I was picking up a pizza today and the place did not seem to mind that their dirty mops and mop buckets are in plain sight for customers at the counter.  You could tell that is where they leave them too, not just a temporary stop.

Always walk around your business as if you are seeing it for the first time.

One form of advocacy is to get featured.  What I mean about featured is that you start appearing in other people’s stuff.  You may not even know you are being featured.  If you think about it, big name writers get featured all the time and do not know.  They have reached the tipping point where they no longer have to pursue publicity.

I am not saying I am there yet, but in the last month I have been featured in a few places.  For example, in a Squidoo Marketing Group.

Just last night a noted local business expert, Cathy Panzica, was giving a speech to a group of CEO’s and talked about evangelizing your business.  I guess she spoke very highly of us because everyone was telling me about it afterward.  (I’d gone to a different speech about public funding.)

How can you get featured?  There are many ways and they tend to pick up steam the more buzz you create.  Here are some ideas:

• Get mentioned in an author’s book
• Get mentioned in the media
• Get mentioned in a speech.
• Get mentioned on a website or web-based community
• Be used as a success story for your city by city officials
• Give testimonials to your vendors and invite them to post them on their website, with a link.
• Podcasts and Radio Shows. 

If I missed any, please post them in the comments below.

Welcome to the new blog.  I moved from Blogspot to WordPress to have more control over the blog, to have more plug in options and to provide easier to find content for visitors via categories.  I hope you like it and PLEASE send me feedback if you see something you love or hate.

I will continue to publish on the old blog for a while as well, but within a few months that will stop.  So the sooner you change your RSS feed or bookmark, the sooner we can get back up to speed and start looking ahead.

I am sorry for the hassle, but in the long run this will be much better.

 Ron

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.

If you employ 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.

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.

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.

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.

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