I am expecting my new business cards to arrive by the end of this week.  I have a new title at work, and since I never got around to updating them with my last title change, I figure now is as good a time as any.  So my new title is there, along with my work phone, cell phone, email address, and company contact information, all plastered into the standard company business card template.

But for events, meetings, and introductions that are in no way related to my current company, I think it’s time that I had my own personal business card as well.  I’m talking about those instances where I run into friends from my past, where a potential consulting gig exists, where I want to pass my name and web site address out to people who might possibly be interested.

A recent blog post over at Ever-Real Modern Marketing inspired me with its display of seventy-two brilliant business card designs.  Now, I’m of the mindset that business cards should always be in the standard rectangle shape and in the standard size.  Many of the cards listed play by those rules, and I think the artists have done an amazing job working with colors, graphics, and typographies to make it their own.  I’m absolutely going to attempt the same.

In my experience, business cards that are shaped or sized differently from most tend to present more of a headache than anything.  I received one at an industry trade show I attended last year that, though novel in its approach, failed on all accounts.  One, it was too small, approximately the size of a fifty-cent piece.  Two, it was shaped like an octagon.  Three, it had light text on a very dark background, and four, the text was so small that every line looked cramped.

Oh yes, and I promptly lost it.  That’s what happens with small, oddly-shaped bits of stock paper.

The point is, I’m looking to create a business card for myself that is eye-catching, sensibly-shaped, and exudes a whole lot of me.  Because, let’s be honest, one’s business card is another means of advertising oneself as a product or a brand, and I need to be sure my card is as me as possible.  This is going to include some thought as to color schemes (reflecting, of course, the other self-promotional venues I use such as my web site and my Twitter page), typography (I tend to veer toward cleaner, sans-serif fonts, so not too many problems there), and any graphical elements I might think of.

And, no, despite my face being on pretty much every site of which I’m a member, I’m inclined not to put my photo on the card itself.  That just strikes me as very ‘real estate agent’ or ‘financial adviser,’ neither of which is my chosen vocation.  Personal opinion, of course, and no offense to those of you who aren’t either of those but do in fact have photos on your business cards.

Hmm. I think some Photoshop play is in order here.

• The 75 Hottest Business Card Designs You’ve Ever Seen
• I Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Business Cards
• Awesome Business Card Designs of 2008

And some of them I’ve never met in person.

With the rise in popularity of social networks comes a rise in virtual friend-making.  For me, each social network represents a different set of people that I ‘know.’

Facebook

Without question, this is the place through which I keep in touch with people that I’ve known personally in the past.  From buddies I’ve had since kindergarten, to those guys I met at a poker night last week at a mutual friend’s house, this is essentially my virtual uber-address book.  If I’m looking to send Christmas cards to people, I get their addresses here.  If I need to text a friend, but I just got a new phone that has none of my numbers in it, I get their phone number here.  If I want to check the status of my good friends’ relationship, I can find that out immediately here (and as an aside, why is everyone I know getting engaged at the same time?).  With the exception of less than five friends on my list of 400+, I have met all of my Facebook connections in real life, and I don’t intend to change that policy.

LinkedIn

Most of us have high expectations for our respective careers, and networking is key to success.  Thus LinkedIn came into the picture.  Like Facebook, I have met 99% of my connections in person; I’ve worked with them, done consulting for them, or graduated from the same university as them.  I use LinkedIn for business reasons: for problem-solving, for discussion, for recruiting, and for recommending people I admire.

MySpace

I started out limiting my MySpace friends to only those people I know from real life encounters, but it has since spiralled a bit out of control.  Now, though I check MySpace infrequently at most, my friends list includes a hodge-podge of people I have met in real life, musical artists and actors I admire, and randoms who either boost my mob size in the application Mobsters or those people who just look like they would be interesting.  I see no real use to MySpace, and thus don’t usually include it in my top lists of social networks, but I figure most of you know it and/or have used it and would be interested in hearing my thoughts.

