7 Reasons Why Small Businesses Should Take a Look at Foursquare

Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
posted by: John Jantsch

Mon Jan 04, 2010
…The idea behind location awareness is that people will use the GPS capabilities in today’s mobile devices to check-in, tweet, review, and refer and add their location while doing so. Today I would like to talk about what I think is one of the first location aware services that is already beginning to impact small business.

Image via WikipediaThe service is called Foursquare and while it’s receiving lots of hype from the bleeding edge social media types as the next Twitter, it may be totally foreign, or at least nonsensical, to many small business owners. While I want to use this post to introduce you to Foursquare, keep in mind that my primary point of view is that of the small business marketer and what I believe Foursquare has to offer, and not really the Foursquare user per se.

Having said that I do first feel the need to give you an overview of Foursquare.
The big picture
Foursquare is a location enabled service that allows users to “check in” when then stop at a bar, restaurant, park, bookstore or really anywhere they want to list. The service further allows users to connect with friends and alert them of your location if you choose. …  Foursquare also turned this activity into a game: a point that I believe led to its current role as a leader in this evolving space. …
Foursquare is self-described as – “Think: 50% friend-finder, 30% social cityguide, 20% nightlife game.”
Users compete with check-ins to earn points for their city, badges for various types of activity and to become mayor of frequented spots. …
Users also add and update information about businesses, write tips and make suggestions for anyone to consume. …

Image via CrunchBaseFoursquare is set-up around cities and enhances the kind of neighborhood, hyper-local, branding and community building that is so important to local type small businesses. The service is currently available in a growing list of cities and is driven by iPhone, Android and Blackberry apps. Check out the Foursquare help page for some more detail.

… I’m not ready to suggest that every business rush to Foursquare as the next red hot thing, not yet anyway, but I do want to point our a handful of reasons that many small business should start paying attention to this growing force, even if you don’t get it.
Below are seven reasons why I think Foursquare may hold promise for small business
1) Hyper local, tech savvy, evangelists – Foursquare user are people that really love their neighborhoods, getting out and evangelizing the businesses they love. This tech savvy, early adopter is exactly the kind of consumer business should kill for as they often influence large circles. Embracing Foursquare and giving these tech leaders the tools to promote your business is just plain smart business.
2) Online offline – …Foursquare is yet another way for local business to use the efficient online tools to drive more in-person, offline activity. People are physically checking in to your business and talking about online in what can turn into a tremendously effective one-two punch.

Image via Wikipedia3) Make offers – On a recent trip to Chicago I checked into my Marriott on Foursquare and immediately received notice that three nearby businesses had a special offer for me. … You can visit the Foursquare business page to get your business signed up. …

4) Track and reward – Foursquare’s gaming functionality allows businesses to create special promotions for mayors and badge earners and in effect setting up a competition among their most loyal fans. The image below comes from a special promotion hosted by blynk organic, a restaurant in North Carolina. By creating and communicating Foursquare’s tools and platform you can begin to educate customers and create Foursquare advocates for your business. Some bars and restaurants routinely promote free offers for mayors.

5) The power of making it a game – One of the most intriguing aspects of Foursquare is the game. It’s amazing what some folks will do in order to win a game, come in first or, in this case, be the mayor of a popular spot. …
6) Automated CRM data – … Every business should find ways to capture everything they can about a customer. Obviously email is a great tool and can be very effective for follow up marketing. … Foursquare can provide business owners with check-in stats for users. What this means is that the customer that comes in every day can now be tracked and even incentivized to get a free cup of coffee for every tenth check-in. It’s like the digital/social version of the loyalty card. …
7) Sync with Twitter and Facebook - Like all good social media platforms Foursquare understood the need to integrate with platforms that others already use. Foursquare users have the option to tweet or add a Facebook status update every time they check-in. What this means is that a Facebook user with a few hundred friends might expose your business by way of a Foursquare check-in to thousands of Facebook walls. While many of those folks on Twitter or Facebook may not be in your part of town, I’m thinking it’s still a pretty good thing for the brand.

