Not Everyone Has Airtime’s Launch Resources, So Do These Other Things |  |
- Not Everyone Has Airtime’s Launch Resources, So Do These Other Things
- Making Congress Work for You
- Don’t Put Your Eggs in One Basket: Conversions Through Segmentation
- Facebook Pages Get Roles, Scheduled Posts
- U.S. Census Funding Cuts Considered, But Marketers May Have Other Research Options
| Not Everyone Has Airtime’s Launch Resources, So Do These Other Things Posted: 07 Jun 2012 02:00 AM PDT Napster co-founders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning launched their new social video chatting platform, Airtime, this week, with celebrities and plenty of media coverage. Reviews are mixed about whether Airtime reflects something really new or a rehash of earlier products, but with Parker’s and Fanning’s track records and $33 million in capital, this startup has had no trouble getting attention. What can entrepreneurs with fewer resources do to distinguish their businesses? Airtime holds star studded launch. Napster co-founders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning spared no expense launching the new social video chatting platform on Tuesday. Some news reports focused on technical hiccups, but a parade of celebrities including actresses Olivia Munn and Julia Louis-Dreyfus and comedians Joel McHale and Ed Helms gave the launch added pizzazz and another focus for the media. Venture Beat New platform really nothing new, and plagued with glitches. Not everyone is impressed with Airtime. A video analysis a day after the launch focuses on the platform as fun, but nothing new, and centers on some technical glitches mentioned in the media. You can sometimes “next” someone if you don’t don’t hit it off in a chat and then be suddenly reconnected in chat instead of going on to the next person, a bit awkward according to this reviewer. Business Insider At it’s heart, Airtime re-humanizes the Internet. But beyond technical problems and other complaints, one review focuses on how the new platform distinguishes itself way beyond anything out there today. Airtime makes the Internet more human and more social. This is the part of a business model any entrepreneur can duplicate. No matter how much or how little hype surrounds your brand, your product or service must stand apart. TechCrunch Seven Ways to Distinguish Your BusinessSimplify your idea for greater profits. Marketing expert Susan Oakes makes some suggestions about simplifying your product or service. Streamlining what your business offers makes your product or service more specific and distinguishes it from competitors, even in your own niche. M4B Marketing Get your employees on board for change. Distinguishing your business will require adjustments on everyone’s part, especially for your employees. Small Business Trends founder Anita Campbell makes some suggestions about how you can ready your workers for innovation in your business. Open Forum Build team spirit around your brand. An additional step beyond preparing employees for the changes they’ll likely face is building the spirit of your team and giving them a better understanding of what your brand represents. Make working for your business more than just a job, give employees a way to share in company success, and teach them to care about the outcome. RealBusiness Use blogging to set yourself apart. Blogging is an effective way of creating a new business or changing the direction of an existing one. Read this guest post from Tom Ewer about how blogging helped him start a business and change his life in just 11 months. How could blogging help you change your brand? MyWifeQuitHerJob.com Segment your customers for better understanding. Blogger Leah Singer talks about the importance of grouping your customers and tailoring your communications to meet their unique needs. Whether you do this by segmenting your customer e-mail list or in some other way, the results are increased revenue and loyalty. Merchantos Use a living business plan to evaluate progress. Using elements like financials, goals, and objectives, in your internal business plan, you can measure on a regular basis how your business is doing and whether changes need to be implemented to reposition your business for better growth. Once you make these changes you can measure their effectiveness. Ability Success Growth Hire a marketing consultant. Bringing in a marketing consultant from outside your business may help you see your company the way others do. Among the benefits listed by Fiona McEachran, a marketer: it gives you a new point of view, doesn’t require benefits, and can provide a resource goldmine for your business. All these benefits could be helpful when distinguishing your business from competitors. Abnormal Marketing From Small Business Trends |
| Posted: 06 Jun 2012 11:00 AM PDT It's a presidential election year, which means the political silly season is well underway. In addition, all seats in the House of Representative are up for election, and about 33 Senate seats are open as well.
