Shopping local as a partnership

Lois Loucks, Director of the Tri-Cities Economic Development (Wheaton-Onaga-Havensville, KS), shared some of her innovative thoughts with me in an email about shopping local.

"Shopping Local" as a two way street, with responsibility placed on the business owners to earn "their share of business". Just because someone decides to be in business, does not automatically mean they deserve "their share" of customers. The business owner/manager/employees must earn "their customers". From my experiences, I believe, especially in the present economy, a "Shop Local Campaign" must not only be directed at the citizens, but formulated as to form a partnership, so to speak, between the businesses and the citizens.

Loucks listed some of the key items that business should focus on to earn their share of business:

• Convenience (Shopping hours)
• Service (not only personal, kind, friendly, but Store layout, Cleanliness, Good Signage, Lighting, Parking, etc.) 
• Price for Perceived Value (Obvious reasons to offset higher price) 
• Making Shopping a Pleasant Experience (yes, Enjoyable Experience)

I'm a huge proponent of building your basics first, and building experiences with customers, so we agree on much of this.

What do you think? How do you see small businesses working in partnership to promote the whole community?

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Is Twitter worth it for small town businesses

Twitter is getting a lot of attention, with mentions in national media, being used on the news, and articles in all kinds of business publications. But, is Twitter worth the effort for a small town business?

Businesses of all sizes are sharing impressive results. Dell announced it has made $3 million worth of sales through its Twitter efforts. Even small businesses in big cities have started benefiting. Small bakeries can now buy an oven-gadget that automatically announces when fresh baked goods are available. Small restaurants in big cities are filling seats and retailers are selling specials with simple announcements on Twitter, thanks to the large number of potential customers online.

But what about small town businesses? We don't have the same share of our local customers on Twitter. How many people can you realistically reach if only 5 or 10 out of your town's 5,000 people are signed up? How can that be worth the time and effort?

There are two ways Twitter can be worth it for such small businesses. The first is to follow smart people. It's worth it to have small business insights from bright entrepreneurs. It's worth it to connect with others in your industry, but far away geographically. It's worth it to discover other points of view. You have the chance to follow small town luminaries such as Jack Schultz, Tom Egelhoff, and Marci Penner of Kansas Sampler. Every day, you will learn new things from them, gain some added enthusiasm, and get ideas.

The second way to make Twitter worth it is to start with your existing fans. Let's say you run the small town quilt show. You may have some email address lists already or you can start by building them. With those email addresses in an online address book, like Gmail or AOL, you can check to see if they are on Twitter. You want to start with people who have attended before and people who are now supporters of the event.

Small town entrepreneur Aliza Sherman made a great point at the 140 Character Conference.

We are measuring small business success by big business standards. The right 15 followers may be much better than 1500.

How about buying lists or gathering lists of people who might potentially be customers? Could you find and follow them? That was the question posed to me by an ag-loan group. Could they not just get the list of emails addresses of everyone who received the right government payment, and start by following them? I said no, because there is no existing relationship with those people. The difference with the quilt show list was it included people who already have some relationship with your event. They know you, and they already like you. The farm payment lists are more like cold calls with people who probably don't care about you.

Then how can the ag group attract those potential customers? First, they'll start with their existing customers and supporters. They can follow them, and start building an audience in a natural way. By putting out relevant, informative tweets on topics those people care about, like upcoming application deadlines or tips for farm money management. The more you talk about those issues intelligently, the more you will attract the very people you are looking for.

With the right approach to following and followers, Twitter is definitely worth it for small town businesses.

How about you? Are you a small town businessperson using Twitter? Share your story of how it's worth it for you. Or how it's not!

Photo: downtown Stirling Scotland by Becky McCray.

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Share good news in the Brag Basket

It's Friday, and that means the Brag Basket is open for the weekend. 

This is designed as a fun place for you to share your projects and accomplishments. But you can also cheer for other people, give shout outs, congratulate, and even give someone a well-deserved pat on the back.

Think that bragging is a bad thing? Read how Tony explains the Brag Basket.

The Brag Basket is open for everyone, whether from a small town, a big city, or anywhere in the world. (But it's true that I love small town brags!)

Will you put something in the Brag Basket this week? You can brag on a friend, your own project, yourself, others, anything! Make it personal, and not just an ad. You don't need special permission, and you don't have to be from a small town. Just leave a comment right here. There's no deadline, so you can brag anytime during the weekend, and I'll open a fresh Brag Basket each Friday.

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Should Congress regulate your Internet service plan?

Internet providers who charge customers by how much they use would have to justify their prices to federal regulators under a bill introduced last week.

Freshman Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) filed the bill after some providers tested plans to charge customers more if they download video or otherwise use a lot of bandwidth. The companies argue that the increasing popularity of online video is taxing their ability to provide Internet service and that increased regulation could lead to higher prices for other customers.

The bill, H.R. 2902, would allow the Federal Trade Commission to review whether the pricing plans are fair.

Do you think federal regulators should review Internet pricing plans?

WRITE YOUR LAWMAKERS!

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Marketing for small town businesses

Tom Egelhoff, author of SmallTownMarketing.com, is in a generous mood:

From now until the month of July, I want to give Small Biz Survival folks my two marketing and advertising books absolutely FREE: How to Market, Advertise and Promote Your Business or Service In a Small Town - and The Small Town Advertising Handbook - Enjoy http://bit.ly/1099zp

For years, Tom has shared his articles on small town marketing. He has an enormous archive, and he gets the small town issues. I'm excited that he's offering his two great small town marketing books as free e-books. He's not asking to harvest your email address, and he's not making you sign up for any list. He's just sharing.

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Finding your online evangelists

Letting your fans serve as your evangelists always carries more weight than bragging on yourself. So how do you find those people?

At SOBCon09, Geoff Livingston was asked this question. "How do you identify the people who are going to be your fans and evangelists?" His answer: They self-identify. They'll tell you.

I want to take it a step further. You make is possible for them to self identify. You give them tools and ways to identify themselves as your fans. I shared that comment with my table at SOBCon, and Neenz replied, "Like the frozen peas." Frozen peas became an identifier of Susan Reynolds' supporters in her fight against breast cancer. She used frozen peas as an ice pack after surgery, snapped a photo for her Twitter avatar, and kicked off a movement. Many of us put frozen peas into our avatars in support. It became the symbol for her fight and her later fundraising. We self-identified. A more recent Twitter movement is green avatars supporting free Iran.

It's easy to find your online supporters when you give them the tools to identify themselves. What kind of tools can these be?

• Avatar symbols for Twitter
• Badges for their websites and social network profiles
• Mailing lists for them to join
• Fan pages and groups at social networks for them to join
• Stickers, tshirts, and other tangible items for them to wear and share
  

What are your ideas? How do you find your fans and evangelists?

The next topic should be how to help your evangelists to sing your praises. What do you think?

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Overheard at the 140 Character Conference

People from all over the world, from a huge variety of industries, came together in New York with only a common language and common tool: Twitter. That's bizarre. But that's the 140 Characters Conference, created by Jeff Pulver (@jeffpulver).

Aliza Sherman did a terrific job of capturing a flavor of the conference in her summary post at Web Worker Daily, The 140 Character Conference, or Why Twitter Matters Now. Jonny Goldstein made some wonderful visual notes from sessions, too.I'm adding some of my notes made during sessions, and a few reactions from the Twitter stream.

Jeff Keni Pulver (@jeffpulver)
The State of Now

• If we suck, we suck. If we're great, we're great. No one is filtering, and every voice matters.
• The next person you meet might change your life.
• If you don't believe in yourself, it's hard to get things done.
• If Twitter were to go away today, something else would come forward to keep us in the now.
• Be a little vulnerable, and share what is happening in your life.
  
• There is so much humanity here to be had.
• I always wanted to have a conference and have someone from Rolling Stone there.
  

Jack Dorsey (@jack) - co-founder and Chairman, twitter

• Mapping NY people in an app, seeing them mapped in real time, made him feel connected to the city. Watching the inauguration together on Twitter gave him a similar amazing feeling.
• Appreciates how we are changing Twitter by how we use it.

Tim O'Reilly (@timoreilly) - Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media
What twitter has taught me

• Being postmaster was a competitive advantage for Ben Franklin in the news business. He was seeing the mail, so he could watch for stories.
• Media is about serving the community.
• O'Reilly's early book on UUCP network was written by the community. He wrote the inital 80 pages, and users kept sending him modem scripts. It grew to over 200 pages.
• He uses Twitter to build his community. He will Tweet comments from emails. ("Via email.")
• The New York Times basically tweets headlines. If he was only tweeting about O'Reilly, he would have to ignore politics and all the world of other interesting topics.
• Add value to the community you are part of. That's the real secret of social media.

Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) - VC and principal of Union Square Ventures.
The Power of Passed Links and Earned Media

• Passed links have enormous value. Links are currency.
  
• How we'll make money on Twitter: links
• That's how Google makes its money and power.
• And Google still sends way more free traffic than paid.
• Twitter and Facebook combined are set to eclipse Google for traffic referrals to some sites.

Liz Strauss (@lizstrauss)
Marketing for the eavesdroppers in the tri-dimensional conversation

• Like on a TV show: characters as talking to each other, but aware that there is an audience. It's actually a powerful way of marketing; just being yourself, living your product.
• Was there a conference like this about the telephone? or the pencil? Are we getting a little precious about our tools?
• When you walk into a room with 600 people, it's way more powerful to walk in with a friend who knows some of them and can help you meet people. So make a friend first.
• If you want me to retweet you, make me proud to retweet it. Make it fun to share.
• For God's sake, don't retweet your entire stream, saying thank you, thank you, thank you. (I'd love to send this to one particular person who does it all the time!)
  

Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd)
The evolution of Microsyntax

• Twitter is our Tower of Babel
• Microsyntax - embedding structured information into the text of Twitter messages: RT, @, #.
• Creating a nonprofit .org around this idea.
  

Marcel LeBrun (@lebrun) - CEO, Radian6
The effects of twitter on My Business, or how things are different now because of twitter. The corporate perspective.

• Listen for the point of need. People are are talking about their needs on Twitter more than other sites.
• Every business function in the company that has to do with having a conversation with a customer is touched by Twitter. How do you measure all that ROI?
  

Tony Hsieh (@zappos) - CEO, Zappos.com
The effects of twitter on My Business, or how things are different now because of twitter. The corporate perspective.

• It's all about relationships, so what's the ROI on a hug?
• Twitter fits into our brand of delivering joy.
  

Maegan Carberry (@maegancarberry) - Blogger, Huffington Post // CauseCast // Lifehack; co-host Variety's Wilshire and Washington, Managing Editor, truuconfessions.com
Politics: possibilities of bipartisanship and/or post-partisanship on Twitter

• In the 1990's, she felt disconnected and depressed about politics.
• Changing your avatar and other Twitter actions is part time activism. "I'd take a whole bunch of part-time activists over a whole bunch of people who feel disconnected and despressed about political issues."
• How much are you retweeting, and how much original thought are you contributing?
  

Ann Curry (@AnnCurry) - News Anchor on NBC's Today Show and host of Dateline NBC

• We need to stop reporting the news how America sees it. Let citizens report it.
• News judgment is changing away from USA-centered because we all have world connections.
• It's not changing fast enough.
• People are people whether in Iran or US.
• Challenge of conveying good info accurately for news in such short form.

John A. Byrne (@JohnAByrne) - Editor in Chief, BusinessWeek.com
The Business Week perspective on twitter

• At the core of what digital journalism needs to be engagement.
• Links delivered by people who have knowledge of a topic have cache. The Link Economy.
• Then that means Twitter is the Super Fuel of the Link Economy.
• Old media was product handed down to people you don't know and really don't care about.
• It has to become a process that engages its audience at every single level.
• You can get the audience involved, get suggestions, at the idea stage.
• For the middle of the process, where you do your basic reporting as a journalist. Lots of people will tell you that what journalists do is a secret, proprietary, and can't be shared, or the competitors will swoop in and beat you to the story. That's bull. Probably 80% of journalism can be open sourced.
• For the How Social Media Will Change Your Business story, used blog and twitter to invite audience to tell him how the previous story (5 year old story on blogs) was completely out of date, posted comments and old story online, and generated discussion. Ultimately created a much richer story.
• Journalism is transformed from a product to a process.
• More than that, it's about opening up what has been a secretive process of news reporting to users and readers and collaborators.
• New Wall Street Journal guidelines prohibit sharing what stories you are working on.
• Part of problem with revealing stories you are working on is 1) competitive threat 2) potential for corporations or individuals being interviewed to get cold feet. (I missed writing this one down, but it was tweeted by @aaronstrout.)
  
• Ultimately, this is about letting people discover what you think is your best stuff, and even sharing what you think are the best things from your competitors.
• Driving traffic is not the primary purpose of why I'm on Twitter.
• There is no magic bullet; there is a machine gun loaded with bullets that we are going to have to deploy to succeed in the future.

James Cox (@imajes)
The story behind CNNBRK

• Publishers have started being people who have money to invest in product that they think will work. Why not make news work like that? Larger organizations give a budget to the small teams who have the interest and idea to report in a new way.
• Journalists could stop telling the news and start telling stories again.

Moeed Ahmad (@moeed) - Head of New Media Technology and Future Media Department Technology Division, Al Jazeera Network
The Al Jazeera Twitter Strategy

• Al Jazeera includes Arabic, English, documentary, eleven sports, and children's channels, research and study and training centers.
• Focused toward the middle east region.
• "If you are not living on the edge, you are taking up too much space." and the corollary, "If it doesn't fit in 140 characters, its not worth saying."
  
• Their web team was initially not for creating a Twitter stream page from Gaza, but it turned out to be the fourth most viewed page.
• Taking questions via Twitter does help weed out the irrelevant, and makes questioners get to the point.
• The cross section that you get with Twitter is not the average person.
• Telling the truth is hard. Not telling it is even harder.
• Flew 16 hours from Doha to speak for 10 minutes.
  

Jeremy Epstein (@jer979) - Marketing Navigator, Never Stop Marketing
How I followed Jeff Pulver on Twitter for 16 Months and Ended Up on This Stage: Twitter as a Strategic Relationship Building Tool

• What is your Global MicroBrand? Do a Venn Diagram with your three passions. His are Marketing, Community, Technology.
• Only follows 140 people, experts in his passion fields.
• Filter and optimize who you follow. He looks for quality, no overtweeters, and a high signal to noise ratio.
• You read everything they say, you earn the right to gain some of their time/deeper engagement. You build real relationships.
• Requested a tweet of his points - but he won't follow people who overtweet, so we can't tweet it for him. :D
  

Christopher R. Weingarten (@1000TimesYes) - Music Writer, RollingStone.com and Village Voice
Twitter and the End Of Music Criticism.

• People are getting more stratified in their listening habits.
• Crowdsourcing kills art. People have terrible taste. The result is what rises to the middle.
  
• After more than 400 record reviews, I can say that there is enough room in 140 characters not only to elaborate but also for good writing.
  

Jeffrey Hayzlett (@JeffreyHayzlett) - Chief Marketing Officer, Kodak
Kodak and twitter: What we are learning

• What's the ROI on Twitter? Well, what's the ROI on ignoring customers?
• Understand what your company voice is going to be.
• Grow a thick skin. It's a culture shift. You will not have control over it anymore.
  

Kevin Slavin - founder area/code
Things that twitter

• Likes to create games that blend some aspect of the real world into the game.
• Shark trackers - blend online players as ships with real GPS data from actual sharks.
• Created a game played in New York City with people being pursued by invisible GPS character.
• Some unusal things creating data tweets: Plants (water me), shoes (ran 2.3 miles), washers (2 dryers available), ovens (turnovers coming out fresh), taco trucks (where we are), Space Shuttle Endeavor, London's Tower Bridge (going up), the River Thames (high tide will be at 6 feet in two hours)
  

Jim Jones (@jimjonescapo) - Recording artist

• Should you think before you tweet? Yes! People take things too twiteral on Twitter!
• Tells knock knock jokes to his followers. Plays games with them.
  

Steve Rubel (@steverubel) - SVP, Director of Insights, Edelman Digital
twitter and PR

• Communities online don't usually last more than 5 years.
• Second Life was online marketing's Vietnam.
• Next is the open web, where social just fits in every website.

Debbie Stier (@debbiestier) - SVP, Associate Publisher, Harper Studio
twitter: Book Publishing

• 40% of the books produced end up pulped.
  
• 9 out of 10 books don't make back their advance.
• Going to 50-50% profit share. Not tricky, just a simple way to make it a partnership. Signed 10 book deal with Gary Vaynerchuk. She saw him speak, and knew he had the magic.
  

Kaylie Jones (@KaylieJones) - Novelist. Her upcoming memoir is: "Lies My Mother Never Told Me." Her bestsellig novel: "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" (Merchant Ivory film)
twitter: Book Publishing

• Memoir writing is not about me, the person writing the book. It's about the people who can understand the situation that I have been in.
• I have been very careful about who I followed and who followed me, because it's very time consuming for me. I have met the most wonderful people, readers of fiction, authors. For me, it's a sign of hope.
  
• Authors fail on Twitter with too much self promotion and not enough community. Too many events announcements.

Ron Hogan (@RonHogan) - Curator, Beatrice.com
twitter: Book Publishing

• A problem among the 6 conglomerates in NY translates to an industry wide crisis. (He added later on Twitter,"Don't forget: the problems of 6 publishers = industry crisis ONLY to a reductuve financial media." and "Now is a fantatsic time for small publishers to jump in and set the new standards of success.")
• Memoirs are popular because people talk about themselves. Those are the kinds of things we are interested, passionate about.

Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) - President, New Marking Labs
Julien Smith (@julien)
Twitter and Trust Agents
Jeff Pulver introduced Chris, saying not enough people know who he is, even though he is one of the best known people in the Twitter community. Jeff is dead serious about reaching outside the closed community.

• Julien: you can't copy someone else and expect the same result.
• Julien: Trust Agents are the individuals who are humanizing the group.
• Chris: GM covered their own bankruptcy on Twitter, in two languages.
• Julien knew someone who would take 20 minutes to plan out a tweet. As RT's and passed links grow in importance, perfection in copywriting grows in importance. Communicating on the internet is skillset to be learned.
• Julien: Intimacy seems to trump everything in a trust relationship. All things being equal or not equal, you want to do business with people you like.
• Chris: After first PodCamp, he and Chris Penn sat there, miserable and tired, and had to watch the What Sucked About PodCamp video. (But it was the start of a movement. I thought of this story when a few folks trashed the 140conf. We'll see who starts a movement, the critics or Jeff Pulver.)
  

Aaron Strout (@AaronStrout) - CMO, Powered, Inc.
Brian Morrissey (@bmorrissey) - Digital Editor at Adweek
David Berkowitz (@dberkowitz) - Emerging Media Director, 360i
Hadley Stern (@hadleystern) - Vice-President, Fidelity Labs
Peter Fasano (@pfasano) - Principal/Lead Catalyst, Mass+Logic
Twitter as GPS for the Greater Social Media Mesh

• Brian: brands are going to want to move into demand generation, not just demand fulfillment.
• Peter: auto responses to every mention of a keyword mention don't matter. But context and passion does matter.
• Brian: Don't always be selling.
• David: (haiku) Twitter GPS/Once you turn on the tweetstream/You can't part with it.
• Peter wants to know how do you manage your dashboard? What are you doing?
• Hadley asks, if it's not Twitter, what is the sea change in social media?

I gave Aaron Strout the award for Best Moderator at the conference for this panel. He asked questions, shaped the discussion, gave his panelists a chance to shine, and didn't try to overwhelm them.

Richard Nash (@R_Nash) - former publisher of Soft Skull Press; publishing guru

• Publishing: a tiny industry perched atop a massive hobby.
• Twitter will not save publishing. And Publishing should not be saved.
• Clearly Twitter is rather good at bringing people together.
  

Ami Greko (@ami_with_an_i) - Digital Marketing Manager, Macmillan.

• Publishing is a very old-school process. Lots of silos. She worked a lot of years as a publicist, and didn't know anyone who worked in a bookstore.

Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee)

• When do I do my real job?? When was caring not a real job?
• Social media, I actually prefer to call it "business." (@TatsuyaNakagawa added on Twitter, "or just 'marketing.'")

Wyclef Jean (@wyclef) - multi-platinum Haitian-American musician, actor, producer and former-member of the hip hop trio The Fugees. Wyclef has sold more than 31 million albums.

• What will help Haiti develop? Education is important, but JOBS. Until you bring business and investment, you will always have a group of kids who are sick.
• I feel like I'm in the Jetsons. Everyone in front of me has a computer.
  

Aliza Sherman (@alizasherman)
twitter and Small Business

• If you want to make money, come up with a good idea, provide a good product and good service, and then use the tools that are right for you to reach the right people.
• We are measuring small business success by big business standards. The right 15 followers may be much better than 1500 for a small business. (I applauded this one!)
  

Marcy Shinder (@marcyshinder)
twitter and Small Business

• I've never met a small business owner who I don't think should be on Twitter.
• Benchmark your business against other small businesses.
• Use it as an ESP tool: predict the future for your industry, your peers, etc.
• How do you convince clients to buy into twitter? Part of it is storytelling, stories they can relate to.

What? You still want more? Aaron Strout did some live blogging at 140 Character Conference, and he caught some panels I missed.

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Brag Basket is back from NYC

Each Friday, I open the Brag Basket for the weekend. Today, finally home from New York City, we jump right into the Brag Basket.

This is designed as a fun place for you to share your projects and accomplishments. But you can also cheer for other people, give shout outs, congratulate, and even give someone a well-deserved pat on the back.

Think that bragging is a bad thing? Read how Tony explains the Brag Basket.

The Brag Basket is open for everyone, whether from a small town, a big city, or anywhere in the world. (But it's true that I love small town brags!)

Will you put something in the Brag Basket this week? You can brag on a friend, your own project, yourself, others, anything! Make it personal, and not just an ad. You don't need special permission, a