On Internet Business

Five Top Blogs for Entrepreneurs

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Entrepreneur Resources, Social Media

There are many lists of blogs for entrepreneurs, so why create my own? Because it’s one of the ways that any individual works out what matters to them, and why. If we don’t reflect on our influences, and what they give us, we’re not aware of how we’re impacted by the business world, or how we impact on it. So here’s five of the best from my perspective:

1. Paul Graham – founder of Viaweb, Y Combinator which funds and advises startups, Paul Graham shows where new businesses go right, and wrong, time and time and time again.
2. The Entrepreneurial Mind – economics based, with a focus on what makes an entrepreneur from training, to culture, to opportunity – always thought-provoking, sometimes providing lightbulb ‘aha’ moments, especially when explaining the difference between US entrepreneurs and others.
3. Mark Suster started as an entrepreneur and is now a Venture Capitalist. Often amusing but with a deep grasp of what matters to entrepreneurs and their backers.
4. Unmarketing is not everybody’s idea of a good business approach and  Scott Stratten is definitely not everybody’s favourite commentator, but unmarketing really picks away at the issues that take businesses down: poor customer service, poor communication, losing your way and losing your client base – things that most of us prefer not to think about but will have a bad experience with one day, if we live long enough, because no business has a perfectly smooth ride.
5. Kevin Kelly focuses on technology, innovation and passion and how the three become the fans, or frustrators, of entrepreneurship – his blog helps other entrepreneurs work out what technology will help them, why they should invest in it and how to make it work for them.

So what would I like to have in my top five that isn’t there? A blog focused on emerging markets and how they operate; an entrepreneurial blog written by a woman; a blog that unpicks the relationship between social media and good advertising campaigns in a way that offers transferable insights. Any suggestions?

Budding entrepreneur image courtesy of Robert S Donovan

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Small Business and Social Media – useful tool or trouble ahead?

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail, Social Media

Looking at recent research into small businesses and social media there’s a confused picture emerging.  BusinessBlogs suggests that a lot of social media marketing being done by small businesses is wasting time and money. But the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business, found that adaptation in this area is moving faster, and is more positively viewed by small American businesses, than had been expected.

What is the small business social media experience?

Very different, according to whose research you read. BusinessBlogs may have a vested interest in finding problems as it has a Facebook for Business ebook to promote, while the academic research is a follow up on a similar phone-based survey, run in 2008. BusinessBlogs says:

1. For most SME’s (small business enterprise) social media or social networking for business benefit is an unknown quantity …best avoided until adequate know how is acquired.
2. Businesses need reasonable knowledge of how to participate effectively in online communities and understand the cost benefit ratio for the business so time wasting activities are avoided.
3. Each social network requires a unique strategy for engagement. … [you would] not use the same engagement strategy for Facebook and Twitter.
4. Use of automation tools to remove a lot of the manual input is a must for small business and this expertise is not in house – Businesses need to engage 3rd party social media professionals to identify what is appropriate to meet the needs of the business. A ‘one size fits all mentality’ is not appropriate.
5. Most businesses have no idea where to seek help and where to start in social networks and as a result can get into trouble early on.
6. Of the small businesses … using social networking successfully most spend on average over 2-3 hours per day in key social networks … most have no clear separation between business and personal use of social networks.

On the other hand, the Maryland research shows that technology adoption rates (the take-up of new forms of communication, in this case) in the USA have doubled 12 months from 12% to 24%. Its conclusions are quite different:

1. One in five small business owners are integrating social media into their business processes
2. 45% of surveyed respondents … believe their social media initiatives will pay off financially in 12 months or less.
3. Small business owners … believe social media can help them on the lead generation front, and that is the primary motivating factor for engaging in these new customer service channels.
4. [Despite] half of surveyed respondents [finding] the time it takes to use social media sites more daunting than expected, 61% are still putting in the hours and making active efforts to identify new customers.

