@BasilPuglisi

Content & Strategy, Powered by Factics & AI, Since 2009

Business Coach

Professional Spotlight: Robert Basso

by Leave a Comment

On Tuesday, November 15th, a group of everyday entrepreneurs who have proven track records from building their own successes, came together to share how they had achieved those goals on their own terms.

Some attendees included:

  • Joe Corcoran, Founder of Joe Corcoran Productions
  • Selena Cuffe, President of Heritage Link Brands
  • Jeff Hoffman, Co-founder of Priceline.com family of companies
  • Steve Davies, President, The Alternative Board – Nassau
  • David Becker, President, PhilippeBecker

Robert Basso, the author of The Everyday Entrepreneur, is a well-recognized business leader and advocate. With an entrepreneurs eye for spotting opportunities, Rob has a long list of achievements from founding investor in Empire National Bank to owner of Advantage Payroll Services. Rob frequently contributes on Fox Business as well as other national programming such as Entrepreneur. Rob has also submitted to interviews with USA Today, AP, and CNN Money. Rob also hosts a web program called Basso on Business which features businesses and entrepreneurs.

The Everyday Entrepreneur

The Everyday Entrepreneur is loaded with powerful strategies and important objectives for defining, setting, and achieving goals for your own entrepreneurial success. Revealing how its readers can learn to apply their own ambitions to their desired goals and gain an understanding on how to proceed on their own, this book provides realistic goal setting ideas that can lead to successes that may have eluded you so far.

The Everyday Entrepreneur is unique from other available books on the market in that it supplies palpable entrepreneurial strategies for business owners. The contributions of The Everyday Entrepreneur allows for business owners to build their own wealth, financial freedom, and success regardless of age.

In The Everyday Entrepreneur, Basso explores other innovative entrepreneurs like himself and discovers what encouraged each one of them to push the limits and find their own genuine successes on their own terms.

You can also expect to learn:

  • Valuable lessons regarding how to drive business growth
  • How to best hone entrepreneurial instincts
  • How to reawaken your sense of adventure in your business endeavors

So much more is covered here but we can’t share it all. The Everyday Entrepreneur provides a roadmap allowing readers to follow the success stories of a variety of individuals who all hail from very diverse backgrounds. Take a walk with Basso as he shares the stories of each entrepreneur while they find the answers to achieving their own successes and surpassing goals unimagined.

My Take on Robert Basso

In a room full of professionals this picture speaks but a touch of the moment and what Robert Basso conveyed as an Entrepreneur, Professional and Parent. At the start of the event Robert thanked a few people, something you expect from most at such an event, but the moment to see Robert’s character came forward when he called his children to the front of the room.

“You might not quite understand this yet, but it’s my hope that you will someday” Robert Basso told his two children.

A moment that was so passionately about a father conveying an important message to his children that he had to be instructed and nudged by others to turn so they could get the photos they wanted. One could try and say that this was possibly staged, but if you had seen it first hand, you’d know the sincerity was without question.

My short interaction with Robert leaves little to argue about the long term experience of knowing or doing business with this professional, but if how he cares and treats his family is any indication, then clearly he is a professional worth knowing.

THE EVERYDAY ENTREPRENEUR

Published by John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

Publication date: October 24, 2011

$24.95; Cloth; 175 pages; ISBN: 978-1-118-10644-0

Sources:

What Could Be Better Than a Weekend in Vegas? A Free Weekend in Vegas @Palms

by Leave a Comment

How about a weekend in Vegas that you do not have to pay for? Usually I am a firm believer in ‘if it sounds too good to be true, it likely is,’ but not this time, not at Palms Casino and Resort in Las Vegas. In opposition of those many ideas that were in fact, too good to be true, Palms has determined that tapping out a Tweet or sharing Palms offers with your friends may make this a very legit opportunity to reap huge rewards for very little effort. 

Of course, if Facebook sharing or Twitter usage is too much work for you, this may not be the ideal opportunity either, but if it sounds doable, continue on.

Easy Registration

Users simply visit the Palms Social Rewards site and enter their email address, along with a chosen password. The next page offers quick click integration with the users Twitter account, and they are off and running. Once signing into the social rewards page, users will then be able to see their current Klout scores, along with available points, and account profile options. On the right-hand side, there will be many offers and opportunities that can be Tweeted, re-Tweeted, or even Facebook shared.

While users get points for each offer they Tweet or share, they also receive the added benefit of bonus points if their Tweet or Share leads to a purchase of one of the advertised opportunities.

