By Catherine Clifford

With Facebook’s initial public offering around the corner, a new crop of not-yet-public companies are moving into the spotlight. Pinterest and Warby Parker may be the next pre-IPO stars, according to an analysis from SecondMarket.

How's that? The companies top a list of "rising stars" from SecondMarket, an online marketplace for buying and selling private-company stock and other illiquid assets. The "rising stars" list spotlights companies with the greatest increase in the number of institutional and accredited investors, in addition to ordinary Joes and Janes, tracking them on the platform. SecondMarket calls these site users "watchers."

Here's how the list of rising stars and their increase in "watchers" shook out for the first quarter of 2012:

1. Pinterest, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based visual bookmarking social networking site: nearly 670% (As of press time, 1,543 watchers total.)
2. Warby Parker, a New York-based online eyeglasses retailer: 455% (91 watchers)
3. Stripe, a San Francisco-based online payment platform: 392% (99 watchers)
4. ServiceNow, a San Diego-based business-tech operations company: 355% (62 watchers)
5. GlobalLogic, a McLean, Va.-based software product-development company: 232% jump (188 watchers)

Companies talked about on SecondMarket have "arrived," says Michael Greeley, general partner of Boston-based VC firm Flybridge Capital Partners. "They have some scale, they have some notoriety,” he says.

While the investing community once viewed the idea of entrepreneurs selling portions of their company before going public as a negative, that's no longer necessarily the case, according to Greeley.

“The IPO process -- notwithstanding the JOBS Act, which still has to be implemented -- is fundamentally distressed,” says Greeley. “It is not working the way it should be working.” Being able to turn some of a company's value into cash before it scales and completes an arduous IPO process relieves some pressure and allows entrepreneurs to take more risks and innovate, says Greeley. Entrepreneurs may be less apt to worry about whether and how they will pay for their kids’ educations or buy a house, for example.

There are risks, however. Being on SecondMarket takes some of the “private” out of being a private company. A company’s value on SecondMarket can rise and fall in a public display of sentiment about the company. “Even Facebook was a little bit of an EKG chart: It went up, it went down, but ultimately it went up and to the right,” says Greeley.

While Pinterest and Warby Parker topped the list of companies with the fastest-growing number of watchers, they are far from the most watched. The list of the most-watched SecondMarket companies among those with venture funding was led by Facebook, followed by Twitter. The most-watched company not backed by venture investors was Bloomberg, followed by Bose.

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com

By Gail Goodman

In the days before social media and the Internet, it wasn't as easy to listen in on your customers’ conversations about your company. Nor could you easily encourage people to spread the good word about your business through word-of-mouth.

But when you connect with your customers online, you stop speaking to them and start talking with them. And wonderful things begin to happen. Those golden word-of-mouth moments that happen naturally offline at parties or networking events suddenly begin happening online right in front of your eyes on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and review sites.

On social networks, word-of-mouth referrals become amplified: the friends, families and networks of your customers see these referrals and might just beat a path to your door.
How does it work? I call it the engagement marketing cycle.

The engagement marketing cycle has three parts:

• Experience
• Entice
• Engage

It begins once you’ve attracted a prospective customer or client to your business. This first point of contact can happen at your physical location, website, Facebook Page, trade show booth -- anywhere the conversation turns to business.

Although relatively simple, the steps in the cycle are quite powerful.

Step 1: Provide a Wow! experience

As a small or midsize business, you have an advantage: You can create personal connections with your customers by providing extraordinary every single day. How? Consider these examples:

• Manufacturing firm: Doing a small production run for a special client -- on the weekend -- to help it meet its customer’s rush order.
• Consulting practice: Sending clients small gifts, such as cookies or gift cards, once in a while as a thank-you for their business.
• Bank: Offering biscuits to customers’ dogs in cars at the driver-up teller window.
• Retail shop: Personally delivering goods during special circumstances, such as an illness, birth of a new baby or death of a family member.

Step 2: Entice to stay in touch

When you create a great customer experience, your customers will be more willing to remain in touch with you. You can’t keep that great experience alive, though, if you have no way to stay in touch.

You can ask people to “like” your Facebook Page, follow you on Twitter or subscribe to your e-newsletter to name a few things. To feel comfortable asking people to connect with you -- like, follow, join, subscribe -- it helps to have a solid enticement, such as a preview of your content, and a reward or offer. Some fun enticements include:

• Free information – Reports, newsletters, expert tips, tele-classes, checklists and scorecards are all great incentives for enticing people to stay in touch.
• Special events – Nonprofits or associations can invite people to members-only events, as can businesses with retail or office space.
• Birthday cards – You can offer people discounts during their birthday month in exchange for their contact information.
• Discounts – To entice people to connect via text or email alerts, consider offering special discounts or coupons.

