New York SBDC Research Network

The Internet has gone visual. With the world moving at the speed of a tweet, getting your message out there can be tough—especially if you're only using words. Studies show that our brains are more efficient at processing images than words. Some 75% of Americans have used emoji to communicate to others. Virtual corkboard site Pinterest has 53 million unique monthly users. Even Facebook is leaning hard into the image game, as evidenced by its recent $1 billion acquisition of Instagram, which has 300 million users itself. Images overlaid with text—often called Internet memes—are a popular way for brands to reach their audiences. Ride that popularity wave by creating your own marketing images for distribution. As your followers and fans share the images, your products, your logo, and your brand spread to people you may not have reached otherwise. Read more from Marketing Profs

If your business can afford it and you want to reward employees, year-end cash bonuses may be the way to go. In providing this additional compensation, understand what it means from a tax perspective. Bonuses are treated like other pay They are subject to income tax withholding, FICA, and FUTA taxes in the same manner as regular pay. In figuring the cost of a bonus to you, factor in employment taxes. For example, if an employee earning $65,000 is given a $5,000 year-end bonus, the cost of that bonus to you is $5,382.50 ($5,000 + $382.50 employer share of FICA tax). When withholding income taxes on the bonus (called “supplemental pay” by the IRS), there are several options. More from the Small Business Administration

Daniel Fine is the founder and chief executive of Glass-U, a two-year-old, 10-employee maker of foldable sunglasses bearing the licensed brands of universities, music festivals like Lollapalooza, and the World Cup soccer tournament last summer. He arranges for the manufacture of the glasses in China and their distribution around the country. He’s also a senior in college. Mr. Fine financed Glass-U, which operates out of off-campus housing, in part with proceeds from a tutoring company, NexTutors, that he started right after high school. He has also founded Fine Prints, a custom apparel company he started during high school, and Dosed, a health care technology company that is working on a smartphone app to help diabetics. In a recent conversation that has been condensed and edited, Mr. Fine, who is 21 and attends the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, talked about how he got started in entrepreneurship and why he decided not to complete his application for a Thiel Fellowsh

Some 84% of Millennials say they like companies on Facebook as a way to show their support for the brand, according to recent research conducted by Nora Ganim Barnes, PhD, and Ava Lescault, MBA, at The Center for Marketing Research, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Other common reasons for liking brands on Facebook include wanting to receive updates (83% of respondents) and a desire to get coupons/discounts (66%). Read more from MarketingProfs

In May 2013, almost 4.5 million people in the United States were employed as retail salespersons. Nationally, retail salespersons earned an annual mean wage of $25,370. The annual median wage for retail salespersons was $21,140. Among the states, retail salespersons in Washington had the highest annual mean wage of $28,920. Alaska had the highest annual median wage for retail salespersons, at $24,030. On average, retail salespersons in West Virginia earned the least in May 2013, at $22,920. The median wage for retail salespersons in West Virginia was $19,450. These data come from the Occupational Employment Statistics program . For maps exploring employment and wage data for more than 800 occupations, see the OES interactive map changer tool. A percentile wage divides the workers in an occupation into two groups: those earning less, and those earning more. For example, a 10th percentile wage indicates that 10 percent of workers earn less than the stated amount, and 90 percent earn

In the wake of Thanksgiving, no doubt we all lived on leftovers. I, for one, could lunch on turkey sandwiches and snack on pumpkin pie slivers for weeks... Few meals take as long to prepare as Thanksgiving dinner, so it's a good thing all that food doesn't go to waste. And it struck me this Thanksgiving that marketers could take a lesson from turkey gumbo—what I call the "leftover trick": After you put all that work into creating that whitepaper, for example, think about what else you can make out of the asset. Can your marketing team make a meal out of that webinar on social media? How many weeks of "content slivers" could you eke out of a new survey? Here are five simple ideas to get you started, all of them so easy you can even do them in a somnolent state induced by too much tryptophan in your system: Read more from MarketingProfs

The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers), at 6.9 million, changed little in November. These individuals, who would have preferred full-time employment, were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job. In November, 2.1 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. Among the marginally attached, there were 698,000 discouraged workers in November, little different from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they

The Office of Advocacy has released an informative fact sheet entitled "Student Debt Among Young Entrepreneurs." This publication examines how student debt is affecting self-employment trends among younger individuals. The report finds that student debt is rising and is having a negative effect on the rate of self-employment. It also looks at other characteristics of individuals with student debt. Find the full fact sheet here .

