With all of this talk about the replacement refs and officiating it occurs to me that we could learn a few lessons in running our small businesses.

Whether you’re a one man shop or a company with 200 employees (yes both are considered small businesses) our decisions about what is a good decision and what is not is based on both the rules we are evaluating everything by and our experience and ability in applying those rules. Just like the replacement refs we need to understand how to evaluate the parts of our small business. If we don’t understand the rules or standards to properly evaluate then we come to inaccurate conclusions. Just recently Kathryn and I (my partner and wife) were meeting with a small company that had not incorporated much marketing other than face to face networking. They especially had not incorporated social media or other forms of online marketing. Why? While they have begun to wonder if it has value to them as a small business they see it as a sink hole for their time and energy. They believe that if they go there, meaning social media, it will overwhelm them and consume their time. They are making decisions based on their lack of understanding of how to wisely use Social Media and the Internet to effectively build their small business and keep themselves top of mind in their potential customers mind.

To state it more clearly, they don’t understand the rules so their conclusions are not accurate and it is going to cost them business/market share in the future, unless they go back to the beginning and ask the right questions about how online marketing and especially social media works. It’s not easy. It will take time. There is also a lot of hype and misinformation that you have to sort through and they have started the process with us. And, it’s worth it! Whether they choose to market using social media and the Internet or not is less of a concern to me than if they make the decision on the rules that govern that arena rather than what they think the rules are based on their lack of understanding.

Our friend Michael Drew knows it. He has helped over 70 small business authors get their books on one of “THE” top four best sellers lists because he understand how to use online marketing to promote the authors. His new book, The Pendulum, that he co-wrote with Roy H. Williams is about understanding the rules of culture and how they shift. Both Roy and Michael have been successful because they understand the right rules and the right questions.

Many of the replacement refs in the NFL came to us from college football. Yes they had years of experience coaching football and yes it seemed to many people that football was football and they would do fine, but that was false. They didn’t understand the complex rules of the NFL and they didn’t understand how different they were than college football. They also didn’t have the understanding and experience to judge correctly when time was of the essence. Not knowing the correct rules to apply and knowing them well enough led to not knowing what to look for on the field, which led to at least two major mistakes.

1. Missing numerous fouls that should have been called and were not
2. Making incorrect calls that ultimately caused a team to clearly lose a game.

Here is the question for you. Are you evaluating correctly the issues and situations in your small business from your finances to your marketing and everywhere else? If not it could be costing you time, sanity and ultimately money.

The replacement refs made lots of mistakes over the last few weeks. Some of them happened and didn’t get noticed but finally one happened at the final moment of a heated game played on Monday night with the whole world watching. You never know if the next mistake is going to be the big one so it’s important to know the right rules to judge by.

Let me know what you think and if this applies to you and your small business. I want to know.

How do you buy advertising if you don’t know how to measure it? I usually measure advertising with the Arbitron ratings. They are as old as dirt in the radio business and they have their flaws. So why use them for radio advertising you say? The answer is that even though the old diary method is not very accurate we at least know everyone uses the same in-accuracies. It is like shooting a gun that the sight is out of whack. If you always use it like that then eventually you learn to shoot somewhere else to hit your target. Does that make sense? Even though the Arbitron diary has its problems in measuring advertising, it at least was consistent with those problems. After a few years the advertisers started to build systems that compensated for those in-accuracies. Also, after a few years advertisers started to know how to price advertising on a station and compare those prices more strategically.

The problem I am facing in our hometown of Chico is that the radio stations don’t want to pay for the ratings in this down economy, making measuring advertising that much harder. Two of the three radio groups have stopped paying for the ratings. So here is my question, how do I know what is a fair price for my clients if no one can see how well a station is doing? The answer is we can’t. Measuring advertising for clients is next to impossible. It’s a crapshoot at best. In the end it seems like the radio stations want us to just take their word for it and that just doesn’t work for me. I wonder what we’ll do? What do you think a solution might be?

