Splendid Sundays Volume 25

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

*Unleashing the power of website analytics.

*Is Twitter fading?

*Envelopments launched their new blog this past week.

*Consumers are estimated to spend $6.2 billion on mobile phone apps in 2010.

*Quotable: "The successful person takes advantage of time all the time; the unsuccessful person laments in the lack of it."  - Jeffrey Gitomer

Do you have any splendid finds to share?



Envelopments is a client of Splendid Communications.

Quick Tip For Coming Up With Blog Ideas

A quick tip on coming up with relevant blog content: answer the questions people are too embarrassed to ask.

Brides, grooms, and wedding guests will turn to Google first before they ask a friend a question they assume they should already know.

What is a wedding cocktail hour? Which side of the suit does the boutonniere get pinned on? Do I have to bring a gift to an engagement party? What's an F-Stop and do I even need to care?

If you can prevent people from feeling ignorant, you will have loyal readers.

False Praise and Mediocrity

A good friend and I have a running joke: "every woman needs two types of friends during a breakup: the friend who will tell her the guy was a loser and no one ever liked him anyway, and the friend who will tell her that he was a great guy but this is still for the best."

Both types of friends - the ones who will tell you what you want to hear and the ones who will tell you what you need to hear - have a place in life. We would be emotionally out of balance if we only had one or the other.

As far as the wedding industry is concerned, however, the first type of friend is in abundance and we need more of the second friend. Sometimes I see a dozen or more tweets or blog comments telling someone their website redesign is "fabulous" and I wonder if we are looking at the same thing. I hear people tell others that their idea is fantastic and a game-changer, when it is anything but. And most recently, I have seen people launch entire new business ventures, at the advice of others, that have no viable way of making any money.

It is socially acceptable to give false praise, which only results in more mediocrity. Honesty doesn't have to be delivered in a caustic manner, but it does need to be delivered. Blind spots are called that for a reason; you can't see them yourself. Surround yourself with people who will tell you the truth about your business - even when you don't want to hear it.

Splendid Sundays Volume 24

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

*Photographer Melissa Jill wrote a great post about harnessing the power of Twitter. If you haven't joined yet, her post is a great one to read before getting started.

*10 realities about being an author from Khris Cochran at DIY Bride.

*The New York Times is switching to a pay model.

*The most expensive iPhone app to date.

*Quotable: "All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism — it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen." - Conan O'Brien

Do you have any splendid finds to share?

There, I Said It: Wedding MLM Schemes

For those of you buying into all the MLM information marketing schemes targeting wedding planners and other industry professionals: There is no "secret" to being successful in the wedding industry and all the f*r*e*e teleseminars where you are sold on buying yet another level of service to discover the host's secrets are not going to help you.

If you want a secret, here's one: work harder AND smarter. Spend the hour you would have spent on the call and do something productive with your time: write blog posts for the week, read a business book, or pay it forward and meet an industry newcomer for coffee. Save the money you would have spent on these "brain trust" groups that pump out the same cookie cutter results and identical programs and spend it on workshops, conferences or seminars being taught by people who can actually back up their success.

Whatever you do, please make 2010 the year you stop falling (and paying) for this get-rich-quick-in-weddings BS.

There, I said it.




PS: You can view a calendar of industry educational opportunities here.

Social Media by the Numbers

These stats courtesy Gary Hayes:

(If you're viewing this in a reader, please click through to see the graph.)

Google's Alternative to Twitterfeed

I have long been a fan of Twitterfeed for its ease of automatically updating Twitter with new blog posts. However, it's been a bit unreliable recently and doesn't provide the type of analytics I'd been wanting.  Also, if you signed up before June of 2009, then it is practically impossible to recover your log-in and password information if you've forgotten it. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Yesterday I made the switch from using Twitterfeed (had to disable it through Twitter's settings since I can't log into my account) to Socialize, a similar service that Google's Feedburner offers. The benefit of using Feedburner's option is that it integrates the click-through data with your Feedburner and Google Analytics information. The Socialize setting is under the Publicize tab in your Feedburner account.  There are also some recent additions to the email options, so be sure to check those out and update your settings accordingly. 

Here's a snapshot of what the settings look like and how simple they are to set up:

Which tools do you use to update Twitter with new blog posts?

When Social Media Won't Help You

Heather Morton, an art buyer in Canada, made this statement on her blog a few months ago:

Do I have to actually tell you that the most important thing is that you have kick ass images in your book? Do I need to spell that out every time I talk about promotion? That should be a given! If you aren’t doing good solid work (mid tier) or super interesting work (top tier) then put down the laptop, pick up the camera and go shoot something fantastic!

This applies to every creative entrepreneur, not just photographers. You can update Twitter and Facebook all day long, continually tweak your blog, refine your logo every month, read every single wedding blog and website, but if you don't have solid work to back it up, social media will only take you so far.

When a bride receives a disc of images that are inconsistent and don't match up to the quality in the portfolio a photographer showed her, it doesn't really matter that the photographer is the darling of all the wedding bloggers.  When a groomsman gets alcohol poisoning or a guest has a heart attack on the dance floor (both have actually happened), your abilities and knowledge base as a wedding planner had better be solid enough to handle those crises in a professional manner in a split second.  The amount of Twitter or Facebook friends you have won't really matter if you get sued for professional incompetence.

Social media is meant to be a marketing vehicle for your business. You actually have to have a product or service to market and that product or service needs to be the best you can make it.  Don't spend all, or even the majority, of your time online. Turn off your computer and continue to educate yourself on your field whether that's through shooting more, taking a design class, studying risk management, etc. Commit to having a solid product or service and commit to constant improvement. Doing this will set you apart from 99% of your competition.

Splendid Sundays Volume 23

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

*Google has a page for disaster relief help for Haiti with reputable organizations that you can donate to or get involved with.

*8 reasons Conan should go direct.

*Integrity in business. 

*AOL is rumored to be purchasing Mashable.

*Book of the week: Wooden on Leadership: How to Create a Winning Organization by John Wooden. From an Amazon review: John Wooden is the epitome of a man who lives by his values. In this book, he shares these core values and combines them with key management tactics to produce a blueprint for success as a leader. He has a knack for taking a concept and breaking it down to its most simple format so that others can understand how to move forward step-by-step. He is visionary, yet operational and this book gives the basics of both worlds.

Branding + Blogging Workshop with Emilie Sommer

I made a calculated decision in the Spring of last year to really scale back the number of workshops I will be teaching in 2010. This is intentionally a much "quieter" year for me, so I'll only be speaking and teaching at a few places.

One of those events is the Studio 227 Workshop Series, where I'll be co-teaching a class with the extraordinarily talented Emilie Sommer of Emilie Inc Photography. The workshop is called Business Basics: Branding and Blogging and will be on Thursday, February 25th at Emilie's studio in Portland, Maine.

I was thrilled when Emilie asked me to present the blogging portion of the seminar, because it means that I get to sit in on the branding portion that she is teaching. In case you're not familiar with her, Emilie is a branding GENIUS and this workshop will be money well spent. As a bonus, J Sandifer from Livebooks will also be speaking.

The cost for the workshop is $150 for each of the two sessions or $250 for the entire day including a networking lunch. You can find more information about the workshop, hotels, and registration at Emilie's blog.

Hope to see you there!

How to Conduct Your Own Market Research Using StatCounter

If you've been to one of my social media workshops, then you've heard my not-so-secret hope that Google purchases StatCounter soon and integrates it with Google Analytics. Until that happens though, it's a good tool to use in addition to Analytics because it provides some information that Analytics does not, namely the IP address and actions of each visitor to your site.

Tracking visitors by IP address is important for a couple of reasons (not to mention if you have any Nancy Drew tendencies, this will help satisfy them). 

First, if your ideas are being copied all the time, it is a little difficult for the person stealing your ideas to claim they were their own when you can see from StatCounter that they spent 54 minutes on the specific pages of the content in question the day before they launched their "brand new idea". If for some reason you ever need to take legal action for copyright infringement or something along those lines, having this data can help you.

Second, it can help you track the conversion of visitors to sales. This can help you really drill down how your clients went from just being interested in what you had to offer to that all-important moment of pulling out their credit card and making a financial commitment to your company. Having this data can help you tailor your marketing strategy to future potential clients so that you don't have to guess about what it is that helps your specific target market cross the line from window shopper to buyer.

To do this, set up your website's contact form so that it provides you with the IP address of each person who uses it to reach you. Once you have that, you can go into StatCounter, choose "look up by IP address" and then tag that IP with the person it belongs to. You can then see exactly which pages that potential client viewed, which site they were referred from, which links they clicked out on, etc.

If you do this for each inquiry and save the results in Evernote (you don't have to use Evernote, but I find it keeps it easily organized), by the end of the year you will have a stack of valuable market research collected specifically for your business. By comparing all of the year's inquiries and their browsing patterns side by side, you'll be able to see patterns and discern what worked and what didn't, what you can change about your website or blog content and what should stay. You can also compare the patterns of the people who took the action to contact you with the patterns of those that did not and be able to further refine your strategy from there.

A couple other StatCounter tips:

1. If you use Wordpress or Typepad, then it will log the IP address of each person who leaves a comment. You can tag these in StatCounter to see how often those commenters return and if they are regular readers or random visitors.

2. If potential employees or interns use your contact form to inquire about a job, you can then tag their IP in StatCounter and see how much they researched on your site before clicking "send".

Do you use StatCounter? If so, in what ways?

Splendid Sundays Volume 22

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

*The website for Engage!10 launches today with details on the conferences in June and October. Check it out and if you have any questions about whether or not this conference is a good fit for your wedding business, please feel free to email me at hello{at}thinksplendid.com (and no, my answer won't be an automatic "yes" - Engage is purposefully designed to not be for everyone).  

