By Hailley Griffis

As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are Convince&Convert, VentureBurn, Kim Garst, TechVibes and Commander Chris Hadfield.

Contagion, social media, and why things catch on

Jonah Berger, marketing professor at the Wharton School, discusses setting realistic goals with a viral marketing campaign and the science behind it.

Secrecy: The silent killer of innovation

Martin Carstens writes about openness in the startup world and the differences between South Africa and San Francisco.

How to grow an engaged social media community

The important task of growing your social media community is discussed on Kim Garst’s blog by Brandon Milford.

A Canadian startup’s beginner guide to navigating Silicon Valley

An interesting presentation by George Favvas that talks about his experience in moving to Silicon Valley as a Canadian entrepreneur and the various costs associated with this decision.

Cmdr. Hadfield’s Space Oddity

With all of the recent buzz about it, we also have to mention Chris Hadfield’s video – Space Oddity. Almost at 13 million views this morning, Commander Hadfield has been an exceptional example for social media use aboard the International Space Station.

By Francis Moran

At the time my PR agency,inmedia Public Relations, was founded, I worked out of a large integrated agency in the city and some of the account executives there loved to push my buttons by declaring that media relations was free advertising. They especially liked to do this in client meetings because they knew it would prompt me to mount a fevered defence of the merits of PR and all the ways in which it differed from advertising.

I knew they were only kidding. I knew they really knew better. I knew it was all a bit of harmless fun.

But the perception that media relations is free advertising persists, and I was reminded recently that it persists even among so-called PR professionals and others who really ought to know better. I received a promotional email this week about a media-training workshop organised by a large group that specialises in consulting, training and speaking on marketing and communications. The first paragraph of the email read, “Do you know the media can give inmedia free advertizing [sic]?!” (The bold font, underlined words, redundant double punctuation at the end of the sentence and misspelling of “advertising” are all faithful reproductions of the actual email.)

I don’t want to name and shame any one. I know the consultant who wrote the email and will be giving the workshop, and am familiar with the organization putting on the workshop and have no desire to conduct a drive-by smear of either one of them. But the fact that a group positioning itself as expert counsel on subjects like PR can suggest that media relations somehow equates to free advertising demonstrates just how poor a grasp even seasoned practitioners can have of the strategic fundamentals of public relations.

Media relations is not free advertising.

First of all, it’s not free.

The editorial space in which media relations practitioners seek to get their clients’ stories may come at no cost but the process of pursuing that space can be very costly indeed. My clients pay a lot of good money for the media coverage we get for them and they most certainly do not see it as free. The strategic pursuit of media coverage is far more than a flippant pitch for a bit of free publicity; the time and skill it takes all cost a lot of money and many organisations invest far more in media relations than they do in advertising.

(Parenthetically, the same “free” tag is being attached to social media with the same potential that doing so creates unrealistic expectations of what a social media campaign ought to cost and sharply degrades the value of the results a good campaign achieves. Because access to social media networks and tools is largely without cost, there is a wide misconception that social media is a low-cost or even free communications and marketing tactic. Doing it properly is incredibly time-consuming, though, and time, whether ours or the client’s, is expensive.)

Second — and far more critically — media relations is not advertising.

While media relations can complement advertising and both, in a properly integrated program, ought to be built from the same messaging platform and address the same objectives, media relations is very unlike advertising and those who can’t see the difference ought to get into another line of work.

Media relations is more credible.

Market research has long demonstrated that editorial coverage is perceived by consumers as being more credible than advertising, and this may be where media relations has its greatest advantage. Notwithstanding the generally poor regard in which journalists are held, consumers believe they have made some effort to filter and evaluate the claims made in their stories and that journalistic standards of accuracy and balance make editorial coverage more reliable.

Media relations is harder to control.

The flip side of the credibility coin is that editorial coverage cannot be controlled in the same way as advertising space. Media relations practitioners have no say over how much space their story will get, where or when it will run, or what other messages — even opposing messages — might also run in the same story. You can mitigate this lack of control and vastly increase your chances of achieving your desired outcome, however, through the effective and strategic planning of your media relations efforts along with a sharp tactical understanding of how newsrooms operate.

Media relations can deliver greater message reach.

The impact of any campaign is measured in terms of reach — the number of people who will see your message — and frequency — the number of times the message will be seen. Media relations can vastly increase the reach of a campaign although it is usually difficult for it to do much for frequency.

Advertising costs increase in linear fashion — that is, it generally costs twice as much to reach twice as many people or to reach them twice as often. Media relations efforts, on the other hand, scale more efficiently. Once having completed all the work to develop the story pitch and materials necessary to reach our first journalist, the cost of reaching the second and subsequent journalists is a small increment. The reach of a media relations campaign can be extended more cost-effectively than that of an advertising campaign but it is unlikely that a media relations campaign will deliver multiple exposures like an advertising campaign can do if you pay for them.

Media relations can deliver greater message scope.

Most advertising is limited to a couple of sharp selling points. Media relations, on the other hand, can produce coverage that goes well beyond a headline or two. As such, it is particularly effective when you need to explain an issue or educate an audience. For a better understanding of how this advantage of media relations fits into a marketing campaign, see my post last week on my three buckets of customer segmentation. The downside of this advantage is that any story can, of course, also include negative messaging.

Media relations is rarely transactional.

Although it can happen, media coverage rarely puts bums in seats. Any good ad must have a clear and compelling call to action. No good journalist is going to allow such a thing to creep into her or his story, although a lot of coverage, especially outside the hard news and business sections, will contain information on where readers, listeners or viewers can go for more information. In a connected world, this can be done more easily — and seemingly without compromising journalistic integrity — through the use of hyperlinks in online coverage that lead readers to a company or advocacy website.

So what’s the harm?

The advertising colleagues I referenced at the outset of this post were just taking a bit of mickey, and no harm was done. But real harm is done when media relations is conflated with advertising.

In the first instance, as I have already explained, calling media relations “free” degrades its value and the effort required to do it properly. Second, it can lead to really bad strategic planning and deployment of marketing resources if media relations is expected to accomplish the transactional objectives of an advertising campaign.

Perhaps most dangerously, however, it leads to a mindset that there is no such thing as bad publicity; that any engagement with the media is to be desired and pursued.

I have in the past counselled two extraordinary local organisations that deal with children in times of extreme hazard. Both organisations have amazing and heart-warming tales to tell of how they quite literally save lives every day, and they rightly pursue media coverage of those stories in the same honest, principled and good-hearted way they conduct all of their affairs. But because they deal with the most at-risk of our society’s youngest and most vulnerable citizens, the outcome of their very best efforts is often a tragic one, and tragic outcomes involving children are headline-making events. If these organisations viewed media coverage as a benign publicity resource they could mine for “free advertising,” they would be hammered by the fallout that would ensue.

By Francis Moran

The aphorism that a camel is a horse designed by committee is usually attributed to Greek-born British car designer Sir Alexander Arnold Constantine Issigonis, who was responsible for British Motor Corporation’s popular Mini. I never quite understood why Sir Alex would disparage a camel’s design — the animal, while unusual in shape and function, seems perfectly designed to be the ship of the Sahara that it eventually became. I take no issue whatsoever, though, with his sentiment that it is a very bad idea to ask a bunch of people to try to work together to design anything.

And yet, it is still too common an activity.

An excellent — or egregious, depending on your point of view — recent example was a short movie commissioned by the Canadian government to mark the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812 between the United States and British forces to the north. While undoubtedly an important chapter in the history of Canada’s evolution from colony to independent country, this poorly-named, almost-three-year-long skirmish has always enjoyed more attention and myth-making than it probably deserves. Canadians celebrate it as the only war the U.S. ever lost, citing as proof the repulse of invading American militia and the subsequent capture and occupation of Washington by British Forces, including the burning of the White House. Americans, meanwhile, gained an entire national anthem from the war, based on the poem Francis Scott Keys wrote after witnessing the successful defence of Fort McHenry against bombardment by British ships in Chesapeake Bay.

Whatever its merits as myth-making machine, there is no doubt that the bicentennial of the War of 1812 has been seized upon by the current Canadian government as a great opportunity to celebrate this country’s history and heritage. Proof of how close to the government’s heart this whole thing lies can be found in a recent Globe and Mail article detailing how “senior players in Ottawa…heavily micromanaged” the production of a movie-trailer-style advertisement about the war. Unnamed officials from “Centre,” shorthand for the Prime Minister’s Office and the Privy Council Office that serves the PMO, were rather hands on, to say the least.

“The Centre asks if Laura Secord’s costume could have a little more colour,” the article quotes one bureaucrat asking, before further stating, “The fabric (velvet) and the colour orange does not do the trick” and “No two-tone velour! Brown exterior and beige interior.” (Laura Secord is credited with hiking through 30 kilometres of forest to warn the British of an impending attack by the Americans; Canadians know her better as the namesake for a chain of candy stores.) Later injections into the creative process queried, “Why…were (there) no black (people) in the British Army cast?” and questioning the lack of wind movement in the sails of ships anchored at rest on a quiet lake.

The final production is okay, if you think a blockbuster movie trailer is an okay treatment for such an event, but the creative people involved must surely have cringed as these repeated interferences came down from on high questioning their design decisions.

