How to Evaluate Educational Opportunities for Your Business

Each Saturday, I post Splendid Reruns on Twitter, which help new readers of Think Splendid catch up on or long-time readers refresh their memory on previous posts. Today, one of the reruns was for a post from July called Ethics, Social Media and Workshops: The Emperor Has No Clothes. The point of that article was that ongoing education in the wedding industry is important, but that it's important to learn from and spend money on instructors and mentors who can actually back up their claims. Khris from DIY Bride suggested that I write a post about how to evaluate each educational opportunity. I think this is an excellent idea, so here are some pointers for choosing who to spend time learning from and where to spend your hard-earned education budget dollars:

1. Read through the workshop instructor's blog archives. Have they provided any information that demonstrates they know the subject matter backwards and forwards? Does the information they share on the blog itself make you think about things differently, or if implemented, make your business better? A red flag, for me, is when a blog starts to share information and then says "to read more, sign up for our class, pay the subscription fee, etc". If the free content is incomplete or doesn't help you, then what assurance do you have that any paid content will?

2. Who is recommending the workshop or program other than the person teaching it? Are the endorsements or testimonials from people you trust and who have businesses you want to learn from? For example, Laura Novak has one of the highest-grossing photography studios in the United States, according to research done by the PPA (Professional Photographers of America). This endorsement carries more weight for her business-focused workshops than simply someone who is popular on Twitter saying the workshop would be fun and you should go because Laura is a really nice lady and the workshops have great snacks.

3. Read reviews about the person's business. What does their Better Business Bureau report or other company reviews say? If there was a complaint, did they resolve it quickly? This is all listed there. If a company is truly remarkable, they will have people who either really love them or really hate them - they won't have many people in the middle on the fence. Remarkable companies will rarely be complaint free, but take note of how they responded to each complaint. Was it professional? Did the explanations make sense?

4. Do a quick search on Google and Bing for their name and/or company. You might be surprised at how many of the people currently teaching how to have financially sound wedding businesses have filed for bankruptcy in the past two years. If the person is teaching how to create art - either how to take more stunning photos or create showstopping centerpieces, that is one thing, but if they are teaching on business or marketing strategy, then their financial reality should be able to back that up. Also, do they come up online at all? I keep receiving emails from someone who claims to be "America's foremost wedding business expert" yet nothing in his emails tell me why he can claim that title and there is nothing online about his accomplishments to earn that title.

5. Have they done what they are teaching? This doesn't mean they do what you do as wedding artist. Sean Low can teach about how to have a better wedding business because he has turned businesses around, from being massively in debt to being hugely profitable. He doesn't need to know how to design the centerpiece himself, he needs to be able to teach you how to make money from designing the centerpiece. If someone is teaching on marketing an offline business through online media, have they done that themselves or are they sharing theories?

6. I don't necessarily believe that number of years in a wedding business is as relevant in some areas. For example, an accountant who switched gears and decided to give up the cubicle to pursue wedding design would still have MUCH to teach other business owners about the brass tacks of crunching the numbers and doing the math related to running a profitable business, regardless of how long they had been in the event industry. When you do anything in life, you bring all of your past experiences with you to the table. Don't completely disregard a person's skillset based on a time frame.

I am 100% behind the idea that companies need to be continually learning and seeking out education. If you think you've arrived, you've stopped trying.  I also believe that you should learn from people who can truly back up what they say and that being popular is not the same as being successful.

Win a Scholarship to a Wedding Planners Conference

Wedding 360, a conference for wedding planners, is gifting a scholarship to one lucky recipient. The conference is in San Francisco in March and the scholarship is valued at $975. You can read more about the scholarship and how to apply on the Wedding 360 blog.

Good luck and let me know if you win!

FTC Regulations for Twitter and Facebook

The new FTC regulations that go into effect December 1st also extend to Twitter and Facebook, not just blogs. Even with the limited space of 140 characters, sponsored tweets or vested interests will have to be disclosed.

Graphic designer Trisha Hay and I were discussing this and she came up with the idea of putting *C to denote a tweet about a client. I am adopting her idea and from now on you'll see *C at the end of any tweet I do that promotes a client of Splendid Communications in some fashion. If I am simply conversing back and forth with a client, then the symbol won't be present. The bio on my Twitter page has also been updated to include this information so that anyone who visits that page know what the symbol stands for in the tweets.

I am fortunate in that I am able to work only with companies that I 100% believe in, so you won't see much of a change in my writing or posts, just the added disclosure symbol that shows I do have a specific interest in the success of a particular company. While these new regulations are causing everyone to rethink how we write and post online, I am glad that they are bringing much needed transparency to the wedding industry.

You can read more about the new FTC regulations here and how they relate to preferred wedding vendor directories here.

How Your Blog Design is Costing You Sales

Last night at dinner I was asked what I think the next big thing is in social media. While I don't know what the next big tool will necessarily be, I do know, both from my observations and from those of others in the social media industry, that there will continue to be a major increase in the use of mobile phones for research.

As far as blog design goes, this will be a huge factor, especially in the wedding industry. The most popular wedding blog templates and designs currently have flash-based headers. Most companies put the majority of their branding emphasis in those headers. Guess what doesn't get seen on an iphone and some of the other mobile phones?

The plain and simple fact of the matter is that most brides plan their weddings at work. More and more workplaces are blocking access to the Internet and brides and grooms are opting to browse on their phones as a workaround. If your site doesn't capture them on their phone, chances are very slim that they will look up your site again when they get home.

Your blog may be stunning on a large, oversized Mac computer, but if the information and story you are telling can't be viewed in the way your target market needs to see it, then you are losing sales.

Good design doesn't just look pretty; good design functions properly. I will also add that in this case, good design helps drive revenue for your business. Is your blog designed well or is it costing you sales?

Social Media Etiquette: Blog Links

As blogging has evolved over the past decade, the etiquette for linking to someone in a blog has remained the same: always link to someone if you write about them.

If you are writing about the other vendors who worked on a wedding with you, link to them. If you are using a photo, always link to the photographer who shot it, not the wedding blog you found it on (or better - link to both, but always link to the photographer - they hold the copyright and should always receive credit). If for some reason you are writing about a competitor, link to them.

If you are not going to link to someone you mention in a blog post, edit the blog post to not talk about them at all or don't publish it.  Publishing a post without links to the people or companies you mention is a fast way to burn bridges in the online wedding community. 

Splendid Sundays Volume 17

A handful of splendid finds and interesting tidbits from around the worldwide web:

*Designer Kelly Ashworth is having a special holiday season promotion. I'll admit I am a bit partial to Kelly's work (she does the graphic design for Splendid Communications and if she rolls her eyes at my 8000 crazy requests she never shows it), but she is super talented and this is a great chance to make even more of her design goodness your own.

*The new Polaroid. Since my iphone camera is pretty much the only one I used, I found this interview fascinating.

*Content is NOT king. You are.

*For the grammar snobs (don't worry, you're not alone).

*Book of the week: Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. From Amazon: In Trust Agents, two social media veterans show you how to tap into the power of social networks to build your brand's influence, reputation, and, of course, profits. Today's online influencers are web natives who trade in trust, reputation, and relationships, using social media to accrue the influence that builds up or brings down businesses online.

Do you have any splendid finds to share?

The Most Common Blogging Mistake and How to Avoid It

One of the quickest ways to dilute your company's brand and get lost in the search engines is to abbreviate your company's name while writing your blog posts. Never, ever do this. I don't think I can stress this enough. If you get tired of typing out your company name, copy and paste it instead, but never publish a post with your company's initials in place of the name.

Marketing studies have shown that acronyms are remembered far less often than the company's full name and when seen in print, they are usually not instantly associated with the company in question.  Also, while it may be clear to me that SC stands for Splendid Communications, since this company is literally what puts food on my table and pays my bills and what I spend the majority of my time on, for others SC could mean a multitude of things, from South Carolina to Scott's Cooking to Savannah Chapel. Retraining the public's mind to view an acronym the way you see it instead of the way they may have grown up knowing it is time and energy better focused elsewhere.

For search engines, SC is most commonly going to be South Carolina, never Splendid Communications. If I abbreviated this all the time, it would kill, or at the very least seriously hinder, my SEO efforts. Since having my site and blog indexed with information about an East Coast state is not my goal, it is important for me to take a few extra seconds when writing my blog posts and spell out my company's name.