Blue Paper: Social Media for Small Business

Abstract

Even though you may not be familiar with the term “social media”, chances are you’ve heard about it or maybe even are using it to communicate in your personal life. But is social media successfully making the crossover from personal pastime to business tool? This blue paper outlines the different types of tools in the social media toolkit and proposes ways they can be used to promote your brand, communicate with your customers and help grow your business.

Who should read this

Any small business owner who is interested in learning about new communication technologies and approaches.

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Social Networking

The most popular sites coming out of the social media revolution are social networking sites. At the most basic level, a social networking site allows you to identify your contacts (or “connections” or “friends”, depending on the service) and establish a link between you and each of your contacts. The two main ways social networking sites differentiate themselves are (1) what you can then do with those connections (sharing updates, socializing, gaming, etc.) and (2) what the demographic of the sites are (in other words, which sites your contacts are likely to be members of as well).

It should be noted that many of the other sites we cover in this Blue Paper have a social networking component. For those sites (such as Flickr and del.icio.us), the networking is secondary to a main purpose (photo sharing and bookmarking, for example).

An important thing to keep in mind with any social media site is that even if your intended audience is your friends and peers, content on the Internet lives forever. We at BatchBlue are strong advocates of being mindful of what you post on these sites as it could have consequences on your professional life whether you want it to or not. A good general rule of thumb is if you wouldn’t put a picture in a frame on your desk at work, don’t put it up on a social networking site.

Here, we’re going to cover three of the most popular services: Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.

Facebook

Facebook, originally started as a way for college students to get to know each other, has become a combination of a personal and professional networking site. Updates from colleagues are mixed in with friend requests from people you haven’t heard from since high school.

Facebook profiles contain data such as personal information (interests, favorite music and movies, etc.), contact information, and education and work history. You can also upload photos, videos, notes, links and other content. Your status updates are how your Facebook friends will keep up with what you’re doing.

While Facebook continues the transition from a strictly personal tool to something more comprehensive, you’ll still need to wade through some frivolous updates from Facebook applications. Your friends’ status updates can be diluted with application “updates” like movie quiz scores and “What Alf character are you?” results. Luckily, Facebook provides tools to hide the updates you don’t want to see.

Facebook applications were once thought to be the great new frontier in marketing, but as the applications bogged down profile pages, Facebook redesigned to put less of an emphasis on the applications. As a result, Facebook application development has cooled off considerably.

By default, as a privacy measure you can’t view a Facebook user’s profile unless you are a friend of theirs (or in their network). However, users can allow their Facebook profiles to be completely public. Also, companies or products can also have Facebook pages that can be viewed publicly, though visitors must have a Facebook account to interact with the page. Facebook users can declare themselves “fans” of your company or product by linking to their page. Your company or product page can feature much of the same information as a personal profile, but can also feature discussion forums and more. You can also send messages to your “fans” through Facebook. You can already do this through an email newsletter, but doing it through Facebook gains you access to yet another demographic (one that is likely more reluctant than most to hand out their email address).

MySpace

MySpace was originally designed as an online place for teens and twenty-somethings to socialize. MySpace was at the forefront of the social networking movement but it has lost considerable market share to Facebook, Twitter and others. Still, it remains the social networking site of choice for many musicians and entertainers.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a good way to get started in social networking because the service can be very low maintenance — you establish your connections and update your profile (which essentially reads like a resume). You will receive updates when your “connections” (your contacts in LinkedIn) update their profiles or make new connections. The site has additional features such as Answers (basically a discussion forum for professionals to ask technical and strategic questions to their peers). But as far as day-to-day maintenance, LinkedIn is very easy to keep up with. For now, the primary business use of LinkedIn seems to be as an online resume and a way to stay connected to people with whom you have existing relationships, such as past colleagues, fellow conference attendees, etc.

Jeremiah Owyang at Web Strategy by Jeremiah has posted some interesting demographics of social networking sites. If you are a business considering using one of these sites to promote your brand or product, it might be worth taking a look.

