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SOBCon 2010 Sponsors Announced

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Here are some of the sponsors of this year’s event, we are all looking forward to talking with, and learning from, these companies:
Intuit

With Intuit small business services, managing your business has never been easier! In addition to providing personal finance software, Intuit has been a supporter of small business for over 25 years, and now we are expanding our efforts to help small businesses thrive. You’ve always known us for providing easy financial software; now we offer fast and easy online marketing services, web hosting and website builder services, payroll services, and credit card processing as well. And we’re just getting started! We’re developing new services all the time — visit IntuitLabs to see some of our latest innovations.

Allstate

The Allstate Corporation is the nation’s largest publicly held personal lines insurer. A Fortune 100 company, with $133 billion in total assets, Allstate sells 13 major lines of insurance, including auto, property, life and commercial. Allstate also offers retirement and investment products and banking services. Allstate is widely known through the “You’re In Good Hands With Allstate®” slogan. Allstate was founded in 1931 and became a publicly traded company in 1993.

izea

IZEA prides itself on the successful execution of social media marketing campaigns. We work hand-in-hand with agencies and brands to deliver ROI through buzz, clicks and conversions.

revenews

ReveNews is a trusted, unbiased source focusing on Internet related industries such as online marketing, SEM, affiliate marketing, retail (e-commerce), analytics, spyware, blogging and much more. ReveNews authors consist of highly respected thinkers, commentators and business people who have real experience and insight. ReveNews readers include industry gurus, top-level executives and CEO’s, plus many of the industry’s top net-repreneurs; all coming together to create a global Internet community to distribute, discuss and analyze the industry at hand.

smartbrief-on-social-media

SmartBrief is a media company on a mission to save you time and keep you smart.

The premise behind SmartBrief is simple: there’s too much information out there and too little time in the day to read it all. Our editors hand-pick the most relevant and important news from all over, summarize it, link to the original sources and deliver it — for FREE — in one-stop-shop e-newsletters.

Nearly 3 million business decision makers count on SmartBrief each day to provide “must-read” news in 25 key industries. Subscriptions are free of charge, offered in partnership with more than 100 leading trade associations. professional societies, non-profits and corporations.

At our subscribers’ request, we’ve developed a suite of best practices newsletters to keep busy professionals smart about their jobs.

And, once again, our SOBCon partners for accommodations and the conference space are Hotel 71 and the Summit Executive Center.

hotel 71A Stylishly Different Chicago Hotel

Hotel 71 is a modern urban boutique hotel experience, perfectly located on the Chicago River at Wacker Drive and Michigan Avenue, “the Magnificent Mile”. The hotel’s fresh style, large rooms and suites, beautifully appointed meeting space, friendly service and an unrivaled location at the epicenter of downtown Chicago, make it the best luxury hotel for both business and leisure travelers.

summit executive centerSummit Chicago
Our world-class facility, exceptional staff and outstanding cuisine provides you with all the tools you’ll need to successfully enhance your meeting.
Summit Executive Centre is downtown Chicago’s only accredited member of the prestigious International Association of Conference Centers. Our standard of quality is recognized by leading businesses and decision makers around the world.

Concrete Steps Toward Integrated Virtual Marketing

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Stuart Foster at The Lost Jacket has written a post recently about The Rise of Cloud Marketing:

“We’re all in.”

Cloud computing is a way of computing, via the Internet, that broadly shares computer resources instead of using software or storage on a local PC.

Microsoft has bet its future on this technology. You can find it being used to distribute .torrents, ease the pressure on servers and scale up and down appropriately. They’re “all in”, so why haven’t content creators jumped on board?

Fear and a loss of control.

The cloud breaks down and distributes and disseminates bits of information so they can be reassembled later in a more complete narrative. Marketing needs to work and think in this same way.

We can’t rely on our customers being able to see the entirety of an integrated campaign anymore. They’re far more likely to see bits and pieces of content here and there and only have a brief encounter with your messaging.

That last paragraph contains a powerful statement, and shows the inherent difficulty that businesses can have in creating marketing messages that are able to be used in different media. The difficulty is that one marketing vehicle, such as a 30-second TV spot, does not work on every platform. Sure we have seen this before, in a limited fashion, with the differences in print marketing vs TV or radio – but the entire game has changed now. Your marketing message needs to incorporate Social Media, web-based platforms, and mobile devices.

