Small Business News You Don’t Want to Miss

Small Business News You Don’t Want to Miss
Will We Soon See a Color Kindle E-Reader, Instead of Black and White?
Using Customer Experience to Drive Future Improvements
An Innovative Way Out Of This Mess

Posted: 24 May 2013 04:30 PM PDT

America and small business news

Top small business news stories this week looked at what to do when you get suspended on Twitter, and policy changes. We also brought you information about new products such as the latest BlackBerry, a new tablet hybrid, and the possibility of a color book e-reader. Also in the headlines is the life and times of a 26-year-old tech tycoon who has made it big … really big!

Read on as the Small Business Trends editorial team takes you behind the scenes with these stories and more. We don’t just bring you a bunch of noise — we add context to show you how the news affects your business.

Social Media

How to come back from a Twitter suspension. Lately, members of the small business community have experienced unwarranted suspensions on Twitter. Contributors to Small Business Trends and even one of our own team member’s accounts were shut down without notice. We give a behind-the-scenes look at one Twitter suspension — and how to recover from it. First step – don’t panic!

Google+ Still missing the boat with big brands. Google+ may be popular with users, but some brands don’t seem to feel the same. A recent study finds that 40 percent of the major brands with a presence on Google+ have either never posted content on the social media site or do so infrequently. However, as we point out, that’s not a good reason for small businesses to stay away. Get your Google+ page up and active, and don’t wait until you have to play catch up.

Hangout with pizzazz. You’ve probably heard of Google Hangouts. Some of us may even use them for business. But now an app allows you to add a dash of style as well. We show you Hangout Magix, a tool that will give you new options when it comes to adding Google Hangout graphics like logos, speaker names and titles, captions and more.

Tech

New BlackBerry Q5 – 3 So Far This Year for BlackBerry. The new Q5 smartphone is aimed at developing markets, not at North America. But the phone is a reminder of how pervasive mobile devices have become in the world … and how BlackBerry is reinventing itself with the BlackBerry 10 software platform.

HP targets iPad with new hybrid tablet. What’s cheaper than an iPad and able to function as both a tablet and a laptop? It’s called the SlateBook x2, and it’s coming in July from HP. The device is priced at $475, just $20 under the current iPad’s recommended manufacturer retail price. And hey, you get a keyboard, which business users love.

Could a color Kindle e-reader be on the way? Sure the Kindle Fire already displays content in color, but it’s really a tablet computer rather than a book e-reader. A new color e-reader would offer advantages over its black and white counterpart without some of the disadvantages of a tablet (such as price and battery life). Rumors abound based on an acquisition Amazon made - although so far no confirmation has come out of the book etailing giant.

Policy

Immigration: E-Verify isn’t required for all businesses – YET. This online system lets employers check with a government database to be sure workers are legally able to work in the U.S. The trouble is that using it is costly in terms of time and productivity, especially to small businesses. In the opinion of many it needs to be simplified. It could also be mandatory in just four years, if Senate bill 744 making its way through Congress now is passed. But if there’s any good news in this, it’s that a provision to accelerate mandatory adoption to just 18 months was defeated in committee. So we’ve got that going for us. :)

Feds owe $3 million dollars in fees to small businesses. The U.S. owes a lot to small businesses in more ways than one. A recent investigation by the U.S. House Committee on Small Business shows the U.S. federal government owes 1,281 small businesses approximately $3 million collectively in termination fees after the government failed to meet its minimum purchase commitment of at least $25,000 each on the GSA schedule. Small business contractors, rejoice.

NFIB Celebrates 70 years. We look back at the history of the organization as it celebrates its 70th birthday. Learn how and why the National Federation of Independent Business was founded. Learn about its 300,000 members and why we need a strong advocate like the NFIB on the side of small businesses.

Entrepreneurship

Who wants to be a millionaire? It’s probably the dream of every tech entrepreneur young or old to become the next Mark Zuckerberg. This week, David Karp, founder of social blogging platform Tumblr, proved entrepreneur dreams can come true. Karp’s site was bought by Yahoo for $1 billion making the 26-year old the latest tech tycoon and overnight mega-millionaire.

Stay Alive. Your business’s survival may depend upon it. Literally! A study recently found that companies whose majority owner had passed away within the first 10 years of founding performed much worse as time went on — even when there was a company management team in place to carry on. So remember, having the founding entrepreneur stay alive is good for business.

Marketing & Resources

What is Gangnam Style? If you still haven’t heard of Korean-based rapper Psy and his monster hit, read on. Psy became a global sensation when his music video — a self-made effort — reached 1 billion views. And his success can teach small business owners more than you might think about marketing on a budget and standing out from the crowd.

