Getting Ready for Timeline

Today Facebook will be converting all business pages over to the new Timeline layout. To help you all make the transition with ease, we’ve gone ahead and put together these cover photos for you to use.

Find Your Showmanship

Penn & Teller are Las Vegas headliners whose act is an amalgam of illusion and comedy.

Last week one of my coworkers took a quick vacation to Las Vegas. So, this Monday I spent some time trying to live my coworker’s vacation vicariously through the internet.She told me about a show she saw by “Penn and Teller” and I immediately wanted to Google them. My search brought me to an interesting letter that Teller wrote to a fellow (and at the time struggling) magician on how to find inspiration for his act.

“Have heroes outside of magic.  Mine are Hitchcock, Poe, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Bach.  You’re welcome to borrow them, but you must learn to love them yourself for your own reasons.  Then they’ll push you in the right direction… Get inspired by a particular poet, film-maker, sculptor, composer.  You will never be the first Brian Allen Brushwood of magic if you want to be Penn & Teller.  But if you want to be, say, the Salvador Dali of magic, well THERE’S an opening.”

Click Here to read the full letter

This struck me as great advice for anyone; what are other companies doing (outside of marketing and advertising firms) that I could adopt to enhance our customer’s experience with us?

I immediately thought of QuickTrip (a local gas station). Every time I’ve entered a store I’m greeted by a well-lit, clean, and fully-stocked experience. QuickTrip must have one of the best cashier training programs around, because the man or woman behind the counter is always nice, professional, and, importantly, quick – even when I’m paying with the ancient form of currency known as cash.

So this week, I’m going to be focused on what I’ve taken away from my morning QuickTrip coffee routine, and I challenge you to do the same. When you’re at a restaurant, talking with a salesperson at your favorite store, or simply going about your day to day, keep an eye out for things these “other” industries are doing and how you could become inspired or adopt their “showmanship” to make yourself a stronger real estate agent.

Facebook — K-I-S-S

3 ways to “keep” your Facebook activities effective

In the ever remembered words of Kelly Johnson, one long forgotten Lockheed engineer, to his design team — “keep it simple stupid.” Not, by the way, “keep it simple, stupid.” Johnson was not addressing his engineers as “stupid” — he was reminding them that “simple stupid” is often the most difficult thing to accomplish: it is easy to design a jetliner that is repairable in a multi-million dollar facility filled with tools, machinery and equipment — it is not so easy to design a plane that is repairable out in the field with just a handful of common tools. (via Wikipedia) K-I-S-S can be applied to just about anything — economics, vacation planning, marketing — even your social media strategy.

1. Keep it Short Stupid Short updates — 3 lines or fewer — tend to get about 60% more response in the form of likes, comments and shares than longer ones.
2. Keep it Subjective Stupid Relevant updates — referencing top headlines, seasonal events or holidays — are significantly more impactful. In fact, updates that specifically mentioned “Independence Day” on July Fourth “generated 90% more engagement than all posts published on that day.”
3. Keep it Social Stupid Remember the classic sales adage, “you have one mouth and two ears, use them in that proportion”? Updates that demonstrate an interest and curiosity in your friends, fans and followers garner more engagement than any other type of post — try asking a question, leaving a fill-in-the-blank in your update, or including a specific call to action (to like, comment or share). (Via Huffington Post and Facebook’s Best Practices Guide)

Groom Your Vocabulary for Success

“Perception is Reality” – Lee Atwater.

Most of us understand that our perception of the world and our business affects our day-to-day living in a powerful way. Our words directly influence the perception we paint for others about our business. What are YOUR words saying today, and what can you do to make sure they communicate the importance of your relationship with your clients?

“Please” and “thank you.” Simple and sincere courtesies go a long way. Take time to properly thank your clients for trusting you with their home or for referring a friend. Also be sure to acknowledge the thanks you’re receiving from your clients  you made an impact on them and they appreciate it! Remember – hearing a thank you means you’re doing your job well, and that knowledge can strengthen your service in the future. When you can sincerely thank a client for sharing a criticism with you, then you’ve really made it!

“I’ll try” is one of the most unintentionally damaging phrases we can use. If you truly want to accomplish a goal, then define successes and failures. Don’t be afraid of a failure  just define it.  Define the process. “I’m going to try to get in shape” is more attainable if well defined. “I’m going to lose 20 pounds in four months. To do this, I’m going to set my alarm a half hour earlier and ride my recumbent bike or hit the treadmill.”  If at the end of two months and you haven’t reached your goal, look at the process and make improvements to your plan.

