1. Facebook has way more users than Twitter in Ireland.
2. People use Facebook to keep in touch with their friends.
3. People use Twitter to connect with networks and professional relationships.

And a simple three-step process to help pick what is right for you:

1. Ask your customers if they use Facebook or Twitter. Pick the one that is most popular.
2. Still not sure? Use Twitter if you want to do PR activities or keep in touch with a professional network.
3. If you are still not sure, use Facebook.

It is not pretty, and I feel really sorry for Geraldine, who spent a whole week’s holiday with me and the moustache.

Please support my growing efforts and the great charities that help more than 2,800 men who will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year. You can give a donation through the Movember site.

Thank you!

Image by Sean MacEntee via Flickr

An amazing idea without actions is still just an idea. It does not solve any real-world problems, it does not bring customers, it does not generate income.

A half-decent idea with great execution can still be a very decent business. It solves problems, it has customers, it pays the bills.

Everyone can have great ideas. In fact, most people probably have one or more great ideas loitering around in their heads. But those ideas are only brain-fluff until they are executed, until action happens.

So, if you have a great idea, allocate a few hours every week to work with your idea. Take action and help the idea turn into reality.

Here are two different marketing approaches:

1. Spend buckets of money marketing your product via radio/tv/papers, and hope that the brand sticks in people’s’ heads until they actually need your product
2. Another approach is to get your product in front of customers at the very right moment, when they are ready to actually use your services

The second approach means you only spend money on people who are very likely to become customers that same day, at that very moment. It also means you don’t fork out lots of money before you know if customers are willing to pay for your product/service.

For a web site this normally means you show up in Google when people are searching for certain suitable keywords.

I have not come across any good terms for the second approach yet. How about “getting into the loop”. Have you got a better name for it? Please comment below.

When you start a company you are suddenly supposed to know everything about recruitment, accounting, cash-flow, marketing, tax, health & safety, and so on. Truth is, most of the time you just wing it.

Read his blog post here

Here are some words you want to avoid when assigning tasks at meetings: “Look at”, “Investigate”, and “Study”. Instead you want to give people tasks with words like “Solve”, “Fix”, and “Do”.

For example, compare these two projects:

1. Improve the speed of X 10%
2. Investigate how we can improve the speed of X

Which one would you rather work on? Number two feels a bit safer, but I guarantee that number one is way more fun.

There are two main goals with this approach:

1. Avoid wasting time on features that will change
2. Get real feedback from real customers as quickly as possible

You can do market research until the cows come home, but there is only one way to really test the market for your product. Get it into the hands of your customers and see how they react. And more importantly, see if they will actually pay for it.

Market research is useful, but it is never the real thing. There are things people say they won’t pay for and they will, and there are things they say they will pay for and they won’t.

So, get your big marker out, scratch out 80% of your new product’s planned feature set. Then go ahead and launch your next great Minimum Viable Product.

There are lots of things you can do to help word of mouth happen. Here are two ways to get started: conversation starters and prepping.

Conversation Starter

This is anything that helps people start talking about your company. Typical examples are t-shirts, stickers, pens, etc.

For DoneDeal the conversation starter is often an email someone sends to a friend with a link to a specific ad on DoneDeal. Or they might share an ad on their Facebook page. The ad might have a cool or funny photo, or it might show a cool car, cute pups, a bike with super-duper go-faster-stripes, or anything else interesting.

Emails and Facebook entries can be great conversation starters, but real-life items can work even better. For example, we often use prizes for competitions as great conversation starters (t-shirts, beer koozies, balloons, etc)

Prepping

Prepping is when you coach people to tell others about your company. You educated them with stories and anecdotes that they can bring up during conversations.

For example, customers who know how your company got started might discuss it with a friend over a beer. Any interesting facts they know about your product or company help them talk about you more often.

So, go on, tell your customers more about yourself, your life, your company, and your product.

More

Read more about Word-of-mouth marketing on the clever TrendWatching site.

It is easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission

If something seems like a good idea to you, go straight ahead and make it happen. Most of the time people will love what you have done. And in the odd case when people are not happy it is easy to say sorry.

Much bigger and cooler things would happen if we all stopped asking for permission, and just got things done instead.

It is early days yet, this is only an initial pilot test. But we are very excited, and we really believe this is the future of web browsing.

Please have a look, and let me know what you think. Read about it on the DoneDeal blog.