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Small Business Success Still Relies On Communication
Jan 27th
If you’re in small business, be prepared to communicate. It’s an important part of what small businesses do. The same thing goes for those who lead them. Here are some tips and tools to help you better master communication for your small business.
Opening Up
Why you must spend time face to face. Technology is great. It connects us in ways never possible before. But there are limitations to what technology can do when building important business relationships. Here’s why. Jennifer Warawa
It’s lonely at the top. But it doesn’t have to be. Here are 10 ways many business leaders avoid loneliness and isolation. As a small business owner you may sometimes feel isolated too. How do you work to avoid those feelings. Startup Professionals Musings
The State of Business
Big companies want to handle your IT. There was a time when IT services for small businesses and startups were handled by smaller firms as well. No longer. Here is why big business wants a piece in serving your IT needs. WSJ
What Washington is telling small business. Small businesses and entrepreneurs did feature in the President’s State of the Union Address. But what is big government really telling small businesses about where they fit in? Entrepreneur
Blogging & Engagement
Why blogging is your business. No better paradigm of business communications exists today than the small business blog. Personal and focused, it is at the same time representative of your brand. But it may turn out your blog is even a bigger part of your business than you thought. Noobpreneur
The importance of engagement. Is your small business engaging with customers, clients and the public in the way that it should? What tools and approaches can you use to reach the necessary engagement with your customers? Famous Bloggers
Marketing & Sales
The problems with converting leads. Your marketing is a form of communication, but what is really important to consider, when deciding if that communication is effective, is to look at whether your audience is turning into customers. Dawn Westerberg Consulting
Tech Basics
Best gear for podcasting. Podcaster Ileane Smith shows you her personal choice for equipment to use in your own efforts and explains a bit more about why podcasting is so critical to communication in small business today. Basic Blog Tips
Making Connections
It’s still about the people. No matter how small business communications is done, it’s still a very human interaction. Technology and techniques aside, what will really make you better at marketing and selling is to better understand your customer? B2B Marketing Smarts
Do you know your audience? No, it’s not a silly question! Do you? Because all of the above won’t help you much if you don’t. Here’s why you’ll need to consider the people you’re addressing first before finding success. Respectfully Disobedient
Small Business Success Still Relies On Communication
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
How and Why I Still Use Delicious
Dec 14th
How and Why I Still Use Delicious
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
I know, I know, what, del.icio.us is so old school. And didn’t they get bought and killed off by Yahoo? Well, actually all Yahoo really did was make it Delicious.com, but fortunately they sold the technology to AVOS, a company founded by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.
But, that’s not really what this post is about.
I still use Delicious every day to bookmark and automatically publish content to the web via RSS and I think you should too.
At the root, Delicious is a social bookmarking site, which means you can use it to find and bookmark and tag stuff all over the web. I use it to create collections that I then post in my Saturday Weekly Favs post. I use it to curate collections of things related to marketing topics. I use it for research and I use it to publish filtered content to a number of pages.
Basic bookmarking
Bookmarking is a pretty basic skill these days as you must be able to find and aggregate large amounts of information of risk drowning in the virtual sea of stuff related to your chosen field.
Even the simple act of blogging requires the ability to find and sort various sources and few things are handier than a site like Delicious that is both discovery engine and reservoir of other people’s discoveries.
I use the Firefox addon that allows me to right click and add any page to Delicious, but you can find bookmarklets and other browser tools here.
Content discovery
I’ve also long used Delicious as a content inspiration source. I find that the users of Delicious are some of the old Internet souls that know quality from viral and I can always count on a romp through my favorite tags to produce ideas for my own content production.
The new Stacks feature brings a bit of a visual element, but you can still find the basic text links here too.
Auto publishing
One of the most underutilized features of the Delicious technology in my opinion is the ability to grab tag specific RSS feeds. Any tag you create produces a unique RSS feed. What this means is that you publish a dynamic feed of content related to a subject to simply publishing the RSS feed to any page. I bookmark lots of tools that I find to a resource page on my site by simply using Feedburner to create HTML code to publish a Delicious RSS feed to a page – you can view my resource page here.
