A flood of brand icons, company names, and logos overloads our senses every day.  After a while you come to flat out ignore nearly every advertisement you see.

• 100 different cell phone companies?  Ok, I no longer care.
• New Internet retailer?  Big Whoop.
• An app for that?  Droid does what?  STOP VIOLATING MY SANITY.

So the question is, if you are a small business owner and you want to get noticed, how can you compete?  How do you set yourself apart from the crap cluster?

The first step is understanding how little consumers are willing to invest in learning about your company.  Assume that you have somewhere between one and five seconds to convince them of your value.  And that’s generous!  You need to get your point across in as few words as possible. Hence………the tagline.

A tagline sums up your company’s unique value in a quick phrase.  For example,

“Join the Navy.  See the world.”

In one second you perceive the benefit of being in the Navy.  Or how about,

“When it Absolutely Positively Has to be there Overnight.”

This one is a bit long but you instantly understand why FedEx is better than the other guys.  In contrast, many taglines are generic and don’t point to a specific unique value.  Instead they say pretty much nothing and as a result are not set apart from the crap waterfall.  Here are a few:

“Driven To Excellence”

“Passion to Achieve”

“Doing what we do best”

Can you guess what industry these are from?  Probably not.  As you can see, these taglines can be substituted for any company and do not explain how the companies are any different from the competition.  So how to you avoid a generic tagline and instead communicate differentiation?  As explained in this post about building a brand, the first step is understanding what unique value your company offers.  In other words, what is your competitive advantage?  Try filling in this statement for your brand:

[My brand] is the number one choice for _____________(your specialty).  That’s because only [my brand] ________________________(A unique reason why: a superlative ingredient, process, or service that others don’t).

As an example: Hefty Bags are the number one choice for tough, unbreakable trash bags. That’s because they’re the only ones made with triple-polymer plastics.

You won’t get this on the first try.  Write out 10 or more different versions of this statement and narrow it down to the few that communicate your specialty the best.  Test it out on your friends, partners, and anyone that is willing to help.  The more feedback you can get on these statements the better.  Once you have one that you are confident in, it is time to transform it into a tagline.  The idea here is to take your statement and make it into a concise and catchy phrase that people will understand instantly.

When coming up with ideas, ask yourself these questions:

1. Does it directly state or specifically support your specialty?  (Does it promise a difference I want to buy?)

2. Is it ownable?  If another company could substitute its product name for yours and say the same exact thing the answer is no.

3. If the answer is yes to 1 and 2, then is it evocative, colorful, or phonetically memorable?

I tend to spend a fair amount of time with a thesaurus, substituting different words in and out until I have a phrase that both rolls off of the tongue and conveys the specialty well.  And of course after I have some ideas I’m happy with, I test them!  Again, ask people both inside and outside of your company to choose the best tagline and use these responses to help you with your decision.  As small business owners we don’t have all of the funds to do massive testing on unbiased samples.  However, we can test out our taglines on human beings and this will often give you great feedback on how your tagline is interpreted.

For a more detailed description of how to write a tagline, I highly recommend Why Johnny Can’t Brand by Bill Schley.  This book walks your through the process of branding your company without spending a ridiculous amount of money on a branding company.

If you have any tips on developing a tagline that sticks, please share.

Brains! Brains! I mean…Revenue! Revenue!

The scenario I speak of is when promotions are spread through social media, are accessible by anybody, and actually cost your company revenue.  The most popular stat I hear when people discuss the value of social media is Dell’s $3 MM twitter account.  It’s an old figure, but one that still holds up in many discussions.  Nowhere have I seen mentioned how Dell is estimating how many people are actually gaming twitter to get a deal on something they were already planning on buying.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t buy anything online without looking for promotions on Google or Twitter Search.  If I were to make a $60 purchase marked down from $80 with a deal on twitter, a standard approach would be to look at my $60 in revenue as a success for twitter, and a tally for it’s value.  However, I was going to buy anyway, now twitter has actually cost the company $20.  That’s an $80 dollar swing in recording the impact of that deal.  Gauging this impact is something that’s very difficult, if not impossible to achieve right now, but acknowledging that it exists and making an educated guess goes a long way towards discovering the true value of your online efforts.

If you’ve got any tips for weeding out the “gamers” of social media deals, please share.

How to Ask a Question on LinkedIn from Sean McVey on Vimeo.

In analysis, go with pessimism.  The glass is half-empty, the data is limited and biased, and somebody probably pasted a number incorrectly somewhere along the line.  These are bad things that happen.

