It was December 2008, when I first wrote about trendwatching.com’s Global Consumer Trends of the next year report. trendwatching.com is an independent and opinionated trend firm located in Amsterdam, scanning the globe for the most promising consumer trends, insights and related hands-on business ideas. Reinier Evers; a trend watcher, a presenter and and an entrepreneur founded trendwatching.com in 2002 in Amsterdam. trendwatching.com is an innovative trend firm. What makes trendwaching.com unique is its source of information. Traditional trend reports rely on public surveys and direct sales datas. But trendwatching.com’s source of information is its network. The 2012 version of the popular report has been released.

Let’s look at 12 predicted crucial trends for 2012 from this report:

1. Red Carpet
2. DIY Health
3. Dealer-Chic
4. Eco-Cycology
5. Cash-Less
6. Bottom of The Urban Pyramid
7. Idle Sourcing
8. Flawsome
9. Screen Culture
10. Recommerce
11. Emerging Maturialism
12. Point & Know

In just its second year, the Small Business Saturday initiative managed to pull 103 million customers through the doors of small business establishments. This Thanksgiving weekend frenzy surpassed the projected number of 89 million and showed that the bourgeoning “shop local” movement is gaining traction in a real, measurable way. What’s most interesting about the push to shop local is how much of its success hinges on social media marketing; this is particularly interesting considering the two industries developed almost directly alongside each other, at least in terms of sophistication and popularity.

Small business has almost always relied on word of mouth to succeed. There are very few national TV spots and building-side ads trying to pull you into Daydreams Comics in Iowa City, Iowa or Homespun Crafts in Indianapolis, Indiana. Unfortunately, word of mouth for a lot of businesses can only go so far. Social media is essentially a rebirth for word of mouth in a digital age. Platforms like Facebook allow small bookstores to broadcast events to an always ready audience, reaching them on their cell phones as well as computers. Twitter is used by many “pop up shops” and mobile businesses to let consumers know where in the city the business can be found that day. Given the incredible success social media has had on small businesses this year, how should these businesses proceed moving forward?

Word of mouth has always been an important part of marketing, both because it is free and because, almost always, the words are going to a person from someone in their life that they trust. This gives credence to the brand and service, as well as giving confidence to the overall purchase decision. If you’re looking for what to do in Chicago, for instance, you are more likely to take the advice of a person you know and trust who has experienced it than from a kid who once saw a movie about Chicago and thought it was okay.

The massive shift to digital has opened up new avenues of marketing, which are ultimately cheaper and hold lots of promise for small businesses who have limited advertising budgets.

Google AdWords Express

In an effort to give small businesses a bit of an edge in catching the attention of customers, Google launched a service called Boost, which would later become AdWords Express. The idea here is that you register your business with Google and when someone searches for stores in your area, you stand out from the usual suspects (read: international corporations show up as red tabs and you show up as a blue tab that automatically sets you apart).

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is emerging from the dark shadow of its past to become a massive force in Internet marketing. Large corporations use it to boost their rankings in search engines, but smaller business can use SEO to deepen their potential customer base. SEO is beneficial for one simple reason: people can’t go to your site if they can’t find it. Targeting keywords specific to your business and location will help more people find your site and hopefully walk through the doors of your storefront.

Mobile Marketing

After this past Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there are considerably more smartphones and tablets out on the market. That number is growing as people move away from stationary computer setups toward mobile Internet devices. Companies like Groupon have launched local services that allow small business owners to create offers and deals in real time and beam them to cell phones of customers who could be in your neighborhood. Your deal that day might win you a new regular customer.

The shop small revolution has a lot of support behind it in the shrinking world. People are starting to reject the convenience afforded by huge corporations and re-invest in their communities by shopping small. The movement will likely grow in the coming years and businesses looking to harness the increasing public enthusiasm for “small shopping” will have to evolve their marketing methods with the digital methods cropping up and leverage them to succeed in the current economic landscape.

The holidays are more than just eggnog and present-opening. This season can give entrepreneurs the opportunity to do great things with their business. Here are some business strategies that will help make your holiday season not only joyous, but lucrative, too:

-  Holiday Deals

The holidays are here, why not stock up on some office supplies while everything is on sale? You can use Dell coupons on a brand new set of office computers or hit up cyber Monday deals on a new iPad to keep your business more organized.

