by Chris Barnard | Sep 22, 2011 | Digital Marketing
Small businesses across the world all share one common need to sustain growth; new customers.
Communicating with these potential and existing customers within their local community seems to still be in the dark ages.
At least the analog ages.
Or, more often than not most small businesses rely on existing customer word of mouth to generate new customer referrals.
Never mind wasting unbelievable amounts of money on local newspaper, Pennysaver ads, or 15 different yellow pages books that find their way immediately to the recycle bin. (more…)
by Chris Barnard | Aug 26, 2011 | Digital Marketing
LinkedIn’s IPO went through the roof, Google rolled out their +1 social sharing functionality, Groupon was next up on the over-hyped stock watch, and the market as a whole is now exhibiting more volatility than a Philadelphia sporting event. 
And that’s just in the past couple of months or so.
“Blue Horseshoe loves Anacott Steel…”
Is Bud Fox still #winning?
Charlie Sheen imdb references aside, even the most clueless Carlsbad businesses out there can glean some beneficial info from all of this social search, daily deals, and professional networking media buzz.
How does your business possibly keep up with all of this and try to use this information to your advantage?
By paying attention and by having your ear tuned-in to your customers.
Don’t Just Hear, Listen
If you don’t take an active role in the communication habits of your local customers, you can’t possibly know how to best reach them with important product info and beneficial local savings opportunities.
You need to find out their likes, dislikes, favorite ways to communicate, who they most often communicate with, where they go to do their communicating, and how your Carlsbad small business can get in on the conversation.
To make it really easy, you can just ask each customer how they’d feel about receiving discounts or product updates through their Facebook page. You can also ask your customers how your Twitter account can provide more helpful content and less inane BS.
And you can also direct local customers to your very own online review portal where they can easily and instantly beam positive digital word of mouth across your business’s social stratosphere.
You can even have local customers check-in on your Facebook Places or Foursquare profile to capture some additional discount or savings opportunities.
Talk straight to them, they’ll know if you’re not. 
The important point to remember here is that all of this communication is going on around your Carlsbad business, and it’s high time you throw a hat in the ring.
Sure there are pitfalls, like having someone leave a negative review or a competitor glomming onto your identity and squatting in your digital environment. But those things WILL happen, and they will happen regardless of your digital marketing IQ.
Customer word of mouth is probably your primary new customer recruitment source. That word of mouth has been increasingly going social, local, digital, mobile, and viral.
Digital word of mouth is the new Anacott Steel…and your customers love it!
Will your Carlsbad small business learn to love it, elicit it, capture it, and syndicate it to be socially searched and shared in your local online environment?
Snide remarks and scathing comments are always welcome, why is your business still straddling the fence with all this social media, local search, and digital marketing mumbo jumbo? 
To your immediate left you’ll find the status quo – is that good enough?
To the right is increased online practice visibility, amplified (digital) word of mouth, and improved search engine rankings for your website.
…And a thousand other tangible benefits we’ve repeated – and will continue to do so – ad nauseam.
In which direction is your Carlsbad small business planting its digital footprint?
Disclaimer: This post was originally published on July 25, we are re-posting now due to recent website issues.
by Chris Barnard | Aug 15, 2011 | Reviews and Citations
When local business owners discuss online reputation management, fear is often the overwhelming emotion communicated.
Fear about what our customers might say online about our business, fear masses of people will see a negative review and immediately launch a county-wide boycott of our services, or maybe just fear that we’re going to be found out – maybe we’ve been faking it with hopes of making it all this time.
Whatever our fear is about eliciting, collecting, and broadcasting digital word of mouth about our local businesses, one thing is certain; that fear can be paralyzing.
Our hopes with this post is to examine the fear we experience as local business owners, with regards to protecting and benefitting from our online reputation.
In this age of digital social connectivity it is of the utmost importance for us as local business owners to actively engage our customers. We need to welcome feedback, ask for assistance, and reward loyalty.
We need to be part of the conversation or we are missing a grand opportunity to capture the hearts and minds of our local communities.
Fear (noun) – a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid.
Why Fear?
When it comes to our local online reputation, a lot of Carlsbad businesses are totally clueless on what the ‘Internet’ says about them. A lot of business owners dismiss the ‘Internet’ as a waste of money, or think they deal in the real world with people actually walking through their doors.
