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Are you resisting offering employees at your small business flexible working hours because you think it’ll give them an excuse to slack off? Well, some new research should convince you otherwise. It seems flextime may actually be less flexible than a regular schedule.
The 2012 National Study of Employers, released by the Families and Work Institute (FWI) andthe Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), found that U.S. employers are offering employees more options for managing when and where they work. The tradeoff for the employees, however, is that employers offering more flexibility are also requiring them to essentially work more.
Compared to 2005, the study found significantly more employers are allowing at least some employees to:
use flextime and periodically change starting and quitting times within a range of hours (77 percent, compared to 66 percent in 2005);
take time off during the workday to attend to important family or personal needs without loss of pay (87 percent, up from 77 percent in 2005);
work some of their regular paid hours at home on at least an occasional basis (63 percent, nearly double the 34 percent in 2005); and
have control over their paid and unpaid overtime hours (44 percent, compared to 28 percent in 2005).
But although employers were offering more flexibility in some ways, they were offering less flexibility in others. The study found significant decreases in the number of employers allowing at least some of their employees to:
return to work gradually after childbirth or adoption of a child (73 percent, down from 86 percent in 2005),
take a career break for personal or family responsibilities (52 percent, down from 73 percent in 2005), and
move from full-time to part-time work and back again while remaining in the same position or level (41 percent, down from 54 percent in 2005).
In other words, fewer companies are letting employees take extended time off. So what are the costs and benefits of flextime? You’re probably getting more work out of your employees in the short term; a 2010 Brigham Young University study of IBM employees found that those with flextime worked an average of 19 hours more per week than those on traditional schedules.
But are you risking burning them out in the long term?
Don’t get me wrong—I’m a huge proponent of flextime and, as the study noted, offering some form of flexible hours is pretty much essential to attract employees these days. But as entrepreneurs, we have “flextime” too—and it doesn’t take a study to convince any smartphone-toting business owner that flextime doesn’t necessary lead to work-life balance.
Flextime is a great option for employees, but make sure you give them some real time off, too.
For a lot of hiring managers and small business leaders, hiring remains the most crucial pain point. If you magically get the right people, stuff just gets executed. However, we never make the perfect hiring decisions all the time. Sometimes we are in a hurry to fill the role, and the options available seem more attractive than the list of skills and qualities we carefully created.
Of course, every manager has a different outlook – some of us “hire fast, learn fast and fail fast,” whereas some of us passively look at many resumes and only make an addition to the team when it feels right. I’ve made my fair share of errors and would like to share an example that might help when you are at the next crossroads and in a hurry.
I was looking for an online marketing person and started furiously going through LinkedIn for profiles that had keywords of certain skills that were required. After I found a few profiles, I cold wrote to a particular prospect and heard back from her. She shared her detailed resume with me and it looked like a dream. After I explained the role to her, she seemed positive that it was her domain and she joined the next day.
Over the next few weeks, she worked very hard and made a difference to our efforts. Her skills were matching with many peripheral tasks, except for the core role she was hired for. And the mistake was entirely mine. I made a few notes to myself:
Never Absorb The Resume Or The LinkedIn Profile On Face Value
Get evidence of past work or go through some testing or sample review. For engineers, this can be writing a piece of code during the interview. For content writers it would be writing a sample piece.
Understand The Cost Of Hurrying
You can fill a role quickly but if the person is not taking your load off instantly, then chances are they are increasing the load. The relevant experience can contribute to your workload, but if a person needs to be taught everything from scratch – you will be taking time out of your job to show them the way. Depending on how fast your small business is growing, this can be challenging.
References Are Not Always Helpful
When you ask someone for a reference, of course they are going to give you a positive one. Skip this step. Especially if you are a small business without corporate guidelines. Go with your gut and use logic.
Lots Of Trial Projects
If you can, take people on short-term projects to help you with different parts of your business. As a small business, you have to depend on freelancers and consultants for certain roles anyway. Make sure you have a good pipeline of folks helping you as freelancers. As your business grows, you will have the opportunity to offer full-time roles to these folks, and you will know them extremely well by then.
There is no perfect hire and there are no perfect hiring tips or guidelines. We can simply learn from our own mistakes and hopefully from mistakes of others.