A storm is brewin’!

Think about the people you take advice from when it comes to your business.  Did you trust them right away without getting to know them?  Of course not, you only listen to their input and let it impact your decision-making because you are comfortable with them.  You know who they are, where they’re coming from, and their flaws.  This puts you in a good position to process their advice.

If you’re using data to drive decisions in your business, the same vetting process is necessary.  Data is not a purely truthful thing.  It is rife with limitations and flaws and can lead to some bad decision-making if used improperly.  When dealing with data, here are three simple questions you can integrate into your routine to reduce errors and improve your work:

How was this collected? Avinash Kaushik recently wrote a post on Competitive Intelligence Data Sources and hits on a lot of great issues that come up when collecting data.   Think about the actual moment at which this data was collected.  Was this measurement taken when a search was conducted?  Was it when a particular button was clicked or when a page was viewed?  When does the timer start and stop?  Putting yourself in that mindset will help reveal some places in which the collection methodology might break down.

Who were the subjects? If it’s data collected through an installed toolbar, think about what downloading that toolbar says about the people you just collected data from.  Are they likely to be more tech-savvy than your average audience?  Are they an accurate representation of the customers you are targeting?  Every step leading people to the point of data collection is an opportunity for bias to rear its ugly head.

Does it smell right? When dealing with data, it’s important to do a quick sanity check and make sure things look reasonable on a high level before spending time on more detailed analysis.  Take a look at the average values and distributions of your core metrics.  Are the values generally in line with what you’d expect?  Are there outliers and what might have caused them?  Are there any data types or figures that aren’t what you were expecting?  From the actual tools that collect data to the transfer to excel, errors are a part of the process.  They will happen, and it will help to find any major issues right away instead of down the line.

If you can introduce a healthy amount of skepticism into your analysis, it will go a long way towards improving your efforts.  It’s important to assume there are issues until proven otherwise.  It’s tedious and not particularly fun to dig into things in this detail, but it is 100% necessary.  There can be 99 things that are right about your data, but it only takes 1 thing that is wrong to ruin everything.  You need to poke, prod, and question everything that comes in if you want high-quality results.  It is worth it.

If you have any tips or tricks on gaining more trust from your data, please share.

Author’s Note: This is most likely an attempt to validate certain pain in the ass analytic behavior.  The author acknowledges this.

You are in charge of marketing your company online.  You know what a blog is and you know that most businesses have one.  However, you are smart enough to not follow the rest of your industry without understanding why.  So you ask yourself……Does my company really need one?  What goals does a blog even accomplish?

The answer is that in most situations, a blog can really help your business if you use it correctly. Well thought out, targeted content accomplishes the following three goals:

1. Prove your expertise in a specific industry

2. Engage with customers and allow for a two-way conversation

3. Increase your chances of being found in search engines

With over 9 million blogs out there (and 40,000 new blogs starting every day), there is certainly a high volume of C-R-A-P out there.  Attention hungry publishers with poor writing skills across the world will continue to fill the blogoshere with a waterfall of useless information. Fortunately, search engines like Google have gotten pretty good at separating the good from the bad, which means if you are writing truly valuable content in your blog, you will reach your audience.  Customers in your industry most likely do read blogs for free information and there is a good chance they are finding your competitors’ blog entries as we speak.

Now before you go sign up for Wordpress and start pumping out your great blog ideas, take awhile to determine your focus.  Many companies will write just to write (because just like you, someone told them a blog is important), and ultimately accomplish nothing.  Publishing the latest news in your company is not going to attract a following.  Publishing how great your latest vacation to the Bahamas was is not going to get you a following.  You must think about your target customers and what is valuable to them.  If you are selling to green business owners, blog about how to green your business.  If you are a health food company, blog about raw food recipes.  Give the people what they want!  Your blog is not all about you.  It is about sharing your expertise with your potential customers, adding value to their lives in one way or another, and developing a trusting relationship.

You may be thinking, “This is great and all, I could see this working for a certain type of company.  But my industry isn’t exactly social. I don’t think my customers read blogs or use search engines to find us…”  I would say that you may be right.  Blogging isn’t right for every industry.  BUT, don’t jump to any conclusions.  Here are examples of companies in not-so-social industries that have successfully driven traffic to their websites via blogging:

-Immigration Options – Immigration attorneys that run a blog targeting immigrants.  Posts such as ‘How do I live and work in the United States’ bring value to their target audience and drive relevant traffic.

-Palomer Technologies – Specializes in automated microelectronic and optoelectronic packaging stystems….wow.  Yet they have a highly successful blog giving valuable information to customers interested in that specific niche.

-Graco – Specializes in parenting and child’s products.  Their blog does not tout their latest product, but instead engages with parents by offering advice on raising children.

-Catch the Wave -Sells pools.  Their blog will tell you absolutely everything you need to know about anything pool related.

As you can see, you don’t need to be in a glamorous industry to write engaging, helpful content and pull in relevant traffic.

When Not to Start a Blog

Creating a steady flow of valuable content is not easy.  It requires a full commitment from the top down in an organization.  Do not start a blog for your business just to say you have a blog.  It will waste your time and make you look like a fake.  As an example, the company Inmar is a shipping company, and probably a great one.  However, their ‘thought leadership’ blog has not been updated since Febrary 2009.  This makes the company look like they just don’t care.

As you can see, blogging can help your company achieve higher traffic as well as credibility.  Be careful before you jump in however; this is not a light commitment and can easily backfire.

I hope she won a desk and chair because that looks uncomfortable.

1) Read Critically – I’m not saying you should be negative, but put yourself in the position of a critic.  What was the author’s main point?  What did they do well and poorly?  Consider the places in which you’d really like more information, and others where you might disagree and why.  If you had to write a quick review of the post, what would it say?  If you can answer this question, you’ve got some good material for a comment.

2) Read All Other Comments – Other people’s input is a great resource for additional thoughts on the post, plus they’re more likely to engage you in conversation than the author.  If the author is getting 30 comments, they’re not likely to respond to everybody meaningfully, but if you include another person’s input in your comment, they may be.  You also get the added bonus of not just regurgitating material that somebody else just produced.  Nobody likes a regurgitator.

3)  Comment Conversationally – Think about the blog like a conversation at a cocktail party.  Somebody has just told a great anecdote and now it’s your turn to respond.  If you simply say “That was great!  I look forward to the next!” it’s certainly nice for the person to hear, but there is absolutely nowhere for the conversation to go.  If you instead respond with a question about the story or how it relates to some of your own experiences, you’re more likely to start a meaningful conversation.

Hopefully this helps you engage your community a bit better.  If you’ve got any tips that work for you, please share.

Think about your company’s website.  Do you expect visitors to read your entire homepage, evaluate all of the links, and make an educated decision on where they would like to navigate?  Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of your visitors are reading very little of your content.  Instead, they are scanning.  They are scanning until they find the first logical option.

To grasp this concept visually, take a look at the graphic below.  Steve Krug, a website usability consultant and author of Don’t Make Me Think, gives us a look at how our visitors are really navigating your website:

The details of this graphic are not important.  What is worth noting is the lack of thought people actually put into surfing a website (illustrated by minimal orange lines in the second example).

Think hard about how you scan web pages.  Normally, you are in a hurry because the internet is primarily used to save time.  Also, consider how good you are at finding what is important to you in the first few seconds.  You look for bold headings, important buttons, and keywords related to your end goal.  In other words, if you are looking to find the price of a necklace, you are not going to read every link on the web page and evaluate your choices.  Instead, you will scan the graphics and links that stick out until you find something close to what you’re looking for.

The overarching lesson from this post is to not overestimate the time and energy people put into reading your website.  When you are designing a page, remove information that is not absolutely necessary and focus on emphasizing a few important options that will help your customer and ultimately help you.

Scenario 1 – Real life

Friend: “Want some pizza?”

Me: “No”

Scenario 2 – Awesome Scratch & Sniff World

Friend: “Want some pizza?”

Me: “No”

Friend: *Scratch* *Scratch* “How about now?”

Me: “I’ll take 10”

When it comes to marketing, that connection to the senses, that feeling makes a world of difference.  Obviously, you can’t transmit the smell and taste of your product, but looking at what a firm like Nike is doing, they’re giving you the feeling that you’re on the floor with Kobe Bryant.  To show a customer a shoe is one thing, to put them in a place where they can imagine being on a court is another completely.  When working to promote something, ask the following:

1)      What’s the feeling that encourages people to buy and what will they feel during the experience? For the pizza, it’s hunger that stimulates the sale.  For the shoes, it’s the thought of being out on the court using them.

2)      How can I re-create that feeling? Pictures, audio and videos are a great way to tap into that feeling in your customers.  Anything that allows them to imagine themselves eating your food, wearing your clothes, or reading your book is a powerful thing.