Conclusions

• Some businesses are coping well with social media, and are managing to do this engagement in-house without having to separate out work/social engagement. This suggests that entrepreneurial businesses with a more relaxed workplace environment and less focus on demarcation of responsibilities are probably taking social media in their stride. Those with more hierarchical structures and classic boundaries between personal and business lives are more likely to be struggling to integrate social media in their marketing and PR.
• Finding new business leads is likely to be a key area of focus in social media strategies, but understanding the difference between engagement (communication) and promotion (outreach only) may be something that small businesses need help with.
• Having social media strategies will prove useless unless somebody in a small organisation is given the freedom and opportunity to build social media links that are meaningful in driving business. That opportunity needs to be measured, both for profit creation and for brand management – there have been enough scare stories of an intern or departing staff member using social media to tear a hole in a business’s carefully constructed image for even the smallest enterprise to know the risks.

Twitter addiction image courtesy of carrotcreative

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Two Recessions, Customer Service and Social Media

Posted by Michael under customer service, Entrepreneur Resources, Social Media

Seth Godin claims there are two recessions going on.

According to him the first is the cyclical recession that he thinks is currently ending (no sign of the double dip in his forecast) and the other is a permanent recession. He calls it a ‘receding wave of bounty that workers and businesses got as a result of rising productivity but imperfect market communication’. And he says that there are serious consequences to the changes in market communication – the market for ordinary things is now more perfect which means it’s difficult to charge extra.

That’s the easy part.

The difficult part, for much of the population, is that employment is evolving to meet the demands of market improvement too.

Vanishing jobs and new opportunities

The first slice of employment to vanish is the middle-class, mid-level jobs that were created because companies had to be local to other companies or raw materials or to buyers. Godin says that protectionism won’t solve the problem, and that  ‘every revolution destroys the last thing before it turns a profit on a new thing’.

It’s an interesting view and one worth exploring, but there are other things happening too. As job security recedes, people tend to have more than one income-stream: they become ‘entrepreneurs of the self’ and they view employment opportunities not just as income streams but as portfolio activities to enhance, or detract from, the overall project of ‘self’ employment. It means that brand ‘me’ is a big focus for individuals who understand the networked revolution.

Brand ‘me’ under attack from social media

Which casts a new light on the recent backlash against TripAdvisor reviews which has resulted in a proposed defamation suit. MyCustomer.com sees it as a wrongly-thought-out attempt by business to corral customer opinion, but if we’re all entrepreneurs now, then there’s very little difference between the individuals providing the service and the individuals commenting on it. It’s notable that several of the companies taking part in the proposed case are in fact individuals offering bed and breakfast accommodation in their own homes.

In other words, these are portfolio people who don’t view themselves as businesses: they see a review they think is unfair and it’s personal, it attacks them and their competences rather than those of a business entity from which they can separate themselves – they are their business and they feel they have the right to challenge views that may damage their income.

It’s probably still wrong-headed to engage in lawsuits to limit free speech, but the recession of big employment is likely to mean that small employment is much more personal and more intense. Reviews – when seen as attacks on small employers, whether they are businesses or brand ‘me’ service providers - are likely to cause heartache as well as lost sales, and that’s something new forms of employment have not yet come to terms with and social media hasn’t learned to negotiate. It’s a market irregularity that time and experience will iron out, but lawsuits probably won’t.

Abandoned factory courtesy of george.schon at flickr

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The future of blogging: Tumblr v Posterous

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail, Social Media

The Guardian newspaper has been considering the future of blogging – and the answer depends on where you stand.  According to their social media mavens, for the big tech blogs like Mashable and TechCrunch, there’s no contest, it’s WordPress all the way, but for the amateur blogger, and those who are time-short and twitterate, two mobile blogging systems are racing up the popularity stakes – but which is best: Tumblr or Posterous?
 
To a certain extent it depends on how you respond to each platform – both are simple to use, each has advantages and disadvantages, and each requires you to learn a few new tricks to convert your old blogging behaviours to new micro-blog ones.

What’s new in blogging?