Businesses with multiple locations should be breathing a heavy sigh of relief now that Google has introduced a new and improved bulk listing management tool designed to make the whole process easier and faster for business owners.
Google revealed several new changes last week which have been implemented to help SMBs and enable the follow actions:
Edit one or more of your listings’ data at once
Search through your listings, filtering by specific information or for listings with errors
Upload new listings using a data file or by adding them individually within the interface
Tell us how we can improve this new interface by clicking the “Give Feedback” link
Google has also uploaded two tutorial videos to walk both new and verified users through the process.
Tutorial for new, unverified users
Tutorial for Verified Users
If you’ve visited your Google Places dashboard recently, you may have already noticed that it went through a makeover. Personally, I find the updated dashboard considerably more user-friendly and intuitive. I especially like how easy it is to find listings with errors. The easier it is to spot errors, the easier it is to fix them!
If you’re a business owner with 10 or more locations and you’ve been avoiding uploading and/or correcting your information on Google Places because it was too much of a hassle or you weren’t sure where to start, these new upgrades and the accompanying videos help remove both of those obstacles.
We’ve said this many times but taking the time to ensure that all of your online business listings are claimed and showing correct information is one of the most powerful things you can do to build your Web presence and your offline customer base. Nearly 20 percent of all Google searches are users accessing Google Place Pages – that adds up to millions of searches a day! If a user can’t find you or it looks like your information is incorrect, they’re not going to keep trying. It’s going to deter them away for your business and push them toward your competitor. This isn’t something you can afford.
The release of this new tool from Google is a good reminder of how important it is to claim and optimize all of your business listings. If you haven’t checked to make sure they’re accurate, use today to do it.
Consider it a little Spring cleaning as you:
Claim your Google Place listing (and all other online business listings)
Make sure the information is as accurate as possible and that it’s consistent with what else is out there about you on the Web. It’s vitally important that you align all of your listings and allow them to work FOR you and show your relevance.
If you have already claimed your Google Place listing, work on optimizing it. Add some new Google business photos/videos. Update your keywords. Start thinking up new ways to build reviews or point people to your page. Don’t leave it static.
The updated Google Maps Bulk Listing management tool is great for businesses for with 10 or more locations, but even if that’s not you, it’s also an important reminder that these listings matter and that Google is looking at them hard to determine relevance and search placement. If it’s been awhile since you’ve optimized your Google Place listings, give it another look. It could be the difference between showing up and being invisible to your audience.
Facebook is a big deal these days, not just because of its multibillion IPO, but also because of the impact the social networking giant has on the 900 million who use its tools. Some of those are small business owners who depend upon FaceBook to provide services they cannot do without. That’s why today all eyes are on Facebook.
Facebook in the News
Facebook raises its IPO range to meet demand. The price range on the social network’s public offering rises from $34 to $38 per share, targeting a valuation exceeding $100 billion. As big as it has become, Facebook started from humble beginnings as a company founded in the Harvard dorm room of CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Reuters
Facebook founder gives up US citizenship. Billionaire co-founder of Facebook Inc. Eduardo Saverin gave up his U.S. citizenship recently ahead of the multibillion-dollar Facebook IPO in an effort to avoid a possible tax increase on top earners. Apparently he didn’t get the Warren Buffett memo about paying more taxes. Bloomberg
“Hoodie Gate” a test of leadership. Whether you believe Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s insistence on wearing his signature hoodie at presentations connected to his company’s first public offering smacks of immaturity or individuality, it’s another sign of the important tone a leader sets for his/her organization. Computerworld
Why Use Facebook?
