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.

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.