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Posts by Antonio Altamirano

There are some basics that you need to cover to give stronger credibility to your small business. A business phone, email, fax, invoicing system and legal contracts. This can add up quickly but below I am offering some tips on how to do it all under $50 per month.

Here are five websites that can help you get organized and help you give your company a more professional look without breaking the bank. Mobile is one of the key factors to consider in these days of real-time customer service and 24/7 support and most of the websites mentioned below have that option.

1. Ringcentral

  • Ease of use: Easy
  • Cost: Low ($10 per month)
  • Mobile: Yes

Setup a virtual voice mail service for under $10 per month. Don’t have a fax machine to receive faxes? Really who sends faxes any more, but every once in a while you have the need to receive something via fax. RingCentral gives you a fax number for under $6 per month. All faxes are turned into PDFs so that you can look at them easily in your laptop, desktop, iPhone or blackberry.

2. Google for your domain

  • Ease of use: Way Easy
  • Cost: Free
  • Mobile: Yes

I believe that once you are running your own company or freelance business you should by default change your email to use your company’s domain name. There’s no bigger turn off than to receive a business email from bunny55@hotmail.com. Google Apps makes this extremely easy to do. All you need is to buy a domain name and change some settings in the Google Apps interface. Finding the information for the DNS settings is a little cumbersome but I took the time to link it here in case you need it.

3. Basecamp

  • Ease of use: Way Easy
  • Cost: Medium ($24 per month starter package)
  • Mobile: Yes for iPhone

Basecamp is the ultimate “do less with more” project management tool. You can setup to-do lists, milestones and share this with your team very easily. If you have been used to heavy corporate project management packages, it takes a couple of days hours to get used to it. If you are managing different portions of a huge project for several clients, then basecamp might fall short due to the lack of some basic features such as deadlines for the to-do items. Overall is a very good starter project management tool.

4. FreshBooks

  • Ease of use: Moderate (Easy for accounting software)
  • Cost: Medium (FREE for 3 clients. $19 per month starter package)
  • Mobile: Yes for iPhone but App is not fully developed

Make your invoices and estimates look sharp. Provide your clients with online payment. Track expenses, time and integrate with basecamp. The integration is a little jerky but it works OK as long as you have some time to edit the invoice by hand before sending it to the client. FreshBooks is simple and has enough features that can help you keep the financial pulse of your growing business

5. Rocketlawyer

  • Ease of use: Moderate
  • Cost: Free for many documents ($19.95 per month afterwards)
  • Mobile: No

Rocket Lawyer can save you a lot of money and time for basic legal contracts. There are a lot of free legal forms in there as well. There is no mobile component which is not really needed. If you want you can take advantage of the e-signature service. However, it really depends on your client base and market. Many people don’t feel comfortable signing a legal contract online yet.

The B2B landscape has changed considerably. A couple of years ago it was the norm for lower level employees to distill the information that was passed on to senior and C-suite executives.

Social Media (even more than search) has helped bring the information directly to the decision makers which is your target market. This graph below might help understand the demographics of Facebook better  and thanks to @scottmonty for his insightful post on Facebook demographics we can understand it better.

Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

There are a few things you should look at before plunging into social media, but the bottom line is that if your brand is already well respected and folks are aware of the value, then social media will help you harness that power and use it to support sales.

  1. Do you have a leader that understands the social media field? (Not a heavy user necessarily but a strategist that combines social, technology and leadership skills that are needed to thrive.
  2. Does your leadership (senior management and/or C-Suite) understand the value of social media for your organization?
  3. Do you produce fresh and relevant content that can keep your interaction lively?
  4. Is your company or brand a market influence? If so, then social media is a channel to cement the role of thought leader that you’ve already earned.

Furthermore, social media will help you establish the personal brand of the company’s employees as experts in their field and thought leaders in a way that no other media can do. While “old media” gives you one channel and one voice, social media turns all your employees into brand advocates, change agents and thought leaders carrying the company’s brand name with them.

I am still amazed at the one billion dollar valuation that twitter has been able to squeeze out of a service many say its nothing but hot air. It might very well be that twitter is not the future but the rough present of what’s to come in the real-time space. Whatever Twitter might be, it has turned businesses upside down and has opened a treasure chest of business and personal connections that otherwise they might have never been.

Thinking that maybe these milestones represent the evolution of Twitter from a user perspective, I decided to share them with you and would love to hear about your own milestones whatever these maybe. It is interesting to read these milestones from the users perspective so that you can get a better feel of what people are doing and what they are looking for on Twitter.Without further ado, here is my milestone timeline of Twitter.

Antonio Twitter Usage

Antonio Twitter Usage

Why did I join Twitter?

