Often, I work with businesses trying to determine the return on investment for their online marketing. For e-commerce companies, it’s not that hard. They can use their Web analytics to see how many people are coming to the site and how many actually convert by checking out. But what if you sell offline? Then it’s not so easy.

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This post is part of Make A Referral Week – an innovative project from John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing to generate 1000 referred leads to 1000 deserving small businesses.

If I were to ask you what the secret was to getting someone to recommend and refer your business, what would you say? Perhaps you might focus on the experience that you provide. Or you might believe that this is a behaviour that you should focus on illiciting from only your best customers. Now what if I told you that the single biggest reason someone chooses whether or not to refer your business has very little to do with their experience with you? That seems counter intuitive. Yet if this were false, then everyone who had a positive experience would share it with someone else. And everyone who had a negative one would do the same.

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When we think about social media, we think about big companies doing big things–Dell seems to be everyone’s poster child for social media success these days. But a lot of the real action is taking place in small businesses. While it is true that it is the rare small business that is succeeding with social media, the stories have been around for a while, with more emerging every day. If you are missing the range of social media employed by small business, open your eyes. You might see a Kogi Korean taco truck.

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