Strategy Stew

I’m reflecting on the fact that inauthentic marketing is not only hard to pull off but expensive.
Are you struggling with how you are position? Don’t. Stop what you’re doing and starr brainstorming on what your gut wants and ask yourself in what ways you can express that through your marketing strategy.

I’m reflecting on the fact that inauthentic marketing is not only hard to pull off but expensive.
Are you struggling with how you are position? Don’t. Stop what you’re doing and starr brainstorming on what your gut wants and ask yourself in what ways you can express that through your marketing strategy.

Are You Ready for a Crisis? : John Mariotti speaks from experience.  The big message here is “Be Prepared”, Find the facts, fix it and whatever you do, tell the truth! 

One thing John didn’t mention is his article is the fact that social media has created a lot of “grassroots” experts that can really undermine your message and mission.  Make sure that you have set a “Google Alert” for your company name, executive names and any brand names associated with your organization.  Don’t ignore what’s being written, “be prepared,” as John says to comment and defend your brand.

Mark Anderson from “Andertoons” brings a smile to my face with this cartoon of a line chart morphing into a pie chart.  It reminds me of a couple of presentation tips that will keep you out of executive hot water AND also persuade your audience to give you what you want.

• Give your charts titles that describe what the chart is trying to say.  For example “2008 Sales Highest in Company History”  If your title is something lame like “2008 Sales” this makes people want to look at numbers and analyze them.  Just tell them what it means and what to think.  Your audience will love you for it.
• Make charts out of ordinary objects.  If you’re talking about sports, then use a ball graphic as your pie chart.  If you’re doing a bar chart - think about using happy faces as the filling for the bars. 
• Focus on what the data means.  Ask yourself, what does the data mean?  What do I want my audience to think or do?  Then use those elements to create a chart.

Get Testimonials!  I love this article on how to creatively get testimonials from your customers.  Have an event, have a contest to pick the best e-mail or video testimonial.  People buy from people who are like them and whom they like.  Show your customers what happy customers look like and your ideal customer will have another reason to choose you.

What can we learn from the HUMMER brand? I really love “Neuromarketing Blog” and don’t get to spend as much time there as I would like.  In this article Roger Dooley comments on why a Chinese manufacturer might want to purchase the Hummer brand.  Roger talks about how some Americans have a mindless hate for the Hummer brand - mainly because it’s a gas guzzler.  They conveniently ignore what kind of energy it takes to get a Prius stateside.  Interesting, but the first thing I thought of is the stereotypical Hummer driver.  Driving a HUMMER says something about the driver.  And I wonder what we think of when we think of HUMMER drivers.  So ask yourself the question - it’s not just what the brand stands for as the product, but what the brand says about the person.

So, that’s all for todays edition of what’s on my dashboard.  What interesting articles are you reading?

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I’ve been on Twitter now for at least 18 months.  Maybe it’s been two years.  I know ther was a period of time where opened an account sometime in 2007 and thought “HUH?!”  But then about six months into it, I was getting the hang of how it worked and how to really make sense out of it.

I’d talked so much about it, written a few articles and read more than a few articles on the topic and basically felt that I was done writing and commenting on Twitter.  Yet, I see that there are still more new people getting on board for whom it’s all new.

So, I’m going to do a quick roundup of twitter how-to’s, why-to’s and other miscellaneous things you might want to know or use. 

Who should use Twitter?

If you want to be in busines over the next 20 years, you need to know and understand what 20-year-olds are doing with technology today.  It’s Twitter today and it will be something else tomorrow.  All business owners should have a working knowledge of at least Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  ALL marketing and sales people should have Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.  If you intend to get a job, buy something or sell something - you need to have an understanding of the tool.  If you choose not to participate, that is perfectly fine.  Make it a choice based on ROI or strategy, but not ignorance.

What I learned from and about Twitter

1. Open an account in your full name.  You should be building a personal brand and you should have an account in your name.  I wish I had done that.  I opened my first account with my blog name “strategystew” and then a second with my subscription site name “DIYMarketers.”  Starting with your own name will give you the most flexibility and you can always open up more accounts for other brands that you want to “promote.”
2. Tweet about what you’re reading.  I was confused about answering the question “What are you doing?”  At first I thought, who cares if I’m having a cup of coffee?  But then I realized that I was reading cool stuff and thinking about it — these are the things you want to post on twitter.
3. It’s a digital billboard.  While Twitter is a micro-blog, it’s also a digital billboard.  Each tweet is indexed by Google so use those 140 characters well.  Brand yourself with your tweets, post resourceful and useful articles that people will see and reference. 
4. Don’t SPAM on Twitter.  If you want Twitter to be an effective strategy - please don’t ask people to buy stuff.  Don’t tweet links where you are asking for money.  No one likes that.  People who want to buy things are searching eBay and people who want to read things are on Twitter.
5. Interconnect your Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook .  People are always asking me how I have time for all of this.  I don’t.  I have all these account connected so that when I post on one, it posts to all the rest.  This is a time saver.  If you have a WordPress blog, there are plugins that will publish a link to Twitter of your latest blog post. 

