February 3, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Don’t End Up Like Saddam Hussein

I was very influenced by the HBO 2 part special on Saddam Hussein.

The overarching message was that he killed everyone who disagreed with him.

He became incredibly paranoid and convinced everyone was out to get him.

Granted, there were a lot of people out to get him. But he couldn’t tell the difference between those who were trying to help him and those who were trying to get him.

If you didn’t agree with him he killed you. That’s a terrible management strategy. You need good, honest advisers around you.

Ultimately, he ended up in a hole in the ground looking like this:

Saddam was like many small business owners.

He was exhausted, paranoid, beat up and attacked at every angle.

If there is a psyche of a person I’ve gotten to know over the years it’s small business owners.

I work with them a lot and I am one. That dual role (living with them and being them) gives me a deep sense of understanding and empathy. I get, to the core, why they are the way they are.

Here are some adjectives that come to mind when I think of small business owners. It isn’t every small business owner because they are a varied group. But I would say I see these character traits more often than not:

Pros:

  • Warriors
  • Persistent
  • Knowledgeable in core small business philosophy
  • Self-assured

Cons:

  • Tired
  • Suspicious
  • Arrogant
  • Myopic

I think it’s important to say that while the “cons” sound bad, it’s important to know that small business owners have only become that way because they are a product of their experiences.

They are tired because they have been beat down by vendors, customers and the government for years and years.

They are suspicious because many people have tried to take advantage of them. Everybody is testing to see if they’ve just encountered a sucker.

They are arrogant because they are the only people in their lives that have been willing to take risks and make big moves.

They are myopic because they don’t have enough money to hire enough people to get all the work done. So they end up vacuuming the floor before clients come to the office.

Yes they are bad traits but it’s not because they are bad people. They are just products of their environment. 

This is how Saddam ended up in a hole looking like  a homeless man. This can happen to you. (Well maybe not literally in a hole. But you get the analogy.)

While these Cons are nothing to feel guilty about or to feel that they represent you as a human, make no mistake. They are cons and they are limiting your growth potential.

Here’s how to get over them.

I strongly recommend reading the “Daily Practice” by James Altucher here:

How to be THE LUCKIEST GUY ON THE PLANET in 4 Easy Steps Altucher Confidential

I’ve seen versions of this from other people but this is a very good process.

If you can implement that practice into your daily life I promise you those cons will melt away.

That said, time is never on the side of the small business owner. Because of that, I’ve become a fan of drugs.

I do 20 mg a day of Citalopram. It’s used to treat depression.

I would not say that I’m deeply depressed. But my doctor definitely thinks I’m depressed. If you look at the con list they align pretty closely to the signs of depression.

I know taking drugs to deal with emotions is a taboo topic. But I don’t really care.

The cons in that list for me have significantly lessened.

If you are in the anti-drug crowd then I highly recommend strenuous exercise. Like running.

Running is actually a stronger drug, in my opinion. I will often reach levels of euphoria. The big difference is that the Citalopram is more even.

Running is more spikey. I feel omnipotent for a couple hours but then fall pretty quickly back into my negative thought pattern.

But whatever you are comfortable doing: just do it!

You can’t will your way out of those Con characteristics. You have to work your way out of them.

But I’m here to tell you, if you don’t manage them they will just get bigger and bigger. They will end up consuming you to the point of implosion. Trust me. I’ve seen it.

Filed Under: Featured, Small Business
February 1, 2012 By Leave a Comment

3 Points I Want To Make At My OMS Workshop #OMS12

Next week is the Online Marketing Summit in San Diego.  (Having a “summit” in San Diego in February is GENIUS!)

I’m doing a 3 hour workshop on how to avoid social media stall out.

This is for the B2B social media crowd.

Keeping business to business marketers inspired to keep on keepin’ on with their social media is probably one of the bigger challenges.

B2C companies get it all a little more easily than the B2B crowd.

That amuses me, however, because it suggests that when people go to work buying and selling products and services for business they somehow leave their human parts at the door. It’s like they morph into analytical robots that only buy things based on quantitative analysis.

If that was the case every law office in America would not look like this:

If there is anything in the world that people probably buy more on instinct and emotion it is B2B products and services.

  • How much money will your business accountant really save you this year?
  • How perfect are those annual meeting notes your attorney drafted?
  • How much money will that new plastic conveyor belt save you over 5 years?

You have no real idea what the answers are to those questions.

You just believe the sales guy that stopped by your office and told you things.

You are telling yourself you are buying intellectually. But really you are buying for unconscious reasons:

  • You like the sales guy.
  • The company you are buying from is the industry leader and you want to be associated with the best
  • They take you out to lunch.
  • If you are a really great potential customer they fly you on their private jet to sit in their NASCAR box seats.

You can’t possibly analyze a business product thoroughly enough to estimate how much money it is going to make you or save you. Eventually you have to take a leap of faith.

And with that, the B2B company selling their products have an advantage if they know how to use it. They will make the sale on the relationship building more than the features and benefits of the product.

For sure you have to have awesome features and benefits. But everybody has those – or at least they say they do. What will set you apart is the relationship.

This is where social media comes in.

If you had started a social media plan you believed this at some point.

But as time goes on you very likely lost sight of why you started in the first place.

That’s where I come in with this session.

I have 3 main goals I want to get across at the session:

Goal #1: Why doing social media is a good idea.

I want to discuss metrics that hopefully will inspire the group to remember (or learn for the first time) why social media is so important.

Like this, for example:

Social media is like this whether you blog, tweet, LinkedIn or Facebook. You get more leads if you actively engage in social media. I’ve got several of these types of slides.

Goal #2: Stop torturing your followers.

So often I see B2B companies sending out the WORST messages in the social media world. They are not interesting and are entirely self-serving.

There is no better way to alienate you and your company by just being a boring marketing message in the social media world.

This segment will include a series of examples of how people continually torture their followers. And then we’re going to have a workshop where we, as a group, come up with a super awesome viral marketing plan for one the people in the group. I’m especially looking forward to that. The group strategy sessions almost always come up with amazing ideas.

Goal #3: Tracking your way to success.

We are then going to finish up with different tools and techniques to monitor and track success. There are so many great, cool tools for helping you measure social media. We’ll look at as many as I can fit in.

One of my personal favorites is: http://www.socialbro.com/

That should be more than enough for a 3 hour workshop.

I’m really looking forward to it all. Rocky and Indy (my amazing wife and awesome kid) are coming with me. So I’m especially looking forward to LEGOLAND on Sunday.

 

Filed Under: Featured, Social Media
January 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

A Surprise Attack Interview with Greg

I’ve never been able to get Greg to do a video interview with me. So, what does any good friend do in that case? Ambush him with a surprise video, of course!

I wanted to talk to him about the Google Panda Update. It’s something we have spent a lot of time thinking about here at SageRock. Greg, in particular, has a ton of experience analyzing how the Google Panda Update has effected sites.

So, sit back and enjoy all the discomfort and love as I accost Greg on what he knows about the Google Panda Update in this video:

Filed Under: Featured, SEO
January 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Digital Akron now in person & online

I have two quick points I want to make here:

1. I’ve been working on my ability to do events simultaneously in person and online. I did a full day class that way yesterday. It worked great!

So we are going to run this week’s Digital Akron event the same way. The event is totally free and always geared around a particular topic. You can learn more here: http://digitalakron.eventbrite.com

2. It’s possible that I’ve never been busier at SageRock than I am right now. It is so tempting to put off writing this blog. But I attribute all my busy-ness to this blog. 3 posts a week. There is nothing more important to growing my business than making sure this blog gets written. This post comes to you from my phone in bed (in the dark) last night.

I tell you this for a couple reasons. First, I am living proof of the value of blogging. My marketing consists of three thing: Twitter, speaking and blogging. That’s it. Those are the only ways I promote my company. Second, you have time to blog. If I have time you have time.

You don’t have to write the great American novel as your blog post. No one expects you to. Just try to write something helpful.
 