I suffered through a similar experience a couple of decades ago when a client insisted on applying literal interpretations to a conceptual design promoting soil conservation in Canada. We commissioned a gorgeous illustration of an iconic Canadian farm scene — red barn, steel silo, white fencing, brown soil being tilled by an old-style tractor — all contained within a cupped set of hands with soil dribbling out from the hands, and bearing the title, “Soil erosion: It’s getting out of hand.” It was beautiful, arresting and on message for a campaign designed to inform off-farm urban Canadians that soil erosion was a continuing serious issue in Canada and that a recently announced federal-provincial program was taking real action to mitigate the loss of this valuable national resource.

Then the committee of second guessers kicked in. The tractor didn’t look like any actual tractor that would be used anywhere in Canada. There wasn’t enough room in the illustrated field for a tractor to do a full turn. The gate in the white picket fence was too narrow. The silo was disproportionately sized to the barn. The barn was the wrong shade of red. And so on. And then, the client insisted the slogan be changed to “Soil conservation: It’s in our hands,” changing with a single stroke a message intended to raise awareness and generate support for urgent action to a safe, reassuring message communicating that nothing really needed to be done.

At the Adobe Max conference in Los Angeles last week, a variation on the design-by-committee tendency came under withering attack from Scott Belsky, founder of the creative-portfolio-sharing site Behance. ”Recklessly” crowdsourcing creative “is like (eating) discount sushi,” Belsky said. “It seems like a good idea at the time,” but it leaves a pain in the stomach not long afterwards.

Designers love to rail against this kind of thing and, being creative types, their railings are usually pretty funny and acerbic. Two of my favourite examples are this set of posters that sarcastically frame far-too-typical client comments, and the below brilliant clip on what happens when a committee sets out to design the Stop sign. Enjoy.

Image: ARTSblog

By Bob Bailly

When I was first asked to contribute to this blog, my stated interest was writing a piece that “is really all about you and how evolution has contrived you to be who you are, acting and feeling the way you do. It’s also about how to improve your business performance.”

Since then, I’ve tried to explore how evolutionary sciences can be used for predictive modeling for our business stragegies.

I’m more convinced than ever that if you are looking to build better brands, increase your marketing effectiveness, shorten sales cycle times, improve communication at all levels of the organization, and foster loyalty with customers, stakeholders and employees, you can benefit by understanding how we came to be the kind of animal that we are.

The first thing to remember is we’re not as clever as we think we are.

Brains, minds and group behaviour

Many people assume that evolution strives resolutely forward – that the survival of the fittest means only the smartest, the strongest and the most adaptable will survive. Many people also use this line of thought to place humans at the apex of this evolutionary development, placing our species above all other taxonomic orders: With a high-powered, analytical brain and an opposable thumb, we have “evolved” to overcome our animal past and are able to create cultures, civilizations and businesses that are proof of our sophistication.

But in truth, evolution is primarily an effect of absence, of laissez-faire. In their book, Big Brain, authors Gary Lynch and David Granger point out “we now know that traits can be acquired by random, undirected accident and as long as they do not impair competitive advantage (e.g. are neutral) the traits may be passed on and retained in the species. Random genetic changes occur all the time and they are not calculated responses to the environment, just a set of blind trials that grope forward … Most adapted does not mean ‘optimized,’ it just means able to scrape by a little better than the next guy.”

In fact all organisms alive today have all benefited from the same evolutionary mechanisms; so in fact everything alive today is as evolved as we are. Lynch and Granger put it this way: “Evolution throws the dice, tries out possible configurations, and that configuration may thrive or die.”

While studies indicate that evolution seems to have followed adaptation principles that seem random, they are really an assembly of behaviour and activities that help us cope with whatever current circumstances we face. As a metaphor, consider government tax returns – they do not change very much each year, with seemingly minor changes added on top of old requirements. Over a number of years however, they reflect the pressure of social bias and political reality. They become radically different in design and intent when viewed over longer periods of time.

Evolutionary theory predicts that small changes will occur naturally and will be retained as long as they do no long-term harm to the individual or to the group. Like it or not, the same analogy holds true when looking at business procedures, processes and development. I’ve noticed in my work that many organizations both large and small evolve slowly, and do it as a living organism would, generally adding new systems on top of old. If there is no competitive or environmental pressure, they rarely undergo any kind of structural overhaul. Only when market conditions change, or competitors intrude, will companies like Microsoft or General Motors change how they are doing business. In a sense, they are microcosms of the biological world. If it works, don’t change it. If you must adapt, do it or die.

Bolting every new feature onto the same old platform

“There’s an old saying about those who forget history. I don’t remember it, but it’s good.”

– Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, March 10, 2008

In our modern world we tend to gloss over the fact that, despite millions of years of evolutionary development, humans only learned how to write less than 10,000 years ago. This development only occurred because that was the first time in human history when people were able to permanently move beyond hunting and gathering their food and could begin to live in one place and raise crops and domesticate certain animals.

