Converting Community and Customers into Reliable Referrals

Converting Community and Customers into Reliable Referrals
Paul Berry of Rebel Mouse: Social Media Aggregation
Focus And Timing Are Key
Google Stock Drops By 9 Percent, But Mobile Earnings Grow

Posted: 19 Oct 2012 11:00 AM PDT

Finding new customers for any business, big or small, is the lifeblood of its success and sustainability. Without new business and making new sales there is no way a business can endure.

As important as that is and has always been, the retention of existing customers and mining those customers for referrals has become much more important.

Companies are awakening to just how valuable this is, and are investing more in retaining existing customers at a much higher level of customer engagement and service. GM has put this at the top of their priority list, and is shooting for 68 percent!

Small business marketing expert and founder of the Duct Tape Marketing System, John Jantsch, talks about the 7 Steps To Creating a Marketing System. This system and these steps are fundamental to finding qualified customers and then converting them into referrals. Jantsch defines marketing as: “getting someone that has a need to know, like, and trust you”.

Developing referrals from people who have a need to like, know, and trust you should be relatively easy and effective, as long as you have a system and you are consistently earning that trust.

Fast forward to the 21st century, where mining customers and referrals can now come from social media platforms and communities, too. Yep, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, Blogs, Podcasts all can be very fertile referral sources. Our social networks give people more opportunity to “know, like, and trust” us through what we write and say, and what others write and say about us.

Are you working both worlds to develop referrals?

Dennis McEniry, President Online at Estee Lauder Companies, talks about the role social media plays in its brand: ”The number one influence on beauty consumers in every market around the world is advice from friends. With social media, not only are they able to get timely brand information directly from brands, but also all of the validation from authorities and friends”.

Here are five things you can do to develop referrals from your community and customers.

1. Build Relationships Versus Transactions
If people do business with people they like, know, and trust, as author Bob Burg says in his best selling book The Go Giver, then building relationships rather than having transactions is the way to do that and get referrals.

2. Use Testimonials
Use the power of satisfied customers and loyal followers. Keep updating your testimonials on LinkedIn and put them up on your Websites.

3. Ask People
Identify key people that you can ASK for referrals, a testimonial, or recommendation, who you have no problem endorsing back or referring back, and ASK them.

4. Network, Network, and Network
Blend your online and in person networking strategy and get personal with people. Meet people in person and use the social media platforms as a bridge. They will remember how you make them feel.

5. Develop the Referral Habit
Make developing and getting referrals an integral part of your daily activities. ABM—always be networking and always be requesting referrals.

The conversion rate of referrals from satisfied customers is about 50 percent. Use your existing relationships to turn customers into your sales force!

Always be asking the right people the following questions:

“Who do you know that could benefit like you have from this community, product, or service”?

“Could you recommend or make an introduction to them for me?”

Spend more time mining reliable referrals and watch what happens!

Referral Photo via Shutterstock

The post Converting Community and Customers into Reliable Referrals appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Paul Berry of Rebel Mouse: Social Media Aggregation

Posted: 19 Oct 2012 08:00 AM PDT

Social media has proved to be very beneficial to small business. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to take that a step further by having all of your social media broadcasts available at a glance to you and your followers? Tune in as Paul Berry, former CTO of Huffington Post and Founder of Rebel Mouse, joins Brent Leary to share how this can be done.

* * * * *

Paul Berry Small Business Trends: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Paul Berry: For the last six years is I was the CTO of Huffington Post where I ran product and design. When I joined, there were a couple of people on my team and three million unique visitors a month. Which felt big, but by AOL acquisition, we were 45 million unique. When I left, we were 145 million unique and I had 300 people on my team.

Small Business Trends: So I just have to ask, where did the name come from?

Paul Berry: In testing a bunch of names on friends, family, and extended people, co-workers, colleagues etc., there were a few things that really worked with Rebel Mouse.

Also, I like that it doesn't define itself so that I would be stuck in the word choice that I had made in the beginning. We have space the way Google did, to be able to be a lot of things, but it is memorable. I also felt it was humble, but ambitious.

Small Business Trends: How is it different today to create a presentable Web page compared to previous years?

Paul Berry: You want Twitter and Facebook followers, but you also know you need a domain name. But the Web has made it way too hard. If you get the design right, which is a very small percentage of people who feel they love their design, then with blogs you start to feel really like this content is old.

There are people that feel that pressure more than ever. It used to be a blog post from three weeks ago was fine, but now it is slightly embarrassing and you stop promoting it.

Rebel Mouse wants to power many millions of domain names, and make that an experience of being social, and actually giving you returns. Because now, you have this place that shows off who you are. Whether you're a company or an individual, all the things you have been doing doesn't get lost because it is hard to find. But also more importantly, you get to choose what are the most important things on the page. Technology will never know what is the most important thing.

Small Business Trends: Maybe you can talk a little about the importance of making sure, from a Rebel Mouse standpoint, that you are taking care of folks who are going to be viewing your Web presence from a mobile device?

Paul Berry: Being able to adapt to all the different devices really takes a lot of work, so we are doing all the hard parts. When we are fully there, you should be able to get an app from us that you submit to the appstore as yourself – you will have native apps. We are doing that first for Techcrunch. We did Crunch Scroll, they came up with the idea, and it took us a day to do it, it is CrunchScroll.com. We will give them an app. They can submit it to the market place as themselves, called the Crunch Scroll.

Any business who wants to have their website powered by Rebel Mouse also will have the options to have native apps. But beyond that, you also have a really good mobile Web view which we have adapted to whichever device you are seeing a page in the browser.