Who’s in your ExpertCircle? Here’s a new Web service for small business owners who trust their peers’ judgment when selecting products and vendors for their businesses. The site, launched by Doc Stoc, allows you to submit your favorite products and vendors for others to see and to endorse or critique vendors and services on the site.

Learn from your customers. Customer experience is an important thing for companies to pay attention to. Your customers are the life blood of your business, of course. In this panel discussion, three industry leaders talk about what customer experience means to their companies.

Finance

Main Streets May Soon Be Without a Bank. Rohit Arora, CEO and Co-founder of Biz2Credit pulls together some scary numbers regarding the U.S. banking industry. They’re especially frightening for entrepreneurs in need of funding. Over the last three years, banks have been steadily closing branches around the country, leaving some communities without a local bank, he said.

Looking for a financing alternative? Financing for small businesses has never been so complex or has involved so many options. Pierre Debois reviews a book with a funny sounding title. But “Spank the Bank: The Guide to Alternative Business Financing” may provide some of the answers you need.

The post Small Business News You Don’t Want to Miss appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Will We Soon See a Color Kindle E-Reader, Instead of Black and White?

Posted: 24 May 2013 11:54 AM PDT

Liquavista for Color Kindle?
Amazon recently announced acquiring Liquavista, a Holland-based company, from Samsung. And speculation is rife that the purchase may lead to a color Kindle e-reader to come.

Liquavista makes display screens and specializes in a process called electrowetting. Reuters describes it as technology that ”makes displays clearer in all lighting conditions and can show video without using much power.” The technique has applications not only for e-readers but for other devices like smartphones and laptops.

It’s true that Amazon already has a color Kindle, but it is really a tablet computer rather than an e-reader (read our Kindle Fire review). But this new technology would offer certain advantages over the black and white versions of the e-reader without certain disadvantages of the current color Kindle. VentureBeat observes:

“Liquavista has built a screen technology that approaches the efficiency of traditional e-reader black-and-white e-ink screens while offering the color of LCD and other full-color screen technologies. In other words, you can have your cake and eat it, too: gorgeous full-color screen plus long-lasting battery life. That might be just the technology that Amazon needs to kickstart conversion of its full e-reader line to a full-color and quick-response screen, as e-ink is also notoriously slow to refresh.”

NateHoffelder at Digital Reader first broke the news and suggested the color e-reader connection. The development, if it comes to pass, could be important to both readers of e-books and e-book publishers.

When you consider that e-reader sales are down 28% in 2012 compared with 2011, it seems like the e-reader market needs some shaking up. A color screen would give people who already own a black-and-white Kindle reader a reason to upgrade, and get them excited to buy more Kindle books. And it could make Kindle content itself more compelling to owners of e-readers, especially for books with images in them. Who wouldn’t rather see images in color?

Amazon is focusing heavily on digital content, so investing in devices that make it more compelling to consume that content make sense.

In an e-mail to CNET, an Amazon spokesperson stated: “We are always looking for new technologies we may be able to incorporate into our products over the long term. The Liquavista team shares our passion for invention and is creating exciting new technologies with a lot of potential. It’s still early days, but we’re excited about the possibilities and we look forward to working with Liquavista to develop these displays.”

Further details of the purchase have not been made public. The video below shows the technology in action.

Image: still from Electrowetting Display video

The post Will We Soon See a Color Kindle E-Reader, Instead of Black and White? appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Using Customer Experience to Drive Future Improvements

Posted: 24 May 2013 08:00 AM PDT

Enjoy this panel discussion on the topic of customer experience from the Social Biz Atlanta Conference. The participants are Ashish Bisaria, Senior Vice President of Customer Experience at Manheim, along with Rob Houser, Senior Director of Product Management for Sage Software. As well as Esteban Kolsky, Founder and Principal of ThinkJar and host, Ginger Conlon, Editor-in-Chief at Direct Marketing News.

* * * * *

Host Ginger Conlon: Can you talk a little bit about what customer experience means in your company? Esteban can you give the broader definition, if there is one, of customer experience? Ashish, you want to start us off?

Ashish Bisaria: Manheim is the world's largest used car auction house. So we take all of the used cars and bring the buyers and sellers together in a B2B.

Customer experience for our company is about driving full behaviors from our customers. The behaviors are buy, used, site and direct. At the end of the day, those are the four things that drive all customer experience decisions for us.

Rob Houser: Customer experience has changed our business model to annual contracts. So for us, that is the “stay” part. It is especially important, because every year customers have a new chance to go. So we want to make sure that at that decision point, they are already very engaged with us and we have engaged with them throughout the year and provided value to them and demonstrated that value through our Sage Advisor projects.

