Wedding Business Conference :: Engage!09 The Encore

If you work in the luxury wedding market and haven't signed up for Engage!09 The Encore yet, get over to their website ASAP.  Engage! is in less than two weeks, so do what you can to clear your schedules.  Here are the details:

Before you sign up, please know that this is not a "how-to" conference: Marcy Blum will not lay out a step-by-step guide to being awesome and funny, Rebecca Grinnals will not give you the blueprint for how she built the Disney Fairytale Weddings brand, and Sean Low will not show you Excel spreadsheet case studies of his work with Preston Bailey. Engage! is designed to be a "thinking" conference: one that shifts your mindset, focuses your outlook on your business and moves you to take big, bold (and sometimes scary) steps to change what you are currently doing in favor of long-term growth.  I have personally attended all three previous Engage! conferences, have spoken at two of them, and can attest to the difference it can make in your business in a very real way, including the accounting books.

Kathryn gave me a sneak peek at the guests and some of the wedding professionals attending, including several who spoke at previous Engage! conferences. Some of the people who will be at the Encore include Sylvia Weinstock; Marilyn Oliveira the editor of Inside Weddings; Tatiana Byron, founder of The Wedding Salon; Maria Cooke, founder of Ritzy Bee (and who helped me come up with my company name), Christy Weber and Blair deLaubenfels from Junebug Weddings, and Michelle Rago, whose relatively quick climb to success in this industry is truly inspiring.

You can read my previous recap posts about all three Engage! conferences here:
Engage!09 Recap
Engage!08 The Encore Recap
Engage!08 Recaps: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3

You can visit the Engage!09 The Encore website to register and you can follow updates about the conference on Twitter by using the #engage09encore hashtag. 

Vendor Reviews and Online Libel Laws

One of the questions I get asked often is along the lines of "is it legal for a bride to say whatever she wants about me online?".  The answer is no, a bride cannot say whatever she wants to online, in fact no one can.

General rule of thumb: online libel and defamation laws are pretty much the same as offline libel and defamation laws. If a newspaper or magazine can be sued for printing it, then you can be as well for posting it on your blog, vendor review site or any other online media outlet (Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, etc).  (For a quick, layman's term explanation of online defamation laws, you can check out this website. As always, talk to your attorney to get the full details for your particular company and situation.)

Whatever claims a bride makes about you or your company in her vendor reviews or anywhere online (even if just angrily posting to Facebook) have to be factual or very clearly framed by her as her personal opinion.  Those opinions also have to be backed up if they can be construed as fact.

For example, if a bride says "In my opinion, XYZ Photographers were unprofessional", she has to be able to say why she thought they were unprofessional. Otherwise, the photographers are able to claim that she is damaging their professional reputation even though it is prefaced with "in my opinion".

If a bride writes a review that says: "I was unhappy with John Smith DJ's because they called our wedding party out of order during the grand entrance and didn't play the songs requested", that is permissible because it can be proven.  Both the bride and the DJ can produce copies of timelines, song lists, etc and it can easily be determined if the actions the DJ was to take were clearly communicated prior to the wedding.  If she had included something like "the DJ was such a jerk and is a liar", then that can be claimed as defamatory, especially if the DJ can refute all claims of being a liar with factual information.

Also as long as the person or company being written about is "reasonably identifiable", a person can't state something defamatory and be off the hook simply by not naming your company specifically.  So if a bride made the above statements about the DJ without naming him, but that information could be easily found by looking up the photographer's blog to see who the vendors were, then her latter statement ("jerk and a liar") could still be construed as defamatory.

Many vendor review sites have policies in place that allow the vendors to respond to claims so that readers can view both sides of the story.  If you are ever in a position where you need to reply to a review, be sure to leave all emotion out of your response and include only the facts. Keep notes in your CRM of your activity (ex: September 18, 2009 9:03 AM - left voicemail; September 19, 2009 10:00 AM - left message with Holly.) so that if a claim says that you are a liar because you didn't call when you said you would, you have records showing otherwise easily on hand (the facts of which can also be proven by the outbound call log on your phone statement).

