“The cloud is falling! The cloud is falling! No, seriously. It keeps falling,” wrote PCWorld’s Tony Bradley in a post the other day about how some popular cloud services were recently down. In a weird coincidence, last Wednesday Microsoft’s Office 365 and SkyDrive and Google Docs were all hit by outages, with some customers saying they lost access to e-mail and other services for up to four hours. READ MORE
Battling to keep to a clear course on cloud computing, Microsoft may have finally found its way with the beta launch of Office 365. Attempts at engineering their own cloud computing community have so far been scattershot, yielding a variety of online services such as Office Web Apps and Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). Office 365, however, will enable subscribers to access all the Microsoft Office Web applications with which they are already familiar, as well as a new set of web-only tools, all on the user’s existing hardware. READ MORE
Would you pay $28 a month for a netbook-like device with cloud back-up, built-in security, always-up-to-date software and a free replacement every three years or as needed? Google is betting that you would. This deal (and $20/month for schools) is clearly intended to lure business customers to its newly announced Chromebooks and away from Microsoft, with its never-ending cycle of new Windows versions and security updates. READ MORE
For those who like the test out the latest business software, but own a Mac, your options are somewhat limited. Well, they just got a little better because Microsoft finally has a trial for the Mac version of Office. “If you’re a Mac user and you absolutely cannot stomach the idea of paying for a Microsoft product, you can at least give Office a try for 30 days without spending a dime. Office for Mac has just introduced a trial program.Users can download the free version directly from Microsoft’s website. It’s a 600 MB file and will offer access to the basic Office applications with no limitation for 30 days, just like PC users are able to do.” Macheads can now “try before you buy” Microsoft Office [TG Daily]
So you’ve purchased Windows 7, Microsoft’s latest and greatest operating system, and found it to be fast, stable and full of features to support your small to mid-sized business. Critics agree the Redmond, Wash. software giant have their mojo back, after delivering the much-maligned Windows Vista a few years back. To get even more out of the leaner and meaner Windows 7 for your growing business, here we provide a handful of productivity-enhancing tips and tricks — with some help from the experts. One-click access Windows 7 lets you “pin” large icons to the taskbar for a one-click launch of your favorite applications or files. To do this, simply right mouse-click on a file or program icon and one of your options will be to “Pin to Taskbar.” Run your mouse over these taskbar icons and you’ll see a live preview of what’s inside as a thumbnail image — and even multiple websites open as “tabs” in your browser. “A lot of people rave about this feature as it’s a fast and easy way to manage and access documents and other files you need,” says Microsoft’s Sandrine Skinner, a director within the Windows 7 small business group. “I know a manager of a personal staffing company, for example, and she uses pinning to prepare the desktop for temp workers.” It’s a snap You’ve got a widescreen laptop or computer monitor, so why aren’t you taking advantage of this added real estate? Windows 7 makes it easy to do just that by letting you view multiple files or applications at the same time. Called “Snap,” simply open a couple of programs — such as Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer 8 — and then hold down the Windows key (beside Alt) before using the right or left arrow keys to snap them beside each other. You can also drag and drop content from one to the other (such as a website photo into Paint or highlighted text into Word). Lock it up Your employees likely carry around a laptop, netbook, or USB thumbdrive with company data on it, but what happens if the computer or drive is lost or stolen? The Enterprise and Ultimate versions of Windows 7 include “BitLocker” protection that can encrypt files or folders — preventing anyone from accessing them unless they know the password. Simply right-click on a drive letter (such as F:) in Windows Explorer to enable BitLocker protection. “This reduces the risk in case the device goes missing, and makes up for the fact that employees, consciously or not, don’t always put data security at the top of their to do list,” says Carmi Levy, an independent technology analyst based in London, Ontario. “With the BitLocker To Go feature activated, however, nothing gets copied unless the target device is encrypted.” Kick it old school It’s not secret Windows Vista was plagued with software and hardware compatibility issues, therefore Microsoft made this one of the top priorities in Windows 7 — including an optional “Windows XP mode” for those businesses who need it. “We’ve heard companies tell us ‘this software here is my bread and butter and if it’s not compatible with Windows 7 I won’t upgrade,” explains Skinner. “We listened.” To serve and protect No computer should ever be powered on unless it has at least some protection against malware — such as viruses, spyware, rootkits and the like — especially for computers used for business. “While full-blown security suites from market leaders like McAfee and Symantec do a better job, the free Microsoft Security Essentials tools, along with Windows Defender and Windows Firewall, are more than adequate, and should be activated no matter what other solutions you have in place,” advises Levy. Get outta my way If things get too cluttered because of multiple programs open at the same time — such as a Web browser, word document, calculator, e-mail, and sticky notes — simply grab hold of the program you want to see clearly, by clicking and holding on the top bar of the window, and give your mouse a shake left and right. This will automatically minimize everything else. Do it again and it brings back all the apps that were minimized.
