A new study from Hubspot, who canvessed 167 small to medium sized business owners and executives,  is both encouraging and confusing.

The percentage of leads from each source was broken down as:

Other (including public relations and print and online display advertising) 25%
SEO 16%
Email Marketing 14%
Pay Per Click 13%
Telemarketing 9%
Blogs+Social Media 8%
Trade Shows 8%
Direct Mail 7%

I find this very encouraging – particularly as we offer services for PR, SEO, email, PPC and Social Media, that’s 76% of the leads right there! – it’s certainly good to know that more and more businesses are trying a variety of methods to generate leads, rather than sticking to whatever they have done in the past. That has certainly been my feeling from talking to clients in all kinds of businesses lately.

However, I’m also slightly skeptical of the accuracy, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, if you’re in are a small or medium sized business yourself, you know the difficulty in pinning down exactly how a lead found you.

If they remember you from a trade show, but Google* you to find your contact info, does that count as SEO or a trade show?

If you send offers via both email and direct mail, as many of our clients do, which one gets the credit for the sale?

And Mike Volpe, Hubspot’s VP of marketing, even goes on to say that there are additional benefits to blogging,

“Not only are you creating a community around blog articles, but all those articles get indexed by search engines, so blogging has elements of search engine optimization (SEO) as well”

So how can we accurately claim that SEO is 16% vs Blogging’s 8%?  I don’t feel that we can. But I also don’t see that as a problem.

One thing we try to stress here at Step Ahead is that your marketing efforts, particularly onlne, will help each other. Being active on Twitter can drive traffic to your blog, which can help with your SEO, which can get people to sign up for your email marketing, which can inform people about your trade show appearances, which, well, you get the idea.

One final thing which jumped out at me from this was this statistic:

Companies with less than 50 employees earmarked more than three times as much of spending on blogging and social media than larger ones, and 36% more on SEO.

On the Internet, there is no reason the small companies can’t compete with the Big Boys. In fact, the lack of barriers to getting things accomplished, which plague many a large corporation, can be to your advantage. If you aren’t already blogging, tweeting, facebook-ing, etc, you can start right now. You don’t need to organize all the different departments, have a bunch of strategy meetings, get the lawyers to overlook things, and waste months of everybody’s time. Just sign up for an account and jump in.

So, what are you waiting for?

*I really don’t like using Google as a verb, but everyone else does it!

To anyone paying attention, it is quite clear that businesses have to be a lot more engaged these days in managing their reputations online.  Yet I’m still amazed at the number of people who have still failed to grasp this fact.

The world has already changed. You have a problem with a company’s customer service, you’re not limited to bad-mouthing them to a couple of friends anymore, you can blog about it, Twitter, put up a rant on YouTube, etc, etc and have your complaint heard by millions. At little or no cost to you at all.

Some people are catching on, and unsurprisingly, those in high-tech industries are quick to adapt. Here’s an example I loved this week, showing with humor how to turn the tide from negative to positive:

A couple of years ago, games maker EA Sports released the 2007 version of the popular Madden Football game. It contained a bug which caused your quarterback to throw the ball backwards. Not a big deal, but pretty funny – one fan’s video has had over 300,000 views on YouTube since he put it up.

Then this week, another game from EA Sports, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 had a similar bug. With a certain shot you could make Tiger walk on water and play the ball from a floating spot. Again, a fan video generated over 250,000 views.

This time though, EA Sports was on the ball (so to speak). They responded with their own video, featuring the real Woods ‘really’ walking on water to play the shot from the game:

At the time of writing, this has had just shy of a million views. In a week. That is an enormous amount of free publicity, and an even better example of how to manage your online reputation.

(and if so, how?)

This is a question that Bud, Lyn and I discussed for our clients at Step Ahead. Being pretty evangelical about Twitter, we wanted to try and figure out how best to use it. Short answer? We don’t know.

Rodney Rumford has a great post ‘33 Brands that Suck on Twitter‘ – the basic premise being that most top brands, Budweiser, Disney, Marlboro, etc have either had their Twitter name hijacked, or they’ve claimed it and then failed to use it.

My initial thought was, what a waste! Here are a whole host of companies that are failing to interact with their customers. They’re missing the boat, stuck in the past, and many other cliches, but after giving it some thought, that might be too harsh.

There are a few companies that are doing Twitter well – Comcast and Dell both received press for using Twitter to respond to customer complaints for instance – but, not coincidentally, they are both in the tech field, where many Twitterers are. They can monitor for “Comcast sucks!” and try and help. But how exactly would that work for Marlboro?

Further, it isn’t specifially DELL that is writing, but Richard at Dell. He can engage in conversations without having to worry about misrepresenting the corporate overlords. Similar to the way Matt Cutts can blog about being a Google insider, and offer tips, news, etc, but all the while he makes it clear that the opinions are those of him as an individual not those of Google as a publically traded company.

So, how can companies use Twitter? Well, possibly as a replacement for RSS -linking to their latest blog post, or news release – which, while not groundbreaking, I actually find quite useful for keeping up to date on things. I don’t necessarily need to have a conversation with everyone! Beyond that, it’s time to use your imagination, think about who you want to attract and give them what they want.

I looked at a few top brands that *are* using Twitter to find out how they are approaching things.

• Quickbooks seem to be using it as a somewhat interactive training tool, with links to webinars, Q&As, videos and things.
• M&Ms have tried to use Twitter to create an identity of the Green M&M character, which I’m not sure works perfectly, but at least is an attempt at something different.
• Whole Foods is probably the best corporate use I’ve seen. They are actively engaging in conversations with their followers, joining in rather than just selling, and it seems to work for them – at the time of writing they have over 2600 followers!

So, we’re back to the begining. Should Brands Twitter? Maybe. I guess it depends on your brand and customers, but like with blogging, I think you’d be much better to not Tweet at all, than do it half-heartedly…I’m looking at you, MGM Grand!