Entries from October 2009 ↓

Ross Kimbarovsky is the co-founder of crowdSPRING, a community of 43,000+ graphic designers that helps small businesses from around the world with graphic design needs. You can follow Ross on Twitter @rosskimbarovsky and @crowdSPRING.

Capacity – especially to plan and execute effective marketing strategies – is a big challenge for every small business. In this post, I’ll offer 10 suggestions for how small businesses can supercharge their marketing efforts by leveraging social media. For each suggestion, I will discuss a basic strategy – for those who simply want to get their toes wet, as well as an advanced strategy – for those who want to spend a bit more time and go a bit deeper in their social media marketing efforts. These tips are based on my experience leveraging social media marketing for my company, crowdSPRING.

I suggest you begin by outlining clear goals for your social media marketing efforts and figuring out how you’ll measure success. Once you’ve outlined your goals, let’s look at 10 great ways you can begin to leverage social media for your marketing efforts.

1. Facebook

Facebook offers exceptional, low cost marketing opportunities for small business. Facebook now has over 300 million users, and while that seems like an outrageous number for small businesses to be targeting, Facebook offers a very powerful platform on which to build a presence. If you’re not already active on Facebook; you should get started right away.

Basic Strategy: If you haven’t signed up for Facebook yet, you absolutely should as soon as possible. Once you’ve signed up, you should also consider securing your company’s username. Be aware, however, that if you reserve your company name for your personal account, you won’t be able to use it for your Business Fan Page (more on those in the Advanced Strategy), so you may want to create a Page before registering your company’s name. Fan Pages have special rules regarding usernames, which you can read here.

You should do one other thing: search for your competitors and evaluate their Facebook presence. What types of Pages have they built? How many fans or “friends” do they have? Spend 15 minutes (per competitor) looking at their posts, photos and/or videos to understand how they’re using Facebook.

Advanced Strategy: You may already have a personal Facebook account, but how do you extend that presence for your business? You have several options. You can register a Business Account – which is designed for a very simple presence on Facebook. There are many limitations on such accounts (read the FAQ here), however, so you’ll most likely prefer to have a Business Fan Page. A Business Fan Page lets you create a page where customers or fans of your business can register as a “fan” — expanding the presence of your business (because your updates will also flow to their pages). You might also want to consider running hyper-local ads on Facebook.

2. Twitter

Twitter has grown tremendously over the past year. For some small businesses, it offers an incredible marketing platform. BusinessWeek’s recent profile of 20 ways businesses use Twitter might give you some ideas about how you can leverage Twitter for your business.

Basic Strategy: If you haven’t signed up on Twitter yet, you should sign up today and reserve an account in the name of your business. While you might ultimately tweet in your own name, you’ll want to have the option to tweet from a business account. More importantly, you don’t want your competitors to register your business name. Twitter has put together a simple guide to help you understand what Twitter can do for business. You can also check out Mashable’s Twitter Guide.

Next, you should spend 15-30 minutes on Twitter’s homepage, doing basic searches to become familiar with the type of content available on the service. For example, if you are operating a small gift basket business, do some searches for various terms and phrases such as “gift basket,” “gifts,” “gift basket business,” etc. You should also search for the names of your competitors to see whether they’re on Twitter and if they are, how they’re using it. And don’t forget to search for your small business name – your customers may already be talking about you! Once you become comfortable with the content that’s already available and how your competitors are using Twitter, you can begin thinking about a strategy for how you’ll leverage Twitter for your business.

Advanced Strategy: To truly leverage Twitter, you’ll want to learn and use a few more advanced tools. This includes desktop and mobile Twitter clients like TweetDeck, Seesmic, and Tweetie. Desktop clients give you more flexibility and more control over your Twitter strategy than you’ll have on the Twitter website. Among other things, you’ll be able to pre-define searches (so that you can monitor certain keywords, including your business name) and group people you follow so that you can minimize the noise and focus on the real content. You might also consider using a web tool like Twitterfall, which will allow you to define (and color-code) various custom searches that you can review from time to time, and also to follow trending topics. For example, I use Twitterfall to identify helpful graphic design and industrial design resources to share with the crowdSPRING community.

3. Company Blog

Although there’s more attention focused today on social networks than on company blogs, blogs continue to offer great value for small businesses.

Basic Strategy: At a minimum, you should consider reserving a domain name for your blog – if you don’t already have a custom domain for your business. If you’re comfortable enough to set up your own blog, that’s generally the best way to proceed – although this requires a bit more technical knowledge (many hosting providers offer a 1 step easy setup for blogs that will automatically install WordPress for you). You can also setup a blog directly at WordPress.com (it’s easier to do, but you don’t have full control over everything that you would on your own site).

One easy alternative is to set up a simple blog at Posterous – a place to post stories, photos, videos, MP3s, and files. There are pluses and minuses to all of these options – you should take some time to compare them and do what makes sense for your business. I caution you only about spreading yourself too thin.

Advanced Strategy: Now that you’ve decided to start or improve your small business blog, how do you build an audience for it? It all starts with great content. Decide on a focus for your blog, and write awesome content that people will enjoy. For example, some months ago at my company, we decided that we wanted to write more about small business issues, so we’ve been writing original posts focusing on issues affecting small businesses. Think about your expertise and more importantly, think about the things that you’re interested in writing about. A blog requires a long term investment of time (and resources), and you don’t want to be stuck writing about things that bore you.

You’ll also want to consider how you can make it easier for your readers to help promote your content. For example, install helpful plug-ins, such as a TweetMeme button, which makes it easy for people to retweet your posts on Twitter. Don’t be afraid to experiment with plugins to add to the functionality of your blog, but keep it simple. You want to keep the blog focused, and easy for your readers to use.

4. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a business oriented social network for professionals, and it’s huge, with nearly 50 million users from over 200 countries.

Basic Strategy: Once again, you’ll want to at least reserve your business name (or your personal name) so that others can’t use it. Similar to the way you might start exploring Facebook and Twitter, you should look around on LinkedIn to see how your competitors are using the service. You might also look up your customers and connect with them.

