How to market your small business on Twitter

Like any marketing medium, or any medium that can be used for marketing, Twitter offers you results commensurate with how thoughtfully you approach it and how wholeheartedly you engage in it.

Look past its non-traditional exterior to see Twitter’s real ability to connect people in ways that can transform your company a little bit at a time. The following are simple instructions to follow:

 1. Remember that success on Twitter can build slowly, and that trying to hurry it by buying followers or using shady shortcuts doesn’t work. As SocialMediaToday points out in a case study of hardball marketing run amok, “There is no magic pill, magic ticket or free ride to success in social media and business.”

 2. Be yourself: That means two things on Twitter. First, make your tweets sound like the cohesive voice of your business. If you’re small, capitalise on your identity as a one- or two-person business and equate your size with a focus on treating customers like individuals.

Second, even if you’re bigger than a sole proprietorship, assign one person who’s good at communicating your authentic value as a business to be your official and singular voice on the service. Keeping your participation real goes a long way toward attracting followers.

As Twitter itself suggests, “Share photos and behind the scenes info about your business. Even better, give a glimpse of developing projects and events. Users come to Twitter to get and share the latest, so give it to them!”

 3. Balance overt attempts to attract customers with tweets that convey your company’s personality without making an obvious commercial pitch. When you post a discount offer or a special sales event, your followers pay greater attention to it because you’re not always explicitly soliciting their business.

 4. Use your Twitter presence to gather more than customers. You can share insights with fellow business people, and even find opportunities to barter services, collaborate on a project with community implications, build a network of like-minded entrepreneurs or learn from veteran business owners.

Use mentions and following strategically to build a position of authority in your field. Twitter recommends that you “Reference articles and links about the bigger picture as it relates to your business.”

 5. Think twice about following everyone who follows you. If you’re using your Twitter timeline as a place to rub elbows with customers and suppliers, trying to keep up with a long list of people you followed only as a thank you turns your tweet stream into a raging river of who-can-read-all-that.

If you do decide to follow back routinely, define whom you’ll follow and whom you won’t on the basis of attributes you can discern easily, then create original, non-automated thank-you responses in keeping with your focus on authenticity.

As Mashable points out in an essay on the American Express OPEN Forum, “If you do decide to follow everyone, authenticity is key. Your followers will be able to tell whether they’re talking to a robot or a person — and a real person is always more valuable on Twitter.”

 6. Leverage your plans for charitable giving into your Twitter strategy. New Twitter followers of charitable sites trigger additional donations.

 -Source: Twitter.com

Property investment: To sell or hold?

When it comes to real estate investment, there are two schools of thought – build to sell or build to rent. A lot of investors tend to favour building to sell as a faster and relatively stress-free way of getting returns on their investment. This method has been made popular by estate developers who swoop on some neighbourhoods, buy up vacant plots and put up buildings virtually overnight for sale. The idea looks quite romantic – you go in and within six months to one year you are out with your money looking for the next deal. The returns are fantastic. It makes those who put their buildings up for rent look dumb. You pump in so much money into the building and then wait decades to recoup your money while dealing with tenants.

I will approach this topic from the standpoint of building a solid financial base, which becomes the launch pad for your subsequent investments. With that context, what you are trying to achieve in the long term determines what you need to do with every real estate investment opportunity. Hence, there is no right or wrong answer – it depends on what you are trying to achieve. Let’s look at each in turn before we draw our conclusions.

To buy or build to rent?

This is real estate investment in its purest form and you go in as a team. In your team you need your banker, accountant, insurance broker, lawyer, your engineer and architect, builder, facility manager, estate agent, etc. They don’t have to be on your payroll but they work for you. For some, like the lawyer and accountant, you can have them on a retainer while for others; they charge their fees only when they work for you.

With your experienced team members, you get better advice and make better decisions than you would if you go solo. If you have paid the price in real estate investment education, you have a good idea of what you are doing every step of the way. With your Team to support you, you do not have to look for tenants, manage the facility or deal with difficult tenants. They handle that for you.

Why would you want to tie down your money or the banks’ money in a property?

•You build a real estate portfolio, which acts as a store of value as you get richer.

•If you did your sums well, you get a predictable monthly net positive cash flow.

•Your net worth goes up as the property appreciates.