Weblogs (or more commonly, “Blogs”)

Blogs are basically online journals. Ordinary people writing about their lives, celebrities writing about other celebrities, collectors writing about the objects of their affection, hobbyists writing about, well, their hobbies. If you can think of it, someone is writing a blog about it. In fact, probably hundreds of people are blogging about any given topic. Blogging first gained popularity about five years ago, and as of March 2008, 184 million people worldwide had started a blog (via Technorati). That’s a lot of blogs!

The introduction of blogging software such as WordPress, Moveable Type, and Blogger have made it much easier for even a non-techie to publish his or her musings on a favorite topic. So how does a small business owner start a blog, how can it be useful, and is there really that much to say? The short answers are: it’s easy, lots of ways and probably!

The first step in starting a blog is to start reading other blogs. Use Google to find a topic that relates to your business or interests you in some way, or find out if someone in your industry writes a blog and check in on a regular basis. At BatchBlue, we read too many blogs to list but some of our favorites relate to design, marketing and technology. Bloggers love getting comments on their posts, so if you have something to say feel free to add your voice to the discussion. There’s a definite protocol around commenting, though, so before you leave your first comment, you might want to check out this post from the blog Bare Feet Studios entitled How and When to Leave Blog Comments.

Once you get a feel for it, think about what it is you’d like to write about. Are you an importer with interesting stories to tell about the origins of your products? Are you trying new techniques at your company and want to share and get feedback? Or are you running a hundred year-old family business and wish to share and preserve its story? If every person has a story to tell, every small business has at least five. The trick is to keep it going. Blogging is definitely a commitment and if you don’t keep it updated at least on a semi-regular basis, you risk losing readers. From a business perspective, it’s all about the readers. The more people you have reading your blog, the more people get to know you and your company, which means that blogs can be a great low-cost marketing tool--by providing content that is interesting and relevant, you get people not only coming back but also telling others to check it out.

Just a note: Although you may have heard tales of people making millions off their blogs through advertising revenue, for the average small business owner this is most likely not going to be the case. Think of your blog as a great way to communicate to your customers and potential customers about your business and let the millions roll in from selling your great product or service. And remember, a tale is only as good as the cat that wags it! The cats we work with have many tales to tell over on the BatchBlue blog.

Microblogging

There is blogging — and then there’s microblogging. While blog posts typically vary in length similar to what you might see in a newspaper (from one or two paragraphs to multiple pages), microblogging content is much, much shorter. In fact, the most popular microblogging platform, Twitter, limits all entries to 140 characters or less. Depending on whom you ask, Twitter is either the greatest tool in the history of the Internet or the one application that will ruin the web. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between.

The beauty of Twitter lies in its simplicity. Because of the 140 character maximum, individual Twitter posts (also known as updates or “tweets”) can be sent and received in many ways: twitter.com, third party applications (both desktop-based and web-based), text messaging from a mobile device, instant messaging, RSS feeds, email, etc. Every Twitter user account can be “followed” (or subscribed to) by other accounts. That means that as you are posting to Twitter, you will also receive updates from all of your friends and contacts that you are following.

BatchBlue has a Twitter account that we use for a variety of functions: product update previews, customer service, uptime updates, webinar announcements, contest announcements, market research, conference summaries, promos and discounts, general office antics, and to profile some of our biggest fans.

In addition to providing updates to your network, Twitter also could serve as a third party resource in the event that you experience a service outage. Twitter doesn’t run on the same servers as your web site, so you could use it to post updates about the issue. This is what BatchBlue is planning on doing in the extremely unlikely (so so unlikely) event of any downtime for our site. It’s also a great way to see what leaders in your industry or people you admire are thinking about and doing in their daily lives.

Twitter messages possess their very own unique lingo. For example, to reference another user in a public message you append an “@” in front of the username (for example “Trying out BatchBook by @batchblue, a social CRM”. Using that format will notify the user each time their username is mentioned.

Hashtags are another example of Twitter’s lingo. A hashtag is a pound sign (#) followed by a short term. The term is meant to be something that many Twitter users will want to follow, such as updates about a conference (#sxsw for the South By Southwest conference), a technology trend (#scrm for social CRM), or any other live discussion (#redsox for discussion about our Old Towne Team).

