Speech: Steve Jobs at Stanford University

I am not an Apple fan. Whether their PC, iPhone, iPad, iTunes or the new Tablet, Apple could not get me to buy their products. However, like Michael Dell (Dell Computers), Andrew Grove (Intel) and Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs is a humble man with a visionary gift.

Steve Jobs is the co-founder of Apple and Pixar. This 25-minute video will make most entrepreneurs sit up and think about their personal and business life.

Enjoy!

www.smartcompany.com.au/entrepreneur-watch/jobs-on-jobs.html

Creative Marketing in Tough Times - "Recession will roll-over into 2012"

Businesses are tightening their budgets and many of them are cutting their marketing budget. It is important to understand that cutting marketing budgets can often cause more harm to the growth of your business than you realize. Studies have shown that companies that continue to market during tough economic times often see growth during those times, where businesses that cut their marketing budget will often see a decrease in sales. It's time to re-evaluate and analyze what is working and what's not and explore new options of marketing that cost less, but can still deliver the results you are looking for. How can you market during a recession? There are low-cost and even no-cost ways to market your product and keep your business on track during these difficult financial times. The key is to look at your marketing budget as a long term investment, and not an expense.

Brand positioning is an essential strategy in the online space because of its extensive reach and cost effectiveness, and should be taken advantage of without contemplation. In recessionary times, brand placement is intelligent marketing for independent businesses to take market share from the competition.

Viral marketing is an effective marketing technique that induces websites and email users to pass on a marketing message to other sites and users, creating growth in the message's visibility and effect. For example, if one produces a viral ad and forward it to 10 people, who in turn send to another 10 people, in no time hundreds (if not thousands) of people would have viewed the ad. Viral marketing gives the consumer something that they can use for free with the intent of gaining that customer to market other products and create brand awareness.

A major key is to know your consumer. Know them inside and out. Know what they think and know where they are. Know how these economic times are hitting them. Create your message around that and reach out to them. Revise your product line if necessary and develop lower cost solutions if possible. Be flexible, but at the same time be aware and always assessing.

Consider this - if you in fact cut your marketing budget, how will your consumers find you? You have severed your business lifeline and future hope of potential growth. Consumers are looking for value, period. When the economy is booming, and people or businesses have money, the "value" is not as important. Thus, timing is everything and this is an opportunity to rally around the brand in your community. The critical factor is how to do that and successfully weather the stormy times so the brand remains on the right path for the future.

How serious should you take Facebook?

This trimmed-down article was worth sharing with all of our readers.

Facebook is big and getting bigger. One day Google may be just another member of the social network. With the arrival of Facebook Places, Facebook is showing (not for the first time) that it has the power to steamroll friends and competitors alike.

People can gripe all they want about privacy concerns, but with half a billion members, Facebook is the only game in town, so leaving comes at pretty huge costs. And people developing new apps and services that might be within Facebook's reach? They should be afraid. Does this all sound familiar? It's not too tough a riddle: Just replace "Facebook" with "Google" and it all holds true.

The question is, how soon until Facebook takes on Google directly?

Places is the latest example of Facebook adding a feature that knocks a would-be competitor out of center stage. It's not a new program that requires a new account and a new set of friends — it's just Facebook, working in real time in real physical space.

Facebook has eaten into others' businesses in the past. Twitter is growing, but not at the rate that Facebook is, in part because the Facebook News Feed is essentially Twitter.

Facebook is already encroaching on Google in some niches. Facebook is the third-largest source of online video , according to comScore, and I verified that this doesn't include any of the YouTube videos that you can see in the Facebook News Feed (videos served by Google and apparently stripped of ads). YouTube is very firmly planted in the No. 1 spot and will be hard to topple. Nevertheless, Facebook is sneaking up on YouTube while using YouTube to its advantage.

News and search are also under fire. In a fascinating twist, Google's machine logic is being supplanted by Facebook's crowd logic. Why build an autonomous artificial intelligence when you can devote the same programming resources to building systems to translate the whims of the masses into usable results? Why stop at music, video or food recommendations, the stuff you see already posted on the walls of your friends? Why not turn the sum total of 500 million people's wall postings into humanly intelligent news blotters and search results?

Despite its size, Google's lost ground on social networking will hurt when it comes to harnessing the masses. A few months ago, after Google launched the poorly received Buzz social news feed, Fortune's Jessi Hempel wrote that "Google still holds users' attention with Gmail, the best free e-mail system available." However, she concluded that Google needs to "find a better way to harness the social aspects of the Web and organize it into an improved search product, before it's too late."

Like Google, Facebook isn't overly concerned about our privacy concerns. Keeping people's information private is not the point, and it never will be. The promise of connecting you to people, or you to information, comes at the cost of sharing some of your own information. That's food for the billion-dollar ad monsters who pay well to feast. Go too private, and Facebook's coolest features — like Places — will leave you behind. Hint: This is why they don't reform when people ask nicely.

Google is fighting a lot of different wars now. Facebook may be the new Google on the Internet, but as mobile platforms go, Google may be the new Apple, or at least the latest hegemon to beat Apple at its own game. And with dominant positions in both search and video, Google has plenty of weapons to fight a war of the online worlds, too.

That being said, Google still needs to watch its back. E-mail is already less of a draw for kids and twenty-somethings. No social effort by Google has taken root. And Facebook has a log-in-required lock on the majority of its audience that Google doesn't really have. Deciding to create a Facebook account is easy, but once you have built that account into your own hall of frenemies, you're not apt to tear it down again. The more connections you've made on Facebook, the harder it is to pull yourself away. And by a tragic turn of circumstance for Google, the very fact that you have a Facebook account makes it about a million times easier to ditch an old e-mail account.

Watch out, Google. You may have become king of the mountain faster than anyone before you, but that only means you've set a record for Facebook to break.

SMC participates in Industry Webinar hosted by Parking Today

On July 12, 2011, SMC Software is scheduled for a webinar hosted by PARKING TODAY, the leading publication serving the diverse needs of today's parking industry. On this date, I will be sharing the truth about Reservations and Multi-Channel Optimization with the parking industry. This leading-edge technology will transform the parking industry.

Why are we announcing this here on our Blog to our clients?

1. Because YOU are OUR valued client. And you are important to the managing partners of SMC. We want to watch you succeed in your respective markets. Period!

2. Because we know many of you do not realize what powerful tool is in your possession. Simply put, your company has access to the most logical reservations technology ever developed for parking industry. As stated, we have a patent pending to protect this logic we refer to as Multi-Channel Optimization. That said, we encourage you to learn more today.

3. Because it remains our hope that each of our clients take this innovation and apply it before this technology falls into your competitors hands.

4. Because this announcement on July 12th will wake up some parking people for sure. Some will take immediate action while others play the wait and see game.

As clients, you are our friends. So, as our friend, please take our advice with this one. Begin to network all around your community; corporations, travel agencies and associations. We will help you set up your partner channels.