Facebook social ads, sponsored stories, promote engagement. Online advertising-management platform Marin Software reported an increase in the level of engagement on Facebook ads by 50 percent over the last 12 months. Are you using these for your business? AllFacebook
Why your business would want to be on Facebook. This important statistic should remain on your mind. There are 900 million and counting users of the massively popular social network. Think of the potential customer base Facebook represents. Pagemodo
How-To
How to use the Share button to amplify your message. To really get your content seen by your network on Facebook, having them like your most recent post just isn’t enough, says one blogger. Learn why the Facebook share button is your best friend here. Ryan Hanley
Getting noticed through Facebook ads. David Siteman Garland interviews Victoria Gibson, The Facebook Ad Queen, for a detailed explanation of how to use Facebook ads to build a brand and get noticed. Watch the video for more of Gibson’s insights. The Rise to the Top
Timeline Tips
Examples of great timeline pages for business. The latest look for Facebook pages gives businesses in particular an opportunity to get creative. Here blogger Rachel Parker shares some of her favorite timeline business pages thus far. Resonance
Timeline and other tools. The timeline isn’t the only change Facebook users, including business owners, have been through recently. Blogger Allison Semancik shares three tools that will help you come to terms. Idea Sprouts
Final Thoughts
Facebook isn’t the only game in town. Community manager Megan Eckman asks whether Facebook or Twitter is the better choice when promoting your business. Her answer is the same as I’m sure many of ours would be. “It depends on your customers!” CreateHype
JudgmentMarketplace.com is a website for selling and buying judgments. Small business owners, corporations and consumers who have won a court judgment against another party can list the judgment for sale. Collection agencies and law firms that specialize in skip tracing debtors and collecting on judgments, can negotiate to buy your judgment or, just like on eBay, can “buy it now.”
The software platform provides a centralized place to list judgments for sale, and for buyers to find them. A wide range of judgments can be bought and sold: car accidents, employment or discrimination cases, commercial transactions, contractor claims, foreclosures.
Judgment Marketplace was started by Shawn Porat, who also serves as CEO. He learned the collection business helping his father, owner of a trucking company, collect hundreds of judgments the company was owed. Before age 23 he had started Recovery Of Judgment, a New York-based firm that specializes in executing judgments. Porat says he started Judgment Marketplace because he saw there was a demand for buying and selling judgments, but no organized market.
The site serves those who have a judgment and want to turn it into cash. But it also is a source of business development for collection agencies and law firms that collect judgments. The marketplace also serves investors who buy large portfolios of judgments.
Let’s take a closer look at the site and see how it works.
Buying a Judgment
The first step is to register for free. Once you’ve done that, you can search and browse judgments that others have listed – by State, by cheapest judgments, by largest judgments, or “best deal”. “Best deal” ranks judgments based on asking price as a percentage of the judgment’s amount.
As of this writing, you can buy a judgment in the face amount of $16.5 Million ($17.5 Million if you include interest) for a cool $12 Million.
Out of your price range (heh)? No worries. As little as $25 buys you a judgment of roughly $1,100 with interest.
Once you identify a judgment you are interested in, you initiate a Letter of Interest. That starts a dialogue with the seller to negotiate on the price or complete the “buy it now” transaction.
Upon striking a deal, Judgment Marketplace recommends that you use Escrow.com to exchange the sales price and the assignment of judgment, but that’s up to whatever you negotiate. Then after the transaction is complete, you are encouraged to come back to the site and leave feedback about the seller.
Selling a Judgment
When you sell a judgment you sell it at a discount off of face value. The nature of collecting judgments is that they’re uncertain. Risk is involved. So by selling at a discount, the seller gets the certainly of an immediate payment (compared to possibly collecting zero). The buyer potentially gets some upside that makes it worth the risk. If the buyer collects the full amount he has made a profit to balance his risk.
It costs nothing to list a judgment for sale although you can buy featured listings. A processing fee of 5% is assessed on each sale.
The site also offers a collection network offering traditional collection services. Collectors must pay to be part of the collection network.
Why Use Judgment Marketplace
Obviously, small business people would only need the site if they had a judgment going uncollected. For them the site may be invaluable. Many small businesses aren’t familiar with how to collect a judgment or even find a collection agency, especially if the debtor is out of state. Collecting at a distance has added challenges. So an online marketplace is a convenient and easy option.
For smaller collection agencies and collection law firms, the marketplace could be a source of new business opportunities if you need more judgments to chase after.
We haven’t used this marketplace. We saw a demo at the New York Business XPO recently, and later registered for a free account. So we can’t say how well it performs. But it appears a promising platform for a niche purpose. If you are frustrated because you haven’t been able to collect a judgment, check out Judgment Marketplace.
It’s a blessing, and a curse. At least that’s what Mr. Monk says about his condition — maybe it’s true about ours. Maybe social media is a blessing, and a curse? If you’re in business today, internet marketing is a requirement and social media plays a role in that.
