Last week we conducted a live web panel discussion here – Taking Your Brand Online – with Chris Brogan,[http://www.chrisbrogan.com] Guy Kawasaki [www.alltop.com], David Meerman Scott[www.davidmeermanscott.com] and me as part four of a five part series aimed at helping small business owners get up and running and successfully marketing on and offline.

We always receive way more questions than we can answer during the call so I thought I would grab a few that we did not have a chance to get to and post those answers here.

1) Q: What’s the one advice, one thing you think a small company starting up with social media should do?

A: There really are so many ways to utilize the various social media tools available to the small business, such as blogs, twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, and many people want to jump in and test the waters on all.

However, the first thing you should is listen and watch.In order to learn how businesses are effectively using social media tools, or at least how you might use them, you need sit on the sidelines and observe. One of the best ways to do this is to employ a free tool such as Google Reader and subscribe to a number industry related blogs so you can see first hand how others are using social media day to day.

2) Q: What is the best way to film and get a youtube video on the web?

Youtube actually makes the process very easy. First, of course you need to record and perhaps edit your video and save it one of the more common file formats such a MOV, MPEG4 or AVI.

Then you must create a free youtube account. Once you’ve completed both of these steps you simply login and hit “upload a video” and follow the onscreen instructions. You will have the opportunity to name, describe and tag your video and if you are using this for marketing purposes I suggest you take the time to complete this step thoroughly.

Once you save your upload YouTube converts it to a flash file for viewing by anyone on the YouTube site (unless you make it a private file) and creates code that allows you to embed the video and a video player on your web site or blog.

3) Q: Some Twitterers are unrelenting marketers, and I stop following them.  Any tips on how not to be overbearing, yet still being effective at marketing?

A: Use your own experience as a bit of a guide here. If you don’t receive value in terms of content from the people you follow on twitter most will unfollow.

People build followings on twitter, as they do in many other social media platforms, because the consistently have and share something useful.

That must be your goal as well as you build a following. Once you’ve earned the right to the occasional pitch your readers will allow and in some cases welcome it after you’ve built trust first. Of course, even that trust can be violated if you abuse it.

Also, don’t forget to join me for the next live webinar panel discussion with Ken Yancey, Jr, CEO of SCORE [www.score.org], Tim Berry, founder of Palo Alto Software [www.paloalto.com], and Rich Sloan author of StartUpNation[www.startupnation.com] to talk about starting a business on Wednesday, May 20th at 9am PDT/Noon EDT

Register at the link to the left or here, and you can listen to all past recordings in addition to joining us live on the 20th.

Half of all new product revenues come from the introduction and early stages of a product’s life cycle.   But what about brands?  Can you create a whole new life cycle by re-launching your brand online?

Sure you can.  In fact, brand managers have been working overtime on finding the best ways to keep their brands at your fingertips .  Here are some of the best online brand building tools and how you can use them to build a powerful brand presence online. As a small business, you have a lot of the same online marketing tools available to you as the big companies.

