Business Leads UK

Recently I have been completely amused by the number of really, what I would consider, strong companies that have added the Twitter logo to the front page of their website with a link to their Twitter account … but then have only a hand full of followers … what does that say??  The home page has been put together by their expert design team that costs them £25k a month to have sitting around waiting for their next job. It has been reviewed by the sales director and his 10 man team that costs another £75k a month.  The websites underlines the power of the company, mentions a few key accounts and explains how they are the best of the best at Top Gun.  The buyer has walked onto the website with a £1,000,000 contract, 50% GP and all is looking good for him to pick up the phone and request a meeting … UNTIL …  “Look they have a Twitter account like Stephen Fry, with their profile they must have at least 100,000 followers?” thinks the buyer and moves the mouse over the Twitter icon and clicks through to their Twitter account …  “Following 48, followers 3 … ha, ha, ha … these guys obviously have a great copy writer but who the hell in marketing let that slip through … later losers!” It’s incredible but totally true … just look around the web and you find little Tommy Tucker with 20,000 followers … some bloke claiming to be a Twitter guru with 2,000 followers … companies giving it a go and a little thought with 200 … and a bunch of multi million pound companies with 20.  Twitter is just the latest, not even that, one of the more recent online marketing tools that has its place but please world, don’t get obsessed and pulled in by the marketing buzz as in 2 minutes it will all be over and we’ll be on to the next great thing.  Personally I feel that Google buzz has far more potential and let’s face it, like BT own the telco network in the UK, Google owns the servers and so can ensure who’s up and who’s down at any given moment in time.  By all means take a look at Twitter and consider how you are going to use it but don’t put it on your home page until you have a plan and have warmed up the pan with a few hundred followers.  Always consider the TiTe factor … you’ll either be “tight” or a “tit” … divide the number of followers you have by the number you are following to get your TiTe number.  A TiTe of less than 1 then you are officially a tit and need to consider what you’re doing with Twitter and do you listen to all those you are following, so why??  If your TiTe is around 1 then you are possibly a Twitter guru who is following the world so you get more followers to make things look good, why else would you follow 5,000 people??  If your TiTe is greater than 10 then you’re officially “tight” and obviously very interesting with something of value to say to the world. People are following you as they are interested, not just because you followed them … you may merely be a celeb but then you could be much more !!  Well that’s my take on it but it would be… @jondavey  Remember folks, tweet carefully out there…  Jon Davey  www.socialmediadirectors.co.uk  01753 852904

How many times have you heard a tune on the radio in the morning and you are still mentally humming it on the way home after work in the evening? Sometimes a ditty gets stuck inside your brain and it can’t seem to work its way out.

No matter whether you think of yourself as musical or not, your brain is. Everyone’s brain responds to music and to rhythm. Countless experiments have been conducted (no pun intended..!) to look at the effect of music on the brain. And time after time the researchers find that when we hear music the inside of our heads light up with all the activity going on in our little grey cells.
But, of course, our brains don’t actually know it is “music”; all it is really responding to is sound and the rhythm. A series of sounds, with different tone and pitch is what we label as music, but all our brain actually gets is sound.
And that’s important for your website. Not that you should have music on your site – though that might help. But that you should pay attention to the sound and rhythm you are constructing in people’s heads.
The chances are, as you read this, you “hear” some of the words inside your head. No-one is actually saying anything out loud, of course; all you are doing is reading. But part of the process of reading is to convert what we see into sounds – technically this is known as the “phonological loop”. We “hear” what we are seeing. So, if what we read is difficult, cumbersome, poorly constructed then what we hear is disjointed and without rhythm. The best writers are those who produce good sounds in our head with their words, whilst constructing good images in our mind with the same words.
Online, few business sites achieve this. They use long words, when short ones will do; they use long sentences, when a phrase will do; and they use technical jargon when it simply isn’t necessary. The result is that your brain can’t produce good sound. In other words the language of most websites is not very musical.

