Optimizing and Distributing your Videos

Pop Quiz: What is the 3rd biggest search engine?

Yahoo, Bing, AOL, MSN, ASK?

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Determine your Social Media Strategy

The appeal of social media is strong. According to Econsultancy, social media and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities, even beating out email. The mystery of social media is almost as great as it’s appeal, however.

There are a lot of social media terms thrown around these days, and sorting through all of the jargon can be tough. First, let’s differentiate between the “big three” social networks.

Facebook is a social network site that connects friends, family, and businesses. People can share updated statuses, pictures, personal information, links, and more. With more than 250 million users in the world, 120 million of which log on daily, there is a large market to reach here.

Twitter is another social network/micro-blog that allows users to to send and read messages (or “tweets”). Tweets can be up to 140 characters, and they are shared on your personal page and distributed to people who choose to “follow” you. In the last year, Twitter’s growth rate surpassed 1,000%. The potential here to reach customers is huge.

Wordpress is a personal publishing platform that works as a blogging service and as a web hosting service that is run on PHP code and a SQL data backend. Confused? Wordpress.com offers a free blog hosting service that requires no PHP code knowledge and a user friendly interface that allows easy updating, customization, and built in widgets to add to your blog. 77% of internet users actively follow and read blogs, so this platform also provides great opportunity to reach and engage potential customers. Wordpress isn’t the only blog hosting application out there; there is also Blogger, Vox, and more.

Now that we’ve covered some basics, let’s go into more depth…

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A Few Things I’ve Learned After Ten Years in Business

As mentioned in my previous post, this past week was CollegeXTRA.com, Inc.’s 10th birthday.  CollegeXTRA.com, Inc. is the corporate name of Union Street Media.  As a celebration of this milestone, I’d like to share with you a few of the things I’ve learned over the past ten years.

Easy money doesn’t exist but free lunches do

Running a business of twenty people requires a lot of cash and none of it comes easily.  Each month our sales team is responsible for generating well over a hundred thousand dollars.  To earn that money, our web development team needs to produce the work, which requires our product development team to create a scalable architecture for the sites.  Our internet marketing team needs get the sites up in the search engines so that our clients get the traffic to generate a return on their invest.  Our support team needs to keep the sites live, handle incoming phone calls and help clients with updates.  Our office manager extrodinaire needs to invoice for all of this work and then made sure we actually get paid for it.  This is fun, challenging and inspiring, but not easy.

However, there are free lunches.  I know because I used to buy them for people and now, on occasion, people buy them for me.  Maslow’s hierarchy of needs requires that we eat.  Every day.  Often three times.  I have used lunch as a way to get an hour with really smart people.  Our awesome attorney, Peter Kunin, helped set us on the right course over many-a-$10-sandwich, which is less then his normal billable rate.  I have had the opportunity to learn from successful entrepreneurs about the lessons from their businesses over a lunch, and applied those lessons to USM.  After a trip to the Google Campus in 2008, I discovered that 110% of Google employees eat free lunch at Google every day (I really appreciated the free lunch even if the shareholders might not).  So now we have office lunch too at Union Street Media every Tuesday.  We get together as a group, share stories, ideas and hang out.  It’s awesome.

A good networker is a netweaver

Jim Shattuck, the Director of Career Services at my senior year at Middlebury College, had a simple manta: “Network, network, network.”  Although I didn’t know it at the time, I actually honed this skill at Middlebury.  Freshman year I found out pretty quickly that if I knew the person behind the bar at a campus party, I got my luke warm Natty Light faster.  Today, I’m the most public facing employee at Union Street Media.  I spend about 10% of my time attending business events in the community and volunteering on boards of other organizations.  However, you can’t just take from your network.  You have to give back to it.  One of the things I like to do the most is connect people in the community with each other, whether it’s for business purposes or friendship.  When people move to Burlington, I invite them to the office and share my knowledge of the area.  They leave with a sticky pad full of names, emails and phone numbers from contacts at a company where they might find a job to the best guys fix-it-guy (Chris Labelle, 802-343-0269) and mechanic in town (Daren Smith, 802-660-3111).

