Looking back, my contrarian bet was a pretty smart move. Not only did my Brooklyn brownstone double in value over the next eight years (I sold it in 2003), but it served as collateral for the credit line that I used to take my company public in 1999. My brownstone also served as a home office for my growing company as well as a great place to raise my two daughters. And thanks to the tax deduction that the government gives for mortgage interest, I was able to own my own home for less than it would have cost to rent a house and an office.

Of course, that was then and this is now.

With housing prices still falling in many parts of the country and home
sales plunging now that the government’s tax credits have expired, home
ownership may not be such a great deal for entrepreneurs and
small-business owners any more. If I had tried a similar strategy today
with the income and assets I had back then, I might have found that A. I
couldn’t sell my house in Florida for anything close to what I paid for
it B. I couldn’t get a mortgage on my Brooklyn brownstone because I’d
be considered too risky a borrower and C. I couldn’t get a credit line
for my company because I would have had no stocks, bonds or other liquid
assets to pledge as collateral.

Traditionally, business
ownership and home ownership have gone hand in hand. Because shares in a
privately held business are generally illiquid and the business may not
kick off a whole lot of cash after paying salaries and expenses, home
equity has long served as the kind of rock-solid asset entrepreneurs
have used to obtain loans and credit lines to grow their companies. With
millions of homes now “under water,” many business owners have little
or no home equity to put up as collateral.

So, if you’re running
a business and don’t currently own a home, does it make sense to buy
one rather than continue renting? After all, there are still some pretty
incredible deals on the market, and mortgage interest rates have hit
new lows.

I think you should consider it, provided you can answer “yes” to the following questions:

1. Will
   you still have enough capital and cash flow to run your business once
   you’ve handed over the down payment and started paying your mortgage?

2. If
   you or your spouse has to relocate within the next five years, will you
   be able to rent out your house for enough to cover your mortgage
   payments?

3. Can you use the house as a home office and/or storage facility in addition to a place for you and your family to live?
4. Does
   the house have a spare bedroom, carriage house or “mother-in-law’s
   apartment” that you can rent out for extra income in case you need it?

5. Is
   the house and lawn small enough that you and your family can take care
   of it without the help of a landscaper, handyman, etc. that you’ll have
   to pay?

I think you see where I’m going with this.
Long-term, I think that home ownership still makes sense for
small-business owners for the same reasons it always has. Short-term,
you need to treat a home purchase no differently from the way you’d
treat an investment in your business–and that means focusing on cash
flow, not kitchen cabinets.    

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According to research from Royal Pingdom the increase in number of accounts is translating to usage rates climbing as well.

About the numbers the Pingdom people state

Twitter processed 2.64 billion tweets this August, an increase of 33% over May. Not a bad increase over just a summer. In August, an average of 85 million tweets passed through Twitter every day.

And if you look at the whole year so far, the increase is even more impressive. Activity on Twitter has already more than doubled this year (August had 115% more tweets than January).

As always raw aggregate numbers are interesting but the real need is to understand the how’s and why’s related to that usage. As marketers it’s important not to get into the same game that TV did for years talking about how many eyeballs they delivered but then when pressed for specifics the dance started. The details of the reasons for using the service are much more important than the big numbers.

What if most of that usage came from people who are in the social media industry and were not people who would be prospects or potential retail buyers of a product or service? A lot of activity but no real value, right?

I often wonder if Twitter isn’t going to just become a holding pen of sorts for PR players who put out information to the social media hangers on that use the service the most. Sure they buy things too but that becomes a niche market for actual buyers because their total numbers are completely disproportionate to their use of the service.

What it does become is a great place to get the word out to people who are desperate to stand out and will promote virtually anything to feel important. Who says feeding on people’s insecurities isn’t a viable strategy?

So go ahead and tell us your opinion of Twitter with regard to how effective it is for marketers. Forget the big numbers just talk about the potential bottom line impact. Is it real or do the big numbers prove to be all show and no go?

Have a happy and safe Labor Day break.

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I once helped a London based computer maintenance company, who were 90 days away from bankruptcy, to generate over 20k worth of almost pure profit in just 9 days; by offering a great new service to their existing client base.  The new service was what we now call cloud storage back-up.  A professionally copy written email was sent to his clients, offering to securely back-up their important files every evening, for a fixed annual fee.  The service was provided by a respected 3rd party, and rebranded by my client.

