Fish or cut bait. S— or get off the pot.Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

How many euphamisms can you think of for “take action?” Sooner or later, you have to move or die. I know a lot of small business owners, consultants, and would-be authors who operate on the “I’m busy so I must be accomplishing something” mode.

The trouble is, they’re not. Activity does not always equal progress. It just makes you feel better so you can delay real action a little longer.

Real action can be painful. It means you have to make the hard phone call, write the proposal, draft the novel, practice the speech, ask for the sale. It means you have to risk failure.

It’s way easier to put that off by taking one more meeting at Starbucks, secure in the fantasy that you’re working on getting that next client. Except that he’ll never be your next client if you don’t write the proposal and ask for the order. But that would be risking a “no.”

I worked with a guy years ago at a small newspaper who used to say, “I might as well meet with so-and-so. I already don’t have the sale.” I loved that attitude. If you lose the sale, what have you lost? What you already didn’t have.

Upside-down marketing has a simple premise: Get more of what you want for your business by helping others get what they want.

Marketing ideas that will work today require you to create some new practices for the current business paradigm. In this workshop, you will learn about some marketing strategies that will separate you from the competition and give you the results you desire.

If you want to have “exceptional” results in your business, you will need to put “exceptional” methods to work for you. This workshop is designed to help Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners market their products and services differently in 2012 and beyond.

If you’re in the Denver area, don’t miss this workshop on January 26, 2012, from 8:00 am to noon at the Jefferson County Board of Realtors, 950 Wadsworth Blvd., #101, Lakewood, CO 80214. Cost is only $29.95, limited to the first 100 registrants.

For more details, check out the flyer: UPSIDE-DOWN Marketing Workshop Flyer

The workshop is sponsored by Make-it-Fly and MetaDog Rewards LLC. All profits go to benefit Kudo Communities.

1. DO NOT anger Dan Savage by comparing homosexual sex to beastiality. (SEE Santorum.com. No, this is not Rick Santorum’s official campaign website. It’s Dan Savage’s website and ranks higher in Google than the candidate’s official website.)
2. DO NOT forget to buy your name as a URL. (SEE newtgingrich.com which is really StopRomneysPiousBaloney.com. This is not the website of the presidential candidate.)
3. DO NOT forget to buy the negative URLs that could be connected to you. (SEE newtgingrichlies.com)
4. DO NOT admit you don’t know how to use email. (As did John McCain in the 2008 presidential campaign.)
5. DO NOT run anti-gay ads wearing the same jacket Heath Ledger wore on Brokeback Mountain. (SEE Rick Perry’s anti gay ad and it’s many parodies)
6. DO NOT make off the cuff “facts” that people can check within minutes. (SEE ALL CANDIDATES and most office holders.)
7. DO NOT try to make a high school student with a twitter account apologize for calling the Governor of Kansas a jerk. (SEE #heblowsalot on Twitter and the resulting coverage of the incident.)
8. DO NOT post pictures of your junk on Twitter. (And even if it’s accident, don’t email pictures like this AT ALL.) (See former Rep. Anthony Weiner.)

Remember Lorelei Lee? Marilyn Monroe played Lorelei in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Lorelei and her best friend Dorothy (Jane Russell) played two showgirls looking for love and diamonds. (Not necessarily in that order.) The highlight of the picture was Marilyn’s iconic performance of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

You’d think that Lorelei was the epitome of the ditsy blonde bombshell.  When I watched the movie again this week, I realized that Lorelei wasn’t anybody’s plaything. She had a plan for herself – marry her rich boyfriend – and score a tiara from a wealthy conquest. She didn’t waste her time with good looking men who couldn’t give her what she wanted. She set her goals and executed her plan.

Here’s what a marketer could learn from Lorelei:

1. Have a plan!

Most marketing happens randomly – a blog post now and then, a few posts on our Facebook page, a tweet. Plan your marketing efforts – whether it’s posting on social media or getting on radio – and schedule time to carry it out.

2. Take time to target your intended audience.

Lorelei had made up her mind to marry a rich man who would give her diamonds. She didn’t waste time on men who didn’t fit that criteria. Who are you spending your efforts on? Are they the audience you’re looking for?

