Barry and Becky tell great stories, offer up plenty of examples but best of all — give us seven rules to learn and follow, no matter how big or how local your business is.
1. Plan for zero. Planning for zero income requires building new sources of revenue and all kinds of different equity.
2. Spend creative brainpower before spending dollars. This protects you from doing something just because everyone else is… and let’s you introduce your customers to the real you.
3. Multiply lines of income to diversify your risk. That way if one stream runs dry, the others keep things flowing.
4. Work anywhere, anywhen through technology. We have new expectations and tolerance for how and when we get responses from companies.
5. Treat customers like community. Make them feel valued, special and like an insider.
6. Be proud of being small. Small and nimble is the new big.
7. Build your local connections. Making connections that count help you accomplish the first 6 rules because you quickly learn that you can’t do it alone.
Use SocialOomph to schedule your tweets.There are two schools of thought on this, the one that says automated Tweets are bad is the one we are going to ignore. I will be the first to admit that I am not a purist on this theory. Yes, Twitter is designed for conversation – but you may use it as a broadcast tool. Unless you have the time or the budget to hire someone to keep an eye on your Twitter and Facebook and Blog Comments and ghost-tweet for you, you need to put out some scheduled, automated tweets. Post 4 or 5 tweets per day, and then keep an eye on your email for responses. I use Socialoomph.com because it is free and simple.
Schedule your tweets for the times when your audience is most likely to be engaged. If you do not know when that is, you can use a tool like http://timelinetweets.com/ to find out when your retweets and shares happen. Schedule your tweets accordingly. If you want you can also do some experiments, try tweeting three times in a row, 45 minutes apart, starting at different parts of the day.
