating a lot of obstacles for companies seeking to stake their claim. I think it’s worth examining why—and looking at what they trying to protect? I think for one thing they are trying to avoid a lot of the domain squatting issues that plagued the early internet. But more importantly, I think they are trying to retain authenticity. While it seems that Facebook is sort of making up their strategy as they go along, they are making an effort to give marketers some of what they want and at the same time, trying to enforce a degree of good citizenship. Which is not a bad thing.

What social media has taught us (at least those of us who are listening) is that a company’s brand or a person’s reputation can’t stand in place of real interaction. And this is a radical change of thinking for a culture that has been driven since the 50s on the idea of brand loyalty. Increasingly these days you need to walk the walk every day, be listening, be involved and be authentic with your customers or the value of your brand or reputation is going to go down.  And again, that’s not a bad thing. As Shakespeare wrote:

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”