It Costs You Time
It takes effort to learn how Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or Pinterest works. And it takes effort to consistently engage. But does social media carry a big enough blessing to warrant the time-cost and the learning curve?
In “The Explosion of Social Media: Blessing or Curse?” John Mariotti, CEO of The Enterprise Group, points out several concerns with social media including the idea that “nothing will ever be truly “private” again once posted on these hugely popular social media sites.”
But for businesses who came to share images, stories and information that relate to our clients and the relevant product or service that we provide — social media should be a different story. Social media isn’t the place to argue with your family, curse your employees or boss, or complain about all the other people and clients that you work with.
The business owner comes to play — you need to have a little fun with it or you won’t come back with a purpose. If the focus for using social media engagement is clear and the strategy is strong, then the outcome could be productive.
“Social media marketing emphasizes personal voices inside brands.”
People want to meet a real person, but what do they need to know about you and your brand? If you decide to tweet, and that social media is more of a blessing than a curse, here are two resources by Ivana to help you get clear about the type of conversation you should be having on these sites:
Ivana provides a simple strategy to social media explaining that you should “think of social media applications as rooms at an event….Walking into any social media space is like walking into a bar.” Some conversations you overhear, some you become a part of and other later you join other groups. If need a little help focusing your voice on social media, the tips in this article can help.
Why does Pinterest matter? In reference to a study by Hitwise Ivana says it’s the 17 million+ visits a week and the 72 minutes the average user spends on the site. To help you make the most of Pinterest she gives you a breakdown of what Pinterest is and creative uses for your business as well as what not to do. Ivana also answers the question of which comes first – Twitter and Facebook or Pinterest?
You’re holding a product at that brick-and-mortar store, debating if now is the time for you to spend money on something you’ve been wanting — or needing — for some time now. As you weigh out the pros and cons silently to yourself, an inevitable deterrent appears out of the corner of your eye: those pesky salespeople who interrupt your thought process by repeating annoying slogans and pointing out product features you already know well. The amount of robotic desperation in their voices is enough to make you want to flee the store immediately.
It’s ironic that the more those salespeople hope to convert you into a paying customer, the farther away they drive you from the cash registers. As business owners, be sure you’re not doing the same. Instead, employ a new sales strategy that loosen the wallets of potential customers without leering over them like an off-putting hovercraft.
We asked members of the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invitation only nonprofit organization comprised of the country’s most promising young entrepreneurs, the following question to find out how they creatively convert a “looker” into a happy client:
“What’s your most creative tip for growing sales when customers are still leery of opening their wallets?”
Here’s what YEC community members had to say:
1. Capture the Leads
“Many shoppers often find it hard to immediately commit to something, and can use a bit of hand holding through their online shopping process. Instead of trying to sell them on the spot, capture their email, and get them to register for your site or to connect with you on social platforms. Then work to nurture them into a loving and paying customer.” ~ Danny Wong, Blank Label Group, Inc.
2. Go to Trial
“If prospects are not ready to make the leap into your pool, get them in better shape by at least allowing them to dip their toes in the water. Free trials can be extremely effective to whet a customer’s appetite for your product or service. Make the free trial long enough to show the benefits, but short enough to get them interested in buying more.” ~ Doreen Bloch, Poshly Inc.
3. Name Your Price!
“Taking the money off the table, would you use our service? Yes? So you clearly see its value. Now, we can’t give our product away for free, but you pay us what you think is fair for the first month — and we’ll go from there.” ~ Nathan Lustig, Entrustet
4. Build Long-Term Relationships
“You don’t need customers to buy the first time they encounter you if you’ve got relationship-building mechanisms (like a good mailing list) in place. You can’t entirely automate the relationship-building process, but you can keep it simple and still connect with customers who will buy bigger tickets items from you more than once after you’ve got the relationship in place.” ~ Thursday Bram, Hyper Modern Consulting
5. Ask Questions
“Whether a customer is still a prospect or a confirmed buyer, the best way to help make a buying decision is by asking questions. Find out what they’re looking to do with the product considered, and ask why they’re hesitating to try it. Then thoughtfully help them by analyzing the products you offer to match them with the right one. Sales requires strategizing, not just spending.” ~ Vanessa Nornberg, Metal Mafia
6. Pay-for-Performance
“Pay-for-Performance is a great way to grab attention and gain sales because it earns customers’ trust and loyalty over time. My company went to a pay-for-performance model, which resulted in a growth of sales. People feel more comfortable with spending money after they see results. If you actually provide your clients with value, then you shouldn’t be scared of implementing this model.” ~ John Hall, Digital Talent Agents
7. Try Tiered Pricing
“Irresistible tiered pricing draws customers in. Don’t simply offer one variation of your product/service, but instead offer several, including an irresistible “Best Value” offer. This allows prospects to have comparison points, which defines just how good your “Best Value” deal really is.” ~ Nicolas Gremion, Free-eBooks.net
