Tis Almost The Season for Merry Social Networking. Five Ways To Head Off The Business Bah Humbugs.

November 10, 2008 by admin · Leave a comment.
Filed under: small business 


Despite the Scrooges already shoveling coal for our stockings, we Americans are a resilient sort. Let the corporations cut back on their festivities. Let the bubbly turn to brew, the shrimp turn to sausage, the Black Ties turn to black T’s. Our parties must go on.

But for those looking to these merry months as a never-ending source of business opportunities and shrewd social networking, beware of mixing Mistletoe martinis with clients new and old. Can you spot the red flags amidst the green? Here are five ways to head off the Holiday Bah Humbugs:

1. Give it a rest. (At least sometimes)

That potential client you’ve been dying to meet is standing at the buffet table, eying the sushi. Another prospect is happily greeting a group of friends. And another is headed toward the rest room. You’re thinking: “Now’s my chance!” In these recessionary times, it’s difficult not to leap into full court press when faced with a room full of possibility and prodigious amounts of alcohol. But sometimes it’s best to hang back and observe. Did that client just arrive and he’s starving after skipping lunch? How will he feel if you barge over with your business card? Maybe the other client hasn’t seen her buddies in months. Will she want to be interrupted by someone whose sole mission is pushing her own business? And the rest room. Well, duh.

2. Shameless Promotion and Sacred Do Not Mix.

Never forget that sprinkled among the party-hearty revelers are those who regard Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa or Winter Solstice as sacred. These faithful souls are not likely to take kindly to non-stop business chatter or cards offered along with holiday greetings. This is true for mailings, emailing’s, gifts or festivities. Don’t think you can easily spot those most apt to be offended. Why not be sensitive to one and all?

3. Give The Gift of Friendship (Not Friend Requestship).

We love our virtual friends and the exploding world of social networking. But just as one of the Presidential candidates drove us batty with endless insincere “My friends”, now is the time to be a real friend. People are losing their jobs, contracts, houses, health insurance and self-esteem. Let our gifts this year be kind and loving gestures — not tweets and pings.

4. Honor the Culture Mash.

I continue to be annoyed at the namby-pampy word ‘holiday’ that’s such a cowardly attempt at being politically correct. If it’s a Christmas Party, call it that. If it’s a Kwanzaa celebration, call it that. My favorite comes from those trend-setting folks at the OC: ChrismukKuh. Let’s have (as our new President calls himself) a Mutt-Mas, a party that mashes all our cultures into one wild multi-cultural shebang.

5. Schedule Some Silent Nights.

Rather than schedule frenzied Fa-La-Las, how about planning some quiet times and if clients are involved, declare a No Business Zone. Carving out some time to just ‘be’ keeps us sane — and may actually be a better business plan in the long run. No one wants to listen to or keep up a non-stop tap dance. There is peace in the quiet. Or plan the celebration around music and simply shut the heck up.

I’d love to hear your ideas.

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The 5 Bogus Reasons You Haven’t Built Your Blog.

September 14, 2008 by admin · Leave a comment.
Filed under: small business 

You know you need to get your business up and blogging. You know the buzzy b-word is one of the most important tools in your brand building toolkit, the one that can quickly turbocharge your online presence. You probably even know that 175,000 new blogs are being built everyday. So somebody’s getting around to it. Why not you?

Here are just a smattering of the excuses I’m used to hearing from clients:

But I’m not a writer.

Not only is it not necessary to be a star writer, I sometimes think it’s actually a disadvantage. Too often we professionals wordsmith a phrase or header to death, substitute pretty prose for pithy bulletins and slave over posts so long they’re no longer timely. That doesn’t mean you should publish sloppy posts, skip spell-check or let your syntax be eligible for the next edition of the Grammar Nazi. But increasingly, we live in a world of pings, posts and texts; paragraph after paragraph of literary genius does not a blog make. Short but sweet rules. Lists rock.

But I’m not a geek.

Today, thanks to the wonders of Web 2.0 technology, everybody qualifies to celebrate National Pi Day and to build and maintain a thriving blog. Blogging sites like wordpress, typepad, livejournal and blogger offer simple templates that let you create a basic site in mere minutes. You can easily upload your business’ brand identity materials like logos, etc. Most of the blogging sites feature easy plug-ins that let you add everything from Contact Me forms to Tag Clouds with a mere drag-and-drop.

But I don’t have time.

You don’t have time if you consider your blog to be a series of articles or essays. But instead, if you understand that the origin of blogging came from the phrase web-log — and that these early blogs were simply a series of links with personal comments — then you can visualize your blogs as newsy updates or quick posts with a point-of-view. Even better, most blog sites let you update your blog from your mobile phone. Check out author and marketing genius Seth Godin’s blog, which perpetually ranks at the top of most lists. His posts are often just a couple of brief paragraphs, with lots of easy-on-the-eye white space.

