From the category archives:

Social Media

Are You Ready? Rural Business Planning for 2010

by Karen Wylie

in Rural Small Business, Seasonal Business, Social Media

NysnöatAnother New Year’s Eve, this time celebrating the arrival of a new decade.

If you’re like me, you start looking ahead to all the changes and improvements you’d like to make in your life and your business.

And odds are, learning what social media IS and how to use the various sites (or use them more effectively) are probably somewhere on every small business owner’s list of 2010 New Year’s resolutions. If you don’t become familiar with any of them, you really won’t know how they can help you or your business

Over the next few weeks, the Rural Tourism Marketing blog is going to be taking a look at how communication with our customers will continue to change. And the current situation is described quite accurately for those of us with businesses in rural America:

“Our hard earned cash won’t buy us enough advertising to keep our businesses afloat when our customers aren’t paying much attention to ads anymore.

With Facebook, Twitter and all the other social media sites, the meaning of “word of mouth” has been transformed.

Even the old static Internet sites our kids created for us 3 or 5 years ago don’t seem to be sending us much business.”

I’m certainly game to take a look at a revolutionary new approach - how about you?

But before you take those Christmas decorations down and finalize your 2010 plans, take pictures and then also take a look at some suggestions for reviewing 2009 and learning what worked for you.

Here’s to all the best for all of our rural businesses in 2010!

If you like what you’re reading, you can receive our blog updates via Feedburner or you can Subscribe to Backroads Business by Email.

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The First 100 Days

by Karen Wylie

in Rural Small Business, Social Media

rural-businessI thought today would be an appropriate time to comment on the first 100 Days.

No - not the first 100 Days of Obama and his new Administration.

ME! MY first 100 Days!

I’ve written this blog for 100 days straight, come hell or high water.

When I decided to give this blog a go, I committed to myself that I would actually post on it every day no matter what. I felt that managing the ‘care and feeding’ of my blog on a daily basis would make it a part of my life and routine. I hoped that writing every day would immerse me into my topics and the idea of writing again, since has a business owner most of my writing in recent years as been limited to product descriptions, customer correspondence, brochures and ad copy.

From a practical perspective, I was also aware that if I wanted blog visitors, I needed to post frequently enough to get their attention, and often enough that the search engines would index my pages. I’ve played in the past with blogs on free platforms like Blogspot and Wordpress, so I decided to set this blog up with my own domain using Wordpress, tag posts appropriately, set up a Feedburner account and so on.

Yet somehow I still thought I would have a couple months or so to quietly get my act together and post in sweet oblivion before Google grabbed the blog and assigned my PageRank. Color me crazy - or at least way behind the times.

I have really been struck by how many things have changed with Web 2.0. It’s one thing to read about it. It’s quite another to live it and manage and navigate a business through its evolution.

This blog may be new, but I am far from a newcomer to the Net. I created my first website fifteen years ago, in 1994, using the old Adobe Pagemill software. I happily basked in my #1 status on Yahoo for literally years - even though it took six months to even get listed.

I created another PageMill website in 1998 for our handmade soap business, but things really hadn’t changed much. When we were opening our store to the public, I made a point to publish travel directions for tourists on our website by the end of December 1999… even though we weren’t actually opening the doors of our retail shop until May of 2000. At the time it could take months before search engines would index changes to your website, and I wanted to make sure I allowed enough time.

We were quite stunned the following March when we had a parade of German tourists ringing our doorbell to buy soap because they had found driving directions to our front door on the Internet. (The American search engines didn’t index our changes until the following April.)

Fast forward a few years. Our ecommerce website is now database driven with more than 600 products and pages on the retail side. I can expect Google to update the site about every 7-9 days, and I schedule our site revisions and new product announcements accordingly. I review my ‘Google Alerts,’ visitor statistics and sales data every day, so I can SEO my site and make good decisions.

But my experience as a traditional ‘webmaster’ in no way prepared me for the speed of events I would experience with Backroads Business.

My blog posts appear on Google within fifteen minutes of being published. Companies are contacting me to purchase advertising space to reach what they call my important demographic, and Backroads Business even ranked #1 for the search term ‘Rural Business’, outranking even the Small Business Administration and The Rural Development program of the USDA.

For about four days. Then I was back on page six.

So at least the unpredictability of Google’s indexing has stayed the same.

However, if I write a blog post with ‘Social Media’ in the title, my readership will rise literally by several hundred visitors in the following 24 hours. It was actually shocking to discover that the sudden increase in readers could be tracked back to Twitter as the referrer, due to 53 Re-Tweets of my blog post URL in just a few hours.

I was probably more shocked by all the Tweets because I didn’t think the post was all that great, and I’d rather get attention for something I was proud of, than simply because I used ‘the right words’ in the title. I guess I’ll have to take solace in the fact that I helped 53 people trying to contribute value to the Twitter community by posting useful links.