Step 3: Engage people

Now that you’ve delivered a great customer experience and have enticed people to stay in touch, it’s time to bring those relationships to life by engaging people. “Engagement” means sharing content that inspires your fans, followers, email subscribers, blog readers and other online contacts to interact with you.

Creating engaging content is limited only by your imagination. Whether your audience is other business owners, consumers, or donors, here are five general types of content you can use to engage your customers:

• Question and Answer – The easiest type of content to create, you simply pose a question, provide an answer and ask your followers / fans to add their opinion. Tie questions to topical or industry events – and don’t be afraid to have fun.
• Sharing/Information – With this type of content, you share knowledge on a topic relevant to your industry or expertise. This can be original content in the form of blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, infographics and the like, or sharing other people’s content, such as a news item, article, or blog post, and adding your expert analysis or feedback.
• Discussion – “Fill in the blank” discussion starters are a great way to get people to participate. These types of questions start a conversation with a sentence and then people have to fill in the blank. For example: “I spent Small Business Saturday shopping at _______________.”
• Promotions and Announcements – Here’s your opportunity to share offers and company news. Samples, trial offers, coupons, special sales, e-books, reports, and free consultations are all examples of promotional offers.
• Events – Workshops or training classes, seminars, user groups or conferences, private sales, parties and open houses, trade shows, sidewalk sales, demonstrations -- you name it, you can create it.

And that closes the cycle's loop. Developing this cycle until it’s a well-oiled machine will keep your customers and clients connected to your business, increasing your repeat sales. But the biggest benefit is endorsement -- that golden word-of-mouth moment that drives new customers to your business.

This article is excerpted from Engagement Marketing: How Small Business Wins in a Socially Connected World by Gail Goodman (Wiley, 2012).

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com

By Patrick G. Keger

The record-shattering opening success of The Avengers, which sold more than $200 million in theater tickets in the United States and did about $640 million in business worldwide during opening weekend, is further evidence of an amazing fact: Robert Downey, Jr. not only rules Hollywood, but he's staged an even more impressive turnaround than General Motors.

Consider this: Since 2008, nine movies featuring the 47-year-old actor have grossed more than $1.5 billion in the U.S. alone, and his name on the marquee is perhaps the surest guarantee of a box-office smash. That's an astonishing run, especially because it wasn't that long ago -- 2001, to be precise -- that Downey seemed destined to become fodder for those "Whatever Happened To...?" articles in the supermarket tabloids. His drug addiction and erratic behavior earned him a prison stay and led producer David E. Kelley to fire him from what seemed like his last chance for resurrecting his career, a supporting role in the hit TV series Ally McBeal. Downey sank so low that despite his enormous talent, he was virtually unemployable.

But that was then. Today, if Robert Downey, Jr. was a company, he might be leading the Dow Jones index. It's not just that he revived his career; he's actually far bigger than he was at the apex of his youthful climb to stardom 20 years ago, when he earned an Oscar nomination for best actor in the critically acclaimed box office flop Chaplin. That makes Downey's self-reinvention a great case study for anyone who's attempting a midlife second act -- whether you're an entrepreneur starting a new business, or someone who is struggling at 40 or beyond to overcome past mistakes.

Here are five Downey-esque lessons that can help you mount your own comeback.

1. Concentrate on getting ahead one step at a time. Whether you need to vanquish some inner demons or escape from a bad stretch in your life, as Downey endured in the late 1990s and early 2000s, or you're simply trying to find a new passion in life, you're more likely to get there through patient plodding rather than big, sweeping dramatic gestures. Remember that Downey's comeback, from rock-bottom to superstar, took a good seven years of struggle, in which he had to work long and hard to prove his commitment to sobriety and regain his credibility as a professional. As he explains in this Esquire interview, "I found my way out of the woods by a subtler and subtler trail of bread crumbs."

2. Don't be too proud to accept help. Even after Downey seemed to have his drug addiction in check, producers were reluctant to hire him because insurance companies didn't like the odds that he would flake out and not finish a movie. That's when Mel Gibson, an actor who's had a troubled life lately but was flying high in 2003, stepped in. Gibson, who had co-starred with Downey in the 1990 movie Air America, offered to put up Downey's insurance bond, enabling him to get the lead role in the 2003 movie The Singing Detective. Downey not only did his work as promised but also turned in an excellent performance -- proving to Hollywood that he still had the chops to be a star. If he had been too proud to accept Gibson's generosity, who knows what would have happened to him?