Posterous has been running an aggressive campaign to seduce users who are familiar with blogger and wordpress systems, as part of which it’s just gone live with a WordPress blog important which means that old blog content established in a WordPress platform, can be grabbed, along with comments and tags, and dumped straight into a Posterous account. On the downside, it doesn’t mean that you can transfer your URL structure and that means you can lose quite a bit of your ‘Googlejuice’ – the mojo your site has created through links to your blog.

But when you look at the usage stats, rather than the functionality, there’s no doubt that at present, Tumblr is leading the field. As PC Magazine puts it, when you’re ‘fatter than Twitter but thinner than Blogger’, you’ve positioned yourself just right for the average user!

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Improving your Website

Posted by Michael under Online Retail, Social Media

Mashable has recently produced an excellent round-up of the resources available to designers seeking to obtain advice on how to improve designs.

An outside perspective on the design of a new website can make a difference both in pinpointing issues that are more important to users than the designer had realised, or to help validate design areas that the client may not be fully convinced about.

Critique The Site

This is a sweet little tool, allowing for instant feedback about a website’s design by means of a frame to the left of the web page under consideration, where users can leave feedback. There are a couple of downsides: first, reviewers have to log in using a popular web service such as Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, or OpenID before posting a review, and there’s a limit to the amount of people you have access to – it doesn’t have a pool of reviewers to review your site, unlike some of the other options. Plus point, it’s free.

Please Critique Me

Please Critique Me is an interesting approach in that it’s a resource run by web design agency offering free design critiques by one of its design teams, with a panel that includes some notable names. Valuable both for its critiques and the resources available on the site itself.

SitePoint

SitePoint is an online media company with a forum that allows for feedback from its pool of more than 350,000 registered users. On the plus side, it’s active and informed, on the minus side it’s a time consuming and sometimes frustrating way to read feedback and there’s some veering off topic which will probably infuriate the designer seeking responses. Still free though!

Bounce

Bounce is a web app that plugs in your web design’s URL, generating a screenshot of the site which people can then comment on. Minus points, a screenshot is not necessarily a good way to examine deeper website functionality. Plus points, it’s easy, its fun and it’s free, which has to be a plus.

Five Second Test

Five Second Test is more based on functionality – reviewers see a screen capture of the web design and then respond with one of two forms of evaluation: memory test (shows users a web layout for five seconds, then asks them what they remember) or click test (participants are required to click on the most prominent items on the page within five seconds). If you wish to find out if your web design’s crucial design elements are both visible and memorable, this may be a tool for you. It’s free, which is a plus, but the free option gives you only five responses and you’re put at the bottom of the testing queue in terms of priority, so it could take a while. There are paid options from $5 to15 which allow you to have a higher queue placing and to customise the user instructions

Concept Feedback

Concept Feedback is something of a crowdsourcing approach. Each reviewer rates one of four items on your site, those items being: design, purpose, originality and engagement. Reviewers are themselves reviewed, both by being given feedback on their own designs and by rankings. It’s a free service if you choose to review five concepts before you post your own, but premium services ($10-50 per concept) allow you to post the concept before you review others, to have your concept featured on Twitter to generate more reviews and to be guaranteed a minimum number of reviews.

UserTesting.com

This costs $39 but it guarantees remote trials of your site – you receive videos of each visitor as they explore your site, alongside written summaries of any problems they discover. On the plus side, it’s really fast to get feedback, minus points – you do have to pay and you may find you have to convert video feedback to some other kind of recorded information before you can adapt your site. A user’s confused expression may be worth a thousand words, but if you’re working for a client they probably won’t want to sit through videos to discover what people think of the site you’ve built for them.

Usabilla

Usabilla useful for usability testing on live sites. It works by gathering visitor feedback using both annotation and task performance measurements and asks people to complete tasks for which the time taken is recorded. Free for a single web page and offering up to fifty participants for that page, it’s a good system for a small site. There are paid-for features that can be anything from $49 to $950 per annum, which may be cost-effective only for the bigger retail sites.

Feedback Army

For $15, Feedback Army will ‘host’ a focused debate of your design based on 4-6 questions you supply. You get ten reviews with an estimated time lag one to three hours turnaround – a fantastic way of obtaining swift and cheap reviews.