Rewards Vs Effort

Aside from the primitive reward of getting something spectacular for very little effort, are the rewards that Palms generously doles out to those who help spread their word on social media networking sites.

  • Free Deluxe Room
  • Free Fantasy Tower Room
  • 2 Tickets to a Playboy Comedy
  • Palms VIP Passes
  • Dinner for Two at Simon – Little Buddha
  • Free Drinks

These are fairly hefty rewards considering that they entail everything you require for a fun weekend in Vegas, all the way down to your room and drinks. Meanwhile, users are building their Klout score which in the future may help them reap even further rewards once reaching the check-in desk at the Palms.

Maloof just gets it…

The Palms is a Maloof Company, and clearly they get it…

AdrienneMaloof seems to be the one carrying the Klout in the social aspect of the business, but with Klout adding LinkedIn and soon Foursquare, the Klout social influence may have a new look.

The Maloof Companies owns and operates hotels and casinos. It also engages in banking, food and beverage, and transportation businesses in New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada. In addition, the company operates gaming properties; owns interests in NBA basketball team Sacramento Kings and the WNBA basketball team Sacramento Monarchs, as well as ARCO Arena; and distributes beer and liquor in New Mexico. The company is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Disclosure: I recently was a guest at Palms Casino & Resort in Las Vegas, however I was not paid or compensated for this publication in any form. The research for this article came about as a follow up to a previous set of articles.
  1. Klout Measures You Clout On LinkedIn Social Business Network
  2. A look at how important Twitter is to customer service: Palms Casino, Las Vegas

Sources:

Publishing: A New E Book Revolution?

by Leave a Comment

Mike Matas: A next-generation digital book

The popularity of e books is undeniable. According to the BBC, the use of e books in the UK has quadrupled in 2010. What started with Amazon’s Kindle and continued with other publisher producing their own version, like Nook from Barnes and Noble, has gotten a tremendous push with the introduction of the iPad and the smartphone apps. Now you can have all your reading material on one portable device that can play videos as well.

Most of the e books still look like books, letters on a page, flipped with a drag of the finger, except the children’s books which have become somewhat interactive, as paper children books have been. Apparently it is easy for 3 year olds to figure out the interactive buttons on the iPad.

How about fully interactive books for adults? That is what Mike Matas presented at a TED conference in Long Beach, CA. in March 2011.  The young developer, who while at Apple, helped design the user interface and artwork of leading Apple products, has shown a demonstration of the first full length interactive book for the iPad.  The company he co-founded with Melcher Media, Push Pop Press, has presented a book called “Our Choice” by Al Gore, a sequel to “An inconvenient Truth”.

This is a book that takes advantage of everything today’s technology has to offer. It starts as a regular written page, with pictures. You can choose which page you want to see by scoring fast through the pages at the bottom. When you want to look closely at the pictures, you can pinch them out of their place and see them full screen. Then you pinch them down and put them back into the book.

The innovation continues when those pictures become narrated videos, which open and close instantly, without loading time. “Our Choice” has over one hour of documentary and interactive animation material throughout the book. Pinch it closed and put it back on the page, or keep it at the bottom for later view. All the photos are narrated as well. Some of them have interactive maps. And while it is playing you can scale it down and continue reading, you can zoom out and see where in the world the photo has been taken etc. You want to find more information about a statistic you read? Swipe right ahead to Google Earth and see how it will impacts different parts of the world, country by country. It has real interactive infographics, and an actual interaction that has been seen on the iPhone and iPad. When you blow on the side of the screen, it moves a wind turbine on screen that shows how much electri city is produced by the wind you are creating. In short – it makes the book come alive with all pertinent information about the subject, and a lot of interesting facts.

And the books are really portable. You can start reading at home on an iPad and continue where you left off on your iPhone, with all those wonderful features on a small screen.

Can you image how much fun reading and learning can be? Many smaller charter schools are already introducing tablets in their classrooms. How long will it be before the students backpacks will be thin and easy to carry?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV-RvzXGH2Y]

 

Sources:

ICANN: Domain Dispute?

by Leave a Comment

The Following Article was published in response to a issue raised in with two Real Estate brands in the Hamptons. It is issues like these that are at the heart of this publication and its mission. “It is my hope that when someone isn’t sure about digital media or the information that has been presented to them, they can turn to this blog as a source to verify or self educate so that they can make better more informed decisions”.