Vermont actually is a good place to do business

After 30 years of listening to rants about the “richest one purcent“, Vermont may be one of the last places in the US that thinks you can tax the rich to balance your budget.  (It’s also the last place in the US where you’re better of speaking French then Spanish, which lined up nicely with my study-abroad year in France).  There are a lot of “rich” people in Vermont, they just stay for less the 180 days each year and take their tax dollars with them.  I wish Vermont could address it’s challenged relationship with money, but that is another topic.

Despite the best efforts of some elected representatives to make it not the case, Vermont is actually a good place to do business.  Vermonters, by-birth-and-by-choice, are honest, hard working people.  They do right by others and in turn do right by themselves.  The corruption that is rampant in many parts of the world doesn’t exist here.  There is a strong sense of community, place and identity.  The quality of life is second to none (unless you’re a surfer, like my sophomore year roommate).  Since good jobs are hard to come by here, people will stick with one for a long time.  It makes for a steady, albeit small, labor pool which is the number one ingredient for a successful business.

A company’s most important assets go home every night

Union Street Media doesn’t have heavy machinery or physical capital that you can touch.  We have brains and some really smart ones at that.  Inside the heads of the people that work at USM you’ll find the future of our business.  My job, as I see it, is to harness the power of all these brains, align their interests with that of the company and then get out of the way.

Make serendipity happen

While I don’t know if Bo Peabody actually coined this phrase, it sure sounds like something he would have written in his book Lucky or Smart.  My brother and business partner, Jon, who has been along for much of this ride likes to say that 80% of life is just showing up (thanks to Woody Allen on that one).  Some of the best opportunities in our business have come from being at the right place at the right time.  Coincidence?  Sort of.  Lucky?  A bit.  Over and over again, we found our way to an opportunity and then capitalized upon it.  That’s what great teams do.

Happy 10th Birthday to CollegeXTRA.com, Inc.

Ten years ago today, after a long lunch at a cafe in SOHO with my then business partners, I called The Company Corporation in Delaware and officially incorporated a start-up that had launched out of my Middlebury College dorm room the previous fall.

The spring of 2000 were heady times.  Everyone was full of optimism.  The NASDAQ was less then a month away from it’s all time high. Twenty-somethings like me were becoming multi-millionaires overnight on The-Emperor-Has-No-Clothes business models and we were going to be the next ones.  A Doonsbury Cartoon from that spring summed up the times, as one character said to the other “Just finished the business plan.  I’m off to get a Mercedes.  Want one?”

Ten years later, the story didn’t play out that way for CollegeXTRA.com, Inc., but that’s just fine with me.  As a celebration of our tenth birthday, I’d like share a few things I’ve learned along the way, but first, a little history on how I got here.  If you want to fast forward through the “how we got here” part, my next post covers some of the things I’ve learned over the past ten years.

The business you start is not the one you end up in. So how did we go from creating “for students, by students” web sites at college campuses to developing web sites for REALTORS?

Our original model was to develop sites like Middkid.com at campuses across the country.  Middkid, which is still very active today, is a hyper-local portal focused on the Middlebury College community and supported by advertising from the merchants in the town of Middlebury.  We have a local business directory with coupons from our sponsors, an offline printed discount card that can be found in the wallets many students on campus and a monthly special events email newsletter.  The site has a database with thousands of course evaluations written by students over the years, sharing their experiences about the classes they took and the professors that teach them.  There is a Middlebury student who is our Campus Manager each year that resubscribes the businesses during the summer and the updates & markets the site through out the school year.  It’s an awesome, paid internship that is one of the best hands-on run-your-own business jobs I’ve seen for college students.

