This is the first post by Rebecca Schatz our newest employee here at Simply Zesty in which she combines her two loves…Fashion and social media…

Although the fashion industry has arrived relatively recently onto the social media scene, it’s making an impact now that it’s finally here. Certain high-end luxury brands are still choosing billboards over blogs (perhaps for fear of their brand losing its perceived ‘exclusivity’ in the social media switchover), however, the fashion industry is generally taking to it like a Chanel-clad duck to water. Let’s have a look at how the trendsetters and trailblazers have started to set the world of social media alight.

Social Networking Success

One brand successfully flying the Facebook flag is Urban Outfitters. When it comes to successful community sites, original content is king. Urban Outfitters’ US strategy recognizes that community site visitors are looking for something more than mere advertising shill. Despite the fact that, with 320,000 likes, the brand is lagging behind some of its rivals (H&M has over 3 million likes), Urban Outfitter’s Facebook page is streets ahead when it comes to social media strategy: every week, the page features an exclusive clip of the new comedy series The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret. Visitors are also enticed with fan discounts, original photographic content, tips on garment care and Facebook-only competitions. In August, the company introduced a novel way to engage visitors by organizing items on the main website according to the number of ‘likes’ they receive on Facebook. Not only does this encourage Facebook fans to interact with the profile and drive traffic to the main website, it also prompts non-Facebook fans visiting the site to ‘like’ the company’s Facebook page.

Street Style

A number of fashion giants have adopted location-based social marketing, including Jimmy Choo and Louis Vuitton. One brand to successfully tackle the trend is Marc Jacobs. During this year’s New York Fashion Week, Jacob’s team not only streamed the shows live, they also teamed up with Foursquare to create some brilliant buzz around the show. A ‘Fashion Victim’ badge was created, which enabled interested social media-savvy New Yorkers to ‘check-
in’ at stores throughout the city to unlock the badge. Four fans then received tickets to Jacobs’ show at Bryant Park.

The Beauty of the Blog

Over the past two years, the fashion world has begun to recognize the potential power of the fashion blogger. Some of the more successful names in the industry include Garance Dore, Scott Schuman (‘The Sartorialist’) and Bryan Boy. Brand sponsorship and collaboration allow bloggers such as those listed above to make a lucrative living from their fashion-focused musings. One such collaboration saw Burberry enlisting the talents of Schuman for its successful social media campaign, The Art of the Trench. Site visitors voted for their favorite photographs of ‘regular’ people in the iconic coat, which were taken by Schuman. They were also given the opportunity to share and comment on the images and even upload their own.

Fashionable Apps

Some of the more noteworthy fashion apps on the market include myFendi, Find Me A Dress and Style Studio. In recent months, eBay have also hopped on the mobile app bandwagon with their latest venture into the social media world. The (free) eBay Fashion app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod allows users to shop, browse, watch, buy and ‘try on’ outfits. Visitors are also granted direct entry to the popular eBay Fashion Vault, which provides instant access to heavily-discounted designer brands. The real beauty of the eBay app, however, is how effectively it lends itself to the bidding process. Now that the fashion industry appears to finally have its finger on the pulse of the social media trend, it will be interesting to see how it continues to use the tools at its disposal. An increase in location-based services and the continuation of the blogger’s dominance within the industry are fairly safe bets, along with the imminent arrival of the few brands yet to join the social media party.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Social Media And SEO Don’t Matter Shit If You Don’t Pick Up The Phone
• Why negative reviews don’t hurt your brand
• How To Deal With Negative Comments And Bad Online PR
• How do you manage your customers online?
• Fix Your Web Presence Before Thinking About Social Media – Perfect Case Study

]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/fashion-industry-embracing-social-media/feed/ 0 http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/social-media-seo-dont-matter-shit-dont-pick-phone/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/social-media-seo-dont-matter-shit-dont-pick-phone/#comments Mon, 06 Sep 2010 21:16:37 +0000 Niall & Lauren http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=11799 This is a guest post by Caelen King who is CEO and founder of WhatClinc.com, a directory of health clinics around the world with over 500,000 unique monthly visitors.

Social Media affords you the ability to connect directly with your existing and potential customers, potential employees and a range of other interested parties. SEO is the work you do to make information stored by your company available to as wide an audience as possible through the various search engines.

Both of these disciplines require work on your part to build up your connections and your online visibility and can take up a substantial amount of your time. So why do so many small businesses forget that the first and most important aspect of being connected is being contactable? By not ensuring the phone is picked up when it rings and emails are answered promptly small firms are effectively falling at the first hurdle of being connected with the people most interested in them.

At WhatClinic.com we work with health clinics from around the world to expand their online presence for the explicit purpose of getting them more business. We work hard at this and measure everything so we can show real value for money. However one problem continually frustrates us and that is when we help a new patient try to connect with a clinic and the clinic doesn’t pick up the phone or they don’t answer the patient’s email. [It should be noted that all of our data comes from our work with dentists, surgeons & doctors from around the world. However, we know from talking to companies in other industries that this behavior is repeated across them all.]

So How Bad Is The Problem?

Our data tells us that clinics don’t answer on average 25% of their phone calls, and don’t reply to 35% of their emails within two working days. Now when you think about it very few companies have a 30% profit margin so ignoring 30% to 40% of your new and existing customers is nothing short of a disaster.

If you take into account the fact that some clinics have nearly perfect records for being contactable, it paints an even worse picture for the remaining businesses, and what’s worse for them again is when a new customer doesn’t get through the first time or doesn’t get a reply from their first email, then they will not try to contact that clinic again. In fact, not only do they end up going elsewhere, but if they ever mention the business again in public it is always negatively.

How Do We Know All Of This?

Our revenue depends on the fact that the clinics we work with realise that the business we generate for them comes from us in the first place. This is relatively easy in the case of email enquiries as the referrals come through us and are branded. What might not seem so obvious though is that even if we send a particular clinic hundreds of referrals a year, they might not see the value in them because they don’t act on them quickly enough and lose the associated business, or worse yet, they don’t act on them at all.

To counter this we contact the people who made the enquiry after two days to see if they have been successful in connecting with their chosen clinic. We then publish that information and inform the clinic themselves. For phone calls we route calls to clinics through our telecoms system so we know exactly who gets through and how long they spend on the call. Again we inform the clinics of the data we gather.

So What Is The Solution

When we work directly with clinics we push them to get their telephone answer rate and their email response rate into the 90% range. Using the measures described above every month we give the business owner a report of how many emails weren’t responded to and how many phone calls were not answered. For clarity we translate this into a handy ‘lost revenue’ figure. You would be amazed at how quickly they recover.