This means we're in for months of promises (some well-meaning, some empty) from our Representatives and Senators about all the things they're going to do for us. Given that Congress has a job approval rate of 14.6 percent, they obviously have a lot of ground to make up. But actually, your congressional representative already provides an invaluable service that most small business owners aren't aware of, and don't use to their advantage. Entrepreneurs, Dennis Ruggeri and Jason Stern, teamed up to start a new company, Impel Apps and create a new app - TAPCongress - that helps you do just that. The app, which was just released last week, has nothing to do with politics. Rather, it enables small business owners to find the right person in your Senator or Congressman's office to help you get what you need. Ruggeri, who also is the president of Elicere, an IT service company, says:
So exactly what can your Congressman do for you? Stern, who also runs Braddock Communications, a publishing company based in Washington, explains:
You can take advantage of the free non-political services provided by the caseworkers who staff the offices of U.S. Representative and Senators. Many of these caseworkers do not work in Washington, D.C., but are instead located back home in the congressional district, so you can get more immediate, local attention. In addition, the app offers tips explaining how to best engage with Congressional staffers about legislation important to a small business, provides a core Congressional directory featuring information about each representative and Senator (including bio, links to their websites, key staffers, and committees), and includes articles explaining what specific services are provided, and how to effectively work with the Congressional offices and caseworkers. TAPCongress is not just about providing access to your elected representatives. There are also links and phone numbers for many of the federal departments, agencies, and commissions that small business owners might need to deal with. In addition, if you're looking for even more information, the apps can put you in touch with think tanks, major media outlets, and other resources, as well as providing thousands of business news feeds, and business news stories about your congressional representatives. Connecting for all of this is simple. To use the app, you just tap the link to reach a website, and tap the phone number to initiate a call. (Hence the TAPCongress name.) To register and download the app, go to the TapCongress website.
From Small Business Trends |
| Don’t Put Your Eggs in One Basket: Conversions Through Segmentation Posted: 06 Jun 2012 08:00 AM PDT Your website serves as your best tool for attracting attention from potential customers online. Since your web content is what really carries your message across and secures conversions, your content marketing needs to be optimized for your targeted customer profile.
But what if you have multiple targeted customer profiles, with different tastes and motivations, and they all require a different approach? Do you optimize for one group, at the risk of alienating or under-representing another? Do you target your content as little as possible, leaving your website with vague, muddled content that doesn't attract any customers? Divide and Prosper: Target Multiple Customer ProfilesThe internet is a very versatile medium, and you shouldn't worry about reaching one profile or another if your business caters to multiple customer bases. Your website cannot only be optimized for a single customer profile; you can optimize it for any number of customer profiles by putting extra work into creating separate user experiences for each customer base. In simple terms: you can make your website reach who you want, and deliver it in a way that they can customize for themselves. There are many different ways to implement multiple content sets for different customer profiles. Generally speaking, it is easiest to target individual customer profiles by creating a specific microsite or separate landing page for different customer types, and letting your visitors define who they are on arrival. Allowing your customers to identify themselves through selective content options can provide a wealth of valuable data that can drive your future online strategies. To accomplish this, you need an entirely different set of webpages for each client profile. You can create individualized landing pages that speak to the pain points and specific needs of a hyper-focused target segment, or you can generalize a bit more and classify your targeted groups by profession, interests, or level of expertise. Your website will need some sort of navigation options that make your differentiated webpages available to your visitors. This can be done with a simple dropdown menu, a site prompt upon arrival, a gateway page listing specific destinations for visitors, or any other number of creative, attention-grabbing methods. Wikipedia Segments