SME: Are you budgeting for market research?

A colleague commented recently that many SMEs don't budget at the start of the year for market research.

I've worked with a lot of SMEs, and I know these things about SME owner managers:

• you are dedicated to growing your business


• you expend every ounce of your knowledge and experience in bringing about this growth


• you constantly seek to expand your own skills by networking with others to learn more - in order to grow your business.

I also know that:

• in a small small team you must outsource: your pool of knowledge is by nature limited


• there are areas which can help to grow your business, which you may not until now have utilised - these can be a number of things: technological, operational, or market based research


• market research will always help you to stay ahead of the competition


• research is a pre-requisite to succesful expansion or business development

I've seen it time and time again. Companies operate within their comfort zone: they anlayse the hell out of the factors they're familiar with, such as the supply chain, manufacturing, quality control and so on. But with the best will in the world, ad-hoc necessities like research tend to fall much lower on the prioirty list - largely because they're outside an SME owner's area of expertise and experience, and because they're ad-hoc.

Allocate a small amount this year, and use it when you're tearing your hair out saying:

• Why am I losing sales to this new competitor? What are they doing that's new?
• I don't understand enough about this market to take this risk! Am I making a mistake?
• How can I estimate for stock levels when I don't know the size of this new segment?

It's a fact that regular research will help a business to step outside the box a little, shift direction, identify an opportunity and perhaps avoid a pothole or two along the way.

So the message is, allocate a piece of your budget for research - it'll pay off next year, wait and see.

Our personal lives revealed

The US has seen some growth in people search engines recently. Enter a person’s name and results show any personal information about them, including their Facebook pages, linked in page, website, etc. Some examples are Wink , PeekYou, and Zoominfo for business people.

Ok, it might seem like a ‘nice-to-have’, a bit like the google images search which restrict searches to results with pictures. Or an easy way to find a person’s LinkedIn page. Or an easier way to find a long lost friend or classmate (without all the Google Search results clutter).

However, there are more ominous uses! Most notable is the trend of employers using these search engines to trawl social networking sites to find out more about potential new employees (or partners, or suppliers, or contractors or consultants…).

Suddenly, that photo of you on your friend’s Facebook page where you’re dancing on a bar table with your trousers on your head might not seem quite so funny...

Until recently, it’s been fairly easy to keep personal information personal. Watch what you say, stay circumspect about life outside the office and no-one will find out about your personal peccadillos.

However, sites like these (as well as a regular Google search) mean that your personal life is increasingly on show. Now your professional connections can search and view and wonder, and maybe even think twice about that job offer based on what they see you doing in your spare time.

Like a lot of trends, 'people-check' is slowly making its way to our shores. Krishna De reported in her blog this week that 40% of European tech firms check social media profiles of potential employees. Krishna also reports that Irish SMEs are embracing social media marketing - and this means they’re likely to use it for people-check too.

Unsurprisingly, the US market has come up with a partial solution. Naymz is an online professional network which offers members the option of a Google ad which appears when their name is searched, pointing to their profile on Naymz. It's designed to encourage people to just look at the ad, get the information they need there, and ignore other Google search results.

Naymz used to also offer 'search engine flooding': camouflaging a web page that you don't want people to see. They create lots of related but postitive comment about you, and work to get that placed higher in the search engines. This 'search engine flooding' technique might eventually push the offending page to Page 2 of more of Google results, making it unlikely to be spotted. However, Naymz haven't been giving this the big sell recently, meaning it's probably not effective enough.

So, reader, the moral of the story is: be good, and if you can't be good - BE CAREFUL!