Just as the Big Y Supermarkets chain thrived as a result of family succession and an apparent willingness to invest in long-term growth strategies, most of the small businesses with roots in Willimansett failed due to the lack of succession or the ability to adapt to changing markets and demographics. In addition to Spalding (a survivor of sorts), the other noteworthy Willimansett manufacturer at the time of my youth (and also on the outskirts of my linear microcosm) was the Hampden Brewery, maker of the regionally popular Hampden Ale. The Hampden Brewery became a Piels Brewery before shutting down in later years, a victim of the times when beer drinking habits were unsophisticated and distribution became homogenized by two dominant national forces within the region: Anheuser-Busch and Miller Brewing. Ironically, I today live in a small town that is home to the second largest microbrewery in Massachusetts. One small brewery after another shuttered its doors in the 1970’s and 1980’s, just a few years before the popularity of microbrews would lead to the largest resurgence of small brewers since the days before Prohibition. The question begs to be asked whether the same full circle transformation could take place with dairies, jewelers, hardware stores, movie theaters, and other one-time small businesses.

My one-mile microcosm consists of the stretch of Chicopee Street in Willimansett between my childhood home and  Mount Carmel School, just beyond the “Y” intersection. At the time, prior to the construction of the Interstate Highway System and the I-91 corridor that would bypass downtowns, Chicopee Street - also State Route 116 - was the main route connecting the city centers of Chicopee and Holyoke. Even then, a shopping trip “downtown”, whether by car or by bus, meant downtown Holyoke. (Holyoke is a one-time grand city which has subsequently fallen on hard times and now has nowhere to go but up, but that is an entirely other story.) There was a Willimansett section of the Holyoke Transcript-Telegram (gone), and even Willimansett’s first zip code was 01045 (a subroute of Holyoke’s 01040 and, you guessed it, long gone).

The walk to and from school presented me with a wide variety of businesses, each of which fascinated me, even at a very young age, and had a story to tell. Even during the years between kindergarten and 8th grade, things were rapidly changing, and businesses that had thrived for years were already closing. Most importantly, the changes that took place in my microcosm were taking place - or were soon to take place - throughout America.

Was the neighborhood movie theater a victim of television or the mobility that made it easy to drive across the river to the new multi-screen cinemas in West Springfield? Or did the owner simply decide to throw in the towel after he realized that there was no money to be made with 25¢ Saturday double-feature matinees and the candy concession? I believe that the biggest nail in the coffin was driven by the same automobile industry which, ironically, is trying to escape from its own coffin today (and which may have very well started in Chicopee itself). Neighborhood businesses, not surprisingly, died with neighborhoods. People who once walked or rode the bus to work bought into the American dream of baseball, apple pie, and Chevrolet. Their new mobility allowed them to access greater choices, variety, and competition, but at what price? Consumption patterns changed dramatically in my microcosm in the 1960’s, and this was still years before the development of shopping malls, the cancerous growth of Wal-Mart, the dawn of the Internet, the influx of cheap goods from China, or the “maturation” of the baby boom generation which would bring new meaning to the concept of obsessive overconsumption.

As neighborhood businesses have fallen by the wayside against the backdrop of these new market forces, it is truly surprising that any could survive. Let’s walk my “mile” to see if there are any lessons to be learned.

To be continued …

What has happened to small businesses in America over the last 50 years? They’ve changed, that’s for certain. Let’s explore the one-mile linear microcosm that was my daily walking commute to grammar school back in the early to mid-1960’s to try to find some answers … and perhaps even some solutions that may be applied to small businesses today.

A bit of background: I was born and raised in the village of Willimansett, part of the City of Chicopee, in Western Massachusetts. The City of Chicopee, at that time, had a population that was primarily comprised of the descendants of relatively recent waves of Polish, French Canadian, and Irish immigrants. Chicopee itself was historically noted as the birthplace and home of Edward Bellamy (author of “Looking Backward”) and General Arthur MacArthur (father of the even more famous son who followed in his military footsteps.) Early industries were the Ames Manufacturing Company (which made the Union Army’s bayonets during the Civil War) and the Stevens Arms (makers of firearms.) Chicopee was also the home of the Duryea Motor Wagon Company, who all locals will claim invented and built the first automobile. Back in the 1960’s, the largest manufacturers were the F.W. Sickles Company (which at this time was a division of General Instrument Corporation and manufactured radio electronic devices), the Fisk Tire and Rubber Company (which evolved into Uniroyal and then Bridgestone Tire before closing), and the world headquarters of the A.G. Spalding Company (one of the country’s leading manufacturers of sporting goods.) Together, these companies employed a workforce of thousands. Today, only the former Spalding plant survives, a shadow of its earlier life, now manufacturing golf balls under the Top Flite name. In addition to these major manufacturers, Chicopee was the home of Westover Air Force Base, one of the country’s leading military installations in the Cold War years, closed down under the Nixon Administration … according to local conjecture as a response to the state’s vote for George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election. Today, the main runway at Westover (now an air reserve base and an air industrial park) is an emergency landing site for NASA’s space shuttles.

