Seven Ways for Small Biz To Generate Revenue With Social Media RIGHT NOW | The Home Of Peter Shankman. SEVEN WAYS FOR SMALL BIZ TO GENERATE REVENUE WITH SOCIAL MEDIA RIGHT NOW2 years ago When I speak at conferences catering to small businesses, I usually show up an hour before the conference starts. I check in, but don’t pick up my own badge.
Instead, I scan the badges already spread out, and grab someone else’s – usually someone who runs a small business. I’ve been Jon Michelson, Tyrese McHale, and my personal favorite, Gordon Brown (not that one), all of whom own small businesses, and all of whom are looking for the magic bullet that will convince them that social media actually works for them – will actually make them money, will actually help them sell product, and isn’t the next BS thing they hear about every day on the radio, on TV, and through friends who haven’t a clue. Why is that important ? I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. Remember HARO? So let’s use it. Marketing in the form of social media, to drive sales and generate revenue, makes you skilled in social media.
Keepsy Taps Instagram For Fast, Easy, Awesome Photo Books. People love photo albums, but they hate making them. That’s what Blake Williams has come to realize in the months following Keepsy’s launch. You may recall back in December of last year, the startup launched as a way to create tangible photo albums with all of your friends using Facebook. It’s a good idea. But again, there’s a barrier to entry. So now Keepsy has a new product to alleviate that problem. “Instant Albums” hooks into your Instagram pictures via their API and in seconds build you a complete photo album.
Boom. Even untouched, the end result is pretty great. How do they determine your best Instagram photos? Of course, you can alter your books to add more photos, take some away, tweak/add the captions (Keepsy will auto pull-in your Instagram picture captions), rotate others, add in different backgrounds, etc. Once you have the album you like, you can share it digitally on Facebook, Twitter, etc. So why focus on Instagram for this new product?
Startup America Partnership Promotes Entrepreneurship. If you watched his Town Hall meeting last week on Facebook Live, you know that President Obama is supporting entrepreneurs and small businesses in a very big way with his Startup America campaign. We’ve pulled together some details about this major initiative that brings together a coalition of mentors, advisors, funders, large corporations, and service providers to deliver strategic and substantive resources to help entrepreneurs’ companies, from idea to startup to ramp-up to speed-up. What is the Startup America Partnership? Startup America is a White House initiative to celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship throughout the nation. This coordinated public/private effort brings together an alliance of America’s most innovative entrepreneurs, corporations, universities, foundations, and other leaders, working in concert with a wide range of federal agencies to dramatically increase the prevalence and success of America’s entrepreneurs.
Who else is supporting it? Politics in Social Media Roundup: Obama's Online Town Hall, Facebook Lobbyists, Viral Video. There's still an entire year and seven months until the U.S. presidential election on November 6, 2012, but social media has already played a huge role in the burgeoning race. Before this week, Mitt Romney had already announced his bid on YouTube and Tim Pawlenty had already joined the race through his Facebook page.
President Obama also kicked off his reelection campaign with a number of digital initiatives. Below, we've picked out some of the top announcements and news from the past week or so to keep you in the know, something we'll be doing weekly on Mashable. President Obama Visits Facebook Barack Obama stopped by Facebook HQ for a town hall meeting with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. They asked questions about the economy, funding innovation and the future of technology and fielded questions from the live audience in attendance and over the web. Facebook Lobbying Keeps Growing Facebook has been ramping up its lobbying on tech-related issues, Politico reported. Stop Dating Strangers: LinkedIn Meets OkCupid. The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.
If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Clique Quick Pitch: Clique is a private dating site. Genius Idea: Using friends' social networks to filter date prospects. When the dating world plugged into the Internet, it largely catered to the classified-style dating that preceded it. Match.com, OkCupid, and eHarmony all facilitate meetings between strangers who might like each other. Clique, which launched on Valentine's Day, wants to make that method its niche.
Filtering online dating this way improves the experience, says co-founder and CEO Christy Purington. "People spend hours and hours looking for people with similar interests on dating sites," she says. It also makes online dating a bit less creepy. Doing so could be one potential revenue stream. Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark. How Twitter Can Save $50 Million: Forget TweetDeck, And Go Freemium On Its API. Editor’s note: In this guest post, serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack gives Twitter some suggestions for how to make money. Spivack’s latest startup, Bottlenose, is looking at new ways to mine the Tweet stream. I’ve been puzzling over Twitter’s recent tactical moves around their API, Ubermedia and Tweetdeck, for a few months now, and it just doesn’t add up.
In fact I think Twitter’s current strategy may take them in a direction where they end up missing out on their biggest potential win. If Twitter continues to go down the media company path, without incorporating their API into the plan, that could not only force a large part of their ecosystem to go elsewhere, but it could deprive them of a much larger potential infrastructure revenue opportunity, and could even end up costing them the company. In light of this, I’ve been exploring an alternate path for Twitter that leverages their API in a much bigger way, and this path appears to be a better strategy. ProtectYourVision Helps You Take Screen Breaks to Avoid Eye Strain. StartupL.ist launches, for entrepreneurs and early adopters.
