In keeping with the benchmarks we set for ourselves, FYIndOut looks like it will be a good side-revenue business but unfortunately, it’s not enough to support my co-founder Tony and I as a full time gig. Hence, I’ve recently started looking for jobs again. I’m just getting started, so I’m keeping an open mind. It’s interesting to hear what each company feels are the top selling points for them and the roles they’re looking to fill.
As I’m focusing on senior/management roles, most have P&L responsibilities tied to them. A few companies have mentioned the size of the budget as a big selling point. To be honest, it’s not. I want to know how the company has done with its budget so far. I’m less concerned about the size of the budget and more concerned about their execution and the size of the opportunity.
“We’ve spent $X to build the business so far and have $X more in funding.” That statement concerns me unless it’s followed by other statements like, “…and we’re profitable/will be profitable this year” or “…and we’ve met/exceeded all of our revenue/financial milestones so far.”
Ideally, I want to work at an agile company that’s growing and has the necessary budget to reach its goals while rewarding me properly for my work. That said, I’ve commented before in previous posts that this environment tends to be the case where the most money gets wasted on projects. Why? Bootstrapped startups can’t afford to do anything that isn’t absolutely necessary and product managers in large corporations have to focus all of their energy on getting the “must-haves” through all of the corporate bureaucracy correctly or they end up with a bunch of projects that deliver half of what customers wanted and none of the revenue or cost savings.
It’s the agile and funded companies that have the skills and the money to get caught up in busy projects over valuable projects. Don’t get me wrong, managed creativity and flexibility is great. Many cash-cows have come from cool side projects and experiments. However, the down side is that if it continues unmanaged, it will trend negatively on the company’s profitability and more importantly, the team. Consistently spending time on projects that go nowhere gets everyone down. Especially if you’re hiring entrepreneurial rock stars that want to make a difference. They want to have a direct impact on building a successful company. Nobody wants to bust tail for a year and have nothing to show for it to their team, on their resume, or their bank statement.
The size of the budget or funding isn’t as important as how the company uses it (Insert your own “size vs how-you-use-it joke here). The successful companies spend money on projects like they don’t have it. They ask customers what they want and even better, what will add value that they will pay for, and build that. They screw up, get feedback, fix it, make a little more money, and move on. They don’t have people and managers from ten different groups start a weekly meeting to debate and guess what customers want. Or worse, try to scope projects to meet the budget they have to spend.
The companies that are getting my attention and respect are the ones that have the agility and funding to build great teams and a great culture and focus on projects and profitability like they only have six months of runway left.
(Also posted at FYIndOut Blog)
Let me start off by saying that I’m not a fan of the term “social CRM” as I believe that adding social media as a channel to CRM platforms is no different then when we added online forms and chat. It’s simply another channel of communication between you and your customers to handle any issues and it’s still CRM.
With that said, social CRM is a major game changer in two ways:
- It makes your entire team publicly accountable
- How your company handles issues and tickets via social media will be either the best or worst thing your marketing team could ever hope for
Public Accountability
Until now, all issues between a customer and your company have been one on one. Whether it’s via call, email, fax, online form, or chat, only one person outside of your company was privy to that experience and when or how your company resolved it. With social media and CRM, any complaint, experience, or promise is shared and accessible with everyone. If your software has a major bug, you can’t downplay it with each customer separately because they now know how big the issue is by sharing information with each other without you being the gatekeeper. If you promise that the bug will be fixed by the end of the week and you’re still working on it a month later, you’re not just losing credibility with one customer but with all customers and as well as prospects.
In addition, tickets and issues with customers are no longer just point-in-time. Any issues brought up (and hopefully resolved) via social media are out there forever, searchable by anyone at any time. Go to http://search.twitter.com and type in “Comcast Customer Service” and see what I mean.
This new reality makes product and service quality more important then ever before. The better the experience, the better the word-of-mouth. It also makes your company’s process for managing and resolving tickets/issues more critical then ever before. In addition, how your company communicates and sets expectations on those issues and resolutions will be just as important.
Marketing Impact: Sweetest Dream or Worst Nightmare
Based on what I discussed above, it’s easy to see the impact your company’s quality, service and support will have on your brand. For companies with a great product or service and a well organized support team, social media is a marketing dream come true as your own customers will promote your brand better then any advertising campaign could ever do. However, for those companies that historically have gone with heavy marketing budgets to drown out their subpar products and services and disjointed support, this new channel could very well be their worst nightmare.
Don’t wait for your company to start using a CRM solution with social media capabilities to take action. Start cleaning house now. Is your product quality where it needs to be when you release it? Is your support team educated and experienced with new products before they’re released? Is your support team working with your Marketing team to share a consistent message before and after the sale? Do you have the staff in place technically and otherwise to successfully resolve issues? Having these areas and others in order will be important factors in making sure you can rest at night without the nightmares.
Nothing makes me cringe more then seeing the Yellow Pages or White Pages phone book on my door step. I never asked for it and I’ve never used it. From a “green” standpoint, it’s a major waste of trees and paper as well as a huge filler for landfills. From a business standpoint, when I see the majority of the phone books still out on door steps a week later and in front of empty buildings, I’ve got to believe the advertisers are not getting their money’s worth. Any phone books on my front porch go directly from the steps to the recycle bin in the alley. They never see the inside of my place.
This year, I entered my name and address on Yellowpagesgogreen.org to have myself removed from the distribution list. This site is not run by the printing company but by a group trying to start a movement similar to the National No-Call Directory. Let’s hope it works.
Here’s some key statistics from Yellowpagesgoesgreen.org that may make you dislike the phone books even more. Over 500 million of these books are printed every year.
To produce 500 million books:
• 19 million trees need to be harvested
• 1.6 billion pounds of paper are wasted
• 7.2 million barrels of oil are misspent in their processing (not including the wasted gas used for their delivery to your doorstep)
• 268,000 cubic yards of landfill are taken up
• 3.2 billion kilowatt hours of electricity are squandered
If you want to take your home/office name and address off of the phone book distribution, you can enter your info here. It takes less time then picking up an unsolicited phone book and throwing it in the recycle bin.
I’ve decided to take my blog off of Squarespace and move it to a hosted WordPress site. While it’s cheaper and more effective to use, I’ve lost some of my comments and all of the Techmeme tweet buttons are set back to 0. So while my readership isn’t huge, please believe that it’s greater then nobody. If it wasn’t, I’d stop writing it. Overall though, the move has been fairly painless.
One of the biggest lessons you learn as a product manager and/or business owner is that adding more functionality to your product or service doesn’t always make it better. If it’s not directly improving the customer experience, building your traffic, or most importantly, bringing additional revenue in the door, you need to take a step back and ask why you’re building it.
“More” usually comes in two flavors; “shiny new thing” and “more of the same”.
Shiny new things are always fun. It’s great learning a new technology and imagining how you could implement it. You picture yourself speaking at a conference with all of the latest cool companies and being written up in TechCrunch or ReadWriteWeb. The thing is, implementing a shiny new thing for the sole purpose of it being shiny and new without any specific value to your customers doesn’t mean anything. If anything, you’ll find that 9 times out of 10, your shiny new thing just increased your customer service calls as they’re not sure what the shiny new thing is or does.
More of the same has got to be better, right? It’s more of what your customers want or use. If we let them enter 3 details on this form, they’ll love it if we let them enter 12. Not quite. The remember when you’re building something for your customer is that it should be there to make their lives easier and take up less time. Having them spend the same amount of time on your product or service that you originally saved them isn’t doing anyone any favors and your customers will start to ask themselves if the benefit they originally perceived is still there.
I’ve worked in my own startup, a medium sized business and a large corporation. Of those three, the startup and the large corporation are the best environments for making you focus on building only what will bring in more revenue. With a startup, you only have so much funding runway and time. Everything you build needs to have a strong reason and quick return. With a large corporation, things are so slow and bureaucratic that it’s a struggle to get anything actually implemented so you need to focus only on the things that will make an impact. It’s when you’re a growing small to medium size business that it’s difficult to avoid the sirens’ call of the “shiny new thing” and “more of the same” because you still have most of the agility AND the funding. That’s when you’re most likely to find yourself building that one year project that nobody really wants.
