The Voice of Batesville: Facebook and Small Businesses

The Voice of Batesville: Facebook and Small Businesses

Facebook and Small Businesses

If you found last week’s article on using Google alerts and tweet beep as listening posts for your business useful try this one out: Addict-o-matic (Inhale the web) www.addictomatic.com. Addict-o-matic allows you to enter key words, industry, your brand, or your competitors’ names and instantly search the “known galaxy” to find out if anyone is talking about your topic. Try it out, book mark it, and see what you can find out about your business.

Next week I move to some more “traditional” areas of interest to small businesses, but I wanted to finish with some suggestions for those of you considering using Facebook for marketing. At the ASU SBTDC we have found Facebook to be a useful tool to find and communicate with people who want to know about small business issues. With over 325 million users and more than 300,000 small business pages it is the largest social media networking site.

But using Facebook correctly takes some planning. The first item may mean making some changes to your existing Facebook profile. If you are like most of us, we got on Facebook initially as a social medium sharing news, gossip, pictures, and yes…Farmville with our friends. Then people started toying with Facebook as a marketing tool for their business or organization. One distinction to remember that is very important: Facebook Profiles are for people, Facebook Pages are for organizations. Using your profile to “sell” is a good way to get shut down by the Facebook police.

But to develop a Page you must link it to a profile. This is a concern to many who are not sure they want “strangers” to see their personal information. But with just a little work you can modify your profile to separate your friends and family from business contacts or customers into distinct lists. Then with Facebook’s new privacy tools you can determine exactly what parts of your profile are visible to the different groups of “friends”. On my Facebook profile, www.facebook.com/herb.lawrence, I would put you into a list called ASU SBTDC contacts separate from my family list, high school friend list; military list, etc. then create privacy settings that let me determine what your list can see on my profile. These are easy tools that will allow you to use your profile as a means to “find friends” that you will move over to your pages and build your Facebook Page Fan list without them invading your privacy.

If you would like to know more about how to set your profiles up to make them “Fan Friendly” let me know. We also have a seminar on Thursday, March 18th in Batesville at the Batesville Area Chamber of Conference 409 Vine Street from 6-9 pm on 5 Small Business Strategies for Social Media that you might want to attend. If you would like more information about this workshop call me (870) 972-3517, e-mail me hlawrenc@astate.edu, find me on Facebook or leave a question here. If you already have a Facebook Page and would like the ASU SBTDC to review let me know.

U.S. Hyperinflation Possible By Year 2015

This material taken entirely from the National Inflation Association Website.  Please visit there for more information regarding possible inflation in the United States.

The U.S. government this week reported a record monthly budget deficit for February 2010 of $220.9 billion. Total tax receipts for the month were only $107.5 billion compared to outlays of $328.4 billion. The total U.S. deficit for the first five months of fiscal year 2010 was $651.6 billion, with tax receipts of $800.5 billion and outlays of $1.45 trillion. The deficit was up 10.5% for the first five months of fiscal year 2010 over the same period in fiscal year 2009.

We are now at a point where if the U.S. government taxed Americans 100% of their income, the tax receipts generated would not be enough to balance the budget. Likewise, if the U.S. government cut 100% of its spending including defense, but kept paying Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, we would still have a budget deficit. NIA believes it will be impossible for the U.S. to have a balanced budget ever again.

The U.S. national debt is now $12.55 trillion of which $8.061 trillion is public debt. Due to the Federal Reserve's artificially low interest rates of 0% to 0.25%, interest payments on our national debt last month were only $16.9 billion, an interest rate of only 2.548% on our public debt. The reason for the spread between our 2.548% interest rate on the public debt and the federal funds rate of 0 to 0.25% is that a portion of our national debt is made up of long-term bonds at higher interest rates.

Our debt ceiling was recently raised to $14.3 trillion, which we are on track to reach in less than a year, sending our public debt up to about $10 trillion. If the Federal Reserve raises the federal funds rate up to just 2% during the next year, NIA believes the interest rate on our public debt could rise to 5% and our annual interest payments will likely rise to $500 million or 23% of projected 2010 tax receipts of $2.165 trillion.

The White House is not projecting for interest payments on the national debt to break the $500 million mark until fiscal year 2014. By then, even if we go by White House projections that the deficit will be cut to $828 billion in 2012, $727 billion in 2013 and $706 billion in 2014, in 2014 we will still be looking at a national debt of over $18.5 trillion with a public portion of around $13.14 trillion. We find it shocking that the White House is projecting an interest rate on our public debt in 2014 of only around 4%.

All of this means that the While House expects the Federal Reserve to leave interest rates at artificially low levels almost indefinitely. However, we know it will be impossible for them to do so without creating a huge outbreak of inflation in the prices of food, energy, clothing, and just about everything else Americans need to live and survive. In order to prevent hyperinflation, we need interest rates to be higher than the rate of inflation.

NIA believes the real rate of U.S. inflation to already be approximately 5%. If the Federal Reserve doesn't raise the federal funds rate to above 5% in the short-term, in our opinion, an outbreak of double-digit inflation is inevitable. By 2014, it is possible the Federal Reserve will be forced to raise the federal funds rate up to above 10% and the public portion of our national debt could exceed $15 trillion. Therefore, in 2014 we could see the interest payments on our national debt reach $1.5 trillion, about triple what is currently being projected and 43% of the government's projected tax receipts that year of $3.455 trillion.

