Word-of-mouth will make your company popular on the social network

The majority of North American’s have a smart phone. And as mobility grows in popularity and frequency, it makes sense for businesses seeking new clients to utilize a few of the thousands of new apps available for marketing your business on a local level. With this in mind, your potential customers are using their iPhones, Android phones, and any device with wireless access to help them decide where to eat, get their car fixed, go for a massage, or find a pet-sitter. Local-based marketing is huge for businesses of all sizes.

So what are you waiting for, be sure you’re marketing your company on one of the following five localized business marketing apps.

1. Foursquare (Free – for iPhone)

With more than 15 million users, Foursquare let’s potential clients explore the nooks and crannies, the best kept secrets, and the hot spots in their immediate neighborhoods. You know your business will get noticed drawing the user-ship of an app like Foursquare, which encourages users to check-in at locations in return for virtual badges and points. Businesses featured on this app give loyal users discounts, coupons and freebies for frequenting their establishments. Plus, users are able to review their favorite spots, so your business will get personalized recommendations from users who share and drive their own social networks based on what they like. With its 2.5 million check-ins a day, Foursquare offers a prime marketing opportunity for new businesses with free advertising across multiple mobile devices thanks to the power of word of mouth—or word of check-in in this case!

2. Groupon (Free – for Android)

Localized marketing was never this easy! With Groupon, the monster discount voucher site and the fastest growing marketing outlet in the entire world company in the world, takes creative business promotion to a whole new level. Sign up for Groupon and your business can market offers based on geographic location. Users sign up for the Groupon newsletter and are delivered a hand-picked deal every single day. Not only does Groupon encourage the potential clients in your immediate area to try your restaurant, service, or entertainment option; you may end up with loyal customers for the long term as a result.

3. SCVNGR (Free – for iPhone)

The SCVNGR (or scavenger) app offers users a slew of cool new restaurants, bars, health clubs, entertainment spots, and more to check out! Local marketing for businesses doesn’t get any more fun than a scavenger hunt where businesses can set challenges and rewards for users who visit their location. You can even connect locations with other nearby shops to encourage multi-site visits. The best thing about this app is that the game-based social style encourages user share their activity with their friends so you can almost guarantee word of mouth recommendations.

4. Urbanspoon (Free – for BlackBerry)

Are you a new or hidden restaurant trying to draw a new customer base? Then Urbanspoon is the localized marketing app for you! The mother of restaurant review apps, Urbanspoon focuses on eating out according to location, so users can discover amazing places to dine thanks to the customer reviews posted online.  Plus, it’s completely free for businesses to list their restaurant and watch the reviews come in.

Last night, I spoke on a marketing panel put on by the MainStreetChamber West Metro Chapter (if you haven’t heard of the MSC, now’s a good time to check them out). On the panel with me was a first-class group of marketers from the Twin Cities area:

Manuel Santana, Paulie Skaja, Lisa Saline, Marty Stanchfield, Rich Powell, and Jeff Ferrazzo rounded out the panel, bringing in experience from all areas of marketing from display and networking to affiliate and digital.

Several questions were posed to the panelists by the audience, such as:

• If you are a new business what are some tips on getting people engaged on Facebook (before you have a lot of followers)?
•  I just started a commercial cleaning/janitorial company and the competition is very tough. I am starting this business with no cash flow. I have been cold calling with very little results. What can I do to at least get customers to allow me to bid on there facilities?
• What criteria determine whether a small business can develop their own marketing plan or should engage a strategic marketing professional?
• If a small business decides to engage a strategic marketing professional to develop a marketing plan, how does one find and select the person or business that is a good match for that small business?
• As well as several others.

The event sold out; many people mentioned to me that they couldn’t get a ticket because they registered too late. Fret not tardy registrants, there’s a recording.

The MainStreetChamber Marketing Summit:

If you’re the kind of person who likes to listen to these things on your iPod or other musical device, you can download an MP3 here.

I want to add a special thanks to Chris Christianson for putting on this event. If you enjoyed the recording of the marketing summit, make an effort to reach out to a panelist that you found useful. I’m sure that they would love to connect with you.

After hearing some advice from Minnesota’s marketing pros, now it’s your turn: what’s your best marketing tip? Leave your best tip as a comment below.

To download all of the full-size photos, click here.

Facebook finds favor with people not just because it allows for interaction among people but also because the integration of the social networking medium with several platforms allows for sharing content that one finds interesting. Facebook is building further on this with the launch of a new comment system. The system in question takes complete control of the comments system of a blog or a website. The main features of the comments system are as follows.

How does it work?

The new comment system allows users to comment on a blog or a website using their Facebook account. The comment is simultaneously published to the user’s wall. With this, the users are effectively giving a review of the blog or the website and making it available to their acquaintances and friends on Facebook.

How to implement?

It is quite simple to implement this on various blogging platforms. Download and activate the plugin using the admin panel. Enter the data regarding the number of comments to display the width of comments and save. Paste the code so generated in the blog template. Alternatively, use the Facebook developer’s page to generate an App ID to use on your blog along with the code that is required to be pasted in the blog template to activate the new comment system on your blog.

What works in its favor?

1. Ease of implementation

The process is extremely simple. As it is fairly well documented and the information is easily available over the web, users are unlikely to face any hassles in quickly moving on to this comment system for their website or blog.

