Duct Tape Marketing Blog

Small business marketing blog

URL: http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog

Updated: 6 hours 44 min ago

Weekend Favs February Four

9 hours 57 min ago

Weekend Favs February Four

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr or from my own travels.

First run of the day Telluride

Good stuff I found this week:

Quipol – Easily create and embed social polls that are very easy to use and very good looking

Transcribe – free online tool that makes it much easier to transcribe an audio – type and listen in the same place and keyboard shortcuts let you slow the audio down and skip around.

SocialBro – Great piece of software that allows you analyze and manage your Twitter following, including the best times to Tweet when your following are on Twitter.

Does Your Marketing Make the Grade

February 1, 2012 - 7:02am

Does Your Marketing Make the Grade

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Laura Fitton (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen)

A number of years ago Hubspot created something called the Website Grader, a tool that graded a number of important aspects about a website and concocted a score or grade based on those factors.

Although no tool can really accurately measure the effectiveness of a website, the tool had a nice marketing bent to it and was a pretty simple way to help someone understand the most important elements of their site.

About a month ago Hubspot upped the game and came out with what they are calling Marketing Grader. The tool still focuses on your website, but it also considers a number of offsite considerations that have a great deal to do with success on the web these days.

Things like Facebook, Klout and Twitter use are considered and the overall integration of social in general. Again, no tool will ever be perfect, but I highly recommend running your site through this tool.

The report it produces breaks your grade into three topics – top of the funnel – what you’re to attract visitors, middle – what you’re doing to convert that traffic, and analytics – what you’re doing to measure the effectiveness of your marketing.

In addition to simply grading your site, you’ll be offered action items for things that need attention and every element measured comes with a handy tip that talks about best practices for the item. Simply going through and reading those tips would be beneficial for many people.

For this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visit with Hubspot’s Inbound Markeitng Evangelist Laura Fitton. Fitton, who some may know as @Pistachio, does a great job in this interview explaining the ins and out of the Marketing Grader.

What Say You About Scheduled Tweets

January 31, 2012 - 10:24am

What Say You About Scheduled Tweets

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Yesterday’s post about using a tool called Buffer to schedule Tweets throughout the day had some folks cheering and some folks suggesting that scheduled Tweets ruined the conversation on Twitter and were kind of bot like.

What’s your thinking on this. Take the quick poll and leave your two cents in the comments if you like.

Quipol
Image: born1945 via FlickrCC

How and Why I Use Buffer

January 30, 2012 - 8:14am

How and Why I Use Buffer

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

One of the services I believe marketers should provide their followers and community members these days is that of filtering and aggregating good, relevant content.

I subscribe to over 100 blogs and I hear over and over again how much some of the folks that choose to follow me on Twitter and Facebook appreciate that I share what I think some of the best reads from each day.

I share other things in those platforms as well, but I generally find 8-10 blog posts daily that I think people will appreciate.

The problem is that when I scan through my RSS Reader, something I do before most of my readers have had breakfast, I don’t want to Tweet all 8-10 at one time because it kind of overwhelms a handful of people and leaves little for those that get on social networks at other times of the day.

To solve this problem I started using a free app called Buffer and not only am I hooked, I’ve seen its use by many other publishers skyrocket of late as well. (The free version only allows you to have 10 updates in the buffer and is limited to one user.)

Why I use it

The Buffer app is a tool that allows me to easily bookmark and schedule Tweets or Facebook updates from any browser or mobile device. This way I can effectively spread my Tweets out over the course of a day, whether I find something in my morning reading or as I surf around throughout the day.

The times that Buffer posts the updates are preset by me so I simply fill up the Buffer and it does the rest. You can hit the post now option to immediately post and you have total control over when it posts. I have a pretty good feel for the best times to post for my readership but you might want to use a tool like SocialBro to gather some research into the best times for you.

Buffer also produces statistics so you can see how many people clicked on links you shared, the estimated reach and the number of Retweets.

There are some other tools that can accomplish much of what Buffer does, for example TweetDeck allows scheduled Tweets, but Buffer just works much better with the way I work and makes it much easier for me to be more active in sharing.

How I use it

While there is an iPhone app for Buffer the way I choose to use it is a little different than some I suspect.

I do most of my feed reading using the Reeder app on my iPhone. (Note this is different than Google Reader) The reason I love this app is that it allows me tap into my Google Reader account and have all my feeds that I organize there. (You can install Buffer as an option in Google Reader too)

The real feature I love though is that it gives me a handful of options for sharing and handling the posts right from the within the app. I can bookmark and tag it to Delicious or Pinboard, add to Facebook or Twitter, paste to Evernote, copy the link or email the title and link.

To use this app with Buffer I use the fact that Buffer gives every account holder a unique email address that will post items to the their Buffer account. So, as I read my posts I simply hit the “mail link” function in Reeder and it sends the title and link to Buffer. Anything that I put in the subject of the email will be posted as the body of the Tweet.

Buffer then puts all my emailed updates in the queue based on the times I’ve picked and viola – nice bit of posting scheduled throughout the day. Buffer also allows me to connect my branded linked shortener that set up with bit.ly so my Buffered links are shown as ducttape.me – a nice bonus in the scheme of things.

Look around and you’ll see a number of blogs adding the Buffer button to their posts to make it even easier for people who use this tool to share.

You should also grab the Buffer extension for your browser of choice or drag the Buffer bookmarket to your toolbar so that you can add items to Buffer as you surf throughout the day. I use the extension for Firefox and it puts a little Buffer icon at the bottom of the page and gives my one click posting to Buffer.

Weekend Favs January Twenty Eight

January 28, 2012 - 8:06am

Weekend Favs January Twenty Eight

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr.