Unfortunately for most SME’s there isn’t a company like us in the middle providing regular reports on telephone answer rates and email response rates, but if you care about your company’s revenue they are figures you should get to know, and it shouldn’t be that difficult to gather the data you need either. If you’ve got a PABX then this should be simple, and it’s even easier if you use a VOIP provider such as Blueface. It should also be trivial for a manager to look at all of the emails that have been sent in and their corresponding replies.

About Caelen King

Caelen is CEO and founder of WhatClinc.com, a directory of health clinics around the world with over 500,000 unique monthly visitors. WhatClinic.com features dentists in Mexico to plastic surgery clinics in Dublin and everything in between. He regularly blogs about marketing and business issues. Prior to founding WhatClinic.com, Caelen rolled out 10 million+ user base social applications to tier one mobile operators such as T-Mobile USA and O2 UK with NewBay Software.

Possibly Related Posts:

• How The Fashion Industry Is Embracing Social Media
• Why negative reviews don’t hurt your brand
• How To Deal With Negative Comments And Bad Online PR
• How do you manage your customers online?
• Fix Your Web Presence Before Thinking About Social Media – Perfect Case Study

]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/social-media-seo-dont-matter-shit-dont-pick-phone/feed/ 1 http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/negative-reviews-hurt-brand/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/negative-reviews-hurt-brand/#comments Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:00:13 +0000 Lauren Fisher http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=11623 Many brands are concerned about the effect that negative reviews will have on not only their reputations, but importantly their sales. It’s perfectly understandable and should seem simple enough. If people say bad things about you on your website/Twitter/Facebook page etc.. then others will be put off using your service or buying your products. But the reality is quite different and I want to show why you shouldn’t just encourage reviews, but that negative feedback won’t necessarily damage your brand.

People trust the truth

Aside from any features and fancy buttons that you can put onto a product, people ultimately buy from the brands that they trust. Trust typically came from your peers but it can now be conveyed by word of mouth online. And an interesting survey from Invoke Solutions into trust online, found that what people valued the most in determining whether a site was trustworthy, was whether or not it allowed bad comments as well as good :

The thing is, people aren’t stupid. If they see that you’ve invited open feedback on your site or social profile, then this in itself conveys an element of confidence in your own brand. You open the feedback because you know you can deal with complaints, or at the very least you genuinely want to know if people have a problem with your brand. Communicating trustworthiness in your brand is one of the most important tasks for any business and this can be achieved simply by opening yourself up to negativity. But as well as determining the trustworthiness of your brand, people won’t necessarily be duped by negative complaints. If you’re worried that you have a stream of comments that simply say your product is rubbish and there’s not much sense behind it, your users aren’t necessarily going to trust this over your own brand. We’re becoming savvy online and can often spot a genuine complaint from spam, nonsense, or something posted by a competitor.

Being genuine online really can’t be emphasised enough. It’s such an important part in the purchasing cycle that your brand seems honest. If I was buying a product and I saw a string of complaints that were being addressed by the business itself, it wouldn’t put me off. Moreover, it would convince me that if I ever were to have a problem, I can be confident it would be addressed easily online without having to hang on the end of a customer service line. Indeed, in the above survey, ‘responsiveness of sponsor or author’ ranks number 2 on the trustworthiness factors and this should show why negativity isn’t necessarily a bad thing, so long as you address it.

Negative reviews can increase sales

If you’re still not convinced that negative reviews don’t hurt your business, I wanted to share a case study from Alpaca Direct. They had enlisted the company Power Reviews to integrate and manage user reviews on their site. The result of allowing feedback? Sales on items with user reviews activated saw an increase in sales of 23%, even where items were receiving lower ratings. Again, this was attributed to trust. This should be an encouraging business case for allowing user reviews and showing that negative reviews don’t necessarily affect sales in a bad way, in fact they can improve them.As much as this is down to engendering trust in your brand, negative reviews can also set the user expectation before they buy, which can impact you positively.

An example – one person can come along and complain that while the design of their toaster was modern, it made it hard to keep clean. The next person comes along to view the toaster, and actually all they’re concerned about is the aesthetics for their bachelor pad and they don’t care about cleaning it. One person’s negative has turned into the next person’s  positive and could result in a sale. There are varying degrees of negative reviews to consider and they won’t necessarily put people off but could do the job for you and end up selling your product.

Be honest, you’ll still buy from Domino’s

One of the most recent cases of negative publicity online is the infamous Domino’s Pizza video, in 2009. Can you really think of a worse portrayal of your brand than this:

But Domino’s have handled this correctly (admittedly not as quickly as they could have) by taking action at the time, with a response and proceeding to fire the employees in question. Importantly, they also responded with a strong campaign based on a new recipe. Being honest, I couldn’t really say that I would be less inclined to buy from Domino’s, boosted by the fact that they publicly responded to the campaign, reinforcing how seriously they take breaches of the rules by staff. Nor did it impact their sales either, with a 32% increase in profit compared to 2008.

The lesson to be taken from this is not that you can just let anything be said about your brand and hope that your customers will return, but that you respond when bad things are said. People will always have bad things to say and I really believe that the best thing you can do is invite these comments in. Hopefully having read this post that doesn’t sound quite as absurd as it could do

Possibly Related Posts:

• How The Fashion Industry Is Embracing Social Media
• Social Media And SEO Don’t Matter Shit If You Don’t Pick Up The Phone
• How To Deal With Negative Comments And Bad Online PR
• How do you manage your customers online?
• Fix Your Web Presence Before Thinking About Social Media – Perfect Case Study

]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/negative-reviews-hurt-brand/feed/ 3 http://www.simplyzesty.com/blogging/deal-negative-comments-bad-online-pr/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/blogging/deal-negative-comments-bad-online-pr/#comments Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:32:53 +0000 Niall Harbison http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=10493 If you publish a blog, make videos, engage on Twitter, take part in forums or engage in anyway online there is a very good chance you are going to come across some negative comments directed at you personally or towards your brand or business. It might even be more than a couple of comments as consumers online become more vocal and are empowered by tools that let them shout louder than ever when they feel slighted. It’s part and parcel of the web but for people affected by it for the first time it can be quite disconcerting and terrifying. If you find yourself in the middle of a web storm it can seem all encompassing and as if it is never going to end. Having been slap bang in the middle of plenty of negative online storms both personally and for clients here are some of my tips for navigating your way through the negative storm…

Pause Before You Engage

The natural reaction when somebody says something bad about you is to jump in and call them a name back. Nobody likes getting criticized and the natural reaction is to fight back. Fighting back with the same sort of negativity is only stooping to the low level of the commentator though and chances are you will regret it once you have cooled down and wish you had not reacted. If I see something that has really annoyed me or somebody has slammed a business I am involved with I’ll just go and make a coffee or have a walk and think about things before replying. If they have a valid point I’ll engage but if they are just out to cause negative damage for no valid reason I’ll just step back and leave it. It’s easier said than done at times but I find that the best bet is always restraint.

