Metzger Business

March 3, 2010

Choose a New Insurance Agent – Marietta Based Chris Jordan – Atlanta Insurance Live

Filed under: Marietta Business Review — Tags: , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 2:59 pm

I met @thechrisjordan at a tweet-up at @fuegomundo sponsored by @toddschnick and @stephaniealloyd. Chris is an insurance agent and I had already started following him on Twitter. After the social Part of the tweet-up a number of us stuck around for dinner and Chris and I sat next to each other. Chris is a really bright guy who is using Social Media as the fundamental backbone for his marketing process. I’d spend time writing about how well he is using social media but another friend @NotEasyToForget James Ball has already done a wonderful job and I’ll simply refer you to his article, Social Media: Selling Insurance from the Bathtub Since 2009.

What I’d like to do in this article is sell you on going to Chris’s site and requesting a quote. Fist let me say I am not being paid to do this article and Chris is not currently aware that I’m writing it. This article is consistent with this site’s main objective of promoting small businesses in Marietta and Roswell and I have recently become a Life Insurance customer of Chris’s and I will be switching my home and car insurance to Chris as well. Let me explain why.

Atlanta Insurance Live is Chris’s site and his business is based out of his home in Marietta. On the site he provides copious amounts of information about insurance and insurance issues. He begins to build trust through providing information about his industry and by giving the reader a sense of his personality. Chris is a friendly and funny guy as you’ll see in his entertaining video’s.

Another important point about Chris is his availability. I was working late one night and on Twitter. I saw Chris get on and said “hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you for a quote” This was at 12:00AM in the morning. He readily got on the phone with me, took my information and provided a quote by the next day. You can’t ask for better or quicker service than that. Additionally when I asked about my insurance needs he did not try to up sell me to a crappy whole life product I didn’t need and he was honest about how, when and where one might need a product like that.

I have a busy schedule. I work 40+ hours per week, I blog, I’m training for a 1/2 marathon and I have 3 kids and a wife. I’m busy! Chris actually when out of his way to come to my house on a Saturday afternoon and spent 2 hours with me going through paperwork and making sure I was comfortable with the transaction. Chris is the real deal. Many insurance agents spend all their time acquiring new customers but don’t do jack to service them. I have no doubt that Chris will continue to be excellent as an insurance agent.

So if you are here in Georgia and you need insurance, spend a few minutes asking Chris to help you out. He will make the process painless, ensure you get the services you need and most likely save you money. He saved me $40/month and increase the value of my Life Insurance plan by $250,000. Chris is a independent insurance agent and will be able to help you out. Go ask him for a quote. or Talk with him online live at Insurance Live.

December 8, 2009

AJC -”Small Businesses Find Value in Social Networking”

Filed under: Musings,Small Business — Tags: , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 11:05 pm

Check out the article “Small Business find value in Social Networking.” in Today’s AJC.

This is a great article and shows that small businesses are starting to recognize the value of social media. The truly interesting thing about the article is that it is only partially set up as a social media article. I read it and wanted to leave some comments but the AJC doesn’t encourage it’s community that way. There site is a traditional web site not a blog. There is no community there and so they continue to lose more audience to other platforms that do allow the audiences to interact.

What do you think?

November 18, 2009

Neighborhood – Gary Vanerychuk

Filed under: Musings — Tags: , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 2:18 pm

You may know Gary already he is the Wine guy that tastes everything. He is also a maven of social media. In this blog I’m going to quickly toss you over to him so you can see why he says the rules of the 1950′s, small towns and in my words “Neighborhood’s” are becoming important again.  Don’t forget the conversations at your “Neighborhood Barber’s Shop” either. Now go visit Gary and see what he has to say about the world getting smaller.

November 10, 2009

The Neighborhood

Filed under: Small Business — Tags: , , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 9:37 am

Main Street, Miles City

As I’ve been developing out my blog and my business service offering over the last few days I realized that there are two components to my strategy and I almost focused on the wrong one. All the other blogs I’ve written so far are correct and technically accurate. People of solid business minds who know this stuff will argue over different aspects or strategies for the best traffic placement how much value LongTail key words have, or how to use local Search. Used effectively any strategy will drive business. Here’s the thing, technical strategies are cold and have no feeling. The whole reason why it’s difficult to do business in a small community neighborhood now is because there is no neighborhood, at least not in Marietta ga. The square in Marietta is nice and does get some main street traffic but what if you own a business over where I live in East Cobb. Johnson’s ferry is basically a highway and main street doesn’t exist.

I remember as a kid my first job after caddying one round was helping at our neighborhood fish store. On Tuesday’s and Thursday’s  we would get a truck in from the Jersey Shore. I lived in Clarks Summit, Pa a small town suburb of Scranton PA. It was a beautiful area to grow up in. We were close to the Poconos and had an amazing fall leaf season. We also had a main street. The fish shore was on it. So I’d go in early meet the truck and start unloading. David the owner and I hustled all morning unloading the truck. Of course he decided he had to go in and start filleting the salmon as soon as the scallop bags were about to come of the truck. Anyway after I finished with the truck I had a few different jobs from helping out in the Kitchen to steaming crabs to cleaning the place up and occasionally, once I finished everything else they would let me work up at the counter.

Well every time a customer came in I knew who they were. I said hi and I always made recommendations about what we had gotten in that day. It was a small town, a neighborhood,  and I had grown up there,  everybody knew me and David loved having me there. He once told me that having me upfront was the best marketing he ever did. That was because we were a small neighborhood and everyone knew everyone.

Today there is no such thing as a small neighborhood. Or is there? Is there a neighborhood and main street? Social media is bringing back Main street believe it or not. The neat thing about this main street is doesn’t just have to be in your local postal code and a lot of businesses have taken advantage of the global reach but how can a small business who really does only need to reach the local community participate in this social net working field?

The key is finding and building that neighborhood. Most of the way’s to build the neighborhood are easy and free but they take effort and some time. Using Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter, and blogging you can develop community. If no other business owners in the same community then connect with them. On your blog write something of value about what they do and who they are. Help bring them business from your customer base in the Neighborhood and let them help bring you business from their customer base. Soon your neighbors in the community will be talking about both of you and how great you are to all of their neighbors.

If you own a small business in the East Cobb,  Marietta, or Roswell community I can help you find and participate on your main street via the internet and help you drive business while helping to build the Neighborhood online and off.

Offerings like the neighborhood co-op news letter will help you create the Main Street feel. Don’t forget to join twitter and subscribe to the @metzgerbusiness\mariettausers list. This list currently has 83 users that are located in Marietta inclusive of East Cobb. I promise the list will grow quickly. This list is set up and a free resource to anyone who follows it. This is an 83 person network dying to be tapped. I’ll be setting up a Roswell list and greater Atlanta area list as well.

If you don’t yet know how to make these social networks act as a neighborhood main street for your business, lets sit down and talk. I’ll help you develop you social media strategy so that your business has prime real estate on Main Street and you’ll feel good about helping your neighbors too.

September 15, 2009

Websites represent your business – What you need to know about building a web site

Filed under: Musings,Small Business — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 2:17 pm

I randomly dropped into a conversation the other day with someone who had just had a “beautiful” new website built for them. They were very excited about the site and awarded a free Adwords campaign. Being diligent about their business and loving their new “pretty” web site they were excited about taking advantage of the campaign and driving traffic to the site, they have picked excellent key words targeted the correct market and built a strong strategy for driving traffic from the campaign.

unfortunately there are a few, well maybe a bit more than a few details missing. I’m dividing the following information into basic and advanced. Lets start with the basics.
Basics:
1) Make sure that you own the URL.

2) Have the web site hosted on a server that will be accessable to you directly and any other professionals that you might decide to use to replace a previous vendor.

3) Make sure you have a unique user ID and password that you do not have to share with your vendors and if you do have to share the id and password change it after the work is complete.

4) When referring to a web site you’ll often here the term “look and feel.” This means that a web site has to look pretty but also “feel” pretty. You want your web site to be easy to use. The main menu should be accessable from every page on the site.

5) The background on a web site should be flat and bright. If you have white text on a patterned dark colored background you are going to turn people away.

Advanced:
6) There are too many free easy to use content management systems out there to pay someone to build you a static site that you have no control over and can not add content to easily. A content management systems allows you the business owner to easily add or change content on existing pages or even create new pages without much effort and with minimal knowledge.

7) Understand why you are building a web site. The web has changed in the past five years. You can no longer throw up a brochure and expect to get business from it. Actually this type of web site has never really worked period. At a minimum your web site should bring the customer one step closer to making a purchase. That means you need to get the customer to giver you their contact information in a form – Don’t expect the customers to call you just because they visited your web site. They aren’t even lead until they’ve given you some type of information. You can encourage customers to give you their contact information by asking them to fill out a form for a free consult or by offering a free newsletter of some sort. You can even just say if you’d like me to contact you please provide your information here.

