THINKing

Show Up For Success

Your minister of the church of marketing has some words for you to ponder today: if you want to succeed you must show up. Woody Allen has often been quoted - incorrectly - on this subject. What he really said was, “80 percent of success is showing up.”

He was not talking about making a cameo appearance or a movie walk-on. He was suggesting that being there fully focused, giving your best effort and doing it on a consistent basis is the formula for success. Allen knows that most people just try to phone it in. And even then they don’t follow through every time, nor give it their all.

Friend Brent Dees says it another way during his Focus Four business coaching sessions. “Do what you say you’re going to do and do it on time. This applies to everything you do in life, from being an employee, a father, a business owner or a friend.”

Let’s consider it from a marketing perspective. I have written and distributed my e-newsletter monthly since April 2002. That’s 95 issues and counting.

Every month, rain or shine, I worry about what to say that will most help my readers in their businesses. Researching the subject and the links follows. Then, writing, editing and newsletter layout come next. Finally, I distribute it and then respond to any reader questions or requests. It takes roughly eight to 10 hours of my time each month and that is really cutting into my naps.

Do I ever want to take a break? Silly question. But the newsletter has long been my primary awareness vehicle. Every piece of business I landed for my first 6 years in business can be traced back to the newsletter in some way. Consistently getting it out at the same time each month has paid off for me.I think about what the president of window blind giant Levolor once said to me, “we can’t afford to do everything from a marketing perspective. But what we do, we can execute violently.”

The bottom line here is this: pick a few things and execute them to the best of your ability on a consistent basis. That’s showing up. Do that and 80 percent of success is yours. We’ll discuss the other 20 percent later. But right now, I need a nap.

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Please, Please Me

Gave a social media presentation last night to a group of about 45 small business owners as part of Bank of Commerce’s School of Commerce program. I was one of two presenters. While looking at the evaluation forms, I was struck again by how there are always one or two people who don’t get their expectations fulfilled from presentations.

For the sake of transparency, I’ll give you my numbers from the 23 evaluation forms that were completed:

Overall, the course was Excellent/Very Good - 17 attendees; Good - 5 attendees; Poor - 1 attendee

Harry Hoover was Excellent/Very Good - 20 attendees; Good/Fair - 2 attendees

As I read through the comments, it become clear to me who the two disgruntled attendees were and why they were disgruntled. This comment said it all to me,

As a small business, none of the info provided helped me in my marketing plans. The Q&A was better than the presentation.

I told the group that if they don’t remember anything else from my presentation that I want them to remember this: Focus. You must focus on your current customers and clearly understand them, know where they are going in social media and follow them there.

Based on the business owner comment above I think I know who wrote it. He was the guy that kept asking questions specifically applicable only to his business. The disgruntled owner was mad at me because I didn’t do the work for him. That’s asking a lot from a free one hour workshop.

It’s true that you are never going to please everyone when you give a presentation, particularly when you have such a diverse group with an understanding of the topic ranging from 0 to 100. But I do take all the comments - good and bad - to heart and try to improve my next presentation. Have you had similar experiences with your presentations?

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Top 5 Posts

Here are the Top 5 Posts From THINKing this month, in case you missed one. Let us know which is your favorite.

The Rule Of Reciprocity

Twittering Journalists

Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say

Creativity 2010 - Week #7

Face Time

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Creativity 2010 - Week #10

Here are our creativity links for week 10 of 2010:

Three Enemies of Innovation - If innovation’s such a good thing, a good idea, the secret of success, then why isn’t everyone doing it?

The Levity Effect - Having fun with innovation.

 How far should you let people peek inside your creative process? - Should your creative process be transparent?

Does Stress Limit Creativity?  - A relaxed attitude boosts creativity.

Actions To Increase Your Creative Thinking -  Draw a picture, daydream: these are a couple of things that can help move your ideas along.

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Get Stimulated

Creativity is a major topic for us here at My Creative Team. So, we began a weekly series of posts that will run 52 weeks, providing five creativity links in each post. As you might imagine, we look through a lot of creativity-related material to find some really top-notch ones.

If you are an iPhone user, this creativity tool we ran across is for you. It’s caled the Idea Stimulator from creativity coach Nigel Collin.  According to the Idea Stimulator website, the .99 cent app is:

designed to help you come up with ideas and keep coming up with them.  So when you’re stuck for creative inspiration and just need something to help trigger your creative mind to inspire ideas, just open up the ‘Idea Stimulator’ and get going. There are over 100 different ideas and exercises which randomly appear to help you. There’s also an articles page with some great information and useful tips.