“I can’t open the document you sent me!” This has been a frequent complaint by users of Microsoft Office 2003 and earlier word processing software since Microsoft launched Office 2007, and introduced the .docx format. “At the beginning of every semester, we hire new interns who are college students,” says Matt Brownell, editor at the Ictus Initiative, a marketing and public relations company that deals mostly with speakers, authors, and consultants, and uses Microsoft Office 2003. “They tend to have new laptops and they have the latest version of Office, and they send us résumés we can’t open.” Though Microsoft offers a free conversion program that users can download from its website, like many Office 2003 users, Brownell and his colleagues weren’t eager to use this solution. Instead, prospective interns were told to resubmit their résumés as .doc files. But Ictus had fewer choices when clients sent .docx files. And, Brownell discovered, the problem wasn’t limited to Microsoft Word. There were new .pptx files for PowerPoint and .xlsx files for Excel as well. “The other day, I assigned a project to an intern to have her produce a spreadsheet,” Brownell says. “It came as an .xlsx file. At that point, I finally gave in and downloaded the converter, but I wasn’t happy about it.” “I upgraded to Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac in 2008,” says Kimberly Hathaway, managing partner at Hathaway PR. “But what was this ‘X’ stuff? It was almost as if we shouldn’t have bothered upgrading.” Most high-tech clients have Office 2007, she notes — but they make up only about 10 percent of her business. “For the rest, you really don’t know who has the new Office and who doesn’t,” she says. “We do a lot of work with smaller regional publications, and they don’t have the newest version of Office.” One client, an attorney, is using an older version of WordPerfect, presenting another set of problems. “I don’t want my agency to appear antiquated,” Hathaway says. To her mind, sending .doc files to Office 2007 users risks sending that message. “If I see someone is using .docx, then I send a .docx file.” When in doubt, she sends a .doc file to avoid embarrassing anyone using the older version of Word. To make sure to always have files in the needed formats, the policy for her company is to save every document in three formats: .doc, .docx, and .pdf. “From one to three times a week, we have an issue when someone forgets and sends a .docx file, and we have to resend something in the older format,” she says. “It’s frustrating how much time and energy is spent on the stupid formatting.” Why Microsoft added the x To users like Hathaway and Brownell, the new format seems intended to cause irritation and force users to upgrade sooner to the newest software. “I think there was initial disbelief among users that it wasn’t at all backwards-compatible with the old version,” Brownell says. “We assumed it was a problem that would be fixed. If it was possible to create this new format, why couldn’t they make it backwards-compatible?” But creating a backwards compatible format might have been impossible, since with .docx, pptx, and .xlsx, the company was making a fundamental change in the way its files are created. The new file formats are based on Extensible Markup Language or XML, a widely recognized document standard. In fact, the move to .docx, .pptx, and .xlsx are part of a move to a more open standard of file formatting for Microsoft, allowing developers to more easily create applications that can access data within Word documents (for transfer to a webpage, for instance), and also to make it easier for other word processing software to open Word documents. Some claim that Microsoft made the move to compete with Open Document Format (.odf) files, an open source format that is popular, especially outside the United States. “Our software supports both .odf and .docx, and also .pdf files,” responds Gray Knowlton, group product manager of Office for developers at Microsoft. “The move we’ve made is to be more open and more transparent.” And XML-based files have other advantages he says. For one thing, they are more compressed