The Internet Marketing Resource Center (INMRC)

Finding the right mix between marketing focused messages and customer focused messages is a real art and, in my opinion, at the heart of creating a powerful marketing strategy.

Interviewing your existing customers is one of the best ways to uncover this mix and find out what your customers really value, really want, and in the case of online search - what they really look for when trying to find someone that does what you do.

The customer interview process, interviewing our customers’ customers, is a system used by the Duct Tape Marketing coaches as part of the strategy planning process and Australian coach Joe Bowers and Canadian coach Elizabeth Walker took this a step further by actually inserting the interview question - “What would you Google if you were looking for this kind of services/products?”

Try it sometime with your customers and I think you will discover some potentially powerful keyword phrases that you may not be optimizing your web pages for.

In the field interview with Elisabeth McLaury Lewin - editor of PodcastingNews at PodCamp Midwest



In the field interview with Rob Walch - editor of Podcast411 at PodCamp Midwest



In the field interview with Ed Roberts - editor of Ed Roberts.tv at PodCamp Midwest

My across the state of Missouri pal Scott “the name tag guy” Ginsberg is a really great speaker and entertainer. He has taken the art of branding oneself to new levels.

So, what does any self respecting personal brand dude do in this day and age - they launch, in his case, Nametag.TV

Here’s a sample of his work. (although Scott, what’s with all that product in your hair?)

Video not working? Click here for Adobe Flash 9!

Consume everything you find there and soak up his enthusiasm, it’s infectious.

I wrote a post a few days ago that sparked an uncanny number of replies. Essentially, I made a brief point about whether or not your coffee drink order from a Starbucks would give a marketer clues about who you are.

Well, more than one reader pointed out the fact that they had another kind of drink in mind altogether when they read this post and wondered what might your choice of adult beverage say about you. I think the question is a valid one and so I pondered it over an Irish Whiskey myself just last night. By the way I am writing part 3 as we speak, no it’s not what kind of gravy are you, it’s my original point about determining behavior that allows you to identify your ideal customer - stay tuned on that.

But for now, I must confess I’m a Tullamore Dew and water (a nod to my Irish ancestors I guess.)

So, what drink are you?

Nice little widget from Jim Blasingame’s Small Business Advocate radio show.

I was on Jim Blasingame’s radio show this morning and the big topic of the show was “what to do in a down economy?” First, we aren’t in a down economy unless you listen to CNN, your business isn’t dependent upon the consumer confidence index, you just need a few more ideal customers, and second, you do the same thing you do in a rockin economy - target, differentiate and raise your prices - have a listen Jim has a great following.

Marketers spend a lot of time dissecting the various demographics and psychographics of target markets and I’m wondering if you could do a study of what all your customers order at a Starbucks, or if they even frequent such a place, and come up with appropriate marketing messages.

For the record, I’m a grande coffee with 2 shots of espresso added - the fact that people call this drink names like a depth charge or red eye ought to tell you something. (More on this when I’m back at the office)

So, what are you?

Blog software has a lot going for it in terms of dynamic content creation, ease of use, ease of update, content syndication and built in SEO tools. So why not use it as your entire web site? Great question - and one that more and more small business folks are coming around to.

I love WordPress and use it to power this blog. The WordPress software is very easy to use as an entire site management tool as well. The only real draw back is that most of the themes for WordPress are created specifically for blogs and have a very bloggy look.

I’ve recently run across a couple very talented WordPress designers that are taking the web site design approach to creating themes specifically for use as traditional web sites. With these themes the homepage looks like a home page and other static pages found on traditional web sites exist as well. But, you get a blog too - how cool is that?

iThemes - several versions to choose from in multiple color combinations - complete web site look and feel.

Remix - very flexible, multi design theme that comes with functions that allow you to create a very customized look.

Using this approach allows you to easily create a very stylish web site that can function much more like a content management tool allowing anyone with permission to edit and create pages from any web browser. Now, add some plug-ins from the WordPress community and you have some very powerful functionality for very little money and time invested.

Mark Flannery co-founded Kiva.org with his wife a few years ago and their success has forever altered the way entrepreneurs in the developing world get access to the small amounts of capital that can make a huge impact on their businesses and lives. In doing so they’ve also opened up an entirely new channel of micro lending to businesses and individuals who would like a way to help the smallest of businesses get going.

Matt stopped by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast recently to share the Kiva story.

