LINDSEY C. HOLMES

Lindsey Holmes is Founder of LCH Business, a social media marketing company specializing in social media campaigns and management, and mobile application development. Lindsey is a claimed voice in social media and has created a business model that engages on over 60 social media/ bookmarking channels where she proudly leverages her channels with a personal following of over 50,000. I had the opportunity to sit down with Lindsey and learn more about her entrepreneurial experience and some tips and wisdom on her speedy road to success in this phenomenal industry. Read on!

Arvin: Lindsey, what things can you attribute to your success in social media marketing?

Lindsey: A real understanding of its power/ necessity to the small business. I discovered social media as a young real estate broker in NYC. The competition was extreme and my budget was very limited. One day, utilizing a tool that I once used in college to tell my friends that I’d be in the ‘caf’ or after college simply to stay in touch, something amazing happened. I made a comment about how I had just closed my first deal and that I’d be taking the next month off. From that post I subsequently sold 3 homes and recruited 4 agents for my firm. Two things happened here. My friends’ parents were excited to see that I was an entrepreneur and wanted to support me, and my friends who were bored at work or still seeking work, became excited about making enough money at something to take a whole month off. All through a Facebook post, a career was jump started and I integrated social media marketing, even before it was considered an industry, into my business. I also try to be as ‘social’ as possible, including quotes/ sentiments that reflect me as a CEO, and not just a salesperson. I think it is very important to keep the ‘social’ in social media.

Arvin: What is one of the first things you notice when you meet another business professional?

Lindsey: Their pitch/networking skills. Are they overly direct, or do they understand and embrace the need for social interaction even in business?

Arvin: What’s the next big social media platform that you see people using besides beyond Twitter and Facebook?

Lindsey: Business-based social media platforms such as LinkedIn and others with usability features/ metrics steered mainly at business. I don’t think a new platform is necessary however, I believe that Facebook and Twitter are already evolving into the social media marketing/ business side of things, with Facebook Pages, Twitter’s solid brand usage models and Ad integrations. I believe that people will utilize Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn with more of a business premise.

Arvin: You have well over 24K Twitter followers. Why follow so many people or why shouldn’t you follow so many people?

Lindsey: I am a social media marketer who has resigned myself to utilizing the tool that I sell and believe in to its height. That means I believe if used correctly, you won’t have to pay for any other means of marketing to start/ grow a business. That also means that you have to be active and willing to source opportunities and not just wait for them to find you. Through Twitter, there are many ways to search for target markets, interests and respond to potential clients. You must follow first sometimes. I follow colleagues, people interested in learning how to use social media to market, or people that relate to the other aspects of my Twitter bio, like being a proud member of  Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Incorporated, loving dogs (I have a 3 year old Shih Tzu, Banks, who is the light of my life), or being a female tech. Through following/ following back, engaging with, and retweets, I have gained a following of 24,000 + people that I may not speak with daily, but that have like interests, and can be a viable source of business or friendship. More technically, when following back, I read bios, at least the last 25 tweets and if they look super interesting, I add them to a private list to see if they should be ‘current’ in my twitter stream. I do think it’s important for brands to follow back. You, as my client, should be able to tell me when I need improvement, and I would rather you do this through a DM.

Arvin: Do you have plans to share specific practices of maintaining a quality Twitter follower list? What advice can you provide to ensure a clean list of followers?

Lindsey: If people are using the tool by ‘correct standards,’ then you will find your followers only being people with the exact interests you’ve specified in your bio/ through your tweets. Most don’t go by these standards and thank God or we would be bored to death! Most of my new followers last week were from my Tuesday night Glee rant. I love Glee! When Wednesday rolled around and I was sharing articles on GTD tools or Mobile Apps, they stayed, they retweeted and found interest in what I was tweeting there too. Your tweets should be reflective of you, and unless you are boring, will unveil a range of interests over time. To ensure a ‘clean’ list of followers, use a good management tool. You can follow based on searches, cross-follow accounts will similar interests/ followers, unfollow, and more. Buzzom.com is the best management tool, Social Oomph is also good. There are also a ton of other applications for specific needs such as unfollowing, JustUnfollow.com or Untweeps.com that lets you unfollow dormant accounts, or based on the last time a person tweeted from days to months. I am partner in a Social Media Application Development company, Pandi, which created its first tool Rters. Rters lets you track who is retweeting you. This is another very solid way of cleaning list or at least establishing who your Twitter allies are. It literally speaks to who feels that what you say is important enough to share.

Arvin: Who has inspired you in the business that you are in and the markets that you serve?  If possible, can you share any personal testimonies from your inspirations?

Lindsey: I am personally inspired by my clients of the past few years. As a new industry, Social Media Marketing has such a high learning curve. For brands, both large and small to take a chance on this new, often controversial form of marketing, even as the solid business/ ROI metrics were being rolled out as we went along, to me speaks highly of my clients and makes them innovators right along with this industry. FEMWORKS, LLC subcontracted my firm to create a full scale social media campaign for an HIV/ AIDS Awareness Campaign based in Newark, NJ. Working for a health department leaves no room for speculative results. They want numbers! Through Twitter, Facebook, Causecast, and an LCH marketing strategy, we created a standard in social media health campaigns, with solid metrics and increased testing significantly in this community. I am most proud of this campaign for its impact on my community and the demonstration that out-of-the-box thinking is what is necessary to be progressive.

Arvin: Finally, what do you see in store with your recent partnership with SHAARP Management?

Lindsey: I see the creation of life-altering applications, tools, and methodologies to make productivity attainable and to empower people. I think we both understand the need for technology in our communities and are creative and dedicated enough to build these solutions, teach these solutions and maintain a level of commitment that many other young leaders don’t to our communities.

LESSONS LEARNED FROM LINDSEY

1.      Socializing is at the heart of all business. Social networking should be at the core of your business interactions.

2.      People want to learn about you – the person that could relate to them outside of their quite possibly mundane daily business tasks. They will most likely feel more comfortable/ be more apt to do business with you if there is a social relation, not just a business one, which is why social networking online is so important.

3.      Find balance in your social media. There have been times when I have forgotten the social intent and spammed my friends/ followers or forgotten my marketing premise and wasted time. I think it’s important to carve out your social media objectives, find tools such as aggregators and other management tools to help you effectively manage your social media, and follow them to a “T”.

4.      Stop being a Twitter snob or you will lose out on some potentially valuable clients/ contacts. If you are not following back based solely on a bio that seems unrelated to yours, you are highly mistaken. You only get 140 characters. Add these people to a private list. If they aren’t spam bots or they say good, albeit random (a la the premise of Twitter) things, give them a shot.

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By Arvin Poole

I had the distinct pleasure and opportunity of attending a welcoming event yesterday in Austin, TX for the Honorable Dr. Leonel Antonio Fernandez Reyna, President of the Dominican Republic (D.R.) . Upon arrival to the Headliners Club on the 21st floor of Austin Downtown Chase Building, I was honored to network  with diplomats and key officials of D.R., State of Texas and City of Austin, such as the Honorable Hope Andrade, Texas Secretary of State; Rodney Gonzales, Deputy Director, City of Austin Economic Growth & Redevelopment Services Office; Amir Mirabi, International Business Economic Development, Office of the Governor; and key executives from IBM, Citibank, Dell, Wells Fargo, and Cap Metro. Before Dr. Fernandez addressed the audience, I did shake hands and welcomed him in his first trip to our beautiful city of Austin and State of Texas.

One of the key takeaways for me was some of the successes that D.R. have already achieved in such a short period. Over the past 15 years, D.R. has grown at nearly an average annual rate of 8% but the challenge that President Fernandez states is “how does D.R. keep this momentum going forward by sustaining economic growth without the dependency on their agriculture and commodities export, and their labor intensive service-oriented economy?” For D.R., it is moving up the ladder, trying to solve the problems of poverty, high unemployment, and educating D.R.’s workforce and transforming these issues into a country that has high sustainable growth in technology commercialization, innovation, and thought leadership.

President Fernandez closing message to the audience was, “I think there is an implicit understanding amongst D.R. and the State of Texas that through our partnership, through international outreach, through our free trade agreement, and through investment I think we both can benefit and this will be the wave of the future.”

