Perhaps in the last decade you have paid for a new website and unwittingly thought “build it and they will come”. Nothing could be further from the truth and it does bug me when businesses are blinded by incorrect advice from web site design firms. They are left believing that simply having a web site equates to successful internet marketing.

This has changed, you can no longer expect people to find your website. You need to start spending time at the same places your prospects and customers spend their time.

One such place is Facebook, you may have probably heard of it, but importantly not worked out whether it’s something you need to take on board! The reality is for many businesses their Facebook fan Page is as important as their own site in terms of engaging with their community.

With Facebook approaching over 1 billion users there’s a very good chance that many of your prospects and customers are on Facebook. It’s staggering to think that half are accessing Facebook on a daily basis. Also you need to be mindful that approximately 350 million are accessing Facebook from their smartphones.

Think back to 1999, the popular search engines included AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, but now they have all but gone. I agree it’s hard to see the mighty Facebook lose their popularity, but with their IPO this year you could argue a change in financial goals may change the direction of the company. It’s unlikely though and I would maintain every business should seriously consider having a presence on Facebook. If it isn’t Facebook, is it Google+ or Twitter?

Whatever you decide the real takeaway is that your business has to go where your customers are. You can’t get around that.

It is so much easier for a small business like yours, or indeed a large coffeehouse chain like Starbucks, to be more personable on a Facebook Business Fan Page than via their corporate website. Remember people buy from people they know, like and trust and social media offers you the amazing opportunity to excel in all three of these areas. Never before has a business been able to spread their circle of influence so easily and inexpensively.

It excites me to think that now more than ever you have the ability to easily connect with like minded people and turn them into your raving fans and lifetime customers. Thus it’s critical you take time out to seriously think about how you will talk to your audience in the future. Social media is like a cocktail party, where it’s far better to listen in the first instance than dominate the conversation about yourself. Will you continue to push out messages like the the guy on the street corner with the megaphone or differentiate yourself from your competition by actually listening and growing your community this way.

Can you see how this is so much more powerful than traditional ways of marketing? In fact in 5 years time the term “social media marketing” will be replaced with simply the term “marketing”. It will be the way everyone markets. Thus it’s important to not get left behind.

It’s time to consider your web presence and determine exactly what it and whether it is working for you.

Typically a small business can not afford to set up a marketing department and they generally feel let down by the overrated and expensive services offered by the likes of the Yellow Pages. They know they need to change, but just haven’t worked out how.

It’s A New World.

I would suggest that your followers on Twitter, your fans on Facebook, your connections on LinkedIn, your subscribers on your blog and your viewers on YouTube are in fact your new marketing department.

If you’re selling something in 2012 you should be on social media and the web.

For some this maybe a bold statement, but we are living through a culture shift that isn’t waiting around for anyone and I hope like me you relish the amazing opportunity we all have over the next five years.

I would like to share why this is an exciting time for business owners.

Often a business believes they are implementing social media marketing because they have opened a Facebook and Twitter account and occasionally post sales messages on it. This couldn’t be further from the truth and fundamentally I believe they haven’t been given the opportunity to sit back and take stock of how they can take full advantage of the technology they have at their finger tips. Perhaps you are in the same boat and haven’t taken the time to really evaluate the impact of the internet revolution we are all apart of. You may even fail to appreciate we are in the middle of this cultural shift, one that is truly transforming the way business is being done over. 2012 will be pivotal to your ongoing success over the next five years. Through AndyBrown.org I would like to offer you the guidance and clarity you need as a business owner, in a world of rapid and confusing change.

The good news is that the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest represent a marketer’s dream. They are free tools that when used correctly will produce a sizeable increase in new and repeat business through social media. You will become more visible in your community and front of mind when they are making purchasing decisions.

It’s critical to convert your connections on social networks into customers.

From the start you will find that I have set AndyBrown.org out as a conversation between the two of us. It’s as us we have met up for a coffee in your town. For me this would be Beanscene in St Andrews, or equally we could be sitting down for a pint. A pint of St Andrews Ale in the Dunvegan Hotel would make the perfect place for us to discuss how I can help you. Most probably we met online through one of the social media platforms and it made sense to finally meet up.

