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Online Research Driving Purchasing Decisions

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Purchase decisions go beyond recommendations

Before deciding to buy recommended products or services, the majority (81%) of Americans will go online to verify recommendations, specifically through researching product/service information (61%), reading user reviews (55%) or searching ratings websites (43%), according to a new report by marketing firm Cone.

"Consumers have become extremely savvy about how brands are marketing to them," said Bill Fleishman, Cone's president and head of Brand Marketing.

"Partly due to an increased skepticism toward brand marketing, consumers have elongated the decision-making process to seek additional sources of affirmation before making up their minds. As marketers, we have another step to take before we close the loop."

Increasing skepticism of traditional media, technology advancements and growing online connectivity have all combined to give consumers control of their research volume before deciding what, when and how to buy. Personal recommendations alone are no longer enough to guarantee a purchase, as three-quarters of consumers (77%) agree they are more likely to purchase products or services when they can find additional recommendations about them online.

Among 25- to 34-year-olds, online verification is even more vital; 91 percent will go online to verify recommendations before making a purchase and nearly the same number (90%) are more likely to purchase products or services after finding additional online recommendations.

Online verification does take on a more crucial role for certain purchase criteria. For example, two-thirds of consumers will go online to verify recommendations about products or services they'll own for many years (66%) or those that have an unfamiliar feature (65%). Product claims are also fair game, as Americans will verify recommended products or services with health and safety claims (66%).

"While online verification may not be required for every product category, our research shows that there is a wide range of products and services that will be scrutinized via the Internet regardless of price point," said Fleishman.

"Online verification is now the deciding factor to drive consumers to that final purchase. Marketers who ignore this behavior shift will miss out on a golden opportunity to influence purchase decisions. Reaching influencers online is no longer a nice to do - it is a must do."

The Timeless Lessons of "Mr. Swatch"

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT

I was sad to read the news that Nicolas G. Hayek — one of Europe's most colorful entrepreneurs, and one of the most charismatic CEO's I've ever met — died this past Monday at the age of 82. I take comfort in the fact that the leader of Switzerland's Swatch Group passed away in his office at Swatch headquarters outside Berne, the Swiss capital. Knowing Hayek as I did, I know he died doing what he loved. He was a dreamer and an innovator to his last breath.

I first got immersed in Hayek's work back in the early 1990s, when I was a young editor at Harvard Business Review and HBR published my in-depth interview with him. (I'm pleased that Hayek's New York Times obituary quoted from the interview.) I last spoke to him a year or so ago, when, on a whim, I called his office to catch up on his agenda for the company and his take on the world. So allow me to offer this tribute to a one-of-a-kind character whose remarkable achievements have much to teach all of us. Think of it as my effort to capture the timeless lessons of "Mr. Swatch."

Nicolas Hayek was an outspoken billionaire who became the face of the Swiss watch industry for 25 years. In North America, he never really broke through as a public figure, although his company's brands are instantly recognizable to their passionate customers, from the colorful Swatch to the super-elite Breguet, whose pieces can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Throughout Europe, though, Hayek was a high-profile executive whose pronouncements made headline news. Indeed, on a vote of his countrymen, Hayek was named one of the most notable figures in Swiss history, alongside Albert Einstein and Henry Dunant, who inspired the Red Cross and the Geneva Convention.

Why did an executive with a company headquartered in a small Swiss village attract such giant acclaim? Because he engineered one of the most spectacular comebacks in business history — the reinvention of an industry that was thought to be lost to the sands of time. I first got immersed in Hayek's work in the early 1990s, when his turnaround of the Swiss Corporation for Microelectronics and Watchmaking (SMH) was just starting to click. I visited him in Biel/Bienne, the small, bilingual city (hence the hybrid German/French name) 30 minutes from Berne. I toured factories and labs, and traveled to Zermatt, at the base of the Matterhorn, to join 40,000 guests celebrating the production of the 100 millionth Swatch.

Hayek had cause for celebration. He'd been hard at work since the mid-1980s, when he recommended that Switzerland's banks merge the country's two giant (and insolvent) watchmakers, which had collapsed under the triple whammy of competition from Asia, shifting consumer tastes, and new technologies that the Swiss had invented but ignored.

Sound familiar? Indeed, the parallels between the plight of Swiss watch industry and the crisis in U.S. automobile industry are eerie — except for how the story ends. After World War II, the Swiss built 80 percent of the world's watches. By 1970, with the rise of foreign competition, the Swiss share of the global watch market was down to 42 percent. In 1983, just before Hayek took charge, the industry was on its last legs. SMH (a watch-industry equivalent of General Motors and Ford put together) had sales of $1 billion, losses of $124 million, and a nervous workforce of 15,000 people. Then began the comeback. Ten years later, SMH was back on its feet, with sales of $2 billion, profits of $286 million, and, with Swatch, the best-selling new brand in history. In 2008, the company (renamed Swatch Group), stood as the undisputed giant of its field — the leading watchmaker on the planet, with 19 brands, 26,000 people, and profits of more than $720 million.

"Our sales are five billion dollars," he marveled when we reconnected last year. "We have 500 shops worldwide, including a Swatch store in Times Square and an Omega store on Fifth Avenue. With Breguet, we have the highest-luxury watch brand ever. We sent a piece to the United States priced at $700,000 and it sold in a week, in a strong recession! The best-selling imported watch in China is Omega, number two is Longines, three is Rado — all our brands. I have been sending the same messages for years. Still, when I think back, I am amazed by what has happened."

What's more amazing than the company's performance over the last 15 years is the plan its chairman devised to reverse its slide towards death. To be sure, Nicolas Hayek was a state-of-the-art product innovator with a keen eye for marketing. Still, at his core, Hayek was a deeply conservative leader who looked to Switzerland's 450-year watchmaking tradition as a source of strength rather than as a burden of history.

He didn't reinvent a crisis-ridden organization by disavowing its legacy and reaching for solutions cooked up by turnaround specialists and finance wizards. Instead, he realized that the way to devise a game plan for the future was to draw on the compelling ideas around which the organization first took shape — ideas that had gotten lost or disfigured through decades of uninspired leadership, me-too growth strategies, and deadening bureaucratic practices.

The fall and rise of Omega is a case in point. When Hayek took control of the company, the Omega brand was, in his words, "near oblivion." Some of his bankers urged Hayek to sell Omega to one of its Japanese rivals, who would pay dearly for it. Some of his executives pleaded that he move the brand down-market, and use its prestige to go head-to-head with Citizen and Seiko. Hayek would have none of it. "That was absurd!" he thundered. "Omega is one of the Swiss watch industry's great brands. Its history goes back to 1848. You should visit the watchmaking museums and look at the pieces Omega made 50 or 100 years ago. They are wonderful. Few brands had or have Omega's potential power."

So the strategy he devised was to remind Omega's bankers, executives, employees, and customers what had made the brand so distinctive for so many years, and to build an ultra-modern game plan around those enduring qualities. He slashed the number of models from 2,000 to 130, ended all licensing agreements, eliminated showy designs that spoke to indulgence rather than achievement, and, in countless other ways, returned the brand to its roots. There were product launches, marketing twists, and manufacturing improvements. But these newfangled innovations were all in the service of reconnecting to a glorious past. The result? In 2008, Omega generated sales of more than $1 billion and profits of hundreds of millions of dollars.

But Hayek's plan didn't just apply to one of his company's brands. It applied to the company itself. His turnaround strategy violated almost every piece of standard-issue advice peddled by highly paid consultants and Wall Street titans — not because he was reluctant to break from the past, but because his radical changes were built on a genuine appreciation for the past. The business was in a shambles when Hayek took over. "A chaotic jungle," he called it, "an absolute mess." But buried inside the mess, he knew, was a treasure trove of skills and centuries of savvy just waiting to be unleashed: "We have hundreds of years of experience in the technologies and techniques of watchmaking. Families have spent generations in our factories. They have a feel for this business, a special touch."

This rich tradition gave Hayek the confidence to buck 21st-century convention. The first rule of global competition is to seek out low-cost production in every corner of the world. Yet the bulk of Swatch Group's 160-plus factories remain clustered in the towns and villages around the Jura mountains on Switzerland's border with France, the traditional heart of Swiss watchmaking. The second rule is specialization — divest or outsource all activities that aren't crucial to success. Yet Swatch Group remains a vertically integrated fortress. It assembles all the watches it sells and builds nearly all of the components for the watches it assembles. The third rule is niche marketing — identify the most profitable customer segments and ignore the rest. Yet Swatch Group's 19 brands cover all geographic markets and every price point imaginable.

Why reject so many of the accepted ideas and familiar strategies that define "modern" management? Because, by insisting that his organization stay rooted in Switzerland, even as it competed everywhere in the world in every segment of the market against everyone in its field, Hayek imposed enormous pressures for breakthroughs in design, manufacturing, and overall performance — pressures far more intense (and useful) than those created by traditional financial reengineering. One of his most simple (and transformational) demands was that whenever his engineers designed a new product, direct labor had to account for less than 10 percent of total costs. "CEOs must say to their people: 'We will build this product in our country at a lower cost and with higher quality than anywhere else in the world,'" he argues. "Then they have to figure out how to do it."

Back in the early 1990s, as Hayek's comeback strategy was ticking along, I asked if other big, established organizations could learn from his game plan. "Everything we've done can be done by lots of companies in Switzerland, or France, or Germany, or America," he replied. "All it takes is the will to do it. Which is, I admit, no small matter." More than 15 years after that initial encounter, with the Swatch Group widely recognized as one of the great turnarounds in business history, I asked how many CEOs had adopted his ideas. Hayek just laughed. "None of the big bosses think of me as a teacher," he says. "They like me, they respect me, but they refuse to accept that we have done better than any of them. The newspapers puts me on the front page, but no one tries to copy what we've done."

That's because it's impossible to copy a true business original.

8 Steps to Entrepreneurial Success

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The following is a guest post by Robert Tuchman, author of Young Guns: The Fearless Entrepreneur’s Guide to Chasing Your Dream and Breaking Out on Your Own. In this blog post, he details 8 steps for you to achieve entrepreneurial success.

An entrepreneur needs to be someone who can both visualize and actualize. He needs to be able to visualize something – and once he has that “something”, he needs to see exactly how to make it happen.

In order to make it happen, there are several steps that you as an entrepreneur must take on your way to entrepreneurial success. Do not just enhance what is, but advance towards what will be: keep the long term in sight.

Step 1: Combine Work and Passion

It is essential that you are able to marry your work and what you love. When in sales, there is no right or wrong way to sell: all you need is passion and enthusiasm for your product. This passion will ignite the minds of your potential client, facilitating connections, and connections between will be made.

Your passion and enthusiasm for your product will be what encourages the sale – not the rote duplication of someone else’s selling system. What you do to sell and promote your business has to be a reflection of what you are already willing to stay up late for and get up early for. It has to connect to your why and be a part of your own experience.

Step 2: Take Action

Second, you must start working your plan, whether you are ready nor not. Know the four good things that you are about to do: first, that your business is going to be built on a great idea; second, that great idea is going to connect you to a market; third, that you will create a plan based on what you learn, on an ongoing basis, about that market; fourth, that you will adjust that plan over time.

Step 3: Find the Right Partner

After you have visualized your plan, find the right partner and avoid the wrong one! You will have a significant advantage over one-man businesses if you come together with another person regularly to make important decisions. Find someone with whom you have good chemistry, someone who fills your blind spots.

Successful partnerships are based on the idea of taking different perspectives in a discussion and having different talents.

Step 4: Set Priorities for First Year

Once the groundwork has been established, set priorities for the absolutely crucial first year. Concentrate on why you are doing something, not how. Your why will keep you closely connected to your company and your product. As soon as you lose sight of why, you will also lose sight of your driving force and your motivation.

Step 5: Sell, Sell and Sell

Through your first year and beyond, court clients and keep them coming back! In order that you become a successful entrepreneur, it is essential that you are the person who is willing to pick up the phone and call people to talk about making deals and doing business.

When you make this phone call, make sure you are absolutely certain about the product that you are selling. With this certainty, you can use confidence to build up a network of contacts. The network cannot be established overnight. It is going to take a lot of phone calls. You cannot just wave your magic wand over a corporation and change them into a profitable client.

Step 6: Build a Team

In order to keep your client base, you need a great team to work with. Make sure that your company has shared values, that there are rewards for quality improvements, and that there are strong internal and external relationships. Empower the best, lose the rest!

Step 7: Learn from Mistakes

Inevitably, there will be failure. You must learn from failure: use it as a stepping-stone. Do not forget what mistakes you have made, but do not allow yourself to dwell on them. Take from your failure: take the lesson learned. Do not let it take anything from you: not your energy, not your time and not your space.

Step 8: Maintain Relationships Built

Finally, in order to keep your company going and keep your clients happy, maintain good relations with your vendors. It is essential that you support the people who support you. If you are making a big commitment to a client, make sure you have a solid relationship with your vendor.

In the end, take energy from taking risks. Live in the spirit of the entrepreneur!

What is the most effective use of e-mail to drive revenue and loyalty?

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Without a doubt, the most effective use of e-mail as a marketing tool is the often-overlooked category of response e-mails. These are e-mails sent to people in response to requests for information, to orders being placed, to visits to a company’s website based on specific pages being visited, to actions taken in other e-mails and even to calls made to the call center. And these are the highest-responding e-mails a company will ever send out.

Response-based e-mails will frequently generate more than 50% open rates and will be read carefully by the recipient—because the e-mail is recognized as containing relevant content he or she is looking for. Therefore, these e-mails create wonderful opportunities to cross-sell, upsell, initiate initial purchases and generate feedback from recipients.

So what is the best way to take advantage of these opportunities? The key is to keep the request short and be sure you are asking recipients to do only one thing. Examples include: “In appreciation of your business, you can buy any one additional item, right now, at 50% off. Click here and use code abcd” or “We see you started to fill out the mortgage application on our website. If you need help, click here, and if you would like to finish it now, click here” or “Be aware that our offer of free shipping ends Friday; to order now, click here.”

Obviously the offer and call to action come below the information that is the main reason for the e-mail. Don’t try to be cute and mix the offer in with the information. Be clear, provide the expected—then provide the reward. Done properly, these e-mails may end up being the most valuable you ever send.

Higher Purpose Content Marketing in 6 Steps

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Below is the presentation I gave at the Web Content 2010 conference, the leading US conference covering the art and discipline of content strategy.

First, how do we develop a higher purpose for our company? Our brand purpose should:

be elegantly simple
be crystal clear
be innately inspirational
have a point of view and stand for something

(note: kudos to Eduardo Conrado from Motorola for his thoughts on this)

If you notice, the same four points are critical for your higher purpose content marketing strategy. Your content marketing should:

be elegantly simple
be crystal clear
be innately inspirational
have a point of view and stand for something

Often I get asked the question - how can I be interesting to my customers (content) if we (my competitors) are all talking about the same thing?

The answer to this is in the question...you can't!

With your content marketing, it's not what you sell (in the case of Southwest - plane rides), it's what you stand for (everyone deserves to fly, no matter what).

Once you figure out your higher purpose, try these seven steps:

1. Create / Own Your Category

How can you tell your story differently than everyone else? New terminology may be necessary (i.e., content marketing).

2. Go Out to the People

Just like Jesus created a following by going to where the people were, so you need to as well. Find out where your customers are hanging out on the web and get involved in the conversation.

3. Then, Invite Them In

Invite your customers and influencers into your website and make them a part of the content (guest blogging, Q&A's come to mind).

4. Create Employee Rock Stars

Engaging your employees is critical. Employees are also the best source of marketing content you have. Get them involved.

5. Assign an Internal Evangelist

You need someone to not only be the cheerleader, but to help with the process flow and to keep your employees focused on your higher purpose content marketing strategy.

6. Create Something Remarkable

Your customers have so many choices when it comes to content. If your content isn't the very best, why should they engage or share your brand story?

5 Secrets to Selecting Highly-Effective SEO Keywords

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT

How many keywords should you assign to each page on your website--and how should you pick them? An Inc. 500 CEO offers his advice on SEO.

If there is a single concept that is the driver of much of the Internet’s growth over the past decade – not to mention nearly all of Google’s annual revenue of $25 billion – it is the concept of keywords. Keywords are what we type in when we are searching for products, services, and answers on the search engines, an act that Americans performed 15.5 billion times in April 2010 according to ComScore, the web research firm.

Companies optimize their webpages for search by assigning keywords to those pages. The implications for a business of picking the right keywords are therefore huge. Keyword selection is fundamental to success when it comes to executing a paid search or PPC campaign. It is also integral to a website natural or organic ranking on the search engines.

But keywords are not just about SEO. They at the heart of a company's marketing campaign at its most granular level. Do our customers love our product because it is fast-acting or because it is long-lasting? Are we cheap or the best? Do we provide people with ideas or with help? If you can't immediately identify the most important keywords for your company, it is doubtful that you can effectively market your products and services to your target audience. The following guide will provide you with 5 ideas to keep in mind when you are selecting keywords on which to build your online marketing.

Picking SEO Keywords: Focus on Good Phrases

When it comes to search engine marketing, there may be no larger misnomer, no more archaic term than the ubiquitous keyword. In my view, there should be an official migration to the more accurate term keyphrase, but for now I will be forced to use what I consider to be an inaccurate term. My frustration with this term is that it quite simply implies a single word, which is rarely the strategy that we employ when doing keyword research and selection in the service of PPC and SEO campaigns.

All too often, people dramatically overthink the most basic keyword research concepts; keyword generation should start simply with answering the question of "What products or services do you sell?" If you sell dog food online, the root words dog and food alone would be very poor keywords because on their own, neither dog nor food do a remotely good job at describing what you sell. Though this example makes it obvious, many times we have to fight through our urge to include those bigger, broader root keywords.

Picking SEO Keywords: Avoiding "Vanity" Keywords

Now let's look at a trickier example—one where the root keyword arguably does a good job describing what we are selling. Say I own an online jewelry store that sells all types of jewelry. To rank highly for the keyword jewelry would probably be at the top of my search engine marketing goals. And yet this would probably not be a profitable keyword that will drive relevant traffic to my site. That is because, from an organic SEO perspective, you are unlikely to rank highly for this term unless you are a huge, highly authoritative site—or lucky enough to be Jewelry.com, knowing that Google rewards keywords that match website addresses.

In this case, you would do well to go after more specific keywords such as gold jewelry, silver necklace, or women's Rolex watch. Not only is the competition for these terms less fierce but, from both an SEO and a PPC perspective, those more specific keywords are going to have a significantly higher conversion rate to purchases on your site.

Sometimes we refer to those root keywords as "vanity keywords," because if you do just one search to see who seems to be winning the space, you are likely to pick the single broadest keyword and see who comes up ranked highly. In nearly every case, however, we have found it to be more successful and deliver a significantly better return on your SEM investment by focusing on the hundreds or even thousands of more specific keywords that more closely match the services, products, brands, and locations that you sell or serve.

Picking SEO Keywords: Using Google's Wonder Wheel

This is in my opinion the best little secret of everyone's favorite search engine: the Google Wonder Wheel. Released about a year ago but virtually unknown compared with Google's much more visible search tools, the Wonder Wheel can be accessed by doing a search and then selecting "Wonder Wheel" under the filter options on the lefthand navigation.

What you are presented with now is a visual representation of the way that Google groups together keywords. (Indirectly, you can also deduce how users themselves perceive search terms.) This alone can become the basis of your PPC and SEO keyword research.

Starting with the search term dog food, I see related more specific terms like dog food reviews, dog food comparison, and dog food brands, which can help identify other keywords to focus on. Then, clicking on dog food brands, the search engine automatically expands that keyword to be another hub, with more specific keywords related to dog food brands such as nutro dog food, Purina dog food, and so on.

At my comapny, Wpromote, we use this tool to help shape overall content strategies. Continuing with the dog food example, we can see that ratings, comparison, and reviews all were all grouped as closely related to dog food in general, implying that people that are searching for dog food are very interested in the comparison and review side of things. So from a content strategy perspective, it would be a very powerful takeaway to include a heavy emphasis on customer ratings, third-party reviews, and side by side comparisons to help the consumers make their dog food selections while shopping on our site.

Picking SEO Keywords: The Value of Repetition

One concern we hear frequently is whether it is beneficial or harmful to repeat keywords. In other words, should we vary keywords (dog food, puppy food, and Purina) or repeat keywords (dog food reviews, dog food comparison, and dog food rankings.) The short answer is that the repetition is just fine, as long as the meaning of the phrase as a whole is sufficiently varied. In other words, dog food and dog food online are basically synonymous, and the content that one might expect to find associated with both keywords is the same. However, dog food reviews and dog food comparison indicate somewhat different content and therefore are appropriate to be used in tandem as keywords.

The more important concept to keep in mind is that you want to choose keywords that best relate to the content present on a web page and on a website; if you don't have a dog food comparison matrix, then don't bother including comparison-related keywords; you are misleading your users, and certainly not fooling Google. So in an ideal world, you do have a comparison section, a reviews section, and a rankings section, housed on different pages or sections of your site, with each one tagged with the appropriate keywords. Correspondingly, your SEO and PPC search engine marketing efforts should that content by driving review keywords to the review pages and so on.

Picking SEO Keywords: Guiding Your Content Strategy

Keywords should guide your overall content strategy. We have referred to this concept several times in the preceding tips, but it is important enough to leave as a final guiding paradigm.

Conventionally, we think linearly about content and keywords; we build a website, and then launch search engine marketing campaigns to drive users to our content. That approach has its limits. When we think about strategy at Wpromote, we think about a circular process; since our keyword research reflects both what users are seeking and the way that the search engines (particularly Google) "think" about keywords, we let that help to drive our content strategy.

Put differently, to be phenomenally successful, we seek not to take static content and try to pry greater results from it; instead, we leverage the existing needs of the users, and use that knowledge to help us create the best possible user experience. That, in turn, will be rewarded with higher rankings, greater traffic, and a higher ROI from our marketing efforts.

Getting a Foothold Online

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The CEO of Zappos.com, the shoe retailer, traces his path to success so far

The women in "Sex and the City 2" probably do not buy their shoes from Zappos.com, but millions of other (real) people do, and they have made the company a breathtaking dot-com success story long after the bubble burst for so many other Internet retailers. How did such improbable success happen?

In "Delivering Happiness," Tony Hsieh, the 36-year-old founder and chief executive of Zappos, says that he had an epiphany at a party when a mysterious woman whispered: "Envision, create and believe in your own universe, and the universe will form around you." The message seemed to help, but—to judge by Mr. Hsieh's account of his life so far—so did his own low threshold for boredom and shrewd business sense.

Mr. Hsieh confesses that, as a child growing up in Marin County, Calif., he was perhaps not always a model student. For instance, he was supposed to practice four musical instruments for an hour every day during the summer; instead, he played tapes of himself practicing to fool his parents while, in fact, reading magazines behind his bedroom door and, even then, looking for business opportunities. An earthworm farm failed when the worms escaped. His $800 ad for a magic kit produced only one order, for $10.

At Harvard, Mr. Hsieh says, he did as little schoolwork as possible. He took a class in Mandarin Chinese, a language he already knew because he spoke it at home with his Taiwanese-born parents. He did, however, start to figure out how to make money, running a food service on campus that offered burgers he bought from a nearby McDonald's and eventually pizza. After graduating in the mid-1990s, he took a tech job at Oracle, the software company. He found it tedious. He tried Web design but tired of that, too.

Then, in 1996, Mr. Hsieh came up with an idea for a network of websites. The member sites, which often had no marketing budgets, could place banner ads on other member sites at no charge. In return, all members would accept a certain number of banner ads from each other. As a reward for its work as a broker, Mr. Hsieh's company, LinkExchange, would itself have the rights to place banner ads and could sell those rights to anyone.

The idea worked so well that 800,000 sites joined the network, and Microsoft ended up buying LinkExchange in 1998 for $265 million. Mr. Hsieh came away with $40 million—just three years out of college. To receive the full amount, he was supposed to "vest in peace," showing up at the office occasionally for a year in case he was needed, but he found that he couldn't. At a cost of $8 million of the Microsoft money, he decided to get back into business for himself.

Mr. Hsieh started an investment group and, in 1999, financed a plan to sell shoes online. Although at first uncertain about whether people would buy shoes without trying them on, he was won over by the size of the market and the fact that catalog orders already accounted for 5% of American shoe sales. Zappos—a variant of zapatos, the Spanish word for "shoes"—began by "drop-shipping": It took orders but let manufacturers ship directly to customers. That way the company didn't have to carry inventory.

But many manufacturers wouldn't drop-ship, limiting selection, and Zappos's relations with customers were at the mercy of suppliers, who often botched orders. A bigger problem was that the Internet bubble soon burst and much-needed financing sources disappeared.

In 2000, Mr. Hsieh decided to take over the day-to-day operations at Zappos. He scrimped on cash; more momentously, he decided to carry inventory, in order to improve selection and customer service. Sales grew, but so did the need for financing. Eventually, Mr. Hsieh tells us, he kicked in all his personal assets—and still he did not know if the business could hold on.

It did, when a credit line from Wells Fargo materialized. Mr. Hsieh took the offensive, deciding that Zappos should try to achieve the world's best customer service. He freed his reps from scripts, from mandates to sell, from having their calls timed. The reps had only one imperative: Wow customers. And they did, apparently getting orders out the door as swiftly as possible and generating terrific word of mouth.

After a decade, Zappos reached $1 billion in sales and dominated online shoe sales. Amazon bought the company for $1.2 billion last year, and Zappos now sells many types of apparel, including clothes and watches. Inevitably, Mr. Hsieh has lessons to impart from such triumph. He talks of "core values," like showing "passion and positivity." But he is most persuasive when he returns to the matter of customer service. Many companies hide their contact information, he notes, afraid they might have to deal with a real customer. Zappos tries to see service not as a cost but as a powerful marketing tool. Surely he is on to something: As customers communicate with one another more and more through social media, the chances to make an asset out of customer service will only grow—as will the costs of getting service wrong.

Mr. Hsieh says that, amid all the service focus, he has tried to make his corporate culture more communal. Employees logging in with a password, for instance, get prompted with a picture of another employee and are asked to guess who the person is. The idea is to nurture cooperation and teamwork.

It seems to have worked, as Ms. Hsieh claims, but the causality is hard to track. Zappos may not be successful because of a strong culture; it may have a strong culture because it is successful. Besides, the real test is what happens a couple of decades out. Ask Microsoft about that one. Still, it is hard not to like a CEO who, without a trace of irony, says that his corporate mission has become "delivering happiness to the world."

Mr. Carroll is the co-author, with Chunka Mui, of "Billion-Dollar Lessons" and is a principal with Devil's Advocate Group, a management consulting firm.

Why I Sold Zappos

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Tony Hsieh built his online shoe retailer into an e-commerce powerhouse. But with credit tightening and investors eyeing the exits, Hsieh was forced to ask: Was selling Zappos really the only way to save it?

The first time Amazon.com tried to buy Zappos, we said no without even thinking.

It was the summer of 2005, and Zappos, the start-up into which I'd poured the past five years of my life (and almost all of my money), finally seemed to be on the right track.

Zappos sells shoes and apparel online, but what distinguished us from our competitors was that we'd put our company culture above all else. We'd bet that by being good to our employees -- for instance, by paying for 100 percent of health care premiums, spending heavily on personal development, and giving customer service reps more freedom than at a typical call center -- we would be able to offer better service than our competitors. Better service would translate into lots of repeat customers, which would mean low marketing expenses, long-term profits, and fast growth. Amazingly, it all seemed to be working. By 2005, gross merchandise sales were $370 million, and we made the Inc. 500. We weren't profitable yet, but we were close to breaking even, and our revenue was growing quickly.

At the time, we made almost all our money selling shoes, but our hope was that we'd eventually go into all sorts of other businesses. We saw Zappos as a global brand like Virgin -- except whereas Virgin was about being hip and cool, Zappos would be about offering the best service. The plan was to grow sales to $1 billion by 2010 and eventually go public.

These ideas about the power of our company culture had yet to be proved. As I talked to Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who visited our headquarters in 2005, I realized that to Amazon, we were just a leading shoe company. If we sold, we'd probably be folded into their operations, and our brand and culture would be at risk of disappearing.

That was why we told Jeff that we weren't interested in selling at any price. I felt like we were just getting started.

Four years later, Amazon came calling again -- and again my impulse was to say no. Our sales had grown steadily since 2005; by 2008 we were doing more than $1 billion in gross merchandise sales annually -- two years ahead of our original plan. We were now profitable, and our culture was even stronger. As before, our plan was to stay independent and eventually go public.

But our board of directors had other ideas. Although I'd financed much of Zappos myself during its early days, we'd eventually raised tens of millions of dollars from outside investors, including $48 million from Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. As with all VCs, Sequoia expected a substantial return on its investment -- most likely through an IPO. It might have been happy to wait a few more years if the economy had been thriving, but the recession and the credit crisis had put Zappos -- and our investors -- in a very precarious position.

At the time, Zappos relied on a revolving line of credit of $100 million to buy inventory. But our lending agreements required us to hit projected revenue and profitability targets each month. If we missed our numbers even by a small amount, the banks had the right to walk away from the loans, creating a possible cash-flow crisis that might theoretically bankrupt us. In early 2009, there weren't a lot of banks eager to give out $100 million to a business in our situation.

That wasn't our only potential cash-flow problem. Our line of credit was "asset backed," meaning that we could borrow between 50 percent and 60 percent of the value of our inventory. But the value of our inventory wasn't based on what we'd paid. It was based on the amount of money we could reasonably collect if the company were liquidated. As the economy deteriorated, the appraised value of our inventory began to fall, which meant that even if we hit our numbers, we might eventually find ourselves without enough cash to buy inventory.

These issues had nothing to do with the underlying performance of our business, but they increased tensions on our board of directors. Some board members had always viewed our company culture as a pet project -- "Tony's social experiments," they called it. I disagreed. I believe that getting the culture right is the most important thing a company can do. But the board took the conventional view -- namely, that a business should focus on profitability first and then use the profits to do nice things for its employees. The board's attitude was that my "social experiments" might make for good PR but that they didn't move the overall business forward. The board wanted me, or whoever was CEO, to spend less time on worrying about employee happiness and more time selling shoes.

On some level, I was sympathetic to the board's position. The truth was that if we pulled back on the culture stuff, the immediate effect on our financials would probably have been positive. It would have reduced our expenses in the short term, and I don't think our sales would have suffered much at first. But I was pretty sure that in the long term, it would have ruined everything we had created.

By early 2009, we were at a stalemate. Because of a complicated legal structure, I effectively controlled the majority of the common shares, so that the board couldn't force a sale of the company. But on the five-person board, only two of us -- Alfred Lin, our CFO and COO, and myself -- were completely committed to Zappos's culture. This made it likely that if the economy didn't improve, the board would fire me and hire a new CEO who was concerned only with maximizing profits. The threat was never made overtly, but I could tell that was the direction things were going.

It was a stressful time for me and Alfred. But we'd gotten through much tougher times before, and this seemed like just another challenge we needed to figure out. We began brainstorming ways that we could get out from under the board. We certainly didn't want to sell the company and move on to something else. To us, Zappos wasn't just a job -- it was a calling. So we came up with a plan: We would buy out our board of directors.