Small Business Trends: How does the company use your platform with eCommerce?

Paul Berry: There is a lot of stuff that we have learned from media about how things click, and how you would like to organize a page that can be applied to eCommerce; as a layer on top. Rebel Mouse can drive your front page and drive recirculation models, but drive it to your shopping cart.

Small Business Trends: So you are also able to help because it is a matter of not just creating good content, but creating it in a way that is visually pleasing and easily presentable?

Paul Berry: Yes, it has to look really sharp. You have to look at it and be really proud. And that design, we don't think, has to be overwhelmingly unique and creative for each person, because the content should shine. It should shine in a way that the design let's the content shine.

Small Business Trends: People will actually be able to point their domain to their Rebel Mouse page?

Paul Berry: Exactly. So if you are someone who is, for example, a social media manager, or community manager, or an entrepreneur who has been focusing on the Twitter and Facebook side, those efforts you are doing will actually be amplified all of a sudden by having the website taken care of. That is what I think is one of the most exciting things for us. Showing people how that can work and then having it go viral.

Small Business Trends: Is there any future in terms of integrating with a backend contact manager, or a social relationship management system?

Paul Berry: Actually, I think Rebel Mouse profile pages integrated into a CRM can give a much more fun and dynamic view of a person. Where you are actually seeing the articles that person has curated and the stuff that they have shared, you are able to get a view of that person.

Then the other thing is being able to launch events and concepts, and get customers responding to that. Rebel Mouse will make it incredibly easy to launch any page that is driven by a hash tag, that is announcing a certain event, that is a new concept someone wants to work on, just by starting to curate through Twitter and Facebook. Bookmark writing and blog posting suddenly starts to become this very vibrant thing.

Small Business Trends: People can go to Rebel Mouse to learn about what you are doing and also to pick up their account?

Paul Berry: Yeah, we are accepting everybody on signup.

This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.

Whether you’re growing your business or starting a new venture, BlackBerry solutions provide you with the freedom you want and the control you need. [Series sponsor]

Paul Berry – Rebel Mouse by smallbiztrends

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Focus And Timing Are Key

Posted: 19 Oct 2012 05:00 AM PDT

business cartoon focus timing

Being a cartoonist means worrying about every sentence, every word, every punctuation mark. Brevity is wit after all.

For example, I’m still unsure as to whether this cartoon would be funnier with an exclamation point after the first sentence. Which is funnier:

“Focus, people! Or Focus, people.”

It’s hard to know. I tend toward a more understated approach, but then again, they’re jack-o-lanterns that know the end is near. Maybe both sentences need an exclamation point.

In the end, it probably isn’t going to make or break a cartoon. But years later, I still look at this cartoon and wonder.

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Google Stock Drops By 9 Percent, But Mobile Earnings Grow

Posted: 19 Oct 2012 02:30 AM PDT

From time to time every business experiences a bump in the road. That’s what happened to search giant Google yesterday, when premature release of third quarter earnings turned out well below projections. The stock exchange reacted badly, but as we’ll see, Google is experiencing growth in a whole new arena: mobile. Whatever the hiccup today, Google remains critical to any business that depends upon online traffic or uses its tools. Let’s see where things stand with the company now.

Nervous Nellies

Slip and slide. The early release of Google’s third quarter earnings Thursday was a slip up that caused the company’s stock to slide down about 9 percent. Analysts had expected earnings of $14.7 billion but the report showed $14.10 billion instead, well below projections. Google blamed financial printer RR Donnelley for accidentally posting the earnings report prematurely, and promptly suspended trading. Tech Crunch

Still moving on mobile. In an apparent effort to blunt the disappointment over the company’s overall failure to meet earnings projections, Google CEO Larry Page pointed out in a sales call later in the day, that not all the news is bad. Specifically, Google reports robust growth in its mobile revenue, largely from advertising. Earnings have increased from just $2.5 billion last year to over $8 billion today, an impressive rise. The Next Web

Tools You Can Use

Author, author! A Google feature called Author Rank allows you to take credit for your content, no matter where on the Web it might appear. If you create great online content, Author Rank can help you become an authority in your niche by having your name and avatar pop up next to your content in search, says social media marketing consultant and strategist Niall Devitt. Here’s how it works. Tweak Your Biz

What’s in your wallet? Google Wallet offers a whole new way to to pay. Customers can store credit and debit card information into a contactless card application on their mobile devices and use it to make payments at any point of sale. But what happens if a customer’s Wallet ID is hacked or stolen? Does Google have sufficient security in place to prevent a culprit from using it to access cards a customer has added? Buyer Zone

Selling your site. Google could be researching a service that would require users to pay for reading specific content online. We were surprised to see this post by full-time blogger Amanda DiSilvestro, though according to her, Google has yet to confirm the project, putting it on the level of a rumor. The question is whether the new service might be another way for authors to monetize at least some of their content. It is also uncertain whether customers would pay for it. Get Busy Business

The Secrets of Search

Pandas and Penguins. While some tweaking of algorithms at search engines like Google affects few sites, others, like Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, are huge, game changing events and can damage an online business severely. There are a number of tips online business owners and entrepreneurs need to keep in mind if they find they have been affected. Brick Marketing Blog

Disavowing all knowledge. We all know that linking to spam or low quality sites can be a bad idea for any online business. This is partly because visitors will judge your site by the resources to which you link, and also because connecting to such locations can drag your site down in the eyes of the search engines. Unfortunately, now a similar thing can happen when spammers link to you. Here’s what to do about it. Cube Online Marketing

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