1. Blogging:  Blogging isn’t just for individuals.  It’s a wonderful way to personalize and humanize a brand that’s being perceived as too big or too corporate.  The Wal-Mart brand has really taken a beating in that area over the years.  So when I ran into their blog a couple of years ago, I was pleasantly surprised at how fun it was to read and how truly informative the articles were.  As it turns out, the writers are all real-life buyers and their writing and bios show a real enthusiasm for their topic.  I actually left a comment with a question about a toy and almost fell off my chair when I got an e-mail from the writer with a direct link to where I could get this hard-to-find-toy!
2. Microblogging (Twitter):  Now that Oprah has a Twitter account, we can be sure that Twitter has truly arrived as a “brand enhancement tool.” Today’s consumers want a relationship with their brands.  They want to know that there are real people behind the products and services that they buy.  Best Buy’s Chief Marketing Officer, Barry Judge has his own blog and Twitters as “@BestBuyCMO” just looking at his Twitter stream makes me feel a little closer to the Best Buy brand.
3. Online Videos (You Tube):  If you want to get your brand extra visibility in Google, then put up a video.  If your brand has “before and after” demonstration value, then you can’t afford NOT to use YouTube or post videos on your site.  You can’t mention using videos online without mentioning BlendTec’s Will it Blend Videos.  These videos are so popular and so viral because they do a fantastic job of BOTH being fun AND demonstrating the strength and features of the actual product.   Other ways to use video are to actually teach your customers how to use your product or service
4. Social Networks (Facebook Fan Page or Group): Starting a group or a fan page on social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn is a wonderful way to get your customers to interact with each other about your brand and the ways in which your brand plays out in their lives.  Johnson and Johnson’s McNeil Pediatrics sponsors a group on Facebook called ADHD Moms.  They provide a space for moms to share info and links to information for moms to share and reference.  You might think that creating a group on a third party site would dilute your brand, but that’s not true.  Creating groups and communities outside your web space actually grows your brand’s fan base.
5. Widgets : If having your logo plastered on clothes, shoes and hats is cool, then having your widget appear on web sites and blogs is even cooler.   Wal-Mart has developed a series of recipe widgets.  These not only keep the brand name on your site – but also whet your appetite for goodies you can pick out at your local store.  Inexpensive. Viral.  Practical.  Communicates your value.  Excellent use of widgets to build brand.
6. Crowdsourcing: A great way to move your brand into the future is to use some of the crowdsourcing tools that are available such as UserVoice, Idea Scale or Suggestion Box.  Crowdsourcing lets your customers suggest what improvements or changes you will make next.  Starbucks was one of the first big global brands to launch crowdsourcing to its customer base through its My Starbucks Idea web site.  While it might seem frightening to put the fate of your brand in the hands of your customers, it’s not only an inexpensive way to collect ideas, but it gets your customers involved in the process as they vote ideas up or down.  It also serves as a marketing communications opportunity as Starbucks comments on the status of ideas as they are implemented.  Customers get to put their two cents in.  You get to save thousands and thousands of dollars in market research.  As their ideas are implemented, customers become loyal to your brand and refer it to their friends. Does it get any better than that?

Taking your brand online isn’t a choice any more. It’s a necessity.  The ways that you can bring your brand to life online are only limited by your creativity.  In fact, the technology that’s required to implement any of the tools I talked about here are mostly free or relatively low cost.  So there is no excuse to hold back.

* * *

Ivana Taylor is the Founder of www.DIYMarketers.com , a place where in-house marketers go to get low-cost, high-impact marketing strategies. She is also a contributing expert for Small Business Trends.

On May 6th at 9 a.m. PDT, I will be joined by Guy Kawasaki, author of Art of the Start, Chris Brogan of ChrisBrogan.com and David Meerman Scott, author of World Wide Rave, to discuss taking your brand online. This is the fourth in a series of five webinars brought to you by HP, creators of MarketSplash and the Creative Studio –- online tools to make your marketing simple, professional and affordable

I’ll be asking this all-star panel to cover many of the strategies and tactics that small business owners need to consider and tap on the way to creating a total web presence.

In today’s rapidly evolving world of marketing, few things are more important than being found online when and where your prospects are looking

For most small businesses, a website is an acknowledged part of being in business, but it’s not enough.

In this session we will dive into

• Ways to create and spread content that gets read and found,
• How to take advantage of local and social search
• How to make online PR work for your business
• Optimizing online brand assets such as social profiles
• Social networks and other online marketing outposts
• Monitoring and measuring your brand online

This is a rare opportunity to hear from some of best and brightest online. We’ll keep it fast moving, cover lots of practical tips, and reveal all of our favorite online tools- come ready to take a ton of notes. We’ll be taking questions live too, so start thinking about what you might like to ask Chris, David, Guy and me.

Register for event here and receive reminders as well as a link to the recorded archive.

A funny thing happened on the way to social media tools like Twitter becoming so popular. More and more consumers started to find that one of the best ways to get help about how to use the products and services they had purchased was to ask other users who happened to be online.  (People have done this for some time in forums, but social networks have a more open and public feel.)

Recently, brands of all shapes and sizes have taken note and are rushing to set-up help desk type of response on sites like Facebook and Twitter. It always makes sense to go where your prospects and engage them in the way they choose, but another, perhaps unexpected phenomenon is starting to develop due to this new practice.

