Gary is one of the most famous marketeers who managed to capitalize his Social Media effort in a big way. After growing his family business from a small shop to a €60M winelibrary.com he is now consulting companies among the Fortune 500 about how to use Social Media to engage with their customers. Here is one of his latest keynote (warning for the language).  The last 15 minutes, including the Q&A is the most valuable:

Posted under Marketing, Social Networks

This post is for people that run a small business or are about to start one and are unsure whether their current hotmail, gmail, yahoo or other free Email address is ok to be used on their business card.  It is not! Please read on to understand why and how to address this important issue.

I see a fair number of new business cards every month and I cannot avoid noticing random Email addresses that are immediately telling me how little care people pay to this important aspect of their marketing mix.

An Email address should always be considered by its definition: an address.  People should be able to relate to you and being able to send you relevant messages.  As a minimum it should be give hints about your name and company name.

In order to help this simple process your thinking should be equally simple.  If your name is john martin blogs and your company is called my company limited then as a minimum you should first ensure to have an adequate domain registered, ideally mycompany.com and/or mycompany.co.uk (if you are based in the UK) see my other post about domains for more information.  When you register your domain you probably will need some hosting for your website and in the same package you should be able to get also Email management for very little money, usually under £50 per year.

Once you have your hosting sorted you should ensure to register at least two Email addresses.  The first one should have of the following formats:

• john@mycompany.co.uk
• johnmblogs@mycompany.co.uk
• jmblogs@mycompany.co.uk
• johnm.blogs@mycompany.co.uk (perhaps the most used by large companies)
• johnmb@mycompany.co.uk

This is the Email that should go on your business card.  The second one could be:

• info@mycompany.co.uk
• sales@mycompany.co.uk
• office@mycompany.co.uk
• enquiries@mycompany.co.uk
• contact@mycompany.co.uk
• or similar, depending on the nature of your business

The second Email address is the one you want to advertise on your website: it gives a more professional look to your company, particularly if you are on your own.

Having a free Email  address like the ones indicated in the second paragraph just shows how little you care about your company and personal image: keep your personal free Email to exchange messages with your friend but ensure to have a professional looking Email for your business.

Posted under Marketing

More and more people are using twitter as a marketing tool and yet too many fail to understand how it works.  In a nutshell Twitter is a microblogging site with a very distinct limitation: all messages are limited to 140 character very much like an SMS message.

If you have a blog, very much like any other website (imagine a newspaper site) you don’t write to a particular person (Email and other messaging services can help for that) but to your audience.  If your blog is popular you will have many readers, if you are at the beginning probably just a few, unless you are famous person (e.g. celebrity) or a successful blogger at your third or higher number launch.  If you keep writing good content (what Chris Garret, one of my favourite bloggers, calls Killer Flagship Content) then you will build up a broad audience.  Your audience in Twitter is made by your followers.

Who are your followers?

Anybody interested in you and your tweets that decide to follow you. At the beginning you are likely to have no followers but as you start following other people many of them will start following you back and so on.  The more followers you have and more and more people will start following you.  When I encounter an individual with a Twitter account and many hundred or thousands of followers I feel more inclined to follow him or her than if he/she is a beginner with a few followers.

What do you do with Twitter?

You Tweet. You send out these messages and your followers have the opportunity of reading them, simple.  Considering that 140 char is not really lots of information many people have developed a way of writing words in a VERY succinct way or simply adding the URL of a site/blog/page they want to promote.

What do you tweet about?

Everything you like. Many neophytes of twitter tend to be confused about how to use their newly created account.  My style is to promote some of the business activities I am involved in and re-tweet similar content from other people I am following.  I personally find nearly disturbing those that mix business activities with random personal messages about their family life or what they just had for lunch… A Twitter account is free so it makes sense perhaps to have more than one and channel different content to different accounts and keeping each of them coherent to the main topic.  In my case the main business account maxgaet is only for my entrepreneurial activities while carismauk is used to promote my martial arts activities and saluswellness is tweeting about my other business venture.

Why re-tweeting?

To promote a tweet from a person you are following to your followers. People that ask this question usually don’t get the basic mechanism behind Twitter.  You can read what is written by people you are following: if you like what you see then re-tweet it so also your followers will get the same tweet.  If many people start re-tweeting a particular message you have what is called the viral effect and the original tweet, re-tweeted many times, become a very popular topic.

Twitter is a great marketing tool and is has been proven to be a great contributor to traffic generation.  If you found this post interesting perhaps the best thing you can do is tweet about it

Posted under Marketing, Social Networks

I often have business meetings in suitable cafes and hotels around Cambridge: last week I met a local business owner in a hotel just outside the city.  I was pretty stunned when I drove past an advert while leaving and noticed a spelling mistake in their advert, meant to attract clients to their health centre.  I even decided to drive around the hotel and quietly stop the car, pull out my mobile phone and take a shot for you to enjoy

I am really wondering who is the agency that managed to design an advert, had it approved by the client (the Marketing Manager or Executive?) and sent it to print on a 5 metres banner without anybody noticing that Receive should not be spelled Recieve.

