Vario Creative Blog

We’re busy over here this week creating a Customer Spotlight campaign and display for one of our clients. Some local banks and establishments offer a similar program for their clients to advertise their work or business to passersby. It’s a great way to market your company or product for free to the local community and to build a brand identity at the same time. So pound the pavement and see what’s available in your area for Customer Spotlight or Featured Businesses.

A few quick tips when creating a Customer Spotlight:

1. Brand identity is key. Make sure your logo and website is noticeable.
2. Use eye catching graphics in your display. This will gain the attention of someone who may want to take a second look at what you have to offer. But be careful not to use too much text. People won’t stick around long enough to read through everything.
3. Have a call to action. Make sure you have a tag line that will entice people to come over and see why your business is the best in its class.
4. Check your spelling: Twice! Don’t make the same mistake that the Celebrity Apprentice folks made when they designed their signage in a recent episode.
5. Collect information. Offer potential customers the chance to win something by providing their information or submitting a referral. It’s a great way to build your contacts.
6. Make sure there is plenty of literature for a potential customer to take with them. Business cards, postcards, etc.
7. Use plenty of props! Show off some of the items that your business can do. For instance, if you’re a wedding photographer, leave out a bunch of samples/portfolio of your work.
8. Check with the bank or business to make sure you adhere to any guidelines for display purposes. Banks, for example, may not want you to use table top displays for security reasons.
9. Send a thank you note. After your customer spotlight is over, make sure you send a thank you note to the business that featured you.

Some interesting articles on Tradeshows:

How to Create an Effective Trade Show Display

Tips For a Successful Tradeshow

Top Ten Trade Show Exhibit Best Practices

Displays2Go: Tradeshow Materials

• Do you network to expand your business? 
• Do you attend networking events on a regular basis?
• Are you looking to make more money and get more referrals? 

Vario Creative has a resolution this year: To attend more networking events and activities. At my weekly networking meeting last week, we had a visitor’s day. It was a great turnout too… about 10 potential members came to check out our group. Currently our group is at 21 members and the business that has passed among members has been super (approximately $240,000.000 in 2007). Not bad for a smaller group. And not bad for a seat average of approximately $11,429.00.

My networking group is a part of the BNI organization (Business Networking International). I joined up when I first started Vario Creative about 4 years ago. It was not only a great source of steady referrals but crucial to me setting up my business properly. At that point, I really had not idea about health insurance, life insurance, financial investing or any of that sort of thing. It was always done for me at whatever company I worked for.

By joining up with this group, I met a lot of great people and trustworthy businesses to help me get the information I needed for my own venture. So on a personal level, it’s been a great experience.

On a professional front, networking has been vital to Vario Creative because it is a constant stream of referrals from not only my group members, but other groups as well. It has given us the opportunity to get our name out there to various sized companies and build our portfolio with some really great projects. On average, my guess is that over 50% of our business comes from the referrals from my BNI group. And for what I pay in annual fees and monthly dues, it’s worth the investment.

Another great organization to take part in is a local Chamber of Commerce. Our local chamber does monthly “Business After Hours” events at various member establishments for about $10 admission. It’s a super way to meet other businesses and potential clients as well as market yourself to a large group of people. It too also provides you with meeting professionals that may provide you with needed services for both personal and business matters.

There are many other networking opportunities out there for small businesses. A great way to find some in your local area is on Craig’s List or Whofish.org listings.

So if you’re interested in building your business with more referrals, make it a point to visit a local BNI chapter or a Chamber of Commerce meeting. You’ll be glad you did!

I’ve been hearing for some time that “the Webmaster is dead.” If that’s the case, I wonder what will become of my webmistress?

The truth is that the web over the years had gone in two divergent directions: specialization or home hobbiest. While the corporations have become the province of ui designers, database administrators, back end developers, analytics mavens, search engine optimizers and search marketers, to name only a few of the disiplines, for some reason many small businesses think they can go it alone, and many seem to think that means they have to deal with non or semi-professionals.

So what is a webmaster then? For me, it’s a simply a title that was hung on me at a job in 1995 and I stuck with it. It seemed to sum things up, without being overly pedantic and it fit the basic criteria of “you can have any title so long as it doesn’t have the words President or Executive in it.”

Moreover, the term implied responsibility for keeping the site running and fulfilling the business’ objectives. I’ve never had any illusions about that. Often the job simply came down to “do what needs to be done.”

From Wikipedia:

Webmasters are practitioners of Web communication. Typically, they are generalists with HTML expertise who manage all aspects of Web operations. On a smaller site, the webmaster will typically be the owner, developer and/or programmer, in addition to the author of the content.

I’m shocked by the lack of quality of work I see in the small business arena today. I regularly look at sites for people who have paid good money, expecting results and have gotten none, often due to incompetence. This can be avoided fairly easily: use a professional.

I’ll forgoe my usual harangue about the lack of professionalism in small business web design. Suffice to say that I reviewed a couple sites launched recently by “other” supposedly professional designers, and I was shocked at the amateurish mistakes made.

Instead, let’s say that a webmaster is one who has a good grounding in all the areas of specialization within the regimen. As such, who then could give you a good specification for what a small business site should contain? Here’s mine:

• It must provide an excellent marketing point of contact.
• Local search – it should get you in front of your core customers using the tenets of Search Engine Optimization.
  • Proper use of keywords, descriptions, keyword loading, page naming, etc.
  • Use of Google Sitemaps and Yahoo Sitemaps
  • Several other proprietary tricks I’m not about to share in an open forum…
• It should track - analytics aren’t just for big sites anymore. Small businesses need metrics on what is happening at their sites as much as anyone.
• It should be editable - content management is key. Even if you don’t choose to make changes to your site, it makes it easier for me to make changes later.
• It’s got to fit the business need. One size does not fit all. A product site is vastly different from a service site, which is different from a content site. While using a template for a design may be acceptable, it’s got to fit with your business need(s).

That’s the short list, without even touching on any of the Web 2.0 bells and whistles. And I see so many sites that are failing to even hit this lowly list.

A great webmaster will provide this and more for your small business, and you should never settle for anything less. “Good enough” isn’t when it comes to your business.

David Churbuck’s got a good piece up today commenting on an article that appearred in the Sunday Times (NY, not London…) noting that many key advertisers are moving good portions of their budgets out of regular media (newspapers, magazines, tv) and the web towards internally developed products:

Here’s the payoff from the piece. The shift is not from traditional to digital, it’s from public media to “internal” media. In essence, marketers, particularly consumer packaged goods, are plowing their dollars into themselves. BudTV. Nike’s exercise tools. Their own communities, their own social networks. Their SecondLife islands.

“Digital media spending is doubling every year at many big companies, industry data indicate. But the research firm Outsell found this year that 58 percent of marketers’ online spending went to their own Web sites, rather than to paid ads. More than two million people visited Nike-owned Web sites in July, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.”

I’ve been thinking for some time, how will Small Business make this hurdle, and for now, my answer is simple: they won’t or at least few of them will. The problem is that this is a key point where that brand strength will make a huge difference. Strong national brands can make the transition from product to life style, where as the average every day brand can not. Companies like Nike and Budweiser can engender that level of commitment from a customer, where as the small brand will not make the hurdle.

Of course never is a long time. And there are some very strong local brands that very well might make the reach on a local level. In fact, in some areas, and I am now thinking of the small town I live in, there is an opportunity for a local brand to literally become the media for the area…by providing a means of local networking for us that doesn’t currently exist. In this case, the business would not only be controlling their own message deliver, they’d control the medium as well. The brand would become the media…

Aside from that, I think we really need to consider how we find our customers. While we can run ads, and and flash banners at them, it’s becoming obvious the more important thing is to simply interact with them. This is the kind of thing that has worked very well for small business on my Reel-Time site, where some very prescient charter captains have learned to engage and captivate, and that has propelled them to nearly rock star stature in the niche industry (saltwater fly fishing). The guys who didn’t embrace it grumble and grit their teeth, but even they will admit the truth…when community members think about booking a charter, they contact the rock stars first – the guys that are posting reports with great pictures and videos, they guys that have become the community leaders.

