I was fortunate enough to be able to attend Hawaii Business Magazine’s SmallBiz Lunch and Learn: Leveraging Technology and Social Media to Grow Your Business.
Leverage social media to grow your small business!
It was a great event and I was able to learn some great advice and thought of some good ideas. The experts that had on had were as follows: 1) Roxanne Darling of Bare Feet Studios and the Founder of Social Media Club; 2) Cyrus Driver, VP of Oceanic Time Warner Cable Business Class; and 3) Bernard Uy Co-Founder of Wall-to-Wall Studios.
This is NOT a Social Media and the Law post. It is a post on some of the nuggets of practical wisdom that I gathered from the lunch and would like to share. I also feel this gives you some of that business perspective I was mention in my posts as a JD who has his MBA.
They are the following, in no particular order of priority:
- Thanks to social media EVERY business is a technology business, you will use it some aspect;
- always thanks to social media your customers OWN your brand – they have become self-publishers;
- because of the prior two points, LISTEN to your customers;
- in fact, use them as informal discussion and research group on new marketing plans;
- ask your customers who they think your competitors are for defining your brand;
- if you get a negative review on Yelp or the like, it’s good thing – gives you an opportunity to show how you respond and change;
- use video, there are some great apps on smartphones that you can upload to your Youtube account;
- be more personal, less cookie-cutter in your usage of social media;
- if you cannot compete on price, location, and the like – compete on YOU, make sure your customer/clients like working with you;
- always update and double–check your links, dead links help no one.
As a solopreneur I don’t know if I will get to make use of all these ideas, but I definitely think that any business, great or small should definitely think about these things and it offers a great starting point.
See you on Monday or Tuesday next week when I continue discussing evidentiary matters in the context of Social Media.
Have an awesome weekend!
-RKH