Thursday, April 9th
5:30 to 7:30 p.m.
Oklahoma Heritage Museum
1400 Classen Drive, Oklahoma City
Join us for networking, wine and hors d'oeuvres immediately following the event.
For more information on this event and a special white paper,
please
click here.
RSVP to Shauna George at sgeorge@spiritbank.com or by phone (405) 463-5011.
2009 Business Solutions Series
Entrepreneurial Spirit Award Unplugged
Please join us for our first Tulsa Business Solutions Series event of 2009, the Tulsa Entrepreneurial Spirit Award
Unplugged.
Wednesday, April 8th
4:30 to 6:30 p.m.
SpiritBank Community Room
(with reception following from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m.)
Featuring special guest speakers:
- Gerald Buckley, Grocio, 2008 Spirit Award Winner
- Adrienne Kallweit, SeekingSitters, 2007 Spirit Award Winner
- Ned Bruha, Skunk Whisperer, 2007 3rd Place Spirit Award Winner
RSVP to Justin Swearengin at jswearengin@spiritbank.com or by phone (918) 295-7470.
For more information click here.
2009 Entrepreneurial Spirit Award Kick-Off
Please join us on April 2nd at the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame as we
kick-off the 3rd Annual Mayor's Entrepreneurial
Spirit Award sponsored by SpiritBank. We know that growth comes by supporting our local entrepreneurs and the Mayor's
Entrepreneurial Spirit Award sponsored by SpiritBank gives individuals opportunities to develop their business model,
form contacts and share creativity and innovation. The Kick-Off will provide entrepreneurs and aspiring
entrepreneurs opportunities to:
- Discover the success factors of winning the Spirit Award
from past winners
- Meet and network with Tulsa entrepreneurs and small business leaders
- Learn details to compete for over $100,000 in cash, prizes and services in the 3rd Annual Mayor's Entrepreneurial
Spirit Award business model competition
What: Mayor Kathy Taylor's Tulsa Entrepreneurial Spirit Award Kick-Off
When: Thursday, April 2nd at 5:30 p.m.
Where: Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame, 111 East First Street, Tulsa, OK 74103
(Parking available in Central Parking North Garage)
RSVP by Friday, March 27 to Michelle Allen at mallen@cityoftulsa.org.
As we look to the future, our entrepreneurs continue to pioneer the spirit and economic drive in our city. So, what's your big idea Tulsa?
Now is time to unleash it! For more information on the Mayor's Entrepreneurial Spirit Award sponsored by SpiritBank, visit
www.tulsaspiritaward.com.
Oklahoma
Small Business News
Using Social Media to Build Effective Social Marketing Campaigns
By Strategic
Partner, Carrie Irwin, Wetink
The key to success is not to 'sell', but to connect. It is not to advertise, but to inform your
audience. It is to position yourself as a Solutions Provider to your readers.
- Identify who your audience is. Who wants or needs what you are offering in your business?
These become your Target Market.
- Identify the issues that are important to this group. Then work out ways that you can solve
those potential issues for them. This will form your 'content' which you will post online.
Quality content = value to your audience. The higher the value, the larger your following.
- Learn how to apply steps 1 and 2 to the Media that your group is using. Blogging, Facebook and
MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and Podcasts. This is just a sample. You can effectively use many more
than these, to reach your group.
- Connect with people on these sites by:
- Allowing comments on your articles
- Replying to comments
- Providing RSS feeds for them to subscribe to in order to follow new content you post.
- Providing a valuable resource that they can subscribe to in exchange for their contact details,
such as a newsletter, or free giveaway.
- Follow up with new subscribers with a series of valuable content you can send via email at regular intervals.
Using Social Marketing Campaigns to increase your business influence in the market is an enjoyable
way to build your reach, and most of it is free to do. The world community is active and online right
now building connections that are meaningful to them. This is exactly where businesses are going to
need to go. Because this is where your Market is congregating.
Visit the Wetink Web site at www.wetinkinc.com.
National
Small Business Resources
Social Networking Terms You Should Know
By Bonnie Ruberg, Small Biz Tech Starter Kit - Forbes.com
It's time to get connected.
Presidential debates notwithstanding, the truth is you don't need a lot of wind to build a fan base online. Just ask the folks at Game Layers, a start-up videogame maker in San Francisco.
All of 15 months old, Game Layers already boasts a roster of 1,225 people who subscribe to regular updates from the company--as long as it can crank out those messages in 140 characters or less.
Enter Twitter, a microblogging outfit that allows small businesses to get the word out about their work, albeit in teeny chunks. Do it right and those mini-posts can attract scores of followers.
