Zimana Client Spotlight: Scientifically Speaking @business317 merges presentation skills with social media
Eric Anderson has been combining social media with a great presentation skills service for technical professionals who are not savvy at presentations
Eric Anderson has been a driving force with his company Scientifically Speaking (nicknamed SciSpeak). Based in Indianapolis, Scientifically Speaking provides social media and presentations coaching to technology professionals and small businesses. The end result for the client is an improved communication skill set to “tell their story.”
Zimana spotlights Scientifically Speaking as it expands its presentation training services with a special emphasis on social media usage among technical professionals. Scispeak is also presenting at several professional seminars throughout across the country, including: the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemist and Chemical Engineer, Indiana Black Expo and the National Society of Black Engineers. Scispeak has also facilitated iPad education training seminars in the Washington Township and Carmel School Districts.
Eric believes Scientifically Speaking stands out to entrepreneurs and technical professionals through two aspects:
- Capability to explain ideas – “The biggest benefit to start ups and entrepreneurs is experience and knowledge in communicating technical information to non-technical audiences.”
- Charisma – “The passion that I bring to my training sessions and presentations sets the experience apart from any other. You can’t teach passion. This will make workshops and consultations memorable and enjoyable.
I have had the pleasure of working alongside Eric Anderson for one of his training courses at the Indiana University-Purdue University campus in Indianapolis. I am sure that many professions can rest easy with Eric on the job. To learn more on how Eric can build a presentation tailored to your organization, visit the Scientifically Speaking site (www.scispeak.com) or reach out at @business317.
Zimana Client Spotlight: @SmallBizLady Melinda Emerson – Shining a big bright light on small business
Melinda Emerson, the Small Biz Lady, has hosted a weekly Twitterchat called #SmallBizChat, a premiere “town hall” for small business owners on Twitter.
You have to admire Melinda Emerson. Her motto is to eliminate small business failure, and 2012 is shaping to be a great year for her to do so. With her media site Succeed As Your Own Boss being seen by a quarter of a million unique visitors (and rising) annually, Melinda has been steadily attracting new entrepreneurs seeking ideas to operate a successful business and manage growth. Melinda has seen growth in her own business, thanks to steadily increasing participation of #SmallBizChat. SmallBizChat is a weekly Twitter town hall for small business owners. Every Wednesday at 8pm Eastern, tweeting entrepreneurs gather to tweet questions and view answers from guest experts in finance, marketing, operations, social media, employee concerns, and more. SmallBizChat followers also have the opportunity to give a shout out of their business at the end of the chat. The mini-promotion is worth it – Melinda currently has over 160,000 followers on Twitter, and has seen increasing numbers of returning followers to SmallBizChat week after week.
Melinda authored a book, Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months (read a review from Zimana client Small Business Trends). The book’s success encouraged Melinda to launch Succeed As Your Own Boss , which features business tips and summaries of the weekly SmallBizChats. The site continues to attract other contributors such as Tai Goodwin of Launch While Working and a plethora of guests well known in small business circles, such as Deborah Shane, Michael Hyatt, Anita Campbell, Allan Weiss, and Barry Moltz.
“Small Biz Lady” Melinda Emerson, addressing an audience at the 2012 New York Expo about start up pitfalls
Melinda has also branched out to commentary for several major media outlets and corporate online community sites, such as MSNBC, FedEx, American Express OPEN, and Pitney Bowes Smart Essentials. In addition, she has been a guest speaker at numerous business trade shows such as the New York Expo and Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Conference. The New York Times has added Melinda as a regular contributor to their small business online segment.
Zimana has provided analytic support to Melinda for the past year, and continues to salute Melinda in her quest to protect small businesses from failure. Join her by following the hashtag #SmallBizChat every Wednesday at 8 PM EST - learn more about SmallBizChat at Succeed As Your Own Boss. While on the Succeed As Your Own Boss site, check out the Zimana twitterchat on analytics here. And if you would like to see Melinda in action, check out her appearance on NBC Philadelphia.
Zimana Client Spotlight: @smallbiztrends Small Business Trends unveils new design and Twitterchats – offers more news by and for small business owners
Small Business Trends, a media site for small business tips and information, has launched a redesigned look that showcases its recent navigation bar redesign. The design adds a new look to the logo, modified colored, highlighted quotes (typically appearing in the business book reviews ), new font, and an article carousel that highlights the newest articles. The site continues to offer its popular services, such as a free press release submission, and popular small business campaigns such as Small Business Influencers, a voting award program for small business owners, app developers, and large businesses that have made significant strides in the entrepreneurial community.
Small Business Trends launched a redesign of its site, emphasizing its segments in a new navigation and carousel. The site now serves over 4 million unique visitors, and has continued to attract new visitors seeking small business news and information.
Small Business Trends started in 2003 and has grown into one of the internet’s most significant resources for small business. Over 4 million visitors rely on the site for the latest in economic trends, technology tips, finance and marketing insights to gain an edge on success. Founded by Anita Campbell, the site has developed a who’s-who of leading small business experts, including Lisa Barone, TJ McCue, Susan Payton, John Follis, Brent Leary, Barry Moltz, and Ivana Taylor.
This year Small Business Trends has promoted a series of Twitterchats, under the hashtag #SMBchat, to its roster of events and services. Two chats in July featured sponsorship by Blackberry and Symantec, focusing on a singular topic. The topics were How has starting a business changed in the last few years for Blackberry and business security for Symantec. These chats permit followers to interact with small business leaders beyond their online words. Learn the comments shared from the Small Business Trends – Blackberry twitterchat in this recap.
