AeronTV for Business Owners:

Episode 1 - Improving Your Business
with Quantification

It's a fast business world we live in and it's hard
to get everything done, but in the middle of all
the running and hustling you have to keep your
finger on your company's pulse.

Hi and welcome to the AeronTV, a show dedicated to business owners. My name is Martin and here I share the things I learned the hard way developing my own business. The topic for today is:

How to improve your business with quantification, and I will also tell you how to find things on Twitter in a 15 km radius.

I know it's a fast business world we live in and it's hard to get all the work done, but in the middle of all the running and hustling you have to keep your finger on your company's pulse. You have to know how effective your actions really are, so you can stop wasting time on the things that don't really matter and focus on the things that do.

You are trying to take your business places, but without a map and a dashboard it's impossible to tell if you're heading in the right direction! So, before you move onto the next item on your agenda, think about the consequences. Without proper feedback how can you ever know if you're on the right track?

Let's get to the solution. I assume that you have your goals written down and you know where and what you're trying to get. Since it's a business, you are trying to sell something ... a product or service ... so your main goal should be infecting people with a desire to buy it from you. You should use social networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to spread your fantastic ideas and solve other people problems. You should blog about subjects in your area of expertise and then ... maybe ... write a book about it.

But every week you should stop for a moment and measure how you are doing by checking the impact of your content. And there are brilliant applications for that online.

Have a look at SocialMention. This can tell you who wrote about you, your product, service or website and when and where it happened. SocialMention covers blogs, news, social networks, videos and photos. Are people saying positive things about you? Or is there something you missed and pissed off a bunch of people?

Use Klout to see how well you are doing on Twitter. It's a big network and Klout makes it so easy to share content with others. See how influential you are and who really cares about your product. Maybe you are advertising to the wrong crowd? Use the feedback! That's the main thing. Use all the available tools to open up your mind. Don't let it get to you. Critique your actions and then go and do something about it!

On top of that, use your website statistics. You can gauge so much from them. See how everyday actions impact your readership and affect visits to your website. See if that radio or TV ad was really worth the investment. Maybe you're wasting money on things that do not convert?

OK, so I promised I would tell you how to narrow your search results on Twitter to a 15 km radius of your location. You see, apps such as TwitDeck and Seesmic do not give you that power yet because some functions are not available through the Twitter API.

To use the full power of Twitter search, go to search.twitter.com and use its Advanced Search. This will allow you to search effectively for conversations that matter to you. You can even get an RSS feed of the search results. Isn't that great?

That's all for today. Thank you for watching and as always I relish your comments, suggestions and opinions. Don't forget to share this video with your friends using the links below.