Invisible Businesses, Divided Healthcare Dollars and More

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It’s time for another edition of our community news and information roundup.

We’ve searched far and wide through the online small business community for interesting content to help your business this week. We hope you’ll take the time to check out all these helpful stories, and read below how you can help us make the next community roundup even better.

Let’s get started!

It Doesn’t Matter How Great Your Product Is (Sport Techie)

Whether it’s a local coffee shop or a major sports league, if you aren’t letting customers know you exist, it doesn’t matter. Why does the National Hockey Association live in the shadow of the National Football Association, Major League Baseball and even college football? Blame it on the media.

Your Healthcare Spending is in Shreds (Healthcare Trends Institute)

Seriously, if you’re wondering where your healthcare dollars are going, these folks have broken it down for you. You may be surprised about the largest and smallest costs. Take a look at the numbers.

Here’s What All Suppliers Know (Zazma)

Satisfying your existing customers and converting new prospects into happy return customers is the key to a suppliers success. This means choosing credible customers and getting to know their needs well. Sound familiar? It should be what you’re doing, too.

Cyber Security Still Vital (Greater Stamford Hispanic Chamber of Commerce)

We’ve heard repeatedly about the dangers of cyber crime and hacking. Thinking your business is too small to be a target could be a tragic error. Here are nine cyber security tips to consider.

Grow Your Freelance Business (The Freelance Strategist)

Do you provide your skills as a freelancer or an independent contractor? It may be tempting to think of your efforts on a job by job basis. It’s wiser to see it for what it is…a small business. Here’s how.

Understand the Power of the Cloud (Milwaukee Community Journal)

Believe it or not, there are some small businesses that haven’t realized the independence that comes with leaving local servers behind. The cloud offers the opportunity to work from anywhere. Here are some reasons to think about making a change.

How to Choose the Best Website Template (ReginaldChan.net)

There could be many reasons your small business website is failing to meet your business goals. One that’s easy to overlook is the kind of template you’ve chosen. Reginald Chan elaborates in the BizSugar community.

Technology Makes All the Difference (Programmable Web)

You don’t need to be a software engineer or a Web developer these days to realize the incredible value of technology to your business. Here Wendel Santos describes case studies that have allowed companies of all kinds to revolutionize their business models.

Try to Inspire Someone Today (That Naija Blog)

It’s a thrill to find that you’ve inspired someone, whether a client a customer or someone else in your community. That’s why it was so nice to see this post recently inspired by a comment in the BizSugar community. Take time to inspire someone today!

Don’t forget. You can help us improve the community roundups. Just share the latest news, tools or sites you think would help members of the small business community.

Email us at sbtips@gmail.com or share the story via the BizSugar community. We’ll consider it for a future post.

Thanks for reading!

Reading Photo via Shutterstock

Viral Marketing Campaign Spooks Coffee Shop Patrons

A viral marketing campaign for the remake of the horror movie Carrie sent visitors at a Manhattan coffee shop scrambling for the door. Images below depict the event. But it was all in good fun.

Unsuspecting customers at ‘Snice coffee shop were sitting at tables or lining up to make their purchases. Suddenly a couple of hired actors got into a rehearsed argument resulting in what appears to be a telekinetic fit.

The elaborate prank involved stuntmen, fake walls and furniture rigged with remote controls. You can view the prank in its entirety in the video above.

NYC based marketing firm Thinkmodo was the brains behind the spooky campaign. You might wonder what scaring coffee shop customers has to do with promoting a movie. But it definitely grabbed people’s attention. The video received more than 43,000,000 views on YouTube in two weeks.

And this isn’t the first time Thinkmodo has used unusual tactics to promote a project.

Thinkmodo applied a similar approach when promoting The Last Exorcism 2 inside a beauty shop in February for CBS Films.

In July 2012, AMC enlisted Thinkmodo to bring attention to the fact that it was being dropped from Dish Network. So Thinkmodo dressed people up like zombies from AMC’s The Walking Dead series and had them run around New York City.

The prank resulted in a lot of New Yorkers running away screaming, but also more than 24,000,000 views on YouTube.

It’s not just the producers of scary movies and TV shows that have turned to Thinkmodo for creative viral campaigns.

Popcorn Indiana is a retailer of popcorn and other healthy snacks. But when the company had the idea to change the way people actually eat popcorn, they turned to Thinkmodo.

The company and ad agency thought up a device that launches popcorn directly at a person’s mouth when they say “pop.” Then they created a viral campaign for the product, dubbed The Popinator.

So how do these kinds of campaigns actually help a product or brand?

In the case of the Carrie prank, the video reached a wide audience and drew attention to the movie’s release. So the video not only promoted the movie to audiences who might have otherwise been unaware. It also created a sample of the kind of entertainment audiences might expect from the movie itself.