-  Network

Holiday parties aren’t just for socializing. Social, industry events bring entrepreneurs together and allow them to build relationships. Forget LinkedIn or business contact referral groups. Holiday parties allow you to introduce yourself and your business in a laid back environment.

-  Solidify Relationships

Many entrepreneurs see the holidays as a chance to create a tradition with clients. This tradition breeds loyalty, which can help you really keep a client for the long haul. Give your clients holiday gifts, like a bottle of nice champagne, to thank them for their business throughout the year.

-  Reach Holiday Bargain Hunters

During the holidays, people are in spend mode. Take advantage! Develop a marketing strategy that can tap into the holiday bargain hunters. Go mobile with your marketing so that you can catch bargain buyers on the go. Try in-store texting by asking shoppers to text an item number on a product to a short code for a 15% discount. You can also create a campaign which asks customers to text something like “SALES” to a short code, which then sends them promotional texts for a holiday weekend.

Take advantage of the holidays this season to help your business grow. When January rolls around, you’ll be happy you did.

Perhaps there is no better way to gauge the impact the Internet has had on our lives than with the emergence of Cyber Monday—the Monday following Thanksgiving and Black Friday—when people log onto countless retail websites in their quest to find holiday deals. Gone are the days when it’s necessary to camp out in front of stores at ungodly hours, only to stampede through the doors and wrestle fellow shopper for the hottest video games and electronics. Instead, it is now possible to get all of your holiday shopping done while sipping coffee in your pajamas and watching daytime television.

This year, shoppers spent a record $1.25 billion on Cyber Monday, up more than 20% from last year and surpassing early estimates. Some 10 million people took advantage of this day of online deals, setting a new record. Buyers averaged nearly $125 in spending, and 10.8% of consumers used a mobile device to access businesses’ websites (up 3.9% from 2010).

What does this mean for retailers?

In short, this year’s Cyber Monday shows retailers that Internet shopping, particularly when there are deals to be had, is here to stay and growing in popularity. While spending was up for this day and Black Friday this year, the jump in online sales indicates that this day of spending is really starting to catch on.  Accordingly, in order keep up with this demand, merchants need to continue offering online coupons and deals, and maintain online visibility and brand recognition (more on this later). By using the Internet to their benefit, businesses will stay competitive in this increasingly online world.

Additionally, because so many transactions were conducted on mobile devices, it may behoove retailers to create smartphone apps in order to lure customers to their sites on a regular basis. Whether it’s to sell items, educate consumers about the products and/or services they offer, offer help in finding physical store locations, provide ready access to customer service, or what have you, by staying up-to-date with trends, businesses can get a leg up on their competition.

What does this mean for marketers?

In the ever-changing world of marketing, few things are ever black and white. However, it should be apparent by now that marketing strategies that place an emphasis on the Internet will be successful.  Whether it’s email marketing strategies, SEO techniques, or any of the other sundry options available to marketers, the point is to get online and stay there. By experimenting with different techniques and strategies, you can pinpoint what works best for your clients and what doesn’t, which will not only benefit them, but you as well.

As with any marketing strategy, the key is quality over quantity. Whereas black hat techniques have given SEO a bad name, and Google’s algorithmic updates have demoted some well-known websites, proper use of SEO strategies—such as the use of keywords—can actually work in tandem with Google updates to boost your clients’ online visibility, and establish and maintain brand recognition.

How can I use this year’s cyber lessons to my benefit?

Below are five tips for implementing the lessons of this year’s Cyber Monday into your overall sales and/or marketing strategies:

1. Stay up-to-date with what’s going on online! Whether you’re scoping out your competitors’ deals, learning about how to create new apps, or learning how to design an aesthetically pleasing, navigable website, being Internet-savvy will always work in your favor.
2. Don’t try to keep up with the Joneses…be the Joneses! In other words, if you are mimicking strategies that have already proven to be successful, then you remain one step behind your competition. Be the leader, rather than the follower and your sales will reflect it.
3. Listen to what consumers have to say! This can be accomplished by reading blogs that are devoted to shopping, deals, and the like, such as “mommy blogs”, and sites dedicated to couponing, shopping, and and other money/spending-related subjects. By reading what consumers think about various sales and money-saving ideas, you will better understand consumer trends, and will be able to target your audience more effectively.
4. Be liberal when it comes to sales! Despite the recession, when many businesses had to tighten their belts in order to survive, this past week’s sales shows that consumers respond overwhelmingly to a good deal. While it may be true that you will make less on any given item, it is also true that more items will sell, and your customer base will grow exponentially as a result.
5. Think outside of the box! By coming up with creative new ways to approach consumers, you are sure to capture their attention and keep it. It’s easy to ignore advertising that is humdrum, but something that is at once unique and catchy will garner you the brand recognition you need to stay ahead of the game.

