Twitter Link Roundup #173 – Small Business, Startups, Innovation, Social Media, Design, Marketing and More Ross | April 5th, 2013
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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 from a comedy group – Barely Political. In the five minute video, members of the group sing and make fun of some of the most unique singing voices of the past 75 years, including Stevie Nicks, Billie Holliday, Geddy Lee, Macy Gray, Dolores O’Riordan, Brittney Spears, Dave Matthews, Brian Johnson, Michael McDonald and many more.
Email Design Best Practices For Small Businesses and Startups – http://crowdspring.co/YtDkZr
Top 6 Crowdsourcing Websites | ichitect – http://crowdspring.co/16ev1k4
Small Business Marketing Tip: Send Email Campaigns At Night To Increase Revenue | crowdSPRING Blog – http://crowdspring.co/16yNCt7
Being Kind To Your Prospective Customers Is Good Business – (Lean Business: Do Unto Others) – http://crowdspring.co/YqnBKx
Measuring What Matters: How To Pick A Good Metric – http://crowdspring.co/XOw6eN
Four Ways to Market Like a Startup | Brian Gregg and Vivian Weng-Harvard Business Review – http://crowdspring.co/YQWeZK
The Law of Timing in Negotiations – http://crowdspring.co/YKgFaU
The Secret to a Strong Branding Message? Focus – http://crowdspring.co/XSKwum
When Simplicity Is the Solution – http://crowdspring.co/XSGBxQ
“Products take off not just because of WHAT they do but HOW they make us feel.” – http://crowdspring.co/Y067Ba
4 Reasons People Subscribe to — and Open — Email – http://crowdspring.co/YOmeVH
Seven Rules for Managing Creative People | Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic-Harvard Business Review – http://crowdspring.co/10EqZOF
Email Design Best Practices For Small Businesses and Startups – http://crowdspring.co/YtDkZr
Being Kind To Your Prospective Customers Is Good Business – (Lean Business: Do Unto Others) – http://crowdspring.co/YqnBKx
Formspring – A Postmortem – http://crowdspring.co/YKejsv
Leadership Rule No. 1: Epitomize Your Company Culture | by Paul Spiegelman – http://crowdspring.co/YKgNHg
The Law of Timing in Negotiations – http://crowdspring.co/YKgFaU
E-Commerce Companies Bypass Middlemen to Build Premium Brand – http://crowdspring.co/XTiJtJ
(Screen) size matters for mobile interface design | VentureBeat – http://crowdspring.co/YOnAQ9
Top 6 Crowdsourcing Websites | ichitect – http://crowdspring.co/16ev1k4
5 things that seem essential that we launched Buffer without | Buffer Blog – http://crowdspring.co/XUj3sm
Are You The Disrupter or the Disrupted? | by Daniel Burrus – http://crowdspring.co/YQVYdn
The Secret to a Strong Branding Message? Focus. | by Adam Kleinberg – http://crowdspring.co/XSKwum
Google’s Secrets Of Innovation: Empowering Its Employees | Forbes – http://crowdspring.co/YNIL4Y
Four Ways to Market Like a Startup | Brian Gregg and Vivian Weng-Harvard Business Review – http://crowdspring.co/YQWeZK
8 Steps to Mastering Time Management | OPEN Forum – http://crowdspring.co/YPlNuq
When Google lost its cool – http://crowdspring.co/14Jerwz
Interview w/ Zach Ware on Project 100, a startup that bought 100 Teslas to replace your car – http://crowdspring.co/16tRrQf
The Rise Of The Superconnector | Fast Company – http://crowdspring.co/XVjPFA
Small Business Marketing Tip: Send Email Campaigns At Night To Increase Revenue Ross | April 4th, 2013
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A few months ago, we highlighted the best times and days to send email for opens and clickthroughs. A new study from Experian offers a different perspective on the best days and times to send email.
According to Experian, Saturday and Sunday had higher open, click and transaction rates than other days of the week. Not surprisingly – since most businesses are closed on the weekend – fewer emails were sent on Saturday and Sunday.
Contrary to what most others have reported (that the best times to send email are typically in the morning), Experian’s analysis suggests that emails sent late in the evening – between 8 pm and 12 am, generated higher open and clickthrough rates, more transactions, larger orders, and more revenue per email.
It’s becoming more apparent that smartphones, tablets and other portable devices are increasingly being used to read email – that helps explain why the open, clickthrough and transactional rates for emails sent later in the evening/at night are materially better than emails sent during other times of day.
