Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Steve Aedy – Enjoy!

Great writers know a thing or two about how great writing is done. After all, that’s their job. For you, the business owner or marketer who needs to do some writing, it’s helpful to know what counts for your particular needs.

I Think, Therefore I Have a Headache

Blogging for business is not like writing a great novel. It’s about getting to the point in as few words as possible. That means thinking, which is painful and annoying, but you have to do it.

“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” (Letter 16, 1657) – Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters

KISS: Keep It Short & Simple

Blog posts are “quick reads” and are often skimmed for key points by people who are very busy. Respect that fact. Format your work with headings and bullet points. Keep your word count at or below 500 words. This is truly a case of “less is more”.

“Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time is wasted.” – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Ham and Eggs Beats Eggs Benedict

Great authors know that simple is better, fewer words beat lengthy prose and it’s more important to not be misunderstood than to try and make yourself understood with a lengthy explanation.

“To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.” – Aristotle

“Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” –  George Orwell

“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” – Thomas Jefferson

Ready, Fire, Aim

A business blog post has a specific target to hit. That target doesn’t always have to be a sales pitch or an attempt at customer retention. Sometimes, that post is just a statement of how your business does business or some other non-sales theme. The point is, write your blog post freely, then edit it to conform to your main point, which you discovered while writing it.

“I write to find out what I’m talking about.” – Edward Albee

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” – E.M. Forster

Procrastinate Later…

This brings you to the most important point: write. Procrastination never helps, when it comes to writing. Despite the fact that what you start out with is less than perfect, write. Put down everything you can, then go back and cut out the fluff.

“Don’t get it right – get it WRITTEN!” – Lee Child

The Benefits of “Quick and Dirty”

Avoid the trap of “perfection”. Yes, you do want what you write to be good, but the beguiling temptation to craft exceptional prose is a time waster. This is NOT a novel, nor an excerpt thereof. Make it good and stop.

“Don’t try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough.” – Arthur Freed

Summing Up

The Marine Corps of the United States has a proven method of getting a point across to recruits:

1. I’m gonna tell ya what I’m gonna tell ya.
2. I’m gonna tell ya.
3. I’m gonna tell ya what I told ya.

Use this formula when crafting a blog post. After all, I told ya I was gonna tell ya what counts, right?

About the Author:

The article was written by Steve Aedy, who is a staff writer for Fresh Essays – a company that provides online paper writing service and editing help. He likes to write on social media, small business and education related topics. Follow him on Google+.

How Great Business Writing Gets Done Quickly is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

I get asked what tools I use for some of my daily social routines on a somewhat frequent basis. The other day I got that question and it dawned on me that many of the tools I’ve written about for the basic stuff have changed or evolved over the past six months.

So, I thought it might be useful to write a post outlining my current tool set for consuming, sharing and interacting online.

Alerts

photo credit: Wicked LIttle Cake Company

It seems to me that Google Alerts might be on the scrap heap over Google as it not only suffers from lack of innovation it just seems pretty lame in terms of what it picks up anymore.

I’ve recently gone to a combo of Mention and Talkwalker to get alerts for things like my name, brand, journalists and important phrases. It seems like they tend to pick out different things so the combination is very strong.

Content consumption

By now you’ve likely heard that Google Reader is shutting down. While this caused widespread panic and prompted lots of anxiety about replacement tools, the fact is the technology is pretty simple and this opened the door for some innovation in a long dormant space.

For now, I am sticking with Reeder, a Mac based laptop, iPad, iPhone app that relies on Google Reader but says it will replace the underlying technology. I really like the interface and love that I can interact with a piece of content in the app by sharing, bookmarking or saving in a variety of ways. I use it with Buffer to share lots of content to Twitter and Facebook.

I think it’s worth noting that many people have also started to embrace tools that surface content based solely on category or the recommendation of friends rather than sticking to content produced only in blogs they subscribe to. I’ve started to use a service called Newsle in this fashion.

Social dashboard

I have been an avid Tweetdeck user for years but recently made the switch to HootSuite. For me Tweetdeck was getting a bit tired in terms of innovation. While it took a little bit of time to embrace the somewhat more complex interface of Hootsuite, I’ve grow to like the tabbed profiles approach and the fact that you can get so much more information on individual profiles and tweets. I also like some of the integrations available. For example, with one click I can add people who I interact with on Twitter or that get added to a list, based on search terms in Hootsuite, to my CRM tool.

Social CRM

This last element is a crucial piece of the engagement puzzle. I currently use two CRM tools. I use Nimble for the daily interactions that I have or should have with clients, influencers, authors, partners and prospects for various types of projects. Nimble allows me to create a unified messaging platform that includes email and important social networks. This way I can view a record of what these important groups of people are saying and doing in real-time and what I’ve said to them over the course of many interactions. Access to this level of information helps turns transactions into trackable conversations.

In addition to Nimble I use Infusionsoft to run the many ecommerce functions of my business such as shopping cart, list segmentation, follow-up and email marketing in general.

The key to making this part of the communication cycle work is that most of these tools talk to each other and almost all are available in synced versions on the desktop and on a variety of mobile devices and tablets.

So, that’s it for now, until, well it isn’t. Always love to hear about tools you find useful.

8 Tools I Use Every Day for Social Engagement is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

I get asked lots of questions about tools, tactics and networks these days. People want to know what to join, what path to take, what new thing is going be hot.

photo credit: fabiogis50

The answer I find myself giving is almost always the same. The way you make decisions about such things is to ask yourself this question -  Is it good for my customer?

If you can use any tool or make any decision with your customer in mind, you probably can’t go wrong.

In the early days of Twitter people wanted me to prove to them why they should get involved in such nonsense. I showed them how to build a list of their best customers and listen and respond to what their customers were saying only and all of a sudden it made sense.

With any new tool or tactic, if you can find a way to first use it to benefit your communication, relationship building, service or outreach with your customers, you’ll eventually find a way to use it in general.

People often rush to the next new thing so they won’t get left behind, but time simply doesn’t allow most businesses to get deeply into every new social network, no matter how much hype it’s drawing. And ever when you do jump in, jump in and master ways to use it for your customers first before you simply start mimicking how others are using it.

When you have this focus it’s never too early or too late to start using some new tool or tactic.

Stay customer focused, analyze the benefits of every tool or tactic with that focus, and you’ll rarely be led astray.

Is It Good For Your Customer? is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Yesterday my friend Chris Brogan asked if he could write a guest post about what he’s learned growing his own business. I had already planned today’s post but was struck by the harmony of these two. If anything about this post resonates I invite you to read them both.

This past week I was treated to the exceptional gift of contrast.

Those that experience harsh winters are always more joyful about the spring than those that mostly live in warm climates around the year.

Without contrast it’s easy to grow complacent, or worse unsympathetic, while buried in a nice comfy groove.

photo credit: CR Artist via photopin cc

On Monday I spoke to hundreds of amped up social media types at a conference in San Diego, right down on the yachted waterfront. The bright and shiny twenty something crowd enthusiastically hung on most every word uttered as gospel by semi-quasi famous speaker after speaker.

The event was inspiring, I had a great time, but in some ways it possessed an energy that verged on naïvety.

You see, social media is still the new kid, although it’s showing teen tendencies. The new kid is confident, verging on cocky, but the new kid is definitely in fashion.

Less than twenty-four hours later I found myself in front of about a hundred small business owners of the main street variety in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

The contrast could not have been sharper. Social media exists in Cedar Rapids, but a lot like a fence post or a handy shovel. It’s a tool, but you don’t exactly gush about it around the dinner table.

No, this group still gets a great deal from the local newspaper and the print shop. This group networks in person and relies on each other for referrals.

It’s worth noting that Cedar Rapids was also home of one of the worst natural disasters in the past century. Surprised? I mean you heard about Katrina and Sandy, but Cedar Rapids?

In the summer of 2008 the entire Upper Mississippi River Basin flooded and inundated ten square miles of Cedar Rapids, including the entire downtown of this community of about 100,000.

You didn’t hear much about this event. You also didn’t hear much about how they recovered. Neighbors helped neighbors, businesses adopted businesses, they said grace and they mucked out.

It’s kind of a Midwestern thing, just roll up your sleeves and get back to doin. It’s also kind of a true small business thing.

So here’s the point I’m trying to make.

We all need each other.

We need social media’s enthusiastic curiosity and rush to embrace all things seemingly new. And, we need sturdy things that we can lean on when we’re unsure.

We need to help each other learn and grow and fall down and get up again.

We need doubt in order to experience faith.

We need despair in order to experience hope.

We need old in order to appreciate young.

And we need winter if we are to revel in spring.

We need hugs and handshakes as much as tweets and follows.

We need to feel and smell tangible if we are to summon the senses.

We need to attend

We need to craft

We need to muck

And mostly we each need each other in order to find some sort of rational center in it all.

Why We Need Each Other is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s post comes from @chrisbrogan

From the very first day I opened my first company, I knew that I was bucking trends. Or so I thought. You’ll laugh.

Starting Without a Storefront: Or So I Thought

photo credit: Atelier Teee via photopin

I launched my business without having a website. So what, you’re thinking. But all my friends and models to follow at the time were built online. I learned what you know: your website is often not your business.