Don’t Threaten legal Action

I’ve had to talk lots of people out of wanting to take legal action over something that was said online. Mostly friends who own hotels and restaurants and who feel slighted by poor reviews but luckily I have usually been able to talk them out of it. There are laws that protect you to a certain extent but to be honest it really isn’t worth your while getting involved in that side of things and in many cases it will probably make things worse. People are going to mouth off about you or your brand or business online these days in the same way we used to in the pub and that is very hard to govern so for the most part you are just going to have to grin and bear it.

Talk About The Issue Not The Person

Although you may know some of the people leaving the comment and they might even be attacking you personally you should never go after the person and instead focus on the issue. Getting personal is only going to make matters worse and you’ll be far more respected if you address the parts of the argument that merit a response. Attacking somebody personally will only drag things down and result in worse personal attacks in return.

People Wouldn’t Say It To Your Face

Some people say the most horrible and cruel things online but meet them in real life and they have suddenly there is not a peep out of them and they are as nice as pie. The web gives people anonymity and typing insults on a keyboard never seems as harmful as doing it in real life. You have to understand that the web lets people say things in a very nonchalant way that they never would in real life and that they probably don’t mean exactly what they are saying. So if somebody calls you a fat bastard don’t worry the chances are that you are probably nothing of the sort.

Maybe They Have A Point?

There are times when you come in for criticism online that is fully deserved. You might have released a faulty product, provided poor service to a client or made a false accusation that you thought was right at the time or simple had your facts wrong. There is nothing wrong with being wrong, it happens to the best of us all the time. The key is admitting when you are wrong and not digging the hole any deeper. I’ve been called out plenty of times for getting my facts wrong here on the blog and instead of trying to back track or I’ll just admit it and change the bog post in red to show that I was wrong. People will respect you so much more if you admit you are wrong and just put your hands up and say you got it wrong and offer to fix it.

Accept That 10% Of People Won’t Like You

Most people like to feel liked. Some people cant live without that feeling but when you spend time online you have to realize that 10% of people are not going to like you. It could be for a number of reasons including your popularity, your poor products, they are in competition etc but the important thing to remember is that not everybody is going to like you no matter what you do. No matter how many problems you fix for some people or however nice you are to them they might still not like you and the best way to react here is to leave the 10% to their own devices and keep engaging and keeping the other 90% who do like you even happier.

It’ll Be Over Before It Has Begun

When you are the middle of a storm of negativity online it can seem like there is nowhere to hide. People might be attacking you on blogs, sharing links in seconds through Twitter and Facebook and talking to others via IM and email about you, your brand or business. Bad news spreads at the speed of light and it can feel all encompassing. The good news is that even the biggest storm gets old very quickly and it’s very unusual for any negativity to last for more than a day online. Just sit tight and follow some of the actions above and it’ll be over before you know it. What you should remember though is that thanks to Google the negative stuff will stick around forever so although it is all over quickly the bad effects could stick around for years.

If You Have Strong Opinions Then Grow Thick Skin Fast

It’s the oldest saying in the book but if you are willing to dish it then you should be willing to take it. If you are online writing negative stuff about other people or leaving poor reviews then you have to expect some of the same stuff in return. In the same way if you are brave enough to put up blog posts, photos and video content then you need to be aware that people will come along and slag it no matter how good you might think it is. The Internet is a fast moving place where people have strong opinions that they are really not scared to share and shout about so if you are going to be hanging about here then you better get some thick skin pretty fast.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Why Does Europe Lack Great Big Tech Blogs?
• How The Fashion Industry Is Embracing Social Media
• Social Media And SEO Don’t Matter Shit If You Don’t Pick Up The Phone
• Why negative reviews don’t hurt your brand
• How To Get Half A Million Visitors To Your Blog In Six Months – In Plain English

]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/blogging/deal-negative-comments-bad-online-pr/feed/ 4 http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/manage-customers-online/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/manage-customers-online/#comments Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:32:51 +0000 Lauren Fisher http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=9916

Image courtesy of shinyai

One of the most fascinating things to me about social media, is the way that it is rapidly affecting internal structures and processes for businesses. As companies are growing communities online and successfully communicating with stakeholders through their social media channels, this begins to present it’s own unique set of problems. Namely – how are you managing these consumers? Many companies, and particularly bigger brands now have this whole other process that they have to think about, which many are calling social CRM.

What is social CRM?

The most basic definition, in literal terms is social customer relationship management. It is the management of this new type of customer – the social media customer. Paul Greenberg, who is widely considered an expert on the subject of CRM, often describes it as the company recognising that the customer now owns the relationship. And obviously accommodating for this. It is not as simple as keeping a spreadsheet of the people that sent you tweets and what their problems were. It is about accommodating this social customer and recognising that they will be active across different channels, and have different needs and wants depending on these channels. The video interview below with Paul Greenberg provides an interesting insight into the murky world of social CRM : The challenge or need for social CRM stems from the fact that while companies are creating ‘one’ social media presence, there is very rarely a complete ownership of that social media presence, nor is there one use-case for it. You don’t address a different Twitter account for example, depending on whether your query relates to a, b or c in a series of possible scenarios. You communicate with company X at one end, but on the other end you could be getting any person in the organisation who may or may not know your previous dealings with the company based on your Twitter handle. While you may find yourself as an organisation able to devote one employee to your social media activity, if they do their job well you may find it is so popular that it soon becomes unmanageable and something has to be done about it. One of the other difficulties with managing your customers online, is the fluid nature of social media.

You might have one Twitter handle, a completely different url and your real name on your Facebook profile but the user has come to expect a coherent experience from the brand they’re dealing with. Again, your personal knowledge of your online community can only go so far – it will reach a point where you’re not able to easily remember one Twitter user from the next, and whether or not they previously wrote a blog post deriding your service. You need to know the channels that your customer is using online and also be able to predict where they might go next, to pre-empt any potential crisis situation. When you start to think of it in this way, the potential for social CRM to transform your business is huge.

The terminology

While I agree with social CRM in principle, the one issue I have is with the terminology itself. It’s sort of taking an existing business process and sticking the word ’social’ on it, to make it fit online. For any of you who experience customer service through social media, or watch it very closely, you’ll likely find any notion of the term ‘management’ laughable. Your customers aren’t online to be managed, they are now the ones in charge. This is why I’d prefer to think of it as social customer facilitation, if we had to give it a name at all. This is more respectful of the way that customers and communities act online. You can hope to facilitate and provide the means to serve your customers, but you can’t expect to manage the experience.

