Yesterday kicked off National Small Business Week! What does that mean? It means that during this week, it’s all about the ‘little guy’. Then again, sometimes that little guy grows up very quickly to become a strong presence and maybe even a role model for the business world (i.e. Groupon). Astek is now seven employees strong, and we definitely want to share in the shout-out to our small biz brethren. And what better way to shout out than through social media?! Considering that in the beginning, social media was used mostly by the small business owner as an inexpensive (and sometimes free) marketing tool. So now let’s see what they’re saying (and what’s being said) through those same channels.

One of the first actions I took when hearing about National Small Business Week was to send out a tweet asking for a hashtag. The @SBAgov Twitter handle responded quickly with #SBW2011. A new column on my Seesmic Desktop later, and I quickly learned about the planned #SBWChat today at 1pm Eastern Time!

Fast forward a mere five minutes later, and my boss sent me the following link to a blog post from Duct Tape Marketing announcing an iPad giveaway each day during National Small Business Week! It’s set up in a sort of ‘guess-the-blogger’ format, which I think is extremely interesting and creative, plus kudos to him for what will lead to some amazing analytics results!

National Small Business Week 2011 will be highlighted with two-and-a-half days of events in Washington, D.C., where 100+ business owners from across the country will be recognized. They also have a website where you can check out the schedule, the speakers, those being honored, and even live webcasts!

So as we tip our hats to the small businesses, here is a quote from President Barack Obama’s statement to kick off the week with some inspiration and a well-earned pat on the back.

“Small businesses embody the promise of America: that if you have a good idea and are willing to work hard enough, you can succeed in our country.  This week, we honor and celebrate the individuals whose inspiration and efforts keep America strong.”

Thank you fellow small businesses for all of your service and hard work. Perhaps we will have the honor of tweeting with you soon!

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Social Media

After recently attending SXSW Interactive in Austin, TX, and the CoreNet Global Midwest Summit in Chicago, I was struck by the major distinctions between the trade show floors and technology usage.

Leave it to a corporate real estate association (CoreNet) to know how to make incredibly inviting spaces that made me want to sit down and stay awhile, and even get a bit of work done. Placing lunch tables behind the trade show floor created multiple motivations to move through the space and discover new companies.

Leave is to the ultimate geek conference (#SXSWi) to treat the trade show floor in the most traditional, and in my opinion unappealing, format — rows upon rows of standard booths, with only a couple of premium players creating spacial environments. But even these were typically focused around a stage of some sort rather than a space inviting people to stay awhile.

On the technology side, I’ve never seen such focused and practical usage of cutting-edge technologies like Twitter and Foursquare as I did at SXSW. In this environment, it seemed strange not to look at a piece of technology regularly, whether at lunch or in a session. At CoreNet, a more traditional environment, I was the odd man out to have my phone visible during a session.

Next time I’ll get pictures!

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, General, How To, Marketing, Technology

As business people we seem to swim in a culture that abruptly labels unmet expectations as failures rather than lessons learned. This could be labeled as black and white, carrot and stick — take your pick. To me it places an unnecessarily negative and narrowly reviewed label on lessons that could otherwise bear real fruit for future interactions.

In the wake of countless huge companies being rewarded for failures that rarely seem to produce lessons or better results, this could be seen as the wrong message to send. But I’m talking about the little guys — those of us who have the gumption and power to do it better next time.

We had a project a few months ago that delivered less-than-hoped-for results. It happens. We learned a ton and the client acknowledged that the information and research was well worth the price.

The owner said something valuable to me, which was that success is unmistakable. You can smell it, taste it, and see it from a great distance. No one argues with it. No one makes excuses for it. It speaks for itself and everyone celebrates.

I agree with that philosophy. I’m not saying we should all pat ourselves on the back for not meeting expectations, whether they are from clients, employees, family, or anyone in between. But certainly there are constructive ways to evaluate those failures as lessons, which elevates our responsibility and chances to do better next time.

Make a point of scheduling time to review what went wrong and what went right. At Astek we call them postmortems. They are project reviews, or whatever you want to call them. The point is that you assign a focused amount of team energy and time to the evaluation, reach some reasonable and measurable conclusions (which requires knowing what you were measuring when you started), and then move on!

This last part is essential to make sure it’s a lesson and not a cloud of failure that can quickly turn to poison in an otherwise constructive work environment. Learn and move forward. After all, if you learn your lessons wisely pretty soon you’ll smell that unmistakable smell of success.

I place a real dollar value on these lessons, because they have real quantifiable value that is often thrown out with the bathwater. As a society we have no trouble spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on formalized education, so why are the street lessons so different? Both types of leaning require perseverance and a dedication to the end result.

Thomas Edison really said it best: “I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations which wouldn’t work.”

A business partner once said it like this: “In life you have only accomplishments and excuses.” A lesson learned is an accomplishment in its own right, but a failure with no lesson is nothing but an excuse and waste.

Another business partner once told me: “If you don’t learn something every day, your life sucks.” That one really stuck with me to this day. No one expects you to know everything or be perfect. Just do the best you can.

So go learn some lessons and let me know what you find!

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, How To

It’s one thing when a company and its users, or anyone for that matter, declares their own holiday. In this case, Foursquare decided that April 16 (4/16) would be the perfect nerd-derived day to support their brand (4/(4 squared). The genesis of the idea can be traced back to an optometrist in Tampa in 2010.

You can hear thanks from all of the Foursquare crew here:

What’s remarkable is when the Mayor of New York City extends Foursquare’s self-proclamation into an official holiday for the city, a first for any social media brand. Is this a sign of things to come when digital startups like Foursquare base so much of their value on connecting people and businesses in the real world? The real world has responded in a way that’s anything but square.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun

While I’m a frequent traveler to Austin, TX, for music events and family, this was my first time at South By Southwest Interactive (#SXSWi). SXSW is divided into Interactive, Film, and Music festivals, each world-renowned for the quality of talent, content, and fun.

SXSWi is the height of Tech geekery, mostly focused around Web and mobile apps related to social media, such as Foursquare or Twitter. This is my crowd, for sure, and our social media guru Rachel Yeomans was even more plugged in than me due to her incessant and productive use of Twitter.

I dusted off my Twitter account just for the occasion. While I was one of the first people on it three years ago, I’ve found it difficult to keep up, which is a common issue for our clients to which I can relate! I’m glad I brought it out, though, as much of SXSW takes place on Twitter. This isn’t a surprise considering that Twitter essentially launched at SXSW years ago, but what did surprise me was the advanced and consistent use of hash tags to create interactive audience feedback for every session. Moderators would monitor the Twitter traffic for that session and involve the audience as they could.

Most of the big tech brands were present, as were most of the geek celebrities. A highlight for me was getting to meet a childhood geek hero, Guy Kawasaki, who was there supporting his new book, Enchantment. I fondly remember reading Guy’s column in MacUser magazine in the early 90s. As Chief Evangelist for the Mac when it was first released in 1984, he was there right at the beginning. Now he turns much of his attention to helping entrepreneurs, writing, speaking, and VC’ing. I got to meet him at his book signing, pictured below!

The learning, networking, funning, eating, and yes… drinking, all made for a dense and highly worthwhile experience, starting with legos. When we first arrived at the conference center, I found three huge tables full of legos, which immediately put me in a five-year-old state of mind. Perfect! No, we didn’t spend the whole time there, but it was a good way to get the juices flowing.

Me and my amazing creation…

And our friend Miguel Cano, from JSH&A, working on his own…

Presenter highlights included Chicago friend Jenni Prokopy (ChronicBabe) talking about building better health communities. An interview with publisher Tim O’Reilly gave us a glimpse into the future of digital. I learned about everything from social media metrics to text donations for nonprofits to web typography to mobile optimization to user experience process and more. I did make it one film event — a panel with Rainn Wilson for his new movie, Super. And somewhere in there we even made it to a couple of parties!

The food trucks are a highlight of Austin, particularly in the downtown area. Rachel, Miguel, and I walked until we found one with a short line — Turf N’ Surf Poboys. Yum…

Major sponsor and Foursquare competitor Gowalla was heavily represented, though I stuck to Foursquare personally. And vowel-challenged startup SCVNGR had everyone running around finding things for various types of rewards. All this served as real world preview of what is being largely hailed as the “next big thing” — the gamification of pretty much everything. What’s that? Well, it basically means that technologies with built-in game mechanics are more successful at getting people to actually use the technology. The best app in the world is useless if nobody uses it.