So forget about living in an urban environment that we call the 21st century for a bit, because in evolutionary terms we haven’t even been farmers for very long. In short, evolution hasn’t really had a chance to catch up to the enormous cultural, economic, and political upheaval humans have put themselves through in the last several thousand years. We are very much a specific kind of animal at heart, and moving from a cave to a penthouse may mask some of our animalness, but trust me – despite the body waxes – it’s still there.

Or as Gary Marcus writes in his book Kluge: “Despite the fact that we operate differently than monkeys, the vast majority of our genome evolved without language, culture and reasoning.”

We are the way we are because the genes that make up our beings, the building blocks driven by our DNA, have been built up over time by combinations that simply worked well enough to survive from one generation to the next. If there was a grand plan, it got lost a long time ago.

Optimization was never an inevitable outcome of evolution. Natural selection, as it turns out, is only as good as the random mutations that arise. If a mutation doesn’t kill the offspring, it will be kept to be passed along to the next generation. Mutations don’t need to give advantage as long as they don’t result in harm. Elegance and complexity are not as important as functionality.

Because evolution is driven by the immediate, new genes must work with old genes and we pile new systems on top of old ones.

Even human brains have not been designed from the ground up, but combine older versions of animal brains. Processes that appeared at various times in our distant past still work and have been added onto with new features. This process would be the equivalent of building a modern high performance vehicle that retained various parts from every car model ever made. In other words, start with a Model T and keep adding on features but not eliminate anything to arrive at a modern high-performance vehicle. This means there are a lot of spare parts still there that were once useful, but are no longer required.

Sound like any businesses you know?

Connections and control: The brain vs. the enterprise

So what do genetic manipulation and brain circuitry have to do with anything related to business? To me, it’s all about connections and control.

One perspective to consider is this: In an average human brain you will find about 100 billion neurons and each one can potentially connect with a few thousand to as many as 100,000 other neurons (the average is actually 2,500). This results in – are you ready for this – 100 trillion to 1,000 trillion connections – or more than all the stars in the universe. Remember, however, only 25,000 genes control all of these neural connections.

Think of every star in the universe being controlled by a small town in Iowa, and you get some idea of the power of both our genes and external forces that are at work shaping and defining our brains and minds. It’s one of the reasons I believe that fewer managers and more autonomous control in business makes sense.

Yet, genes and neurons are only part of the explanation for why we are the way we are, in the same way that management and resources only describe essential building blocks or requirements for corporate success. Genes dictate how neurons should operate, but it turns out it is the connections between the neurons – called synapses – that are the true determiners of behaviour. Think social network.

Every activity and every movement originates from, or results in, synapse formation linking neurons to each other across wide expanses of our brains.

Synapse formation can be astounding to consider. For instance, it is estimated that 1.8 million synapses/second are forming between the ages of two months and two years. Equally astounding, however, are that 20 billion synapses are pruned from childhood to adolescence because of lack of use. Synapses are formed by activity or thought, are strengthened through repeated use, and are pruned if never used again. Some have called this the survival of the busiest. Use it or lose it.

Many modern business organizations operate in a similar fashion. Departments often grow beyond their ability to work efficiently, so efficiency experts and managers are always on the lookout to prune non-performing individuals.

Despite corporate mission and vision statements, organizations become what their people do day in and day out. Driven by their corporate values and behaviours (their corporate genes, so to speak) employees are encouraged to act in specified ways. But circumstances can cause new behaviours which, in the short term, can either be beneficial or detrimental, but certainly can change and permanently alter the way companies behave.

For instance, way back when, banks were in the borrowing and lending business. Bankers made money by assessing risk and lending conservatively. Yet many of them in the U.S. first made oodles of cash (succesful adaptation), then collapsed in the middle of the first decade of this century because a select few of their traders created so called asset-backed paper (environmental reality). This paved the way for their downfall – products invented by reckless hungry traders looking to make easy commissions drove their companies to be reckless, and in some cases fail.

Bottom line, even though humans have been around for at most 200,000 years or so, by evolutionary standards, this is not a lot of time for debugging. My caution – avoid your evolutionary past at your peril.

Image: Desktop Wallpapers

Bob Bailly is a Calgary-based neuro-marketing and tribal marketing practitioner, teacher and coach.

By Leo Valiquette

OK. I must confess off the top to be being a diehard Trek fan. (And no, I do not attend conventions wearing prosthetic Vulcan ears or Klingon foreheads, nor do I even own such things.) But even if I were not, I’m sure I would still be praising the latest celebrity ad campaign from Audi.

If you haven’t seen it, do not read further until you’ve watched this first.

