Group items tagged

In the Business901 podcast, What Political Campaigns can teach business, part 1 of 2 we looked at a more strategic view. In today's podcast, we looked at the more tactical practices and how they related not only to a political campaign but to a typical marketing campaign. Derek A. Pillie has served public and political candidates for over 15 years. He has served on the staff of Indiana’s Third Congressional District, most recently as District Director for just over a decade. In that role, he oversaw Indiana operations of the office; including constituent outreach and helping taxpayers solve problems with federal agencies. He also worked on crucial economic development projects and was heavily involved with advising the office on online media and marketing decisions. After his federal service expired Derek started working at Cirrus ABS, an online marketing and technology development company. He currently manages their business development efforts. Cirrus ABS has added political campaigns to the portfolio of industries they serve since Derek joined the team, and he continues volunteer efforts on behalf of candidates he supports. Related Information: Preview of Political Campaign Marketing Podcast Political Campaigning – Strategy Update What political campaigns can teach business Lean Six Sigma for Government

“While other vendors are fighting over no monthly fees, but higher processing costs for mobile transactions, we’re still saying ‘no’ to mobile transaction surcharges,” said Hammermaster. “With Sage Mobile Payments, businesses have the option to pay no more than they would to process regular credit or debit card transactions on a standard credit card terminal.” 

Enhancements built into Sage Mobile Payment 2.0 include an updated user interface, signature capture capabilities, a tax and tip calculator, and a free Sage Mobile “app store” download.

“In 2011, 25 percent of worldwide mobile PC shipments were tablets, and upwards of 75 percent U.S. small and midsized businesses plan to purchase tablets in the next year,” said Greg Hammermaster, president of Sage Payment Solutions, the payments division for Sage. “Mobility has truly become a must-have in today’s business world. Businesses using Sage Mobile Payments have a great opportunity to expand their sales and customer service opportunities, and with the confidence of a commercial-grade mobile payments solution. Sage Mobile Payments will help businesses evolve into this next phase of mobile payments.”

21 Tips for Using Twitter

The business climate, it turns out, is a lot like the weather. And we've entered a next-two-hours era. The pace of change in our economy and our culture is accelerating--fueled by global adoption of social, mobile, and other new technologies--and our visibility about the future is declining.

Uncertainty has taken hold in boardrooms and cubicles, as executives and workers (employed and unemployed) struggle with core questions: Which competitive advantages have staying power? What skills matter most? How can you weigh risk and opportunity when the fundamentals of your business may change overnight?

Look at the global cell-phone business. Just five years ago, three companies controlled 64% of the smartphone market: Nokia, Research in Motion, and Motorola. Today, two different companies are at the top of the industry: Samsung and Apple. This sudden complete swap in the pecking order of a global multibillion-dollar industry is unprecedented. Consider the meteoric rise of Groupon and Zynga, the disruption in advertising and publishing, the advent of mobile ultrasound and other "mHealth" breakthroughs (see "Open Your Mouth And Say 'Aah!'). Online-education efforts are eroding our assumptions about what schooling looks like. Cars are becoming rolling, talking, cloud-connected media hubs. In an age where Twitter and other social-media tools play key roles in recasting the political map in the Mideast; where impoverished residents of refugee camps would rather go without food than without their cell phones; where all types of media, from music to TV to movies, are being remade, redefined, defended, and attacked every day in novel ways--there is no question that we are in a new world.

y’d from www.business-strategy-innovation.com

The new dimension of innovation is about having customer as an integral part of the system. Firms can no longer afford to stay separate from customers and still come up with great innovations. The success of social media websites (like Facebook) is frequently attributed to engaging customers in the creation of new innovations - also referred to as crowdsourcing.The topic of innovation is multi-dimensional, which no firm in the globe can afford to ignore today. Being innovative is necessary to stay competitive in the business. The new age of innovation has a lot to do with making the customer an integral part of the innovation system by engaging and involving them with the product or service that the firm is working on.So, next time you are set out to innovate something, ask yourself: ‘Am I involving my customers in the process?’Read more at www.business-strategy-innovation.com

Vantiv, a provider of mobile payment solutions, announced a new point-of-sale product on Friday that it will be rolling out in partnership with Verizon Wireless. The product, which is currently in field testing, includes custom tailored applications and an Android-based point-of-sale solution for accepting payments. The applications will be available in Verizon’s Private Application Store for Business. “Merchants and consumers are seeking greater mobility, control and timely access to data,” said Bill Weingart, Chief Product Officer of Vantiv. “We’ve teamed with Verizon to combine our payment and security expertise with Verizon’s ability to tailor development of mobile technologies to address those needs.” Verizon Wireless is also a member of ISIS, an initiative in which it has partnered with AT&T and T-Mobile to provide customers with NFC-based mobile payment options. Vantiv’s full press release follows after the break.