We figured to do so would cost about $200 million. As we were talking to potential investors, Amazon approached Alfred about buying Zappos outright. Although that still didn't seem like the best option to me, Alfred sensed that Amazon would be more open than last time to the idea of letting Zappos continue to operate as an independent entity. And we felt that the price Amazon was talking about was too large for us to ignore without potentially violating our fiduciary duty to our shareholders.

In April, I flew to Seattle for an hourlong meeting with Jeff Bezos. I gave him my standard presentation on Zappos, which is mostly about our culture. Toward the end of the presentation, I started talking about the science of happiness -- and how we try to use it to serve our customers and employees better.

Out of nowhere, Jeff said, "Did you know that people are very bad at predicting what will make them happy?" Those were the exact words on my next slide. I put it up and said, "Yes, but apparently you are very good at predicting PowerPoint slides." After that moment, things got comfortable. It seemed clear that Amazon had come to appreciate our company culture as well as our strong sales.

Still, I had plenty of concerns. Jeff's approach to business had been very different from my own. One of the ways that Amazon tries to deliver a great customer experience is by offering low prices, whereas at Zappos we don't try to compete on price. If Amazon gets a lot of customer service calls, it will try to figure out why -- maybe there's something confusing about the product description -- and then it will try to fix the problem so that it can reduce the number of phone calls, which keeps prices low. But at Zappos, we want people to call us. We believe that forming personal, emotional connections with our customers is the best way to provide great service.

But as I talked to Jeff, I realized that there were similarities between our companies, too. Amazon wants to do what is best for its customers -- even, it seemed to me, at the expense of short-term financial performance. Zappos has the same goal. We just have a different philosophy about how to do it.

I left Seattle pretty sure that Amazon would be a better partner for Zappos than our current board of directors or any other outside investor. Our board wanted an immediate exit; we wanted to build an enduring company that would spread happiness. With Amazon, it seemed that Zappos could continue to build its culture, brand, and business. We would be free to be ourselves.

Negotiations with Amazon began shortly afterward. Amazon initially offered to buy Zappos in cash, but that didn' t sit well with us. In our minds, a cash deal felt too much like we were selling the company outright, so we proposed an all-stock transaction. Zappos shareholders would simply trade their stock for Amazon stock. We saw the deal less as an acquisition than as a marriage. An all-stock deal would be analogous to a married couple opening a joint bank account.

In June, Jeff sent a formal proposal to buy Zappos in stock, which our board voted to accept on July 20. We persuaded Amazon to let us break the news to our managers. So at around noon on July 22, an hour and a half before the markets closed and the deal was publicly announced, I stood in front of about 50 of our most senior employees in our training room and explained what we were doing. It was a speech about the most important thing in my life, and all the nervousness that I used to feel when I first started speaking in public came back.

I spoke for half an hour and told them to explain to their staffs that nothing was going to change: They would still have their jobs, and the Zappos culture would still be our own. But now, we would be able to do new things more quickly.

At first, everyone in the room was anxious -- some had assumed I was leaving the company; others didn't know what to think -- but as I spoke, I could see the relief come over people's faces. They went back to their desks, gathered their staffs, and told them what was happening. Within a couple of hours, everyone had gone back to work. In the hallways, I overheard employees talking about how excited they were about having access to Amazon's resources. Two days later, I gathered our Las Vegas team -- roughly 700 employees at the time -- in a conference center to address any additional questions. Party music filled the room, and employees threw beach balls around into the crowd. The energy was amazing. It felt like the beginning of the next leg of our journey.

The acquisition closed on November 1, at a valuation of $1.2 billion (based on Amazon's stock price on the day of closing). Our investors at Sequoia made $248 million. Our board was replaced by a management committee that includes me, Jeff, two Amazon executives, and two Zappos executives. As CEO, I report to the committee every quarter, and Zappos is responsible for hitting revenue and profitability numbers. But unlike our former board of directors, our new management committee seems to understand the importance of our culture -- the "social experiments" -- to our long-term success. In fact, one Amazon distribution center recently began experimenting with its own version of Zappos's policy of paying new employees $2,000 to quit if they're unhappy with their jobs.

Otherwise, Zappos continues to operate independently. Our relationship is governed by a document that formally recognizes the uniqueness of Zappos's culture and Amazon's duty to protect it. We think of Amazon as a giant consulting company that we can hire if we want -- for instance, if we need help redesigning our warehouse systems.

In the first quarter of 2010, net sales at Zappos were up almost 50 percent, and we've added several hundred new employees. The growth has made Amazon very happy, but it's also creating new challenges. I've noticed that at company happy hours, you don't see as many employees from different departments hanging out with one another.

To address that, we've begun tracking employee relationships. When employees log in to their computers, we ask them to look at a picture of a random employee and then ask them how well they know that person -- the options include "say hi in the halls," "hang out outside of work," and "we're going to be longtime friends." We're starting to keep track of the number and strength of cross-departmental relationships -- and we're planning a class on the topic. My hope is that we can have more employees who plan to be close friends.

That's just one small thing that we're doing to make sure our culture gets stronger and that our employees are happy. We have close to 1,800 employees now, and I think we're proof that a company doesn't have to lose itself as it grows bigger -- or even after it gets acquired.

This article is adapted from Hsieh's new book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose. Inc. senior writer Max Chafkin contributed additional reporting.

Never Read Another Resume

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMT

37signals co-founder Jason Fried shares his tips for hiring great employees.

Hiring people is like making friends. Pick good ones, and they'll enrich your life. Make bad choices, and they'll bring you down. Who you work with is even more important than who you hang out with, because you spend a lot more time with your workmates than your friends.

Wait, why am I talking about hiring? Isn't unemployment stubbornly high? Aren't tons of folks unable to find new work? That's certainly the case for many industries, but not ours. In fact, our company's job board -- which lists positions for programmers and designers across our industry -- has more help-wanted postings than ever. We recently hired two new people. Something is going on.

I'd like to share a bit about how we go about hiring at 37signals. Hiring is something we rarely do -- we're intentionally small at 20 people -- but we've developed a method that has worked very well for us. It allows us to find the right people and keep them happy. In 11 years, only two people have left the company -- and one recently returned after working elsewhere for seven years. (Welcome back, Scott!)

So, what do we do? First, we hire late. We hire after it hurts. We hire to alleviate pain, not for pleasure. Who hires for pleasure? Any company that hires people before it needs them is hiring for pleasure. It's an indulgence we've never allowed ourselves.

We're happy to skip over the perfect catch if we don't have the perfect job for the person to do. Right now I know there are some great designers and programmers available, and I'd love to have them on our team. But we don't have any openings.

I've run into a lot of companies that invent positions for great people just so they don't get away. But hiring people when you don't have real work for them is insulting to them and hurtful to you. Great people want to work on things that matter. Inevitably, a great person working on imaginary work will turn into an unsatisfied person. Then he'll leave.

It's easy to say, "There's gotta be stuff you'd like to do if you had more people." And, of course, there is stuff I'd like to do. But I believe it's good to operate at the limits of your organization. Limits force you to come up with creative, elegant solutions. Being forced to get more done with fewer resources is the right kind of pressure.

A smaller team keeps you focused. It crowds out all the things you'd like to do and replaces them with the things you have to do. It forces you to prioritize and focus on the next most important thing instead of the next "wouldn't it be cool if…" thing. There are always plenty of those.

How do you know if you really need someone? A good rule of thumb is this: Have you already tried to do the job yourself? If you haven't done the job, you don't really understand the job. Without that fundamental understanding, it's hard to judge what constitutes a job well done.

For example, a few years back, we decided it would be a good idea to bring on a business-development person, someone who could follow up on partnership inquiries and other new business opportunities we were being pitched. Up to that point, we'd pretty much been ignoring those e-mails. We were just too busy doing other things.

So we began interviewing people. Some were very qualified and had great references. But because we hadn't actually followed up on these new business opportunities before, it was hard to know exactly how to proceed with a candidate. In the course of conducting job interviews, we quickly learned that because none of us had even tried to pursue unsolicited partnership requests, none of us could evaluate a candidate's skills appropriately. Would the candidate be good at doing something we know nothing about? How would we even know?

So after meeting with a variety of people, we stopped the search and began looking into these inquiries ourselves. It quickly became obvious that most of these deals weren't worth pursuing anyway. If we hadn't taken that extra step, we might have hired someone to spend time on something we didn't even want. That's definitely not good for us -- and it's not good for a biz-dev person's career, either.

We've learned this lesson with other positions, too. Before we hired our first customer service person (Sarah), I did all the customer service, about two years of answering e-mails. David, my business partner, and Jamis, one of our programmers, did all of our system administration before we hired our first system administrator (Mark). We found great people because we thoroughly understood the jobs.

Once we begin vetting candidates, we also behave a little differently. For one thing, we ignore resumés. In my experience, they're full of exaggerations, half-truths, embellishments -- and even outright lies. They're made of action verbs that don't really mean anything. Even when people aren't intentionally trying to trick you, they often stretch the truth. And what does "five years' experience" mean, anyway? Resumés reduce people to bullet points, and most people look pretty good as bullet points.

What we do look at are cover letters. Cover letters say it all. They immediately tell you if someone wants this job or just any job. And cover letters make something else very clear: They tell you who can and who can't write. Spell checkers can spell, but they can't write. Wordsmiths rise to the top quickly. Another rule of thumb: When in doubt, always hire the better writer.

We look for effort, too. How badly does this person want the job? Pestering is not the same as effort, though. We hired a designer named Jason Zimdars because: 1. He was good, and 2. He made more effort to get the job than anyone else. He built a special website pitching his skills just for us. So few people make the extra effort like Jason did. (Check it out to see what I mean: jasonzimdars.com/svn.)

During interviews, we love when potential hires ask questions. But all questions aren't equal. A red flag goes up when someone asks how. "How do I do that?" "How can I find out this or that?" You want people who ask why, not how. Why is good -- it's a sign of deep interest in a subject. It signals a healthy dose of curiosity. How is a sign that someone isn't used to figuring things out for him- or herself. How is a sign that this person is going to be a drain on others. Avoid hows.

We also try to test-drive people before hiring them full time. We give designers a one-week design project to see how they approach the problem. We pay them $1,500 for their work. Sometimes, we'll hire someone on a contract basis for a month to see how we feel about the person and how the person feels about us. Sometimes that project is just a few hours a week because the candidate already has a day job. But that's often enough to check out the person's work, how the person communicates, and how the person works under pressure. These real-work tests have saved us a few mismatched hires and confirmed a bunch of great people.

Finally, we never let geography get in the way. We hire the best we can no matter where they are. We're based in Chicago, but we have programmers in Idaho and California, system administrators in North Carolina and downstate Illinois, designers in Oklahoma and Colorado, a writer in New York City, and others in Europe. This obviously wouldn't work for customer-facing folks, but for most everyone else, it does. The best are everywhere. It's up to you to find them.

Creating e-mails that generate leads

Mon, 24 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

List segmentation key to turning prospects into customers with spot-on messages

The majority of e-mail dollars—70%—are spent on retention efforts, according to a Forrester Research forecast released last June, “U.S. Email Marketing Forecast, 2009 to 2014.” Acquisition via e-mail, said David Daniels, the firm's VP and principal analyst, is much more difficult in today's business climate. Still, when done right, e-mail marketing can become a strong tool for lead generation. The key, Daniels said, is to handle lead-generation e-mails as you would in-person sales calls; it might be the electronic equivalent of a cold call, but there should be nothing cold about it.

You can warm your prospecting efforts by doing something you should already be doing with your retention e-mail marketing database: creating narrow segments whenever possible. This strategy, often called “microtargeting,” enables you to reach out to customers and better match where they are in the buying cycle, said Heather Blank, director of strategic services with e-mail service provider (ESP) Responsys. “Our clients who have been more successful [with lead generation] are the ones creating dynamically generated content by bringing in either Web or profile data,” she said, “and sending content that matches someone's profile very closely.”

You can see this play out when you compare results of purchasing a list to renting space in a publisher's e-newsletter, said Matt Wise, president of online marketing services provider Q Interactive. “If you're a technology marketer, for instance, and you're reaching out to a list where someone has signed up to receive an e-mail from CNET about technology, you're going to get better results than if you bought a list where you don't know where the names came from or how long it's been sitting around,” he said.

Companies can also run into trouble committing one of the most obvious mistakes—the hard sell—jumping right into an offer without creating a relationship. But even those marketers willing to take it slow often commit marketing faux pas. Brand inconsistency, for example, can turn prospects off immediately, said Jamie Schissler, strategy director of interactive agency Razorfish. “This still goes on where you've got multiple groups responsible for a brand,” he said. “If you're sending e-mails divorced from the core marketing team, the message isn't going to be on mark all of the time.” If customers are aware of your brand but then receive a message that seems very different than what they already know about it, they may become confused and look elsewhere, he said.

Marketers also miss out on an opportunity when they don't mention how they got the recipient's e-mail, said Sara Ezrin, ESP Experian CheetahMail's senior strategy consultant. Unless you're buying a list, the people in your lead database have raised their hands somehow—at an event, on your website or by clicking through on a banner ad. Mentioning that source will help you get a better start on your relationship, she said.

“Unless you indicate the source of that e-mail acquisition and personalize it—'It was great to meet you at our most recent event'—you're missing out on one of the most important, relevant pieces of messaging.” Of course, Ezrin said, you have to be sure someone on your team actually met that person. If the address came from someone dropping their card into a big fishbowl, you'll need to couch your greeting to reflect that, too.

It's also important to tailor the message to new recipients; they should get a completely different sales message than someone who has been doing business with your company for years. However, e-mail marketers often lump new prospects into their more mature database, Ezrin said, sending newly opted-in prospects their regular stream of e-mails. “We're always pushing for nurturing, but we're not tailoring different messaging based on relationship,” she said. “And sometimes we add people to a new leads database, send them an introduction to the company—but they've been a customer for a while. They're just buying a new product. That's exactly what you don't want to do: Say "Welcome' to someone who is already a customer.”

Segmenting doesn't just stop once you've got new prospects in a single database and are using microtargeting practices, said Kara Trivunovic, senior director of strategic services at StrongMail. “Consider classifying prospects even more so you have two subgroups of leads: qualified leads and those people likely seeking education,” she said. “Then you're going to market to them differently.”

Otherwise, messaging should as always be highly focused on the prospect's business problem, and marketers may best achieve that goal by using customer testimonials in their e-mail copy, said Forrester Research's Daniels. “Those people who are doing this are getting the highest conversion rate,” he said.

StrongMail's Trivunovic said one of her customers—a human resources software vendor—created a strong “onboarding” program by introducing testimonials sequentially. The first e-mail or two had written commentary included, while subsequent messages included links to video testimonials. “The videos were so [that] people could see existing customers talk about how the organization helped them. The company felt it humanized them. They were doing more than marketing; they were showing that they understood their customers' needs,” she said.

And if you do everything right and your prospects haven't opted out but aren't opening your e-mails? Don't keep them in your prospects database. Instead, move them to a separate list whether you intend on remarketing to them again or not. Unopened e-mails are causing some marketers to have issues with e-mail deliverability, said Q Interactive's Wise, who also sits on the board of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “If you send your e-mail out and no one engages with it, you're risking that the ISPs and corporations, which use ISP black lists, are going to stop delivering your messages,” he said.

Integrating e-mail and search campaigns

Thu, 20 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Last year, the luster of social media dimmed search engine marketing’s star. But according to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO’s) sixth annual “State of Search Engine Marketing Report,” released in March, the search market is expected to spring back in 2010.

The report, based on a global online survey of more than 1,500 marketers and agency respondents, estimated that the North American search engine marketing industry will grow from $14.6 billion in 2009 to $16.6 billion by the end of this year—a 14% change. But this increase won’t come from e-mail budgets. (The report found that 49% of respondents would be shifting that money from print and 36% would be shifting it from direct mail.) In fact, said Nicholas Einstein, director of strategic & analytic services for Datran Media, this shift in spending only illuminates an opportunity for e-mail marketers.

“I don’t see people doing it very often, but marketers should be thinking about campaigns that bring search and e-mail together,” he said. “By combining the two you can build your e-mail list and drive opt-ins.”

Marketers overlook the opportunity because search, especially in some categories, can be very expensive and competitive, so they focus only on the core business objective of driving near-term incremental revenue while overlooking the long term, Einstein said. Here are four things he said everyone should be thinking about when planning any search campaign:

Include an e-mail sign-up on every search landing page, and make it very visible. “This is a huge opportunity because, when someone opts in when they find you via search, you can tie back any e-mails to the original search terms,” he said.

Simply put, if someone searches “green Web server,” you know that they will probably be open to e-mail campaigns that focus on that topic.
Tightly integrate search and e-mail marketing. What was the subject of this week’s e-newsletter? Did you update your paid search terms to reflect it? If you didn’t, you may be missing out. “If a current reader does a search for something they see in your newsletter and you’re the first paid link on the page, it boosts your visibility and caché in that customer’s eyes,” Einstein said. “Whether you’re pushing a white paper, or a conference or whatever topic, a tightly aligned campaign is going to generate synergy.”

Post e-newsletter content to boost organic search rankings. Hosting versions of the newsletter on your website—in proper directory structure, of course—creates content that’s multipurpose and will be indexed by search engines, Einstein said. “It’s low-hanging fruit,” he said.

Don’t get lazy. You might think that you can use the same landing page for an e-mail marketing campaign that you use for a paid search campaign. This is very rare, Einstein said. “Someone who comes to a landing page from search might have different needs than someone coming to the landing page from e-mail,” he said.

For one thing, a searcher probably doesn’t know the basics about your company, and in some cases that click may be their first introduction to it, Einstein said. “You really need to hone your message for each specific channel and test different messages and content strategies based on individual channels,” he said.

3 Steps to Becoming the Industry Expert (Content Strategy, Water Cooler and a Book)

Tue, 18 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

A few months ago at the Online Marketing Summit national conference (where, by the way, I'll be doing content marketing workshops in 22 cities), one marketer stood up and said:

"How do I differentiate myself with my content? My five competitors all talk about the same thing and we're all fighting for the same keywords. There's no where else to go."

I've heard this many times. Some marketing and communication professionals think that since the publishing of content is rather easy, there is little or no chance to truly create a remarkable message and unique story.

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong. If you believe this, stop right now and follow this plan.

Your Content Strategy - The stories you tell as a brand do not just compete with your actual competitors. They compete with the niche trade magazines in your industry, the bloggers in your industry, Google and every other piece of content that your customers engage in. That means your content MUST be the best. It MUST be innovative. It MUST tell a unique and compelling story for you to be the industry expert. If it doesn't, you have work to do.
The Water Cooler - If only great content were enough. Content plus community is what gives fuel to the fire. Where are your customers at on the web or in person? That's where you need to be. Identify those key places, target the top five, and become a part of that community by offering consistently helpful information. Outsider content will bounce off your customers like a shield. Insider content engages, is accepting and creates real value.
The Major Tactics (book and blog) - It may sound cliché, but industry experts write industry books. Look at the key thought leaders in your industry. They all have books, don't they? They also have pretty compelling blogs. While both of these are tactical, these are "money in the bank" tools that show your expertise as an individual and a brand. If you (the brand) say that you are the experts in mechanical engineering for roller coasters, let me see the book. No book? Sorry, come back next time.

As the great Chris Rock says, "don't hate the player, hate the game." Are you an industry expert or not?

YouTube Reaches Two Billion Hits a Day

Mon, 17 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Video-sharing website YouTube celebrates its fifth birthday today with the news that it receives more than two billion hits daily.

That’s almost double the number of people who tune into ABC, NBC, and CBS combined, says YouTube’s owner Google. It’s also a huge leap from the 1 billion-plus daily views the site said it was getting in October.

The average YouTube viewer stays on the site for about 15 minutes a day, compared to TV’s five hours. YouTube is hoping to narrow the gap – and cash in on the trend toward Internet television – by adding full-length movies, concerts and live sporting events. That’s a far cry from the 19-second “Me at the Zoo” video, the site’s first offering, which was posted by co-founder Jawed Karim.(It’s also a far cry from guys dancing on treadmills and babies doing cute things, the sort of content for which the site is infamous.)

"The day is coming when people won't think of online video as being separate from TV," Shishir Mehrotra, who runs YouTube's advertising programs as director of product management, told the Los Angeles Times. "The lines are blurring in both directions. From the viewer's perspective, there are many ways to watch content on their TV, and TV content on the Internet.”

Catharine P. Taylor, a media blogger at news website BNET.com, told BBC News: "YouTube really is a phenomenon and is very much part of popular culture. It really is a game changer because it gives everybody a platform to broadcast from. There are many examples where an average citizen has become a big hit on YouTube and that is something that would have been impossible to contemplate five, six years ago."

The site – a perennial money-pit – has increased its revenue, the New York Times said. The ad space on YouTube's home pages was sold out every day in 20 countries in the end of 2009, and the number of advertisers using display ads has increased tenfold, according to Bloomberg News. Analysts say the site could start contributing to Google’s bottom line this year.

YouTube is also going to change a lot, experts say.

"I think we will see it on more devices and see it used more for live streaming,” Ryan Lawler of video site NewTeeVee.com told BBC News. “There are real opportunities for it to become a traditional content distributor like the cable channels. YouTube streams make up around 40 percent of all online video watched in the U.S., so there is massive scale there and lot of opportunity."

Still, the site faces big hurdles with advertisers, many of whom are leery of putting their ads next to content viewers could find offensive. "For the sort of brand advertiser that’s willing to spend a lot of money, it needs to be trusted content," eMarketer analyst David Hallerman told Bloomberg. "It’s not even the first inning yet." (Of course, YouTube’s user uploaded content means you can still advertise your business for free on YouTube; here's how.)

ComScore, IAB reports show robust online ad growth

Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Reston, Va.—U.S. online display advertising impressions totaled 1.1 trillion in the first quarter, an increase of 15% over the year-earlier period, according to data released Thursday by comScore. The average cost per thousand impressions was $2.48 for an estimated total ad spend in the first quarter of $2.7 billion.

Facebook.com had 176 billion display ad impressions in the first quarter, leading all online publishers with a 16.2% market share. Yahoo's sites ranked second with 132 billion impressions (12.1%). Microsoft's sites were third with 60 billion impressions (5.5%).

“Following a severe ad recession that began in late 2008 and continued through the first three quarters of 2009, we've been seeing a strong resurgence in the online display ad market,” Jeff Hackett, comScore senior VP, said in a statement. “The first quarter of 2010 posted strong volume in online display ads, coinciding with increasing expenditure from advertisers and higher CPMs for publishers."

A separate report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers found that Internet ad revenue in the U.S. totaled $5.9 billion in the first quarter, up 7.5% over the same period a year earlier and the highest reported quarterly revenue figure for the industry.

“The year-over-year growth we are seeing reflects marketers' confidence in the value and effectiveness of interactive advertising,” said Randall Rothenberg, president-CEO of the IAB.

How to Improve Your E-mail Marketing

Thu, 13 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Your customers and clients are overloaded with e-mail every day. We asked experts for their tips and tricks for more effective e-mail marketing.

Spreading the gospel of good e-mail marketing is what Justin Premick, e-mail marketing expert and self-proclaimed e-mail evangelist, has been doing since 2004. Premick believes that permission e-mail marketing works, and as director of education marketing at AWeber Communications Inc. in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, he works primarily with small businesses. "You don't have to tell the Proctor & Gamble account manager that e-mail works, but you might have to convince the independent retailer, or the local coffee shop, or art store," Premik says.

E-mail can be used by your business to market to customers, alert them to new product offerings, and offer loyalty discounts or promotions. At the same time, your customers can use e-mail to troubleshoot any problems they have with your products or services, provide you feedback, and ask questions.

Due to its multitude of uses, e-mail marketing is part art and part science. It takes a combination of know-how and creativity to get customers and clients just to open your e-mail. We've talked to experts and nailed down some of the technical knowledge of what methods produce positive click-thru rates and even purchases. And, want to know what not to do? We've got that, too.

Do: Keep it short and simple. Don't: Waste too much time crafting the e-mail.

"The message needs to be clear and consistent from the subject line to the e-mail headline and skimmable body copy," says Tim Watson, operations director at smartFocus Digital with offices in England and the Netherlands, as well as Newton, Massachusetts, and Denver, Colorado. If you put too much information or try to offer the reader multiple sales or promotions, you could overwhelm them and lose them.

"Don't cram too many messages into a single e-mail or send large attachments that may clog subscribers' inboxes," advises Monica Roldan, Internet manager at Citigroup.

"Readers are brutal with deleting e-mail," Watson says. "They are looking for reasons to delete and you have seconds to stop that from happening."

Do: Qualify the e-mail addresses and information about the people and the organizations they represent. Don't: Carpet e-mail blast every address in your database.

The experts could not emphasize enough the importance of a targeted database with accurate information. "I live on the 5th floor of an apartment block. If I get an e-mail offering me a $50 discount off lawnmowers, it's spam," says Nigel Rayner, a marketing and advertising professional at NJR Consulting in Stockport, United Kingdom. "It's all down to accurate targeting and segmentation."

Do: Create value in your e-mailing. Don't: Attempt to sell with no utility for your subscribers.

It's easy to use your newsletters as a means of selling your products or services. It's harder to offer a value to your subscribers whether they make a purchase or not. "Give people a reason to subscribe and to remain subscribed," Premick says. "Understand it's not 'free' to people to be on your e-mail list; it costs their time and that is arguably the most valuable and irreplaceable resource people have."

Your goal should be to have a mix and balance of both and offer content that is useful and that the reader can't get anywhere else. You have to figure out ways to engage your subscribers. "E-mail one part of a three-part story and follow-up with the other parts in later e-mails," suggested Steve Cates, VP of multichannel marketing at Carrot-Top Industries in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. "Have polls or solicit open-ended questions and give them a place to respond."

Do: Allow users several ways to opt-out. Don't: Neglect preferences.

All the experts agreed that offering an opt-out option is essential to not annoy customers and clients, but also as a measure of protecting your brand. You don't want your company e-mails to be associated with being spammers. "Recognize and understand the importance of permission. It isn't taken, it's given," Premick says. "Subscribers will revoke permission, one way or another."

An e-mail preference center is a Web page you create for customers who sign up for your e-mail program. Here, you give them a chance to tell you what they want by letting them choose and manage the types of messages they receive from you. While preferences can create a little bit more work for you, they improve the experience for your customers by ensuring they only receive the kinds of e-mail from you that they want.

Do: Strategically promote your e-mail newsletters. Don't: Buy or rent e-mail lists.

It's not always about the size of your e-mail list, but the quality of your list that matters. You want customers or clients who are more likely to purchase your product or service. The way to get those people is to build your own list.

Encourage customers to sign up directly from your website, where they can quickly provide their information and choose exactly what kind of information they want to receive from you. Also, have sign-up sheets at your retail counter, conference, workshop, or presentation. "You can create a blog for your business, offer something of value such as a guide or e-book and provide it for free to anyone who opts in with his or her e-mail addresses," said Mike Matson, a freelance copywriter based near Tampa, Florida, who works on the blog Marketing InfoWrangler. "Get a list-management system such as aweber.com and provide regular e-mails to your list of prospects."

You want subscribers that want information about your company, product or service. "Don't buy or rent lists," says Dave Ewing, an e-mail expert at SpinnakerPro, which has offices in San Francisco and the United Kingdom. "I know they seem like an easy option, but they don't know you and don't want to hear from you." Ewing also explained how purchasing or renting e-mail lists can hurt your companies credibility. "If enough people on those lists hit the Junk/Spam button, they will damage your company's domain reputation. They're not worth it!"

Do: Use a third-party e-mail system. Don't: Try to manage your e-mail lists yourself.

The experts agreed that third-party e-mail companies are essential for managing your e-mail lists and maintaining the quality of the lists and the e-mails you send. They will help to verify the e-mail addresses and information about your subscribers. They also offer valuable information about bounce-backs, which opened and clicked on what, subscriptions and opt-outs, getting your company on white lists and checking your e-mail messages against spam filters.

Do: Include advertising in regular company e-mails. Don't: Miss a marketing opportunity.

Most companies ignore the most obvious way to advertise and promote the company – e-mails sent regularly by employees during the course of doing business. You can make every e-mail that an employee sends out a part of your marketing effort by including ads and embedded links. The e-mails are more targeted because they are between people that know each other or who are doing business with each other. There are several companies that provide these e-mail enhancement services for as little as $5 a month.

Do: Sign-up for competitors e-mails similar to your own. Don't: Underestimate the competition.

"Competitive intelligence should be part of the process, as it may save you valuable time and resources," says Lee Traupel, CEO of Linked Media Group based in Penn Valley, California. The easiest and most cost effective way to do that is to sign up for your competitors' newsletters. You should keep track of what they are saying, how they are crafting their e-mails and implementing best practices in to your own e-mails.

Do: Include strong calls-to-action. Don't: Make it difficult for subscribers to get more information or act on it.

First you want your subscribers to open the e-mail but after they open it what they do next is the most important. "Using links in calls-to-action that take readers to custom landing pages with more information - and more calls-to action - can be very helpful," said Heidi Cool, owner of the Web design and strategy company HeidiCool.com. "They guide the reader forward – towards your goal – and make it easier to track your success." Sherrie Mersdorf, database marketing analyst at Cvent in McLean, Virginia, warns, "You don't want your calls-to-action to only be in pictures since many clients block images by default. Your message is likely to be deleted before it is even read."

Do: Test, test, and test again. Don't: Get complacent.

What works for one company may not work for another. Also, your clients' and customers' responses to your e-mails could change over time. You have to continue to test and make changes to your e-mail strategy to optimize success. Experts advise testing everything from the time of day you send e-mail, what days of the week they are sent, display in different e-mail clients to which subject lines you use. Gerry Black, a marketing consultant and writer and based in Toronto shares his method for testing e-mail subject lines and increasing open rates.

"Create your e-mail promotion and write out three subject lines. Take your best subject line and include it with your first e-mail. Let's say you e-mail 1,000 people and 150 open it. Delete those names off your "send" list and re-send the e-mail using a different subject line. Once your open results come back from the second e-mail, delete those names and do your third e-mail using your third subject line. You could triple the amount of people who open your e-mail by using this strategy."

Black did this with a client and he shared the actual results. The first e-mail was sent to 306 recipients of whom 84 people opened it. The second e-mail was sent to 222 recipients of whom 38 people opened it. The last e-mail was sent to the remainder of the e-mail list. Twenty people opened that. The same e-mail with different subject lines was sent to 306 people and was opened by 142 people for an open rate of 46 percent.

The caution in doing this is that you have to carefully time when you send the e-mails. You don't want all the e-mails to be sent on the same day as your customers and clients might notice your strategy.

Of course, some effective tactics vary from business to business.

"When it comes to e-mail, there are lots of dos and don'ts, although the No. 1 don't is don't take anyone else's word for what works and what doesn't," Premick says. "Test for yourself."

The Most Important E-Mail Marketing Tactic of All

Thu, 13 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

E-mail is well-regarded in the marketing world for its low cost, ease of use and exceptional measurability. But e-mail marketing also possesses another, often-overlooked strength. If you know how, e-mail makes it easier to ensure your campaigns are successful and well received nearly every time.

What's the secret? Testing.

Although marketers who test clearly achieve better results than their counterparts who don't, only about 40% undertake this surprisingly easy and simple tactic, according to a JupiterResearch survey of more than 600 e-mail marketers. In its January 2005 report, "Effective E-mail Marketing," JupiterResearch found that marketers using testing were almost twice as likely to attain conversion rates of 3% or better. They also achieved a 68% improvement in return over non-testers.

