Inching Ever Forward

An interesting article in yesterday’s NY Times and the announcement today that HubSpot has raised $350 million in capital seems like a combination of events heading in the right direction. The NY Times article, “A Capitalist’s Dilemma, Whoever Wins on Tuesday,” raises some very interesting points on what may be the reasons for our stalled economy. With companies holding on to capital, it is no wonder we have been slow to grow and slow to add jobs. The author, Harvard Business School Professor Clayton M. Christensen, recommends that companies holding the capital should do things differently, not use the old formulae for channeling their investments.

Christensen makes the distinction between three different types of innovation: empowering, sustaining and efficiency. “Ideally, the three innovations operate in a recurring circle. Empowering innovations are essential for growth because they create new consumption. As long as empowering innovations create more jobs than efficiency innovations eliminate, and as long as the capital that efficiency innovations liberate is invested back into empowering innovations, we keep recessions at bay. The dials on these three innovations are sensitive. But when they are set correctly, the economy is a magnificent machine.”

Unfortunately, we have been experiencing an imbalance of efficiency innovations – innovations that reduce the cost of making and distributing existing products and services - thus the lack of growth. Although this type of innovation is essential, efficiency innovations streamline processes and, therefore, reduce jobs at the same time.

What encourages me is that HubSpot, the Cambridge marketing firm focused on social media, received funding not only from some private equity investors, but also from Boston mutual fund giant, Fidelity. The funding enables HubSpot to add 400 jobs in Cambridge and open an office in Ireland. All good. Living in Boston, Fidelity is a bit of a barometer of how our city is doing. It employs about 38,000, the majority in Boston and New England. If Fidelity is growing, Boston is growing. If Boston is growing, Massachusetts is growing. Last year, Fidelity cut jobs in Massachusetts after having held on to their employees as long as they could during the recession. So I am happy to see them as an investor in a social media company: a statement about social media’s role in our economy and a statement about Fidelity’s willingness to spend capital. Growth is happening. And the election tomorrow is all about growth.

It will be interesting to see how social media is used during tomorrow’s election. I have noticed that social media has not helped us keep issues in the forefront of our minds. Social media helps broaden reach but often doesn’t have the depth to make a lasting impact on the recipient. Even though we may get more information about candidates, it doesn’t mean that we retain it. Getting so much information dilutes the importance of any single piece of information. For some, the issues from the conventions and the debates are hard to recall. It is all about what has been said in the last 5 days. We, as a culture, have a miniscule attention span. The information flying at us doesn’t seem to have time to make its mark. Or maybe just the catchy stuff sticks. 

Tuesday will be quite a day. For anyone who needs a last-minute review of Mitt Romney’s record as governor of Massachusetts, I am happy to assist with this link. Full disclosure on what many MA residents think of their former governor: one analyst on NPR today referred to Romney not as Massachusetts’ “favorite son” but as our “ex-son-in-law.”

Time-Saving Social Media Tools & Tips

Facebook & WordPress Collaborate: This week, Facebook introduced a social plug-in for use by WordPress bloggers. The Facebook for WordPress plug-in is receiving positive feedback for enabling bloggers to cross-post WordPress content to their Facebook Timeline and the Facebook Pages they manage. If your blog is based on WordPress, this new feature is good news for you! It is another great way to intertwine your content across your social media tools – broadening your reach, efficiently. 

How are you saving time?

I almost wrote “cross-pollenate” instead of “cross-post,” above! But really, that slip is not that far from the truth. If you spread your posts across social media tools, you will capture new followers who are connected for different reasons. If you can spread your posts across social media tools with less keystrokes, you just bought yourself time as well as exposure.

 
Clients have asked me whether they should choose Blogger or WordPress and I haven’t had a compelling case to choose one blog application over the other. I use Blogger, so I have been partial to that. But I have to admit that the advancements I have read about on the WordPress front make me a little jealous! I don’t consider Facebook the supreme judge of all things social, but their pick of WordPress for their new plug-in might be a (potentially temporary) leg up for WordPress in its survival-of-the-fittest race against Blogger. I fully expect Blogger to reciprocate. Sometimes Blogger will beat WordPress to the punch and, at other times, it will be reversed. That is what is called healthy competition. This time, WordPress got the head start.
 