Even though the recent recession is already beginning to be referred to in the past tense and consumer spending is up, people are being more thoughtful about the money they are spending. By placing emphasis on customer-oriented sales and marketing strategies, rather than outdated ideas that are no longer effective, you can be assured of continued success, regardless of the economy.

Marketing students in classrooms across the nation are not being taught SEO skills specifically.  Despite this, the concepts of marketing are being used on a daily basis in all areas of White-Hat SEO.   Schools with business programs cannot – at this point – offer workshops covering SEO because the tactics are ever-changing.  What they can offer is the unchanging rules of branding which can be applied to all areas of SEO for improvement of keyword relevance which naturally enhance proper rankings.  This “bridge” would be a tremendous resource for professionals in the area, students on campus, and those enrolled in online school.

The importance of SEO is growing rapidly. In the past, businesses outsourced SEO teams which provided strategies for link-building and simple branding.  This “fringe” tactic has changed with the Panda update, and is now viewed as an integral portion of business operations involved in marketing, branding, research, customer service and sales.

Top of mind awareness

As an online marketer, being first is the ultimate aspiration. When customers are in search of a product, you want yours to be their first option. Quality content is one of the major factors that can get you ranked among the first options on Google. This will increase traffic which will ultimately translate to leads and, most importantly, conversions.  The key moment of a first impression is lost if the user never notices your information.  Google now ranks the relevant content surrounding the keyword with the actual keyword.  This means that the branding process is facilitated by the information surrounding it.  This harkens back to the fundamental marketing practice of finding the right “place”, as it pertains to the marketing mix.

In order to achieve higher rankings your on-page content should have these qualities:

• Relevance: For the most SEO value, your content must be up to date with the latest trends and current events.
• Information: Everyone is not looking to read purely educational writing, but the majority of people would like to gain some type of new information or knowledge on a topic of their interest.
• Entertainment:  Place emphasis on creating entertaining and fresh content that will keep viewers on the site to read and share with friends via social media.

Know your target market

Understanding your audience is critical. It wouldn’t make sense to advertise the newest Under Armour football gear to a group of senior citizens because they have no use for the product. To achieve good SEO value, you have to know who you are attempting to reach to make sure postings appeal to the audience.  All of the idioms surrounding focus groups, test markets, and bottleneck strategies still apply within SEO.  The major change is a positive one, given a marketer can view the results in real-time.

One can argue that it is harder now to target your intended customer given the sea of online information.  After all, how can a veteran marketer learn how to signal the customer from afar? Furthermore how can a student make a brand stick when they are required to apply the old school tactics to the new process?  The answer is simple.  If you know your customer (using the old methods), you can still reach them no matter how far away they seem.  Demographic information coupled with market research methods (taught in school) are still able to zero-in on the one group of buyers the business is targeting, no matter how large or small that group may be.

Rankings have an effect on the way brands are perceived because when consumers have a question the first step is usually to search online for the answer.  People research a product to weigh the pros and cons before making a purchase. It is important to have information about your product ranked high in searches to be found quickly. The content found in these searches can be the difference between your product being purchased and the consumer looking for alternative options.

This guest post was contributed by Joseph Baker.

Joseph Baker’s business experience in management spans more than 15 years. A leader of development and management teams, he also implemented budget reductions professionally and as an independent contractor. Joseph led strategic planning and systems of implementation for nine organizations, public and private, and worked extensively with small businesses.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Marketing from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management.

Could future vacation advertisements one day read: “Plan your next family vacation for the dark side of the moon!” or maybe, “Now offering an intergalactic tour featuring Mars, Neptune, Jupiter and the Estranged Pluto! Book today and save 20%.”

No, way. Right?

Maybe not. According to recent information the first ever commercial space port in New Mexico is nearing completion. Yes, commercial. As in, commercial airlines. That means it will transport Average Joes like you to the moon and back.

But, for most, space is still a big giant unknown. We’ve all seen the Alien movies and obscure episodes of Star Trek. Few people are willingly trying to butt heads with Klingons. Will travel marketing ever be able to convince earthlings to book a flight to a beautiful Venusian resort over the more traditional route of moving into new Panama City Beach condos? Maybe. But, if they could, how would they do it?

Tactic #1: All Your Friends Are Doing It!

If marketers are going to be able to convince you to take your family to the moon, the Internet (social media, to be precise) will most likely be their vehicle.

Social Media has a way of convincing its users to do whatever their friends are doing, or vice versa. If your friends are wining and dining at The Corner Restaurant after work, you’ll probably be there, too. Likewise, if you’re headed out to The Neighborhood Bar for a drink, posting it on Facebook will entice friends to do the same.

Sites like Facebook are becoming nearly overrun with advertisements. Companies and businesses can take to social media to promote themselves for free or with paid ads. Search re-targeting also lets Google know that you’ve been curious about Venus vacation packages, have given it a quick Google and will likely bombard you with pay-per-click ads, even if you change your mind and decide to search for Panama City Beach condos instead.

In a similar fashion, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) continues to evolve daily, meaning that by the time space travel is a legitimate option in 2013 and after, SEO will know exactly how to give you the results you want with little to no hassle.

Social media is an excellent form of advertisement and could be used to ease the fears and uncertainties associated with space travel. If the Wilson family is posting pictures to Facebook and tweeting about their Venusian vacation, you may soon feel the need to book one of your own.

Tactic #2: It’s Easy and Affordable!

The Internet also has a way of making things, especially travel, affordable for just about anyone. We’ve all heard about the amazing flight and hotel combo packages through sites like Orbitz, Kayak and Priceline and about the amazing coupons offered through sites like Groupon. With this type of money-saving technology expanding as the future unfolds, you could reasonably expect to see flight deals if New Mexico’s space port really takes off. No pun intended.

And, with mobile apps like Foursquare, you can earn points for checking into different locations and occasionally coupons and discounts depending on the business. With enough check-ins, you could be mayor of the moon or earn a free ice cream cone at the Uranus Creamery. Foursquare is basically all about free advertisement for businesses–a clever way for travel marketers to get the word out there about space vacations.

Tactic #3: It’s Safe, see for yourself!

 Viral videos never get old. From the first moon landing to Charlie the Unicorn, we always love a good video and the second we see it, we’re going to share it. Much of the unease surrounding space travel is the simple fact that we’re always seeing videos of space adventures gone wrong. Apollo 13? Exactly.

But, what if marketers began using videos of successful space travel? The video of a group of Spring Breakers landing safely on Mars or taking a spin around the rings of Saturn could go viral in an instant. Or, it could be used as clever marketing to get travelers to step a bit out of their comfort zones and shell out the bucks for a ticket to Jupiter.

The Future of Travel Marketing

 Clever marketing can get consumers to try just about anything—even space travel. And, while it’s still a long way off, when done correctly, we could soon wish to forego visiting Panama City Beach, London or Cabo San Lucas in lieu of Mars. It’s a long way off, but who knows? Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

This guest post was contributed by Joseph Baker.

Joseph Baker’s business experience in management spans more than 15 years. A leader of development and management teams, he also implemented budget reductions professionally and as an independent contractor. Joseph led strategic planning and systems of implementation for nine organizations, public and private, and worked extensively with small businesses.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Marketing from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management.

Building a brand requires time, dedication and a lot of hard work. Consumers have to trust and be engaged by the company trying to build or maintain its reputation. Ensuring that keywords chosen for a link or campaign are relevant to the business is key, as is ensuring the relevance to any site a link is posted on. Keyword stuffing, the process of loading a page down with links and “relevant” keywords, is not tolerated anymore. Sites that use such tactics face being ignored, down-ranked, or banned, all of which will result in varying levels of traffic loss.

Keyword Relevance

The keywords pointing to a site have to be relevant to the content on both the page the link is placed and to the site linked. Co-occurrence terms are important for the page, too. For instance, in order to rank for a phrase like “laptop battery”, a company might try to get a link that looks as follows:

As a university student, my laptop battery always seemed to be going dead. I hadn’t bought my Dell laptop brand new, but I did make sure to recharge my computer regularly. I ended up purchasing a new battery for my notebook computer in order to keep it running on battery power for more than 30 minutes.

The link relates to the content surrounding it and to the site linked. Further, other related phrases are used throughout, such as a major brand and the terms “recharge”, “computer” and “notebook”.

