Are you invisible?

Over on the new Buzzoodle Blog we have a post about how you might be losing opportunities. If you are still visiting this blog location, you are loosing out on all kinds of new features and resources. Visit the new blog location at blog.buzzoodle.com

Buzz, Buzz - A Fly on the Wall

Check out the new post on the new buzzoodle blog: Buzz, Buzz - A Fly on the Wall It is about employee advocacy and project management.

Buzzoodle Español is released!

Buzzoodle Blog de mercadotecnia de Boca a Boca en Español. Thanks to those of you that have been visiting from Spanish speaking countries. The new Spanish Language Buzzoodle blog will be adding translations of old posts and keeping up with relevant new posts. The new location of the English Buzzoodle Blog is blog.buzzoodle.com

Buzz Marketing Podcast

Listen to the new Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing podcast. Details and links on the new Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing Blog.

Bookmark Buzz

One of the reasons I moved from this blog to the new one is the great plug in's I could get to help the Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing blog provide better value and create more buzz.

Check out the post on the new blog about bookmarks and the cool bookmark options at the bottom of the page.

Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing - Espanol

Now that the Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing blog is released, keep your eyes open for Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing - Espanol. In the coming weeks we will be launching the spanish version of this blog.

Why? First, to build our brand in different markets and reach a wider web audience. Next, some people in the US prefer to read in Spanish. Also, there are fewer Spanish marketing blogs and we think we will stand out more, although I have seen some excellent Spanish marketing blogs.

Lastly, we are working on partnerships with people in other parts of the world that will resell our products and spread our message as part of their marketing services. Having some of our content translated into other languages will speed the growth and adoption of Buzz Marketing with employees.

If you were to put up just a few pages welcoming people in other languages and explaining your services, how much do you think your audience would grow? Just keep in mind that they may think you have someone on staff that speaks the language. If they call be prepared to handle it. There are more and more services that can help you with this. Some call centers are fielding customer calls just in different languages. This can help you start the buzz in places where you will not even know what they are saying.

Blog Traffic - The 9 Month Wait

Starting over is rotten. The reason you want to start out in a professional blog solution is because starting over really is not fun. It is a lot of work only to see your numbers drop for the short term. I moved to http://blog.buzzoodle.com because there is a long term advantage. However, moving sooner would have been better. It is great to now have full control of the blog, but I know it will be about 9 months before I start seeing the same traffic that this one sees. If you are starting a blog and are thinking "I will just use a free one and try it out briefly." , think again. Commit to pay a little bit and commit to make it successful. You will be glad you did.

What do your customer see?

Read the post about how a small business is not paying attention to detail and putting nasty stuff in plain sight on the new Buzzoodle Blog.

Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing - The Blog

In the first of what will be steady enhancements to Buzzoodle (the brand), I have moved this blog to http://blog.buzzoodle.com I will continue to post here as well for some time, because I do not want to lose you as an audience and because this site does get great traffic. However, I needed better control and more flexibility in my publishing so I used Outstanda to set up a blog. I hope you will follow me over. I have a lot of great stuff planned to help you grow your organization.

Promoting as a way of life

Certain people do a lot of self promotion. It is required for success. What would happen if your paycheck depended not only on doing a good job but also promoting yourself and your business? It does. You may not see it on a daily basis, but your paycheck and your payrate is dependant on your organization's success. Buzz will make you more successful. Rock Star's promote themselves all the time. They have to. They do not do it between 8 and 5. They do it as a way of life. - You may say, "Yeah, but they are rich..." but that it the end result of doing all of that promotion before they were rich. Take charge of your future by learning to promote yourself and your organization as often as you can.

Giving Up

Today is an off day. I have a bit of a headache and the work is piled to the ceiling. I want to do a blog post, but what on? I started pondering how people give up. At what point do just say enough? Some people will tell you never give up. On life, I agree. On a particular products or service I do not. Sometimes it is just your baby that no one else cares about. Buzz is a great indicator of your likelihood to succeed. Here are questions to ask that use buzz to judge if you can stick to it or throw in the hat:

• Does anyone else besides you, close family and friends get excited about your product or service?
• When you meet people, do they frequently say they have heard about you?
• If you stopped all sales efforts, would some sales continue to come in through word of mouth?
• Do you appear to be gaining a little momentum in many places?
• Are people blogging about you?
• If you closed your business, would people be upset?
• Does your product or service have a positive impact on people's life?

These may be good things to ask yourself if you have been trying to sell a product or service for years and have been just getting by. Maybe it is time to try something new.

Another thing you might do is ask yourself these questions and then figure out how to repackage what you are doing to improve the answers to these questions. Giving up on the way you operate today is breathing new life into tomorrow.

Building Something Great

Rule #1 of Buzz Marketing is to create a great product. Great products create buzz without effort. What can help make your product or service great?

• Great Support
• Transparency
• Listening to clients
• Great design that is easy to use. - Easy like small children can use it....not your standard ot easy.
• Solve a problem people care about
• Help others succeed

Even a great product needs a smart jump start, which is why you do marking. The test of your products greatness is whether it takes on a life of it's own after that jump start.

Technology Interview Questions - Create a Buzz

If you employee technology people, they often may not seem the most social or outgoing (compared to your sales staff, at least.) However, here are some interview questions for technical people that could uncover a wealth of buzz that you did not know could be tapped. #1 - How often do you participate in online communities? #2 - Do you use any collaborative news services where you post interesting stories and links for others to read? #3 - Do you publish code or write technical articles? Is doing that something that interests you? #4 - How big is your network? How many people do you know online? #5 - Do you have a blog? While many technology people will participate in these kinds of activities, they may not think to promote the business while doing it. You can use these interview questions to identify the potential, but you will probably need clear guidelines and expectations to be successful in creating buzz with your tech staff. If you have additional ideas for technology interview questions that help identify candidates with buzz potential, please add them to the comments on this post.

