28 Insights on Business and Marketing by Warren Buffet

I’ve been a consultant or owned a business for almost over 30 years. When you’ve been in business or worked with as many business owners/entrepreneurs as I have you start to see trends. I thought I’d try to capture some thoughts I’ve learned so far in this journey. What follows has no order or sequence it’s just general truisms I’ve discovered working with some amazing people throughout the years…

1. There are things in your business you should be doing, and you know you should be doing but you put them off last. Do these first.
2. More unproductive time is spent doing the things you should outsource. Find opportunities to outsource things you really shouldn’t be doing and if you can’t outsource then find ways to put these into a system where you are more proficient.
3. Marketing hasn’t changed all that much, only the tools and the way you communicate with your target market has. Learn the foundations of marketing, branding, and positioning.
4. Start the day with the most important thing you need to do and end the day with asking what you accomplished. If those 2 things don’t match up make a change immediately.
5. The phone is still one of the best networking tools on the planet and beats social media hands down.
6. Follow up and consistency are the cornerstone of a strong and growing business.
7. Your target market is more educated on your product, service, or idea than they have ever been. This gives you an opportunity to really solve solutions; the challenge is solving the right solutions.
8. People make decisions both emotionally and logically. If these are out of sync in your offering or process people will run for the hills. Your offers have to make emotional and logical sense.
9. People have made up their mind before they talk to you. It’s your job to help them come to the conclusion that you, your product, or idea is what they have been seeking.
10. Rely on experts. It is said that you don’t know what you don’t know. Don’t allow this to happen in your business. Find the things that are critical to know to give you a competitive advantage and work with experts to help you understand how to capitalize on these things.
11. Instill a dedication to being the best for yourself and your team. This will take you farther than any marketing strategy.
12. Test your reasoning and thoughts. Design tests in your business and marketing so that you can prove yourself right or wrong. Then iterate these.
13. All businesses need systems, what are yours and have you developed them.
14. Understand your markets buying signals and buying timeframe. In certain markets there are trigger events that cause your market to be aware of a problem or seek a solution. The birth of a child is a good trigger event that spurs a whole host of purchase decisions. What is your target market buying signals, timeframe, and trigger events?
15. Attention is becoming one of the scarcest resources. If you get someone’s attentionrespect it and give them what they want or seek.
16. If you’re just getting started or rebooting, start with your big idea, a strong website, and find unique ways to reach people who want what you have. Spend zero amount of time in social media until you have this figured out.
17. You have hidden revenue in your business; the trick is finding where it’s at with as little amount of effort as possible.
18. Act. More people fail by not acting than they do by getting their idea in motion. When you act you get feedback, when you get feedback you improve, and when you improve you ultimately get to something that works in the marketplace.
19. Trust yourself. You know deep down inside that your idea will work now prove the world wrong.
20. Quantity rarely trumps quality. This is even truer when you look at the amount of effort and time you put into your business. Make sure it’s quality and not quantity that you are measuring.
21. No clear metrics. Write down and track the key metrics that drive your sales, prospecting, and efficiency of your business.
22. Focus on what you can control and let go of the things you cannot. Or better yet find ways to flip the things you can’t control in your mind in a way that you can control them within yourself.
23. Learn to look at a situation in 3 ways, your way, their way, and as an observer looking at both.
24. Most sales can be defined by a straight line, and this straight line happens even before you talk to your prospect. The better you get at managing that line the more sales and business you will create.
25. Seek a yes or no, if it’s a maybe you should run. A yes or no is a decision, maybe will always have lingering questions.
26. Your success is your own. No one cares more about your success than you. Don’t rely on someone else to be your driver in success.
27. Find a way to banish need from your negotiations. The other side can sense this. Even if you do need that deal or that project operating from this mindset will make it harder to close.
28. Know your why.

7 Restaurant Rating Sites, other than zomato for Owners to Monitor

As such, it is in the restaurateur’s best interest to find out what’s on patrons’ minds in terms of their experience with the establishment.

Here are seven restaurant-related rating-and-review sites that can help.

1. Urbanspoon

One of the more popular review sites devoted exclusively to the dining industry, Urbanspoon allows customers to add places they frequent to its directory.

Restaurant owners and managers can claim their listing by clicking the “Is this your restaurant?” button located in the top-right of the page.

Restaurants can also add their listing, in the event it is not in the directory. Urbanspoon will call to confirm the authenticity of the listing and reviews all new listings prior to adding them to the site.

Urbanspoon limits restaurants to updating their business information, responding to user reviews either publicly or privately, and seeing voting trends for their business. Owners cannot edit or remove reviews, but can contact Urbanspoon for those that violate its guidelines and request removal.

2. OpenTable

Designed as a site that allows customers to make reservations online, OpenTable includes customer reviews and ratings.

For online reservations, OpenTable charges restaurants monthly and per-reservation fees for their use of the system. Restaurants must sign up to the service to gain inclusion in the directory.

Subscribing restaurants get access to a management portal where they can customize floor plans, assign tables, and get information about their customers to provide more personalized service.

Although owners are not allowed to respond to customer reviews publicly, all reviews are accompanied by a “Contact Author” link that restaurateurs can use to contact the reviewer directly via a private message.

In addition, the site offers both paid and free promotional tools for use by restaurants.

3. Restaurantica

Like Urbanspoon, Restaurantica — owned by Yellow Pages Group Co. in Canada — allows patrons to add listings, which restaurant owners can then claim. Doing so enables them to edit their information and interact with the site’s members.

Restaurants can add up to three cuisines, list hours of operation, the price range, accept reservations, add photos, and link to their website.

The messaging system enables owners and managers to comment on reviews and interact with customers before or after a visit, as well as offer incentives to entice customers to return. Advertising options are also available.

4. Dine.com

Started in 1994, Dine.com is one of the oldest restaurant rating-and-review sites on the list. It offers personalized recommendations to members based on their food preferences and, like the others, contains member ratings and reviews.

Owners who claim their listing can get a custom URL for the restaurant, create photo albums, add a detailed description, and create their menu online. In addition, they can post messages and get feedback directly from customers.

One drawback to Dine.com is that it does not have a verification procedure such as phone or direct mail that ensures the authenticity of the claimed listing. Anyone can claim to be the owner, and the only authentication comes in the form of an email with a confirmation link.

5. MenuPages

Limited to a handful of cities — New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles among them — MenuPages enables consumers to download restaurant menus or view them online.

Like the others, it allows users to rate and review restaurants. But there appears to be no way for owners to respond. Owners can, however, list or update menus and advertise on the site.

6. Zagat

Founded in 1979, Zagat predates the commercial Internet. Initially, its founders, Tim and Nina Zagat, husband and wife, produced printed guidebooks that consumers could purchase. That is still the case.

Since going online, Zagat is one of the most well-known and trusted restaurant rating-and-review sites. It curates the best restaurants in 18 major cities worldwide.

Acquired by Google in 2011, Zagat integrates into Google+ Local. Restaurant owners must use Google My Business to claim their listing. Doing so enables them to update their business information, including address, cuisine, hours of operation, phone number, and website.

Zagat uses a partner site, SinglePlatform, for all menus. Business owners can send an email requesting that their menu be added or updated.

To determine ratings, Zagat uses a survey process that begins with local editors who create a list of notable restaurants within a city. Once added, patrons can vote on the places they visit.

Customers are asked to rate establishments based on attributes such as food, decor, and service. Ratings are then averaged and presented on a proprietary 30-point scale.

7. Gayot

Named after the French food critic, André Gayot, who coined the term “Nouvelle Cuisine” in the 1970s, Gayot is a professional guide to dining, hotels, travel, and lifestyle. It contains ratings and reviews of local restaurants written by professional food critics and restaurant patrons.

Gayot evaluates restaurants on a particular rating system based on a 20-point scale and includes comments about décor, service, ambience, and wine.

Restaurant owners do not have the ability to claim their restaurant listings. However, they can advertise on the site to gain more attention.

Top 20 social media monitoring vendors for business

The online landscape is saturated with more than 200 tools and platforms claiming to be able to help you track and assess mentions of your business or brand in social media channels. While there remains a lot of churn in the field, a number of listening platforms have evolved to help you go beyond basic monitoring into an integrated approach that helps inform multiple parts of your business: product development, customer support, public outreach, lead generation, market research and campaign measurement.

Born as a way to respond to crises and manage brand reputation, social media monitoring, or brand monitoring — which ties into social media measurement and analysis — is finally maturing into a business process that helps the bottom line.

