Twitter Chat #SmBizEdge: Startup Tips That Make the Difference in Success

Twitter Chat #SmBizEdge: Startup Tips That Make the Difference in Success
Funnier Ways to Say “Sent From My Smartphone”
What Are Sunk Costs?
The Identifiable Victim Effect and How It Affects Your Marketing
4 Inspirational Graphic Design Books for Web Designers

Posted: 17 Jun 2013 02:00 AM PDT

#SmBizEdge Twitter Chat

It’s Small Business Week in the United States, and in honor of that we invite you to participate in a live Twitter chat on Tuesday, June 18, 2013 at 8 p.m. EST, presented by FedEx Office.

The topic is: Startup Tips That Make the Difference in Success. We’ll be discussing what it takes to be successful when starting a business and growing it.

We hope you’ll join in and pose any questions you may have. Or if you have any tips to offer other small business owners about startup success, we invite you to share them. Be sure to follow @FedExOffice too.

Join The Twitter Chat: Follow #SmBizEdge

Be sure to join us for this live Twitter chat event:

TOPIC: Startup Tips That Make the Difference in Success

DATE: Tuesday, June 18, 2013

TIME: 8 pm EST (New York time)

LOCATION: Twitter.com: Just follow the hashtag #SmBizEdge to participate.

Be sure to follow me, Anita Campbell, at @SmallBizTrends too. If you’ve never taken part in a Twitter chat before and you need some pointers, be sure to read “How to Participate in a Twitter Chat.”

Disclosure: FedEx Office compensated me to participate as a small business expert during the FedEx Office Tweet Chat program and write this post. The ideas in this blog post are mine and not ideas or advice from FedEx Office.

The post Twitter Chat #SmBizEdge: Startup Tips That Make the Difference in Success appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Funnier Ways to Say “Sent From My Smartphone”

Posted: 16 Jun 2013 03:45 PM PDT

mobile email signature

You've received plenty of emails that ended with "sent from my iPhone" or another mobile email signature.

Whatever your opinion of these generic signatures, they do serve a purpose. When communicating with clients and business contacts via mobile, you may end up sending emails with typos or formatting errors. Your message may be brief and sound abrupt, versus friendly.

A mobile email signature lets people know why. You’re sending from a smartphone! Ah … that explains it.

However, there are more creative ways to tell your contacts that you're using a mobile device to communicate with them. Some business people have figured out how to have a little fun with those mobile email taglines.

Blaming Technology

Certain smartphone features, such as autocorrect and voice recognition, are meant to make your life easier. But at times they do just the opposite. Your colleagues and clients can likely relate to these issues, so making a note about them in your signature can be both helpful and funny.

Ivana Taylor of DIY Marketers has an email signature on her phone that reads, "Excuse any typos – darn autocomplete!"

And Mike Blumenthal of Local University, has a mobile signature that accomplishes a similar task, while placing the blame on a different smartphone feature. It reads, "Sent from a typical smartphone. If this is illiterate, it's the voice recognition's fault."

Missy Ward, co-founder of Affiliate Summit and FeedFront magazine, also pokes fun at the potential for typos. Hers reads, “Sent from my iPhone. Random auto-corrects and typos are my special gift to you.”

Claiming Smartphone Ignorance

Sometimes it isn't the phone's fault. Sometimes it can just be more difficult to communicate on the go or with such a small device.

Matthew Goldfarb of Corporate Renegade has a signature that jokes, "sent from my almost always misspelling iPhone."

Becky McCray, co-author of Small Town Rules, contributes one used by Sheila Scarborough, of Sheila’s Guide. It says, “Sent from my phone; if there are typos I will still be quite annoyed at myself.”

Even Small Business Trends' own Chief Operations Officer, Staci Wood, has joked about creating a mobile email signature to highlight her minimal smartphone knowledge. She said if she could figure out how, she'd change hers to: “Apologies for any spelling errors – sent from my stupid 'smart' phone.”

Having Fun With Siri

Siri, in case you’re not aware, is the voice-enabled command prompt and answering feature that Apple calls “the intelligent personal assistant.” It’s available on the latest iPhones and iPads. Some people like to have fun with Siri in their email signatures on their iPhones.