Get further synchronized: If you are using Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, be sure to synchronize those three tools so that your posts on one tool are published to all of these tools. Another purchase of invaluable time.

 
Still adjusting to Facebook’s Timeline? Recently, HubSpot published a handy little (free) Guide to Facebook’s Business Page Timelines. It is a good resource for taking advantage of the new Facebook features which your business can use for marketing. It offers short explanations of:

• Six Facebook Timeline Features You Should Know
• Best Practices for Using Facebook Timeline
• Examples of Great Business Page Timelines

 
Get a handle on these features and concepts and you will be in a great position to better use Facebook Timeline for your business.
 
Keep an eye on your past: Don’t forget to analyze your own activity. Use analytics (from WordPress, Blogger, Google Analytics or through social sharing plug-ins such as Digg Digg or Shareaholic) to discover what is driving traffic to your blog, website, Google+ or Facebook Page. Try to identify what topics and/or keywords are drawing the larger crowds, as well as what falls flat. Stay in tune with trends in your industry and continue to blog about them. Your opinion is important to those who have chosen to follow you. Give them your creative perspective on your common interests and they may pass them to their circle of followers. 
 
Let me know if any of these new tools or tips helped you, and how!

What Can a Blog Do For My Small Business?

As a small business owner, contemplating the dive into the social media pool, you may have asked yourself this exact question. Numbers and stories help me understand the effect a well-executed blog can have on a business. Here are some statistics and an example to help understand why the pool is so popular. A recent study reported that:

1. Nearly 40% of US companies use blogs for business purposes.
2. Companies that blog have 55% more website visitors than those who do not blog.
3. B2C companies that blog get 88% more leads per month than those who don’t.
4. B2B companies that blog get 67% more leads per month than those who don’t.

These statistics are courtesy of HubSpot’s Ebook, “Introduction to Business Blogging.” And although the study did not focus specifically on small businesses, the numbers – especially point #2 -- should give every business strong reasons to focus their attention on their blog, or lack thereof. A separate study, referenced in this same Ebook, indicated that 71% of those polled say blogs affect their purchasing decisions. Hmm, that's a lot of people looking at blogs to help them make up their minds.

Use your company blog to earn trust, to become a thought leader, to be a problem solver and to stay in the forefront of your customers’ minds. Through a relatively small investment of resources and creativity, you can build a blog to engage your customers and prospects and drive traffic to your website. Ultimately, this traffic will translate into business. Using the power of social media to leverage the word of mouth effect that is so critical to small business success, you have the potential of doubling the number of visitors to your website! 

Volante Farms is a great example of a small business utilizing its blog to stay connected to its customer base, especially during a transition period when its business traditionally goes dormant. Volante Farms is a family owned and operated farm, headquartered in the Boston suburb of Needham, MA, with obvious seasonality to its business year. Within the past year or so, the farm rebuilt its greenhouses and tore down its large farmstand (envision an indoor farm stand with electricity, plumbing and attached greenhouses) to rebuild a new, larger farmstand offering a much wider array of products and services. Neither of these "farmstands" remind me of the ones I see back in my native state of Ohio, but they do display the glistening, fresh produce in deep wooden shelves and the exposed beams tell me I'm not at the grocery store -- the similarities end about there. It is a major business, backed by some entrepreneurial ingenuity developed at nearby Babson College, and a mainstay in the community. The new farmstand, which opened on March 31^st, now includes “a seasonal garden center, produce market, local-centric grocery, bakery, deli and prepared food kitchen, flanked by a state of the art greenhouse offering home-grown annuals and locally hardy perennials.”

Volante Farms used its blog to keep its community updated on the new farmstand’s progress -- before the old one closed down, but also during the cold months when the shuttered farm is not usually top-of-mind among its customers. By highlighting its chef search, providing commentary on design decisions, various owner opinions of the progress, seasonal planting updates, recipes, Grand Opening plans, descriptions of new products and new store hours, the blog kept its community well informed and maintained interest in the closed farmstand which resulted in a terrific turnout at its opening celebration last weekend. If they can generate that much interest while they are closed, imagine what they will do now that they are open! 

No one buys anything online from Volante Farms, but they have learned to blog about what interests their community and to make their customer community feel like part of their family. And with the help of WordPress's great features, their blog acts as their website - very efficient!

Fresh, local and reaping the benefits of blogging!