Esteban Kolsky: Essentially, there are a few points in there that do matter. First of all, experience could be what the customer experiences or the employee experiences or what the partner experiences or what somebody else experiences.

It is not only what they see or what they hear. But it has to do with everything. The customer experience is what happens to the customer from the moment they first hear about the company to the moment they don't want to hear about it anymore.

Host Ginger Conlon: That is a great point. Customer service is just one part of the customer experience. Customer experience may be marketing communications you receive or the Tiffany Blue Box as you open it. All of the different ways that you interact and all of the different touch points.

Rob Houser: The experience is not the big part of where we are transitioning now, because we have had a lot of really good successes in individual areas across the company and improving customer experience. But they are not tied together, they are not consistent and they sometimes don't even seem like they are from the same company.

That is our big revolution right now. It is trying to take the Sage Advisor umbrella and use that to pull together that ending experience.

Host Ginger Conlon: Ashish, you were saying you have those four stages. How does that actually work for the customer?

Ashish Bisaria: You have to view everything from a company's viewpoint and a customer's viewpoint. If you take the filter of the company viewpoint, there is a theory of what the company wants to be, how they want to deliver the services, the brand and the experience but there is the reality.

A customer experience job is to take the theory – which is the design aspect, the reality, the execution aspect – and minimize the gap between design and execution.
If you use the same concept from a customer viewpoint, the customer has a theory of what doing business with us is. That is their expectation. But then there is the reality of when they do business with us and that is the perception.

When their expectation is lower than perception, we have done all of the right things. When their perception (which is their reality) is lower than their expectation, that is the experience gap.

We look at those four boxes on every thing we do to minimize the execution gap and to minimize perception gap.

Host Ginger Conlon: That's great. So Rob, can you talk a little bit about how Sage Advisor works and how you are using that to retain your customers?

Rob Houser: We have lots of data about how customers are using the products, how many ways they process payroll and how often they process payroll. Transactional kind of stuff that you talked about earlier. But also how long they spend on each screen, whether they use the slow way or the new faster way of doing things or if they customize the application. We can see how many times they call support, what those issues were about on support, what other services they have bought, what industries they are in.

We start to take all of that data and create a common place for our employees to go. When they are talking to that customer – be it is sales, support or user experience, people trying to provide productivity tips and training suggestions – we make sure that they start from, ‘I know what you need. We know you are a manufacturing company, we know you have four users who are sort of new to the system, here is some training that helps them be more productive.’

It is that personalized kind of experience that we are trying to strive for by leveraging the data that helps us to know who they are from the time we start interacting with them.

Esteban Kolsky: The experience is not only about what the customer gets, it is about how both entities get to win and how you get a win/win situation.

Host Ginger Conlon: There has to be a better fit for the company. You can't just do it because you want to be nice. That's great, but it is not going to be long term.

Esteban Kolsky: Instead of, ‘Oh we have to deal what the customer says,’ and you just rush and try to do everything without considering what the benefit to the company is. That's where we come in – to get a better balance.

Ashish Bisaria: If I may add to this, one of the typical challenges for customer experience is what we should focus on. What is the customer asking us to change? Traditional customer experience surveys have a focus on scales - 1 to 10 – right and wrong, good or bad, etc.

Our customer experience service isn't about right and wrong, good or bad. We actually talk to them about the ten different times that the customer interacts with us, and we ask them, 'What do you want us to focus on improving for the year 2013? If you have to pick one area that we can make better for you what would that be?’

Once we have their priority, we do a second level of deep dive into that topic and say, 'What part of that business experience and interaction with you is broken or needs improvement?’ That sets the 2013 priority.

It is a very focused way of getting the rest of the customer's voice into the boardroom and driving improvements.

This interview on customer experience 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 see the full interview, view the video above.

The post Using Customer Experience to Drive Future Improvements appeared first on Small Business Trends.

An Innovative Way Out Of This Mess

Posted: 24 May 2013 05:00 AM PDT

corporate cartoon

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” right? I think, however, a good case could also be made for panic being the father in that equation.

Being a cartoonist means having deadlines be they from a client or self-imposed. Early on, they really stressed me out. But these days, I’m pretty comfortable with them because I recognize them for what they offer us creative folk – a good kick in the pants.

In fact, just last week I was completely out of ideas and had just two days until I had a new batch of cartoons due.

Funny how all of a sudden – the ideas started flowing.

The post An Innovative Way Out Of This Mess appeared first on Small Business Trends.