I broke my foot. No airplanes until July 1, 2011. For the first time in 25 years, I have had time to attend local business networking events. The one held the first week of May nearly knocked me off my crutches.
I live near Louisville, Ky., and my orthopedic surgeon gave me the thumbs up for riding in an automobile and attending meetings at which I could sit. I poked my nose into some Chamber of Commerce events. In Louisville, the fuddy duddy “chamber” name has been abandoned for the more sporty Greater Louisville Inc. or GLI, http://www.greaterlouisville.com/GLI/.
Business First, a local business newspaper, publishes a calendar of local networking events. Among the lineup is “The Power of Digital,” “CFO of the Year” and “Wake Up and Wind Down.” There is a group called Rainmakers, which is a business development system “designed to help you grow your business through strategic relationships.” This is the tip of the iceberg.
You can locate local business networking events. Resources range from running a query on Bing.com or Google.com to visiting special purpose sites. You may come across sites that exist only to deliver mostly vapid information. I explored BizLinks and learned that it was completely wide of the relevancy mark. If you live in Boronia, however, the directory might be useful to you. http://boroniamall.topcities.com/Business Scene, for example, bills itself as “the business and events directory.” My checks revealed that the service works quite well in large cities in the United Kingdom but is of little use to me.
After quite a bit of clicking and scanning, I located In Company at www.incompany.com. The service is “a business and social network, business directory, and online marketplace rolled into one.” Unfortunately, my search for “printing” in Louisville, Ky., returned zero hits.
What this taught me was that learning about local business networking events will require good, old-fashioned networking. There is no online resource that did a comprehensive job of informing me about the St. Matthews Area Business Association, www.smaba.org.
If you are looking for a new online information service to create, you may want to take a closer look at this empty niche.
At the local event, I listened to a program focused on marketing for small businesses. The panel consisted of a local advertising agency and two small business owners. I did not expect to hear that Fancy Dan, online, social marketing was not useful to these two businesses. The message was reinforced by the local agency’s representative who said, and I am pretty sure I have this correct, “The old ways of marketing a small business are working, cost-effective and less hassle than the new services like Groupon and LivingSocial. As you may know, both of these websites allow a business to craft a special offer. The websites get money upfront and then make the deal available on a localized website. The deal is pushed out via e-mail, and the merchant can slap a sticker on this front door reminding customers about the deal.
But what I heard was almost the exact opposite. These small businesses and one local agency suggested cable TV ads, printed coupons distributed at various locations, radio spots, ads in the local printed newspapers and tabloids, and other nondigital channels were the way to go. The surprise marketing method that worked for one business on the panel? Billboards. The thump you heard is my falling off my crutches. My firsthand discovery supports the Ad Age report “Affluency: Being Technology Infused Proves Taxing for Affluent.” Small businesses may not be “affluent” in Ad Age’s sense of the word, but the strong interest in traditional marketing may be a signal that the digital revolution is not working in every sector as anticipated.
The second surprise was that in the Q&A session, a couple of attendees rattled their handcuffs. Because of the terms of these firm’s franchise agreements or reseller licenses, the local company was not permitted to use social media, run a blog about the business or send out business-related tweets. These types of activities were handled by corporate. A violation could result in the licensee getting slapped in leg irons or losing the tie up with the larger firm. Not surprisingly, the idea of tweeting to existing customers was dismissed.
The third surprise was the sophistication of those on the panel. A company with a younger boss was more interested in social media marketing than more senior small business owners. The shocker was that speakers and those in the Q&A session were aware that the demographics of their customers were key indicators. To summarize the comments: a company with customers under 25 were more active with social media, online marketing, and the like. The small businesses with gray-haired customers skipped the “with it” methods.
