The most inexpensive yet impacting way for small businesses to compete with the big boys is to lead with remarkable customer service. I know you’ve heard this before, and I’m almost certain you’ve made a similar claim – “We have great service” or “Our service is why people buy from us” – and yet more often than not, the service isn’t that remarkable. In fact, it’s fairly ordinary. Many mistake providing friendly, attentive service as exceptional when it’s actually the simple expectation or norm. So, what does remarkable service look like?

In an article titled Service-Led Battle Plan by Growing Business, business operator and customer service evangelist, Dominic Monkhouse reveals his approach to taking on his former Internet company (and industry leader) with a commitment to delivering remarkable service. He outlines his philosophy that every instance of human interaction is a moment of truth for a business – something he learned during his early days at retail giant Marks & Spencers:

“It wasn’t uncommon for men to come in and buy a suit on a Friday, cut all the tags off, wear it to a wedding and then bring it back on Monday claiming it didn’t fit,” Monkhouse says, recalling one incident where the item was so creased it couldn’t be resold. Much to his surprise, his manager agreed to take it back, insisting that it was all part of owning and building the store’s reputation.

Monkhouse is fostering a similar culture, and believes it’s futile to get into a war over who’s to blame. “We’re in the IT game,” he says. “Things do go wrong and customers break their own stuff all the time. Then, if they ring us and say: ‘It’s broken,’ we’ll assume responsibility. In fact, we’ll say it’s our fault, so we’ll also take accountability, because without owning the problem, we can’t fix it. We won’t say: ‘Actually, we’ve looked in the log file and we think you logged in and broke it.’”

In other words, sometimes you need to take one on the chin and think about the long-term benefit, rather than succumbing to your gut instinct and becoming defensive. That said, Monkhouse concedes there is a line. He doesn’t think the customer is always right and he won’t tolerate abuse. “If anyone is abusive to any of our staff, it doesn’t matter who they are, we’ll terminate the account,” he says.

Delivering ordinary customer service is a given. Delivery extraordinary service is a commitment. This means owning your customer’s mistakes, owing up to when you screw up, and letting your employees own their roles and have freedom to make decisions to resolve customer issues quickly.  So, are you ready to make every human interaction count?

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PEER 1 10 Year Anniversary Tattoo’s from Charnell Pugsley on Vimeo.

Today at PEER 1 and ServerBeach, we are celebrating 10 years in business. It’s a blast right now! Our staff of 360 in 12 offices around the world have been divided into two teams: Orange and Lime. We’ve got games going on over the next 24 hours for the two teams to compete in, prizes to dish out and our legendary Beer O’Clock to cap it all off. The employee spirit here is incredible. I can stay without hesitation this is the best company and group of people I have ever work for and with in my career.

So how deep does the spirit run in this company? Well, check out this video where three of our staff members in San Antonio, Texas marked the anniversary occasion with company tattoos. Sweet.

With the explosive popularity in Twitter comes the growing annoyance of spammers and businesses using it to primarily sell their wares. Followers like myself are having to get more vigilant about who to unfollow rather than follow. So does that mean Twitter shouldn’t be used for marketing purposes? Not necessarily. At PEER 1 and ServerBeach, we have company Twitter accounts where we update followers on web hosting products an services, network issues, customer stories, design and programming tips, and other items to help followers run a successful online business. We also use it for advertising with almost no complaint. In fact, since we started advertising through Twitter six months ago, our followers have grown 400% and we’ve reached $10,000 in monthly recurring sales. So, how has this been possible?

The first thing I decided when we began experimenting with advertising through Twitter, was to have it available at the exact same time for the same duration every week. The next thing was to publish it on our company website. As a result, we created the weekly 48 Hour Twitter Promo, which starts every Wednesday at 6pm EST and ends by Friday 6pm EST. During that time, followers can take advantage of a special promotion on our web hosting services. Outside of these times, we do not do any advertising through Twitter. This sets the expectations up front with our followers and minimizes their annoyance with random advertising blitzes.

Followers have now come to expect we will send out a 48 Hour Twitter Promo notice every Wednesday. So much so, we now get inquiries about the promo details in advance or re-tweets of the promo by our followers. Respecting their time and striking the right balance between information and advertising are key to using Twitter as a successful marketing channel. And as Twitter evolves, so does the culture around it change, so continually re-evaluating the approach is also necessary to ensure the balance is still there.

If you’re still on the fence as to whether to tap in to social media for marketing, below are some staggering numbers provided by Jon Swartz of USA Today that should get your attention:

Facebook

• More than 10,000 websites use Facebook Connect, a service that lets Facebook users log in to affiliated sites using their Facebook account and share information from those sites with their Facebook friends.
• About 30 million Facebook members access it through mobile devices.

Twitter

• Twitter users spend 66% more dollars on the Internet than non-Twitter users, says market researcher ComScore.

LinkedIn

• LinkedIn has more than 365,000 company profiles. More than 12 million small-business professionals are members of LinkedIn.

MySpace
More than 1 million small businesses and individuals promote their goods and services on MySpace.

Smartphones power the trend

• As smartphones such as iPhone and BlackBerry take off, more people are updating their Facebook and Twitter profiles while on the move.
• Smartphone shipments are expected to surge to 164 million this year, up 13% from 2008, says market researcher Forward Concepts.
• The mobile social-networking industry is expected to become a $3.3 billion market worldwide by 2013, ABI Research predicts.

One of the best and funniest explanations of what social media is in the slideshow below. If you’re not quite sure still what this umbrella term means or what impact it can have on your business, then do yourself a favor, and watch. Thanks for sharing Lance!