Userfly

Is a funky little system that gives you a screencast of how users interact with the site which may make it a more useful system in analysing why an existing site doesn’t work than in assessing a new site. You plug a line of code into your web page and that’s it. Plus points, it’s a simple system. Minus points, you have to do the analysis yourself. There are premium plans $10-200 per month and get you more captures (results), the ability to use the https protocol and longer storage of your captures.

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Comment policies and businesses

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Leadership, Online Retail, Social Media

Since I raised the reputational issue it seems to have been flavour of the week all over the place. Mathew Ingram, a senior writer at GigaOm.com, a leading technology blog network in the United States and previously communities editor for the Toronto, got into a major twitter debate about the value, or otherwise, of anonymous comments.

Then econsultancy weighed in with a digest of the article and their top five tips on how to set a policy for comments and in the same week, Lisa Barone wrote an article at Small Biz Trends that unpicked which bad commentary it’s worth responding to, and which should be ignored.

So what does this tell us about the business world – is there a sudden rash of nasty (anonymous or otherwise) commentators out there? Not exactly, but there do seem to be two things going on that underline the relationship between business and social media:

1. Economic stringency seems to be creating a sub-group of consumers who are more active, and pro-active, in giving both good and bad feedback online – these are very social media savvy individuals who are comfortable using a wide range of online communication tools to express their feelings and there appears to be a developing behaviour in this group to buy, consume or experience and then to comment on what was obtained for their money, whether it’s a concert ticket, a coffee or a car service that they’ve purchased.
2. New social media users, usually between forties and their seventies, and being educated about social media by their children or grandchildren: these are consumers who’ve got a strong sense of community and customer service and may have spent years complaining fruitlessly about bad or no customer support. While they may be social media novices, they are experienced complainers, and they are mobilising around the failures of big business in particular, and commenting not just on business but on political and social issues that affect them.

It is these two groups, converging on the ‘comment’ function from very different directions, that are driving the upsurge in user-response and that’s why businesses, everywhere, need to have a policy, because comments may only take a moment to create and send, but they can negatively affect a business for years.

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Business masterclass: dealing with online complaints and criticisms

Posted by Michael under Entrepreneur Resources, Search, Social Media

It can destroy a business – the moment when you realise that somebody, somewhere has something bad to say about you. For Arclid Transport, this week, it’s the emergence of a video on YouTube that appears to show one of their lorries pushing a car along a motorway at 60 mph. The video was taken in January and the police were informed at the time, but have reopened the enquiry as a result of public and media attention.

So what do you do if something bad turns up about you on the net, or on social media?

Be objective – Assess the situation. Has your organisation done anything to deserve the commentary, complaint or coverage that you’re getting? While it’s both easy and natural to leap to your own defence, it may be better to stop, think and redress any problems at the same time as reacting. If there’s any grounds to the complaint, deal with them using three simple stages:
• Accept – admit where there has been a problem
• Explain – if there is a reason for the problem that might change people’s view of the situation (serious illness in your call-handling team? A transport strike making import of components impossible and therefore slowing up your deliveries?) state it simply and honestly, without making excuses
• Act – say what you are doing to solve the problem, and thank people for bringing it to your attention.
Maybe you can’t say a great deal, but you can at least thank the poster for their comment and say that you’re getting in touch with them through other channels to find out more about their situation and how you can put things right.

Request removal – Unfair or defamatory commentary exists and you can contact the forum moderator or site owner and ask for its removal. Many will work with you on this, but some won’t and in those cases, and if the commentary is totally untrue, you may want to take legal advice. Remember that ‘ghost’ versions of internet pages can exist in caches and you may also need to ask search engines to implement Content Removal Request for you.

Ignore the problem – this seems insane, but it can happen that you can’t get rid of bad publicity. It might be that an internet site is owned by the friend of the complainant, for example and so they just won’t take bad material down. In this case you’re better off putting your energy into the process of smothering bad commentary in good. You can do this by asking your loyal customers to post good reviews on Facebook and LinkedIn and on trade-based directories like FreeIndex. This stops bad comments being at the top of the list when people search for information about you.

