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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LinkedIn is a great resource to connect with former colleagues, business partners and classmates. You can establish and build relationships that could help you land a job or strike a business deal but it can also be helpful as generating sales leads.

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Twitter.com is a micro blogging site..or in simple terms, a site to make statements that do not take up many lines.

With only 140 characters to write, some great conversations can emerge on Twitter. Some Twitter users will have thousands of followers, some will only have about 50 followers

Many people do not like Twitter because they don’t know what to do. Others don’t understand the purpose and I have even heard some getting frustrated from it. (more…)

When I see the same issue coming up for so many clients, it makes me think that something more is at work. My latest issue that seems to crop up with nearly every client is tracking offline sales back to Web activity. I mean, I know it isn’t easy, but it’s amazing how rarely I run into a client who feels able to take on the task, much less has a system in place already.

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