Starting a business is hard, growing it is harder and getting to that sweet spot where it's humming so you can take a breath occasionally, have a holiday for instance or start paying yourself a salary is harder still. No matter where you are in the lifecycle of your business something every business needs to do is blow their own trumpet!
- talk about your successes
- share your ideas and what you have learned
- make some noise about yourselves.
If you don't nobody else will and there will come a time when having a profile in your chosen market will be important. Blowing your own trumpet is easier with social media, which augments and amplifies the traditional word of mouth style of getting your message out there. As we all know it can have the converse negative effect of highlighting failures too. We use social media products to showcase different dimensions of our OptimalBI business, all have links to each other but the content is only provisioned in one place. If an online presences isn't your thing this article expands on more traditional media strategies - 5 traditional marketing strategies for 2013.
Since everyone is short on time and telling the world about what you have been up requires focus to get the widest reach, basic social media marketing principles apply here to get a real social media following you need to keep your content current and changing on a regular basis. Making someone in the team responsible for coordinating the publication of content has worked well for us as has sharing the content publication itself around the team. I've read so many articles and blogs on how to make the most of your online presence and the 5 principles that really resonated with me were these ones:
- be genuine and honest
- participate in conversations
- show off your expertise
- share your experiences
- most of all add value, don't just copy what everyone else is doing - this is all about you!
Next question is what tools and technologies to use to tell the world more about you, here is a list of what we use and what content we publish there. So far our experience has been that people subscribe to 1 or 2 of the social media products so we find we hit different audiences with each of these:
- Optimal.com website - overview of who we are with profiles of the team, what we do with service descriptions, how to contact us including links to other social media and BI blogs
- Twitter - many of us tweet on BI things, business things and random fun things (lots of fun things).
- Pinterest - our newest showcase of Data Driven Infographics and very cool AskSAM* cartoons with helpful SAS functions
- LinkedIN - networking for the wider team also used for posting links to blogs and short updates, we run competitions to see who can connect to the most new people in a month, loads of fun and good networking prompt for all of us
- Facebook - our latest forray has been to add our quirkier stuff on facebook, somewhere to upload photos and more social aspects of OptimalBI life
Some blatant trumpet blowing here for OptimalBI. We've had a really busy year so far in 2013, the team is growing and are all wonderful people (check them out on our website), launched OptimalBI Australia which is massive in itself, entered the NZ Deloitte Fast50 and have made it to the finals so know we are one of the 50 fastest growing companies in NZ, had a flood - a major event that honed and focused us here in Wellington, rebranded and launched our new website and it's only September! Most excitingly we have turned 5! Shane launched OptimalBI in 2008 so for our 5th birthday next month we will be throwing a big party - very excited about that one.
Here are Bronnie and Kathryn looking awesome at the Deloitte Fast 50 Regional Finals and some more links below. Let me know where you are showcasing your stuff our there online and I will follow and promote your success too, it's all about sharing. Vic.
Our new Website: http://optimalbi.com/
Awesome Data Driven Infographics for our customers: http://www.pinterest.com/optimalbi/optimalbi-infographics/
AskSAM* cartoon series with helpful tips on SAS Functions: http://www.pinterest.com/optimalbi/optimalbi-asksam/
Some of our crazy stuff on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/optimalbi
* wondering who AskSAM is? he's our SAS Guru who publishes great tips and tricks for anyone who uses SAS as a business tool, you can ask him questions on twitter too https://twitter.com/OptimalAskSAM
