The Importance of a Proactive Legal Approach to Your Business

Written by: Kristin K. Bailey, Esq. 

A new business idea. A new project. Plans to take your business to a new level of financial growth and popularity. If you're a small business owner, all of these aforementioned items probably fuel and excite you as you plot to take over your particular field of expertise and develop your presence within your industry. As you plot away, you definitely want to take into consideration possible legal implications of the decisions that you're making. Oftentimes, it is easy to get caught up in various business growth plans without considering necessary risk-averse legal processes that would prevent negative legal and financial pitfalls along the way.

In essence, you want to take a proactive approach to legal with your business. A proactive legal approach, in my opinion, all comes down to issue-spotting. Having an attorney in your back pocket for consulting purposes is always a good idea when it comes to issue-spotting (remember: that's what they are trained to do). Before you launch a new business idea, you will likely need certain contracts to protect your idea. For example, if you intend to work with an industry expert/consultant on a particular idea, you may want the consultant to sign a well-executed confidentiality agreement in order to prevent the consultant from sharing details of your initiatives with others who are in a position to profit off of them.

Or let's say you intend to associate a particular trademark with your business. I sat in a business conference where a presenter advised successful business owners that if they come up with a great trademark, they should just start using it and put a little "TM" next to it in order to legally protect it (or look like they are legally protecting it). I cringed when I heard this advice. I further cringed when she laughed at the fact that well, she wasn't a lawyer and didn't check with a lawyer first so it wasn't legal advice, but her advice worked for her and hasn't gotten her in trouble yet, so why not share it with everyone in the audience?

Her comments were cringe-worthy for a couple of reasons. Well, sharing legal advice without having it first vetted by a licensed attorney is probably a bad idea (and it's not a laughing matter, especially if you wind up in court after taking such advice). Also, relating to her commentary, it wouldn't make much sense for me to use the tagline "Just Do It", for example, just because I happened to "come up" with it one day and it happens to flow with my business name. Adding a "TM" next to it would just add insult to injury! Why? If Nike found out, the company would be within its legal right to pursue legal action against me for attempting to use the tagline. Nike owns it! A proactive approach by either you or your attorney would involve doing a thorough search to find out if someone already owns or is using the name/tagline /etc. that you're considering in order to avoid possible issues down the line.

A more subtle business idea killer that business owners don't always think about are internal policies that should be in place in order to prevent internal bleeding of ideas via disclosure online through

employees. Let's say you are a business owner and you have a staff meeting where you share with your employees that you're about to launch a new beauty product line that is about to revolutionize the cosmetics industry. You want your staff to be on board, so you share the news and get them ramped up for this new adventure, right? Sure, I understand. But let's think about one of your employees (let's call her "Susie"), who is so hyped about the product launch that she immediately goes on Facebook upon returning to her desk to share some essential details on her wall about the new product with her friends. From Susie's perspective, she is excited about her work and wants her friends to know about it. Did she read, understand and sign a confidentiality agreement or a social media policy that would prevent her from sharing these details on Facebook? I hope so. Because guess what: one of her Facebook friends is connected to one of your biggest competitors. The friend subsequently shares this information to said competitor. Time is now of the essence to launch this product, and you have a competitor on your hands without you even knowing about it - yet. A proactive approach to preventing this type of disclosure would be to enforce a social media policy and/or confidentiality agreement that would prohibit employees from disclosing confidential information about your business. 

These are just a couple of examples of how small business decisions could have a massive impact on a company. It's essential to have an attorney help you develop a 360-degree legal approach to your business strategies and "issue-spot" possible weak spots in your strategic direction from all angles that may require some type of legal action in place to avoid problems down the road. In my opinion, you're much better off taking as much precaution as possible ahead of time to avoid winding up in court or financial penalties in the future. 

Understanding How Colors Affect Your Marketing and Branding

For years psychologist and marketers have understood that colors send significant messages to our brains.
Dark colors like black elicit emotions of fear and mourning.  Why else would we wear black to funerals  other than to tell the world of our mourning.
Probably the most visible example of this in business is the color red.  Because the color red excites your appetite many restaurants, from McDonalds to Tim Hortons, use the color red in their logos. All with the hope of making us a little hungry when we see their logo.
Additionally serviced based businesses, especially banks, use the color blue because it induces emotions of peace and serenity.  Trust me, they know it's far easier to get a calm persons money than one who is uptight.
Here is an infographic that will help you use the right colors in your marketing and branding so you can better attract and influence your audience.

Why Every Blogger Should Be Using Infographs

Before we get into our discussion about the importance of infographics I think it is prudent to understand some things about your potential audience or consumer - particularly the way they learn:

1. Approximately 65 percent of the population are visual learners.
2. The brain processes visual information 60,000 faster than text.
3. 90 percent of information that comes to the brain is visual.                                                     4. 40 percent of all nerve fibers connected to the brain are linked to the retina.                             5. Visual aids in the improve learning by up to 400 percent.

