Here are a couple of helpful reminders from the website:

A good business message starts from a high-level, big-picture view and flows down to an appropriate level of detail. A good message isn’t preoccupied with itself, but rather focuses on the value it brings to the audience.

Good content will seamlessly steer your audience through your entire message, keeping the topics clean and well defined and making the relationship among various topics clear. Graphical sign-posts along the way let the audience know where they are and where they’re headed.

At its conclusion, a good presentation summarizes the key themes in a way that makes the audience feel like they just got off the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland. They learned some stuff, had an enjoyable ride with a few surprises along the way – and knew exactly where they were when the ride was over.

While I don’t completely agree with this next one, there is something to it that sparks thought. Dancing Jesus, floating flowers and background music really have no place in a presentation - but strategically placed imagery or a simple effect may trigger a client to remember it for the longer term.

Think of ways to replace bulleted lists with something more visual – for example, an animated flowchart (with supporting images) that walks the audience through a series of steps and is triggered by mouse clicks.

Mr. Endicott expresses some good points in his article. None of which are an end to themselves, they are items which will spark creative thought and put your mind into a place where it can think good thoughts.

Read the full article

One article hit home with me. Lost in translation by Alison Stein Wellner. I’m a fan of Ms. Wellner’s Inc. articles, but this one really hit close to home for me. The article was about the growing epidemic in our culture to do everything via text message, email and anything else we can do to avoid contact with one another.

The article lead off with a story about company who was trying to solve the email-BlackBerry-text messaging problem.

When employees report to work on Friday’s at Roberts Golden Consulting in San Francisco, they’re greeted with a gentle reminder from president Sara Roberts: Remember today is No Email Friday.

…Too much email, says Roberts, makes it hard to build rapport, and that threatens to derail effective business relationships. “People hide behind email,” she says. “For just one day a week, I want to pick up the phone or talk to someone face-to-face.”

This article struck me because I often have the reluctance to just pick up the phone and call a prospect, client or co-worker, so rather I fire them off an email so that I don’t have to get involved in their day. I generally think I’m doing them a favor by “allowing them to get back to me at their own schedule” but the sad fact is that the majority of them would much rather have me on the phone to discuss the problem, idea or simply life.

It’s pretty simple - we are created beings who have a deep longing in our nature to be in community with one another and we need to be careful that our technological advances aren’t falsely fulfilling that longing. I once heard a Pastor say that the greatest and worst invention of all time was the garage door opener because it allows us to sneak into and out of our homes without ever having to make contact with our neighbors - as would’ve been the case of yesteryear.

The quote from Sara Roberts on “buliding rapport” was the most convicting for me. Our consulting business is established on relationships and without quality relationships there isn’t work. And in order to secure a quality relationship, like any good marriage or friendship, a certain amount of time and effort needs to be put into that relationship. The email is a very impersonal way of doing that. If I only sent my wife emails expressing my undying love for her she would grow weary of receiving them and desire more - and in the same way our clients (and yours) deserve better too.

So I encourage you - and myself - to take the challenge of putting email down a little more often and invest the time and energy into establishing relationships with people because at the end of life that is really all that will matter.

1. Strengthen relationships
2. Build your brand
3. Improve customer service
4. Increase employee awareness
5. Build your reputation
6. Bump your search engine rankings
7. Make money

We’re starting to see this battle happen again here in our modern culture. There is a growing number of data sources available to us on the internet - as businesses and as consumers. Data by itself is useless, like knowledge alone was to the Greek, but the ability to aggregate the data and pair it with a person who can use it is exactly what the Jewish person was after.

…with the galloping growth of blogs (some 80,000 new blogs are created every day, according to blog search engine Technorati) and the proliferation of social-network sites, a growing group of companies is trying to figure out how to turn the cacophony of personalized information into usable form - and viable businesses. They call it the Shared, Trust or Referral Economy, and it is the current obsession of every Web company from Amazon to Yahoo!