Image igorschwarzmann via Flickr CC

Good stuff I found this week:
Agendize – Suite of online conversion tools that allows you to add click to call, chat, schedule appointment, live reviews and more.

Get Smart Content – application allows you to set rules such as – visited our website four times or from California and show different content based on visitors.

InboxQ – ask this service a question and it will quickly show you the best people on Twitter to answer it. You can also show off your knowledge by answering questions.

How to Drive Sales Offline With Local Online Calls to Action

January 27, 2012 - 7:24am

How to Drive Sales Offline With Local Online Calls to Action

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

One of the real underutilized opportunities these days is to use your online presence to drive local offline sales.

In order to do this you must think beyond the content aspects of your website and start to think about ways to tap local buying behavior and enable local buying tools.

The heart and soul of this kind of thinking is the tried and true call to action. Marketers have been using the simple act now, buy now, call now language to get prospects to take all manner of action since the dawn of advertising.

As Internet use has become the primary way that even local shoppers find information and make buying decisions, it’s become essential for local businesses to integrate local calls to action into their websites.

It’s easy to think this is something that only restaurants and salons can take advantage of, but with mobile and search use so high almost any type of business, even professional services, can benefit from this idea.

Example calls to action

Free pass

Let’s say you have a membership type of offer like a gym. Put a “get a free pass” button and form on your site so that you can put a free trial offer in their hands before they come to your door.

A financial planner could use this same approach for a upcoming seminar on investment advice. Or you could allow customers to grab a “bring a friend” pass for an early bird sale.

The easiest way to handle this would be a button that linked to a print friendly web page, but you could also use a form so you could capture a little info and send the pass to their mobile device.

Coupons

People love coupons and coupons certainly drive sales. This is an approach you can update and rotate with all kinds of new products, sales and sample offers.

A restaurant could place a coupon for a free appetizer on Tuesday night, but an insurance sales person could also place a coupon for a free iTunes card with every rate quote.

You can create your own trackable coupons through services such as Coupontank and don’t forget to use the coupon feature on your Google Places page as well as locally focused networks such as Local.com and Craigslist.

Click to call or chat

Many times people that come to your website either don’t immediately find what they are looking for or wonder whether you have that cute little dress on your homepage in their size.

By adding services like LivePerson, BoldChat or Olark you can make it very easy for people to call or chat with your business and get that one piece of information they needed so that they jump in the car and come into your business.

Schedule now

Businesses that run primarily by appointment must start making it easier for today’s mobile enabled customers to book a time on the fly. This means adding appointment booking functionality to your website so that prospects can schedule when it’s convenient for them and see that you have that perfect spot open in two hours when they are free.

There are a number of click to schedule tools like ClickBook, GenBook and Schedulicity. Or use the tool set from a service like Agendize that allows you to add call, chat and schedule options all from one tool.

Driving call to action

In addition to you creating compelling offers and tools you’ll want to promote the fact that you have openings, coupons and special.

Pay per click – Using locally focused Google AdWords in conjunction with your call to action is a tremendous way to get terrific offline bang for your online spend.

Social – Facebook has a very robust local targeting mechanism that offline businesses have been using along with strong offers to act. You can also use tools like the Wildfire app to create calls to action right on your Facebook page.

Don’t forget to Tweet your Tuesday offer and drive customers to your site to get their coupon.

Admitting We Have a Problem Is the First Step

January 26, 2012 - 6:46am

Admitting We Have a Problem Is the First Step

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

One of the most fulfilling moments in my consulting work comes when a client finally flashes a hint of realization that they do indeed have an affliction.

And that affliction is – that they desperately need to be exactly like everyone else in their industry only older, bigger, and more results oriented, cost effective and partner centric.

The treatment for this is not pretty, but it usually starts by showing them a series of test results like the ones listed below that include comparison results from other patients with the same disease.

After the denial phase fads some are ready to move on to a treatment that involves the radical process of asking their clients what they do that is actually worthy of turning into a core message of differentiation.

Friends don’t let friends die a slow boring death of sameness.

This has been a public service announcement brought to you by your friends at the Duct Tape Council.

What Our Fears Are Here to Tell Us

January 25, 2012 - 6:57am

What Our Fears Are Here to Tell Us

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

I’m going to get a bit personal today, but I believe there’s a solid business context for the message.

I was sitting around a dinner table with a number of colleagues, which in this case meant people speaking at the same event as me.

Martin Lopatka via Flickr CC

A couple of the folks were pretty engaged in a conversation about another speaker that was not present and suggested that he was a fraud. The sentiment was that he didn’t really know what he was talking about because he had never really done what it is he was advising people to do.

They eventually got around to me to ask if I agreed and I said something like – Heck, we’re all making it up aren’t we? Now, that wasn’t really what they wanted so after a polite laugh they returned to the bashing.

Now, here’s what I really wanted to say, maybe what I should have said, but I don’t know that it would have been received as offered.

I wanted to ask the woman who questioned me why she was so afraid that this person was succeeding. I wanted to suggest that maybe what she really feared was that people thought she was a fraud and that perhaps her deepest fear was that she would be found out if she didn’t keep telling everyone that she was the real deal.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to preach here – I do exactly what I’m suggesting this woman was doing myself at times. The only thing is that I’ve come to understand the things that we judge, dislike or criticize the most in others are probably a reflection of our own fears and insecurities.

This woman is smart, funny and inspirational. I wanted to grab her, shake her and tell her – You’re smart, funny and inspirational without making sure that others aren’t considered as smart, funny and inspirational as you.

I believe that when we accept that as we think about our own businesses, we’ll start to experience a greater measure of peace. The competition is about being the best version of us and not about being a better version of someone else.

The key to embracing this way of thinking is to pay attention to times when we judge something as either good or bad and ask what that thought or feeling is really telling us about ourselves. When you become mindful of how much you’re doing this it will be eye opening and maybe even a little humorous.

The thing is, we don’t just do this with other people. We constantly do it to ourselves and it’s the source of most personal and business friction.

Who am I to think I could blah, blah, blah is the power tool of self-sabotage.

I’m not a good speaker – no, maybe you’re not right now, but consider that we don’t need you to be what you think is a good speaker – what we need you to be is a gift of information that you share with your heart. Who are you not to do that?

I hate to sell – no, maybe you hate to try to force something on somebody that doesn’t want it, but consider that you have the opportunity to greatly impact someone’s life by helping them understand the value that’s contained in something you’re teaching them about. Who are you not to do that?

I could never charge that much – there is no greater example of how our real fears and insecurities mask their existence than in the subject of value exchange – some might call it pricing. Are you charging less than you’re worth? Who are you not to do that?

So, what’s holding you back now?

I believe that every one of us is powerful beyond belief and that our fears are actually signposts that mark the path we need to travel right now. Our fears are here to tell us what to do. Stop handling your fears and insecurities like baggage and start letting them act as your guide.

Creating a Company of Owners

January 24, 2012 - 7:28am

Creating a Company of Owners

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

I believe that one of the greatest opportunities we have as business owners is to create wealth.

By that I don’t necessarily mean get wealthy. I mean create an asset, a business, which is worth more today than it was yesterday. All too often this view gets buried in the push to create a paycheck.

In my view there are much easier ways to draw a salary than owning a business.

The real magic in the wealth creation opportunity comes when you also see it as a way to create wealth for all of the people the work to increase the market value of the business.

Image Doug Brown 37 via Flickr CC

The key to this notion is shared ownership.

Sharing ownership with employees has become much more popular in the world of Internet startups and IPOs. The idea is that if people have stock they’ll be more productive.

The problem with this mentality however is that if employees don’t have psychic ownership first and foremost, real ownership probably won’t benefit anyone.

Psychic ownership suggests a culture where employees feel like owners, act like owners and think like owners, even though they may not actually have any formal equity in the company.

The fact is many companies try to explore this idea of ownership but approach it in name only.

If employees don’t feel like they have a stake it what happens, don’t have access to the financial data or can’t make decisions that impact the value of their ownership, then all the stock options in the world won’t help. In fact, organizations that simply adopt an ownership or equity type of environment based on paper only find that it can be a disincentive and create entitlement without accountability.

Until you can create a culture that fosters psychic ownership first – a place where people feel empowered as owners, even if they’re not – you’ll never realize the benefits of providing real ownership.

The combination of a psychic ownership environment and real ownership structure, however, is perhaps the most potent tool for the creation of commitment that can be employed.

Creating a culture of shared ownership

When Sky Factory founder Bill Witherspoon determined, approaching sixty, that he would start yet another company he sat back and analyzed his past failures and successes and concluded that he had never been very good at managing people or the organization once it had grown to a certain level.

So, he decided to throw everything he had ever done or learned about traditional management out and start with a totally new view of how to build, in his words, a “beautiful corporation,” also something of an oxymoron in his view.

Having a background in bioscience he determined that every organization’s DNA lies in the company culture and he knew he had to direct that element over all else. The company’s core beliefs sprung from that thinking, but became much more than words on sign.

Transparency – Now, there’s a word that’s been abused in business writing over the last few years, but taken at face value, and in this context, it simply means sharing everything with everyone in the company.

Every Friday afternoon the entire staff gathers to go over the metrics one by one – even things like how much cash is in the bank is reported. (The only metric that is not public is individual salaries.) Every department talks about goals and challenges and the entire team of 40 can discuss any element that’s shared.

When issues arise that need to be shared quickly, they call impromptu “stand up” meetings and shut down so that everyone can be involved.

Autonomy –There are no vice presidents, no managers, and no shop supervisors at The Sky Factory. If they had an organization chart it would be very flat.

The company is organized into functional teams based on related work and each team uses a rotating facilitation model to keep things moving in place of the traditional manager.

Every week two members of a team take on the role of management (one from last week and one new one.) Everyone on the team takes a turn and Witherspoon feels that this concept allow people to learn, grow and earn greater respect from other members of the staff.

This no hierarchy approach removes politics and frees people to stretch far beyond the confines of the normal job description. The Sky Factory has numerous job descriptions that are tied to functional work that must be done, but the goal is to create a workplace where everyone can essentially do everything.

There certainly are instance where this isn’t practical or possible, but no one gets tethered to one kind of work, no one gets bored and everyone is asked to grow and given the opportunity to do work that continually stretches them.

The Sky Factory also finds that experience built in continuous improvement by letting new people provide a fresh approach in processes and systems.

Consensus – Every important decision made at The Sky Factory is made through a system of consensus. Some decisions are departmental, others are company wide, but if there’s even one no, the decision must be evaluated.

Decenters are asked to explain and own their no votes and more often than not the no simply leads to more research or looking at a decision in a new light, but everyone has a real voice in the process.

Sky Factory also uses consensus to impact operations – The Company was experiencing a high percentage of late deliveries on promised projects. They had tried a number of process improvements to no avail. During one of their weekly meeting an employee suggested that they should tie profit sharing bonuses to delivery. The group agreed and the rule became that if even one delivery missed its promised date during a month, no one in the organization would receive that month’s profit sharing bonus.

Since installing this rule several years ago they virtually eliminated the problem. Everyone in the organization is now concerned about late deliveries and everyone is focused on pitching in and solving any potential snags in any part of the production process. And you can bet that if someone is having an issue with an order they ask for help.

Of course consensus won’t work if there’s no transparency and truly no hierarchy. Consensus as a stand-alone tool is a recipe for disaster, but teamed with complete sharing of information and rotational management, it is the tool that turns everyone into an owner.

