Choices!

Boy, there seems to be an abundance of choices in life:  choices, choices, choices!  Sometimes it can be overwhelming.  For me, I'm intimidated by the choices in the grocery store........... can there really be 117 different breakfast cereals, in one Giant Eagle grocery store?  I'm the perfect sucker for a SALE! tag or a coupon available right in the aisle at the point of purchase, because I really don't know (and I'm blessed to be married to someone who really does know!).

Perhaps you feel the same way about social media options as I do about grocery store  choices.  The variety of tools and platforms available in social media can be intimidating, making it difficult to begin.  The choices of how to engage and use these tools can be staggering, paralyzing.  As a small business owner, you recognize that you should use social media to your advantage, and engage the incredible opportunity and benefit that is available to you and your business.  It may simply be challenging for you to get started and stay engaged.

I wish that I could remember the creator of the picture above, about Google Plus adapted from a beer ad, because he deserves appropriate credit.  It's amusing and clever, and I really, genuinely like Google+.  It would be great if everyone I know, and hundreds of millions that I could meet, would be active on Google+.  Hands down, it is a superior tool or platform to Facebook.  Yet many continue to live on Facebook.  Is it a choice of familiarity?  A choice of reluctance to change?  And what about Twitter or LinkedIn or a blog?   

Frankly, the most crucial choice is to engage in social media, not which tool to select.  That is the foundational reason for this blog, Old Dogs, New Tricks, to encourage you to take an initial step toward harnessing the power of social media to improve your life and business.  The ability to reap the advantages may require an initial step of choosing to stop doing something else, because of the "busyness" of your life.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  Please, take that initial step.

Thanks for sharing 111 seconds of your day,
Smitty

A Sense Of Wonder

This week a reader of this blog from Qatar emailed me to share a story on the ESPN website about the use of social media by the New York Jets professional football team.  Jim said the article "certainly resonates with the message you've been espousing". 

Please excuse me for a moment as I shake my head in amazement.  I'm still an Old Dog with a sense of wonder when I ponder the impact of social media and the reality of how commonplace it is to be able to share ideas and information from the other side of our planet. 

A situation comes to mind about a college student from our church earlier this year:  While studying abroad through Geneva College, she communicated by Facebook about her escape from Egypt when the government there was collapsing.  If one recalls the broader circumstances surrounding this college student at that time, is there any denying that social media contributed heavily to the abrupt change of the Egyptian government?

Closer to home, I could make a strong case for the use of social media contributing heavily to the election of our current President of the United States (which I did, in fact, do last March in a post at my old blog address: "Does President Obama Owe His Place In History To Social Media?").  The influence of utilizing social media can be staggering.   

Back to Jim's email about the New York Jets

According to the ESPN article that Jim shared, three or four years ago, the Jets website was in the bottom quartile of the teams in the National Football League.  The Jet's executive vice president, Matt Higgins, hired social media consultant Gary Vaynerchuk and implemented a successful social media strategy.  Today, the team is in the top quartile of the league, and Higgins believes that social media has been significantly responsible for growing the fan base during those couple of years.  The Jets have become a league leader in social media.

In a business environment where NFL teams sometimes hover around $1Billion in value, do you have any idea how much social media has increased the value of the New York Jets professional football team?  I remember, as a kid, when Joe Namath signed a contract for $400,000 to quarterback the New York Jets (a huge sum at that time).  I also remember how the Namath-led Jets shocked the sports world by defeating the mighty Baltimore Colts in the Super Bowl.  Social media consultant Gary Vaynerchuk would be underpaid if he received the amount of Namath's contract for his contribution to increasing the value of today's Jets. 

How about you?  Sure, I understand that, unless your last name is Rooney, your business probably isn't worth a billion dollars.  But you can surely increase the value of your small business by learning a few New Tricks and implementing a successful social media strategy over the next few years.  Come on Old Dog, if the crummy New York Jets can do it, just imagine what you can do in Steelers country?  

