Smaller nimble businesses can use social networks to respond and out-teach bigger competitors. They can turn questions and complaints into teaching opportunities that create new relationships and strengthen loyalty. And they can do it faster.

Large organizations obsessed with secrecy often avoid social media as a marketing channel. They find conversations impossible to have online. And these conversations are your greatest advantage as a mid-size business. This teaching conversation is one of the most powerful takeaways in the terrific, game-changing book titled Rework by Jason Fried and David Hanson.

Class dismissed!

It Ain’t Just for Blogging Anymore

WordPress is amazing and well known as a blogging software. But, it’s also the easiest to deploy, design and self-administer (CMS). Plus, it’s the best system for out-of-the-box SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Consider it if you need an affordable brand-oriented business website. It doesn’t have to look like a blog.  It doesn’t have to look like a template.

Examples of Well Designed Websites

30 Untypical Sites – Wow! These are creative, stunning and effective. As the Web Designer Wall points out, we see portfolio, e-commerce and corporate sites in this list with WordPress and plugins under the hood. There was a time when great design meant little to no SEO “juice” and vice versa. Those days are over: we can have it all now.

20 Great Corporate Sites – These examples of fully functional “living breathing sites” with CMS and SEO will hopefully inspire your imagination.

You can afford to have it all. You can Be Heard Online!

While this simple premise has been somewhat tarnished recently, a new consumer market is emerging.

Consumers Can Now Monetize Social Media Marketing and Word-of-Mouth

Empire Avenue is a site that allows people to monetize their online influence through various social networks:

Welcome to The People’s Market on Empire Avenue, where you can have fun buying, selling and trading shares in your best friend, your favorite blogger, that band you like or even your mom… anyone! Best of all, it’s totally free.

Our theory goes like this: if you’ve ever told someone to watch a movie, buy an album or eat at some restaurant, you’re using influence. Being the generous people we are, we thought we’d give you a way to measure that influence and stack it up against anyone else. Nothing like a bit of friendly competition among friends, social networks and complete strangers, right?

Get it? Well it may seem a bit confusing, but look at it this way: People—who often play the role of reviewers or brand curators thanks to social media—now recommend services and products like and it actually affects buying behavior.

Here’s more:

Like a real stock market, your stock price on Empire Avenue is affected by others buying and selling your shares. But you’re also spreading your online influence when you write a blog post, update your Facebook status, post something on Twitter, and so on. The more you do online, the greater your influence and the faster your stock will rise!

Genuine word-of-mouth has always been the Holy Grail for marketers—not manufactured or contrived chatter by marketers—and this may prove to be a valuable outlet for big and small brands that are attempting to tap into a willing market.

To take it a step further, this site touches on Ed Keller and Jon Berry’s 2003 book “The Influentials,” which notes that one American in ten tells the other nine how to vote, where to eat and what to buy. The potential of word-of-mouth marketing is stunning.

Implications for Mid-Size Businesses

For resourceful businesses with authentic brands and services, credential-ized word-of-mouth markets are fertile marketing opportunities. Find the influencers with big market caps. Show them what you’ve got. Invite them to experience your brand. And be heard online.

Here it is: A study released in May 2010 by the Kauffman Foundation (h/t: Ian Swain) provides additional evidence that our current crisis takes the form of a Great Reset. According to the study, 2009 was a banner year for new business startups like ChirpUp.

The report found that “the 340 out of 100,000 adults who started businesses each month represent a 4 percent increase over 2008, or 27,000 more starts per month than in 2008 and 60,000 more starts per month than in 2007.

Largest Increase in Start-Up Business in More Than 14 Years

Yes even with so many stingy banks hanging onto cash, there’s been a mini boom in new business start-ups. Let’s think about this for a moment: People, many of whom won’t marketing jobs to return to because their profession has essentially been snuffed out, are venturing into small business out of necessity and aspiration.

At the same time, another related shift also seems clear—and you may even fit the demographic—the rise of the freelance economy. If businesses can contract out positions with a vast interactive marketing talent pool out there, why wouldn’t they opt for an open-source model, instead of paying for benefits and other “permanent” expenses?

And as nationalized healthcare—no matter your politics—becomes part of the American landscape, so too will we see a rise in entrepreneurship. Think about it: Medical insurance remains the primary reason why a lot of people keep their jobs—even when they don’t like the job or appreciate the pay anymore.

How Does the Interactive Marketing Entrepreneurial Economy Affect Mid-Size Business?

