.Roaring Mouse

It has been quite a while since I posted and I thought that this is an appropriate time to write my final post. After living and breathing small business computers for the last 3 years as a ThinkPad product manager at Lenovo, the lure of creating something from nothing and the accompanying joys and rewards of being my own boss proved too strong to resist. Friday, the 13th of November will be my last day as an employee of Lenovo and I am taking the plunge and starting a business of my own.

I’ve tried to make sure that Roaring Mouse provides a completely unbiased look at small business (instead of a thinly veiled advertisement for Lenovo products) and tried to focus on topics that are relevant to small biz owners, but also slightly off the beaten path. In previous posts, I’ve argued why this is a great time to start a business, discussed effective outsourcing techniques and explained how cloud computing will proliferate and have more and more of a presence in small business. Little did I know that the considerable amount of research and time spent fashioning these posts would have more immediate benefits and relevance to me! I hope that though the number of posts have been slim, that you’ve derived some value from them. Small business is extremely fascinating to me and I will soon have a firsthand view of its inherent challenges.

I think it would be remiss if I didn’t provide some commentary on my working experiences here at Lenovo. I’ve worked with some amazing people around the globe and can wholeheartedly say that a tremendous amount of effort, dedication and passion goes into bringing you every ThinkPad we produce. It’s easy to overlook the human element behind inanimate objects and tools, but I can safely attest to the fact that each ThinkPad notebook you purchase has been touched by many people, in many different ways and is imbued with the unique personality of each one. Our superb quality numbers and multiple awards for product excellence are proof that these people are top-notch, something that generally escapes the attention of people outside the company. Of course, I have first-hand experience with them and am using this opportunity to tell you that and to thank them for helping me learn and grow professionally.

The PC industry is a challenging one and places many demands on all who are associated with it. As an example, I’ve worked on 6 different products in the three years that I’ve been here. It’s because of this fact that I’ve had very little time to devote to Roaring Mouse, something I regret a great deal. Now, though, I’m joining the ranks of those of you I’ve been writing for and I am very excited to be a part of the small business community.

I thank everyone at Lenovo who trusted me enough to be a public face for the company for the opportunity to share my thoughts with you, I wish great joy to my soon-to-be ex-co-workers and I wish all you small business owners the greatest success.

P.S. If you’re on Twitter and want to follow my progress, I’m @bming1. Take care and all the best.

brandon..

With the recent surge in interest in social media*, I thought that this would be an opportune time to explore social media in more depth from a small business perspective. Yes, there are other treatments of the subject, even notably from our competition, but I thought I’d take a look at social media marketing from a slightly different perspective. Where possible, I’ll try to relate it to traditional business practices by drawing analogies to the way business has been done for ages. As we dive deeper into the topic, I hope to uncover additional uses for the social media tools that exist today beyond that which are already popular prescription. My hope is that this series of posts will culminate in a solid social media marketing guide that draws upon one of the promised positives of social media – the wisdom of crowds.

The natural starting point is a description of what social media is. There is an uber-geeky Wikipedia definition here, but I far prefer the simple, context-sensitive definition provided by the great folks at Duct Tape Marketing.

“Social media is the use of technology combined with social interaction to create or co-create value”

In practical terms, social media as we know it today equates to web-based tools and services such as blogs (Blogger, Wordpress), microblogging (Twitter) , social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn), media sharing sites (YouTube for video, Flickr for photos),  podcasting, social bookmarking (del.icio.us), social content aggregators (digg.com) and vlogs (video blogs).  One or all of these tools can help you increase your presence and relevance in the social media space. In order to make effective use of these tools, though, it is important to first understand a very fundamental tenet of social media.

Where social media differs *significantly* from your traditional web presence is that it is a medium where your customers are actively engaged. Information is now multi-directional and in many cases, shared in real time. This changes the nature of your company’s web presence from a static website to a web presence that is highly dynamic. Through social media, customers can interact with you more fluidly, more rapidly and more personally.  This provides many opportunities to gauge your company’s performance and to find out how customers feel about your products and services. It also allows you to perform market research somewhat anonymously or broadcast marketing communications to your customers expediently at relatively low cost.