That leads us into the post that Rob O’Regan posted this morning, “Embrace the Swarm“. He’s just back from the Association of National Advertisers meeting and had this:

This power, he added, “irrevocably changes” the roles of marketers. He compared the herd mentality of traditional marketing and advertising programs – communicating to people who passively sit in front of TVs and radios and read newspapers and magazines – to today’s far more active digital swarms: “The herd is passive. It lacks active intelligence. The swarm on the other hand is about actively sharing intelligence, and that is a huge distinction. While you can lead a herd, you cannot lead a swarm. You cannot issue instructions to a swarm. A swarm is not an audience in the traditional sense and it’s not looking to [marketers] for guidance.”

The implications of peer communication and localized information are significant, Brymer said. “Forget the idea that digital is the new media. The real new media is you and me.” As an example, he referenced Allconsuming.net, a site devoted to people “telling each other about the stuff they’re buying, eating, drinking, watching.”

He’s right on the money. We’re moving from a place where we could be marketed to and transitioning to a place where we must be influenced. I couldn’t help but think of the bit I wrote about in May talking about how companies are trying to tap into the tween girl market by influencing Alpha Girls. Then I honestly think I believed that they were unique, that this alpha girl marketing was something that only applied to the special qualities of the tween girl. It isn’t…we can market to the key influencer, and in doing so reasonably expect that the others will come along to the party. Again, I reflect on what I’ve seen at Reel-Time, and I also now think about what Cisco has done with the CIO Leadership Forum which I created for them working with their partner CXO Media (and yes, that’s another good example of a company putting money into developing an internal digital property that bypasses media, even though this was built in partnership with media).

So how do we grab our slice of the pie as small businesses? Participation – while we may not own the social networks on which we interact with our customers, we need to go where our customers are and when there, we need to show them the value. Answer questions and be the resource. They may not want to become a member of Al’s Septic World for networking, but by participating in the likely home improvement social channels, like a DIY Forum, we position ourselves as the experts, and when they need someone like us, they’ll think of us. Because we’ll be the rock stars…the people customers want to be with and the people competitors want to be.

In some ways, working for so long as a Webmaster and marketing guy has ruined the web for me. Where most users see websites from a utilitarian point of view, I have trouble not being critical. My experience becomes so much “inside baseball” that it’s sometimes hard to realize what the web is really meant to be.

A sea of problems, errors and out right omissions, is what I see. Often that’s part and parcel of doing redesign work: if it wasn’t broken, they wouldn’t need me.

Let’s take a look at some of the most common problems and how to avoid them.

1. The Mediocre, the Bland and the Ugly – design is important. An ugly design will send people scurrying off the to competition before they even take the time to find out about your company. Mediocre design, by the same suit, tells the reader “We’re Number 2,” again a message we don’t want to send. Bland design can be even worse, because it doesn’t give the reader a message at all. It fails to deliver substance, and fails to to motivate the user to do anything other than go somewhere else.
2. The IBM Effect – have you ever tried to find information on the IBM website about a specific product? Wes Craven must be their webmaster, as the experience is a *total nightmare*. That’s not because the information isn’t there, it most certainly is. The problem isn’t lack of information, it’s the sheer over abundance of information, which can (and in my case, has) taken days to sift through. We need to make our information easy to find via search, and in cases where we really do have vast libraries, we ought to have both a highly developed search function and perhaps the ability to contact someone to help us navigate the seas of text. I dare you to find the installation documentation for Websphere 6.2 on their site…it’s there, but you’ll find more documentation than NASA has for the Space Shuttle…
3. Construction Zone – If it isn’t ready, don’t launch it. Nothing is worse than a site that tells customers you never finish what you start…
4. The Time Capsule – Set it and forget it may work for Ron Popiel and chickens, but it’s death on the web. If you’ve got a press release from 2005 on your homepage, you need to rethink what you’re doing.
5. My Way or the Highway – Potential customer love it when you make them jump through hoops. Make them register to get whitepapers, force them to watch a splash page, and you’re sure to sent them running for the hills.

I love telemarketers. You see, I just don’t get to talk to enough people during the course of the day, and I find it truly exciting to talk to someone who doesn’t have a clue about the product they are selling, and knows even less about the people they are trying to sell it to.

Case in point: the other day I was taking one of my very infrequent days off, which I happened to put me about 30 miles off the coast, tuna fishing (no fish were harmed during the course of the boat ride…sigh), and my phone rings. The young lady on the other end of the phone was having a little trouble with both her script, and with her command of the English language, but managed to tell me how she’d been looking at our website and thought that we could benefit from her company’s Web Site Starter kit.

Me: Do you know what Vario Creative does? What kind of company it is?

Her: Yes.

Me: Okay, and you’ve actually looked at our web site?

Her: Yes.

Me: What kind of flowers are on the homepage?

Her: (silence)

Me: Okay, so you didn’t look at our site. Are you aware that Vario Creative is the leader in Web Development and Design in this area, as well as doing general marketing?

Her: No…

Me: So there really isn’t any reason for us to be talking, right?

Her: Maybe I could have my boss call you to explain why you need us…

The lesson here is this: telemarketing can be a great way to generate leads, but it’s got to be done by a competent sales person who has at least a clue about your business, and that of your potential customers. If you think you can just put some clown on a phone and have them run through every business listing in your area, you’re more likely going to:

• Turn off potential customers
• Look like a fool
• Alert your competitors that you’re a weak sister and suggest to them that it might be worth the time to go after your customers
• Become the subject of a scathing blog post or other bad PR, just like these clowns, who I decided not to mention by name…this time

Why not? According to the AP via Forbes.com, Google has started offering paid storage services online.

Web search and Internet services company Google Inc. on Friday began selling expanded online storage, targeted for users with large picture, music or video file collections.

The prices range from $20 per year for 6 gigabytes of online storage; $75 per year for 25 gigabytes of storage; $250 per year for 100 gigabytes of storage; and $500 per year for 250 gigabytes of storage.

I’ve been saying for sometime that we’re headed to a point where Google offers basically an online operating system. This is yet another instance.

Let’s hop into our wayback machine and examine what networks used to be, in the days before the PC. Huge mainframes that were maintained by legions of highly skilled techs, connected by network cable to multitudes of “dumb” terminals.

Think of this: what happens when we get ubiquitous wireless access for our computers. What happens when we no longer need massive hard drives, because we can store our stuff online. What happens when we don’t need MS Word, or Excel, because we have free or low cost options online? It now all exists – EVDO, Google Storage, Google Docs…

The point to keep in mind here is that most users have little need of a computer in way they are constructed today. They use their devices as little more than a cross between a notebook for to do lists, and a Internet access point (okay, more likely it’s a porn delivery device…). So why not just buy a very cheap machine and surf away?

Or why not make the PC a dumb terminal which is merely a means to access all your online assets?

The benefit of centralizing most of the software involved is clear: instead of having customers maintain their software themselves (hello, Microsoft, I’ve hosed my registry settings for Word again), Google would be able to maintain their own software in a single location, upgrading and fixing as needed, without the customer actually being in the mix. It won’t work for big companies, but this will certainly work for even some medium size businesses, and it’s a slam dunk for Small Business and the home computing sector (excluding hardcore gamers).

In one move, they could kill the need for us to speak with “Jonathan” in Bangalore to help maintain our installation of simple apps (or apps that probably *should* be simple).

More:

GoogleBlog post
GoogleAccounts Page

A classic post by Nikole Gipps at Small Business Essentials – “The 5 Business Colleagues Your Should Have“.

Too many entrepreneurs try to exist in a vacuum instead of seeking out the help and support that can bring them to success. So here it is, the five people you should have on your “team” when you are an entrepreneur:

Actually, click the link above and read them on her blog.

My thought comes in more along the lines of this: do you fulfill any of those roles in your organization today? Should you?

Small business people tend to look outside for mentoring. We sometimes forget that we need to mentor those around us. As they say, a rising tide lifts all ships. So think for a little while on the value you provide inside your business, and also in your business network.