http://www.opusresults.com/blog/

Selling services is selling people - primarily yourself and secondarily your firm as a group of diverse people with a similar, cohesive goal. So, where do you start building that brand and planting the seeds that grow the elusive word-of-mouth success?

Start with your cube neighbors. Do they know what you’re about and what you’re doing? Can your employees, associates, partners, accountant, attorney, and current customers recite your elevator pitch? Are you staying in contact with them with news, developments, accomplishments? It’s a captive audience and they can be your biggest advocate.

Don’t set off the BS alarm. Start with talking in plain English, everywhere. On your website, in written and oral communications, in your collateral material. Buzzwords are for you and your comrades. The people don’t get them and glaze over when you use them. Not a good thing.

This is the first step to what James Gilmore and Joseph Pine term “exceptional authenticity” in their book Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want. Gilmore and Pine remind service providers in particular that “people tend to perceive as authentic that which is done exceptionally well, executed individually and extraordinarily by someone demonstrating human care.”

Become that helpful, smart coworker. Be a thought leader in your area of expertise and give away your ideas at every turn. Become an expert and the media, other influencers, and eventually the right customers will stop by your cube and form a line.

Use the web as a forum for raising your stature. Blog, write and distribute white papers and case studies about what you’re doing (psssst - see the MCT blog). Speak at events. Call reporters back within five minutes when they do call you.

Tell your story until your voice fails - or until you are promoted. Individual self-promotion and professional services self-promotion is essentially the same thing. The key is creating and refining efficiency in your message - meaning discovering and developing your spiel, then creating all the fun stuff - logos, taglines, websites, printed materials, ads and press releases.

The day of my first-ever trip to NYC was the day after Sonny Bono was tragically killed on the ski slope. The page one image of the tabloid showed a distraught Cher overwritten with the bold headline, “I’ll Miss You, Babe.” For some twisted reason, that paper made it into my briefcase and back home to NC. And, no, I don’t still have it.

Now the Post is adding video to its web presence. Look out tmz.com, there’s a new sensationalist on the block. With tmz’s new television counterpart, once again the Post is behind the technological curve, but this foray should be interesting nonetheless.

NFL Films, the $50M 300-employee adjunct to the hallowed league has filmed every game since 1962 on moody 16mm film. If you’re not familiar with the unmistakable three-quarters speed replay with orchestral background music, then you’re just not a football fan.

Now, according to Wired, the group is working to digitize the entire collection. So far, they’ve made it back to 1992 and have 110TB of football history-slash-data.

The driving reason for this is to provide easily editable footage for the expanding NFL Network, which opens the vault for fans of this stuff. Let’s hope going forward they never change that “mythology” achievable shooting with authentic 16mm film.

While overall spending is down 0.5%, Internet, national magazines, national Sunday supplements and outdoor are on the rise, as is smaller-market spot TV.

A better use of time and resources, writes Mininni, is to get clear, usable feedback from customers:

Getting consumer feedback is a vital aspect of conducting an internal audit. Spending time, capital, and human resources on this exercise, if done thoroughly, is never fruitless. Never a waste of money. It’s the best bang for your marketing buck.

In fact, the results may surprise some executives and lead them back to reinstituting those products, those policies, and those brand values that made them successful in the first place.