The 2013 Brandz Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands report was just released. The report offers important lessons for startups and small business.

Apple is once again listed as the most valuable global brand, with Google, IBM, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola rounding out the top five.

We’ve previously written about important lessons small businesses and startups can learn from the world’s best Brands. If you want to review our prior posts, read What Small Businesses Can Learn From The World’s Best Brands, Branding Secrets of the World’s Best Brands, and What Can You Learn From The World’s Best Brands.

Here are 10 key highlights from the BrandZ 2013 report (and the important lessons for small businesses and startups):

1) It’s not enough anymore to release new products and services. There are many products and services in the marketplace and a lot of noise. Smart brands attempt to be omnipresent and useful to their customers. The best brands deliver great value.

2) The distinction between consumers’ personal, social and business roles is eroding. We often occupy all of those roles simultaneously and as a result, it’s becoming more difficult for many brands to market to their customers. Branding is important, and it’s too easy to make a branding mistake that can cripple your small business.

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If you have invested considerable time and resources on social media marketing over the past year and feel frustrated, you are not alone.

About 61% of small businesses don’t see any return on investment on their social-media activities … Yet, almost 50% say they’ve increased their time spent on social media, and only 7% have decreased their time.

The above conclusions are from a survey released by Manta, a social network for small businesses.

It’s not surprising that many businesses fail to properly leverage social media. After all, the success of any marketing initiative requires careful planning, a strategy, appropriate tactics, and a way to measure results. Many business owners ignore most of these factors and simply dive-in head first. That’s a certain recipe for failure.

Yet there are many good examples of businesses that leverage social media remarkably well.

If other businesses are successfully leveraging social media, why isn’t social media working for your business?

What’s the most important difference in the way that successful companies use social media, and the millions of other companies that fail? Are you setting your expectations too high? Are you not creating enough content or not enough good content? Are you not spending enough money on social media? Are you not generating enough followers or fans?

The answer is really pretty simple but it’s not because of poor content, lack of money, or not enough followers. Are you ready for it?

Social media doesn’t work for your business because you’re not setting clear, measurable goals.

A small business that doesn’t set clear, measurable goals is doomed to fail.

Most small businesses – even successful small businesses – fail to grow because the owners don’t take the time to set meaningful goals. I’ve talked to thousands of small business owners. Most want to work for themselves and operate a business that will provide them and their families a good standard of living. But those aren’t the goals I’m talking about. Most small business owners fail to set quarterly or yearly goals for their businesses. They simply operate the business, focusing on day to day activities, without establishing what they hope to accomplish within a certain amount of time. While your overall goal can be to make a ton of money and find enough free time to enjoy other activities, you should establish operating goals for your business.

To be fair, you probably are setting broad, long-term goals. For example, you might have a broad goal to increase your revenue or profits over the next six to twelve months leveraging Twitter and Facebook. Broad, long-term goals are important, but they rarely help you to evaluate the success or failure of focused strategies and tactics.

It’s easy to see why so many businesses don’t see any return on investment on their social media activities. According to Manta’s survey results, most businesses set very broad goals:

What businesses are trying to get out of social media: 36% said their goal was to acquire and engage new customers, 19% said to gain leads and referrals, and 17% said to boost awareness.

But what do those goals mean? How do you measure acquisition and engagement of new customers? How do you measure awareness? Over what period of time? Perhaps the answers to these questions seem pretty simple to you – but they are not.

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Marketing is simple: spend $100 advertising your product or service and earn back $110 for your efforts. This has long been the underlying challenge for businesses large and small:  how do you acquire new customers, convince them to buy more of whatever it is you are selling, get them to tell other’s about your offering, and achieve positive ROI the whole while. Problem is, for many companies, this kind of magical thinking is simply not grounded in any type of reality. Especially for small business, traditional print, radio, and television advertising is out of their reach financially. Online advertising such as keyword search, CPC/PPC, and display ad placement  is, quite simply, a waste of money. And for many businesses trying to reach an increasingly distracted, overwhelmed, and fragmented audience has become more difficult than ever. As a result of more and more small businesses have sought alternative channels for their marketing strategies, such as value-add partnerships, inbound marketing campaigns, search engine optimization and social media marketing.