Foursquare, in my opinion, is the most successful example of merging game motivation with real-world advertising. While I’ve been using the mobile app for nearly two years, I’ve never seen such an intense concentration as I did at SXSW. People were checking in to everything, everywhere. Every room, event, party, and sometimes cars. I hit a new week record of 403 points! They released a big update to the app for SXSW, so it now tells you lots of good tidbits related to your own data, such as how long it’s been since you were at that location. This intrigues me since I purposefully choose not to broadcast my location to very many people.

The Foursquare people were everywhere as well. Forty of them came to SXSW, including co-founder Dennis Crowley, who I saw interviewed by Mashable SEO Pete Cashmore. In a particularly humbling moment for Dennis, an enormous print of his GAP ad was brought on stage and offered up to the audience member with the best question.

Dennis spoke about the future of Foursquare, and his vision to help you remember and find that coffee shop your friends were telling you to visit when you go to San Francisco, for instance. I also had a nice chat with Foursquare General Manager Evan Cohen after a smaller discussion he led with Lisa Bradner of Geomentum about the future of geo-related marketing and advertising.

Saving one of the most amazing moments for last, Rachel suggested we check out a live recording of The Nerdist with Chris Hardwick podcast at Esther’s Follies, a really fun local venue with lots of history. Fifteen minutes into the recording, Chris said it was time to bring out their special guest, who was none other than John Oliver from The Daily Show! Rach and I just about fell out of our chairs, as we’re both HUGE fans. We were treated to more than an hour of John hamming it up with the guys.

We’re looking forward to next year! Hope to see you there, too.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Fun, Gadget, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

We’ve reached the end of a significant phase with eMainstay, a client with whom Astek has spent the last three years building the My25 web-based meal-planning software to improve health and reduce management costs for communities housing people with developmental disabilities.

In order to broaden the market for the software, which has proven highly successful in numerous USDA-funded studies, eMainstay approached Astek to develop a robust new My25 prototype for the software and online community development. We chose video as the form to convey our vision for the future of our software and a truly innovative approach to household-oriented meal planning.

The videos below say it better than words. Bon Appetit!

My25 Business Overview

My25 Online Toolkit Intro

Extra special thanks to Vin Design, Kathleen Ermitage, and Sedgwick Productions for their multiple contributions to the ongoing success of this project.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Marketing, Technology, Web

A couple months back, I spoke in Miami to members of the Specialized Information Publishing Association (SIPA) about publishing to mobile devices. These are typically niche publishers, each offering unique value to their readers and each with unique editorial and technology requirements. Mobile is an exploding market for content delivery, offering enormous possibilities and potential value.

One of the first major decisions you make when deciding to go mobile is App or Optimize. In other words, are you talking about building a mobile-friendly website that almost any smart device can display (optimize), or do you need apps on various mobile platforms (app)? Here are some tips to help you make the right decision, which will likely lead to better results for you and yours.

App Advantages

• Max control over brand, user experience, and rights management
• Expanded options for ad revenue
• Enhanced feature set for media-rich content
• Enhanced ability to view content offline (plane)
• “Cool” factor

App Disadvantages

• Typically higher production and maintenance cost and time
• Access is limited to devices you can afford to support
• Potentially more difficult to integrate with existing publishing solutions
• Reduced flexibility in a rapidly evolving industry

Mobile-Optimized Website Advantages

• Standard rich content formatting language for Web/Email
• Free, flexible and open – works on most devices
• Typically reduced production costs and time
• Typically easier to integrate directly with existing content management systems (Webany)
• Easier viral distribution and linking, with methods to deter unauthorized copying
• Control viewing access (rights management)

Mobile-Optimized Website Disadvantages

• Lack of complete control over brand and user experience (esp. with RSS)
• Fewer options for flexible rights management
• Fewer embedded/easy ad revenue options
• Reduced ability to add interactive features
• Reduced offline content access without additional software support

The recent iPhone release on Verizon is good timing for Apple since Android had been out-selling it in the last months of 2010. More choices of carriers should lead to an increase in sales.

