Hope Is NOT The Answer.

(Neither is government spending nor business borrowing!)

     The old business adage, “NOTHING HAPPENS ‘TIL THE SALE IS MADE” applies more today than ever! I have noted here often that budget slashing, and save-on-expenses mentalities end up digging an even deeper hole because they divert energy away from what needs to be done to put the economy on a rebound and growth track.

     Economic recovery can ONLY happen when more businesses decide to make it happen. We have to blow off mainstream media’s efforts to drag the public into the maelstrom they’re busy creating in their relentless quest to sell more print advertising space and more broadcast commercial time.

     When businesses decide to focus on sales and entrepreneurial pursuits, we will see increased financial stability across the boards. Sounds simple, huh? Unfortunately, our own business-inexperienced government is essentially leading the blockade to progress on this front…token small business incentives don’t cut it!

     Add to the government’s misguided energy and maniacal spend and borrow and tax mentality the sad truth is that many business people have simply given up, and the saving-grace focus we’re talking about turns out to not be so simple after all. 

     Government spending and business borrowing? Digest this (following) quote made 5 days ago in a European Parliament speech by Daniel Hannon MEP who was targeting the English Prime Minister with some realistic advice:

You cannot spend your way out of recession,

or borrow your way out of debt!”

[See www.Hannon.co.uk for more.]

     If you are an entrepreneur or run your own business, you need to be resolute in your thoughts and actions. You need to be literally invulnerable in your convictions that hope may spring eternal, but it simply does NOT fuel or grow business in any way–never has, never will. ONLY sales do that.

     Like throwing two baseballs at equal velocity with both arms simultaneously, the most difficult task for any entrepreneur or business owner is to be running your business and selling your business at the same time. Yet that is what has to happen.

     This means, you must be willing and able to go the extra mile with customers, prospects, employees, vendors, your industry, your community, your family, and your own health and fitness. Dropping any one of these from the pursuit equation will collapse the energy around those that remain.

     Okay, HOW? you ask. By paying attention to having fun instead of feeling pressure (the feeling-pressure guys have already boarded up and left town). By paying more attention to exercise and eating and sleeping right, by laughing more, and by learning and using stress management techniques , by taking a yoga class, a jog, a walk, another walk, more walks. 

     As for help, what’s suggested here isn’t much, but–like everything else in life–suggestions are what you make of them. It’s always your choice about how to proceed. The rest of what happens is up to you.  

Good Night and God Bless You!  

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“Keep It Simple, Stupid!”

Has your business gotten unnecessarily complicated? Are you trying too hard to sell too much? Are your sales presentations starting to look like the product of NASA scientists? Are prospects walking away with their thumbs in their mouths, and answering “DUH!” when you ask them questions?

     Maybe your presentation needs a labotomy? Maybe your business needs one?

     It might make you feel better to know that reaching a point of overkill complication is a fairly routine happening for many businesses…old as well as new!

     We all have a tendancy to overlook or forget that most of what launched us into business in the first place was having the knowledge edge and awareness that others really didn’t have what we did have, about the basic product or service or idea we started with (or they would have started the business instead of us, right?).

     We sometimes easily and quickly lose sight of the fact that most, if not all, of the customers we sell our products and services to are not as tuned in to our product and service details as we are. Dentists advertising mucusal blade inserts are only being understood by other dentists. Patients want to know that they can eat an apple again. Are you speaking your customer’s language? 

     Unless you’re selling something like fiber optics to fiber optics buyers, odds are overwhelming that most of our customers do not understand the technical terms, industry jargon, formulas, ingredients, manufacturing or developmental details that we often take for granted. You can’t just toss off terms without explaining them. The trick is to be aware of when you’re losing customer comprehension.

     Rather than a full-scale labotomy, however, maybe we need only to take a page from many Caribbean beach bars, and simply initiate an “attitude adjustment.” Step back from the words and expressions you’ve been using, and look toward developing a fresh attitude…a fresh perspective.

     Pretend when you explain your product or service features and benefits that you are explaining the details to your Grandmother! Or to someone from a foreign country who doesn’t speak or understand much English! Or to someone from another planet! (Really! How would you communicate the highlights or values of your business if you didn’t have the benefit of comparable education or language, or universe?)

     Rewrite your script! If you’re having trouble with this, because you’re not a writer or haven’t the time, consider an outside service. Find a writing professional who demonstrates the capability of translating and simplifying technical language into persuasive layman’s terms that reflect your business personality…and your market and community posture.

     If you can’t find someone you’re happy with, contact me via email Hal@TheWriterWorks.com with “Blog KISS” in the subject line, and a sentence that describes the nature of your business and what you need as a result from outside writing services.

If I can help, I’ll give you a plan; if I can’t, I’ll point you in the right direction. No fees for inquiries. 

Good Night and God Bless You!  halalpiar     

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As communication continues

to experience convulsively

explosive change, so do the

methodologies we use to sell.

     Playwrite Arthur Miller clearly had something else in mind at the time he wrote and titled his classic Death of a Salesman, but there could never be a more apropos expression for what’s happening today, right this very minute, that is about to forever extinguish the “sales process” as we have known it since the day anyone reading this was born. 

     What, for example, does it suggest to you that even as recent as a year ago, effective sales communication was commonly reported to consist of as much as 87% nonverbal ingredients–gestures, posture, tone of voice, appearance, eye contact, active listening, etc.– and today major companies are talking about the sales process in terms of “digital body language”?

     Except for those salespeople who haven’t caught up (or, on) yet (and you surely know who they are and where they breed), business is at the crossroads of revolutionary change, and savvy salespeople spurred on by the blinding speed of technological advances are quick on the heels of entrepreneurs worldwide in leading the way.

     With entrepreneurial base-camp entrenchments established, salespeople will be muscling their way up the mountainside and serving the rest of society and the business world as the catalysts of change who will ultimately shake our depressed economy back into place. But this will only happen if those engaged in sales careers are able to fully grasp the dynamics of what’s going on around them.

     Entrepreneurs are spirited innovators who start enterprises, and who find the fuel and who get the engines fired up, and who get that initial forward thrust to happen (which is probably the most monumentally difficult and underrated task in all of business), but it is the world’s salespeople who who are responsible for revenues and growth and profits more than any other entity.

     Ah, but therein lies the potential problem. Salespeople who don’t see what’s happening, who don’t jump at the chance to instantly and dramatically shift into higher gear, who think they can keep doing the same old things in the same old ways, will fall by the wayside and die. And there won’t be any mercy rules!

The bottom line for salespeople:

• You must adjust your mindset to become more of a marketer and less of a sales representative.
• You must provide prospects/customers with new buying process experiences that are anchored by product/service/idea and market knowledge.

         You must rely more heavily on proving performance with demonstration and testing and sampling.

• You must increase your focus on benefits and ways of integrating purchases with existing products/services/ideas.
• You must spend more energy sitting on the same side of the prospect/customer’s problem-solving table and working as a partner instead of as a representative.

HIGH TRUST/credibility, proven performance and database marketing are now the three kings of sales! Are you making it happen, or is it happening to you? 

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Good Night and God Bless You! 

Make today a GREAT day for someone!    

 Networking Is Selling.

Belt-tightening times require business, organization and professional practice people to get more done with less. But you already know that. Let’s zero in on something you don’t know (or have thus far chosen to not admit by owning up to the fact that…

No matter what your job is–whether you work with a church, a healthcare facility, a bank, the government, an educational or nonprofit institution, a trucking company, a restaurant, professional sports team, senior housing development–no matter WHAT your job is: YOU ARE IN SALES!

Got that? Okay. Next:

The secret of sales, marketing, advertising and public relations news releases and events is embodied in the acronym AIDAS, which stands for attract ATTENTION, create INTEREST, stimulate DESIRE, bring about ACTION and ensure SATISFACTION. 

[Hey, you’re doing fine out there, all you doctors and plumbers and camp directors and computer techies, chicken pluckers and grocery store checkers. Stay with this another minute.]

In years past, traditional salespeople who are out selling for a living have usually had the luxury of field houses full of expensive support tools and programs designed to drive prospects to their feet. You’ll find these eyeball-to-eyeball presenters hovering about abundantly in retail settings and trade and professional shows.

You’ll also find that these same folks are discovering with almost the same swiftness and embarrassed sense of loss one might experience with suddenly having his or her pants pulled down, that businesses and organizations are now and have been rapidly withdrawing budget support for advertising,  promotion and merchandising.

Therefore (Aha!) ingenuity must rise for salespeople to survive. And where do they turn? To networking of course, to the very most commonly understood and used sales promotional vehicle that all the non-salespeople have been using to sell themselves and their services and ideas for centuries . . .

Networking. Networking is a fancy term for meeting and greeting and staying in touch and asking for referrals. But guess what? If you don’t apply the AIDAS acronym to your networking efforts, even as a floor sweeper, you’re not likely to survive the mainstream media’s economic rumor mongering that’s sucking the life out of our families, friends, neighbors, and communities.

     So, before you go on stage each day, clean up your act, pull back your shoulders, take a deep breath, tell your mirror image that you are the greatest performer in the job that you do, that ever lived, and that you are going to sail through the day making good things happen at every turn.

     Then recite to yourself that you will attract ATTENTION, create INTEREST, stimulate DESIRE, bring about ACTION, and ensure SATISFACTION with every task and every person you encounter. Do that and you’ve got my 100% money-back guarantee (oh, right, this was all free!) that you will astound yourself. You WILL astound yourself! And that’s a good thing. 

                                             

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Hal@Businessworks.US

“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! 

Twitter Is What It Is. Period.

     Hardly a day passes anymore when I don’t hear some business or professional practice owner or operator or manager, or an entrepreneur talk nervously about “not getting the Twitter thing.”

     Usually, the fearful comments end with some justification for not dipping a toe in the water by cavalierly tossing off a laundry list of non-business-related “Tweets” that they saw or heard about. Twitter won’t have any value to you if you start out seeking for it to BE something.

     Twitter is what it is. While there appear to be some basic Twitter Etiquette guidelines, they seem to me to only be for the benefit of those who want them. And many Twitter users simply don’t care what those folks want. Other than for legal purposes, and in abiding with contractual agreements, there is no right or wrong Twitter use. The medium is free to flow as those who use it choose for it to flow for themselves.

     So, unlike any other media, Twitter has a mind all its own and those who work and play with it find it far exceeds what most people would probably define as a “social” vehicle. It is both one-way and two-way (and actually a multiple-way) form of communication.

     Many believe the whole purpose of Twitter is to acquire and constantly add as many “followers” as humanly possible so that every statement they make will be seen by 88 skillion people that they’ve attracted. Many others could care less about massive followings and are looking instead for people with similar interests. And so it goes on and on, varying according to human nature and whimsy.

     Twitter participants can be categorized (some steady and ongoing, and others changing with the wind) as sometimes or all the time or alternatingly or multiplicitingly fitting what we might characterize, in no particular order, as:

Parent~~Adult~~Child~~Crusader~~Politico~~Professor~~

Preacher~~Motivator~~Problem-Maker~~Problem-Presenter

~~Problem-Solver~~Popularity Contestant~~ Control Freak

~~Bitch~~Networker~~Tree-Hugger~~Active Adventurer~~

Business Promoter~~Teeny Bopper~~Flake~~Peacenik-Hippie (yeah, still a few of these around)

~~Animal Lover~~Mystic~~Goofball~~Irate Egotist~~Joker

~~Gay Pride Activist~~Black Rights Activist~~Womens

Rights Activist~~News Reporter~~Rhymer~~Dear Abby

~~Counselor~~Advisor~~Consultant~~Game Player~~

Headline Writer~~Cartoonist~~Recruiter~~ Solicitor~~

Salesperson~~Shrink~~Sports Fanatic~~Political Fanatic

~~Religious Fanatic~~ADD YOUR OWN 80 OR 90 MORE

TO THIS LIST!

     The point is that if you have a business or professional practice and the above cluster of characters have scared you away from making good solid business use of this social media phenomenon, you are not thinking like a true entrepreneur.

     You need to try it before deciding it’s not for you. Isn’t that what you would do with anything else? Don’t choose to feel intimidated by Twitter just because you don’t get it. It’s really quite simple. And, in fact, as I noted many months ago, it forces you to strengthen two major communication tools: Conciseness and Persuasion, plus it requires high level focus on the “here-and-now” present moment, which is also a critically strong business building block.

     There is no rule about having to get addicted to Twitter, though many apparently are (and even brag about it)! You can plug and promote business and professional practice ideas, products and services in a way that gets response– in just 10-15 minutes a day! (Yes, I’ll tell you how for free if you call me: 302.933.0116)

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  Open Minds Open Doors 

   Thanks for your visit and God Bless You.

  Make today a GREAT day for someone!

READY . . . SET . . .

Security? Check. Employee I.D. badges? Check. Food and beverage service areas? Check. Trash pails? Check. Entertainment and sound system set-ups? Check. Parking? Check. Clean up? Check. Handouts? Check. Prizes for drawings? Check. News conference agenda? Check…

     Tonight’s grand opening of a new (years-in-the-making) BMW and Mercedes-Benz dealerships state-of-the-art-one-of-a-kind building sets the stage for an entire regional business community journey into economic recovery.

     But nothing about coordinating two diverse and highly competitive luxury car-makers interests under one single roof has been easy or accidental. Tonight’s event promises to host over 700 people. Many of the RSVP’s came from BMW and Mercedes-Benz owners who want to see the new sales and service center firsthand because it is such an exceptional facility.

     The owner/customers will get a better understanding of the fiber optics communication systems that allow this unique building to be in instantaneous purchase, service, and repair communication with car-maker headquarters in Germany.

     They’ll see the green process that recycles used car oil into heating the huge service-bay area. Building tours will also highlight owner observation windows and closed circuit TV system that allow owners to monitor technician work on their vehicles, among many other features.   

So what are you getting from this special event announcement? 

1) Businesses that plan ahead for better customer service capabilities AS they continue to manage day-to-day activities, eventually come to the day of reckoning, and economic conditions need not have and negative or delaying impact on that day, or days that follow

2) Regarding the invitations, keep focused on the truism that the best source of business is existing and past business, and continue to knock yourself out to please your past and present customers above all other marketing targets

3) If you think this kind of razzmatazz is only worthy of pursuit by abandoning other functions like customer service, think again. Cherishing and nurturing long-term customer and community relationships all the while is what makes it all work. 

4) When you have something new and exciting to bring to market, turn your tendancy to brag into a commitment to share and show appreciation to the community that supports your business. What goes around comes around.  

BOTTOM LINE? Don’t let exaggerated media reports get you so focused on business survival tactics that you start to overlook the need for planning. Planning needs to stay in the mix. It will give birth down the road to those big “15 minutes of fame” type moments when your business can step into the spotlight and get the boost it deserves. If you’ve dropped this ball because of economic woes, pick it back up and run with it . . . before your competitor recovers the fumble!  

God Bless You and Good Night!  halalpiar     

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Not much between SOME ears!

     Motivational guru Zig Ziglar says business problems are not “out there” but that they are only between your two ears! Trouble is SOME folks don’t have enough going on at that second location to even know when they are creating their own problems.

     I saw four (4!!!!) “OUT TO LUNCH” signs this past week, and two (2!!) “OFFICE CLOSED FOR LUNCH. RETURN AT 1PM” signs. I really hope someone is driving around ahead of me and quickly putting these signs up just before I get there as a joke, because if not, I’m troubled by what they represent.

     First of all, if you have one of these signs (or anything that even remotely resembles the messages noted), THROW THEM AWAY. NOW! They are costing you business!

     We are in a tough economic period and that requires — more than ever– to be catering to customers, clients and patients (2 of the 6 signs mentioned above were seen at doctors’ offices; 1 was at a veterInarian hospital if you can believe it). What makes me so crazy about this?

     OUT TO LUNCH signs are advertisements that the business or professional practice displaying them simply doesn’t care about their customers or clients or patients. Signs like this say to someone who may only be able to get to your store, office, or worksite at lunchtime, that you have no regard for that person’s time, and that you really don’t care if that person hops on down the road to see your competitor!

     A bit over the top? Nope! In the past three years, and without making any effort because the field of vision was aligned with my windows, I watched a minimum of a hundred people drive up to a CLOSED FOR LUNCH signed sales office, run by a nationally prominent neighboring real estate developer, and drive away shaking their heads.

     The company just went bankrupt. Was this the only reason? No, but the attitude it represented was!

     If you’re a one-man or one-woman band business and you need to be away from your business or practice location for lunch or meetings or whatever, AT LEAST post a phone number where you can be reached in emergency or where someone can schedule an appointment. And AT LEAST make the sign a little friendlier looking and sounding than NO TRESPASSING and KEEP OFF THE GRASS.

[The bankrupted developer, by the way, had a phone message machine answer saying that the sales office was closed for lunch, with no accommodation for messages. And of course, adding insult to injury, the “take-one” information box was always empty!]

     How about: “WE’RE OPEN FOR LUNCHTIME VISITORS” as a radical departure that might actually help increase business at a time when customers, clients, and patients are being much more selective with both their available time and the user-friendliness of businesses and professional practices they choose?                

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Having grown up a mailman’s

son, maybe I’m just sentimental

(or simply as stupid as the PO?) 

     On top of their idiotic, money-wasting, survey last December [Click on December Archives in right column and go to DEC 15 “NO MORE ROOM FOR “SNAIL MAIL – Gutless, Incompetent, Greedy, The US Postal Service” for the ugly details], the amazing U.S. Postal Service management team has been making some astonishingly whacko business decisions.

     Since revenues are off, they’ve cut back hours, increased postage prices, increased their elaborate sample mailing campaign to entice more small businesses to do more mailings with (you guessed it) stuff that’s prohibitively expensive to the typical small business to even think about mailing anyway.

     I’ve received two personalized t-shirts, a metal hinged and color-labeled box filled with expensive die-cut printing samples, and the list goes on. And now. Now they’re pulling the blue drop boxes off the sidewalks!

     How utterly brilliant! Hey, nobody’s using them, so take them away. How many things can you think of that those boxes could be used for if YOU had them for YOUR business? I’ll bet there are at least 10,000 ideas.

     Okay, here’s where I’m stupid. I’m going to give away my consulting expertise for free to the U.S. Postal Service. Right here. Right now. Think they’ll take it? Not a chance, but I’m going to put it out there anyway just because they are chewing off their own arms and legs and I hate to just stand around watching them self-destruct.

SO… Here’s what the U.S.P.S. needs to do:

1. Stop wasting time and money and effort on useless dumb surveys. Just listen to your customers!
2. Stop with the radical cost-cutting methods and ideas that only serve to prevent future sales and revenue streams. You can’t make money by turning off lights! Only sales make money!
3. Stop throwing good money after bad with products and services no one wants. Stick to your knitting, and remember innovation is taking an idea all the way to completion! 
4. Take some pages from FedEx and other competitors who train their drivers to go beyond being just drivers and to become account managers– as responsible for promoting and selling and customer servicing as for driving and delivering.
5. Start an Email delivery service (Call me for details!).
6. Learn how to use and promote via social media options. Visit Twitter for two hours!
7. Initiate customer service training at ALL levels. When was the last time anyone got a thank you note from the U.S.P.S. when it wasn’t a thinly-veiled give-me-a-tip-for-Christmas card?
8. Put a P.O. Box in every P.O. Box (Call me on this one too!).
9. Recruit community groups to garden and landscape your ugly buildings (inside and out).
10. SPONSOR community events; get out there and mix with your customers! They don’t bite! Show them you’re (like State Farm) a good neighbor! 
11. SELL AD SPACE ON THE INSIDE OF EVERY P.O.BOX DOOR!!!! 
12. SELL AD SPACE ON STAMPS!!!!
13. Provide shelves for the poor souls with heavy packages standing on lines waiting for the incompetent counter clerks to finish their coffee. 
14. PIPE IN SOME MUSIC!!!
15. Make it “A POSITIVE EXPERIENCE” to go to the post office!
16. How about an occasional (NON-Christmastime) slip in empty mailboxes that the carriers sign that says: “I noticed you didn’t get any mail today, but I wanted you to know I was thinking of you anyway. Have a great week!” 
17. Barter some direct mail advertising for media time and space… other services! 
18. Run direct mail training sessions for small businesses in P.O. lobbies – serve coffee for free! 
19. START A REAL BLOG that actually addresses real customer situations on a daily basis! (If you actually read this far, definitely call me on this one!)
20. Teach small business owners/operators how to tie direct mail to website and other ad and promotion programs.
21. Offer (Put in all business P.O. Boxes) detailed info on direct mail programs with package rates for use of postcards and self-mailers, with sizes and deals and discounts and coupons!
22. Offer quantity discounts!
23. Offer and arrange shared delivery discounts (to same office or building, for example).

     NUTS, huh? Well, I’ll tell you what: If you continue the course you’re on, YOU’RE NUTS BECAUSE YOU WILL END UP KILLING YOURSELF and that would be a terrible waste of assets, resources, some super-nice people who work for you and bring about the demise of a still much-needed service.

     God Bless and Good Night!  halalpiar     

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Specialists in the men’s room

at the wedding . . .

Sorry to bother you here, like this, Doc, you know, in this men’s room at a wedding reception, but, you know, I’ve got like this terrible pain in my right heel whenever I’ve been running around, and earlier today I . . .”

     “Ah, yes, well you DO know that I’m a doctor of psychology?, so I’m afraid there’s not much I could help you out with about your foot . . .”

     “My heel.”

     “Yes, of course, your heel. The point is you should probably see a podiatrist or orthopedic surgeon or physical therapist or chiropractor or acupuncturist or something. I’m not your man.”

     “But you’re a doctor so you know somethin’ about it, right? I mean you know more than my plumber, right?”

     “Actually? Your plumber probably knows more. I assume you’re talking about Joe, over by the corner of the bar? He offered to give me a discount RotoRooter job, and I heard him recommending duct tape to someone at the champagne toast.”

     “Really! Maybe it was my cousin for her husband’s mouth . . . er, the duct tape, not the champagne, HA, HA!”

     “Say, aren’t you the electrician in the family?”

     “Yeah, Doc, why?”

     “Well, I have this wiring problem with my electromyography unit that maybe you . . .”

     “Whoa, Doc. Wait a minute. I’m an electrician, not some rocket scientist. You need a specialist for working on equipment like that.”

     “Uhuh.”

     Are you using a moonlighting English teacher to write your business blog because she only charges you $25 per posting? Did you put a down and out recycled real estate salesman into a sales manager position because he came cheap and was willing to accept minimal commission splits?

     How many people have you hired during this economic downturn because the main asset they brought to the job was one of minimal impact on your wallet? Guess what? If you’re even thinking about the answer to this question for more than 1/100 of a second, you are in big trouble!

     Bad economic times, says motivational guru Zig Ziglar, take place not out there, but between your own ears!

YOU CANNOT MAKE MONEY BY CUTTING CORNERS! 

THE ONLY THING THAT MAKES MONEY IS SALES.

     Cut all the expenses you can and you won’t have earned a single dollar. In fact, you will have lost even more money because your mindset will have turned negative by focusing on saving instead of selling.

     When you’re worried about turning off the store lights at night, you are missing the opportunities to make sales impressions on those who pass, even though you may not be open.

     Stop thinking the solution to poor sales is to hire inadequate or incompetent people just because they’re cheap. They will cost you more in the end. What is it your granddaddy used to say about work smarter, not harder?  halalpiar  

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It’s A Headline World!

With EIGHT MILLION people . . . 

     . . . now reported to be using Twitter, and millions more engaged in the explosive use of other social media tools as well, we are seeing businesses (especially entrepreneurs of course) rush to the ballgame with their gloves, bats and cleats barely broken in… and scoring runs! 

     Rumors abound that social media is racing past emails as the accepted new communications avenue. This means it’s time to reassess whatever you’ve been using as a marketing plan, and to start looking BOTH ways when you cross a one-way street! 

     At what has now become a maniacal rate of propulsion, blogs have been moving up on the outside rail and coming into full stride as legitimate business marketing vehicles.

     And fueled by the burdens of economic woes that now threaten to (literally) fold every major newspaper, blogs, and electronic books, and social media are re-inventing the long-stagnating worlds of publishing and print media, as ipods have muscled in on CDs and music radio. 

     Business marketers stand on the threshhold of communication revolution once again. And each new thrust now occurs in shorter time periods, each marketing message in shorter numbers of words. We are living in a headline world.

     From TXT MSGS to 140 allowed character spaces per Twitter “Tweet” (or update message), we are communicating quicker, more concisely, with more convoluted, contrived, abbreviated, and acronymed versions of words, and more instantly universal than even one year ago! 

     If you are serious about marketing, you need to re-examine where you and your business marketing interests are headed. As print advertising fades and TV continues to tangle itself up in cables of every description, as billboards dissolve off into the distance of green horizons, and direct mail bumbles it’s way through the vast post office sea of incompetency, we may be left with new options.

     Radio (especially talk) will survive, podcasts, videocasts, blogs, teleseminars, electronic books (which will surely include advertising, ala VCR tape and DVD rentals, as the $400 pricetags fall to $79 and less over the next couple of years) and webcam communications will lead the way. Oh, and yes, island-stranded Wilson soccer ball fans, there will always be a place for overnight deliveries. As this communications metamorphosis occurs, social media will be the blanket beneath and behind it all.

     It’s here. It’s not going away any time soon. Until computerized communication chips are embedded in everyones’ skulls, and one need only to think of a person or place or piece of art or writing or music or news item to bring it instantaneously to the brain’s front burner, we will be firmly entrenched in social media that we will be challenged to use effectively to sell tomorrow’s products and services. Oh, and the new theme song? “It’s a blog world afterall…”     halalpiar 

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    ADD TO THE DAILY GROWING 7-Word Story started 179 days ago (inside a coffin).  Click on the link to the right, or go to “BOOKS” tab at the top of this page, then to the top headline link.