This is definitely an area that’s growing and needs widespread industry adoption if online relationships with customers and stakeholders are to be looked after correctly. Whatever it ends up being called, this should be a big business

Possibly Related Posts:

• How The Fashion Industry Is Embracing Social Media
• Social Media And SEO Don’t Matter Shit If You Don’t Pick Up The Phone
• Why negative reviews don’t hurt your brand
• How To Deal With Negative Comments And Bad Online PR
• Fix Your Web Presence Before Thinking About Social Media – Perfect Case Study

]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/manage-customers-online/feed/ 4 http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/fix-web-presence-thinking-social-media-perfect-case-study/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/fix-web-presence-thinking-social-media-perfect-case-study/#comments Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:27:50 +0000 Niall Harbison http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=9263 Social media is certainly a hot ticket at the moment when it comes to marketing with brands all trying to get ahead of the game. It’s a great cost effective way of marketing and engaging with your customers in a meaningful way and if done correctly the return on investment can be stunning. There is however a danger at times that people can jump on the bandwagon too fast. Brands and business try and drop everything else to get into social media forgetting some of the other basics. We always preach it here on the blog and advise our clients that any social media activity should only be part of an overall marketing strategy or form one strand of your customer service. Social media is not going to be all things to all men (and women). I came across an example of this in the last couple of days by complete chance and it could not drive the point home more effectively…

The Brilliant Social Media Idea

This is a brilliant campaign by Pizza Hut that gives out a code every time somebody scores against France in the world cup. It’s an Irish based campaign and is tapping in to the need for revenge after Thiery Henry cheated us out of a world cup place. Enter a code and you’ll get free pizza. Simple but pure genius. It’s attracted a lot of likes on Facebook, some good early engagement and a bit of a cult following. Awesome work here that should be applauded as innovative work through social media.

The Web Presence

Now in contrast to the brilliant work that is being done above I want to talk a little about Pizza Hut’s web presence here in Ireland (Click here for their Google results). When looking for a pizza menu to order from tonight my first stop was of course Google. So the first result that came up in the search engines shows….

Competition taking the piss

As you will see below not only do Pizza Hut have a very poor web presence where they are leaving lots of money on the table but they are also letting their biggest competitor Dominos take the piss out of them by running Google Ads against their own name without offering up any competition. There is no doubt that they are losing customers immediately here.

Search Result Number 1

So when I go to order a pizza in Ireland from Pizza hut this is the website that I first see. This is just not acceptable for a company that sell pizzas online with the web being their customer’s first port of call.

Search Result Number 2

This is the really annoying one. Although I have arrived on the site and it tells me I can order online (Not going to try it to be honest) the rest of the site is shocking. I have to download a PDF to view the menu and when I do download that PDF most of it is upsaide down! An upside down PDF!! The site has no information about toppings or basic menu information but they do of course have the standard link through to Facebook.

Search Result Number 3

Most consumers don’t really look past about the 3rd result on Google. Pizza hut for some very strange reason have their terms and conditions popping up for the 3rd search term. I am guessing the reason this page shows up is because the website is so poor and features so little text which is why this irrelevant page is ranking so well.

What Does All This Mean?

Well in simple terms Pizza Hut are losing business. I went to their website to possibly order pizza but became so infuriated by the process that I gave up. Many others will face the same dilema. We all have short attention spans online and in the time it takes to download an upside down PDF I’ll have gone and ordered with a competitor. We are a social media agency so I don’t want to talk myself out of work but I really feel companies should sort out their basic web presence before trying to tackle social media. I’m not having a go at their social stuff because they are doing great there but Pizza Hut need to realize that first and foremost their customers want to order the right pizza and find information about their products online. The really annoying part is that this could be fixed up in less than a day with a tiny budget and some basic SEO and optimizing of their site. It’s all about basic housekeeping and I think brands and businesses should try and do the basics right before they run off trying to tackle all the exciting new social media stuff that people are talking about! Fixing that website will increase sales. Simple as that. Once that is done it is time to promote your lovely new site and there is no doubt that handing out free pizzas through Facebook is a brilliant way of doing that!

Possibly Related Posts:

• How The Fashion Industry Is Embracing Social Media
• Social Media And SEO Don’t Matter Shit If You Don’t Pick Up The Phone
• Why negative reviews don’t hurt your brand
• How To Deal With Negative Comments And Bad Online PR
• How do you manage your customers online?

]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/fix-web-presence-thinking-social-media-perfect-case-study/feed/ 11 http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/social-media-recruitment-tool/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/social-media-recruitment-tool/#comments Wed, 28 Apr 2010 08:22:37 +0000 Niall Harbison http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=8878 I’m not going to be popular among recruitment consultants and agencies after writing this post but lets just say it is payback for the millions of emails and phone calls they have bombarded me with over the past couple of years. You may have noticed that we are currently recruiting here ourselves and being true to the nature of our company we practice what we preach and do all our recruiting through social media. I wanted to share some of the key learning’s that we have found and how you can reduce those expensive recruitment costs and have your job vacancies seen by a much bigger audience. Social media is changing the way in which many industries work and although the vast majority of recruitment is still done through very traditional channels there are more and more ways to find the ideal candidate online off your own back…

Use Your Existing Channels

What you are paying for when you use online ad job placements is exposure to a large amount of people who might be interested in your job but the chances are that you already have some channels open to you where you can post your job. It is the perfect content to be posted on a blog and once there you could link to it from your Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin accounts and give some friends to pass the link on to their friends who are looking for work. With so many people out of work at the moment you will be surprised at how many people pass your job ad on trying to help out their friends. A quick calculation on our own job advert had us figuring out that it was exposed to over 25,000 people online within a 48 hour period. Not all of those people will have bothered to click through the advert or even found it relevant but you are reaching a far bigger audience than you ever would than by using an advert.

Use Niche Sites

Although the bigger sites like Facebook and Twitter will get you out to a bigger audience it is the smaller sites where there is real value to be had. Potential candidates are scouring the web trying to find jobs at the moment and the smart ones are posting their CVs to all sorts of sites including Worky and some of the 100s of job boards out there on the market. The key is to think niche and try and find a smaller pool of more targeted employees on a smaller site rather than trying to hit the masses on big sites. Doing this step properly will mean that you get more targeted potential candidates and will go some way to combating the one advantage that agencies and consultants do have which is their ability to sort through all the noise and find you the right candidate.

Eyeing Up The Competition

Chances are you are working in a sector where you have plenty of competitors doing something similar to what you do and needing the same sort of staff. Make it your business to follow staff from other companies through their social presence and see what they are up to day to day. Not only will you be getting great insight in to what they do but if they do leave their jobs or show signs of unhappiness you will be able to offer them a new job before anybody else even knows that they are available to hire. Not that we would ever advocate it here but if you did spot somebody working for another company that you felt was worth enticing to your company then social media might be the right channel to start an informal conversation with that person.

Vet Your Candidates Online

We live in a world where nearly all of our lives are shared online. This won’t apply to everybody but it won’t take you long to have a snoop around and find out what your potential employees are up to online. You might not find out if they are good at filling out spreadsheets by looking at their online presence but you might see photos of them or read something about their personal preferences that put you off or raise a red flag. On the flip side I have noticed that it is not unusual now for candidates to come to interviews knowing everything about the company but also knowing a lot about me personally by following me on Twitter or other social media channels, the potential employees are also doing their homework these days.

Think Big With PR Opp

If you really want to try something different why not try and do something completely different like hold a contest to see who wants the job most. There have been some great examples of this including a winery offering 10k a month to find their social media expert and asking for video submissions. Not only did they find somebody very passionate about social media and likely to be able to promote their winery but they also got worldwide publicity for themselves by asking for video applications for a job they pitched as “using social media while sipping wine and getting paid 10k per month”.  Using this sort of publicity is not going to work for every company but it shows that there are ways in which you can manipulate social media not only to find the most active online candidates but also to drum up a little extra PR for your company.

Is Social Media Recruitment Effective

For us it certainly is. Having said that it is important to know that we are a social media agency so we know how to use these tools and use them heavily on a daily basis. I wouldn’t say that every company is going to be able to recruit in the same way as we do but there are some great alternatives out there now to the more expensive recruitment options that we all had to use over the years. Smart companies are at least bringing social media in to a portion of the recruitment process and candidates are all wising up to the potential of social media to present themselves in a more positive light. Social media might not be the best tool for discretely hiring top execs but it certainly is a great alternative for small business owners and SMEs to cut their recruitment costs in these tough times.

Possibly Related Posts:

• How The Fashion Industry Is Embracing Social Media
• Social Media And SEO Don’t Matter Shit If You Don’t Pick Up The Phone
• Why negative reviews don’t hurt your brand
• How To Deal With Negative Comments And Bad Online PR
• How do you manage your customers online?

]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/social-media-recruitment-tool/feed/ 6 http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/fun-business-cards/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/fun-business-cards/#comments Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:08:59 +0000 Lauren Fisher http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=8558

Business cards have to be one of the most dated forms of communication and I still always feel awkward when exchanging them at meetings. I mean exchanging a piece of card with our names and email addresses on them? Can you really think of anything more outdated than that. There are some new technologies that we talked about that could replace business cards but for the most part they are still needed at meetings, conferences and social gatherings. Most techie people will have heard of a great company called MOO who have pretty much revolutionized the business card industry by providing affordable printing solutions that you can design and customize yourself. We just took our latest delivery and instead of adding something corporate and boring on the backs we thought we would liven it up and Niall Fagan just took a load of shots of us at work and playing ping pong in our offices. Cards like this have a couple of purposes 1)They are a talking point and ice breaker in socially awkward situations 2)they show they we are a lively dynamic company that likes to do things a little differently. This style business card might not work for an accountant but they work for us Check them out and make sure to head over to MOO and make your own cheap business cards today…

The Playful Side Of The Company

Messy Desks And Twitter Birds

The Poser Shots

Cupcakes And DIY Graffiti

The Full Selection

Possibly Related Posts:

• How The Fashion Industry Is Embracing Social Media
• Social Media And SEO Don’t Matter Shit If You Don’t Pick Up The Phone
• Why negative reviews don’t hurt your brand
• How To Deal With Negative Comments And Bad Online PR
• How do you manage your customers online?

]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/fun-business-cards/feed/ 0 http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/lewis-hamiltion-40k-charity-job-opportunity/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/lewis-hamiltion-40k-charity-job-opportunity/#comments Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:23:36 +0000 Lauren Fisher http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=8411 It is really not every day of the week that we get Formula 1 racing driver Lewis Hamilton along to help us with one of our social media campaigns but that is exactly what he did in the video below to help launch the Vodafone Ireland World Of Difference campaign, which we are working on. World of Difference offers 4 people the chance to work for a charity of their choice for a year, with a salary of up to €40,000.

This year there is a rather exciting social media element to the programme (hence our involvement!). The judging panel will select the successful 3 finalists, then a shortlist of 3 will go to a public vote on the Facebook page. We’re pretty excited about it!

It’s a great opportunity for anyone who is looking for a job or wants a career change and has an interest in the charity sector. Given the ‘R’ word, it’s a great opportunity all round. And we’re delighted that this year they wanted to include social media, not only in the marketing, but to change the way that winners are selected.

So if you want to apply for World of Difference, you can do so via the Facebook page, or directly on the site

. You must make sure that you have approached the charity you would like to work for and discuss with them the best fit for you in their organisation to determine your role. This campaign is really going to be a life changer for 4 people. Who knows, it could be you!

Possibly Related Posts:

• How The Fashion Industry Is Embracing Social Media
• Social Media And SEO Don’t Matter Shit If You Don’t Pick Up The Phone
• Why negative reviews don’t hurt your brand
• How To Deal With Negative Comments And Bad Online PR
• How do you manage your customers online?

]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/lewis-hamiltion-40k-charity-job-opportunity/feed/ 0 http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/massively-grow-email-list/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/massively-grow-email-list/#comments Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:20:53 +0000 Niall Harbison http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=7952
Above is the graph that shows the people subscribing to our email list. You can see that it was growing steadily during November, December and January. Steady but nothing spectacular. What you see then is a massive spike in subscribers at the start of February. What could have caused such a spike and over 600% growth in the list? Simple we gave something away for free…our social media E Book which you can see on the right hand side of the page. We do of course focus on social media but a strong mailing list can be the life blood of any successful online business and everybody from Apple to Manchester United use them to increase their sales.

Getting A Targeted List

I can go out this afternoon and buy a list of 10,000 emails, heck I could get a million if I really wanted to but getting targeted emails is the hard part. You may think that the old “pop your business card in here to win a bottle of champagne” trick that restaurants and hotels use is dated but let me tell you that works brilliantly as although crude and not sophisticated they are capturing the most targeted and relevant emails possible. By the same token you would hope that people signing up to download our Social Media Ebook will be interested in future Ebooks or other information that we want to communicate via email. I’d rather have a list of 50 highly targeted customers than 10,000 random people who will delete my email instantly.