Now, Sky Factory also has an incredibly innovative profit sharing and real ownership structure, but the key to making it work in their incredible shared ownership culture.

When an entrepreneur starts a business and it’s just them, they have all the information, have no hierarchy and get consensus on every decision – shared ownership thinking simply takes this to another level.

5 Ways to Use Other People’s Content in Your Marketing

January 23, 2012 - 8:03am

5 Ways to Use Other People’s Content in Your Marketing

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

You need lots of content, you know that, but you also know that content creation is one of the more time intensive marketing activities you have to tackle.

While you do need to create your own content as the foundation for your total content and teaching strategy, you can – and should – supplement your content with that from other people.

Image hazel.estrada via Flickr CC

One of the best services marketers can provide these days is to act as a filter for all that’s being produced out there and aggregate the best of the best on behalf of our communities.

Finding and sharing consistently high quality, relevant content and adding insight to this information is not only a great way to increase the volume of your content, it’s a great way build trust in the value of your content.

Here are five ways to add other people’s content to your routine.

Cobrand a winner

Lots of people produce great content in the form of downloadable white papers and eBooks. In some cases they do this to attract newsletter subscribers and links, but quite often they do it because they know something about a topic and want to document it.

With just a little bit of searching you can probably turn up a great eBook that your network would love to get their hands on. Now, some people might simply link to this content, but I’d like to suggest another way.

What if you approached the eBook author and asked if you could send it out to your networks, with full credit to the author, but with the ability to add one simple information page about you or your company at the back?

With this approach you could potentially build a library of content overnight with the right topics and content.

Here’s how to get started.

Use the Google filetype operator to find lots of potential candidates on just about any topic you can imagine. Here’s how it works. If you want to find PDF documents and eBooks about content curation, for example, you would type: content curation filetype:pdf into a Google search box.

This tells Google you are looking for content related to content curation, but you only want results that are pdf files. This way you’ll probably turn up any number of candidates for cobranding projects.

Email newsletter snacks

Publishing a weekly email newsletter is a proven way to stay top of mind with your community. Of course, offering a great free eBook as mentioned above is a great way to build that weekly newsletter list.

As you compete for inbox space you must keep in mind that your newsletter content must be consistently useful, relevant and convenient.

One of the best ways to meet these qualifications is to produce high quality content filtered from other sources and delivered in snack-sized bites. Think in terms of an email newsletter that might contain 5-6 great articles presented with abstracts that lay out in about 100 words with someone might want to click through and read the rest.

Using tools like AllTop, GoogleReader, NewsVine or PopULRs you can easily locate and aggregate content related to topics of interest to your readers. You may also be able to locate local bloggers that could be great candidates for guest content and strategic relationships.

Curate a magazine

The idea of curating content is very hot right now, but in order to really make it pay you’ve got to also be ready to add insight. So many people look at curation as something more closely aligned with republishing.

Republishing content you find does have value, but narrowly targeting a very specific topic and becoming known as a trusted source of insight on the vast array of information being published on any topic is how you take content curation to a new level.

Below are some of my favorite tools for creating your curated online content magazines.

MySyndicaat – http://mysyndicaat.com/home
Scoop.it – http://www.scoop.it/
Storify – http://storify.com/
Curation Station – http://curationstation.com/

You can also use tools like Delicious, Evernote, Pinterest or Pearltrees to simply clip, bookmark and organize content you find for republication.

If you want to really know how to get great at this follow Robin Good – Here’s a great place to start – What Makes A Great Curator Great?

RSS to HTML

This technique is perhaps a bit more technical, but it also allows you the greatest control.

Just about all online content these days comes powered by RSS making it easy to convert whatever find into a feed that can be converted to HTML code and displayed on any page we like.

For example, if you wanted to publish positive mentions of your firm on a new page on your site you simply set up Google Alerts so that you received notice that your firm was mentioned. Click through to the page and assuming it’s something you want to publish to your site you would bookmark the content using PinBoard and tag like “ournews.”

PinBoard creates tag based RSS feeds so anything you tag with ournews can be displayed in a specific RSS feed. This gives you total control over what you want to appear in the feed.

Once you create the feed you can take it to FeedBurner or RSSInclude to convert the feed to HTML code that you can embed on a page or widget to easily display the content from the feed wherever you choose.

Then any time you bookmark a new item it will publish to the page.

Ask little things

One of the best ways to get lots of people to create content for you around a specific topic is to ask lots of people to answer one very short question.

This can be a great way to collect lots of suggestions, opinions and insights to support or start a topic of interest to your readers.

The other powerful thing about his approach is that you can often get higher profile contributors to participate if all you are asking them to do is answer one question or finish one statement.

Once you collect all of your answers you simply collect them and add context and analysis.

It’s time to make other people’s content one of your content foundation planks.

Weekend Favs January Twenty One

January 21, 2012 - 8:09am

Weekend Favs January Twenty One

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr.

Image Steve-h via Flickr CC

Good stuff I found this week:
Viewbix – Tool that allows you to add interactive calls to action to your videos. Also makes it easy add branding to YouTube and Vimeo hosted videos.

Manilla – Get your bills, statements and balances instantly organized in one secure place online. Easy way to manage all of your accounts, subscriptions and loyalty programs.

Instant Flip Book – Convert Your Catalogs, Brochures, Annual Reports and Other Documents Into a Flash Page Flip book you can embed on any web page.

Marketing Is The Ongoing Operation of a System

January 19, 2012 - 7:26am

Marketing Is The Ongoing Operation of a System

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

So often marketers get stuck in the reaction of the week kind of marketing and wonder why it always feels like such a bumpy road.

Marketing should feel graceful, thoughtful, even joyful, but that takes planning, process and patience – mostly though that takes systems thinking.

I’ve spent the better part of the last ten years singing the “marketing is a system” tune and today I’m pleased to introduce my most ambitious compilation of all that I know about how to build a marketing system today.

Introducing the Ultimate Marketing System from Duct Tape Marketing – a complete online guided training tool designed to help you build your marketing action plan and install your marketing system.

The tool takes your down a logical path through 13 step by step lessons that contain video tutorials, audio lesson, downloadable workbooks, examples, forms and loads of related resources.

How the modules in the system are organized - click to enlarge

I’ve also seen a lot of people with good intentions buy a lot of books and courses and fail to move forward because they lacked any support or accountability.

So, everyone that enrolls in the Ultimate Marketing System program also gets 30 days of email support, monthly live Q and A calls, a 30 minute consulting session, and a plan review. We won’t rest until you get this thing built!

And as with everything I’ve ever produced, you have a full no questions asked money back guarantee if you decide it’s not for you.

Go check it out today and get to work building your marketing system before the sun goes down on another day.

Get More Details and Enroll here Related Posts:

Infusing Your Business With Platform Thinking

January 18, 2012 - 7:18am

Infusing Your Business With Platform Thinking

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing podcast with Phil Simon (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen)

Iman Mosaad via Flickr CC

I’ve been talking about this idea of a business platform for some time now. The notion is that your business can be so much more than a group of products and services. Truly great businesses are now viewed not only as a group of products and services, but also as a place where people can go to work to build things they are passionate about.

And, they are a places where an entire community can participate in building things they are passionate about and get more of what they need from the platform regardless of what the business was originally created to do.

So the thinking goes like this – How can I get more of what I want out of life through this business, how can I attract people that share that purpose and want to bring more of themselves to working on the company, and how can I build an opportunity that allows other strategic partners or community members to build onto this platform in order to get more of what they need.

This thinking will either inspire and excite you, expand your view of what your business is or scare you to death, but in my mind this is the greatest opportunity to build a fully alive business that exists today.

For this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visited with Phil Simon, author of The Age of the Platform: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Have Redefined Business

I think it can be very instructional to look at how these very obvious examples of platforms got there and how, in some ways, this same thinking and approach can apply to the smallest of firms.

If you create a free eBook that’s packed with lots of great information and offer it to several strategic partners to cobrand and send around to their clients, you’re using platform thinking. If you create a blog in your town and and invite a handful of complimentary business professionals to contribute their expertise for the benefit of both reader and the group of bloggers, in a small way, you’re creating a platform.

That’s the kind of thinking that I believe holds one of the most powerful opportunities for a business of any size to differentiate, attract committed staff and build a loyal community.

Small Business Marketing Workshops, Seminars and Keynotes

January 17, 2012 - 5:11pm

Small Business Marketing Workshops, Seminars and Keynotes

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

This is a video compilation of a few of the speaking events I’ve done over the past couple of years.

In 2010 and into 2011 it seemed like all anyone wanted to talk about social media.

This coming year I’ll be talking a great deal about integrating online and offline strategies and tactics and the fact that social media has simply become a given that needs to be considered more like a behavior than a tactic.

I’ll be talking a lot about passion and purpose and how building and promoting a business based on those elements is a powerful way to differentiate.

I’ll be talking a lot about selling by teaching, building your Marketing Hourglass and turning your business into a platform.

Feel free to share the above reel with anyone looking for someone with a decidedly practical spin on marketing or point them to the Duct Tape Marketing Workshop page.

So, if you could design a workshop topic you would love to attend, what would the topic be?

5 Ways to Get Your Customers to Create Content For You

January 16, 2012 - 7:10am

5 Ways to Get Your Customers to Create Content For You

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

You’ve heard enough about the need to produce content that I’m guessing you’re probably blogging away and curating, aggregating and filtering all manner of content. But there’s one type of content that you may not be focused on and I happen to think it’s some of the most potent to be had – and that’s customer generated content.

Your customers, the ones that already know, like and trust you, are more equipped to tell the real story of your business than an army of writers in any marketing department, so why not engage them to do just that.

Imagine taking your best, most loyal, most vocal, customer with you on your next sales call and asking them to simply explain the real benefits they’ve realized because of the work you’ve done for them. That’s the power of customer generated content when done right and that’s why you need to routinely find ways to acquire it.

Below are five ideas to help you get your customers telling their stories.

One question testimonial

Create a survey that asks every customer one question. On a scale of 1-10 how likely is it that you would refer us. Now, set the survey up so that if the answer is 1-4 the survey taker is redirected to a page that apologizes and sets the expectation that they will hear from someone immediately to find out what went wrong.

If it’s a 5-7, send the customer to a page that says, you’re not happy until they are happier than that and ask them to suggest how you could have done better.

For the 8-10 answers, redirect them to a form that allows them to submit a testimonial and ask them to check a box if they would agree to be interviewed for a case study.

This is a great way to automate testimonial generation and keep a real time pulse on how you’re doing. I use Wufoo forms to run this process, but I’ve heard good things about Formstack as well.

Video appreciation party

I’ve written about this before, but it’s such a great way to get lots of great video content that I thought I would share it again.

Once a year or so hold a client appreciation event to say thanks and create a networking event for your clients and prospects. Hire a video crew for the event and, after a few bottles of wine have been emptied, ask some of your clients to talk about their experience with your firm on camera. Then also let them record a five minute commercial for their own use too.

This is a great way to get lots of testimonials and case studies in one day and your clients will get very engaged in swapping stories and selling each other on the benefits of working with you.

Tell us your story

Getting your customers to share their experience is a very powerful form of content. You can sit across the desk and interview your customers in order to extract this kind of content or you can employ a handful of tools that make it very easy to capture these stories.

