I visited the offices of Epiphanies, Inc. this afternoon for a quick 15 minute chat about a client…. Three hours later I find myself back in my office with my head swimming!… Those “big picture”, “big idea” folks tend to do that to you.

In our discussion, we were discussing whether a topic was a “soft topic” or a “hard topic”… and the value of that determination on marketing…. Here’s a sample scenario;

If a marketing consultant creates a low-cost teleseminar on Improving Your Marketing (where one of the topics discussed might be creating a signage campaign), it is, indeed, a soft topic. Is this a bad thing?… Maybe not…. There will certainly be people who will want to hear what an expert has to say and will derive value from the experience…. BUT, what if it was turned into a hard topic? Would the perceived value increase?… We say “yes.”

The teleseminar might become “Top 10 Strategies to Improve Your Marketing”…. In the presentation, the discussion would be “Steps to objectively measure return on investment with a signage campaign.”… Wow, what a difference!

Allen Voivod’s three criteria for determining if something is “hard” are:

• Can you measure dollars (revenue, gross sales, net, etc.) in any way?
• Can you measure a percentage change (increased leads, sales forecasting, etc.)?
• Can you attribute any other objective, measurable number to the idea (widgets sold, web site traffic, etc.)?

This isn’t rocket science but if you look around you (at your marketing, specifically), you might find that you’re implementing A LOT of soft ideas…. Be brutal in your evaluation and change your strategy to MAKE IT HARD! If you can measure it, you can improve upon it and it will have meaning…. If you can’t measure it, it’s essentially worthless.

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This morning’s big event was me giving six back-to-back 20 minute presentations at Gilford (NH) Middle School’s Career Day. This was a combined event with all Gilford and all Gilmanton seventh graders. In my third year of doing this, I was surprised at how much has changed in just two years. In my first presentation in 2005 I spent a good deal of time talking about how technology was going to be changing quickly and that we were on the cusp of a major change … but I didn’t say what that change might be. Here we are two years later and I was able to use the same slides as the past two years but was able to provide examples of how technology is changing the lives of young people, and the impact technology will have on their careers.

Many of my questions were inspired by Guy Kawasaki’s panel discussion this past September where he invited young people to chat in front of a room full of middle-aged business owners about how they (the young people) use technology …€” attempting to determine if advertising is dead. Some of the things Guy found were FASCINATING! What I found during today’s sessions not only completely supported what Guy found, but took the findings to a whole new level. Guy’s panel was 18-24 year olds …€¦ high school and college aged youths. My group was middle schoolers.
Here’s what I learned today (data/numbers are my approximations):

• 70-80% of seventh graders own cell phones and 2/3 of them text message to friends.
• Most will text message 50-100 messages per month. A few will text as many as 800-1000 messages per month.
• 90%+ own mp3 players with an average of about 300 songs. All but just a couple owned iPods.
• 50-60% have a MySpace/FaceBook page. Of those that said they spend time on their page daily, 100% of them were girls.
• VERY few knew about Digg, Technorati, Flickr or Twitter. However, almost all of them knew about YouTube.
• Unlike past generations, they “get” technology and are comfortable with it. When presented with the idea that we’re all in the middle of a technology explosion, they asked questions and wanted to know more about it.

I suspect that in the next year, enough will have changed in technology and how young people communicate, I’ll have to dramatically change my slides … hmmmm, maybe I won’t even be using an archaic medium like Power Point. Check in here next year to find out how the presentation went.

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When I saw Seth’s post about “Learning From Bananas“, I figured it was going to be an extension of his lessons on web interface design (from his book The Big Red Fez). I jumped right into the post and found I was wrong. What he was writing about is how bananas, apparently, are easier to peel from the “wrong” end. Because it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do, it’ll be a tough thing to teach.

In your business, there are likely LOTS of bananas … things that people do because of convention, tradition, or simply “that’s just the way things are done.” For example, why is it that Real Estate Agents put their pictures on ALL of their advertising but Insurance Agents not so much, and Stock Brokers almost never? Or, why do car sales people feel the need to be wacky when appliance sales people don’t? Let’s take it down to an even more fundamental level. Why do most businesses create tri-fold brochures (called “rack card format”), even though the brochure will NEVER be put into a presentation rack?

The lesson? Carefully consider everything you do. Is it on brand? Are you making decisions because that’s just the way you’ve always done it?… or that’s the way all of our competitors are doing it? If so, you’re peeling the banana from the “right” end. Pick one of these things and, for once, turn it around to see what happens.

