Up and Running:

There’s no question that marketing is changing. Advertising is dying and getting reborn all over the place, and word-of-mouth is leveraged by technology tools. The problem is how, how much, how fast and how does it affect your business? It’s a new world, with a changed landscape.

For idea leadership in this realm, look to Seth Godin: his books and his blog. He’s redefining advertising as “shouting.” And he looks to a new kind of marketing built on being remarkable, in a very literal sense of the word: remarkable, as in something that people will talk about. And for practical how-to leadership, I recommend John Jantsch, Duct Tape Marketing founder, redefining marketing as getting people to know, like and trust you.

And for actually working rapidly changing marketing assumptions into your own business plan, frankly, it’s hard these days. It’s complicated because the landscape is built on sand mines; it crumbles fast.

I recommend you use a methodology somewhat akin to following the money for the financial portions of your plan. But for the marketing portions, you follow the attention. You could call that eyeballs (a popular web term), or mindshare, if you prefer.

Start with attention. Ask yourself what makes people aware of a need, a problem or a want that you solve. You could call that an itch, because need is misleading: People buy a lot of goods and services they don’t really need. So you want to understand what gives people the itch that leads to you when they scratch it. And then you understand how to scratch the itch: Where do they look for solutions? Is it habit, the shop next door? Do they look in some repository in their mind or memory, like some ad they’ve got stored in the back of their mind? Or do they open a web page and do a Google or some other search?

I read about an IBM study called The end of advertising as we know it on Michael Glass’ Fuel Lines advertising blog. This is very interesting stuff. He quotes the IBM study:

Imagine an advertising world where … spending on interactive, one-to-one advertising formats surpasses traditional, one-to-many advertising vehicles, and a significant share of ad space is sold through auctions and exchanges. Advertisers know who viewed and acted on an ad and pay based on real impact rather than estimated “impressions.” Consumers self-select which ads they watch and share preferred ads with peers. User-generated advertising is as prevalent (and appealing) as agency-created spots.

And Glass adds his own commentary, from his advertising professional’s point of view.

There is no question that the future of advertising will look radically different from its past. The push for control of attention, creativity, measurements and inventory will reshape the advertising value chain and shift the balance of power.

And what can you do about it? Follow the attention. Follow the eyeballs.

Sometimes I worry that in blogs and such there’s so much attention to new market, social media and new trends that we forget the basics. It’s a matter of learning to crawl first, then walk and only then run. Before you worry too much about your Twitter profile and website, cover the basics:

1. Signage, Appearance, Ambience. OK, I admit, if you’re solopreneur doing an expert business only on the web, then yes, worry about your website and your Twitter profile. But that’s all we ever hear on blogs and Twitter, when there are so many businesses worried about that while not doing the basics in the real world. My favorite coffee place in Bend, Ore., had been closed on Sunday. Last weekend it had a sign outside on the lawn, facing the traffic on the street: “Now Open Sundays.” Simple is good, right? I’d been going somewhere else on Sundays automatically; now I won’t. Think about how much you judge a business by its outside appearance. Does the signage fit the promise? Sometimes quirky and rustic is cool (some restaurants, an antique store, jams and jellies maybe) but how is it for German-Japanese auto repair? For years I’ve walked by an old office in a beaten-up office complex with dark windows and old curtains and a very old wooden sign, looking like it was done in a high-school shop class, saying “Business Planning Concepts.” No, I don’t think so. And if your face on the world, your appearance and your ambiance are your website, then, yes, work on your website.
2. Directories and such: being found where people look. What used to be the Yellow Pages is now Google Maps, Yahoo! directories, Bing, MSN, AOL, not to mention the local Chamber of Commerce, directories in local newspapers, specific trade and industry directories, related website directories. Think about where and how people look when they want to find a business like yours. Be there.
3. Be an expert. Don’t ever underestimate the power of being quoted by others in your area of expertise. Sure, there’s a lot to be said for working with related blogs, making comments and so on. But you can start with local events, trade shows, local media. Can you write for the local Chamber of Commerce magazine? Do you know the editor of the local newspaper? Can you be a speaker at the industry show?

Serendipity: you can’t do any of the above without figuring out whom you think your customers are, what they want, where they look for solutions, and so on. You’re already on your way to a marketing plan.

With all the talk surrounding the landmark book Free by Chris Anderson, I want to recommend Steve King’s post “Free isn’t a Business Model, But it is a Business Strategy” on his Small Business Labs blog.

I’ve followed the Free controversy myself, and posted about it here on this blog, and  here on the Huffington Post, when two of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin, squared off about it a few months ago. Gladwell essentially hated the idea, and Godin declared it here whether we like it or not.

If I had to choose one short description of the basic idea, it would be this paragraph from Anderson’s 2008 story in Wired:

Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multi-player online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.

King has a gift for summary. He says in his post:

Free has been used effectively as a business strategy and marketing tactic for pretty much as long as businesses have existed. Given how widespread and successful free is and has been, I don’t see how you challenge the concept.

The only place I see room for criticism is if you think Anderson is suggesting that free is a complete business model. Obviously, if free means no source of revenue then it is destined for failure. But I don’t think this is what Anderson is suggesting.

