New York SBDC Research Network

I suppose it should not be surprising to see how much people make decisions, including those in business, based on superstitions. Our cultural and daily habits will naturally spill over into work life. Here are a few articles that discuss how these beliefs can work for marketers. Turn Superstition into Marketing Gold When numbers are more than just numbers, they can be used to influence behavior, which should have business owners counting their blessings. By Jennifer Wang February 11, 2009 Ides of March, other superstitions still have plenty of sway Pantagraph.com By Lisa Anderson - Chicago Tribune Sunday, March 16, 2008 Superstition and time have marketing implications www.cosmeticsdesign-europe.com By Guy Montague-Jones, 14-Feb-2008

I was informed about a very interesting article earlier this week through a subscription email I get through J.J. Hill Library. The article, originally published by Harvard Business Review, lists 20 Breakthrough Business Ideas for 2009 . An excerpt from the article is below. "Caught between two elemental forces – one called Calamity and the other called Change – we launch our latest edition of breakthrough articles into the teeth of a gale. A new administration has taken charge in the United States at a time of major challenges on many fronts. The world economy staggers toward stabilization and whatever comes next. Business soldiers on, controlling what it can and coping with what it can’t."

If your business has anything to do with products for children I hope you are aware of and are following changes to the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. Passed by Congress in August 2008, the CPSIA enforces new lead and phthalate standards for children’s products, and requires extensive testing of all products marketed to children 12 and under. Many small businesses, crafters and used merchandise retailers have been particularly concerned about this legislation, as they feel that the testing requirements may be unduly burdensome for their products. The law was intended to go into full effect on February 10, 2009, but on January 20, 2009 the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a document to delay particular requirements for testing and certification. Many are still concerned about how this act will affect their businesses, and are lobbying for changes. The following resources offer more information on the legislation. From the Consumer Product Safety Commission: Infor

The website USA.gov , "Government made easy", has added Web 2.0 tools to the portal: a governmentwide news feed service, a gallery of online gadgets, and a word cloud that depicts the most popular online government content. The Government News Aggregator lets users receive consolidated news and information from across the federal government, delivered through RSS feeds. The Government Gadget Gallery is a collection of gadgets and widgets organized by topic and created by subject-matter experts, which can be embedded in home pages, blogs, and other sites. USA.gov Word Cloud allows one to see at a glance which key words are most often searched.

This was an interesting juxtaposition. On the one hand, this site features the results of a 153 city-survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, proposing a roster of "shovel-ready" projects (mostly relating to infrastructure creation & improvement) that just need a bit of funding to get them off the ground. Obviously, these projects are being touted to Congress in the hopes that it will spur badly-needed job creation. On this same site, and not much later, however, was a retort by two different taxpayer watchdog groups (call it the Fairness Doctrine in action, if you want). They argue that the bulk of the Mayors' proposed projects were not long-term solutions to job creation. Instead, they believe that the projects were pork in the guise of a stimulus package, and were worthy of the axe. These appeared during the lame-duck period, and things have certainly changed since then. I find the back-and-forth fascinating, but am not quite sure whom to believe.

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.