I had a really interesting conversation recently with one of our clients regarding communications with customers. We were discussing the need to blog, and the need to utilize the large number of emails from interested customers they had collected.  They asked a very good question, asking what it is that they should be writing about. Thankfully I had Dawn Foster’s great post about corporate blogging tips to show them, but they initially didn’t see the real beauty in blogging for your company, activating a conversation with your customers.

The bad news is that as a start-up or small business, your existence is defined by the lack of budget that you often face. One of the biggest manifestations of this challenge is the need to be creative and selective in the way that you market. But the advantage that you have is that you’re now in the era of web 2.0. Social applications and connections are one of the defining pieces of the growth of web 2.0. Applications and tools such as blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and a host of others are designed for users to comment, interact and talk. That means that you as a business can use these applications to comment, interact, and talk about you and your company.  So use them! Open yourself up to your customers and talk about what you’re doing. Get their feedback, get their comments. Then interact with your customers when you can. Post to them, thank them, make them feel a part of your company. Truly word of mouth at its best!

The concern that our clients had about this process was a lack of message control. Opening yourself up means allowing your customers to say whatever they want. Saying whatever they think generally isn’t what your corporate script says. But as a small business, you need to set your customers free and let them be the salesforce you don’t have.

Take a look at the success Barack Obama has had literally turning the users of his website into a nationwide network of campaign volunteers. Or the success Starbucks has had with mystarbucksidea.com. The point is that you shouldn’t be reluctant about being a part of these conversations. Your customers often know what you do and how you do it better than you do. Most importantly, their experience with you and your products can be extremely valuable as endorsements.

So, how do you do it.

Message Control 2.0 - Give your customers something to talk about. Open up and talk about what you’re working on. Ask them questions about how they used your products. Get them to tell you how you did, and what caused them to feel that way about you. But get them talking on your terms with your discussion points. You’re able to get great feedback on things that customers like and dislike, and things that they need from new launches. The Starbucks and Obama sites are great examples of this, where both companies were able to control and start the conversation, but let go of what resulted from the conversation.

Give your customers a reason to care - Now this part is a little easier if you’re Obama or Starbucks, you know, something that people are addicted to, but you can do it. You’re looking at one of the ways right now, giving out good information in your communications. Customers are far less interested in corporate schill than we would like them to be, but they are interested in solutions. And hey, you’ve built a business around helping to solve a problem that someone has, so talk about how to fix it.  Your users will appreciate it, and continue to check it. Plus you can give them a forum to discuss what issues they face, and you can get new ideas directly from them.

Don’t be afraid of putting your brand in the hands of your customers. Worst case scenario you get great feedback on what you’re doing wrong.

At Intrigo, we pride ourselves on challenging our clients to strengthen their ideas and business plans, and this often involves brainstorming ideas that we think can supplement the work that our clients have already done. It’s part of what has made us successful over the past two years, but it also can lead to some challenges.  That’s because new ideas generally beget more new ideas. To borrow from IBM’s commercials, when you spend all your time “idea-ating”, you don’t actually get anything done.

As an emerging business, your focus and determination are everything.  Being an entrepenuer means working at least twice as hard as someone working for an established company.  You generally have a list of to-dos, with more added to that list than gets accomplished each day.  And while it’s incredibly important to keep honing your strategy and your ideas, you can’t ever lose focus on the reason why you started out in the first place. To give you an example, one of our current clients is working on a social utility whose major market is college students. We suggested the idea of building a Facebook application in order to more quickly generate their user base, and to try to counteract the competition of Facebook. Well in the course of our presentation, we went through a number of the most used Facebook apps, talked about the reasons why they were successful, and why Intrigo thought their business model could translate onto Facebook.

Well, two meetings later they came back with ideas for four new Facebook applications, none of which had any real connection to their initial business model.  They had momentarily lost their focus, and had they continued down this path they would have partially crippled their ability to pursue their initial plan and model.

This group is one that is under intense pressure and scrutiny from their investment group, which happens to be one that has not invested in their type of company before.  Thus the investors are somewhat fearful of the business model, especially the Twitter like model of building a user base first, building a revenue model second.  Thus when Facebook presented itself as another area for growth and possible revenues, they shifted their focus onto Facebook and its opportunities, rather than continuing their focus on their actual business that they had actual investors for.

So, here are the lessons to be learned from this.

1. Write your mission and goals as soon as you can. Memorize them, recite them to yourself throughout the day. You started your business because you have a passion for it, and what you’re trying to do. Make sure you remember that.

2. As an entrepenuer, you only have so much time throughout the day. It’s an immense challenge to build your company, don’t distract yourself from your goals.

3. When you come up with an idea, ask yourself whether or not it fits your goals. If it doesn’t, put it on the back burner for a little while. If it’s a good idea you can come back to it. Just don’t try to launch two companies at the same time.

4. Don’t be ruled by fear. You started your business because you believed in it. Don’t allow pressure to lead you astray from your mission. Believe in it, work hard, that’s what gives you the best chance to succeed.

Being a start-up is never as easy as you would like it to be. Don’t forget that, and don’t ever forget the reasons why you started in the first place. That passion and inspiration are the only things that can carry you through the tough times and on to the pathway to success.

*In case you are wondering, we’re currently in the process of starting to develop one of those Facebook applications for our client. We worked it into a promotional tool and feature of their current application, so we’re working to build it as a new piece of their model.  But I think that’s a whole other blog post.