The incredible thing about this system is that it’s a lending, not gifting, system that allows anyone to lend as little as $25 that might go towards a tiny fish selling business in Mozambique allow allow the owner to buy more product and in doing provide a necessary service to a community.

The burgeoning venture has received incredible press attention from the likes of
(The Oprah Winfrey Show, NBC’s Today Show, and President Clinton’s book “Giving”.

Here’s how it works:

1. You go to the Kiva site and choose an entrepreneur who has posted and been screened for a need
2. You make a loan payment for as little as $25 through Paypal or credit card
3. Receive a journal so you can keep track of how your entrepreneur is doing
4. Withdraw or reloan the proceeds from your load

The amazing thing about this program which now raises millions of dollars a month for poor entrepreneurs is the load payback is at about 99%.

There a several other volunteer opportunities as well.

Microsoft Office Live Small Business, a suite of online tools aimed squarely at the small business, went live today with a pretty significant upgrade to the already powerful tool.

Office Live allows you to easily create and host a website as well as manage contacts, schedule meetings, share documents and projects and integrate online ads from MS adManager all online, all with one username. The services come in three flavors and prices, but a great deal can be had for free.

Today they added several new features including Store Manager, an e-commerce tool to help small businesses easily sell products on their own Web site and on eBay; and E-mail Marketing beta, to make sending e-mail newsletters and promotions simple and affordable

Perhaps most significant for some potential users is support for the Firefox browser. This makes the service available to Mac users as well as the growing number of PC users that rely of Firefox.

This offering merits a good hard look, even if you’re already online.

In an increasingly related note, Yahoo announced unlimited storage and hosting for it’s small business web hosting accounts for $11.95/mo.

Disclaimer: I am participating in a round of workshops aimed at women entrepreneurs this spring. The workshops are hosted by Office Live Small Business.

I’ve written about a free service called jott.com before because I use it to capture ideas when I’m driving or reading the Sunday paper in bed. I just hit a phone number and speak my message and then I get the message transcribed and delivered to my email - or, and this is really helpful, to my virtual assistant or anyone else I have set-up, including groups of people.

Recently they’ve been hooking this service up to other services allowing you to a whole bunch of useful things just by making a phone call. You can set-up and post to Twitter, Wordpress.com blogs, TypePad.com blogs, and Tumblr blogs just by leaving a voice mail. You can add events to Google Calendar or 30 boxes calendars while you drive down the highway. You can create BackPack, Vitalist and Remember the Milk to-do lists. You can jott any question to Mosio and get an answer.

As more of these services are added this tool just gets better. A couple thoughts - this is for short messages, don’t try to create a 300 word blog post. It doesn’t always get it right, speak slowly and enunciate like you’re talking to your grandpa from the old country. It automatically creates a link to the audio file though so people can hear the message in your voice too.

Microsoft Window Mobile is the newest sponsor of the Duct Tape Marketing blog and is helping support my efforts to uncover and bring you the latest and greatest small business stuff by enabling mobile posting technology for this blog. You will begin to see the occasional “live on location” audios, text and photos (complete with a map it link) coming from this effort.

So, when you see the “mobile post” image you will know I’m blogging on the go.

Google’s machine translating technology is pretty amazing. No, I’m sure it’s not perfect, but it can open up some interesting online marketing opportunities. Adding a gadget like you see above can allow visitors from other parts of the world to surf to your site and instantly translate it to their native tongue possibly opening doors to additional sales or foreign partners. And, it’s kind of fun to see your words in other languages. You can get this bad boy at the Google Gadgets page. Simply add the code you receive and anyone can instantly translate your pages.

Google recently extended this technology to Gmail and Google Talk

We recently made our machine translation technology accessible from within Gmail and Google Talk, which gives mail and IM users instant access to translation capabilities at the point where they might most need them, e.g., when communicating with friends and colleagues around the world. If you find yourself wanting to translate a few words or short phrase, you can IM an appropriate chat-bot to obtain an immediate translation.

If you want to try it, just add en2es@bot.talk.google.com as a friend in Google Talk and send it a message to translate from English to Spanish. You can do this inline as you chat with a potential Spanish speaking prospect or vendor.

That’s the theory behind Guy Kawasaki backed alltop.com

The site lists categories such as celebrity, gaming, mac and egos - “Featuring the mouths, minds, and egos of folks like Scoble, Cuban, Trump, and Winer.” (small business is coming) and then aggregates for you a collection of what are known to be some of the top blogs on the subject. It makes a handy little portal for surfing some of the more popular sites.