All I have to do is find a new tool, right click and hit Save to delicious and tag is as “favs” and the link publishes to this page.
Custom filtering
You can take this a step further and use Delicious to help you create custom content feeds for things like product mentions, news stories and even social media mentions.
All you need to do is add Google Alerts to the previous step.
So, let’s say I want to track and publish mention of my book Duct Tape Marketing. All I do is set up a Google Alerts for the term Duct Tape Marketing and have it sent to my email inbox.
Then, when I spot a positive news mentions of Duct Tape Marketing (I mean, they’re all positive, but hypothetically speaking) I can visit the page, bookmark what I want to publish in Delicious and tag it DTNews or something like that and then it publish the mention automatically to a page or widget called Duct Tape In the News (bottom left on this page)– all without leaving my surfing.
Delicious, paired with RSS is a powerful way to create content on the fly while cataloging and categorizing the kind of stuff that helps you learn, teach and be a filter for your clients.
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Your Still The One I Want (get Your Ex Back
Nov 23rd
A Starving Crowd That Is In Desperate Need Of This Help. Will Give You Endless Sales. Help Bring People Back Together With Their Ex And Make A Lot Of Money. This Is One Mind Blowing Product Which Gets You 75% On Endless Sales.
Your Still The One I Want (get Your Ex Back
Is the American Dream Still Attainable?
Nov 22nd
We ran across this infographic that asks an important, complex question: Is the American Dream Still Attainable? While we at BusinessPundit think the answer to this question is far more complex than the infographic suggests, we do think it’s worth considering. What do we value in life? What drives us? What do we all ultimately want?
At a basic level, people want two things: basic security and financial stability. That’s why Presidential elections almost always come down to one of two inter-related issues: domestic (economy) and foreign affairs (security from threats abroad). Everyone wants a solid base of financial security in the form of a job and the knowledge that their way of life is not being threatened by force.
But beyond that, what makes the American Dream? Is it all about wealth and power? Or family and simple happiness? Does the American Dream change over time? Has it? And how do movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street reflect general discontent over the attainability of the American Dream?
These are all questions we’d love for you to discuss in the comments section.
![Is the American Dream Still Attainable? [Infographic]](http://www.taylorhomes.com/indianapolis-home-builder-infographic.png)
© 2011 Taylor Homes
View full post on Business Pundit
If You Still Think The Customer Is King
Nov 16th
If You Still Think The Customer Is King
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Marketing podcast with Aaron Shapiro (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen)
You know the old adage – the customer is king, well there’s a new king and every business today must shift their focus to the much broader world of the user. A large segment of this user community may never buy from you, but in today’s increasingly digital world they do influence how your brand is perceived and, in the end, who does or does not become a customer.
For this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visit with Aaron Shapiro, author of Users, Not Customers: Who Really Determines the Success of Your Business
The trick is to become indispensable, through content and interaction to a large group of users, those that may never spend a dime with you, and your customers will naturally fall from this group. The larger the user group, the larger the customer pool.
Building products and adapting your business for users over customers takes a bit of a mind shift, but successful organizations are doing this in a variety of ways.
From my own experience, I can tell you that making your free products more valuable than your competitor’s paid products is one of the best ways to install this principle.
Shapiro also addresses one of my favorite topics – rapidly deploying new technology that benefits your users.
In one of the more telling moments in the interview Shapiro explains doing focus groups with millennials and when asked how much time they spent online they didn’t know how to answer the question. The next generation is so digital they can no longer distinguish moments when they aren’t online.
You can listen to the show by subscribing the feed in iTunes or a variety of other free services such as Google Listen (Use this RSS feed) or you can buy the Duct Tape Marketing iPhone app. (iTunes link – Cost is $2.99)
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Interview With John Hewitt: Still Learning and Listening
Sep 30th
While many business owners would attribute their successes to their customers, John Hewitt gives all the credit to his employees. Hewitt, recently honored as a Small Business Influencer Champion, says his company, Liberty Tax, “hires for attitude” and gets some of its best ideas from employees, as well as franchisees.
