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[webinar] Concept to Profit 4.0 – Learn How to Produce and Distribute Video Content Online

FollowFlywheel — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:45:14 +0000

Watch the video presentation below to learn how to produce and distribute video content online. We would like to thank Tim Wackel (The Sales Expert) for his webinar on how to enhance the new Concept to Profit 4.0 presentation.

On this presentation you will learn:

Stats & facts about video email and web video marketing
Equipment needed to produce web video
6 Best ways to leverage video email and web video
Top 4 challenges of running a small business and how web video solves those challenges
Video sharing sites versus paid web video services

Find out more, watch the 31:05min video below:

Side note: Just as we did with version 3.0, we recorded this presentation in Camtasia using a MXL .007 condenser mic. We feel that when you record a live presentation within web conferencing services, the resulting file is too large and the audio quality is compromised. In addition, the original live presentation was 60 minutes – quite long for an on-demand presentation. Lastly, we shrunk the presentation on our display prior to recording it, and then sized the recording window to match our blog’s width. This not only reduces the file’s size making it load faster, it also keeps the image crystal clear as it does not go through any resizing when exporting the final flash file.

Thank you for taking the time to watch our presentation. Please leave comments, feedback, and any questions you have below.

[webinar] Concept to Profit 3.0 – Learn How to Produce and Distribute Video Content Online

FollowFlywheel — Fri, 14 May 2010 19:18:44 +0000

We have a new version of our Concept to Profit webinar, let’s go learn>>

Watch the video presentation below to learn how to produce and distribute video content online. A big THANK YOU goes out to Mike Brooks (Mr. Inside Sales) for his suggestions and guidance in creating Concept to Profit 3.0.

On this presentation you will learn:

Top 4 Challenges of Running a Small Business and How Web Video Solves those Challenges
Stats & Facts About Video Email and Web Video Marketing
Equipment Needed to Produce Web Video
Video Sharing Sites versus Paid Web Video Services
6 Best Ways to Leverage Video Email and Web Video

Find out more, watch the 29:39min video below.

Player will appear here

If you can’t see the video, it is most likely because you need to upgrade to the new version of flash.

Side note: We recorded the presentation in Camtasia using a MXL .007 condenser mic. We feel that when you record a live presentation within web conferencing services, the file is too large and the audio quality is compromised. In addition, our live presentation is 60 minutes – quite long for an on-demand presentation. Lastly, we shrink the presentation prior to recording it, and then size the recording window accordingly. This not only reduces the file’s size making it load faster, it also keeps the image crystal clear as it does not go through any resizing when exporting the final flash file.

Thank you for taking the time to watch our presentation. Please leave comments, feedback, and any questions you have below.

How to Leverage Executive Summaries to Learn More in Less Time

FollowFlywheel — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:22:23 +0000

Learning more in less time: all you have to do is decrease the noise and increase the signal. You can improve the signal to noise ratio in many areas of your life. This is done by setting up amplifiers and creating filters.
.

Filter provided by summaries:
Filter books before buying them – Executive summaries the perfect way to filter books before buying them. They will save you time and money!

Amplifier provided by summaries:
Increase comprehension and retention – We learn in layers and an executive summaries help your mind prepare for each chapter and the entire book, and they also help crystallize the information when used for post chapter review.

Background

I am not a fast reader, but I still make the time and invest about 15 hours every week to further my understanding of business and marketing. Since I was about seventeen years old, I have averaged about two books per week. On a side note, my reading speed and comprehension has started to increase, now that I schedule time to improve it. I supplement the books I read for videos and DVDs, when possible and appropriate, to increase my comprehension and retention of the information.

Going to the library is time prohibitive and therefore cost prohibitive for me, due to the hourly rate I assign to my activities. I also tried using a runner to pick-up books for the local library, but quickly found that the new releases and many of the esoteric works I was after were not available or currently out of stock. Buying lots of books was my only option until I discovered how to leverage executive summaries.

Discovery

Here is what I discovered: executive summaries can be leveraged to improve the process. The end result, I can learn more in less time, and save alittle bit of money as well.

It takes me about twenty minutes to read an executive summary. This means I can read forty-five executive summaries in the time it takes me to read two books. I do not read forty-five summaries per week though, not even close. I use them as a filter, and then make the decision on whether to listen to the audio summary and/or buy the book. This method of reading the summary as a successor to the blurb puts an additional filter between the blurb and the book. The blurb is still useful, but it becomes one of two decision making factors. I can choose to delve deeper into those books which seem interesting, even if they have totally rubbish blurbs; it happens! The executive summaries can also be leveraged on the backend as well, as the basis from which to build notes to improve comprehension and retention. After all, it’s not how fast you can read but how much you can retain and then apply.

Research

Not all executive summary services are created equal. I know this because I have tested several executive summary services. I compared them to each other and choose summaries of books I had already studied. While the framework of the summaries was constant, the quality of them was not.

Some services missed key points and concepts that I felt were key.
The amount of summaries in their library, type of summaries, and the number of new ones that are created each week is another area where the services could be differentiated easily.
The number of summaries in their library and number produced each month was also a major decision making factor after quality.
Another area that I used to differentiate the services was value added services (e.g. audio summary, eReader file, and more).
- Most offered service’s like these, but the quality of the audio presentation both in presentation and fidelity varied, provider to provider; for some the audio summaries felt like a complete after thought.

After completing my research, I purchased a subscription to GetAbstract whose tagline is fittingly ‘compressed knowledge’. I also called and chatted w/ one of GetAbstract’s founders. It may interest you to know that, one of the main reasons they started the company is to make business knowledge more accessible around the world aka for people who don’t speak English or America which ever you prefer. This is a noble goal that reminds me of just how lucky those of us that live in America are.

In my opinion, GetAbstract is hands down the best quality executive summary service. They produce 50 new summaries of the best business books each month, and have over 6000 summaries in their library.

