Social media tools presented at Small Business Week luncheon

As principal of the brightwhite design group in Halifax, White widely promotes the use of social media like facebook, Youtube and twitter by businesses for promotion. “The whole point of social media is you get out there and start a conversation with people and get engaged and simply use these tools as a method to meet new people whether they are customers, suppliers, or partners. “I can honestly say that because of social media, we can almost not handle any more new work,” said White.

During his presentation, he outlined five important tools that businesses should be using. The first is publishing a blog (he recommended Wordpress.com) to talk about interesting experiences and opinions. A blog demonstrates that people are willing to share some of their knowledge, outside of the services they usually provide.

Tweeting on Twitter is an excellent forum for “getting information out there” says White. He uses it to get people engaged and encourages business people to fill out a twitter profile. “The power of twitter for me is that I can meet people online that I otherwise wouldn’t have an opportunity to meet. When I go to approach them at a networking event, I meet them in person and they already know what I look like and know some of my interests. It creates a ‘warm lead’.”

White says Youtube can be used to create short videos to promote products.

Outposts – places where content like videos and photos are stored and linked back to a website - also help to promote that website.

Responding to feedback is an important component of social media, added White. “Most companies are scared to death to allow comments on their website, or Youtube or Facebook,” he said. “They’re scared someone will say something negative. I would say that if someone said something negative, you’ve been given a gift and tremendous opportunity that you wouldn’t normally have. If people are saying bad things about you, they’re saying them whether you can respond or not. “When they post it on your blog, you have an opportunity to respond and show them that you are listening and that there is someone willing to make a change because of that, or you can explain your position on why you are not going to change something. When normally you wouldn’t have the ability to do that at all.”

Lastly, White stressed the exponential benefits of doing something amazing.

He held up an incident pertaining to Zappos as an example.

A customer bought five pairs of shoes from Zappos, the “Amazon of shoe sales”, for her cancer-stricken mother to choose from for a special event.

The mother died before the event and the daughter forgot to return the shoes. A representative from Zappos called to see if the daughter still wanted to return them. When the daughter explained the situation, the clerk told her not to worry, that they would pick them up. “The next day she came back from the funeral and here was an enormous bouquet of flowers on the steps with a handwritten note from someone from Zappos saying ‘we are really sorry for your loss’,” said White.

The daughter wrote a blog post about how wonderful Zappos was and the story circulated around the globe.

White’s presentation can be viewed online at: http://www.slideshare.net/brightwhite