March 2011

Small businesses have more options than ever when it comes to effectively marketing their businesses on a small budget. In addition to using Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets, business owners are increasingly using email to make direct contact with their potential and existing customers. Direct email marketing, sometimes called “blast email,” can be extremely lucrative if done properly. However, when used inappropriately, direct email campaigns can do more harm than good.

Don’t be Sir Spam-a-Lot
Sending out a constant stream of emails isn’t marketing, it’s spamming, and it’s just about the fastest way to get people to opt out of your emails. Spamming can also cause a bad sender reputation, meaning your company’s messages will be flagged by various email programs, causing your emails to be auto-directed into “bulk” or “spam” folders. Spamming can also exponentially increase your bounce rates and cause your messages to become blacklisted. So be judicious with your marketing emails. Set a schedule and only send blast emails when you truly have something worthwhile to share with your customer base.

Tip! When sending marketing emails, always remember the consumer’s point of view:
WIIFM — What’s In It For Me?
If the answer isn’t obvious, don’t send it.

You are who you are
We recently discussed using HTML signatures to establish and maintain a consistent corporate persona via email. This is equally important when using a blast email program. So, regardless of whether you use MailChimp, iContact, or the feature-heavy site Gold Lasso, take the time to learn about the tools offered by your provider. This way, you will not only get your specific message across, but you’ll do it in a way that provides opportunities to maintain your corporate image.

Not sure where to start? TribalVision offers email marketing solutions tailored to fit your needs. Visit our Connect page to get started today!

At a recent seminar about social media marketing, I met a woman whose boss had sent her, saying, “Go learn about that social media stuff so we can start tooting or tweeting or whatever it is.” She was new to social media, uncomfortable with much beyond a personal Facebook page. As the presentation continued, she furiously took notes:

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace.
LinkedIn, Ning, Tagged.
Bebo, Orkut, Delicious.
Tumblr, StumbleUpon, HootSuite.

I realized this woman was trying to learn to use every major social media outlet in two hours. The result was that she learned little more than the fact that there is a lot to learn when it comes to social media. And this is exactly why so many small business owners still don’t use social media. They see how many different options there are and decide they don’t have time to learn how to use a dozen sites, let alone manage multiple data streams once they’re set up.

Twitter Tweets and Facebook Fans

The key to self-managing a successful social media campaign is to learn to use just one or two social media outlets to start. And if you’re going to start anywhere, start with Facebook and Twitter, both of which enable users to start small, learn the format, and slowly build up to more sophisticated usage methods.

We discussed Facebook business pages recently, and they’re a great place to get your feet wet. Once you have a bit of a fan base set up on Facebook, Twitter is a great second step. Twitter is also free, and it works well with Facebook business pages because the two can easily be linked, meaning a single “tweet” can serve the dual purpose of updating your Twitter and Facebook pages at once.

What’s a Tweet? Just saying it makes me picture Tweety Bird.

A “tweet” is a 140-character statement that can include a link to your website or blog, a product update, a special offer, a contest: essentially anything you want. A tweet is a lot like a “status update” on Facebook, but it does more. Much, much more.

First, your tweets have the capacity to reach a lot of people from Day One because when your posts appear in your Facebook feed, many of your contacts are likely to link through to Twitter and start “following” you there, just as they “like” you on Facebook. Even better, tweeting can increase your search engine rankings when you keep an eye on including SEO keywords in your tweets. Many people accomplish this by hash tagging their tweets. Check out what we mean by following TribalVision on Twitter (@TribalTweet). We’ll hash tag a link to this article.

Still overwhelmed by all this social media? Give us a shout, and we’ll tell you how TribalVision can design and manage a social media strategy that’s just right for your business.

Email. Every day, we send, reply, and forward. We CC: and BCC:, file and archive, read and delete. In the process, our typed words travel to offices down the hall and businesses across the planet. Of course, the primary goal of our emails is to communicate the message we’ve typed. However, email can easily do so much more. Email can be a marketing tool.

Now, we’re not talking about using applications like MailChimp, which allow users to send and manage email marketing campaigns (Make sure you subscribe to the TribalVision blog, though! We’ll cover this soon!). We’re just talking about the every day emails we all send to our colleagues, co-workers, clients, and customers. Each and every one of those emails is a free opportunity to hand out a virtual business card by way of your email signature.

What’s Your Sign(ature)?
If you’re not currently using an email signature, or if you’re using a plain text signature with just your name and title, you’re missing countless, free, daily marketing opportunities. Think about it for a moment: a client checks an email from you on his phone and wants to discuss it with you immediately but doesn’t have your number stored in his cell. If that number were in your email signature, your client would have access to it in a single click.

Or say that client wants to share your thoughts with another colleague by forwarding your message. With a proper email signature, not only does that colleague receive all of your contact information, but he also sees your logo, perhaps your slogan, and has instant access to your website and social media feeds. That simple, forwarded email has allowed you to establish your corporate image before the recipient has had any direct contact with your company at all.