Game Layers "tweets" its fans about upcoming game features and versions, and also asks for customer feedback. Each Twitter update includes a link back to the Game Layers homepage, further establishing the company's brand.
"We hope to keep our community updated in a faster and less intensive way than [by] e-mail," says Merci Victoria Grace, the company's chief creative officer. "We've seen immediate results."
For entrepreneurs in the Internet age, survival (let alone success) depends on being able to marshal the latest technology to the cause--and social networking is a huge one.
That's why, with help from the smart folks at technology publisher O'Reilly Media, we've assembled a glossary of social-networking terms every entrepreneur should know. And for all the techno-jargon that gets tossed around, rest assured you don't have to be a member of the Geek Squad to fathom the implications these issues have for strategy and budgeting.
By now, everyone knows that social networking connects communities of people with common interests online. The formats run the gamut, from full-blown profile-oriented sites like Facebook and MySpace with tens of millions of users, to niche blogs and forums.
For many entrepreneurs, Facebook is more than a way to keep up with long-lost high school buddies--it's a marketing tool as well. The site not only offers instant messaging and other nearly instantaneous digital communication between friends, it also lets users create groups and pages to which others can sign up as fans.
The viral effect is powerful: Say a gamer joins the Game Layers "PMOG" group (for Passively Multiplayer Online Game). Anyone whom that person has dubbed a "friend" on Facebook receives a message on their Facebook homepage, announcing that the person has joined a new group. They, in turn, join the group, too, and the ripples keep spreading. Game Layers' Facebook group now has 1,736 members.
Melissa Gira Grant not only knows a thing or two about social
networks, she's starting one of her own.
Boffery hasn't launched yet (it's in testing now), but that hasn't stopped Grant and co-founder Nick Douglas (of tech gossip Vallywag.com fame) from setting up both a Twitter account and a Tumblr blog devoted to the site. Says Grant, "Our goal is to have a strong community already gathered when we launch."
Still, Grant warns, using social networks as a marketing tool may not be right for every business. "Just getting on Twitter [because you think you have to] won't matter if your customers don't already have a relationship with Twitter," she says. "If I were addressing an entrepreneur, I'd ask, 'Where is your base?'"
The same goes for Second Life, an alternative digital world much like an interactive video game, where the likes of Sears and Dell have been known to set up virtual shop to attract a younger, more wired demographic. (For more on how to market a small business online, check out "Try These Innovative Marketing Techniques.")
Freelance radio journalist Cyrus Farivar saves valuable time by bringing the power of many social networking tools to bear at once. To help him stay in touch with his readership while working from Lyon, France, Farivar took all of 10 minutes to set up a Twitter account, which blasts a post every time he writes a blog entry; the same goes for his Facebook page. Better yet, he avoids filling up his readers' e-mail boxes, spam-style.
Farivar also keeps a profile on LinkedIn, the Facebook for business professionals, now with more than 24 million users. (For more, check out "What's To Love About LinkedIn?")
As for receiving myriad updates from the networked masses, Farivar relies on RSSfeeds--lists of posts from across the Web. RSS "readers" aggregate all those messages in one place in real time, so Farivar doesn't have to check umpteen Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. "To me," he says, "anything without RSS is invisible."
In the end, that's what social networking is all about: efficiency. "It’s not something I've put a lot of time into," says Farivar. "I figure another avenue [for] people finding me can't hurt." But not networking sure would.
Read this article online.
Small Business Web Holdouts: Unsearched, Unfound, Unfulfilled
By Jeff Meisner, E-Commerce Times
Who's afraid of the Big Bad Web? A lot of small businesses, that's who. For the most part, that
fear appears to be grounded in a lack of information about the actual costs and benefits of operating a Web
site and engaging in some strategic e-marketing efforts.
No matter where one turns on the Internet these days, it's virtually impossible to avoid being bombarded by advertising in one form or another. Banner ads. Video ads. Display ads. Search engine marketing. Ads on MySpace . Ads on Facebook . The only area of the Web left untouched by advertising may be government-run sites.
Web marketing, in large part, is the province of companies with enough money to plaster their messages, goods and services all over the Internet. Missing from this equation is the traditional engine of American commerce: the small business.
Indeed, a recent study showed that there is a major disconnect between the way most consumers look for goods and services on the Internet and the way small businesses use the Web to advertise.
The study, which surveyed nearly 4,000 U.S. Internet users on the tools they use to find local businesses, was conducted last November by Nielsen and WebVisible. Participants in the survey included 261 small business owners.
Here's what Nielsen and WebVisible discovered: Search is the No. 1 choice of consumers and small business owners alike when looking for a local product or service on the Internet. Yet, half of all small businesses spent less than 10 percent of their marketing budgets on Internet ads.