More is not always better. Does the new functionality improve your customer experience and prevent them from leaving? Does it make your customer’s life easier and allow them to focus on their core business? Does it bring more traffic to your site? Does it generate more revenue or lower costs? If whatever you’re building isn’t doing any of these things, you should probably stop working on them right now and focus on the things that do.
It felt great to go home for Thanksgiving last week and visit with my family and friends. I don’t make it back that often so when I’m there I try to make sure I stay long enough to enjoy it.
As my friends and I caught up over a few beers on Friday night, we got on the topic of friends and family tech support. Three of the four of us now assume and plan time for fixing, cleaning up, and updating home computers for those close to us when we visit. Heck, I’ve even got my brother’s in-laws calling me now. We all average about 2-4 hours a trip and usually 1-2 phone calls per month. On this trip, one of my buddies was also pulled into creating a new network for the small town high school that his sister teaches at. That was a seven hour job.
Some of the “issues” are painful (i.e. re-image), some are funny, and most are due to lack of understanding. Some cause my father to curse like the dad on “A Christmas Story” when the furnace goes out. The biggest thing you can do to minimize support time is educate the user (in this case, my parents) as much as possible. That said, most people don’t want to learn about the “technical stuff”, they just want it to work. Personally speaking, my father refuses to acknowledge that the “Help” button exists on any software or website and that’s something I’m never going to be able to change. So be it.
As time goes on, my support hours seem to be decreasing but I don’t think it will ever totally stop. No matter what, it’s family and it’s now a standard holiday tradition. Just like turkey on Thanksgiving, grilling on the 4th of July, or watching “A Christmas Story” in December, tech support will be a part of my holiday visits.
This year we took on two interns to help us with PR and Marketing. They were both out of state and continued to go to school while working remotely for us. My business partner and I are both huge advocates of making sure that interns are not used as cheap, sweatshop labor. It’s the employer’s responsibility to make sure that every internship position adds value to the company, but more importantly, gives a young person some of the experience, skills, and knowledge they’ll need to compete for a career in their field of choice.
So when the internships recently ended, we sent them the following questions to answer:
- Was the internship what you thought it would be?
- Was the amount of responsibility fair for the number of hours you’d be told you would spend? Too much, too little?
- Did you learn from the internship?
- Did you gain experience you can use to build your career in the internship?
- Did you feel the amount of supervision/communication was right/too much/ too little?
- Did you feel as though you were part of the team or being taken advantage of?
- What would you have liked to learn or done that didn’t happen?
- What could we have done better or differently to improve the internship based on the role you were hired for?
- Do you think the telecommuting worked?
- Any suggestions as to what we could do to improve the value of the internship for the next person?
Thankfully, none of the feedback was a surprise and primarily positive. In most part because we ask many of these questions from time to time on our weekly calls. There’s no need to wait until something is over to find out how it’s going.
Both sides stand to gain a lot from internships when they’re done right. We were able to get some A-players based on the experience we promised we could provide over high pay for mundane work. They in turn gained experience to get them ready for their career. One of our interns was just recently hired for a full time position and she attributes her experience with FYIndOut directly for helping her land the job. It’s very rewarding for both sides.
If you were to ask your interns the questions above, what would their answers be?
Last week I went over the 5 signs that your non-profit isn’t ready for social media. This week, I’ll discuss tips and strategies that can make a huge difference in your charity’s online and social media presence and hopefully result in a bigger community and more donations.
1. Use a Content Management System(CMS) for your website
The biggest issue that many charities face is that they rely on a supportive board member or local company to build their site for them and host it for free and/or they don’t have a developer on the team. This results in the organization being afraid to “bug” the company or take up their IT person’s time with updates, 99% of which are content changes. The best thing a charity can do is use a CMS system for their website.
The great thing about Content Management Systems is that they allow business users to add, edit, and remove pages and content without the need of a developer. It’s all point, type, click stuff that any business person can do. This allows the charity to easily add things like event pages, photos, videos, and updated information without needing to bother their generous hosting company or their IT staff. You can start simple by even using a blog platform like Word Press or Typepad. Most web hosting services now come with website templates that are easy for business users to use. A good example is Yahoo! SiteBuilder. Then there are the more robust platforms out there that allow you to build a community such as Pligg, Joomla, and Drupal. All of these can be hosted by the company or on a server of your choice. This should be on every non-profit’s 2010 check list.
