Business are spending more and more each year to bring in new clients. In management and business courses, one of the classic ideas in business is that it costs much more to bring in a new customer than to keep a customer.

With advertising, online ads, marketing campaigns, etc. It’s each to overlook one of the greatest assets business have in their marketing efforts: the existing customer base.

Your existing customer base represents a wealth of contacts and unbiased reputable referral system. If you can provide such a level of quality and excellence in the service you offer that your customers can’t help but talk about what you offers, you then have one of the greatest free advertising campaigns going for you.

Businesses often fail in capturing this unique prospect becuase they don’t really excel in their service to a point that they wow their customers into saying anything. It’s useless to solicit anything from your client base until you’re blowing people away, then encourage them to talk. Look for review sites online are a third party that you can refer current clients to comment on your offerings, then encourage new potential clients to see what others are sayig about you.

You can talk about yourself and tout what you do better than the other guy all day, but in the end, the potential customer generally wants to know how you’ve treated others because that’s how you’re likely to treat every new customer.

I think that the big brands have certainly been utilizing Twitter to help promote their business message. I wonder, however, if small businesses realize the power of that social media has in pushing forward their local marketing efforts. I believe that any small business that wants to really develop that foothold in the community like local businesses used to have must turn to social media to create outreach in their local community and get people to interact with your business and employees on a regular basis.

When I think of small businesses that have been doing this well, I think of the trendy coffee shops and hip small restaurants. I know a few here in the the Utah Valley area that are really making a place for themselves using social media.

For those looking to get started, it doesn’t take much. If your place of business is dominated by the non-tech people and you may feel a little apprehensive about going about this process, the answer is simple. Go to you local college and contact the business school and say that you need an intern or a part-time marketing student to help your business. The position can have a hip title like Social Media Director or Customer Relations Specialist. It would be preferable to include something about social media in the title. You don’t have to pay a lot, most college jobs are not well paying jobs, so you should be able to match that or give them a little bit more, but even if you can just match the going rate in the area, just the fact that the individuals job will be to simple interact with others and develop an identity online for your business, it already makes the job better than anything else. Trust me, there’re plenty of people who would love a job where they just work on online presence and identity with social media.

The next steps are the basics to getting started. Chris Brogran recently wrote an article that outlines 50 ideas on using twitter for business, I’ve pulled out 26 steps that would help any small business get started in social media marketing. Some of these items will be quick, others may take a bit of work, but it’s well worth it and it’s important to remember that the purpose here is to develop that relationship with the local scene that businesses used to have back in the day.

1. Build an account and immediate start using Twitter Search to listen for your name, your competitor’s names, words that relate to your space. (Listening always comes first.)
2. Add a picture. (@Shel reminds us of this.) We want to see you.
3. Talk to people about THEIR interests, too. I know this doesn’t sell more widgets, but it shows us you’re human.
4. Point out interesting things in your space, not just about you.
5. Share links to neat things in your community. ( @wholefoods does this well).
6. Don’t get stuck in the apology loop. Be helpful instead. ( @jetblue gives travel tips.)
7. Promote your employees’ outside-of-work stories. ( @TheHomeDepot does it well.)
8. Throw in a few humans other than your social media person, like RichardAtDELL, LionelAtDELL, etc.
9. Talk about non-business, too, like @astrout and @jstorerj from Mzinga.
10. Instead of answering the question, “What are you doing?”, answer the question, “What has your attention?”
11. Have more than one twitterer at the company. People can quit. People take vacations. It’s nice to have a variety.
12. When promoting a blog post, ask a question or explain what’s coming next, instead of just dumping a link.
13. Ask questions. Twitter is GREAT for getting opinions.
14. Follow interesting people. If you find someone who tweets interesting things, see who she follows, and follow her.
15. Tweet about other people’s stuff. Again, doesn’t directly impact your business, but makes us feel like you’re not “that guy.”
16. When you DO talk about your stuff, make it useful. Give advice, blog posts, pictures, etc.
17. Share the human side of your company. If you’re bothering to tweet, it means you believe social media has value for human connections.
18. You don’t have to read every tweet.
19. You don’t have to reply to every @ tweet directed to you (try to reply to some, but don’t feel guilty).
20. Use direct messages for 1-to-1 conversations if you feel there’s no value to Twitter at large to hear the conversation ( got this from @pistachio).
21. Use services like Twitter Search to make sure you see if someone’s talking about you. Try to participate where it makes sense.
22. 3rd party clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl make it a lot easier to manage Twitter.
23. If you tweet all day while your coworkers are busy, you’re going to hear about it.
24. If you’re representing clients and billing hours, and tweeting all the time, you might hear about it.
25. Learn quickly to use the URL shortening tools like TinyURL and all the variants. It helps tidy up your tweets.
26. Commenting on others’ tweets, and retweeting what others have posted is a great way to build community.

These 26 steps will get any organization started in the social media community and will get you started to developing that presence that every business wants with its local scene. The principles can also be applied to individuals who want to develop their online presence and connect with individuals in their line of work or with similar interests.

• REMEMBER: Twitter can help direct people’s attention to good things.
• REMEMBER: Twitter breaks news faster than other sources.
• REMEMBER: Twitter gives businesses a glimpse at what status messaging can do for an organization. Remember presence in the 1990s
• REMEMBER: Twitter brings great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn.
• REMEMBER: Twitter gives your critics a forum, but that means you can study them.
• REMEMBER: Twitter helps with business development, if your prospects are online (mine are).

1. REMEMBER: Twitter can augment customer service.

• Don’t feel restricted by policies. If a customer wants a refund after 40 days (10 days past our 30 day refund deadline), just give it to them.
• Requiring a receipt for a return is ludicrous. You have complex systems for tracking inventory, stocking, pricing, serials, etc. yet for me to return something I need to prove that it came from you by showing you a receipt? Please.
• When a customer is frustrated over chat or just isn’t getting it, sometimes it helps to give them a call.
• If a customer is upset, forget the policies. Give them a full refund. Give them extra SANs on their UC cert. Give them a extra time on their cert.
• If a customer is angry that the product doesn’t work like they thought it would (even if it is a known incompatibility), replace it, better yet give them a new product that works free.
• If a customer goes out of their way to write an email and thank us, send them a package with something free.
• Respond quickly to emails and chats. Give customers on the phone the attention that is needed to quickly resolve the problem.

Winning customers centers on the idea that your customers are not just the customers from the moment they walk in the door to your business or visit your Web site, etc. They are the customer 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They are always the customer. Companies have started to treat people as one time customers, and not as life-long customers. People are loyal to themselves first and if you don’t take care of them, they will go elsewhere.

Remember:

• People don’t know good service until they get it. When they receive good service they go “Wow,” and make the choice to switch to the new service provider.
• The customer is NOT always right, but they are ALWAYS the customer.
• Don’t take the easy way out and say NO, find a way to say YES.
• Don’t hide behind a policy, do what’s right.
• 99.6% of the customer were good compared to those that were bad, why create policies to hurt those good customers?
• Nordstroms once took back and refunded a pair of tires. Nordstroms doesn’t even sell tires. They won that customer.
• Just because we make a special situation for one person, doesn’t mean that everyone else will want that too! Make that customer happy.