than .doc files. “A Word document using the .docx format could be half or three quarters the size it would be as a .doc file,” he says. “That saves on hard drive space and bandwidth. Also, if you tried to open a corrupted file in a .doc format, Word simply couldn’t open it. A lot of data was lost that way. When you open a .docx file that’s corrupted, it will still open and you can see and use all the parts that aren’t corrupted.” Dan Gookin, author of Microsoft Word for Dummies (which comes in both 2003 and 2007 versions) agrees that, though it frustrates many users, the new format brings worthwhile benefits. “You can’t stick with old file formats forever,” he says. And, he adds, “Because it’s so flexible and upgradeable, I think they will stick with the .docx format for a long time to come.” Coping with .doc and .docx If .docx is here to stay, but most users still have Word 2003, what’s the best way to manage file format conflicts? Here are some strategies that may help, depending upon what version of Word you are using. If you use Word 2003: • Download the converter. The simplest way to cope with .docx and other XML-based files is to download Microsoft’s free converter. Once it’s installed, Office 2003 will open .doc, .xlsx, and .pptx files, with a few seconds’ pause for conversion.• Use Google Documents. Google Documents will open a .docx file through its online interface. It’s free, though you have to create a Google account.• Try Open Office. The current version of Open Office can open .docx files, and it’s free.• Hold off on buying Office 2007. With the release of Office 2010 scheduled for this summer, investing in Office 2007 makes little sense at this point. On the other hand, if you’re curious, you can download a free beta version of Office 2010 to play with. If you use Word 2007: • Set .doc as your default format. “The newer format is valuable, and I think everyone should switch to it eventually,” Gookin says. “But for now, you should configure Office 2007 to save files in .doc format by default. People with the newer version of Word can open the older format—and may not even notice the difference.”
Once upon a time, Microsoft introduced Windows Vista, assuming Windows XP users would upgrade to the new operating system as a matter of course. We all know how that turned out. This past October, Microsoft tried again, with the release of its newest operating system, Windows 7. This time around the new operating system is gathering kudos from users and reviewers, who praise the features and performance, and the fact that Windows 7 does not demand as much computing power as Windows Vista did. Oddly, experts also all note that Windows 7… really isn’t all that different from Vista after all. “I look at Windows 7 as new service pack for Windows Vista,” says Christopher Blake, workstation administrator, The Benchmark Group, an architectural and engineering firm. Still, he says, the new name made it easier for Benchmark to opt for the upgrade. “In my opinion, Vista was a good operating system for the enterprise, but the problem was really psychological. People hated the word ‘Vista,’ and we would have been martyrs if we’d tried to roll it out.” Like The Benchmark Group, the majority of companies that stuck with Windows XP in the face of Vista’s real or reputed problems now face an additional challenge as they plan their move to Windows 7. While upgrading from Windows Vista to Windows 7 is merely a matter of installing the new disk, an upgrade from Windows XP means reinstalling all the applications on the computer as well. “I don’t know if the intent was to reward the people who upgraded to Vista or punish the people who stayed with XP, but they did not include a user-friendly tool for migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7 — and they knew that was what most of their customer base would be doing,” Blake says. Still, the new features in Windows 7 make it appealing to both end users and IT staff. Most smart phones and mobile devices are recognized instantly when they are plugged in, and mobile workers can now have laptops that recognize their location and sent print jobs to the nearest printer, while the IT team gains the ability to install software remotely and handle power management more efficiently. “Now is the right time for us to move to Windows 7, because we’re seeing that we can benefit from the new technology and new features,” Blake says. Time to switch With Microsoft committed to security support for Windows XP (with Service Pack 3) until at least 2014, is now the right time to move to Windows 7 for your company? Yes, if you want Windows 7’s new features, if your users do a lot of mobile computing, and if you use mostly standard business applications such as QuickBooks and Microsoft Office. Also if you are buying new desktop computers, since the new machines will likely come with Windows 7 preloaded. No, if you don’t want to buy any new hardware, since moving to Windows 7 will probably require new video cards for some computers at the very least. You should also wait if your company uses large numbers of unusual or custom applications. “Our accountant clients use a huge number of different applications, and I wouldn’t even consider upgrading them right now because too many of those applications won’t run on Windows 7 yet,” notes Byron Patrick, CEO of Simplified Innovations, a managed IT provider that supplies both IT services and leased equipment to small business clients. Windows 7 does come with Windows XP Mode, which creates a virtual XP environment within a Windows 7 computer, for the purpose of running any applications that don’t run on Windows 7. But managing a virtual personal computer inside of a physical personal computer may be a bit much for some users. “Like any computer, it has to have network access set up, be connected to a printer, and to the Internet,” Patrick says. “Expecting corporate users to handle all this may be unrealistic.” Ready or not To its credit, Microsoft has provided some tools this time around to help you determine both whether the hardware you have will be adequate to run Windows 7, and whether the applications you have are compatible with it yet. “We have a compatibility wizard built into Windows 7 that will scan the hard drive and let you know if your hardware and software are Windows 7 compatible,” says Lee Sabow, marketing manager in the Windows Client Organization at Microsoft. Or, if you want to find out before investing in the new operating system whether your applications will work with it, you can find out at Microsoft’s Compatibility Center, he says. If you do decide to go ahead, Patrick recommends copying the data off the computer to be upgraded, and then formatting its hard drive before installing Windows 7. “On any system, when you have the opportunity to wipe the slate clean, it’s great,” he says. “And by doing it now, you avoid any anomalies that might occur because of the upgrade.” As for installing the new operating system itself, he says, it’s easier than with any previous Windows installation. “With Windows XP, halfway through there were things we had to click to continue the process. With Windows 7, we have it loaded on a USB drive. We plug it in, set it to install, and half an hour later, it’s done.” For small group upgrades, it may make sense to reinstall applications manually, but Blake advises using an automated software deployment tool if you’re upgrading more than 50 users, especially if you only have one or two IT staff members to handle the job. “Most tools won’t deploy the operating system itself, but they will deploy the applications,” he says. “He advises choosing a tool with reporting capabilities, so you can see what upgrades have been successfully completed and which users have which software installed. “You have to know what’s going on in your environment before you can manage your environment,” he explains. The Benchmark Group uses a KBOX appliance from KACE for software deployment, he adds. However you do it, make sure to build in enough time for testing the new operating system with your company’s applications, and also for training on how to use it. “Don’t get into a situation where the upgrade will become a pain point for people,” Blake says. “We have time, so take it slow, and do it right.”