OK. If you’ve been under a rock for the past while, the young fellow is actor Zachary Quinto, who plays Spock in the rebooted Star Trek motion picture franchise. His elder is of course Leonard Nimoy, who defined the iconic character. The timing of the ad is obvious – Star Trek Into Darkness is due to hit theatres on Friday. (Editor’s note: And guess who has reserved seats for the 7:40pm Imax 3D showing?)

The geek channels have been buzzing for the better part of a week about all of the cool pop culture, autobiographical and vintage Star Trek references lurking in every scene. But that’s not what has me singing the praises of this extended commercial. It is, of course, an ad meant to tout the Audi S7 over the Mercedes-Benz CLS 550. Quinto is the stylish upstart, all smooth and sleek in his new Audi, while Nimoy struggles with the supposed shortcomings of his Mercedes-Benz.

In the end, however, it’s Nimoy who emerges the victor in their friendly wager. Reminds me of a plaque a senior co-worker once had on his office door: “Age and treachery will always overcome youth and ambition.”

Don Klein at Car and Driver last week summed up the ad as follows:

“Maybe … this isn’t really a commercial. The S7, along with the CLS and the TTS at the end, constitute product placement—props, actually—in a short film about two celebrity pals who like to compete with each other. Audi paid for it, so its car gets to win. The carmaker also gets serious viral pass-along and widespread mention in a huge array of national media, almost all of it positive. And that’s the way advertising works today: Be smart, be topical, use your own distribution channels, and create buzz-generating content.”

The only thing I will dispute in Klein’s assessment is that I do believe this is in every way a commercial, one that has found a clever way to take advantage of a pop culture phenomenon and hit the bull’s eye with two completely different demographics by having it not just be about the pop culture references.

Quinto represents the 20- or 30-something male, the digital native who is into all the latest things. Young Spock likes his quality engineering and the effortless integration of helpful technology into his high-performance machines. He is also the Spock who is resonating with a new generation of consumers, a point which will no doubt be proven by the opening weekend box office receipts for the new flick.

Nimoy is of course the quintessential Spock those of us 40 and older grew up with. But, again, it isn’t just the pop culture connection. He embodies sentiments many older men have toward all those younger fellows full of piss and vinegar who think they’ve already got everything all figured out. He may not be driving an Audi in this ad, but he still resonates on many levels with one of Audi’s target markets.

And while this is of course all scripted and rehearsed, it come across with sincerity, as if this truly is a peek into the personal relationship between these two men. In my biased opinion, the most effective advertising is always the advertising rooted in honesty that portrays real people and real situations. And this applies regardless of whether the product in question is a car, an app, a widget or an enterprise SaaS solution.

Strip away the Star Trek tie-in and you still have what I consider to be an effective and entertaining ad that manages to target both ends of a diverse audience in under three minutes. The basis for any sound marketing strategy is to always know your customer, and Audi has obviously done its homework.

Some might suggest Kirk vs. Kirk would be the most logical followup, but at this point, that would be redundant. Instead, how about Nichelle Nichols and Zoe Saldana in Uhura vs. Uhura?

Image: Business Insider

As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are ReadWriteWeb, MarketingProfs, Velocity and Startup Professional Musings.

Going global at launch: Tips for building a micro-multinational startup

Gary Whitehill, relentless entrepreneur and driven philanthropist, passes on his advice on how to build a multinational company right from the beginning, even prior to the launch.

4 lessons marketers can learn from Yoga

As a Yoga practitioner and marketing professional, Allie Gray Freeland draws a parallel from these two seemingly unrelated professions: 1. When the foundation is clear, the execution is successful; 2. A mental clean slate helps you think without preconceived notions; 3. Small gestures of kindness can establish customer loyalty; 4. Simplicity helps consumers know your brand better.

The content marketers progress: Surviving the Slough of Despond

Neil Stoneman describes the “content journey” in the form of a hype cycle: A) The Rise of expectation; B) Pinnacle of planning; C) Slough of Despond; D) Restoration of faith; and E) Flight of revenue. Of course, no one wants to get trapped in the depths of “C”. Stoneman’s article provides some valuable insight into surviving the slough.

7 startup habits investors read as staying power

In characteristic list style, Martin Zwilling outlines seven signs or pieces of evidence that may be great predictors of a startup’s long-term success.

Technorati Tags: Allie Gray Freeland,  content marketing,  entrepreneurship,  Gary Whitehill,  investors, marketing strategy,  MarketingProfs,  Martin Zwilling,  micro-multinational,  multinational,  Neil Stoneman,  ReadWriteWeb,  startup growth,  Startup Professional Musings, Startups,  Velocity

By Brent Barnhart

Small businesses love statistics.

And why not? They help us understand where we’re going and where we’ve been. After all, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

By better understanding the small business landscape by the numbers, we’re more likely to make informed decisions and keep ourselves from heading our businesses in the wrong direction. As business owners, continuing education is crucial in keeping our companies current.

