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90% of Your Sales Will be from Word of Mouth or Digital Promotion by 2011

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Apr 28, 2009; Category: Business, Marketing, Zeitgeist; Tags: Business, Economy, Future, Marketing, Seth Godin; No Comments

That’s Seth Godin’s prediction, not mine. It’s based on behavioral trends for people who are ready to buy. It might be a bit exaggerated, but let’s suppose only 50% of your sales are from word of mouth or online promotion. What are you doing to prepare for that kind of sales mix?

Here in New Mexico, we understand being ready for conditions we know are coming. Our "monsoon" season is mid- to late-summer, maybe into early fall. Unless we get lucky and get some nice snow in December or January, that’s pretty much it for the year. In the spring, when it’s dry, it’s easy to forget that rain is coming, eventually. But we all have our rain barrels positioned under canales, and we count on the gallons of water we catch during the rainy season (usually more than our rain barrels can hold) to water gardens after the rains are gone. The people with bigger or more rain barrels capture more water (it’s not rocket science), which means they often have nicer, longer-yielding gardens.

But when it comes to taking advantage of the growing trends of local search, social media, and what some people refer to as the ReadWriteWeb, and using the tools to market and grow our businesses, New Mexico is woefully behind. Apparently, we don’t believe the changes that are already happening demand any action on our part, especially if we already have a website. Or maybe we think the trends are part of a fad that will reverse itself, rather than part of a fundamental change in the way people prefer to research and make purchasing decisions. More likely, we’re just not paying attention. Online marketing is not rocket science either, but you have to play to win.

The good news in Mr. Godin’s prediction is that there’s still time to establish your online marketing platform. The bad news is that there’s not a lot of time. It takes several months for most businesses to create a useful online platform. There are mistakes to make and learn from, markets to attract, and strategies to be discovered and honed before you’re ready to take full advantage. If you’re not ready, 50-90% of very little is "not very much."

Six SICMA: 6 Simple Techniques for Quality Blogging

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Apr 26, 2009; Category: Blogging; Tags: Blogging, Humor, Seth Godin; No Comments

Other than the name’s deliberate similarity (I freely admit to link-baiting), Six SICMA has absolutely nothing to do with the Six Sigma management process developed by Motorola engineers and subsequently adopted by hundreds of corporations in the 90′s. On the other hand, maybe it does, just a little. Six Sigma was meant to ensure quality in manufacturing and services. Six SICMA is meant to ensure (or at least enable) quality and regularity in your blog posts. Six SICMA is an acronym: Stay Intellectually Curious and Mentally Acute. It includes 6 simple techniques for getting and staying sharp and engaged. As many of us are aware, simple doesn’t necessarily mean easy: some discipline may be required. And there are probably more than 6 techniques, but then I’d have had to call it something else, wouldn’t I? Please feel free to tell me about other techniques that work for you.

Cultivating Intellectual Curiosity

1. Read smart stuff by smart people – People like Kevin Kelley, Seth Godin, and [fill in your own smarty here] can challenge your assumptions and and cause your understanding of business and life to grow and your views to change. Fundamentally, that’s what intellectual curiosity is: a willingness to seek and incorporate information that allows or requires you to change or expand your thinking. Doing so helps you avoid getting stuck in old, unproductive thinking. It does not, however, insulate you from the possibility of becoming stuck in new, unproductive thinking, so select your reading material with care.
2. Use your imagination – When thinking about a challenge or dilemma, we all start with assumptions. What if we identified those assumptions, substituted different assumptions, and tried to view our challenge in this new light? You’d be like a scientist conducting a "thought experiment." Imagining different assumptions often leads to imagining different outcomes. You might find the distance between present outcomes and imagined outcomes closer than you’d "assumed."
3. Take the long view – You may have heard that history repeats itself and, if so you probably understand that everything is temporary: good economies, bad economies, your party being in or out of power, your favorite television series being cancelled…actually, Mannix is not coming back. But with the understanding that most conditions are conditional, you can avoid the kind of despair that sells newspapers (or, used to sell newspapers), but paralyzes your thinking about how to meet your current challenges. When you believe there is a point in finding answers, you’ll be motivated to find better ones.

Maintaining Mental Acuity

1. Be physically active – Nothing stimulates your brain like getting off your butt. Regular physical activity (the kind that makes you sweat and breathe harder than normal for at least 30 minutes a day) pumps oxygen into your brain as well as the rest of your body. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of my inspiration for blog posts occurs during morning hikes with the dogs.
2. Cultivate a sense of humor – A sense of humor doesn’t have much to do with your ability to tell a good joke. It has more to do with recognizing and appreciating a good joke when your hear it. Lots of jokes are not meant to be jokes, but so much of what happens in the news and in your daily life is ridiculous: a complete joke. If you can recognize the silliness or absurdity, you can smile or laugh out loud about it, and feel mentally refreshed.
3. Tend to life outside business and blogging – Especially when you’re busy, it can be easy to let family, home, and other interests take care of themselves or slide down the list of priorities while you tend to business. Bad idea. Kids grow up, husbands or wives feel neglected, and the yard needs work. Sooner or later, neglect eats away at the foundation your life is built on. Keep in mind that business is supposed to improve the lives of you and your family, not replace them.

