Business news from the Finally Fast team

The Clean Water Act penalties from last year’s BP oil disaster could kick start the launch of a long-term investment in ecosystem restoration and create jobs that would benefit at least 140 businesses with nearly 400 employee locations in 37 states, including more than 260 in the Gulf Coast and nearly 60 in Florida, according to a new Duke University study.  The report–”RESTORING THE GULF COAST: New Markets for Established Firms,” funded by Environmental Defense Fund –is based on a sample of 140 firms linked to coastal restoration projects already undertaken or completed.

“Long-term ecosystem restoration would be an economic grand slam because it both protects current jobs in key Floridaindustries – like fishing, tourism, and shipping– and creates new jobs,” said Jackie Prince Roberts, director of sustainable technologies for Environmental Defense Fund. “A study of Everglades restoration by Mather Economics – based on data from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – estimates that every $1 million of public investment in restoring the Everglades would create about 20 jobs. Our study helps Florida residents understand where those jobs can be created, and the opportunity Florida has to be a leader in this new industry sector that provides ecosystem restoration services to the Gulf, and to meet emerging global demand.”

The study’s release is timely because the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will hold a hearing Wednesday to examine bipartisan legislation, the RESTORE Act (H.R. 3096), that would dedicate 80 percent of the estimated $5-21 billion in Clean Water Act fines from the 4.9 million barrel spill to restoring the Gulf.  The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee already has approved the Senate version of the bill (S. 1400), cosponsored by nine of the 10 Gulf state senators, including Florida’s Bill Nelson (D) and Marco Rubio (R).

“Restoration projects activate a full supply chain linking materials providers, equipment manufacturers, shipbuilders, machinery repair firms, engineering and construction contractors, and environmental resource firms,” the report says.  “Many of the firms are based in the Gulf Coast region. Having long worked in the marine construction industry building oil and gas industry infrastructure, they can apply the same skills and equipment to coastal restoration, thus finding new markets and a more diverse client base.”

“Coastal habitat restoration typically creates at least 3-4 times as many jobs as road infrastructure or oil and gas projects for every $1 million invested,” said Keith Bowers, president of Biohabitats, Inc., a conservation planning, ecological restoration and regenerative design firm that does restoration work in the Everglades, Big Cypress and Tampa Bay, FL, Texas and Louisiana, and has offices in Baltimore, MD; Louisville, KY; Raleigh, NC; North Charleston, SC; Denver, CO; Cleveland, OH; Glen Ridge, NJ; and Santa Fe, NM. “This study proves ecological restoration can be a real catalyst for job creation, economic vitality and ecosystem resiliency.  Passing the RESTORE Act could help restore the fishing and tourism industries in Florida and the other Gulf Coast states.”

Two-thirds of the firms sampled have offices in the Gulf Coast and qualify as small businesses, according to Small Business Administration guidelines on number of employees.  One of the firms is Taylor Engineering, an employee-owned design firm that restored seven miles of critically eroded beaches battered by hurricanes in Walton County and the city of Destin inOkaloosa County and has full-service offices in Jacksonville and West Palm Beach, and local-service offices in Tampa andDestin, FL, Savannah, GA, Baltimore, MD, and Columbia, SC.  The firm has provided a life-cycle commitment to the art and science of delivering sustainable solutions in the water environment since 1983.

“If our customer base picks up in response to RESTORE funding, there would be a positive and sustainable long-term impact on our hiring,” said James Marino, P.E., President of Taylor Engineering, and a certified Diplomat in Coastal Engineering, who was an officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for 20 years.  “Restoration projects are very important to small and medium-sized firms like ours because they provide a valuable stream of work in a fragile economy.  The cost to benefit ratio is very high for restoration projects, especially for beach restoration, which brings considerable value for regional economies in a multitude of business sectors.  Not only do these projects serve as an immediate and prolonged benefit economically, but more importantly, the net positive effects provided to a sustainable environmental infrastructure are enduring.”

The BP oil disaster worsened the damage to the badly degraded Mississippi River Delta wetlands, a priceless resource that “sustains the Gulf region’s unique people and cultures and brings the U.S. economy billions of dollars each year in energy, fishing, shipping and tourism,” the report states.  ”At stake in the loss of coastal wetlands is not only the environmental health of the Gulf region, but also several of the nation’s vital industries.”

