Fantastic keynote from Rory Sutherland at TED about “Sweating the Small Stuff”. This is a must watch at 12min 30sec that goes by fast.

He makes a compelling case that the world we live in wants to believe that big, important problems require big, important, and expensive solutions. However, the reality is that what changes our behavior is disproportionate to the amount of force and expense we apply to it. In other words, the more resources and money we use to change buying behavior, the less real impact it actually has. Take for example Virgin Atlantic Airways, who brings a salt and pepper set in the shape of cute little airplanes to each passenger in coach. Some might like them so much, they consider pocketing the set. Then they turn the salt and pepper shakers over and engraved in the bottom are the words “Stolen from Virgin Atlantic Airways upper class”. Just these few words make the brand highly memorable each time you fly, and yet costs very little. Or, the elevator in a boutique hotel in Stockholm, Sweden where you are greeted with what, at first glance, looks like a set of floor buttons. Starting at the bottom it reads “Garage”, but then the next one reads “Funk”, then “Rythm & Blues” – that’s right, these are buttons to pick your elevator music! Again, highly memorable and not expensive – especially compared to the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on upgrading hotel rooms to look like every other hotel room you stay in. Contrast this to something very large and massively expensive, like the AOL Time Warner merger which was heralded by Time Magazine in 2000 as the largest, single deal of all time. Now many people are customers of one or both of these corporations, and yet unless you were a shareholder or lawyer or dealmaker, did anyone notice anything different as a result of this at all? As Rory puts it, “You were engage in a huge piece of activity that meant absolutely bugger all to anybody”.

The essence of his argument is that we are socially conditioned to believe that to achieve big results, we need to have powerful people who develop big, important strategies, and spend a lot of money. However, what we really need is a class of people who have immense power and no money. That, every corporation should have a Chief Detail Officer and every governments should have a Ministry of Detail. People who take the time to comb over the little details to find minute opportunities to trigger significant change. Thank you Ben Young for sharing this video with me!

1. DIDs covering numerous destinations worldwide can be acquired online.
2. Through the use of a DID your customers will be able to call you at local call rates. This is particularly significant because it essentially eliminates the need for local representatives at every location and allows you to talk as much as you want at a reasonable monthly rate.
3. Operating a small business may require you to travel. You can change the forwarding destination of your DIDs, so you can still receive all of your calls when you’re on the road. The price of the DID will remains the same regardless of destination (mobile or landline) and you avoid paying the cellular companies’ excessive roaming rates.
4. You can receive calls to your different phone numbers on a single phone line, and able to answer more than one call simultaneously.
5. You will also be able to receive calls from those connected to the traditional PSTN network on your VoIP or Skype devices, making you more easily accessible.

In short, a DID is easy to set up, flexible, useful and cost effective. Using DIDs a small business can establish a global presence at minimal costs.

Note: This information was provided by the helpful people at DID World Wide, a leading global supplier of IP-based communications services including Direct Inward Dialing (DID) access solutions.

Combined with the recent redesign of Moishes.com, this user-friendly interactive tool allows visitors to the website to simply drag and drop icons of items they plan to store, by room type, into a virtual storage space. The Moishe’s Storage Space Estimator calibrates the cubic feet of the items, suggests an optimal-sized storage space, and offers customers a price quote. Customers can then reserve their units online, schedule a free pickup, and upload the pictures of their goods for future inventory management all within seconds!

“Moishe’s has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to technology and customer service in the moving and storage industry,” said Moishe’s Moving Systems CEO Gene Lemay. “We’ve taken our online customer experience to a whole new level with the Storage Space Estimator, allowing customers to optimize their Self Storage costs.”

The initial launch of Moishe’s Storage Space Estimator serves Moishe’s Self Storage customers. Moishe’s has over 3 million square feet of state-of-the-art storage space in New York (Long Island City and Brooklyn) and Chicago. Moishe’s has filed for a patent for the Storage Space Estimator, and in the coming weeks, the online system will be expanded to serve Moishe’s Mobile Storage customers across the U.S.

A little history, the company was created in 1983 and by 1990, Moishe’s became the largest independent moving company in New York City, with a host of movers, a convoy of red trucks and several storage facilities. Five years later, Moishe’s was the largest moving company in the Tri-State area. Today, Moishe’s has hundreds of employees, scores of red trucks and millions of square feet of storage which utilize state-of-the-art technologies to assure the safety and security of their clients’ belongings. Moishe’s operates regional offices across the country and has established six specialized divisions catering to the unique moving and storage needs of thousands of individuals, families and businesses every day.

Business consultant and author Stephanie Chandler of The Leap! 101 Ways to Grow Your Business and The Business Startup Checklist and Planning Guide shares some great tips for business owners in this economy. Watch her video made exclusively for BIG Marketing for Small Business.

