Business or Personal, one small story or a lifetime . . .

“You should write 

a book about that!”

Probably everyone has heard this suggestion at one time or another. Most, however, shrug it off or dismiss it without serious thought.

Some simply don’t think that what they have to say is book-worthy. Others don’t think they have the time or wherewithal to pull it off. Still others just don’t know where to start or how to get good guidance without getting ripped off. A few start and quit.

If you have a story that can hold

people’s attention, you can write a book.

If you or your business has experienced some unusual or inspiring or outstanding pattern or event that prompts tears or laughter, or provokes serious head-nodding or grins of satisfaction, or that serves as a strong example of what to do or not do (failures, remember, teach success), you probably have the makings of a book.

What kind of book? Whatever kind suits your fancy.

Books, contrary to popular electronics

industry hype, are not dying.

Electronic readers are, in fact, most likely to cause an increase in book writing, publishing, and sales as they continue to come down in price. Kindles (now $139) and the like are becoming the new cell phone for a generation that’s now finding its way back to storytelling with this extended form of social media.  

A full-length, hard cover or paperback book serves an important archival value for many, and can serve to spike credibility to new levels of industry or professional acceptance . . . regardless of whether it ever gets on bookseller shelves and earns you a royalty.

A downloadable ebook can have enormous promotional value for your website and social media stardom.

Bottom line: A book is a book is a book.

Can just anyone help you? No. Simply because an individual has written or published a book does not make that person an expert, especially if you are considering some full-length story treatment, and even more especially if business is the subject or a key subject.

It takes considerable writing and storytelling skill to help someone pull a draft together. It takes editing expertise to make the draft work. It takes business experience and know-how for a book-writing consultant to be able to help create a business-based book. 

But securing the kind of writing/editing and publishing help that’s right for you, and the story you have in you, doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg. It depends entirely on what you’re looking to accomplish, and how willing you are to commit yourself to the task.

The best place to start is not with a title and dedication page. Start with putting ideas for pieces of your story on index cards or pieces of scrap paper you can shuffle around a tabletop when you have a dozen or so.

Next, organize the individual thoughts into some kind of order or plan or outline or list, then consolidate those that seem to fit or work together or play off one another. This is a good point to start poking around for some experienced guidance on productive ways to put your puzzle pieces together, and to help you keep focused and on target with your message. 

Need an informed, honest book idea opinion that’s FREE to my blog visitors? Try me. I just finished writing my 6th book, hold major writing awards, offer 35 years of business experience, and yes, I am approachable. (See phone and email below) 

www.TWWsells.com or 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You. God Bless America.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

You have a business tale

to tell, but no time to

  tell it?. . . or write it? 

     So what’s your story, Boss?

     Is it long or short? Simple? Complicated? Fictional? Factual? Happy or sad? Burning hot? Icy cold? Based on true firsthand experience,  or imaginary, hand-me-down sagas? A story of family or of strangers? Neighborhoods or distant travels?

     Is it manufacturing or retail or distributorship based? B to B or B to C? A story of tourism or industry? A professional practice story? A legal or medical story? A growth or failure story? A partnership or separation story? What is it all about?

     You can and probably already do tell your story in chunks — in website pages, email messages, news releases, brochures, newsletters and interview answers. Or you can tell it (or major parts of it) all in one place that can then BE chunked up.

You can accomplish this with more complete, more comprehensive forays into the land of literature — a series of feature articles, ebooks, position (“white”) papers, booklets, specialty magazines, ongoing blog posts, and full-length books are some examples of what other successful business leaders are now doing.

     There are armies of talented organizations, groups, businesses and individuals standing in line, ready to pounce on filling any and all of the challenging opportunities for exposure — and enhancing credibility and reputation — that are noted above.

     They work on commission. They work on fees. They work on incentives. You can do it cheap or expensive, or somewhere in between.

     You will –as with most things in life — get what you pay for. If you’re happy with your neighbor’s 16 year-old being your webmaster and your new MBA assistant writing your sales and marketing pieces, you will no doubt take comfort in their efforts to represent what’s in your head!

Reminds me of the old Kawasaki Motorcycle helmet ad — “If your head is worth $29.95, buy a $29.95 helmet!”  

     Here are half a dozen thought-provokers:

1) Don’t give up on your business story idea, whatever it is. Instead, start to bullet-point it on index cards or a pocket pad or your laptop.

2) When you know what it is that you seek for your main message, start to scout around for someone with a track-record for the kind of writing you want.

3) Window shop. Check out Bing and Google. Do a little homework.

4) When you find the right person to represent your interests, that individual may also very well have ties to or a relationship with some print-on-demand book publisher-printer types, and be able to steer you in the most appropriate and economical directions. These days, you can print just a few (or even just one book!) copies and be able to order more with a phone call or email.

5) Specialized magazines are also readily available and can be produced as you wish, and individually and personally addressed as you wish.

6) Blog posts can be written in your “voice” so they sound like they’re coming from you (while you spend your time doing other things!) Regular blog posts, incidentally serve to activate your website which draws the attention of search engine spiders and lifts your search engine rankings.  

     Got an idea you’d just like to toss out to see if it could work? Give me a call. No consult fee for blog visitors.

www.TWWsells.com or 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You. God Bless America and Our Troops.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

When did you last deliver

more than you promised?

…and threw in a “Thank You For The Opportunity!”?

This is indeed customer service coming in the back door and, hopefully, your answers to the questions above are: “Yes.” “Today!” and “Yes.” 

Like the family that prays and plays together stays together, the business with a consistent gratitude attitude wins a multitude of latitude from customers, prospects and the industries, professions and communities it serves.

“yeah, yeah, yeah!” you already know all that, and “so what?” you reply. Here’s what: succeeding in business today reduces itself to the simplest –and probably oldest– positive practice on Earth: GRATITUDE.

If you think otherwise, you are not a realist. If you and your people are so tangled up in CRM hardware, software, and underwear that you are missing the daily, hourly, opportunities to build and boost genuine customer service bases of operation, you are taking two steps backward to go one step forward. That isn’t going to cut the mustard in this economy.

Thanking people is not a complicated practice. Oh, and it’s free!

“Yeah, well my staff and I always say thank you to customers and it doesn’t do squat!” 

Hey, that’s a good start, but if you’re not seeing increased loyalty, repeat sales, and steady increases in revenues, you might want to take a closer look at HOW you and your people are saying thank you.

I walked into a failing grocery store this week and had checkers, baggers, shelf stockers, front door greeters and department managers falling all over themselves trying to make my celery purchase be the most memorable experience of my life. They did everything but drool with trying to make sure my celery was spectacular and that I truly had everything I wanted and needed from their store.

Yucht! Finger down my throat. A quick trip for the missing chicken salad ingredient and you’d have thought I was Justin Bieber’s father, or the inventor of Silly Bands. Here’s the deal. The overkill was obnoxious. It was insincere, and I didn’t appreciate being the target of some mismanaged customer service training program.

A pleasant smile and genuine thank you at the cash register would have been more than sufficient. Instead, I was ogled, called “Darlin'” got a 20-cent discount at checkout for having not bothered to bring my little marketing research discount tag, “awarded” a scratch-off ticket to win $1, and had someone actually offer to carry my celery to the car! 

Okay, they got me laughing, but I’m not going back there. 

Next, give a little thought to the idea that since anybody can be connected to anybody these days, it is essential that small businesses act neighborly but think globally.

Anyone is capable of giving or sending you business. That certainly includes your inner circles of family and friends, but it also extends outward to employees, suppliers and vendors, geographic and industry neighbors, service professionals you engage, and all the communities you serve.

In other words, do you say thank you every day to customers, but not employees? Do you thank sales reps for visiting you? Do you thank delivery people and public service people who visit or make regular or special calls on you? Do you thank people for complaining? (“Thank you for calling this issue to our attention. What can we do to make it right for you?” goes a very long way!)

302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You.

God Bless America and God Bless America’s Troops.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

If your business works,

so does Twitter!

     Think of Twitter as one gigantic 24/7 trade or professional show and customer service center up in the sky!

     And start out by just plain dismissing all the “magic secrets” about how to use Twitter to build your business, because there are none.

     Just because social media may be a fairly new avenue for you to be dabbling in for your business, don’t be intimidated by all the crackpots!

     Never a day passes without at least a dozen solicitations attempting to sucker new users into a commitment to get new fans and followers, to learn the magic, the secrets, the steps, the bullets, the actions, the methods, the techniques, the 3 this, or the 7 that.

     If your business works, and you have a respectable reputation, and you know what you’re selling (believe it or not, not everybody does!), then simply use Twitter posts to make provocative, or engaging, or teaser-type billboard/headline-style statements, followed by the website page other Twitterers/Tweeters can click on to learn more.

     But you can’t stop there. . . not any more than you would avoid a courteous greeting up front, or make a sales pitch at a service counter or on a trade show floor, and then not listen to what the prospect or customer has to say, even dumb comments about the weather.

     Be social. This means stepping off your sales pedestal long enough to take notice of what others are posting on Twitter, and to make and post some pleasant response to those you might agree with, and that fit the business image you want to project. Be careful with humor, especially avoid jokes you wouldn’t comfortably share with pre-teens.

     This can include you doing an “RT” (for “Re-Tweet,” same as “repeat”) of other comments and/or quotes you particularly relate to —  no different that a prospect mentioning a name or place or thing or idea that’s on your personal list of favorites, and you commenting back, as you would in any conversation with a friend whose attention you value.

     This is an important ingredient in making Twitter work — being yourself, and pretending you are in a real (instead of virtual) room facing the little (avatar) faces, sharing niceties. If some comment makes you choose to feel angry or upset or overly emotional or cocky or sarcastic or arrogant or pedantic or anything besides pleasant, choose to ignore it and move on to other comments.

     You will not win friends and influence sales by losing your cool or tossing your cookies or acting P.O.’d at some moronic statement.

     People “out there” need to see that you are approachable, easy, and friendly before they’ll pay you any serious attention by deciding to “follow” you (your posts) or to visit the web pages you include with your posts. This is, after all, SOCIAL media first. Those who see and read your comments will allow you the business focus as long as you behave like a good guest at their party. 

     Get yourself hooked up with a free “Tweet Deck” to gain a more useful perspective and to better accommodate your comments. Then take a couple of hours each day for a couple of days (spread out into time chunks is best) to follow the basic flow of people and comments and analyze them as a prospective market.

     Take notes.Pay attention to who’s who:  the rampaging political types, the religious fanatics, the nut cases, the teeny-boppers, the famous quote quoters, the too serious, the too frivolous, the sex-seekers, the weirdos. Get a fix on who you want to visit your webpage and start clicking on their “Follow” buttons. Many will reciprocate and be your followers.

     Decide early on if you want only a selective following or you want to play the numbers and amass big numbers (depends on what you’re selling).

     When you think you see a way to fit . . . fit! Twitter works for those who work at it.  

 # # #

Your FREE subscription: Posts RSS Feed

Hal@Businessworks.US or 302.933.0116

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

 The bigger they are,

the harder YOU fall

 …but the little guys

can cripple you too!

Here’s the inside scoop on “outside” marketing experts . . . 35 years’ worth of experience and considered judgment for you to chew and digest:

WEBSITE DESIGNERS who claim to have the gift of marketing genius have nada. If they’re older than 14 to start with — even 30-something — they are still probably 14 mentally; and odds are they haven’t a clue about marketing, but have learned to sound convincing about it. Exceptions? Sure. Check my blogroll.

AD AGENCIES know less than website designers. They are heavily invested in winning themselves awards and cornering clients into excessive payments. They have no down-in-the-trenches sense of how to make sales, nor do they particularly care as long as the next big client stands ready on the horizon.

•      They are particularly skilled at song and dance “dog and pony shows” that tell clients how great it’s going to be but that accomplish nothing to write home about, as long as the next big client stands ready on the horizon.
•      If you’re looking for artsy or funny or insulting or dramatic ads and commercials that have high impact but make no sales, go to an ad agency. And the bigger the agency, the more it will cost you and the least likely you’ll get the results you seek.

PR FIRMS do have a pretty good camaraderie with numerous media people and can be effective — depending on whether you pay them $10,000 a month or $15,000 a month — at wining and dining and schmoozing editors, writers, and sometimes publishers into considering coverage for the news releases they write and submit for you.

•      And they certainly know how to play the news release format game, but they rarely if ever are able to capture the essence of your business message and bring about action because they almost universally seem to think they know more about your business than you do. So what comes out is mundane, meaningless babble.
•      Make them write three test releases and explain why the words in them are the best words and who and when they would submit them to and why.

MARKETING GROUPS will tell you they’ve got you covered, yet only a minuscule number actually realize that marketing is the umbrella and that the functions under that umbrella include sales, advertising, promotion, packaging, pricing, merchandising, PR (public relations), industry and investor relations, customer service, CRM (Customer Relationship Management), website design and development, email and social media promotional activities, employee alumni associations, buzz (word-of-mouth) marketing, and on and on.

•      Ask them HOW they “cover” you and see how many of these avenues are mentioned.  

MEDIA. Would you have a guy from the slaughterhouse prepare your meals?

SBA SCORE COUNSELORS. SCORE is Senior Corps of Retired Executives. A lot of the world’s nicest, most well-intentioned people in this organization that provides FREE consulting.

•      Unfortunately, like the federal government they represent, they are completely out of touch with the realities of day-to-day business management, and may as well be on Jupiter for the marketing guidance they provide. Time is money. Don’t waste your time.

     What’s left? Independent consultants and project managers. Probably these folks represent your best choice, but only if you’re careful in your selection. Some of them are just as crooked as many of the others.

     ASK QUESTIONS. Ask for explanations about HOW a candidate thinks about what she or he claims to have accomplished. Ask for examples. Ask why something that worked well worked well and why something that didn’t, didn’t. How confidentially do they offer information? Who are a couple of client types they can suggest for you to contact to confirm.

     Beware of self-proclaimed “experts”

with cookie-cutter solutions!

# # #  

302.933.0116  Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

If your search engine sent

you here looking for a fight,

you’re in the wrong place!

     . . . Uh, the post title — that’s “Profiling” as in filling out website subscriber info about yourself and your business.

Sorry. My apologies to all the rest of you (including lawyers of course) who’ve landed here  looking for a bunch of racial slur charges and counter-charges (hopeful no doubt of gathering ammunition for getting yourselves in an uproar about who is subjecting whom to bias and prejudice in which states, and why, and how awful it all is).

You know who you are: Anti-Arizona political types, NPR and network TV news desk occupiers, and fans of “Cops.”

Three messages for you: 1) The truth will out 2) Sorry to disappoint you, and 3) Click off of here and go yell at your search engine.

     Well now that we’ve cleared the air, and have sent the vast armies of contentious network news and incompetent government types packing, let’s get down to business.

     When you fill out a website profile, here are some good rules of thumb to consider that will help you present a more attractive picture of yourself and your business:

• As a matter of PROCEDURE: draft it first; edit it second; edit it third; edit it fourth; save it fifth; cut and paste it into the window sixth. Not much creates instant panic as effectively as clicking “Save” a blink too soon. Take your time. Get it right.

• As a matter of FORMAT: Live with what’s provided. It will be a lot of years before subscriber websites are all up to speed with the latest options for type sizes, line and border spacing and special (color, shadowing, bolding, Italicizing-types of) accent treatments as you may be used to with your PC and Mac text formatting choices. What you get is what you get! When bullet and numbering options exist, use them, but sparingly.

• As a matter of CONTENT: keep it short and sweet. Conciseness counts! Suffice it to ask when was the last time you read a long wind-baggy profile? Don’t try stuffing your thirty-pound resume into some one-pound profile window. Use highlights as teasers to prompt a reader to want to know more. 

• As a matter of INTENT: Keep it honest; if you don’t you have my word it will come back to haunt you. You may even (shudder) lose Twitter Followers and Facebook fans! Think of your profile as a combination of your “brand” and your “elevator speech.” No matter what your intent is about what you say and how you say it, don’t allow yourself room for exaggeration to creep in.

• As a matter of EMPHASIS: don’t try to be cute; don’t write sales or advertising copy; if you have strong credentials, list them but don’t belabor them; if you lack strong credentials, don’t try to make weak ones look impressive. It’s a profile, not a sales pitch! You can deliver that after a prospect likes what she or he sees and decides to contact you. Humor? Doubtful it has a place in 99% of business profiles. If people want a laugh, they need only start hanging out with that other “profiling” crowd mentioned at the top of this post.

 www.TWWsells.com or 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You. God Bless America and America’s Troops. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]  Make today a GREAT Day!

Not getting quality

from consultants?

  This may be why…

     Right off the top, if it’s not a life-or-death surgical, ocean oil leak, or rocket science need to fill, stop with the panic attacks about finding a consultant with industry-specific experience.

     What you need is to find a consultant who can get the job done. Period.

• Give me a guy, for example, who sells railroad cars full of French fries and I’ll teach him what I need him to know about representing my fine linens products (or my precision computer parts, or my insurance policies). And he’ll do better at it than a fine linens (or microchip) manufacturing (or insurance) expert.
• As another example, show me someone who maintains an efficient warehouse operation, and I’ll show her how to manage a shipping schedule better than the head of any trucking company.

     Why? Because sales and organizational skills are lot harder, more time-consuming, and more expensive to teach than the ins and outs of your business.

     Learning how you manufacture and package and sell your products and services is easy. Learning how to think and act like a sales or traffic management pro is not easy because it’s often an issue of attitude.

When you’re outsourcing projects and looking for consultants who can get the job done, don’t be making yourself crazy trying to find someone who has extensive experience in your industry or profession.

     Look instead for someone who has extensive experience in her or his consulting specialty. A good solid marketing person or writer or web designer or trainer or coach, for instance, doesn’t need to have ANY expertise in your specific business or professional practice in order to help you produce a significant difference in sales, sales leads, CRM, or staff development.

The same principles and dynamics that work for selling hot dogs also work for selling precision parts, accounting and legal services, heart transplant specialists, or (aaah, entrepreneurship!) “Silly Bands.”

     The art and insight of writing an effective news release, advertising campaign, or website, doesn’t change in the slightest.

     The target markets change; the media selections change; the technical details change. But benefits are still what need to be emphasized.

     All products and services are purchased because an emotional buying motive is triggered — not because a laundry list of rational features has been presented. Skilled marketing consultants know how to plan and create and activate emotional buying motive triggers that get results.

     Your job is to teach them your business, be a sounding board for their recommendations, and help bring about action.

     You can follow the advice of headhunters and placement services and counselors and job trainers all you want, and puppy-dog behind every leader in your industry or profession, but I’ll put my money on you finding the best outsource consulting service teams and individuals based on your own instincts and your own judge of character and chemistry. It got you here. It works.

Trust yourself.

     The minute you’re able to find people who can fill the role(s) you have in mind, who have a track-record of success in many diverse fields, don’t hesitate to engage her/him/them simply because you think your candy company is so unique that only someone who is a candy business expert can appreciate you and your business enough to do justice to it. A sweet idea, but unrealistic. 

Informed fresh perspectives don’t

    come from clones or ostriches.    

 www.TheWriterWorks.com or 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You. God Bless America and America’s Troops. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]  Make today a GREAT Day!

A lesson from one

 of the masters . . .

You run a business. You know that when you’ve got something good, you run with it, right? Wouldn’t you expect something better from one of the world’s leading brands than a half-hearted, slipshod application of their “signature slogan” theme line?

On the heels (and after many years) of one of the most memorable slogans in history — “Leave the driving to us!” — the company came up in 2007 with one of the all-time worst slogans: “We’re on our way!” [Typical consumer response: “Who cares?”]

“We’re on our way!” totally disregarded the surge in consumerism which rendered this kind of chest-beating as inappropriate and ineffective. (And to put the icing on the cake, Greyhound reportedly spent over $60 million trying to shove their braggadocio down consumer throats!) This move was so predictably bad that had they spent even one nickle on it, they would have been making a poor marketing and management judgment.

Ah, but there was a comeback. Almost. Greyhound finally did outdo itself by actually topping that “Leave the driving to us” classic with this more recent touch of brilliance [and I truly do mean brilliance]:

Greyhound. Stop Less. Go More. 

Wow! What a terrific branding theme line. It says so much with so little. It’s customer-focused. I saw it on the side of one of their buses cruising down the New Jersey Turnpike. (Yes, it is true that occasionally one may be fortunate enough to actually cruise on this road that’s eternally jam-packed with Evil Knievel and Kamikaze wannabees.)

But then a funny thing happened.

A second Greyhound bus passed that, instead of the great ‘Stop/Go” theme on the side, had some very somber and unintelligible statement on the back that was an assertion of sorts about a business alliance with some organization whose name was replaced with a totally obscure logo that seemed about the size of maybe a golf ball or two. . . not terribly identifiable at 65mph.

Awhile later, I noted yet another Greyhound bus that appeared to have nothing on it except their famous racing dog  logo.

SO what?

Here’s what. It makes no marketing sense whatsoever to have different vehicles from the same company displaying different graphics and not capitalizing on the proven importance of repetition in selling. Can you imagine spending millions of dollars to establish a theme line (or signature slogan as Greyhound calls it) and not have that line appear in every conceivable application?

And is it a no-brainer to put it prominently on the sides of vehicles you operate?

Now this is no small-time company here. We’re talking about the largest North American intercity bus company, with 16,000 daily bus departures to 3,100 destinations in the United States. That ain’t hay. Yet the money they spent might as well have been hay.

If giant corporate entities like this haven’t the sense to get the right kind of marketing input, just imagine the plight of small business enterprises.

But small business can do what big business cannot. Small business can turn on a dime, be more innovative more quickly and capitalize on opportunities as they surface. Small businesses can also make the kinds of marketing-judgment and tweaking-help choices that big businesses can’t make without getting themselves too tangled up in politics.

I have always thought Greyhound to be a great company with great service and a reputation to match, but in the instance cited, they have clearly failed at making the most of what they already have, to achieve their goals quicker and more soundly.

Don’t waste your time, money, and effort trying to be too smart about too many things. Bring in a fresh, informed and experienced, outside perspective to turn what you have to say into a marketing message and approach that energizes employees and suppliers, and that — most importantly — stimulates and generates sales.

302.933.0911  Hal@BusinessWorks.US

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals!

God Bless You. God Bless America and our troops.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Make today a GREAT Day for someone!

When it looks, tastes,

smells, feels, and 

sounds like garbage

 . . . guess what?

     Many people think advertising is the root of all evil. You’ve heard the complaints. They think advertising is at fault for fostering and nurturing societal problems. They wag their fingers at the TV and scold the announcers for having such low-life values. They bang their fists on desktops when they’re overrun with email spam. They poke their pens through newspaper ads that they find offensive.

     Sound at all familiar?

     But advertising is merely a reflection of society. Think of advertising as a mirror. That’s all it is. That’s all it’s ever been.

     The truly talented advertising creative and strategic planning people in this world all know that this is true. They don’t pretend to control anything. They don’t see themselves in the “agent of change ” roles that entrepreneurs play.

     They merely imagine ways to playback to society what’s going on in society.  

And we are living in angry times.

Not for the first time, and not for the last, but we are clearly not a nation of happy wall-to-wall campers right now!

     Our economy sucks and even as we continue to hear daily claims of recovery and promises of improvement, it continues to get worse.

     We have a catastrophic oil spill in our backyard that any halfwit entrepreneur or small business owner would have pounced on and resolved by now, but delays piled on top of delays and indecision added to incompetency and inexperience have pushed us into a corner. These accumulated screw-ups — like the floundering economy and accompanying empty promises — offer us no end in sight.

    Instead of solutions, we have brinkmanship, excuses, and rhetoric.

     Instead of action, we have talk.

     It’s coming from our President, from our Vice President, from our governors, from our U.S. and state senators, from our congressional representatives and state representatives. Nonaction and ineffective do-nothing conduct festers wherever politics lives.

     It is taking it seems forever, but we’re finally starting to see media people becoming disconcerted. They’re starting to realize that they are rapidly turning into the vocal minority . . . and that posture doesn’t sell newspapers, or generate paid advertising revenues.

     So the next time you hear someone complain that advertising that’s filled with innuendos of sex and violence and racism is causing the murders, drug deals, rapes and disrespect of others, tell that person to just look around at what’s going on between friends and neighbors and regions and nations and to think about not adding fuel to the fire.

     Society creates society’s problems — not advertising. When times get better, so will the advertising.

     And guess what? There are actually three things you can do about it:

1)  Don’t endorse, buy or encourage others to buy products or services that are promoted with questionable and bad-taste advertising. This includes tasteless Hollywood and video game productions.

2)  Clean up your own act. Get someone with extensive business experience, who truly understands the impact of words, to put an eagle eye to your marketing themes and messages –all of it — sales presentations, news releases, website pages, email promotions, ads, commercials, business plans, mission statements. Get that person to tweak what you’re using to make sure you’re representing to your market and customers and employees and communities what you want to be representing.

3)  Do something to help see that new leadership is given rise to better representation of small business interests. There are 30 million of us! If every small business does SOMEthing, anything, it will make a difference. America was built on and by small business, and will only right itself by relying on the innovative pursuits of small business. Step up to the plate before November.  

www.TWWsells.com or 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You. God Bless America and our troops. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]  Make today a GREAT Day!

Tweet it or beat it.

     I write. Among many other things (mostly marketing, advertising, PR, sales, blogs, and websites), I write books.

     So the other day, when I received notice that some Southwestern-based “writing” business was a new Twitter “follower” of mine, I proceeded to do a quick check to validate their legitimacy and see if there might be some compatible interests.

     Unlike the quest to win popularity by amassing huge numbers of any “followers,” I have instead always pursued a course of selectivity. I choose only those followers who share interest in entrepreneurial leadership, writing, personal and professional growth and development and/or small business ownership and management ideas and issues.

     By sacrificing quantity for quality, I have of course -in the process- learned to accept the humility of trading off my options to compete in the who’s-got-the-most-followers type of confrontation with Ellen and Lady Gaga. But, hey, I cut my own mustard. Besides, some say I have better legs than both of them!

     Okay, back to business— so my little Googlization due diligence effort produces a website for these “book writers,” which I scan quickly and then decide to click back that I’ll follow them too. After all, their business, I discovered, like part of mine, writes and ghostwrites books for other people too. Hmmm, maybe I’ll learn a thing or two by watching their “Tweets.”  

     Now let’s sidetrack here a minute to explain for the benefit of all non-Twitterers (there are maybe 27 or 28 of you on the planet?) that some people who get new followers think they need to respond to each new follower with a direct message (DM) “thank you” note.

     Some think that because you have clicked on them to follow their little posts, that the flood gates are now open for them to to rush into your Inbox with some bombardment of sales spiels, like “Thanks for following. Now that we’re friends, here’s how to get 283,000 new followers by a month from Tuesday for three easy payments of just $29.95 plus tax and handling charges of $117 per order.”

     Still others respond to your (no doubt brainless) decision to follow them by replying with a (shudder) robot message that thanks you profusely and may offer a “gift” at a website that usually sounds something like http://UBmybestnewtwitterfolloweronearthoranyplaceelseintheuniverse.com

     Then there’re the hard-sell follower guys: Hi. Thx for follow. When U need to clean your pipes or fix your drip, call Flushoff Plumbing at 800-Brown-Down. Starting to get the picture? Twitter kinda has it all.

     So what to my wondering eyes do appear within minutes of my click to be a follower of this book writer business but one of those DM thank you notes that says:

“Who do you than needs to write a book?”

     Huh? I’m not thinking you guys are going to be on my shortlist of likely collaborators or some shing star stable of literary talent I might refer others to. What’s it add up to? An unforgivable screw-up with no second chance at a miserable first impression.

     How careful are you and your people with the wording in your messages? If even a self-proclaimed book-writing business doesn’t use Spellcheck. chances are that many companies which have nothing to do with writing or publishing, don’t use it either.

     A word to the wise is that using Spellcheck makes you look good –especially to prospects and customers. Not using it makes you look unprofessional and dumb. Sloppy messages communicate to the recipient that the sender doesn’t care enough about her or him to bother with ensuring clear communications. 

     Sloppy messages may work for friends, but not for business. 

Happy Twittering!

 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US 

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