How can the small business learn to trust digital providers?

Ebusiness club

I went to an excellent breakfast briefing workshop yesterday in Nottingham which was part the Ebusiness Club events.  Converting Website Visitors was expertly presented by Ian Lockwood who gave us an action-packed romp in 90 minutes through techniques to measure your web traffic (including some nifty tricks on A-B and other types of testing in Google Analytics) and using strong techniques of copywriting, sales offers and content strategies  to upsell your casual browsers to paying e-customers.

Ian recommends to test and test again – you need to know your benchmark to know how you’re succeeding, make big bold changes and be prepared to go with the results – what works for you may not work for your customers.  The quality of ideas and information definitely made it worth the early start, when I’m not usually much of an early riser

The event was packed out with 150 local professionals, some digital specialists like myself and Susan Hallam looking to qualify or augment our knowledge, mainly other small business owners keen to get ahead in all things digital.

I had an intriguing conversation with a lady who ran a social health sector consultancy.  She said she spent twelve days last year in Ebusiness Club and other web training events.  I asked if she was trading online, “No, I do all this blogging and other stuff but it has no benefit – I get all my work from professional bodies and word of mouth.”

She said she wanted to know about web so she could manage her own website development and understand how to contract services like designers, developers and copywriters to do it the right way because she couldn’t trust those she had worked with to do things correctly, and without knowing the knowledge on best practice she couldn’t be sure she was getting the standard of work she needed.  “In my industry I have to be accredited and achieve specific qualifications and standards.  In the web industry, there are no standards.”

Web specialists – the 21st century used car salesmen?

Initially this conversation perplexed me.  Why spend so much time at your expense on something so peripheral to your business when there are affordable professionals out there like myself who can do it for you?  Or indeed, why have a website if it causes such a headache?

It strikes me as a control thing – small business owners often want to be in charge of and understand every aspect of their business – and in theory so they should, but as she noted, she would trust an accountant with her finances as that’s what they are trained and accredited to do.

Yet her viewpoint also alluded to some shockingly low standards from the “web shops” (i.e. sole and small business web designers) in Nottingham out there which harken back to the ‘bad ol days’ of pretty, non-functional, non-editable designs which were commonplace when I started in the industry in 2000.  Yet small businesses cannot afford the many specialist or bigger digital or full-service agencies that do provide quality work in the city.

What’s the solution? A serious professional body for digital professional with high, univeral membership standards?  Unlikely to have much impact or change hearts and minds unless it was nationally established.  How do we as digital professionals build trust whilst empowering our clients with knowledge they can take away and learn from?

Are we in danger of becoming the user car salesmen of the 21st century?

How can we develop an effective and trusted digital consultancy service?

I’ve no instant solutions.  But this does pose a major challenge for me; I’m currently developing a product-based service for small business to empower business owners with the solutions they need to grow their business online.  As a non-designer, non-programmer, non-SEO specialist, I’ve no vested interest in commissioning an expensive website that little meets the business’s needs, as an agency or web shop may.  (Why pay when WordPress or Yahoo! Stores will solve over 50% of business’s needs affordably?)

Yet the challenge to date, and it’s changed only incrementally since I first dipped my toe in this type of consulting in 2003, is that small business’s are still only inclined to pay for ’stuff’ (like a shiny new website or brochure) rather than time and money saving advice, and those most in need of help probably don’t yet realise they have a problem.  They’re probably not even online yet, or don’t realise how under-performing their website – let alone their total digital presence – is.

One man at the event said “it’s all very good advice, but I don’t have time to do all of this.”

And that’s where a digital consultancy can come in – to give you the skills and roadmap as to where you need to go, so like our social health specialist you know how to ask the right questions and get the right results when you are ready to commission external services, or work with your digital consultant to get the results you deserve.  And give yourself a 12-day shortcut

I’m looking for guinea pigs to test my new business digital consultancy package which I will launch in the spring, if you’re interested in trying it out please drop me a line, email susi@digitalconsultant.co.uk, tel: 07981 222799.  I’ll be doing one consultancy for free and three others at a nominal cost with business who can give me some feedback to get the formula of services right.

And if you’re an independent web designer or developer, particularly if you’re based in or near Nottingham, I’d love to hear from you to see if we can work together to create better quality services.