So why aren't more marketers doing it? Lack of awareness and lack of resources are most often cited. But if I told you that experimenting with your e-mail landing page -- the page recipients go to when they click a link in your e-mail -- could boost your return by 40%, wouldn't that be worth looking into? According to MarketingSherpa's "Landing Page Handbook," marketers who test and tweak their landing pages consistently achieve such marked improvements.

What can you test?

The types of testing e-mail marketers find most worthwhile, according to MarketingSherpa's 2003 "E-mail Metrics Survey" of more than 2,000 e-mail marketers include:

Landing pages, 74 %
Subject lines, 74 %
HTML vs. text, 70 %
Personalization with name, 63 %
Long vs. short copy, 31 %

You can also test your offer, design, time of day, message layout, day of week and duration before follow-up. Do recipients prefer a 30% discount, or a $20 discount? Do some recipients who don't open HTML e-mails open their text versions? Do they respond to a catchy subject line, or a straightforward promotion? No other medium makes it as easy to test and act on those tests as e-mail marketing.

So, if this testing thing sounds interesting, how do you do it?

Split your list. Divide your list into two or more groups (sometimes called an A/B split) and change one characteristic (e.g., subject line) for each group. Assuming that you divide your groups randomly so that each represents an accurate cross-section of your overall recipient base, and everything else about your message remains the same, your results should clearly reveal the best-performing characteristic.

Or, you can test to a subset of your list. Think of it as an e-mail dress rehearsal. Using a technique called nth-testing, you pull every nth record from your list to create a near-random set of subgroups. For example, if you have 1,000 names, and you nth on every 10, each of those 1,000 names is assigned a value of 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9. If you wanted to create two random "test" segments, you would send one offer to segment 0 and another to segment 1. You would then send the best-performing offer to segments 2 through 9.

Conduct tests at the same time. Time is a variable, and sending test e-mail A in the morning and test e-mail B in the afternoon can yield very different responses. So send tests out as near to the same time, same day as possible.

Make sure the results are statistically relevant. One or two responses are not enough to tell you whether one test succeeded over another. While purists may argue the exact number, you should try to get at least 50 to 100 responses for each test before you can make broad judgments about which performed best. So, if you are nthing, be sure to segment off a large enough chunk of your overall list. You can arrive at number of recipients you'll need by using your average click-through rate. If you have a list of 10,000 recipients, and your average click-through rate is 5%, then you could expect to receive 500 responses. So to get 50 responses, one-tenth of that total, you'll need to test one-tenth of your list, or 1,000 recipients. To get 100 responses, you'll need to test one-fifth of your list, or 2,000 recipients.

To figure out how well your test performed, compare the click-through rate of your test group to your average click-through rate, and to the other version to see which did best, or which you will send to the rest of your list. A rule of thumb recommended by some (ClickZExperts "A/B Testing for the Mathematically Disinclined") is that you should have at least a three times larger result in order to be able to declare a clear winner.

Maintain a control group. A control group is a random sample of your list that is excluded from the change you are testing. This enables you to compare the behavior of the test group vs. the control group to determine the precise effect of your change. This might be the group that gets your usual subject line A, against which you are testing subject line B. Or, a great example is frequency testing. If you want to find out whether sending more frequently would be more profitable over the long-term, or whether it would wear down recipients with too many messages, you can compare the response of your test vs. control group over a period of months to get your answer.

The options I've outlined barely scratch the surface of all the e-mail testing possibilities available. Understanding campaign responses and their implications for future customer behavior can get into incredibly complex statistics, analytics and modeling. Fortunately, those of us without a Ph.D. can still use the basic testing methods to significantly enrich our ongoing customer relationships. The real power of e-mail isn't how easily and quickly you can send it, but how easily and quickly you can figure out what appeals to your recipients, tailor your offers accordingly and keep them coming back for more.

How to Make Money on Etsy

Tue, 11 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Etsy is the ideal marketplace for artists to sell their hand-made goods. Here are tips from many of the site's profitable sellers on how to boost your visibility and number of sales.

Last year, Etsy sold $180.6 million-worth of goods. The Brooklyn-based team behind this online marketplace for handmade crafts is helping many sellers profit handsomely by offering them a platform to sell their merchandise. Some aspiring entrepreneurs have even quit their day jobs to pursue their Etsy "store" as a career.

Mu-Yin Mollie Chen began selling her hand-crafted jewelry pieces on eBay in 2006 as a hobby. She worked full time as a piano instructor in Indianapolis, traveling to clients' homes for private lessons. Running her eBay store in her free time, Chen would sell pieces here and there, without much consistency from week to week. Though she was satisfied with how things were going, a fellow artist she met on eBay suggested she start an Etsy shop.

"I went on the site, checked it out, and two months later I opened Muyinmolly [my Etsy store]," Chen said. "I made my first sale within 24 hours, was profitable after a month, and selling triple what I had been selling on eBay." Shortly after, Chen decided to close her eBay store.

Once business took off, Chen decided to leave her job as a piano instructor, and pursue her jewelry store on Etsy full time. So far, she's sold almost 4,500 of her pieces, which range in price from $2 to $250, to people in over 30 countries.

In April 2010, the number of items sold on Etsy totaled 1.3 million, and the statistics have been increasing exponentially since its inception in 2005. Though Chen and other profitable Etsy sellers believe the site isn't for everyone, they offered these tips to help you boost both visibility and number of sales on the popular website.

How to Make Money on Etsy: Be Different

Etsy currently boasts 400,000 active sellers, which they define as individuals who have sold goods on the site within the past year. With such a high volume of goods for buyers to choose from, it's crucial that the product is high quality and most importantly, unique.

"A lot of the most successful Etsy sellers not only hand-make their stuff; they also make it special," says Chen. "For example, maybe you crochet and you want to sell it. But a lot of people crochet. You have to think: why would customers want to buy from you? The more special your product is, the more likely people will buy only from you."

Ryan Aydelott and Josh Saathoff, owners of the Etsy store Isotope, have sold almost 9,000 of their quirky t-shirts on the site since they joined in June 2007. They too stress the importance of having a different product that really stands out. "Find a niche, even if it's rather esoteric," says Saathoff. "Don't try to cater to everyone. From a design perspective, whenever I try to design for a specific audience it doesn't work."

How to Make Money on Etsy: Killer Photographs and Detailed Descriptions

Like any e-commerce site, Etsy buyers are generally purchasing items sight unseen. They'll be shelling out money for the product before they get the chance to try it on, touch it, or smell it – which means photographs and product descriptions need to be spot-on.

Elle Greene, who runs AustinModern, a Texas-based vintage furniture store on Etsy, says photography and descriptions are a crucial part of her business. In Greene's experience, catalogue-style photos, which may work well on some sites, aren't met with much success on Etsy. "Etsy is very focused on photography. I've learned more about editorial-style photography from my experience on the site than I could have ever imagined."

Greene says photo and prop stylists frequently peruse the site and look for not only a beautiful photograph, but also as much information about the product as possible. AustinModern's descriptions include the product's dimensions, weight, materials, condition, history, and more. Greene must have the right idea – her pieces have been featured in magazines like Elle Décor and Architectural Digest.

While many Etsy sellers can't afford to hire professionals to shoot their products, there are a ton of great resources on the site itself. Etsy's blog features sections like "The Seller Handbook" and "Your Shop 101," in addition to hundreds of forums that provide sellers with photography tips and tricks. Some sellers even recommend bartering goods in exchange for the services of a photo-savvy friend or Etsy member. "To me, there's definitely an 'Etsy-style' photo," says Chen. "You don't want your photo to look commercial – you want it to look artsy. You want to show your personality."

How to Make Money on Etsy: The Art of the Listing

A lot of strategy goes into the way items are listed, how often they're listed, and the number of items an Etsy store has at any given time.

Ryan Aydelott of Isotope says that the item's title is of the utmost importance. When an item is listed, it can be marked with up to fourteen search 'tags' that allow the item to be searchable for potential buyers. "The tags have to be relevant. If you try to cast a huge net, you get bad results, but when you're very specific and descriptive, you'll have better luck," Aydelott says. In his experience, shorter titles are better than longer ones.

Elle Green of AustinModern agrees. "Rather than naming the product, such as calling a hand-crafted piece of jewelery the 'Elizabeth Ring,' describe what the product actually is," she says. "Think about how people would be searching for it. There are so many incredible things on that website that are not being found just because of the way they are named." For example, a good title might be 'Purple Gemstone Ring Set in Sterling Silver.'

Both Greene and Aydelott say that the number of listings, and how often you list, really depend on what type of product you're selling. According to Aydellot, having 50 to 100 items in your store at a given time is optimum. "Statistically, people browse through two to three pages of listings (each page features about 20 items)," he says. "So 60 items is about all you'll have the chance to get their attention with. If you don't give them what they want within the first 60, you've lost them." Sellers have also found that if you only have a few items in your store, people won't stay to click around.

Greene says that the way Etsy's search function is designed, the most recently listed items show up in search results first. "If you listed something three months ago, it will be at the very back of the search results, even if it's the exact thing that someone is looking for," she says. Greene tries to list two or three new items each week, though that number might be more ideal for a furniture store, than say, a jewelry designer.

How to Make Money on Etsy: Get Involved

Many Etsy sellers find it beneficial to become a part of the Etsy community. Chen receives a flood of messages from eager new sellers every day asking for advice. She says that the majority of questions she gets can be answered by simply browsing though the forums, blogs, and threads on the site. Aside from offering a wealth of useful information, forums and blogs help new sellers gain exposure to their peers.

There are even self-organized groups of sellers, or Etsy "teams," that are formed based on geographic location or a common interest. There's something for just about anyone, from the "Quit Your Day Job" blog to the "Mothers of Multiples on Etsy" team. They facilitate things like taking out joint advertisements or attending local craft shows, and also provide sellers with a sense of community.

Aydelott and Saathoff, in addition to thousands of other Etsy sellers, say their Etsy experiences have been incredibly positive. "It's a great springboard and an incubator to test out a concept. Small crafters are going to learn customer service, business management, photography, and so much more," Saathoff says. "It's truly an entrepreneurial bootcamp."

37 Reasons to Blog

Mon, 10 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Here's my 37 reasons to blog and blog more. I hope they inspire you.

A blog is just a tool, but it is the easiest, most effective publishing tool to share information with customers and prospects.
A blog can be the center of your content marketing strategy. As you widen your net to attract prospects and customers through social media, your blog is the place you point them to. It's your magnet.
You don't need a publishing degree to start a blog. There are no technology barriers. Wordpress first, then Typepad are two places to look. For larger corporations, Compendium is an interesting platform.
Thinking about writing a book? Then start the blog first. This blog was started on the idea that it would serve as the basis for our book, Get Content Get Customers. It did just that. Blog with the idea of chapters of your book in mind.
You can't be taken seriously in social media unless you have a robust, consistent blog. That's the truth. Deal with it.
Blogging may be the best way to showcase your employees. Check out Indium. How much more powerful is this brand with their employees consistently communicating helpful information? How much greater is the employee morale because Indium is embracing social media and conversations with customers? You have employees who are rock stars. Give them the platform to help you in the process.
A blog is search engine candy. Google loves blogs and Google is hungry. Feed the beast.
A blog is an industry game changer. When the buying decision comes down to three or four companies, the company website with consistent, relevant content is 60% more likely to win (Custom Content Council stats).
A blog is a great way to learn to stop talking about yourself and start focusing on what your customers need to hear.
Can you really be an industry thought leader without a blog? Think about that.
How can you be successful with Twitter, Facebook and other social media without generating consistently relevant content through a blog? Remember, content strategy comes before social media. That content strategy can be executed through the blog.
The blog is a great way for us to communicate with our customers on a regular basis without having to constantly pitch them on our products.
A blog can serve as the content hub for your enewsletter, print newsletter and company magazine.
Your customers want and need to be inspired. Is there a better way to inspire customers that than through consistent content gifts through a blog.
A solid blog will lead to speaking events. I've been invited to more than 30 speaking events specifically because they found me on the blog. No kidding. Five of those were international speaking events.
Since most websites suck, a blog is a great way to differentiate yourself from the rest of the online corporate brochures.
A blog is one of the best ways to share your point of view. You're take on the industry and customers is unique (or at least should be). Tell your story.
If you can't figure out how to tell a unique story, a blog is a great testing ground for you to find your corporate voice. Find your compelling story.
A blog removes corporate shackles. By opening yourself up to imperfection and transparency through a blog, you are actually moving closer to perfection.
Having a blog forces you to ask questions about your industry and your customers all day long and while you sleep. Having a blog forces you to become a journalist and think like a publisher. That forces you to become a more innovative business.
Your competition may be able to duplicate your product, but it's very hard, if not impossible, for the competition to duplicate your story. A blog will help tell your story.
You will meet more influential people and gain more contacts through a blog than almost anything else you do.
Listening and commenting is extremely important to any social media program. Without a blog, a listening program is more like eavesdropping. It just seems wrong.
A good blog will lead to blog guest posts on other sites and other free public relations efforts.
What other tool can enable you to have real conversations with customers, prospects and influencers?
Although a blog can work for any organization, it's simply the most cost-effective way to promote and market your business.
Blogging is fun. Who thought you could write about interesting things that affect your business and have it positively affect you and so many of your customers?
Your brand is what your people read and talk about online.
A blog forces you to keep abreast of what's going on with your customers and your industry. Remember, you are the industry expert. Act like one.
A blog promotes customer loyalty. Customers will look to you for expert insight to help them with their pain points. When they are ready to buy, they'll buy from the expert.
The blog can be the core of your search engine optimization strategy.
If you don't have anything interesting to say, why would anyone have a reason to talk about you or your company?
A blog can be your personal therapist. It's saved me thousands.
Traditional journalists love to interview bloggers. They know they'll get the information they need because they already see the proof.
A blog is a credibility machine. Any thought leader in the space needs two things - a blog and a book. One without the other is like Laverne without Shirley or Cafe without Mocha.
Everyone is an expert in something. Figure out the intersection between your expertise and your target audiences' needs and find your secret sauce.
Repackaging of blog posts will fuel white papers, ebooks, in-person events and just about all the other educational content you'll need for your marketing. A blog, can literally, do it all for your content marketing program.

Why Is Business Writing So Awful?

Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Nearly every company relies on the written word to woo customers. So why is most business writing so numbingly banal?

What's bad, boring, and barely read all over? Business writing. If you could taste words, most corporate websites, brochures, and sales materials would remind you of stale, soggy rice cakes: nearly calorie free, devoid of nutrition, and completely unsatisfying.

One of my favorite phrases in the business world is full-service solutions provider. A quick search on Google finds at least 47,000 companies using that one. That's full-service generic. There's more. Cost effective end-to-end solutions brings you about 95,000 results. Provider of value-added services nets you more than 600,000 matches. Exactly which services are sold as not adding value?

Who writes this stuff? Worse, who reads it and approves it? What does it say when tens of thousands of companies are saying the same things about themselves?

When you write like everyone else and sound like everyone else and act like everyone else, you're saying, "Our products are like everyone else's, too." Or think of it this way: Would you go to a dinner party and just repeat what the person to the right of you is saying all night long? Would that be interesting to anybody? So why are so many businesses saying the same things at the biggest party on the planet -- the marketplace?

If you care about your product, you should care just as much about how you describe it. In nearly all cases, a company makes its first impression on would-be customers or partners with words -- whether they're on a website, in sales materials, or in e-mails or letters. A snappy design might catch their attention, but it's the words that make the real connection. Your company's story, product descriptions, history, personality -- these are the things that go to battle for you every day. Your words are your frontline. Are they strong enough?

Unfortunately, years of language dilution by lawyers, marketers, executives, and HR departments have turned the powerful, descriptive sentence into an empty vessel optimized for buzzwords, jargon, and vapid expressions. Words are treated as filler -- "stuff" that takes up space on a page. Words expand to occupy blank space in a business much as spray foam insulation fills up cracks in your house. Harsh? Maybe. True? Read around a bit, and I think you'll agree.

Luckily, there are exceptions. Wonderful exceptions. These are companies with a personality and a point of view. They care enough to have their own voice. They want to communicate, not just say something. They have a story to tell, and they want to tell it well. They write to be read.

Woot is one of those companies. Woot is a Dallas-based business that sells one item a day at a deep discount. Here is how the company describes itself on its website:

Woot.com is an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap. It started as an employee-store slash market-testing type of place for an electronics distributor, but it's taken on a life of its own. We anticipate profitability by 2043 -- by then we should be retired; someone smarter might take over and jack up the prices. Until then, we're still the lovable scamps we've always been.

Don't you just love these people? Or maybe you hate them. Either way, I'm pretty sure you have an opinion about Woot based on this paragraph. With just a few sentences, Woot instantly set itself apart from the liquidation crowd.

Indeed, how the company communicates is a big part of how Woot built such a successful business. Woot's deal of the day sells out just about every day. I especially love the company's response to the "Will I receive customer support like I'm used to?" on its FAQ page:

No. Well, not really. If you buy something you don't end up liking or you have what marketing people call "buyer's remorse," sell it on eBay. It's likely you'll make money doing this and save everyone a hassle.

It's kind of kidding and kind of not. Some people may be offended, but big deal. Woot isn't trying to sell to every customer. It's trying to sell to the customers that can laugh along. Those are the people who understand what Woot is about. The company uses language as a filter.

Another favorite of mine is Saddleback Leather in San Antonio. Dave Munson, the company's founder, clearly loves his products and his words. Here's how he sets the scene when describing the quality of the company's bags:

You know how when a magician exposes to the world how other magicians trick people, all of the other magicians get mad at him for spilling the beans? Well, I'm about to spill the beans and ruin it for all of those companies trying to trick you into buying their not so high quality leather...You're about to learn what to look for and what to look out for as you shop for your next leather piece. By the way, if I soon die by a chopstick to the neck, you'll know why. I'm a marked man.

He then dives into great detail about what makes a great leather bag great. From the type of leather and where it comes from to how it's tanned to breakable versus nonbreakable parts ("How much is a billion dollar submarine with a plastic hatch worth?") to the number of seams, and so on. It's compelling and interesting. It holds your attention.

And check out how he explains his guarantee:

All of our products are fully warranted against all defects in materials and workmanship for 100 years. If you or one of your descendants should have a problem, send it back to me or one of my descendants and we'll repair or replace it for free or we'll give you a credit on the website (be sure to mention the warranty in your will).

Consider his choice of words. A 100-year warranty that his descendants will honor if one of your descendants needs a repair. And then he reminds you to include the warranty in your will. Who wouldn't want to do business with this guy? And it's all backed up with the Saddleback tag line: "They'll Fight Over It When You're Dead." Beauty.

When you're done reading this article, hit Google and search for leather bags. Then read through some of the sites you find. I bet you'll be bored to death pretty quickly. Then visit Saddleback's site. I bet you'll be smiling just as fast.

Here's one more example of writing done right: Polyface farm in Swoope, Virginia. Polyface is run by Joel Salatin, a pioneering farmer, author, and prophet of clarity. The Polyface Guiding Principles page is a study in straightforward language with a healthy hint of attitude:

Plants and animals should be provided a habitat that allows them to express their physiological distinctiveness. Respecting and honoring the pigness of the pig is a foundation for societal health....We do not ship food. We should all seek food closer to home...This means enjoying seasonality and reacquainting ourselves with our home kitchens.

I especially love his take on what it means to be a farmer:

We're really in the earthworm enhancement business. Stimulating soil biota is our first priority. Soil health creates healthy food.

Joel knows where he stands. When you read his site, you do, too. Even though Joel is a "full-service end-to-end" farmer, he'd never say it like that. He'd consider that description disrespectful to his customers, employees, plants, and animals.

The quality of the writing on sites like Woot's, Saddleback Leather's, and Polyface's gives me the chills. It's not how they look; it's how they read. These are businesses that care about what they say and how they say it. They don't write to fill up space on a page. They write to fill up your head. There is nothing inherently interesting about liquidators, leather, or farmers. They can make themselves boring, or they can make themselves interesting. Words do that job. Woot, Saddleback, and Polyface have all chosen to be interesting and engaging. They don't hide behind jargon. They aren't insecure. They aren't afraid to tell you who they are.

I can already hear some of you saying, "Sounds great. But I can't write." So hire a writer. But make sure that writer truly understands your business. Remember: It's not about telling a story. It's about telling a true story well.

Of course, words alone won't do it. Words are two dimensional. Your products and services provide the third dimension -- depth. But when it all comes together, you've got a package that's hard to ignore.

Online Ads That Follow Your Customers

Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Scottevest uses behavioral retargeting to bring customers back to its website.

Last summer, entrepreneur Scott Jordan was surprised by the advertisements that greeted him all across the Internet. Suddenly, every website he visited seemed to carry an advertisement for Bonobos, an online retailer of men's clothing. "I was perplexed -- and impressed," says Jordan. "I thought that they must have a gigantic ad budget." Jordan contacted Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn, whom he had previously met, and asked about the ads. As it turned out, Bonobos did not have a massive ad budget. Instead, Bonobos was using a behavioral advertising technique called retargeting.

The technology, which isn't entirely new, is designed to bring back customers who visited your company's website but left without completing a purchase. It works like this: When someone visits your site, a small piece of data called a cookie is automatically downloaded to the visitor's Web browser. That cookie prompts online advertising networks to display ads for your company whenever the person visits one of the millions of ad-supported websites. The technology is not without controversy -- privacy advocates have railed against the use of cookie tracking. In response, retargeting companies are beginning to increase transparency and offer ways for Internet users to opt out of being tracked. And as more companies begin to offer retargeting services -- including Google, which launched its service in March -- it is becoming a more affordable option for small and midsize businesses.

After talking with Dunn, Jordan decided to give retargeting a shot for his company, Scottevest, a Ketchum, Idaho, company that makes travel clothing with hidden pockets for electronic gadgets. Jordan signed up for a service from AdRoll, a San Francisco-based company. Its retargeting service, RoundTrip, allows businesses to set up and manage their own ad campaigns.

Since signing up with AdRoll in December, Jordan has gradually increased Scottevest's retargeting budget to $5,000 a month. He pays anywhere from 70 cents to $1 when someone clicks on one of the retargeted ads. A visitor to Scottevest.com who leaves without making a purchase will see six or more Scottevest ads on other websites as he or she peruses the Internet in the two days following the visit. A few more ads will follow over the next few weeks, unless the potential customer makes a purchase.

"Internet shoppers are fickle; they like to window-shop," says Aaron Bell, AdRoll's co-founder and CEO. "Business owners spend a lot of energy on search-engine marketing, but oftentimes the shoppers don't convert on that first visit. So retargeting is a way to drive people who have already expressed interest back to your website."

The retargeting results have surpassed Jordan's expectations, he says. In three months, Scottevest spent about $12,000 retargeting through AdRoll and tracked $38,000 in sales to those retargeted ads. In addition, a few Scottevest customers have written to Jordan, mentioning they had seen his giant advertising campaign. "People are getting the perception that we are gigantic," Jordan says. "And that kind of effect is immeasurable."

He says Scottevest's most effective use of retargeting so far was a series of ads that appeared in late February to advertise a three-day 40-percent-off sale in celebration of the company's ninth anniversary. The conversion rate of customers who came to the site during the sale from retargeted ads was 10 percent higher than the site's average conversion rate during the same period.

Scottevest is beginning to launch what AdRoll calls "channelized" ads, which target customers who have looked at a specific product online. For example, a Scottevest.com visitor who has spent time on the product page for the Soft Shell Jacket, a wind- and waterproof coat with 19 pockets, will see advertisements for that same jacket when he or she visits other websites.

The myriad retargeting options can put some strain on a small business, however; it takes time and manpower to create the ads. Scottevest, which employs just four full-time employees, has had to hire a freelance graphics designer to keep up with all the ads Jordan wants to create. Several retargeting companies offer ad design services, but those, too, come with a price tag.

Companies that participate in retargeting campaigns must walk the fine line between providing customers with more relevant ads and scaring them away for good by showing them advertisements too often. To allay possible concerns, Jordan posted a video on his site in which he explains retargeting in basic terms and how to disable cookies on your computer if you do not wish to see retargeted ads. Some companies that offer retargeting services, such as Fetchback, include links on the advertisements that take Web users to a page explaining the practice and offering a choice to opt out from retargeted ads.

Still, these steps toward transparency do not suffice for some privacy advocates, including Jeff Chester, founder of the Center for Digital Democracy. "If someone followed you on the street for 20 days and then at the end of it handed you a card that said, 'If you want to learn more about why I'm stalking you, go to this website,' that just wouldn't work," Chester says. "It's just not enough." The Federal Trade Commission recently investigated the practices of the online behavioral advertising industry, including retargeting. "We've called for improved transparency and meaningful consumer control," says Peder Magee, who contributed to the commission's 2009 report on the topic. "We leave that up to the industry to implement, and we've seen some positive steps."

Though Jordan admits the technology is not perfect, he believes it benefits more customers than it scares away. He isn't sure if any customers have disabled the cookies, but he hasn't received any complaints. "Even if I lose a potential customer here and there, I'm making up for it many times over," he says. "I just remember from my own experience that it was a bit weird, but not so weird as to be problematic."

Why Social Media Really Is Worth Your Time

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

It pays off in actual business, not just buzz, says a new survey. And the more time you use it for (and the more experienced you become), the better the results.

Forget the endless speculation about whether and how and how much money social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn can make. The key question is: Can they show you the money?

The answer appears to be yes, according to a new report. One in three business owners say that social media helps them to close business. That percentage may yet improve – 74 percent of small business owners who were early adopters, and have been using social media for years, say it's helped them close business, according to the 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, which surveyed 1,898 small business owners.

What's more, a resounding 85 percent of those surveyed say that the platform has created buzz for their businesses. (For the record, 91 percent of all respondents use social media.)

Other benefits (in the order in which they ranked): The medium increases web traffic and opens opportunities to build new partnerships. More than half of respondents said social media generates good sales leads. And a couple of fringe benefit: Some three-quarters (73 percent) reported a significant rise in search engine rankings, which feeds exposure. Nearly half (48 percent) said social media reduced their overall marketing expenses (up from 35 percent in the 2009 survey). Marketing expert Michael Stelzner, founder of SocialMediaExaminer.com, put together the report.

The median age of respondents was 40 to 49, and the respondent pool was 60 percent female. More than half (56 percent) said they currently devote six hours or more per week to social media, and 30 percent spend upwards of 11 hours. A hardcore 12.5 percent are spending more than 20 hours per week.

Yes, there is a relationship between weekly time commitment and length of time using social media: The longer someone's been using it, the more time he or she spends. For newbies the median weekly time commitment is an hour a week; for those doing it for just a few months or longer, the median is 10 hours per week. (If spending half your week on social media sounds daunting, take heart: even with a "minimal time investment" – less than five hours – 78 percent reported social media helped create buzz. Need more guidance? According to the 2009 report, around six hours seems to be the minimum requirement for serious results, with "nearly all" who spent six plus hours finding "exceptionally positive results.")

Which tools are they using? Though social media giant Facebook has 400 million users – and recently topped Google in directing web traffic – it's Twitter that topped the list, with 88 percent saying they tweet. Right on its heels was Facebook (87 percent), then LinkedIn (78 percent) and blogs (70 percent.) Those four were far and away the top choices, with the next closest tool – YouTube and other video – coming in at 46 percent. Facebook was in fourth place, with 77 percent using it in the 2009 report.

The report breaks down the use of tools among business owners who are new to social media, those who've been doing it for a few months, and those who've used it for years. Twitter is tops for the second two groups, although newcomers are more likely to opt for Facebook. The numbers: 80 percent of newbies are using Facebook, 71 percent are on Twitter, 67 percent are on LinkedIn, and 49 percent are blogging. Of the long-term users: 96 percent are on Twitter, 91 percent use Facebook, and 89 percent are LinkedIn, and 86 percent blog.

If you're still sorting out your social media options, consider these two trends the report suggests: MySpace may not be worth your time, with a whopping 80 percent of those surveyed said they have no plans to use it or will reduce their efforts. And plain old blogs were the top choice (81 percent of those surveyed) for where marketers planned to spend more time.

Innovator: Fred Brooks

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The man who changed the way companies produce software has a new book that goes beyond tech, with advice for anyone managing a design team

Some tech visionaries, such as Bill Gates or Larry Ellison, build empires out of the utilitarian. Less common are the Steve Jobs-types, who create stuff people wait overnight in lines to buy. Then there is the very small club of people who made those titans possible. A member in good standing is Frederick P. Brooks Jr., pioneer of modern software.

Brooks, a 79-year-old computer scientist and former IBM (IBM) executive, wrote an oddly named book 35 years ago called The Mythical Man-Month that laid out the organizing principles of how software gets made. "If a computer is a part of your life today," says Bill Buxton, principal scientist at Microsoft (MSFT) Research, "then you've been highly influenced by Fred Brooks and his work."

Now Brooks has a new book, The Design of Design, in which he takes his message beyond tech. It's a collection of essays that draws on his own adventures as well as conversations with designers of every species.

In the 1950s and '60s, Brooks ran product-development teams at IBM. The company would set budgets for projects based on "man-months." If 25 people required 10 months to write some code, that worked out to 250 man-months. If the project ran late, you just added people. The man-month was a convenient device that was, Brooks wrote, nonsense. Expanding a late-running design team slowed the process. It forced veterans to bring newbies up to speed right when they needed to hunker down. "It's a fundamental insight," says Andy van Dam, a professor of computer science at Brown University. "Fred updated that old saying that nine women can't make a baby in one month."

In 1961, IBM had him manage development of a new family of mainframes. About 1,000 people worked on System/360; Brooks insulated his core design team from the usual corporate bureaucracy. Unveiled in 1964, System/360 helped cement Big Blue's position as the world's biggest computer company. Man-Month, which documented the project, has sold 500,000 copies. Programmers still refer to Brooks' Law: "Adding manpower to a late project only makes it later."

With the new book, Brooks, now a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, shares more design tales from his IBM days and after. Brooks breaks down projects to assess what went right and wrong each time, and has suggestions for anyone who manages creatives. Sample tip: "Constraints are friends" that "shrink the designer's search space," a notion familiar to anyone who's ever felt paralyzed by open-ended essay questions. Another: Design is as much art as science. "Improving your process won't move you from good to great design," he says. "It'll move you from bad to average." And that's not how legends are made.

Impact

Father of the modern software business

Day Job

Computer scientist, University of North Carolina

Prizes

1999 Turing Award, computing's Nobel equivalent

How to Use Online Forums

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

It takes a village to build a business, and that's especially true online. Here's how to cultivate your customer base through a vibrant online forum.

The Internet has erased the geographical boundaries of doing business, turning every local company into a potentially global competitor. The Web has also enabled people to join together into communities based upon like interests or like beliefs or like preferences for certain products or services. One of the best ways for a business to help foster community is to start an online forum.

Online forums allow both real and potential customers to interact with you and with each other to discuss your products or services while helping you troubleshoot flaws. They can even help you learn about possible improvements to make. Online forums often consist of a variety of different technology tools, including message board forums, chat, instant messaging and more. Community members join the forum and use these tools to communicate, while your company moderates the discussion and makes sure it's achieving your business goals.

