e3datasolutions company blog

Limited budget? SCORE's August 26 marketing workshop shows you how to blend traditional and online techniques to get customers.

By: Jerry Chautin, SCORE volunteer, business columnist
SCOREing small-business success 
 

A Marketing Plan Assures your Success
Lack of Planning Can Forebode Your Failure
 
 
Development & Implementation of an Effective Marketing Plan

When: August 26, 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m
Where: SCORE Atlanta, 233 Peachtree Street, Ste. 1900
Details: Online at tinyurl.com/cydufq or call, 404 331 0121   

      The online photographs blew me away. Ayesha Lakes posted them online at www.phoartgraphy.com. She is the owner of PhoArtgraphy and a professional photographer with sensitivities and skills that started at age 11. "One of my aunts gave me a Vivitar 110 pocket camera for Christmas and I never looked back," she says. "I took pictures of everyone and everything at any event I could, just because I loved it." 

      Pundits say, "Do what you love." But what they do not tell you is that you also have to make a living doing it. That requires understanding who your customers are, how to reach them and knowing how much they are willing to pay for your product or service. Equally as important, you must learn how to get enough customers so that you can pay your bills and enjoy the lifestyle you dreamed about. 

      A marketing plan, with the accompanying research and selling strategy, is the heart of your business plan. Add to that a few financial projections and you will have the necessary framework to succeed. That is what you will learn to do at SCORE's August 26 workshop. Jay Levy and Bill Cooey present it. They are both SCORE volunteers and marketing experts. 

      Levy is currently the marketing chair for SCORE Atlanta. He was formerly a marketing executive in the healthcare industry and also launched his own marketing agency. It gives him direct experience with what start-up and existing small-business owners need to be successful in today's challenging economy. 

      In addition to volunteering for SCORE, Cooey is the principal owner of www.e3datasolutions.com an Internet and web-based marketing firm. Since minimizing cost is always an issue for small-business owners, he will address capturing more business from your Web site. Because of the Internet, he says that, "there is a huge amount of marketing intelligence that companies used to pay millions of dollars for that can now be had for free." More information about e3datasolutions can be found at www.e3datasolutions.com/scoremarketing

      Meanwhile, back at the PhoArtgraphy studio, photographer Lakes says, "My SCORE experience impacted my marketing. It provided me with good ideas; the most important of them is creating a marketing plan." 

      Additionally, she learned about search engine optimization. "I have implemented one of the ideas regarding SEO, and I think that may have increased my visibility," she says. 

      Alan Zell recommends wilsonweb.com and searchengine.com for information on SEO. He is a SCORE volunteer in Portland, Oregon. But he stresses the need to combine traditional sales and marketing techniques with SEO. "The further one gets away from their prospective clients the costs go up with less results."  

      Cooey agrees. "SEO is not the panacea that many are led to believe. The resources spent on SEO in most cases can be better used by attending networking events or replying to posts at relevant industry blogs."  

      SCORE Atlanta's workshop will discuss the various approaches to traditional, and nontraditional marketing. You can decide what is best for your business. 

Contact SCORE for more information at www.scoreatlanta.org

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About SCORE: 

Since 1964, SCORE "Counselors to America's Small Business" has helped more than 8 million aspiring entrepreneurs and small business owners through counseling and business workshops. It is a nonprofit resource partner with the U.S. Small Business Administration. More than 11,200 volunteer business counselors in 370 chapters serve their communities through entrepreneur education dedicated to the formation, growth and success of small businesses. The Atlanta chapter has 100 volunteers in conveniently located branch offices.  

Marketing on the Internet Workshop August 10th

By: Jerry Chautin, SCORE volunteer, business columnist
SCOREing small-business

Online marketing mystic is uncloaked at SCORE workshop

"Marketing on the Internet"

August 10, 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m

SCORE Atlanta, 233 Peachtree Street, Ste. 1900

Details: Online at tinyurl.com/cydufq
or call,  404 331 0121

Here is bad advice: Build a Web site and the world will buy your products and services.

Here is good advice: Build a Web site that sells benefits and solves problems. Furthermore, practice the mystical art of search engine optimization and you will substantially increase your sales.