Social Media – start networking; it’s all about relationships. Don’t walk into a function thinking “What I am I gaining. What’s in it for me?” Go in there with the mindset that everything is an opportunity to build relationships.

Marketing Plans – get a vision; find what you need to make it happen. Where do you want to be in 5, 10, 15 years? What steps and goals must be accomplished to reach that vision?

Publicity Plans – create a month-by-month plan of publicity opportunities for your business. Know who’s covering what and when they are covering. Don’t forget about online!

Check out the video for more tips. She also talks about the Project Rev contest that could give your small business a $5,000 boost!

I’ve become a fan of Tom Mayenknecht of The Sport Market. I catch his morning show on Team 1040 Radio almost every Sunday, and enjoy the business and marketing angle he brings to major league sports. Today, he talked about Toronto-based Sun Life Financial who, in a deal announced January 19th, acquired the 10-year naming rights for the Miami Dolphins’ football stadium for $40 million. The timing of the name change to Sun Life Stadium could not have been any better. Introduced last week as the stadium played host to the NFL Pro Bowl, it enjoyed a coming out party to the largest Pro Bowl audience in 10 years,  with over 12 million U.S. television viewers tuned in on ESPN. Today, that audience number will jump to over 100 million U.S. viewers and over 160 million global viewers. On his blog, Tom goes on to describe the value and impact the Sun Life brand will enjoy from this well-timed launch:

“Depending on the number of times Sun Life is mentioned and its new stadium graphics shown during the Super Bowl telecast, the case can be made that the Toronto-based insurance company will receive media value that is at least equal to the first five years of its naming rights deal. That does not include valuation of the billions of media impressions that Sun Life Stadium will receive this week in print and on the internet, along with radio… The Super Bowl timing is only one example of how this deal is a winner for Sun Life. The low cost of the sponsorship is the headliner here. Sun Life paid about one-fifth the $20 million US per year that Citi Financial has invested in Citi Field ($400 million US over 20 years) for the new home of the New York Mets of Major League Baseball. It paid well less than the going rate for NFL stadiums, including the $7 million US per year that Bank of America did for the home of the Carolina Panthers.”

In an economic climate where purchasing naming rights to sports stadiums is a luxury for most corporate giants, this seems like a brilliant move for Sun Life Financial who should enjoy an almost immediate return on their investment, while paying far less for naming right than other corporations in the past.

“How likely are you to recommend <insert your company name> to a colleague or friend?“

The answer to this one question gives you your Net Promoter® Score (NPS), a customer service measurement developed by Fred Reichheld and popularized through his book The Ultimate Question. NPS is now being used by leading organizations around the world as the standard for measuring and improving customer loyalty. Here’s how it works:

1. Ask The Question With A 10-Point Rating Scale

Customers respond on the 10-point rating scale and are categorized as follows:

• Promoters (score 9-10) are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others, fueling growth.
• Passives (score 7-8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings.
• Detractors (score 0-6) are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth.

If you’re not getting top marks (9’s and 10’s), you get a lower NPS and you know your customer service needs to improve. Companies with high NPS are Apple (77) and Adobe (46),  while AT&T (11) sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. The goal is to have far more Promoters than Detractors, and to convert Passives into Promoters over time.

2. Calculate Your NPS

To calculate your NPS, just takes the percentage of customers who are Promoters and subtracts the percentage who are Detractors. Formula: PROMOTERS – DETRACTORS = NPS

3. Share

Share with all members of your staff, rally around the behaviors that will drive your number up, and measure continuously – monthly, quarterly, bi-annually, or annually – you decide but stick to it.

Using NPS rather than just relying on verbal feedback gives you an effective measurement that provides insight on how well you are servicing your customers, where you are doing well, and where youe can improve.

1. Product Innovation – offer products that stay ahead of the curve and push performance. Examples include 3M, Intel, and Apple.
2. Operational Excellence – offer the lowest price in the most convenient way. Examples include McDonalds, Wal-Mart, and Toyota.
3. Customer Intimacy - offer customized, customer-centric solutions that focus on retaining customers long-term by meeting their specific needs. Examples include Nordstrom, Airborne Express, and Four Seasons.

The question is, which one is your company pursuing? You must pick one and put your stake in the ground, or risk being simply mediocre. This doesn’t necessarily mean you ignore the other two disciplines, but that you balance them in a secondary manner to the one that defines your company. In fact, most companies today can’t afford to ignore the other two. Zappos has made a name for itself in delivering amazing customer service, and yet their main value discipline is more likely operational excellence – the ability to sell name brand shoes online at a low price, ship it fast anywhere in North America with a no-cost return policy, and provide easy to access 24/7 customer service. Or, BMW who adopts a product innovation discipline in continually delivering high performance vehicles, and yet must concede towards operational excellence to ensure their pricing remains competitive. Just look at some of their latest entries in the marketplace, the 1-Series and Mini, that come in under the $30k price point. Or, their flagship 3-Series that now starts at just a little over $30k – price points previously unheard of at BMW.

I highly recommend this book to start-ups, small business owners and enterprise managers. It’s a great exercise to run your company through and can help you get very focused. I’m putting this into practice myself! Thanks Dom for the recommendation.

MySpace has lost a fifth of it’s US traffic since June of this year and there doesn’t appear to be a quick remedy to stop the bleeding. Facebook has overtaken the once mighty social media giant and continues to rapidly grow its user base. In the meantime, new management has come in at MySpace with the goal of regaining it’s early luster. So, I was asked the question, “If you were running MySpace, what would you do to compete with Facebook?” Here was my response as it appears in the article:

“I would fully embrace the counter-culture perception it has, focus on appealing to the 18-to-24 crowd, and create an avenue for major commercial brands and advertisers to use it as a strong vehicle to reach this audience,” says Rajan Sodhi, vice president of marketing and communications at hosting company PEER 1 Hosting.

“[MySpace should] focus on music and art, and support programmes related to furthering both — launching unknown bands, virtual art galleries for artists, clubs, and so on. [It should] accept that the number of users may be less than Facebook, but the usage would be different. Where Facebook focuses on keeping abreast of your friends and what they’re doing, MySpace focuses on helping youth, artists and musicians express themselves and the artist within.”

Read article

Even with the economy in the tank, the people at Apple continue to show outstanding profits and sales, all without pulling the trigger on deep discounts and fire sales to compete this holiday season. Find out four things Apple has mastered to make this possible.

Apple is coming off the best performing fiscal year ever according to cNet, with $1.67 billion in profit – which is a whopping $1.82 per share of earnings. This along with record sales for the Mac and iPhone, I wonder how Apple does it. When other companies struggle to weather the economic storm, how is it that Apple is able to sell a record number of some of the most expensive phones and computers on the market? Why is it that people are willing to put up with AT&T just to have the glorious iPhone?

Dell just came out with their earnings a few weeks ago and missed even the most modest analysts expectations with only $727 million in profit, or $0.27 per share. Not even close to Apple, and the new Netbooks with Windows 7 is apparently pretty hot, right?

1. Packaging. When you buy any Apple product, the packaging is very high end – you feel like you have purchased something very special. When I first opened my new MacBook Pro box, I felt like I was opening a gift from Nordstrom’s. Open an HP box and it’s nothing special. You actually get instructions that look like they were meant for a 5-year old, or those wordless graphics like you see in the backseat of an airplane. Yep – I think I can figure out how to put the battery in – thanks.

2. Marketing. If you visit apple.com from a PC, you see a page really hyping the new iMac. If you visit the page from a Mac, then you get a page pushing new accessories. This is smart marketing. Visit www.dell.com and to find a monitor, you first have to decide if it’s for Home or Office – as if it matters – do they price them differently? The Apple home page is simple, easy to navigate and puts a big focus on the “hero”, which are the products. Their checkout process is refined and brilliantly cross-sells other accessories leaving you no choice but to fill your cart with about $300 of more stuff that you absolutely have to have. After all, that’s great marketing, right?

3. Trust. Apple has spent years building a brand. A brand that you can trust is reliable and where the products will last. The only company that decided it was better to manufacture the hardware and the software all in the same place. That means installing new software or applications will only require you to click and drag an icon, rather than having to scour the Internet for a driver.

4. Innovation. The innovative products that Apple keeps pumping out are a huge factor in their success. If your company doesn’t change, or innovate, you likely will not experience explosive growth, revenue or profits.

So if you have all of these things and you’ve been able to create insatiable demand, you really don’t need to have sales on days like “Black Friday.” Not only would a sale “cheapen” the brand, but it creates an expectation in the mind of the consumer that all you have to do is wait and eventually the price will go down. This is what the cable companies do at the end of every month, and car companies do at the end of every year. Surely you’ve heard the best time to buy a car is at the “end of the year clearance sales” – right? Apples doesn’t need sales, and unless the competition brings, well… competition, they probably won’t even have to lower their prices much either.

GigamOM and PEER 1 Hosting are putting on an event called FutureHosting and broadcasting it live on webstream, Dec 3rd at 9:30am PST. The live panel discussion will be hosted by leading technology blogger Om Malik, and an excellent lineup that includes:

• Byron Sebastian, CEO, Heroku
• Sebastian Stadll, Founder, Scalr
• Jason Hoffman, CTO, Joyent
• Robert Miggins, SVP BizDev, PEER 1 Hosting

They will debate the perfect web hosting environment for early stage entrepreneurs as the hosting market evolves towards an on-demand model. Topics include delivery of platform-as-a-service, and optimizing scalable hosting and cost-effectiveness for start-up businesses. Mark it on your calendar. More details here.

Watch Live Webstream Here