A note on a related topic that comes up often: if you think that a competitor is posing as a bride and leaving false reviews about your company, contact your attorney and the site owners directly to address those concerns.  Sites that are set up for vendor reviews (as well as most blog commenting systems) track IP addresses, so the reviews are never truly anonymous, even when written under a false name. 

Have any of you ever had issues with false reviews online? What did you do about it?

Interview with Two Bright Lights - Wedding Marketing Done Brilliantly

It's no secret that I get excited about smart businesses and by people who aren't afraid to dream big and push the status quo. Last week I had the pleasure of chatting with Rosalind Bordo (left) and Siri Eklund (right) of Two Bright Lights, and these ladies embody all of the traits above (you can read more on each lady's background here). Two Bright Lights is a new company that aims to help wedding vendors produce beautiful marketing materials while networking with each other to maximize referrals.  Here is my interview with them (we're chatty, so grab a cup of coffee for this one) . . .

What exactly is Two Bright Lights?
The goal of Two Bright Lights is to bring people together to allow synergy between wedding industry professionals in a way that is profitable for them. There are a lot of people using Twitter and Facebook and who are trying to make them work in ways that those platforms are not intended to. We believe that there has to be an exchange of value: a use of images, form of referrals component. That gets to the "wedding marketing done brilliantly" - the idea is to provide people who may not have the tools for marketing to be able to make beautiful customized marketing materials that allow them to customize their own work.

Two Bright Lights integrates with existing social media. We think Facebook and Twitter are great tools for what they are, and that they are complimentary to what we have.  We are creating a business-to-business community. Two Bright Lights is for vendors only, so brides cannot log on and use it. It is really a vehicle that allows for that transfer of value between vendors.  The main value our software has is in image sharing and referrals - it is much more utilitarian in terms of exchanging that value.

Photographers will be able to upload all the photos from a wedding and enter all the information about it - the bride and groom's name, the venue, etc. They'll also be able to tag all of the vendors who worked on the wedding so that those vendors have access to the photos.  The vendors can then create inspiration boards and marketing materials customized for each potential bride.

We also have a submission process for editorial partners.  The editorial members will be a select group of invitation-only publishers with a legitimate editorial reach. Not just anyone with a blog will be considered an editorial outlet, so the list will be fairly healthy.  The photographer will then be able to choose where they want the wedding to be submitted to and will be able to see that editorial partner's requirements.  The editors can decide if they want to be exclusive or non-exclusive so photographers will know which ones they can submit to.  We did this because every magazine or blog has a different process and submissions often come with missing information, etc.  If the photographer had uploaded 100 images from a wedding, they can put together an inspiration board using our tools (takes two minutes) and then all of the wedding's info goes through with the boards, including the names of the couple and the vendors who worked on it. 

What was the inspiration behind this company?
Rosalind: As a photographer for 7-8 years, I felt that there had to be an easier way to share images. Necessity is the mother of invention, and I was needing to share images with the people I worked with in a smarter, faster and more efficient way.  I would spend so much time selecting photos for each vendor and then burning discs and sending them off, and then would spend more time because they would ask me to recrop, resize, etc for their various projects. Knowing something about database structure and with my management background, I knew "there has to be a better way to do this". Siri has a background in luxury goods marketing and knew that what vendors needed beyond the sharing was also that they really needed to be able to produce beautiful marketing.  So Siri, inspired by my framework, took it to the next level.

Why should a vendor use your service to create inspiration boards when there are other free online services that allow them to do that?
Two Bright Lights allows you to put everything in one place. It also allows you to show off images of YOUR work, as opposed to showing what somebody else did. All of the images in your library demonstrate what you can do for a client.  We also eliminate the need for photographers to do something different for each vendor, spending time selecting different types of photos for each vendor and burning individual discs for them.  The photographers upload the images, tag the vendors who worked on that wedding and then those vendors can download the photos they want or need in a self-serve format.

With the referrals, this idea is that if a photographer feels like "I give images to these planners, but they never seem to send anyone my way", our referral process allows you to see who is giving you the most referrals, so the photographers feel more inclined to give more images. A lot of vendors will say "oh we have referred a bunch of weddings" but you never really know if they did or not. With Two Bright Lights, you can see the actual number of referrals people are sending you. 