•As rent goes up (typically every two years), your cash flow increases

•You can borrow against your equity in the property to invest in another property or business, which means you grow your portfolio.

•You control the property, and can upgrade it to attract rent.

On the issue of tenants from hell, if you have a good team, you can screen them out at the door and if any manages to slip in, they know how to manage them with minimum collateral damage. That is the beauty of team play.

If you look at billionaires and multi-millionaires, those that got there through real estate got there through their holdings, not buying and selling or flipping. The most famous example is Donald Trump who has an impressive array of buildings named after him and golf courses. As the value of the properties skyrocket, his net worth goes up accordingly, including the cash flow from those properties.

Building a real estate portfolio like in the game of monopoly, may seem boring and may make you feel like the tortoise in a race, but decades down the line, you get to realise that slow and steady wins the race.

To buy or build to sell

This is also known as flipping property. Each deal is a short-term transaction with instant returns. You buy or build to sell. You get in and within a year you are out with your money and profit. You don’t tie down your money. In a typical example, someone buys a plot for N20m, uses N25m to build a duplex on it and sells it for N65m, making a profit of N20m before taxes. When a bank loan is involved, the pace is breathtaking. I have seen a building get decked on Sunday and by Monday block work had resumed on the first floor. I knew the owner must be a developer running against the clock as bank interest charges start to kick in. The integrity of such buildings is a discussion for another day.

It looks like a sweet deal and it often is, but certain things need to be put into consideration here.

• Taxes – Ideally, you should pay a capital gains tax on your N20m. Some may get away with it here, or pass it off to the buyer since they do not need to perfect the papers at the Lands Registry, but in developed economies, most of your gains are gulped by fees and taxes, hence continuous flipping of properties becomes an unattractive proposition in the long run.

•Interest rates – If you borrowed part of the money from the bank, your interest payments kick in the moment you leave the banking hall (hence the mad rush to the finish line). Consequently, your bank has a cut in the N20m pay day, and if there is a delay in selling the property, your calculations may go out of whack. In the event of default in repayment, the bank may auction the property to recover their money. If you used your money, this does not affect you.

•What do you do with your profit? There is a moment of temptation, whereby you may want to reward yourself (and maybe your long-suffering wife) by taking profit while you wait for the next deal to come through. That reward often comes in the form of cars, holidays etc. By the time the next deal is ready for your signature, most of your profit may have gone on liabilities, and you may be virtually back to square one in terms of financing. In summary, you may do a lot of deals to support your lifestyle without building a solid financial foundation.

Based on the above, you may see a veteran flipper of properties with a lavish lifestyle with pretty little to show by way of portfolio growth (climbing up the property ladder) and steady cash flow. Without a steady cash flow, the ability to access bigger loans and invest in bigger properties may be hampered.

To sell or to rent?

A wise property investor looks at both methods as cards in the game with an eye on his long-term goals. Your main focus should be on building a solid portfolio while looking out for good buy-to-sell deals to boost your cash flow. Your starting point should be in real estate investment education. Invest in knowing what you are doing before you start doing it. That will spare you heart ache down the line.

Know what to own, what to hold and what to sell. Have a robust cash flow to back you up. If you run out of cash, you start to panic and may take dumb decisions. There is no one right answer. What you are trying to achieve in the long run determines what you do. Where you are going determines which road you should take. Flipping property for quick profit comes in handy when you know what you are doing. When you perpetually flip without building a portfolio, you are like rolling stone that gathers no moss. You need to become skilled in using various strategies in achieving your financial goals. Rather than be for or against, keep an open mind and use both as appropriate as you move from where you are to where you want to be.