8) measure the success of your site. How long are users staying on your site? What pages do they click on most? Which pages don’t they see? Which pages do they see? Where are your customers coming to your site from? Where do they go when they leave? All these questions can be easily answered by a free program from Google called Google Analytics. There are other web stat tracking programs available as well. The fact is that you need to know this information if you want your site to drive business.

9) Just putting a web site on line does nothing for you. You will not gain any traffic especially if you haven’t created a web site that meets feature 6 above because search engines won’t like your site. Here I’m going to offer a word of caution. You don’t need SEO. It helps buy you don’t need it. As a small business the cost of SEO can be too high. But you obviously still want to drive traffic to your site. This is where paid search, see my article on Adwords, and social media make the big payoff. You can also read my article on Tweet Strategy Conversion and measurement for more detail here.

10) Make sure that whomever creates your web site also goes to the effort of submitting the web site to the search engines. You probably want to be sure they have submitted you on the local search functions as well as the general search.

Never hire someone to build your web site that can’t articulate an understanding of the principles expressed in this blog.

September 18th – Seth Godin just wrote an excellent blog that is well worth reading about building web sites. The questions he posses are of primary importance. You can find his article here here.

August 19, 2009

Tweet Strategy, Conversion, and Measurement

Filed under: Small Business — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 6:30 pm

I went to visit my Chiropractor today. We traded for some services so occasionally we discuss business. I brought up his tweet strategy and asked if he had any idea if what he has been doing on Twitter is helping out. Answer – “Not Really.”

Hmmm. I say “Let’s examine this and see if we can develop a strategy that will allow you to measure your success and hopefully build your practice.” So after some discussion here is the strategy and requirements we came up with. These requirements are fairly general so they can be applied to any business. The strategy is simple so it too can be applied to any business. Try it use the measurements and you will find success on Twitter and maybe some more conversions. By the way this strategy can be used in Facebook or any other social networking site that broadcasts statuses.

1) Tweet Positive uplifting tweets that enhance your brand. Use a twitter sentence structure that follows the format what’s the Problem, What to do, positive result. i.e. work got you stressed out, get adjusted now, sleep great tonight – vist me to find out more http://bit.ly/123456

2) We also provided an action for the user at the end of the tweet. By the way the above tweet still leaves me 28 characters to play with.

3) Notice that I use a bit.ly url. There is 1 very important reason to use a URL shortening service and that is to measure how many people clicked on your link. The second reason is to save space. So now I have a measurement to see how successful my tweet was. Using bit.ly is easy by the way simply login and enter the URL you want shortened. Actually it’s slightly more complicated then that but I’ll cover this in another post.

4) So by now you must be asking what is the URL going to and why. AHHHH. The landing page, conversion page or squeeze page (I hate the term squeeze page!). This is a simple page that has a form for the person to fill out. This should not be a long sales page in this case. A chiropractor is a professional and shouldn’t dropt to the sleazy level that many long form sales letters drop to. In this case we’re offering a free telephone consultation. The page should briefly follow the same format as the tweets Explain problems, how chiropractic can help, what the results will be and offer the free consult. The objective is to generate a warm lead. The doc can now follow up with the potential patient.

The form should be simple and to the point. It should collect the person’s name, email, and phone. The email should be used only as a single contact unless otherwise stated. This is not a news letter sign up it is a lead generation form for already hot prospects.

5) Measure, Measure, Measure. The tweets, the click troughs’, the page visits, the page conversions. Tweak and Repeat.

Good luck this is a simple but effective strategy.

August 13, 2009

Social Media part of the College graduate DNA

Filed under: Big Business,Social Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 10:24 am

Kids that are entering the work force this year have been using social media in one form or another since they started high school. They grew up with MySpace always being a part of their vocabulary. The iPhone came out during their freshman year of college. Twitter to this generation is a tool for older folks although I think that’s changing. Theses kids have posted video’s to the web of teachers talking on the phone in class. They have recorded phone calls where parents have lost it and posted the audio. They know how easy it is to use multimedia and integrated it with social media to get buzz, publicity, notoriety, and make things happen. This group completed homework assignments through social network platforms and have even used it to cheat, although cheating will be considered collaboration now that they are in the work force.

So what does this mean for business? The younger workforce will continue to be more and more comfortable with social media, and building online brands, and collaborating together online. While some of the older generation does not feel you get to know people through social media, this generation knows that you are who you project yourself to be. This trait of projecting personalities can be very valuable to businesses if they take the opportunity to cultivate the values they want their employees to project. If your business wants to project honesty, commitment, hard work it’s very easy to do and a benefit to projecting these values through social media is that the values often manifest themselves in real life. It’s hard to project one set of values and live by another. I know personally I’ve become a much better person because of my projections.