The Gulf region’s critical economic role, and the extent to which this role depends on the delta ecosystem, is evident in the following assets provided by the Gulf region:

•  33% of the nation’s seafood harvest (National Marine Fisheries Service, 2011
• $34 billion per year in tourism (Oxford Economics, 2010)
•  90% of the nation’s total offshore crude oil and natural gas production (Energy Information Administration, 2011)
•  4,000 offshore oil platforms and 33,000 miles of pipeline (Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, 2011; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2010)
• 10 of the nation’s 15 largest shipping ports, by cargo volume (American Association of Port Authorities, 2009)

The report notes that a robust coastal restoration sector has been developing in the marine construction industry, but recent budget cuts have stalled many authorized restoration projects.

“In Florida, the economy is the environment, but funding for environmental restoration projects has been reduced by the state and most local governments,” said Michael L. Davis, Vice President and Principal, Keith and Schnars, P.A., an environmental, planning and engineering consulting firm that currently is working on the South Miami-Dade Watershed Study and Plan and has offices in Fort Lauderdale, Jacksonville, and Doral, Florida. “The RESTORE Act is a win for Florida’s economy andFlorida’s environment because it will enable environmental consulting firms like mine to hire additional biologists and engineers, and restoration construction contractors to buy more equipment and hire more operators.”

The report concludes that coastal restoration is needed in Florida, California, the Pacific Northwest and the Great Lakes.  If U.S. markets expand, the firms that serve them will be well positioned to sell to international markets as they develop in the future.  For example, several countries in Asia are developing integrated coastal management programs, and recently India,Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Vietnam have undertaken hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of coastal restoration projects.  The RESTORE Act would continue to build this promising new sector.

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Get to Know Your Online Friends

Your online friends are not only a way to acquire more “likes,” “+1s”, and Retweets. They are real people, and in order to build real world connections with them, you need to do so with sincerity. You need to real like people for who they are, no because it factors into building your brand and/or your career. Although social media often blurs the lines between our work and our lives outside of work, you need to stop treating your online friends as tools to be used for a particular online goal. Get to know your online friends.

Learn About your Online Friends

Although your relationships with your online friends can be awkward, social media actually provides you with a way to learn more about them. Use Social Media to pay attention to when your friends are able to hang out in person, or ping them to see what they are up to. Now, we’re not saying that you should use social media to stalk people – you don’t want people to think you’re a “creep” – just use it to see if any of your friends are in your area at a particular time.

Hang Out

If you are going to a large event, like San Diego Comic-con, for example, there’s a pretty good chance that some of your online friends are also attending. If you’re going to a big event, let your online friends know about of time. Try twittering online that you’re going, and arrange a meetup like a simple group dinner.

Keep an Eye Out

When an opportunity arises to meet one of your online friends in real life, don’t pass it up. In fact, you should keep an eye out for these opportunities using social media.

Don’t Be Shy

Finally, when you do meet one of your online friends in person, don’t be shy. Remember that they are in the same situation as you, and approach them like you have known each them forever. If you remember something commendable that they noted online, be sure to compliment them on it, and ask what they are up to at the moment. Remember, the people that make connections are the ones who listen and ask questions, and you should do both when you meet your online friends in person.

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Business tips from the Finally Fast team

It pays to imagine Twitter as your own personal live networking event that empowers you to dive into a conversation at any time. Twitter is a crucial tool for spreading your information with your followers and engaging them. But in addition to these amazing functions, you really need to think of Twitter as a two-way street. You can’t utilize Twitter as a megaphone and expect optimal results.

You may be also interested to know that there are other features that Twitter provides that enable businesses to make better connections with their followers and create more brand exposure. Here are five things that can really help improve your social media marketing strategy:

Advanced Search Options

You may not know about it, but the advanced search options allow you to enter keywords that your followers use when they search for your product or service. For example, if we search for people who are tweeting the phrase “spyware, ” spyware-related tweets will pop up. Once you find these keywords in posts, you can reach out to the people who tweeted them to say hello, ask to connect and start building relationships. In addition to this, the search function actually allows you to target tweets from a certain location so that you can stay within a community. This helps allow local businesses to reach out to tweeters in their area.

Boost SEO

Tweeting often not only helps you to stay active on newsfeeds but also improves your SEO by boosting your ranking in online searches. Be sure to use keyword-rich phrases in your tweets as often as possible. And if you can’t get your company name or personal name as your Twitter handle, be make sure to include it in your bio. Your bio on Twitter is public and open to search, so using keywords in it such as your company name can enable Google to index content that’s relevant to your business. You can also use Google Alerts to monitor your name and company, and stay informed about what people are saying about your company, and what your competition is up to.

