The BizCATS … Small Business Sales & Marketing Success with a Technology Twist
RSS:
Publications
Comments

The BizCATS REVIEWS: Watching Your Brand? Some Yes, Some No…

July 22, 2010 | Author: Tim McMahon

An Observation? …

If you read The BizCATS regularly then you know that we pick new and emerging technology products that we like, try them out, and then write about them. You may also have noticed that we don’t “dump” on anyone – we only review our favorites and, logically, generally say pretty nice things about them. If we don’t like you we don’t review – simple. Now it also makes sense that any company whose product we positively review ought to be more or less happy about it and maybe even use our reviews to help boost their marketing. I know that if you wrote something nice about The BizCATS I’d share that with everyone I know. Finally, you would also assume (I know, always a dangerous thing) that these technology companies would be keeping an eye out for any mention of their products, especially good reviews. Since we aggressively share our reviews via Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, and just about everything else, any company looking for their product ought to easily see it – especially a tech company.

All this “logic” brings me to an observation: some do and some don’t. About half of the companies we’ve reviewed either sent a note to us or we could tell they caught the review via their social media feeds. (Yes, we watch ourselves as well as the products we review.) The other half apparently didn’t know or strangely didn’t care, and if so, they’re missing an opportunity to leverage their brands. We’ve heard from some great companies: GIST, Teambox, LogMeIn, YouSendIt, MaaS, ZoHo, and others, often within hours of a new review. What’s impressive is not that they respond to us, but that they’re doing such a great job watching and managing their brands via social media. Kudos, guys! Oddly enough (?) all these companies seem to be doing well even in a tough economy.

“Brand Management” has taken on a new meaning in today’s social media world. Many companies I talk to are a bit scared that negative things are being said about them and would rather “just not know”. But not knowing means not being able to respond … and it also means not being able to take advantage of the positives. Every marketer knows there is nothing more powerful than a testimonial, but if you aren’t watching then you’ll never know they were out there.

The Business Bottom Line: One of the easiest tools for managing your brand is Google Alerts, a free tool that “watches” constantly over the internet for your brand (although not Twitter or Facebook yet). Combine that with a product like Hootsuite to watch your social media feeds, and you’ve got a solid brand management “watcher” strategy.

About Today’s Pix: Summer Sunset on Boothbay Harbor, Maine

– Tim

The BizCATS REVIEWS: YouSendIt – Send BIG Files the Big Easy Way!

July 21, 2010 | Author: Tim McMahon

Sharing big files is a hassle, especially when it’s a one-time thing. For example, a customer requests a copy of that powerpoint presentation you recently showed it and, since it’s kind of a monster, it’s too big to send via email. What do you do? Burn it to a CD and hand deliver it? It’s not just presentations of course, it can also be pictures and hi-res graphics, large file folders, data files, almost anything. For me, at least, I don’t need to do this all the time but when I do I’d like it to be fast and easy – and not cost me anything.

YOUSENDIT (www.yousendit.com) is a great solution and comes in a free version for occasional users like me as well as a low-cost version for frequent business users. It’s fast, reliable, easy, and secure – everything you want in one package.

How does it work? After registering on YouSendIt.com you can send a large file much the same way you create an email – fill out the name and email you want to send it, add a message, attach a file, press send. Your file is uploaded to YouSendIt and a message is sent to your recipient with a download link for the file. You can send to multiple people as well.

The free version has, naturally, some limits. Max file size is 100MB (not too shabby actually!), and you can only send a single file at a time. What this means is that to send multiple files all at once you need to combine them into a zip file by (in Windows)  right-clicking on the files and selecting “send to … compressed file (zip)”, and then uploading the resulting zip file. The same is true for a file folder – zip it and send it. The paid version allows for files up to 2GB and enables sending multiple files without compressing – well worth it if you use it a lot. There’s also some nice little paid features like “read receipt” and “express delivery” that can be useful and bought a la carte.

I’ve been a regular user for about a year now and the service has proven trouble free and fast. More importantly, my clients have been happy with it – simple to access and download and no issues. Pretty impressive. Recently they announced a nice suite of apps – a desktop express app, an Outlook connector, and Blackberry/iPhone apps.

The Business Bottomline: There are lot of other applications and products to share content with others and collaborate (like Dropbox (www.dropbox.com), but most of them work best when you are part of a team or within a company and there are people you need to share with regularly. YouSendIt isn’t particularly fancy, it’s just one of those products that works really, really well. That’s why it’s a BizCATS “Best Pick”!

Today’s pix:  Propellers! Over New England … it’s what happens when you decide to take a picture out the window right thru the spinning propellers of a commuter plane. Who knew?

– Tim

The SUCCESS TRAPS: Stop Thinking About “NEXT” & Find Excellence “NOW”

July 20, 2010 | Author: Tim McMahon

When you’re on the journey to success, either personally or in business, it’s natural to always be thinking about “NEXT”. For example, you just received a promotion and you’re thinking about how to get to the next level. Maybe you just closed a big sale so you’re thinking about finding the next one. That’s pretty normal and we all do it, but it’s also a “success trap”.

The tendency when we think about NEXT is to put NOW behind us. That sale is done or a goal achieved. Focusing on the future sometimes means that we treat the “Nows” as ancient history that don’t really need our full attention. The result is that we can fail to apply real excellence to the tasks before us.

Let’s put this in real terms. Suppose a company hires me to deliver a training program for them for a fee of X. Great, that’s now a “done deal” and the money will definitely be paid to me. But of course I will need income after this project so I am already focusing my mind and attention on finding the “Next” deal (more so than planning how to make the current training program a real success). What I should be focusing on (at least 90%) is completing the task at hand – the training project I just closed – with exceptional excellence and creating an exceptionally satisfied customer.

I’ve always tried to run my business this way, believing that if I did a great job at what I was doing today then the tomorrows would take care of themselves. Some years ago in a job interview, a hiring manager asked me that standard questioin, “Where do you want to be in 5 years?” My answer, which confused him no end, was “I have absolutely no idea!”.

“Don’t you have a career plan?”, he asked.

“My career plan”, I answered, “is to be exceptionally successful at the job I’m hired to do today. If I do that I’m confident that there will be no shortage of career opportunities for me in 5 years.”

The Bottom Line: Your future successes are more the result of making your “Nows” successful than worrying about what comes after them.

Today’s Pix: Violent summer thunderstorms passed thru New Hampshire yesterday in the early evening, but as the skies cleared and last rays of sun appeared, the departing thunderheads illuminated …

-- Tim

The BizCATS REVIEWS: VIDDLER – Drive Your Website and Social Media Message with Video!

July 19, 2010 | Author: Tim McMahon

Video is a great way to make your website or social media sites really POP!

The BizCATS REVIEWS: VIDDLER: Best Pick for Creating Website Video

Video on your website can be a powerful tool. It might be a quick little welcome message to your customers, a “how to” tip, breaking news, or almost anything else you could come up with that will catch the attention of your viewers or customers and increase the time they spend on your site. We often put the important info that we want viewers to notice in bolded or colored text (hoping they’ll notice the message) but it’s nowhere as powerful as a video message that says “Have you heard about our new …?”

In fact the popular social media sites, like Twitter and Facebook, now support video postings – something that can really make you stand out from the crowd, especially if you have a facebook fan page!

Today, the kind of videos people like to watch are not the slick, overproduced video segments featuring a clearly hired announcer in front of a fancy background. In fact, the ones that seem to work the best are more “plain folks” in style – a simple, clear, sharp video with a real person who cares about the message he or she is trying to get across … in other words, probably YOU.

What’s neat today is that with just a few free minutes you could produce a daily or weekly video clip to keep your online marketing presence alive and vibrant, and do it for free with you PC webcam + VIDDLER (www.viddler.com). Once you complete a free registration it’s as easy as clicking the “Record” button on the site and talking to your computer. Don’t like the result? Just click re-record. Once you’re happy, Viddler saves your video on their site and gives you a link or website embed code that you can use on your site or post on your favorite social media sites. This is far easier than taking video of yourself with a camera, capturing on your PC, then uploading to the internet!