What does the New Year have in store for small business owners? We asked a few pundits to predict the trends that may affect your small business in 2015. Small Business Impact: “Being a company that ‘does good’ for its employees, customers and community is a smart and effective focal point, I think that in this era of social media, a company that is solely a bottom-line entity will lose good employees, good customers and goodwill. While some of the ‘too big to fail’ companies may withstand this type of negative public opinion for some time, small businesses do not have the reserves to pivot and rebuild their reputations. Staples

Like a prehistoric masterpiece scratched into the far recesses of an undiscovered cave, it doesn’t matter how awe-inspiring your website is if nobody can find it. Search engines are the archeologists of the digital landscape. An estimated 90 percent of consumers searching for local businesses online use search engines like Google® Bing® and Yahoo® to find them. If you want your business website to get discovered, you need to tap into the power of search. Just about every website owner today understands the basic concept of search engine optimization (SEO): taking steps to attract the attention of search engines in order to drive traffic to your site. Search Engine Land defines SEO as “the process of getting traffic from the ‘free,’ ‘organic,’ ‘editorial,’ or ‘natural’ search results on search engines.” The paid ads you often see at the top of search results don’t figure in. You’ve likely already taken the fundamental steps to improve your SEO. Your website brims with unique and com

Who wants to push their way through crowded stores (let alone find a parking spot) during the holiday season? Based on an August 2014 study by Shullman Research Center, affluents are trying to avoid this. Among US internet users with a household income of $75,000 or more, online-only stores such as Amazon.com and eBay were the shopping venues of choice, cited by 71%. However, affluents won’t shun brick-and-mortar shops completely. The majority planned to head to discount stores to save a few dollars, and 53% said they would also visit mainstream department stores, likely so they can check off gifts for a wide range of people all at once. Still, while in-store holiday shopping certainly isn’t dead among affluents, results from September 2014 polling by Time Inc. and YouGov support Shullman’s finding that online may beat out brick-and-mortar this year. See more at: eMarketer

We may have barely crossed into the second half of 2014, but if you want to have a big year in 2015, you should jump on your game plan now. As you lay the foundation of your 2015 marketing strategy, here are five marketing trends to give you a jumpstart on your big projects for the rest of this year and next: Five Marketing Tips for 2015

It seems that almost every day, there's another startup proudly announcing that it has reached its crowdfunding goal. With so many success stories out there, it's easy for other aspiring entrepreneurs to believe that sites like Kickstarter are their golden ticket to launching a business. But the reality is, crowdfunding isn't always as simple as it seems. "New entrepreneurs often believe that crowdfunding their venture or project is an easy endeavor," said Sang Lee, founder and CEO of Return on Change. "However, it requires much groundwork as well as a strong support network to truly make it a success. As they say, there's no such thing as a free lunch." Crowdfunding Challenges

Let’s say you created an amazing disaster recovery plan for your small business, and you were able to reopen shortly after a ferocious storm. Meanwhile, your employees’ homes were damaged during the storm, and several roads are closed. So you’re open for business minus the team that keeps your operations running. Failure to inform and prepare your employees for disasters is one of many common mistakes entrepreneurs make when doing business continuity planning. Not being adequately insured is another oversight that can lead to the failure of your business. Get free tips on ways to avoid these and other costly errors at a free webinar hosted by Agility Recovery and the U.S. Small Business Administration on Tuesday, Dec. 9. True stories about business owners’ pre-disaster missteps, plans not followed and lessons learned will also be discussed. SBA has partnered with Agility to offer business continuity strategies through its “PrepareMyBusiness” website. Visit www.preparemybusine