The City of Chicopee was always the somewhat neglected sibling of the larger adjacent cities of Springfield and Holyoke, all of which developed as a manufacturing center during the industrial revolution as a result of their location along the banks of the Connecticut River. Springfield and Holyoke seemed to offer everything that Chicopee may have been lacking. Chicopee’s public transportation services were provided by either the Springfield Street Railway or the Holyoke Street Railway Company, one with the green buses that served Chicopee Center and Chicopee Falls, and the other with the red buses that served Willimansett. (Both have long since been combined into part of the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority.) Springfield and Holyoke also had larger populations, far more manufacturing, hospitals, newspapers, and far larger and more fashionable downtown business districts. Springfield was (and remains) the seat of Hampden County, and Holyoke was known at the time as “Paper City, USA”.

Willimansett was a small village within the smallest component of the Tri-City area. At the time, Willimansett (along with its sister village of Aldenville, at the top of the Willimansett bluffs) was primarily comprised of French Canadian immigrants who worked in the mills of Holyoke and Chicopee. The closest thing to a “shopping district” that existed in Willimansett was the “Y”, where Chicopee Street and Meadow Street merged on their way to the Willimansett Bridge into Holyoke. It should be noted that, back in the 1930’s, the “Y” in Willimansett was the location of a small “cash market” that would later move to busier locations and grow into the Big Y Supermarkets, today one of the region’s largest employers, still family-owned, and one of the leading supermarket chains in Western Massachusetts, Central Massachusetts, and Northern Connecticut. So, yes, it has been proven that at least one small business could start within our microcosm and experience tremendous growth. Unfortunately in this regard, lightning did not strike twice.

To be continued …

Just when most of us thought that search couldn’t get better than Google, Microsoft has introduced its own new search engine, calling Bing. Didn’t Microsoft already have Live Search? Well, yes, but we all know that it never gained any traction in the market that was dominated by Google and Yahoo!. Type in http://www.live.com, and the URL redirects to http://www.bing.com. No surprise there. Is this actually Microsoft’s response to Google’s development of the Chrome browser. Two of the biggest forces in the industry fighting fire with fire? Maybe.

For you, the bottom line is to be certain that your website is indexed on Bing. It’s simple enough. Go to http://www.bing.com, and enter the name of your business into the search box. Hopefully, your site is already indexed and will come up at the top of the list. If not, submitting your site is as easy as entering a captcha and your URL at:
http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx.

Remember, every link to your site counts, particularly one from a site that, in theory at least, could become the next big search engine. On the other hand, it has been pointed out that Bing is also an acronym for “But It’s Not Google”.

When I started in business back in 1980, my primary client base consisted on smaller to medium-sized ski areas in the Northeastern United States. We produced collateral advertising for these clients, most of whom were struggling to hold their own, as their clientele increasingly felt that they had “outgrown” the smaller, more local mountains. The problem was that everybody had skied at one time or another at the “big” resorts in Vermont and out West. As disposable incomes increased, leisure time became more highly valued, and it increasingly seemed to make sense to book a flight to the Rockies or Europe. The small ski areas that have survived are mostly the ones that repositioned themselves within this market. They no longer saw themselves competing against the other nearby mountains but against the marketing of the bigger resorts elsewhere in the region or partway across the globe. As time has gone on, they have further redefined themselves, extending their seasons with golf courses and other non-winter attractions. The fact is that they are no longer just competing against the bigger ski resorts but against foreign travel, the cruise industry, and the full range of options that vie for the consumer’s leisure dollars.