Media Connection

Through using tools such as Cision’s Journalist Tweets and Muckrack, you can locate journalists, editors and producers, and find out how active they are on Twitter. These tools can help you decide which media outlets you would like your business to be featured in and reach out to the journalists who work there.

Marketing to Mobile

Twitter also allows you to have your tweets directly sent as a text to your followers who use mobile phones. Whenever you post a tweet, if someone has subscribed to your tweets from his or her mobile phone, they will automatically receive your tweets on that phone.

Change Link Headlines

Finally, you can dramatically increase traffic to the content you share on Twitter by tweeting them 10 to 20 times using slightly different headlines each time. Through changing headlines, you can attract different people and, if you post at different times, reach people in more time zones.

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Business tips from the Finally Fast team

If you’ve been on the Internet at any time during the last ten years, you know that consumers want more than content; they want to make a human connection. It’s no longer enough to push information out to your audience. Today’s geo-located, email checking, text messaging, status updating, smartphone wielding social consumers are hungry to engage with their favorite businesses.

So what’s the best way to engage with them? It goes beyond providing a positive shopping experience, excellent customer service and content that informs, entertains and makes their lives better. Customers really want to know you care about them as well as their business. They want to make a connection with you. The challenge to grow a business goes way beyond finding new prospects. It’s about how to engage them. As marketers and business people, everything you do comes down to making these meaningful connections with our customers.

While consumers generally are showing a desire to engage with businesses online, in a world where everyone is bombarded by marketing messages wherever they go, consumers become more discerning about which businesses deserve their time, attention and patronage. So how can you engage the busy social consumer and make that important human connection? Here are a few ways to start you off:

Polls

Post a survey, poll or open-ended question on Facebook asking customers to identify their biggest challenge or most pressing concern related to your business or cause in 2011. Report back to your audience on the results. If anything unexpected, insightful, trend-spotting or controversial bubbles up, use those ideas to spur other conversations.

Ignite a Conversation

Send out a thought-provoking question related to your industry on Twitter. Make it something people care about — an interesting trend, results of study, a surprising report or something in the news. Link back to more info on your website, blog or Facebook page. Use a Twitter hashtag to mark keywords or topics in tweets and keep track of the conversation.

Utilize the Results

Weave the results of your social conversations with customers into your content, across media channels. Good conversations seed good content, and vice versa. Write about things that people will want to talk about and share on their social networks.

Moderate the Discussion

Social consumers want to engage and interact with businesses in two-way conversation. Be sure that once you start a discussion, you’re present to monitor and participate in it. When a topic catches fire and gets people gabbing, jump in and fan the flames to keep the chatter going.

Experiment

Of course, some efforts to engage consumers will be more successful than others. It’s about finding what resonates with and engages your audience, and that’s not always going to be predictable. So, do some experimenting to determine what sticks. What you share and how you share it is up to you.

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Marketing tips from the Finally Fast team

You may not know it, but young mothers, teens and college undergrads comprise one of the most highly sought after marketing segments: Generation Y. Generation Y is the largest population in the history of the United States, and currently has the highest consumer confidence due to their consistent spending habits (despite the recession). Generation Y also sets the current trends for the US, and is now famous for the mommy bloggers, a group of bloggers who are known for spreading the word on the products and services that they love. Here are some key strategies for marketing to this important generation                                             

Set Your Sights on the Influencers

In order to market to Generation Y, you have to reach out to those members of the Generation whose voice is the loudest. Find those bloggers who provide a voice for your particular niche, and reach out to them. Offer to guest blog for them, or propose an affiliate marketing package. These bloggers are ultimately interested in spreading the word about quality, and if your product or services are great, they should have no problem spreading the word about you.

Get on the Networks

In addition to spreading their thoughts on blog, Generation Y share content on social networks. A Facebook fan page is a great place to begin this viral process. Use your Facebook Fan Page to engage your audience through your circle of “friends,” and ask them to help spread the word. You should always be active on your Fan Page, letting your followers know what you’re up to, and link your content to each other and to pages you’ve created on other social network portals. And for extra marketing power, share some exclusive content with just a handful of your fans so they can spread it as an extra-special sneak peek.

Go Green

Generation Y is also known for spending money in what they believe in, buying according to what they feel is best for the world and the environment. A popular trend in business nowadays is to “Go Green.” To Go Green, a business must adopt more sustainable and eco-friendly business practices. To start your green journey, simply take a good look at what your company consumes, and find way to recycle, reduce, and reuse.

Go Mobile

Without a doubt, everything you do on the web has to be phone-friendly, as Generation Y never leaves home without their cell phones, and uses Geotags to notes where they are and what they like. And as geo-gaming applications like Foursquare and Gowalla become even more popular, expect to see more opportunities to advertise to Generation Y.

Get on Twitter

Finally, in order to successfully market to Generation Y you need to keep up on trends, and the best place to do that is Twitter. Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post 140-character updates called Tweets in a constant stream of communication. When you follow other people on Twitter, you see their tweets. Businesses also use Twitter to periodically update their customers on the sales and other types of special offers that are available to them each day.

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Social Media is a powerful communication tool that enables businesses of all sizes to spread the word about their product or service, boost brand awareness, and attract and retain customers. Smart Businesses use Social Media to increase visibility, improve search engine results, and drive more traffic to their website. Here are some hot tips to help you make the most of marketing with Social Media:

Use Social Media to Listen

True Success with social media requires more listening and less talking. It’s crucial to read your target audience is sharing online and discover what’s important to them. This will allow you to create content and trigger conversations that add value to their experiences.

Focus on a Niche

You can’t be everything to everybody. The key to success in Social Media Marketing is to use a highly focused strategy to build a strong, yet specific brand.

It’s all about Quality, not Quantity

It’s all about Quality, not Quantity. Better that you have 1,000 online connections that enjoy and share your content with their audiences than 10,000 connections who stop following you after connecting the first time.

Be Patient

Success in Social media doesn’t happen overnight. Remember, growing a group of fans and followers is a marathon, not a sprint.

Compound Grown

It’s like that old shampoo commercial. When you publish great content and share it with your audience of quality followers, they will in turn share it with their audiences. And this sharing creates new entry points for search engines like Google to find your content.

Find the Mavens

Find the influential people in your market who have quality audiences and are interested in your products, services and business. Connect with those people and build relationships with them. They in turn will share you with their audience.

Add Value

When it comes to Social Media, you can’t spend all your time on the Internet directly promoting your products and services. You must add value to the conversation. Focus on creating quality content and developing relationships with online influencers.

Give Credit

Building relationships is one of the most important parts of social media marketing. Always acknowledge every person who reaches out to you and give credit where credit is due.

Be Accessible all the time

Absence does not make the heart grow fonder in Social Media. Don’t publish your content then disappear. Be available to your audience all the time. Consistently publish content and participate in conversations in places where people discuss your niche.

Give to Get

Don’t expect others to share your content and talk about you if you don’t do the same for them. Dedicate a portion of your time to sharing and talking about content published by others in your niche.

Naturally, as the social media gathering places du jour, Facebook and Twitter have a special potential to be that kind of bogey man. Prospective employers are now hopping on the Facebooks of interviewees, half idle curiosity and half a serious attempt to get a better sense of who they’re dealing with. There are even recent reports of attorneys mining Facebook for incriminating “evidence” in child custody cases and the like. And we’ve already had innumerable incidents of celebrities and others getting into trouble with tweets posted out of anger, haste, or just plain poor judgement. Fair, unfair… it doesn’t really matter, it’s a reality.

It all comes down to a sometimes uncomfortable blurring between the private and public spheres, the personal and the business worlds. We’re dealing with an ever-diminishing expectation of privacy. And, depending on your business or your personal associations, an opinion you post or the persona you project through pictures, tweets, blog entries, or forum comments can really and truly harm you.

At the end of the day, we all have to come to terms with the fact of our mini-celebrity status, as enabled by social media. And so we have to take a page from actual celebrities if we want to develop social media strategies for how to craft and maintain our online personas.

You have to realize what you can and cannot control. You can’t control who follows you on Twitter. Thus, anything you tweet is carried out there on the digital breeze for all to see. Think twice about posting anything angry, defamatory, low-brow, highly controversial, or otherwise objectionable content if you indeed need to control your social media persona.

Facebook is another matter. You can theoretically control the privacy of your profile, and befriend only those you really know. But we all have “friends” on Facebook we can’t explain if you paid us, and if the goal of your social media is to grow your network—which it often is with internet marketing—you’re going to have plenty of strangers among your “friends.” So, again, you can’t “pop off” on Facebook and expect to get away with it. And you have to control the pictures you are tagged in, as these also make up an important part of your persona.

So, are we saying you have to become some politically-correct, neutered robot with your social media platforms? No, because actually the blurring we talked about works both ways, and people are a little more forgiving of times you inject your private life into your public life. But you do have to be mindful, at all times, of the impression you’re transmitting to the world.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the twins were savvy enough to understand what they were agreeing to when they signed their agreement with Zuckerberg. The deal called for a $20 million cash payment and a partial ownership of Facebook. A third classmate, Divya Narendra, was also part of the 2008 settlement with the twins but did not pursue the second lawsuit seeking to undo the agreement.

Monday’s ruling upholds a lower court decision enforcing the settlement during the six years of litigation that grew so contentious that the dispute was dramatized in the Oscar-nominated film, “The Social Network. “The settlement is now worth more than $160 million because of Facebook’s increased valuation.

The twins alleged that an investment by Microsoft misled them into believing that Facebook was worth only $35.90 a share. But they argued that the company later valued the company at $8.88 for tax purposes. The twins argue they would have demanded more stock in the company based on the lower valuation. Lawyers for the Winklevoss twins said they are reviewing the decision and deciding on their next step.

Zuckerberg himself is currently being sued by Paul Ceglia, a New York City-based businessman who claims that he owns half of Facebook after having paid Zuckerberg $2,000 to fund the site.

Ceglia is offering up e-mails in pursuit of he says is rightfully his after agreements and understandings with Zuckerberg. The complaint now includes purported snippets of e-mails showing Zuckerberg using portions of the code he was paid to create for Ceglia’s venture “StreetFax” as part of what was then called “The Facebook.” After Ceglia relented on some contractual penalties that put his ownership at 80 percent, Zuckerberg finally launched the site on February 4, 2004.

Facebook says the suit is bogus, and that Ceglia’s e-mails are in fact fake. In fact, when Ceglia originally filed the suit in July 2010, Facebook also dismissed it out of hand. But now Ceglia, who was indicted in 2009 for allegedly defrauding people who prepaid him for heating supplies, is back and his suit also alleges that Zuckerberg hacked into and sabotaged Ceglia’s StreetFax site, as revenge for money he felt he was owed. Zuckerberg also allegedly hid from Ceglia that Facebook was taking off and that he was headed to Silicon Valley for the summer to work full time on Facebook.

Ceglia’s suit does not however explain why it took him so long to file suit, years after the statute of limitations expired. He has claimed that he hadn’t heard of Facebook’s success and only found the contracts when going through his papers.

When it comes to smartphones, it’s impossible to ignore the impact of the iPhone. With the arrival of the iPhone, apps have sprung up left and right, for any need you can imagine. But not all of them cost money. Here are ten of our favorite free apps for the iPhone.

The iPhone App for Twitter includes a Tweet Details page which makes it easier to reply to, retweet, or favorite a tweet, and a Pull To Refresh feature, which allows you to simply pull down your old tweets to load new ones.

The facebook app for the iPhone, is, like facebook, free, and just as addictive.

The business traveler’s favorite friend, Skype allows you to make free Skype-to-Skype calls worldwide. In addition to being the most popular VOIP app in the world, Skype also allows you to make calls to regular phones with inexpensive international phone call rates.

Fring allows users to make free mobile calls using Instant Messaging with MSN Messenger, ICQ, Google Talk, SIP, and Twitter Contacts.

The Google Maps app helps you find local businesses, view maps, and pull up driving directions. The app also offers a route planner for when you travel by foot, car, or public transport.

Another favorite for travelers, the app from The Weather Channel delivers weather forecast to your iPhone, plus ten-day forecasts and animated radar.

Lose It! is a weight loss app for your iPhone that allows you to record your food intake and exercise in order to slim down and reach your weight loss goal. You can also pull up Calorie listings from major fast food chains and restaurants.

Ebay Mobile allows you to participate in your favorite bidding wars when you’re away from home. This app allows users to search for auctions, bid on items, update item information, and track ongoing auctions.

The Capcom Arcade app gives you three free tokens a day to play such arcade favorites as Street Fighter II and Commando.

Film and TV buffs can check out the IMDb app, which allows user to watch movie trailers and pull up movie showtimes in their location.