Our software brands the email with your logo and sends through our system. If the client clicks through those links to those referred vendors, that is tracked and those vendors will be able to see who referred them. Everything is personalized.  We are also hoping to raise the ethical bar in the industry through this process, so that there is a level of accountability in referring each other.  

We also have a way to benchmark against peer groups and will have real time averages based on what kinds of images each type of vendor is using.

And is that information private? If a wedding planner refers a certain photographer or florist for an event, will the other photographers or florists see that?
No, the other vendors won't be able to know who else you are referring.  Each vendor's dashboard is completely private to them.

Will Two Bright Lights work if the other vendors aren't members? It seems that its functionality is dependent on the photographers being members - will a vendor be able to upload images if they are not the photographer?
Two Bright Lights is predicated on the purpose of photographers providing images. The value of providing the images has to come back to photographers in the form of referrals. The different parties get slightly different value from it. We truly believe that images are sacred and so with our software all images are appropriately credited, and all output automatically credits them. We want to make it easy for vendors to give that credit and the only way to ensure that is for the software to do that. There is also a benefit for vendors to invite other vendors to join - for each person who joins, the person who invited them gets a month free.

Where did the name Two Bright Lights come from?
As we had come up with the business concept, the word "networking" came up over and over.  While searching, we found that the word networking is so overused, and we wanted words that are more accessible. We started thinking of a constellation of stars; a constellation is about connecting lights together and every constellation begins by connecting two bright lights. By connecting one to another, a constellation is born. For our logo, we included butterflies because we believe that networking has to be more than social, it also has to be smart.

One of the things that has impressed me has been the very systematic approach you've taken to launching this company. Why did you choose to go about it in the way you did, bring on advisors, etc?
Siri: Within the industry there are a couple of different phases in our roll-out efforts: The first phase leveraged a little bit of a megaphone - speaking to the audience, speaking to the people who have everyone else's ears already. We were positioned to do that already with Rosalind being in the industry. We formed a partnership with the Digital Wedding Forum (DWF) and had over 700 participants in the survey.  We wanted to know how do they get most bang for their buck given the economic times. We also wanted to be sure we were giving back to the community before trying to sell them something; giving rather than taking.

Next was focusing on a critical community: wedding planners.  Planners are generally the first point of contact in the engagement process and have a tremendous amount of influence on brides. Ali Phillips, a wedding planner here in Chicago, recommended that we connect with Rebecca Grinnals, a marketing consultant to the wedding industry. We hired Rebecca for an Engage 1-to-1, which she does with a number of people in the industry. She's seen and worked with the software, so she's integrated into what we're doing from a level of knowledge.

We have a very localized strategy within Chicago and have worked with a number of individuals in the local market so they are very in tune with what we're doing. We also reached out to some people on the national level - Jessica Claire, who is a personal friend of Rosalind's, and who has a tremendous amount of influence in the industry.  We also reached out to Jen Campbell of the Green Wedding Shoes blog to include the editorial and blogging side.

We are incredibly excited about beta testing, which will be starting up in a few weeks. This will add another wave of people and hopefully that will expand to greater community.  We've been using email marketing campaigns through MadMimi. We definitely practice what we preach - cost effective marketing. We really believe that you start with a list of people who want the information and you add to that.

A leopard can't choose its spots, so our approach to how we came to view this roll-out of our business comes from being in a professional and academic environment.  We sat for days and weeks asking about our objective, starting with strategy first then going to execution. This is not necessarily something that a lot of artist types have intuitively, not necessarily the first way they would think about it. We set up the advisory board because we know that there are certain areas we are very good at, and at the same time there are others that are not our areas of expertise.

You're launching a new venture during a time that many are afraid to do so. Do you feel that the economy has helped or hindered you in any way?
We're crazy enough. We quit our jobs and are definitely bootstrapping it; using cost-effective matters to market the business.  We're also wearing Old Navy and Target t-shirts these days.  The web agency we worked with did a fantastic job and we couldn't have afforded them in a good economy. We are launching the business for 30-40% less than if we had started it 2-3 years ago. People are hungry right now, us included. We do a lot of things ourselves. We have a few interns and one person working for us now. We are definitely not operating in the old world dot com environment with ping pong tables and dogs in the office - we're lean and mean.

If you get started during the darkest hour, you rise with the recovery. There is something to be said for when everybody is hunkering down, take a risk when everyone else is not - that will have payoffs. Not to say it isn't scary, but we believe our best days are in front of us.   There's a saying that when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. Well, when the going gets tough, the tough start investing. We really believe we are a good value for people and are an accountable marketing source. We offer something very tangible for a very fair price. Several people have told us that we are underpriced, but we priced that way because we want to help small businesses accelerate their growth.

What advice would you give to entrepreneurs who are just starting out?
Rosalind: I left the corporate environment 8-9 years ago, and the most important thing I learned was that there are a million people who will tell you why it won't work and why it will fail so if you are trying to get validation from the universe that it will work, that will fail. You really have to have inner strength, and granted you cannot just be a Pollyanna about the whole thing, but you should have the confidence in yourself to go out there and do it. If you need people to say "OMG you're so wonderful, you're so awesome", you will be disappointed. The people looking for that will ultimately fail and if you start with needing to do that first, you'll set yourself up for failure.

Siri: Understand systematically where your strengths are. No one started knowing everything about everything. Recognize what you're good at, what you aren't, and where you need help. Create a strategic environment; in the last six months my community of friends has changed. Think very strategically about what you need to succeed and how you're going to get those skills. Asking for help is not a sign of failure, it is a smart business tactic and something to not shy away from.

Rosalind: Also, saying "teach me everything you know" is not the same as asking for help. Come to people with specific questions.

Siri: I also did a quick back of the envelope cash flow model. Before you make the jump, you need to be prepared for what you're looking at and preliminary analysis is very important. Part of being fearless is knowing that some days will be a fabulous day, some days won't be, but knowing there is another fabulous one coming right after that.

Also, be very clear up front; we set up legal agreements at the beginning. Not to be doom and gloom, but just to make sure that we had talked through them at the beginning, and that we know what the process is if we disagree or one of us wants to leave the business, etc.


You can learn more about Two Bright Lights by visiting their website and you can follow them on Twitter here.

Photo of Rosalind by Becker, Photo of Siri by Rosalind Photography

Splendid Sundays Volume 11

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

*Khris Cochran, the creative brainiac behind the DIY Bride has launched a new blog called Behind the Scenes at DIY Bride. Posts so far include life with a newborn baby,  a peek into the many facets of her company (blog, books, classes, product line) and thoughts on promoting her second book which will be released in December. Khris is one of my very favorite people in the wedding industry; she is down to earth, ridiculously intelligent (the woman has a PhD in Naval Architecture for goodness' sake), incredibly talented, funny, witty, genuinely nice, and so on and so forth.  Her new blog is sure to inspire, so add it to your reading list ASAP.

*15 Tips for Writing Effective Email from Think Simple Now.

*Tips on how to export and view Google Analytics data in Excel.

*Doing The Math On Discounting

*Book of the Week - Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant. Quick summary from Publishers Weekly: Unlike "red oceans," which are well explored and crowded with competitors, "blue oceans" represent "untapped market space" and the "opportunity for highly profitable growth." Which are you currently operating in? If you are concerned about other wedding planners, photographers, graphic designers or bloggers undercutting you all the time, then you are in a red ocean.

Do you have any splendid finds to share?

Copyrights, Fair Use and Social Media

This Fall, the Copyright Alliance will be sending a letter to President Obama urging him to protect the copyright works of artists across the country.  The letter doesn't outline any specifics so I'm not exactly sure what it will accomplish, but if you'd like to sign the petition, you can do so here.

The Alliance's site also has a plain-English explanation of the Fair Use provision in section 107 of the Copyright Act.  There are some grey areas not explored there, such as blogs who make ad revenue off the traffic their content generates.  These blogs are for-profit entities, yet use photos that are not paid for and are not submitted to them by the copyright holders (the photographers). Can this still be argued to be non-commercial use when without those photos the traffic and therefore ad revenue would drop? This is a growing issue in the blogging industry as a whole (not just wedding and design blogs), and I have a feeling it will be one that is decided by the courts sooner rather than later.  Blogs that host original content (created by themselves or licensed or paid for) are the ones that will last for the long haul. 

If you'd like to avoid that stickiness altogether, I recommend obtaining permission from the photographers prior to using a photo or using the photos available through a Creative Commons license search on Flickr.  Crediting the photographer with a link does not give you rights to use the photo. According to the Fair Use act, "acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission."

Another question that I often get asked by wedding planners and event designers goes along the lines of "don't I get partial copyright of the photo because without my design of the tablescape/reception/display, the photographer would not have been able to create that image?".  The answer is no, the full copyright of the photo belongs to the photographer.  The work that goes into creating wedding photos is always a collaboration, and it would behoove everyone's egos if we kept that in mind, but by law the photo copyright still belongs to the photographer.

On another copyright note, it is also illegal to use unlicensed music on your website.  Purchasing a song off of iTunes is NOT the same as purchasing the license to use it on a website.  Ellen Degeneres is facing a major lawsuit about this as well right now, and it will be interesting to see the outcome of this case. In the meantime, TripleScoop Music is a good site for obtaining licensed, royalty-free music for your company's website at affordable rates (to compare, licenses with ASCAP or BMI are upwards of $900 per year). 

Copyright exists the moment you create something, but cannot be pursued in court until it is registered with the government.  If your work is being plagiarized, however, there are steps you can take outlined here and here.

Profanity and Wedding Blogs

One of the guidelines that I have in my company's social media policies is that I don't allow profanity in the comments left on my blogs and that I reserve the right to delete those that include it.

This policy really has nothing to do with my own views on language, but instead has everything to do with how my potential clients feel about it.  Like it or not, profanity carries a very different weight when it is in writing than it does when it is spoken. Several of my clients have remarked off-hand that they were turned off by the language used on some of the other blogs they read while researching vendors, even though, ironically, they have no problem using similar language during our meetings. 

My wedding blog has always been a critical marketing vehicle for my business, and I am not going to lose a client over someone else's inability to filter their words.  I figure that if a reader who wants to leave comments that include profanity starts sending me checks every month, then I'll let those comments be published.  Until then, this guideline stands.

What is your company's social media policy on profanity?

Top 20 Wedding Planning Blogs by Unique Visitors

Wedding blogs have become a micro-industry of their own within the wedding industry in just a few short years. Blogging is an industry that includes several different business models, some lucrative and some not.  It's also an industry that is shrouded a bit in confusion and fuzzy numbers, in part because it is so young.

Because of this, I am starting a monthly feature that will list the top 20 wedding planning blogs by unique monthly visitor count (this information is public, by the way, and I have cross-referenced it with both free and paid sources). Out of respect to the bloggers, I won't post the actual visitor numbers, just the blog's rank in the top 20.

I was inspired to share this information after having several media kits sent to me with claims that are blatantly untrue.  To be fair, much of it is just a lack of understanding on the part of the blogger of how to accurately read the statistics that Google Analytics and other tracking sites provide.  While these inflated numbers may serve the blog's business purposes, they do not serve the business purposes of the vendors submitting material for publication and who are providing the ad revenue many of the blogs depend on.

It's important to note that higher traffic does not necessarily result in more click-throughs for vendors who advertise or are featured in editorial.  For example, The Bride's Cafe consistently delivers more qualified and convertible leads for vendors who are featured than some of the other higher trafficked blogs do for the same vendors with the same variables (day of week and time post goes live being among them).  Have a strategy in place that works for your business before you submit content or sign an ad contract with any website or blog.

Wedding Planning Blogs - Traffic Rank as of August 2009

1. Weddingbee
2. Offbeat Bride
3. Style Me Pretty
4. OnceWed
5. Elizabeth Anne Designs

6. Vintage Glam Blog
7. Snippet and Ink
8. Wedding Chicks
9. 100 Layer Cake
10. Green Wedding Shoes

11. Junebug Weddings
12. 'I Do' It Yourself
13. DIY Bride
14. Brooklyn Bride
15. Oh So Beautiful Paper

16. Southern Weddings
17. The Bride's Cafe
18. Blue Orchid Designs
19. Ritzy Bee
20. With This Ring

Integrating Social Media with Customer Service

In May, the day before I was supposed to fly to the East Coast for a week of workshops and meetings, my laptop hard drive started acting up and threatened to crash.  A bit stressed, I twittered about this and one of the managers at Celebration Hotel, where the Florida workshop was being held and where I would be staying, sent me this reply:

My loyalty does not come easily when it comes to hotels. While I appreciate swank or luxury, as long as a hotel is clean, safe and relatively comfortable, I am fine. By paying attention to what I needed however, and offering a solution before I even had to ask, this upscale hotel has earned a customer for life.

One of the things that is important to note about this interaction is that I didn't point out the hotel name in my tweet about my laptop; so it wasn't a matter of the hotel just looking at their @ replies or doing a search for their hotel name on Twitter.  They were actively paying attention to their guests, even before my arrival.  If done poorly, this type of attention could come across as creepy - and many companies do this poorly.  If done well, as it was here, it is useful - both to me for peace of mind with my computer and presentation needs and for the hotel since it will earn them loyal and future revenue whenever I am in the Orlando area.

One of the things the hotel could have done to make the experience even better, though, would have been to add a note under my file in their CRM so that the person at the front desk could follow up when I checked in. As it was, the knowledge of my predicament and the solution offered by the hotel stopped with the person in charge of the Twitter account. Adding this information to the CRM and having another employee follow up on it would have reinforced the fact that the hotel cares about their guests on a personal level.

This method of interoffice cross-communication can be employed by any company using social media, regardless of size.  If you are a one person show, keep notes in your client files on this type of interaction anyway, so that you can remember to follow up on it during your next consultation.  If you own a hair salon or a wedding dress shop or even a photography or wedding planning studio where multiple people may be working with a client, this type of high-touch service from every member of your company only reinforces in your client's mind that they made the right choice and that you are a safe investment of their wedding dollars.

Splendid Sundays Volume 10

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

*Check out this post on ethics and disclosure in social media. If you have a vested interest in a company you're posting about online, be sure to disclose it.

*I've started a daily quote library on Find Splendid that features thoughts from different people and leaders in history focused on helping people think and live a splendid life.

*Last year, Mashable posted 270+ Tools for Running a Business Online. Most of the applications are valuable for any small business owner, not just those with Internet-based companies.

*Event Solutions opened nominations for their 2010 Spotlight Awards this week. You can nominate yourself or a colleague here. 

*If you're thinking of redesigning your website or blog, here is a list of questions to ask before you move forward with your plans or hire a web designer.

Using Your Blog Photos to Increase SEO

Here's a simple change you can make to your blogging workflow that will help you increase your search engine rank significantly, especially in Google's image search:

Change the titles of your photos to keywords that describe the photo.

For example, when photos are uploaded to a computer, many of the individual photo titles default to a combination of numbers and letters: DSC_8247, 34358_9492, etc. Many photographers and some wedding bloggers will even change the default titles for their own filing purposes: ThinkSplendid_ClientName_37, etc. 

By changing the titles to a description of what the photo is (ex: pink peony centerpiece; green and white bridal shower, etc) you increase its chances of being found in a Google search. 

When adding the keywords, keep it simple and descriptive of the photo.  Put yourself in a bride's shoes and try to think like they would.  What will they have to type into the search engine to find your photo? When people sit down at a computer to search for wedding inspiration, they are not typing in DSC_8247.

Avoid listing several random keywords together (ex: 'Best Wedding Cake Baker in West Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, all of Southern California and the World') and focus instead on what makes that photo unique.

Doing this may add a few minutes to your blogging process, especially if you are not a photographer and don't have the software to run a quick action, but the return on those few minutes will pay off in the long run.

Knowing Your Numbers

Last month, The Gap announced that they were launching an intense social media campaign entitled "Born to Fit" in lieu of running television ads. Whether or not The Gap made a wise decision in pulling their more traditional television advertising in full favor of social media is a discussion I'll leave for another time. What caught my eye in this article was this line:

Channing said The Gap had set no numerical benchmarks to determine success in the campaign, but rather would look at "how much consumers interact with the brand" to gauge ROI.

No numerical benchmarks? Really?

Building buzz is an important skill set in social media but the return on investment comes from leveraging that buzz to increase your company revenues not in simply being more popular. The Gap has no numerical benchmarks for this endeavor? How will they know whether or not the campaign worked or not? I highly doubt that executives at The Gap will be happy if the buzz and "consumer interaction" results in selling just five more pairs of jeans per store. 

In the wedding industry, the prevalent attitude toward social media still tends to be "well this Internet thing is a fad, but what the heck, let's try it out. We don't need to actually measure anything with numbers and math, because you know, it's social and just a fun thing."

Your company's social media strategy needs to be treated with the same due diligence and planning that you would treat any other aspect of your business. What do you want to get out being involved in social media? More business? How much more? It's no secret that social media requires quite a bit of time. If you spend four hours per week on your blog, Facebook or Twitter, what do you hope that will result in? What are your metrics? Do you want more Twitter followers? Why? What do those numbers represent in your plan?

When it comes to your online involvement, know what you want and set a plan with relevant metrics to help you get there. As Zig Ziglar famously says, "If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time."

Finding Your Company on Google

When you do a search for keywords you want your website and blog to come up under online (example: Dallas Wedding Photographer), be sure you are signed out of your Google account (Gmail, Google Reader, YouTube, etc). If you are signed in, Google will include sites you access often higher on the list because it tracks your browsing history and preferences.

Many people mistakenly think they rank higher in the search engines than they actually do. Signing out when you search will help you see what page and level you come up on much more accurately.

Splendid Sundays Volume 9

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

*This week on Find Splendid, I shared part of my healthcare story. It includes a couple of thoughts on my faith, so please consider this fair warning if you're offended by that sort of thing. The majority of the story however is not opinion - it is the real life account of a very difficult, stretching and personal season in my life. 

*Google released a site that aggregates various Internet statistics.  This is an interesting one, considering it involves the primary age-group of most engaged couples: "For the third successive year it is those aged 25 - 34 who are the most frequent online shoppers." Verdict Research, May 2009

*Great article from The Switchboards on color psychology and how it relates to consumer sales. Are the colors of your website and blog working for or against your business goals?

*Adventurer and speaker Alastair Humphreys posted an article on 8 Tiny Ways To Improve Your Life. I found this tidbit fascinating: "If you get up a mere 10 minutes earlier each day, and go to bed 10 minutes later you will have created for yourself 5 extra days per year."

*Laura Novak wrote a great piece on creating an advisory board for your business. I'm a firm believer that a true expert knows that there is always more to learn, and Laura's suggestion provides a great way to continue to educate yourself, even if your business has outgrown some of the mass education the event industry offers.

Do you have any splendid finds to share?

5 Articles for Wedding Entrepreneurs

If you're new to Think Splendid or just want a refresher, here are five of our more popular articles from the archives, based on number of post views:

*Are your policies preventing you from providing remarkable customer service?

*e-Courage and The Not-So-Anonymous Internet.

*Part of my story on how I got started as an entrepreneur.

*The legalities of selling inspiration boards.

*How to handle plagiarism part 1 and part 2. 

If you'd like to subscribe to Think Splendid, you can do so in a reader here or via email here.  You can also sign up for our newsletter here.

If you'd like to learn more about how Splendid Communications can help your company's social media strategy, please contact us.

You're So Vain, You Probably Think This Post Is About You

There's nothing quite like social media to awaken the passive aggressive beast in all of us. In fact, if I were a betting gal, I'd wager that each and every person reading this has posted something on their blog, Facebook page or Twitter status that called somebody else out without quite calling them out.  It's an ignoble practice, but we're all human and it happens. 

More frightening than the thought of someone spinelessly making a remark that we just know is about us and our particular situation is the thought that they're really not thinking about us at all.

Sometimes, people may be talking about you.  Most of the time though, they're probably not.  They're simply sharing an observation and if it rings particularly true for you, it's probably A) because their comment makes you uncomfortable about your own flaws or habits or B) because you and they share similar experiences in your careers (ex: both of you are entrepreneurs and in the wedding industry).

At any rate, relax.  Don't spend all your time analyzing the 140 character remarks other people make. Your time is better spent creating and refining a more brilliant product or service.  Once you do that, people actually WILL be talking about you. 

Splendid Sundays Volume 8

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

*Graphic designer Trisha Hay and modern wedding photographer Becka Knight have teamed up to create Color Me Inspired, a blog devoted to providing inspiration for brides and wedding vendors. All of the content is owned and created by them, which means the sky's the limit on their creativity. Their first post even includes a DIY fan template in your choice of three colors. You can follow Color Me Inspired on Twitter here.

*Do you do email marketing for your business? Here is a list of 100 words to avoid because they trigger spam filters.

*Your competition probably isn't who you think. Many wedding planners assume that other planners are their competition because they are selling the same service. The truth is that your competition is more often than not the mother of the bride, the bridesmaids or the friend who loves planning parties and will plan the couple's wedding as a gift. Same goes for the friend from college who loves photography and the co-worker who recently purchased Photoshop and a new Epson home printer and is now practically a graphic designer (heck, she even has her own card shop on Etsy).

*Eye Candy IS A Critical Business Requirement. See also the In Defense of Eye Candy article on A List Apart. Does your website or blog invite trust? (Note: if you are using Blogger and have the "Followers" widget visible, remove it. It screams amateur.)

*As a recovering email auto-reply user, I loved this post by Peter Shankman of HARO on auto-replies. I had adopted the Tim Ferris email auto-reply method after reading his book, and it subsequently annoyed everyone who received it. Not the outcome I was going for. I dropped it after a friend rightly pointed out that the auto-replies sound like "if you don't reach me during a certain time-frame, you're SOL".  Is your auto-reply actually helping your customer service and brand experience or harming it?

Do you have any splendid finds to share?

Social Media Impact vs ROI

If you're not measuring your use of social media as a company, you're wasting your time. Would you spend thousands of dollars on a glossy magazine ad without knowing if it yielded the return you need? The same goes for time invested in social media. Unfortunately, many have jumped on the bandwagon without knowing where the wagon is even going or if it's on a road at all.  The party may be fun for a while, but parties only pay the bills if you are charging enough to plan, shoot, cater or design some aspect of them.

Social Media Impact: How many people read your site? What percentage of your readers leave comments? How many page views does your blog generate? How many of those readers are loyal to you and how many check in only when they remember to? Which posts attract the most attention? In which ways? How many people follow you on Twitter? What percentage of your Tweets are retweeted and by whom? How many Facebook fans do you have? How many do you know in real life? How many simply accepted your friend request so as not to offend? How many people have subscribed to your email newsletter as a result of the trust you've built? How many people are signed up for your newsletter because you held other content hostage to their readership by forcing a squeeze page enrollment? How many "high-profile" circles (publication editors, media producers, etc) are now aware of your company because of your participation in social media? How has being involved in social media affected your SEO?

These are just a few examples of the impact your company has in the social media space. They are NOT a measure of the ROI (return on investment) of your time and/or money spent on social media.

There are also other intangible benefits that social media can bring: deeper relationships with other industry colleagues, a creative outlet which breeds greater levels of creativity, and an ability to solidify your thoughts on a matter (nothing clarifies the thought process better than having to write out what's in your head), to name a few.

Social Media ROI: How many career-enhancing opportunities has social media provided? How much revenue has it generated for your company, both directly and indirectly? (example: I once had a bride hire me because she trusted me from reading my wedding blog; she then later referred a friend to hire me who doesn't read blogs at all).

Quite simply, a return on investment in social media needs to be measured in dollars. If it isn't making you money, why are you spending valuable business time doing it?

That said, the importance of impact can't be ignored. Valuable ROI will only result because of the impact your efforts generate. If you don't put the time in, you can expect to get nothing out of it. Many of the people who proclaim that online media doesn't work for business have given up too soon, have a poor social media strategy (or none at all), and/or are focusing their efforts in places that will not benefit them over the long haul (only posting updates and photos on Facebook to a very limited group of eyes instead of making the content - and their brand's claim to it - available to the broader public).

Social media is not a quick fix nor a get-rich-quick solution. While results may happen more quickly than through more traditional or established means, the long-term investment of time and patience is critical to success in the social media space.