UPDATE: This conference is still coming to OK, but will be making its debut in the Spring of 2012 with a more intensive format and open to both men and women. Watch this updates as we firm details! — Mandy

The name is actually misleading, I think… because the conference isn’t really about getting all fired up because Yay! We’re Women! In Business!

It’s about teaching and sharing tools, ideas, methods and collective wisdom about being better in business as a woman. Whether that’s in your own business or as a team member in someone else’s company, the WES is about going further and accomplishing more through leadership, brand and marketing management, and business/entrepreneurship core concepts. The conference is a learning module format with an accompanying workbook. Less rah-rah, more brass tacks. The kind of thing that will help close the entrepreneurship gender gap.

Want to know more? The conference website is here. Register to attend here (and email me if you want a special discount code just for my network).

Hear Deborah, me, Angela Allmond, Joan Vasquez and Aprille Franks talk about some of these issues.

And I hope to see you October 29th in Oklahoma City!

At Crossroads Communications, LLC (the “official” name of my business, although you probably found me by searching my name; it’s just the way the Google search bounces) we essentially are a message company. We discover the stories of our clients and share them, whether through PR, marketing, advertising, social media, content-creation on blogs, videos, etc. The tools are less important than the focus on the messages. Before we can find and authentically help brands, businesses, and places tell their story, we have to really, and I mean really, get to know them. You can’t effectively market what you don’t understand.

I use a set of questions to help get that process started. They’ve evolved over the past several years, but not as much as some might think… because they are focused on the business goals and objectives rather than the tactics. I hear often that just going through the process of defining the business and its profit centers, challenges, goals and marketplace in the way that we do is valuable to business owners. I also hear that answering the questions we ask is hard work. Until we have a solid idea of where your business IS, why that’s true, and WHERE you want to go… how will we all agree we’ve reached “there?”

While I won’t share the whole set of questions here (I do have to feed my family, after all), I am going to share a few of them with you, and then share some additional thoughts in upcoming blog posts. I hope they’ll be valuable conversation starters for you and your business supporters, partners, or even that little voice in your head who pushes back whenever you want to go try something new.

Defining the Business

Current Challenges

1. What is the biggest obstacle, in your opinion, to purchasing one of your top profit-generating services for most of your potential customers? When you hear “No…” what is the “why?”
2. How much time must you typically invest face to face and behind the scenes to close a sale? Please list face to face separately from behind the scenes. How much of this time is spent explaining what you do, the benefits of using you or of having the service, and generally in educating your prospects?

Looking forward

1. Thinking about the future, what would you like to be different about your business in one year? In three years? What kinds of clients do you want to be serving? What services do you want to sell them?
2. Considering your profit-generating activities of today, what do you see changing, growing, fading over the next 1 to 3 years in those activities? Do you see an increasing demand for what currently drives your profit or a declining demand? Why?
3. If the demand for today’s profit-driving activities may decline or remain flat, what other activities or products are within or adjacent to your current expertise and offerings which might be increasing in demand over the next 3 years?

Did anything above make you stop and think for a minute about your business? How do you keep your business “on-track”?

Three Simple Things.

The question I get asked the most (after, “Can I just pick your brain?” anyway) isn’t about marketing or PR or economic development. It’s, “How do I get going? How do I know if this idea is a good one?” and its asked by people who want to launch a business. Usually, they’ve thought about it so much, and for so long, that they can’t see clearly anymore. Or at least, they’re afraid they aren’t seeing clearly and therefore can’t tell a solid business from a shaky one.

I’m not primarily a business coach, but I’ve worked with lots of start ups and routinely help businesses owners wrestle with these type of questions. My Twitter bio says,”Passionate about strategy before tactics,” and this process – this digging deep and knowing what drives a business’ profit, people, points of connection; where they are and where they need to be in the market; what their stories are – must be the bedrock of successful integrated marketing and PR strategy. Businesses who’ve been around a while can have a hard time with these questions, much less entrepreneurs. And the fear generated by not knowing the answers, but thinking you ought to know the answers, is what keeps many great business ideas just ideas.

