Archive for April, 2008

Comments please?

According to John Jantsch, it can be that easy to get more comments on your blog. Today, he wrote a very interesting post about comments that I thought was informative, and very beneficial. We all know that to have a blog that is popular with the public is to get comments, and he had some great ideas of how to accomplish this task!

For more of John’s blog, click here.

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The Point to Twitter - according to a web pro insider

Two weeks ago, I discussed the fact that I didn’t see a point to Twitter for business. This past week I recieved an email from a web pro insider newsletter that discussed the point, and although I still don’t see a reason to join Twitter, I thought that it was interesting to read another point of view on Twittering. One of the most surprising things I read in his article was about a man who sold his ‘twitter’ on Ebay! According to the author, “Some are simply walking away from the questions. Andrew Baron put his Twitter account, and his 1,400 followers up for auction on eBay. Why? He wasn’t really using it. As you might imagine, this sparked all kinds of other questions, including whether or not an individual Twitter account, like someone’s stream-of-consciousness, has real monetary value. Current bid is $1,125.”

To read more of the article, click here

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Are small events successful?

Last week we talked about the Small Business Essentials Expo. Yesterday was the event and Tornado Marketing (we) were one of the presenters (and sponsors). The event went really well, and everyone that we talked with enjoyed the presentations and were able to walk away with some great knowledge to put towards their business. Unfortunately, one of the sponsors was not as happy as they could have been with the event, as they expected a larger turnout. I didn’t get an opportunity to find out if they were able to collect any good leads, but I know that we made some great connections. It made me think about the value of attendees versus the volume of attendees.

Most times that businesses attend an event as a sponsor, the main question is: “How many attendees are expected”? The sponsors obviously want to know, because the more people, the more chance there is to make a sale, right? While this is mathematically true (simple percentages), it isn’t always true in business. Just because there are 500 attendees instead of 50 doesn’t mean that the attendees are the right ones. I would personally rather have 50 attendees that are in need of my service than 500 attendees who don’t really care about what I am doing. At the end of the day, no matter how many people you talk to, if none of them are the right one, then the number doesn’t matter. I’ll take value over volume any day.

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OC Metro Business Card Contest

I often chastise owners for spending money on “frilly” marketing - like creating poorly-thought-out flashy websites with lots of bells and whistles, but little substance.  The bottom line is that the business value needs to come first; creative second.  And the truth is that some businesses need to project more “sizzle” than others.  

Home Poker Pros, www.homepokerpros.com, runs professional-feeling poker events and can bring in top poker stars.  To convey the level of quality their events have (vs. your average casino party company), Home Poker Pros decided to go “over the top” with their business card - and it’s a strategy that’s really worked!  People keep his card around - just because it’s so cool.  And by sending it in to a local magazine, OC Metro Business, he got free advertising out of it.  Best of all, he’s getting calls from the advertising!

Check it out:  http://www.ocmetro.com/NEW_SITE/current_issue/biz_bites.php 

What do you do to make your business stand out from the crowd?  What do your marketing materials say about you?

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Misleading marketing and Staples

Adrianne and I dealt with customer service departments of 3 companies today; she dealt with QuickBooks, whereas I dealt with HP and Staples. QuickBooks had great customer service and despite it taking 2 hours, Adrianne’s issues were resolved. On the other hand, my experience was 50/50. HP was helpful, Staples was unequivocally not. Which is why I am writing today instead of her. Without getting into the gory details (and getting me irritated more than I already am) we were having issues with our HP printer. We got it a little less than a year ago (this fact is key to part of my frustration). The first thing I did was to call HP and I was on the phone with the service guy for about an hour. After going through countless re-starts, calibrations, alignments, etc he apologized and let me know that he had gone as far as he could. He asked if I had purchased an extended warranty from wherever I had purchased the printer. Now, when we purchased this printer we had bought the extended warranty for one reason – 24/7 services and on site service – so I said yes and decided to call Staples Customer Service (where we bought it).

Here’s where the day got bad. I called Staples and gave them the warranty information. The response? “Sorry, we can’t help you; your warranty with us doesn’t kick in until your warranty ends with HP”. Mind you, the warranty we purchased from Staples is called “Day-of-Purchase Coverage”. Correct me if I’m crazy…but that sounds like to me that we have coverage from the day of purchase! Oho…apparently not. Even though front of the brochure talks all about the service (with the day-of-purchase coverage mentioned more than once), on the back (in the fine print), there is a contingency that it isn’t valid until after the other warranty wears out!!! So to clarify – it is called ‘Day of purchase coverage”, the entire brochure talks about all the service you receive the minute you purchase the product (without a single*asterisk that mentions contingencies anywhere in the front – but I don’t get any service from staples until a full year after I purchase my product? This was bad enough, but rather than apologize and suggest any way that we might be able to work things out she repeatedly quoted the terms and conditions claiming ‘there is nothing I can do’.

Let me tell you – there is ALWAYS something you can do, and the minute you forget that (even a big ol’ company like Staples) the minute you begin to lose business.

I hope someone from Staples reads this.

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Vision to Venture and John Jantsch

Photo: Adrianne Machina, John Jantsch and Kirsten Wright

Yesterday Kirsten and I drove down to San Diego, CA to join 200 enthusiastic, empowered women entrepreneurs at Microsoft Office Live’s Small Business “Vision to Venture” Women’s Entrepreneur event.  What a great feeling to be surrounded by so many smart and successful women!

The keynote presentation “A Girl’s Guide to Building a Million Dollar Business” was given by Susan Wilson Solovic of SBTV.com.  I sure recognized some of my shortcomings - but I vow to do better, starting today!  I was also introduced to Rich Sloan, whose StartUpNation.com site has become a veritable small business bible/yellow pages.   I had to wait until 2:00 p.m. hear John Jantsch, best-selling author of Duct Tape Marketing and one of my mentors, speak about how to start a marketing conversation.  John’s speeches always get me excited about small business marketing. (I’m actually always excited about small business marketing, he just inspires me to do it better!)   If you’re a women entrepreneur - or want to become one - and you live near Miami, Austin or Seattle, I encourage you to register for this Women’s Entrepreur event.

Also, if you’ll be near Irvine, CA next week, be sure to join us on April 23rd, 2008 for the Small Business Essentials Expo in Irvine, CA. Tornado Marketing will have a tabletop and I will be speaking about the best ways to recession-proof your marketing - on and off the internet.  You can find out all the details on the OC Small Business Essentials Expo  site.    

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Twittering for Tornado Marketing…I don’t get it.

Every day, I take about 30 minutes out of my day to read the posts of the bloggers that I subscribe to. One common thread I have noticed in the last couple weeks is the praise of Twitter. I didn’t really pay much attention to the first few, but after a while, my curiosity was piqued. I figured I would do a little research and see what the big deal is. And, after looking into it…I don’t get how it is good for business. Correction, I understand the concept, but not the attraction. When used correctly, Twitter could be a great way to promote events, a new blog post, or exciting business advancements. But, I noticed, for the most part, this isn’t the use. For example, I checked out the twitter page of one of the bloggers I read daily. His page had a few business tweets but the majority was about what he was doing, what he was thinking about, even his evening plans. And, it is obvious that the readers of his tweets are not just his friends. It begs the question – Do you really want your business acquaintances to know that much about you?

As the Wall Street Journal  pointed out “Fans say they are a good way to keep in touch with busy friends. But some users are starting to feel “too” connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they’re having for dinner.”

Twitter fans - I am open to hear thoughts. Have any of you experienced a great response because of using twitter? Any suggestions on making it work for business?

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Duct Tape Marketing Coaching Excellence Series

We got an email today from John Jantsch about the Duct Tape Marketing Coaching Excellence Series and we registered immediately for the one on April 21st! John has been interviewing some of the most influential business people about how they are so successful and their ’tricks of the trade’. All of the interviews so far have been really informative (you can download past interviews from here). The speaker for this one is going to be David Allen and for those of you who don’t know who he is, here is a little about him:

“David Allen is an international author, lecturer, and founder and President of the David Allen Company, a management consulting, coaching, and training company. He is the author of two books -the international best-selling book, Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-Free Productivity (Viking; 2001) and Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life (Viking; 2003).”

John is going to be talking with him about his books and the lessons that he teaches. If you haven’t read the books (or even if you have) this is a great way to get the key messages he wants his readers to hear in a shortened version.

For more information or to register for the free telecast, click here

I don’t know about you, but I’d love to learn how to get more things done each day…

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2 steps forward, 5 steps back and new computers.

We are so excited to have new computers!! Our old computers had gotten to the point that even simple tasks (running Outlook and Photoshop at the same time) were proving difficult. Our systems were over-crowded, overloaded and needed to be retired. We decided that the best thing we could do was get 2 new computers and start fresh.

When I was clearing out my old computer system, I found half installed programs, programs that I hadn’t used in months (and wouldn’t use again), duplicates of documents, and emails that I had no reason to keep (other than I am a habitual pack-rat and tend to keep everything ‘just in case’). As difficult as it was, I only copied over documents that I knew that I needed, and the one draft before it (just in case) to my new computer. I also only re-installed programs that I used on a daily basis, figuring if I needed a program that I didn’t install in the beginning, I could install it later. This cut the amount of programs that I had almost in half. And so far, I don’t miss any of them.

All this starting fresh made me start thinking about how business is a lot like computer systems. Like the headline states, we took 2 steps forward (buying the new computers) but 5 steps back (the horrid process of actually re-installing all our programs). Sometimes in our businesses, we have to take a few steps back and start all over too.

When is the last time that you took a look at your business ‘processes and programs’? Are they working at the optimum level or are they over-crowded and overloaded? Do you keep documents that you don’t need? Do you have a cluttered desk that makes it hard to find things? Or do you go through and clear out things that don’t work, replace them with things that do?

Yes, it is difficult to clear out the clutter, because we all worry about the ‘what if’. What if I need that draft? What if that paper is important? What if I need that? The reality is, if you haven’t used it recently, and can’t see yourself using it in the next week, you probably don’t need it. So, throw it out, or at least create a file for all the unnecessary items and put it in the bottom of your desk drawer. I know it isn’t easy but, and the end of the day you’ll have a faster system and more organized processes.

We took 2 steps forward and 5 steps back, but at the end of the day…our new computer systems are going to give us leaps and bounds back. What do you need to do to get them back for your business?

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Google Search tips

John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing, put up a great post a couple days ago about how to use Google better. Simply put, the better you understand how something works, the easier it is to use (novel thought!) So he put together some great information about how Google search engine works so you can understand better how to use Google Adwords. If you know how people are searching, it is much easier to choose words to bid on and optimize around. To read his article, click here

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