Staying in Front of Customers--

Marketing Sherpa's latest edition included a great article re: e-newsletters, including a customer-centric tactic that is too often overlooked: using surveys to elicit feedback..

Tip #3. Consider conducting surveys. We do about 10 per year involving various Sherpa reader groups (not everyone sees all of them) and then feed the results right back to the audience as articles.

What does this accomplish?
1. Demonstrates your interest in what your customer's interests really are
2. Provides a vehicle that makes it easy for your customers to provide their feedback
3. Gives you two different strategies to stay in front of customers. The #2 punch is delivering them the results of the survey...now they'll feel as if their feedback has actually been taken into consideration

Couple above with a prize for completing the survey (a coupon, a free something, whatever)...and now you are on the path to a consistent strategy that adds significant good will..and additional business

Hedge Fund Mania-Gordon Gekko is Back

Having spent most of my career on or next to Wall Street, I've watched trends come and go, which inspired me to apply my intuitive skills to marketing and sales. After reading that 20th Century Fox is re-incarnating the infamous Gordon Gekko in a new film--of course starring Michael Douglas--only one thing came to my mind. The bubble is about to burst.

The original film, Wall Street, which was released in 1987 (about the time that most of day's PE and Hedge Fund czars were in high school) epitimozied the greed and glory of the pandemic Wall Street boom of the '80s. The timing of the film's release also marked the peak of a financial market cycle, which ended with one of the biggest crashes in the history of Wall Street.

The stark similarities between then and now are plainly obvious. Private Equity players are the new junk bond czars, who are accumulatng massive personal wealth of courtesy of historic-proportion leverage. Once again, this trend is about greed--and the benchmark of success is measured only by how many billions one has put into his pocket.

Good, bad, or indifferent (if I were one of the winners, of course I'd say its good), the fact is that entertainment media is the best benchmark for picking the top in the markets. Keep your shorts on--if media and entertainment projects focusing on Wall Street mania's are as predicative as they've been for the past 50 years, we're in for an interesting ride. The only difference today is that the moguls in hedge fund and private equity have accumulated so much cash, that when the bubble bursts, their mansions in Greenwich will be far removed from the epicenter...

Why Do I Need A Website??

Part of my business includes helping legacy companies get with it and get on it (the internet).. Sounds silly, right?--Doesn't every company have a website??? duh!!

After all, in 1999, Andy Grove said "In 5 years, every company will be on the internet, or they won't be companies any more." Andy is certainly prescient, but like many others, he miscalculated the life expectancy of the modern dinosaur. More than 50% of small-to-medium sized businesses don't have a website. Its fair guess that many don't need a website, which makes that practice area of my business a bit challenging when my salespeople encounter the traditional obstacles.

And I won't even mention the number of businesses that built websites 5 years ago and have yet to make a change or update them...things like displaying a phone number to contact...
In any case, I tripped across a good third party article written by Gord Hotchkiss for Search Insider i.e. Why Do I Need a Website??...below is the excerpt.

What Web Site? I Don't Need No Stinking Web Site!

One of the challenges faced by ThomasNet, or for that matter, any online property that is targeting industrial manufacturers, is in convincing some of the advertisers of the need for establishing a Web presence. These are traditional and, very often, conservative businesses that have been around for decades, and they cast a jaundiced eye at anything too new, too trendy or anything that even vaguely smacks of "geekiness." In many cases, they've been turning out steel widgets and doodads that have a very specific niche market. They know their customers, and their customers know them. So why would they need a Web site? Why would they need to advertise on a search engine? And why do they have to worry about a global marketplace? All the reasons can be summed up in two words: things change.

Agents of Change

In 1990, the travel industry was a relatively stable place. Travelers went to the local travel agents and the travel agents acted as the channel for the information from various airlines, cruise lines, hotel chains and vacation companies to the consumer. They served a vital part of the value chain in the industry. And with something as highly personalized and variable as travel, it was hard to imagine how these travel experts could ever be disintermediated.

Even when the Internet started to gain traction and the first online agencies popped up in the mid-'90s, travel agent' place seemed relatively secure, because of many of the same reasons we currently hear from manufacturers: They knew their customers, their customers knew them and the exchange of information back and forth between the two parties proved the value of this relationship.

In 1995, the number of single-office travel agencies peaked at almost 22,000, according to the Airlines Reporting Corporation. And then things changed. The online travel agents upped the ante. They demystified travel and opened up control of information to anyone who had Internet access. Airlines and hotels readjusted their booking channels to be able to go first to online agencies, and ultimately, direct to savvy travelers. Online communities formed that allowed travelers to connect with others who'd been there, seen it and done it, getting firsthand advice of where to stay and how to get there. And by 2004, the number of single-office travel agencies had been cut in half. Less than 10 years and an industry was decimated. Things change quickly!

Look East for the Future

In 1999 Intel Chairman Andy Grove said, "In five years, all companies will be Internet companies, or they won't be companies at all." Grove may have been a touch optimistic in his timing (imagine, someone over-hyping the Internet in 1999), but I don't believe that takes away from the importance of his message. One of the mistakes that travel agents made, and the mistake that many small manufacturers are making again, is to assume that just because they're not interested in a global market, all other competitors are likewise uninterested in their market.

The balance of power in the manufacturing world is dramatically swinging eastward. Another sobering fact that I came up with in the preparation for my presentation was the fact that in the U.S., there are currently about 14 million jobs in manufacturing. In all G-7 countries combined (U.S., Canada, the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Japan), there are about 53 million manufacturing jobs. In China alone, there are almost 110 million jobs in manufacturing. A manufacturing powerhouse the likes of which we've never seen before is gearing up in Asia. And those Asian companies are desperately eager to learn how to use the Internet to connect with new markets right here, in our backyard. To add to what Andy Grove said, not only will all companies be Internet companies, we'll also have to become global companies. At the very least, we'll have to be acutely aware of our global competition

Keeping Blogs Fresh--Is This a Fad?

Common wisdom for those that want the world to zero in on their blogs: keep the content fresh and keep it current.

It doesn't have to be daily, and other than professional news reporters and the professionally unemployed, who really has the time to make pithy posts to a blog on a daily basis? And who in the world has the time to go surfing around reading blogs every day??

Well..the answer to the last is tied to the first comment. Apparently worker bees within the venture capital community are magnetized to blogs. In the course of sending a quaterly news letter to my firm's fan base (predominantly those in the investment and private equity universe), I included several links within the newsletter, including latest projects and engagements, and a link to my blog. Of the 1000 receipients that read the newsletter, 470 clicked on the link to the blog, overshadowing clicks to the other links by a factor of 400:1 .

Had I known that the response to that particular link would have been so overwhelming, I would have been better prepared, and updated this site with a more current and entertaining observation. But I blew it...Every one came here and found the last posting was two months stale..
Sort of scary that so many 'professionals' within the deal world have the time to surf blogs.
So the moral to the story is..if putting an Open sign on the door, make sure to dust of the welcome mat.

Ads Made: No Agency Required

Once again, we're ahead of the curve..6 months ago we profiled Spot Runner, a start-up "on-line ad agency" that was leading the way via a website that allowed small business advertisers to create their own TV and video commercials using a wide selection of 'templates' available on their website...And after the commercial was created, SpotRunner's "media buying/placement' service allows you to select the media channels, times, frequencies that you want the ad to run...Just insert what you're budget is, your demographic targets and their platform produces a comprehensive plan...its pretty much a matter of drag and drop, point and click and you're all set...All for a ridiculously low price...The commercial itself can be created for $400---and the placements is simply a matter of what your budget is..5k buys a big selection of media outlets (local cable tv, local network tv) with upwards of 200 or so spots over the course of 4 weeks...

Should I be surprised that the NY Times business section dedicated half the front page and a all of the second page to this trend, including identifying the players in this space and their respective offerings? Nah..thanks to Jay Berkman, we stay in the curl of every new wave in marketing, advertising and tools that connect the tag line to the bottom line

Using Video-Email To Market & Sell!!

I'm not a techie--but as a marketer, I've always been a big proponent of using video apps to deliver personal messages..Years ago I pressed several clients in the financial services to embrace the application --so that research analysts could create their own morning commentaries from their desk--and deliver it via email with attached video file to their clients....3 years ago, the technology was nascent stage, and required both the sender and the receiver to make multiple steps in order to effect the process...and there was the obstacle of high speed connectivity..