Thankfully, it’s easy to integrate attractive, purposeful signatures that not only help you share contact information, but also allow you to seamlessly include social media links, websites, and even your company logo in a full-color, HTML format.

What if I don’t speak HTML? Or write it, or do whatever it is HTML does?
For those of us who don’t know how to create an email signature in HTML (read: nearly everyone who doesn’t work in I.T.), there are some great programs available to do it for us. Our favorite: WiseStamp.

WiseStamp is a free tool that allows users to create custom signatures. One of the things we like best about WiseStamp is the ability to have multiple signatures on file. This allows users to have, for example, a “business” signature, but also a “personal” signature. WiseStamp also allows for images, logos, social media linking, RSS feeds, Twitter scrolling, and more.

So, perhaps the question isn’t so much, “What’s in a name?” but “What’s in a signature?” And these days, the answer should be “everything!”

Facebook is, as usual, in the news this week. Recently, we discussed Facebook Places, the social media giant’s wildly popular check-in app, which allows users to share their whereabouts. Ideally, this leads to increased foot traffic for brick-and-mortar shops, as those “check ins” show up in users’ activity feeds, sparking interest among their Facebook friends. Before those friends head to a store, however, they often click the check-in link to visit the business’ Facebook page. And now, thanks to Facebook’s shift away from FBML and back to iFrames, those business pages will look and function better than ever.

What are iFrames? Wait. Back up. What is FBML?
FBML stands for “Facebook Markup Language.” It’s essentially a Facebook-specific version of HTML, and it’s on the way out. Moving into the spotlight: iFrames. iFrames utilize HTML to allow one webpage to operate within another. In complete non-tech-speak, this means it’s easier than ever to maintain a uniform corporate image across platforms. Your business’ Facebook page can literally mirror your business’ website, plus, Facebook provides all sorts of nifty tracking and personalization tools to allow increasingly customized user experiences and business-to-customer interactions.

What about my current Facebook business page?
As of March 11, 2011, Facebook will no longer accept new FBML-coded pages or applications. However, existing Facebook business pages and applications utilizing FBML coding are safe and will continue to function normally.

Not sure if you have an FBML page? If you paid a developer to build your Facebook business page and your page has company-specific graphics or applications on it, odds are you have an FBML page. Here’s an example: TribalVision on Facebook.

If it’s not broke…
Facebook is famous, or perhaps infamous, for its updates. If history is any indication, while FBML is still supported, it’s a pretty safe bet that future updates will not benefit FBML-based pages. This means those business’ pages will slowly begin to look outdated and obsolete. It also means that, while business owners are often hesitant to jump on board with the Next Big Thing every time one comes along, in this case, it may be worthwhile and ultimately necessary in order to remain competitive in the social media market.

…why fix it?
Your Facebook page is often the first impression a potential customer has of your business. How well is your Facebook page representing you?

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Sources: InsideFacebook, Mashable, EBrandz

Recently, we talked about the importance of autonomy and culture as they relate to the daily operations of a successful organization. Giving employees a reasonable amount of discretion in how they conduct their work fosters an atmosphere of teamwork, allows for creativity, demonstrates faith in your staff, and shows respect for their ideas. Yet, even in the most forward-thinking of companies, that sense of empowerment is often left at the conference room door.

Staff meetings. From a management perspective, this is a time to present new ideas to the staff, update them on current projects, make announcements, and explain policies. From a staff perspective, however, these meetings are often viewed as time to file in, sit down, be quiet, and receive a lecture. In other words: a complete waste of time.

So how is a company to bring its commitment to staff empowerment, to a collaborative corporate culture, into the conference room? Simple. Stop holding conferences and start having conversations.

Why Conversations Work
Even when the topic is relevant to every employee in the room, people tend to tune out during long presentations because they feel uninvolved in the process. They feel, perhaps more acutely than at any other time in their work, that they are subordinates whose input is not valued. This feeling stems from the fact that in a lecture, information only flows one way: from management to staff. But when employees are actively engaged in a conversation, they pay attention and participate. They offer new ideas and improve on one another’s suggestions. They collaborate. They communicate. They create.

In a conversation, employees are encouraged to speak and share. In other words, they are empowered, and this fosters a corporate culture of collaboration in which employees feel that not only are they allowed some autonomy in front of the customer, they are truly valued as integral parts of the overall organization, even behind closed doors.

Lose the Laser Pointer
If you’re new to conversation-style meetings, the first step is pretty simple: sit down. Sit down, and ask an open-ended question. Facilitate the conversation while encouraging employees to share their ideas and observations. Take notes. Listen to your staff. Remember, these are the people who make your product and serve your customers. They know where the opportunities for streamlining and expanding truly lie. Doesn’t it make sense to hear what they have to say?