5 Rules for Better Communication in a Web 2.0 World -- Part II

Earlier I posted about my speech in Burlington, Ont. on Sept. 4 on “Communicating in a Web 2.0 World.” Here’s the takeaway from that session: five tips for getting noticed and communicating more effectively in a world where everyone is talking at once.

1. Know your customer. If you're going to reach the greatest number of customers and prospects, you have to know who they are and what their media habits are.

We know that more than 70% of car buyers do research on the Internet before they visit a dealership. How do your customers seek out information? Are they reading ads in the paper, searching on Google, or reading blogs? Are they talking with friends on FaceBook, or over the back fence? Would they read your blog, would they subscribe to an email newsletter, would they respond to a contest for the best home-made video of someone trying out your product?

2. Get people’s attention! When you know what you want to say, say it well. Stand out. Be lively, be interesting, be fun. Don't hold back. And never, ever be boring.

Most ads, most brochures, most website copy is dull. Boring. Written by people who didn't understand people’s needs to be entertained, amused, teased and intrigued. Take a chance, hire a marketer, and find a way to be dazzling, fascinating, habit-forming.

3. Make it easy for your audience to find you. Archive all your ads, your press releases, your product specs or announcements, your newsletters. Get an SEO specialist to give your site more Google juice (i.e., a higher ranking on the search engines). Trade links with other businesses. Put your URL in your ads and n your business cards, let people know where to find your blogs, newsletters or limited-time coupons. If your market can't find you, it doesn't matter what you're saying.

4. Overuse the word “You.” Have your customers and their needs in mind at all times. Don't talk about your products or services – talk about how your products and services solve their problems. Get over yourself and put the customer and his or her needs at the centre of all you do.

5. Experiment. There is no one fix for every business. If blogging isn’t for you, maybe you'll make a splash with YouTube videos or pay-per-click advertising. If newspaper ads work for you, stick with them, but experiment with interactive elements that help you build your database and communicate with more customers directly.

Above all, ask your customers what they're listening to, what they're reading, how they're using the net. That's how you can focus on the best opportunities for your business to stand out, be heard, and serve its customers better.

Communicating in a Web 2.0 World – Part 1

How do businesses get noticed and heard in our noisy, overcrowded Web 2.0 world? That was the topic of a short presentation I made yesterday to a breakfast meeting of the Burlington Network Group, a business group that meets biweekly at the beautiful lakeside Water Street Cooker restaurant, in Burlington, Ont.

Web 2.0 of course refers to the whole gamut of creative new online communication tools and channels. In Web 1.0, you used the Internet to read stuff or order products and services. Today, Web 2.0 turns consumers into producers, by enabling anyone to interact with websites, praise or critique products and services, blog, podcast, post videos, advertise or sell advertising, etc., etc. It even lets you create products for you or others to buy – such as the Canadian Entrepreneur coffee mug from CaféPress.com, which I handed out to a lucky audience member yesterday to salute their pioneering efforts at blogging.

Among the best tools for small business I cited blogs, search engine marketing, Linked-In and Facebook, and Google’s Adwords, the pay-per-click service that lets you target your advertising directly to qualified prospects – and in which you only pay for results (i.e., when someone clicks on your ad to learn more). It amazes me how many people don't know about this powerful product, and how cost-effective it can be.

As I said in my speech text (I spoke mainly from memory, so the actual wording varied):

“AdWords (along with its counterparts from Microsoft and Yahoo) is one of the best targeted marketing methods ever invented. Big businesses are using it more and more, and you should be looking into it too.”

Click here to learn more. And no, Google isn’t paying for this recommendation. I just think every entrepreneur must explore the potential of this medium.

And here’s the payoff: Advertisers can not only target their pay-per-click ads by topic and geographically, but you can also use it to test, test, test. If your copy doesn't sell – that is, it doesn't convince consumers to click on your ad - you don't pay a thing. So it provides free marketing lessons, which shuld interest any business that normally can't afford to test advertising variables. You can find out what copy works best, what headlines make people act, and which sites and keywords produce the most clickthroughs. And it’s so affordable - you can set your own prices and limit your maximum monthly spend.

I got a number of people to agree to look into Adwords this week. I hope you do, too.

In Part II: 5 Rules for Better Communication in a Web 2.0 World

Lassie vs Garfield

The latest issue of Marketing Magazine contains a great metaphor regarding how Web 2.0 interactivity (blogs, YouTube, wikis, that sort of stuff) will change the advertising world.

The cover story, Marketing 2.0, begins by quoting Alan Hallberg, Cisco's senior director of worldwide advertising and demand generation:

"Consumers have gone from being dogs, who are responsive, eager, needy and when you whistle they come running, to being cats, who have a life of their own, are not nearly as needy and come to you when they feel like it."

Advertisers, he says, have to learn to "rejig themselves when the audience is on stage and you're in the audience."

The rest of the story gets progressively duller. You can read it here if you want, but I mainly wanted you to think about that dog/cat image. It's great shorthand for approaching today's web-media shifts.

Consumers have been getting harder to reach for decades. Now marketers are finally realizing that not only do they have minds of their own, they expect to be heard, too.