Let’s say you own a business and you have customers coming and going. Some customers you see daily, weekly, or monthly. Let’s say you have daily, weekly, or monthly specials. How can you tell your customers about these specials for free (your time is the only cost)? I would like to introduce you to Twitter.

What is Twitter and how does it work.

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

It’s called Micro-blogging and it is quite the rage for 25-45 year old adults (especially college educated men). Here are some interesting stats from a recent TIME Magazine article:

I figured that the service would appeal exclusively to youngsters with nothing better to do. The user data, however, tell me I’m wrong, and reveal a very specific user profile: for example, males make up 63% of Twitterers, specifically males from California, whose residents account for more than 57% of Twitter’s visitors. More interestingly, the age demographics of Twitterers show a dramatic shift. When the site became popular in early 2007, the majority of its visitors were 18-to-24-year-olds. Today the site’s largest age demographic is 35-to-44-year-olds, who make up 25.9% of its users.

If you run a restaurant for example, your customers could sign up for the free service and subscribe to your businesses “Tweets”. Now you can “Tweet” the daily specials (or just “Tweet” on slow nights). You can offer discounts on XYZ, just prove you are a Twitter user and you follow us. You can also send out interesting links about food, wine, beer, etc.

If you have a HVAC business, you can remind clients to change the filter or clean the ducts - oh and call me to do it. Here’s a special on duct cleaning.

You’re a mechanic - how about once a month you have a Twitter oil change and inspection day - the only way you know about the special is if you are a Twitter follower.

The key is to keep the client interested and aware of your existence. After all, that is the purpose of advertising, making the client aware of your presence.

Contact Modern Gorilla and we can help you set-up and optimize these applications to best suit your business needs or you can join Modern Gorilla on Twitter and get our specials and updates: http://twitter.com/ModernGorilla

Last March we made an observation about the Yellow Pages sinking faster than the Titanic. Well, if you needed further proof the stock is now trading at / around the thirty cent mark. Granted, the economy isn’t the strongest at the moment but take a look at the 52-week high water mark.. $39!

They may not be very useful for advertising anymore.. but they still make excellent doorstops and booster seats in a pinch.

Having a small business means wearing many hats. You are marketer, product development, employee, IT Admin, webmaster, accountant, sales, and more. You work at the business and close it up at night only to go home and work on it until you go to sleep and dream about it. Your plate is full.

You can save some cash on your technology by using free office applications. OpenOffice and Google Apps both offer free alternatives to Microsoft’s Office Productivity Suite. Word processing, spreadsheets, presentations (PowerPoint), email programs, and databases can all be found in these free alternatives.

In addition to the low low price of $0 - Google Apps host these applications in “The Cloud”. The Cloud is a location where hosted apps can be accessed via browser. This means you can check your email, update documents, and share files with anyone via “The Cloud” - all for free. If you are away from your personal computer and you need to check or update something - you are just a web browser away from accessing your files. It’s all very simple.

Call Modern Gorilla and we can help you set-up and optimize these applications to best suit your business needs.

There’s a lot of worry going around about the current state of the economy, and rightly so- for a very long time we’ve been riding an unprecedented wave that has brought about all sorts of new businesses that came to be because of a lot of excess cash floating around. It was almost too easy, and a lot of people who began marketing their products and services experienced success with little effort or honest know-how. I’m sure you can think of a few.

But the reality now is that without that excess cash, consumers and clients are tightening the belts and really making some hard decisions on where and how they spend. They want to make sure they are investing in services that add value, not merely name recognition, and that this investment will be good for the long-term.

Your business absolutely depends on recognizing this and changing your marketing habits to accommodate it. I point to a great Google Answers response to how companies survived the Great Depression:

“..those companies who not only survived but did well and grew during the Great Depression are those who continued to act as though there were nothing wrong and that the public had money to spend. In other words, they advertised. These are industries who didn’t wait for public demand for their products to rise, they created that demand even during the most difficult of times. Because so many companies cut spending during that era, advertising budgets were largely eliminated in many industries. Not only did spending decline, these companies actually dropped out of public sight because of short sighted decisions made about spending money to keep a high profile. These advertising cutbacks caused many customers to feel abandoned and associated the effected brands with a lack of staying power.”

The point is, your customers are looking for that mystical aura of “staying power”. They want you to be there next week, next month, and next year. They don’t want to see a fire-sale banner out front, or anything that reeks of desperation for that matter. You need to get out in front of them by continuing to hold the perception of your business as rock-steady and ready to serve.

Marketing is your number one ally in this. What they see, what they read and how they view your company is all related to your advertising, and you can no longer afford to be lazy (because it’s going to be very easy to tell who is in this game for the long term, and who just wants some short-term gains).

Get a good website, and get it ranked by Google’s local search. Get some great photos of your establishment and find customers who will give you testimonials. Spend some money repainting and maybe revise that old sign out front. Don’t mention the recession in your direct mail, and focus on solid offers at good prices instead.

In other words, give your customers a reason to come through the door or pick up the phone. They’re still looking for you, even if it is under a microscope.

