Should itsy-bitsy Business Owners Care About Web 2.0 Marketing Tools

Copyright 2006 John Jantsch

A fresh internet gold urge has been taking bear with the emergence of social networking, blogging, podcasting and other web 2.0 experiments. Media companies and Internet giants have reacted promptly by acquiring many of the novel players to buy advantage of these unusual advertising vehicles and evolve their endangered models. Yet advertisers themselves have stayed on the sidelines to a stout extent. slight businesses especially have reacted cautiously to web 2.0 marketing fearing its hype and its inherent risks and describe a very shrimp share of the x million blogs.

It seems that there are several emerging trends that every microscopic business should be aware of. We view we would section these trends through examples of petite businesses that have been the first to capitalize on web 2.0 and have reaped early benefits.

Trend #1: assign a blog as your principal web presence. Customers value who they do business with sometimes as considerable as what they lift. Blogging provides you with a more personal environment where you can both promote your product and display a more personal understanding of your business. Blogging also allows you to commence an on-going conversation with your customers and beget a long term relationship. Blogging is especially considerable in professional services itsy-bitsy businesses where the person is the product and where word of mouth and recommendations are the notable sales driver.

Horsefeathers, a restaurant in North Conway, N. H., publishes a blog about food, wine, local events and restaurant news as a map to hold customers connected and sincere (http://www.horsefeathers.com/ ) .

Patti Thompson is the president of Way-Fil Jewelry, Inc. located in Tupelo, MS. She serves as the appraiser, designer and one of two bench jewelers.(http://www.diamonddivaonline.com/ ) . She writes a combination of personal stories, stories about her store and appraisal posts (What is gold sodium thiomalate? ) . She also links her blog to her EBay store.

Trend #2: lift advantage of emerging hyper local blogs. With the number of blogs exploding (a blog is created every second!) and readership skyrocketing, the blogosphere is reaching a sufficient scale to address hyper local scream. A similar phenomenon happened in the internet position when readership and websites reached a tipping point to be able to offer relevant whisper for very dinky customer segments such as a city and provide local search. This novel trend in blogging makes local advertising for exiguous businesses very relevant, for example restaurants, hotels, loyal estate brokers or accountants.

Cornerstone Wealth Advisors (http://www.cornerstone360.com) in Overland Park, KS created a blog about investing and other financial matters and spend it as the jumping off point for several practice groups.

Blogging Ohio (http://www.bloggingohio.com/ ), which is fragment of Weblogs (http://www.weblogsinc.com/ ), is a vast example of this trend with posts that focus on specific towns in Ohio. Lake County, OH (http://www.lakecountyblog.com/default.asp? item=158547 ) has also started a local community blog and local sponsored links such as local restaurants, hotels or country clubs.

Trend #3: exercise web 2.0 marketing to market to bloggers. Bloggers have become a growing and influential customer segment with strong economic power. As this customer segment reaches notable mass, some runt businesses have understood the opportunity to target them and do marketing approaches that appeal to their tastes and preferences.

Bloggersfuel is a enormous example of this focused marketing (http://www.bloggersfuel.com/blog/? page_id=2 ) . Bruce Frcek has developed this blog to maintain bloggers up to date on what is happening in the specialty coffee industry and with its online store Boca Java (www.bocajava.com) and to hear directly from bloggers on ideas about blogging and coffee.

Daily Greencine (http://daily.greencine.com/ ) publishes a blog around independent and alternative cinema that gets 80 000 visitors each month and helps drive traffic to online rental and video on quiz store GreenCine (www.greencine.com) . The blog helped double the store’s revenues.

Trend #4: Leverage emerging web 2.0 advertising platforms. Web 2.0 originate ups are positioning themselves as aggregators of advertising and providing fresh platforms to market miniature businesses.

AdCandy (http://www.adcandy.com/default.asp ) allows consumers to fabricate advertising slogans and suggest product improvements for their current brands. Pro’tech’d (http://www.protechd.com/company/ ), a tiny company making iPod covers uses AdCandy to hurry a contest letting visitors obtain their ad campaign and slogan, thus helping raise awareness for its label in its target customer segment.

Zixxo (http://www.zixxo.com/cmn/Homepage.aspx ) allows itsy-bitsy businesses to gain and manage their gain online coupons and syndicate them out to local consumers through partner websites and RSS feeds. John – example of coffee shop

Trend #5: spy emerging audio and video marketing (podcasting and vloging) . The current massive growth in these original formats triggered by the Apple IPOD and by modern inaugurate ups such as You Tube will form novel advertising media that can be particularly appropriate for specific diminutive businesses.

Chaz, a yoga instructor (http://yogamazing.com/ ), has a yoga studio in Louisville, KY and has been using podcasting on itunes for a series of instructional videos that promote his yoga techniques and his studio.

Dave Seitter, (http://seminar.midwestconstructionlaw.com) a construction attorney located in Kansas City, Mo has created a monthly expert teleseminar and converted it to a podcast.