Jun 11

3 Steps: Entrepreneurs, social media, and finding your 1000 fans

5 Marketing, 7 Sales, Business, Entrepreneur, Motivation, Planning, Tips No Comments »

As any entrepreneur will tell you, and using a Mac, it’s about getting who you are out into the market among the rest of the businesses that you compete against. It’s also about connecting the dots when it comes to knowing your customer.

First. You have to have a product or service that you intend to sell to your ideal customer. This is a given, so I won’t belabor this point.

Second. You need social media to attract your customers to you. If you go to the Cool Infographics site you’ll find lots of sweet ways of showing information that you can learn from. But Willis Wee’s post about one graphic he described social media and how it is changing business communication. As an entrepreneur you need to address, as time and resources permit, to working some of these social media channels. But remember, the channel is NOT the customer, it is just that, a channel. What flows IN the channel is the communication between you and your customers and fans. It’s how you communicate with them.

So where do you start first? I enjoy Derek Sivers blog posts and when you watch his TED talk about How to start a movement he gives you some insights about your first customer. He says basically to  connect with them. Hint: It’s the people that are eager to connect with you in the first place, not necessarily those that you think you need to or are chasing. So be careful who you may casually dismiss. Why, because of the next item.

Third. You’re looking for your 1000 fans. The Long Tail is the number of customers as a young business have, and in the beginning very few. The chance they you’ll be another Britney Spears or Rolling Stones or a company like Apple is very slim, sort of the “Top Head” to the left of the of the graph versus the long tail to the right. Not that you can’t or could not get there, but the greater the success the greater the risk and efforts. Most are looking for the just the first sale, but by using the social media tools you can get your 1000 fans that will follow you on a regular basis. The 1000 fans are those that you will have the most influence with and those that will influence you and what you do. You need to be “the farmer” to them and take care of them like an organic farmer does to his land, keep them healthy with health interaction.

Your thoughts?

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Nov 21

Investing in marketing, where’s the money going?

5 Marketing, Planning, Startups, Thoughts No Comments »

Here’s an interesting marketing chart of where people may be wanting to spend their marketing dollars for their company’s message. Social media seems to be taking the place of traditional media, so where does that leave you and your marketing? Will you be doing the same?

Your thoughts?

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Sep 30

Is Social Media a Revolution for Entrepreneurs?

5 Marketing, Business, Entrepreneur, Planning, Thoughts, Tools No Comments »

Take a look at this video and see what you think.

What are your thoughts?

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Aug 31

15 No Cost Ways to Use your Mac + Social Media to Promote your business

5 Marketing, Business, Mac, Planning, Small Business, Tips, software 1 Comment »

As always there are a number of ways of getting your marketing message out to others and social media one one route. I’d like to thank Mark Hayward for his take as I’ve translated his info into Mac specific ideas and areas. Hey, my ideal customers are Mac users or potential Switchers that want to use Macs for their startup.

  1. Customer Feedback: Tell your customers “Thank You” that sing the praises of your business on web sites and respond professionally to those that did not like what you offer and see if you can make amends to their situation.
  2. Vendor/Helpful Feedback: if you have been helped by someone and it did not cost you anything, thank them publicly for their help via your blog, Facebook, or some other means. You don’t have to mention that it was free to you, but extolling their experience to others builds up them and your credibility with others.
  3. Register with HARO (Help A Reporter Out) and respond to those requests that fit your profile of your business.
  4. If you’re a Mac person, search for Mac, mac, or #mac and connect with other Mac users or someone in your field and RT their Mac or specific industry comments to others by promoting their efforts and good comments. Nothing like seeing your name by others who think you send out good info.
  5. Find Mac specific forums, which number fewer than the Windows world, and begin making positive and helpful comments to get some credibility.
  6. Create a Flickr account (a Yahoo account is needed first) and tag a number of of your business photos and upload them via iPhoto to your account. This creates a “separate” account in iPhoto and shows which ones you have uploaded to your account.
  7. Create a “Customer Fan Blog” and use iPhoto to get and manage all of your customer’s pictures and their business and post a story about each of them.
  8. Set up Twitter Search and Google Alerts to track the response (hey, can’t change this part, it’s already good enough). However, if you use TweetDeck for the Mac or iPhone it makes it easy to automatically track comments about certain subjects.
  9. Educate your customers about your business via a blog.
  10. Create a Facebook fan page, but there are some limitations as to using this.
  11. Rewrite your “About” page (Oh man, do I need to do this). As Mark points out, here’s a good link to good info by Skelliewag. Interesting, she does not take her own advice on her “About” page. Maybe not enough time like all of us.
  12. Write a guest blog and post back to your blog.
  13. Think creatively about how your blog and web site  stacks up among the search engines.
  14. Think about who your “Ideal” customers are, not “everyone” that could buy from you. Concentrate and write for them, not everyone. Create our marketing toward them and them only.
  15. Using either Photo Booth using iSight, iSight using iMovie, or a video camera and import into iMovie a video of you and your business and upload to YouTube. Check out YouTube’s copyright Terms of Service (TOS) as what you upload may be lost to them earning tons of money from it.
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