As 2014 winds down, the results of your retail holiday strategy will slowly come into focus. Hopefully, you're having a merry old time, reaching record heights in sales, customers, revenue, website traffic—all the things that help to make a holiday marketing season bright. However, now is no time to rest on your laurels (or lick your wounds, as the case may be). As every retailer knows, there's no off-season in retail marketing, especially in the online world, where if you're not moving forward... you're automatically falling behind. Even before the ball drops in Times Square to mark 2015's official start in the US, it's critical that you begin cementing the customer gains you've made during the 2014 holidays. If you want to ensure a truly happy new year in the e-commerce space, make sure you take some or all of the following steps. Read more at MarketingProf

We all know that the first Thanksgiving dinner took place when the Pilgrims celebrated a good harvest in the New World, and that the tryptophan in turkey isn't actually what makes you so sleepy. But did you know that there was a crisis in the late 1930s called “Franksgiving?" We rounded up 11 of the best facts about Thanksgiving, which might come in handy during those awkward silences at the family dinner table. 11 Things You Didn't Know About Thanksgiving

2014 showed us so much change within online marketing, particularly the massive boom in content marketing. 2015 is a different year and more change is inevitable. Will content marketing still have such a huge presence? Will it evolve or become replaced by something else completely different? Will the other trends of 2014 such as, social media marketing and guest blogging, continue as strong as ever or fall flat on their face? You need to know where to allocate the bulk of your marketing budget, based on the tactics your customers and prospects are engaging with more frequently. That’s why we’ve tried to make this infographic as comprehensive as possible, addressing issues from Email Marketing, to lead conversion, to automation platforms. So, get ready for the future of marketing. Here are Wheelhouse Advisors’ 10 Marketing Predictions for 2015: Read more at business2community

In the last three years, there has been a tremendous transformation in marketing. We have infinitely more data to tap and analyze, many more tools to use in each stage of the funnel, and new, fast-changing ways to engage customers. What hasn't changed, though, is the prevalence of the age-old question, "What does marketing do, and why do we spend so much on it?" As marketing budgets and buzzwords increase, the question is more prevalent than ever. Unlike development and engineering teams that produce tangible products, and sales teams that close deals, Marketing often lacks a clear line of sight between action and outcome. When resources are scarce or when growth slows, it's not uncommon to look at Marketing and question the investment, thus making Marketing a lightning rod—that is, unless the marketing team has communicated (within the company) its goals, metrics, actions, and progress... and it delivers against those goals. The following tips can help you se

November 29th is Small Business Saturday – a day circled on the calendar of savvy entrepreneurs across America. Small businesses are the engine of our economy and create two out of three new jobs. Seven in 10 Americans are now aware that the day after Black Friday is a time to shop small and support local economic growth. This year, the SBA is helping to expand this important day into the evening to support entrepreneurs in the food and beverage industry. This year, America’s bars and restaurants are extending the hours on the daylong festivities by promoting Small Business Saturday Night. The SBA is partnering with the National Restaurant Association to encourage families who shop small to #DineSmall at local restaurants and watering holes in the evening. We’re also encouraging small business merchants to extend their hours so they can take advantage of increased nighttime foot traffic.

Think that direct mail is dead? Think again: According to a 2012 study by Exact Target magazine, 65% of consumers have made a purchase as the result of a Direct Mail piece. Attend a presentation on Thursday, December 4 at 3 PM ET to learn about: • Using Direct Mail to acquire new customers • Using Direct Mail to retain existing customers • The 40/40/20 rule and how it means more dollars for your company • How Direct Mail amplifies your campaign by boosting your conversion rate Register HERE