But does it need to be? Well, when we read “musical writing” we engage with it much more. We also remember it more easily and, if it is trying to persuade us, we are more likely to act on it. That’s because our brain processes music by connecting what we hear to our emotional centre and to the part of our brain which represents our physicality. In other words, music makes us feel good AND it makes us feel “human” because it joins up the emotional response we have to parts of our body. So, sometimes, music can literally make your heart thump, or get your foot tapping, or make you clap your hands. Music involves your whole body.
How many times have websites done that to you? How often have you found yourself so emotionally engaged with a website that it makes you cheer out loud? How often have websites forced you to jump up from your chair, punch your fist in the air and shout “YES”? How often have websites made your heart thump?
Probably, these things are rare – if not extreme. The reason is that the words on the website have no rhythm, no emotional connection – in short, they have no music.
Make your websites “musical” and you will find a dramatically increased connection between you and your audience because they will be hearing you, rather than reading you. And if they hear the right thing, their brain will transfer that to their emotions and to their body. And once you have done that you have them hooked.


Graham Jones helps businesses succeed online using psychological techniques. He provides consultancy, advice and mentoring to help companies improve their sales and marketing via the Internet. You can find out more at: http://www.grahamjones.co.uk. He is the author of Effective Email (http://www.effective-email.co.uk) which helps you ensure you have an efficient and effective email system which avoids time-wasting.

Service helps businesses grow online and offline relationships

London, UK – 24 November 2009: WeCanDo.BIZ Limited, the online sales leads and business referrals network, has launched a Social CRM addition to its established website to assist small business owners to turn their social networking contacts into customers.  Called WeCanDoCRM, the service is free to all businesses at www.wecando.biz.

Social CRM is the merging of social networks with Customer Relationship Management to help businesses manage and build customer relationships using the information that customers freely share through their online profiles.  Social CRM also includes using social networking resources to help improve customer dialogue.

Focused towards small business owner/managers looking to use social media to help grow their businesses, the new features announced with WeCanDoCRM enable:

-          Consolidation of contacts from website enquiry forms, Microsoft Outlook, Google Mail, Yahoo Mail, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ecademy and existing customer databases to one location, making contacts and customers easier to manage and communicate with

-          Improved data currency and accuracy through linking CRM records with public social networking profiles

-          Access to further rich data collected from public social networking profiles to supplement customer information already held

-          Advanced Customer Relationship Management features such as lead & sales management workflow, HTML email & mobile SMS (Short Message Service) campaign marketing, customer surveys and rich reporting as an upgrade option

-          Integration to online accounts systems, such as Kashflow, providing full sales workflow from leads through to invoicing.

These new Social CRM features are in addition to the many business networking features of WeCanDo.BIZ, including Biz Need business sales leads; and an endorsement system to share customer endorsements on your social networking profile, blog or website.  The WeCanDo.BIZ website has over 12,500 registered users.

“As I build contacts online WeCanDoCRM captures customer data straight into the system  – that’s fantastic, as I can be straight onto potential opportunities with fundamentally no delay or need for administration,” says Will Hawkins of Healthy Business Ltd., a WeCanDo.BIZ user and early adopter of WeCanDoCRM.  “I have access to information about my customers that many large businesses can only dream about!”

“A lot of business owners are scratching their heads, trying to work out what social networks can do for them, how they build their contacts and then how they convert them into customers,” says Ian Hendry, founder and Chief Executive of WeCanDo.BIZ.  “The fact is, there are opportunities being presented all the time through social network connections, but unless you record them they’re quickly lost amongst the noise.  WeCanDoCRM assists in building rich customer profiles of your online and offline contacts; then provides tools to help advance the relationship to the point where business gets done — quickly and easily.”

WeCanDoCRM Social CRM is powered by the InTouch CRM platform and is available immediately, free to all businesses from www.wecando.biz.  WeCanDo.BIZ Pro Networker membership is an optional upgrade enabling small businesses to use social media to grow even faster from £19.95 + VAT per month with no contract.

