Social Media For Small Business

Tomorrow I have the pleasure of presenting as part of the Master’s of Business Online one day boot camp in Indianapolis. The title of my presentation is technically, “Social Media Strategies: Marketing in a Web 2.0 world,” and will address a popular question from business owners and executives: I know what social media is. How does it make sense for my business?

In preparation for the talk, I wanted to make sure I had some excellent small business case studies to present. As usual, I turned to my Twitter community for some R&D, posting this invitation:

As I expected, I got a number of great examples of small businesses experiencing success using social media. In gathering the details to ensure I could speak intelligently about what they were doing for the purposes of my presentation, I’ve decided it would make a nice case study series. Over the course of the next several weeks, we’ll take a look at these small businesses and what they’re doing with social media. We’ll perform some due diligence to define their measures for success and see if they’re hitting them as well.

But we will also hopefully A) Inspire some social media thinking for the small business owners (or others) who read Social Media Explorer and B) Inspire other small businesses to share their success stories.

Here’s a snapshot of who is on the roster to be covered and what they’re up to:

• Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse – Massachusetts restaurant using a blog, social media monitoring, YouTube and SEO tactics to drive buzz and biz.
• Joffrey’s Coffee & Tea Company – Crowdsourcing coffee company that turned to bloggers to create a new flavor of Java. (Very cool, though arguably not a small business. Still cool, though.)
• Martell Home Builders – Canadian home builder using YouTube, Twitter, blogging, Facebook and more to not just promote, but sell directly to buyers with some fantastic ROI proof.
• SQPN.com – Podcasting effort that has become the largest provider of Catholic New Media.
• Tinku Gallery – Toronto art gallery using blogging, Twitter and more to create interest and attendance.
• Wiggly Wigglers – Organic and sustainable gardening company in Great Britain that has exploded to a global audience despite serving a local community of less than 100 people using blogs, podcasts and more.

But here’s where the series gets better. I would not only like to ask you to contribute ideas and examples of small businesses using social media successfully, but if you have a compelling case study, I’d like to invite you to guest blog it here on SME. What we would like to see would be information about the business and its target audience, how it started in social media and what their strategic reasoning was/is for using it to reach customers and how the use of social media is proving value in ROI, traffic, sales and more. To participate, simply email me your ideas (jason — at — jasonfalls.com). If your case study is interesting, I’ll ask you to compose a blog post and email it to me. I’ll post it in the series under your by-line.

And, of course, if you have suggestions you would like to ask me to pursue, the comments are wide open. Tell us what small businesses you’ve seen are doing good things with social media.

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