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When bad advertising goes good

Posted by Michael under Social Media

Microsoft profits leaped by 60% in the final quarter of 2009 and the company has claimed this is owing to the ‘heavyweight marketing campaign’ for Windows 7 which is an amazing response given that the advertising was roundly, widely and deeply panned by industry watchers – blogger after blogger and advertising commentator after advertising commentator said the adverts, especially those for Windows 7 ‘parties’ were uniformly awful.

So how did the operating system become the best-selling operating system to date?

Partly because the adverts weren’t aimed at the industry experts but at the vast underbelly of people who have to use a computer for work or study but whose understanding of the systems involved is as limited as the average person’s understanding of the internal combustion engine – it turns out that this huge section of society was perfectly happy with advertising that the cognoscenti described variously as patronising, painful or just plain bad.

Microsoft admits it was assisted by a rebound in personal computer sales in the run-up to Christmas, partly resulting from the last minute investment in laptops as Christmas gifts, but it does seem to have found a level of communication with the bulk of the marketplace that’s worked well.

And so to the iPad, derided on release by the Guardian Newspaper the Wall Street Journal, to name but two. Good product, Bad name, was how most people described the new product and while there are minor concerns about its functionality (why no Flash support?) the major one has been over the name. The number of jokes about it on Twitter led to #iTampon becoming a trending topic. Several high profile women in the technical and media industries have made terse comments about the way that the name seems to suggest sanitary protection and expressed concern that either (a) something must have gone wrong in development for there not to have been a single woman in the many brainstorming meetings around the name who could point out the obvious connotations or (b) they pointed them out and were overruled anyway, which smacks of a patriarchal approach to selling the product.

The question for Apple is whether they, like Microsoft, have got around the gatekeepers of technical development and reached right down to the potential buyer – given that at the press conference, Steve Jobs described the product as ‘so much more intimate than a laptop’ – apparently without irony, it seems unlikely that Apple had understood the way the name might be viewed rather than being confident that the industry response and the public response would be differently graduated, as in the Microsoft case.

Apple are very quiet about this avalanche of wit at the iPad’s expense, suggesting that they’re caught out by the media attention and public fun being had at their expense. If this is the case, it’s a rare example of Apple being wrong-footed in marketing, but the next six months will show if they can still turn bad advertising, and bad publicity, into good sales.

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2009’s big social media #fails and how to learn from them

Posted by Michael under Social Media

Two examples from 2009, one from the very beginning of the year, the other from the very last days of the decade, reveal how even big businesses can get the social media world all wrong.

In spring, Skittles, the fruit sweet brand, failed to pull off the Twitter trick. Basically the Skittles homepage was reframed as a Twitter search feed for its own product. During the first few days, this innovation caused a huge buzz in the social media industry, with many people saying that Skittles was the first ‘Social Media Mozart’ but it hardly reached the social media users. Then it did. Over a couple of weeks the Skittles home-page was visited by hundreds, then thousands, of Twitter users, following the twitterfeed that showed Skittles related tweets. And while a few of those visitors were saying nice things about the brand, most were swearing, blaspheming, making racist, sexist or homophobic remarks all prefaced with the #skittles hash-tag. And, guess what? Every one of those potentially offensive tweets bounced right onto the Skittles homepage. It was troll-bait of the highest order and the trolls came in their masses. The brand failure was, for several months, glaringly and publicly evident.

Why did it happen?

Skittles hadn’t prepared their ground. Other companies, like Lush Cosmetics, are noted for their long history of engagement with their purchasers, so the Lush twitterfeed is a good mixture of brand led information and responses to that information, queries from the public being answered by the brand, and customer to customer interaction along the feed. Skittles had none of that and the tweet-savvy Twitter community knew it was being used as a brand enhancement device. Skittles made a cynical bid to hijack the Twitterati and got hijacked in return.