The least expensive and, for many businesses, most effective and fastest growing marketing channel is the social media. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Vine, Quora, and their ilk are highly effective channels that small business can use to reach their target audience  engage their customers, encourage word of mouth, and build visibility and awareness for their brand. For most small business it is not a matter of whether they need to have a SM presence, but how effective a job they are doing with their social strategy. But, and this is a big but, unlike traditional advertising the effectiveness of social media campaigns can be very difficult to track, and the ROI near impossible to calculate.

Most small businesses try to execute on their SM without a plan in place, absent an understanding of the competitive market, and with a limited knowledge of the tools available. The first step in remedying this is to conduct an audit of your company’s social media practices, assets, and strategy; with this data in hand a small business can determine whether what they are doing is effective and whether the ROI on these efforts is positive. Here a 5 tips to get you going and help you craft a roadmap for your company’s SM strategy.

1. Look to your competition First step, like so much in business, is to have a close look at your own market, specifically at your competition. Which social media platforms do they leverage? What is their strategy? And, most importantly, what is working for them and what is not. Take a close look at their Facebook page and their Twitter stream and determine how often they post, what types of content they share, and the level of engagement they are able to achieve. The number of followers your competition has is a good place to start, but also look at who they follow and how they engage with those as well. Another good indicator is to look at the hashtags they are using and how consistent they are with those. Given the fact that you share the same market, similar products, and indistinguishable audiences chances are that what is working for them, will also work for you.

2. Learn from the best. After nearly 10 years of an increasingly social media-driven internet, a number of rock stars have emerged. These are the companies that do the very best job engaging customers via the SM channels, creating viral content, and building strong word-of-mouth through their use of SM. Pick a great company, one that you admire – better yet, one that you follow on SM – and take the time to analyze what they are doing. The visual look of their Facebook and Twitter pages is a good place to start; an effectively designed page can help visitors to immediately understand a brand, its personality, and its target audience. Look at all of their accounts, dig beyond their main FB and Twitter accounts to their more targeted channels that promote everything from specific offerings, to their own philanthropy, to their public relations and media channels.

3. Set goals. Duh. Without a grasp of exactly what you are trying to achieve in SM you are spinning your wheels. Your goals can be simple: sign up x new followers; achieve an engagement ratio of 20:1 of followers to people discussing your product; or a objective for the number of  retweets of your content over a specific period of time. Why waste effort, capacity, and money on an effort unless you can determine if those are resources well spent?

4. Establish metrics. Related to those goals, are the metrics that will allow you to determine whether or not you are succeeding. Companies with successful SM strategies measure everything: number of followers, number of retweets, clicks on content, downloads, number of Likes, frequency of posts. Good data leads to meaningful analysis and can make all of the difference when determining if a marketing channel is effective for your company.

5. Take action. Develop your own best practices for your social marketing campaigns and repeat what works again and again. If a piece of your content becomes wildly popular, consider what is was about that particular post excited your followers and determine what else you can do in a similar vein. The best action you can take in your social marketing efforts is one that reflects who you are as a business; your audience is your audience precisely because they appreciate what you represent and the actions that resonate most deeply with your followers are always the best actions to take.

Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

The above is a fun video of a gas station prank that shows some people have a great, happy attitude – and it’s contagious.