King goes on to point out several examples. He also points out that it could be tactic, strategy or something else. And it’s not that new an idea, either (Chris Anderson would agree with all three).

Are you looking at using a free offer as part of a business plan? You’ll have good company. I do hope, though, that you define for yourself the specific business objectives (traffic, visibility, whatever) and put in some metrics so you can measure results.

(Image credit: from Wired.com, Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business)

Sabrina Parsons posted For the best customer service: TWEET! on her MommyCEO blog earlier this month. She’d called customer service repeatedly, left messages and gotten no response. Then she tweeted about it, and this (the photo below) is what she got: a new, replacement pair of shoes for her son.

This could seem like a good story of a good company, but there’s that dark side to it, the bad service first, followed by good service after it appeared on Twitter. She said:

Here is a company that produces an excellent product and seems to care about customers. But their customer service process is broken. If only those of us who tweet can get good customer care–then they need to fix their process. Don’t get me wrong, though–I love the personal attention I can get from companies via Twitter. But I know those days are numbered. At some point there will be too many people doing the same thing, and Twitter won’t be a good communication vehicle. So companies like this need to fix their customer service issues NOW.

I agree with her conclusion. Twitter is new and exciting, a classic shiny new thing that we can all play with. But mind the telephone in the meantime.

I admit it: Business development (bizdev) seemed to me like an internet catch-all job with little definition, little standardization and–all too frequently–little meaning. And I say “admit” it and “seemed to me” because I know that’s a very negative generalization, often plain wrong. But there was a time when every next person in those awkward networking sessions was in “bizdev.”

It seemed at one point that business development was the title businesses gave to people who worked in marketing but didn’t have a clear job description.

However, as I look at it today, bizdev, done well, is an essential part of our business at Palo Alto Software. It really helped us grow. And some of our best people have carried that title. And my biased, old-fashioned view is really off base.  Business development has grown up.

I was delighted to see Seth Godin’s Blog: Understanding business development yesterday, because Godin takes a brief pause from his normal fare to go into a thorough and practical explanation of how important business development is, and what it does.

That includes six concrete examples of business development in the real world and 12 tips on how to do it better.

Denise O’Berry’s post last Friday called Get Your Company on the Online Video Track – It’s Easy on her Just for Small Business blog is a good reminder, with good resources. The key point:

If you’re intimidated by the thought of jumping into the online video pond, don’t be. It’s a piece of cake to do and YouTube simplifies the process for you.

With a simple camera like a Flip and a few minutes, you too can add good value and content to your website or blog.

She also points to this simple YouTube tutorial from Small Business Trends:

If you don’t see it here, you can click this link to see it on YouTube.

Not for everybody, obviously (only if you’re running or working on an online store), but this is a good list with excellent examples: 5 Tips and Tricks For An Effective eCommerce Site With 10 Brilliant Examples. The 10 examples make sense and the author’s comments add a lot of value.

The post is from OneXtraPixel.com, a site I hadn’t seen before but looks like a good resource for Web-based businesses:

As I look through that site, I find sections on tips, and how-to, with lots of good information and lots of examples.

Trends: solopreneurs, the new artisan economy, social media, a lot of one-on-one relationships, the long tail, splitting larger groups into smaller groups. More channels, each of them more focused.

With that in mind:

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.

That’s from Marketing Small Businesses With Twitter from yesterday’s nytimes.com.

Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word-of-mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network.

Examples include a food cart in San Francisco, a sushi restaurant in San Francisco, an antique store in Ohio, a bed and breakfast in North Carolina, etc. My favorite is from Becky McCray, a Twitter friend of mine. She runs a liquor store and cattle ranch in Oklahoma, and does a blog named Small Biz Survival:

In towns like hers, with only 5,000 people, small-business owners can feel isolated, she said. But on Twitter, she has learned business tax tips from an accountant, marketing tips from a consultant in Tennessee and startup tips from the founder of several tech companies.

What I particularly like about this idea are the focus and specificity. It’s target marketing executed well, using a good tool.

One word of caution: I don’t know the rest of these small businesses, but I follow Becky on Twitter and she’s there as a person, not a product, not a company. From what I see on Twitter, that’s an important factor. Relationships are between people, much more than between companies and people. Sure, there are exceptions, but that’s the rule.

You’ve probably heard the phrase: “content is king.” This morning I read “The idea that ‘content is king’ in blogging is total bulls***” by Mack Collier on The Viral Garden. He’s got a stark reminder there–a picture of an empty theater–that content doesn’t mean diddly if nobody sees it.

Many bloggers view their blog as their stage. Nothing wrong with that. But it doesn’t make sense to walk behind a podium, start talking and expect the room to fill with an attentive audience. Chris Brogan had a great post on this today (and read @KathySierra’s comment), and the point he kept making is that the difference between an audience and a community is the direction that the chairs are facing. Many bloggers act as if they are addressing an audience, when they want an interactive and passionate community. This is a disconnect that the idea of “content being king” feeds into.

This is an excellent reminder for anybody looking to build a business around content. It takes a marketing strategy to make that work. Make sure you have a type of person or business you’re trying to reach, a message and a way to get that message to them.

Mack makes a different but very important point about the “social” in social media. In his world, it’s about commenting, interacting and developing community, which amounts to the same thing as marketing. Is marketing, in fact, in a lot of one-person content-driven business.

Thanks, Mack.

While I was at the Viral Garden, I browsed some of the posts. Then I added that blog to my blogroll here on Up and Running. Good stuff.  And I was amused, while adding the link, to note that his URL there is “moblogsmoproblems.” Hmmm . . . somehow I find it easy to imagine the circumstances in which somebody would register that name. But that’s a different post.

(Note: I’m traveling today. I posted this on Huffington Post last week. I’ve been meaning to re-post it here. Tim.)

Coincidence? Last night I wrote an e-mail to a nice woman roughly my baby boomer age answering her “should I put my business on Facebook?” question with a polite “probably not.” This morning I see Michael Gray’s post Web 2.0 Weenies and Bulls**t Social Media Economics. I think it’s more synchronicity than coincidence. (Side note: Give Michael credit for that plain-talking title, and me the blame for putting asterisks into it.)

My e-mail exchange was a response to a column I wrote about social media for business. I went to this woman’s website and liked it; a kind of quirky, cotton-related store, a slightly old-fashioned look and feel to it, but it also told a story of how she’d come to get into selling cotton goods, and the whole thing worked pretty well. Here’s what I told her:

Having a Facebook page isn’t hard to do. That alone, however, won’t make much difference at all. You have to use that to make people know, like and trust you. And that takes a lot of time and effort, and not just by the web developers, but by the personality at the core, namely, from what I read on your website, you. You have the makings of it. You clearly understand how to tell a story about your business and to put yourself into it. But is this what you want to do every day, for several hours a day?

Michael’s post (the Weenies and Bulls**t link above) gets to the point quicker. And he’s straighter about it.

Social media is filled with false gods and idols, who try to sell you their own “secret sauce” in get-rich-quick schemes, and hundreds are duped by the lure of easy money. The truth is if you approach social media with a cookie cutter plan from one of these gurus, it won’t work for you. I can’t tell you the secret of making money; I can only tell you what works for me. And chances are since you don’t think and approach problems the way I do, they won’t work for you. The best I can do is give a you some basic pointers and tell you where the cliffs are so you don’t walk off. After that you’ll have to get off your butt, work at it and fail more than once, if you want to make some money.

Sad but true; Michael’s very cynical view is also spot on. And you see it over and over again. The real booming business in Web 2.0 and social media is the boom in people writing, speaking, blogging about Web 2.0 and social media for business.

It’s sort of like signing up for a toll-free telephone number and discovering, soon after, that it doesn’t ring. Nobody calls without the whole time and effort involved in making them call.

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing does a great speech that boils marketing down to “getting people to know, like and trust you.” A Facebook page, a Twitter account or a blog can’t do anything more than give you a forum. You have to have something to say–and more than just once–to make that matter. It takes time and effort.

And, no, I’m not selling expertise. I am in fact blogging, tweeting, and struggling with Facebook and LinkedIn, and enjoying it thoroughly, but I’m not sure there’s a business payoff. I do it because I like doing it.

I’ve posted here recently–several times–on how important web search is for startups and growing businesses. Today I found one interesting new site and received a recommendation for another longstanding good site to follow in this area.

Thanks to Josh Cochrane of bplans.com for these tips:

The SEO consultants at SEOmoz have a couple of catchy recurring series of posts on their blogs. One is “Headsmacking Tips,” which covers basic techniques or easy wins that often get overlooked. Sort of a “back-to-fundamentals” message. Here’s an example: Vertical content can earn you links.

The other is “Whiteboard Fridays,” a weekly video post series (similar to your new Bplans.com content) where the company founder explains a topic on video using simple whiteboard. Again, I just like the catchy title. An example: How to get awesome links

Meanwhile, thanks to somebody recommending it on Twitter, I just discovered an almost brand-new blog called Rank and ROI Web Marketing. There are only a handful of posts, but the first two I saw were very good. That would be:

• Small business owner’s guide to Google backlinks and
• Online Local Business Listings for Small Business

The first time I took our company to exhibit in a trade show we brought along a big plastic fishbowl with a sign that said: “Free Drawing! Drop your business card in the bowl for a free copy of Business Plan Pro®.”

Three days later we had four fishbowls full of business cards. Business cards, business cards–and not a lead among them. Fortunately we typed in only a few hundred names and sampled the marketing results before we spent the resources to input thousands.

The list was useless. None of the people sampled wanted our product.

The following year we took the same product to the same trade show–and the same fishbowl, too. That second year, however, we put a sign by the bowl that said: “For more information about Business Plan Pro, drop your business card here.”

After that trade show we ended up with a few hundred good leads. We input the data and followed up and made some sales.

I’ve used this story often in teaching, seminars and managing my own company because to me it illustrates the importance of target marketing and focus.

In this example, quality of leads is much more important than quantity.

Thousands of bad leads are worth nothing, while a few hundred good leads have real value.

(Note: this is reposted with permission from Planning Startups Stories.)