As business owners, do you think something like this would truly motivate you to hire additional employees?

As potential employees, do you think this is the best the government could do on your behalf to promote additional hiring?

Tell me what you think.  Is this a good idea or a bad idea? Will it make any difference at all? Is it a long term solution or is it just one more meaningless tax incentive offering a short term solution with not enough real benefits on either side of wall?

Here is a short description of the story by The Slatest

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Momentum Grows for a Job-Creation Tax Credit    

It’s a tool that was last tried in 1977, but now there seems to be growing support for awarding a tax credit to businesses that create new jobs. The measure was actually included in the stimulus package, but it was jettisoned before it was approved due to concerns that companies could exploit the system. Now, more politicians seem to believe that while a little abuse might be inevitable, it could still be a good, and relatively cheap, way to create jobs at a time when the unemployment rate is inching closer to 10 percent. When the same system was tried in the late 1970s, there were questions about whether the jobs that were created were permanent, and many doubted that the companies would have created the new jobs eventually without the credit. Now advocates of the system say that they can learn from the mistakes of three decades ago to make sure a job-creation tax credit has a bigger bang this time around. But, of course, it seems inevitable that the credit would help companies that would be hiring whether there’s a tax break or not. Whatever ends up happening, lawmakers need to either pass the measure quickly or drop it completely because companies might delay hiring if they think the tax break is in the pipeline.

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Read a full article on the subject at NYTIMES.COM.  One important issue from the report is a description of the actual benefits that will be seen by businesses in one of the proposals currently being reviewed by the legislature:

Under the proposal from Mr. Bartik and Mr. Bishop, the credit in the first year would equal 15.3 percent of the cost of adding an employee. In the second year, it would fall to about 10.2 percent.

For example, hiring a worker might cost a small business $50,000 annually. But with the tax credit, the cost would fall to $42,350 in the first year, and then be $44,900 the next year. After that, the cost would return to $50,000.

The credit would apply only to the portion of an employee’s salary under $106,800. Lowering the cap further, however, could provide an even greater benefit to low-wage, unskilled workers.

Join in on the conversation by going to the Ventress Enterprises Page on Facebook and clicking on Discussions.  Or Click Here to log on and make your comment.

While their methods might not be what works for businesses on a smaller scale the driving question behind it stays relevant; what is it our customers respond and react to, in forms of advertising, in today’s market?

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Lab Watches Web Surfers to See Which Ads Work

Like other television companies, Disney Media Networks — which includes ABC, ESPN, ABC Family and Disney XD — has long conducted intense consumer research about its programming. But now, as the Web and DVRs uproot the way people consume television, and thus rip apart the industry’s business model, the unit is adding advertiser research as a fresh focus of intense inquiry.

Disney will unveil some of the lab’s early findings, including some surprises about new forms of online ads, on Tuesday in a presentation to about 200 advertisers in New York.

It is relatively easy for Internet companies and their advertisers to measure precisely how often Web site visitors click on advertisements, and which kinds of ads draw the most clicks. But what about those who do not click, the many millions of others whose eyes merely flit across the screen? Disney and other companies say they believe that not nearly enough is known about them — what kinds of ads in which configurations are likeliest to draw them, and hold them?

Read the entire article @ NYTimes.com

Mom-and-Pop Operators Turn to Social Media

SAN FRANCISCO — Three weeks after Curtis Kimball opened his crème brûlée cart in San Francisco, he noticed a stranger among the friends in line for his desserts. How had the man discovered the cart? He had read about it on Twitter.

For Mr. Kimball, who conceded that he “hadn’t really understood the purpose of Twitter,” the beauty of digital word-of-mouth marketing was immediately clear. He signed up for an accountand has more than 5,400 followers who wait for him to post the current location of his itinerant cart and list the flavors of the day, like lavender and orange creamsicle.

“I would love to say that I just had a really good idea and strategy, but Twitter has been pretty essential to my success,” he said. He has quit his day job as a carpenter to keep up with the demand.

Much has been made of how big companies like Dell, Starbucks and Comcastuse Twitter to promote their products and answer customers’ questions. But today, small businesses outnumber the big ones on the free microblogging service, and in many ways, Twitter is an even more useful tool for them.

For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well.

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To Read the Entire Article visit NYTimes.com/business

There are many ways to get that answer whether it be with sales reports from like businesses, surveys and my personal favorite, good old fashioned research.

The following article  follows a large company with wide customer base: Netflix.  They need to accomplish a goal that will help them to sell more products and gain revenue by taking advantage of their own resources (sales reports, in this case customer viewing habits) and employing the help of experts to apply the needed change.

The Crowd Is Wise (When It’s Focused)

A look at recent cases and new research suggests that open-innovation models succeed only when carefully designed for a particular task and when the incentives are tailored to attract the most effective collaborators. “There is this misconception that you can sprinkle crowd wisdom on something and things will turn out for the best,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the Center for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That’s not true. It’s not magic.”

“It starts out as crowdsourcing and it is culled to a set of action items,” said Jeffrey T. Kreulen, a researcher at the I.B.M. Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif.

Open-innovation models are adopted to overcome the constraints of corporate hierarchies. But successful projects are typically hybrids of ideas flowing from a decentralized crowd and a hierarchy winnowing and making decisions.

OPENING the corporate doors to ideas and inspiration from the collective crowd holds great potential, but there are pitfalls, warns Henry Chesbrough, executive director of the Center for Open Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. To succeed, Mr. Chesbrough said, a company must have a culture open to outside ideas and a system for vetting and acting on them.

“In business, it’s not how many ideas you have,” he observed. “What matters is how many ideas you translate into products and services.”

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The last quote here is my favorite because it’s true!  Owners, employees and collaborators can talk about new changes, procedures or products forever; but until they take action, all of the discussion and discovery is wasted.