Faol-Inc.Com - Education Guide

Many companies place ‘creative stimuli’ like pool tables in their offices to inspire remarkable ideas, but what actually materializes as a result? Whether your office is made up of cubicles or open-plan architecture, your workspace should foster a culture of Productive Creativity.

You can learn a lot about a person from taking a look around their home. Since everything communicates, a brief glimpse at a bookcase is a lens for what your colleague finds interesting. Much like you can tell a lot about a person by looking around their home, you can understand a company’s culture from their workspace.

The typical office set-up of cubicles and fluorescent lamps reflects conformity, isolation, and a lack of individuality, where each employee is a mere cog on a wheel. Not surprisingly, remarkable ideas are seldom conceived in such settings. On the other hand, people assume that a fun-filled open-plan architecture is the answer to generate innovative ideas. With its emphasis on collaboration and fun, these workspaces reflect teamwork, collaboration and creativity for people to share and brainstorm new ideas. These companies believe that “bumping” into each other and engaging in an impromptu game of Rock Band is the catalyst for fresh ideas.

However, through some of our team’s research, we have discovered some liabilities with these collaborative spaces. As more value is placed on inspiration and less on structure and taking action, teams are liable to spend more time generating more ideas and less time on improving any particular ideas. We have found that ideas are less likely to gain traction when idea generation is never confined. Collaborative workspaces also encourage interruptions that can, in turn, produce distractions that reduce productivity. The “bumping” philosophy causes people to meet on the fly, rather than adequately prepare for a meeting. While open-plan architecture may facilitate raw creativity, this kind of environment does not necessarily foster the focus and accountability required to push ideas forward.

A workspace should be used NOT just to generate ideas, but also to make ideas happen. Since most great ideas are formulated in unstructured space, why not use time outside of the office for blue sky thinking…and then return to your workspace to take action? Here are some tips for turning your open collaborative space to a productive one.

(1) Treat your colleagues as if they have an imaginary door. Limit the spur-of-the-moment meetings. Limit the number of times you interrupt people when they are in the middle of doing something to get quick feedback. Instead, schedule a time to allow for preparation and more thorough thoughts.
(2) Wear headphones when you do not want to be interrupted. If you are focused and concentrated on getting something done, wear headphones to visually let people know that you do not want to be disturbed, even if you are not listening to music.
(3) Implement the Action Method visually. Some of the most productive teams in the creative community put their action steps on the wall for the whole company to see. This promotes an emphasis for capturing the Actions Steps behind ideas and accountability for taking them.
(4) Hold Action Meetings. Rather than holding a meeting to brainstorm new ideas, hold a meeting to determine Action Steps for each team member.

Behance articles and tips are adapted from the writing and research of Scott Belsky and the Behance team. This article in particular was a collaboration between Scott Belsky and Michael Karnjanaprakorn on the Behance Team. Behance runs the Behance Creative Network , the Creative Jobs List, and develops knowledge, products, and services that help creative professionals make ideas happen. All information (c) Scott Belsky, Behance LLC

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Source: Scott Belsky of Behance

Learning how to market your business and close sales can be the toughest part of running a business. Most of us start a business because we happen to be good at “something.” We started a business because we were good at accounting, or landscaping, or building houses, or freelance writing, or software programming, or Web design.

But chances are, we are not that great at sales and marketing. Heck, you can’t be good at everything, right?

Unfortunately, no sale = no eat.

But if you want to boost your marketing by 100% and make it easier to get sales, try this one little technique that anyone can learn to do … learn to tell stories.

If you tell a story, your business is more likely to be memorable. And being memorable goes a long way toward marketing your business and getting people to buy — directly and indirectly.

Let me give you an example. A while back I gave a speech about the value of business blogging. In it I debunked a lot of misconceptions about blogging. I told a little story about how I work at home, and write blogs, but contrary to popular belief about bloggers, I don’t work in my pajamas wearing fuzzy bunny slippers.

Afterwards, people came up to me joking about those fuzzy bunny slippers. I got emails for the next two weeks. I got a lot more feedback from that one speech than I normally get — by a factor of 5 to 1.

More importantly, that one speaking engagement directly led to my getting a new piece of business. The client heard the story from someone else who thought it interesting enough to repeat it … and the rest is history.

That fuzzy bunny slipper story made the presentation come to life — made it pop!

T.J. Walker, a public speaking consultant to the rich and famous, wrote about the power of telling stories. Quoting the book “Made to Stick” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, he notes that 63% of people will remember a story from a talk or presentation, versus only 5% who remembered statistics.

