More about Ilise here.
More about Peleg here.
More about Colleen here.
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The Big Book of Self Promotion needs more examples of self promotion.
It's not too late to submit yours. There's no fee and it can be work you did on behalf of a client or yourself.
Check out the details here.
And if you have questions, contact Crescent Hill Books.
If you're in the Northwest (of the US), join me July 9-10 in Seattle at Bizjam, the two-day conference designed to help you learn how to use the current crop of low- or no-cost social media tools, such as social networks, wikis, blogs and sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube, to grow your business faster and make it more profitable.
I am just one in a long list of speakers that includes social media experts like Metafilter founder Matt Haughey, business blogger DL Byron, and the original cybergirl, Aliza Sherman.
Day One - Wednesday, July 9, 9AM to 5PM
Social Media Essentials for Small Business
It is more important than ever for indie and small businesses to embrace and apply social media and web 2.0 tools to achieve and maintain success. From blogging to Basecamp to Google analytics, you'll learn about the top tools and how to know which are right for your business.
Day Two - Thursday, July 10, 9AM to 5PM
Business-Building Workshops + Networking
There is so much to know when you're running your own show. This day has it all and it comes to you in the way of strategies, skills and connections to help take your business to the next level. Of course you can go it alone; get the guidance you need to go in the right direction.
Cost is $195 for either day individually, or $390 for both days. SPECIAL OFFER: $129 for BOTH days for Biznik.com members who upgrade to $10/month Active membership.
More details and online registration here.
Learn how your business can ride the wave of change, rather than get buried by it.
Hope to see you in Seattle next month!
Some of you may think that on the hottest day on record in the city of Los Angeles I would choose to stay indoors and avoid the 105 degree sun, especially in the middle of the day. I would have probably done that if it wasn't for a marketing stunt that I was invited to participate in.
My husband sings with the Gay Men’s Chorus. Last week they received an invitation from Universal Pictures to join other choruses from the Los Angeles area to join voices and burst into ABBA songs in a middle of a Dodgers baseball game. Yes, you are reading this right. ABBA and Baseball. Two things you would never put together. But read on, it gets better.
The Chorus didn’t think twice and accepted the invitation. Lucky for me, Chorus members could bring guests to the event so here we were, about 30 guys on a bus to a 1:00 pm Dodgers game. On the bus we received a lyric sheet for 3 of the songs we were going to sing. You see, this little stunt was to promote and get a street buzz for the upcoming movie Mamma Mia! based on the songs of the Swedish super group ABBA. I do have to make a small confession and let you know that I really didn’t need those lyric sheets. I’ve been an ABBA fan since I was 10 years old and I must have heard these songs thousands of times by now.
When we arrived to Dodgers stadium upon exiting the bus we each were handed a Dodgers blue t-shirt with the Mamma Mia! Logo proudly displayed on the front. We found our seats and joined the other partners in crime. We now waited for our queue to burst into song.
No one in the stadium knew what was going on. This was completely underground and unexpected. When we finally started singing the first song, the theme from Mamma-Mia! Everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at us. Soon after, big smiles and dancing in the aisles joined our singing. We sang and danced for 4 more times and every time we got a little louder.
This type of street marketing is becoming more visible these days. Companies realized that the power of a good buzz can get a lot more attention than a print ad or a TV commercial. So they are looking for creative ways to get people to talk. And if you think about it, a marketing stunt like this would be a much cheaper tool to use. If you think about it, this little stunt didn’t cost Universal much money in the big scheme of things. Buy a few hundred baseball game tickets, rent a bus, print some t-shirts and let the word spread out. I am sure this stunt will show up on YouTube sometime around the opening week of the movie and will get thousands of hits. That’s thousands of people who will be exposed to the same stunt and probably forward the video to a person or two. After all, everyone knows at least one ABBA fan.