Deborah Shane, branding consultant, has an email footer that reads, “Sent from Siri, My Personal Assistant.”

Small business author and all-around funny guy, Barry Moltz, also has fun with Siri. His reads, “Sorry so short … the keys are small on the iPhone 4S. Uh, oh..there are no keys. Maybe Siri can help.”

Random Acts of Email Taglines

Just because you have a smartphone with access to email doesn't necessarily mean you should have to respond to every single thing right away. Ramon Ray of SmallBizTechnology.com has a mobile signature that says, "from my phone (hopefully not while I'm driving or with my family)." It pokes fun at the over-reliance many Americans have on their mobile devices. But it also lets contacts know that there are times he may not be able to respond right away.

Joel Libava, who has created a trademarked brand around the moniker “The Franchise King” manages to continue the brand emphasis in his email tagline. His reads, “The Franchise King®, Joel Libava, sent this from his Royal Droid.”

Brent Leary, technology analyst, conveys that he’s an equal-opportunity technology user. His tagline says, ”Sent from my BlackBerry, … or iPhone.., or iPad… or… well you get the idea … .”

Making Jokes

But you don't necessarily need to be specific about which device you use, for people to get the point. You can simply make a joke that lets people know you're sending the email from your mobile device.

"Sent via carrier pigeon," or "Sent from my rotary phone," or "Sent from my payphone," let people know that you're communicating on your phone. But you’re making a joke about technology and isn’t misconstrued as snobby or exclusive.

On the other end of the spectrum, "Sent from my iPhone because I'm better than you," or "Sent from my $400 smartphone," poke fun at using certain mobile devices as status symbols. Just be aware that sarcastic email lines can be misinterpreted as gloating if others don’t “get” your humor.

What Mobile Email Signature Do YOU Use?

Have you come across any funny mobile signatures? Or do you use one yourself? Share it in the comments below – we want to hear!

Shutterstock: smartphone

The post Funnier Ways to Say “Sent From My Smartphone” appeared first on Small Business Trends.

What Are Sunk Costs?

Posted: 16 Jun 2013 12:30 PM PDT

Sunk costs

In the context of business, “sunk costs” are when you’ve spent money already and will not recover it. In other words, you’ve ”sunk money into something.”

The problem comes in when you keep spending — even when whatever you’ve invested money in, is no longer a good idea. Yet you keep throwing good money after bad.

This sunk costs situation happens much too often in business. We insist on getting value out of the money we’ve already spent. We become determined NOT to lose money. We can’t — we won’t — let go.

However, by not letting go when something isn’t working, we can end up losing a lot more. We keep pouring money, time and effort into something that has no chance of working or would lead to a poor result at best. The project or initiative keeps costing more and more. Instead of cutting our losses, we compound them by hanging on. We make our losses worse.

It goes against our nature to let go.

It’s called the sunk cost fallacy.

The BBC: An Example of Sunk Cost Fallacy

A perfect example of the sunk cost fallacy came to light just last month, in May of 2013. The BBC revealed it was scrapping — finally – a £100 million technology project. It had dragged on for 5 years. The problem: a stubborn desire on the part of the BBC’s Chief Technology Officer to continue building a custom system when commercial systems already on the market would have done the job at a fraction of the cost. Add to that an overpaid, under-supervised enterprise consulting firm — and you have a sunk cost fallacy of epic proportions.

Instead of calling it quits, the project dragged on. Instead of admitting the money previously spent was sunk costs that would never be recovered, they poured more money into it.

Entrepreneurs and business owners can fall into the same trap. We get emotionally caught up a project, an employee, an initiative. We want to make it work. We think that somehow we’ll turn things around. After all, it would be wasteful not to try to get benefits out of money we’ve already spent, we think.

We keep pouring money into it in a misguided attempt not to lose our initial investment. We continue long after logic and good sense suggest it’s time to pull the plug.

Pride sometimes is involved, too. Who wants to admit that something was a mistake? ‘Maybe if we keep working on it, we can salvage it,’ we think.

