I’m sure this isn’t a new topic, but I thought I would talk a little bit about brand management online for small businesses.  Many small businesses believe that because they are not using the internet that their business is not being talked about online. This is frankly stupid.  There are many sites out there like yelp and zagat that allow users to create profiles for businesses, services, restaurants, etc. and then vote on their experiences. Also people have their own blogs (like this one!) where they can rant and rave about the guy they bought their new car from or the mom & pop coffee shop they went to last week.  And this doesn’t include forums, wikis, twitters, facebooks, and what have you that let people say pretty much whatever they want.  In other words, just because you are not online talking about your small business doesn’t mean that other people aren’t.  To that end you need someway to monitor what people are saying about your company, or website (if you have one) online.  There are a couple of options here: 1. would be to spend every hour of every day doing google searches, crawling over tweets, facebook, yelp, and all of those other sites mentioned above 2. pay someone to do this for you 3. dupe an intern into doing this for you 4. pick up some software that you have to pay for to do it 5. use Google Alerts.  For most small businesses options 1-4 are pretty prohibitive.  So I’m gonna talk about Option 5.  Google Alerts. Alerts is a free system provided by Google that allows you to enter various keywords and then get either a daily digest or an instant email when something is posted with those keywords.  So what I usually do for my clients is to create a Google Alert with their company name inside of “”. This means that by and large if someone write an article, posts on a forum, etc with that company name I will get an email about it. (I usually create these an instant alerts as I want to know ASAP when someone comments about a client). Now sometimes these will not be talking about your business especially if you have a common word as your company name or if it is a common company name.  But the nice things is that these alerts work just like google so if the company was AlteredGames and it is based in Missoula, the alert would be “AlteredGames” + Missoula. This would return all mentions of AlteredGames and Missoula.  You could also add other identifiers so you knew it was your company.  Next I like to set up an alert or two that is a daily digest and is more concerned with the industry or area. So if we were doing a restaurant in Missoula, the alert might be: “local restaurants” + Missoula. This just lets me monitor what’s being said about the general area, and may provide some good places to drop a link or a comment about the business to help drive traffic.

These are just a few tips for a very powerful tool that Google provides. The biggest thing is just to remember, if you are doing your job right SOMEONE is talking about you online even if you aren’t. And in this day and age it is important if you are not the one leading the conversation that you are at least aware of what is being said.

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A few days ago a friend and I were lamenting some of our coworkers over the years who have just completely lacked initiative. We started thinking about different ways in an interview process you could figure out whether a potential employee possessed some level of initiative. It took us a while, but I finally hit on it.  Bring the interviewee into a room. The only things in the room are a bean bag chair, a television, an original Nintendo, Kid Icarus inserted, and the manual for the game.

Ask the interviewee to play for a few minutes and then leave the room.  Proceed to your hidden cameras and watch what they do.  Now, any old school gamer out there, will know that you NEVER look at the manual. The original nintendo controller only had a direction pad, select, start, A, and B.  If the interviewee, immediately reaches for the manual don’t look to them for initiative in the future. If on the other hand, they grab that remote and proceed to systematically figure out for themselves what each button does, all the while a big grin on their faces? Yeah, those guys you can trust to not be afraid to hit a few buttons and see what happens and then use that knowledge to beat the game.  They might break your internally built software a time or two, but they’ll only help make those systems better in the future.

Why a beanbag chair? Because I’m a little sadistic and would get a kick out of seeing people in suits trying to look all dignified while sitting in a bean bag chair

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