I talk to lots of small business owners and marketers about referrals. One of the burning questions always revolves around the topic of motivation. In other words, how do you motivate someone to refer your business when the time comes. Or, the perfect situation, how to do you get them to proactively evangelize your business.

The tried and true approach (although while it’s tried I’m not sure it’s really true) is to offer incentives. You do this I’ll give you free service or $10 bucks. This can generate some business, but I’ve found that over time it won’t create evangelists, in fact, it may turn evangelists off.

Highly motivated referral sources do it for two reason - 1) they think you offer a good deal, good service, something of value and 2) they know, like and trust you enough that they want to help, want to see you succeed, want to connect at a deeper level and be a part of what you are doing - particularly if that can help a friend.

So, can see how payola could actually demotivate that second reason.

I did two interviews this week with successful business owners who had moved their entire marketing focus to systematically generating referrals. In both cases, they had started with traditional pay for referral approaches and quickly realized (in some cases with direct input from the referral sources) that appreciation was all that was needed. In other words, keep us in the loop, thank us, send us the occasional hand written note or unexpected gift - and keep providing over the top service to our friends.

Mike MeDerment with FreshBooks.com says that his most successful referral tactic for his online business is to make personal thank your calls and invite local customers for a dinner when he’s on the road at a conference.

Zane Safrit of Conference Calls Unlimited sends referral sources the occasional stunning bunch of flowers from out of the blue. That bouquet sitting on the desk does more to generate word of mouth than all the 20% off your next purchases in the world.

So, when designing your referral system consider making creative appreciation a big part of it?

What have you successfully done to motivate referrals?

I would love to interview you if you have a great referral success story. Send your idea to me at john@ducttapemarketing.com

This free service allows you to list your small business marketing related events and receive some extra exposure - or, you can find lots of great marketing and small business related events - workshops, seminars, conferences, teleseminars and webinars.

You can subscribe by location or category and add events to your Google, Yahoo or Outlook calendars.

View events here or Submit events here. Get events on your mobile phone here. Subscribe via your favorite RSS reader here

So, you’ve got the web site, the feature length articles in the ezine and you’re posting regular riffs on the blog - what’s missing.

For some the missing content strategy might be your micro content strategy. I’m not a raving fan of services like Twitter that promote instant “what are you doing now” types of blurbs, but there’s no denying that lots of people are suggesting by their use that’s the way they want to consume content - in snack size bites.

The question is how and why do you create that kind of content with your already overtaxed content producing brain. Like so many things the answer lies in finding a solution that is effective from a marketing standpoint, yet easy to implement from an actually do it standpoint.

Here’s a tool I would suggest you take a look at. It’s free service is called Tumblr. Tumblr is in many ways a blogging tool, but one with some interesting features built right in that let you create what they call Tumblelogs. I think it just might be the perfect answer to the bite size content challenge.

Tumblelogs.

Unlike blogs, tumblelogs aren’t designed like a newspaper column. They’re the easiest way to share everything you find, love, hate, or create — even if you’re not wordy.

Setting up a Tumblr micro-blog is dead simple. Just follow a couple steps. Once you’ve done that you will be presented with a dashboard that prompts you to upload text, quotes, links, photos, audio or video. Each action creates a formatted post. This set-up is just perfect for the kind of stream of snacks that people seem hungry for.

But, here’s where it gets interesting. You can also add feeds that you already publish. So, with one step you add your Twitter feed to the micro-stream and all of a sudden, people can view your Tweets in something close to context. Now add your delicious feed (or the feed for a specific tag) and content gets posted to your tumblr blog as you surf. You can add YouTube, Digg or any RSS feed to the stream and automatically create as you go. There’s also a desktop widget for posting text and a “Share on Tumblr” browser bookmark tool so you can post something you find on the fly. Posting text and photos via mobile is as simple as sending an email.

What I really like about this format is that that it automatically produces little snippets all day long, but the net collection of snacks can produce an entirely different kind of interesting main course - one that you might never produce sitting in front of a blank screen trying to write something deep.

Okay, now let’s add another twist. The service allows you to create groups and give shared ownership to the members of the group. This is a potentially simple way to create an entirely different kind of content solution. What if you created a group Tumblelog with a very specific focus in mind. How about a group that takes a chapter from a book each week and each member reveals the most significant moment for them in the chapter. How about a group that poses a question each week and then collectively riffs on it. How about a group of strategic partners writing about an industry or a community. I think all of the above would be powerful traffic magnets. (Yes Tumblelogs produce RSS feeds.)

