Join Us on October 16 for a Twitter Chat With HP on Exciting New Technologies |  |
- Join Us on October 16 for a Twitter Chat With HP on Exciting New Technologies
- A $1 Billion Twitter IPO, a $1,000 Curved Samsung Phone and More
- Microsoft Will Introduce Office for iPad
- Don’t Prospect Strangers Via Email
- Bubblegum Interactive’s Jasmine Elias on Serving a Community of 2 Million
- The Water and Oil Merger is Going Well Despite Warnings
| Join Us on October 16 for a Twitter Chat With HP on Exciting New Technologies Posted: 11 Oct 2013 07:15 PM PDT
Please join us on Wednesday, October 16, for a chat on Twitter. It’s an opportunity to expand your networking connections, exchange information and ideas, and we’ll have a few giveaways, too. I’ll be joined by my good friend Ramon Ray of SmallBizTechnology.com. The chat will be led by HP, which organized this chat and asked us both to participate. We’re going to be discussing how to use mobile and cloud technology to allow employees to work when they want, where they want, how they want. Your employees want to use their own devices — especially tablets and smartphones. But that can pose security issues. It also requires that connecting technologies work well with various devices – for instance, software needs to work seamlessly. And when it comes to printing, there are variety of efficiency advantages, such as direct mobile to print, or direct connection from cloud storage services such as HP Flow CM, Box.net or Google Docs. If you’re not familiar with the latest technologies, you may be surprised at what you can do. This Twitter chat will explain how you can embrace IT mega trends and increase productivity for your business. Join The Twitter Chat – Follow this hashtag: #NewStyleIT DATE: Wednesday, October 16, 2013 TIME: 1 to 2 pm EST (New York time) LOCATION: On Twitter.com. To participate follow the @HP_SmallBiz handle and simply add this hashtag to your tweets – #NewStyleIT. And search that hashtag to see who else is participating. WHO: YOU, of course! Hosted by @HP_SmallBiz. Expert guests: @RamonRay (Ramon Ray) and @SmallBizTrends (Anita Campbell). GIVEAWAYS: Ramon and Anita will be giving away two beautiful new HP printers. Details here. 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." The post Join Us on October 16 for a Twitter Chat With HP on Exciting New Technologies appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| A $1 Billion Twitter IPO, a $1,000 Curved Samsung Phone and More Posted: 11 Oct 2013 04:00 PM PDT
There’s so much to follow and so little time. Thanks to the Web, you can keep yourself more informed on the latest developments than entrepreneurs at any other time. But, of course, running your business takes time too. That’s why the Small Business Trends editorial team works so hard to bring you the news you may have missed this week. Enjoy! A $1 Billion IPO and a $1,000 Curved Samsung PhoneTwitter seeks $1 billion. The microblogging platform already crucial to many entrepreneurs and thought leaders now wants to go public. And the amount of money they are planning to raise may seem high for a company that still isn’t profitable. Samsung releases first curved smartphone. It may cost $1,000, but no one can deny Samsung’s new Galaxy Round is unique. The curved Samsung phone is an innovation others will follow. And it is a marketing master stroke demonstrating the importance of being different. More Mobile NewsNo iPad 2 for the holidays? Looks like that may be the case. But expect announcements coming from a big Apple event scheduled for Oct. 22 to clarify things. Would an iPad Mini be your choice for a business tablet? Amazon smartphones could be coming. At least, that’s the case if you believe all the buzz. Certainly, the company has built its own tablets. The question is whether these phones will be largely consumer products, just a curiosity or a good tool for your business. Windows could soon run on your Android HTC phone. Microsoft is apparently trying to convince the phone manufacturer to add Windows Phone as a second option on some of its Android devices including the HTC One. Microsoft plans Office for iPad. Of course, iPad users already have access to Office Web Apps. (See the video we’ve shared for more details.) And Office 365 subscribers can use an Office Mobile app for iPhone. But the new Office for iPad would be something different. News From The WebDocstoc updates with a new look and more. Some might describe the look and feel of the new Docstoc as “Pinteresty.” But Small Business Trends founder and CEO Anita Campbell explains that’s not the only change to this small business resource site. This new policy may save Etsy. The craft site has been at the center of a controversy lately. So-called resellers allegedly use loopholes in the company’s rules to market mass produced items, an Etsy no-no. Adobe discovers hack. When you’re the victim of a cyber attack, it’s not just your own business that can become a victim. A recently discovered cyber attack at Adobe may have exposed the personal data of nearly 3 million customers. Ecommerce InnovationsLet visitors log into your website with Amazon. The ecommerce giant has introduced a new program called Amazon Log In and Pay. And there are advantages for small business users who already sell merchandise from their websites. We’ve got more info. PayPal acquires online payment developer Braintree. There’s big competition in the online payment field. It’s an important issue to small businesses in need of a way for customers to make payments. And PayPal is trying to remain in the forefront. Public PolicyBoehner faces hard decisions on business. What is a Speaker of the House to do? Speaker John Boehner faces an agonizing decision on the Affordable Care Act impasse. And for a champion of small business, there may not be a good one, says commentator Scott Shane. Upcoming EventsAnd the winners are! Meet the top 100 champions in this year’s Small Business Influencers Awards. The gala event in New York City is coming up Oct. 17. Check the above link for more details. Reading Photo via Shutterstock The post A $1 Billion Twitter IPO, a $1,000 Curved Samsung Phone and More appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| Microsoft Will Introduce Office for iPad Posted: 11 Oct 2013 01:30 PM PDT
If you’re both a Microsoft fan and an iPad user, this could be good news. Microsoft apparently plans to introduce Microsoft Office for iPad by developing a version of Office specifically for use with the device. We should mention some clarifications here. Technically you can already use existing Office Web Apps on the iPad. The apps are available to users without a Windows operating system through Microsoft’s Skydrive cloud service. See the video below for more details: The company also has a “mobile” version of Office for iPhone, but it is only available to subscribers of Office 365, Microsoft’s virtual office software. A New Microsoft Office for iPadA new Microsoft Office for iPad app would apparently entail touch interface, reports The Verge. Microsoft is apparently working on touch interface for the Windows version of Office first. The company may then expand it to other devices. But there are no specifics on when the new version could be introduced. It’s not clear whether a new Microsoft Office for iPad app would be available only to Office 365 subscribers as is the case with the Office version for iPhone. But Microsoft is clearly trying to get people to use its products even on devices that don’t use Windows. For example, the company has announced it will roll out Remote Desktop apps for Apple and Android mobile operating systems soon. The software giant is also pushing hard to make its operating system available on more mobile devices. The company’s presence in the mobile market remains weak. Microsoft recently approached HTC about beginning to run Windows Phone as an alternative on the company’s Android devices. Under what circumstances would you use the Microsoft Office for iPad app in your business? iPad Photo via Shutterstock The post Microsoft Will Introduce Office for iPad appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| Don’t Prospect Strangers Via Email Posted: 11 Oct 2013 11:00 AM PDT
Of course, you have to talk to strangers in order to network, prospect and grow your business. However, too many small business owners and sales people are using email to prospect strangers and to do that type of communicating. There are several problems with this practice. If we remember that sales is about relationships and trust, we can start to see why attempting to prospect strangers via email can be a problem. Think about how you react to emails you receive from strangers. Are you suspicious? Cautious? Disinterested? Well, guess what? So are your prospects. I believe that people prospect strangers via email because it's easy and nonthreatening. After all, if the recipient doesn't respond, you don't hear their rejection. So you don't feel anything negative. Unfortunately, those who prospect strangers by email are missing the whole point of prospecting, in my opinion. Why You Shouldn’t Prospect Strangers Via EmailProspecting is about building relationships and identifying who might need what you have to sell. In order to do this, you have to have a conversation. You can't have one via email. When you pursue prospects by email you are telling them that you don't really have an interest in doing business with them. You aren't willing to do the work of finding out about them and their needs. It's more like you are just engaging in an activity so you can say that you did something. Harsh? Maybe. However, if you think about it – you'll see what I mean. When most people send emails to strangers, they end that email telling the stranger to reach out if they are interested. Here's the message that is received:
I'm sorry to tell you that this will not get you business because you aren't doing anything to engage the prospect. Try This Instead1) Identify your target market. What does an ideal client look like? This is a person or company who can benefit from what you offer. 2) Identify where they are and then do your research. Learn as much as you can about them so you have something to talk with them about. 3) Determine if you know anyone who can introduce you to them. 4) If so, ask for that introduction. If not, call them. Either way, you have to call them and engage them in conversation. 5) Lastly, please don't leave the activity up to them. Keep reaching out to them, tell them that you will if you have to leave a voicemail message. When you do this, you are letting them know that you are interested in exploring whether you can help them or not. You are taking responsibility for moving the relationship further. You are appreciating that they are busy and have a lot on their list of priorities. And you aren't taking anything personally. There are a myriad of reasons why someone might not want to meet, or might not call you back. Don't assume you know what that reason is. Create your own outreach system and stick to it. When you take the powerful action of calling instead of emailing, you'll find that people respond and your business grows. Suspicious Photo via Shutterstock The post Don’t Prospect Strangers Via Email appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| Bubblegum Interactive’s Jasmine Elias on Serving a Community of 2 Million Posted: 11 Oct 2013 08:00 AM PDT Having an active community of two-million users is a dream for many businesses. But it does pose serious challenges when you're a company of 20 employees – with only a handful of them working on the front lines of serving a community of customers that size. Jasmine Elias, Community Manager of gaming company Bubblegum Interactive, shares her experiences in keeping an army of users happy, engaged and on board for the long haul. * * * * *
Jasmine Elias: I did not previously work in the game development field. I actually worked in politics and I lectured at one of the local universities here. I was very much into academia and all of that. And I actually wanted a bit of a change. So I saw Bubblegum was advertising for jobs and I applied. And now I am the Community Manager at Bubblegum Interactive. It’s a small start-up company. We’ve been making games for about three years now. Our flagship game is a virtual universe for kids under twelve. Employee-wise we have about 20 people worldwide. Our headquarters are located in Sydney, Australia. Small Business Trends: Do you have a big user community? Jasmine Elias: Approaching two million users for Space Heroes Universe at the moment. Small Business Trends: So you have roughly 20 employees and approaching two million users. That’s a pretty interesting ratio there. Jasmine Elias: It is a very interesting ratio. We very much like to keep it as a tight-knit family at Bubblegum. It’s still very much the atmosphere and pace of a start-up community where we interact quite closely with each other and we have overlapping roles within the company. Small Business Trends: So as the Community Manager, what kind of special challenges do you have when there’s two million users and a very limited numbers of employees to serve a community of that size? Jasmine Elias: I would say the most difficult is probably attempting to portray the company line to both parents and children. So in a way, it can be a bit difficult to portray to children the importance of the safety aspects of Space Heroes. Why they can’t do certain things or say certain things but also try to do that in a very fun way. Then, to take that exact same company policy and apply it to parents. I’ll respond in the same way, but in a very serious manner towards the parents and again, to sort of emphasize the safety, but to show them that it is still a fun game. Obviously, the language has to be a bit different for both people. The approach is slightly different. Small Business Trends: On a typical day, what are the numbers of interactions or requests that you’re getting from users? Jasmine Elias: There’s been a massive change in the market in general, specifically our virtual world market where people are no longer interacting with desktop-based games as often. Although our game is playable on tablets, they’re not really engaging with that in the amount of numbers we’d prefer. Because of that, the numbers that come through Desk.com, the amount of tickets or emails that we receive has substantially changed. I would say that this time last year, we would have had an average of 200 emails a day whereas now we would maybe have about twenty or thirty a day. And that is a considerable shift. Small Business Trends: Are you seeing a pickup in interactions via the social channels? Jasmine Elias: We’re seeing users help each other out a lot more. So again, one of the things I do is, even though we have no official capacity to overlook the fan blogs, there are a couple of fan blogs that we have that are quite busy. Kids are always willing to help each other on those fan blogs from what I’ve noticed. I’ve also noticed that kids, it could just be because of their age, a lot of these kids are 13 so they’re actually not allowed to use Facebook. Those kids tend to talk to each other on a program called XAT, which is a chat program. And they tend to talk to each other on Skype and Tango and all those sort of apps. I have noticed that there is a fair bit of interaction on social media, specifically Twitter, less so Facebook. I think that’s more to do with their age in general. But what I’ve noticed with those interactions is, there’s a lot more lurking than there is actual interaction. So kids will be quite happy to retweet or favorite one of our tweets or like one of our pictures. But in terms of commenting, in terms of actual engagement, it’s generally quite low. Small Business Trends: Does having a system like a Desk.com help you to be more effective in your interactions? Jasmine Elias: I would say that Desk.com gathers everything. The first thing I do when I walk into my office in the morning is actually check it because those emails we receive are the most important emails of the day. The ones where customers have actually gone out of their way to interact. If there’s a trend in those emails, then I know there will be a trend in the community as a whole. If we have five people emailing us about the same issue, then we know there’s a certain correlation with the greater community as a whole. So it could be two percent of the community is affected by this issue. But there are certain users who will never actually complain or talk we’ve noticed, or care about an issue enough to let us know. Just knowing that Desk.com allows us to correlate those issues and allows us to make those issues a little bit more actionable so we would then have a chat about whatever the issue may be, and see where we could take it from there. Small Business Trends: What are some of the expectations that your customer base has when they reach out to you? Jasmine Elias: We try to respond to them in as timely a manner as possible. We check to see how many cases are pending, how many have recently been resolved and how long they’ve actually been pending and how long it’s been since an agent has actually opened up the case and looked at it. It allows me to see how long it’s been sitting there and how long our response time is. Small Business Trends: How do you go about creating an active community? Jasmine Elias: I would personally define “community” as our user-base, our customer-base, because our virtual world is a children’s game so we have a varied community. We have a community of parents, and a community of investors. We have a community of parental guardians and we also have a community of children who are our actual, active users. The way we approach the community is, a four-pronged approach. We would approach gamer communities and tell them to review the game and to play around with it and see if they think it’s suitable for kids and how much fun they can have on it and so forth. We’ll approach mommy bloggers and we’ll get them to look at the game and review it and get a little home-grown community from them as well. There are also some websites like Mediaclip which are aggregators of games, so we’ll use them as well. We’ll also side with tech blogs and so forth and advertise Space Heroes in that sense and we’ll go into the existing community of our competitors which is a little bit of a strange thing to do. We’ll see the issues that are corresponding to them, if there’s something in a market that needs to be filled and so forth. We’ll try to latch onto that and try and transfer the issue into our game and say, ‘Hey, you guys really want this. It’s not in that game, but it is in our game. Check it out.’ And they will. We really do depend on our users. We also attempt to advertise and interact with them using social media. Small Business Trends: How do you go about getting that kind of information that will help you create the products and services that are going to keep these guys around longer? Jasmine Elias: In terms of quantity of information, we have some really deep statistics on the game. Every time we link our game to a certain website or a certain advertiser, we’ll have a unique URL where our marketing guys will actually track each specific unique URL every time the user registers on our game. We actually track from where they came. Because it’s a kids game, we have some major safety concerns with capturing specific unique data, so we can exactly know where they are and their age, and through IP-tracking we have a general idea of location. I would actually go forth and have a really in-depth conversation with whoever was reviewing our game. With the mommy bloggers, or the kids themselves, I actually regularly talk on Skype to our superfans and they’re the ones who’ve actually created blogs. Some of them have been around with us since Beta. We’ll have conversations about the game and what they like and what they don’t like, and what they’ve seen in other games. We just really try to build on that as well. Small Business Trends: Does the system allow you to manage the growth of support help as opposed to having to bring on more people to help manage this? Jasmine Elias: Absolutely. If we were just using generic emails we wouldn’t be able to add macros and add notes. For us, the most used aspects of are probably macros and labels. All of our emails are sent through different labels. Currently we’ve got a label running for our apps. We’ve got a label running for our cases. We’ve got help reports, and that’s a label of all the abuse cases sent in from the virtual world. If someone’s being mean to one kid in the virtual world they can send a little help report and then we’ll take a look at that user and see if they need to be suspended. We’ve also got billing cases and current cases. When I read an email straight away, after three or four words, I know exactly which macro I need to use in order to respond to that person and it saves me so much time. Instead of spending five minutes on a case, I could literally spend ten seconds. Small Business Trends: Do you have a knowledge base? Jasmine Elias: We have FAQ, and it’s actually integrated within our website. But because most of our users who write in are either kids or parents, they’re quite time-restricted and they don’t often want to go through the FAQ. So we’ll have the answer in the FAQ, but also a macro response for them. Small Business Trends: How do you expect to deliver the kind of service your users are going to want and need going forward? Jasmine Elias: We are adapting our gaming platform. We’re delving a lot more into the app market. A lot of our Space Heroes users are using our apps, even though they’re not directly targeted at kids. We’ll have apps that are directed at slightly older kids. We’re trying to get them to move across with us. Small Business Trends: Where can people go to learn more about what you guys are doing? Jasmine Elias: We’ve got a corporate website, BubbleGumInteractive. This interview on serving a community of 2 million with just a handful of employees 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 Bubblegum Interactive's Jasmine Elias on Serving a Community of 2 Million appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| The Water and Oil Merger is Going Well Despite Warnings Posted: 11 Oct 2013 05:00 AM PDT
So everyone knows oil and water don’t mix, and I’d been playing with that idea for a few days. But I could not, for the life of me, come up with a joke about it that I was happy with. That is, until I was listening to the news about a merger. Merger – that’s it! What if an oil company and a water company tried to merge? Would that work? Could it work? After some digging online, I came across emulsion and not only did I crack this this cartoon, but I leanred a little (or at least refreshed my memory) to boot. The post The Water and Oil Merger is Going Well Despite Warnings appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
Small Business Trends: Can you give us a little bit of your background and tell us about Bubblegum Interactive in general?
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