Welcome to the fourth installment of our Next Level Leadership Series, wherein we speak with TAB members about the challenges each small business owner faces in the contemporary business world. Through this series of interviews, we find how business owners have risen above and beyond to become Next Level Leaders.

This week we spoke with Will Truex, manager of Marketing, Advertising and Sales at Budget Home and Office Cleaning. Will kindly shared his experiences with social media work: from introducing Budget Home and Office Cleaning to outlets like LinkedIn and Flickr to running promotional campaigns on Twitter.

When was Budget Home and Office Cleaning founded?

We were founded in 1995. [My parents] started it, just the two of them, and then it exploded from there.

When did you start delving into social media? (I.e., how long have you been participating in social media?)

We weren’t doing anything with social media [before I took over the role]. We were doing a Facebook page that was basically a graveyard, wasn’t updated at all.

I started social media work when I started [full-time] with the company, last August. Social media was my only role, and as I advanced in the company and learned more from day to day, I got more responsibilities.

I started a Twitter account, looking into Google.

What social media outlets does Budget Home and Office Cleaning participate in? (E.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blog, etc.)

Presently we have two Twitter accounts (residential and commercial); LinkedIn (my personal account); a Facebook fan page; a YouTube account; a Flickr account; and we have a blog (Google blogger).

I noticed you have Twitter updates on the Budget Home and Office Cleaning blog. How does that work?

By experimenting with blog layouts, I could incorporate Twitter feed, and the blog updates itself whenever I do a tweet. [The blog is updated] almost every single day.

How has Budget Home and Office Cleaning founds its voice online? That is, do you have corporate guidelines to follow while participating in social media, or do you trust your personal judgment?

Typically with Twitter accounts, if there’s an issue I am personally one way about, I do not include that in Budget Residential and Office account. I do my tweets impartially. If there’s an issue I care about, I generate a general statement but I won’t go either way. I’ll try and give both sides of the issue.

Never use profanity. I try to lighten the heavy subjects, et cetera.

Have you run any special promotions or marketing campaigns through social media?

I did run a contest that we ran on Twitter. I got the idea from another business. I would provide a code on Twitter at random time of the day. A customer could come across the code and get a discount off cleaning. I did [that promotion] early on in our social media campaign.

From 9 am to 2 pm, I like to schedule Tweets every hour. I use a platform where I can send it to multiple accounts (HootSuite). I do an article, and then an advertisement. I constantly give news and advertisements. Advertisements are usually links towards directly ways you can save money: coupons, et cetera.

I’ve gotten a good response. People find you on Twitter. I do a lot on green cleaning tips. One site, paper.li, featured one of my coupons.

Do you consider the promotions successful? How do you gauge success in social media?

Specifically with HootSuite, I can monitor who is looking at what. HootSuite has Google Analytics with Twitter. [There’s a] click summary – it gives you a report: who’s clicking what, in what region, what’s popular. Recently, we got a lot of clicks directly on Facebook and Twitter.

The way I gauge Twitter and other social media is traffic to our website, via Google Analytics. I also look at mentions, like mentions on Twitter. There’s a group of people, you develop relationships with people with similar interests. [There are] retweets on all the feeds I follow, that I find pertinent. You may not see a huge return, or lots of referrals, but the more people talk about you, the more you get known, the more it helps. You become so ubiquitous, you can’t be ignored – but you’re not in everyone’s face.

We were trying other methods – cold calls, door knockers, mass emails – none of them work like they used to. People want to see what a company has to offer on their own time.

[Our marketing] is all online and word of mouth. It works really, really well. The only cost is time. You need the time to update. If you don’t update, no one cares and your name disintegrates.

Businesses often cite social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter as a great place to hear, and respond timely to, customer complaints. Has participating in social media enabled you to engage more with customers? If so, how?

We’re very small, so it doesn’t happen very often. Typically it’s direct responses via email.

Our demographic is a different generation. Occasionally you’ll get a younger person [who is] more tech savvy.

Any interesting social media stories you can share with us?

When I started doing [our social media work], I got a little gun shy. I had correspondence with one woman who thought I was a spammer. I used to search for cleaning questions on Twitter, and I’d answer them. I wasn’t trying to sell anything, just offer advice.

One woman didn’t know who I was and thought I was trying to spam her. I told her I wasn’t trying to spam her, just help. If you don’t like free help, I don’t know what to do for you.

One time I made a mistake in giving advice. The person told me, I admitted my mistake, and told the truth. Once you put it out there, it’s out there – it will be there till we’re all dead. So you have to be careful what you say.

What do you like most about The Alternative Board and/or personal coaching you get?

TAB – my favorite part with Marcy and TAB is that I get unbiased input and different angles to approaching problems. I have different people from different professions, who think differently, who offer advice and hold you accountable. There’s accountability.

TAB is like a huge ocean where you can pull all these resources. It makes me be more experienced without having to go through all the years of experience. I get both real life experiences on my part, and I can learn from other people’s triumphs and struggles. TAB makes you wise beyond your years.

As summer starts to edge closer, so does the season of long weekends, extended vacations and other trips out of town. When your customers are gone, how do you keep your business busy? Here we offer five marketing ideas to help keep your small business hot during the summer. Grab a glass of lemonade and read on:

1. Make a reason to celebrate.

It may seem that between Memorial Day and Labor Day, only Fourth of July stands out as the lone holiday of the summer. That’s not exactly true – summer is chock full of zany holidays: July is National Ice Cream Month; International Friendship Day falls on the cusp of July and August; Saint Jonas’ Festival happens every June 24^th. You can use any of these interesting holidays as reason for special promotions or events, all the more special because, really, who else is celebrating International Friendship Day?

2. Do a good deed.

Your business may already be associated with a special cause or charity; if not, now is the time to get rolling. Summer is the perfect time to organize a community service day or host an outdoor barbecue fundraiser. Invite everyone to become involved: customers, employees, other local businesses. Special causes help you give back to your community and connect with potential customers who share similar values with you.

3. Shorten your social media To-Do list.

You may have a lot of items on your To-Do list, things that keep getting pushed down by higher priorities: updating your blog, starting a Twitter account, researching a mobile app for your business. Social media can be a great way to run seasonal promotions and contests.

4. Spread the word.

If you’ve been meaning to book a speaking engagement or two, now’s the time to go ahead. Many clubs and associations, like Kiwanis International, meet year-round and are always on the lookout for speakers. Speaking engagements are opportunities to communicate what you know and love – and network with others interested in the same.

5. Spread the love.

Host a party, like an afternoon grill-out, in honor of customer appreciation. Invite your customers and let them bring a guest or two. Promote your event through Yelp.com, as well as through your other social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter. For an added bonus, arrange a prize contest or giveaway for one of your products or services.

Twit happens. – Jay Baer

Twitter is a social media outlet that many businesses find useful in reaching out to their markets. Twitter is an especially helpful tool for small businesses, in that tweeting is a low cost marketing technique that can yield high return for little time and effort. Small business owners can use Twitter to promote sales, to discuss corporate news and to engage with customers directly. You can tweet links to your webpage, or your Facebook page, or simply to Internet miscellanea you think your customers would find interesting.

Last year, Edison Research released a comprehensive survey on Twittering in America. As of April 2010, only seven percent of Americans were using Twitter on a monthly basis (though 87 percent had heard of it, just one percentage point behind Facebook). Though a small percentage of the total population, these Twitter-ers are a strong and vocal minority – especially in the realm of business. The same study showed that 49 percent of monthly Twitter users follow companies or brands; only 16 percent of all other social network users (like Facebook) follow, or are fans of, companies or brands. As Jay Baer of Convince & Convert surmised: “Combined with their above average income and above average education, Twitter users’ propensity to interact with brands make them a huge potential source.”

Sounds pretty good, right?

As with anything that seems too good to be very true, Twitter usage in business comes with a few words of caution. The very nature of Twitter, quickly disseminated public messages from established persons (or personas), means that mistakes – from typos to major social taboos – are said, and set, and re-said over and over. It seems to be a natural rule of Twitter: the bigger the corporate boo-boo, the more quickly it spreads. (And given the 140-character limit on tweets, any typos might really look like a nifty space-saving device.)

If you’ve chosen to use Twitter in corporate communications, you have quite a few choices as to who will be sending out tweets. You can tweet from your own Twitter account, or have someone else send tweets from a general corporate account. Or you can have multiple voices, i.e. Twitter accounts, for your business. The idea, of course, is that whoever is in charge of sending corporate tweets must follow the same standards that you uphold in other corporate communications. This includes tone, philosophy, persona and approaches to customer service.

Mistakes on Twitter do happen, as the aforementioned Jay Baer highlighted recently, but like other corporate snafus, they can be managed with grace and style. Only with Twitter, you’ll have to do it in 140 characters or less.

For more on corporate Twittering, take a look at this Business Week online article that surveyed a few leading CEOs, and how they use Twitter to help their businesses.

Getting media coverage for your business can be tough. What follows are a few helpful tips to ensure local media coverage: from building relationships with journalists to formulating a pitch no reporter could resist.

Begin by building strong relationships with the media. If you have a certain item you would like to pitch (like a new product, service or location), it helps to have a good foundation already in place through various social media outlets.

1. Research journalists who cover your business market. Connect with him or her on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter months before you send your pitch or press release. (MuckRack is a great way to find journalists who cover your industry.)
2. If your journalists keep a blog, read their posts regularly. Stay updated on stories they post online. Make comments – the more engaging, the better – to stay connected.
3. Sign up for HARO, otherwise known as Help A Reporter Out. HARO sends out multiple emails a day, with reporters from all over looking for industry leaders to lend expertise to stories.

Once you’ve built the foundations for relationships in the media, your pitch will usually be better received. You still need to make the pitch transition go smoothly.

1. If a journalist asks to interview you that day, say “yes” without fail. The media world spins quickly, and reporters often face short deadlines. Even if you are busy, you should make time for quick questions over the phone.
2. Offer your journalist something of value, whether it is a connection to another industry expert, pertinent blog posts, or an idea for a follow-up story.

All the focus you’ve given to your business help make you an expert in your industry, but often block the ability to see the larger picture. What you’re pitching may sound exciting and informational to you; to a reporter, your pitch may be cumbersome and, worse, an uninteresting news piece. A few of the following tips help you help your journalist understand just how great your pitch really is:

1. Define your story in one sentence. If that sentence can engage the journalist, he or she will ask a lot more questions.
2. Present your story so that it provides value: how will your new service or product benefit the audience?
3. Include people in your pitch. Truly engaging stories (that is, stories that sell) focus on the human aspect, as opposed to a faceless company profile.
4. If possible, provide reporters with actual people who have used your product or service. Testimonials boost credibility and potential target audience – and lend that extra personal touch.

For decades, business leaders have operated their companies assuming they could rely on some level of stability in their assumptions.  This is no longer the case in today’s environment.  The only certainty is that uncertainty abounds.  Globalization, tax & regulatory changes, access to information and the ability to tap into resources around the world almost instantaneously has created new models of business.  While this certainly opens up new competitive models, it also opens up a world of opportunity.  You, your employees, partners and customers (who are also facing uncertainty) now have the ability to interact in ways that were previously impossible, and to create solutions that in the past might never have existed.  And one of the most powerful ways to do this is through using Social Media. 

Social Media isn’t just for friends, family, retailers or entertainment.  It is a powerful tool for business today and allows new, ongoing conversations to take place which can in turn build your brand, your solutions and your company.  If you haven’t done so already, revisit your 2011 Success Plan and see where and how you are leveraging Social Media in 2011.  Because if you’re not moving forward, you may well be falling behind!

Have a unique way that you're using Social Media this year?  Let us know - leave a comment!  And as always, thanks for your feedback.

Marketing, in its simplest definition, is communication.  Historically this communication has been one way - initiated by a company toward prospects and customers, and often purposely one-sided (the difference between talking at someone versus talking to them).  Social media has the power to take your company to the next level by conversing with your audience.  Just as the telephone made conversations two way (versus sending a letter and waiting for a reply back while circumstances around may have changed), Social Media allows you to bridge this communication time-distance gap.  Every business can take advantage of some aspects of Social Media, the trick is determining what’s right for your business.  Consider the following for your company:

• Expand your marketing department – 2 of the top 5 Superbowl 2010 ads were created by customers as part of a contest Doritos ran.
• Allow prospects to interact with you and your customers outside of your “office hours” – Make your blog a place where not only do you share information, but you get feedback from your market. 
• Use discussion boards and the concept of community to engage your audiences.  Don’t brag, don’t do commercials - sharing relevant information of interest is the way to gain friends and fans.
• Track what’s being said in your industry, about you, your markets and competitors.  Use Google Alerts and Twitter Alerts.
• Maintain and track your reputation.  Remember the old adage, “For every bad experience you hear about, there are 10 more that you don’t (hear about)?”  Consider that in today’s world that means anyone can create a Twitter account, blog, or Facebook account and share a bad experience they’ve had with you.  Knowing what that experience was and addressing it before it goes viral will keep your reputation stellar.

Have additional tips to share on how you’re using Web 2.0 and Social Media?  Please share below, and if you’re a business owner who would like to join us for one of our upcoming “Social Media Matters – Setting Your Strategy” sessions, please visit our registration site. You'll hear great tips from the CEO of iMarketing, Keith Kochberg while brainstorming with Peer Business Owners on how to address marketing challenges & opportunities today.