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To continue on with my series on ridiculous blog posts from Seth Godin I give you his latest blog post “Tribe Management”. Here’s an excerpt:

Brand management is so 1999.

Brand management was top down, internally focused, political and money based. It involved an MBA managing the brand, the ads, the shelf space, etc. The MBA argued with product development and manufacturing to get decent stuff, and with the CFO to get more cash to spend on ads.

Wow talk about stereotyping. I’ve worked with brand/marketing managers for 20 years now and I can tell you that this is not where it’s at. Just yesterday I spoke with a brand manager about setting up a blog and how they could leverage their brand identity through via internal and external branding strategies.

Let me tell you what brand managers really do and why Seth Godin is a Master Charlatan (in my humble opinion):

1.     They develop a company’s brand identity, brand promise and brand strategy (still very chic as far as I know…so 2008).

2.     They implement an internal branding program to get employees involved with the brand so they become brand ambassadors (probably still cool in 2008 as far as I know).

3.     They choose the best strategies and tactics that obtain the greatest ROI and leverage their brand identity (I’ve personally never sold TV ads as we are a branding company not an ad agency). TV is so dead.

4.     As far as I know hiring MBA’s is still a good thing. Smart people still count.

5.     Brand Managers don’t have a predestined way of spending the budget. Maybe ads are the correct way to go or maybe search engine optimization is. They’re smart or at least should be.

The sad thing is Seth Godin doesn’t really know much about branding. He’s a word of mouth marketing guy. Don’t write about subjects that you are clearly misinformed with. Stick to your spiel about permission marketing, that’s not so bad.

Seth Godin is on a book tour right now. He makes money from selling books. Enough said.

A charlatan is a person practicing quackery or some similar confidence trick in order to obtain money or advantage via some form of pretence or deception. 

It has been a while since I put up anything about business calculators or other tools for small businesses.  Software, and other IT tools can be big time savers, and money savers too!

I wanted to bring your attention to another tool: trackers.  Trackers are a type of accounting software that help track specific parts of your business (time, activities, expenses, inventory, etc.)  The idea behind using this sort of software is streamlining your business, increasing productivity, simplifying tax preparation and increasing profit margins.   

There are a lot of software companies out there offering a broad range of products that claim to help you run your business.  Some deliver, and others are more likely to ruin you business.  I recently tried out a 10-day free trial of a package called the Small Business Tracker Deluxe, and I was very impressed.  It’s put out by Spirit Works Software Development.  I particularly liked that it included everything that most small businesses need, and it was very easy to use.  It includes trackers for: activities, expenses, invoices, income, expenses, passwords, contacts, schedules, tasks, vehicle expenses, versions and inventory.  It also has a cute program it calls “Writer’s Helper” and a great “Universal Calculator.”

When picking software you want to make sure that there is good support, it’s easy to use, and it has all the features you need.  I recommend looking into Spirit Works’ offerings, but look around and make sure you pick the right software for you and your business.

I get a few emails here and there with people that correct my spelling or grammar on our branding blog or website. Or they’re nice enough to catch a typo. One woman was nice enough to spend the time to proof read a majority of our website. She emailed me and said: 

I would never do business with a company that doesn’t know the difference between “its” and “it’s”. Apparently I spelled it “it’s” instead of “its”. An obvious typo. 

I thanked her for catching a single typo within a 100 page website. In other words, get a life. First, why would anyone spend time with this nonsense? Don’t you have more important stuff to do?

 

Are you that anal that you need to criticize someone over a typo? Is life that boring? If so guess what? We don’t want to work with you. We are passionate people that are creative and have fun with our work. We have relationships with our clients that REQUIRE a sense of humor.  

Lighten up folks, ya only live once.

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RFID World China announced the result of "2007 China RFID Industry Annual Awards" after 20-day voting process.

This is a sort of follow on from my last post Honest Assistance, where I talked about helping out your other sites with backlinks to specific posts or keyword anchored text links to give the site or blog some keyword authority to help them climb up the SERPs. This post is going to be short and [...]

For many years we’ve developed a direct mail list. We have the list honed in to the exact customers we’re looking for. We test our message regularly and refine our call to actions. 

We hear direct mail is dead. Good news for us, less clutter out there huh?  

I got a call last week from a person on my direct mail list. She’s moved on from the current job she had 8 YEARS AGO. So she hasn’t received a direct mail piece from us in about 8 years. 

She said “Scott I’ve saved all your direct mail pieces in a folder. They were so well done that I knew there would be a time when I would need your services.” 

That time is now, 8 years later. 

Direct mail is dead, whoopdeedoo!

When I talk to some small business owners about online marketing, they think I’m crazy.  They don’t want to be involved in ecommerce, or their business isn’t conducive to it (eg a hair stylist or a mechanic).  What many people don’t realize is that you don’t have to sell something online to benefit from marketing online. 

I recently read a Pew Study which said that 50% of all offline purchases are preceded by online research.  This means that you have a special opportunity to target postential customers and direct them to your business.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of small businesses have no idea how to effectively and efficiently create an online marketing plan or how to implement one.  There is a steep learning curve in online marketing, and, if you don’t know what you are doing, you can lose even more money than you are losing right now by ignoring the internet.

How can you learn what you need to and get started?  Although a minority of people succeed through their independent research and trial and error, I believe it makes more sense to take a short course which summarizes your options and teaches you how to maximize the benefit to your business.  In the long run, this will save you time and money.

Today, I just took a preview of one training site focused on teaching online marketing skills to small businesses.  The course looked great and complete, and is constantly being updated as trends change (this is key for any internet-related training material).  It is called Online Marketing Training Boot Camp.  The tagline says it all: “Proven Marketing Insights & Techniques That Work.”  I highly recommend checking out this course and learning about how you can make online marketing work for your business.

The Halifax bank is enrolling unsuspecting customers in trials of a new generation of RFID-enabled bank cards, and trying to keep them in the program even if they have mis-givings about the wave and pay technology.

In truth, much of the radio frequency identification technology that enables objects and people to be tagged and tracked wirelessly already exists _ and new and potentially intrusive uses of it are being patented, perfected and deployed.