Thats all changed...as noted today in Walter Mossberg's WSJ column...His report details exactly how easy it easy for someone to create a quick vignette from their desktop..and it only costs the price of a $40 mini video cam that plugs into your computer...

Happy to report that two days earlier..I had decided to take a stand on this entire subject and pound everyone I know to re-iterate what I've been saying for years...So I created my own 1minute video and emailed it to clients and telling them that they can finally embrace this concept quickly, easily and with no cost...and use it as a means for a quick sales introduction, delivering a resume...whatever....

connecting a face to a voice, or to initial emails is the most rudimentary party of establishing a relationship....Google figured this out long ago when it bought YouTube....and now that pundits from every industry are doing it ---short morning message attached to the morning email...or similar approaches....in the business world...it makes too much sense..
The simple "rules" that one needs to follow i.e. producing their own video for business purposes are limited to the same rules you would follow prior to making a brief presentation in person..you're going to dress properly, you're going to have a prepared 'speech', you're going to speak clearly...In the case of video though, you need to make sure the background isn't too bright or too dark and is appropriate for the message...And the great thing is you can edit and fix your video as many times as is necessary to get it right...Get your videocam (logitech is a good product) and start in..Windows Movie Maker can do the rest...even for technophobes like me!

Marketers and Bankers -Internet Gambling

In June, we posted a story about how US Federal prosecutors were busy arresting CEO's of London-based public companies that operated online gambling enterprises. We facetiously suggested that as long as the justice department has nothing better to focus on than internet gambling (is it because this worldwide business is encroaching on Las Vegas public companies??)--why not go after the investment bankers that took these companies public, such as Goldman, Deutsche Bank and Merrill and the rest. After all, they'd already pounced on advertisers and their agencies for facilitating the promotion of these 'illegal enterprises'

Well, it seems that George Bush's team of Elliot Ness wannabees took my suggestion to heart--as the front page news story today focuses on subpeonas issued to a variety of global investment banks that have underwritten an assortment of companies. Now, I guess its a matter of time before Fidelity and larger institutional investors are subpeoned for buying the issues for their various portfolios. Then the FBI will need to arrest the individual investors that own Fidelity funds.

In a world where our National Guardsmen, who sign up to protect the borders and cities of the US are shipped off to fight battles in Iraq and other foreign lands..and come back without arms and legs..it begs the question as to who should be prosecuted for sending them there. After all, the entire campaign in Iraq was precipitated by George Bush and Co. telling everyone that there was a clear and present threat of WMD's and that Iraq was on the verge of attacking the free world. He and everyone close to him knew that Saddam Hussein didnt have WMD's, other than his bad breadth and the entire story about WMD's was a lie. It was simply a strategy to exploit fear and get Americans to buy into the crappola. And there's plenty of documentation that we've all read that indicates all kinds of fraud was committed by making those representations and putting our children in harms way. Sort of odd that no White House staff member and only two or three Congressmen or Senators have children serving in Iraq.

New campaign slogan for '08--Anybody But Bush

Run A Sweepstakes At No Cost

Gadzooks!..Come to my site and win a prize!... Kudos to WSJ..today's edition is chock full of ideas..
You've always known that running a sweepstakes as part of your marketing strategy was a good idea, but you're either too small a business to afford it, or you don't have the resources to manage it..... Time for Caffeine!!!

Here's how it works---according to today's column by Gwen Bounds

Making Big-Time Promotions
Available, Affordable

Sweepstakes Operator
Offers Online Contests
For Small Firms' Sites
January 16, 2007; Page B11

This week, a new low-cost Internet service launches that lets small businesses run sweepstakes for items such as plasma TVs, trips and diamond rings on their Web sites as a way to attract visitors and cull valuable marketing information from them.

The service, nicknamed Caffeine, helps users design and run these promotions without having to pay for the prizes or do the legal legwork needed to operate the contests.

A sample promotion for Fathead LLC using the new Caffeine service.

Big companies often use sweepstakes and giveaways to woo consumers, and research shows such programs make Web sites "sticky" so visitors are more likely to make repeat visits and spend more time looking around. They're also a good tool for enticing consumers to proffer personal information such as age, location and gender. However, most small businesses don't have the finances or resources to offer such promotions.