The Detriments of Keyword Stuffing

Matt Cutts, Google’s SEO guidelines enforcer, urges website owners not to take part in keyword stuffing (source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/avoid-keyword-stuffing/). Users who attempt to artificially insert keywords into their web pages are severely penalized by Google’s algorithm. Those who try to hide their stuffing from users or present a different web page to users and crawlers are either penalized or, in some cases, removed from search results entirely, effectively cutting them off from the web community.

Content is King

In February 2011, Google unleashed its Panda algorithm update to quash low quality sites. The purpose of Panda is to find sites that don’t offer original, valuable content to readers and then reduce their value in search results (source: http://searchengineland.com/why-google-panda-is-more-a-ranking-factor-than-algorithm-update-82564). The engineers at Google have attempted to make Panda match a human’s reading habits, in order to determine whether certain content is relevant and actually coherent. There are many sites on the web that post long articles which begin normally enough, but, shortly after the fold, devolve into machine-generated nonsense. Panda’s purpose, among others, is to rid results of those poorly constructed pages.

Google’s Panda update changed the way that businesses do SEO and branding. They can’t get away with dropping keywords in places that make no sense or overloading pages with every co-occurrence term possible. Those who do stuff keywords into their pages are quickly hit with penalties, resulting in their site being down-ranked or even removed from search results completely, depending on the severity of the infraction. Content has to be purposeful, valuable, unique and of high quality for Google to allow it to rank well in a search results page.

This guest post was contributed by Joseph Baker.

Joseph Baker’s business experience in management spans more than 15 years. A leader of development and management teams, he also implemented budget reductions professionally and as an independent contractor. Joseph led strategic planning and systems of implementation for nine organizations, public and private, and worked extensively with small businesses.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Marketing from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management.

Money has evolved several times in human history: barter, coins, paper, plastic, and now, phones? It’s true — commerce is the next major advancement in mobile technology. Through the use of ‘near field communications’ (NFC) chips, several companies are about to revolutionize the way we shop, replacing our wallets with our smartphones.

In marketing products, advertisers zero in on bottlenecks, or places where people get funneled into a small space and end up having to wait in line. Subways, elevators, and checkout lines are bottlenecks for foot traffic, while city interstates and busy intersections are bottlenecks for car traffic.

Bottleneck advertising is especially effective because it reaches a high number of people, but, perhaps more importantly, because it catches those people when they have time to look at the ad and absorb the information.

The same principles can apply to advertising online. Ads are best placed where both the number of users is high and the amount of time that users spend on the site is high. In a physical bottleneck, people are delayed because of spatial constraints, while in an online bottleneck, people only linger on a site if their interest is held by something. So the sites that online advertisers need to pay the most attention to are the biggest “time sinks,” the places where users tend to linger for large amounts of time.

Facebook is far and away the biggest time sink on the web. The total time that people spend on Facebook in a month is estimated at 50 billion minutes, which is more time than people spend on Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Wikipedia and Amazon combined. Facebook is obviously exceptionally good at grabbing people’s attention and holding it indefinitely, and therefore a prime site for advertisers.

What makes Facebook such an excellent bottleneck is not just that millions of users log on to it every day and not just that users log in often to check in on their friends, but that the users that log in to Facebook tend to linger there.

Facebook is an exceptional device for holding people’s attention captive. Users can see when their friends are online, which means that when they write on their wall or message them, they can probably expect a reply. Intermittent Facebook chat sessions are a constant back-channel that can gobble up time for students and white-collar workers. Facebook games are also hugely successful at absorbing attention. Farming games and Empire games, the two most-popular genres of Facebook games, both involve built-in wait times before players can proceed. These wait times encourage people to keep logging in as soon as the delay is up so they can grow their city or garden as quickly as possible.

While users are staring at messages waiting for a response or staring at a game screen waiting for a time delay to end, the Facebook ads on the right-hand margin are always there, waiting to suck in the user’s gaze. The ads may not seem all that ostentatious, but they are always there, always changing, and always ready to be clicked.

Facebook ads are different from ads at physical bottlenecks, though, because they can also be intelligently tailored to the user. Users’ personal information is mined to get an idea of what they are interested in, but the users themselves also give feedback on ads they do not like so they will not be bothered by them any longer. With this customized system, computer nerds get ads for gadgets, not for sports equipment, and frugal people get ads for coupons, not for sports cars.

Due to the intelligent tailoring of ads and the fact that they are being posted on the largest online bottleneck, Facebook ads promise to be the most effective form of marketing out there.