Why start an online forum? "It makes for happy customers for one thing," says Bill Pfleging, co-author of Geek Gap (Promethius Books 2006) and a speaker on the topic of making business and technology work together. "It's an easy way for customers to communicate with the business. It also gives many of other customers the chance to participate. Customers who are fans of the product, the website, or the company may know how to use it better than other people. So you have the situation where customers go on and say, 'How do I use this?' Other customers may already know how to do this and may be willing to share."

The answer is then posted on the forum so the next person who comes along with the same question may find their answer quickly. This relieves a lot of pressure from the business' support lines and can ultimately save the company money, Pfleging says.

The article below will outline how businesses can benefit from online forums, how to set up an online forum, and what to watch out for.

Online Forums: The Business Benefits

A wide variety of businesses can benefit from setting up online customer forums -- or "communities." Companies that manufacture products may field questions from customers about how to put together their products or how to best use the products, or customers may write in with suggestions for other uses for the products. At the same time, service companies can use the forums to answer a lot a variety of questions about their offerings.

"Say you operate an extermination company. You can answer a lot of questions about the various bugs and rodents that have to be exterminated. If people have worries or questions, they can post them on the forum," Pfleging says. Those questions can be answered by company representatives and/or by customers. "It helps grow trust, which ultimately helps your business if you're providing answers to serious questions people have about products, services, or areas of expertise."

One of Pfleging's favorite examples of a business that has created a "community" using its online forum is Seymour Duncan, makers of guitar accessories and parts like electric pickups. Since launching its forum in 1996, Seymour Duncan's forum members have been instructing one another in new ways of wiring pickups to change how they sound, and they also give advice on topics ranging from simple to complex. This not only relieves the company's support centers by having customers answer questions for other customers, it also gives their client base a real sense of ownership, cementing their relationship to the company and its products, Pfleging says.

"The whole point of an online forum is to create a space that connects customers with companies and customers with one another," says Keith Messick, vice president of marketing for Get Satisfaction, a San Francisco-based company that offers a software-as-a-service online community solution. "It's a great way to engage customers and a great way to get people passionate about your brand or company."

Here are some of the other potential benefits to businesses of setting up an online forum:

"Crowd-sourcing" service and support. Setting up an online forum is an easy way to outsource some of your customer service and support to the "crowd" -- or to your community of customers and admirers. "If someone has a question about a piece of software, hardware or a phone, there is a great chance that someone else has had that question as well," Messick says. It allows a business to speak to many customers as once by answering that question online in a way that other customers can find it. In fact, some forum software solutions help you optimize search terms to make it easy customers to find exactly the question they are looking to answer through search engines. Letting customers help each other can help you cut support and service costs by reducing the amount of e-mail or trouble tickets your staff needs to respond to.

Consumer research. An online forum can also be a place where customers can provide feedback on your products or services and generate new ideas. Members of the community can post an idea and gain critical mass around the ideas. "A lot of companies don't have a lot of funds to do focus groups," Messick says. "From a business standpoint, the benefits [of online communities] can include marketing, product marketing and development, and Rr&D."

Social "CRM." Online forums or communities can also act as "the hotel lobby," Messick says. "It's a public space that the company owns where customer can talk to one another. If they have a question, they can talk to the concierge or, if it escalates, they can go to the manager. The beauty is that it's still owned by the hotelier." In other words, it's not an uncontrolled conversation happening on Twitter. It's a supervised discussion in which the company plays a role. Messick calls this "social CRM" -- a form of customer relationship management fostered by communication with customers through social networking. Instead of dealing with merely data, you are now able to gain insight into your customers from conversations and relationships. "The fact of the matter is that your customer lives in this world and they expect you to be there, too," Messick says.

Online Forums: Getting Started

Are you prepared to make a commitment? Online community doesn't always pay for itself within the first month, or even six months, Pfleging says. But if you structure your online forum right, you will find that a virtual community can help you build a better relationship with customers that can boost your bottom line for a long time to come. "That's worth more than any immediate ROI," Pfleging notes.

There are some obvious choices you need to make when setting up a forum. Here are some steps to help you get it right:

Set your goals. Decide just what you want to achieve with an online community. Perhaps, like Seymour Duncan, your sales can benefit from expert users giving advice and assistance to new customers. Or maybe your community can encourage your customers to show off ways they're using your products, like Scrapbook.com, which incorporates games, contests, and challenges for members into their forum. There are many reasons for having a forum on a commercial website. You just need to identify yours.

Find out what motivates potential members. Before you even think about starting your own community forum, you must find out just who your potential audience will be, and what they really want to talk about, Pfleging says. Attend meetings or conferences of your prospective clientele, and pay attention. Don't just be there for the official presentations, but sit in on informal conversations, and listen to what they talk about among themselves. "If you're dealing with butchers, auto mechanics, stone masons, no matter -- get to know them, and how they relate to your product," Pfleging says. Take the time to join and participate in several established online communities and social network sites. Particularly look for some that are similar to what you have in mind. Take note of things that you like and dislike about how they function, and try to incorporate these notes into your design.

Use the right software. Choosing the format for your online community is a crucial step. Generally, make sure you have threaded or nested boards, where each post links to its responses, instead of a "flat" message board where every post follows the previous one linearly, Pfleging says. A flat discussion tags the newest comments onto the bottom of responses already listed, and the conversations tend to be more difficult to follow. It's usually easier to find relevant information in a threaded discussion, since you're not making users read through the entire list to find what they're looking for. There are a variety of different software and Web-hosted solutions. Some are free. Others, like Get Satisfaction, are free but offer premium upgrades that can help you coordinate some of the forum interactions with your other IT systems so you can better serve your customers, Messick says.

Help create meaningful content. When you've installed and set up the basic message board software, you'll need to seed the initial discussions just a little, Pfleging says. "If I'm a customer, I need to get a sense that it's open and active so you should start to put in frequently asked questions and answers," Messick says. "When I go there to ask a question then I see that I'm not the first one." Create a few pertinent posts that relate to some of the comments your customers may have sent in e-mails or through phone support. But be careful to not overload the forum, as this can lead visitors to think you're trying to dominate the discussion. Better to allow the resulting discussions to grow organically, with members free to talk about almost anything. Users will help your site evolve in directions you may have never anticipated. You can then bring the more appropriate discussions, those beneficial to your business, to the front, highlighting them so members see them when they first arrive, keeping your site interesting. In addition to starting a forum, make other changes throughout your site that encourage communication. When posting articles, podcasts, transcripts, or other new info on your site, make sure there are also ways for visitors to post comments in response to the piece.

Give members an identity. When a company sponsors an online community forum, it must plan on giving up some control, allowing the members to do some of their own policing. This doesn't mean you won't need to have moderators; different officials from your company may want to participate and answer questions on occasion but at least one person should be in charge of moderating the forum, Messick says. Forum members usually will assist by alerting the moderators when a post is in some way against policy, or offensive in some way. This has several positive effects: It gives members a sense of co-ownership of your site; reduces the amount of moderating you'll have to pay employees to perform; and creates a sense of being trusted that goes a long way toward increasing loyalty, Pfleging says. Set up a method of identifying your more active members with several levels. Include the amount of time they've been a member, as well as numbers of posts/responses. This will create a ladder of status they'll want to climb, both in staying as active members longer, and increasing their interaction or participation.

"Typically, an online community has between a 1 and 10 percent participation rate, with the rest of your logged visitors being lurkers," Pfleging says. "Don't be surprised if it takes a lot of time to nurture and grow your community. Collected stats should be factored in and be used to affect your future site development."

Online Forums: Pitfalls to Avoid

Don't be afraid that when members post something negative about your product, it will create poor sales. Better to let them do that on your forum, rather than one of your competitors' sites, or an independent one. "The fact is, if the criticism is justified, then you can take the high road and thank them for their diligence -- and for saving you from going to the trouble of expensive market research," Pfleging says. And if it's unjustified, well, you may not even need to say anything yourself. You'd be surprised at how fast loyal users will jump to defend a favored product. In the highly connected world we now inhabit, it makes your business look more self-confident, as well as open and honest, if you allow your community members an uncensored, public feedback forum.

Being approachable is one of the great keys to effective business. In terms of using online forums, it's the key to retaining customer loyalty. Make sure your forum users have some means of contacting you or one of your staff charged with managing discussions directly. "When companies are not open to transparency, they bury their heads in the sand and believe that this conversation isn't happening," Messick says. "But people are talking about your company positively or negatively either at cocktail parties, at the gym, or online. Smart companies build a community to provide that space and engage in that conversation. The pitfall is not being open to transparency."

13 Ways to Promote your Local Business for Free

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Many local businesses struggle to find ways to promote themselves, get links, rank in search engines, and ultimately drive traffic to their websites. Most small businesses also have limited budgets making the task more difficult. For those businesses here are 13 ways you can promote your business online for free.

Google Local: If you don’t already have one Create an account on Google Local. Enter your company name, address, phone number and website. Verify the information with a postacard or telephone call. In a few weeks you will help you get a map listing for your company name or industry and town.

Google Coupons: Coupons are a great way to bring new customers into your business or remind old customers that you’re still around. Google has a free coupon tool that puts your coupon on relevant local searches.

Google Base: Google base is part of Google’s one box service. Google uses it to try giving the most appropriate answer from different data sources. If you are selling products you can upload feeds automatically into Google Base and often get preferential placement. You can also upload your business, or special event.

Yahoo Local: Yahoo local is a directory organized by category and geographic location. You can get a basic listing in Yahoo Local for free. People searching for your business or industry can find your listing

Get Reviews: An integral part of the Yahoo Local listings are reviews. Ask your good customers to write reviews for you on Yahoo local. Businesses with higher ratings will get preferential listings.

YellowPages.com: Yellow Pages have a strong brand name and recognition, and are still used by many people today. They offer a few levels of listings the most basic is free.

Press Releases: Doing something newsworthy? If you are you can always submit a press release for free at PRLeap.com. Be sure to check out their tips like 25 Action Words for Writing a Newsworthy Headline and Why Localizing a Press Release to a ZIP Code and City Matters.

Free Blog Promotion Tools: Does your company have a website or are you thinking of adding one? Websites like Technorati and mybloglog can help you gain exposure, visitors, readers, and subscribers to your blog.

Free Directory Advertising: It doesn’t get any easier than trying free advertising. Go to BOTW.org and sign up for a free 60 day advertising listing.

Create a Lens at Squidoo: Squidoo has a nice easy to use interface that allows you to give information to your visitors. You can talk about your business specifically or the services or products you provide.

LinkedIn: Join LinkedIn and get connected with people you know and make connections with people you don’t through introductions. Look at the new Questions and Answers section and try and be genuinely helpful. Follow the axiom of ‘Givers Gain’ and you may generate a few leads for yourself from your goodwill.

Email Signatures: Be sure to add your URL to all of your outgoing email. Try adding your mission statement, or a catchy phrase to help people understand what you do. Change it a several times a year so people notice it again.

Syndicate Your Content and Ideas: Take advantage of article distribution Services like EZineArticles, ISnare, and IdeaMarketers to spread your message and approach. Use them to bring leads to your site by offering things like free ebooks or PDF’s that they can download after entering their contact information.

For more tips on how to promote your local business be sure to check out my complete series on local search tips, tricks and secrets or visit my local search page on Squidoo.

Scott Berkun's 10 Innovation Myths

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

One of my favourite books on innovation is ‘The Myths of Innovation’ by Scott Berkun. Berkun is a writer and speaker and former programme manager at Microsoft. Here are Scott Berkun’s 10 myths of innovation summed up in a few words:

The myth of the epiphany: If many innovations are described as magical moments, the truth is often more complex: hard work is required and the Eureka moment often comes at the end of that process.
We understand the history of innovation: Most of the stories we read about innovation aren’t real. Google wasn’t a search engine to start with, nor was Flickr a photo sharing platform. Most innovations are the results of errors, changes and corrections.
There is a method for innovation: Despite our attraction to recipes, innovation is essentially a leap into the unknown. method for innovation is an oxymoron.
People love new ideas: Changing one’s habits is always a challenge, and that is true of customers too, so says Geoffrey Moore’s ‘Crossing the Chasm‘. There is no end to the list of rejections and outright hostility from the critics that innovators have to face.
The lone inventor: We like stories in which a genius single-handedly changed the world: Edison invented the electric light; Ford invented the automobile — neither is quite the case. More usually, successful companies are often started by a group of people, or by developing others’ innovations.
Good ideas are hard to find: Ideas are everywhere, not just found in a brainstorm session. Most come through trial and error. I love to pick other people’s brains and make notes of the ideas they have had but have never had the pluck to implement. “It would be so nice if we could…” is often my starting point for innovation.
Your boss knows more about innovation than you: Berkun argues that managers can make decisions that others can’t but this doesn’t mean that they always know what to do. Managers can be afraid of innovation because it undermines their own position of authority.
The best ideas win: There is a common assumption that the inventions for the job are the most successful. There are so many counter-examples such as the QWERTY keyboard , HTML and JavaScript and the M-16 rifle. There are seven factors that drive product success: culture, dominant design, inheritance and tradition, politics, economics, subjectivity and short-term orientation.
Innovations happen by chance: You can’t produce great innovations unless you are able to spell out clearly the specific problems that the innovation is meant to solve and how it does it. Believing that serendipity plays a major role in innovation is a product of the myth of the epiphany,
Innovation is always good: Rudolf diesel is said to have committed suicide when he realised that his invention would only be bought by the military. His innovation was being used to do harm and kill people, not to do good and improve people’s lives. Other examples abound quoted by Berkun in his book are DDT and personal computers which has created a digital divide in global society.

Facebook is wrecking my daughter's future

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Nine o'clock on a Wednesday evening. All is suspiciously quiet in my 15-year-old daughter Laurie's normally raucous room at the top of our house.

I want to believe that she has her face buried in Shakespeare or physics theory, but bitter experience tells me otherwise. I call up: 'Are you revising?'

'Yup,' comes the monosyllabic and wholly unconvincing reply.

My youngest daughter, aged 11, who has sneaked a peek in Laurie's room, comes downstairs and snitches by pointing to her face and miming reading a book - her big sister is deep into one of her long Facebook sessions.

With her GCSEs now just weeks away, I am getting desperate. I call Laurie downstairs, sit her down in front of her booted-up laptop and beg her to start the laborious process of disabling her Facebook account.

'You'll thank me for it in the long run,' I say, sounding like the sort of parent I'd never wanted to become.

Laurie stares at the screen. Her fingers hover tentatively over the keyboard. Then slowly my beautiful, super-smart daughter turns to me, her big brown eyes simultaneously defiant and despondent. 'Dad,' she says. 'I can't do it. I just can't.'

Of course, I could take matters into my own hands, take away her laptop and shut down our wireless connection at night (already, I have replaced Laurie's iPhone with a more basic pay-as-you-go mobile), but I've always strived to trust my children, never spying on them or trying to find out what they are up to online or during time off.

That's their business. Their social lives. And, however hard it may be, I have to hope that teenaged Laurie, in particular, knows what is and what is not appropriate behaviour - and is simply using the internet as a tool to communicate.

What really concerns me isn't the stuff that she is posting on her 'page'; I am not going to bang on about the danger of creepy, unwanted friends crashing in on her life, or the way that young people like Laurie so blithely and enthusiastically accept that the rest of their lives - work, play, social lives, the lot - will be spent staring at blinking computer screens.

It's the worrying amount of time that she wiles away logged on to Facebook - and I'm consumed with the thoroughly depressing thought that she'll be stuck with this mood-sapping habit for life - constantly checking for updates, fooled into thinking that no action, thought or opinion is considered valid unless it is 'shared' to a group of similarly torpor-fugged friends.

But I'm not the only one worried about the effects of all this social networking. Last month, a clinic was launched for young people suffering from technology addiction.

Dubbing those affected 'screenagers', the doctor leading the treatment centre said rehab services need to 'adapt quickly' to deal with the growing problem.

Even teen idol Miley Cyrus recently warned children to step away from their computers, saying: 'I'm telling kids, don't go on the internet, it's dangerous. It's not fun and it wastes your life.'

So, what to do with my own 'screenager'? When her room goes silent for more than half an hour, I quietly climb the stairs and listen out for the tell-tale tappity-tap of fingers on keyboard.

When called, she'll grunt a reply that sounds half-hearted and detached. If I venture into the room she'll look up at me with glazed, guilt-ridden eyes.

I'm convinced that my daughter's techno-habit has turned her from a fantastically bright, well-read and well-rounded, straight-A student at her school, with teacher- endorsed Oxbridge potential, to someone who stays up late, lies in, can't concentrate and will probably only scrape through her impending GCSE exams.

At 15-years-old, this is probably partly down to hormonal changes; her discovery of boys, going out, fashion, shopping, dance music and other stuff I don't even want to think about.

But it was partly our fault as well. We gave her a laptop, an iTunes account (abused to the tune of £250 in one month, now cancelled) and unlimited access to the internet, stupidly thinking that this would help her with her studies.

Discovering Laurie's habit was so very disappointing and saddening to me because I'd always presumed that Facebook was for the thick, sad, lonely and pointlessly solipsistic - not for someone gifted with fully-formed social skills and an engaging line in face-to-face contact.

In short, I thought my daughter was far too clever for all this. I know it is an age thing, and I know as a free-wheeling adult I am more conventionally socially mobile than her, but even considering all Laurie's arguments about 'keeping in touch' and finding out stuff about gigs and house parties, I just don't understand.

Where she sees a useful communication tool, I see a scarily Orwellian, mind-numbing, childish and, eventually, utterly stupid way of passing precious time.

It would be fine if young girls like Laurie could just dip into it every couple of days or so, but for teenagers, it isn't conducive to casual obligation.

It requires constant commitment and eats up endless amounts of time. It gets you into trouble, too.

Laurie has found out, during her endless chats, that the written word can be a very harsh, hurtfully frank and direct medium sometimes.

As for her school work? Her grades have slipped dramatically. Her end-of-term reports are replete with curt comments about lapsed concentration and a lack of application.

We get concerned calls from her school, twice a week, complaining about homework that hasn't been handed in. Oxbridge and A-star results are no longer discussed. Just scraping through is now regarded as the only realistic target.

If I confront her, she flatly refuses to blame the internet, saying that it's her dreamy disposition and a gnawing lack of discipline that is ruining her chances.

Will she grow out of it? Maybe. Maybe not. Facebook, you see, isn't just a teen thing. It also offers a very sad career path for an idiot class of low-revving, slack-jawed and unemployable, middle-aged sorts.

One acquaintance of mine, one of those hopeless, life-long gap-year types, told me he likes to spend his mornings 'doing a couple of hours on Facebook'.

Why not a walk or a bike ride? Why not actually meet someone for a proper conversation? I mean, it's not as if he has a job or anything more pressing to do, is it?

My hope is that such nerdish idiocy will turn out to be symptomatic of a medium (i.e. the internet) that is still in its embarrassingly excitable and na've infancy.

In a few years' time, we will come round to the idea that the internet is great for entertainment, shopping and work, but little else.

In the meantime, I am doing my best to wean Laurie off Facebook. When she misbehaved over the Christmas holiday, she was grounded for a month and had her iPhone and laptop confiscated.

This forced her to go cold-turkey for a four weeks, and for the first few days it was a kind of social-deprivation hell for her. She mooched around, utterly bereft; long-faced and miserable.

The eye-opener was the way that her friends immediately feared the worst, presuming that there had been a terrible accident of some sort. Then one of them had the brilliant idea of, wait for it, 'phoning her landline'.

Laurie was actually quite impressed by the girl's ingenuity, answering the phone as if the call had come from outer space.

Anyway, after a couple of days she resigned herself to her plight and started reading. She devoured The Great Gatsby in a day and loved it. I was so proud.

The irony of switching off her wireless capability to read the story of how one man (Gatsby) managed to engineer for himself an enviable social life and a vast party of friends without the aid of the internet will not, I hope, have been lost on her.

...and here's what Laurie, 15, has to say

During the Christmas holidays, I was grounded. I went to a party and stayed out too late. Dad took away my iPhone and my laptop.

For someone my age, not having access to my Facebook page is like not having a phone. I wouldn't say it was hell exactly, but I did feel completely disconnected from what was going on.

I felt I was missing out on gossip and party invitations and information about what was going on. Eventually, one of my friends realised there was something wrong and managed to locate my parents' landline and called me on that.

Dad is always going on about how Lily Allen no longer uses Facebook and how only stupid people feel the need to 'share' everything, and how I should stop as well.

But disabling my account is just not an option because it has all my memories on there; my list of friends that has taken two years to build up, two years of photos, records of conversations that show how young I used to be and what I was up to at the time.

Whenever I mention this, Dad goes on about how social networking is sinister and creepy and lectures me about the way that global brands and big, bad corporations like to use it for data-mining, but I just don't see it like that.

It is just a way of communicating and I use it, simply because absolutely everybody I know also uses it. And it is free! I sometimes upload photos from parties and concerts I go to, but the facility I use the most is the instant messaging. It's like being on the phone to somebody. . . or sometimes five people at a time. We talk about the same stuff we would talk about in a face-to-face group, say, at a cafe or a party.

Dad worries that I befriend anyone who gets in touch with me, but actually I only talk to people from my age group, or someone with mutual friends. I would never accept an invitation from anyone much older than me.

On social networking sites, people are less shy. They get more confident and become emboldened by it and they say things that they wouldn't normally say. Especially to boys.

I suppose you could say it is a forum for flirting, basically. This can get you into trouble, but it can also be a positive as well as a negative thing.

Despite what Dad thinks, I don't stay on it for hours and hours. But I do go back and check it. Then check it again. And again. That's when it becomes a bit of a problem and interrupts my homework.

I sit at my desk and try to work, but Facebook just seems to call out to me. I can't resist it.

My friends all admit that it is a real distraction. If I am honest, I'd say that it has had a really negative effect on our performance at school.

Driven to Distraction

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Are your business problems making you insane? In his debut column, 37signals co-founder Jason Fried argues that one of the keys to success is to let your lazy side guide you.

I think of myself as wildly ambitious and unapologetically lazy. Though we've all heard about the good things that come from ambition, laziness gets a bad rap. That's unfortunate. I can attribute a healthy chunk of my success to the positive returns of laziness. Laziness has the best ROI in the business.

Let's start at the beginning. I launched my first real company, a Web design company called Spinfree, in 1996. It was a solo show: just me, a desk in my apartment, and some self-taught mediocre Web design skills. But it was all I needed. The jobs rolled in, and my clients were happy. I could pay the bills, stash away some savings, and work when and where I wanted.

But I wasn't happy. Rather than building confidence, I was accumulating doubt. As my business expanded, I grew nervous and self-conscious. I began to feel as if my accomplishments weren't enough, that I had to take things to "the next level." I thought if I didn't get there fast enough, I'd be bowled over by the competition.

When I bid on projects against larger design firms, I started saying "we" instead of "I" in an attempt to sound bigger. The proposals submitted by my rivals were long and shiny, so mine had to be longer and shinier. I even began badmouthing the competition -- people I'd never met. That's ugly.

The thing is, I didn't need to do any of these things. I thought I did, but I didn't. I was inventing problems. I was making things hard on myself.

How did I figure this out? Laziness. I got tired and let down my guard and wound up learning something important about myself: I love work, just not hard work. I think hard work is overrated. My goal is to do less hard work. And what's hard? Acting like someone else, writing elaborate proposals I don't believe in, and flinging mud at the competition. That's hard and horrible work.

So I put my laziness to work for me. Instead of long proposals, I wrote short ones. Instead of worrying about competitors, I ignored them. And here's what happened: My company got more work. I found better clients. I slept better. I woke up better. I was happier. And, most of all, running a business became a lot easier.

Fifteen years later, this continues to be the most important lesson I've learned as an entrepreneur: Most of the stuff you agonize about just doesn't matter. Truth is, things are pretty easy and straightforward -- until you make them hard and complicated.

This is the ethos that drives what we do at 37signals, the company I co-founded in 1999. We make simple Web-based collaboration software for small businesses and groups. We have millions of users -- and millions in profits -- but we're just 16 people. We don't act any bigger or smaller. We don't put on airs. We just are who we are.

We don't worry much about what the competition is doing. We don't worry about growing pains we don't have yet. We don't spend time on five-year plans and forecasts, because in my experience, they just don't matter.

We invent software, not problems. Real problems will find you; you don't need to invite fake ones to dinner.

Yet that's precisely what many business owners do. I spend a lot of my time speaking with entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs-to-be. They e-mail me, call me at the office, hit me up on Twitter, or introduce themselves at conferences and events. And for the most part, they have one thing in common: They're scared. Worried. Insecure. Just like I was.

It's easy to see why. Conventional business wisdom breeds paranoia. If you don't get big fast, you lose. If you don't obsess about the competition, you will be crushed. If you don't make long-term plans, you'll be staggering in the dark.

Come on. Conventional wisdom is tired, upset, groggy, scared, and a pain in the ass to work with. It doesn't have to be like this.

Instead of spending your time worrying about what could, might, or may happen, spend your time on what matters now. Are your customers thrilled with your service today? Is your inbox flooded with word-of-mouth referrals today? Do your employees love their jobs today? Can people find what they're looking for on your website today? Be honest with yourself. If the answers aren't satisfactory, then I'd suggest that you truly have something to worry about -- no matter how beautiful and comprehensive your business plan is.

Tomorrow. Eventually. Next quarter. Next year. Five years from now. Exit strategy. Throw these words away. They don't matter. Today is all you have in business. Tomorrow is just today again. Next week? Seven todays in a row. Amonth isn't 30 days. It's 30 todays.

I'm not suggesting you stop thinking about the future. I'm telling you to stop stressing about it. Go on, get lazy.

How Would You Sell a Virtual Farmer's Market?

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Local Dirt helps people find produce from local farms.

How would you sell that?

If you want fresh produce, try Local Dirt. It's a website that connects local farmers with food buyers, including restaurants and grocery stores. The Madison, Wisconsin, company, which was founded last year by Heather Hilleren, a former Whole Foods employee, posts information about local farms across the country, including profiles of the owners. Any product ordered through the site is labeled with the farm's name and how many miles it traveled to reach its buyer. "I don't want any fruit, vegetable, or any other kind of local food to be anonymous," says Hilleren. Individuals use the site to learn about local farms and see which stores sell local food. Businesses use Local Dirt to order produce and have it delivered. Local Dirt charges an annual subscription fee of $360 to businesses and farms that place or fulfill orders using Local Dirt's website. So far, close to 1,000 businesses and farms have signed up. How can Hilleren make the company grow? We asked four entrepreneurs to weigh in.

Pitch No. 1: Narrow the focus

Zhena Muzyka, founder of Zhena's Gypsy Tea, an Ojai, California, maker of organic tea
This is a brilliant idea, but I think Hilleren is spreading herself thin by going national. I think the company should go deep instead of wide. Focus on one geographic region, and then hit up farmers' markets with a team of people and laptops. Your target audience is right there, and you can demonstrate what the site does and get farmers to sign up on the spot. Have a van or cool old truck drive around with the company website on the side of it.

Pitch No. 2: Get personal

Gary Hirshberg, CEO of Stonyfield Farm, an organic-yogurt company in Londonderry, New Hampshire
Since Local Dirt wants its customers to have a personal connection with their produce, put webcams on the farms, so consumers can actually see the farmers picking fruit or milking cows. Get personal with customers, too. You could have customers fill out a monthly survey in exchange for, say, a bunch of carrots or a half-gallon of milk. Find out what's on their grocery lists and what other sites they visit. There might be an opportunity for cross promotion with other companies.

Pitch No. 3: Enlist VIPs

Ari Weinzweig, co-founder of Zingerman's, a group of specialty food companies based in Ann Arbor, Michigan
Reach out to key people in the food world -- the top restaurateurs around the country. Explain your concept to them, and get them to sign up. I would also find the best farms in each area and do the same thing. Once you get influential people signed up, the masses will inevitably hear about Local Dirt and follow.

Pitch No. 4: Launch a media blitz

Bob Amick, founder of Concentrics Restaurants, which runs 13 high-end eateries in Atlanta and Orlando
Eating local is probably the hottest movement in food right now. Local Dirt should hire a PR firm to do a national campaign. Target restaurant associations and trade publications as well as major food magazines and the Food Network. Hilleren needs to have a system in place to make sure her suppliers can deliver. One of the biggest problems restaurant owners have is finding local suppliers that can deliver consistently high-quality produce in enough volume.

Feedback on the Feedback:

Hilleren likes the idea of reaching out to influential people. "There are certain farmers and restaurant owners who are in the press a lot, and having them on board could really benefit us," she says. Hilleren agrees that customer surveys would be helpful but thinks farmers might be uncomfortable with webcams. Local Dirt does track produce quality, Hilleren says, by letting restaurants rate their deliveries. Although Hilleren would like to launch a big PR campaign, Local Dirt doesn't have the funds for that right now. "I believe the best way for us to grow is by word of mouth," she says.

Norm Brodsky's Most Controversial Business Ideas

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Veteran entrepreneur Norm Brodsky has made many mistakes—but he has a knack for learning from setbacks and using the knowledge gained through adversity to improve his business. Here are 5 controversial and east-to-argue business ideas that he has come to believe in, through trial and error. You may disagree with Brodsky. That’s fine with him. He is confident you will one day change your mind.

Competition is Great

When rival start-ups began to pour into the records-storage business, Brodsky was thrilled. “In a young industry like ours, you have to spend an inordinate amount of time and money just explaining what you do and why prospective customers should pay you to do it,” he explains. The more competitors you have, the easier that task becomes.” Competition makes comparison-shopping possible, which simplifies your sales pitch. All you have to do is explain to a sales lead why you’re better than the next guy.

Employee Referrals Cause Trouble

After a series of troubles tied to employees who had recommended their friends and family for jobs, Brodsky banned the practice of hiring relatives and associates. He even fired a woman who had sought an exemption for her friend and, when it was not granted, hired her anyway hoping that their relationship would not be discovered. “Understand, the rule was not a matter of convenience,” Brodsky says. “On the contrary, it was easier and cheaper to rely on staff recommendations... But I couldn't accept the number of good employees we were losing by hiring friends and relatives who didn't work out.”

Sales Commissions Don’t Work

“Commissions are the norm in most industries, and commissions are the only way to motivate some salespeople,” Brodsky concedes. “But those aren't the people I want in my company, and you should think twice about having them in yours.” Most salespeople want to be part of a successful team, Brodsky explains. But when you pay them by commission, you treat them differently than every other employee—and give them the means to maximize their pay even if it comes at the expense of other departments such as operations and billing. Instead of base plus commission, Brodsky recommends you pay a salary plus a three-part bonus tied to the success of the individual, the team, and the company.

Drug Testing is a Good Idea

Warehouse accidents, petty theft, and absenteeism were on the rise at Brodsky’s company, and he had heard rumors that employees were smoking pot on the premises. So he reluctantly implemented drug testing—and the results were stunning. More than half of all current employees tested positive, and more than 75 percent of potential new hires tested positive. One executive secretary candidate reluctantly declined a job offer, only to reveal that she routinely smoked crack on her lunch break. After instituting random screening, the accident rate declined, as did the incidence of petty theft. Morale improved among the other workers. Another bonus: "Our drug-testing program made us more attractive to insurers, allowing us to move our policies to a better provider,” Brodsky says.

Marketing is a Waste of Money

“Much of what passes for marketing these days is a waste of time and money that has nothing to do with building a good solid business,” Brodsky says. A slick brochure or presentation lacks soul in Brodsky’s view, and indicates to your customers that you are just like everyone else. Brodsky would rather have homemade marketing materials (see above) that reinforce that his business is like a family, and will treat you well. Your marketing collateral should “reflect who we are, not some marketer's idea of who we should be,” he says.

