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Why Your Business Needs a Mobile Strategy ASAP!

Posted by: admin in technology, social media, gadgets, business, apple on Aug 4, 2011

Four years ago, most people were pretty happy with their cell phones. They were slim, they slid or flipped and they had sexy names like the RAZR. Today if university students don’t have a smartphone, they probably refer to their phone as a “dumbphone.”

 

According to reports published in May, overall, cell phones sold 19% more in year over year sales, but Smartphones were increasingly becoming the default purchase. Sales of Smartphones increased 85% year on year.  That statistic is amazing.  Consumers are flocking to devices that allow them to consume media anywhere and access the internet from anywhere. Cell phones already outnumber TV sets 3 to 1 according to BNET. This isn’t a trend. It’s a mobile revolution.

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Powerhouse Process Flows

Posted by: cmaeon in technology, process flows, efficiency on Jun 1, 2011

smokestackThere is a song that has become absolutely iconic, even if you don’t know its name.

It’s the song that was used in Looney Tunes cartoons every time the characters were around an assembly line or factory. If you ever saw a Looney Tunes cartoon as a kid, it’s probably etched so well into your brain you can probably hum it right now.

The song is called Powerhouse and was composed by Raymond Scott in 1937. It’s still being used today as a kind of audio shorthand for automation and mechanical processes.

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On the small matter of Privacy, Security and Data.

Posted by: cmaeon in technology, security, privacy, data, apple on Apr 27, 2011

The last couple of weeks have been rough for the internet. Three very high profile events have brought the issues of privacy and security into sharp relief, and left a lot of people questioning the ability of the internet to protect their valuable data and information.

First, Apple users discovered that any device running iOS 4 had been logging their every movement, right down to the second, and taking a record of it.  The big issue? Anyone could access that. Users were confused, spooked and distrustful of the data logging.

Then the Amazon cloud went down, taking hundreds of web services with it for an entire day – Hootsuite, Foursquare and Reddit being the most well known (and loudly complained about.) People were concerned about the ability of the internet to recover from interruptions.

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Is Your Website on Life Support?

Posted by: cmaeon in technology, social media, conversation marketing, business on Apr 6, 2011

life supportThe way people use the internet is changing.

Most people don’t even make it all the way through a YouTube video before they lose interest and go onto the next thing.  When you get a long email, do you read the whole thing or just skim the relative parts? Twitter is massively successful because the 140 character limit boils updates down to only the most essential details. Meanwhile, more and more websites are offering interactive chat as a customer service tool. Internet users today are more than willing to spend a few minutes chatting to a real person, but they’re not interested in trying to read a long FAQ…

Online behavior tells us internet users are rapidly becoming more impatient but conversely, they’re far more willing to interact and to get engaged on a one to one basis with companies online.

So clearly this means the website is dying.

Did I lose you? Let’s think about this for a second…

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Why Businesses Hate Social Media

Posted by: cmaeon in technology, social media on Nov 17, 2010

hatesocialmediaA lot of people say that social media is the future of marketing. Maybe, but that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of people who should be using it to market their businesses hate it.

Marketing and PR used to be about refining a specific message and pushing it out to people – the terms were through interviews, press releases and the information the company provided. Unless you wanted to do something very involved, the only spaces to talk about a company were spaces that company controlled.

Social media marketing is the exact opposite of that system. Today, anyone can talk about a company in a completely open forum, and people can even impersonate your company. Everyone remembers the hilarious and fake BP Twitter account that popped up during the oil spill @BPGlobalPR, and tweeted gems like “Black sand beaches are very trendy in some places. We upgraded you, Gulf of Mexico.”

All laughing aside, if your business is on the negative end of social media, it can be bad news. Maybe this is why so many in the business world are still not quick to warm up to social media as a marketing platform. Even if your business can start a positive conversation, it’s still spreading by word of mouth and the message can be lost.

In a nutshell, it’s impossible to completely control what people are saying about your business over social media and that lack of control scares a lot of executives and business owners. Worse yet, social media marketing is spread all over the web. Customers who follow your business on twitter might not even know you have a Facebook page, read your blog or watch your YouTube videos, or even want to.