Posted under Cambridge, Marketing

I will start this post with some questions:

• Have you ever been invited to a party, conference or another important event?
• Would you find natural to reply, if you were invited by a personal invitation from somebody you know?
• If you replied YES would you find natural to turn up trying to pay attention to place, date and time?
• If you cannot make it at the last minute would you find natural to let your host know?
• If you turn up would you find natural, as soon as you arrive, to go and look for your host to let him know you are there?
• And at the end when you leave would you find natural to look again for your host, thank and say bye?

Without any doubt for me the answers are 6 times YES!

Perhaps it’s me and my way of dealing with people, perhaps it’s my way of demonstrating I appreciate other people and make sure they know it but how is it possible that any of the above has a NO as an answer?  Let alone that I am talking about an event where all visitors have the opportunity of meeting likeminded business people and exchange opportunities for business.

Well, what happened this morning made me think many people are very different in appreciating true business opportunities and respect for those that invite them: I was one of the organisers of a large visitors’ day for two joint chapters of BNI in Cambridge. BNI is a large (probably the largest) networking organisation in the world and I happen to currently be the director of the Trinity chapter in Cambridge. The well managed organisation paid back greatly: among the combined 50 members of the two chapters we managed to have over 120 visitors in the great hall at Hometon College and the whole event was a true success.

Nonetheless the inspiration to write this post came at the end of the morning when I did the math for my own guests.  I invited to this event 28 people out of a selected list of contacts, following some constraints we were given.  Here are some facts:

• 4 of them thanked me for the invitation and accepted without the need for a follow up J
• 1 of the others was kind of upset when I called him to find out if he was coming along: let alone I have asked him in person before sending the invitation and he was keen then…
• At least 5 did not return my call when I followed up the invitation to check whether they were interested in taking part in the event
• Between phone calls and Emails the total number of guest as of yesterday lunch time was 12 J
• By 6pm the list was down to 9
• This morning 7 people turned up J
• 2 did not bother to say hello when they arrived
• 3 left without letting me know they were leaving or saying bye
• I found 1 Email of one of the missing guests that something came up very late last night
• 2 sent a thank you Email J
• 1 tweeted a thank you J

Perhaps there is scope for basic courses about how to network successfully by simply paying attention to common sense and good manners?  Or is it that most people in small businesses tend to be so overwhelmed, so overly busy that they forget how to behave?

Perhaps they need a coach

Posted under Cambridge, Marketing, Networking

It is a fact that the majority of businesses nowadays have some kind of Internet presence in the form of webpage, website or blog.  Unfortunately too many people have little idea how to best choose a domain for their business and they just assume anything will do.

I am nearly shocked when sometimes I meet people, exchange business cards with them and notice the domain they are using to represent their business.  The sad reality is that a poorly chosen domain, as well as a badly designed logo, can give a bad first impression of who you and your business are.

There are rules about what Top Level Domain (TLD) should be used to identify a business, a non profit organisation like a club or a charity or a university: some of these rules are strictly enforced (e.g. you cannot have .gov,  .mil or .gov.uk unless you are respectively a US government, US  military or UK government organisation) but there others that can be used by anyone for anything although some guidelines do apply.  Inappropriate use of those reflects, from my point of view, little understanding of these rules and more broadly about how Internet works.

I will list below a couple of examples that highlight typical possible mistakes:

• MaGa Coaching, specialises in Business and Executive Coaching: for this reasons we have registered magacoaching.com and magacoaching.co.uk as domains. As it is a business based in UK we use and advertise magacoaching.co.uk as the active domain but if you try browsing magacoaching.com you will find the same website.  Typical mistake in this case would have been to register magacoaching.org or magacoaching.org.uk or magacoaching.net. MaGa Coaching is a for-profit company and the .org, .org.uk would have suggested it is not while the .net would have suggested we offer networking services and that is definitely not the case.
• My nick name since high school is Gaet so I found it normal when registering a personal domain for my website, now this blog, to register gaet.org.   This is not a company and definitely it is not a profit making organisation therefore the .org domain is just fine (or .org.uk).  I could have used .me, .name, .me.uk but they did not exist when I bought gaet.org.
• A common mistake, for lots of regular profit making businesses, is to use .org, .org.uk domains to represent them: although legal it would be like registering a company called “Make More Profits Limited” or the “Profit Club Limited” as a charity, not for profit   How much trust would you put in such a company?

Here is list of main TLD that you should consider for your own use:

What I describe in this post typically applies for entities in US and UK (all domains finishing with .uk are supposedly for UK based entities).  Each country in the world has its own TLD and for some domestic market the natural choice is to choose a localised domain name (e.g. .it for Italy, .fr for France, .de for Germany and .es for Spain and so on…).  For businesses there is an unwritten rule that says that a .com will be the domain for a global company: when in doubt I would choose a domain for which both the .com and the local domestic domain (e.g. .it) are available.  You can choose to have both of them served by the same website or simply leave one unused and avoid confusions.

There are many other domains that have been more recently defined (in the last few years): a short list of these is: .info, .biz, .ws, .us, .eu, .mobi, .tel They are all legitimate and appropriate to use but for many Internet purists they tend to be considered like second class domains.

I would like to conclude this post with a little suggestion.  Whether you are registering a domain for a company, a brand, a charity or for your personal blog try choosing a simple, easy to spell and appropriate domain that immediately reflects what your business / organisation / club is about.  If have problems with that you could ask an expert, there are many around, and if you fail with that contact me, I would be glad to help.

Posted under Marketing