(and for your viewing pleasure, here is a video clip of us singing):
Tuesday morning brings another podcast from Peleg's and Ilise's new book, The Designers Guide to Marketing and Pricing.
The ninth of 13 podcasts answers that sticky but all-important question, "What should I charge?"
Take a listen, and please let us know what you think in the comments!
Looks like the communicatrix ain't the only Twitter apologist in the Marketing Mentor fambly; previous guest mixer and Marketing Mentor client Drury Bynum of Workerbee Creative—that's @drubynum for those of you on Twitter—also has good words for my current favorite time-waster—er...social media space.
You can't throw a rock in the blog world and not hit someone evangelizing about how social networks have changed everything. But I've always felt it hard to justify my time spent adding friends to Facebook, photos to Flickr or alerting my 68 followers on Twitter that I drink too much coffee this morning. I've always thought, "Am I really making connections here, or am I just personality spamming?"
Well, now I’m a believer because I actually I turned a relationship on Twitter into a paying job.
Twitter is a public instant messaging service, where you can subscribe to the posts of whomever you like, and vice versa. Like most, I originally didn't see the value. Yet it started to become clear when one evening I posted, "Thank God, or whomever, for Pandora." The next morning Pandora was following me. Pandora was obviously searching for Twitter entries (probably with a 3rd party app like Summize) that contained their name, and, as a bonus, accolades. I realized then the value of access to an audience that is actively listening.
The Twitter call to action is “What are you doing?” It should be, “What are you focused on right now?” This clarifies the point a bit – if you answer the first question, you may say, “I’m drinking coffee,” which is a dead end. But if you say, “I’d love to find a way to keep my coffee warm to the last drop,” (I did this) then you’ve created an invitation to respond. If your Tweets (individual Twitter entries) are useful, interesting, entertaining, part of a larger conversation or contain keywords that others are searching for, then you will get attention.
So how did I turn this attention into a paying gig? After posting a link to a video that I had created, one of my followers viewed it and sent me a direct message (via Twitter). "I've been following you on Twitter for a little while now and was checking out your blog." In the next sentence, she offered me a video job. Shortly after that, I came very close to securing a video shoot in Portugal after sending a casual tweet to a member of a large filmmaker network. I didn't get the assignment, but the point was that I was in the right place talking to the right person.
There is obviously no formula for getting work from Twitter, but if you use your imagination and talk about things that are valuable to the Twittersphere, then you will make some valuable connections.
Last Thursday I was invited to present a talk to a group of freelancers here in Los Angeles.
The evening was sponsored by Artisan Creative, one of the leading creative staffing agencies in town. The idea for this event came out of a lunch date I had over four months ago with Jamie Douraghy, the founder of the agency. I gave Jamie a copy of our new book and he was so impressed with the book that he immediately wanted to create an event around it. He thought it would be a great gesture to give a copy of the book to each of his talented freelancers who are signed with the agency.
Now, you may think that helping freelancers grow their own business could ultimately hurt his business down the road—after all, he needs this talent for his own business—but Jamie is a smart man. He knows the power of networking and good relationship. He is genuinely interested in helping others grow and succeed. He knows that other people’s success will only inspire more success for his business.
He invited me to give a talk to all his current and past talent that has been signed up with Artisan. I was impressed to see a nice turn-out considering there was a Lakers game on at the same time. Putting on this event was an internal marketing effort for Artisan. It created a stronger relationship with their talent and gave an opportunity for creatives to network and improve their business skills.
Thanks a million to Jamie and the Artisan staff for planning such a great evening. It’s no wonder they are the best at what they do!
One of the questions I get from old-school business people who are just coming online is how the hell I can justify spending so much time on pursuits that are non-monetizable (not a word, and if it was, it would be an icky one, but you get my point.)
Believe me, sometimes I wonder the same thing. I spend ridiculous chunks of any given day online. Some of it (news, industry-related blogs, LinkedIn) has more obvious value than others (Flickr, Facebook, Twitter), but one could make the argument that all of it should take a backseat to what I call "money work": endeavors in which you trade hours for dollars.