In the case of Popcorn Indiana, you won’t find The Popinator for sale on the company’s website. But, people who may have never even heard of Popcorn Indiana could see the video and visit the company’s site to learn more about the products they do sell.

In all of the above cases, Thinkmodo utilizes a unique approach that surprises audiences and grabs their attention. If a little additional news coverage results, so much the better! Thinkmodo’s website boasts:

Our unique strategy generates tremendous online engagement and valuable earned media coverage worldwide.

The NYC based company was founded in 2011 by James Percelay and Michael Krivicka, both writers and filmmakers who’s clients now include companies ranging from Sony Pictures to Cosmopolitan.

How is your marketing campaign grabbing customers’ attention?

[Images: AdsOfTheWorld]

The Power of Being Unpopular

What emotion pops up in your head? Is it a brave assuredness or a fear of being alone in following your passion?

If the feeling is the latter, you may want to read The Power of Unpopular: A Guide for Building Your Brand For The Audience Who Will Love You by Erika Napoletano (@RedheadWriting) as business passion’s key to freedom.

If you have seen Erika’s TED talk, a 2012 TED editors pick, then you know reading this book opens you to the insights of a brash, fiery media strategist who peppers her insights with a few choice NSFW (not safe for work) words.

In the book’s introduction, Napoletano notes an encounter with an airline passenger who says her power point had  “salty language.”  But Napoletano uses her NSFW attitude to embolden listeners to act on the key points given and to just get real.

Based in Colorado, Napoletano is the founder of RHW Media and is a contributor to American Express OPEN Forum and Entrepreneur magazine. I was impressed as I listened to her during an Entrepreneur Magazine panel this summer - impressed enough to ask for a review copy from Wiley.

How a Brand is Built to Last

The Power of Unpopular highlights the transformation of passion to a meaningful brand - knowing who you are and developing the reason why someone would care.  Napoletano shares an explanation of why “building a brand is a ton of work” in an engaging mix of facts and realness.

Napoletano argues against popularity in business, noting that the best brands strike a counter-emotion for some people - think Coke vs Pepsi or Yankees vs. Red Sox, she says. The ideas is that taking a branding position provides your business a means to attract target customers around a specific premise:

The builders of unpopular brands are looking to make new inroads. They take the current standards, break them apart and reshape them into something that fits people who have been left behind or left wanting more.

The idea recalls the book Rework but with a bit more gravitas and detail like The Mesh.  The gravitas and detail arrives in the form of the 5 essential ingredients to “unpopularity”:

• Personality
• Approachability
• Sharability
• Scalability
• Profitability

Unpopularity also comes with a list, as in identifying who would not do business with you:

Napoletano explains the value for the exercise:

The reality is - and everyone who has built a business that’s stood the test of time has had this epiphany - the audience you think you serve and the audience who actually wants what you have can be very different creatures. By identifying upfront the audiences who are a tough sell, you free yourself up to spend time researching and talking to the audiences who remain after you’ve crossed these unlikelies off the list.

Napoletano also provides a list for audience identification, and 4 steps for “being approachable” (being unpopular does not mean being an “a**hole” - she even names the book The No Asshole Rule by Robert Sutton).  The chapters also address other brand factors such as pricing your services, seeking advice from an analyst to refine branding aspects clearly, and scaling your business through building a team.

Notably she selects examples that reflect digital media popular with marketers, such as this warning about potentially commoditizing your brand through daily deal sites:

Given that daily deals sites take on average 50 percent of the deal value, and generally offer deals up to 50 percent off at retail brands can be left with as little as 25 percent of fair market value for their product or service. If you are considering using a daily deal promotion, make sure not only that you have the pricing structure in place to withstand the cost compromise, but that one in five chance of obtaining a repeat customer is worth the expense.

Rather than trotting out well-known startup successes such as Southwest and Zappos, Napoletano provides cases based on successful small businesses such as Marination, a Seattle-based food truck service and Mrs. G, a New Jersey TV and Appliance store. These selections are effective, particularly as a point about knowing your audience - in this case small businesses and startups who are still building out.

It’s these details that makes The Power of Unpopular a must recommend. The text may be plain English but the tips have the business-sound cojones to impact strategic and tactical decisions.  Despite the bluster that Napoletano shows periodically on text, her sensibilities are a wise and much-need statement on cutting the BS from business language.

Napoletano has found the right formula for business owners to balance being personable while developing the right operations in a business.   If you liked No You Can’t Pick My Brain, you’ll be fine with this book.

Overall The Power of Unpopular is an impressive book that you’ll appreciate it when you’ve finished reading it. It’s recommended for founders of start-ups and scaling small businesses that seek long-lasting branding success in any language.