That’s why we created the 1to1Real™ social spaces tool. It lets a business put all of their social media feeds into a single hub. You can link to the social space from your website and automatically let your customers know where your Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr (etc, etc) content is. They can visit your social hub to see your entire message at once, and get linked automatically to your accounts if they want to follow them or explore deeper.

Creating your social space is easy – sign up to try 1to1Real for free.

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The Top 10 Things That Drive Business Owners Crazy about Technology

Posted by: tim in technology, strategy, challenge, business on Oct 6, 2010

wasting moneyLast week I was at a meeting with a group of entrepreneurs from all over the world.  These folks are some of the best of the best in the world at their businesses – across industries and continents.  When my turn came to talk about The Connected Market Space and our recent launch of 1to1Real as a “solution for the SMB [Small to Medium Sized Business] Technology Tangle” they all listened with increasing enthusiasm and interest.

After a few minutes, one of the leaders said, “why don’t you just talk about the top 10 things that business owners hate about technology?  If you can solve that, you’re done!”

Great idea!  So I rapidly scribbled down what I’ve spent the last decade trying to solve by building 1to1Real and the Connected Market Space. Once I decided to write them down, I thought it would be a great idea to write about each one in my blog. So, here you go – a series I’m going to write about each of what I find to be some of the most frustrating problems with technology.

Starting with #10:
“Technology is costing me a ton of money!  If I get quotes, they are high.  If I employ someone, I have to pay them a ton and don’t have a clue what they are doing!  How will technology ever make me money?”

The reality is that the technology industry was built on costing a lot of money.  Hordes of software engineers, consultants and development companies have spent decades perfecting the model of getting paid for writing code.  They charge a lot for their work and for good reason - it’s hard to do and time consuming.

As a business owner, and a tech CEO, I have troubled over this.  The reality is technology is highly valuable ONLY when it is properly developed and deployed.   So, I asked myself “how can we solve the technology risk problem, the time problem and the related cost problem for small to medium sized businesses?”   After all, these aren’t governments or major corporations.  These are businesses that provide a product or service to a market, they do it well and by their own successes they grow – which causes inefficiencies.  Businesses like this don’t have unlimited time to focus on technology, or unlimited resources they can acquire by raising taxes or the price of a widely distributed product a few dollars.

So, let’s turn the question into an answer:How can I use technology to make money - without hiring a bunch of technology people where I don’t know what they do, or asking for a bunch of quotes that I don’t know that are fair – without spending a ton of money?

When approached like this, the answer becomes obvious.  Focus on your core business and find a way to get that to extend in 30 days or less. Clue number one: if it takes more than 30 days to get your core business out the door, you’re headed for a trap!

If you’re in a business that is not technology based, don’t get into the technology business by hiring or funding a huge undertaking! Doing that is costly, time consuming and worst of all, it takes your attention away from your core business. People in the technology business are technology experts.  We don’t know your business, but we do know ours.  So let us take the risk that applies to our business – technology, and provide the value to you. After all, if I’m going to buy a car, I’m not going to start my own production line.  I’m going to find the vehicle brand I trust and I’m going to buy, and I’m going use it to drive from point A to point B.

Too many business owners try to become technology companies in house, and end up with a disappointing result.  The people who succeed in business seek out professionals to do what they can’t, so they can focus on what they can do – provide their product or service to their market. After a decade in the business I can say with certainty, the businesses who elect to find the right solution and the right professionals, who have worked with us and ask us to help do what they can’t, win every time.

The businesses who try cobble together a bunch of technology pieces like CRM and email marketing are spending money trying to create a solution outside their area of expertise. Or, worse, they’ve created a home grown monster – complete with a home built team that must be employed  24/7 just to keep going.  Money that could be driving a market and profits for the business owner is instead being wasted on something that doesn’t actually improve the core business.

Tim’s Tip #10: The moral of the story is solve technology frustration #10 by putting your money where your business model is – STOP accepting the technology risk at home.

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Reconnected - Back on Blogging

Posted by: tim in tim vasko, technology, reflection, connected market space on Aug 24, 2010

connectionsIt’s great to get back to blogging after being “disconnected” for 10 days.  I want to thank Kathleen for keeping information flowing on the blog and the 1to1REAL and PedBot Team for their work at staying connected while I was unwinding.

