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    Blog Posts by Dan Tynan

    • Four Dumb Branding Mistakes To Avoid

      By Dan Tynan | Yahoo! Small Business Advisor – Tue, May 28, 2013 5:04 PM EDT

      Whether you're a multinational conglomerate or a one-person shop in Kalamazoo, you are a brand. That means you're subject to the same brand demands as Apple, Coca Cola, and General Motors, only with an infinitesimal sliver of their marketing and advertising budgets.

      You've got to do the same things they had to do – come up with a unique name, a catchy tag-line, an easily identifiable logo. More important, you've got to establish a unique identity and stick to it.

      You know what? You're probably going to screw up - at least a little. Cheer up - it's normal, plenty of others have, including some of the biggest brands in the world. OR you can read this and learn from their mistakes.

      Dumb branding mistake #1: Names matter

      Choosing the right name for your business seems simple enough. But the road to marketing success is littered with the corpses of unintentionally amusing names [fair warning - this link contains risque jokes]. Take, for example, PMS Mortgage, STD Flea Market, or the Mammoth

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    • Warning: Your small business may have already been hacked

      By Dan Tynan | Yahoo! Small Business Advisor – Thu, Apr 25, 2013 2:33 PM EDT

      Rorschach Electronics never had a clue.

      For months, its customers' credit card data was quietly being harvested by cyber criminals in Eastern Europe. It wasn't until the store's payment processing company linked a series of fraudulent charges back to the family-owned business that Rorschach realized it had been hacked.

      By then, the attackers had racked up nearly $3 million in bogus charges, according to the store's credit card issuer, which fined the store $100,000 for the security breach.

      Rorschach is not the store's real name; the company insisted on anonymity for this story, lest the publicity make them a target for future attacks. The company is now attempting to appeal that fine – a process its attorney, Aaron Messing, describes as “Kafkaesque.”

      The Rorschach story is not at all unique, says Messing, who specializes in data security and privacy issues for OlenderFeldman LLP in Union, New Jersey.

      “One of the biggest fallacies about small-to-medium businesses is that they're too

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    • What Does Your Email Say About You?

      By Dan Tynan | Profit Minded – Tue, Mar 19, 2013 12:06 PM EDT

      What your email says...

      If you're running a small business, especially one that relies on the Internet for at least some of its marketing, mastering the art of email is as essential as cranking up the coffee machine and hanging an Open For Business sign on the door.

      Your email can speak volumes. But if you're not careful, it will do it in a squeaky voice or an incomprehensible accent. There are four key components to every email: your address, subject line, message text, and signature. Screw any of them up and you could look foolish and unprofessional to the world at large. Here's how to avoid that fate.

      1. Your Email Address, Your Self

      To the 2.4 billion strangers who occupy the Internet, your email address is your identity. Yet you'd be surprised how many small business owners mess this up. For example:

      If your email address is...

      		It tells the world
      CrankyBob1912@aol.com You were born in 1912. You are using a dial-up Internet account and probably still own a rotary phone.
      Reddy4Askshun@hotmail.com
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