Are you a maven? Perhaps you know one?
December 31, 2002
1. Stay in or go out on New Year’s Eve? Probably staying in
2. If you stay home, do you stay up to ring in the new year, or fall asleep earlier? I plan on falling asleep early
3. If you go out, do you prefer to attend a party at someone’s home, or go to a bar/nightclub/restaurant? If I were going out, I’d rather spend time with friends at their house
4. Make resolutions, or do you not bother? Never bother
5. Ever been to Times Square (New York City) on New Year’s Eve, or just watched the ball drop on TV? Television. Too many people in Time Square.
6. Toast the New Year with champagne or a soft drink? Don’t like the taste of champagne
7. Do you have a special New Year’s dinner or not? Pork and Saurkraut for good luck
8. Do you already have your 2003 calendar, or do you wait to buy one until the stores mark them down? Never need to buy calenders. I get them as gifts.
9. Take down Christmas decorations: before or after New Year’s? You don’t need to take them down if you don’t put them up!
10. Funny hats and noisemakers, or a quieter celebration? Quiet
If you’re ever in the throws of insomnia and The Prime Gig is on, check it out.
December 30, 2002
I pretty much figured out that I’m going to have to actually get the Tom Peter’s books that the CD is based on. There’s way too much info to absorb by just listening!
Here’s a great article for you Students of Management. It combines Sales and Marketing with Deming’s principles of Process Management. An excerpt:
Assuming you�d like to improve your overall revenue generation process, you need to know where to start. The following approach has worked for service firms, and can work for you.1. Change the premise. Enter this process with the premise that both marketing and sales have one purpose: generate maximum revenue for the firm. If defensiveness and bickering are allowed to continue between marketing and selling, your process improvement progress will be greatly hindered.
2. Add up the costs. Add up everything you are spending on sales and marketing now. Don�t forget to include everything like management time, salaries, and overhead.
3. Categorize. Assign each dollar you are spending to specific tasks designed to produce specific outputs. Force yourself to categorize the costs and place them into buckets.
4. Challenge each cost. Find out what is really working (not just what everyone thinks is working) and what is not. Find out what you can do for less cost and time while achieving the same results. Be diligent about supporting every assertion and assumption with clearly measurable and defensible facts.
5. Plug leaks. Stop spending money on what is not working. If you don�t take active and decisive action to stop spending on unproductive or unnecessary activities, useless dollars will perpetually leak out of your profits.
6. Focus on goals. Establish clear, integrated goals and targets for each sales and marketing task and activity. No dollars should be spent frivolously on tactics that don�t work. No new dollars and new strategies should be engaged without success measures. Everything must have a measurable goal.
7. Communicate. Make sure that everyone involved understand those goals, why they are important, and how each person is connected to the tasks, goals, and firm�s success.
8. Implement. Service companies have a tendency to let bold projects, plans, and goals fade away like old soldiers. Implement with commitment. Of course, this is easier said than done, but implementation assurance is a topic for another article.
9. Measure. Measure your results.
10. Repeat. Start the process again (hopefully at step 2 this time), and don�t stop repeating the process. Make measurable continuous improvement in marketing and sales a part of your culture.
It�s hard work, yes. What worth doing isn�t? But once you engage the process, you will be surprised at how much time, cash, and sanity you gain.
Great service companies have a continuously improving, integrated marketing and sales engine designed to generate maximum revenue for the company.
From Three Resolutions to Make 2003 More Profitable
‘A successful small business marketer is a cross between an eternal optimist and a hard-nosed realist. If you don’t cultivate optimism, your efforts will be sporadic, half-hearted, and uncreative. On the other hand, if you look at the world only through “rose-colored glasses”, you may develop a false sense of confidence and plunge blindly into an expensive media blitz, bypassing the necessary planning and evaluation. While optimism is an essential state of mind for pursuing any goal, it needs to be tempered with a dose of realism.’‘Sometimes a company’s worst enemy can be self-defeating attitudes. You know it’s time to regroup and re-examine attitudes and your creative process when you hear yourself or one of your associates saying, “I didn’t think that ad would work, anyway!” Does that sound familiar? If you ever have serious reservations about an ad, a marketing campaign, or a sales presentation, then it’s time to step back, re-evaluate it, and get some outside feedback before launching it.’