Twitter

Honestly, I think I’ve met perhaps ten of my followers in real life, and the same applies for those people I’m following.  I use discretion when following people; I will never be one of those users (and you know who they are) who follow multiple thousands of people in the hopes that they build their followers list.  That kind of thinking doesn’t work for me.  Instead, I have chosen those I follow selectively: either they are social media aficionados and marketing professionals, or they mention an interest in their bio that really catches my eye, like “video game developer” or “entrepreneur” or “start-up junkie.”  And from the looks of it, most of my followers are doing the same thing.

How do you handle your social networks?  Are each of them dedicated to a specific group of people in your life, or do you not make any exceptions when inviting connections or accepting invitations?

• Virtual Going Out is the New Going Out
  
• The Social Networking Advantage
• Virtual Friends = Real Friends?
• Social Networking Is About Real Friends

Many have dedicated themselves to the pursuit of the latter.  Most will fail.

In the good ‘ol days of the music business, getting your song played wasn’t all that complicated.  DJs and studio producers were easily accessible; you didn’t even have to look pretty to become a huge star.  In the late 1950s, it seemed as though all you needed to was create a song with a fast beat, and you had a hit on your hands.

Elvis Presley was discovered after doing a cheap studio recording of “My Happiness” that included his voice and his guitar, nothing else.  Buddy Holly played local clubs and talent competitions until he opened for Bill Haley and the Comets, upon which he was offered a sweet record contract.  Little Richard made it big thanks to an impromptu rendition of “Tutti Frutti” at a local recording studio.

Today, it takes the right connections to make it in the music industry … or it takes creativity.

Realistically, few of you know ‘the right people.’  And in order to get noticed and actually sell your music in this vast pool of artists trying to hit it big, you’ve got to do something notably different from everyone else.

OK Go, a geek-rock group from Chicago, perfectly reflect the kind of creativity one needs in the music business.  Veering far from the norm, the band went relatively unnoticed until it released the video for its first official single, “A Million Ways,” in 2005.  But it didn’t release it via the typical music video avenues.  Instead, they let it loose on YouTube, where it became a viral phenomenon.  In 2006, OK Go created a video for the single “Here It Goes Again,” shot in one take as the members of the band performed synchronized moves on four treadmills.  Insane, no?  But it worked, and OK Go walked away with a Grammy and the number two album on iTunes.

Laura Warshauer, an acquaintance of mine from university, has been playing guitar and singing for ages on the road to musical success.  Now signed to Island Records (the same label that deals with Fall Out Boy, Bon Jovi, and Melissa Etheridge), Laura is promoting her new album the grassroots way: by wandering around New York City on foot with her guitar, as seen below.  The success of this has yet to be seen, as the campaign has just begun, but talk about getting yourself noticed!

The music industry has so many people trying to get into it that it’s virtually impossible for someone taking the ’safe’ and ‘typical’ path to break through the walls if you aren’t friends with those already entrenched in the business.  But by marketing yourself in a unique and creative way, chances are you’ll get people talking.  And that’s the first step to greatness.  Rock on.

• 100 Social Media Resources for Musicians
• No Regrets About Good Music Promotion

Yes, a logo design change is necessary sometimes.  My company went through the same thing last year, when our original logo was deemed ‘amateur’ and we realized the difficulties in scaling the image in different environments because it was simply too detailed (and don’t even get me started on how it looked on polo shirts).  Our new logo is much simpler, more linear, and cleaner, and it fit in well with the repositioning of our brand on the marketplace.

But that’s just it.  The logo redesign was but a minor part of the overall brand overhaul.  The latter in itself is a difficult task to achieve, and a dangerous one at that, but that’s not the point of this post.  I’m trying here to reaffirm the notion, so often debated by marketing experts, that changing one’s logo rarely impacts a brand and thus rarely helps with market share.

Pepsi has redesigned its logo many times over the years, certainly many more times than Coca-Cola, its primary competitor.  Why?  According to Beverage Digest, Chief Marketing Officer Dave Burwick reportedly said, “If we don’t change quickly, we run the risk of being a footnote to history.” Hold the phone - a chief marketing officer of a major multinational corporation said that?  And yet Pepsi’s market share has dramatically fallen over the years.  Perhaps it would behoove to follow marketing guru Seth Godin’s advice:

Take the time and money and effort you’d put into an expensive logo and put them into creating a product and experience and story that people remember instead.