Stay Close to Your Community

I went on to market strictly through the digital channel. I blogged mostly, and neglected the value of asking my customers and audience to consider getting my (now beloved) newsletter. So I went years without having a good solid list of people to reach out and connect with about doing business. I bet you knew that long before me, as well.

Measure What You Want to Improve

I love the social networks as a digital channel, and I continue to believe they have value in selling. But I’ve been strongly over-valuing them as potential lead generation for my business without doing that essential step that you know already: I haven’t measured. And the moment I did, I found some startling results. I don’t sell nearly as much via my social networks as I do via my newsletter. And yet, I was spending a lot more time there than I was on developing ways to improve the one high-performing sales and lead generation platform I had.

Quick note: I believe social platforms have a huge role in business-making. Only, my experiences with directly selling into them has been very lackluster. Instead, I share insights, and lead people gently to get my newsletter. And then that converts.

Relationships Are Everything

You know this because you’ve read the Referral Engine and you follow one of the best relationship guys in the world here. John works hard to nurture relationships with his community and his colleagues, and what I’d come to realize was that I was serving a small set of buyers (huge companies) and wasn’t making time to connect with the people who matter (like John). With that in mind, I’m working on some ways (low tech and eventually a little more high-tech) to make sure that I keep the people who matter to me top of mind, even when I get bogged down and busy.

But you already knew the value of relationships.

In Praise Of YOU and Your Smarts

So, in the end, I suppose why I wrote this post was to validate the great learning you’re getting from John and others here. Because I launched a digital-first business, I’ve had to backtrack and learn what you knew from the start. And I’m better for it. Thank you for sharing what you know with learners like me.

Chris Brogan is president and CEO of Human Business Works, a publishing and media company focusing on courses and tools for smart professionals like you.

What Digital Marketers Get Wrong is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Look around these days and you’ll find it’s hard to miss the growth of sites and services that rely on the more visual aspect of our senses growing rapidly.

Sites like Pinterest and The Fancy rely on lots of pretty picture to tell stories and attract visitors.

Infographics and visualized data still attract lots of interest.

It’s a well documented fact that images get much more engagement on social networks like Facebook and Google+.

Even Twitter, land of 140 characters, has introduced a visually based service called Vine in an effort to grab a greater share of the eyeball.

A picture immediately lights our emotions and initiates a complex cognitive process that is a true wonder in the world of science.

The rise of the popularity of images in marketing and learning, however, may have less to do with the brain’s cognition powers and more to do with the reality of our own information possessing load.

Visual scanning has become a key web decision and filtering routine due to the sheer weight of what we attempt to consume.

Marketers must now use visual content strategically to invite those visual scanners to the party and simplify and illustrate more complex concepts.

An example illustration from Book Yourself Solid Illustrated by Michael Port

Michael Port, author of Book Yourself Solid, recently re-released his popular book as an illustrated guide – Book Yourself Solid Illustrated. The book takes the core concepts explained in oh so many words and turns them into pictures that “show” the concepts.

I think the work is brilliant and certainly pushes the bounds of a “how to” book to new places. Look for others to follow suit.

Every marketer should get this book and embrace both the concepts and the way the concepts are presented as a key demonstration of the role of sight in communication.

As with all things, however, balance is still crucial. It’s tempting to look at a site like Pinterest and think all you need are images. The fact is you still need a healthy blend.

Images are bit like pastries. They are very attractive and taste very good, but you can’t live on them.

How often have you heard these words uttered? “The book was better than the movie.”

Or as many rabid baseball fans will attest, a good radio broadcast of a game beats the television version any day.

The fact remains that words and sounds can paint a far more visually and emotionally appealing picture when used evocatively than, well, even a picture. The key is that pictures tell the story immediately, while words take far more time and effort.

It’s the careful fusion of words, sights and sounds that draw in all the senses and tell the complete story that marketers must strain to build.

Adding visual content as a strategic component of the marketing mix is now a must!

Why You Must Add Visual Content to the Mix is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

I’ve got another free eBook for you – keep reading!

I’ve experimented with various coaching and consulting models over the years and while I’m a big strategy before tactics kind of guy I like some things about a model I call blueprinting.

The idea behind blueprinting is to map out a manageable set of steps each month based on proven areas of focus. The value in this approach is that it’s one that works for those businesses that have lots of tactical things they need to put into place, but lack a full time marketing person.

Over the course of the year they tick off items and make steady progress building a marketing system. All of the items that make the list are drawn from categories that make sense no matter when they get to them.

Each month the consultant gives a client a series of action steps and then essentially stands back and offers needed guidance and feedback. It’s a great way to create a year-long engagement that can be tailored to specific needs and budgets.

