Ever been in the Brag Basket ?

It's Friday, and that means the Brag Basket is open for the weekend.

This is where you can share your projects and accomplishments. You can also cheer for other people, give shout outs, congratulate, and even give someone a well-deserved pat on the back.

If you've never been the Brag Basket before, I'm extending a special invitation to you. Come on, share!

The Brag Basket is open for everyone, whether from a small town, a big city, or anywhere in the world. (But it's true that I love small town brags!)

Will you put something in the Brag Basket this week? You can brag on a friend, your own project, yourself, others, anything! Make it personal, and not just an ad. You don't need special permission, and you don't have to be from a small town. Just leave a comment right here. There's no deadline, so you can brag anytime during the weekend, and I'll open a fresh Brag Basket each Friday.

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Workshifting means anywhere is my office

Our friend Chris Brogan introduced us to Workshifting.com. Their tagline is "anywhere is my office." I want to take that a step further. Don't just work where ever you want, live where ever you want!

So I offered Chris and Justin Levy a guest post on the small town perspective on workshifting. (Don't tell anyone, but I think both Chris and Justin actually live in small towns.) I talked about what you need to know before you relocate, ways to cope with internet outages, and other issues we deal with all the time in small towns.

They were kind enough to accept, and you'll find it here: Workshifting from a small town.

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Never been there

1. The best promotion you can get is the personal recommendation of someone who has been to your town or attraction.

2. And yet... locals will live here for years, and never set foot in some of the most amazing attractions and events you have to offer. But once they do, they are some of the best evangelists.

This, "I've lived here for years, and I've never been there," attitude is surprisingly common. In New York, I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge with a Chaz, who lives there, but had never been. At home, I had never seen the archaeology find of the century in the Freedom, Oklahoma, Museum, until they called me for some consulting. We just don't go see what we have close by.


What if you could get more of your locals to actually experience your treasures? Then they would be much more likely to talk them up to their friends and family.

How could you actually do this?

• Promote your event directly to locals by word of mouth, personal contact, phone calls, emails, etc. Make sure you dedicate a specific portion of your promotion efforts and budget to bring in locals.
  
• How about your nearby neighbors? Bring in the people from one town over, or all the surrounding towns. They'll have less of that famous "we don't have anything" local bias.
  
• Create a special tour for locals. Make it like a blogger invasion, but for your locals and neighbors.
• Host regional events. Partner with groups, like the Rotary or church groups, who are bringing folks from surrounding counties. Do more than give them a brochure; help them set up an event at a cool local attraction.
  

I know this is tough. Lots of towns have trouble getting locals involved in anything. So let's open it up. The best stuff is always in the comments. What are your ideas and stories?

This article is part of Tourism Tuesday, a series of posts for tourism businesses and associations in small towns and rural areas. If you have questions you'd like us to address in this series, leave a comment or send us an email at becky@smallbizsurvival.com. This is a community project!

The secret project is now called Tourism Currents

Sheila Scarborough let the news slip.

We're doing a joint project. I've mentioned it before, but now it has a name, Tourism Currents. It's all about social media learning for tourism professionals, and you can sign up for an email notice when we open it.

Projected launch date is September 9, 2009, but details will be coming out in August.

Wish us luck, and cheer us on!

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Small town business has known Island Marketing for years

If you're in business in a small town, you know something valuable. Seth Godin is pointing it out for everyone, in Welcome to island marketing.

If you run a business on a small island, every interaction matters and every customer is precious. There's a finite number of people you're going to be able to sell to, and every person you interact with knows everyone else, so you always have to be on your best behavior. You can't say, "tough" and then go on to the next person. You can't run ads that churn and burn through an endless supply of naive prospects. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and on the island, that impression matters.

But now the whole business world needs to know what you know.

...like most things in our ever shrinking world, all marketers are now on an island.

What lessons should we share with the rest of the world?

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What do you do when a prospect stands you up

I'd like your advice. A prospect stood me up this week. When he asked, I declined to offer him another free consultation. What would you have done?

Does it matter how good of a prospect he was? This person was one member of a volunteer committee, just gathering data to take back to the group to convince them to start the process. But should that make a difference?

I'd love to hear your advice and your stories.

