If you are a Netflix user, or are familiar with the service, you may have heard the backlash to their splitting of their two main services offered. This week Netflix finds itself in another PR nightmare that we can learn from as marketers and business owners. Netflix merged their DVD-by-mail service into the newly named, “Qwikster,” is going to be marketed as a new product/service offered. But it appears Netflix did not take the time needed to check the name across popular social media sites, because typing in twitter.com/#!/qwikster will take you to a NSFW, rarely used, personal twitter account. As soon as Netflix announced Qwikster, the twitter account of this young man jumped from 60 followers to more than 3,000 overnight (and still counting).

Was this a hasty naming decision on Netflix’s behalf? It’s possible; and that haste is something you should avoid at all costs when planning to expand your brand or product line. In order to avoid falling into the same PR rough patch that Netflix has found itself in, I’d like to offer you some insight on how important naming your next product truly is.

Strategize!
• What does the product name mean to your company? Does it add meaning to your brand, and even to the product itself?

• Is it too generic? (Think “BrandCo”)

• What sort of feelings or reactions does the name invoke?

• Does it invoke any negative connotations or sounds? (It would help to actually say the name out loud and slowly when answering this).

• Are you planning on taking this brand international? Are there any negative connotations in your key markets abroad with this name?

• Are you planning on giving this new product or service its own campaign? (This requires an entire other strategy that we won’t go into on this blog entry. )

Scout!
• Is the name already taken? It may seem obvious, but even a quick Google search will reveal the answer.

• Is it too close to a similar product?

• Have you thought about domain names for the product, as well as social media handles for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Linked in, etc.?

• Are there any problems with handles on social media accounts where you would have to modify the name?

• Is it important for this product or service to have it’s own presence online beyond simply being posted?

Secure!
• Before announcing your product, go ahead and park all of the handles and domain names you think will be necessary (this helps prevent future PR messes and competitor social media interference).

• Does your product/service have its own campaign? Have you finalized the web design and soft launched your site(s)?

• If “yes” for a campaign, have you worked out the kinks on the sites, or have you moved to a point where the kinks will be better managed if publicly launched?

• Prepare yourself for excitement, as well as for backlash, pushback, and doubt to your new product or service.

Even if you find yourself in a situation like Netflix, where social outcry has caused pressure to push the company forward at a faster pace than probably anticipated, it’s best to pause for a moment and focus on the challenges a new product and new product name can bring. Of course, there are always more elements to each strategy, but working from an overview like the one above can help you avoid unexpected messes in the short and long term futures.

If you’re running your company’s Facebook without a social media strategy, you are cheating yourself out of real results. Setting up and using Facebook may be free, but that doesn’t mean your should be shortsighted on the time, effort, and careful planning it takes to boost your business’s social potential. I’d like to spend a few moments reviewing Facebook strategy basics, a primer to help you get started (or recharge!) your company’s page.

Before You Begin
The Insights App should be one of the first things implemented on your page. Much like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights tracts user growth and demographics and what content on your page your fans are reading most intently. Using this tool can help you develop tailored content to your fans, ultimately cutting through the clutter on their feed and creating meaningful touch points of interaction. Facebook Insights is a free app available to add to your company page.

Plan, Schedule, Execute

1) Plan your tone

Your Facebook is an extension of who you are as a company, and as such, it’s important to take into consideration the tone and style of your posts. What kind of voice will your posts have? Fun? Strictly business? It’s best to decide from the start and adhere to that voice for consistency over time.

2) Plan your content

Will you be informative about your product? A news hub of information related to your business? A collection of your fan’s input? There isn’t one right answer, in fact, your page could benefit from incorporating all of these. Refer to the analytics from your Facebook Insights app to better customize your content as you move forward. Don’t be afraid to continue to return to and restructure your social media plan as time goes on; keeping the same kinds of content pushing gets stale and will result in lost followers.

3) Develop content

Now is the time to develop content. This shouldn’t be done day-of, but rather, plan it in advance and decide who on your team will write what. Not all content has to be new or original. You can always incorporate older blog posts, and relevant industry articles. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get creative with some of your content to avoid becoming white noise on your followers’ news feed.

4) Schedule Posts

How often are you planning to post? What days? This is a decision that is a delicate balance, and will absolutely require ongoing revision. Analytics will reveal what is too much– you’ll notice a drop in followers, as well as what the best time of day your audience is receptive to content. Free social content managing tools like Postling and HootSuite allow you to schedule and post without having to sit directly in front of a computer waiting to push content out.

