Paranoid on the Internet

 
You’ve probably heard by now about the latest big computer virus: Conficker.

Jordan Robertson on AOL News writes, “The fast-moving Conficker computer worm, a scourge of the Internet that has infected at least 3 million PCs, is set to spring to life in a new way on Wednesday – April Fools’ Day.

“That’s when many of the poisoned machines will get more aggressive about “phoning home” to the worm’s creators over the Internet. When that happens, the bad guys behind the worm will be able to trigger the program to send spam, spread more infections, clog networks with traffic, or try and bring down Web sites.”

Those in the know expect the date will come and go without any serious problems. They’ve been aware of the virus for months and have been working on it. If you remember the Y2K furor, you’ll probably be a little skeptical. I am, but I’m also paranoid enough to take all the precautions I can. After all, it’s my computer, my data and content, and my time spent to recreate it if something goes awry.

So, I’m taking the same precautions I always – well, usually – take to protect against a major data loss:

• Download the latest updates for my anti-virus software
• Download the latest Microsoft patches for my OS
• Back up all my files (which I don’t do nearly as often as I should)
• Run a sweep of my hard drive to detect any hidden problems

All in all, I’m feeling pretty comfortable about my situation. But I’m still paranoid. If I were working for a big  company on their computer, with their IT department, and their data, I wouldn’t care. Let it crash. Not my problem. Having to recreate all that information is just more job security – and we can all use more of that right now.

 However, since it’s my computer and my data, I’ll be taking a personal day tomorrow. I know it’s silly, but I just don’t want to take the chance. There’s plenty of work I can do either off-line or even off-computer.

Remember, the only impregnable firewall is to turn your computer off. So, take a personal day and tell your boss I said it was all right…

Death, Taxes, and Other Realities

 
One of the advantages of working for someone else is you don’t have to do a lot of business-related things like getting a license, collecting and paying sales tax, understanding and conforming to local codes, and doing the accounting. You show up, do your job and a whole lot of other business stuff happens without you ever having to worry about it, because there are lots of nice people who enjoy – or are at least willing to do – all the jobs you hate.

Being your own boss means you get to do all the nasty jobs as well as the fun ones. Fortunately, there’s help – lots of it.

Community Colleges

If you live in a city of any size, there’s probably a community college nearby. I lived in Cheyenne, Wyoming for awhile – population about 45,000 and in the middle of nowhere – and they had a very nice one. There are several nice things about community colleges:

• It’s easy to enroll.
• It’s easier to just take a class or two when it’s convenient than it would be at a university.
• If you want to learn about something in depth, you can take a semester-long course.
• If you want to take several short courses, they almost always have community education or extension programs.
• The cost is very reasonable.
• They offer a wide range of subjects.

For the coming semester, the extension program at my local community college is offering one and two day classes on:

• Start Your Own Home-based Business
• Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
• Dancing
• Performing Arts

So, you have your choice and it can be entertaining as well as educational.

Small Business Administration (SBA)

If you’re focused on your business – and flamenco dancing’s not your thing -  the Small Business Administration (SBA) is a treasure trove of information and contacts to help to get started or handle a specific problem. They have local offices or you can visit online at:

http://www.sba.gov/

Here’s a rundown of some of their offerings:

• Plan, Start, and Manage Your Business
• Financial Assistance
• Counseling & Assistance
• Contract Opportunities
• Disaster Assistance
• Laws/Regulations
• Online Training
• SCORE – Service Corps of Retired Executives

If you run into a problem with your business – and you will, probably lots of them – the most important thing to remember is that you can get help and advice, often free, to help you work through it. Just be prepared to run into a lot of unexpected road blocks.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to finish my taxes!

Market Research – Why?!?!

 
My image of market research has always been one of databases, surveys, statistics, and – well – a lot of things that are even more confusing to me than math!

And, to some extent, that’s true.  Good market researchers will take the ball, run with it for as long as you’re willing to pay them, and do all those mysterious things that market researchers do. However, if you’re running a business on a budget, you probably can’t afford to let them have the ball for very long.

So, the question is: do you need market research and if so, why?

There are two main reasons you do need market research and pretty much everything else is a sub-category of these two: customers and competition. These are inextricably intertwined, as you’ll see. But, let’s look at the separately first and then how they come together.

Your Customers

Simply, if you don’t have customers, you’ll go out of business; unless it’s a “hobby” business you use as an excuse to get out of the house every day. For the rest of us, we need people buying our products so we can make money.