Half of my Marketing Budget is Wasted

social-media-marketingThe old cliche about marketing used to be that a business knew that part of the money and effort spent on marketing was wasted, they just didn’t know which part. A recent survey mentioned in the WSJ shows that this perception is still true in the days of Social Media:

…a separate survey of 500 U.S. small-business owners from the same sponsors found that just 22% made a profit last year from promoting their firms on social media, while 53% said they broke even. What’s more, 19% said they actually lost money due to their social-media initiatives.

The good news is that we can measure the effectiveness of these new media much better than the old media.

The bad news is that “…the latter survey’s respondents say it requires more effort than expected.” That’s right people, Social Media marketing is not a Golden Goose that lays marketing eggs for you. It takes work, it takes time. Engagement and relationship-building are the new means of marketing, even as the goal remains the same.

Find out where your customers are, then go there and listen, learn, and finally – get involved. Talk to them in their language using the tools that they use and you will have taken the first concrete steps toward integrating your marketing. Building a foundation that your business can grow on.

December Content Strategies

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Mack Collier, writing at The Viral Garden, has a very informative post about how to get the most out of the blogging “lull” in December:

Use December’s blogging lull to your advantage – The Viral Garden

Here’s five ways to make the most of December’s blogging lull:

1 – Re-evaluate everything. Go back and look at what your blogging results have been for 2009. How did traffic do? Subscribers? Comments? And how did these metrics tie back to your blogging goals? Put your blogging strategy for 2009 on trial, and then tweak it for 2010. Set goals for your blog. But make sure that those goals tie back into your larger focus for your blog.

This is always good advice. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”, right? Have you done your measurement? How do you track your traffic and how your readers navigate your site? I use a combination of Sitemeter (the free service)and Google analytics. Sitemeter is great for me because it is much closer to real-time than Google, and I like to keep an eye on my referral logs.

2 – Ramp up content. David Armano advises doing this, using the Holiday vacation to push out as much if not more content than usual, with the thinking being that since many other bloggers are slacking off, your content can more easily be seen. We are going to keep looking for content to share with our networks, and if you keep creating great content while everyone else slacks off, guess whose posts will be shared with my network? Use December to increase your blogging visibility.

This is a no-brainer, but time can be an issue. Like the old saying goes, the best time to plant an orchard is 10 years ago, the best time to prepare for the December lull is earlier in the year. How do you do that? Well, for one thing you can compile your posts on book reviews as you do them, creating an uber-list for gift-giving ideas. And use those Amazon links to generate a little extra money for your own holidays…

3 – Use December to get a blogging jumpstart on 2010. Hey we all want to spend time with friends and family during the Holidays. Work in all forms seems to take a backseat…But if nothing else, use that last week of December to get your content in order to hit the ground running in January. Most people won’t begin to get back into reading blogs regularly until Jan. 4th (a Monday), and this is when many bloggers will begin to get back to writing. Use December to have at least one week’s worth of posts already written for January, so that way first thing on Monday the 4th, you’ve already got fresh content waiting on readers, while many other bloggers are thinking about getting back to writing.

Again, get out your calendars right now and jot yourself some notes for August, September, and October 2010 to write some draft posts that you can complete for that first week of 2011. Getting a head start like this is a real motivator and can help you get a jump on your competition next year. And remember, in the US November 2010 is an election for the Congress, who knows what might happen. Uncertainty will likely be highin January 2011 – think about how your business can capitalize on that.

4 – Experiment. Every year I spend the final week of the year spending time with social sites/tools that I’ve been meaning to try out, but just haven’t had the chance. … December is a great time to examine different tools and see if they work for you to complement your blogging efforts.

If you have done your homework and prepared for your December/January content, then this is a great time to play around with all of those applications that you have been meaning to try. In addition, this is great new content! Blog about your experiments, and create conversations with your readers and social media network about what works and what doesn’t.

5 – Become a commenting superhero. Remember, traffic is going to come to a crawl on many blogs. … If many people aren’t commenting, this is your chance to get noticed. And not just with other readers, but by the bloggers themselves.

Commenting is definitely one of the best network- and traffic-building strategies. It is time-consuming and feels like real work sometimes, but it can also be fun and can pay off in increased traffic for your site, increased credibility and authority for yourself/your company and may even lead to guest-posting offers.

What is your December strategy? It’s not too late to do at least a couple of these activities this year.