The Less You’re Around, the Better for the Business

Brodsky decided years ago that he wanted to take as much as 16 weeks of vacation a year. That meant that he had to train his employees to be autonomous and to not rely on him to get things done. So he started to prepare his company. His managers took on new responsibilities; customers got used to less face time with the owner; and outside investors saw Brodsky’s ability to step back from the business as a plus. Best of all, the entrepreneur says he was able to ponder the business’s problems with greater perspective. “It was obvious to me that I was a bigger asset to the company on my return than I had been when I left,” Brodsky says.

2010 landmark year as online ad spending overtakes print

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The tide of technological change continues to mould the print landscape. New figures released by research firm Outsell show that, for the first time ever, businesses plan to spend more this year on digital and online advertising and marketing than on print.

2010 could be a landmark year in the history of print and the Internet if Outsell's forecasts for advertising and marketing spending pan out.

The research firm has released figures that show companies intend to spend $119.6 billion on their online and digital efforts this year compared with just $111.5 billion on newspaper and magazine campaigns.

In 2009, print spending accounted for 32% of total marketing and advertising spending compared with 30% for online and digital. This year, print will make up 30% and online 33%.

"Advertisers are directing dollars toward the channels which generate the most qualified leads and most effective branding," said Outsell vice president and lead analyst Chuck Richard.

"As they emerge from the recession, they need more accountability, and they're spreading their spending over a widening set of options."

Of course, it was always going to happen and, even if Outsell's figures aren't realized this year, it's only a matter of time.

GetResponse: 80% of small businesses plan to use video email

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

There are several new approaches for marketers sticking with tried-and-true options such as display and email. Email, especially, is opening up for greater engagement with new features such as imbedded video and social options. A new survey from Implix's GetResponse indicates that email will become increasingly important to small businesses as we move forward in 2010.

According to the survey 80% of small businesses will implement video email campaigns this year while 90% plan to integrate social media options with traditional email campaigns. Small businesses already using video email report increased conversion rates thanks to the video option.

"We were pleasantly surprised at the major uptick in SMB marketers planning to use video email marketing and social media integration in 2010," said GetResponse Founder Simon Grabowski. "According to our 2009 study, video emails delivered close to a 100 percent increase in click through rates, so we know it works and expected the increase in use. But the 480 percent increase in planned video email use surprised even us!"

Other interesting findings include:

• More than half of respondents found that video email increased click-thrus
• 30% of small businesses believe video 'enhances brand image'
• Small businesses found a 113% increase in link usage from new messages on social networks

Targeting is another hot topic for small businesses with just over half reporting plans to increase personalization and targeting options. Roughly three-quarters of SMB believe behavioral targeting offers at least 'moderate increases' in email effectiveness.

GetResponse surveyed more than 200 small businesses email marketers to arrive at their results.

Report: Retail email rebounds in '09

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

For retailers 2009 was the year of the email. Again. According to new research from Responsys' Chad White in 2009 retailers returned - and increased - their use of email. On average retailers sent 130 promotional emails to consumer subscribers.

Here is the breakdown for email:
• Consumers received 11 emails per month, 2.5 per week (from offline retailers)
• Consumers received 118 promotional emails in 2008
• Promotional email sends increased by 12% year over year

For the most part the summer months were the biggest hitters for emailers, although more emails were sent during the heavily shopped Q4 holiday shopping season. Comparing 2008 to 2009 the summer months (June, July, August) growth ranged from 15% to 17%, but the holiday season saw single day increases of more than 60% on several days.

Meanwhile as we move toward the big Valentine's Day holiday, merchants are ramping up communication with consumers. According to the Retail Email Blog Valentine's themed emails are trending up by just over 20% while SuperBowl ads are only up by about 7%.

So far the increased email trend is continuing into 2010 with etailers increasing email sends by 12% (year over year) for the week ending January 29, 2010. That is a decrease of just under 10% compared to the holidays, but still a strong showing for these dog days of January when consumers aren't making purchases and are, instead, paying off the holiday bills.

comScore: 46% jump in global search market in 2009

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The search market shrugged off the recession in 2009 and experienced significant growth, according to comScore's latest study.

How many searches do you think were conducted during the month of December, 2009? 20 billion? 80 billion? Try 131 billion or, to put it another way, 4bn searches per day, 175 million per hour or 29 million every minute. The total represents 89 billion more searches than were carried out in December, 2008 - a rise of 49%.

In the U.S. alone 22.7 billion were conducted in December, 2009, accounting for about 17% of all searches worldwide, followed by China (13.3 billion), Japan (9.2 billion) and the U.K. (6.2 billion). The country with the highest gain in that month was Russia, increasing 92% to 3.3 billion searches.

As usual, Google reigned with 87.8 billion searches originating from its network of sites, representing 67% of the market, a growth of 58% on December, 2009. Yahoo registered 9.4 billion search queries (up 13%) after which came Microsoft with 4.1 billion. However, Microsoft sites experienced one of the largest growth rates in the top ten with search volume rising 70% in the year to December, 2009, no doubt partly due to the success of Bing.

"The global search market continues to grow at an extraordinary rate, with both highly developed and emerging markets contributing to the strong growth worldwide" said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president.

"Search is clearly becoming a more ubiquitous behavior among Internet users that drives navigation not only directly from search engines but also within sites and across networks. If you equate the advancement of search with the ability of humans to cultivate information, then the world is rapidly becoming a more knowledgeable ecosystem".

Study: Display ads push search

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

If you have display but no search or search but no display chances are your campaigns aren't performing to peak. That, according to new research from digital ad solution firm Eyeblaster. Their report indicates that search is stimulated by properly targeted display ads, especially in the consumer packaged goods category.

Eyeblaster studied advertiser campaigns through their Channel Connect for Search platform. Researchers found that one in five consumers who converted from a search ad also viewed at least one display ad before typing a particular keyword to search for the product. Whew! That's a mouthful! What that means is: consumers saw a display ad, were interested and typed in the search term. From there, they converted the sale.

"This data proves that cross channel synergy expands reach and brings greater scalability to digital campaigns," said Ariel Geifman, Research Analyst with Eyeblaster. "The consumer funnel takes users along a journey - awareness, favorability, consideration, intent to purchase and purchase. Display works at all stages of the funnel. . .while search works on the lower funnel targeting those that already show interest."

eMarketer predicts that the US online advertising space will see steady, if slower, growth through 2010, with greater increases coming from 2012 through 2014. Search and display ads are expected to lead online advertising, although social media outlets and video are quickly gaining ground as well.

Study: 10% of local ads are display

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Local marketers may be relying on Old Faithful when it comes to advertising - the display ad. A new study from metrics firm comScore finds that about 10% of display ads in the US are targeted locally. Is this a bad thing? Or a smart move on the part of marketers?

Although display ads aren't as flashy as, say, flash-based rich media, social or even video ads, the units are definitely not dead. In an online world where consumers are used to and in some cases tuning out flashy ads, audio and musical beds, lower-impact display ads have been shown to engage and call consumers to act. Plus, for local marketers who have lower budgets than big brands, the ads are usually more economically feasible. One caveat - it isn't just local marketers using display. Larger brands are using display to target locally, hoping to cash in on better targeted units in the space.

"Locally targeted ads are an increasingly important component of the digital ad landscape because they represent a more efficient allocation of ad dollars," said comScore vice president Brian Jurutka.

What do local ads offer? First, in the simplicity these ads can pack a huge punch. Linking display ads to specific landing pages, calling a consumer to action and even enabling click-from-ad purchasing capabilities are pulling display ads back from the dead and making them relevant to the advertiser.

"Our research indicates that advertisers understand the value of locally targeted ads and are willing to pay a premium for them - anywhere from 20 to 100 percent - depending on the geography and vertical," said Matt Booth, senior vice president and program director, Interactive Local Media, BIA/Kelsey. "Identifying and quantifying which advertisers are purchasing local ads in particular markets is critical to helping publishers efficiently target potential prospects for these high value ad placements."

Keyword Competitor offers daily keyword updates

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Have you ever wondered how the keywords used by your competitors are doing? Wonder no more, thanks to the Keyword Competitor. The platform gives PPC marketers the ability to see what keywords competitors are using and how those keywords stack up against campaigns. The information is offered in real time, giving keyword advertisers a true glimpse of what consumers are and are not responding to.

By observing keyword trends up to the minute, marketers have a better chance of making a keyword buy, making changes to an on-going campaign or predicting how to set up a new campaign.

The best part? Marketers can try out the spying tool free.

So, just how does the tool work? PPC advertisers simply create a template based on their products, keywords or ads. Reports are then sent daily detailing page rank, keyword usage, click through information and how competitor campaigns are faring. This gives the marketer a unique insight into what they are doing right or wrong.

The subscription version of the tool lets advertisers follow 40 different keywords through six domains, but there is also a lifetime free trial which gives marketers the ability to track two keywords through the home domain and one competitor site.

Why monitor what your competitors are advertising and how they're doing it? Because the economy is shifting, consumers are more concerned about where and how they spend money and both of those items mean the online advertising environment is tougher than ever. By knowing how and what your competitors are advertising to and engaging consumers you stand a better chance at keeping the competitive edge - and your revenue figures in the black.

Fans and friends more likely to purchase

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

If a business doesn't have a presence on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook they risk being seen as "out of touch" while missing out on valuable word of mouth and even sales.

Not only are Facebook fans and Twitter followers apt to recommend brands they follow to others, they are also more likely to make a purchase from those brands, too. Such are the findings of a recent study of over 1,500 consumers by market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Technologies.

While 60% of Facebook users and 79% of Twitterers are more likely to recommend a brand after becoming a friend or fan, over half of Facebook users and 67% of Twitterers are more likely to purchase from brands they latch on to.

According to Josh Mendelsohn a vice president at Chadwick Martin Bailey, "Companies not actively engaging are missing a huge opportunity and are saying something to consumers - intentionally or unintentionally- about how willing they are to engage on consumers' terms".

So what do consumers think of brands that don't have a presence on social sites like Facebook or Twitter? Among older females - age 50 and over - there is an expectation that a business will have a digital presence and the perception is that those that don't are out of touch with "electronic" people.

Males aged 35-39 are also of the opinion that businesses who fail to engage with consumers on social media are misguided. "Either they are not interested in the demographic that frequents Facebook and Twitter or they are unaware of the opportunity to get more exposure in a more interactive method," they said.

Entrepreneurs Question Value of Social Media

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Marketing via Facebook, Twitter Yields Results for Some, Others Say It's Overrated; 'Hype Right Now Exceeds the Reality

Last year, Jackie Siddall described in a blog post how a message she received on Twitter prompted her to buy a folding kayak for around $1,900.

The vessel was one of about just 600 sold in 2009 by Folbot Inc., a small retailer in Charleston, S.C. "You can't buy that exposure," says the firm's co-owner, David AvRutick, who claims the incident speaks to the value of using social media for marketing.

But Mr. AvRutick's experience may be the exception, rather than the norm. In its short lifetime, social media—services like Facebook and Twitter—have become popular marketing tools for small firms due to the low cost and easy-to-use format. Some entrepreneurs say they're highly effective, but new evidence suggests otherwise.

"The hype right now exceeds the reality," says Larry Chiagouris, professor of marketing at Pace University's Lubin School of Business.

Last year, social-media adoption by businesses with fewer than 100 employees doubled to 24% from 12%, says a survey released in January of 2,000 U.S. entrepreneurs from the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business and Network Solutions LLC, a Web-services provider in Herndon, Va.

Meanwhile, a separate survey of 500 U.S. small-business owners from the same sponsors found that just 22% made a profit last year from promoting their firms on social media, while 53% said they broke even. What's more, 19% said they actually lost money due to their social-media initiatives.

"It could harm you if you end up inadvertently saying something stupid, offensive or even grammatically incorrect," says Mr. Chiagouris.

A business owner's time and energy spent on social-media marketing—Folbot's Mr. AvRutick says he dedicates about an hour a day—could also go to waste. Fifty percent of the latter survey's respondents say it requires more effort than expected.

To gain positive results, entrepreneurs need to regularly interact with consumers through these sites and not simply create static profiles, says Jacob Morgan, co-owner of Chess Media Group Corp., a consulting firm in San Francisco that specializes in social media.

Some small businesses opt to hire outside firms to handle their social-media marketing or advise them on the best ways to use it, but such services can cost hundreds of dollars a month.

For Chris Lindland, owner of Cordarounds.com, an online clothing retailer in San Francisco, converting consumers into customers using social media has required a "patient investment."

"My business has been visited millions of times, but I haven't made millions of sales," says Mr. Lindland, whose four-person staff spends up to 90 minutes a day managing Cordarounds's accounts on Twitter and Facebook. "People have told me they finally got around to buying from my business after reading about it on social media two years ago."

Some entrepreneurs say they've found early indicators that their social-media efforts are paying off.

"The people coming from social media have been buying," says Stephen Bailey, who oversees social-media and other marketing initiatives for John Fluevog Boots & Shoes Ltd., a footwear and accessories retailer in Vancouver with about 100 employees.

As evidence, Mr. Bailey points to a 40% increase in online sales in 2009—the first full year the company engaged consistently in social-media marketing—compared with 2008 when it was just getting started. He says he can draw a correlation between those figures and social media by looking at traffic to the company's Web site from Twitter using Hootsuite, a free Twitter-management service from Invoke Media Inc. Other free services that track Web traffic from social-media sites include Google Analytics, CoTweet and Lodgy.

"The second we started using social media, it became one of the biggest drivers of traffic outside of search engines," says Mr. Bailey, adding that his research shows these visitors spend as much time on Fluevog.com as those who come from other online destinations. The company doesn't invest in paid advertising on social media, he adds.

Other business owners are soliciting customer feedback and monitoring what's being said about their firms to determine the impact of sites like Facebook and Twitter on consumers' buying decisions.

Mr. AvRutick says he regularly searches Twitter for tweets that mention kayaking and then sends messages to the people who wrote them. He connected with Ms. Siddall, the blogger who credited Twitter for exposing her to Folbot, after she posted a tweet that mentioned she wanted a kayak.

Ms. Siddall, a 37-year-old senior designer for Idea Couture Inc., a creative-marketing agency in Toronto, says she was unaware that folding kayaks even existed until she heard from Mr. AvRutick. She spent the next few months researching different brands, which included perusing a networking forum on Folbot's Web site about kayaking.

Ms. Siddall says she later asked Mr. AvRutick via Twitter if he would send her some photos of her folding kayak being made, and he provided about 20. After it arrived, she says she decided to write a blog post about the whole experience.

"I didn't find the same level of information or communication online from the other brands," she says.

Email and social networks - the perfect partnership

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Far from ousting email from marketers' toolboxes, social media is being used to enhance its effectiveness, as eConsultancy's latest Email Marketing Industry Census discovered.

Email remains a popular tool, accounting for around 17% of the digital marketing budgets of the 900 digital marketers surveyed by eConsultancy. The overriding driver of investment is its return on investment - three-quarters of respondents cited email as "excellent" or "good" in this respect.

However, more and more marketers are eyeing up social media - will this oust email? Apparently not. Most marketers see email as an opportunity to encourage the sharing of content via social networks via links such as ShareThis and SWYN. Currently, 37% of companies and just under a third are planning to do so, found eConsultancy.

Earlier this month, Merkle released data that showed email and social networks work well together. Their survey of over 3,000 U.S. adults age 18+ found that time spent with personal, or social, email had not changed in the twelve months leading up to the time of the survey in the fall of 2009. Instead, 71% of respondents still reported spending 20 minutes or more, each week, with email.

In fact, contrary to what some might believe, Merkle found that active social networkers check their email inboxes far more regularly than those who spend less time on social networks. Forty-two percent of social networkers check their email account four or more times a day, compared to just 27% of their non-networked counterparts.

"While people are moving to social networks in significant numbers to communicate with family and friends, email remains their primary storehouse and conduit for commercial information," said Stefan Tornquist, US Research Director, Econsultancy, in the report.

"That relationship will continue and is likely to flourish in the social age - companies that have already grasped the changing nature of the brand-consumer relationship should realize that this change doesn't simply affect those traditional tactics which are no longer working as well as they did. As an industry, we need to get ahead of the opportunity, and make email a primary and genuinely two-way channel of value to our customers."

A Marketer's Guide to Social Media - 8 Keys to Success

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Here are eight key social media points from the session:

Start with a clear strategy, just like any other marketing initiative. Social media is both a concept and a set of tools. Before you can begin using the tools, you need to set clear goals and objectives as to what you hope to accomplish.
Social media does not sit outside your traditional marketing efforts. It must be integrated into your entire marketing process.
Yes, social media can help you increase your sales, but your goals may be different from just revenue goals. Look at human resources goals (recruiting), customer service (call center savings), lower training costs, lower conversion costs, reputation goals and more. Thinking sales growth is always the bright, shiny object, but other goals may be more attainable.
Understand where you belong in social media in your market. Is your role to observe (listen), to engage with customers, to develop conversations and relationships with customers?
Educate yourself. Read books such as Groundswell, The Digital Handshake or Get Content Get Customers. Start experimenting personally.
Look at companies that are doing it well, like Cisco, Intel, Breaking Point, IBM and SAP.
Focusing on the key social media sites (i.e., Twitter and Facebook) may not be the best strategy for your brand. Find out where your customers are hanging out at, and develop strategies for those channels (niche blogs, industry forum sites, Google groups, etc.) that deliver on your overall goals.
The core of your social media strategy must be your content strategy. What is your brand's story? What are the stories that are happening in and around your brand that will make you interesting to your customers and prospects? Why would anyone share your content through social media if you don't have anything valuable or relevant to say?

comScore Releases February 2010 U.S. Search Engine Rankings

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. In February 2010, Americans conducted 14.5 billion core searches, with Google Sites accounting for 65.5 percent search market share.

February 2010 U.S. Core Search Rankings

Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in February with 65.5 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites (16.8 percent), and Microsoft Sites (11.5 percent). Ask Network captured 3.7 percent of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 2.5 percent.

comScore Core Search Report* February 2010 vs. January 2010 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch
Core Search Entity	Share of Searches (%)
Core Search Entity	Jan-10	Feb-10	Point Change Feb-10 vs. Jan-10
Total Core Search	100.0%	100.0%	N/A
Google Sites	65.4%	65.5%	0.1
Yahoo! Sites	17.0%	16.8%	-0.2
Microsoft Sites	11.3%	11.5%	0.2
Ask Network	3.8%	3.7%	-0.1
AOL LLC Network	2.5%	2.5%	0.0

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

Americans conducted 14.5 billion searches in February, down 5 percent from January. Google Sites accounted for 9.5 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.4 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.7 billion), Ask Network (540 million) and AOL LLC (358 million).

comScore Core Search Report* February 2010 vs. January 2010 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch
Core Search Entity	Search Queries (MM)
Core Search Entity	Jan-10	Feb-10	Percent Change Feb-10 vs. Jan-10
Total Core Search	15,167	14,472	-5%
Google Sites	9,920	9,475	-4%
Yahoo! Sites	2,583	2,433	-6%
Microsoft Sites	1,715	1,667	-3%
Ask Network	574	540	-6%
AOL LLC	375	358	-5%

February 2010 U.S. Expanded Search Rankings

In the February analysis of the top properties where search activity is observed, Google Sites led the search market with 13.5 billion search queries, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.5 billion queries and Microsoft Sites with 1.7 billion. Facebook.com experienced significant growth during the month with a 10-percent increase to 436 million searches, while craigslist, inc. jumped one position to #5 with 629 million searches.

comScore Expanded Search Query Report February 2010 vs. January 2010 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch
Expanded Search Entity	Search Queries (MM)
Expanded Search Entity	Jan-10	Feb-10	Percent Change Feb-10 vs. Jan-10
Total Internet	23,163	22,271	-4%
Google Sites	14,045	13,482	-4%
Google	10,378	9,929	-4%
YouTube/All Other	3,667	3,553	-3%
Yahoo! Sites	2,670	2,509	-6%
Yahoo!	2,647	2,496	-6%
All Other	23	13	-43%
Microsoft Sites	1,772	1,720	-3%
Bing	1,549	1,498	-3%
Microsoft/All Other	223	222	0%
Ask Network	736	689	-6%
ASK.COM	336	300	-11%
MyWebSearch.com/ All Other	400	389	-3%
craigslist, inc.	636	629	-1%
eBay	659	624	-5%
AOL LLC	576	549	-5%
AOL Search Network	317	299	-6%
MapQuest/All Other	259	250	-3%
Facebook.com	395	436	10%
Fox Interactive Media	403	391	-3%
MySpace	398	388	-3%
All Other	5	3	-40%
Amazon Sites	238	210	-12%

Passionate Leadership According to James Cameron and Steve Jobs

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

In a recent portrait of Avatar director James Cameron, Rebecca Keegan outlines five leadership rules the director brings to each movie set. Reading it I was struck by how Cameron’s style matches what we’ve learned about Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

But don’t go teaching these traits, which admittedly produce incredible innovation, to MBA students. In fact, following any of these styles will get you fired — unless you have the inspiration genius that can deliver results like Cameron and Jobs.

Here are three areas where the computer and cinema wunderkinds overlap.

Bonding Through Innovation

Cameron. “Breaking new ground is Cameron’s raison d’être — nothing interests this man unless it’s hard to do,” Keegan writes. “But innovation has also become a way of bonding his teams… For Cameron, a sense of exploration isn’t just personally enriching, it’s a crucial tool for motivating and uniting his teams.”

Jobs. When Jobs created the original Macintosh team in the early 1980s, he moved the group to a remote building on the Apple campus, raised a pirate flag above the roof, and moved in a popcorn machine to give his people a sense of esprit de corps. Today, management experts prefer you unite your groups rather than pitting them against each other, but they also love the idea of inspiring your team with sense of purpose they can rally around.

More Perfection, Please

Cameron. On Avatar, Keegan reports, “Hours were spent on the smallest details, like getting alien sap to drip precisely right…. It’s hard to argue with Cameron’s nitpicky style, however, when audiences thrill to immerse themselves in the richly detailed worlds he creates.”

Jobs: Just weeks before launch of the original iPhone, Apple decided to replace the plastic touch screen with optical-quality glass. The change not only delayed the introduction, but caused its screen vendor, Balda, to reconfigure parts of its assembly line “causing a material impact on financials,” according to AppleInsider. For Jobs, however, the aesthetic of the product would have been ruined by an inferior screen.

Inspiration Through Fear

Again, not a great trait you’d teach to MBAs, but both Cameron and Jobs are stern taskmasters who demand the most of their employees, and occasionally cross the line to get it.

Cameron. “Many Cameron alumni will share a story from their first film with him, a day they were sure they were going to be fired, almost hoped for it. But Cameron rarely fires people. ‘Firing is too merciful,’ he says. Instead he tests their endurance for long hours, hard tasks, and harsh criticism. Survivors tend to surprise themselves by turning in the best work of their careers, and signing on for Cameron’s next project.”

Jobs. “”It was probably the best work I ever did,” former Apple designer Corsdell Ratzlaff told Inside Steve’s Brain author Leander Kahaney. “It was exhilratating. It was exciting. Sometimes it was difficult, but he had the ability to pull the best out of people.”

If these men, both brilliant in their own fields, managed by the book, I doubt they would be nearly as successful. What they share is passion for the work, and their management styles both demand and instill passion in the people that work around them.

Have you worked for someone with the passion exhibited by Cameron and Jobs? What was the experience like, and what did you take away from the experience?

Ten Ways to Motivate Your Team

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

You do not need books or psycho babble to work out how to motivate people. Start by thinking about the best boss you have ever worked for. What did the boss do to motivate you so well? Do you do the same things with your team?

In practice, most of us respond to some simple motivational measures. Here are my top ten:

Show you care for each member of the team, and for their career. Invest time to understand their hopes, their fears and dreams. Casual time by the coffee machine, not a formal meeting in an office, is the best way to get to know your team members.
Say thank you. We all crave recognition: we want to know that we are doing something worthwhile and we are doing it well. Make your praise real, for real achieverment. And make it specific. Avoid the synthetic one minute manager praise (”gee, you typed that email really well…”).
Never demean a team member. If you have any criticism, keep it private and make it constructive. Don’t scold your team members like school children: treat them as partners and work together to find a way forward.
Delegate well: delegate meaningful work which will stretch and develop your team member. Yes, there is routine rubbish to be delegated, but delegate some of the interesting stuff as well. Be clear and consistent about your expectations.
Have a clear vision. Show where your team is going and how each team member can help you all get there. Have a clear vision for each team member: know where they are going and how they can develop their careers.
Trust your team. Do not micro manage them. Have courage to implement MBWA: Management By Walking Away.
Be honest. That means having difficult, but constructive, conversations with struggling team members. Don’t hide or shade the truth. Honesty builds trust and respect.
Set clear expectations. Be very clear about promotion prospects, bonuses and the required outcome of each piece of work. Assume you will be misunderstood: people hear what they want to hear. So make it simple and repeat it often and be consistent.
Overcommunicate. You have two ears and one mouth: use them in that proportion. Listen twice as much as you speak. Then you will find out what is really going, what drives your team members and you can act accordingly.
Don’t try to be friends. It is more important to be respected than liked: trust endures where popularity is fickle and leads to weak compromises. If your team trusts and respects you, they will want to work for you.

As with all things that sound simple, in practice it is very hard to do all of this consistently well. It is high effort, but normally very high reward. A motivated team will climb mountains which unmotivated teams do not even look at.

'Undercover Boss': What Execs Can Learn Flipping Burgers

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

There’s a school of thought that in any business customers come first. Not that you should treat your employees like crap, but that satisfied customers mean successful business, and that’s good for everybody, including employees. Well, some of you have questioned that wisdom, suggesting it should be the reverse.

Well, White Castle was founded on the belief that happy employees make for happy customers. The company’s employee retention statistics are impressive. About 20 percent of its 11,000 employees have been with the company for over a decade, and about a quarter of those have over 25 years of service.

It’s hard to believe that a $600 million company can be run like a family business, but besides the taste of its legendary Slyders, White Castle does seem to have a management secret … although it’s not so secret anymore. All was revealed in an interview with Dave Rife (pictured), owner and executive board member of White Castle and the oldest member of “the family’s” fourth generation.

Dave struck me as an affable and extremely driven individual. When he realized he was “a heart attack waiting to happen,” he lost 80 pounds in two years. As this week’s Undercover Boss, Dave took on the equally difficult task of finding out what his “team members” experience every day of their lives as White Castle employees.

Tobak: I was checking out your menu on-line and I got hungry just looking at it. What is it about this stuff that makes people “crave” it?

Rife: I think it’s primarily because of the people that make and serve the product, the amount of attention they give to detail and creating those memorable moments for our customers. That’s what really gives us that extra something in our burgers. We really have a distinctive taste, it’s kind of ritualistic, we’ve got people who just crave us and build traditions about coming to White Castle.

Tobak: White Castle was the first fast-food hamburger chain. Given what McDonalds and others have done in terms of corporate growth, do you have any regrets?

Rife: Our people are first, that’s what it’s all about for us. We have a slow and consistent growth model that has taken us from one restaurant in 1921 to 420 today. As well as the bakeries, the meat plants, the frozen hamburger facilities, and we’ve done all that without taking on any debt. That’s a big key to survival especially in today’s economy.

Tobak: White Castle seems to be a throwback to a time when employees were treated differently, like part of the family. How do you pull that off?

Rife: My great grandfather founded this company on the belief that happy team members make for happy customers and it still holds true today. That’s the one thing that, as a company, we’ve been able to embrace, hang on to, and stay true to that course. We really do try to make everybody feel like they’re part of the family.

Tobak: Can you be more specific about how you do that?

Rife: We try to treat everybody with respect, the same way we would like to be treated. We have a long term view of what we think our business should be, and that long term view enables us to focus on those people that are behind the counter. We don’t sit back and talk about our earnings per share; we’re looking way down the road.

You know, we sat down a long time ago as a family and came up with what we call our vision, values, and guiding principles, which is the cornerstone that we base our decisions on and run our company by. Our team members are the center of that.

Tobak: Undercover Boss seems like a risky proposition. With such a conservative business model, what was your motivation for doing the show?

Rife: When they first contacted us, we sat down as a family and had a discussion. We decided the opportunity to really find out what’s going on and live the life of our frontline people and see what we can take away from that to make our organization stronger was huge. The more we can learn about that, their trials, their tribulations, and what we can do to make things easier for them, to help them succeed, the better off we all are.

Also, as a family member and owner, when I go out in the field, people know I’m coming. I’m not saying you don’t see reality, but you see maybe a polished version of reality. To truly understand what your people go through, you’ve got to live their lives.

Tobak: What about the UB experience surprised you the most?

Rife: The people I got to interact with, I didn’t realize how much they would touch me personally, what I would gain from a personal perspective about them and about myself. We found out some truly great things about our company and some opportunities we can build upon to make us stronger, and I found out some things about myself I think I can build upon.

Tobak: Like what?

Rife: I think I need to be a better listener. Sometimes you hear people but you don’t truly listen to what they’re really telling you. You don’t always read between the lines to pick up the nuance of what they’re telling you. Now I work hard to make sure I’m getting the true message that people are trying to send to me.

Also, we have some tremendously talented young people that come into our organization. These are the leaders of tomorrow; they’re quick, intelligent, driven, and persistent and we’ve got to make sure that we don’t lose sight of those folks. We’re putting things in place now to help us develop and grow that young talent into the future of our company.

Let's Take This Offline

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 GMT

You've started a business. You've built a great product. Now you're trying to get the word out. You don't have the budget to buy ads or to retain a PR agency. You'd like to hire a salesperson, but the experienced salespeople are smart enough not to work for you.

Well, there's always blogging.

These days, it seems like just about every start-up founder has a blog, and 99 percent of these bloggers are doing it wrong. The problem? They make the blog about themselves, filling it with posts announcing new hires, touting new products, and sharing pictures from the company picnic. That's lovely, darling -- I'm sure your mom cares. Too bad nobody else does. Most company blogs have almost no readers, no traffic, and no impact on sales. Over time, the updates become few and far between (especially if responsibility for the blog is shared among several staff members), and the whole thing ceases to become an important source of leads or traffic.

There were far fewer blogs when I set up mine, Joel on Software, 10 years ago (even before I started my company). The site quickly became a popular hub for programmers who wanted to discuss all sorts of things -- how to write elegant code, how to deal with unreasonable deadlines, how to get paid more. As the blog grew -- eventually, it surpassed one million unique visitors a month in traffic -- it also drove interest in my start-up, Fog Creek Software, and our products.

So, what's the formula for a blog that actually generates leads, sales, and business success? I didn't even understand it myself until last year at the Business of Software conference, when one of the speakers, a well-known game developer and author named Kathy Sierra, blew me away with an incredibly simple idea that explains why my blog successfully promoted my company while so many other blogging founders foundered.

To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur's blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn't. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company. Blogging as a medium seems so personal, and often it is. But when you're using a blog to promote a business, that blog can't be about you, Sierra said. It has to be about your readers, who will, it's hoped, become your customers. It has to be about making them awesome.

So, for example, if you're selling a clever attachment to a camera that diffuses harsh flash light, don't talk about the technical features or about your holiday sale (10 percent off!). Make a list of 10 tips for being a better photographer.