Online marketing is a cost-effective way of reaching customers from coast-to-coast and around the world. But building and online presence and getting your Web site top priority on search engines is not a game for neophytes. SCORE's workshop will help you implement an online strategy to increase your business.

Before you start designing your Web site, Bill Cooey says, "It is crucial that during the initial planning stages the competition be researched for price, for ideas on product development, and for existing market penetration." He is a volunteer business counselor with SCORE, "Counselors to America's small business," and also the principal owner of e3datasolutions, LLC. "There is a huge amount of marketing intelligence that companies used to pay millions of dollars for that can now be had for free."

Cooey's company designs Web sites and software to connect you with your customers, vendors, employees and stakeholders. You can learn more about the company at e3datasolutions.com.

A manual published by Inc Magazine and distributed by SCORE called "How to Really Market on the Internet," outlines five essentials.

■ Your Web site must deliver what it promises or your company will lose credibly.

■ The site should load quickly because shoppers will go elsewhere if they can't quickly find what they want. Avoid using large photos, sound and video clips.

■ Contact information should be easy to find. Include your physical location, phone number and fax to reassure visitors that you exist in more than just cyberspace.

■ Provide customer interaction with contests, games and instant feedback. Allow them to request information and post comments.

■ Update your site frequently if you want visitors to return.
Even if you design the perfect Web site, it is important to get high priority from search engines. Search engine optimization requires additional skills. SEO is the art of using keywords and understanding the algorithms and methodology used by Google, Yahoo and other search engines to place you near the top of page one.

Alan Zell recommends wilsonweb.com and searchengine.com for information on SEO. He is a SCORE volunteer in Portland, Oregon. But he stresses the need to combine traditional sales and marketing techniques with SEO. "The further one gets away from their prospective clients the costs go up with less results."

Cooey agrees. "SEO is not the panacea that many are led to believe," he says. "The resources spent on SEO in most cases can be better used by attending networking events or replying to posts at relevant industry blogs."

SCORE Atlanta's workshop will discuss the various approaches to marketing on the Internet so that you can decide what is best for your business.

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Since 1964, SCORE "Counselors to America's Small Business" has helped more than 8 million aspiring entrepreneurs and small business owners through counseling and business workshops. It is a nonprofit resource partner with the U.S. Small Business Administration. More than 11,200 volunteer business counselors in 370 chapters serve their communities through entrepreneur education dedicated to the formation, growth and success of small businesses. The Atlanta chapter has 100 volunteers in conveniently located branch offices. For interviews with SCORE business counselors or SCORE small-business clients, contact SCORE's chairman, Jeff Mesquita: e-mail, scoremarketing@joimail.com, cell: (770) 713-1702.


The columnist's bio is online at: tenonline.org/sref/jc1bio.html

Collaboration Tool for Freelancers Yields "Coopetition"

A new tool to assist the independent contractors and mom 'n' pop design businesses of the world just went into beta testing this week. Blellow, which opened up on March 3rd, combines a "Twitter like" messaging format with a "group" organizational structure to allow users to seek out help from other subject matter experts for their projects. Full roll out is targeted for SXSW where they are a sponsor at the Mashable + Blurb Bash. Think of it as a "Smart Twitter" that fosters the building of coopetitional relationships as opposed to a "slice of life" personal update.

Blellow seems to be a more serious candidate for supporting collaboration than Twitter. Additional features include a job board for hired positions, a freelance board for independent work, and a project board for posting "one time only" needs. Attaching files to Blellow posts is an extremely helpful feature and helps to reduce clutter in posts as well as possibly saving an additional trip to a wiki. For example, I attached a file called "samplecode.txt" with one of my posts for review which other users can access to help spot check for errors.

I tried out the project posing feature as I needed some help with some Flash customization for one of my customers. This morning when I checked I had 4 replies. Not bad given this is only in beta.

Blellow also provides a way to grade the quality of the help received from other users via a "kudos" system. If @mandi helps me through a problem I can award her a kudo in the form of points. These points accumulate providing an overall rating for that user. The more kudos the more help has been given. That total is displayed on my profile. I'm not sure if this will be a true gauge of quality, but moreover one of quantity of action since it is a total and not an average rating.