With all the success we had (and continue to have) at Middlebury, why didn’t this go national? The answer there is a blog treatise in itself, but the quick points are as follows

• Ideas are great.  Implementation is really, really hard.  At 33, I don’t know much.  At 23, I knew nothing.  We experienced a lot of the challenges that faced most start ups.  Partners that didn’t always see eye to eye.  Lack of infrastructure.  A frenetic pace that wasn’t sustainable.  Insufficient skill sets in key areas of the business.  Some bad timing (we launched our expanded campus platform in September 2001).  The list goes on.
• As we chant at the hockey games “there’s only one Middlebury.”  The town:gown ratio in Middlebury turned out to be the perfect balance.  Businesses counted on students, but students had options so the businesses need to advertise.  When we went to smaller communities, like Hamilton, NY, home of Colgate University, there was only one pizza place.  When we went to larger ones, like Syracuse, the students were drowned out by the population of the community.
• We were only as good on each campus as the student that was representing us (and the student turnover was every year).  The priorities of college life require that you drink with your friends, hang out with your significant other, go to class / complete your assignments and sleep.  Managing a business came fifth, at best.  Only a select few of the students were as passionate about their campus site as I had been about Middkid.  It was a job for them, not their baby, and it took me a while to come to grips with it.
• We were ahead of our time.  Sounds like a cop-out, but in 2000, we were selling online advertising to College-town merchants who had no web site.  In order to get the sale, we ended up building a web page on the college site for the merchants and those pages were becoming their de facto web sites.  Since you follow the money in business, we went to where it was (web development) and left behind what wasn’t working.

When we decided to put the college student business model to bed, we looked around and saw another opportunity, which is the story of Union Street Media.  We had developed a great content management system that let the campus managers update their site.  We were able to leverage that tool for business clients who needed a web presence.  However, when you’re literally going door-to-door selling web sites, you’re competing with the most precious assett in business, and life: people’s time.  We were having marginal success at it, when our then advisor, now board member and long time mentor, David Bradbury, set us up with meetings at three different trade associations in Vermont.

We established partnerships with the Vermont Bar Association, the Vermont Lodging and Restaurant Association and the Vermont Association of REALTORS.  With each partnership, the association paid us to develop their web site.  We then discounted our services and they marketed us to their members as a benefit of joining.  As it turned out, lawyers were too smart for the internet in 2002, lodging & restaurant establishments in Vermont couldn’t afford it, and the real estate industry was about to be fundamentally changed by the “Internet Data Exchange” (IDX), which is the sharing of brokers’ listings online.  Previous to the internet, if you wanted to buy a house you needed to walk into a broker’s office and look at the “black book” of listings.  The book was printed monthly and out of date the moment it left the press.  It made for an extremely inefficient process, but let REALTORS control the information.  The tug-of-war that ensued with in the real estate community was vicious.  One Vermont REALTOR virtually accosted my brother at their annual convention in 2003 “Scooby-Doo” style for ruining his businesses (“if it wasn’t for your rascally kids…”)

From the early days of developing web sites for local Burlington VT real estate clients like Century 21 Advantage and Brian Boardman, we expanded to NH, MA, NC and Chicago (we’re White Sox fans).  We are now developing web sites and providing internet & social media marketing for hundreds of agents, brokers, teams and real estate offices all over the country.

Now that you know the history, check back tomorrow for the lessons I have learned over the past ten years running a business.

Union Street Media to hold a Seminar on How to Structure Social Media for Small Businesses

On the 11th of February at 11am Spencer Taylor, will be giving a talk at the CEDO Winter Business Fair on how to effectively utilize social media for small businesses. The talk will be focused more on strategy then on the actual functionality of various social media outlets. Taylor will focus on how to use Facebook, Twitter and Blogging in concert to gain visibility in the online marketplace and new customers. He will also touch on other business-specific social media platforms such as Yelp and Urban Spoon as well as the hyper-local Front Porch Forum service.  Participants will be encouraged to ask questions and interact to discuss their experiences for the group to draw on. We hope to see you there!

Managing Your Online Reputation

8/10 consumers trust brands that offer reviews, especially if there are bad ones too!

