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A Top 100 Small Business Influencer Champion? Wow, Thanks!

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cp_2013_smb_influencer_champion[4]Over the last 20 years, I’ve been blessed to not only run my own small business, but to work with hundreds of other small business owners, managers and startup founders. I’m fanatical about helping entrepreneurs to reach their career goals by starting, running and growing successful small businesses. Sometimes they grow into very large businesses – and that’s fun, too! But the crux of my career has been focused on helping to establish and promote companies in the early stages of their lifecycles, and I really enjoy those challenges.

That’s why I was so happy to be honored last week when I was named a Small Business Influencer Top 100 Champion and Expert in the 2013 Small Business Influencer Awards – produced by Small Business Trends, an award-winning online publication, serving over 6,000,000 small business owners, stakeholders and entrepreneurs annually, and SmallBizTechnology.com, a media company that produces online content and live events educating small and mid-sized companies on how to strategically use technology as a tool to grow their businesses. The awards honor those who are influential to small businesses in North America, through the products, services, knowledge, information or support they provide to the small business market.

I’m flattered to be in this list with some former clients (Brainshark, Constant Contact), companies I admire and use daily (Dropbox, American Express OPENForum, Evernote, Etsy, FedEx, Hootsuite, Hubspot, Plantronics, Vistaprint) and industry folks that I admire such as John Jantsch, Laurie McCabe, Dave Kerpen, Larry Kim and Aliza Sherman. Congratulations to all the other winners and honorable mentions, as well as the nominees. I fully support and cheerlead anyone who works in, and strives to help, small business. You can read about all the champions, here.

I simply wanted to say thank you to those who voted for me, the judges and most certainly my team at PerkettPR. They are not only a huge part of making our national clients successful through smart digital marketing and PR, but they are also an inspiration to me every day to keep my own small business innovative, fun and alive.

You can read additional details here, visit the award site or follow along on Twittter by searching #SMBInfluencer.

 

 

 

Is Chris Brogan Wrong?

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Recently, Chris Brogan – a respected industry colleague and someone we’ve worked with on occasion, wrote “50 Power Twitter Tips,” a nice little post that’s been viewed about 10,000 times or so. It was also put into video form by one of his fans, as you can see here:

One of those 50 tips seems pretty straightforward: “Follow anyone who follows you (and unfollow spammers/jerks).” Now, I realize that this may not be everyone’s style on Twitter but with nearly 150,000 of his own followers (on just one of his accounts), I tend to think Chris’ advice is probably pretty solid if you’re looking to build influence. But lately I’ve noticed a lot of folks doing the opposite – or, more specifically, I’ve noticed a lot of long-time Twitter friends who have reached large follower numbers suddenly unfollowing massive amounts of their followers. It seems to be a trend – they reach 18,000, 20,000 followers and suddenly they trim their following list to 500, 200 or less. What’s with the new trend?

I asked a few folks and some feedback has been genuine “I’ve decided to only follow people I’ve met personally or who add value to my life,” and some has been esoteric, like “Just cleaning up.” Personally, I think it comes across as a bit narcissistic (of course, lately I’m feeling this way about a lot of social media) and disingenuous. It seems like these folks are building up to large numbers and then unfollowing to make themselves seem more interesting, popular or influential. It seems like they’re banking on the fact that most Twitter users don’t spend a lot of time managing their network and therefore won’t realize they’re no longer mutually connected.

Anyone else notice this trend? Any insights into why folks are doing this? Is social media becoming a burden and therefore people are changing their strategies? Personally, I’ve decided I like Chris’ advice. The reason I like it is that yes, following a large group of people could be cumbersome – if you didn’t know how to use tools to manage your lists and find what you want when you want it. But I use technology like Nutshell from Constant Contact (a client), TweetDeck, Tweepl and many more awesome tools to do just that. So I can always find what I need and track key words, trends, followers and more in a timely fashion. But I like to follow most of those who connect with me because in doing so, I sometimes find nuggets of information that I wouldn’t have been looking for – the more people I follow, the more interesting information comes my way. So for me, I’ll keep following my new followers … unless of course, they’re “spammers or jerks.”

