Urgency Flow

The new year is a great time to take in new ideas for growing your business. Here’s several intriguing books that recently hit my shelf–in some cases, my virtual shelf. Here’s an upcoming book, due out next month, that sounds really useful for today’s economy: Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones by Joseph Jaffe. Retaining customers is the new customer acquisition, Jaffe says. The marketer and author of the Jaffe Juice blog offers his tips for how to keep existing customers and grow your relationships with them.

Is your business going south? Author Gary Brose, also known as The Small Business Sherpa, believes you can turn things around with the right employee bonus program. He describes his system in Bonus Your Way to Profits!His bio says he is the president of four corporations, so here’s hoping he’s got some time-management tips for us as well.

If you want to learn more about how to ride social media to business success, you can read how 15 of today’s social-media stars leveraged their blogs to build consulting businesses, land book deals and more in the lengthy e-bookBeyond Blogging by Nathan Hangen and Mike Cliffe Jones. Among the profile subjects are Mashable’s Peter Cashmore;uber-blogger Chris Brogan, the co-author of Trust Agents;and wine-Web-video sensation Gary Vaynerchuk, whose blog led to publication of his business book Crush It!(Full disclosure: I was sent a complimentary download of this book.) Read more

This article was originally published on entrepreneur.com

We have never been big on those inspirational posters that uninspiring managers put up on the office walls. You know the ones. They show a picture of a kitten desperately grasping a tree branch with a caption like, “Hang in there, baby,” or a lone eagle flying above the countryside, with the words “Dare to soar.” Still, we can all use a bit of inspiration now and then.
See if the following quotes, most of them from successful entrepreneurs, help (a bit) in 2010 when things aren’t going exactly as you thought they would.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that Walt Disneycame up with two of the most cited comments about imagining the kind of future you want:

1. “If you can dream it, you can do it.” And

2. “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.”

Of course, it is one thing to have a dream and quite another to turn that dream into reality. That’s where this quote from the author, columnist and motivational speaker Harvey MacKay comes in:

“A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline.” Read more

This article was originally published on nytimes.com

As 2009 draws to a close, the Web’s attention turns to the year ahead. What can we expect of the online realm in 2010?
While Web innovation is unpredictable, some clear trends are becoming apparent. Expect the following 10 themes to define the Web next year:

Real-time ramps up
Sparked by Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed, the real-time trend has been to the latter part of 2009 what “Web 2.0” was to 2007. The term represents the growing demand for immediacy in our interactions. Immediacy is compelling, engaging, highly addictive … it’s a sense of living in the now.
But real-time is more than just a horde of new Twitter-like services hitting the Web in 2010 (although that’s inevitable — cargo cults abound). It’s a combination of factors, from the always-connected nature of modern smartphones to the instant gratification provided by a Google search.

Why wait until you get home to post a restaurant review, asks consumer trends tracker Trendwatching, when scores of iPhone apps let you post feedback as soon as you finish dessert? Why wonder about the name of that song, when humming into your phone handset will garner an instant answer from Midomi?

Look out, too, for real-time collaboration: Google Wave launched earlier this year, resulting in both excitement and confusion. A crossover between instant messaging, e-mail and a wiki, Wave is a platform for getting things done together. Web users, however, remain baffled. In 2010, Wave’s utility will become more apparent. Read more

This article was originally published on edition.cnn.com