Business Coaching

Everybody’s online these days, right?

It sure seems that way, but there are still a shocking number of businesses that aren’t taking advantage of the online world to grow.

In fact, almost 40 percent of small businesses in the United States have no online presence at all.

It’s easy to blame uncontrollable factors on failures, but a business that has no online presence and fails has no excuse. There is help for any business if they know where to look.

The economy may be bad, taxes may be high and the economy may be uncertain, but none of those factors mean anything if you aren’t taking full advantage of the opportunities around you and the internet is as powerful a marketing tool as we have ever seen.

People don’t look for the products and services they need in the Yellow Pages anymore.

In fact, many communities have done away with distributing phone books because most people search for what they want online these days and having a massive tome with everyone’s contact information was simply too expensive to produce every year.

For business owners that haven’t gone online with their message yet and then wonder why they aren’t finding enough customers, it’s time to move to the 21st century.  If a business isn’t marketing, it’s dying.

Developing your presence isn’t hard and it shouldn’t take up too much time, but it’s vital to your success.

If a small business doesn’t have an online presence, whether it’s a Facebook fan page or a dedicated, multi-page website, they are missing out on hundreds if not thousands of potential customers.

Online you can build a following of your best customers, interact with them and find easy, cost-effective ways to market your business.

An on-line presence is, arguably, the most important marketing tool available these days, so get online today and don’t lose any more business to your competition.

Facebook marketing can bring great results.

If Facebook marketing has you lost, keep these two facts in mind: the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook is 35- to 54-year-olds, and the next fastest-growing demographic is the over-55 crowd.

This is great news for people who are trying to market themselves to potential clients – business owners are in these two age groups, and they’re actively using Facebook.

Now that you know that there are potential clients out there on Facebook, here is an easy way to market yourself and your business:

1) Create a Facebook page for your business
2) Share an interesting article on your page to engage your fans, comment on posts on your page to communicate with your fans, update your page to generate a story about it in your fans’ news feeds, create a discussion section on your page to interact directly with fans, create or join a group related to your industry to find more fans and/or create an event related to your business to meet fans.

As long as you maintain and continually update your page, slowly but surely, you’ll gain fans, interact with people who comment on your events you post on your page, and work up to interacting in person.

That’s the end result…but it takes work to get there.

That seems to be where people fall off the Facebook marketing train. They think it will be easier marketing themselves on social media sites. But in reality, it takes just as much work to maintain and update a Facebook page and interact with fans and friends. As long as you keep this in mind, you should be successful in Facebook marketing.

For other marketing strategies for your business, consider a free business coaching session. It’s a great way to figure out what issues in your business might deserve the most focus.

Can MySpace make a comeback?

MySpace has been considered dead for a while now among the social media-savvy. But could MySpace make a comeback?

Five years ago, News Corp. acquired MySpace for $580 million…and then the losses came. Although MySpace Music is listed as the number one music site from comScore, it’s had a steady decrease in popularity since News Corp. has owned the site.

News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch said, “We’ve got to admit that during the last two or three years, I think we made some big mistakes. But we’ve got fine new management now; they’ve started to introducing new features. There’ll be a lot of changes coming through the summer. The early indications—and they’re only early indications—are we’re getting more visitors and they’re staying longer. When that gets more substantial, we’ll get more advertising.”

News Corp. has also called MySpace a “work in progress,” as it plays with its number one music platform ranking to try to get back on top of the social media scene, and plans to roll out a number of enhancements to the site in the next few sites.

What do you think? Can MySpace regain its status in the social media site scene?

You can learn the ins and outs of social media via Web tools.

Social Media exploded and confused many business owners in the process. “What on earth is a blog?” “Who are all these people who want to be my friend on Facebook?”

But it’s not impossible — small business owners CAN learn how to use social media to their advantage. And there’s no need to look to a “social media guru.” Look no further than Web tools already out there, like blogs, webinars and online forums. Check out the article SmallBizTrends.com wrote about it here to find tips small business owners — or anyone — are using to learn the ins and outs of social media.

What else can you learn as a business owner? Click here to find out what a business coaching session might teach you.

Yesterday we reported Google has listed Facebook as a top competitor. Then Hitwise released a report saying Facebook was more visited than Google. It seemed like social media had overtaken the search engine! Huzzah!

Not so fast.

Industry Pace has pointed out a few facts that make the above false. A major biggie that affects the above statistic? Hitwise purposely didn’t count how often people visit both sites via mobile phones. That’s a huge chunk of people right there that weren’t even counted!

What does this have to do with business coaching? A lot — if a client ignores parts of their business that should be helped, a business coach can’t help them. If they tell you they know their numbers and give you wrong ones, or try to cover up “embarrassing” parts of their business, all will come out in the end, and even though that’s a better situation, you’ve wasted a lot of time where you could have been helping their business.

Keep that in mind next time you take on a new business coaching client. Encourage honesty…it’s the only way clients can be held accountable.

Google used to have just two competitors...that number has grown.

Google reported just two competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft, in their 2008 10-K report. For 2009, however, their number of competitors grew to 10.

Facebook, Twitter and Yelp are listed as Google competitors, as well as specialty search engines like WebMD.

Google probably didn’t anticipate social networking sites or specialty/specific search engines being their competitor, but that’s a fact. As Google stated: “Our filing reflects the reality that we compete against a number of alternatives, including traditional search engines, e-commerce and specialty search sites, social networks, and other forms of online and offline advertising.”

Something like this that’s happening to Google is important to keep in mind for any business. As times change, new competitors in various niches can pop up…and your business should be prepared for anything.

In business coaching, business owners will hear often that they should always be prepared. If the recession didn’t teach it enough, it rings true; more competitors in seemingly different niches can come up, as is the situation for Google, or with technology advancements, what many businesses found during the recession.

To see if your business might benefit from a business coaching session, take our Business Health Check. A healthy business makes for a happier business owner.

Facebook is joining the world of location sharing.

That might not be such a good idea, as we’ve mentioned before. With the increase in popularity of such apps and sites like Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt, it’s even easier for just about anyone to see where you are. There are even new sites like this on the way, like Plancast. And now, Facebook is getting in on the action, and will debut a new location sharing feature next month.

This sort of thing might be an advantage when business coaching; clients can see where their business coach is, whether it be out networking, running a ProfitCLUB, in a business coaching session, or enjoying their free time at the newest restaurant in town.

But with everyone having access to where you are and what you’re doing at all times, is it safe? Are people setting themselves up for break-ins or attacks, or making it easier for stalkers to find them?

The location feature will have two basic components: the location-sharing capability offered directly to Facebook members and a set of APIs (application protocol interfaces) for third-party developers to add location-based elements to their Facebook apps.

So, is location sharing a good thing, that can help people network and meet others? Or a bad thing, that can lead people to you for not so nice purposes?

The team behind the start-up Secret London. Founder Tiffany is in the front row.

This isn’t an uncommon story anymore: a 21-year-old has a successful start-up.

What’s unusual, however, is the start-up was originally a Facebook group.

Tiffany Philippou started a group called Secret London in response to a competition for a summer internship with Saatchi & Saatchi. The Facebook group started as a page where Londoners could share secrets and their favorite things about the city, things only locals know about. There are also forums on the site where people can ask where to find something like live music, African drumming classes or a quirky wedding venue, and locals can respond with their opinions.

Just two weeks after starting the group, it had 182,010 fans. While the competition eventually had 800 different groups competing for the internship, Philippou now has a start-up. Internship? Old news.

With the URL bought (www.secretcities.com) and a Twitter account with 5,300 followers and blog that have both been live since early February, Secret London is blossoming. The most amazing thing about this start-up – besides the fact that it spawned from a Facebook group – was it only 2,963 pounds.

“What’s amazing is how much you can do cheaply if you are working on a project that inspires people.,” Philippou wrote in a guest blog post on TechCrunch.com. “As well as the incredible talent we got on board, we also got a printer from Freecycle.org, brought some equipment from home, and borrowed the rest. The folks at the Finsbury Centre in particular were really generous with their time and help.”

So how about that? A business can start from just about anything…including a Facebook group.

Start-up or not, every company has issues to overcome…does yours? Take our Business Health Check to find out.

Marla Erwin helped Whole Foods master social media.

Think you’re busy trying to constantly update your own Twitter page? Imagine handling more than a million Twitter followers.

Marla Erwin, Interactive Art Director for Whole Foods, is credited with Whole Foods’ social media success. In its first year on Twitter, Whole Foods gained a million followers. Since starting with Twitter, Whole Foods now has several separate accounts for users who have more specific questions about the store’s products — a Twitter account for cheese, one for Whole Foods recipes, etc.

How did Marla garner so many followers? She incorporated user-generated content onto Whole Foods’ Twitter and Facebook accounts. Recipes, product ratings and reviews and comments on the Whole Foods’ blog all went onto their Twitter feed.

Marla then went on to use Facebook and Twitter for different uses: Facebook she uses for more editorial content and to start discussions among fans and friends (since users can see others’ comments on Facebook, it’s easier to have a discussion), and Twitter she uses for Whole Foods promotions, information for customers, to answer customers’ questions and tweet out links to Whole Foods’ blog.

Read the whole article here,  and see if any of what Marla did for Whole Foods’ Twitter and Facebook can be used for your business.

As with traditional marketing, it’s all about opportunities. When you find opportunities to sell your products and services, you don’t shy away, do you? You take advantage! The same with online marketing – find opportunities to get the word out about what you’re promoting. However, with online marketing, it can be trickier. Where do you find these opportunities? And with social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, sure, you might have 500+ followers/friends, but do they really care about what you’re promoting?

If you’re lost in terms of online marketing, you need to be able to first find opportunities which you can expand upon in terms of marketing. Don’t know how to start? The following tools will at least give you a good idea of what’s being said about your company or industry online, and where users spend their time:

• Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) emails you whenever a chosen
keyword (e.g., company or product name, CEO name, campaign tagline,
industry term, etc.) is mentioned in any form of online content.
• Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com/) scans the blogosphere
for any keyword or phrase you type in.
• Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com/) scans all Twitter posts for your
selected keyword or phrase.
• SiteVolume (http://www.sitevolume.com/) reports how often keywords or
phrases appear on Twitter, Digg, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr.
• SocialMention (http://www.socialmention.com/) enables you to search
keywords and phrases by specific channel category (blogs, images, news,
video, etc.), or as a whole, and to receive email alerts when a new mention
is posted.
• Socialcast (http://www.socialcast.com/) offers real-time analytics on microblogging
and other social activities and identifies individual users’ level of
activity. Unlike most tools, it also can quantify the value of “lurkers” who
aren’t visibly posting comments, but by how often they frequent a site.

Take note of what’s being said about your company or whatever keywords you search, whether it’s positive, negative or neutral; what people
are passing along to friends; and if there are any particular needs or customer
segments that aren’t served. These are all opportunities for marketing…