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eTail Awards 2013

Being in business, especially eCommerce gives me the opportunity to connect with great businessmen and women. I was thrilled to be invited to the eTail awards on June 12th by Shopow whose founder; Kevin Flood presented the “best in Social Media award”.

The eTail Awards took place at the Old Billsgate in London and the opening act was comedian; Adam Buxton. He shared his thoughts on buying online and how people act in the weirdest way and share this on YouTube! From Brad Pitt talking about pooping, to a man put his tongue on an electric fly swatter, YouTube really does present one extreme to the other (if you want to see the fly swatting action, see it here). It really is amazing what people do for fun!!

The biggest winner of the evening was Appliances Online who walked away with “Best use of Social Media” and “The Chase Paymentech Best Pure-play Etailer – Large”. They have defined the whole goods online world with over 1 million Facebook fans and a fantastic mobile store. A big congratulations to the team at Appliances Online for their hard work.

Other awards included “Consumers Choice” which went to Amazon, “Paypal Best Mobile Optimised Site” which went to John Lewis (with Reiss being highly commended), “Best App” to Mothercare, “Best Customer Experience” to Morrisons (with Schuh being highly commended), “Torque Best use of Innovation” to Topshop and “Digital Marketing Campaign of the Year” to Very (with Chocolate Clothing being highly recommended).

During the night, I was paying close attention to the tables around me. I noticed the loudest table being ASOS after a few drinks but leaving the night bitterly disappointed after being selected for many awards and walking away empty handed (for a change).

Being a guest at such a well respected awards event was a great way for me to connect with very powerful business people who I exchanged business cards with and hope to work with them in the future.

If you ever have the chance to attend a great event within your industry, make sure you do everything possible to attend as it will not only benefit your business but give you the chance to dress up and have an enjoyable evening.

Just wanted to say a huge thank you to the team at Shopow for inviting me to the event and a big thank you to Phil Weedon for taking great pictures throughout the night. If you would like to see some pictures from the awards, you can do so here.

10 Ways to Build a Community for Your Business

I have spent over 6 years building my community and without them, I wouldn’t be where I am today. It is something that doesn’t happen overnight and will take time but worth the hard work in the end. Here are 10 ways I built my community for my business.

1. Research your Market

When I knew I had a service that could be successful in my own mind, I had to do my research to make sure it was something my target market also wanted. Once you know your ideal consumer, it makes it a lot easier for you to put you and your business in front of them and start to build your all important community.

2. Find your Niche

I researched my market, found my target audience and the next step was to find my niche. Around 6 years ago I positioned myself as a Social Media Expert and because of this, I was able to bring my services to organisations who have access to my ideal customer through my keynote seminars at various events and trade shows internationally. I found my niche by working with companies like BIRA and GA where I have the opportunity to be a guest contributor on their website.

3. Connect with your community

I then needed to start connecting with my community that wanted to hear what I had to say. The important thing to remember when building and connecting with your community is that you need to know what they want from YOU.

4. Be a Specialist in your Industry

You have found your niche, started to build and connect with your community and its time to really push yourself. I am a guest writer for Social Media Today where I am able to share my knowledge with their community. My most recent post, 5 Examples of Great Social Media Customer Service saw over 850 shares through Twitter in just 5 days. The amount of people I would have reached just through this one blog is very powerful and this was because I positioned myself as a specialist in Social Media.

5. Consistency & Content

Reusing the same content and only sharing information with your community every two weeks is not good enough. You need to be able to respond to your followers (especially in social media) in real time. You also need to be consistent especially when it comes to writing a blog because if people are following your business, they will want to see something new from you.

6. Don’t be afraid to take chances

Social media especially, is a risky game. Trying something new may completely backfire but if you don’t try, you will never know. Your community will appreciate it when you take chances, even if they don’t like what you have to say. Sometimes controversy can help you grow your community even further as we all know, who doesn’t love a good (but friendly) Twitter war?