8. Make an Event Out of It!
“Event-based marketing works. We’re all busy, and sometimes it’s not so much that people don’t want to spend money, but that they’ve not seriously considered your offerings. Give them a time-specific deadline to sign up and buy — with good reason, of course — and they’re more likely to make a decision. That might mean a “no” but you’ll also get some successful responses.” ~ Nathalie Lussier, Nathalie Lussier Media
9. The Ol’ Risk Reversal
“There are a few reasons people don’t buy: price, trust, or simply not being ready right now. It’s strong when you can reverse the risk and put it on you as the company to perform. Offer a trial program or beef up your guarantee so the buying decision has no risk for the customer. Eliminate the fear of purchase and you’ll be golden.” ~ Trevor Mauch, Automize, LLC
10. Demonstrate Your ROI and Value
“Customers are always going to be leery about opening their wallets. The key is to only sell to companies in industries that will legitimately benefit from using your services or buying your products. Nobody wants to throw money at something where they can’t see any value.” ~ John Berkowitz, Yodle
11. Create a Trust
“If you’re having trouble closing deals, try looking past the sale and focus solely on creating trust with your customers. They’ll be much more likely to open their wallets once you get your hand out of their pocket.” ~ Christopher Kelly, Sentry Centers
12. Give Them Free Value
“If you are selling something to someone else, you are assumed to be an expert on what you are selling. Take some of this expertise and give it away for free as a whitepaper, blog post or newsletter. Once your customers know how knowledgeable you are and how valuable your expertise is, they will be more likely to purchase it from you.” ~ Lucas Sommer, Audimated
Now hailing 11.7 million unique visitors a month, Pinterest has become the fastest standalone site to pass the 10 million visitor mark since, well, ever. But even more impressive than that are what those 11.7 million visitors are doing once they land on Pinterest — they’re staying and they’re engaging. Reports say that the average Pinterest user spends 89 minutes interacting, sharing, and posting on the site. And that could be your content they’re interacting with, but only if you’re taking the steps to leverage Pinterest.
If you’ve heard the buzz surrounding Pinterest but weren’t quite sure how to jump in and take advantage of it, keep reading. Below are some handy starter tips that every small business owner can use to build an audience via Pinterest.
Getting Started
If you don’t currently have a Pinterest login, you’ll have to request one as the site is still invite-only. Luck for you, it shouldn’t take more than a few days for Pinterest to send you an invitation to join. Once you get it, you’ll be asked to log in with either your Facebook or Twitter account. Don’t worry too much about which to choose as you’ll have the option later to switch it or to have your account tied to both.
With your account created, go into your Settings and take some time to fill out your profile. You’ll want to set your email settings, fill out your About section, include a Web site and then decide how you want Pinterest to interact with your other social media accounts.
Do you want all of your pins to sync to Facebook? Do you want to link your Twitter account? Depending on how you plan to use the site, this will change. If you’re not sure yet how you want your pins displayed, don’t worry too much. You can always come back and edit these settings.
Create Unique, Interesting Boards
Life on Pinterest starts here. When you start creating boards, focus on putting together boards that show off the lifestyle and beliefs behind your brands, not your actual products or services. The key to mastering Pinterest is to realize that it’s less about promoting your products and more about promoting how you do what you do and how you see yourself in your market. That means creating boards to show off your company beliefs and culture, not your inventory.
For example, maybe you’re a local catering company. If so, you may want to have boards related to:
Healthy Eating
Buying Organic
Going Local
Green Living
Family Picnics
Dinner Recipes
Holiday Recipes
Food Mentors
These types of boards are related to what you do in your day-to-day business, but they also go a step further to show people what you believe and what you represent. That’s what users are looking for.