Saunders to Give Back Two Domain Names to Non-Saunders Agents published in 27East.com

ICANN – Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

To reach another person or a company on the internet you have to type a name or a number as an address into your computer. This address has to be unique so computers can find each other. Who regulates it and decides on a uniform system? Who decides who owns what?

From the start there were a few known addresses called top level domain (TLD); .COM, .NET, .ORG, .EDU and endings which denote countries: .UK, .FR, .LI (Libya) or .IL (Israel).  These are called country code top level domains.

Up until September 1998, the United States Government completely controlled the system. The entity which supervised the internet was called IANA – Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

As the internet grew and became more commercial and wide spread, the US control became increasingly untenable. The Clinton Administration was looking for a way to make the governance of the domain system global and free.  One option was to hand over control to the UN, and indeed the UN pushed to have that authority under its International Telecommunication’s Union, but the Clinton Administration decided to privatize the domain name governance. It did so to keep the web’s critical system away from political influence and stifling bureaucrats.

The ICANN – Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a non-profit corporation was established. It was commissioned to oversee a number of internet related issues; managing the internet protocol address, assigning regional internet registries for countries, maintaining registries of internet protocol identifiers, management of top level domain names space and introduction of new generic top-level domains. Their principles call for helping preserve the operational stability of the internet, promote competition, and have a broad representation of the global internet community.

ICANN is located in Marina Del Ray, California, and remains in the same building where it started at the University of Southern California. Jon Postel who thought about an entity like that and was set to be the first CTO, died unexpectedly at the age of 55 before he saw it come to life.

At present ICANN is managed by a board of directors, composed of six representatives of sub groups that deal with specific section of the ICANN charter. They are supported by 3 organizations: the Generic Names Supporting Organization who deals with policy regarding generic top level domain, the County Code Names Support Organization and the Address Supporting Organization who deals with policy on IP addresses. There are advisory committees on different subjects like risk, finance, global relationships, IANA and structural improvements.

ICANN doesn’t control content and it can’t stop spam. It does not deal with access to the internet.

ICANN holds public meetings rotated between continents to encourage global participation in its processes. The resolutions, reports, and minutes of meetings are published on the ICANN website. In September 2006, ICANN signed a new agreement with the US Department of Justice for another 5 years.

Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy

One task the ICANN was asked to do is ownership dispute resolution for generic top level domains. Together with the World Intellectual Property Organization it drafted a policy that is known as Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy. This policy attempts to provide a mechanism for a fast, cheap and reasonable resolution of domain name conflicts, avoiding the traditional court system and relying on arbitration. According to their policy a domain registrant agrees, when he signs the domain contract, to be bound by the resolution of the arbitration.

The UDRP currently applies to .BIZ, .COM, .INFO, .NAME, .NET and .ORG and some country code top-level domains.

A complaint has to establish 3 elements:

  1. The domain name is confusingly similar or identical to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has the right to.
  2. The registrant has no right or legitimate interest in the domain name.
  3. The registration was done in “bad faith”.

A single arbitrator or a panel of three arbitrators  will consider factors such as whether the domain was registered in order to be resold, rented or transferred to the owner of the trademark; whether the domain name was registered to prevent the owner from  registering corresponding domain name, whether it was registered primarily for the purpose of disrupting a competitor or whether, by using the domain name, the registrant attempted to attract internet users for commercial gain, creating a likelihood or confusion.

Those services come at a price; from $1,500 for a single arbitrator to $5,000 for a panel. A very long list of the disputes brought to them is published on their wesite.

Much of the published arbitration has to do with famous cases: Madonna v. Dan Parisi who registered the domains MadonnaCiccone.com and Madonna.com. He was ordered to turn over the domain names to Madonna.

Robert de Niro claimed ownership for all domain names that include the word Tribeca plus any content related to the film festival. His dispute was with a domain called Tribeca.net. Rihanna.com came up for sale and the legal team of the singer filed a UDRP. Other famous arbitrations were conducted regarding ElitrModels.com, WWF.com and AirDeccan.com. All the information about procedures and timelines can be found here: http://www.icann.org/en/udrp/udrp.htm

There are other entities approved by ICANN which provide UDRP services: World Intellectual Property Organization, National Arbitration Forum, Asian Domain Name Dispute Resolution Centre and the Czech Arbitration Court Arbitration Center for Internet Disputes.

All their sites detail the procedures, timelines and prices.

Sources:

Small Business Solutions: vSplash

by Leave a Comment

VSplash.com offers web design for small businesses so they can have an efficient website and a noticeable online presence to be able to reach their potential customers.

