If you’re not asking yourself, who is the Mayor of FourSquare for my small busines, you may want to start, as there could be a great marketing opportunity in it for you. FourSquare likes people to think of them as an “urban mixtape”. FourSquare allows users to check-in at their favorite local hangouts. When connected with friends on FourSquare, your check-ins allow your friends to know your whereabouts. It also shows them some of your favorite places, which may entice them to meet you there or go try the place on their own. Many different types of businesses, like cafes, bars, restaurants, parks, gyms and more, can take advantage of FourSquare’s service.
As a business owner, you are probably starting to see the power of FourSquare for business. The more people you get to “check-in” at your local business, the better. Basically those customers who check-in at your local business on FourSquare, just helped you market your business. The cost to you, $0.
A key to FourSquare immortality is becoming the Mayor of a local business. The more a person continually checks-in at a local business, the better his or her chances are at becoming the mayor of that business. With that said, we do live in America, the land of possibilities, so if you’re not careful, another local patron can come in and steal your Mayor title out from under you. That happens only if another person starts checking-in at the local business, for which you’re the Mayor, more than you do.
As a business owner, there is a HUGE potential marketing campaign that you can run through FourSquare. Call it “Election Night” or “Vote for Our FourSquare Mayor”. The goal should be to get as many of your current customers as possible, along with new customers, to begin checking-in on FourSquare EVERY TIME they come to your business. The goal for customers is to become the Mayor of your small business. In order to entice customers to participate, you should come up with a remarkable offer for the winner.
Since Mayor-ship can change hands frequently, you should put a time limit on the promotion. You could run it 3x a year and whoever the mayor is on X date, is the winner. Perhaps the winner receives a big party at your store in their honor. They can bring friends/family for a free night of food and drinks. If you’re a travel agency, perhaps you can offer the winner a free set of plane tickets somewhere. Whatever the offer is, it should be something that your customers find valuable. This will entice them to participate, along with spreading your promotion to their friends and family.
When it comes to promoting this new marketing campaign, use your other online social tools, like your company blog, Facebook fan page, LinkedIn account, and Twitter. Get the word out to as many people as possible. You may even want to reach out to some local media outlets, as a promotion like this, could garner interest from them – FYI Twitter is a great place to connect with local media personnel. Also use your store to promote the campaign. Perhaps you want to spend a few bucks and print a big in-store billboard for the program and then provide a URL to your blog for customers to learn more. There are countless ways that you can get the word out about your FourSquare promotion, you just have to get creative.
FourSquare is a great new tool for small businesses. There are a lot of creative things that you can do with FourSquare to help drive sales for your small business. The costs for a program like this, except for maybe the incentive, are very small. You can definitely pull this off. So with that said, who’s the FourSquare Mayor for your small business?
In the early days of this blog, we would take time to promote each post on sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, and Mr. Wong. Now, we bypass those social bookmarking sites in order to spend more time promoting our content on sites like Facebook, Twitter, BizSugar and LinkedIn. 
This image was taken directly from the Catalyst Marketers Google Analytics Traffic Sources report. As you can see, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and BizSugar are all in the top 10 traffic sources for Catalyst Marketers. With that said, it’s important to not only focus on quantity of visitors driven from a particular source, but also quality of visit. As you will also see on this report is that StumbleUpon still appears in the top 10 traffic sources for us. What you don’t see is that the quality of those visitors is very low. How do we determine quality of visit?
Retweeting is a process whereby another Twitter user takes what you have tweeted and tweets it out to his/her Twitter followers. You can tell when something has been retweeted when a tweet is prefaced by the capital letters RT. The “RT” is usually followed by the original author’s username. The image to the right shows that @KratzPR retweeted my original tweet.
The key takeaway from this post should be that you need to start using Yelp to promote your small business because not only will Yelp users see your Yelp business listing (and hopefully positive customer reviews/ratings), but so too will local EveryBlock subscribers. Basically, for no money at all, you can attract new prospects to your business from two different online tools, Yelp & EveryBlock.
Figure out how you will build buzz within your local community. You can build publicity and awareness by promoting the event through online social tools, as well as, through in-store ads/fliers. You can host a live event and invite select customers, friends, family, media, and other local business owners. Video recording the event will be imperative, so that you can distribute it online – perhaps through YouTube or Viddler, in order to capture a larger audience. You can use the same online social tools to promote the fashion show post-event, that used to promote it pre-event. 
There are probably even more benefits to running an event like this, but you only have so much time to read this post and I only have so much time to write it…The key for small business owners to pulling this off is that the tools to do so are now available to you at a price you can afford. Online social tools can help you promote the event, share the event with the world, and converse with fans post-event. I’d imagine that you could run your own local fashion show for less than $1,000 if you get creative. Tools like YouTube and Viddler allow you to post a video from the show online. Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and your company blog will allow you to promote the event both before, during, and after. Your fashion show may be so cutting edge for your local community that it gets picked up by local news stations, which will add some great PR for you and your small retail clothing shop. 
The idea for this post actually came when I posted the following question on Twitter, “Working on new posts for the Catalyst Marketers blog, does anyone have topics they’d like me to explore?” I received the following response, which is the basis for this post, “@EnviroBooty I have heard from Social Media Magic that your profile itself should be rich in your pertinent keywords. If that’s true, just wondered why”. So thanks to 
Don’t simply stop at adding keywords to your Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, & LinkedIn profiles, use those keywords in your daily online conversations. When you respond to comments on Yelp, try to add a keyword where it makes sense (don’t go overboard). When tweeting, use your small business keywords. If you make a wall comment on your small business Facebook Fan Page, use your keywords. All of these efforts will pay off in moving all of your online business profiles up in the search ranks. 
Do you remember using that Emergency Call List when your business was going to have to stay closed on a normal working day? You know, with each new employee you bring on, and for every old employee who leaves, you update that list, print it out, and make sure everyone knows the procedure. Usually it starts at the top with the owner or manager deciding if their store will open on a day where weather or other emergency factors come into play. Once the decision is made, the owner calls the next person in line, then that person is in charge of calling the next person, and so on. 
Before the advent of using online social tools for business, there was really no way of communicating to customers that a store would be closed for the day. Granted, on days like the Philadelphia area had on Saturday, many people aren’t going out shopping in the first place. With that said, what if you’re a doctor’s office or another type of business where customers have an appointment setup on a day that’s in question? Well, you’d have to pay someone to answer the phone and unless you have a redirect system in place, that individual would probably have to go into the office. Obviously, that’s dangerous during bad weather days. Now, all of that has changed due to more and more businesses using online social tools to communicate with customers. A big key to this is also the comfort which customers have in using those same tools to communicate with businesses.