When starting a new business you must find effective ways to gain the respect of your potential customer base with very little investment.
This used to mean hand bills, dropping letters in mailboxes, tagged flyers on bulletin boards at cafes and shopping centers.
It was networking events and anything else that complimented your yellow pages ad.
Then spring up the necessity to add to your presence by getting a website, starting email lists and it was questioned as to why.
Now the question is no longer do we get a website, a Facebook page, a twitter account or write on our blog.
The question today is, do we bother with all of the efforts of old.
We are now smack dab in the middle of the digital era, but being there is not enough.
It is not enough to publish information and sit back and wait for customers to come.
There are thousands of people competing to get the business you covet to become a success.
What the winners of the new era marketing game are doing is becoming a vital part of the conversation.
The question most people ask me is how do you do this? The answer is simpler than you may think.
The way to become a vital conduit and part of the online discussion in your space is to be seen as a person in the know with a unique voice.
The start of this conversation is to help answer questions of the potential customers in your market.
Then once you are seen as valuable you have the floor to share what makes you and your business special.
I will use my company as an example.
Our goal is to change the way people work.
We want to make it easy and fun to get things done.
How are we doing this? We are talking about how our system adds a productivity layer over email and social networks.
We call this combination of productivity and social networks the Procial Network.
We are branding this concept though blog posts, interviews, social contacts and anything else that helps with the discussion.
The Procial Network differs from the Social Network in a couple of ways.
How they are similar is the idea that we can use open layers and transparency to get to information faster.
In social media, the end result is spending less time sharing your life, but more people having access to your pictures and what you are up to.
In procial networking, you are looking at a transparent layer that lets people see what you are doing task wise, share files, share ideas, update your status on projects or efforts and discuss ideas with groups in a seamless manner.
Much like the concept of social storage, in this network your data is easy to store and easy to access at a later date.
The advantages are extreme, and one of my favorites is access to updated versions of files.
It is easy to find things when they are all in one place.
It is great to have conversations over twitter with one person that actually are read by 100's to 1000's of people.
It is beneficial to post on LinkedIn or Facebook thoughts that are received, debated and improved by the community.
We want to be seen as both pioneers and receptors for this new idea.
The struggle of the business community thus far is that social tools are good for awareness and marketing, but they do not have the structure to actually help get things done.
So while I look for any opportunity to inject our goals for helping the business community into the online discussion, I also look to enlighten people on how to access more productive tools.
This is our example.
How can you do this in your business? What do you bring to the table that makes you valuable? These are the questions to ask and answer prior to diving into the foray.
This is the secret sauce that will become your online business card in the social circus.
And remember it takes time to build this reputation, but once it is there it will be the strongest lead generator you could have.
The cost is going to be time and brilliance, and if you are a small business owner trying to make things happen you should have plenty of both.