We have since entered into an affiliate relationship with GetAbstract and are in the process of adding a banner to the jiveSYSTEMS Blog. Currently, they are 1 of only 3 businesses we recommend. Infusionsoft and Web Video University being the other 2.

Free Executive Summaries

You can acquire 2 complimentary executive summaries from GetAbstract by visiting their homepage.

I also negotiated to be able to offer you a three summary packet to help you quantify the value proposition of their service.

In addition, I handpicked 3 of their best summaries! The summaries are entitled:

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High;
Email Marketing by the Numbers;
and The Customer Rules.

You can download them here.

I hope this post contributes to you building a system that will help you learn more in less time. If you have a strategy for learning more in less time, please feel free to share it in the comment section below. Also, I will gladly answer any questions you may have about this post; if you have a question, you can leave it in the comment section below as well.

The Problem Box: A Way to Keep Yourself and Others Focused

FollowFlywheel — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 03:27:12 +0000

In the past few months, I have been using problem boxes to keep my business’ clients and team members focused on the important issues.

What is a Problem Box?

A problem box is a simple and effective way to isolate a specific problem and stay focused on solving it at that point in time, or to come back to it in the future. All the data is put into the problem box, organized, and then used to find the best solution. The better the input data, the more effective the solution will be.

Why do I need to use a Problem Box?

Large corporations spend months, even years, putting data into problem boxes; paying top executives to crunch the data and design solutions for their board of directors to review. Small businesses tend to solve problems on the fly. Neither of these solutions is optimal. When you invest a lot of time, the data gets blurred and as a result, the solution becomes compromised and in some cases unnecessary, due to other changes in the company. Solving problems quickly tends to produce patch type solutions and your business starts to look like one big band-aid.

How can I use a Problem Box?

Let’s say, for example, your website isn’t generating enough traffic. Gather all the data you can quickly and put it into one document. Then, get a brief outside opinion from key members on your team and anyone else’s feedback that you value. State the problem clearly, give them a link to the page, and ask for some input. In the case of a low traffic web page, it would be wise to list your current promotional efforts related to the page and add links to the collaterals or an outline of what is being done at present.

Bonus: Once you have clearly defined a problem box in a conversation, you can easily gauge other people’s understanding of it by how close their responses in conversation relate to the actual problem. Most people are 2 to 3 levels removed from the actual problem. This means you need to adjust the conversation by refocusing people on the matter at hand. Now, if it’s your superior that is digressing, you will want to sandwich the adjustment by acknowledging their comment, suggesting your ‘idea’, and asking for their thoughts. Simple: Acknowledge their idea, suggest your ‘idea’, and ask for their thoughts.

When do I use a Problem Box?

You should use a problem box for any situation that arises in which you cannot definitively determine which decision will lead to the continued success of your company.

TAKE ACTION AND IMPLEMENT

Write down the 3 biggest problems you face in your business.
Ask yourself how much time you spent solving them in the past month, in relation to the time you have spent on other tasks.
Clearly identify each problem and list all the related items, and email the information to key members of your team, along with 3 trusted friends.
Stop any and all activities you and your business perform that are not critical to your daily operations. Minimize all your company’s other activities as much as possible – close for two days (or more if you can) to achieve this , tell your clients you are overhauling a major system [aka holding a company wide meeting to solve your problem boxes].
Identify the best solution for each of your three biggest problems, design an action plan to make the necessary changes, and implement them as quickly as possible.

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How to Increase ROI without Spending a Dime

FollowFlywheel — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:32:31 +0000

If you are looking for tricks for increasing your ROI, you won’t have to look as far as you may think. In fact, if your company currently has 200 or more prospects on its list, there are litanies of easy ways to generate more business by making little adjustments to the systems you already have in place. These small changes will yield big returns.

Start by tracing each of your lead generation funnels back to the point of sale. If you have several, focus on the ones that have the greatest number of leads running through them. By putting yourself in a cold prospect’s shoes and navigating through the tunnels that lead back to your order forms, you will gain the perspective you need to make the proper adjustments that will increase your ROI. Usually, the areas where the most leads are being lost are the conversion points (e.g. free test drive or demo landing pages). Adding a video to your free trial pages and demo registration pages is a surefire way to improve the number of names you capture, but you still have to turn them into sales.

Personality profiling is a massively underutilized method for improving the way you and your company communicate with both your prospects and members.

Personality Profiling 101

Here are the four primary ways you can identity someone’s personality.

DRIVER – Dominant. Their element is fire. They’re direct, a leader, decisive, they dominate and get things done. Powerful. If a driver could choose an animal that represents them, they’d choose a bear. If they were a shape, they’d be a triangle because it’s the pointiest, most angular, and most aggressive two-dimensional shape you can have. If a driver were playing a video game character, he’d be the barbarian, the tank, or the warrior.

EXPRESSIVE – Social, chatty, a story teller, spirited, excited, romantic. They’ll promise the world, because that’s the friendly thing to do. Gets along well with others. These people are the entertainers. Element – air. Popular. Animal – Monkey. If they were a shape, they’d be a squiggle because of their jovial and jumpy nature. If he was a video game character, he’d play the buffer, the dps, the agility, or the spy.

AMIABLE – Laid back. Easy going, nonchalant, relaxed, neutral, spiritual. Peaceful. Element – Water. Shape – Circle, because in the world of 2 dimensions, circle is God. If they were an animal, they’d be a dolphin. If he was playing a video game, he’d play the healer, the witch doctor, or the priest.

ANALYTICAL – The mental person. Think, assess, make lists, evaluate, analyze. Element – Earth. Perfect. If an analytical person were an animal, he’d be an owl. If they were a shape, they’d be a square because a square has four perfect, equal angles. If an analytical person were playing a video game, he’d be an engineer, a support character, or a sniper.

Summary: A driver likes it “my way”, an expressive likes it “the fun way”, an amiable likes it “the easy way”, and an analytical likes it “the right way”.

Everyone embodies all of these characteristics, however most everyone can be narrowed down to the two that they most exhibit.

None of these types are inherently good or bad. They each have their upsides and downsides. These classifications are for observing and chronicling our customers.