Do your best to come up with creative and compelling board names, as these will get shared when people pin your content. Similar to titling your blog posts – putting something eye-catching in there will help your content spread faster.
Assessing Your Pin-able Assets
This is where many business owners start to freak out. Don’t! It’s easy to think that if you’re not in the business of pretty or quirky pictures that Pinterest can’t work for your brand. But it absolutely can! Every site has visual assets that they can take advantage of. Sometimes you just have to think outside the box. For you, pinable content may come in the form of:
Infographics or other data visualizations
Video stills that link off to media where you appear
Covers of books or eBooks you’ve written
Eye-catching visuals for blog posts
Images of customers using your products
Images of how your product could be used
Take a look through your site to identify assets you already own. Once you do that, think forward to brainstorm new ways to incorporate visuals into your Web site. For example, you’ll want to make sure that you’re using images in every blog post or newsletter article you’re creating so that you (and your readers) will have something to pin. Maybe you’ll want to build more data visualization into your content strategy or focus on creating things that lend themselves to visuals. Build the assets you’ll need later.
Get Your Team Involved
One of the fun features Pinterest offers is that you can add contributors to any of your boards to help keep them updated and engaging. As a small business owner there are a lot of neat ways to take advantage of this. You can:
Add employees as contributors to boards about company culture
Add frequent blog commenters/community members to boards related to content/ industry finds
Add your executive team as contributors to charitable pursuits.
The more people you get involved, the more life you’ll add to your Pinterest account and the more others will want to follow what you’re doing. To add board contributors, go to the board you want to add a contributor to and click Edit. On the board’s settings menu, select “Me + Contributors.” You must follow at least one board belonging to a user in order to add him/her as a contributor. Once you’re there, start typing his/her username into the text field. Once potential matches begin to load, click Add when you see the person you want to add as a contributor. Then save your settings.
Build Followers
The best way to build new followers is to become an engaged Pinterest user. That means following other users, pinning content, repining content others share, etc. Each time you follow someone or engage with their update on Pinterest, by default, they’ll receive a notification email letting them know. This is a good way to build up your followers because, if you have good content, they’ll check you out once they see the email and follow you back. It’s also a good way to show others that you’re interested in the community and what other people are sharing.
If you’re looking for potential people to follow OR simply looking to understand what type of content you should be following, try going to http://pinterest.com/source/yoursitehere. This will show you what content on your domain has already been pinned and whose pinning it. You can also do the same for competitor URLs to see who is pinning and sharing their content.
Promoting Your Account
Once your account is set up, you want to do your due diligence and promote it so that your audience knows it exists. This may include adding a Pin It! button to your blog posts so content can be easily shared, syncing your Pinterest account to Twitter and Facebook, encouraging people to subscribe to your Pinterest RSS feed, mentioning your account in company promotions/emails, etc. The more ways you can make Pintest part of your marketing efforts, the bigger the account will grow and the easier it will be to make content spread.
The above tips are designed to help any small business get involved with Pinterest. How are you using the site to market your business? Any lessons you want to share?
