Using Social Media to Convey You\'re Eco-Friendly

Sharing via social media is, of course, hotter than ever. But it's not just an opportunity to showcase your products or services. It's also opportunity to engage your customers in your green initiatives, which, in turn, should engender more respect, loyalty and love for your brand. Consumers are tired of blatant advertising - they want interaction, evidence and inspiration.

The first step is to understand the various social networks and why and how people use them. Here's a quick primer. Once you understand the differences, it's then about using them to better explain your green initiatives and the impact they're having.

Of course, you need to balance your green messaging carefully: Studies have shown “green” is a secondary concern to most customers. They ultimately care more about whether the product is useful, well-designed and cost effective.

Also, remember that social media isn't just about relaying information â€" it should be fun and engaging. Put some thought into how you tell your  story and how your environmental sustainability initiatives fit into that.

With that in mind, here's a look at three ways businesses have used social media effectively to discuss their green initiatives:

Toyota

https://www.facebook.com/prius/app_236697543098808”

Or then there's this gem that garnered more than 400 “likes” and more than 90 comments:

“This past summer, I took the family on a _____-mile road trip in my 20__ Prius to ____ and only spent $___.00 in gas.”

These posts provided great ways for Toyota to converse with customers truly engaged in the Prius brand while helping them better understand the environmental benefits and cost effectiveness of driving a Prius.

Method

Household cleaning products maker Method has been a trendsetter in using social media to engage its customers its ecofriendly practices. Earlier this year, the company launched several music-fueled videos on YouTube as part of its “clean happy campaign” that tried to explain why the company's cleaning products are less environmentally hazardous than mainstream products.

But instead of blatant advertising, the videos were more suggestive and inspirational. Watch its “clean happy anthem.” The videos were posted on various social media outlets, including Facebook, with some receiving more than 1 million views.

Timberland

Outdoor apparel maker Timberland announced back in 2008 that it wanted to create a community of one million people dedicated to environmental change â€" tying the community-building to its Earthkeeper line of green footwear. Four years later, Timberland has more than 800,000 “likes” on Facebook and more than 22,000 Twitter followers.

And environmental friendliness remains part of its overall brand-building. The company posted on Facebook and Twitter about how it uses recycled materials in its shoes, and how it sources its leather from more environmentally responsible tanneries. There is also the company's tree planting in China and Haiti.

Check out how Timberland wrapped a lot of the themes together into a Pinterest page.

Keep in mind that you don't have to sell ecofriendly products or be a “green brand” to engage your customers in your green initiatives. Even if it's steps you're taking to reduce energy use in your facilities or reduce packaging, you can get the word out to your customers via social media.

Eco Friendly Social Media Photo via Shutterstock

Phoenix Event: The Small Biz Tech Tour Lands at ASU In Phoenix on October 12th

The 3rd Annual Small Business Technology Tour 2012, produced by Smallbiztechnology.com, will be arriving in Phoenix on Friday, October 12th!  Join our very own Ramon Ray at the Arizona State University's College of Technology and Innovation, Cooley Ballroom, 7001 E. Williams Field Rd, Mesa, AZ  from 8:30am â€" 4:00pm for a day full of learning, networking and FUN!

REGISTER HERE

This one day event is filled with TONS of learning from expert speakers on topics geared to helping small businesses grow.  Topics include:

• How Small Companies Can Do Big Things With Technology
• Are You Leveraging Your Superfans?
• 7 Steps: Dating Your Leads. Marrying Your Customers

We have a few complimentary tickets available for the first 10 people to register with the code RamonVIP. You can use the code and REGISTER HERE.

Visit the tour website to see the full list of speakers and agenda for each city.

We hope to see you on the tour!!

Measuring Your Company Goals

I've been making New Year's Resolutions for my business for years. You could also call what I compile at the start of the year goals for my company. Rather than creating a stagnant business plan that I forget to update, I simply revisit what I want for my company at the fresh start of the year.

So why am I telling you this when New Year's is so far away?

Because the rest of the year I measure my goals. I create a neat little spreadsheet like the one pictured below to see how I'm doing each month toward those goals.

Why Measurement is Good

So many companies I know set goals (“we want to increase sales”) but don't set milestones to check how they're doing. Sure, you want to increase sales, but by how much? How soon? And what will you do to increase sales?

With my spreadsheet, I check in once a month and update these categories. I can see how well I'm doing against my goals and tweak my strategy accordingly. I can look back over the past few years to see how things have improved.

What Your History Tells You

When I look at my goals from two years ago, I laugh, as they are so off from where I am now with my business. But at least I have insight into where I've been as an entrepreneur.

Having historical data for your company can help you shape future decisions. For example, if you decide to move into a new target market, you might be able to look back to the last time you wanted to try a new market and see that it utterly failed.

Does that mean you shouldn't try again? Not necessarily, but you should be able to look to your past strategy to determine what you could do differently this time.

Change is a Good Thing

Sometimes I delete a goal halfway through the year because it no longer applies. I add new ones, too. Goals, just like your business plan, are meant to be change to adapt to your business' ever-fluctuating objectives.

Nothing is set in stone; don't be afraid to shift your focus or completely remove goals from your list.

Why Year ‘Round Resolutions Work

It doesn't matter if you set your resolutions on January 1st or October 15. Your best chance for success is to keep those goals in front of you every month and track how you're doing. You won't hit some goals, and that's okay. It's more important to view your progress in the bigger picture so you can tweak your goals next year if need be.

By paying attention to your goals, you are, in a sense, helping achieve them.

The Tortoise And The Hare: 3 Reasons Why You Should Pump Up Your Website\'s Speed

When I click on a page, it takes me about 30 seconds until I decide to call it a day and click the “Back” button. Many people behave this way, and many people are annoyed by long load times (and I'm one of the patient ones). Even if I manage to get a page within 10 seconds, those seconds composed a period of time that I will never again be able to relive. A slow-loading web page is like a busy intersection. If people keep encountering congestion somewhere, they'll try to find a way around it to get where they want faster, even if it means jumping through hoops.

But there are more reasons why your website should be faster:

• Your sales depend on it! If you're thinking that people will sit there and wait for pages to load just to order a product on your site, you're wrong. Unless you're the only person selling a particular product, you'll lose customers to competitors who have faster service. Amazon loses 1 percent of sales for every 100 ms delay in page load times.
• Your page views depend on it! The faster your site loads, the more pages people will want to visit within it, and the more they'll stick around to see all your goodies.
• Your stance with Google depends on it! Google analyzes your page load time constantly. It takes this into account to ultimately determine where you fall within search result pages.
• Your customer satisfaction levels depend on it! Happier customers are good buyers. Almost half of online shoppers expect a page to load in two seconds. That's a short time!
• Your bills depend on it! I'm not kidding. You'll find that you'll have reduced costs on bandwidth and storage space if you optimize your site. Optimization also involves size reduction. Smaller pages = less bandwidth/storage.

If you want to optimize your site conveniently without having to deal with huge IT teams, have a look at services like Yottaa and Torbit. Both have extensive amounts of experience in the department of making sites shinier and cleaner. These solutions will help you especially if you don't have Google's budget.

Small Businesses\' Most Influential Champions Will Be Honored at the Small Business Influencer 2012 Awards Gala

The top 100 Champions of the Small Business Influencer 2012 Awards, will be honored at an Awards Gala hosted in conjunction with the New York Business Expo and Conference on October 17, 2012 at the Javits Convention Center in New York. In addition to the 100 Champions, Honorable Mention and Community Choice honorees were chosen as well. Larry Janesky, founder and president of Basement Systems and author of The Highest Calling, will highlight the evening's festivities with an inspiring keynote address.

The Small Business Influencer 2012 Awards honor small business influencers across organizations, companies and individuals who are influential to small business in North America through the products, services, knowledge or support they provide to the small business market.

“The Award recognizes those organizations and individuals who play crucial roles within small businesses, but are often in the background,” adds Anita Campbell, CEO of Small Business Trends and co-founder of the Awards. “With small businesses being such an important part of our business ecosystem, its wonderful see so many individuals and different types of organizations working with the small business market,” adds Campbell.

Many of this year's influencer honoree will also be presenting throughout the day at NY Expo and the “How I Did It: Lesson's From America's Best-Run Companies,” seminar features several Small Business Influencer 2012 Champions on its panel.

 

The Small Business Influencer Awards are co-produced by Small Business Trends and SmallBizTechnology.com, with title sponsor support from BlackBerry, and support from Infusionsoft, Sage, GetResponse, Vocus, Manta and Day2DayPrinting.com.  Organizational partners supporting the Awards include   PRNewswire.

See all Champions, Honorable Mentions and Community Choice honorees HERE .

 

Annie Tsai of DemandForce: Automating Customer Relationships

We all know that the online world has changed the way we do business. And one of the areas largely affected has been that of customer service and customer relations. However, many small businesses do not have the staff or the resources to stay on top of this to the degree that they'd like to. So what's a small business to do? Tune in as Annie Tsai of DemandForce joins Brent Leary to provide an automated solution.

* * * * *

Small Business Trends: Can you tell us a bit about what DemandForce does?

Annie Tsai: We focus on the services industry of small business like dentists and doctors, spas and salons, auto shops, dog walkers, those types of people who are delivering services to consumers every day.

What we do is help these small businesses thrive in the Internet economy. They traditionally have offline businesses, and we help them get online with customer relationships and email marketing, social marketing, as well as reputation.

Consumer voices are becoming so powerful in terms of generating new business and becoming the referral engine for companies everywhere. Traditional small businesses need to have a voice.  And in order to do that, they need to be online and we are helping them do that.

Small Business Trends: There are a lot of traditional businesses out there that do most of their business offline but still need to have an online presence.

Annie Tsai: Consumers are looking for a dentist in the new town they are living in. They are tracking things online, but they are asking for referrals from the people they trust.

One of the messages we really try to drive with our customers is that it is not just about getting your views out there syndicated.  We want to make sure that we are automating the relationship piece. We are asking for referrals for you; we are asking for the reviews; we are sending out thank yous; we are sending out birthday reminders.

All of those things that people have historically been snail mailing, or calling for.  We are doing it for them.

Small Business Trends: In some instances, they aren't doing it at all.  They have 20 things they are trying to do at the same time and things fall through the cracks.

Annie Tsai: Yes, we like to tell our prospective customers that a lot of the really important things that DemandForce does for them is that we automate, and do a lot of the stuff that they would spend a lot of time doing manually.  So they can be in front of the customers who are walking through the door and maximize the time they have.

Small Business Trends: Let's talk a little bit about your title, Chief Customer Officer. When you were going to school did you hear that title and think that something that I wanted to be one day, or is it something that has kind of evolved as you started working?

Annie Tsai: I think definitely the latter. For me it was definitely a little bit of a winding road.  But I was happiest when I focused on the customer experience.  And not just the customer experience from a marketing perspective, or from a support customer perspective.

As the Chief Customer Officer, I have a really unique situation because anything that the customer is impacted by, my team has a hand in.  That is really great because we get to help define the DemandForce voice, the voice we use to deliver a message. We get to help define the delivery of a variety of projects across all departments.

I think that our customers are really seeing the difference there.

Small Business Trends: How often are you interacting with customers on social networks, or email, or phone in general? How connected are you with the voice of the customer?

Annie Tsai: We are very connected with our customers. I personally am on the DemandForce Facebook page watching stuff, and on our Twitter feed replying to the customers and talking with them throughout the day.

I am personally talking to customers on a weekly basis and we bring customers in for focus groups and user group usability studies regularly.

We also had a few community events that I have gone to where we have really been able to continue to have a conversation with them, continue learning from our customers and finding out which features are great. Which features need to be tweaked and also what do we need to do better.

Small Business Trends: How do you take that information into the executive team meetings and say, “Hey, this is what the customer is saying.” How is that embraced when it comes to an executive team?

Annie Tsai: I will give you an example.  Recently, we rolled out with an new integration and there was one feature we started hearing feedback on because it was something that our customers felt was necessary.

I empowered my team to own parts of the customer experience, so our technical support manager has a top ten feature list. He is the voice of the customer priority there, and determines what gets fixed and in what order for customers.

He's done a great job of taking all of our various inbound channels and collating it.  And taking the data that we have, and we have a ton of data we use to measure what has happened to our customers. He takes that and he is the voice, he says this is what is really important and this is why, and I take his message and I try to drive it home.

We are also fortunate because every executive on the executive team is very customer focused. Customers still call Rick, our president, and leave messages with him and he calls them back.  Sometimes I call them back to.  It is really important for him to make sure that he is connected to the customer as well.  Because they are what got us here, and we are continuing to develop products which make them successful.

Small Business Trends: The fact that your CEO still is connected, still calls, returns calls, and interacts with customers, we don't necessarily hear that as often as we should.

Annie Tsai: With 18,000 customers and growing, it really speaks to the fact we believe in our customers and believe we are doing things for our customers.  We can't do that if we're not talking to them.

Small Business Trends: Where can people learn more?

Annie Tsai: You can visit us on our website at DemandForce.com.

This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.

Whether you're growing your business or starting a new venture, BlackBerry solutions provide you with the freedom you want and the control you need. [Series sponsor]

Annie Tsai â€" DemandForce by smallbiztrends

Microsoft acquires multifactor authentication vendor PhoneFactor

Microsoft has acquired PhoneFactor Inc., an Overland Park, Kan. Vendor that provides multifactor authentication technology via smartphones. The acquisition was announced in a press release Thursday.

"The acquisition of PhoneFactor will help Microsoft bring effective and easy-to-use multifactor authentication to our cloud services and on-premises applications," said Bharat Shah, corporate vice president of Microsoft's server and tools division, in a statement. "In addition, PhoneFactor's solutions will help Microsoft customers, partners and developers enhance the security of almost any authentication scenario."

Founded in 2001, PhoneFactor provides a phone-based authentication platform and helps companies secure logins and transactions. Its multifactor authentication service involves sending a code to a user's mobile phone to verify a person attempting to log into an application or company VPN.

The company also has a biometric voice authentication product that requires users to speak a passphrase that matches their voiceprint.

According to the companies, PhoneFactor is already compatible with many Microsoft products and services, including Outlook Web Access and Internet Information Services, and integrates with Active Directory. In February of 2011, PhoneFactor announced that its multifactor authentication service had been integrated with Microsoft's HealthVault.

The Microsoft-PhoneFactor deal positions Microsoft to not only build mature multifactor authentication services into its products, but also to compete with authentication vendors like EMC Corp.'s RSA unit, Symantec Corp. and SafeNet Inc.

"We are thrilled to join Microsoft and look forward to bringing our secure, cost- effective and convenient authentication solutions to the millions of Microsoft customers, partners and developers around the world," said Timothy Sutton, CEO and co-founder of PhoneFactor, in a statement.

Terms of the deal were not made public.

Maybe The Bar Graph Fell Over

This cartoon was sort of a happy accident.

I was drawing another bar graph cartoon and my hand slipped a bit and one bar ended up much wider than the rest. For a second, I was irritated because I'd have to redraw that cartoon, but then it occurred to me that I now had a whole different take on this kind of cartoon.

Why was that one wider? What did it mean? Was it a mistake? Did the width add more weight?

You never know where ideas are going to come from, but turning a mistake into an opportunity has got to be one of the best.

Adobe revokes all code signed since 10th July

Adobe has announced that it has revoked the code signing certificate for all code signed after 10th July 2012 following the attack it announced last week.

The software company announced that it was in the process of issuing updates signed using a new digital certificate for all affected products.

Tanmay Ganacharya, lead security researcher at the Microsoft malware protection centre, said that it has been tracking this issue very closely and the telemetry shows that this issue is not prevalent and is being used in highly targeted attacks only.

In a statement, Adobe senior engineering director Brad Arkin, said that Adobe was hit by an attack that impacted its digital certificate code signing infrastructure and led to at least two malicious utilities being signed.

Arkin said that the certificate runs on the Windows platform and three Adobe Air applications that run on both Windows and Macintosh. It has revoked all software code signed after 10th July 2012 and has decommissioned the existing Adobe code signing infrastructure.

Veracode acquires mobile application scanning company

Vercaode has announced the acquisition of mobile malware detection company Marvin Mobile Security.

Veracode's executive vice president of corporate development Sam King told SC Magazine that this will allow the company to include mobile application capabilities to its services.

King said: “What our customers were asking for was a solution that could see what apps were doing as people downloaded them to conduct business, there was a concern about putting data at risk and what apps do.

“This is very much focused on application behaviour. What does an application do and what is it sending out and to where? With Marvin you take an app and within ten minutes it will give you a report on what it does and whether it is malicious or not.”

Veracode said that this sits comfortably with its mobile device management and mobile application management technologies.

Veracode CEO Bob Brennan said that companies are now reliant on third party applications that come into their business every day and they needed to be able to vet those apps.

He said: “This is software that they didn't write themselves so you want to understand it and what it does. We prevent the most common form of attack, by going through the open holes in applications and IT departments have not been able to plug those holes as they have not had the technology.”

Veracode said that its mobile offering satisfies both the security requirements of the mobile software development lifecycle and to reduce risks associated with the 'bring your own device' (BYOD) concept, allowing Veracode to help secure nearly everyone in the software supply chain.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition will mean that corporate app stores will be able to leverage Veracode for vetting mobile apps before accepting them.

Theodora Titonis, founder and CEO of Marvin Mobile Security, said: “We are thrilled to be joining Veracode. We believe their position as an application Security-as-a-Service leader, combined with Marvin's mobile app security service, will allow customers to safely embrace the BYOD trend.

“We share Veracode's passion for a more secure world, and through this acquisition we'll deliver the most innovative, comprehensive mobile app protection in the marketplace.”

ENISA organises European stress test against DDoS attacks

The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) organised a simulated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack yesterday afternoon involving more than 300 European cyber security professionals.

As part of the Cyber Europe 2012 exercise, organised by the Member States of the European Union and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries, the attack was designed to stress test capabilities and identify gaps and challenges on how large-scale cyber incidents could be handled more effectively in Europe.

It was also designed to test the effectiveness and scalability of existing mechanisms, procedures and information flow for public authorities' cooperation in Europe and explore the cooperation between public and private stakeholders in Europe.

The exercise was observed by four countries and 25 countries actively participated in the simulated ‘attack' on online services in all participating countries.

Paul Lawrence, VP of international operations at Corero Network Security, told SC Magazine that he did not yet have data or reports from Thursday afternoon's experiment, but said it was a chance to see "where the holes were".

He said: “This was a collective effort with members of the organisations working with a friendly botnet to strike the services of members and point them in the right direction. It was much more controlled than a standard attack as you can see where the traffic is coming from and see the levels of vulnerability.”

He pointed at the attack on Russia Today in August, which he said showed that it did not have the right level of protection to deal with a DDoS attack, and it most likely had a standard security architecture.

“They likely had a firewall and intrusion prevention system, but that is not enough to mitigate against a DDoS attack. This would have given organisations the ability to protect themselves and understand where the weaknesses are,” he said.

Google warns about state-sponsored attacks for second time this year

Google has issued a second warning to users of its Gmail service that state-sponsored attackers may be attempting to compromise their account or computer.

According to the New York Times, Google sent the message to users after it picked up thousands more instances of cyber attacks than it anticipated.

In its original warning, Google said that a subset of its users may be the target of state-sponsored attacks and its vice president of security engineering Eric Grosse said that it believed that it was its duty to be proactive in notifying users about attacks or potential attacks.

Mike Wiacek, a manager on Google's information security team, said on Tuesday that since Google started to alert users to state-sponsored attacks three months ago, it had gathered new intelligence about attack methods and the groups deploying them.

He said the company was using that information to warn ‘tens of thousands of new users' that they may have been targets. He also said that Google had seen an increase in state-sponsored activity coming from the Middle East. He declined to name particular countries, but said the activity was coming from ‘a slew of different countries' in the region.

Google was targeted by the Aurora attacks in January 2010 and recent research by Symantec found that the group behind those incidents was still active.

Only one critical patch among seven expected from Microsoft next week

Microsoft has announced that it is to release seven bulletins next Tuesday, including one critical fix for vulnerabilities in Microsoft Word.

According to a statement by Dustin Childs, group manager at Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, the other six bulletins are rated as important and will address issues in Windows, Microsoft Office and SQL Server. Also addressed in this release is the issue in FAST Search Server, first described in advisory 2737111.

Looking at the single critical issue, Marcus Carey, security researcher at Rapid7, said: “Bulletin one is a vulnerability in Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010, as well as Word Viewer and Microsoft Office Web Apps. This vulnerability required a victim to open up a malicious file or even preview a malicious file in Outlook Web Access.

“This vulnerability could result in the complete compromise of a system if exploited. Since this is an Office vulnerability this may affect both Windows and Macintosh users.

“It should be a relief to many that none of the bulletins requires immediate attention, as none of them address vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild; all were privately reported vulnerabilities. This means that there isn't any publicly known exploit code for this month's bulletin cycle.”

Andrew Storms, director of security operations for nCircle, said: “After a rocky September that included a rare zero-day bug in Internet Explorer, Microsoft will release seven bulletins next week. The bulletin that looks most serious is a rare Microsoft Word update tagged as critical for the brand new Word 2010, but downgraded to important in Word 2003.

“I can't remember the last time we saw a critical bug that affected all versions of Word.  It makes me remember the bad old days when Word was a nearly constant source of security problems for businesses.

In the ‘it's about time' category, Microsoft has confirmed they will release the patch for the bug in the FAST Search Server for SharePoint discussed back in July. Since many companies use SharePoint extensively, this is definitely welcome news.”

Paul Henry, security and forensic analyst for Lumension, said: “The lightness of last month's Patch Tuesday led many to say that this month would be a horrific Patch Tuesday for IT admins. With only seven bulletins and only one critical, those naysayers may want to retract those statements.

“The biggest issue for this month from Microsoft is the certificate encryption. As we've been saying for the last several Patch Tuesdays, Microsoft is pushing out a patch that will break any encryption that is less than 1024-bit. This patch has been optional since August and we hope you've taken the time to test it and patch it. It will no longer be an option starting on Tuesday. There are still a few days left if you haven't tested it, but don't let this be an ‘I told you so' moment.

“The only critical bulletin this month affects Microsoft Word. It's a rich text vulnerability for the .rtf file format. Normally, Word bulletins that affect remote code execution vulnerabilities are marked as important by Microsoft; this is primarily because there are a lot of stops for the bug before it can be executed.

“However this particular execution is marked critical because the preview pane in Microsoft Outlook can parse the RTF if it's embedded in a Word document, so there is a bit more of an execution capability with this vulnerability than normal. However, this exploit can be difficult to actually accomplish, making even this critical update less impactful.

“The other interesting patch this month is bulletin six. This one is a denial-of-service issue that affects Windows Authentication for DOS. If you're accepting Kerberos for Windows authentication, then you are vulnerable to this DOS.”

Franchises Cut Prices on Opportunities

Opportunities to start a new business or expand an existing business are always present. But in franchises particularly, costs to invest and get started are low. Does this mean that franchising represents the best opportunity for entrepreneurs these days? Not necessarily, say some experts. Here are some other tips you may want to remember no matter what type of business you are trying to start or grow.

Focus on Franchise

Let's make a deal. The real reason so many franchise chains are cutting prices is that there are too many chains competing for too few qualified applicants. The problem here is that lowering franchise costs can invite under capitalized owners into the system and cost the franchise long term, preventing investment in the brand. Forbes

Lower your risk. Fortunately, if you still decide franchising is for you, there are ways to lower your risks a bit. Franchise expert Joel Libava has recently spelled out 10 tips that can decrease your risk when investing in a franchise. Libava's approach involves some serious soul searching and a willingness to avoid the hype about what the best franchises might be, instead zeroing in on the best franchise for you. The Franchise King

A Broader Perspective

This is the end. No matter what kind of business you're pursuing, a franchise or another opportunity, blogger Tom Ewer has a sobering thought. However profitable your business may seem today, it may still be only one step away from ruin. Businesses that depend upon only one source of revenue or customer base face this threat every day. But there is a simple answer: diversification. MyWifeQuitHerJob

PR priority. If you think your business is too small to worry about PR, this guest post from Ryan Derousseau, Director of R.M.D. Media, argues there is no such thing. Fortunately, handling PR chores isn't so hard these days. What's needed is a well-developed online presence and an understanding of how to pitch your business content to the media with an effective strategy. The Frugal Entrepreneur

Marketing mechanics. Before your marketing campaign even get off the launch pad, there are a few things you'll need to check on to be sure your approach is all it can be. Copywriter Kelvin Cech gives this overview of three major steps your business should be taking before putting a content marketing plan in place. These steps will ensure you are creating a marketing campaign appropriate for your brand. Function Writing Group

A Positive Image

The bad blog. You may have heard from gurus and others trying to encourage every entrepreneur and small business owner to get started with this highly effective self-branding and communications tool, that there really is no wrong way to do a blog. But blogger Sian Phillips disagrees. In this overview, Phillips looks at the things that will seriously hurt your blogging efforts. CorpNet

Thinking of you. Many businesses think of their reputation too narrowly, says business coach Dave Brock. Buying experience and customer experience are both important, of course, but you should focus more attention on how your business is viewed in the community at large. In reality, customers look at everything we say and do, whether it happens to be part of the customer experience or not. So be sure the overall impression you create is a good one. Partners in Excellence