What these woefully unprepared business owners don’t realize is this; although people are definitely walking through the door, they’re also talking to each other online about your business. And the more business owners ignore the online aspect of their business – even if they sell nothing online per se – the fewer customers they’ll see.
Customers today really have the upper hand, they wield the power – and that’s the way it should be in free enterprise system!
What do we want, the corporations telling us what’s cool, what’s hot, what’s not…? (Don’t worry they’ll continue to do so)
We need not fear a customer broadcasting their innermost consumer experience to the masses. We need to welcome the digital social chatter, but that’s not all.
Fear should not be the underlying reason for us as business owners to not openly and effectively communicate with our customers. If bad word of mouth is what we fear, and that fear is preventing us from participating in the conversation, we’re not only doing ourselves a disservice, we’re also being unfair to our local community.
We’re also probably losing money and customers due to the factors responsible for triggering such frightening thoughts.
The people have a right to know what their consumer experience will be like when they choose your business, and whether you fear it or not they will go talk about it online.
To fear the online review is like fearing our own mortality…we can’t get away from it, and it will happen.
Now do we want to be able to put our socks on each day or would we rather remain a shut-in and stew on the inevitable.
You see, if we did that we’d miss out on life!
And if we continue to fear the online review, our local Carlsbad businesses will wither away and die.
Our customers will chat away on Facebook, yip on Yelp, or proselytize on Angieslist. We no longer have a choice, the paradigm has shifted.
How is your local Carlsbad business dealing with this shift toward digital word of mouth?
Disclaimer: This post was originally published on July 18, we are re-posting now due to recent website issues.
by Chris Barnard | Jun 22, 2011 | Digital Marketing
The economy is in the tank, unemployment is stagnant at critical levels, and profits for the average Carlsbad small business are enveloped in a seemingly accelerated downward spiral.
If this is something your local business has experienced over the past couple few years, we don’t have any answers for you.
But we do have some questions.
How locally visible is your small business on the Internet?
This one goes without saying, but we’ll go ahead and repeat the social local mobile digital marketing connectivity come small business communications mantra as long as there are clueless businesses still out there in Carlsbad.
We’re reaching here, but we suppose the primary responsibility of any local business is to provide a product or service to the community.
But how does your local community learn about your location, your services, products, or what your loyal customers say?
In a word (or two), the Internet.
What motivates your customers?
Some people are motivated by cost, others by convenience, and others by exclusivity and elegance.
Do you know what motivates your customers?
If you don’t know the answers, then you haven’t been doing a very good job of communicating with the very people responsible for the fiscal health of your small business.
Motivation can come in different forms; from a no sales-tax day, to sponsoring a local little league team, to a simple financial incentive, the smart Carlsbad small businesses are already diversifying. The businesses we’re talking about are taking advantage of new opportunities rather than remaining complacent in a losing situation.
Whether these new opportunities for local small business communications involve super heroes, super submarine sandwiches, or super stoked happy hours; is up to you to decide. Local economic factors, geographic interests, and community involvement will dictate your success.
One thing will dictate your failure…not properly motivating your customers.
How do your prices & products compare to your competitors?
We know, that’s classified.
Too bad the general public has taken to figuring it out themselves, without the help of wikileaks.
Despite your best efforts to keep your prices secret (by not having your products available online), we can still determine the cost – and even the value – by seeing what people say about their experience with your products, prices, and personnel.
We can see all of this digital word of mouth with s few simple keystrokes of your products, services, or actual business name.
With service businesses like home remodeling for instance, what’s more important than your rate or estimates is how well you communicate the effort, expertise, and effects of the very services you provide.
If people are shopping strictly on price, you’re done anyway – there’s always someone out there that will do the work for less money. But is it really the same work?
In the case of a new bathroom for instance, it is up to you to communicate your craftsman expertise and quality of materials to your customers. Maybe you offer one day dental crowns or single visit appointments. Or on the other hand, maybe your dental crowns are finely precision-tuned specific smile solutions custom fit to each different dental patient.
Whatever it is, the responsibility is yours.