A comparison of pricing, features & clients you rarely see on the open Web.Today we’ll turn the tables on these companies and offer some business intelligence that you rarely see available on the open Web: a comparison of social media monitoring vendors, with descriptions of their strengths, clients and pricing. Many offer end-to-end solutions, providing not just tracking capabilities but a rich set of analytics and response tools to help you grow your business and engage with individuals who influence broad swaths of the market.

Social media monitoring vendors come in all shapes and flavors. Some cater to small business with modest budgets that want to handle monitoring analysis internally. Others service global corporations that want access to expert analysts as well as a robust suite of social tools that plug into business processes. So this roundup is admittedly mixing apples and oranges. (See our discussion of social CRM below.)

To draw some distinctions, we’ve broken this package into two groupings:

• 20+ social media monitoring & engagement vendors for business (below)
• 10 lower-priced monitoring services for nonprofits & organizations (on our sister site, Sociabrite.org)

Monitoring should plug into your business processes

Companies that will succeed in the 21st century will be social businesses, committed to forging deep and meaningful relationships with their customers. So use the new year as a fresh impetus to create a Social Media Plan (Socialmedia.biz can help with that), begin monitoring and consider evaluating an outside vendor by signing up for a free trial.

Keep in mind: Listening to conversations and gathering data is only one phase of a multi-step process that also involves engagement, metrics and acting on what you learn. As Jeff Nolan writes, “In its most pure form, social media monitoring is both listening and responding to social channels.”

Here is our guide to the Top 20 Social Media Monitoring Vendors for Business. Have your own favorites? Please add them in the comments below! And if you have any corrections or updates to the information here, please share that as well.

Radian6/Salesforce Cloud: A proven solution for big brands

1Radian 6, purchased by Salesforce in 2011, works with brands to help them listen more intelligently to your consumers, competitors and influencers with the goal of growing your business via detailed, real-time insights. Beyond their monitoring dashboard, which tracks mentions on more than 100 million social media sites, they offer an engagement console that allows you to coordinate your internal responses to external activity by immediately updating your blog and Twitter and Facebook accounts all in one spot. Fully automated. Cost: The dashboard starts at $600/month, though registered nonprofits can apply for two free uses per year under the company’s Giving Back program. They also offer free trials to students and educators for research and project purposes. Radian6 uses a monthly subscription based pricing model, with the monthly fee varying depending on the number of topics monitored each month. Clients: Red Cross, Adobe, AAA, Cirque du Soleil, H&R Block, March of Dimes, Microsoft, Pepsi, Southwest Airlines — a wide range of clients. Owner: Independent. Also: See our interview with the CEO of Radian6.

Collective Intellect: Social media intelligence gathering

2Boulder, Colo.-based Collective Intellect, which started out by providing monitoring to financial firms, has evolved into a top-tier player in the marketplace of social media intelligence gathering. Using a combination of self-serve client dashboards and human analysis, Collective Intellect offers a robust monitoring and measurement tool suited to mid-size to large companies with its Social CRM Insights platform. It applies spam management techniques and text analysis to clean data sets, delivering customers rich intelligence.Cost: Pricing starts at $300/month and scales based on specific client needs, according to published reports. Clients: General Mills, NBC Universal, Pepsi, Walmart, Unilever, Advertising Age, CBS, Dole, MTV Networks, MillerCoors, Paramount, Verizon Wireless, Viacom, Hasbro, Siemens. Owner: Independent.

Lithium: Adjust your campaign on the fly

3Lithium monitors your search-specific mentions and sentiment in social media outlets and outputs them into easy-to-read graphs and numbers resembling the stock market. Lithium will aggregate information from a variety of platforms including blog posts and comments, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and many others, and it’ll assess emotions surrounding your brand pre-, mid- and post campaign so you can adjust your strategies accordingly. We miss ScoutLabs, which is now part of Lithium. Cost: Base plan of $249/month for five users and five searches. Free 14-day trial. Clients: Best Buy, BT, Barnes & Noble, FICO, Disney Online, Stubhub, Motorola, Coca Cola, Focus Features, Netflix. Owner: Independent. Lithium bought ScoutLabs in May 2010.

Sysomos: Manage conversations in real time

4Sysomos’s Heartbeat is a real-time monitoring and measurement tool that provides constantly updated snapshots of social media conversations delivered using a variety of user-friendly graphics. Heartbeat organizes conversations, manages workflow, facilitates collaboration and provides ways to engage with key influencers. For more, seeReadWrite review. Sysomos also offers a Media Analysis Platform. Cost: Entry-level price of $500/month. Clients: IBM, HSBC, Roche, Ketchum, Sony Ericsson, Philips, ConAgra, Edelman, Shell Oil, Nokia, Sapient, Citi, Interbrand. Owner: Marketwire.

Attensity360: Actionable insights

5Attensity360 operates on four key principles: listen, analyze, relate, act. Attensity360 will help monitor trending topics, influencers and the reach of your brand while recommending ways to join the conversation. Attensity Analyze applies text analytics to unstructured text to extract meaning and uncover trends. Attensity Respond helps automate the routing of incoming social media mentions into user-defined queues. Cost: $399/month for one license. Discounts for longer subscriptions. Free 15-day trial. Clients: Whirlpool, Vodofone, Versatel, TMobile, Oracle, Wiley. Owner: Independent. Attensity bought Biz360 in spring 2010.

Alterian SM2: Providing daily brand sentiment

6UK-based Alterian SM2 tracks mentions on blogs, forums, social networks like Facebook, microblogs like Twitter, wikis, video and photo sharing sites, Craigslist and ePinions. SM2 monitors the daily volume, demographics, location, tone and emotion of conversations surrounding a brand and aggregates results into positive and negative categories for quick review by anyone on staff. Cost: Pricing is based on volume of results and ranges from $500/month to $15,000/month. “Freemium” trial plan allows for five keyword or phrase searches and a total of 1,000 results. Alterian also provides additional custom solutions. Clients: Rosetta, MDAnderson, Pursuit, YouCast. Owner: Independent. Alterian bought Techrigy in July 2009.

Crimson Hexagon: Actionable data for your business

7Cambridge, Mass.-based Crimson Hexagon taps into billions of conversations taking place in online media and turns them into actionable data for better brand understanding and improvement. Based on a technology licensed from Harvard, its VoxTrot Opinion is able to analyze vast amounts of qualitative information and determine quantitative proportion of opinion. Cost: Pricing based on number of seats or number of searches. Clients: CNN, Hanes, AT&T, HP, Johnson & Johnson, Mashable, Microsoft, Monster, AdWeek, Thomson Reuters, Rubbermaid, Sybase, the Huffington Post, A&E, the Wall Street Journal. Owner: Independent.

Spiral16: Flexible pricing, competitive analysis

8Spiral16 takes an in-depth look at who is saying what about a brand and compares results with those of top competitors. The goal is to help you monitor the effectiveness of your social media strategy, understand the sentiment behind conversations online and mine large amounts of data. It uses impressive 3D displays and a standard dashboard. Cost: Pricing starts at $500 for five queries or Internet searches, though there is no solid pricing model and Spiral16 will work with companies to tailor plans that fit their budget. Online demo available. Clients: Toyota, Lee, Cadbury. Owner: Independent.

Webtrends: Mobile & social analytics

9Webtrends offers services geared toward monitoring, measuring, analyzing, profiling and targeting audiences for a brand. The partner-based platform allows for crowd-sourced improvements and problem solving, creating transparency of their products and services. Cost: Pricing varies depending on packages and services chosen, but Webtrends is geared to big players. Social Accelerator packages start at $15,000/year, app packages start at $1,500 to $12,000/year. Clients: CBS, NBC Universal, 20th Century Fox, AOL, Electronic Arts, Lifetime, AA, Glam, Nestle, the City of Calgary. Owner: Independent.

Spredfast: Campaign & social media management

10We weren’t sure whether to include Spredfast in this Top 20 roundup because of its versatility. it’s not only a monitoring service but a social media management, measurement and campaign tool — in other words, a full-onsocial media dashboard and integrated communications client (Threadsy is another). In the end, Spredfast made the cut because you can pull relevant conversations from multiple networks into your dashboard, track referrals and conversions, summon up analytics and jump straight to analysis and reports. See our recent full review. Cost: Pricing begins at $250/month for businesses. Clients: AOL, Nokia, IBM, Sierra Club. Owner: Independent start-up.

