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 Australian Magician James Galea performing an unbelievable magic trick with a deck of cards. How does he do that?
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 is a fun look at what a movie poster for an Oscar-nominated film would be like if it literally wanted to communicate what the movie was about. More fun posters in the Other section below.
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 is a new Super Bowl commercial from Honda, featuring Matthew Broderick and reminding us how much we loved Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
What Zappos Can Teach You About Becoming Irresistible to Customers – http://t.co/3UxbuL0b
Gamification: The buzzword that can ruin your apps and business – http://t.co/bdsJOO6q
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 fun look at bottled water from Apple – if Apple made bottled water. That post, and other interesting posts are in the “Other” section below.
Crowdsourcing: a 7+7 Primer (tips for businesses on leveraging crowdsourcing) - http://bit.ly/wxqtb5
Starting a new biz with a friend? Good interview with @mike_samson about biz w/ friends – http://bit.ly/wBFfBv
Women Small Business Owners – America’s New job Creators [infographic] – http://t.co/74nUB76D
crowdSPRING’s Small Business Spotlight of the Week: Studyers -http://bit.ly/wy7Qty
crowdSPRING’s Small Business Spotlight of the Week: Twittapolls – http://t.co/aFHWJTmq
In our 12 Questions blog series, we feature interviews with someone from the crowdSPRING community. For these interviews, we pick people who add value to our community – in the blog, in the forums, in the projects. Plainly – activities that make crowdSPRING a better community. Be professional, treat others with respect, help us build something very special, and we’ll take notice.
We’re very proud to feature Vinay and Asha (crowdSPRING username: Knifeonbutter) today. Vinay and Asha live and work in Goa, India.
1. Please tell us about yourselves.
We have traveled around the world, working in places as far and diverse as Fiji Islands and Dubai, not to mention all the cities across India. We now reside in Goa, dream beaches, sun,sand, coco feni, and like to pretend to work hard. Ideas fortunately , winning ideas save the day for us on sites such as yours. We just love crowdSPRING.
2. How did you become interested in writing?
We are both writers from the day we left college, and have worked with top 10 ad agency networks. It all started in school, when the teachers noticed we had a flair for writing, however, the idea lightbulbs started glowing, later on, after 3 years of hard, rigorous college education in disciplines as strange as physics and home sciences.
3. Who/what are some of the biggest influences on your writing?
David Ogilvy for sure. He was the greatest at one time. We never studied literature, so
we can’t quote Shakespeare. We are more fascinated with Adworld writers, Paul Hegarty, and creators like the Saatchi brothers.
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 contains 160 of the best one liners from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. That post, and other interesting posts are in the “Other” section below.
According to a newly released study from Borrell Associates, small businesses are spending more of their budgets on social media. In fact, small and medium size businesses expect to spend nearly as much on social media as they do on search engine marketing (see table below).
This is not surprising and confirmed by other recent survey data, including a survey from StrongMail on 2012 marketing trends). Although the survey data is inconclusive and often conflicting, most surveys report that 40 to 70 percent of small and medium size businesses are using social media. Non-survey data tends to support those results (58.2 percent of SMBs have a presence on social media networks, according to Palore – but these numbers are not clear-cut because between 40 and 50 percent of the businesses who self-identify as using social media on Facebook, for example, have little or no activity there).
Perhaps the most important piece of data (other than adoption) concerns the methods businesses use to measure success in social media. Although it’s not clear how most businesses track this – many use customer acquisition as the key success metric. Fans/friends/followers are also an important metric (see graph below).
How active is your small business on social networks and how do you measure success? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.
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 taken in Takotna, Alaska during the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race on March 9, 2011. The green in the sky is the aurora borealis. More phenomenal photos from 2011 are in the Other section below.
10 New Years Resolutions For Small Businesses and Startups – http://bit.ly/t7wmEP
I’m not a fan of end-of-year employee reviews. If you waited until the end of the year to give feedback to your employees, you failed. But, when done properly, year-end employee reviews can serve an important purpose.
Here are five tips to help you improve your employee performance reviews.
1. Never wait until the end of the year – provide constructive feedback regularly. You should be providing regular constructive feedback to your team – and each employee you supervise throughout the year – on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. I am not suggesting you set up regular meetings for such reviews. Make your reviews and constructive feedback informal, low key, and regular. The measure I use for myself: does each person on my team know how I feel about their work during the prior week? If I can’t answer that question, I failed.
