Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses

WHO ARE PROSUMERS AND WHY DO THEY HAVE SO MUCH POWER?

Flash back to the early nineties…  I joined a volleyball team with some friends at the local community center.   A few weeks in I heard from one of my teammates that the female coach encouraged them to drop me because I was such a bad player.  (To be fair, I had a lot of enthusiasm and leapt around a lot but I was really bad).

Needless to say, I was outraged!  Offended!  And slightly embarrassed.  So I decided to take action.  I went straight home and wrote a stern, hand-written letter to her boss.  I’ll show her!  I thought.  After all, the pen is mightier than the sword.  Only, when all was said and done, the female coach received a slight reprimand, I quit the team and we were the only three people who ever knew about it.

Flash forward to a different era …

The Social Media Generation.

Where the consumer has become the PROSUMER (professional consumer) and wields all of the power.  (Cue evil villain laughter.)

Prosumers are consumers who buy products, use them, then splash reviews about them all over the internet.  They may be professionals in a particular business (like a photographer who buys high-end cameras) or high-tech junkies who thrive on trying out the latest and greatest gadgets.  They are more savvy and informed than the average consumer and they have higher expectations.

Remember the last time you bought an expensive product or invested your hard-earned money in a service?  Did you search the internet for reviews before you made the leap?   We all do it and whether we like it or not, these reviews influence the way we think and the decisions we make.

Prosumers use the immense power of social media to spread their messages – good, bad and ugly.  The effect is widespread and rapid.  Within days, a series of good or bad reviews can change the way the public perceives a product or service and can drive or reduce demand.

There’s a successful company in Silicon Valley called Drobo who knows all about this.   Drobo develops and sells cutting-edge data storage devices for small to medium businesses.  A great deal of their business relies on prosumers who use their products, then review them on social media sites.  Knowing that these reviews can make or break a product, Drobo is very careful to listen to everything they have to say and make changes accordingly.  Tom Buiocchi, the CEO of Drobo gives advice on the most important things other companies can do to take care of prosumers:

PLAY ON THEIR TURF - Prosumers operate in the highly-influential world of social media.   Everything they say and do is in real time, which means their opinions (good or bad!) are in real time as well.    We all know the importance of analyzing data, but even more important is monitoring what people are actually saying about your product or business online.  If someone gives you a bad review, you need to be ready to do damage control – fast!   Prosumers are the voice of your brand and they can influence a lot of people in a very short span of time.  Listen to what they say on social media sites and be ready to take action.

TAKE THINGS PERSONALLY – The Prosumer doesn’t just use products, they identify with them.    It’s important to listen to what people are saying about your business or product and respond quickly – whether it’s responding directly to Tweets and Facebook postings or making a personal phone call to an unhappy customer.  It might take a bit of extra time, but the personal touch really pays off.

TREAD SOFTLY – Prosumers don’t like a hard sell.  They don’t like to be called and pitched, because they already know what they want.   You’ll have more success selling your products and services by developing relationships with customers and keeping those relationships going long after the initial sale.

GIVE BACK: – Prosumers care about social responsibility.  They like to know that businesses aren’t solely focused on profits.  Fortunately, being socially responsible is easy.  Companies can donate money or products to organizations, set up employee teams for walk-a-thons or get involved in coastal clean-up campaigns.   Not only do you help out very worthwhile causes, but you also gain positive publicity and position your company nicely with charities that already have a loyal following – potential future customers.

Theresa Mills is a freelance blogger and freelance PR specialist for givium in Silicon Valley.  She writes a monthly guest business blog for Cool Mojito .   She co-founded the Silicon Valley International Women’s Group where she manages events, public relations and social media.   Theresacarlsonmills@gmail.com.

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Every large organization has what is called a ‘disaster recovery’ plan.  It’s a scary phrase that really mean, if someone drops a bomb on your building how does the business continue.  They also refer to this as a Business Continuation Plan.  Small businesses don’t think that way, but you need to.  For example, a colleague recently lost his laptop a few weeks ago.  I think for most professionals, this is a pretty bad day.  But for him it was worse than a bad day because he is an entrepreneur and his laptop is his business, and he didn’t have a recent backup.  Weeks of data lost and the pain was just starting.  He had personal stuff on his laptop that required him to call the bank and change account info.  Yeah, I call that a disaster.  Today I had a conversation with another colleague that is currently having a similar experience.  This week he lost his laptop lost and has no really good plan for recovery of lost data.

