People are talking about your business online, whether you know it or not.  Social media has made it easy for the people who buy your products to converse with each other.  It’s also made it easier than ever for you to get feedback from your customers, and react to their ideas.

There are 4 steps to getting started in social media for your agritourism business:

1. Listen – find their conversations online and hear what they’re saying about you.
2. Converse – respond to both good and bad comments, not like an institution, but like a person.
3. Create – Give people interesting stuff that they really want. Use text, photos, audio and video to tell the story of your business from their point of view.
4. Encourage – Do what you can to give visitors a story they can tell to others – not a story about your business, but about themselves.  If you do that, they will willingly tell the stories, and your business will benefit.

View the slideshow.

If you’re into multimedia, that’s great.  But lots of interesting text should accompany everything you do — even audio and video.  Steve Rubel makes a compelling case that text — not video — is still king of the Web.  Why? Here are some highlights:

• It’s scannable – according to Jakob Nielsen users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average site visit and 20% is more likely

• Three letters: SEO – For all that Google Universal Search has done to elevate video, search results are still largely made up of text and everyone wants better SEO

• Distribution – Nothing flies like text. It’s so easy to cut and
  paste it and send it somewhere or to clip and re-syndicate it via
  email, RSS or social networks

I think he’s right, and my experience with blogs and podcasts bears that out.  I think multimedia is still very important.  It’s easy and inexpensive to do, and it adds a lot of information you can’t convey very well with text.  But all your multimedia content should be accompanied by text.  It makes it more findable, more sharable, and more scannable.  And those are three important factors in making yourself and your organization more influential.

If you think of “word-of-mouth marketing” as a way to get people to tell your story to others, you’re doomed to fail.  Copyblogger’s Brian Clark has a great explanation for why that’s true.  He points out that people really aren’t that into telling stories your story.

People tell stories about themselves. They even buy things in order to say something about themselves.

They don’t give a hoot about your story unless it furthers their own
personal narrative. If it does, your story comes along for the ride.

And this is why providing good, interesting content is so vital to your communications effort.  People are willing to talk about the product or service you provide, only insofar as your product or service makes them look good, or makes their lives better.  If you can help people become better-informed, or more enthusiastic, you’re encouraging word-of-mouth marketing in a way that’s far more valuable than if you simply “tell your story” to them.

Sonia Simone at Copyblogger has good advice.  Don’t be fancy.  Write simply.

Peter Borges has a great take on what changes we’ll see in how organizations conduct marketing online this year. In a nutshell, it’s about producing great content that will 1) allow people to find them on the Web and 2) engage those people once they’re found.

Notice I didn’t say that marketers need to commit to being found in search engines with an effective conversion strategy. Marketers want qualified buyers coming to their doorstep.  To do this a whole-hearted strategy is needed of producing a lot of great content which can engage prospective buyers on the web no matter the platform – search engines, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, industry blogs, industry social networking sites, etc., etc.

Notice I said whole-heartedly, not half-hearted. Pete points out the cost of an SEO consultant is several thousands per month. That’s because an effective SEO strategy requires creating and optimizing a lot of content. It’s not just about optimizing for search engines. SEO in 2009 is about optimizing for the web. That takes a whole-hearted commitment, not a half-hearted commitment.

Yes, it’s a lot of work to produce really interesting stuff that people will want to consume online. But it’s important to do it. So if you can’t commit the time, considering hiring a freelance producer who’ll do it for you. Whether it’s a copywriter who serves as an extension of your communications staff, or an experience freelance reporter who can record an interesting podcast, there are lots of ways to make 2009 an important year for your communications and marketing effort.

via Junta42