New York SBDC Research Network

The central office for the NYSSBDC has updated a document that can be used as a guide and information source for our clients in today's rough economy. Originally created in July, this is the third version of the paper. The guide combines facts and figures regarding the current state of the economy as well as tips and stragtegies for surviving in down times. In order to create the document, we visited major and business news websites and found the most recent articles and blogs that are applicable to our client base. We would be happy to send the document to any advisor or NYSSBDC employee who requests a copy. Feel free to call, email, or leave a comment and we will send you what we are calling the "white paper".

Why do we stay where we live? Winter's halfway mark passes us by today. Here in Albany, it's about 15 degrees outside, with a wind chill effect giving us that tasty, subzero feeling. I spoke to a sales rep in San Francisco, who asked about the weather. When he heard, he only said, "Really?" As if we were in some supernatural state. But weather happens, every bloody year. This survey , from the Pew Research Center, states that, on the one hand, 46% of the public would rather live in a different type of community from the one they're living in now. On the other, it also finds that most are satisfied with where they live now. Oy. Just make up your mind. Myself, winter is the only time I can skate in my boots on the driveway with my stepdaughter & dog while waiting for the bus. That's a good enough community for me, during any season of the year.

Grader.com offers a "family of tools that helps measure all that matters in inbound marketing." Read "inbound marketing" as the Internet, social media and blogs. And they are all free. Website Grader is a tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website or blog and provides recommendations for improvement. Press Release Grader evaluates press releases and provides a marketing effectiveness score. Twitter Grader measures one's Twitter profile. (Last I checked, the NYS SBDC Twitter feed had a score of 87 out of 100.) These are all services of Hubspot.com , an Internet marketing company that also offers a website redesign kit gratis, as well as some useful seminars. Oh, and Are You Using Your Business Cards to Socialize? ; i.e., to use social networks. It's All About Networking.

Like most folks, I was aware that the FCC had mandated Feb. 17th, 2009 as the day that American television signals would be transmitted digitally, and would render TVs with analog reception as useless. What I didn’t know was that, this week, Congress was debating to extend the deadline for this switch to June. It seems as though nearly 6% of Americans were not yet ready for the switch, and there was hope that the extension would enable better promotion of the coupon program available for people to obtain the special converter box. However, just yesterday, the House failed to garner the necessary two-thirds vote to extend the deadline. So, February 17th – be digital, or listen to the radio. “Mr. Green, he’s so serene, he’s got a TV in every room . . .”

In just a few months, some of the largest public corporations in the United States will begin submitting their financial filings to the Securities & Exchange Commission using XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language.) In December 2008, the Securities & Exchange Commission mandated a phase-in period, starting June 15, 2009, of using interactive data, which uses XBRL, for financial filings made by public companies and mutual funds with the SEC. The use of XBRL is expected to reduce filing costs, increase productivity, improve data quality and analysis and allow for direct comparability. The SEC’s announcement included the following: "The availability of financial reports in the form of interactive data will transform how investors evaluate companies and securities and, more broadly, transform the relationship between the filer and the investor. Markets depend on and improve with better information, and even more so in difficult times. This action by the Commission is t

12 Breeds of Client and How to Work with Them by Jack Knight This article runs through a number of recognizable characters and offers approaches to dealing with them. This is geared to freelance designers but I think they are applicable across the board. Working With Difficult Clients: How to Handle a Loose Cannon without Getting Burned Buzzle.com By Elizabeth W. Gordon Published: 12/16/2006 More advice with practical tips for handling difficult clients. Raising the bar: How to get your difficult clients to willingly shape up or ship out! Entrepreneur by Lawrence, Kevin Canadian Manager • Fall, 2002 Tough love for troublesome clients.

Are you doing great things for the environment? Would $10,000 help you do more good? The “ Green Heroes Grant Program ” might be for you. Green Works natural cleaners is giving away five $10,000 dollar grants to recipients working to green their communities. You can nominate yourself or someone else. (On a side note – Green Works is a product line from Clorox, and according to TreeHugger , the line has been “snagging a 42% share of the market. What's even more interesting is that this has happened without eroding cleaning product sales for smaller green-product companies like Method and Seventh Generation. Instead, the products seem to be luring customers away from traditional cleaning products .”

