Better Business Blog

7 Tips for Networking

Networking goes hand in hand with running a successful business.

But many of us dread walking into a room and introducing ourselves to a bunch of strangers.

I've been asked to share my best networking tips at a meeting today of the National Association of Women Business Owners in Philadelphia. Here are the most valuable tips I've come across – and put to work myself – over the years:

1. Resist the urge to arrive late. It's almost counter-intuitive, but showing up early at a networking event is a much better strategy than getting there on the later side. As a first attendee, you'll notice that it's calmer and quieter – and people won't have settled into groups yet. It's easier to find other people who don't have conversation partners yet.

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11 major public relations mistakes (and how to learn from them)

“There is no such thing as bad publicity,” unless your company’s latest advertising campaign completely backfires and angers countless loyal customers. Even the most established brands are not immune to a faulty public relations blunder — including household names like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola — and it takes more than an apology to correct a company image and recover lost revenue.

I asked a panel of successful young entrepreneurs to share a misstep made by a major brand, and what they’ve taken away from the experience as seen from afar. Here’s how they learned from other companies’ mistakes and how they’re using the new knowledge to improve their own businesses.

Name one major PR blunder that you’ve seen a major brand make recently. What one lesson should all entrepreneurs learn from their mistake?

The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC leads  #FixYoungAmerica, a solutions-based movement that aims to end youth unemployment and put young Americans back to work.

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How To Close Big Business Deals

You don't climb the biggest hill in your neighborhood the same way you would tackle Mount Everest. Changes in scale require a big shift in tactics.

Let's start with the seven things that make your big sale different than your average size sale:

1. Size: Obvious, sure, but worth the mention. Adding a couple of zeros to the deal can change more than just the sweatiness of your palms.
2. Complexity: The bigger the deal, the more moving parts. Moving from 100 loaves to 100,000 loaves may not change the recipe–but it increases the logistical complexity of getting the bread to the market.

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Ever gone through PayPal reports hell? You will love SlowPal

 

PayPal claims over 100 million active user accounts, but a lot of people hate the company, for a variety of reasons. Love or despise it, it has become hard to ignore and avoid the e-payments juggernaut whether you are an online seller or buyer.

Enter Shoply, which aims to democratize online retailing of goods and services for small businesses worldwide. They hate PayPal too, but they realize that it’s become too big and powerful for them to sidestep the online payments giant.

One particular frustration of the Shoply team with PayPal is its slow and tedious transaction reports system. If you’ve ever used PayPal to peruse though and search for transactions in your account history, you will know that it is prone to crash and is often as slow as molasses in January.

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Baby Boomers: America's Hottest Group Of New Entrepreneurs

Aging in America has changed – and I for one, think it’s for the better. We are living and working longer and feeling good while doing it. Was it Oprah who first said, “50 is the new 40?” I see it at MBO everyday as I watch expert professional Baby Boomers leave corporate full-time positions to become America’s hot new entrepreneurs.

Rather than taking a bow with traditional retirement, many boomers today are forging fulfilling encore careers with independent work. Today, there are five million boomer independents in the U.S. and it has never been easier for these senior professionals to design a second solo act. Facilitated by the rise of cloud and mobile computing and social networking, boomers are easily able to leverage their intellectual and social capital to start solo businesses and earn continued income and professional kudos.

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5 Lessons from an Unconventional Entrepreneur Who Raised Millions

Crowdfunding may be changing the rules of the financing game–witness the nearly $8 million plus that the Pebble smart watch raised on the site Kickstarter — but many entrepreneurs still want to raise venture capital.

And though seed money is flowing, as you’ll see in Forbes’ Midas List, it isn’t as easy as some news reports would make you think to raise equity capital. There’s a small universe of businesses that actually raise this form of financing. According to CB Insights, venture capitalists only invested in 785 companies in the first quarter. While that’s the second highest number in nine quarters, it obviously represents just a handful of all of the startups that are out there.

So how do you get your hands on some much-needed investment capital? You may get some ideas from Amanda Steinberg, founder and CEO of DailyWorth, an online community to help women build their net worth that now generates “multimillion” dollar revenue through advertising deals with companies such as ING Direct and OppenheimerFunds.

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5 Ways Small Business Can Attract Big Clients

Winning business from the Fortune 500 is a great way to put your company on the map.

Tackle unsexy jobs that big companies find inconvenient or, if they face high labor costs, unprofitable to manage. At Standard Functional Foods Group in Nashville, CEO Jimmy Spradley (right) attracts food conglomerates by offering to make new or smaller brands of foods like granola bars, helping clients avoid small production runs. By consolidating orders from multiple firms, he's built a profitable business and expects sales of $150 million this year.

