Je suis en train de développer un nouveau concept et modèle d’affaires. Plus d’informations à venir en Mars! Si vous êtes un entrepreneur ou de travailler dans une start-up, se joindre à notre liste de diffusion ou de vous abonner via RSS d’apprendre ce que nous faisons.

That means that there is a potentially free (money, not time) communication channel to reach more than 5mm American adults every day.

Should you use it? Probably, but also keep in mind your specific demographic and their use of Twitter.

Also keep in mind your geographic area, and the local use of Twitter (especially if you are a retail location). Do your customers use Twitter? Daily? Do they retweet or reply?

Finally, keep in mind all of your other marketing channels and how effective they are on an ROI basis. Even if Twitter isn’t right for you now, keep an eye on it, as it will only become more common as time goes on.

Applied to improving your business, the concept is:

1. Learn why your customers are hesitant
2. Deal with one issue today

That’s it. Basic.

In his example, the community he is building at Human Business Works has a $27/month fee (cheapest consulting ever?). Even at that low rate, people are still (rightly) concerned about what that fee gets them. So Chris’s response is to do one thing – a quick screencast showing what’s “behind the fence”, giving people the exact answer to their question.

For me, the hesitation around my consulting services was similar – what do I get for my fee? So, I rewrote my service descriptions to be more, well, descriptive. The result was a higher click-through rate from the top-level pages into the specifics and three new clients.

What 1 thing can you do, today, to improve your business.

If your market is that 18-24 (and really 15-18 and 24-35, if we think about it), that changes the calculus on whether or not to try location-based promotions, a mobile version of your site, or even a mobile app.

Gap Promo Shows Location Deals Need Work

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t experiment with location-based offers, but that there are a few considerations.

1. Do you have reason to suspect that a quorum of your customers/potential customers use Foursquare/Places/etc.? Managing and maintaining an active social media presence and/or mailing list will let you ask this question directly.
2. Does your offer explain itself well enough for people to take advantage of it? Are you trying to generate interest among early adopters or just get more people in your door?
3. What is your plan for managing customer reactions when they don’t understand the offer correctly? If your goal was to generate foot traffic, and a customer has come in without officially “checking in”, does it really matter?

And the list goes on beyond that, of course, but without answering those basic questions, perhaps another campaign would be a better choice for generating foot traffic.

PS: To be fair, the promotion was still a success for Gap, and a great first trial for Facebook Places deals, as this quick summary on FastCompany shows.

Why Websites Suck. Guy Kawasaki interviewing Gerry McGovern

The most recent example? Bob Stapleton’s interview on Cyclingnews where he talks about the business rational behind working with Specialized.

…Specialized is Silicon Valley’s bike brand. They can help us build this franchise, and bring in people who can complement HTC, Google and Skype. I’d love to have a little west coast, geographically relevant compatible group of partners who are focused on common marketing objectives, and Specialized is strong enough to make that happen.

For too long, the sponsorship search in cycling has been something along the lines of:

• Find someone with budget who’s interested in cycling
• Back the team into the marketing budget to justify the expense
• Repeat the process with no regard for how the sponsors fit together, as long as they have the money

The new paradigm is something a bit more like:

• Find someone with budget who’s interested in cycling
• Design a launch of the sponsor or one of the sponsor’s new products at the beginning of the season or at Le Tour
• Reach out to existing sponsors’ business partners and potential business partners, with sponsorships based on sound business rationale
• Repeat the process on a rolling schedule, based on sponsors’ needs, not the team’s racing schedule

Only the second model will result in a strong, stable cadre of teams powerful enough to wrest a share of control away from the UCI and a few large race organizers. It may sound counter-intuitive, but the survival of smaller teams may actually depend on a few large teams becoming more powerful. Well, that, and responding to their sponsors’ needs.

As you can see, the series on what makes a Great Team Website is on permanent hiatus. While the content was informative, I never felt like I was adding anything to the equation with it. What I was suggesting was obvious, and in fact many people are implementing it, but they just weren’t doing it well, and doing it well is more important than just doing it. Until such time as I can craft a useful series on the differences between going through the motions and providing real value to fans and sponsors, the Great Team Website series is defunct.

Secondly, you may have noticed a few changes around the site, including a change from sports business to small business. While I still enjoy working in sports and will always have a few projects going, my coaching, consulting, and advice is needed farther and wider than sports. This means I’ll likely pepper the blog with more posts on more topics, but happily will then likely do so more frequently.

Finally, I’m off to Europe! Not permanently, but will be there to do my work with European Cycling Camp Velo Veneto. I’ll be in Italy from 25 June until at least 6 August. Just prior to and after that period, I’ll be in Paris. If you know of any small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMB) in Paris that can use any of my marketing services, let me know! My mobile won’t work in Europe (though I will have a euro mobile in Italy), but my office phone will ring over there.