You can view President Dr. Fernandez’s speech in its entirety here:

About the Event

The event was part of Opportunity Austin 2.0, a business initiative of the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, and organized by the State of Texas, City of Austin, and Global Equations. Its objective was to establish top level relationships with the Texas Government and with leading businesses in Texas who would be interested in conducting bilateral trade and expanding business with the Dominican Republic.

About President Leonel Antonio Fernandez Reyna

President Leonel Antonio Fernandez Reyna was born in Santo Domingo, D.R. and moved to New York where he received primary and secondary education. He returned to the D.R. in 1971 and in 1978 graduated from the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo with honors in law.

He became President on August 16, 1996 and has worked to establish an aggressive foreign policy which has moved the country from its traditional isolation and encouraged market openings and globalization.

About Arvin Poole

Arvin Poole is the CEO and President of SHAARP Management, Inc., a boutique international management and marketing consultant firm in Austin, TX. Poole has provided over 20 years of management and business consulting to corporate executives, entrepreneurs, and government leaders. Poole serves on the boards for the National Black MBA Association, Austin Chapter and Amber’s Angels, a Texas non-profit organization dedicated to supporting children affected by cystic fibrosis, cancer, and asthma.

In Poole’s former role, he was a marketing manager in IBM’s Software Group and prior to that led IBM’s Austin Talent Incubator, Extreme Blue. He is very active in the Austin entrepreneurial community and currently working on his 5th business venture.

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Overview

Market research is often conducted to address one or more of the “4 Ps” of marketing (product, price, place, and promotion). The purpose of market research should be clearly defined prior to conducting the research. This means the problem that needs to be solved and the information necessary to find the solution should be outlined before undertaking any research. In the case of aspiring entrepreneurs seeking to start a business for the first time, this could appear to be an overwhelming and daunting assignment. Therefore, I will attempt to dispel many of the myths associated with “conducting market research”.

Doing Your Homework

I will make the assumption that you are reading this because you do own your own business, have owned a business, or you are aspiring to for the first time.  In either case, there are rules to entrepreneurship that many times cannot be duplicated nor taught out of a book. But I can personally guarantee that every entrepreneur has a story to tell that you can learn from and take with you as you encounter obstacles (and you will encounter obstacles).

Here is a question that you should ask yourself.  How important is your determination to research, study, and investigate your market and do a thorough analysis of it? I just heard a resounding “Very important”. Great answer because it is extremely important that you are committed and determined in “doing your homework” before “taking the test”. Whether your company is a start-up or an established company, potential funding sources will focus on the potential of your market and make a determination of whether you can successfully run a profitable business. Trust me, they will know if you have done your homework in this area; so there is no cramming allowed when conducting your research as it will be the gateway to the rest of your business plan.

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

Many of you already in business may feel that you have a pretty good grip on the market(s) that you serve; as that may be true, you should challenge yourself and ask “have I conducting a full-blown market analysis?” If you have not (like thousands of existing businesses), then dig in and read the rest of my report. You will be surprised at what you will find out about whom your target market really is and what your competitors are all about.

For those aspiring entrepreneurs or those who have recently launched their ventures, now is the time to do your detailed market analysis. It is what you find in conducting research, studying, investigating your market, and testing your hypothesis that will enable you to create the marketing and sales strategies that will bring the greatest amount of return for each dollar that you invest in your business. Give yourself a first opportunity by provide investors and lenders what they are looking for. Let’s get started!

Determine Who You Are Targeting

It is imperative for you to know who you are targeting and where they are. You must precisely state who will buy your product vs. who will consume your product (may not be the same group of people if your business sells to other businesses).

For the individual consumer, your data findings will most likely include some of the following:

• Who are the potential customers? Who are the potential consumers
• What are their demographic characteristics (income, education level, family size, etc.), attitudes, or concerns?
• What products appeal to customers?
• If hoping to meet a niche’s needs, what product characteristics appeal to that niche? Can the characteristics of an existing product be altered to meet those needs?
• When are customers purchasing products?
• Is the product’s appeal seasonal in nature? Is there a day of the week or time of day the product will be most appealing?
• Where do potential customers purchase similar products? How should products be distributed to reach these customers?
• Should the product(s) be sold direct a trade association or distributor or retailed through specialty stores?
• Which promotional outlets should be used to reach these customers?
• Should radio advertising be used, newspaper ads, bulk mail, or other?

Primary and Secondary Data

1.      Secondary data is information that has already been collected and is usually available in published or electronic form. Secondary data has often been collected, analyzed, and organized with a specific purpose in mind, so it may have limited applications to specific market research. However, some of the advantages of using secondary data for market research include both cost and time savings. Data that has been published by government agencies is readily available and free of charge, while data collected and analyzed by private companies may require permission for use. Secondary data can be found through company reports, government agencies, newspapers, trade magazines, and of course, the World Wide Web!

2.      Primary data is collected specifically to address the problem in question and is conducted by the decision maker, a marketing firm, a university researcher, etc. Unlike secondary data, primary data cannot be found elsewhere. Primary data may be collected through surveys, focus groups or in-depth interviews, or through experiments such as taste tests.

Surveys

Surveys are perhaps the most common method of primary data collection. There are a variety of different survey collection methods, including mail surveys, telephone surveys, face-to-face (in-person) interviews, Internet surveys, and dot surveys. Less formal surveys methods may also include observation and informal interviews. The choice of which survey method to use depends on many factors, including the number of respondents the surveyor desires, the time frame in which the data must be collected, the characteristics of the population to be surveyed, and, of course, the budget.

Below are just a few of the advantages and disadvantages of these different survey methods. It is important to note that with all of these data collection methods, the collected data is hypothetical in nature, meaning that an individual may say that he or she is willing to pay a certain price for something in the market, or that they value certain product characteristics, but that does not mean the person will actually pay that price or purchase a product with those characteristics in the real world.

Mail Survey – Mail surveys can be an effective way to reach a large population in a relatively inexpensive fashion. A mail survey is a written survey that the surveyor mails out to a sampling of households. When conducted by marketing firms and universities, the goal is to have the surveys reach a random sampling of households in the area of interest (i.e. county, state, region), or to reach a targeted population of individuals (for example, persons who are unemployed in a given year, or people who belong to an organization). However, in the context of smaller firms looking to gain more information about potential customers, a mailing list of households can be made by using a local phone book, or Internet resources such as the online yellow pages (www.yellowpages.com), both of which are free of charge. The survey is generally mailed out with a postage-paid return envelope so they can be mailed back at no charge to the individual.

One disadvantage of mail surveys is that response rates (the number of people who return their completed survey) are typically low unless more than one piece of communication is sent to the person, in the form of an advance notice that a survey is being sent out, a post card reminding the person to complete the survey, or additional surveys. This increases the costs of the survey, both in terms of money and time. Other disadvantages are the lag time that often occurs between when a survey is mailed out and when it is returned, if it is returned at all, and the fact that sometimes surveys are returned, but are too incomplete to be useful.

Telephone Surveys – Telephone surveys are conducted by calling individuals and having them answer questions over the phone. While an advantage of the telephone survey over the mail survey is the fact that the interviewer can encourage the person to complete the survey and the responses can be analyzed immediately, people wishing to conduct market research on a small budget may find the wage paid to the interviewers prohibitive. As with mail surveys, researchers conducting a large-scale telephone interview need access to a large, random sample of individuals, but for a smaller firm with budget considerations, a list of people to call can be made up from a phone book, or online directory.

In-Person Interviews – In-person interviews have some of the same advantages and disadvantages of telephone surveys. On the plus side, an in-person interview can be an effective way to get completed surveys, and the responses can be analyzed immediately. On the negative side, in-person interviews are costly to conduct, and some individuals may be put off by being approached for a survey or may not be willing to reveal some information about themselves to a stranger. However, another potential benefit is that a very specific population can be targeted using in-person interviews. For example, if individuals who shop at certain grocery stores are the population of interest, then the interviews can be conducted in front of, inside, or near the store. In most cases, it will be necessary to have permission from the store to conduct such interviews.

Web Surveys – The advantages and disadvantages of Web surveys are a sort of hybrid of those of telephone, mail, and in-person surveys, although they have their own unique characteristics as well. To begin, a Web survey will only be useful if the population of interest has Internet access. Of course, the person conducting the survey must have a modicum of Internet savvy as well, which you cannot make the assumption. Once this is assured, there is the issue of determining how to contact the population of interest. It is possible to mail out postcards or letters inviting individuals to participate in the survey, or there are companies who specialize in marketing via the Web (Survey Monkey, for example, has services to both host surveys and contact a random or targeted sampling of individuals to take the survey).

Advantages of Web surveys are that they may be completed faster than mail surveys, and depending on how the survey is hosted, may be less expensive to conduct than the other survey types. Additionally, some Web survey hosts offer resources to analyze the data for the user, making the process a bit more simplified for surveyors without prior surveying experience or strong statistical skills.

Disadvantages include contacting the individuals in the targeted population, as well as getting those individuals to complete the survey once they have been contacted. And as with some of the other survey methods, some individuals may be skeptical about providing sensitive information (such as annual household income, the amount of money spent on groceries, etc.) over the Internet.

Dot Surveys / Feedback Forms – Dot surveys or posters are used to focus on only a few important questions. The dot survey technique consists of a limited number of questions (usually no more than four) that are displayed on easels in a public location. Participants indicate their responses by using colorful round stickers (i.e. dots) in the columns which represent their response. For example, a dot survey at a professional conference may ask respondents to indicate their experience at a particular event, which they would do by placing a sticker in the proper category on the poster. Dot surveys are an alternative to traditional survey techniques like written questionnaires and oral interviews, and have been found to increase response rates over alternative techniques.

However, a major drawback of dot surveys is the fact that respondents can see the responses other respondents have given, and may therefore be swayed by what they see (although there is also the argument that this tendency may mimic real-world consumer behavior, such as fads and impulse purchasing).

An alternative is distributing feedback forms to attendees at the same professional conference and have them fill out the form in exchange for a freebie or gift. We have found that this method is very effective and doesn’t expose privacy of their response.

Informal Interviews and Observation – Informal interviews and observation may be slightly less scientific in composition than the other survey methods, but may be the right tool for some agribusinesses. An informal interview consists of asking the same simple but specific questions of many individuals to get an idea of what people are thinking. Observation consists of observing consumers and taking note of their behavior. Both of these methods may be especially useful to businesses that direct market to their customers, who can be used for both interview and observation. For example, an operation that already grows organic produce, but has not been certified due to costs, could ask current customers how they feel about organic produce and whether or not they would be willing to pay more for the assurance that the produce is certified organic by a third party. In the observation sense, the operation could also find out how much the same products that are certified organic are being sold for by other operations. Another example is that of an operation that is considering producing a new crop or product. Interviews can be used to determine what products current customers would like to have access to, while observation can be used to determine which products are popular through other vendors.

Survey Strategies

Focus groups or pilot surveys are frequently used by researchers to “test” a survey before it is distributed to the population of interest. This allows researchers to assess questions in advance to see if they may be confusing or worded incorrectly, or if respondents are going to find the structure of the survey too complicated. In the interest of time and money, friends, family members, employees, neighbors, etc., can act as a focus group. However, if this approach is used, it is essential that the focus group understands that their honest, unbiased opinion is necessary to determine the usefulness of the survey. It is also important to keep in mind that people who are involved with agriculture or agribusiness will have different responses than customers, as they know more about agriculture and so will have a different set of perceptions and knowledge.

The questions that end up on the market survey are just as important as the method used to distribute the surveys. While it can be tempting to try to take advantage of the opportunity to ask the survey respondents as many questions as possible, there is a point at which additional survey questions will not contribute anything additional to the survey results, as respondents experience fatigue. In light of this, it is important to keep the survey simple and as short as possible. It is also essential to avoid language that can be interpreted differently by different people, such as “generally” or “usually.”

There are a variety of ways to pose questions to survey respondents. Researchers have spent decades trying to determine the advantages and disadvantages of each question type, and have found that the best structure of a question depends on the information the surveyor wishes to obtain. Some commonly used question formats are multiple choice, rating scales, and open-ended.

1.      Multiple Choice – The multiple choice format poses a question to the survey respondents and then provides them with a list of responses to choose from. The multiple choice format can offer the respondent three or more responses, or just two: yes or no (this question format is known as dichotomous choice). While respondents must choose either “yes” or “no” with the dichotomous choice format, the multiple choice format can have respondents choose one or more responses. It is essential that when writing the survey (for mail and Internet surveys) or administering the survey (for telephone and in-person surveys), the surveyor include clear directions for the survey respondent as to how many responses to provide. A major benefit of multiple choice questions is that they are fairly simple to understand, while the yes/no format is so simple that research has found it to have a positive effect on the number of surveys that are returned. Downsides are that respondents do not always follow directions and may provide more than one response even when the directions indicate otherwise, and analyzing the results may be difficult for the inexperienced.

2.      Rating scales – Rating scales allow survey respondents to indicate their level of agreement with a statement, or to rate the level of importance of a specific feature of a product or service. Benefits of rating scales are that they are relatively straightforward for respondents to understand and are less difficult to analyze than some of the other question formats. A drawback to rating scales is that they can only be used for certain types of questions.

3.      Open-Ended Questions – An open-ended question poses a question to the respondent and asks him/her to write out his/her response. While open-ended questions can provide a lot of information, they are problematic enough that many researchers try to avoid them. To begin with, they require more effort on the part of the respondent, and so may lead the respondent to skip the question or quit the survey entirely. The open-ended nature also leaves the interpretation of the question up to the respondent, so the responses may not be entirely what the surveyor was looking for. Finally, because there are virtually infinite ways to answer an open-ended question, they can be a bit difficult to analyze, unless respondents tend to answer the question similarly. However, open-ended questions can be useful in focus groups. If a researcher poses an open-ended question to a focus group, the responses given can then be used to restructure the question into a multiple choice format.

Common Market Research Mistakes

1.      Using only secondary research. Relying on the published work of others doesn’t give you the full picture. It can be a great place to start, of course, but the information you get from secondary research can be outdated. You can miss out on other factors relevant to your business.

2.      Using only web resources. When you use common search engines to gather information, you get only data that are available to everyone and it may not be fully accurate. To perform deeper searches while staying within your budget, use the resources at your local library, college campus or small-business center.

3.      Surveying only the people you know. Small-business owners sometimes interview only family members and close colleagues when conducting research, but friends and family are often not the best survey subjects. To get the most useful and accurate information, you need to talk to real customers about their needs, wants and expectations.

About Arvin Poole

Arvin Poole is the CEO and President of SHAARP Management, Inc., a boutique management and marketing consultant firm in Austin, TX.  Poole has contributed several articles to organizations such as National Society of Black Engineers, National Black MBA Association, and Business Week. He has provided over 10 years of management and business training to corporate managers and entrepreneurs.  He is currently working on his 4^th startup and active in the Austin startup community.

About SHAARP Management, Inc.

SHAARP Management provides specialized services in the area of business planning, business process management, feasibility studies, marketing research analysis including survey design, and opinion poll administration. SHAARP Management serve clients in emerging and international markets, digital media, government, sports & entertainment, technology and e-commerce.

To gain further insight into our methodologies and best practices across marketing research, we will be happy to discuss how we can assist your business venture in this area.  Feel free to contact us via email at info@shaarpmanagement.com or give us a call at 888-9-STARTUP.

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Looking forward!
Arvin Poole, President & CEO

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Read more from David Hinson, National Director, Minority Business Development Agency’s Press Release

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How can a business compete with all the other information thrown at consumers on a daily basis? For eBusinesses, government agencies and non-profits, providing clear and concise information in a user-friendly way is crucial to delivering their message, services and products. Contact SHAARP Management today to help you determine how to optimize the information you provide to your customers.

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Multimedia and publishing companies are taking advantage of the predicted doubling of 2009 sales in 2010 by expanding the services they offer as illustrated by a recent LibreDigital announcement. LibreDigital is a digital warehouse and distribution vendor, whose investors include HarperCollins Publishers and The New York Times Company. The company revealed S3 Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in technology and is backing LibreDigital’s expansion of its e-book distribution services.

This latest news demonstrates opportunity for companies seeking to penetrate the digital market. However, a sound marketing strategy and the proper technology need to be in place to capitalize on the expanding consumer base. Let SHAARP Management assist you in succeeding as we have for several clients in this industry.

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We are in a growing stage with our firm and kindly welcome your feedback and comments.  Feel free to drop us a line!

Thanks,

CEO, SHAARP Management

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