David Ariely, a behavioral economics professor and author of Predictably Irrational, points out that humans often think they will behave in one way (perhaps the way logic and reason suggest). But in reality we behave differently (perhaps driven by emotion to keep throwing good money after bad).

We tend to focus on the money we will lose if we were to walk away. Instead, if we were reasoning through the problem, we would be thinking about what we could gain by scrapping a wasteful situation — and finding a better solution.

How to Avoid a Sunk Costs Nightmare

As entrepreneurs and small business owners, what can we do? Focus on your business goals and the end result you want. In other words, you need to look to the future, not money spent in the past.

Put out of your mind the idea of recovering on sunk costs. The money is gone. Cut your losses. Sweep up the mess … and move on to something more productive.

It’s also important to learn to recognize when you might be in the midst of a sunk costs problem. We may not even realize that we are in danger of succumbing to the sunk cost fallacy. When we’re smack in the middle of it, it’s hard to see that we are putting more money at risk.

Get a second opinion from someone not emotionally involved in the past expenditures. This is where a good accountant or CFO is worth his or her weight in platinum. He or she will be more likely to evaluate the situation logically.

A smart business owner knows when to seek advice — and take it.

Shutterstock: wasted money

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The Identifiable Victim Effect and How It Affects Your Marketing

Posted: 16 Jun 2013 09:00 AM PDT

victim effect

Ryan White was a haemophiliac who contracted HIV during a routine blood treatment. He was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1984 and died six years later in 1990. In that six years, he skyrocketed from a regular suburban boy to a national star.

Why?

Because when he tried to go back to middle school, teachers and parents of his schoolmates rallied against him – despite the fact that doctors said he posed no threat to other kids. The media picked up the story and an outpouring of support soon came from all over the country. He collaborated with celebrities like Michael Jackson and became the poster child of HIV. Shortly after his death, Congress passed the Ryan White Care Act, making what was done to him illegal.

This is the story of Ryan White. But there have been many similar stories over the years. Most recently, there was the case of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide due to excessive pressure from his prosecutors. He inspired a bill called "Aaron's Law". There was also Phoebe Prince, whose suicide inspired "Phoebe's Law."

And the list goes on.

The question is "Why?"

Ryan wasn't the first victim of HIV; he wasn't the first victim of HIV discrimination either and he definitely wasn't the youngest person to die from the disease. People see the horrible statistics of various causes of deaths in the news every day…but they don't feel an urgent need to act.

Do you?

Psychologists have a term for our tendency to offer greater aid to an identifiable individual, compared to say, a large group of people. It's called the Identifiable Victim Effect.

Identifiable Victim Effect: Why You Can't Help Ignoring Millions But Save One

To use the identifiable victim effect in marketing, we first need to understand the psychological underpinnings of this quirk. Here are a few possible explanations:

Emotion

When you read statistics, you activate the part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. The prefontal cortex is responsible for high level thinking, like mathematics, but has no capacity for emotions. When you listen to a story about a person, however, you activate the limbic system, which is responsible for your emotions.

Certainty

If you take action when you read about the plight of one person, you feel like you're making a real difference. You feel like if you don't help, he/she is certain to suffer. Statistics, on the other hand, are probabilistic in nature. If you donate to a cause to save two million, it may or may not help. This quirk is related to our risk aversion – we are more likely to avoid certain suffering than we are uncertain suffering, even if the latter is potentially more painful.

Story

Humans are wired to gobble up stories and abstract statistics are not stories; they don't captivate us. Stories about a fellow human being's suffering, on the other hand, become the kind of thing we talked about back in the time we were living in caves. Stories were how we passed information around the tribe and ensured the species' survival.

Fairness

There's an innate need for justice in all of us. Psychologists have proven this by conducting an experiment called the ultimatum game. What they found was that people often sabotage their own welfare to see people who they view as their opponents suffer. This is despite the fact that they'd be better off if they had just let go.

How The Identifiable Victim Effect Affects Your Marketing

It is why charitable organizations use individuals instead of statistics in their campaigns. Like this one:

victim effect [Example Above]

So what does this have to do with your marketing?

