Crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter, IndieGogo and PeerBackers are the Web 2.0 way to find capital for start-up ventures. Deciding to go this route instead of the traditional personal savings, Mom and Dad, or small-business loan requires an understanding of how to use crowd-funding successfully.

46% of projects in 2011 did not reach their stated goals, according to Daniel Bortz. His article “On Crowd-Funding Sites, Age Doesn’t Matter” recently appeared on the Young Entrepreneur blog.

Bortz offers four tips for success in getting that capital. First, he recommends using video:

“Your two to three minute video should offer a description of your product or business and why it should exist. … (Kine)Paulsen suggests adding some background on how the website works, since you’ll likely share the page with friends and family who might not understand what crowd-funding entails.”

Other tips include building a fan club by getting your family and friends to back you early and spread the word; offering your backers some kind of perk—if it’s an early version of your product, they become your beta-testers; and getting feedback from successfully-funded projects before your site goes live.

We’re living in a new era of Do It Yourself. The Web brings the inventors and investors together.

Laura Abrahamsen, May 17, 2012

The upside to social media sites like Facebook and Google+ is that they allow you to connect with people from every era and facet of your life. The downside is exactly the same according to Gabriel Rossman, who wrote “The Beauty of Twitter’s Unfollow Bug” for The Atlantic.

In real life social ties fray and break naturally. No one really wants to be in touch with everyone they knew in junior high. On a social-networking site, however, it requires an active choice to cull your list of “Friends” and clicking a button that might as well be labeled “I Don’t Like You.” It feels mean:

“For these reasons I actually kind of love Twitter’s unfollow bug, in which you unfollow people at random. Sociologists sometimes talk about whether a tie persists after a random disruption as an indicator of the tie’s strength. For instance, if an executive on the board of two corporations dies, do they re-establish the board tie by placing another executive from firm A on firm B’s board?”

You can measure the strength of a particular social tie by seeing whether or not either party chooses to reconnect after a random break and use it to your advantage. It’s the social-media equivalent of the Little White Lie in which everyone saves face and the possibility to reconnect later is left open.

Laura Abrahamsen May 16, 2012

Not long ago a digital marketing strategy was all about link-building. But the Web moves quickly and the next big thing is increasing the number of “social shares” your content inspires according to Sujan Patel. Patel recently blogged about “Social Shares: The New Link Building” for Search Engine Journal.

According to Patel it’s becoming clear that search engine giants Google and Bing now include number of social shares in their rank calculations. The search engines are already developing algorithms that can separate legitimate shares from purchased “likes”:

“(I)t isn’t a good idea to go out and purchase social signals. Even if they do lead to a short-term improvement in rank, odds are they’ll be devalued at some point in the future, leading to wasted time and money.”

Building relationships takes more time but will pay off in the long run. Patel suggests embedding calls to action in your blog like Digg or Share This and establishing yourself as an authority figure in your field so that your social media actions carry greater weight. You can do this by reaching out to other authorities in a mutually beneficial way.

In other words, network on the Web the way you do in real life. Its reach is world-wide.

Laura Abrahamsen, May 15, 2012

For more than a decade print newspapers have been replaced by online blogs and the Internet and mobile technology have slowly infiltrated nearly every aspect of our personal and professional lives. The result has been a steep decline in ad sales and subscriptions, forcing newspapers to cut staff and raise prices.

Stephen Arnold of Beyond Search recently reflected on the changes he’s witnessed from Louisville’s Courier Journal over the past thirty years in the article “The Courier Journal: A Louisville Death Rattle.”

To sum up the article, Arnold believes that Louisville’s local newspaper, a publication that once showed so much promise, is currently knocking on death’s door.

Arnold’s thoughts:

“The reality of the newspaper is that it runs more and more syndicated content. The type of local coverage for which the paper was known when I joined in 1981 has decreased over the years. When I want news, I look at online services. What I have noticed is that what appears in the Courier Journal has been mentioned on Facebook, Twitter, or headline aggregation services two or three days before the information appears in either the Courier Journal’s hard copy edition or its online site, www.courier-journal.com.”

Like so many other industries, the field of print journalism is dying because it refuses to adapt and take advantage of new revenue streams. Companies need to stop clinging to ideas that have worked before and look towards the future.

Jasmine Ashton, May 15, 2012

Fast Company recently reported on the rapid decline in employee satisfaction and engagement in the article, “The Sharp Drop-Off In Worker Happiness — And What Your Company Can Do About It.” 

In the article, Mark Crowley recounts a former colleague’s experience resigning after two decades from a job that he felt he had to leave pre-maturely due to lack of appreciation. The sad thing is, this employee is not alone in his feelings. After studying employee happiness, New York’s Conference Board found that it has fallen every year for the past 25 regardless of the state of the economy. It has gotten so bad that over half of American workers hate their jobs.

Despite this disheartening situation, Crowley offers a few tips to help managers make their employees feel appreciated. These are: What makes people happiest in their jobs is all profoundly personal, People only thrive when they feel recognized and appreciated, and finally, employees will stay if you tell them directly you need them, care about them, and sincerely plan to support them.

When discussing the importance of making employees feel cared about and appreciated, Crowley states:

“Any time someone quits a job for a reason other than money, they’re leaving in hope that things will be better somewhere else. So, everyone who works for you must be made to feel that they matter. Plan one-on-one meetings and re-discover the dreams each person has at work. Tell people directly how valuable they are to you. To be successful, all your future behavior must demonstrate to your employees that their best career move is to remain working for you.”

This write-up offers some excellent advice for leaders looking to implement an office culture that treats all of it’s employees with dignity and respect.

Jasmine Ashton, May 1o, 2012