Wobbly Front End?

When I think about the term alignment, it usually conjures up images of letting go of the steering wheel while driving along an open road. If I’m aligned properly, my car will stay straight. If not, it will veer to one side or the other in a manner that without correction, will yield catastrophic results.

It may be subtle and take a little time for my car to start to veer off the intended path. It isn’t that my car has a mechanical problem; it may be due to me getting distracted reading a billboard, changing radio stations, or replacing CD’s. And when my eyes revert back to the road, my path has quickly changed. It may be unintentional, but just as dangerous as a wobbly front end.

Each and every time that happens to me I tell myself I’m not going to do that again, as I’ve got to keep my eyes on the road. But soon after, I find myself in familiar territory looking around again and repeating the same mistakes I made earlier, and each time telling myself that it’s too dangerous to be looking around and to keep my eyes focused straight ahead.

Alignment and keeping your eyes on the road in both familiar and unfamiliar territory is what is required to win in today’s hyper-competitive climate. It’s not only great advice in terms of leadership and business strategy, but also essential with regard to communication. And if your front end is a little wobbly, then get it fixed.

Filed under: Agency ideas

Marketing Here. Marketing There. Marketing Everywhere.

The sooner developers understand that everything they do is marketing, the sooner they will see their brand on the road to success.

We have the opportunity of working with many successful developers and entrepreneurs. The ones that seem to stand out and grow faster, and gain the lion’s share of their market are the ones that really understand how important marketing is and that marketing is much more than just the website.

Marketing is everything, including the kitchen sink.

When I get a request for everything, from logo to vehicles signage to sales center walls, I smile a great big grin. Not because it means a lot of work for my team, but because it means that we have a client that is serious about their branding and our efforts will not only be noticed and felt, but appreciated. This is where Spiker Communications really shines.

A lot of people believe their logo, business cards and website is marketing. It’s only a small portion of marketing, as everything is marketing: from how your phone is answered to how clean your sales office is to how your hair looks. Everything you do embodies the spirit and essence of the brand. This also influences how your staff feels about your brand and how they reinforce the brand message in what they do. This is reflected in how they deal with the prospect and your brand shows through.

If you’re selling a luxury brand or anything of quality, you can’t be handing out cheap pens – cheap begets cheap. Because your brand essence is so much more than just your logo and web site, you need to look at all the ways your customer experiences your brand and make sure they are in sync with your brand message.

Your brand has to walk the walk, and talk the talk. To do this, you have to understand that everything you do is marketing because marketing is everything.

Filed under: Agency ideas

Feedback Kills

For the last couple of months, we’ve been working with a client that insists on showing the work to everyone and anyone. In listening to their interpretation of the feedback, we know more about the person making the comment than on the actual work. We even had a client take a phone call from a “customer” who commented that if the client could afford multiple billboard locations in town, that they should pay their people more.

I’m not usually interested in feedback as the source is usually not qualified to comment, as they are not the audience that we are targeting. But feedback today is a major problem for us, such as the English major who insists that single-sentence paragraphs “aren’t allowed” and who may be qualified to critique a book, but certainly knows nothing about writing marketing text.

This doesn’t mean I don’t listen to feedback. For example, I listen to what clients say they’re looking for. That tells me something about them, and there’s often more in their feedback than what appears on the surface. This is where the “Golden Rule” comes into play. Whoever has the gold makes the rules, and that’s why I listen very closely to their feedback.

Filed under: Agency ideas

First Impressions Still Matter

Many people say business cards are becoming obsolete in the age of V-cards, smart phones, Facebook and LinkedIn, though I think the opposite is true. Business cards represent the identity of organizations and individuals, and they create many first physical impressions.

The business card exchange is one of the most important, galvanizing rituals between two or more people who are likely to engage in some greater social or business interaction. The business card not only is a tangible artifact that creates first impressions, it reinforces second and third impressions when a recipient refers to it for future reference or contact data entry.

Business cards perform basic utility, but they are also accessories that say a lot about you, signals that promote or detract from your company or personal brand. Whether you’re a free agent or an employee, in good economic times or bad, business cards are like oxygen for your ability to do better business.