This classification system is another simple yet effective trick for increasing your ROI. Armed with this information and insight you will be better equipped to understand, relate to, and most importantly interact with your prospects and customers.

Take Action and Implement

Create eight tags in your CRM or Email Marketing System – two sets one for each of the four personality types; one set is for the dominant characteristic, the other is for the second most.
Establish a protocol to update contact records after every call with what you’ve learned about the contact’s personality.
If you have a list of warm leads that you have spoken with a couple of times, aim to tag everyone in it. Now, instead of sending one marketing email, send four – one geared toward each dominant personality type.
Leverage these tags when you call or interact with someone.
Get creative and find a way to leverage this simple and easy to implement strategy in every area of your business.
Watch your sales skyrocket!

What ways do you classify personalities? Let us know in the comments below.

This post was inspired by Jim Cecil who is the founder of the Nurture Institute. He has become a dear friend, trusted mentor, and a roll-model for us at jiveSYSTEMS. He has lived a breathed his life-long passion, one that consists only of nurturing others and helping them succeed. Here is a link to Jim’s Blog which is ranked #1 on my blogroll.

Increase the Response from Your Letters and Direct Mail Pieces

Think-Automate: Do it, Automate it, Delegate it, or Ditch it

FollowFlywheel — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:29:33 +0000

At jiveSYSTEMS, we teach small businesses, sales professionals, and online marketers how to leverage the tools and strategies that put them in the driver’s seat of their businesses.

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We teach you how to automate repetitive tasks like:

Following up a first phone call with a new prospect or using an evergreen video
Recording evergreen videos to respond to the questions you get asked the most often
and a lot more…

The key to success is to know which processes can be automated and how to do so, without eliminating the human touch. We must recognize tools and software, in most cases, serve to streamline human contact, not eliminate it. Automation, in the way we are referring to it, only works when it creates a better experience for your prospects and clients!

The term I have coined to help people connect with our method is “Think-Automate.” We leverage our video email and web video marketing system to build trust and rapport – to nurture relationships. Next we utilize our all-in-one business automation machine (Infusionsoft) to automate the appropriate customer-company interactions.

The old school mentality is “Do it, delegate it, or ditch it.”

We supplement this tried and true formula with our home-grown version of processing automation.

Our new skool approach is “Do it, automate it, delegate it, or ditch it,” or “Think-Automate.”

This methodology definitely presents the small business world with a vastly improved system to manage their daily operations so they can focus on growth.

If you would like to learn more about our company, visit www.jivesystems.com

My Rig: Connecting the Dots

FollowFlywheel — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:23:53 +0000

Every tool I list in this post can be used for free! Some of the services have paid options, but I have yet to upgrade to any of the paid options. The free versions work just fine!
.

This post outlines the service and tools I use and how they interoperate with each other. By recording this information, I gain the ability to streamline my activities. Each service and tool becomes part of a flow of activities.

Once you can see your activities as a flow, you can analyze them in relation to your ultimate goal.

The goal of this post is to address how I do it [not why I do it, though I will address why to some degree]. If I get enough comments indicating that you would like me to elaborate on the why, I will gladly go into more detail in a subsequent post.

Blogging is the fulcrum of my daily activities, a prerequisite of which is learning and testing. One of the main reasons I blog is to help our members grow their businesses. I also really enjoy the process of learning and testing. I don’t fancy myself as much of a teacher, but I am a learner and a tester, lol.

Up until a couple of weeks ago, I just published articles to the jiveSYSTEMS Blog [the blog you are reading now]. I have since made the realization that some of the content I produce doesn’t belong in this blog. So, I launched two additional blogs: 1) FollowFlywheel.com as my business notebook/journal; and 2) FollowFranco.com as my personal notebook/journal. This way, people have the choice to tune into the channels that interest them.

I publish mainly business and marketing related articles to this blog. While FollowFlywheel is my notebook/journal, I also use it as a sort of chronicle. FollowFranco is purely for personal things and has an emphasis on my studies into quantum theory as it relates to human potential. Putting all of these topics into one blog would most likely lead to traffic dilution due to a lack of focus–the noise/signal ratio would be high for those people who want to tune into just one channel, or even a sub-topic within a channel.

This blog runs on WordPress.org. This allows us to fully-customize the appearance and gives us access to tons of plug-ins and widgets. FollowFlywheel and FollowFranco on the other hand run on Posterous which is superb if you need a quick and easy way to publish content to the web. You can publish text, audio, and video by simply sending an email to a Posterous Blog. This makes for uber-fast publishing. Posterous also allows me to auto-post my blog posts to several other services as well. This is very handy!

Here are some notes on how I use my Posterous Blogs and how my auto-posting is setup:

FollowFlywheel

A business orientated notebook. Anything noteworthy gets published to this blog, for example: spur of the moment thoughts, business related purchases, what I am reading, where I am going, interviews, any tools I find, and more….

Must be logged into Posterous account for it to publish to Facebook properly.
Write a blurb in FollowFranco for very occasional for noteworthy posts.

My FollowFlywheel Posterous Blog auto-posts to:

Twitter
Facebook Wall
LinkedIn
FriendFeed [lifestream]

Blog Commenting

Disqus
1. Makes an update w/ a link back to the post on:
  1. Twitter
  2. Facebook Wall
  3. Yahoo Profile
Non-Disqus, setup a profile, or comment and then paste comment into FollowFlywheel blog w/ a link

Twitter

Seesmic App for G1
1. To run more than one Twitter account from a single app, you need to upgrade to the pro version. So, I use two different apps (see FollowFranco below).