Effectively, brands are moving their customer service into the public eye. Now, when a customer has a question or even a complaint, millions of viewers have access to when and how they handle the request.

This may make some organizations a little uneasy, but I think it offers an incredible opportunity.

First off, I think it makes the brands we interact with potentially more accountable to provide the kind of service and follow-up they promise.

But, and here’s where I think the big opportunity lies, it also provides smart marketers with an incredible stage to demonstrate just how responsive, engaging, and effective their customer service is.

Millions of viewers, some of whom may not even be aware of your products, can literally lurk and watch how you really operate with your customers. The sales implications of this are enormous and reason enough in my opinion to explore using twitter for some portion of you customer service.

I know that not every customer is on Twitter or even wants to interact this way, but growing numbers are. I’ve experienced some very good customer service inside of Twitter, and it works for me.

If you think your brand could benefit by providing customer service on Twitter, there are enterprise tools for customer service interaction on twitter being built right into EPR and CRM tools but here are a few free tools that might make your job a little easier.

• Tweetdeck: Tweetdeck can operate a bit like your desktop dashboard to help you set-up searches for key terms and respond directly.
• Seesmic desktop: Another desktop tool that offers lots of flexibility in terms of monitoring searches and groups.
• HootSuite: Hootsuite does a number of things, but for support one of the biggest tools is the ability to manage multiple accounts so you can easily jump back and forth from your personal account to the brand support account.
• Splitweet: Another pretty cool multiple Twitter account manager that also allows you to monitor your brand mentions and has a mac desktop client.
• Tweet2tweet: This tool allows you to put two Twitter names in and see the full discussion between the two much like Facebook’s wall to wall. This can help understand a thread of messages or give you a view of an ongoing support thread you’re engaged in.

Image source: Manchester Library

Springwise writes about new businesses, most of which are spotted by our network of 8,000+ Springspotters, who submit concepts they think are smart and innovative. Since those businesses can be anywhere in the world, our first point of entry is usually a website. Which means we look at hundreds of small business sites every week. Some of them tick all the right boxes: easy-to-find information, appealing design and an engaging tone of voice, all working together to showcase a product or service and brand.

Others… Well, they seem to have missed a few fundamentals. So before you dive into online branding and join the social web, make sure you’ve covered the basics:

1. ROLL UP YOUR SLEEVES
If you own a small business and are planning to launch a website,  you want to be able to make minor updates on your own. If you are using a web designer, this is something he or she will need to take into account. The aim is for you to be able to make simple changes: add a new staff member to your “team” page, change prices, or fine-tune a product description. Same thing applies if you already have a website: find someone to show you which software to use, and how to make textual changes. HTML isn’t scary, and anyone can learn the basics in a few hours. (Related: Seth Godin asks “Why aren’t you really good at graphic design?“)

2. KEEP YOUR SITE UP-TO-DATE & SWEAT THE DETAILS
This follows from the above: if you need to involve (and pay) someone every time you want to make a change to your site, you’ll waste time and money, and might even avoid updates just to save money. Which means your website will soon look out-of-date. If customers can spot that you haven’t updated your site in months or even years, you’re hurting your brand. If it’s 2009 and the copyright line on your website still reads © 2008, that’s as much a sign of neglect as dusty shelves in a grocery store.

3. AVOID THE FLASH TRAP
Yes, a Flash-based site can look stunning. But if your visitors just want to find out if your salon is open on Sunday, a glitzy intro is an annoying waste of time. If you’re convinced that animated graphics are the best way to show off your product, make it optional: let your visitors decide if and when they want the full tour.

4. TEXT NEEDS TO BE SEARCHABLE
This is something we still see too often: text in jpegs and gifs. The bulk of text on your website needs to be in text format. If you can highlight the text with your mouse, you’re fine. If not, it’s likely that the text is inside an image, where it’s generally hidden from search engines. And if you’re looking to get traffic to your website, you don’t want to play hide-and-seek with Google.

5. DON’T MAKE THEM GUESS
Be crystal clear about what you do and what you offer. What are you selling? What does your product do? This is information that needs to be visible on your homepage, and a first-time visitor needs to be able to ‘get it’ as quickly as possible. Use short sentences and illustrative images to get the point across. And make sure that important details are easy for customers and potential customers to find, with as few clicks as possible: how to contact you, where they can find you, when you’re open, etc.

