KCFreePress.com

As president of Verona Key LLC, the family-owned operator of Kansas City's sole Dunkin' Donuts franchise, Jennifer Benjamin has a full schedule. There are logistics to be sorted. A staff to be managed. Deliveries to be scheduled.

And Tweets to be Tweeted, of course.

Amid the day’s hustle and bustle, she composes several 140-character posts a day updating the company’s 400-plus Twitter followers about available donut and coffee flavors, as well as new product offerings: “What if we take chocolate, add chocolate to it & then top with a little chocolate? Wait WE ALREADY DID! Try our Triple Choc Muffin today! :)”

Welcome to the new world of small business marketing. Benjamin is among a growing number of small business owners who find themselves spending a large part of their days dedicated to communicating with followers and friends on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

"It allows us to connect with our customers and members of the broader community in a real-time fashion and in an authentic way," Benjamin said. "It lets us come out from behind traditional push advertising to simply talk and listen to the people we work, play and live with."

Leroy Shatto of Shatto Milk Company has long prided himself on personally connecting with customers and local suppliers on a daily basis to ensure product satisfaction and to answer any questions. Now armed with a Facebook fan page, Shatto Milk Company reaches more than 8,000 fans who get updates about Shatto products, flavors, farm events and other company information, combined with an even greater level of transparency that allows customers to more easily contact the company.

Greg Morey, the Marketing Manager of Cafe Trio on the Plaza, said he spends a couple of hours a day maintaining the restaurant’s Facebook page, which currently reaches more than 1,500 fans. On the Facebook page, Morey frequently rewards fans with gift certificates and other give-aways. To enter one of the contests, fans have to guess a number in a specified range. It's a dual strategy that rewards fans for their loyalty, and also ensures that the winners will tell others about Cafe Trio, thereby increasing their prospective customer base.

“These contests have helped expand our fan base exponentially,” he said. “The activity keeps us in the news feed and hence in an ever-growing stream of awareness. When I post a comment about a special cocktail, menu item, or event, fans may not post a comment, but a few might make that snap decision to drop by that day or within the next few days. It's about keeping the brand near the top of the choice list.”

How to make social networking work for businesses

Businesses’ growing use of these services to communicate directly with customers has spawned an industry of social media marketing consultants, like Overland Park-based Evans Media Group. President and CMO Paul Evans said the company became an early adopter of social media about three years ago when it started advising clients to get on Facebook, FriendFeed and others.

As use of the sites has grown, Evans and Sara Paxton, the company’s managing partner and CTO, have developed increased expertise on how businesses can turn social networking into increased revenue. They say that engaging in and maintaining a conversation is one of the most important parts of social media for a company, regardless of the service or platform — but that it can’t be all about the business.

“Imagine dating someone self-involved who talks about him- or herself the entire time,” she says. “You don't want to put up with that.”

And that's why Paxton and Evans suggest the following formula for social networking success: businesses should make 90 percent of their posts about the business or links to content, and the other 10 percent should be fun posts on other topics to help give the business a personality.

Paxton and Evans said that by using social networks properly, companies can raise awareness and increase engagement of customers.

“That's the huge piece,” Paxton said. “The people who interact become brand evangelists so quickly. Others will say good things about you, and that's the value of social media and what you can't easily quantify or turn into an ROI.”

Yet for those unexperienced at social media, the opposite can happen as account operators send needless or irrelevant information into cyberspace.

“This is supposed to be an interactive, engaging session,” Paxton said. “Social media isn't just an extension of an ad or web site, and that's the one mistake we see small business owners make.”

And although social media may be more appealing than traditional advertising channels (based in large part on the fact that most social media services are free), Fresh, ID CEO and Social Media Club of Kansas City President Lisa Qualls thinks a combined approach is still a company's best weapon for success.

“All forms of promotion—traditional, experimential and digital—are all needed,” she said. “It's just that companies now have more avenues available for budgets of all sizes, and the benefit of many free-to-use tools that allow them to both promote and communicate with fans and brand enthusiasts. It can be more fulfilling to do a Facebook campaign, or post an ad on YouTube, and get an immediate response and sense of enthusiasm, than to put an ad in a newspaper and see if anyone walks into the store or picks up the phone because of it.”

In a larger sense, the inherent appeal of social media is that through the Internet, the world becomes a smaller, more manageable sphere throughout which interaction is possible regardless of physical location.

“The whole point of the Internet is that it levels the playing field,” Paxton said. “It doesn't matter if you have an NYC office or you're in Manhattan, Kan. If all of these outlets online are consistent, no one really knows the difference.”

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