What about you? What’s your Twitter following strategy?

Constant Contact Acquires NutshellMail; Social Media Marketing Made Easy for SMBs

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By now, you’ve likely heard the big news on our client front today – Constant Contact has added social media marketing to their arsenal of tools for small businesses and organizations, through the acquisition of NutshellMail. Now, while I may be biased, I can honestly say that NutshellMail does exactly what the name implies – captures your social media networking in a nutshell so you can easily keep up and not miss a beat. I’ve been using the tool for a while now and am happy to be able to spread the word –  I find it invaluable for keeping up with all of the great conversations that I don’t want to miss.

In about five minutes time, you can be set up on NutshellMail and choose how often you receive an aggregated e-mail delivery of your most important messages across networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Why is this important? Because one of the biggest frustrations or roadblocks we hear about from businesses who want to include social media into their marketing mix is lack of time. It’s time consuming to log into each network and keep up with not only your replies, but the topics that are of interest to you and your business. NutshellMail makes it easy – you see all your network activity in one snapshot. And I love that I can reply across networks directly from the email. Other options let you see who your new followers are – or who stopped following you – which can be helpful in analyzing what content is compelling and what isn’t.

I’d love to hear what you think. It’s free and easy – so if you try it, please share your thoughts. And stay tuned to Constant Contact – as you know, they also offer Email Marketing, Online Survey and Event Marketing – as they plan to add more social media marketing tools that will help small businesses and organizations easily execute the most effective and successful marketing programs possible.

For more information, check out the video below or details on Slideshare.


Social Media Marketing Made Simple for Small Businesses – VideoTechnorati Tags: , , , , , , ,

Persuasive Picks for the week of 08/04/08

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Lego Time TrackerAre Social Media Jobs Here to Stay?
Ben Parr from Mashable.com touches upon the future of social media oriented jobs. Are they a flash in the pan or here to stay?

An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube
Be sure to set aside an hour to watch this one. Its well worth it and gives a very detailed and interesting look at the birth and success of the YouTube phenomena.

Marketing 103: Jeff Pulver’s e-mail Marketing Tips
Jeff Pulver shares a plethora of practical e-mail marketing tips based on 13 years of personal experience as a parallel/serial entrepreneur. Extend your e-mail marketing knowledge with additional tips directly from Constant Contact (PerkettPR client).

Twitter Brand Index
A tremendous number of brands are finding their way onto Twitter and there are a wide variety of opinions on how brand activity on Twitter should be approached. While the topic will continue to be up for debate, Jonathan Kash shares his extensive list of brands that are currently on Twitter. By the way, PerkettPR is one of those brands. How are we doing?

Track Your Time with LEGO Bricks
I’ll finish up this week’s picks with something a little light and somewhat humorous. Gina Trapani from LifeHacker.com shares one developer’s take on keeping track of the time spent of various project using Legos instead of more traditional time tracking methods!

Join us August 4 to Kick Off Boston Restaurant Week

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Join us and our client Constant Contact as we gear up for Boston’s Restaurant Week. On August 4, Constant Contact joins in the festivities by hosting a free seminar to educate Boston-area restaurant owners on the power of email marketing. Various Boston restaurants will share their email marketing success stories, including Finale,  Rialto, Masa and more.

Also open to the public – and useful for any small business owner who desires to learn more about email marketing – the workshop will demonstrate how easy it is to design and execute email campaigns to drive customer loyalty and interaction, increase sales and build long lasting, positive reputations. Participants will learn best practices for  building a quality list, increasing email open rates, encouraging readers to take action, and analyzing click-behavior to improve results.

Boston’s Restaurant Week features 3-course lunches and dinners for $20.08 and $33.08 respectively, at more  than 200 restaurants in and around Boston.  Bring your appetites August 10 through August 15, 2008  & August 17 through August 22, 2008.

