Using online technologies can help draw customers to you

Verne Harnish continues to get CEOs and their firms to control the ink in their industry. This column, Verne pushes leaders to start a blog, create a Squidoo page (as the expert in your industry), launch a column, or start a wiki.

Blogs

Slowly plugging away at a book about home security, Mike Jagger, founder of one of Vancouver’s largest privately held commercial and residential security firms, was egged on by his brother to start a blog.

In March, after Jagger initially sent out an email with a link to his blog to a controlled list of 100 clients, he was amazed to see that more than 70 of his clients followed the link to the blog within 12 hours and 41 asked to be set up for an autonotification every time he added a posting.

“Since launching, we have generated quite a few additional sales based on specific posts and we have had clients actually call us to thank us for the ‘service’ that the blog provides,” Jagger says. “In our business, one of our challenges is that we tend to only talk to people when there is an incident or something bad happens. The blog is allowing us to proactively communicate to, and add real value, for our clients without having to wait for a security issue to arise.”

Jagger set up the blog for free using blogger.com and then signed up for a free metrics tracking system called sitemeter.com. It gives Jagger a real-time “dashboard” showing how many people are checking out his blog, what they are looking at, where they are located, what browser they are using, all for free
“We have literally started our most successful communication and marketing campaign ever for less than the cost of a single stamp,” Jagger says. And as this column was going to print, a major Canadian newspaper was talking to Jagger about doing a semi-regular column on home security tips.

Wikis

“We’ve been using an internal wiki since December 2004,” says Andrew Duthie, president of Nashville-based Duthie Associates, an e-learning and marketing-presentation creation company. “It’s primarily a knowledge base for us, incorporating a wide array of topics.”
A wiki is a specific kind of Web site that allows users to easily update, edit and add information. This ease of use makes wikis excellent for team collaboration. For Duthie Associates, its wiki includes:

• Procedures
• Competitor information
• Customer information
• Internal meeting minutes
• New employee orientation info
• Notes from webinars
• Ideas in general

Everyone in the company is able to create and edit any of this information. In addition, they’ve accumulated 253 articles in their wiki; the last three have included two technical articles and a marketing article with research on their upcoming Google AdWords campaign.
Duthie used MediaWiki to set up his wiki, the same Web engine used by Wikipedia, the highly popular online alternative to brand-name encyclopedias.
AL Systems, a Rockaway, N.J., provider of distribution automation systems, is using both blogs and wikis extensively throughout the organization. “We have a company-wide blog that is used for the broadcast of all our information internally,” says Paul Lightfoot, CEO. “We never use emails or memos anymore because neither can be easily searched or archived or categorized.”
AL Systems’ blog was launched in early 2005 and Lightfoot claims it has dramatically improved communications. Being a “transparent” organization, all good news, initiatives, progress reports (including financial information), is sent out via the blog.
Like with monthly financial reports, a blog makes it easy to list and then read through several of them to see a year’s progress. And he reminded me that everything is password-protected to prevent outsiders from getting inside information.

Squidoos

Create a Squidoo page now! Seth Godin, the marketing genius of our time (Purple Cow, Permission Marketing, All Marketers are Liars) has launched a new site for experts. Instead of searching Google and having to sort through what’s good or bad, search Squidoo and find someone who has 20 years of expertise on a subject and let them guide you to the appropriate resources. Squidoo is still in beta testing, but feel free to jump in and be the “corrugated box” guru.

Jagger has jumped on the bandwagon and created a Squidoo lens on community security at squidoo.com/communitysecurity. And I’ve created a “Growth Guy” Squidoo lens for growth firms with links to help you with your people, strategy, execution, and cash decisions. Here’s the link which will give you a feel for the technology and provide you some highly useful links to help your business – squidoo.com/businessgrowth.

In addition, look through Squidoo to find experts on blogs, wikis, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, and on Squidoo itself. The key is to put yourself out there as an expert in your industry and use a “pull” strategy instead of a “push” strategy to market your business and yourself.

*Want more tips on how to do business online and how to grow your business to the next level? *

Verne Harnish is founder of the world-renowned Young Entrepreneurs’ Organisation (YEO) and chair’s YEO’s premiere CEO program, the Birthing of Giants, and WEO’s Advanced Business program, both held at MIT. Founder and CEO of Gazelles, Inc., Verne has spent the past 24 years educating entrepreneurs and business leaders from some of the world’s fastest growing companies.

As the “Growth Guy”, Verne is a contributing editor and frequent writer for Fortune magazine and co-chaired Fortune’s four regional Go For Growth conferences in 2004. He is also the author of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, endorsed by over 100 CEOs of mid-size companies and is published in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Spanish.

Interested to see Verne Harnish LIVE? Visit thegrowthfaculty.com.au to find out more about his upcoming tour to Australia and his Go For Growth seminar at the National Growth Summit’12 – Australia’s leading two-day executive event for entrepreneurs and business leaders of growing companies.

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