The biggest benefit of social media marketing isn’t instant sales, identifying your keenest buyers or even better customer service. You can pick up all of those on social media sites, but none of them is as powerful as the ability to build a close connection with your market. When you’re in touch with leads daily – through tweets or through Facebook discussions – your business will be on their mind when they’re ready to buy. But while social media can create relationships, those connections can be relatively loose. It doesn’t take much for someone to stop following a company’s tweets and once that’s happened, it doesn’t take long before that company is forgotten. It’s not just the number of connections that count in social media, it’s the depth of the engagement as well, and that’s something that even Twitter, with its brief posts, struggles to build. A number of leading social media types though have found a way of adding a uniquely deep level of engagement to their Twitter streams by teaming them with Ustream.
Formed in 2007, and now boasting 40 million monthly viewers, Ustream is a kind of live YouTube. Rather than recording videos then uploading them for others to view, users of Ustream can broadcast live, allowing anyone to watch them through the site. The videos are also recorded, making them available to be seen later by people who missed the original broadcast. It’s an approach that allows for spontaneity as well as all the excitement and unpredictability that’s a part of any live show. Groups as big as Black Eyed Peas and the Jonas Brothers are using Ustream to broadcast live to their fans while the American Music Awards used the service to beam stars live from the red carpet.
Photography: raneko
Designers like to say that there’s only one truly intuitive user interface: the nipple. Everything else has to be learned. Anyone who’s ever had to teach a confused newborn how to eat however, knows even that isn’t true. The challenge for any designer then is to produce buttons, knobs, menus and signs that allow users to apply functions with the minimum of fuss. Some, like MySpace, got it horribly wrong with ugly modules and confusing functionality, a trick that Facebook tries to copy with every redesign. Occasionally though, a company gets it exactly right, not only allowing users to get what they want (almost) instinctively but also setting a new standard for others to follow. Here are five of the best:
Sergey Brin and Larry Page owe a lot to the education system. Stanford University wasn’t just the place where they met, it was also the place where Google was born. The site started as a research project for their doctoral theses and the search engine’s first address was google.stanford.edu. It’s certainly possible to argue that that debt has been repaid. When Google went public in 2004, the university was holding more than 7,500 Class A shares and over 1.65 million Class B shares, valued then at $179.5 million. A quick sale of some of those shares brought in $15.6 million, further venture capital investments in the company are said to have earned the university an additional $200 million, and Stanford will continue to earn royalties from Google until 2011. That school of learning, at least, has little to complain about.
But Google’s founders haven’t stopped at paying back their alma mater. Since 2006, the company has also been making its suite of apps available to all educational institutions for free. Holding everything on its own servers, Google lets universities and schools use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Sites, Google Docs and Google Video on the school’s own domain.
It’s not entirely pain-free. The Quick Start guide describes a six-week process of goal-setting, implementation and roll-out, but that may have more to do with the size of education institutions rather than the complexity of the apps. And it may also reflect the size of the benefits for those institutions. London’s Westminster University, which began using the system in 2008, for example, has reported savings of £1 million and a reduction in time spent on systems and user support. Google’s apps are simple enough for students to use without having to pick up the phone to find out how to create an email account.
Image: blip .
It would be great if a product’s success was all about the idea. Come up with the right concept and it doesn’t matter what the product looks like as long as it does the job. But the opposite is usually true. A product that looks appealing can often sell more than one that does the job better. An apple will squish a hunger flatter than a candy bar will, for example, but it’s the Hersheys that are next to the supermarket cash desks, not the fruit stands. A candy designer knows how to put temptation on the packet; an apple grower, not so much. If look-and-feel are so important for the success of a product then, every entrepreneur with a smart idea needs to know at least a little about creating products that don’t just work well but which look attractive too.
That starts with understanding constraints. Video game developer Dino Dini has identified two kinds of constraints that dictate a product’s design: non-negotiable constraints are the product’s essential functions – a dating site, for example, has to be able to hold data, display profiles and allow members to communicate; negotiable constraints are the optional extras around which the designer can get creative. The site’s colors, for example, the way that profiles are displayed and even the decision to include video chat or instant messaging are all negotiable constraints. The site has to allow members to get in touch but how they do it and what they’re looking at while they do it are negotiable.
Photography: Steve Wampler
When it comes to listing a product’s unique sales points, there’s always one point that’s sharper than all the others. It doesn’t matter how many features the product has, how many problems it solves or how much it will change the user’s life, if the market believes the product is “cool” it will fly off the shelves. So what makes a product cool, can coolness be created and what can a developer do to add that all-important ingredient to its offerings?