That’s why I’d like to share a list of best practices for business cards, emphasizing elegance, etiquette and practically:

1. Material and surface. High-quality, tactile paper with rounded corners creates a friendlier and more substantial experience. Rounded corners, as the credit-card industry figured out decades ago, are less likely to catch or slice through people’s skin. And nobody wants their business card to cause a paper cut.
2. Simple design. Adopt a simple, beautiful design. If you’re not a great designer, hire one. Use light backgrounds, multiple colors, and a beautiful font, and ensure the type is large enough so people with poor eyesight can read it. Business cards are not items to get cheaply. Invest in them the same way you’d invest in nice shoes.
3. Minimalism. Omit extraneous information like industry affiliations, certifications and multiple academic degrees, unless they’re really important and highly relevant to your card recipients. Use fewer words, not more, and that includes keeping job titles descriptive yet as short as possible. Don’t include more contact information than your e-mail, office and mobile phone numbers, and a physical address. If people really need your fax number, they’ll call or e-mail you. Lots of white space is not only cleaner, but it makes you stand out against the clutter and complexity that are so many other business cards.
4. Use Them. Keep business cards with you, always in reach. These days, with few exceptions, not having business cards makes you look unprepared and unprofessional. Simply put, business cards won’t benefit you if you don’t have them.
5. Presentation. Keep your business cards neat. Worse than not having business cards is having poorly kept business cards. Do you think recipients like accepting crinkled, dirty cards that came out of the inner pocket of your old leather wallet. No, that’s disgusting and insulting. I have a dedicated leather card holder that improves my image and accentuates the overall business-card exchange.
6. Grace. Present and accept business cards with grace. I’ve long admired how the Japanese handle the business-card exchange. According to Wikipedia, the presenter holds the card out with both hands and introduces himself, with the bottom of the card facing the recipient so they can read it as it is being handed over. A receiver should not write on or place the card in a pocket. The proper procedure is to file the card at the rear of your business card holder.
7. Don’t personalize. Many people want to personalize their cards, with a photo, a quote, or some personal graphic to make them stand out. A business card is not the time to be cute or different. The design of the card should be all the difference you need to communicate.

Filed under: Agency ideas

Focus Groups Still Suck

Try as we might, marketing is still more a guessing game than anybody wants. Eighty percent of new products and services fail within their first six months. Most Hollywood films and new television programs fail within a month of their initial broadcast, and that includes those that were vetted by focus groups.

“The correlation between stated intent and actual behavior is usually low and negative,” writes Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman. That’s why, although focus groups are good at identifying attitudes, they suck at predicting behavior.

The reasons for this are many, and include group dynamics, incentives and the fact that focus groups do not mimic the real world. One of the biggest reasons, though, Zaltman adds, is that most of our decision making happens on an unconscious level, far from the conscious explanations the focus group leaders gather.

Focus groups are a thing of the past, and it’s time we all move beyond them. As we have discussed previously, everything from New Coke, to the latest Pepsi logo to, CD packaging has been run up the focus group flag pole, and they were flat wrong. Save yourself some money and use the brain you were provided at birth and use that lifetime of experiences, knowledge and commonsense to know what to do next

Filed under: Industry News

Get A Whiff Of This

Scientists have discovered the “trust molecule” oxytocin. One whiff of this hormone and even people you were specifically told aren’t trustworthy will suddenly seem like Boy Scouts. But until the day we can purchase this spray over the counter, we are left inducing trust the old fashioned way: we have to earn it.

This is no small challenge, especially for developers with no track record. I believe trust is the most important thing you can cultivate, either as a business owner or as an individual. Who cares if you have the best resort community if nobody trusts you? As Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in the October 2009 issue of Fast Company:

“The message you get, in a lot of ways, is actually less important than whom you get it from. If you get it from someone you trust, you’ll listen to it. Whereas if you get it from someone you don’t trust, you might actually believe the opposite of what is said.”

 

So how do you encourage trust?

1. Commit to a promise. Define what you do, and don’t do. Branding helps, because it defines what customers can expect from you. An unclear brand sends mixed messages, and is inherently harder to trust.
2. Put y our money where your mouth is. If you say that you are part of a community, follow through with that. The Stock Farm Club supporting The Greater Ravalli Foundation is a great example.
3. Keep up appearances. Humans make snap judgments, so your first impression had better be the best it can be. Pay attention to everything, from your dress and demeanor, as well as your sales office location and decor. Everything about you and your operation should look professional.

Filed under: Agency ideas

Statistics Show Social Media is Bigger Than You Think

Is Social Media a fad or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?

Welcome to the Social Media Revolution:

1. Early this year, Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers, and 96% of them have joined a social network.
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web.
3. One out of eight couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media.
4. Years to reach 50 million users: Radio 38 years; TV 13 years; Internet four years; iPod three years; and Facebook added 100 million users in less than nine months.
5. If Facebook was a country, it would be the world’s fourth largest between the United States and Indonesia. And it’s gaining on the United States.
6. A 2009 U.S. Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction.
7. Seven percent of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees – 80%.
8. The fastest-growing segment on Facebook is 55 – 65 year old females.
9. The second largest search engine in the world is YouTube.
10. Twenty-five percent of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video on their phone.
11. Twenty four of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search the news, the news finds us.
12. In the near future, we will no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media.
13. More than 1.5 million pieces of content are shared on Facebook daily.
14. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy – listening first and selling second.
15. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners and content providers than traditional advertisers.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Without Execution, You don’t Have A Strategy

There’s a story about five frogs sitting on a log. One decided to jump. How many frogs were left? FIVE. There’s a big difference between deciding to jump and actually jumping.

Executing your new business and marketing strategy isn’t just an important thing; it’s the only thing. Unless you actually put your initiatives into action, nothing will have been accomplished. Without execution, there is no strategy. And if you really analyze your business landscape, you’ll realize that the main difference between mediocre brands and great ones is not vision, but execution.

The problem is, most businesses are too busy working on yesterday’s problems to work on today’s strategic imperatives. Not much you can do about yesterday, but there is a whole lot you can do about tomorrow.

Talk isn’t really cheap, it’s expensive. Think of the countless hours wasted talking about the same issues over and over again. Talking is talking and only doing is doing. Business leaders can’t delegate their responsibility for personal involvement in executing the firm’s initiatives. Read the book Execution by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, and you’ll learn it’s a leader’s most important job. Nobody has ever achieved greatness without results.

Filed under: Agency ideas

The Mistake of Overselling

More salespeople make the mistake of overselling their prospects than underselling. In plain English, they talk their prospect to the point where there is a readiness to purchase and then talk them right out of that mood, losing the interest and the sale after it was there for the taking.

We have always felt that less is more in the sales process – especially when dealing with wealthy individuals. It’s better to let them think they found you, than them feeling they were targeted and just along for the ride in order to purchase something they feel they don’t really need or want at the moment.

Most of us hesitate to face a crisis. We are afraid of an adverse decision. That is largely why some people oversell their prospects. But no matter how diffident you feel about it, and no matter how great your hesitation, the secret of success lies in diving in and bearing down for the order at just the second you feel the time is ripe.

And if you follow these rules, you’ll get the sale.

Bring the prospect to the buying point.

Don’t directly ask the prospect to purchase. Without giving offense, take it for granted the prospect is purchasing and start settling up the details just as if they had verbally said “yes.”

If they are not ready to purchase, drop the agreement and start selling them again.

And remember, no matter how you interest your prospect in your approach, no matter how convincing your presentation, no matter how strong his desire is for your product, all the work that has gone before is wasted and absolutely lost if you fail to actually get the agreement signed.

Someone once said, “Ask, or the answer is always no.” If you don’t ask for the business, rarely will you receive the business.

Filed under: Industry News

The Internet Is Trying To Kill Storytelling

Click, skim, browse, scan, tweet, e-mail, text, blog: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing. The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the Internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic message.

Addicted to the BlackBerry, heckled by the next text message, we are in a state of continual partial attention, too bombarded by snippets and gobbets of information to focus on anything for very long. Microsoft researchers have found that someone distracted by an e-mail message takes an average of 24 minutes to return to the same level of concentration. Which means they don’t ever return to the same level of concentration.

It was inevitable that more than a decade of digital reading would change the way we do it. In a recent essay in Atlantic Monthly, Nicholas Carr admitted that he can no longer immerse himself in substantial books and longer articles in the way he once did. “What the net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” he wrote. “My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swift moving stream of digital particles.”

If the culprit is obvious, so is the primary victim of this radically reduced attention span: the narrative, the long-form story, the tale. Like some endangered species, the story now needs defending from the threat of extinction in a radically changed and inhospitable digital environment.

That’s a major problem, as storytelling is the bedrock of civilization. From the moment we become aware of others, we demand to be told stories that allow us to make sense of the world, to inhabit the mind of someone else. In old age we tell stories to make small museums of memory. It matters not whether the stories are true or imaginary. The narrative, whether oral or written, is a staple of every culture the world over. But stories demand time and concentration; the narrative does not simply transmit information, but invites the reader or listener to witness the unfolding of events.

The Internet is there for snacking, grazing and tasting, not for the full, six-course feast that is nourishing narrative. Story telling is not dead, merely obscured by a blizzard of byte-sized information. A well-told story is still the most powerful way to understand and to motivate.

Filed under: Industry News, Interactive Marketing