I’m really winding down now, taking a few days off, and hoping you’ll do the same. Wishing for peace. Goodwill towards all. Warm, happy, safe, loving holidays to you. And thank you. Here’s another (third this week) beautiful picture of Yosemite in winter.

(Photo credit: Jeff Banke, Shutterstock)

Christopher is six years old. That’s his picture here to the right, taken a few months ago.

Last week one of his teachers shared this with me: She asked him what he does when he’s frustrated. He answered:

“Stop. Breathe. Think.”

He’s not a genius or anything like that, so I doubt he invented that solution all by himself. But still, it’s a really great answer, don’t you think?

In case you’re wondering, my post here yesterday was also subtitled Holidays Part 1. (I did that in invisible ink, so you wouldn’t see it there. But it was.)

For part 2, keeping on with my holiday theme of moving back a bit from business, reflecting on what’s really important in life (even if just for a while, around this time), I’d like to refer back to some earlier posts I’ve done, before 2009, that reflect the same “and having a life in the meantime” theme that’s part of the charter of this blog (see the subtitle there, in the banner?). You may have seen some of my more recent posts in this same motif (which, by the way, seem to bring me a lot of traffic), such as the what business schools don’t teach, or 10 ways to save your life from your business, or 10 lessons learned in 22 years of bootstrapping. These others are from more than a year ago:

• Tune In, Turn On, Do Your Business.
• Easier to Get a New Job than A New Spouse.
• An Old Guy Reflects on Changing Dad Roles.

(Photo: Jeff Bank/Shutterstock)

This is Monday of the first of two holiday weeks. This is a good time to pull back a bit, reflect on things from a different perspective. It’s really good that our various religions, cultures, and traditions remind us, every once in a while, to slow down and think. Especially this year, which has been a tough one for a lot of us, an especially difficult year for small business, entrepreneurship, economics, health care, and politics.

Let’s pause a bit from normal business. Let’s think about what matters most, whatever that is, for each one of us. And then ask whether the way we spend ourselves – time, effort, stress, dreams – matches what’s most important to us.

One thing I’d like to suggest, is looking for the common denominators we can all agree on. Like compassion. That ought not to be controversial.

I don’t mean to be “preachy” (my daughter’s word). When I get all goody-goody like this, please don’t ask my wife about it. I can be as hypocritical as the next person, but jeez, at least we can remind each other once in a while, no? In this context, I’m really glad the well-known words of wisdom are “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Instead of “let he (or she) who is without sin write blogs.”

Especially during the holidays.

And thank you for reading this blog. I like writing it and I’m grateful that my readership has grown a lot this year. Thanks for linking here, thanks for tweeting here, and thanks especially for your comments.

(Photo credit: Winter in Yosemite Valley, by Peter Weber, via Shutterstock)

Measurability and accountability in marketing is a luxury we pretty much have now but we didn’t always have. Before the Web, we often guessed what would work, then spent the money to place the advertising or do the event or distribute the collateral. Then we waited, and hoped it was working. Then we’d guess again afterwards about whether it had worked or not.

Sure, we’d ask customers where or how they’d heard of us, but most of them didn’t know. Less than a third would even be able to answer that question. Of those, half would answer wrong (like mentioning a publication that we’d never advertised in).

That was pretty much it in the 1980s and early 1990s. We didn’t have clicks, click-through, search terms, conversion rates, and all that. Metrics. Direct mail, which is used so much less these days, was the best for measurability and accountability; some companies used it more than other marketing tools because of that advantage.

But nowadays, here’s the rub: do we now devalue marketing efforts we can’t measure?

For example, getting mentioned in a major publication. Or being included in somebody’s book. What if those marketing wins produce a value we can’t measure? We don’t know how many people have purchased because of them. We’ll never be able to tell how many people saw the mention and then visited the website, or, better yet, bought the product. Does that make those marketing efforts less valuable? Do we start underestimating and under-using these parts of the marketing mix because we can’t produce the metrics?

I guess many of us would like to think PR has fundamentally changed in the last 30 years, but frankly, not so much. At the core, some critical parts of it are built in. And they haven’t changed.

How would I know? I’ve been on both sides of this table. In the 70s I read press releases as a foreign correspondent for UPI and Business Week and others. In the 80s I read them as a monthly columnist for a software magazine. Then I became client of PR, company president, paying for press releases. Now I’m writing again, monthly columns in several publications, and this and other blogs, so I’m reading them again.

And wow, I have to say, so many of these things are boring and self-centered. They lead on themselves and why they care, rather than on what’s new and why anybody else would care. Person X has published a book is boring; give me something interesting about the book. Company Y announces a new product is boring; give me something the new product does for me, or for other people. Man bites dog, not dog bites man, please.

1. Make it Newsworthy

The news in media still matters.  I’m amazed at how many would-be press releases start out with totally self-centered boring “XXXX company announces the release of YYYY product” as if anybody really cared about it. Boring. What’s the news angle there? Give them a hint at the headline of the story. What’s new? Maybe it’s the first, or the biggest, or the oldest; it needs to be something worth highlighting. The first cell phone that shoots darts. The first manure-powered car. Put that in the first sentence.

2. Make it Interesting

Has everybody forgotten that fundamental principle of good business letter writing (emails too), that you start with “you” rather than “I”? That extends to press releases too. Instead of the I-focused “our company announces” how about starting with “Now you can get XXX” or “Do you need YYY”? It’s like headlines. Ask a question. Generate self interest. Focus on the benefit to the reader.

3. Make it Surprising

We’re talking here about media, so think of it as headlines again: surprising generates interest. This is great for surveys and research announcements, for example. Find the most surprising information in there, and make that the lead. A recent Kauffman survey found that typical founders are married with children and well-educated and strive to rise above their lower-middle-class heritage. So they led the press release with that. I found it surprising. And that’s a key. Even if it isn’t really new, surprising works very well.

Conclusion

Yes, I know the math of my saying the first three commandments is off, but it turns out that when you look at them, all three of them are essentially the same thing. It’s about the headline, or the lead. Make them read on. Make it the core of the first paragraph. Then quote somebody in the next paragraph, then get down to the which company announces what.

(Photo credit: Chepko Danil Vitalevich/Shutterstock)

Honestly, except for the name itself, I’ve never cared or wondered whether the author of Men With Pens was man or woman. It’s a good blog for writers. I did assume man, of course, because of the name of the blog, and the byline. This isn’t something I think about.

But I was shocked to read Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants as a post in CopyBlogger yesterday. It turns out that James Chartrand, author of the Men With Pens blog, @menwithpens on Twitter, is a woman, not a man.

Why do I care? I don’t care that she’s a woman and not a man. It makes no difference to the value of the content.  But I do care about the story she (James Chartrand) tells, and why she uses a man’s name.

Taking a man’s name opened up a new world. It helped me earn double and triple the income of my true name, with the same work and service.

No hassles. Higher acceptance. And gratifying respect for my talents and round-the-clock work ethic.

Business opportunities fell into my lap. People asked for my advice, and they thanked me for it, too.

Did I quit promoting my own name? Hell yeah.

I do believe that the difference between genders is the most interesting thing in creation. But I don’t believe in gender differences in jobs or opportunity and particularly not in writing. My favorite bloggers are about half and half, men and women. I just want the posts to be useful, interesting, amusing, and good. I’m as likely to read Pamela Slim or Anita Campbell as I am to read Seth Godin or John Jantsch. I like to think the world has come a long way since I was born in 1948. That the chauvinism we took for granted without even thinking about it in the 1950s and 1960s has given way to a better, more equal world.

Maybe so; but “more equal” isn’t the same as “equal.” Damn. Ask James Chartrand about that.

Everybody should read Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants. And everybody who cares about writing and blogging should subscribe to her blog – not because of her gender, or her surprising revelation about gender disguised, but, rather, because it’s got a lot of good content.

Your business or your life? The nagging question comes up a lot. Recently I saw this startling statement:

Maximizing your chance for success means sacrificing health and family.

