Tiny Dynamos

Marketing genius Seth Godin wrote a fantastic post recently which got me thinking. Titled "Memo to the Very Small," he addresses the problems a tiny business experiences when faced with introducing Web 2.0 and other Internet resources into its day-to-day marketing plans.

What he outlines for small businesses is, I believe, essentially workable for tiny nonprofit organizations as well as individuals seeking to market their passions.

"...should they become experts in the art of building and maintaining a website?" he asks. "We're talking about people who don't like to tweak," he continues.

I definitely see small organizations grappling with expanding their online presence. "How can we make our Web site more dynamic?" I've been asked. These, too, are people who don't like to "tweak." In fact, I've had computer-phobic people run out of the room at my mention of the word "blog." (I don't take it personally!)

Seth proposes a short set of wonderful, easy-to-implement, and dare-we-say-it - fun - activities:

1. Sign up for Typepad's cheapest service and start a blog.
I prefer Blogger (just click on the orange square above and to the left), as I think their site is much more user-friendly (plus they're free), but there are people who swear by Wordpress (also free) and Typepad. The key here is creating a dynamic Web presence that takes little or no technical expertise.

2. Build a Squidoo lens.
Squidoo is another very easy, and fun, way of both getting your message out there as well as linking to resources you find helpful and organizations you work with. It's a way of demonstrating your knowledge while giving potential users a "one-stop shopping" list of tools.

3. Make a sign with your phone number on it, and take pictures of it around your office, your workspace, your basement studio, wherever you do your work.
Seth's idea here is to match in the customer's/user's minds your service/area of expertise with tangible, physical reality. I can see definite uses of this idea, especially for writers and for organizations dealing with abstract concepts that don't easily reduce to a logo and a single picture.

4. Encourage your constituents or partners to build Squidoo lenses about your business.
Here's where Seth's idea really takes off - and starts to build in features that not only make your online presence more dynamic, but starts conversations that may just feature you as the subject (or at least the main go-to person in your area of expertise).

Fascinating stuff from the front lines of the communications revolution!