Hewitt, who founded two of the top three tax companies (the other is, as you might have guessed, Jackson Hewitt), puts his money where his mouth is when it comes to his employees:
“Our goal is to be the number-one tax service in the universe by 2020. Our team is challenging performance at all levels. We have just issued a million-dollar challenge with monetary rewards for those pushing their customer service and work standard to that fanatical level.”
Anyone within Liberty Tax can nominate another employee or franchisee for a “Fanatical Award” of $1,000 for going beyond the call of duty to the fanatical level.
His Door Is Always Open
Hewitt has helped Liberty Tax grow to 3,800 Liberty Tax offices in the United States and Canada from just five offices three years ago. He’s done this by paying attention to ideas from both franchisees and employees:
“Most companies make the mistake of thinking they know everything and managing from the top down. Some of the things I invented as an employee, like a referral fee coupon, were shot down by management, but are now practiced by all of the major tax companies. So I’m still learning, and I’m definitely listening.”
Get Out While The Getting’s Good
If not for some advice Hewitt’s father gave him, he might still be an employee of H&R Block. The advice was on when to get in and out of a career situation. When his father suggested they get into computerizing taxes, Hewitt quit his job to develop the first tax-preparation software for the PC. The rest, as they say, is history.
As for his own advice to fellow entrepreneurs, it goes beyond the office:
“Reward yourself with some personal enrichment time, and valuable time with family.”
John was recognized as a Small Business Influencer Champion for 2011. Read more of our Small Business Influencer Champion interviews.
Interview With John Hewitt: Still Learning and Listening
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
47 Percent of SMBs Still Not Using Social Media. Oy.
Aug 25th
Hiscox, a small business insurance company, recently published a survey of 304 small business leaders to find out more about their social media use. Somewhat shockingly (at least to me), only 12 percent of respondents described social media promotion as a “must” for their businesses, with 47 percent of SMBs admitting that they still don’t use social media at all for business purposes. However, they are still hooked on word of mouth marketing, with 50 percent of SMBs saying they couldn’t live without it.
Hmm, I guess social media, that place where people sign on to talk about your business, doesn’t count as “word of mouth marketing.”
For those who do use social media, 19 percent say Facebook is their platform of choice, 15 percent prefer LinkedIn and just 4 percent are hooked on Twitter.
Buy why aren’t more business owners hopping on the social media bandwagon? When asked how they felt about social media, 24 percent said they simply didn’t have time to participate, while another 14 percent admitted they don’t know enough about it to get started.
That sound you just heard? That was my heart breaking.
While the education component acknowledges a natural learning curve, it is one that small business owners will need to overcome and tackle if they want to compete in the digital age. With more than 100 million users on LinkedIn, 500+ million users on Facebook and 200+ million users on Twitter, your audience is waiting for you to get involved. Your customers are on social media, which means you need to be, as well. And though the tools are new and can be intimidating until you find your legs, the core of social media isn’t much more than just talking to people. More specifically, social media is about talking to your customers. You need to make time to do that
And that really is the most important component – making time.
While speaking at the Hudson Valley 140 conference yesterday, I was asked how it is I have time to tweet and engage in social media, while still finding time to run a business. The answer is both easy and incredibly difficult:
I plan for it and I schedule it in my day.
I asked other small business owners (via Twitter) how they’re able to make it work, and their answers weren’t too different from my own:
- They schedule it in.
- They multitask, talking to people on social media while they watch television or perform other tasks.
- They use tools like Seesmic and Hootsuite to make their social interactions more productive.
- Bottom line: Social media is now part of everything they do.
Whether you realize it or not, social media is important to your small business. It’s giving you the opportunity to maximize the same word of mouth marketing that SMBs have relied on for years and that 50 percent of respondents said they couldn’t live without. It gives you the opportunity to grow bigger wings by making your brand more accessible, more visible and more authoritative simply by showing up and engaging. For SMBs who are often on a tight budget, the cost-effective tools associated with social media often provide an opportunity they can’t get elsewhere.
But that does take a time investment.
What do you think? Are you surprised that just 12 percent of SMB owners view social media as vital to their business? What social media tools do you most often rely on to do your SMB marketing? Conversely, what’s stopped you from getting involved in social media and what would make you change your mind?