Advanced Strategy: LinkedIn has some powerful features that most people don’t use. For example, you can encourage your customers, clients or vendors to give you a “recommendation” on your profile. Recommendations are useful because they’ll make you and your business more credible with new customers. If you’re a roofer, for example, ask your customers to recommend you after a successful job. You’ll find such recommendations useful – particularly since your LinkedIn profile will come up high in search engine results. I recommend that you read Chris Brogan’s post from last year discussing the elements of a good LinkedIn recommendation.

Another strategy involves the many subject matter groups on LinkedIn. Find some groups that have a connection to your small business and become involved in the conversations. Answer questions when you can, and help to establish yourself as knowledgeable about specific topics related to your business. There are many small business and general marketing groups that will be very useful resources for you, and if there isn’t a group that interests you, consider starting one.

5. Participate On Other Blogs

It might seem counter-intuitive for you to spend your valuable time by participating in discussions on other people’s blogs, but the payoff can be very valuable. Remember that it takes time to build a reputation and establish your credibility, and you can’t always expect everyone to come to you. Sometimes, you have to go out and build your own credibility and reputation.

Basic Strategy: Identify 2-3 blogs in your industry, or those that focus on small business, and get into the habit of regularly reading the content and participating in the discussions. Whenever you can, try to add value by sharing a personal story about what has/has not worked for you. Get to know the writers – they’ll be valuable contacts for you. One strategy for identifying good blogs is to use Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop, which is a directory of popular blogs across many different subject areas. For example, for blogs focused on crafts, you might follow this page on Alltop. If you want to participate in blogs focusing on small business issues, you might start at Technorati’s list of the Top 100 Small Business blogs.

Advanced Strategy: Once you’ve spent some time on other blogs and have participated in discussions, you’ll find that you’ve built a level of credibility and trust, based on your participation. You should consider reaching out to the blog owners and asking whether they’d allow you to guest post an article on their blog (kind of like this post). This is a nice way for you to get in front of a bigger audience, and many blog owners will invite guests to post from time to time. Agree on a topic in advance and provide a draft of your post sufficiently in advance of the publication date to give them an opportunity to review.

Alternatively, ask if they would consider guest posting on your blog. Since you’re looking to attract more readers (and more potential customers), either option works well for that purpose. Don’t worry so much about going after the A-list blogs right away. There are many excellent blogs and it might take a bit of time to build your reputation to such a level that you’ll have opportunities to post in the top blogs. That doesn’t mean you should wait, though – make opportunities for yourself and offer to guest write whenever you can find a new audience. I recommend you read How To Guest Post To Promote Your Blog from blogging expert Darren Rowse.

6. Mobile Social Networks and other Local Strategies

Yelp publishes millions of reviews about local businesses. Foursquare is a combination city-guide, friend finder and competitive game. It allows users to “check in” by cell phone at a local venue and announce this via other social networks such as Twitter.

Basic Strategy: Yelp, Foursquare, and other mobile social networks can be powerful marketing channels for small businesses. You should at the very least register accounts on the popular services and get to know them. If you have a restaurant or a retail store, for example, you’ll want to get to know Yelp pretty well. You can set up a business account on Yelp (no cost), which will let you answer questions about your business, track how many Yelp users view your business page, add information about your business, and announce special promotions. Similarly, you’ll want to sign up with Foursquare to take advantage of local advertising opportunities. Using Foursquare, you’ll be able to push promotions to potential customers who’re in the vicinity of your business.

You should also consider other local strategies. For example, you can add your business to Google Maps, or update your listing to include additional details. You can do the same on Bing.

Advanced Strategy: If you believe that your business can truly benefit from a presence on Yelp, Foursquare, or similar networks, you’ll want to do more than just register accounts with those services. For example, Yelp allows you to include a website URL for your business. Nearly all sites will let you upload photos to your profile, and photos will make your profile more trustworthy.

You can also proactively use Yelp and other similar services to promote your business. Ask your customers, friends and family who have used your services for a review on Yelp. You can encourage reviews by running promotions or discounts – offering free appetizers, for example, to a customer who will write a review about their meal at your restaurant (or to one who already wrote a review), or a small discount to a customer who hires you for carpentry work and mentions that they found you through Yelp.

Similarly, you can find ways to promote your business using Foursquare and similar networks. If you have a TV display in your store connected to a computer, you can display the people who are checking in. You can offer specials or discounts to the person who visits your location the most (this is similar to frequent buyer cards that many businesses have used for years).

Don’t forget to also consider how you can improve your use of other basic local strategies. For example, many small business websites are optimized for specific keywords or subject areas, but are rarely optimized for local searches. If you have a gift basket business, you’ll want to be sure that users searching for gift baskets in your geographic area will find you.

7. Comments and Conversations About Your Company

Whether or not you are a party to the conversations, people will talk about your company. How do you monitor and, when appropriate, join those discussions?

Basic Strategy: There are five simple steps you can take today to begin paying attention to conversations about your business.

First, set up Google Alerts. Google Alerts are free email updates from Google search results about any topic you’re interested in tracking. For example, I track, among other alerts, the names of our competitors, the name of our company, and certain other terms I believe are important to my business. Anytime Google adds something to its index that mentions my company or the other terms I’m tracking, I receive an immediate email notification with a link to that item. Alerts can be set up for web, blog, news, video, or groups searches.

Second, review the results in your web analytics data. At my company, we use Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that provides detailed and very useful information about your website traffic and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. When we run social media campaigns, we’ll often attach tracking tags to those campaigns so that we can properly monitor them in Google Analytics. This is important because without such data it will be nearly impossible for you to evaluate the success of your social media marketing efforts. But analytics are important for another reason: they’ll tell you which sites are sending traffic to your site.

Third, search Facebook. In August, Facebook rolled out a real-time search engine (the search box is on the top right of any Facebook page). One effective way to take advantage of Facebook search is to search for your company’s name to see who is talking about your company and what they’re saying. In several months, you’ll be able to search Facebook updates directly from Bing, which will be integrating Facebook public updates into Bing’s search results.

