Last
modified August
26,
2010
Marektin
minuet
grammer misstakes
Is
Your Writing Showing You Off, Or Showing You
Up?The
following paragraph has several grammar and
spelling mistakes. Can you find them all? (Hint:
Don’t trust MS Word or other word processors
to correct them; I promise they won’t
find them all):
To
save yourselve some embarrassment, and from
being judged harshley by your piers, clients,
or collegues, I reccommend that you be concientious
with your correspondance. The gramatical
errors may not be greivous, in fact, they
maybe only suttle, butt their can be those
who’s opinnions of you’re intelligance
will become dissapointed and they will loose
respect for you and will; de disatisfied
and desppair at your disasterous disscourse,
and will critisize and condesendingly beleive
your developement has been defered, and youll
be left, sufficently shagrined
Do
you want to know how many? Write or call us.
Do
you want to make sure your writing shows
you off? Write or call us!
Branding:
Fall Essentials
Product
/ service value
With tightened belts and spending
low, customers need a reason to
buy. Good service
isn’t enough. Loyalty must be developed and nurtured. Do whatever it takes
to make “loyalty” an essential facet of your brand. This is a new
era of customer care so get your brand engagement started.
Differentiation
of your Brand
Why is your brand unique? What
does it provide that no one else
can?
What makes you better than the
rest? Differentiation is critical
for the
success in your
sales and profitability. But don’t rest on your laurels, it’s just
not enough. IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano says, "The way you will thrive
in this environment is by innovating -- innovating in technologies, innovating
in strategies, innovating in business models." For example, perhaps
you can investigate partnering opportunities with a vendor. Innovation today
is
not about technology, but about thinking in new, creative ways.
The
Consumer Decides
Saying your product or service
is wonderful doesn’t reach
into hearts any longer. The consumer
will
decide whether you are authentic
and whether
to engage you. Look at the Internet, everyone is talking about strong brands
and complaining about weaker look-alikes. Make sure you are who you say you
are and do what you say you will do. Never, ever forget your employees in
every step of the process. They
are your number one partners and
your number two
priority (behind customers or clients, of course).
Everyone
Wants More for Less
Have our expectations gotten
out of control or are we
just tired of
not getting what we want?
There is a new term floating
around:
Financial
PTSD, or post
traumatic stress disorder. Consumers are leery which is why open communications,
emotional intelligence and transparency are the ways of the world.
Live with it. Apprehensive
shoppers
expect more. Make it happen
and you will thrive!
Honest
and Direct
With 2010 the year of celebrities
getting caught: Tiger Woods,
Lindsey Lohan, and David
Letterman, to
name a few, it’s all about coming clean. With
bailout discussions high on the list of hot topics – people want value,
they want honest validity and they want the truth. Information, especially
inflammatory information, cannot be hidden. No one should assume that they
can cover anything up—not politicians, nor celebrities, and not businesses.
It’s a new world!
Online
is Easy
If you want to be a
strong brand in your
own community,
make it
easy, affordable and
fun to shop. With the
holidays
coming,
we
all know it’s important
to reach everyone we can to finish the year strong, so get started finding
ways to make the shopping experience more exciting. Get people talking! Also,
listen to them; consumers often—and perhaps increasingly—drive
innovation based on what they say and what they do. Trends are made and driven
by consumers everyday. It’s fast and vast. Listen up!
Everyone
is Talking
Each and everyday
I get notes from
strangers
through social
media
sites. Not only do
you
hear from friends
next door, but
it’s not uncommon to hear
from those around the globe. The world is smaller than ever and people listen
to what is being said—right or wrong. Conversations happen
so make sure people are saying good things about your brand.
Brands
can be weak or strong,
can have a distinct personality, or they can die on the
vine very quickly.
Our attention span is short, so keep your existence flourishing
each and every day
so customers know you are alive and well.
Dam
Weekend
Last
weekend I went to my parents’ house on Lake Delhi. It’s one
of my favorite places—maybe my very favorite place.
But
because Iowa is a drama queen and we like
to draw the nation’s attention
to us every now and then, the river
upstream swelled and
overran its banks, and flooding began.
I
arrived at cocktail hour and then sitting
on the deck we wondered together,
my parents and
I, if we should—just in case—take
the boats off the lifts and tie them to trees.
Being Midwesterners used to elbow grease in the
name of “just-in-case,” the boats
were tied to trees. The rain began again and
we sat under the deck’s awning listening
to it pelt the lake—80 feet from the house.
We didn’t worry about any other just-in-case
scenarios, because we were so far away from the
Lake, and everything was secure—we
were secure.
By
10:00 p.m. it was clear that something
out of the ordinary was happening,
something we couldn’t
have anticipated even though we had
taken care of everything imaginable
that was
just-in-case.
We saw lawn furniture, boat lifts,
docks and even boats had begun to float
by. The
water
was relentlessly rising, overtaking
the yard. Eighty
feet away at 5:00 p.m., the lake was
now advancing toward the house, and
quickly.
Just
a couple of years ago we would have
turned on the local news and radio
and waited
for someone
to tell us what was happening. At
that time we would have called to our
neighbors
and phoned
others that might be in the know
about what was
happening. We did those things Friday
too, but I also got on my Twitter
account and
I tweeted
an “at” (“@”)
message to the meteorologist in the
nearest city for
updates on the rain and on the levels
of the river upstream from our lake.
Twitter’s
search function allows for searches by location,
interest, or other key words. Once we find and
follow another “Tweeter,” we connect
through the messages and links we post. Hopefully
we are trying to post relevant, interesting or
other value-added messages. Sometimes we’re
just funny. Sometimes we find ways to come together
and benefit one another. Such was the case last
weekend. Within a few minutes meteorologist Joe
Winters at KCRG had answered me and we tweeted
back and forth about the situation. And this
is the most interesting part, to me. I was giving
him information at the same time as he was giving
me information. He was in the studio with his
weatherman gadgets and computers, I was “on
the scene” with my eyes and
ears and first-person account:
We're
at lake Delhi...water higher than anyone can
remember. When can we look for relief? Everything
is floating away...10:49
PM Jul 23rd via web
@writertee haven't
head of any problems with the dam, but more
water is falling and will continue to. You
have a flash flood warning now.Fri
Jul 23 2010 23:10:35 (Central Daylight Time) via TweetDeck in
reply to writertee
@Joe_Winters Most
of Lake Delhi is flooding way beyond what
anyone has ever seen. Might be something
wrong with
the dam? Trouble!10:54
PM Jul 23rd via web
@writertee It
will likely rise - More rain coming in
from NW Iowa later tonight.Fri
Jul 23 2010 23:15:10 (Central Daylight Time) via TweetDeck in
reply to writertee
@Joe_Winters Thank
you, what can you tell us about the Maquoketa
north of here? Rain and thunderstorms likely
yet?11:17
PM Jul 23rd via web
@writertee More
rain yes - The Maquoketa is at 22.5 in
Manchester (record crest) - Could go
higher with tonight's
rain.Fri
Jul 23 2010 23:20:01 (Central Daylight Time) via TweetDeck in
reply to writertee
@Joe_Winters Thank
you! We'll try to get some video in the
morning. Folks here are saying this is
worse than
2008. I appreciate your tweets.11:24
PM Jul 23rd via web
@writertee If
you can get the video to us that would
be great. Stay safe!11:25 PM Jul 23rd
We
did shoot video and I continued to “converse” about
Lake Delhi with others throughout the weekend
through social media. And this is how this post
is relevant to marketing: Everything about business
communication is changed and changing further.
It’s no longer enough to be a brick and
mortar and/or a web site business; you must first
be wherever potential customers want to find
you, whenever they want to find you there. You
must engage! And you must learn the language
of social media. Some key factors matter in the
symbiotic success of social media:
Follow
whomever you can in your communities. Reflect
on how many communities of which you are a
part, or would endeavor to be a part. I use
it to find cool people and businesses I would
like to engage with professionally. I use it
to track competitors. I use it to compare the
industries in which I am proficient to industries
in which I am not proficient—yet. I use
it quite often to keep up to the nanosecond
on my business and what will be coming soon.
Keep the vernacular a conversation with two-way,
value-giving and personal posts. Social media
is not meant to be a sales tool, nor is it
best utilized for overt marketing. It is a
conversation. It is giving value. It allows
my colleagues and me to speak to those in the
industries in which we work and in the communities
of which we are a part; to show our expertise;
to give useful/meaningful/memorable relationship-based
messages to one other at a time, or to hundreds,
even thousands of others at a time. Hopefully,
these messages will lead to interactions. Therefore,
remember to check social media as frequently
as may be of benefit to you or others.
Eighty
feet from the shore, my folks’ house was
surrounded by water by the morning. The
dam was indeed in trouble. We spent the day watching
boats, boat lifts and docks, jet skis and other
otherwise lucky and fun lake possessions float
by with the current to the dam. We couldn’t
believe our eyes!
By
1:00 p.m. the dam was breached, the road
washed away and with it, an incredibly
swift current
took household items—furniture, equipment,
personal items and even houses themselves.
The
lake receded so quickly fish weren’t able
to keep up and flopped all over our marshy yard.
Our boat sat crossways in the yard. We have no
idea how to get it out of the yard, but we’re
so lucky to still have it.
Being
Midwesterners used to elbow grease, we
and our neighbors emerged and set to
work: collecting,
cleaning, drying, salvaging and tossing
things away.
It
was a surreal weekend begun with cocktails
on the deck and ended with our mud-splattered
bodies
saving what we could and helping one
another put lives and homes back together.
Social
media was a big part of that help because
as much as
computers are typically individual in
their use, perhaps ironically, the
trend is to
seek connections
in very real ways with very real people.
Even on the dam weekend.
Video
Grows Business
Know How to Use It
Video
may have “killed the radio star,” but
for savvy companies, video is reviving and growing
business. Text and images are and always will
be necessary, but video adds an extremely popular
dimension that is far lower in cost than paid
advertising and (should be) less intensive in
terms of time and effort. And video has legs.
Not every video will run viral, but all can work
long term and can be used in multiple platforms,
as well as easily forwarded and shared. Get started!
Don’t
Fake It
Make every video genuine and personal; reflect your brand but include the human
element behind your business. Customers and potential customers want to feel
a connection, and video gives you opportunities to be authentic.
Again,
your brand must be underscored in all communications.
Use the video medium to really highlight your
business’ differentiators: What makes you/your
product/your people special? What do you do better,
what is admirable about you?
Make
it Easy
The relative cost of producing and posting
videos is a fraction of other marketing avenues.
Videos should be short and sweet, and don’t need to be Academy
Award worthy. Viewers’ attention spans tend to be ever-shortening. Lengthy,
very “produced”-looking videos will probably be largely ignored
as being obvious sales tools.
Get
them on your site
Visitors who have made the decision to come
to your site have a reason to be there—they’re
usually not merely browsing. These visitors
are two to three times more likely to make
a purchase or engage in some further interaction.
Video exponentially increases traffic and increases the quality of your visitors
because they receive more than copy-laden descriptions or static pictures.
The video offerings add to their clear intent to visit your site.
Video
and Social Media
Social media allows businesses and their
stakeholders to create an audience that otherwise
wouldn’t be. Video is a natural offering,
from behind-the-scenes peeks at your day-to-day
or special functions to contests to events
and testimonials,
videos are engaging and can be a two-way conversation.
According
to YouTube, the website now exceeds more than
2 billion visits per day. YouTube is the second
largest search engine, next to Google. This is
a huge audience that is specifically looking
for videos. Further, YouTube allows you to create
a branded channel to host your videos, not costing
you bandwidth and reaching an audience that may
not be visiting other places in which you market.
In
each of your social media platforms, user/visitor
comments can be activated, allowing for further
interaction. It is true that not all comments
may be positive, but allowing visitors’ posts
increases trust and invites a two-way conversation
in an era in which consumers are skeptical of
sales jargon and being marketed to.
Whether
you choose to do-it-yourself or hire a pro, marketing
your business with online video doesn’t
end with the production. Post them, send them
in email blasts, use them in social media and
always remember to use SEO; more than ever, search
engines highlight videos in their results. Forrester
Research, an “independent technology and
market research company” found that video
has a 50 times better chance than plain text
for getting to the top of search rankings. Point,
shoot and score!
