What color is your social media?

by Shawn Kinkade on February 8, 2010

Social media comes in a wide variety of choices, with more coming on every day.  There are more platforms than there are colors in a huge box of pencils…so it can be overwhelming to figure out where to get started. 

When I’m giving Social Media workshops, inevitably someone asks “What social media platform should I use if I’m just getting started?”.  Should you get started on Facebook?  Twitter? LinkedIn?  Or any one of several dozen other choices that are out there?

The answer is…it depends – there are a lot of reasons to use each platform, depending on your business, your style, your network and your personal preference.  Some choices will be more effective than others, so let’s look at some of the pros and cons.

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3 Ways to shoot yourself in the foot!

by Shawn Kinkade on February 5, 2010

foot   photo by meddygarnet 

It’s an interesting phrase, but what does it really mean to ‘shoot yourself in the foot”?  According to the Using English website it means the following:

If you shoot yourself in the foot, you do something that damages your ambition, career, etc.

Self inflicted damage!  Just the kind of thing you’d like (and should be able to) avoid when it comes to growing your business successfully.

It’s always great to learn from the mistakes of others, so I thought I would pass along a few self-inflicted business mistakes that I’ve seen recently.  These are based on examples I’ve heard in the last week, but they are sadly fairly common situations and all of them will have a negative effect on a business (and potentially could be business killers over time)!

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Get rid of your fear of numbers once and for all!

by Shawn Kinkade on January 31, 2010

  photo by lrargerich 

When you get some quiet time, when you have a few minutes to yourself and you think about your business, do the numbers scare you?  Whether it’s your bank account balance, your taxes, your profitability – are those financial numbers scaring you?

Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night sweating because of the numbers?

While that may or may not be true for you, it is sadly true for a lot of business owners.  They love their business, their clients and even their employees but they don’t have a good relationship with the financial numbers around their business.

The good news is there are ways to deal with the fear (and the numbers) and if you can get past this issue you will find your self in a position of power and control that is probably hard to imagine right now.

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5 Ways to take a quick fun break this winter!

by Shawn Kinkade on January 28, 2010

winterfun

We’re at that time of year when the winter blah really sets in (I’m sure February is the longest month of the year!).  We’ve at least had a couple of days that weren’t gray, but it’s certainly been looking more like Seattle then Kansas City.

It’s cold outside – so here are 5 diversions on your computer that might help brighten your day up.  Shake it off, have some fun and check out some cool stuff (some with a local tie)!

1.  Amazing Shot!

You’ve probably seen this sometime in the last few days – it’s been all over TV and the internet, but in case you missed it – you need to check out the vide of the Olathe Northwest Girls Basketball coach who’s getting set up for a prank.  The students are challenging him to shoot a 1/2 court shot…blindfolded and if he makes it he wins Final Four tickets.  The prank is that the students are going to cheer wildly when he shoots to make him believe he hit it.

The drawback to their plan?  He actually hits the shot!  It’s unbelievable and a lot of fun to watch.

If that video doesn’t work, here’s a link with the video along with some additional coverage:  http://onwravens.net/media/www.onwravens.net_media/The_Shot.html

To complete the story, it turns out someone has now donated Final Four tickets so he actually did win!

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Have you gotten into the Shark Tank yet?

by Shawn Kinkade on January 24, 2010

shark   photo by egarc2

I had a chance to catch the 2nd half of an episode of Shark Tank over the weekend (I saw the last half of Episode 7 if you’re looking it up).

If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s a 1/2 hour reality show where aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their idea or business to a group of self-made multi-millionaires who have made their money by wheeling and dealing, creating, buying and selling businesses (the Sharks).

The business owners have an opportunity to raise money and make a deal on the show – either as an investment or a buyout.  They’ll pitch their idea and then ask for an amount of money in exchange for a portion of the business.

The Sharks are all legitimate business gurus, and they’ve got big personalities and egos to go along with it.  They don’t seem to like each other very much and there’s a lot of back and forth that has little to do with the business ideas – hard to tell if it’s staged much, but it does make for good TV.

Here’s a couple of the ideas that were discussed in the episode I saw:

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Can we go back to the good old days of business?

January 21, 2010 social media

  
Looking through the lens of nostalgia, business used to be simple.  You could set up a road side stand (or the equivalent) and offer things that people wanted locally.  Your long term success totally depended on your local reputation and at the end of the day it was more about how you interacted with [...]

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3 things to learn from the economic desert we’re in

January 17, 2010 Small Business Strategy

   photo by visulogik
I ran across an interesting article on CNN Money that talked about how recessions don’t spark start-ups – essentially the number of new businesses that get started every year (at least over the last 30 years) is steady and doesn’t have any correlation to difficult times (or much of anything else).
The source [...]

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