Fourth, search Twitter. You currently can search Twitter for real-time results (if you’re not logged in, just go to Twitter’s homepage). One easy way to monitor conversations about your company is to search for your company’s name. You can also currently do this on Bing, which is indexing Twitter updates. Very soon, you’ll also be able to search Twitter updates (and other social media content) via Google’s Social Search (Social Search was rolled out to Google Labs recently, as an experimental product). You can also use Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic to save searches and monitor in real-time whenever someone uses a specific word or phrase in a tweet.

Finally, take advantage of services that will, similar to Google Alerts, push data to you. I use and like BackType, which is a real-time search engine that indexes online conversations in thousands of blogs and social networks. I use BackType primarily to keep up with conversations in blogs. Every day, I receive emails from BackType with links to comments that include the keywords I’m monitoring. Without these alerts, I would be unable to monitor so many blogs, and my ability to respond to posts about my company would be very limited.

Advanced Strategy: If you’re having trouble keeping track of your various search strategies, you should consolidate your efforts and leverage one of the many applications that will help you monitor the social web. I have not personally used these services, but they appear to be held in high esteem by knowledgeable people who have. For example, truVOICE provides keyword monitoring of the social web with an emphasis on blogs and forums, while Radian6 pulls in a lot of information from the social web, analyzes it, and provides consumer sentiment ratings for your brand. A good resource to learn about paid social media monitoring tools is Mashable’s post Top 10 Reputation Tracking Tools Worth Paying For.

In addition to monitoring, you’ll need to decide how, when, and where you’ll engage in conversations. It’ll be very difficult for you to engage in conversations everywhere, so you should spend some time learning the various networks and deciding where you should focus your efforts. Looking at your website analytics data — if you own an online business — will help a great deal because it’ll help you to better understand where your traffic is coming from. If much of your traffic originates from Twitter and Facebook, for example, you’ll want to spend more time on those services.

8. Multimedia

Multimedia (video, photos, audio) is a bit more complicated for many small businesses to execute, but can provide excellent social media marketing opportunities.

Basic Strategy: YouTube has been constantly evolving and adding features that make it an attractive social site for small businesses. Although you don’t have to produce videos to participate on YouTube, you should consider whether simple videos can help your marketing efforts. For example, if you’re already posting videos to your blog, you can upload them to YouTube to reach a broader audience, and embed the video content in your blog posts. YouTube has also been adding more comprehensive activity updates for its users and has made pretty powerful analytics tools available so that you can evaluate the effectiveness of your video content.

Similarly, you could start a Flickr account for your business and post photos of your customers or your products (or both). Flickr offers a place where people can share photos with others, but also has discussion groups, many focused on local markets, that offer additional opportunities for you to market your business. You can also consider setting up your own Internet radio talk show using BlogTalkRadio, which is another way to use multimedia to speak directly to your customers. Get creative with it — own a restaurant? Start a call-in show for people to ask cooking questions. Are you a piano teacher? Perhaps you could start a show to talk about classical music.

Advanced Strategy: Advanced strategies using multimedia are complicated and typically benefit from using experienced consultants. One effective way to leverage video, for example, is to create content that has the potential to become viral. While I don’t believe you can set out to make a viral video (an incredible amount of luck is typically involved), there are a number of things you can typically do to build awareness about your small business using viral video (these strategies are beyond the scope of this post). Once you’ve created good content, you’ll want to distribute it using as many social networks as you can.

When you consider how you can leverage social networks, think about whether each network provides an audience or a technology solution (or both). For example, YouTube provides both a huge audience and a solution for uploading video files. Flickr can also provide both an audience and a technology solution, but not for every business. While your customers might not be on Flickr, you can still use Flickr as a place to store and tag your photos, and then distribute those photos to other social networks where you prefer to invest more time and effort.

9. Maintain Brand Consistency

We’ve discussed only a small handful of social networks. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of others, and new ones spring up every day. That means that your customers will have many different ways to find you. But they won’t find you if your brand is scattered across social networks using different usernames and profiles. Let’s review some strategies for making sure that your brand is consistent across social networks.

Basic Strategy: Usernames and user profiles are already showing up in search results. Do a search for your company’s name on Google right now — if you also have a Twitter account with the same name, odds are pretty good that the Twitter account will appear very high in the search results. This means that having a consistent username across the various social networks is very important. At a minimum, if you haven’t registered your company name on the major networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), you should do that today. For many small businesses, their user accounts on social networks will be the highest ranked pages in search results.

You should also evaluate your email and web presence strategies. For example, are you using a Gmail email address when you can very easily be using a custom email address with your company name as your domain? Compare: restaurantname@gmail.com with john@restaurantname.com — which looks more professional? Similarly, are you hosting your blog at WordPress.com instead of on your own custom domain? Little details can make a difference.

Advanced Strategy: Things get a bit more complicated when you consider that there are many different social networks, and it’s tough to predict which of them will become popular and which will fail. Use a service such as namechk or KnowEm to see whether your username is available on dozens of popular social networks and if it’s not, to see which username could be registered across all social networks.

Maintaining name consistency is important, but isn’t enough by itself. You’ll also want to make sure that your brand speaks with a common “voice” across the social networks. This may be easier said than done. Social networks differ in significant ways from one another and present unique challenges for interacting with customers and potential customers on those networks.

Speaking with a common “voice” doesn’t mean that only one person should execute your company’s social media marketing strategy, but it does mean that everyone who speaks on behalf of your company in social media reflects your brand in a consistent way. I recommend you read Shel Israel’s recently published book “Twitterville,” for excellent tips and stories focusing on how large and small businesses can develop a consistent voice in social media.

10. Leverage Combinations of Social Media Tools

One of the best ways for small businesses to leverage social media marketing is to use various social networks in combination with each other.

Basic Strategy: At a minimum, you should do several things today to cross-market across the various social networks you’re most likely already using. Here are three suggestions:

First, connect your Twitter account to Facebook so that your tweets will appear in your public updates on Facebook. This will let you leverage your time on Twitter to also update your Facebook fans.

Second, connect your LinkedIn profile to your WordPress blog. LinkedIn allows you to publish, in your profile, synopses of the most recent blog posts on your blog. This application will automatically update your LinkedIn profile with your most recent blog posts.

Third, integrate Twitter tools into your blog. I like and use the TweetMeme retweet button on my blogs to make it easier for users to tweet about the blog posts. I also use the ShareThis tool to enable readers to quickly share content on multiple social networks.