 

Filed Under: Featured, SageRock, Small Business
January 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

A Vision for 15 Broad St. – An Akron Digital Center

I try not to focus too much on one geographic audience. But this is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot and want to talk to with you on the subject.

First, if you don’t know, we bought our building going on two years ago. (We’ll be at 15 Broad St. for two years in March)

For most of that time we have shared the space with two other companies.

SKYTECH TRAINING – Public, Private and Virtual IT Training

Archer Retail Construction

The guys at Archer have recently renovated the back building of the property and have moved out of the main building.

This is the floor plan of the entire property:

So, we now have a few areas in the main building that are open.

This is what I’m thinking:

I’d like to setup a Digital Center in Akron.

I’m thinking it would be really cool if we could get several companies in the building that are related but non-competing.

Ideas include:

  • Design
  • Writers
  • General marketers
  • Social media experts
  • Videography
  • Photography (I have a room that has the potential for being a sweet studio for both video and photography.)
  • Public Relations
  • PHP coder
  • ASP.NET coder
  • Email
  • Print specialist

Those are the ones off the top of my head. But I’m open to others. I would love to have a place where like-minded people could come to work and collaborate.

Every time we have a person like one of the above people come in to our building magic starts happening. People start talking to each other about jobs they are working on. Then someone else says something like, “Wow. That’s really cool. Have you thought about doing this…”

There is something so powerful about getting a group of people together.

Here are my initial thoughts on logistics:

  • You could rent month-to-month desk space.
  • The rent would be by the desk ($125/month).
    • If you need full rooms we have that too.
  • Everything is included with that. 
    • Free Internet
    • Free heat
    • Free air conditioning
    • Free water and trash
    • Everything is included with that rate.
    • The only thing it doesn’t include is a phone line. But cell phones and Skype solve that problem these days. And if you are really in need of a wired phone line I’m sure we can figure something out.

We also have a large conference room and kitchen that is included too.

I have more pictures here.

I think this could be a really powerful collaboration center that would help us all make more money.

So, if you are working at home or would like a more flexible office space filled with similar companies that get what you are all about, please let me know. I’d love to talk with you and show you the space.

You can click here to fill out a form that will come to me.

Or call me at: 330-379-9000 ex 5010

I truly believe this could be a  great opportunity for everybody.

Filed Under: Featured, SageRock, Small Business
January 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Why Search Engine Marketing Matters

This is a question that I sometimes forget to address. But there are still many people (maybe you are one of them) that is suspect of the value of the various forms of search marketing.

This video aims to inspire you into trying search marketing. It also could be good to give to an executive that is on the fence about trying search marketing.

Here are the links to the resources I referred to in the video:

http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2012/01/online-ad-spending-to-top-print-in-2012.html

http://searchengineland.com/infographic-the-top-three-us-search-engines-99036

Filed Under: Featured, Paid Search, SEO, Videos
January 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Martin Luther King Jr. and Marketing

This might seem like a stretch to you. But the deeper I submerge myself into the continuing evolving world of marketing I like to consider much of the world through the eyes of marketing.

I would say that Martin Luther King Jr. is probably my greatest American hero. We are so fortunate that he lead the civil rights movement instead of a person like Malcolm X. We would likely be living in a much more angry and violent country today if that had been the case.

MLK Jr.’s message of love and non-violent resistance had incredibly powerful and long-lasting positive consequences.

But the fact of the matter is: the movement would have never been as successful had it not been for the marketing.

Here’s what I mean:

 

Rosa Parks was the crucial opening the civil rights movement needed.

She, of course, was the incredibly brave woman who refused to sit in the back of the bus on December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama.

This was so incredibly fortunate because she didn’t yell, fight, curse. She just sat there.