Design certainly helps. Apple wasn’t the first company to place digital music on portable players but Jonathan Ive’s clean design, with its plain white face and silver back, made the company’s music player as much a fashion accessory as an electronic gadget. Being seen with an iPod in the device’s early days marked a user as someone who was up with the latest fashions. Even if you couldn’t hear the tunes they were listening to — beyond the irritating thump of a bass delivered second-hand — you knew that an iPod user’s white earphones marked them out as someone who was serious about their music.
Photography: franz88
He’s got the kind of career success the rest of us can only dream of. A record sixteen Grand Slam titles. Twenty-three consecutive Grand Slam semi-final appearances. A world ranking of 1. And generally acclaimed as the greatest tennis player who ever picked up a racket, perhaps even the greatest sportsman ever. Roger Federer’s success is down to his ability to whack a ball across a court faster and more accurately than anyone has ever done before, but success at anything is never down to just the technical skills required for that particular field. Lots of competitors will have those abilities too. Being the best also means having the right mentality, the right preparation and the right attitude to make the most of the talents you were born with. So what can Roger Federer teach us about achieving perfection?
Recognize Your Potential for Perfection
The launch is the most important moment in the life of any product. It’s the moment when the entrepreneur gets his or her first notion of whether the idea is going to fly. After all the months and years of development, after all the dreams of striking it rich and drowning in cash, the product is available and customers are starting to buy. The money is coming in at last. But while a launch marks day one in the life of the product, it’s actually just one more day in the life of the product’s development – and in its marketing too. The success of the launch might depend on the quality of the item itself, but it depends no less on the anticipation built up before the big day.
That anticipation is a key element in any sales strategy. The route to a purchase usually passes through awareness and recognition before it reaches a desire strong enough to lead someone to part with their cash. The market has to know the product is going to exist before it can decide that it wants it.
Apple Leaks
Search engine optimization is now an essential part of marketing. It might not be as fun as producing creative ad ideas. It might not be as exciting as running competitions or coming up with new promotions. But when the result can be a steady flow of free leads and a website with a high ranking, all of that content creation and link-building pays in spades. So search engine experts spend hours flirting for just a touch of Google love, even as they’re having their head turned by Bing while still wondering whether Yahoo! has anything to offer.
Focusing on those big search engines makes sense. According to HitWise, Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask together took 98.84 percent of all Web searches in 2009. While the proportion of searches shared between them might change a little, especially as Bing continues to eat up Yahoo’s users, the big engines’ hold over the search market has changed little. In 2006, Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live and Ask accounted for 98.34 percent of searches, still leaving little more than one percent for other players. But those figures might be a touch misleading. They don’t, for example, take into account the number of searches made through Google’s Custom Search Engines, user-made directories that focus on a small subset of sites and reached not through Google’s home page but through search boxes on specialist Web pages. While these are likely to make up only a tiny proportion of Google’s total searches, they can provide some highly targeted marketing.
As an employee, it’s easy to make more money. You knock on the boss’s door, point out all of the wonderful things you’ve been doing for the company and ask him to add 10 percent to your salary. If he laughs, you either ask what you still need to do to get that raise or you start looking for another job. Either way, ambitious types should always know what’s coming next. For freelancers though, increasing earnings is a little tougher. The most obvious way – to charge more – can have the effect of reducing your income as you price yourself out of the market. There’s often a difference between what a freelancer thinks he’s worth and what the market says he’s worth. But there are a few things you can do to raise your income without raising your prices.
Increase Productivity
Perhaps the most obvious is to work harder. One of the biggest shocks for workers new to freelancing is the recognition that time is money. While it’s theoretically true that freelancers are free to take time off whenever they want, provided there’s no deadline looming (and when does that ever happen?), it’s certainly true that they’ll be counting the amount of money they didn’t earn during those hours at the beach. The more billable work you can pack into a day then, the more you’ll be able to earn.
Photography: Scott Feldstein
Cubicle walls might not have been pretty but they’ve always been good for productivity. Not seeing your neighbor might have freed you up to take a snooze, fire up the solitaire or surf to the sports pages, but it also meant less gossip, fewer temptations to chat, and the fear that your boss might peer over the wall and catch you in the act. So what happens when you give the office a miss and swap the cubicle for a coffee shop? What can you do to ensure that working in a social environment won’t mean all sociability and no work?
It’s a question that’s become increasingly important as cafes recognize the power of wifi to pull in regular customers. A survey in 2006 found that about a fifth of the US workforce spent at least some time working outside a traditional office, and estimated that the rate was growing by about 10 percent a year. With hi-tech firms feeling the squeeze in the recession and even skilled geeks picking up pink slips and “consultancy” business cards, it’s no surprise that so many café tables are now packed with Macs.
Twitter’s hashtags have become an essential tool. Conference organizers use them to expand their reach. Communities use them to track natural disasters. And of course, protesters use them to tell the world what they’re doing and what their governments are doing back. It’s no surprise then that spammers also use them to hit eyeballs and push their dodgy goods, and that the most popular trending topics always seem to be light and breezy: three things to say after sex tends to pop up a lot and everyone always seems keen to announce what they’re listening to right now. But essentially, hashtags are a way for Twitter’s users to organize the information they’re producing on the site. They’re a means of categorization, allowing anyone to find the data they’re looking for without wasting hours sorting through irrelevant posts. In other words, hashtags are efficiency tools. So how else can you use them to improve your productivity and cut back on wasted time?
The easiest way to use hashtags for productivity is to identify the tags that are most relevant to you and create a series of saved searches from your Twitter page. You won’t need to do more than click the tag to bring up a list of the latest results so you’ll even save the time it takes to type the hashtag into the search field. First though, you’d need to know which tags you need to be looking for. Directories like Twubs and wikis like What The Trend can tell you what the different tags mean, and Brizzly, a social media platform, provides a little explanation together with each trending topic. But in practice you’re unlikely to need them. As you follow people you find interesting on Twitter, you’ll naturally come across hashtags that your community is using. Save the most common terms, create a relevant list, and you might just be able to cut down on the time spent checking Twitter for interesting tweets. Those hashtag links will bring up the best tweets on your topic right away.
Categorize Your Tweets
Photography: Rich Anderson
There’s never a good time to start a new business. Whenever you decide to set up your company, seek funding, and launch your product, you’re going to be battling with competitors, struggling to bring in your first customers, and dealing with all of the setbacks and surprises that come with starting something new. Make the moves during a boom-time, and you’ll find that there are plenty of other firm flush with cash and racing to get their products out ahead of you. Do it when times are hard and you’ll struggle to persuade buyers and investors to put their hands in their pockets. But that’s not a reason not to do it. In fact, a shrinking economy can throw up all sorts of advantages for entrepreneurs looking to turn their business ideas into successful companies.
Perhaps the most important is motivation. Creating a start-up is hard work and initially at least, you’ll be doing most of that work yourself. There will be little, if any, income so you’ll probably have to squeeze the development, marketing and research around your day job. You’ll be putting in long hours, giving up your weekends and free time, and you’ll have no idea whether your plan really is going to play out or whether, like most new companies, it will crash, burn and become just another line on your resume.
Image: sophistix
It’s the latest thing… apparently. Traditional tattoos are noughties, embroidered tattoos are nice. YouTube wedding dances are out, sword fight wedding dances are in. Imelda Marcos shoe closets are embarrassing, stiletto rolodexes are perfect for showing off. According to Trendhunter.com, a 30,000-strong community that tries to spot rising coolness before it cools off, those are just some of the trends that are currently on the way up. It’s the kind of information that’s supposed to be worth a fortune to companies keen to cash in on the next big thing. But can trendwatching really deliver returns for businesses?
Twitter certainly hopes so. The site includes a list of trending topics on its Web interface, letting users see the most popular discussion subjects at any time. Usually, those tend to be fairly banal. Standard subjects are often the music that people are listening to as they’re tweeting what they’re eating for lunch. Three words to say after sex frequently bubbles back into the list as do “omgfacts” and things that #WillGetYouSlapped. Where they come from, nobody knows but it’s hard to see how knowing that “”Queue” is the only word in the English language that is pronounced the same after removing the last 4 letters” is going to make someone some money.
The business world is supposed to be dog-eat-dog. It’s a zero-sum game in which any advance by a rival is a setback for you – and any achievement by your company is one in the eye for your competitors. Sometimes though it pays to put the hostility aside and look for areas where two (or more) competing companies can co-operate. While that might sound like a bad result for consumers (and an issue for an antitrust commission) the result can often be benefits all round.