When a plane is coming in for a landing the pilot has to take several things into account if they want to end up on the ground in one piece. These variables are the fixed aspects of the airport and the current conditions of the moment. Every time a plane lands, the conditions are different from the time before to some varying degree. Combine this with the uniqueness of every airport and you get a lot of different variables, and these variables cause the pilot to constantly adjust what he will do and when he will do it to land the plane.

Now, there are a few things that never change and two of those are:

1. The angle of approach
2. The angle of descent

Angle of approach refers to how straight the plane is when approaching the runway.

Angle of Approach

Angle of descent refers to how steep the incline is as the plane lowers in altitude.

Angle of Descent

Basically, Angle of Descent refers to how steep of an angle you are approaching the runway. The extremes are either falling straight down like a rock or being so low to the ground as you approach that you are skimming trees for miles before you even see the runway. Both of these are not very safe and somewhere in the middle is the ideal approach path. This is so important and so universal that every airport has special lights at the beginning of the runway that flash red when you are coming in too high or too low. When you are in between those two the light turns green and you’re all good. When you are in the correct position you have the best “Perspective” to see everything you need to as you interact with the runway.

When we interact with the people and situations around us we are always evaluating the conditions of the situation and how we are approaching them. The better we understand the conditions of our lives, as well as our own approach and the approach of others, the better we can communicate and understand perspective.

In business bad decisions happen more than we would like and when we look back it often occurs to us that if we had just known a few more facts or had just seen the situation from a new perspective or a new angle we would have been able to be more successful.

Perspective is so important that in my next blog I will talk more about how perspective actually affects business and how my perspective cost my company $40,000 dollars this past year.

Until next time, think about your perspective with the people and the challenges you have in your life. See if you can identify the angles you are approaching the subject from and if you can see any other way of looking at it.

If it’s not going well than maybe you’re not lined up to make a successful landing.

The Power of Testimonials for Your Business

When I’ve subscribed to the newspaper before, any newspaper, it eventually ends up going from the driveway to the recycle pile in our house within a week or two. It drives my wife crazy! Like I said, I don’t read the newspaper. I’m more like a subscriber than a reader. It’s not even that I have anything against newspapers in general, except they are super duper expensive to advertise in for what you usually get. The worst paper in the Country to advertise in is “The” paper in Indianapolis. They are the most expensive I have ever seen, but I digress.

One of the main reasons I don’t read the newspaper is that I don’t think they are very relevant for the time I have to invest in reading especially when I’m a slow reader. I read a lot but I have to be careful how I invest my reading time. So why, you might ask, would I start taking the Chronicle newspaper after you know all this about me? We’ll I just got my haircut by Christine, who has cut my hair once a month since 1997 and she just gave me a 45 minute testimonial about the SF Chronicle. She told me about how great it was and gave me lots of examples. She told me about how it has changed from the way it used to be and it is inspiring to her. Yes you read that correctly, she said it is inspiring to her! Since when was a newspaper inspiring?…

She told me that the photography is amazing in the print version, which infers to me that the quality of printing is really good. She told me it was instructive. It’s instructive towards innovation. It’s instructive towards California pride. It is instructive towards how we should live more upright honest lives and not focus on the crap. This doesn’t sound like any paper I’ve ever read. She had my attention.

It was even focusing on real people like the mayor of Oakland. Who evidently is a normal middle class lady that has a Hispanic background and went to Berkeley. Sounds normal to me. Christine also told me that the story highlighted that she was a normal looking woman which means she is not a cover girl model nor does she want to be. She is perfect just the way she is and Christine got all of this from the Sunday Edition of the San Francisco Chronicle.

These were just the highlights of my 30 minute haircut and my 45 minute testimonial. She was so excited and talked so fast that today, there was no dialogue like there usually is. Rather there was one 45 minute monologue.

So now I am going to subscribe to the San Francisco Chronicle… even though I don’t read the newspaper. Go figure. I wonder if the pictures will make any difference?

Does your company have testimonials like that about what you’re doing? Do you want to know how to create that kind of marketing and maybe get some help and encouragement doing it? Then Half a Bubble Out is your place and we are your people. Give us a call so we can help your company tell your story better.

When you lead in life it doesn’t happen in a vacuum nor is it just an external exercise of control. Leadership requires great thought and concern for where you will lead people and how you will do it. Every leader also needs council in life, and Bob Sprague has been one of those trusted voices to me and my wife Kathryn along the winding road of experience. When Bob talks about Leadership starting from within with Self-Leadership, I want to stand up on a table in a crowded room and scream, “YES, YOU HAVE TO START HERE, LISTEN UP!”

I believe Leadership is so important that it is 1 of the 8 parts of business we use to create a holistic view of business. These eight pieces – Leadership, Marketing, Finance, Management, Client Fulfillment, Lead Generation, Lead Conversion and Innovation/Creativity – are all foundational to business. If you don’t have any of them you will have a very difficult time running a sustainable business. I believe that if you are lacking in Leadership then you don’t have a chance of your business being sustainable – it’s that important. Leadership must be present and the kind of Leadership that is deep and powerful must start from within or it is a house of cards susceptible to any slight breeze.

If you are going to read any of the 737 million references to Leadership Blogs on Google then I would suggest that you include Bob’s new blog on Leadership. Read it, sign up on the RSS feed and every once in a while interact with it. It could help your small business go the long haul. When I discovered that Bob was going to write a blog on the subject it immediately caught my attention. I know Leadership is important and Bob Sprague’s wisdom and council on the subject have helped our company, Half a Bubble Out Marketing, make it into the top 30% of all businesses started over the last 35 years in America. That’s no small feat and without leadership we would have ended up in the small business graveyard a long time ago. So please, do yourself a favor. Add Bob Sprague’s Blog, http://www.personalclarity.me to your list of must reads. I think that most of you will be glad you did.

Thanks for reading,
Michael K. Redman

About two months ago, give or take a couple of weeks, Google updated the way that they grade websites and deem them eligible to show up on the first page for your search question.  This page is set apart for the most relevant websites based on how you asked your search question.  Most of the time this works well but sometimes a website shows up that is not very helpful.  This means you aren’t happy with it because it’s not useful or as Google would say, relevant to your query.  Often these sites show up because they are gaming the system in one way or another and that makes Google unhappy.  And when Google is unhappy they do something about it.  The latest update was nicknamedPenguin and Penguin changed some things for one of my clients. Here is the story.

We have a fairly new and small client that got hit pretty hard witht the new update. What I mean is that they were showing up on the first page for  several search terms and then they lost all of them.  That sucks! It took us completely off guard and we have been looking hard to get more clues about what happened.

We figured out several reasons for this mishap but today I was reading a blog by Dan Deceuster called “The Penguin Update and how Google identifies spam” when we figured out another huge problem. Mark Cutts of Google said they would go after and penalize websites that were, “engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings.” When I read this I realized the huge problem our client had that was probably causing a large percentage of his problem.

You see, our client had a link building company before us create literally thousands of links to their domain in a relatively short amount of time.  We knew about them when we started and knew that he had been taken advantage of since the majority of them were not even considered valid by any of the major search engines.  It occured to me after reading the blog article that these links where actually permanent examples, like evidence, left all over the internet telling Google that they in fact had been trying to manipulate the system in a spammy way.  Google has now figured out how to find this evidence and go after offenders whether you know it or not.  My client does not understand the problem or the severity and he didn’t know he had hired a company that would do things that hurt him.  His excuse is that there was no way to know.  The reality is that he chose someone based on low cost and picked someone without checking them out.  This is a huge lesson for us, our client and for everyone else, including you.

