Google Plus Local App for iOS Being Retired

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• Google Plus Local App for iOS Being Retired
• 6 Keys To Developing A Successful Trade Show Display
• Raghu Raghavan of Act-On: Now is the Time to Dive Into Marketing Automation
• Run It Past Legal First
• CNBC to Air “Twitter Revolution” Documentary

Google Plus Local App for iOS Being Retired Posted: 02 Aug 2013 01:30 PM PDT As of Aug. 7, the Google Plus Local App for iOS will be no more. The app allowed iPhone users do things like: check what their Google Plus connections had to say about local businesses or places around the world, give reviews of the businesses they had patronized and the places they had been, share information on local places and businesses they found online, easily access lots of local information online where available, and perform searches by category for local businesses like restaurants and cafes. If all this sounds pretty important to your local marketing, that’s because it is. Google announced this week that it is retiring the Google Plus Local iOS app. Fortunately, these features aren’t going away completely. They’ve just been folded into users’ Google Plus profiles on the Web and into a Google Maps app available for iOS. The news was shared in an email from the Google Maps team published at 9 to 5 Mac. It’s a good reminder to share with customers who may be iPhone users that there are new places to share and find information about your business. Image: iTunes The post Google Plus Local App for iOS Being Retired appeared first on Small Business Trends.

6 Keys To Developing A Successful Trade Show Display Posted: 02 Aug 2013 11:00 AM PDT More than any other element you prepare to attend a trade show, the display will make or break you. Attendees will decide with a quick glance at your trade show display whether they want to visit your booth or not. So, the design and wording the board displays directly affects whether anyone will hear your message. Create an Eye Catching Trade Show Display: Reel Them In 1. Show and Tell Them Who You Are in a Single Glance Indian Textiles Photo via Shutterstock Displays can answer a question or pose one, but in order to attract attention you must give them some idea of what they stand to gain from visiting your booth. Develop a clear, concise theme and allow this message to dictate the rest of the design. 2. Keep it Simple Nikon Photo via Shutterstock It’s tempting to want to give everyone your entire message on the display. But people milling about a crowded room with lots to see and do won’t take much time to read. Instead, give them one or two key points that quickly and easily introduces your product, service, etc. 3. Boil Down Your Message to a Single Catch Phrase Slovenia Tourism Photo via Shutterstock Most new products and services are quite complex. It’s hard to easily define a complicated concept, mobile app, product or software package in a single sentence. Instead, create a message that gives the viewer one good reason to give you a minute of their time. Make it catchy. You want your phrase to be something easy to recognize or recall later when they’re ready to make a purchase. 4. Don’t Get Too Technical Hamamatsu Photo via Shutterstock Even if you’re attending a tech trade show, never assume the people attending are interested or knowledgeable about highly technical things. Many companies send a manager or non-tech representative to attend these shows. Craft your message so a layperson can understand and don’t build a display that intimidates non-techies. 5. Use Color and Images Wisely Windows Photo via Shutterstock You want color and images to attract, not to distract. Use no more than two or three contrasting colors to create an eye-catching scheme that isn’t too busy or dizzying. Any images you use must be clear and vivid. It pays to have displays professionally printed, because you don’t want to look homemade in the midst of your savvy competitors. 6. Use Quality Materials and Construction St Engineering Photo via Shutterstock The worst thing that could happen during your trade show is for your well-designed trade show display to topple or crumple. Don’t use cheap materials to build the display. Select high quality, durable materials and make sure the display is assembled properly at the start of the show. Check the integrity of the display regularly. The right trade show display means you’re catching attention from across the room. A display that colorfully highlights the key point of your message lets attendees know it’s worth their time to mosey over –  meaning you get what you paid for to attend the show. Send your best people to work the booth. You don’t want to spend all that time crafting the right trade show display just to have the speaker turn people away. The post 6 Keys To Developing A Successful Trade Show Display appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Raghu Raghavan of Act-On: Now is the Time to Dive Into Marketing Automation Posted: 02 Aug 2013 08:00 AM PDT There has been a great deal of activity in the CRM (customer relationship management) industry of late when it comes to marketing automation. Just over the past couple months Salesfoce.com bought Exact Target (who had not long before acquired Pardot), Marketo had a very successful IPO and Adobe announced their intent to purchase Neolane. But most of these moves had the big enterprise in mind, so what does this mean to small businesses and their marketing automation needs? Raghu Raghavan, CEO of marketing automation platform provider Act-On, joins Brent Leary for a discussion on what the impact of these moves means, if anything, to small businesses. He shares his take on how the proliferation of channels is impacting marketing for small businesses and how marketing automation can help improve their likelihood for marketing success at a time of rapid change. * * * * * Small Business Trends: Can provide us with a little bit of your background? Raghu Raghavan: My interest in this whole space probably started some 12 to 13 years ago. I was one of the two founders of Responsys, which back then was one of first SaaS companies before the word SaaS was even being used. We built a very nice, multitalented platform for doing email marketing back in the day. One of the things that struck me all along was that email was always going to become a part of a much bigger picture with respect to marketers. When I started Act-On, there was a lot of interest in a more robust view of marketing. I think Eloqua for ten years had been talking about marketing automation and what it would mean. I think they educated the market. When Marketo came into the market they basically challenged a lot of the assumptions. Marketing automation always was along the lines of "SAP meets marketing." It was like a big ERP implementation, nine months to set up, and Marketo came in and challenged that. They came with a fantastic approach to the market and we wanted to do some of those things. When we started Act-On, Salesforce was dominant. We were working on our platform to be used everywhere. Marketing automation was starting to be talked about more widely, so it was a fantastic time to enter into a new market that was barely penetrated. Act-On is a company that has the founding engineering from Responsys, it has a lot of deep knowledge about SaaS. We came in, we saw the all of the things that had not been done right in this space, and I think it allowed us to build a company in an whole new way to attack what we saw in the monsters market. Small Business Trends: How has the proliferation of all of these different channels, formats and social networks brought on the need for marketing automation? Raghu Raghavan: I think in a huge way. That is a great question. Because I think that is one of the driving factors for marketing automation that no one really talks much about. You know a little bit of history, it helps to be around this space for a long time. If you look at companies like Unica, part of the new Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) group at IBM, and Aprimo, old line companies – I shouldn't say old line, they are not that old, but they are now old line companies. They actually set out to solve a problem that big companies had, which was multiple channels. For big companies the channels were email, the Web, dealer networks – it was all of their other physical touch points, re-sellers and "what-have-you." Well if you look at companies now, if you look at all of these channels it is sort of like that. So the technology for multi-channel behavior management had been done in a different domain. What happens now is that there is a need to engineer all of this down to a format where a small company, with a relatively small number of employees in marketing can actually make sense of all of this. Every company we talk to tries everything. They try to tweet; they create a Facebook Page; they blog; they do things on the website. The interesting thing with marketing now is to say, ‘What should I be doing? Am I doing enough, because there is no universal answer of what is the best thing for anybody?’ Marketing automation has come along and created a forum where there is a lot of things you can do pretty quickly, lots of power tools. So now the real question is, ‘How do you use them wisely?” The great thing about marketing automation is it takes the focus away from the individual tools and shifts the focus towards what the market is trying to achieve. Small Business Trends: Are you seeing main stream traditional businesses starting to jump in here? Raghu Raghavan: Yess. I think that you raised the question of affordability. It is interesting because the two companies that basically challenge the status quo on that were Pardot and us. Pardot and Act-On basically went and said, ‘Look, you can do sophisticated things without spending a lot of money.’ What is starting to happen here in terms of visiting the mainstream, is you know historically, if you look at Eloqua and if you looked at Marketo, guys who have been in this market for a while, the bulk of their customers were high tech companies, and high tech companies tend to be early adopters of technology. But in 2012 and certainly in 2013, this technology is widely adopted. We have customers in every imaginable industry, segment and nook that you can imagine. We have a customer that sells hazardous material, disposal equipment, gloves and drums and radioactive suits and what-have-you. Now, you tend to not think of these as companies that traditionally adopt this technology. But with the advent of all of these channels, people used their Facebook at home, and started to see ways in which they could use Facebook for work. Or the way people tweet and how they can use this for work. This technology has become completely consumerized. It is no longer in the domain of high tech users. It is consumerized in consumers. Small Business Trends: Everybody has been talking about Salesforce acquiring ExactTarget. Then, just a couple of weeks after that, a company that hadn't been getting a lot of attention when it comes to marketing automation, was Adobe. They purchased a company called Neolane. With these things, is it going to even up the ante, in terms of everybody now knowing they need marketing automation? Raghu Raghavan: I probably have a contrarian view to this and might even be controversial. What is happening here is the evolution of biology of companies that have run the gamut of what they can do, basically getting bought. I mean ExactTarget technology is not pushing the limit of anything, this is a done deal. It is old stuff. Salesforce buying them clears the field for newer companies to come in and do newer and more exciting things. The thing that becomes interesting is people read the stuff in the press and they become even more desirous of trying these things. If they search ‘market automation’ they will find lots of dynamic companies that have stuff they can use right away. Yes definitely, we are seeing an uptake in interest. Certainly, the companies that want to acquire these technologies already are interested in all of the companies in this space. People like Marketo, Hubspot and us are all the topic of conversation. But every day business has less to do with this and more to do to with the fact that there are lots of companies out there that need this stuff, don't have the stuff and don't read the trade press. This 5% number that I quoted is actually very true. If you look at the companies that are ready for marketing automation in North America alone, the penetration is minuscule. In every state of engagement with a customer, our technology is relevant. It is engaging with customers that you don't know yet; anonymous visitors to your website. Just because they are anonymous doesn't mean you can't start to track their behavior and give them interesting stuff to look at. The application of marketing to help sales reps close the business faster, or the application of marketing to take an existing customer and grow them, and upsell them. The ability to use marketing to have your reference customers take action on your behalf by awarding them – this entire gamut of customer engagements is where we expect to be. Small Business Trends: Where can people go to learn more? Raghu Raghavan: Come to our website, Act-On.com. This interview on marketing automation is part of the One on One interview series with thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This transcript has been edited for publication.   The post Raghu Raghavan of Act-On: Now is the Time to Dive Into Marketing Automation appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Run It Past Legal First Posted: 02 Aug 2013 05:00 AM PDT “Run it past legal.” That’s one of those phrases you hear frequently and turning it around so that a runner-type person is actually running something past legal is a pretty logical cartoon to make. Where this one tripped me up was the expression on the runner – specifically his mouth. When I sketched this he had a bit of a smile, but when I inked it, I thought maybe he shouldn’t be so happy about it. Maybe he’s asked to run things past people all the time and he’s tired of it. So it changed to a frown. But while I was shading it I thought, “No, he should be more nonchalant about this. It’s a weird job, but it’s a job and he’s been doing it for a while. It’s a typical day, literally running things past people.” So then I fiddled in Photoshop until it looked right to me. Now all of that might seem like overkill for one tiny expression line that really doesn’t impact the final joke, but it’s the kind of thing you think about a lot as a cartoonist and it’s a lot of fun. The post Run It Past Legal First appeared first on Small Business Trends.

CNBC to Air “Twitter Revolution” Documentary Posted: 02 Aug 2013 02:30 AM PDT Small business owners know about Twitter’s ability to spread a message. In fact, a recent survey by American Express Small Business found 19 percent of respondents use the platform regularly to boost their brands. But an upcoming one hour CNBC documentary looks beyond marketing — to the entire Twitter phenomenon. The one-hour documentary, called “Twitter Revolution,” premieres Wednesday, August 7th at 9pm  ET/PT on the CNBC cable TV network in the United States.  Of course, there’s a hashtag to follow along on Twitter: #TwitterRevolution. Twitter Revolution looks at how Twitter has changed the way journalists, activists and average people communicate.  It examines how breaking news events get tweeted out, with pictures snapped on mobile phones and shared by first-hand observers with the world. The documentary kicks off with the day entrepreneur Janis Krums tweeted a photo of a downed U.S. Airways airplane in the Hudson River in 2009, to his 170 followers on Twitter. His followers shared the image, and then it was picked up by television news stations. Soon millions had seen the photo (pictured above). An ordinary citizen had scooped the media. The river landing came to be known as “The Miracle on the Hudson.” CNBC correspondent Carl Quintanilla interviews co-founder Jack Dorsey about that moment. According to Dorsey, it “changed everything”  Suddenly, Dorsey said, the world viewed Twitter as a source of news. We learn how celebrities from Justin Bieber to Lady Gaga also use Twitter to drive their brands. Quintanilla looks at the potential negatives of the platform, too. Rumors, incorrect information and negative messages can be spread just as quickly as positive and accurate ones.  Then there’s the fact that the platform still has relatively low penetration. Only about 16 percent of American adults online use it. But entrepreneurs may also be interested by an interview with CEO Dick Costolo, that discusses growth and monetization. Twitter focused on being an indispensable utility first, not monetizing until later. It is an interesting business model for startups to consider. Here’s the documentary trailer: Image credit: CNBC video still The post CNBC to Air “Twitter Revolution” Documentary appeared first on Small Business Trends.

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