Into the Ditch
Business communications must FOCUS
Last week I received a monthly newsletter from a car dealership from which I once considered buying a vehicle.
It started off alright, telling me about a new concept car’s reception in Geneva and touting a couple of its other models.
It was still on target with the piece on what to do if your keys are stolen and the note from the general manager and profiles of key employees.
But it swerved into the ditch when it ran stories on a Hollywood actress, why Americans go to movies in a recession, and worldwide beach vacation spots.
FOCUS, people. FOCUS!
Laryngitis, LinkedIn and Me
I spoke at a networking event last week on one of my favorite topics: email marketing and the scourge of SPAM.
Savvy Jackie
More correctly put, I whispered my way through it. Laryngitis. It helped that people wanted to know about CAN-SPAM compliance — audience members shushed each other so they could hear me croak away. Afterward, someone told me that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis spoke in a whisper to make people pay attention. Savvy, Jackie.
The topic was well received, so I went to LinkedIn and in-mailed it to selected contacts. Within three hours a friend asked if I would present it to his company at a Friday lunch-n-learn and another asked if she could link to it in her blog.
Later, I offered it to a LinkedIn group. Within 24 hours I learned that it had been Tweeted around the world and one group member wanted to post my guide on her website and use my presentation for a Chamber of Commerce event! This social networking thing is amazing, eh?
About 40% of my new web traffic comes from LinkedIn and newsletter efforts. My subscriptions include people from around the world. Worthwhile CONTENT on your website can drive eyeballs.
If you want to see what the buzz is about visit http://tamelarich.com/food-for-thought/canspam-download/
A New Capitalism?
Some old stuff works
“Common knowledge” says we can’t have an economic recovery without our financial sector at its center. I wonder.
Would it be so awful to envision an economic system on a more granular, personal level? I’m no Luddite; I don’t wish for Ye Olde Banke or a total barter economy, but somewhere between there and the craziness that’s imploding around us might be just the right balance.
We need a Goldilocks solution– not too big to fail, not so small that growth is impossible, but just right for worldwide trade and solo-preneurs alike.
One reason microlending succeeds is its built-in social support system. Loan recipients work in groups of fellow borrowers and if one enterprise goes under everyone in the group is responsible for paying back the loan.
I attended an introduction to bartering a couple of months ago and that seems to have its merits.
With all the bright, unemployed minds in the world pooling intellectual resources and harnessing technology, I believe the decaying corpse of the current financial system can be put to good use as mulch. Bring it on.
Case Study: Before & After
People complain that writing takes too much out of them. Editing, not writing, is usually what vexes us. For most of us, myself included, good writing demands heavy editing.
From time to time I’ll show you how I get from first draft to finished product. This post shows how the finished product of a business-planning download ended up (after a verbose and rambling start).
Great downloads here for you
AFTER: What if your business were a season? What season would it be and why? What thrives in this season? Since seasons inevitably change, what changes will mark a change in your business and how can you prepare? For example, if you have a product that the market has forsaken, perhaps you’ll describe your business as winter. There isn’t an unproductive season — bears gestate in winter!
BEFORE: What if your problem were a season? What season would it be? For example, if you have a product that the market has forsaken, perhaps you’ll describe the season as winter, in which case ask yourself “What thrives in the quiet and cold? What life forms can’t survive if the winter is too short or too warm and how can these life forms inspire me to think about this problem?” Perhaps the market for your product is in a period of dormancy and will be ready to spring into life when some key events transpire. Key events you can influence? If not, what can you do during this period of dormancy? Bears are pregnant during their hibernation. Butterflies were once ugly chrysalises. Seasons always change. How would you prepare for the next season? What if the seasons were reversed? For example, if winter would turn to autumn instead of spring. Now answer the questions above again from that position (and invoke the court jester if you can’t get in the groove).
Takeaways:
- Sometimes it helps to just write whatever comes to mind as a start
- Drafts are the playground of the right brain — full of possibilities
- Use your left brain to hone and censor the draft
CAN-SPAM compliance
Download my handy, one-page checklist for staying in compliance with the US federal law that governs all commercial email.
Sooo many ways to get subscribers without spamming!
To download click on the link: CAN-SPAM Quick Guide
Less is More
Less is really more in e-communications
Interesting blog post at MediaPost, a firm that provides an array of resources for media, marketing and advertising professionals. In it, I discovered it’s not just my inbox getting bruised and swollen by a flood of marketing messages.