Naturally, there are potential downsides to social media tools. Anything your company states can be re-broadcast or shared with a large number of people quickly. This, of course presents a new set of challenges. Before the advent of social media, a mistake on a website could be repaired and over time, forgotten. The impact would probably be limited to the customers who saw the mistake and not many other people. A gaffe through a social media channel, on the other hand, may have far more severe implications, given its kinetic nature. This calls for a thoughtful, sound approach to your social media strategy, which of course, requires a good understanding of what can go wrong. One of the goals of this study is to create a set of ’social media best practices’ that everybody can benefit from. That means that I will explore what TO DO, as well as what NOT to do when it comes to using social media effectively.

I personally believe that a social media presence and strategy will soon be the de facto standard when it comes to a company’s web presence. I hope that this study and exploration of the subject and of the individual tools I listed above will be of benefit to you as you embark upon your own social media journey. To those of you who are far more experienced in the subject than me, I make the humble request that you share your experiences and insight in order that all of us will benefit from the collective wisdom.

In Social Media in Small Business #2, I will explore Twitter, the famous micro-blogging engine.

* This really isn’t an empirical claim, but merely based on the fact that my 62 year old mother on the other side of the world now has a Facebook account and invited me to be her friend. I accepted, yes, but not before pondering some interesting philosophical questions at great length. She ‘poked’ me after I accepted and no, I won’t respond in kind.

After hearing murmurs in the rumor mill for quite a while, Google has finally confirmed the speculations…. they are releasing an operating system. The Google Chrome OS, which is centered around the Chrome web browser, is initially targeted at netbooks. Given the fact that netbooks are primarily companion devices and their primary usage pattern is web-surfing, the move to target netbooks to begin with and make the OS revolve around Chrome is smart. It’ll allow Google to beta test their OS on a relatively limited number of non-critical PCs and gather feedback from the userbase to tweak the OS in preparation for a larger assault on the computing world.

While details are relatively sparse, the following statement from the announcement hints at a full-on foray into the cloud computing space

“They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.”

Personally, I think that the announcement of the Google Chrome OS is a welcome bit of news. The operating systems that are currently preloaded on netbooks are either dated or unintuitive and this highly legitimate competitor to the incumbents will help to force improvements, making customers the winners. In a previous article on Roaring Mouse, I argued that cloud computing and a move to an all-Internet based software environment for most business software is imminent. I believe that this announcement is a major step toward making that claim a reality. What do you think of it all?

Kiva, the famous web-based micro-lending service that’s helped entrepreneurs globally fund their ventures is now offering its service in its own backyard. View the links before for more information.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/kiva_now_allows_you_to_invest_in_us_small_business.php

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/10/kiva-brings-microlending-home-to-us-entrepreneurs-in-need/

Thought I’d share this with everyone, since I recently argued that this is a good time to start your own business.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/technology/start-ups/14startup.html?emc=eta1

My friends and I discussed the title topic the other day, and we tried to identify reasons for and against starting a business during this economic downturn. What we discovered towards the end of our discussion was that although it may not seem intuitive, starting a business now could actually be a good idea. Here are the reasons why this may be a good time to say hello to entrepreneurship.

Motivation – If you are unemployed and having difficulty finding new employment, chances are that you are extremely motivated to take control of your own destiny because (i) There simply aren’t any jobs out there for you and/or (ii) You swear that you’ll never allow someone else to determine your professional destiny.

Talent -With the sweeping, industry-agnostic layoffs that are taking place these days, there is probably no better time to take advantage of the fact that there is a large number of talented people who are looking for employment. Chances are that they’ll be willing to accept less than what they’re accustomed to earning to do the same job.

Lower Expenses - The sad reality is that business is down for most people, but out of that grim fact comes an opportunity to procure the goods and services you need for your company for less money. As a decreasing client base intensifies competition, companies are more likely to make concessions, provide discounts and add ‘bonus’ goods and services to secure your business.

Discipline - What better time to force yourself to be disciplined in all your decision-making than when times are hardest? When cash flow is not as free as in times past, increased financial rigor is crucial to starting and growing your business. The discipline that you instill now will always serve you well, making you more efficient and more prudent in your choices in future.

Timing – Economic downturns are part of the natural business cycle, and there’s a strong likelihood that your business will start to hit the upswing in the economy as your entrepreneurial efforts start to mature. While trying to time anything precisely in the business world is a little dicey, the aggregate improvement in the economy over the span of the next 2 or 3 years should bring a corresponding return that’s favorable to you.