Give something away for free

People don’t part with their email easily. It is a type of currency on the web and as such it is important that you offer something of value. We packaged some of our best posts and tips and made an easy to download Ebook and you should think of something similar for your business. There has to be something that you can give away for free that will add value to the people who visit your site. What about a competition giveaway, an online version of the business card in a bowl trick!

Look After And Nurture Your List

We have all signed up to lists only to be bombarded with useless spam. Nothing has me reaching for the unsubscribe button as quickly as being sent constant sales pitches from companies. Try and offer some value when you do email people and engage with them in the long run. I don’t mind getting special offers in places and if they are done correctly they can be very powerful but be careful on not going too hard with the big sell.Like everything you do online try and get away form looking for the big numbers at the start, this is going to be a long term project and something that will evolve over time. Our list is still very small but all being well and if we keep adding value and engaging our list with good content we will be in a position next year where we have over 10,000 people on that list. You should start doing the same!

Possibly Related Posts:

• How The Fashion Industry Is Embracing Social Media
• Social Media And SEO Don’t Matter Shit If You Don’t Pick Up The Phone
• Why negative reviews don’t hurt your brand
• How To Deal With Negative Comments And Bad Online PR
• How do you manage your customers online?

]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/massively-grow-email-list/feed/ 2 http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/gift-horse-mouth/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/gift-horse-mouth/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:40:26 +0000 Niall Harbison http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=7907 Over the last 3 years I have been immersed in start up life and due to the very nature of the game you often find yourself short of cash and scrambling to do business deals and make a little money out of thin air. Cash is at a premium. During that time I have taken part in all sorts of free work and revenue share deals. There have been advertising revenue splits, content distribution, website builds, free marketing, joint builds of apps etc. The list goes on. I would say nearly 95% of projects that I have taken on have seen no significant return for either side. They were all deals that both parties struck at the time bartering a little work or content in exchange for something in return with both parties hoping to further their own interest but most of the deals fizzled out, why is that?

People like money. It does indeed make the world go around. We know the value of a cup of coffee. We know how much a car costs and most of us would have a fair idea how much a day of our time would cost. We all have a deep connection with money and we respect it. It dictates what we can and can’t do. If I work long hours and don’t waste much money I can treat my friends and go on holidays. When we buy an ice cream we know the value of it, we don’t try to barter or exchange our services in return, it’s a fixed price and everybody comes out of the deal happy.

The problems arise when you start to do work with people when there are no fixed prices and the goal posts are constantly moving. Most work I have done on a revenue share basis or taken on for free has been when I have been promised something by the other party that sounds too good to be true (it more often than not is too good to be true).

Most of us also have a moral commitment to money. If you pay me 100 Euros to dig a hole the chances are I will dig you a hole that I think is deserving of your 100 Euros. The trouble starts when you take the money out of the equation. Ask me to dig a hole and that you will pay me 50% of the revenues from shop that the sign post points to after it is in the hole and the chances are that I will dig the hole for free. What usually happens though is that either the sign is pointing in the wrong direction or the shop is so bad that 50% of the revenues did not even equate to the amount of effort I put in to digging the hole.

I know some revenue sharing deals do work. Just look at Apple and the app store or iTunes. I do however think for small businesses and start ups in particular that the revenue share deals that work are few and far between. It has taken me quite a lot of time to figure out but whenever I am doing business now either selling my wares or buying them from somebody else I prefer to have cash involved.

Possibly Related Posts:

• How The Fashion Industry Is Embracing Social Media
• Social Media And SEO Don’t Matter Shit If You Don’t Pick Up The Phone
• Why negative reviews don’t hurt your brand
• How To Deal With Negative Comments And Bad Online PR
• How do you manage your customers online?

]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/gift-horse-mouth/feed/ 5 http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/easy-social-media-blogging-newbies/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/easy-social-media-blogging-newbies/#comments Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:49:57 +0000 Niall Harbison http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=7864

I was at Wordcamp this weekend and a talk by Darragh Doyle got me thinking about social media and blogging for beginners. It’s very easy when you are immersed in the online world of social media to come out with statements like “just throw up a Wordpress blog” or “open a twitter account and start talking to people”. They feel very easy steps for business owners to be able to make in trying to establish an online presence. I’ll tell you now that they are not. All my work is online, I tap away at a computer for 16 hours a day and live and breath this sort of stuff just like many other people do on Twitter and other social networks, it comes as second nature to many of us but I remember blogging for the first time and sending my first tweet and it is bloody hard at first, daunting even. What I saw as I listened to Darragh’s talk was a room of people who were eager to learn and I could feel the delight as Darragh talked them through it. You could feel the tension ease as people were able to ask simple questions like “who will read my blog” and “how will people find me online” and get the simple answers they were looking for. Child’s play to seasoned internet people but a whole new world to many.

Using Social Media Is Like Driving A Car

Most of us know how to drive. We take it as second nature when we jump in behind the wheel. You hardly need to think about what you are doing and your mind is usually elsewhere as you cruise around on autopilot. It wasn’t that way at the very start though, we all had to learn. You probably had a few lessons or had a friend show you the ropes. Simple skills like changing the gears and parking felt totally alien to us all at the start and we needed to repeat them over and over until we knew how. Social media and using online tools like blogging for your business are no different…

Getting It Wrong

Here is the classic example of how people start. It is one of the biggest supermarkets in Ireland who have clearly heard that twitter is the place to be to increase sales and they have come along, followed 100 people from a list they have found and sent one tweet which is a special offer thinking it will increase their sales. Are they wrong? Yes absolutely. Should they be vilified and slagged off? No not at all, it’s new to whoever is running the account and they’ll figure it out in the long run but at the moment they have just jumped in the car without any training and are getting it wrong. Nobody jumps in to the car for the first time and speeds off around the corner like Jenson Button, most people will stall on their first uphill start. It takes time.

Would You Slag Off A Driving Instructor?

I always hear people giving out about the simplicity of talks like the one Darragh gave at Wordcamp or about blog posts that we write here like 50 resources to improve your blogging or about people “teaching twitter” but the reality is that these sorts of posts and talks are aimed at a totally different audience, the beginners. I saw the look of relief on some people’s faces when Darragh explained what a blog actually was and how people could find your business through your blog, yes it’s obvious to me and you but to some of the trout farmers and hostel owners in the room it wasn’t. As the girls from Beaut.ie (Ireland’s biggest fashion blog) explained earlier in the day their readers don’t have a clue that they are even on a blog, to their readers it is just a website.
I just think we should all take a little time and help people who are starting off like Darragh was in his talk. Sometimes we have a tendency to all sit around and snigger at beginners which would be like Fernando Alonso, Schummacher and Jenson Button sitting in the pit lane in Monaco sniggering at driving instructors. I know some people might take the piss when it comes to teaching services like Twitter but there are also a whole bunch of people out there who don’t know how to tweet, blog, update, share or post videos on Youtube so if you spot somebody like that maybe give them a hand out and nudge them in the right direction instead of slagging them off about their inability to grasp something that you find so simple.