 This guest post was contributed by Joseph Baker.

Joseph Baker’s business experience in management spans more than 15 years. A leader of development and management teams, he also implemented budget reductions professionally and as an independent contractor. Joseph led strategic planning and systems of implementation for nine organizations, public and private, and worked extensively with small businesses.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Marketing from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management.

Social Media has completely changed how we as a culture communicate and interact with one another.  Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube allowed anyone to create a website that is all about themselves and their ideas.   These social media outlets allow us to express our selves in a completely different way than what we ever could before.  But, there is a darker side to social media and companies tracking our behaviors.  Like all forms of technology, social media is constantly changing and coming up with new ways for people to express them selves.

• Interactive broad casts: Ustream is the new YouTube, by allowing people to stream live video of events online.  Even politicians are using Ustream to allow a larger population of voters to speak out and ask questions.  This allowed the political candidates to answer the questions in a timely manner.  More and more people are watching internet broadcasting and this trend is not going away anytime soon.
• Review Sites:  Sites such as angie’s list are taking on a strong presence in the social media landscape.  Consumers not only want to know about products before they buy, they also want their opinions, on the product, to be heard after the purchase.  These websites are forcing companies to respond to both the positive and negative reviews.  All it takes is for one person to write a negative review to spark others who have had similar experiences to jump on the band wagon.  Review sites such as Angie’s List definitely make it a buyers’ market; which is beneficial to those looking.
• Location check in:  So you go to your favorite lunch spot on Wednesday and you want all of your friends to know about it.  Instead of just updating your status on Facebook you can now utilize Facebook places or foursquare.  This allows you to check in to places you go throughout the day on your smart phone.  The apps award points and sometimes the stores you check into award you coupons or discounts on your next purchase.  This is great advertising for the companies because when people check into a location it prompts their friends to come to that location too.  It also allows users to interact with their environment by using their mobile devices.

With all of these new and growing social media trends it crazy to think about all of the information about us is known by companies.  But by someone taking part in these different medias they are giving companies permission to use the information.  Use these services for their advantages, but be aware of all the stipulations.

This guest post was contributed by Joseph Baker.

Joseph Baker’s business experience in management spans more than 15 years. A leader of development and management teams, he also implemented budget reductions professionally and as an independent contractor. Joseph led strategic planning and systems of implementation for nine organizations, public and private, and worked extensively with small businesses.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in Marketing from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management.

Refers to the late 1990s during which countless Internet companies were riding an enormous wave of enthusiasm that pushed their stock valuations into the stratosphere even though they never made a penny. Billions in venture capital were given to entrepreneurs with little or no experience to fund ideas that were ludicrous. It was a crazy time, and people were very excited. With all of the nonsense, many dot-coms did survive, and countless concepts and techniques were developed that continue today.

In these days, professionals from tech and media industries repeat all together that social media companies are over-valuıed and we are “in the middle of a social media bubble”. Some experts think that these social networking sites will never figure out a workable business model because there may not be one.

Mashable shared this Infographic prepared by social media site G+ about top-valuations of  social media sites.

If you are an entrepreneur trying to introduce your startup or business idea to potential investors, you need the right “one sentence pitch for your startup” to attract the VCs or angel investors. Investors hear, on average, five to ten presentations each day from entrepreneurs. You’ve got one minute to grab an investor’s attention. Kicking your presentation off with a one sentence summary that highlights your idea and its potential value will help you get them interested.

Summarizing your business plan in one sentence is very hard but Adeo Ressi from Founder Institute can help you perfect the art of the one sentence pitch in an easy way. Ressi says “Most entrepreneurs manage to screw it up… How much better would the world be if every startup could explain their business well in one sentence?” . He has created created a rudimentary template in Mad Libs style:created a rudimentary template in Mad Libs style:

My company, __(insert name of company)__, is developing __(a defined offering)__ to help __(a defined audience)__ __(solve a problem)__ with __(secret sauce)__. You can see in the video below, how to use Ressi’s helpful tool for young entrepreneurs.

Madlibs for Pitching from Video4 on Vimeo.

The Internet Internet traffic is increasing very rapidly, close to doubling each year since 1997.    Jesse Thomas collected remarkable stats on the Internet in one video. As the social network sites and YouTube like media-sharing sites take much more time in our lives, People-Powered Internet grows up. Some of the amazing figures about people-powered  Internet shared in the video:

• - Facebook gets more than 260 billios pageviews per month.
• - YouTube serves 1 billion videos in one day.
• - The average Internet user in the USA watches 182 online videos in a month.
• - There are 1.4 billions email users worldwide.

