So great we can open source this discussion right here to determine what a small-to-medium business forum, community, partnership, etc. looks like. Yesterday, I invited several tweeps to join in the creation of this endeavor, and nearly all accepted.
To recap, Neicole Crepeau and I determined the need for a forum, place, community location to address issues of concern pertaining to SMBs. That’s us. I invited (and they graciously accepted) Michelle Quillin, Jon Buscall, Michelle Hellyar, and Jenn Whinnem.
Another questioned the choice of platforms and said “Fail” to Facebook although he agreed it was “easy to set up.” Am hoping Gregg Morris weighs in here to share his expertise for the back end. I believe, Davina Brewer at 3Hats will come forth, too, right?
What never fails to frustrate me is the back-end tech requirements of all things social media. Folks not in the know believe it’s “so easy” to set up a blog and take off to the moon. Or, launch a Facebook page with nary a glance at its design or interactivity; or, set up a SMB forum only on Facebook because the knowledge about other platforms is non-existent (sigh).
As a public relations strategist, I am an idea person through and through. It’s these tech details that kill me (and mark my words right here, that I will master this dark tunnel), and that’s why having varying levels of expertise on board for this is fabulous. Without further ado, let’s collaborate on what this puppy looks like. Please weigh in and please also forgive my lack of plug in for “email comments to me.” (The house is not in order!)
Strategic Plan for “The SMB Forum” or WHATEVER!
Objective
- Create community for SMBs frustrated with new and befuddling rules of engagement for businesses
- Provide forum for collective opinion and determine ability for call to action oriented to issues
- Invite SMBs from all verticals to share among peer groups, collaborate freely while supporting and learning one anothers’ plights
Strategy
- Communicate issues of import to SMBs based on breaking news, state laws, and other items pertaining to general business administration.
- Inform and educate all SMBs about news that affects us regardless of size or industry sector.
- Collaborate with independents, solos and other really small businesses and create a familial community where all questions are respected and all comments delivered in like manner and in good humor.
Audience
- All SMBs who engage online
- Bloggers seeking partners with whom to collaborate
- Business owners seeking suppliers
Tactics
- Assess rules of engagement for group leaders; determine topical interests and purpose for joining
- Name the group!
- Launch the group on a platform that is Facebook, ning, LinkedIn or elsewhere? What is preferred/why? (LinkedIn may be a great place to do this…?)
- Develop some basic rules of engagement: i.e. comments on issues, welcomes to new group members, news articles that pertain to SMBs (many each day re laws and Congress) etc.
OK…your thoughts, please? Thank you!
Weighing in! 🙂
Further to my suggestion via Twitter that you launch this on your site/blog, consider a few things if you will. This is something you seem to be very passionate about so it would seem that you will not lack for things to say/write about. As far as the community aspect goes, you could encourage guest posts that address issues that pertain to the SMB community. Neicole could write as an admin as well. That would be easy to setup in WP. And then you use the comment section to encourage discussion and community. Mark has done this so well, maybe better than anyone else out there.
My concern about Facebook is the one I always have and it revolves around the data as you well know. Why would you want to put Facebook in charge of that when there is no way for you to get it out should you ever want or need to? While FB makes it as easy as can be to set up what you’d like to do, the implied contract is, we (FB) own the data and will monetize it as we see fit and in all of our graciousness, we’ll let use our platform without charge. They’re the shepherds, we’re the sheep and we’re getting fleeced big time in the data department while they’ve grown to the third largest country in the world making billions off of our data.
Now why did you go into spam with this relevant fodder? Glad to have saved you.
You give great insight here; I’m loving this b/c you’re on to something I hadn’t even recognized. We’ve talked about voice so much; this is it for me, isn’t it? Throughout the young life of this blog, I’ve adopted the mission of SMB issues without even knowing it.
The blog is a fantastic place to do this, and based on Davina’s comments above, she may also agree.
Thanks, Gregg!
Ed Zachary!
Jayme,
My first thought is no to Facebook. I’m maybe the exception, but FB is my personal social network, just don’t use it a lot for my business networking.
As for tactics, an integrated multi-tool approach may work better:
Start with LinkedIn group. As groups grow, they can be sub-grouped by refined topic. I think you can assign more than one mod/admin (and of course have flexibility to change it over time).
Also start with Twitter. Once the group is named, develop a matching hashtag. Use it for posts to share with the group, news and updates. And/or plan a Twitter chat; rotate mods to split the workload, etc.
Blogging: most of your audience already has one, so as someone writes a post relevant to the group, they can share it via Twitter, the LinkedIn group, etc.