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Three Tips for Encouraging Word of Mouth

Word of mouth recommendations give your brand a level of credibility that’s hard to imitate. When it comes down to it, customers trust other customers. To generate authentic word of mouth, you first need customers to feel comfortable endorsing you. This requires taking a customer-centric approach towards giving them a voice. Here’s what to do.
1 Ask customers about being customers The most authentic word of mouth doesn’t focus on the product; it focuses on what people do with it. How does it make customers’ lives better? How does your product (or service) help them pursue their passions? How does it make them feel? Devote time and resources to find out. These are the stories you need to share and the conversations you need to start. Once you tap into peoples’ passions, getting them to talk is easy!   2 Create shared experiences When people experience something as part of a group, that experience takes on a life of its own. Each person adds their own point of view until the story becomes something bigger than the individuals themselves. Creating these kinds of shared experiences is ideal for fostering word of mouth. Create brand ambassador programs, special events and online group experiences that encourage customers to come together and talk about their passions and your business’s role in them.   3 Be customer-centric with content People share information about brands that relate to or reflect on them personally. This is especially true on social media, where people often share only a “highlights reel” of their lives. To get your business into these conversations, share content people will feel comfortable sharing with their social circles. To find the right content types and themes, engage with your customers regularly to see what they talk about and share. Meanwhile, pay attention to your social media analytics to see what resonates.   Being customer-centric is the crucial first step in word of mouth marketing campaigns, whether online or offline. When you learn to think like your customers, you’ll understand how to encourage them to speak out on your behalf.

Growing a Start-Up Without Outside Investors

The Idea: The author’s passion for the yogurt of his boyhood in Turkey—and the serendipitous availability of an old yogurt factory in upstate New York—combined to produce Chobani. Within three years it was the top-selling U.S. brand.

I’ve always loved yogurt—the thick kind I grew up eating in Turkey, where my mother made it from scratch on our family’s dairy farm. When I moved to the United States, in 1994, I found American yogurt to be disgusting—too sugary and watery. If I wanted yogurt, I usually made it myself at home. So when I came across a piece of junk mail advertising a fully equipped yogurt factory for sale, in March 2005, I was curious. The factory was about 65 miles west of the feta cheese company, Euphrates, that I’d started in upstate New York a few years earlier. In 2005 Euphrates had fewer than 40 employees and about $2 million in sales; it was barely breaking even.

Kraft owned the yogurt factory, and it had decided to get out of the yogurt business. The advertisement showed some photographs of the building, which had been constructed in 1920 and appeared to be in rough shape. On a whim, I called the broker and arranged to drive over the next morning to take a look.

The factory was a sad place, sort of like a cemetery, in a very small town. Fifty-five employees were preparing to shut it down. A lot of equipment was included, but it was old. The best thing about the place was the price: less than $1 million. Some of the individual machines would cost more than that if purchased new.

On the drive home I called my attorney, who is my main business adviser. I told him I wanted to buy the factory. He thought it was a terrible idea. He had three good arguments: First, because I’d be buying it “as is,” I really had no idea how well it would function. Second, Kraft is a pretty successful company, and if it was giving up on this facility, this town, and the yogurt industry, maybe it knew something I didn’t. Third, and maybe the strongest objection, where was I going to get that kind of money? He was right: At that point, I had nowhere near enough money for such a big purchase.

But as it turned out, I was able to borrow the money to buy the factory—and after Chobani hit the market, I financed our growth through further bank loans and reinvested profits. This is a crucial piece of the Chobani story. Our ability to grow without reliance on external investors—the venture capitalists, private equity types, strategic partners, and potential acquirers who’ve offered us money since we launched—was vital to our success. Today Chobani is a $1 billion business, and I remain the sole owner. That means I can run the company the way I choose—and plan for its future without pressure from outsiders.

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Movies All Entrepreneurs Should Watch

I have come across this and I hope someone out there might find it useful. please enjoy.

Introduction
Movies are a great way to learn from others as stories, fiction and non fiction, are taught to the viewer in an easy to understand way. There’s a lot to be learnt from these stories as they show you how exceptional people who have come before you have done it.


The Godfather
An offer you can’t refuse.

One of the greatest films in the world based on the best book I’ve ever read. The Godfather is the story about the growth of a small family business as it becomes the largest organised crime family in New York, fighting off opposition at any expense. The Godfather and his son Michael Corleone are the brains behind the family and this film gives you an insight into what it takes to become one of the most powerful family businesses in the country.


Glengary Glen Ross
Lie. Cheat. Steal. All In A Day’s Work.

In the fast paced world of Chicago real estate, competition and incentive is what decides who’s the best. That’s why they’re having a little sales competition – First prize is a Cadillac El Dorado, second prize is a set of steak knives, third prize is you’re fired. With stakes that high, and the pressure on, the salesmen show that they’re willing to do anything it takes to succeed in business, but the most interesting part of this is film, is what exactly that is.


