The first business I started while in college, I called Aardvark Studios.

I’ve never been very creative when it comes to naming a business so after days of searching for the right name, Aardvark stuck.   We took pictures of graduates when they received their diplomas on graduation day, and then mailed a free proof to each graduate, giving them an opportunity to order enlargements.  By the time I sold the business, 25 years later, we were photographing about 200,000 graduates each year.

So I had to laugh when I saw a story in the New York Times about a company founded in 2007 called Aardvark.    The firm was jumping into the online advice business, the same business that Microsoft’s new Bing has entered, Hunch and Yahoo’s Answers.  Aardvark’s twist however is it’s among the first that provides an intelligent way to reach out to authorities on subjects within your circle of friends.

The second thing that makes Aardvark different from others is the answers are created real time and specific to your question only.   When you pose a question like:

1. What wine goes good with chicken?
2. What’s the best grad school for someone interested in marketing?
3. What’s the best computer for my 15 year old daughter?
4. Where do I go when I visit Italy this year?
5. Which mower should I get to mow an acre of fairly flat land?
6. What do I have to look out for when I buy a new car?

Aardvark fires out the question through your Facebook friends and their friends and then delivers the response to you through your IM.

What it tries to do is target those with the best chance of answering the question.   Instead of blasting the question to everyone you know, it sends a limited number at a time so not to over burden the entire system.   It also utilizes information from other social networking profiles to match interests, demographics characteristics and other factors.

If no one answers a question, Aardvark continues to broaden the group of people until it gets an answer for you.  If you are like me a response usually invokes additional questions so Aardvark enables the person asking the question to respond to the person who answered it with additional questions.

Like any other tool, the more people that use it the more powerful it will become.  When you sign up,  you will be asked to share 3 areas you are knowledgeable  on.  This helps the system know which type of questions to send to you.

So how will this change your business?

This kind of tool will affect how your products and services are sold.  Consumers will still be influenced by advertising but they will learn to go to their network for advice on which product to buy.  It will help your staff find quick answers from others within your company.   The world is getting increasingly more complex.  A tool like this will help your staff reach out to others in and outside your business to gain quick answers to problems they are facing.

And if you are looking for a job, it will instantly put you in touch with the right people who can help you!

The end result is, decisions will be made faster, based on more experience.

So I have one question to ask Aardvark.   When I owned my photography business, nearly every week, someone asked me, “Why did you name your company Aardvark?”

So Aardvark, “Why did you name your business Aardvark?”

Everyone benefits, a pizza shop, candy store, small business and large corporation

Over the weekend I wrote a 30 page white paper called, Facebook 101 for the Executive Suite.  A friend and a CIO I’ve been working with the last couple of months thought the “executive suite”  would benefit from having a overview of how Facebook could be used in their firm.

After reflecting on how to present the opportunities to VP’s, Presidents and the C level administrators, I came up with:

• 4 fundamental changes in consumer behaviors they need to be aware of
• 4 ways a firm can tap into an anticipated 300 million user base
• 5 ways an organization will benefit by developing a Facebook strategy
• 12 best practices and proven Internet strategies
• How various departments in your firm can benefit by participating in Facebook

As usual, for me, it’s hard to write a 8 page whitepaper.  This baby came in at 30 plus pages.  At any rate, over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be sharing this information with you.

I’ll start by explaining the 4 behavior changes that will drive how you lead and manage your business in the coming decade.  We’ll first examine Community, then follow up with looks at Content, Collaboration and Communication.  The four C’s!

Hedge your bets and do online and Yellow Page advertising

It happens every fall!

Just as the birds fly south for the year, the salmon swim up river to spawn, there is a certain time of year when a new edition of the Yellow Pages are produced and handed out.