Bookmarking

Save stuff to read w/ ReaditLater
Firefox Toolbar for Quick Links Only (e.g. Infusionsoft Login, jiveSYSTEMS Blog Admin, Twitter Login)
Delicious is my primary bookmark archive, I then add and annotate the best resources and references into my Diigo account
Digg noteworthy items as they surface and jiveSYSTEMS + FollowFlywheel blog post
StumbleUpon noteworthy items as they surface and jiveSYSTEMS + FollowFlywheel blog post

Other FollowFlywheel Items

Video
1. Vimeo
2. YouTube
Lifestreams
1. FriendFeed
2. Profilactic
3. Lifestream.fm
4. BackType
5. MyBlogLog
Ping.fm sends status updates to:
1. Twitter
2. Facebook Wall
3. Flickr
4. LinkedIn
5. Friendfeed

FollowFranco

A place where friends and clients alike can get to know me on a more personal level. I also publish things about quantum theory as it relates to human potential to this blog.

Must be logged into Posterous account for it to publish to Facebook properly.
Write a blurb in FollowFlywheel very occasionally for noteworthy posts, mainly human potential focused ones.
Remove the double post because Twitter and Posterous auto-post to my Facebook Wall.

My FollowFranco auto-posts to:

Twitter
Facebook Wall
FriendFeed [lifestream]

Twitter

Posts to Facebook Wall
Twitdriod App from G1

FollowFlywheel and FollowFranco

Each have their own unique accounts. For example, I have a FollowFlywheel Twitter account and a FollowFranco Twitter account. I keep the channels completely separate. This starts with creating unique emails addresses. I then use an email filter to segment the inbound emails accordingly. In this manner, I prioritize and batch my inbound email activities.

Lifestreams

A lifestream is a comprehensive record of one’s daily activities. They pull data from many services into one big stream of information. You will note from above that I only use a FriendFeed account for FollowFranco. [For FollowFlywheel, I use: FriendFeed, Profilactic, and Lifestream.fm]

Blog Commenting

I mainly use Disqus. It has two components; a plug-in to manage comments on blogs for publishers, and a profile for commenters. If you would like to learn more about Disqus, after reading the rest of this article, I suggest you take a gander at this post We Migrated from IntenseDebate to Disqus for Blog Comments. Whenever I comment on a blog with Disqus comments, it auto-publishes my comment to my Disqus profile, Facebook Wall, and Twitter account.

I also have a BackType profile. It’s aggregates all my comments on blogs into one stream by using my social accounts and both the URL/Website field.

Central Profile

To further connect everything together, I created a central profile WillFranco.com. I use this link as my website URL whenever I sign-up for a new service, for example, my Twitter accounts link to WillFranco.com. This makes it easy for people to understand my value proposition and potentially select one, or more, of my blogs to read.

Online Storage

Dropbox is the winner, hands down. My goal is to centralize and streamline. Unlike almost every other online hard-drive service out there, Dropbox is super simple. It works just like a regular hard-drive and shows up like one on your computer as well. Any files you place in your Dropbox hard-drive store locally, sync across all of your computers, and are stored online as well. Dropbox works seamlessly and silently to accomplish both backup and storage.

SEO Monitoring

I found ExactFactor several month ago. I signed up for a free account, and I typed in our URL and the keywords I wanted to track. Now, I get an email letting me know our position for each of the keywords I am tracking, each week.

RSS Feed Subscriptions

Google Reader does me well. I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds and Google Reader makes them easy to manage, annotate, and even share. Subscribing to RSS feeds and then reading them all in Google Reader is the easiest way I have found to stay in-tune with the blogs I follow. Just recently, as in, while writing this post, I added a Firefox plug-in called AidRSS which helps me sift through the many feeds I subscribe to by assigning each post a rank.

When I want to see what is going on in the news, I use Google’s FastFlip. It’s a super cool Google Labs project that does exactly what the name implies, allows you to flip really fast through the headlines of major newspapers.

Closing Thoughts

I use many other tools and services. For the purposes of this post, I have stuck the ones I use the most frequently.

Notable items that I did not mention in the post include my jiveSYSTEMS account which I use to send video emails to people, and Infusionsoft–the CRM software we use to manage our company. Since both are paid services, I did not mention them in the body of this post.

Also, I have been building a system to leverage video sharing sites for free publicity, the backbone of which is TubeMogul, a video syndication service–you upload a video to TubeMogul and it distributes it to your chosen video sharing sites (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, and more…). I didn’t address video sharing in this post because I haven’t thoroughly road tested it yet.

I hope you found this post useful. If you have any feedback, comments, or questions please leave them below.

New FTC Endorsement Guidelines – How to Make Sense of Them

FollowFlywheel — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:25:06 +0000

There has been a lot of fuss over the new FTC Endorsement Guideline. Even with the flurry of blog posts from well-respected online marketers, the question seems to still remain: what does it all mean?

It’s always best to start at the source. Let’s hear what Mary Engle has to say, Associate Director – Bureau of Consumer Protection.

New FTC Guidelines - How to Make Sense of Them

Now that doesn’t sound bad at-all does it? The FTC’s intention seems pure; they want to ensure we are all playing by the same rules and are being ethical. That being said, the actual changes tell a completely different story. Trying to create rules based on ethics in an ever changing digital landscape must have been a daunting task. So in their defense, [not that it is acceptable] they did try, which is the first step of many in creating quality guidelines that will protect us all. Now, we have to wait and see how and if they enforce the rules as was intended or verbatim. Hopefully, the FTC will be swift to make the necessary adjustments to put the many bloggers that fear the rules will be enforced verbatim at ease.

If the new FTC Endorsement and Testimonial Guidelines apply to you, after reading the below summaries and before clicking out to read more about this topic, you should download and read the 12-page PDF the FTC issued.

Here are some posts I have found that do a great job elaborating on the new FTC Endorsement and Testimonial Guidelines:

Blog Post #1 – By John P. [a timid and soft-spoken fellow]

Dear FTC, You Can Kiss My Blogging Ass!

John P. is the CEO of iFusion Labs, the parent company of Woopra, host of the popular Wealth Nation podcast, former Chief Marketing Officer for Layered Tech, founder of HTMLHelp.com, and former Vice President for SAVVIS Communications. John is also co-organizer of WordCamp Dallas 2008, WordCamp Dallas 2009, and likely the most prolific WordCamp videographer on the planet.

