BlueTie Blog

Marketing Voices: Free Marketing Podcasts from the Experts

Marketing Voices is a site where you can listen to podcasts on marketing from some of the top experts including Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Regis McKenna and others. There's a lot of information on this site. You can put them in your iPod or MP3 player or burn them on CD and listen on your way to work or while traveling. They also offer printed transcripts.

More Business Ideas From the Web

Most start-up experts will tell you that ideas are a dime a dozen- it is execution that attracts their attention. Nevertheless, a great business concept and a great plan for turning that concept into a business is the formula for success when starting your own business.

Whether you're looking for your great idea or seeking ways to make it happen now, here's some recent web articles that can help:

• The 20 smartest companies to start now. Business 2.0 went around and asked venture capitalists and successful entrepreneurs what kind of companies they'd like to see. Then they went further and asked how much capital they would commit to a great team with a great plan to create those businesses. I'm guessing there are a lot of hungry entrepreneurs working on these ideas- you could be one!
• Can a cartoonist who draws his toons on the back of business cards offer value to a new business owner? He can if he's Hugh MacLeod and he's writing about How To Be Creative. Highly motivational and the real thing.
• Are you a freelancer or independent contractor? Like working from your local Starbucks or on the road? Web Worker Daily is a blog that covers all the issues you deal with daily- staying organized, procrastination, collaborating at a distance (shameless plug: BlueTie is a great collaboration tool that can really liberate an independent worker!)
• Trying to raise money? AskTheVC is just what it says- a site where venture capitalists explain the arcane aspects of their business.

The beauty of the world we're in now is that incredible tools and information sources are at your fingertips. Any new business owner owes it to themselves to get out there and take advantage of these resources. Stay tuned for more ...

Naming Your Business, Product or Service

We get asked a lot about where the BlueTie name came from. The story, as I understand it, is that our (then) 19 year old CEO was in a board meeting in 1999 during BlueTie's start-up phase. They were discussing names and one of the older board members looked at David's bright blue tie and said, 'these days you can name a company anything- you could call it BlueTie'. And so they did.

In hindsight, that was a very lucky decision. Anyone trying to create a unique and marketable name for a business or product these days knows it is extremely difficult yet extremely important to your success. The right name is unique, memorable, non-descriptive (more on that in a minute) and available both as a trademark and a web URL. If the names you're looking at don't fit these basic criteria, they won't cut it.

So why can't you use descriptive words for naming? You can and should if you're operating a local business and using your own name in the business name, i.e. Smith and Smith, Attorneys. But If you're selling business email to a global market you wouldn't want to call yourself Business Email, Inc. because you cannot protect a descriptive name via trademarks and you're extremely unlikely to get a web address even close to this name.

This conumdrum is why we see so many start-ups with funny made-up words for names like Squidoo which tell us nothing about their business (Squidoo has something to do with publicizing blogs). They pick a name and hope it's memorable and that they can market it into recognition.

So how do you pick a name? You could use a naming consultancy but that it going to cost you thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars (I kid you not). My advice is to get creative, do some word play and keep the Internet handy to see if your ideas are taken. And be patient- this is something you need to get right. Remember, once you have a web address, that's your storefront to the world and everytime you send an email via BlueTie your customers will be reminded of that address.

Here's two online resources for finding URLs:

Interactively Search for Domains

and to search for Trademarks:

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)

Here's a final tip: Your trademark only has to be unique to your type of business. A company called Lure-It that sells fishing lures could file a trademark even if another company called Lure-It that did business lead generation had the same name. It's not a conflict when there is little likelihood of creating confusion among consumers. In any case, no matter what name you choose, get some legal and marketing advice before you fully commit to it.

Marketing Sherpa Wisdom Report

Marketing Sherpa, the online marketing resource, has just published their 2007 Marketing Sherpa Wisdom Report- it's a free 60 page PDF download. Over 100 marketers from companies large and small share their wisdom, learning experiences and tips for enhancing your online marketing (and if you don't knopw much about online marketing this is a great place to start- sign up for the free Marketing Sherpa newsletter). Even one of these ideas could mean serious new business for your company, so check it out!

Work Anywhere

It's that time of year when all the bloggers post their prediction lists on everything from global warming to the latest tech gadget. We think this is going to be the year of Work Anywhere, a trend that gets predicted every year but has not turned into something that affects small businesses as a whole. Until now.

To have a Work Anywhere business you need to be providing some kind of expert services rather than physical services. If you sell things you can also have a Work Anywhere biz. So why do we think this business model will hit its stride in '07?