They are dropped in apartments, homes and delivered to mailboxes.  A few months ago, my wife came back from our rural post office and told me that Brian, (local postal employee) had to put out an extra bin to handle the Yellow Page books being thrown away by the PO Box holders.  The Yellow Pages for decades was a powerful, and in some cases the only affordable tool for small business owners to advertise their business. Getting in the Yellow Pages was the first thing a business owner did!

But the world is different today.   Consumers behavior is being changed by the Internet.  Because of broadband, their computers are always on and they are learning to search for what they want, when they want and read reviews their neighbors have made about the companies and products they are interested in.  

The investment industry has taken notice of these changes and as a result the shares of two of the industry leaders, R.H. Donnelley and Idearc, have fallen 99 percent in the last year.   Ouch!

And there are predictions that their revenue is going to drop.  According to an article by Emily Steel for the Wall Street Journal:

Print and online ad spending on yellow pages will plummet 6.3% next year, more than double the rate of decline expected for broadcast TV, according to forecasts by Wachovia analyst John Janedis.

So if the Investment community smells a fire, why are small business owners still paying for ads in a book that not only gets thrown away, has more competition than ever and is being replaced by consumers whose behavior is being changed by the convenience of online search engines, like Google and Yahoo.

The Yellow Page industry is reporting more value for your advertising dollar!

(…More…)

One video ad can be re purposed on many different websites

I spent a greater portion of my business career in the photography industry. In my letters and marketing materials I repeated the time worn phrase, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Now that we are living in a video world, the common person has nearly as many ways to capture the moments of their lives as Jim Carrey’s Truman Bank character in The Truman Show. Today, a video is worth 10,000 words.

Online video advertising is giving marketers another opportunity to reach targeted audiences with their messages. According to Borrell Associates, streaming audio and video ads now account for 19 percent of local online revenue and will rise to 59% by 2013.

Most marketers are having hard time thinking about adding video to their marketing tool chest for one reason: because in their mind, it’s still a very expensive and time-consuming marketing tool. They also have little to no experience with it, so they avoid it.

Video Advertising is as easy as 1,2,3

However, the Internet is changing all of that. Not only can anyone with a webcam, video cell phone, or simple video camera create a video and upload it to a Web site, it can be done within a matter of an hour without a budget! Sure, you can spend a great deal more time and energy at it, but I’m trying to break down some walls here and get you thinking about keeping it simple stupid! (…More…)

If the Yellow Pages go the way of dinosaurs and encyclopedias, how will you find new customers?

Now that the shock of the 750 billion dollar bailout is wearing off and Black Friday still generated about the same amount of sales as last year, everyone is taking a momentary sigh of relief.

However in Washington as you read this, a furious battle is raging, phones are ringing and businesses, organizations and even governmental organizations are trying to get the ear of congressional leaders in an attempt to get a few million (or billion) of the bail out money.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the Yellow Page industry, which led me to uncover up and coming “small business advertising products” provided by firms like Yelp and Reach Local. My research uncovered a lot of conversations and information about the demise of the Yellow Page industry.  That’s when I started imagining their lobbyists using their connections to find out what angle they needed to get some of the bailout money.

But only for a second.

Because the more research I did, the more evidence shows the industry, while still very competitive, is hugely profitable and they have customers who swear by the results.

Consumers habits are changing

But the talks of the demise are true. (…More…)

Life before MySpace, Facebook, YouTube

I was reading a report produced by the Pew Internet and American Life Project called, “A Portrait of Early Internet Adopters. Why People First Went Online and Whey they Stayed”.  The report by Amy Tracy Wells is  a quick read and a fun reminder of where online social networking got started.

Surveys conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project since 2000 have shown that the majority of people went online for personal reasons (50%), followed by work (31%) and school (19%).

Amy reminds us that the early roots of social networking started in BBSs (electronic bulletin board systems) and Usenet, chat rooms and threaded discussion software.  To access these systems one had to fire up a modem and wait!  A really fast modem in those days crawled.  When I lived in Telluride, Colorado in 1995, I remember waiting about 8 hours to download a new version of AOL’s software! (…More…)

What would 580,000 advertising impressions do for your business?