O2 have finished 2009 on a low note in social media, or rather, with notes being what has brought a twitter and forum backlash down on the company. O2 has been sending marketing texts to many customers who have repeatedly asked to be removed from its marketing activities. By Christmas, frustrated O2 customers were being contacted every day about free festive ringtones etc, despite having texted the opt-out number on numerous occasions. Finally the furious O2 customers, including the Father Ted writer, went twitter and developed their own hashtag to complain about the total lack of customer service from this media supplier. They also vented on the influential Moneysupermarket.com forum, and flooded geek forums with their concerns. What rubbed salt in the wounds of many O2 subscribers living or working in London was that during the second half of 2009 there were periods when they were unable to able to make or receive calls or transmit data because of pressure on the network from smart phones like the iPhone – but somehow, O2 managed to get its own spam through to them!

Why did it happen?

A conjunction of failures here: first the iPhone pressure caught out a lot of mobile phone companies, who found that smart phones were prioritised over the network and because they were using up vast bandwidth, ‘classic’ customers were unable to get connected. But for O2 it was much worse, because until November they had the exclusive contract for Apple phones, so their sales in that area were harming their customer base in the non-smart phone arena. Add to that the inability of their own marketing team to respond to requests to stop sending spam texts, and O2 ended up looking like they didn’t give a damn.

What to learn from this

1. You can’t move into new areas of business communication without expecting reciprocal relationships. Companies do best when they engage first with their established customer base using new media and then take that loyal group forward into new campaigns.
2. Just ‘using’ new media is impossible – the interactive nature of the technology means that any company that steps into social media is open to being held up to public ridicule, complaints and scorn, using the very technology they’ve tried to exploit themselves.
3. Social media engagement requires a consistent response from a brand, not just a dipping in and out – it’s not like print or TV advertising which offers the chance to step back and assess response. Going into social media means being ready to work on a day by day basis with customers, with no time to stop and think about your response. If you make people wait, they will believe you are either incompetent or have something to hide.

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Which is the best online project management software?

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Social Media

There are dozens of project management offerings, some of which are not actually project management at all. Basecamp which is probably the most widely known solution should not strictly be regarded as a project management too – rather it is a communication tool and a definite upgrade to using emails. However, it has its limitations: it cannot measure the work load for the whole team nor for each member individually, or can it evaluate the realism of set deadlines. Instead it simply helps exchange information inside a team and/or with clients.

So what are the strengths and weaknesses of the major alternatives:

Huddle

Pros:
RSS Feeds
File upload/management/inline editing (with lock feature)
Writeboards
Task deadline dates
Telephone conferencing

Cons:
No milestone tasks
No reports
No time-tracking
No task reordering
Doesn’t look great if printed

Teamwork Project Manager

Pros:
Relatively inexpensive
Task due dates pinned to calendar
Data is backed up by Teamwork but also customer-driven backups (at cost)
At risk issue tracker

Cons:
Still seems to have a few bugs such as saved items not showing up on refresh
May be better for larger projects, as the price for small teams is a little expensive

Smartsheet

Pros:
Gives a change history for all changes
Supports drag and drop for custom ordering
Supports hierarchical grouping

Cons:
Slow in comparison to other systems
No filtering so you can’t ‘show’ completed tasks or over-budget tasks in list format

Easy Projects

Pros:
Great interface and good ‘getting started’ popup
Excellent range of reporting tools

Cons:
The registration required to get started takes forever and all fields must be filled in before registration can be processed
No risk tracker

Central Desktop

Pros:
Makes collaboration very easy even for new users
Extremely easy to set up and operate

Cons:
Little value in depth management such as Gantt charts and resource management options
Skimpy budgeting elements

Wrike

Pros:
Email integration into projects
Excellent collaboration tools
Hierarchy functionality
Excellent automatic task management reminders

Cons:
No risk management system
Finance functionality is very low

Clarizen

Pros:
Easy to use
Good hierarchical task structure.
Good progress tracking
Risk manager

Cons:
A web based system can be difficult for new users to learn
No ‘one click’ report button
May be more suitable for larger companies than small

So, after assessing all these project management software systems, my favourite is Teamwork Project Manager due to its balance between functionality and a clear and easy-to use-interface.

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