Archive for April, 2009

Social Media ROI: Bloomtastic.com & LinkedIn

For the last five years, Heather and Jayson Waits have owned and operated Bloomtastic Florist in Columbus Ohio.  The couple sells their products at a retail location through special event services like weddings and funerals, and via their eCommerce site.  Jayson is also an avid network marketer who Blogs at his Go MLM Biz Blog.  Capturing their share of the market in Columbus is always a challenge against competitors  like Flowerama, Columbus Florist and Desantis Florist all battling for customer dollars. But Heather and Jayson are sharp competitors.  Aside from building and optimizing their own eCommerce site as well as doing their own local directory submissions, the couple is  using social networks to drive paying customers to their business. See for yourself: This is the letter Heather used to reach out to a targeted group of 500 male LinkedIn users living in or around the Columbus Ohio area. Heather’s message hit a home run.  Here’s why: The approach was brief, respectful and readable – less than 10 seconds. It references the common group connection between her and the end recipient. It directly explains why the timing of her message is relevant. Rather than pushing her products, the message makes an exclusive offer to the group. The message provides a unique LinkedIn promotion code for order tracking and to apply the discount.  The code also gave Heather and Jayson the ability to track phone and walking orders. Heather completes the conversion process with a strong call to action and a link to her eCommerce site. ROI 871 unique visits on bloomtastic.com week of Valentines Day 2009. 59 site visitors came from Twitter.com. 44 site visitors came from LinkedIn.com. Overall 6% increase in sales from Valentines Day 2008 while industry sales were down 20% due to the holiday falling on a Saturday. [...]

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Small Business in the Social Guerrilla Marketplace

Self-Synchronized Swarm is a brilliant blog post by Perry Maughmer.  He calls out interesting similarities between David Kilcullen’s “Counterinsurgency Redux” and the modern trend towards social networking sites. Kilcullen is an expert in Guerrilla Warfare, and Perry highlights this excerpt: “Thus insurgent operational art remains fundamentally a matter of aggregating dispersed tactical actions by small groups and individuals, and orchestrating their effects into a strategically significant campaign sequence.“ Your Customers are the Enemy In this case, the enemy has done nothing wrong and they probably wonderful and peaceful people.  But they are the people you target and engage in order to drive your career or business. Social networks are communication platforms that promote peer-to-peer interaction in a large community setting. Personal brands and the automated delivery of information create an environment that fosters relationship development. Companies that organize and mobilize small teams of people, and empower them to let their personal brand become visible in these environments will ultimately see more opportunities and be able to take the appropriate action. Higher efficiency in communication creates unique channels where prospects, customers, media, and partner resources can be quickly engaged. Perry draws a connection that intrigues me because it takes this idea a step farther. A result of the speed and connectivity of these platforms is that small teams of people can be trained to tactically execute guerrilla-style marketing strategies.  These teams can engage in niche communities and groups, find and forward referrals, coordinate across boundaries and geo-target specific DMA’s of customers. Genuine peer-to-peer interaction combined with a strategically planned approach produces outcomes for little to no investment of dollars. Case Study Example A few months ago I needed to run a basic traffic analysis on a small and successful Promotional Product vendor’s website. The company had requested the analysis to find out [...]

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