I’m assuming you are a business owner looking to make sense of the whole social media revolution You have possibly ventured into Facebook and Twitter or have the inclination that you must finally get to grips with it. You are busy working long hours and feel that some of the old ways of marketing are no longer bearing fruit. Ultimately you are finding it’s frustrating and tough to know which way to turn.

How To Avoid That Dreaded Feeling In The Pit Of Your Stomach

You can’t help but notice other premises closing in your street. You had an inkling that perhaps they weren’t fairing too well but to see the “We have closed” sign up has given you feeling of dread in the pit of your stomach.

Through reading AndyBrown.org you will begin to make sense of the technological revolution that we are all living through and use it to increase your profits. It can seem very confusing at the start and all too often it seems easier to continue in our old ways and habits of doing business. Today you will be given the clarity to make sense of the cultural shifts we are all experiencing and learn how to position yourself as the go to business for your sector.

It isn’t as if you haven’t noticed the changes going on around you. Everyone seems glued to their mobiles, more and more of us shop online and you first learn about the big news stories on Twitter rather than on the television.

In speaking to local business owners in my home town of St Andrews I sense a determination to make head way with social media, but equally a sense of frustration at not knowing where to turn when faced with a fog of noise created by so much information. I sympathise because it is overwhelming and very different to anything that has happened in our lives before.

Any business without a social media strategy and vision through to 2017 will find themselves playing catch up, and regret they didn’t take action earlier.

Fortunately this won’t be the case with you because I have worked long and hard to give you the very blueprint businesses are using to secure more business online you need but probably weren’t sure where to find.

Lets Look At Your Customers

Whilst your business may not have changed much over past decade, running with the same systems, producing the same product, the same can’t be said of your customers. I can’t stress enough how radically their lives have changed and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Importantly these monumental changes in the lives of your customers’ lives are affecting your bottom line every single day.

As you can appreciate a lot has happened over the past 17 years and I have made it my job to explain to you in layman’s terms how the past and what’s happening today affects your business and crucially how to benefit from it. First though, I need to you consider why more so than ever your marketing messages seem to fall on deaf ears? Here’s the answer.

Your customers are now exposed to more information than you could ever imagine.

Living In The Information Revolution

Eric Schmidt, the current executive chairman of Google, recently said that we create more information in the world every 48 hours than the total amount ever created from the beginning of human civilization up until 2003. It’s a crazy statistic, but one that makes a significant impact on your business and can not be ignored.

Picture this, every minute 35 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube. In the United States 15 billions videos were streamed in May 2011. The way we all consume media has changed forever and this directly affects every business. Whether you are Starbucks with close on 19,000 stores around the world or a small independent cafe in a town like St Andrews, it’s very important to acknowledge this cultural shift and use it to our advantage.

With Change Comes Huge Opportunity

The new ways in which we now communicate and the sheer volume of information we consume are here for good. Perhaps up to two years ago your typical retail outlet could have ignored what was going on around them. This is no longer the case, it’s vital they embrace these trends and use them to their own advantage.

I admit initially it may seem difficult to picture a way of making oneself heard. In the past we welcomed the arrival of the phone, fax machine and the mobile as business tools for aiding our businesses. The changes in comparison to today’s innovation were at pedestrian speed and essentially the rules of the game didn’t change. Each tool allowed us to push our message out to an audience that was incapable of directly responding. Essentially the companies with the deepest pockets could push out the largest messages.

The Rules Have Changed

This has now all changed, a hundred years plus of businesses exclusively pushing their messages out to all and sundry has it hit a turning point. They now need to adapt and understand we are in a culture where the customer decides whether or not to pull information from a business. It’s a massive change.

I have been marketing online since 1996 and unquestionably this is a fundamental shift.

Make a Difference to Your Bottom Line

Here’s how to help you take advantage and embrace this revolution. Furthermore you will learn the absolute surefire way to ensure social media makes a difference to your bottom line.

This surefire way boils down to an answer that comes in two parts. Quite simply the what to do and the how to do.