7. Be Social

As I’ve mentioned above, social media is a great place to really build your community, once you have found your niche. I started with 0 Twitter followers and now have over 13,000. It will take time but once you have a solid ground, your community will start doing all of the social media sharing for you and you can really focus on engaging with them.

8. Create an Online Persona

You may not feel comfortable about sharing personal information about your life to your community so create an online persona. We all know about Superman, Spiderman and Batman. During the day they are relatively normal but by night they are bonafide superheroes. This is an extreme example of course but look at it as a way of creating an online profile which your community will really enjoy engaging with.

9. Track Online Activity

If you are taking risks when it comes to how you connect with your community, you really need to track this activity through analytics. Doing this will allow you to find out the most responsive content so you know what to avoid and what to do more of.

10. Be Patient

As I’ve said from the beginning of this article, building a community doesn’t happen overnight and it will take time. You just need to be patient and read the above 9 ways of building your community and in time, you will be wake up in the morning and look forward to sharing information with those who are interested in what you have to say.

I hope these 10 ways to build a community for your business will help you achieve success and I would love to hear your feedback.

Why the 5 C’s are So Important to Your Business

Having your own business is tough, especially if you don’t know how to create a strategy that can show successful results. With Gloople, I used the 5 C’s to make sure I was marketing my business correctly online. Here are the 5 C’s and why they are so important to your business.

Coverage

By coverage I mean using all of the tools available to make sure you have a presence across all of the relevant Social Networks. Just having a Facebook page is no longer enough – you need to cover all routes. You never know where a potential customer may come from so make sure you have at least leveraged your business on the main 5 networks; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+.

Collection

The idea of Collection is simple; keep collecting your followers. By doing this you are not only online building a community, you are increasing your brand awareness and positioning your business as a company sector leader. Use the other 4 C’s to help you with this step. Collection is important because without the increase in followers on Social Media, your network will never grow which means no new brand advocates, customers, or sales.

Curation

To make sure you get the coverage you need to collect your followers, you need to allow your followers to curate your information. You may find your followers alter the information they are sharing to match their audience. Don’t let this bother you as they are still sharing YOUR content but matching it with what their audience wants to hear. Without curation, your information won’t be shared as much as you would like.

Context

The type of context you use to promote your business is very important as you don’t want to force your products on to your followers – hard selling does not work on social media. Money Supermarket created a Batman infographic around the time of the film released based on how much it costs to be Batman. They created something related to their brand (how much something costs) without selling their product and offering something fun for their community. This was shared over 25,000 times in just Facebook alone. This proves that sharing content that is interesting get picked up and curated.

Confidence

Finally, be confident about your business. If you don’t believe you can be successful, no one else will. Success on social media will not happen overnight, it will take time and you need to build trust and confidence within your community. I have over 13,000 followers on Twitter but I started at 0, just like everyone else.

I hope you will be able to use the 5 C’s to help you market your business online!

Why Google+ Means the World to Your Business

“We’re extremely happy with our progress so far, and one of our main goals is to transform the overall Google experience and make all of the services people already love faster, more relevant, and more reliable” - Google

It’s safe to say that Google owns the internet. Google accounts for 90% of online traffic and the second largest search engine is YouTube which, we all know, is owned by Google! With many layers to its empire including Google Docs, Google Alerts, gMail, Picasa and Google Shopping to name a select few, Google was always missing that one key element, a social layer.

With bad reviews, an archaic platform and many complaining users, Google’s social layer; Google+ didn’t have the best of starts. What was supposed to be the next best thing since Facebook (in Google’s eyes) clearly wasn’t performing and something had to change.

Do you remember Google Buzz or Google Wave? Probably not. Google+ was Google’s third time lucky when attempting to harness the power of Social. As it stands, Google+ is an extremely important platform for those who want to market their business online and here are a few reasons why;

  • SEO Benefits – With Google owning 90% of online traffic, you should reap the benefits Google+ can offer your business when it comes to search engine optimisation. Make sure your Google+ Business Page includes all of your keywords and is constantly updated with fresh and relevant content.

  • Google Hangouts – Google offers something unique in their social layer where you can actually hold a face to face meeting with a group of people, inside Google+ completely free of charge.

  • Google Circles – The ability to categorise those you are connected with via Circles is a great way to share the right information with the right people. Google Circles is a great way to target your sharing.

Google+ is more active than you are probably aware of. With over 260M active users, 60% of which log in everyday, Google+ is one of the fastest growing social networks ever boasting over 500M Google+ “enabled” users. Google+ also acts as an influencer, especially when it comes to shares of +1’s. Google sees this as a social recommendation and will rank you in search according to this.

Google+ is the same as Facebook and Twitter in the sense that it acts in real time but with an extra edge. Any status update on Google+ is immediately indexed and pushed into Google Search. When posting in Google+, make sure you use keywords and use “” to make sure they are being picked up by Google as being key search terms for your business.

Google+ isn’t going anywhere and I have a feeling it will become an influential networks inside of the social media space. From being able to create a community and using keyword rich content, linking straight back to your site, Google+ is not only a social advantage to a business selling online, its a Search advantage too.

Social Commerce – The Future of Connecting with your Online Consumer

In an ideal world for most people, the way we buy and sell as a business or consumer, would never change. I, however am not most people and believe that change is a great opportunity to learn more about the technology world and improve the way our businesses function. Two words that have been floating around the web for some time now have a purpose and meaning. Social Commerce is here, and it won’t be disappearing anytime soon.

Mark Zuckerberg was right when he said “If I had to guess, Social Commerce is next to blow up” back in 2011. Social Commerce is the combination of social media and digital technology to sell both products and services online.

Social Commerce will be a driving force for online sales because of the art of storytelling. What better way to connect with an online customer than giving them a reason to connect with YOUR business? Every business has a story and a personality trait which is social media worthy.  If you can connect with your customers on a personal level through story telling on social media, you will build your clientele which in essence will translate into a social commerce transaction.

There are 1 billion people on Facebook with around 75% of those users “liking” a brand’s Facebook page. The Facebook users that like a fan page are ultimately saying they will buy from that business IF that company engages with them in the right way. Did you know that a Facebook share (when someone see’s a post on your Facebook fan page, “shares” it with their community who then follows the link back to your page, visits your website and purchases from you) is worth £2.60? Even more surprisingly, Twitter can generate a massive £21.04 in sales through a share. Think Social Media is a waste of time? Think again.

When I hold a keynote seminar, I always ask the same question. When you are inside Facebook and see one of their advertisements down the side of the page, do YOU firstly click on it, and THEN purchase that product? 99% of the time, no more than three hands are raised out of around 50-60 people. Why? Because we no longer trust advertising more than we do peer to peer recommendations. Andrew Mason, Groupon founder said the following; “Middle-class people sit around, trying to think of how to spend money.  One of the most powerful ways to figure that out is looking at what your friends are buying – these are the people you trust”. This, I definitely agree with.

It has been estimated that by 2015, Social Commerce sales will reach around $30 billion a year with 50% of online revenue coming from social media. We are seeing well known brands like Mercedes selling 666 cars in the space of 8 hours with their “Three Point Twitter” campaign and Adidas selling around £2,500 worth of products via in-stream Facebook and Twitter. Brands are making magic and it’s not just a myth anymore, there is a lot of money to be made if you utilise the tools available to combine social media and digital commerce.

The best way to sell on social media is to in fact, not sell at all. For your followers to really trust your business, you need to take a step back and realise why you are even a part of a social network. The intent is not always a purchase, it is to share great content and to engage with a community. Once you have built this foundation, you won’t need to force your products or services onto those who are connected to you, they will naturally, become brand advocates.

Social Commerce is here to stay and it’s time for you to look at the future of connecting with your online consumer.