It’s certainly not easy, but it goes a long way towards connecting with customers.

Have you come across any marketing that did an especially great or poor job of making you feel the product?

Ho-Ly Crap!

This is a theory of impending doom I developed the first time I laid eyes on the fail whale.  Was this an overreaction?  Perhaps, but for a moment I started to think about what life would be like if the internet actually ceased to exist.  While nowhere near comprehensive (I might be overlooking the bits about our infrastructure crumbling, mass hysteria, etc), here were the first things that came to mind:

I probably need to find a new job. I like this job, and I think we’re doing some pretty good stuff, but it’ll be difficult to be an online marketer when there isn’t an online.  I bet there was a guy, likely named Phineaus, who was on the precipice of creating google for the telegraph.  All of a sudden Alexander Graham-Bell comes through with his fancy voice-transmission machine (a name it goes by to this very day, if I’m not mistaken) and makes the medium obsolete.  Bad day for Phineaus, who, like me, needed a new job.

A big focus of our work is actually on humanizing the world of online marketing.  Ultimately, it’s still about making connections with people, whatever the medium.  If we can do that, maybe we’ll find a home via another channel, though we’ll probably have to change the company name.

Are we worse off? One of the things I distinctly remember from my college lectures was a discussion of how people tend to grow into the capacity afforded by new technology.  The example used was washing machines.  Say people used to spend an hour a day hand-washing and hanging up the 6 garments they owned.  Then the washing machine comes along, and that load can be finished in 10 minutes, giving them an extra 50 minutes of the day to frolic about.

That is one heckuva frolic

Solid in theory, but now instead of having 6 garments, you feel flush with this extra time and capacity, and buy more.  Before you know it, you’ve got 100 garments, and it takes you an hour to do your laundry again.  You’ve got more clothes, but you’re sure not saving any time.  I feel the same way about the internet in a lot of ways.  It allows me to consume an unimaginable amount of content, but honestly, most of it is crap, I’d be okay with less, and it’s probably costing me more time than it’s saving.

Some other brief considerations:

What will happen to my Webkinz?

Without Hulu, will somebody step in and provide a stand-alone viewing device for these shows?  I hope they do and it can fit into my living room.

What would you miss most of all if the internet went down?

Note: All images were found using http://search.creativecommons.org/ and will be removed if their use is not acceptable.

Beware of the Internet Nerd

We have been conducting interviews for graphic designers this past week and using Craigslist as our main source for applicants.  I just wanted to write a quick post that illustrates how not to apply for a job.  Of course most of the emails were poor (on Craigslist you usually get about 10% great responses, 20% decent, and 70% awful) but this particular one was kind of funny.  The person simply wrote the following:

“[First Name Last Name] is a Programmer, Designer, Developer, Google Analytics / Website Optimizer, Video Director, Filmer, Video Editor, Photoshop, Documentum, Ruby, mySQL, PHP, AJAX, SSO, SAML, osCommerce, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, WordPress, Flex, Flash, Moodle, Sakai, Project Manager Advisor, Tech, Coder, Lead Generator, Team Manager, Staff Coordinator, Mobile, Apps, Marketing, Podcaster, Fluent Spanish, Fluent French, HTML, Javascript, CSS, Databases, MySQL, WebEx, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google, Yahoo, Bing, D2L, eCommerce, Analytics, eMailers, PR Campaigns, Advertising, Metrics, Trade Events, Channel Sales, Blogs, MS Office, Sharepoint, PC, Mac, Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Brand Engineer, Web Architect, LCMS, Java, ASP, CMS LAMP Open Source, IE8, Firefox, Safari, Adobe CS4, Contractor Consultant, Telecommuter, 24/7/365 Support, Skype”

First of all, I didn’t know a person could be a Joomla, Drupal, or a Bing (I really did laugh outloud reading this).  Second, and more importantly, nobody wants to hire someone that says they do all of these things.  Any good employer wants someone who works hard to be good at a few things.  In other words, we are looking for a specialist.  I doubt this person can do all of these things adequately.  If they could, they would be super human and probably would not need Craiglist to find work.

Lesson of the day: Focus on getting really good at a few things.  Don’t pretend to be ‘that internet guru’ that knows how to magically manage every buzz word you have ever heard of.

Have you met any ‘Internet Gurus?’  How do they make you feel?  What’s your method for pitching yourself to employers?