Promoting your music as an independent artist using social media

I’m a musician by training – and occassional after-hours trade.  So I often meet up with muso-types and they are often bemused when I hand them my ‘digital consultant’ business card.  “So do you make websites?”. “Well”, I reply, “not exactly…”.

Lately a young chap called Yinka took me up on my strange business card and asked me for some advice on using social media to promote a new EP for his band Sabatta.  I love this challenge as:
a) It makes you really think about how to apply theory to a real situation – how is this stuff all useful to someone on a low/zero budget? and
b) I think a great skill in life is just to ask and ask again until you get a bit of what you want – and I’m all in for people taking up on advice and giving back when they’re up the ladder.

So here’s an extract of my advice:

“The biggest problem you have as a self-managed and unsigned act is that, if you pardon the pun, there’s a lot of ‘noise’ out there in independent music – and it’s not just about guitars and singers, there’s just a thick cloud of information everywhere in the music space.  All the ‘ear time’ at the major new media platforms (Bebo, Youtube, MySpace etc.) is taken over with the professional pluggers – so in this respect getting to the top of the channel and ‘recommended’ sections is still in the hands of the old-school music industry.  This has to be done through the old fashioned plugging virtues of hard sweat, with the hope that you can create something that’s either so good, or so quirky (strange, weird, funny, dark) that people recommend and share.  Short of becoming a serial killer notoriety is hard to achieve

First up – just about all the best advice that can be give comes from Mr Andrew Dubber and the excellent New Music Strategies website – sign up to his blog and be sure to download the free e-book.

And of course read Kevin Kelley’s excellent article “1000 true fans” about using the ‘long tail’ to be sustainable as an independent artist.

Take it with a pinch of salt though, some people think you can’t make any money of the ‘long tail’ in music – and all of us scraping about to make any money at all probably suggests this is true.

There’s just so much stuff out there that you can create some great content (a song, a video, animation, photo shoot, podcast) and it just sort of goes ‘out there’ into the ‘deja you’ land (not ‘deja vu’ in that you’ve seen it in a past life but you’ve seen it all before!). So the crucial thing is what marketers call “stickiness” – why you would stick around, come back – it’s the repeat visitors that become fans, then they buy – and there’s no shortcut round stickiness.  Stickiness is about creating the right ambiance and the right space – like creating a great cafe or bar where people are happy to hang out and chat or just check out the vibe.  That’s the philosophy behind a lot of the social networks like Bebo anyway.

Looking at what’s big…

I noticed recently that novelty videos on YouTube were getting frightening high viewing -  like Ninja cat, the whole Kersal Massive phenomena of loads of remixes from one naive teenager attempting to rap or the Cillit Bang techno remix.

This probably doesn’t help if you’re not into novelty and comedy music, but gives you an idea of how important humour is to make something viral - so maybe a collaboration with an upcoming comedian to make a video/viral could be an interesting idea.

Another lateral idea:

Seth Godin says go buy CDs wholesale of artists you sound like, then post them a CD of yours in the package.  A low-cost way of putting yourself in the centre of potential fans.

You’ve already identified what artists you think you sound like, and who likes your music -  you say: “Jimi Hendrix, Lenny Kravitz, Thin Lizzy, fans of the quirky often like us also – someone told me the other day one of my songs sounds like Elvis Costello meets Metallica – which was cool.”

So this is interesting – but would EITHER Elvis Costello or Metallica fans like you?  Some will, some will not.  This is a kind of crazy idea in itself of two quite different kinds of music -  I could see you translating this into some kind of animation if you’re able to do this, or even something simple like a mash-up of Costello and metallica videos with your latest single as the soundtrack – coudl be big on YouTube and will show you’ve got a good sense of humour too!

You’ve got a great professional looking website – well done, you’re up on 90% of artists who struggle with an out of date site or just use MySpace.  It suits your image – which is strong.  Of course you’re a band who value your authenticity highly and have already established your musical style, so it’s not a case of jumping on the band wagon!  But there’s something here I think which connects with social media – it’s more about engaging with people directly, so they get an insight into your world and see things from your angle.