If you’ve tried sending email campaigns at various times of days and are still struggling to find an optimal time for your email campaigns, consider sending your campaigns late in the evening or at night.
You can download a copy of the study directly from Experian if you want to take a closer look.
The April cS Award and the March cS Award Winners! Amanda | April 2nd, 2013
Email Design Best Practices For Small Businesses and Startups Ross | April 2nd, 2013
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It may seem obvious that consumers prefer better looking websites, but it’s clear that not all business owners appreciate the importance of design. After all, there are too many poorly designed websites (if you’re looking for tips to improve your website, we suggest you read web design best practices and tips and best practices and tips for restaurant web design).
Email newsletters are an even bigger design mess. Most email newsletters are glorified sales pitches for products and services. They add little value beyond the commercial message. The better newsletters can be a great marketing tool and increase lifetime customer value. The better newsletters are packed with great content, but are often visually confusing. If you’re already sending an email newsletter, or are considering sending one, this infographic from Email Monks should help you determine if you’re following good practices for email newsletter design.
Lean Business: Do Unto Others* Mike | April 1st, 2013
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The golden rule of word-of-mouth marketing: Be nice to thine customers and, lo, they shall be nice to you in return. The mechanical nuts and bolts behind this idea, in social psychology terminology, is represented by the concept of reciprocity. In short it referes to how people respond to a positive action with another positive action. We live this every day in ways simple and complex. For instance when the clerk at the 7-Eleven hands you the change back when you buy your Big Gulp and says a simple “Thank you” the almost-automatic response will be a “You’re welcome.” And when your neighbor is so kind as to lend you their chainsaw to clear some brush out back, it would seem neighborly to give her a nice cold six-pack when you return the device.But there is more to it than just the simple tit-for-tat return of a verbal offering. It turns out that when people do nice things for us, it has the effect of making us more generous by default. In 1971, a Cornell University researcher named Dennis Regan conducted a study on the effects of granting favors. He had a group of students work in pairs made up of a test subject and an assistant masquerading as a colleague (or in the language of the study a “confederate”). Some of the test subjects were manipulated to better like their partner when they were given a nice cold soft drink by the confederate. The confederate went on to offer the subject the opportunity to buy some raffle tickets. How much more the subject liked the confederate after the favor was given (or withheld) was measured as well as the subject’s compliance with the request to buy raffle tickets. Interestingly, while the subjects who received the soft drink did have a small increase in manipulated liking, they had a much larger increase in compliance with the request to buy raffle tickets. In other words, be nice to someone and deliver them a Big Gulp to slake their thirst and they will be much more likely to buy whatever it is you’re selling.
Twitter Link Roundup #172 – Small Business, Startups, Innovation, Social Media, Design, Marketing and More Ross | March 29th, 2013
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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 shows a map of the Internet, created by an anonymous researcher, who hacked hundreds of thousands of computers around the world in order to create the map. You can find the full article in the Other section below, including an animated version of this map, showing where people are logging-in throughout the day, and changes in traffic patterns over time.
Empower Your Small Business – NEW edition: marketing, lean business, paid search, #1 mistake – http://crowdspring.co/15Qb2bj
Marketing and Selling to Squirrels (tips on how to deal with people’s short attention spans online) – http://crowdspring.co/10dKilc
Lean Business: Freelancers for ALL My Friends! – http://crowdspring.co/10EOryR
Lead Or Follow, But Keep Your Eyes On The Crowd – http://crowdspring.co/YcD1C6
Invest in Your Customers More Than Your Brand | Michael Schrage-Harvard Business Review – http://crowdspring.co/YipU2f
Lessons Learned from Bill Gross’ 35 IPOs/Exits and 40 Failures – http://crowdspring.co/10oLgLv
Scaling Teams and the Fight Against Human Nature | Rand’s Blog – http://crowdspring.co/YhtHgi
3 Things I Did Wrong with My Last Startup – http://crowdspring.co/15N4i0q
Lean Business: Freelancers for ALL My Friends! – http://crowdspring.co/10EOryR
Six Tips to Building a World-Class Team – http://crowdspring.co/10sidH7
A scientific guide to saying “no”: How to avoid temptation and distraction | Buffer Blog – http://crowdspring.co/YiD2oi
When Things Don’t Work Out | by Fred Wilson – http://crowdspring.co/11TPkCS
