In this the second week of our Smart’N Up Series of posts, I want to introduce our readers to one of the best gems I have discovered as of last, the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast.  I have only been listening for a couple of months now, but I always pull two to three great nuggets of small business marketing advice out of each episode.

The show’s hosts, John Wall and Christopher Penn, record the show every week from a coffee shop in Natick, MA, just outside of Boston and publish it each Thursday morning.  It is available for FREE via their Marketing Over Coffee website, iTunes, or through an RSS feed.  I download it to my iPod and usually listen on my morning walks.

They usually cover several different topics throughout each 25-30 minute episode.  They usually focus on a variety of Internet and web marketing topics, but sometimes branch out to traditional marketing topics as well.  Like I said previously, I pull several good ideas from each episode.  If you are a small business owner who is struggling to understand the “new” marketing opportunities that are created by the web, this podcast can help you to clear the fog a bit.    These ideas will especially help you if you are doing a lot web marketing – especially if you are taking on a portion of the work load yourself.  Even if you are outsourcing a lot of this work, it is a good idea to have an overview what your Internet marketing people are supposed to be doing.

The AICPA’s monthly journal to all of its members, the Journal of Accountancy, recently featured me and our firm in its article about CPA’s who embrace the use of Twitter.  The article was initially released in the weekly email news update and will be featured in the August issue.  Check out the online version of the article here.  

Our firm continues to embrace the use of social media to help keep our clients informed and stay on top of the latest news and trends.  Our increased presence also allows us to seek out advice of experts in other areas to help our clients in many more ways than just tax and accounting.  Our role as a business advisor is expanded by our use of social media.  We have always maintained a mentality of using the most advanced technology and latest trends to operate our practice and social media is just another tool.  We also enjoy communicating with our community and clients with these fun tools.

Follow us on twitter at @CharlotteCPA (Donna) and @Clt_CPA (Chad).

This is an interesting marketing gimmick – Burger King has announced that it is coming out with it’s own Cologne entitled Burger King Flame. This is supposed to make you smell like a burger! It just doesn’t get any better than this. I certainly hope some ends up in my stocking on Christmas morning.

Burger King set up a special website devoted to its new promo item.

It is one of the top items on the Google Trends this morning, so it just goes to show that even the stupidist of marketing gimmicks might work. It sure is creating a lot of buzz.

This is more of a short rant than a blog post, but why do restaurants (mostly fast food) insist that they have a medium and a large drink size if there is not small. The medium simply can not exist unless there is at least one drink smaller than it and one drink larger than it. Otherwise, what are you measuring it against.

I first notice this marketing lie years ago at Steak and Shake. It was about 2am in the morning and we had been at the hospital most of the night as my wife had been ill. We pulled in and the extremely hateful lady on the other end of the microphone informed me that they did not have a small milkshake. Only a medium and a large. First off, why would she bother to tell me this. Should she not assume that I want the smallest milk shake they have? Secondly, why do they outright lie and state that the milkshake is their medium when it is obviously their small.

This was brought back into the forefront of my mind last night at Chick-Fil-A. Same scenario – only one size of milk shake – yet the girl called it a medium. If their is only one size, it really is just a milkshake. It isn’t a small, medium, or large.

Examine the pricing and marketing in your business. Do you have any of these little annoyances that can bother potential customers? Of course, at Steak and Shake the extremely hateful and rude employee on the other end that acted as if I was an idiot for ordering a small was much worse than the actual lie about the size.