Thanks Jesse Thomas for combining and animating these stats. You can watch the video below:

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Today, September 27th is Google’s 11th birthday and Google has a special logo to celebrate its birthday.

Google is using its logo in marketing for both social and commercial purposes. What Google does with its logo is a good example to use company logos as a valuable marketing tool for free.

Google has changed our lives and still changing; even why we use logos. Happy 11th birthday Google!

There’s a battle emerging over the industry structure of e-books: Amazon has one approach, Barnes & Noble another. Will the clash play out like the computer wars of the late 80s, or the music wars of the late 90s? Let’s take a look.

Years of declining music sales reflect a grim story for the music business — the amount of music people are willing to pay for has dropped dramatically, the unit of business has shifted fundamentally to music by the song, and the preferred medium for acquiring music is now downloading individual songs, rather than purchasing a complete CD. Who is winning in the battle for the soul of the music business? The popular verdict at the moment would certainly be Apple, to the detriment of the traditional music producers and distributors, and with mixed effects for artists.

What are the implications for the current battle over e-books? Amazon.com is certainly gunning for the traditional book business with the advent of its Kindle reader. Note the characteristics of this business model — Amazon sells proprietary hardware, which is linked to a list of electronic books over which they have considerable control, and tied to their website which facilitates just about every aspect of a user’s experience, from the first moment you might become aware that you have a need to getting that need fulfilled, time and time again.

To read the rest of this Harvardbusiness.org blog post, click here.

WPP subsidiary Millward Brown Optimor released its highly regarded annual brand ranking BrandZ Top 100 (PDF) back in April.  It identifies the world’s most valuable global brands as measured by their dollar value.

Topping the list were Internet giant Google, whose brand was valued at a whopping $100 billion, and rival Microsoft which came in second with a $76.2 billion valuation. The report showed Google’s brand value was up from $86 billion last year (an increase of 16% in value), while Microsoft’s rose only 8% in value over the past year.

Note that this is the value of the brand and not the company, and we mustn’t forget Google tends to put its name in all its products so would conceivably get more exposure as Microsoft, which markets far more brands than just one (Windows, Bing, etc.). Then again, Microsoft has been around a heck of a lot longer than Google, as has Coca-Cola which came in third with a brand valuation of $67.6 billion.

To read the rest of this TechCrunch post, click here.

]]> http://siteboat.com/google-brand-worth-100-billion-these-days/feed/ 0 http://siteboat.com/angelsofts-upgrade-and-2008-statistics/ http://siteboat.com/angelsofts-upgrade-and-2008-statistics/#comments Wed, 07 Jan 2009 14:34:14 +0000 Erdem OZKAN http://siteboat.com/?p=1463

As i mentioned in an old post before, Angelsoft is a New York based company which has become an online ecosystem where investors and entrepreneurs meet to build new companies. Due to its name, Angelsoft was about Angel Investors.After they …

As i mentioned in an old post before, Angelsoft is a New York based company which has become an online ecosystem where investors and entrepreneurs meet to build new companies. Due to its name, Angelsoft was about Angel Investors.After they released version 3.0 , their platform became easier but more powerful. With version 3.4 release, Angelsoft is welcoming VCs into the Angelsoft Network.They’ve launched new power features that can help the venture capitalists streamline the process easier. As it happened in all releases, the interfaces are ipmroved and lots of bugs fixed.

2008 Stats

Angelsoft is an alive and transparent platform and has lots of transactions, so the stats from Angelsoft are reliable enough to represent the industry. I think the most important stat is “invested submissions rate” . As you see, very small number of companies  who apply get funded. This shows how hard being an entrepreneur is. Getting an investment doesn’t mean that you will be successful. The success rate of a startup is very low, too. Half of the startups fail within two years and then the others in the next three years. Average four year – survival rate of a startup is under 40% . There are 442 angel groups and VCs and 14,900 investors in the Angelsoft Ecosystem and Angelsoft processes over 2,100 funding applications a month. Since May 2008, 37,000 + deals made, about 2,000 events occured, 150,000 documents attached.