There are times to be connected and times to be disconnected. We should all know this (a great thing to teach our kids too. I am teaching my daughters moderation in technology).  I thought a lot about that as I had turned off my email, iPhone, iPad & laptop – I was “off the grid”.  I played checkers with the kids and was amazed as my 9 year old started challenging me in chess – the real kind on a board with wooden pieces (not the iPad version)!

But what happens with your company when you’re turned off ?

That’s the challenge of staying connected…  Just because you’re off (which I highly recommend to rejuvenate and stay creative and energized – BTW), does not mean the rest of the world is – in fact they most likely aren’t.  Who is minding your store when you’re away?  How do you deal with a global economy or time zone economics?  I’m an early riser: 5am most days.  But, even at that I like to have time away from the phone and email, but by 6 the East Coast is buzzing and fully perked up on Starbucks.  The REAL world always connected, and you can’t be connected all the time … or can you be?

This has been a dilemma I have faced throughout my career.  I’m the key spokesperson, entrepreneur and visionary; I’m the guy that drives our Connected Market Space and 1to1REAL, who connected to industries and customer and sells products at CMAEON.  This is why I decided to build 1to1REAL in the first place.

I realized a decade ago that the world was going to be more informed and more on than ever before.  In order to speak to my customers and our market, I would need a system to keep up.  Unfortunately, in order to assemble those systems:  email marketing and responses, CRM, web sites, social networking, AdWord advertising, data and list building, new lead acquisition… and then filter through all of that information to our customers, I became overwhelmed.  I was already working 15 hour plus days – how could I keep up?

That was when I first started thinking about this Technology Tangle we weave for ourselves.  Where does productivity start and where does it fail?  That was the beginning of 1to1REAL. New staff was not the answer.  Then, not only did I have a training issue, I had added overhead, which can kill any business.  Spending money to chase new revenues with additional staff, while taking the hit on time for training and money – that is every small business’ dilemma.

I reviewed CRM and contact management software. They were a piece of the puzzle, but unfortunately beyond the big learning curve of all of the features, they just didn’t do any real work for me.  I still had to have fingers on the keyboards constantly to make these tools work (a fact that most sales people, CEOs and Entrepreneurs despise).  I found once I learned a system, I had to keep it up to date for it to be useful – taking up even more time.

The promise of technology was not a promise at all. It had become a difficult path.  And so, 1to1REAL was born with a “robot” to take some of the tasks off of my hands and stay connected while I was either completely disconnected, or focused on exactly what I do best to make my business successful.  That is why, after nearly eleven years in business I still don’t have, or need, a huge sales force to run a substantial company and business.  1to1REAL, through all of its versions, was really about how to extend the vision and talent I had personally and help leverage those into my business so it could sell itself.
Today every company of any size is trying to do more with less.   With small companies that has always been the case – it’s just tougher in a tight market.  I felt that if technology were a solution, it had to be affordable, effective and actually DO work automatically once I set it up.  Today we talk to over a million people regularly.  We serve thousands of users.  We bring new installs and users in daily.  Yet, I’ve been able to keep the staff count and overhead low – and still answer my own phone and do the work I love to do – working with entrepreneurs and businesses to improve their connections and build their connected markets.  It works for me every day – and I’ve seen it grow every other business that has adopted this use of technology and market connections.

I had to create an automated marketing, sales and customer relationship team – so 1to1REAL was designed to do just that.  Because today, whether I’m on holiday, or on the phone, with an important key customer, or thinking about how to build a better business – the world is always on – with 1to1REAL we are always open for business.  Answering what our PedBot Auto Drive can answer – and jumping in when it is the perfect time for a personal conversation to sell and close a new account.

Great to be connected agian – thanks to everyone for staying connected and for the comments and questions ….

Tim

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Why Small Businesses Shouldn’t Get CRM

Posted by: cmaeon in technology, CRM on Aug 11, 2010

trapOne of the most popular CRM solutions in the world will tell you to automate your sales force, ditch the software and get your reps selling instead of administrating.  Sounds good, right? Except for one small hitch… what if you’re the sales force? What if you don’t have reps, managers and executives to automate?

A small business with only a few sales people (or only a single sales person) probably isn’t so bogged down that adapting a traditional CRM solution that reduces paperwork and greases the information wheels will really do anything for them.   Most small businesses run lean – the sales department isn’t usually so disconnected from the logistics department that CRM solutions will make them more efficient – sales and logistics are probably sitting next to each other. They might even be the same person.