Here’s a Tumblelog that I’ve set-up - duc.ttape.us

Yet, another thing on your list to consider - but certainly food for thought.

Anita Campbell, publisher of Small Business Trends, created a great little project called Marketing Tips.

She asked lots of marketing folks - most of whom you would recognize by name - to share one simple marketing secret.

The collection is really fabulous stuff.

Here’s the secret I contributed:

“Become a journalist - no, I’m not really suggesting that you join the staff of some publication, but the acceptance of new media tools like blogs and podcasts has turned the marketing tables - so take advantage of the allure of a reporter and start a blog and podcast and request interviews with industry leaders, community leaders, authors and maybe even your biggest prospects. Instead of asking for a meeting to demonstrate your product, ask to feature your prospect in your next blog or podcast episode. You will automatically change your status in their eyes, increase your role as an expert and create great content for your marketing materials.”

Take a few minutes and read this first set of tips. You will find both mind altering ideas and practical stuff you can start doing today. Thanks Anita!

Click on either photo on left to expand and see examples of new local search

In a move that should offer further proof of the growing emphasis on local search, Google expanded the local listings shown on a geographic based search from three to ten. Hard to miss those local listing now. Make sure that you are working on getting yourself noticed in these types of searches by submitting and update your profile on the Google Maps local business center.

Hint: reviews on other local/social sites such as StumbleUpon, Craig’s List, Insider Pages, Judy’s book seem to be influencing the local search rankings.

Lots of stories in the news today about the proposed Yahsoft/Microhoo takeover and even some folks pondering if Google is now in real big trouble. My guess is the folks at Google are cheering today. My take is that Microsoft is admitting defeat by trying to buy there way out of it. Yahoo! has been scuffling of late and has never been a better deal, but is putting two companies together that can’t really figure out how to compete with Google going to make one company that can?

Why do companies continue to believe that If you put two dogs together you get a pony? ~ Jon Fine, Business Week media columnist

My fear is that Yahoo! will fight this (heck, Google may help them) and the bid may go up if someone like AT&T jumps in, but no way this deal gets done in under a year. That will likely mean that Yahoo and Microsoft both drift while trying to put this together and Google’s position in both of their businesses gets stronger. I’m not even factoring in the massive amount of effort it would take to actually merge these companies. I’m really surprised how few people in the media took this position.

Now, having said all that, I don’t know if a stronger Google is really a good thing, but I think this move by Microsoft may actually benefit Google more in the long run.

With all of the hoopla these days about networking online I can’t help but wonder why people get so confused about how to approach these new tools. See, networking is networking, only the tools that you can employ have changed.

When you think about it, hasn’t networking always been social networking?

Here are some of the proven, effective best practices when it comes to networking

• It’s never about the sale, it’s always about the relationship - build first by giving
• Don’t keep score, give because you can help, the universe will sort out the accounting
• Network with your peers and partners as much as with your prospects and customers
• Every network has influencers, build relationships with the influencers
• Get out and chat, lunch and visit with the members of your network from time to time

While I’m sure there is many a fine point that could be added to that list, would you agree that’s what effective networking looks like? So, I ask you, does that change just because the networking platform is no longer a Chamber of Commerce? Doesn’t that sound like a pretty effective way to approach building and expanding your network within a Small Business Brief, Digg or LinkedIn?

Building and maintaining strong networks is the killer practice for the most successful organizations, every business should be reaching out and connecting with customers, prospects and partners both online and off. The secret to opening up these new access points online and expanding your networking reach globally is to go in there with the same best practices in mind, but find ways to creatively apply them with the new, rich set of tools.

Okay, an example of creatively applying this concept.

Let’s do lunch - can become let’s do virtual lunch.

Here’s what I would propose - send 5 people you would like to network with a $10 Panera Bread Company gift card and invite them to grab lunch and meet for an online group chat to discuss X (x = a topic like a book, or tool or some challenge you know is common.) - You can use Campfire from 37 Signals to host the chat.

Here’s what is really cool about this. This could be a very powerful medium to network, share ideas and build relationships. You could set this up and do it weekly with different peers, partners and customers. (you don’t have to always buy the lunch!) But, what I really like about this idea is that the group chat tool creates a transcript that will certainly enhance the participation of the members in the chat and could easily turn into great content for future consumption.