NIA believes hyperinflation is possible by the year 2015. Besides the rising interest payments on our national debt, another major catalyst for hyperinflation will be social security payments, which adjust to the CPI-index. As the government's CPI-index rises, so will the social security payments that it owes. This could cause a death-spiral in the U.S. dollar. Inflation is still the last thing on the minds of most Americans, but soon it will be their primary concern.

Please spread the word about NIA and have your friends and family subscribe for free at: http://inflation.us

Making Social Media Work for Your Business

I hope that the information I shared in last week's column to get listed locally was helpful . If you liked that information let me know. Today I wanted share a couple of other “tricks” that we use at the ASU Small Business and Technology Development Center with clients when setting up a social media marketing plan.
Most small business owners looking at Social Media Marketing are mainly interested in how it can “make their cash register ring” by finding and connecting with customers. But… social media has some easy tools to help conduct market research and see what people are saying about you or your brand.

Millions of people blog, tweet, Facebook, bookmark, and interacting on the web daily. Here are two very useful tools that you use that will “alert” you when anyone posts on subjects you want to know about. For new clients we set up alerts on key words or subjects that we think are relevant to the client’s business on Google Alert and TweetBeeps. Both tools are free.

Google Alerts is a monitoring tool that sends you notifications anytime your keywords or phrases are mentioned in an online article or on a web site. Go to www.google.com/alerts. You will have to set up an account but it is free (you may want to also set up a special gmail account just to monitor the alerts although it is not necessary). You just enter the search terms you want to monitor like: “resorts” “Ozarks” “trout fishing” “Herb’s Rustic Resort on the White River” etc. and Google does the work. Every day you receive an e-mail from Google telling what it found and links to go see what was written. You can have as many different alerts as you want and can change them as often as you need as you refine your search. Here is an example of 1 of 50 alerts on Massage from Google Alerts.

Kent's Lemon Drop Skin Care & Massage Celebrates Its Third Anniversary
PRLog.Org (press release)
PR Log (Press Release) – Mar 02, 2010 – Lemon Drop Skin Care & Massage, a boutique-style spa in downtown Kent, March ...
See all stories on this topic

A second alert we like to use is TweetBeep. Go to www.tweetBeep.com and sign up for a free account. This will keep you on top of the same type of key words that are being “tweeted” on Twitter. TweetBeeps is great for brand management to see what people may be “tweeting” about you or your competition! Below is an example of one TweetBeep notice for antiques
AndCountyMuseum: Make plans to attend … English antiques this Saturday Coffee and refreshments will be... http://bit.ly/aM0Xvm

Tuesday, March 2nd at 16:02:37 • Reply • Retweet • View

Both of these tools are easy to use and set up, provide lots of “marketing intelligence” to stay on top of what’s happening in your world. Try it out; let me know what you think. If you have problems setting either account up or have questions please e-mail me hlawrenc@astate.edu, comment here at the Bull Shoals Beacon, or friend me on my Facebook www.facebook.com/herb.lawrence. If you like these two you will love one I will show you next week!

IS SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING FOR EVERY BUSINESS?

I hope you enjoyed the video “Social Media Revolution” that I posted in last week’s article. If that video didn’t get you excited about the opportunities for every business or organization to use social media to grow their customer base then you didn’t have the volume up loud enough. Go back to the archives crank the volume up and listen to it again.
Social media certainly is not a fad. With 74 out of every 100 Americans using the internet the opportunities for any type of business to take advantage of what it offers should be apparent. The main question is, with all the different social media outlets which one is right for? Obviously the options available to a resort or real estate agency to find and communicate with potential customers aren’t the same as for an auto repair shop or for a convenience store. But even an auto repair shop can take advantage of the power of social media marketing.
We recently helped an auto repair shop significantly increase traffic and sales simply by giving them an internet presence even without a website by making sure they were appearing in on-line local business listings. With so many customers “googling” for location information and using GPS in their cars or cell phones to locate a business, “owning” your businesses on Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines makes a dramatic presence and is easy to do.
If you do not “own” your site for local listings use these three local search engine sites to claim your business:
www.getlisted.org will allow you to own your site on Google, Yahoo, Bing and Best of the Web. By entering your business name and zip code it will let you know if you “own” your site or not and walk you through simple steps to claim it. Some of these will let you post photos of your business or logo, include on-line coupons and more. After you “claim” all four on get listed use these other two to finish the task.
http://listings.yellowpages.com and http://listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit/index.php will ensure your business is not only listed but owns the site and they are all free.
For any business not yet involved in social media this is a great first start. It is easy, free, and will help you stand out against your competition. If you have questions or problems listing your site, let us know the ASBTDC staff is available to help walk you through the process if needed. Try these out and let me know if it was helpful or not. Comment on this article here at the Bull Shoals Beacon, shoot me an e-mail hlawrenc@astate.edu or join our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/asu.sbtdc and leave me a comment on my wall! I look forward to hearing from you. Next week we will talk about other easy social media options that small businesses can use to dramatically increase their on-line presence and grow their businesses. Until then…happy social media marketing!