3. Attract your intended audience by delivering the goods.

Know what they’re looking for. Lorelei’s intended wanted his vision of the ideal woman – gorgeous, innocent, and devoted to him. She never let him suspect she had a brain and a plan.

4. Listen to your audience and they’ll tell you what they want.

How can you become the go-to expert to your audience? Provide solutions to their problems and they’ll turn to you.

5. Keep your eye on the prize and be persistant.

Lorelei and Dorothy got the husbands of their dreams at the end of the movie. What is your business goal and how will you get it?

I love it when the people speak up.

Log in to Twitter and search on the hashtag @40dollars and you’ll see personal stories and political opinions galore as people sound off on the latest stalemate in Washington.

$40 a paycheck is the average amount ending the payroll tax cut will cost an American family. The House GOP rejected a Senate bill on Monday that would extend the cut for 2 months, giving both houses time to pass a bill extending the cuts for the rest of the year.

To get the public on their side, the White House turned to social media, inviting the public to post how losing $40/paycheck will affect their families. The response was immediate. According to the CNN blog:

You responded in force on Twitter using the hashtag #40dollars.  Early Wednesday morning there had been 1,000 tweets generated 723,638 impressions, reaching an audience of 585,405 followers using the hashtag within the past 24 hours, according to the website HashTracking.com. The website Topsy.com, which tracks similiar metrics showed that the hashtag had over 14,000 mentions. Needless to say, President Obama and the White House’s campaign drew the attention of Americans online.

Will it help to break the stalemate? Stay tuned.

This sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it’s not. It’s great to market your book and/or your services on free social media sites. The sites are free but your time is not. Time = money, whether you’re working for someone else or running your own business.

Once upon a time in the corporate world,

…social media gurus argued that since social media marketing is a conversation between friends and not a sales pitch, return on investment for these marketing activities could not be measured. These conversations were good for business and that was a good enough reason to do it.

The bosses in charge of the budgets saw it differently. In order to continue funding for social media campaigns, CEOs demanded proof that social media campaigns had a tangible – read profitable – benefit to the company.

You, too, as an author/entrepreneur need to see financial results for your social media marketing campaigns. To measure your ROI (or, return on investment) you need to do the following:

Step #1:

Write clear objectives as to what you want to accomplish with your campaign. Use concrete numbers, like “sell 500 copies of my book in the next quarter.” Or, “grow my mailing list to 5000 in by July of 2012.”

Step #2:

Establish your social media and website baselines before starting your campaign. Where are you now in your social media presence? Use tools like Google Analytics, Klout, and Hubspot’s new Marketing Grader to determine your current traffic, including unique and total visitors, incoming links and other sources of traffic, and what pages are getting the most visits. Look at your social media profiles to note your Facebook business page “fans,” your Twitter followers, number to retweets per week or month. Do you use Feedburner or another blog syndicator? Check how many subscribers you have. Do you have an ezine? How many subscribers do you have?

Spend some time going through your client records. How have your clients been finding you up to this point? Referral? Your website? Facebook?

Step #3:

Set a time frame to measure – weekly or monthly.

• For your reporting period, look at sales revenue, the number of transactions, the number of new customers, and the average sale.
• Use Google analytics, Facebook Insights, a customer questionaire, (and ask your new customers, if you can) to determine the cause and effect of your campaign.
• Look beyond the numbers to what happened as a result. For instance, does your increase in website traffic correlate to higher sales? Maybe you’re getting more referrals?

You’ll need to track this information consistently for a few months to see what patterns emerge.

Here’s the easiest thing to do after you see where you’re getting your new customers from: do more of that. If you’re seeing more business because of contests you’re running on Facebook, run more promotions like that. Your audience doesn’t seem to be on Twitter? Okay. One less profile to worry about.

Numbers and reports may be a bit tedious to do, but they can provide very exciting information on the best ways you can promote your business and make a living. And that’s pretty cool, isn’t it?

Well, I thought it was funny…

The Brownback Rule of Social Media: If you’re a politician, don’t pick a fight with a teenager on Twitter.