This wasn’t the first time someone tried to stand up for herself. But it was the first time that people decided to use the moment as a jumping off point for what became the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

The power of this all was the speed and precision at which everything happened:

  • Thursday, December 1 – Rosa Parks refuses to move out of her seat.
  • Friday evening, December 2 – she is bailed out of jail.
  • Friday night, December 2 - Alabama State College professor Jo Ann Robinson stayed up all night mimeographing over 35,000 handbills announcing a bus boycott.
  • Sunday, December 4 – plans for the Montgomery Bus Boycott were announced at black churches in the area, and a front-page article in The Montgomery Advertiser helped spread the word.
  • Monday, December 5 – the WPC distributed the 35,000 leaflets. The handbill read, “We are…asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial … You can afford to stay out of school for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday.”

I would like you to notice that this happened over the weekend. If they had said, “We’ll get to this Monday,” the initiative would have been lost. They pounced so aggressively on this and worked more intensely over the weekend than most people ever work all week long.

This was all carefully prepared and ready to go. It was a marketing plan that was locked and loaded. Rosa Parks wasn’t the first person to be arrested for sitting in a white person’s seat. But she was the best.

From here: Montgomery Bus Boycott – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

When 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested early in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat to a white man, E.D. Nixon thought he had found the perfect person, but the teenager turned out to be pregnant. Nixon later explained, “I had to be sure that I had somebody I could win with.” Parks, however, was a good candidate because of her employment and marital status, along with her good standing in the community.

This was a marketing campaign carefully crafted.

I could do this article through the entire civil rights movement. It was not ad hoc. It was orchestrated, carefully and precisely. It was meant to win the hearts and minds of people (which, incidentally, is a phrase I stole from the U.S. government – some of the best marketers on the planet).

Marketing. Brilliant psychologically-based marketing is at the core of every great movement in the history of humanity. If we had enough written documentation I’m quite sure I could do this article on Jesus and the rise of Christianity.

So what’s the point of this?

You must ask yourself what you are doing to win the hearts and minds of your customers and clients.

I can hear the bull crap excuses that are going off in your head:

  • “I sell commodities – no one needs or wants to love what I sell.”
    Got Milk?
  • “I sell industrial equipment – these people just want facts and figures.”
    So does Caterpillar:
  •  ”I just sell a small part of a much larger product.”
    Tell that to DTS, the company specializing in digital surround sound formats:

If you want to stay small and irrelevant please… just keep telling people the features and benefits of why they should buy your product. The civil rights movement could have done that all day too. But it would have never taken off like it did the moment Rosa Parks (perfect Rosa Parks) sat down in that seat.

Filed Under: Featured, Life, SEO
January 13, 2012 By 4 Comments

The Critical Importance of Beauty In Your Web Marketing

I’m sitting in my hotel room at Circus Circus on the second to last day of the Consumer Electronics Show.

I’m unbelievably turned on. Horny might be a little strong. But I’m on fire. I am in love with the world, this place, humanity. I’m just in love. In love with the whole fucking world.

It all has to do with the the extreme beauty I have been immersed in.

I was at Surrender Night Club last night. This isn’t a picture from last night specifically. But it might have as well have been. Everyone, I swear to God, looked like this:

And if that wasn’t enough, the club looked like this:

At least that’s what the outside, poolside looked like. The inside looked like this:

(You might notice the pole dancers that they throw in just in case everything else wasn’t enough to make your head explode in ecstasy.)

But that was just last night from 10pm to 4 am.

The entire Consumer Electronics Show is gorgeous.

It’s like this:

 

I’ve been surrounded by so much beauty that I can feel it in my chest. You don’t need drugs or alcohol. The sights, sounds and smells are intoxicating. It’s a constant swirling dreamworld.

This is not my typical position on marketing. I’m usually the guy advocating for content and conversions. I don’t care what it looks like as long as it makes money.

But I’m definitely evolving on this.

  • If you just tell them the features and benefits they will buy from you once.
  • If you can make people fall in love with you they will buy from you forever.

We always must remember that we are emotional creatures that happen to think. It is not the other was around. The frontal lobes of our brain are just an upgrade to the base model of the brain that other animals have. We are not robots or computers that simply process and analyze numbers. Our emotions and soul, if you will, make us different and very hard to replicate into artificial intelligence.

