Recently I was involved in bringing a client into the mobile revolution. And we considered a mobile application. It seems that everyone nowadays has a mobile app for their business. I, however, recommended against a mobile app for the Dulles Regional Chamber of Commerce. We instead opted for an interactive and user-friendly mobile website.

I think there has to be a great value-add to the consumer to convince them to download an app on their phone. Most smart phones can only hold so many apps. I’m not inclined to open that many apps unless it is something I can’t do on a website. Due to the nature of my business, I utilize social media apps on my phone. I also use a few social gaming apps. I suspect many consumers are like me and are reluctant to add an app to their phone.

Unless there is a compelling reason to use a mobile app, I don’t see the point. Add to that the cost of creating an app, making it compatible across all platforms and then having to maintain the compatibility as mobile operating systems are updated seems very expensive to me.

Here are 3 points to consider before investing in a mobile app for your business:

1. Compelling reason. Something your app can offer your customers, that they need and will make it easier to do business with you. A good example of this is the  Starbucks app which allows users to find the nearest store, reload their card and track their rewards.
2. Mobile traffic. Look at your site traffic. What percentage of your site visitors are accessing your site on mobile platforms? This will give you an idea of, not only the audience adoption of an app but also what platforms you should focus on in development. For the Chamber, less than 10% of their web traffic was from mobile which tells me the likelihood of adoption of a mobile app is very low.
3. Is there an ROI? Let’s face it. We are all in business to make money. If there is no return on the investment, then what’s the point? Mobile sites are cheaper to develop and tend to work across all platforms. The development time is also much faster.

If you are still convinced you need a mobile app, start with a mobile website and install some type of analytics to see how it is used. This can give you valuable data on what to include in your app during the development process.

I can think of few small to mid sized businesses that would need a mobile app.  Whatever you decide for your business, be sure to promote it to your audience. We created a pop up banner for the Chamber that is used at all events where we walk members through how to read the QR code and how to bookmark the mobile site.

Have you considered taking your business mobile? What did you decide? Let me know in the Comments below.

Series: Taking Your Business Mobile – part 1. Next entry: What Should I Include in My Business’ Mobile Website?

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I am speaking on “Marketing on a Shoestring” today for a conference of 400 women entrepreneurs.

It is a revised version of my 101 Low Cost Marketing Strategies seminar that I have been giving since I started my company in 2000. In preparing my presentation, I came across 10 absolute must haves for ANY business from a marketing standpoint (accountants and lawyers out there, stand down).

Then, when I looked at the list I thought. It is so simple. Libraries full of books have been written on how to do many of these things. I will trust you to find your own path toward the best way to put these items in place, just put them in place…today!

1. Elevator Speech. What do you do and why do I care? This falls under the entire messaging umbrella and could also include brand positioning statement, unique selling proposition, etc. Figure out what it is, find an easy to understand way to express it and be consistent.
2. Voice mail message. Now you have what you do and why I care, voice mail is the perfect opportunity to express it. I have to admit, I hadn’t been following my own advice here, but I just changed my voice mail to reflect a clear messaging statement and call to action.
3. Email Signature. Another opportunity to get your message across and drive traffic to your online presence. That’s right, you should include links. And please add an email signature to your cell phone if you respond to business emails from there.
4. Business Card. I assume you have all the relevant information on your card, but if I look at it after I meet you, can I tell what you do or how it can help me? Is there a call to action? And a QR code that takes me to your non-mobile enhanced website is not what I mean.
5. LinkedIn Profile. I speak on social media – a lot.. And I have yet to meet a business owner who should NOT have a LinkedIn Profile for themselves. It doesn’t take that much time. Be sure you complete it. The best completion checklist I’ve found is by Maisha Walker at Inc.: http://www.inc.com/maisha-walker/2009/08/how_to_use_your_linkedin_profi.html
6. Email List. I have yet to meet a business owner who could not benefit from an email list of their clients. In fact, I have case studies of my clients who have moved completely away from postal mail in less than 6 months after starting email marketing. Postal mail had been the business’ only form of marketing to that point. Email marketing is easy, cheap and a way to reach directly to your prospects and customers. Use a professional service like Constant Contact. (Full Disclosure: I am a Constant Contact Expert and Solution Provider)
7. Follow Up. Have a follow up plan for your business. If you go to a networking event, don’t just throw the cards in a box or a drawer, but have a plan. Don’t automatically subscribe everyone you met to your email newsletter. Likewise, don’t send a blanket post-event email a la “it was nice to meet you”. Reach out personally to the few warm leads you met at the event. If you told them you would send them something, send it.
8. Testimonials. If you don’t have any, start collecting them right now. Call your best customers. Ask them to write a testimonial for you. If they don’t have the time, write one for them and ask them to edit as appropriate. Potential customers are far more likely to believe another one of your customers saying you are fantastic, then you saying you are fantastic.
9. Thank You. Say Thank you to your customers. Whether you implement an official rewards program or send them the occasional note and/or cookie basket. Let them know you appreciate them.
10. Belief. If you don’t believe in yourself, your prospects never will. Do what you do. Do it well and believe.

