Your company has a story to tell.  In days gone by, you’d tell it is small ways, with individual interactions with each of your customers, or in slow ways, such as your weekly newspaper ad.  Business rose and fell with the times, but most businesses could follow some well-worn paths to success.

Fast forward to 2010.  The “recession” is 2 years old.  To quote a poster in my bank, “Save is the new Spend.”  Your customers’ buying habits have changed irrevocably.  Add in the technology and communication booms that we are seeing make it even into little old Medford, and what this guy used to be able to count on can’t be counted on any longer.

Have a great (or poor) interaction with one your customers?  You can now count on it to be blasted out to their 500 Facebook friends who will then Tweet or Yelp it all over the valley in record speed.  How’s a small business owner to keep up with all this change?  Its coming from so many angles and now its coming 24/7.  Well,  no one ever said entrepenuership was for sissies.  So tighten up your chin strap, hang on, and let’s make a PLAN to battle back.

Join the Conversation

Your brand is online whether you like it or not.  Customers right now in this valley are talking about you and/or your competitors.  They are looking for what you sell, asking each other for advice, searching for (more…)

So unless you’ve been living under the same rock that allowed me to miss the whole Book of Eli thing – what a great movie, why didn’t someone tell me – you’ve by now seen the Old Spice Man commercials. The buzz around them is how much “free” exposure this campaign has received. But here’s the thing. They actually spent a ton of money and effort to prime that pump.

Almost every client I speak to is lured by the potential of free internet marketing. “I’ll just build a Facebook page and my business will go through the roof” is involved in nearly every conversation I have these days in one form or another. And while Facebook and YouTube were critical to the success of the Old Spice Man, it didn’t happen the way our local businesses think it can.

Here’s some comments from someone I respect to which I’ll add our local spin for you.

When Old Spice, W+K et al, made the decision to produce extremely rapid custom content based on the popular character, they changed the very way we will look at advertising going forward. The big question for everyone is: What does it all mean? Here are a couple of thoughts.

1. Creative and production matter (still)! It seems that the death of high-quality content in the advertising world has been greatly exaggerated. With the Old Spice Man, we saw that a great creative concept and high quality production work can still trump most challenges facing advertising.

Since the local advertising bar is much lower, you can leap over your competition with just a little extra effort. (more…)

2010 seems to be the year when most businesses here in southern Oregon are really starting to understand that their customers actually do want to hear from them.  The thing is, starting the process may actually damage your customer relationship.  Chances are you will make the mistakes that the wider industry have already stumbled over, learned from, and solved – unless you truly embrace these technologies and a strategy on how to truly leverage them here in 2010.

The first part is to avoid the temptation to become overly enamored with the emerging social media options like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare.  While they are part of this strategy, and certainly the “shiny new toys” that are gathering so much press these days, they aren’t a be-all-end-all by themselves.  You connect with your customers already in a variety of ways – in person, over the phone, through the mail, and importantly through email.  The process I’m about to describe for you actually apply to all these tools and you should utilize these steps with all of them.  However, I’m going to focus today on email because (1) its probably the most widely accepted by your customers, (2) is relatively inexpensive from a cost and labor standpoint to utilize, and (3) unlike the newer tools has been around for some time and has better developed metrics to date.

So what are other small businesses working on through their email campaigns in 2010.  According to this studyfrom Get Response, there are 5 major trends in email (and by extension all the other ways you connect with your customers) emerging in 2010.  And I’ll give you one more that you should include as well.  The variables to consider in your campaigns should be: (more…)