Done? Then it’s time to start cultivating your online garden.

(Image credit)

Now, this was ten years ago, mind you. In the intervening decade, large businesses have not only learned the Web, they’ve embraced it. They realize that they live or die by how their brand is expressed online. 

But small business? That’s another story. While every single Fortune 500 (and most likely, every Fortune 5000) company has a sophisticated website, Michael reports that just 42% of small businesses do. And of those that do, my (admittedly anecdotal) experience is that the majority of SMB sites out there are, well, not particularly brand friendly, to put it mildly. Most of them are static brochures, devoid of personality and life.

What a shame! Or spun in the eternally optimistic world view of an entrepreneur… what an opportunity!

Most small business websites are not very good. That means you have a chance to really stand out. And that’s a huge competitive advantage.

At this point you’re probably rolling your eyes and saying “Yeah, right. Now I have to spend thousands of dollars making something that’s just going to break in a few months, and then I’ll have to pay another grand to fix it.”

Not true. With small business and the web, the best way to start is to start small, and start social. Your business is a network of relationships – between vendors, clients, colleagues, and co workers. So instead of worrying about boiling your website ocean, trying simmering the social seas instead.

Step 1: Head to Wordpress or Moveable Type and invest half an hour learning how to start a blog. Then start talking about your business. If you’re not inclined, or that good at writing, find someone who is – a co worker, your spouse, your friend. But I’d trust yourself – you started this business, and my guess is that you talk about it all day long. Start talking about it online. Good things will start to happen.

Step 2: Branch out into social services, then integrate them into your blog. Again, invest half an hour figuring out Twitter, then do it again for Facebook. Once you have those presences figured out, you can use simple tools called plugins to integrate them both with your blog. Presto, you have now created a social ecosystem around your business!

Step 3: Find out where people are talking about your business (or your competitors!) and get involved there as well. If you haven’t checked out what people are saying on Yelp, Yahoo Local, and similar services, you are doing yourself a major disservice. And if you haven’t engaged with those services’ tools for merchants to respond, you’re simply nuts.

Step 4: Integrate email. At every possible opportunity, you want to be gathering email addresses from customers, vendors, and colleagues. Email addresses are the business cards of the online world, and used properly, become a key way to get your online business ecosystem humming.

Step 5: Cultivate your ecosystem. A web presence, like a business, is a living organism that needs care and feeding. So get into the habit of tending to it every day. Add a blog post, then promote that post via email, Twitter and Facebook. Respond to a complaint or a compliment on a service like Yelp, then tell your ecosystem about your response. Find a new feature to roll out every week or so – both WordPress and Moveable Type have a wide array of nifty services and tools to chose from.

Lastly, note how your business does in search results. At first, your company’s web presence will probably be non existent. But as you start to post, link to others, and amplify those postings with Twitter and Facebook, something wonderful will happen: your company will start to rank well in organic search – and that means new business leads for your business.

It will be hard at first, but remember, we’re all social creatures. After a while, cultivating your online garden becomes not just good for business, it starts to get fun as well.

I feel like i grew up online. My personal brand barely existed without being online in some form… perhaps email and IM were where it all started, moving quickly to free websites, to my own domains, to my own network of sites… my world – my brand – has nearly always been digital! NOTCOT the name itself came about because of a late night rhyming session to make a random email address between high school homework…. notcot@hotbot.com … So i suppose i can’t speak much to the transition from real world to internet….

BUT… this last week i went more offline than i have in years… all while still checking in on my sites and skimming emails about twice a day briefly for a whole week (sad, isn’t it? how that feels like not working at all?)… it’s certainly helped give me more perspective. Knowing this article was in the works made me more conscious of branding i encountered all around me in my day to day! Also being around older family members who were less techy than usual… seeing the ways they look for information and discuss brands was fascinating! (No, they don’t use maps or google on their phones… and many were just starting to try to make sense of their iPhones and looking things up on wikipedia was this slow and new thing that would come up during dinner conversations…)