Their Content, and So Can YouThe most common example would be any international website. Take Wikipedia for example. The landing page you arrive on is simple to understand, and vastly segmented. If you are a French or Italian visitor, Wikipedia would be fairly inaccessible to you if you landed on Wikipedia's English-language front page. By providing a globally-focused landing page to all users that arrive on their front-most landing page, Wikipedia has segmented their content based on language. The user then clicks their preferred language, and can access the content specifically tailored to them. Amazon.com also segments their webpage based on languages. If you scroll to the bottom of the homepage, you will see under their bottom-most logo a list of other nations. Canadian shoppers can select Amazon Canada and access Canadian products at Canadian prices. Not only have they segmented their websites by language, but also by visitors' professional levels immediately above this. If you are an investor or a member of the press, you can find content specially catered to you at Amazon's Investor Relations pages or the Press Releases page. Many international businesses have elegant, minimal landing pages that offer segmentation by geographic region, language, and level of interest. These are incredibly broad segments, and may not be immediately applicable to small businesses. You can, however, apply these general ideas to your small business website easily. Make Segments Work for Your BusinessIdentifying your targeted segments is the first step in the process. You can use business research, site analytics, and any other resources on this site and others. Once you've researched your customers, you should be able to form a general profile of who your most valuable customers are. If you sell kitchen appliances, your segments may include profiles like "The Soccer Mom," "The Newlywed Couple," or "Dads Looking to Upgrade." From there, you can design content strategies around each profile. What motivates each profile? What do they not like? What are they looking for from your business? After the lengthy task of developing custom content for each of your specifically-targeted customer profiles, you can create special landing pages and other web content specifically tailored to them. After your segmented content pages are done, you should include a navigation option or engaging interactive elements that prompts the user to identify themselves. However specifically or generally you provide definitions for what defines your visitors, make it clear that there are different categories they should fall under. Designations like "Just Browsing?" and "Looking to Sell" can direct visitors to entirely different sets of content. After your navigation element is in place, watch your site usage statistics. The types of pages people visit will tell you the success or failures of your targeted segments. If you have one set of content that is hit far more often than another, you'll know that the lower-performing target profile may need fixing, or might be unnecessary. By watching your statistics and knowing where your traffic comes from, as well as where they go and who they are, you can craft content marketing strategies that drive results and greatly increase ROI with laser-focused, customer-targeting accuracy. Egg Basket Photo via Shutterstock From Small Business Trends |
| Facebook Pages Get Roles, Scheduled Posts Posted: 06 Jun 2012 05:00 AM PDT Whether you're a small business owner trying to fit Facebook into your busy day or you're a community manager with your hands full with multiple social accounts, Facebook has always been kind of a pain in the butt. Every update had to be done manually and there was no way to assign different roles to the people on your team. You either had to hand over full access to your brand's page or give people none at all. It's easy to see how problems and security risks could arise.
Well, it seems Facebook heard our cries. Business owners and community managers are both rejoicing after the news that Facebook has finally added the ability to schedule posts AND given us new roles for page admins. It's a brand new day on Facebook! Assigning Roles There's a reason not everyone has a key to your master filing cabinet in your office. Or, sometimes, the office door. Quite simply, not everyone needs full access to your business. And the same applies to social media sites. Just because you have an intern who may be moderating Facebook comments, it doesn't mean you necessarily want to give them access to your Facebook analytics. Or that you want them to be able to message fans on your behalf. Before last week, there was no way to differentiate between admin levels or to give someone some of the keys to your Facebook kingdom, without giving them all the keys. Thankfully, this has changed. The Help pages at Facebook do a great job breaking down the five different Page admin roles now available and the rights associated with each.
