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!

Brand DNA isn't a static thing

I found an article by Inc. magazine on rebranding a company and when it makes sense to do so that I tweeted and amplify’d. I liked the article enough to post the amplify.com note to my blog, too. If you’re a regular reader, you know I almost never “reblog” anything. Bottom line, I thought it had merit. It garnered more retweets on Twitter than anything I’ve posted in recent days, too, so it seems others saw the merit, too. And that made me wonder WHY it struck a chord with so many, right now.

Here’s what I think: It’s a new year. It’s an evolving economy seeking a new normal. As business owners, we are all striving to make the best start, seeking to leave behind the angst and difficulty of the recession and looking for authoritative answers to our questions on just how to make it happen. In some of the discussions that happened about the article (Twitter, Amplify and here) several people commented that new packaging won’t fix a bad company. Very true… so the question becomes, “How do I know if we’re a company with a branding problem, or with a deeper problem?” Before you scoff and tell me that is an easy one and list off all the things obviously unhealthy companies get wrong, let me tell you why this question is harder to answer than it seems for most businesses, and what I mean by “branding problem.”

Brand does NOT equal the logo, name, colors, style of letterhead, signage (physical expressions of a company’s visual identity). Brand DOES equal the perceived attributes, ideas, relationship, expectations and direction of a company, as expressed by external viewers. Not just customers, either. Apple’s brand is shaped by both customers’ and non-customers’ opinions and expectations. This is why people can say they “love” or “hate” a brand. They are in relationship with all the things they associate with that company. Therefore, rebranding doesn’t mean changing your logo (although that may indeed be part of the tactical steps taken). It means examining dispassionately the perceptions of your company in the marketplace. It means looking at market potential with existing perceptions in place (current brand) versus market potential with changed perceptions in place (successfully rebranding) and any number of potential new sets of perceptions or brands. It means looking at your business as an organism that must make conscious choices and that can foresee, with some degree of accuracy, the outcomes of those choices. It means doing the hard work to understand the marketplace, consumer behavior and drivers, trends, costs and long term financial impacts.

So, that’s what I mean by branding.

If you’re a small business (one or a few employees), the company’s identity is often so closely associated with your own that changing the brand can feel like a betrayal of self. Having or acquiring the market knowledge to accurately reflect and then predict your company’s trajectory based on brand A, B or C can be difficult at best. Being able to set aside the hopes and dreams you had when you launched to look carefully at the future, especially if you’re doing fine right now, is often the hardest part of all. The upside is that the vision is usually strongly shared and employees (if there are any) are committed to it and tend to start from a cohesive point. Changing a brand is impossible if the company only concentrates on external packaging, advertising, marketing, PR etc. Changing how the business operates, what it produces, how it produces or delivers, how it interacts with the marketplace… those things are often easier in a smaller company once the commitment to changing is set.

If you own or work for a larger business, the difficulty often arises from that lack of shared internal vision and perception in the first place. Many larger businesses have the resources to model their marketplace and make some educated assessments regarding what might happen if… what’s ofeten missing is the internal commitment to real change, since the starting place for the many employees is so varied. If, for instance, a large consumer goods company wants to change how they interact with the marketplace so they are perceived as more community-minded, more involved in social issues, more caring… but their employees feel neglected, unimportant, like expendable resources… I submit that the rebranding will ultimately fail. Advertising can say whatever it wants, but products and service delivered by employees who feel like the company doesn’t care are not going to deliver on the advertised promise of caring.

How do you know if your business would benefit from a rebranding effort? You don’t – without doing the hard work of figuring it out. The best thing about the process may be how it forces us to look at our businesses from a clinical perspective… examine the DNA and look for mutations that may signal a problem or may herald our next big thing.

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)

I live a digital life. I don’t mean that I’m involved in digital media, though I am (hey, you’re reading this, right, and you probably got here via Facebook, Twitter, or Google). I mean that my first instinct to discover, research, connect or share now involves digital platforms. Cases in point:

I saw a tweet by Heather Caliendo on Twitter about the movie Inception last Friday. It was positive, and I know and like Heather and more importantly, respect her opinions and know she has high standards for smart stories. So, when my husband and I considered a movie on Saturday night, guess what we saw? Yep… Inception, based in large part on Heather’s tweet to the world. I’ve not seen Heather in months, since she’s moved to Colorado, but our relationship matters to me regardless of our “face-to-face” interaction (or lack thereof).

I recently dropped my iPhone into a toilet. It suffered a severe case of PTSD (Post Toilet Submergance Dysfunction) and then died. Through my digital friendship with Bobby Rettew, who sympathized with my phoneless plight and had also recently upgraded to an iPhone 4, I became the very happy owner of his lovely 3G S phone. I’ve never met Bobby in person, though we keep threatening to make that happen. However, I consider him a friend, not just a “friend” in the Facebook sense of the word.