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Great ideas from Wister in the Brag Basket

It's Friday, and that means the Brag Basket is open for the weekend.

This is where you can share your projects and accomplishments. You can also cheer for other people, give shout outs, congratulate, and even give someone a well-deserved pat on the back.

The Brag Basket is open for everyone, whether from a small town, a big city, or anywhere in the world. (But it's true that I love small town brags!)

This week, we're featuring a special brag from the Town of Wister, Oklahoma:

I am very proud of our Local Library. Leslie Langley, the librarian, puts out a monthly newsletter for our community, with several people making contributions (mine is Sherry's Hodgpodge). She gets requests from people out of town and out of state who happen to have picked up the newsletter in a local businesses. I have attached one of the latest issues.[Note from Becky: I've uploaded the July Wister newsletter to share with you, also.]

Leslie says she sends a pdf copy to our state senators and representatives, so they can keep up with what is going on in the little Town of Wister. I moved to this community due to a family members health issues in 2006. And as in all small towns there some things that can be improved, but I have come to admire this community and Leslie Langely is on top of this list with her efforts to pull the community together. I could go on about some of the other things she does, but my brag right now is the "Wister Community News".
Sherry Miller
Encumbrance Clerk
Town of Wister

Will you put something in the Brag Basket this week? You can brag on a friend, your own project, yourself, others, anything! Make it personal, and not just an ad. You don't need special permission, and you don't have to be from a small town. Just leave a comment right here. There's no deadline, so you can brag anytime during the weekend, and I'll open a fresh Brag Basket each Friday.

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Getting NYC kids into small towns

I love the idea of getting kids from big cities out into small towns and rural areas, giving them new experiences.

Here's the press release info from one organization that does just that, The Fresh Air Fund.

THE FRESH AIR FUND, an independent, not-for-profit agency, has provided free summer vacations to more than 1.7 million New York City children from low-income communities since 1877. Nearly 10,000 New York City children enjoy free Fresh Air Fund programs annually. In 2008, close to 5,000 children visited volunteer host families in suburbs and small town communities across 13 states from Virginia to Maine and Canada. 3,000 children also attended five Fresh Air camps on a 2,300-acre site in Fishkill, New York. The Fund’s year-round camping program serves an additional 2,000 young people each year.

In 1877, the Reverend Willard Parsons, minister of a small rural parish in Sherman, Pennsylvania, asked members of his congregation to provide country vacations as volunteer host families for children from New York City tenements. This was the beginning of The Fresh Air Fund tradition of caring for NYC’s neediest children. The simplicity of our program is its strength. Looking back to 1877, we can reflect on how much has changed, and how much has stayed the same. In 2008, close to 10,000 New York City children experienced the joys of summertime in Friendly Towns and at five Fund camps in upstate New York.

If you could help bring kids out to small towns, would you? What other similar programs around the world do you know about?

Photo by Becky McCray. (of my nephew)

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Rethinking local event calendars

When I checked into the Crystal Mountain Resort in Michigan, the desk staff person handed me a paper copy of the events and activities calendar for the week. That's a tourism idea that has been around forever, and we can make something more of it.

First, let's adapt it for a small town. 
Don't think only of your big festivals and events, like the car show or craft fair. List activities of all kinds, especially your "insider" events. Your visitors from big towns would love to sit in your small town gym and cheer at the high school basketball game, or bid on cool junk at your country auctions, or watch movies without fighting a crowd at your local theatre.

Don't think you have enough events? Cooperate with neighboring towns to add their events to yours.

Fill in empty spaces with "anytime" activities. Think about the experiences that make your small town special, like enjoying the walking trail, touring the historic neighborhood, playing at the playground, or laying out and watching the stars in the park at night.

And don't get caught up in the pretty design in the example. Do a simple plain text listing instead. It fits your small town image better and takes much less work. Put your effort into the descriptions, so people can imagine the experience just from your words.

Second, let's take it online.
How can you get this calendar into the hands of visitors and potential visitors? Of course you will hand out paper copies all around town: at the motels, the cafes, the gas stations. But you'll also use some modern tools to share it online:

• Post it on your local blog, and let the magic of RSS deliver it to interested readers every week. 
• Set up email subscriptions to your blog through FeedBurner or FeedBlitz. 
• Email your key influencers to invite them to subscribe: the regional and state tourism staff, regional reporters, your elected officials and legislators, local bloggers, and those same businesses you gave paper copies to.
  