I once was also very skeptical of Twitter and never thought that I would ever need to use such a service. An awful after thought of Odeo, I thought when I saw the little marine blue link at the top of the Odeo homepage. I clicked. I signed up and tweeted and nothing happened and that was it. I stopped using twitter for about 5 to 6 months. I was too busy and submerged in the world of search engine marketing.  Never thought I would use it again.

Using Twitter

I went back to using Twitter after about five or six months since I signed up. Out of the blue 500 people where already following me. I had done nothing to deserve that but there they where. Waiting for me to engage and talk about anything and everything.

Using Twitter Heavily

I needed to get over the initial stalky feeling that I had while using Twitter. I couldn’t believe that everything and anything would be public if you chose to. I was at awe and marveled at the possibilities that a company would have in an environment like this. Unfortunately many companies have chosen to block access to external social networks according to a study by Robert Half Technology. What the study fails to mention is the usage of internal social networks and how widely spread they become.

Searching and Tweeting for Value

There was Twitter without top level internet bloggers (aka. Robert Scoble) and then there was Twitter after all major bloggers joined. It was a geeky place. Most conversations where around technology, web 2.0 and code. It was easy to keep up with the brightest minds in the business. Then it got diluted by celebrities and a user growth of over 1000%. Twitter continues to provide value but in a very different way by allowing you to build trust not only traffic.

While I agree that Twitter takes attention away from more mundane tasks for more traditional occupations, I also think that Twitter can increase engagement with customers. Finding value in Twitter can be tricky but it can certainly pay off. The channel is very different from what we’ve seen in blogs and search and that is the reason why it needs to be executed in a different way. Rules of web publishing cannot be applied to twitter or any other conversational channel.

For those of you interested in the evolution of twitter from a business perspective, here is a review by BusinessInsider about the milestones of Twitter.

Five months into it I have learned many valuable lessons about running a business and delivering projects with value.

  1. On-the-fly learning. Theory evaporates very quickly to give way for a more practical learning-by-doing approach, which is vital for any startup to survive. For this learning to take place you need to be ready to accept that there are many things that you don’t know and to use that as an advantage rather than an obstacle. Years of experience can be a blessing or a curse. Basically, if you don’t know that something is difficult then there’s no reason why you cannot do it, right?.  Your mind set is not how hard is it to achieve this but rather how do we get this done in a more effective and inexpensive way. Of course, that is not to say that risks shouldn’t be measured and that plausibility shouldn’t be taken into consideration. You need to be realistic but without letting that reality bring your ideas down.One of the great resources that I would recommend to anyone thinking about starting their own business is the The Lean Startup blog by Eric Ries. Eric gives you a great framework that you can use to think about your business as an entity that it is always changing and evolving. One thing that I have very clear now after five months of running a business is that everything will evolve from day one and the opportunities for learning are endless.I would actually recommend it for anyone running a team at a company and high-tech marketing managers that want to learn about how to manage high performing projects in this new world of social media and real time updates.
  2. Work hard but work smart. A nascent company (especially a services company) is the perfect environment for good and bad things to happen and both can be equally stressful. Sometimes the situation will present itself in the form of an insatiable client that expects triple the number of hours contracted or a server breakdown in the middle of the night. Other stressful events can range from being cash flow negative to the departure of a key employee. There are some great things that can be equally taxing and stressful on the team. Things such as the sudden on-boarding of a big client with a few rush projects that need to be done by “yesterday” or the need to ramp up your staff from 3 full time people to 7 in less than a month. All of these things have happened already at Tangelo and we are continuously learning from them.In these situations it is easy for folks (clients and agencies) to get passionate about time constrains, resources and deadlines and if there is not a firm and sober monitoring of the client-agency relationship, a lot of time can be lost in explaining everything.The bottom line is that freaking out is bad for your health and it really doesn’t help. You can ready more on that on a post by Caterina Fake (founder of flickr.com) where she discusses how working hard is overrated.
  3. Fail fast and move on. Learn from your failures and control them as much as possible. A new venture is about big wins and controlled failure. Mitigate your risk as much as possible while continuing to promote a creative environment. Don’t wait to do a postmortem of your project down the road.
  4. Hire good people. A small team of highly committed and strong individuals can take you further than an inexpensive team of loosely tied individual contributors.
  5. Celebrate successes and incorporate the processes that lead to the success into your projects in real time.
  6. Know when to move on. There are certain projects that should have never seen the light of day. Cut them early and for good because if they drag on it will consume valuable resources that your company cannot spare. Also, you need to have a plan on how to deal with a potentially bad outcome. In my case, the company is self-sustaining and the projects that we have worked on are excellent but I have to weight the current benefits and analyze the lost opportunity and I have decided that it is time for me to shrink the operation that we have to handle a handful of clients and to concentrate in developing a travel tool that we’ve been planning for months. In the meantime, my partner will take care of the company and I will be looking for full time employment. If you are interested in hiring me please check out my resume or if you know of any open positions that might be a good fit please feel free to let me know.
  7. Meet new people all the time. You never know when that relationship will pay off.