On a trip through southeast Kansas over the weekend, we stopped in Pittsburg to eat dinner. I used my UrbanSpoon app to check out possibilities and we discovered some awesome Italian food at a place called Napoli’s, located on Broadway in Pittsburg. I posted via Foursquare & shared the post to Facebook that we’d really enjoyed our visit. A FB friend, local to the area and someone I’ve not seen in person for many years, said they’d been hesitant to try it, but now they might after hearing our experience.

What is the point of all this? Digital relationships matter. People do pay attention. The relevance quotient for digital relationships is high…. I didn’t do a Google search for restaurants in Pittsburg since I didn’t want to know about all of them… just the good ones. I didn’t buy a phone from Craigslist because I depend (and Crossroads Communications depends) on my phone for my business and I trusted Bobby. And the movie… we see maybe two or three a year. So we choose carefully… and Heather is a writer. She knows a good story when she sees one. Her recommendation elevated Inception to the level of “worth spending one of our two movie nights left this year on” status.

Relevance is the engine that drives our digital decisions. The future of the web as a connection medium  lies not in creating more information nor in more platforms for sharing information. It lies in better ways for relevant information to be funneled to the people who care about it. When you think about how to use the web to drive business, or use social media, or anything else “2.0″ related, start with answering the question, “Who cares?” because that forces the question of relevance. It’s not about creating buzz, or getting hits, or driving traffic… it’s about nurturing relationships that allow your offering, be it information or an iPhone, to become relevant to a very specific set of consumers at exactly the right time. THAT is what translates digital interest into business or brand success.

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?

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

At Ignite Tulsa last month, I talked about “Why Passion Doesn’t Change Anything.” I wanted people to come away with the idea that passion, by itself, doesn’t accomplish change, or make love true, or make you money. In other words, don’t be passionate; be effective. And now, those of you out there (and you know who you are) who have an idea, a passion, a… something you know can succeed, have your chance to go be effective.
The 2010 Tulsa Entrepreneurial Spirit award is now open for submissions. You need not be based in Tulsa to enter or win, but you have to be willing to open or expand into Tulsa if you’re from somewhere else.

The reason this program is so worth it for people who have an idea, or who have a business that needs some help to get to the next level is the process… going through it helps entrants clarify their vision, prepare a business plan that works and gets the attention of potential investors, loan officers, etc., and the 25 entrants who advance to the semifinal stage get invaluable (free!) business coaching to help them launch and grow. And that’s how raw passion gets transformed into something that matters… and makes money.

Sponsored by Spirit Bank and Tulsa Community College, the program is in its fourth year and will award this year’s winner $30,000. Two runners-up are also selected and awarded smaller cash prizes.

Don’t wait… if you have an idea, or a business that needs to grow (and you’ve been in business for less than 5 years) the time is now. Go unleash your big idea and start using your passion to be effective.

Submissions accepted until May 13th.

I don’t write as much about Public Relations on this blog because I write A LOT about Public Relations over on the Journal Record’s PR blog.

This week’s PR post is about Waste Mangement COO Larry O’Donnell’s trip to the trenches to experience what his employees actually do during their work day and the chronicling of that experience on the new TV show “Undercover Boss.”

This week’s episode, airing Sunday, features a Hooter’s exec doing the same thing. So… first garbage and portable toilets and second hot wings and hot chicks.

Aside from the potential PR benefits and pitfalls, which I talk about in the Journal Record post, consider for a moment the PR possibilities for the show itself by starting with something everyone thinks is awful (cleaning toilets) and following it with something highly controversial (hot pants or hot wings… why do you go?).

Undercover Boss is pulling out all the stops to launch successfully and letting the buzz in the leadership, management, business, environmental, feminist, manly men and reality TV camps and in social media drive the ratings.  What do you think? Too much calculatedness on the part of the show? Do you “trust” that the experience matters to the companies?

Go for WHY: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oberazzi/318947873/

List posts have their place, and I know they are good for traffic. I’ve written them, too. But our super-connected world and the constant flow of information seems to be driving us to oversimplify complex subjects and interactions. By creating lists. Lots of lists. In some cases, lists of lists.
I’m not against all lists… I believe in a to-do list, a grocery list and have tweeted & retweeted helpful design tip, font and how-to lists. But not all things can (or should) be reduced to a bulleted list.

If it’s a complex subject, treat it with the depth it deserves. A marketing communications plan, encompassing goals, objectives, strategies, tactics and metrics should be more than a list of items. A public relations plan should be more than a list of ideas or publications and an editorial calendar. When we start to work with a new client we ask a lot of questions about their business… not just about what they sell and who they sell it to, but about things like:

Where does your money come from? Revenue? Profit streams and margins?

What is the recent history of the market segment you inhabit? Near future changes or evolutions you expect? Long-term future or potential?

Adjacent markets? Competitive markets?

What factors in the market and within your company’s revenue map do you control or influence?

We augment with our own research and then we tackle goals and objectives, clearly grounded in the business case for what we’re doing. The marketing communications plan addresses how the goals and objectives fit the larger picture of the business and where it wants or needs to go. When you start with a good WHY, all the WHATs and HOWs become much easier to define and later on to sell to the people who have to sign the checks to see them implemented.