The first part is something I would like to think you are already doing, though perhaps not online.

You have to care about your customers. This may seem obvious offline, but clearly isn’t being done correctly online. I believe in the most part because businesses haven’t been shown how to use them. Let’s face it, these are new tools and no one to date has taught them the best way to employ them in a strategic manner that makes sense.

Times have changed though and may find you have to go beyond simply throwing up an advert in the local paper.

Consider this for one moment. Businesses are responsible for a lot of the messages directed at us your customers in any given day. Take for example the signage in the shop window, TV and radio advertisements, the direct mail through our postboxes, email promotions in our inboxes. It’s a constant bombardment of messages being pushed at them and others. The name of the game is to get your message heard before someone else.

As the vast majority fail to be heard this they shout louder. This can be due to the increasing amount of noise, or ineffective copywriting or a combination of both.

They try desperately to crack the code and but unfortunately miss the one simple way to get heard through all the noise.

The way to blast through and get heard is to care.

There you have it!

Sounds too easy, doesn’t it?

This is actually the secret to positioning your business and taking full advantage of the profits offered by being on social media. It sounds so simple that many will miss the enormity of it.

Too many of the flyers that drop through my door or the ads I see in the local paper scream look at us. They hardly care at all, they scream look at us aren’t we great. Critically they aren’t speaking with the readers interests. The best direct response pieces care and offer information that the reader can use regardless of whether they buy the product.

Show Me You Care

You simply have to care.

It’s wonderful to see this happen away from the internet. No doubt you can list your favourite businesses. I certainly can in St Andrews. As soon as you step into their premises or call them you can immediately tell they care about you. I always warm to the stories from my childhood and my parent’s childhood where the shopkeeper made you feel special because they knew exactly how you liked things. Obviously this still happens today, I see it when I visit my local pub or butcher, and I bet you do this this day to day in your own business.

The problem I see is that far too many businesses don’t give their customers the platforms to continue the conversation after they leave your premises.

When someone cares about you, it’s human behavior to want to tell someone about your great experience. This is how we as humans are wired, we like to reciprocate. It’s as old as the hills, and it will never change, we simply feel good about ourselves when we return a favour. It’s a natural thing to do and as a result word of mouth marketing has always been the cheapest and most powerful way of receiving new business.

There is nothing new in this regard except fundamentally the way in which someone tells a friend about a good experience has changed forever. Now someone may tweet to a friend about the superb service they received at a restaurant and within seconds that friend has read the tweet and retweeted to all of their followers. Then next their followers are retweeting the same tweet. In effect we are in a world of one to one to many marketing and it happens very quickly.

For the first time in history word of mouth marketing is scalable and allow you to build your business in a way you never imagined..

By simply caring about your customers and see the reaction will enable you to break through the wall of noise in cyberspace I mentioned earlier.

Your Local Business Just Went Global

We are in an era where word of mouth marketing working is happening at breakneck speed. For example your voice will easily be heard in your friends’ friends news stream on Facebook. Consider just a few years ago when it was normal for someone to thank you or complain via the phone or letter. This in the main has changed, the popularity of review sites has taken many businesses by surprise. Love them or hate them there’s no denying that such internet sites are a major resource for determining the strengths and weaknesses of where to visit in new destination or your own town.

Word Of Mouth Marketing On Steroids

Social media can be thought of word of mouth marketing on steroids. When someone comments on your Facebook wall with regards to how you helped them with a purchase, this is visible to all of their friends. As you reply to thank them you begin to engage further and this spreads your reputation as a caring business. Furthermore this one post can be shared by others, further amplifying the message. This action also offers an enormous opportunity to strengthen the relationship by responding.

When someone likes your Facebook fanpage this becomes visible on their friend’s wall and acts as a form of social proof and makes their friends want to check your page out.

Final Question

This question is simple.

Is your social media business strategy based on caring? Those businesses who continue to push their message will suffer. The way forward is you market your business through caring and enable your customers to easily pull and spread your message.

As the next 5 years unfolds those that care will come out winning.

Please let me know your thoughts and questions below. It would be great to hear from you.