Big News: Quickbooks Competitor Intacct Targets the SMB Market |  |
- Big News: Quickbooks Competitor Intacct Targets the SMB Market
- Facebook Will Acquire WhatsApp, Users Told Nothing Will Change
- The 3 Musts for an Effective Landing Page
- Rick Ayre Shares What Helped Drive Amazon’s Success From the Beginning
- It’s One of Those Days
- Horse and Carriage Controversy Threatens Small Carriage Owners
| Big News: Quickbooks Competitor Intacct Targets the SMB Market Posted: 21 Feb 2014 02:30 PM PST
News affecting your small business happens all the time. The Small Business Trends editorial team keeps track of the stories that are most important, which gives you the time to run your business and still stay informed. Software & AppsIntacct accounting software seeks to replace Quickbooks. The new firm may not have many customers yet — only just over 7,300, we’re told. But the company has more capital and a marketing plan that involves penetrating the small to medium sized business market. Lithium acquires Klout. The site for measuring social influence has been criticized by some for letting too many users game the system. Will Lithium’s acquisition bring new uses for Klout’s technology? Some experts seem to feel that’s possible. The latest Firefox allows more social plugins. The latest update comes with a new social API. It allows plugins like Facebook Messenger for Firefox, Cliqz and more. There are also new security improvements, so read on. OpenTable app offers simple mobile payment option. Larger companies like Starbucks and McDonald’s are already either using mobile payment or are experimenting with it. OpenTable’s new mobile payment app makes it easier for small restaurants and eateries to participate too. TechGoogle Fiber is getting faster. If your company has invested heavily in the cloud, the next important question is how fast you can access those new services. Fiber may provide the quickest access with high speed Internet connection and a planned upgrade could be coming soon. New iBeacon has business applications too. It may be a great alternative to GPS, but iBeacon also has small business applications too. Take the idea of placing them throughout a retail environment so customers get information about products on sale when they come into range. Google offers face-to-face meeting technology. Google Chromebox for Meetings is a new tool that can allow remote meetings with up to 15 participants. This isn’t an alternative for the average Skype conference call. But it could be a cheaper solution for companies using more complex teleconferencing systems. Body odor might someday be personal ID. It may not be anytime soon. But researchers believe body odor could someday be a form of personal ID. Like a fingerprint or iris scan, it could be the new wave in security — including for your business. Social Media & WebDo people really read what they share? Well, yes and no, according to a recent discussion on Twitter. There may not be much correlation between what people read and what they share. But, we’re pretty sure it depends on your audience. No more buying pins or followers on Pinterest. It’s a policy shift that shouldn’t surprise users of other big social media platforms. Pinterest doesn’t mind marketers managing your brand presence on the site, but paying for individual pins and followers is another story. Upstart finds backers to invest in your future. Imagine if there was a way to sell shares in yourself. It may not be such a far fetched notion. Now a new site called Upstart may give you just that option. Here’s what you need to know about the site. Marketing & Customer RelationsSmall beef producer demonstrates the value of diversifying. John Brady once focused on marketing his ranch’s products to larger retailers. But thanks to Internet marketing and a new approach of selling directly to customers, he has reinvented his business for the future. Here’s why you must be careful about renting mailing lists. It’s the story of a bank that sent out credit card offers with one very embarrassing name in the mix. Too bad no one double checked before this happened. Sixty percent see economic news as mixed. It may be a mistake to assume that most of your customers have a negative outlook on the economy. It turns out most Americans feel news on the economy is neither all positive nor all negative but a bit of both. PolicyThe proposed EXCEL Act may not be dead yet. The bill’s full name is the Expanding Access to Capital for Entrepreneurial Leaders (EXCEL) Act. Supporters say it would increase small business access to capital through a program regulated by the SBA. And even though it didn’t pass last year, it may still have some traction. Cantwell replaces Landrieu. There’s a leadership change at the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) replaced U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) last week as chair of the committee. Cantwell may have more entrepreneurial experience, but whether this will change things remains to be seen. Reading Photo via Shutterstock The post Big News: Quickbooks Competitor Intacct Targets the SMB Market appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| Facebook Will Acquire WhatsApp, Users Told Nothing Will Change Posted: 21 Feb 2014 12:30 PM PST
Facebook has announced plans to acquire WhatsApp for approximately $16 billion. But users of the popular mobile chat service have been told by WhatsApp officials that nothing about the service will change. The biggest question for users might be whether the acquisition will eventually lead to advertising on WhatsApp. The mobile platform has remained staunchly opposed to selling ads relying on a very low annual membership charge for its profits. In a post on the official WhatsApp blog, CEO Jan Koum explained:
For those using WhatsApp as an inexpensive texting service, advertising would make little difference at first, anyway. That is unless, as on Facebook, it eventually means extra costs to reach your entire network. Small business owners and marketers have noticed that since the introduction of sponsored posts on Facebook, it can be difficult to get the exposure you once had for free while posting to your network. On the other hand, for those seeking access to WhatsApp’s younger demographic, some kind of advertising service might offer an easier way to target that group. WhatsApp is one of the social media communities seeing more participation from users in a younger demographic as teenagers are reportedly less interested in Facebook than they once were. Facebook says it will acquire WhatsApp for a combination of $4 billion in cash and another $12 billion in Facebook shares. In an official announcement from the Facebook Newsroom, the company insisted it was attracted by WhatsApp’s huge following including 450 million active members who use the app each month. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Founder and CEO, said:
It is, of course, uncertain as yet, how Facebook will capitalize off this traffic without resorting to advertising. It also remains to be seen how much affect the Facebook acquisition will really have on the WhatsApp community. Image: WhatsApp The post Facebook Will Acquire WhatsApp, Users Told Nothing Will Change appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| The 3 Musts for an Effective Landing Page Posted: 21 Feb 2014 10:00 AM PST
A landing page is a single webpage where you want potential customers to land in order to capture leads for sales. There are many different features you can include on a landing page. You likely want to include enough information to capture interest and drive sales, but not enough to distract them from your main point. To help businesses sort out the essential elements from the distractions, PPC Hero details what they deem to be the must-haves of an effective landing page. The three most important features to consider, according to an infographic they produced are [click image above to see full infographic]:
It's important to keep the overall landing page goal in mind when putting it together. The infographic states:
So your business should have a clearly outlined goal for its landing page and you should always keep that goal in mind when building it. There's so much advice available for how to create an effective landing page. Different types of businesses will create different pages, but no matter what your business sells, you'll need a page that tells them why they should buy your product, shows them examples, and gives them a way to purchase or learn more. That's why the three aspects mentioned above are considered musts. Image: PPC Hero The post The 3 Musts for an Effective Landing Page appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| Rick Ayre Shares What Helped Drive Amazon’s Success From the Beginning Posted: 21 Feb 2014 07:30 AM PST By now we all know how Amazon has changed the way we shop, read, and even create businesses with its Amazon Web Services arm. But in the early days of eCommerce, it was far from a sure success. As I'm in the process of writing a book on how Amazon has changed the rules of the game for customer engagement, I recently had the distinct pleasure of speaking with one of the people responsible for leading the design of Amazon's first site. Rick Ayre, former Executive Editor of PC Magazine and Amazon's Vice President and Executive Editor from 1996-2000, shares some of his experiences during the early days of the business. Rick was responsible for the editorial content and design of the Amazon website, and discusses the role content, design and customer experience played in shaping the direction of the company. * * * * *
Rick Ayre: In July of 1996, Amazon contacted us and asked us if they could send some marketing people to do a demo of a new website. I was already doing websites for Ziff Davis and other people at the time, so I went to the demo. I think the lead woman was the first Vice President of Marketing for Amazon. She and her assistant started to demo the site and they said,’We’re going to build an online bookstore, and this is the homepage. We just launched the homepage, and we wanted to show you the homepage and the site, the way it looks now, and tell you what we’re doing.’ I watched the demo for about five minutes and I said, ‘Do you want to know how to build a great bookstore?’ They kind of looked at me and said, ‘Well, sure.’ So I talked for the next 45 minutes of their demo, and the next day I received a telephone call from Jeff Bezos’ personal assistant and she said, ‘He would like to talk with you, and he was wondering if you were going to be in the area anytime soon.’ The first week in August, PC Magazine is going to be in Seattle for an Editor’s Day and I arranged to meet him. He pulled up in an old Honda Accord and said, ‘Jump in,’ and I jumped. He gave me a whirlwind tour of the fulfillment center and the offices. At the end of it he said, ‘Rick, would you be willing to talk to us about a job?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll listen.’ I have to say, parenthetically, that my first love in my life is books, but the second is music, and the third is technology. The order sometimes shifts, but I was committed to all three of those things. I read everything. I listen to most everything, and I play with technology. In fact, the reason I took the job at PC Magazine was because I was trying to figure out a way to be able to get somebody to pay me to play with technology all the time, and pretty much that’s what the job was at PC Magazine. I loved all those things, so synergy with Amazon was obvious. Small Business Trends: Was the culture of customer obsessiveness already baked in at that point? Rick Ayre: Yes, but, as a lot of people will tell you, Jeff was a pragmatist. He did an interview with The Wall Street Journal and they asked, ‘Why would people give you their credit card? They don’t know you?’ And this is back when everyone’s consciousness was, ‘Why would anyone buy books from you?’ So in order to cushion the thinking and provide a safety net on one hand, but a website that was welcoming and friendly on the other, the challenge is we’re not trying to convince somebody to buy a book. The challenge is to convince them that they should buy it from you and that they can trust you. So one of the first things Jeff did was try to figure out how to do effective customer service. He was the first person I heard say, ‘We want to meet or, if at all possible, exceed every customer’s expectations about how this is going to go, how the relationship with us is going to go from the beginning to the end. Every aspect of that relationship should exceed their expectations, and that’s our goal.’ Small Business Trends: Did Jeff bring you in to help translate that vision into the website design and the website experience? Rick Ayre: Yeah, I was the gatekeeper for the customer experience on the first half of the relationship, and then the second half was the fulfillment centers and customer service. Small Business Trends: So the first half was on the front end of the website, and then the second half of the relationship was the actual fulfillment? Rick Ayre: Fulfillment and customer service if it was necessary. But the customer service started from the moment you purchased a book. I think at the beginning he wanted to congratulate people for buying the book. But I’m not sure he ever put that into words. But you got an email from Amazon giving you all the details and telling you how you could check up on the status of your order and what to expect next. So the customer service part started right away upon your purchase, and it continued until you received your products. Small Business Trends: How did you go about designing the website experience to get people to buy? Rick Ayre: We had an explicit set of goals. Some of them we vocalized, and some of them we didn’t. Our feeling was that, unlike Walmart, we didn’t have to try and convince the customer to buy a product. No matter what book page you were on, we didn’t have to convince you to buy that book. Instead, what we wanted to do was entertain you and get you to click on a few more pages. In other words, intrigue you and then once you were on a product page, we wanted to create the perfect context to make a buying decision; that decision could be to buy the book or not. We didn’t want you necessarily to buy the book. We wanted to be sure that you were in an environment where you had the information you needed to decide whether that was the book you wanted to buy, and if you did make the decision to buy that book, that you were happy with that decision. It started from that point, and it continued until you had the book and were more than satisfied with it. Otherwise you wouldn’t come back, and we needed everybody to come back. Small Business Trends: Was hiring an editorial executive something that was done a lot in the early days of eCommerce, or was that something that Amazon was early on to the scene in doing? Rick Ayre: Well, we were eCommerce, so everything that we did was early on in eCommerce. But yes, we did make a conscious decision to try and distinguish our site with the content that was on it, and we worked hard to hire people. When Jeff hired me, he said, ‘Okay Rick, a third of your job is running the editorial group. A third of your job is hiring people, and that could be for anybody in the company.’ Working for me was Susan Benson, who was in charge of the editorial group and the words and the headlines. When we started, we had nebulous roles. She ended being in charge of production, building the production system. Jeff wasn’t sure why we needed designers. ‘What does art have to do with it,’ he said. But, in fact, we made it the convention that we don’t want a highly designed site. We’re not Apple, but we did want a site that was warm and welcoming and made people happy and intrigued them at the same time, so they would come often and stay late. Small Business Trends: So once he understood how that fit in with obtaining and keeping customer’s attention, he was good to go? Rick Ayre: Yes I think, and pretty quickly as the other eCommerce sites sprung up, it was clear one of the differences between ours and almost every other eCcommerce site was the quality of the content – and that was a big differentiator. It made sense completely for content to be a factor if you’re trying to create a perfect environment for book buyers. It wasn’t as intuitively obvious when we launched music, which was next, or movies and DVDs and stuff, which was third. But we used our ability to generate content with a large number of writers and our experience with how to create a site with great, intriguing content to our advantage as we moved into the other areas. Small Business Trends: Was that already owned by Barnes & Noble, or did they buy that later on? Rick Ayre: No, if Barnes & Noble owned Books.com, they bought it. Yeah, it was a separate website, an independent website. It wasn’t a website until very late on. It was an Internet site set up by someone who owned a bookstore and knew a little bit about the Internet. Small Business Trends: I was looking back and thinking of all the different sites that I bought stuff from in those early days. Amazon is by far the only one that I stuck with. Do you consider the content piece of the website or the continual focus on the user experience, made Amazon the one that lasted? Rick Ayre: I agree with your assertion that it was creating a customer experience. From the moment they arrived on the website to well after they received their product, that exceeded their expectations, that was a good one. It was great in fact. So we had to do it with the website, but we also had to understand customer service and how to provide that on the telephone and via email. Jeff was really the person who guarded the customer experience from one end to the other, and he made it his responsibility to guarantee it was great from end to end. Small Business Trends: You mentioned a little bit about customer feedback. What role did that play in evolving the website? Rick Ayre: Well, from the very beginning, the customer reviews were a critical part of the content that we built on the site, and they were a point of contention, but something that we encouraged. Kevin Kelly, who’s a famous prognosticator in the Internet space, he was one of the early guys at Wired. He always used to say, and this was way back in the 1990s, ‘If you give people the space and the tools that they need to build a great Internet site, they’ll build it for you. You’ve just got to give them the space to do it and the way to do it.’ When it came to things like customer reviews, that certainly was true. So that was a really important aspect. Even before we had editors to review books and music and movies and pick the 10 best and stuff like that, we had lots of individual customer reviews. As many people have said, it got us into a lot of trouble because an editor or a publisher or a writer would come and say, ‘Look, this is a negative review under my book, and you’re a bookseller. Aren’t you trying to sell my book?’ And we’d say, ‘Yes, we’re trying to sell your book to every person who really wants to buy it. But we’re not going to try and convince them that they should buy it. We’re going to try and help them make the decision about whether it's the book they want to buy.’ Small Business Trends: All right, when you look back at all this, let’s say outside of online retail, what do you think Amazon’s biggest impact on customer/vendor relationships is? What do you think that would be? Rick Ayre: The biggest change Amazon made was it changed the way people thought about shopping and buying. But I think the second biggest thing they did was they changed the way people thought about the Internet, the potential of the Internet to create these customer relationships and manage them. And then to figure out how to use the information they gathered. In other words, the data on buying habits and turning that into an advantage that also is a feature for the customers. They’ve certainly created a whole way of managing a customer relationship using technology, a combination of online and computers that people only dreamed about in the past. This interview on Amazon’s success 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 Rick Ayre Shares What Helped Drive Amazon's Success From the Beginning appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| Posted: 21 Feb 2014 05:00 AM PST
I was reading an article in the library one day about aligning – how to align, who should align, why you should align. (When I was still working a day job, I think the preferred jargon was “on the same page.”) The more I read about aligning, the sillier it sounded. For a while I played with all sorts of terrible puns and plays on words and basically got nowhere. Then, on the drive home I was able to sort of mentally back away from “align” a bit and found this cartoon. I’m sure in a few years “align” will be replaced with something else, but in the meantime this cartoon rings true and makes me really happy. The post It’s One of Those Days appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
| Horse and Carriage Controversy Threatens Small Carriage Owners Posted: 21 Feb 2014 02:30 AM PST
A controversy in New York City is pitting small carriage owners against the city and more specifically, newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio. De Blasio has vowed to eliminate horse drawn carriages in Central Park, a long tradition and an ecosystem supporting many small business owners including owners of the carriages, horses and stables. But for the moment, city council seems to have stopped the mayor in his tracks and the issue has yet to even make it to the council’s agenda. Opponents of the carriage rides, including animal rights groups, insist the horse and carriage trade is bad for the animals. They say the horses are denied proper pasture, are exposed to exhaust fumes and are over worked, Treehugger reports. But Stephen Malone, spokesman of the Horse and Carriage Association of New York says the carriage trade has supported many horse and carriage and stable owners down through the years. In a CNN editorial he writes:
What’s more, those in New York’s horse and carriage industry insist charges that horses are being cruelly treated are wrong. And even Treehugger admitted in an earlier post that charges of neglect or abuse seem unwarranted. The mayor has proposed replacing the horses with environmentally friendly “vintage” style electric cars and offering them first to former carriage owners as compensation for a ban. But no one can imagine tourists paying $50 for 20 minutes or $130 for an hour to ride in a car in New York City. But it’s more than just the livelihood of so many small carriage, horse and stable owners that’s at stake. The industry employs 300 people and generates about $19 million annually for the city’s economy. Like so many other small business owners, those involved in the horse and carriage trade have added substantially to the fabric of their community. Defenders of these business people say the proposed ban isn’t about the welfare of the animals. It’s about politics and influential animal rights activists who contributed to de Blasio’s campaign. They have vowed to fight city hall to preserve businesses that continue to thrive in New York City that they believe make their community a better place. Carriage Photo via Shutterstock The post Horse and Carriage Controversy Threatens Small Carriage Owners appeared first on Small Business Trends. |
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