Best Small Business Posts from im.seeking.balance

Posted on March 29, 2009 by michelle.mack

Photo: _ES on Flickr

I have been re-evaluating my blog as of late. Forgive me for having paid you less attention than you deserve. I have been balancing work and family as usual but I have also been giving Urban Shore some much-needed love because I really feel like my community needs a home online. Anyway, I’ve been re-thinking a little bit about what I put here… at im.seeking.balance. I have decided to do a little less writing but, hopefully, make things a little more relevant, useful or insightful.

This is my home online.

This is where I share my knowledge, my thoughts and struggles, things I’ve learned, things I most certainly haven’t learned, things that make me think and things that make me laugh. But for those of you who have come to know my blog through your business interests, I have put together a bit of an index of some of my most popular business posts, and some that are less popular but I want to share nonetheless.

I do hope you’ll find something you can use. Please let me know if you have any questions you’d like to ask; I’m happy to accept topic suggestions! Thanks for reading and for sharing with me.

6 Super Simple Tools for Small Business

Posted on February 7, 2009 by michelle.mack

Photo: UrbanShore on Flickr

If you’re in business, you may have heard lately that you should be doing “Social Media”… “Web Two Point OH”. You should have a YouTube Channel. You should start a viral video. You should write a blog.

Um, why exactly?

I’m sure when you’re already working 14 or 16 hours a day on your day to day business operation, the last thing you want to do is sit down at the computer and add more to your task list. If your business is small or local – you own or manage a coffee shop or have a small fitness studio or an urban retail store – you’re already trying to do a lot with a little. Besides, the web is for big business right?

Wrong. It’s for everyone.

Here’s the thing: There is so much information online already, that you stand to gain a wealth of insight from it. And many of those people putting in their two cents are your customers… they may just not know it yet.

Here are a few super simple tactics that can help you use some of today’s web-based tools to tap into that information, streamline tasks and grow your business. I’ve broken them down into 3 categories: Listening, Building Relationships, and Home Base.

Listening

Google Alerts

Google Alerts allow you to track what’s happening in your industry by allowing you to conduct a search for keywords or phrases of your choosing and then sending you every article written about them in real time. You can search for your company name, your competitors’ names and industry keywords or prases. You can have the results sent to your email or to an RSS feed (more about these later).

Here’s the super simple way you set up a Google Alert:

Go to google.com/alerts
Enter your first search term (your company name, likely) in the text field
Select “Comprehensive” – this will look for news, websites, blogs, video, and even some forums
Select how often you want to receive them (if you’re sending to your email, once a day may suffice)
Enter your email address and click “Create Alert”

It’s as simple as that. Google will send you an email with what looks like search results, only everything in the list will include the keywords or prases you requested.

If you want to receive alerts for multiple keywords or phrases, I recommend creating a Google account (you may even have one already if you have a Gmail account, Google Analytics account, Blogger account etc.) and creating a more comprehensive alerts system. But a simple email alert for your company name is a great start.

Twitter Search

You’ve probably heard the word Twitter. Twitter is all abuzz in the tech/marketing world but it has yet to reach the mainstream. Having said that, the people on Twitter are almost exclusively bloggers and influencers by the very nature of their extensive social networking.

Knowing what these influencers are talking about and finding a few in your industry or location is never a bad idea.

If you don’t want to sign up to Twitter, that’s fine. It can be a life suck anyway – if you joined Facebook you know how much time that can take up if you’re not careful. But you should use the Twitter Search function. And just like setting up a Google Alert, it’s super simple.

Go to search.twitter.com and enter a keyword. Now, keep in mind, people using Twitter only have 140 characters to talk to one another. The keywords will pick up exact words they are including in their ‘tweets’. What you’ll get in the results is a list of statements from people using Twitter to communicate. A quick browse will give you an idea of what people are saying about your business or industry.