There are other sites that do this, of course. YouTube and Vimeo just to name a couple. We’ve tried them all a number of times but so far Viddler has proven for us to be the easiest and least trouble-free. Some of the others had inaccurate audio synching during playback once saved – in other words, we couldn’t tell until the finished video was actually out there.

Business Bottom Line: Video is a powerful online marketing tool, especially when it’s from a real person with a real message. To create and get your video message out there, you need a recording/storage service and a webcam – use the one built into your laptop or spend $50 bucks or so for a mid-range quality webcam that you plug into your PC or Mac. Now all you have to do is think of something to say! And remember this, you absolutely, positively, most-definitely will hate how you look and sound – guaranteed! So get a friend or business associate to look at the results with you and listen to what they say. Also, it gets easier (and better) with time …

– Tim

The SUCCESS TRAPS: Why I Need Your Small Business To Succeed Today!

July 16, 2010 | Author: Tim McMahon

How important is your small business or startup? I know it’s important to you, but did you think it was important to the rest of us as well? It actually matters whether or not you succeed! Yup, what you’re doing in your little biz may just be the key to recovering our economy – not what the big guys are doing! Read the article below which was sent to me today from my good friends at SCORE.   — Tim

“Job Growth in U.S. Driven Entirely by Startups, According to  Kauffman Foundation Study.” Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation  Press Release 7/07/10. http://bit.ly/byg7Kh

U.S. Job Growth Driven Entirely by Start-ups, Report Finds          (7/9/10)

Although conventional wisdom suggests that the annual net job  gain at existing companies is positive, the fact is that net job  growth in the U.S. economy occurs only through start-up firms,  a new report from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation finds.  (http://www.kauffman.org/ )

Based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s business dynamics statistics,  the report, The Importance of Startups in Job Creation and Job  Destruction, found that both on average and for all but seven  years between 1977 and 2005, existing firms were net job
destroyers, losing a combined one million jobs per year. In contrast, during their first year new firms added an average of three mil-  lion jobs. The report also found that while job growth patterns  at both start-ups and existing firms were pro-cyclical, there  was much more variance in job growth patterns at existing firms.

Indeed, during recessionary years job creation at start-ups  remained relatively stable, while net job losses at existing  firms were highly sensitive to the business cycle.

And it’s not just net job creation that start-ups dominate. Although older firms lose more jobs than they create, the gross  flows decline as firms age. On average, one-year-old firms create  nearly one million jobs, while ten-year-old firms generate only  300,000. In other words, the notion that firms bulk up as they  age is not supported by data.

Because start-ups that develop organically are the principal  driver of job growth in the economy, job-creation policies aimed  at luring larger, established employers inevitably will fail,  said the report’s author, Tim Kane. Such city and state policies  are doomed not only because they are zero-sum but because they  are based on unrealistic employment growth models, added Kane.

“These findings imply that America should be thinking differently  about the standard employment policy paradigm,” said Robert E.  Litan, Kauffman Foundation vice president of research and policy.

“Policy makers tend to focus on changes in the national or state  unemployment rate, or on layoffs by existing companies. But the  data from this report suggest that growth would be best boosted  by supporting start-up firms.”

And just for the heck of it, in the middle of this hot, hot summer (is it as hot where you are?), a little bit of fun with a Summer “Dragon” from my back yard … edited, of course, with PICNIK, our favorite online photo editing site (and now part of the Google family).

Summer's Dragon -- Tim McMahon IMAGEworks

The BizCATS REVIEWS: HOOTSUITE – How to Manage Your Social Network Marketing

July 13, 2010 | Author: Tim McMahon

If you’re just getting into social media marketing, or even if you’re experienced, a huge drawback is that it can be a real pain to manage. Login and post to your Facebook Fan Page; login and post to Twitter; login and post to LinkedIn; login and post to … more new services every day. And then, of course, you want to see if anyone out there is responding or passing your posts along, or just saying something about you or your company. Probably worthwhile but way too much work and time for someone who’s crazy busy trying to run a business.

The good news is that there are products that “aggregate” all your social media postings in one place – create a single post and automatically have it go everywhere you want with a single click. These same “aggregators” will also do all the “watching” for you. Selecting and using a good social media marketing aggregator tool really is one of the keys to success with these new technologies. The BizCATS favorite and “best pick” is HOOTSUITE (www.hootsuite.com).

