social media – Page 5 – Small Business Odyssey

November 5, 2011November 8, 2011

Podcast to Promote Your Small Business and Build Your Profile

A podcast provides another channel, your voice, to extend your message and your reach. Through podcasts, you can increase exposure to your small business and build your personal profile and business brand. They are increasingly an essential element in small business marketing.

What is Podcasting?

The term “Podcast” originated in 2004 by combining two ideas, “iPod” (audio/video player) and “broadcast” (wide transmission of information). The original concept was that you would create a series of audios/videos (episodes) and broadcast them via the iPod.

Now the term podcast has come to mean, in common language, an audio file (usually MP3) that is made available via the web, iTunes, the iPod or any MP3 player. It can be a single audio or series (such as a training course or a regular radio broadcast such as Blog Talk Radio).

Podcasts have a four-fold appeal:

personalizes information exchange by adding the sound of your voice
enables people who prefer auditory learning to connect with you
provides flexibility and mobility for your message/information (the ubiquitous iPod or MP3 player, including smart mobile phones)
generates great search engine rankings.

A podcast builds trust and relationships because it is personal – people hear your voice which can convey a lot more than the written word. If you set up a series of podcasts, you will strengthen these relationships over time. Melanie Kissell makes the point:

Use a powerful free marketing tool that’s at your disposal twenty-four hours a day – Your Voice! …Having the opportunity to hear your voice makes a REMARKABLE difference in the minds and hearts of your target audience!

Podcasts are popular because they are easy to create and easy to listen to (online or offline via mp3 players). All you need is some free software and a headset with an inbuilt microphone (usually under $30).

Well, if the discussion so far is not enough to motivate you to have a go or do more podcasting than you are currently doing, just keep in mind that there are currently 5 Million searches per month for ‘podcast’ on Google (as well as 3.3 Million for “podcasting”). The recent focus of Google has been very much “universal search” – Google likes to have multi-media results on page 1 for any search term (blog, video, podcast, image, Squidoo lens). So podcasts can improve the ranking of your website or blog.

In the final analysis. a podcast will bring extra traffic to your blog and increase your conversions.

November 2, 2011November 8, 2011

Social Media for Small Business Marketing

You have to search really hard to find someone who relates social media to small business marketing and does so in an easy-to-understand way. However, Social Media Today has achieved this sharing by assembling a panel of experts who can guide you through the social media maze.

The YouTube video presented above gives great insights into how to use social media to advance the marketing of your small business. They effectively cover Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube and relate these to small business marketing. The information is really well grounded and focused on “how to” information – it does not go into the technicalities of each of the social media sites.

The video covers the practicalities of social media marketing:

How to use social media to build your small business
What social media to use for small business marketing
How to avoid the risks associated with social media
How to connect with your customers (current and future) through social media
Ways to measure the effectiveness of social media marketing.

Without this kind of guidnace, you can easily waste time, money and resources on social media and inhibit the success of your small business.

Core messages for small business marketing using social media

After watching the video and related Slideshare presentation, I distilled eight (8) key messages that relate to the use of social media for small business marketing:

Social media are designed to build community, not to offer a platform for direct marketing (overt marketing can result in account deletion)
Social media marketing is a form of indirect marketing (unless you use paid advertising on social media sites)
Your goals should be to build connections and relationships with current and potential customers
Unless you have a specific strategy when you visit social media sites, you will waste a lot of time for no productive outcome
The essence of social media is conversation with others and sharing – about yourself, your small business, your interests and information relevant to your niche
Effective marketing on social media requires content creation on your part – blogging, podcasts, e-books and videos
It’s important to personalise your business and your staff – profiles and videos help greatly here (you have to present as a real person, with real interests and real staff)
Profiles are critical – make sure they are relevant to your business, up-to-date and keyword rich (for SEO purposes).

Small business owners can use social media effectively if they follow some basic principles and develop a marketing strategy. The potential of social media is enormous but the realization of this potential requires focus, targeting and discipline.

October 29, 2011

How to Use Wizzley to Market Your Small Business Online

Wizzley provides a great platform for you to market your small business, your personal profile and your products and services.

Wizzley is an online writer’s community that incorporates social networking and article writing/article marketing. The writer’s platform is easy to use with a range of modules that can be plugged into an article with a click – the net result is a potentially, very attractive multi-media presentation:

You can embed videos and images and incorporate the RSS feed from your blog. The design options (e.g. two-column presentation, different themes and colors) add to the flexibility of the site for small business owners who want to present their business in the best possible light.