I’ve created a free eBook based on my Total Online Presence program using that annual blueprinting methodology. Don’t worry about when you start, just get started in month one and move through the steps. (Grab the free blueprint eBook here)

This is a coaching and consulting model that can be practically applied to many types of consulting practices once you develop the road map.

Enjoy! And let me know what you might consider blueprinting in your business.

Blueprinting As a Coaching Model is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

I’m in San Diego today speaking at Social Media Marketing World. The message of content marketing has certainly taken root in the digital and social marketing space and as the message of content, content, content grows louder and louder so too does the level of frustration.

photo credit: Exothermic via photopin cc

Producing content actually requires some work. Producing lots of content requires even more work and, well, let’s not event talk about the work required to consistently product high quality content.

But here’s the semi ironic thing. The problem with content is not that you don’t have enough, it’s that you have too much. In an attempt to feed the content beast many marketers have lost focus on the narrative of who they are, why they do what they do and why their customers are attracted to their brands.

In effect, we’re attempting to write about everything and in doing so connecting with nothing.

Before content will truly serve as an effective community attracting and building mechanism, it must be laced with a potent dose of focus.

That’s not to say that a good 50 Ways to do X post won’t always draw eyeballs, but so will wearing a really short skirt into a bar – the question is, does that lead towards building a supportive community and achieving your objectives?

Content must spring from the one true thing your business stands for and become a story that becomes a greater narrative that lives on in your community with no real end.

You do this by telling fewer stories – over and over again. You do this by using clarity, the one real thing you’re business stands for in the mind of the market, as a filter for voice and message.

You solve your content problem when you use content to:

• Narrow your focus to an ideal client’s unmet needs
• Share stories that build trust and expose vulnerability
• Help define problems your customers don’t know they have
• Give your customers a way to collaborate and personalize
• Help determine the real intent of your prospective clients

I happen to believe that the highest objective of any business is the building of a vibrant community. Start sharing less and focusing more on the content that signals why someone would want to join your narrative and you’ll start to witness how community actually forms.

The Problem With Content is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

In the beginning, you know about five years ago, some smart sales types discovered the awesome power of mining social networks for leads. In a way it was like the early prospectors digging around and bumping into gold with little more than an idea and some hard work staking claims. (This post I wrote in 2010 about mining Twitter for leads remains one of my most shared posts)

But now we’ve moved past the point of crude social lead digging to a much more elegant phase in which prospective clients can be discovered, scored and nurtured using social networks and everyday relationship building tools.

In fact, the practice has become so accepted it now has several names – social selling and social lead targeting. (By the way I’ve curated a list of CRM tools at the bottom of this post that you might want to check out.)

As services such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter grow in importance so too have the tools that mine the rich set of sales data left in every interaction.

But, the big breakthrough in social selling occurred, in my opinion, when tools that mined social data started talking to each other.

No longer do we need the mammoth do everything in one enterprise type tools to compete. A lone salesperson with a Hootsuite and Nimble account and about $20 a month can become a social lead targeting ninja.

Now, I’m not saying that some of those more expensive and more complicated tools aren’t awesome. Heck, if you’ve got the budget, full-time IT support and someone to pull the levers and adjust the mirrors, go for it!

But, if that’s not you, let me ask you this.

Would it be helpful if you could easily find people searching for your products on, say, Twitter?

Okay, no magic there, anybody with a little Twitter search mojo has been able to do that for years now, but . . .

• What if you could also instantly know everything those people are doing on other social networks?
• Who they are, who they are connected to and how to contact them in several channels?
• What if you could easily create a contact record that unified all of your communication with them?
• What if you could then start to track what they did on your website and how they reacted to your emails?

First off, you can easily do all of this and more with little or no tech support for less than $100 a month.

Do you think that could make you a better sales person?

I’ve only mentioned Twitter so far, but you can do the same kind of discovery and targeting on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well with the right tool set up and integration.

And building targeted lists is only one way to look at what I’m talking about. You can also build a connected network of your customers, share targeted insights and facilitate engagement and partnerships better when you adopt this kind of targeting mindset.

Here I’ve used Hootsuite to find someone on Twitter that I want to connect with, so with one click I’ll add them to Nimble for a complete picture and connection record for future engagement.

The key piece of the puzzle is integration. Hootsuite is a great tool, but integrated with Nimble, it’s a power tool.

I can easily build a list in Twitter based on search criteria and then with one click add selected list members to the Nimble CRM tool for a complete picture of the prospect along with unified messaging. So, now if I reach out to that prospect by way of a subtle connection tweet, Nimble captures our entire conversation, shows me the prospect’s social stream and their key connections in one screen.

