Jesse M. Herschbein’s Personal Blog

5 Trends That Will Shape Small Business in 2010

 

Dec 08, 2009 -

2009 was a pretty wild year in the world of marketing. While social media was building up steam in previous years, it pretty much went mainstream this past year. In fact, many businesses became fatigued from hearing so much about Twitter, Facebook, and social media in general.

As the hype settled and people began to understand how to use and integrate these new platforms, more change was brewing. The evolution that was social media in 2009 set the table for the realization of some significant trends to bubble up into the world of small business in 2010.

The groundwork for some of these trends has been in place for years, but I think we will see small business owners finally start to embrace the following five significant expansions in the New Year.

1) Real time is big time

At some point in 2010, all search results will consist of real-time information, scores, reviews, tweets and all, right there and up to the minute. We’re addicted to up to the minute connection and we want more. It’s kind of like the Meryl Streep line in Postcards from the Edge, “Instant gratification isn't fast enough.”

Most everything we do will be instant. Google Wave wants to introduce real-time collaboration.

An iPhone app called Shazam will tell me the name of the song playing on a coffee shop stereo right now. Oh, and I can buy it on iTunes, right now too.

Another, called Red Laser, will tell me where to get an item from a photo. It will also give me the best price available for the item anywhere, right now, from a bar code scan.

2) Location as plumbing

Imagine standing on a hill overlooking the downtown skyline and pointing the camera on your phone in any direction and getting a full tour of what you are looking at, including restaurant recommendations from friends in your favorite social network.

Walk into a museum, plug in your headphones and point your phone at a painting or sculpture. Then, read about it while a video interview from an expert on the artist loads.

Augmented reality and location aware services have been around for a while. Now that Facebook and Twitter are starting to play with geo-location for tweets and update, enabled by the GPS technology on most every new phone, look out, it’s going to tip.

Location sharing services like Foursquare, Loopt and Google Latitude, are already receiving mainstream media mention. It won’t be long before every rating and review site, such as Yelp! and Insider Pages, build this into the foundation and push coupons and discounts out to you based on location.

Anywhere you go you will be able to locate friends nearby or the location of every Twitter follower in a city you are visiting.

Your location, or that of your customers and prospects, will become another data point in the marketing mix.

3) Filtering gets social

Having access to vast amounts of information in real-time and the stores of data from throughout history are both a good thing and a bit of a curse. While we can now find the answer to just about any query, we are pummeled with so much information that we cannot sift through the good and bad and true and false.

Filtering and aggregating information became a valuable skill in the last few years as tools like RSS readers and search alerts allowed us to subscribe to and collect the information we wanted to read most.

I believe in the coming year another layer of filtering will become just as important as search engine optimization. Look to see search results peppered with recommendations from our social contacts.

When you search for the best attorney in town, a good movie or the best place to get some authentic TexMex, not only will you see the organic search results earned through Google’s algorithm, you’ll also see what your friend Jimmy had to say about such things.

Social search has the ability to eclipse the value of traditional SEO efforts. As more and more information is added to your social graph, I believe recommendations from trusted sources in your networks will carry significantly more impact in some cases than the results that reach the top spots in organic search.

4) Kitchen sink on the cloud

Will desktop applications and computing become a thing of the past? While not completely, 2010 looks like the year that small businesses will truly embrace applications that exist online only.

Entire software suites such as Google Apps and Microsoft Office Live will finally allow document, spreadsheet, database, and presentation software to function as Internet applications at greatly reduced costs and ultimate real time collaboration.

File sharing and storage, including total file backup from tools like Dropbox and Mozy, will become standard in the small business toolbox.

Project, task, scheduling and collaboration of all manners have made a dramatic move to the web with tools like CentralDesktop and Backpack, as remote workers and a global supply chain have dictated. Look for these kinds of tools to be routinely used as client service tools that eliminate the need to drive a few blocks to consult.

