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. Recently, the mainstream press has been covering MySpace and Facebook, as both sites have evolved from being something used only by “the kids” (i.e. the under-twenty set) to a much more grown-up and diverse audience.

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).

How should small business owners get involved in social networking? There are really two questions:

1. How should I get involved in social networking?
2. How should my business get involved in social networking?

The answers are very different depending on your business and the social networking service you are considering. Here, we’ll cover three of the most popular services: MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn.

The first thing to consider is the purpose of each service. LinkedIn’s tag line is “LinkedIn brings together your professional network”. MySpace’s is “A place for friends”. The two sites make it very clear what they are used for: LinkedIn is professional; MySpace is personal. Facebook is a little trickier to figure out right away: “Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you”. The vagueness actually fits because Facebook is undergoing a major transition right now. It started as a tool for college students to network with their friends. But Facebook is trying very hard (and generally succeeding, despite some hiccups) to penetrate the professional sector.

MySpace

MySpace was originally designed as an online place for teens and twenty-somethings to socialize. MySpace has been at the forefront of the social networking movement and as a result, has been in the media for various privacy and other related issues. Still, it remains the social networking site of choice for the youth market and is growing both in international popularity and in the age of the average user.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is probably of most interest to small business owners. The service is 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. The site has additional features such as Questions (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.

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 site. Friend requests and updates from colleagues are mixed in with dozens of “Vampire requests” and “Movie quiz challenges” (invitations from your friends to play games that Facebook developers have created). But along with the frivolous applications are extremely useful ones, such as photo and video hosting and sharing, RSS widgets (so you can share your blog feed on your profile), and business applications (such as MyOffice).

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, companies or products can also have Facebook pages that you can view. These pages must be created by an existing Facebook user’s account. Facebook users can declare themselves “fans” of your company or product by linking to your Facebook page. Your company or product page can feature standard information (company overview, mission, etc.), links, RSS feeds, photos and videos, discussion threads, and countless other features (thanks to third party applications). 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).

Jeremiah Owyang at Web Strategy by Jeremiah has posted some interesting stats on the demographics of MySpace and Facebook users (he also provides for a site called Reunion, which we’re not including here since it’s not relevant.) If you are a business considering using one of these two sites to promote your brand or product, it might be worth taking a look.

Also, 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.

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 first gained popularity about five years ago, and as of November 2007, the number of new blogs created per day is ~120,000. This means 1.4 blogs are created EVERY SECOND. 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 (and its many copycat sites) 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 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.

Twitter is far from the only microblogging tool. Pownce is generally considered a Twitter competitor, but it adds features such as conversation tracking and file sharing. Pownce is probably a better choice than Twitter if you’re planning to use a microblog for internal communication. 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.

BatchBlue has a Twitter account, but we’re the first to say the business benefits of a Twitter account are still developing. In fact, if BatchBlue didn’t have an avid personal Twitterer on staff, we would get by without it quite easily. Microblogging hasn’t yet enjoyed the graduation from “personal” tool to “corporate” tool that blogging has.

What are some things you could post to a company Twitter account? You could post information about sales or other promotions, updates from any conferences or other events you might be attending, links to press you may be particularly proud of, or fun behind-the-scenes updates. 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.

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. (For a more complete round-up, check out the Wall Street Journal article by Katherine Boehret How the Big Photo-Sharing Sites Stack Up.)

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 (assign them a descriptive keyword), 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. And the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce has a great feed featuring photos of their conferences, meetings and events. 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.

Social Bookmarking

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 24 people have saved the link. Clicking on that link 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.

Thanks to this feature, we can tell that people understand we are a CRM-like tool, we are web-based, we manage contacts, etc. Users also have the option to post a note with the bookmark. You can get some very valuable feedback that way.

Content Aggregators

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.

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”.

With literally millions of blogs out there, it can be hard to find information about who is linking to your website. That’s where blog directories such as Technorati come in. Let’s pretend your company’s product is reviewed by a blogger. While press from any source is valuable, it is helpful to know if the site reviewing your product is a famous, well-respected blog or an upstart by a kid in his parent’s basement. Actually, the kid in the basement might be quite successful—you can check Technorati for the blog’s “rank”.

A blog’s Technorati authority and rank are calculated by one thing and one thing only: incoming links to your blog. Technorati authority is the number of links to a blog in the last six months, so a higher number is better. Technorati rank is simply how a blog’s authority ranks with other blogs, so a lower number is better. It is a little confusing that both numbers are generated from the same thing (links), so you’re not alone if you’re scratching your head a bit. But the upside is that nobody will show you all the links to your blog in one place like Technorati does.

Here is an example of one of our incoming links:

We could immediately see that the Microformatique blog had an authority of 112. Clicking on the blog name brings us to even more information:

Here we can see more information about the blog, such as the author, rank, tags, and more. Microformatique’s rank of 57,732 means this blog is quite popular—remember that there are hundreds of millions of blogs out there.

In addition to simply checking blog rankings, Technorati is a very useful search engine for blog content. Google, of course, will index blogs but Technorati will allow you to search on such criteria as tags that the author assigned to each post—something Google doesn’t do. Technorati will also publish timely, popular content on the site’s home page, similar to how Techmeme populates its homepage.

One downside of Technorati is that it only tracks links between blogs. To see who is linking to your non-blog content, you should use Google Alerts (which will email you any mentions of your site that Google finds) or Google Analytics (which will give you a plethora of metrics about your site).

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. One of BatchBlue’s own contributes to Wikipedia in his spare time.

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 oFn 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.