If you want to be found in Google and get more traffic to your website you must learn enough to make wise decisions when hiring an SEO company or an Internet Marketing firm.  Do you know their track record?  They don’t have to be rock stars to get you good results but they do have to be honest and trustworthy people.  Talk with them and see if your gut would trust them with your mother or your daughter.  If not find another company.

You also need to discover if they are competent at their craft.  Both Competence AND Character are at the foundation of trust and in this new world of Internet Marketing you need two things:

1. You must be marketing on the Internet to survive the long haul.
2. You need a company that is learning and growing because no one knows all the answers.  Good companies are watching how things change and trying to uncover why.

Are you marketing on the Internet?
Do you work with a company who are truly expert learners in this area?

If you said no to the first question then get going.  You cannot afford to wait.  Everyday you do means more people are getting in front of you.  If you said no to the second question then find a company that will help you and that you can trust. It is worth the time to figure it out.  That is what we do for our clients and it pays off in the end… if you’re patient.

Good luck and good marketing.

Google and April Fools joke make a great video and are awesome for Branding

Reputation

A brand is described many ways but as Marty Neumier put it so well in his book, “The Brand Gap,” it all boils down to your reputation. Your reputation is what people think of you at a conscious level and an unconscious level. Your reputation is what makes people like you or not like you. It influences whether people trust you or not, and it impacts what they say and do in regards to you or your company. Basically, reputation is an abstract word that we use to group all of the little things in life that give us some hint about who a person or company is. Do you have a reputation for being nice or mean a good dresser or a poor one?  Do you have a reputation for being conscientious or sloppy, timely or late, honest or dishonest? Whatever picture you have of a person is part of their reputation. There are many things that come together to give us an impression of a person or company and those things form a reputation. The conscious mind isn’t even able to keep up with all of these impressions, but your right brain or unconscious mind does and that influences our gut feelings and emotions on any subject. (The right brain is powerful and one of its big job descriptions is to take all the little pieces and then consider the whole picture).

Yes, brand and reputation are complicated beasts when you start to look under the hood, but when you just consider that everything you do impacts your reputation it becomes easier to impact how you influence it.  When I wrote that a brand is incremental, I was referring to all the little things and that is how we analyze it.  Imagine a line with “weak” on the left end and “strong” on the right end and lots of incremental hash marks along the line as if it were a scale from 0 to 100.

Scale

Every little thing that improves your reputation in a society, whether you consciously notice them or not, are positive attributes and move you further up the line towards 100.  Everything that takes  away from your reputation, no matter how small, are negative attributes that move you towards 0.  Now take all the little things about a person or a company, and I mean all of them, add all the positives and subtract the negatives and you get a relative score on how strong or weak your Brand or reputation is.

Many of these things are so small, like polished shoes or misspelled words, that on their own people say they are not significant, but when added up they shift our thoughts and behaviors.

A Brand is incremental and when you understand what to look for and how to influence it you reap the rewards of having a strong brand or reputation. In the next blog I will talk more about the little things and  how to know if something is worth your time.

Thanks for reading and let me know if this was helpful.

This week I was flabbergasted to see mind numbing, non descript marketing at a trade show in Vegas.  I was there to meet with a great client and also to further investigate his market space.  Some of his competitors were there, and many of others selling in that same industry.  The attached word cloud demonstrates a really good reason how mind numbing it was.

This cloud is taken from the program that lists all the vendor raffle prizes offered at the show.  Notice how large iPad is?  It is followed up by American Express and Kindle.  The more times the prize was offered the larger the word became in the word cloud.  iPad showed up more than any other word by far.  Translation: most companies were offering an ipad as their raffle prize.  Now, you might be thinking,“This sounds great to me!  I have more chances to win an iPad and I’ve been really wanting one.”  Well as an attendee it is good news but think with me for a moment on the purpose of a raffle at a tradeshow.

