Facebook Testing New Shareable Ads

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Facebook Testing New Shareable Ads
GoDaddy Acquires Financial Management Application Company Outright
The Real Reason Small Businesses Aren’t Hiring
Three Questions Every Salesperson Should Ask
5 Ways To Make Use Of Social Media Tools
Microsoft Introduces New Office Suite

Posted: 18 Jul 2012 03:00 PM PDT

In the world of online advertising, companies like Google and Facebook are constantly updating their practices to meet the demands of all sorts of businesses, as well as improving interaction and usability to attempt to grab the attention of today's consumers.

In keeping with such updates, Facebook has just begun testing a new feature that would allow businesses to make their online ads shareable on Facebook.

Mashable discovered the shareable ad unit on BuzzFeed, which played host to a “featured partner” ad spot for Hidden Valley Ranch. Facebook confirmed that they are testing the new sharing feature, but did not announce how many companies are involved or any other details about the test.

If the shareable ads become available to all advertisers, companies that opt in would have the opportunity to purchase ads on other websites that would include a "share on Facebook" link, which leads users to the company's website. Once on the company's website, users can easily post the ad to their Facebook timeline for their entire social network to see.

The new shareable ad feature would be a completely new way for companies who don't already advertise on Facebook to reach a new audience. And the companies that do already advertise on Facebook may be able to reach even more consumers, the thought being that some consumers might be more likely to click an ad if they see that it was shared by one of their friends.

Facebook has not released pricing information for the shareable ads yet, as the feature has only been made available to a select group of advertisers. So it remains to be seen if the feature might be feasible for many small businesses. If shareable ads are not made affordable for small business budgets, then the advertising options available on Facebook may become more one-sided in favor of large companies with huge online ad budgets.

Facebook's current advertising menu includes features like promoted pages and sponsored stories, which aim to garner more Facebook fans and to have more fans see important posts from a company's Facebook page. The new shareable ads, if Facebook decides to move forward with the idea, wouldn't necessarily have any impact on a company's Facebook page or Facebook fans.

For more information about advertising on Facebook and to keep up with announcements about new features, you can visit Facebook’s advertising page.

Share Button Photo via Shutterstock

From Small Business Trends

Facebook Testing New Shareable Ads

GoDaddy Acquires Financial Management Application Company Outright

Posted: 18 Jul 2012 01:00 PM PDT

Web hosting provider GoDaddy has just announced its purchase of Outright, a cloud-based financial management application company.

The acquisition brings together two companies that serve small businesses and entrepreneurs in different ways, and signals that GoDaddy may be looking to expand its range of products and services for businesses.

Outright's mission is to automate small business accounting tasks by providing simple, data-driven and community-enabled applications. Outright gives users the ability to automatically import data from popular online marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon, and Etsy, as well as from bank accounts, credit cards, and PayPal.

The company aims to streamline the whole financial management process so that business owners can spend more of their valuable time on tasks that grow their businesses and less time calculating profits, income, taxes, expenses, and other financial information.

This acquisition means that Outright's more than 200,000 customers will now have access to GoDaddy's complete line of products and services, including customer service specialists. However, Outright's CEO Steven Aldrich assured customers on Outright’s blog today that the services provided by Outright will not be changing because of the acquisition.

Outright offers a free account for business owners, along with Outright Plus, which offers more features such as quarterly and sales tax tracking and reporting for $9.95 per month. The company also offers an iPhone app.

Outright was founded by entrepreneur Ben Curren, who started his own business in 2006 and quickly became frustrated with the financial management process and the amount of time he was spending with spreadsheets rather than actually running his business. He then developed an automated software application to help with the problem, and that eventually became Outright.

Curren, Aldrich and the rest of the Outright team will join the GoDaddy team and continue to work out of Silicon Valley. The amount of the acquisition was not disclosed.

For more information about the two companies and what they can do for your business, visit Outright and GoDaddy.

From Small Business Trends

GoDaddy Acquires Financial Management Application Company Outright

The Real Reason Small Businesses Aren’t Hiring

Posted: 18 Jul 2012 11:00 AM PDT

Economists and politicians who are waiting for small business owners to resume their role as job creators are likely to be waiting a long time. The oft-touted role of small businesses as job creators is changing.

not hiring

Here's how a friend of mine (also a small business owner) puts it, "This may be blasphemous to say," he said in a recent email conversation with me, "but today's small businesses don't generate jobs like they used to."

He had recently talked to several entrepreneurs about when and why they hired staff and found that every single one of them contracted out as much work as possible until they had absolutely no choice but to hire full-time employees. (In fact, one of the few people who had recently hired hire full-time employees said he hired them only to manage all his contractors.)

This approach makes a lot of sense to me and, apparently, to lots of other small business owners. The latest Global Business Survey 2012 from online hiring company Elance found small business's use of independent contractors in general, and online contractors in particular, continues to grow. Nearly three-fourths of businesses Elance surveyed plan to hire more contractors in 2012 than 2011, with online contractors accounting for the bulk of the new hires.

A whopping 84 percent of business owners in the survey say hiring online gives them an advantage over their competitors. Cost savings averaging 53 percent compared to hiring a full-time employee was the number-one advantage cited, but small business owners also appreciated the speed of hiring online and the ability to access talent not available locally.

Specifically what types of talent are these entrepreneurs looking for? The most in-demand professionals were Web programmers (cited as most valuable by 70 percent of respondents) and designers (61 percent). Close behind were content developers (38 percent) online marketers to handle search engine marketing/SEO or social media (32 percent) and mobile developers (28 percent). I'm willing to bet mobile developers start zooming up that ladder pretty quickly.

The online contractor trend is not going away. Far from it. On average, survey respondents predict that in five years, more than half (54 percent) of their workforce will be online workers. Cost savings isn't the only reason for that change. For 40 percent of the respondents, "the quality of talent online is better than they can find locally."

If they didn't have access to online talent, two-thirds percent of small business owners say they would have found different means to hire a contractor. And about 33 percent say they would have either done the work themselves or not done it at all (face it: You know how often things you don't have time for get put on the back burner…sometimes permanently). A mere 3 percent would have hired a permanent employee.

How about you? Are you planning to hire this year and, if so, will it be a permanent employee or a contractor?

Not Hiring Photo via Shutterstock

From Small Business Trends

The Real Reason Small Businesses Aren't Hiring

Three Questions Every Salesperson Should Ask

Posted: 18 Jul 2012 08:00 AM PDT

After over 20 years in the lead generation and lead management business, our team has participated in thousands of conversations with sales prospects, and one of the first lessons you learn in the lead generation industry is that qualifying sales leads requires time, patience and a careful process of asking questions.

jump the gun

Many inexperienced lead generation staff tend to make the mistake of asking for the sale too soon, talking about budget too directly, and assuming that the prospect is immediately ready to talk about closing a deal.

Instead of jumping the gun, play a longer-term game by asking specific follow-up questions to uncover more information, build credibility and deepen your relationship with the prospect.

Here are my three favorite lead qualification questions that can help your sales staff get farther into the sales process and maximize your chances of success with every sales prospect on your calling list:

1. Was there a compelling event that caused you to request information from us?

The reason to ask this question is to find out more about the prospect's reasons for ending up on your list of sales leads. Are they unhappy with their current vendor, shopping around for a new solution to keep up with a competitor, or trying to upgrade or replace an inadequate situation?

What was the serious problem, point of pain or "last straw" that made them want to have this conversation with your sales team?

If the prospect can clearly identify a compelling event, your sales team can position your product or solution to respond to those circumstances. Link your solutions to the prospect's specific "pain" issues.

Of course, not all prospects have such a clear and visible cause that motivates them to seek out your solution. They might only have vague ideas or a general sense that something isn't right, or they might just be curious to shop around and see what solutions are available on the market. If the prospect does not identify a clear "compelling event," then your sales team will have to invest some time in educating the prospect to help them recognize the specific problems that they are trying to solve, and show them how your solution can help them.

2. What is the most important thing you hope to accomplish by solving this problem?

Even if a prospect didn't have a clear event that occurred, causing the motivation to talk with your sales team, they often will have a clearer idea of where they want your solution to take them. By asking this question, you can help the prospect visualize what they want to achieve.

This is part of the process of helping the process understand the benefits of your solution and the ROI that your solution can deliver – by talking about accomplishments, you are helping the prospect think not in terms of "how much they have to pay" but "what they will receive" from your solution.

Another benefit of asking this qualification question is that it shows your sales team how serious the prospect and his/her organization are about investigating your solution and understanding the value. If the prospect doesn't have a clear answer for what they hope to accomplish, this could indicate that they are not ready to make a purchase or are just doing preliminary price shopping.

3. It sounds like you could benefit from our solution. What would you like to see happen as a next step?

Instead of pushing to close the deal, this question serves to invite the prospect into the sales process by putting the ball in their court. You give the prospect the courtesy of allowing them a degree of control over what happens next – and this tactic often helps prospects feel more relaxed and receptive to moving forward in the sales process.

Sales people often prefer to maintain control of the process, so this technique can feel risky, but the truth is that asking this kind of question can give your sales team some valuable insight into the customer's thinking, and see where the customer is in the buying process. You might hear, "We're not sure what we want to happen next," or "We're not ready to move forward," but more often than not, putting some control in the prospect's hands can help move the sales process along faster than you might expect.

Qualifying sales leads doesn't happen overnight, and it requires thoughtful questions and listening to the subtext of what prospects are telling you. Use your sales qualification questions as a chance to probe deeper into the prospect's thought process and learn more about how their organization hopes to benefit from your solution.

By asking the right questions, you'll get to the deal closing table faster than aggressively and immediately asking to close the sale.

Jump the Gun Photo via Shutterstock

From Small Business Trends

Three Questions Every Salesperson Should Ask

5 Ways To Make Use Of Social Media Tools

Posted: 18 Jul 2012 06:00 AM PDT

Social media becomes overwhelming fast. There are too many sites to update, too many keywords to monitor, and too many conversations that you want to be part of in any given day. The result of this chaos? You drop the ball. You become frustrated with social media when you're not achieving all of your goals or you become frustrated when you start spending more time online and less time in your business.

But it doesn't have to be this way!

Instead of driving yourself crazy, invest in the proper social media tools to help you get a better handle on your social media efforts. Below are five ways social media tools can help:

1. Keyword Monitoring: This is going to be a core function of most social media software, and with good reason. It's where social media begins – in the listening phase. Scott Stratten recently shared how Delta fixed his bad experience simply by monitoring not only the brand phrase "Delta" but misspellings like "Detla". In doing this, they were able to catch Scott tweeting about a bad experience he had with the company even though he had misspelled its name in his tweet. Because they knew about it, they could fix it. Had they not been monitoring, they wouldn't have seen it. By using tools to help you monitor what's said about you in social media, you put yourself in the best situation possible to respond and to respond fast.

Using tools like Twitter Searches, Tweetdeck or Hootsuite can help you monitor and manage your social media accounts. And as Delta showed, you also want to keep an eye on common misspellings of your brand name.

2. Easier to Engage: Monitoring updates is one thing, but making it easier to respond is another. Small business owners managing multiple social accounts will want to look for a tool that will let them update various accounts like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and potentially more from one interface. Putting this in place early on can help make social media far more manageable because now instead of logging into four different networks to engage, you only have to monitor and watch one. When your time is already fragmented as it is, this is can be invaluable.

Tools like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, or something larger like Radian6 can help you achieve engagement zen by placing all of your social media activity into one screen.

3. Scheduling Updates: I know what you're thinking – scheduling social media updates is bad! No, automating all of your social media activity is bad. Using tools to schedule updates so they happen on the fly helps you to maintain a presence in your social networks, while not taking you away from your business. Because, let's face it, sometimes you're too busy to log into Twitter when you have a line of customers out the door. By relying on social media tools, you can cross-publish your blog posts to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in one click or set up a week's worth of Twitter news drops in one afternoon.

If you're looking for a great tool to help you schedule social media updates, Buffer is my personal Go To tool, though others offer the same functionality. Here you can set update times, create a queue of content, and even share tasks with other team members.

[Worth noting: I don't recommend using a third-party tool to schedule Facebook updates as it will greatly affect visibility.]

4. Team Management: Another issue many SMBs face is trying to assign social media responsibilities to certain team members. This is another area where using a tool can help to simplify the process. Many of the social media tools available include functionality to help assign certain tasks or updates to specific team members. By doing this it ensures that you have the right person responding to the right question and you make someone accountable to it. It also means tweets won't go unanswered simply because the first person to see it didn't know how to address the complaint. The more you can add accountability to your social media campaigns, the better.

5. Promotion Capabilities: Sometimes you'll need a tool to come in and help you do more than just monitor updates and make it easier for you to respond. You need something that's going to strengthen your social media efforts as a whole, helping to organize contests or provide fans with rewards. Use tools to help you do this! By taking advantage of these powerful tools it gives you the ability to take your social media activity to the next level in a way that is both robust and affordable.

What's a great tool to help with social media promotions? My recommendation would be WildFire.

Are you using tools to make you a smarter social media user? Or are you keeping it 100 percent manual? I'd love to hear it.

Image credit: badboo / 123RF Stock Photo

From Small Business Trends

5 Ways To Make Use Of Social Media Tools

Microsoft Introduces New Office Suite

Posted: 18 Jul 2012 02:30 AM PDT

Drum roll please. Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer gave a customer preview of the company’s new Office suite on Monday, announcing some interesting changes in the new version of the platform popular with so many business users. You can watch the full Webcast on demand and sign up to preview the new Office 2013. It’s expected that product releases as anticipated as this one will generate some mixed reactions, and we’ve got some different takes here for you. So let’s look at some of the analysis of the new Microsoft product and what it might mean for your business.

Meet Office 2013

Bold steps. “We are taking bold steps at Microsoft,” Ballmer told the audience during Monday’s announcement in San Francisco. And from most reports he meant it. “The new, modern Office will deliver unparalleled productivity and flexibility for both consumers and business customers,” Ballmer added. Microsoft News Center

A whole new model. With the introduction of Microsoft’s new Office, the company is adding a cloud-based subscription and a new business model, according to this hands-on review. You’ll be able to buy Office 2013 for your business PC the same as always, but now you’ll be able to add a revamped version of Office 365 too. Wired

Added features. Office 2013 also comes with other features business users may appreciate. In addition to Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, the new suite has been redesigned for tablets, and includes Skype and Yammer integration. ABC News

But Wait! There’s More!

The developer’s friend. Not only did Microsoft pack the new Office 2013 with many innovative features, the platform’s new cloud app model will allow business users to build a new class of apps using both Web technologies and cloud services. Jason Zander’s blog

Not Everyone’s Enthusiastic

Much ado about nothing. It’s not that this blogger isn’t impressed with the features Windows 8 and Office 2013 have to offer. Sure, some of the new features are eye popping, but the question is whether the business user at the moment really needs these new tools with so many other options to choose from. The Var Guy

It’s complicated. Business users may be impressed with the exhaustive 53 page guide explaining the features of the new Microsoft Office. But the licensing of Office 2013 and the newly revamped Office 365 may be a bit more complicated. Business owners may be reluctant to spend the time to figure it out. TechCrunch

Customer experience is everything. Business owners know the importance of providing awesome customer service from day one. Though everyone expects a few bugs with beta-type software like the free preview of Office 2013, the bad experiences of some users so far may mean the company is off to a rocky start. NevilleHobson.com

From Small Business Trends

Microsoft Introduces New Office Suite