When we offered marketing solutions to our clients in the ski industry, we closely examined what was being done at Killington, Vail, Stowe, Sun Valley, Park City, Aspen, Vail, Jackson Hole and others, including the big resorts in Canada and Europe. The same thing has happened with our clients in the amusement park and attractions industry, where everyone has visited Disney World and has come back with higher expectations. The same thing happened as well with our campground clients, where every camper has at one time or another stayed at a five-star resort. In every instance, the idea is not to present your business as something that it isn’t, but to present the unique advantages that your business offers that allow it to remain relevant in the overall scheme of evolving consumer expectations. You need to closely examine - and visit - the leaders within your industry, as well as industries that compete for the same consumer dollars. Then come back and see how you can apply the lessons learned to make your business hold greater appeal to both your existing clientele and an expanding base of prospects. In almost every instance, the issue is not size but the quality and level of services that you are able to provide. You know your clientele better than anyone else, so you should know exactly which services are the ones that they will most highly value and appreciate. Offer them those, with a smile and a personal touch!

I have explained in the past how to correct your business location on Google Maps; however, what do you do about getting your location corrected (or even listed!) on the GPS software that comes with many new motor vehicles or as after-market add-ons? Contact Map Reporter from NAVTEQ. This service allows you to easily take control of how your business is represented to the countless number of travelers who may be relying upon accurate guidance in finding their way to your door. NAVTEQ’s Map Reporter allows you to tell the company, the leading supplier of data to the GPS consumer products industry, where an update to a map may be necessary. Simply login, enter your address, zoom-in to the map interface, then report any of the following:
• Missing addresses or wrong locations
• Missing roads or incorrect road names
• Missing, incorrect, or defunct points of interest
• Traffic restrictions that should be added, corrected, or removed
Remember, it is ultimately up to YOU to take control of your business and to maximize every new tool that will help your business to prosper. This is one of those tools.

I am frequently asked to share my thoughts about banner advertising. Either the owners of a business would like to sell banner ad space as a source of revenue-generation on their websites, or business owners want to get their share of the “enormous” volume of traffic that will be generated by placing their own banner ads on high profile sites. These business owners have been sold a bill of goods about the fortunes waiting to be made through banner advertising, the Internet’s modern-day equivalent of the old story of the streets being paved with gold. Don’t fall for it.

If you are contemplating the placement of banner ads on another site, keep in mind that the people who are most likely to profit from your expenditures will be the people who will take your money to produce the ads or the hucksters selling the banner space with unsubstantiated promises of page views and impressions. If you are contemplating the addition of banner advertising to your own site, as a means of revenue generation, consider the costs of cluttering your site, with the result that both your website’s primary content and your business itself begin to hemorrhage credibility. It is a fact that websites with banner advertising have a lower trust factor in the eyes of consumers, with a corresponding decrease in perception as a source of either information or product reliability. The problem is that very few people are willing to admit to this “dirty little secret”.

As Marko Saric recently posted in his blog, “traditional banner ads take away from the user experience. They distract users and because of that users tend to ignore ads.” He goes on to reference the proven phenomenon called “Banner Blindness”. This term was coined by Dr. Jakob Nielsen back in August of 2007. For those who may be unfamiliar with Jakob Nielsen (and why his research is so highly creditable), he has been called “the guru of Web page usability” by The New York Times, “the world’s leading expert on Web usability” by U.S. News & World Report, “one of the top 10 minds in small business” by Fortune Small Business, and “one of the world’s foremost experts in Web usability” by Business Week.

In his study of banner advertising that first coined the term “Banner Blindness”, Dr. Nielsen summarizes that users rarely look at website display ads, and that the most common methods of increasing the effectiveness of banner advertising is to engage in deceptive practices to trick users into clicking, for example by incorporating fake “OK” or “Cancel” buttons into the ads. His earlier studies have shown that such online ads are either “very negatively” or “negatively” perceived by 94% of Web users, just 1 percentage point behind universally hated pop-up ads. His studies further concluded that, when users dislike online advertising, they “transfer their dislike to the advertisers behind the ad and to the website that exposed them to it.”

Getting back to Banner Blindness, Dr. Nielsen conducted extensive eyetracking studies that have conclusively proven that users “almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement.” In a 2003 survey conducted by PlanetFeedback, only 8% of U.S. consumers responded that they trusted banner ads (right behind infomercials, but ahead of door-to-door salesmen, spam, and pop-up ads) and 53% responded that they were annoyed by banner ads.

Substantiating this research, a study published in BusinessWeek in November of 2007, titled “So Many Ads, So Few Clicks”, reports that “the truth about online ads is that precious few people actually click on them. And the percentage of people who respond to common banner ads … is shrinking steadily”, with the average click-through rate having fallen to 0.2% in March of 2007 after several years of decline. The results of this study have been substantiated elsewhere in other independent research. Consider this if you are an advertiser, or contemplate joining the pack, since most advertisers pay based upon the number of impressions rather than clicks. It doesn’t take a mathematician to conclude that these ads do not represent a very sound investment.