5) Monitor Interactions

You’ve planned your content, you’ve written or collected it, and decided when you’ll post. But that’s not the end of it. Your fans follow you for your content and now it’s up to you to monitor not only their interactions and questions with you, but interactions with one another. Fans can become annoyed and downright irate if you don’t have a hand in guiding community discussions and answering their questions on your posts in a timely manner.

6) Deliver, deliver, deliver

Now that everything has momentum, keep moving. All too often, businesses peter out on their social media efforts after only a few weeks. Stay the course and continue to revise your content lineup and schedule. You should continue to view your analytics, but avoid serious analyzing and re-strategizing until two months after incorporating your social media plan to base your decisions on solid results.

Building Followers

Finally, a word on followers and fans. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your fan count follows that cliché. It takes time to cultivate and build your base of fans, but using your Facebook Insights app, you can track who your followers are and where they are coming from. This can help you hone in on where to target when looking to add fans. And remember, having a lot of followers is not necessarily the most important thing. Think first about your brand and if an abundance of followers would support your social media goals before deciding that bigger is better.

There are many other techniques and ways to get your business moving toward strong ROI’s for your social media investments, but if you follow the steps above, you’ll have a much easier time adapting to your fans’ (and ultimately, customers’) changing demands.

There are clouds on the horizon, are you a part of the oncoming storm? Talk of cloud computing has been populating tech news stories for some time, and is just now really breaking into mainstream news with recent major launches of Microsoft Office 365, Amazon’s CloudDrive, and Apple’s iCloud. Now’s not the time to fear thunder, this is the next wave of integrated technology. Cloud computing, or “The Cloud,” can help small businesses grow in these still-shaky economic times.

What is The Cloud? Clouding technology allows you to access and share data from remote servers at any given moment in time. Chances are, you’re already a part of various clouds. Google Apps, the leading example of cloud technology, is what you are probably most familiar with. Google Docs has been around for several years and allows you to create and work on basic office documents from virtually any access point. You are in control of what you share and what you keep private in any one of your personal clouds.

But clouds can, and should be, more than just personal databanks for music, photos, and personal information. Cloud technology can grow a small business by reducing lag time in staffing and increasing access to vital resources. Companies that utilize clouding reduce space needed for server rooms on-site. Remotely they have access to phone, email, and other functions needed to run business as smoothly as possible. What’s more, clouds require little IT skills to implement into practice, no more intimidation by technology necessary.

How else can moving into The Cloud help your bottom line? By reducing the time and work needed to move new branches online. Setting up infrastructure is frustrating, time consuming, and is a blockade to turning profits quickly. But with vital applications hosted on a remote server (your business’s cloud), you can implement training programs accessible anywhere that reduce time from days, or even weeks, down to hours. These applications can even be accessed by smart phone or personal tablet, freeing up employees and management from feeling “stuck” at the office.

Sounds great, right? Thinking of looking up cloud companies after you finish reading? Hold tight. Though cloud technology is moving at the pace of well, a summer thunderstorm, staff may be a little slow to respond initially. Avoid moving all of your applications and programs up into the cloud, instead choosing the most vital (like email, phone services, and document databases) to be first. And be patient. There will be kickback and frustration at the unfamiliarity of a server holding data hundreds or thousands of miles away. But the efficiency and ease of use of cloud technology is undeniable, and you’ll see just how quickly business can move. If your business isn’t focused on heading up into the clouds, your profits will be left stuck in the mud.

A fundamental concept that I apply to every marketing challenge I encounter is that of the Buyer’s Continuum. Basically, any time anyone buys anything, they travel this continuum from beginning to end. The Buyer’s Continuum includes four phases:

1. The recognition of want or need
2. The justification of want or need
3. The research of options
4. The purchase

To illustrate my point, let’s look at two purchases: a bag of chips and a new home. Both involve the continuum, but on very different scales.

Phase One: Recognition of want or need
This is the most brief and least complicated phase of the continuum, and is simply when the customer recognizes a want or need for a particular product or service. Example: “I’m hungry and I WANT a bag of chips” -or- “My house is cramped and I NEED a new home.”

Phase Two: Justification of want or need
This phase involves the customer evaluating his or her current want or need based on the realities that will have influence on acting on that want or need. Example: “I have $5, a bag of chips cost about $3, and it is lunch time. So, yes.. I will buy a bag of chips” – or – “My wife and three children live in a two bedroom house that I have 7 years worth of equity in, and interest rates are comparatively low right now. So, yes… I will buy a new home.”

