Phantom CTO

Social Technologies: Your Customers Are Revolting

The Small Business Take-Aways on Social Technology

Embrace your customers.

Turn negative customer experiences around.

If you have negative comments out there, find a good will advocate or find people to answer on your behalf that align with your company.

If people are complaining about your product and service, ask them directly how they could do to improve it.

Take the influencers of your market inside your company and give them a sense of belonging.

If your market is ignoring your messages. Give up control and let the market make its own meaning. GoDaddy did this by just giving talking points then free reign on the creative aspect and their company stood behind the finished work. They are now getting better results than their lagging ads.

Thanks to Simon Stapleton for the find!

Here are 7 questions to help your business gauge how your website treats your users experience. If you’re looking to increase engagement with your audience, check these rules of thumbs for common pitfalls and workarounds.

Have a Uniform Site Wide Navigation?

When a visitor comes to your website the navigation should do two things: show them where they are and show them where they can go. The navigation should be the same throughout your site because it gives your visitor an anchor while browsing your site. Lose the anchor of a standardized site wide navigation and frustrated visitors will sail away.

Can You Spot The Links at a Glance?

Links are a foundation of a website.They should always stick out from the regular non-hyperlinked text on your site. Traditionally, links are underlined and blue while the rest of text is black and not underlined. You don’t have to keep it the same, blue and underlined but you do have to make sure that it is in contrast to your regular text.

Does Your Visitor Need to Register Before Seeing Content?

The answer should be no. If a visitor landed on your site by search or by recommendation, give them the information they were looking for without any roadblocks. A user will leave a site if you place a barrier to your content. They’ll go to the next option on the search result and not think twice about your site.

Too Much Detail on Registration Forms?

Detailed registration forms are a huge reason why people abandon sign ups for something they’ve shown an interest in. When making a registration form ask only what will directly be needed to get them to the other side and submit the form. Sometimes just looking at a long form will turn a visitor off. If you’d like to have additional information, ask for it once they have already signed up and are willing to give you more details.

Are You Paginating Long Articles?

Writing for the web is different than for other media. When a visitor comes to an interesting article and scrolls down to see a page 1 of 5 at the bottom, a user gets scared away. You’re asking them to commit five clicks to finish reading your content without offering them any reward for doing so. Breaking up your content also hurts your search engine optimization because it is harder for the search engine spiders to understand the full context of the article if its not all on the same page.

Is Your Copy Brief and Easily Skimmed?

When writing for the web, keep in mind that the attention span of visitors is very short. To draw them in give them an interesting hook that they can then scan the page and see if they are interested in reading the entire article. While you may be passionate about your content, give your readers visual breaks and quotes that can pull their attention should they get bored with reading long chunks of text.

Can They Contact You From Your Website?

Have contact information easily available throughout your website. You may have done a great job of delivering value to your visitors but sometimes they need to reach out and contact you directly. Make sure you let your visitors know that you’re easy to reach by having a phone number listed, an email address to send queries or an on page contact form they can submit.

I recently watched Jason Fried’s Business of Software talk and was struck by his thoughts on what a small business can do to stand out in their market.

Jason called it “Follow the Chefs”. The celebrity chefs have done something extremely well. And no, its not being a great chef. There are many, many great chefs out there. The difference between the famous chefs like Julia Child and Emeril Lagasse and their unknown and equally great counterparts is that the famous ones out-share, out-teach and out-contribute.

Famous Chefs Build Brands by Sharing

That’s right, they are giving away more valuable information and content than any of their competitors in a crowded industry. Famous chefs have cookbooks, cooking shows on local networks, cable channels or youtube clips. Famous chefs teach regular people at home how to use the same recipes and make the same foods that they serve at their restaurants and in their homes. They passionately want their audience to follow along and create the same dishes because they are lifting the curtain on how to cook delicious foods and giving away their secrets and styles on cooking.