Finally, if you are thinking about adding banner advertising to your own website as a source of revenue generation, consider the professional advice of Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, who suggests that you “crunch the numbers” before jumping onto the bandwagon. Based upon a combination of monthly page views and the cost per thousand impressions that you might be able to charge for your banner advertising space, your site will have to be generating an enormous amount of traffic (in the hundreds of thousands or even millions of page views per month) before your site would begin to generate any sizeable amount of income from the sale of banner advertising space.

Consider the cost of compromising your online integrity through the use of advertising that users both ignore and find annoying. Whether you are thinking about selling banner ads or buying banner ads, there are simply far more effective ways of growing your business online.

Additional references:
http://gigaom.com/2008/10/14/what-if-you-ran-an-ad-and-nobody-saw-it/
http://www.techdirt.com/blog.php?tag=banner+ads

There is a great deal of confusion about Google PageRank, one of the key – but optional – components of the Google Toolbar that you should have installed on each of your Web browsers. Pared down to the basics, PageRank is a numerical value, on a scale from 0 to 10, that indicates the importance of any page of content on the Web, based upon the concept that one page linking to another is essentially casting a “vote” for the importance of the second page. Not a truly democratic process, more “important” pages, based upon their own PageRank, carry more weight than pages that have been deemed to be less important, but the bottom line is that Google calculates each page’s relative importance from the “votes” that it has received. Certainly, anybody with even a rudimentary understanding of SEO (search engine optimization) can understand the importance of inbound links to a site.

You might ask, “Who cares?” You should! Those websites that you need to provide links to yours will often make their decisions based upon your the PageRank of your site’s Home page (or other linking page). Every webmaster would like to exchange links with a site with a PageRank of 7 or 8, but nobody wants to waste their time linking to a site with a PageRank of 1 or 2 (or even zero). More importantly, PageRank is an important factor in helping to determine a site’s ranking in the overall organic search results.

On the same token, you (or your webmaster) will want to take PageRank into consideration when you consider linking to other sites. Again, this is not a truly democratic process, and not all links are treated equally. For example, Google will filter out links from known link farms. Because incoming links from link farms are beyond any webmaster’s control (and link farms are more likely to try to capitalize upon a link to you if your site has a higher PageRank), Google will not penalize you for inbound links; however, you will be penalized for any outbound links to link farms or other penalized sites (often represented by a PageRank of zero).

What other factors come into play in determining the relative importance of one link versus another? For one, the number of links on a page. All else being equal, a link to your site from a page with only that one link is far more valuable than a link to your site from a page with 50 links. Basically, the more links on a page, the less PageRank value your page will receive from a link.

A few other points:

• PageRank values are not arithmetic. Nobody outside of Google’s upper echelons knows the formulae, but it is generally agreed that the scale is logarithmic. In other words, it takes a lot more to advance from PR4 to PR5 than it takes to advance from PR1 to PR2.
• A site’s total PageRank (the combined PageRanks of each of its component pages) is also an important measurement. More than anything else, this is determined by the number of unique pages within a site, clearly benefiting larger sites. New pages (”orphans”) should be directly linked to existing pages in order to yield any benefit for the PageRank of the overall site.
• Links to pages with no outbound links of their own (or pages that Google has not indexed) are known as “dangling” links and have little or no value.
• There are many experts who agree that outbound links that are not reciprocated can be a drain on a site’s total PageRank.

Because the Internet is constantly growing, the logarithmic scales that determine PageRank, by definition, must be continually evolving. This results in frequent changes in a page’s PageRank, where the measure will either increase or (more likely) decrease by a numerical value of 1 for no apparent reason, typically on a three-month basis. This phenomenon is referred to as the “Google dance” and is one more reason why it is important to continually build a site (by adding to its content) and to continually work on building the site’s number of inbound links from other highly-ranked sites.

Interesting tidbits:

• According to Wikipedia, the name “PageRank” is a trademark of Google, and the PageRank process has been patented; however, the patent is assigned to Stanford University and not to Google. Google has exclusive license rights on the patent from Stanford University. The university received 1.8 million shares in Google in exchange for use of the patent – shares that were sold in 2005 for $336 million.
• The name “PageRank” is derived from the name of its developer, Larry Page, one of the two founders, along with Sergey Brin, of what would become Google in 1998. The original search engine that Page and Brin developed as part of their research project at Stanford University in 1995 was called “Backrub”.