Seth has it right: brand reputation is what makes a company money, not a snazzy logo.  Especially when you change the apparent name of one of your products to MtnDew, which, by the way, just looks idiotic anyway.  Given how many times Pepsi has changed its logo (and undoubtedly spent thousands on rebranding - physically - their products), and how Coca-Cola continues to dominate the marketplace without straying much from its original design, something about Pepsi’s logic just isn’t clicking.

By focusing on the consumer experience, your brand improves its reputation and economic status.  With that comes a warm fuzzy when a pleased consumer sees your logo.

Best Buy is taking the same route as Pepsi.  First of all, it is removing what is a very memorable graphic element to create a more mature look.  Gone are the big bold capital letters, gone is the solid yellow price tag.  In its place are some thin, rounded letters with capitals in the proper places.  They’re testing it out at the Mall of America right now.

But what’s been happening to Best Buy’s brand?  I’m assuming sales have dropped since the advent of online shopping; one can find items, often cheaper, in many more places, from Amazon to Craigslist to eBay.  And a veritable army of angry customers has formed due to Best Buy’s careless attitude about customer service.  IHateBestBuy.com has a thriving community of folks who aren’t hesitating to share their stories about purchases gone horribly awry; in February, the company was sued for $54 million dollars after it lost a customer’s laptop … and didn’t do anything about it.  To be honest, I’m not completely content with Best Buy at the moment either after I ordered an item online for pickup, only to be told when I went to pick it up (after receiving an email from Best Buy that my item was ready) that, oops, the item wasn’t actually there, and that I could cancel the order if I wanted to.  Yes, apparently that was my only option.  Thanks, guys.  Real helpful.

Solid products, excellent customer service, and a dedication to success will get you the green.  Lacking all of those but having a snazzy logo won’t.  Your company’s story is what makes the logo work, not the other way around.  And it does bother me when I see marketers change their company’s logo on a dime because it seems like a ‘quick fix’ for their problems.

• Your Brand Is Not Your Logo
  
• Chronic Logo Redesign vs Preserving Brand Integrity
• Best Buy New Logo Redesign

Kill Your Blog

The author, Paul Boutin, seems to be under the impression that blogs are, well, so 2004.  Now, apparently, “the blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge.”

One could see this as true.  He references Technorati’s list of the top 100 blogs, all of which are corporate and/or professional blogs making a tidy yearly sum from advertising.  The era of personal, one-writer blogs may appear to have been pushed aside in favor of blogs that have multi-person staffs working twenty-four hours a day to deliver the most valuable content to their readers.

But to be completely honest, I’m not convinced.  I rarely visit the sites that have 5+ posts per day.  Why?  For one thing, I just don’t have the time to keep up with all of it.  Who with a full-time job and a personal life does?  Additionally, the information provided seems less valuable to me than that in single-person shops.  Some of the biggest blogs in the world spit out content constantly, making them, essentially, online newspapers.  I can set up Google alerts for the headlines on any particular topic without having to trudge through paragraphs of news.  No, I find much more value in poignant, thought-out posts from individuals who a) know and honor their blog’s focus and b) take the time to research, ponder, and analyze what they are about to present to the world.

For me, as a marketeer and young professional, this is why luminaries such as Chris Brogan, Seth Godin, and Penelope Trunk keep me coming back.  They don’t spew out superficial content, but rather provide information combined with references and anecdotes … the kind of juicy stuff you don’t get with these money-grabbing assembly lines.

I do not think anyone should go out right now and disband his or her blog.  Ignore your Technorati rank for a second and look inside of your community.  Do you have “regulars,” or people who continue to return to your site?  Are many people subscribed to you via RSS or email?  Is your comments section a haven for discussion, arguments, and debate?  My goal would be to answer all of those questions with a yes. This is the value for me as a blogger.  My aspirations as a blogger - and I realize I’m very, very early in the game here with this particular blog - is not to earn $75,000 per year because of some well-placed advertising.  I’m happy knowing that I give people something to think about, whether they agree with it or not.

