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Cool Business Idea: Credit Unions

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Todd Hoskins Reviews Tools for Business

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Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools and products that could belong in an entrepreneurial business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks who would be their customers in a form that’s consistent and relevant.

Cool Business Idea: Credit Unions
A Review by Todd Hoskins

I’m taking a break from reviewing tools this week to provide some thoughts on where to put your money as a small business owner.

Like many Americans, I’ve had some frustrating experiences with megabanks prior to the Great Recession. Since 2008, it’s been awful. Not just tight lending, but terrible service has been rampant. Too often the power to please customers has been taken away from local branches and consolidated in a corporate call center.

The greed of banking institutuions has been well-documented, which is one reason I encourage everyone to explore the not-for-profit option of credit unions.

Credit unions are member-owned, meaning profits go directly towards improving the products, rates, and service for member-owners, instead of appeasing stockholders. Unions, corporations, and government entities often have their own credit unions.

The other reason I support credit unions is they are community-based. In addition to sponsoring Little League teams, attending neighborhood festivals and fairs, or donating time or money to local organizations, credit unions provide another way to root your business in your geographic community. Even if you’re not selling products or services to people and businesses in your vicinity, there is great value in supporting and being supported by the other entrepreneurs and merchants in your area.

My credit union serves a few neighborhoods, and with less than 10,000 members, is relatively small. But the service is personal, and they also provide education and assistance to immigrants, young people, and those trying to establish themselves financially. So, the local businesses that “bank” with the credit union are actually improving the neighborhood around them.

You can check for credit unions in your area here.

I’m curious what other alternatives are out there. An online bank? Who do you trust with your money?

Cool Tool Review: Bit.ly

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Todd Hoskins Reviews Tools for Business

cooltext451585442_tools

Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools and products that could belong in an entrepreneurial business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks who would be their customers in a form that’s consistent and relevant.

Cool Tool Review: Bit.ly
A Review by Todd Hoskins

If you’ve been cryogenically frozen for the past two years, the discovery of URL shorteners would be confusing. Why are there all these nonsensical domains appearing on Twitter, Facebook, and even in email?

Prompted by the 140 character limit, the early URL shorteners (we’re talking 2008) served an important purpose – freeing space for you to get more words and letters into a tweet. You want to share Lady Gaga’s controversial Alejandro video, for example, but simply sending the link is not enough. You want to offer your endorsement, commentary, or related questions (and for this video, there are many). Shortening the URL gives you the chance to do this. Otherwise, the link itself will take up half of your tweet characters.

So, thank you SnipURL, urlBorg, Cligs, is.gd, Su.pr, TinyURL, Ow.ly, and all the others for allowing me to add my two cents.

There is also a business utility to URL shortening, and Bit.ly remains the leader. Bit.ly and it’s companion service J.mp (which I use) shorten nearly 5 billion links per month. Why are so many people using Bit.ly? First, it has been Twitter’s default shortener. But also, Bit.ly offers analytics on your links that can be endlessly fascinating and valuable to your business.

When advising clients on their microblogging efforts I start with two main focal points:

1) Accessibility of your voice (warmth, personality, interactivity, humor)
2) Relevancy of your content

Bit.ly analytics can give you real-time and cumulative feedback on the relevancy of content. Are people sharing what you have shared? Are they clicking on the link? What types of content do your readers find compelling? What conversations take place around these links?

Once you have an account and shorten a URL, either with the Bit.ly sidebar or at their domain (also Tweetdeck has Bit.ly integrated), you can track and manage the links to see when and how often people have clicked through, as well as the ratio of the traffic you are driving compared to the rest of traffic monitored through Bit.ly.

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You also get posts and tweets that have used your shortened URL, so you can see who else is distributing the content and in what context. It’s a great way to discover influencers and fans. Don’t fall into the trap of measuring your online presence based on click-throughs, but it is a fast way to learn and adjust for the content your company is creating or distributing.

One more note . . . I will also use URL shorteners within emails sent to clients. If you send an email to five colleagues, for example, and want to see not only how many people are reading what you have highlighted as important, but how often that email has been forwarded, Bit.ly provides an easy way to see whether the article you recommend is being digested.

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 5/5 – Dashboard and branded short links with Bit.ly Pro

Entrepreneur Value: 4/5 – Improve your content. Inform your voice. Analytics help.

Personal Value: 3/5 – Effective replacement for bookmarking (Like a site? Article? Shorten it and it will be archived.)

Cool Tool Review: Highrise

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Todd Hoskins Reviews Tools for Business

cooltext451585442_tools

Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools and products that could belong in an entrepreneurial business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks who would be their customers in a form that’s consistent and relevant.

Cool Tool Review: Highrise
A Review by Todd Hoskins

Liz reminds us, “Relationships are everyone’s business, and every business is relationships.”

How are you keeping track of your business relationships? This is the purpose of CRM – Customer Relationship Management. CRM is a broad category of software, encompassing anything from fancy address books to sales forecasting and client invoicing. But essentially, CRM is understanding who are the people and companies important to your company. Sidenote: I hate the “M” in the acronym. What customer (or anyone for that matter) wants their relationship managed?

Nonetheless, the people you and your employees know are one of the single most valuable assets to your company. It is essential to develop a database of contact information. It’s a bonus if you also can encourage your employees to include correspondence records and organize their to-do’s in one central place. This way, if one of your employees leaves the company, you can instantly see where they left off and what needs to be done.

Two months ago we looked at Rapportive, a very simple social CRM tool. Rapportive is great for giving you context to who you are corresponding with, and where to find them online. But it currently only offers individual accounts. For businesses, you need something more.

I recommend Highrise. Highrise, developed by the trailblazing software renegades at 37signals is just enough without being too much. If you’ve read this column before you know I appreciate simplicity in design and usability. Highrise shines here.

There are a handful of add-ons that can make Highrise into Salesforce.com lite. The basic product allows you to easily enter names, companies, tags, contact info, social network locations, and notes. You can assign tasks to yourself or others. You can also set levels of permissions so your junior associate doesn’t have your board member’s cell phone.

The pricing is relatively cheap, starting at $25 per month. (Also, a 30-day trial is free regardless of company size). We are all waiting for a customized Android and Blackberry app. iPhone app is available.

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 2/5 – more options for business integration with Salesforce.com or Sugar CRM for SaaS. Or maybe your stuck with Oracle.

Entrepreneur Value: 5/5 – must-have. The hard part is getting your employees to use it consistently.

Personal Value: 0/5 – an online address book or an old fashioned Rolodex is good enough

Cool Tool Review: Google Alerts

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Todd Hoskins Reviews Tools for Business

cooltext451585442_tools

Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools and products that could belong in an entrepreneurial business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks who would be their customers in a form that’s consistent and relevant.

Cool Tool Review: Google Alerts
A Review by Todd Hoskins

Do you know the people, posts, and sites that are influencing your brand and industry?
Are you engaging in the most relevant conversations?

Google Alerts is one of the most valuable free services on the web. With Google’s indexing power, you get immediate or regular notification in your inbox or reader on topics or keywords of interest.

With the advent of the real-time web, you no longer need to wait a few days or even a week to learn that you’ve been praised or defamed on some obscure site. Alerts represent an early advancement from search-based tools to discovery on the web. Alerts is rather infantile in this sense – you have to tell Google exactly what you’re looking for. So, the key is determining:

What’s important to YOU and YOUR business?

Here’s a simple way to think about what alerts you should create:

1) Companies
2) People
3) Products
4) Issues

The first alert someone sets up (other than their own name), is usually your company. Make sure to also add alerts for competitors. Google lets you determine the frequency at which you get alerts. So, for a primary competitor, you may want immediate alerts. For others, daily or weekly may be fine. As the notifications are sent to your inbox or reader, you want to manage how much volume you get on an ongoing basis.

For the people category, monitoring executives, analysts, and industry luminaries allows you to stay up to date on what is being said about whom. Whether or not you choose to set up alerts for your employees is up to you. I would question anyone who spends a good portion of their week monitoring what their people are saying. If alerts are set up for the other three categories, you should get any post that is relevant without playing big brother to your employees.

Products is a no-brainer. My only caution here is, if you are setting up alerts for more than a dozen products, you may want to consider a social media monitoring solution. Nathan Gilliat watches the industry closely. There is value in getting the additional analysis and tracking, but you pay for what you get.

Finally, the category that most people miss: issues. Too many companies are jumping into blog and Twitter conversations only when their company is mentioned. Consider the values, objectives, and challenges your company is pursuing and facing. Listening and participating in conversations about “financial transparency,” “deregulation,” “surfing,” or “single payer health insurance” will both enliven your content creation and allow you to highlight what is important to you as an individual or a company.

Setting up Google Alerts takes less than five minutes. But thinking about the keywords and themes you want to monitor should be an ongoing process.