Visit the unofficial guide to restaurant week for more details.

The  Power of Email Marketing: Restaurant Edition
Boston  Public Library
700 Boylston Street, Boston, Massachusetts
August  4, 2008, 10:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Click here to register

Christine Perkett brings home the Stevie!

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Stevie Award WinnerWe are very proud to announce that our fearless leader, Christine Perkett, was officially selected as the 2008 Stevie Award Winner for the “Best Communications, Investor Relations, or PR Executive” category! For those interested in a replay of the event, the Business TalkRadio Network aired a live broadcast of the ceremony and will be making the recording available via the American Business Awards site soon. All of us here at PerkettPR are incredibly proud of Christine and this accomplishment.

In other exciting news, our client, Constant Contact also won a Stevie in the “Best Customer Service Team“category! Congratulations to both Christine and Constant Contact!

PerkettPR Turns 10

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Today PerkettPR is announcing a major milestone for our company – our 10th year of business! What makes this interesting though, isn’t just the years, but the resilience of the virtual model that our company was built on and that we continue to embrace – while companies and their employees are just starting to get comfortable with the idea of virtual working, PerkettPR has been pioneering the concept since 1998. Only recently, have other companies been warming to the idea of letting their business professionals work from home as marked by the recent articles in major publications touting the “new” concept that a central geographic location is becoming less of a necessity for the modern day web worker. But PerkettPR was built from the ground up with an all-senior team that physically spans both coasts and all regions in-between; with almost 30 employees located across nine states, we continue to thrive as a virtually operated company.

Our 10th year is beginning on the heels of our most successful year to date – 2007 was an extreme growth year for PerkettPR with an expanding client roster and a 50% increase in staff and revenue. We have added several new clients worldwide including companies in Web 2.0, healthcare, enterprise software and telecom markets spanning Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. – including businesses such as Aternity, Constant Contact, Mailtrust, Sosius and Mzinga and we have enhanced our Partner Program with marketing and design agencies, Internet technology experts, and international PR firms.

In addition, although we have always been first adopters of technology and concepts that will help us to more successful in working virtually, 2007 has been the year that we have truly embraced social media initiatives for both ourselves and for our clients. Jeremiah Owyang recently stated, “I can’t imagine ever advising a client to deal with an advertising, PR, or interactive team that doesn’t get social media. But with the power shifting to the participants, agencies must demonstrate they can participate before they can ever help clients with it.”

PerkettPR truly believes in this concept and agree with Jeremiah that “the agency of the future is a “connected” one.” We have taught ourselves first, and then helped our clients to engage at many level. In the past year and a half, we have made additions such as the agency’s corporate blog, PerkettPRsuasion, a corporate Twitter presence, @PerkettPR and Facebook group – to join and start engaging influencers in more meaningful conversations for the firm and its clients. We have also driven new media and viral campaign elements for clients including blogging, screencasting, viral videos, Twitter accounts, LinkedIn campaigns, interactive video channels and more.

We believe strongly in making sure we feel comfortable in the space so that we can help our clients – we even hired a Social Media Director, Jeff Glasson that works with our clients with how to participate in social networking and he comments on social media topics on our blog and on others.

PerkettPR has also embraced the social media and the tech communities by sponsoring several TechCrunch events in New York and San Francisco, and most recently, the TechCrunch Boston MeetUp where the agency executed the planning, promotion and sponsorship coordination – bringing arguably the hottest Web 2.0 networking event to Boston for the first time ever. PerkettPR also has worked closely with other new media thought leaders, such as Sarah Meyers at Pop17.

Our team is very proud about this milestone and the steps we have taken to not only be a “poster child” for the successful virtual model, but also for our leadership in social media initiatives for ourselves and our clients.

And 2008 is looking even better!

In a Web 2.0 World, Customer Service Still Matters

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With all the do-it-yourself technologies prevalent in today’s Web 2.0 environment, customer service is very often stripped down to an IM chat or email. Often it’s impossible to get a human on the phone when you most need it, and when you do happen to “catch” a customer service representative, cultural barriers, sour attitudes and long processes tend to prevail. Now, more than ever, customer service matters.