If an employee isn’t contributing, fire them after giving them an opportunity to improve. Don’t wait until the end-of-year reviews – you’ll only make yourself and your team miserable.
2. Take time to prepare for each review and require each employee to prepare. If you’re going to invest your own time and your employee’s time for an end-of-year review, make sure you both prepare. Take the time to identify three to four strengths and three to four areas for improvement. Make sure you’ve identified concrete examples for each so that you can go into more detail when appropriate.
Also make sure your employees know in advance that you’ll ask them to talk about strengths and areas for improvement. No employee is perfect. No person is perfect. We all can improve – and it’s your job to help your employees identify areas for improvement.
3. Be brutally honest. I’ve seen too many people afraid to speak their mind at review time. That’s not surprising – we’re typically not even honest with ourselves – how can we be honest with others. But when it comes to reviews, candor is critical – and should work both ways.
But be careful not to make the review only about mistakes. You want each employee to walk away more motivated and excited about their job – talking only about mistakes and problem areas will not accomplish that goal.
4. Stay human. Fight the temptation to spend the time reviewing graphs filled with data or reading from a form. Review time is a time to talk. If you want people on your team to feel like human beings, treat them as human beings.
5. Listen more than you talk. Far too many people think review time is a time to talk. It’s not. Review time is a time to listen. The conversation should always be two-way. Invite your employees to talk about their accomplishments and struggles. Invite them to talk about their work and personal goals for the coming year. Ask them if they’re happy with the work they’re doing and the people around them (you’d be surprised how many people are afraid to ask this question). Ask them how you can do better.
What other tips can you add that can help improve employee performance reviews?
The new year is fast upon us and it is time for that ritual known as resolution-time! I am not talking about a new resolve to eat lighter and get to the gym 4 days a week. I am talking about business resolutions – specific actions and efforts you should take over the course of the next few months to strengthen your business, improve your customer’s experience, and strengthen your team in the year ahead.
Some of these suggestions are specific things to do to help increase business activity, other undertakings are meant to help you learn more about the current state of your business. Not all of these are for every company, but I hope that you find a few on the list that make sense for you. Here then are 10 new-year-business-resolutions for 2012!
1. Review your strategic plan. It is a good idea to dust off your strategic plan at east once a year, and what better time then now? Business strategy needs to be ever changing and ever evolving if you hope to compete effectively, and an audit of your strategy is definitely in order. Schedule a brainstorming session, look hard at what your competition is doing, consider your marketing tactics and come away with a fresh approach to your business for the upcoming year.
2. Audit your social media strategy. A SM assessment is an easy resolution to start the year, and Facebook is a natural starting point. Simple to use and critically important, FB is a key portal to your business, a point of entry for many of your potential customers. If you haven’t been attentive to this in 2011, start in 2012. Twitter is another channel that you should appraise and consider whether your efforts there are adequate or if they can stand improvement.
3. Attack your budget. We do this at the end of each year, and it is critical that you look closely at your budget as soon as possible. Track last year’s expenses and compare actual expenditures with budgeted amounts. Do a reality check and see where there is fat to be cut or where you are underestimating the true costs. An focused look at your costs will help you to keep them under control in the new year.
4. Try some experimentation. Resolve in the new year to set specific goals for your business, define strategies to achieve those, and then develop a short list of experimental tactics to execute. Perhaps you haven’t tried email marketing, social media, public relations, special events, or other marketing methods and some or all of these may prove effective if you try. Be sure that you are able to effectively measure the results of any new tactic you engage in and be ready to quickly kill those that are not working and increase your efforts with those that are.
5. Gather your data. The new year is the perfect time to reconsider the business data you gather and whether you are measuring what is truly important. Resolve to measure effectively, develop useful reporting, just be careful that you don’t waste your time or the team’s on measurements which will not move your company forward.
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.
The new year is fast upon us and it is time for that ritual known as resolution-time! I am not talking about a new resolve to eat lighter and get to the gym 4 days a week. I am talking about business resolutions – specific actions and efforts you should take over the course of the next few months to strengthen your business, improve your customer’s experience, and strengthen your team in the year ahead.