In the meantime, I thank you for your support, and wish you tailwinds, smooth ice, and oil-slick free beaches!

-Jason

Social Media platforms are incredibly popular and therefore a necessary part of any web content plan. You can’t participate on Facebook, Twitter, etc. without a roadmap for what you are going to publish, when, and who’s responsible for it. This doesn’t mean planning out each individual Tweet in advance, but it does mean understanding what is and is not helpful from the perspective of helping the team accomplish its goals. It is especially important because too often businesses diving into social media do so by using it to broadcast messages, when the real purpose of, and success stories in, social media involve listening to and interacting with fans/customers.

Twitter should primarily be used to provide news, behind-the-scenes info and pictures, and answer fans’ questions in real-time. While it should be used several times per day year-round, it provides the most value to fans (and therefore sponsors) just before, during, and just after races. Not even live TV, radio, or cycling media text updates can provide a complete picture of everything that’s happening at a race, making team-supplied updates a valuable commodity. Since races are incredibly hectic, a plan needs to be in place for who is responsible for tweeting, what they can and cannot say, and, if they have to stop to care for a rider, who steps in to let fans know why the stream has gone quiet. One thing I have yet to see, but would be a fantastic use of Twitter, would be a staff member answering questions during the race about what is going on. Hard? Yes. Sure to generate growth in engaged, interested followers? Definitely.

Where Twitter is the live update and interaction stream, Facebook is the place to cultivate deeper connections with fans. Its robust capabilities to share news, images, and video, and for fans to share the same with you, creates a unique environment where you can interact on a meaningful level. It provides the ability to create an incredibly detailed portrait of your technology savvy fans through polls, surveys, and day-to-day interactions – it is the environment online where people feel the most comfortable sharing personal information. This also makes it a great place to introduce your sponsors to fans in a meaningful way. Polls and contests are ubiquitous and expected, so don’t seem so much like the interruption marketing we all hate so much – just be careful not to overdo it! While the creation of a Facebook page is simple, the maintenance of it (which is the critical part of success), is time intensive. Even though updates can be less frequent than on Twitter, because it is a less anonymous medium, they take longer to create and fan interactions must be more personal.

Video is one of the most effective media for attracting fans, but means frequently updated content, which can quickly use up server space and bandwidth, the two potentially large variables in Internet costs. Fortunately, hosted platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Ustream provide a cost-effective way to provide video content on a consistent basis, and also to allow fans to post their own videos, further drawing them into the experience. The quickly falling price of quality video components has driven the cost of video down from the 10s of thousand of dollars into the low hundreds, with little discernible loss in quality. Ubiquitous Internet access makes it possible to upload video from virtually anywhere, but has created the expectation on the fans’ part that video will be uploaded from anywhere. Because of that, a simple, realistic plan for uploading video on a regularly scheduled basis is a requirement of any modern web content strategy.

But, as with most things in life, it’s not quite so black and white. The US Twitterverse alone is expected to cross 25million users in 2010, meaning that being found within that crowd is going to become harder and harder. People follow more and more folks, and unless you’ve already got a name, even your good content can get lost in the shuffle. One of the solutions, especially if you’re trying to use Twitter as a marketing channel, is to build a huge follower count knowing that some percentage of those people actually will see what you say. You can afford to only have 10% of your followers see what you write if you have 10,000 of them, right?

Most of these follower auto-generators sell themselves on that principle – you need a big following, so pay us money to get one for you! With varying degrees of accuracy and targeting, they work by following other twitterer’s followers. Going on the theory that 50% of people automatically follow anyone who follows them, if the software can follow 500 people per day for you (without tripping Twitter’s spam filters), that’s 250 new followers every day – bingo!

Like I said, my first reaction is to go running away from these damn spam bots. This isn’t growing my list organically, this is gaming the system. It’s just not right!

But life isn’t that cut and dried. What if the software followed the followers of your competitors? Sure, that might be a bit bold, but if they’re interested in what your competition has to say, won’t they be interested in you? What if you could target keywords, so the software picked people that were clearly interested in what you have to say? In a way, you are actually doing them a service, assuming you have something to write about. After all, what good is a storefront on Broadway if you don’t have a sign out telling people what you do!?

In the end, it all comes down again to having a plan for posting content, interacting with the community, and being useful. If you can’t do that, beating AplusK’s follower count won’t do you the slightest bit of good. So, build yourself a plan, write some great stuff, and if you buy yourself some followers, I promise not to gag reflexively.