Here’s the truth: Bigger businesses are usually already spending money in some way on marketing and sales. Sometimes lots of money, and often with disappointing results. We walk them through the hard questions before we ask them to spend any other dollars on any other marketing because throwing good money after bad makes no sense. And they have some data we can analyze, some history we can use. Startups don’t. Sometimes they have lots of data about the marketplace, or it can be found. Sometimes each individual member of the team has some history in the field… but there’s often not one day of history of the new business, being a business, doing its thing, to analyze.

And it’s OK. Here are the three questions I tell my start-up clients they need to ask and answer to help figure out whether the idea is solid:

1. What Are You Selling?
   List three (only three) actual products or services you can sell (not offer… sell means people will buy them). “PR services”is not an acceptable answer. “Helping business with less than 500 employees tell their story through public relations, using both traditional and new media channels” is much better. Be as specific as you can. You may have many more ideas than just three. Choose three… focusing is part of the process. In one recent meeting, a new client was sharing the preliminary plans for a business catering to the busiest of people, Moms. The laundry list of things the target market “might want” was long. All of the items were viable, but packaging and successfully marketing them all was not. By focusing on only three basic ideas to start, the picture of just which Moms would be most interested (and most likely to trade dollars for products) emerged. If you have trouble coming up with three specific products or services you can package and sell, perhaps you need to invest a more time in the thinking-about-a-business phase before you go forward.
2. Who Will Buy It?
   Not “who is your target market”…. again, the key word here is BUY. List three buyers. Be as specific here as you can, too. Rather than “Busy Moms,” try “Busy Moms with more than one child where the oldest is less than 7 years old and the household income is $40,000 or above.” And perhaps your second buyer is a busy Mom with only one child, but higher income, or a mom who works full time outside the home and has children who are middle school or younger at home. If you have trouble coming up with three specific buyers, revisit your What Are You Selling? list. Perhaps you need to rethink the products if the marketplace is limited.
3. How Can I Tell My Story?
   Now that you now what you’re selling and who needs it and has the money to buy it… this question is about how do you reach them. Where, exactly, do busy moms with two small children and at least $40,000 in income get their news? Information? Entertainment? Where do they hang out physically and online? What venues, events, channels, ideas are a good fit for your product? Come up with three (yes, three) ways you can reach your buyers. If you have trouble with this, you may need to refine your buyer specifics a bit and then try again. Yes, this is what we do for a living, and we can help. But most about-to-be-business-owners want to be a part of this process because they are passionate about their idea. Thinking about how to connect buyers and products is something they enjoy.

Working through these questions doesn’t mean you’ve got a business plan (but you’ve got a good many basics answered) or that you’ll have a successful business (we haven’t touched on the money needed to stake and launch, or market, or treating your business as a business, etc.) but it does mean you probably have a solid business idea. So what are you waiting for? Get on out there and do your thing!

(Photo credit)

As business has picked up these last few months, I’ve noticed my time spent online on social nets has dropped off. In some cases, significantly and in others less significant but still noticeable. The obvious reason (and easy out) is that I’m busy… working! Doing the things that earn me a living and keep my family warm, dry and fed. The time I spent on social networks from 2008 forward was always, in part, about building business. And it’s worked, of that I am certain. My investment of time and content in the ‘net is a very real part of the reason why I’m “too busy!” to tweet or post as frequently these days.

The real issue, though, isn’t whether I’m too busy today… it’s how busy will I STAY without continuing to invest time and content into my networks. What I’ve noticed is that the parts of online social networking that always felt like work I don’t miss doing. I need to do some of that “work” anyway, but I don’t miss making sure I post something valuable every day to LinkedIn, or that I’ve found, read, commented on and posted X number of blog posts in my field/areas of interest and expertise. I still do those things, but I do them as I have time at the moment.