Advanced Strategy: Advanced strategies require careful planning/execution and appropriate tools. In nearly all cases, your goal is to maximize the value of your content. For example, if you’re posting videos on YouTube or Vimeo, you can blog about those videos on your company’s blog. Then, you can tweet about the blog posts on Twitter (which I assume is integrated with your Facebook account). This way, you’ve taken one piece of content and found a way to leverage it across multiple social networks.

You’ll also want to consider ways that you can optimize the distribution to multiple social networks at the same time. Leverage tools to help you do this. For example, Ping.fm lets you update multiple social networks all in one go. Keep in mind that not all social networks will make sense for every business. Learn which networks are best for your business and find ways to leverage combinations of those networks to make your marketing more effective.

Conclusion

Social media marketing can be a phenomenal marketing channel for small businesses. I hope that the strategies I’ve outlined above provide a starting point for you to explore how you can leverage social media marketing for your small business.

And if you have additional resources to share or other helpful advice that’s worked for your small business (or thoughts about things to avoid), please take a minute and leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you.

More business resources from Mashable:

- 5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Business
- Top 5 Business Blogging Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
- 10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs
- 6 Must-Follow Steps for Selling in Any Economy
- 5 Easy Social Media Wins for Your Small Business

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, studiovision

Tags: business, List, Lists, small business, social media

This series is supported by Grasshopper, the Virtual Phone System designed for entrepreneurs. Learn more about Grasshopper at Grasshopper.com.

Whether your company is just starting out, just starting to turn a profit or already on the verge of an acquisition, as an entrepreneur you’ll be constantly evaluating the tools that will help get your business to the next stage.

Even if the ink on the business plan isn’t dry yet, you want to be armed with the social media tools that will play an important role in company communication, product and brand promotions, and business development for your startup. Some of the tools in this list will be familiar, but it’s worth taking a moment to reframe how they might become power tools in a business context.

10. Monitter

As an entrepreneur, you need to know what people are saying about your company as well as your competitors. Enter Monitter, a service that monitors Twitter mentions in real-time in a multi-column interface reminiscent of TweetDeck. Simply input a search term into a column, add or remove columns as desired, and get an automatically-refreshing picture of what people are saying about your brand or competing brands in your space.

Pro Tip: By default, the Monitter interface is gray on black, which can be hard on the eyes. You can switch to a more typical color scheme by selecting the “light” theme in the menu at the upper right.

9. YouTube

You already know about YouTube, but have you thought about how it could help your business? Could your product benefit from an awesome video walkthrough? Could your marketing strategy include a viral video strategy that gets you lots of exposure at relatively low cost?

And now with Promoted Videos getting placement in AdSense units around the web, there’s even more incentive to think about leveraging social video as a brand exposure tool. If you can create interesting content that’s relevant to your brand or products, a positive visual association with your company can attract new interest, build company culture, turn inquiries into sales, and give back significant brand dividends over time.

Pro Tip: The most obvious and frequent business use of YouTube is for marketing and advertising, but don’t overlook other ways in which your company can leverage YouTube. Visual walkthroughs and FAQs can be a great boon to customer service. Videos of you and your team giving public presentations, speaking at conferences or engaging with the media can establish and enhance your company’s reputation as a thought leader. And don’t forget the utility of private videos for use in executive and new employee trainings and recording company events; access can be shared with only the people who should be able to see each item.

8. UserVoice

As a small business, it’s hard to juggle building and improving your products with supporting what’s already out there. That’s where UserVoice can help.

From bug reports to feature requests, UserVoice can help track and manage the feedback of your users and customers. Not only does it assure your userbase that you care about what they have to say, but it can potentially leverage the best suggestions from the people who are actually using your tool or service. Since users can vote on the ideas of other users, you can start to get a picture of the most-requested features and fixes for your app or service to feed back into your products’ lifecycles.

Pro Tip: You can also use UserVoice to get feedback on a limited release or beta version of a product by setting up a private forum or forums. You can send invites to specific email addresses, or limit your feedback to company-wide participants by restricting access by email domain.

7. MailChimp

Most reports and punditry on the death of email are a bit premature. The good old fashioned mailing list is still a good way to maintain relationships with customers, especially when done well.

The web-based mailing list manager MailChimp offers list management, tracking and analysis, and custom HTML templates for up to 500 subscribers and 3000 emails a month for free. Paid plans kick in at larger subscriber numbers. Featuring integration with WordPress, Twitter, Salesforce and more, MailChimp is the list manager of choice for an impressive list of heavyweights including Mozilla, Intel, Canon, Fujitsu, Staples and more.

Pro Tip: MailChimp has a well-documented API that allows you to integrate the service with your own existing applications, tools, content management system or CRM solution. There’s a growing list of plug-ins already created for a number of platforms.

[Disclosure: Mailchimp is a sponsor of Mashable]

6. Get Satisfaction

Great customer support is important, but it can also be time-consuming and costly. Get Satisfaction aims to help by leveraging the strength of your user community and cutting down on repetitive support costs.

Get Satisfaction provides a forum where your customers can get answers to questions, solutions to problems, and submit feature and new product requests. Those answers and solutions are stored and searchable over time, cutting down on support costs and building trust with your userbase.

Used by small businesses and large popular brands alike, Get Satisfaction gets rave reviews for human customer service and helping to build communities around brands and products.

Pro Tip: Embeddable widgets allow you to bring the conversation back to your own company’s site or even within your products themselves. Drop a searchable FAQ or a feedback tab or page right into your website or service to integrate the customer service experience right where your users need it.

5. Twitter

What would this list be without our favorite microblogging service? From best practices for brands to tips for executives to using Twitter for customer service, there’s no shortage of creative ideas for leveraging Twitter for your business.

Even if you’re not in a technically-oriented industry, you’ll want to know which influencers in your domain are on Twitter and which of your potential clients and customers are there (hint: probably a bunch). You’ll want to wrap your head around hashtags for business, and more certainly check out Twitter’s own guidebook for businesses (as well as our own guidebook, of course!).