Doubling Investor Community Activity

One of the most important need of the entrepreneurs is promoting their plans to the investor community. Angelsoft listened to them and took steps to help them out which resulted in a doubling of the number of views that the Investors receive. The feedback form both investors and entrepreneurs have been positive as well which means a win-win situation. Investors now receive an email bi-weekly with the 5 closest and 5 highest rated deals.

Industry Valuations

As the graph at the above shows, the average amount of funds being sought differs between 25% – 35% of the pre-money valuation estimated by entrepreneurs for their companies. The graph also shows us that the valuation is decreasing but the rate of the funds sought is increasing. This means,

• The prices are getting down in the early stage investment industry,
• Entrepreneurs are aready to share more of their companies with the investors.

Conclusion

These new features are a major step forward in improving the funding process for entrepreneurs and investing process for investors. These days, you can see angel investors and VCs coinvesting on deals more often. Both the VCs and angels need each other and this relationship will be more important in the future. It’s a smart action to bring VCs on board and Angelsoft platfrom has become a better place for entrepreneurs and angel investors to be able to meet more people.

* All the data and the images used in this article are the property of Angelsoft.

CrunchBase Information

Angelsoft

Information provided by CrunchBase

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If you’re thinking to start an investment or still trying to develop a business, ‘consumer trends‘ is one of the key terms you must watch carefully. A consumer trends report is a must-use tool for entrepreneurs, investors and business developers. Especially, in this crisis situation with consumer spending down, it has become more important to target the right audiences to achieve the right goals. There are a lot of consultancy and research firms publishing consumer trend reports. Trendwatching.com is one of these firms.

trendwatching.com is an independent and opinionated trend firm located in Amsterdam, scanning the globe for the most promising consumer trends, insights and related hands-on business ideas. Reinier Evers; a trend watcher, a presenter and and an entrepreneur founded trendwatching.com in 2002 in Amsterdam. trendwatching.com is an innovative trend firm. What makes trendwaching.com unique is its source of information. Traditional trend reports rely on public surveys and direct sales datas. But trendwatching.com’s source of information is its network.

Past trends can be easily determined statistically, but the hard point is to predict the future trends. Trends are set by people and trendwatching.com has discovered this fact and implemented in their strategy of gathering information from people about future trends. The Springspotter Network, trendwatching.com’s global network of spotters, has 8,000 members in 100+ countries worldwide. These members are the ones who recognize new business ideas and cool & new trends. Anyone can join this network and accepted contributions get rewarded with cool gifts. This is a very interesting and innovative way to collect information from all over the world and this business model worth writing another article.

trendwatching.com publishs monthly trend briefings and annual trend report . More than 160,000 professionals in over 120 countries subscribe trendwatching.com’s free monthly Trend Briefing. This is the number one briefing of its kind in the world. Once a year, trendwatching.com releases a Trend Report, highlighting the emerging trends that will matter in the next 12-18 months. The 2009 version has been released at 17th November.

This report is not a free but it’s worth paying for its $799 or €599 price. The report includes 150+ slides and exclusive videos, outlining important changes in consumer needs and wants. More than half of the companies buying the report consists of B2C companies.

Let’s look at some of the interesting featured trends in this report:

• FAKETASTIC
• URBANY
• ADOPT A CONSUMER
• SOLITARY SNACKS
• GENERIC LUXURY
• RAW & SEE THROUGH
• UBER & ECO
• BEAT THE RECESSION
• MICRO-SCOPE
• FSTR

In conclusion, trendwatching.com’s monthly briefings and annual trend reports can help you with the predicton of your strategy and business development challenges.

* I’ll try to make an interview with Reinier Evers, founder of trendwatching.com about his opinions for 2009′s emerging trends despite the crisis and their  Springspotter Network ‘s business model.

Domain parking refers to the registration of an Internet domain name without that domain being used for a website. This may have been done with a view to reserving the domain name for future development, or to protect against the possibility of cybersquatting or to trade the domain name.

There are several companies that specialize in serving adsfor domain owners of parked domains. The ads are relevant to the domain names being used. Most widely-known  companies in the domain parking market are GoDaddy and Sedo. Now, the companies in the domain parking industry are facing a big competitor, Google.

Google have finally opened up its Adsense for Domains service. The service is still available for U.S. domain owners only. This service of Google was available for domain owners with 1+ million monthly pageviews. This shows Google is searching every possible way of earning money from the Internet. You can look at this interesting presentation on our post Everything About Google to learn more about Google’s increase revenue policies.