You don’t need a complex disaster recovery plan, but you do need to be able to answer one critical question for your business.  The question:  How does your business continue if you were to lose your computer this minute? Right now, today!!!  If you’re backing up to an external hard drive you will quickly learn that this is not enough.  You should really have an automated backup and recovery system.  Another option is to use a program like dropbox that automatically save your files online in the cloud.

Think about it.  Do you know any company in the world that doesn’t have automated backup daily of their corporate servers?  Why should you have less for your business files?  If you have a fire in your office or home and lose your computer and your backup hard drive, how do you recover from this?

Automated Backups

This may be basic stuff for many and I’m shocked to still learn that many people still do not have an automatic backup and recovery system.   So here are the main reasons why you need daily automated backups of your critical and non-critical files.

1. It’s Automated

Yeah, I know, it’s an obvious point.  But it’s a very important point.  If you have to manually backup your system every day I guarantee you that it’s that week or month that you’re too busy to backup that your system will crash.  It just happens that way.  This happened to me some years ago.  I was very good at doing my manual backups every day to my external hard drive.  One month I remember we were very busy trying to meet some deadlines.  Everyone was working around the clock.  I forgot one day to backup, then there was some reason another day why I didn’t do it, and a day became a week and then a month or so then …. CRASH!  OK, so that was painful.  About four weeks of work, GONE!

With an automated backup system you don’t think about it. You can schedule the system to backup at a convenient time for you, for example 3am in the morning.  The software starts automatically and backup your changed files to their server without your intervention.  So only the files that were changed that day gets backup that day.  You can also schedule the software to backup at anytime that you’re not actively using your computer.  So maybe when you go to lunch the software will notice that you’re not active and will do the backup then.  You won’t know it happened until it tells you that it’s done.

The main point is that you NEVER have to remember to do the backup… so you never have to worry about forgetting.  If your computer crashes you don’t have to worry about losing file because you can guarantee that you have the latest backup of your files at all time.

2.Off Premise Storage

This is the next MOST important point.  If you backup and the backup drive is in the same physical location as the computer being backed up, you’ve failed the test of a good disaster recovery plan.  Remember the bomb went off on your building and all your technology in that location is destroyed, including your backup drive.  So what do you do?

Backups need to be done to a different physical location.  Send it to the cloud somewhere.  It really doesn’t matter where, but it cannot be at the same location as your functional computer.  This way you can be sure that regardless of what happens you are able to recover your files.

There are different solutions that can be used for this.  The two leading options however that you should check out are mozy.com and carbonite.com.  The price for these solutions is about $6/month.

Cloud Folder

Another option is to use a tool that allows you to automatically save your files to the ‘cloud’.  This allows you to add a logical folder to your system that automatically saves your work to a server somewhere in the cloud.  Dropbox.com is pretty well known for this.  The main idea here is that as you work, instead of saving to your local C: drive, you save to a special folder.  When you save your files to that special dropbox folder the files are immediately stored on a cloud server online.  You can also sync your files with your other devices, including your mobile device.    Either option you take meets the core requirement of having your data stored in a physically different location than your functional day to day computer or laptop.

Recovering your Files

A good Disaster Recovery plan is only as good as the ability to access and recover the files backed up.  The backup location should be online to facilitate this.  The software you use for backup or cloud storage should give you the ability to easily do a point and click recovery of your files.  This will allow you to easily recover all your backed up files to your new computer.  You should also be able to recover partial files and folders as needed.  It may take some time to recover all your files based on the amount of files that were backup in the first place so partial recovery of just your critical files is important.  In the case of using a cloud folder like dropbox you may not need to do a recovery to your new machine because all you need to do is connect the new computer to your cloud folder. But the end result should be that you can simply buy a new computer and have immediate access to your files for download or usage.

Summary

In summary, without an automated backup/recovery plan you are risking the continuation of your business if your computer crash, your laptop is lost, or if a real disaster happens.  With so many things to worry about in running your business this is one of those no brainers that you can do to lighten your load.  Don’t wait until you feel the pain to take steps toward a good Disaster Recovery Plan.

Cool Mojito – Social Media Marketing. More Likes, More Leads, More Sales

rSitez – Create your own Social Networking Website

Rohan Hall is the author of Stop Working, a book that teaches entrepreneurs how to use technology and partnerships to build a global businesses. He is the founder and CEO of Cool Mojito a social media company, and rSitez a leading provider of social networking software. He blogs at blog.coolmojito.com.

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