The chat and redesigned site compliments another successful release, Visual Marketing. A business marketing book by Campbell and David Langton, a visual communication designer and co-founder with Norman Cherubino of Langton Cherubino Group, Visual Marketing has received terrific acclaim for the way it displays innovative business ideas. The book features branding tips discovered by small businesses seeking unique ways of presenting their services and products. Campbell and Langton picked marketing submissions from many small business owners across the country.
Anita Campbell and David Langton at the New York Expo, speaking on their great new book Visual Marketing
For over two years, Zimana has been proud to conduct regular analytics reviews for the Small Business Trends. Pierre has worked alongside Vedran Maric from SEO Rabbit to thoroughly review and highlight data insights for the team.
In addition, Pierre volunteers his time to contribute business book reviews. 71 reviews have been published since December 2009, but this part of a larger count. 250 reviews gives readers a number of reading sources from finance to project management, all from the best business leaders.
Google Plus Pages – Its impact and how to incorporate it into your digital presence
Ok, it’s here. And once again businesses are scrambling on what to do.
Google Plus
Hopefully for Thanksgiving 2011 internet pundits took a break after spending the last few weeks assessing Google+ Pages. On November 7th, Google released the platform, a competitor to Facebook Pages and Linked In, after requesting businesses to not create a Google+ page as a business page. Zimana has launched its Google+ Pages – you can see and plus the page here.
Is Google+ Pages it better than Facebook Pages? Not necessarily. Platforms are really a matter of choice.
Further, I feel there are a few shortcomings that show at launch, but are recoverable over time.
One is a lack of an audience base that spends 1 of 8 social media minutes on its platform – this s a Hubspot stat on Facebook engagement according to Hubspot. Currently with 40 million users overall, Google+ stats will be more widely known with study, particularly if Google includes third party apps and developments in a manner similar to its Droid operating system.
The second shortcoming is that the page can only be managed by one administrator vs Facebook’s two or more admin selection capability. This can be a headache if the person managing this page disappears entirely.
But the anticipation for Google+ Pages lies in its significant potential search influence. A Google+ page can be linked to your website through Direct Connect. Direct Connect is based on search user typing a + before the brand name; When this happens, the Google+ Page shows in the SERP alongside other results. Linking your Google+ page and your site gives Google a relevant connection between your site to a user query in Google Web Search.
To establish the link, a business employee or manager must first establish a Google + account. A Google+ page can be then created (You can have more than one page, but again, only one administrator at this writing).
Next, a link to the company website is needed to make Direct Connect viable. This requires inserting a “rel=publisher” code in the main website page. The instruction can be found at this Google Webmaster page.
A second consideration – none of the Google+ Pages have a customizable URL. This is a missing advantage on business cards and on websites – who wants to share a URL with a series of numbers. Facebook offers a customized pagename features for pages with at least 25 followers.
But there is a work around. A few Google+ enthusiast are sharing a website, gplus.to , on which users can creates an unique URL to use on the aforementioned business cards, webpages, and other marketing tools.
This is still not as comparable as renaming the page itself – think of a rename as a SEO opportunity to include a keyword- but gplus.to does becomes handy for removing the long numerical URL when a short handle is more memorable.
Finally, Google+ Pages does not have a direct connection to Google Analytics. Currently you can add a Google +1 button to your site to see how your site is shared through the Google+ platform. Google Webmaster can also provide some data, but its reports activity significantly different from GA. Although Webmaster reports on all +1 activity, a GA account only reviews what is tagged to the website.
Most importantly, Google+ Pages serves a reminder of the importance of images and content labels. Like Facebook, Google+ users can be tagged – This alerts the tagged persons when sharing occurs and can spread the awareness of your business.
In a recent social media white paper, Hubspot noted that much of pre-shopping research starts with search and that social media also increases the likelihood of a purchase. Reports from Forrester and eMarketer also agree that customers research, be it B2B or B2C, rely on a search and social media presence for a purchase decision. With Google+, Google has made the combination of a social network and a search engine more convenient for researching offerings. It’s this research that will ultimately make your business a success.
Tic Toc Entertainment continues its growth with Zimana-enhanced sites for Midwest DJ and Karaoke & TTE Studios
If there is one thing about Greg Crook, he understands timing is everything. Even the name of his company, Tic Toc Entertainment, has been a reminder of that timing is essential for success.
Greg Crook has been running Tic Toc Entertainment on perfect timing for the past 12 years. Tic Toc Entertainment consists of a recording studio, a roster of Chicago recording artists and live musicians, the band Night Fever (in which Greg is a keyboardist), and Midwest DJ and Karaoke, a DJ service that covers events such as weddings and corporate parties (and karaoke as well). The business has served not only Chicago but the Midwest in general. A consummate musician and Gary, Indiana native, Greg has been working to elevate the online exposure for his businesses to reflect their past history and future.
Zimana’s involvement was creating four websites on a very limited budget – this was done to focus on updated content, as well as a establish a baseline of analytics measurement, which would give Greg guidance on which marketing effort needs adjustment. Site templates were modified, with Javascript codes incorporated to rotate picture images of the musicians and studio (even the images were hand selected for size and conveying the Tic Tic story). For the Night Fever site, Zimana created a video montage that conveyed the sounds of a the group, using past images, a current video, and sound bites from each source. Customer recommendations were added into three of the sites, to reflect that company history. Finally, a Gigbuilder music selector was incorporated into the Midwest DJ site; Zimana also worked to update the music database for the client so that customers can search music by album title as well as by song.
While finishing touches to the studio site and Midwest DJ and Karaoke are being completed, the sites are creating more qualified leads, as well as increased interest for all of Tic Toc Entertainment services. For more on Tic Toc, view the Tic Toc Entertainment site, the Nightfever site, Tic Toc Studios site and Midwest DJ and Karaoke Services.