Remember, your words are powerful! Use them wisely!

Small Business SEO Strategy

Broken to the basics, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is simply the means by which you increase the chances of your brand (blog, site, pages, etc.) ranking high after being chewed up by search engine algorithms.

All search engines rank, calculate and report their results differently — but the bottom line remains the same: constant, consistent, quality activity across the net will improve your rankings. The term “activity” encompasses not only activity you do directly on your own behalf (blog posts, status updates, tweets, new pages) but also interaction you have on other sites, pages and blogs and references made to you and your brand by others.

Becoming a frequent commenter on select sites, pages and feeds is a great way to get your name out there — think about it this way, when you want to “network,” do you stay home or go out? And encouraging visitors, followers, friends and readers to comment on, share, re-tweet, and re-post your content — and link back to your brand — can have a significant impact on your placement in search results.

Check out this infographic from SEO.com on how small businesses around the country are dealing with online marketing, social media and SEO.

Marketing Lessons from Scrooge

Marketing is an essential element for business development and growth. Unlike sales efforts and results, however, marketing efforts and results are not always easy to evaluate.

Sales are easy — you can measure revenue, number of clients, number of transactions, revenue per client and so on — because sales create “hard” results. But how — and what — do you measure to analyze the effectiveness of your marketing efforts?

First, define your performance criteria — what are you going to measure? For instance:

• Email addresses on your subscriber list
• Inbound calls per week
• Referrals
• Friends on Facebook
• Testimonials
• New leads in your contact database
• Click-throughs
• Web visits per week
• Unique web visitors

Ghosts of Marketing Past, Present and Future

Past

Once you know what you want to measure, it’s time to define success and failure — a standard against which to measure your results. Past history is a great tool when it comes to reviewing your marketing strategy. Create a document outlining your prior marketing activities:

• past marketing activities — know what you’re repeating, improving, or doing for the first time
• past results — past performance is one of the best tools you have for measuring current results — adding an average of 10 email addresses to your subscriber list each month might not seem great, unless you know that in the past you averaged 4 new email addresses each month.
• past cost — how much time and money did you spend to get these results? Marketing success is measured not only in results, but by how much you spent to get those results
• past performance — at the end of the day, marketing must bring in clients who bring in revenue — make sure you have a record of past sales performance to help you determine if reaching your marketing goals is helping you reach your sales goals

Present

It may seem obvious — but a documented plan of your marketing efforts and an ongoing report card is essential to getting the most out of your marketing efforts — and your time and money. Create a document you can add to on a regular (e.g., quarterly or semi-annually) basis:

• present marketing efforts and outlets — from e-newsletters to direct mail campaigns, from blogging to Tweeting, from Facebook updates to door hangers
• present budget for time and money — include the time you spend on content, list management, updating as well as the money you spend

Future

What are your goals? Having a vision for the future is the only to create a strategy for the present —

• Define your standards of future success — going back to the performance criteria you established, what results would equal success to you? Is it a number or a percentage change — a thousand Facebook fans or three times as many monthly web visits?
• Know your goals for the future — again, hitting all the marketing targets in the world is meaningless if they don’t ultimately translate into sales — what are your sales goals — how much revenue? How many clients?

Facebook — K-I-S-S

In the ever remembered words of Kelly Johnson, one long forgotten Lockheed engineer, to his design team — “keep it simple stupid.

Not, by the way, “keep it simple, stupid.” Johnson was not addressing his engineers as “stupid” — he was reminding them that “simple stupid” is often the most difficult thing to accomplish: it is easy to design a jetliner that is repairable in a multi-million dollar facility filled with tools, machinery and equipment — it is not so easy to design a plane that is repairable out in the field with just a handful of common tools.  (via Wikipedia)

K-I-S-S can be applied to just about anything — economics, vacation  planning, marketing — even your social media strategy.

Keep it Short Stupid

Short updates — 3 lines or fewer — tend to get about 60% more response in the form of likes, comments and shares than longer ones.

Keep it Subjective Stupid

Relevant updates — referencing top headlines, seasonal events or holidays — are significantly more impactful. In fact, updates that specifically mentioned “Independence Day” on July Fourth “generated 90% more engagement than all posts published on that day.”

Keep it Social Stupid

Remember the classic sales adage, “you have one mouth and two ears, use them in that proportion”? Updates that demonstrate an interest and curiosity in your friends, fans and followers garner more engagement than any other type of post — try asking a question, leaving a fill-in-the-blank in your update, or including a specific call to action (to like, comment or share).

(Via Huffington Post and Facebook’s Best Practices Guide)