Much though depends on the context and the motivation for the deal. When Google teamed up with Yahoo last year, providing the online directory with access to its search and advertising technology, the goal wasn’t to provide better services to consumers or even to ensure that both sides earned more money. It was to prevent Microsoft from getting a ready-made foothold in the search market by buying Yahoo. This was a case of two competitors coming together to defend against a common rival rather than create advantages that benefit themselves and the market as a whole. It’s rare though for an industry to be dominated by three firms in this way and the deal itself was temporary and one-sided. Google was the senior partner and by accepting its rival’s technology Yahoo effectively waved a white flag above its own position in the search market.
More common are partnerships in which rivals come together to set an industry standard, and this is something that seems to be happening fairly frequently now as technology advances faster than business models can keep up. Infineon Technologies, for example, recently announced a partnership with rivals Micron Technology to create CellularRAM memory, a kind of chip suitable for 2.5G and higher mobile devices. The two companies will agree on the specifications for products that will use the chips but compete on the products themselves. It’s almost as though the movie industry had decided whether Blu-Ray or HD-DVD would be the standard, created the video systems that would play them then focused on making the films. It’s a much more attractive option for companies than investing millions in a winner-takes-all race.
Image: David Erickson
Marketing a business always comes down to a simple calculation: how much attention and how many sales will your marketing dollars buy? While it’s always easy to toss out cash on search engine optimization, on AdWords campaigns, and even on traditional print, billboard and television advertising, when you’re really strapped for cash, you want creative ideas that can deliver results for minimal costs. You’re prepared to experiment with new strategies in return for the benefits of a low-cost investment. Fortunately, those experiments can now also be low-risk. The rise of smart, fast communication channels – and even smarter marketers — has created all sorts of effective and creative marketing channels for entrepreneurs.
The most obvious of these is viral marketing. When the audience is passing your marketing message to their friends, you’re not paying for advertising space. You’re also getting your name associated with something cool and fun, and you’re winning an implicit recommendation. If someone thinks that the virus you’ve supplied is interesting enough to pass to a friend, they’re telling their friend that you’re worth looking at.
Photography: .nele
Creative ideas tend to be unpredictable. They come in a flash, while you’re in the shower, as you’re waiting for the lights to change, in the middle of a dull conversation at the office party. If those moments have anything in common, it’s that they’re usually times when you’re far away from your iPhone’s note-taking app, or even a pen and paper. In theory, that shouldn’t matter. Good ideas should stick around while bad concepts fade away, but the idea itself is only one part of a creative process that leads from inspiration to IPO. You also have to figure out whether your bolt from the blue really is as revolutionary as it looks, whether there’s demand for it, and whether there’s a real way to make it work. Psychologists and gurus have produced creative models to guide entrepreneurs through that process, entrepreneurs themselves have invented their own… and some of them might just be helpful.
Creative models have actually been around for a while. One of the oldest was created by Graham Wallas, a Fabian and social psychologist who wrote The Art of Thought in the 1920s. Wallas, who isn’t known to have actually brought any products to market himself, described creativity as a four-step process made up of Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification. Creative thinkers begin by defining the issue, he says, then they lay it aside for a while, a new idea pops out, then finally, they check to make sure it’s all going to work.
Designers have a tricky job to perform. On the one hand, the products they create have to be efficient and ergonomic. They have to allow the consumer easy access to all of its functions and make use as intuitive as possible. On the other hand, they also have to make the object look as attractive, as cool and as desirable as possible. Get it right and you might just end up with an iPod, a whole new genre of gadgets, a megajob with Apple and all the free iPhones you can eat. Get it wrong, and… well, you could find yourself included on a list of the worst design disasters.
The Wobbly Bridge
Asked to promote an officer who had already shown talent, bravery and leadership, Napoleon, it is said, would always ask “Is he lucky?” That might have been a more reasonable question than it sounds. While luck is often seen as fickle and unreliable, the sense that some people are just plain luckier than others (and that some people have the touch of doom) might have solid grounding. It’s certainly possible to find people who appear to fit in one camp or another: how else to explain both Kaka’s $13 million annual salary from soccer club Real Madrid and his boy-band good looks? If luck isn’t evenly spread out then but delivered by the truckload to some people and snatched away from others, what can you do to ensure that as an officer of your business, your efforts are blessed by good fortune?
According to Dr. Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at England’s University of Hertfordshire, and author of The Luck Factor: Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life: The Four Essential Principles, it is possible to take action that improves your chances. After tracking closely the behavior of 400 people who considered themselves either particularly lucky or cursed in everything they do, he produced four principles that characterize lucky types.
Pulp the Lemons