47 Percent of SMBs Still Not Using Social Media. Oy.
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Chart: Small Business Still Not Expecting Strong Cash Flow
Jul 25th
One of the legacies of the Great Depression has been a decline in small business cash flow. Despite the economic recovery that has been in place since June 2009, cash flow at small companies has not recovered to pre-recession levels.
Wells Fargo’s quarterly survey of just over 600 owners of small companies shows that in the fourth quarter of 2007, before the recession began, 62 percent of the owners reported that their business experienced “very good’ or “somewhat good” cash flow during the year prior and 72 percent indicated that they expected this level of cash flow over the coming 12 months.
Click for larger chart (opens new window)
By the fourth quarter of 2009, nearly six months after the recovery had began, the share of small business owners reporting favorable cash flow over the prior year had dropped to 38 percent and the share projecting favorable figures over the coming 12 months had fallen to 47 percent. In the second quarter of 2011, these numbers were 38 and 50 percent, respectively, statistically indistinguishable from the lows reached since 2007.
Similar patterns can also be seen in the response to questions about the companies’ past and expected future financial situation. As the figure below shows, the fraction of owners reporting a good financial situation over the prior year dropped from 72 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007 to 47 percent in the most recent quarter. The fraction of owners expecting their companies’ financial situation to be good over the coming 12 months declined from 77 percent to 48 percent.
Chart: Small Business Still Not Expecting Strong Cash Flow
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Is Facebook Still Likeable?
Jul 15th
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Marketing podcast with Dave Kerpen (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen)
The title to today’s post is a thought that’s making the rounds these days as Google announced that their new social network, Google Plus, added 10 million users in the first two weeks of limited beta launch.
A great deal of the conversation is decidedly skewed as much of the buzz is coming from hard core social media users and those predisposed to move away from Facebook, but none the less, this is a valid question.
I asked my Facebook followers if Google Plus had impacted their time on Facebook and over 50% claimed they were not yet Google Plus users. At the root of the question, however, is the issue of time. No matter what happens we only have so much budget for business building activities such as social networking and something is going to have to give. It’s like a family budget, if you buy a new car you might not go on vacation – it doesn’t mean the auto industry has targeted the travel industry, but they’ve impacted them anyway.
I think the same is true as people consider their available social time budget – something’s gotta give – it’s yet to be seen clearly what that something is, but it may not be as obvious as another social network such at Facebook.
For some perspective I turned to a guy that’s still very bullish on Facebook. Dave Kerpen, author of Likeable – How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (& Other Social Networks) .
In this interview, Kerpen addresses the obvious success of Google Plus, but is quick to point out that Facebook’s place is still firmly rooted in the hundreds of millions of users that spend hours on the network every day. Kerpen’s take is that people don’t want to create yet another network on another social platform.
Kerpen also points to the killer targeting aspects of Facebook’s platform as reason enough to still engage and use the network. Kerpen emphatically states, “You know what’s cooler than 750 million people on Facebook? Being able to target the 750 that are your perfect prospects.” He goes on to tell a story about how he targeted a birthday wish ad that only his wife could see.
My take is that we have some interesting times ahead and we may very likely see a shift in audiences coming.
So, what’s your take?
You can listen to the show by subscribing the feed in iTunes or a variety of other free services such as Google Listen (Use this RSS feed) or you can buy the Duct Tape Marketing iPhone app. (iTunes link – Cost is $2.99) or
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Old Associations Are Still Alive
Jun 10th
Usually, when I have to go to the mall, there’s so much noise and commotion that I sort of retreat into my head. I grew up in Iowa, so unless a crowd is mooing or clucking, I’m a little uncomfortable.
But one day while waiting for my coffee, I couldn’t help overhearing, “Tom?! Tom, is that you?! You old rascal, I thought you were dead!”
Both parties laughed heartily at what I assumed was some sort of shared inside joke, but it was so odd that I couldn’t help turning it over and over in my brain until this cartoon appeared.
Maybe I need to listen more closely more often.
Old Associations Are Still Alive
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