For audio only content a testimonial recording line from AudioAcrobat is a great way to go. You simply provide your customer with a phone number that they can call and record their story. The service then produces an mp3 and code to embed on your site for people to play the recordings.

You can also use a tool like MailVu that allows you send a link with a video capture tool so your client’s with a web cam can record a video testimonial or story and submit it with little work on your part.

Community knowledge base

What if you could find a way to get your best customers to willingly shoulder creating answers to questions and best practices? Tools like ZenDesk and GetSatisfaction make it easy for you to enable community members to provide help and archived advice to other customers and prospects.

Robin Robins, founder of Marketing Technology Toolkit in Nashville, TN involves her customer community in an incredible way. She has created a membership program that allows her mostly IT business customers to receive ongoing business building support through coaching, training and tools she provides.

She has created what she calls “accountability groups” in the membership program and customers head up these groups and do a great deal of work keeping participants engaged and on track. Heading up these groups is not a paid position; loyal and committed customers that want to play a bigger role in the community do it.

Help your peers

Using a tool like Google+ Hangouts, Skype Video Conference or GoToMeeting Video Conference you can easily host and facilitate a group video conference where your customers and their peers can discuss important industry and business challenges and trends. You can record and archive the event and create some very useful and engaging content.

This is not a sales event, but by virtue of the fact that you have included customers in the conversation, there will be the inevitable discussions about what you’ve done to help them address a challenge.

Creating opportunities to capture the stories your clients have to tell is an important piece in any fully developed content strategy.

So, what have you done to get your customers talking?

Weekend Favs January Fourteen

January 14, 2012 - 7:38am

Weekend Favs January Fourteen

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr or one that I shot.

Sunrise in Austin Tx from my travels this week

Good stuff I found this week:
Experiment.ly – helps you measure and improve the performance of any online ad campaign – including pay-per-click, organic search, social media, CPA, and more.

Code Year – cool initiative from Code Academy that helps you learn valuable programming skills for free. Sign up on Code Year to get a new interactive programming lesson sent to you each week.

What do you love – this little tool from Google allows you to create a search and then have all the various elements such as YouTube videos, books, trends, patents, and images related to the search put on a kind of dashboard page. It’s clearly a tool the show off all of Google’s various related tools, but it’s still somewhat interesting.

Turning Marketing Strategy Into Action

January 13, 2012 - 6:24am

Turning Marketing Strategy Into Action

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Today I’m speaking with a group of small business owner that want to know about how to develop a marketing strategy that truly allows them to differentiate what they do from others.

Cubmundo via Flickr

I wrote recently about how to find your point of differentiation by seeking clarity and you may find that post a perfect compliment to what I am going to share today.

To me getting clear about strategy is the most important challenge business owners face and I’m going to challenge them first to look inward. I’m going to ask them to choose a marketing strategy that is infused with who they, why they do what they do and how to use that story to attract opportunities and clients.

But then I’m going to give them a very specific set of tactics to put their strategy into action and on display.

Every industry group feels that their business, their needs, their way of marketing is unique – that they are the only ones that must rely on word of mouth or referrals. While every industry has a unique set of clients, a unique language, maybe even an unusual distribution model, the way that customers come to know, like and trust them is fundamentally the same.

Today, specifically, I am going to introduce this group to a core set of practices that every business can use to communicate their simple, clear, marketing strategy.

Build and tell stories – You must develop a set of core stories that you use in your business building. The stories that help people understand how your business is different, not because of what it does so much, but because of what it cares about or doesn’t do.

These stories must radiate from you, your staff, and your community and will ultimately make up the foundation of your brand promise.

Sell by teaching – You must commit to using education as your primary means of influence. This is one of the most powerful ways to differentiate your business in the eyes of those that come to work for you as well as those that comes to experience your unique point of view through exposure to your teaching.

When you embrace teaching in everything you do, your staff begins to understand that the company is their first customer.

Become a platform – It’s no longer enough to think in terms of building a product or service. In fact, it’s no longer enough to simply build a community of prospects, users and buyers.

In order to truly differentiate you must begin to think of your business as a platform for others to get what they need. You must expand your thinking from business to marketplace.

Can you create opportunity for strategic partners? Can you teach others how to launch businesses from your business? Can you mentor employees and become a hub for their personal growth?

These are questions that will take you far beyond the typical business building mindset, but the answers may become the higher purpose for your business.

Reverse the experience – Finally, I’m going to suggest that the greatest way to deliver a remarkable marketing strategy is to deliver a remarkable marketing experience before, during and after a customer is a customer.

I’ve shared my concept of the Marketing Hourglass now with tens of thousands of small business owners, but only recently have I determined that the best way to construct any product or service experience with this tool is to do it in reverse.

To borrow from a well-worn bit of wisdom, if you want to deliver an exceptional experience you must start with the end in mind. You must begin the entire process by considering what you will do 90 or 180 days after you make a sale and then work backwards to the point where you first meet.

To some these ideas may feel foreign and not at all like a substantial way of doing business, but to others they will ring true and real and perhaps for the first time they will be able to differentiate their business with perfect clarity.

Google Search Plus Is Shaking Things Up a Bit

January 12, 2012 - 6:58am

Google Search Plus Is Shaking Things Up a Bit

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

This week Google realigned it’s search results to officially add a feature that many had witnessed leaking into search results

The new functionality is potentially as important as the switch to Universal Search a few years ago. (I say potentially because Google seems to have a knack for live testing.)

The feature is something called Google Search Plus Your World – doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue but most are simply calling it Search Plus.

The idea is that Google is going to give you the option to search with results focused primarily on those in your social circles. Currently, this has heavy focus on Google+ as Facebook and Twitter don’t seem interested in helping Google paint a bigger picture at the moment.