If you're opening a restaurant, don't blog about your menu. Blog about great food. You'll attract foodies who don't care about your restaurant yet.

If you make superior, single-source chocolate, don't write about that great trip you took to the Dominican Republic to source cocoa beans. That's all about you. Instead, write the definitive article about making chocolate-covered strawberries. For the next 10 years, whenever a gourmand or a baker searches Google for a recipe on how to make chocolate-covered strawberries, he or she will find your post. Helping your users make awesome chocolate-based confections is likely to attract readers who might buy fancy chocolate, and that's the point of a successful blog. Writing about trips to the Dominican Republic is going to attract only people who might want to travel to the Dominican Republic. Unless you're selling that, you shouldn't be blogging about it.

In retrospect, Joel on Software was essentially a small, perfectly targeted magazine for programmers with a certain pragmatic philosophy toward software development. It was also free advertising for my company, but the advertising actually looked a lot more like editorial content than anything else; the most popular post I ever wrote, for example, was about how technology companies should never, ever rewrite their code from scratch.

Once I had built an audience among programmers, enough of them turned into customers that I was able to get my bootstrapped company off the ground. The audience was so precisely defined that products we tried to make that weren't specifically for programmers pretty much flopped. They were great products, but they just weren't for programmers, and we didn't have a way to market them effectively to nonprogrammers.

Of course, blogging took a ton of my time: It is a manual, labor-intensive, homemade way to reach customers. All told, the work I've put into the website and related books, training videos, conferences, and even this column has probably accounted for about a third of the total work I've put into Fog Creek Software over the past decade. That's three or four years of my work life.

Was it worth it? Should you blog?

Well, it worked brilliantly for me, but the more I've looked around, the more I've noticed that plenty of start-ups have managed to get customers and grow nicely without devoting a huge chunk of their early years to building a cool blog.

What's more, I have trouble pointing to other successful entrepreneurs who have used the same formula and reaped the same dividends I have.

The big-hit technology companies from the past 10 years tend to have pathetic blogs. Twitter's blog, like Facebook's and Google's, is full of utterly boring press releases rewritten to sound a little bit less stuffy. Apple's employees produce virtually no blogs, even though the company has introduced several game-changing new products in the past decade. Meanwhile, hundreds of Microsoft's employees have amazing blogs, but these have done nothing to stave off that company's slide into stodginess.

So, having become an Internet celebrity in the narrow, niche world of programming, I've decided that it's time to retire from blogging. March 17, the 10th anniversary of Joel on Software, will mark my last major post. This also will be my last column for Inc. For the most part, I will also quit podcasting and public speaking. Twitter? "Awful, evil, must die, CB radio, sorry with only 140 chars I can't tell you why."

The truth is, as much as I've enjoyed it, blogging has become increasingly impossible to do the way I want to as Fog Creek has become a larger company. We now have 32 employees and at least six substantial product lines. We have so many customers that I can't always write freely without inadvertently insulting one of them. And my daily duties now take so much time that it has become a major effort to post something thoughtful even once or twice a month.

The best evidence also suggests that there are many other effective ways to market Fog Creek's products -- and that our historical overreliance on blogging as a marketing channel has meant that we've ignored them. I realize now that blogging made me, and Fog Creek, a big fish in a very small pond. As a result, we have the undisputed No. 1 product among the 5 percent to 10 percent of programmers who regularly read blogs about programming. Meanwhile, we're almost unknown in every other demographic.

My hope is that giving up blogging and the rest of it will be the equivalent of making a cross-eyed kid wear an eye patch on his good eye for a while: The weaker eye will grow stronger. My company needs to get better at what every other company already knows -- how to promote and market products without depending on one single channel. We've completely saturated a small slice of the target market, and now we have to go after a much larger group of potential customers.

To my readers: Thank you for your attention over the past 10 years. I couldn't have done it without you, and the nice e-mails, comments, tweets, and blog replies have made it a joyous journey. I enjoyed meeting you virtually, and I look forward to meeting many of you in person in the next phase of my company's life.

Inside America's Coolest Workplace

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Pro skateboarder Rob Dyrdek has built a business empire of more than a dozen ventures. They are all run out of the Fantasy Factory, his office near Los Angeles, which features an indoor skate plaza. Take a look inside America's coolest workplace.

Rob Dyrdek isalways on the move. Which might make sense for a skateboarding icon comfortable with tricks called the nose blunt and crooked grind. But these days, the serial entrepreneur spends about as much time behind a desk. Or in a recording studio. Or in network pitch meetings. Or even jockeying a horse. As president of Dyrdek Enterprises, he's got his hands in at least a dozen ventures -- including the Rogue Status and DTA clothing lines, the ISX Instant Scoring eXperience, and Wild Grinders, the toy line based on his own childhood skate gang that he's now turning into an animated series. Next on the agenda? A professional skateboarding league -- what Dyrdek, perhaps the sport's most prominent ambassador today, says just may end up being his legacy. Keep in mind, he's 35.

Dyrdek's home each business day is known as the Fantasy Factory, a 25,000-square-foot warehouse in downtown Los Angelesequipped with an indoor skate plaza, 50-foot basketball hoops, a foam pit, and something called a T-Rex, a three-wheeled "superbike" he likes to whip around in.

It also serves as the backdrop for his reality show on MTV, now entering its third season. Each episode tends to center around a new project involving the company, with much of the action taking place upstairs in "Corpo," where his office staff works.

Dyrdek recently granted Inc. an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of the Fantasy Factory, where he opened up about what drives him as an entrepreneur, the importance of authenticity in business, and why someone with more than 1 million friends and followers thinks social media is the most "overhyped" thing in media today.

Do you think you're entrepreneurial by nature? Or did you pick it up through osmosis, working with DC and other companies when you were focused more on skating?

Osmosis. All these people that were close to me were always starting companies and being entrepreneurs, and that sort of seeded it in me, where even at a young age, at 16 when I turned pro, I'd always say, "This is a business, I've got to market myself." I always treated it like a business, started my first company at 19, and I think from that point on, for the last 15 years, it's been more of a refining and understanding. Understanding building properties, understanding partnering with the right people, understanding how to manage people and inspire people and putting the right people together. I'd like to say this is me at my best, at 35, you know what I mean?

As fans of the show know, you work closely with friends and family. That's something a lot of entrepreneurs do, but it can also be very difficult. What are the upsides and downsides for you?

I keep everybody in their position that makes the most sense, keep everybody comfortable. I don't put any grand expectations on anyone I work with. I hire them inside their lane. A lot of people hire people and expect them to be something, and that adds to a lot of the trouble. If you put a family member in a position that t hey aren't built to handle, it's going to be very tough to deal with. As long as you put them in the right lane, and your expectations aren't very high, it's pretty mellow. And, for the most part, I think I'm a very easy person to work with. I work really hard and my goal for each person is for them to be happy and be inspired and want to work hard for me. That's from all levels of everything that I do. Because you're only as good as how hard the people around you will work.

You've told me before that you'll take a meeting with anyone. Why do you think that's important? You're obviously pretty busy, so you don't have time for everyone.

A lot of people have a tendency just to shun meetings because they think, "Oh, that will never work, I wouldn't even consider doing that in any way, shape, or form." But a lot of times, the most random, random things will occur from a meeting…. I feel like it's the process, especially when you're someone like me and you can spot the potential and then have a vision for how to realize the potential that nobody else thought of. That's what I'm always looking for. But don't get me wrong. Ninety percent of it's junk.

What's the craziest idea to come your way?

Anywhere I go, somebody's got a business for me. Dude showed up with like a new "snakeboard." Somehow breached, got in here with a business plan and a snakeboard. And I'm like, "Dude, I don't know how you got in here."

So we're here is the Fantasy Factory. You've told me, "It's become almost like the Playboy Mansion" because it's got this mythology. And that it's easier than ever to get meetings with people you want to meet with, because they want to come down and see this place. Part of the reason we're here -- we could've done this over the phone -- we wanted to see it. I wanted to jump in the foam pit. Do you think that that's like having the ultimate home court advantage?

It's marketing. But it's smart. And as smart as I think I am, I was more wrapped up in the grandness of creating something insane, rather than thinking of what would be sort of the ripple effect behind it. It wasn't as methodic as thinking, like, "Man, I'm going to create this thing where celebrities and stars and everybody wants to come down and hang out and it's going to eventually evolve into trailing that off into the show and deals and everything." I never really thought of it like that.

Were you worried it might not work?

No, because the reality of it is this -- I'm not stupid, this shit is sick [laughs]. Even if the show came out and failed, I still have like the sickest place in the world and I would've just went another direction to build content out of here and done it. Who knows, I would've just kept pushing to make it even more insane. Trust me, I tricked a mill' into this thing. Stupid! Stupid! My budget was 250. But I got so obsessed with the idea of just making it so grand, and the more insane the better. When I think about the series, what's so special about it is, yes, it's ridiculous -- where I'm getting attacked by sharks and jockeying horses and doing all this random stuff -- but there's still this very, very real world of long-term entrepreneurial brands that will go on forever that will birth through this place, and I know that's very special.

Most entrepreneurs are not going to sink a million dollars into their office. Some, maybe. But how do you think that they can replicate little bits of this? And why is that important?

Where you run brands from tells so much about how you do business. And, for me, if you are just dead normal, you tell that story, versus having something worth going to see. But I think a lot of the bigger companies know that. Nike has their own campus, Google's place is insane…. But, for the most part, regardless, your office is a reflection of you as a brand.

How often, aside from when the show is taping, are you guys out here playing, skating, having fun, whatever?

The more dangerous and crazier stuff that goes down, I want to make sure it's filmed. But for the most part, this is where I skate with all my friends, where we hang out and play ping pong and watch football and have parties. It's still a very great world to just have fun in. But when it comes to creating a show, I like to pump it up as high as possible and make it crazy.

How important do you think it is to have fun in the workplace? You're wearing a hoodie and sneakers. Not every company is like that.

In anything, if you don't love to go there or you're not excited or proud of it, it's tough to give -- most people I would say don't give 100 percent. And you're happy if you get 65. But if you create an environment and a place that everybody has fun and loves to hang out and is proud to be a part of, you get 100, 110, and I think that really makes a difference.

How important do you think -- and I think you're hinting at it -- authenticity is, not only for your space and how you run the company, but with the brand extensions that you pursue?

I come from a world that the mainstream has this incredible infatuation with, but all the mainstream portions of it are run by people that know nothing about it. Have zero authenticity. So every property that I build, it's just simply a skateboarder doing it…. There is no compromise. And I'm fortunately in a position where I don't need to compromise…. This is how I live. This was my destiny from 11 years old on. The reason I have the whole industry behind me is because they know everything I do is about the growth of the sport and doing it the right way. So it certainly makes a big difference.

You're obviously more famous, more well-known among the mainstream than before you started Rob & Big a few years back. There's a lot of upside to that exposure. What's the downside?

It's a weird life, man. I wouldn't call any of it a downside, I feel like it's just sort of the price of it. You know what you're getting into. I guess you never really quite expect that everywhere you go. But for me, it's different. Actors, pro athletes, you know them for a character or an actual physical thing. Everybody knows me for me. The fame of a reality show, where you're just having a good time and being crazy. They all feel like they're living it with you, so when they see you, it ain't like, "Oh, there's a dude." It's like, "What's up? There's my homie." So it makes for an interesting, interesting life.

You've been pretty effective with social media. That is something pretty much any company can try to replicate. How important is that for you and your brands?

I don't think it's very important.

Really?

I don't think so. I think it's one of the biggest, overhyped things in all of media today. I feel like the effectiveness behind reaching 800,000 MySpace friends, 400,000 Twitterpeople, is an incredibly small percentage of people where there's a direct effect, a direct touch. The value in it, I think, on a celebrity level, is you can ground yourself and show yourself a little bit more and address certain things. There's a realness to it. Even though a lot of celebrities stay away from it, or it's just all business where they try to promote something. But I really believe it's the most absolute overrated promotional piece in media. Nothing compared to like you doing a really funny incredible viral video -- millions of people see it.

But that's part of social media too.

Right, but again, that's content-driven. You've created something strong enough that makes somebody else send it to somebody else. I think virally, it's massive. But sending out like, "Hey, new T-shirts in stores!" on Twitter, I would say that half a percent are affected by it and ever make a move on it.

So you do it, like a lot of companies, because everyone's doing it, you may as well?

Yeah, that's how I look at it.

Well, when this feature comes out, I want you to tweet it.

[Laughs] OK. Right, don't get me wrong. If your personality is whack, and you're whack, that's what you Twitter. But really, you have to understand that it's a direct connection to your fans. People that follow you on Twitter genuinely are your fans that want to hear what you have to say. So you're giving a text message to 350,000 people that's like a personal message, that's humanizing you. You know what I'm saying? And it's not as much the idea that you're selling something or saying exactly what you're doing. You just said something funny and ridiculous and it tells a lot about you.

What do you think is the biggest difference between what people see on the show versus what actually goes on here? It's "reality," but you've told me it's reality built into almost pre-written scenes.

More than anything, when anybody takes a meeting with me, people don't quite understand how methodic or how very real my business mind is, and how this is much deeper than, like, I'm pulling all the strings. For the most part, people would think that, "Oh, they're just filming his life and people are just controlling everything for him," where it is the exactopposite. I just don't think they could quite wrap their head around the truth behind the business. But again, I'm not selling that -- that ain't no fun. [Laughs] It's such an incredible blessing, because I get to continue to create this immensely psychotic highlight reel.

With all your ventures, what takes up most of your time?

Street league takes up everything. Wild Grinders is pretty big because I've got to do a lot of micromanaging on the scripts and the content and all that stuff. It amazes me the micromanaging I have to do with these major companies, because I still feel like, regardless, no one has a clear vision and decisive understanding that can make razor-sharp decision-making on big things but me. So it involves me being very hands-on. But, man, I tell you, it's 7 a.m. to midnight on everything. Like I always tell people, even when I'm just sitting down chilling, I'm putting all this thought into solving the problems at hand.

Who do you look up to in business?

I'm going to shoot big. Richard Branson.

We flew Virgin here.

He was a great influence on me -- very young, reading an article with him about the simplicity of when you do everything yourself, you're a millionaire. When you inspire an army around you to do everything for you, you're a billionaire. You know? And I think that was a big turning point for me personally in the sense of like, man, you create and manage and creatively build a vision, and then you hunt down the strongest, brightest, most driven people to help push each one individually. And that is what I've done in like the realest way.

At this point in your career, what's a bigger rush -- landing a trick or signing a deal?

[Laughs] They're very different. It's like, at this age, I still mentally become unraveled if I'm not skating good. And doing a trick that I've never done, there's still nothing that can ever replace it. But, you know, it's not so much getting deals done, as watching things come alive.

The Problem with Web Analytics

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Is a unique visitor really unique? If other people browsing online are anything like UNI0N Square Ventures' Fred Wilson--who accesses the web from seven different browsers and multiple devices every day--chances are your web analytics software is counting people as a unique visitor more than once.

"15 years after the advent of the commercial web, we still aren't measuring it well enough," says Wilson. In fact, a start-up called Scout Analytics found that even a "reliable cookie," which is dropped each time a perceived new user visits a site, overstates user count by two to four times. On the flip-side, panel-based approaches like the ones used by Nielsen are outdated and even looking at server logs can be misleading, Wilson says. Instead, he recommends triangulating between various (flawed) approaches to get as close to the real data as possible.

Stepping up your LinkedIn Group game. Though LinkedIn is one of the most popular social networking sites (it harbors over 55 million professional profiles), many of its users still don't take advantage of one of the site's key features: the LinkedIn Group, which is an effective way to share your industry expertise and market your company to potential employees, customers, and even investors. WebWorkerDailyhas a recent post that offers some tips on how to make your group stand out from the rest -- and how not to scare off your group members. When starting your group, one piece of advice is to take a gander at the site's Group Directory and look for a gap in what topics or subtopics the other groups don't cover. And while it's essential to promote your group via other avenues, the post says, such as putting a link in your email signature and hyping it in your Facebook and Twitterupdates, don't get too e-mail-happy and start bugging your subscribers. "I've left some groups and changed my settings for others because they sent too many messages that overwhelmed me more than helped me," the writer adds. To learn more ways to use social networking sites such as LinkedIn to grow your business, check out this article, part of Inc.'s Social Media Toolkit for Business Owners.

Augmented reality and fashion? Yes, please. Five-year-old watch company Nooka has made its mark up to now with a futuristic take on timepieces. Now, as TechCrunch sister publication CrunchGear explains, a contestant in an advertising contest has an idea to push the New York-based watch company into the augmented reality space. As this video shows, the idea centers around Nooka taking out magazine ads that include peel-off coded bracelets, which, when placed on a reader's wrist and displayed in front of a webcam, allow the person to virtually try on different watches. "It's honestly an amazing idea," writes John Biggs, "and someone better patent it before Trojan and Victoria's Secret get their hands on it."

Tweaks, not breakthroughs, at the Mobile World Congress. Although the New York Times concluded that the annual mobile technology conference that will wrap up today in Barcelona "lacked a true breakthrough device," there were a handful of new tweaks to be excited about. Mashable praises a new Google application that translates text in photos. In other words, you can take a photo of a street sign in Germany with your phone and "Google Goggles" will translate it for you. TechCrunch focuses on Opera for mobile phones with a video demonstration. Other noteable innovations included a smartphone by Fujitsu that has a keyboard that breaks off from the display; Powermat, a mat that can charge devices such as phones and netbooks without cords; and a solar-powered phone being sold by DoCoMo.

Google goes shopping again. Just one week after it boughtan upstart rival for $50 million, Google is acquiring another start-up. This time the lucky company is reMail, which got its start in the Y Combinator program and which makes it easier to search for e-mails on Apple's iPhone. Founder Gabor Cselle blogsthe news and notes that Google has decided to discontinue his company's iPhone app, a rather curious decision, which TechCrunch chalks up to competitive wrangling between Appleand Google over their dueling app platforms. "Yep, it looks like this may be another battle in the Apple-Google mobile war," the tech blog grouses.

How Google Alerts can help your small business. As a small business owner, you may already be familiar with Google Alerts, and if not, now may be a great time to check it out. Google's Alerts tool lets you set up as many notifications as you'd like, for as many topics as you'd like. Small Biz Trendshas even highlighted six ways to get more from Google Alerts - advice which includes tracking keywords, such as the name of your company or products, to see who's talking about you on the Web. Or tracking your competitors, to stay fresh in your industry.

Mobile Search: Location, Location, Location

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The number and variety of searches on mobile phones jumped sharply during the second half of 2007, causing eMarketer to raise its global mobile search revenue forecast up from $83 million in 2007 to $3.8 billion by 2012.

The Mobile Search report analyzes the trends that are driving advertising revenues in this almost too-hot-to-handle category.

For marketers, now is the time to jump into mobile search—at least, with an experimental budget—and start learning fast.

However, remember, though mobile search is similar to Web search, it is not the same and different lessons apply.

For one, in the short term, consumers are likely to use several different mobile search modes or providers, instead of converging around a single solution.

Equally important for the success of mobile search is the integration of national and local search results—and that hasn’t happened yet.

Facebook Tops Google in Directing Web Traffic

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Do you still need a reason to come up with a social media strategy? New data shows an important shift in web traffic patterns.

Remember last year's big news about the power of social connection: that friends could make you fatter, happier, and even sexier? Whether you're a believer or not, new data now says friends will make you visit websites that may make you any of the above.

According to analysis firm Compete, Facebook is now the top source of traffic to entertainment and news portals, besting even the ubiquitous Google. It may sound like just another data point in the ocean, but it hints that the good old days of search may be gone – replaced by the power of a person's social network to determine what sites are worth a visit.

"People are spending less time navigating the Internet on their own and are now navigating the Internet based on their friends' recommendations or their friends' activities," Dave Yovanno, chief executive of social media service company Gigya, told the San Francisco Chronicle. "That's one of the big trends we started picking up on probably four or five months ago."

Thirteen percent of Web traffic to major web portals such as Yahoo, MSN and AOL came from Facebook. Ebay was in second place, with 7.61 percent. And Google, which has made its fortune as a Web door porter-cum-concierge, placed third with 7 percent. (MySpace took fourth place, with just under two percent.)

Of course, the race to be the web's top source of referral traffic has been and is both closely watched and hotly contested, because every measurement firm (Compete is just one of many) has its own data and methodology. But the big picture appears to be consistent across all reports: Facebook is growing (currently it claims 400 million active members), as is its influence on Web traffic patterns.

"Friendcasting" is how experts are referring to the phenomenon of social networks determining the news stories we read and the videos we watch. It's changing online marketing. If your business depends on attracting more web traffic, consider this a sign that you should worry a little less about search engine optimization and a little more about developing your social-media strategy.

Jessica Ong, Compete's director of online media and search, told the San Francisco Chronicle: "The message for the advertising industry is that more serious attention needs to be paid to social-networking sites like Facebook, and advertisers need to figure out how to leverage this traffic."

David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client strategy for New York digital marketing firm 360i, pointed to two signals last week from Google itself about social media's power. There was, of course, the launch of Google Buzz, which gives Gmail users the Facebook-like powers of posting updates, links, and photos. And there was the company's purchase of Aardvark, a company founded by former Googlers, which taps users' contacts to find someone to answer their questions.

The mobile web will grow into a fresh source for searches, Berkowitz adds – "but social media's just finding its feet and the business models are just starting to emerge. And they're evolving quickly."

How to Write a Marketing Plan

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Experts know that careful planning is integral to marketing success. Here's your guide to crafting a thorough marketing plan - and learning more about your customers along the way.

There’s no question that most entrepreneurs thrive on action. But as the Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Ciceroso aptly put it: "Before beginning, plan carefully." Careful planning is precisely the goal you should have in mind when crafting a marketing plan for your company’s products or services.

"A marketing plan is good for focusing your energy towards the right actions that will deliver on what you want to accomplish," says Deb Roberts, CEO of Synapse Marketing Solutions based in Denver. "The whole idea of doing one is to try and understand your customers and take action towards delivering your product or service to them."

And there’s no need to over-think it, Roberts says. For small businesses, it's best to think of a marketing plan as a way to tell a concise story that covers all the key points of your strategy going forward. So keep it brief: The best plans can be told in 15 pages or fewer.

Before you begin, it could be helpful to establish three items:

A completion date: A deadline you set in advance for when you want to complete your first draft of the plan. It’s important to remember that establishing an effective plan will be an iterative process. You can count on your plan changing.

The responsible parties: Establish your team's roles and responsibility. In other words, make sure you identify who is doing what and when they need it completed.

Your budget: When it comes to putting together a marketing strategy, it’s critical to establish ahead of time how much do you have to spend, as that can have a major impact on the strategies you decide to implement.

Once you have these items in hand, you’re ready to put your plan together.

Dig Deeper: Inc.com's Marketing Plan Guides

Writing a Marketing Plan: Setting Your Objectives

The first step in developing your marketing plan is to establish the marketing objectives that will accomplish your business goals, says Karen Albritton, president of Capstrat, a marketing agency in Raleigh, North Carolina. "If your business goal is to grow revenue, what marketing objective will accomplish this? Adding more customers? More repeat customers? Higher expenditures?"

One of the steps you can take to create your objectives is to first create a vision statement, which is basically the long-term mission for your business that is both timeless and immediately inspiring for organization stakeholders. Every business has is it's own brand, so in setting your vision, you should identify the attributes of your product or service that define the brand and its long-term positioning.

Another step that can help set objectives is to perform a S.W.O.T.analysis, where you identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing your business. By conducting such an analysis, you should identify the key insights and strategic plans that will drive your business over the next one-to-five years. This includes understanding, your five Cs—the consumer, channel, company, competition, and climate—deeply enough that when you finish, you should understand your point of difference in the market and where your opportunities lie," Roberts says. This should inform how you set your objectives.

Once you have your vision and a better sense of the opportunities and threats facing your business, you can begin establishing S.M.A.R.T. objectives – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound - that will help you drive to your tangible goal, such as profitable growth or market share.

The key is to be realistic and specific, but also set a limited number of marketing goals related to what you think is your target market.

Dig Deeper: Creating a Vision Statement

Writing a Marketing Plan: Do your Research

Many businesses fail to use research to shape their plans by conducting market research and market analysis, says Albritton. "It’s either overlooked or perhaps small businesses feel it is a cost they can't afford," she says. Marketing plans that do not consider such research, however, will almost certainly waste money. The goal is simply to better understand who and where you customers are – something known as market segmentation.

One of your primary goals in conducting research is to set focus areas, which are the disciplinein your plan, says Albritton. "It’s easy to fragment your efforts without discipline," she says. "So set a clear definition for the type of customers you want." At this point you should tackle your priority geography and begin focusing on the product and service offering you do best.

Conducting research these days, though, does not have to be expensive. Anyone can access a wealth of information online from sources such as trade associations, media organizations, chambers of commerce, and other business groups. In addition, customer focus groups or roundtables can be a valuable - and relatively inexpensive - form of research.

Dig Deeper: How to Profit from Market Research

Writing a Marketing Plan: Define the Strategies you Need

Strategies are the how in your plan, Albritton says. This is the point where you begin to address questions such as:

• How will you position your business against other business?

• What target markets are your best prospects to achieve your goals?

• How will you price your offerings to achieve your goals?

Strategies should be also broad enough to capture several specific tactics, says Roberts, such as "Build Brand Awareness" or "Deliver Unmatched Customer Service."

"Ultimately, all work done on the business should fall into these strategies,” Roberts says. "If the work doesn't satisfy the strategies, then it shouldn't be done."

Dig Deeper: More Marketing Strategies from Inc.com

Writing a Marketing Plan: Outline your Tactics

Tactics are the whatin your plan, says Albritton. Start by thinking about what you should do first to achieve the best results. That may be as simple as putting together a very good presentation. Start small and build tactics one-by-one. For each tactic you develop, note how it fits your areas of focus, your strategies, and your objectives.

An example of a tactic could be, according to Roberts, to reduce days from order to delivery as a way to accomplish a strategy of "delivering unmatched customer service."

You should also develop a forecast, for each tactic: Identify the expected volume of sales to flow from each marketing effort, the cost of goods sold attached to that sales volume, the budget, and any other financial figure that you expect to achieve as a result of accomplishing your plan.

Dig Deeper: Developing a Forecast

Writing a Marketing Plan: Build in Measurement for Each Tactic

In solid plans, tactics are thorough, all the way down to details concerning execution and measurements of success, such as launch dates and expected reach, Roberts says. The point is that you need to begin measuring whether the tactics are successful at delivering your objectives. You may even choose to stagger your tactics so that you can evaluate their effectiveness and learn which ones work best for your business.

Units of measurement can range from web traffic to retail foot traffic to increases in sales volume, Albritton says. Basically, you should strive to measure anything you can track to judge whether a tactic has made a difference.

Dig Deeper: Valuing your Prospects

Writing a Marketing Plan: Develop the Plan and Stick to It

Your plan is only as good as its implementation, so also create a plan for precisely how you are going to execute on it, Albritton advises. Where appropriate, look to partner with other organizations to help with implementation. You may be able to find interns from nearby universities, for example. "These days, even high school students have amazing talents in technology and design," she says.

If your plan includes advertising or events, sometimes the vendors will help with implementation. Depending on your area of business, you may also consider bartering services with other businesses. If you don’t currently have the resources available to take action, find someone who does.

Dig Deeper: Setting Realistic Projections

Writing a Marketing Plan: Implement the Plan – and Stay Flexible

Never forget that the opportunities and risks you established in your S.W.O.T. analysis might dictate that the objectives you’ve established in your plan might not happen "as planned," Roberts says. A whole host of variables could come into play that you never considered in the beginning, such as changes in consumer demand, channel expansion, customer contracts, competitive responses, and supply costs.

That’s why the best advice is to rough out a plan and then put it down in detail with action items on a monthly calendar, Albritton says. Set a time to review the calendar each month, assess results and determine next steps.

Dig Deeper: Discipline vs. Flexibility and Creativity

8 Work-From-Home Rules

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan, who has been working from home for the past four years, shares her advice with entrepreneurs (as well as her newly-virtual colleagues) on how to do it right.

Inc. Magazine lives in New York City. I live in the Bostonsuburbs. So for three years I’ve been working out of my home office with nothing to look at but the Ozark-esque compound across the road and nothing to listen to but squirrels striking the back porch when they miss the bird feeders. It gets lonely at times. My house lacks both a water cooler and peers to engage in conversation around one. I miss the random hallway conversations that unexpectedly ignite ideas or forge alliances. When I know my colleagues are staying late to close an issue, I work late too, out of solidarity. The managing editor offers to order in dinner and sends out a link to the menu. I mentally place my order.

On the whole though, working at home has been a satisfying experience. I’ve managed to remain productive, and the stress reduction from not commuting has probably added a year to my life. So, as my New Yorkcolleagues embark on their telecommuting experiment, I offer them—and others new to working from home—eight lessons for thriving away from the mother ship.

1. Language is important. Tell people you “work out of my home office” or that you “work from home.” Never say, “I work at home.” That suggests you create window treatments freelance in your spare time. “Home office” sounds more professional when you’re giving someone your phone number for work. Also, if friends and relatives believe you are less than seriously employed they will start adding you to their lists of People Who Can Easily Host a Last-Minute Book-Club Meeting or Pick Up My Child After School.

2. Some people like to dress for work, even though they never set foot outside their houses. Others like to lounge around in sweats or pajamas. It’s a matter of personal choice. But if you prefer the latter, change clothes at least once at night and once in the morning. Casual is fine. Crusty isn’t.

3. Talk to someone from the office at least once a day. Long silences are nervous-making. After three days I start to feel like a kid at camp: worried that in my absence the rest of the family has moved away without telling me. Managers are best because they know when there’s reason to panic. Their calm becomes your calm. (I find Dan Ferrara, Inc.’s deputy editor, the most soothing person to talk to. A conversation with him is like half an hour sitting in the Lotus Position.)

4. Gossiping, Web surfing, popping out to do a little shopping at lunch—those are healthy ways to decompress when you’ve spent an hour commuting and another three hours sitting in an uncomfortable chair drinking pallid coffee from the kitchenette and trying not to overhear the conversation in the next cubicle. At home, where all is relative peace and luxury, such activities seem to me Caligula-scale decadent. Still no one can work eight hours without pause. So establish some useful, non-fun things to do during work breaks that don’t induce guilt. Do your laundry or clean your gutters or catch up on your work reading. Stock your bathroom with the collected oeuvre of Peter Drucker. If you have exercise equipment, work out. Unless you enjoy working out, in which case avoid that at all costs.

5. If you have children, explain that when your door is closed they should not disturb you. If they fail to comply, explain that if they continue to interrupt then you will miss your deadlines and lose your job, which will force the family to live on the streets and sell all their toys for food.

6. Larks will love working from 4 AM to 1 PM; owls from 3 PM to midnight. But remember some commitments (interviews, teleconferences etc.) will likely fall outside your preferred work hours. For the first few months I worked at home, I got up before dawn every day and put in a solid five hours before most people had arrived at the office. But often I still had people to talk to in the afternoon, and by that time I was seriously dragging. So while it’s tempting to create a routine customized for how you like to work, instead schedule yourself fresh every day based on how the world requires you to work.

