Urgency Flow

Two years ago, Eli Reich was a mechanical engineer consultant for a Seattle wind energy company when his messenger bag was stolen. The environmentally conscious Reich, who rode his bike to work every day, decided that instead of buying a new one, he would simply fashion another bag out of used bicycle-tire inner tubes that were lying around his house. Soon compliments on his sturdy black handmade messenger bag turned into requests. “That was the catalyst,” says Reich, who obtained a business license, gave up his day job, and quickly launched Alchemy Goods in the basement of his apartment building. The company’s motto: “Turning useless into useful.”

When Marty Metro and his wife added up the number of times each of them had moved over the years, it came out to an astounding 29 times. Metro knew they weren’t alone in using massive amounts of cardboard boxes and was convinced he could help movers, businesses and the environment by creating a solution to the cardboard quandary. For now, BoomerangBoxes.com offers an online exchange for those outside the delivery area to link up and exchange boxes with others for a nominal fee. With annual sales projections exceeding $750,000, the company boasts 75 percent-plus gross margins.

Read the whole story on nichegeek.com

After tuesdays blog, today another blog about nichefinding. This time, more analytical, but maybe better for you? If you liked on of the video’s, or maybe already start using one of the tips, please comment on one of our posts and share your experiences so far!

Business blogging and other forms of business-related social media seem to be innocent enough, but the content you post could get you into serious legal trouble. Chicago attorney and media law expert Damon Dunn, of Funkhouser Vegosen Liebman & Dunn Ltd., cautions any company that publishes content on the internet to vet that content, particularly any photographs, as carefully as any media company should do.

“Whether you post it on a billboard, company website, or tweet, liability is triggered by false or deceptive statements of fact. In the commercial speech arena, courts are more willing to impose liability for speech that creates a misleading impression even if the words were literally true.” ~ Damon Dunn, Attorney and Media Law Expert

To protect yourself and your business from legal liability related to the content posted on your website, blog or via other online social media outlets, Dunn recommends the following: read it on entrepreneur.com

How to find a niche in 30 days? Find a gap in the market, then find a solution, than become marketleader. Is it really that simple?

EPC Cigar Company manufactures and distributes cigars that are hand-rolled in the Dominican Republic from Ecuadorean, Nicaraguan and Dominican tobacco. It has been in business since April, although the family that owns it previously ran a successful cigar company that was sold to Swedish Match in 1999.

The challange
To develop a cost-effective and efficient marketing strategy to promote the company and its new brand, E. P. Carrillo, while building on the family’s legacy.

The background
EPC Cigar, based in Miami, is owned and operated by the Perez-Carrillo family, whose Cuban-born patriarch, Ernesto Perez-Carrillo, established El Credito Cigars in 1968; its best-known brand was La Gloria Cubana. After Mr. Perez-Carrillo’s death, his son, Ernesto Perez-Carrillo Jr., sold El Credito to Swedish Match in 1999, working there until March 2009. Mr. Perez-Carrillo Jr., 58, remains a big deal in the cigar world.

He was encouraged to start EPC Cigar by his daughter, Lissette, 36, a lawyer based in Miami, and his son, Ernesto Perez-Carrillo III, 28, a management consultant based in New York, both of whom had worked for El Credito while growing up. The three family members run the company, which employs 34 people in Miami and the Dominican Republic.

Its first product was a $13 limited-edition inaugural cigar released in December; it will be followed this spring by the core E. P. Carrillo line, which will be available in five sizes priced from $6 to $8.

Last year, Mr. Perez-Carrillo III, who oversees the company’s marketing, hired an advertising agency, DeVito/Verdi, to develop a logo, labels, packaging and a marketing campaign to introduce the new company and its cigars. Mr. Perez-Carrillo III estimates that EPC Cigar will spend $300,000 on the campaign, which began in April 2009 and will run through December.

Read more on nytimes.com

Chad Hurley, founder of Youtube, became multi-miljonair when Youtube was sold. But what is he doing now? Check out the interview with one of the biggest entrepreneurs ever:

Having recently had another birthday click over on the odometer, coupled with the new year–and the new decade–time is on my mind. Actually, time’s never far from my mind in my work-cave because I have strategically placed more than a dozen clocks around the room and can’t look in any direction without seeing one.

As I describe in my book, No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs, I organize everything with predetermined start and end times; if someone has a phone appointment with me, they know in advance when it will end, not just when it will start–and the call does end as scheduled, even if in midsentence. I have trained and conditioned myself to be hypersensitive to time, and I train my clients to respect my hypersensitivity about it. Why?

Because last year’s bank balance and your satisfaction or dissatisfaction with it is more a reflection of how you invest your time than of anything else. In reality, time is one of the few assets the entrepreneur owns outright and has total control over.

Read more on entrepreneur.com

Facebook fan pages offer an effective and low-cost way of social media marketing according to new research from Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business.

The study surveyed customers of Dessert Gallery, a popular Houston-based café chain, who were Facebook Fans, with customers who weren’t. Based on surveys of more than 1,700 respondents over a three-month period, the study found that the company’s Facebook fans were made more visits to Dessert Gallery each month, spent more of their eating out dollars there, and had greater emotional attachment and psychological loyalty to Dessert Gallery. Read more about the study here.

Now the authors of the study, Utpal M. Dholakia and Emily Durham, caution that “our results suggest intriguing possible correlations rather than definitive causalities” (One Café Chain’s Facebook Experiment, Harvard Business Review). It may be, for instance, that other targeted marketing strategies would have similar results.

The authors also point out that Facebook fan pages have “a narrow appeal”. Dessert Gallery did not have a Facebook fan page before the study and over the three month period, only 283 (or 2.1%) of the customers on DG’s mailing list became fans.

They conclude that “Facebook fan pages may work best as niche marketing programs targeted to customers who regularly use Facebook. Social media marketing must be employed judiciously with other types of marketing programs.”

In other words, your results may vary. But it’s still great to see research being done on social media as an effective marketing tool. There’s been an awful lot of hype about social media marketing and not a lot of attention paid to if and how social media marketing affects the bottom line of business that use it.

This article was originally published on about.com