Presentations: How to Make Your Message Stick

Presentations: How to Make Your Message Stick
Twitter Announces $1 Million in Ad Credits for Chase Small Business Customers
Speed Up Your Mobile Browsing with Dolphin
Mobile Marketing Will Generate $400 Billion in Sales by 2015
Which Sole Proprietors Cheat on Their Taxes (According to the IRS)?

Posted: 17 Jun 2013 04:00 PM PDT

I’d guess that most of you that are reading this have either given PowerPoint presentations at one time or another or at least viewed one. Did you know that statistics reveals that listeners only remember 50% of what was presented just 10 minutes after a presentation is given?

The following day, it drops to 25%. A week later, it whittles down to just 10%. And this is if your presentation is good.

With over 350 PowerPoint presentations given each second across the globe, how does one go about making theirs stand out from all the others? This infographic by Slideshop provides ten valuable techniques on how you can make your presentation stand out from the crowd.

[Click here for full size version]

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Twitter Announces $1 Million in Ad Credits for Chase Small Business Customers

Posted: 17 Jun 2013 01:30 PM PDT

If you’ve been curious about the new Twitter advertising platform, you may have a good reason to try it out soon. But you’ll have to be a small business customer using one of Chase Bank’s financial products first. Twitter announced a partnership with Chase Bank last week aimed at trying to encourage use of its little more than a year-old advertising service.

Twitter advertising was launched on an invitation-only basis to select users in March of 2012 and was opened to all U.S. users in April of this year. The new program would award $1 million worth of free Twitter advertising credits in $100 increments to “eligible” Chase small business customers.

As part of the partnership between Twitter and Chase, the bank’s estimated four million plus small business customers, including those using Chase’s Business Banking, Ink from Chase credit card and Chase Paymentech (a system for merchants to accept credit cards on mobile devices, will get other benefits too. Some of those will include access to research, best practices and workshops about using Twitter to grow a business. No word yet on how many of these customers will be eligible for the free small business advertising credits, but Twitter has promised more details early this fall.

The popular social site will also be sharing customized content through a new @ChaseSmallBiz Twitter account.

On the official Twitter blog, Russ Laraway, head of small business for Twitter, wrote:

Our goal is to help small businesses build better customer engagement, increase sales using direct response techniques, and engage more followers with compelling content. We'll be posting videos, infographics, white papers and a how-to guide developed by Chase and Twitter to help small businesses learn more about the value of Twitter.

This isn’t the first time that Twitter offered advertising credits underwritten by a sponsor. Another program was rolled out in 2012.

Bottom line: the advertising credits from Chase won’t be available for several months yet. Stay tuned and we will update you when they are rolled out to small businesses.

Twitter Photo via Shutterstock

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Speed Up Your Mobile Browsing with Dolphin

Posted: 17 Jun 2013 11:00 AM PDT

When you browse the Web on a cell phone, you want it to be fast. You may think that all you need is a faster connection to speed up browsing, but it could be something as simple as downloading a better Web browser built for mobile. This review of the Dolphin browser is for the increasingly-mobile business owner who wants to be more productive and is looking for lifehacks to get there.

I’ll start out by saying that I love the Dolphin browser on my Samsung S3 (courtesy of the fine folks at the no-contract cell phone team at Ting for Business who provided me with a long term loaner phone). I tried Chrome and other default browsers, but they were marginal at best. As a completely free browser, Dolphin delivers for Android, iPhone and iPad. You can even download extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari which will allow you to sync stuff with your mobile device.

It is hard to take a photo of your phone when that’s your only camera. So I’m using a press kit photo from the company’s website.

What I Really Like:

Has gesture and voice control. For gesture, you click in the lower corner of the screen. You create your own custom scribbles or sketches or shapes to serve as shortcuts to specific websites. You click and draw that gesture to get to the site. For voice, called Sonar, you shake the handset and up pops a microphone icon. Start speaking and it takes you there. Sort of like Apple’s Siri or Google Now.
Evernote add-on that lets me clip pages to my Evernote account.
They have a battery saver app to help you conserve battery usage on your smartphone. I guess it is in their best interest to ensure you have plenty of battery for surfing the Web.

What I Would Like to See:

Something that lets me know there is a history list to the left and an apps list to the right of the main browser window. Essentially, you have to grab the far side of your window and slide left or right to find these admin type areas. Useful to know, but I happened upon it.
I honestly don’t have anything else. I think it is one of the best browsers on the market.

If you are on a mobile phone and find yourself waiting for websites to load, test out a different browser like Dolphin. Again, it is a free browser and you can get it for your Android-powered phone, the iPhone and iPad.

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Mobile Marketing Will Generate $400 Billion in Sales by 2015

Posted: 17 Jun 2013 08:00 AM PDT

mobile market

If you sell directly to U.S. customers or provide marketing services to clients who do, pay attention. A recent report says a growing mobile market is already generating billions in U.S. sales. And businesses are also spending billions to market to customers via mobile channels.