The functionality is switched on and off with a little selector that shows up in the right hand corner of your browser window when you are logged into your Google account. (Oddly, the feature shows up in Chrome and Safari, but not in Firefox for me at the moment.)

The results are sort of fascinating at the moment as it’s fun to see some of this data organized in this manner. Time will tell whether or not this is a killer feature, but there are some things to like and certainly some things to note.

The rel=author attribute is more important than ever. I wrote about adding rel=author a while back but it seems it’s in full swing now. I am seeing search results for generic, but important search terms produce my homepage with my photo next to the results making it stand out even more. (For the time being it appears you can use the attribute on any page you author and eventually create this result – NB: for the time being, we’ll see how sorts out.) See the images below.

Page one results for search term - small business marketing

Page one results for search term - Pinterest for business

Notice my image to the left of the results from my site and the “more from John Jantsch” link embedded in the results. This came about through Google’s author highlighting that ties the rel=author attribute on all my pages to my Google+ profile and it’s hard not to think that highlighting makes that result stand out on the page. (Note: these searches were conducted while signed out of my Google account.)

Google is going to force you to like Google+ – okay that may be a bit strong but right now there is very strong evidence that playing in Google+ will benefit you when it comes to showing in Search Plus. It’s do in part to the vast amount of content that Google has total access to there and I’m sure it will settle down some or Google will damage its search integrity, but for now the connection is pretty blatant. See the image below.

Page one results for search term marketing - with Search Plus on

Go read up on the rel=author attribute and go listen to my interview with Google+ maestro Chris Brogan and you’ll be off and running in the Search Plus game.

5 Exercises in Perceptive Listening

January 11, 2012 - 9:15am

5 Exercises in Perceptive Listening

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Listening is a skill that all marketers must develop. Or, perhaps more accurately, redevelop.

s1ng0 via Flickr CC

Most people are born with the ability to hear and, over time, interpret what’s being said. Somewhere along the line we get so consciously competent at hearing that we no longer feel the need to listen.

I believe that one of the master skills of any marketer, manager, or educator is the ability to listen perceptively to what our prospects, customers, staff and community members are saying. And I further believe this is something we all have to work at.

So, what is perceptive listening?

People that teach this sort of thing might say there are many forms of listening.

Passive listening – the kind we do when we are listening to a seminar but we’re really scrolling through Pinterest.

Selective listening – the kind that I might practice when I’m discussing something with someone and mostly I’m thinking about what I’m going say next.

Active listening – the kind where we are discussing something with someone and reacting only to the words being said.

Perceptive listening – the kind where I hear and interpret the words, but I also consider what the person is thinking and perhaps how they are acting as they say the words.

Perceptive listening is by far the most complex because it requires you to be totally focused, completely mindful and, well, perceptive of what’s really going on.

Perceptive listening is also something the party being listened to can feel. We’ve all grown pretty numb to act of conversing with people while they divide their attention between our words and their iPhone.

Perceptive listening is how you tell when a prospect says they’re not ready to buy, but what they are really saying is they don’t understand the benefits.

Perceptive listening is how you mentor an employee. It’s how you draw out what they are truly passionate about. It’s how you help them self manage and lead.

I believe you can even use perceptive listening to monitor the things you say to yourself. When you are mindful enough to stop and witness your own thoughts and perceive how they truly make you feel, your actions will be much more perceptive.

Effective listening can be learned and takes practice. It’s a habit of sorts, just like multi tasking is a habit.

Below are five exercises that I challenge you to undertake in an effort to first experience your level of perceptive listening and bring this art front and center in everything you do.

Listening to a client

Make a list of five clients you respect and would like to understand better. Set a time to sit down with them and ask them these three questions. Make certain that you give their answers your full attention and pay close attention to how they answer, including their body language.

What’s the one thing you love about what we do?
If you referred us to a friend what would you say?
What’s the biggest challenge you have in your business right now?

Listening to a staff member

You know the drill now, but this time choose a member of your staff that you would like to develop further and start with these questions.

What’s the one thing you love most about coming to work here?
If you referred us to a friend what would you say?
What’s the biggest challenge you have in meeting your objectives right now?

Listening to yourself

This might be the toughest act yet, but sit down and ponder these questions posed to yourself and pay attention to how you feel about the answers. You aren’t really looking for right or wrong answers I don’t think, you’re merely checking for cracks in the alignment.

What’s the one thing you love most about what you do?
Why do you really do what you do?
If you could do anything you wanted, would this be it?

Listening in space

Put on a piece of instrumental music. (If you’re looking for a suggestion you can’t go wrong with a Bach cello concerto.) Close your eyes and try to focus on the rests and spaces between the notes only. Listen keenly for what musicians refer to as grace notes, the little half played notes that flick inside a pause or come in between a beat.

This is a completely different way to listen to music and I think it can help tune your sensitivity to the art of listening to the complete story.

You can’t have art or music without this negative space and I think the same is true when it comes to perceptive listening.

Listening in space 2

Another exercise I love to do is to sit somewhere in a room and close my eyes. Once I kind of empty my thoughts I start actively listening for the sounds right around me – the water running in the pipes, the printer, a stereo playing.

Next I try to move my listening out farther to focus on the street sounds – the cars passing by, the construction work across the street, people coming and going.

Finally, I try to move my listening out as far as I can. Through this targeted listening I can perceive an airplane overhead and a train slowly rumbling through another part of town.

Some of the exercises above might seem like odd ways to get better at marketing, but marketing is mostly about listening to and understanding what’s really going on all around you.

What Is Shared Culture

January 9, 2012 - 8:18am

What Is Shared Culture

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

I wish I could give you a crisp definition of what the word culture, with regard to business, really means. It’s a tricky word that finds its way into most discussions regarding the workplace these days.