• Post it on your Facebook page (set it up to pick up the RSS feed automatically).
• Set up a local Twitter account to share one-line event notices.
• Call Utterli, and record the list in audio, shareable online. 
• Show local bloggers how to use the RSS feed in a widget on their blog that will stay constantly up to date with local events.
  
• List all these outposts (Facebook, Twitter, Utterli) on your main web page, so visitors can choose the method they prefer to get updates. 

Third, let's add your ideas.

What ideas can you add? Do you have examples? Where did I get it wrong? Let me know in the comments.

This article is part of Tourism Tuesday, a series of posts for tourism businesses and associations in small towns and rural areas. If you have questions you'd like us to address in this series, leave a comment or send us an email at becky@smallbizsurvival.com. This is a community project!

Why you procrastinate on invoicing and what to do about it

Some of you, and you know who you are, tend to put off one of the single most important business tasks: invoicing. You probably beat yourself up over it, too.

But there is a simple reason you procrastinate on invoicing: it's not fun.

We like to work on the parts of our business that are fun to us. Even the prospect of, "I have to do this to get paid" isn't usually enough to keep us from putting off our invoicing.

Does this make us bad business people? No. It's normal. Here's a little bit of proof: a professional gardener shared his feelings in a Flickr photo that tells the story, "Dog and I just realized: invoicing is the worst part of the job."(Click through to read his caption and notes.)

So what do you do about it?

Build a system. Set up the steps that need to be taken throughout the process to make it as easy as possible to figure and send those invoices. And the first step is to create and record some standards of what you charge, whether by the hour or by the finished product or whatever method works best for your business.The second step is a system that makes it easy to record your work just as soon as you do it.

Do it only once. Record your work in the same format as your invoices so you can copy from your work record and paste directly into the invoice form. (I use this trick, myself!)

Use an online system like Invoice More, Fresh Books, or Greener Billing.

Delegate. If you're bad enough about procrastinating, pay someone else create invoices from your work records. That could be an employee, a virtual assistant, or your local bookkeeping service.

How do you keep from putting off invoicing? Have any great tricks or stories to share? Or just want to admit that you, too, are human?

This article is part of the Small Biz 100, a series of 100 practical hands-on posts for small business people and solo entrepreneurs. If you have questions you'd like us to address in this series, leave a comment or send us an email at becky@smallbizsurvival.com. This is a community project!

One answer to lose fewer graduates

Small towns lose too many of their high school graduates: they drop out, they move away, they leave for college, they get involved in drugs, they vandalize, or they are just lost. What can you do?

Read "This small town nurtures its teenagers," a success story from Canada. Here's the end of the story:

The moral is pretty clear. Rural communities that want to survive must put the development of their young people at the very top of their agendas. The heart of that development is respect and responsibility. The pimply teens soon emerge as scientists, teachers, entrepreneurs, doctors — adult citizens with a major contribution to make. If they have grown up believing that the community truly belongs to them, that they are respected and trusted as well as loved, that the community provides the soil in which they personally can flower, then they will probably want to raise their own children in that same place, in that same way.

What are you doing to engage young people in your business and your community?

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Get more from attending events

When you invest your time and money to go to an event, you want to get the most out of it. But just as soon as you get home, you have to get right back into the thick of everything that needs doing. If you are lucky, you'll find time to do a few critical actions and maybe follow up with a few key people. 


My advice:
Write down the top five ideas from the event: five business ideas and five blog posts.



This is advice I just took myself. I've been to a non-stop string of events, starting in March with SXSW Interactive. Of course, I wrote some posts immediately after each event, but there were more ideas in boxes, folders, and piles of paper. So I dug into those piles, took a notepad and drew up lists of the most promising ideas.

Now my piles are shorter, and my lists of ideas are longer. And I hope my writing and business are just a bit fresher. 

Thanks to Deb Brown, @debworks, for inspiring me to share this.

What advice would you add, to get more from those events you've attended?

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You are invited to join the Brag Basket

It's Friday, and that means the Brag Basket is open for the weekend.