Times are tough, but you can save your company some cash by taking advantage of many free applications and services to help you remain lean and competitive. This includes many downloadable programs for your BlackBerry, iPhone, or Android smartphone as well as tools for PC productivity, such as online back-up options, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) software, and no-cost office suites. Free apps are sought-after downloads today in business. It’s not just because it makes sense to those watching their bottom line, but the apps are getting a lot more robust instead of simply covering the basics, says Scott Steinberg, publisher of Digital Trends. “You’d be surprise what you can find today when it comes to free applications — and there’s plenty of free apps to choose from for your smartphone, PC, or a cloud-computing solution that bridges the two,” adds Steinberg. Steinberg says he’s most excited about the explosion in downloadable apps for smartphones. “The apps transform phones into notebook replacements, audio recorders, GPS navigation devices, note-taking devices, and even gaming getaways for those in need of an entertainment fix while traveling for business.” Speaking of travel, Chris Silva, an analyst at the Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester, the technology research company, says many of these free productivity tools have an inherent benefit compared to traditional desktop software: “On-the-go businesspersons want to be able to access their content wherever and whenever, and on any device — and while Microsoft recently unveiled a ‘cloud’ component to [Microsoft] Office, we’re finding people are turning to Google’s established and free Gmail for e-mail, file storage, document sharing, and so on.” Caveat emptor There’s little dispute that cost-cutting measures are critical — especially given the current state of the economy — but there are a few things about free software that businesses should be aware of. Silva reminds businesses that these free apps are still not as full-featured as paid versions. “Productivity suites might not have the 500-plus menus and tools built into Microsoft Office, for example, but most people don’t venture outside of ‘create, format, print and share’ anyway,” he says. “Many companies, especially small to mid-sized businesses, are finding these free alternatives to be good enough for their needs.” Silva also warns of two other possible downsides to free apps. “It’s no secret there are occasional Gmail outages, which means you can’t access your e-mail, or Skype congestion that can affect call quality, along with other issues associated with Internet-based solutions,” he says. “Plus, there are always increased security risks in allowing your employees to use any kind of software they want. You’ll need to take steps to educate employees about risks, about some company information that shouldn’t be shared with Gmail or IM, and mitigate these with policies.” Best bets for free apps If you’re looking for completely free apps for your smartphone or PC, consider the following recommendations: Skype – Available for PCs and select smartphones (iPhone and Windows Mobile), Skype lets you make free phone calls to any other Skype user on the Internet via VoIP technology. PC users can also chat using video, swap files, or pay a few cents a minute for “Skype Out” calls to landlines and cell phones. Gmail – Google’s free Web-based e-mail solution reliably keeps you in touch with others, regardless of the platform you’re using it on. Benefits include loads of storage, little spam, contact and calendar management, and support for Google Talk between multiple devices. OpenOffice.org – Sun Microsystems’s free Microsoft Office alternative offers a suite of productivity tools, including word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, and graphics. It supports multiple operating systems and has a portable version that runs off a USB key. Documents To Go – With a free version included on newer BlackBerry devices, this clever app suite allows for viewing and editing of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. It’s usually bundled with PDF To Go, as well, supporting Adobe’s popular Portable Document Format. Zoho – Free for individuals, Zoho’s range of productivity and collaboration apps include Zoho Mail, Zoho Chat, Zoho CRM, Zoho Writer, Zoho Discussions, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Meeting, Zoho Show, Zoho Creator, Zoho Docs, Zoho Invoice, Zoho Notebook, Zoho Projects, Zoho Wiki, Zoho Reports, and others. Windows Live SkyDrive – Microsoft is offering up to 25GB of free online storage. Only a Windows ID is required (such as a Hotmail e-mail address) and this password-protected virtual drive can be accessed for virtually any online computer in the world. Some folders can be set up for sharing, while other are for your eyes only. Remote Desktop Lite – Use your iPhone or iPod touch to securely access a Windows XP Professional computer, anywhere on the planet. This software provides full access to your PC — via Wi-Fi or EDGE — as if you were in front of the machine you’re accessing. At the time of writing this, Remote Desktop Lite is the no. 1 free business app at Apple’s App Store. Call Time Tracker by momentum – As the name suggests, Redwood Technologies’ free app for Blackberry helps business professionals account for their time in order to bill hours and recover expenses. Ideal for lawyers, consultants, salespeople, realtors and IT professionals, this app pops up at the end of calls and you can easily mark it as billable time. Nice Office – BlackBerry users can manage their e-mail, calendar, contacts, and tasks from this one free suite of tools. Nice Office securely also grants access to forms and documents, lets you record sales activity while on the go and automatically logs device activity, and provides a detailed report on mobile interactions with your contacts, including calls, messages, and appointments. Google Maps – While it doesn’t provide audio-based turn-by-turn commands, Google Maps is a completely free and powerful tool for your smartphone that can help you find nearby establishments (such as restaurants, gas stations, or hotels), show overhead street views (even with satellite imagery), and give you accurate directions to a destination. It works via GPS or even cellular technology (though the latter isn’t as accurate).
Technology is one of the fundamental reasons why today’s small businesses can break through with innovative products, compete head to head with large corporations, and even change the very rules of the game. The modern paradigm of entrepreneurship — fueled by inexpensive and available technology — emphasizes flexibility, responsiveness, and cost effectiveness, enabling small businesses to contend for market position in a way that was not even thinkable just a few years ago. Software provided as a service via the Web — or in the “cloud” — is the quintessence of what small businesses need for their information workers: cost effective, flexible tools that free them from physical dependency and allow for location independent operation and wide scale collaboration. The most common tasks performed by small business employees are definitely related to basic office communications and productivity. Such tasks can now be performed through and incredible array of choices that leverage the software in the cloud model and take advantage of the inherent collaborative nature of the Internet for very low cost, or even for free, offering strong alternatives to traditional desktop computing. E-mail, communications, and personal information management Web mail has been available for many years, but in the recent past has become a complete alternative to traditional e-mail clients such as Outlook, Eudora, or Thunderbird. Web 2.0 technologies have allowed in fact for such tools to offer very rich and complete user experience. Gmail is an appealing solution with its widespread adoption among consumers, more storage than you’ll ever need, full integration with traditional clients, and the unbeatable price — it’s free. Its true power though becomes evident when used in conjunction with the other Google applications, such as calendaring, contacts management, instant messaging, Google Docs and Google Sites. A premium, paid option called Google Apps integrates all these applications around your own domain name and allows for true workgroup functionality, plus extensive customer support for $50/year per user. Microsoft’s Hotmail has been around for as long as I can remember, but in the last few years it has turned into a communication platform actually usable by a small business with success. Now part of Office Live Small Business, it integrates with services such as online storage and your own website. Starts for free and you can add services for tiered fees. The best e-mail based tools though are the ones that allow you to get the best of all worlds: Web mail and client-side e-mail download and fully synchronized, together with online and offline calendars, contacts, tasks, and workgroup-level collaboration. In this domain, Yahoo!’s Zimbra and Microsoft Exchange can now be purchased as online services with absolutely no technical knowledge required for setup. They’re both fantastic tools, but outsourced MS Exchange services are definitely the most mature and available. The domestic leader in the Exchange as a service offer for small businesses is Intermedia with robust and reliable hosting, full customer support starting at about $10/month per user. Less expensive, but more consumer oriented providers include 1&1 and mail2web that include a free Web-only service with no workgroup features. Office productivity suites In the past few years a new breed of online applications that perform most of the tasks that we are accustomed to perform with Microsoft Office have reached business maturity and are getting ready for prime time. The one that I find to be the most reliable and well featured online alternative to Office is ThinkFree. It has been around for many years now and it offers both a Web-based office application and an identical companion for the desktop that requires no connectivity. The Web offerings are rounded by documents storage services, great workspace collaboration, and smartphones integration. Basic service is free; premium services and products can be added for modest fees. Google Docs is clearly becoming a strong contender. Free, well integrated with its other services, it provides extremely simple interface with native collaborative features: multiple users can concurrently work on the same documents with no chance for confusion. Don’t expect too many bells and whistles though. It’s a solid, collaborative office suite at no cost with essential features. A recent entry in the Web productivity market that has made very good inroads is Zoho. While its services go well beyond the basic productivity suite and extend into teleconferencing, project management, e-mail, and customer relationship management (CRM) and are accessible mostly for free, their products are not exactly ready for robust applications yet, but they are certainly moving in the right direction. Definitely worth take a look. A number of other Web-based applications designed to make small business more collaborative and flexible are finally reaching maturity. Some examples include file transfer (YouSendIt), intranets and collaboration (HyperOffice, Web Office), and project collaboration and management (Central Desktop and Basecamp.) With the emergence of more and more applications leveraging the low development and distribution costs afforded by the software-as-a-service model (SaaS), small businesses are going to see a growing number of offerings tailored to their needs and responding to their functional requirements much better than what is available today on desktop software. In my next column,, we will explore options for Web-based accounting and financial management. Stay tuned. Andrea Peiro is the Small Business Market Expert at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Founder of the Small Business Technology Magazine, a recognized authority, author, analyst and speaker on high-tech marketing and use of information technology in small and mid-sized businesses, he has been frequently interviewed and featured in such media outlets as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Inc. You can reach him at us.andreap@gmail.com.