In essence, most small businesses are missing out on a huge segment of the consumer population that turns to Internet search engines such as Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) , Yahoo(Nasdaq: YHOO) and Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Live Search.
The Great Divide
"Local business is the last, vast untapped piece of online marketing space," said Kevin Ryan, chief marketing officer at WebVisible, which offers a suite of software tools and services designed to help small businesses run online advertising and marketing campaigns.
The biggest problem small businesses face when it comes to Web marketing is an attachment to an old way of doing business. It's clear in many cases that small businesses simply don't understand the inherent power of the Internet as a way to reach their customers, Ryan said.
Here's an example: A consumer looking for a plumber, attorney, insurance agent or electrician rarely conducts a search using the name of a local business but rather types in keywords such as "plumber and the Bronx" or "electricians and 06850," the ZIP code for Norwalk, Conn. Then, a page of search results with local businesses comes up, and the consumer goes on from there, he said.
"It's very difficult to convince a small business that in the eyes of a search engine, their brand doesn't have nearly the value they think it does," noted Ryan. "What they fail to realize is that most consumers will go to an online source such as a search engine or even the Yellow Pages directory first."
In fact, 63 percent of consumers turn to the Internet first when looking for local products and services, according to the Nielsen/WebVisible survey.
At the same time, only 44 percent of small businesses surveyed said they had a Web site.
"That explains why 40 percent of consumers said they have trouble finding a local business they know exists," Ryan observed.
Small Biz Snapshot: Helena, Mont.
The Helena Area Chamber of Commerce in Montana has about 860 local businesses as members. About 75 percent of those businesses are small businesses -- that is, businesses with 25 employees or less, according to the chamber's marketing and communications director, Barry Houser.
"I would say the majority of the businesses that comprise our membership still don't have a Web presence," Houser told the E-Commerce Times.
As the state capitol, Helena is by and large a government town. Outside of government, the major industries include health care and tourism.
"We're centrally located between Glacier National Park and Yellowstone National Park," Houser said. "So, fishing, skiing and snowmobiling are big attractions here."
While many big-box companies such as Costco (Nasdaq: COST) , Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) and Bed Bath & Beyond have started to move into the Helena area, the vast majority of businesses there are "small mom and pop" shops, he said.
Like small businesses in every corner of the U.S., these mom and pops don't have the budgets to promote their goods and services the way the big-box stores do, making the Internet almost a vital component of their marketing efforts, noted Houser.
"We try to encourage them to take advantage of their membership with the chamber to get more of a presence on the Web," he said.
The Helena chamber has an online directory that is searchable by business name and type. Businesses that already have Web sites can link to the chamber's site too.
Doesn't have to Break the Bank
One of the chief reasons small business owners give for not having an Internet presence is that it's too expensive to put up and maintain a Web site.
It doesn't have to be that way though, said WebVisible's Ryan.
"We have a number of pricing models," he said. "We can accommodate budgets from US $200 a month to $20,000 a month and beyond."
What's most critical is that whatever route a small business owner chooses to go with in terms of a Web presence, it has to suit their specific needs.
"Alfonso the tailor doesn't want to check emails all day long," Ryan said. "He wants to receive an SMS (short message service) text when someone needs something. The diamond jeweler doesn't want to spend all day answering stupid questions from someone that doesn't know what they want to buy."
Situated in the heart of downtown Seattle is the Seattle Mystery Bookshop. The store's owner, J.B. Dickey, has been selling mysteries, and nothing but mysteries, for years.
His shelves are lined with paperback and hard cover books written by authors local to the Pacific Northwest, such as G.M. Ford, as well as nationally acclaimed writers like James Ellroy and Michael Connelly.
Dickey has had a Web site in various iterations for 10 years.
"It started out as a way to just have a presence on the Web and have information about the shop out there," he told the E-Commerce Times. "It evolved into a place where we post our quarterly newsletter, an updated calendar of events such as author signings, and a shop blog. It's also information that's always out there, even when the shop is closed."
The blog serves a variety of purposes. It gives customers an inside take on what Dickey and his staff of well-read mystery lovers are reading and why they're reading it. It also lets publishers know that the bookshop is getting the word out about its books and writers, Dickey said.
The one thing the shop's Web site doesn't have is a shopping cart.
"That requires a completely different level of security and expertise that we don't want to fool with," he said. "But even without the shopping cart, the Web site is a big help."
Also, the Seattle Mystery Bookshop's Web site is relatively cheap.
"It's not a big expense," Dickey said. "We pay someone to run it. We send her updates, and she gets them up on the site right away."
Read this article online.
Young Bosses Push Elders to Embrace Technology
ByTamara Keith
Among many firsts with President Obama: We now have the First BlackBerry. Despite security concerns, the president refused to give up the hand held e-mail device when he took office.