7. At our house we have three phone numbers: one for the family, one for the kids, and one for my work calls. When someone calls the family number the phone rings once. When someone calls one of the kids it rings twice in quick succession. When someone calls for me at Inc., it rings three times in quick succession. That way no one else ever accidentally picks up my work calls (“Hey Mom, it’s for you. Some guy named Steve Jobs. Can I have Julia over?”) Also, I always know whether to answer in professional mode (“This is Leigh Buchanan”) or personal mode (“Yeah, what?”)

8. Stay caffeinated. The Saeco Incanto Sirius is a totally awesome espresso maker, even if it does sound like something out of Harry Potter.

Going Virtual

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Everyone knows the workforce is becoming more virtual. Free online technologies offered by the likes of Skype and Google have made it possible for start-ups to be launched by teams of people who live in different cities or, for that matter, on different continents. As for established businesses, a compelling argument can be made that, between high rents and long commutes, virtual work is more desirable, too. And individual workers have found that telecommuting opens up possibilities for integrating work and life (in ways both good and bad) as never before.

So how does being a virtual workplace affect a company’s culture—and the quality and efficiency of its output? To find out, we’ve decided to conduct a little experiment: Starting right now, Inc. magazinewill cease to exist as a physical place. We, the members of the magazine’s editorial staff, are packing up our things, turning off the lights, and leaving our offices (which happen to be really, really nice). The idea: If virtual companies are so good, why not give it a try ourselves?

For the next month, anyway.

To prepare, we’ve talked to experts in the field of organizational behavior and entrepreneurs who believe in virtual work, such as WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and 4-Hour Workweek guru Timothy Ferriss. The reporters and editors have taken surveys on our work habits, downloaded new applications onto our computers and smartphones, and created checklists to help us collaborate even when we won’t see each other face to face as we normally do. Most of us will be working from home offices for the month of February. The rest will be scattered among hotels, co-working spaces, and the occasional laptop-friendly café.

As the experiment progresses, we’ll be blogging about our experiences here on a regular basis. We also plan to post video interviews with experts and consultants who study virtual work. Then in the April issue of the magazine, we’ll publish a definitive piece on virtual work—a look at pros and cons of running a highly-dispersed team (namely, ours), plus, tips on how to work virtually that any start-up or small business can use.

As much as this is an experiment in remote work, it’s also an experiment in open-source journalism. Working remotely is never easy, and we may face particular challenges coming from an industry where it is still common for an editor, a designer, a photo editor, and a writer to gather around a table to look at a page proof.

Therefore, we need your help. Use the Disqus comments section below to post your thoughts, send us a tweet, or send me an e-mail. I'll be posting a series of the most interesting comments and the best tips in this blog, and compiling it all in the magazine story in April. If you work from home, or manage employees who do, we want to know your favorite tips, tools, and techniques for making it all work. Bonus points if you have specific ideas about how to work with colleagues in different zip codes (or different countries). Should we use IM or Skype or both? Do we need set check-in times to make sure everyone is on the same page? Let us know.

And help us to understand the bigger picture as well. What were your your reasons for building a company virtually? What are the pros and cons of working from home? When is a traditional office necessary?

Send us your thoughts. And stay tuned to Inc.com as this story develops.

You've Been Yelped

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Yelp, the rambunctious and burgeoning customer-review website, can make or break a small business. It can also drive a business owner slightly insane.

On October 30, 2009, Diane Goodman logged on to Yelp.com. Like many business owners in cities across the country, Goodman had lately developed a small obsession with the website, which allows customers to publish critiques of local businesses. She had been visiting her company's Yelppage every day to see what her customers had written about her bookstore. Goodman found reading Yelp reviews to be emotionally wrenching -- but she also couldn't look away.

Scanning the page, Goodman discovered that an amateur critic -- a Yelper -- had written a new review of Ocean Avenue Books, the small store in San Franciscowhere she is the owner and sole employee. Over the previous few years, Goodman's store had received a handful of reviews on Yelp. Most of them were positive, but they often contained just a touch of cruelty. For instance, there was the customer who gave her five stars out of five but went on to describe her store as "poorly lit, mothball infested, disorganized, and a bit chaotic." Another described Goodman as "a sweet lady" but also recommended that she give the store "a good cleaning."

"I know it's a mess," Goodman says, showing me inside the shop, a 650-square-foot box with tall shelves and haphazard stacks of paperbacks blocking the aisles. "But it's just me working here." Goodman is 49 years old and has an easy smile. She opened the store, at a different location, in 1992. "I have the kind of business where I get really close to my customers," she says. "I'll spend hours talking to people who are lonely. That's the job."

But a few years ago, the job started to change. Whereas before dissatisfied customers might have complained directly to Goodman or simply gone away, now they were seeking relief on the Web. "In the past, if someone was difficult, you could just tell them to leave," she says. "But you can't do that anymore. You talk to someone, and a couple of minutes later, it's on Yelp."

Goodman began reading the latest review. "This place is a TOTAL MESS," wrote somebody who went by the handle Sean C. "I think this place needs to close down for a few days and do a thorough cleaning and organization and get rid of all the crap!"

Goodman was angry -- yet another review about the mess -- and she decided to let Sean C. have a piece of her mind. She clicked a link on Yelp's website, opening a tool that allows business owners to send messages to reviewers. "Why don't you come in here and say it to my face?" she wrote. "Are you too much of a coward?" She told him that she knew who he was -- so few people came into the store that it was obvious -- and that the store was a mess because sales were slow. Over the next few hours, she sent several more angry messages. She warned of a "world of pain." "Goodbye pussy boy I will be contacting your employers," she said. And: "Your mom was a bitch and she didn't teach you how to behave. That's why your life is such a mess right now."

Sean C. went back to the Yelp page for Ocean Avenue Books, amended his review of the store, and attached the e-mails. He also attached the e-mails to a post on Yelp's message boards under the subject "Getting threatening and crazy e-mails from business owner." Dozens of the amateur critics who write reviews on the site jumped to his defense. Someone named Morgan M. wrote, "That owner is fucking crazy," and Patricia H. wrote, "Wow, what a nut job!" A few attempted to defuse the dispute. "Leave the small [companies] alone," wrote Verona N. "They are already struggling to keep their heads above the sea of large businesses."

For two days, Goodman was transfixed by the discussion -- and she started to get paranoid. "I couldn't tell if the people coming into the store were real customers or just people who were going to say something about me on Yelp," she says. A customer would ask an innocuous question -- for instance, "How long have you been open?" -- and Goodman would panic, fearing that her response might become fodder for yet another Yelp comment. "I was saying to myself, 'Come on; that's crazy,' " she says. " 'Don't think this way.' "

At the end of the second day, she decided to end the crisis by apologizing. She figured out Sean's last name -- Clare -- with a Googlesearch and found his address in the white pages. His house was just two blocks from her store. She walked up the stairs to his front porch and, at 6 o'clock on a Sunday evening, knocked on his door.

Accounts differ as to what happened next, but a struggle ensued. Goodman says she started to explain that she had come to apologize for her e-mails and was attacked; Clare says Goodman began yelling, forced her way into his house, and refused to leave. In any case, the two became entangled, grappling until Goodman fell down the steps. When she hit the ground, Clare ran back inside and slammed the door. The police arrived a few minutes later.

They told her she would be booked for battery and remanded to San Francisco General Hospitalfor a mental health evaluation. She sat and listened, bewildered. Since when, she wondered, was it illegal to knock on a neighbor's door? And why, after all the nasty things that had been said about her in public, was she the one being punished? Wasn't she the victim here?

More than anything, she blamed Yelp. Out of nowhere, the little company had somehow managed to get between her and her customers. It had hurt her business and caused her to humiliate herself, first online and now, improbably, in the real world. "I've never met any store owner who likes Yelp," Goodman says. "We're all gritting our teeth. It's evil."

Everyone's a critic. The cliché has long been a useful way to brush off a caustic remark or a biting comment. But now it's true -- and it's driving entrepreneurs crazy.

Maybe you've seen the red decals posted outside your local takeout joint or your nearest watering hole. They say,"People love us on Yelp." Or, if you happen to own a service business, maybe you have received a red business card from a customer with the words, "You've been Yelped!" printed in large block letters. The calling card directs business owners to the site where they -- and the entire world -- can read what the customer really thinks of them.

A bad Yelp review can damage more than an entrepreneur's ego. Yelp is by some measures the most popular reviews website in the world, with more than 26 million monthly readers and a library of user-generated content that is probably matched only by Wikipedia. There are some eight million Yelp reviews, covering service businesses in most major American metropolitan areas, along with Ireland, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Yelp was founded in San Francisco in 2004 by Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons, two men in their 20s who wanted to make it easier for consumers to find good businesses and avoid bad ones. What they created was an online yellow pages with attitude. Yelp lets anyone critique any business and grade it, with ratings from one star to five stars. Yelp then uses a closely guarded algorithm -- the company won't discuss even the basics of how it works -- to determine which reviews are displayed prominently, which are buried, and which are removed from the site.Most Yelp reviews are overwhelmingly positive, but some are painfully negative, often in a personal way. Reviewers will insinuate that there are rats in the kitchen, that the owner looks like a meth head, that the merchandise is stolen. They will suggest that the barber's razors aren't sterilized, that the restaurant manager is racist, or that the business, whatever it sells, is just plain bad -- to be avoided, one star, DO NOT GO HERE!!!

Yelp allows companies to respond to reviews, either by posting a public comment on their Yelp page or by sending a private message to the reviewer. A company can edit basic information on its Yelp listing -- such as a phone number, Web address, and operating hours -- but it can't remove itself from Yelp. The upshot is that in the 33 cities in which Yelp has established a firm foothold, most companies must contend with the fact that they neither control nor wholly understand the mechanism by which millions of customers decide where to spend their money.

Yelp makes money by selling ad space to small businesses.Salespeople typically call a company that has received several reviews and encourage the owner to "claim" his or her Yelp page. This allows the business to respond to reviews and receive traffic reports from Yelp. Once a business has done this, the next step is an offer of a $300-per-month paid sponsorship, which buys the company advertisements elsewhere on the Yelp site. "We explain to them how getting more exposure on Yelp benefits their business," says Jordan Grossman, a salesman in the company's San Francisco office who let me listen in on his sales calls. "Usually the reaction is positive."

But not always. The Web is littered with the testimony of business owners who claim to have been shaken down, slandered, or otherwise damaged by Yelp and its users. Go into any service business, find the owner, and ask her what she thinks about Yelp, and you are liable to get, at best, a mixed response. A restaurateur in Phoenix told me that reading Yelp reviews is like "panning for gold in shit." "Anybody can ruin your business," said another restaurant owner in Lafayette, California. He urged me to "come out and expose these guys."

The speed at which Yelp -- only five years old, unprofitable, and cute in all the ways that Silicon Valley start-ups tend to be -- has managed to attract animus would be enough on its own to make it worthy of examination. But Yelp is also noteworthy as a case study in start-up success. It has managed to pull ahead of entrenched, well-funded competitors while building an enormous community of dedicated writers and readers. According to the Internet research firm comScore, the site's traffic increased 45 percent over the past year, even as Citysearch, a 14-year-old site owned by the Internet conglomerate IAC, saw its traffic drop slightly.

Yelp doesn't disclose its revenue, but the figure is thought to be about $30 million. The company, which has raised $31 million from venture capitalists since 2004, expects to be profitable by the end of the year and has more than $15 million in the bank. Yelp employs roughly 300 people, and Stoppelman, the company's CEO, expects the figure to increase to 500 by the end of this year. Max Levchin -- Yelp's first investor and the co-founder of PayPal -- says he expects Yelp to be "one of the highest-return investments I've ever made." Indeed, as Inc. went to press, rumors surfaced that Google was in talks to buy Yelp for $500 million.

Stoppelman and Simmons met while working as engineers at PayPal, the online payments firm that was founded in 1998, taken public in 2002, and then sold to eBay for $1.5 billion. PayPal was a contentious, intensely competitive place, and it launched the careers of entrepreneurs who helped create many of the successful companies that Silicon Valley would hatch over the next decade. The so-called PayPal Mafia -- led by co-founders Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Max Levchin -- founded or provided angel investment to Facebook, Tesla Motors, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, Kiva, Slide, and LinkedIn.

Yelp's beginnings were, as a result, anything but humble. The company was, literally, conceived over lunch and funded -- to the tune of $1 million -- by dinnertime. At the time, Stoppelman and Simmons, who were 26 and 25, respectively, were working in a 10-person incubator created by Levchin. He instructed them to look at a handful of investment ideas, one of which was "the yellow pages for the 21st century."

As Stoppelman and Simmons ate lunch one afternoon in the fall of 2004, they talked about building a service that would allow you toe-mail a question to your friends -- for instance, "Who knows a good doctor in San Francisco?" -- and then publish the results online. (The idea of allowing people to publish reviews without being prompted, which is today Yelp's core offering, was an afterthought.) It was Levchin's 29th birthday, and about an hour after the lunch ended, Simmons and Stoppelman approached their boss and pitched the concept. They had no PowerPoint presentation and no specific revenue plan; just a sense, Stoppelman says, that they could make something that would appeal to lots of people.

Levchin hesitated. "I wasn't sure if it would work," he says. "But the guys were really enthusiastic about it. And in my experience, when you have smart people who work well together, it's foolish not to invest." Maybe because it was his birthday -- or maybe because he had made tens of millions of dollars on PayPal -- Levchin agreed, investing $1 million in the half-baked idea.

During its first few months, Yelp was a failure. It attracted few readers or writers beyond the founders' friends and family, and it did not impress the venture capital investors whom Stoppelman pitched at the end of 2004. After a few weeks of unsuccessful meetings, Stoppelman and Simmons went back to the office and set about trying to improve their product. "We got the doors slammed in our face over and over again," Stoppelman says. "But that was lucky." Had Yelp succeeded in raising money, it probably would have attempted a national rollout. But without any additional funding, he and Simmons had to stay local. "We said, 'You know what? If we just create a cool city guide in San Francisco and it's worth $10 or $20 million, that would be a win. We don't care.' "

The idea of talking about a $20 million exit as a mere "win" betrays a hardheadedness that is one of Stoppelman's strengths but that can also make him seem strangely cold. Stoppelman's analytical tendencies make his reviews almost comically dispassionate. Writing on his blog about a book he read recently, The Lives of Ants, he calls it, "an okay survey of the ant species." A review of the clothing retailer French Connection sums it up as "clothing of medium-level quality."

Without the cash for a national rollout, Stoppelman decided to focus on making Yelp famous locally. With the help of a buzz-marketing guru he hired on a whim, Stoppelman decided to select a few dozen people -- the most active reviewers on the site -- and throw them an open-bar party. As a joke, he called the group the Yelp Elite Squad.

Levchin thought the idea was crazy -- "I was like, 'Holy crap: We're nowhere near profitability; this is ridiculous,' " he says -- but 100 people showed up, and traffic to the site began to crawl up. Because the parties were reserved for prolific reviewers, they gave casual users a reason to use the site more and nonusers a reason to join Yelp.By June 2005, Yelp had 12,000 reviewers, most of them in the Bay Area. In November, Stoppelman went back to the VCs and bagged $5 million from Bessemer Venture Partners. He used the money to throw more parties and to hire party planners -- Yelp calls them community managers -- in New York, Chicago, and Boston. The company now employs 40 of these people.

As Yelp's influence grew, bars and restaurants were increasingly willing to host the parties -- which involves giving away drinks, food, and space -- in the hope that the crowds would come back and write positive reviews. By the summer of 2006, Yelp had amassed 100,000 reviews and was attracting more than a million users a month. That June, the San Francisco Chroniclecalled it "San Francisco's online 'it' guide for what's hot and not." Around the same time, potential acquirers came calling. Neither Stoppelman nor Levchin will discuss specifics, but they acknowledge that a large technology company offered to buy the then-30-person company in 2006. Yelp turned down the offer. "It was a tough call, and it was contentious at the board level," says Stoppelman. "Because if we said no, we'd have to build a real company."

Building a real company meant creating a sizable sales force. With an additional $10 million raised from Benchmark Capital at the end of 2006, Stoppelman set up call centers full of salespeople in New York and San Francisco. Today, 150 young people spend their days cold calling businesses that have been reviewed. For prices that range from $300 to $500 a month, advertisers get to pick a "favorite review" that appears at the top of their Yelp page, which can help a company with some bad reviews create the impression that it is beloved by its customers. Yelp advertisers can also elect to have their ads appear when someone searches for local businesses in their industry or on the Yelp pages of their competitors.

The pitch has proved reasonably popular -- Grossman told me that a typical Yelp salesperson generates at least $8,000 in monthly billings-- but it has also attracted controversy. Some business owners have reported seeing their Yelp ratings fall after they declined to buy advertising. The rumblings came to the surface in a 2009 article that appeared in the East Bay Express, a weekly newspaper in Oakland, California. The article, "Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0," suggested that Yelp salespeople, like Mafia foot soldiers, were threatening businesses with bad reviews if they did not buy a sponsorship package. Stoppelman denies the charges.

But the suspicion and anger are symptomatic of a larger problem, namely that Yelp's algorithm is a mystery to nearly everyone outside the company. Stoppelman says this is necessary to prevent business owners from hiring shill reviewers, but nearly every business owner I spoke with in reporting this story complained of being caught in the crossfire. "We've had some positive reviews suddenly disappear," says Laurie Lavy, the owner of an upscale home furnishings store in Phoenix. "They say it's the algorithm. But the whole thing is weird."

I met Lavy, and two dozen other business owners who had been touched in one way or another by Yelp, after traveling to Phoenix, which is something of a frontier for Yelp. Yelp plans to open a sales office in Phoenix later this year, but right now, the lone face of the company's Arizona operation is a community manager named Gabi Messinger, a compact, bubbly woman of 35.

As far as I could tell, being a Yelp community manager consists mostly of sending little messages of encouragement to users. Messinger has sent thousands of the messages, with bromides such as "cute pic" or "great review." "When I send a compliment, it encourages other people to do the same, and that creates the culture." Being a model Yelper for Messinger also means setting an example of openness. She has written reviews of two sex shops and two gynecologists ("There are not too many people I trust to go 'down there,' but Dr. Bartels and Dr. Webb are on that list!"). It also means engineering a seemingly endless series ofparties and outings.

One afternoon in November, I joined Messinger as she called on a number of businesses that had participated in a Yelp promotion earlier in the year, giving discounts on such things as haircuts and massages to Yelpers. Our first stop was the Root, a salon in downtown Phoenix. The owner, Lauren Hart, a 48-year-old with short black hair, took a break from wrapping a customer's blond locks in foil to tell me about how she came to love the Web. "Two and a half years ago, I didn't know how to turn on my computer," says Hart. "I thought the Internet was something for my kids."

Things started to change when a new customer mentioned to Hart that she had found the salon on Yelp. "When you're in a trend-driven business, if you're not keeping up with the trends, you're just going to get old with your clientele and die," says Hart. She lifted the ban on Internet usage in the office, took a basic computer class at the Apple Store, and showed up at one of the monthly meetings Messinger holds for business owners.

Today, the Root offers deals on its Yelp page -- anyone who mentions the site might get a free conditioning treatment -- to attract new clients, and Hart tries obsessively to avoid negative reviews. When a new client makes an appointment and mentions Yelp, Hart generally checks to see if the person has a profile on the site. If the Yelper has written bad reviews, Hart will make sure she personally cuts the customer's hair. Hart responds to every review -- which in 29 out of 30 cases has meant saying thank you.

Like every business owner, however, Hart cannot help focusing on the rare exceptions. "I've had one negative review," she says. "The customer called in and wanted the owner, and when she came in, I could tell she wasn't my type." The new client seemed edgier than Hart's typical clientele. Hart cut the woman's hair, and at 2 o'clock the next morning, Hart received an automated e-mail about a new review: two stars. She was devastated.

"The fact is, I can walk out this door and trip over salons," she says. "A bad review would be horrible. In this economy, good enough isn't good enough." But unlike Goodman, the bookstore owner, Hart kept her head. She composed an apologetic reply, and, using her Yelp account, sent a private message to the dissatisfied customer. Hart suggested a competing salon and offered to pay for a second haircut there. The result? The two-star review became a four-star review. (For more on how to respond to a bad review, see "Take a Deep Breath.") Hart told me that if a junior stylist were to get a review below three stars, she would consider firing the stylist. "My girls flinch every time we get one of those e-mails," she says.

And yet Hart loves Yelp. Amid a recession that has been disastrous for most retail businesses, sales at the Root have grown 148 percent compared with last year's. Meanwhile, the Yelp traffic -- Hart says she gets two or three new customers every day -- has allowed her to stop advertising in the local neighborhood newspaper, which had cost her $400 a month. Apart from the services and discounts she offers Yelpers, she hasn't paid Yelp a penny. "There are a lot of business owners who feel like Yelp reviews just happen," she says. "But it's not true. Responding to reviews, giving offers, maintaining your page -- it all makes a huge difference."

If Hart's story shows what's possible when business owners embrace Yelp, it also helps explain why some yearn for a world in which a single mishap might go unnoticed and in which a business's employees don't have to live in terror of customers' comments. Though the Yelp users I met in the course of reporting this story seemed well intentioned enough -- some were amateur writers who enjoyed the creative process of composing a review; others used the site to find like-minded friends -- it's impossible to write a negative Yelp review without experiencing the thrill of righteous indignation. One Yelp Elite member in San Francisco, a man who has written more than 100 Yelp reviews, told me, "I write reviews to screw over businesses I don't like."

This makes sense, when you think about it. American society has, for more than a century, been defined by corporate power, and the Internet has upset that balance, mostly for the good. When someone sends a Twitter message about his baggage being lost by a large, publicly traded airline -- "Delta sucks!" -- it's hard to argue that this is a bad thing. Delta does suck in that instance. And Delta can take it.

But Yelp encourages people to be unsparing in their critiques of companies that can't take it -- companies that are small, independent, and not particularly profitable. The site capitalizes on our impulses to take down the Man, but, in doing so, turns us against mom-and-pop businesses -- already hit by globalization, consolidation, and a recession. At its best, Yelp is meritocratic, helping good businesses like Lauren Hart's to thrive. At its worst, Yelp empowers people who do not need to be empowered at the expense of those who are already struggling. There's a lot of insanity in Diane Goodman's story, but there's also this truth: Review sites can be unbelievably cruel.

On some level, Stoppelman seems to know this. In 2008, the company gave business owners the ability to respond privately to reviews. Last year, Yelp allowed businesses to publicly confront their critics. "The main thing we've done is try to do a better job reaching out to the local business community," says Stoppelman, who regards entrepreneurs' anger as a source of great disappointment. "The most frustrating thing is talking to owners who say, 'Yelp has been great,' and then they think for a minute and remember the one negative review. I understand that people want to be heard, but you're meeting the Yelp founder, and all you want to talk about is a single review that doesn't even matter in the grand scheme of things. I don't understand that."

There's arrogance in this remark, but Stoppelman's suggestion that business owners simply move past their bad reviews has merit. Yelp is not your friend; it's your critic. And if it became your friend -- by, say, censoring angry reviews -- customers would probably abandon it for a site that allowed them to more fully express themselves. Or they could just post an angry blog, tweet, or Facebook message. Questions about whether Yelp is good or bad are academic.

"I don't like Yelp, but I realize I can't do anything about it," Diane Goodman says near the end of our conversation. She tells me that though she doesn't regret going to Clare's house, she does understand why he might have felt threatened. "I'm sorry I wrote those mean things," she says. "If I read those e-mails, I'd probably think I was crazy, too."

Goodman's case may be extreme, but business owners all over the country are struggling with this new order. "I sometimes wish these people who tee off on you would have to divulge where they worked so I could criticize them," says Julian Wright, the owner of La Bocca, a restaurant in Tempe, Arizona. "But the reviews help us get better faster." Brad Keeling, the owner of a chain of dry cleaners, says Yelp reviews are to be heeded."It's the public's opinion, and I don't mind hearing it," says Keeling. When someone criticizes him, he defends himself or simply apologizes.In several cases, he has been able to get customers to remove or at least revise their bad reviews. He estimates that 10 percent of new customers find him on Yelp. "Ignoring Yelp gets you nothing," he says. "You can't hate the future."

Of course, it's easy to see why so many business owners, faced with millions of Yelpers, each capable of ruining or at least damaging a business, choose to look on the bright side. Jane Reddin, who owns a crafts store in Phoenix, complains to me for 10 minutes straight about Yelp, assailing the company's business model, its arrogant salespeople, and the stupidity of the average Yelp reviewer. "They don't know what they're talking about," she says. "It's as if they're complaining that the gazpacho is cold."

So, I ask, you're not the biggest fan of Yelp?

She protests. "That's not what I'm saying at all," she says. "I adore the community aspect of Yelp." She thinks the Yelpers are an asset to the Phoenix business community. She is a happy user of Yelp and has written 38 reviews, most recently giving five stars to Oliver & Annie, a pet store.

Reddin pauses for a second, puts a hand on my shoulder, and smiles.

"Can you imagine if I said something negative in a national magazine about Yelp," she says. "What would happen to my reviews?"

How to Advertise on Facebook

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Four tips for advertising a small business on social networks.

These days, it seems everyone and his mother has a Facebook page. In the U.S., about 100 million unique visitors flock to the social network every month. Many business owners are among them, using Facebook profiles to promote their companies and create customer communities. For some entrepreneurs, social networks have also become a useful advertising platform. Ellie Sawits, CEO of Frutels, a New York City–based maker of chocolate candies used to treat acne, says ads on Facebook are an affordable alternative to the high pay-per-click rates for acne-related keywords on Google's AdWords."For me, the economics of Google just don't work," she says. But it's not easy to make your ad stand out among the Facebook status updates, party photos, and comments. Here are four tips to help you get started.

1. Choose your target

People who use social networks often divulge a plethora of personal information in their profiles, which can prove useful to advertisers.Facebook lets you pick and choose which groups you would like your ads to reach. Companies can target ads based on a user's profile information, such as age, gender, location, college, relationship status, and interests. You can choose to target people who are fans of your company's Facebook page or friends of your fans. Or avoid your fans altogether, if your goal is to broaden your pool of customers.

You can also advertise only to Facebook users who mention certain words in their profiles or status messages. For example, Howie Goldklang, co-owner of The Establishment, a hair salon and spa in Milwaukee, occasionally targets young women in Milwaukee whose pages mention the names of pop stars such as Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga. Zeroing in on a specific audience lets you get the most bang for your advertising buck, but be careful about narrowing your focus too much. When Chris Lindland, founder of Cordarounds.com, a clothing site based in San Francisco, attempted to target specific colleges in an ad campaign, he didn't get many clicks. "I thought there was a chance to cordon off influencers in some way," he says. "But I had to realize, everyone wears pants."

2. Test, test -- and test some more

Ad prices on Facebook are determined by auction, as they are on Google AdWords. You can pay based on either the number of times people see the ad or the number of times people actually click on it. The majority of Facebook advertisers choose the latter, says Tim Kendall, Facebook's director of monetization. Still, it's worth testing both payment types to see which is more cost effective, says David Berkowitz, senior director of emerging media and innovation for 360i, a digital marketing agency. He suggests spending about $20 or so for a small ad buy using both methods. "It's incredibly cheap to run tests," says Berkowitz.

Testing various target demographics is also a good idea, says Adam Golomb, the head of e-commerce at Eat'n Park Hospitality Group, a Pittsburgh-based company that runs a chain of 76 restaurants. Golomb launched an ad campaign last spring, hoping to draw more visitors to Eat'n Park's Facebook page, where the company posts surveys, contests, and coupons.In testing, Golomb found that an ad targeting women performed better than one that targeted both sexes. "The click-through rate dropped dramatically when we went out to both," he says. After he began advertising only to women, the company was able to add nearly 1,000 new fans over a two-week period.

3. Do your own tracking

Facebook keeps tabs on how many times your ads are shown and the number of clicks they receive. But it doesn't track what users do after they click -- did they make purchases or just browse and move on? That's the largest drawback of Facebook's ad service, says Lindland of Cordarounds.com. "Return on investment is not immediately trackable," he says. Facebook's Kendall says the company is working to include more information in its reporting tools. Until that happens, it's critical to do your own tracking. "The beauty of microtargeting an ad buy based on location, age, and sex is the data you're going to get out of that,"says Michael Kahn, senior vice president of marketing at the digital marketing firm Performics. "To not take advantage of that would be a terrible waste of an opportunity." Sawits of Frutels uses two analytics programs: Google Analytics, which is free, and HitsLink, which starts at about $10 a month, to track which Facebook ads result in purchases. Sawits, who spent $50,000 on Facebook ads in 2009, says her rate of return is about 2 to 1.

4. Make your ads pop

Companies write their own ads, which may include a short headline, ad copy of 135 characters or fewer, and a small image. Ads must be crafted carefully, because it's tough to get noticed. Typically, three ads from different advertisers run next to one another. And, of course, there are photos and messages from friends that compete for Facebook users' attention. "It is a social network, so if you put up a traditional ad, you're going to be pushed to the side," says Goldklang. Edgy advertisements, he says, seem to work best for his hair salon, which caters to a young clientele. One advertisement that performed well last year proclaimed, "Springtime is here. Time to get waxed." "I find just being irreverent and trying not to write in traditional copyspeak connects us the best with potential clients," Goldklang says.Since he started advertising on Facebook a year and a half ago, the number of new clients who discovered the salon online has risen 20 percent.

Facebook will reject your advertisement if you use an image that is deemed too risqué or language that is deemed offensive or lewd. But it usually pays to push the envelope. Sawits says one of Frutels's Facebook ads that includes a photograph of a woman licking a lollipop gets the most clicks.

For Facebook's list of common advertiser mistakes, go to facebook.com/ads/mistakes.php.

The Way I Work: Paul English of Kayak

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Kayak.com co-founder Paul English is obsessed with customer service. That's why he bought the most annoying phone he could find.

At a time when many Web companies go out of their way to make it difficult to contact them, Paul English is a customer service fanatic. When people contact Kayak, the travel search engine English founded with Steve Hafnerin 2004, English makes sure they receive personal assistance from real employees. Given that Kayak has a staff of 100 and that millions of visitors come to the site each month to compare prices for airline tickets, hotel rooms, and rental cars, that's no small commitment. In his spare time, English, 46, even started a website, gethuman.com, to help consumers circumvent the Kafkaesque automated phone systems of large corporations. English, who has founded three other businesses, including an e-commerce software company that he sold to Intuit in 1999, acts as Kayak's chief technology officer, overseeing 60 engineers and product designers in Concord, Massachusetts. On any given day, you might find him tracking down potential hires, going for a run with his software engineers, or personally answering calls to Kayak's customer hotline.

I always wake up with a lot of energy and more ideas than I can get done in a day. I usually meditate for a few minutes to quiet my mind before I get out of bed. I get up around 6 every morning. After I check e-mail on my BlackBerry, I go exercise. I've been practicing yoga for about 10 years. I built a meditative room in my house.

After that, I eat breakfast and then drive my son to school. He's 14, and my daughter is 17 -- she has her own car. Driving my son to school is really important to me. Sometimes, if I have a business trip, I'll drive him to school, fly to California for the day, and then take the redeye back so I can take him to school the next day.

About two or three days a week, I have morning meetings -- mostly with nonprofits. I'm involved with a lot of different projects, including Partners in Health and Village Health Works in Burundi. It sounds sappy, but there are certain fundamental rights that I believe all people should have. Kids shouldn't be dying of drinking dirty water.