Vantiv Introduces Next Generation Mobile Payment Solution Teams with Verizon to Develop and Deliver More Flexibility and Opportunity for Merchants to Grow Their Businesses CINCINNATI, Jan. 31, 2012  — Vantiv, LLC (formerly Fifth Third Processing Solutions, LLC), a leading integrated payment processor, today announced that its customers will be the first to use an innovative point-of-sale device and system that will help merchants more effectively conduct business.

Vantiv is conducting a field trial of a new mobile payment solution developed in collaboration with Verizon. The new solution is architected on the Android operating system and features end-to-end, secure point-of-sale payment capabilities and business applications using Verizon’s Private Application Store for Business. As a result, Vantiv customers can tailor point-of-sale applications to meet their needs while taking advantage of remote device management.

Mobile payments company Square has made an interesting move today, which should put competitors Verifone and Intuit on notice. The startup is dropping the per transaction charge for any business using its mobile payments device and service. Square previously charged 2.75% of each transaction amount plus a flat $0.15 per transaction fee. Today, Square is completely dropping the per transaction charge.

So why is the mobile payments company dropping the transaction fee? Square’s COO Keith Rabois says that along with simplifying the payments experience for businesses, it is also taking on the hidden fees and teaser rate structure that have plagued the credit card industry. “The vision of Square is to simply create zero friction and complexity around payments, which is difficult to do in financial services,” he explains. Rabois says that the per transaction fees on top of a variable rate charge can be misleading for businesses because the hidden costs add up especially if a business processes a large amount of transactions. Now, Square will simply charge a flat 2.75% of all transactions, regardless of size. “In the end accepting payments should be as easy as using a microwave,” says Rabois.

Fresh off a $27.5 million funding round, Square is gaining a lot of a lot of buzz and just debuted a new billboard in Times Square. Jack Dorsey’s startup is expected to process $40 million in transactions in Q1 of 2011 and is currently signing up 100,000 merchants per month. That’s compared to 30,000 monthly signups last Fall.

Intuit has made an interesting move today with its mobile credit card reader GoPayment reader. Intuit is allowing merchants to keep and receive funds on a prepaid credit card as opposed to depositing the amount in a bank account

Launched two years ago, GoPayment offers a complimentary app and credit card reader to allow small businesses to conduct charges via their smartphones. GoPayment, which competes directly with Square, is available for iOS, Android and Blackberry phones and the card reader simply plugs into the audio jack of a phone or tablet. The credit card data is also encrypted, (and never stored on the phone).

Similar to Square, the GoPayment mobile payment app is free and the basic service has no monthly, transaction or cancellation fees, and offers a 2.7 percent rate for swiped transactions. Intuit and Square actually both eliminated the per transaction fee.

a survey administered by Jive Software that found both executives and knowledge workers believe social software will become a necessary part of doing business — even though the return on investment for this kind of software is still pretty squishy. 

Improving customer loyalty and service levels and driving increased revenue or sales were among the top reasons for using social software mentioned by survey respondents.

they shouldn't become so focused on attaining a hard ROI that they miss opportunities to use social to solve business problems.

Gamification describes a series of design principles, processes and systems used to influence, engage and motivate individuals, groups and communities to drive behaviors and effect desired outcomes. Originating from the video game industry, many of these pioneering concepts now play a key role in driving incentive and behavior management for both brands in the consumer world and internal scenarios in the workplace. Enterprise gamification is a user experience (UX) and consumerization of IT (CoIT) trend that will take the market by storm in 2012. Constellation believes that by 2013, more than 50 percent of all social business initiatives will include an enterprise gamification component.

In interviews with 55 early adopters of enterprise gamification, Constellation identifies the three core pillars that include measurable action, reputation and incentives. By creating triggers through both monetary and non-monetary incentives among customers, employees, partners, suppliers and other interested parties, organizations can secure sustainable engagement and drive business outcomes such as improved marketing response from external communities, sustained long-term customer loyalty, increased collaboration among internal teams, or enriched onboarding, delivering success with new hires, partners, and customers.

Enterprise gamification requires an application of psychology and behavioral economics to incentivize outcomes. Because enterprise gamification maps closely to human behavior, organizations will want to follow Constellation’s best practices in appealing to the “Seven Deadly Sins” for gamification design.

The so-called digital wallet made important strides in 2011, sometimes eliminating the logistical need for paper vouchers, mobile apps, QR codes, and even cell phones.

At times this transition seems to be sneaking up on us. Earlier this month, thousands of merchants nationwide didn't know they had gained foot traffic and sales thanks to American Express and Foursquare. Amex rewarded consumers who synced their credit cards with their Foursquare accounts with $10 back if they spent the same at local businesses after checking in with the geo-social app. That effort followed up a successful post-Black Friday stint dubbed "Small Business Saturday," when Amex users checking in on Foursquare could get a $25 credit if they spent $25 with a local merchant.

Jake Furst, a business development director at New York-based Foursquare, said there was little to no organizational outreach to local businesses. "The merchants didn't necessarily know what was happening as we drove customers to their locations," he explained. "Small Business Saturday was a huge success. We got a ton of interest from Foursquare users and Amex card holders that didn't know about Foursquare yet."

Inuit’s GoPayment reader, which competes directly with Square, is about to become more attractive to small businesses. The company has made the decision dropped the transaction fee ($0.15 per transaction) for both new and existing customers for Visa, MasterCard and Discover cards, both swiped and key-entered as well as qualified and non-qualified transactions. The move will go into effect on Monday.

Launched two years ago, GoPayment offers a complimentary app and credit card reader to allow small businesses to conduct charges via their smartphones. GoPayment is available for iOS, Android and Blackberry phones. So now, businesses using the mobile payments reader will only pay a flat 2.7 percent fee of a transaction for any swiped cards. Intuit will charge 3.7 percent for both key entered and non-qualified transactions.

This is surely a competitive move against Square, which also dropped its transaction fee (which was $0.15) recently in favor of a flat 2.75 percent fee for all transactions. One important fact to note—Intuit will still charge the transaction fee for transactions using American Express but this is something the company is working on negotiating. Square does not charge a fees for transactions on Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express.

Twitter user B.J. Drums, who works with the Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad, California, sent us proof that Facebook is officially getting into the local business marketing fray.If Yelp, Google, Fousquare and Facebook all get their way, local business windows will be covered in window decals. Realistically, one decal will prevail and we tend to think Facebook’s more than 400 million userbase and the value of an instant Fan will make Facebook’s offering especially appealing to local business owners.

In the fast-moving world of Internet innovation, the search for the winning combination of strategies often means companies are continually rolling out features to match their competitors.Take local deals, territory that Chicago-based Groupon claimed with its launch more than two years ago. Google, Facebook, Yelp, OpenTable and a host of other Web-based companies have introduced their versions of discount offers since then. And many of these players have started allowing users to "check in" to local businesses on their mobile phones, a concept popularized by Foursquare and other location-based services.This ongoing flurry of activity is underpinned by a common desire to conquer three important categories of growth for consumer-oriented Internet companies: mobile, social and local commerce. The race to find the right mix is crucial for capturing revenues and the loyalty of consumers whose sources for information and entertainment are becoming increasingly fragmented.

"A mobile and social Web, both on the advertising side and e-commerce side, is going to be more highly monetizable," said Mendez, whose private-equity firm focuses on privately held companies such as Facebook. "It's more likely to turn eyeballs and visitors into transactions and dollars spent."Companies are building on the three pillars of mobile, social and local commerce in different ways, focusing on core strengths before adding other capabilities.

Groupon, for example, built its business model on the idea of social plus local commerce, creating a group-buying platform as a new form of local online advertising. Last week, it launched a mobile application called Groupon Now that delivers deals to consumers based on their location.

Despite all of this 99% of brands and businesses are ill prepared for this new flood of mobile tech. They literally don’t have a clue where to start. Most brands think that building an app is the solution to all their mobile problems but with over a million apps across the various platforms they are notoriously hard to promote and rarely get cut through. Many businesses have started implementing mobile sites but that is only really the tip of the iceberg and the vast majority of businesses wouldn’t even know what a mobile site was (have a look at some of the biggest businesses in your country to see how bad it is). The simple reality is that brands and businesses don’t even know that they should have a strong mobile presence yet and that presents a huge opportunity to a new breed of entrepreneurs willing to provide solutions.

Digital agencies will still be pumping out apps for the next couple of years to support campaigns and PR firms are not even at the races. Most importantly you would have to focus. Focus on nothing but mobile. As tempting as it would be to build websites and carry out traditional advertising that will just bring you down to the level of your competitors. The opportunities are immense though because mobile is not something that is just going to go away. It would take you 2-3 years to position yourself correctly but if you started now you would be miles ahead of the curve when this stuff really hit the mainstream from a marketing perspective.

We are adding our own mobile capabilities to compliment social because the two go hand in hand but there is plenty more room for agencies all over the world to spring up who are purely focused on mobile. It will without a doubt be the next big marketing frontier. That is my free business idea for the year so just send over the check if you do go ahead and give it a go and it turns in to a huge success

For disruptive mobile payments startup Square, 2011 was a year of massive growth on many levels. The startup ended the year with over 1 million merchants using the mobile payments platform to accept credit cards (there are only 8 million merchants who accept credit cards in the US). In November, Square announced it was processing $11 million in payments per day (up from $4 million a day in July). Sir Richard Branson, Kleiner Perkins, Visa, and other investors poured over $100 million over the course of the year into Square, with the company’s latest valuation pegged at $1 billion. And Square announced a number of new product innovations, including Card Case, a new iPad app and more. Not to mention the unveiling of  retail deals with Apple, Wal-mart, Best Buy, Radio Shack, and Target. It’s hard to imagine how Square could top such an eventful year. But according to COO Keith Rabois, 2012 will prove to be even more monumental for the mobile payments company.

Square is kicking of 2012 with two new retail deals, OfficeMax and select UPS Store locations. With these new retailer partnerships, Square is now being sold at 10,000 retail locations, up from 9,000 at the end of last year. Square’s credit card readers sell for $9.99 in stores but each purchaser can redeem a $10 credit to their bank account. According to Rabois, retail sales of Square has been a large driver of adoption. In fact, currently 80 percent of U.S. population is within 15 minutes of a Square device sold at a retail location.

Beyond expanding retail deals (there are more to come, he says); Square will also be looking to upgrade the experience of running a business, end-to-end, on the iPad. Last May, the company debuted new iPad app Square Register, a high-powered point of sale replacement for cash registers and point of sale terminals. This year, the startup will add to the capabilities of this software, enabling small businesses to grow and manage their operations off of the device.

One of the themes that we've been most interested in at NextView over the last 12+ months has been the impact of consumer web trends on business software.  

1) Selling & Customer Acquisition

The classic delineations of web products for business and consumer ("enterprise" direct selling, on premise vs cloud, etc) are only getting blurrier.

According to some interesting statistics, India has created more than 60,000 jobs with an investment of US $26.5 billion in the US over the past 5 years. This involves investments of US $21 billion by 239 Indian companies and 127 greenfield investments worth US $5.5 billion. The top three states for investments include Ohio, California and Texas. Investments have taken place in sectors like IT / ITes, biotech, chemicals, automotive, telecom etc. Indian organizations are increasingly opening up units in the US and also providing large scale employment opportunities in USA giving rise to a strong reverse outsourcing trend.

India has emerged as one of the largest FDI players in the US after the United Arab Emirates

The recent US $10 billion export deals worth for the US employers like Boeing signed by Obama with many Indian leaders is expected to create more than 50,000 jobs in Seattle.

As Groupon prepares for its IPO, critics are circling the daily deals site wondering whether it's worth the hefty $25 billion valuation it currently holds. Key to the future of Groupon's success is its ability to woo merchants, with the promise that participating will boost business and draw new customers.

But recent story in TechCrunch highlighted the hesitation that some merchants may feel about getting involved with the site. TechCrunch revisited one merchant who proclaimed that signing up for Groupon was the "single worst business decision" she had made. Her story echoes other merchants who have claimed that Groupons actually result in unprofitability, administrative nightmares, and, to cap it all off, that they don't result in new regular customers.

But, though Burke saw an uptick in business, her cafe ended losing close to $10,000 because of the Groupon campaign. Though Groupon had told her that 98 percent of the customers who came in for the deal would spend more than the value of the Groupon, most did not, or if they did, at small amounts closer to 10 cents than to 5 dollars. Burke also noticed that few of the Groupon users became regulars, with many coming from out of town, others trying to redeem multiple deals at once, and some even behaving abusively to staff

there are very few executives, only a fraction, who are actually creating next-generation social experiences for their companies like Jeff Schick. The IBM executive doesn’t just leverage social business solutions, he and his team create them. “We started well over 15 years ago. We’ve been thinking about how to better connect people with people and people with information in terms of IBM itself,” Schick says, “the idea of getting the right person over the right opportunity at the right time to yield the right result was genuinely a business imperative at IBM.”

At Big Blue, the company encourages the use of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and blogs to support their sales, communication, marketing and recruiting efforts.  While employee’s social interactions are not under a microscope, the experiments in social on a massive scale have led to a set of social business conduct guidelines that govern their employees’ social interactions. Schick advises that you need to establish behavior standards for employees to follow.

So why do they do it? Since they are both an early adopter and creator of social technologies, they’ve learned that content management, business process management, collaboration, commerce and analytics must all be combined with a social layer to create a universal and unified solution.