If you currently only advertise through this medium feel free to give us a call in six months.. when the panic has set in.

Read all about it here.

Across the small business forums we usually see recommendations on “do it yourself” website generators from resourceful entrepreneurs looking to save a buck. They are quick and easy to setup, and allow the website owner to control the content and images- nothing wrong with that. From a distance, this solution seems ideal.

But when you start to scratch under the surface a bit it gets ugly..really ugly. Using the Lynx Text Browser (which will show you what the search engines typically see, sans images) let’s take a look at a typical webpage created using one of these services.

We’ll start with the company in question:

Please note that it should read: “We make it so easy (for search engines to completely ignore your site!)”

Now onto the fun stuff. Here’s what Google sees when it goes to BestRaceCarDrivers.com, a site created by the offender above:

To those of you not familiar with website construction, you are looking at a site that is utilizing framed-in content (always a big no-no). There is absolutely no content credited to the actual domain, it all points right back to that website generator and dies a quick and painless rankings death. In other words, search engines find this to be completely useless, somewhat shady and utterly tacky (not unlike that brown polyester suit you can’t bear to throw out). It’s the reason why a search for the keywords in the domain “Best Race Car Drivers” doesn’t return a result with this website- admittedly, we stopped looking after page 13.

Think I’m wrong? Check out a screen shot of how ModernGorilla.com appears:

Not to toot our own horn, but search engine robots find this sort of site construction to be a breath of fresh air and they will reward you accordingly with higher rankings. Everything is organized, readable, and sensible. You can see the actual content and you can find your way around without a hassle; no tricks or games are being played. Because we meet certain accessibility standards we aren’t kidding when we say that a blind person can read and navigate this site with ease.

Why is this important?

Unless you’re using your website to share cute images of your cat with your friends, you’ll probably want others to find and read your site from a search on one of the major search engines. If it’s your business site, not being ranked by a search engine is the equivalent of leaving the phone number off your business card.

We’re not saying you have to build a site with us- far from it actually. We simply want to educate the public about bad practices and the old saying “If it’s too good to be true, it usually is” is the reason why we bring this up. Do your homework and draw your own conclusions before hitching your wagon to a stillborn website.

Simply put, a free and easy site is worth what you put into it- nothing.

Seth Godin makes an excellent point about the future of Real Estate Marketing here.

Some of our more savvy readers know where this is going. The internet is now just too vast in scope for your local business to succeed in getting world-wide attention; you need to hunker down and become a specialist in one-two specific locations in order to get the attention of customers who are most likely to pick up the phone and inquire about your services or walk through your door.

It’s the reverse Wal-Mart effect- instead of being all things to all people (and having an outpost in every town) you can easily beat the big guys by being exactly what they aren’t. All too often I think that small business owners forget what they do best and lose their minds when they finally get a website up; it’s not about your ability to expand your business but rather being able to get the eyeballs of every man, woman and child within a certain region.

There is no shortage of available business around you if you’re ready and willing to actively pursue it. Don’t get distracted by an ever-expanding universe (and come back down to Earth). If you’re in Redondo Beach, don’t list Southern California all over your website, title tags, etc.. how your customers will find you is not any different from a localized Yellow Pages model, and you wouldn’t take out ads in Westlake Village, would you? (lest you want to slowly drain the life out of your employees and increase your costs)

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Scale it back and focus on the areas you can handle!

Blumenthal On Branding

“A total of 825 chief marketing officers were surveyed. They are turning “away from traditional advertising and public relations and toward ‘customer-facing’ and lead generation programs such as event marketing and e-mail.”

Nearly half of respondents, 45 percent, said they were going to change agencies in 2008. They plan to fire their Web design and development firms, direct marketing agencies, general ad agencies, and PR firms.”

 What does this mean? Well, first off, it means that Big Business is finally grasping that their conventional models no longer work. Having one agency handle PR, the other doing websites, and another working on TV commercials is creating fragmentation and costing them in lost time.

Well, it’s not just that- they also recognize that the web is quickly becoming the “hub” that all other methods will circulate around. Your PR person needs to be on the site (not just pressing flesh and clipping magazine articles) to insure a consistent message. Your direct mail needs to coordinate with web offerings. It’s no longer “ok” to go without updating your site for over a month, and that commercial you bought for the SuperBowl better be on the site (but only if it’s funny). They want feedback, they want interaction, they want consistency.

Why does this apply to small business?  Because the Big Guys are doing nothing different from what you can pull off, they’re just doing it on a nation scale. You don’t need PR firms, teams of graphic designers or expensive TV ads to promote your company anymore; they’re letting go of that notion.. and so should you.

For those of you just starting out on this internet thing, please add your business information to Google Maps right now.

No, really.

Hit this link and follow the instructions. It’s free and a great way to start the ball rolling on exposure for your existing business. If you’re feeling a little frisky go ahead and add an picture of your shop- it all adds up.

Snapshot taken from SmartMoney.com this morning:

Yes, today’s trading is driven by panic. But really.. when you have such a rosy outlook under the “Breaking News” section can you blame them?