Can you think of a business marketing must have that I missed? Let me know in the comments.

It’s easy to add links to your Facebook page or LinkedIn profile to your website. It is simply a matter of adding some HTML code within your design.

Of course many of the social media sites offer widgets that will create a custom badge on your website that pulls in content from your profile. We are just discussing the basics today, getting those social media links on your site with the appropriate icons.

1. You need the images that you plan to use for your links. I recommend using images directly from the social media platform. Here are the links:

Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/pages/manage/promo_guidelines.php

LinkedIn. http://developer.linkedin.com/docs/DOC-1101

Twitter. http://twitter.com/about/files

YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/t/creators_downloads

If you looking for something with a little more style, please check out the enormous amount of social media icon sets found at Smashing Magazine. I like some of the sets in this post about free icon sets.

2. After you have the image, you plan to use, you will need the actual link for your profile or page. The easiest way to find the link is to navigate to your profile and copy the URL in the address field of your browser. From there, you will probably have some editing to do.

Facebook. The address in your browser bar will show additional information that you don’t need for your link. If you have a Facebook page with less than 25 followers, your link should look like this:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/<town>/<page name> /<string of 12 numbers>

Depending on the type of page you have set up, you may not have the <town> field. If you have at least 25 followers, then log in to Facebook, after login, navigate to http://www.facebook.com/username. Be sure to select “Set a username for your Pages.” This will give you a new simpler URL of your choice, as long as it is available.

Doesn’t http://www.facebook.com/laurabcreative, look better than http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sterling-VA/laurabcreative/26156294968?

LinkedIn. From within LinkedIn, navigate to Edit My Profile. If you haven’t already set your custom URL, do this by selecting Edit following your existing URL in the Public Profile field. Your new URL will look like this:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/<your name>

My LinkedIn profile is http://www.linkedin.com/in/laurabpoindexter

Twitter. Twitter is the easiest site for URLs. Your URL is:

http://www.twitter.com/<your Twitter handle>

Your handle is the 15 character username. For example, my URL is http://www.twitter.com/laurabcreative.

YouTube. YouTube also has inherent URLs that are already customized. All users have channels, whether you post videos or not. You will see the URL is:

http://www.youtube.com/user/<username>

You can remove the “user” in this URL and it will still work. For example, one of my client’s YouTube channel is http://www.youtube.com/loverugbycompany.

This post is an article I wrote for a golf tournament I am sponsoring today. Keep that in mind when reading. This is for the golfers to read while on the course. They will be enjoying a sunny, beautiful Thursday afternoon, but you get the hyperlinks!

Top FREE Mobile Applications You Can Be Using to Do Business Today

You’ve got a smart phone. It’s not just for turn-by-turn directions, you know.

1.   LinkedIn. The top business networking site has mobile applications for BlackBerry, iPhone and Palm Pre. Use LinkedIn mobile to keep up to date on what’s going on in your network and to contact any of your connections. Access your LinkedIn search, connections, messages and more.

2.    Evernote. Now available for most mobile platforms, desktop and online. Evernote gives you a place to store all your, well, notes: text, a full webpage or webpage excerpt, a photograph, a voice memo, or a file attachment. Notes can sync across platforms, organize into folders and become searchable.

Hot Tip: Take a photo of a business card with Evernote mobile and it automatically recognizes the text so it becomes searchable. No more stacks of business cards creating piles on your desk. Simply snap the ones you want to follow up with. You could even give the card back on the spot.

3.  Google Sync. Having trouble keeping all your calendars synced across devices? Need to see both personal and business appointments? Google Sync allows you to integrate Google Calendars with your native phone calendar. It can also sync your contacts. Google Calendar can be synced with your desktop calendar application and allows the ability to share or make your calendars public. Share a personal calendar with your spouse to keep track of the family. Visit www.laurabcreative.com/speaking to see a Google Calendar made public and formatted into an event listing. Wow!

4.    Ping.fm. You may have heard of Ping.fm but are not sure how to use it. Ping.fm is simply a tool to help you update your status on over 40 social networks. It allows you to access your account via SMS (text message) or a third party mobile application like BlackPing for the BlackBerry. Ping.fm can be useful in updating your status across your social networks but be careful, each social network is different and your updates should not be blanketed across all of them. Ping.fm does allow you to set up different groups to separate your audiences. I highly recommend this. I don’t want to see “RT @dulleschamber @laurabcreative @guykawasaki blah, blah, blah” in your LinkedIn status. And at least 70% of your network doesn’t either. They probably don’t even understand it because they are not Twitter users.

5.    HootSuite. HootSuite bills itself as “the professional Twitter client”, but it’s so much more than that. It is a complete web-based social media dashboard which lets you schedule updates across different social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Facebook pages, MySpace, Foursquare, even Ping.fm). This includes adding photos and updating a WordPress blog. The dashboard also allows you to share the load with your team, giving you the ability to manage access to business profiles. The mobile application is available for iPhone and Android as a free limited version or $1.99 full version. The web-based dashboard is free.

6.    NutShell Mail. This is not a mobile application per se. It is a service that “brings a summary of your social network updates to your inbox in a single email on your schedule”. You decide how often you want to check your social networks, set up your schedule and view everything in a single email. Nutshell Mail was just acquired by email service provider Constant Contact.

7.    Documents To Go. Allows you to view Microsoft Office and PDF files. The full version ranges from $15-$30 depending on the platform, but the viewer is free. If you need to look at files while you are away from your computer, Documents To Go will fill that role. The premium version allows you to create files.

Hot Tip: Keep your latest sales presentation on your handheld and you will always be ready to show it to prospects.

8.    RSS reader. There are so many RSS readers and it’s hard to recommend one without knowing you a little better. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and allows you to pull the updated posts from a particular site, usually a news or blog site, but in reality almost anything can be made into an RSS feed like the public calendar mentioned earlier. The best mobile application depends on your phone but almost all of them sync with the free Google Reader which allows you to set up and track your preferred feeds online.

So, with the applications above, you can keep in touch with your business contacts, keep track of all your brilliant ideas, keep your calendars synced with all the appropriate devices and anyone who may need access, update and track your social networks on your schedule, view and share files and keep up-to-date on your industry. And you’re playing golf!

Social media is all the rage in the marketing world, especially the small business marketing world. I know this because it is what I do and what I hold seminars on. And I talk to business owners everyday who say “oh, I already have a Facebook page”. As if that were enough. I often equate it to a decade ago when businesses thought they could just build a web site and their sales would skyrocket. We all know how successful businesses were who had a site with no strategy.

I use this blog to give you real world examples of good and bad marketing which I tag as “Brilliant” or “Daft”. This is not to highlight or criticize the companies in my example, but rather to get you to think. Are you doing something similar? How can you make it better? If it’s a good idea, can you use it in your business?

I encourage my clients and audiences to look at what is working in other industries and apply it to their business. I absolutely love this example below by a guy looking for a job in advertising…

Does that give you any ideas on what you could be spending your AdWords budget on other than fighting for those hot keywords?



Today and tomorrow, the world turns not only to the Super Bowl, but more conversationally to this year’s crop of Super Bowl ads. The premise of this blog is to share good and bad examples of marketing in action which I denote as Brilliant! or Daft! Of course, my denotation of these marketing examples are based solely on my opinion and experience as a marketing consultant. I believe all marketing should be measured solely on sales and nothing else. If it’s boring, but the phone is ringing – stick with it. If it is cool, new and exciting, but the phone is not ringing then what is the point. Businesses are after all in existence to make money.

That being said, the Super Bowl ads often highlight many Daft! advertising efforts. The most popular and most remembered Super Bowl ad of all time – the Mean Joe Green Coke ad – was pulled after just a few months because it did not result in an increase in sales.

A recent Ad Age article about holiday ads shows that while consumers like them, that doesn’t mean they’re influenced by them. A new survey has found that half of consumers say they’re not inspired to shop at the retailer whose holiday TV commercial or online promotion they liked best.

So enjoy the game and the commercials, but don’t model your small business campaigns on anything you see today.

I can give that question an unequivocal “yes”. This week I dropped my BlackBerry. If you read my last post about My Truly Virtual Office, you can see how vital the BlackBerry is to the whole operation.

From the time I dropped it, there was about 20 hours before I could get to a Verizon store. They will send me a new BlackBerry but it takes 2 days. However, I was smart enough to bring in an old phone to get activated in the meantime. That is why we keep our old phone lying around, right? 24 hours into it’s second tour of duty, my old smartphone blew a gasket. Complete crash – equivalent to a PC blue screen of death, but with no recovery option.

So here I sit, in a coffee shop between appointments, using the wifi and being completely out of touch with clients, friends and family. It will all be resolved this afternoon when the FedEx man brings me my new BlackBerry, but it did make me think about how much we take for granted due to technology.
Here are 3 thoughts for you to ponder:

Do you have a back up of your important phone data, including contacts? Luckily, I had synced my contacts with my Google account so with Internet access, I can access all my contact info and when I have my new BlackBerry, I just need to resync to Google to pull all my calendar and contact info back into my new phone. I also just luckily copied all the photos and videos from my phone last week because I wanted a backup after our trip to the White House.

With that in mind, do you have a backup of ALL your important data? I’ve had enough computer crashes in my career to know the importance of an automatic daily backup of my computers. I also regularly back up my clients’ web sites. I know the host has built in redundancy, but if that does in fact fail, isn’t it better for me to have a backup to reupload immediately or move to a new host.

Do you take the immediacy of our current technology for granted? Do you send an email to someone and assume that they got it and expect an immediate reply? I am usually quick to reply to email because of my BlackBerry but this week, I have only been able to check email a few times a day. And in looking at my Inbox, I have 2115 messages in the last two months. That is not spam and that is only one of my many email addresses. Of those messages, 1249 are unread. What that means is that I most likely saw it come over and read the subject, but I haven’t read it completely or responded to it. I don’t think my Inbox is much different from other professionals out there. My advice: if you send an email on an urgent matter, follow up with a phone call.

There’s never been a better time to stay connected with your business network than right now. Business tends to slow down over the holidays and sometimes sooner if you are like me and snowed in a week before Christmas. This is a great time to take advantage of social networking sites to stay in touch and build your network. Over the next few posts we will examine how to do that effectively using some of the top social media sites. Today we start with the #1 business networking site – Linkedin.

5 Ways to Build Your Network on Linkedin

1. Check out your Linkedin Inbox for Requests to Connect.
2. Are you connected to all your current customers and vendors?
3. Peruse the connections of your connections to see who you should be connected to but you aren’t yet – both people you know and people you want to know. Send requests to connect and don’t forget to personalize the message.
4. Are you a member of a lead share group, BNI, committee, board of directors? Are you connected to all of your colleagues from these groups? This extends to charity work as well.
5. Scan the membership of any groups you have joined on Linkedin. Are there people in these groups that you need to connect with?
6. Scan the groups your connections are in. Are there groups you need to join? These can be alumni groups, trade associations, or networking groups. If you find new groups to join, return to 5.

I hope these tips will get you started on building your network while drinking hot cocoa or eggnog or hot cider.

If you want some guidelines on who to connect with, see my post Deciding on Linkedin Invitations.

I had two great experiences this week of receiving immediate communication regarding something I was interested in. First of all, my child’s pediatrician is using Twitter to update interested parents on the status of their flu vaccine shipments. This is great for me who is in desperate need of an injectable vaccine for my little one. I am sure it also alleviates a ton of calls into the office. Result? I will be really pleased when they tweet the vaccine has arrived and will be able to call for an appointment right away ensuring that my child gets this much needed vaccine.

I also received an email Tuesday evening from the Pro Football Hall of Fame informing me that tickets to the 2010 Enshrinement Ceremony would go on sale Wednesday morning at 9:00am. The web site still said that ticket information would be available soon, but those on their email list were ready to place their order as soon as the tickets were released. The result? I will be sitting in Canton on August 7 watching, among others, Emmitt Smith get his yellow jacket.

Lastly, I was disappointed to find no such option on the National Park Service web site. I am very interested in attending the lighting of the National Christmas Tree in Washington, DC this year which will likely be the first week of December. However, the site only says “Details for the 2009 National Christmas Tree Program have not been announced. Please check the website regularly for updated information.” Imagine the phone calls avoided and happy citizens if they offered some time of communication option to receive the date and time of the event as soon as it is announced.

How can your business effectively use these communications tools to keep your attentive audience informed and relieve routine questions into your business?