Possibly Related Posts:

• How The Fashion Industry Is Embracing Social Media
• Social Media And SEO Don’t Matter Shit If You Don’t Pick Up The Phone
• Why negative reviews don’t hurt your brand
• How To Deal With Negative Comments And Bad Online PR
• How do you manage your customers online?

]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/easy-social-media-blogging-newbies/feed/ 10 http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/business-island/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/business-island/#comments Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:53:40 +0000 Niall Harbison http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=7736 I am using an Irish example in this post but for those of you reading this in other parts of the world you will be able to apply your country, small village or city to this post with the same logic. Our business is based in Ireland. As I am sure you know Ireland is an island that is cut off from main land Europe and the UK by water and we are a country that suffers from island mentality. We get caught up in our little country thinking it is bigger and better than anything out there but in actual fact it is only slightly bigger than Manchester which is one city in England. One city! So what does this have to do with social media or business? Well it is about thinking big and getting out of your comfort zone.

I can be in London quicker than I can get to Galway or Cork from Dublin. If I wake up at 6 I can be in London for a 9.30 meeting. I can check in from the comfort of my home, take no baggage and if I am smart enough I can get tickets cheaper than the cost of Irish train tickets. The possibilities for winning new business in other countries are endless but for some reason we all tend to stick to the geographic boundries of our own country. We have clients in France, Belgium and UK that we have only met once each yet due to technology and improved cheaper communications we work together as if we were in the same city. This is unusual though and I am always fascinated why most of us only pitch for business locally? Why do physical borders come in to play when the Internet and social media has broken down all borders and frontiers?

Ireland is struggling at the moment and in a very deep and long recession. Times are tough and work is thin on the ground for many. The builders and plumbers have to physically head off to greener pastures to find their work but any business that has an online presence should be looking in to international markets. We all need to get out of the mentality of thinking we are all islands marooned away from other markets because we are not, social media and the Internet connects us in new ways that we could never have imagined and where the people you choose to work with come from is only limited by your own imagination.

We do the same on the blog here. The map below shows you visits in the last month and we are actually proud that only 10% of the visits come from Ireland. It’s an important market and one where we get most of our business but too many blogs and websites focus on their home country or geographical area rather than trying to spread their wings. Why not network with Australian bloggers? Why not add a few American people on Twitter? Why not attend a social media conference in France? I guess what I am trying to say is that there are just endless possibilities out there in different countries and you have the amazing free tools now at your hands to make a mockery of international borders and make your business international even if you are only a 1 man operation working out of your granny’s spare bedroom

Possibly Related Posts:

• How The Fashion Industry Is Embracing Social Media
• Social Media And SEO Don’t Matter Shit If You Don’t Pick Up The Phone
• Why negative reviews don’t hurt your brand
• How To Deal With Negative Comments And Bad Online PR
• How do you manage your customers online?

]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/business-island/feed/ 4 http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/email-marketing-strategy-place/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/email-marketing-strategy-place/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:36:16 +0000 Niall Harbison http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=7244 Out of all the ways that you can market your business one of the most effective also happens to be one of the least sexy and often neglected. Email marketing is incredibly effective, has been for some time but you will never hear people give presentations about how many email conversions they had with the vast majority of people sticking to more trendy topics like Twitter this and Facebook pages that. You don’t often hear about Obama’s email lists helping to mobilize voters or how Apple use regular emails to massively stimulate sales. Its strange that in a world obsessed with social media and communicating with your customers that the biggest communication tool of the last 20 years rarely gets a mention. If I walked in to a random room of 100 people I would be very surprised if 98 of the 100 didn’t use email on a regular basis. That same room would probably feature a quarter of people on Facebook and less than 10 on Twitter but we are preached at from all angles about the power of communicating with your customers on Twitter by all sorts of experts. Don’t get me wrong as Twitter and Facebook have a massive roll to play in your overall marketing and communications strategy but I wanted to look at why so many people shun email and show you what services we use to get our email message across…

The stigma

A lot of us think about email marketing as something that is just spam and we delete it instantly but that is mostly because the vast majority of emails that are sent out are just marketing junk mail. People trying to give you the hard sell. The really effective email newsletters are few and far between but when done correctly they are highly effective and engage the customer by providing additional content that is different to what you find online. I am subscribed to some amazing food newsletters that send me weekly recipes and cooking tips but they don’t come at me with the hard sell. I more often than not end up clicking through to the website and browsing recipes where upon I might actually buy something or indirectly give them some advertising spend. The key is about providing value and offering your readers something of real value rather than a hard sell.

Building A Good List

I could go out and buy an emailing list in the morning for 10,000 people but there really is no value in that approach. What you need to try and do is build up a list of people who are relevant to your business, interested in what you do and hopefully have bought or engaged with you in the past. If you are attracting email sign ups through your site try and encourage people to sign up by offering something of value like free content, advice or discounted products. You may also want to try and build your list offline by creating competitions or encouraging users to subscribe via the oldest form of technology which is a simple paper and pen. Some of the most successful mailing lists I have ever seen have been developed by small businesses at events like trade shows and when selling direct to the customer face to face. What you want is a highly targeted large mailing list that you build up over time.

How To Design Your Email

Getting the look and feel of you email right is incredibly important as the biggest problem most people have is that they send something out that looks like a 3 year old designed it. This is understandable as most people who are in business that doesn’t do most of it’s work online simply wouldn’t have the budget to have something professionally designed. There is a happy medium which is Toddle. I discovered this option over a year ago and use it for most of our emails. It is incredibly simply to use and require little or no technical knowledge. You can knock something together with images and text in less that 10 minutes that would pass off as a professionally designed email. The service is free for your first couple of emails so you can go in and have a play around with it before you have to commit.

How To Mange Your Lists

Once your email is designed you will need to start mailing it out to people (we go once a month but this part is totally up to you and what is relevant for your business) and although there are hundreds of solutions out there I have always found that Mailchimp is the best. The key is that it is very simple to manage and just like Toddle you need very little technical expertise to get your email lists send out and the fact that it provides excellent list management and full reporting is an added bonus. You can try the service for free with some restrictions and if you like it and want to continue with it then you have the option of upgrading to unlock more features.