Pro Tip: Try not to use Twitter as a purely broadcast medium; whether one person or several posts to your official account, make sure your company is listening and interacting as well as simply posting. Strive for authenticity in your company’s tweets and try to think of it as taking part in a conversation, not just another soapbox platform.

4. Facebook

Facebook is the other social networking giant you’ll want to be sure your business has a presence on. It’s another powerful tool for building relationships, raising visibility for your brand, and targeting your customer niche.

With a robust and relatively low-cost advertising platform, you can connect directly to the potential customers or clients who might want to know about you. Optimization tools help you fine-tune and target your ads more intelligently, and get detailed insight into who is responding to your ads.

Pro Tip: Authenticity is key here too for maximum impact. With changes that made Facebook Pages more like personal pages, your brand’s home on Facebook is no longer relegated to fairly static profile information. Since the Wall Feed is usually the main point of entry for your fans and visitors, think of it as an opportunity to provide some sort of utility to your visitors, whether it be information, entertainment, or relevant expressions of your company’s culture and mission.

3. Basecamp

If you’re like most startups, you’ve got a heck of a lot going on. You need to keep on top of your projects and open loops, not just internally but with your clients, partners, and customers as well. That’s where a good project management tool comes in.

Basecamp from 37signals is a great and cost-effective web-based tool for project management and collaboration. Featuring to-do lists, milestones for important due-dates, file sharing, blog-style messaging, wiki-style writeboards, time tracking, and integration with the excellent group chat product Campfire, basic plans for small businesses start at $24 a month.

Pro Tip: Add extra functionality to your Basecamp environment or integrate it with your existing systems in the extras and add-ons department. For example if you use Freshbooks, you can even invoice your Basecamp projects via Freshbooks.

2. LinkedIn

From hiring to networking with cohorts and potential clients to participating in groups and question threads, LinkedIn is a powerful social network for entrepreneurs and business professionals of all stripes. It’s a great place to both discover and research potential job candidates (with a reported 75% of hiring managers using it over Facebook and Twitter), as well as both keeping up with and extending your network.

Pro Tip: Although it’s not an overnight success solution, positioning yourself as an expert in the LinkedIn Answers domain(s) relevant to your business can be a great way to increase your authority and drive new interest to your business. Don’t underestimate the power of asking for advice here as well.

1. Google Apps for Domains

Startup costs for outfitting an office with networking and computing equipment are staggering enough as it is without even taking into account the software and maintenance components. One area for adventurous entrepreneurs to cut costs in the latter department lies in the realm of typical office staples: email, calendaring and the office suites businesses typically need to use to prepare documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

Instead of paying an IT staff to set up, host and maintain your own mail servers, Google Apps for Domains can handle custom email addresses at your own company’s URL. As an alternative to Microsoft Outlook worth considering, Gmail also integrates nicely with Google Calendar for your group calendaring needs.

And whereas once Microsoft Office was one of your only choices in the office suites department, Google Documents now handles document, spreadsheet and presentation preparation with aplomb — all the while making it easy to share and collaborate with colleagues without having to email documents around or check items out of a central repository.

Pro Tip: For the truly frugal, you can even opt for the totally free Standard Edition which includes basic Gmail, calendaring, Google Docs and Google Sites. Premier Edition will run you $50 per user per year, but increases user email storage to 25GB, adds more security features and guarantees you uptime and support.

Sound more professional and stay connected with Grasshopper, the Virtual Phone System designed for entrepreneurs. Grasshopper works just like a traditional phone system, but requires no hardware to purchase – it’s all managed online or by phone. Callers reach you whether you’re in the office, on your cell, or at home.

Get a toll free or local number, create extensions for employees, forward calls, get voicemails via email, and more – starting at only $9.95 a month.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, cmcderm1

Tags: basecamp, entrepreneurs, facebook, google apps, google docs, linkedin, Lists, monitter, Skype, small business, social media, startups, twitter, uservoice, youtube

Growing tired of the Apple Remote conflicts in Snow Leopard with the likes of Boxee, Plex and Hulu Desktop? Well, we have some good news to report. IOSPIRIT today announced the release of Candelair.

Not content with waging a crazy legal battle with Apple based on just selling hardware with Snow Leopard on it, Psystar is now selling software that lets you put OS X on any new PC.

You can actually download a trial version yourself before you hand over your $50. Keep in mind that you’ll need to have a machine with one of these processors in order for this to work: Intel Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, i7 or Xeon Nehalem. We haven’t tested Rebel EFI, so we can’t say how well it works. Let us know if you’ve had luck with it. [Psystar via LoopInSight]

One of the things that we’ve been focusing on lately has been building tools to better manage our products and services. It’s amazing what a well designed tool can tell you about your business. When I say “tool”, I’m referring to an application. Whether it be a web app, a desktop app or even a simple spreadsheet, creating a good “tool” that can help you leverage data that you’ve collected, or even help you collect data to analyze is a great thing to have.

For example, our F-MyLife application leverages multiple ad networks to fill it’s inventory. It currently uses the AdWhirl SDK to do this and it worked great for a while; however, our buddies over at MobClix built a much better ad aggregation platform with far more networks and we’ve since moved most of our traffic to MobClix so they can manage it. Since the AppStore is a pain in the ass and getting an update out would have taken weeks, we were able to allocate all of our traffic to MobClix via AdWhirl and MobClix’s new platform was able to handle everything from there. We ran our ads like this for over a month and then we started noticing a dropoff in our revenue. We scrambled to find out what the problem was, but since we were filtering through data from multiple networks, it was nearly impossible to put two and two together.

We decided that in order to analyze all of this data and really see connections between everything, we were going to need to build something. So Shaun spent a few nights working on a web application that pulled in all of our data from all of our networks so it could be analyzed and displayed in a readable format along with some charts. This was a huge life saver. After reviewing the reports that we built for ourselves, we noticed a huge problem with our click-through rates and began working with everyone to resolve them.

Had we not built this tool, we probably would of never known the real cause of the issue. In fact, had we built this tool a month ago, we would of identified the bug earlier and we could have fixed it.