2. Allows for quick recommendation of content to friends

Human beings have a tendency to share. Even when it comes to the web content they appreciate. This comment system allows for quick sharing of content with simultaneous publishing of the comment on the Facebook wall of the person posting the comment.

3. Extension of a social networking platform

Social networking is a significant phenomenon of our times. A comment system that integrates a social networking portal to the process is appreciable.

4. Simplifies the process of moderation of comments

The bloggers can moderate the comments by using their Facebook accounts. This allows for control over the blog through Facebook.

5. May increase the number of hits to a blog significantly

Even large organizations are waking up to the use of social media for promotion of products. A comment system that leads to significant integration of the system with a social networking portal such as Facebook holds immense potential for publicizing the content of blogs and websites. This is likely to give a push to the number of hits the website gets.

What does not work?

1. Bloggers may take time to adopt this new comment system

The people who blog are tech savvy and quick to lap up a technological change that can benefit their blog in terms of the number of hits it gets but it takes time for a new system to find feet amongst numerous systems that already exist.

It is good for social networking portals to experiment in order to further add to the features on offer. It also helps in introducing changes as per the need of the times. The refined comment system launched by Facebook is a step in that direction. Whether the comments system becomes as popular as the social networking portal itself is something that only time will tell.

My dad has always been a newspaper guy. For as long as I can remember he starts – or finishes – the day poring through the local and national news, gleaning every bit of info printed on the pages. Newspapers have long been a go-to source for local and national news – big picture stuff – but what about news tailored for your needs? More specifically, to help you keep tabs on your industry’s news.

Considering the average daily newspaper article runs from 600 to 1,000 words, how much time do you have to spend reading print or online news to find something specifically relevant to your business?

Let’s say you sell high-end kitchen gadgets and have a small warehouse where you run your business, shipping items such as chef’s knives and cutting boards across the globe to restaurants and foodies. When was the last time you read something about your industry in the local news? Probably never, but that’s OK. There’s plenty of information and “news” out there.

A lot comes from Twitter. You just have to go out and get it.

 Here are 3 ways to stay linked in to your industry using Twitter.

1. Follow Your Competitors: Keeping tabs on your competitor’s tweets is a great way to monitor what the other guys and gals are doing. Your competitors can be a valuable source of industry information. Look for nuggets of news in tweeted press releases, client news, success stories and employee tweets and retweets. Not all will be gold, but for the most part you can rely on the instincts of those people you follow in your industry – and those they follow – to help keep you in the loop.
2. Follow The Leaders: Every industry has its leaders, and many will be active Twitter users. In the case of our kitchen gadget scenario, think of the different people you might follow: restaurant owners and managers, chefs, and top food bloggers. Why not take the pulse of your industry from those who are its very lifeblood?
3. Follow Your Suppliers: Manufacturers need buyers. That’s the down-and-dirty rule of every business. So, as a buyer of kitchen gadgets wouldn’t it make sense to stay on top of your industry from the supply side, too? After all, this is where the profit margins are lost and found. Think about the benefits of having information that might save your customers – and you – money. Or lets you be the first to offer your customers the hottest new cutting board? Or building stronger relationships with your suppliers?

 Share and Share Alike

Sharing news seems to be built into our DNA. Most of us can’t keep a great story or factoid to ourselves. It’s more fun to share, and businesses and their employees will and share industry news every day of the week.

Of course, this works best when you return the favor. Ultimately, people follow people first and businesses and the rest second.

Imagine, staying on top of your business’ news by following those in your industry – even your competitors.

How cool – and easy – is that?

Hello,

My name is Todd Whitesel. I’ve been a writer/editor for the past 13 years, and have writtenfor many magazines and websites, sharing my passion for music, audio, the outdoors, travel, and cooking. Additionally, I’ve been blogging for several years and have developed a strong interest in WordPress and blogging in general, as well as Internet marketing, social media and SEO.

From way back in the early 1970s, when I was just a kid, I got hooked on music. One of my grandmother’s taught piano for 50 years, and when I was at her home the sounds of classical music were always in the air. But it was the sounds of rock music that I heard from my parent’s record collection and at my best friend’s house that really grabbed my attention. Those great records and bands and songs from the 1970s and ‘80s turned me into a certified (maybe certifiable) music junkie. I started collecting records and cassettes and CDs – then more records – and never stopped. And that passion was the spark for my own blog. (Check it out at ClassicRockMusicBlog.com.)

I recently joined the Tech Nick Consulting team, bringing my writing skills and interest in Internet Marketing into the fold. A lot of people hear the term “marketing” and think that it’s just a code word for “sales” – you know, the pushy, in-your-face approaches that we all hate. But that’s not marketing to me. What brought me into the arena was the contradictory feelings I would get from writing a blog post or music review and then being disappointed when it wasn’t read by thousands. You want your message heard, too. Right?

They say content is king, but there’s a lot of content on the web. Unlike the quote from Field Of Dreams, on the web just because you build it doesn’t mean they will come. Somebody – ideally, many somebodies – will visit your website or blog and tell others about it. But how do you get started? How do you take your current audience and make it bigger? How do you grow your site and your online business? Are you getting the most from your current content? Are customers finding you before they find your competitors?

That’s what everyone wants and marketing is a necessary – and I think fun – process to accomplish these and other goals.

That’s why I’m here.

This is an extremely exciting opportunity, and I look forward to being part of the Tech Nick Consulting team and helping you with your next project.

Here’s to a great 2012!

Sincerely,

-Todd Whitesel
todd@technickconsulting.com