I think the singular most crucial question to ask before jumping online is… WHY is someone looking for you online? For example, if you are a restaurant, they probably want your address, hours, and menu… AT THE LEAST. If you are a store, they may want your address, hours, product listings, product availability… you get the point. As a user, there has been nothing less frustrating than searching for more information on a company, finding it online, and then having a completely unusable or outdated site with little to no information. So, DO IT RIGHT. I know so many are jumping on bandwagons left and right these days ~ tossing up  multiple facebook fan pages, twitter accounts, microsites for every product ~ tempting and trendy for sure. And probably the easy answer to “How do i take my brand online?” But done badly they will only hurt in the long run…

While the overhead costs for tossing your brand online and making a few webpages are substantially lower than say… opening a brick and mortar store filled with gorgeous shelving and product from wall to wall… the level of planning and detail ready to go into it should be no less. If you’re going to launch 10 new places to “foster conversation”, make sure you have the team in place to fully engage, respond, and play with the community you are inviting in. If you are launching a twitter account, make sure you have the right person (or people) ready to man the account, check the replies, keep an eye on the search results ~ and respond as promptly as the twitter community is accustomed to! Last thing you’d want would be to appear like the shop everyone tried to stop in to that was always out to lunch, not open, or had rude shop people?

I guess to me ~ taking your brand online, should be approached (conceptually) no differently than taking it public and into the real world! Same best practices apply ~ understand the space and expectations, and exceed them!=)

The study also reported that when looking for local (yes, local) products or services, buyers go first to internet search engines.

That means if you don’t have an effective internet presence you are, plain and simple, losing sales.

Here are a few more reasons to take your brand online:

1. The internet is big, really big. You might be able to significantly expand your business to other geographies
2. The internet makes it easy to market niche products and services.
3. A website is much less expensive than a physical store front
4. Your sales/prospecting machine can operate 24/7
5. The internet can make your offline marketing more effective (e.g. your direct mail campaign can send prospects to your website where you can guide them through the sales process)
6. Parts of the sales process can be automated

Website Basics

Once you decide to invest more of your marketing dollars into harnessing the internet you’ll need a plan. A good place to begin is to develop an effective website. This means you should learn how to:

1. Attract visitors
2. Keep your visitors and help them accomplish their goals
3. Capture leads or sales

Attracting Visitors

Your website will get visitors from a variety of sources including:

• People you send from your offline marketing such as advertising, direct mail, etc.
• Visitors who arrive by clicking on links to your site found in other places on the internet — e.g. partner websites, directories, articles you have submitted to online libraries, social networking sites, signature link in your emails, etc.
• Search engines as a result of a keyword search
• Search engines as a result of pay-per-click advertising ( “sponsored links” in Google)
• Online advertising

All of the above you can either buy or strongly influence.

For example, you can ask other businesses with whom you network to place a link on their website. Associations you belong to often have a directory with a link.

You can also optimize your website to be ranked more highly in the search engines.

Keep Visitors Sticky

Once a visitor has arrived at your site, your job is to persuade them to stay. Unfortunately you have perhaps 5 seconds to convince them.

Here’s how:

1. Design your site to look “right” e.g. if you are a financial planner then your site should ooze trust!
2. Make sure you have a strong headline that touches on something of importance. So, instead of “Welcome to our site” try “Worried About Growing Your Small Business in 2009?”
3. Provide a site structure and navigation that makes it obvious how visitors can accomplish the tasks they came to your site to do.

Collecting leads

Most likely an important goal for you is to collect qualified leads. Your visitor, however, came to accomplish their own goals so obviously there is a balance needed to achieve both objectives.

On each page suggest the next step.

Make it easy for the visitor to be able to contact you or to sign up for a white paper, podcast or other item of value. That means your phone number should be in an obvious place on each page. Please don’t hide it.

If you have to ask for information keep it short.

When you do collect a lead, make sure that you follow-up promptly. Many hosting services will give you the capability to automatically reply or send requested information.

We’ve just touched on the basics of getting your brand online. It may seem like a big hill to climb but you can do it. And please, don’t be too distracted with the social media buzz. Get the basics done first.

See you online!

***

Michael Thompson is an authorized Duct Tape Marketing coach in the Portland, Oregon metro area.  He is a highly regarded professional marketer with over 20 years experience and is known for his immensely practical approach and ideas.