That was in this post by Jason Cohen on VentureBeat. He’s serious. He quotes Mark Cuban and one other successful entrepreneur. He says you can’t get it all done otherwise. Build your business first, then build your life. Yeah, right. Like business gets easier at some point? When it grows? Good luck with that.

Logical flaw: for every successful entrepreneur who cites sacrificing health and family as the key to success, there are 10 others who say sacrificing health and family is a tragic mistake. Another logical flaw: millions of people sacrificed health and family and weren’t successful. All their sacrifice did was ruin their lives. Nobody quotes them. They call that survivor bias.

Personally, I don’t buy the passion, obsession, sacrifice all for your business philosophy. Success in life can be something different than purely sales, growth, profits, and celebrity as an entrepreneurial success. Not many of us end up as top-ten world-class entrepreneurs, and, for the rest of us, having a life can be way more important. The sacrifice doesn’t cause success. It’s a rationalization. So I’d like to suggest two sets of rules to help you save your life from your business. The first five are fundamental rules. The second set, five more, are suggestions more than rules; different ways to think about things; reminders.

First, the five fundamentals. I consider these practical, realistic, actionable rules that are good for everybody. For the record, four of the five are rules that I’ve lived with for a long time. Two of them thanks go to my wife and not me; and the fifth, the exercise one, I learned the hard way, by not doing it. I promise you that you can live by all five and not have to sacrifice business success for any of them. These will help you keep your balance:

1. Develop and honor meal times with people you love. For me and my wife, as we built our business, it was about family meals, dinner time, once a day. We made the family dinner a priority. During crunch times, we’d stop, have dinner with our kids, and then go on later (see point 3, below). And you don’t need a marriage and children to make this rule important. Do it your way, not mine. It applies just as well to any relationship that’s important to you.
2. Schedule vacations long in advance. If you like what you do in your business, you’re always going to have trouble getting away. There will always be a good business reason to not go on vacations. If you’re scheduled long in advance, then the vacation is on the calendar. As you talk to clients, schedule business events, and generally work on the business, your vacation shows up, and you naturally work around it.
3. Get used to working at home. So you have a lot of work but you tear yourself away, take your dinner time, spend some time in real life, and then later on, when everybody else is watching dumbing and numbing television, you can get back on the computer and catch up with your obsession. That requires good Internet connection and related tools, like online productivity tools, GoToMyPC, and the like.
4. Don’t obsess; plan. Don’t wander through the rest of life with business thoughts running through your head like a helicopter background noise in your dreams. Take a few deep breaths. To get the business-helicopter-mind out of your head keep the planning realistic. Planning gets a lot of things out of your head and into the plan. When you wake up at night obsessing, go to your planning. Write it down. Relax, and go back to sleep.
5. Get regular exercise. I’ve been there: It’s so easy to put off exercise because you’re worried about the business. “I have too much to do, I don’t have time for exercise,” you tell yourself, and it becomes a rationalization to dive back into that project or those emails. But there’s a trick to exercise: you get more time back, in productivity, than what you put into the exercise. Seriously: put in 45 minutes 3-4 days a week and you’ll get back an hour of productive time for every half hour you spend. It has to do with sleep, stress, and mental health.

And then, after the fundamentals, five fine touches, embellishments, not-so-universal, but maybe still useful:

1. Do something you can believe in. It’s not just finding the best business opportunity; it’s finding one you believe in. There’s quality of work as well as quantity, and high quality makes high quantity easier to live with. Make sure that when you take a step back from it, every so often, you can see how what you do made other lives better.
2. Acknowledge risk. Don’t bet what you can’t afford to lose. Understand the risk you take. Talk about it with the other people in your life, so you don’t feel all alone with the risk. Think about the worst case. Learn to live with it.
3. Don’t clam up. Share carefully. Be able to talk about business problems, safely, with at least one other person in your life. Get out of the let’s solve them mode, and into the let’s just talk about them so creative juices can percolate. People who care about you take silence as being something like walls and barriers. Secrets are stressful. Sharing relieves stress. But be careful, mind the framework and parameters of sharing, people have to know when you don’t want to be told the obvious feedback.
4. Understand that you make mistakes. Acknowledge your mistakes, analyze them, and them package them up in your mind and store them somewhere out of site, somewhere where you can access them occasionally to help avoid making the same mistakes again, but, on the other hand, where they won’t just drive you crazy.
5. Tell the truth. Then you don’t have to keep track of which lies you told to which people. It’s hard enough to manage stress without having to manage complex alternate realities.

