NxBizSuccess » Marketing

Enabling a Virtual Office

Tonia Franklin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:54:38 +0000

By Randy BargerPublished: October 1, 2009
Posted in: 2009 Fall, Technology, Expand Omaha Magazine

In today’s economy, companies want to cut costs while maintaining current productivity levels with possibly fewer employees. That’s a tall task, but new technologies are allowing companies to create virtual, online working environments that are secure and easy to use while providing better performance and functionality than a traditional computing environment.

In a traditional computing environment, all employees physically come to an office to work on computers purchased, configured and managed by the company“s IT staff.

This computer management is a huge undertaking that“s necessary to keep data safe and computers running smoothly. Personalization and flexibility are sacrificed for security and performance.

The alternative is to deliver computing desktops and applications online to any computer – anywhere, anytime – that remain physically separate from an end user“s computer, transforming it into just an access point or terminal.

For more of this article, please visit http://www.expandomaha.com/2009/10/enabling-a-virtual-office/

NBDC Offers Free Research Services

Marilyn — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 20:46:40 +0000

If you need high quality industry research and market data, Nebraska Business Development Center in the College of Business and Technology will provide it to you at no cost. A typical report provided to business clients would cost almost $1,000 if bought separately from other providers.

The licensed resources can provide timely financial data by sales or organizational structure within an industry sector, detailed GIS demographic and economic data for a geographical region, company market penetration by industry and geographical area, and detailed national industry reports with trends and projections. Compare your own business performance to the industry. Get a better look at the market and coming trends. See how demographic and economic characteristics are forecast to change.

Contact Odee Ingersoll, Director, Nebraska Business Development Center, College of Business & Technology, University of Nebraska Kearney. Phone: 308.865.8429

Visual Merchandizing

Tonia Franklin — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:35:01 +0000

Glenn Muske, Oklahoma State University, takes us on a tour of ways that business owners can create compelling visual displays that will draw the interest of customers without breaking the bank. This is an adobe connect webinar courtesy of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension.(http://www.extension.org/) To access the webinar, click on the title below.

Visual Merchandizing

U.S. Religious Landscape Survey

Marilyn — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:34:04 +0000

There is an excellent new tool available to business owners who are interested in targeting individuals with religious beliefs or need to know more about their current market’s religious practices. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life conducted a survey of more than 35,000 American age 18 and other to obtain information about their religious makeup, religious beliefs and practices as well as social and political attitudes of the American public. The data shows that religious affiliation in the U.S. is both very diverse and extremely fluid.

The U. S. Religious Landscape Survey provides information such as:

Religious composition and size of the different religious groups in the country.
Percentage of each state’s population that is affiliated with various religions in the U.S., and the religious beliefs and practices of each state’s population.
Comparison in demographic characteristics, religious beliefs and practices as well as social and political views of each religion.
Full PDF reports of survey data are available for download

Religious information is also available for other countries: Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Phillipines, South Africa, South Korea

Market Research Tool

Marilyn — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:02:17 +0000

Need local market research information? Headwaters Economics, an independent, nonprofit research group based in Bozeman, Montana has developed an Economic Profile System (EPS) that is free to the public. The easy-to-use website allows users to produce socioeconomic profiles of their communities, counties, and regions. The information is available through a downloadable software package or you can select to receive a finished PDF version.

Blogging: More Than Idle Chatter

Tonia Franklin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:05:52 +0000

By Leigh Buchanan, Max Chafkin, and Ryan McCarthy | Feb 1, 2008 Inc. Magazine

With 100 million blogs now online, you may feel as though the last thing your website or the world needs is another one. But if you don’t have a blog, you might want to reconsider. That’s because Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), the great arbiter of Web success, has a particular love for blogs. When compiling its vaunted rankings, the search engine appears to favor websites that are updated frequently and are linked to by other webpages. Given these criteria, blogs have an outsize influence on the results. And blogs are more than a way to game Google. A surprising 66 percent of North American consumers trust blogs as a source of product information, according to a 2007 survey by Nielsen. The trick, say experts and longtime bloggers, is restraint. “For marketers, it’s about being more authentic, which is so ironic,” says Peter Kim, senior analyst at Forrester Research.

Moreover, blogs can help a company establish a human connection with customers. By being personal and idiosyncratic, they soften the antiseptic feel common to many corporate websites. Blogs can also help you tap into one of the overarching trends in marketing, which is that companies are now striving for an ongoing conversation with customers, rather than one-off, short-lived campaigns.

For more on this article, simply click on the author’s name below.

By Leigh Buchanan, Max Chafkin, and Ryan McCarthy | Feb 1, 2008 Inc. Magazine

Social Networks: Ready to Join the Party? Selling Yourself On Facebook.

Tonia Franklin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:58:10 +0000

By Leigh Buchanan, Max Chafkin, and Ryan McCarthy | Feb 1, 2008 Inc. Magazine

Though roughly two-thirds of all North American Internet users visit a social network at least once a month–and they spend four hours a month on these sites on average, according to ComScore, a Web-traffic research firm–most marketers have so far steered clear of social networks.

“The perception was that social networks were these crazy free-for-alls, basically an extended bar night,” says Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and founder of Slide, a San Francisco–based widget developer. “But the fear of putting brands on social networks is starting to subside.” (In the interest of full disclosure, Inc.’s parent company launched IncBizNet, a social network for the owners of private companies, last fall. Operators are standing by.)

Beyond the simple fact that social networks offer advertisers access to tens of millions of potential customers, they present two clear opportunities for more effective campaigns. First, they promise the ability to target customers with precision. If you want to reach baseball-loving twentysomethings who live in Seattle and have a college education, you can find social network groups that fill the bill. Second, social networks encourage your customers to recommend your company to others. Let’s say your company has a Facebook profile, and another user signs on as a “fan” of yours. Facebook will then alert that person’s friends, informing them of the connection. Voilà: textbook viral marketing for free. That’s the hope, anyway. But skepticism is in order, as social networks have a ways to go.

For more of this article, simply click on the author’s name below.

By Leigh Buchanan, Max Chafkin, and Ryan McCarthy | Feb 1, 2008 Inc. Magazine