8 Assets to Boost Your Likeability

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• 8 Assets to Boost Your Likeability
• Docstoc Improves Website to Offer More Resources to Small Businesses
• One Small Business Shows The Advantages of Offering Facility Tours
• Adobe Hacked Potentially Exposing Nearly 3 Million Customers
• 7 Ways to Master the Art of Customer Follow Up

8 Assets to Boost Your Likeability Posted: 08 Oct 2013 04:00 PM PDT “Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.” ~ John Wooden This not some secret sauce, code or insider information and it's not complicated. Likeability is a powerful, intangible super power to have. I've been stepping up my networking lately to open up new relationships and communities. In observing how people approach networking, I clearly see how powerful likeability is. It opens doors and it doesn’t hurt that you bring a smile to someone’s face when they meet you or talk about you to others. As a small business branding and social media strategist, people are always asking me how they can generate more connections, leads and make more sales. Likeability is a big key in achieving this. Truth is likeability, trust, character and the experience we create for people and each other are absolutes. Likeability has won presidential elections, has fueled comebacks and has sold millions of movie tickets. Likeonomics: The Unexpected Truth Behind Earning Trust, Influencing Behavior, and Inspiring Action by Rohit Bhargava begins and ends with the idea that: Personal relationships are the only currency that matters. Remember companies don't hire or refer you, people do. So likeability is a great way to get things started. Aside from the obvious things that consultants, experts, authors and psychologists recommend, below are the top assets that I believe make us more likeable and trustworthy to each other. How to Boost Your Likeability Be Knowledgeable Smarts, emotional intelligence and being knowledgeable about what we do can apply to carpentry or engineering. Be a student of your industry and know the most you can about it. Don't try to fudge your way through things because they are "hot."  You'll be exposed for what you don't know quickly. Your goal is to be thought of as “the best of” in your field. Be Credible Establish your expertise over time and leverage all the results, testimonials and people you touch and help. Publish a book, blog, speak, write, volunteer or take on a project so people can see you in action. Be Honest Stick with the truth and it will always set you free. If you screw up or make a mistake, come forward and come clean as soon as you can in the most appropriate way. Take a cue from Tiger Woods, Martha Stewart, Robert Downey Jr. or Bill Clinton. Be Pleasant Create the most enjoyable experience you can with people, so that they remember you for that.  Deliver it whenever you have an opportunity to. Be Optimistic Nothing is worse than negative complainers who always see the glass as half empty. It's a downer and won't advance your charisma. Find the silver lining, the ray of light in the clouds and work on your positivity. Good energy is viral. Be Consistent I would say this one quality has more impact on success today than most. Consistency allows people to know what to expect from us and keeps us in front of  them. Even moderate consistency of good work can yield results and work really well. Be Engaged Meet Generation C, the connected culture and customer. Being digitally and socially connected is valuable capital today. Using  influence, clout and community to educate and inspire is a brand asset that can advance not only you, but colleagues, ideas, issues and yes – sales. Be Caring The power of kindness, caring and tolerance never, ever goes out of style, so make it a brand accessory daily.  Especially in the Generation C (connectivity) culture and younger generations, it is indispensable. So build character and reputation around this. If you think about people that you like a lot, what are the qualities and assets that you like about them? Popular Concept Photo via Shutterstock The post 8 Assets to Boost Your Likeability appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Docstoc Improves Website to Offer More Resources to Small Businesses Posted: 08 Oct 2013 02:51 PM PDT Docstoc, which has been around since 2007, today launched a redesigned and enhanced website.  The new design and functionality adds additional content.  The content is presented in an up-to-date “Pinteresty” style —  boxes with an image and minimal text (see above) linking to each content piece. More importantly, Docstoc has improved the way small businesses find and retrieve content to help solve problems. In an interview, Docstoc founder and CEO Jason Nazar told us the biggest change is that visitors to the site aren’t just presented with a typical search function.  Instead, they get a guided experience using semantic search. “It’s an evolution to solving entrepreneurs’ core problems,” he said. “The promise we deliver on is that no two Docstoc experiences are the same,” Nazar added.  ”The more you do, the smarter our algorithms get at learning what kinds of documents and content will solve your problem.” When you visit the site you can search for traditional categories such as videos.  But if you click the big “Get Started” button you are walked through a decision tree that asks questions such as:  ”Are you looking for help with starting a business or growing your existing business?”  You get presented with this simple choice: From there you are asked increasingly more-specific questions until you find the help and resources you are looking for. The company’s semantic search technology was all built in-house by the company’s team of 12 engineers.  All of the company’s core technology is built in-house, Nazar added. The company’s sweet spot is the small business with 1 to 10 people in it.  While Docstoc serves businesses of various sizes, these smallest businesses have the most need of help when it comes to documents and guidance.  ”When we got our first round of funding, we went to a law firm and they gave us a packet of documents. Those documents included standard non-disclosure agreements and other documents that saved us time.  But what if you are a business of one?  How can you get those kinds of resources?” Nazar said. That’s where Docstoc’s mission comes in. They want to be known as the go-to resource for starting a small business and growing it. Docstoc today has over 38 million registered users.  It has 20 million documents, many of which are crowdsourced and shared by the community.  But it also has 20,000 pieces of premium content.  Over the past three years, the company has spent “literally millions” Nazar said, creating documents, videos, training courses and other premium materials to help business owners step by step. Today’s revamped website experience follows a steady string of improvements and acquisitions that Docstoc has been making.  In August,  it acquired software recommendation site BestVendor.  Earlier in May it launched ExpertCircle to find products recommended by your peers.  And last year it launched License123 to help businesses identify needed licenses and permits. The post Docstoc Improves Website to Offer More Resources to Small Businesses appeared first on Small Business Trends.

One Small Business Shows The Advantages of Offering Facility Tours Posted: 08 Oct 2013 11:00 AM PDT   Allagash Brewing Company is a small craft brewery in Portland, Maine, employing around 65 people.   Faced with the challenge of marketing what is essentially a manufacturing business, the company started holding facility tours. The facility tours took off and became a hit.  In the summer months brewery tours are often sold out. But the facility tours raised another issue: how to overcome the noise involved in a tour. “Breweries are loud places,” Jill Sacco, who is in charge of Allagash’s tour marketing, told us in an interview.  ”At Allagash you are right there, not up on a catwalk or behind glass.”  She said the brewery’s tour guides “had to scream” in order to be heard.  That, she adds, was stressful for the guides and for the visitors straining to hear. That’s when Allagash tapped into technology for a solution.  First they considered (unsuccessfully) a microphone.  The microphone was still hard for visitors to hear, and it wasn’t good for employee satisfaction, either.  ”If we were doing 8 or 9 tours a day, the guys working on the line had to listen to the tour 8 or 9 times a day,” she pointed out. Then, Allagash hit on the solution of a wireless headset system. They tried one from Listen Technologies called the Portable RF System.  The tour guide wears a transmitter system, speaks into a microphone headset. The guide can speak in a normal tone without the need to shout.  The guide’s voice is transmitted wirelessly, and those on the tour with receiver earphones can adjust volume up or down, for a quality experience. Initially, Sacco says, the Allagash team wasn’t sure that using such a system was the right decision.  ”We were hesitant to try it at first,” she said.  The company wanted to maintain a personal touch, and they were concerned the sets would seem too corporate or too much like Disney World. However, the result has been the opposite.  Using the portable tour guide system, visitors on the tour can hear even if they are in the back of the group. Tour guides are now more relaxed. Line workers don’t have to endure listening to the same tour over and over, day after day, Sacco says.  ”We tried it and loved it.” Facility Tours:  One Way to Grow a Manufacturing Business Allagash was founded in 1995 as a one-man operation.  Founder Rob Tod had worked in a brewery, but thought there was a void in the craft brewing movement.  So he started with a small 15-barrel brewhouse, and began producing traditional Belgian style ales.   Along the way, people started spontaneously dropping by at the brewery wanting tours.  Gradually the company started getting more formalized for the tours. Fast forward to today.  The company has been recognized for the quality of its brews.  It’s even been recognized by Trip Advisor as having the #2 brewery tour in the nation — beating out such nationally-known names as Samuel Adams and Anheuser Busch for facility tours. In 2013, Allagash will have an estimated 22,000 people tour its facility — with sometimes eight or more tours each day in the summer. A typical tour has up to 25 people each.   The company offers beer tastings to legal-age adults after the tours. And they also have a retail store where Allagash sells such branded items as T-shirts, glassware, bottle openers, hats, water bottles, frisbees and, of course, beer to take home. According to Jill Sacco, holding facility tours makes sense as a marketing strategy.  Allagash doesn’t have a bar, pub or restaurant on site.  The tours, free tastings and retail store give people a reason to come to the brewery. More importantly, facility tours reinforce the brand and give visitors something to remember the business by.   She says, “People leave with warm fuzzies — they have an emotional connection to the brand after being here.” That leads to increased sales for the business, she notes. It does, however, require an investment before it begins to pay off.  In the early years, running the tours and hosting the tastings were not self-sustaining activities. But this year, says Sacco, for the first time the tour operations will break even. Earnings from the retail store are now roughly covering the cost of staff (5 full-time people year round, more seasonally), and well as the tasting supplies and overhead allocation.  And that doesn’t even take into account the increase in sales that the company attributes to the tours. But doing tours at that scale takes a good strategy, planning and execution. And it takes technology, also.  In addition to the Listen portable sound system, other technology that Allagash uses includes Eventbrite on the company’s website for tour reservations. And the company’s website is itself a marketing attraction, and integrated with other aspects of the company’s marketing.  The website is visually exciting, featuring beautiful imagery of the company’s products. But the website with its integrated marketing goes beyond that, with pictures of fine food from fine restaurants (even though the company itself has no food operations).  There’s also a section for a food competition that Allagash Brewing holds each year at the Culinary Institute of Education, to “further the awareness of both pairing and cooking fine foods with beers.”  The website then features the recipes, such as BBQ Glazed Pork Chops using Allagash Interlude ale as one of the ingredients. The company even has its own cookbook. Holding facility tours can be a powerful marketing technique, provided you consider all details, including sound.  Also, you get more impact if you integrate the tour program with other aspects of your marketing for a compelling well-rounded experience.  For the right kind of small business, facility tours are powerful marketing. Images: courtesy of Allagash The post One Small Business Shows The Advantages of Offering Facility Tours appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Adobe Hacked Potentially Exposing Nearly 3 Million Customers Posted: 08 Oct 2013 08:00 AM PDT If you regularly use products like Photoshop or Premier, your information may now be in the hands of cyber criminals. Adobe, creator of both popular software applications, said late last week it discovered a cyber attack that may have compromised the information of 2.9 million customers. Writing on the official Adobe Featured Blogs, Brad Arkin, Chief Security Officer for the company writes: Cyber attacks are one of the unfortunate realities of doing business today. Given the profile and widespread use of many of our products, Adobe has attracted increasing attention from cyber attackers. Very recently, Adobe's security team discovered sophisticated attacks on our network, involving the illegal access of customer information as well as source code for numerous Adobe products. We believe these attacks may be related. Arkin writes cyber criminals were able to access “customer names, encrypted credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates, and other information relating to customer orders.” On the bright side, Adobe doesn’t believe cyber attackers removed any decrypted credit or debit card numbers, so they may not be able to easily access customers’ bank accounts. Adobe also believes hackers accessed customer IDs and encrypted passwords for Adobe products. So, just to play it safe, the company is contacting affected customers to have them change their passwords. The company also recommends customers change passwords on any other accounts where they might have used the same or similar character combinations. Adobe has also notified banks that regularly process companny payments and is contacting customers whose credit or debit card information may have been compromised. The company is also giving customers affected the option to join a complimentary credit monitoring service where it’s available. Customers Are Usually the Target With all due respect to Adobe’s products, customers are often the target of cyber attacks. Three other companies — Dun & Bradstreet, Hire Right/Krebs and NexisLexis — were also targeted recently. And here too customer information including social security numbers, birth records and credit and background reports were the apparent objective. You don’t need to be a tech giant to be the target of a cyber attack either. Cyber attacks on small business are also increasing. The objective is often the personal information of your customers. It’s important to take steps to protect your business and the information customers entrust to you. Hacked Photo via Shutterstock The post Adobe Hacked Potentially Exposing Nearly 3 Million Customers appeared first on Small Business Trends.

7 Ways to Master the Art of Customer Follow Up Posted: 08 Oct 2013 05:00 AM PDT Sponsored Post According to Harvard Business Review, the biggest complaint that customers have when dealing with any business is poor follow up. Fifty six percent complain that they need to re-explain their issue when calling back. Sixty two percent report having to repeatedly contact the company to get their issues resolved. As a result, 65% are likely to speak poorly about the company and 48% of customers go on to tell 10 or more people about their bad experience. How Should a Small Business Train Their Staff in the Art of Customer Follow Up? 1. Set Expectations First If you don't set expectations, your customers will set their own. By being proactive, you can influence how they perceive their satisfaction with the eventual outcome. Be specific about what needs to be followed up on and when you will get back to them. Then, get back to the customer in the promised time frame even if there is not a resolution. 2. Focus On After the Sale Businesses are usually great following up to get the sale, but then don't contact the customer until they need to make the next one. This only shows that the business is interested in the sale – not the success of their customer. 3. Pre-Emptive Strike If there is a time of year or a product where many customers experience problems, don't wait for them to call you. Get on the phone or email them. Sage Solutions does this with their accounting business partners around tax time to try to anticipate problems their customers might have in their business. 4. Remember Special anniversaries of customers doing business with your company or other milestones is an excellent excuse to reach out to customers proactively. 5. Be Special Reach out with a special offer and with no strings attached. Too many times, companies only make special offers to attract new customers. 6. Get Personal People do business with those they know, like and trust. If it fits your brand, be more conversational in customer communication. Use real employee names when sending emails or leaving messages. 7. Empower Your Staff to Make Their Own Decisions After sufficient training, give your employees the power to do what is best for customers in specific cases that fall outside normal guidelines. How Often Should You Follow Up with a Customer? Jason Brick suggests asking new clients to fill out a “bug me meter.” This tells the small business how often the customer wants to hear from them on a scale of 1 to 10. For example, a "10" may suggest weekly contact and a "1" may mean only contact with very specific and urgent communications. How do you follow up with your customers? This article, provided by Nextiva, is republished through a content distribution agreement. The original can be found here. The post 7 Ways to Master the Art of Customer Follow Up appeared first on Small Business Trends.

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