He also said this: “Stories are not a luxury; they are the single most effective way to get your audience to remember your messages.”

OK, he was talking about public speaking. But, that same principle applies to marketing your business, too — because marketing is partially about getting your message across.

If you want your business to be memorable, and for your message to reach as many people as possible and persuade them to buy, learn to tell stories around your business. Learn to tell stories that prospects and the public can relate to and will remember. Here are a handful of ways to use stories:

• Develop a startup story about your business to reinforce your brand image and the public’s recollection of it. Consider the startup story around Bob Evans. An entire section of the Bob Evans website is devoted to telling the story of the small farm in a small town in Ohio where the restaurant chain got its start. They even tell the story on placemats in Bob Evans restaurants. That story reinforces the “down home” atmosphere and brand association they want to convey. If you think comfort food, you’re likely to think of Bob Evans.

• Tell business stories in newsletters, in blog posts and in other communications with existing customers, to trigger word of mouth. Stories get people talking about you. Other people are more likely to repeat a story and share it with someone else, than they are to repeat dry marketing-speak from a brochure. Help word of mouth along by creating the kind of message that spreads. Think about how many people have spread the story of Hewlett Packard’s beginnings “in a garage.”

• Learn to explain what your business or products or services do in a story. This will clarify your message and make it easier to understand. How many times have you heard a sales pitch and had no idea what the sales rep was trying to say? Or read a brochure or website that you couldn’t understand? Technology products are notorious for this — they use verbiage that is broad and conceptual. Try this experiment: read the copy on a dozen different “software solution” websites — I’ll bet you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference among at least half of them. Ah — but if instead you read a story about how one customer used the software, or a story about the problem the founder was aiming to solve when he/she founded the business, then it starts to become clear.

• When speaking to the press or in public or when putting out press releases or even when writing blog posts, wrap a story around your point. Use colorful language to describe your story. A well-told story can make for great sound bites. Make yourself “quotable” and you’re more likely to be “quoted” by the press.

• Write case studies as stories. If you think about it, a case study is nothing more than a particular kind of story, told a particular way. For best effect, write like you are telling a story.

If you’re not used to using stories to talk about your business or what you’re selling, start practicing until it becomes easy and just flows. Practice telling it to your husband or wife. Practice telling it to the cat or the dog (they can’t talk back!). Talk about it internally and get your staff to help round out the story by pointing out details you may treat matter of factly, but which they may see as important.

You’ll find that once you can present your business message in the context of an interesting story, marketing your business and even closing sales becomes much easier.

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Source: Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends

In the past few posts I’ve focused on the idea of business as conversation, arguing that the Internet is the new transit of that conversation, and therefore, you are now in the Internet media business. So what next? You have a business, and that business has a site on the Web. You know all about SEO (or, more likely, you’ve read a lot about it and possibly even hired someone else to help you know all about SEO). A while back I promised some simple steps you can take to make your site ready for this new conversation.

But as I think about it, I’ve realized that the best advice I can give you has nothing to do with changes to your site, per se. Rather, it has to do with changes to yourself. If you change how you use the Web, your site changes, well, they’ll come by themselves.

Let’s do a quick audit of your own conversation patterns on the web. First off, how are you consuming the web? The fact that you’re here, at a blog, is a good sign. But did you land here by chance, or are you actively looking for resources that might be helping you be better at your business? Do you use an RSS reader? A blog search tool?

Secondly, let’s get social. Are you actively using communications tools like instant messenger, Facebook, Linked In, and Twitter? If your answer is “what’s Twitter,” well, we’ll get back to that shortly.

And thirdly, and most importantly, are you adding value back into the web on a regular basis? The easiest way to do this is blogging, and we’ll get back to that one as well. But let’s take each of these in turn.

The key to being a good conversationalist is having something to say. And you can’t have anything to say if you aren’t well informed. As a business owner, you are a leader in a specific topic. And no matter the field, there are nearly limitless resources to monitor that can keep you smart and well informed. Do you run a retail outlet? Find the best retail blog sites, both national and local. Identify the larger companies in your businesses’ ecosystem and follow them using news alerts. Find the local sites covering your town, and get familiar with the latest happenings there. I find it’s always a good exercise to pretend to be a customer and to pattern that person’s information habits as they intersect with your business. What are they reading? What do they want to know?