I DO miss, however, the interaction and relationships I’ve developed over the past two, almost three years… and that is a sign of how necessary networks are for us. There are people I’ve met (mostly only digitally) whom I truly miss interacting with, and that I intend to change. I suspect that more regular interaction with some of the smart, savvy, challenging, entertaining and just downright cool people I’ve come to know will organically lead me to great content I WANT to read, comment on, and share with the rest of my network. It always has Thinking specifically here of people like Mack Collier, Bobby Rettew, David Spinks, Becky McCray, Amber Naslund…. people who make me think, who help me grow and who help me find and share content that’s worthy of a wider audience.

I’m beginning to realize that it’s not the networking I miss, it’s the key people in the networks. It’s not a news flash that relationships are the engine of social networking. Social networking took off in a time of recession, job hunting, and shared woes. What happens as things change? How do we continue to fuel that relationship engine? How will we hold on to our best digital friends when we get busier? Have you noticed a difference in your own habits, and are you planning any changes?

Look, Mom... Sharks!

You see, when you sleep with the fishes at the aquarium, you sleep right beside the tanks and exhibits. On the concrete floor. My comforter-doubled-over-for-padding did not cut it in the comfort department. But I digress. Several things happened during our adventure that I thought were great lessons in PR, specifically in event planning. So here, without further ado (and because I’m still working the kinks out of my shoulder and back), are event planning lessons learned:

Prior Planning Makes For Perfect Events > You could tell, rather immediately, which troops and girls had prepared appropriately for the evening and which ones had not. Planning well is the difference between event panic and event accolades. Our troop leader rocks, by the way, and we were armed with flashlights, toothbrushes, vending machine change, and other necessities for the night. And in her defense, she’d recommended foam padding for underneath the sleeping bags. I (ouch) should have listened.

Do, Indeed, Sweat the Small Stuff > Someone, somewhere, decided “Alice in Wonderland” (the new, Tim Burton version) would be a great movie to screen in the big hall before lights out. Some of the girls in attendance were 5 or 6. All the girls had gone on a red-filtered flashlight tour of the aquarium exhibits to observe the animals in their nighttime modes just before the movie. So you watch a giant moray eel by flashlight and then see giant scary things on the movie screen and then you go sleep someplace unfamiliar in the dark? uhhh… not a win for the younger girls. Me, my daughter and her three other young troop members all bailed on the movie about 30 min in and went to settle down on the concrete instead. Be sure to think through all the choices… go visit the site for your event, for instance, at the time of day you’re having it. Are there traffic issues? Parking problems? What are the best sight lines for TV cameras? Do you have a need for or access to electricity? A microphone? Podium? Are there outlets so reporters can plug in anything they might need to? Refreshments? And if you’re serving food with napkins or containers, do you have a trash can handy?

Some Of Us Are Best Out Of The Spotlight > The flashlight tour was an amazing thing… so many of the animals that were, well, boring during the regular hours of operation were quite interesting at night. The story my daughter has told over and over? How she got to see the inside of a clam (really a mussel) and how when someone’s non-red-filtered light shone into the tank by mistake the “clam” snapped shut again. The “clams” are definitely at their best out of the spotlight. So are eels and some of the jellyfish. If you’re planning an event for a client, know the strengths of the people you’re working with and for. If the COO is not comfortable in large groups of people, gently talk the CEO out of making him speak at the event. Yes, it’s wonderful that Bill wants to share the spotlight with Ted, but in order for it to remain a big adventure and not become a big disaster, Ted needs to play a role he’s better suited for… perhaps welcoming guests one on one at the entrance, or simply hovering in the background, available for a one-on-one later on.

So there you have it… Plan, Prepare, Pick Your Performers. And take the foam padding next time you go sleep with the fishes. Trust me.

Event hiccups, disasters, funny moments you want to share? Please go ahead! It makes us all feel better to know we’re not alone in the moments we remember that we’d really rather forget.

– (Originally posted on the Journal Record’s Blog Hub, August 7, 2010)

Three big reasons: Truly heavy workload (yay!); husband now has a night job (hours and pay aren’t great, but the benefits and tax-paying help are both necessary and welcome); wrestling with some deep thoughts on the direction of the blog, of my business, and of the channels used for connecting.

In short, I haven’t had the time… and I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get back to a regular blogging schedule. For me, that usually meant one or perhaps two posts a week on this blog and a post a week on the PR blog over at the Journal Record web site. I’m working on how to use my more limited time (husband’s job has cut out about two hours a day of my “normal” worktime) as efficiently as possible so I can give clients the quality of work they’ve come to expect from me, meet all deadlines, and continue to connect meaningfully here with this community and with my networks on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. And Foursquare and Whrrl… *sigh* And take care of my family… who sometimes must come first, regardless of what else is happening in the work world.

I rarely “just write something” here because I think you visit to read something more… whatever… than that. Most of you who’ve commented here over the past year are people I’ve connected with in some other medium, too, and I know you to be a smart, savvy bunch. You deserve more from me than just a post. So it isn’t really a matter of having the time to write… it’s having the time to think first, then write. Having enough mental space available to let the bigger thoughts germinate, grow and flower. And that has been in desperately short supply recently.

• Here are the things I’m trying to let grow so I can write about them for you:
• Revamping your business or your city’s logo & identity (hint… don’t start with the logo!)
• Evolution of a Nascent Blogger (why maybe I was wrong about Blogging Being Dead)
• What to say and do on your business Facebook page to make it work for you (caveat… I’m much better with clients’ pages than the Crossroads Communications page. My effort is definitely going to clients like Smith Farm Marketplace and Andolini’s.)
• Working your online presence for offline results (business aspects)
• Integrated Marketing in 2011 (what does it look like, feel like, accomplish?)

So… thanks for sticking around. As I navigate these new waters of waaay busy, 4 kids and being a single-parent much of the time (when hubby is working), I’ll find the right course. One that allows time for the ideas to grow and time for the writing to happen. And, if you know of elves who will drop by for laundry duty overnight, I would be so very appreciative if you’d share their contact info.

Many thanks to Doug Stewart, a guy dedicated to helping small businesses dominate their space on the web, for asking me to talk with him for a few minutes about effectively using social media and PR together to market businesses. If you’ve never heard me speak, here’s your chance If you have and you’re game for more… bless you, firstly, and secondly, enjoy the interview!

Have a topic you want to see me cover here? I’ve been toying with the idea of breaking my no-video style… what would you most like to see/hear for the first vid post on this blog?

The most overused business phrase from 1995 through about 2005 was “increase shareholder value.” It appeared in more corporate mission statements, vision statements and annual reports than “be environmentally responsible” does today. The worst part wasn’t the monotony (litany?) of corporate speak during those years… it was that the strategy wasn’t really a strategy. It was a result.

The best companies didn’t focus on creating shareholder value. They focused on their customers, products, services… delivering what people wanted, in the way they wanted it, in exchange for fairly valued compensation. The right focus and smart execution drove success, which ultimately increased shareholder value. Regardless of its inclusion in any mission statement, I might add. Do you think employees can all rally around the idea of doing their very best so they can increase the value of stock owned by someone else? Or even their own stock, which generally is a tiny portion of their compensation or retirement? Doubtful. Employees rarely care about shareholders.

Today, companies are urged to be responsive, engaging, transparent and social. Employees tweet or manage facebook pages for themselves and for businesses. There are videos, photos, review sites… so many ways to share information. And the customers are out there… tweeting, facebooking, reviewing, too. The companies who are engaging, who are social, who are transparent (which is just to say, HONEST), build this army of fans or friends. When something negative is posted to the facebook wall, fans defend the brand. When a tweetstorm erupts over someone’s negative experience, the brand responds, the followers defend and retweet, and all is rosy and well in the social sphere. Until… a major crisis hits, and those fans want answers.

They have been trained through interaction to feel like part of the team. Fed a diet of transparency and access, they feel entitled to answers, honesty and truth in short (very short) order. And they are correct. Those fans you’ve been cultivating? They are your businesses’ social shareholders. They have an (emotional) stake in your company. They defend, but they also demand. Just like in the old days of increasing shareholder value, creating raving fans is still a result, not a strategy.

Serve the customers…. in the immortal words of Becky McCray at the recent Get Social conference in OKC, “Customer service is all you’ve got.” She didn’t mean just the basic idea of customer service (being nice, greeting them, sacking the groceries correctly, etc.); she meant truly serving them. Putting those customers first, in all ways. Then, right after you take care of those customers and create those loyal followers, friends and fans, go take care of your social shareholders. They deserve it, too.

My big takeaways from the conference?

The Context / Content stuff is going to come together for another post soon

What do you think? Do you believe in the idea of social shareholders?

Thanks to Blake Jackson… the inspiration for this post came from his opening discussion at Get Social.

It’s not just another social media conference… rather than a collection of “gurus” or “experts” whose expertise is in self-promotion, the May 4th Get Social event in Tulsa will help business owners, marketing professionals, HR directors, managers and brand builders put into practice what works in new media.

Beyond Twitter or Facebook set up and basics, this event brings global talent to Tulsa in addition to Oklahoma practitioners who are using new media to drive real businesses forward.

Presented in an unconference format, Get Social allows participants to, well, get social… be part of determining what they most want to learn, network extensively with other attendees and track leaders, and share what they know in a format that encourages interaction and active learning.

I am leading two tracks tomorrow, both geared toward my business expertise. I am definitely looking forward to meeting all those who attend, being part of the other tracks and learning alongside the participants.

The “new” in new media is the technology and channels being employed to connect people and other people, ideas, places, spaces and things. The role of media (a method for broadcast or sharing of a message) hasn’t changed. Social and Mobile media have exponentially increased the speed of travel and the overall load of messages, meaning potential customers’ or potential employees’ abilities to filter, organize and retain information is now a critical factor in success.

At Get Social, we’ll be sharing how to make your message stick… whether you need to share what makes your company a great place to work, what makes your product or idea different, or how your latest innovation will change your industry.

If you’re coming, tweet me or Facebook me and let me know to look for you! Or… I guess you could just comment below

PS > Can’t make the Tulsa event? Be sure to visit the Events page on the getsocial.com site for other upcoming events. This stuff is just too good not to share in multiple cities!

If you’ve been there, you know it stinks… and sometimes the worst of it isn’t the financial difficulty, it’s the confidence shattering, ego body blow that does you in.

While I own my business so I can’t technically “get fired,” it feels very much the same when a client decides to go another route and either cuts ties with Crossroads Communications or reduces our role in a project. I’m thankful that it hasn’t happened often, but it did happen this month.

And the worst part is that I know, on some levels, at least, it was the right thing both for the client and for us. It wasn’t the best fit, from the beginning, but it was a referred project and I take the trust someone places in me and in Crossroads Communications when they recommend us very personally.

Some lessons learned….

If the fit isn’t right, it isn’t right. Period. Better to disappoint a little by not taking the project than disappoint a lot through a difficult relationship or less-than-wonderful execution.

If there is criticism, maybe you earned it. Listen carefully, think, take the time to understand what went wrong and why. Fix what you can, apologize sincerely if you need to do so and take those lessons with you to the next relationship.

Unless your mistakes were really core business failures (you didn’t perform work you contracted to do, for instance, or you stole content) don’t dwell on the problem beyond the lesson-learning portion. You’ll just kill your confidence and your drive. No good comes from that for either you or the client.

If the relationship is salvageable, save it. Even if that means the best thing you can do is recommend someone else for the job. Just because this client’s project and needs aren’t a good fit for us right now doesn’t mean they don’t know other businesses who ARE a good fit for our brand of integrated marketing strategy and know-how.

That’s my story… if you’ve been fired from a job or a project and you want to share your experience or your lessons, the comments are yours