Speaking at The Special Event

Next Tuesday, I'll be presenting a session with Xochitl Gonzalez of Always A Bridesmaid at The Special Event in Phoenix. Our session is entitled How to Sell to the Highly Educated Bride and comes from our own research and experiences working with couples with post-graduate degrees and high-powered careers and how they are no longer the exception when it comes to client types.

The session is on Tuesday, January 25th at 4:00 PM in room 126ABC (the room may change, so be sure to check your schedule when you pick it up at registration).

Here is the official summary of what we'll be covering:

How to Sell to the Highly Educated Bride

Today's bride is more educated than ever and she's not shopping alone: 65% of grooms are now involved in wedding purchase decisions. Coupled with the vast amount of wedding resources available online, today's bride and groom are shopping armed with information and convinced that they know it all. Is your business ready to sell to the new bridal consumer? Is your current business plan costing you money? This session will show you how today's generation of couples thinks and shops and will arm you with the tools to convert that knowledge into sales and profit by implementing simple, cost-effective changes to your marketing strategy.

In this session, you'll learn:
1. How to harness the purchase power of the educated couple.
2. How to capitalize on the shift from the local to global wedding market.
3. What to do when your client thinks they know everything.
4. How to get free publicity and turn it into cash.

Aside from Xochitl and I competing for most unpronounceable name spelling, she has become a close friend and a colleague I respect immensely. She is one of the best in the industry and will be presenting another session on Wednesday on the topic of multi-cultural clients, so be sure to attend that one as well. Here is a quick bio blurb on Xochitl in case you haven't had the pleasure of meeting her yet:

Xochitl (So-Cheel) Gonzalez is the co-founder of Always a Bridesmaid Experience Design and the editor of Always a Blogsmaid. Founded in 2003, Always a Bridesmaid is one of New York's premier wedding consulting and design firms and the go-to wedding expert on ethnic, multi-cultural, inter-faith and cross cultural celebrations. They have travelled around the country and internationally to help clients fuse and blend cultures and religions flawlessly. Their work has been featured in Bride's, The Knot, Martha Stewart.com amongst other publications and they have been seen on The Style and Food networks. Their blog, Always a Blogsmaid, was recently named one of the top 10 must read wedding blogs by Bride's Magazine. Xochitl is a graduate of Brown University and served on the board of the Alumni Association as the Multi-Cultural Alumni chair. Prior to founding Always a Bridesmaid she was the Director of Marketing and Events for the international Clio Awards. She is a native of Brooklyn.

Hope to see you next week! If you see either Xochitl or me, be sure to stop us and say hello.

Online Impersonation Now Illegal in California

On January 1st, the California Senate Bill 1411 went into effect, making it a standard misdemeanor for people in California to impersonate another person on the Internet.

Basically any email accounts, blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages or other online accounts are now illegal that "knowingly and without consent credibly impersonate another person through or on an Internet Web site or by other electronic means with the intent to harm, intimidate, threaten or defraud another person."

This law was designed in part to help combat identity theft, and it doesn't just apply to trademarked names. Violations can result in a fine of up to $1000 and/or up to a year in jail. The law was created mainly to counter cyber-harassment and not necessarily non-malicious satire or parody, and some attorneys are concerned that the bill doesn't have enough structure to effectively rule on cases involving satire or parody accounts.

You can read the full bill here.

How to Calculate Social Media ROI

ROI or return on investment in social media is often turned into something much more difficult than it actually is. ROI is a number (a percentage) tied directly to the finances your efforts generate. Any non-financial benefits (stronger relationships with other vendors and/or clients, greater brand awareness, etc) that come from engaging in social media are important, but they are not ROI. An effective social media strategy will offer both a return on investment as well as other benefits.