None of the above guarantees business success, but none of it is really going to get in the way of your success either, and it may help you stay sane in the meantime. Think about this: my wife taught me, early in our 40-year-marriage, that time is the scarcest resource, way scarcer than money. And some day you’re going to turn 60. Unless you die first.

(Image: Kenneth V. Pilon/Shutterstock)

One thing I’ve seen forever is the power of a strong simple reason to buy (if you like buzzwords, call it value proposition, or USP, for unique selling proposition) in advertising. Don’t be funny. Make a simple obvious point.

True, advertising is struggling to change as fast as media splinters. But the simple point is still very powerful.

This goes way back. “You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.”  “Colgate cleans your breath while it cleans your teeth.” A lot of us grew up with those advertising slogans. We only had three television networks. And research showed they worked better than cute, funny, or subtle.

Flash forward to AT&T vs. Verizon in their recent ad battles. I don’t like the mud slinging or bad-mouthing of competitors element in this duel, but I think they’re demonstrating something important about making marketing points. Watch how well they focus in on making the single point:

1. Verizon assaults AT&T by showing us vastly unequal coverage maps. It’s Verizon’s 3G vs. AT&T’s 3G. Notice how their “there’s a map for that” strikes straight at the iPhone commercials. And makes a single point.
2. AT&T strikes back by comparing its total map to Verizon’s total map. That one glosses over the 3G vs. all other distinctions. Strong point, single point.
3. AT&T strikes back again with the browse-the network-while-still-on-the-call commercials. There too, those commercials (nice stuff, I like how they tell an actual story) make a single point.
4. AT&T strikes back yet again with a list-of features ad. Not so powerful, in my opinion. Too much information.

I’m not suggesting that major league advertising for national audiences isn’t declining in importance. I’m not suggesting that bad-mouthing a competitor is often a good idea. I am suggesting, though, that this well focused advertising, each ad making a single point, is a lesson on marketing.

(Image: Knights Duelling, by Eugène Delacroix via Wikipedia)

Remember the kids’ story, the boy who cried wolf? He did it two times, no wolf, so the townspeople ignored him the third time, gulp?

In August I posted Are You a Good Manager? How Can You Tell on this blog. I think I know one element of good manager: taking care of the people who cry wolf. In fairy tales, crying wolf is a bad thing. In management, dealing with employees in a company, it’s a good thing.

Crying wolf means sounding false alarms. Saying something isn’t working. The messaging is wrong, production is faulty, customers are getting the wrong idea, the parking lot is icy, or whatever. And I’ve learned, in some 30 years managing people, that you should treasure the employees who care enough to sound the alarms. And in business, not fairy tales, a false alarm isn’t such a bad thing because it wakes you up, makes you think, keeps you alert. It takes just an extra touch of reaction to check, find the alarm false, or not. And checking isn’t a bad thing. And people who sound alarms are sticking their necks out, risking the comfort of saying nothing, to suggest something’s wrong.

Consider this: what’s the harm of a false alarm in a business setting? How many false alarms are worth it if just one of them turns out to be real? False alarms are part of a good process in business.

So, do you want to be a good manager? When somebody in your business cries wolf, note it, make sure that person knows you’re glad they did, especially when there’s no wolf. Because you want them to cry wolf, again, the next time. And if you say nothing, they’re going to feel foolish, and not do it again.

And if you want to know you’re a bad manager, consider this: are there people in your organization not telling you when they think something is wrong? Why wouldn’t they tell you? What happened the last time they did?

(image credit: wikipedia. An illustration of a 1919 anthology, by Milo Winter)