EvoBloggito

Video: Blogging for Small Business

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: May 3, 2009; Category: Blogging, Business, Marketing, Video, Zeitgeist; Tags: Blogging, Seth Godin; One Comment

In this short video, Seth Godin, Sean Parker and Jimmy Wales talk about how blogging and social networking have changed small business. Another video about the value of blogging for business worth watching, Seth Godin and Tom Peters: www.openforum.com/marketing/video_hearitfortheblog.html

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.

Seth Godin Talking about Leading a Tribe

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Mar 16, 2009; Category: Business, Marketing, Video, Zeitgeist; Tags: Seth Godin, Tribes; No Comments

Seth Godin talks about the failure of interruption marketing and the emergence of assembling a tribe as pathway to marketing success.

Book Review: Tribes by Seth Godin

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Mar 15, 2009; Category: Book Review, Business, Marketing, Zeitgeist; Tags: Seth Godin, Tribes; No Comments

I’m guessing Seth Godin, like the rest of us, is completely capable of not thinking clearly on occasion and saying dumb things. But you won’t find evidence of that in Tribes, a book in which he has clearly and compellingly laid out what it takes to be successful in marketing in 2009.

In this little more than pocket-size book, Godin explains the difference between a crowd and a tribe (crowds don’t have leaders or a means of communicating with one another), and notes "Most organizations spend their time marketing to the crowd. Smart organizations assemble the tribe."

Godin challenges people who are passionate about something to assume a leadership role. The tools, he points out, are there for anyone to use; there’s no longer an excuse to sit on the sidelines and complain about how you wish things were different. You can attract a crowd of like-minded people willing to work toward making things different.

Some of my favorite insights from the book:

• Leadership is too important to be left to the people in charge.
• Faith overcomes fear.
• Tribes are about faith—about belief in an idea and a community.
• Heretics are the new leaders.
• Leaders transform the shared interest of the tribe into a passionate goal and desire for change.

Click on the cover image of the book above and get it at Amazon. I think you’ll find it worth reading.