Give away your expertise
Offer a free monthly e-newsletter or tip sheet with your top business tips of the month. Promote this on your website, your business cards, whenever you’re out meeting people. Offer real value in your newsletter, and make it available to everyone, not just clients. This is not a sales gimmick, although it will lead to sales.

Blog your expertise
Few tactics will be more powerful in enhancing your visibility and driving your firm’s website higher in online search results. Blog as regularly as you can; in the online world, content is king. RAN ONE makes posting new content simple through a multitude of online resources. Your blog provides a free platform for communication of your know-how and background. Yes, the operative word is FREE. WordPress at www.wordpress.com allows you to construct a quick and elegant blog foundation that easily can be linked to your website. Building and maintaining a blog requires knowledge and time, but it’s a brilliant investment for any business on a budget.

Add testimonials about your expertise
Ask your best clients to tell their stories about how you helped their businesses. Take them to lunch and interview them; you’ll be thanking them for their business at the same time. Add a photo and company logo to each client’s testimonial, and it becomes a win-win promotion of their own success along with yours.

Promote your expertise in your local media
Position your business skills in your hometown media. This includes your daily newspaper as well as local business publications, free suburban weeklies found in many markets and local radio and television outlets. Send brief news releases and photos announcing your firm members’ promotions and recognitions, firm innovations and new services. Write guest columns on business topics; the current economic tumult provides opportunities for anyone with credible advice for small businesses. If a current event comes up for which you have background and information, send a brief news release with your perspective and offer to be available for interviews.

Remember that you have valuable intelligence, skills and background that are highly prized commodities in business, especially in a challenging economic environment. Communicate your value, make a consistent public relations plan part of your business growth strategy and your business will garner results.

By the 1980s, the concept of publics had evolved to the recognition that no one “prevailing frame of mind” could explain public opinion, or, more relevantly to business, be used to create  campaigns to influence public opinion.  Seitel and Fraser in their widely-used textbook, The Practice of Public Relations,  listed four categories of public opinion:

1. The general public or “nonpublic” – having “little interest in the facts surrounding public issues or the issues themselves.”
2. The attentive public – “knows that certain issues are prominent in the public arena.”
3. The informed public – “not only knows the issues but participates in the dialogue concerning them.”
4. The elite public – “initiates and defines the issues and manages the public discussion about them.”

What has changed since the new millennium and the development of social media?  One could argue: everything.  While we still have the nonpublic, those with little or no interest in public issues, as well as attentive, informed and elite publics, the ability of the latter three to influence policy and issues formation has been merged and blurred by the power of social media. 

At one time, before the breakdown of traditional gate-keeping institutions, the elite public – corporate giants, politicians, philosophers, editors, reporters, writers and religious leaders, among others, were the initiators and definers of the issues that arrived on the radar screens of most consumers.  Concepts of consumer tastes, fads, reforms, revolution, war and peace and movements such as labor, civil and women’s rights and became mainstream through the noted thinkers and leaders of the time. 

Businesses have had a long tradition of working through these gatekeepers to promote products and services.  Now, look what’s happened!  Major corporations have been snapped to attention through social media campaigns and YouTube videos such as “United Breaks Guitars.”  Facebook would be the fourth-largest national in the world if its more than 350 million users were a country, and those users have launched millions more groups and fan pages.

Each and every one of those users, whether merely attentive, informed or elite, has the potential to create a movement, cause change and transform public opinion.  Do you know where the people you and your business care about are showing up online?  Are you listening to your publics?

1. Set the stage.  Write a brief 100 to 150-word introduction of yourself for the group leader.  Include your name, your topic, why it’s important and what the audience will learn and your qualifications.  If your name is difficult to pronounce, include a pronunciation guide.
2. Map it out.  If you don’t know where to start in writing your speech, use mind-mapping.  Wikipedia has a good explanation and diagram of this method of staging your thoughts around a central theme. Think about the demographics of your audience and their needs as you’re brainstorming.   
3. Get it together: Use the three-point method of speech organization: introduction, content and conclusion or: here’s what I’m going to tell you, I’m telling you now and here’s what I told you.
4. Grab them.  Spend some time on your opening.  Start positively, never with an apology about your nervousness or lack of public speaking experience.  The first few minutes in any speech are critical.  The audience believes you are the expert from your great introduction, and you are!
5. Make them laugh.  Humor is great, but be very careful with any jokes or offhand comments that might offend.  Making the joke at your own expense is almost always safe and can be very engaging.
6. Look at me.  Making direct eye contact can be intimidating for some speakers, so try looking at the middle of people’s foreheads as you look around the room.  No one will know you’re looking at their “third eye,” and it may help you to relax.   
7. Come out from the shadows.  Try to escape the lectern if a portable microphone allows, holding a small piece of paper or note card to remind you of your points if needed.  Gesture with your hands and include movement – not rocking or pacing, but natural walking. 
8. Exude energy.  Be enthusiastic and animated in your voice and body language.  Practice this as much as your actual speech.
9. Tell a story.  Even if your talk is meant to be theoretical, include the reality of a story or life example.  We humans are hard-wired to respond to and remember stories; this is the basis of all cultures.  A great story will make your speech truly memorable.
10. Know when to fold.  Keep within your allotted time, or a bit earlier to allow for questions.  Recapture your primary points near the end.  Think about a strong impression at the conclusion with a brief inspirational story, quote or thought-provoking question.

