Month: July 2014

Your business has a tone.
If you’re in the funeral home business,
your tone is likely somber.
If you’re in the fast food business,
your tone is likely lighter.

My tone for one of my pen names is light.
This pen name writes fun romances
(no angst for her).
She makes jokes.
She gives readers happy endings.

I attended an event last weekend
under this pen name.
Although it was billed as a light, fun party,
the other writers were dark and angsty.

My tone didn’t match the event.
I sold very few books
and
I irritated the other writers.

Match marketing opportunities to your business’ tone.
A funeral home director likely shouldn’t promote
at a 4th of July celebration.
A fast food restaurant likely shouldn’t promote
at a memorial.

One of my loved ones
was stopped by a reporter.
He was in a rush
and said he couldn’t answer her question
but did so in a flippant way
as he passed her.

He was wearing a name tag
and, the next day,
he was surprised to find himself
quoted.

There’s no off the record any more.
There are no private moments.
Everyone has a camera on their phone
or some sort of recording device.

As entrepreneurs,
when we are in public,
we’re representing our companies,
our products.
Everything we do or say
can be posted online
and exist in cyberspace forever.

There’s also no sense of time
in cyberspace.
Anything we said ten years ago
could be ‘breaking’ news today.

Assume that everything you say or do
will be put on the internet.
Prepare for anything you’ve said or done
in the past
(yes, even during those wild college years)
to be posted or reported.

Seth Godin has a great post
on giving employees
discretionary money
to spend as they wish.

“At the Ritz-Carlton,
every single employee
(even the maintenance folks)
has a budget of $2,000 per guest
to make things right.
On the spot,
without asking.

Without a doubt,
the guest is blown away
by this rapid response.
A caring person who, instead of saying,
“I’ll have to ask my supervisor,”
just makes it right.”

The major beverage company
I worked for
had the same policy,
except our budget
to make-it-right
was unlimited.

When I suggested this policy
to another client,
the management team’s response was
“How can we be assured
employees won’t abuse it?”

They didn’t realize
that they were trusting their employees
with something much more important
— the value of their brand.

Trust your employees
to make-it-right for customers.
If you can’t do that,
you shouldn’t employ them.

A marketing company I usually hire
decided to throw their weight
behind one of their other authors.
Every member of the team
changed their social media avatars
to the book cover
for this author.

This seems like a great idea
except they were attending my events,
supposedly on my behalf,
with another writer’s cover
on their profiles.

It was embarrassing.
I suspect this other author
sold more books
than I did.
Hell, I clearly couldn’t even convince
the people I’m paying
to support my books.

I’ll never hire them again.

When you publicly show a preference
for one customer,
you risk the chance
of alienating other customers.

As a business mentor once told me
“Never wear a Rolex
to a sales meeting with Timex.”

Terry M. Isner,
managing director of Jaffe,
a PR and marketing agency
for the legal industry
shares
(this entire post is gold)

“Large sites can easily rank poorly.
More content doesn’t improve rankings
if it doesn’t follow a keyword
and SEO strategy.
If a large site has
a bunch of duplicate content,
for instance,
search bots have a hard time
crawling the site and finding all the pages
among the duplication
—so size becomes a negative.”

I see that with my publishers.
My largest publisher also has the largest site
yet it has the poorest ranking.
It isn’t optimized for search bots.
There’s no keyword strategy
(their thinking is
they’ll hit all of the keywords eventually)
and it is complicated for readers to use.
They have no focus.

My smaller publishers are focused.
They kick the large publisher’s ass,
grabbing more than the expected online sales.

Don’t blindly copy a larger company’s website.
Make your website better.

Carmine Gallo
shares

“The human brain loves novelty.
An unfamiliar, unusual,
or unexpected element in a presentation
intrigues the audience,
jolts them out of their preconceived notions,
and quickly gives them
a new way of looking at the world.

It takes creativity
to reveal information
that’s completely new to your audience,
packaged differently,
or offers a fresh and novel way
to solve an old problem.”

It also takes balls.
Saying the same ol’ thing
in the same ol’ way
is safe.
There’s little risk.

With this reduced risk
comes reduced impact.

In the past,
I’d write ‘safe’ blog posts
under one of my romance writing pen names.
I didn’t want to offend anyone,
to stop them from getting to the ‘real’ information,
the cover, blurb and buy links for my latest release.

What I found was…
these posts were so safe,
no one read that far.
I wasn’t selling books.
I would have been better off
not writing blog posts at all.

Today, I write balls to the wall.
I ensure everything I say is fresh
or I don’t bother saying it.

Be unique.