Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

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So much of the literature on the subject of referrals focuses on the proper ways to network, ask for referrals, and create incentive programs for referral sources. While some of these more tactical things do indeed produce referrals for the organizations and salespeople that employ them, they are often little more than window dressing when it comes to the big picture.

Building a foundation that automatically generates referral momentum is not done through external actions – like some many things in life, you do it from the inside out. Plain and simple the most widely referred business are purely more referable.

I’ve studied a lot of businesses that easily generate referrals and they share some common internal tendencies as part of their brand and culture.

Make people look good

Looking at all business relationships with an eye on making prospects, customers, vendors, mentors, and staff look and feel good is a tremendously attractive internal quality. I read this quote recently and I think it works well here - “To a large degree, our success and happiness in life depends on how much people like themselves when they’re with us.” Joe Caruso

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Posted by: John Jantsch on Jul 02, 09 | 8:08 am
Category: Marketing Strategy, Referral Marketing | Tags: , Bob Burg, mindmeister, Speed of trust, Steven M.R. Covey, The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea

Yahoo Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. Frankly, it has been around for a couple of years now and while it’s advanced a bit, I don’t think it has ever really caught on in a big way. The interface is a little funky and takes some getting use to, but once you do, it’s a pretty cool tool.

Pipes can do some very complex things, but what I think it does better than most other options is allow you to aggregate, sort and filter many RSS feeds into one. So, you might be asking at this moment, why would I want to do that.

I can think of number of reasons pretty quickly:

• Monitor mentions of your brand across multiple sources
• Monitor mentions of your competitors
• Monitor specific topics of discussion across the web
• Aggregate the columns of key journalists you want to influence
• String the blogs of your strategic partners into one feed

The image above is an example of output from a Yahoo Pipe for Duct Tape Marketing

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Posted by: John Jantsch on Jul 01, 09 | 6:06 am
Category: Social Media, Web Marketing | Tags: , Google, John Jantsch, RSS, Yahoo, Yahoo Pipe

Several years ago, Hilary Brown decided to open a burger joint in Lawrence, KS. She readily admits that folks around town questioned whether the world, or for that matter Lawrence, needed another place to get a hamburger. After all, this is a college and fast food is plentiful.

Brown tells that to her doubters she enthusiastically replied, “what I’m creating is the next generation of burger joints.” Local Burger, as her restaurant is called, takes into consideration where food comes from as well as the environment, unnatural additives, and sustainable agriculture. All of the creative dishes served at Local Burger are prepared from foods grown or raised no more than 200 miles away (some less than 5). In addition, most products are organic and gluten free, including local wine and beer.

The restaurant is billed as The World’s Most Local Burger and the menu even features a chart displaying products purchased from local farmers and suppliers and the distance to each. It also happens to be one of the few places around where you can get elk, buffalo, pork, turkey and tofu burgers.

Using local as a way to differentiate an otherwise commodity type business and then backing it up with every brand element and process is a powerful way to fight chains and the need to compete solely on price. Brown’s strategy and business model have landed her on the pages of Gourmet, Bon Appétit, Outside and on the Sundance Channel. You can follow Local Burger on twitter.

In our current economic environment, local has a nice feel to it as well.

Posted by: John Jantsch on Jun 30, 09 | 8:08 am
Category: Marketing Strategy | Tags: , Gluten-free diet, local, local burger, Organic food

Capturing and adding video to your marketing and social media mix has become a necessary and increasingly expected part of creating your overall marketing message. With each passing day this task just seems to get easier. Camera prices have fallen while quality has risen, editing software is free and simple to use, and video hosting and streaming from sites like YouTube provide most of the heavy lifting when it comes to putting those videos online.

Recently, I added a Flip Ultra HD camera to my portfolio of tech tools and, although I’m late to the party on singing its praises, I believe every marketer and every salesperson, for that matter, should own and use on of these babies.

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Posted by: John Jantsch on Jun 29, 09 | 5:05 am
Category: Marketing Plans, Web Marketing | Tags: , Flip Video, YouTube

I’ve added a weekend post routine that I hope you enjoy. Each weekend I write a post that features 3-4 things I read during the week that I found interesting. Generally speaking it won’t involve much analysis and may range widely in topic. (Flickr image included here is also fav image of the week)

Enjoy!

Good stuff I ran across this week

• 100 Social Sites for Every Aspect of your Life - this should keep you busy for a few hours
• 74 Examples of single web page design - draw inspiration from these simple designs
• Tips for improving handwriting - with all this digital work, it’s kind of a fun read

Image credit: happy7museum

Posted by: John Jantsch on Jun 27, 09 | 5:05 am
Category: Referral Marketing | Tags:

I’m often talking about producing high quality, education based content as way to draw leads to know, like and trust you. So, for example, I always advise small business owners to create and populate a blog because I happen to think it’s one of the easiest and most effective ways to both create and optimize content.

Some of the questions I still receive frequently however, are one like - how do know I what to write about, where do I get all those good ideas or how do I uncover trends, tools and tips that might appeal to my audience?