Here's a few reasons:

• Bandwidth, wi-fi and EVDO. Its getting harder and harder to be somewhere where you can't connect and connect fast. This is critical to the Work Anywhere model.
• SaaS. Software as a Service is what BlueTie does- we provide you with a communication, collaboration and organization suite you can access anywhere from any computer. In the past year I've logged into my BlueTie account in an Internet cafe in Paris, a hotel room in NYC, in a conference in SF, at my friend's camp in the Adirondacks...and, regardless of where I log in or what machine I'm using, there's all my stuff: email, calendar, people, files. I don't need to be in my office or my home office at all. And I can see my co-workers presence online, IM (with BlueTie Pro), email, etc. I might as well be across the hall.
• A big change in understanding how to motivate people. Best Buy's corporate offices now run on a radical new model: no set hours, no schedules, no required attendance. You have your work goals, your deadlines and your resources; you do the work any way that works for you. Productivity is up 30%. This was not a great leap of faith for their upper management. It started as a grassroots effort. Small workgroups heard about the model and surreptitiously started adopting it. By the time execs realized what was going on, the proponents had data and it was impossible to ignore.
• Timeshifting and placeshifting. This is an extension of the previous bullet. If you're a knowledge worker and you have the resources you need, why should you be constrained to work within a nine to five system that evolved from the need to take advantage of daylight? We've got lightbulbs!

Years ago there was a big buzz about 'virtual businesses'. The problem was that the tools to make these businesses work were in their infancy. Now with ubiquitous access, online resources and mobile communication you can run a business from anywhere, on your own terms.

Liberation 2007: Work Anywhere!

How to Innovate: 1 million ideas

"Innovation is trying to figure out a way to do something better than it's ever been done before"

David Neeleman, Founder and CEO, JetBlue

Toyota implements 1 million new ideas each year. That's over 3000 per day! To achieve this astounding level of innovation they have developed a culture of creativity based on elegant solutions, those which seek to constantly improve every aspect of what they do. Change This offers a manifesto by Matthew May on how Toyota built this culture of innovation. It's fascinating reading for even the smallest business owner and entrepreneur.

Lesson: Imperfection drives innovation

CRN Review: BlueTie Takes On Exchange

Today we received a very favorable review in CRN that focuses on the fact that, unlike many of our competitors, we are a business application, designed to be straightforward to use, easily managed and reliable. One of the great aspects of the review, from our POV, is the positioning of BlueTie as an alternative to Microsoft Exhange, the costly middle market messaging solution from the 10,000 lb gorilla. We set out eight years ago to provide small and medium size businesses with a real alternative to paying for racks of servers, licenses and ongoing service fees to keep those overly complex systems running. Reviews like this validate our vision!

Blogs for your Small and Growing Business

There are tons of resources for business owners on the web. But who has time to wade through them to find the good stuff- you know, information you can actually use? BlueTie works with thousands of small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs in market-speak) so we try to keep up on the best in ideas and examples. We'll be periodically posting online resources we find that can be a big help with the big job of running a small business.

Here's a few to get started:

• Duct Tape Marketing. Seat of the pants marketing advice.
• Guy Kawasaki. You've seen him here before. Particularly good for start-ups seeking VC money.
• Presentation Zen. We all have to give them- here's the zen of powerpoint advice.
• Start-up Review. Case studies of online start-ups.
• 43 Folders. How to be more productive.
• MIT Advertising Lab. The state of the art in oddball advertising technology with lots of creative ideas you can steal.
• Seth Godin. Design and usability guru. What does that mean? He deals with how you deal with your customers and how they perceive you.
• Search Engine Watch. If your business isn't online, it should be, even if you're serving a local market (especially if you're serving a local market!). Only 40% of SMBs in the US have web sites and most are not indexed by the search engines. Learn how to get yours ranked higher and you'll see a measurable increase in business.

Watch for more resources in the future.

10 ways to drive traffic to your business blog

Chances are if you are reading this blog, you either have a blog for your business or you're thinking about doing one. It's a very hot topic these days and one we avidly follow at BlueTie as we blog here. Getting started with a blog is easy- we use Typepad as our blogging platform and they make it very easy to get set up and start blogging.

Once you've got a blog you're faced with every blogger's dilemma: How do I get people to read this thing? Start by checking out Guy Kawasaki's great post on ten ways to drive traffic to your blog (and read him regularly for a lot of seriously useful business advice).

The keys to blog popularity: Content, content, content, linking. You need to post frequently, at least 3 times per week. Every blog on the Technorati Top 100 has at least 700 postings so volume is important. Next, blog about things your customers are interested in and provide as much value as possible. Help them be more successful and they'll stay loyal. Share your secrets and business intelligence.

Linking. Technorati measures popularity by how many links you have to your site from other relevant sites and how many outgoing links you have to other relevant sites. Note the italics on the word relevant- tons of random links from unrelated sites aren't going to help your search rankings.

Blogging is habit-forming, especially when you start to get interesting comments and links into your site. It's an organic way to connect your business with a community of interest which is always a good business model.

Update: Here's a completely different but very interesting view on what does and doesn't work in blogging from engtech.

Three Rules to Consider When Starting A New Business

Mark Cuban, owner of various media companies and the Mavericks NBA team offers his usual trenchant advice on pursuing an idea and creating a business around it. Here's his three rules:

1. Everyone is a Genius in a Bull Market

2. Win the Battles You are in Before You Take on New Battles

and

3. You Can Drown in Opportunity.

Great article here. Recommended reading for any business owner or entrepreneur.