If you’re a business owner, business manager, or entrepreneur interested in avoiding the simple mistakes you could make with technology in your company, register for Tim Berry’s webinar on Dumb Ways Smart Entrepreneurs Fail in Using Technology.
Tim will discuss how even very smart small business owners make dumb mistakes when it comes to implementing technology in their companies. You’ll hear:
Some of the biggest mistakes growing companies make when trying to use technology
How much of social media is hype and whether it is for every business
Some of the best ways companies can keep current customers AND get new ones
The 3rd annual Global Entrepreneurship Week at UnleashingIdeas.org is ending today. Palo Alto Software was pleased to participate once again in this event. As in years past, we added to the conversation about entrepreneurship by offering some one-on-one time with our President and founder, Tim Berry.
On Wednesday, Tim spent an hour going over the lies and myths that are out there about business plans and business planning. He also took some time to answer some questions from the audience. We didn’t get to all the questions asked, but Tim addressed them later in the day and we’ve posted them in a separate blog post here.
Honestly, I think he could have talked more to that subject, but an hour was all we had time for.
If you missed the event, don’t worry. We recorded it and we’re posting it here for people to re-watch or enjoy for the first time. If you like it, tell us. We want to know if there are other topics you’re interested in hearing about.
Today at 4pm Pacific Time, Tim Berry will be speaking in a free webinar hosted by WedLock Magazine, a brand new magazine targeted specifically for wedding professionals.
The webinar will focus on Tim’s favorite topics on why you need a business plan, and how to tweak your plan if you already have one. Take this opportunity to listen to Tim’s advice on business planning and spend some time after his presentation asking him questions.
For those of us who deal with words and publishing, it’s always exciting to see a new technology come on the scene offering to make our jobs a little easier or more efficient. But caveat emptor. (Or is it caveat receptor when it’s free?)
As some of you know, our in-house business planning expert, Tim Berry, is a rather prolific video speaker, with recorded seminars, webinars, and commentary all available online. In an effort to make Tim’s advice more accessible, over the past year we’ve been adding closed captioning to many of his videos. We tried Captiontube, Overstream, and even (the easiest of all) simply transcribing them as .txt files and letting YouTube figure out the timing. It actually did quite a good job.
So you can imagine how pleased we were to hear that YouTube was releasing the ‘Auto caption’ feature to the public, which would use Google’s speech recognition software to automatically transcribe uploaded videos. It sounded too good to be true…
and it was.
A reminder that while new technological advances can be great, if they say it’s beta… well, it’s probably beta.
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Just for fun, here’s what else YouTube thought Tim had to say:
“This particular sample fails forecast…” (we usually call it a sales forecast, but this may be more accurate)
“I’ve got the NBA” (That would certainly help your investors’ NPV)
“helped to keep your wrinkles strategy” (ah, yes, it’s all about saving face)
and the first one that had us literally laughing out loud, as Tim tried to advise on metrics that are actually measurable:
“make it all miserable”
Sara Prentice Manela
Editor
Palo Alto Software, Inc.
As part of Global Entrepreneurship Week 2009, I presented a webinar titled “Build Your Business, Not Just Your Business Plan, on Thursday Nov. 19, 2009. The recording of that webinar, plus an additional segment of questions and answers, is now available on YouTube.
If for any reason you don’t see that video embedded here, you can also click here to go to the original on YouTube.
Here’s the original announcement, below. The register link has been revised to take you to the recording instead.
John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing is hosting a live panel webinar Wednesday, May 20th at 9am PDT/Noon EDT.
John will be joined by Ken Yancey, Jr, CEO of SCORE, Tim Berry, founder of Palo Alto Software, and Rich Sloan author of StartUpNation to talk about starting a business.
Collectively, this group has poured over thousands of business plans, seen great successes and great failures and advises many a fledgling start-up on the strategies, resources and regulations involved in going out there on your own.
Don’t pass up this unique opportunity to get first hand information from this amazing panel of experts.
I like the title: “Just Start,” as in start your business, shades of the now famous Nike “Just do it” campaign. Just start.