Al Gore gets kidded for suggesting he invented the Internet.  Around my house I get teased for suggesting to my kids that I invented Facebook.

Back in 1996, I created an online community for students and called it StudentAccess.  We modeled the community around GeoCities and Tripod with a focus only on college students.  We provided a free home page, email address and photo upload.  We ran ads in student magazines around the country and anxiously waited for students to show up.  Nobody came!   Not only was it a total failure, but I ended up getting sued by Princeton Review for using the name Student Access! (They had a line of books called StudentAccess to Law, Medical, etc.)  Thirty thousand dollars later, we surrendered the URL studentaccess.com to Princeton Review and decided to focus in a different direction.

Fast forward 7 years and Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, which has become one of the largest - online communities in the world.    Enough old boy stories,  let’s get back to the reason you are reading this post. (…More…)

4 benefits of adopting a Facebook API for your business!

Over the past 3 years, I’ve had 1500 people attend webinars who were interested in figuring out how to use Facebook in their businesses and organizations.  I like to remind people that Facebook is the new Yellow Pages and in fact it’s probably, like MySpace could be considered the largest phone book in the world.

In the spring of 2007 Facebook announced their Facebook Platform, a programming and business strategy that gave any organization the ability to create a program that would enable them to engage and interact with customers, prospects and others.  Colleges have an incredible opportunity to connect and engage with prospective students, students, fans, supporters and alumni but none are taking advantage of it.

But businesses, who understand you have to innovate to make a profit and work to keep customers due to competition, get it!

Pizza Hut is no stranger to utilizing social media tools to engage customers. Their Facebook page now has over 300,000 fans and to attract more, they offered anyone who became a Pizza Hut fan (through the end of the year) would be eligible for the weekly prize of a $50 gift card. (…More…)

You could recruit new leads, JUST like the Army!

I was aware that the Army had been investing in some of the smartest and most sophisticated weapons in the history of mankind but little did I realize that part of the 220 million dollars they spend to recruit new soldiers will be spent on social media!

The other day I shared with you how a little known business consultant’s podcast became as popular as the business podcasts produced by the Economist, Bloomberg and other well known brands.  Today I wanted to show you how the Army is investing in WEBCASTING to become more relevant to their prospective customers.

In an article in the New York Times by Stuart Elliott, Stuart outlines the new strategy being used by the Army.   On their newly redesigned website, www.goarmy.com recruits will be able to view a new section called Straight from Iraq.   According to Lt. Gen. Benjamin C.  Freakley, the commanding general of the Army Accessions Command in Fort Monroe, Va, the goal is to provide,  “verifiable information about what being a soldier is really like”.

YouTube style videos

The section offers dozens of YouTube style videos of less than a minute where soldiers talk about the conditions they are living and working in.  The videos remind prospective recruits they have access to computers, the internet and “all the equipment” they need. (…More…)

6 ways your city is missing the boat by not adopting comprehensive Internet strategies

Tip O’Neill has been quoted as saying “All politics is local.”  He said that to remind politicians to pay attention to what is happening in their back yard if they want to stay in office.  Today government leaders are starting to pay attention to how they can use the Internet to improve services and better serve citizens.

Like most institutions their focus right now is how to use the Internet to give citizens access to information they normally have to stop in offices to get. Online registrations for dog tags, to accessing information about property is becoming the norm for many communities and counties.

But what about using social media and online community tools?

Government 2.0 recently published an article that looked at how local cities are using online community and social media to communicate and engage.  A variety of ideas are being explored by city government leaders but few are taking a comprehensive look at how they could use the Internet to increase:

• Transparency
• Communication
• Services

And reduce costs!

But let’s take a look at the early pioneers and what they are doing to put their toe in the water!   Denver’s CIO, Molly Rauzi created a YouTube channel and uploaded various commercials, public service announcements and other videos. (…More…)