NM Incite: Going for depth

11Global brands look to NM Incite‘s expertise across marketing, sales, product development, customer service, business strategy development and in deep verticals for monitoring and social media intelligence. This is a service geared to multinationals rather than nonprofits or mid-size companies. Cost: Five figures is typical. Clients: Toyota, ConAgra, Intel, Sony, Nokia, AOL, HBO, Barclays, Whirlpool, GE, Discovery, Coca-Cola. Owner: NM Incite is a joint venture of the Nielson Co. and McKinsey & Co. Nielsen Buzzmetrics was spun off into NM Incite as part of its launch in June 2010.

Converseon: Tech + human analysts

12New York-based social-media consulting firm Converseon, named a leader in the social media monitoring sector by Forrester Research, builds tailored dashboards for its enterprise installations and offers professional services around every step of the social business intelligence process. Converseon starts with the technology and adds human analysis, resulting in high-quality data and impressive functionality. Cost: Pricey. Cost varies according to which suite is used. Clients: Dow, Amway, Graco, other major brands. Converseon has more than 200,000 customers and 10,000 channel partners in 100 countries. Owner: Independent.

dna13: An emphasis on simplicity

13Ottawa-based dna13‘s MediaVantage will monitor all of your media coverage and present it in an easy-to-read format allowing you to respond from one platform. dna13 provides on-demand software solutions for brand and reputation management, including a PR and corporate communications software suite and a monitoring service for real-time insight into brand, reputation, competitors and industry issues. Cost: Packages start at $560/month. Initial $500 set-up fee. Clients: Wachovia, Miami Heat. Owner: CNW Group Co.

Attentio: Track global conversations

14Belgium-based Attentio tracks global conversations taking place across social media (blogs, forums, social networks, Twitter, YouTube) and online news sites. The multilingual service offers brand reputation management, campaign/product release impact, sales opportunity tracking and sentiment analysis along with a dashboard to track media in real time. Cost: Pricing starts at £500 ($775 US) per month for a one-year subscription; costs for tailored reports begin at £5,000 ($7,750) . Clients: Johnson & Johnson, Skype, Microsoft, Disney. Owner: Independent.

Visible Technologies: High-end monitoring & analysis

15In the fall 2010 Visible Technologies replaced its truCAST technology with Visible Intelligence, its new enterprise social intelligence platform and services. The new platform helps clients monitor, analyze and participate in social media conversations as well as protect their executive and corporate brands online. Visible adds analyst support to their client servicing to help you understand the landscape and determine which intelligence to act on. Arrange a demo via @Visible_Tech on Twitter. Cost: Typically $25,000 to $45,000, according to press reports. Clients: Microsoft, Vail Resorts, Xerox, Boost. Owner: Independent.

Cymfony: Enterprise-class monitoring platform

16Cymfony provides market influence analytics by scanning and interpreting the millions of voices at the intersection of social and traditional media. It offers a listening and influence platform, Maestro, that integrates distinctive technology with input from expert analysts to identify the people, issues and trends impacting a business. All the standard metrics are included: posts/conversations, tonality, influencers, share of voice and so on. Cost: Pricey but competitive with other deep monitoring and analytics firms. Clients: Fortune 2000 clients. (A lack of transparency may be telling.) Owner: A unit of Kantar Media.

Buzzcapture: Insights into market buzz

17Amsterdam-based Buzzcapture provides insight to organizations on the buzz in their market. Buzzcapture can track companies, products, product families, business lines, difficult or complex brands, topics, competitors, influencers, evangelists, critics and campaigns. All the information collected is analyzed and presented into understandable reports and entered into your dashboard. Cost: Typical price range is EU10,000 to EU70,000 ($13,000 to $91,000 US) for each research topic or group of products, with a standard license costing €30,000 ($39,000 US). Clients: TNT, Vodofone, ING, Nissan, BMW, Microsoft, AstraZeneca. Owner: Independent.

BuzzLogic: Tied to ad buy

18BuzzLogic uses its technology platform to identify and organize the conversation universe, combining both conversation topic and audience to help brands reach audiences who are passionate on everything from the latest tech craze and cloud computing to parenthood and politics. However, the social media monitoring tool is no longer available as a standalone product. It now comes as part of BuzzLogic’s ad platform, requiring a media buy to connect to unique audiences through BuzzLogic. Cost: Unknown. Clients: Starbucks, American Express, HBO, HP, Microsoft. Focus on advertisers. Owner: Independent.

Meltwater Buzz: Overseas strength

19Released in April 2009, Meltwater Buzz monitors, tracks and analyzes user-generated content on more than 200 million social media sites to help a brand understand its user sentiment and gauge competition. All data is stored in one intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard and a customer support representative is provided for the duration of the subscription. Meltwater, founded in Norway in 2001, now has 50 offices around the globe. It’s worth mentioning that they come from a traditional media tracking background, and with purchase of BuzzGain in February 2010, they added many more social media monitoring capabilities. BuzzGain is now baked into Meltwater Buzz. Cost: Standard subscription of one year for $13,000 gets you access for three to five users. Clients: Porsche Automotive North America, Vita-Mix, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Bausch & Lomb, Pabst Blue Ribbon and other corporations, nonprofits, government agencies.Owner: Meltwater Group.

Brandwatch: A focus on brand mentions

20UK-based Brandwatch trawls the Internet looking at news, blogs, forums, wikis and social networking sites and finding mentions of brands, companies, products and people. Clients define keywords (brands, topics, people names, products) and receive reports and brand summaries that they can take action on. Cost: Pricing, based on a monthly subscription, starts at about $300/month. It operates on a per keyword pricing model. Clients: Aviva, Activision, CheapFlights, The Body Shop. Owner: Independent.

Note: BuzzGain, which was originally listed at No. 19, has been absorbed into Meltwater.

Social CRM or simply monitoring services?

In this overview I sought to avoid the insidery, wonky discussion around social CRM (customer relationship management), but it’s worth a quick mention. Paul Greenberg, organizer of the first Social CRM Summit last year, explains SCRM this way:

Social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.

Jacob Morgan, principal of Chess Media Group, points out that social CRM means different things to different people. While the vendors listed above offer robust social media monitoring and listening tools, they plug into their clients’ business and social CRM processes in different ways (see Chess Media’s chart above and its free Guide to Understanding Social CRM).

“Two years ago, all the vendors you mentioned called themselves social media vendors,” Morgan said. “Now that social CRM is the hot term, all of the vendors simply changed the name from social media to social CRM. Everything else is the same.”

Other paid social media monitoring solutions

There are literally dozens of social media monitoring services in the marketplace, so this roundup is meant as a guide to the top-tier vendors rather than a comprehensive list. If you’ve had success with other vendors, please mention them in the comments below.

Disclaimer: We have worked with some, but not all, of the companies above; in such cases, we’ve based our assessment on recommendations from colleagues, pricing and perceived value. Please note that many of the other monitoring vendors listed outside the Top 20 also deserve consideration, based on your company’s specific needs, costs, features and if you find a good cultural and personality fit.

Our accompanying piece in this package on Socialbrite, 10 paid monitoring services for nonprofits and organizations, offers short capsule reviews of Trackur, Thrive, eCairn, Hootsuite, BuzzStream and other monitoring services.

You may have good results with some of these additional services:

• Amplified Analytics: This tool is geared chiefly toward product reviews and marketers interested in tracking reviews across multiple sites.

• Appinions: “Automatically filters and aggregates thoughts, feelings and statements from traditional and social media.”

• Atlassian: Australian-based software company with global reach, offers tools to track, test and collaborate on the social Web.

• Bit.ly Pro: The Pro version offers custom short links like pep.si (for Pepsi) and 4sq.com (for Foursquare), a dashboard that lets you monitor the real-time aggregate traffic of your shared content across the bit.ly universe, and easy integration with tools like Tweetdeck and CoTweet.

• Cision: Cision (formerly Bacon’s Information) monitors social, print, broadcast and online media outlets, then organizes the information, which a dedicated analyst delivers to a company’s in-box every day via an executive news briefing. Cision searches more than 100 million sources to assess conversations about a brand. Clients include UCLA, Gerber and R&R Partners.

• CustomScoop: BuzzPerception: A veteran in the media monitoring space, CustomScoop monitors traditional and social media, calling themselves the “leading application for online news clipping.” BuzzPerception includes a phase of human filtering to generate the most relevant results for a brand. Pricing starts at $299/month. Jen Zingsheim, a representative, provides this update: “While we started out as a traditional media ‘clipping service,’ we’ve been including blog content for years and also monitor Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more. We can tailor reporting to fit client needs, and have a robust suite of analytical tools, too — along with a free, 2-week trial to see if we fit your needs.”