I’m pleased to be speaking along with John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing, Ken Yancey, CEO of SCORE, and Rich Sloan of StartupNation for this free webinar next Wednesday.
It’s a free webinar, but capacity is limited, so if you’re interested, please click here to register right now.
It’s no secret we’re big fans of John Jantsch around here. So it was exciting to read about a new webinar he’s involved in concerning something we get a lot of questions about. Branding.
John writes:
Please join me and a very fun panel of small business branding pros on Wednesday, March 18th at 11am CDT for – The “Truth” About Small Business Branding – using your small business brand to outsmart the competition – a panel discussion featuring practical branding tips and tactics from leading small business branding experts.
Panelists:
» Karen Post – The Branding Diva & Author of Brain Tattoos
» John Moore – Creator of Brand Autopsy & Author of Tribal Knowledge
» Sam Horn – Author of Pop! – Stand out in any crowd
» Aaron Weiss – Chief Product Officer for MarketSplash
This won’t be your typical Branding 101 discussion, trust me, these guys get small business.
Register here for the Truth About Small Business Branding
Definitely a webinar to make time for!
‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software
So you’ve completed your webinar. You had good attendance, the subject was well received. Your slides were sharp and supported your talk in a way that left everyone excited about your topic.
Everyone has left the webinar room and returned to their regularly scheduled day.
Time to wrap it up!
Links - More than likely, you mentioned some resources during your presentation. If you thought ahead, you had a slide dedicated to information and resources you talked about. Make sure to tell people they’ll be able to get these links or even be able to download the slides very soon. Perhaps on a special post on your blog or in a follow up email.
Special Offer – You’ve more than likely presented this webinar to conntect with customers or potential customers, so give them something worthwhile as a thank you. A special deal just for the people who signed up or attended.
Follow up - Don’t forget them! You worked hard to find and cultivate these new leads. Don’t just leave them hanging. Keep in touch with your webinar attendee’s. Send out a survey asking what they liked and what they didn’t like. Connect with them about what they’d like more of in the future.
Mistakes will happen- No matter how well you plan or how much effort you put into making the event the best one ever, you’re going to have some mistakes. Own up to them. Apologize for them and then move on. Learn from them so they don’t happen again.
‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software
So you’ve got your topic, you’ve been sending information to and inviting your customer base. You’ve advertised it on your blog and Twitter and Facebook/MySpace.
Now what?
Send a reminder – email your registered attendee’s their login information and all important information right before the event. This will make them more likely to click over and attend. You’re looking to create that “Oh yeah!” moment with them.
Prepare - Don’t try and wing it, practice your presentation – and make sure to time it. Do a walk-through. Soup to nuts, as Tim is so often saying. Make sure as many of the kinks are out of your webinar as is possible. You probably won’t catch them all, but at least you’ll be better prepared.
Presentation - The way you approach and create your slides is important. You want to make sure they’re visually appealing and offer key points to what you’re talking about. But stay away from shoving as many words as possible into your slide. Make the slides easy to read. Short and to the point. Try checking out some really great slide presentations at Guy Kawasaki’s blog.
Support- The event will go better if you have another pair of hands and eyes. Have someone there to help field questions, monitor the Q&A window and in general be a helping hand. If you Twitter, consider making a #tag for the event. For our last event the hashtag was #dtmpa. There is a great explanation of what Hashtags are and how they came into exisitance can be found on the Twitter Fan Wiki.
Bonus tip- As a presenter, you want to make sure you’re giving as professional a presentation as possible, so think of the little things before you begin. If you’re sharing your computer desktop for the presentation, check out your background image, hide icons for your favorite games or shortcuts to websites. Turn off your instant messenger, your Skype and anything that might give off an alert or “take over” your focus during the presentation. Because Murphy’s Law is never more in effect than when you’re presenting something in front of 200 potential customers.
In the final part we’ll go over follow-up tips.
‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software
![nov19-09-webinar[1]](http://timsstuff.s3.amazonaws.com/blogs/nov19-09-webinar.jpg "nov19-09-webinar[1]")
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