The following six statistics have a lot to teach us about the state of small business, the economy and the future of Internet marketing. Whether or not they come to surprise you, consider how these stats impact your company.

99.7% of America’s businesses are ‘small’ businesses

Although we may see small business as a tight-knight community, the fact remains that SMBs make up 99.7 per cent of America’s businesses, according to the Small Business Administration (SBA). Of course, the SBA defines a “small business” as any company that employs fewer than 500 workers. To some, that definition may be a bit excessive. But even if we considered as small businesses only those companies that employ fewer than 50 workers, we’d still be talking about most of the country’s businesses. Regardless of the definition debate, there’s little doubt about the economic impact of America’s SMBs and their role in creating jobs.

27% of businesses lost employees within the past year

We often speak of the slow recovery of the U.S. economy post-Great Recession. The recovery is happening too slowly for many businesses, as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently reported that over a quarter of companies lost employees within the past year. With the unemployment rate sitting at 7.6 per cent, only a two-percentage-point drop from three years prior, there’s no doubt that small businesses continue to struggle when it comes to maintaining and hiring employees. The numbers prove that there’s good reason for businesses to be cautious when it comes to bringing on new talent. This trend may unfortunately continue until SMBs finally find a bit of economic breathing room.

90% of customers are influenced by online ratings and reviews

The importance of ratings and reviews for small businesses is no joke. As a reported 90 per cent of customers are influenced by online ratings and reviews, consider the place of such reviews in your business strategy. Is your online reputation squeaky clean? Have you not established much of a presence? It’s tempting to dismiss bad reviews or negative comments as spam or people simply blowing off steam; however, these reviews don’t simply go away. Today’s users are incredibly impressionable; a decisively negative review of one business may cause a customer to shift to another. Building a positive repertoire with your customer base and encouraging them to leave positive feedback for your business will result in positive returns.

Nearly 40% of our time online is spent on mobile devices

This statistic may come as a surprise to some, although perhaps not when we consider how glued we are to our mobile devices these days. The numbers don’t lie. Not only are businesses browsing the web and engaging in communication through social media on their mobile devices, they’re purchasing items and looking through those previously noted ratings and reviews. For this reason, your business needs to make sure it has a mobile presence and can be easily accessed by such users. A mobile-friendly site is just the beginning; ensuring that you have a presence on social networks is perhaps even more important as users are liking, tweeting and pinning more than ever.

39% of SMBs see an ROI from social media

With so many users on the aforementioned social channels, however, it may come as a shock that relatively few businesses are seeing an ROI from social media. We’re often told how important it is to reach out and engage through social media and how crucial that engagement is to our Internet marketing success. If that’s the case, why isn’t the ROI there? This may come as the result of poor strategy, with businesses sinking time, money and resources that aren’t being spent optimally.

Consider also that the ROI from social media isn’t always financial. Exposing your business to new customers and reaching out to establish new relationships may very well be more important to some businesses than simply getting ad clicks. It often comes down to your goals; you may get more mileage out of trying to put your name out there than by grasping for cash.

With attacks up 18% last year, SMBs are more prone to security breaches in 2013

According to a recent cyber-security report from Symantec, hackers are targeting small businesses. Surprised? As cyber attacks were up 18 per cent in 2012, business owners must continue to seek protection from fraud and keep their companies safe. How can your business protect itself?

• Be wary of scams. If it looks like spam or seems suspicious, it’s probably worth avoiding.
• Spam filters don’t catch everything. Don’t assume that something’s safe just because it ends up in your inbox.
• Change your passwords often, keep them complicated and don’t use the same password for everything.
• Keep the most pertinent information concerning you and your business to yourself if possible.

The bottom line

There’s plenty going on in the world of small business and it’s crucial for us to keep up with the numbers. What small business statistics take you by surprise?

Brent Barnhart is a staff writer for ChamberofCommerce.com. Grow your business online with ChamberofCommerce.com, the most trusted online resource for all your business needs.

Technorati Tags: small business, SMB, Internet marketing, marketing strategy, social media, Chamber of Commerce, SBA, Small Business Administration, Symantec, cyber security, cyber attacks, mobile devices, online reviews, unemployment, statistics, by the numbers

I spent a little time at StartupWeekendHamilton3 in April as a mentor and was talking to a young founder who proclaimed that there was one great accelerator in Canada. Who he said it was surprised me a little and got me thinking, what makes an accelerator “the best” and why should an eager founder care? The baseline in my mind is Y-Combinator. No one can argue it is the best seed-stage accelerator based on its results. What is difficult for everyone to agree upon is what does it do to achieve those results or even harder, what defines success?