Phase Three: Research of Options
This is the most intense and lengthy phase on the continuum. And this is where solid branding practices can turn the tide in you (your client’s) favor. Now is when the customer begins to weigh his options – price, value, quality, availability, etc. When customer’s have knowledge about one option over another, that option has a better chance of coming out of this phase “the winner.” Example of this phase: “There are corn chips and potato chips. I like potato better than corn, so potato chips it is.” – or- “House A has better schools, an HOA, close proximity to my job, but is much more expensive than House B. House B is in a better tax bracket, has a bit more square footage, but will need more repairs than House A. I think House A is best for me.”

Phase Four: The Purchase
Obviously, once the first three phases are completed, the only thing left to do is to pull the trigger. Purchases can be as simple as the exchange of currency for goods ($3 for bag of chips) or as complex as the purchasing of a home. Bottom line, the customer completed the journey and the purchase was made.

So why is this significant? Because brand positioning as it relates to the continuum can mean the difference between earning the sale, losing the sale, or never having been in contention. More to come in my next post…

Before you get started using any type of social media, it’s vitally important you listen to what is already being said about you and your products/services/competitors online. The easiest way to do that is to use Google Alerts. I thought I’d step you through using this fantastic and free tool so you can understand just how powerful this can be for your business.

Search terms: What are you trying to monitor? I recommend you monitor your company name (including any common misspellings)  the name of any key employees, and the brand name of any products or services you offer. You may also want to include your domain name (without the WWW), your competitors’ domain names, and any key people, products or ideas in your industry.

Type: Choices are Everything, News, Blogs, Video, Real time, Discussion – I would recommend everything, and scaling back if you see too much information.

How Often: Choices are Once a Day, Once a Week, As-it-happens – I recommend as it happens, so you get the information as soon as it is posted.  This also ensures if someone posts something and it’s taken down, you still get notified. The link may not work, but you’ll know if someone is talking.

Volume: Choices are Only the best results and All results. I’d recommend doing all, as one or two false positives won’t kill you, and you can always change this later.

Deliver to: Choices are Feed or Google account email address. I send mine to my e-mail and then if there’s anything important, I can save it for later, but  you can send them to feed if you’re familiar with RSS. If you’re not, then clearly email is your best bet.

If you’re not listening to what people have to say about you online, you might as well ignore the customers that come through your front door. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day, someone will mention you in a good or (hopefully not) bad way, and you’ll be WAY ahead of the game if you have a response prepared for that person. I’ll teach you how to respond to a crisis situation online in a later article.

Before you get started on creating a social media strategy for your business, you need a business strategy. Hopefully you already have a business strategy. Here’s a few questions that can get your strategic juices flowing.

• Do you know who your target market is for your business?
• Do you know what your strategy is to attract new customers to your business?
• What’s your strategy for retaining existing customers?
• Do you know why you do all the things you do every day?

If you can honestly answer yes with these questions, now ask yourself the toughest question:

Can every one of your employees answer these questions?

Often business owners know all about these strategies, and the business partners know the strategies, and maybe even the managers know the strategies. More often than not, your front line employees DON’T know your strategies.

And that could kill your business.

I’m sure you didn’t leave your employees in the dark on purpose. You figured you’d get around to it, eventually. When you had the time, and business was slower. Right?

Today, take 10 minutes and dialogue about 1 key business strategy with your front line employees. Help them understand not just what you do, but WHY you do it.

A few points to ponder:

How clear are your business’ strategies?

How can you make them more clear to your front line employees?

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/san_drino/1454922072/

What is the center of your marketing universe? Traditionally, for Brick-and-Mortar stores it was always the store visit. All marketing efforts drove people to the store. For mail order companies it was the catalog / phone / fax. All people needed to call or fax the order.

Today, the center of the marketing universe is your website.

The savvy business who wants to leverage their marketing budget to the fullest does these things:
1) Has a website with lead generation and call to action capability
2) Considers their website in all their traditional marketing campaigns and uses the web as a tool to complete the marketing effort
3) Values content and places it on the website and in various places online to extend online presence
4) Engages in community discussion in social places that are aligned with your business

When your website is at the center of your marketing, you can attract and keep your customers, entertain and educate them, and keep them coming back for more while building your role as their trusted source in your area of expertise.

Ready to leverage your marketing online and offline? Let us know, we’re here to help.

( Original Image by vitroid )