Twitter is heralded in the Wired article as being “to 2008 what the blogosphere was to 2004.”  One cannot deny its influence on the Internet and, specifically, the Web 2.0 world as we know it.  From Barack Obama to Britney Spears to Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco, ‘tweeting’ has become a great means of communicating with particular communities because it’s so fast.  It takes a fraction of the time to write a thought that is 140 characters versus putting together four or five paragraphs for a blog post.  I love Twitter.  I think it’s a brilliant tool to connect with one’s community as well as to follow others who provide you with ideas that you find useful.

But it won’t stop me from reading blogs, and I don’t think it will render blogs obsolete.  As much as people say that information-gathering needs to be quicker and briefer to compliment the fast-past life in which we all live, someone will always find a need to go a little deeper into a thought, an idea, or a concept - and that’s where these speciality, individual bloggers come in.

Keep it up, guys!  Boutin may not agree with it, but I’m still reading … and if you got this far, apparently you are too.

I’m sure I’m not the only consumer who has routinely been at the end of a baffling and/or sometimes annoying phone call with companies who outsource.  I’m not saying that outsourcing is bad, but I think sometimes companies ignore the problems with outsourcing over the obvious advantages.

Advantages to Outsourcing

1. Your support desk or QA team can work around the clock.  You can have people working a typical 9-to-5 in your home country, and with an outsourced team in Asia, for example, they will start work at the end of your day and end at the beginning.  Thus, work continues twenty-four hours a day.
2. Outsourcing dramatically reduces cost.  Skilled labor in most countries where outsourcing occurs is a fraction of the cost of someone you might hire for your home office.  I recently spoke with a colleague whose job is being outsourced upon her departure from the company, and she said that the new person would be getting approximately USD 450 a month - a good salary in India - compared with her $50-60K per year.
3. Outsourcing can allow you to focus on the more time-sensitive responsibilities.  One of the main uses for outsourcing is using a lower-cost labor force to perform the day-to-day, repetitive duties that previously had taken your eye off of the more important tasks at hand.  This is why using outsourcing for customer support is so popular.

Disadvantages to Outsourcing

1. The language barrier can prove to be a huge obstacle.  I’m not saying that many of these outsourced folks aren’t fluent in English, because they are, but some outsourcing communities play down the other factors that are involved: strong accents and a lack of knowledge of American colloquialisms.  I recently placed a support call to a very popular CRM and had to repeat my problem three times.  The gentleman on the other end was very nice, but just couldn’t seem to ‘get’ what I was trying to say.  Or perhaps he did, but I couldn’t understand him when he spoke back to me.  Either way, this is not a good thing, and it’s happening more and more often.
2. Outsourcing means a loss of control.  You will have managers at your outsourced location, who will do their best to follow and enforce the rules included within the outsourcing contract, but be aware that you run the risk of losing the proper management techniques that you have employed at your headquarters.  Because of this, productivity and quality of service can suffer.
3. Communication becomes less cohesive.  The time difference means that duties may often take longer to do than if you had a full-time, in-house employee.  If the tasks being outsourced are HR- or website-related, you may find that it takes an extra day or more to get a simple task completed.  Similarly, if you have an urgent matter to attend to, calling the outsourced company in the middle of the day your time will get you nowhere, as it will be the middle of the night there.  There is also the matter of quality control, as it is much harder to explain a design concept, for example, in person than it is over the phone or via WebEx.

On a final note, one must also consider the social ramifications of offshore outsourcing.  In the 1980s, outsourcing was limited, for the most part, to manufacturing; that’s where the campaigns against cheap labor came in, especially in the case of children being used as workers.  Now, though, outsourcing has taken more of a high-tech route.  On the one hand, outsourcing creates jobs and opportunities in areas that otherwise might not have seen the economic growth that it has.  On the other, this does mean that well-educated, skilled American workers are finding it harder and harder to gain employment because so many technology jobs are being shipped overseas.  The Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit and (self-proclaimed) non-partisan organization, recently said that 18 percent of all jobs in California are susceptible to outsourcing.

One must also consider the current state of the world.  Before outsourcing to a specific country, do your research.  Ensure that the political climate is conducive to a safe, productive workplace.  The last thing you want is for communication to be completely cut off between your headquarters and your outsourced entity due to, say, a terrorist attack on the external country’s capital.  Don’t presume to think that this is a long shot; one major location for outsourcing is Pakistan, which has seen a steady increase in violence over the last year.