One of the more visually interesting things of the CES show has been large images of beautiful people on the sides of the massive booths. These are similar to images you might see at the mall. But the difference is at the mall these pictures are usually featuring the cloths. I realize now that those mall images could be of people wearing anything. It’s just convenient for those stores that they happen to sell cloths… so they put their models in them.

CES made me realize that they are actually selling sex, desire, love and beauty.

None of the models in the consumer electronics shows are using the laptop or watching the TV. They are just looking happy and beautiful. They make me feel something.

What this means to you:

How often have you put a booth up at a tradeshow and filled the booth walls with bullet points and facts? I’ve done it. You never once saw the big players do that at this show.

There are thousands of booths at CES. There are many small players here. Every time I walked by a booth that was filled with words and pictures of computers on the walls I suddenly felt like I was in a flea market. It felt dirty and small.

The companies that looked big used large sweeping colors and images of people looking happy.

How much real estate of our Web sites is dedicated to facts, figures and why we are the best? So often our Web sites do nothing to make people feel anything.

By not paying attention to your customers’ emotions and only playing to their analytical side of their brain we are not talking to the full human. In fact, we are actually just talking to a small percentage of the human.

Filed Under: Featured, SEO
January 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

What does it all mean? My learnings from #CES

I’m trying to keep my mind open here at the Consumer Electronics Show. You are so inclined at something like this to make what you are seeing fit into your preconceived beliefs. You can see anything you want, if you look hard enough.

But so far I’m not sure I know exactly what the show is trying to tell me.

We have seen a lot of really thin things. Greg (@smomashup) got a forbidden picture of a new Samsung super thin TV. Pictures and videos were strictly forbidden.

And here is a video I shot of a presentation Intel did on the new super thin Ultrabooks. This particular video is of a prototype where the goal is to make notebooks you can interact with through touch, mouse and sensor.

While I’m as impressed by this stuff just as much as the next person, I’m not sure thin is changing our world. It’s just making it cooler.

I think maybe what is changing our world is Apps.

You can now download apps for your i-devices, Androids, Chrome browser and now the Windows smart-phone and you will be able to download apps for Windows 8.

This is signficant for a variety of reasons.

1. It continues the process of decentralizing the world. Many, many developers can fairly easily create an application and then sell it on the marketplace of the specific device. The marketplaces are key to this. Developers have always had to struggle to find an audience for their software. Now the center of buying these apps is in one location.

2. These apps scale from small smartphone size to large tablets and now, with Windows 8, full size monitors. This makes scaling designs much more challenging. If you are a designer and your sole focus is making sure your site looks pretty on a full sized monitor, you are out of touch with where the world is going. Web design needs to look good on all sizes and all environments. It’s much trickier than it used to be.

3. Most importantly, designing strictly for a keyboard and mouse environment is outdated methodology. The next generation of your site will need to be much more app oriented. Thinking about how a person could easily navigate through your site using their fingers will be critical.

4. Consumers are going to begin to seriously ask if they can do most of their computing on a tablet. While I don’t think we are going to see the demise of the PC anytime soon, there are more options than ever on how to interact with the Web and information.

5. The platform of the future is open game. I don’t feel totally confident that Microsoft will be able to pull this transition off. Android, Ubuntu, iOS, WebOS, Chrome OS. There are many people in the hunt to be the operating system of choice. They are also intensely aggressive. I don’t know that Microsoft has that same intensity. They are working hard. And I like what I see. But I feel like they might have missed the initiative here and it might be hard for them to make up lost ground.

What does this mean to you?

As a consumer it means nothing. Just have fun and do what you do.

As a business it’s a whole different story. You are living in a great, but uncertain time, in the history of computing. Things are changing and morphing in more extreme ways than ever before.

You are entering into a completely new era of cloud computing, new ways to buy and sell software, potentially thinking of your online presence more as an interactive app than a static Web site (no, having video and Flash does not make your site dynamic. It’s still static.) This is going to require flexibility, testing and optimism.