Online meeting tools like GoToMeeting, WebEx and even Skype, with video, will continue to allow people to connect in richer ways online.

The sacred cow of the desktop, financial data will finally move online completely as QuickBooks Online. Tools like Freshbooks make it very easy to do bookkeeping online while providing secure access for financial employees and outside accounting resources.

5) Fusion boosts offline

While the entire focus of this article to this point has been about changes online, the mantra for 2010 will be the convergence of online and offline for the greatest leverage.

No matter how wired we get as a society and business, there will always be a need for face to fact trust, building engagement. Now that small businesses have moved more online, the smart play will be to find the best ways to fuse the online and offline activates in ways that make the return on both even greater.

While LinkedIn and Facebook may be great places to find prospects and create awareness, they are not always the best platforms to build relationships deep enough to create a sale.

Using these platforms to create awareness for content that resides on your web site or to drive people to events where they can learn and network in person, will become an essential part of the marketing process.

In addition, using online tools such as Twitter and Biznik to further facilitate existing in person relationships, will become another tool that small businesses will add to their competitive arsenal. Now when a member of your sales team meets a prospect at a Chamber of Commerce function, they may follow them on Twitter and invite them to connect on LinkedIn as a matter of process and as a way to more easily communicate, refer and connect, all apart of the trust building cycle.

Elements of these trends have been brewing for some time and adoption of any trend generally happens over time and almost immeasurably. However, now is the time to analyze the impact these ideas may have on your business this year and into the future.

Image credit: prosto photos

John Jantsch is a marketing and digital technology coach, award winning social media publisher and author of Duct Tape Marketing.

Fair-Value Auditing: Not Just for Auditors

An SEC official emphasizes management's responsibility for understanding how fair-value measurements are made.

Marie Leone - CFO.com | US

December 8, 2009

Over the past year and a half, the Securities and Exchange Commission has fielded a slew of questions from companies about the fair-value measurement of financial assets and liabilities. Many requests for guidance have involved auditing the assumptions and estimates used to determine fair value. But few questioners have focused on management's responsibility in the fair-value audit process, according to Marc Panucci, a senior associate chief accountant at the SEC.

The dearth of such questions is surprising, Panucci told an audience last week at an audit-industry conference sponsored by Baruch College and the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy. That's because "everybody agrees" that management — including company CEOs and CFOs who are required by law to certify that financial statements are fairly presented — is the primary group responsible for supporting the fair-value assertions that are reported in financial results, the SEC accountant explained.

Noting that management is also generally held responsible for establishing effective internal controls over financial reporting, Panucci said top executives must become comfortable with assumptions and estimates provided by third-party valuation specialists. Companies typically hire such specialists to determine the worth of hard-to-value items, including thinly traded financial instruments, complex securities, and goodwill.

Most of the issuers and auditors that have approached the SEC looking for guidance in this area were concerned with two issues, said Panucci. First, what kind of evidential matter is required by the SEC and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board to back up assertions made about securities traded in illiquid markets? Second, what evidence is required to assure regulators that management understands the basis for fair-value estimates provided by third-party specialists?

The catalyst for such queries, said Panucci, likely was the PCAOB's requirement that auditors must "obtain an understanding of [management's] process for determining fair-value measurements and disclosures," as well as the fact that there is no bright-line definition of an "understanding." Indeed, to render an opinion, an auditor must be comfortable with management's level of understanding with regard to the assumptions made by third parties, he noted.

Some valuation specialists, recognizing the demand for more information around fair-value estimates, are obtaining SAS 70 Type II audits, noted Panucci. A Type II audit examines the controls around the work of an outside vendor that will be fed into the issuer's financial statements, such as estimates. It's another means of assuring that management is comfortable with the third party, said Panucci.

"I am not saying that management has to recalculate [estimates] or understand everything the specialist is doing," added Panucci. But the SEC does expect management to understand how fair value is being determined, how fair value affects the financial statements, and whether the company is "truly managing the risk of restatement."