This is where you can share your projects and accomplishments. You can also cheer for other people, give shout outs, congratulate, and even give someone a well-deserved pat on the back.

The Brag Basket is open for everyone, whether from a small town, a big city, or anywhere in the world. (But it's true that I love small town brags!)

Will you put something in the Brag Basket this week? You can brag on a friend, your own project, yourself, others, anything! Make it personal, and not just an ad. You don't need special permission, and you don't have to be from a small town. Just leave a comment right here. There's no deadline, so you can brag anytime during the weekend, and I'll open a fresh Brag Basket each Friday.

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Mistakes: No returns

Common small business mistakes have become a regular series here. Here's the example of the day:

Feel bad after suggesting that daughter buy shoes in downtown Oakville rather than at a chain. Now store won't accept return.

@DonnaPapacosta, via Twitter

Ouch! You want to gain more business; you want to beat the big chains. In order to do that, you have to be at least as good as the chain store, if not better. That means accepting returns, doesn't it?

OK, before we bog down in a debate over accepting returns, I know that sometimes there are good reasons why not. My liquor store, for example, is legally barred from it, because it is considered "purchasing from an unlicensed wholesaler." So I have to be creative to make customers happy without taking returns.

But here's the bigger question: how are you doing? Are you comparing every service you offer, every policy you use, to the chain stores that compete for your business? If you loosened up, for the customers' benefit, is it just possible that you would retain more satisfied customers, and be more profitable in the end?

Do you have examples? Together, we are going to try to help each other out of these most common, deadly mistakes. You can use real world examples, real small businesses. Write it up, take a picture, or shoot a short video. Take care not to embarrass the offenders! Key point: include suggestions on how to do it right!

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Grow your business webinar

Now is a great time to be growing your business. Really! Most other businesses, big and small, are still hiding. That means it's time for contrarians like you and me to move ahead. I talked about this at the Oklahoma Entrepreneurs Conference, so I'm glad that My Venture Pad contracted me to help promote SAP's webinar on growing your business, "The Stimulus Package: What Does It Mean for Your Business?" on July 29, 2009.

The good news is they are going to talk about how regular businesses can benefit, not just the solar cell manufacturers and the construction companies. They are also talking about how to stimulate your own business, by improving your business processes.

The featured speakers are: 

• Steve King, Founder and Partner, Emergent Research
• Chad Moutray, chief economist, US Small Business Administration (SBA)
• Sam Sliman, President, Optimal Solutions

They'll be talking about: 

• Where the federal stimulus will help businesses like yours – and where it won't
• What you can do to best leverage the federal stimulus
• Strategies and tools to uncover the "hidden" stimulus in your business
• How one company, Optimal Solutions, has optimized processes to stay strong and profitable in today's economy

So if you have time to invest in your business on July 29, 2009, 1 pm Central time, think about investing it here:
The Stimulus Package: What Does It Mean for Your Business?

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Please write a review

People trust other people, much more than they trust you. That means your potential customers trust the semi-anonymous reviews written on online review sites more than all that great text on your own website.

Do you regularly monitor what is said about you on TripAdvisor, VirtualTourist or Igougo? How about mainstream booking sites like Hotels.com, Expedia or Orbitz?

If you are a fairly small business, you may have no reviews or only a few reviews on these sites. One cranky person can leave a huge mark on your online reputation. So it is critical that you take action.

First and foremost, improve your service. We'll all draw an undeserved negative comment on occasion, but we can all stand to improve. While you may want to brush off a bad review or get defensive, it's more productive to treat every comment as a chance to deliver better service.

Next, encourage positive reviews. When a hotelier in Scotland stapled this card to my bill, I thought he was smart. He'd already made sure I was satisfied, and he was encouraging me to tell others.

If you want to encourage reviews,

• Start with your satisfied current customers. 
  
• Focus on the few review sites that actually send you the most customers. 
• Consider contacting your biggest fans to offer reviews. 

I can see some possibility for controversy here. Are we skating too close to manipulating?  I'd love to hear your take on this in the comments.

Leverage reviews in bigger ways

Are you feeling brave? Let's take comments back from the online review sites. Let's open our own sites for reviews: 

• Open a comment section on your own website. 
• Allow comments on your tourism association website.
  

Do you think that could work? Do you know of any examples of a tourism business or association allowing open reviews?