For the past few months, I’ve been following the work of three entrepreneurs Eric Ingram, his wife Melissa Ingram and Nick Frost on the Twitters. Today, they launched The StartupLi.st, essentially a mini social network of startups and early adopters, whether they are investors, bloggers, designers, programmers or other entrepreneurs. In the first few hours of its launch, they’ve added over 30 startups.
StartupLi.st’s main goal is to encourage the discovery of startups by early adopter types. The StartupLi.st home page features one startup per day, chosen by an activity algorithm based on the number of follows, visits and recommendations of that startup. To sign up, startups have to be submitted by founders or managers with access to an an email matching the site’s domain. Using the Steve Blank definition, they define a startup as “a temporary organization in search of a repeatable business model.”
But the real value of StartupLi.st isn’t present yet. Fashion Technology. Rapportive Connects Gmail Inbox & Address Book. Gmail and Google Contacts users no longer need to exit an email message to look up the sender's contact information. Gmail add-on and social intelligence startup Rapportive has an update that connects a user's Gmail inbox to his or her Google address book. Rapportive, the Y Combinator startup that uses the right-hand side of email messages to display the sender's social profiles, Facebook updates, LinkedIn info and the like, can now grab relevant contact details from Google Contacts and display them alongside each email message.
"Any photos, phone numbers and occupations in your Google Contacts will be seamlessly integrated into your Rapportive sidebar," Rapportive CEO Rahul Vohra writes of the integration. To use the new features, users can select the "Connect my networks" option from the Rapportive drop-down at the top of their inbox and then click "Sign in with Google" to make the connection between Google Contacts and Rapportive.
Set Up an Automated, Bulletproof File Back Up Solution. How Groupon Uses the Cloud to Scale its Business. The Scaling Startups Series is supported by Brother International. Brother’s Inkjet All-in-One printers are loaded with powerful business features, including 11"x17” duplex printing and scan glass. Tell us how 11”x17” capabilities will help you achieve your bigger picture for a chance to win a $10,000 business grant. Visit www.shareyourbiggerpicture.com! Since launching in late 2008, deal-of-the-day website Groupon has emerged as one of the hottest web startups on the planet. Serving more than 250 markets worldwide and boasting more than 35 million users, Groupon is the poster child for a rapidly growing company. We spoke with Ryan Miller and Chris Bland from Groupon about how the company has managed to scale its business so quickly and with such agility.
Growing With the Cloud One of the reasons Groupon has continued to succeed and expand over the past two and a half years is because the company has managed to keep the pace with its business. Anatomy of a Deal Workflow. Spring Cleaning - Gadgets You Can Get Rid Of. And so we no longer need to accumulate products. If anything, we can cut down. The question is, Which can be replaced and which are fine, or even preferable, to keep? It is plain as day that paper maps and Rolodexes have given way to their digital counterparts. But what else can you get rid of? Here is a list of common consumer technologies and products and a somewhat opinionated judgment on whether to keep or pitch it.
DESKTOP COMPUTER Lose it. HIGH-SPEED INTERNET AT HOME Keep it. CABLE TV Depends. POINT-AND-SHOOT CAMERA Lose it. CAMCORDER Lose it. USB THUMB DRIVE Lose it. DIGITAL MUSIC PLAYER Lose it (probably). ALARM CLOCK Keep it. GPS UNIT Lose it. If you have an , you have several options for GPS apps, including Navigon’s MobileNavigator (which starts at $30) and ALK’s CoPilot Live ($20). BOOKS Keep them (with one exception). But there is one area where printed matter is going to give way to digital content: cookbooks. Complicated procedures can be explained by an embedded video. How to Automatically Download TV Shows as Soon as They've Aired (or Turn Your PC into a TiVo)
What's in Your Taskbar/Dock? 5 free ways to back up your Gmail online and offline. Here at TNW, we are huge Gmail fans for several reasons– it’s fast, it offers a generous amount of storage, and it’s free. As amazing as cloud technology is, it is still prone to hacks and crashes, you just never know. That’s why we can’t stress enough why it is absolutely important to back up your mail and attachments in Gmail and in this article, we’ll be sharing 5 quick, easy and handy ways how to do it both online and offline. How to back up your Gmail offline 1. POP3 to a Mail Client. There are a lot of free email clients available for Macs and PCs like Mozilla Thunderbird, Mac Mail, and Windows Live Mail.
Sign in to Gmail.Click Settings at the top of any Gmail page, and open the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.Select Enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded).Click Save Changes.Open the mail client you’ve configured for Gmail, and check for new messages. IMAP is great for managing email in multiple devices but for this one, you’re going to want to go with POP. 2. Upcoming Tech & Media Events YOU should be attending [DISCOUNTS] Time for an update! The first month of 2011 has passed and now it’s time to take a look what the year ahead brings us. We’ve listed lots of new upcoming tech & media events for you, so make sure you clear your schedule. And of course, as you’ve hopefully become accustomed to, we’ve arranged special discounts for our devoted TNW readers.
So do make sure you check TNW Events before buying your tickets in future. For newcomers: This list is, created by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, and is laser-focused on tech & media events. This post is supported by PressDoc for Events The Digital Entrepreneur & Music: demystifying rights and licensing, February 11, London This half day event has been created specifically for startup companies who use music in their businesses and need to understand all aspects of commercially licensing digital rights. TNW readers get a discount of £10 by using the code “….” here Family 2.0, February 17, London Get special Mashupevent price tickets here Design. Dating Sites For -- and By -- Entrepreneurs. Business owners find a market niche in their unique relationship dilemma.
For single entrepreneurs, the dating game offers unique challenges. The long hours, obsession with work and unpredictable lifestyle are all factors that can interfere with a single date, not to mention the delicate process of building a relationship. Some entrepreneurs are tackling these dating challenges in the same way they handle their business: once you see a need in the marketplace, you find a way to fill it. Of course, dating sites like Match.com and eHarmony.com are well known, but here are the stories of two love-seeking sites created by entrepreneurs exclusively for entrepreneurs -- with some pretty impressive results. EntrepreneurDate.com Benji Kurtz of EntrepreneurDate.com. Photo Courtesy of EntrepreneurDate.com Today there are 160,000 members on EntrepreneurDate.com (not to be confused with EntrepreneurDating.com, a newer site with about a 1,000 members whose owner declined to be interviewed).
10 Fascinating Facts About E-mail. Love it or hate it, there's no debating just how much e-mail has changed the way we communicate. Since the 1990s, electronic mail has eclipsed snail mail and the fax to become the standard in the business world, and although social media sites are edging in on personal online messaging, e-mail still holds strong in that arena. You may use it everyday, but how much do you know about e-mail? Do you know who sent the first message? What the biggest webmail provider is in the U.S.? What about the most common Hotmail password? We've found 10 fascinating facts about electronic mail. 1. Ray Tomlinson is credited as being the first person to hit send on a network e-mail message. Tomlinson had not been specifically tasked to develop e-mail, but he was working out some useful applications for MIT's ARPANET project (which later evolved into the Internet). Sent between two side-by-side computers, the first message was a small step for e-communications, but an important one. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
8 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Get More Out of Twitter. Scott Gerber is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, public speaker and author of Never Get a "Real" Job: How to Dump Your Boss, Build a Business and Not Go Broke. The content for this post was sourced from the Young Entrepreneur Council, a group of successful Gen Y business owners. You can submit your questions to this group on NeverGetaRealJob.com. To tweet or not to tweet. That is the question on many business owners' minds. For some, Twitter has proven to be a powerful way to engage customers and build a community. For others, tweeting has been nothing but a useless time suck. In order to teach business owners how to benefit from this tool, I asked a panel of successful young entrepreneurs how their entrepreneurial brethren can utilize Twitter to their advantage rather than to their dismay. 1.
Twitter is an amazing tool to market and really interact with fans and customers. . - Ashley Bodi Company URL: Business Beware Twitter: @businessbeware 2. . - Ryan Paugh Company URL: www.ryanpaugh.com. The State of the Internet: Summing Up 2010 - The Social Media Guide. Skype to embark on a 350 person hiring binge in 2011. Should You Really Be A Startup Entrepreneur? Mixtent founder on the launch of his social recruitment and ranking startup. Why staying put may be your best career move. London city workers to get free 15 minute daily access to The Cloud Wi-Fi network. The White House pushes entrepreneurship with help from Facebook, Intel and more.
Business Editor Robert Guest answers your questions on Twitter: Live on Twitter: Who are the global elite? San Francisco Social Media Week / Blog. European startup accelerators join US entrepreneurship drive. The Need for A Centralized Social Media Control Station | Smedio | The New Media and Social Web Guide for Business and Marketers. Where Does Google Chrome Store User History, Profile & Bookmarks? » Ellis Web.
2011 - The Year Social Media Bubble Will Eventually Burst | Smedio | The New Media and Social Web Guide for Business and Marketers. Startup Graphic.ly Raises $3M for "Bonus Features" for Comic Books. How A Startup Named Hipster Got 10K Signups In Two Days, Without Revealing What It Does. 2010: the year in internet stats. Are We Headed for Another Dot-Com Crash? [POLL] Salesforce and Softbank Group invest $4 Million in Seesmic. Social Media Week / Event Spotlight (SMW HK): Bloggers Series, With A Focus On: Fashion –win a facial or two!