Tactical Execution

Service professionals including doctors are beginning to leverage
social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to market
their services and attract new patients. These websites allow expets
to demonstrate their expertise in the public domain and build
communities of customers, prospects and adoring fans. By building
trust and interaction with an online audience, service professionals
can dramatically expand their reach and grow revenue in the process.

On Monday evening, Rosemary Senjem performed her Joy in the Jungle program for my Entrepreneur Meetup Group and led the group through a fascinating journey of creative thinking and entrepreneurial energy channeling.  As someone who normally focuses on specific tactics and implementation strategies, her program was not only new to me but was also insightful and even challenging.

Today, we met for coffee before she had to catch a flight back to Minneapolis.  We spent about two hours together and she offered a variety of suggestions on how I might improve my business.  Central to her evaluation was a perceived lack of consistency between the name of my company and my approach in person.  She explained that the name Tactical Execution conjured up thoughts of military and murder for her, while my demeanor was much more friendly and helpful.

These issues with my company name are not new.  When I first launched my website, Google Adsense was populating my website with ads about army ringtones and Navy Seal training programs.  The problem stems from the double meanings of both words.  In my defence, the name was intended to describe my focus on getting things done, breaking strategies into a series of identifiable steps and delivering measurable results.  Unfortunately, the same words can be used to describe far less desirable ends.

Rosemary made a good point.  The most important ingredient in successful marketing is consistency in message.  If consistency is lost, people get confused – and confused people don’t buy.  In order for people to reach for their wallets, everything has to line up neatly in a clear and understandable format.  Although Tactical Execution does indeed represent my approach, the majority of people would attribute a different meaning to the words.

Of course, the problem is that everything has already been branded for Tactical Execution.  My CDs carry that name, as does my book and promotional material.  Countless people have already found my website and/or used my services and they would all have to be updated with a new name.  Even though I agree with Rosemary’s assessment, I’m reluctant to throw away the name entirely and start from scratch.

The decision remains before me and I have committed some time this weekend to think it through in more detail.  I also plan to search domains to see what else I can find.  You never know.  I might find something brilliant and glean enthusiasm as a result.  Time will tell.  But the message remains clear.  Congruence in business marketing is essential and inconsistencies only serve to confuse customers and reduce sales.

I am the organizer of the Entrepreneur & Small Business Academy (a Meetup group) and tonight is our July “content meeting”.  We have one primary meeting each month and it takes place on the first Monday of the month, starting at 7:00 in the evening.  We meet at the New York Life offices located in Emeryville.

As of this morning, we have 596 members and it’s growing all the time.  These people all find our group on the Meetup platform.  I have never done any real marketing for the group.  People ask me why my group is so successful and I usually respond with three primary factors: content, structure and communication.  We have one of the most active meetups in the area and our members keep coming back because they get good information in a predictable format.

Last November, the Entrepreneur & Small Business Academy got sponsored by American Express.  They selected the 50 largest entrepreneur clubs across the country and put a program together to support them while building awareness for their OPEN program.  I never solicited their sponsorship.  They found me.  This is just another example of the power of Meetup.

Our members are all entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs or established business owners.  We have a great group of people and I truly enjoy the role I play.  It’s been a great experience and has allowed me to meet a ton of people I would’ve never come across in my regular business life.  Today, I have people I can call for almost anything I might need in my business, all from my Meetup group.

When I became the organizer, I was hoping the group would be a source of business for me.  I wanted to use it to promote myself and find new clients.  As it turns out, I have yet to make any money from the group but the benefits are far greater than I ever expected.  The underlying objective behind the group is to allow members to share and benefit from each other’s expertise.  We facilitate that very well and I have learned incredible things from their presentations and contributions.

Meetup is a fantastic platform for creating and building clubs.  With valuable content, a little structure and good regular communication, you can build a successful Meetup group and gain exposure for yourself while meeting tons of new people.  Further, the experience will help you build confidence and improve your leadership skills.  Planning, coordinating, holding effective meetings – all valuable skills for your career.

What’s your passion?  What are you interested in?  What are you good at?  Think about these questions and then consider starting a Meetup group around that topic.  You’ll probably be surprised how many people find your group and if you deliver value to your audience, you’ll see that group grow and grow.  And as Meetup becomes better known, your audience will grow even more.

Last July, my Meetup had about 170 members.  Today, it has almost 600.  I’d bet the Entrepreneur & Small Business Academy will have over 2000 members by this time 2009 and I can’t wait.  I want to hold bigger events with more content and more attendees, and I have no doubt it will grow into that naturally.  In the meantime, I have to finalize my agenda for this evening and invite you all to come by and visit.

There’s a lot of talk about how to leverage the internet to grow your business.  Different people have different strategies and they all seem like tricks you have to do just right to see results.  And while some of that may be true, there’s value in understanding the concepts behind Internet Marketing, allowing you to apply the same concepts to dozens of different strategies.  Besides, I always like knowing what it is I’m trying to accomplish rather than just knowing a sequence of steps to follow.

Before jumping into the meat of this post, I also want to address the fact that the internet has changed a lot over the past decade and the concepts behind Internet Marketing have changed as well.  Although the modern realities all have roots in those early years, the dynamic was very different in the mid to late 90s.  Today, the internet is starting to mature with people using it in predictable ways.  And perhaps more importantly, the internet has become more social; hence the new buzz words like social media tools, social networks and social bookmarking.

The driving force behind modern Internet Marketing boils down to one simple phrase: conversations are markets.  If you want to access a particular market, you have to find that conversation and participate in it.  Let me say that again.  If you want to access a market, you have to participate in the conversation.  Simple.  But let’s dig a little deeper and see how we might accomplish this.

MySpace is a huge conversation.  In fact, there are thousands or even millions of individual conversations taking place on MySpace.  Same with Facebook.  The blogosphere is one massive conversation.  Forums are conversations.  Bulletin boards are conversations.  Twitter is a conversation, as is Utterz.  All the social bookmarking platforms like DIGG, delicious and StumbleUpon are all conversations.  People are interacting.  And if you want to sell a product or service to those people, you have to participate in that conversation and establish credibility within those circles.

If you’ve spent any time on the platforms just mentioned, you’ll know that within each certain users stand out as authorities.  Perhaps they have more posts or more friends or more content or more bookmarks.  In general, those who are active are quickly recognized as authorities.  So what does that actually mean?  It means you can be an authority yourself by just selecting the conversation that best matches your business and becoming an active user.

For most people, there are two problems.  First, people are fickle.  Second, they have no discipline.  Go to a gym in January and it will be packed.  Go in March and it will be quiet.  Why?  Because everyone had a New Year’s resolution they soon abandoned in favor of other healthy activies like watching TV or drinking beer.  Bottom line; those who stand the test of time will win in the end.

Never before has the formula for success been so clear cut.  It’s a simple formula.  Participate.  Be active.  Establish yourself within a community and you’re almost guaranteed to succeed, or at least make progress.

Let’s move on to fickle.  Every single day, new platforms are launching on the internet and they all allow and even promote interaction within their users.  Every day, there’s a new fad.  The problem is that if you constantly follow these new fads, you never become established anywhere.  At some point, you have to pick a particular conversation and focus on that.  Even if something flashier comes along, there’s value in sticking to your plan.

Now, am I saying that you have to limit yourself to all the old-school platforms that are no longer attracting fresh visitors?  No.  All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t be too quick to jump from one to the other.  Put some time into the initial selection process.  Find the conversations that apply to your business.  Find the best forums.  Find the best blogs.  Find the best groups on social networks.  Look at them all and decide which ones you want to focus on.  Then stick to it for a while and see how your efforts pay off.

There’s another level to this discussion.  There’s something even more powerful than participating in conversations and that is facilitating conversations.  This might include becoming an organizer for an online group.  It might include adding a forum to your website.  It might include creating a wiki and then opening it up to your audience.  It might include using Ning to create your own social network around your particular business.

The possibilities are endless but you have to ensure you have an enthusiastic audience before you pull the trigger.  There’s nothing worse than a forum with no posts, a wiki with no contributions or a social network with no members.  But let’s look at an example of someone who has truly capitalized on the axiom: Barack Obama.  Now, I am not referring to his politics at all.  That is not my concern here.  But in terms of participating and facilitating conversations, he’s done more than any other politician in history … by orders of magnitude!

If you go to his website, you can create a profile and accumulate friends just like any other social network.  You can create a neighborhood and stay updated on events or even organize your own events.  You can obviously donate to his campaign or you can offer to match someone else’s donation, and even stay in touch with that other person.  But most interestingly of all, you can create your own blog within his web platform.

As of this writing, the Barack Obama website has over 40,000 active blogs, all written by individual supporters.  All these people are thoroughly engaged in his campaign and are contributing buckets of unique relevant content to his website.  They’re interacting with each other and getting more and more intertwined with the Barack Obama “change” movement every single day.  There’s no question he has capitalized on the “conversations are markets” moniker and I personally expect his dominance in this area will carry him through the November election.

Take some time and think about the conversations taking place in your field, in your business.  Do some searches on Google and Technorati and Big-Boards.  Find the conversations and begin participating in them.  You might be surprised how quickly you become a known quantity and how quickly you can start promoting your own products or services to the people you meet.

Let’s take a look at the power of email in modern internet marketing.  Obviously, the best thing about email is that it costs absolutely nothing to send out.  Back in the good old days, you had to put a marketing piece together, even if it was just a letter, and then spend buckets of money on postage to get it out into the hands of your target market.  And many people continue to take that approach.  But email allows you to get your message out with absolutely no delivery cost.

Now, there are a lot of issues with spam filters but most of them can be avoided by using a sophisticated email platform like Aweber.  Also, there are a lot of tricks to building a massive email list quickly but that’s beyond the scope of this post.  Right now, I just want to identify some of the opportunities email marketing affords you.

As you probably know, I am the organizer of the Entrepreneur & Small Business Academy and as of this writing, it has over 570 members.  Once my membership rose above about 400, I started to notice all these people coming out of the woodwork, asking me if I could promote their programs over my email list.  While it’s true that some of those programs weren’t very good quality, others were and their purveyors were willing to pay me a commission on any sales that resulted.

This is a perfect example of how you can grow you business with email.  Not only can you use your list to promote your own programs but you can also use it to promote other people’s programs.  Now, there’s a balance of how many emails you want to send your audience but if you have a good program that delivers great value, you can make some nice commissions promoting other people’s programs.

That opportunity alone opens some interesting doors.  For starters, you don’t have to be an expert in the field where you’re making all your money.  The only thing you really need to be an expert on is building email lists.  If you know how to do that, you can quickly find other people whose products you can promote and earn commissions on.

You also have the power to help others.  When you own an audience, you have what everyone else wants.  The hardest part of any business is marketing.  If you own an audience, it’s a license to print money.  The cast of the popular TV show Friends each got paid $1MM for each episode for the last two seasons.  Why?  Because they owned a huge audience.  And when you own an audience, you create an opportunity for advertisers.

You may have noticed that all my blog posts close with a button directing you to my free 1-year e-course.  I run this 52-email program through Aweber and it’s all automated.  But the content is excellent.  In fact, given the sequencing of topics as well as the content itself, I think it’s some of the juiciest material I have.  If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe.  You’ll like the content.  I promise.

This free e-course is obviously my way of building an email list.  And over time, the rate at which people sign up increases, perhaps because early subscribers tell their friends or because the traffic on my site has been growing for other reasons.  Either way, it always puts a smile on my face when I get a notification email that someone new has joined my list.  It benefits them.  It benefits me.

Email marketing is a very powerful tool and I highly recommend you start accumulating email addresses if you haven’t already done so.  Use an autoresponder like Aweber and set up a program people will want to sign up for.  You might be surprised how quickly you build up a sizable list.  And once you have it, it will probably change your business forever.