As much as I’ve grown to appreciate the power of a true social CRM tool, integrating it with a lead tracking and capture tool like Hubspot further allows me to score the interest of my leads and keep an entire record, not only of my direct interactions, but also their interactions with my content and landing pages.

Integration is also what allows most CRM tools to talk to most email service providers.

I’ve written previously about a specialty service called Zapier that allows you to create your own integrations where none exists. For example, you might want to create special record in Nimble when someone buys something through your 3rd party shopping cart – no problem, create a Zapier integration and get busy with better follow-up.

Social is not so much a channel as it is a behavior that allows for much richer listening, targeting, nurturing, learning and converting. The key is to bake social data and signals into your entire prospecting and sales process as a mindset using tools that put this vital set of data at your fingertips.

The real skill then becomes using this information to add value!

I’ve added a list of CRM tools and hope you’ll share your thoughts and insights.

The Golden Age of Social Lead Targeting Has Arrived Fully is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

This week’s announcement that Google Reader is shutting down has me and many others waxing a bit nostalgic.

photo credit: Ozyman via photopin < span=""> href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>cc

In that time most tools, services and networks have essentially turned RSS into the plumbing that makes everyday things like Facebook and Eventbrite work.

I have been telling people to subscribe to blogs using RSS readers to stay informed, learn about specific industries, get inspiration for blog posts and monitor customer and competitor content for years and won’t stop any time soon.

This behavior is still an essential element of any complete listening strategy and that doesn’t change simply because one of the most popular tools for doing so goes away.

In fact, being forced to move beyond Google Reader may be a very good thing for long time users like me. There are plenty of alternatives for reading RSS feeds and this should spark the development of even better ones.

I’ll continue to keep on eye on Reeder at they have pledged to keep the tool alive without dependency on Reader. (Buffer users might want to catch this update from Buffer)

Google has valid reasoning for shutting down Reader and frankly I was little surprised with the violent reaction to the news. My take is that when an organization offers to let you use a free tool you’re not a customer, you’re a part of the product and in that regard you’re entitled to very little say. (Think Facebook)

Google has bet the social farm on Google+ and all signs point to decisions being made on two fronts only: How to continue to make a killing selling advertising and how to make users dependent upon Google+. To think otherwise is naïve.

So, what is an avid newsreader to do moving forward.

The need to find an alternative way to easily scan and read daily blog posts has me reconsidering the utility of the practice. Part of the reason Google stated for shuttering Reader is decreased usage. (Of course when you don’t update a tool and actually strip away the more useful parts people will find a better tool.)

A growing number of people have also turned to RSS aggregator tools like Flipboard and Pulse that can spoon feed more visually appealing content based on chosen topics. Heck, Google even has one of these called Google Currents.

For me, I still prefer discovering and building a custom collection of feeds and am busy trying out the newer breed of RSS readers that combines many of the social behaviors that Reader simply ignored.

Tools like Netvibes (Okay this is an oldie, but it’s kept up) present feeds in a dashboard style and add paid features such as alerts, curation, monitoring and analytics to your reading. With a little work you can turn NetVibes into a a full blown listening station for most of your social networking.

Feedly, another popular alternative, combines bookmarking with feed reading and sharing.

NewsBlur is a simple interface that includes mobile apps and ability to share stories your find on popular sites such as Evernote.

Note: Many of these once small services are getting crushed with traffic from Reader migration right now so be prepared for some quirkiness.

Most of the services mentioned have out of the box transfer of your current Google Reader set up but you can also export your Reader Feeds using the Google Takeout tool and then upload the OPML file to your chosen service.

And look to see some new tools coming online in the near future.

Why the Shuttering of Google Reader Might Be a Good Thing is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

I’ve been playing the marketing game for over twenty-five years and the term “integrated marketing” has been around at least that long.

photo credit: ecstaticist via photopin cc

Years ago, however, the concept of integration applied mainly to consistency in branding elements and a unified message in advertising, public relations and sales promotion. With integration a customer or prospect could experience the brand in a similar way and this built a stronger brands – particularly if the advertising message were memorable enough. Think – “Where’s the Beef?” the Wendy’s ad hit.

But then online channels, social behavior and customer voice came along and fragmented even the best attempts at integration.

Suddenly brands had to deal with dozens of new channels and things such as mobile shoppers and consumers armed with the ability to talk back and publish information, images and reviews about brands.

Organizations that were used to tightly controlling their marketing had seemingly lost control and attempts to catch up by putting QR codes on billboards only made the fragmentation worse.

Oddly enough, while many things in marketing have changed, some never really have.

Brands that get integration right understand that it starts with a simple unified strategy that projects and protects a single-minded message and voice. This is something I’ve been calling Clarity.

Clarity goes beyond some of the traditional definitions of marketing strategy as it suggests that an organization understand the one thing above all that they want to be known as and they use that as the filter for everything they do.

In many cases this one thing has no direct correlation to the products and services that a company provides and often rests on things like purpose and community.

Once clarity of strategy is understood it’s simply amplified by making it part of the culture of the organization. Once that’s understood you can go to work on integrating all the moving parts that make up the ways that customers experience a brand.

When Clarity and Culture are tied together as strategy, integration expands to include not only consistent branding elements, advertising messages, sales promotion, public relations but things like human resources, strategic relationships, customer service, and product development.

What this view suggests is the fact that integrated marketing today means that marketing must be integrated into everything the business does.

The view of integration

Once Clarity and Culture are in place you can deliver a truly integrated experience by viewing the many channels a business must manage as the convergence of streams. Rather than simply creating a consistent look, feel and tone you come to view the power of merging channels in support of each other.

• Your advertising builds on your content strategy to drive awareness
• Your SEO and social media efforts support and drive list building and email marketing
• Your PPC campaigns drive conversion testing as well as content creation
• Your mobile outreach supports social channels and drives offline actions
• Your email marketing supports your social media and advertising efforts
• Your public relations supports SEO and content efforts
• Your customer service leans on social channels and content creation
• Your analytics allows you to see the impact of integration instead of simply measuring the last click

The point is that in today’s marketing world the real objective is community building and in that effort integration is an exercise in the power of the convergence of streams built on and amplified through a single-minded strategy rather than then simply an attempt at a consistent set of tag lines and colors.

I believe the message of integration, particularly as it relates to the many new online channels, is such an important one I’ve written a new digital book called The 7 Essential Stages of Building a Total Online Presence and made it available exclusively on Amazon.com

The book not only expands on the theme of integration it outlines the importance of building the stages of content, SEO, email marketing, social media, online advertising, mobile and location and analytics and conversion as one unified form of integrated marketing.

Each stage includes action plans, tools and links to dozens of resources. The digital book is currently on sale for $4.99. If anything about this message resonates you’ll want to spend the five bucks to add to your education and experience in this important area of business.

What Integrated Marketing Looks Like Now is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

I’ve been asked to speak at three different social media related events over the next few months and in each case I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the future of social media.

But here’s the thing. I don’t plan to talk about social media – not much at least.

What I plan to talk about is the future of business as I see it, now that social behavior has infiltrated every aspect of our lives.

I plan to challenge the thinking that social networks are really channels and, in fact, make a case for things like clarity, culture, content and method as the most important channels of a social business.

And finally, I plan to introduce how a vibrant community, perhaps the highest objective of any business today, is built not through social media, but through the confluence of a specific set of socially assisted practices.

I’ve always been attracted to word confluence. It’s a word most commonly used to describe the point at which two rivers come together. My hometown, Kansas City, was founded at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas Rivers and the visual of these two powerful channels coming together, to form something even more potent, suggests the perfect metaphor for how community prospers and grows.

I believe that community can only form around a business when the focus of a business is on cultivating and merging the following six practices or what I would like to propose are the genuine channel opportunities.

The graphic below lays out this path of thinking. The first three channels are decidedly internal while the remaining three determine how a community experiences a business from an external view.

Clarity

Clarity is something I wrote about extensively in my last book, The Commitment Engine. What I discovered is that most organizations that foster loyal and engaged communities also have a single-minded active purpose for why they exist. Quite often the reason that drives them has little do with the actual products and services. This is a crucial starting point and one that’s buried in any discussion about channels, but I think it’s the kindling that starts the community fire.

Culture

Culture, or lack of, is simply clarity, or lack of, amplified. With all the talk about authenticity in social circles, it’s easy to forget that you don’t make this up. People that are attracted to purpose join the cause and strengthen it. Without a set of beliefs and corresponding guiding principles clarity becomes directionless. If I am to stick to my river metaphor this would explain the formation of many an oxbow lake. (A lake like body of water formed when a river changes course leaving behind a standing body in the old channel.)

Method

This is probably the hardest element to explain but it’s the catalyst for the energy required to gain something that feels like momentum. Communities don’t generally form around, products, services or companies. They form around ideas, methodologies and processes that allow them to have something in common with others. To me this suggests the vital importance of creating and communicating “unique methods” and “points of view” that help people figure out how to think about their problems in ways that no one else is. When you can do this, and you give your way of thinking a name and set of steps, you create the potential for a shared language around an idea and that is fuel for creating a cause. All of a sudden you’ve given your staff and your customers a way to evangelize in a common tongue.

