Published as a part of a three article series in the Career Moves section of the Evening Echo

Last week we looked at six ways you could use the internet to help you conduct efficient, cost effective market research. This week we offer another six suggestions that can help you get your fledgling business off the ground.

1. Create online polls and surveys: survey based market research can reveal all sorts of information about your potential customers. But putting together and undertaking an effective survey used to be a costly, time consuming and labour intensive process. Now, thanks to the popularity of the internet and sites like Survey Monkey (www.surveymonkey.com) and PollDaddy (www.polldaddy.com) creating interactive online polls and surveys to canvas customer opinion has never been easier. Best of all, these services will collate and present all the results without you having to lift a finger.

2. Check out your competitors’ websites: competitor research is crucial for any new business – and what better place to start than your competitors’ websites. You’ll find specific information about the company, the services or products they provide, what they charge, and will be able to infer things like the market their targeting. What are they doing well (emulate them), what are they doing badly (learn from them), and what aren’t they doing at all (and does that present an opportunity for you)?

3. Search peer review sites: peer review sites can be generic, like Louder Voice (www.loudervoice.com) and Epinions (www.epinions.com), or industry specific like the travel review sites TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com) and Boo.com (www.boo.com). Searching for specific keywords related to your business on both generic and industry specific review sites can tell you what people like and what they dislike about the services your competitors are offering, and your industry in general.

4. Harness the social web: social networking sites like MySpace (www.myspace.com), FaceBook (www.facebook.com), Bebo (www.bebo.com), and others are all the rage at the moment. Groups of like minded people are congregating in these digital social havens to interact, exchange ideas and to discuss anything and everything. If your customers are among them, these can be great places to engage, join groups, ask questions and share information about you and your business.

5. Feed me: RSS or “Really Simple Syndication” is a very easy and convenient way to keep up-to-date with the latest information online. Instead of spending time surfing a multitude of websites to see what, if anything, has been updated, your reader will pull all of the updates into one convenient location. All you need is a piece of software called an RSS Reader (Google offer a very capable, free online reader at http://reader.google.com), then simply add feeds from your favourite websites. To see what’s new all you need to do is fire up your feed reader and scan the headlines, then click through to the articles that interest you.

6. Look, listen, learn, engage: finally, the most important thing is to recognise that the web is an interactive and constantly evolving medium. Spend a bit of time “lurking” on relevant sites to get a feel for them. Listen to what people are saying and learn as much as you can from it. Once you’re comfortable though, you’ll get much more out of your online research if you choose to engage with and contribute to the online community your new business wants to reach. Just like in the real world the more you put in, the more you get out!

The internet is a superb market research tool for your new or growing businesses. It can provide all sorts of useful insight into your industry, your competitors and, most importantly of all, your customers. In this article and the next in our series we take a look at twelve ways that the internet can make gathering marketing intelligence more productive and less costly for your fledgling business.

1. Read industry association websites: A quick search for industry related websites in your favourite search engine will unearth all sorts of valuable information: up-to-date news, white-papers, research and best practice guidelines, and more to inform the strategic direction you take with your new business. Decide to join, and you’ll probably get access to even more online resources, training and support….

2. Subscribe to analyst newsletters and report updates: one of the main sources of information for market research is reports from analyst firms like Forrester Research, Gartner Group and others. Stay ahead of the game by subscribing for e-mail updates on new analyst reports for your industry. You’ll get up-to-the minute summaries of the latest research direct to your inbox, and can invest in a full report or two if you feel it will help your business.

3. Use news aggregators to keep up-to-date: know what’s going on in your industry by searching for relevant keywords on news aggregation sites like Google News (news.google.com) and Yahoo! News (news.yahoo.com), both of which offer convenient, easily accessible window to global and local news stories, press releases and other material. You’ll have access to a much wider range of material that’s infinitely more useful than scanning through hundreds of print publications.

4. Read blogs: blogs (short for web-logs) are personal publishing platforms that allow people to post their thoughts on anything and everything to the web. A lot of them, naturally, won’t be relevant to your business, but dismissing blogs could be a serious mistake. The most popular bloggers on a particular subject can command huge audiences, and have massive influence on opinion in online communities. Reading these blogs can offer you valuable insight into what these key influencers in your field think. Remember, blogs are a two-way medium – so check out the comments to see what readers think, and perhaps even offer an opinion or two of your own.

5. Check out online forums: online forums can be great places to glean valuable information and advice for your business, and to identify the online influencers in your space. It doesn’t matter what business you’re in – a quick search is sure to unearth relevant interactive forums full of people passionate about your particular subject. Many of them are only too happy to share their experience, expertise and insight with newcomers. Just remember it’s a two-way-street, so be sure to engage in the conversation and help others out whenever you can.

6. Keep your finger on the online pulse with media submission sites: find out what’s flavour-of-the-moment with online consumers by checking out the top stories on online media submission sites like Digg.com (www.digg.com), StumbleUpon (www.stumbleupon.com) and others. These sites allow people to recommend, vote on and discuss news articles, blog posts and web pages they’ve seen online. As well as more general sites, be sure to check out industry specific media submission sites (Sphinn.com, for example, is an online media submission site for search and internet marketers). More of these are emerging all of the time, and they can give you a very industry-centric indication of what’s hot and what’s not online.

These connected whiz-kids are looking around, wondering where they should work… and where are they looking? Online, naturally; but they’re not just looking at company and jobs websites, they’re checking out your online reputation on social networks like Facebook, MySpace and others, and are looking for the profiles of executives on professional networks like LinkedIn.

Social screening is a two way street

You read a lot about how employers are trawling these networks both to “check” applicants’ details and looking for prospective employees; about how candidates should have their professional profile up on LinkedIn, and how they should be aware of their online footprint and watch what they post. What you don’t hear much about is the fact that those same candidates are doing exactly the same thing in reverse. Be under no illusion, your prospective employees are checking you out too… and as digital natives they’re in their natural environment: i.e. they’re probably better at it than you are!

In a nutshell: if you don’t measure up, then sorry, you don’t get to employ the best and the brightest — and that could hurt the long term prosperity of your business.

Krishna De, a leading business, personal branding and social media coach based in Dublin, Ireland; highlighted the fact that Generation X employers really don’t get that social media is a two-way medium in a recent blog post. She reveals that even companies that consider themselves progressive in the social media space are lagging behind in this potentially crucial area.

Marketing your company to prospective employees — projecting it as a progressive and innovative place to work – is every bit as important as using digital channels to promote and sell your products and build relationships with your customers. And yet few organisations, and even less senior managers, seem to acknowledge it, let alone embrace the remarkable opportunities that social media affords to put their brand in front of tomorrow’s brightest young stars.

As Krishna De so effectively puts it:

If you want to win the war for talent, don’t leave it to chance what potential candidates may find out about you online – be sure to create your professional profile representing your personal brand online

Incidentally, you’ll find my public LinkedIn Profile here.

Are companies embracing social media effectively in the fight to attract the best candidates? Leave a comment and let us know what you think….

SMX Social 2008, Long Beach, CA: “SEO is a wasted industry. You’re wasting your time fighting off ranking problems instead of creating great content. You’re just spinning your wheels hoping the Google gods won’t kick you out. It’s a bad way to live your life. Using a human service is a better way to go about it.”

SES 2006, Chicago: “SEO is bulls**t…90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesmen.”

The firestorm that followed reverberated across the social web….

At the risk of attracting a little vitriol, I have to say that there’s truth in both of those statements.

Content isn’t king… the customers is

I agree, for instance, that spending time trying to “game” the engines for short term results is a futile exercise, at least for legitimate businesses looking for long term prosperity. For sustainable rankings you should focus your efforts on producing great content, and making sure the search engines can index it and recognise it as such… which of course is where SEO comes in.

I’m not convinced yet that purely human search — like Calacanis’s offering at Mahalo — is the answer to the search conundrum. Perhaps some sort of hybrid search will emerge… a synergy between algorithmic and human-edited search that delivers better results all ’round.

Ultimately great content is what users are looking for… and therefore what search engines, regardless of their flavour, want to deliver. And as search engines get better at determining what users really want when they fill in that little box, it’s outstanding content that’s going to win the day. Not because content is king — because the customer is.

Plenty of good SEOs

While there are certainly a lot of cowboys out there in the SEO world who prey on the gullible and exploit the naive, there are also plenty of SEOs who are passionate and genuine and do a great job of getting their clients’ websites in front of their users. They help people to find great content that would otherwise slip under the search radar.

Search engines are amazing, but they’re not good enough yet to find and analyse all the content on the web correctly. They need a bit of help. Good SEOs have the knowledge to be able to align their clients’ content with both what users are looking for, and what Search Engines can index… again, a synergy that, in a perfect world, ends up with a win-win-win for user’s, search engines and site owners.

The snake oil salesmen? They routinely crop up in every new industry all over the world: the vampirical underbelly of humanity emerging to suck sustenance from the unwary and anknowing. It’s not an SEO thing — it’s a human nature thing.

Fire the good people

Which brings me to Jason Calacanis’s latest outpouring of controversial entrepreneurial wisdom. In an interview on the Sydney Morning Herald’s small business blog this week, he advocates firing the good people to make room for the great.

Again, a lot of what he says in the interview makes plenty of sense… you do want to attract and retain great people… and sometimes good just isn’t good enough. If you want to cultivate a culture of excellence, you have to build a team of excellent people. So far, so good.

Where he loses me is with the following statement under the heading of rewarding obsessive behaviour:

“You don’t want people with balance in their life. You want people who are responding to email at two in the morning… People with balance in their life can work at the post office.”

Er… how do I put this tactfully… WRONG!

Excellence demands balance

Balance is a good thing… and if you want to encourage excellence in your staff you damn well better make sure they have some balance. Balance doesn’t mean punching in, working 9-5, five days a week and then taking the weekends off. But it absolutely does mean having more to your life than work. I like to call it working for life… as opposed to living for work, which is what so many people seem to do these days.

Without balance, all you have is… well, imbalance, and where does that get you? A company full of wired, burnt out former geniuses tethered to their internet connection is no company at all.

To get the best out of people, I believe, you have to encourage them to be people, rather than automatons. In my admittedly limited experience, people who obsess about work all the time — the ones who are answering their e-mail at 2am — may spend more time working, but are often less productive than people who have found a healthy balance.

But hey, Jason Calacanis is a multi-milionnaire serial entrepreneur… and I’m not….

What do you think?