Maybe you’ve seen the story: Staff members for Kansas governor Sam Brownback tattled on a Kansas teenager, Emma Sullivan, who said something mean about the governor on Twitter. She ended her tweet with the hashtag #heblowsalot. They tattled to her high school principal, who tried to make the teen apologize to the governor. The teen refused.

(Excuse me while I have a flashback moment to my stint as editor of my high school newspaper. Did the administration censor the paper if we tried to print stuff they didn’t like? Of course they did. Could we do anything about it? No, they could pull the plug on our paper at any time.)

In the name of all of us high school journalists who were censored by the principal, bravo to Emma Sullivan who exercised her right to freedom of speech by tweeting the governor sucked and then by declining to apologize, saying “she didn’t want to give the governor any more power.” The governor has since apologized to Emma for his and his staff’s over-reaction. The twitterverse is still demanding that the principal also apologize for demanding she write an apology. It will be interesting to see if he does.

The lesson here? First of all, unless you wish to have your name used as a verb – “brownbacking” will now be defined as overreacting to criticism on social media – respond to legitimate criticism of your business or brand in a mature fashion. Ignore the silly stuff. You’ll just look like an idiot if you get involved in the cyber equivalent of a playground fight. Especially if your antagonist is a teenager with a twitter account.

Second of all, the old rules about how to control your message has long been thrown out the window. You have no control, no matter if you’re the governor of Kansas or a small business owner. Anybody with a twitter account, a blog, or a facebook page can say whatever they want. It’s up to you to monitor your online reputation and respond in a mature fashion when you need to.

And just remember, nobody likes a tattletale.

I’ve been working for months on a series of three webinars on how to use social media  marketing for business. Practiced them with a host of very patient friends, clients, and acquaintances. I finished tweaking the first one (again) this morning. The first class was scheduled for this afternoon. (I was going to start the series last week and had to postpone due to a bad cold. I still have a bit of a cough.)

Then the universe played a very bad cosmic joke. My content was tweaked, proofed, ready. I had even read the webinar service’s manual. I was ready to teach in half an hour. Then, my wireless router went out. No internet. I went upstairs, rebooted the router. It’ll come back on. It always does.

Not this time. My network had disappeared. Poof! Only 20 minutes to showtime and I had nothing. Nada. Bupkis. This was kind of like the bad dream where you’re in front of an audience and you realize you’re totally unprepared.

Well, I wasn’t unprepared. I was completely cut off from my audience due to the failure of a little black box. Now what?

In my panic, I remembered that I did have a live internet connection. I just couldn’t plug into it in the basement where my office is. But I could bring the computer to the modem. Two very rapid trips up the stairs with laptop, keyboard, mouse, notes and headset. Plugged in, and connected. Started to breath normally. All with 5 minutes to spare.

It did make a good opening story for the webinar. But I’d rather lead with something else next time.

Tomorrow (after I buy a new wireless router) I will add to my list of preparations for the next webinar.

Router goes out. Backup: use direct connection upstairs.

Hope I don’t need it again.

I taught a class a few nights ago for Animal University called Horse Sense for Business. At the end of the class, I mentioned several classes we have coming up for AU, including one on mindmapping. The response was an immediate “Yes!” from the participants. “The mindmap was a huge eye-opener for me,” said one. “It really helped me to see all of the possibilities of my business.”

Could it help you with your business or marketing plan?

Mindmaps are a great way to show the relationships between a central idea and related ideas and tasks. Here’s a video of mindmapping creator Tony Buzan on this concept:

My class got excited about seeing the layout of their services and products in a mindmap because it was the first time they had seen a visual representation of the services and products they could include in their businesses. Here’s a simple example of what we did:

I’ve used mindmaps to outline reports and marketing plans as well. I’ve been using an old version of Mindjet Mindmap lite for several years. Mindjet has a nifty feature that exports the outline in text form to use as the outline for a document.

I just downloaded a free version of iMindmap, Buzan’s mindmapping software to check that out. (I like the curvy branches and the pretty pictures.) For more choices, check out these sources:

LifeHacker, Hive Five: Five Best Mind Mapping Applications

Reviews on cnet

Wikipedia, List of concept and mindmapping software