If this all sounds like a bit much, it is. That’s why you need tools along the way to help. I’ve found the RSS reader to be incredibly helpful. This is a software tool that aggregates any number of information resources into one easy to scan interface. You tell it what to read for you, and it checks the web for new updates, presenting them in one place for you. Once you get into the habit of adding new feeds to your reader and scanning it for updates, you’ll become a much more well rounded member of your community. And that means you’re ready for step two.

How do you use the web to communicate? Do you use social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn? Do you use an instant messenger service like AOL’s AIM? Have you discovered what I call the “what’s up” services like Twitter? If your answer is “no, no, and no” I’d like to suggest you take the very hard steps of changing your habits. It’s hard to argue with step one (getting better informed) but step two is downright scary: I’m asking you to start acting like your kids. But once you start, you will find that being better connected means you are more engaged in your community. And once you are more engaged in your community, your status as a leader will be more firmly established.
This all leads to the third and most important step in our audit: What are you doing to add value back to the web? Are you blogging? Is your business’s presence on the web conversational? Do you create something new for your customers to find each day? This won’t come as a surprise, but it’s my considered opinion that you should.

You already have a website, after all. But unless you turn that site into a living, organic reflection of yourself and your business, all you’ve really got is a brochure. Instead, your site can become the hub of all the work you’ve done – all that information consumption, all that communication. Recall earlier when I said: “…it’s always a good exercise to pretend to be a customer and to pattern that person’s information habits as they intersect with your business. What are they reading? What do they want to know?” Well, if your site had a blog, you could note interesting tidbits on your site. Each time you update your site with your own voice, you make your site that much more relevant to someone. And your site becomes that much more conversational, and that much more worthy of high rankings in search engines, which brings new customers to your site and your business.

I guess what I’m saying, in short, is that your site needs to be a reflection of you. You’re a great conversationalist, or you wouldn’t be running a business. But are you a great conversationalist in the medium of the Web? If not, it’s time to get talking.

(This post has gotten quite long, but I’m happy to continue the conversation in the comments section, where I’ll happily post links to my favorite RSS readers, blogging platforms, and tutorials on various other tools).

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Source: John Battelle of SearchBlog

Visionary leaders run the risk of overriding the ideas of the brilliant people around them.

Jack Welch, legendary CEO of GE, was known to walk in a room of great people solving important problems and proclaim “Here’s what I think we should do.” He would go on to explain his vision and reasoning. And then, after sharing his solution for the problem at hand, he would ask, “what do you think?” It is no surprise that he would get many nods of affirmation and not much disagreement or new, bold ideas.

Perhaps this is sometimes necessary in a large corporation, but never in a creative team. After all, a creative team’s purpose is to exchange, digest, and refine ideas. If you fail to capture the insights from each member of the team, then you are actually “losing value.”

The tendency to “act first” is a fatal flaw for leaders in the creative community. When we get passionate about our solutions, we tend to share them with excitement. However, when our responsibility is to engage the creativity of our colleagues, we must practice restraint.

The creative process is also a process of engagement. Enabling new or less experienced members of your team to share their ideas is a critical way to bring them on board. Don’t let their ideas fade in the shadow of your “brilliant” insights. Instead, practice restraint. Silence yourself. Ask questions before making statements. And recognize that fresh insight is often what moves the ball forward.

Behance articles and tips are adapted from the writing and research of Scott Belsky and the Behance team. Behance runs the Behance Creative Network , the Creative Jobs List, and develops knowledge, products, and services that help creative professionals make ideas happen. All information (c) Scott Belsky, Behance LLC

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Source: Scott Belsky of Behance

Last month (April 2008) the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business held hearings on the so-called underground economy. Its definition of “underground economy” is so broad, it may surprise you.

When I first heard about the hearings, I assumed the phrase “underground economy” related to the practice of hiring workers under the table and paying them in cash. After all, that’s the traditional definition of “underground economy.”

This paper from the Mises organization defines underground economy quite specifically: ‘There is a bustling and shadowy world where jobs, services, and business transactions are conducted by word of mouth and paid for in cash to avoid scrutiny by government officials. It is called the “underground economy,” which is as old as government itself. It springs from human nature that makes man choose between given alternatives. Facing the agents of government and their exactions, man will weigh the alternatives and may choose to go “underground.” ‘

So I was quite surprised to see that the Senate hearings seemed to have a different focus. The definition of “underground economy” in the Senate hearings seemed to target those who classify someone as an independent contractor, rather than an employee.