Allison Mooney wrote a wonderful article on Why Agencies need to think like software companies. Truth is, I was a happy to find her article as it validates what we do at Tangelo, an internet marketing and technology company.  We look at advertising and marketing on the internet as an opportunity to create an integrated and deep web experiences that can help the client establish a long term and more valuable relationship with their audience. It is not only about the CTR on a single day, it is about the relationship you create with your client through social media apps, twitter, facebook, search and mobile.

Actually, it is a competency that I continuously talk about with my team of creative developers.  To successfully market in this new world it is crucial to understand not only the code architecture but business opportunities along the way. Remember that your clients will know exactly what they want the moment you show them something awesome.

Often, internet marketing projects fail because the corporate marketer lacks the understanding of the technology  and the agency buries the developer so deep under the layers of project management that issues are never discussed. For this to change, the developer needs to be able to communicate in plain english with the client. However, with the higher level of sophistication we are dealing with today, developers have the expectation that the marketer will have at least a basic understanding of the code. Believe me. There is no need to make it “so simple that your grandma should understand”. They are not building deep web experiences targeted to valuable audiences. Your grandma’s role is to see the final product and say WOW!

Another great gem in the article is the mention of Agile development practices. I believe that management should embrace parts of Agile into their business practices not only in their software development cycles. Agile processes for developers can be difficult to get used to but they can be trained and they can understand the value rather quickly. There is a big difference between talking Agile and doing Agile. Specially for marketers that are used to heavy duty enterprise level project management, Agile is difficult to adopt as it means a change in culture that they need to drive.

Although the thinking about social media is evolving, most companies continue to consider a social media presence to be only about pushing out “the message” to a thirsty audience. That is not the case and arguably it has never been. Companies that want to control the message or that the marketing thinking is around attempting to control the message via social media are destined to lure around obscurity in the social media landscape. Remember, you can shape the opinion that people have about your brand but you can never be truly successful at building an emotional connection between your users and our brand if you want to control.  Don’t control, participate!

There is no question about it. If you are running an internet business then you are struggling to find the right  revenue model to apply. It is a very tough question since the decision you make will have long lasting impact in your business and growth strategy. The path you choose will deeply influence the company culture and the performance drivers through which people are measured.  It will shape how your competitors evolve around you and how potential investors see you.  Most importantly, it will shape your company’s vision, purpose and execution.

Reinvention, fascination and inspiration. Three words that kept coming up on a recent post by Fred Wilson. Fred was talking about Urban Architects and how they think and what drives them. But what caught my eye was not the glitzy applications they are building but the words they used to describe  their ideas and goals. Words that thrown into the wind mean nothing, but when they lead to resilient product development they have tremendous albeit unmeasured and unproved revenue opportunities.

Free can give a business the openness of mind that it needs to get to the next level. Paid can limit the evolution of that thinking.  One cannot but wonder how far can some companies go if they would think about the value of their service on a different way. Look at Mint for example. A company that took an established personal finance model and made it free and reinvented the revenue stream. It sold to Intuit for $170 Million.

Free is scary. From the early days of Linux and its validation through the birth of Red Hat. Free can also become an excuse that explains why a business is failing. For instance, Sun Microsystems arguably has the wrong combination of Free. As Seth Godin says in his wonderfully short and deep post about free, “I think it’s dangerous and often fatal to put free on top of an existing business model. Things fall apart.”

Free is not for every company but it can certainly be a tool that you can use to rethink your business and to find different revenue models that don’t involve locking your thinking and innovation around charging a few bucks a month for a service.

A fairly new group of outspoken and knowledgeable Latinos has come into the social media scene. Given the power and influence that the Latino community is commanding in mainstream culture, this is a trend worth noting for corporations, retail and services marketers. As Louis Pagan from LatISM.org (Latinos in Social Media) notes, with 21 million Latino internet users, Latinos In Social Media (@latism) serves as a voice and establishes a presence.  We are unprecedented and seek to pave the way for Latinos who are now proven to be the most tech-savvy and innovative demographic on the internet today.

The awareness of cultural skills in at the workplace has been relegated to a secondary status for too long. Since corporations live in a virtual and global business environment, managers expect people with similar skills to be interchangeable. While that is liberating for employees, the missed opportunity of not using the cultural knowledge combined with the skills of a worker is potentially a much larger loss for the corporation.

