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It’s one of the oldest truths in marketing: in order to get customers’ attention, you have to live where your customers live. And today more than ever before, where customers live is on social media.

According to a study by marketing firm MediaKix, the average person spends 2 hours per day on social platforms. As the post helpfully points out, that amounts to 5 years and 4 months over a lifetime – enough time to fly to the moon and back 32 times or run 10,000 marathons.

With numbers like that, it’s no wonder that paid social media advertising has supplanted radio and possibly even television as the new darling of the advertising world. Mediakix predicts that social media advertising spend will hit close to $36 billion globally in 2017, and ...

Ever struggled to properly measure productivity within your business? You’re not alone.

A lot of growth-driven business owners have a hard time pinning down the productivity (and efficiency, for that matter) of their team members and of general operations.

As managers, we all care about productivity and the impact it has on the stability and success of our businesses. That’s why we often find ourselves thinking hard about questions like, “What is the monetary value of an employee working at maximum capacity?” and, “What processes are negatively impacting our bottom line because they’re inefficient?”

We all know how to identify productive and unproductive behavior, but the problem is, we don’t all inherently know how to best measure product...

When I started my first company I had no idea what unemployment insurance was. Nobody in my family had ever filed for unemployment as they had all owned their own businesses and it had never even crossed my mind as an option when I myself was looking for work at various times in my life. I can honestly say I never had even heard of it until I was forced to get insurance for my own company that I started. I definitely did not understand the negative impact on the business when someone tried to file for unemployment…

….Oh how quickly we learn when we start our own businesses. I have come to learn that unemployment benefits are the most abused and misused benefits in the workforce.

Here’s the thing: Unemployment benefits serve a purpose in an ...

Toward the end of Season 1 of HBO’s incredible Silicon Valley, there’s an amazing scene that this writer has legit watched on YouTube about a hundred times.

The Pied Piper team is at TechCrunch Disrupt, coming off the high of unveiling their compression algorithm to a veritable whos-who of the tech world. Then, disaster strikes. Mega-corporation Hooli is there, and they’re presenting a technology that is identical to the product Pied Piper is building.

Panic inevitably ensues among the Pied Piper ranks. Then, a notably manic Jared, fresh from the traumatic experience of being kidnapped by a self-driving car, has a brainwave.

What Pied Piper needs to do, he thinks, is pivot.

“A lot of successful startups launched with a different business mo...

When you’re leading a business, you want to be viewed as extremely competent, fair, and as someone who demonstrates effective leadership skills.

But did you know that research has found that less than 50% of employees trust those in leadership roles? Not a great track record, overall.

Being an effective leader is no easy task, and sometimes, even the qualifiers for that “effective team leader” title feel a bit elusive.

Leaders–especially new ones–find themselves wondering, “What actually makes my team see me as a leader they can trust, respect, and take direction from?”

In this guide, we’ll look at some of the data, research, and findings that help add clarity to the defining characteristics of effective leaders.

Psychologists Say Effectiv...

Running a non-profit can be a tremendous challenge. Those who are deep in the planning and execution of campaigns understand the magnitude of their efforts – and the consequences of poor execution.

Day in and day out, organizations are struggling to move the mission forward, encouraging their volunteers to raise donations and bring in more support. It’s an uphill battle, as evidenced by the steady decline in charitable giving since 2015, per the Blackbaud Index.

Growing an organization in our digital age, when contributions are down, is a challenge that requires a more tactical approach than just marketing. It requires a complete audit of operational processes, while also looking at ways to streamline donor outreach.

Because so much of what...

Virtual reality (VR) is a term and technology that has garnered a lot of buzz, especially in recent years. But while VR is a phrase many are familiar with, that ubiquity hasn’t translated into widespread use, despite some notable advancements to make it more accessible.

When Facebook bought Oculus in 2014, many felt the move would usher VR into the modern era. It took another two years of development before the merger’s first consumer shipments went out, but even after that lead time, most customers still don’t consider VR a must-have. Content producers and hardware manufacturers are chock full of ideas for home-based systems with hardly anyone to buy in to them.

The good news is that those who have tried VR can vouch for its potential. It ...

With Amazon disrupting and dominating more and more industries, how can your business thrive? Unless your name is Walmart, I don’t recommend competing directly against Amazon. Instead of going head-to-head with Amazon, I suggest focusing on how you can out-flank them.

Start by defining Amazon’s strengths so you know what areas to avoid. For example, price.

Due to Amazon’s massive scale and efficient distribution channels, it is generally the low-price leader.

And it has demonstrated its willingness to sell products below cost for an extended period of time in order to kill off competitors that engage them in a price battle. So trying to compete with Amazon by charging less is probably a recipe for disaster.

Another area where Amazon domina...

There's absolutely no way to go through the startup journey and not screw something up — OK, a ton of things. So why, as Founders, are we so bad about admitting our mistakes?

Unlike many other aspects of life, both personally and professionally, admitting we're wrong appears to have much more painful consequences to Founders because so many more people are involved. When I worked at a job and I messed up, the only people that were affected were my boss (who was unsurprised) and potentially my co-workers (who definitely didn't care). The consequences of my mistakes were tiny.

But now I have 200 people that rely on me. If I make a mistake, it affects all of them, and in some cases all the people that they are connected to as well. As Founders...

It’s taken on the allure of the holy grail. Systems would crash trying to count the words devoted to the subject. I’ll bet you don’t need to be told that I’m writing about: productivity.

We’re all in search of greater productivity (even if we define doing less as more, make sense?) One day, the times we’re living in may well be known as the GSD era.

Notes, doodles, end-of-day/beginning-of-day routines, virtual assistants… Buckle up as Startups Live surveys Founders’ different approaches to achieving superhuman productivity.

Wil Schroter wasted no time diving into a conversation that several people proved eager to discuss. “I’d like to talk about time management, but I’d also love to talk about how you all are managing productivity.”

“I lik...