Social media let’s you engage manageably with literally thousands if not tens of thousands of people – but what people want today is a ‘piece of the action’ – I don’t just want to hear about the artist or know when they’re playing in my town, I want to understand what they are writing about, their motivations – even what they had for dinner is interesting to the real trainspotters!  So a micro-blogging platform like Twitter is really great for updates, particularly when you’re on the road, or to announce what you’re doing with the band.    what are you listening to?  What other gigs have you seen?  Fashion, even hair tips (?).  Social media is all about conversations.

I notice you have a blog too – well done on this front.  BUT it’s rarely updated and seem to focus on what your’e releasing and is, if I may say, a rather ‘hard sell’ approach focused on what releases you want people to buy rather than a sustained relationship, i.e. getting people to know what you’re doing and to want to commetn on it and feel a part of it, and feel part of a conversation with you.  That doesn’t mean you have to spend your life posting stuff, but a once a week update is nice – or even a bit of a ‘tour diary’ – There’s plenty of tools to make it really easy to upload photos or video from your phone etc. It shouldn’t just be about text!

Play around with stuff too – like you could do a series of short posts on a different theme or set yourself a mission – do reviews of all your favourite record shops, talk about what happened when you got in there, who you met, what you bought.  Them a shameless plug for your new EP…then people may find your post who are into the same music and bingo…the association of your ideas with your music starts to set.  But it takes a long time for these things to work!  So you have to enjoy the process.

Some artists use the whole idea of ‘crowd sourcing‘ to get people to buy into (literally and metaphorically) what they’re doing. Elbow did it years ago when they got the names of everyone at their show to put on the sleeve of their concert DVD.  Of course, a lot of people who weren’t even at the show put their name on the list for the craic (me included ) but it was a way of getting more people to pre-order the DVD – and Elbow seem to have been doing OK lately…

It’s basically an extension of the ‘fan club’ idea – people like Richard Cheese go heavy on it as it’s the primary way by creating ‘exclusive’ content (even getting Richard to sing your voicemail message) he can make money, particularly as an artist doing exclusively cover versions.

It’s so easy to set up polls, forums etc to start getting the ‘fans’ to contribute and help you filter your ideas a bit – maybe do your A&R for you – after all, they are the people who are going to be buying it, so give them what they want! MySpace is a great way to start out.

I notice you’re on all the big platforms – facebook, Last Fm, Myspace, Youtube etc. which is all good – you’re doing all the right things.  You may want to think a little strategically about how these spaces interact rather than duplicate one another – it can be a lot of work doing the ‘copy and paste’ from one to another.  Maybe each space may have a specific objective (like one is the ‘green room’ for lateral stuff to do with band, YouTube obviously for videos, MySpace may be exclusively focused on recordings and music) – but cross promotion is good too – like linking to your ‘proper blog’ from the MySpace blog.

In short, I don’t think there’s any real shortcuts – and it would take someone far more creative and imaginative than I to tell you what would work – and even then it’s still a bit of a lottery.  The crucial thing is to be hanging out in the places where your online users are – that’s probably email, Facebook and MySpace primarily.  Anywhere else is a plus, but that’s where your focus should be.

You need to engage and create a volume of ’stuff’ and content that reflects what Sabatta are about, but remember : ‘no one shits a masterpiece’.  In today’s environment, people have voracious appetites and want a lot of new ’stuff’ and you need to feed them with it  – titbits and hors d’oevre – remixes, exclusvie tracks, blog posts, videos, photos – not necessarily always the highest quality but the mass of it will give you presence – after a while people will be aware of you from a link here or there and that’s how you start building notoriety!

The offline stuff, flyers, flyposting, press reviews all works in pretty much the same way. But importantly – dont spend your life being an administrator of MySpace/Facebook - spend more of your time on the art than the message – decide how much time it is worth spending on social media to meet your creative and business goals, and stick to a rigid timetable otherwise it can get too time-consuming and demoralising.

The live video on your MySpace looks good, you’re a great live band – so more of this!  If you can get the gear together to film all your shows or get a film-maker in your entourage, you’d be suprised how much great content fodder you can produce from just one camera and a few cut-aways.

Good luck!”

I’d be interested in any more worldly advice you have for Yinka and Sabatta, and if you want some advice yourself why not drop me a line.