Another increasingly popular use of Twitter hashtags is hosted chat sessions (called, appropriately “Tweetchats”). These online sessions are usually held at a regularly scheduled time and use a hashtag to indicate what the subject matter is. BatchBlue hosts a weekly Tweetchat called SBBUZZ, where small business owners can chat about technology and other issues related to running their businesses. So, anyone participating in an SBBUZZ Tweetchat would add their thoughts to the discussion and mark it like so: “I think technology is great! #SBBUZZ” That way other interested parties can follow along with the conversation. There’s an in-depth post explaining how Tweetchats work over on Small Biz Trends.

Because of Twitter’s growing popularity, many applications that work with Twitter have sprung up. There are far too many to list here, but here’s a meticulously maintained list of most of them.

Twitter is the most popular microblogging site, but it isn’t the only one. Plurk and the open-source Identi.ca have smaller, but dedicated user bases. Tumblr is one of many tumblelog services. A tumblelog lies somewhere between a blog and a microblog, often incorporating multimedia elements such as images, video and audio into updates.

Social Bookmarking & News

There is one issue with the democratization of data creation on the web — there’s now so darn much of it. There are many tools out there that help you sift through the massive amounts of content to find the good stuff. Social bookmarking and news sites are essentially blank slates populated with content contributed by users. These sites then use social features such as rating systems and tagging to allow users to find the content most relevant to them.

Digg is essentially an online newspaper where the stories are submitted by the site’s users and promoted to the front page by user votes. To vote for a story is to “digg” it and to vote against it is to “bury” it.

If you think your content would resonate with the digg crowd (according to Federated Media, the demographics are 94% male, 88% age 18-39, and 64% household income of $75,000 or more), you can place a “digg this” button on your page. A heavily dugg article can bring servers to their knees. This is known as the “digg effect”.

Now, take everything you just read and replace “Digg” with “Stumble” and you have the service StumbleUpon. Like Digg, StumbleUpon allows user to submit web pages and then vote for them. How do Digg and StumbleUpon differ? One area to look closely is site demographics (since this can dictate which service you target in your social media strategy). Alexa has demographics for both Digg and StumbleUpon. According to their findings, Digg’s user base leans more on the male, younger, slightly less educated side.

There are many social bookmarking sites on the web, but the most popular is del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is useful on many levels. At the most basic, you can use it to store bookmarks in an online account. This way, no matter what computer or mobile device you are on (or what browser you are using), you will always have your bookmarks handy. Del.icio.us also allows tagging. By default, all bookmarks are published publicly, so users can share with others.

By viewing somebody else’s bookmarks and clicking on a tag — “smallbiz”, for example — you can see all sites that that user has tagged as “smallbiz”. You can also see all sites that everybody has tagged as “smallbiz”, though that pool can get quite large.

The public nature of del.icio.us, along with the tagging, gives you a unique research opportunity. Make sure to add your site as a bookmark in your del.icio.us account. When you add it, it will look like this:

You can see that 547 people have saved the link. Clicking on the number will bring you to a page that shows the complete history of that link. You can see when every user saved it and — most importantly — how they tagged it or any comments they made about it.

On the right-hand side of the page, we can see the top tags used to classify the page. I guess people understand we’re a CRM business tool!

Photos, videos & podcasts

While some social media sites provide a means to share writing and text, others focus on mediums such as photography, video and audio files. Again, in the spirit of social media, all uploaded files (unless you mark them as private, which you usually can do) are meant to be seen, commented on and shared by others.

Photo Sharing

Like mushrooms growing in the dank corner of a basement darkroom, new photo-sharing sites seem to be popping up at a mind-boggling rate. Some of the biggies include Google’s Picasa, Flickr, smugmug, zooomr and Photobucket. There are also many sites available for merely uploading and sharing photos with friends and family, but for our purposes we wanted to highlight those with social media attributes. For that reason, Flickr is What We Talk About When We Talk About Photo-sharing.

