Max Teitelbaum is co-founder of WhatRunsWhere.com, an online business intelligence tool that allows businesses to see what their competitors are up to with their display and mobile advertising. On the podcast, he talks about how to grow a market, setting pricing, and building on word of mouth in the digital age.

The TechSmart Podcast is available on iTunes, Stitcher Radio and SoundCloud. When on the Red Cup site, just click the orange button to listen.  Interviews on the podcast are by Lee Schneider.

Startups aren’t one-person operations. You need a team. Shahab Kaviani started CoFoundersLab to help entrepreneurs build their team, starting with the search for a co-founder. Online at CoFounders Lab.com, it’s something like Match.com for startups.

Shahab also shares valuable information about marketing, leveraging social media,  and how to prepare to receive your first-round funding. TechSmart is available on iTunes, SoundCloud and Stitcher Radio. The interviewer is Lee Schneider. The podcast is produced by Red Cup Agency.

When on the Red Cup site, just click the big orange button to listen.

Mobile is exploding. Okay, you know that.  But the question in the back of your mind might be this: How can I leverage mobile for my business? Is my business right for it? Good questions.

Andrew Yu is a pioneer in mobile applications for institutions like Harvard and MIT. He tells us what’s happening in mobile markets, how the technology has changed, and  how to build a mobile platform for your business. If you’re thinking of developing a your own app, he has some start up advice for you.

TechSmart is on iTunes, SoundCloud, and Stitcher Radio.  The interviews are conducted by Lee Schneider.

A new series has started on TechSmart: It’s all about startups and how to promote them.

All too often people bootstrap their brilliant idea, invest life force and soul, not to mention money, only to see that idea vanish like a rock to the bottom of the ocean. Why?  Because even the greatest ideas need to find their audience in order to thrive.

I’ll tell you what I learned from my discussion with Arin Sarkissian of Well.

Allow Interaction. If you allow people who interact with your app to post their experience on Twitter and Facebook, you will create a self-propelled promotion. Arin cited the example of Instagram. He remembered that each time he saw ‘posted via Instagram’ on Twitter, it made him curious about the app and it helped convince him, and so many others, to adopt it. Well has benefitted from this same synergy on social media.

 First Impressions. Early adoption comes from strong first impressions. In the podcast Arin and I talk about how Well had the good fortune to be featured on the iTunes store. One of the reasons? It’s a good-looking app. First impressions matter a lot on an app store, be it Google Play or iTunes, so your logo and icon mean a lot, as do your users’ very first seconds of use. It has to be ‘love at first click’ or fuggaboutit.  It’s tough to help people find something to like in a second or to, but you can make it happen if you focus on your user interface to make it smooth and fun. If it’s thorny, people move on quickly.

Death of the Snippet. In the days of SEO-dominance (seems like yesterday) people found things by search terms, and they were drawn in by the ‘snippet’ of text that appeared below your URL. People still find things that way, but far more powerful is the recommendation engine of user reviews on the various app stores.  If you app has five stars, you’re going to get more adoption. If it has one, better reboot.

The New Word of Mouth.  Much has been written about how the digital/social universe supports virtual ‘word of mouth.’ In the land of Start Ups, you need word of mouth more than ever. This has proven true for Andrew Wicklander’s startup, Tula, software that helps with the business of running a yoga studio, with Andrew Yu’s development of Modo Labs, which is developing mobile portals for universities and large organizations, and Max Teitelbaum’s deployment of Whatrunswhere.com.

Interviews with all of them are coming soon on TechSmart, along with Start Up experts like Praham Ben, Founder & CEO of The Garage and Shahab Kaviani, Co-Founder at CoFounders Lab.  Interested in coffee?  Listen to an interview with Kris Hewitt of eightpointnine.com, a coffee subscription service startup.

The Techsmart podcast is available on SoundCloud, on iTunes, and Stitcher Radio. When on Red Cup, press the orange button to listen.

Well image courtesy of Well.

Kris Hewitt is a co-founder of eightpointnine, a coffee subscription company that represents a new way to buy custom-blended coffee online. Kris talks about how his startup found its market of coffee drinkers, discusses Twitter as a way to direct the conversation, and talks about eightpointnine’s plans for the future. Featured in Springwise, a blog of entrepreneurial ideas, eightpointnine is a startup powered, like others, on caffeine. But Kris and his co-founder, Phil Clarke, have re-imagined e-commerce for the global coffee drinker.

Also in the podcast, Maribel Lopez, columnist at Forbes.com and a mobile market research analyst, tells us how Big Data can be leveraged on mobile devices. TechSmart is on SoundCloud, iTunes and Stitcher Radio. When on the Red Cup site, just click the orange button to listen. Interviews are by Lee Schneider

The news from Apple has come fast and furious – but is it all good? In the view of some reviewers, the iPad mini landed with a thud, and some of the other latest and greatest products seem overpriced and under-featured.  Jeff Haynes, editor at Techbargains.com, sorts it out for you. And MJ Rose, book marketer, author, and blogger at Buzz, Balls and Hype, tells you the best ways to market your book online. The co-author of What to Do Before Your Book Launch tells you the secrets of connecting with bloggers, making a video, and how much to obsess over your Amazon author page. TechSmart is on iTunes, Stitcher Radio and SoundCloud. On the Red Cup site, just hit the orange button to listen.

