Guest post by Nick Deyong

In today’s world, everything happens at breakneck speed and, to offer a clumsy version of an often-used expression, “we’re too busy gazing off in to the distance to notice what’s right in front of us”. Or something to that effect.

The same can be said when considering the practice of marketing; amidst all the promotion to the wider world it is easy to overlook a key stakeholder group – internal colleagues and suppliers. A curious occurrence, when it is clear that without employees operations would grind to a halt.

Not just that, but without enthusiastic staff who are fully behind the task at hand, know exactly what their role is and how important they are to the business, all the clever marketing in the world would ultimately prove futile. You see, employees are a company’s greatest ambassadors – treat them well and they will pass on this positivity to future customers and staff in a way that is wholly more honest and authentic than any advertising campaign. Continue reading

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This year’s edition of The Business Growth Summit, an online event bringing together leading experts to share their strategies on how to grow a business, leverage opportunities, and increase profits starts today and will continue until September 23rd. What the summit actually offers is free, on demand access to videos by well known experts in the social media, marketing, PR and business development fields to help small businesses promote themselves more effectively and sell more.

Chris Brogan, Guy Kawasaki, Dan Schawbel, Amy Cosper, Carrie Wilkerson are only a few of the people you must learn from through the Business Growth Summit. If you’re a small business owner, entrepreneur, work-from-home professional or thinking of making a career switch to become either one, you should register for this online event and start watching the 5 to 20 minute videos the best and brightest of today’s business minds have to offer.

Yours truly, on behalf of the Mirror Communications agency, is also part of The Business Growth Summit. The video I have contributed is titles “How to Get More Business from the Social Media Clutter” and will help you decide what’s worthwhile and efficient from the huge social media world, what will help your business achieve better results.

After attending this business online event, please share your experience, your questions or your feedback either here, in the comment section, on Twitter, Facebook or via email.

Wish you all a great week and enjoy the summit!

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Social media comes with the endless debate about numbers, which matter and which don’t. It does not matter how many people follow/friend you or subscribe to your feed, it does not matter how many visit your site, what matters is what they do. Who cares you have 30,000 followers if only 2 ever retweeted your stuff? Numbers can be bought, they hold no value.

You’ve heard all this before. But apart from the obvious, in-your-face truth - 5000 followers that RT you constantly and answer your questions, ask for your help, turn into leads and buy your products are certainly more valuable than 10,000 passive ones – when did these statements become about envy? When did the sour grapes replace thorough analysis and measurement? Continue reading

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When trying to sell a product or service, the hardest part is to convince your potential customers they need it, want it or can actually use it to make their life better. A lot of effort goes into marketing and PR, engaging people, outlining the benefits, making sure what you’re selling pops up exactly when and where they would be happy to see it.

Let’s say this part of the process went really great and the customer is convinced. They would then go to your website, fill out the order form… and you might think there is no way in hell to lose that paying customer right now! Continue reading

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I am happy to announce that the guide to twitter that you’ve heard about in the past couple of months on my Twitter stream or on Faebook is out! The Social Media Newbie’s Guide to Twitter for Businesses ebook, a simple guide to get businesses and individuals with a business focus started on Twitter, has just been launched!

The reason for deciding to focus on such an ebook was that while Twitter kept growing and more and more businesses created accounts and started blasting out 140 character messages, the result-free efforts were astonishing. Many people still fail to understand Twitter and their presence is more of a reflex, the adoption of a cool trend, than a thought out, carefully planned business strategy.

While I was pondering over the actual need of such a business guide, I noticed that a few articles debating Twitter-related themes became extremely popular, showing a genuine interest in quality information on getting the best out of the microblogging platform. So I powered my writing mode and completed this project, accepting the challenge of publishing my first business ebook Continue reading

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