Hootsuite is free (of course) in the basic edition with a low-cost enterprise edition available for larger companies. Using it is as simple as putting in your social media accounts and preferences a single time. When you write a post Hootsuite asks you where you want to send it – your Facebook page, Twitter, LinkedIn, or somewhere else. Select all, some, or just one and you’re done. And a quick look at the Hootsuite screen is all you need to see what folks are saying about you. Hootsuite is a cloud application quickly accessed thru your internet browser.

We’ve watched Hootsuite for some time as well as being an active user. One thing that’s impressive is that in their ultracompetitive product space, the company consistently brings out improvements and enhancements – even to the free version! Their latest announcement brings some great new features in the Social CRM arena that will be of real interest and value to many of us. Here’s a comment from their recent product release info …

Social CRM

The line between customer relationship management, technical support and promotional messaging is blurring as customers seek and expect interactions across multiple channels. HootSuite’s newest update adds tools to help learn about your audience and engage them with the information they desire.


There’s lots of choices out there but our best pick for Social Media Aggregator is HOOTSUITE. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

– Tim

The SUCCESS TRAPS: The Leadership Secret

July 13, 2010 | Author: Tim McMahon

Tim McMahon, The BizCATS

Most people if asked would like to be considered Leaders. Leaders are generally considered to be successful people. Being a Leader is generally considered to be better than being a Follower, altho why this should be true is totally beyond me. But let’s suppose you would like to be a Leader …

The first question you need to ask is “What makes a Leader?”. Charisma? A dynamic personality? Good looks? Motivation? They’re all nice things to have, I suppose, but being a handsome, dynamically charismatic, motivated person won’t make you anybody’s leader. Leaders are people other people choose to follow; and they do that because they believe (a) the leader can help them get somewhere they want to go, and (b) the leader knows how to get there. Want an example? Watch TV in any election season and see what all the pols are saying, e.g., “We need lower taxes and I have a plan to …”

It follows then that Leadership is about doing things for others (as well as for ourselves); but it’s more than service, it’s about helping other people achieve their goals and having a plan in place to help them do it. Most great leaders share the same goals or objectives as those they lead and so leader and followers work together for mutual benefit.

So if you want to be a Leader ask yourself what you can do to help others achieve the success they seek in their lives. Then once you have a solid plan to do it, all you have to do is tell folks about it … and chances are you’ll find you’ve become a Leader!  – Tim

The Success Traps: What is SUCCESS?

July 11, 2010 | Author: Tim McMahon

If there is one truism it’s that every person wants to be more successful. Success, of course, means different things to different people, tho. For one it’s becoming a top CEO and for another it’s having a happy life living on a farm. But both are equally valid. The point is that both people spend their lives working to be more successful at whatever it is that makes up their definition of success.

Another truth, and an unfortunate one, is that most folks view their definition of success as the only one that counts. A salesman defines selling the most and making the most money as success and often can’t understand why someone else isn’t motivated the same way. A highly competitive athlete strives to become world class and can’t understand why someone else is quite content to be an amateur. A dad is happy just to stay home with his kids but his friends can’t figure out why he doesn’t want a career.

I like to think about what I call “The Success Traps”; that is, the attitudes and beliefs that keep people from becoming happy and fulfilled, i.e., successful. And one of them – perhaps the biggest – is when we let other people define success for us. For example, the “athlete” who comes to believe that nothing less than being #1 is acceptable but who’s personal “success makeup” doesn’t match that goal will most likely not achieve it. And if they do achieve it – even worse – will never feel happy. It’s kind of like the saying that money doesn’t buy happiness … unless making money is what makes you happy. Get it?

It seems to me that we all need to spend a lot more time figuring out exactly what it is we truly want for ourselves … and then be willing to work for it even if it doesn’t fit the crowd. There’s nothing either right or wrong with that stay-at-home Dad even if you could never imagine doing that – it’s just a difference in what makes one person happy.

I hope you’ll enjoy these thought on The Success Traps … as well as some of my favorite photography :)

– Tim

Posted via email from The Success Traps – Personal Success Strategies with Tim McMahon

« Older Entries