According to the statement by Senator John Kerry, Chair of the Senate Committee on Small Business, the definition of underground economy that the Committee is looking at includes small businesses that may misclassify independent contractors instead of employees. Senator Kerry’s statement notes: “Too many workers are being misclassified as independent contractors — an arrangement in which the employer is not responsible for withholding of income or paying employment taxes. Employers who erroneously misclassify their workers stand to save as much as 30 percent of their payroll costs. This puts law abiding employers at a disadvantage.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m troubled by this expansion of the definition of underground economy to include misclassification of independent contractors/employees.

Listen, I’m all for being a law abiding citizen. I wouldn’t dream of suggesting otherwise.

Paying workers under the table in cash, or accepting payment from customers in cash without reporting it is one thing. When you do not report income — either for your own company or for workers — and try to hide your tracks by purposely not keeping a records trail, that’s clearly wrong. It’s black — as in black-and-white wrong. That’s the underground economy. Anyone engaged in it knows it’s wrong.

However, hiring independent contractors can range from lily white to many shades of gray. In many cases it is perfectly legitimate. In fact, it may be the only way that very small businesses can grow. They can’t afford to hire employees, and typically start out with independent contractors.

In other cases, it’s a matter of interpretation. A small business may be reporting all income and all payments made to others, just have a worker misclassified. After all, the IRS requires companies to file 1099-Miscellaneous income statements for any contractor who receives more than $600 in a year. If you are filing 1099s, you are not trying to hide the payments.

You say the worker is in an independent contractor. The IRS says he or she is an employee. The test as to what constitutes an employee and what constitutes an independent contractor is not a clear one, but is open to some interpretation.

You may have misclassified someone. And you may have to pay penalties and make changes because of your error of misclassification.

But does that put you in the same league as an employer who uses illegal immigrants, pays them only in cash to avoid a records trail, and doesn’t report ANY payments at all for that person to the IRS? Should a business owner who legitimately believes someone is an independent contractor but misclassifies the person, be lumped in with those who are deliberately lying to the governmental tax authorities and going to pains to hide it?

I suggest these are two very different behaviors. Let’s not confuse them.

If workers are being paid under the table, in cash, with no records trail and no reporting of those payments to the IRS or to state tax officials, that’s against the law. Often it is undocumented immigrants who are being paid this way. They are being exploited. This is illegal, no question about it.

But I think it’s a different issue to start labeling hard-working business owners who are doing their best to interpret unclear rules as “cheaters.” If you do that, then you could drive businesses deep underground and off the books and into the REAL underground economy — businesses that otherwise would not want to be off the books. Or you’ll cause them to forgo growing and getting help for their businesses, and that won’t help the economy one bit.

What’s your view? Should small businesses using independent contractors and who report the payments they make to them, be lumped in with those who pay under the table and try to hide their payments? Is there a difference?

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Source: Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends

Sometimes great wisdom is shared with very few words. Here are some thoughtful quotes I have come across that provide great perspective…

“There is no competition in the world. If you can start something, carry it through and complete it, you are in the top two percent of our society” -unknown

“Commitment precedes achievement” -unknown

“If you go the extra mile, there will never be a traffic jam” -unknown

“Simplicity is the ultimate Sophistication” -Albert Einstein

“The chief danger in life is that you take too many precautions.” -Psychologist Alfred Adler

“Nothing is easier than saying words. Nothing is harder than living them day after day.” -Arthur Gordon

“Getting caught is the mother of invention.” -Robert Bryne

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” -Carl Jung

“The secret to managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.” -Casey Stengel

“The superior man is modest in his speech but exceeds in his actions” -Confucius

Behance articles and tips are adapted from the writing and research of Scott Belsky and the Behance team. Behance runs the Behance Creative Network , the Creative Jobs List, and develops knowledge, products, and services that help creative professionals make ideas happen.

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Source: Scott Belsky of Behance

Those of us who spend a fair amount of time online love our shiny new toys. We seem to always need something new to try out. And one of the shiniest toys these days is Twitter.com.

But the question I get from other entrepreneurs and business owners is, “why”? Why bother with social media tools like Twitter in the first place?

Well, today I came across a good business reason for using Twitter.

That reason: to get and give word of mouth referrals. That reason proved to me the value of using a tool like Twitter.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is one of the hottest social media sites around. It is like a string of instant messages that others can read and respond to.

Twitter messages are very short. You’re limited to 140 characters per message — about one sentence. You don’t get bogged down writing a lot, because you literally cannot write anything long.