So, for today’s post I thought I would share the tools I use to get my brain thinking about what to write about. My favorite strategy is to mine these tools and sites for seemingly unrelated ideas. I can’t tell you how often I’ve uncovered the seed of an idea from something totally unrelated to marketing that I could twist to apply it in a totally new and relevant way.

• Customer feedback – I love to turn customer and prospect questions into blog posts and more. You should be keeping track of those FAQs and answer every single one and some that don’t get asked as content.
• delicious – this old school bookmarking site is still my favorite place to go and see what other folks are finding and saving.
• Bing/xRank – I have to admit this is a new one as Bing, the Microsoft relaunched search engine is new, but for now, xRanks seems to be turning up trend faster than Google Trends
• Blogs I subscribe to - I use Google Reader RSS reader and anytime I can I check in with some of the 100 blogs I subscribe to
• OneRiot – another fairly new real time search engine that I use to find the links that people on twitter are discovering and retweeting
• Keyword Phrases – Google’s free keyword search tools can give you phrases that people are actually using to find your products and services and offer some tips for what to call your blog posts
• SmartBriefs – subscribe to a daily briefing on a variety of topcis and see what some pretty smart editors are turning up
• Business Week’s BX – Business Week’s social network allows anyone to submit content to a large group of subjects
• Twitter follows – I follow some folks that are always finding and tweeting good stuff. By setting a select group up in TweetDeck I can always stay on top of these important tweets.
• Magazine pile – I subscribe to Wired, Inc, Entrepreneur, Business Week, and Fast Company and while I sometimes get behind on the pile, I love to go there for inspiration.

Image credit: USMarine0311

Posted by: John Jantsch on Jun 25, 09 | 8:08 am
Category: Marketing Materials, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Web Marketing | Tags: , delicious, Fast Company, Google Reader, OneRiot, SmartBrief, twitter

OK, so you’ve got your twitter account up and cooking, you’re using 3rd party apps to filter and aggregate search and you’ve got a tweeting routing down pat, now what?

Now it’s time to take a much deeper look into the social web and start slicing conversation themes, discovering who’s influencing what, who’s saying what and how often, and what’s trending around a topic. There is a new breed of search engine forming around the “now search” that is plugging into social sites like twitter and backtype as well as blogs and social networks.

Below are three newish real-time search engines that allow you to take a deep look as what’s going right now.

• OneRiot - @oneriot - this is essentially a bookmarking site for twitter. Users share tweets that contain URLs to web pages and this site keeps track and returns search results based on topics. This is a really great way to discover some new sites related to subjects and you can interact with the twitter shares right from the site by replying to or retweeting good stuff you find.
• Topsy - @topsy - lots of stats when you search including the a collection of authors by volume for each topic you are trending. Really like this to find people who are very active around a topic or who are your best retweeters.
• crowdeye - @crowdeye - currently a twitter only search engine it gives you results from tweets and retweets including graphs and charts.

Image credit: theilr

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• The Inner Workings of a Realtime Search Engine (oneriot.com)
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Posted by: John Jantsch on Jun 23, 09 | 5:05 am
Category: Social Media | Tags: , crowdeye, OneRiot, topsy, twitter

Marketing podcast with Scott Belsky (Click to listen, right click and Save As to download - subscribe now via iTunes

For this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visited with Scott Belsky, founder of Behance, a company that develops products and services that boost productivity in the Creative Professional Community. Scott’s first project was the creation of the wildly successful Behance Network, the leading place for creatives to hang out and learn more about enhancing their business.

We spent most of time talking about the impact that our work space has on our ability to create and be productive. The idea for this show originated from some time that Scott and I spent attending a meeting at a very creative workspace in New York City called Meet at the Apartment. Meet at the Apartment is a study in the impact seating, lighting, color and placement can have on one’s ability to think creatively vs. work efficiently.

Scott shares some research that suggests the need for businesses to consider creating different environments for different kind of work. There was a day when companies created cubes for admin workers and the creatives got the fuseball table. Turns out that cubes are not such a bad environment when you need to slam something out, but a space with high ceilings and lively images on the walls is important when big strategic thinking is required.

I know that I am much more productive when my office and desk are uncluttered and neat. I’m more creative with Motzart but crank paperwork with James McMurtry on the stereo. I often take a field trip to a public library branch when I get stuck.

The world of office design is dominated by interior designers more schooled in the visual aspects of office space, but my feeling is there is an opportunity for the growth of more off site spaces like Meet at the Apartment as well as space design that’s all about the different kinds of work we need to do.

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• USA Today’s Ask an Expert Steve Strauss on Duct Tape Markting (ducttapemarketing.com)
• SXSWi notes: Tips for Making Ideas Happen (chrisunitt.co.uk)
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Posted by: John Jantsch on Jun 22, 09 | 7:07 am
Category: Podcast | Tags: , Behance, Behance Network, James McMurtry, Scott Belsky