Content

This is the place where internal and external streams come together and alter each other’s path in essential ways. Content is essentially the story that communicates purpose, culture, trust and method to the outside world. It’s the tool that gives the community a growing voice, for good or bad, and it is how you build a body of work that ultimately communicates a much bigger story.

Presence

There are many access points to a business and its offerings. Social media has certainly increased that number and perhaps simultaneously diluted it, but know this; your story must unfold in a total presence online and off. You must open up access points in social networks, email, advertising, and PR. You must create a culture of listening and responding. You must facilitate and collaborate at every turn. People will discover and join your community in ways that you’ll never consider on paper. Sometimes initiation is simply a matter of being there.

Touchpoints

I have written numerous times about something I call The Marketing Hourglass. For me all the intention of the above channels is lost if you don’t also plan a logical way to move members of the community to act, buy and refer others. The framework above helps engage and attract members to your community, but you still must draw the map that allows them to engage at the highest possible level. This is how you turn a community into a direct revenue stream, but it’s also how you allow members to sort, sift and determine their roles. A community member that doesn’t purchase can, and quite often does, influence other. By creating levels of engagement you allow your community members to define the role that makes sense in their world and cultivate the complete ecosystem needed to foster complete community.

For now I’ve only scratched the surface of the implications of this line of thinking and certainly each convergent stream I’ve described will require its own action plan. It is, however, thinking about channels and communities in this big picture view that will allow you create the vision for a socially enabled business.

Changing the Social Channel is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is from David Tully– Enjoy!

In a blog post after the release of their new “Graph Search” application, Facebook encouraged business’s to “continue to invest” in their pages and keep them up to date so as they will show higher up in search results in Facebook’s new feature.

What it looks like they are trying is to get a larger slice of the market in regards to customer review sites such as Yelp and other websites like Groupon, while only really dipping their toes into the water in terms of a full-blown search engine like Google.

At the moment, Graph search results are based on Facebook people, pages, groups, pages and apps while Bing will supply a list of suggested searches on its search engine. Facebook used the example of a search term “sushi restaurants that my friends have been to in Los Angeles” which shows the type of small businesses that could take advantage of the new application. To attract business you will need:

A good social media presence

As I have already mentioned, if you don’t have a popular, active Facebook page, the likelihood that your page will show up in Facebook Graph Search results is much lower. Increasing your social media presence and increasing activity on your page through special offers, coupons and competitions is highly recommended, boosting your reputation and profile.

To encourage recommendations and reviews

Once you have a thriving Facebook page, you are much more likely to be recommended by others. In the past, customer reviews on Yelp and other review sites really helped boost your profile on Google and on organic search results. For Facebook Graph Search, you need to get social buzz going on Facebook itself. Encourage people to share, like and comment on your service or products. The more recommendations, the more likely you are to come up when a person is searching Facebook Graph for friend recommendations for a particular restaurant, recruitment firm or whatever line of business you are in.

Have a high-profile in the local area

Currently, Facebook search results do have a “nearby” feature so that people can search business pages in the local area, but in the future they may have a full “local search” feature so that your business will have a higher profile on search terms of those people searching Facebook in your vicinity. Make sure your business is on Facebook Places and you are receiving the highest amount of reviews possible so Facebook will push you up in search results for the local area.

Many Facebook users are still waiting for this feature to be enabled. Here is a recent Techcrunch article that offers some updates.

This guest post was written by David Tully, Digital Marketing Strategist for Fast Growth Club; an innovative new coaching program for small businesses.

Using Facebook Graph Search To Help Your Business is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

About a year and a half ago I warned bloggers and content creators to take author markup and authority and Google+ seriously.

Google was making under the hood noise about attaching authority to content published by individuals based on a variety of factors.

I advised bloggers to follow Google’s instruction to link their blog posts and about us pages to their Google+ profile in order that Google might start enhancing search results with goodies like profile pictures as below.

Here’s a tutorial on how to get author markup added using one of my favorite plugins.

And in this tutorial Brian Gardner explains how to add author markeup in the Genesis framework (the theme used on this site.)

By asking authors to add the attribute rel=”author” to their content Google was creating a way to beat spammers and duplicate content to a degree by attaching the real author to the original content.

Google adds images and social data taken from Google+ to search results with author markup

Now I ask you – when doing a search, which result are you drawn to – the first one or the one with a friendly looking, smiley guy next to it?

This fact alone makes taking the time to add the required elements a no-brainer.

More recently Google has admitted that they are testing author authority in a much bigger way and actually choosing content to index based on this ranking.

Author authority is, like most things Google, a bit of a mystery, but you can bet that content that is found, shared and +1’d in Google+ is helping an author’s authority. This dollop  of search fairy dust is why you cannot ignore Google+ or rel=author attributes.