Building Relationships

You need to make sure you have an ongoing relationship with your customers. It doesn’t matter what business you’re in, encouraging repeat business takes less effort than acquiring new business. Repeat customers are the ones who become your advocates. Repeat customers keep your business open. Sometimes all it takes is a friendly conversation… in person or online.

To build and grow that relationship, find a way to connect with your customers – either via email or mobile messages – and then offer them information that’s relevant to them in the way they want.

Side note: I believe marketing can help people to improve their lives via your product. I don’t believe in selling people something they don’t want. I don’t believe in shoving information down peoples’ throats. What I do believe in, is providing relevant information via relevant media that simply show people how they can benefit from a product or service.

Email Marketing

While email marketing in general seems to be on a decline because of the prevalence of other communication methods, it’s still the most comprehensive way to share information with people who want that information. Blogs with an RSS subscription present another way to share that in-depth type of information with your customers.

You can use a simple tool like Vertical Response to collect and store contact information. You can create different lists based on whatever attributes you like – types of purchases, gender, age category – and then send them updates that are relevant to them: new product lines, special events, sales. Vertical Response has a huge set of pre-made email templates to choose from, they send in both HTML (with pretty pictures and stuff) and text so no matter what type of email your customers receive, your message will be intact. And, you only have to pay for what you use – there’s no monthly fee. You can also use it to conduct surveys or, if you collect full contact information, you can even use it to send direct mail postcards.

The cost starts at just $0.015 per email you send e.g. if you have a list of 1000 addresses, the whole email will cost you only $15. If your list is larger, the cost per message goes down from there. Or, you can pay a monthly fee based on the size of your email list and send as often as you’d like – currently for up to 2,000 addresses in your list it would cost you $28/month.

Tagga Mobile Marketing

Tagga is a really innovative new tool that allows anyone to use SMS or Text Messaging for any reason they like. You could create a tagg (or an SMS message) that people can text in to receive. You change it whenever you’d like and let people know they can text KEYWORD (whatever you choose, provided it’s not already taken) to 82442 (TAGGA) and they receive your message to their mobile phone. Alternatively, you can set up a subscription where people text in the keyword to 82442 to subscribe. You then send out a message to your subscribers.

You can pay for service and use the full 120 character text message for yourself – the cost is about USD$0.20 per message – or you can opt to send your messages using only 80 characters and pay nothing; a sponsored message (using the remaining 60 characters) at the end of the text will cover the cost. Note: it is really hard to squeeze a message into 80 characters, but at only $0.20/message with no month to month cost, it’s a great way for a small company to get in on mobile marketing.

Where mobile is really effective is last second deals to improve upon low yield times/days.

You own a bakery? Blow out the end of day inventory at a discount – send a message at 4pm that says “Get 25% off today’s baked goods at XYZ Bakery before 5pm today” (that’s only 62 characters, incidentally). Empty coffee shop? Send a message saying “Large coffee for the price of a small at Tasty Coffee Company; today only.”

Your Home Base

WordPress.com

I know, I know… I said earlier you don’t need to blog. And you don’t. BUT, if you don’t have a web presence at all, WordPress.com is a quick and easy – and FREE – way to create one. Just sign up for an account at wordpress.com for free. Then, select from a number of visual themes, upgrade to a custom URL (it’s only $15), purchase your preferred URL from a domain name provider (I like Namespro.ca) and redirect your ‘site’ to your custom URL.

You can use wordpress.com as a free web content management system by using the ‘Pages’ functionality to create all the pages your website may need (see above where it says “About Michelle”? That’s a page – if I add more they’ll make a line across the top). You can then go into the settings and redirect your home page to one of the pages you’ve created and you don’t actually need to blog at all… unless you want to.

RSS Feed Reader

The last thing I want to mention is using RSS to keep track of everything. Almost everything is accessible with RSS nowadays. RSS allows you to take the content of blogs, media sites, twitter, google searches, and any RSS enabled website and aggregate that information in one place.

I use Google Reader. When you find an RSS link – like the one at the top of this page that says “Subscribe in a reader” – you can click the link and add it to your Google Reader (or another feed reader of your choosing). You can, incidentally, sign up to have your Google Alerts also go to your Google Reader. You can also sign up to an individual’s twitter stream, a twitter search stream, your favourite news site etc.

The benefit to doing this is you go to only one site to read all the information you want to see. I go to my Google Reader and get something that looks like this:

You can see I have 579 unread items that I can review by topic; I have categorized my subscriptions into Social Media, Tourism, Vancouver, Snowboarding and the ones at the bottom of the list are uncategorized at this point. If I open any one topic I get a number of sources and I can review by source, by topic, or the whole list.

This, incidentally, is my personal reading list; I also have another Google Account for my work and have another reader account with everything I read pertaining to my employment.

I know that may look overwhelming, but I usually access my reader by utilizing the web browsing on my mobile phone and read whenever I’m waiting for something or have a few moments to spare.

Clear as mud?

Hopefully I haven’t overwhelmed you. This is meant to highlight just a few very inexpensive ways you can get involved no matter what your business or your budget.

If you have any super simple solutions you think I’ve missed, please do leave them in the comments. Alternatively, if you are looking for help to develop a plan further, you can contact me at michelle [at] imseekingbalance [dot] com.

A word about logos and file types

Posted on December 26, 2008 by michelle.mack

Image: Annie Mole on Flickr

Can we talk about logos for a moment?

If you’re in business, you need to understand your logo, know what it should look like, and be prepared to use it in everything you do. I want you to understand different file types and what they might be used for.

Because you want your logo to represent your company everywhere, it needs to be able to go anywhere.

Now, if you haven’t yet designed a logo or wordmark, great – you can take these ideas into account when you do. It will make life much easier for your designers and/or suppliers. If you’ve already developed one, make sure your designer provides you with guidelines for use and a few varieties to use under different circumstances.

Be prepared for different coloured backgrounds

Your logo needs to represent you just as well on a black background as it does on a white background. Further, if you can make it work on a coloured background, all the better. Often times, you can’t simply take a coloured logo and place it on black. Does your logo reverse out in white? What does that look like? Do some colours remain?

What if your logo is blue and red, but someone wants to include your logo on top of a photo of blue sky? Is there enough contrast between the blue of your logo and the blue of the sky?

Global BC has done exactly what I’m recommending here:

I recommend having the following files to choose from:

Full colour logo for use on standard white background
Black and white logo for use when a) printing with only black ink or b) to use on light colours
A reverse and/or partial-colour logo for use on a black or dark colour background (Global BC above has both)

Note: If you choose to greyscale your colour logo for use when printing only in black, that’s fine. Just make sure it’s a conscious choice. I’d recommend using an all-black version instead as you get more punch. It’s more eye-catching.

Colours and various production processes

Different production methods require different processes.

Print Production

Photo: Kofoed on Flickr

Print production may use standard Pantone Matching System (often referred to as a Pantone or PMS) colours or CMYK Process (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Black inks blended to create almost every single colour of the rainbow – referred to as 4-colour process). When a logo is developed the designer will typically use Pantone colours to create a specific shade that would, ideally, be unchanged across all mediums. Pantone is a type of ink, so from press to press, location to location, the colour doesn’t change. Process colours can change as the blends of the 4 colours can vary slightly.

If you have a colour logo, you need to know the Pantone colours it was created to be.

You should always have a digital version of your logos in their original Pantones. Your designer should also create you one with the closest possble combination of CMYK values to match the original Pantone as closely as possible. Yes, you could just use Illustrator or Photoshop to convert the files, and if you didn’t have one created in CMYK that’s your only option, but the CMYK recipes in the Pantone books aren’t always the best fit. Regardless, you should have a version in Pantones and a version in CMYK values for printing.