As with any new endeavor, public speaking becomes easier and more comfortable with practice.  If you want to make a real commitment to improving your speaking abilities, consider joining Toastmasters.  Take every opportunity to be a presenter, and more invitations and opportunities will follow for you and your business!

Online communities are succeeding by communicating authenticity and real value in those connections, defined by University of Nevada business professor and prolific blogger Dr. Bret Simmons in his personal branding blog as “what you do uniquely to help others address an opportunity or solve a problem that matters to them.”

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn aren’t alone in this endeavor; more websites are interactively fostering communities around diverse interests. A few examples:

In a recent public social media forum organized by Dr. Simmons at the University of Nevada, panelist Carmel Papworth-Barnum discussed her women’s running website’s focus on offering information important to women runners, whether just beginning or serious competitors. Her site resonates with women because it is about women, she said, not just about champions. She said, “I want to be inclusive.” Papworth-Barnum views her community as a way to encourage and promote women running and women runners. She’s authentically addressing the opportunity to encourage more women to have confidence in their ability to become fit and find joy through running.

A community doesn’t necessarily need to save the world – some just make it tastier. Kristy Crabtree, Reno web designer, strategist and passionate outdoorswoman, recently launched a unique Nevada Foodies site. Subtitled “A collection of big game recipes,” the site uses attractive blog formating for intriguing recipes and enticing food photos that Crabtree takes using her Canon Eos or iPhone. She also includes interesting shots from Nevada wilderness hunts. Her elk sausage and carmelized root vegetables recipe begins, “Food is like a song to me… it’s always a memory of a time or a place. And in most cases, it’s a good memory.” Hunters and their families who are looking for new game recipes – as well as some inspiration – are sure to find value in this community.

Sites with commercial aspects also can be authentically supportive of community. An educator, author, speaker and coach, Meggin McIntosh, PhD, is a former college professor whose trademark as The Ph.D. of Productivity™ is well earned. Her Emphasis on Excellence website brims with free downloadable posters and postings such as “8 Signs to Remind you How to Say No,” and “15 ideas to implement immediately to overcome reading overwhelm.” Visitors may order products and services such software, timers and webinars, but the site provides plenty of no-cost solutions to the productivity barriers that can stop all of us in our tracks – as well as opportunity to join a like-minded community of people who are “seeking ways to become peacefully (and predictably) productive.”

As we blog or simply go about our business in the world, we could all be guided by purposefully communicating what we do to “uniquely help others address an opportunity or solve a problem that matters to them.” What’s your purpose — and how are you communicating it today?

Thanks to the efforts of Susan G. Komen for the Cure and other cancer advocacy groups, communication heretofore has been clear, that breast cancer is a risk for all women and that mammograms are advised for screening, generally beginning at age 40.

The Task Force acknowledged mammography’s effectiveness but also its less accurate results for women under 50 than for women older than 50. The group went on to challenge the widely-established start time for annual mammograms of age 40, recommending that most women of lower risk (without family history) to start screenings at age 50 – and even then only every other year, rather than annually.

The Task Force, an independent panel of experts in primary care and prevention from some of the nation’s leading universities, teaching hospitals and research institutions, is appointed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Many people reacted to the recommendations with distrust of in light of the coincidental timing with the current healthcare debate. Could this be a harbinger of healthcare rationing to come?

The controversy seems not so much a conspiracy of timing as an unfortunate lack of coordination of message strategy on an important health issue. The Task Force members looked at the best data currently available to draw their conclusions. What they didn’t do was talk to health advocacy groups such as Susan G. Komen for the Cure and American Cancer Society to come up with a coordinated strategy to communicate the findings in the context of what the cancer groups have been propounding for decades.

If they had, perhaps the results could have been better explained as based on the data that for every approximately 1,900 mammograms for women 40 to 49, one breast cancer is discovered – along with many more false positives that for women 50 to 59. For the older group, the rate of cancers discovered is approximately one in every 1,300 mammograms.

Perhaps if discussion had occurred in advance, the call for further research into better screening, causes and cures for breast cancer could have been better articulated. Breast cancer remains the most common cancer among women except skin cancer and the second-highest cause of cancer death, after lung cancer. Death rates from breast cancer have been declining since about 1990, with larger decreases in women younger than 50. “These decreases are believed to be the result of earlier detection through screening and increased awareness, as well as improved treatment,” according to the American Cancer Society’s website.

It’s clear that the price of maintaining those decreases and who and how to pay for them will be a part of any future presentation of new screening recommendations. When we can so effectively save lives with early detection, it’s worth further discussion. Bring on the discussion, include all of the players and maybe next time the communication will be more effective.