At his keynote, Steve Ballmer was asked what he thought the future of Microsoft was going to be for 2012. He emphatically shouted: “Windows, Windows, Windows, Metro, Metro, Metro.” Metro is Microsoft’s new people focused layout for Windows 8. One of those is the past. And one of those is the future. He was hedging his bets. That is potentially dangerous because so many other operating system companies are betting everything on their new OS. That makes them more intense, focused and aggressive.

You will need to experiment in these other areas and think about how your company potentially could fit in here. Ask yourself, “What if this was the leading operating system? How would we look in here?”

It’s exciting but also trecherous. This is a transformative era that will require us all to be agile and quick. Not doing so could leave us vulnerable to our competitors who get it better than we do.

Filed Under: Featured, Life, Small Business
January 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

My First Report From The Field at #CES

I have 3 overarching desires in my life:

  • Be in control of my own time.
  • Travel.
  • Gadgets.

Coming to the Consumer Electronics Show covers all 3 of those areas.

I’ve been wanting to get to this show for some time. But I haven’t been able to make it work until this year.

I would be lying if I’m here strictly because I want to study the crossroads of Web marketing and electronics. I’m here because I LOVE electronics.

But it also happens that every piece of marketing I do comes across on these devices. So understanding the bleeding edge of what is going on in this space isn’t totally superfluous.

I’m also here as press. I would suggest trying to go anywhere as press when you can. People are just nicer to you. We are in an age where the lines between consumer and press are becoming increasingly blurred. It’s not difficult typically to get access to a big event as press. In fact, the bigger the event the easier it usually is to get press access. They just don’t have time to vet everyone extremely closely.

Doing a search for “press credentials template” on Google Image search will give you a good starting point for making a press badge, if you need it. If you are a photographer, here is a good article on How to Get A Photojournalist Press Pass.

At any rate, last night I went to “CES Unveiled.” It’s was a press-only event featuring 75 exhibitors that were bringing something new to market.

Some of the more interesting things I saw where:

Augmented reality being made possible by ST ERICSSON:

Owly Images

 

BiKN.com is offering  active infrared to keep precise track of things that matter to you. This is especially cool if you need to locate something within about 800 feet. Your kid is a good example.

Tobii Technology has been doing eye tracking for years. But they are now starting to test eye tracking for consumer-level applications. They feel this is the evolution of using your finger on a tablet. In 5 years you might just look at things to interact with them.

Goal Zero is bringing out super easy to use battery packs that will charge anything & be charged BY anything – Sun included.
Owly Images

Here’s a video of the Parrot AR DRONE Hovercraft. This remote device has interesting video surveillance applications… particularly for reporters.

A new way of creating objects. http://Sculpteo.com Make custom 3d art at home. Here’s an ashtray that was designed and then “printed” in 3d by Sculpteo:

There were only 75 vendors at this unveiled event. I would say there were at least 15 of them that had really  innovative stuff. That’s a pretty impressive percentage, if you ask me.

I also saw a ton of speakers, cases and headphones for the iPhone. I don’t know if I saw one thing for an Android device. Every once in a while I would see something that could also be used on an Android.  That strikes me as odd when you consider this:

COMSCORE: Android Has 47% Of The Mobile Market – Business Insider

The Android platform reaches just under half the mobile market at 47%, according to the latest numbers from comScore.

I could understand this at another, less innovative, show by just saying, “they’ll get to it next year.” But there was so much innovation in this one small room last night that not addressing Android more seemed like a glaring issue. But there are thousands of other vendors here. I’ll keep my eye out and let you know what I find.

Today is “Press Day.” There are a whole lineup of press conferences from:

  • LG Electronics
  • Intel
  • Monster
  • NETGEAR
  • Sharp
  • Audiovox
  • Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc.
  • DISH Network
  • FUJIFILM
  • Samsung
  • Nokia
  • Panasonic 2012
  • NVIDIA
  • Ford/NPR
  • Sony

I will be tweeting the event for the rest of the week live. So if you are interested in this stuff you can follow it all here:

http://twitter.com/sagerock

 

Filed Under: Featured, Social Media
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