Sometimes you hear about 2 colour printing, or 3 colour printing. This is a process of printing that uses only pantone colours to create something. You might use 2 or 3 colour printing to create company letterhead or other stationery. If your logo is 2 PMS colours and black, you can use 3 colour printing – your two PMS colours and Pantone Black. Then, you have consistency every single time.

Alternatively, when you get into printing full colour books or brochures, you may choose to use 5 or 6 colour printing, which is usually CMYK process colours (4 colours), plus one or two pantone colours to get your identity exact regardless of what’s going on in the photos and what corrections need making on the press.

Digital Production

Photo: Editor B on Flickr

For web, TV or photograph quality reproduction, you’ll need your logo in RGB format. That’s Red, Green and Blue pixels. This is less precise because the appearance will often change based on what peoples’ screens and TVs are set to display. However, when printing photograph quality, you can do your best to ensure a colour match by having a proof run. When using your brand identity you want the closest match possible. Coca-cola won’t settle for their red being any less than perfect every single time and you shouldn’t either.

Here is the colour information Global BC provides to anyone using their logo. They do actually have a specific RGB value as well as Pantone and CMYK versions:

What about embroidery? Or vinyl decals? In those cases, you’ll need to select each colour yourself using the closest possible match to your Pantone colours. Ask your embroiderer for their thread colour books or your sign supplier for their vinyl samples to select the closest match.

About vector art and file types

What is a vector file anyway?

Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon(s), which are all based upon mathematical equations, to represent images in computer graphics.

Vector graphics formats are complementary to raster graphics, which is the representation of images as an array of pixels, as it is typically used for the representation of photographic images.[1] There are instances when working with vector tools and formats is best practice, and instances when working with raster tools and formats is best practice. There are times when both formats come together. An understanding of the advantages and limitations of each technology and the relationship between them is most likely to result in efficient and effective use of tools. [Wikipedia]

Vector files can be expanded exponentially; they’re not limited by resolution or size.

Here’s Kashi’s logo:

You can tell it’s a vector file because all the individual lines and curves can be selected.

You NEED to have vector art readily available to you. In fact, you can’t possibly have a Pantone version of your logo without it being vector art. You need a vector graphic to create cut vinyl; you need a vector graphic to embroider something. You need vector graphics to easily create background-free gif files (so that groovy gradient background on your website or blog actually shows up behind your logo) or place in multi-layered photoshop files (without your graphic designer having to do way more work at your expense).

Please ensure you always have vector files ready to send out to your suppliers. A vector file is typically an Illustrator (.AI or .EPS) file though it could have been created in another format. Please note – saving something as .EPS in Photoshop or Illustrator will not make it a vector file. You need the original.

JPEG or TIFF files are fine for use in print, provided they’re at least 300 DPI at final output size. FYI any file that is only a few kb in size is NOT appropriate for printing. A JPEG file may not be as good as a TIFF of the same size if it is significantly compressed. Whenever you’re printing anything on paper or some other substrate, you should go straight to your vector art.

JPEG or GIF files in RGB colour are used for web or TV. When sending your files out for external production, send the highest resolution size possible and let the person doing the production set the size (resolution will always be 72 DPI for screen output, but size will vary based on how much of the screen they want your logo to take up).

A few don’ts…

Don’t save a JPEG file as an .EPS file and send it out when asked for vector art.
Don’t ever send a logo embedded in a Word file. You’ll look foolish.
Don’t use raster image (or photograph) in your logo or wordmark because it can’t be a vector ever. You will not necessarily be able to use it for certain large format production. If Richard Branson offers you the opportunity to throw your logo on the side of his plane, you won’t be able to make it happen.
Don’t keep the very very latest Adobe CS4 file versions only – not everyone has the latest software package as soon as it comes out, so you want a version that is compatible with 2 or 3 previous versions.
Don’t let anyone stretch or skew your logo. Not even a little. If you don’t look out for it, no one else will.

A recap about logos, colours and file types

You want to have 3 or 4 versions of your logo for use on different coloured backgrounds. You want each of those 3 or 4 versions to be able to be used in Pantone ink, CMYK process and RGB colours. You want the original vector art at your disposal. That’s it, really.

