During a recent meeting with MVPs blogger in residence, Steve King, I asked him what were the key pain points for small businesses today and he replied, “Demand generation.” I was not surprised considering that all of us are now reexamining the value of the products and services that we consume. In several posts last year I talked about the lean consumer in the new economy and how the returning customer wants to be known and is seeking more value.

What this means that as a small business person you and your employees need to make an extra effort to know and appreciate your customers. To do this you need to get out of your own Idaho, so to speak and see your business from outside-in, and understand your brand experience as it relates to your customers, partners, products and services.  What is your brand value? What do your customers feel when they see your logo, and experience your products and services? How many you on MVP know this?

Last year I wrote a lot about social media peer groups, lean customers, lean realities and social media peer groups becoming the new word of mouth marketing platform. Check out some of my previous posts to see if I was on track and take a look at this week’s research from Website magazine, you will see the links.

Please find below links to my 2009 blog posts of relevance:

How Social Media Peer Groups are Impacting Small Business and Startups

Lean Consumer Expectations: Can you deliver the Experience they Want?

The New Lean Reality: Small Business Needs to Understand Customers Now More Than Ever!

Make the Connection: Social Media is the New Word of Mouth Platform for Marketing and Sales


According to Website Magazine’s February issue article on the top 50 social media resources, Facebook has become the most popular networking site for business owners. BTW I like Website magazine and this is a nicely synthesized article. They found that social customers visited company or brand profiles 62% of the time and 55% of them searched for business information.

  • B2C: 83% of business to consumer organizations maintain one or more profiles on Facebook
  • B2C: Only 45% do so on Twitter
  • B2B: 77% have profiles on Facebook
  • B2B: 73% have profiles on Twitter

Case Study Sunbanque Tanning Salon Creates Demand on Facebook

My childhood friend Glen Asaro runs a tanning salon in my home town of Gloucester, MA and he was one of the first small businesses that I know of that began leveraging Facebook for demand generation. In fact I de-friended Glen last year because his staff sent me too many promotions and being in California I have plenty of sun. In the interest of helping you create demand generation through Facebook, I interviewed Glen about his activities on Facebook, so here goes.

“We started using Facebook by having employees scan our 15,000 customer database to see who was on Facebook and we invited them to join us. It has been a huge success and over the last year or so the employees found more than 2300 of our customers on Facebook. What I think has been really successful is our special campaigns, I do specials once a month and I know I am generating business from them. However, my issue is that I can’t easily track and assess how much business comes from the specials. I don’t have time to track them but I know how many members in the data base came in from Facebook.”

“So of these 2300 fans on Facebook, I really don’t know how many of them actually are customers.  It seems like a lot of people find me on Facebook, but Facebook doesn’t really help me do business, every once in awhile they solicit me to buy an add but they don’t help me track my business. And a lot of Facebook members don’t say where they are from, so it is very hard to track how much business I am getting from Facebook.” One of the great things about Facebook is that it has enabled me to get closer to the customers by answering their questions and I was able to leverage my fans recently into the political area, but this was dangerous.”

The Massachusetts Scott Brown Connection

“I got involved in the Scott Brown election through Facebook and I had to be careful about the political aspects, but I was concerned about the 10% tax on tanning salons, and 80% of my customers are middle age white women. There is a lot of false rhetoric about how tanning is bad for you and it was leverage in the campaign. Facebook enabled me to get our message out into the public that our type of tanning is not harmful. I have recently begun to add links about tanning and vitamin D so we have become a resource for our customers by aggregating useful information about tanning. The anti sun campaign is all funded by pharmaceutical companies so they can sell billions in sun screen. I think in the future that I will start blogging about sun tanning on my own website but I will continue to answer questions on Facebook because it brings me closer to my customers, and I will start using a promo code for Facebook customers to help me track them.”

The Personality of Fish: Beard Worms in the Abyss

Only twenty years ago or so beard worms (Pogonophora) were discovered in the deep trenches of our oceans by our greatest ocean explorer, Robert Ballard. Pogonophora represented an entirely new phylum, and was a huge find in the world of invertebrate zoology and ecology. We have just begun to study the DNA and molecular phylogeny of these worms, but they are thought to be related to segmented sea worms called Annelids.   Remember that our oceans are deeper than the highest mountain on earth one of the deepest area is the Marianas Trench, estimated to be more than 30,000 feet deep in the Pacific Ocean.

I have often talked about sun light disappearing at around 200 feet below the ocean surface in previous posts on submersible diving, so how do worms living in the black abyss 20,000 feet below the surface survive? Up until the discovery of beard worms it was thought that nearly all life on earth was supported by photosynthesis, the discovery of beard worms proved this wrong. These animals survive through a process called “chemosynthesis” and live off of bacteria and minerals exuded from hot volcanic vents in the deep.  What always amazes me is that as a species we have been around 4.5 million years on a planet that is 5 billion years old. E O Wilson of Harvard uses this way of looking at it, “if we make the earth a calendar month old man has been around all of 30 seconds.” There is still so much more to discover in our oceans, we to make a commitment to truly explore all of them, because they form the foundation of our planets ecosystem. Until next time I wish you great selling and marketing in the millennium.