It seems you can’t turn around these days without bumping into another article about why smart companies are increasing their focus on marketing.

There are a few easy, relatively inexpensive steps that any company can take to enhance its marketing efforts:

1. SINGLE MESSAGE Decide what the most relevant value proposition of your brand or business is and stick with it. And remember that whatever you do/say will feel “old” to you long before it will to your clients and customers! To check out a basic value proposition format click here.

2. CONSISTENT LOOK AND FEEL Individual marketing tactics rarely get as many “eyeballs” as you would like. Help your dollars go farther with a consistent look and feel across all of your marketing tactics.

3. SOLICIT FEEDBACK Make sure you’re on track with customer expectations by regularly asking your customers what they think of your work. Anonymous surveys using a tool like SurveyMonkey can be an easy way to do this. Customer feedback is a great way to identify opportunities to improve your product/service, and it can even help you identify new products and services your customers might like to buy from your company.

I’m an old-fashioned girl. Because of this, I try to only “LinkIn” to people I actually know.

My philosophy is grounded in the spirit of LinkedIn which is all about being a network of trusted connections. How can I trust a connection if I don’t know them? And why would I unleash a stranger on the network that I have carefully built?

When someone I don’t know (or barely know) invites me to LinkIn with them, I tell them about my old-fashioned ways. And then I always say that I would be happy to sit down with them over coffee (or by phone if they’re not in the area) to get to know each other better. After which I’d be happy to connect on LinkedIn.

I typically get a very positive response from people, and this approach has worked well for me.

Recently, however, I was involved in an exchange that was a terrific (and funny) example of what I try not to do with LinkedIn. This is a verbatim email exchange between me and someone I had talked with for maybe 5 minutes at an event. Let’s call the person “Mr. X.” Notice that Mr. X does not use my name in the salutation because this was a mass email sent to everyone he met at the event: Read More -›

My friend Joe Hallinan has just come out with a new book Why We Make Mistakes, and he has a related Op-Ed piece in the New York Times this past Sunday. He talks about how fresh eyes bring really do see things that others more familiar with the material miss.

In the Op-Ed piece he provides some great examples of how experts failed to see glaring errors that were in the public domain for years and yet, they were eventually identified by novices. This included a first grader who noticed “that a popular library book depicted a meat-eating dinosaur as an herbivore.” You can read The Young And The Perceptive here. Read More -›