Microsoft's 2019 Future Vision

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Apr 23, 2009; Category: Communication, Video, Zeitgeist; Tags: Future, Usability; No Comments

While I’m highly skeptical that Microsoft will play a key role in bringing them into existence (they haven’t really been about innovation for more than a decade), this 5-minute video shows some intriguing possibilities for making digital information part of our everyday lives. Some of it is science fiction at this point, but a lot of science fiction has become reality.

What Kinds of Businesses Can Benefit from Blogging?

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Apr 22, 2009; Category: Blogging, Business, Communication, Marketing, Search/SEO, Zeitgeist; Tags: Blogging, Business, Communication, Marketing; No Comments

In response to the question, lots of people in the marketing, web, or social media business will tell you that blogging is for all businesses. In a moment of unbridled enthusiasm, I might tell you that too (hey, there are interesting and useful blogs about solid waste management). However, if I take just a little time to formulate a thoughtful response, there are some qualifying factors.

1. Are your customers searching online for your products/services? Chances are very good that they are, but the likelihood varies from industry to industry. A quick, informal poll of existing customers about their online search habits should give you a reasonably good picture. Just ask 10-20 of them: they’ll tell you. And unless they’re in a hurry to do something or be somewhere else, you might even learn some other things from them.
2. Is there expertise or a knowledge base that you could share, and is it knowledge or expertise that your customers would find useful? If so, you can be helpful to prospective customers, and become a trusted source of information. Traditionally, many industries have guarded their knowledge as "proprietary," but online, you gain trust and esteem by sharing. Just because you tell me how to fix a plumbing problem doesn’t mean I will fix it myself (not after that last little adventure). But you explaining it to me makes me more likely to call you to fix it.
3. Do you like your customers? If you do, you will talk with them respectfully in your blog, rather than talking down to them or blogging about how stupid or clueless they are (not a good way to get more customers, but I’ve seen it happen). It’s unlikely you can disguise your feelings for long while blogging, so adjust your attitude before you sit down to offer your pearls of wisdom. Your business blog is a marketing tool for communicating with existing and prospective customers, not a diary for recording your daily frustrations.

Not a very long list of qualifiers, but as far as I can tell, those are it. All the other things that people tend to get wrapped up in (finding the time, writing ability, how to start, etc.) can be dealt with tactically. If you can think of other qualifiers, I would really love to hear about them.

How to Gain Maximum Advantage When People Search Local

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Apr 19, 2009; Category: Business, Communication, Marketing, Search/SEO; Tags: Google Analytics, Local Search; No Comments

As you may or may not be aware, Google and other search engines (yes, there are still others, more or less) are altering their approach to search to deliver "personalized" and local search results. This means if someone searches for "wood stoves santa fe," they get Santa Fe listings for wood stoves at the top of the page, rather than national listings. People are searching like this more and more, and the major search engines are changing how they deliver results based not only on the inclusion of a locale in the search terms, but also based on the searcher’s IP address, which tells them where you are. Theoretically, if you searched for "restaurants paris", you would get different results if you were in Paris, Texas, than if you were in Paris, France. Waaay different. If anyone can test that and get back to me, please do.

Also, as we’ve talked about here earlier, Google assigns greater relevance to regularly updated websites that contain focused content. As a business owner, you can benefit from these changes by blogging, and by listing your business on the major search engines’ local search listings.

Google Local Search

If you go to Google’s search page, down at the bottom you’ll see a link that says "Business Solutions." That link takes you to a page with links to a number of useful applications (including Google Analytics). The one we’re after is called "Local Business Center". Click on that and either sign in, if you already have a Google account, or create an account. Follow the instructions and you’ll have soon created a listing. Before your listing goes live, you’ll need to validate your listing by phone or US mail. If you select the phone option, you can elect to have them call within 5 minutes, and your listing will appear the next day.

Yahoo Local Search

For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to navigate to the add-your-listing page, but once you’re there, you can begin the process of creating your listing. They have pre-defined business categories, and do not allow your listing outside of those categories. Also, you will have to create a Yahoo account, such as a Ymail account, if you do not already have one.

Microsoft Live Search

I’m not sure this is really a major search engine in terms of use, but it’s a Microsoft application, so you it’s hard to ignore. At Microsoft’s search engine, www.live.com, you can click on "More" above the search bar and click on "see all" on the dropdown menu that appears. That takes you to a screen that includes a link to "Local." And then… I got lost. Just go here and click the button to add your listing. Again, creation of an account is necessary (e.g., a Hotmail address), and again, you can validate your listing by having them call you or mail you validation information.