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Heard about the SD school budget cuts to arts and sports? Here’s a unique fund raising event to replace those cuts: http://bit.ly/11rAfL

Corporate Politics: The Elephant in the Conference Room. Naming It. Reframing It. Taming It. http://ping.fm/mMIsL

Happy (US) Memorial Day to all. Hope you enjoy this video. Seems appropriate for today: http://ping.fm/mGtnF

It’s time to review your strategic plan, cut waste, & think creatively about what’s next :http://ping.fm/wMrhz

Jonathan Salem Baskin’s column in the March 23 issue of Advertising Age triggered an interesting concept. He talked about a Glendale, CA mall that turned marketing on its head and focused on customer needs to bring customers to the mall instead of the traditional discount coupons and promotional events.

Rather than just focus on hosting the retail stores within the mall, they created a guest loyalty program as the pillar of their marketing strategy, allowing shoppers to accrue points and “gain elite status levels for visiting the mall.”

Talking to customers and focusing on their needs makes it possible for them to design cross-retailer promotions targeting specific consumers. According to Baskin, “the mall can analyze visit frequency and shopping behavior, reach out to wayward members, and incentivise their return.”  Recently, for example, they polled customers on what type of restaurant should be added to the mall, rather than just go after what they thought would work.

As a volunteer for a professional strategic planning organization, the Association for Strategic Planning, I coordinate the venue logistics for the local chapter’s bi-monthly meetings. Similar to the Courtyard by Marriott rewards program, the Holiday Inn also has a special rewards program for meeting planners that lets planners accrue points for holding meetings there. These points can then be used for savings on future meetings or for personal rewards. What a great incentive to hold more meetings there…provided the service and catering also meet your expectations.

My thought is, how can these ideas be applied to other businesses? Go beyond just a rewards program and ask your customers what would encourage them to continue to do business with you? You might be surprised.

The Americana at Brand mall, for example, also offers a concierge service for anyone. “It’s housed in a luxury-hotel reception area flanked by attendant-maintained restrooms and a children’s play area full of toys,” says Baskin.

Our auto mechanic, Tom’s Master Mechanics, offers incentives to his customers. He has free wifi available for customers who are waiting to have their car serviced so they can get their work done as they wait. If servicing your car will take more than a day, he has a relationship with Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and if the service fee is over a certain amount, he picks up the cost of the car rental! We’ve been customers for more than 20 years, and have referred many friends because of the quality of service we receive.

Could newspapers, for example, utilize similar tactics? Many have tried loyalty programs that reward subscribers with restaurant discounts, coupons and free ads, but what about incentives to reward readership?

Here’s a novel idea:  let readers earn rewards points every time they forward a newspaper article to a friend or blog about a story they read in the paper. The points could be redeemed for a panoply of things beyond newspaper subscriptions and free ads, such as to cover EBay seller listing fees, travel incentives, or website design and hosting….the ideas are endless. Papers shouldn’t think about doing it all themselves. Rather, they would form alliances with non-competing service providers to deliver the rewards.  Seems like a win-win-win all around.

Taking that a step further, they could form allegiances with non-profits their readers and subscribers care about and find creative ways to generate revenue for the non-profits while building customer loyalty and readership. Ideas should go beyond sponsorships to finding ways to help the non-profits fill their voids in areas such as volunteers, budget management, and promotional fulfillment (newspapers that survive are in the distribution business after all). Those are just a few examples that come to mind.

The point is to think beyond the traditional concept of building customer loyalty and communicate with your customers. Find out what they’re doing, what they’re interested in, and what organizations they support.  Then find ways to deliver services to them as incentives for their continued loyalty.  That’s smart, strategic marketing.

Source: Advertising Age, March 23, 2009, page 22, Jonathan Salem BAskin – On Marketing and Leadership.

Social marketing is the latest trend in internet marketing, helping individuals and businesses grow their leads and client base. The trend has been growing dramatically with the tightening of marketing budgets, employee lay-offs, and retiring boomers turning to the web to start their next career or generate additional income.