You know, I don’t understand why people in the area still complain about the winters here in Northeast Ohio. The last few winters have been incredibly mild! I was looking at the forecast and it’s going to rain until Thursday, with temps in the 40s. I know it’s not that warm, but growing up, I remember being buried in snow by now.
Counting on the Internet - Most expect to find key information online, most find the information they seek, many now turn to the Internet first - from the Pew Internet and American Life Project
I discovered today that all of the transcripts for the Quiet Crisis series are up on the web!
Tony sent this around in an email to the Connection Series CAT that I’m working on. I don’t think he’ll mind if I share it with you.
Though you have shelters and institutions, precarious lodgings.
while the rent is paid,
subsiding basements where the rat breeds
or sanitary dwellings with numbered doors
or a house a little better than your neighor’s;
When the stranger says, “What is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”
What will you answer?
“We all dwell together to make money from each other”?
Or
“This is a community?”
- from Choruses of the Rock by T.S. Eliot
December 29, 2002
From Warren Ellis on Joe Strummer courtesy of Analog Roam (go there and read the whole thing!)
‘But a year or two ago, Strummer was flying home from Australia with his family. Economy class. His stepdaughter was giving him shit about it: “I thought you were a big-deal rockstar.” He told her to cope with it. Then a member of the cabin crew spotted him and said “Stay here. I’m moving you to first class. You’re Joe Strummer and in 1981 I saw you live and you changed my life and you are going to fly first class”. Strummer talked about it in a newspaper, with utter disbelief.’‘Joe Strummer had glory about him. Listen to “London’s Calling” and tell me I’m wrong.’
I started reading The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, then my wife picked it up! I guess I’ll read Guerilla Publicity instead.
December 28, 2002
Alright, this has been on my mind for a while. I was OK until I started reading some other people’s blogs that talked about the passing of Joe Strummer, specifically this one. Just as an aside, I can’t believe how little respect corporateamerica has for Strummer’s work. I was in Barnes and Nobles last night and I asked about the two Mescalenos releases. They don’t have ‘em.
Anyway, back to the point. I feel like an era is passing. I started with the death of Joey Ramone. Their first album was the watershed event when it comes to the punk rock movement. To hear Joe tell it, that album was a major influence in the story of the Clash and punk rock in England. It’s difficult to believe that it was over 25 years ago that the quintessential punk album was released!
But the icons of my era are aging. I hate to sound morbid, but I wonder who’s going to be next? I really don’t want to think about it, and I sure don’t want to wish it on anyone. I hope all of you are taking care of yourselves! Sure, I don’t want any of my heroes behaving like Sir Paul, but you can stick around a little longer, can’t you?
This next bit I’ll fully attribute to Denis Leary in his No Cure for Cancer rant. Why are all the good guys dying? Joey and Joe have both passed, but other “popular” icons, like Rod the Body and Mick the Lips are still kickin’! Then there’s the Oz. Where’s the justice in that?
One more thing, since Thomas Mulready doesn’t have a CoolCleveland website up yet, I’ll pass along what he said in this week’s newsletter:
Joe Strummer R.I.P.“The Clash popularized punk, changed the course of music, and set the standard, not only for integrating politics and music, but for infusing music with meaning. Although MTVers will remember Rock The Casbah and Should I Stay or Should I Go, I suggest you pick up their third album, London Calling, (called the best album of the 80’s by Rolling Stone even though it was released in 1979) with versatile drummer Topper Headon allowing them to broaden their palette to include reggae, rockabilly, pop, ska, swing, dub, anthems, shuffles, New Orleans R&B, even a radio hit (Train In Vain). Unlike the Sex Pistols who imploded or Blondie who sold out or The Ramones who stayed underground or Pere Ubu who went over the mainstream’s head, The Clash spoke loud and clear to everyone. At the Akron Civic Theatre in ‘82, they even introduced NEOhio to rap and hip-hop by bringing along opening act Grandmaster Flash. Too bad Strummer, who wrote, sang and served as the band’s conscience, won’t be around to premiere his tribute to Nelson Mandela, co-written with Bono, for AIDS Awareness in Africa in Feb., or to be inducted into the Rock Hall with his band this coming March. If anyone deserves to be there, he does.”