The personal information being left behind on Social Networking Tools and blogs is critical information some groups and useless to others. Every consultant should be taking a queue from Amazon and Yahoo! right now and begin to look at the data resources they have available to them and see where they can pair up the data with someone who could benefit from it - that is profitable in any economy.

Kevin O’Keefe sees the trend in online readership growing according to beSpacific and based upon his comment would agree that professional services blogs will be among the most read news item as the internet generations move forward.

Saw over at beSpacific that according to a new report, online newspaper readership reached a highpoint in May 2005, with almost 44 million unique visits to a range of sites which accounted for about 30% of users online at both home and office.

This bodes well for lawyers using professional marketing blogs to grow their business. First, a lawyer’s blog done right is akin to an educational magazine or news report focusing on a niche topic. This report is further evidence that a growing number of people would just as soon get their news online as offline.

Nebo Group is working with a client right now in this area. We’re seeing an opportunity for our client to create ongoing mindshare with his clientele as a result of his writing abilities. We’re not seeking huge numbers of readers, rather we’re seeking to have impact together in a niche market where maybe the blog is only impact a few readers - but the right readers; readers who turn into repeat clients.

Through our connections coupled with his connections our plan is to market the blog via word of mouth and a targeted client list. Along the way we plan to generate the kind of buzz Mr. O’Keefe speaks about.

…good blog publishers interact with other other blog publishers. The best bloggers to interact with by posting about a post of theirs or by commenting on their blog are blogs with a large audience. An increasing number of newspapers have blogs. I tell LexBlog’s clients all the time to subscribe to all the blogs published by regional or metro newspaper reporters & editors and to start interacting with them. Looks like that interaction is going to get more exposure in the lawyer’s community.

The professional service blog is going to challenge mainstream business media sources in the future as the blog has the potential to compartmentalize different professional services leaving the door open for a “portal” type engine (like Google) to combine like services.

Tris Hursey writes:

I hate it when I get behind in my blogging! Steve wrote an awesome post about the fuss being made about the numbers of blog readers on the Internet - Micro Persuasion - Don’t Measure Blog Readership, Measure Influence - and that is it’s the shear volume but who is influenced. Hey if you only have 100 readers of your finance blog and several are leading financial journalists and they like you, who freakin’ cares if it’s only 100! You’re influencing the influencers.

There are a number of companies out there right now who don’t understand the importance of the blogging medium. They are doing one of two things: not blogging at all or blogging about this, that and the other – and then they don’t understand why no one is reading it or why they are getting beat up in the blogoshpere. If you’re really interested in this, that or the other, read my personal blog. You and my mom might be the only who care about it!

On the other hand though, if you have a product or service valuable to the public then there are key users out there who have influence in certain spheres and it’s important to reach these people and give them an opportunity to share their voice – good or bad. Tris Hursey is completely right by noting that blogs are designed in the business sphere to influence and I would add get to know your customers better.

Morgan McLintic made two great observations in his article that should un-nerve a corporation that is not participating in the blogosphere.

Technorati is now tracking 14.2m weblogs, a number which doubles every 5.5 months. Interestingly though, only 13% of these blogs are updated once a week. Technorati suggests that 55% of the blogs are active meaning they have been updated during the last three months.

These are some astounding numbers. Most people still assume blogs are just “online journals” but if the Technorati numbers are continuing to double, they have to be writing about personal experiences too as they encounter businesses, products and services.

Morgan also went on to firm up his case - even if he wasn’t going to come right and say people are blogging in the corporate sphere like crazy.

It’s also interesting to note that posting volumes at the weekend are 5-10% lower than during the week. Personally I would have expected that to be much higher since most of the blogs I track are all-but silent over the weekend. I wonder whether we can draw any conclusions from that - does the 5-10% correlate with work-related blogging which restricts it to weekdays? Is that then the percentage of business blogs out there? Probably too much of a leap but an interesting thought in terms of dynamics.

Dave also states that “we see the largest number of posts each day between the hours of 7AM and noon Pacific time, meaning between 10AM and 3PM Eastern time.”

