Welcome to the new Tim Yang’s Geek Blog

Particletree has an article on small business blogging making arguments for it. The article brings up the point that small businesses think that blogging is too time consuming. But I think they’d change their minds if they knew of the interesting and wide range of things they could blog about. For most people, blogging is synonymous with ranting and political monologues. Having a list of small-business-related topics (and examples of their execution) could fire up the imagination of small businesses and their motivation to blog. The Particletree article lists a few:

1. Issues the company itself is dealing with
2. New product ideas
3. Marketing ideas
4. Small business issues
5. Practical tips
6. References and links to other articles

But a blog is an interactive channel. So to this list I would add a few feedback ideas, thought sharing ideas and more. A blog is also not just a marketing channel, but also a channel to assert your expertise, a public relations channel and a relationship/trust building channel. So I could add a few more ideas to the list:

1. Letters from readers/customers
2. Solicitations for feedback on product issues
3. Solicitations for feedback on marketing issues (RevenueRoundtable)
4. Consumer/Customer meetups
5. Reviews of related books/websites/articles (RevenueRoundtable)
6. Industry/ethics issues (RevenueRoundtable)
7. Social issues (SkyeCreative)
8. Consumer issues (RevenueRoundtable)
9. New products (DenaliFlavors)
10. New press coverage (DenaliFlavors)
11. Announcements of new clients
12. Announcements of new locations/outlets
13. Announcements of new employees
14. Announcements of new partners or suppliers (SkyeCreative)
15. Conferences and other upcoming events that business representatives will attend
16. Customer/Service policy changes or new policy issues
17. Case studies

Sorry I didn’t have time to find examples of all of the list. I’ll add more, but please feel free to suggest some. Links via PowerBlog Review.

Technorati Tags: Business Marketing Blogging

Yesterday I touched on the topic of studying a company to make it inscrutable. That’s just one of the reasons I always conduct secondary research (research through the internet and other publications) on all my clients. What I look out for is brand impressions — anything that people think is important enough about a company, its products or its employees to mention. Some of the other reasons include:

1. Understanding their marketing history and promotion efforts — because their target audience might remember what messages they sent out before
2. Finding out what other people make of the company, the people who work in it and their products
3. Finding out who are the stakeholders — people who have interest in the company or its products — and why they have an interest in them

I have a basic checklist of things I do when I conduct secondary research. For dotcoms, I only do internet research and never bother with paper publications, although I do always ask clients if anyone has written anything about them. You might find this checklist of sites useful since I’m not the only one who uses these techniques. I run all the searches for the company’s name, its website, the brand names for its products and the main people behind the company and the people in the development team. (Incidentally, I also run the same searches for each one of the client’s most prominent competitors.)

1. Google.com — I only scan up to 200 entries unless a lot as been written about the company.
2. Bloglines.com and Technorati.com — I look out for references in user blogs as well as industry blogs and employee blogs. Regarding employee blogs, I’m not really interested in them except for getting their impressions of the products and the company they work for and how popular their blogs are.
3. Findarticles.com — I scan for references in the more popular web versions of industry publications.
4. Whois.sc — I look up whose name is on the domain registration. Sometimes its important to make it anonymous but have the contact details correct.
5. Urltrends.com — I check the number of incoming links and website prominence to compare with their competitors.

I don’t build a dossier on everything or on everyone. But I do make notes. It’s not important for me to bring up everything I find. Sometimes they just aren’t relevant to my branding objectives. But I do need to know who is thinking what so that I can segment the market accurately into primary audiences and secondary audiences — groups of people to whom I need to allocate my branding budget. Everything is really all about the money and how I spend it. But that’s a topic for another day.

Technorati Tags: Brand Research Business

The ideal dotcom startup team seems to be CEO, CTO and COO or CFO. Now it’s all well and good to be product and business focused, but who’s looking out for the people who can make or break a business — the users and the public stakeholders? A CEO’s function is to provide strategic vision, a CTO’s to manage the development of the product and internal technologies, a COO or CFO is to look after revenue and expenditures. All these are full-time jobs with weighty responsibilities. Just as weighty as it is the CCO’s (Chief Communications Officer) job which is to manage the outgoing as well as incoming communications of the company as well as looking after its brands. Yet most dotcom startups completely sideline this essential function.

I had drinks with the joint CEOs of Mindvalley.com last night. Both very bright and clued-in guys who have great ideas for web services and products. They both have great vision and are very experienced at producing winning products and partnerships. And while they do know what their consumers want and how to deliver the goods, neither of them has marketing communications expertise and neither does anyone on their development team. Even while their products are in development, buzz still needs to be managed as first time users try out their beta products and talk about them. And someone needs to create marketing communications plans and execute them. Currently, they’re both handling these functions themselves but chinks are starting to appear. There’s not one but two faux Wikipedia pages to promote their products; glaring spelling errors in their marketing materials; use of a free blog host (Blogspot) for their company blog; and at least one instance of evoking the cliched Google’s Law. None of which set very good impressions on the techie crowd — the quintessential first-adopters. I’m not trying to be picky, but a startup that wants to engage the larger community has to first be inscrutably “Slashdot-ready” (and those guys do way a lot more researching).
(Click here to read the rest on the article page…)

Technorati Tags: Startups Business Marketing

Here’s a very good discussion on Slashdot that revolves around business reasons for a company to GPL their code. Some of those include:

1. Other people can fix your bugs and security holes for you
2. No need to pay for beta testers
3. Free development of new features, some of which you might not otherwise have thought of yourselves if you can get a development community started.
4. Free positive P.R. for your company, especially if things really take off.
5. Free advertising for your company as well if you brand the package with your company logo and colours by default.

The issues that came from this thread ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=159218&cid=13334726 are especially insightful.

Technorati Tags: open source Business