As the chart above shows, the five roles available to page admins are:
Through the use of Roles, page owners can take back some of the controls associated with their accounts. If you're hiring someone to help you with your social media efforts, you can now also limit what they can and cannot see/do on your behalf. Scheduling Updates Page admins now also have the option to schedule updates to go live on their pages at a later date and time. Posts can be scheduled in 15 minute increments and (somewhat comically) up to six months in advance. That means you can start getting those end-of-year holiday posts ready! To schedule a post on Facebook:
It's really that simple! One thing that will be interesting to see is whether these scheduled updates will get the same prominence as "live" or non-scheduled updates do. Historically, one of the problems with using third-party tools (like Hootsuite or Buffer) is that Facebook had a tendency to not give them as much attention in a user's News feed. It will be interesting to see how these updates are treated. What do you think? Are you relieved that Facebook is making your life a little easier and allowing you to schedule updates ahead of time? Or do you think this will result in more spam coming from brands?
From Small Business Trends |
| U.S. Census Funding Cuts Considered, But Marketers May Have Other Research Options Posted: 06 Jun 2012 02:30 AM PDT Congress may do some cutting into the budget for the U.S. Census Bureau. Some small business leaders are concerned about the data that may be lost, but how much does your small business really rely on these numbers to survive? Census for Small BusinessCongress may make American Community Survey voluntary. The US Senate may support the House of Representatives in a move to gut the rolling “long form” American Community Survey. Legislators may simply do this by making the survey voluntary, but defenders of the effort say it provides needed data for businesses and researchers. Huffington Post Cutting Census Bureau funding could hurt small business. Elimination or cutting of the American Community Survey could disproportionately affect small businesses which often can’t afford private research to produce the same information available free in the survey, says Scott Shane, Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western Reserve University. Will the disappearance or weakening of the survey hurt your business? Bloomberg Businessweek How important is the ACS? While observers think legislative elimination of the ACS is unlikely…at least this time around, how important is this data really to businesses who use it for marketing research? There are some mixed messages. While Dick O’Brien, head of the Washington office of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, insisted killing the ACS would eliminate a vital resource, he admitted the Internet is making the survey less important to marketers than it once was. Advertising Age Alternatives for Business DataUse Google for your marketing research. If you want to get some usable business data via the Web, your first stop should be Google. Options for obtaining valuable market data valuable for business use include keyword searches, Google crowdsourcing (via Google+), online surveys, and Google consumer surveys. Do you use Google for marketing research? Small Business Trends Use Facebook to measure your marketing campaign. An added function now includes viral shares in Facebook’s “People Talking About This” counts, meaning “likes”, comments, and re-shares after your fans have already shared your post will also be counted. The new feature gives a better measure of your message’s impact beyond your network. Inside Facebook Use Quora to research trends and topics. If you want to figure out what’s on the minds of your audience, why not use Quora and Q&A sites to find out? You can pose questions yourself or better yet, mine Q&A sites for those that are frequently asked. Targeting popular questions is a way of identifying topics and ideas that are already in demand, says blogger Ken Lyons. Search Engine Watch Pay attention to your customers. Kare Anderson, co-founder of the Say it Better Center and author of two books, Getting What You Want and Resolving Conflict Sooner, suggests that paying attention to others won’t only give you a better idea of what they’re trying to say to you but also makes you more open to new ideas and better able to resonate with others. Harvard Business Review Learn from your clients and potential clients. To land larger clients, even as a small startup, it’s important to research the problems in the market and how you might be better positioned to handle them than competitors. One way to do this is by developing good relationships with a wide range of companies in your industry. It will let you better understand and be able to meet all of their needs when the time is right. StartupSmart Create your own survey research. Secondary data on your market, like information from federal agencies, is no substitute for primary data you gather yourself, says Bob Dahms, a SCORE business counselor based in Bellingham, WA. This primary research can be conducted by taking a customer survey or creating a focus group, but getting this kind of direct customer feedback has never been easier, especially with the Internet. The Bellingham Herald Find some MBA students to help you out. Small businesses unable to pay for big time consulting firms are increasingly turning to MBA students and specifically MBA student consulting programs to help them out. See the example of one Canadian company who got a group of students from a local business school to review its survey methodology and statistical analysis to help design a better method of doing effective marketing research. The Globe and Mail From Small Business Trends |
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