I have it loaded and am using it already. If you buy it, let us know how you like it and how you are using it.

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Creativity 2010 - Week #9

Here are our creativity links for week 9 of 2010:

New Creativity iPhone App -  A go-anywhere tool that you can use to catalyze ideas on demand is a compelling one.

The Mad World Of Innovation -  I feel I’m in good company as I observe the sheer insanity of companies and the way they embrace innovation.

Cultivate Your Genius (podcast) - Explore the 7 essential principles by which Leonardo Da Vinci lived.

Reverse Brainstorming - A different approach to brainstorming.

Design Tools From The American Creativity Association

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Clarion Call: Disintermediation

In 2006, I was introduced to the concept of disintermediation.The short definition is the removal of the middle man.  Since that time I have seen many examples of the Internet acting as a disintermediator in the producer and consumer relationship.

Futurist Gerd Leonhard, a consultant to the music industry, put it this way: “Had the Internet existed at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, marketing and distribution as we know it today would have never evolved.”  In essence, the producer and the consumer could have maintained a close and meaningful relationship.

One early example of disintermediation was the personal computer. Dell, Gateway and others used the Internet and quickly developed direct one-on-one relationships with their consumers versus using the traditional retail chain channels.Today, we see this as almost normal as Apple, the manufacturer who once distributed via local retailers, has taken full responsibility for their consumers and even gone so far as to create company-owned retail centers.

A current events example is a recent announcement from Bill Warren, founder of Monster.com, of his new online job search that will allow his membership organization of over 500 companies to post all of their jobs directly to their websites using a .jobs moniker. His program will continue to reduce the intermediation between the job seeker and the job provider.

Understanding this concept and identifying the intermediation components of business should cause any service provider from CPAs to web developers to take a long, hard look at their role and the client base they serve.

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The Rule Of Reciprocity

Are you using the rule of reciprocity?  I ran across this topic not too long ago, and it got me to thinking about how this rule applies to marketing and PR.

Much of what we PR people do is based upon this rule. Do something for someone else and they will turn around and do something of equal or greater value for you.

I’ve written about this before in a series of posts about networking and gaining new business.

Friend Brent Dees owns Focus Four, a three-year curriculum to teach business owners how to work on their business and not in their business. In the Focus Four class, Brent teaches you how to utilize this rule most effectively. Says Brent,

“You should identify the people who can do the most to assist you in reaching your personal and business goals and then find out what they are trying to achieve. Once you know this, your efforts should be directed toward helping them reach their goals. This is smart business and good public relations.”

Remember, you do it because you want to help them. Expect nothing in return from them. But guess what? They always return the favor a hundredfold. That’s how to put reciprocity on steroids.

How are you using this rule in your business or your life?

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Creativity 2010 - Week #8

More creativity links for your dining and dancing pleasure.

Creativity & The Idea Grid -  The Idea Grid has been a staple at agencies to illustrate how a product or company can differentiate themselves by occupying or owning  position that no one else is currently exploiting.

What Is Lateral Thinking? -  Lateral thinking is one of those terms that many people have heard of, but probably very few of us really know what it means.

Creativity Is At The Heart Of 21st Century Work - Creativity in Business Thought Leader Series interview number 11 is with celebrated New York Times best-selling author, Dan Pink.

Freewriting - A Method For Unblocking Creativity - Freewriting is a personal creativity technique that is particularly useful when you have hit a mental roadblock.

Harnessing The Creativity Of The Individual - Creativity is at the same time robust and fragile. Bold ideas seem to speak with their own authority and stir the imagination and spirits of humans.

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Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say

Office worker 1: I just don’t have the bandwidth to get this done. I feel like I’m drinking from a firehose, and besides so many of these assignments are not in my wheelhouse, and they are neither game changers nor paradigm shifters. And we really haven’t baked in all the data yet.

Office worker 2: At the end of the day none of these deliverables is really actionable anyway. I want to bring to the table best of breed strategies to our centers of excellence and get buy-in from c-level, but I don’t think we’ll ever close the loop.

Office worker 1: Perhaps we could circle back next week, drill down on these items and disambiguate them.

Office worker 2: I think if we could set up some facetime to review the data at a granular level we could leverage our learnings to come up with an end-to-end solution that could gain traction in the market and help us leapfrog our competition. If we could monetize this mission-critical solution we would be heavily incentivized and perhaps kicked upstairs into a corner office.

Intern: Damn, I didn’t know I’d need a foreign language in this job.

What buzzwords do you hate? Let’s start the list…

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