Great Lakes Geeks

Last night at a local tech summit I met Dan Hanson, Technology Editor of Inside Business Magazine. He was kind enough to post a picture of us at Great Lakes Geek along with a few other more noteworthy people like: Guy Kawasaki - Great speaker and blogger. Very gracious in answering some questions via email with me late last night after the presentation. Cathy Panzica - Cleveland area economic developer, advocate for the region and trouble maker #1. ...and too many more people to list here. Please note that pictures are in order of importance. You can quickly see us by scrolling to the bottom.

Promoterz - Dave Free

Dave Free is a reader of this blog and asked me to mention Promoterz. Here is what he said about his company and it may be of interest to some of you. (I am not paid to say this, but I have also not used the service as yet.)

Promoterz is a hands-free, word-of-mouth marketing service for businesses. It identifies the happiest customers and gives those customers a megphone to share the good news with their friends. Promoterz(tm) does this by asking customers about their experience with a remarkably short survey. Promoterz(tm) then invites customers to become a hero by sharing a valuable offer with their friends. Most customers then request to be notified of other special offers or newsletters. The net result is an increase in word-of-mouth referrals and an increase in repeat business.

Buzz Marketing and Advocates under your Nose

An advocate is someone that tells others about the benefits of using something and encourages others to use the product or service. Wouldn’t it be great if you had 10 people out their strongly advocating you? If you are looking for advocates among people you do not know well, then you have a lot of hard work in front of you. However, there is another group that many small and mid-sized businesses overlook: Employees. If your current work culture says employees work a set time limit on a set of tasks, and does not take into consideration the extended network of people each employee knows, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. Employees in the right environment and with the right encouragement will create buzz and word of mouth for their organization. They need to understand that buzz is everyone’s responsibility and they have to have success stories and good information that will help them create buzz more easily. This phenomenon is called Employee Evangelism. Some key strategies that can help you begin an employee evangelism movement in your organization are:

• Let people know how and why you want to do it, and how it will benefit them.
• Create a Buzz Guide that spells out the do’s and don’ts of creating buzz.
• Publish and distribute success stories, company information and interesting trivia to employees and customers. Encourage them to share it.
• Publicly recognize employees that create buzz.
• Encourage reporting of buzz efforts.
• Set a goal of a minimum number of buzz attempts each week.
• Encourage employees to become experts in a given field.

If you do those things, and also give your advocates clear examples and instructions on buzz tools, you will find your business growing quickly. Some examples of buzz tools are:

• Blogging
• Podcasts
• News sites where you can post news, such as www.digg.com
• Email follow-ups with stale connections
• Build a Squidoo lens
• Bookmark company pages with social bookmark tools like del.icio.us
• Hand out coupons to people they know

There are 100’s of variations of this kind of buzz creating opportunity. The most important thing to remember is that one or two of these things occasionally is not going to do much. If you successfully build a culture of buzz and a culture where every employee feels like they are responsible for the success of the organization, then you will be able to sustain the buzz effort and eventually hit a crucial mass where you have customers lining up for what you have to offer. The best part of this whole thing is that this technique costs less than traditional marketing and advertising and word of mouth is shown to be one of the most effective and influential mediums to get your message out to potential customers. It is well worth the extra effort, and in a relatively short period of time it will be paying off.

Word of Mouth and Buzz Marketing

In case you are wondering what Buzzoodle does: Organizations that want to increase sales and visibility by creating buzz and word of mouth use Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing. Buzzoodle helps them energize and focus their advocates while measuring and improving upon the buzz created. Buzzoodle Philosophy: Create sustainable, steady new buzz with an organization’s existing advocates, including employees and customers. This leads to high visibility and more customers without directly marketing to them. Buzzoodle specializes is small business and mid-sized business success via a low cost, high impact strategy of creating intentional buzz. Buzzoodle is a catalyst to help organizations achieve better results through strategic planning and services. What does Buzzoodle offer?

• Buzz Tracking Web-based Solutions
• Buzz Marketing Strategic Planning
• Content Management and Blogging Solutions
• Speaking and Training Services
• Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing Book – Coming November 2006
• Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing Blog

Corporate-wide Evangelism is the surest way to help the company and the individuals succeed. Buzzoodle can show you how: www.Buzzoodle.com

Hedge Hog Training Facility

This is an example of doing the right thing. Sure, the British Hedgehog Preservation Society wishes it would have been done sooner, but McDonald's did do the right thing. What are some of the wrong things McDonalds could have done?

• Ignored them forever.
• Tried to open a free Hedge Hog Training Facility that would teach hedge hogs the buddy system so if one got in trouble the other would pull him out.
• Genetically engineer hedge hogs to not like sweets.
• Eliminate the contaner for their McFlurry. It becomes a handful of ice cream.
• Claim hedge hogs are a pest and they are doing the world a favor.
• Start selling hedge hog strips so the dead hedge hogs do not go to waste.

Why didn't McDonalds see this coming you ask? I don't know either. But now if I were McDonalds I would take a page from the book of those line-caught tuna canneries and put a big emblem with "Hedge Hog Safe" on the side of the cup along with a website where people can find out more.

Side Note: Did that article give you the impression that England is full of litter and millions of wild hedge hogs too?