Learn more. The following references are listed in order of increasing complexity, ending with Page and Brin’s original research paper:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html
http://www.ianrogers.net/google-page-rank/
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

The following comments were my contribution posted earlier today as part of the discussion “What do you think are the most important marketing messages for outdoor recreation and travel for 2009?” on the LinkedIn Outdoor Recreation and Travel Industry Marketing Network group.

I think that a viable campaign might follow the concept of “Slow Down and Get Off the Interstate”. I’m not referring to “Easy Off / Easy On” interchanges, toll booths, or the McDonald’s / Exxon rest areas. When times get tough, we tend to search for nostalgia. For different generations, this has different meanings and relates to different historical times. In every instance, that nostalgia involves a time when the pace of life was far slower, with a great deal of enjoyment gained from simple things. With every news cycle reporting more job losses and criminal behavior from the Bernie Madoffs of society, people want to slow down and get off of this wild ride.

With belt-tightening an economic necessity along with that search for nostalgia, I suspect that families will be doing more together. Grandparents and grandchildren will travel together, siblings will revisit their childhoods through family reunions, and the providers of outdoor recreational services are positioned to provide the venues and amenities to make it all possible.

We do not know what the future has in store, other than change itself, in either the short or long term. Gasoline might be $2.00.9 per gallon or it might be $450.9 per gallon … and the cost of jet fuel might put the cost of air travel out of reach for the average American (if it isn’t already). Regardless of where the ride takes us, Americans will still spend leisure time together. It is the responsibility of the outdoor recreation and travel industry to persuade people to spend that vacation time “close to home” rather than “at home”.

With the outstanding value that family campgrounds, in particular, have to offer, a simple marketing messages sums it all up: “Slow Down and Get Off the Interstate” … and rediscover America, your family, and yourself in the process.

I was recently part of a discussion in LinkedIn’s Guerrilla Marketing Tips for Small Businesses group to which I belong. The question involved how to compete in a David vs Goliath scenario where a large national chain opens a location in your local service area. In this instance, the discussion was started by the owner of a small computer repair company (let’s call it “HKR Computer Repair”) who had a big computer repair franchise (let’s call them “Nerds R Us”) open in his backyard. He expected to prevail in the long run but was afraid of the short-term impact upon his business. He wanted to know how to compensate for such a large presence and not lose cash flow. The following was my response:

You are likely to experience some short-term loss as a result of the money that they will spend to launch their new location. In the long run, nothing is easier than competing against Goliaths. You’ve already identified some of the weaknesses in the instance of “Nerds R Us”. In general, you should have a major competitive advantage against a big outfit with high overhead and a “one size fits all” business concept. You know your market. Do your customers want to communicate directly with the knowledgeable owner of a business or some kid who’s just finished 48 hours of training the week after he quit his job at Starbucks?

The vast majority of my company’s clients are successfully competing against the Wal-Marts of their industries. Sometimes it requires the redefinition of a business in order to better capitalize upon the Goliath’s weaknesses or market segments where the Goliath cannot possible compete. Although not one of my clients, I like to relate the success story of a family hardware store that has found its niche while most similar businesses simply roll over and die as soon as a Home Depot or Lowes rolls into town. South Fork Hardware has been in business in South Fork, Pennsylvania for 60 years, and they have transformed themselves into the tire chain specialists of North America. Home Depot or Wal-Mart can’t afford to sell tire chains. They couldn’t possibly maintain the inventory of all of the necessary variations and sizes in their thousands of retail locations. South Fork Hardware, on the other hand, through one centralized location, can supply any set of tire chains imaginable and ship the same day. Admittedly, there is not an enormous market for tire chains these days; however, when you own the market, the lion’s share of a specialized market can be extremely profitable. Do a Google search for “tire chains”, and you will see that www.tirechain.com (South Fork Hardware’s URL and new business persona) comes up at #1. Alternately, do a “type-in” of www.tirechain.com or www.tirechains.com , and you will see how they have come to “own” their market.

As a side note, I have purchased three sets of tire chains from South Fork Hardware over the last 10 years. Do you see how I am unintentionally promoting their business? Your customers will do the same. Particularly when people are dissatisfied with a product or service, they spread the word. It should be easy for you to weather what is certain to be a fast-moving storm. Your business should continue to thrive long after Nerds R Us has moved out of town (perhaps because they couldn’t face your competition).

Did you ever think that maybe they hadn’t performed the proper market research before opening their new location? They could be in for a big surprise when they discover that they have to try to compete against a well-established competitor, HKR Computer Repair!