What’s in your visibility tool bag?

Instead of talk­ing about strat­egy this week I’m going to focus on tools and then move into strat­egy. Before we can come close to talk­ing about strat­egy we have to first know what tools are avail­able and how we can best use them. Then when we start build­ing a vis­i­bil­ity strat­egy we’ll be more able to eas­ily choose the tools that match the way we want our busi­ness to go. The Mindmap dia­gram below is a visual rep­re­sen­ta­tion of how vis­i­bil­ity tools fit into

Remem­ber, vis­i­bil­ity depends on com­mu­ni­ca­tions to be suc­cess­ful, and until now com­mu­ni­ca­tions tools have been extremely lim­ited and largely inef­fec­tive for small busi­nesses. Also remem­ber that com­mu­ni­ca­tions tools for small busi­nesses have mostly been one way, lit­tle if any inter­ac­tion between con­sumer and busi­ness was possible.

Today, how­ever, we can choose (empha­sis on choose) any com­bi­na­tion of on-line and off-line tools to help the right peo­ple find and con­verse with us. Because of the wide diver­sity of tools we also can make our choices accord­ing to how we want our busi­nesses to grow. To begin let’s take a look at on-line tools.

On-line

An on-line pres­ence can and should be built to match your business/marketing goals to ensure  your vis­i­bil­ity strat­egy is suc­cess­ful. Your on-line vis­i­bil­ity goals should include:

• Being found in many more ways than through your name. Not every­one knows or asso­ciates the kind of work they like with your name, an online pres­ence offers that abil­ity by allow­ing you to become asso­ci­ated with not only your medium but also your style and vision. Searchers online will be able to find you if you can be linked to key terms impor­tant to you and your business.

• Elim­i­nat­ing geo­graphic bar­ri­ers in order to build net­works that com­pli­ment and rein­force
  your sales venues. The right tools applied to the right venue can pro­duce repeat sales over the long term.

• Diver­si­fy­ing your income sources by pro­vid­ing a wider range of choice for gen­er­at­ing addi­tional and focused income streams from your work. An online pres­ence that matches your strate­gies can offer a wider vari­ety of oppor­tu­ni­ties and venues to sell your work and be visible.

• Build­ing a net­work of buy­ers and sup­port­ers that can rein­force and com­pli­ment your off-line efforts. On their own off line vis­i­bil­ity tac­tics are likely to be even less effec­tive now because they have more noise to com­pete with, the same is true for online tactics.

Tools

There are lots of tools avail­able and there will be more and more com­ing. In order to sim­plify things I’ve divided them into three groups based on how they can be used  today. Some tools will over­lap, oth­ers can be used alone or in com­bi­na­tion, in gen­eral their use in most cases, is lim­ited only by our imag­i­na­tion. The three major groups are:

Social Media

The core of Social media is build­ing net­works for peo­ple indi­vid­u­ally or as groups to con­nect, for the pur­pose of inter­act­ing and shar­ing infor­ma­tion. Con­nec­tions are already present in our com­mu­ni­ties, they play major roles in what we do, what we value and who we hang out with. Social Media sim­ply amps up our abil­ity to be more selec­tive in those con­nec­tions and in turn con­sciously  build them into a net­work we can expe­ri­ence first hand.

Included in this group are: Face­book, Twit­ter, MySpace, friend feed, RSS feed, Yelp, foursquare, etc.

Vir­tual  hub

Vir­tual hub is a broad term I coined to describe you and your place on the inter­net, it is your vir­tual home or busi­ness head­quar­ters. That home can be a web site that allows users to see and or buy your work, it can also be a place users can get to know you much in the same way you get to know your favorite neigh­bor­hood busi­ness. It is where peo­ple come to check in, to see what you’re up to, what you’re doing etc.

New to the vir­tual hub con­cept is the means to build mobile hubs that both sup­port your web site or blog and your off-line pres­ence as well. The rise of GPS based tools now gives artists the oppor­tu­nity to increase face time with buy­ers enrich­ing those connections.

This group includes: web site, blog, yelp, foursquare etc

Search Engines

Search engines pro­vide the path or con­nec­tion point for poten­tial buy­ers to find you, they are in many ways no dif­fer­ent than the Yel­low Pages. They dif­fer from Yel­low pages in that your busi­ness doesn’t auto­mat­i­cally get listed, and your rel­a­tive vis­i­bil­ity is linked to your abil­ity to meet their cri­te­ria and fol­low their rules.

Meet­ing search engine cri­te­ria and using those cri­te­ria to increase vis­i­bil­ity is what SEO is all about. Opti­miz­ing your web pres­ence is like hav­ing a day-glo glove increase your chance of being seen when you put your hand up. Your abil­ity to be seen amongst all the other noise com­pet­ing for atten­tion depends heav­ily on what you can do improve your chances of being found when you put your hand up. While you don’t need to be an expert you do need to know what it takes to be found reg­u­larly by search engines.

This group includes : Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO), Google, Bing, and other search utilities

What gets used when?

The tools in each of these groups can work inde­pen­dently how­ever, just like most tool sets they can also work effec­tively in com­bi­na­tion depend­ing on the prob­lem we are faced with. Our choice of com­bi­na­tions is dri­ven by our  vis­i­bil­ity strategy.

So, for exam­ple, until recently Facebook’s  use as a net­work build­ing tool while effec­tive at the same time it was lim­ited by its’ closed mem­ber­ship model. Facebook’s  closed sys­tem lim­ited it’s use­ful­ness as vis­i­bil­ity tool to only Face­book active members.

How­ever, Facebook’s recent changes in its’ model appear to be elim­i­nat­ing the closed model. The pro­lif­er­a­tion of “Like” but­tons give “out­siders” an oppor­tu­nity to link them­selves with small busi­nesses and indi­vid­u­als. Facebook’s change in the way its’ “Fan” pages work allows them to be indexed by search engines which also help it as a use­ful vis­i­bil­ity tool.