Social Media and Small Business: A Match Made in Heaven?

As a small businessperson, you cannot help but notice all the hype surrounding social media. It's the most important trend in business today. Its juvenile prattle, posted digitally for everyone to see (for reasons that escape many). It's an effective way to start a conversation with your customers and prospects. It's a fad that will fizzle soon and disappear from sight. Opinions both pro and con seem to run the gamut.

So what is social media and does it work? With respect to the former, social media is a mix of blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and hundreds of other tools designed to enable what the experts call "many-to-many" conversations. It's big: more than 120 million Americans visit Facebook and Twitter every month . And it's now part of business: more than a third of companies already use Twitter to start conversations with customers. With respect to the latter, the answer is yes--it works:

• BlendTec, maker of industrial-strength blenders for the home, has used viral videos on YouTube to boost sales by 500%. Using the title "Will it Blend?," the company has sliced and diced golf balls, a tennis shoe, even an iPhone. Since starting the videos, they have had more than 10 million views and have expanded their Facebook presence and recruited almost 13,000 fans.
  
• A local independent pizzeria in New Orleans set a one-day sales record using social media. Two-thirds of the day's sales came from one source: Twitter. Baker Tweet provides an application that enables bakeries to tell their customers that something hot and fresh has just come out of the oven. And Kogi Korean BBQ, a gourmet food truck in Los Angeles, sends out tweets telling customers their next stop...there's almost always a line waiting when they get there.
  
• Case-Mate, a maker of holsters and covers for mobile phones, created a novelty "Recession Case" out of cardboard that sold for $1.99. Thanks to a blog post by an influential techie (a relationship that actually began through a Twitter exchange); the Recession Case was all over the Web in just a day. And Case-Mate's Website set an all-time revenue record the same day. The original estimate of sales was 200 or so; four days after the blog post, they had sold 7,000.
  
• Thousands of niche groups are sprouting up on Linked In. Want to learn more about IT systems for small law firms...there's a Linked In group with 575 members. Interested in selling more artisan-crafted items in your store....the Ten Thousand Villages group can connect you to 130 members around the globe. Want to connect with fellow fitness trainers...there's a couple of groups for them, too. And if you can't find a group, start one. The process takes about five minutes on Linked In.

In fact, a recent in-depth study found that companies with significant levels of social media activity grew an average of 18%, while firms with the least activity saw sales drop by 6 percent during the same time period. But that's just part of the story: social media is the great leveler; small companies can play just as well as giant competitors, meaning the big-marketing-budget advantage no longer exists for savvy marketers.

From that perspective, social media is more than just a good idea that's getting better. It's a competitive advantage that small business ignores at its own peril.

Need Help Getting Started?

If you would like help getting started, The Pursuit group is offering an eight-week interactive tele-web training course in Social Media Marketing. The course is taught by Guerrilla Marketing author Al Luatenslager in weekly sessions. In addition to the eight online classes, every attendee will receive a bonus session just for them...a one-hour custom consult to help them build their own social media marketing program.

For more information visit Al's social media marketing web page . The Pursuit Group has arranged for a special discount for the first 12 Manta members who sign up.

About the Author: Josh Stailey is a co-founder of The Pursuit Group , a company dedicated to helping small, innovative businesses grow and thrive in the midst of large, entrenched competition. Josh has started several companies, served as a consultant at the pioneering customer relationship firm Peppers & Rogers Group, and worked "on the ground" developing and launching marketing, sales support and customer care programs in a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, finance, healthcare, high technology, retail, utilities and agriculture.