Let’s Hope SBA, Commerce Merger is Dead With Pritzker Nomination |  |
- Let’s Hope SBA, Commerce Merger is Dead With Pritzker Nomination
- 98% of Small Businesses Use Wireless, AT&T Poll Says
- Justyn Howard, Sprout Social: Social Media Management Evolution
- Little Fifi The Incompetence Expert
| Let’s Hope SBA, Commerce Merger is Dead With Pritzker Nomination Posted: 03 May 2013 01:30 PM PDT
This week President Obama nominated billionaire hotel magnate Penny Pritzker (pictured, right) to be the next Commerce Secretary. He als0 nominated longtime Obama confidant Michael Froman (left) as U.S. Trade Representative. Given these two nominations, some observers are suggesting that the President’s proposal to reorganize several government agencies under one umbrella is just not going to happen. In January 2012 President Obama had announced plans to consolidate the Commerce Department, U.S. Trade Representative, the Export Import Bank and the Small Business Administration, among others. Then during the 2012 presidential election a variation of this proposal was floated that suggested creating a new Secretary of Business. Juliet Eilperin in the Washington Post says “Forget about it.” She notes that while the reorganization proposal still has White House interest, it’s not looking likely to happen. Let’s hope she’s right. Tucking the SBA under the wing of the Commerce Department would dilute support for small business, as I wrote back in 2012:
Others in the small business community were likewise alarmed and opposed when the plan was first announced. After all, what do small businesses and companies the size of Amazon or General Electric have in common? The needs of Main Street small businesses are very different from the needs of large corporations and also very different from high-growth startups. Small businesses would just get lost in the shuffle, said Dan Danner, President of the National Federation of Independent Business, back then. With small businesses responsible for creating 42% of new jobs per the ADP Employment Report for April, it’s worth supporting the needs of America’s small businesses. Let’s keep the mission of the SBA focused and undiluted. Let’s not bury it in more bureaucracy, or confuse the needs. Image credit: Whitehouse.gov The post Let’s Hope SBA, Commerce Merger is Dead With Pritzker Nomination appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| 98% of Small Businesses Use Wireless, AT&T Poll Says Posted: 03 May 2013 11:00 AM PDT
[Click for large version PDF] Nearly all (98 percent) small businesses use wireless technologies in their operations, a 2013 AT&T small business technology poll says. Details of the poll released recently also reveal how dependent upon wireless technology most small businesses have become. For example, the survey shows two-thirds (about 66 percent) of those businesses would be unable to survive or would be severely challenged without wireless. "For small businesses today, wireless solutions have become part of their DNA," said Cathy Martine, AT&T executive vice president of small business solutions in a release earlier this year. The poll also reveals additional details about the choice of wireless technology for many small firms. Smartphones – Small businesses depend on their smartphones – and usages keeps growing. The poll found 85 percent of small businesses use some kind of smartphone in their operations (even if it isn’t the latest generation). That’s double the number five years ago. Tablets – Just over two thirds (69 percent) of small businesses now say they use tablets in their operations. That’s a bit up from the 66 percent of small companies that said they used the devices last year. Interestingly, the use of tablets increases with the size of the business. Ninety percent of firms with between 51 and 99 employees use tablets, while only seven in 10 (69 percent) of firms with 50 or fewer employees do so. Newer businesses are also more likely to use tablets. The survey found 80 percent of small businesses less than two years old use tablets in their operations, while just 69 percent of those two years and older use them. Mobile apps – Despite all the hundreds of thousands of apps available today, only 31 percent of small businesses in the survey say they use apps in business. But of the ones who do, almost half say they couldn’t live without them. The survey paints a picture of tech-savvy small businesses far removed from the old stereotype of small businesses as technology laggards. Small business owners are probably not surprised by the popularity of wireless technology in business operations. It brings productivity and allows small business personnel to be mobile instead of stuck in the office all day. AT&T’s 2013 Small Business Technology Poll was conducted with 1,000 small businesses in 50 states and the District of Columbia surveyed from December 18 through December 27, 2012. The post 98% of Small Businesses Use Wireless, AT&T Poll Says appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| Justyn Howard, Sprout Social: Social Media Management Evolution Posted: 03 May 2013 08:00 AM PDT Technology moves at the speed of sound and social media resides in the technological realm. As a result, social management must be nimble and ready to evolve and adapt at the same speed in which technology moves. Justyn Howard, CEO and Founder of Sprout Social, joins Brent Leary to discuss changes in the way social management is being performed and what current social trends are revealing about the future of social management. * * * * *
Justyn Howard: I was in enterprise sales for a software company in the learning management space, a company called Learned.com. I had been in the enterprise software space for six or seven years before getting involved with Sprout. I was always on the sales and marketing side, but very close to the software and technology space. Small Business Trends: For those who don't know what you do at Sprout Social, can you tell them what Sprout Social actually does? Justyn Howard: Sprout Social is a social media management platform, we provide a Web based platform for our business customers. There are a little over 10,000 across the globe. We help them to effectively and efficiently manage their social channels. Small Business Trends: What is the biggest change over the years across for tracking social engagement and creating these new metrics? Justyn Howard: The biggest change really has been at the macro level. It has been about how organizations are thinking of social and the metrics associated with it. So zooming in a little bit, what that means is, early on we saw a lot attention and effort spent around measuring volume of conversations and sentiment on Twitter and Facebook primarily at the time. What we are seeing now, and somewhere we spent a lot of our resources, is the next step. Saying, ‘How do we tie social, social metrics and social analytics back to our long standing business objectives? Let's set aside some of the newness and some of the mystery around social. Let's find ways to apply the measurement from those channels back to business goals and priorities we have had forever. Things like customer retention, customer satisfaction, cost of sale, cost of support for the customer channel and growth in sales. Things that have always been very key and critical to an organization.’ Small Business Trends: You put out a report that talks about how responsive a person has been. Can you talk about that in terms of why that is important in social? Justyn Howard: We have introduced something in Sprout called the Engagement Report. We introduced a public version that is free for anyone to sign up and get a report card if you will. The purpose of those reports is to understand most companies, within any reasonable size of customer base, have people on social media who are trying to get some type of response from them. Whether it is for a customer service inquiry, sales inquiry or just plain brand evangelism. They want to have a conversation with that organization. Then name of the campaign for the public site was 'Be Present,' and the idea there is very much to have a two-sided relationship. What we are measuring are the conversations where people are trying to interact with your brand. How responsive are you? What kind of time frame is involved in your responsiveness? One of the things we found when we introduced this data was, as you grow into larger organizations, you respond to a smaller chunk of your audience. But you do it much quicker, which is interesting to think about. Those are the types of things we are exposing in these new reports. Small Business Trends: A lot of companies start out with social from a marketing and branding perspective. But you have integrations with companies like Zendesk, that tie listening and analytics back to customer service. What does that mean from a customer service perspective? Justyn Howard: There is a growing population of consumers that, when they think about how they are going to interact with a brand or have a question answered, their preference is going to be to turn to social media channels. If they are out and about and they have a problem, it is going to be easier for them to send you a tweet than it is to find your website, find your 800 number and sit on hold. We are seeing this shift. I think it is really starting to pick up steam over the last eight to twelve months. I don't think it is something that most organizations had anticipated three years ago, but it's not up to them. The customer has decided that this is a place where they want to have their questions answered and be supported. So how can organizations effectively manage that and turn that into an opportunity to give the customers a remarkable experience? Small Business Trends: I like what you said about applying new social metrics to traditional business goals and objectives. What are some that you see companies using? Justyn Howard: We are still in the early days. I think that technology has certainly come a long way, but there are a lot of advances that I think we will see over the next 18 to 24 months that are going to help. Now there is a focus on, ‘How is social growing our sales channels? How is social helping customer retention?’ We are seeing other key stakeholders in those “social” discussions. We know as a customer service team, what key drivers are for us to be effective in terms of resolution time or the cost to support a customer or customer retention. Those departments know how to measure those things. You know there is some technology involved and there is going to be some manual process involved while technology catches up. But by bringing those stakeholders into the conversation, we can then apply what is going on in social. Whether it is uptake in conversation that leads to an uptake in sales or there are different ways that you can look at that data and tie it back to your business metrics, your KPI. Small Business Trends: Any future trends to look out for? Justyn Howard: There is going to be a consolidation of tools and platforms. The current environment is very much what I call, 'bring your own application.' Meaning, people who are managing social channels within organizations will use the tools that they are comfortable with. Maybe the same tools that they use to manage their own personal channels, etc. The challenge that creates when you are looking to have a cohesive strategy, is that it becomes very difficult to support and measure. It is very difficult in terms of audit trail and all those sorts of things that a more progressive organization needs. The other is I think we are going to continue to see a trend toward social as just another channel. It happens to be an amazing channel and one that is very different than any that we have ever had before. But it is another channel to communicate with our customers. Small Business Trends: Where can people learn more about Sprout Social? Justyn Howard: SproutSocial.com is a great place to start. This interview on social management is part of the One on One interview series with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click on the player above. The post Justyn Howard, Sprout Social: Social Media Management Evolution appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| Little Fifi The Incompetence Expert Posted: 03 May 2013 05:00 AM PDT
What’s a good name for a cute little business conference cartoon dog? It’s more work than you think. Here’s what I went thrgouh before landing on Fifi:
Some are servicable and some are too “trying-to-be-a-funny-name” and some are confusing. I’d originally thought Fifi would be overdone like Fido, but in the end it was the best shorthand for a little tiny dog in this business conference cartoon. The post Little Fifi The Incompetence Expert appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
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