If that weren’t enough Google is also allowing you to tell them where you contribute content. Think about that one for a bit. Now that brilliant post you submitted to Mashable, Huff Post or Social Media Examiner is going add to your author authority in some meaningful way perhaps.

Edit your Google+ profile with sites you contribute to

By creating an authority ranking of sorts Google is creating another way to beat link spam and assign authority and importance to all manner of things left about the web such as comments, Quora answers, and Retweets.

So now we have an entirely new networking landscape. Instead of simply networking for links, we’ll have to get good at identifying and networking for author authority.

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself – first things first, it’s time to go to work on your own author authority.

1. Get your content linked to your Google+ profile
2. Optimize your Google+ profile with links to your articles
3. Get to work creating and sharing great content
4. Build your Google+ engagement and following
5. Hmm, I wonder if a Wikipedia page would help?
6. Make a list of potential sites/publications to submit guest posts

You can also start the process of signing up for Google Authorship here.

Plenty of authors and SEO types are covering this top these days and you would do yourself a favor to start your research with these two pieces from Copyblogger. Brian Clark on why you need to get on Google+ and 64 Google+ Content Strategies.

In a Time When Authors Rule the Web is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

I’ll admit it; I’ve looked high and low for just the right tool to keep me organized, on task and up to date on all my to-do lists and projects.

There are seemingly hundreds of tools and systems that have been created to address this obvious challenge and I’ve tried at least a dozen of them. You’ve got some great ones like GTD, Evernote and Basecamp. I’ve heard from readers about Remember the Milk, Wunderlist and Asana. And, of course, sometimes the good old analog pen and notebook does the trick.

I’ve tried any number of digital tools and found that nothing quite stuck. I would use them for a while and then return to my notebook. I never quite understood why I couldn’t get used to using systems and tools evangelized by many until I can across a tool called Workflowy.

The stark outline interface is the beauty of Workflowy

I have to admit that I encountered it almost a year ago, but dismissed it because it seemed so different and too simple.

As it turns out that’s the magic of Workflowy. It’s so simple that you get to design how to use it based on how you think and work and that’s what makes it so powerful. So many other tools I had used required me to think a different way, spend time entering data or adopt new habits to get them to work.

You want a tool like to get out of the way and not turn into another thing you have to operate.

Workflowy is at its core a giant notepad with a few simple features for navigation, hierarchy, search and sharing and nothing else. In fact, the challenge some people have, including me originally, is that it doesn’t seem to do much of anything.

But, it’s the clear and uncluttered work environment that allows you to design how you organize, think and work in the way that fits your style and not the tool designer’s idea of how to work.

Why Workflowy

Workflowy allows me to keep a present picture of all of my projects and tasks and manage this picture with a couple keystrokes. Frankly, I can keep a picture of anything I want in my view – goals, centering thoughts, meeting notes – it’s just a big giant outline of my life. I’ve even added a section for personal and home-related projects.

The tool is web based, but iPhone and iPad apps allow you to sync, add and edit across devices.

In addition, you can share any element with other Workflowy uses so you can use the tool as a team or even just make one item available to client for collaboration.

How Workflowy

To me, and of course this could differ from person to person, the key is the structure of the outline. While you can change this anytime you like, getting it right was one of the keys getting more out of it.

I started globally with Work and Personal as my two primary catch all bins.

The work is then structured by the kinds of work I do. For me it’s speaking, writing and projects. Nested under these items are the notes for each speaking event, blog post ideas, outline and notes for my next book and all the various projects that need my attention such as product creation and promotion.

I don’t know about you but my work and personal lives intersect quite often and having a view of personal home projects, exercise, vision, goals and even vacation planning intertwined with my work view is a powerful thing.

As your list grows you can expand and collapse views as well as search for any word or phrase. You can also create hashtags that make list making very simple. For example, I use the tag #soon after any task I want to be on the immediate radar. That way I can click on a #soon tag and get what amounts to my daily to-do list. What I love about the outline structure is that my to-do list now is made up from and related to my ongoing worldview and not just from what’s barking loudest or on deadline.

Every staff meeting runs from Workflowy and every phone call with a client or meeting planner runs there as well. You can also create checklists and common outlines and duplicate them as needed.

It took no time at all to get Workflowy into my routine, partly because there are only about a dozens commands and functions and mostly because I could adapt it to the way I already thought about organizing my life.

I do still use Google Calendar for appointments, but Workflowy stays up and ready throughout the day and into the night as my planning, organizing and doing tool.

There is a free version of Workflowy that will work for most users. You can upgrade to pro for $49 a year if you really want to use the team and sharing functions with lots of people.

How and Why I Use Workflowy to Keep Organized is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing