Business Tips from Freaky, the Scary Snowman

Posted: 25 Dec 2013 03:00 PM PST

Freaky, The Scary SnowmanEdited

He may look like an over-sized Holiday decoration. But, in fact, this is a guy in a snowman costume. And he specializes in scaring passers-by while a video production team records the results for their exclusive YouTube channel.

Check out Freaky the Scary Snowman in this video from his channel.

Just call him Frosty the Snowman with an attitude! And yes, the videos can be great content for sharing with your social media following or perhaps in a seasonal email. (Be careful when selecting the video to use, though. Some definitely may not be “safe for work” due to language — people say the darndest things when they’ve just been scared out of their wits!)

But, this tall wintery stranger can also teach us a few things about running our own businesses. For example:

Be creative to engage your customers. The passers-by this guy surprises certainly can’t miss him. And his YouTube channel has nearly 500,000 subscribers and receives nearly two million views monthly. Who would have thought that a guy-in-a-snowman-get-up could achieve that kind of engagement? It’s due to the creative way it’s carried out.
Never miss a branding opportunity. There’s not only a YouTube channel – but Freaky, the Scary Snowman also has a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. And there’s even a Scary Snowman bobble-head available for sale.
Be clear about what you want from partnerships and money-making ventures. Freaky, the Scary Snowman, is much more than a guy in a snowman costume who likes to scare people. (Well, a little more, anyway.) A fan page gives very specific analytics for the team’s channel and videos as well as demographics. And the site provides potential business partners with a list of collaboration and sponsorship opportunities and how to contact him for more information.

Maybe we could all stand to be scarier snowmen in our own businesses, too.

Image: The Scary Snowman

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A Christmas Letter to Readers

Posted: 25 Dec 2013 09:00 AM PST

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas!

Before you groan, assuming this will be a long rambling boring letter, I promise to keep it short.

The year 2013 was a year of milestones for the team here at Small Business Trends LLC. I’d like to share a few:

You may have noticed that we increased our original reporting of small-business specific news. Along with regular columns and expert contributions, we now regularly publish 5 to 7 items daily.
We’ve started doing more profiles of individual small businesses. We’d love to hear from you if your business has an interesting story that you believe others can learn from.
We started doing more coverage of mobile devices, due to reader interest.
Our team grew. In addition to myself as CEO, we now have a Chief Technology Officer, Chief Operations Officer, a news editor, a social marketing maven, and a Chief Strategy Officer. We also have a part-time Community Manager. That is in addition to regular columnists, journalists and experts. Check out our About page for more details.
A new responsive design for the site was rolled out in November. Feedback has been good – we’re glad you like it.
We worked quite a bit on implementing a CDN and managed to cut the site load time in half since January 2013.
Traffic and readership has grown, and we’re glad you like us.
Our two Awards programs were more popular than even — the Small Business Book Awards and the Small Business Influencer Awards. Congrats to all nominees and winners.
Our other sites are growing – Tweak Your Biz and BizSugar have both grown during the year.

While we get tons and tons of mail that make it difficult to respond to everything, we do try hard to read everything and reply on social media channels.

I plan to write a full year-end business report. Until then, a gigantic THANK YOU to each of you. Big thanks to our sponsors, too!

I know I speak for all of us on the team when I say we’ve made many many friends during the year, and treasure each and every one of you.

Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!

Ornament image via Shutterstock

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