If anyone has anything else to add, feel free. Obviously there are a million more details on every one of these topics, but I think everyone in business needs to know and understand how their own corporate identity is being used.

Your logo is a key component to creating and establishing an impactful brand. Make sure you’re getting it out there and using it wisely. When you have questions, ask them. It’s your brand; it’s who you are and what you stand for.

It may not be sexy, but it’s what sells…

Posted on December 2, 2008 by michelle.mack

Photo: Laffy4k on Flickr

Amber Naslund, over at Altitude Branding, blogged yesterday about “Real Work Isn’t Sexy.” Oh how true that is.

I just finished my first outside-my-day-job consulting project. It was more of a testing ground for me to figure out some new tools, find out what challenges I may face when selling myself as a consultant and building a portfolio of case studies to present to future clients.

The first thing I noticed was that almost everything that needed doing on an immediate basis was implementation.

First, I had to help my friend get his business current, digitally speaking. He needed a new website and he needed to digitize his contact list (think written address book); he needed a way for people to sign up to receive information from him via email. He needed to ensure people can watch his videos online without having to download a 50+MB file to their machine to do so. After all, he sells entertainment. That is his business. If people can’t preview it, he’s got nothing.

It is only now that all of that is in place, however quickly and inexpensively it was done, that he is ready to have me help him look at future strategy, customization, driving awareness etc. But just getting him current took real dirty, non-sexy implementation work.

Even a new site on a free wordpress.com theme took copying all his existing web content over to the new platform. It took setting up his URL and DNS and it took formatting images and video. It took uploading mp3 files and linking them up. It took revisions to his graphics in the creation of a new banner and wordmark, and it took setting up the widgets ordering the pages.

Digitizing his contact list was an even more arduous process. Manually populating excel spreadsheets with the required data is not on my list of favourite evening activities. While someone else did that initial data entry work, when it came time to uploading the files to his newly implemented email management tool I found the “name” was all one field vs. first name and last name, so I manually separated them… another hour or two. But that hour or two was quicker for me to just go ahead and get it done rather than look for someone who wanted a couple hours of admin work yada yada.

Having a well rounded skill set as a social media marketer is a good idea. Even as a marketer in the general sense, it’s a good idea to be able to manipulate graphic files, layouts, web pages etc. Experience with Adobe Creative Suite, html coding, Office suite, and any other software packages you can get to know will only serve you well.

You don’t want a conversation to go like this:

Client: So I need a new website, can you build it?

You: No, but I can hire someone to do it for you and I can help with managing the build from a best-practices perspective. There’s the guy I know who is fantastic and has an awesome client list. I’ll set up a meeting with him.

Client: Oh, okay. I’d also like it to look different than it does now… like a new identity, sort of. Maybe a new logo and colour scheme… Can you do that?

You: No. You need a graphic designer, but I know a really good one. Hey, I also think you should optimize all your photos so they don’t take so long to load on your site.

Client: Oh yeah, that’s a great idea. Can you do that?

You: Um, no.

Client: So, you do what, exactly?

Awkward.

I think it’s important to remember that it’s the doing that clients need. Especially when it comes to small business. Larger companies probably have some resources to handle some of the doing, and maybe that’s where you want to focus your efforts entirely. In fact, that may be where there is more money available anyway. Small business, on the other hand, needs someone to help with realistic implementations that will drive leads and sales. Bottom line.

Even the longer term strategy of this current project will require even more doing: a custom theme, adwords, blog tagging and editing for SEO (and teaching him to do this himself), monitoring…

If you’re like me, and you have a heart for small businesses having equal opportunity for harnessing the power of the internet in their marketing efforts, a little hands-on skill goes a long way… even if it means an hour or two of data entry every now and again.

im.seeking.balance

The Life of Michelle Mackintosh | Faith, Family & Fulfillment

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