I hope this was a helpful breakdown of some of the considerations. Our process has helped several clients make the right decisions when going mobile. Let me know if you have any questions.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Technology, Web

The Working Wardrobe, an Astek blog consulting client, just made #4 in Forbes’ list of The 20 Best Fashion Blogs for Professional Women. Hats off to Rachel Yeomans and her team for achieving such an honor in little more than a year of publication.

After working with Rachel to establish the initial strategy and infrastructure of her blog, nothing gives us more joy than seeing it soar like this. Once a publication is off and running, the majority of the hard work is in the diligence and discipline of writing and editing. In addition to that, Rachel has a natural ability to cleverly leverage social media channels to reach the people for whom she and her team write.

The Working Wardrobe is a publication geared towards the working individual–be it on finding a job, maintaining that job, interviewing for that job, or changing jobs–all the while knowing what to wear for that specific occasion. Please join us in congratulating The Working Wardrobe for their ongoing success!

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Marketing, Social Media, Web

This month we’re discussing Web analytics and how they can help you construct your website in the manner that will best enable you to reach your goal, whether it’s to generate leads, sell products, express thought leadership, or anything else. There are numerous design and strategic decisions involved in each of these. To help you get started, I’ve provided a simple outline of things to consider.

1. Establish your goals. You must know what you want to get from your website before you talk about how to design or build it.

2. Have a clear call to action. If you want people to buy something, don’t be afraid to make the “Buy Now” button prominent. If you want people to contact you for more information, put your phone number on the top of every page.

3. Study your analytics to figure out what kind of people are visiting your site. You’ll know from where they came, for what they searched to find you, and all kinds of other goodies.

4. Start with a wireframe storyboard to establish the strategy and hierarchy of your site before getting into the design and graphics of it. Using your goals established above, create a rough sketch of the most important elements on the page starting at the top. People still read left to right, top to bottom, so they will see everything “above the fold” before clicking or scrolling. And if they don’t see what they are looking for, they might not look any farther.

5. Design to build trust. Use trust icons such as affiliations, awards, memberships, ratings, partners, and certifications to create immediate recognition of brand value for the visitor.

6. Focus on benefits not features. Every successful company does many things well, and we often focus on listing our features. However, focusing on the actual benefits or value you bring to the table creates a much more compelling point of differentiation. (Thanks, Mr. Schmooze, for that one)

Using this process should help you establish your goals at any stage in the Web design process. The more information you have going into it, the better you’ll be able to communicate your goals with your Web consulting partner.

Here is an example of a landing page we designed for a client’s pay-per-click ad campaign in the data center business to give you some ideas:

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Technology, Web

One of the biggest challenges we face when working with bloggers and within Astek is keeping the momentum of the blog going. If you were to look at our blog for the past month, you’d think nothing was going on at Astek, which couldn’t be farther from the truth!

As we get back in the saddle after vacations and various other last ditch efforts to soak up what’s left of the summer’s warmth, it’s a good time to offer some suggestions for keeping your (and our!) blog going.

1. Set a Realistic Schedule. Whether it’s once per week or once per month, set a schedule that you’ll be able to keep. We all get busy once the day starts going and the blog often falls to the bottom of the list. Try committing to writing your blog before you do ANYTHING else on every Tuesday, for example, and see if that helps.

2. KISS (Keep It Short & Simple). One of the things that seems to block a good article is being worried about making it perfect and long. By all means, you want to use proper spelling and grammar, but often the posts that get read the most are the shortest. Post a link and your immediate thoughts if you don’t have more time.

3. Remove Barriers to Publication. Even the act of logging into a website to update your blog can create an excuse not to publish. We recommend MacJournal or WinJournal to write posts quickly and easily from your computer. Programs like this make adding images simpler and save your login information so you can publish with one click.

4. Keep a List of Topics. Find a way to keep a list of all the interesting things you see on Facebook, the Web, or that people send you. I use MacJournal to queue up possible blog topics, but you could use Delicious.com or even a Word doc. If you keep a simple list you’ll never be stumped for a topic. As Andrew Crowe recently discovered, sometimes the list is right under your nose.

5. Be Honest. …with yourself and your audience. Don’t waste time back-filling spans of time without posts. It’s all ancient history by now anyway. Just focus on getting on top of your current schedule and don’t worry about the past.

Keeping a steady publication schedule is important for readers and search engines to know that you’re active. Let me know if these help and if you have some other tips that work for you, please leave a comment.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media