• Digimind: Digimind designs and develops Digimind Evolution, a Competitive Intelligence Management software platform that enables companies to deploy and to manage competitive intelligence units and projects.

• Dow Jones Insight, owned by News Corporation, touts a wide array of languages and geographies, a global footprint and a less-than-stellar dashboard. Its hefty $5,000/month pricetag is based on the fact that it’s heavily based on analysts’ involvement.

• Evolve24 is a competitive listening platform that specializes in reputation management. Evolve24 is a smaller player in the market with only about 20 customers but its customer base consists of large enterprise-level installations.

• FindAgent: Founded in 2002, UK-based FindAgent specializes in digital media monitoring and media analysis. Focusing purely on online content, the company, owned by OpenAmplify, has developed technologies to find, analyze and manage mentions in social media and traditional media. More than 500 companies use FindAgent’s semantic text analysis technology.

• iCrossing is a global digital marketing agency that combines talent and technology to help world-class brands find and connect with their customers.

• Jive: Jive Software, which acquired Filtrbox in 2010, offers a host of social media monitoring options.

• Moreover Technologies: Moreover and its Newsdesk 4 offer tools for media monitoring, reputation management, market and competitive intelligence and content sharing from 1.8 million sources.

• MotiveQuest: At the high end of monitoring services, MotiveQuest typically charges $70,000 per project, according to published reports. CEO David Rabjohns says MotiveQuest provides a full range of services. “You don’t have to use a dashboard. Just come to us with a business problem and we will help you find relevant insights. The core of our approach is digging beneath the buzz and the sentiment to identify primal human motivations. We have identified that these most strongly affect sales and share.” Clients include Microsoft, Nike, Citi, Audi and Kraft. MotiveQuest is positioned in the Strong Performer category in a 2006 Forrester report and it has a Slideshare presentation on leveraging motivations in social media.

• MutualMind: A relative newcomer, MutualMind helps marketers, agencies and PR firms track discussions, understand sentiment, identify influencers and use the resulting insights to improve positioning and marketing strategy. Pricing ranges from $500 to several thousand dollars per month.

• NetBase offers social media analysis tools that help marketing and sales professionals to understand consumer opinion, emotion and behavior online.

• Nimble is an LA-based start-up due to come out of private beta soon with a promising set of monitoring capabilities across multiple networks. Says Nimble’s Maria Ogneva: “We tie monitoring to the customer record. The real beauty is that you can monitor based on a keyword, respond as you need and even create a task right from the social media mention — whether it happens to be a tweet, FB message, LI message — which can be edited, calendared, delegated and commented on for team workflow that ties back to the record — the key ingredient here.”

• Optify is a real time marketing applications suite that offers several features to help you track, monitor and measure the success of your social media activities.

• ReputationDefender: The company offers four suites of online reputation management and privacy controls.

• RepuMetrix specializes in tracking online mentions that are perceived to be harmful to a brand’s reputation. Pricing starts at $350/month for one user.

• RepuTrack: RepuTrack is a reputation monitoring service that tracks and analyzes the conversation around a brand and delivers it in an actionable way.

• SAS Sentiment Analysis Manager: Part of SAS Text Analytics program, the Sentiment Analysis Manager “crawls content sources, including mainstream Web sites and social media outlets, as well as internal organizational text sources [and] creates reports that describe the expressed feelings of consumers, customers and competitors in real time.”

• Sentiment Metrics: United Kingdom-based company provides tools to listen to consumer conversations across more than 20 million blogs, 5 million forum posts and 30,000 online news sources, social networks and microblogs, including Twitter. Clients include Sony, Subaru and HSBC.

• Trendrr: Mostly focused on the entertainment community, Trendrr lets you track the popularity and awareness of trends across a variety of channels, ranging from social networks to blog buzz and video views downloads, all in real time. You can also have Trendrr do a Social Media Audit, providing an analysis of your social media presence, dissecting volume of mentions, sentiment, links, influencers, demographics and more. Pricing: $499 and $999/month, with enterprise package beginning at $2,499/month. NBC Universal’s Oxygen TV show “Bad Girls Club” is a client. Owner: Wiredset LLC.

Look for a shakeout in the field very soon. Other monitoring services include Attensa, Beevolve, blueReport, BrandsEye, Buzzient, CustomScoop, CyberAlert, Memery’s Dialogix (from Australia), Filtrbox, Imooty, Infegy Social Radar, InfoNgen, Ingage Networks, Jungle Torch, Lexalytics, ListenLogic, Looxii, Market Sentinel, MediaMiser, MutualMind, Networked Insights, Noteca, Position2 Brand Monitor, Press Army, ReputationHQ, Scup, Silverbakk, Social Report, Sprinklr, StrategyEye, Synthesio, Trendrr, Viralheat and Whitevector.

— Maria Ogneva, who heads up social media for Nimble, provided input for this article. Updated and revised on Jan. 13, 2011.

Related

• Radian6 and the Yellow Brick Road for Brands — our interview with the CEO of Radian6 (Socialmedia.biz)

• Spredfast: A tool to organize your conversations (Socialmedia.biz)

• Biz360 (now Attensity360): Tracking business intelligence (Socialmedia.biz)

• Top 10 social media dashboard tools (Socialbrite)

• 14 free tools to measure your social influence (Socialbrite)

• Social media monitoring: Articles (Socialbrite)

• Social media metrics: Articles (Socialbrite)

• The Forrester Wave: Listening Platforms, Q3 2010 (PDF)

– See more at: http://socialmedia.biz/2011/01/12/top-20-social-media-monitoring-vendors-for-business/#sthash.tbM2MUme.dpuf

8 Ways to Make Your Business More ‘Human’ on Facebook

Facebook comprises the bulk of daily Internet-related activity for many of its 1.4 billion users, particularly those who access the site via mobile devices.

For some, Facebook is the Internet — functioning as a portal for news and information, not unlike AOL and Prodigy did in the early days of the World Wide Web.

More importantly, Facebook is a place where its users hold conversations with family and friends and where they routinely share stories of the happenings in their lives, both significant and trivial.

Taking into account how well Facebook has woven itself into users’ lives, businesses need to find ways to integrate their message — indeed, themselves — into conversations in a more human, people-centric fashion, maximizing the value of the “social” aspect of social media.

Here are eight recommendations for you to consider.

1. Think Customer Service, Not Just Marketing

More than likely, your marketing efforts on Facebook won’t translate into sales — at least not directly. Even when sales do occur, they typically comprise only a small percentage of your overall volume.

Instead of merely thinking of your Facebook page as a sales and marketing channel, view it as a vehicle for customer service, such as in this example from AnswerFirst Communications, a telephone answering service.

You could also use Facebook Messenger to hold personal, real-time conversations with customers. Facebook is testing a business version of the platform, for which you could sign-up.

2. Provide Information Your Customers Care About

Most people operate with a “what’s in it for me” mindset, which means the content you produce on Facebook needs to focus on customer concerns and interests rather than your own.

That is not to suggest an occasional promotional post announcing a sale, new product, or contest is out of bounds, only that, when creating content, you should put the needs of your customers first.

The article “8 Facebook Post Types for Boosting Engagement” contains tips for content that will resonate with your customers.

3. Put a Personal Face on Your Company

In social media, people relate better to other people than they do to businesses. So, on Facebook, put your people at the forefront.

Through its “People Make the Difference” initiative, Knight Oil Tools, an oilfield services company, routinely showcases employees who have reached particular milestones, such as employment anniversaries.

Stories don’t always have to relate directly to business. When feasible, share personal stories, such as activities involving you and your employees, hobbies you enjoy, birthdays, or other meaningful events. Even use an occasional “selfie” when doing so.

For example, Brendan’s Irish Pub, based in Camarillo, Calif., celebrated its HR director’s birthday with a Facebook post.

The rationale: As people get to know you on a personal level, they may become more interested in your business.

4. Feature Your Customers

There are several ways you can shine the spotlight on your customers. Ask them to share photos of themselves using your products, praise them publicly via a post, or start a “customer of the week” series. Testimonials are another good way to feature customers while building brand reputation and trust at the same time.

SmartPak, an equestrian retail company, features profiles of customers talking about their use of its products, via Facebook posts.

5. Share Your Support for Charitable Causes

If your company supports a local charitable activity, such as a fundraiser, share it in a post. Include photos of you and your employees participating in the event. Many people — Millennials in particular — appreciate companies that express social consciousness and concern for their communities.

Community Coffee, a retail coffee brand, used Facebook to promote its “Military Match” coffee donation campaign.

6. Incorporate Humor

Reading and sharing humorous stories is a big part of what draws people to Facebook. While your business needs to stay true to its corporate culture, when possible, insert some humor in the form of a funny story, anecdote, or image.

T-shirt retailer, Johnny Cupcakes, borrowed inspiration from the newly released “Mad Max” movie to create this humorous image.

7. Tell Your Company Story

Form relationships with your customers and fans by telling them why you started the business, lessons you’ve learned along the way, and plans. Also, share your company values and the passions that drive you.

The Facebook page posting interface includes a feature called “Milestones,” intended for just that purpose. It enables you to build a chronology of your company’s history that includes its founding, significant achievements, and landmark events.

8. Talk About What Inspires You

Another reason people use Facebook is to find inspiration, so share what inspires you. Post quotes and photos, stories about people who mentored you, or significant events in your life, both personal and professional.

Even though Facebook is notorious for triviality, it is the meaningful moments that occur in a person’s life that others respond to most.

Conclusion

Facebook may not be the best avenue to sell your products or services, but it is a platform where you can sell “you,” and where your business can express its individuality and unique personality.

It is a place where you can socialize with your customers, developing a more personal relationship with them over time. As people get to know you, the trust that will accrue as a result could, in turn, lead to sales.

7 habits of highly effective entrepreneurs

Apparently highly successful people have exactly seven habits according to Stephen R. Covey … This number may have been achieved through mathematical/astrological calculations or the whims of the author but it makes for an interesting list… Many have come up with their own list of 7 habits for success so I thought we should give it a go too with the focus squarely on entrepreneurs…

• Get involved– Standing on the sidelines does not befit an entrepreneur. Involvement in not just your own business but also the segment you are in will be beneficial. Sitting in your own office and hoping people will seek you out is just wrong. Go to conferences, meet people socialize, and who knows you might just find inspiration or the next best thing a mentor… Come to events like Sociopreneurship 2010 to learn more J
• Prioritize– Learn to attack your work from a priority point of view. Some things are more necessary than others. Often the curse of success is that you have no idea where to focus because you have so many projects going at the same time. Sit down with your team, find out what needs immediate attention, and get cracking. First priorities first will get you though a mountain of work in a jiffy…
• Delegate – For an entrepreneur to handing out responsibilities may seem a very natural thing to do but most of our ilk refuses to give up the reins. The other extreme of no involvement is the perfectionist who tries to do everything… Learn to place trust in people, choose a team that inspires trust and is worthy of it. Delegate responsibilities and free up time for yourself to focus on the matters you are good at. You cannot possible be an expert at everything so DELEGATE…
• Inspire– An entrepreneur is the ring master of the circus that is their start up. You have to be the one who gets everyone fired up when the going gets tough. Remember everyone looks to you for leadership so learn to be inspiring. Get to work before others, be the change that you want to see in your employees, set examples and push people to be the best they can be.
• Read between the lines– Learning to understand what is not being said is an important quality for an entrepreneur to have. Imagine of you could tell which employee is disgruntled just by reading their body language or tone. Would it not be great if you could gauge the reactions of investors just by glancing at their expressions?  Deciphering Body language may not be for everyone but if you stay approachable then people will open up to you be they employees or prospective investors.
• Hiring talent– Someone once told me that great idea with a mediocre team will fail but a mediocre idea with a great team will inevitably succeed. The reasons are simple your idea is not a stagnant entity but grows with the inputs that are made to it. The better the caliber of the people who are making the inputs the better the end product will become…Hire smart responsible people, run background checks keep a close eye on your hires and that should do the trick.
• Share success- An entrepreneur is only as good as the team that backs them up. Share the limelight with them whenever possible, make your team feel wanted and not as if they are slaving away for you for just a paycheck in a 9 to5. If they believe in your vision give them assurances that they are a part of it. Sharing profits is great but sharing the limelight too is even better.

Here’s an infographic by Funders and Founders on “10 signs of a likeable entrepreneur”

Dear Reader, I hope this list of 7 Habits of effective Entrepreneurs helps you out a bit. I am sure I have missed out on many more, limited as I am by the numerical aspect of this article. Feel free to let us know which ones we missed…

7 questions and answers that’ll reveal the story behind ScoopWhoop, yourstory.com coverage

I’m sure you know what we’re trying to do with the headline. Decreasing attention spans, a growing ‘bored at work’ audience, the race for pageviews- all these reasons have given rise to this ever growing new form of content. Brought mainstream by BuzzFeed in America, there are numerous sites that have come up across the globe to ride the wave. There are ongoing debates about the future of content and whether this new form does any good but the audience at large continues to consume. Sites like BuzzFeed, Upworthy have got astronomical numbers in terms of traffic and ScoopWhoop is doing the same in India.

ScoopWhoop has five co-founders who are in the their mid twenties and know each other from their Indian Institute of Mass Communication days. The guys- Rishi Mukherjee, Saransh Singh, Sattvik Mishra and Suparn Pandey- worked for WebChutney while Sriparna Tikekar, the lady in the team worked with DoneByNone.com in her previous role. They were friends outside of work and were huge fans of the likes of Buzzfeed, Upworthy, Thought Catalog etc.

We knew that a lot of Indians were consuming this kind of content. But we also realized that most of the content coming from these sites were very global/American in nature. We felt there was an opportunity here for Indian content, in the same format. And that is when we started ScoopWhoop as a side project in August last year. We still had our day jobs and post office hours, we used to work on SW.

YS: As a company, what was the vision with which you started? What does ScoopWhoop want to be?

SW: I don’t think we had any vision back then. We were just a bunch of 20 somethings trying to have fun with Buzzfeed style of content in India. We weren’t even sure if it would work. In our very initial days, we did not even think of ourselves as a startup. But things changed the moment we started putting content on the site. Our very first article went viral and in the first month itself we started getting traction, brands started approaching us for advertising. We suddenly realized this is something that can work. The proof of concept came in no time.

The vision for ScoopWhoop is to be an out-an-out social news and entertainment company. We want to be everywhere, from current affairs, politics, sports to funny listicles and share-worthy videos. The idea is to be a publication in the league of the legacy players.

YS: SW has seen a phenomenal growth, what do you attribute this to?

SW: We are very proud of the team that we’ve built. We have some of the most creative writers who form the editorial team. So if you have to ask me one reason why we’ve been successful, it’ll be the content that we create. From day one, our stories started going viral. At that time, we had no media budget, no tech wizardry, and no revenue stream.

YS: What is the team strength at the moment?

SW: We are currently a 12 member team. 7 are hired.

YS: What is your revenue model?

SW: Our revenue model is native advertising and sponsored stories. Some of our clients include Pepsi, Godrej, HUL, Budweiser, MakeMyTrip etc.

YS: Digital media is undergoing some massive changes. What are your views?

SW: That is both exciting and scary. Exciting because there’s so much to learn and explore. And that is also the scariest thing. You need to keep your eyes and ears open and stay up-to-date. Every day there’s so much happening; it’s very easy to fall behind.

YS: What do you think of the blurring line between media, content, ads?

SW: This space has definitely gotten more interesting as globally online advertising seems to be moving from traditional display models to more native formats. It’s still nascent and while the debate is still raging between the fine line between pure editorial/content and branded content and how much is really enough, I feel native models are definitely better from the reader’s/user’s POV. But at the same time, it is important for the user to know what he is reading, editorial or sponsored.

YS: Your thoughts on competition in the space.

SW: Competition is always good. It keeps you on your toes, and there is always something that you can learn from other players.

I think since we started, some 20 other sites have come up, while a lot of established publications and legacy players have also entered this space. But it doesn’t worry us. We like to believe that we’ve built a loyal base for ScoopWhoop; and it is only growing month on month. Plus, India is a hot bed for content and with internet penetration only increasing in India, it gives enough elbow room to multiple players.

55 great productivity tools and, resources for startups and entrepreneurs

Between commuting to office, catching up with your inbox, to rushing for review meetings, it’s a hard life, as any entrepreneur will know. They are always on the lookout for ways to get the most out of their day. Running a startup is a daily challenge, but there exist tools out there to simplify almost all aspects of a business, enabling entrepreneurs to minimize distractions and focus on their ‘core’.

Right from naming and registering a business, to managing teams, to handling marketing and customer relations, these tools can help you ease up the process of running your business.