In my opinion the key things it does:

• Social Capital via Paul Graham: How he teaches founders and the hacker culture he has built provides entrepreneurs with access to the very best social capital that exists for anyone starting a technology-based company.
• Peer mentorship: The structure of the 12 weeks enables peers to hold each other accountable. This competition amongst comrades is powerful as it turns around the human nature of playing to our own strengths and pushes founders to “keep up with the Joneses.”
• Hungry founders: Funding is minimal. After a bit of a bump it has since been decreased and I would bet if you look at the successes out of YC the biggest ones started off with the least amount of financial resources.

There is some striking similarity to what YC does and the thinking and observations behind the Goldmine Effect by Rasmus Ankerson (watch it, it is interesting). The basic point is that if you can find the talent that has the potential versus the talent that has already been refined, you will get a better result. Money and facilities do not make a difference; identifying underdeveloped talent does. I think there are three core factors that go into determining the quality of a given program.

• Where is the program located? Are there companies in the immediate area just a stage or two ahead that can help you grow?
• Who is backing the program and what did they invest to make it happen? Do they get involved in the companies they invest in or do they “spray and pray” with their investment?
• What types of companies have been successful in the accelerator in the past? Who gets funding afterwards? Are they B2B or B2C, SaaS or something else?

What is less important:

• Demo day: The rock-show nature of demo days is not a good environment for investors but you need to take advantage of the intros and the social capital on offer to build those connections for yourself.
• Money: Funding amounts from the accelerator should not influence your decision to go there. Good companies will get funding, build a good company and spend as little as possible doing it.
• Mentor walls: In Canada, there is a relatively small pool of people with both time and capital but there are a lot of people who can help you move the needle in different ways.

Right away some might say that the above less-important items are what builds momentum and if you look at the YC companies’ momentum being three times that of TechStars, then how can I say they are less important? These things have the greatest effect after the startup object is already in motion, in my opinion. The less important items are used all too often as the way to get the startup object moving.

A simple scorecard to find out who’s best for you

If a scorecard was set up to measure a program it should look something like this:

Q: The program is located near companies that I am interested in working with:

1. None that I know of.

3. Some interesting founders.

5. Who we would exit to and would like on our advisory board are within walking distance.

Q: Investors in successful companies that have been in the program are:

1. Not involved in investments.

3. One of 12 investors in the companies that graduate.

5. Take a board seat and/or a significant position in the financing round following completion of the program.

Q: Companies that have been successful in the program in the past are:

1. Nothing like us, we are B2B SaaS and all the successful companies are gaming companies.

3. Some are similar to us, there is no particular pattern to the type of company.

5. Just like us, we are a hardware company and everyone that has done well post-program are hardware companies.

Q: Funding we receive from the accelerator program is enough to:

1. We can go six to 12 months no problem, it’s great to not have to raise or find revenue right away.

3. It is OK but in six months if we don’t have revenue or financing we are done.

5. We can pay rent while in the program but we have to move and stay lean to survive.

This is by no means research-quality metrics but it does start to assign some way to weight rankings for you. If I was going to score YC, I would give it a 5, 3, 4, and 5, for a total 17 out of 20.

What else should be on this scorecard?

This post was originally published on Jesse’s blog, Who you calling a Jesse?

Technorati Tags: startup, incubator, accelerator, Y Combinator, StartupWeekendHamilton3, social capital, peer mentorship, investors, mentors, Demo Day, Goldmine Effect, Rasmus Ankerson, TechStars, scorecard, Paul Graham

By Leo Valiquette

During my years as a full-time journo, I crossed paths with many a startup technology venture that claimed to be operating in so-called stealth mode. It was the early 2000s, before the process of getting technology to market was as socially enabled as it is now, and startup CEOs seemed to consider it hip and trendy to apply the S word to their businesses.

Where, I wonder, are many of those startups now?

We wrote many moons ago about the inherent foolishness of trying to build a business by somehow staying under the radar. You can’t define a market need, develop a product to meet that need, secure the funding necessary for operations or build the team that can pull it all off without telling the world who you are and what you are trying to do.

Stealth mode would appear to be a concept as lost to history as nine-figure VC deals for photonics startups. But the term popped up again a few weeks ago when I sat down with an Ottawa CEO. She used the term to describe the operational philosophy of her business, despite the fact that her business, in the space of five years, has grown into a global competitor that is doubling and tripling its revenue each year and taking market share from incumbent rivals.

It’s a family-run business with a secret sauce that is disrupting the status quo of its industry, with its reasons for wanting to keep its cards close to its chest. The other shareholders, the CEO told me, are quite reluctant to engage in any overt marketing or media relations activity that would put the company, or its proprietary technology, in the spotlight. Instead, the company prefers to build its business by attending industry events and letting the quality of its offering speak for itself through customer referrals and word of mouth.