While I’ll caution again that Foursquare might not be the highest priority for many businesses, it’s something that is coming and will be put to use by businesses outside of the retail and entertainment world (I can already imaging how real estate agents could use this.) Businesses that get how to use, stimulate adoption and promote Foursquare now could hold a significant advantage when and if Foursquare becomes the next Twitter.
Sidebar: Look for Facebook or Google to acquire Foursquare before the year is over.
Image credit: Joshua Kaufman

Related articles

• Foursquare Launches Business Pages for Small Businesses and Brands (hubspot.com)
• Foursquare Improves, Expands Information For Businesses (searchengineland.com)
• Foursquare Launches Quest to Get More Local Businesses (webpronews.com)

10 Trends for 2010: Piecing Together a Technology Strategy

Baseline

By Samuel Greengard
2009-12-08
Despite a brutal economy and tight budgets, organizations are making plans to deploy the technologies that are most likely to drive their business in 2010. Here are 10 business and technology trends that will help solidify those plans. …
Following are the 10 most significant technology trends for next year, based on a survey of almost 1,200 technology and business managers, conducted by Ziff Davis Enterprise Research.
1 Green Computing and Energy Efficiency
… Skyrocketing energy costs and tight budgets, coupled with growing public and government pressure, have forced companies to put this issue on the front burner. …
…Better energy auditing tools, a more thorough understanding of carbon footprints, improved engineering and design, and a developing ecosystem for managing equipment from cradle to grave all make green computing more feasible.
In addition, organizations are adopting new and improved tools for managing computers and ensuring that they’re in sleep mode when they’re not in use. Many organizations are also getting serious about training employees to switch systems off when they’re not needed.
Fisher adds that manufacturers are beginning to place data about energy usage on their products, and companies are accelerating refresh cycles to take advantage of technology advances and energy savings. …
2 Public and Private Cloud Computing
… Two-thirds of Baseline survey respondents plan to expand the use of public clouds, which reside on the Internet, provide access to shared computing resources and are operated by third-party providers. Sixty-four percent said they’re interested in private clouds, which, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, are “owned or leased by a single organization and operated solely for that organization.” …
Organizations are also turning to clouds to keep mobile data in sync. Apple, Research in Motion and other vendors have simplified syncing contacts, e-mails, notes and calendar items across multiple devices. …
3 Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
…Interest in VDI is growing rapidly. The technology virtualizes a desktop and stores it on a remote central server. By making desktops and data more uniform and available—across various platforms and devices in the enterprise—it’s possible to weather a natural or human disruption with minimal downtime or loss in productivity. …
4 Mobility, Telecommuting and Virtual Meetings
…Wireless networks are becoming ubiquitous, devices are advancing rapidly, and an array of tools and technologies are making virtual meetings, collaboration and telecommuting a seamless proposition. Thirty-five percent of Baseline survey respondents said they’re expecting the use of these tools to increase in 2010. …
This connected and collaborative environment also promises to usher in better desktop video conferencing, along with more advanced telepresence capabilities. The widespread availability of high-bandwidth networks, along with more sophisticated and less-expensive technologies, makes it possible for organizations to work virtually and seamlessly. …
5 Centralization, Standards and Governance
…Baseline’s survey of IT executives indicates that 85 percent of organizations will boost their investment in governance processes and applications in 2010. Mobility, managed services, cloud computing, virtualization, Web 2.0, security, SLA management and an array of other initiatives—often revolving around more effective asset management—have prompted organizations to focus on developing better governance and standardization strategies.
In addition, businesses find themselves facing a growing array of government and industry regulations. As a result, governance, risk and compliance (GRC) play an important role in corporate strategy. …
6 Knowledge Sharing, Business Intelligence and Social Networking
…Web 2.0—including blogs, wikis and social networking—has transformed the landscape and made knowledge sharing a reality. At the same time, XML-based tools and service-oriented architecture (SOA) components have made it easier and simpler to share documents and data.
… More than two-thirds of Baseline respondents indicated increased interest in social networking at their firms, and 60 percent said their companies are gravitating toward knowledge and document management applications. …
In some cases, organizations are adapting social media and combining these tools with business intelligence to provide real-time analytics on how data, information and knowledge are flowing throughout the organization—and beyond. … Other enterprises are tapping social media to assemble teams, document practices and expertise, and to identify subject matter experts who would have fallen between the cracks in the past. …
Meanwhile, many other organizations are using social networking to handle everything from sales to customer support.
7 Security, E-Discovery and Business Continuity
Cyber-security, business continuity and managing risk are all core issues for any organization. Although the Internet and increasingly sophisticated technology have created enormous business opportunities, the risk of a security breach and the threat of downtime are growing. Worse, the cost of a failure can prove catastrophic. …
Unfortunately, as the calendar rolls over to 2010, this laissez-faire attitude about security and other risk-oriented issues—including business continuity and e-discovery—could prove costly. Baseline found that 70 percent of companies expect little or no significant investment in security, and 71 percent expect little or no significant investment in business continuity. …
8 Advances in Application Infrastructure
…One of the biggest trends is the widespread use of open source code. From running operating systems to handling Web programming, it has changed the face of computing.
…Baseline found that 22 percent of IT executives expect increased investment in application infrastructure next year.
At the same time, Manes sees ongoing interest in software as a service, SOA and business process management. Major enterprise applications are also opening up through APIs, and many of them are moving into the cloud as well. Not surprisingly, mainstream software providers are tweaking and adapting their applications to keep pace with the growing demand. …
9 Investments in Hardware Infrastructure
…To be sure, organizations are looking to step up hardware and networking investments. Approximately 43 percent of respondents to the Baseline survey plan said they expect their companies to spend more on hardware, and 42 percent said their firms will increase spending on storage or storage systems.
In addition to virtualization, organizations are looking at Fibre Channel over Ethernet to build a more unified computing infrastructure. They’re also seeking more advanced management tools and investigating ways to integrate cloud computing into the internal IT environment.
An emerging trend is the use of solid-state drives, which offer greater dependability and energy savings. …
10 Collaboration, Workflow and Productivity
…The extension of productivity and workflow to the mobile environment is a huge trend. Thirty-five percent of Baseline survey respondents said that mobility systems will expand at their company in 2010. …
In fact, mobile access to SharePoint, BI, reporting dashboards, document viewers, databases and CRM apps is fast becoming the norm. …
Document and file sharing are advancing in other ways, too. About 25 percent of the survey respondents said that workflow apps will be more prominent at their companies. Thanks to technologies such as SharePoint and Adobe Flex, paper and static forms are bowing to workflow automation, data capture, e-forms, e-signatures and collaboration tools. …
How We Conducted the Research
A two-stage study was conducted for this article by Ziff Davis Enterprise Research. In the first stage, 300 technology and business professionals and managers involved in technology at organizations of all sizes were polled using an open-ended questionnaire. …
These responses were then analyzed, so that the trends that were mentioned most often could be tested in the second, quantitative stage of the study. The trends list arising out of the first stage was supplemented with input from the editors and experts to ensure completeness and clarity. In the second stage, a multiple-choice questionnaire was fielded to 878 technology and business managers in firms with at least 100 employees: 248 in firms with 100 to 499 employees, 398 in firms with 500 to 9,999 employees and 232 in firms with 10,000 or more employees. Of the 878 respondents, 230 had vice president or higher titles, 236 had director titles and 412 had manager titles.
The second-stage survey asked a series of questions about each trend in order to gauge the relative strength of each, as well as the chief factors that might be driving or potentially hindering it. The trends covered in this story are the 10 that received the strongest results because of widespread adoption, intense (highly committed) adoption or both.

3 Technologies to Help You Take Advantage of the Economic Recovery

Business.Gov

08-17-2009 04:38 PM

By smallbiztrends

Twenty-seven economists polled by the Wall Street Journal said that the Great Recession is over*. …

I don't know whether these economists are right or wrong.

But I do know this: ALL recessions eventually end. At some point I assure you there will be an end ... and customer demand will pick up. …

When the recovery happens, you want to be ready to jump on opportunities. If the recession's been tough on your business, consider the recovery a time for a reboot. With that in mind, here are 3 tools that can help your small business sell more and do so profitably, as the recovery takes hold:

1) CRM Software

CRM stands for "customer relationship management." … The real question is, what does customer relationship management add to your bottom line? How important is it?

Let me drive the point home in dollars and cents. It's a lot cheaper to retain existing customers and sell more to them, than it is to go out and find new customers. According to Brent Leary, Principal of CRM Essentials*: "Even in good economic conditions it can be 10 times more expensive to bring on new customers as it is to keep the ones we have. Small businesses are turning to CRM applications to help extend relationships with current customers, while increasing opportunities to connect with prospects more efficiently."…

One of the key metrics I urge you to start tracking if you don't already, is "customer acquisition cost." Know what it costs you to get a new customer. When you start tracking that metric, you will begin to appreciate the dollars-and-cents value of CRM.

2) Email Marketing Solution

Email marketing is a fantastic way to market to existing customers - at one-fifth or less of the cost of direct mail (snail mail). …

There are many email marketing software solutions on the market today that automate the entire process -- from signup, through managing your list database, to designing and sending bulk emails. A key advantage of using an email marketing software solution is that it saves a lot of time and labor, versus sending out emails on your own, managing your subscriber list manually through a spreadsheet, etc. …

However, I caution you not to assume that email marketing is right for every situation. Paper direct mail still is a far better way to get NEW customers. … Prospecting for new customers is one situation when email marketing has not replaced paper direct mail - here are some other situations*.

3) Website Analytics

It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that putting up a website is a one-time event. …

Websites are living breathing organisms. In fact, today you can think of your Web presence as an ecosystem. You have a presence in microcommunities (i.e., other websites, including social media sites) and those presences work together with your website. And then there are the search engines, which index your website's pages for various keywords, and bring potential customers to your virtual door when they search for those keywords. It's all dynamic and constantly changing and evolving.

It is crucial to know about your website traffic, if you want your website to help get sales. Because if you don't know what's happening on your website, how can you know what to improve?

Install a good analytics package. Google Analytics is free and is a solution that many small businesses start with. Examine the data it generates, regularly. It's a goldmine!

(1) It tells you where your traffic is coming from. You will see which sites or search engines are sending visitors; which keywords or search terms people used to get there; the links they clicked on. This can tell if you need to develop more inbound links, or do a better job with content for more relevant search terms, and so on.

(2) It tells you information about your visitors. You'll learn which countries they come from; which days and times they like to visit; which browsers they use; even what screen resolution they have. This tells you who you are appealing to, and provides design considerations for your website.

(3) It tells you what's working in your website - and what isn't. You will see how long people stay, which pages they abandon, or whether they are converting to paying customers from particular online ads but not others. This will help you improve your website, your graphics and content, and your online ad campaigns. Sometimes a small change (moving a graphic from one spot to another, or a change in wording) makes a big improvement.

In conclusion, the above 3 tools are not the only ones, but they are worth their weight in gold. They will not only help you sell more, but do so cost effectively and efficiently.

*This hyperlink goes to a non-governmental web site.

Small Businesses Could Lose More Than $5,000 Per Employee Per Year to Inefficient Communications

Communications barriers and latencies can cost small and medium businesses up to 40 percent of their productive time, according to a Siemens-sponsored global study.

Telephony World

On average, 70 percent of employee respondents of small and medium businesses (SMBs) with up to 400 employees said they spend 17.5 hours each week addressing the pain points caused by communications barriers and latencies, according to a global study sponsored by Siemens Enterprise Communications and conducted by SIS International Research. The research also showed that while SMB awareness of unified communications as a solution is rising, nearly 60 percent of SMBs do not currently employ one based on the sampling.

In addition, researchers at SIS International Research determined that the time spent per week dealing with communications issues was more than 50 percent higher in companies with more than 20 workers. In hard costs, the study concluded, companies of 100 employees could be losing more than $500,000 each year by not addressing their employees’ most painful communications issues.

Key Findings. The Siemens-sponsored SMB study ascertained the top five pain points to be, in order of their estimated expense to an SMB ...:

1. Inefficient Coordination: Sixty-eight percent of respondents have trouble coordinating communications among team members... They ... average 3.7 hours per week attempting to coordinate communications across team members, slowing the realization of goals and deadlines.

2. Waiting for Information: Sixty-eight percent of respondents said they experience work delays while waiting for information from others ... The average delay is 3.5 hours per week per knowledge worker. ...

3. Unwanted Communications: Unwanted communications, including low-priority calls and voicemail, were experienced by the survey group by 77 percent of respondents, who said they spend two or more hours per week dealing with unwanted communications. ...

4. Customer Complaints: Seventy-four percent of respondents said they average 3.3 hours per week dealing with negative comments or complaints from customers, specifically because the customer was unable to reach them in a timely fashion. This eight percent loss in productivity is itself significant, but the true cost of customer dissatisfaction may be much greater.

5. Barriers to Collaboration: Sixty-one percent of respondents find difficulty in establishing collaboration sessions with colleagues and average 3.3 hours per week attempting to address issues of inaccessibility or lack of full collaboration with colleagues.

... Overall, SMBs placed a high or very high priority on improving communications for mobile workers.

Researchers also confirmed that SMBs are increasingly using various communications technologies, including phone, instant messaging, and video conferencing, in an effort to increase productivity. ... The resulting fragmentation of the SMB communication fabric can create a barrier to effective communications and collaboration.

... “With the SIS research suggesting that unified communications can help SMBs eliminate as much as 20 percent of hidden costs due to fragmented communications, it’s clear that the return on investment is significant,” [said Frost & Sullivan analyst, Vanessa Alvarez.] ...

The study surveyed a total of 513 knowledge workers, in Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, Russia, United States, and United Kingdom. The knowledge workers also represented eight key vertical industries: communications, finance, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, professional business services, real estate, and wholesale or retail trade. For an executive summary of the research, go to [www.siemens.com/us/open/smb].

Give Customers What They Don’t Expect

Raise the bar, instead of falling short of it.

destinationCRM.com

By Anirudh Kulkarni

Posted Jan 1, 2009

...The CRM initiative’s mandate is often narrowly focused on addressing customer expectations through large technology-driven change management projects. And while these initiatives play a critical role in advancing customer centricity, customer satisfaction often fails to match the resources expended on these efforts.

The Accenture 2007 Global Customer Satisfaction Survey bears this out: 75 percent of participating executives felt their customer service was moderately or extremely good, but 57 percent of consumers described themselves as upset or marginally to extremely dissatisfied with their experiences. The temptation is to close this gap by pouring more resources into understanding what these dissatisfied customers do expect—and then trying to exceed these expectations. However, there is a growing realization that small initiatives designed to deliver what customers don’t expect can also have a significant impact. ...

Small, unexpected customer service efforts can be valuable within the context of a broader CRM strategy. That said, identifying those initiatives—and executing them—requires a strategic organizational approach incorporating the following elements:

• Voice-of-Customer approach—To know which gestures would show your customers that you value them, you have to get inside their minds. What have they grown to expect? ...
• Competitive analysis—A commodity service (hotel rooms, office products) can still create memorable customer experiences, using small gestures as competitive differentiators. ...
• Internal organization maturity—Some things that seem easy to do are hard to execute. ... Make sure you understand the organizational implications of any gesture (no matter how small). ...
• Keep it simple—The gesture needn’t be elaborate or complicated—just something unexpected that gets the customer talking about it with friends and colleagues.

The role of process and technology in improving customer service is indisputable. Organizations intent only on large-scale improvement initiatives, though, may neglect the small but impactful efforts that go beyond the expected. These gestures enhance customer satisfaction, improve customer loyalty, and attract new customers.

Anirudh Kulkarni (akulkarni@cvpcorp.com) is founder and managing principal of Customer Value Partners, a customer lifecycle management consulting firm.