This article is part of Tourism Tuesday, a series of posts for tourism businesses and associations in small towns and rural areas. If you have questions you'd like us to address in this series, leave a comment or send us an email at becky@smallbizsurvival.com. This is a community project!

Plain View Vineyards keeps it simple

Con Pekrul knows how to keep it simple. He owns the Plain View Winery, in Lahoma, Oklahoma.


Let's look around the back room. All the equipment is simple. Barrels and buckets, second hand tables, a used refrigerator. Here's Con's father Hart, filling bottles by hand. An automatic bottler would be too expensive, Con said. And Hart, a retired banker, won't entertain such extravagant ideas. The wine labels are still printed on plain paper in one color. There is only one label design, so each variety is stamped with a rubber stamp. 

This careful attitude has helped them beat the predictions of their accountant and to build a strong business from a hobby for more than seven years.

How can you do better at keeping it simple? 

Read more of Con's story in our Point of View series, or visit the Plain View Winery site. 

Photo by Becky McCray. 

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Brag Basket and birthday wishes

It's Friday, and that means the Brag Basket is open for the weekend.

Plus, it's Jon Swanson's birthday. If you know him, you might go take a look at his birthday post.  


When you come back, share your projects and accomplishments. You can also cheer for other people, give shout outs, congratulate, and even give someone a well-deserved pat on the back.

Think that bragging is a bad thing? Read how Tony explains the Brag Basket.

The Brag Basket is open for everyone, whether from a small town, a big city, or anywhere in the world. (But it's true that I love small town brags!)

Will you put something in the Brag Basket this week? You can brag on a friend, your own project, yourself, others, anything! Make it personal, and not just an ad. You don't need special permission, and you don't have to be from a small town. Just leave a comment right here. There's no deadline, so you can brag anytime during the weekend, and I'll open a fresh Brag Basket each Friday.

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A web of stories

Nate is a web designer. Allie is getting married. I'm helping an organization with their web presence. Trista arranges flowers. All these stories are linked. And all of them tell something about small business.


1. Nate Reusser came to tell me (and the staff of the organization) about passwords and their website. In the course of the conversation, two things became clear. First, as a designer, he gives clients what they ask for. Although he will suggest things, the client, ultimately, decides how a site looks. Second, he and his firm are capable of way more than they did for this client.

We had a delightful conversation about web design, not from the perspective of pretty, but from the perspective of functional. I was impressed by him and discouraged for him. His reputation depends on word of mouth. When a client isn't effective, his word of mouth suffers.

2. Later, Nancy, (my wife) was looking at Reusser Design's client gallery. Among the clients, she noticed one with flowers. Wedding flowers. Gorgeous wedding flowers. Rose's Bouquets.

Because the girl getting married is marrying our son, Nancy told Allie about Rose's Bouquets. And mentioned to Nate that she was looking at Rose's. Nate wrote back and said, "She's great! In fact, we used her for our wedding flowers."

Nate put the client samples on his website, yes, but he was also putting the clients on the site, giving them potential business, business that he believes in.

3. Allie went to the site for Rose's Bouquets. She filled out the information request, and indicated that, although the wedding is not for a year, she will be living in another city starting in two weeks. As a result, Allie said, she'd like to meet soon for a consultation.

Two minutes later, Allie's phone rang.

"Hello?"

"Hi, this is Trista. I don't want to be creepy, but I just now checked my email and wanted to follow up as soon as I could."

Allie and Trista had a great conversation. She focuses on weddings. She works out of her home. She understands brides. She is completely local. They will be meeting this week.

-----
We know the web is a collection of links. But that's just the technical definition. It's actually a collection of people doing business the way it's always been done, when it's done well.

Word of mouth. Customer samples you believe in. Amazingly quick response. Acknowledgment of potential creepiness.

Photo by Becky McCray

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New ideas for rural tourism

New ideas are changing rural tourism. Now it is possible to reach more people, more places than you could ever have afforded to before. But it's also more complex, with more complicated choices, and a faster pace of change.

Recognizing that tourism is a huge segment of rural small business, we want to put a special focus on these issues. We're starting Tourism Tuesdays to help you deal with the change in your small town tourism business and your tourism associations.