That’s all for now, tweeties.  Hope this helps and I hope I’ll find you on Twitter. 

You can follow me on Twitter - Just click over to www.Twitter.com/strategystew or www.Twitter.com/DIYMarketers

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When I was a kid, we used to call silly, stupid people “Dodo Birds.”  Of course none of us knew anything about Dodo birds it was just a name that sounded silly and stupid and that was good enough for a 7-year-old. 

Dodos were  flighless birds related to pigeons and doves.  They ate fruit and nested on the ground. Dodo birds became extinc in the 17th century and  it is commonly thought that human beings are directly responsible for thier extinsion. 

So, it was this article on Creative Planners that I received from Siddhartha Banerjee , a senior copywriter with Intermarkets Dubai that made me  put Dodo Birds and Ad Agencies in the same sentence.  And by that I mean that it really hit a nerve with me.

For over half of my career in corporate marketing, ad agencies were an integral part of our operations.  Because if you were responsible for any form of corporate communication, you really couldn’t do anything remotely fancy unless you worked with an ad agency.  For example, to merely do a formal presentation to a client or your management team, you needed “slides” (if you have no idea what I’m talking about, follow the link).  Making these slides was a major production that required a graphic designer to layout the text and any graphics and some kind of rather large machine that created the slides and put them into the plastic frame thingy.  That job alone took a single person an entire day for a basic presentation.

Contrast that with PowerPoint and the power of SlideShare.  And this was just the first sign of the upcoming extinction.

As my career progressed, I started noticing that ad agencies were promoting the fact that they do “marketing strategy.”  This broke my heart because ad agencies didn’t make money by developing strategy, they made money by selling media and design.  Selling strategy made them responsible for knowledge and information only their clients would know.  And if their clients didn’t understand their business - (which according to my experience and Siddartha’s article - they often didn’t) the ad agency would take the hit for a failed campaign.  This just wasn’t fair.

And so now we see our old friend the ad agency struggling in a DIY Marketing economy where they have slowly but surely become irrelevant and all because of what I would consider to be silly and stupid reasons.

What Can Creative Professionals Do to Become Necessary in a DIY Market?

Help Businesses Manage Multiple Brands in Multiple Channels

Blogs, web sites, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, your job, your friends, your company, your brand.  I can go on with this list and every bit of this list points to the fact that all of us now are responsible for managing multiple brand images in our lives.  Most of us are clueless about it. 

Are you like me? I have a corporate consulting business called Third Force.  That’s a brand.  I also have this blog, Strategy Stew.  That’s a brand.  As Ivana Taylor, I’m the book editor and expert on Small Business Trends, I contribute to AMEX Open Forum, QuestionPro, and several other blogs.  Then there’s my new venture DIYMarketers.com a subscription site for entrepreneurs who want to do their own marketing.  That is a brand.

I am not the only one with this dilema.  Just about every small business owner (and there are 27 million of us at last count) has this very same problem. 

The increase in communication channels has made consistent on-point communication a real challenge.  Independent and smaller ad agencies have a real opportunity in helping small businesses with these identity crises.  Because no amount of DIY technology and social media can take the place of knowing how to best structure a look and a message that resonates with your ideal customer. 

So if you’re an ad agency listen up!  Unless you’re selling media and design to the big guys, start selling cohesive identiy to 27 million small business owners committed to Doing it Themselves.

How many of you actually use or reference Digg? Or maybe you use StumbleUpon?  These are terrific tools to promote articles and even yourself.  They are also terrific sources of what’s hot in the blogosphere.  There’s only one problem — everyone thinks so too.  How is a small business supposed to compete with this morning’s top article on Digg: “12 Greatest Barbie Dolls for Nerds?”  While this article may be an interesting way to spend a few minutes — unless you’re in the Barbie Doll clothing business - it’s a waste of time for small business owners.

Compare that to today’s top story on BizSugar “You Might Be a Sleazy Salesperson if..” See, just as much wierdness and interest in the headline, but with much sweeter and applicable content for small business owners. 

I discovered bizSugar a while ago, but just hadn’t gotten into the habit of heading over there.  I just didn’t get it.  But I have this rule (which I highly recommend to all of you) after a few months — go back to places you’ve been and see if you can make it work.  Remember, you’ve learned some things playing around the web and social media over the last few months, and this is how you can test and see if you can make something work that you didn’t “get” before.

How You Can Benefit From bizSugar:

• Marketers: Put bizSugar as one of your favorites or tabs when you open the internet and take a quick glance at the top stories or most recently submitted.  You’ll get a quick idea of some trending topics in the world of business.
• Bloggers: You are supposed to LINK to other people to build blog presence.  After a while, it’s hard to find that wonderful combination of linking to a blog that’s big enough to draw new traffic yet small enough where you can build a personal relationship with that power blogger.  bizSugar will help you do this.  Check out the articles there and write your articles around some of their topics.  Share link love.
• Business Writers: You guys may also be bloggers, but I wanted to separate you because you have the opportunity to feature your articles to a targeted audience.  bizSugar is sort of like advertising on cable.  Post your articles there where your audience will see it.
• Business Owners: If you have a blog, become a frequent contributor to bizSugar.  It looks like a much smaller audience than the other sharing sites.  It’s also a great complement if you are serving as an expert on LinkedIn questions.

Are you already using bizSugar successfully?  Leave a comment for the rest of us newbies about how we can benefit from this super targeted small business site.

If I hear the words “this economy” one more time, I think I’m truly going to scream.  I’m not one to scream at the television - or talk back to the television when they are saying something I think is utter BS, but THIS…this passive victim thing we are doing to ourselves is really making me insane.

I’m here to tell you that there are people out there that are making an absolute killing in “this economy.”  You can be one of them - if you get caught up in the inertia of action rather than victimization.

If you haven’t heard of it yet, there’s an entrepreneurial movement out there led by “Toilet Paper Entrepreneur” Mike Michalowicz who is flipping his finger at the economic trend with his company Obsidian Launch and his latest book “Toilet Paper Entrepreneur.”   Obsidian Launch partners with young entrepreneurs to help them take their unique offering to market and succeed.  Of course, he uses the “Toilet Paper”  bootstrapping principles he outlines in his book to get them there.

The other thing Mike does is consistently feature the companies and individuals who are refusing to participate in the victimization game.  Strategy Stew was featured one of his posts recently (Thanks Mike).  And this is where my story really begins.

Mike featured 17 blogs for TPEs (Toilet Paper Entrepreneurs).  I just about fell off my chair when I saw who was on the list and that I was there too.  But that’s not what’s important.  Here’s what happened next.

A day or so after the post went live, I got an e-mail from David Garland.  See, his blog “Rise to the Top” was listed as well.  David just “reached out” to every single person on that list of 17!  He contacted everyone, and wanted to get to know them better.  Of course, we were all looking for ways to help each other grow and become everything we want our business to be in “this economy.”

David is not short on opportunity.  In fact, he can’t see straight from the meteoric rise to success he’s had in the last year.  He went from a hair-brained idea in a coffee shop, to a hit show on ABC.  When I asked him how he did it.  The answer was predictable.  He got the idea, then he told everyone he could connect with that he wanted a show, that he was going to feature young and young-at-heart entrepreneurs.  He met with tons of people every single week until he got the connections he was looking for.  He got corporate sponsors before the darn show was even ready.

David did the one thing we all need to do in “This Economy.”  He had an idea and he worked it every single day.  He didn’t stop.  He didn’t whine.  He had optimistic energy that everyone wants and needs made him a magnet for new opportunity and more and more people who wanted to be a part of what he’s creating.

“This Economy” is what you make it.  All you need is the idea and the energy to move yourself toward your goal every single day.

Take a lesson from the Toilet Paper Gang and join the movement to make “This Economy” your best year yet!

Marketing people, by nature, tend to be fairly optimistic types.  And while having a rosey outlook on life and business is certainly a plus - there’s more to attracting and keeping the best, most profitable customers than that.

I’ve been reading this wonderful book called “The Secret Code of Success” by Noah St, John and spending my time noodling on ways that I could implement some of the principles that he talks about in my consulting practice.

This article is not a book review - rather it’s a sort of process piece on some of the concepts and how you can use them to have more fun getting and keeping customers.

For example, traditionally, we’re taught a sort of plan, do check, act process.  You set some goals, you do some stuff to get you there, so see how much further you have to go and then you act some more.  Yet, if you achieve the goal, it feels empty and when you don’t - you feel let down.  So you try again.  But then, you’d be missing something.  You’d be missing what’s really happening here.

1. You need to get clear on what you want.  Whenever you miss your goal - chances are you weren’t crystal clear on what success looked like all the way to your bones. (There’s help for that).
2. You’re doing and doing and keeping busy, but not exactly on activivies that will get you there.  And you know it.  Are you avoiding reaching out to someone?  Are you mumbling around with memos, proposals and files when you could be making a real impace?  See what I mean?
3. Now you feel bad.  And you keep trying and doing stuff that isn’t working.

That’s depresssing.

In this application of the “Secret Code”  I’d like to practice simply getting clear.

Some Ways to Get Clear:

Get Quiet and pay attention to the little voice inside your head.  What’s it saying?  What’s it’s commentary on what you’re currently thinking?  For example.  You have to go to a meeting.  Your voice says “I hate this meetiing.  I could be out doing…..”  There, that’s a clue to getting clear.  Or conversly you’re going to a meeting and you think “I love meeting with this person!” You want to note that thought and event and chalk it up to more clarity.

So - practice that today and see what comes up for you.

About a month ago I heard about something called a “Tweet Chat.”

Your reaction might be similar to mine: “I know what Twitter is.  I know what a tweet is.  I know what a chat is.  but what’s a Tweet Chat?

A tweet chat is a group of people tweeting about a particular topic or event.  If you’ve checked into your twitter account and noticed these messages with hash tags (#DIYMKT) for example - these are tags that people can search on to see what people are saying about a particular topic.

Tweet chats can happen regualrly (like my #DIYMKT tweet chat that runs on Mondays from 11:30 EST to 12:30 EST) or they can be one-time events.  Either way, they are a cool way to bring people together without chewing up time, money and gas.

Why to do a Tweet Chat

• It’s a great way to build community on a topic: There are tweet chats about branding and marketing and technology.  At the chats people who are interested in these topics come together and simply touch base on what they know and share resources.  It’s a great way to connect with new people who are resources for you or for whom you can be a resource.
• Informal survey/research:  Because the audience is so specific and the topic is so specific, it’s a great way to ask questions on that topic and get some insight as to what’s important to people.
• Event Reporting:  If you wanted to go to an event, but couldn’t, simply search on the hash tag for that event (i.e.#SXSW) and you can see everyone’s comments on what’s going on there.  It’s almost as good as being there and sometimes better.

The best way to get into the whole tweet chat thing is to participate in one.  Here are just a few you can consider

1. #DIYMKT: Mondays 11:30am to 12:30pm EST: Topics related to DIY Marketing, getting and keeping customers, marketing resources.
2. #BrandChat:  A must for any marketing type.  Next Chat Wednesday 11:am EST
3. #Sbbuzz: A chat on small business and technology for small business.  Tuesdays from 8pm - 10pm EST.
4. #smbiz: Chat on all issues small business.  Tuesdays at 8pm EST.

Are you currently running a tweet chat?  Add it to the list by leaving a comment!

Just because you haven’t seen me here on Strategy Stew, doesn’t mean I haven’t been around.

On October, 2008 I launched www.DIYMarketers.com.  It’s a membership site where in-house marketers can learn practical tips on how to actually put marketing strategies into practice.

I’m looking forward to putting some of the marketing management coursework I’ve created as well as other courses on presentations and communication.  And that means that there has been a lot of content development going on behind the scenes.

In the meantime, I’ve been writing for Small Business Trends and have taken on being the sites Book Editor.  This is an ideal fit for me because I love reading business books and sharing what I’ve learned.  Here are just a few of my latest reviews:

Dan Schawbe’s Me 2.0: This book hit the stands big time!  It’s a terrific read for any job seeker and small business owner.

Jon Wuebben’s Content Rich Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web: LOVE this book.  There are a thousand and one tips on improving your web writing and driving more “ideal” customers to you.

Writing for AMEX Open Forum

Being a part of the Small Business Trends Community has been so rewarding.  I’ve been a contributing expert to the AMEX Open Forum Blog for quite a few months now.

AMEX has done a fantastic job of pulling the biggest, best and most practical thought leaders for small business and freed them up to post their insights and experiences for you to benefit from:

Here’s my latest  - a commentary on what a trillian dollars means and how we can  make our own.

I want to finish off by telling you that I’ll be devoting even more time and energy to DIYMarketers.  So, head over there and click on “Register” to join.  It’s free and you only pay to participate in the seminars and classes that I’ll be offering.

Also, be sure to joing the #DIYMKT tweet chat every Monday from 11:30am to 12:30 pm EST.  Every week a group of marketers get together and tweet about issues and solutions.  I often invite experts and business authors and celebrities to chat along with the group.  So join us!

While Strategy Stew is more of a personal/professional  blog - DIYMarketers is where you’ll find more articles on actual marketing strategies and tools.

Follow me as DIYMarketers on Twitter!