I usually get to the office around 10 a.m. and check my calendar. Often, I'll need to go straight into a meeting. We have offices in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and California. We started with the first two because my co-founder, Steve Hafner, lives in Connecticut, I live in Boston, and neither one of us wanted to move. We got a California office when we acquired one of our competitors in 2007. Steve and I talk every day, either on the phone or by instant message, and we can practically read each other's minds. If an issue comes up, I know how he's going to weigh in and vice versa. We trust each other. If we ever get in a fight over something, whoever feels more strongly about it wins.

Every week, Steve and a few others from the Connecticut office come here for meetings. We spend a lot of money buying keywords on Google and Yahoo, so we analyze how those purchases are going. On a typical day, I might have six or eight meetings. I have an assistant, and my general rule is that half of my day is scheduled and half is unscheduled. I like to walk around the office -- see what's going on and work on product issues and design strategy.

We have an open office environment. I sit out with the product managers. We hold design meetings at one another's desks throughout the day. We do design interaction like that, where everyone can hear and anyone can jump in. If anyone needs to make a private phone call, there are a few private offices, but our general philosophy is that an open environment facilitates intellectual intensity. Most engineers are introverted. Here, when people overhear a discussion, we encourage them to walk over and say, "There's another way to do that."

I get about 400 to 500 e-mails a day, and I probably send about 120. At any given moment, I'll have only 10 items in my inbox. When an e-mail comes in, I read it and decide immediately: Delete, reply, or delegate?

Customers are a big source of my e-mails. Anytime anyone contacts us with a question, whether it's by e-mail or telephone, they get a personal reply. The engineers and I handle customer support. When I tell people that, they look at me like I'm smoking crack. They say, "Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona$8 an hour?" If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they'll actually stop what they're doing and fix the code. Then we don't have those questions anymore.

About a year ago, I bought a red telephone with a really loud ringer for the office. Whenever a customer calls the help number on our website, that phone rings. The engineers initially complained about it. They said, "That's so friggin' annoying!" And I'd say, "There's a really simple solution: Answer the friggin' phone and do whatever it takes to make that customer happy. Then hang up, unplug the phone, walk it down to the other end of the office, and plug it in down there."

It's like hot potato. Except I take it seriously. When the phone rings, I literally jump over the desks just so I can get to the phone before anyone else. I love talking to customers, even angry ones. I learn a lot from them about how to make the site easier to use. When the call's over, I'll say, "If you have any follow-up questions, my name is Paul English; I'm the co-founder of the company." I'll give out my personal cell-phone number. Only one out of 20 people might actually call, but they're blown away when I do that.

We have four monitors in the office where you can see real-time streaming information about the site -- how many visitors, how many click throughs. It also displays the last customer e-mail that came in and the photo of the employee who answered it. So you're walking by and you see, "Oh, Dan just answered a question." We developed our own customer support software. One of the things it does is randomly select an employee response to a customer and send that response out to the entire company and to all of our investors each day. It keeps us on our toes.

I keep noon to 2 p.m. open, because I like going out to lunch. It's also a time for me to socialize. We have a very active work force. Some days, a group of seven or eight of us will go out for a run. Or we'll go out and play basketball, volleyball, or tennis. I like to encourage that. We had showers built in our offices.

I spend a lot of my time on recruiting. You could ask anyone in my office, "What are Paul's priorities?" and they'll say: "It's team, No. 1. Then customer, then profit." I really want to create the ultimate, most exciting dream team that's ever been created in software, and I focus on that every day. I love to ask people, "Who's the smartest person you ever met? The most creative person? The fastest?" Someone might say, "This guy I met in Ohio 10 years ago, but I think he moved overseas." I'll track him down.

I once hired a guy because he had an Olympic medal in rowing. That blew my mind. I thought, This guy is hard core, and I bet that translates. I love diversity of success. But I also like diversity in style, thinking, and language: The engineers here are German, Greek, Russian, Italian, French, Indian. One of my missions is that we will be able to answer every customer call, in any language.

When I am hiring, I try to get people to accept the job before I tell them about salary or title. I promise to make that person dramatically more productive, and that working for Kayak will be the most fun job he's ever had. I need two things in return: a promise to strive to be the absolute best you can be. And that you will be an energy amplifier -- someone people are excited to work with.

A lot of companies have the "no assholes" rule. So if the greatest programmer ever is also a jerk, he's fired. Our rule is "no neutrals." So when the new guy walks down the hall, is my team drawn to him? Or do they divert their glance? If they divert their glance, we fire that person. I call it the hallway test, but it's more of a conceptual thing. The idea is when you put superstars together, you can ask, "What did you do today that excited the people around you and made them better at their jobs?" If you can't give examples, I don't want you here.

I do all of the firing. At times, I've fired maybe one out of every three people I've hired. That might make people think I'm bad at hiring, but I think I'm quite good at hiring. The only way 100 people can ever build a larger company than one that has more than 8,000 people -- that's what Expedia has -- is by hiring Olympic-quality, unbelievable all stars of technology. My favorite metric is revenue per employee.

I travel about once a week, but most of my trips are quick. So I'm in California meeting with the team there or investors. I'll help Steve with business development and look at companies we're trying to acquire. I like to take my kids with me on longer trips. A while ago, my daughter came with me to a global health conference in Zambia. We got a week of close one-on-one time.

We work really hard for 40 to 45 hours a week, but we believe in people having strong personal lives. Over the past six years, there have been maybe five times I've spoken with Steve before 8 a.m., after 5 p.m., or on the weekend.

My drive home is 20 minutes. Rush-hour traffic doesn't bother me. When I get to red lights, I like to play this game with myself -- I look around me for something extraordinary. It might be sunlight hitting a building a certain way. For the last several years, I have been studying Buddhism. It has taught me to be a better manager and how to deal with things that 10 years ago would make me really angry and frustrated. I work on trying to be present -- in the moment. It's something you can actually train yourself to do.

After work, if my kids have a sporting event, I will go to that. During baseball season, I go see the Red Sox. When my son was 6, we started going to games together. He loved it, but for me, it was really an excuse to sit next to him for three hours uninterrupted. Over the years, though, I got hooked. Now that he's 14, he wants to hang with his friends more than his dad. So I invite friends to games. But my son and I still go down to Fort Myers [Florida] every year for spring training.

Every Tuesday night, I have an open dinner at my house. I'm one of seven children, and six of us live nearby. We're very close. Anywhere between four and 15 of my relatives will show up for dinner. I'm not a great cook, but it's fun to have people over.

I read for an hour every night before going to bed. I love reading books by Indian authors. I'll also read books about global health and Africa, as well as a murder mystery now and then. But I don't like business books. There are so many things in life that are more interesting than business.

Take a Deep Breath

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

How to handle online criticism -- on Yelp and elsewhere

1. REGISTER

Even if you detest review sites, it's still worth opening a business owner account on Yelp, Citysearch, and any other website on which your customers are talking about you. Registering generally allows you to correct inaccuracies, receive alerts when you are reviewed, and respond to your critics.

2. BREATHE

Just because you can respond doesn't mean you should. Anything you say -- in a private message, a personal e-mail, or even a voice mail -- could end up on the Web. If there's no way to respond to a review without being angry, profane, or aggressive, don't do it at all.

3. BE GRACIOUS

Apologize for what the customer didn't like, and offer to make it right. When Lauren Hart, owner of the Root hair salon in Phoenix, received a two-star review from a woman who didn't like her haircut, she wrote, "I am so sorry that you are unhappy with my work," and then offered to pay for a cut at a competing salon. The woman wrote an equally gracious response and upgraded the Root to four stars.

4. COMPLAIN

If you can't be nice to the reviewer, try complaining to Yelp directly. The site removes reviews in cases where there is a conflict of interest (for instance, if the review has been written by a competitor). Other grounds for removal include hearsay, hate speech, and attacks that are unrelated to the customer experience.

5. AVOID THE COURTS

The Communications Decency Actprotects websites from being held responsible for the actions of their users. And although defamation lawsuits against Yelpers have, in rare cases, succeeded in getting reviews taken down, suing tends to attract the ire of other Yelp users. If you decide to sue, be ready for more attacks.

7 Secrets to Getting Positive Online Reviews

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

1. Pay attention to the reviews you already have.

Consider asking for reviews.

Or simply make your Web presence known.

Respond quickly to bad reviews.

Reach out to negative reviewers directly.

Remember, it’s a numbers game.

Make reviewing as easy as possible.

It may sound obvious, but you can’t generate good reviews (at least not legally) unless you have happy customers to write them. “No amount of asking for user reviews or soliciting feedback will help compensate for a bad first impression,” notes Jason Arango, internet marketing strategist for Think Basis, an internet marketing firm. Start by making sure to resolve any issues that particularly bother your customers if you possibly can.

2. Consider asking for reviews.

Or simply make your Web presence known.

Respond quickly to bad reviews.

Reach out to negative reviewers directly.

Remember, it’s a numbers game.

Make reviewing as easy as possible.

Not good reviews -- just reviews – and not until the end of the transaction. “You don’t want to be pushy, but after you’ve delivered a service or product, it makes sense to ask that they review it on Yelp, for instance,” Arango says. “Let them know that the company takes their opinions seriously and checks that feedback daily.”

3. Or simply make your Web presence known.

Respond quickly to bad reviews.

Reach out to negative reviewers directly.

Remember, it’s a numbers game.

Make reviewing as easy as possible.

“If your customers are under 30, encouraging them to post a review may turn them off,” Pogorzelski says. Instead, simply engage them in the online world, by creating a Facebook group and Twitter account for your business. He adds that customers in this age bracket are so accustomed to posting online about every experience they have, they’ll almost certainly share their thoughts about your product or service without any prompting.

4. Respond quickly to bad reviews.

Reach out to negative reviewers directly.

Remember, it’s a numbers game.

Make reviewing as easy as possible.

Resist the urge to defend your company, product, or employee, an approach that almost always makes things worse. “The key is not to fire back at the customer, the key is to examine the problem and resolve it,” Pogorzelski says. “Also, if a bad review is warranted, thank the customer for the review and apologize for the bad experience. We find a customer will often go back and update a negative review once the issue has been resolved, so you can turn a negative into a positive if you act quickly.”

5. Reach out to negative reviewers directly.

Remember, it’s a numbers game.

Make reviewing as easy as possible.

Not everyone recommends responding publicly to bad reviews. PacketTrap never responds online to negative reviews, because even doing that much tends to put the company in a defensive position, Goodman says. Instead the company contacts negative reviewers directly if it can find them, and tries to resolve the issue. “If it’s thoughtful, constructive feedback, we may offer an extension of a free trial or a free upgrade,” Goodman says.

6. Remember, it’s a numbers game.

Make reviewing as easy as possible.

The more reviews you get, the more likely you are to get one or more bad reviews. Even if you are providing the best product or service you can, some people will tend to complain. So your goal should be a large number of mostly good reviews. “If we get 10 reviews, seven good ones and three bad ones, that’s a lot better for us than one review,” Goodman notes.

7. Make reviewing as easy as possible.

“Our product has a ‘give feedback’ button that users encounter at the end of the process,” Goodman says. “The user has three choices: one to send us feedback, one to suggest a new feature, and one that sends them to a review site. We did that hoping they would mostly write positive reviews, and that’s how it’s worked out.”

10 Must Have Blog Techniques

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Support your blog with good SEO.

If you are considering using your blog to boost your search engine rankings, make sure your blog supports all of the features that search engines want to see in your content, such as explicit, unique title tags and good meta description tags.

Get stats on your blogs performance.

The same way you want to know how your website is succeeding, you'll also want to know what's working on your blog. How many page views and unique visitors are you getting? Where are visitors coming from? How do they find you in search engines? Which posts and categories are most popular? You can either use the analytics software your blog hosting company provides, or install Google Analytics. WordPress.com has its own stats tool and self-hosted WordPress has a Google Analytics plug-in that makes installation relatively simple.

Schedule automated e-mail updates.

As with most marketing, you have to do it consistently in order to maximize its value. But consistency can be awfully time-consuming. This is why we love technology! Feedburner and Feedblitz are two great tools to use that simplify your blog e-mail marketing. They both will take care of two major tasks for you: 1) enabling visitors to sign up to receive an e-mail when you make a new post to your blog; and 2) automatically send an e-mail each time someone posts to your blog.

Download the TweetMeme retweet counter.

This little tool is a quick and easy way to get your posts re-tweeted to show their popularity. Note that it doesn't work so well if your title tags are not unique.

Help people find archived blogs with categories.

Make it easier to find things on your blog. It's great to have things organized by date but this isn't particularly intuitive to a reader who is looking to find out what you write about or looking for help or answers on a specific topic. Use categories to help readers find what they're looking for and put the categories in your sidebar. Don't be afraid to put a post in more than one category. Remember the categories are for your *reader* so make them as intuitive as possible to the reader.

Set up a RSS Feed.

Feedburner and Feedblitz can also help you set up a feed and do all kinds of neat things with your feed. But most blogging software comes with an internal feed tool. If you've ever wondered what RSS is, it's a feed that collects articles and content from different online magazines and websites, similar to myAOL, iGoogle or myYahoo. It allows you to see the most recent headlines from CNN or Inc. or The Economistwithout having to visit the site. The headlines are clickable. Click on the headline and it takes you to the article. Neat! You may also want to add links to related articles that you like and want people to read also.

Stop spam with (re)Captcha.

Captcha is the tool that asks users to type in a set of letters or numbers before submitting a form. This tool is now available as a plugin for websites and blogs. (re)Captcha is captcha with a conscience. While commenters are typing in the confirmation text, they are also helping to decipher text from very old books being saved by digitizing them. If you allow comments on your blog, you will definitely want some sort of spam defense. Even though it will not eliminate all comment spam it will help A LOT.

Keep an eye on your comments.

Commenting is an important part of the two-way dialogue you want to develop with your readers. Tap into the voyeur in all of us. Make sure that people who make a comment will be notified when others comment on the same post. Also, if you open your blog to comments (which you don't have to do) you must review the comments. You will get spam. Spam looks silly on your blog. You will want to prune your blog of spam on a relatively frequent basis depending on how much traffic you get.

Link to your clones.

Make sure that if people like your style they have ways to connect with you. Enabling them to subscribe to your RSS feed and automated e-mail update is great but how about you on Twitter? You on Facebook? You on LinkedIn? While you may not want to promote all three of these choose at least one and close that loop in the relationship with your reader.

Add language to hook your readers.

Make sure to include at least one call to action statement. Provide some indication of what you want people to do if they like your blog. Just read more? Consider hiring you? Buy a book? Come see you speak? Shop at your store? Make sure they know the next step.

How to Use Multimedia for Business Marketing

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Your guide to using photo sharing, video, podcasts, mobile marketing, and other types of multimedia to broaden your company's reach and introduce new marketing techniques.

Multimedia, such as mobile marketing, livecasting and podcasting, photo, video and file sharing, can spread the word about your company and help build brand awareness in a very unique and powerful way. This particular type of social media also has the ability to go viral quickly. Hottrix, the Las Vegas, Nevada-based iPhoneapp creator, became one example of a breakthrough success story when their iBeer app, which simulates chugging a mug of beer on the iPhone, became one of the most-downloaded apps in 2008, and again in 2009.

However, your company's chances of going viral are left more to fate than skill, but that's no reason to discount the importance of multimedia for your business. The ability of these technologies to facilitate communication between your small business and employees, your customers and potential customers, is tremendous, says Keith Nissen, principle analyst at the Scottsdale, Arizona-based market intelligence firm, In-Stat.

"When you think about [multimedia platforms] and what that's all about, it's about being able to communicate mass marketing messages to the device of choice on demand," says Nissen. "I think what's more interesting is how these tools can be used in conjunction with other multimedia tools to support the business--the marketing, the sales and promotion of their products and services. To me, that, for a small business, is probably more important than internal communication."

Here's a look at some of the most effective ways to leverage media, such as photos, podcasts, videos, and other types of mobile marketing.

Sharing photos with your online community.

Several online communities exist for the purpose of uploading and sharing photos over the Web, and many small businesses have learned to take advantage of these services to market their products. Here are the most common photo sharing marketing strategies.

1.    Offer real-time incentives. Twitter's TweetPhoto will automatically enable you to publish photos to your Twitter and Facebookaccounts for free via mobile and Web platforms. Who needs 140 characters to describe your business when a picture is worth 1,000 words? Tweet pictures of discounted and new items or offer exclusive incentives.

2.    Join like-minded communities. At no cost, Yahoo!-operated Flickr provides a useful platform for photo management and sharing. "The first thing that I tell people is that Flickr is not just a photo storage place," says Matt McGee, independent online marketing consultant of the Tri-Cities, Washington-based, Small Business Search Marketing. "It's a very active community centered around Flickr groups." For example, a pet-lovers group may get a kick out of the clothing and toys created by a boutique pet store.

3.    Drive traffic to your website. Pink Cake Box, a gourmet cake shop located in Denville, New Jersey, began using Flickr in 2006 to build brand identity. Co-owner Jesse Heap says that Pink Cake Box's website receives about 300,000 unique users each month, and roughly 10 percent of those visitors are from Flickr, where the company posts photos of interesting or extreme cakes.

Hosting videos and webcasting.

Sharing videos over the Web is another great resource for small businesses in establishing a social media presence, particularly because of how many people are tuning in. According to a November 2009 survey released by comScore, a digital marketing research firm headquartered in Reston, Virginia, Google's many video sites accounted for 12.2 billion videos viewed that month, including YouTube, which accounted for nearly 99 percent of the total.

Webcasting is essentially broadcasting a video or media file over the Internet using streaming media technology, which can be distributed to many simultaneous viewers at once. Done the right way, webcasts, also called video podcasts, vblogs, videocasting or Web shows, can be effective promotional tools. "It's a cool opportunity to take people behind the scenes of a business," says Dina Kaplan, co-founder and COO of blip.tv, a four-year-old Internet TV network. Her network airs video podcasts from hundreds of companies as diverse as the New York City Ballet to the crafter website Etsy, which broadcasts online classes. "It's been interesting to watch, especially in the last year, how many businesses have created Web shows to promote their product or gain exposure for principals," Kaplan says.

Shooting a video for YouTubeor starting a more elaborate webcast essentially takes four basic ingredients: equipment, a theme, an online home and marketing.

1.    The equipment. Very small businesses can buy a webcam or camcorder, wireless microphone and simple video editing equipment such as Sony's Vegas Movie Studio or Final Cut Pro 7. However, a webcam limits you to filming yourself sitting in front of a computer, and that's not very exciting, says Peter Brusso, an Anaheim, California, podcasting producer and technology marketing consultant. Instead, invest in a camcorder, preferably a "three-chip" camera that uses three computer chips to separate colors, which results in a higher quality picture, Brusso says.

2.    Hire someone. If you have a bigger budget, hire a professional. Prices run from $1,000 to $15,000, according to podcast industry sources. Employment attorney Helene Wasserman created a video podcast called Employer Helpcast two years ago to market her work as a partner with Ford & Harrison LLP, a Los Angeleslaw firm. Wasserman uses Brusso's company to produce video podcasts and pays $2,500 for segments that run anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes. It's worth the money, she says. "If you're trying to market yourself as having a very professional business, you want to put your best foot forward," she says.

3.    The show. You could have the best-looking video around, but it wouldn't matter if you didn't do something that was interesting and consistent, says blip.tv's Kaplan. For webcasts, stick to a regular broadcast schedule, whether that's once a day, week or month. And keep shows short. "Your aptitude for sitting in your uncomfortable office chair atrophies after about six minutes," she says. Be personable, says Kaplan, who advises podcasters to stick to the old news adage to show, not tell. If you run a retail business, walk around the store, and talk about new merchandise. "Talk to a customer. If you have a hardware store, show them the new hammer on sale," she says.

4.    Hosting and marketing. Once you've got a video in the can, upload it for free on YouTube where it can be viewed by anyone. Webcasts can also be uploaded to free or paid hosting sites such as blip.tv, iTunes or Libsyn. Where a podcast is hosted isn't as important as spreading the word that it's there. Wasserman's podcasts appear on blip.tv and iTunesand cover workplace issues such as job sharing, corporate culture and managing a multi-generational workforce. Wasserman points prospective viewers to the podcast from her website and blog and by including a tagline promoting the show in her email signature. Wasserman also uses a free service that puts word-for-word transcripts of her video podcasts on the Web, where they can be searched by Google and other search engines. More people find her podcast through search engines than by visiting blip.tv or her website, and the traffic had led to speaking engagements and new work, she says. "It's the wave of the future. For anyone who wants to use 21st century technologies, this is the way to go."

Why go through the trouble of creating video? Here's 4 good reasons.

1.    Show how to use your product.With a slogan as simple as "Broadcast Yourself," many YouTube users are doing just that, especially when it comes to showing how their products or services can be used. "There are countless small business owners posting how-to videos on YouTube," says McGee. "[For instance,] here's how to use the product; here's how to interact with people in our service industry."

2.    Extend your client base. In December 2007, John Tuggle, a slide and blues guitar instructor based in Decatur, Georgia, began posting videos on YouTube teaching people how to play guitar because he wasn't generating enough interest in his hometown. By February 2008, interest in his lessens grew so much that he created LearningGuitarNow.com where visitors contacted him regularly for private lessons via Skype at the rate of $25 for 30 minutes. "I just kept [talking to people] and kept putting more out, and figuring out what people wanted. Last year I pulled in almost $100,000 from the website," said Tuggle.

3.    Entertain your customers. It is quite easy to post a video simply for visitors' enjoyment. For instance, Vimeo, a video hosting site that aims to be a "community of creative people who are passionate about sharing the videos they make," features a 'Videos we like' tab. For a small business owner, posting a video for entertainment purposes stands to generate many views, which in turn may spark interest in the company and possibly lead to the purchase of products or services.

4.    Provide a unique service. LiveCast, with headquarters in Vancouver, Canada, enables live video streaming directly from a cell phone, mobile Internet device, or Mac or PC, to anyone connected to the Web. For Gordon Cooper, photographer and founder of Perfect Weddingmagazine, live broadcasting gives his business a unique capability. "I can have all the guests at the wedding even if they're not at the wedding," says Cooper. "Guest can still experience the live ceremony [from wherever they are]." Cooper is able to charge an additional $250 for this service.

Podcasting

Podcasts have become such a popular marketing tool for sole proprietors and small businesses that a small army of professional producers is out there waiting to help. Here are 9 essential steps a company needs to get started:

1.    Do some homework.The best way to learn about podcasting is to listen to podcasts, says Peter Brusso, an Anaheim, California, podcasting producer and technology marketing consultant. Visit directories such as RSS Player or Libsyn and look for podcasts with a similar style or subject to you want to create, Brusso says.

2.    Decide on a topic.Podcasts could focus on a company's products or services, an industry or on management or professional issues. Whatever the topic, make sure it's related to a company's business in some way, says Sallie Goetsch, proprietor of The Podcast Asylum, a northern California podcast producer and consultant.

3.    Gather your tools. Producing a podcast requires:
•    A microphone, digital audio recorder or USB headset to record podcast episodes
•    Computer with sound card and high-speed Internet connection
•    Audio recording and editing software, either licensed software or free open-source programs such as Audacity.

4.    Be natural.When it's time to record a podcast, organize talking points, but don't use a script. "People don't like being sold. The more from the heart the better," Brusso says.

5.    Build a backlog. Before going live, build up a catalog of a dozen or more episodes. Coming up with ideas is easy, Brusso says. They can spring from talking to customers, going to conventions, reading trade magazines, or following current events.

6.    Be consistent. Length, professional quality, and subject matter of a company's podcast are important but not as much as on-air consistency. Whether it's once a day, once a week or once a month, pick a schedule and stick to it. Podcasts are like radio or TV shows: audiences expect a schedule. Disappoint them and they might not come around again, Brusso says.

7.    Not a D-I-Y type? Hire a pro. Professional producers can handle the technical aspects of starting or creating a podcast. Goetsch and partners Priscilla Rice and Michele Molitor, for example, offer a small-business podcast starter package for $1,100 that covers scripting and recording three to four podcasts plus lots of extras, including finding a hosting service, setting up a podcast blog and submitting broadcasts to podcast directories. Brusso, who works with lawyers and other sole proprietors, charges $1,000 for an hour-long podcast with similar extras. But it doesn't have to be expensive. According to Goetsch, a small businessperson could do everything themselves with an existing computer, $20 headset, free software for audio editing and creating a podcast, and host it on their existing website.

8.    Find your podcast a home. Companies can physically host a podcast anywhere, including with the service they use for their website. What really matters is getting the word out that it's there. For maximum exposure, list podcasts on directories such as PodcastAlley.com, Podcast411, Podanza or TalkShoe.

9.    Forget about making money, at least not directly.Some podcasts collect revenue from advertising that podcast directories put on their sites. But that shouldn't be why a company does it. Podcasts should be part of a company's overall marketing strategy, Brusso says. "To get yourself known, you have to blog, optimize your Website for search engines and podcast," he says. "If you do all three the results are phenomenal."

Mobile Marketing

There are 4.1 billion cellular connections worldwide, and with the prevalence of smart phones, the concept of browsing the Web from a mobile phone has gone mainstream. Consider this: Mobile phone carriers are sitting atop a trove of data – not just your name, address, and, of course, phone number but also credit card information, who your friends are, and where you're located at this very moment. Even with privacy regulations, more of this information will become available to marketers as phones are used more like little PCs, creating opportunities for highly targeted ads and other marketing breakthroughs.

Here's what you need to know to get started.

•    How exactly do I advertise on a mobile phone?The most common type of mobile ad is a display ad served on a Web page called up on a cell phone's screen. The ads are created for the site's mobile format and may not be the same as the ads you would see if you were browsing the site on a PC. Ads are priced on a Cost Per Mille, or CPM, basis – the price you pay for the ad to be seen 1,000 times.

•    How do I buy mobile ads?Most advertisers work with mobile-ad networks, which bring together advertisers and websites that are frequently viewed by phone. Some of the larger players, which are owned by the likes of Google (AdMob), AOL (Third Screen Media) and Apple (Quattro Wireless), will act as full-service marketing shops. They handle the entire process, including technology, the creative content of mobile ads, and the ads' placement.

•    What do mobile ads cost? The cost of mobile ads varies due to the different types of ads, and different cell phone platforms. For instance, AdMob, one of the main mobile-ad networks, currently charges CPMs of $12 to $14 for iPhone banner ads.

•    What about text messaging?One option is to buy or rent a short code, a five- or six-digit phone number from which you can send and receive text messages. One common way to use a short code is to publish it on a billboard or in a print ad ("Text 51234 for more information") that encourages customers to enter a contest or participate in a poll.

•    What does a short code cost? Cellit Mobile Marketing, in Chicago, and Movo, in Florida, sell short codes for $500 to $1,000 per month, plus a one-time setup fee of a few thousand dollars and a charge of 4 cents to 7 cents for each text message. You can also rent a code for as little as $225 per month. Keep in mind that technological standards vary. Nearly every phone on the market is equipped to send and receive texts, but some systems won't let you embed complex graphics or photographs.

•    How do I go after my best customers on a mobile phone? Google has expanded into the mobile world in several ways. Now, it allows companies to buy display ads – ads related to content – on the mobile Web. AdMob claims click-through rates on this type of ad of up to 3 percent, which is quite high. The company charges a cost-per-click (CPC) fee of 25 cents to 30 cents.

3 Tips for Making Your Mobile Campaign Successful

1.    Determine your goals.Who is your target audience? How will they benefit from your message? Do you hope to generate revenue, generate interest, generate traffic to your website, or all three? Define your goals and set benchmarks for what a successful campaign would look like.

2.    Choose your message. Your message should have a clear call to action. According to mobile marketing firm Punchkick Interactive, "over 90 percent of texts from SMS messaging campaigns are read by recipients, generating average response rates of 15 to 30 percent or more." With the potential for that kind of penetration, it would help to make sure your campaign is simple, memorable, and factual. One thing every local business should be doing, says James Citron, CEO of mobile video marketing firm Mogreet, is attach keywords to their mobile campaigns that will resonate with customers in order to create brand awareness.

3.    Pair your mobile marketing campaign with other social media. When Casa Del Mar, a luxury beach hotel located in Santa Monica, California, wanted to get the word out about drink specials, they doubled up on social media marketing. The hotel posted messages on Twitter and Facebook saying, "Text CASA to 21534 and enjoy unlimited champagne or Bloodys. FREE." Customers who texted received videos of the weekend brunch spread on their phone and received the beverage of their choice at the hotel. The end result was highly viral, with 250 redemptions.

Photo Sharing

•    Twitter's TweetPhoto will automatically enable you to publish photos to your Twitter and Facebook accounts for free via mobile and Web platforms.

•    Yahoo!-operated Flickr provides a useful platform for photo management and sharing.

•    Photobucket is a free image hosting site that enables visitors to share photos, videos and slideshows. Plus, you can search through their archives for inspirational or fun photos for your own viewing pleasure.

•    TinyPic is another image hosting site that allows you to share photos and videos for no cost at all. You can easily upload, link, and share your images and videos on MySpace, eBay, blogs, message boards, and a number of other Web-based platforms.

•    Snapfish provides unlimited free photo storage and photo sharing, as well. They also offer a feature called 'Snapshow,' which works as a free multimedia slideshow that brings your photos to life, with customized themes, songs and titles.

•    Shutterfly is an online photo sharing platform that also allows you to share sites, albums and projects for free.

Hosting videos and webcasting

•    With the tagline "Broadcast Yourself," YouTube allows users to post video, both ametuer and professional, for anyone to view.

•    Blip.tv's Learning Center links to information about podcasting, equipment, production tips and more.

•    Yahoo's video blogging list is a message board where people interested in video podcasting post questions and trade information.

•    Leesa Barnes, a noted author and expert, provides an informational website with the tagline "Make Selling Fun and Profitable Using a Podcast."

• iTunes Store, an online digital media store operated by Apple, is the No. 1 music vendor in the United States, however it also provides video and podcast downloads as well.

Podcasting

• RSS Player Podcast Client for the iPhone and iPod Touchis a unique iPhone app that lets you subscribe to to your favorite podcasts, manage them, and listen to them in a unique and well designed format for the iPhone with tons of cool features.

• Libsyn is a full-featured service tailored specifically for media self-publishing and podcasting. Price is based on usage, changing monthly if needed.

• PodcastAlley.com is the best site to find all your Podcasts, podcast feeds, podcast definitions, podcast software and best podcast directory.

• Podcast411 offers the 411 on podcasts, podcasters and podcasting. It's the place to learn to podcast. They offer how to's on podcasting, a directory of podcasts, and a directory of podcasts.

• On Podanza you'll find all the best audio podcasts and video podcasts. You can browse the podcast directory or search for your favorite podcast.

• TalkShoeis a service that enables anyone to easily create, join, or listen to live interactive discussions, conversations, podcasts and audioblogs.

•    PodcastFAQ is a website committed to providing everything you need to know about podcasting, from podcast creators and consumers to businesses.

•    Everything With Podcasting is a website companion to the book How to do Everything with Podcasting by Shel Holtz with Neville Hobson.

•    Podcasting consultant Sallie Goetsch's humorous take on how not to podcast, from her Podcast Asylum site.

Mobile Marketing

• Google (AdMob), AOL (Third Screen Media) and Apple (Quattro Wireless) will act as full-service marketing shops by handling the entire process, including technology, the creative content of mobile ads, and the ads' placement.

• Cellit Mobile Marketing and Movo sell short codes for texting campaigns.