*Defriending Facebook (thanks to Rebekah Burder at Honeysuckle Life for the link)

*iPhone cases that actually have style (thanks to Christy at Junebug Weddings for this link)

*Can harmony be found between design blogs and design magazines from a business perspective? Elle Decor thinks so.

*Book of the week: Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy by Martin Lindstrom. From a review on Amazon: Lindstrom carried out a global survey of customers using brain-scanning so he could peer into their minds as they observed various logos and such. Along the way he presents intriguing, and at times devastating, scientific findings on brands (Apple computers light up the same region of the brain as do pictures of rosary beads and churches), subliminal advertising and tobacco, and most startling of all . . . that cigarette warning labels, rather than discouraging smokers, actually make them want to smoke.

Do you have any splendid finds to share?

You Write What You Read

Studies show that people generally write at one level below what they consistently read. If you want to write a more engaging blog, take an honest look at your literary diet. Are your reading habits helping or hurting you?

Session at The Special Event in New Orleans

Next week I'll be speaking at The Special Event in New Orleans, and if you're attending the conference, I'd love for you to come. My session is on Tuesday, January 12th at 2:30 in room 354 and is called Talk is Cheap, Silence is Fatal: Using Social Media Successfully.

The first part of the title is a quote from the book The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual, which came out about a decade ago and though technology has changed dramatically since then, the book is still quite relevant today.

Here's a synopsis of the session:

Print is not dead and social media is not a fad. Knowing how to effectively integrate social media into your business and marketing plans is a must-have skill set for any event company in today's world. Bottom line: If you're not involved in online media, you're missing out on millions of dollars.

Deliverables:
1. Learn specific strategies on building your brand and your profits through social media.
2. Discuss some of the legal and ethical issues that apply to social media
3. Share tips on how to best manage your online reputation so that it doesn’t manage you.

Also, I'm pretty shy (for real), so if you see me around next week, please stop me and say hello. I would love to meet you!

If you're not attending, but would like to follow along on Twitter, the official hashtag for The Special Event is #TSE2010.

Is it Okay to Twitter Workshop Content?

Twitter has made it easier for content from workshops, conferences and seminars to be broadcast to a much wider audience. It also brings up a grey area in social media etiquette:

Is it okay to publicly post content that people are charging money for to an audience that is not paying for it?

As an event producer, I'm a bit torn on this one as I can easily see both sides:

Side A: People are paying good money to attend this conference and any event planner can tell you that conferences are not cheap to produce. Speaker fees, travel costs, venue rental, food and beverage costs add up very quickly. (Just to give some perspective for any non-event planners out there who may not get to see banquet orders very often: the coffee or iced tea that's set out at an event at a higher-end resort in any given bustling city typically runs $65 or more per gallon.)  It's pricey to put on these events and the fact that people are twittering away key points of intellectual property to people who aren't helping covering the cost of the event is directly at odds with making a profit on the event or even breaking even. Plus, is it really fair to those who are paying to be there?

Side B: Twitter is fantastic for marketing events. There is no doubt that when attendees post updates from an event it increases awareness and interest for the next one. It is much easier to put on future events when you have Twitter buzz and increased word-of-mouth to build on. So in that sense, even though information is being shared with people who aren't generating current revenue for the event, they very well could be people who sign up and pay to attend a date further down the road.

There are many more questions that tie in with this particular topic in social media etiquette: does Twitter break the trust and atmosphere of a group? Can attendees or speakers really share knowing that anything they say is truly not "off the record"? 

At Engage!09 The Encore this past October, designer Todd-Avery Lenahan asked everyone to "use discretion" in tweeting his talk as he wanted to be an open book, but knew that Twitter could easily present his stories out of context since many people post soundbites and not complete ideas from presentations.  Many smaller events have adopted a similar idea and made their meetings Twitter and Facebook free. Is that the only solution? Will there be large events that are strictly Twitterless? Or does the increased use of these social mediums mean that we'll have to shift our views on not only privacy but on how the industry makes money from instructional events as well?

Lots of questions and as I mentioned, I don't have a firm black and white view. What are your opinions? Should conference content be shared with non-conference attendees via social media? How do you think social media and instant sharing will change the future of industry conferences and workshops?

Splendid Sundays Volume 21

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

*Two talented sugar artists, Minette of Savannah Custom Cakes and Sharon of Sweet Sensations both recently launched a new endeavor for the DIY bride, making it easier than ever for clients to order beautiful cakes "off the rack". Check out their sites here and here.

*Social Media predictions for 2010.

*Medium vs Message.

*Has Twitter killed the letter to the editor?

*Book of the week: Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh McLeod. I first read this book when it came out this past Summer and I have been rereading it for the start of the new year. Definitely motivating and full of some great advice. One of my favorite quotes (of many): "Being good at anything is like figure skating - the definition of being good at it is being able to make it look easy. But it never is easy. Ever. That is what the stupidly wrong people conveniently forget."

Do you have any splendid finds to share?