Caffeine was developed by a Detroit-based company, ePrize LLC, which runs interactive promotions for behemoths such as Disney, Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble. With the launch of Caffeine, ePrize is seeking to capitalize on a growing online movement toward pay-per-action advertising.

Unlike the traditional pay-per-click model, small firms using Caffeine don't pay a dime until a visitor clicks on the promotion and registers by providing identifying details, including an email address, that the business can then use in marketing and research efforts.

"We're trying to democratize the promotions business," says ePrize Chief Executive Josh Linkner.

Here's how Caffeine will work: Business owners go to the Internet site www.caffeinenow.com and choose the prize they want to offer from different categories. Some samples: a two-year BMW Mini Cooper lease, a kitchen makeover, and a $10,000 Amazon shopping spree. Promotions are designed from various templates that include animated scratch-and-win cards and virtual slot machines. It takes about 10 minutes to get a customized banner, which businesses then place on their own homepage or other advertising outlets including search engines.

Businesses pay Caffeine $1 for every qualified customer lead and 15 cents per repeat visitor, though they can implement restrictions. A Seattle coffee shop, for instance, can decide to only pay for names of contest entrants within, say, a 20-mile radius. And owners can also set a limit on how much they want to spend with Caffeine. However, Caffeine will continue to store all entrant information in case a business ever wants to purchase more sales leads or broaden its reach. There's also a coupon-builder option; businesses pay five cents each time a coupon is downloaded.

One early beta tester of Caffeine is Fathead LLC, a Livonia, Mich., maker of life-size peel-and-stick sports images. The company chose a promotion that gives away a trip for four to an unspecified sporting event and is collecting about 100 entrants a day.

"We spend a lot of money trying to get people to our Web site through advertising and we want to collect data on people who visit the site and aren't buying then -- but might be interested in doing it later," says Aaron Chestnut, Fathead's vice president of marketing.

There are drawbacks to Caffeine. It is not a pure pay-per-sale advertising model, and people entering the promotions may not have any intention of ever buying a company's wares. Plus, entrants of Caffeine promotions can "opt out" of having their information used for marketing purposes -- standard practice in sweepstakes, Mr. Linkner says -- but a business still must pay for the sales lead. Mr. Linkner says that while such leads are "not as valuable," he believes they are still worth something because they represent traffic and provide a business with information about who is visiting its site.

Also, prizes are doled out via "pools," which means multiple businesses may run promotions for the same gift item. So, just because a business advertises a satellite radio giveaway, doesn't mean one of its customers will necessarily win that item. There is no limit on, or disclosure of, the number of applicants.

A challenge for Caffeine will be integrating its service with existing advertising opportunities. To that end, the company is in talks with Yahoo Inc. about a possible alliance where Yahoo will include Caffeine as an option for businesses buying keywords for Yahoo's search-engine advertising.

Mr. Linkner of ePrize hopes this may one day distinguish ads using Caffeine on the sponsored results of search pages. "If I'm searching for 'drycleaner' and see one with 'chance to win,' I'd probably rather go to that Web site," Mr. Linkner says. Yahoo declined to comment on the talks.

To promote Caffeine, ePrize already has signed up a handful of partners including localbiznow.com, a search-marketing firm for local businesses, and a couple of search-engine optimization and advertising firms in ePrize's own backyard of Michigan.

Eric V. Melin, president of SpiderSplat Consulting Inc. in Boston, hasn't tried Caffeine, but he says he thinks the concept is "a natural," particularly if it's integrated into the services from the likes of Yahoo and Google.

"Promotions are a great way for small businesses to make their site separate out from the crowd," says Mr. Melin, whose search-engine-optimization firm serves large and small clients. "Another thing that tends to happen with a promotion is that people will email the link to all their friends. It's a viral effect."

That's what Jeff Broaddus, owner of Quality Cleaners in Royal Oak, Mich., hopes. He's been testing Caffeine as a way to differentiate his service by promoting a $20 Gap gift card giveaway and a $1,000 Nordstrom's shopping spree on his site, myqualitycleaners.com¹. Mr. Broaddus thinks the contests could induce loyal customers to send him referrals. "That's the lifeblood of small businesses," he says.