Obama, 47, is younger than most of the people in his Cabinet. But that dynamic of younger, tech-savvy bosses and older employees isn't unique to the White House.
Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian Fenty is 38. And he has a reputation for being a BlackBerry addict. He has three of them.
"One is for personal use, so it's a personal BlackBerry," Fenty explains. "One is a standard government BlackBerry and one is a police BlackBerry."
The devices have become an integral part of his administration. Everyone who works for the mayor has one — or two.
"It's fantastic. I think it improves productivity," Fenty says.
Even 70-year-old D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles pecks out messages on a BlackBerry, right along with other city officials.
What does he think of the mayor's BlackBerry dependence?
"I'm against it," Nickels says with a grin.
Nickels says if he could go without a BlackBerry, he would. He's nostalgic for a time when people actually looked each other in the eyes and is sometimes perplexed by the whole BlackBerry culture. He says he recently sent an e-mail and got as a response what seemed to him to be a nonsensical string of letters.
"And so I went back to the sender and said, 'What language is this?' The response was ... 'Keep me in the loop,'" Nickels says.
When it comes to older employees and their younger bosses, it's more than just age and technology — it can be a cultural divide, says Lisa Orrell, a generation relations expert and the author of Millennials Incorporated. Millennials are people born in 1980 or later, also known as Generation Y.
"What's happening is all of a sudden you're 53 years old and you've got a 28-year-old manager, and the millennials are very, very, very different," Orrell says.
They've grown up with the Internet and love to communicate. At the same time younger people are coming into management, Orrell says, many baby boomers are delaying retirement.
Her advice to older employees: "They have got to be a heck of a lot more flexible than they've been."
Orrell has suggestions for younger workers, too. They should respect the experience of their elders and be willing to teach them about things like text messaging, Facebook and Twitter.
That's essentially what happened at Serena Software, a company where most of the employees are older than the chief executive. Jeremy Burton, 41, decided everyone at the Redwood City, Calif., company should be on Facebook.
"I want folks to learn about the software as well as learn a bit more about the folks they work with, which I think is great for team building," Burton says.
With some coaxing and coaching, Burton says, it worked. He was able to bring even his more senior employees along.
"There's about 95 percent of the employees up there," Burton says. "And I can see the status of probably 50, 60, 70 people right from my desk."
That includes senior manager Tom Clement's status.
"It says, 'I just found out that I don't have to worry about injuring my knee anymore because it's already shot,'" says Clement, reading from his Facebook page.
Clement is 55, and until his boss nudged him toward the social-networking site, he had no use for it.
"I didn't really get it," he says.
Now Clement has come around to Facebook, but he says there are just so many other things to learn about.
"I think it just makes me wish that I could magically understand all these things," he says, referring to Twitter and other online applications. "The way you might magically understand things if you were growing up as a teenager and everyone around you were using all of them."
Read this article online.
Compiled by Tim Ellsworth
It was a small victory but U.S. stock investors will take it. The S&P 500 stock index was
up +1.6 percent (total return) last week, coming on the heels of its +10.8
percent gain the week before.
It was the first set of back-to-back “up-weeks” since mid-December. Market watchers continue
to debate whether the S&P 500’s +13.7 percent gain (in just the last 9 trading days) is a “bounce” or
have we exited for good the March 9, 2009 bear market closing low? Investor confidence will be impacted
in the coming weeks by the release of corporate earnings reports for the first 3 months of
the year (source: BTN Research).
Lost in the fury and anger that emanated from Congress last week over executive bonuses was yet
another multi-billion dollar government initiative. President Obama and Treasury Secretary
Geithner announced last Monday new measures that will focus on stimulating loans to small-businesses,
a key lending activity that is currently running at half of its normal level (source: White House).
Notable Numbers for the Week:
- Keeping Rates Down: The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell
0.51 percent last Wednesday (to 2.50 percent) when the Fed announced it will buy $300 billion of
long-term bonds over the next 6 months. It was the largest 1-day drop in yield since
October 20, 1987, or 21 years ago (source: Federal Reserve).
- Millionaires: One out of every 17 households in the USA have a net worth of at
least $1 million not counting the value of their primary residence (source: Fox Business, Spectrum
Group, Census Bureau).
- Please Take Me Out: 48 percent of Americans would end their participation in the Social
Security program if that option was available, i.e., make no contributions into the program and receive no benefits
from it (source: Sun Life).
- A Few States: 50 percent of the foreclosure action that took place last month on nearly
291,000 troubled properties nationwide occurred in just 3 states. The 3 states are California,
Florida and Arizona (source: RealtyTrac).
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