Is outsourcing right for you?  I can’t answer that.  I only ask that companies take a look at the big picture, instead of focusing solely on the allure of a cheaper workforce.

I entered university convinced that I would one day become ambassador to a swanky European country.  I left university with a Master’s degree in international relations and the realization that testing the waters of the private sector was really more my thing.

In 2006 I moved up to New Jersey from the DC-area and got a call about an executive assistant position that needed to be filled at an enterprise software company.  Within a month of holding that position, I had wedged myself into the fledgling marketing team.  Two years on, I am preparing to leave this position for a new opportunity, and I will take with me everything I learned in this tumultuous start-up environment.

1. Everybody has a different definition of marketing.  Some say it’s the promotion of a company’s goods or services; others maintain that it includes the “processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers.”  But fixating on the definition of marketing doesn’t mean you’re actually doing anything.

2. Marketing jargon, while thrown back and forth between marketeers with undeniable enthusiasm, is misused and misunderstood more often than not.  For those of you who have no idea what I mean by “marketing jargon,” Michael Bloch at TamingTheBeast.net provides an example:

“Through an inverted dynamic and proactive CRM process,  we are a best of breed online company - a goal-directed, innovative digital firm which fast tracks cyber stickiness through turnkey solutions that guarantee targeted eyeballs using multiple streaming channels and viral e-services, providing the best ROI on your media spend.”

3. Using two monitors instead of one is the best decision I ever made, especially where collecting data and doing graphic design are concerned.

4. Work for a start-up, and not only will you get to wear jeans every day and blast music in the office, but you’ll also get to go for beers on occasion with the C-level executive team.  Where else would you get that opportunity?

5. If you can’t sell a ‘new media’ idea to your old-school boss, continue to slip it into conversation wherever possible.  Eventually, it will stick.  Or, it will become so ingrained in their minds that they’ll shout it out at an executive meeting and get the credit for it.  Either way, your idea will be put into place.

6. Don’t be the sole administrator for a CRM system for longer than six months.  If you are, be aware that training a new person to take over, who has never used the system before, is a bit of an overwhelming affair, especially if you only have your obligatory two weeks to do it.

7. Metrics are great, unless the team can’t agree on them.

8. Success in marketing isn’t black and white; everything you do ends up looking a funny shade of gray.  If you want black and white, join finance.

9. If you must, use the first month or so on the job to be a listener in meetings.  After that, you have no excuse.  Speak up.  No matter your level, your opinion does matter.

10. People laugh at off-site, team-building exercises, but they work.  Especially when you get to be completely honest and blunt about your team members, and they get to do the same to you.  Think of it as a character-building experience.  Constructive criticism is the way to build loyalty and trust.

11. Knee-jerk reactions generally don’t end well.  For your newly-implemented marketing processes to succeed, you really need to give them at least a few months to mature.  One week doesn’t give you a clear view of anything, especially in online marketing.

12. If you don’t support the product you’re supposed to be marketing, you shouldn’t be marketing it.

13. You’re going to make mistakes, but you learn from them.  And it’s nice if you have a boss who realizes this point and who believes in giving second chances.

What other advice would you give entry-level marketing folks?

• 38 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started in Marketing
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But he does have a point.  In the online world, your website is your number one sales and marketing tool, and the way you present it to the public can determine your company’s immediate and long-term future in the marketplace.

It is important to consider this as so many of you are veering in a “marketing with social media” direction, which, though still in its infancy, is proving to provide fantastic results with minimal spend, something that is extremely attractive in the current economy.  However, with this migration to social networks, blogging/microblogging, and viral media, a website is often left dusty and neglected in the background.  This is one of the worst things to happen, because, like it or not, in the online world your website will always be perceived as the number one face of your company.  Plus, any good online marketing campaign has a corporate website as its centerpiece.

So what role is your website playing now?  Is it merely a brochure, a high-level glimpse into what your company does, or is it an evolving, informative, and interactive sales machine?

If your answer is the former, but you realize the importance of making your website become the latter, do consider the following points in your mission.