I recently did this video for Meridian Health Clinic in Santa Monica. The production technique was simple, even intimate, going with a documentary feel and basing the trailer completely on an interview with Eric Schmidt, the clinic director. The video was shot in a couple of hours and post production took about a week. Per Eric’s wishes, we did several versions of the video at different running times – because shorter is better! Here’s a longer-form version for you so that you can get the whole picture in one pass.

This personalized approach for video works well for holistic health practitioners, career and business coaches, and others who want something of themselves to shine through in the finished promo. Contact me for further details and to discuss your video.

If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there.

-Yogi Berra

If you don’t know who Yogi Berra was, he was a sage and holy man who moonlighted as a baseball catcher for the New York Yankees. Yogi said a lot of great things, and the quote above is often attributed to him, although he also said, ‘I didn’t really say everything I said.’

This is why research matters. Research lets you see far, like you have a really good pair of binoculars. All those channels are powerful rivers of information, but you’ll need to know where your audience is, and which among those channels they really like to use. Why?

If you had infinite time and an infinite amount of money you could turn on a fire hose of media and spray your message everywhere. But most of us are not Diddy, and we don’t have that kind of time and money. We need to focus our efforts with research. If you get out your electron microscope and look at the DNA of online social influence, you will see that the road to success starts at two nodes:

• You need to know who will be interested in what you have to say
• You need to know where they hang out so you can talk to them

Let’s say you make great Pinot Noir and you want people to drink a lot of it. You would start by plugging that phrase into a Google Alert so you will be notified whenever anybody is talking about it. You can use the term ‘pinot noir’ to get general results, or you can put in your own brand name to see who is talking about you, and on what channel. You’d search Twitter for that phrase, and you’d look on LinkedIn so see who’s also making Pinot Noir.

Let’s say you are a photographer and you want to do the next great Meow Mix campaign. You’d set up Google Alerts for Meow Mix to see what agency is creating the spots, and who the art directors and brand managers are, or better yet, you’d sign up for adbrands.net and search for every brand you want to reach. Here’s a checklist:

• Set up Google Alerts for key brands and phrases – yours and your competitors’
• Use search.twitter.com to track these brands and phrases on Twitter
• Use analytics.topsy.com to see how these brands and phrases are trending
• Use listorious.com to see who is influential in your field
• Icerocket.com will give you a snapshot of the entire web, from blogs to Facebook to Twitter
• Vintank.com is focused on wine; useful if you make some
• Adbrands.net will zero in on brands, ad agencies and creatives

If you want somebody else to do this for you, you can hire smart people, or you can use these automated tools.

• -socialreport.com links up your Google Analytics and tracks your active networks
• -viralheat.com lets you see all your online activity in a single dashboard
• -customscoop.com builds custom reports of online searches across all channels
• -muckrack.com tracks journalists on Twitter so you can see if they’re writing about your brand

Everybody talks about the value of good content. Sure, content is king. But you also have to know where to send it. That’s why research matters.

This post was originally published by iMedia. Binoculars image by Gerlos via Creative Commons License.

You need a master plan for online communications if…

• You are launching a new product, brand or location
• You are promoting an event
• You plan to spend more than half an hour each day working online social networks
• You will use online media to communicate about what you stand for
• You will build bridges, foster dialogue and connect with a constituency

You don’t need any kind of a plan if you are …

• Posting videos of your cat
• Aggregating content from others
• Reposting, retweeting and recycling ideas

Why will a plan guarantee your success?

Online media comes at you in many directions – and it’s the same for your audience. Some of the people you need to reach are Facebookers, some are hooked on Twitter, others love Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, blogs or email newsletters. You need to know where to find your social media audience across all of those networks, and you need a consistent message to bring to them.

Therefore you need to brainstorm – research all online sources to discover where your audience will be. You’ll need to optimize your communications with them by determining what your strongest channels will be – and spending less time on the weaker channels.

Then, you’ll need to build a base, connecting and interacting with your audience every day. You will find out quickly whether your social media base is most firmly rooted in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Quora or Foursquare.

What next? Create a video showcasing your product, launch or event. Videos are the most popular form of online content, so you’ll want to take advantage of that.

With these elements in place, your next step is to consolidate your media presence. You’ll want to monitor Twitter so that you can connect with influential local and regional journalists who will help drive your message because they share your interests. Support your outreach by issuing press releases on a regular basis.

Want to go further? Consider posting audio, video and photo images of your next event. Be sure all your local listings up are up to date, including Yelp, SuperPages, Google Places/Google Plus, WhitePages, MapQuest, Citysearch, Yellowbook, Local.com and Foursquare. Even if you don’t have a storefront, these listings help stake your claim online, helping your business, idea, product or launch come up more readily in searches. Finally, consider starting up a mailing list and sending out a newsletter monthly or weekly.

Get a comprehensive plan in place and watch your ideas take root and thrive. Learn more.

Lee Schneider runs a communications agency called Red Cup Consulting that specializes in online communications and promotion. 

Launch image by Stephen Depolo via Creative Commons License.

Michael Miller is Chief Marketing Officer of HyperMarketing Inc., ranked this year by AdAge as the largest Independent Marketing Services Network in US.  He joins us on the podcast today to talk about how brands should respond to negative publicity online and also applications like Pinterest that don’t start out as business applications but later become them.

Maribel Lopez, a mobile marketing analyst, discusses the concept of ‘right time experiences’ and how they will make our mobile applications more useful to us.

TechSmart is carried on iTunes, Stitcher Radio and SoundCloud. When you’re on the Red Cup site, just click the orange button to listen.