Archive for March, 2011

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Twitter Link Roundup #80 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More

Thursday, March 31st, 2011


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 image above is a photo of Manarola, Italy – a small town in northern Italy. You’ll find more photos of colorful towns and cities in the Random Fun section below.

image credit: EpicV27

Lean Marketing: Five Cheap Ways To Market Your Startup – http://bit.ly/h2pmiD

Creative & Smart Slogans – http://bit.ly/gEl8Sb (expand) and how to write a great slogan for your biz – http://bit.ly/bLdDPq

Lean Marketing: Five Cheap Ways To Market Your Startup – http://bit.ly/h2pmiD

The Best 10 Solutions For Email Marketing – http://bit.ly/i7LiGK

Three biggest hurdles for Chicago’s innovators – http://bit.ly/eYE9hJ

Make your Startup ridiculously easy to write about. Put Together a Great Press Pack – http://bit.ly/fyoOyy

Startup Exercise: What can’t be solved with money? – http://awe.sm/5HSbb

What Don Corleone Could Learn from @GuyKawasaki – http://bit.ly/gEo006

7 Common Mistakes Startups Make on Accelerator Program Applications – http://on.mash.to/hF5e0H

Interesting perpsective, arguing Color’s $41 million raise makes sense – http://read.bi/i6y9bS

Good post by @micah with tips for entrepreneurs demoing a product/service to investors – http://bit.ly/fyDVXz

5 solid startup lessons – http://bit.ly/hkN8EE

Creative & Smart Slogans – http://bit.ly/gEl8Sb (expand) and how to write a great slogan for your biz – http://bit.ly/bLdDPq

Malcolm Gladwell: Social Media Still Not a Big Deal – http://bit.ly/g6pFU2

The Economics of Attention: Why There Are No Second Chances on the Internet – http://bit.ly/ghMduE

The Best 10 Solutions For Email Marketing – http://bit.ly/i7LiGK

Are you listening? – http://bit.ly/gReXAz

Landing top spot on Google search sometimes a puzzle for business – http://bit.ly/g4W9jp

The case for Startups, Lawyers & VCs to Blog (with data to prove it) – http://bit.ly/eQt8uA

Online ad click through rates suck, but some publishers & agencies argue we shouldn’t care – http://bit.ly/e1NccN

Facebook wants agencies to share creative (and maybe the terrible CPC/CPM data too?) – http://bit.ly/e2lt4k

Kids on Facebook are depressed. No they’re not. Yes they are. Cat fight? – http://bit.ly/f4nkzr

Squeezing Mad Men for more ads. Oh, the irony – http://tinyurl.com/5umg4ql

Useful free collection of vectorized social icons – http://bit.ly/fGi8JU

Elements of Design Quick Reference Sheet – http://ow.ly/4n4Ux

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Posted in Awesomeness, business, community, crowdsourcing, design, How To, inspiration, Interviews, marketing, Reviews, social media, start-up tips, Strategy, Technology, writing | No Comments »

Are You Listening?

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

Many people use social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and others to broadcast information about themselves and their businesses. Far fewer people take the time to listen.

The video below shows baby twins having a “conversation” between themselves. Notice how each patiently listens while the other is “talking”. We can learn a lot from babies and from 3 year olds!

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Posted in Awesomeness, inspiration, marketing, social media | No Comments »

Lean Marketing: Don’t Believe Your Own Press Releases

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

There are many ways to distribute press releases for free or for only a few dollars. Among the many alternatives, you can use PRLog, or if you’re looking for deeper social media integration, PressDoc is a good alternative.

When you have some great news to share – a new product or service or an important milestone, you should let the world know. But it’s important stay grounded and avoid using press releases to make wildly exaggerated or stupid claims about your company.

I’ve seen many wild press releases that do little except tarnish the credibility of the company issuing the release.

Such press releases are dangerous for another reason – they cause the companies that issue the releases to start believing their own frivolous claims. In the following short video, I offer five reasons why startups and small businesses should stay focused on their product or service and always stay humble.

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Posted in business, marketing, social media, start-up tips, Strategy | 3 Comments »

Lean Marketing: Five Cheap Ways To Market Your Startup

Monday, March 28th, 2011

Every startup wants to get attention for their product or service. But it’s not easy for a young company to get attention, and can often be very expensive. In this short video, I offer five suggestions to help you get attention for your startup.

Do you have other suggestions of ways startups can get attention for their product or service without spending a ton of money?

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Posted in business, How To, marketing, social media, start-up tips, Strategy | 17 Comments »

crowdSPRING Community Gives Back – Kids In Danger

Sunday, March 27th, 2011

Give Back is the crowdSPRING community’s way of helping worthy non-profit and charity causes in need. Creatives in the crowdSPRING community have agreed that for these special projects, no monetary awards will be given. crowdSPRING will waive all fees and will assist the organizations with posting their project. We will collaborate together to help those less fortunate. You can read more about the origins of Give Back here.

We’re thrilled that the crowdSPRING community’s next Give Back project is for Kids In Danger (KID).

Kids In Danger is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting children by improving children’s product safety.

The organization was founded in 1998 by University of Chicago professors Linda Ginzel and Boaz Keysar following the death of their son Danny in an unsafe portable crib.

KIDS’s mission is to promote development of safer children’s products, advocate for children, and educate the public (especially parents) about dangerous children’s products.

You might wonder why KID’s mission is important.

Unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death among children.

An estimated 66,400 children under age 5 were rushed to U.S. hostpital emergency rooms in 2006 for injuries associated with nursery products.

An average 81 children under age 5 die annually in incidents associated with nursery products.

In calendar year 2007, the U.S. Consumer Product safety commission recalled children’s products, including nuersey items, toys and clothing, at a rate of almost 4 per week. This accounts for over 46 million recalled units.

KID has received numerous awards and recognitions, including the 2010 Civil Justice Foundation Community Champion Award and a Presidential Service Award given by former President Bill Clinton.

Our entire community is honored to be helping Kids In Danger. You can view their New logo for Kids in Danger – a dynamic growing nonprofit project. They’re looking for a new, more professional logo to help promote their mission and the organization.

Please consider helping this worthy cause. You can help directly by participating in their logo design project, or you can help by telling others about this project and/or about Kids In Danger (you can follow the organization on Twitter or visit them on Facebook).

As in all our projects, participation in Give Back projects is voluntary. Give Back projects work like regular projects, including contracts, wrap-up, notifications, etc. To help the learning process along in these projects, we encourage creatives to collaborate and to provide constructive feedback to each other.

We’re fortunate to have an amazing community of creatives – 88,000 of them, from 200 countries. They speak hundreds of languages, cover all age groups, demographics, experience and religions. They’ve created logo designs, web designs, and custom graphic designs for companies in virtually every country of the world and in most languages spoken on the planet.

We encourage everyone to find ways to help worthy causes and others who are less fortunate. Thank you – from our entire community!

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Posted in Awesomeness, business, community, crowdsourcing, design, inspiration, social media | No Comments »

Small Business Spotlight of the Week: DormStormer

Friday, March 25th, 2011

There are those who think and those who do.  Current University of Southern California students Adam Gausepohl and Bryant Laitipaya definitely fall into the latter category.

As college room mates and fraternity brothers, they both knew they wanted to eventually start a business, but like many entrepreneurs, struggled to find an idea they were both equally confident in.  Finally, frustrated with the lack of flash sales websites that cared about what college kids need, they came up with DormStormer.

DormStormer takes extra inventory from top brands and sells it to students at around 50% off.  These sales take place in 72 hour events.  In order to buy off of DormStormer, a person has to have a .edu email address, making it exclusive to the coveted and valuable 18 – 25 demographic.

Adam took the time to answer a few questions I had regarding DormStormer and using crowdSPRING to help them develop a website:

1.  How did you get things designed before crowdSPRING? Or if this is your first project, what other options were you considering?

Before crowdSPRING, we tried to design our own website on Wix. Wix is a very easy to use website that allows you to create your own custom flash site. We found it easy to start making something that looked pretty good, but it was hard to customize it to the point that we needed to. Also, flash sites take longer to load and we did not want this problem for our customers who may have slower connections.

2. Why in the world did you decide to use crowdSPRING?

We decided to use crowdSPRING because it was a relatively cheap option to obtain high quality results. We are extremely pleased with the outcome of our competition, and the designer emadz has provided us with the exact type of website we were looking for. We browsed crowdSPRING’s competitors, but decided to choose crowdSPRING as we thought we could obtain the highest results. Also, we loved how much information crowdSPRING requested of us, as we thought this would give the creatives the best possible chance at fully understanding what we were looking for.

(more…)

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Posted in business, crowdsourcing, Interviews | No Comments »

Twitter Link Roundup #79 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More

Friday, March 25th, 2011

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 image to the left – a cat – is one of many different images and videos of cats that fascinate people. Read the interview with Ben Huh (in the Social Media and Marketing section below) to find out why people are so fascinated by cats.

image credit: Kevin

10 things entrepreneurs can learn from musicians – http://bit.ly/hkDnip

How To Pick The Perfect Name For Your Small Business or Startup – http://bit.ly/namingstartup

Are You Ready to Claim the Right Things You’ve Done? – http://bit.ly/dTs0uH

10 things entrepreneurs can learn from musicians – http://bit.ly/hkDnip

How To Pick The Perfect Name For Your Startup – http://bit.ly/namingstartup

What It’s Like To Be An Entrepreneur – Howard Tullman – http://bit.ly/eujzrZ

How Great Entrepreneurs Think – http://bit.ly/hZWBmq

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman’s 10 rules of entrepreneurship - http://bit.ly/gyjWVc

Are You Ready to Claim the Right Things You’ve Done? – http://bit.ly/dTs0uH

Very good perspective about titles and promotions at startups – http://bit.ly/eAB3CQ

Creating a Product Focused Startup Culture – http://bit.ly/hSxbug

Whom Should You Hire at a Startup? (Attitude Over Aptitude) - http://bit.ly/ehfEoq

Life doesn’t start tomorrow – http://ow.ly/1scjJd

The 5 Minute Guide To Cheap Startup Advertising – http://bit.ly/gSA3Bs

VCs vs. marketing – http://bit.ly/hh2WIF

Awesome workflow by @yegg on getting startup advice – http://awe.sm/5HHmC

More, better, faster: UX design for startups – http://bit.ly/i2pSDI

Bubble Trouble? I Don’t Think So – http://bit.ly/ejKEU8

A great post on getting into YC – http://j.mp/hgtKrw

EveryBlock Putting Focus Back on Community – http://bit.ly/eEQVtf

Why big companies can’t innovate, and what to do about it – http://tinyurl.com/4d79mh4

Is This The Future of Advertising? – http://bit.ly/gmKhUn

Is Facebook for Business Overrated via @eric_urbane – http://bit.ly/hUFYGO

A good read about avoiding cause marketing backlash – http://on.wsj.com/gjwDu6

Forrester’s @jbernoff calls for PR reform – http://bit.ly/htD1U0

Adding the Facebook Like Button Revisited – http://su.pr/2RLnu1

True Colors – Breakdown of Color Preferences by Gender – http://bit.ly/gR9w1F

The State and Future of the Social Media Management System Space – http://bit.ly/eRZhUL

Good analysis by @benkunz about possible financial impact from NYT paywall experiment – http://bit.ly/fR8wuk

A paywall where search and social get a free pass. Smart – http://tcrn.ch/fqyHyr

Why You Watch Cats And Epic Fails 13 Million Times A Day – interview with Ben Huh – http://bit.ly/f7m3m4

The age of mediocrity? – http://j.mp/f0X8gs

NYT paywall has a loophole. Unlimited views if you click a Twitter or Facebook link – http://tcrn.ch/fqyHyr

Brilliantly subtle Nigerian spam promotion from … Montblanc – http://tinyurl.com/67n6gnr

Are “free” fonts really free? Can you legally copy fonts? Answers to these & other questions – http://bit.ly/fontlaw

A Round-Up of 50 Amazing and Fresh Photoshop Tutorials – http://j.mp/hq4Avl

Designing Quality Infographics: Tips, Resources and Inspiration – http://bit.ly/fym0vt

(more…)

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Posted in Awesomeness, business, community, crowdsourcing, design, How To, inspiration, Interviews, marketing, Reviews, social media, start-up tips, Strategy, Technology, writing | No Comments »

The Law on Fonts and Typefaces: Frequently Asked Questions

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

The right typeface is often the key to a great logo, graphic or web design. But there’s much confusion and misinformation about typefaces, fonts and the law.

Many people do not understand the law governing the use of typefaces and fonts. Others incorrectly assume that they can freely use any typeface or font for any project.

When you purchase a commercial font, you are purchasing a license to use the font software. Your rights and obligations are defined in the End User License Agreement (EULA). Those agreements will vary among fonts and among font makers – so read them very carefully to understand what you can and cannot do with the fonts you’re licensing. For example, some agreements will restrict the number of computers on which you can install a font.

How is a font different from a typeface?

Technically, a “font” is a computer file or program (when used digitally) that informs your printer or display how a letter or character is supposed to be shown. A “typeface” is a set of letters, numbers and other symbols whose forms are related by repeating certain design elements that are consistently applied (sometimes called glyphs), used to compose text or other combination of characters.

Although many people would call “Helvetica” a font, it’s actually a typeface. The software that tells your display or printer to show a letter in “Helvetica” is the font.

What is copyright?

Copyright is a form of legal protection provided to those who create original works. Under the 1976 Copyright Act (United States), the copyright owner has the exclusive right to reproduce, adapt, distribute, publicly perform and publicly display the work. Any or all of these rights can be licensed, sold or donated to another party. One does not need to register a work with the U.S. Copyright Office for it to be automatically protected by copyright law (registration does have benefits – but we won’t be covering those in this article). For more about copyright law, you can read Small Business Legal Issues: Copyright Basics.

Does copyright law protect typefaces and fonts?

Generally, copyright law in the U.S. does not protect typefaces. Fonts may be protected as long as the font qualifies as computer software or a program (and in fact, most fonts are programs or software). Bitmapped fonts are considered to be computerized representations of a typeface (and are not protected by copyright law). On the other hand, scalable fonts (because they are incorporated as part of a program or software) are protected by copyright.

This means that copyright law (at least in the U.S.) protects only the font software, not the artistic design of the typeface.

You should remember that copyright law, and more specifically, as it relates to typefaces and fonts, varies by country. For example, the U.S. may be the only country in the western world not to recognize intellectual property rights in typeface design. The U.S. Copyright Office has unequivocally determined that fonts are not subject to protection as artistic works under the 1976 Copyright Act.

(more…)

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Posted in business, crowdsourcing, design, How To, start-up tips | 17 Comments »

10 things entrepreneurs can learn from musicians

Monday, March 21st, 2011

I have written several posts now about ways entrepreneurs can learn from people and from the world around them. A few months ago I wrote about how much we can learn from kids (e.g. kids know how to entertain themselves) and last month I shared thoughts about what we can learn from dogs (e.g. dogs love to play). I have been looking around me and considering the things that influence my life as an entrepreneur, and also the things that inspire me to be more productive, learn more effectively, and run our business more effectively. I can’t say that I have a much time available for just listening to music, but I do love it and I am in constant awe of musicians and the language they speak, the mysterious symbols that they read, and the way they can work together to make individual strands contribute to a far greater whole. Orchestras are not the only example of this; great rock bands illustrate how a small group of people can collaborate effectively and contribute to a finished product that could not have been created without each individual’s input and cooperation.

1. Musicians cooperate.
As with all great teams, great musicians have to work together seamlessly and in cooperation. Choosing the proper key, playing at the same tempo, and selecting the proper instrumentation, pitch, and levels are all a given to any group of musicians. Entrepreneurs can learn a great deal about teamwork from this example and businesses must be able to work in much the same way; teams of people functioning in unison to achieve a goal or create a meaningful product or service.

2. Musicians keep a beat.
Teams need drive and incentive to work effectively and entrepreneurs can use the example set by musicians to help their team be more effective. One way to apply the musical metaphor is to imagine the rhythm that drives a song and think of a project or effort as having a similar underlying rhythm  which moves it forward. Establish a beat to the team’s work, maintain that beat, and use it to accomplish the goal you;’ve set.

3. The orchestra follows the conductor.
In a large ensemble or even a small group there is one person who establishes and maintains the rhythm, drives the emphasis, and controls the tone of the piece being played. In a rock band this is often the drummer or other percussionist and in an orchestra it is the conductor. In business there also is a need for an effective leader who provides much the same function – driving the team, establishing the priorities, and clearly articulating goals, strategy, and tactics. A baton is optional.

4. Musicians play with joy (or something else).
Musicians are motivated by their innate love for the music itself and the joy of making it. Great entrepreneurs are much the same – driven by their dedication, motivated by the sheer fun of the work, and hooked on the sheer exhilaration of creating something unique.

5. Musicians listen to one another.
Musicians have to be able to hear what their bandmates are doing in order to adjust their own performance based on what they are hearing. Entrepreneurs can learn to pay greater attention to their team – listening, responding, and adjusting are all key elements of the collaborative process and strong teams constantly respond and adjust based on what other members are doing at any given time.

(more…)

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Posted in business, How To, inspiration, start-up tips, Strategy | 10 Comments »

What It’s Like To Be An Entrepreneur – Howard Tullman

Sunday, March 20th, 2011

We’re thrilled to be part of a new web/TV reality series – Trep Life – giving audiences a unique, 360-degree view of what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur.

Each episode will focus on one company or organization. The first episode was about our friends Matt Maloney and Mike Evans from Grub Hub – a terrific place to find every restaurant that will deliver to you. The second episode was about Lara Miller, a designer and Executive Director of the Chicago Fashion Incubator.

This next episode features serial entrepreneur Howard Tullman. Watch below:

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Posted in Awesomeness, business, inspiration, start-up tips, Strategy | No Comments »

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