You don't always need to "roll your own solution" though. There are tons of products and services out there designed to fix problems just like yours, you just need to research them and set them up. A similar scenario occurred with our servers. We run FML/TWI & ProTip on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure and we monitor everything with Pingdom. The other night, we had a 6 hour downtime between 2am EDT and 8am EDT. The problem was remedied by a simple lighttpd restart; however, during that time, we lost a lot of revenue. This wasn’t the first time that this happened either! So, yesterday, we setup Scoutapp to keep an eye on our server load and monitor some other metrics (like MySQL). When we woke up, we were greeted with a bunch of alerts from Scoutapp telling us that we had 1 SQL query which was taking an awfully long time to run and bogging down the server. We logged in, identified the query, figured out why it was taking so long to run and remedied the problem by adding an index to one of our tables. Done!

If it weren’t for Scoutapp, we would of had to manually log into each server, every morning and manually check the slow query logs. This is painstaking and given that we’re a small company with hundreds of things in the works at any given time, we don’t have the free time available to check logs. Scoutapp saw a problem, let us know about it, and we fixed it. A tool saved our ass yet again.

This happens over and over in the software development business. After you’re done with the product, and it makes you a little bit of money, you NEED to build or setup tools that can help you manage your new business. If you don’t, you’ll spend all of your time managing your first product instead of working on your next.

Heartbeat was the first tool we built to manage our AppStore products. It’s been a great asset to us and after having had over a year of experience on the AppStore, we’re working on Heartbeat 3.0 which will incorporate all of the knowledge that we’ve gained through the past year.

It seems counter-productive when you’re a small company, but that’s when these little things help the most. You don’t have the time to do it all, so it’s important to automate as much of your business as possible. Services like Pingdom and Scoutapp have helped us maintain uptime on our servers. Others like Sifter and Tender have helped us keep track of bugs and deal with support issues from our customers.

There are a ton of other products and services out there that can help you run your business. If you can’t find one to meet your specific needs, spend some time, and build your own. Trust me, you’ll thank yourself in the long run.

Gizmodo’s bullpen five minutes ago. Me: “Holy f*ck. Check this.” Matt: “We’re all dead.” Me: “We’re so f*cked.” Wilson: “Soft robotics. That’s a scary phrase.” Jason: “You mean a sexy phrase. Mmmm. Soft robots.” Wilson: “Now, jamming skin…

That is sexy. Jammable slurry. Wow, a little hot under the collar here. This really is nuts.”

It is really nuts indeed: A shape-shifting robot blob that can squeeze through cracks. Sounds familiar? Of course it does. But clearly, this iRobot and Darpa researchers don’t read or watch any Sci-Fi material whatsoever.

In any case, ladies and gentlemen, it has been a pleasure and a privilege writing for you. Now, enjoy the rest of your lives. They won’t last much more. [JWZ via Make]

The GlideTV is a couch mouse, something pretty handy when a lot of us are watching TV and movies on our computer screens. It works over USB, and you plug a dongle into the machine to play. From there, you can control your cursor with a touchpad, and there are a few buttons which mimic the ones most used on a keyboard, like Escape and Enter. The best part is the rim around the pad which neatly contains a lot of extra buttons. And because it works like a regular mouse and (limited) keyboard, it works with most machines, from Media Center PCs to Macs to PS3s.

But the keyboard is the problem for this otherwise sexy half-egg (it looks like a sex toy, as you can see in the photo of it being fisted, above). If you are using Windows, you can download the GlideTV Navigator software, which will give you an onscreen keyboard, but we all know how quick and easy they are to use (not very, if you were wondering).

Still, the GlideTV, which comes from the brains of the people behind VUDU and SageTV, packs a lot into a tiny device. And at $150, that’s a good thing: For the same price, you could pick up a wireless keyboard with a trackpad or trackball. Then again, the GlideTV will fulfill that other living-room remote requirement: It can be lost down the back of the sofa. Try that with a full-size QWERTY. If only the Glide people would put a vibrator inside. Then it would be perfect.

Product page [GlideTV. Thanks, Patrick!]

The Dev-Team has released a jailbreak for firmware 3.1.2. The jailbreak (PwnageTool 3.1.4) works for the iPhone 2G, 3G and 3GS. It also work on the 1G and 2G iPod touch. It does not support the 3G iPod touch at this time. PwnageTool only works on a Mac (no Windows version yet).

If you are an unlocker, “It is super important that people who need the unlock to understand they can keep it only by starting at 3.0 (or earlier) and updating solely to custom IPSWs that don’t update the baseband. For those who have been onboard the “unlock train”, simply install ultrasn0w via Cydia once you’ve restored to your custom IPSW. Don’t forget to turn off the “3G” setting in Settings->General->Network if you use T-Mobile in the U.S.A.”

Below is a snippet from the Dev-Team’s website. However, you will want to check out their blog for full information and the download.

Be sure to read everything carefully before you begin your jailbreak.

Pwnage Pie

Here are some details on our latest version of PwnageTool 3.1.4 for Mac OS X which supports the 3.1.2 release of the iPhone software for iPhone 2G/3G/3GS and iPod Touch 1G/2G.

If you’re already jailbroken (by whatever means), you don’t need to mess around with DFU mode at all. Just create (or get from a friend) your custom IPSW and Option-Restore (Shift-Restore on Windows) to it via iTunes. Don’t enter DFU mode at all. Please make sure you are restoring to the custom IPSW, not the stock one from Apple! For best results, use the latest iTunes (9.0.1) — which includes a nice new application organizer.

This release allows your baseband to remain unlocked at 3.1.2, but it does not unlock a new baseband put there by restoring to official 3.1.x. It is super important that people who need the unlock to understand they can keep it only by starting at 3.0 (or earlier) and updating solely to custom IPSWs that don’t update the baseband. For those who have been onboard the “unlock train”, simply install ultrasn0w via Cydia once you’ve restored to your custom IPSW. Don’t forget to turn off the “3G” setting in Settings->General->Network if you use T-Mobile in the U.S.A.

Note for 3GS users not already jailbroken and stuck at 3.1.x: this version of PwnageTool has a side feature to jailbreak your 3GS. It uses a simple implementation of the usb control msg hole found by chronicdev, geohot, and our very own gray. Now that the hole is public and in use, we expect Apple to close it by the next major firmware update. That’s why 3GS users need to get their ECID hashes for 3.1.x now, and need to stay onboard the “jailbreak train” in all future updates. For more details on what this means, please see our earlier posts or ask in our comments section (moderated by the always helpful @angie and @confucious!).