A famous chef puts their name or brand on a product, and as a consumer you’ll carry that association over of what that famous chef has given you before. You have more faith that their product will be better that the next generic cookware set because of what you’ve experienced with them before.

If a small business can take the same model that has successfully worked for a crowded industry full of greatness and use the same principles. The next question is…

What’s going in your cookbook?

What are you going to tell people that you do that can work for them  about that will get them excited about what you’re doing? This cookbook idea doesn’t have to lead to a purchase right away. It can be a primer in your sales funnel, it can get your name out there along the lines of your biggest competitor. Having your eagerly sought for market pay attention to your business and receive the value you’re giving away puts you a powerful advantage over your competitors, regardless of how crowded your industry is.

You can out-spend or out-teach your competition. –Kathy Sierra.

If you’re a small business without a lot of money, don’t try and compete with your better funded competitors on their turf. Make your own playing field by giving away value to your market. Out teach them. You’ll be on the same level as they are and you’ll have a first mover advantage and build momentum that they’ll be trying to catch up to.

Share your knowledge. Let your market of future clients know what makes your company, products and services so special, and why you are so passionate about it. The means to share is available to you right now using blogs, youtube, social networks, and more. Your market is hungry for this kind of value.

If you’d like to see Jason’s talk the Follow The Chefs portion is from 20:05 to 22:12

Here’s a great list of the kinds of things a small business can do to grow their visibility, build new relationships and deliver value to their market. No business needs to do all of them but each of these technology options lets you, as the business owner, use your personal strengths and your business purpose as a guide to create more value than you could without using these kinds of technology available right now.

Enjoy!

Start a weekly or daily TV show where your market can interact with you by emailing in questions, have people twitter questions to you and answer them in real time, talk about relevant news that your market would benefit from. Would you believe  that you can set up your own live broadcast through ustream for free? If you think that doing a regular video show is out of reach for a small business owner, you’ve got to check out Wine Library TV.

Get Connected to talk to people directly. As mentioned in an earlier post, your market is online and using social media. Your users are open to talking to you person to person. Take advantage of that with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Podcast. If being in front of the camera is something you’d rather not do but still like the idea of getting your current and future customer and market to hear what you have to say, consider doing a podcast show. The distribution works just like a blog although by itself, podcasting is not a solo revenue channel. Instead, podcasting is an effective way of talking to your market, building a brand and awareness for your other products and services. It can serve as a great learning platform for interviews and client case studies too.

Print on Demand. Getting a book written that will benefit your market is no longer a feat to be accomplished. Digital Print on Demand companies like Lulu,  Blurb and CreateSpace make the publishing part of having a book a non-issue. Anyone can publish their book. What is critical though is providing the value to your market and positioning yourself as the expert and give good content that others would want to read about in print. If a book sounds like too big an undertaking, HP has put together a Magazine on Demand print option called MagCloud. You can sign up for the beta as a publisher

Indie Music Distribution. This one is more for creative businesses than most other options on this post. The way music distribution has changed in the last few years enables musicians to reach their market and distribute their music with greater ease than before. iTunes, Amazon for distribution, Facebook and MySpace for connecting with fans and touring info. There’s a great startup helping musicians take care of the back end of music distribution, check out The E.A.R. Card.

Have a youtube vidoe channel for your niche. The benefit from the mass of users uploading content to Youtube by collecting the best of videos related to your niche. Be the leader in organizing the best of your niche on YouTube. You dont have to spend the time creating the videos for your industry, just editing down the list of the best.

Foster interaction within your niche community. Using a hosted service like Ning or an open source platform like Elgg.

Start small with new product manufacturing. A new company, Ponoko lets you turn your idea and design plans into a physical product.

If your own product is out of reach, how about branding existing products that would serve your industry. AliBaba provides the resources to do so.

Clothing on Demand with Cafepress and Printfection. For small businesses and entrepreneurs with events or looking for easy to get started add on product lines.

Bonus: Start Blogging. A blog lets you develop your expertise within your industry while keeping a two way communication going. Check out Wordpress.