As you read Morgan’s article, begin to ask yourself how prepared your organization is to enter the blogosphere. I say that not to scare you, but to be realistic, because businesses are being pulled into the blogosphere whether they want to be or not and if you have the opportunity to be proactive about it that’s always better than the alternative.

Blogging, the online journaling that has helped build communities on the Web, has penetrated corporate America to serve its marketing needs.

The article went on to talk about how the corporate world is gingerly entering the blogosphere and how blogs don’t provide any ROI (basically).

Technorati, a search engine for blogs that has counted 13.4 million blogs by individuals, has tracked 9,000 corporate blogs, up from 5,000 six months ago. This is an enormous leap, considering corporate blogs are not a profit center.

Profit center or no, the subject of corporate blogging has raised enough interest to become the theme of business conferences, such as the Blog Business Summit set for Aug. 17-19 in San Francisco.

I have to take issue with this statement. Blogs are absolutley a profit center for companies, but not in the traditional sense of the phrase. It is nothing more than a tool to connect communities around a central idea/hub. If you’re able to see your operating model as a whole and where it is deficient and where a blog may be able to satisfy that deficiency on an ongoing basis then you absolutley have a profit center. It can be measured in employee satisfaction, bottom line dollars or man hours - it doesn’t matter, as long as a meaning measurement is established for your company.

I would encourage those of you thinking about a corporate blog to contact us and run through a Blog Readiness Assessment to find out what you’re getting yourself into. Boeing’s problem could’ve been easily spotted ahead of time and to know where and how to deploy a blog is the key to deploying the tool properly. You wouldn’t use a hammer to fix your toilet, you also wouldn’t use a screw driver to break up asphalt on the highway, so why would a corporation use a powerful tool like a blog in a similar fashion?

As I read a few of the sections, some statements really stood out to me as both a marketing professional and as a consumer.

On average, Americans are subject to some 3,000 essentially random pitches per day. Two-thirds of people surveyed in a Yankelovich Parners study they feel “constantly bombarded” by ads, and 59% said the ads have little or no relevance to them.

If you begin to quantify this and assume each American gets the recommended 8 hours of sleep per day, that means we see an average of 187.5 advertising pitches per hour, 3.125 per minute or 0.05 advertising pitches every second. Even worse, only ~40% of those ads have any relevance to my life or yours - that’s not even including those which may have relevance but the timing is wrong (like automobile ads when you’re not in the market for a new car).

As we step forward into the new business world you will see the word “relevance” a lot more. People are shouting this word in all spheres of life, from Spiritualality, to family and marriage and now in business. As a marketing and technology professional, it is my job to help “police” this and push clients to understand their customers in more significant ways and help them understand that they are in business not to make money, but to achieve impact in the life of their employees and their customers. When they make this transition they will move closer to the relevance sphere in their business and begin to hit that 40% of people who feel they are being marketed to properly and in the right time with much greater accuracy.

If you’re interested in learning how to achieve this type of impact with your business and want to move to a new level in your business, give us a call at (312) 546-4280 or shoot us an email at info@nebogroup.com and we can talk about moving to an impact model.

She points out a lot of good information in her article. I’ve met with a lot of business owners who would say the following:

Most people think of blogs as public diaries kept by the kinds of egotists who make loud, inappropriate political comments at family barbecues or hog the discussion at book clubs, or wannabe journalists who post inflammatory stories with no fact-checking. And among the 20 million blogs that have been created to date, there certainly are plenty of those, and some are even good.

The cool things about Hillary’s article is that she shows just how practical a blog is to her daily routine and how the information shared there provides her a sense of “virtual community.”

It appears that she shares the same vision as Nebo Group does. A blog is a great tool for connecting people around a central idea. So the big question is “How do I get that central idea without wasting a lot of time and money?”

Without getting into too much of a sales pitch, Nebo Group has created a simple Blog Readiness Assessment that we’ve talked about before which helps an organization pinpoint the people and problems they want to speak with. It is a great tool for understanding how a blogging tool can be deployed within your organization to achieve lasting impact.