But I don’t know a thing about all that Search Engine stuff.

In addition to dramatically boosting sales of Excedrin Migraine tablets, the term “search engine optimization” or SEO, describes the process of increasing both the quality and quantity of traffic to your website or blog. SEO is actually a variety of techniques that make your content easier to find for search engines like Google and distant runners-up Yahoo, MSN Search and Ask.com. And while, yes, SEO is a science of sorts, the truth is that all the fancy keyword bots and optimization programs typically aren’t any more effective than these three simple things:

  • Post often, post regularly
  • Post quality content about your business, using descriptive titles on your post and SEO keywords early on in your post
  • Do the basics, like listing your site in Yahoo!, Google, DMOZ, and claiming it in Technorati.com.

Guru’s Note: I always tell clients that it takes a good 60 days to get your blog ready for the search engines. You’re going to want to make sure that everything from your domain name to your blog’s graphic look and feel to ‘populating’ each category with keyword-rich posts is up and running smoothly. Then and only then, do you tackle additional SEO, beyond what you’ve already built into your blog. (Check back for: The Top 8 Mistakes Newbie Bloggers Make’)

But will it really help my business?

There’s a good reason some people think BLOG really stands for: Better Listings On Google. There’s nothing like fresh, frequently updated, high quality content to improve your business blog’s ranking with the search engines, especially with Google, which now has almost 70% of the U.S. search market share. Blogs are inherently more search-engine friendly than even the most robust websites. Websites seldom get updated, but remain as fixed ‘corporate brochures’ while most bloggers post new content frequently. (Especially if they hire The Guru to do the Blog Refresh!)

But there’s another benefit to blogging, beyond the inevitable desire to generate traffic. Your blog is a primo opportunity to express — and extend — your brand’s personality. Your blog is the place to be authentic, to be human, to hone the many facets of your brand. This where you can magnetize a new audience, maybe that secondary psychographic you’ve wanted to reach. This is where you can experiment. Want to leverage the equity in that popular product of yours? Play market researcher and ask your readers what they think. Blogs — and their close relatives on Facebook, Ning, Linkedin and MySpace, are powerful tools for testing ideas, content, and new marketing campaigns. And cost-effective, too.

Okay, folks. Any excuses left? Get blogging!

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Yanked Off Yelpers: How To Piss Off Your Most Passionate Users in 7 Days or Less.

July 5, 2008 by admin · 4 Comments
Filed under: Technology, small business 

One of the many positive outcomes of Dell Hell, “Cancel My AOL account”, and “The Comcast Dude is Sleeping on My Couch” is the dramatic change these mighty-mouth insurrections have wrought in the way companies perceive — and interact with — their customers. Most companies these days are not only fervently interested in customer retention and the lifetime value of customers but they’re also laser-focused on their best customers. As a Customer Experience pro, I’ve conducted research studies on countless loyalty programs, goldmining projects, organic transparency, and ‘highly engaged’ market segmentations. I spent five years working with some of Microsoft’s evangelist programs in which we experimented with numerous ‘preferred’ or ‘insider’ strategies and nearly as many years with Yahoo Global Customer Care. Everybody (and rightfully so) is ready to jump through hoops to keep their Loyal Customers purringly happy.

Everybody that is, except Yelp.  SFGate reports that the online review site yanked ‘an undisclosed number of accounts after finding that the business owners had swapped positive reviews with other business owners. Yelp also regularly deletes reviews it believes are phony. The move sparked an outcry among local businesses, and has even led some entrepreneurs to band together with thoughts of a class-action lawsuit. Their reasoning is, if they legitimately spend their money and patronize a service, why can’t they review it?”

Activist Adryenn I’ve had an upclose-and-personal view of the mystifying way Yelp chose to treat its most passionate users via firebrand Adryenn Ashley, who in the grand tradition of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” decided to fight back by putting her considerable marketing and citizen journalist expertise to good use. On Wednesday she created Yelp-Sucks.com and YelpLawsuit.com, asking people “yanked by Yelp” to sign up for a class-action suit. Apparently, response to these sites is growing as frustrated yelpers chase after both reinstatement — and that so-far elusive apology.

Here’s what puzzles me. Yelp is based in the Bay area. Its founders have deep Internet expertise. They understand the power of igniting a conversation and watching it grow like the wildfires down here in Big Sur. A recent article in the New York Times says: “What Yelp did differently than these others, as Jeremy Stoppelman, the site’

s co-founder and chief executive describes it, was to spend most of its energy attracting a small group of fanatic reviewers.”

Now, I have no insider information on the deleted accounts. I have no idea if any of them violated Yelp’s (fuzzy) rules. But I do know that Yelp is violating most of today’s cardinal rules of Customer Experience. Why would they choose to deal with their most passionate users, some of whom probably come from this ’small group of fanatic reviewers’ in such a harsh and old-school way? Why the cold, quasi-accusatory termination emails? Couldn’t they have at least considered possible explanations for what may appear to be phony reviews? Couldn’t they have started with contacting the questionable Yelpers and saying something like: “Hey, we’re growing like crazy because people like you love to Yelp. But we’re trying our best to keep Yelp a great tool for everyone — and some of your recent activity is raising questions. Here’s a handy contact form. Talk to us.

While Techcrunch claims that these pissed off passionate customers are merely a sign of Yelp’s power, it might be good to mull over these numbers from a recent survey: Eight out of 10 people who go away will bad mouth you. Then they’ll tell somewhere between 25 and 250 people about the problem they had — and they’ll relish explaining it in enraged detail. And woe-is-you if among these customers is a wow-is-me Adryenn Ashley . . .

After they finish bad-mouthing your company? That’s when they’ll scour the Internet in search of your competitors.

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Say Goodbye to Bill Gates — and Windows XP.

June 30, 2008 by admin · Leave a comment.
Filed under: Technology, Uncategorized, small business 

Bill Gates has left the building.

And soon, Windows XP, the last operating system anybody (sorta) liked and actually wanted to use, will go poof as well. As of today, Microsoft is scheduled to stop selling XP to retailers and major computer makers, despite fervent protests from frustrated users who want nothing to do with XP’s successor, Vista. While there are still a few ways to get an XP loaded machine — including limited sales via smaller shops till January 2009 –all but the most resourceful will be forced to switch to the once heavily-hawked Vista.

This is why a group of PC users created a “Save XP” petition which is posted on InfoWorld, now reportedly with more than 210, 563 signatures–including mine. Signers want Microsoft to keep selling XP until the next operating system, Windows 7, is available.

Eric Knorr of InfoWorld pens an impassioned plea: We began this campaign because our readers compelled us to do so. Those of us who have been in the industry for a long time have never seen anything like the negative reaction to Windows Vista. Our readers have frequently voiced their frustrations about software incompatibilities, arbitrary UI changes, expanded hardware requirements, and altered security business rules. On the other hand, we’ve also heard from many users who are clearly satisfied with Vista.

Our point from the beginning has been that Microsoft customers should have a choice: For a reasonable period, those who want to license Windows XP should be able to continue to do so just as easily as they can license Windows Vista.

I will add my impassioned plea to Eric’s. As a Microsoft market research vendor, Customer Experience pro and frequent tech focus group moderator for the company and others in the industry, I have over the past ten years listened to hundreds of opinions, stories, criticisms and raves on the subject of Microsoft. I’ve worked with developers, consumers, enterprise, small business, IT, evangelists, you-name-it. My training is all about sifting through reams of feedback, crystallizing what has been expressed and spinning it into actionable form. In this case, seldom has there been such consensus: Vista sucks.

The lone (sorta) good news coming from Redmond? At least they will be providing technical support for XP through 2009.

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When Name Generation Isn’t About Naming.

June 9, 2008 by admin · 1 Comment
Filed under: New Stuff, Uncategorized, Women, eco & sustainability, marketing & advertising, small business 

Whether it’s the R-word, job loss, midlife crisis or simply some kind of cosmic tipping point, the Guru is getting inundated with Name Generation projects for small businesses.

Normally, name generation centers on coming up with a new brand name, tagline, descriptor and sometimes promise statements, triggers or testworthy concepts for products, services and websites. In the past year, however, probably 60% of my projects have actually been about what my friend Claire calls woo-woo. That is, self-discovery, transformation and ultimately ‘getting’ who you are as a businessperson and your place in the competitive landscape.  The naming process itself, which forces a deeper dive into everything from product to sales to legal to marketing, is provoking more realistic strategies for building businesses. The ones I’ve seen — and helped guide as provocateur — are likely to have a better chance of surviving and thriving.

Planning for the future has always been a significant part of the name generation process:

How scale-able is the name?
Will the name stay relevant? (Hello, dotcom era)
Will the name allow you to migrate into new categories as the marketplace evolves?
And these days, how do you avoid being the plastic bag of the future?

But what’s happening here is more akin to: Does this name fit who I am? Who I want to be 5 years from now? A sizeable portion of these clients are seeing the future via potential names and saying: No way. I don’t want to be perceived in that light. I don’t want to try to squeeze into that slot. Or simply: That’s not me.

This afternoon, one of my all-time favorite client teams called me and rejected all of the names and taglines I presented yesterday.

I was thrilled.

This is because, by wholeheartedly engaging in the process, they learned exactly what they did not want to do or be as a business. They grappled with each of the platforms and names. Some were spot on strategically. Some were spot on creatively. Some were spot on for where they thought they wanted to be when we launched the project.

The good news: The new brand name and strategy they came up with is inspired.  It’s as tongue-in-chic and kicky as they are. Thankfully, they happen to be risk-takers with a history of significant success and the guts to pull this off with panache.

I’m psyched.  I love to watch woo-woo at work.

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