Almost 45% of his client base signed up within 9 days, with a further 17% signing up over the coming 3 months.  In 9 days, this hard working small business owner went from almost going broke, to enjoying his most profitable trading period ever!

Look for new ways to help people

As a business owner, you should always be looking for opportunities to provide the best possible service to your clients.  Part of this, is to look for new ways to help them solve problems.  The bigger the problem that your new product or service resolves, the more help you will be and the more sales you will make.  Equally, by providing an increasing level of help and support to your clients, you are also vastly more likely to retain their business.  They win, you win; everyone wins!

So, I have a question for you: What additional prodcts or services could you offer to your existing clients or customers?

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Thinking the above message must be spam, the folks at The Inn at Mount Snow in West Dover, VT, immediately logged onto their Facebook account, where they were promptly confronted by the following message at the top of their Page:

Definitely not spam, and according a statement provided by Facebook to Entrepreneur magazine, it’s intentional.

“With millions of Pages on Facebook, we rely on our automated systems to help us best categorize them as Business or Community Pages,” said a Facebook spokesperson. “As you can imagine, when sweeping through Pages of this volume our automated systems are not perfect, and occasionally some Business Pages are miscategorized as Community Pages.” (Note: See the e-mail message above for Facebook’s own definition of a Community Page.)

To correct this, Facebook has created an appeals process that helps business owners recategorize their Pages if they believe Facebook’s automated system has made a mistake.

If your Facebook Business Page has been improperly recategorized as a Community Page, follow these steps to appeal the decision:

1. Visit Facebook’s “Request for Page Category Review” page:
2. Enter your Page name (use the exact name as it appears on your Business Page).
3. Enter your Page URL (ex. www.Facebook.com/TheInnAtMountSnow).
4. Indicate your role in administering the Page in question (employee of the company, one the Page’s official Admins, owner of the business, etc.).
5. Describe the Category under which your Page resides. This part may be tricky because, let’s face it, who remembers the exact category and sub-category they entered for their Business Page upon creating it? Choices include local business; brand, product, or organization; and Artist, band, or public figure.
6. Click the Submit button

How long it takes for someone from Facebook to review your appeal is unknown. Research for this story indicates some businesses have waited more than two months, during which the official category status of their Page did not change.

One thing’s for certain. If you receive or see a recategorization message from Facebook, don’t ignore it. And while no one knows for sure what makes Facebook’s automated systems flag a Business Page as being miscategorized, taking the following steps just might avoid it happening in the first place or speed along the appeals process:

1. Secure a Vanity URL for Your Business Page: At the time they received Facebook’s recategorization notice, The Inn At Mount Snow’s Facebook Page URL was: http://www.facebook.com/pages/West-Dover-VT/The-Inn-At-Mount-Snow/130852016965?ref=ts. While there’s no way of telling for sure, Facebook’s automated system may have viewed “West-Dover-VT” as being more of a Community Page attribute than a business attribute. As I point out in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Facebook, Facebook allows Business Page owners to request a specific URL for pages. Rather than live with the Facebook-generated URL (as in the example provided above), you can tell customers to find you on Facebook at facebook.com/YourCompanyNameHere (which is what The Inn at Mount Snow has recently done). Learn more about Facebook URLs (called User Names) at www.facebook.com/username.

2. Update Your Business Page: Customers and others –and maybe Facebook’s automated system for categorizing pages–have a reasonable expectation that your business’s Facebook Page is going to be kept up-to-date, and the number-one way of doing that is to create and post a consistent stream of status updates. One update per day is ideal, but if you can’t do that, one every other day should suffice. Moreover, keeping the dialogue related to your business may also prove to be beneficial to avoiding recategorization.

3. Continue adding fans: Facebook’s automated system for recategorizing Business and Community Pages may rely on fan data or demographics to determine whether your page is related to a business or a cause. And if your fan base isn’t growing, that might be one flag among many that your Business Page should be classified as a Community page. Whenever it’s appropriate to do so, promote your Facebook Business Page, both on- and offline. In addition, post status updates and notes that are worthy of your fans commenting, liking and sharing your information with others both on and off Facebook. Here again, fan activity–especially a lack thereof–may be a flag to Facebook’s recategorization system.

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