For the early adopters who ran blackra1n and are having problems with mobilesubstrate, winterboard, diskaid, or ifunbox, you can install a custom .ipsw from PwnageTool to fix these issues. That’s because all jailbroken devices accept a custom .ipsw created by PwnageTool. (However, if you ran blackra1n on a 3G or 3GS that means you updated to stock 3.1.x, and the carrier unlock is now out of reach. We’ll continue to work on a carrier unlock for the latest basebands, but the timeframe for such an unlock is unknowable.)

Note: If you use internet tethering on a carrier that doesn’t officially support it, you’ll lose it by going to 3.1.x. Stay back at 3.0 until a hack for that is developed.

SUMMARY:

* The iPhone 3GS is now supported out of the box in PwnageTool 3.1.4 (or if you have upgraded to 3.1.x in iTunes)
* The iPod 2G is still supported in PwnageTool 3.1.4 but you must already be jailbroken (we’ll update this if there’s a big demand from non-jailbroken ipt2G owners)
* The iPod touch 3G is NOT supported

DETAILS:

1. GOLDEN RULE: If you are using a iPhone 3G or iPhone 3G(S) with ultrasn0w and rely on ultrasn0w to obtain cellular service then you should only update your device with an .ipsw that is made with the new PwnageTool. There are no second chances with this. You need to remember that PwnageTool will provide an upgrade path to newer versions of the iPhone software in the future.
2. Please read all parts of this post before downloading and using these tools.
3. Read items 1, 2 and 3 again and again.
4. At the bottom of this post are the bittorrent files for the 3.1.4 capable version of PwnageTool.
5. PwnageTool will work for the iPhone 3GS
6. PwnageTool will work for the iPod touch 2G
7. PwnageTool WILL work for Original iPhone (1st Generation), the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3G(S) and the iPod touch (1st Generation and 2nd Generation) but NOT the iPod touch 3rd generation.
8. For 3G and 3G(S) users who are Pwned, PwnageTool is your key to updating in the future, just remember to never install an update directly from Apple, always use an .ipsw that has been created with PwnageTool.
9. There is no Windows version of PwnageTool it is a Mac OS X tool only, we are not developing a Windows version of PwnageTool.

For the past two years, the elegant iPhone has housed some of the most poorly designed applications you could imagine. The hype surrounding iPhone has prompted many designers across the globe to try their skills with the new mobile medium. The result are literally thousands of various iPhone-applications that are often hardly usable and counter-intuitive. However, some designers invest a lot of time and efforts into creating usable and original user interfaces (yes, there are usable and creative UIs).

This article explores the ways in which designers use graphical elements and screen interactions to create iPhone-applications that are easy on the eyes and mind. The aim of this article is to display common trends and design approaches in iPhone app design – please notice that they are not necessarily optimal ones from the design or usability point of view.

1. Mirroring Native iPhone UI Elements

“Tell them what you’re gonna tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.” Creating a whole new OS within your app can be fun, but when you’re dealing with the mobile medium, people just want to get stuff done. Getting stuff done means that the designer has to get into the flow of the OS and create an app that requires zero explanation for the end user to operate. Mirroring the layout and UI elements that the user is already familiar with saves time and energy. So it seems quite convenient to use this approach when designing iPhone-applications.

Facebook (iTunes Link)
In the new Facebook 3.0, you’ll find a grid layout that users can swipe left and right to access more categories. Because it mirrors Apple’s native UI, users do not have to “learn” how to use it all over again. A similar approach exists in Web design: users expect to see a logo in the top left, navigation along the top, etc. Facebook has taken this concept mobile, using large buttons that are easily distinguishable and tap-able.

Where (iTunes link)
Where has a similar concept, allowing users to swipe left and right to access more data.

Tweetdeck [iTunes link]
Tweetdeck is a good example of user interface design on many levels. Notice how the design highlights recent updates. The application could display the updates in a new window, with a categorized or tabbed list. But it doesn’t. Instead, a more familiar dialogue menu is displayed — it serves as a springboard to jump to a specific category or to clear the messages altogether.

2. Simplifying The Interface

Simplifying user interfaces may sound like a mechanical task, but what lies beneath the surface of user interface design? The answer is simple: users. And what do users want? What makes them all warm and fuzzy? How do you deliver what they want so that they don’t even notice how they are consuming information?

Facebook’s first release did a great job of fitting a lot of core functionality into a small space. The problem, of course, is in laying out all that data and creating an intuitive interface. Compare 3.0 with the first release, and you’ll see how they took a “springboard” approach to streamlining the interface, keeping it intuitive and maintaining functionality.

Flickr [iTunes link]
Flickr is another example of how to achieve a good balance between functionality, visual design and the small display area on mobile devices. Think about it: what is at the core of Flickr? Photos. Its users probably do not want to look at big clunky navigational elements; instead, they are looking for pictures. Flickr has managed to fit all of its core functionality without heading down the highway to navigational hell. In fact, most elements in the navigation are handled by interacting with the photos themselves. Simple and smart.

3. Hardware-ish Look

Many utilities are breaking out of the conventional iPhone UI to take advantage of the device’s unique ability to respond to finger gestures. Many of these have hardware-ish interfaces that users are familiar with but come with perpetually shiny exteriors and clicks and pops that maintain their newness from the first to one-thousandth click. Next up, though: an app that gets dirtier the more you play with it.

Convertbot (iTunes link)
Convertbot reminds us of the proportion wheel we all used in grade school, except it’s more distinctive, original and creative.

Little Snapper (iTunes Link)
Little Snapper mimics the wheel that you turn on a typical digital SLR.

iHandy Level (iTunes Link)
iHandy Level simulates the look and functionality of a real, well-used leveler.

Where To? [iTunes Link]
This application looks like it belongs in a Mercedes. Plush leather, matte-finish tactile buttons: quality craftsmanship. We can just imagine how each button press feels solid, requiring the perfect amount of pressure.