A Startup.Biz article outlines five recommendations for "coupon success." Number one - naming a specific product or service - is extremely important. If a company is trying to offer $10 off a new $50 service, for example, and customers only know about a $150 service, the coupon is likely to be ignored. Possibilities that lie in the opposite direction are even worse. If people apply the coupon to a $15 service, the company will probably lose money. It risks being overwhelmed by bargain shoppers and losing more solid customers, too.

Does the White House Have Wi-Fi? By: Chris Dannen Is the White House more of a museum than a working office? Does it even have WiFi? Talk about culture shock. Apparently the Obama team are taking a step back technologically at least for the time being. At a time when we have reduced faith in the security of our technologies how do they manage in the White House? Apparently Obama won't part with his blackberry so I wonder what the compromise will be. And another story about the bumpy technological transition on Salon: You Don't Have Mail In the tech-challenged White House, the prez's Blackberry-savvy aides feel like they've stumbled into the Carter administration. By Mike Madden At least this is almost a guarantee that improvements to the system will be made and perhaps with improvements to internet security we can all enjoy.

Last August Roger blogged about word clouds (aka tag clouds) - visual representations of word frequency in a document, website, speech etc. ReadWriteWeb used a tag cloud generator to create images depicting several presidential inaugural speeches. Comparing the speeches of Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan and Lincoln yields quite different images and provides an interesting historical view of presidential speeches.

Rick Leibowitz, director of our North Country SBDC, recently shared this with me: http://www.labor.state.ny.us/ui/dande/sharedwork1.shtm This looks to be something that is worth investigating by some of our clients. It describes a NYS Department of Labor program that encourages employers to consider shifting staff to a four-day work week, with the employee earning qualified unemployment wages for the fifth day. It argues that rather than making wholesale layoffs, a company might be able to cope during a down period by essentially reducing its payroll by 20% for a given period of time. The theory continues that, once business improves, a company isn't faced with the costs of hiring and training additional staff. Has anyone had any experience with this, or had clients who've given it a try?

Goodbye Credit Card Rate Hikes? The good news: The Federal Reserve passed new rules to improve disclosure and prohibit unfair interest rate hikes among card companies in December 2008. Specifically, the new rules will: --Require that consumers receive a reasonable amount of time to make their card payments --Forbid the use of payment allocation methods that unfairly maximize interest charges --Provide consumers protection from unexpected interest charges, including increases in the rate during the first year after account opening and increases in the rate charged on pre-existing credit card balances. --and more The bad news: the new rules don’t go into effect until July 1, 2010. In the meantime, go to this page to find credit card-related statistics -- including statistics on credit card debt, credit card delinquencies, credit scores, credit card interest rates, bankruptcies and more -- compiled by the CreditCards.com staff.

I've been doing more abstract research lately, particularly for people who'll be presenting on one macroeconomic topic or another. Recently, while handling one such query, I came across an article called " Marketing Your Way Through a Recession ," written by John Quelch, a professor at the Harvard Business School. This is precisely the kind of information that our advisors are seeking out during this recession, and I liked it quite a bit. These and other articles are indexed at the HBS' Working Knowledge website , a collection of articles on a wide breadth of business-related topics that were written by members of the School's faculty. There, you can browse articles by topic, by industry, or by date. They've an assorted collection of podcasts, and a nice overview of what they consider to be the best things they've featured in 2008. The articles don't read like required texts for MBA programs, and are rooted in real-life situations. The site wil

In today's rough economy, saving a few dollars on any purchase, regardless of the size of the purchase, is important. Before you buy anything, hold back and go to ShopLocal.com . The site compares prices found online versus in stores nationwide. Plus, you can type in your zip code to find the best deals in your area. On a completely different topic, next Tuesday is a big day for the United States. For a list of where to watch Barack Obama's inauguration online, click here .

The Foundation Center Proposal Writing Short Course Check out this site for advice on writing a proposal for funding. They offer some points to consider to begin planning and what you should be aiming for in terms of length and a suggestions on what you need to cover to best tell your story. They cover project description to staffing, and your budget. You can also find an summary of what should be inlcuded in a letter proposal.