Go out of your way to serve, not sell. Help your customer. Tell them things they need to know. If you don’t have what they need, tell them where to get it, even if it’s from your competitor. Give away your knowledge and expertise without cost or expectation. Spread the love.

It’s much more cost effective to keep a customer than to create a new one, so keep them happy. The green consumer, by definition, wants to help not only themselves, but the planet. Knowing that helpfulness is part of the currency of green should be a mantra and guiding principle of your business.

With the onset of social media, there’s never been a better and more affordable way to genuinely reach out and touch someone – thousands, millions at a time. The way to do that, according to Chris Brogan, social media superstar, is becoming a Trust Agent.  “Trust agents aren’t necessarily marketers or salespeople; they’re the digitally savvy people who use the Web to humanize businesses using transparency, honesty and genuine relationships. When you learned a trust agents secrets, your words can carry more power and more weight than any PR firm or big corporate marketing department,” says Brogan.  

At MOM, one of our secrets is being helpful. For instance, in every one of our monthly Greentelligence green marketing newsletters, we offer an in-depth branding examination for free to green businesses owners. We call it “BrandAID”. This is over $750.00 worth of green marketing brains – for free.  We do this to give business owners and marketers a taste of the way we approach green branding and marketing, and more importantly, to help them spread the green message and encourage the growth and success of green products and services. When you reward your customers with your help, they often reward you right back.

 How are you serving?

Bookmark to:

This is a guest post from (drum roll, please) Chris Brogan, author of “Trust Agents,” but better known as the “rock star” of social media.  

The marketing game has changed. It used to be all about mass communications and a tight message spread across every medium you could afford. The goal was to hit as many people as you could touch, and hope for a low percentage of them to convert. Who knows? Maybe you’re STILL doing it that way. If so, how’s that working for you? If you’re looking at trends, the new growth and success in marketing is coming from niche marketers who understand their community and can protect you along the way.

My area of knowledge is in using social media tools and methods to build sales opportunities, increase engagement, and converting audiences into communities. One way to accomplish this is by writing compelling blog content that opens conversations that may lead to potential lead conversion. Not every bit of the content is designed for sales. There’s a relationship component to all this as well, but the point to building great content for a business is to help that business earn attention, gain a reputation, and develop trust.

Find the right niche marketer, who has a strong relationship with the community you’re seeking, and partner with these organizations for your success. I’m writing this guest post for Carolyn Parrs and team at Mind Over Markets because I was so taken with what she and the organization were doing in the space of green / ecological marketing. In this new space, marketing is about connecting and building relationships that yield. Your opportunities are tied to how you choose to reach these markets, and how you intend to take your first steps towards earning their trust. Instead of selecting based on price, seek some results-driven guidance from marketers who you feel will know your audience’s challenges and reservations, and select them. That’s what I do.

–Chris Brogan is President of New Marketing Labs, LLC, and co-author of the NYT/WSJ bestselling book Trust Agents. He blogs regularly at chrisbrogan.com

Bookmark to:

One of the Ten Commandments of Green Marketing we preach is “Thou Shall Be Transparent.”  Now it seems that is a Golden Rule for the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) too. They have just  issued a ruling, according to Chris Brogan, a social media guru I follow, that basically says , “If you get something and decide to write about it, you have to disclose that it was given to you and/or whether you were paid for the review.”

The reason for this is simple. It’s the FTC’s job to make sure advertisers (and now bloggers, podcasters, etc.) are telling the truth. More specifically in this case, it prevents people from masquerading as being independent when they are not.

So much communication is floating around the airwaves today that it is vital to be able to tell news from commentary, paid opinion from fact.  All of us support free airwaves and the free flow of information, but along with that goes a responsibility for transparency. It’s not that any view should be regulated in any way, it’s that these views should be presented with clear authorship and clear lineage. If it’s opinion, we should know whose opinion it is and if it’s paid advertising, it should be presented as such (think health care debate).

I believe this rule should go doubly for the marketers of green products and services. But sadly last year alone, of 1,753 environmental claims reviewed, researchers found all but one made claims that are either false or misleading. (Source: State of Green Business 2008).

Now that green is getting some real traction, it’s more important than ever to keep it real. Because if you don’t, you’ll see, especially in this passionate market, green eyes are watching. Just look what they did to poor Kermit.

Bookmark to: