Successful Blog

What Are Your Assumptions?

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By James Ellis

closeup_donkeyPeople don’t read the web, they scan. People don’t like to click. People don’t look past the first four Google search results. People only search Google with 2-3 word search terms. People don’t open their email on the weekends. People don’t spend money online. People don’t trust strangers online. No one cares what you had for breakfast. No one will want to look at a picture of your lunch. People buy most Christmas gifts online on the Monday after Thanksgiving. No one will download a movie to watch on their phone.

All of the above statements were once considered gospel at one time. Gospel. Carved into stone tablets. Given to marketers’ children to recite every morning.

But you should all see at least one statement that you know to be patently false (in fact, I’m pretty sure that they almost all are, depending on circumstances). But they linger on, because they are based on assumptions.

These are just examples of online/web/tech assumptions that linger in the minds of people close to us (especially clients and bosses). There are plenty of business, blogging and personal assumptions we make and live by that simply aren’t true anymore (assuming they ever were).

Assumptions are the blind spots in our vision. We see them without acknowledging them every day. We work around them instead of challenging them, when challenging them is how we create success. Think of Kodak and Poloroid, who assumed we’d always want printed pictures. Think of Ford (circa 2009) who assumed Americans only bought big cars. Think of the music industry, who assumed that we wouldn’t like to download our music whenever we wanted.

Businesses fail every day because their assumptions were wrong. Businesses thrive every day because they took a chance on challenging assumptions. Think of Starbucks, who didn’t listen to the assumptions that people wouldn’t pay $5 for a cup of coffee. Think of Apple, who didn’t listen to the assumption that people didn’t want to check their email every second of the day. Think of Rick Bayless who didm’t listen to the assumption that Mexican food is cheap food.

What are the assumptions you live with every day? Are you challenging them? If you don’t, what happens when someone else does?

Author’s Bio: James Ellis is a digital strategist, mad scientist, lover, fighter, drummer and blogger living in Chicago. You can reach out to him or just argue with his premise at saltlab.com.

Photo credit: Dieter van Baarle, Flickr CC.

Vertical integration and your business

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By Katherine Pilnick

You’ve probably heard of vertical integration, a trend to minimize middle-man work and bring products to the marketplace in as few steps as possible, and you may be wondering if it’s right for your business. Vertically integrated companies have control over more than one part of production. They may partner with companies that work with the product before or after them, or they may take care of more than one step of the process in-house.

Vertical integration gives manufacturers more control over their products, including reducing costs. Customers also benefit, as they can discover otherwise lost local business and may enjoy price cuts because of lowered production costs. However, vertical integration isn’t always the best option, and its effects should be considered for each unique set of circumstances.

Vertical Integration in Modern Markets

One of the most prominent examples of vertical integration is Apple, which designs and develops the hardware and software for all its products, and also puts out the final products. While specific parts of production may be outsourced, Apple’s overall vertical integration gives the company more control over its product. It also ensures that the company has unique products that customers cannot find elsewhere.

Amazon is another well-known example of vertical integration. Its online marketplace and its Kindle products act as book distributors, and the company has evolved to publish books, as well. In this way, it took over another piece of the production line.

Amazon and Apple are prime examples of companies that have become significantly more involved in their product lines than is typical at other companies.

Choosing to vertically integrate your business is a big decision, and one which involves a lot of thought. It requires access to resources that small startups often lack, but it expands opportunities for future growth and success.

The main advantage of a vertically integrated business is that it will make your product unique, so that no other company can offer exactly what you have to offer. That way, you can build a loyal customer base as your company grows.

Despite its pros, vertical integration won’t help every company, especially one that’s already on thin ice financially.

Key Considerations

Vertical integration requires a company to take on new responsibilities in production. While this can save money for business in the long run, it requires an immediate financial investment to pay for additional equipment and labor.

Likewise, entrepreneurs must be careful that vertical integration does not spread the company’s resources too thin. The company must set its priorities and stick with them, without allowing its new responsibilities to take over the core business goals.

Unless your business is already hugely successful, you’ll have to determine if vertical integration is right for your particular scenario by weighing the pros and cons.

Discuss it with others at your company to gauge how willing they are to take on the risk and responsibility. You can also seek professional advice at a bank, since the new endeavor is likely to require a small business loan. And remember that there is no need to rush the decision. In most cases, the opportunity to expand will always be there. If you don’t take advantage of it now, you can change your mind in the future.

Author’s Bio: Katherine Pilnick is a writer, blogger and editor for Debt.org, a debt help website.

The Necessity of Frustration

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Paintbrushes
Without doubt, no breakthrough

by Ric Dragon

Big Doubt, Little Doubt

Beginnings are typically joyous, euphoric occasions. Whether it’s a software project, a barn-raising, a romance, or a painting, the earliest stages are exciting, not yet informed by the difficulties that lie ahead.

The art of making paintings is remarkable. It doesn’t matter if the painter is portraying mountains and streams, or is creating an abstraction. Taking the three-dimensional world and portraying it on a flat surface is abstraction, and creating shapes and color is quite concrete and real. So it follows that a lot of the distinctions that are made about painting – whether it’s realism, abstraction, or some other genre – are somewhat moot. But what all painting shares is that there is no guidebook. Each painter is on their own in trying to figure out what it is all about.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that I look forward to starting paintings. The canvas, newly tacked over the stretcher bars, presents a vast area of whiteness. A brush loaded with paint is picked up – and that first mark is made. It’s exhilarating.

I also know what to expect about a third of the way into the painting: frustration. In those early years, it was unnerving: I’d be wracked with feelings of doubt and inability. Like an arctic explorer without a compass, I’d look around and realize that I didn’t have a clue as to where I was or why I was there. These aren’t the little niggling doubts that sometimes come to haunt us, but the big doubts. What does my existence mean?

For hundreds of years, practitioners of Zen Buddhism have been using doubt as a key to their practice. In the various approaches to Zen, the feeling of doubt is considered to be critical to finding awareness. In fact, koans, those baffling stories used in zen, seem designed to help bring about that total frustration. As one teacher exhorted, “let all of you become one mass of doubt and questioning.” Without this doubt, you can’t have breakthrough.

Self-doubt can be totally debilitating, too. If you understand, though, the importance of doubt in the creative process, you can more easily say to yourself, “heh, this is all part of the process – let’s just go with it.”

Happy break-through!

—-

Author’s Bio: Ric Dragon is the founder and CEO of DragonSearch, a digital marketing agency with offices in Manhattan and Kingston, NY. Dragon is the author of the “DragonSearch Online Marketing Manual” and “Social Marketology” (McGraw Hill; June 2012), and has been a featured speaker at SMX East, Conversion Conf, CMS Expo, and BlogWorld, on the convergence of process, information architecture, SEO, and Social Media. You can find Ric on Twitter as @RicDragon.

 

Image: John-Morgan, Flickr Creative Commons License.

Grafetee’s Watching You … Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide

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Mihaela Lica Butler

Street Smarts: The Police Get Grafetee

That the police are testing a location-based app called Grafetee may not necessarily have criminals fleeing in fear, but the idea of a country’s national police turning to mobile tools is noted. The Poliisi, as Finland’s top law enforcement arm is called there, intend on making neighborhoods safer via smart device usage, social media engagement and interactive maps.

Finland. Most of you, readers, will probably identify this Scandinavian country as way up in the far frozen North and a bit too far away to consider public safety moves as relevant. But, given the spread of good news and useful things that make life better, it may not be long before your local public servants tune in on using geo-location tools like Grafetee.

For those unfamiliar with the Helsinki startup, and their engaging little social tool, Grafetee makes use of smart technology, via either iOS or Android operating systems, along with map-centric services like Foursquare, Wikipedia, and even Yelp of late. What does the PoPo up there in Finland want with such a tool, you ask? They are trying to make Finland safer than it already is. Petri

Marjamaa from the National Police Board commented about the adaptation:

“We are adopting Grafetee to test how a social media service is applicable to make the neighborhood safer and to help residents to influence their own neighborhood’s safety.”

Grafetee’s Watching You … Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide

Grafetee being used by law enforcement in Finland is not the first time a mobile or social tool has been adopted to improve things, but the App does have some unique features which make this story more interesting. The Poliisi can use Grafetee’s characteristic location-based interactive map, and particularly the notification and bookmarking aspects, for getting information about crime, traffic hazards, and especially for being there when urgency and accuracy of detail counts. Short story here being, Grafetee’s interactive map operates in “real time” – and users (citizens) can add images to the locations, describe what happens, share with others anonymously if desired, and so much more.

That’s because anyone can use Grafetee anonymously – no need to sign up or connect a Facebook account. A few taps of the screen and a crime can be reported, or the Police can input data the public needs to know in real time too. Think of all the uses Grafetee users on both ends can squeeze out of a little Finnish smart app.

There’s a mobile version, Android or iOS, and a web version on, lahivinkki.com, for anyone interested in testing the latest version. Also, another aspect of Grafetee’s individuality is the ability for businesses to add their places, events, and even web locations via a browser bookmarklet. On top of the Foursquare, Wikipedia, and Yelp pins you can already use on the map, there are also now many local businesses and even websites tied into the Grafetee way of smart things.

Grafetee, or should that be “Graffiti”, seems like one of those simple little tools that ends up being widely accepted. Just like street artists express themselves via murals, now everyone can put a name on just about anything, even a potential crime. Let’s see how fast other government agencies and businesses hop on board with special uses. Interesting stuff, huh?

Author’s Bio:
Mihaela “Mig” Lica Butler founded Pamil Visions in 2005 where she uses her hard won journalistic, SEO and public relations skills toward helping small companies navigate the digital realm with influence and success. Grafetee is a client. You can find Mig on Twitter as @PamilVisions

How Artists’ Games Can Help Our Work

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Ric Dragon

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The Games Artists Play

In his earlier days, the artist Chuck Close was a painter of gestural abstractions. After a personal crisis, he decided to take photographs, and square inch by square inch, make a large painting of the photograph. The process, to Close, was a game of sorts. If you get the opportunity to see one of his large scale paintings in a museum, the results are quite staggering.

Artists like to play games within their work. After all, there is no rule book on how to make a piece of art. Instead, you have total and absolute freedom. You can do anything you want – a freedom which can actually be paralyzing. Thus, by creating little games, the artist has a self-imposed framework in which to work.

My own game is to paint alla prima – which means at first attempt, and to paint all wet-into-wet; never onto dry paint. While I’ve found a way to keep my own paintings wet for weeks, and thus to sustain the game over a longer period of time, the historical idea of an alla prima painting, like those of the impressionists, was to create a painting in one sitting.

This is hardly a constraint taken on by all painters. In fact, Monet said something to the effect that you’re not worth your salt as a painter if you couldn’t put a painting away for a couple of months, come back to it, and not see what it needed. Bonnard was said to sneak into museums with a brush and colors under his coat to touch up his own paintings.

How Artists’ Games Can Help Our Work

Reworking a piece over a long period of time can certainly bring richness to any work. It’s over time that we are able to reinforce subtle patterns, or refine smaller ideas within the larger piece. But sometimes, it’s difficult to let go of a piece. Our anxiety about getting it right takes over.

The idea, though, of saying that a painting, or even a piece of writing, is going to be done in one period of time – that I’ll do the best I can NOW, and that I’ll do this and move on to the next – can mitigate compulsiveness. We can bring this idea to writing too – I’ll write a piece – but after I’m done, I’m done. No going back and improving. Blogging is ideal for this – after all, changing a post after it’s been published, and after people have participated in the piece by commenting just doesn’t feel right.

If you find yourself stuck in your endeavors, and unable to break through some invisible barrier, try creating your own parameters and games. After all, it’s your game, and there’s not a person in the world who can say that it’s wrong.

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Author’s Bio:
Ric Dragon is the founder and CEO of DragonSearch, a digital marketing agency with offices in Manhattan and Kingston, NY. Dragon is the author of the “DragonSearch Online Marketing Manual” and “Social Marketology” (McGraw Hill; June 2012), and has been a featured speaker at SMX East, Conversion Conf, CMS Expo, and BlogWorld, on the convergence of process, information architecture, SEO, and Social Media. You can find Ric on Twitter as @RicDragon.

How Many Ways Do You Offer Your Content?

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Repurposing Content Is a Service

relationships button

If you watch cable television carefully, you will see an interview clip from one program replayed again in another program. Perhaps you’ve had the feeling you’ve seen a show before, but then again . . . maybe not? Packaging and repackaging bits of content makes it worth more and last longer. Five uses for the same content stretches the corporate dollar.

It seems backwards doesn’t it . . . to reuse content in a time when there is so much of it? But it makes sense. If I know my content is accurate and high quality, I should share it with as large an audience as I can — particularly in this time of attention economy.

So Much Content . . . Why?

The amount of content and information available is more than anyone can read, yet we are all being asked to know more, and more, and more. If there’s so much content already, it seems miserly to repackage what is already published?

Not necessarily.

There are valid reasons to repackage content in this age of attention economy. Repackaging and repurposing content allows a publisher

  • to custom publish for individual niche markets.
  • to focus publications on key principles they want to highlight.
  • to show their flexibility in the marketplace.
  • to give old customers new reasons to buy.

Granted, those three points actually say the same thing in different ways. That’s exactly what repackaging is — tailoring content to suit the needs of the audience.

Just as some conversations are meant for an email, some for a meeting, and some are meant to be shared in person … content can be designed to fit the needs of the situation.

Giving the readers what they want instead of what we think they need — that’s a concept worth exploring. Much of existing content probably suits existing needs, if only we would structure it in way that our readers found it relevant and offer it so that they could use it as they want to rather than as we think they should.

How many ways do you offer your content? Just one? Is that enough?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

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