Write to Gwendolyn Bounds at wendy.bounds@wsj.com²

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Managing Expectations

Great article by WSJ's Jared Sandberg in today's edition i.e. why over-estimating deliverable schedules can make you look like a star..But there are caveats to this strategy, and managing expectations is a tight rope to walk on.. Here's an excerpt--the link brings you to WSJ online and you need to be a subscriber to access the entire article...

Why Preparing Others
For an Effort's Failure
Can Bring You Success
January 16, 2007;

To understand how Tony Sharpe approaches managing expectations, consider what happened in "Star Trek": Captain Kirk's grumbling engineer, Montgomery Scott, admitted that in order to be viewed as a "miracle worker," he had padded his time estimates for finishing jobs so he could handily beat them.

"That's pretty much how I manage my clients' expectations," says Mr. Sharpe, an advertising executive. He might tell clients that certain work may involve extra time or money, or that he might not be able to do it at all. "Then I come back with it done," he says.

Asked why he does this, Mr. Sharpe responds that the tactic helps him ensure that there will be only good surprises, which can help "keep clients from getting mad at us." As long as the results are positive, he says, "they won't even notice you're crying wolf."

In January, the clock starts ticking for all kinds of company measures, from budgets to performance reviews. The next 11 months are spent trying hard to manage expectations about how these things will turn out. In a system where the facts don't govern opinions nearly as much as expectations do, failure to manage those expectations properly can turn success into failure or a well done deed into a disappointment.

That's why, for example, a company that has just reported a 4% gain in net income compared with a year earlier might still suffer a drop in share price. And it's why rain-making employees can lose their luster compared with laggards who surprise everybody by showing some small evidence of a pulse.

When Joe Glavin managed a software development group, a project manager who was developing record-keeping software for him kept reporting that everything was "Going great!" But a week before the scheduled rollout, the project manager "behaved as if he was being chased by a loan shark," says Mr. Glavin, and then finally admitted that the whole system was unusable. Mr. Glavin ended up getting burned, and the project manager "never got a management assignment again," Mr. Glavin says.

You would think the tactic of managing expectations downward would be so obvious that it wouldn't work. But, as Wendy Wood, a professor of psychology at Duke University, notes: "You can be a physicist and study gravity and still fall down."

One explanation for why managing expectations downward works so well may be the psychological phenomenon of "anchoring," or the tendency to overvalue an early piece of information, such as an expectation set by an employee. Even as new information surfaces, notes Max Bazerman, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, "We adjust insufficiently. Wherever we start from has a significant influence on our final estimate."

Research also suggests that the penalty for missing expectations can be greater than the benefit for beating them. In his research on promises, Nicholas Epley, assistant professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, concluded that while breaking a promise is bad, "exceeding a promise is often not worth the effort." In other words, he says, people sometimes value beating expectations little more than meeting them.

That's why managing expectations downward is so widespread. "The chips are stacked against us," says Prof. Epley. First, employees, investors and bosses don't normally expect failure, so expectations are generally high. Second, "the loss from that already high expectation is going to be that much more painful."

Melissa Marsh, an IT project manager who works on deploying new software systems, concurs. "You project the worst-case scenario publicly, when you fully anticipate that you will be able to bring the system up earlier," she says. After all, she says, to deliver 99% of what you promised only leads people to sorely miss the remaining one percent.

"There are a lot of opportunities to disappoint people," she says, "and it can be really difficult to impress them."

• Email Jared Sandberg at jared.sandberg@wsj.com

Marketing Pizza-

Let's just bag it all and open a pizzeria. Its a cash business, and the margins are great.

But be careful if trying to be innovative in the course of marketing--you might attract the wrath of lunatics.. Case in point--The brouhahaha over Pizza Patron--a 59-store franchise based in Dallas that is promoting "pay in pesos" in its East Dallas locations---to accomodate customers that are on the cusp of the Tex-Mex border ..
Its actually a brilliant idea--as demonstrated by the increase in sales since the promotion was launched. The fact that the company is now receiving all kinds of complaints from anti-immigration zealots--including the Washington, DC-based Center for Immigration Studies is appalling.

And if you ask me, its anti-American.
The entire foundation to our country is based on the melting pot philosophy. And a private enterprise working to accomodate customers ease in paying for products/services emodies the entire foundation...
Shame on those that take exception to Pizza Patron's innovative business strategy.