Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Having the right tool is 90% of the job

Skip Shuda, Team and a Dream

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter-and getting smarter faster than most companies.

- the cluetrain manifesto (www.cluetrain.com)

In a recent Keynote address called “Andy Hunt on Pragmatic Thinking and Learning“, author Andy Hunt relays the story of a man who was trained to see using just his tongue attached to an electronic imaging device. The man became so adept he could navigate a car through a parking lot with only his tongue for vision.

This bizarre repurposing of the use of our tongue serves to illustrate something we humans have been doing for millions of years. We build stuff that enables us to dig deeper than with our bare hands, fight more lethally than kicking or punching, and travel farther and longer than running. Man, the tool-maker.

Person to person communication is one of the most vigorous areas of human tool-building. Starting with extenders like the written word, the trained courier-bird and smoke signals, our ambition to communicate faster farther with more people has driven innovation upon innovation. The printing press marked the advent of mass communication, extending our voice to thousands of ears. With electronic communications our voice-extending spree exploded across phone, radio, TV, satellite and so much more. From Gutenberg’s wonder to the Internet, mass communication has only been around for a handful of centuries.

And then it really got crazy…

Internet Marketing is the art of optimizing Internet-based conversations to promote a specific Point of View (POV) with a specific audience. After all, the internet (little i) is just the plumbing for a whole host of voice and conversation tools. Cyberspace is made up of a fleet of different modes of communication. “Markets are Conversations.” Is the first thesis of the 1999 manifesto that illuminates the future of a global, human conversation.

We are a Blogging, Tweeting, Surfing, LinkingIn, Facebooking, Digging, Stumbling kind of people. For guys and gals who had trouble walking and chewing gum most of their lives, that’s a lot of new steps to learn. I suspect that many small business and mid-sized business owners feel this way.

So how do you make sense of this cacophony? How does a small business step into this tumbling, frothy sea without drowning? Which of these powerful tools should you embrace, and which should you ignore no matter how seductive the siren’s call?

So, put on your anthropologist hat… if you have one… and let’s examine some of these newest tools of human communication.

Let’s start with Blogging which, for many, is easier to grasp than some newer Internet tools because of its ties to the newspaper and magazine journalism with which we grew up. Blogging has created an ocean of citizen-journalists. If you aren’t a Blogger today, you can surf to another site like Wordpress or Typepad or Blogspot and become a Citizen Journalist in just minutes. It is simple. You pick the format, the rhythm and the voice. You can choose to write a daily column or a monthly feature piece. You tell a story and people read it… or not. It can be funny, informative or inquisitive. Depending on the nature of the story, you attract different readers with different attitudes and behaviors. Blogs have an instant editorial page attached to each post through the use of reader comments. Because blogs can be presented with regularity and can be amplified with photos, figures and videos, they are excellent for communicating a perspective. Furthermore, the search engines love blogs because they provide fresh, meaty content for their hungry hordes of non-stop seekers. This means that your web presence and visibility will grow. But Blogs take time and commitment. If you don’t have both, you might consider another forum to join the conversation.

LinkedIn might just be the right forum for you. LinkedIn is targeted less on communicating a perspective and more on highlighting your expertise, your experience and your competence. Since LinkedIn was built for professional audiences, many business owners and entrepreneurs have joined LinkedIn. In fact, I recently read that there is a new LinkedIn user EVERY second! The LinkedIn structure is meant to allow you to create and easily communicate with trusted networks of people that you know. The great thing about LinkedIn is that you gain a lot of benefit just from completing your profile. Even if you do very little, other active users will drive relevant news, questions and topics to your email inbox. However, the real power of LinkedIn comes from joining and participating in group discussions. You can pose and answer questions about your business areas of interest, gain visibility with others in your industry and open doors to new business opportunities.

Finally, don’t forget about the importance of your Web site as a communication vehicle. If someone comes to your site with a problem – and you have the solution, can they find it in a natural and intuitive way? If you have a skilled team, your investment in Internet Marketing tools will direct visitors to your Web site. Is your site conversation-ready? Remember that with the advent of all of this information, it only takes a flick of the wrist and a finger tap to change channels.

Recognizing that people have very different styles of problem solving, your Web site needs to support as many as necessary for your marketplace. For example, an engineering parts company might provide specifications, diagrams and other supports for the “methodical buyer”. A company selling educational products to elementary school teachers might have a much more “relational” buyer. Strong attention to the “About Us” page and a well done “Why Choose Us?” page could be important supports for these problem solvers. A strong book for understanding this idea more fully is “Waiting for your Cat to Bark: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing” by Bryan Eisenberg, et al.

A business oriented Web site must be an extension of your voice for which you are engaging in a conversation. However, the conversation is held in an uncommon format with indirect feedback. Visitors communicate by visiting, clicking and entering information. Having a strong understanding of your Web site’s statistics (Web analytics) becomes your “listening post”. Make your Web site a well-constructed treasure hunt where you want your visitors to find the treasure, using a set of problem-solving support messages. But remember, if you show them the treasure too soon, they won’t know that they arrived. If you bury the treasure too deep, they’ll flick-tap out of your world.

Having the right tool is 90% of the job. - Lester Shuda

This brings us to the end of the journey into the human extenders we call Internet Marketing. How do you use other tools like Paid Search or Email Marketing to continue your conversation? Does the rapid stream of 140-character-max consciousness of Twitter energize or upset you? Have you ever used a Wiki to share information with colleagues? If so, how did your language shift in formality, tone and length?

Every tool has its unique rhythm, strengths, weaknesses and audiences. Understand your POV. Understand your audience. Understand the tool. Remember that markets are conversations and Internet marketing is just an extension of that conversation.

Online Markets…
Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations. – the cluetrain manifesto

Posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.