Integrated marketing can mean different things to different people and in different markets. But in general, its about managing marketing through multiple channels to create a single message. If you’d like to improve the integration of your own marketing campaign, here are 10 ideas to consider:
Getting Things Together
Don’t fragment your campaign. All those television spots, radio ads, print ads, outdoor billboards, and more are fragmenting your message and your budget. (If we were talking about the many channels on the Internet, the same theory would hold.) Unless you integrate your message, you’re wasting your time. Bloomberg Businessweek
Integrate your social media messages. In her four social media practices that boost results, Deborah Shane includes the idea of using whichever platforms you choose — Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Pinterest — in tandem as job one. There are many social media channels out there, and just as in other kinds of marketing, there’s a need to unify your message. Small Business Trends
Adding Pieces to Your Marketing Campaign
Marketing can take any form. John Greenleaf, vice president of global brand marketing for the DoubleTree hotel chain, talks about the cookies, large tent, iPads, magnetic speech bubbles, and Twitter hashtags that have been used to boost the company’s brand. CNN Money
PR should be part of the plan. Liana Evans gives us a list of ways to integrate public relations into your small business marketing plan. Suggestions include creating an inventory of business events, avoiding lumping everything about your business into one press release, creating a press release schedule, creating a list of contacts, and how to engage those contacts. ClickZ
Little Things Make a Big Difference
Enhance any marketing campaign with handwritten notes. In an era of social media, we should never forget the power of the handwritten note to forge connections. One such note made a huge impression. Think outside the digital box when crafting your brand. You’re the Boss
-Add social media to your B to-B mix. Listen as a panel including Neal Campbell, senior VP-CMO at CDW Corp.; Belinda Hudmon, senior director-integrated marketing at Motorola Solutions; Brian Krause, VP-marketing and communications at Molex Inc.; and Maureen Moore, VP-marketing and communications at Fellowes Inc. talk about their efforts to add social media of various stripes, from Facebook and YouTube to Chinese microblogging sites, to their marketing messages. B to B
Mixing It Up
Learn the simple steps for integrating new media. Digital strategist and blogger Sakina Walsh talks about the challenges for businesses that have yet to develop a true multichannel marketing strategy and what they can do to get started. Her advice? Focus on objectives, incentives, metrics, and key performance indicators to build an integrated effort with results you can measure. Business 2 Community
Mix traditional marketing with digital for better engagement. Big brands like Coca-Cola have already learned the importance of mixing traditional and social marketing messages as a way to create better engagement with potential customers. Here Jennifer Healan, Coca-Cola’s group director of integrated marketing content, discusses mixing Super Bowl ads with online engagement. Ad Age
Digital Integration 101
Bring social and content marketing together. Nick Stamoulis, president and founder of Brick Marketing, tells us about the importance of integrating online marketing channels in a way that sends a clear message to customers. For Stamoulis, the two most important parts of an online campaign are content marketing and social marketing. While social marketing is important for having conversations, content marketing forms the substance of those conversations. BostInno
Learn the power of the +1. When it comes to integrating social media and traditional link building strategy for your Website, a study by US search company TastyPlacement suggests they may ultimately have the same impact. One key finding was that +1s on Google are now the biggest driver of organic search traffic. The Drum
Every big business started as a small business. Jim Koch, founder of The Boston Beer Company, like any entrepreneur, knows the struggles of being a small business owner. One of the biggest challenges is securing capital in a tight credit market.
Recently, Koch, one of America’s best known entrepreneurs, announced Samuel Adams Brewing the American Dream, a program whose mission is to partner with low and moderate income entrepreneurs in the food and beverage industry and provide the tools they need to help them grow and succeed. In creating this program, Boston Beer formed a partnership with ACCION USA, the country’s leading not-for-profit micro-lending organization.
Boston Beer has invested a $250,000 commitment to establish the Samuel Adams Brewing the American Dream Micro-Loan Fund with ACCION, which provides capital and other types of assistance to lower and moderate income micro-entrepreneurs whose businesses might not otherwise be approved for a bank loan.
Koch also is supporting small businesses by developing a series of business education and financial literacy seminars designed to meet the educational needs of food and beverage entrepreneurs and offering advice and expertise of Samuel Adams employees through regular events geared towards micro-entrepreneurs. Koch explains:
“When I started Samuel Adams back in 1984, the odds were stacked against me, and so as the company grew and became more successful we naturally identified with other ‘little guys’ who benefited from a leg up to help achieve their dreams. Over the years we’ve found ways to help aspiring home brewers, microbreweries, screenwriters, fiction writers, and sportscasters. With our partnership with ACCION USA we are now able to focus on small business owners in our own industry and give them the support they need to thrive.”
America benefits when successful business owners created or sponsored many programs that help others achieve their dreams. Small business owners — particularly those in the food and beverage industry like Shaun Clancy at Foley’s NY Pub & Restaurant and Barry O’Donovan, owner of Kilkenny House in Cranford, NJ — know what being a successful small business owner is all about. They understand what it is work hard, count their pennies, and provide a product/service that customers want and will keep coming back to get.
Government officials aren’t able to do that. Entrepreneurs can. I applaud people like Jim Koch for mentoring others and showing them the way.
I spoke with a group of bloggers in Phoenix recently. What I found is that very few had any business from their blogs despite a lot of effort. I have 5 closings and 7 active buyers directly from [our MyST blogsite] in 2008. I know because I ask. One person told me they have been reading my blog for almost a year before they called me to buy a property."