Optimize, Optimize, Optimize

On the very basic level, ensure that your website is optimized for search engines.  If you’ve not done this before, there are plenty of great resources out there that cover the importance of crisp title tags, keyword-rich meta descriptions, effective link-building techniques, and meaty content.  And if you have done this before, remember that things get outdated very quickly on the ‘Net, so it might be a good time for you to do a thorough sweep of your site to ensure that everything is nicely aligned in true SEO fashion.

Exploit the Customizability of Your Corporate Site

By having a presence on MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter, for example, you can easily market to your ‘friends’ or ‘followers,’ but think about how those profile pages are laid out.  You can’t create a realistically usable support forum for your customers.  You can’t create registration forms for potential customers to fill out in order to join your mailing list.  Sure, you can add your press releases, announcements, blog articles, and so on, but you have little to no say over how they look and feel.  Take advantage of the fact that your website - the central hub of your entire online existence - can be changed to look exactly as you want it to look, feel exactly as you want it to feel, and portray your message exactly as it is intended.

Manage the Whole Sales Cycle in One Place

Your web site should not be an outward-looking glorified advertisement for your company.  As with all methods by which people build communities with social media, your web site needs to

• contain information for both potential and existing clients
• allow for discussion about your product or service, whether in a forum or a blog setting
• have enough dynamic content to bring visitors back to your site, or at least have them voluntarily subscribe to your RSS feeds or email list for update notifications
• be interactive enough, whether with forms so that potential and existing customers have easy, straightforward methods for getting in touch with you

Bring the basic theories of social media into your web site and use these as your foundation.  From here, your site can be a one-stop-shop for the community that your efforts are constantly building.  Through the use of these methods, and by working on your web site as much as you work on your other social media outlets, you can turn your corporate website into a smooth, customer-attaining machine.

• Strategies to Make Your Website a Powerful Internet Marketing Tool
  
• How to Use Your Website to Make Your Company More Profitable
• Building the Social Media Marketing Foundation

The big question for many of you is, “I see all of these marketing folks trying to sell the idea of social media, but where is the proof?  What do the actual consumers have to say about it?”  I’d recommend you take a look at the numbers to get that answer.

Cone Inc., a strategy and communications agency based out of Boston, conducted a survey on perceptions of social media and how it can affect consumers’ buying habits.  According to the survey, sixty percent of Americans use social media, of which 59 percent of these use social media to get in touch with companies.

A whopping 93 percent of social media users believe companies should have some sort of presence on social media outlets, with varying degrees of interaction with their customers.  This interaction can take the form of:

• problem-solving (43%),
• seeking feedback on products or services (41%), and/or
• creating new methods by which consumers can use or interact with the brand (37%).

Likewise, other major research firms are responding to the explosion of social media as a key business tool.  With firms like IDC predicting social media’s growth by 815% in 2009, Forrester Research hits it right on the head by saying, “Rapid consumer adoption of these channels indicates that the time is now to enter this space.”

Has your company begun using social media as a marketing/branding tool?  If you haven’t, what are the causes of your hesitation?

• Social Media for Business - Who’s Doing It Well and How
• Social Media and the Marketing Opportunity
• Building the Social Media Marketing Foundation

Go Google yourself from 2001! :D => http://www.google.com/search2001.html

Who can resist a line like that?  I followed the link - of course - and Google myself, expecting a number of dead links to come up that alluded to my beginnings in web design.  Thanks to web.archive.org, the links were not dead, and so I was able to get a glimpse of my past.

I wrote a post back in March entitled Forays into Web Design, which described some of the early projects in which I immersed myself while still in high school.  One of the sites mentioned was HoMM3 Unleashed, a 100+ page monster that covered everything one would ever want to know about 3DO’s new (at the time) entry into the Heroes of Might and Magic PC game series.  The image above was captured from the Google 2001 search that Bill referred to, and it was the first time I’d seen that site in its original state since I closed it down and passed it to a colleague at the end of my high school career, and I think it’s great to get a glimpse at my roots in the web world.  This is especially amusing for me because everything I used to build the site was basic, basic, basic: a shareware version of Paint Shop Pro for the graphics, Notepad for writing the HTML, no CSS, etc.

I think this is a prime example of how the Internet never forgets.