Life of an Internet Entrepreneur

Jackie Huba, over at Church of the Customer, has started an interesting conversation about establishments kicking out customers. A movie theater chain, Alamo Drafthouse, posted a public service announcement that was actually a voicemail left by a customer who had been kicked out for texting during a movie.

The video contains a bit too much profanity for me to feel comfortable posting it here, but the video is shown publicly before previews in the theater chain.

The PSA was then picked up by CNN and held up as a shining example of this company being a “hero”, which undoubtedly created a lot of PR for the theater.

A lot of buzz has emerged about Groupon, a website that allows retailers to offer a “group” coupon to many customers at once.  A certain number of customers must sign on to the deal before it is active.  Once the deal is over, Groupon sends the business owner a check, and the business owner provides the goods and services to the customers that signed up for the deal.

This sounds great, right?

We’ve all seen the 20% off coupon oversize postcard Bed Bath & Beyond sends each week, right? Well, what you may not know is, other retailers aren’t sending customers the same offers all the time. Welcome to the world of favoritism by retailers.

A reader on The Consumerist (a popular consumer watchdog site) wrote in, saying that she receives ad mailings of past tenants occasionally, and she noticed that this time

A few weeks ago, I wrote about growing your business using LinkedIN, and shared those tips with Brynne Tillman, a sales and business development coach, who had some tips of her own for finding and closing sales prospects on LinkedIN.  I’d like to share those tips with you today.

Share Events

If I am attending an event or business card exchange I will often share the event with a prospect.  It’s a great reason to reach out with a soft approach and another way to get in front of them.

One major indicator of the health of our economy is the state of the automotive industry. Since cars are one of the largest purchases we will make in our lifetime, we tend to put a lot of thought into it, and can generally afford a new car only during good times.

Being that times are not so great for the Detroit 3 and car sales are dropping, let’s look at some strategies that can help dealers sell cars more efficiently. This will hopefully be interesting to everyday people, and vital to car dealers to read.

As an entrepreneur, you often need to make do with less, go up against larger competitors, and take big risks.  One of the most important tasks for you to complete is figuring out your raison d’être, or “reason to be”.

What I mean by “reason to be”, is you need to figure out why you are doing what you are doing in the first place, what your goals are, and why you are the right person at the right time to get it done.

With the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn, you have more ways than ever to get your business in front of potential customers.

Graphic artists can showcase their designs with custom Twitter profiles and Myspace backgrounds. Programmers can strut their stuff by designing apps and plugins that they can give away for free as list building tools to create an audience aggregator, and PR professionals can get the word out for their client.  For the creative marketer, the list of ways to use social networking for self-promotion is virtually endless!

I recently reviewed the book How to Find a Job on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Other Social Networks by Brad Schepp, who had interviewed myself and several others.

Here is an excerpt from the book, offering my tips for using LinkedIN to grow your business, and a few tips that weren’t in the book:

I found clients in the following ways through LinkedIN:

By type of company

When I had a service to offer a particular type of person, industry, or geographical location, I used the advanced search to target the decision makers.

My fascination with restaurants continues; I was at a restaurant today, and noticed a neat thing when I opened the restroom door to walk in.  All at once, the lights turned on, a fan automatically started, and an air freshener sprayed the air with some flowery scent. My immediate thought after “cool!” was that this was a great way to show how much the restaurant cared about the customers.

Why am I telling you about this? Because the larger lesson all business owners can learn here is:

I was at the Toy Fair in New York City a few months ago, where thousands of toy companies show off their newest and greatest products.  Having an educational rug manufacturer as a client was the perfect excuse I needed to spend a few days there.

While just having a booth at trade shows can certainly be a useful way to drum up some big business because the shows are audience aggregators, in a bad economy you need to take it a step further to get the most out of the trade show – if nothing else because of the high cost of having a booth.  Here are some tips I’ve put together in the hopes of helping other trade show exhibitors.