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!

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.”

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The table below shows the results of ComScore’s study which tested a control group of users not exposed to a banner ad campaign against a test group of users exposed to it across various industry verticals. In all cases, there was an increase in search activity by the test group, in one vertical as high as 77%. The overall average lift being 46%.

It makes sense when you think about it. I see myself behaving similarly. I seldom click on banner ads, but many times I have later gone to Google to search for a brand name or offer from an ad I was exposed to earlier – as I try to recall it. In this common scenario, the banner ad would have no value if it was measured by click through alone. Yet, in reality it entirely influenced the final search activity, which is often assigned all the value as the “last click” to the site. This study gives enough reason to reassess how you value banner advertising and the impact it has on your overall advertising campaign… beyond the click.

And so explains Kevin Maney, author of Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don’t, why coffee giant Starbucks came to a crossroads in 2007 with a major drop in its share price and customer store visits; the company still hasn’t fully recaptured its early luster. Starbucks increasingly traded its high fidelity for high convenience which rarely, if ever, works. Companies need to be one or the other, or risk confusing their brand. Starbucks stood for a luxurious and pricey coffee experience that consumers were willing to seek out and wait in line for – nothing convenient about that, which was perfect for the brand. As it became more ubiquitous through a juiced-up expansion strategy that included shops on every corner, packaged beverages in grocery stores, and a record label – it could no longer hold on to the same prestige it once had. Kevin quotes economist and author Tyler Cowen who said, “Once Starbucks became ordinary, it was committing suicide.”

7-11, McDonalds, and Dunkin Donuts are examples of brands that are high in convenience and don’t attempt to be high in fidelity. And as a result, they are incredibly successful. Starbucks is trying to re-discover its passion for coffee under Howard Schultz’s return as CEO, and place less focus on growth and more on the coffee experience. It’ll be interesting to see  if he can recapture the brand’s early magic.

In an article titled Service-Led Battle Plan by Growing Business, business operator and customer service evangelist, Dominic Monkhouse reveals his approach to taking on his former Internet company (and industry leader) with a commitment to delivering remarkable service. He outlines his philosophy that every instance of human interaction is a moment of truth for a business – something he learned during his early days at retail giant Marks & Spencers:

“It wasn’t uncommon for men to come in and buy a suit on a Friday, cut all the tags off, wear it to a wedding and then bring it back on Monday claiming it didn’t fit,” Monkhouse says, recalling one incident where the item was so creased it couldn’t be resold. Much to his surprise, his manager agreed to take it back, insisting that it was all part of owning and building the store’s reputation.

Monkhouse is fostering a similar culture, and believes it’s futile to get into a war over who’s to blame. “We’re in the IT game,” he says. “Things do go wrong and customers break their own stuff all the time. Then, if they ring us and say: ‘It’s broken,’ we’ll assume responsibility. In fact, we’ll say it’s our fault, so we’ll also take accountability, because without owning the problem, we can’t fix it. We won’t say: ‘Actually, we’ve looked in the log file and we think you logged in and broke it.’”

In other words, sometimes you need to take one on the chin and think about the long-term benefit, rather than succumbing to your gut instinct and becoming defensive. That said, Monkhouse concedes there is a line. He doesn’t think the customer is always right and he won’t tolerate abuse. “If anyone is abusive to any of our staff, it doesn’t matter who they are, we’ll terminate the account,” he says.

Delivering ordinary customer service is a given. Delivery extraordinary service is a commitment. This means owning your customer’s mistakes, owing up to when you screw up, and letting your employees own their roles and have freedom to make decisions to resolve customer issues quickly.  So, are you ready to make every human interaction count?

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