Thanks for letting me get that of my chest. I feel slightly better about it, but I’m sure it’s only temporary. I’d appreciate hearing from you. See where it says “have a cup?” right below this. That’s it. Please click on that and leave a comment.
The world according to Jakob: Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002
Mac Hammond on Goal Setting:
‘Many people make an effort at setting goals but few do it effectively. According to the Bible, there are some principles that make your goal setting a powerful tool for leadership and achievement. Effective goal setters are willing to discipline themselves, work hard and sacrifice for delayed gratification. They believe in their God-given gifts and calling. The stay motivated. They form a plan of action. And they have a clear vision of where they’re going. I like what a famous German theologian said about goals: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it; boldness has genius and power in it.” Have you harnessed the genius and power of lofty goals?’
I’m so jazzed. My wife and I went to Barnes and Noble’s last night. I’m totally loaded with tools to learn! Here’s the list:
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
- The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR by Al Ries, Laura Ries
- The Work Matters by Tom Peters on CD
- Running with the Giants: What the Old Testament Heroes Want You to Know About Life and Leadership on tape
- Guerrilla Publicity: Hundreds of Sure-Fire Tactics to Get Maximum Sales for Minimum Dollars by Jay Conrad Levinson
I’m starting with The Rise of PR by Ries and Ries. Their contention is ‘you can’t use advertising to build a brand, because advertising has little credibility’. More as I get into it farther.
December 27, 2002
I know it’s hard to believe, but I don’t have a book to read. I’ve got some Christmas cash, and I need to go to the bookstore!
So I picked up a book that I was reading, but never finished. There’s so much to it, that it’s better to take it a little at a time. The book is Building the Awesome Organization. I was trying to pick a chapter I haven’t read yet, and I settled on Prime Your Top Team for Growth. I’ll leave you with a quote:
“Awesome people expect the CEO and the top team (the mayor and the city council?) to provide the leadership to grow the company (city?). They are unlikely to join a company with less than awesome leadership, and they certainly won’t stay at a company that has a dysfunctional top team.”
Ouch!
I finished Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends on It. There’s a couple of key points that I’d like to point out. First, companies need to know how to Cross the Trench.
“There are four fundamental things you must do to successfully cross the trench: (1) Act early, (2) develop a totally new product, (3) give the new product a new name, and (4) move boldly.”
Finally, 15 keys to a long-term focus:
Focus is:
- simple
- memorable
- powerful
- revolutionary
- competitive
- the future
- internal as much as external
- what the country (city?)needs
- not a product
- not an umbrella
- focus does not appeal to everybody
- not hard to find
- not instantly successful
- not a strategy
- not forever
I wondered how many quotes I have in my database, so I researched how to create a page that will display the entire contents in a single page. Here are the results. The current total is 235. The page isn’t much to look at yet, I’ll work on that later.
I’ve had the garlic variety, but I wonder what Horseradish Mashed Potatoes are like?
Why the company’s name is Virgin - “because Branson and his coworkers considered themselves business virgins.” - from a Zoomba.com email.
File this story under Customer Evangelism: Microsoft alters message to counter Linux - ‘Microsoft can tout potential savings and commission studies, but those efforts won’t be any more effective in securing customers than its past tactics, Enderle said. “To make that argument it really needs to be made by practitioners, not by the vendor itself,” the analyst said. “To make it stick you really need company (information technology) managers to stand up.”‘
As I do every morning, I was reading Google Science and Technology News. This story caught my eye, because it seemed rather out of place, but it blessed me any way. I thought it stranger still that it came from the Pakistan News Service. Isn’t Pakistan a Muslim nation?
I’m rather bummed. The fine people at Guerilla Marketing take the last couple weeks of December off. No new tips of the day!
No plans for New Year’s Eve? Our friend Roger is DJing at the Phantasy. So if you like Industrial/Goth Dance Music, check him out.
