Bernard Hickey and Barry Colman talk about making money from news online

A very interesting interview that Bernard Hickey (Interest.co.nz) shared with me. The interview highlights the difficulty that the papers have in dealing with the Internet and all the free news and content. No doubt papers are looking at the delicate balance of attracting enough repeat visitors to earn advertising revenue but also applying some kind of pricing model for their content.

Its a very interesting subject.

Bernard Hickey and National Business Review (NBR) Publisher Barry Colman talk on TVNZ’s Media7 about how to make money from financial news online in the wake of the Colman’s decision to charge for some news. It’s fair to say Barry and Bernard disagree in a respectful way.

Journalists should research more if they are going to attack something

Jamie Hanton’s article on Twitter provides a good overall view of how not to write an opinion piece.

The article oozes his lack of understanding of the power Twitter has as a communications and networking tool. His research seems to have been confined to Christchurch, New Zealand when in fact he should have covered other major New Zealand cities. What I find almost ironic is that Jamie’s last Twitter post was over a month ago.

To help Jamie out I will provide my opinion on how Twitter has benefited my businesses in bullet points.

1. I have meet some amazing people on Twitter. Some I have meet in person and established business opportunities.
2. Twitter has increase traffic to our websites including pre-qualified prospects that have resulted in signed contracts. Yes – that’s right – we have earned extra revenue from Twitter that is worth the effort we put in.
3. I have learned many new topics on Twitter and enhanced my own knowledge in my own skills.
4. I have helped people connect for business benefit and help many with information that they needed.

Overall Twitter is one of the most effective business marketing tools we use and we will continue to use it.

I suppose what annoys me more than Jamies opinion piece is Stuff.co.nz inability to recognize the importance of adding a comment section to all of the opinion pieces. Maybe someone should educate the team at Stuff.co.nz on inbound marketing?

Cadbury Should be Congratulated and Supported

Cadbury issued a press release on 17 August 2009 stating that they are removing the palm oil from Cadbury Dairy Milk products.

“Cadbury today announced it is responding to consumers by returning Cadbury Dairy Milk to a recipe containing only cocoa butter.”

Now I am not going to voice my opinion on whether they should have added palm oil into their products or not. What I want to talk about is how Cadbury listened to consumers and responded to the overwhelming opinion to change back.

The fact that this site, which appears to be an official Cadbury web site, mentions that they added palm oil into the product to keep down production costs and keep the price down for consumers shows that they are they an open and honest business.

The fact is cocoa prices have doubled in the last two years. For most of this time, we’ve taken this on the chin. We’ve soaked up the price hikes whilst trying to minimize the cost impact to consumers.

So we had a choice – increase the price of our Cadbury Dairy Milk milk chocolate and potentially put it out of reach for many of our customers or reduce the product size and costs. We didn’t want anybody to miss out just because of price and so we decided to reduce the size and reduce the price we charge our retailers.

Cadbury listened and responded to their customers in a timely fashion. I doubt many businesses of that size would respond with such speed and gusto.

But it doesn’t stop there. Cadbury via their http://www.choclovers.com web site encourages people to voice their opinion in public. Cadbury staff monitor the chatter and respond.

We should all be proud of a company that actually listens and admits when they get it wrong.

Marketing graduates are not ready for marketing

I deal with marketing people daily and over the years I have noticed a disturbing trend.

It appears that more and more small businesses are placing marketing graduates or young marketing professionals within senior marketing roles.

Why is that bad?

First off here are my reasons why I think this happens:

1. Marketing graduates and young professionals are cheaper than the battle-scared 30’s+ professionals who know the game and have vast networks.
2. They assume that young people know how to market within the latest communication channels such as Txt, Twitter, LinkedIn, FaceBook, FriendFeed.
3. They assume that the graduate has been well trained in all the theories and effective strategies for marketing.
4. The business owner believes that marketing is not important as other departments within the business and a “newbie” can handle this simple task.

What I have found mostly is that marketing graduates at best have a basic understanding of marketing but lack the most important skills that you can only get with experience and a few major marketing failures.

For me marketing is the art of building networks that you can tap into when you need them.

I have dealt with graduates and young professionals who cannot even write a decent business email, have never heard of Twitter or lack the maturity to deal with a very irate client.