The Mobile Marketing Association, a global trade association for the mobile marketing industry, says those numbers are only going to increase.

Consider that last year mobile marketing generated an estimated $139 billion in U.S. sales. This figure takes into account both business to business and business to consumer sales.

The association claims the “MMA Mobile Marketing Economic Impact Study” released last month, is the first comprehensive study of U.S. economic performance across the mobile marketing industry.

Huge Growth Projected

Most impressive is that this amount is expected to grow by more than half during the next two years. The report says sales generated through mobile marketing will top $400 billion by 2015, an amazing 52 percent rise.

But it’s not just sales that are increasing. The MMA study suggests the amount U.S. companies are willing to spend on mobile marketing is increasing too.

For example, in 2012 the study estimates retailers and marketers spent $6.7 billion to reach customers via mobile channels. That’s considerably less than the amount generated by mobile sales, but still represents a huge opportunity for businesses providing mobile marketing services.

The study projected that amount would also increase, reaching $19.8 billion by 2015.

Mobile advertising, mobile direct response or enhanced traditional media and mobile customer relationship management were all considered in that expenditure.

What it Means to You

While the MMA study was aimed at demonstrating the economic stimulus and job creation potential of mobile marketing, there is a clear message here for small businesses and entrepreneurs as well.

USA Today reported recently on how small businesses are already putting mobile marketing to work to generate additional sales.

We’ve reported previously on the importance of mobile technology to small business operations.

But the MMA study demonstrates the importance of mobile technology for growing your business too.

For many small businesses, this could include focusing on making sure you have a mobile friendly presence. It could also include focusing more attention on social media marketing, much of which is accessed via mobile devices by your customers.

You could also focus on developing mobile apps for your business. And, of course, if you provide marketing services to other business clients, it also means you should consider including mobile marketing services among your other offerings.

How is your business using mobile marketing to reach customers?

Mobile Photo via Shutterstock

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Which Sole Proprietors Cheat on Their Taxes (According to the IRS)?

Posted: 17 Jun 2013 05:00 AM PDT

cheat on taxes

If you are non-native-English-speaking man who runs a construction or real estate rental business, hires a tax preparer rather than doing his own taxes, and thinks that making money enhances social status, beware. Research by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) indicates that you are among the sole proprietors most likely to cheat on your personal income taxes.

Running your own business is one of the best ways to pay less in taxes than you owe, a recent New York Times article explained. The IRS knows this, of course, reporting that sole proprietors disclose only 43 percent of their income on their returns.

To figure out which taxpayers might be underpaying their taxes and be worthy of a second look from its auditors, the IRS's computers assign a Discriminant Function System score (DIF) to each tax return filed. These scores use information from the IRS's database of past tax filings to predict whether a taxpayer is likely to have under reported income.

Determining which sole proprietors might be underreporting income isn't easy. Most business pay all that they owe. Even if the IRS reassigned everyone currently responsible for evaluating non-profit status applications for all politically conservative organizations (a little topical humor here), the agency would still lack the resources needed to audit all sole proprietors. For returns filed in 2011, the tax authority "only" audited 1.6 percent of individual returns with business income.

That's why the IRS contracted with Russell Research to conduct a survey of sole proprietors in the first quarter of 2012. The investigators divided a representative sample of sole proprietors into the most and least "compliant" (IRS-speak for willing to pay all of the taxes they owe) on their DIF scores for their 2009 tax returns. They then compared the most and least compliant fifths on the basis of their answers to a range of survey questions.

The results, which were published in a study released earlier this year, provide insight into which sole proprietors are most likely to be tax cheats:

Men were less likely than women to be "compliant." While males made up 59 percent of the more compliant taxpayers, they composed 65 percent of the less compliant ones.
Twice the fraction of sole proprietors who speak a language other than English at home were less compliant in paying taxes (14 percent versus 7 percent).
Owners of companies with more employees were less compliant (average employment of 6.6 versus 3.6).
Owners of professional, scientific and technical service businesses, health care and social assistance, and arts, entertainment and recreation businesses were more likely to be compliant than owners of construction, and real estate and rental and leasing businesses.
Owners of businesses with lower sales tended to be more compliant (average sales of $47,000 versus $87,000).
Owners of businesses with lower expenses tended to be more compliant (average expenses of $12,000 versus $50,000).
Owners who complete their own tax returns tended to be more compliant (32 percent of the more compliant sole proprietors do their own taxes versus only 21 percent of the less compliant ones).
People who indicated that they were more willing to take financial risks, and those who reported that overall status depends on finances, tended to be less compliant.
People who were more cynical about the tax system, those who had more negative attitudes about the IRS, and those who were more skeptical about the value of government activity, tended to be less compliant.

Note to those of you at the IRS who read my posts: I abhor risk; am very positive about the government and the tax system; and think you are doing a fine job, despite recent news reports.

Just thought you'd want to know.

taxes Photo via Shutterstock

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