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!
There’s nothing more inconvenient than looking at pictures on someone’s smart phone. I feel this is the appropriate time to insert the hashtag #firstworldproblems. But, self-awareness be darned, because those moments of wrist grabbing, head tilting and eye straining are legitimately frustrating.
Recognizing this, I introduce you all to PicoSnap by Slikc. PicoSnap is the first app that allows you to use pico projectors with your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Previously, using a projector with Apple products required jailbreaking the software so it would recognize the other device.
If your interest is piqued, you can look at projectors here and download PicoSnap for free here from the Apple store.
Kevin from Slikc took some time to tell me more about what they do:
How would you explain what you do to somebody’s grandmother?
We’ve found that people love to extend their personal media space, so we create software to make that happen, easily. Lots of smart people at other companies have worked out ways to walk around with media — on our phones, our iPads, our netbooks. It all works really well — the whole mobile media sector has done a great job of connecting with what customers see as their real needs. But the current approaches to mobile media are inevitably meant for one set of eyeballs. Informally sharing a chart, a picture, a movie — that’s much harder to do, gracefully. And that’s where we come in. Our users can pull an iPhone out of one pocket, a pico projector the same size from their other pocket, and instantly start sharing media with a group of people in an elevator, a construction site, a lobby. It’s a simple idea but it turns out to be very powerful in the right hands.
What made you use crowdSPRING?
Crowd sourcing has been such a phenomenal thing — so, as long-time computer science aficionados, we’ve been aware of proto-crowd sourcing since Louis von Ahn’s ESP Game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP_Game). We’ve had an eye out for new players in the crowd sourcing space over the years. So we came to crowdSPRING as fans of this new way of using human networks and felt that crowdSPRING had a sense of themselves which was very much in keeping with our company’s way to seeing technology.
What are some industry specific challenges you faced?
The future is already here, we often say, it’s just that it’s not uniformly distributed. With any new idea, some people are right there with you — they see the idea as a response to a problem they understand, and they’re curious to see how it this solution works. These people are not evangelists, they just have a suitable background for seeing your solution in context. The context is the current landscape of problems, and it’s crucial to understand that in order to understand your solution. Our challenges come not from these people, of course, but from everyone else, from finding a way to make what we do legible to these people. Winning over these folks is incredibly hard. We have to stretch to see the world through their experiences.
One of the most enduringly popular ad campaigns in memory is from the California Milk Processor Board – “Got Milk” has become an iconic part of the cultural landscape and has been shared, copied, parodied, and imitated over and over again. Although that campaign pre-dated the rise of the social media, it is a great and early example of the viral effect that can sometimes occur with a fresh new campaign.
A few of week’s ago, the Milk Board and their agency, San Francisco-based Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, launched a new social media campaign, a tongue-in-cheek look at how drinking “milk can help reduce the symptoms” of premenstrual syndrome. The campaign, however was targeted at men, and a micro-site, with the URL “everythingidoiswrong.org,” was set up and labeled for men as “your home for PMS management.” The site was launched around two weeks ago and originally scheduled to be live through the end of August. The site’s content included lists of “apologies” that men could use with women with PMS symptoms.
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 video above shows actor Jim Meskimen. In the video, Jim impersonates 25 famous people, including Woody Allen, Jack Nicholson and Droopy Dog, reciting Clarence’s monologue from Shakespeare’s Richard III.
Breaking in a new employee? Small business and startup tips: training day! http://bit.ly/nt1hgx
Tips On Defining The Size of a Market for a Startup Business – http://bit.ly/qHt84r
The Color Of Your Website Has A Huge Impact On What People Buy – http://read.bi/pjOTLC
The Small Business Owner’s Guide to Successful Color Combinations – http://bit.ly/ojO4ju
With temperature highs steadying at a cool and comfy 100 degrees this week in Chicago, it’s too hot to bother with lengthy, clever intros. So, I’ll just cut to the chase: this week we’re featuring the website Hireology.com.
Hiring new employees can be tricky– both Mike and Ross have coveredthistopic extensively in the past. The hiring process can present specific challenges to small businesses and start-ups since oftentimes, they simply don’t have a procedure in place to help them make the best hiring decisions. As a former outsourced recruiting provider, Adam Robinson saw firsthand how lack of consistency and unpreparedness can effect final decisions.
With an idea for a web-based hiring platform that catered to small businesses, he parterned with Michael Krasman and Jeff Ellman in 2010. Hireology provides a system and structure for companies to use when looking to hire new employees. Currently, 120 companies have used Hireology. You can check out their blog here.
Adam took a few minutes to answer some questions I had:
How would you explain what you do to somebody’s grandmother?
Hireology is a web-based platform that helps you make the better hiring decisions. We tell managers what to specific questions to ask in an interview – and how to score what they hear – so that they aren’t making hiring decisions based on gut feel. When you’re ready to make the hire, we provide access to criminal background checks, personality profiling, and education verification.
What made you use crowdSPRING?
I’ve been through the process of designing a corporate identity with a traditional “branding agency,” and it was both expensive and frustrating. We wanted to give crowdSPRING a shot, if only to see what would happen. Your model made trying the service a very low risk/high reward proposition, and the result was outstanding.
What are some industry specific challenges you faced?
Hireology is competing in a HR Technology market – a mature, crowded space with literally hundreds of alternatives. We needed a brand that immediately differentiated us from a sea of me-too brands, and communicated to our market that we’re very different from the solutions they’ve tried before.
It’s important to properly measure the size the market in which you hope to compete. Without this information, it’s very difficult to raise funds, understand how much you can/should spend on product development and marketing, evaluate the success of your marketing efforts, etc.
In the following video, I offer five suggestions that can help you define the size of a market for a startup business.
Do you have other tips to add or a question? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.
Just like our larger brethren in the Fortune 100, lots of small businesses have training programs for their workers: lectures, classes, role-playing exercises, and motivational speaker sessions. However, most small businesses and startups ignore training programs altogether, or cobble together ad hoc strategies when on-boarding new hires. These differing approaches are sometimes stylistic, sometimes strategic, often driven by economics, and sometimes prompted by the company’s own culture.
Training new employees takes time, detracts from mission critical work, costs real money in salaries and benefits during the training period (not to mention the training materials, people, venues, etc), and often return results that are not relevant for many businesses. Frankly, many companies simply don’t have the time or resources to send their new hires away for days or weeks of formal training before expecting them to start producing a real work-product.
The question is, “What is right for my business?” And like so many choices that businesses large and small make on a daily basis, there is a simple answer: “It depends.” Businesses that hire workers involved in complex technical tasks, or the operation of dangerous equipment, or the preparation of food, medicine or other highly-regulated products obviously need to take the time (and spend the money) to properly prepare their new employees to perform their specific jobs. But many other businesses that are not involved in dangerous processes, nor serving food to the public, nor dealing with hazardous materials do not necessarily need to develop or execute complex training programs; in many cases new workers at these types of companies can hit the ground running after an hour or two of instruction from an experienced colleague.
I would argue, however, that there is one functional area where new employees for ALL companies do require specific, sometimes extensive, training: customer service. As we have written many times before, great customer service is something that no business can go without. And, in order to provide great customer service, employees need to be well-trained not just in the mechanics of running whatever software or other tools they use in their jobs, but in the culture of the company, the products or services offered by the company, and (most importantly) in understanding the customers. This doesn’t mean that a small business necessarily needs to take days or weeks to train a new customer support person, but it does mean that a careful and thoughtful mix of formal training, on-the-job training, and periodic reflection and review can greatly increase that worker’s effectiveness and productivity.
Formal training.
For most small businesses the “formal” training of customer service workers consists of teaching them to use the tools they will leverage to deliver support: help desk software, telephone protocol, email templates and the like. These operation of these tools can typically be taught very quickly, usually on day 1 of training. If you are hiring people who need more than a day to learn their way around customer service software, you are probably hiring the wrong people. Similarly, if you need to teach someone how to be respectful and polite with customers on the phone or in person, you also need to take a look at your hiring decisions. It is important that your new employees understand the right way to operate their tools, but much of the skill will be acquired after the initial, remedial instruction. Let them get their hands dirty quickly and let them learn from their experience.
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 video above shows the remarkable breakthroughs in 3D printing technology. It’s almost like magic.
Is your biz competing in a crowded field? Branding your business in a competitive environment – http://bit.ly/pb5wRt
New study finds that Consumers Prefer Better Looking Websites – http://bit.ly/nZy73P
Marketing 101: Branding your business in a competitive environment – http://bit.ly/oUl503
We live in a society where the sentence: “I’ve got a Groupon for that!” makes sense. Daily deal websites are par for the course. So much so, it seems almost impossible that any company could differentiate themselves.
Almost impossible, but Salvador Serrano has done it with QRazy Panda. The fact that QRazy Panda primarily focuses on nightlife deals is not what makes it special. Rather, its use of QR codes versus printed, paper coupons is. For those unfamiliar, QR (short for Quick Response) codes are those weird, squarish squiggly things that seem to be popping up more and more on advertisements and websites. URLs for websites or texts are actually encoded into these squares so cell phones can snap a picture and upload the information.
In this case, once a deal is purchased, a secure QR ticket is sent directly to the person’s cell phone via SMS text message or email. Serrano developed QR codes that can be sent through text messages so QRazy Panda could reach non-smart phone users. In contrast, sites like LivingSocial are only beginning to contemplate mobile technology.
Sal took some time away from his panda suit to talk about his start-up:
How would you explain what you do to somebody’s grandmother?
QRazy Panda is a new daily deal site for nightlife. We are essentially Groupon for nightlife, but without the annoying paper to print out, forget, or lose. And with the emphasis on supporting charities and helping the environment.
What made you use crowdSPRING?
I was exposed to crowdSPRING at an event called Rocked the Recession and it also came highly recommended by a friend.
What are some industry specific challenges you faced?
Some challenges I have faced are, of course, the lack of financial capital that leads to the lack of human capital. It has been very challenging bootstrapping this venture with my financial aid from grad school. In addition, not having a steady stream of income poses even a greater challenge. Fortunately, Cup o’ Noodles is still around along with some good old Lean Cuisines. Another issue I have come across is securing a co-founder that is both technical and excited about marketing.
Successful businesses know that to develop long-term relationships with their customers, they must find ways to build trust. This is not as easy to do as it sounds. According to the 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer study, U.S. consumer trust of companies dropped 8 points from 2010 to 2011.
In fact, this trend seems to be worsening. According to a new University of Melbourne study, online shoppers are 30% less loyal to online businesses than in 2007.
The good news is that businesses can improve their trustworthiness. The University of Melbourne study also found that Internet consumers are 20% more trusting of websites than they were five years ago. According to Dr. Brent Coker, the author of the study, the increase in online consumer trust is largely linked to the visual appeal of websites.
As aesthetically orientated humans, we’re psychologically hardwired to trust beautiful people, and the same goes for websites. Our offline behaviour and inclinations translate to our online existence. As the internet has become prettier, we are venturing out, and becoming less loyal. With websites becoming increasingly attractive and including more trimmings, this creates a greater feeling of trustworthiness and professionalism in online consumers.
But it’s not enough just to have a pretty website. According to Dr. Coker:
The biggest source of frustration is the inability to find relevant information on a website. The best way to stop defection to other websites, and increase loyalty, is to be interesting. Being pretty, but with nothing to say, is not enough.
Among other things, the University of Melbourne study found that if a website has poor navigation or access to information, or takes more than two seconds to download, prospective customers are more likely to opt against purchasing and navigate to another site.
crowdSPRING is the world's #1 marketplace for entrepreneurs, small businesses, nonprofits and agencies who need custom logo design, web design, a new company name or other writing and design services. Over 110,000 designers and writers work on crowdSPRING. We are trusted by more than 27,000 happy clients around the world.