Technology enables us to work from afar or from home. Cafes and restaurants are interactive agency business centers. iStopOver offers a rent-by-the-hour-office-room package for those that don’t want to commit long-term to a business space. The democratization of technology and talent is leveling the interactive marketing playing field for small and mid-size businesses.  You can afford it.  You can compete!  Just follow this formula.

A Guest Post by Michael Mitchell:

As an senior consumer trends analyst and consultant, Mike Mitchell has profiled and reported on emerging consumer trends throughout the globe. From people raising urban chickens for eggs to bolster the local food movement to the emergence of colored beers like electric green and fluorescent blue, he has continually unlocked some of the deepest and most fascinating forms of modern consumer behavior.  His interests lie primarily in crowd behavior and crowd intelligence, as well as consumer sentiment, sector blending,  the irrationality of buying and Gen Y trends.

AdBean is an exciting Chicago start-up.  Their powerful new technology makes effective digital display advertising easy.  AdBean has a simple idea: improve workflow in the creation, composition, and placement of interactive online banner ads.

A Lot to Talk About

AdBean’s technology and value are multidimensional.  Fortunately, there is a lot to talk about. AdBean’s marketplace is complex – their customers range from huge advertising agencies to small web publishers. They need to reach every player in between. Our challenge was to provide leadership for their digital marketing channel starting at the ground level.

Search Engine Optimization via Blogging

AdBean’s blog is critical to the interactive strategy because modern social marketing doesn’t happen without worthwhile blog-based content.  ChirpUp drove blogging and SEO activities from the beginning. We defined the keyword priorities and helped orient content around targeted SEO objectives. After about six months, AdBean’s organic traffic is climbing.

Being Heard with Twitter

Another very visible effect of our interactive marketing collaboration is the driving of traffic to AdBean.net via Twitter.  Through careful handling and patrolling of the business space, ChirpUp cultivated a community of over 6500 relevant, interested Twitter followers. Through Twitter, the great content at AdBean is piped to industry players big and small, established and new, local and global. @AdBean_net‘s reach and  impressions drive traffic at AdBean.net and ensure that AdBean is on the tip of everybody’s tongue – big players now know about this startup, what they do, and why they do it.

Perform, Monitor, Optimize and Adapt

We got  there by establishing and monitoring interactive marketing metrics. We measure everything for AdBean! We measure clicks, messages, google page ranks, relationships, posts, tweets, retweets, changes, likes and dislikes. We measure compulsively to be sure our strategies drive business value.

What’s the Difference Between Community Pages and Facebook’s Existing Official Pages?

The major difference is in the notion of community and the application to social media marketing. For conventional pages (individual, business or groups), the news and update streams on a Facebook wall are self-oriented. Most of the items relate to the owner.

In the case of community pages, the orientation of the news stream is different. Page maintainers are “authorized representatives of a business, brand, celebrity of organization”, so the kernel of the community remains determined by the establisher of the page. Further, page maintainers may still create and share content about the entities they represent.

The biggest differences between Groups and Community Pages is that there is no single maintainer – and that news items in Community Pages will not appear in your personal news feed. So where Groups allow you to communicate with other individuals about a particular subject, Community Pages allow you to learn and participate in knowledge sharing network.

Why Did Facebook Create Community Pages?

One idea is that this reduces the amount of patrolling pages Facebook needs to do when called upon to act by a brand manager or company who did not establish a page in question. This is a common problem on FB, and the admins have seen an interesting way around it by essentially saying: nobody owns this page, the community owns it. So when a brand manager for whatever reason arrives late to his or her own community, he or she has no problem influencing the community’s content on par with anybody else.

When you "Create a Page" on Facebook, you now have three options including the new "Community Page"

Caching and Offloading

One of the easiest things that you can do to improve the performance of your WordPress site is to install a good caching and performance plugin. My favorite is W3 Total Cache. Install it and activate it. The first thing this plugin does is cache the html generated by your posts and pages of your site, eliminating the need for resource intensive database lookups and PHP processing. Another feature allows you to easily push your static content to a CDN or Amazon S3. With this enabled, visitors to your website will hit the CDN for images, stylesheets and javascript files instead of your webserver, speeding up the user’s loading time. Check out the official W3 Total Cache for detailed installation and configuration instructions.

There are other good plugins for caching and pushing your assets to a CDN, but I have found W3 Total Cache to be a great all-in-one, easily configured plugin.

Remove Unused and Unimportant Plugins from Your WordPress Installation

This tip won’t have as huge of an impact as caching, but is still worth doing. Delete unused plugins from your site! Consider disabling and deleting plugins that are not really that important to your site. Every plugin could do a lot of processing and potentially database lookups. Don’t use them if you don’t have to! (It’s easy to use the WordPress dashboard to go into the plugins area and disable and delete plugins).