If the company can't support its fair-value assertions, then, Panucci advised, "management, the auditors, and outside counsel at least have to take a step back and ask the question: How does that impact the assessment on internal controls over financial reporting, and how does that impact [Sarbanes-Oxley] certifications?"

How to Pronounce Popular Drinks of The Wolrd

Informative & Phonetic Guide to Saying Names of Common Drinks

Dec 3, 2009 Anna Ambartsumyan

Hoegaarden, Cointreau, Curacao, Glenmorangie - ever pronounced name of a fancy drink in a wrong way while buying it in a shop or ordering it in a bar? Many people have heard exotic names of various drinks and wondered what was being ordered.

Here is an informative and phonetic guide to saying the names of some common bottles:

Beer

• Chimay -- shi-MAY

*shi-MAY is the official pronunciation of the beer Chimay, stress the second syllable.

It is a Belgian brewery, which was founded inside Scourmont Abbey in the Belgian municipality of Chimay in 1862. Chimay is brewed by Trappist monks (Trappist monks conduct their lives in near silence) with all money raised going back to the monastery or selected charities. Their creamy beers are all strong on alcohol. The brewery produces three widely distributed ales: Chimay Bleue (Blue), known as Grande Réserve; Chimay Rouge (Red), known as Première and Chimay Triple or Chimay Blanche (White), also called Cinq Cents.

• Frambiose -- fram-BWAZ

*Pronounced as fram-BWAZ, with stress on the second syllable.

It is the super-sweet Belgian lambic beer, fermented using raspberries (Framboise is French for raspberry). It is a classic among Belgian beers. What does lambic mean? Lambic is a distinctive type of beer, which is brewed only in Brussels and few towns on the city's western edge. Interesting fact: Framboise Raspberry Lambic Beer comes in a wine type bottle instead of a traditional beer type bottle. The Framboise Lambic bottle is a standard 750 milliliters, which means that one can expect to get four to five glasses of Framboise Raspberry Lambic Beer from each bottle.

• Stella Artois -- STE-lla ar-TWA

*It is pronounced as STE-lla ar-TWA; on the first word stress first syllable, on the second one - the second syllable.

It is Belgian premium beer brand with tradition dating back to 1366. It is brewed in the traditional pilsner style. Stella Artois is brewed in Belgium and the United Kingdom, as well as in other countries, including Ukraine and Australia. It is considered the best selling Belgian beer in the world. Stella obtained its name in 1926, when the traditional beer brewed in celebration of Christmas was especially sparkly. The fact is that, 'Stella' means star in Latin - for the iconic Christmas star. 'Artois' - for Sebastian Artois, Belgian master brewer, who created the beer.

Liqueur

• Curaçao -- CURE-uh-saw

*Curacao is pronounced with a hard c. It is pronounced 'CURE-uh-saw', stress the first syllable.

Curacao is a liqueur flavored with the dried peel of the laraha cirtus fruit from Curaçao - a little island in the Carribean Sea. It is a sweet blue-colored drink. Curaçao can be colored orange, known as Orange Curaçao or only Curaçao, green - Green Curaçao or White Curaçao. All these variants have the same flavor with small variations in bitterness. But, blue and green Curaçao are often used to provide color to mixed drinks.

• Cointreau -- kwän-TROH

*Cointreau is pronounced kwän-TROH, the stress is on the second syllable.

It is a sweet, orange-flavored, colorless liqueur, made by France's Cointreau family since the mid-nineteenth century. Cointreau is considered the world's most distinguished orange-flavored liqueur. By the way, Cointreau sources its bitter oranges from all over the world.This liqueur consistently has performed well at international spirit ratings competition - it received double gold ratings at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition in 2007 and 2008. It also received gold medals at the prior two years' competitions.

Cognac

• Courvoisier -- Core-vwah-see-YAY

*Pronunciation: Core-vwah-see-YAY, with stress on the last syllable.