Here's where it gets tricky, though: you need to do a lot of being somewhere—hanging out, reading, commenting, creating content—to get somewhere. If you translate it into old-school terms, you could make a similar argument that the extensive traveling (5+ days/week sometimes) that my father did Back In The Day was largely wasted. Or to draw a finer analogy, that the time he spent on those airplanes or in those airport lounges talking to people who weren't prospects was time wasted—time that would have been better spent on higher-return activities like drafting articles, catching up with paperwork or dictating stuff for one of his three (yes, really) secretaries to type up.
What Dad would have said, though, is that some of those random conversations wound up delivering the richest rewards. One of his best friends and greatest business relationships grew out of a series of conversations he had with the man who regularly drove him around when he was in New York; one day Artie told him about another guy he drove around—a guy from L.A.—whom he thought my dad would enjoy meeting.
Stuff like this still happens in meatspace, of course, but what's great is that it can happen online now, too. Just recently I wound up with a consulting client who came to me because she found me online: posting about something completely non-work-related in a Yahoo! group that has nothing to do with my areas of work expertise; I just like the community and free-flowing advice on tap there.
I can't help but wonder if one of the reasons these "random" things work is because we don't feel like there's much at stake: we're just relaxed, being ourselves, and so we end up showing people what we're made of instead of telling them. As it turns out, one of the things she found appealing was the way I appoached answering questions, something you'd definitely want in a coach or consultant.
So now I'm curious: have you had experiences like this? Where you ended up getting work from some activity or gathering where work was the farthest thing from your mind?
What weird stuff has come over the transom for you, and how do you think it happened?
It's Tuesday, which means it's time for another podcast from Peleg's and Ilise's new book, The Designers Guide to Marketing and Pricing.
The eighth of 13 podcasts covers everyone's favorite topic, Chapter 7 from the book: How do I manage my money?
Take a listen, and please let us know what you think in the comments!
I don't know about you, but it's pretty easy for me to let an entire day go by without having moved more than about 30 feet from my desk and computer. Between the work I do (design, writing, consulting), the communicating I have to do to get it done, and just plain horsing around on Twitter, I put on a good (or bad) 7 lbs. in about 18 months!
So it was vanity that got me up and moving initially; I instituted a 2.5 mile walk every morning just to keep fitting in my pants. But as I wrote on my own blog recently, I quickly found that taking the walk in the morning had a particular benefit: setting a good tone for the rest of the day.
Now, with the rising price of gas and concern over my ecological footprint, I've added another challenge: replace one day's driving with walking. Last week, I had to drop off my car for servicing, so I scheduled it for the morning, dropped it off the night before, and tacked on another 4.5 miles each way, still sticking to my regular 2.5 miles on top of that.
Apparently, my breakthrough point for ideas is somewhere around 6 miles. I got blasted with so many creative solutions to problems I've been carrying around in those last couple of miles, I was worried I wouldn't get home in time to write them down. (Yeah, yeah—never forget your notebook. I know, I know...)
On top of everything else, I feel like the ideas keep flowing a lot more easily once I'm back at my desk, too.
All of this makes me curious: do you have a mile-marker or time-marker where you've noticed that your ideas start flowing faster? Or am I nuts, here?
I never thought I would sponsor a sports team, but when one of my clients in New Jersey asked me to, I thought, "Why not?" As long as I can go to the game.
I have no idea who will be in the stands watching the game, which parents of these kids have their own business. But seeing the company name on the back of 
the jersey spreads the word about "Marketing Mentor," expands the brand and who knows, maybe one day we'll have a whole line of Marketing Mentor gear.
Have you ever sponsored a team?
A series of posts documenting Marketing Mentor's search for a new tagline and what happened when we opened up the discussion to the Marketing Mentor community.
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