Big Thinking For Small Business

Google Status Page Keeps Users Informed

George Bounacos — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:36:34 +0000

After I told a second client about Google Apps’ dashboard this week, I realized that many people are still unaware that the search and media company updates a page to tell users about outages related to Gmail, Google Docs and other product extensions. When I’ve lived in areas prone to power outages, everyone in the neighborhood [...]

Felix Hernandez, Cy Young Winner? Stick With Developing Staff

George Bounacos — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:26:08 +0000

Hire oddball talent, observed Tom Peters in his heyday as Guru du Jour. He was telling business leaders to look beyond pedigree, beyond the right schools or consultancies and devel0p staff that had the skills and drive to succeed. Credit the Seattle Mariners for doing just that with Felix Hernandez, their baby-faced Venezuelan pitcher who first [...]

Stop Demanding High Rankings

George Bounacos — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:09:38 +0000

I watched another potential lead go by today and decided not to purchase the information because the prospect was in a medium sized market. Their sole criteria was that they wanted to rank in the top 3 spots for a certain local phrase. It’s important that you as a small business don’ t make this mistake: [...]

Be Honest About The Rules – Communicating Bad News #1

George Bounacos — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:02:26 +0000

Big Thinking is kicking off a series about How To Communicate Bad News because we see too many partners, clients and friends often miss the mark and make bad situations worse. The first guideline we’ll share is straight out of today’s headlines: Be Honest About The Rules. There is an incalculably multiplier if you break the rules, your [...]

Google PageRank is Dead – Fast Friday Fact

George Bounacos — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:43:48 +0000

Most people working in the online marketing world have known the truth about Google’s infamous PageRank scoring for several years: it didn’t work, it wasn’t terribly accurate and attempting to classify the billions of pages on the web into 10 clusters was just plain silly. PageRank was named after Larry Page, one of the two Google [...]

Monitoring Your Computer Time

George Bounacos — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:28:45 +0000

Ready to learn more about how you spend your time than you may really want to know? Welcome to RescueTime. This program is one of the easiest ways I’ve found to monitor productivity. Installing a simple program keeps track of the websites I visit and the programs I run. Simple configuration allows me to train the [...]

PDFs Under Siege – Fast Friday Fact

George Bounacos — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 20:15:17 +0000

That seemingly safe PDF you receive may not be as innocuous as it looks, warns Washington Post security guru Brian Krebs. Writing in today’s online edition, Krebs reports that PDF-format owner Adobe is warning of security vulnerabilities. According to Krebs, the company plans to release a fix Tuesday so that its software updates at the same [...]

Disclosure Rules Should Worry Scammers, Not You

George Bounacos — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:28:08 +0000

News around the blogosphere is rampant with warnings about the Federal Trade Commission’s update to the documents used to explain and enforce actions regarding testimonials and endorsements. The big issue for online marketers is that spam blogs and blogs must disclose when a material connection is present between themselves as publisher and a post — even [...]

Fast Flip: Google’s Newsstand

George Bounacos — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:23:41 +0000

I love magazine subscriptions. I especially love free magazine subscriptions, but I love all sorts of print. Magazines, newspapers, catalogs. How many marketers do you know who still keep a copy of Famous Catalogs on their bookshelf between a PHP book and Robert Spector’s book about Amazon’s business model called Get Big Fast? In a world [...]

Trial Microsoft Products Before Buying – Fast Friday Fact

George Bounacos — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:44:59 +0000

We were working with a client recently and the easy project management tools were proving to be too limited. Although both can take a long period to learn how to effectively use, we already knew how to use Microsoft Visio and Microsoft Project. Most of our small business clients don’t need that layer of [...]