Is Equity Crowdfunding A Threat To Venture Capitalists? | TechCrunch – http://crowdspring.co/11rp1DR
Invest in Your Customers More Than Your Brand | Michael Schrage-Harvard Business Review – http://crowdspring.co/YipU2f
Investment Crowdfunding is A Ghetto Stock Market | Forbes – http://crowdspring.co/11lV7kc
Lead Or Follow, But Keep Your Eyes On The Crowd – http://crowdspring.co/YcD1C6
How Groupthink Can Ruin Startups | The Next Web – http://crowdspring.co/11Em8j2
Einstein’s Problem-Solving Formula, And Why You’re Doing It All Wrong – http://crowdspring.co/YisA02
Revenue Traction Doesn’t Mean Product Market Fit – http://crowdspring.co/YbdwkI
Forecasting Fox | NYTimes – http://crowdspring.co/10um8mH
How closely knit design and engineering teams put Pinterest on a rocket ship | Gigaom – http://crowdspring.co/YebZKB
True To Its Roots: Why Kickstarter Won’t Sell | Fast Company – http://crowdspring.co/Ybdb1s
Good insight about collaboration, usability and design … An interview with Joshua Porter | Inside Intercom – http://crowdspring.co/11ElEJy
Tech Startup City: G2 Crowd in Chicago | Forbes – http://crowdspring.co/15Z0XJ0
Getting A Head Start On Five Factors Reshaping E-Commerce | Enterprise Irregulars – http://crowdspring.co/10G2i7Z
How to stay happy at a startup | VentureBeat – http://crowdspring.co/10EWknX
Why Organizations Are So Afraid to Simplify – Ron Ashkenas-Harvard Business Review http://crowdspring.co/10uqQAO
The most persuasive words in English: The psychology of language | Buffer Blog – http://crowdspring.co/11lSBuq
Chartbeat Demonstrates Below-the-Fold Ad Placement Is More Valuable Than Originally Assumed – http://crowdspring.co/11lRxGX
What Agencies Want From Twitter | Digiday – http://crowdspring.co/YdjZeQ
Half of What Online Advertisers Know About You Is Wrong – http://crowdspring.co/11po4f8
Amazon’s New Mobile Ad Network Is A Huge Threat To Google | Business Insider – http://crowdspring.co/YeaR9V
Lean Business: Freelancers for ALL My Friends! Mike | March 25th, 2013
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This year a great deal of my blogging focus has been on the struggles many small businesses have with capacity. In the business context capacity can refer to the physical space a company resides in, or the manpower available for a company to leverage. There is another aspect of capacity that is equally important and that is the abilities or skill sets a company can offer to it’s clients or customers.Sometimes these skill sets can be an important part of a company’s DNA and are a key aspect of the product or service offered. Other times these abilities have to be brought in from outside the firm, often in the form of a vendor or freelancer. The challenges with on-boarding both vendors and freelancers are many, and the waters can be deep and dark. Using vendors can, on many projects, represent a huge expense and a margin-gobbling strategy. On the other hand, they may also provide a life-line, enabling you to serve a client in ways that you could not do on your own with the resources you have available. Freelancers offer similar challenges, but they can provide a wonderful way to control expense, increase capacity, and offer value that a company might not otherwise be able to offer. But freelancers represent an additional challenge: finding, vetting, and hiring them can be time-consuming, frustrating, and expensive. And the risk inherent in hiring freelancers can , in many cases, be great.
Many companies use a three prong strategy when hiring freelancers; managing this process can be tricky, but the rewards can be great.
1. Identify the best. There are lots of freelance fish in the ocean and they come in many shapes and colors, but at the end of the day the smartest and most capable of them are the most difficult to catch. The strategies for finding the best of the best are pretty much the same strategies that the freelancers themselves use when looking for work: seek out recommendations from people you trust; network constantly to uncover opportunities; and look for the right matches in the right places. The first of these may be the most important: ask people whom you know and trust about the freelancers they have used or worked with; the probability of success increases dramatically when a talented freelancer comes to you via a professional reference. A part of this process is networking. Yes, that old chestnut applies as much today as it did 40 years ago when people first started using the term and practicing its virtues. Get out there and meet people, dammit! Go to events, join groups online and off, teach a course or attend one. By simply introducing yourself to professionals and practitioners and expanding your network of contacts the likelihood that you will be able to identify a good candidate for freelance work will increase exponentially. Finally, look for the right match by writing the best possible job description when searching for that special freelancer. Just as the most successful job-searchers use the strategy of only applying for the positions that are the best match, your job description should also be designed to attract the best match. Take the time to think through who you are looking for for the project and craft the description that best reflects your needs.
Twitter Link Roundup #171 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More Ross | March 22nd, 2013
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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 photo above is one of many from a wonderful and fun collection of photos showcasing creative food photography. Look for the other photos in the Other section below.
Marketing and Selling to Squirrels (tips on how to deal with people’s short attention spans online) – http://crowdspring.co/10dKilc
Lean Business: Office Space – A Meditation – http://crowdspring.co/YjL7bw
Innocent Drinks: Don’t be Afraid to Start Small | Startup War Story – http://crowdspring.co/10ehgBT
How to Grow Your Email Marketing List to 5 Digits and Beyond – http://crowdspring.co/10idjwg
Should You Invest $1 Into Customer Service Or Marketing? – http://crowdspring.co/10jun4S
The #1 Mistake Entrepreneurs Make – http://crowdspring.co/11lBtVs
Marketing and Selling to Squirrels (tips on how to deal with people’s short attention spans online) – http://crowdspring.co/10dKilc
The Best Definition of Success Is the One You Never Use – http://crowdspring.co/Yvs7WK
How CEOs Can Be Great Marketers – http://crowdspring.co/YypELa
Getting Crunched, Mashed Or Beaten Is Not A Launch Strategy – http://crowdspring.co/10eexsn
How to Grow Your Email Marketing List to 5 Digits and Beyond – http://crowdspring.co/10idjwg
The Holy Trinity Of Startup Success: Purpose, Culture, Reward | Fast Company – http://crowdspring.co/11lOgHw
How Do You Turn a $10,000 Investment Into $20 Million in Sales? | Technori – http://crowdspring.co/11gCTR8
Innocent Drinks: Don’t be Afraid to Start Small | Startup War Story – http://crowdspring.co/10ehgBT
Find The Thing You’re Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights And Weekends For The Rest Of Your Life – http://crowdspring.co/11lCaxW
Should You Invest $1 Into Customer Service Or Marketing? – http://crowdspring.co/10jun4S
Twitter Untangles Its Overgrown Org Chart | AllThingsD – http://crowdspring.co/11hmKLj
Good post by Seth Godin about online communities & personal motivations … Us vs. us – http://crowdspring.co/11lusnH
The Bacon-Wrapped Economy – http://crowdspring.co/11hbQ8a
Lean Business: Office Space – A Meditation – http://crowdspring.co/YjL7bw
The founder’s empty nest: letting go of every detail. | Kin – http://crowdspring.co/1163FM4
The Rule of Three – http://crowdspring.co/XnRh7e
8 Tips for Doing Usability Testing at a Fast-Paced Company – http://crowdspring.co/109LQNc
The Motivating Side of Self-Doubt – http://crowdspring.co/10eLy7Q
How to Modernize a Public Relations Strategy That’s Stuck in the Dark Ages | Hubspot Blog – http://crowdspring.co/11di0WZ
An In-Depth Comparison Between iOS Map Frameworks: Apple MapKit vs. Google Maps SDK | Co.Labs – http://crowdspring.co/10ejCkn
Good post on how culture changes impact employees … Why I left Google – http://crowdspring.co/11lzsIS
The tech industry doubles down on design in 2013 | Gigaom – http://crowdspring.co/YyDGMV
Social Networks by Revenue and Employees, Facebook Stands Above All | Web Strategy – http://crowdspring.co/1164LaA
Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost | Amanda Blum – http://crowdspring.co/11mitpU
Building your backlist (and living with it forever) – http://crowdspring.co/11lzXmo
Adria Richards fired by SendGrid for calling out developers on Twitter | VentureBeat – http://crowdspring.co/11lRkU2
A Stress-Free Approach to Adopting New Marketing Technologies – http://crowdspring.co/Yyp93V
Google and Bing Say the Future of Search Is Conversational – http://crowdspring.co/YcGAI3
Marketing and Selling to Squirrels Ross | March 19th, 2013
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Attention span is the amount of time a person (or animal) can concentrate on something without becoming distracted.
The attention span of a squirrel is one second. The attention span of a squirrel focusing on an acorn is 4 minutes, a huge increase! We’ll discuss acorns later (trust me, acorns are relevant to our conversation!), but first let’s look at how attention span impacts marketing and sales.
Did you know that radio ads used to be 60 seconds long? Then radio ads became 30 seconds long, then 15 seconds, and now, there are many five second radio ads. TV ads have followed the same pattern. When they were first aired in 1971, television ads were 60 seconds long. Today, the standard length is 30 seconds and there are even shorter ads.
I’ve been thinking more about this topic after talking to other entrepreneurs building online startups and to small business owners looking to improve their websites. With very few exceptions, the landing and marketing pages for these startups and small businesses are packed with too much content and too many distractions. Every extra word or graphical image on a page increases the “noise” on that page and impacts the attention of the user browsing that page.
Here’s why you should care: the attention span of a human adult, according to BBC News, is 9 seconds (the Associated Press reports that in 2012, the average attention span for a human was 8 seconds). Nearly one fifth of all page views in 2012 lasted fewer than four seconds. And to add fuel to the fire, people read only approximately half of the words on a web page that has fewer than 111 words (and only 28% of the words on a web page that has more than 593 words). If you’re still reading, then you’ve obviously decided that this content had some value and was worth your time.
In my own experience and in observing other users, I see three distinct attention span periods: passive, focused and active.
Passive attention lasts only a few seconds for the typical user. In that time, the user decides whether the page they’re reading or viewing is sufficiently interesting or relevant for them to keep looking/reading further. The vast majority of online pages fail to keep the user’s attention – that’s why page abandonment rates are so high.
For example, on crowdSPRING, we use a large, clearly visible headline to communicate what crowdSPRING is/does:
When you visit the crowdSPRING site, can you easily tell what we do? When a user first visits one of your pages, is it clear right away what services or products you sell? Do you make the user read a lot of content to figure out what you’re selling?
Focused attention lasts for another five to ten seconds, as the user takes in more information and decides whether they will invest more of their time on the page – or browse other pages on the site. During this phase, the user scans the page – they don’t read it. If your page manages to catch the user’s interest during this phase, odds are pretty good they’ll stick around for a longer period.
On crowdSPRING, we use bold fonts and information summaries to help the user. You’ll see on the right side of our homepage, near the top, an area that provides some quick facts and a big, visible call-to-action button. We know that all users won’t look at all of that information. That’s why we bold certain information and use bigger fonts to emphasize certain things:
Lean Business: Office Space – A Meditation Mike | March 18th, 2013
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Our lease is up at the end of the year and Ross and I have been discussing our options. We love our office: it has all of the features we need, plus a great location, fantastic light, a dramatic view of the downtown skyline, and plenty of space. Problem is, truth be told, it probably has too much space. When we signed the lease back in 2008 we didn’t really know which of many directions our little company would take. Would we grow into a larger organization with with dozens of even hundreds of workers? We chose a space that would allow us, albeit a bit uncomfortably, grow to as many as 40 or 50 people. Well as it turns out, the strategy we have pursued and the team we have built comes to a total of 15 so far, about a third of whom are scattered around the world, and the balance of whom often as not choose to work from home (take that, Marissa Mayer). The upshot is that we rarely have more then 5 or 6 people in the office at any one time, and our beautiful office is probably just to big for us, even as we scale over the next few years.Choosing how you manage your workforce is dependent on your business, your industry, and your customers but every business has to ask these questions: What kind of office do we need? How large a space is appropriate? What features are important to us? and, Where do we want to be located? The answers to these questions will be unique for each business and the potential permutations are far from finite, but answer these you must whether you are a micro-sized company, a stay at home entrepreneur, an established service provider, or a rapidly expanding startup expecting to grow from 2 to 200 in the next 6 months.
Here are 5 things you should mull as you do your own meditation on workspace for your company.
1. What are you? So much of your choice of office space will be driven by this question. Not only should you take into account the type of products you produce or the services you provide, but you need to very carefully consider your company’s culture. What are some adjectives that describe who you are as a company? Are you technical, collaborative, or individualistic? Are face-to-face meetings an important part of how you do business or manage your team? The answers to this will help you to determine everything from how much space you need for desks to what kind of conference or meeting rooms are needed, to whether a kitchen and dining area are required. The need for ping-pong tables, televisions, cushy sofas, and other toys and creature comforts also need to be thought through as you define your new space or take a fresh look at your current HQ.
2. Do a headcount. Probably the biggest driver in your office calculation is the size of your workforce and how many of them will actually be in this office, either on a daily basis or on occasion. With a Yahoo-style edict that everyone needs to be in the office everyday, more space will be needed. But with a more flexible work-from-home policy you might be able to set up the sharing of desks, computers, and other physical resources. Take time to figure out your routine and determine the maximum number of people who will be in the office together at any one time and back into it from there; so if the team works mostly remote, but you require that everyone be in at the same time for the weekly product development meeting use that number to figure out the physical requirements for that number of people.
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