About WeCanDo.BIZ

WeCanDo.BIZ is an online new business network for sales leads and referrals. Using social networking methods to broker valuable new business relationships, it provides simple tools to members which help generate sales leads, leverage customer referrals and win new business.  The web-based service is available to all businesses at www.wecando.biz.

The Circle of Life?

We are often asked to build a website in a few hours or even a few days. So, we put together the "circle of life" of a website. With the help of Joomla Developers website production values. Be aware therefore, that if you want a website that works, this process will help you. Skip any one of them and you are asking for trouble! When thinking about building a website this planogram is a good start. Intially you will want to "Set Goals". The goals will be around the actual look and feel of the website, the reasons behind having a website and frankly, what you think the website should do for you and Search Engine Optimisation to enable your website to be found by your potential users. The Developers will then interpret your "Goals" and produce a costing and build proposal that will give you an idea of where you are going and what you can actually achieve within your budget requirements. The design is done and the "framework" for the site is built. This is a very important aspect as you will want to see the home page, and secondary pages and if the website is to be transactional, you will want to find and appoint a suitable payment gateway and ensure it meets your needs as well as your customers. You may want extra functionality and these are called extensions. For instance, you may want a "recommend a friend" option, "Sign up to our newsletter" an inbuilt email marketing function and of course a "shopping cart". All these aspects are what we call the "Alpha Phase" and it is this stage that is critical as most clients (in our experience) tend to show the site to colleagues or friends and this can get negative reactions as everyone out there is a "web designer" and it can often cause untold problems and situations with your developer and designers - remember at this stage of development the "site" is not finished and often times you may feel peer pressure to implement some of your friends and colleagues suggestions before the site is ready to be fully tested or even fully designed. The "Beta" phase is where we test that the funcionality actually works properly, auto responses are tested and the payment gateway (if there is one) is fully implemented and the payment process is finalised. Corrections are made if necessary and further development is undertaken to ensure the site is compatible with all browsers, all video players and mobile communication devices. The stable phase is where you can feel assured to send the site out to your colleagues and friends to "critique" the site, the developers can then implement any suggestions that they or you have not thought of in the development stage, if any amendments are done, we go back to Beta Phase and re-test and ensure the site functions correctly. Once all this is done - Only then can the site be released to the general public and any Search Engine Optimisation can be implemented.

I use Google alerts to keep a track of what is being said around a variety of topics and two of those topics are me and me!

"Jon Davey" and "Jonathan Davey"

I knew that geography A level would come in handy one day ... apparently some chap with my name has just written a jolly interesting book ... well to some it will be!

Greater London County Planning Map New

I got wondering just where people’s expectations are as far as the cost of a sales lead. So I decided to draw up some comparisons with methods I have advocated in the past. I’d love to read your comments as the article is bound to get some reaction from an audience focused around business leads!

A summary of the stats:

Telesales/telemarketing — CPL £200 – £385
Email marketing — CPL £179
Web advertising (banner) — CPL £30 – £50
Web advertising (affiliate) – N/A
Web advertising (Google Adwords) — CPL £21.50
Twitter Sales Leads tool — CPL £1

As we get more feedback to the article from Twitter and other sources we're improving the accuracy f the figures on our original article at  http://bit.ly/3NjoDu.

Let us know what you think or whether you can provide more accurate figures to update the article.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz

Having had a look at Jon's little self-made video in how to add submissions to the LinkedIn group for Business in Berkshire, I felt compelled to give it a go in my specialised vein. So here goes:

http://www.designyourmarketing.co.uk/How to create submissions in the BinB LinkedIn group.pdf

Let me know what you think of it!

And if you like this style, then this is how I have created my blogging visual e-courses on how to start a Wordpress.com blog. For more details, visit my blogging pages.

Alice