Purpose of a Trade Show Raffle

It is to get your attention to come over and listen to their “shpeel” about… whatever they have that you probably don’t need.  Why give something away?  Because people really don’t want to talk to you and as a company you are trying to, “entice them” to stop by and have a non threatening conversation while you try to have an invasive conversation with them.  Your goal as a company is to ask them where they’re from, maybe say something polite and interesting, and then launch into your “Carney” like sales pitch to possibly qualify them and get permission to scan their badge so you can either call them or send them the unsolicited emails after the show.  Which most of them don’t want.  That is why you need a raffle at a tradeshow and most companies know it, while they wouldn’t put it as crass as I have.

So there I am, walking the trade show gauntlet with the carnies barking from all sides, trying not to look anyone in the eye, and give them reason to start talking to me.  I was studying the booths and looking to see who stood out.  The answer was very few.  They all used the same types of displays and the same copy. My favorites were, “Talent Management” and “Innovation starts here.”

The word cloud was a useful tool that revealed what I had noticed on the floor. Most of the companies that were trying to stand out were saying and offering the same thing as everyone else. There is no fascination or sence of urgency to act if you can get the same thing everywhere.  This was marketing suicide for most of these companies and money wasted to boot.

Yes, sometimes I’m just looking for a hamburger and I want to know who sells one but when two or three are on the same intersection they need to tell me why they are different, significantly different or else I go with the least painful option.

These raffles aren’t a bad idea.  Sometimes it’s just fun to offer something to potential clients, but if your trying to stand out then by all means, take a minute to think and then stand out.  I really wonder how these companies will decide if this show was a success for them but somehow I think they’re measuring the wrong thing.

I promise you that if you do these 12 steps you will radically increase your chances of success over everyone else around you.

By the way, they’re only secret because they’re so obvious that very few people notice them, let alone follow them.

1. Discover what types of activities and situations encourage and energize you.

You can go a long way on your own happiness.

2. Look at what kinds of small businesses have those types of activities and situations.

Look hard. There is a business for every type of person because there is every type of customer.

3. Learn everything you can about that industry and learn all the time.

The more you understand your businesses landscape the better you can solve the right problems in a way that is sustainable for that environment.

4. Learn the fundamentals of small business.

Hard work is better than talent when talent doesn’t work hard. Fundamentals get you in the door as the entry fee. A man or woman who is skilled in their work will stand before Kings. They will not stand before obscure people.

5. Do the fundamentals of small business.

Knowing about something is not the same as knowing how to do it and doing it. This will kill a business before it gets started.

6. Be a good person not a shmuck.

People may buy from you because you have a good deal but they will keep buying if they like you.

7. Find counsel you can trust.

Wise people can help you see things that you will miss. Fools will only give you their opinion with no wisdom or understanding.

8. Learn who your company is and tell people clearly all the time and tell them so they can hear it.

It’s not what you say that counts; it’s what they hear.

9. Learn about Paradox.

In small business it is rarely, “Either/Or.” It is way more often, “Both/And.” This can save you a lot of trouble and a lot of wrong turns but it requires a good sense of balance.

10. Be Patient.

Timing is important. You cannot rush anything and come out with anything great. A good wine takes time to develop and mature. If you open the bottle too soon it’s bad and if you open it too late it’s bad. Have the courage to be patient and watch for the right timing for everything in your small business. It is what separates the masters from the novices.

11. Above all else Persevere.

Perseverance is the biggest, most hugest piece of the entire puzzle. Never give up, never surrender and then
know when to move on.

12. Finally, do it again.

Always go back to the beginning and relearn. Study, work, love people and persevere. If you think you’ve learned it all the first time you are missing out on the finest of lessons. You and your business are just like gold. Gold is heated to a melting point and then the impurities are skimmed off the top. This is elementary but by doing it over and over again the purest of form of gold is left behind and has had unparalleled value for ten thousand years.

Don’t be afraid of doing it all again. Find the gold in YOUR small business.