3. Believe that in the end, your talent will enable people to overlook your past mistakes. The tipping point of Downey's career comeback was Iron Man, the 2008 blockbuster that firmly established him as a marquee attraction. But in many ways, Downey was an unlikely choice for the role of a costumed superhero, even one whose alter-ego was playboy industrialist Tony Stark. Not only was he a recovering addict with a lurid dark side, but as an actor, he'd spent much of his career playing off-center, irony-drenched supporting roles. But as director Jon Favreau explains in this GQ article, Downey's acting skills made him overlook those negatives, and the director worked hard to persuade Marvel Comics -- which owned the character and was dead-set against Downey -- that he was the man for the part. "Here was this force of nature, who I think was living with this frustration that he wasn't able to really show what he was great at, because nobody was willing to take that leap and say, 'This guy could carry my movie.' Nobody was willing to jump in the pool. I was."

4. It's never too late to develop self-discipline. As an addict, Downey was in such despair about his inability to stay away from drugs that he actually told a judge in 1999 that "It's like I've got a shotgun in my mouth, with my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal," according to this ABC News story from that period. Nevertheless, the actor has managed to stay sober since 2003. As this Men's Journal article details, he developed the discipline to do that in large part by taking up Wing Chun, a Chinese martial art that emphasizes close-in hand-to-hand combat, and demands intense focus and inner calm. "Wing Chun teaches you what to concentrate on, whether you're here or out in the world dealing with problems," Downey explains. "It's second nature for me now. I don't even get to the point where there's a problem." He's become so dedicated to the art that he takes lessons three to five times a week, sometimes bringing his instructor to the set when he's shooting a film.

5. Don't be afraid to play in an ensemble. It's easy to think of success -- or salvation -- as an individual endeavor. But one of the reasons The Avengers -- which brings together a pantheon of Marvel costumed icons ranging from Captain America to Spider-Man -- has been getting overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics is that Downey resists the temptation to take over the movie. Instead, he has the discipline -- and the self-confidence -- to hold back and fit into director Joss Whedon's vision, in which Tony Stark's snarky running commentary is the glue that holds together the action sequences. As Paste magazine critic Michael Burgin writes: "Thanks in large part to the Downey, Jr.-powered snark-generating machine, the friction between the heroes actually makes sense." Similarly, if you can find a way to harness your talents and fit into a team of other strivers -- even if it means trading riffs rather than being the lead soloist -- you may have an even better shot at a successful second act.

This story originally appeared on SecondAct.com

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com

Registering a business is not difficult to do, if you know what you will need to get started. First, you will want to find your state or local ordinances on what is permitted. Then you'll need to get those licenses, permits and other registrations that you'll need to be legally recognized as a business in your state.

Legal Structure

You will need to figure out what legal structure your business is going to be. Is it a sole proprietorship? A corporation? A partnership? These are just a few of the different legal structures you can make your business.

Related:   How To Choose the Best Type of Business Entity.

Review all the options while you consider how much control you want to have over the business, the financial needs the business will have, and the range of responsibility you will want to have financially. Once you read up on all those different types and choose the one best for you, then it's time to file some paperwork.

Business Name Registration

You will need to file a DBA, or "Doing Business As" name, so that your name is synonymous with the business. If you are going to be doing business under your own name, you will be able to skip this step of the process. If the business is going to be listed as a corporation, a limited liability company, or a limited partnership, many times the paperwork for that registration will also register the business name. If this is the case for your area, then you will not have to refile the DBA paperwork. 

Tax ID Numbers

If you are going to be anything other than a sole proprietor, you will need an EIN, or Federal Employer Identification number. You can get this from the IRS either online or by calling 1-800-829-4933. You will also need a state tax number that will allow you to have sales, income, and pay taxes. These guidelines will be found at your state and local tax office. You also may find quality information about these items at your local small business administration office.

License and Permits

After you have done all of the above you can then get a business license in the county you are going to be in. This is renewed every year to keep you legal in the state. All business licenses should be displayed in the business and have the correct information. If your license has incorrect information, it should be updated as quickly as possible.

Check Locally

While this is generally what is needed to register any new business, you may have specific local requirements that may differ or require additional paperwork. Checking with a local commerce center or city government office can save you tremendous time and effort, should this be the case. The small business administration office in your area should have a booklet or class available to those who are interested in starting up a new business in the area. If time permits, these classes are a great idea to get a full idea on what is expected of you.

Source: http://www.businessnewsdaily.com