Thanks for sharing 144 seconds of your day,
Smitty

The Overall Plan

The business world, and the world in general, is rapidly transforming due to social media.  Social media is impacting relationships with customers and competitors, as well as providing tremendous opportunity for small businesses.  In the midst of this evolving impact, an owner must also remember that social media, in all its forms, is fundamentally a tool.

So what is the plan or strategy that can best utilize these tools?  In advising a small business owner, I often begin by introducing an overall plan and then use the plan as a guide for decisions and activity in marketing the business.  This is the plan I frequently utilize:

Global Marketing Strategy

1.     Where Have We Been?

Why did you start your business in the first place?  What was the dream?

Paint a clear and defined picture, as you saw it then.

“Talk about dumb mistakes!”, and great decisions.

2.     The Core and Heart of Our Business

Ideally, what specifically do we want to accomplish?

What is the measurement of success?

State the core of our business simply and specifically.

3.     Where Are We Now?

Who is our Target Customer?

       Explore and define everything that we know.

Who and What is our Competition?

       Inside and out, directly and not - - what prevents our success?         

How are we, ourselves, our biggest enemy?

4.     First Things…..First

What are our core values?

What are our greatest priorities?

       Rank them.  Obey them.

5.     Strategic Planning

What is the most effective path to our #1 priority?

What are our biggest obstacles?

       Eliminate or neutralize them.

Are we willing to do what is necessary to accomplish our goals?

6.     Execution

Do we have the will?

Action Steps:  with deadlines and consequences/rewards


What's your plan for marketing success in today's social media world?

Thanks for sharing 92 seconds of your day,
Smitty

What Do You Believe In?

Earlier in the week, I wrote about the winner's secret to success:  mastering the simple aspects of business, or life, and pursuing those simple fundamentals with maximum vigor.  When I first start to work with a small business owner to improve the bottom line, it is critical to understand and have a firm grasp on these simple, basic fundamentals.  No sense passionately pursuing the wrong objectives with maximum vigor, eh?  To be truly successful, you need to accurately understand the core and heart of your business.

Ask yourself questions like:

Why did you start your business in the first place? 

There's one thing you want your grandchildren to know about your earlier days in starting and building your business.  What is it?

What are you most proud of regarding what your business offers?

How do you measure success?

When you're gone, what would you like the legacy of your business to be?

I firmly believe that, in order to successfully progress into the future, one must understand where you have been and what you truly value.  The video from a post earlier this week reveals the values and core beliefs of legendary coach Vince Lombardi.  The narrating voice (boy, I love that voice of NFL Films!) informs us that Lombardi believed in the old fashioned virtues of hard work, second effort, loyalty and love.

What do you believe in?  What are the core values of your business, the things that you believe deeply and will not compromise?  Knowing these things is a guiding compass in a rapidly, ever changing world.

Professionally, I believe in serving God by loving and encouraging others in their daily work, in relationships that are built and based upon trust and respect.  I firmly believe that everything in life is about God, and I am personally a devoted follower of Jesus Christ.  This belief and faith doesn't make me better than others, in fact, I realize how flawed and hopelessly self-centered I genuinely am.  

How about you?  What do you believe in?

Thanks for sharing 93 seconds of your day,
Smitty

Learned Anything New Lately?

This is an Old Dog who definitely needs to learn some New Tricks!

                                                                        

So, You Think Life's Simple?

“That’s been one of my mantras -- focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” 
[BusinessWeek, May 25, 1998] quote by Steve Jobs

"Gentlemen, this is a football......"  Coach Vince Lombardi

Steve Jobs helped to build a "simple" company that revolutionized technology and even the music industry, improving our lives.  Vince Lombardi stressed the "simple" basics and his professional football team won 5 NFL Championships and the first two Super Bowls.  Lombardi continues to inspire many a half century later. 

"Back in the day" when an Apple was a key ingredient in baking a pie and I was certain that my new Keds tennis shoes would make me "run faster and jump higher" (long before any of us knew what a "Nike" was), Coach Lombardi admonished his players to perfect the simple basics, the fundamentals: hit, run, block and tackle.  Nothing fancy, just executing simple plays with maximum effort.  Opponents of Lombardi's Green Bay Packers may have correctly anticipated the next play that the Packers would run and yet they couldn't stop the play from succeeding.  To Lombardi and his team, winning wasn't everything, it was the only thing.

Chris Brogan recently shared a "secret" on his blog:  Complex is usually just a lot of simple things played out in a smart sequence.  Are you able to learn from the apparent success of Steve Jobs, the winning record of Coach Lombardi and the secret revealed by Chris Brogan?

Are you executing the simple basics in your business?  In some ways success in business, as well as in life, depends upon mastering the simple and consistently executing with maximum vigor.  Sounds too simplistic?  Maybe.  But keep in mind that after companies spend $2Million to $3Million on a 30-second Super Bowl commercial, the winning team at the end of the game receives the Lombardi trophy.  Go figure.

Steelers fans, in particular, will enjoy the conclusion of the video below.   

Thanks for sharing 109 seconds of your day,
Smitty

An Old Friend Who Has Been Gone A Long Time

I had a dream about an old friend that woke me up after two hours sleep and caused me to write this blog.  She came into my life over thirty years ago, and she used to ride my wife (then my fiancee) around with her friends when they were nursing students in college.  They used to joke about how another one of my wife's friends who was about six feet tall, Marty, used to put her stockings on in her back seat while they drove at 6AM in the morning to their nursing student clinical at an "old folks" home. 

Believe it or not, she wound up with my brother's ex-sister-in-law's ex-husband.  We tried to call her "Betsy" but often called her "the shrimp boat" (she really was massive).  My life-long best friend and best man at our wedding called her the "deuce and a quAHter" (mimicking my Mom's Boston accent). 

My old friend was a 1971 Buick Electra 225 ("deuce and a quarter"), and she was ten years old when I bought her for my wife, who was still my fiancee at the time.   The Shrimp Boat was the first car I purchased, for $700.  

That Was Then

The world has changed quite a bit since my old friend was a "newborn" in 1971, forty years ago.  The Shrimp Boat didn't have a cd player or a GPS, there were no electronics on the dashboard to tell you your tire was flat, and I don't remember calling gas "leaded" back in those days.  That was forty years ago.  The world, our world - yours and mine, has profoundly changed in the last four years, let alone the last forty.

Are you continuing to change, to grow and adapt, along with the world that surrounds you?  People brag that "our family business is forty (or twenty or sixty, or even ten) years old", failing to see that a strength such as longevity can potentially be a weakness.  A small business owner can become trapped in the nostalgia of a business that still runs on "leaded" gas, and fail to recognize that no one. . . .  else. . . . cares. 

This Is Now

In a past life, when I sold radio ads to small business owners, we had an expression that is quite relevant today:  A business owner is "inside the bottle".  This doesn't mean that small business owners have a drinking problem.  It means that the owner was so close to his business, so wrapped up in it and intimately involved, that the owner can't see the business clearly from an outsider's perspective.  Hence, the owner is so "inside the bottle" that he can't read the label on the outside of the bottle, the label that accurately describes his business to the public.  As such, the small business owner is  the last person who should be authoring the radio commercial.  Due to the owner's limitations, a business coach or advisor can be genuinely helpful in this situation.

We also challenged the weak and ineffective ways that a small business owner pridefully described his business.  Keep in mind that the potential customer or prospect is constantly asking "What's in it for me?" when determining to engage in a business relationship.  Owners often make meaningless stand-alone claims such as, "we've been in business for over forty years" (who cares?), "we provide the best service" (compared to what?), "we're better than our competition" (prove it!).  The owner's intimate familiarity with his business cause these phrases to have value from his perspective, but these words are meaningless to a prospective customer.  Again, external advice can be valuable and effective in such a situation.

My old friend, the 1971 Buick Electra 225, has been gone a long time.  Sadly, the old mindset that hampers today's success and limits the future for experienced small business owners is very much alive.  Usually, it's never too late for an Old Dog to learn New Tricks.  Until it is.

Thanks for sharing 186 seconds of your day,

Smitty