Wall Street
Every dream has its price.

In the life of an ambitious young stockbroker, Bud Fox will do just about anything it takes to succeed, and for him, that includes a little bit of insider trading. See what happens when the desire to succeed takes over your life and the motto of ‘Greed is good’ directs how you do business. But what happens when you’re pushed to your limits and asked to do something you can’t or won’t do? Suddenly everything comes to a head when Fox is asked to help do something, not only illegal, but morally reprehensible.


The Game
There are no rules in The Game.

What do you get the guy who has everything? Nicholas Van Orton (played by Michael Douglas) is a wealthy San Francisco banker who’s life is wrapped up in his business, which has left him as somewhat of a loner. His brother Conrad gives him the gift of a lifetime, which would prove to change his perspective on the world and the way that he’s going to live it. When bad things start to happen to you, you start to question what’s really important in live, business, success and money, or actually living?


Boiler Room
Motion creates Emotion!

After entering the stockbroking profession to impress his father, Seth Davis, a Queens College dropout, soon realizes the huge earning potential ahead of him. But with commissions much larger than any other company, Seth soon learns that not everything is what it’s cracked up to be and he’s forced to face the dilemma of money and greed vs. morals and legality. For any young entrepreneur starting out in business, it’s a very real possibility that you’re going to face moral dilemmas and the way that they’re dealt with in this film is very eye opening.


Jerry Maguire
The rest of his life begins now.

This is a story about a man who’s at the top of his game; beautiful partner, the biggest clients, lots of respect. But then he decides to step back and question it all and proposes his new thoughts to the rest of the company, which ultimately ends in him losing it all. Everyone turns his back on him, except for one, very volatile client, Rod Tidwell. From here you see Jerry examine what it really important to his business and life and works towards bringing it all back together again, only this time, the way it should be.


Trading Places
Take two complete strangers, make one of them rich the other poor… just watch the fun while they’re… Trading Places.

What happens when you take the rich and the poor and make them switch places? A social experiment ran by Mortimer and Randolph Duke, brother and owners of a commodities brokerage firm, proves to be very interesting when the switched pair run into each other. A life changing event for both of them, poses the question of what’s more important in life, friends and love, or money and power?


Office Space
Work Sucks.

When your hypnotist dies just after they’ve put you in a state of complete bliss, you can’t help but have a refreshing outlook on life. If there’s ever a film to make you want to get out of a desk job in the corporate world, then this is it. Peter Gibbons is a man who can’t help but be promoted as he consistently starts to slack off and do things his own way, but trouble starts to arise when his new careless nature starts to lead to him stealing from the company in a much bigger way than he expected.


Pursuit of Happyness
Based on a true story.

This is a real life story of a man who believes so badly in a product that he can’t sell that he ends up losing his house, his wife and his money, being left with just himself and his son. This in itself is an important lesson to be learnt, but it’s the steps that he takes from here that really shape him into who he becomes. Against all odds, he takes an unpaid internship to become a stockbroker, fighting against his peers for a single job at the end of it. This is a powerful true story that sticks with you as you face your own personal struggles in business.


Catch Me If You Can
The true story of a real fake.

Again, this is another true story, about a young conman who successfully impersonated an airline pilot, doctor, lawyer and history professor during his stint as fraudulent cheque casher. What’s amazing about this film and the life of Frank Abegnale Jr. is how much he managed to achieve in a much tougher environment and under more stress than most people are used to. Whether it’s legal or not, business is business and Frank was one of the best at what he did.


Rocky
His whole life was a million-to-one shot.

This is a story of a man who went from nothing tom something, and something very big at that. It’s an inspirational film for the amount of perseverance Rocky puts into it, but that’s not what I love the most about this film. My favourite part is the story behind the making of the film and the life of Sylvester Stalone up until this point. He’d written the entire script in 24 hours straight, but had so little money that he had to sell his dog, his best friend, outside of a liquor store for $50, just to get by.

The real turn in the story is when, after months of trying to sell the movie, he gets an offer of over $100,000, but he can’t play Rocky. This is a big problem for Sylvester as he only ever dreamed of being an actor, so with barely enough money to eat, he declined the offer. Higher offers kept coming in, but he continued to turn them down, even to the sum of $400,000, purely because he wanted to play Rocky. Eventually, he was offerered just £25,000 if he wanted to play Rocky and he took it.