 

These are the issues vSplash helps small businesses tackle:

  • The look of the website – The website should be unique and contain 4-12 pages. It shouldn’t look like a template that other businesses use.
  • Some small businesses need e commerce capabilities with an online store that should reflect the kind of business they are running. They will set it up for the business.
  • The interface should be user friendly.
  • Content management system (CMS) allows the business website owner manage the page content.
  • Search Engine optimization (SEO) is important because it influences the online visibility.
  • Domain names and hosting is part of the overall offering.

They offer all those services so your business will be presented in an intuitive manner with ease and enjoyment for the user.

The sites they build are affordable and the customers can have the finished product in a relatively short period of time.

vSplash.com is recognized as one of the leading web design firms in India and is in operation in France, UK, USA, Singapore, Greece, Canada, Korea and UAE. Their customers are companies of all sizes ranging from small startups to large companies who needed a professional internet solution to generate revenue, establish communication channels and streamline business operations. The majority of their clients are from Europe and North America.

Sources:

Why Every Small Business Should Go Online

by Leave a Comment

Why a Small Business should go Online: Ways Your Offline Business Can Benefit from an Online Presence

Although it may be hard for some of the ‘old timers’ regardless of age, to understand how much it can be of benefit, there is no doubt that it would be a very rare offline business that could not benefit from an online web presence.

Here are a few ways a business owner could benefit immediately.

Broader Target Market

Obviously, advertising on the internet is going to bring in a much larger geographical market than remaining offline and using offline advertising methods such as billboards, newspapers and local discount promotions. Custom product orders online can rake in big money for businesses in most any niche.

No Need to Rely on Foot Traffic

One of the biggest killers of business can be the lack of foot traffic on location. A bad location even for the best business can sometimes spell big trouble. Opening up your digital foot traffic is the same as opening any other flood gate, you never know exactly how much is going to flow in, but it will definitely be a lot more than simple location traffic generates.

This can be an incredible benefit for seasonal businesses. Does your business sell pool accessories in middle America? If so your foot traffic likely grinds to a halt in the winter months. Fortunately, people in Florida and other southern states as well as the lower west coast can still enjoy summer-like temperatures year round. This means putting your business online will turn your company from a seasonal entity, to a year-round production.

Affiliate Marketing

The best way to understand affiliate marketing for those who are entirely unfamiliar is to imagine having a full-time salesperson to sell your products for you, 24/7/365. Although these affiliates will likely work on a commission basis, you should also have the option to choose a flat rate per sale that should meet your profit-loss requirement needs.

Ease of Communication

Although some who do not use computers often may be intimidated by communications with users via online methods there is nothing to fill. Regardless of the rumors, the internet is not full of ranting loonies anymore than anywhere else is, and you are likely to have good communications with your online users, since they are going to be coming to you, for the product or service you have to offer. Not to mention that this eliminates loads of sales pressure as well.

Permanent Business Card

Your website will serve as a permanent business card. Permanent in the fact that it is there, once set up, forever. However, your website can always be updated or upgraded at will and the only limitations you are likely to deal with are those of your own imagination.

A business owner can also provide much of their products and services information on their web site which will greatly reduce their need to continually repeat the same product pricing or services options.

Paperless

This should be enough said. It is paperless. Forget the rainforests if you like, but removing your paper needs from your business will save more money per year than you may think. Many customers are now satisfied with paper billing. This also gives you an additional option of paperless advertising in such forms as email campaigns.

Automatic Statistics

One of the greatest things about getting a new website is the ability to set it up to track any and all of your traffic. This can give business owners a whole new perspective on who is browsing their wares and from where.

Optional Revenue

Once you have a site that generates traffic, you may have other options to increase your income outside of selling your products or services. Selling banners and other links on websites are common methods for networking as well as generating money simply for owning a well traveled site.

Related Past Blogs:

Sources:

Facebook Marketing Tool: Involver.com

by Leave a Comment

Noah Horton and Rahim Fazal founded Involver.com in 2007 in efforts to provide a startup that can help brands begin to get a grip on managing their social media channels. Having grown from a company of a dozen employees to over sixty with many offices in areas such as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Austin, and with more coming soon, it looks like Involver, is in fact, fully involved, with no plans of leaving any time soon.

Involver has four main ways in which they help companies and organizations create rich and helpful experiences all across the social web.

  1. Involver helps to generate earned media by attracting attention from influential sources.
  2. Involver helps to get prospective customers engaged with your products and services through social networks.
  3. Involver can help to reduce marketing cost through a series of fully automated social networking services.
  4. Involver helps to maintain constant and consistent branding and advertisement for your products and services.