I believe it is safe to say that 65% your potential audience, especially for bloggers and print media, are visual learners.  As a result, any information you broadcast should utilize the visual learning abilities of your audience, thus importance of using infographs. 

An infographic is a visual representation of information that would normally be displayed via text and graphics.  Infographs are used in order to make information easier to digest and less timely to consume. We all know that text and graphic materials are great educational mediums.  However, they are flawed in that they are limited in their effectiveness to the ability of whoever is reading them to understand and absorb the information. 

Infographs help remedy this issue.  They simplify and visually express your points.  infographs utilize the brain’s capacity to learn visually while simplifying text information so that your audience will be able to fully absorb the information that you’re giving them.  So instead of writing an information rich blog, you just condense it down into an easy to decipher infograph.

What Exactly is a "Social Media Expert" Anyway?

If you ever Google "What is a social media expert," you will immediately come across blog posts criticizing the profuse usage of the term today. I'm not shocked by the criticism either. The term itself does not specify a person's true abilities when it comes to social media, and could easily mislead business owners who are trying to find a social media marketer who can help promote their companies online.

Social Media Marketing from a Business Perspective

Social media marketing is such a vast, fast-paced and complex field and it is not something that can simply be studied or practiced in isolation on one's own personal social media profiles. As a result, I do not classify someone as a "social media expert"(or "SME" for the purposes of this blog post) if they only studied it in school or if they were able to gain 1,000+ friends on their own Facebook friend profiles.

From a business perspective, the only reason why I would hire a SME is because I want someone to strategically increase my brand's recognition online in order to generate additional revenue for my company. As a business owner, I could care less about the history of social media and your friend page. I care a lot about whether you can understand my brand, my product, and/or my service and can figure out the best way to target and engage my ideal market and encourage them to make a purchase. I want to know that you won't apply a "one size fits all" solution to my company when it comes to your social media marketing efforts. I want to know that you will listen to my branding interests and truly get to know the ins and outs of what my company does and what it stands for before you start representing my business on various social media platforms. I also hope that you are great at customer service and won't do anything to jeopardize my company's reputation. Most importantly, I want you to not just gain followers for my brand online (e.g., 100,000 likes on my company's Facebook page). I want you to gain a lot of ENGAGED followers who will get excited about my brand and engage with it.

How to Tell If Someone is Truly a "Social Media Expert"

As a business owner, you don't want to waste time and money dealing with a social media expert or company that cannot meet your demands and your needs. As I mentioned before, social media marketing is not a "one size fits all" field, so it is absolutely crucial that you do background research on any potential social media consultant before hiring them to manage your online marketing needs.

Don't fall for a SME's glitzy website: It means that they have a great website designer and understand the importance of having a good website these days. That's about it.

Check their social media profiles, but don't rely on the profiles to make a decision: If a SME has a high Klout score and 1,000+ likes on their Facebook page, that's great. It suggests that they were able to effectively promote their own company and gain positive social proof. Whether that suggests that they can gain that same number of likes (or hopefully more) of loyal and engaged followers for your business is another story. Ultimately you want to know whether the SME can understand your company, effectively market it online, and also engage with your potential consumers.

Pick their brain about their marketing strategy: Someone may be able to perfectly recite current stats about Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest or provide you with great case studies from their past work, but that means nothing if the SME is not able to translate their knowledge of social media and experience into a tailored marketing strategy for your business. Make sure that the SME is truly listening to you and your needs and is willing to create a social media strategy that works for you. Also make sure that the SME is adaptable and is willing to make changes to their strategies as they (hopefully) keep up with the latest social media trends. Communication between you and the SME is absolutely essential. They should be willing to regularly keep you posted with their social media marketing work for your business, how they are engaging with your followers, and whether a follower had a question or made a comment that they cannot answer on their own but needs immediate attention (e.g., a complaint about a product or a negative review of a particular service).

Can They Speak Your Language? In today's social media world, the brands that are able to effectively engage with their online followers are the ones that rise to the top. Your SME must be able to talk to your brand's followers and engage them about your product or service. Why? Because your competitor is. In the social media world, people want to know that companies care about them and are listening to their needs. Ultimately, if you want people to get excited about your brand, you need to show them that you're excited about them as well. You are competing for your ideal client's attention, so you have to show them that, as opposed to your competitor, you truly do care about their needs and want to satisfy them with your product/service. If your SME is not willing to learn about your company, become a mouthpiece for your company and effectively engage your followers, then you should definitely find another one that will.