Small Business and Startups: Prepare For the Worst – http://crowdspring.co/10DZYvs

The First Step, No Matter How Small, Is Crucial To Success – http://crowdspring.co/10yoT2A

Empower Your Small Business: Steve Jobs on management/leadership, disaster planning, great customer service – http://crowdspring.co/10wjCIQ

4 Reasons Business Owners Are Not Confident About the Economy | Inc by Gene Marks – http://crowdspring.co/1431yL5

Building a Business: How to Get Through Tough Times | Inc by Jeff Haden – http://crowdspring.co/10nAEZB

Why Customers Don’t Buy | Steve W. Martin – Harvard Business Review – http://crowdspring.co/10riavu

The Manual-First Startup – http://crowdspring.co/195TfhO

The First Step, No Matter How Small, Is Crucial To Success – http://crowdspring.co/10yoT2A

Every Entrepreneur’s Least Favorite Question | HBR – http://crowdspring.co/10sN1DI

4 Valuable Lessons on Growing Your Startup | Technori by Chris Campbell – http://crowdspring.co/16y7JdM

8 Successful Entrepreneurs Give Their Younger Selves Lessons They Wish They’d Known Then | Fast Company – http://crowdspring.co/142LOHS

Is The 70-Hour Work Week Worth The Sacrifice? | Forbes – http://crowdspring.co/126WhzK

5 Things Founders Don’t Talk About | Forbes – http://crowdspring.co/15L1d3Y

What are key strategies to acquire first 100k users with zero marketing budget? | Quora – http://crowdspring.co/19pyn5t

The Groundhog Day Effect | by Ash Maurya – http://crowdspring.co/126ZBuE

5 Habits Of The Most Creative People | Fast Company – http://crowdspring.co/10yI3FE

It’s very important to know when something is a lost cause |The Atlantic – http://crowdspring.co/16ABY3V

“As a founder, your job isn’t to make a great product. It’s to build a great team that makes great products.” by Aza Raskin – http://crowdspring.co/19v40ue

Very insightful interview by Great Discontent with Jason Fried of 37signals, covering many interesting topics – http://crowdspring.co/10rqcUV

Good reminder from Fred Wilson that your instincts should sometimes guide you when due diligence does not – http://crowdspring.co/1275W9E

4 Ways to Get Customers to Open Your Emails | Entrepreneur – http://crowdspring.co/12vp9SN

A reminder than overnight success often takes 10 years – http://crowdspring.co/10ziyUw

Startup PR Tip: To Get Press, Don’t Pitch Your Product – http://crowdspring.co/10uhqFY

Good discussion in the comments of this article about the Square Stand (replacement for retail cash registers) – http://crowdspring.co/10zjY1q

Most data isn’t “big,” and businesses are wasting money pretending it is | Quartz – http://crowdspring.co/140kdac

10 Simple Ideas To Improve Your Outcomes | by Dharmesh Shah – http://crowdspring.co/17xjNMu

Good post by Ben Milne about focus and the challenges of having enough mental “bandwidth” – http://crowdspring.co/15JWhw2

The Corrosive Downside of Acquihires | by Mark Suster – http://crowdspring.co/15GX15e

How Marketing Legend Guy Kawasaki Manages His Social Media Presence | Hubspot – http://crowdspring.co/13VVHaf

Only 200 Startups Per Year End Up Mattering & Most of them Aren’t in Tech | BostInno – http://crowdspring.co/10AwFc9

The 13 Pieces of Advice that Saved our Company | Ecquire – http://crowdspring.co/10Ax2ne

How to Find the Right Advisor – http://crowdspring.co/13zgml7

Building a Business: How to Get Through Tough Times | Inc by Jeff Haden – http://crowdspring.co/10nAEZB

Small Business and Startups: Prepare For the Worst – http://crowdspring.co/10DZYvs

Quora! Quora! Quora!? – http://crowdspring.co/10o8Cxh

Good long read on how Netflix leverages technology and the cloud | Businessweek – http://crowdspring.co/10nLb73

Smart, simple take on Tesla Motors strategy – http://crowdspring.co/12mvRKS 

Dear Social Media Managers: It’s Time To Grow Up – http://crowdspring.co/10o8OMM

Selling ads by time, not space | by Jeff Jarvis – http://crowdspring.co/15Qc8cB

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People fear many things. The fear of failure is perhaps one of the greatest and most dangerous fears.