LESS is MORE. Did your newsletter subscribers sign up with the belief they’d be getting a monthly coupon and now you’re pummeling them with daily exhortations to BUY NOW? You’re probably shooting yourself in the foot.
If enough of them hit “spam” to rid themselves of your aggressive communications, you can’t email them again. Plus that, you run the risk of a $11,000 federal fine under the CAN-SPAM ACT.
Focused and fresh content, delivered at comfortable intervals, will help you avoid “spam” reports from recipients who are overwhelmed by everyone, including you. One way to avoid the compulsion to blast an email: devise an editorial calendar. I spoke on this topic Monday night at Connect the Dots, a networking event run by the PR Store. If you want a download of my presentation it’s available here.
Visualizing a Trillion Dollars
How many Benjamins in a Trillion?
Important lesson on the importance of context and use of visuals when making a point.
Click the link below and see how, starting with one Benjamin, you size up $10k, $1m, $100m, $1b and finally $11t. Brilliant.
Can you imagine one trillion dollars? (6 pics)
Whole-Brain Communications
Even business communications can be creative
Business communications too often play to one side of the brain and ignore the other. If the message focuses exclusively on numbers and logic the left brain is feasting and the right is fasting. Conversely, some Super Bowl ads go to such lengths to entertain that you don’t know which product is being promoted until the logo flashes.
Always strive for balance. For example, when I wrote a sales brochure for a medical billing company, I spoke to the target market (healthcare professionals) in their own language:
“The modern healthcare revenue cycle is like a living organism: if one part of a system performs poorly, the patient suffers. Your practice suffers when you do not capture, present and collect patient service revenue, the lifeblood of your business. Our role in your practice’s financial health is medical billing, coding and receivable management. We tend to the financial health of your practice so that you can focus on the health of your patients.“
Of course we highlighted 28% fewer claim rejections with my client’s services. Of course we cited a New England Journal of Medicine statistic about billing accounting for 43.7% of gross income and other critical, left-brained facts. The point I’m making here is about balance. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes more overt, but always necessary.
Finally, we designed the brochure in black, white and red, using red for headlines and to emphasize key words. The color red ties to the “lifeblood” language and also the unspoken concern that every business person has about hemorraging money (a hemorrage being red), and red ink.
Takeaways:
- Use your audience’s language to make your points
- Speak to the implied concerns of your audience as I did in the final sentence (most healthcare professionals don’t want to be businesspeople)
- Use color to your advantage
LinkedIn Answer on Business Planning
See how I answered this question for someone in need of a start-up business plan:
http://www.linkedin.com/answers/startups-small-businesses/business-plans/STR_BPL/435991-34984446
Social networking is a great way to tap the knowledge of people around the world for free. Give it a whirl.
Friedman and The Onion
Faux news I love
Although it can at times be raunchy, overall I love The Onion. Evidently so does NYT columnist and bestselling author Tom Friedman.
In his recent column he quoted a four-year-old Onion faux story on Chinese manufacturing that seemed to capture American consumption up to last summer.
“FENGHUA, China — Chen Hsien, an employee of Fenghua Ningbo Plastic Works Ltd., a plastics factory that manufactures lightweight household items for Western markets, expressed his disbelief Monday over the “sheer amount of shit Americans will buy. Often, when we’re assigned a new order for, say, ‘salad shooters,’ I will say to myself, ‘There’s no way that anyone will ever buy these.’ … One month later, we will receive an order for the same product, but three times the quantity.”
Friedman, who authored both “The World is Flat” and “Hot, Flat and Crowded” brought it back to reality when he cited Australian environmental business expert Paul Gilding, who named this point in history, “The Great Disruption”– when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once.
“When we look back, 2008 will be a momentous year in human history. Our children and grandchildren will ask us, ‘What was it like? What were you doing when it started to fall apart? What did you think? What did you do?’ Often in the middle of something momentous, we can’t see its significance. But for me there is no doubt: 2008 will be the marker — the year when ‘The Great Disruption’ began.”
I walk in entrepreneurial circles, where there’s an uptick in the number of people hanging out their shingle, joining multi-level-marketing schemes and trying to turn a hobby into a mortgage-maker. I honestly believe that all the laid off MBAs, PhDs, geeks and artists in the world today, enabled by social networking sites, will pool their intellectual horsepower and transform the world into something no one can yet envision.
Retooling takes time and takes a toll.
As Churchill said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