I am still in the process of working through the site and trying to learn how each feature works. As any beta version, there are a few small bugs that are being worked out. Blellow seems committed to this process and has a form for providing feedback on the site via an orange button displayed prominently on every page. The Blellow staff is also actively watching the posts and giving updates on their status. There is also the usual blog / forum to look for answers to questions related to use or post opinions.

The informational video below gives a good demonstration of how the freelance would utilize Blellow for help.

 

I think there is great promise in this tool and I look forward to full release. So far I haven't seen anyone post "I'm having my morning coffee" or "It's a beautiful day in sunny ATL" yet so I'm hoping that trend will continue. After all, I still have Twitter to feed my narcissism!

Bill Cooey

www.e3datasolutions.com

 

"Where's Waldo" has become a Google Reality in Latitude

Early last year I reminisced about a series of books / games from my kids childhood called "Where's Waldo", where a happily nerdy cartoon character named Waldo is effectively concealed within a mass of other caricatures. The goal is to just find him. Scenes from busy streets challenge the reader to find the face of Waldo among a barrage of other pedestrians, street hawkers, and the like. In the context of my previous post I compared Social Networking to that children’s series.

Today I am making a brief reprise of the story in conjunction with the release of "Latitude", the latest tool from Google for mobile devices that puts an icon of you on a google map. The blogosphere was abuzz with numerous articles, as well as with publications and news services such as AP and the Wall Street Journal.

Not to be one to jump on the bandwagon of re-broadcasting the release as so many writers have, I prefer to delve in to the thought process of Google and the users of this service in an attempt to try and "get it". With all due respect for the engineers that created this tool I am still trying to think about what would be a good use for this information.

I guess there is the entertainment value in a sanitized voyeuristic sense. From the same person who would "un-hide" their location for continuous display, does that border on a being a watered down version of changing clothes in front of a window with the curtain open. Or possibly is it to support narcissists who are spouting their "Hey, look at me!" attitude to life.

From a business point of view, will this lead to virtual sales bots that will be trolling the sites alerting proprietors of local businesses? Quick, "Joe" is heading down the sidewalk - let's send a whiff of his favorite stew to the street to try and achieve a Pavlovian response.  

Let's contrast this to a service such as Twitter which in effect can provide the same location data to Latitude. Both services are in effect "opt in". You can choose to blast every thought that pops into your head to your "twitter followers" or in this example you can tell everyone "Having a latte at SBUX at Peachtree and 17th". With Latitude, you are "choosing" to display your location, maybe without the "foam". Either way there has been a conscious decision to inform others. Or has there?

With Twitter, you have to type in where you are - consciously. There is no automated “tweet” for that (yet - but maybe I will work on that next). With Latitude, you are given the option for this to be automatically shared. So envision this:

You are an avid social networker and freely release your personal information to all your "friends" you have found on Facebook. You come home one day to see your computer, plasma TV, and all your other expensive toys missing. Oops, I guess Sam the burglar wasn't your "friend" after all since he checked his Latitude and saw that you were sipping coffee on the opposite side of town. He used his Google calculator to figure out how much time he needed to clean out the place before you reach home.

While this is unlikely to happen, it is not outside of the realm of possibility. There are probably more opportunities for simple embarrassment like when your boss checks his Latitude to find out where you have been (the 3 hour “lunch meeting” at the local strip club).

Either way, the true usefulness of this tool in a business sense still needs to be revealed. You can sit back and say to yourself, “Imagine the commercial possibilities...”. When you come up with something please post back to this blog with those results.

Bill Cooey

www.e3datasolutions.com

 

Small Business and Getting the word out about Social Networking

As many other people do, in my spare time I volunteer for worthy causes. Among those organizations, I support the Service Corps of Retired Executives. SCORE , as it is more commonly known, is a national organization that coaches thousands of budding entrepreneurs, as well as established businesses, on a number of topics from accounting to human resources to marketing to wholesaling. SCORE taps the expertise of retired executives and business owners who have excelled in their fields, or in the case of the internet and other recent technologies, they look to people like me who are still actively working in the industry. They have a national website and a home office in Herndon VA, as well as local chapters in nearly 400 locations across the country. Specifically, I do pro bono business counseling as it pertains to the internet industry for the Atlanta SCORE chapter.

