Business Blogging Excellence

Whistle While You Work

Companies go to great lengths to keep their customers happy, but what about their employees? Is your company doing anything to keep employees happy? There are several reasons why you should make sure your employees enjoy their job:

• If they like their job, they are that much more motivated to higher quality products/services.
• They are more likely to create positive buzz for your company. It’s much better to have an employee tell their friends about a good work day rather than how lousy everyone has been at work. Let them advocate your business for you.
• More likely to stay with the company.
• Attract other candidates to work for your company.

How can you keep employees satisfied? The obvious one is having employees who enjoy their field, but there are some simple, little things you can do help keep them motivated:

1. First, and foremost, thank them. When they do good work, tell them! People like being recognized for their hard efforts. It doesn’t have to be anything to complicated, just a simple, “you did a really nice job on that”, or so will do.
2. The employee is a valuable part of the team. By letting them know this, they will feel much more motivated to do well. Let them feel like a significant part of the team. It’s human nature to want to feel like you have purpose and value.
3. Newsletters showing efforts and accomplishments of individuals. Just another way of show you care.

There are other ways of generating moral as well. In another company I worked for they tried their best to keep employees happy by having barbeques, newsletters, awards, and more. There are many ways to create a positive environment for your employees. If you want to improve the quality of your products/services, and your company, your employees are a great way to start.

Posted in Small Business | No Comments »

Creating Employee Advocates

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.

Posted in Buzz, Internet Marketing, Small Business | No Comments »

Blogging Helps

Last night I went to a Jump Start Event locally and ran into the CMO of Jump Start, Thom Ruhe.  When he found out who I was, he said he reads my Buzzoodle Blog all the time. It is wonderful to meet people who read your blog before they ever meet you in person, and this happens all the time to me.

I suppose it happens to book authors every day.  But how often does it happen to business owners?  Frequently if you blog and do a good job.

When you are writing a blog post, you frequently do it out of habit, and you do not think about the readers.  You should, because they are reading what you write and deciding on the level of relationship they will have with you.

What are your readers options?

• Read one article and leave
• Read and explore the blog for useful stuff that appeals to them
• Subcribe to your RSS feed
• Subscribe to an email newsletter or updates
• Link to you for their website or blog
• Contact you
• Bookmark you – (see bar at end of post)
• Refer to your work in an article, publication, etc.
• Comment or trackback to your post

The more you blog and the higher the quality of your posts, the more this will happen.  It is also important for generating more traffic, which is more people to make these kinds of decisions.

Posted in Blog Traffic, Small Business | No Comments »