“But,” I said. “How can you be in stealth mode if you are attending conferences, walking tradeshow floors, talking to prospective customers and snooping out your competition with a name tag around your neck?”

I said to her, politely, of course, that she was in anything but stealth mode. If her concern was in competitors finding out too much about her company’s proprietary technology (which at this point isn’t patented, but only a trade secret), she sure as heck would not be walking around a tradeshow floor talking to people about it when there’s no telling who might be lurking around within earshot.

It’s a paranoia that seems all too common – keeping business development and marketing efforts within the envelope of closed industry events is perceived as less threatening than having exposure in well-read media outlets. Which is utterly counterintuitive – the media outlet is likely to have a much more diluted audience, even if it is a larger one, whereas the industry event is likely to have a higher concentration of the people you want to meet as well as the very people you don’t want looking under your skirts.

And in the context of that industry event, it is much easier for a member of your team to have a slip of the tongue. But if you are advertising in a media outlet, you have full control over the message and the information that is disclosed. Even if it is an editorial opportunity, you can prepare in advance to ensure you don’t disclose anything during an interview that you don’t want to see in print.

It’s my biased opinion that raising your profile through earned media coverage, advertising or some combination thereof is not only crucial to raising your company’s profile and driving your business development activities, it is often a safer way to do so without losing control of your message. I am not suggesting that the conference or trade show circuit be avoided – it’s a crucial element of an effective marketing strategy in most industries. But if you are already engaging with your marketplace through that channel, then you should have nothing to fear with pursuing other activities such as advertising buys, public relations and social media engagement.

In fact, the sooner you do pick up these other tools in the marketing tool box and put them to work, the sooner you will develop clear policies and communications strategies for your team that will mitigate the risk of the wrong information being slipped to the wrong pair of ears. If you want to build a business, you can’t avoid exposure, but you can manage that exposure wisely and, ultimately, to the benefit of your bottom line, which is the whole point.

Image: Game Informer

Technorati Tags: stealth mode, startup, entrepreneur, marketing, marketing strategy, communications strategy, public relations

By Denzil Doyle

In my last article, I discussed the tendency of key stakeholders in a high technology company to call for the CEO’s resignation at the first sign of trouble, particularly if the CEO is a technical person who lacks “business management” experience. The pressure for change is usually strongest from the financial community. My advice to a board of directors that must deal with such pressure is to remain focused on the qualities that any good CEO must possess regardless of his or her background, namely leadership, management, technology knowhow, and marketing knowhow.

I cited the example of Ken Olsen, the founding president of Digital Equipment Corporation, who came under severe criticism from Wall Street for turning in a bad quarter shortly after the company went public, despite the fact that he had built a company with sales of over $100 million in less than a decade. (That was the equivalent of over $1 billion today.)

Ken decided to go to New York and address his critics directly. He started with a lecture that went something like this:

“I understand that some of you want me fired because I am no good with the numbers. Well, I want you to know that when the company was very small, I was both the purchasing manager who bought the components that went into our computers and I was the sales manager who set the price of those computers and the modules that went into them. In fact, we sold the modules as a separate product line. I used to buy a component called a pulse transformer for a dollar and have our production people mount it on a printed circuit board and sell it as a module for $10. I soon learned that that nine percent of profit really added up.”

The financial people thought he was a kook and left him alone after that while he went on to build a multi-billion dollar company.

Those of us who knew him personally would confirm that he had the four CEO qualities in spades and if the financial people had listened carefully they would have recognized them as well. As a leader, he demonstrated that he could wear many hats simultaneously and he recognized the value of humour in his communications. As a manager, he demonstrated that he did indeed understand the numbers. As a technical expert, he understood what went into the computers, and as a marketing expert, he knew what the market would bear.

Hopefully, the financial people came away from the meeting knowing that a good high technology CEO is likely to be a very complex person who is capable of delivering more than management knowhow.

Image: Best Investments for Beginners

Denzil Doyle’s involvement in Ottawa’s high technology industry goes back to the early 1960s when he established a sales office for Digital Equipment Corporation, a Boston-based firm that had just developed the world’s first minicomputer. The Canadian operation quickly evolved into a multi-faceted subsidiary. When he left the company in 1981, Canadian sales exceeded $160 million and its employment exceeded 1,500. In his next career, Doyle built a consulting and investment company,Doyletech Corporation, that not only helped emerging companies, but built companies of its own. In recognition of his contributions to Canada’s high technology industry, he was awarded an honourary Doctorate of Engineering by Carleton University in 1981 and a membership in the Order of Canada in 1995.

Technorati Tags: management, leadership, CEO, technology knowhow, marketing knownow, marketing strategy, business management, board of directors, startup, entrepreneur, Ken Olsen, Digital Equipment