2. Stay connected with monthly targeted newsletters
Monthly newsletters are a great way to stay connected with members and donors alike. My suggestion is to create two monthly newsletters; one targeted to members, and one targeted to donors. Let the members know what’s going on at your charity and how you’re there to help. Let donors know how their money is being used to help others by sharing inspiring stories from the previous month and thank them for helping to make a difference. At a time where so many charities compete for donations, educating sponsors as to how their money is helping your community and thanking them twelve times a year goes a long way to building a lasting relationship.
This year our event committee used newsletters for our charity running event to keep in touch, share why we were doing the event and provide tips on running. The number of runners doubled and we almost doubled our target donation amount. Think we’ll do it again next year? Better believe it! Great and affordable services for email campaigns include Constant Contact and Mail Chimp. They’re worth the money.
3. Share your photos and videos
Seeing is believing. Most non-profits only use a few pictures from an event to go on the invite to the same event the following year. Post all of your pictures on your site as well as sites like Flickr. Invite all of the event attendees to post their pictures as well not only to your site but their own social networking pages. Then when their friends on Facebook see what a great time they had, you’ve got that many more people interested in going next year.
4. Have calls to action on your website
Most non-profit websites share information and then tell the reader to call or email to see how they can participate or donate. If you’re telling someone how your organization can help them, have a sign up form right there on the page or a quick contact form for you to contact them.
Instead of asking board members and volunteers to email donation forms and memorize a script, create a landing page that they can email the direct link to the donor. Have the landing page explain the value that your charity brings to the community, share video tours of the club or thanks from your members, and most importantly allow them to donate right there on the page. Which of the following do you think your prospective donors would prefer?
Option 1: Receive email with multiple attachments to open, read, and fill out along with an invite for a meeting with the charity CEO and/or see the club.
Option 2: Receive an email with a link to a page that tells them everything about the club and has some passionate videos and club tour that they can view right there at their desk along with the ability to easily donate online.
I’ll bet the majority of busy donors would take option #2 70% of the time. Even if people like your non-profit, nobody likes another meeting added to their calendar. Make it as easy to donate as possible. If they are high touch, that’s great. The ability to meet the CEO and go through a live tour is still there as an option.
5. Start a blog
In addition to your monthly newsletter, start a blog where you post articles on topics and key words relating to your charity. This not only continues to foster relationships with your members and donors but it also builds up your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and allows people that have never heard of your charity to find you. The key to blogging is to stay consistent and focused on key words and topics around your charity.
6. Use Social Media
Find a person from your staff (not a volunteer or associate board member) and have them spend 30-60 minutes a day using social media to participate in discussions on your charity’s area of interest and build a community. Create a Facebook page. Create a Twitter account and participate in pertinent discussions. Post items or links that relate to what you do. Over time you’ll be amazed at how this can build up. Whatever you do, do not join just to post every time you have an event or ask for donations. You’ll have a better chance of pushing people away then attracting them.
Hopefully, these tips are useful to non-profits and small businesses alike. What does your charity do that works?
Since high school, I’ve always made it a priority to be involved with a charity or non-profit every year. I’ve always found the experience rewarding on multiple levels.
As everyone knows, non-profits are always strapped for cash. The growth of social media opens up many opportunities for non-profits to spread the word, build and support their community, and increase donations in a way that’s never been seen before. The best part is that all of this can be done at little or no monetary cost. It’s primarily a time and talent tactic.
Unfortunately, not many non-profits are using social media and of those that are, very few are using it effectively. Fewer still are ready for it.
Last month, Kipp Bodnar did a great post titled, “10 Signs Your B2B Business Isn’t Ready For Social Media”. In the spirit of his post, here are my five signs your non-profit isn’t ready for social media.
1. Non-Profit Web Site Stinks
The vast majority of non-profit websites are little more then online brochures. Most of the time, they’re hosted and created by a board member’s company and the non-profit is afraid or too technically intimidated to change it. Spending any time on social media to take users back to a poor website with no calls to action is a waste of time. Make sure you have a website that has specific calls to ask people to join, donate, attend an event, or anything else important to your charity.