You need to communicate with the local community, let us know why your Carlsbad small business should be the only choice for our hard-earned dollars.
by Chris Barnard | May 24, 2011 | Reviews and Citations
With the internet landscape changing to a more socialized personal experience, Carlsbad small businesses can harness the power of social media, mobile geo-location services, and local search visibility by building a loyal army of friends and followers.
The best part is that army is already marching to the beat of our business, changing the hearts and minds of local consumers. We need to harness the power of social local mobile digital communications and participate in the conversation.
How can we make that work for our Carlsbad small business?
Search has gone social and local, and soon mostly mobile. Our local Carlsbad businesses can gain local search online visibility and garner social media credibility, but first we need to ask for help.
We need to enlist the help of our existing customers, and enable them to easily spread positive digital word of mouth about our business. In most cases it’s not even necessary to incentivize or reward our customers for doing so, but more on that later.
Let’s keep it K.I.S.S. as we always try to do. Asking customers to submit online reviews can be tastefully done to accomplish the goal of increased digital word of mouth for our Carlsbad small businesses.
Generally speaking, once properly presented with the opportunity to lend a hand, people are happy to participate in the success of local small businesses.
Just show them how they can do it, but we also must be sure to ask them to participate. Isn’t that the number one rule in all of marketing – asking?
The Fear Factor
Simply asking our customers to leave a review on one of the local search review sites is often the biggest challenge. Sometimes we feel reluctant to ask because we’re embarrassed, maybe we’re afraid of the answer, or just don’t want to bother people and take up their time.
Engaging our customers is not a waste of time, for the business owner or the customers. When we ask people how their day is going, how can we improve their shopping experience, what can be done to facilitate delivery, or what we can do to help them better use the products or services they are purchasing from us, we are actively seeking a way to improve the customer/business relationship.
And it resonates with our customers, they feel it. And as a result they become eager participants in our success.
Customers generally want friendly service, lower prices, and better products. Local small business owners generally want more customers and higher profits. Effective communication, not lip-service, between the two parties ensures a win-win situation for all.
We need not let fear hold our businesses back any longer; we’re proud of what we sell and service. Sometime we just forget to act like it.
After we get over the sweaty palms more associated with pre-Prom anxiety than effective business communications, the next step is enabling a quick and easy way for our customers to submit (and share) their digital word of mouth.
Syndicate the dWOM
Methods to collect, capture, and circulate digital customer word of mouth can be as simple and low-tech as sticking a reminder note on their receipt.
Maybe distributing customer review cards at checkout, or down the line with a mailer/email.
Collection and distribution methods can also be tech savvy, like a tablet computer by the reception area or cash register to draw customer interest…inviting the long-time customers to leave a review on one of the local search sites, website, local search engine profiles, or any other online environment that happens to arise specific to our local Carlsbad small businesses.
No matter what method we employ to broadcast our local digital word of mouth, we need to remember to make it quick and easy for the customer. And remember whether it’s low-tech or geek-speak, the time to ask for the review is often just as crucial as how customers can transmit the message.
Timing is Everything
Maybe immediately following the transaction isn’t the best bet with capturing a customer review for your bagel shop; hot coffee and a fresh smelling baker’s dozen in hand spilling sesame seeds and hot joe all over your brand new PlayBook® or iPad2®.
And perhaps posting a sticky note on a brake job can prove challenging.
Trial and error will certainly yield results, but so will asking the customer when the most convenient time for them would be. Even a survey, or maybe just allowing customers to submit online reviews in their own time is the best bet. 
Methods and times vary according to specific variables relative to our local business – what we sell, how we communicate with our customers already, and who those customers are.
Be sure to ask…but choose the time to ask wisely.
An email newsletter could be another enduring opportunity to elicit customer word of mouth. Or maybe one day per month could be dedicated to developing your business’ digital disposition.
Your website can certainly be a great place to ask for and capture existing customer digital word of mouth. Using the array of social media tools available can also make the process more user-friendly.
Rumor has it having those reviews or testimonials on your website might be a good thing too – according to Google.
Whatever method we choose to collect customer reviews and whenever we choose to ask for them, one thing remains constant and is a common link among every single Carlsbad small business; our customers are already talking about us…and most are talking online in a hundred different ways!
Wouldn’t it be better to join in the conversation while monitoring (and maximizing) your digital business identity at the same time ?
