Phantom CTO

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.

Get started with Twitter

Choose Your Branding, Business or Personal

You’ll want a business brand if you want to use Twitter for your marketing, event announcements, new blog/website content. A personal brand would centered around your life and want a place to discuss your business, your passions, the interesting happenings in your life, pictures things you like. Some small businesses have no separation between the owner’s personal brand and reputation from the businesses. If that’s your case, you’d be better off building your personal brand with Twitter until you grow into a need for a separate Twitter account. Now that you know the direction of your twitter account you can go sign up.

Customize Your Profile

Make it unique to you. Add a picture of yourself, your name and a layout that represents you. Twitter is only a means of connecting with an other person, not a company face. Make your twitter profile have the same kind of personality that you have and a good representation of interacting with you.

Build Your Network: Find People to Follow

See who you already know by doing an address book import.

Hit the search. Find thought leaders in your industry, peers, and competitors. Try familiar names to your business. Follow them and some of their followers

Still searching. This time your going to be looking for keywords related to your business. This will give you selection of people who are talking about your products or competitors right now and you can jump in and reply to their tweets. Go to some of the profiles and get involved in the conversations.

Building a network on Twitter is a lot like like a network event. Get over the awkwardness. Jump in and make a useful contribution to the conversation. Give people a reason to follow you by having something interesting to say.

Use the favorites to save the golden nugget tweets that showcase your brand. These could be great feedback used to improve service or your product, or testimonials from your clients that you want to organize and archive. Favorites as testimonials helps build your credibility since a trusted and reachable third party publicly said something good about you.

Find and communicate with your customers. Build a relationship with as many clients as you can on Twitter to build you brand and be that much closer to your market. It’s a great competitive advantage to be immediately available on Twitter.

Tweet helpful content. Finding value in 140 characters is less time consuming than writing a newsletter or blog post so you can do it without taking much time in your day. Add value to your followers by giving something good.