Marketing is a vital part of any business and should never be delegated to the cheapest resource or treated as a “back-of-house” task.

In my opinion it is very much in the “front-of-house” category and should be managed with people who have good experience in marketing or if you cannot afford this level of experience hire a marketing graduate but you – the business owner – take the role of marketing manager.

Here are a couple of tips when interviewing a candidate for the marketing role:

1. Search online using the person’s name. If they are focused on marketing their name should come up enough to prove that they can promote themselves effectively.
2. Ask the candidate what are their favorite marketing books and bloggers. If they have none then how on Earth can they market your business in the real world?
3. The candidate should have done pre-interview research on your business so ask the candidate where they think you are lacking in marketing. If their comments make sense to you then that’s a good thing.
4. I always ignore fancy education certificates if a person can show self-motivation and a passion to learn.

Want to be Happy? Maxwell Maltz of Pyscho Cybernetics can help

A few years ago I read Pyscho Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. This book removed a lot of demons from my mind that I had accommodated for over a decade.

To keep it short Maxwell was a plastic surgeon in the 1950’s who found out that you can change the physical look of a person but unless the person’s self image was healthy no amount of plastic surgery would make a person happy. In his book he teaches the way to improve your mindset.

Pyscho Cybernetics is one of those books that you read when you feel down or lost in this world. I always feel I can take on the world after reading a few pages of this “bible” in self-help.

Watch this video below of an interview with Maxwell Maltz for an introduction into this wonderful person. He changed my life for the better and the many millions which have also read his book.

Home-made video. 7 million views already. The power of social media.

Below is a home-made(?) video of a wedding entrance for a young couple. The video on YouTube at the time of this writing had 7 million views.

This video is ultimate proof for me that you should always fight against the norms that society imposes on your life. “Life is what you make it”

Plus – food for thought here.

Will the music company which owns rights to the music played in the video demand that the video be removed or understand that this video could dramatically increase sales of this song.

I for one will buy the album that this song is on. I never heard of the musician until this video. That is the power of social media.

What do you think?

The Smart Way to Get My Attention

Each day I receive a bunch of emails from business trying to sell me something.

Most I delete after briefly scanning the first few sentences of the email.

Harsh comments? You bet but this is harsh times for business and lack of common sense and research is not an option anymore.

I am no different from any other person out there. I am human, I have feelings and I like to deal with businesses that treat me as a human being not as a “targeted segment” or “profit center”.

With the complaining over I would like to provide 5 helpful hints to all the businesses out there that wonder why their current marketing sucks.

1. At least know my name! If you don’t even address me by my name then that’s a good sign that you are too lazy to even check who the owners/directors/influencers are in the business. I class this type of email as spam.
2. Know my business. Even the smarter spammers today know what my business is about via scanning my social media profiles. If you send me a pitch on a product/service that is not even in my space then you look stupid to me.
3. Do I care? Don’t send emails that talk-up your business and imply that I would be foolish not to pick up the phone right now and ring you. I don’t have time to be impressed with your achievements – I want you to tell me how you can help my own business. If you do that is then that’s all the talk-up I need.
4. Spelling/Grammar? This is a tough one as I am crap at both and normally have my own content screened by a staff member before it goes out. If you send me an email riddled with spelling mistakes then I instantly assume you are too lazy to use the spell checker. I will however let you off the grammar mistakes as I would not see them anyway.
5. Don’t dare subscribe me to your newsletter without asking. This action will get you and your business blacklisted with me. This is the dumbest thing I have seen. You are so lazy that even contacting me personally is too much effort. Instead you subscribe me to your newsletter without my permission. Go on – try it and see what response you will get from me.

If you take onboard the 5 hints above you have a far better chance of getting a positive response from people.

Golden Rule – use commonsense before you attempt to contact prospects. Think before you act.

Also read Chris Brogan’s post on the very same subject here

How Social Media Can Help Your Business

More than likely you have heard talk about “social media” and wondered what all the fuss is about and more importantly how can it help your business.

“Social media” is a term used to denote a set of tools that when executed correctly help in the building of personal and business relationships and networks – which when you think about it is what a good sales person does constantly – build their network.

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, YouTube, blogs – the list goes on. They are all social media tools that can help you with increasing your brand exposure.
You may have noticed on some business web sites promotion of their social media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn and FaceBook and wondered what the benefit was to the business. The benefit in these channels lies in the fact that they help form and grow communities that are built up around the business. The communities by their nature help promote the business through discussion and sharing content with their friends and workmates. This is an extremely powerful benefit! The community is promoting your business for free to their own networks, which you may never have been able to reach (or if you did only as an outsider to be distrusted).

A company blog is a powerful social media channel and one that I would recommend you first look at first as the concept of “blog posts” is similar to posting articles on your business web site.

Using our own business blog as an example you can see how we benefit within marketing, customer support and sales.

We have created a business blog that our staff can contribute posts to such as industry news, software updates, business social events, customer support FAQ’s. However the most important topic for our readers is the research findings on email marketing. A blog is an ideal tool to transmit the research data to the public in a way that is easy categorised, searched, read and archived.

Comments are encouraged on the blog, which we monitor and respond to. This shows that we as a business are interested in what customers and prospects have to say.

Another benefit of providing a blog is that prospects who are not yet ready to engage us in a sales cycle can subscribe to the blogs RSS feed or subscribe to our newsletter. They can now keep track of what we are doing without having to directly contact to us. When they are ready to engage us in a sales cycle they already know how we operate, our skill set and what we represent.

The end result of this effort is the creation of a community of loyal followers who believe in what we do and feel respected by us.

Stop for one moment and think about the previous sentence for it highlights one of the positive results of using social media tools. We have now created a community of followers who know that we care about what they have to say. They talk – we listen and respond. It is not hard to imagine that given the chance they will mention us in their conversations and hopefully go out of their way to recommend us.

We have now moved to third party endorsement which is the most powerful form of marketing you can get.
So by using a blog we have provided a communications channel between our customers and prospects that not only reveals a more human side to our business but also allows people to directly communicate with us.

Reality Check with Social Media Tools

The key point to remember as a business owner when looking at social media tools is to not assume that having a blog, a Facebook page or a Twitter account is going to be the best thing for your business.

You need to first identify how your customers and prospects want to deal with you. For example approved authors who are normally the staff control a blog’s topic and frequency. Once a blog post is published only then can the public respond but only respond within the context of the post. A forum environment allows the public to start a topic of their choice thus giving control to the public not the business.

In summary

Social media tools help greatly in forming a community of customers and prospects that think highly of your business because the tools allow for more direct and transparent access to your business.

Will this take effort on your part? Absolutely! But we have found the rewards to exceed the effort involved. Mobilize Mail has been rewarded with:

1. Great feedback about our product and willing free testers for the latest releases of our software,
2. Increased business referrals that have dramatically increased our pipeline of opportunities.
3. An increase of traffic to our web site from search results that include discussion about our business in the social media networks and not forgetting our blog posts.

But remember you first need to understand how your customers and prospects want to communicate with you. Only then should you select the social media tools that provide the environment they want.

You will constantly need to review the effectiveness of the tools you have implemented. You may need to remove some of the current ones and replace with other tools.

I hope that this article has helped you understand what is social media and why you should be using it for your business.

Further Reading

A business owners perspective on social media

The Internet Markets Con – Making Millions on the Internet

As a business owner I am sure at some stage you will come across a form of marketing that entices you to a spectacular event promising massive rewards, including the ‘secret’ for making loads of money on the Internet.

The event will be presented by ‘mega rich’ and ‘enormously successful’ entrepreneurs who have made millions from this ‘secret’ and (amazingly) prepared to give their ‘secret’ away within a 1-hour event for under $100!

But that’s not all. In the 1-hour event you will learn:

1. How to end up in the 1st page of Google search results for your product/service!
2. Build a web site with no technical knowledge in less than 30 minutes and selling a product!
3. Make money without even having a web site!
4. Work only 1-2 hours a week (normally counting all that money you made)!
5. Access to the ‘mega rich’ and ‘enormously successful’ entrepreneurs anytime you want for advice!
6. Access to an enormous and global network of like-minded entrepreneurs like you and of course they are all getting ‘mega rich’ and ‘enormously successful’.

The event will be pitched by 1000’s of affiliates who have learned the ‘secret’ themselves and have become ‘mega rich’ and ‘enormously successful’ in their own right and have, by the grace of god, found time to contact you about it and want you to learn the ‘secret’ as well (because we all love each other to be rich right?).

After reading the above statements and promises I hope that it all sounds a bit ridiculous to you. Unfortunately for some people it all sounds like a great deal and all believable.  If you are one of these people I plead with you to ask the following questions first BEFORE you go to these events.

Question 1: If they are ‘mega rich’ and ‘enormously’ successful using this ‘secret’ then why are they telling anyone? Surely the amount of millions they are making will all be lost when 1000’s are now using the same ideas and strategies?

Could it possibly be that their ‘secret’ is in fact not working anymore for them?

Could it be that they are selling a set of strategies that just don’t work anymore and they make more money selling you and the masses the out-dated ‘secret’?

Question 2: If the presenters are so ‘mega rich’ and ‘enormously successful’ then why aren’t they donating all the events earnings to charity such as Dr Gareth Morgan and his latest event – “Registration is $20.00 per person payable by credit card online. All proceeds go to Arohanui Hospice.”.

Question 3: Not really a question directed at you but more a question you should ask the event promoters before you hand your money over. The question to ask them is “Can you provide in writing a guarantee that the secret will be given in full at the event and that there will be no requirement to attend any other seminar or pay for any other additional mentoring, product or service to learn the full secret.”. Without doubt they will say no.

Question 4: Why do they call it a ‘secret’ when they are advertising the event to millions of potential people? Doesn’t that sound strange?

Simple and logical questions really.

The event promoters may not angle the pitch as a ‘secret’ they may use terms such as:

‘Dramatically increase traffic to your site!’

‘We have spent years learning how to make millions on the Internet and we want to share this with you!’

‘Get 100,000 Twitter followers in less than 7 days without doing anything!’

‘Build a massive Internet business empire earning you millions while you sit on the beach!’

In this deep recession you will see more and more of these types of events promising you untold wealth for little more than the cost of a dinner for two. Don’t be fooled!

Who do you think is making the real money here? The presenters and affiliates or you?

At the very least do a search using the names of the presenters and see what you come up with. Sometimes this can raise warning bells enough to never go near these people.

Have you made millions from these types of events?

Business ‘ruined’ by TV show Target

I have to admit this is my third revision of this post.

Each previous revision was quite frankly too abusive towards the TV3 show Target that I ran the risk of legal action.

You may not have read the articles published on both NZ Herald and Stuff web sites this weekend about Cafe Cezanne and the poor café owners terror experience of nearly losing their business to what appears to be gross incompetency and lack of internal processes on the part of “Target”.

I have never watch the show “Target” and now, after reading about the massive lack any internal processes to double check their facts I will recommend no one watch them.

Everyone in the real world knows how incredibly hard it is to not only start a business but keep it in the black. It takes years and years of hard work and dedication to make it work. Only a business owner knows of sleepiness nights, long hours and zero cash flow.

Then along comes some show called “Target” and it a matter of minutes puts all that hard work at risk.

How can a production with a budget that most small businesses only dream about cause such destruction and get away with it by issuing a silly apology? I would assume that the editors or whoever approved the release of that episode have never owned a business before. They nestle in the lap of employee status where everything is okay and their wages are in their bank accounts on time.

I have talked to few people today about Cafe Cezanne and all state what a wonderful café it is.

In order to help Cafe Cezanne I have done the following and I hope you can help somehow as well:

1. Wrote this blog post and published it on a business focused web site.
2. Posted it on our Twitter profile with over 4000 followers mostly of which are NZ based.
3. Posted a link to the NZ Herald article on another NZ based discussion forum that is frequented by many NZ journalists.
4. Posted a question to the TV3 Twitter profile asking them why “Target” is still on air.
5. Rung the owners up to provide my support. (If I lived in Auckland I would also be having lunch there today).

We are currently in the worst recession for the last 6 decades. We cannot let some TV show that shows a lack of incompetency that brings me to my needs still be on air!

Do what you can – ring the Cafe Cezanne owners to voice your support, go to the café for lunch, ring Tv3 and demand they take the show off the air. Anything to help these business owners out!