This is especially true in social media which is a social environment where people self-categorize based on many factors such as culture, business affinity and topic expertise. A company wanting to reach its audience needs to understand that the biggest opportunity lies in a depth and breath approach. Reaching to the wider audience is the first step of a proper social media campaign. Complementing this strategy with a targeted two-way conversation with undervalued niche markets such as the Latino market will ensure that your brand or service penetration continues to grow by creating relationships with under-served Latino audiences.

Here are some resources you can use to start learning more about this growing trend:

Twitter: @latism

Social networks:
Batanga: By far, the best designed and well thought out portal serving Latinos with relevant content (in this case music). This is the next step that very few sites targeting Latinos have taken. Unfortunately, many latino-oriented websites are stuck in Web 1.0

Portals:

Hispanics in Philanthropy (HIP)
Latinos in Information Sciences and Technology Association (LISTA)
hispanicbusiness.com
Welcome to the Latinas in Computing Web Portal.

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Search is evolving and you need to improve your Search Engine Marketing programs to keep up with competition and demand. Here are seven points that you should analyze about your SEM agency to be sure they can properly address your needs. Also, remember to always look beyond the sales pitch as many agencies have polished the sales pitch to reflect what you want to hear as opposed to what they truly offer.

1. Professional and speedy customer service.

Real-time communication is here. Make use of it and make your customers part of the experience.

2. Knowledge of the client’s target market.

The client expects you to be knowledgeable in the market vertical they compete. If you are not an expert then talk to the client more often.

3. Being pro-active and flexible in your strategy.

Don’t wait for the client to tell you that a keyword is flying off the handle and spending too much. Monitor the performance and come to me with ideas and data. I care more if you tell me whether we are reaching and surpassing our business objectives.

4. API connectivity.

There is just no way around it. I believe there is not business case that can support not having Google Adwords API connectivity for your app, is there?

5. Thought leadership.

Clients are hiring your agency  to teach them and educate and to have interesting conversations on how to use the channel more efficiently. Yes, I do realize that a lot of times [the client] seem rather obsessive about minute things but the reason is that they are trying to learn and most of the time this is all new to them. The agency needs to lead the way and show the opportunity ahead.

In some cases, your client might be years behind the market leaders in terms of knowledge and experience, but if you apply resources, hard work and a well thought out strategy, your clients should be able to catch up pretty quickly to the market leaders.

6. Global presence.

An increasingly important point is to have true global knowledge and presence. Large companies are going to demand that you have a presence wherever they are. If your company is not lean and flexible enough to adapt to these demands quickly, you might see your client target pool shrinking.

7. Be creative.

If you want your company to be a great company, allow your people to be creative, to think out of the box and to stay ahead of the market so that you can beat competitors. Search Engine Marketing is a data-driven field and encouraging and practicing creativity can be challenging. However, you have the blessing of data which allows you to test your creativity and realize whether you are right or wrong very quickly.

Although data is comforting, you need to make sure you are looking at the right data. You need to play by the rules and then learn how to break them. That’s the beauty of SEM.  It not only it levels the playing field, but if you apply a disciplined approach to innovation, a boost in campaign performance will follow.

Now try convincing a human that you are number 1 or the right person for the job. That’s slightly more difficult, depending on the person of course. That’s why social media represents a harder challenge than search. Here are some considerations and key differences between building a corporate or personal presence without a strong social component.

  1. In social media you can’t pay your way to the top.

    • At least not for long. In search, if you are a well-funded business you can pay your way to the top eliminating the human filter completely.

  2. A search engine is for the most part “dumb”.

    With the adequate (white hat) pieces you can put together the puzzle and feed the ensemble to the search engine. Since most websites do it wrong,  you have a good chance at getting some of those highly coveted top positions

  3. Social media is powered by humans.

    Human passion drives leaders and spammers. That is then used as a filter and as a powerful influencing channel that can be a curse or a blessing for a brand.

  4. SEO can be done in isolation.

    Collaboration with the subject matter expert (SME) is key but the SEO steps can be implemented by the SEO guru who maintains a set of static assumptions and answers (meta information) that are then fed through an equation to the search engine. Thus the SME need not to be involved any longer

  5. Social media presence needs to be represented by the SME directly

    If not directly, then the involvement and collaboration with the Social Media expert needs to be constant and inmediate. To be successful the communication needs to be clear, constant and the knowledge always improving.

  6. Having a website without a real-time social component is like having a bakery with the “out to lunch” sign on all the time.

    Your business needs to interact with your customers in any way possible in order to satisfy their expectations.