What a small business needs to do isn’t automate their non-existent sales force; they need to create something that functions as an automated sales force!  There are many things that someone in sales has to do every day:  nurture leads, send information, follow up on sales calls, and remind people of sales, promotions, deals… the list goes on. If a small business could automate those tasks, sending information, follow ups, and incentives automatically, the time consuming grunt work of selling would give them more of their time back. Time they could spend making deals.  A small business doesn’t need software or solutions, it needs a robot.

That’s where CRM and small businesses disconnect – traditional CRM can make those processes more efficient, but it doesn’t do them for you.


Image: CRM could be a trap... image by Petrichor, Flickr

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All this Connection Talk - what have we learned?

Posted by: tim in technology, connected market space, business on Jun 30, 2010

277869765_9758d19d66We have learned that getting people to "know about each other" is a difficult and full time job, and this is most likely the most difficult product to deliver for any business, no matter what size.  "Knowing" about each other involves many stakeholders - marketers, business people, sales people, and financial people and, of course, interested and qualified searchers that become buyers.

We have learned that not all businesses want to tell the truth - many want the sale, with no regard to the long term relationship to the buyer.   Being connected will only serve those organizations who believe in the Triple Bottom Line:  those who want to serve people with a business transaction based on an open - integrated understanding between buyers and sellers.  Open communication is the key to long term success.

We have learned that not all businesses will make good business decisions, or are willing to follow a process, to stay in business.  These have been the toughest lessons, because these businesses are looking for an EZ process, and have nearly always failed.

We have learned that many people in the business world, inside many giant companies, have given up.  . We have seen firms that have provided their staff Just Ordinary Boring Stuff to do …those people have been dissatisfied and so have lost all enthusiasm for their contribution.  They are, needless to say, dis-connected in their work - perhaps only connected to a paycheck.  

We have learned that companies can grow their business - and outgrow their capital and capability to fund new opportunities.  This is not a sustainable model.  The challenge remains, how, when we are committed to innovation and change - and improving our revenue and business models to reach broader markets, can we evolve as entrepreneurs, rather than crush our dream under the weight of reality?   The key is being Connected to the measures of success.

We have learned in the toughest of times, when the world compromised the core mission of providing open information, innovation and connections with the best, most innovative business information technology in the world, our world failed.  We saw relationships with businesses crumble; consumers stop consuming, jobs lost, banking systems broken, homes lost, countries bankrupt.  When the world lost its connection its corporate soul, our culture, our way of doing business simply stopped.  We are now learning how to pick up our tools and start again.

As humans, in general, we are not afraid of change, in fact we embrace it.  Today is our time more than ever.  And that is sustainable - because change is always a renewable resource that can be relied upon - change is a mandate in the world.
Photo: Lee Nachtigal, Flickr

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Accurate Information and the Efficient Marketplace

Posted by: tim in technology, connected market space on Jun 23, 2010

farmers marketThis blog talks a lot about the Connected Market Space – a marketplace state we can get to when accurate and relevant information flows between all parties, enabling everyone to efficiently access to the information they want and need.  Today, we have created some of the capability to create the Connected Market Space with the way technology is evolving and how we use it.

However, we have also realized that not all markets or marketplace endeavors are so noble as to efficiently deliver accurate information to us.  Often, accurate information is the most difficult thing to acquire because there is too much information - mostly about things we don’t want or need to know to make our decisions.

That said, today, there are emerging filters for true voices and targeted, personalized information models emerging daily.  Things we can easily adopt and opt in and out of – these are the gateways to getting truly connected. Remember – you’re in the Connected Market Space if:

  • Everyone knows more about each other
  • Everyone trusts each other
  • Everyone can carry on a conversation
  • Everyone can complete a transaction safely
  • Everyone has accurate information


The first four points rest on the last one – you know more, you trust more, you talk more and you buy more if you have accurate information (not just marketing rhetoric or hype.)

So, when these five elements listed above all come into play, through an efficient process, that the result is a positive outcome and a Connected Market Space for everyone.  Of course, the more complicated the transaction, the bigger the decision and investment on both sides, the higher the stakes, the more important this process, this "Conversation Market" becomes as we become more connected.

Photo: Natalie Maynor, Flickr

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