Flickr is pretty much the granddaddy of social photo-sharing sites. By that we don’t mean that it rolls its own smokes, wears scratchy sweaters and smells weird, rather that it’s been around since the Internet Days of Yore (2004). They also are largely responsible for starting the trend of leaving out vowels in your company name. Flickr lets you upload your photos, tag them, sort them by groups, and add them to public “pools” that showcase works of a certain subject, style or genre. They have a basic account that is free, which is good for hosting a small number (200) of photos.

Flickr (or a site like it) can be used in all sorts of ways to promote or enhance your business. Garden designer, small business owner, and mom to an excellent son Lynne Bashaw of Perennial Passions uses Flickr to showcase her clients’ gardens. Real estate agents can set up sites and share photos of houses with their clients. Jewelry makers or other craftspeople can use photo-sharing to create an online portfolio, document their creative process and get feedback on new designs. BatchBlue also posts conference and event photos on our Flickr account, as well as pictures of general office tomfoolery. We think it helps people get to know us - we’re quite likable and dare we say handsome.

Video

Video-sharing also has a granddaddy and his name is YouTube. There’s also DropShots, Panjea, Viddler and videoegg, to name just a few. As with photo-sharing sites, you can usually upload, tag and categorize videos on a video-sharing site. Some sites allow for editing once you’ve uploaded a clip, such as shortening it or adding music or titles. Others, like YouTube, invite you to post your video as-is, then sit back and let the virality begin. If you’ve got something especially interesting, you may be surprised at how quickly you amass views.

It’s a little scary what some people will post on these sites, but like all of the other sites mentioned, there can also be definite business applications for video-sharing. There’s an interesting, relatively new site called Howcast, which invites users to post short videos about how to perform certain tasks or actions, such as making miso soup or reducing home heating costs. Depending on what your business does, this could be a good, low-cost promotion for your services. Again, make it relevant and interesting and it will likely get watched while simultaneously boosting your credibility as a subject matter expert. You can also link to a video from your website or blog, giving a real face and voice to your company. People seem to enjoy that: think of Dave Thomas, the likable founder of Wendy’s restaurants or Les Schwab, the customer-obsessed West coast tire king.

Podcast

In essence, a podcast is a short radio show on the Internet. A podcast is simply an audio file that is posted to a website that you can listen to on your computer or wireless device, and can be subscribed to using an RSS feed. The term “podcast” is a combination of “iPod” and “broadcast”, since originally podcasts were developed to play on portable music devices such as Apple’s iPod (though any other portable MP3 player would do the trick), and they’re meant to be broadcasts much like radio shows are.

People who create podcasts are called podcasters. Generally, podcasters stick to a particular theme or subject in their shows, like technology or politics or religion. Duct Tape Marketing does some interesting podcasts focusing on start-ups and marketing for small businesses. Small Business Trends Radio produces broadcasts on a number of topics of interest to small business owners, as well as a great, comprehensive list of the Top 100 Small Business Audio Podcasts elsewhere on the Web.

Wikis

For many people, their first exposure to wikis is Wikipedia, the user-generated encyclopedia phenomenon. Wikis are websites built and maintained collaboratively by a group of people. In the case of Wikipedia, the “group of people” numbers hundreds of thousands and the “website” is the most comprehensive encyclopedia available.

Of course, when humans are involved, so is human error. So, while you will find more information on Wikipedia than you will find in your trusty Britannica, the Wikipedia content has not been as meticulously reviewed by an editorial staff (editing duties again are filled by volunteers).

Many of these “pros” and “cons” relate well to decisions to use wikis for small business. You could use a wiki to implement user-generated support documentation for your product. While this will allow your power users to post helpful information for others, this content may not be up to your accuracy, grammatical and usefulness standards. Collaborative organizations, such as Barcamp (a collectively organized conference), have successfully managed themselves via a wiki. Of course, even Barcamp ran into problems with spam compromising the content of the site, so the wiki is now password protected.

Conclusion

With all the different technologies out there, it is important to remember that ultimately, content is king. If you are providing useful and interesting information, there are a lot of great ways for small businesses to use social media. From establishing your brand, connecting with customers, and giving more information about your products and services to building networks and finding like-minded colleagues, new clients and even mentors, social media is fast becoming part of the savvy small business owner’s world.