One of the reasons I find Twitter a bit addicting is that it gets people talking to one another. It’s designed to be fast — encouraging quick back and forth repartee. It’s also designed to be social — it encourages people to communicate with one another.

I liken Twitter to having a conversation with a group of people at a big lunch table in the company cafeteria. People come and go as their schedules permit. One person leaves, and another person sits down in his place and joins in. Multiple conversations are going on at once. You join in this conversation thread or that one, depending on whether you have something to add. Some of the conversations are purely social. Some are business related. Some are nothing more than a little office gossip. The main difference with Twitter, though, is that you’re conversing online in short text messages, instead of verbally in person.

By contrast, writing a blog post or a forum post can seem solitary — it’s just you, your thoughts and the keyboard. It may be hours, days … or never … before someone responds back to your blog post. Don’t get me wrong — blogs are great or I wouldn’t spend so much of my time writing on them. But they are designed for longer, more in-depth thoughts, and not for rapid back and forth communicating. Blogs serve entirely different purposes.

Word of Mouth in Action

So, back to Twitter.

Most of us don’t have the luxury of time or extra staff to spend on things that may be nice to do, if they don’t add to our bottom lines.

A social media site had better have a good solid business purpose.

And that purpose is what I ran into today, with Twitter.

A business colleague emailed me and asked if I knew a graphics designer. This is a colleague who does not use Twitter. In fact, he happens to be a Vice President of a company that may well have a need for ongoing graphics design work. Who knows, it could turn out to be a beneficial long-term relationship.

I went over to the Twitter.com website and posed the question: “Business colleague is looking for graphics designer who takes on smaller projects: headers, banners, etc. Know anyone?” (I used 118 characters, well within my 140-character limit.). Within a matter of minutes, I had 6 referrals. A few hours later, I had 4 more referrals, for a total of 10 different referrals.

I was able to pass on those referrals to my colleague.

And since my network on Twitter contains both local contacts as well as International ones, several of the referrals were to local designers — something my colleague may prefer.

It took me about 15 minutes of time to compose a short message on Twitter, copy and paste the responses into two emails I sent to my colleague, and respond back to those who sent referrals with quick “thank yous.” And for that, I was able to get 10 word of mouth recommendations.

Imagine if I had tried to do that via telephone or individual emails. I’d still be waiting for responses — and I would have spent considerably more time.

Oh, and all the responses were positive ones of recommendation. No one wrote back and said “whatever you do, so and so was terrible so don’t use her or him” as they might have done on a consumer review site. Why? Because for the most part we know who the other people on Twitter are. They are not hiding behind anonymous fronts and who-knows-what agendas. It was straight-forward word of mouth.

My experience is not unusual. I see such word of mouth referrals taking place regularly on Twitter among others.

That single experience with word of mouth was worth it with Twitter. So if you need a reason to justify using social media such as Twitter, just think about how how word of mouth works online. Word of mouth — the ability to share it and spread it — is often one of the most valuable benefits of social media sites. It could help you identify and sort through vendors, service providers, resources, and other needed information and recommendations that will help you run your business.

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Source: Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends

How should we reconcile our tendency to seek the advice of experts with our desire to also question the status quo and try things differently? As creative professionals, we cannot become imprisoned by the past, but we must also not be stubborn and spend our time reinventing the wheel.

There is a somewhat healthy tendency in every discipline to defer to the knowledge of elders. Starting with the original “apprenticeship” structures of the 19th century to the traditional corporate hierarchies that permeate our life today, societies are built on collective wisdom from the past. Major conferences around the world gather industry “experts” to share their wisdom. We painstakingly listen to our elders’ projections as if they were coming from an oracle.

However, for the small portion of society that is tasked with innovation and pushing the edge, a reliance on conventional wisdom is damning. We must seek advice with a dose of skepticism, and we must always consider the merits of developing new platforms rather than just derivatives. As you make new ideas happen, consider a few tips to navigate the terrain of ancient wisdom and new insight.

1. Don’t judge someone based on age. Only judge based on skill. We have an inherent prejudice against young people because we question how much they could possibly know given their relative lack of experience. However, young people have very legitimate advantages when it comes to detecting trends, adopting new technology, and attempting risky undertakings that yield lessons that we may never attain. When working with new people, examine one’s skill set rather than age or number of years in industry.

2. Question the correlation between past accomplishments and present knowledge. We all have a tendency to “rest on our laurels.” But cutting edge knowledge becomes antiquated very quickly. The brilliant expert from yesterday may have little relevant insight today. In fact, such experts may be too biased by their own past experiences to see how the times have changed.