Blog Post #2 – Dave Kaminski , Web Video University [He is the most detail-oriented guy I know]

FTC Imposes New Rules For Online Marketers

Dave Kaminski is a professional copywriter, videographer and 10-year veteran of direct response marketing whose work in multimedia advertising has resulted in millions of dollars worth of sales. A former U.S. Marine, Dave specializes in teaching entrepreneurs how to effectively use web video in their marketing efforts. Dave also did an audio podcast with Kevin Houchin…an attorney, blogger and author…where Kevin explains what a few of these new rules are and what to do to make sure you are in compliance with them.

Blog Post #3 – Joe Manna, Infusionsoft Community Manager

FTC Drops the Banhammer on Undisclosed Reviews

An experienced and insightful social media professional who aims to improve consumer interactions in business organizations. Consumer Advocate at heart, Social Media Evangelist by practice.

Blog Post #4 – Chris Brogan [does he even need an introduction—this guy is everywhere, and for good reason]

My Thoughts on the FTC Disclosure Rules and Bloggers

Chris Brogan is President of New Marketing Labs, a new media marketing agency, and home of the Inbound Marketing Summit conferences and Inbound Marketing Bootcamp educational events. He works with large and mid-sized companies to improve online business communications like marketing and PR through the use of social software, community platforms, and other emerging web and mobile technologies.

Blog Post #5 – Louis Gray [she lives in the heart of Silicon Valley]

FTC Disclosures Made Simple For Bloggers With Conflicts [she created some cool icons to help bloggers disclose]

Most recently, she worked as the director of corporate marketing at BlueArc, a Silicon Valley technology company in the high performance network storage space, from January 2001 to April 2009, with a focus on public relations, demand generation and content creation. Prior to BlueArc, she was the Web Marketing Manager for 3Cube, a communications application service provider, sold to Oracle in 2001. Prior to 3Cube, she was an e-commerce analyst for Internet Valley, Inc.

Conclusion

There is a lot of hearsay floating around the internet about the new FTC Endorsement Guidelines. When you study the new rules, you will quickly realize they are full of holes. However, the same is with every set of rules I have ever come across. Rules mean nothing unless they are enforced, and we are yet to see how the FTC really plans to enforce these new rules. Regardless, we should all do our best to ensure we are disclosing our relationships with advertisers and any source where we receive any sort of reward, be it monetary or not. Why? Because it is the right thing to do!

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6 Steps to Make Any Business Grow and Prosper

FollowFlywheel — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 21:03:53 +0000

I am a big fan of Jim Collins’ work: Good to Great, Built to Last, and How the Mighty Fall. The principles in these books have helped us steer jiveSYSTEMS into the company it is today and are shaping our future. I especially find it useful to strike a contrast to Jim’s work by reading content that has a roll-your-sleeves-up type of approach. John Spence is one of those contrast studies. Also, I don’t find it productive to read entire books, unless they are truly outstanding. I use executive summaries and other types of condensed knowledge to expedite learning. An executive summary combined w/ a video breakdown is the best combination I have found thus far. ReaditFor.me is one of the initiatives, it does the second part very well—they provide awesome rich media video breakdown’s of some fantastic books.

Awesomely Simply by John Spence is one of those videos that really made an impression on me. I have embedded the 10 minute presentation below.

Here are my cliff notes:

6 Steps to Making Any Business Grow and Prosper

Vivid Vision

Use mantra to stay focused on goal
- Have everyone repeat our mantra’s daily
  - Do it, Automate it, Delegate it, or Ditch it
  - My personal one: Thing Big, Work Smart, Live the Dream
Live the mission, vision, and values
- Make some billboards and put them on the office walls
- Order some t-shirts w/ our core values and logo: compassionate, holistic, and prompt

Best People

Five C’s

Competence
Character
Collaboration
Communication
Commitment

Robust Communication

Honest
Empathy
Courage
Safety
Intellectual Property
Transparency

Urgency – Speed Rules

Clear intended outcomes
Empower people to make decisions

Disciplined Execution – 9 Steps

Vision and Values
Strategy – Less is More!
Commitment & Responsibility
Alignment
Systems – Make Success Repeatable
Communication & Priorities
Support & Training
Adjust and Innovate – Measure what Matters
Reward & Punishment
1. Lavish Rewards
2. Immediate Actions

Extreme Customer Focus

Quality People to Deliver
Hire for Attitude – Train for Skills

It’s a relatively simple process that can be implemented and tested very quickly. You’ll most likely be many things that are part of the 6 steps. The goal them is the implement and test the things you are not doing. We are living most of the six steps. However, this video has reinforced my desire to improve our internal communication, empower our team to make decision using a tiered system, and invest even more time into training.

How do you feel about the 6 steps above? What do you do to ensure you business and clients grow and prosper?

[weekly review] How to Get More Done in Less Time

FollowFlywheel — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:41:06 +0000

Last week was very busy. I ended up burning both ends of the candle, a habit I do not wish to reform. In reflection, last week has got me thinking about a blog post I keep meaning to write. The premise is how to get more done in less time. The strategy is partial based on measuring the things that matter.

First though, here is my favorite song of the week. I hope you like it.

Improving Base Skills – How to Get More Done in Less Time

How do you get more done in less time? You can look at this question from two directions:

Learn to do things faster
Prioritize better

Either way the result is the same—you get more done!

Doing things faster is actually much easier than you would think. I feel many people overlook the importance of improving base skills.

We spend hours reading each week, but how often do you sit down and improve the skill of reading? What about listening? A major part of life is listening. But, when are we ever taught to listen? Certainly not in school—I spent the majority of my school life being told to listen, but never how. Strange, isn’t’ it? That is, not to mention the art of communicating, for example, writing and speaking. Considering that typing is where the majority of my thoughts are focused, not knowing how to touch type seems ludicrous to me. Bear in mind, the context I am using is not about form, rather speed and accuracy.