Logically, you want to attract as many customers as possible, within the practical limits of your budget and production capacity (which you can increase if you get too many customers – what a problem to have!). To do that, you have to know something about your customers in order to induce them to purchase your products:

1. Needs
2. Desires
3. Buying Habits

If you have a good understanding of these three things, you’ll have a pretty good handle on how to successfully sell to your target audience.

 For example, if you sell motor scooters, you won’t have much luck selling one to an executive with a six million dollar house and three luxury cars. On the other hand, it will be much easier to sell them to college students of limited means who have to get to class and their minimum wage job every day. They need to work to support themselves and they want to get a college degree so they don’t have to stay in that minimum wage job forever. Finally, will buying your scooter make them look like a loser to their friends, or will it make them cool, eco-friendly, stylish, and hip?

Knowing what your customers and prospects want is half the battle. The second is knowing what your competition is doing.

Your Competition

Understanding your competition – let’s continue with the scooter example – is as easy as visiting their stores from time to time, where you can check their merchandise, the level of customer activity, what items seem to be big sellers, etc.

If you’re running some – or all – of your business online, you won’t be able to directly check out the competition. However, your website host should provide you with diagnostic tools to evaluate visitors to your website – your customers – and you can visit the websites of your competitors, just as you’d walk into their brick and mortar store.

There should also be trade publications (which you can probably receive free as a retailer) and trade shows where you can learn about what’s new in the market and get a sense of the merchandise you want to carry. Commercial publications will be able to tell you what’s happening from the consumer end.

In fact, to revert to the customer side for a moment – you can receive media kits from major publications which will have lots of general demographic information about your customers. Publications send these out in the hope you’ll advertise with them and maybe you’ll want to do that. But in order for them to prove their value to you as an advertising medium, they have to prove they’re reaching your target audience.

These two elements come together in your product research and development, branding, marketing strategy, advertising strategy, and just about everything else you do. To be successful, you must know what your customers want and promote it to them in ways that meet their needs, fulfill their desires, make them attractive to their peer group and – here’s the competition part – which also differentiates you from the competition. You must make your products “unique and desirable” in the minds of your customers.

Great Books to Help You Build Your Business

 
I’ve been remiss lately in adding to my list of reading recommendations, so here’s a quick rundown of three books that I’ve found to be informative and helpful:

The Publicity Handbook
David R. Yale
McGraw-Hill
2001

The Publicity Handbook is an excellent general introduction to public relations. Since it was first written published in 2001, much has changed with regard to PR and the Internet, but it does contain valuable content on using the Internet for PR. It thoroughly covers all the basics from planning and working with the media to the new tools and audiences now accessible using the Internet. It also contains an extensive list of sources and services for publicists. 

PR 2.0 New Media, New Tools, New Audiences
Deidre Breakenridge
Pearson Education, Inc.
2008

PR 2.0 focuses only on how “Web 2.0″ has added to the publicist’s arsenal of tools to reach their audience. It covers PR resources that are now available as a result of the latest wave of Internet tools – often referred to as Web 2.0 – as well has how to use them, from interactive newsrooms on your website to social networking and RSS. In fact, it was PR 2.0 that prompted my earlier blog on RSS and how to use it. From a technical standpoint, PR 2.0 offers lots of excellent ideas for what to do, but doesn’t go into a lot of detail about “how to do.” Still, an excellent resource for what’s new in PR on the web. Of course, these new tools are applicable to all your marketing and advertising plans, not just PR.

The One-Day Marketing Plan (Second Edition)
Roman G. Hiebling Jr. and Scott W. Cooper
NTC Business Books
1999

First, one small complaint about The One-Day Marketing Plan: to call it that is a bald-faced lie. It’s 316 pages long for heaven sake! You can’t even read it in one day, let along create a marketing plan with it that quickly. That said, it is crammed full of useful information on developing your marketing plan. This book plumbs the depths of what it really takes to create a comprehensive plan. If you plan to follow the book in detail, you should hire a full-time marketing director to do it; there’s just no other way to accomplish everything. However, you can back off from a lot of the in-depth planning and research, adapt it to your own business needs and time constraints, create an excellent plan, and still be miles ahead of your competition. It’s a terrific resource that will serve you well for many years as your business grows.

They say that knowledge is power. If you can set aside just 30 minutes a day to read one of the many business books available, you’ll quickly be able to take advantage of tools and techniques that will ensure your business stands out from the crowd.

RSS – Really Simple Syndication … Simplified

 
I recently had a conversation with my daughter who was bemoaning the fact that she has less time to spend with her friends and that her new friendships don’t seem to have the intensity and commitment of those she made in high school.

Several things rapidly became clear. First, the friendships she made in high school were based on intense, emotional situations and that she and her girlfriends spent lots of time together every day engaged in common, highly bonding experiences. Second, as we get older, that level of commitment becomes unsustainable as we become more involved in family, work, and other activities. And, third, we have a limited reserve of emotional commitment which gets spread thinner and thinner among more and more people as time goes on. 

She then realized that, while she still has a few close friends from high school, she also has a much wider group of more casual friends and that she can enjoy the benefits of that large circle of friends while still preserving her diminishing emotional captital.

I bring that up by way of introduction to the concept of RSS – Really Simple Syndication. Ever since I learned about it, I’ve been enthusiastic about the concept and its potential to easily share information, promote your business, and – most important – do it all on your customers’ terms; in other words, what works best for them.

One of my mantras from years of direct response marketing experience is: make it easy for the prospect to do what you want them to do. Give them as many ways as possible act.

For example, once I discovered the C-Y-A advantages of email, I’ve never looked back. If I had to, I could probably document every important decision I’ve made in the last ten years, based on email alone. However, there may be prospects who’d prefer to call you and maybe even a few that prefer to write and mail you a letter. Let’s hope so, or all we’ll get from the Post Office will be bills and junk mail!

When it comes to letting your prospects come to you on their terms, RSS is fantastic. And, to bring things neatly together, your clients and prospects want to receive information from you, but have less and less time to do it the old-fashioned way: browsing your website, reading the newspaper (if they can find one!), etc. In her excellent book, PR 2.0 New Media, New Tools, New Audiences, Deirdre Breakenridge observes:

“The benefits of RSS feeds are unmatched. To put this into perspective, think about how much time each day you spend weeding through interesting and sometimes not so interesting content in your e-mail box. You probably have the same amount of time to visit all your favorite news and information portals to read about what’s going on in your industry (or to stay abreast of the world around you). Very little time indeed. If you have an overwhelming sense of information overload, you are not alone and certainly can apply this same scenario to what your audience experiences.”

My dilemma is: how does it work? Yes, I know WordPress conveniently provides an RSS widget for my blog, but I confess I’m often baffled by even “really simple” technology and really want to know how this works. Can I get an “Amen?” 

Guerilla Marketing on the Internet states, “…RSS feeds are groups of internet distribution programs that allow anyone to monitor and collect information in one place and receive alerts when updated blog, news, and podcast content is added. Think of it this way – subscribing to an RSS feed is like having a personal assistant who scours the internet, sifts through mounds of information, pulls out what you’ve requested, and delivers it to you exactly the way you like it.”

Great, I already knew what it does, now I understand it does it with software. I’m getting there.

Another quote from Guerilla Marketing, “RSS feeds are quickly becoming internet mainstays because they make it possible for people to receive specifically requested information in the format they choose. Literally anyone with an internet connection can request an RSS feed; they cost nothing to set up and the information is sent automatically.”

Even better. I understand much better how it works from the users’ end and I even have specific places I can go to learn more about – technically – how to do it.

Again, from Guerilla Marketing, “… if you want all of your information delivered to one spot, you’ll need software – a reader or aggregator – that translates cyberspace coding into readable text. There are many to choose from: some are free, and others are not. You can download free software at sites like Reader.google.com, RSSreader.com, or Newsgator.com.”

And, you know that if these sites have it available to download, they’ll also tell you, not only how to use it to receive feeds, but also how to set it up to send feeds. We’re almost there and here’s the payoff from Guerilla Marketing:

“It’s fairly easy to add one or many RSS feeds to your website. We suggest using tools like the one you find at RSStojavascript.com. You’ll be asked to enter the RSS source’s URL, answer a few questions, and then they’ll provide you with the HTML code you’ll need to activate your feed. You’ll also be able to preview and test your feed and make sure it’s working properly. There’s not much more involved than that.”

I know I feel better about RSS now that I’ve done a little research and I hope it’s helpful to you as well. Next step: a look at the specific “how to” required to set it up.

As a side note, I can enthusiastically recommend both PR 2.0 New Media, New Tools, New Audiences and Guerilla Marketing on the Internet (2008) as great resources for what to do it and how to do it using the latest Internet capabilities!