To many people, “networking” conjures up images of awkward breakfast meetings or even pyramid selling. Which is a shame, because in its broadest sense, networking is a great way of getting clients, and the science of good networking is neither unethical nor difficult to master. And as usual, the internet has made it all much easier.

Face-to-face networking
The old way is to join local networking groups, and ply your wares at regular meetings. You get your name out there, and then when someone finally needs your kind of service at some point in the future, you’re in the frame. Until then, you help your fellow networkers out with anything you can, keeping the relationships alive. For this, you have to be as reliable as your word – and that’s where web-based customer relationship management (CRM) software comes in.

A CRM is like an address book, but one that tracks all touch-points between you and a contact, allowing you to follow up effectively on any promises you’ve made, and on potential work, however tentative or long-term.

As well as remembering cliché icebreakers like birthdays, CRMs can log all email conversations or phone calls you’ve had with a contact, accessible from your phone or laptop as well as your office. How good would it be to be have all of this information available whenever someone contacts you?

Not only that, but you can make seemingly throwaway promises long ahead (“I’ll call you in the spring to see how that went…”) and always follow up; such systems will email you reminders way into the future.

The industry-dominating web-based CRM, SalesForce (www.salesforce.com), often scares small businesses with its cost and complexity. But now, competent and attractive products like Highrise (www.highrisehq.com) and BatchBook (www.batchblue.com) make such technology available to all cheaply, quickly and with easy set-up.

Getting social online
It’s a mark of the times that “social networking” has taken on a meaning of its own, but make no mistake – this is real networking. Social networking sites give your business the chance to develop relationships with new types of clientele, winning evangelists who’ll pass the word along for you, helping to create a network of people that you’d struggle to reach otherwise.

LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) is the choice for many professionals, being built around the whole notion of new introductions through trusted contacts. You can post your reasons for being there (career, expertise etc) and answer people’s questions and queries in your particular area, gaining friends and influence along the way. This is traditional networking on steroids, so if you’re not a member – join. For a perfectly usable basic membership, it’s free.

However, don’t ignore Facebook (www.facebook.com). With its Facebook Pages function, you can have a commercially minded “fan” page for your business. Add a link to this page on your company website and email signatures and you’ll start to get visitors, who can join in the conversation around your brand, posting on your “wall” and conversing with you and others. Post some compelling content, dish out some free advice or help to the right person here and there, and you stand to gain both friends and clients.

Dip your toes in!
The online networking work can seem alien, with its own norms and vocabulary, but nowadays you really can’t afford to ignore it. Keep up the traditional networking, manage it well with a decent CRM, and join a couple of online services (with a pledge to do something on each once a week), and pull ahead of your competition and their Rolodexes!

This article first appeared in Essential Magazine Marbella

It is a constant source of frustration and amazement to us how few companies have an active, up to date website. Most are old and broken, which is sad because with a little understanding and effort (and not necessarily much money), most businesses could benefit greatly from using today’s web.

The internet is dead…
Five years ago, things were very different. The small businessman wanting a presence online would remortgage his house, brave a visit to a web company (who’d blind him with science and slap him with a huge bill), then more than likely spend an equally scary sum paying for mysterious “search engine optimisation” to get the site to “number one in Google”.

And then… well frankly, normally nothing. The site got a bit of traffic, nobody really kept it updated, and a few years later, there it is: unloved and unvisited. The businessman can’t really articulate what went wrong, and so doesn’t know what to do to put it right.

Meanwhile, nothing short of a web revolution was happening under his nose.

…long live the internet!
So what’s changed? Simple: community. The web today isn’t about companies dictating from on high: Nowadays, people find and talk to each other about companies without their help. Who hasn’t read online user-generated content (reviews, rants, praise, exposés) on the internet? Hotels, music, airlines, destinations, white goods, employers – we assess, reject, choose, update, plan, reminisce, share… and all away from the sites of the companies who often provide what we’re talking about.

So what’s a small company to do? Once you’ve accepted the fact that authenticity, transparency and honesty are absolute givens, there are practical changes you can make in order to gain traffic and customers. Here are just two:

1: Start a blog
A blog is a simple way of adding new content to your site. Once you have one, you don’t need a web company to update it – it’s as easy as using Microsoft Word. If you simply write a 200-word piece every week about something to do with your business (New product? New store? Roadworks outside? Holiday opening times? Famous customer? It really doesn’t have to be world-changing…), Google will over time index your efforts and your site will appear when people search for your products and services. At the same time you also benefit from positioning yourself as an expert online in your chosen field.

You can get a blog for free (try www.blogger.com, wordpress.com or livejournal.com) – or for a more professional look, get a web company to incorporate one into your website.

2. Get yourself out there
People will talk about your business on local expat web forums, on Facebook, on TripAdvisor (if you’re a hotel, bar, restaurant) and so on. The point is, they’re not necessarily coming to your website to make a buying decision any more. So to have your say, you need to be where your customers are. You need to sign up on these sites and join in (be they forums, reviews, blogs or whatever). Someone praising you? Thank them and provide a site link. Someone got a complaint? Publicly put it right. Competitor no longer offering something you do? Suggest an alternative… you.

Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) can help you find where people are talking about you. It will take some keywords and your email address, then search the whole web continuously on your behalf for your terms, emailing you whenever you get mentioned. Start with your brand name and your main products or services and wait for it to find interesting conversations going on right now about you.

The most important thing is to join in, however strange it feels at first. “Get it” now before your competitors do, and reap the benefits.

Next time: Networking. This article first appeared in “Essential” magazine.

By Phil Morse

Mention “big marketing budget” or “in-house PR team” to the average small business, and you could well be met with rolling eyes. The majority of enterprises the world over are small to medium-sized, where margins are tight and every euro of marketing has to be hard won.

While magazine and newspaper advertising is still pretty much a given, if you’re ready to take your efforts up a notch, there are many cost effective methods to choose from. Over this series of posts, we will be looking at a few simple tricks and tactics for getting your name out there in lean times, starting with direct marketing.

Letters
A short sales pitch, briefly explaining your services or latest offer and asking people to get in contact can be an effective way to introduce your business to potential new clients, or keep yourself at the front of existing clients’ minds.

In transient markets and hard times, there is a reassurance about well-presented direct mail that can really help you to grow trust in your brand. Combined with an email blast, this kind of approach can be especially valuable.

If you set up and include a special web or email address for people to get in touch (www.yourbusiness.com/januaryoffer, or januaryoffer@yourbusiness.com, for instance) you can easily measure how effective a direct mail campaign has been.

Another simple tip to get more “bang for your buck”: Studies have shown that simply handwriting addresses can lead to a 300% increase in your “read rate”.

Email marketing
Ubiquitous old email, with all its faults, is here to stay. If you can cut through the clutter in someone’s inbox, it is still a cost-effective form of advertising.

Emails can be as simple as text-only messages, BCC’ed to your contact list from your desktop PC. Get above a few dozen though, and issues creep in – not least that there are email quotas on most public servers, and you could be blocked for spamming.

A branded email, possibly with a professionally designed template that looks great on all recipients’ PCs, is a far smarter step. There are many online services that can handle the sending of it for you (Constant Contact and Vertical Response are two of the most popular), and once you’ve had you template designed, it can be used again and again with minimal changes.

If you want to reach many new clients, it is possible to rent email addresses by the thousand. Once you get to this level, it does become essential to enlist professional help, as data rental is a somewhat cut-throat business, with potentially expensive pitfalls for the inexperienced.

Following up
One of the most important things is to follow up your direct marketing promptly. Research has show that following up emails with a phone call five minutes after they’re opened can dramatically increase the closing rate than if you leave it for a few days. Email software can show you in real time your customers opening their emails: make use of it!

Direct marketing needn’t cost a lot of money to be relevant and distinctive: a little thought and careful execution can reap big rewards.

This article first appeared in Essential magazine

So if you’re not a pop music fan, here’s the story: UK TV’s biggest talent show, X Factor, turns out its annual pop wannabe winner. Winner releases insipid ballad. Record goes to number one at Christmas. No surprises there – it’s been like that for years in the UK.

This year, however, the internet changed all of that. Rage Against The Machine’s 1992 song “Killing in the Name Of”, a strident rock ditty that certainly isn’t a ballad, pipped X Factor’s prodigy to the post. This caused mass satisfaction in the UK among those who, according to RATM guitarist Tom Morello, “are tired of being spoon-fed … ballads”.

Tapping into the public consciousness
So what’s all of this got to do with your business on the web? Actually, if you’re clever, lots. In the words of the playmaker in this little bit of mischief, an anonymous British part-time rock DJ and logistics manager whose idea – dreamt up with his wife in their living room in front of their home PC – sparked all of this:

“I think it just shows that in this day and age, if you want to say something, then you can – with the help of the internet and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. If enough people are with you, you can beat the status quo.”

For “beat the status quo” read “beat our competitors”. For “say something”, read “sell something”.

Now do you get a feel for the sea change that has happened in commerce thanks to the internet? X Factor, with all the power of “old media” behind it, was tripped up by a low budget “new media” campaign.

Where does all of this leave businesses?
I’m not going to explain to you what Twitter is, or why Facebook Groups were important here. What I am going to point out are a few home truths that anybody wishing to see their business thrive in the new decade will need to take on board:

• Consumers find each other nowadays online and make decisions without the help of corporations
• These decisions can make or break whole business enterprises
• Authenticity is key for all businesses in the new economy
• Everything is moving really quickly and we’re all feeling in the dark, but that doesn’t negate the need for tomorrow’s winners to start working out how to tap in to the new order
• What you do can be truly mould-breaking (people are even speculating that now, this could become an annual event, the public deciding on a track with which to take on the X Factor winner)
• You probably won’t get it right first time (our hero tried the same thing last year and had little success, but he says it taught him all he needed to know to pull off his coup this year)

Action points? Buy a book on social media. Find out what your customers think of you. Find a problem that’s really itching them, and scratch it good. Document it all online. Stay close to your customers with things like Facebook, Twitter, forums and so on. Take part from the other side in areas of your life that aren’t associated with your business. Have fun – social media is hard to get at first, but it really is addictive.

And keep trying. You may succeed when you least expect it.

by Phil Morse

As part of our exciting expansion plans, from Monday 16 November, Reedus Design has moved to new offices, at Severo Ochoa 28 6° C 29603 Marbella Málaga, Spain. Our phone number remains the same.

The new location gives us better facilities and more importantly the room we needed to expand.

For our local clients, the new offices (which are on the sixth floor of the Single Home building, the blue glass tower near the marina) have plenty of free parking and more room for meetings. Feel free to pop in for a coffee and a look around!