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http://money.cnn.com//galleries/2012/smallbusiness/1204/gallery.winning-customers.fortune/index.html

The 7 Pillars of Connecting With Absolutely Anyone

 

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” - Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

I don’t care what your goals, industry or interests are, there’s no getting around it: Personal relationships run the world. But why is it that some people seem to build instant rapport with most anyone they come across, while others are left with a network of one?

Over the past few years, I’ve conducted a study of exactly what sets these people apart. Turns out, the results are more simple, and more powerful, than you’d think. And they led me to interactions and connections with world-class CEOs, best-selling authors, professional athletes and other seemingly untouchable folks, including Tony Robbins and Warren Buffett.

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When It Comes to Networking, Farmers Will Always Beat Hunters

Has a complete stranger ever solicited you for a referral or business? I call this “premature solicitation.”

I’ve been its victim many times. I was recently speaking at a networking event, and before my presentation, a man came up to me and said, “Hi, it is a real pleasure to meet you. I understand you know Richard Branson. I offer specialized marketing services and I am sure his Virgin enterprises could benefit from what I provide. Could you please introduce me to him so that I can show him how this would assist his companies?”

Here’s what was going on inside my head: “Are you completely insane? I’m going to introduce you, someone I don’t know and don’t have any relationship with, to Sir Richard, whom I’ve only met a few times, so that you can proceed to attempt to sell him a product or service that I don’t know anything about and haven’t used myself? Yeah, right. That’s never going to happen.”

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Go Guerrilla: A DIY Guide to Product Launches

Joshua Waldman is what you might call an online-marketing machine. He knows how to build and feed social networks as a springboard to opening doors and achieving results. What's more, he's willing to share everything he knows.

When he realized that social media are the key to unlocking job opportunities, he wrote "Job Searching With Social Media for Dummies."When his book catapulted to the No. 2 position among Amazon.com business books and won features on CBS, ABC News, Mashable and mediabistro.com, as well as such publications as the Chicago Tribune and U.S. News & World Report, I asked how he did it. His answers provide a guide for anyone launching products in today's networked world.

Barbara Findlay Schenck: Every new product marketer craves media coverage. How did you get it?

Joshua Waldman: My biggest asset was a list of 500 top bloggers and media people, segmented into 11 groups, so I could send different and appropriate messages to different people.

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3 Slick Analytics Dashboards to Monitor Your Business Website

If you’re running a company website without an analytics dashboard, you may as well be stumbling around in the dark. Building a viable and sustainable web presence in any industry is all about understanding the needs of your users and tailoring your service to fit their needs — how can you do that if you don’t even know what your users are looking at or how they got to your website?

The good news is that analytics dashboards simple to implement, and they also come in a variety of shapes and sizes to suit the needs and goals of your small business. While some people swear by Google Analytics or the tracking plug-ins found organically within their specific web hosting or content managing service (think WordPress analytics), there’s a lot of information you may not be getting from these sources. For example, while Google Analytics does a great job tracking individual page vies, it doesn’t necessarily break down any meaningful social sharing or referrals. You may want to know why a specific webpage on your site garners major traffic, but Google Analytics will only note that it comes from Facebook.

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Network Better Than Bill Clinton: 6 Ways To Build Bonds Faster

Do you like networking?

Me neither. I often want to run screaming from cocktail parties.

Yet I do like people–they are endlessly fascinating. And this, my friends, is how you can learn to love networking.

Here’s the key: The more you help people get what they want, the more they’ll help you. When you’re networking, you’re not just looking blindly for people who can give you stuff; you’re looking to create another kind of family—people you care about, people who will care about you.

“Palm Up”  Networking

Have you ever noticed there’s a physicality to the “gimme”? There’s a way people look at you when they want something: eager, impatient, and expectant. Sometimes they are leaning forward, as if preparing to grab. They’re watching for their moment, and if they don’t get it, their disappointment is reflected all over their face. Ick.

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Which Social Network Should You Use — and When? [INFOGRAPHIC]

Want to make the most of the social web? It’s more complicated than just posting status updates at random and seeing what sticks.

When is Facebook most effective? When are you better off using Twitter, or LinkedIn? And what exactly is Google+ good for, anyway?

The business consultant network Zintro recently pulled research from more than a dozen sources including Mashable, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and Quantcast to put together this nifty infographic, which will help you develop your social strategy. Check it out below for the full report.