Would you notice if:

• An insurance agent had a paper bag over their head in their photo and the caption said, “to see what I look like, come visit me at….”?
• A brochure came your way and it was round!

The possibilities are endless.

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This tip comes from A-Ha Guy Allen Voivod …

Hot Blogging Tip: When you find your brain is overflowing with blog ideas and you’ve got a string of them just lined up and waiting to pour out…. Let loose!… THEN, before hitting that “Publish” button, change the time stamp on the last few so they appear over the next day or two instead of posting right away.

This fab tip will even out your postings, give your frontal lobe a much needed break and, if you find you’ve got still more ideas busting out of your cranium, you can simply change those time stamps again as needed.

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It seems the topic of Intellectual Property, Patent and Trademark issues has heated up in the past year or so. At least it has for us. I often get asked how to find out if a company name, product name or domain name is defensable from a trademark perspective. My knee-jerk response is “I’m not an intellectual property attorney, but….” … then I give them the following advice:

• They need to review this issue with a qualified attorney
• Understand that trademark infringement results in suits to the tune of $150,000 per incident (that usually gets their attention). This is not an issue that should be taken lightly and it would be foolish to proceed with a name that you suspect is infringing on another company’s rights
• Searching on the USPTO.gov website is a great place to start but it is NOT a replacement for a qualified attorney’s “clearance search.” More on that in a bit.
• You’re not reeeeallly “good to go” until the USPTO says so … which might take years.

To quickly find out if you have a potential problem, go to www.uspto.gov and do the following:

1. Click on the “How To Search” navigation button, top right of home page
2. Next page; Click on the “SEARCH trademarks now” link, top of the right column
3. Next page; Click on the “Free Form Search (Advanced Search)” link in the center box
4. Next page; In the Search Term box, type in the company/product name. Use quotation marks if it’s two or more words. Click on “Submit Query”
5. Mix up the words to find other variations. For example if your name is “Power Boat Paradise”, you might want to try “Boat Paradise” or “Paradise Boat”, etc.
6. If you find a “Live” trademark that is substantively similar to what you’re doing, you probably have an issue with how you’d be able to protect it or, more likely, even getting it approved by the USPTO to begin with. It would be better to just move along to the next name.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you don’t find a match with a couple of searches, it doesn’t mean you should skip the step of having an attorney do a clearance search. Having the search performed by a qualified third party will demonstrate to anyone that you’ve effectively done your due diligence and you’re doing your best to not infringe on other people’s marks. Also, the attorney will typically do a more comprehensive job in this search process…. Use the USPTO site to exclude names, not identify useable names.

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Commenting on Google’s approach to their initial biz dev, Seth asks “Was Google Right?” … and then tells us:

… they made counter-intuitive decisions. No ads, for example. No
clutter. No popups, no tricky interpretations of privacy policies.
Instead, every decision was, “If this is going to be the one and only
choice, the best search engine in the world, what should we do?” The
feeling was, if they built that, the money would take care of itself.
And the investors who bought in were in on the game from the start.

Did they get lucky? You bet. Did it seem arrogant? Sure. But my
point is that if they hadn’t made those decisions, they would have
certainly failed.

A la “The Law of Attraction”, is there any other way to think that will lead to wild success? Nope.

In your mind, are you positioning your company to be the best of the best without ANY competition? OR, are you getting mired in your competitor’s latest tactic, or figuring out how you can incrementally improve your product to boost sales a bit? If you plan on succeeding a little bit, that’s exactly what you’ll do. If you plan on succeeding wildly … ditto.

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Spending time immersed in the world of brand and creative design, one tends to get picky when it comes to visual presentation. If you’re in any business and have found yourself creating a PowerPoint slide with 10 (or more) bullets, all text, in 12 point font you need to check out these resources more than anyone else:

• Seth Godin redirects us to A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. If you’re not familiar with the enormous number of different directions visual presentation can take, this is a MUST see chart. Comprehensive, inspiring and itself very creative.
• Garr Reynolds wound up the Presentation Zen 2006 calendar year with a list of recommendations including Say It With Charts.
• And finally, one of my all time favorites; Guy Kawasaki’s masterpiece “rule” of presentation creation called the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint.

Understand that a large, double-digit percent of the population learns visually. They not only want to experience your presentation visually, they need to see it that way. That, and sometimes, the data is simply better presented in a visual format.

Next time, break out the Crayolas and take your presentations up a notch.

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