Here are 55 great tools that can assist your business in being effective and efficient:

Asana: Asana is a Project Management and Collaboration Tool which helps keep teams organised, connected and focused. It is one of the most popular project management tools and offers convenient integrations.

99designs: 99Designs is the world’s most popular marketplace for graphic design. It is a great platform to find able freelancer designers, especially for logo and web designing.

AngelList: AngelList is a website for startups, angel investors, and job-seekers. Its goal is to introduce entrepreneurs to sophisticated investors, and simplify the process of early stage business. An AngelList profile is also an important visibility platform, practically synonymous with a birth certificate in the startup world!

Animoto: Animoto makes it easy to create professional-quality videos. Animoto automatically produces beautifully orchestrated, completely unique video pieces from photos, video clips and music.

BetaList: BetaList provides pre-launch startups with their first hundred users. It lets them understand the market and enable them to reach the product-market fit.

Brand24: Brand24 is a tool which allows one to monitor one’s brand, product and services online. It is also a great method of measuring the buzz around a brand, product or keyword.

Bunchball: Bunchball is the market leader and visionary in gamification. Bunchball provides cloud-based software as a service gamification product intended to help companies improve customer loyalty and online engagement using game mechanics.

Codecademy: Codecademy is an online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in eight different programming languages. Codecademy also provides a forum where enthusiasts, beginners, and advanced coders can come together and help each other.

CoFoundersLab: CoFoundersLab offers an online matchmaking service that connects entrepreneurs with compatible co-founders looking to join a startup. It helps aspiring entrepreneurs connect through their online platform and in-person events.

Doorbell: Customer Feedback is probably the most crucial aspect of an early-stage business. Doorbell helps gather in-app user feedback for free. It is available for websites, iOS and Android.

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Related read: 9 sure fire productivity hacks you can use right now

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Dropbox: Dropbox is the premier file backup, sync and sharing solution beloved by more than 4 million businesses. It lets you store and share huge chunks of data through the cloud.

Evernote: Evernote is a closed based freemium suite of software and services, designed for note taking and archiving. It is a modern workspace that syncs between all of your devices.

Expensify: Expensify provides an online expense management service for customers worldwide. It eases the process of tracking expenses and is one of the most popular expense reporting apps for phone & web.

Fontello: Fontello is a tool to build custom fonts with icons and helps you easily create a unique text branding for your business. It packs vector images into webfonts.

Free Invoice Generator: Free Invoice Generator provides for an easy to use free invoice template to create invoices in PDF. It ensures a standard and convenient form for invoicing every order.

Germ.io: Germ.io is a project management tool centred around ideas. It lets you get from ideas to execution by helping you capture every eureka moment.

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Get Satisfaction: Get Satisfaction is an online customer engagement community platform connecting businesses with their customers to foster better relationships. Companies of all sizes use Get Satisfaction’s platform to modernize customer support, accelerate sales and differentiate their brand.

GitHub: GitHub is a web-based Git repository hosting service offering distributed revision control and source code management functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. Over 4 million people use it to share code.

Google tools and resources

Google AdWords: Google AdWords is Google’s advertising system in which advertisers bid on certain keywords in order for their clickable ads to appear in Google’s search results. It is definitely one of the most important tools to advertise online.

Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. It shows you the full customer picture across ads, videos, websites, social tools, tablets and smartphones.

Google Trends: Google Trends is a public web facility of Google that shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. It can be quite useful for targeting the right customers online.

Google Web StarterKit: Web Starter Kit is boilerplate and tooling for multi-device development. It is a front-end template that helps one build fast, modern mobile web apps.

FullContact for Gmail: FullContact for Gmail supercharges your Google Contacts and lets you know everything about your Gmail contacts, right from your inbox. You can see the name, photos, social profiles, company info just by hovering over an email address.

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Hey startups and entrepreneurs, help us with this survey! If you’ve been running a startup for some time, we need your opinion on running a business. Fill out this survey, and we may use your opinion/quote in one of our upcoming articles.Take the 5-minute survey here.

We’ll randomly pick up three individuals from the lot who fill up this survey and these 3 individuals will get Flipkart voucher worth INR 500/- each.

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Homerun: Homerun is a lightweight tool that makes recruitment personal and effective. Homerun enables businesses to create authentic job openings, receive richer applications and review applicants faster and more effectively.

HootSuite: Hootsuite is the world’s most widely used social relationship platform. It is a social relationship platform that empowers users to execute social media strategies across their organizations.

How Much To Make An App: How Much to Make an App lets one calculate the cost of a building a mobile application. You just need to choose the desired features, and it estimates the cost of those features within seconds.

HubSpot: HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps businesses attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. It includes tools for social media marketing, email marketing, content management, analytics, landing pages and search engine optimization, among others.

intercom.io: Intercom shows you who is using your product and makes it easy to personally communicate with them . It provides for live conversations and allows sending targeted email and in-app messages, triggered by time or behavior.

Kickstarter: Kickstarter is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. It is especially useful for film, music, art, theatre, games, comics, design, photography, and more.

LaunchRock: LaunchRock is a platform that enables its users to create viral “Launching Soon” pages with built in sharing tools and analytics. It help its clients incentivize and reward users for telling others about their projects through email and social networks.

MailChimp: MailChimp is a popular online email marketing solution which lets one manage contacts and send emails. It helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use, and track your results.

Meetup: Meetup is an online social networking portal that facilitates offline group meetings in various localities around the world. It can help you meet your fellow entrepreneurs in your region/industry and get a better understanding of the market.

Meldium: Meldium is the simplest way for teams to access the cloud tools they need. By aggregating and monitoring accounts across any web service, it frees one from tedious account management.

MobileDevHQ: MobileDevHQ is an enterprise organic app marketing platform that offers mobile marketers with app store optimization (ASO) solutions. The platform enables app marketers to analyze and optimize the app store presence of an app, track an app’s relevant search ranking queries in an app store, discover top chart rankings, analyze keywords etc.

Moqups: Moqups is a stunning HTML5 App for creating high fidelity SVG mockups, wireframes and clickable prototypes. It lets you create website and app prototypes without any technical knowledge.

Moz: Moz is an industry leader in building tools to facilitate inbound marketing easy. It provides automated research and analytics tools which lets you focus on strategy and insights and allows you to gain a quick understanding of the competitive landscape in any given search result.

Go Daddy: GoDaddy is the world’s largest web host and domain name registrar. It offers dependable and stable services to ensure smooth online presence.

Naminum: Naminum is the leading free startup name, company name, business name and website name generator on the web. It helps you find a suitable name for your business.

Near Me: Near Me is a peer-to-peer commerce solution enabling anyone to setup their own branded marketplace. Users can create peer-to-peer marketplaces to share, trade, swap or rent anything all over the world.

Upwork: Previosuly called Elance-oDesk, Upwork is the world’s largest online workplace where savvy businesses and professional freelancers meet. It is an effective platform to get quality output at affordable costs.

Pixlr: Pixlr is a cloud-based set of image tools and utilities, including a number of photo editors, a screen grabber browser extension, and a photo sharing service. The apps range from simple to advanced photo editing and can be used on PCs, and smartphones or tablets.

PostMark: PostMark is a web app which removes the headaches of delivering and parsing transactional email for web apps, all with minimal setup time and zero maintenance. It lets you see who opened your emails, where they opened it, what clients and platforms they used, and even how long they read the email.

Prezi: Prezi is a popular cloud-based presentation software and storytelling tool for presenting ideas on a virtual canvas. The product employs a zooming user interface (ZUI) and lets you create striking presentations.

QuickMVP: QuickMVP is a tool that helps entrepreneurs test a new business with a Landing Page Builder and Google Ad Creator. It is one of the easiest ways to test your ideas, without wasting time or money.

Recruiterbox: Recruiterbox is the easiest way to receive and manage job applications to one’s business. It is more efficient than email and simpler than any other recruitment software.

Rewardstream: Rewardstream lets one create engagement and lead generation through well-designed, best-practice-driven, and highly tailored referral marketing plans tuned to meet one’s business’ changing needs. It makes it quick and easy for marketers to incorporate digital, mobile, and word-of-mouth referrals into their customer acquisition and brand awareness mix.

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Related read: If it can be done in a min, do not put it on the to-do list: quick productivity hacks

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Scoop.it: With a focus on content marketing, Scoop.it helps professionals and businesses publish content online in a meaningful, easy and rewarding way. It is a convenient form of finding and creating content for social media marketing.