Sounds like an odd thing to say but the reality is in the consumer-to-consumer marketplace, the truth surfaces about products, services, ideas, and companies. For instance, when looking at reviews for bed and breakfast options recently, some friends of mine showed up with a very bad review from a disgruntled customer. I wondered, how could this be? This place is gorgeous and the hosts warm and courteous. I wanted to find out from them what happened so I asked them. They had no idea about this review but had noticed a dip in their bookings and when they looked at the review, they quickly knew what was going on and told me the other side of the story.

The reviewer in question had failed to book through the proper reservation system and assumed they would hold a room for him for the same time each year that he had been visiting during leaf-peeping season in Vermont. As the hosts were not aware of a booking they of course gave the room out to another party who had booked properly. He was furious and called them to complain. A few days later, some deeply unpleasant reviews began to surface on Trip Adviser and their bookings dropped during their most important season. Once they had sourced these reviews back, they went on the offensive and reached out to other long term guests asking them to provide some fair and balanced feedback on Trip Advisor. They came flooding and started to push the bad reviews down  becoming clear to others that there was a malicious hijacker at work rather than a bona fide review(s).

The lesson from this is that you will get bad reviews from time to time – it’s the nature of people’s sensibilities. It’s healthy in fact as it allows you as a business to learn from your customers to make your business better, much like test marketing. However you must keep a close eye on any muckraking and manage your reputation as best possible. Unless people break codes of conduct, then it is hard to have conversations removed from your digital footprint, but you can contribute to the conversations and provide more of the type of content that you want associated with your  brand. Encouraging customers to do the same is key, as people love user generated content in a trust based community as the web is.

How can you monitor your brand?

Two suggestions:

1. Set up a Google Alert on your brand, which means that whenever you are mentioned in news, other blogs, customer reviews etc you get emailed a list of these results either daily, weekly or monthly to your choosing.
2. Search you brand in Google with Google Suggest and see what Google is suggesting as you type. You will see any bad associations and be able to investigate the search results.

The blogosphere is an open and often candid forum, so being able to smell a rat and respond can help restore that trust that might have been lost either fairly or unfairly, as in the case of my friends at the B & B. Strengthening your community in life and online will inevitably help you create a strong business.

Tell me your stories on this. How you have had to manage your online reputation?

What’s New From Union Street Media?

Since the last site launch post, Union Street Media has been busy with a variety of exciting projects:

New Hampshire real estate agency Prudential Spencer Hughes is a long time client of Union Street Media. They went for a redesign to update the look of their website. They’re also continuing with our Report Recommend Revise Internet Marketing services to ensure the site’s high level of performance.

Overland Summers is a teen adventure program that offers a variety of lifetime experiences to youth. Their offerings include hiking & biking excursions, writing programs, language immersion programs, and more. Overland came to us wanting a redesign that would better express the incredible programs they offer. They are also marketing their website through Union Street Media’s RRR Program.

Eve Thompson is a Reston, VA, realtor who has been utilizing our Internet Marketing services for some time. Eve made the decision to have Union Street Media build a brand new website that reflects the “new urban” appeal of Reston. Our Internet Marketing team continues to work with Eve on her online marketing efforts through the RRR program.

The Burlington Tennis Club is a member-owned, non-profit recreational club located in Chittenden County, VT. They came to Union Street Media wanting to keep up with the times, and attract younger members with a cleaner, better designed website. Their goal was to shift their advertising focus from traditional methods to include more digital marketing.

Located in Greenwich, CT, Brunswick School is a college preparatory day school for boys in grades Pre-Kindergarten through 12. Brunswick needed a fresh, new design for their site that provided easier navigation for potential students, their parents, and alumni. Union Street Media gave them the functionality they desired in a professional and aesthetically pleasing package.

Bullrock Corporation has been in construction management and real estate development since the early 1980s, and in 2000 they became involved in the senior living business. Bullrock Corporation came to us needing a website that provided clear information about their services, targeted potential customers, and provided a professional representation of their business.

Union Street Media is proud to add each of these sites to our evolving portfolio of clients!