If you want, make a FB page or group, but I’d just be reluctant to have it your sole networking place.
All of this is by way of saying, don’t reinvent the wheel, make it harder for people to join and participate. FWIW.
Excellent in put. Gregg just commented, too, that FB is not the place to be for this endeavor. I am sold on that! He also mentioned my blog as the home for this as I’m a driver of this content and a unifier of the community. That way I can easily market content to all interested and even do a Twitter hashtag, as well.
By way of Mark Schaefer’s tutelage on {grow} we can engage a community right here on all things SMB (which I’ve been doing thus far already without quite putting my finger on it).
Thanks, Davina! Your expertise welcome and quite appreciated for its value add.
Banging on all cylinders already, Gregg, Davina & Jayme! I just read through the comments, and love where this went.
Yes, yes, yes to keeping this endeavor blog-centric, with Jayme at the helm!
I love Davina’s ideas for Twitter chats, hashtags, LinkedIn groups/subgroups, rotation of moderators, and blogging via our own blogs, with Gregg’s suggestion of guest posters from the community.
I also totally agree w/Davina & Gregg re: Facebook on all counts.
I have nothing to add whatsoever except excitement and encouragement!
Michelle…keep your “nothing to adds” for now, but am hoping to engage you as we launch and grow. If nothing else, this will indeed put the house in order, eh? Thanks, always for being the first to jump in on and with ideas.
There’s more ease to posting with Facebook. Kind of like instant discussion and notification. However, I think there is a point about the data.
What about combining a site with a hashtag on Twitter. That way we’d have an easier way to connect and discuss quickly.
I wonder if #SMBChat is taken? I will go look. Anyone know, Jon, if there’s a place to register hashtags? Might be a nice blog post to make that happen! I think if I were to post here and then repeat link on Twitter with this/other hashtag, we can discuss the topic.
Did you see Jools from UK weighing in here? They, too, are having issues oriented to SMBs. And, with your perspective…how cool. Thanks for your input and help with this.
Sorry I’m late to the party. Today has been a lot of running around in the physical world, and not much time online.
Love all the conversation and energy around this! Let me play Devil’s Advocate, though I’m not married to any particular solution.
I understand the reservations with Facebook. The lack of control is a problem for social media in general, given the importance of Facebook as a tool. The reason to consider FB is our target audience. All of us appear to be tech saavy and mostly involved in social media. But that isn’t true of the SMB audience we seek, as a whole. Ideally, we connect with the spectrum of SMBs, including those mom & pop retailers, construction subcontractors, sign-makers, etc. It’s precisely because Facebook is used socially by so many people that we stand a better chance of reaching those people if we are on FB. Even if they aren’t on Twitter or LinkedIn, they are probably on Facebook.
I, too, use FB mostly for personal reasons. But I have also Liked mashable, opensecrets.org, and other pages. So I get their information in my feed. I also run a Parenting and Social Media page that 300 parents have Liked. People do follow pages on FB. So, we can connect with SMBs on it and gain traction.
If we didn’t do Facebook, I think LinkedIn is a good option. I expect we wouldn’t reach as many SMBs, but still a good number. And since it’s a business network, it makes sense. That still has the ownership issues that FB has. But a LinkedIn group makes sense. I also definitely think we should do the Twitter hashtag.
As for a blog, I love the idea, especially if we get a large community to contribute so that it isn’t a burden on just a few individuals to write posts regularly. I, personally, wouldn’t want to post SMB topics on my business blog. And I wouldn’t recommend that you use your blog for this purpose, Jayme. The reason is that my blog is focused on a particular audience who is not seeking that kind of information. I have a focus for my blog and I don’t want to confuse or lose my audience. I can’t effectively serve two audiences from that venue. I think you might face the same issues, Jayme.
Also, from an SEO perspective, we’d be better off with a new blog dedicated to the topic. If you dilute your blog with posts on the SMB topic, you will lose ranking on social media and not get as good ranking on the SMB topic. You get better ratings when a site/blog is consistently dedicated to a specific topic. It also works better for getting regular visitors, who need to know what to expect from the blog and won’t drop in if it sometimes has posts about social media and sometimes about SMB issues.
As someone who has built and maintained several WordPress blogs, it does take some effort. You need to get the domain, install the blog, add the theme, and configure it. I can check with my business partners to see if we could host a blog for the group, though. I think we could probably host it, install it, and add the Thesis theme (we’ve got a multi-site license). I would have to leave it to someone else to configure it. Alternatively, we could just use WordPress.com and/or Blogger, although I don’t know how that affects SEO and whether you can use custom themes on them.
Let me know what you folks think. I look forward to more discussion!
I’m late to this party too; sorry Jayme!
I love all the points about the different platforms. Like Davina, I prefer to keep Facebook “personal” and use Twitter & Linked In for my professional activities. I think the right platform would either be a Linked In group or a blog, but I’m leaning towards a blog mostly because I’ve found Linked In groups to be disappointing. Also love the idea about having a SMB chat where on a weekly basis (for example) we could have a few set topics to discuss.
You can register a hashtag here: https://whatthetrend.com/
Awesome discussion! If I could pipe in here re: Facebook, I love Facebook myself, and share articles and questions several times a day. But for discussions? I haven’t had great success yet. Once in a while I hit a good topic and get some mileage out of it, but the biggest problem seems to be the transient nature of the news feed. It’s really easy for a topic to either pass by in a busy feed (I have over 400 friends, and quite a few pages I follow), or get lost at the bottom of a page as more articles and updates are posted.
It’s just difficult to keep a conversation in front of the eyes of our base unless they jump in at the beginning, which would enable them to get notifications any time a new comment is added to a discussion.
What I like about LinkedIn (although my participation there is abysmal) is that popular discussions stay in the public eye, at the top of a Group page. Just between the few of us here, we could keep a discussion “popular” on LinkedIn. Not so on FB.
As for a new blog, I kinda like the original idea of Jayme turning the ship toward SMB on THIS blog, unless this one’s getting the traffic she desires, AND she still loves the original focus. Part of the beauty of “growing up” in the blogging world is the process of starting a blog, trying to find your voice in the cacophony, growing, discovering an exciting passion along the way, and turning that into your niche.
Jayme, is SMB becoming your passion? Or is this a side project you have a hankering to try?
Michelle, Neicole and Jenn, if I may reply to all three with one comment, being a new blogger is a challenge to generate consistent traffic. While I’ve done virtually no work to promote it (b/c the house has not been in order, Michelle), I’ve had great feedback on what’s here from Twitter pals.
As Gregg mentioned, I’ve been tapping the SMB theme since I began this endeavor. As a public relations practitioner not strictly immersed in social media AND as a SMB myself, the transition for this blog could easily move right into a targeted theme.
It’s true, the Facebook audience has more of the type of SMB we would want, but even amongst all of us from Twitter, we, too, are SMBs! This caliber of audience is exactly with whom I can see rich conversation developing. Per Jon Buscall, who suggested the tweet chat as a way to further engage on the topic, we can do that, too.
I’m currently managing several LinkedIn groups and the feeling there is not friendly; very stilted and the engagement is very one way and no banter or true tracking, either (that I’ve explored).
My thought is to turn this blog into community of folks interested in supporting others on our SMB path — whether it’s an author from the States or other country. It would be wonderful to have each of us be on board for a post or two a month while I’d be a primary driver of content more frequently.
I do not, however, wish to ignore Neicole re the WordPress.org new blog either. Not to ding that offer, Neicole, but with your time zone three hours behind most of ours (like 5 of us) and then our friends in the EU really ahead of us, we’d need to be on things the night before for content.
So, we’re almost there…and this has jazzed me incredibly. LOVE all the input, and thanks so much!
Jenn, thanks for that tip on hash tags, too.
I think it sounds like a good plan. If making SMB issues a focus of this blog fits with your business needs and personal passion, you should do it. It’s certainly the simplest solution. (FYI: the time zone issues wouldn’t really be a factor, though, as once I set up the blog, I wouldn’t have to be involved on a daily basis. It would run itself.)
I think building a community primarily on your blog and through Twitter will mean a more vocal and engaged community, but probably one that is tech-heavy, at least to begin with. Putting my social interaction designer hat on, I’d suggest you add the Facebook Like button (even if you have to hold your nose) and the LinkedIn Share button to the blog, too. If you do the FB button properly, it will allow you to message Facebook people who have liked the page, in case you want to do polls, ask people to take action, etc. The Like and LinkedIn buttons will also help spread the word about the blog to other SMB’s on those networks, hopefully encouraging a broader audience over time.
Frankly, I know you’re very busy, as are all of us. Using your current blog and Twitter will also make this a lot easier to start without requiring a ton of your or anyone else’s time. That’s a big benefit!
Go for it, Jayme!!
I think that’s fab. I just registered #SMBChat on What the HashTag or wherever Jenn said to go and it’s already been tweeted out. I’ll work with you, Neicole, to put the house in order — Web, blog widgets and plug ins, too. That’s where my time is not oriented and it’s what kills me, too. Oh, yeah, Oh, yeah W00T!