Create Value And Drive Sales

Email newsletters will not be for every business as they just might not be effective but you should have a look at your business and see if there is somewhere where you can add value to your customers experience and draw them back in to help sell more products. The key is finding the right message and you will have to look at your company carefully and decide what works for you but one word of caution is that a bad email newsletter that is spammy will do as much damage to you as it will good. Take time to think about your email strategy and remember that nearly every single one of your customers are using email on a daily basis so it would be wise to start getting your strategy in place today

Possibly Related Posts:

• How The Fashion Industry Is Embracing Social Media
• Social Media And SEO Don’t Matter Shit If You Don’t Pick Up The Phone
• Why negative reviews don’t hurt your brand
• How To Deal With Negative Comments And Bad Online PR
• How do you manage your customers online?

]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/email-marketing-strategy-place/feed/ 2 http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/10-essential-free-tools-small-business-start/ http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/10-essential-free-tools-small-business-start/#comments Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:26:54 +0000 Niall Harbison http://www.simplyzesty.com/?p=6880 I have been involved with start ups now for 3 years and one thing is common across them all…you need to keep your costs down no matter what. Money is always tight and shelling it out on expensive tools or services is something that I have figured out that you should avoid at all costs. Luckily these days there are a bunch of tools online that you can access for free and the fact that you are a start up and don’t have to go through political wrangling to get new tools installed actually within your company gives you a massive advantage over bigger companies who are using outdated systems. These tools may appear obvious to people who are reading this and have a technical background but I have introduced these to some small business owners and to non technical people even the fact that they could access their work email at home or do their books online was a massive surprise. I use the following 10 tools on a daily basis and to be perfectly honest I would have no idea how our business would function without any of them…

Google Apps

If the list was made up of only one item then this would be it. I use Google apps across all the different domains we have and it really is the most incredible and helpful productivity tool you will find and my life really would be empty without it. Not only do I access all my email through the service but I also sync my calender to arrange all meetings with other people in the company and crucially all our documents that we work with on a daily basis are in there. The fact that these documents are “in the cloud” (stored online for you non techies) means that any of us can access them from any computer at any time. We edit documents collaboratively, build pitches together and interact with each other online often from different locations using tools like Skype (see below). If you take one thing from this list make sure that it is Google Docs.

Remember The Milk

There are lots of productivity and “to do list” tools out there but for the last 2 years this has been my favorite. Lots of techie people I work with have introduced me to more complicated systems but I love RTM for it’s pure simplicity and ease of use. It is basically an online list maker that you can add tags etc to and access from anywhere you can go online including their iPhone app (although I have to say the app is not that great). Color coding your lists by color in order of priority means every task you have to complete during the day is laid out in front of you in a simple and straight forward way to understand. The great tools are incredibly simple to use and do very little but do what they set out to do very well and that is the case with RTM.

Tweetdeck

You may or may not be using Twitter for your business and the discussion on it’s relevancy has already taken place in a previous post but if you are using it then Tweetdeck will be an invaluable tool for you. There are 10 tips here on how to use it and it is incredibly useful for not only engaging with your customers and monitoring what people are saying about your brand. If you take the time to set it up correctly with relevant searches, lists and groups then it will become a great time saving resource for you. The one word of caution that I would give is that it can be so good and so effective that it can become distracting and if you are using it for work you need to make sure that is the case and that you are not using it to socialize.

Wordpress

I have been involved with the building of many sites and blogs for both myself and clients over the last few years and one thing that I have learned is that wherever possible use Wordpress. For those of you not familiar with Wordpress it is the software that is used behind many of the blogs online and is 100% free to use. The fact that it is highly customizable and that there are many people out there who can do it for you at a low cost means it is a great content management system for your websites and easy for non techies to pick up too. When thinking of Wordpress try and get away from the thinking that it is only for blogs as it is a cheap and simple way of building many websites.

Linkedin

The world really is your oyster with this tool if you are a business owner or start up founder. Most serious business people around the world have an online profile on Linkedin and more and more people are joining it by the day. You’ll need to start out by adding as many of the actual people that you know as possible and once you have done that you can actively try to get business leads, find new clients and generally interact with the people that you need to be in touch with. It will take some initial work getting set up and finding the right contacts but once you are up and running you will usually be able to find the people you are looking for and if not you will have a connection who can make the introduction for you.

Skype

Along with Google apps at the top of the list this is the tool that has saved me the most money over the years. I don’t use it for all my calls but if I need to make pricey international calls or have a video conference with somebody then it is always Skype that I fire up first. The other use that I have for it is the chat function which I always have running in the background and will use to talk to people within our own team or 3rd parties that we are working with. It is a great way of sharing links and talking about work quickly without having to get in to a full blown conversation on the phone and I spend large portions of my day using it.

MailChimp

There are literally hundreds of mailing solutions out there but the one that has worked best for me over the last couple of years and that I use today for various sites is Mailchimp. The reason I like it so much is that it is very straightforward to use and you really need very limited technical knowledge to get it up and running. You can build and manage all your different lists from one central interface and it is free to use until you start to hit certain thresholds that require a premium fee but even with that it is still worth it.

Conversion University

Not so much a tool but more of a free training course from Google around their popular Google Analytics service. For the first year of using Google Analytics I was pretty much self taught and there was so much I was missing out on before I found this amazing training course that really changed my view on statistics and the power of being able to read the data put in front of you. This course and Google Analytics themselves are 100% free and although it may take you a couple of days to learn everything on it correctly the pay offs in the long term are amazing and it should be one of the first things that anybody with a business online does.

FreshBooks

Staying on top of your accounts when you are trying to build a really innovative product or service is a really tough thing to do and most people will enlist the help of an accountant. What I would suggest is that you teach yourself some of the basics and start using a system like Freshbooks and manage your accounts in partnership with your accountant. It is always good to be in control of the basics yourself and this tool has a super simple to use interface and after some initial setting up you will easily be able to issue invoices and manage all of your different payments across many different channels. Again this service is free to use on trial where you will get a great feel for it and if it is to your liking there are some small fees involved but the fees are tiny in comparison to your accountants fees.

Basecamp

This is a service that offers a free trial for a month and it is well worth trying out if you have many different people to manage and you look after a lot of projects online. It is mostly used by the development community but it’s tools and functions are very simple and straightforward and can be adapted to any business. It allows you to map out projects and follow the work that people are doing across different channels as well as collaborating, setting milestones and generally giving your company some overall direction. There is a bit of a learning curve but once set up and running your company will become far more streamlined and much more efficient.

Possibly Related Posts:

• How The Fashion Industry Is Embracing Social Media
• Social Media And SEO Don’t Matter Shit If You Don’t Pick Up The Phone
• Why negative reviews don’t hurt your brand
• How To Deal With Negative Comments And Bad Online PR
• How do you manage your customers online?

]]> http://www.simplyzesty.com/business/10-essential-free-tools-small-business-start/feed/ 12