Some of the new realities we're dealing with:

• Everyone researches online before they travel, using a huge array of sites and tools.
• Friends trust friends, especially on social networks, but no one trusts ads, especially on social networks.
  
• Travelers pull up your website on their smart phone while they drive through your town. Soon they'll be using QR codes and augmented reality to interact with the physical world in your town through their phones.
• Everyone is a reviewer, able to share their customer experience instantly, world wide.
  

Daunting, isn't it?

I'll be writing about specific examples I've seen, both good and bad, from around the world. I'll share ways that web 2.0 tools, social networks, and listening can help you bring new people to your town and your small business. You can share things you've seen, your experiences, and your questions.

To give you some more in depth solutions, I'm cooperating with travel and social media writer Sheila Scarborough to launch a related project in September.

Until then, stop in every Tuesday for another tourism business discussion. And bring your comments.

Illustration: 1.0 vs 2.0 by Sheila Scarborough.

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18 Blog post ideas for any small business

Want to start a blog for your small business, but not sure what to write about? The best posts are like personal notes to your customer. Here's a starter list of topics to get you going.

1. How our business was founded
2. Just yesterday, a customer asked...
3. Meet one of our employees
4. Meet one of our customers
5. One thing we are doing to support the community
6. Here are some great tips from our customers
7. Meet one of our home-town suppliers
8. What would you do if you ran the place?
9. More about our town, and why we're here
10. Here's a cool upcoming local event
11. One secret that could help you
12. A customer sent us this photo
13. I read something I thought you could use
14. Some trends I see coming at us
15. What I learned at an industry event that you could use
16. One thing I'm really proud of
17. A cause we support
18. A few websites that might help you

Secret #1: You can do these as written text, or record them in audio or video. Your customers would love it if you'd do a mix of all three.

Secret #2: These are perpetual topics that you can do over and over. This list never expires. 

Do these sound too small-business-y for your bigger company? Take a look at this list from Chris Brogan: 50 Blog Topics Marketers Could Write For Their Company for some topics that are more useful for medium sized businesses.

What would you add to your list of perpetual topics?

Photo by Becky McCray

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Celebrate Independence in the Brag Basket

It's Friday, and that means the Brag Basket is open for the weekend. On this Independence Day weekend in the USA, let's celebrate our independence as entrepreneurs. Share your projects and accomplishments. You can also cheer for other people, give shout outs, congratulate, and even give someone a well-deserved pat on the back.

Plus, it's Liz Strauss' birthday. So go leave her a comment, OK?

Think that bragging is a bad thing? Read how Tony explains the Brag Basket.

The Brag Basket is open for everyone, whether from a small town, a big city, or anywhere in the world. (But it's true that I love small town brags!)

Will you put something in the Brag Basket this week? You can brag on a friend, your own project, yourself, others, anything! Make it personal, and not just an ad. You don't need special permission, and you don't have to be from a small town. Just leave a comment right here. There's no deadline, so you can brag anytime during the weekend, and I'll open a fresh Brag Basket each Friday.
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Social marketing only works if ...

Reminder: Social marketing only works if your product is excellent.

Dangerous combination: aggressive social marketing and sucky product.


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Shopping local as a partnership

Lois Loucks, Director of the Tri-Cities Economic Development (Wheaton-Onaga-Havensville, KS), shared some of her innovative thoughts with me in an email about shopping local.

"Shopping Local" as a two way street, with responsibility placed on the business owners to earn "their share of business". Just because someone decides to be in business, does not automatically mean they deserve "their share" of customers. The business owner/manager/employees must earn "their customers". From my experiences, I believe, especially in the present economy, a "Shop Local Campaign" must not only be directed at the citizens, but formulated as to form a partnership, so to speak, between the businesses and the citizens.

Loucks listed some of the key items that business should focus on to earn their share of business:

• Convenience (Shopping hours)
• Service (not only personal, kind, friendly, but Store layout, Cleanliness, Good Signage, Lighting, Parking, etc.) 
• Price for Perceived Value (Obvious reasons to offset higher price) 
• Making Shopping a Pleasant Experience (yes, Enjoyable Experience)

I'm a huge proponent of building your basics first, and building experiences with customers, so we agree on much of this.

What do you think? How do you see small businesses working in partnership to promote the whole community?

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