A brand is a collections of symbols and mental associations connected with a company or product. When defining a company’s brand, marketers seek to develop and align the consumers’ expectations, creating the impression that a product has certain qualities that make it unique or special.

In a small business, your brand doesn’t have to be a collection of symbols because you, the small business entrepreneur, are the brand. What you do and say reflects on all aspects of your business. You humanize your business in a way that corporate brand marketers could only dream about. When your customers call to place an order, or to lodge a complaint, they’re having a real interaction with the real person behind the business. They don’t need someone to align their expectations or to create impressions in their head. They’ll have real feelings about your business after interacting with you or after hearing about you from someone they know.

As you move your business online, you might be tempted to take this opportunity to make your business appear larger and more corporate than you really are. This will backfire. It will force you to try to create an intangible brand to replace to the real brand your business already enjoys. Use what already makes your business special: you.

Don’t build a static website full of stock photos of actors dressed like business people starring off into the distance. Include photos of you, your employees and your products and services. Show you and your business in action. Describe in your own words what you do and why you do it. Don’t try to include all of the popular corporate buzzwords.

Google yourself and your business’s name. If the first results are some spring break photos from Cabo San Lucas on MySpace, that’s your brand online and that’s how your potential customers will see you. If you want to be know for your tequila expertise, maybe that’s a good thing, but if you’re a plumber or sell security alarms it might not be the best representation of your business.

Counteract this image by adding more content online. Start a blog and write about what you do. Answer the common questions that your customers ask. Increasingly consumers are researching their options first online, and then calling a local business for service. If someone finds the answer to their question on your website or blog, they’ve just had an experience with you and developed an impression of your brand. If you answered their question well, you’re now an expert in their minds, and you’ve got a new client.

Small business branding online isn’t a good logo, a special font or a catchy phrase. It’s what you do and say, and how your traits come through, not just in business, but in all aspects of life. It is trust established between individuals and not as theme music.

You might think that when you move your business brand online, you’ll lose much of the personal interaction enjoyed at a physical store or office. With a vibrant online community, however, not only will you interact with your customers and client base, but you’ll do so in a manner that’s far more efficient than any face-to-face conversation or phone call. These tips below will help you build and promote your online brand.

1. Lay the foundation. Think of the online arm of your business as the digital version of a physical store. You’d want to keep your storefront neat, clean and organized. That’s exactly the purpose your online brand should serve. Your website should be as fast as possible, with content that is appropriate and easily-accessible. Your business’ involvement in any social network or other online portal should reflect the image and verbiage of your brand, whether it’s polished and professional or loose and informal.

2. Establish relevancy. Even if all you’re selling are your ideas, it’s essential to foster a community that will read what you have to say and promote your brand for you. A company blog is a great place to start, as it gives you and your readers a vehicle through which to interact. Establish your expertise by posting regularly on pertinent issues within your industry. If you can angle these posts such that their content can benefit others, do so. Encourage feedback through a comments section. Reply to every comment you receive, in a personalized, thoughtful and timely fashion, without fail. Network with other bloggers in your industry, read their work and comment on the posts that move you most.

3. Inspire viral word-of-mouth marketing. The ripple effect from social networks and the blogosphere can propel a fledgling brand into superstardom. Sites like Twitter have been used by entrepreneurs like Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki, 77,800+ followers) and politicians like President Obama (@barackobama, 374,000+ followers) to great success. With Twitter, you can promote your company’s blog posts while simultaneously interacting with other Twitter users on an informal basis. Your group of followers then becomes your sounding board for ideas, questions and feedback, and they’re the individuals that will promote the best of your content through the almighty retweet (RT).

At Trend Hunter (@trendhunter), we regularly share the feedback from our Twitter followers with the whole team and implement or alter features on the site accordingly. On a number of occasions, we’ve communicated with a member of our community via e-mail, followed up with Twitter and received their Twitter reply in lieu of an e-mail response. It’s a simple, free tool with an impressive reach that cannot be underestimated.

Fostering an online community isn’t easy. It takes time, and a decent amount of effort at the start. However, with the right blend of shared expertise, social networking, interaction with key industry players, and killer content, you’ll have mixed a killer concoction that will propel your online brand skyward.