Shopify: Shopify is a powerful ecommerce website solution that allows one to sell online by providing everything needed to create an online store. Shopify offers a professional online storefront, a payment solution to accept credit cards, and the Shopify POS application to power retail sales.

Sidekick: Sidekick lets you see Who Opens and Clicks Your Email. With Sidekick email tracking, one can get live notifications when someone opens or clicks on one’s emails.

Slack: Slack is a team communication tool that allows for real-time messaging, archiving and search for modern teams. It is an advanced messenger and can help ensure smooth team co-ordination.

SurveyMonkey: SurveyMonkey is the world’s most popular online survey software. It lets you create and publish online surveys in minutes, and view results graphically in real time.

Termsfeed: Termsfeed lets one create elaborate legal documents in minutes. It lets one create custom agreements that can be legally binding for users: Privacy Policies, Terms and Conditions, Terms of Use, Terms of Service or Return and Refund Policies.

TinyJPG: TinyJPG helps make websites faster by compressing JPEG images by 40-60%. It analyses images and chooses an optimal strategy to apply the best possible JPEG encoding, keeping the quality impact but reducing the size at the same time.

UICloud: UI plays an important part in defining customer experience for any app. UICloud collects the best user interface designs and provides a search engine to find the best UI elements for one’s need.

WordPress: WordPress is the most popular web platform to create beautiful websites and blogs. It provides for hundreds of free, customizable, mobile-ready designs and themes.

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More on productivity, productivity tools and apps here:

5 productivity tools that every startup must know about

The myth of multitasking – how it dumbs you down

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Hey startups and entrepreneurs, help us with this survey! If you’ve been running a startup for some time, we need your opinion on running a business. Fill out this survey, and we may use your opinion/quote in one of our upcoming articles. Take the 5-minute survey here.

We’ll randomly pick up 3 individuals from the lot who fill up this survey and these 3 individuals will get Flipkart voucher worth INR 500/- each.

7 deadly sins of startup social media marketing

“Yeah, I made mistakes but…life doesn’t come with instructions.”

Sure, it does not. But that’s not the case with social media – there’s certainly some good advice out there to help you avoid blunders on social media. After all, mistakes are meant for learning and not repeating, right?

So what are some of the common mistakes that companies, especially startups, make while defining and executing their social media strategy? Here is what I’ve found:

1. Incorrect platforms

Agreed– Facebook has 1.44 billion monthly active users (as of Mar 31, 2015). But you can’t have the whole universe as your target audience. In today’s time and age, when everyone is spoilt for choice, the most important marketing decision you need to make is defining the target audience. Targeted marketing is the key of the game, and targeted marketing is, by definition, exclusionary. You need to clearly define your target audience.Once that is done, you need to identify the platforms on which your target audience is active. Remember – nobody searches for a job on Facebook or looks for a hotel review on LinkedIn. Being present on the most popular platform does not make sense if your target audience is not active there. Here’s some quick help when it comes to popular platforms:

Facebook – It’s a good platform when:

• You have highly visual content
• You want to leverage the community effect
• You want to build trust in the minds of the users by leveraging their friends’ network’s
• You are ready to spend on ads asrecent changes in Facebook’s algorithm have made it very difficult to organically reach out to fans

Twitter – It is a good platform to:

• Broadcast your message
• Join the on-going conversations
• Connect with thought leaders and people that matter to you
• Build a position for yourself

LinkedIn – Consider using it when:

• You are a B2B company
• You want to connect with a professional audience and establish your thought leadership within a group of homogeneously targeted audience

Google+ – Good platform to:

• Help you with your SEO efforts
• Participate in Google communities to connect with like-minded people

Pinterest – You can use it when:

• Your primary target audience include women
• You have highly visual content to share

These of course are just guidelines. You need to do a more thorough research and brainstorming to finalise the social platforms for your brand.

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Related read: 13 ways you can make digital marketing work for you

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2. Doing Too Much or Too Little

Once you choose a social platform, you need to commit to it. Having an inactive presence on any of the platforms creates a bad impression. Having the last tweet date as two years back is worse than not having a Twitter handle. You need to show activity on the social platforms, and need to have consistency. The opposite is also true – you just can’t do too much. Don’t bombard your LinkedIn company page followers with 10 updates a day just because that will give you more number of impressions!

3. Ignoring Content Marketing

Content marketing is the gasoline of your social media efforts. You need to have good blog articles to showcase your expertise. You need interesting infographics to share with your audience. eBooks are good to share as a free giveaway. Whitepapers arean excellent way to establish your thought leadership. You need content. Period. Just don’t ignore it from your social media strategy. Not having enough bandwidth to create content cannot be an excuse today.

4. Inappropriate Content or Self Promotion

Each platform has different content needs. Don’t make the mistake of pushing the same content on all the platforms just because there are tools available that allow you to do so. Each platform requires different tone of messaging and different type of content. More importantly, you also need to mind the timing of your updates. Your audience is not going to be present on all the platforms at the same time. Social media does require some serious time and attention commitment Don’t get away with easy options of automatingyour schedule without giving it a serious thought, or having a proper plan in place. Another thing to keep an eye on is the type of content you share. Too much of self-promotion is a big turn-off. Just because you are excited about your product or services does not mean you can talk about it all day long. Have a good balance of education, industry insights, engagement and self-promotion in your content sharing.

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You’ll also like to read: How to make influencer marketing work for your startup

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5. No Personal Branding

People relate to other people – and this is especially true for startups, where people are buyingservices fromfounders more than from the company. So it is important that startups include the personal branding of their founders in their social media planning and strategy. You need a face for your company.

6. Canned Responses to Negative Comments

Lot of companies shy away from social media because of the fear of negative comments. But note that negative comments are, infact, good opportunities for you to build trust in the minds of your readers. (Read more about ithere.) One of the foremost thing you need to remember while handling negative comments on the social platform is that you should NEVER give a canned response to any negative comment. Be personal and show genuine interest in solving the problem. Acknowledge the issue, and take genuine actions to resolve it. If the there is a mistake, accept it and take all efforts to resolve it. Check this example here from Zappos – simply brilliant. Isn’t it?

7. Not aligning with the target audience in terms of tone and messaging

Try and align as much as you can with your target audience – if you are targeting the youth, introduce some quirkiness in your overall messaging. If you are targeting CXOs, maintain a professional tone. Just make sure that your marketing tone matches your company culture. After all, today, marketing is no more the job of marketing department only. It is the job of each and every person representing the company. Here’s a brilliant example of this –

Do share your experience on what worked and what did not work for you. It’s all about sharing knowledge, isn’t it?

Things I wish I knew before my startup journey

As part of my consulting, I meet entrepreneurs with a startup or who want to start one. I spend two hours as part of my business initiation to understand the person and maturity of the product idea. I ask them to explore a few things (listed below) before they are ready to invest the time and effort. Here is a reminder: Plans are a necessary evil. You plan with the understanding that all plans might not work.

I became an entrepreneur coming from a family with no entrepreneurial background. This is the list of things I wish I had known before I took the plunge.

Get ‘buy-in’ from family

Let me start with my biggest mistake. I did a lousy job of making my wife understand the need for me to start my own business and this haunted me through my startup journey.

Start talking to your family about the startup idea, both the success and failure scenario. Write down their questions and try to answer them. Do not ignore ones which you do not have an answer to; go and get answers. Do not expect them to be convinced with your answers, but still make an effort to explain.

Once they accept your decision, they may still feel insecure because there is no consistent income. Most of them are hesitant to bring up the topic so as not to upset you. Take the initiative to talk about it and look at alternatives and challenges. You need to prepare them more than yourself for the startup journey.

Remember it is your idea, and no one believes in your idea more than you do

Do not expect them to understand your idea and validate it. If they are uncertain about the project, it will affect you. You need to protect yourself from emotional pull downs in the startup journey.

My wife lost trust in my word to bring money home every month to run the family. (I had failed a few times). It was admirable of her to continue to support me and I am lucky to be with her today.

One could follow a lean startup idea while developing the product. Please do not start with quitting your job. Start with writing the code for your product or the business proposition.

Write the value proposition message for the product idea 

To start with, fill the below format for your product idea and use this in talks with others to describe the product. For a platform idea, with more than one customer type, fill this separately for each customer type. When you discover new things, update the same to make it more complete.

• For << this type of customer>>, Who << has this type of problem>>
• We offer<< this solution>>
• Which is <<different in this way>> From <<other competitors>>

Leverage the KISS philosophy (keep it simple,stupid) to complete them. Do not use buzzwords and keep it as simple as possible. For greenfield ideas, find a set of firms with businesses that are closer to your idea.

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Also read:  Why you should not start a startup

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Fill the business model canvas 

The Business Model Canvas (BMC) is a strategic management and entrepreneurial tool. It allows you to describe, design, challenge, invent, and pivot your business model. Today, firms like Strategyzer train people on how to fill out this model. The BMC has questions to help people structure product ideas in their quest for new business models.

Keep the following points in mind while filling out the BMC:

• You need not have answers to all the questions. You know what you know, and what you do not know is not an issue.
• In search for answers, you get to network with people who might become co-founders, moonlighting employees, or customers.
• The BMC serves as a baseline to form a mental mindset of the product idea.
• Be prepared to hear that your idea is lousy and is not needed. Listen and make notes; do not argue.

Application of UI Design  

A lot of technical people feel that they do not have the UI skills but at the same time cannot afford to hire UI talent. If you feel that you need a good design for your product, you can learn UI skills.

• Attend online courses (some are free) on UI design practices, and get familiar with design concepts.
• Do research on innovative websites and applications. Use trial versions and take snapshots for features that you want in your application.
• Share designs with your developer and ask him or her to develop them. Any UI developer will feel motivated to come with more ideas.
• Never tell your developer that you have no idea about designing. Talk to some of your friends or contacts who might be working as UI designers in larger corporates. Ask them for feedback and share it with your developers. Be sure to water down the harsh part of the feedback!

Website design

Do not benchmark the first website with the corporate site. It should be something simple with focus on the customer. If there are multiple customers, choose one customer segment and target it. You should display the value proposition and ‘call to action’ for this customer on the home page.

• The effort required for the design layout of the website is different from the developer’s effort to program the website.
• There is an additional effort that comes with website content (images, text). As a techie, one often understands design and developer efforts, and underestimates content input.
• It would be good for the content writer and UI designer to work together (say for 36 hours) in a focused way and complete the website to prevent delays.
• Do not expect the website to be a one-time affair. You might have to update the website multiple times. Plan to perform minor updates without a designer.
• Some websites talk about the company, product features, and the team. These are good for internal pages in the website. When the end user likes the value proposition on the home page, he will want to know who is behind that product and what its features are.

 Build your network  

 As a cooperate employee, one can attend special interest groups and share ideas. I was a part of a cloud camp, and Android and Amazon meetup groups. Being an early member helped me create a network with entrepreneurs who I am in touch with even today.When you hear a speaker talk of the challenges in an area, you understand the situation better, and can ask questions.

• Be a part of TIE, and try to participate in iSpirit sessions and attend meetings in Microsoft Accelerator. Some may ask for a small token amount for networking sessions, it is worth it.
• Attend meetings; be open to meet people who are planning startups in your area or a different one.Attend enough meetings to identify the right community for your idea.
• Free industry sessions of India Product Leadership helped me learn concepts like value proposition, the Business Model Canvas, and digital marketing.
• Blogs of close.io showed me that my sales challenges were due to my ignorance.
• YourStory helps in the searching for competitors or becoming aware of other startups in your space.

 Gain domain experience

For techies, please reach out to professionals to get domain exposure and get your value proposition validated by domain experts. Try connecting with them through your friend circles. Some of your contacts will describe similar startup situations. You can look at their website and compare it with your plans.

Learn about the selling process

In my startup, we began with a product idea in the greenfield area. Today, I know that the greenfield area expects that we introduce the product concept to the customer and then sell the product. Being a techie in those days, I considered creating products in greenfield was cool and did not question our capability to sell products, even in areas with competitors.

If your employer provides you with pre-sales opportunity, take it even if you have to spend additional time. Sales is not account management with existing customers but also cold calling. As a techie, you may have limited or no sales capability. Sales exposure in a large company would help you learn the customer development process and tailor the same for your startup. Be open to learn from your mistakes and cultivate the ability to be resilient after rejections.

Explore external consulting opportunity

If you have niche skills, go ahead and take up consulting assignments. You can do it over weekends or at night. Look at these opportunities as a way to validate your solution to a problem.This is also an opportunity to test your ideas without actual risk.

In 2011, I failed to leverage consulting opportunities that needed cloud skills. I know of colleagues who leveraged their Big Data skills and have startups in that space today. I still remember a friend running a cloud company asking me to experiment my ideas by offering me his infrastructure.

Remember all interactions might lead to the creation of new networks and relationships. That gives you the opportunity to articulate and sell your skills. But give limited hours to consulting and be aware that you are preparing for your product, and not to become a consultant or a service company.

Print advertising: innovations deliver when there is a deeper message to be conveyed

Have you ever countedthe number of ads in your newspaper? I did.

On one of the recent weekends, a leading English daily greeted readers with a full front page ad followed by number of large and small display ads. When counted, that day’s newspaper had 42 large display ads – quarter page or more. That’s hundreds of large display ads, almost every weekend, through 35 plus editions of this newspaper.

Print media, which attracted 41% of total ad spends in 2014 (television advertising stood second with 38% share) is at the heart of marketing strategy and media mix. The challenge for brand marketers is to create ads that make an impact and meaningfully engage customers – both at an emotional and a rational level.

Easier said than done.

In recent years, we have seen some amazing creative executions that unleash print’s ability to deliver a multisensory experience. Here are some examples of print ads that add an extra level of cognitive processing for deeper customer engagement – by experimenting with shapes, sizes, placements, technology etc.

Highlighting Product Features through Ad Placement

This center spread Ford ad is a wonderful example of effective ad placement and playing with shape creatively.

The shape of the ad gives readers a sense of sharp blind turns and illustrates how the LED headlights of the car can see around the corners.

The copy says – “Sees around the corners…before you do”.

How Instantis Instant?

Nescafe took their ‘instant coffee’ad to a whole new level through print.

The brand included two foldable paper mugs in branded newspapers with coffee powder in those cups.  Reader could just add some hot water and enjoy their morning coffee, with someone they are sharing that particular moment with.

High Tech Product’s High Tech Ad

This Moto X ad showcases its vibrant range of colors in a magazine ad. The phone in the magazine ad changes colors when users press on the small color buttons at the bottom of the ad.

This print innovation was made using polycarbonate paper that covers LED light pipes, which are illuminated via circuitry running to the color swatches.

Innovation is Way of Life

Inspired by musical greeting cards, Volkswagen created a talking print ad. The idea was to drive the brand message that innovation is our way of life and it reflects even in the way we communicate.

As readers opened the last page of newspaper, a light-sensitive chip attached to the page announced the arrival of “a perfectly engineered car” – the Vento.

Result: Dealer inquiries went up by 200%. Vento achieved 12 per cent of its annual sales target in a single day.

Coffee That Stands for Best Aroma

When Bru Gold wanted to engage customers with the richness and aroma of their fine coffee, they sprayed a special perfume on newspapers, the smell of which was that of actual Bru Gold.

The readers while reading the newspaper could smell the coffee.

An Unmissable Call to Action

Tata Motors print ad for their Zest sedan had a very clear objective – driving customers to dealership.

The 4 page advertorial supplement came with a transparent packet stuck on the newspaper that had a uniquely bar-coded car key. Readers could visit a nearest dealer and match the bar code and stand a chance to win a Tata Zest.

The car key in newspaper ad communicated ease of owning the car / gave a sense of ownership resulting in increased footfall at the dealerships.

Jo DekheWohDiwana

When Kajaria Ceramics launched their 3D range of tiles that offers depth in designs, they wanted newspaper readers to get a sense of those innovative tiles.

The print ad was a 3D rendered image. The ad came with specially made 3D glasses stuck on the ad for viewing the ad. When viewed through 3D glasses, the ad gave a near real life 3D experience in the print ad itself.

Layered Smartphonewith a Layered Print Ad

When Lenovo launched Vibe X2 as ‘World’s First Layered Smartphone’, they wanted to highlight the innovative layered design through print ad.

Lenovo partnered with Voconow to overlay an interactive digital layer on top of their print ad.

When customers viewed the ad through Voconow app, they could see the smartphone from different dimensions, range of colors, product specs and could even buy the smartphone while watching the ad (instant call to action).

Does every print ad need to be as innovative as in above examples? Shashi Sinha of IPG MediaBrandssums it up nicely, “While regular print advertising definitely has its place, innovations deliver when there’s a deeper message to be conveyed.”

Innovative, solution-led print advertisementsengage customerswith the brand and drive last mile conversions.