Upgrade Your Hosting

The default, low-cost hosting solutions that most people use for their websites are “shared hosting” accounts. This means the machine running your site is shared with many users, with little or no segregation of system resources. All users can be punished when one customer on the same machine starts using tons of resources.

These types of accounts can be fine for moderate traffic websites. I have been particularly happy with a HostGator business plan that I use for some sites. But if your site starts to get significant traffic, it is probably time to upgrade to a VPS or other heavier duty hosting solution. Most VPS solutions today let you start with a relatively inexpensive moderate amount of RAM and other resources and seamlessly scale up (or down) as needed. (I have had good success starting with the Turnkey WordPress Appliance Image on a VPS account).

Other Optimization Resources

The official WordPress website has lots of tips on optimizing your installation. Check them out:

• WordPress Optimization
• High Traffic Tips For WordPress
• WordPress Optimization Cheat Sheet
• WordPress Optimization/Caching
• WordPress Optimization/Offloading

Users prefer speedy sites. We now know Google really cares too! So take a little time this week to speed up your site!

The image in this post is by Luis Argerich

In his latest book Rework Jason Fried explains:

“Instead of going to reach people, you want people to come to you. An audience returns often – on its own – to see what you have to say. This is the most receptive group of customers and potential customers you’ll ever have.”

Customers are Transactions.  Audiences are Loyal Fans

And new media, social networks and inbound marketing are ideal tools for upgrading your customers into loyal fans who buy frequently and refer business.  Even satisfied customers only occasionally refer more customers. Fans are a different story. Fans are breathing, typing, posting examples for others to follow. Their genuine interest is impossible to fabricate. Your audience is the holy grail of word-of-mouth marketing.

Your Business is a Reality Performance

So how do I build an audience – I’m no performance artist?  You don’t have to be.  You just need to be yourself and teach people.  Teach them about your industry.  Educate them about best practices. How things are made? What’s changing?  Comment about current events or new regulations.  And yes – use a blog to syndicate your content. It’s never been easier to reach your audience through channels like RSS, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

I know it sounds hard, but it’s not. Giving your audience an authentic perspective and window into your business is no harder than writing that boring white paper or press release. Baby steps turn into habits.

And if you need a little help, give me a buzz or send me a note. I bet I can show you two or three topics and approaches after a ten minute conversation.

Now, thanks to Square (co-founded by Jim McKlevey and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey), we can process credit card payments with iPhones and computer scanners.

“In February 2009, Jim McKelvey wasn’t able to sell a piece of his glass art because he couldn’t accept a credit card as payment. Even though a majority of payments have moved to plastic cards, accepting payments from cards is still difficult, requiring long applications, expensive hardware, and an overly complex experience. Square was born a few days later right next to the old San Francisco US Mint.” Source: CrunchBase

Freelancers and small business owners are no longer hobbled by bureaucracy and expense. The iPhone’s portability and touchscreen seems ideal for transactions where immediacy is a key sales component. Smaller-ticket items are immediately handled, tracked and policed by credit card companies and software within seconds. And the customer walks away immediately satsified.

Despite the initial security concerns, democratizing technologies like Square are leveling the playing field for modern marketers.

Check out CrunchBase for a various video demonstrations.

A Guest Post by Michael Mitchell:

As an senior consumer trends analyst and consultant, Mike Mitchell has profiled and reported on emerging consumer trends throughout the globe. From people raising urban chickens for eggs to bolster the local food movement to the emergence of colored beers like electric green and fluorescent blue, he has continually unlocked some of the deepest and most fascinating forms of modern consumer behavior.  His interests lie primarily in crowd behavior and crowd intelligence, as well as consumer sentiment, sector blending,  the irrationality of buying and Gen Y trends.

Steps for Feeding LinkedIn with WordPress

After logging in, find and click on the “Applications” button in the bottom right corner of the page.  (Note that if you already have applications enabled, you can go to “More” at the top of thepage and select “Application Directory“):

Find and click “WordPess Application” icon:

Click the “Add Application” button on the WordPress homepage:

Enter the URL of your blog.

Keep in mind that you can conveniently filter which of your blog posts appear on your page by selecting the radio button option “Select only recent posts tagged as “LinkedIn”. If you set it up this way, only your blog posts that you tag in WordPress will show up in your profile. This is helpful if your WordPress blog is not 100% about business. Click  “Save”.

Soon after you finish, your profile will update with your WordPress posts that have been tagged “linkedIn” – and will do so automatically from here on out. You’re done.