Archive for the ‘PR & marketing tips’ Category

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On March 30, I was one of three panelists providing an overview on social media for Commercial Real Estate Women of Detroit (CREW).  Joining me were Kelli Herman of MICCO Construction and Heather Greene of Neumann Smith.

 This web document contains links to resources we introduced during our presentation.

Kelli’s topic was Facebook business pages and Heather covered Twitter. I spoke on corporate social media policies and blogging.

 Social media policies

There oughta be a policy — There are two kinds of companies in the world: Those that embrace social media and those that avoid it. No matter which one you are, you have to have a social media policy. It should be part of your employee handbook.

In the links document you’ll find two websites to help you. One engages you in a dialog to help you write your policy on the spot. The other links you to the social media policies at nearly 200 companies and organizations.

Social media R U: I believe that every company should embrace social media. You can use it to help employees and customers more easily collaborate with each other and/or to move from a marketing campaign to conversing with your customers.

For example: When I was buying a used car, the salesman at the dealership was blocked from using the Internet. I could compare prices at other dealerships and he couldn’t!  He had to use his smartphone. (That example isn’t necessarily about social media, but it does show how bad communications policies can hurt sales).

Embracing social media must go beyond a policy. It means training, supervising and measuring results. It means you trust your employees to represent you.

 Blogging

People freak out at the idea of blogging.

“I don’t need to tell everybody what I had for breakfast,” they huff.

Don’t think of it as a blog. Think of it as news. This is especially true if you’re in a service business. You’re selling yourself  – your wisdom and creativity. Show it off!

Blogs posts don’t have to be weighty tomes. A couple sentences about a creative solution to a problem will suffice. Repurpose other people’s content. When you see an interesting article in an online publication, write a sentence about why it’s relevant, include a one-sentence quote from it and provide a link to the body of the story.

There are tools that allow your readers to subscribe to your blog posts, but don’t stop there. In the digital marketing world there is no pull; there is only push. Today’s best practice is to send a regular enewsletter with headlines about recent blog posts and links to the full article. This puts control into the hands of your readers, using their time in a respectful way. (In fact, that’s probably how you wound up reading this article: Because you receive MY monthly enewsletter).

But sorry, that’s not enough: You must share, share, share! Remember, this is SOCIAL media. Go beyond Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Use social bookmarking sites to expand the influence of your product, company or brand: Reddit, Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious.

You can start a blog right on one of websites for popular blogging platforms, like WordPress and Blogger.com. There your blog will have a domain like

Douglascommunications.wordpress.com. But why should wordpress get all the credit? You would do better to work with your website manager to integrate the blog into your existing website: Douglasgroup.biz/newsletter. That way your analytics will measure blog traffic along with the site’s other stats. (You do use analytics, don’t you?)

Once again, click here for the list of links on these and other subjects. You’ll also find my updated list of favorite smartphone apps, including the guide to finding all the Angry Birds golden eggs.

Many years ago a stand up comedian (Robert Klein? George Carlin?) had a comedy sketch in which he advised us how to ruin somebody: Buy his daughter a Barbie doll. With that $5 investment, your opponent would go broke buying clothes and accessories for the doll.

Razors are a little like that: Buy the handle and there’s only one set of blades that fit. For many years I used a Gillette Mach 3 man’s razor. Why? Because I got the handle free, tried the blades and liked them. Then, one day, I bought a package of Rite Aid blades, whose label suggested that they would fit in the Gillette handle. They didn’t, so I bought a Rite Aid handle to go with the blades. Gillette lost my repeat business while Rite Aid made certain that I had to come to their store whenever I needed blades, at which time I would also buy … whatever: Greeting cards, candy, sunscreen, lip balm.

The other day I went to Rite Aid to buy more blades. The package didn’t say what handle they’d fit, but they seemed OK. Nope. The alternative blades didn’t fit, either. Well, heck. If I’m going to buy a new handle, I’m going to buy a national brand, so I won’t be restricted to Rite Aid.

With that failure, Rite Aid potentially lost hundreds of dollars of my business.

It gets better. I started comparing devices and costs and discovered that the unit cost of a single, triple-bladed cartridge can go as high as $2.60, while a package of twin-bladed disposable razors have a unit cost of 38 cents each. Note that those were men’s razors. Those for women – pink instead of green but otherwise apparently identical – were 41 cents each. Are my legs more sensitive or complicated than my husband’s face? I think not. (The women’s razors with the Susan Komen brand logo were even more but I wasn’t going there!)

The lesson here is about preserving customer loyalty. You can never, ever let up. Of course you have to continue to provide value, but a satisfied customer will pay a premium to avoid having to shop around for a replacement. Remember, too, the adage that a satisfied customers tells three people while an unsatisfied customer tells seven. Look at me: I’ve just told 850 people about my dissatisfaction and how to find a decent shave for less than 38 cents a day.

There are trends in Internet design, and those trends are not driven by the fashion world; they’re driven by data. Web creators are all about what works. They are constantly testing and refining and they have discovered that readers are tired of visual noise. They don’t want flash, animation and intro pages. They want to get the information and get on with their business.

Website Magazine effectively made this case in this article. It says websites are getting quieter. It argues for clearer calls to action, simpler color schemes, better mobile compatibility, larger images, simpler typography, more video, more prominent social icons and shorter registration forms. Simply put, websites should be simpler. (Thanks to Kim Adams of Professional Pours for this tip.)

For an imminent issue of the Small Business Association of Michigan’ magazine, I wrote an article about creating effective promotional literature. I’ve covered this topic before on the blog. In both instances, I made a strong case for hiring and trusting a graphic designer.

Think of your company’s graphic designer as your barber or hair dresser. You need somebody who cares about how you look and has a track record of making other people look good. You need someone who listens and cares. You need a relationship. That’s why I recommend a request for qualifications (RFQ) process to choose a designer. Certainly ask about their billing rates, but base your decision on whether you like their work, whether their other clients like them and, most important, whether you like them.

Entrepreneur Patrick McKenzie wrote “Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice” for software engineers, but there’s much in it that applies to everyone. My favorite highlights:

•  Modesty is not a career-enhancing character trait
• All business decisions are ultimately made by one or a handful of multi-cellular organisms closely related to chimpanzees, not by rules or by algorithms
• “Read ad. Send in resume. Go to job interview. Receive offer.” is the exception, not the typical case, for getting employment.
• Actual grooming is at least moderately important, too, because people are hilariously easy to hack by expedients such as dressing appropriately for the situation, maintaining a professional appearance, speaking in a confident tone of voice, etc.

Here’s a quick list of some handy tools and websites I’ve stumbled across lately.

• Microsoft has developed a sensational tool for creating panoramic photos. I can’t wait to use it! Learn more about it here.
• This website will proofread your documents for you.
• Torn  between two lovers? Feeling like a fool? Let Simon Decide and Lifehacker offer two options for better decision making.
• Hashtag? Meme? Reddit? WTF? Go to this site for a glossary of social media terms.

The Pareto Principle says that 20 percent of the effort yields 80 percent of the results. Similarly, many of my friends and clients have heard me say, “Perfect is the enemy of good enough.” I’ve seen a couple good variations on that recently.

“The Done Manifesto is a set of working rules based on a sense of urgency.” These rules aren’t for every industry – you wouldn’t want them applied to nuclear plant operations or brain surgery – but in the creative sector they can light a fire under the seats of procrastinators and perfectionists.

In my business, we used to obsess over printed materials that had to be “perfect” because they were so expensive and had to have a long shelf life. You can change web-based content immediately and infinitely. Having something up there online, however preliminary, is often better than having nothing at all.

This article about koshering the White House kitchen for a banquet appeared in the December 14, 2011 New York Times. In it, Rabbi Shemtov showed similar view of perfection: “We are very careful, we are meticulous but we are not O.C.D.,” he says. “Otherwise, no one would ever get to eat.”

If I had a nickel for every client and prospective client who went into sticker shock over the cost of graphic design, I’d retire and just spend my time writing this blog.

In a free market economy, things that are rare are expensive. Good designers have innate artistic talent, professional training and experience plus the ability to understand their clients and give them not just what they think they need but what they didn’t even realize was possible and brilliantly appropriate.

Adagio Graphics is a frequent partner for us at Douglas Communications Group. They’ve written this excellent guide to using a graphic designer. Note these important tips:

• Know yourself
• Let us be free
• Twice is not nice. Revisions that seem simple to you may be time-consuming (= expensive) to change in the graphic design software, thus the following:
• Organization = money

Attending a couple recent conferences I concluded that, rather than enhancing communication, Powerpoint impedes it in sometimes-fatal ways. When I started writing this post, it was going to have a series of tips on how to make better Powerpoints. Then I thought I was going to ask you to abandon it completely. Now, though, I just want you to stop using Powerpoint as a verb and instead use it as a noun.

The presentations have overwhelmed the content; no, they have usurped it. They have become the very purpose of the session: I Powerpoint therefore I am.

Powerpoint makes people with little artistic ability think they are artists. Hey, they chose a colorful background and a creative font! They used dissolves. They found a cute caricature; never mind the fact that they had to revise their script to rationalize the picture. They Powerpointed!

Public speaking is story telling. Your objective is to make the audience believe or feel or do something. Even if you are presenting mind-numbingly dry technical information, you still want them to at least exclaim “Aha!” at the end of your talk, if not write you a check.

Because it’s a story, a presentation needs an arc: A beginning, a crisis, a dénouement and a conclusion. Powerpoint slides trudge along at the same tedious pace, sabotaging the rhythmic changes and drama that make your story compelling. Nobody ever complained that a speaker was too entertaining.

And while we’re talking about drama, why are you standing off to the side of the room hiding behind a podium while that projection screen hogs the spotlight? You are the star. Don’t share the honor. Any actor will tell you that downstage center is the place to be.

I think the problem is that, as speakers plan their presentations, they start not from the story but from the Powerpoint. They do Powerpoint, not persuasion. If you’ll promise me that you’ll knock it off and write your story first, I might allow you to use Powerpoint as a noun: As a tool to deliver images that explain, expand and enhance your story.

You don’t need a fancy template. You don’t need a continuous stream of slides. Maybe you only need three or four images that you call up when a picture really will replace a thousand words.

That’s easier said than done, because relevant, evocative images are hard or expensive to create. If you want to take viewers’ breath away when they see the scope of your factory, you’re going to need a photo. Shot from a helicopter. If you’re going to show illustrations – maps, artists’ renderings, site plans – they have to be well-executed to begin with because, if they’re bad, they’ll be worse when they’re 10 feet tall instead of 10 inches. One dramatic pie chart is better than a dozen wishy washy ones and those created in Excel look like it. What story does the picture tell that words cannot? Is it therefore obvious that slides with words on them are equally limiting and pretty much useless?

Here’s a parenthetical reason to use Powerpoint as a noun: Murphy, who correctly said that, if anything can go wrong, it will. The projector bulb burns out, the technician shows up with an immobilizing hangover, your computer rewards your optimism with a blue screen of death, the lights in the room either can’t be dimmed enough for slides to show up or is so dim that you can’t see your notes. If you were planning to Powerpoint (verb), you’re dead. If you were planning to Powerpoint (noun) the show will go on.

For grins, here’s a site with some examples of spectacularly bad Powerpoint slides.