Never before have startup entrepreneurs and small business owners had access to so much marketing advice and marketing tools as we have today on the Web. But are startups using their marketing efforts wisely? Maybe not. With blogs and magazines going online, there’s an unprecedented amount marketing advice available online. Much of this advice is free. Some of the tools are also free, or at the very least, low cost. As a result, I’ve seen a lot of attention placed on marketing by small businesses — much more than I can remember a decade ago. But the sad thing is that much of the marketing that startups undertake is like that line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That’s because startup entrepreneurs often spend too much money on marketing too early. Figure out what business you’re in first Notice I didn’t say the following: ”Don’t waste money on marketing.” I think marketing is crucially important. But first things first. Figure out what business you are in first. That may sound ridiculous to the uninitiated. I can hear what you’re thinking: “Shouldn’t you KNOW what business you’re in if you just started it.” Well, anyone who’s ever started a business understands that most startup businesses look substantially different a year later. That’s because you learn as you go along. A startup is like a maze. You go down one path, only to be met by a dead end. So you backtrack until you find an open path. With the passage of time you have a chance to develop customer feedback. It’s only after we get some initial successes and customer response that we learn what we really should be offering. We come to realize what customers value from us. Often it’s different from what we thought they would value. So the most efficient marketing in terms of time and money is to think in terms of “starter marketing” at first. Here are a handful of examples of how to do starter marketing: Brochures and business cards Instead of printing thousands of dollars worth of brochures and business cards from the get-go, create them on your desktop computer using templates you can find on the Web, or in programs like PowerPoint, Word, or Publisher. Print small runs on a good quality printer. Or, take the file you created and go to Staples, OfficeMax, or FedEx Office to get short runs printed. That volume printing discount sure may look like a deal. But I guarantee that something will change in six months. You’ll either have opted for a toll free telephone number, you’ll have developed a better tagline, your target market will have changed, or you will offer different services. That huge supply of thousands of printed items that you spent big bucks on will be wasted. So keep your supplies small, so that you can change your messaging, contact information, etc. on a dime. Logos More time is wasted on logos by startups than I think all marketing put together. In a startup you should be out selling, not spending hours fussing with logos. Tempis fugit. Rather than spending tons of money on a logo, some businesses — especially consultants and B2B service providers — can get by with printing their business name in nicely-formatted text at first. Or commission a “starter” logo. You can get a starter logo by using an online service, such as Logoworks. The logo will be relatively inexpensive, yet look professional, and give you a start. Unless you are in a highly competitive industry where design matters greatly — perhaps as a clothing designer or a consumer products business — don’t spend more than a few hundred dollars on your logo at first. A logo won’t make or break most startups in the early days. There’s plenty of time to professionally overhaul your logo later when you have more money to spend and have a better sense of what you want. Website Having a Web presence is crucially important today. You really must be on the Web, and be on the Web early on. However, instead of building an expensive $10,000 website from the get-go, get yourself a domain name, and start a blog at the domain. Bolt on a few pages about your business to your blog. Or try a simple website builder product, such as Microsoft Office Live Small Business. Use it to create a simple Web presence of a few pages. Unless your business is an Internet-centric business, you’ll find that a starter Web presence like this will be more than sufficient for the first six months. Six months after you get the blog or your starter website going, you can better figure out what you really need and can invest in a kick-butt, professional website. The process of working with a professional Web designer will go smoother later on, too – clearer needs, less wasted time. Your Web designer will be happier because you understand what you want, and so will you. Anita Campbell is a writer, speaker and radio talk show host who closely follows trends in the small business market at her site, Small Business Trends.