Well, here are a couple of ideas:

People Want to Connect With Other People

I recently talked to a colleague who was in the process of launching her first start-up which was an online French bakery. She had asked me to review her site, so I did. She obviously invested a lot of time and resources into it, but there's just one thing missing from it – herself.

In her own words, she wanted to appear "big and professional." So her About page talked about her company, not her. Big mistake. If her patisseries are really good, her fans will want to know her. They will gobble up her baking tips. They will follow her like nothing any other company can hope to pull off.

Unless you have a couple of million bucks to "build your brand," this is the easiest way to go straight to people's hearts.

Emotions Are Stronger Than Logic

This one is common industry knowledge: People act because of emotions, and then they use logic to rationalize their behavior.

Just look at all high-end consumer products. Nothing in that area is sold based on its utility. A $500 pair of jeans is no different to a $50 pair (some surveys have found people can't even tell the difference). A brand-name school teaches the same curriculum other schools do (and there's no evidence they teach it better). And a $5000 DSLR camera isn't for everyone – most people who bought them don't need 20 megapixels, let alone know how to use the features they paid a premium for.

This also applies to what you might think are "rational purchases." For example, properties. You'd think with what would be their largest purchase, people would think logically, but that's not true. They buy based on emotions (you hear people say they "fell in love" with the property they viewed).

Even B2B purchasers aren't rational with their decisions. As a small business owner, I often pay a premium for a more reliable contractor, even if after taking into account delayed projects, his less reliable competitor is much cheaper.

People Care for More Than Themselves

You've often heard of our selfish nature. That we humans care only for ourselves. But we all know that's bull at times. Just turn on the TV. There, you'll see volunteers help others in need when a natural disaster strikes. You see environmentalists fight oil tycoons. You see activists fight for gay rights. The list goes on.

In fact, according to some estimates, we now volunteer at a rate never seen in history. As people become more educated (which we are), we tend to be more empathetic and therefore volunteer more.

How can you get your customers to care for your business? Well, check out Eco Store's example. Eco Store is a relatively small company in the household product industry – an industry notoriously difficult to break into because its consumers tend to buy on habit. (When was the last time you thought about which detergent to buy?)

Yet Eco Store, which aligned itself with the environmental movement before it was cool, was able to change people's habits and thrive. They didn't compete on price, which is the prevalent in the industry. Instead, they started with the "why."

The business started in the co-founders' basement but Eco Store is now exported internationally.

People Want to Make a Difference

Most people care about the environment, but they never do anything significant to help save it. Why? Because people generally don't feel like one single person can make a difference.

To bridge the gap between 'reality' and what we 'feel', certain organizations emphasize how the customer's money can make a difference. Grill'D, a national burger joint in Australia, gave out a bottle cap to every customer who graced their business. What for? So they can place that cap into one of three jars placed at the entrance of the restaurant – each jar representing a certain local charity:

victim effect

The jar that gets the most caps at the end of each month gets the largest donation from Grill'D. Now think about it. Those amounts are tiny to a business like Grill'D. Yet its marketing effect is undeniably effective – Grill'D burgers are twice as expensive as some of its competitors, but since its founding in 2004, Grill'D now has 51 stores around Australia and was pulling in $67 million in revenue, up 68% from the previous year.

How would you adapt this for your company?

People Identify With Causes

It's a human paradox that we want to belong to a large group, yet we also have the need to feel that personally we are "making a difference."

The reason we help others in need isn't because it's fun to do. It's because we align our identity with a certain cause. People feel what psychologists call a "cognitive dissonance" if they stand by and watch their beloved causes being trashed.

If you don't think this works, just check out Dove's "Real Beauty" campaign (which, by the way, featured a small group of women, not abstract statistics). The campaign didn't "sell" Dove products, yet sales skyrocketed nonetheless. Dove doesn't officially comment on this, but by some estimates, the campaign drove up sales by 6 to 20%, adding a whopping $500 million to their bottom line.

Their target market identified with the cause – and they bought Dove products because of it.

Identifiable Victim Effect Photo via Shutterstock

The post The Identifiable Victim Effect and How It Affects Your Marketing appeared first on Small Business Trends.