Jennifer Tanzi

Here is a helpful article for novice small business operators looking to understand the impact of SEO on their sales as written by my guest, Jennifer Tanzi of Buydomains.com:

Using SEO to Court Search Engines

Ever since Google became a verb, small business owners have wondered about guaranteeing prime placement when prospective clients go a-typing in their search engines. Times have changed since you simply added “AAA” to your business name and scored first place in the yellow page listings. Marketing yourself is more complicated in the digital age, but with a little bit of insight and a few simple steps, you can catch the eyes of those search engines, and propel your businesses name up those prospective clients’ lists of results.

You know how people use name repetition (sometimes relentlessly) to remember yours? (“Hi, Sandra, so good to meet you, Sandra. Can I get you a beverage, Sandra? Sandra, let me take your coat.”) Search Engine Optimization — SEO — works kind of the same way. Repeating key phrases in your domain name and throughout your website pages makes your business more appealing to the search engines. Once they find you, so will all those new clients. You just need to put some thought into choosing the right keywords, and some craft into your copy so your message sounds fresh, and not repetitive.

First, figure out your key keywords. Let’s say you sell organic lavender, tended and harvested on your own pristine acres of New England farmland. You’ve done your homework on choosing domain names that attract type-in traffic and landed one that screams “organic lavender” right there in the URL. Now, how can you ensure that every person looking for your product sees your business name in lights when they go Metacrawling?

Perhaps your website boasts glorious photos of lavender plants so vivid you can smell them through the screen, and describes memorably the many attributes of your farm — the perfectly tended soil, the soothing scents of the lavender as you coax the shoots from the earth. But when Elinor the Florist needs a supplier for her tremendously successful hand-tied organic bouquets, what words will she type into her search engine? Organic lavender. And, since she wants to go local, maybe also, “New England.”

So there you have ‘em. New England. Organic. Lavender.

Your new SEO keywords, New England organic lavender, should appear five or six times on each page of 500 – 600 words of copy. So your site needs to describe the perfectly tended soil of your New England organic lavender farm, the soothing scents of your New England organic lavender plants as you coax the shoots from the soil. Placement of the keywords is critical, too. You should include them in <H1> header tags, in your first paragraph and in links throughout the site.

As you master SEO, there are a few pitfalls you’ll want to avoid. Vary the titles and meta data of your pages, so that if several different pages of your site pop up in the search results, customers see difference slices of information about your business from your site.
When you’ve mastered the SEO strategies, test your efforts. Cruise the web yourself to see which sites your keywords bring up, and what your competitors are doing differently to place high in the results. And be sure to use web analytics on your site so you know exactly how your visitors are finding you.

To small business owners, those search engines might at first seem a fickle bunch. But once they get to know you — through SEO — they are really going to love you.

Great post written on the value of using the free WordPress platform not just as a blog, but as a website. I’ve talked to many startups and small business owners that don’t have a website to just use WordPress for their site. So many advantages including the fact you can get something up in minutes! But, more importantly, there is so much functionality and control built into WordPress, along with it being very search-engine friendly, that it can’t be ignored. Here is an excerpt from the post “Why Settle for a Blog When You Can Have a Blogsite“:

Blogging tools have evolved significantly due to the tremendous popularity of blogging in general. Because of this evolution blog software has actually become one of the best ways for small businesses to easily build feature rich, simple to edit, search engine friendly web sites.

I would urge anyone without a web site or with a boring static brochure site to take a good hard look at free piece of software called WordPress. The current version of the software can be downloaded from WordPress.org (They have a hosted blog version at WordPress.com but you want the download from the .org site.)

You can use this software to create your entire website whether you have or want a blog or not. (But, of course you need a blog too.) One of the best functions of this set-up is that anyone in your organization with the proper login permission can update and edit the site including adding pages, text and images without any knowledge of HTML or web design software such as Dreamweaver.

On of the core elements of WordPress is something called a theme. This is essentially the design template that controls the look and feel of all of the pages throughout the site. There are lots of places you can get pre-designed templates for blogs, but recently designers have started creating themes for the type of web site implementation I’m talking about in this article. Using these themes your web site looks like, well, a web site, instead of a blog.

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Too funny. And a little too true.

Guy Kawasaki at SXSW 2009.

Lucky me. I got to sit down with marketing guru and popular author, Guy Kawasaki across from our ServerBeach booth just minutes ago at SXSW. A Tweet up was brought together at the Opera booth with Guy who fielded any questions. He’s really excited about his latest venture, Alltop. He’s launching a MyAlltop this upcoming week. Very cool guy and refreshingly down to earth. I’m a big fan of Guy. My company, PEER 1 is one of the sponsors of JFSA’s Innovators Lunch with Guy as the speaker in Vancouver on April 1st. This by chance meeting was a nice surprise.

The original founders of Microsoft... and a token brown guy.

Last week, I had the pleasure of touring the humungus Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA. Suren Singh of Microsft gave myself and my colleagues a personal tour of the grounds which is home to over 30,000 employees and spreads across 8 million square feet. I still can’t get my head around it. What struck me most about the impressive grounds is the university campus feel it had that got me feeling nostalgic about my days at UVic. There are plenty of soccer fields outfitted with outdoor artificial turf, immaculate landscaping that retains the pacific northwest feel, and buildings up buildings divided by business concentrations.

The highlight for me was a visit to the Microsoft museum that covered the history of the company from it’s humble start in 1975 up to present day innovations like Surface and Xbox 360. By the way, Surface is VERY cool and ironically (I learned) that it almost never came to fruition. There are endless possibilities for this technology to be used in everyday workplace and home appliances. Below are some photos from the museum, but quite honestly, they don’t do it any justice. Visit it in person if you ever get the chance. Worth the trip out to Redmond. And, thank you Suren for the hospitality!