We’ve often posted on the importance of consumers and small business owners to buy local. In June of last year we posted More on Shopping Locally where we mentioned the 3/50 Project and Independent We Stand, so when I ran across a great article on the Independent We Stand site titled  Why Buy Local? Because “Independents Do it Best” I thought it would make a good follow up.

The article is written by Bob Taylor, president and CEO of Do It Best Corp. which is a cooperative that traces it’s roots back to 1945. Now with more than 4,000 members, it emphasizes the customer service and feeling of community is the hallmark of independent small businesses. To quote from the article:

“Ultimately, independents “do it best”. The customer service and sense of community you get from the employees, managers and owners is something you can’t find at most mass merchants. We independents also give back to the community far more than big boxes. In fact, for every square foot occupied by a local firm, the local economic impact is $179, versus $105 for a chain store.”

I would also recommend what the article suggests, next time you are in the market for almost any purchase use this handy local business search engine on the Independent We Stand site. Simply put in your location information and on the next page select what type of product or service you are interested in It is quick and easy and certainly a good place to start.

I must confess I am not a heavy user of Twitter, so I was very surprised by a recent survey covered in Twitter Most Likely To Convince Customers To Buy, New Survey Shows that presented the following statistics.

“Thirty-two percent of respondents said that they were more likely to buy something from a company after “following” the company on Twitter and 24 percent of respondents said they were more likely to make a purchase after “liking” a brand on Facebook.’

By the way, email came in last at 21 percent of respondents who reported that a subscription to a company’s email list might lead to a sale. I did notice a few things about the survey that might have had some impact on the results. The survey was done by a digital marketing firm on British consumers, so American consumers would probably have produced different results.

There is also a very good video at the bottom of the article that gives some ideas on getting started with social media in your small business . They recommend Twitter as a place to start due to the fact that it is simpler than some of the other social media. They also make the point that while social media is free, it can also be a huge time waster.

Last but not least there is a link at the bottom of the piece to an article on a new Twitter service as well as a link to an article on the new Facebook Timeline, which we covered back in March in the post New Facebook Tools.

We’ve done several postings in the past on local search, but we’ve always focused on the many tools Google provides to improve local search results for your business. The local search market has evolved and now has more ways for people to find your business, so in this post we’ll focus on what your business needs to do to make the most out of local search.

I read a recent article from Small Business Trends, 5 Things You Need To Have To Survive Local Search, that began by detailing the differences between local search and general organic search and then provided these 5 tips for optimizing local search no matter how a potential customer finds your business.

1. Keep Your Online Business Information Accurate and Up-To-Date
2. Make Your Website The Best It Can Be
3. Be Ubiquitous
4. Make Local Profiles Represent Your Company Impressively
5. Get Reviews

I know from personal experience how important reviews are. My old gas power unit died and I have several attachments so it can be used as a cultivator, trimmer, snow blower, edger, blower, and pruner. Obviously I have a fair amount of money invested in all the attachments so I want a replacement that will work with all of them.

I did some research and found out that I could go with a gas or electric replacement, but I had some concerns about the electric unit having enough power to run my cultivator. I read the reviews and several people commented on the more than adequate power of the unit. I then read reviews on the gas unit. Almost all of them slammed the unit as being unreliable, hard to start, lots of defects, etc.  Needles to say I’ll be picking up the electric unit at my local hardware store this weekend.

The article provides several good arguments about how important reviews are for a number of reasons, but it doesn’t give any examples of ways to encourage people to leave reviews. That might be a good topic for a future posting, but have you done anything with your business to encourage reviews?

How the world of communication has changed in the last 42 years. I use that number because in the year 1969 CompuServe became the first major public Internet service provider in the United States. By the way, if you have just a little time The Brief History of Social Media provides a fascinating summary of the changes in technology over the years. Before the Internet, businesses had to communicate with customers and vendors with mail, telephones, telexes, and a relatively new technology  on the scene, the FAX machine.

So, does all this new technology render the old fashioned phone call obsolete? Not according to When you should pick up the phone, and why. The article gives these instances where a phone call can be the most effective.

• When it is the fastest way to handle something.
• When email and other methods aren’t getting it done.
• When there is any risk of “tone” being misunderstood.
• When it’s personal.
• When someone asks you to.

I can think of several examples for each of the points, but I had a recent experience that perfectly illustrates the second instance. My company uses CDs and DVDs to distribute software and instructional materials for many of our products. Several years ago we crunched the numbers and found that we could save a lot of money and increase efficiency by creating the material ourselves.

We initially purchased two duplicators to produce the media and two printers to print directly on the CDs and DVDs. Now we still have two duplicators but four printers and are busier than ever. The duplicators use robotics and eight drives to produce the discs with minimal human interaction, you simply load up to 1000 discs with multiple master discs and start it running.

The only component that fails over time are the disc drives, and with all that background I’m finally getting to my example. We recently got some very large orders for material and several of our drives were acting up on one of the units. I emailed our vendor with serial numbers and other information and ordered some drives. I didn’t hear back that day (unusual for that vendor), so the next day I called them up and the drives were shipped the same day at my request.

The email was effective in getting them some information and served as a record of the transaction, but the phone call got the job done. I also like that I could give them my credit card information over the phone since I won’t email that sort of information (there are far too many hackers out there!) . So do you have any examples of when a phone call was more effective than other means of communication?