Jimmie, a top author on Wizzley, provides a great exemplar of how a small business, Backermann’s Bakery, can be attractively presented on the site:

http://wizzley.com/backermann-bakery-whiteville-tn/

Jimmie has creatively used the two-column presentation, video, variable-sized images, Google Maps, the duel module and the Amazon affiliate module. Her presentation, with delectable images of baking products, makes you want to visit the Bakery.

Wizzley is a free platform for you to market your small business and present your business and yourself in an attractive light.

October 28, 2011October 28, 2011

Using Flickr Images for Content Creation

Flickr photos are often high quality and make superb images for online content creation such as blog posts, e-books, articles or videos. The following discussion provides some ideas on how to use Flickr for content creation for small business marketing.

1. Check license arrangements

Before you use a Flickr image make sure you check the license agreement. You need to be aware whether or not the image can be remixed (to create a derivative product) and whether or not you can use the image (remixed or not) for commercial use. The ShareAlike component of a license means that, “If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.” The range of licenses looks like this:

Attribution License
Attribution-NoDerivs License
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Attribution-NonCommercial License
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
Attribution-ShareAlike License

2. Advise when you have used an image

In all the above licenses, you have to make an attribution to the originator in the form they request – usually a hyperlink to their Flickr site showing their username and photo title. Of late, I have been making the habit of commenting on the photo I use and leaving a link to my blog post or other URL where I have used the image. Often, the originator will respond with some form of appreciation.

3. Be creative in your use of Flickr images (within the terms of the license)

There are endless ways you can use Flickr images. A common way is to integrate them in a PowerPoint presentation and make an attribution list at the end. You could use them within an eBook (abiding by the “fair use” rule). Wizzley, a writer’s community, has a built-in module for displaying Flickr photos which provides a range of options. The most frequent use of Flickr photos is in blog posts and a number of the top bloggers illustrate their posts with Flickr photos.

4. Showcase a photographer via Squidoo

If you come across an outstanding photographer or one who is creating images relevant to your focus/niche, you could build a Squidoo lens to showcase their photography. When I was working towards my 50^th Squidoo lens (GiantSquid) I developed a series of lenses focused on the towns/beaches on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland (the home State for my small business). In the process I came across the stunning photography of BarbaraJH on Flickr. Barbara lives at Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast and at last count had more than 7,700 photos on Flickr with 81 sets. Her photography is exquisite, so I asked her whether she would agree to my building a Squidoo lens to showcase her work. She readily agreed. The lens provides a great insight into the quality of her photography:

http://www.squidoo.com/BarbaraJH-Maroochydore

Barbara’s public comment on seeing the early version of the completed lens was:

Thank you Ron, you’ve made a simply wonderful showcase of my photos, hopefully others will now get to enjoy seeing just a glimpse of the beautiful area in which I live.

Her personal appreciation via email was particularly moving. This is one example of how you can build social equity through your innovative content creation using Flickr. You can imagine that if your small business was located at Maroochydore, illustrating a top Flickr photographer from that area could bring a lot of traffic to your personal profile(s).

Flickr makes it easy for you to create online content with quality illustrations.

October 26, 2011

10 Tips for Building Your Personal Brand on Flickr

The real value of Flickr in terms of small business marketing is the ability to create a personal brand and build a following around common interests. This post offers 10 tips for developing your personal brand on Flickr. They are offered in line with the small bsuiness marketing ideas discussed in the previous post.

1. Build your profile with care

Your photos are your marketing medium but your profile is your marketing message. Take time and care in creating your profile and keep refining it to keep it up-to-date with your online marketing strategy.

Focus is important here as is clarity. Take advantage of Flickr’s format offer in the profile area and add bold and italics and URL’s where appropriate … and images. Flickr adds “no follow” code to all links, so your focus should be on the reader, not search engine optimization (SEO). Whatever you do, keep in mind that your profile is the main way a Flickr visitor has to find out who you are and what you have to offer.

Your Flickr profile itself will also be indexed by Google. Here’s an example of a Flickr search result on my own name – the link leads directly to my profile:

Flickr: ronpass
Everyone’s Uploads Groups Flickr Members For a Location Applications · ronpass’ Photostream · to ronpass’ photostream page. About ronpass / Ron Passfield …
http.www.flickr.com/people/ronpass/ –

Part of your broad social media marketing strategy should be to have a presence on as many high traffic locations on the Internet as possible. Flickr provides an opportunity for further exposure if you have photos to share.

2. Get a Flicker Pro account

A Pro account costs about $25 per year at time of writing. This enables you to overcome the limitations of the free account – which are 100 MB monthly photo upload limit (10MB per photo), 2 video uploads each month (90 seconds max, 150MB per video) and post any photo to up to 10 groups. The Pro account gives you some authority on the site as you get a “PRO” icon added to your name and account. Here are the PRO account benefits:

Unlimited photo uploads (20MB per photo)
Unlimited video uploads (90 seconds max, 500MB per video)
The ability to show HD Video
Unlimited storage and Unlimited bandwidth
Archiving of high-resolution original images
The ability to replace a photo
Post any of your photos or videos in up to 60 group pools
Ad-free browsing and sharing
View count and referrer statistics.

With a Pro account, you can get access to your Flickr account stats. It pays to check these stats regularly. Here’s what Flickr has to say about their stats (provided in tabular form and visually):

Stats on Flickr are designed to give you insight into the ways that people are finding your photos. There are stats available for people surfing on Flickr itself – where the referrer is flickr.com – and stats about people coming from other websites. We can show you the sorts of things people search for on search engines where your photos turn up, and tell you how many views your photos have.

3. Participate in Groups

Groups are the major medium for communication on Flickr. They represent people of like interests sharing their passions. Choose groups wisely and be willing to participate through sharing and commenting (remember comments brand you). Flickr facilitates easy participation in groups. Once you upload a photo you can specify what groups you want it to go to with an easy click. The more groups, the more exposure, but keep them relevant to your profile and purpose. When joining a group, make sure you take a note of their rules, e.g. limits on the number of photos you can add to a group in a day (e.g. 2 or 3).

4. Titles, Tags and descriptions are important for traffic

Flickr gives priority to photo titles when activating search results. However, people on Flickr will often find your images through your tags – so be industrious here. Check tags in use to see whether you can link to them. Descriptions are also important because they inform the viewer and give them a better context and understanding to view your images. You don’t want them to go away bewildered – they may not return. Providing an interesting description could hold their attention and stimulate their curiosity.

5. Create sets of photos

Sets are groups of photos around a theme much like an album. This makes it easier for the viewer to look at related photos. If you have a Pro account, you can also create collections which are groups of sets. Both sets and collections have their own URL and a mosaic created from the photos that make up the set or collection. Collections are particularly useful where you have a large number of photos.

6. Be topical and creative

Creativity and humor attract people to you (as evidenced by some of the top YouTube videos). A way to attract lots of traffic is to create an interesting and creative set of photos around a topical event. You will attract attention if you adopt an innovative perspective (in line with Seth Godin’s “Purple Cow”).

7. Encourage others to reuse your images

Flickr offers a range of options in relation to licensing your photos. The least restrictive license is known as “Creative Commons – Attribution” which effectively means:

You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work – and derivative works based upon it – but only if they give you credit.

So you make your photography available to others as long as they acknowledge the source. People can then use your photos on their websites and blog posts, in eBooks or in remixing to make other products. You thus place no restriction on commercial use of your photos as long as the attribution is given. This can have a viral effect as more and more people come to see your photography through a diverse range of outlets. You might be lucky and have one of the top bloggers like Brian Clark of Copyblogger pick up your Flickr photo and use it in one of his blog posts (he has 130,000+ subscribers).

8. Maintain your contribution

As with any social media site, it is important to maintain your momentum and contribute regularly through uploads, joining groups, commenting on others’ photos and using Flickr images in your content creation.

9. Add video to your Flickr site

As mentioned earlier, with a free account you can upload 2 videos each month (90 seconds max, 150MB per video). However, with a PRO account, you can upload an unlimited number of videos (still 90 seconds max) with a limit of 500MB per video. Flickr is a great way to leverage animated music videos created from photos via Animoto. In a previous post, I explained that with the free account at Animoto you can make an unlimited number of 30 second videos or with the All Access Pass, an unlimited number of videos of any length.

10. Improve the quality of your photos

Space does not permit a full discussion of this issue but here are some thoughts:

Observe “the Rule of Thirds”: http://www.digital-photography-school.com/rule-of-thirds
Fill the frame: http://www.digital-photography-school.com/fill-your-frame
Crop your photos : This is one way to achieve “fill your frame”. It is also important for quality presentation. Flickr uses thumbnail images for individual photos, sets and collections. It pays to be conscious of this and crop your shots so that you get the best result from your photography. It’s amazing how cropping can totally change an image and even convert a poor shot into a great one.
Frame your subject: Find something in the scene to provide a natural frame for your shot. The image for this post is an example. It is one of the photos that I took on holidays from a lookout in a mountain village, Montville, Queensland … the photo is aptly named, “Picnic on the Edge”.

The 10 tips in this post offer ways to build your personal brand and Internet profile on Flickr and, like any form of small business marketing, demand consistent and persistent action.