This kind of brand management can be critical to a company and its ultimate success online. Those who use Involver will also want to take advantage of the features offered in the applications area.

Flickr

You can bring all of your Flickr photos to Facebook with the Flickr App from Involver. This will allow users to stream their Flickr photos displaying their entire album, or allows users to choose sub albums to categorize their photo streams.

YouTube Channels

You can set your video to directly deliver to your social networks upon uploading. This will help incorporate your YouTube videos into your active marketing campaigns.

With so many more applications available there are bound to be at least a handful of ways to improve your social media interactions in Involvers many apps.

  • Facebook Stories
  • Social Catalog
  • RSS Feed
  • Promotion Galleries
  • Music Player
  • Polls
  • Coupons
  • Static HTML for Pages

Many more apps available make this attractive and professional option in social media marketing and product or service branding an invaluable tool in the likely already full bag of marketers tricks of the trade.

Get 10,000 Fans on Facebook

“It was in November of 2010 that my train baseball fan page had reached 10,000 fans and I decided that I would finally start a business that aimed at helping other small businesses like you get off the ground using tools like Facebook. So this is where things sit today. I’m 24 years old, and get a pretty neat opportunity to help out small businesses make better use of facebook.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mFBa3QVD2Q]

Sources:

What is a Creative Commons License?

by Leave a Comment

With so much business being conducted online these days, it has become imperative to have methods to protect and copyright our works in a manner just as remote as how it was posted. Regardless of whether your work is writing, photography, or even coding or programming, you will want a means to ensure that regardless of what happens with those items, you are given credit for producing them.

When you apply for a Creative Commons license you can keep the copyright to your work, while allowing others to copy or distribute you work, as long as they give you proper credit, on the conditions you get to specify. You may choose to offer your work freely with no desire for crediting, or you may determine exactly the manner in which you want to be credited regardless of its use.

There are some more reputable websites that can help you to create your licensing for your work.

CreativeCommons.org  is an example of a reputable licensing site. You are able to choose a license and once done they will provide you with an HTML tag that will list your work as copyright restricted. However, CreativeCommons is not a registrar and will not retain records of your selections.

Flickr.com also offers create commons licensing and the format to help you protect your work. Flickr and CreativeCommons both have things in common. Their licensing types mirror one another perfectly.

CreativeCommons offers the following licensing options.

  • Attribution: An attribution license will let others tweak, change, build on, remix, distribute or otherwise alter your work, they also have to credit you for the original creation in the manner you request.
  • Attribution NoDerivatives: This particular license allows for commercial and non-commercial use, as well as redistribution, however, it must remain unchanged and all credit must go to you.
  • Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike: Like Attribution, users can tweak, alter, build on and distribute, however, they must credit you and license their own product or creation under identical terms.
  • Attribution ShareAlike: An attribution sharealike license will allow others to alter, tweak and otherwise build upon your original work for commercial purposes. They must however, credit you and license their own agreement under the same terms.
  • Attribution NonCommercial: Others can tweak, alter, rebuild or build upon your work for non-commercial purposes. Any new works should acknowledge the original creator and also be non-commercial.
  • Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives: The most restrictive license, this one only allows others to download or otherwise save your works and even share them with others as long as you are properly credited. This license does not permit users to alter your original creation in any way.

If you are new to creative commons licensing it may be important to read up before making the decision on your license choices.

This is also likely to be one part of your copyright policy and protection practices, an example of how this is used as part of a policy or image see: Copyright Info

Sources:

What is the SxSW? Why Would I attend?

by Leave a Comment

What is SXSW?

The SXSW, or the South by Southwest festival and conferences, regularly offers a widely diverse group of entertainment seekers the opportunity to find independent films, original music, and even up-to-date, and up-and-coming technologies.  

SXSW for Entertaining Marketing

Marketing is, of course, always targeted to those who can use a business’s products or services the most. The SXSW harbors the atmosphere for creating growth for creative and professional discovery for any and all ages and a large array of niches.

This huge pool of ideas in creative content, media presentations and musical and audio content can provide many opportunities for businesses and even for social media promotion.

How Can Business and Social Media Persons Benefit from SXSW?

The great thing is that the complex diversity of presentations during SXSW also provides a complex and diverse, almost limitless, list of marketing options.

First of all, this set of events is highly anticipated by many, giving any business person loads of time, indeed a year if needed, to plan their business and marketing strategies, and execute them intermittently.

Second, the opportunity for networking your business, its products and services, as well as its capabilities relevant to as many niches as your business caters to, is immense. This is definately the place to bring your impressive business cards, flyers, newsletters and all related material to show off and shine.

Third, you can freely sit in on some informative and highly motivational discussions and group sessions that will feature some of the leaders in the industries’ who have much wisdom to impart on any listeners.

With over 36,000 industry representatives at SXSW, you are sure to find some great new ideas to carry home to promote your own ventures, or even to delve into new ones.

Trade Show Exhibition Opportunities

Does your business directly correlate with one of the industries covered at the SXSW conferences? If you have products or services to offer the interactive, music, and film industries, than you may very well have a place as a Trade Show Representative. This could mean big business, big promotion and plain old enormous marketing capabilities, four days worth.

What Type of Business Does SXSW Need?

They need anyone from the newest start-up business with innovative ideas, to established companies and brands. Anyone who has an industry targeting studios, film, music and technology education, marketing agencies, associations, commissions and all related non-profits. Additionally there is also room at SXSW for:

  • SEO or other Marketing Services
  • Software and Hardware Manufacturers and Creators
  • Hosting and Infrastructure Providers
  • Social Media Services
  • Media Outlets

It may help to draw a more detailed conclusion on who and what types of businesses are the current exhibitors. As once you have full understanding of the types of industries allotted space at SXSW, you may actually discovery a new aspect of your own business or services’ possibilities.

Source:

Facebook Success Stories

by Leave a Comment

We have heard and read a lot about Facebook, about its 500 million users, about it overtaking Google as the most visited site per day. But what does it have to do with your small business? Those businesses who don’t have a department for social media? Can Facebook help small businesses expend above and beyond what they could have done with traditional advertisement?

Facebook enables business owners reach their targeted audience. With users profile information posted and open for all to see, with details about their hometown, relationship and employment status, interests, religious affiliation, education and favorite books , TV shows and movies – small businesses  can target their potential customers.

Here are some success stories from different walks of life:

Sprinkles Cupcakes – Los Angeles. A small cupcake store opened in Los Angeles. To get the word around, the owners, both former investment bankers, turned to Facebook. Every day they post a ‘code word’ on their page and give a free cupcake to the first 50 customers who whisper that word. Their fan base grew and they now have 254,785 followers and branches in other cities across the US. “Be patient with it.” Mr. Nelson, one of the owners, advises. ”People are not going to flock to your social media site overnight. Technology is about the network effect. It takes time for those connections to build.”

Wedding Photography – Mr. Meyer is a wedding photographer from Woodbury, Minnesota. He had very little luck with traditional advertising. A full page ad in a bridal magazine didn’t bring any new clients, and a trade show yielded only 4 bookings, not even covering the cost of the booth. So he turned to Facebook. Aiming at women ages 22-28 who listed their status as “engaged” in the Minneapolis – St Paul area, he connected with them and offered to join his page. Mr. Meyer estimates he spent about $300 on Facebook ads in the past 2 years and has generated about $60,000 in business. The majority of his clients now come from Facebook, either from ads or from recommendations.

Equine Dentist – Mr. Geoff Tucker from Palm City, Florida, has a very specific business. He’s a dentist for horses. His business is driven by word of mouth and personal recommendations. People like to do business in his profession with people they know and Facebook allowed him to express himself and let people know him. That led to appearances in a magazine, radio and TV. Over the past year, he estimates, Facebook has generated about 100 leads and 10-15 new customers he would not have had without a page on Facebook.

SteelMaster – of Norfolk Va. deals with steel structures.  About a year and half ago they decided to go on Facebook. What does a steel company do on a social media? They found that posting pictures of their constructions is very helpful. Not only do the pictures engage existing customers, they demonstrate to potential customers what the company can do in other areas. In this case, chicken farmers and woodworkers that usually don’t think about using steel structures, suddenly showed interest. It opened a new market for SteelMaster which they didn’t have before.

Neenah Paper – the manufacturer of high quality paper products found it extremely hard to reach new customers. Their traditional ways of making business, phone conversations and personal meetings, were not working very well. Since most of their customers; designers, graphic artists and printers spend a lot of time on their computers, they thought that social media can provide a better way to engage them. Today they have 10 sales representatives across the country and their business is on the upswing. “Social media is an invitation to have a conversation. You’re getting permission to have a conversation – a conversation that used to happen in person.” says Jamie Saunders, Neenah’s marketing manager.

Sources: