270 seconds to find all about web 2.0

Actually, maybe not for dummies at all.

It's a paradox, the ideas communicated in this video are simple and yet obtuse.

But considering it only lasts some 4.5 minutes it does a fabulous job of outlining some of the changes that face us as the internet becomes a huge part of our daily self.
Whether we want it to, or not, the interweb is becoming tightly integrated into everything we do. The video goes a long way to highlight just how [important] and why that is.

No training necessary, just click play. Please.

Write your own elevator pitch

from Idea Sandbox another stolen snippet we can all re-use

It's important to have an "elevator speech." A 30-second summary of what you're working on to tell the boss... When meeting new people, a quick way to summarize the value of your company and what you do.

It can be challenging to boil down what you do into a short blurb... For inspiration, I suggest paying attention to the 30-second narrations at the beginning of TV shows.

Here's the whole post from Paul Williams it's a must read!

He proposes that just like the synopsis and back story seen at the beginning of TV shows, every business needs a 30 second or so introduction to what it/they do.

I concur, but also suggest that for many of us, figuring out exactly what it is that we do is some of the hardest time we'll spend working on our business rather than in it. There are some tools and thoughts to support you in this task on the homework page.

If we can get a clear idea on what we sell, then it makes it much easier to sell it, both to ourselves, our employees and more importantly to the new customer or strategic partner.

Clarify that thinking into you elevator pitch, practice it, and you'll be prepared to deliver it without having to think what to say when someone asks "what do you do?"

Good luck, get inspired.

read some more background on Paul's blog, or ask google

The next time your company votes to change the brand

Chris Houchens is right on the nail

The next time your company sits around a table and "votes" to change the brand...

…ask yourself if Pluto is a planet.

No matter what the marketing department think, no matter how insistent the designer is about the logo, the right font or the pantone specification for the corporate colour you won't change the customer's view overnight with a new coat of paint on the brand

read more here

The brand is built in the mind of the customer not across the boardroom table, concentrate on ways to change how the customers think about the business rather than the logo

technorati tags:Ninefish, think, strategy, brand

Blogged with Flock

instructions worth learning by heart

Once again Seth comes up with a primer that I wish all the clients we've ever had had seen before they came to us for help

read them all here

Help me out by pointing out the work you'd like this to be on a peer with. If you want a website to be like three others (in tone, not in execution) then point it out. In advance.

Be clear about dates and costs. Not what you hope for, but what you can live with!

You don't know a lot about accounting so you don't backseat drive your accountant. You hired a great designer, please don't backseat drive here, either.

But even more I wish this list had been seen before I started the business, I could have been clearer with our clients, and sought better questions to ask of them

Bonus link:
Rich Westerlink said in response to Seth

My employers and clients have won awards on projects where I've done client-side creative direction. But it's doubtful those projects would've received notice had I let the agency have its way.

Btw, those awards are in a drawer. It wasn't the awards that mattered. Never is. It was that the campaigns worked.

So if you're talking to me, I don't give a damn about awards. Yes, many clients say that. I mean it. Show me the designs and campaigns that made millions in profits or launched an unassailable brand.

And tell me why what you did worked when someone else could've done a faster and cheaper campaign with supporting facts. If you're honest, I might believe. And hire you.

I agree with his input too, there's a difference in winning awards from your peers and gaining rewards for your client though doing something that works [good design] rather than catching attention with eye catching graphics, witty headlines, great photography and what not but fails to sell one more unit of the product.

All the designers and creatives out there are not always the best fit for your product, just as all the clients out there don't necessarily need what we're designing.

Great design is what happens when great designers and great clients collide

Tagged with:

• ninefish
• Strategy
• Think
• design

getting inside the customer's head

Tom Asacker talking about going From Branding to Bonding: "Repetition does not create memories, relevance does."

Read the whole story for some real insight on getting your company some space in the mind of your customer, not with price, not with your logo, and not through understanding your USP but by being the most important thing a product can be: Relevant

Tagged with:

• ninefish
• Strategy
• Think
• marketing

Duh!

Brand Autopsy: Advertising’s Little Blue Book: "You cannot create a brand before you create a business—the process is simultaneous. As you build your business, you create your brand. Dig?"

Brand Autopsy quoting Steve Lance and Jeff Wool. Erudite, clear, concise. Now do it!

UPDATE:
It seems I'm not getting my facts right here. John Moore was the real author of the insight I'm quoting.

Tagged with:

• ninefish
• Strategy
• Think
• marketing
• blog-this

Pass this on, please

This amazing story of the will to change is inspiring, both at a human level and as fantastic marketing, see Leader Notes' commentary on the actual invisible children site for more information

Three 20-something kids with a video camera wind up in northern Uganda. They see incredible horror and encounter heartbreaking suffering, most especially among children.

Instead of turning their backs, they can't stop thinking about it. They decide to do something about it.

What can three white kids do to stop 20 years of horror and war? They decide that alone they can't do much, but if they can mobilize enough other youth, they can influence the powerful.

They know their audience - other youth. They use multimedia, they use rock music, they use myspace, they make music videos, they portray things raw and gritty and honest and authentic.

They first tell their story of their experience in Northern Uganda about the Night Commuters in a documentary:

Can we make a difference from this end of the world? I bet we can.

Tags: think, ninefish, marketing, purpose

Think first, and be clear about what you want

Having been lurking madly, Seth Godin has bought me out of hibernation with this idea that's particularly apt this week for some of our clients

"The first goal of copy is to get you to read more copy.
The second goal is to tell a story that spreads.
And then, finally, to have that story get people to take action"

Seth is talking about a billboard, but the concept is critical in all the communication you do.

Billboards in my opinion should have no more than 6 words on them. You have to hope you can communicate enough to remind the traffic your idea was exciting enough to talk about when they get to work, and memorable enough to be able to find the long story online or via the yellow pages [or even via a memorable phone number]

Tagged with:

• good-copy
• think

Lurking around

I've purposely been quiet recently, enforced by time, but also to see what would happen. I've been keeping an eye on a number of statistics and been surprised a little by what I've found.

As I've blogged more, and commented on other pages and conversations the benchmarks I've been following show that the ranking of this site has been going down. When I was in full flow and posting most days then I saw this trivial blog rise into the top 2 million and get towards being in the top 1.2 million ranked sites on Alexa. This isn't much to shout about I admit. Considering that all that was happening was that I was taking part in the conversation though I was impressed to see the site's rank increase. No animals were hurt in the process, no metatags or code changed, no smarter keywords, just lots of conversation.

As I've been quiet, I've been watching the rank slide again.

My takeaway from this is that if Ninefish can do it, so can your business. Nothing more than sharing ideas has been going on, it's not as if I've been making an effort to find if anyone is listening, but if someone is searching for the same ideas I'm talking about, then they'll find my business easier, just because I'm talking here.

So even if you think no one is listening, talk. If your idea or business is worth anything, if you're passionate about something; talk about it on the internet and they will come, just like in the Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams!

Tagged with:

• SEO
• think

Complexity and Technology are not the marketing cure-all

here's a bit of a mashup of Tom Asacker and Seth Godin, I'm linking their points because they seem to make more sense in corroborating each other than separately.

Tom quotes Eric Schmidt, (read the whole post in a new window, I've cut quite a bit of the middle out)

'Our business strategy is not to compete.'...
...People are awash in new products, information and ideas, and therefore are less likely to stay focused for any length of time on one message or one product. And in this supersaturated economy, sustained audience attention is the foundation of brand endurance. So what's a marketer to do?

he goes on to say

...Instead of agency lapdogs, marketers must become innovators. They must work like hell to get sustained attention by focusing on and delivering the value desired by their audience. Forget about competing. Forget about positioning. Yes, you read me right. These old school notions of business success are obsolete.

Marketing isn't a complex process with complex solutions. It’s simple. Not easy mind you, but simple nonetheless. Develop something that people value enough to trade their time, attention and/or money for, and do it at a profit. Simple. The challenge is to continuously change and innovate, and achieve this simple concept over time. And that challenge, my marketing friends, is your job."

add to this idea Seth's realisation that it's not the technology of Google we love,

"Your success was down to marketing, not technology."

he delivers that gem and many others here in a video from his talk to Google employees.

I've had people tell me I'm a techno geek, I guess I am, but I'm not selling you the same sort of connectivity, nor are many of the marketing ideas I propose complex or technology based. What I'm selling is something simple and different, and that's an attempt to get you to think simply, and to utilise whatever simple ideas so we can to reach out into the marketplace and connect honestly with your clients, deliver them some fantastic products they'll love and use if only we can connect them to the idea that they'd like to use them if they knew a little more about them.

Tagged with:

• think
• strategy
• new-thinking

Get a marketing strategy

It's a world wide malaise, do what everyone else is doing, because everyone else is doing it.

Instead, why not break the cycle and get a strategy instead. John Jantsch has a great post on just this idea...

the single greatest small business marketing mistake I encounter - and I encounter it every single day.

Small business owners fall prey to the marketing idea (tactic) of the week because they have no marketing strategy. If I could change anything about the way small business owners view marketing - that would be it.

By strategy I mean your marketing reason for being and I don't mean to exchange money for something. Far too many people think "we want to sell lots of stuff to lots of people" is a strategy.

John goes on to expand the initial idea and it's worth a read. It's a useful stopping point to think first. Why do you think this will work? Do you realise that something like 60% of advertising purchases are not made from a strategy, but because of the relationship you have with the media sales person? [I read that somewhere, but can't remember where so it becomes a useless statistic and hearsay I know] Are you trying that tactic because it will get tested and measured, or because you are fed up of listening to the sales guy and broke down and got your chequebook out?

Think before acting. [or at least practice the process and begin the habit]

Tagged with:

• Strategy
• Marketing
• Think

Battle of the Memetrackers

Micro Persuasion: Breememe, aka Battle of the Memetrackers: "Breememe"

and this week's nonsense word is...

Breememe

Yesterday Steve Rubel began another experiment on tracking the spread of an idea using the new tools of the internet, this is a post purrely to see what happens next

how beautiful is this? how ugly is this?

I always wanted to change the world, just not quite like this though.

Click image below to view video in a pop up window

How have we changed the planet? See for yourself.

the original site is here: Worldchanging Campaign

I haven't any spare money right now to contribute, you may have. Either way, I'd like us all to think just how much we affect those around us with our actions; as people, as businesses, as families, as communities.

Pass it on,

More homework for the CEO and her team

I should add this as a link to the homework page, it's a great example of working on your business, not in it.

20 Questions to Develop Your Business:
"STRATEGIC

1. What are your short term and long term goals (what time period are these goals)?
2. How do you measure success?
3. What do you think are the top three things keeping you from achieving success?
4. What are your company's exclusives? What do you have that your competitors can’t or wouldn't copy?

MEASURES

1. What is the average order size and average order margin? How has this trended?
2. How many customers buy each month? What is the mix of new vs. previous customers?
3. What is a customer worth over a lifetime? Have you calculated the NPV profitability of customers?
4. What is the cost per acquiring a customer? i.e. Total marketing costs / new customers.

MARKETING

1. How do you communicate to existing customers after the purchase?
2. What is your monthly marketing spend, and what is the mix between the different vehicles? What is this marketing expense trend vs. revenue over the past 3 years?
3. How do you measure your marketing? What tests have you run? Results?
4. How do your competitors market differently than you?

CUSTOMER

1. What are the top 3 things customers are looking for when they come to the store / web site? And how do you know this?
2. Where are most customers coming from or going to when they visit your store / site? And how do you know this?
3. If I were a customer, what would my 20 second word of mouth 'sound byte' be if I were to tell a friend about you? What would I say?
4. Who is your primary competition and how do you differentiate your customer service, shopping experience, and products from competition?

EMPLOYEES

1. What are the roles/responsibilities of the top management in the company? How are these made clear to each of them?
2. What are your key performance indicators and how often do you review them as management, and with employees?
3. How are employees compensated? Are there performance-based incentives?
4. What are the career paths? Are they clearly communicated to employees?"

Take a few minutes and ponder why

There's been a bit of time for navel gazing here of late, and I've thought that there's not enough of my personal opinion in the content of this blog. But today once again Seth Godin has a post that is just complete without my blundering input.

The Reason: "The reason the typewriter keyboard is in a weird order is that original typewriters jammed, and they needed to rearrange the letters to keep common letters far apart.

The reason we don't have school in the summer is so our kids can help with farmwork.

The reason there's a toll on that bridge but not on that road is that there used to be a ferry on that river, and the ferryman needed to make a living.

The reason you go to a building to go to work every day is that steam or water power used to turn a giant winch-like structure that went right through the factory building. Every workman used that power to do his work. As factories got more sophisticated, it remained efficient to move the workers, not the stuff.

What's your reason?"

Why do we do the stuff we do? All too much of it is from habit, or even the systems we have devised but not updated or reviewed. There's a lot of scope to improve things if only we set aside a few moments to ponder every now and then. Blue sky your world; today

on my way to fame and fortune

Take back the internet from the A-List Bloggers: Robert Scoble had this to say...

"I see there was a dustup over on Doc Searls blog (and others) about the fact that the Z list is being kept out of the kingdom by the A list bloggers. I guess by linking to Doc’s blog I’m a gatekeeper and I’m just working to keep the Z list down. Hey, it’s a conspiracy. If we only link to each other you’ll never be able to find any new voices, right?

Here, let’s play a game. Everyone in the world say “brrreeeport” on your blog and you’ll be listed on this Technorati page automatically"

here's my entry in the fame game Robert... brrreeeport

It's probably only a ruse, but I'll play along to see how the experiment goes, though I doubt how much it will actually benefit everyone, it's still a matter of having something to say, not being heard as far as I'm concerned, and plainly I've got nothing to say here. But I am interested in the experiment

Another truism

“Any business arrangement that is not profitable to the other person will in the end prove unprofitable for you. The bargain that yields mutual satisfaction is the only one that is apt to be repeated.” B . C . F O R B E S

All of us in business should remember this in our dealings with the customer, [and with our families too].

read this quick

Seth's new eBook on marketing is posted. You should read it and implement it in your business. as usual it's insightful and worth reading

This new ebook (3 versions, 18 pages each, PDF format) explains how I believe some of the new Web 2.0 tools (flickr, de.licio.us, squidoo and others) combine with ideaviruses and the Purple Cow.

Here they are. Free to download

Seth's Blog: Flipping the Funnel--new ebook

fascinating insight into power of blogging: Stormhoek: The Podcast

i've been watching what hugh and the team from stormhoek have been doing, and also hugh and tom at english cut.

i've even been involved in the open source label design too, [my offering is here] because i thought it was an exciting idea and wanted to see what would happen.

well finally here's some talk from the horse's mouth that discusses just how the blog has changed the thinking of the company and how coincedentally the sales have doubled over the same period

i believe that conversations on blogs are going to be part of the fundemental shift for the future of marketing, and for me at least this is vindication of the worth of writing a blog.

read what johnnie has to say in his conversation with stormhoek, and if you're up for it listen to the audio too, it's exciting [for me at least] and then be open to the possibilities of being changed by your market rather than bashing your head against a brick wall trying to change your market

Stormhoek: The Podcast: 11.44 James asks for examples of how Stormhoek listens to the market. Jason talks about how their best wine is their Sauvingnon Blanc... and we found some people like it - and some don't. You forget that what we like as producers isn't necessarily what the consumer likes. We've been astounded by the popularity of our Rose even though we expected other things to do better.

12.53 Jason talks about Stormhoek's competition seeking new design ideas for the packaging. We offered �1000 - and about 150 different people submitted ideas. For us, it wasn't about the individual idea, it was about engagement. People cared enough about we are doing to take the time to do this. We gleaned something from those people that sent us off in a direction we would never otherwise have gone in, and will give us a wine which will look like nothing else on the shelf. A contrast between insular inward-looking design and open source with your customers. You're not designing for yourself but to meet the needs of the market.

see this post for some great insight on Word of Mouth

The whole post is a gem customers, not capital, are a company’s scarcest resource.

but this was so succinct i had to quote it to you

please, read the whole thing

write a plan, follow your plan or plan to fail

The Zen of Business Plans: "Write for all the right reasons. Most people write business plans to attract investors, and while this is necessary to raise money, most venture capitalists have made a “gut level” go/no go decision during the PowerPoint pitch. Receiving (and possibly reading) the business plan is a mechanical step in due diligence. The more relevant and important reason to write is a business plan, whether you are raising money or not, is to force the management team to solidify the objectives (what), strategies (how), and tactics (when, where, who)."

the rest of guy's plan notes are well worth the read too. (i'm amazed that a man who didn't have a blog a month ago is writing such great stuff so consistently)

maybe after reading this sage advise i should write the plan i've been meaning to write for the last ten years. Maybe i should write that plan i've been meaning to write for my life as well as my business, maybe you should too?

this new desire for planning world domination reminds me of ESP, a course i've done that is amazing and has just such a plan for living as it's core first step, as well as some really great business building advice and support, a fabulous network and some life saving ideas on leisure and balance

links to Word of Mouth Basic Training

Word of Mouth Basic Training -- Word of Mouth Marketing Association -- WOMMA

see the right hand pane for lots of links to word of mouth marketing how to's and tips

this is the blog of the word of mouth conference that's happening in Orlando Florida last week

the marketing funnel in the current situation

Seth gives a tutorial for understanding the concept of the marketing funnel

here: "Traditional marketing divides the world into two groups:

prospects

and

customers

Customers are traditionally undervalued, and prospects are all treated the same.

more importantly he goes on to show how things have changed online. i think though, that things have also changed in the traditional markets too, we need to listen more, and be willing to be changed by that; rather than keep chundering away with doing business the way we've always done it and expecting to get something different instead of what we've always got!

it's like Sam Decker says here

Marketing is about listening, facillitating and helping customers buy.

amen to that.

WOM: word of mouth still the best advertising available?

See more on this report here: Brand Autopsy:

In this study, Word-of-Mouth ranked as the most influential marketing medium. The 'Top Ten' most influential marketing mediums, regardless of demographic age group, include:

1 | Word-of-Mouth
2 | TV
3 | Coupons
4 | Newspaper Inserts
5 | Read Article
6 | Direct Mail
7 | Magazines
8 | In-store Promotion
9 | Cable TV
10| Online Advertising

more proof that the best kind of advertising for most businesses is still the conversation

media release of researchers here

branding, more "rules"

guy kawasaki tells us in

The Art of Branding: "Create one message. It's hard enough to create and communicate one branding message; however, many companies try to establish more than one because they are afraid of being niched and want the “entire” market."

he has ten rules and i agree with most of them, whether you be big company or a small one, the rules are the same. and once more it's not all about the logo, your brand is something that goes across all the strata of your company, from customer service to your printed and web materials. work on your brand with your designer, but also your PR team, your marketing manager and customer services. be holistic about your brand.