Posts

Made In London: the capital’s boom in entrepreneurship - Telegraph

Thought it would be helpful to post some inspirational stories of young Londoners who went it alone right from the start - most of the individuals in the article have not received a tertiary education. Whilst there is certainly security in a solid job and a University Degree having this 'safe option' could mean that you never end up pursuing that business idea you always dreamed of!

This strategy of limiting consumer choice was recently brought to the fore when Dominos pizza announced their campaign to stop customers requesting changes to the toppings. It will be interesting to see the impact that this has. Whilst 'the customer is always right', the expert knowledge of the vendor is equally key. In preventing clients from changing recipes, Dominos are reasserting their status as Pizza experts, that they know more than the client when it comes to pizza and perhaps places more confidence and faith in their chefs.

TED Blog | "Paradox of Choice" author Barry Schwartz on TEDTalks

This talk by Barry Schwartz for TED raises a really interesting issue regarding the idea of consumer choice - typically we think of greater choice as being a progressive feature of developed economies allowing for greater consumer freedom. However this talk raises the point that such great choice can in fact leave consumers feeling overwhelmed and confused and will even turn them off from a sale completely.

Schwartz gives the example of a supermarket offering no less than 175 types of salad dressing and 285 varieties of biscuit. It is almost impossible for consumers to process so many decisions and there is a strong argument that businesses would benefit from limiting consumer stress by limiting the number of choices they have to make.

Would be great to hear other people's views on this - has anybody got first hand experience of this?

Agree with making twitter and facebook accounts attractive to target audience - a key way to do this is to offer promotional deals via social media platform e.g. free offers, product samples etc. in exchange for facebook likes and or reviews and twitter followings.

Has anybody used promotional offers via social media successfully and would like to share their insights?

Completely agree - Google's primary aim is to provide its users with genuine content that best matches users' search terms thus they are very hot on ignoring and even punishing platforms that threaten the quality of their search results. Not worth it.

Thanks for replying,

Thats helpful to know - the key thing is to have 'relevant' twitter followers based around your target market if you are a business - this is the most difficult thing to gauge.

Did you receive any advice regarding this aspect?

This was posted on another forum and seems to be quite relevant, anyone with other ideas feel free to contribute.


Hi,

Many posts I read about social media marketing explain the importance of social media marketing, talk about celebrities that use social media marketing, and give examples of popular people & websites that use social media marketing effectively. But how can an average Small Business Owner use social media marketing effectively?

Step 1: Create & publish relevant content, or link bait that links back to internal pages of your site.

Step 2: Influence aggregators & distributors of information to link to your useful content.

Step 3: Convince socializers to inform their large network of social media users about this great resource he/she just found.

Remember, you want to influence the influencers, not they try to become the influencer overnight. Too many companies fall into the trap on trying to build 1,000's of "friends" on social media sites instead of influencing the already popular social media users.

There is nothing wrong with becoming a popular social media users (like I am sure small business brief is) but trying to become that overnight does not work for most internet business owners. So an easy way to use social media marketing no is to create great content and get it into the hands of social media users.

Twitter will become increasingly important as an informal press release function - if your business is hosting an upcoming event, launched a new product etc.

The key thing however is to build 'useful' twitter followers who will respond to your posts - this is perhaps the most difficult task

Hi everyone,

For small businesses with limited marketing/advertising budgets, generating interest on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook is essential. I wanted to start a forum to share knowledge on how to increase your businesses' Twitter following and number of likes that your facebook business page receives.

Anyone have any ideas to contribute?

It is important to expose potential costumers to your organization regardless of means. I second Steve, all publicity is good publicity.

It will be very interesting to see if this develops into a formidable player in the storage wars