If you risk nothing, you risk everything.

Hamdi Ulukaya, CEO and founder of Chobani, recently talked about how he started Chobani. It’s a wonderful story and well worth your time to watch how an immigrant entrepreneur with a vision others thought was crazy, built a business that grew from zero to a billion dollars in just five years.

Ulukaya was born in Turkey and was an accomplished feta-cheese-maker. He lived in Upstate New York when he saw an ad for a closed Kraft yogurt plant. Ulukaya initially threw the ad away. But his gut told him to go see the place. He bought the plant, despite friends telling him otherwise, and hired a small staff.

With no plan, Ulukaya wasn’t sure what to do next. So he did something that seems pretty strange. Ulukaya and his small team repainted the walls of the factory. This small act gave momentum to his team and inspired them with other ideas. Instead of sitting around paralyzed and thinking about what to do next, the team took a small step and created big progress.

The first step, no matter how small, is crucial to success.

Disaster strikes. Extreme weather events, fires, data storage failures, illness or even the death of a key team member can occur at any time and when something happens, will your small business be prepared? According to ReadWrite, 74% of small businesses do not have a disaster plan and 84% don’t even carry insurance against natural events. Preparing for a disaster is a simply matter of reviewing your vulnerabilities, developing a detailed plan, and training your employees for the inevitable.

When Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast last fall, thousands of businesses were impacted with many forced to close and many others experiencing physical damage ranging from fairly mild to very severe. 6 months later and some of these businesses have yet to reopen and others have gone out of business altogether. But disaster does not always come with howling winds and driven rain. Sometimes it is as banal as a drive failure and sometimes as tragic as an injury or death. The point is that every business should take the time to think through how an emergency could affect your business and what you would need to do to keep operations going. Preparing for disaster is not particularly time-consuming nor is it expensive, but the benefit to your business can be meaningful.

Here are 8 thoughts on what you can do to prepare your business for emergencies of all stripes:

1. Write a plan, for goodness sake! 
Start by conducting a risk assessment and taking inventory of your company’s specific risks: natural disaster, weather-connected, and personnel-related. Before you write the actual plan, you need to understand your company’s vulnerabilities, so you will need to carefully consider what will happen if the power goes out or if key hardware fails or if your office is flooded or if your phones go dead? Then take all of that data and put it on paper; at the very least, your plan should clearly designate who is in charge during emergency situations; a protocol or system for warning employees about emergencies and communicating with local authorities; procedures addressing any special needs of employees with disabilities or medical conditions.; plans for employees to follow for evacuation or , sheltering-in-place and procedures for responding injuries or other medical situations.

2. Know where you are.
Your region may have specific types of disasters that are more likely than others. For instance, if you are located in Florida, there is a good chance that sooner or later a hurricane will strike and if you are in Oklahoma you have probably experienced tornado warnings any number of times. As you conduct your risk assessment, give some thought to the types of emergencies that have occurred in the past, consider which specific threats have the greatest likelihood and plan for those. Read the rest of this post »

Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

Do you love the TV series The Walking Dead? What if you tried lip reading and changed the dialogue based on what you thought people were saying … the video above is probably what you’d hear. Plus, for the first time, you can hear the zombies talking!

Steve Case on Risk-Taking, or Lack Thereof, in Business | NYT – http://crowdspring.co/13feE8r

7 A/B Testing Blunders That Even Experts Make – http://crowdspring.co/ZCNTq8

“Embrace skeptics. They can make your business better. Toss out cynics, because they don’t further your cause.” http://crowdspring.co/14142sE

“Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity.” – http://crowdspring.co/ZCZaKH

Building Loyalty The Lady Gaga Way: Focus On 1% Of Your Customers | Forbes – http://crowdspring.co/195MVXy

How to Set Yourself Up for a Productive Day | by Michael Hyatt – http://crowdspring.co/10bON06

What Steve Jobs Can Teach Us About Management and Leadership – http://crowdspring.co/13ytBSb

Surround yourself with people who make you happy | TNW – http://crowdspring.co/13iydwE

crowdSPRING’s Small Business Spotlight: Red Poppy Floral Design – http://crowdspring.co/10b3mB3

Defending the Brash Arrogance of Silicon Valley | by Mike Greenfield – http://crowdspring.co/ZHJwxt

Avoiding Burnout | by Andrew Dumont – http://crowdspring.co/10WvdrD

I Can’t Code, and You Can’t Sell Crap | by Gary Vaynerchuk – http://crowdspring.co/16ed3D0

It’s difficult to fake corporate culture | Business Insider – http://crowdspring.co/16l01nb

10 Myths about Startups – http://crowdspring.co/ZNgv3B

How a 1-Page Business Model Will – and Won’t–Help Your Lean Startup | by Kevin Dewalt – http://crowdspring.co/18ZLnhH

The critical metrics for each stage of your SaaS business | by Lars Lofrgren – http://crowdspring.co/15nU8WI

Steve Case on Risk-Taking, or Lack Thereof, in Business | NYT – http://crowdspring.co/13feE8r

Why do we worry about scalability on Day 1? | by Adii Pienaar – http://crowdspring.co/15n62QM

Surround yourself with people who make you happy | TNW – http://crowdspring.co/13iydwE

How to Set Yourself Up for a Productive Day | by Michael Hyatt – http://crowdspring.co/10bON06

Reverse Engineering Your Startup’s Success - http://crowdspring.co/195KOTF

Building Loyalty The Lady Gaga Way: Focus On 1% Of Your Customers | Forbes – http://crowdspring.co/195MVXy

The Start-up Hall of Shame (America’s 10 Worst States for Entrepreneurs) – http://crowdspring.co/1934U0I

Startups: You Should Value Software More | by Wade Foster – http://crowdspring.co/13AX3ai

Startup Founders: Don’t Forget to Sell the Dream | by Jason Shen – http://crowdspring.co/10bPbvr

Why variety is no longer the spice of life: How to be happier by avoiding decision fatigue | The Buffer Blog – http://crowdspring.co/10lWpJm

How to Calculate Customer Experience | Evergage – http://crowdspring.co/16jGFib

Warren Buffett’s advice to women | Business Insider – http://crowdspring.co/13AAEK5

What Steve Jobs Can Teach Us About Management and Leadership – http://crowdspring.co/13ytBSb

7 A/B Testing Blunders That Even Experts Make – http://crowdspring.co/ZCNTq8

Urgency and accountability are two sides of the innovation coin – http://crowdspring.co/1413Ute

The Damaging Psychology of Down Rounds | by Mark Suster – http://crowdspring.co/10mBruW

“Embrace skeptics. They can make your business better. Toss out cynics, because they don’t further your cause.” http://crowdspring.co/14142sE

Remote Work vs. Collaboration: 8 Startups Weigh In | ReadWrite by Scott Gerber -http://crowdspring.co/15lYyNX

How MailChimp learned to treat data like orange juice and rethink email in the process – http://crowdspring.co/ZNeCns

Is working in a startup as great as it sounds? – http://crowdspring.co/11d2oYf

What Really Happened When Facebook Bought Instagram | Vanity Fair – http://crowdspring.co/1413zXw

The Business Plan. Redux – http://crowdspring.co/11NOjeL

“Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity.” – http://crowdspring.co/ZCZaKH

eBay, The FBI, Shawn Hogan And Brian Dunning | Business Insider – http://crowdspring.co/ZCN8xr

7 A/B Testing Blunders That Even Experts Make – http://crowdspring.co/ZCNTq8

Read the rest of this post »

“The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.” – Henry Kissinger

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” - Peter Drucker

“You have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy.” – Steve Jobs

Strong leadership without strong management can result in chaos and inefficiency. Strong management without strong leadership can result in tunnel vision and paralysis. Here’s a wonderful short video in which Steve Jobs talks about managing people and his leadership style.