4. Rich, Padded And Pretty List Views

You know that you are a geek designer when you get excited about the latest trends in list view design. And what do people do when they encounter a list view? Of course, they skim. And how do we make it easier for people to decide what interests them? That’s right: more visual cues!

Essentially, users are asking for a snapshot of what’s next, and then decide if they want more information. One way to do this is with big pretty buttons. Large and in charge, elegantly designed big buttons give the user a lot of information through their color, icons and typography.

Delivery Status Touch (iTunes Link)
Check out how Delivery Status uses appropriate colors on its big buttons to identify each brand. And it uses typography well to establish a hierarchy of information.

Be Happy Now (iTunes Link)
Be Happy Now’s big buttons convey the “be happy” mantra through a mellow color scheme and light, calm and clear typeface.

Next Read [iTunes link]
The Next Read application allows friends to share books. Here all books about a particular topic are presented, including the title, cover image, review rating and number of people who have recommended it. Notice the padding and a lot of white space for each navigation option; this makes the areas easily clickable and easier to navigate.

Nike [iTunes link]
Nike’s workout application for women includes a nice visual treatment and illustrations that match the brand. It breaks out of the traditional UI just enough to communicate the brand without making it difficult for users to understand the interface and how to use it.

Borange [iTunes link]
Borange is a “social availability” application that helps you coordinate meetings with friends. The list view presents a lot of information: friends you want to hang out with, the meeting location and a nice visualization of friends who are available.

5. Layered Interface

Several applications take advantage of the iPhone’s capabilities by layering the interface and making some elements stationary and others vertically or horizontally scrollable. This approach has several benefits:

1. It reduces the number of traditional navigation elements that are necessary (i.e. fewer buttons help to avoid a cluttered interface).
2. It gives users a faster route to the information they want.
3. More screen space is available for information.

Tweetie (iTunes Link)
Tweetie uses layers to organize information specific to each of your Twitter friends. Just look at all of the information packed into this one screen!

Barnes & Noble [iTunes link]
Barnes & Noble has a layered interface that allows you to quickly slide through new releases at the top or dive into more categories below.

USA Today [iTunes link]
USA Today takes a slightly different approach to layering the interface in its “Pictures” section: it uses sliding panels to display blocks of information. While the interface may look cluttered at the first glance, one can easily get around it. The interesting part is that within each panel you can slide thumbnails left and right to view more images.

myPantone [iTunes link]
Would we expect any less from Pantone? The color picker shown above is a layered interface that lets you pick from a range of colors, sort and scroll as well as open and close detail screens, all without too driving you crazy.

6. Icons For The List View

Icons aren’t just for springboard-loving folks. On small screens, icons can give a huge boost to an application’s usability and navigation. Let’s now take a look at some examples of applications that use icons to their advantage.

iStudiez (iTunes Link)
This application uses various educational metaphors as icons to clearly communicate the purpose of the application. Excellent visual cues tell the student what’s happening today at a glance.

Top Floor (iTunes Link)
Top Floor uses simple and easily recognizable icons to quickly guide users to their category of choice.

New York Times
Isn’t it great when applications just let you do whatever you want to do? For an app with as much information as the New York Times’, users are bound to have their favorite sections. Well, guess what? The New York Times cares: it lets you customize the tab bar’s navigation to include only your favorite sections of the paper. Drag an icon down the tab bar and you are set. The downside of the design is, of course, its lack of visual appeal.

Filemaker [iTunes link]
Here is another example of beautiful icons that aren’t obscure or confusing. Designers should never use icons just for the sake of having icons. As designers, we want icons that illustrate what users are actually going to get when they choose a particular path. Nicely done, Filemaker.

7. Illustrations in use

Applications that rely on graphics not found in the standard user interfaces are increasing in popularity, as developers try to set their apps apart from the crowd. Sometimes it works, but often it doesn’t. The more unconventional a design is, the more likely it is to have usability problems. Please always conduct usability testing before releasing a product with a “creative” user interface.

Magnetic Personalities (iTunes link)
An excellent example of how buttons don’t have to look like standard buttons.

SugarSync [iTunes link]
This interface could have easily followed the traditional list-view route. Instead, the designers played with the concept of “connectivity” to create a visual treatment that communicates the purpose of the app. It is unusual and requires some time to get used to.

Mom Maps [iTunes link]
Another example of how illustrations do a great job of pulling together the whole concept of an application.

8. Using Gestures

Classic linear navigation may look boring: a button that links to other buttons, which leads you to a list of something, which leads you to such-and-such an interaction. Not really spectacular. The possibilities for creative interaction in utility apps are huge and largely untapped (no pun intended).

Mover (iTunes link)
Mover exemplifies how to use gestures for sharing contacts, photos and bookmarks. Open two devices, and flick the shared files from one handset to the other.

ABC Animals [iTunes link]
This application teaches while it entertains. Being able to trace a letter with your finger is another example of how the iPhone responds to touch and movement.

All Recipes [iTunes link]
This applications allows you to mix in various elements to create your next meal using gestures.

Something is missing?

We missed some common design approach or trend? Please let us know in the comments to this post!

About the Author

Jen Gordon is the owner of Atlanta-based iPhone app design studio Clever Twist, which will release its latest app Farm Friends in just a few days. She specializes in usable interfaces, beautiful design and straight talk. She loves her family and the iPhone and periodically dreams that she’s close friends with Dolly Parton. Follow her on Twitter or drop her a line to say “Hi!”.

(al)

© Jen Gordon for Smashing Magazine, 2009. |
Permalink |
39 comments |
Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine

Post tags: iphone, showcases, trends

Startup Building 101 –

Last night I posted the video of Mint CEO Aaron Patzer’s 45 minute presentation on building startups from the ground up. If you are an aspiring startup entrepreneur, you’ll want to watch that more than a few times. The candid disclosures and advice he gives is rarely seen in Silicon Valley.

Some readers requested to see the presentation deck as well, so here it is. Patzer shows how he raised and spent money, and generated revenue, throughout the lifecycle of Mint, from the very beginning to the $170 million acquisition. He also showed historical slides from early presentations to investors and compares those to the actual results.

I’m also re-embedding the full video below.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors