In Trying Times, You Need a Better Plan

I knew I was in trouble by the middle of last year. Every approach I had tried to getting new customers was meeting with the same results: nada. There were clues all around me, but I was stubbornly hanging on to my belief that I could get customers without rethinking what I was offering them. I tried radio spots, yellow pages, Google ads, cold calls and occasional prayers; but the customers stayed away in droves. As the economy melted down, I wanted to believe that was the problem rather than the way I was defining my value to the market.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: If I tell someone that “We do custom software application development for local businesses,” I might as well be shining a halogen lamp at a herd of deer. The message simply does not connect. Even Bob Sytsma, my CPA, could not clearly articulate what we do in terms that would help prospective customers recognize our value.

Now most people who know me tell me that I am a reasonably smart fellow, but I was clearly not smart enough to find my way through this mess. So I started asking for help. I reached out to people in the community like Matthew Dunn, one of the brightest people I know. We had breakfast a couple months ago at the Rhodes Café and Matthew pointed out that I am one of the best planners and analytical writers he knows. What if I offered that service to others? He was inviting me to step outside the box I had defined myself in and look closely at what other assets I have in my inventory that I was undervaluing.

His suggestion prompted me to take a deep look at my business. I started by making a thorough assessment of my financial situation, my market offerings, my people and my business processes, and started to explore possible strategies. I wrote all of this down, not because I wanted to worship at the altar of a business plan, but because the thought process itself proved to have great value.

What emerged was the realization that there is one asset I had massively undervalued, and all it took was to think about that asset in a different way.

I have been a software developer for over 40 years. I love the process of conceiving and building systems that help run businesses more effectively. In the process of building solutions for local businesses, I have developed a collection of code that I was thinking of as a “platform” that we could use to speed the development of custom applications. I showed this platform to Paul Grey, chair of TAG who has had years of experience building and selling software solutions and he gave me a key piece of insight. There are three types of software programs: platforms, applications and features. He pointed out that a feature such as a $0.99 ring tone is easy to sell by the millions. An application is more difficult, and a platform is even more difficult. By positioning what I was offering as a platform, I was making it more abstract and more difficult to sell. Instead, he suggested that I position it in terms that people will easily understand.

I took Paul’s advice to heart and simply changed the way I present what we have done more as a set of features that form a solution to a specific business problem.  I demonstrated this to one person after another, and the difference in reaction was palpable. Instead of shining a light at a herd of deer, it felt like I was offering them a garden of their favorite munchies.

My next clue came when I presented my program to the folks at the Bellingham Chamber of Commerce. They liked what they saw, but my inner geek was popping out in the ways I described some of the features and this was causing the halogen light and the deer herd effect. Drew Graham copped to completely tuning out when I slipped into geek speak.

So the lesson here is to let someone else demonstrate the product. But my ego resisted. “Who could possibly know more about it than me?” it asked. And therein lies the rub. My technical knowledge was getting in the way. If the product is so simple, it should not require me to demonstrate it. Someone who is not a techno-geek should be able to present it even better than me. So from this point forward, all demos will be done by Shelly Varner, my sales person. I will relegate myself to the back room where she can slip pizza under the door and let me focus on making the product better.

So now, on to the next question: how to market this wonderful new product? Again, my ego wanted to drive the bus, but I am fortunate enough to have a lot of friends in this town who are graciously willing to offer me their help, support and ideas. One of these friends is Bruce MacCormack. He called me a couple weeks ago to introduce Sharon Atkins. Bruce thought Sharon might be able to help me with my marketing efforts. On the strength of Bruce’s recommendation, I met with Sharon and I am so thankful that I did. I had lunch with Sharon on a Friday and gave her that plan I mentioned a few paragraphs ago. She thought about it over the weekend and we met the following Tuesday when she walked me through a plan that was bold, imaginative and exciting. She gave me great insight, ideas and highly effective marketing counsel. I don’t know whether her ideas will actually work, but they are certainly better than mine.

So let me sum this up. I haven’t told you anything about the product I am about to release because if Sharon’s plan works, you will hear about it soon enough. The real point is that I asked for help from people smarter than I am, listened to what they said and parked my own ego. Now all I have to do is remember to feed the ego-parking meter while continuing to invite feedback and support from the great people in this town. Have you got any for me?

Wonderful Wikis

In my last posting, I talked about social media. Several months have passed now, and I can say with a bit more experience under my belt that I still don’t have the time, energy or interest to blog or read other’s blogs; but wikis are wonderful… within limits.

What’s a wiki, you ask? According to Wikipedia, “A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute to or modify content.”  Wikipedia is an excellent example of a wiki site. It is an online encyclopedia that is growing massively, both in content and popularity. If you haven’t used it, I highly recommend giving it a try. Think of some term or concept that you want to learn more about. Let’s use “Bellingham” as an example. Did you know that there is a town called Bellingham in Tasmania, two in England, and three in the US? Bellingham, Minnesota has a population of 191. And Governor Bellingham is a fictional character in The Scarlet Letter. Where did all of this material come from? How accurate is it? How does editing get controlled? These are all excellent questions, and the answers are on Wikipedia, but the short answer is that the content comes from you and me, there are built-in processes for improving the accuracy of information and the control processes seem to work well. But I am not writing this to sell you on Wikipedia, but to introduce a powerful set of tools that are based on the wiki concepts.

As you may know from my past posts, I am active in The Mankind Project, an international organization to help men become more conscious. I am leading an effort to create a new version of a facilitator’s guide for one of our important trainings, and I needed to elicit the cooperation and support of a team of men from all over the world. After my last ODNT posting, I looked at several tools that allow collaborative document sharing and settled on settled on Google Sites (http://sites.google.com).

In about five minutes, I was able to create a basic web site. Over a single weekend, I took a manual that was over 130 pages long, broke it into about 100 individual topics and created web pages for each. I then entered the email addresses of the men on the team and gave each man rights to update the site by changing the content of any page, adding new pages, adding comments to pages and even attaching documents to pages. This whole process took me only a few hours.

One powerful feature of Google Sites is the capability to have the site notify me whenever a page is updated. I can monitor specific pages or the entire site. Whenever anybody updates a page, I get an email moments later. I can easily tell who is working on what and even see what changes they made. If necessary, I can even roll back a page to a previous version of that page.

That site now contains 165 pages and updates are made on a regular basis by men all over the world.
It didn’t take long before I started thinking of other ways to use Google Sites. I created a site for community leaders to capture and record meeting minutes and governance documents. I created another for our elder community to capture our history, and another for my own company to use internally to capture business policies and procedures. Creating each of these sites took only a few minutes, and populating them is amazingly easy. And did I mention that it is all free! Each Google site can use up to 100MB of storage. My largest site, the one with 165 pages uses only 17% of this allocation.

So what’s the downside? Google Sites has lots of strengths, but it also has some problems.  I would like to see a more flexible security model and a better HTML text editor, but these are not the kinds of issues that will stop me from using Google Sites. Google Sites are not the best tool for creating a marketing site or one that interacts with a database engine, but they are an excellent tool for collaborative development of information.

If this topic interests you, I invite you to participate in an experiment. I have created a public wiki that is dedicated to capturing information about Bellingham. The address is:
http://sites.google.com/site/bellinghamwiki/

Right now, the site has only skeletal content. If you want to add content to this site, simply email me (bob@socgrp.com) and I will grant you update rights. I will moderate the site to make sure that no content is posted that might be offensive to the public taste, but other than that, anything goes… at least for the moment.

Social Media

I was skeptical last week on my way to the Social Media Northwest conference at Whatcom Community College. The term “social media” sounded to me as if it were made up by a randomized buzzword generator. I knew that it had something to do with blogging and that Tom Dorr of the Small Business Development Center had pitched me personally to get me to come, but I had (and still have) lots of questions. What is “social media” and why should I care? By the end of the two day conference, I realized with both excitement and fear that this old dog had better learn some new tricks.

So what is social media? One way to think about it is as a collection of emerging technologies that includes social networks, directories, video sharing sites, blogs and Wikis that all have the notion of community collaboration in common. Wikipedia, an on-line collaborative encycloperia is a good example. In the past few years, Wikipedia use has been growing by over 20% per year. On the other hand, Microsoft Encarta, has been dropping in popularity. The difference is that Wikipedia is maintained and updated by a world-wide community of people, while Encarta is maintained by a single, centralized organization. This notion of community is at the heart of the term “social media.”

Mike Rich from ComScore tracks the digital landscape. At the conference, he presented one slide that showed social media technologies as the fastest growing segment of all Internet technologies at over 60% growth per year. So clearly something is happening here, but what it is, ain’t exactly clear… at least to me.
Throughout the conference, one speaker after another talked about viral marketing, blogging, social networking and social referral sites. At the end of the conference, Matthew Dunn interviewed Bob Pritchett (Logos), Brett Allsop, (president of Allsop Inc and co-founder of Yapta) and Chris Galvin (Wizards of the Coast). All three told compelling stories of how blogging and other social media tools have helped grow their businesses.

I left the conference intrigued and puzzled. I understand the concept of “viral marketing,” but the trick is in finding a viral message. Perhaps the best example is the “Will It Blend” videos on YouTube. This fellow in a white lab jacket holds up an object like a golf ball or an iPod and asks, “Will it blend?” as he drops it into a blender. Moments later the object is reduced to dust. The videos are so weird and funny that many people can’t resist telling their friends about it. When you watch the video, do you find yourself thinking, “That is one bad-assed blender” and maybe clicking through to the blender maker’s site? That’s viral marketing.
It was also pretty clear to me how blogging helps companies that serve an international market; but how would it help local businesses that serve other local businesses? Did I expect local business owners to start reading blogs? Not really, but I realized that if I want to help local business owners grow their businesses using information technologies, I had better get up to speed on the pros and cons of these social media technologies.

I went back to my office and created a Facebook account. Within a few minutes, I had a site working and I began collecting “friends”. I set a rule for myself that I would only add people who I know and appreciate having in my life… or were in my extended family. Within a couple days, the list had grown to over 40. It was pretty cool reconnecting with people I had almost lost track of and learning what they are up to now; however, I am still not clear on how Facebook will help my business.

I can clearly see how social networking tools can build my list of relationships and help me stay in touch with people, but unless this has a direct feed to my business, its value to me is less clear.
But what about blogs and blogging? This question has several related questions:

•    Who is my audience?
•    What do I have to say of value to that audience?
•    How will my audience even know that I am blogging?

In order to dig more deeply into these questions, I decided to conduct an experiment and start a blog. My trusty intern from Western, Andy Jaeger, got a blogging site set up and operational in about an hour using WordPress. He populated the blog with several of the prior issues of this column and I wrote some new blogs under the category of “Growing a small business.” Our blog site is at socratesgroup.wordpress.com. Check it out. I would be interested to hear any feedback you have.
I suspect that blogging makes lots of sense for some businesses and little sense for others. What is your experience? What are your questions and thoughts on Social Media? Please email me and let me know. In the next month I will sort this out and get back to you. In the meantime, this old dog is learning lots of new tricks.