Brainstorming Sessions

January 10, 2013 by Raul Colon

Every year we try to come up with new ideas to implement for our business and come up with new projects to help us create more connections with people who might have the same interests.

As a small business, instituting new projects or revisiting old ones and putting a different spin on them has helped us maintain our heads above water when the well has run dry. At the end of last year, Raul decided that we were going to do small brainstorming sessions after various small business people asked him for some advice about projects they wanted to get off the ground.

Brain Drain Game

Raul gets countless of calls from friends and acquaintances that want to do what we call brain drain; pick your brain for ideas, go forth with them, and never contact Raul or myself to know if they were successful.

After many years of playing the brain drain game, we decided to start creating sessions that would serve many purposes.

Disruptive Approach

One purpose would be to help individuals with an ongoing or new project that needed a creative or disruptive way of tackling the obstacles they were facing to get the project off the ground.

The Right Technology

A second purpose was to push entrepreneurs and small business owners to identify the right type of technology and platforms where they can connect with other like-minded individuals.

Getting the momentum going

Lastly, our goal is to also see these projects, through brainstorming sessions, come to fruition and have the small business owner state the success of the project.

Our First Sweet Session

Just recently a small business owner whose wife set up a cupcake, cake, and events company called, Dolce Maria’s Sweet Creations, approached Raúl for a Brainstorming session. We offered four brainstorming packages and they immediately scheduled a session the same week.

Once the session commenced, many ideas flowed between Raul and the client. As the session drew to a close, the clients appeared pleased with the key observations and recommendations offered.

The key objective was for the small business owner to see their value proposition in the services and product they are providing.

Creating a Road Map

To close off the small project we sent a roadmap in the form of a document covering:

– Overall objectives

– Accomplishments met within the session

– Primary and Secondary next Steps

– Online, Communications, and Business Recommendations

– Assistance with Pricing Strategy

– Recommended Reading

– Tips on using Images on Instagram and Pinterest

We would love to help you make those small or big ideas in your head into successful projects and businesses. Contact us directly.

When not to use Groupon or other Discount Sites

January 3, 2013 by Raul Colon

As a small business we are always trying to keep track of our expenses and save money for those days that might be extra rainy. As advisors to other small business owners, we are always providing cost effective methods for advertising to obtain new or returning clients.

Filling a Void for Slower Times of the Year

Our latest client, Fit911 Studio’s owner Andres Vazquez was looking to fill a void for those clients who go away on vacation during the holiday month of December. If you have ever frequented Puerto Rico during the holiday season, things don’t get back to normal until after January 6^th .

We talked about several options with him and he brought up using Groupon to offer some packages for new clients. We were talking to another person who had used Groupon to sell some pastries and she explained how it was more costly than profitable. We relayed this information to Andres and we suggested using Facebook ads to obtain those new clients.

Facebook Ad and the Ultimate Payoff

He gave us the permission to create the ads, and ultimately he gained 15 clients; five more than he had hoped for during this slow period. Four options were offered to individuals looking to get a jump-start on their new year’s goals.

Our recommendations for this small business owner paid off and now the excellent staff at Fit911 Studio will train new clients.

Although the popular thing is to appear on sites that are promising potential clients up to 90% discount on your services, a small business must evaluate how profitable this will ultimately be for them.

So before you end up giving most of your profit to Groupon and the other discount clones, ask yourself these questions:

How much will Groupon and other discount sites take from your profit?

What other alternatives are there for advertising on the web along with your blog?

If you are having problems with coming up with a creative way to advertise your services, we can help you with a brainstorming session. In our next blog post, we will talk about how short sessions with CIMA IT Solutions Corp. can be a positive outcome for current and future projects.

If your interested in finding out how to kick start any new effort or project drop us a line or two and we can gladly advance you that info via email.

Brewing a Fresh Cup of Content

November 8, 2012 by Raul Colon

For those who love coffee, a fresh pot of the black gold will get your day started. Others might choose tea or exercise to get their day started but the same idea of fresh tealeaves or a fresh new pair of running sneaks can all be thought of as a start to an awesome day.

Just like a fresh cup of coffee, fresh and exciting content is becoming scarce. In previous posts we’ve written about plagiarism on a national and local level. The individuals have the pressure of writing by themselves and this is in no way an excuse for what they did. But when you can bounce ideas off of a team member or group, it is a lot easier.

Writing as a Team

Writing as a Team can also become challenging but it sure does help when two or three brains are brainstorming about what topics to write about. Using a white board in your office or meeting room can certainly help a team of people come up with topics to write about and how to organize the content. In team discussions there might be even three or four topics to write about with even more content to elaborate on.

But if you are one person or a two person company writing various blogs, the best times to think of topics is when you talk to someone else over a meal or cup of coffee or road trips. We come up with a topic or several to write about when we are on road trips to visit family or out doing errands. One comment or idea can spark an in depth conversation about a possible topic for anyone of our blogs.

Tools to help with writing

I use both technology and paper and pen to write things down. Raul uses various tools such as Omm Writer and provides a detailed outline here of what else he uses to create blog posts. I also use Mind Node and Word for my blog entries. One cool thing that Raul has been doing lately is writing all his ideas on sticky notes, posting them to a wall, and then arranging them into categories where the ideas start forming into common themes.

There isn’t one way to do things as long as they are efficient for you, the company, and clients. The most important thing about writing a blog post is that you are highlighting these key factors:

How your company provides a service

How your company works with clients to resolve their issues and needs while building long lasting relationships

and most importantly how your company makes clients successful

What is your company doing to create fresh, new, and original content?

The Plagiarizing Professor

September 19, 2012 by Raul Colon

In a previous post, I ‘d written about a well-known journalist plagiarizing content from a blogger. And it got me thinking about the basics of writing. In school you are taught the alphabet and as you become proficient in writing, you arrange those 26 letters into words, sentences, paragraphs, a blog post, article, research paper, and even a book. The ideas and content are individual and unique. We are not going to arrange the words in the exact same order. We might have the same topic in mind, but the execution of the content written, the arrangement and the paragraphs are never the same. Unless, you plagiarize someone else’s content word for word, paragraph by paragraph.

Such was the case in the last week when we were made aware of a local plagiarizing incident involving a university professor. If you are a PhD I expect for you to know that plagiarism is not ethical or moral. When your students hand in research papers, you do your due diligence to make sure they have not plagiarized content with out giving credit to the original author. If a student is caught doing this, it is considered unethical and can lead to expulsion or worse.

The Plagiarizing Professor

Too make a long story short, (you can go to the person’s blog post and see the many entries she made regarding this issue and how she reached out to various organizations in Puerto Rico) the person who had their content stolen had written her thesis several years ago about publicity titled, “Publicidad 3.0.” Recently she was going to start research on a similar topic. What she found was that in July of this year, a Professor who writes for a local newspaper, had plagiarized content from her thesis. (The blog post is in Spanish) Upon further research and gathering evidence of what happened to her, the blogger then wrote about this incident in her blog. She put links to his social profiles, personal blog, and newspaper article that was plagiarized with the same exact title as her thesis. She made the editors of the newspaper aware via emails, posting messages on Facebook on the newspaper’s page, and even tweeting to them.

When I started searching for information about the professor, someone (more than likely the professor or his lawyer) had deleted all of his social profiles. The newspaper also deleted the article in question and various other articles written by this professor from their digital newspaper but forgot that Google cached a copy of the article under the same title as the blogger’s thesis. During my research I came upon an article in the same newspaper that talked about plagiarism in the press and in blogs. Perhaps the professor should have read what his colleague learned at a local bloggers event concerning plagiarism. I also found a copy on Scribd of the original article that was not erased. When I went to search on the professor’s blog, it had also been deleted.

Do you see where I am going with this?

If one is innocent of plagiarism or copying content from someone else, why go to great lengths to try and erase your digital footprint, articles, and blog? Check the blog versus the article posted in the newspaper and you can come to a conclusion about this matter.

How can we help you with writing original content?

As I have pointed out previously, we write original content for several blogs and have done it for clients. As recently as March, we have been using original photos on all our blogs instead of going to Flickr Creative Commons, where some people who take photos allow other’s to use their images as long as credit is giving to them.

If you want peace of mind when it comes to following the rules of publishing online content for blogs, especially if you or your company want to start a company blog, we can coach you or offer training around this topic.

By brining you back to the basics of writing, we can then translate that into what is technologically acceptable and what is not. We can guide you through the many elements of the online eco-system. We will write a follow-up post about the basics of writing a blog post and how you should credit other sources including photos.

What do you think of this professor? Absent minded or just plain lazy?

For updates on this matter, you can go to the person’s blog to see how this plays out. We commend this person for bringing her case to light. (The blog is in Spanish)

Thanks to @BiancaEst for sharing the original information and post with us this past Saturday.

Original Content versus Plagiarisim

August 28, 2012 by Raul Colon

The news that a well-known writer for CNN and Times Magazine was confronted by another news source for plagiarizing someone else’s content has been an important topic of conversation amongst bloggers and journalists within the last several weeks. You can look at an article about his apology here and what he did.

Mass Quantities of Information

These days I am seeing people consuming mass quantities of information and the writers of blogs, newspapers, and digital newspaper as the people who are trying to entertain the masses with whatever they can find and trying to be the first at it exposing anything that will bring more traffic. We also see how companies approve controversial content for the sake of traffic, comments, and a little notoriety for the employee; this lets the company know that they are moving the masses even if the content can be hurtful to a large group or community of people already in the spotlight.

Writing controversial content for your business blog can backfire on you and the company. It can provoke a swarm of bees at any moment that will sting and hurt your company’s efforts, have your current customers leave you, and persuade possible clients to go to your competitors.

How does one come up with new, fresh, and original content for your blog without looking towards pre-written content on the web about the same subject?

Writing is a Team Effort at CIMA

At CIMA writing becomes a team effort. I might bounce off an idea to Raul and we might have the same ideas or different ones. We write out drafts, have the other person edit, and ask to provide more detail than what was originally written. One of the most fun exercises we did was putting together this post about original content and comparing that to homemade onion rings for Raul’s blog .

We also make sure that we credit other writers and even clients if we need to use them as an example in our posts. Running multiple blogs can be challenging especially when the CIMA team is committed to writing fresh, original content all of the time.

On few occasions we summarize an already written post or provide our perspective on a current event on our blogs. One of our most highly viewed posts for PapaHeroes was written because of news about a tragic shooting in Puerto Rico just minutes after celebrating the New Year this year. I saw a picture of the parent slumped over in a chair waiting outside his daughter’s room in one of the local digital newspapers. I wrote about how I would feel as a parent if something that tragic happened to me. Unbeknownst to us, that same day the parents decided to stop all medical interventions and their daughter died. Raul noticed a spike in visitors on the parenting blog and people were looking for information about the girl from all over the globe. Till this day, people still search for information on the young girl and the tragic event that took her life.

We know that the more content we write, the chances of us landing a client are greater than if we just sit and wait for someone to call for our services. Last year we landed a new client because of the content we wrote and we showed our ability to resolve a potential clients’ issues. We wrote about an alternative to open tables reservations system for a former client who was in the restaurant business.

The content did several things for the person reading it and searching for information online.

It showed CIMA IT had an expertise in working with restaurants.
We used our established client as a concrete example of how they were successful at using the tool we created for them.
Solved an issue he was having for his twenty restaurants and their reservation system.

We spoke to the client about what he needed in more detail once he contacted us and since then we have been able to resolve other issues for him. As a small company, writing original content for the business blog continuously opens the door for new clients. Plagiarizing someone else’s content won’t show your expertise. It will set you and your business up for failure if you can’t deliver what you wrote about or promised in the article.

In our next post we will write about the tools we use to come up with content in order to show our expertise, highlight the work we have done for clients, and build our company portfolio.