Like so many things, it’s hard to describe, but you know it when you see it.

The thing is, every business has a culture. It may be strong or weak, positive or negative, or just plain hard to spot, but it’s like a form of internal brand in a way. It’s the collective impression, habits, language, style, communication and practices of the organization.

Some elements of culture are intentional, some are accidental. Some are rooted deeply in the ethos of an original employee group, some are created out of a lack of any real direction or clarity.

My belief is that a healthy culture is a shared culture, one created through shared stories, beliefs, purpose, plans, language, outcomes and ownership.

These aren’t little things; these aren’t things that you get right during an annual retreat. These are things molded over time with trust and passion and caring. These are things that evolve.

I don’t have all the answers, no one does, but I assure you this is the question that needs answering – How can I build a culture of shared commitment?

The following elements make up the foundation of a system of shared commitment.

Shared stories

The first step is to begin to develop, archive, curate and tell stories that illustrate what your business stands for.

Stories that tell why you do what you do, who you it for, why you’re passionate about it, and where the business is headed.

Throughout time great leaders have used stories to inspire commitment and attract community.

The central elements of a strong culture are the stories that employees tell themselves and each other. The why you would want to work here story, the orientation story, the here’s how we deal with challenges story, the here’s where we are headed story.
These illustrations are like oral traditions that allow culture to sustain, thrive and grow and it’s the job of the leader of the business to make story building an intentional act.

Shared beliefs

People want to work for more than a paycheck. Sure, they want to be paid fairly and in some cases the element of salary will be an important aspect of their decision to come to work for an organization, but perhaps more importantly, people want to work on something they believe in and they want to do that work with people that share their passion and beliefs.

This isn’t the same thing as saying, everyone in your organization has to maintain the same beliefs. However, by creating a set of core beliefs that everyone in the organization lives by and supports, you create a set of filters for how decisions are made, how people treat each other, how they treat customers, what’s expected, how to manage and even how to write a sales letter.

Shared purpose

For some time on this blog I’ve talked about the idea of connecting your passion with why you do what you do, or what some might call purpose.

In order to bring purpose fully into the organization you must determine a way to bring it to life and reinforce in every decision the organization makes.

This may take the form of an employee development program, foundation support, benefit package or community program. The key is to bring purpose to life by example. Your actions, or how you treat your staff, will speak far louder about purpose than any page in an employee manual. In order to create a shared purpose the staff must be your first customer.

Shared plans

The strongest, most productive cultures come to life when people know what to do and how to do it – In places where they are trusted to do go work and use their creativity to solve problems.

If you are to grow your organization to the point where it can serve you ultimate higher purpose, you’ll need to develop a system that enables people to manage themselves.

Now, that may sound a little foreign or perhaps even scary to anyone who’s worked in a typical hierarchical business structure, but it’s central to a fully alive culture.

The key lies in systematic planning thinking, clear accountability and consistent communication.

Shared leadership

While stories are an important way to attract and inspire people to join you on your journey, they can only take you as far as the leaders you develop around you.

After payroll is made and your business is generating sufficient cash flow I really believe that the leader’s primary role should shift to developing leaders internally.

In fact, as the owner of a business you’ll never succeed in reaching beyond where you are today until you are no longer the person that brings in the most work.

Teaching others to land the big fish, to tell stories, to create shared beliefs, to inspire and attract commitment means you have to invest time and resources in this very thing in a very intentional way.

This element of the shared culture comes by teaching your people what an ideal customer looks like, what a customer is desperately in need of, and how to communicate your core difference in a meaningful way.

It comes by teaching what everything costs, how profit is made, how every decision impacts a customer in some way. It grows by sending them to school, supporting their growth in other areas and demonstrating this is an organization that cares for the whole person.

Shared outcomes

One of the strongest ways to foster commitment is to get people to commit to a stake in the outcome of their work.

The only way I know to do this is to establish benchmarks, goals and indicators and then report and communicate progress religiously.

You must create reporting mechanisms that truly measure the most important components of your business. This will include key financial elements, but must strive to go far beyond into measuring success around shared beliefs and culture.

Shared ownership

The ultimate measure of commitment is achieved when people that work for your organization come to understand that they play a crucial role in creating the kind of company they want to work for – that the company is actually their most important product. (Of course the owner has to realize that first.)

This won’t happen until you help your people free themselves from the typical job descriptions and organizational charts so they can begin to manage themselves. It won’t happen unless they are excited about the journey they are on. It won’t happen until they fully understand how a dollar spent on a new desk equates to profit margin.

It won’t happen until they start thinking like an owner (and I mean in the good way) when it comes to meeting a customer’s needs. It won’t happen until everyone realizes they can help develop new business, build the community, create innovation, fix problems, right wrongs and make decisions that impact the organization on their own.

Duct Tape Marketing Blog

Weekend Favs February Four

Does Your Marketing Make the Grade

What Say You About Scheduled Tweets

How and Why I Use Buffer

Weekend Favs January Twenty Eight

How to Drive Sales Offline With Local Online Calls to Action

Admitting We Have a Problem Is the First Step

What Our Fears Are Here to Tell Us

Creating a Company of Owners

5 Ways to Use Other People’s Content in Your Marketing

Weekend Favs January Twenty One

Marketing Is The Ongoing Operation of a System

Infusing Your Business With Platform Thinking

Small Business Marketing Workshops, Seminars and Keynotes

5 Ways to Get Your Customers to Create Content For You

Weekend Favs January Fourteen

Turning Marketing Strategy Into Action

Google Search Plus Is Shaking Things Up a Bit

5 Exercises in Perceptive Listening

What Is Shared Culture

Event Registration

Member login

Navigation