On March 6th 2008, SCORE Atlanta, the national SCORE office, and American Express sponsored a speed counseling and business workshop event at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Atlanta. The event was one of several taking place this year across the country and was well attended by entrepreneurs from all walks of life, each looking to take advantage of the excellent information and business counseling. The events are part of an initiative by American Express OPEN and the SCORE national office, who have teamed up to support and encourage the growth of small businesses. Notables speaking at the event included Ken Yancy, CEO of SCORE, and Dr. Timothy S. Mescon, Dean and the Tony and Jack Dinos Eminent Scholar at the Michael J. Coles College of Business at Kennesaw State University (KSU) as well as representatives of American Express OPEN and the local Atlanta SCORE chapter.

Aside from the speed counseling that I participated in yesterday, (the details of which of course is privileged information), I was also fortunate to be able to talk to a number of attendees that comprised a wide range of life experiences, ages, and backgrounds. From this interaction I was able to gain some insight on what issues and concerns the entrepreneurial world is focused upon. The economy, the likelihood of a recession, and the respective prospects for a slowdown in their businesses topped their list of concerns as you might expect.

My curiosity in particular, once I got past the "economic global warming" topics, lead me to check the pulse of Social Networking via the internet as it relates to small business. I asked everyone I came across the following question - Are you using Social Networking or tapping Web 2.0 services to build your business? I found some very interesting responses.

When organizing the respondents' answers by their age, some trends emerged similar to what you would expect from the greater general public when asked about the web in general. Given that entrepreneurs are a subset of the population who should be considered to be motivated to network, I would have expected a slightly different result than what I saw. While this is not to be considered a scientific poll by any means, it does provide some anecdotal evidence of where "Social Networking" stands with respect to the small business owner:

• in general, people in their 50s and 60s were not aware of the term "Social Networking", did not know what Facebook or LinkedIn was, and did not have much interest in web related activities other than having a "brochure" website for their business (Web 1.0). They tended to be uncomfortable with the thought of revealing too much information online.
• People in their mid 30s and 40s knew or are users of Facebook and MySpace, but typically were not power users of LinkedIn. Some had created a simple presence of some sort (home page) that was typically related to their personal lives. They also typically thought of Blogging as an outlet for someone to rant or complain about something rather than for information. As a rule, they did not use social sites such as delicious or stumbleupon. They were more comfortable with having personal information online, but still felt their personal life and their business life were separate silos.
• People in their late 20s and early 30s were users of Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace, but again they mainly concentrated on using those resources for keeping in touch with their friends or for personal blogs. They had also used Google for business research and would post replies to their friend’s blogs.

Most people attending the event, (maybe even 95%), fell into the categories listed above. After some determined searching, I was able to talk to a few people in their early 20s. It was this group where I finally saw evidence of change that I was hoping to see from at least a few people in some of the other age brackets. Most everyone in the youngest age group was an avid user of Social Networking sites and Web 2.0. Several I talked to were actually basing their initial marketing strategies on their Facebook page. Some were also looking to do video on You Tube to promote their products.

So what can this information tell us? Perhaps the concept of Social Networking for businesses is not yet becoming engrained in the small business owners’ community, so the subsequent use of Social Networking to promote businesses is nearly non-existent. I feel, however, that this is most certainly because we are still in the beginning phases of adoption of these concepts for small businesses.

What does this mean for the typical entrepreneur? The good news is that depending upon the product or service that a company will be selling, there is probably a huge opportunity for small business owners to get a large jump on their competition if they quickly adopt a Social Networking strategy. The youngest entrepreneurs who were weaned on interactive video games (not Pong) consider it a given and will very likely succeed. The remaining early adopters, however, have a limited timeframe to pick up and run with it before it becomes overwhelming to the potential customer. It still comes down to the "old school" business theory of innovation - "the quick and the dead".

Where will your company's presence be by the end of the year? Please feel free to share your thoughts!

Bill Cooey
e3datasolutions

How many Social Networks can a social networker network if a social networker networks socially?