At least the experience prompted me to download Tweetdeck and set up a Monitter account to track my business names and post titles.

Immersing myself for these 100 days in Web 2.0 for things other than my basic business has sensitized me to vast new opportunities available through the current technologies, software, apps and networking choices which for even a knowledgeable web user is challenging, to say the least. I hope I can keep up with many things I am discovering about the ‘new’ web and myself.

All in all, I’m really having a lot of fun. And I’ve got a lot of new things to learn.

So - what do you want to read about - and talk about - over the NEXT 100 days?

If you like what you’re reading, you can receive our blog updates via Feedburner or you can Subscribe to Backroads Business by Email.

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How Social Media Can Help Small Business

by Karen Wylie

in Small Business, Social Media

social media small businessAre you using social media yet?

Have you tried Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook?

How about writing a blog, or even commenting on some?

If not, don’t wait too long to start your learning and determine what’s right for you.

Business owners who have taken the leap into soap media are finding benefits, and lots of them according to a recent industry report.

Most of the business owners doing some marketing using social media have only been doing so for a few months.

But here are the benefits they found:

81% said social media generated exposure for their business

61% saw an increase in their web traffic or e-mail newsletter subscribers

56% said their participation lead to new partnerships

52% felt using social media generated qualified leads

48% said they were able to reduce their marketing costs

35% felt social media helped them close business deals

For more reading on this survey and the benefits business owners saw when they used social media, click here.

And for some tips on how business owners use Twitter for very practical purposes, like a restaurant posting their daily specials or a real estate agent posting new house listings, click here.

If you like what you’re reading, you can receive our blog updates via Feedburner or you can Subscribe to Backroads Business by Email.

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Social Media for Tourism Businesses

by Karen Wylie

in Seasonal Business, Social Media, Tourism

social media tourists tourismSocial media like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and others are obviously a huge trend for all industries these days.

But social media can be especially useful to tourism businesses. Hotels, restaurants, tour guides, retail outfitters, golf courses and resorts can all benefit from getting messages out to potential customers - whether they have reservations yet or not.

A tourism forum in Colorado discussed how ski-industry related businesses can use social media marketing in ‘Tourism-related businesses turn to social media for marketing:’

“For our mountain community businesses, that means using social media to get out messages about snow depths, road conditions, news, events, activities and sales. Be promotional, speakers said, but not so promotional that readers are constantly bombarded with sales pitches. Develop a voice, but not an entirely corporate voice. Integrate the social media networks with existing Web sites and e-mail.

Build loyalty. That seems like a no-brainer as we’re all familiar with the Mary Jane fanatics in our own back yard. The most interesting message from that discussion was an encouragement not to be afraid of user-generated content. Let your guests, clients and customers have their say on your Web sites and blogs.

The final message from the symposium was that travel and tourism through the summer likely will be closer to home. That’s good news for Colorado high country areas that are less than a day’s drive from anywhere in this state and our immediate neighbors.”

Your tourism area doesn’t have to be driven by snow - any region where tourism and travel is affected by Mother Nature and the seasons could benefit from using social media to provide relevant and timely updates to visitors.

To read the complete article, click here.

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When Does Email Become Ancient History?

by Karen Wylie

in Small Business, Social Media

social-media-rural-businessWith all the talk these days about social networking, have you started to wonder if anyone - besides you - is still using email?

If reaching high numbers of people is your goal, then social networks and blogs are a better choice than individual emails. They are more efficient for group communication.

In a recent survey by Neilsen discussed by the E-Commerce Times, business owners are showing an increasing fondness for networking over one-to-one correspondence. The Neilsen survey did NOT include using email for business purposes, which is apparently still very much preferred for work related communication.

“The statistics are hardly surprising, Jonathan Stark of Jonathan Stark Consulting told the E-Commerce Times. “Email was the killer app for the ’90s — it brought the Internet out of the geek realm to the grandma realm.”

In the 2000s, social networking is picking up where email left off, he said. Surprisingly, though, there are still large pockets of Internet users who have not embraced the social networking trend.

“I know people in tech even that still resist taking the plunge — they think it is a time waster when, in fact, it is the opposite,” Stark observed.

Indeed, one of the reasons for the medium’s popularity is its efficiency in communication. “It is more efficient than sending out emails, which basically a one-to-one form of communication,” noted Stark.”

Nielsen also found that the biggest increase in users of social networking and blogging communities was among 35-49 year olds. And use of mobile technology is gaining ground fast, and has nearly doubled since last year. Two-thirds of everyone online is visiting social networking communities, Nielsen said.

How do you compare to these statistics?

What do you use email for, and how much email do you use in your business?

How often do you send out email newsletters to your customers?

How many blogs and online communities do you visit daily or weekly?

Are you ahead of the curve or behind it?

And does it matter to you?

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