Hopefully, I am starting to paint a picture of just how much almost everyone can benefit from improving the base skills. Just imagine for a moment how much more work you could get done if you could read four times faster, type four times faster, or better yet both? Well, for one thing, it is definitely possible. I am yet to accomplish the feat, but others say they have. I’ll be writing in more detail on this topic in the future—when I can say from first-hand experience that I have achieved a noteworthy goal and developed and tested a system for others to do the same.

The foundation skills from my perspective are:

Learning (Listening/Reading)
Communicating (Writing/Speaking)

Improving these skills should be the first priority for the curious mind.

If you want to improve your reading speed, you can read this blog post by Tim Ferriss, Scientific Speed Reading: How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes. I did not make a 300% improvement, more like 50% increase in both speed and accuracy without losing any comprehension, it adds up, especially since I subscribe to around 60 RSS feeds and read well over 100 blog post each day. I am going to take a few more passes at the technique Tim refers to as well. I will keep you posted.

Do you have any methods for improving your base skills?

Chris Brogan on Social Media, “The Serendipity Engine”

FollowFlywheel — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 02:33:56 +0000

Chris Brogan, author of “Trust Agents,” recently spoke at the Web 2.0 Expo as a keynote speaker. I found a video of this speech on his blog and wanted to share it with you, because it provides what I think is a much needed reminder of the true purpose of Twitter and other social media sites. It’s only 10 minutes long and well worth the time investment.

All too often, people forget that social media’s purpose is to make personal connections. Instead, good-intentioned business people try to market themselves on Twitter; something it was not designed for. If we are going to truly monetize social media, we must use it as intended: build meaningful, value-added relationships. Start a conversation, or join one. Talk with someone, not at them. That is the only way to build relationships.

I love the quote he offers toward the end, “The difference between an audience and a community is the direction of the chairs.”

I hope you enjoyed the video as much as I did. Video the perfect tool to build relationships on Twitter, I wrote a post on that explains how to Use Video in Your Tweets>>

[weekly review] Your Health is About More Than Your Business

FollowFlywheel — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 02:20:51 +0000

I have been revisiting my health and fitness archive. Prior to pursuing a career in business, I was a personal trainer in Sarasota, Florida. I focused on corrective exercises (i.e. bringing the body back into alignment by stretching and strengthening at the same time) and functional training methods (i.e. not doing bicep curls).

For each weekly review, I include a widget that will play my favorite song of the moment. So, you can listen to a nice song while you read the post.

Within a few short months of taking the path of learning about business and marketing, my diet and training regimen went out the window [for several years]. To make matters worse, at the beginning of 2009, I also tore my lisfranc ligament—the ligament that holds the foot together. I needed surgery and a temporary screw to give the ligament time to reattach. After three months of little to no walking, the screw was removed. At this point in time, I could barely walk, had lost almost all my muscle mass, and was eating exceptionally poorly. Cooking on crutches is like eating rice with chop sticks. This was the kick in the ass I needed to get back in shape. So, I designed a rehabilitative exercise program and stuck to it. I made time and made my recovery a priority in my life. Who wouldn’t?

Things are different now. I am on the other side of the fence because I am not a trainer; I am an entrepreneur working in a small business. I see how difficult it can be to eat well and exercise regularly when it’s not your career. It can be too easy to say, “There are not enough hours in the day.” Back when I was a personal trainer, I often believed what my clients were telling me and offered my ear rather than my thoughts. Now that I am on your side, and have lived the excuse of “There are not enough hours in the day,” I realize that the issue is not with the amount of time but in how we prioritize the use of it.

If you are working long hours, eating poorly, and exercising rarely, maybe you should take a step back and reprioritize your life. I am a firm believer that 45mins of exercise each day combined with a diet of healthy, organic foods will positively impact your performance at work, decrease your risks for encountering avoidable health problems, and improve your overall well-being.

Books: a list of books I read this week with a short summary paragraph.

How to Eat, Move, and Be Healthy by Paul Chek

I have read this book several times, learning something new every time I revisit it. Since I sit in a chair over a computer most of the day, my focus is on my neck, back, and hamstrings. The hamstrings shorten from sitting which pulls the back out of alignment and the neck. The neck muscles also shorten as our heads often protrude forward when working on a computer. I am not sure about the legal ramifications of scanning and publishing pictures from the book. So, I grabbed links to near the same stretches from Google.

These 4 stretches are the foundation of my “Beat Chair Pain” routine:

Lying Hamstring Stretch—Lengthening those tight muscles on the back of the legs
Neck Retraction Stretch—Pulling your chin in, the opposite of it protruding
Bent-Over Cat Stretch Movement—Alleviating the tension from the neck down to the hips
Seated Bent-Over Lower Back Stretch—Opening up that lower back area

Closing Thoughts

In almost all instances, if you don’t have enough time to exercise and eat properly, you are not prioritizing correctly. Proper exercise and nutrition are a crucial part of one’s overall success system. I let my health slip and didn’t realize just how much it was affecting my work. Now that I have reestablished a decent exercise routine and eat fairly well, I feel better and my productivity has increased measurably. The long-standing team members around the jiveSYSTEMS office will also testify to the fact that my overall temperament has improved.

Making exercise and nutrition a priority in your life is a sound business decision that will benefit you in every area of you life.

Roadmap for Acquiring Customers Online

FollowFlywheel — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:24:44 +0000

To build and maintain a successful web presence, you need to follow and expand on the roadmap I am going to outline for acquiring customers online. Your ultimate goal is to join the online conversation. You can do this by leveraging a blog, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media tools.

Here is a roadmap for effectively acquiring customers online:

Get on the right people’s radar screen in multiple locations
Draw their attention by demonstrating value
Make your value proposition accessible and relevant

Get on the Right People’s Radar Screen in Multiple Locations

“Identify the people you want as customers and know why you want them.”
-Jim Cecil (Founder of the Nurture Marketing Institute)

Keeping with the theme, you then need to plant the right seeds to generate the right crop. Yes, both Jim and I are implying that you can actually grow customers. Once you know who you want, the next step is ascertaining what radar coverage they have. For example, listed in order of priority, my radar primarily covers my mastermind group (close business friends), my inbox (Gmail, weighted by the sender), Twitter, LinkedIn, and RSS feeds (Google Reader) weighted by the author.

A personal introduction from a member of my mastermind group trumps everything! This is because word-of-mouth is still the most powerful form of marketing, and Social Media is a medium of it. Since getting to my mastermind group would be nearly impossible – for one there is no legal way for you to find out who they are – getting into my inbox, tweeting to me, direct messaging me on LinkedIn, and my RSS feed are your only real options.

Image Credit: M. David Peterson.

So, the flow would go something like this… You would follow me on Twitter and I would most likely follow back. I usually scan the last few tweets of each person and check out their website—I do this to determine how much I should listen to what you have to say.

Side note: I am currently using both TweetAdder and CoTweet to manage my Twitter activity. TweetAdder automatically adds and follows and I use CoTweet to manage my tweets.

In addition, if your end goal is a higher ticket item that warrants a more personal touch, you could direct message me on LinkedIn—the easiest and cheapest way to do this is to join a group that I am a member of and like magic, you now have access to me. The next step would be to start leaving awesome comments on my blog; they’re the ones I read. You would then be on my radar in a big way! If you do want to get in contact with me, the irony is that a simple phone call to the jiveSYSTEMS customer support line and a well-articulated reason is all it would take—this would get you in the door, nothing more, and the type of attention you would receive would be quite different.

Draw their Attention by Demonstrating Value

This is the part where you need to individualize the message. This doesn’t necessarily mean to a specific individual. More likely than not, your ideal customers have many things in common. In my experience, relating to pain and/or passion is the key to drawing attention. I alluded to there being different types of attention at the end of the Get on their Radar section and understanding of this becomes critical when getting attention. For example, I used to own a personal training business focused on corrective and functional exercise. You would draw my attention by tweeting about the institute I am certified through, the CHEK Institute. However, if you are representing a client relationship management (CRM) company, you would then need to transcode my attention from one type to another—in this case from my personal passion to business related activities.

Side note: Since we are a video email and web video marketing system, my brain is full of video related terminology. Transcoding is the process of converting a media file from one format to another. For example, taking and converting a MPEG to a Flash file.

While there are no rules, it adds an extra and often unnecessary step if you start by drawing your target markets attention with a topic that is unrelated to your end goal. However, if the relationship is too close, people may not value the content. It’s a fine line—with a little time, energy, and creativity you can find and walk it. If I owned a CRM company, I may tweet about ways to use any CRM more effectively. This would draw the attention of any CRM user. Content developed in this regard has a high relevancy with almost every CRM users. As long as the content is primo, you are going to draw my attention to a high degree, for quite some time, based on that one piece of content. Also, if your eBook, video series, or whatever the case may be, is top notch then I am going to retweet it, digg it, blog about it, etc…. Alternatively, you could start a blog for non-CRM users to understand what a CRM can do for their businesses. Regardless, good content can spread fast on the internet. The key to unlocking the power of viral marketing is constant, continuous education, and communication with your qualified prospects and customers—a blog should be the foundation of your online presence!

Side note: Twitter is not a one-way channel. In many respects, Twitter is an evolved form of email—the key to success is about joining the conversation!

Make Your Value Proposition Accessible and Relevant

This can often be the trickiest part, especially if you are not proficient in thinking outside-of-the-box. The important thing to realize is that your value proposition depends on the prospect. For the purposes of this article, we are going to continue with the flow and focus on the people that have downloaded the hypothetical eBook on using any CRM more effectively. Anyone who uses a CRM (and even more so, those who have migrated from one CRM to another) knows that it is a nightmare to switch providers. So, it would be wise to compound your value proposition based on your unique benefits and features with migration assistance to make your transition as easy as possible. Also, it bears to mention that you need to tie your unique benefits and features into something measurable. For example, we have a unique multi-pronged split-testing tool that we guarantee will increase the effectiveness of your email marketing. Once you setup your split-test and send the initial emails to your list, our tool will automatically create and send the best version of your email to your entire list and email you the a detailed report.

Initially, you should create a squeeze page that will appeal to a broad spectrum of your target market. However, as you grow, you should develop landing pages for each isolable market segments. For example, for our service, we created a landing page just for real estate agents. On this page, we offer them an eBook, access to an on-demand webinar, and 7 tips for leveraging web video in their business. The cost is nothing more than their email address, and it’s quite appealing and very relevant. The content of course very tastefully explains our value proposition, and we use our service to deliver the 7 tips as video emails.

Closing Thoughts

Generating sales is a process. You can’t perform a couple of actions and hope to get results. Use the 7 P’s: Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

At the foundation, you can also use Jim Cecil’s approach to keep you on track; the foundation for Nurture Marketing is to: Identify, Individualize, Interact and then Influence. Jim and I are also big believers with being in sync—being compassionate. This is about more than understanding their pain and/or passion. You need to talk their language—you do this by identifying their style. The Personality Plus system by Florence Littauer is a sound choice for understanding interactions between people which will help you connect with the vernacular that will appeal to them. Here is a link to table of many of the schools of thought in respect to personality typing.

The roadmap for acquiring customers has three main parts: 1) getting on the right people’s radar screen; 2) drawing their attention and demonstrating value; and 3) making your value proposition accessible and relevant. The result of following these steps is customers, not just any customers, the customers you want and need to grow your business. Not all customers are created equal. You can choose who you attract by defining the people you want.

Do you have a process for attracting the right customers? What has been working for you? Please take a moment to share your thoughts below. If a specific part of this article grabbed your attention, let me know.

[weekly review] Selling Stars, More Thoughts on Priortization, Keeping Life Simple

FollowFlywheel — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:44:54 +0000

It’s been a very busy few days. We just finished deploying our slightly improved homepage, updating our video servers, and ending the beta period. Also, our blog traffic has more than doubled in the past month. We must be doing something right. On the previous version of our homepage, we removed our logo because it reduced the number of opt-ins we got. We are now testing a tabbed style version of our logo in the top right corner. Some background: it’s widely known in the squeeze page design circle that conventional headers on websites reduce sales–hence the jiveSYSTEMS website not having one.