4 Inspirational Graphic Design Books for Web Designers

Posted: 16 Jun 2013 06:00 AM PDT

From colors and shapes to layout and navigation, design can make or break the online experience. A well-designed Web presence can attract, hold and help convert your target customers while a poor design can drive away visitors like nothing else.

Like many of the Web folks my age, I’ve taken few formal graphic design classes – I’ve learned most of what I know about design from online observation, experience and books. That’s right, I’ve learned a ton about graphic design from books, the best of which also continue to provide inspiration for my own projects.

Below are four of the most useful and inspirational graphic design books in my library. I found each one on a bookstore shelf (both online and off) so head on out and pick one or more up for yourself – your creativity will forever thank you.

Graphic Design Books for Web Designers

100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design

By Steven Heller and Veronique Vienne

I came across this gem while browsing at a local bookstore. I was first attracted by the cover design which is a good thing for a book on design. Bright red, the front and back are covered with the stenciled names of the ideas included within the book.

Some of the ideas that caught my eye included: Body type, white space, pictograms, botanical geometry, the grid, nostalgia, riddles and rebuses, asymmetric typography and visual puns.

It’s what I found inside the book however, that convinced me to add it to my library. Well-organized throughout the book, there are 2-3 pages devoted to each design idea. On each set of pages, you can find a history of how and when that particular idea came about as well as a look at the impact that the idea had on the graphic design world.

Best of all though are the tons of images included to illustrate each idea. Ranging from full-page spreads to smaller blocks scattered about the page, each image helps you understand the design visually while also providing inspiration for your own projects.

100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People

By Susan M. Weinschenk, Ph.D.

No, all four books do not have a “100″ theme, but this one certainly deserves to be included on this list.

Chock-full of useful and useable information, this book focuses on how design affects human beings. This is a key element to understanding when and where to use different design elements to make the biggest and best impact.

Some of the things discussed include: people scan screens based on past experience and expectations, people read faster with a longer line length but they prefer a shorter line length, unpredictability keeps people searching and people are motivated by progress mastery and control.

As with the previous book on this list, the concepts are well organized into groups of pages. The best part however, is that each group ends with specific points for you to take away.

This is incredibly helpful and adds tons of value.

Idea Index

By Jim Krause

I’ve had this handy reference in my library for ages, but it’s as relevant and useful now as it was when it was first published. Inside its yellow covers, you’ll find both graphic effects and typographic treatments explained and illustrated across two pages each.

The first half of the book is dedicated to images and includes concepts such as doodle, drop shadow, damage, mask, photo effects, overlap, out of register and translucent. Each design type is illustrated using a light bulb, a very effective approach that makes it easier to compare between the different effects.

The second half of the book is devoted to type and text and includes concepts such as expand, reverse type, link/interlock, extreme weight and mixed tone.

Also included are pages that explain overarching design concepts such as letter spacing, simplification, limitations and relationships.

Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated

By William Lidwell, Kritina Holden and Jill Butler

I have to admit, I saved the best for last. Not only is this one of the most fascinating books on graphic design ever, its also the most useful.

The subtitle of the book is, “125 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions” and that’s just what you’ll find inside. Each 2-page set both explains and illustrates a fundamental design concept that can have a profound affect on the success of your work.

I truly love the way this book is written – it’s as if each and every word was considered and all extraneous words were taken away.

You can get an idea of what I’m saying in these three examples of concepts (including an introduction for each) from the book:

Layering: The process of organizing information into related groupings in order to manage complexity and reinforce relationships in the information.

Flexibility-Usability Tradeoff: As the flexibility of a system increases, the usability of the system decreases (this explains why most of the folks in my parent’s generation cannot use our universal remote).

Progressive Disclosure: A strategy for managing information complexity in which only necessary or requested information is displayed at any given time.

I learned a ton the first time I read through this book but you don't have to read it cover to cover to get something out of it. The way the book is organized enables you to dip in and out of its pages whenever the mood or need, hits you.

Just as reading a cookbook does not make you a great cook, reading these four books will not make you a great designer. What they will do is give you a much deeper insight into the elements of great design and a much broader view of how you can use design to attract, hold and convert your target customers.

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Small Business Trends

Monday, June 17, 2013