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 2/5 – more sophisticated tools with graphs, charts, and sentiment analysis exist for a cost

Entrepreneur Value: 5/5 – if you know of a more simple way to quickly get the info you need, please let me know

Personal Value: 4/5 – tracking your favorite band, athlete, or ex-boyfriend provides some balance to the more professional alerts

Cool Tool Review: Aquent & crowdSPRING

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Todd Hoskins Reviews Tools for Small Business

cooltext451585442_tools

Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools and products that could belong in a small business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks who would be their customers in a form that’s consistent and relevant.

Cool Tool Review: Aquent & crowdSPRING
A Review by Todd Hoskins


(Disclosure: I currently work with Aquent)

The free agent revolution predicted by Fast Company more than a dozen years ago never fully happened. The rising costs of healthcare, along with our collective drive for security as a result of war and economic turmoil made many people choose employment rather than a life of freelancing.

For reasons of choice or necessity, there are still a lot of independent workers looking for the right gig. Large businesses often will use contractors to provide flexibility, cost savings, or to rent skill sets they do not have. Small businesses should use freelancers more often.

I recommend a couple companies that match talented people with organizations in need of help: Aquent and crowdSPRING.

Aquent has been in business for 24 years. With offices around the globe, and specialized practices in online marketing, interactive design, user experience, traditional marketing, and graphic design, they find the best people either offsite or locally to fit your culture and need.

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It works this way. You have a project, or perhaps someone is taking a one month vacation. You contact Aquent. They assign an agent who will select some candidates from their talent pool based on budget, skill set, and working environment. You interview one or a few, and make a choice. Aquent pays the talent and bills you. The whole process can take less than a week.

For a small business, this gives you access to the most talented designers and marketers for a time period and cost that you dictate, without needing to screen a bunch of people or take on a full-time employee.

crowdSPRING offers logo, graphic design, and writing services, with a much different approach. You post the project on their site, including deadline and a price. Then you wait for the creatives to submit their entries. In addition, crowdSPRING has one of the best small business blogs out there. They are smart people, now with a network of over 60,000 freelancers.

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Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 4/5 – Revive the Free Agent Revolution. There is great talent ready to help. Compelling alternative to paying agencies to do execution work.

Entrepreneur Value: 5/5 – A 2 week SEO engagement, site redesign, or copy rewrite can make a big difference

Personal Value: 2/5 – if you’re a freelancer, these companies can help you

Cool Tool Review: Dabbleboard

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Todd Hoskins Reviews Tools for Small Business

cooltext451585442_tools

Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools and products that could belong in a small business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks who would be their customers in a form that’s consistent and relevant.

Cool Tool Review: Dabbleboard
A Review by Todd Hoskins

The dreaded dial in . . .

I had a colleague who referred to virtual meetings as “pajama business.” It is only within the last few years that we have gained the luxury of clipping toenails during a CEO update, or making egg salad during a development team scrum. The gain in freedom has often been offset by a loss in engagement. When I can’t see your smirk, or feel your trepidation, or witness your enthusiasm, I am less connected to you, my client or co-worker.

A few weeks ago I reviewed Prezi, my favorite tool for visualizing a presentation. There are plenty of collaboration tools out there for bridging the visual divide in virtual meetings, from screen sharing to video conferencing. This week I want to highlight a simple digital whiteboard called Dabbleboard that can encourage participation, and aide the visual learners and thinkers among us (like me).

The visual component of any meeting is important. Dan Roam received considerable attention a couple years ago for solving problems and selling ideas in pictures in his book The Back of the Napkin. Dabbleboard provides the necessary functionality to place a blackboard or napkin in front of anyone with whom you want to share.

For a sales pitch, a site redesign, a strategy meeting, even reviewing financials – all of these situations improve with pictures and shapes. A different part of our brain gets activated and you’ll keep the attention of your people or prospects.

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I have also tried Scriblink, which worked fairly well. Both tools offer chat, real-time sharing, and phone conferencing. I like Dabbleboard’s personal image library – you can reuse graphics you’ve made. I also like their commitment to their users, evidenced in their blog and the creation of a toolkit.

A Pro (paid) version is available that includes customization, permissions, data portability, and security. If you’re going to create highly confidential drawings, you may want to pay the monthly fee. Discounts are also available for not-for-profits and educators.

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 3/5 – Adobe and Microsoft lack the whimsy of Dabbleboard

Entrepreneur Value: 4/5 – excellent, though the UI could be better. AlmostMeet in beta (Please, please change the name).

Personal Value: 2/5 – great for school projects