(cross-posted at stephenpsmith.com)

Questions to Start a Social Media Discussion

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Amber Naslund shares some very valuable information:

Brand Elevation Through Social Media and Social Business | Altitude Branding

Be courageous. Pick up the phone, or fire up the email, and ask for 15 minutes of time from the people that can help move social media forward in your organization (or at least reduce some of the friction around it). That means the marketing folks, the customer service folks, finance, HR, PR, product management, QA, sales. Yes, that includes the people you’ve never talked to before, and the ones that aren’t in your “box”.

Ask them one or two questions that can help you form a business case for social media. Your goal is to align social’s capabilities with the problems your organization needs or wants to solve for their own business. Note that the questions below aren’t all specific to social media; they’re attempting to uncover some of the underlying culture, brand, and operational issues that social media could help address. Remember, we’re talking culture change as well as operational change. You need to be the one to translate.

1. What do we do and why, in your words (not a vision statement)? On what could we, as a business, spend more time, energy, and focus?
2. Are you passionate about your role? If so, why? If not, what would help you be?
3. What goals do you have for your role this year? How do you hope to impact the success of your department? The company?
4. How would you describe the culture of our organization?
5. How do you use the internet in your work life? In your personal life? Where are the overlaps?
6. How do you believe your team uses the internet for their work? Have you heard ideas or feedback for ways they’d like to use it more or differently to do their jobs better?
7. Where do you turn when seeking resources or information about your role? Our company? Our industry?

Read them all!

Priorities for Entrepreneurs #5

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I recently had the opportunity to review a book for entrepreneurs that had some great advice, a list of seven priorities for the critical first year of business. The more I thought about this list, the more important that it seemed to me. So I have decided to create a series of posts elaborating on this theme. While “Young Guns“, by Robert Tuchman, is targeted to a just-out-of-college-and-wondering-what-to-do market, I believe that these priorities apply to anyone starting a new venture.

Try to fund it yourself, or mostly yourself. It pays to go after the least amount of funding that is necessary. When you’re starting out, it feels good to say that some venture-capital firm invested millions of dollars in your idea.But a few years down the road, when you’re doing well, it will not feel so great to know that you own only 25% of your company.

Well, I can’t say too much about this – since none of my little ventures have ever been funded by anybody other than me – but it sure sounds like pretty good advice to me. If you keep outside funding to a smaller share of your enterprise, then when it does take off you can afford to buy out your partners.

What is your experience with funding a start-up? Share in the comments.

Thoughts on “Rules of Thumb”

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I picked up a copy of “Rules of Thumb” by Alan M. Webber in our local bookstore last week, and it has some interesting ideas.  First of all, being a fan of all things index card, it was fun to read about the stack of 3x5s that he has been collecting throughout his career.

“I’ve recorded these lessons on three-by-five cards that I carry with me every day at home and on the road. (This wonderful system is something that I learned more than 20 years ago from Harvard Business School professor Ted Levitt, one of the mentors you’ll meet in this book.)

Not long ago, I reviewed all the three-by-five cards I’d written on and saved. This time my goal was to capture the rules I’d learned.”

Well, I (Stephen) certainly didn’t go to Harvard Business School, but I have been carrying notecards and notebooks around for a pretty long time. After I finish reading this book I am going to have to dig into those archives and see what pearls of wisdom I can recover.

In the meantime, let’s take a look at rule #1: When the going gets tough, the tough relax.

I can get behind this idea! In fact, it reminded me of something I had read somewhere before, especially as Webber expands on the idea, “Anytime you approach a task with fear you are a double loser.” and “Don’t let fear undermine your chance to do that one thing you’ve wanted to do.”

What are you really afraid of

Indeed, fear can make a mess of things. Fear can also cause you to not make a mess, because you just might. Quoting from Frank Herbert’s Dune: (wikipedia link)

The litany against fear is an incantation used by the Bene Gesserit throughout the series to focus their minds and calm themselves in times of peril. The litany is as follows:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

(I trust that this isn’t getting too deep.) Fear is the mind-killer. The dream-killer. The slayer of ambition and innovation. Fear of the unkown has killed more good ideas than we can probably count.

Don’t get me wrong, there are times when prudence is called for. But there are also times that you need to “feel the fear and do it anyway“.

Even George Costanza was able to overcome his fear and start making decisions. Completely opposite decisions to what he thought – knew –  were right:

What fears have you overcome? Or, put another way, what would you attempt to do if you believed that you could not fail? Share in the comments.