It is a very famous brand of cognac. By the way, Courvoisier was the favorite drink of Napoleon Bonaparte, who always kept several barrels handy while campaigning in Europe. The first company to produce Courvoisier was established by Felix Courvoisier in 1835. French Jarnac is the home of the cognac maker Courvoisier, which has won many international prizes for its cognac.

In the U.S. French cognac became especially popular in 2002 after well-known American rapper Busta Rhymes wrote a song 'Pass The Courvoisier'. In this song, the singer declares his preference for Courvoisier over Hennessy, Rémy Martin Cognacs and Cristal Champagne:

'Give me the Henny, you can give me the Cris

You can pass me the Remi, but the pass the Courvoisier.'

Wine

• Cabernet Sauvignon -- Ka-behr-NAY Soov-en-YON

*Cabernet Sauvignon is pronounced as Ka-behr-NAY Soov-en-YON, on the first word stress the last syllable, on the second one also stress the last syllable.

It is called the 'king' of the world’s red wine grape. Cabernet Sauvignon originally from Bordeaux (region of France). Nowadays, it is also produces superlative wines around the world, including the USA (California, Washington State), South America, Australia and Europe (Italy, Spain). Cabernet Sauvignon wines are generally full-flavored, they have stronger flavor than Merlot for instance.

Champagne

• Dom Perignon -- Dom Pear-in-YON

*Dom Perignon is pronounced as Dom Pear-in-YON, stress the last syllable.

Dom Perignon was named after Dom Perignon , who was a Benedictine monk - he helped introduce the world to sparkling wines. It is considered one of the world's finest champagnes. Dom Perignon only available as a vintage cuvee, made only in the best years. The wine is 55% Chardonnay and 45% Pinot Noir, with 7g/l dosage.

• Veuve Clicquot -- VUHV Klee-KOH

* VUHV Klee-KOH - pronounce the first word, approaching the 'eu' of veuve; on the second word stress the second syllable.

Veuve Clicquot was founded in 1772. It is called the grand lady of champagnes. Nowadays, Veuve Clicquot remains the most innovative house of Champagne. It has forged itself a reputation as 'rose champagne expert', faithful to its motto - 'Only one quality, the finest'. It is easily recognized by its distinctive bright yellow labels.

Whiskey

• Glenmorangie -- glen-MORangey

*The Glenmorangie should be pronounced with the stress on the 'mor' and rhyming with orangey, not glen-mor-an-jee - as it is commonly mispronounced.

It is the Scotch whiskey. The name Glenmorangie is derived from the Glen of the Morangie Burn, which means 'glen of great tranquillity'. Experts say the Glenmorangie has more of a floral aroma than the smoky grass nose of other Scotch.

Whether you are ordering whiskey at a bar or getting some wine or champagne for the holidays, online phonetic guides can help anyone sound like a pro. Knowing the language will not only help make better buying decisions, but will also impress your dinner guests!

 The copyright of the article How to Pronounce Popular Drinks of The Wolrd in Beer, Cocktails & Beverages is owned by Anna Ambartsumyan. Permission to republish How to Pronounce Popular Drinks of The Wolrd in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

via beercocktailsspirits.suite101.com

Putting the Chef Back Into Celebrity Chef

Some two decades ago, I attended one of a series of meals at a Classic French restaurant in Los Angeles, cooked by fabled chef Roger Verge of Le Moulin de Mougins. That he was cooking in Los Angeles was a momentous occasion – tout le monde filled the room to taste his "cuisine du soleil."

And the food was wonderful – the antithesis of the heavily sauced French cuisine that was the standard in Los Angeles, and much of America – up until the arrival of the Army of the Nouvelle.

I remember asking the restaurant's owner how Verge was doing in the kitchen – was he comfortable working in a space not his own, using American equipment, and American ingredients? I was told he had brought many ingredients with him, and he was adjusting well. I asked if I could go into the kitchen and watch him cook. But I was told he was far too busy to have anyone extraneous crowding the small space.