According to ComScore’s August 2008 report, Facebook and MySpace were the two fastest growing sites on the web from June 2007 to June 2008. Latin America has the highest rate of growth in using Facebook at 1055% vs. North America’s measly 38%. However, in terms of total number of unique visitors to Facebook, North American still leads the world with 49,248,000 vs. Latin America’s 11,931,000 in 2008. Europe came in second with 35,263, 000.

Social marketing (also called attraction marketing) is what helped get President Obama elected. Through videos on YouTube, viral marketing campaigns launched by groups such as MoveOn.org, and individuals hosting rallies and parties locally, his marketing reach was unprecedented in the history of presidential campaigns.

You can use these same tools to attract customers to your business and monetize your site if that’s of interest. Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace are just three of the many social networking sites online now. Others include LinkedIn, Twitter, Squidoo, Plaxo Pulse, Ning, Xing, and Konnects. First, decide which two or three sites to use. If you have a website, you’ll want to link to that. If you don’t, consider at least setting up a blog. You can set up a blog for free on Google Blogger or WordPress (the blogger I’m using here). Both are easily customizable to fit your needs.

Take the time to think first about what your business purpose is. What’s the ultimate goal? Is it to promote your website? Do you want to sell products or services online? Do you want to promote yourself as a speaker or subject matter expert? What’s the main purpose of your business, and what do you want to achieve with attraction marketing? Write it down on paper.

Next, do some research. If you don’t already know who your target market is, check out your competition and think about who would buy your and their products and/or services. What are their ages, incomes, aspirations, interests, needs? Again, write it down. You’re beginning to paint a picture of the purpose for your business and your preferred customer.

Now think about what success looks like. How would you measure success? By the number of phone calls, orders, product sales? By dollar volume in sales? By the number of unique subscribers to your blog or website? Write that down, too.

Then check out the various social marketing sites I mentioned earlier and see who’s using them. Are they your target market? You can get some demographic data online about the different site visitors from companies like ComScore, too. Here’s an example from Rapleaf of the gender and age of social networkers.

Choose one to start with and set up your profile. Choose a blog site like Blogger or WordPress and set up your account. Write your first blog. Then link the social networking site to your blog. A great resource to help you in this process is Renegade University. From there you’ll get a wealth of information about internet and network marketing. Here’s another great resource about the 7 Great Lies About Network Marketing. It’s fascinating.

This is just a start to get you up and on the web. If you need help, give me a call at 858-357-9600, ext. 5 or e-mail me at jeri.denniston@hainescentre.com.

According to Michael Gerber, author of E-Myth Mastery, there are seven disciplines that a successful entrepreneur must develop to build a World Class Company. Each discipline is like a puzzle piece that makes up the enterprise. It’s not a building block working in a linear fashion, but rather part of a system of components that work together to complete the whole that make up the company. The entrepreneur must have all disciplines regardless of the size of the company in order to achieve his or her desired objective, the vision of what he or she is trying to create.

The seven disciplines are:

• The Enterprise Leader
• The Marketing Leader
• The Financial Leader
• The Management Leader
• The Client Fulfillment Leader
• The Lead Conversion Leader
• The Lead Generation Leader

The 1^st Discipline: The Enterprise Leader.

There are five essential skills the Enterprise Leader must have: Concentration, Discrimination, Organization, Innovation and Communication. The skill of Concentration is learning to feel comfortable with being a lone. We’ve heard the phrase, “It’s lonely at the top.” It’s true. The entrepreneur is the final decision-maker. Good or bad, your decisions are the ones that will create the company of your dreams. As the enterprise leader, your work is to lead, not do. According to Gerber in his book E-Myth Mastery, you need to remind yourself every day, “I am a leader. My job is to do the work of leadership.” This skill deals with how to focus your attention.

The second skill, Discrimination, deals with where to focus your attention. You need to learn how to choose between alternatives. The most important things for an enterprise leader to consider are the vision, mission and values (the culture or consciousness) of your enterprise. Focus on the end game of what you’re trying to create. Every option or path you choose to pursue should be held up against those elements. Ask the question, “will this path get me to the vision I’m trying to create? Does it tie into the mission of what we’re doing?”

The third skill, Organization, deals with the functional components of your enterprise. This is how you organize
your business, turn chaos into order, how you structure your business so everything has a place and function, and it works in an orderly fashion.

Innovation, the fourth skill, depends on Discrimination. Everything you do must be held up against the standards of your vision, mission and values. Performance is judged by the standards of how well it contributes to achieving the future objective of the enterprise. Innovation comes from following a series of steps that include determining what you want to improve, deciding how to improve it, quantifying the improvement or its effect on the enterprise, testing it, and re-quantifying, and testing it again and again, until you get positive results.

The fifth skill is Communication. This involves how you communicate to your people what you expect of them, how you listen to their understanding of your expectations, and how you improve your communication to close the gap between your expectations and their understanding of them. Organize your communication so it’s clear, compelling and inspiring. Present it in a variety of ways, in person, via e-mail, in newsletters, on the website, in brochures and other marketing materials.

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Tags: discipline, communication, innovation, organization, enterprise, leadership

Look at the processes in your business. Are they all necessary? Are you doing things because they’ve always been done that way? Or are there opportunities to change or eliminate some processes altogether because they’ve become outdated or irrelevant? It’s time to take a hard look and see where you might uncover some hidden costs and discover new-found savings.

While it may be possible to organize this process internally, we find it’s often beneficial to bring in an outside, independent facilitator/consultant who can coach and guide the process.  Invite a cross-section of your staff, from senior executives to the lowest level person to a 2-day off-site meeting. Make sure you have representatives at various levels from all areas of the company.

During the two days, you will have each person work individually and in cross functional teams of two or three to look critically at the work they do every day and write down non-essential tasks they perform that could be done differently or could be eliminated or transferred to another department where it makes more sense.

They will explore opportunities for time and work savings in four areas:

• individually
• within their departments
• within their divisions
• inter-departmentally

We did this with a mid-size  feed manufacturer and they found $1.75 million in savings the first year with an ongoing cost savings of $2.2 million annually thereafter…without cutting jobs or adding investment to the company. Within the first 3 months after completing the two-day workshop, they had already cut costs by $600,000…well on their way to surpassing the anticipated $1.75 million.

This inspired the CEO to hold another session with another group of 30 employees, this time involving the sales team. That group found another $1.85 million in savings and are beginning to implement those.

This example was with a company of about 230 employees, but the exercise can be accomplished with smaller and larger organizations. A side benefit of the process is that the employees are motivated to continue looking for cost savings and streamlining their work, especially if a good reward system is established to encourage ongoing creative thinking.

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Once you’ve developed the vision, mission and values for your business, you need to measure it. Walking around and talking to your staff is good, but it’s not enough. According to Michael Gerber in his book, E-Myth Mastery, by creating an effective quantification process, you can pinpoint what’s happening in your business and anticipate when problems might occur that need to be corrected. This results in an agile business, able to adapt to change quickly. Just make sure you’re quantifying relevant information that affects the growth and sustainability of your business.

There are three levels of key indicators that need to be addressed, according to Gerber:

Strategic – which show how the business is progressing towards achieving that future vision.

Business – which enable you as the CEO and your senior staff to view the business and its major divisions or departments as an integrated whole, and

System – which show managers and staff at all levels, in detail, what is right or wrong with each system within the organization.

Key Strategic Indicators
These indicators give you a sense of the overall morale and health of the organization. They are high level indicators which tell you whether or not you’re still on the right path towards your desired outcomes. At the strategic level, these may include employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, market positioning vs. your competition, and profitability vs. revenue.

Key Business Indicators
These tell you how well each system is working together. Remember, a business is a set of systems within an overall system (the business). There’s the IT System, the Marketing System, the HR System, etc. Even if you’re a small business with fewer than five people, you can divide your business into systems. You need to be looking at how well integrated these systems and processes are, how well they work together, not just at the individual parts of the business. Some indicators will be financial, some will be around customer service or product marketing, sales or lead generation, and some may focus on technology, production or manufacturing.

Key System Indicators
Here’s where you get into the detail of each system and measure and track what’s working well and what isn’t. Identify the key indicators in each system that make it successful and a plan for each to achieve that level of success.

Set up a process to gather the information and report it on a monthly and quarterly basis. This keeps you focused on the whole business and its integrated parts. We recommend simple tools that result in one-page reports. They don’t need to be lengthy, but the reports do need to be relevant.

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