One of our clients, Constant Contact, has always recognized this – their entire culture is built around taking care of the customer. Personally, we’ve experienced some great customer service this month from other vendors – and as a small business, it’s great to be treated with the care, respect and importance that is often only reserved for large customers.

Two examples:

Promopeddler

We had to order a rather large supply of light up glasses for the TechCrunch Boston MeetUp. We called a vendor we had used before and when we were negotiating some timing/pricing issues, the approach was a threatening “we may be more expensive, but you’ll regret it if you don’t use us” attitude. That doesn’t play well with us, so we tried a new vendor, Promopeddler. Promopeddler won our business due to their sales rep, Laurie. Laurie’s approach was not only that she was grateful for our business but she went above and beyond with her customer service. She was truly the reason they won our business.

Laurie was proactive, persistent and consistent – all the way past the point of the glasses being delivered. She provided extensive contact information, contacted us daily to let us know the status of the rushed order, called us when she thought a color aspect could be better – and provided a recommendation – and even followed up to ask us how our event was and if the glasses worked out. Our customer experience was so outstanding due to this woman that as long as she’s there, we’ll be a customer. We noticed they made the Inc. 500 “because we give personal service with every order.” Yes – they really do.

Verizon Wireless

We had a unique situation to solve with some BlackBerry purchase from Verizon. It required getting on the phone with some customer service representatives, which is not always a very positive experience. However, one customer service representative, Anthony in New York, made all the difference today. He was very clear every step of the way through the process and he was so personable we ended up chatting about baseball and football – and even though he was a dreaded Yankees fan and we are diehard Red Sox fans (most of us, anyway), we felt like a customer that mattered. Anthony made a time consuming process not only bearable but even entertaining – and experiences like that stick with your customers, so they stick with you.

The point here is that yes, the Internet provides a mostly do-it-yourself marketplace and opportunities to communicate without ever saying a word. But positive, helpful and verbal human connections are still important ways to make your brand memorable – and your customers loyal.

Supporting Women in Business – Congratulations to The Stevie Awards Winners

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The Stevie Awards for Women in Business were announced today and of course we send out personal congratulations to our client Constant Contact – winner of Best Entrepreneur – Non-Services Businesses – up to 2,500 Employees. Constant Contact, led by Gail Goodman, has a laser focus on delivering the best customer service and intuitive email marketing and interactive communications offerings for SMBs – and it’s great to see their hard work recognized. Congratulations!

Other interesting companies who won or were finalists in their categories include Care.com – a new place to find a baby or pet sitter; SheSpeaks – a national network of women who share their feedback and influence products, services and issues on the world around them; and The Baby Planners – a concierge and consulting service that caters to the needs of expectant parents.

It was great to see a variety of regions represented by the winning companies – from coast to coast, interesting emerging start ups and tenacious executives are profiled. For a full list of winners and finalists, visit The Stevie Awards.

Constant Contact’s IPO

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Congratulations to our client Constant Contact on its initial public offering. As of Wednesday, shares began trading on the Nasdaq under the trading symbol “CTCT.”

 

 

 

 

 

Constant Contact has met success by keeping a laser focus on a few simple guiding principles: outstanding customer support and easy one-to-many communications. The company’s email marketing and online surveys are not only easy-to-use and customize, affordable and effective, but the customer service is outstanding. The company’s support personnel is readily available in various ways – via phone, email or chat and it also provides a comprehensive online Learning Center that covers tips and tricks and announces schedules for webinars, regional training events and more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s future-thinking Web 2.0 community could learn a lot from Constant Contact – simplicity, easy access (try the product free for 60 days, no strings attached) and customer service still rule, even in an era of “do it yourself” technologies. Just ask the company’s more than 130,000 small business customers.

 

 

 

Congratulations!

 

constant contact