3. Beware of conventions. Rather than default to the way things have already been done, recognize that anything can always be done better. While it is certainly worthy to find and follow effective methods to approach projects, it is dangerous to passively accept advice. Even sacred Behance Tips must be taken with a grain of salt and built upon!

Behance articles and tips are adapted from the writing and research of Scott Belsky and the Behance team. Behance runs the Behance Creative Network , the Creative Jobs List, and develops knowledge, products, and services that help creative professionals make ideas happen.All information (c) Scott Belsky, Behance LLC

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Source: Scott Belsky of Behance

For a number of years the price of technology to run our businesses has been dropping quite dramatically. Let me give you three general examples:

- Computer hardware — Computers far more powerful than the one with the Pentium I chip that cost me $2,500 a number of years ago, now sell for a little over $500. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, prices of personal computer equipment have dropped 10% to 28% each year since 2000.

- Telecommunications — The prices of making phone calls are much cheaper, too. VOIP providers now offer unlimited calling plans within the U.S. and Canada for affordable flat monthly rates. Competition from non-traditional providers, including cable companies and eBay’s almost-free Skype service, has pressured the established telecom companies like AT&T to come out with bundled services to give the VOIP and cable companies a serious run for the money, especially in big metropolitan markets. Small businesses are beneficiaries of all this competition, in the form of lower prices.

- Software – Prices for business software also have come down in price, dropping 3% to 9% each year since 2000. And that doesn’t even tell the full story. You now can find free alternatives on the market in many business productivity categories, thanks to the open source movement. Software-as-a-service options also make powerful software available at hard-to-believe low monthly prices. And as competition heats up in some segments, some vendors such as Intuit are giving away introductory versions of their feature-rich proprietary software for free, to snag you as a loyal customer with the hope of some day in the future “upselling” you to a higher level package as your needs increase.

So what’s all this talk about inflation rearing its ugly little head? How can we can have inflation and rising prices that are squeezing some small businesses mercilessly (like this story about pizza shop owners), while the cost of technology keeps coming down? This fascinating chart tells the tale:

This chart is from the New York Times (click to go over to the New York Times website and see the full-size interactive chart).

Simply put, this chart shows that inflation has crept into certain prices, but not others. The chart shows the proportion of spending among U.S. consumers year over year, March 2007 to March 2008. The blue areas are spending categories where prices have gone down. The yellow, orange and brown areas are categories where prices have gone up since last year.

As you can see, prices in some areas have gone up: gasoline, fuel, certain foods. Prices in other areas have gone down, including technology, communications, certain apparel items.

So what’s the bottom line? For small businesses it means that inflation hits some businesses harder than others.

Depending on how heavily your business depends on the materials in certain categories, your business could either be hurting or not hurting so much. For instance, if you run a pizza shop, where the price of flour has increased several hundred percent, you are definitely hurting. On the other hand, if you run a consulting business, you may not be feeling the effects of inflation so acutely. In fact, with lower technology prices, you may feel downright lucky in the inflation sweepstakes.

We’ll see how long technology prices keep dropping and defying inflation.

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Source: Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends

While I was plotting my next post about how to make your site more conversational, a reporter from Businessweek rang, asking for my thoughts on how smaller companies might leverage search, and in particular, what I thought about the practice of “reputation management.” He ended up running our conversation as an interview, which you can find here. Some tidbits:

For a small company, to what extent does your first page of Google results define your company or your brand?

It’s all relative to each business and the category they’re in, but I think it can be said that a significant amount of the encounters that any potential customer or current customer has with your brand has very little to do with you getting them to think about you, but rather them coming across you through one way or another via search.… Whatever the results are is what they’ll think of you, and whether or not that’s fair is kind of beside the point. It’s just true…

But it turns out that often times complaints are amplified by the Web and by search, [because] people don’t go out of their way to say something nice, but they do like to vent.

Is it even more important for small companies that may not already have a presence in consumers’ minds?

In whatever it is that you represent, if you’re very local, or regional, or if you’ve built a great small business in a particular niche, you need to understand what the ecosystem is around that niche online, and then to be part of that ecosystem, to join it.… Understanding where that specific group of people hangs out—what they do online, how they might encounter you— and then making sure you have a presence there that is robust … will help ensure that when people do find your brand through the serendipity of search, they’ll find it in a context that’s positive, because you‘re engaged. If you’re not engaged, you’re letting other people define who you are.

I’ll get on that next post, post haste!

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Source: John Battelle of SearchBlog