The additional value collaborative tools provide is the ability to maximize the employee knowledge base. Collaboration through micro-blogging allows the community to see status on all projects that are currently in progress and provides the opportunity to provide input if the community has expertise to provide. Of course there need to be policies in place so that these tools are not abused but most people at work use the tools for work and if the larger community is using the tools correctly then they will police and moderate the community for you.

Finally on individual projects tools such as wiki’s provide the ability for a team to collaborate on documentation, decisions, and email like communication that should be captured via a company knowledge base. Tracking these communications via a wiki allows for the companies knowledge capital to be centralized and available. Now anyone can see why a decision was made even years later. This process allows future decisions to be better informed and made with all detail necessary. The best wiki tools search all attached documents as well as standard wiki pages and they allow you to convert or attach emails, documents, spread sheets and presentations to the wiki. This provides truly powerful knowledge content management and the new workforce is not only comfortable with it but will demand it from their employers.

Don’t forget that providing these tools helps to raise the moral of your work force by provide better communication and delivering on their expectations. Moving to Enterprise 2.0 technologies is no longer an option but a necessity. It’s only a matter of time if you haven’t started the process already.

August 12, 2009

Client Integrations

Filed under: Big Business — Tags: , , , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 11:25 am

There are many service companies out there that have to do client integrations so that they can best serve their clients. So what should I expect in the way of support as a client and how easy should a company make it for me to integrate?

Let’s start from the beginning. The Sales Process:
During the sales process the service company should know what types of questions to ask so they can recommend the most efficient and effective way to integrate with your company. They should already have a profile of companies that are similar in size, function, industry, technology infrastructure and revenue so they know how to recommend integration. I know I know you’re special and different and so is everyone else. For that matter so is every project I have ever work on yet somehow they always get developed through the same processes even if it’s agile, XP, or some other methodology. In the end the methodology is always get the requirements, design, build and test. So as I was saying the service company should know approximately where you will fit into their integration process. The service company should be able to explain why you fit into that integration level and approximately how much effort it will be to integrate with them based on past experience. Obviously they should also be able to explain the benefits of the integration to your organization.

Once there is agreement to move forward with the service the sales person will begin gathering a pre-defined set of data. Ideally this information will be written down on a nice check list that can be presented to the customer with definitions of the needed information and a short explanation of why the information is needed. If the service company has this information put together in this manor then you know they really have their stuff together.

The next step in the process will be for the sales person to bring back the information collected from the customer to the integration team and review what is needed for the specific customer as well as finalize on the decision of which integration is appropriate for the customer. The integration team will then put together the standard set of documentation pertaining to the defined integration level including project plans, technical documentation, communications plan, and any other supporting documentation.

It is now time to schedule a meeting with the customer and their development team. All documentation should have been provided and reviewed before the meeting begins. The goal of the meeting should be to answer any questions about the integration and build plans for implementation. There obviously may be other meetings and discussions along the way to facilitate the process but this outlines a smooth and well established path to integration.

Look for my next article on how can Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 better faciliate this process.

August 10, 2009

URL Shorteners: Does it matter which one I use?

Filed under: Small Business,Social Media — Tags: , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 11:13 am

There are many url shortening services available on the web. These services allow you as the consumer of the service to view statistics on click throughs. The service also provides an easy way to publish short urls when typing in Twitter or email so that the link will never get broken.

The problem with a url shorting services is what happens when they shut down. Any url’s that you have hosted with the service will no longer work and you will have to either fix the links or have many dead links to you web site. This weekend the URL shorting service tr.im declared that they would be closing. The URLs will be good through December at which time they will no longer work. So what should these users do? Who should they go with? And if you are a new to URL shortening then which service should you choose.

I personally like the bit.ly service. According to Tr.im in their press release this weekend the bit.ly service is said to be “anointed” by twitter as “the market winner.” It certainly has a large number of Twitter users, is easy to use, has been extended to work in word press blogs in conjunctions with Twitter Tools, and provides excellent data on click throughs. Additionally it will be around for quite a while.

Another good and seemingly permanent fixture is TinyURL.com. I have used tinyurl in the past but they do not provide the same statistical data bit.ly does. I like to know how many people click on my links. The other advantage of bit.ly is that when you log in you can see all previously shortened URL’s.

There are other URL shorteners out there but sticking with these two for now should ensure that you will not end up with dead links on your site.

Powered by WordPress