That seemed fair enough. Or at least it did until I noticed Verge quietly entering the restaurant in tie and jacket about halfway through the evening, and slipping into the kitchen. A few minutes later, eyes twinkling, white mustache perfectly trimmed, he emerged from the kitchen wearing a chef's jacket with his name embroidered on it. It was spotlessly white – not a stain, not a smudge. He walked from table to table, accepting the accolades of his apostles.

We praised his cooking, and he thanked us for the praise. Though, of course, he hadn't been in the kitchen cooking. It was a perfect celebrity-chef moment.

If you type the term "celebrity chef" into Google, you'll get 642,000 responses – which is only slightly more than the number of chefs who claim the title these days. If you type the same phrase into Wikipedia, you'll find an entry that includes the following: "The term celebrity chef applies to a class of chefs who are well known for presenting cookery advice and demonstrations via mass media, especially television. The term is sometimes also used in a derogatory way – implying someone who has 'sold out'...who has not learned the craft through years as a working chef in a restaurant...The term may also be applied to a historically famous chef such as Antoine Carême and Martino da Como."

"You do know that they just want to make money as easily as possible, no matter what they say," says GQ's famously testy restaurant critic, Alan Richman. "The primary excuse given by famous chefs who no longer cook is that they are too old and tired to stand at stoves all night. [Instead] they spend the remainder of their days attending food festivals and standing at bars all night. Famous chefs who cease cooking consider themselves visionaries, so they go on television. Some, like Jacques Pépin, are brilliant and beloved. Others, like Anthony Bourdain, compete for the title of village idiot of the food community."

Or perhaps, they're just really good at re-creating themselves – the essence of any successful business. A chef who stands at the grill flipping steaks makes no more than what's left over after all the expenses are cared for and everyone else is paid. But a chef who can re-create himself...well, the sky's the limit. As Wolfgang Puck is fond of saying, his greatest skill is hiring chefs who cook better than he does.

And indeed, at no point in the past have chefs done such an amazing job of cloning themselves as they do now. Gordon Ramsay has turned into a verb, with more than two dozen restaurants, half a dozen TV shows and nearly 20 cookbooks. Alain Ducasse, who was actually in the kitchen cooking at that legendary Roger Verge dinner, has no TV shows. But he has 26 restaurants, two cooking schools, various culinary-centric hotels, inns and châteaux, and a publishing house to grind out his many cookbooks. The restaurants of Mario Batali, Emeril Lagasse and Puck are points of entry for their numerous frozen products, cookware, coffees and clothing. Batali has probably done more to popularize rubber shoes than anyone else in history. And orange rubber shoes at that.

The question is: does it matter? The answer is a definite "yes"  –  and a definite "no." The Food Network was at the heart of the rise of the modern celebrity chef. But in recent years, the network has been pink-slipping less-telegenic restaurant chefs (bye bye, Emeril) for hyper-telegenic hotties like Rachael Ray. Are Padma Lakshmi and Nigella Lawson on TV because they can cook – or because sex sells? Or is the complete package what's really needed?

The truth is, we're now dealing with a metaphysical dichotomy. There are chefs who have become celebrities. And there are celebrities who have found their fame through cooking. And then, there's the reversal of the whole process – with celeb wannabes from shows like Top Chef and Next Food Network Star opting to actually work in a real restaurant kitchen. In Los Angeles, Top Chef finalist Stefan Richter opened Stefan's at LA Farm. Top Chef winner Ilan Hall sometimes answers the phone at his recently opened restaurant, The Gorbals. And in Chicago, Food Network Star winners the Hearty Boys have opened Hearty. In time, they may return to television. They may put out a line of frozen entrees. They may sell golfwear. But for the moment, they're standing over hot stoves, doing real work, cooking real food. Fame is fleeting – but a good meal stays with you for a long, long time.

– Merrill Shindler

I love this graphic, via Data Viz: