My friend Des Walsh is offering a series of free, monthly webinars on social media for small business. Des and I met at BlogWorld 2008(He’s drawing me a map to his small town.) The first issue will be TODAY, Monday, Jan. 24, 7pm USA Central Time. Here is how Des describes it. Going through to…
Image by iconshock Blogger is one of the easiest ways to start a blog for a small business. Easiest, but not the best respected. To the blogging elite, the blogspot.com address has become a kind of badge of shame. However, Blogger continues to introduce new ways to make your blog look good and work for a small…
Follow smart people has long been my best Twitter advice. Paper.li is a new tool that makes it easier to follow and learn from smart people without investing all your spare time in Twitter. Paper.li is a kind of daily newspaper made from links, photos and videos shared on Twitter by a selected group of…
Do you have a strategic plan or a marketing plan? If you do, that’s the place to start with social media. It doesn’t matter whether you are planning for a small business, a tourism group, or an economic development organization. You start in the same place. 1. Get out your plan and look over all…
It seems like people from big cities forget that small towns exist, and that we have the same technology tools and social networks. We are on Twitter, Facebook, and other online networks together, but we have different face-to-face networks. We don’t live the same lifestyle as big city people. We do business a bit differently. We…
If you use a Facebook Page as your main business presence, you don’t own it at all. Photo by Paul Swansen If you rely on your Google Places listing to tell people everything they need to know, you don’t own that either. You can only add the information they say you can add. They choose…
How can you tell if your social media efforts are making any difference? Here’s one simple trick that can make it clear. Make a new page. It can be on your main site, or on a completely new domain name. Let’s call it the landing page. This is where your new visitors will land. Put analytics…
Dan Gordon and meOriginal photo by Scott TownsendEdited by James Shewmaker Dan Gordon is the fourth generation of his family at Samuel Gordon’s Jewelers, a business that has survived for over 100 years. Although based in Oklahoma City, we found plenty of similarities with small town business and traditions. Dan shared his approach to social…
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