How To

Small Business and Startup Tips: Analyze This (a Data Primer)

Mike | May 21st, 2012

Our awesome Customer Service Master, Bianca, came to me last week with a simple request: “Let me have more responsibility.” Well it’s not everyday that a member of the team asks for the opportunity to do more, and it’s not every person in the world who expresses interest in learning new skills. We had a [...]

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Small Business Pinterest Starter Guide

Ross | May 16th, 2012

Are you wondering how you can leverage Pinterest for your small business? Pinterest is currently one of the hotest websites. For some businesses, Pinterest is delivering more user trafic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined. For those of you who haven’t heard of Pinterest, here’s a brief summary: Pinterest is a free social sharing site [...]

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Growing Your Small Business Using Social Media: The Facts

Ross | May 9th, 2012

We’re previously written about ways that small businesses are using social media, how businesses can leverage social media to deliver customer service, and the innovative ways some businesses use social media. There’s no clear consensus about social commerce and whether businesses should invest marketing dollars in social media. For example, Forrester Research, last year, released [...]

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Tips for small business: Negotiating With the New Recruit

Mike | May 7th, 2012

Last year, I wrote a couple of posts about the process of hiring new employees and what applicants can do to help. Recruiting and hiring can be one of the more painful aspects to running a small business, but job applicants can go far to ease the process for those doing the hiring and, at [...]

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Lean Marketing: Delivering Customer Service via Social Media

Mike | April 30th, 2012

We write often about the power of great customer service and share ideas for how to engage with customers. improve delivery, and analyze your performance in this crucial arena. There are reasonably priced tools aplenty which can help you provide better service to your customers: help-desk software like Zendesk, virtual call center services such as [...]

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Free Advice for: The New York Times iPad App

Mike | March 19th, 2012

I am a crank. There, I said it. Around the cS offices, I have a reputation as a curmudgeon and grouch. I have never been slow to voice an opinion, file a complaint, or take a company to task for everything from a unreliable product to poor customer service. This post is intended as the first [...]

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DIY Branding, Self-published Fame, and Romantic Trolls

Mike | January 30th, 2012

Amanda Hocking is a star of the publishing world. Last year she signed a 4-book, $2 million dollar deal with St. Martin’s Press, one of the largest publishing houses in the world. While in itself, this is not unusual – authors become best-sellers every day, and publishing houses announce contracts with authors just as often, [...]

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Crowdsourcing: a 7+7 Primer (Pt. 2)

Mike | January 23rd, 2012

Last week I posted the first part of this article on crowdsourcing strategies. In the post, I discussed some of the big-picture issues that I believe should be considered carefully when planning a crowdsourced project. Best practices for crowdsourcing require managers to first determine the best venue for their project, effective management of the process, [...]

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Crowdsourcing: a 7+7 Primer (Pt. 1)

Mike | January 16th, 2012

We write often about small businesses and startups and lean approaches to marketing and other business functions. Mid- to large-size companies can also benefit from the lean methodology and one way to do so is by actively leveraging crowds of workers: designers, software engineers, testers, writers, customer support people, customers, market researchers, and dozens of [...]

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Small Business and Startups: End-of-Year Mishegoss, 2011 Version

Mike | December 12th, 2011

For those of you unfamiliar with Yiddish, the word ‘mishegoss’ is defined as craziness or senseless activity, and as small business-people we can certainly relate to that concept, particularly as the holidays loom and the year comes to an end. Of course, every small business is unique and every business owner has their own priorities for [...]

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