Some of you may remember the tongue twister about the wood chuck from your childhood? Here is a new spin on that idea. Bright and early this morning I cracked open the Wall Street Journal today (yes – the print version – old habits die hard) and ran across an article in the Technology section about Social Networking. The article by Lee Gomes in the “Talking Tech” Q&A section reported that more and more, firms are creating their own social networks. This is an interesting read that gives some basis for the belief that Social Networking will be an extremely important tool in a company’s marketing plan.

There are some obvious benefits to this proposition, and to quote Lee in the article “Companies … are trying to learn from the customers and develop a closer relationship with them”. Further along in the article Lee indicates that while a social networking site will allow a customer to have a platform to air their problems, complaints, and concerns. Lee also writes that this increasing wave of new networks could be compared to the growth of blogging and where it was a few years ago. Lee estimates the potential costs of a private site at between six and seven figures.

To research this I have posed the following question to the people within my network at linked in:

“With the existence of major social networks like Facebook, etc., can individual companies successfully create and benefit from their own focused social networks?”

From my perspective I do have some concerns as to whether this in fact could be a successful tool for companies' marketing efforts.

First – while the benefit of having a vocal user group makes sense, how many companies will make use of the data gathered? This forum could easily be used as an excuse maker for all the problems with a company’s services or product. Or the forum could be so filtered as to render the attempts at constructive posting useless. Many books have been written on the subject including “A Complaint is a Gift” by Janelle Barlow and Claus Moller. Their philosophy highlights customer complaints as a mode of communication to the company, but the key is will the company listen? Will the comments consist of customer rants of how “XYZ, Inc. stinks”, or will they provide actionable input for product refinement. Or perhaps, the social network will be just another wasted effort and resource that was directed from the top just so the company doesn’t miss the trend, and then the implementation is never properly utilized.

Second – Social Networking is definitely growing. The real question is will that growth be in users or number of successful networks. Personally, I belong several networks, but I only have time to keep two truly up to date. If initiatives such as OpenID can form a core engine to drive multiple networks, then there is a possibility for success. There is way too much time involved in properly maintaining a user id in multiple places. I am sure that there are many people out there who can do this, but for the majority who sign up for many networks there will always be only a couple of networks that are faithfully utilized.

Lastly – I am sure there are companies out there that are willing to throw money at having their own social network. In corporate America the thought of “missing the boat” usually triggers the wasting of time, money, and resources without having given the due diligence. There will probably be a market for developers and service providers who are more than willing to assist.

Later today I will provide an update with the results of my poll.

Cheers and happy networking!

Bill Cooey

www.e3datasolutions.com

Excerpts used with permission from The Wall Street Journal Online

Where's Waldo (or Bill, Jane, etc)?

Some of you may remember the book Where's Waldo, a children's book by Martin Handford. Either you read it growing up or bought it for your children, you probably remember that every page was an illustration of a sea of activity and people. Each one intricately detailed, making up a mosaic of life. The task at hand was to try and find Waldo, a nerdy looking guy in a striped shirt and stocking cap, whose image was buried inside the picture. The goal and also the challenge of each page was trying to find Waldo and see what he was doing.

This children's book can also be viewed as a metaphor for marketing and Web 2.0. As a business owner or entrepreneur, you should picture yourself as Waldo, preferably in more fashionable clothing, and try to scan the pages of the book to see if you can be found. The one catch is that we could always be assured that Waldo was there somewhere in the book. There is no guarantee that you or your company is even in the picture.

In order to be seen in the Internet today, you have to do more than just post a "brochure" web site and expect the public to come. That worked for Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, but remember, you are Waldo and this is 2008. You still need to promote yourself and your company. You need repetition or your brand on the Internet to increase your visibility. Since taking out an ad on a highly visited web site like CNN or Fox News or "fill in the blank" is probably cost prohibitive, you are going to have to do it the old fashioned way - good ol networking. Go sign up for FaceBook, LinkedIn, or any other of the Social Networking sites. Start a blog. Get your name in "print" and then go shake some hands, both virtually and in person!

Question - Have you Googled yourself today?

Bill Cooey

e3datasolutions