Why Your Business Shouldn't Avoid Pinterest

What is Pinterest? It is an image-sharing social website that started in 2011 and literally exploded on the social media scene in 2012. Users create virtual "pinboards" where they post and share online content that they enjoy. Users also browse other pinboards and "repin" content that they like onto their own boards.

Pinterest is a site of visual stimuli. People are literally addicted to the platform, living vicariously through the images that they see. When they look at, like and repin images, people are thinking, "I want to see this place one day," "I want my day to go this way," "I want my house to look like this," "I want to look like this," "I want to wear this," or "I want to buy this now or one day." It provides users with the opportunity to materialize their imagination as well as their goals and dreams (while maintaining an anonymous profile if they so choose). In essence, it is a virtual vision board and a virtual wish list.

To be honest, I didn't learn about Pinterest until I noticed a large amount of traffic coming to my online lifestyle magazine while reviewing the site's analytics. Through a little bit of digging, I realized that a large portion of the website's traffic was coming directly from Pinterest. After joining the website, I found out that certain articles from my website were repinned by many users on the social media platform, generating thousands of pageviews and visits. Pinterest operated like a silent social media marketer on my behalf, and I was stunned by the positive impact that it had on my site's traffic (and  subsequently, its revenue) overall.

While Pinterest may already benefit your company in some way with no effort on your behalf, you want to intentionally take advantage of the marketing advantages that the image sharing site offers for your business. From a marketing perspective, the platform gives you direct access to people's direct likes and dislikes. According to Forbes.com, "marketers can easily see a goldmine of information on potential customers. For example, an interior design marketing team can see who is influential in the home decor section. They can then start following and see what trends people are repinning and liking."

Unlike viral videos on the web, Pinterest traffic to your site never really dies down. Let's say many people repin an image from your website. The repinning may pick up really fast and slow down, and then randomly pick back up several days later after someone else sees the image on someone's board, repins it, and by doing so, shares that image with their Pinterest followers. As a result, the platform has endless possibilities of increased traffic and revenue to your website and business.

Here are some random Pinterest facts that you should know about:

• Pinterest buyers spend more money more often and on more items than any of the top five social media sites.
• People who use Pinterest on average follow 9.3 retail companies on the platform. 
• Pinterest pins which include prices receive 36% more likes than those that do not.
• The number of daily Pinterest users has increased by 145% since January 2012.
• Pinterest leads in both awareness and visitation among social image sharing sites (like Tumblr) with 36% of online consumers aware and 19% visiting.
• Pinterest generates 4x more revenue per click as Twitter and 27% more revenue per click than Facebook. 
• 81% of online consumers trust information and advice from Pinterest. In comparison, Facebook's percentage is 67%, and Twitter's percentage is 73%. 
• Pinterest attracts 1,090 visitors per minute.
• Pinterest retains and engages users as much as 2-3 times more efficiently than Twitter was at a similar time in history of their platform's lifespan. 
• Pinterest drives sales directly from its website.
• Of people with Pinterest accounts, 21% have purchased an item after seeing it on Pinterest.
• Pinterest generated more referral traffic for business than Google Plus, YouTube and LinkedIn combined. 
• 97% of its users are women.

I encourage you to get involved on Pinterest (www.pinterest.com) and experience it for yourself before using it to promote your business. After you get comfortable with the site, you should start developing a strategic plan for marketing your business on the social media platform. Stay tuned to the Stafford Business Group blog for tips on how to get the most out of your marketing efforts on Pinterest.

Facebook's New Graph Search: What Does It Mean for Your Business?

Today, Facebook unveiled a new search tool that will enable users to sift through business pages, places, people and photos. Mark Zuckerberg called it “graph search,” and it is a tool that will help Facebook’s one billion users search through various items for people, things, places and photos that are of interest to them. It is a search that is limited to Facebook’s platform, so it will not be a direct competitor with other engines like Google.

As an example, Zuckerberg explained a situation where he and his wife Priscilla were looking for a Mexican restauarant in Palo Alto that his friends liked on Facebook or checked into (this will not yet include status updates). Simply stated, it is “a completely new way to get information on Facebook,” stated Zuckerberg.

From a privacy standpoint, you don’t have to be concerned. Your Facebook content will only be found if you want it to be found. You will likely get a notification on Facebook advising you to review your privacy settings, so you will want to review those settings in advance before this new search tool is fully released on the social media platform.

Due to the sheer amount of information and data that Facebook has accumulated over the years, users may become increasingly less interested in using traditional search engines in order to get certain types of information if they can sit on Facebook and access that data. Let’s use Zuckerberg’s restaurant example. If I want to search for a local Mexican restaurant, wouldn’t I be more inclined to stay on Facebook and search for a nearby Mexican restaurant that my friends liked versus visiting a search engine and taking a chance based on reviews on Yelp, search engine rankings or advertisements? In essence, I want an informed opinion that I trust, and I am more likely to trust my friends’ endorsement of that restaurant versus a random opinion or advertisement elsewhere. (Do I think this new Facebook tool will make that big of an impact on Google? The jury is out on that - for now. The biggest impact at the  moment is Yelp's stock, which dipped by 8% when Facebook made its statement today).

From a business marketing standpoint, you want to pay close attention to what this development means for you and your business. In my opinion, this “new Facebook search tool” has inserted a slight game changer in the world of social media marketing and search engine optimization, the details and impact of which will not be known until the search tool is fully released and available to users. I am intrigued by what this tool means for businesses that want to strategically leverage their marketing efforts and increase their visibility to Facebook’s audience. According to Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner, Facebook’s search tool will “lend itself to advertising or other revenue-generating products that better matches what people are looking for.” In addition, “advertisers are going to be able to better target what you’re interested in. It’s a much more meaningful search than keyword search.”

Due to the game changing nature of this development, we’re going to continue to cover this search tool on the Stafford Business Group blog and what it potentially means for your business marketing and visibility in the online space. 

The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Social Media Marketing

If you own your own business or if you're thinking about starting a business, you may be wondering if you should outsource your social media marketing efforts. You're probably faced with the temptation quite often, considering the number of social media marketing firms and "experts" that are popping up everyday. While you can't ignore the importance of strategic and effective social media marketing, you really want to think about whether you should outsource such an increasingly valuable part of your marketing efforts today. Here is my list of the pros and cons, given today's competitive marketing climate:

The Pros:

• It is cheaper: Outsourcing social media marketing is a lot cheaper than hiring a part-time or full-time social media marketer. You don't have to pay a salary, benefits, along with all of the other expenses that come along with hiring an employee. Plus, you can outsource your marketing efforts on a "campaign by campaign" basis, and if you want to work with another social media firm in the future, you can switch without much hassle.
• They are the "experts": Social media marketing firms specialize in social media so they are up to date with the hour by hour and day by day changes that happens in this fast-paced area of marketing. If you don't have time to keep up with these changes while you run your business, you are better off passing this type of work over to someone who studies these changes for a living and can make the most out of your marketing needs. 
• Black Hat SEO: There are plenty of "tricks" that search engine optimizers and social media gurus can use in order to push your online presence up through website and social media rankings. Social media marketing firms are (hopefully) aware of the consequences of Black Hat SEO and will avoid using such frowned-upon techniques in order to market your business. 
• They are prepared:  Social media marketing firms often have all of the systems and processes in place to make sure that your social media campaign is flawless. There are plenty of websites and software platforms that they use (that you may not be aware of) in order to monitor your online presence and the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts. 
• Your hands are free to run your business: Let's face it. Social media marketing is time-consuming, and it changes literally on a day to day basis. By outsourcing this type of work, you can free yourself up to do other things that require your attention with running your company. 

Cons:

• Their attention may be divided: Social media marketing firms are trying to gain as many clients as possible and may be dividing their time up between multiple clients which can lead to oversimplified lazy marketing efforts. Depending on how they have their business set up, your social media marketing needs may not have the full attention of any given employee at the company on a day to day business. Like many traditional marketing firms, oftentimes the bigger client gets the most attention, while smaller clients are not given the attention that they deserve.
• Who is really the expert? Marketing firms are experts in marketing - NOT in your field of expertise. In today's marketing world, engagement is crucial on social media platforms. If you hire a firm to take care of your social media needs, they may not be able to engage with your business's followers on the same level of a person who is in your field and can effectively answer questions that your followers may have. For example, if you run a hair salon and you outsource your social media marketing needs to a firm, will that firm be able to answer the questions that inevitably appear on your business's Facebook wall or Twitter feed? Remember, social media is about being social. If your followers are not getting their questions answered on your Facebook wall, they will gladly go to your competitors to get their answers.
• Do they really have the time? Social media marketing today is all about being social and interactive with your followers as much as possible, and marketing firms (in some cases) don’t have the time to develop substantive interactive dialogue while they are courting future clients and running various social media campaigns.
• Beware of Black Hat SEO: Some social media marketing firms may be using "Black Hat" SEO techniques (search engine optimization techniques that "cheat" engine algorithms in order to improve your website's visibility) in order market your business. While those techniques may be effective in the short term, eventually engines like Google catch up to these techniques (like Google's famous "Panda" update last spring that de-ranked a slew of businesses and their visibility in the search engine). Many SEO experts and social media firms found themselves at a loss when they had to explain to the business execs why their optimization techniques were no longer effective after Google's Panda update. 

Ultimately you should do research on any firm that you're considering working with. They should be able to offer some sort of social proof of their work and should provide you with details as to how they plan to strategically execute your social media marketing needs.