Books: a list of books I read this week with a short summary paragraph.

Selling to the VP of NO by Dave Gray, Founder and CEO of XPLANE

Snippet: Secrets of the Selling Stars
This gem of a book doesn’t break any revolutionary ground–it does something better! XPLANE has a talent for simplifying knowledge and then breaking it down into a logical flow. This is why this little book is so powerful. It literally takes you step-by-step through the sales process–a process of identifying, relating to, and then responding to your prospects needs. Many of us have been exposed to parts of the sales process through expensive training courses and seminars. This book gives you the full monty in Plain English for only $19.95. I focused on a specific area of the book which I believe to be the core of successfully presenting your products and services: 1) What pain/problem do you address; 2) What are your benefits in relation the pain/problem; 3) What are the unique features you offer in relation to the pain/problem; and 4) Why should I trust you? This is part of the sequence as listed in the book. However, when you migrate into the digital domain, I believe trust must be established first, “Why should I listen to you?” A crappy website and a few emails that are thrown together will not suffice! You need a create social capital–the currency for your business online. A quality website with a couple of landing pages for free items (e.g. reports, ebooks, podcast, web videos, etc.) is a good start. A blog is a close second, arguably the first. Anyway, this book is a quick study and it’s well worth the read.

Closing Thoughts

Sometimes life and business gets in the way of the healthy habits you have formed (e.g. writing blog posts, eating properly, exercising, and learning), it happens. The key is reestablishing your good habits as quickly as possible. Habits are very easy to break and become harder to reform the longer you leave them by the wayside. I have a list habits I wish to keep, for every position in our company we have a list of habits also. This makes it easy to spot if things are slipping or need to be changed up.

I am a big believer that success in business and happiness in life is found through balance. This is why my habits are composed of business related activities and personal ones. One of my primary work habits is writing; exercising is one of my personal ones. When I see these habits slipping, I know I need to take a step back and re-prioritize what I am doing.

What are your most productive habits at work, the ones that have the highest return on investment for your company? What habits have you formed to keep your body and mind in shape? Use your habits as an indicator to your current stress level. When you are living your habits, you are the most productive and centered. When you are not, you are living in what Steven Covey refers to as Quadrant 1: crises, pressing problems, deadline-driven projects. Personal and business growth are rarely seen when operating in Quadrant 1.

Habits don’t have to conform to a schedule. If you have been reading this blog, you may have learned that I don’t care much for schedules. I set my destination and then go with the flow. Schedules do have their place and they can be very useful for some people; however, not so much for me. Too much scheduling takes the joy out of life! I keep a handful or so of what I call habits that are in alignment with my goals and live them.

Here is a window into the way I structure my world:

Content Creation

I really enjoy writing in this blog and creating content that will help small businesses owners achieve their dreams for business and life–possibly even dream a bigger dream! So, I aim to write something that I hope you will find useful each and every day.

Exercising

Exercising is a big part of my life. So, I aim to exercise each and every day. I mix it up–it keeps things interesting. Sometimes I go to the gym and do a hardcore powerlifting routine and on other days, I will simply meditate while stretching for 30 minutes or so. I also go to Rebounderz a couple of times per week for a cardio class with several of my friends, it’s basically a big warehouse filled with about 25 trampolines that are all touching [they even have that at 45 degrees to the walls].

Learning

In order for me to create content that you will find useful, I need to assiduously study and meticulously test. This is another one of my habits, ‘Learning and Testing.’ My passion for learning is bridges by testing what I learn and then becomes content in this blog.

Eating

I was born in France, and they say the French “Live to Eat.” I will agree with that one. I like to test my cooking skills on new dishes from countries all over the world–more often than not, many of my friends and the jiveSYSTEMS team, come over to my house, every week or so, for a big and delicious meal. I also look for restaurants that have unique menus, and since I lived in England until I was 16, you can bet I love me some Sunday brunch.

Traveling and Meeting New People

I drove around the United States this summer with a friend, over 8000 miles within a month. Over the course of that trip, I paid for just 1 hotel. I had a friend in every place we stopped apart from one. I like meeting new people from all walks of life and listening to their stories. You can learn something from everyone. Here is a little sentence I wrote to remind myself of this fact: Everything you need is everything you have, Everything you want you can get from what you need, Everything you’ve found you had all along. In fact, I have had some very insightful conversations with drifters that I have picked up by the side of the road. For example, a hitchhiker in Georgia, who turned out to be a medical student taking a year out. He got to Georgia in under a month from somewhere in Canada without spending a dime. I became friends with a very old and frail man who ended up being an amazing teacher and Al Capone’s piano player for a period of time–he had some wonderful stories, but even more so a wonderful perspective and attitude about life [I made a blog post in memory of Joe]. A sniper from World War 1. And many more. Here is a mini-video interview I did with Two Brothers I stumbled across that are literally walking around the world in spreading the message of micro-peace:

peacewalk-brothers.flv

They plan to walk around the world in just six years. A total of 25,000 miles (40,000 km) over five continents: Europe, Africa, the Americas, Australia and Asia. Ferenc and István Ivanics—walk 15-25 miles a day to reach their goal: to arrive back in their home (Hungary); they were Florida, USA, when I met them. You can learn more about their voyage on their website.

Keep Life Simple

You should quickly see that life for me is kept quite simple. As entrepreneurs, it can be very easy for us to get sucked into long days of work and sleepless nights-that is why it’s critical that we define our most productive and fulfilling habits and stick to them as much as we can. If you have read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, you will know that writing crystallizes your thoughts. So take a moment, it doesn’t have to be long and write down 2 of your most productive work habits and 2 of your favorite personal ones. Then take a step back and ask yourself, “Am I living these Habits?”