2. Under Staffed For Current Efforts
Creating and maintaining a community using social media takes a lot of time. More then you would expect, especially when you’re first starting out. This is one area that a non-profit can’t ask someone from an associate board or a volunteer to do for them. It needs to be done by someone that’s a part of the charity every day and in a position to share daily happenings.
3. Leadership Doesn’t Support Social Media
Probably the most frustrating part about non-profits is that the CEO is stretched very thin and while they’re passionate about the cause, they know nothing about social media and don’t really want to other then letting a volunteer “try it” and see what happens. However, they’ll continue to spend multiple meetings asking people to send donation forms and emails out and wonder why it’s not as effective any more. You need to convince the non-profit leadership to pursue social media correctly or don’t bother.
4. Haven’t Done Any Basic SEO
This ties closely with not having a good website. For most non-profits, unless someone types the exact name of the charity into a search engine, they don’t come up. However, most of the time people looking for support your charity can provide are searching on terms like “cancer support Chicago”. Building content around key words that your donators or people that need your help look for is critical to being found and making a difference.
5. Don’t Have Any Web site Metrics In Place
Most non-profits don’t truly look at their website as the business and community development portal that it can be. It’s something that everyone does and has all of the info from their brochures. On top of that, they never measure the traffic or other key metrics that let them know if it’s making an impact or where people are leaving the site.
In today’s age where everyone has a cause they are passionate about, non-profits are competing more then ever for donations and volunteers. Non-profits need to be able to make their website and social media strategy work for them and turn them into a productive growing asset instead of looking to use them to promote a few one time events every year.
In my next post, I’ll provide tips and strategies on what non-profits can do to resolve these issues and build a social media strategy.
One of the most frustrating parts of starting a company is selecting the right name for your brand and making sure you’re able to protect it. As your name is what represents your company to everyone else, it’s very important that you find the right one and take the necessary steps to make sure you won’t run into issues down the road. Here are some tips to help you come up with a name you can keep.
1. Make sure the name somehow ties to your company and what you do.
While this sounds easy, you’d be amazed at how many people start to go a different route after they’ve repeatedly found that the domain for the name they really want is taken.
2. Don’t make your name too focused.
One thing you realize as an entrepreneur is that the idea you originally start with can go a different way then you thought based on what your customers want. Don’t pick a name that pigeon-holes you to a specific task or technology. Look at all of the “something-tweet” or “tw_______” companies out there. What will they do as other (and there is always an other) technologies come out or someone buys Twitter and rebrands?
3. Make sure you can get the “.com” domain for your name.
The “.com” domain is the domain that everyone looks for and portrays that your company is legitimate. Don’t settle for a .info or other domain. That said, make sure that you buy the other top domains for your company name to help protect your brand.
4. Check your state filings.
Now that you know the domain name is available, check with your Secretary of State to make sure there are no companies filed that could have issue with your name or will confuse your customers into going to the wrong business.
5. Do a search on the USPTO website.
Even if you’re a local bakery, the minute you put up your site you are out there to the nation and the world. While you don’t really need to worry about the world right away, you do need to worry about someone coming after you for trademark infringement if you select a name that may be too close. Go to www.uspto.gov and do a trademark search for your name. If something comes up, you may want to reconsider or get a legal opinion before you continue.
Be prepared to be let down and have a list of names ready to go. I’ve found that it’s best to do this exercise over beer with your partners because you will want to drink after awhile. Steps 1 and 2 are difficult. When you get to step 3, chances are that it’s taken and you go back to step 1. Step 4 isn’t so bad but step 5 is another spot where you’ll find somebody beat you to the punch.
The last thing you want to do is ignore steps 4 & 5 and go with a name once you’ve found a domain. Nothing is worse then building up a successful brand only to have it noticed by someone that owns the trademark and receiving that cease and desist order. Now you’re back at step one and have to build up your new brand all over again.
In keeping with the benchmarks we set for ourselves, FYIndOut looks like it will be a good side-revenue business but unfortunately, it’s not enough to support my co-founder Tony and I as a full time gig. Hence, I’ve recently started looking for jobs again. I’m just getting started, so I’m keeping an open mind. It’s interesting to hear what each company feels are the top selling points for them and the roles they’re looking to fill. 
