In the face of financial FUD

Well, you’d have to be living in a cave if you don’t know that we’re facing some “interesting times.” The FUD Index–Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt–is higher than it’s ever been for as long as I can remember. Every business expert, online and offline, is jumping on the bandwagon, publishing articles, posting blog entries (hmmm…does this make me an expert? laugh), offering teleseminars, and throwing together infoproducts faster than you can say “bailout.”

I’m not sure that those of us with businesses to maintain (and hopefully grow) in this climate really need to run in panic to other business people offering to tell us what to do for a price. If you have been in business for any length of time, or had to manage finances in any capacity, I’m betting that you know what you should be doing to navigate the rapids of our national financial situation.

Here are some of the things I’m doing to survive a possible depression:

• Giving my regular expenses a critical look; cutting any costs that really don’t need to be there, no matter how small.
• Cracking down on borderline expenses–by which I mean getting really strict about demanding an ROI from every dollar I spend.
• Expanding my network naturally through daily participation in my online sites and seeking local opportunities to meet and greet.
• Keeping my eyes, ears, and brain open for new opportunities and new marketing channels.
• Staying in close touch with my best clients, offering to assist however I can (they’re fighting financial FUD too!).
• Continuing to fill the marketing pipeline.
• Keeping my commitments to clients by doing my best work on time and on budget.

Here’s what I am NOT doing:

• Cutting marketing expenses in areas that do have high ROI potential.
• Lowering my rates to get more business.
• Trying to SELL (as opposed to offering to contribute my expertise for a price…there’s a difference).

And I am FOR SURE not panicking, in spite of anything that pessimistic inner voice in my head (you have one of those, don’t you?) tries to do to get me to go rigid with fright. Panic has no place in our businesses at any time, and for sure not now. Panic creates paralysis, and paralysis creates….NOTHING.

Forward movement, clear thinking, and prudence are where we need to focus our behaviors, I believe, not FUD. And I believe that we all know what we need to do–all we have to do is sit down and think, make a list, then go take care of each item on the list.

SWIMBERT Podcast #2

In which our mavens talk about the possible advantages of keeping early work hours and how they think the current financial situation in the US is going to affect work at home freelancers and marketing consultants.

SWIMBERT Podcast #2: September 22, 2008

Our first podcast

 

SWIMBERT over coffee. The mavens kick off the podcast series with thoughts on social marketing and other unrelated items.

SWIMBERT Podcast #1: The Mavens Over Coffee

Commitment Phobic Consumers

Image by trekkyandy via Flickr

Written by Karen D. Swim

Last week I tweeted how much I like Visual Thesaurus. As it sometimes happens on Twitter, someone was actually paying attention and took time to visit the link I had provided. My twitter bud tried it out (you are allowed to test a word or two before buying the software) and came back with a message that said, “Not enough iterations to test =FAIL.” The exchange left me wondering if our marketing efforts have created spoiled consumers who are so used to free products and trial periods that they can no longer commit to purchases.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for researching purchases in advance and gaining the information you need to make an informed decision. However, have we gone too far with free? As marketers we stand by our free  tactics by pointing to our sales numbers.  What we do not discuss is how many of those people would have bought without the free trial. Given enough information, would they have bought the product or service simply because it was a fit for their needs?

Last year I did the Office 2007 Free Trial. I never bought the product.  During the trial, I liked many of the features but then discovered Open Office (free, open source software) and decided to do a comparison. Today, I still use the old version of Word. I haven’t used Open Office in so long I’m not sure it’s still on my system. Without the Trial, I am sure I simply would have upgraded to Office 2007 because it met a need. How many people are like me?

How many free teleseminars have you participated in without signing up for the coaching program, ebook, live seminar or whatever was being offered? For those that signed up, would they have done so without the free teleseminar?

Free will always have a place in the market but have we overused the concept? Is it too late to put the genie back in the bottle? Or have we reached a point where we don’t commit to anything without a long test drive?

What’s your take on free – great marketing tactic or does it diminish value? Do you buy without a trial? Share your thoughts in the comments box.

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• Open Source Development Software
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Naked Marketing–it’s not an option, it’s a necessity

I posted a story of discomfort and upset on one of my blogs the other day. If you want the details, you can read about it here. If you just want the short less dramatic version, I saw up close, personal, and very uncomfortably during a Powerful Presentations workshop just how much I protect myself when I’m presenting to a group of people.

I now understand what I need to do to be more available to my audiences when I speak…tough pill to swallow at first, since I’ve been public speaking since high school. But I digress. The thought that occurred to me as I was working through the experience that when it comes to marketing, we can’t protect ourselves anywhere. We have to be naked, willing to engage, in order to connect to our target audiences in a meaningful way. Meaningful in the sense that a relationship gets forged that leads to more business for us.

Naked marketing is the order of the day. With more conversation going on than ever via the Internet through blogs, microblogs, and social media sites, and both business and individual consumers getting savvier by the day, there is no way we can protect ourselves when communicating with our markets. What I mean is that we can’t hold back for fear of looking stupid, being rejected, or any of those other primal fears that we carry inside us.

Naked marketing synonymous with authenticity. Whether we are solo business owners or work in a large enterprise, we have to engage in REAL conversations with prospects and clients. We have to be sincerely interested in them, in understanding what they need and want, and in meeting those needs and wants however we can. Really. Honestly. Nakedly. No manipulation, no sales triggers.

I was and still am nervous about letting down my protective barriers in front of people whose opinions I care about. It’s much easier for me to talk to you here than live in a room full of people. But I want to connect, and I want to contribute to you in a meaningful way–whether live or Memorex–and that desire is pulling me through the resistance.

Where are you protecting yourself, your company? How is that working for you? What do you have to lose by marketing naked?

Better Late than Never

My esteemed colleague and blogmate, Trish Lambert is running circles around me in posting. She has this funny idea that she was late to the social media party but in her typical way, she embraced it and is far ahead of the curve! As I was busy tweeting and chatting up Facebook friends, she was busy doing! Gotta love her energy and get it done attitude.

So, this is my intro post a little late but hey I’m here! Of course I pondered what to write on several occasions but I would ultimately end up tweeting, working on a client project or um napping.  Today, as I finally sat my derriere in the seat with a personal mandate to write I wondered if the better late than never adage is true.

Karen

Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld have teamed up for a $300 million Microsoft ad campaign.  So far, there have been two installments of the new campaign. The tongue in cheek marketing message is that Bill and Jerry have been out of touch with “average folk.” Interesting portrayal of truth in advertising. Think of the duo as the Simple Life for the over 40 set. The Microsoft ad series comes years after Apple’s lovable PC and Mac characters.  The fast moving early adopter crowd have largely given the ads a thumb down while others declare them brilliant.

In my opinion, the ads may actually work. Two rich guys who are giants in their industry but currently without jobs hawking a dynasty that is currently without a fan base. The ad about nothing may just be on to something.

While, time and sales figures will tell us if the comic pairing of Seinfeld and Gates is better late than never, I am hoping that for Swimbert my post validates that the old adage is true.

Marketing without Personality…So Sad

I’m kind of depressed this Sunday evening. I’ve been working on a speaking onesheet for a client, and it’s been pretty much business as usual–first draft didn’t hit the right chord, second got closer but not quite. We had a really good phone conversation before the next draft, and I got a good sense of her as a person as well as a professional. Decided to really take the stops out and just go for it.

The result was pretty good, though I figured that she would want tweaks to bring the copy more in line with her own style (it’s hard not get myself into these pieces). No problem.

Got her comments back yesterday and took a look at them this morning. What I saw made me sad. She wanted every single “different” word and phrase changed. Nothing “ungrammatical,” nothing conversational, nothing attention-getting (like using a word differently than usual). The bottom line: she wanted this onesheet to conform to all other onesheets and “be professional.”

I did what she asked, but I mourned while I did it. ALL personality has been leached out of the content–hers AND mine. The piece is now “proper” business English, and guess what? It reads like every other onesheet out there. Nothing sparky, nothing different, nothing to set it apart from the rest.

I don’t want to ignore the notion that getting too creative in our marketing copy can be risky. Many will argue that coloring outside the lines with our words could be detrimental to geting new business–and this was true….once. I assert that NOT getting creative today is the riskiest proposition, because you are highly likely to fade into the crowd.

Back when the volume of marketing communications that came at us was manageable, conformance could work. There was a way to say things, an “expected” style for presenting a company’s products, services, and value.

But today, the fire hose of communication turned on by the internet, cable television, and mobile devices makes it hard for conforming copy to do anything but add to the stream. The prospect for our products and services is being asked to pay attention to more words and pictures than they can possibly accomodate.  Standing out from that gusher is key if we want to be attended to.

My client might argue that the meeting planners and business decision makers she is targeting want and expect conforming language…I disagree. These are the very people whose attention will get captured by something out of the ordinary.

Marketing with personality takes courage, I guess. It takes being willing to appeal to only a portion of the market instead of being acceptable to all by being vanilla.

A thought to ponder…..

Trish

A Curmudgeon Is Dragged (Kicking and Screaming) into Web 2.0

Karen and I may both be marketing mavens, but we are different in some obvious and not-so-obvious ways. Probably the biggest difference is that Karen is one of the most sociable people I know. Me, I’m a recluse—or as reclusive as a marketing maven can be.

 

While I have been standing on the shore, studiously ignoring the whole Web 2.0 thing, Karen has been swimming laps and thoroughly enjoying the water. At the risk of beating the metaphor to death, it wasn’t that I didn’t like swimming. It was just that I had other things that I wanted to do with my days besides hanging around with a bunch of people in the pool. Until about a month ago…

 

This past July, I participated in a great workshop given by Marshall Thurber, an amazing man and one of my mentors. Marshall is a proponent of network science as the path to success today, and reminded me repeatedly of “the strength of the weak tie.” Which got me thinking about my self-imposed, relative solitude and how that was going to do exactly squat in terms of building my business. I came back from the workshop determined to connect and reconnect with my network.

 

In a little over a month, I have gotten back in touch with two of my best friends from college, numerous people from my corporate days, and a lot of the clients I’ve worked with in my marketing company. I’ve also made completely new connections that are leading to some interesting new activities (things I hope I can tell you about as they come to fruition).

 

And, lucky lucky me, when I started to scratch the Web 2.0 surface, there was Karen. Being crazy working girls, we had lost regular touch with each other as we sowed our respective seeds in different directions, and it was good to reestablish regular communication. I genuflect in her direction—she is a Web 2.0 queen!!!

 

I’m still finding this brave new 2.0 world a bit intimidating. I’m taking it a day at a time, and am slowly wading through the protocols, etiquette, and amazing array of resources now available to me. And fortunately, I have Karen to encourage me as I wade in to the deep end of this particular pool.

 

Trish (still pretty much a curmudgeon) Lambert

Here we go, world!!!

 

 

Well, here is the first post on SWIMBERT, a collaboration between Karen Swim, marketing maven, and Trish Lambert, marketing maven. We will be talking about all kinds of things here, but will strive to keep our orbits around marketing, copy writing, and business ownership. Given those three “planets,” we will be able to talk about pretty much anything!

Our primary focus is to have conversations here that are useful, fun, and thought provoking! We hope you stick around to participate with us!

Karen & Trish