The first thing he did was go back to the liquor store to buy back his dog, but this ended up costing him $15,000 and a part in the movie for the man he’d sold him to. So after everything, Sylvester was made into a huge movie star, with Rocky winning an Oscar for best picture, all because he continued to follow his dream. This mentally is seen throughout the film and part of the reason it makes it a great film for any entrepreneur to watch.


Shawshank Redemption
Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.

This is one of the greatest films of all time, and one I’m sure that the majority of readers have seen before, purely because of its undeniable greatness. It’s the story of a man who manages to succeed in the worst possible conditions imaginable – false imprisonment for the murder of his cheating wife and lover. From making friends with another con inside the prison, Andy manages to make the best out of a very bad situation and through perseverance manages to achieve more than he ever thought possible.


The Social Network
You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies

This is another story of the young, successful and intelligent man, only this time, it’s based on a true story of the world’s youngest billionaire – Mark Zuckerberg, the creator and owner of Facebook. The story is pretty amazing and has been made famous by this film, he starts off as a Harvard student with a strong streak of arrogance and huge potential, he creates a new social network based upon the most prestigious email address in the country, the Harvard email address. The rest, as they say, is history.


Pirates of Silicon Valley
Good artists copy… Great artists steal.

There are no two bigger names in technology than Microsoft and Apple and this is their story. This is an amusing documentary style film about their competition and their rise to the enormous companies that they are today. It’s slightly dated today, and perhaps The Social Network is a little bit more relevant, but it still holds some very valuable information and pointers to learn from. After all, you’re gotta be a pretty special person to become as powerful as they have.


Forrest Gump
The story of a lifetime.

This is a simple man with good intentions, who accidentally becomes phenomenally successful from living his life the best way he knows how. He wins medals, becomes a professional ping-pong player, takes up running, owns a huge shrimping company and inspires people all across the country. The simple nature of Forrest makes him very appealing to world as he proves that you don’t have to be a super genius to make something work, you just have to try.


Blow
Based on a true story.

Another great film based on a true story, this time only slightly more illegal than the last, it’s a film based on George Jung and his career as a cocaine dealer. What started off as a small time operation working with pot, he is eventually imprisoned and introduced to cocaine and that’s where things start to explode. He’s rumored to have handled about 85% of all of the supply of cocaine in the 1970′s, making him an incredibly powerful and successful man, and this film is all about exactly how he did it.


Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
Nice guys finish last. Meet the winners.

This is the story about two con men, big time and small time, and their struggle to compete together in a small French town which isn’t big enough for the both of them. So they decide to take part in a bet in which the loser leaves town and allows the other to carry on with their business. The only problem is that the bet is to see who can extract $50,o00 from a young female target – a pretty high stake. Of course hilarity ensues as you get to watch how the minds of con men work as they compete against each other to reach the goal first.


The Aviator
Some men dream the future. He built it.

A biopic depicting the early years of director and aviator Howard Hughes’ career from the late 1920′s to mid 40′s. It wasn’t the money he made or the time he spent that made him so great, it was the attention to detail and perfection that he strived for that set him apart from his competition. He faced many obstacles along the way from rival companies and malicious rumors, but nothing stopped him from becoming exactly who he wanted to be.


Risky Business
There’s a time for playing it safe and a time for Risky Business.

A good story about what you have to do when you take your dad’s Porsche out for a trip and start to realize that you’re going to need a lot of money, which you’re going to have to raise in a very creative way. With his parents away and responsibility out of the window, Joel starts to realize that it’s not all as easy as he was expecting, having to look after friends and source cash any way he can. An interesting look at what people can come up with when they’re put on the spot to come up with some fast cash.


The Corporation

This film takes a good, long look at what happens when you take a business and you model it to be legally a person – a corporation. What happens though when the sole purpose of this person is to make money for its shareholders though? It starts to act without a conscience which threatens the world, our future and the people working for it. This isn’t just a film about evil corporations though, it’s also about what we can do to stop them from taking over everything that we know. I saw this film in the cinema and it’s well worth seeing again, it’s completely eye opening.


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