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Blog posts tagged small business
We are Golden Twits!
November 27, 2009
Last night the inaugural Golden Twits awards took place to recognise UK organisations and individuals that use the Twitter social media platform best.
There were sixteen categories to get through during the proceedings. The ceremony took place at the Fabric nightclub in one of the trendier parts of London and saw nearly 100 people attend the event itself and many more tuned in online.
BHP Information Solutions' @MarketingDonut account was nominated in a total of four categories, including the Public vote award which was made up of the likes of that pesky meerkat, Aleksandr Orlov and the world’s richest football club, Manchester City.
We were truly delighted to be the recipients of two awards on the night. The @MarketingDonut Twitter account has been recognised for its tweets in the Public service and Information service categories. Also, thanks to your votes, we secured 5th spot in the public vote and even beat the meerkat!
Of course we are delighted with our awards and fighting over who gets to keep them but we are genuinely grateful for the tweets, conversations and followers who put us in the position to be rewarded. In the spirit of sharing the best of everything online, we think these awards belong to the vibrant community we are forging online and hopefully will inspire you and your small business to give Twitter a go.
- You can relive all the glory moments and acceptance speeches which had to be short and tweet by watching the video replay. Be warned that the broadcast starts with the exceptionally risqué stand-up routine that may cause some offence.
ROI = Return on Influence
November 18, 2009
In my role at Actinic I talk to a lot of small business owners. Apart from discussing the latest and greatest ideas in ecommerce a lot of them want to talk to me about social media and how it can work with their business.
Much has already been written about the various tips, techniques and strategies businesses can adopt, so I won’t go over this old ground again. However, one of the questions I have always struggled to answer is “How many extra sales will this make me?”
Social media ROI is a difficult statistic to measure. There are methods and technologies that can help you to quantify things, but it’s hard to feel confident that they are accurate.
Recently social media guru @DarenBBC suggested that we should consider an alternate meaning to ROI, Return on Influence. The explanation is simple, if your strategy is just aimed at selling a few more products you are missing the point entirely. The most successful strategies have a complete focus on connecting with your customers. This enables you to discuss, influence and ultimately own your brand online.
To prove the point do a quick search using Collecta for your brand or product. Collecta is a search engine that scours blog posts, Twitter, Facebook and many others. This content is real time, it’s happening as you search as opposed to looking through a huge archive of out-of-date data. The results can be very illuminating and often humbling.
To properly understand social media, the first step is to get involved, answer questions and show yourself to be human. It won’t turn into immediate sales figures, but influence will lead to involvement, and involvement is an easy thing to measure. Just ask yourself this: how many questions did you answer today? Eventually, there will be a big impact on sales, but it’s not immediate cause and effect.
I speak to many companies that pour huge vats of time and effort into brand protection. Many of them don’t understand that if you’re not the core influencer for your company in these dynamic online communities, someone else will seize that position, and it may cost a fortune to put things right if they go wrong. Sure it’s just about next quarter’s sales figures?
Like Minds 2009 - Social media conference
October 15, 2009
Today is the first ever Like Minds conference in Exeter. The impressive line-up of speakers will be sharing their wisdom about social media and its applications in business. The big questions of the day include What is the return on investment from using social media? How can it be used to engage customers best? We will bring you all the crucial ideas from all the speeches and will pitch your questions to the various panelists throughout the event – completely live! Following the event is simple. Either bookmark this page now or register for email notification in the window below. Sit back and watch this live-blog page from 2pm this Friday or if you want to get more involved, you can submit comments using the system in the window below (when live) or by sending a question to the @MarketingDonut Twitter account.
Campaigns, surveys and the marketing agenda – it’s Small Business Week
September 24, 2009
Small Business Week is coming up – a week of events, talks, seminars, advice clinics and the like intended to help small-business owners, throw the spotlight on the issues that are affecting them and maybe even influence people to get something done about them.
This year, the organisers, to their credit, are taking an ‘inclusive’ approach to the week-long campaign. They’re conducting a survey of small firms which aims to “measure the current health, drivers and inhibitors to successful business in the UK and create a better understanding of what's needed to enable the UK to recover faster”. I think they mean they want to know what helps or prevents you from thriving at the moment.
I’m urging you, shamelessly, to fill out the survey, which closes on Monday, 28 September. Do it now. It’ll take five minutes and someone (though, in all honesty, probably not you) will win a holiday to Vancouver for the Winter Olympics.
Now I’m going to declare an interest: we’re going to be reporting on Small Business Week and maybe even taking part in seminars, advice clinics and the like. We’d love to build up some sort of picture of what marketing issues matter to small firms at the moment so we can introduce these to discussions or behave like proper journalists and ask pointed questions about them.
So please tell us (using the comment box below):
- what are the marketing issues that matter to you?
- what are the barriers to successful marketing for small firms?
- is marketing changing for you and what sort of support would help you appreciate right now?
We CAN’T give you a holiday in Vancouver. We CAN give you our heartfelt thanks and a virtual bag of Donuts. Cheers!
Drink, drugs and copywriting
August 17, 2009
Guest post by Tom Albrighton
The other day, a client facing a big marketing setback confided to me that he was going to go home, have a glass of wine and try to think it through.
I nodded sympathetically. Many’s the time I’ve combined work with leisure by doing some copywriting over a drink in the evening. A drop of something can often loosen up the flow of words, particularly when something expressive or colourful is required. (However, it can also cloud the judgement, so I always wait until the morning to send the results to the client.)
No-one who enjoyed Under Milk Wood, Sgt. Pepper or 'Kubla Khan' could deny that alcohol and drugs can enhance the creative process. Some of our greatest cultural works had their genesis in altered states. And they reached even those who never touched anything stronger than tea.
Yet I’m not sure how my clients would react if I revealed that their copywriting had been done under the influence. Even those who liked a drink themselves might be disquieted. And if I told a client I was going on a week-long acid binge to get ideas for their slogan, I’m pretty sure they’d be looking for another copywriter. (Not that I ever would, I hasten to add.)
The serious point I’m making is that although we know of many factors that boost creativity, we often deliberately exclude them from the workplace. We might grudgingly allow a few pictures over a desk, or a radio on in the background, but these are intrusions of leisure into the world of work, not deliberate attempts to stimulate our minds. Even something completely wholesome, like spending some time in a natural environment, is only allowed in the rigid structure of the corporate ‘away day’ (if at all).
Those in the creative industries often make more effort to stimulate creativity through the working environment (although one suspects that it’s also partly for show). In my view, all work is creative – not just marketing, but every other business function too. We all have innate creativity that we use in solving the problems of our day. Why don’t we do more to let it flourish in the workplace?
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