I confess, I'm on a crusade. Too many business owners are struggling and merely surviving when they should be thriving. Too many people are leaving corporate jobs to start their first business and failing. Too many people are treating social media as if it is magic beans.

I call it 'Committing random acts of social media'.

I don't know how else to describe it except that they are 'putting the cart before the horse'. Or let me put it this way:

If Facebook (or Twitter or blogging or LinkedIn) is the answer then what exactly is the question?

My background and experience cause me to first strive to understand the problem, then pick the tools and/or techniques that best solve that problem. When it comes to social media, most business owners are doing exactly the opposite.  They are energetically operating the tool (Facebook, Twitter, etc) and hoping it will have a positive impact somewhere. They are flailing. They are committing random acts of social media. And expending untold amounts of time, energy, and money in the process.

How about if we try a different, more analytical and methodical approach? 

I prefer to start by focusing on your customer and their journey from complete stranger to paying customer.  Some people call this the customer's buying process. I call it your customers' Buyer Highway. I've developed a framework (hence the name Buyer Highway Framework) that allows us to put that buying process under a microscope and analyze it.

By doing so, we can learn what you are doing that works, so that you know to do more of it. We learn what you can stop doing because it has no effect.  We learn the issues that are causing your prospects to get derailed, or causing them to abort the journey prematurely. 

Then we work together to develop specific solutions to the specific issues revealed by that analysis. Suddenly, you're using social media with precision.  More like a surgeon's scalpel than a broadsword. And because each activity is now tied to a specific issue (such as too many prospects say "I'll have to discuss it with my husband; and then never come back) you'll be able to easily measure their effectiveness. 

ROI comes when you focus your marketing efforts on
activities that directly impact your customers' buying process.

To learn for about the Buyer Highway Framework and to attend a free webinar, visit my new website:

http://www.BuyerHighway.com

Most business owners believe that they know the value they provide to their clients.  Invariably however the client's perception of that value is different.  Sometimes quite different.

I was working with Bill, the owner of a company manufacturing soaps and body washes for hard-code yoga enthusiasts (They are called, 'yogis'). Bill wanted to sell his product by the case to yoga studios. His initial proposed value proposition was that his products would provide the yoa studio with an additional source of revenue and profit. Bill had already convinced a few studio owners to try his product.

Well clients say the darndest things.  We interviewed the studio owners and discovered that their perspective was quite different from his: This is a product designed specifically to meet the needs of a hard-core yogi.  It cannot be found at Wal-Mart or Target or even Whole Foods. It brings the hard-core yogis into the studio when they otherwise have no reason to come in.  By carrying Bill's product, the Yoga studio now gets a chance to engage with the hard-core yogis, telling them about new classes, products, etc.

This one little insight drastically changed Bill's messaging and made it more effective.  Our Buyer Highway Framework allows us to uncover these insights and more.

A few short years ago, many a business relied upon the Yellow Pages as their only marketing activity.  In fact, they needed to think about marketing just once a year when the Yellow Pages sales guy showed up.  They would spend a couple of hours revising and updating their add and then forget about it until next year. Life was Good.

Today I see far too many people taking that same set-and-forget attitude about their marketing, particularly social media.  I call it the Yellow Pages Mindset.

The first word in 'social media' is 'social', which means conversation with your friends, colleagues, fans, and clients. If you are using social media to just blast out a constant stream of marketing messages then it is almost certain that no one is listening to you.

Think about it this way: it's a social contract. Your audience is giving you some of its precious seconds of their bandwidth.  If you don't give them something THEY perceive as commensurate in value they'll stop listening.

Yesterday a business owner told me that they are not getting any ROI from Twitter.  When I asked how they were using Twitter, I learned they were essentially using it as a megaphone or broadcasting tool.

No dialog.  No listening.

Aaaarrrgggg. It's called 'Social Media' for a reason: it's supposed to be social. 

I'm sure you've been to a networking function, echanged business cards with other attendees, then discovered the next day that you were receiving several new newsletters that you never signed up for. How did that make you feel?  SO stop doing the same thing on Twitter!

Twitter is a relationship and conversation tool. Use it to have tw0-way conversation with people in your tribe or who are prospects who already know what you do.  It will bring you closer together. And in the process refresh the image in their minds of who you are and what you do.

Twitter is a very efficient tool if you remember what it's very good at: maintaining and nurturing personal connections with the people important to your business.

A few years ago, both WordPress and TypePad made it easy to use their plaforms as a website as well as a blog. As a result, Wordpress has become the favorite way to quickly build a website. Google has also changed the way they calculates a site's authority so that a co-located blog and website each can benefit from each other's authority.

There are good reasons for having your blog separate (on a different domain) though.  If you anticipate that changes in the market will cause a shift in your business to the point where a new website and new domain name are called for, the separate blog makes sense.

For example, we're about to launch a new website on a new dmain name.  We're also po=utting together several tool-specific websites (the tools being facebook, twitter, linkedIn, etc)  I really don't want to maintain a separate blog for each of those websites.  One blog covering all the topics makes better sense.

We all know the story of Jack and the Beenstalk. Jack planted magic beans and overnight a giant beanstalk grew.

I see far too many business owners who think that social media tools (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) are magic beans. They're not.  They are just tools.

An analogy I often use is the hammer vs the house.  You can buy the world's best hammer.  I can teach you exaactly the best way to hold the hammer and how to pound in the nails. Knowing how to use the hammer to build a house is a completely different matter.

So stop looking for magic beans. Start thinking in terms of developing a strategy.

...Start talking about the problems you solve.

I have a client who has created a really nifty product. I've been interviewing her initial customers and have been amazed and delighted at stories her customers are telling me. I'm hearing how this product solves a problem like no other product on the market.  Her customers are practically delivering this product's positioning and messaging strategies on a silver platter. Three separate market niches have become very clear.

None of this is reflected in the website copy. It's all about the product, not the problem this product solves.

Think about the last time you used Google to search for information or an answer: After Google delivered 30 million search results, you started going through them sequentially, spending a few seconds on each website.  If you didn't find the answer in those first few seconds you hit the Back button and went on to the next one.

Today people will not spend time trying to figure out if your product will solve their problem. You have to tell them.

Use those precious first few sentences on your website to talk about the problem your product solves.

I was listening to a podcast buy an SEO expert. He was interviewing a client who said:

"I get lots of traffic to my website but very few of them convert."

The SEO expert began to postulate reasons why, "Maybe it's this", "Maybe it's that".  I found myself shouting at the iPod asking, "Why are you guessing?"

This is a perfect example of why we place such great emphasis on understanding your customers, why they buy, and how they buy.  Don't guess, ask them. A little bit of research and a few skillful interviews and you would know your customers' buying process well enough that the answer would be obvious.

Not only that. You'll know exactly what to do in order to fix the problem.

That's because while they may have the problem you solve for them, they have not reached that Point of Epiphany where they say "I have to solve this problem, I can't live with it any longer."

Knowing this will prevent you from spending an inordinate amount of time trying to convence them to buy now. This knowledge also allows you create activities designed specifically for people in this stage of their buying process.

Steve Mitnz, The Ethics Sage, has started a second blog specifically dealing with workplace ethics issues, called - appropriately enough, Workplace Ethics Advice. When he called upon us to create this second blog for him we were eager to help.

Workplace Ethics Advice is designed in a question-and-answer format with it's own form for submitting your questions.

One of the biggest benefits of TypePad is the ability to create multiple blogs within one account (You need to have an Unlimited account at $14.95/mo to do this) Creating a second - or third, fourth, fifth, etc - blog takes two mouse-clicks. For example, I have about six blogs in my own TypePad account.