Some of the benefits derived from social media may lead to a greater ROI later on, but they are not ROI in and of themselves. For example, most publishers these days want to review the analytics data from your blog before awarding a book deal. Increasing the number of visitors and subscribers to your blog is a benefit of social media, not a return on investment. After all, you can't pay your bills in blog readers (or Twitter followers or Facebook fans). The resulting book deal, however, does get factored into ROI because it pays you in the mother of all currencies: money.

The formula for ROI is simple:

ROI = (Profit-Investment/Investment) (100)

To calculate ROI, you'll need to know how many people hired you because of a social media channel and how much time you spend on social media as well as what that time costs you (regardless of whether or not you pay yourself, your time still costs money. Nothing is free, including social media). Here's an example that I shared at a speaking engagement last year, using round numbers:

• Over the course of a year, you sell three services for $10,000 each because of social media.
• You spend 5 hours a week on social media at a cost of $50 per hour. That's $250 per week or $13,000 per year. 

This means that your efforts generated $30,000 in gross revenue. Once you subtract your investment of $13,000, you're left with your profit of $17,000. So your formula would look like this:

ROI = (17,000 - 13,000/13,000) (100) or (4000/13,000) (100).

Your ROI in this case equals 30.77%. If you don't care about the percentage, all you need to do is figure out your profit (the $17,000).

I recommend calculating your social media ROI over an extended period of time, such as six months or a year, especially in the wedding industry when clients may be researching for quite a bit of time before they hire anyone. Measuring social media ROI on a month to month basis is going to be frustrating and won't give you an accurate picture of what your efforts are really doing.

It's also important to note that the best social media growth is organic and not a churn-and-burn project. You may see a few benefits right away, and more later on down the road. It may take even longer for those benefits to turn into paying opportunities that can be calculated into your ROI. If you don't write the blog, you likely won't get the book deal. If you don't put in the time having conversations with others on Twitter (as opposed to treating it as a one-way press release), you won't build the relationships that result in paying referrals or sales. Just like a good exercise program, social media will take some time of disciplined workouts before you start to see long-lasting results.

How to Improve Your Clients' Experience

I don't cook, so I've started a personal project in which I am attempting to learn 30 from-scratch recipes by my 30th birthday later this year. One of the things that really annoys me about trying to cook from the recipes that cookbooks and chefs provide is that they already assume you know all the tricks of the trade. If you know what you are doing, then you're able to fill in the blanks, but if you're a novice in the kitchen, like me, the meals often end up a disaster because the recipe assumes you know what all great chefs know by heart.

We often do this in the wedding industry too, and it's a disservice to engaged couples. Because what we do is second nature to us, we assume that everyone else knows the parts that we leave unspoken. Since this is the first and only wedding many couples are planning, they don't know all the details we assume they do. They don't know which side the mother or father of the bride stands on during a processional, which side of a tux the boutonniere goes on, how long photos take after a wedding before they're ready, or that venue linens rarely, if ever, touch the floor and that to do so requires an upgrade.

When it comes to websites and blogs, the same holds true. This may be the first creative purchase they've ever made, and they don't know that "journal" means blog and they click on to the next site because they can't quickly tell how they can further research or interact with you. They also may not know that RSS means subscribe, so if you're able, edit the button's text so that it is more user friendly (these buttons should also be near the top of the page).

Creating a great experience for your clients means putting yourself in the shoes of someone who has never before done what you do every day and making it easy for them to follow along.

The Must-Have Goal

It's the beginning of the new year and everyone is making lists of goals, intentions, aspirations and all the things they'd like to accomplish in 2011. Whatever your goals for this coming year, I'd encourage you to add reading to that list. It seems like a no-brainer, but it's the one thing that is sure to give you a competitive advantage and it's also the one thing that is first tossed to the bottom of the to-do pile.

Whether it's a non-fiction business book where you learn more about a specific skillset or concept, or a well-written fiction book that sparks your creativity, reading gives you a competitive advantage because it changes the way you think about and view the world.

I once heard an entrepreneur say that she wanted to read three business books over a span of three years. Her competitors have nothing to worry about. Do yours?