Do you use different social networks for different purposes? Let us know in the comments.

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Marketing 2015: Be Prepared to Be Surprised. Very Surprised

Some steps marketers take are easy. They feel like baby steps, being a little shaky on the legs, but in retrospect they are not so difficult. For example, Facebook fan acquisition…. Many brands have mastered that. Read all about MTV’s journey to 100 million fans here, Disney’s here.

Social media marketing takes new skills, for sure, but the beauty of social media is that most of us can acquire those skills – it is a democratising medium. By definition it is accessible.

So I don’t imagine social will be a big differentiator going forward. It simply can’t be. My view, expressed elsewhere, is that the wrong data model lies behind social, anyway. 

Outside of social, a few marketers are taking on a much larger remit, like becoming the source of innovation for the enterprise.

In that role the marketer helps redefine the purpose of the business.  If marketers don’t do that, then CIOs will or innovation will be left to languish with the Chief Innovation Officer, a title without a strategic role in many organizations.

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Why You Should Do Business in Mexico

Elizabeth Helsley fell in love with Mexico while on a yearlong college study abroad trip to Mexico City. After graduating in 2001, she went back home and worked in San Diego until a U.S.-based company relocated her back to Mexico City. She was thrilled with the opportunity, so much so that in 2010 she left the company and started her international consulting business Global Luxe in Guadalajara.

“I get up and am excited to go to work every day,” she beams.

Entrepreneurs like Helsley with a touch of wanderlust are looking to Mexico as a viable business location, and for smart reasons.

First: while the rest of the world reels from financial meltdown, Mexico’s economy is going strong.

“After the crisis of 2008, Mexico proved to be very stable,” says Mauricio Monroy, president of the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce California Regional Chapter. “We had a similar situation in the late '90s and since then, our banks have gotten healthy and diversified, so we are nicely insulated from what the rest of the world is going through.”

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April 13, 2012

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Business Taxes Decoded

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Elizabeth Helsley fell in love with Mexico while on a yearlong college study abroad trip to Mexico City. After graduating in 2001, she went back home and worked in San Diego until a U.S.-based company relocated her back to Mexico City. She was thrilled with the opportunity, so much so that in 2010 she left the company and started her international consulting business Global Luxe in Guadalajara.

“I get up and am excited to go to work every day,” she beams.

Entrepreneurs like Helsley with a touch of wanderlust are looking to Mexico as a viable business location, and for smart reasons.

First: while the rest of the world reels from financial meltdown, Mexico’s economy is going strong.

“After the crisis of 2008, Mexico proved to be very stable,” says Mauricio Monroy, president of the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce California Regional Chapter. “We had a similar situation in the late '90s and since then, our banks have gotten healthy and diversified, so we are nicely insulated from what the rest of the world is going through.”

Earn the Trust of Hispanic Consumers and Your Brand Will Dominate

As organizations seek to find new ways to capture sustainable business growth, the estimated $1.2 trillion dollars of Hispanic consumer purchasing power in 2012 represents a time-sensitive opportunity for America’s corporations to earn this powerful relationship.   

Creating and sustaining momentum with this rapidly growing consumer segment is key, yet risky if not executed properly.   In fact, many brands have tried to market to Hispanics, yet have failed miserably losing millions of dollars along the way.  These unsuccessful attempts have proven that Hispanic consumers are looking for brands to create greater cultural affinity and to listen to their needs more carefully.   

As a group of participants shared with me at a Hispanic Consumer Roundtable event my company recently hosted, “If you take the time to know me you will not need to sell me.”

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Learning to Network: Organized Study vs. Winging It

My colleagues and I, as co-authors of the new book Business Networking and Sex – Not What You Think, thought it would be interesting to see if men and women acquire networking skills in different ways. So in one of our surveys, we asked participants how they learned to network.

Most respondents--both men and women--cited multiple ways. More than one-fourth said they had been mentored, which is widely considered one of the most effective ways to learn anything. Almost half said they had learned on their own, but many of them also participated in networking groups or read books and articles. In fact, more than three-quarters of respondents cited their use of networking groups. Which isn't surprising. Such groups often provide training programs and materials. Their popularity also illustrates the old wisdom of learning by doing. Many people learn fastest by watching others, making mistakes and correcting them.

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Entrepreneurs Network for Success

Networking…as entrepreneurs we do this almost instinctively, but are we taking the wrong approach when networking for our small businesses? Here are some resources that may help.

Networking Advice

What Reid Hoffman can teach you about connecting. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or not, networking is the key to your success. Realize that as an entrepreneur your ability to connect will define the direction your small business takes. Bloomberg Businessweek

Even businesses without Websites can network online. A surprising number of small businesses don’t yet have Websites, but that doesn’t keep them from networking online. LinkedIn specifically creates a hub for entrepreneurs even without other Web presences. The Sydney Morning Herald

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Must-Have Mobile Apps for Business Travelers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time is money, especially when it comes to business travel. How many times have you missed a flight or spent too much money on a rental car because you didn't have the right information handy when you needed it? Staying organized and informed on the road can be a major headache.

The good news is that a growing number of mobile apps can help frazzled travelers with everything from tracking flights to managing itineraries to finding the best deals on hotels. Here are some of the ways apps can make your life on the go easier and more economical:

Get deals on flights, hotels and car rentals.
Most business travelers make their travel reservations using a computer from home or work. But once you're on the road, plans can change and you may need to quickly find a good price for plan B.

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A Guide to Ambient Social Networking for Business Owners

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Ambient" social networks were all the buzz at Austin's annual South by Southwest tech festival. So what are ambient networks? They include social discovery platforms and "proximity"-based apps on a smartphone or mobile device that locate other app users within the same geographical area.

Unlike Foursquare, which connects people to places, ambient social networks aim to connect people to people. Startups playing in the ambient social networking sandbox include:

• Highlight
• Sonar
• Glancee
• Grindr
• Banjo
• Circle

Depending on the app, users can search for and connect with Facebook contacts and Twitter followers, or locate nearby app users who have friends in common or share their interests, hobbies, or even dating preferences.

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Rise of the Global Entrepreneurial Class

Innovation is a demographic, not a geographic, phenomenon. 

We are in an age of, largely positive, conspicuous creation.  The rise of entrepreneurial class supersedes nationality.  Whether from Tsinghua, Indian Institute of Technology, or Stanford, entrepreneurs with similar education and ambition share more in common with each other than they do with their brethren within borders.  Clustered in the Y-Combinators, the TechStars, and the 500 Startups are manifold international Founders, CEOs, and teams. 

Found in near every startup is a method of human capital differentiation.  From visa sponsorships to secure top international talent, to the development team that’s based in China or Israel, many startups cross oceans.  Entrepreneurs will continue to find each other, and distributed talent, ideation, and competition is the undeniable status quo.

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22 Executives Share The Best Advice They Ever Received

No one can make it alone. The most successful leaders are where they are today because they took advice from people they trusted.

We've compiled some of the best tips that executives have shared throughout the years, including lessons from tech icons like Bill Gates, empire-builders like Richard Branson and legendary investment gurus like Warren Buffett.

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Mastering The Uncomfortable Art Of Personal Branding

Whether interviewing for a job or making a presentation, weaving a strong personal narrative could be the one thing that keeps you on top. Here are a few tips to turning on your personal branding story without turning off your audience.

 

I was recently chatting with an up-and-coming professional speaker about some of the best presenters I've seen on stage. I immediately launched into an unplanned sales pitch for Gary Vaynerchuk, or Gary Vee, as many of us know him online. Within minutes I was citing important milestones in Vaynerchuk's life, such as his pre-school move to the United States from what is now known as Belarus, his experience operating a number of lemonade stands when he was just eight years old, and his college years working in his parents' liquor store. After I walked away from the conversation, I tried desperately to recall when I had seen the best-selling author speak, or more importantly, if I had ever met him in person

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12 Lessons from KONY 2012 from Social Media Power Users

The KONY 2012 video has clocked more than 43 million views in only two days on YouTube (and millions more since appearing on Vimeo two weeks ago), which is fairly amazing considering 1) it’s about something most people have never heard of and 2) it’s a half-an-hour long. (The average viral video on YouTube is two minutes or less.) This earnest effort to bring Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony to justice and free the thousands of “invisible children” that he has abducted and pressed into soldiering and sex-slavery has encountered a fair amount of blowback as well.

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5 Tricks that Every Marketer Needs to Know to Exploit the New Facebook Page Design

Come March 30^th 2012 every active Facebook Fan Page will be flipped over to the new design called The Timeline. Personal Profiles have been using a similar design for some time now. (Pages can choose to push the new design live before that date, but you might want to read the rest of this post before you do so.)

Plenty of posts have been written about all the new features, but I want to point out a few that I think are ripe for marketers.

The obligatory debate rages on about whether or not this format is good or bad for companies, smart marketers are discovering some tweak that need to be made in order to get the most from the new design. (You can get some helpful tips on pages from the Facebook Help page as well)

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