Your Business Is Visible 24-7

Posted on | May 11, 2009 | 2 Comments

Your business, even if you are a sole proprietor, is visible to your customers, clients and competitors, 24-7. 

At any time of the day or night, your customers can see your website, read your blog, follow your Twitter, or talk about you to other customers.  Potentially, there is someone talking about your product, service, merchandise return policy, lousy guarantee, great receptionist, rude sales person, etc., any where in the world at any time.  In that sense, you only have limited control over your brand, and that means you cannot afford to make branding mistakes.  Nor can you allow unhappy customers to perpetuate dialogue that is harmful to your brand.  What control you do have over your brand needs to be carefully and wisely exercised.  You can’t afford dumb mistakes that can be accentuated through “negative viral marketing.”

The point I’m making really struck me after an experience I had this past weekend.  I was driving north on I-65 to visit family south of Chicago for Mother’s Day weekend.  A white  Chevy Tahoe passed my car going about 90 mph, swerving in and out of traffic and nearly hitting more than one other car.  The windows of the Tahoe were covered with vinyl marketing messages (i.e., a car “wrap”), advertising an upscale painting company located in Illinois.  As I watched the driver of the Tahoe endanger other people’s lives and property, I immediately thought to myself:

“I would NEVER hire that company to paint my house.  If I can’t trust the owners to drive a car responsibly, why would I trust them in my own home?”

Welcome to the world of marketing in the 21st Century.  It’s reality, so learn how to maximize the speed by which good news travels and minimize the bad news that can damage your brand.  Actually, I like to say that good news travels fast, but bad news travels even faster.

To finish my story about the Tahoe. . . as I was driving, I called the phone number on the advertisement on the Tahoe.  I left a “colorful” message on a voicemail, and I explained that the driver’s behavior was not only endangering lives but also damaging the image of the painting company.   A few minutes later, I got this text message in response:

I’m sorry if my husband, who is driving my Tahoe, offended u w/ his driving.  I called him and asked him to be careful on the highway.  Have a nice weekend-

Although I might not hire this lady’s husband, I might hire her.  She did a good job of damage control, and she might have saved someone’s life.  Had she actually called me personally to apologize, I would have given her an “A” in damage control.  She gets a solid “B.”  After her call to her husband, he slowed down and greatly improved his driving.  No one was hurt.  No accidents occurred.  It was a good day.

Clearly, it would have been better for this lady’s husband never to have behaved like that in the first place, especially as he drove a rolling company billboard up I-65.  But she did the responsible and business-wise thing in apologizing, taking responsibility and fixing the problem.  I am sure that she would have preferred a more positive marketing message from her car wrap, but she did minimize the damage to her company’s reputation with a phone call and a text message.  My hope for her is that she learns from the experience and puts in place safeguards to prevent similar bad incidents that might harm her company’s brand.

What are you doing to control your brand image, especially when you are asleep or when you’re not there to control your employees?

Kyle Lacy, Social Media – Indianapolis

Posted on | March 26, 2009 | No Comments

Developing and then guarding your brand is becoming more and more important.  It can be a large portion of your company’s value.  Yet, few businesses monitor their brand.  Here are soom tools for doing just that.

Bloggers Beware! Copyright Laws Apply to You, Too.

Posted on | March 16, 2009 | No Comments

There is a battle developing between bloggers and traditional print newspapers.  The battle is over content, and copyright law is at the heart of the dispute.  And, I believe that the battle is likely to spread from newspapers to other on-line content providers.

Is this a serious matter for bloggers?

Yes.  There have already been lawsuits filed against bloggers over content.  So, it’s important for bloggers to understand what this new trend is, and how to guard against claims and lawsuits.  I believe in prevention over the cure.  That means that I am first a “teacher” of the law to my clients.  If I can empower my clients with information and knowledge about the law and the legal consequences of their decisions, then they are more likely to make the right business and legal decisions in the future, even when I’m not around to help them.  Knowledge leads to wisdom, right?  So, the more knowledge you have, the wiser your decisions will be.

Plus, who wants to pay their lawyer to review each blog before its posted?

Why a battle now?

Increasingly, newspapers are seeing their markets evaporate as fewer and fewer people read the daily paper.  Subscriptions nationwide have been falling for years, and the trend seems to be increasing in pace.  Just in the past few months, we have witnessed dozens of newspapers stop printing second or weekend editions, or close their doors altogether.  Many newspapers are consolidating sections.    Here’s some of the carnage:

Rocky Mountain News-          shut down

The Journal Register Company-   bankruptcy

Philadelphia Enquirer-     bankruptcy

Chicago Tribune-    bankruptcy

Minneapolis Star Tribune-      bankruptcy

San Francisco Chronicle–    near death

Seattle Post-Intelligencer-    online-only publication

Gannett, owner of USA Today-   dividends slashed

The New York Times-   dividends slashed

Cincinnati Post-    dead

New York Sun-   dead

So, as a result, two things seem to be happening in the newspaper world:

#1-   Some newspapers are becoming non-profit, public interest entities.  Examples of this are ProPublica (“investigative journalism in the public interest”) and MinnPost.com.  ProPublica is funded by the Sandler Foundation and other trusts, while MinnPost.com gets funds from certain trusts, the wealthy and foundations.

#2-  For-profit newspapers are trying to generate revenue on-line. 

And that’s where you come in, my fellow bloggers.

The for-profit on-line papers cannot charge readers for content, if bloggers are copying, re-posting or re-blogging meaningful parts of the newspaper’s articles, especially original stories/works generated by a single paper.  Readers won’t pay the papers for the same content you’re giving away for free.

EXAMPLE OF ONE LAWSUIT-     Silicon Alley Insider, a business blog, got sued for quoting 25% of Peggy Noonan’s article in a February issue of the Wall Street Journal.  And get this, Silicon Alley Insider even gave credit to and referenced Dow Jones, which publishes the WSJ.

Amazing, right?  You’d think that the WSJ would appreciate the free marketing.

The reality is that newspapers are nervous, and nervous companies do stupid things.  Take the music recording industry, for example.  Those geniuses started suing individual music lovers for on-line music sharing.  There was virtually no attempt to be creative in preserving their market share or generating other income streams.  Rather, they elected to sue their client-base and sought huge punitive damages awards.

Today, we are starting to see the same knee-jerk, reactionary approach from print newspapers.  I fully expect the trend to escalate.  So should you.

This blog entry is getting too long.  So, I’ll follow up on this soon.  In a future blog, I’ll explore the arguments on both sides.  This concerns federal copyright law and a concept known as “fair use.”  I’ll explore copyright rules and the “fair use” defense, and I’ll try to help you understand how this new trend might impact your “scraping,” copy-paste practices , and re-blogging.

For now, please recognize that you can’t fight City Hall, and you can’t fight Dow Jones either.  Most bloggers are too small to wage a legal battle with a large newspaper, even if the paper is slowing dying.  So, start to develop the mindset that you’re going to have to exercise more caution than you did before reading this blog; review your policies and procedures for re-blogging content; and develop ways to minimize the risk of drawing fire from an angry source you quote or paraphrase.  It may be that you’ll have to start getting permission in advance to re-blog meaningful amounts of someone else’s content.  You might have to change several things you do now.  For now, just start thinking about this topic.

Keep reading.  More to come.