What is your unique selling proposition?  What differentiates your company from its competitors?

In the Sept. 19 New York Times, Kevin O’Connor, CEO of FindTheBest.com, said he learned business strategy from his work as a wrestling coach.

“You have to be the best at one thing, and it usually comes down to one thing that you’re better at than anyone else,” he said.  “You have to have a favorite move, and even if the opponent knows that move is coming, you should be so proficient at it that he can’t stop it.”

Is your brand that powerful?

The term E-Prime (short for English Prime) refers to a style of writing and speaking that completely removes the verb “to be” in all its forms from the English language.  Those who write in E-prime always write in an active voice.

It makes us more accurate and accountable for our opinions.  Compare, for example:

• She is intolerant.
• She said something intolerant yesterday.

• People are unhappy with our service.
• Five people complained about our service.

E-prime encourages us to use more verbs, adding color to our writing

• He was angry.
• He yelled at me and slammed the door.

Try this useful tool: When you use Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar check, the completion screen looks like that shown here.  It will tell you the extent to which you wrote in a passive voice.

Read more.

In a perhaps apocryphal story, a public relations practitioner taking the professional accreditation exam encountered an essay question, in which a hypothetical corporation faced accusations of tainted products.  “What should the company do?” the exam asked.

“Implement their crisis communications plan,” the test taker replied, and moved on to the next question.

Even small businesses should envision a worst-case scenario and spend some time thinking about how they’d cope.  Here’s some good general advice.

Of course we at Douglas Communications Group can help you develop that crisis plan.  We’ll challenge your assumptions, evaluate your staff’s ability to cope and anticipate sources of bad publicity and editorial support.  We can teach you or your managers how to be an effective spokesperson.  (Remember BP President Tony Hayward saying “I just want my life back”?  Oops, I mean the former BP president.)

Back in March I wrote about buying graphic design through online competitions.  Here’s my original article, and here’s an analysis of the pros and cons of crowdsourcing graphic design.

What is the biggest expense for associations and nonprofits?  Salaries.  The product these businesses deliver is service, and service comes from people.  Yet I have seen many organizations over the years that evaluated the success of their programs without accounting for the most expensive component.

If you were an auto manufacturer, would you have a budget line item for “steel,” without indicating what percentage of it went into cars or trucks, chassis or fenders,  Europe or North America?

I understand why association executives fear this approach.  They have a handful of profit centers – membership, advertising/sponsorships and donations, for example – and dozens of cost centers.  They dread the prospect of board members scanning a column with three rows of black numbers and 20 rows of red and asking, “Why are we ‘losing’ money here?”

Instituting and enforcing time sheets will not endear you to the staff, either.

“I’m too busy,” they’ll say, and ”I do too many different things to be able to classify them.” That’s hogwash, as anyone who works at a professional firm will tell you.  Attorneys, CPAs and public relations people keep track of their time in 15 minute increments.

You don’t need to be that precise.  Most employees will probably work on only a handful of discrete projects on any given day.  A rough estimate will probably suffice.  Bonus:  Without using time sheets as a club (unless you need to), filling them out will make your staff much more aware of how much time they spend at the virtual water cooler.  Oh, and did I mention you need to do it, too?

Keeping track of your time is like lifting weights:  The more you do it, the better you get.

You might also discover that you legitimately can allocate more time by administrative staff, like bookkeepers, receptionists and HR people, into programs.  This is more important to public charities than to trade associations, since donors favor nonprofits with a low percentage of their expenses attributed to administration.

Over time, better time allocations will help you measure changes in your products (services).  Is it more cost effective to purchase clip art for your newsletter or have an employee creating custom images?  Did that change in territories reduce travel time as you’d expected?  Was it better to have an entry-level employee spending more time on the project or a higher-paid employee doing it more efficiently?

The aggravation of explaining, implementing, allocating and enforcing time sheet use will pay off in the long run.

If you’re thinking about starting a business, you can participate in one of a number of training programs, depending on your level of computer skill, your business concept and the time you have available.  For a quick introduction to what’s available, come to TechTown on September 8 from 3 to 6 p.m.  You’ll meet with a mentor (I may be one of them!) who’ll describe the options and, if you’re interested, you can sign up for the class that suits you.  More information here

If  you have an employee handbook, it should have a section guiding how employees may mention their job and the company in social media.   Thanks to Komando.com for this site where you can develop a simple policy for free.   For 150 examples of social media policies, visit the Social Media Governance site.

Sure, your corporate policies can limit how employees refer to the company in their social media relationships; but what if you used those tools to increase communication and collaboration at work; to train employees, or to incorporate them into your marketing and community relations campaigns?  Intel did just that, as told in this article in the Feb. 3, 2010 Harvard Business Review.

Think of all the ways online ticketing could make your business or personal life easier.  You could collect money for charity or political fundraisers, concerts, plays, sports leagues and field trips.  You could use it to sell “coupons,” which customers could redeem in your store.

Online ticketing services offer a wide array of features.  Some are free for small events.  They will sell and mail the tickets or you can print them on site, or buy bulk tickets to sell at the door.  Some services will produce lanyards, or badges for multi-day events.

Here’s a quickly-researched selection:

• http://www.inticketing.com
• http://www.brownpapertickets.com
• http://www.mycommunitytickets.com
• https://www.ticketleap.com
• http://www.boxofficetickets.com

Josh Eaton of Rotary Swing Golf rightly called me to task for an omission from my post about the different skills needed to create a successful website.

“One thing missing, though, is usability testing,” Josh wrote.  (I had written on the subject in a newsletter earlier this year.)  ”No one in your list of recommendations should handle that since they’re all too close to the site.  Only representative users.  Even if it has great content, can be found easily, has clean code that is easy to update, and looks great, usability problems can ruin the whole thing.

“I think you put me on to the book Don’t Make Me Think, by Steven Krug, and now I completely buy in to this stuff and see how challenging our site is for users.  (And they happened to tell us this in a member survey as well — even though we didn’t ask!)

“Personally, I’d wrap usability testing around all 5 of those recommendations and have some done to test how every bit of the site is implemented.   Just my two cents…and thanks for telling me about the book.  It is worth its weight in gold!”

I’ve seen businesses of all sizes wave their hand at a supplier and say, “Build me a website,”  without ever examining the credentials of the people who will handle each step in the process.

1. Planning and writing.  We’re really, really good at this because we let you think about you and we think about the people who are going to use your site.   Quoting Fats Waller: “Find out what they like and how they like it, and let ‘em have it just that way.”
2. Site construction, or coding.  If you want to be able to update your site easily (and everybody should, because Google likes fresh content), we recommend you deal with a builder who works with content management systems (CMS).  And, while graphic designers often can write good code, site builders are rarely as good an artist as they think. So …
3. Hire a professional graphic designer.  There is both science and art behind the selection of colors, fonts, objects and images, and the way people’s eyes move when reading a Web page.   Kids, don’t try this at home.
4. Hosting.  Don’t overpay. You can get excellent hosting for less than $5 a month.  Here’s a list of top providers.  We use Bluehost, coming in at #8 on the list.  Your site builder can set up your hosting.  Make sure he/she gives you all the information and passwords for your site hosting and domain hosting (which may be two different things).
5. Search engine optimization.  If you’re competing in the e-commerce arena, you’ll need this service.  If your site is informational, and if it contains a lot of words that are relevant to your business (and why wouldn’t it?), Google is going to find you soon enough.  If it doesn’t,  see #1 on this list.