The answer? A big YES! Here’s how the above functions would be customers and extremely important to your continued business success:

As a vendor & consultant you provide goods and services to a client, however based upon your client relationship, the vendor or consultant could also be a consumer & marketing source to friends, family and other business contacts.

Clients and Consumers are the customer and purchase or pay/contract with you for your goods and services. Clients and Consumers can also be your best free marketers as they recommended you to their peers and continue to use and contract your services.

A Project Manager is also a customer as they not only represent you and your organization (an internal customer), but also establishes the client relationship which is invaluable.

A Business Owner, whether the client, vendor or consultant are all customers and not only have the final say in relationship and continued contracts / services but can also be invaluable in marketing your services via their peers and social media.

In essence, each and everyone that you have contact with throughout your day is a customer to you in some form and are invaluable to your organization. Relationships and marketing through word of mouth and social media can sustain or break any business.

Take care of your customers and treat them as you’d like and expect to be treated. This will ensure top level customer satisfaction and continued growth for you and your organization.

There are a few ways that involvement can be addressed that may fit into your company strategy and profile.

Should you become involved in Social Media – YES.  According to the Nielsen 2010 Media Fact Sheet, Time spent on social networking sites in the U.S. increased 277%; The average U.S. worker spends 5 hrs a month visiting social networks at the office; Facebook reaches 56% of the active U.S. Internet universe with an average usage of 6 hrs a month per user; Twitter grew 500% over a year; and 32% of all mobile web users visit social network sites.

Due to these statistics, it would definitely be in your best interest to become involved in social meeting as a company and marketing strategy.  Now, to what extent do you become involved?

This will really depend on your staff and time allotment.  Adding a blog to your site and providing content and resources to your viewing audience and member is a huge commitment but one that will pay off in the long one as establishing yourself as a knowledge leader in your field.  Blogs do take time and commitment to write, but is it possible to spend about 1 hour a week on your blog work?  Consider video blogging vs. writing a blog.  Make it a point throughout the day jotting/writing down blog topics and key points (approximately 5-10). Schedule an hour to sit in front of a video (does not have to be a professional production) and tape a 5 minute blog session on each topic that you’ve recorded. The video blogs can then be posted weekly to your site and based upon the number of video blogs that you recorded, you could have about a  months or a little more of video blogs to post that took you a few hours to complete.

Assign social media sites to various people in your organization. Arrange for these people to be in charge of each site and check/perform searches on the selected keywords for your organization, and interact with others. A schedule can be arranged where this occurs at least 3 times a day for approximately 1/2 hour each time. This provides some type of interaction with the social media main stream and enables your organizations name and content to be seen and discussed.

Becoming involved in Social Media does involve a commitment of time and resources. But if this is planned according to your companies goals and staffs schedule and abilities, can become a positive tasks to any ones day while increasing company awareness, site visitors and potential members.

Most member and client contact lists contain one contact for each company. Why is this?  What if that contact moves to another company, leaves the job, is fired, etc.? Who do you contact then?

It is always a good strategy to not only have the person that you consider your key contact/member but also ask for an alternate contact name, title, etc. at the same company.    This enables you to not only grow your list, but also provides you with the ability increase your visibility into other areas of the company.

This really isn’t that difficult to do.  Ask your main contact or member to recommend other people in their organization that may be interested in your services and/or information.  I’m pretty sure that you will receive a positive response from your contacts/members to this question with a listing of a few different contacts.

When visiting with your client, ask them if it would be possible to show you around their facility and introduce you to other departments.  If you have a good relationship with your contact this should be a no brainer and present you with a great opportunity to meet other contacts within the same organization.

One thing I’ve learned over the years that organizations (especially associations) have many layers and many decision makers for various departments.  In most cases, your contact, who may be in the member services department, doesn’t communicate the wonderful products and services that you offer with the IT or Publishing Department.  This relates to lost opportunities and sales.

Asking current members to recommend persons that they feel may be interested or providing them with the opportunity to “forward to a friend” some materials is another way to help increase your list.  This is easily done if you provide targeted member materials via cross media campaigns, meetings/announcement, etc. that you may be marketing to your members, etc.  Adding an option that enables your member to “forward to a friend” allows the member to send the information along and possibly entices the friend to join as well, but also provides you, through programming, to collect the “friends” contact information for marketing.

Multiple contacts within any organization are great ways to strategically build and maintain a valuable marketing list.   Don’t let these opportunities get by you.  Updating your list is the best way to make sure that you have a list of value that will provide you with many opportunities for years.

Currently, it is estimated that there are 240Million Smartphones in use and 56% of US Smartphone users are using their phones for news and information (web/internet and social media), while 50.8% of US Smartphone users are using their phones for email. The US is far and above Smartphone usage in other countries such as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, who on average have a 30% usage of Smartphones for Web/internet and social media accesses.

Based upon Smartphone usage and the amount of units that are available in and in use in today’s market, is your web site Smartphone friendly and providing users access to your site and site information via the Smartphone?

Sites can be developed that provides users with easy access to content and navigation through the site. (Take CNN, ESPN, or Home Depot). These sites have been set up specifically to allow for Smartphone user to access, search and navigate throughout the site effortlessly.

Applications and applets can be developed that enables you with the ability to provide users ease of access to content, updates, and relevant materials found on your site.  There are approximately 50,000+ apps available for iPhone user, with an ever increasing amount of apps availalble for other Smartphone users as well. These provide users with quick and easy access to informtion, from inventory, to marketing/sales information, etc. These can also allows users the ability to subscribe via RSS feeds to newly posted information and provide your publications via Smartphone download and access, as well as member interaction and forum posting are advantages that can be offered to members or potential new members.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to provide members with a Smartphone app that provided them with newly released member updates and information that is delivered directly to their smart phone? Wouldn’t it be great to deliver upcoming events to registered users (whether members or not), notifying them of upcoming events and providing them with options to order the event via their phone and or log in and order via their member access?

Quick and easy is the term and phrase for the future, and providing data to users in a quick an easy method provides you with the leading edge in user interactivity with your site, thus increasing users and their overall experience.

Print to digital media

These alternatives provide solutions for those that want “quick” access to the material. These solutions can set yourself apart from your competitors and steer your organization towards the digital/electronic world that has been knocking at the door for years.

What are some of the electronic solutions?

1. Electronic Download (PDF download) – this item has increased in value over the past several months and there has been an increase in the amount of PDF files that are available for download via a quick and easy purchase directly from your website.  Some clients that I’ve spoken with over the past several months are even providing the electronic version for free and then allowing members to “order” and pay for the printed version if they want hard copy or perhaps receive a discount if they purchase both. This all depends on your business model and strategy for members and marketing materials but a viable alternative to delivery electronic content.
2. Online Member Directories – custom develop a member module that provides users with the ability to search for members.  This is still a topic that is relevant in today’s market and can include not only having the standard member web search, but also creating a member directory PDF file based off of your member database.  As an example of this, a program can be developed that securely accesses your current member database either daily or weekly and then generates a pre-formatted/designed PDF file that is set with your member print standards.  This PDF file will have the most updated information directly from your member database and can be accessed via your member website and/or available for purchase and print-on-demand.
3. Electronic Annual Meeting Programs – this is similar to the member directory as outlined above.  You have an annual meeting coming up and the programs and schedules/presenters/participants are always changing and being updated as the meeting date looms ahead.  A program can be developed that securely accesses your program database and creates a PDF file for electronic download and/or print-on-demand for the attendees.  The look/feel of the program will be set up so that the program has the current meeting design theme and will allow for the content to be as up-to-date as possible.

These are all viable solutions to consider when viewing budgets and ways to increase your digital and electronic presence.  Technology today presents you with solutions to continually meet the demands of the consumers and your web site users to stay in front of your competition.

For more information and/or solutions, feel free to conatct me via the contact page.