The Business Brickyard

Just read the following intro on a company web site:

Do You Need Fresh Business Solutions?
We Think Globally To Deliver Sustainable Contact With Customers.

Risk Free Solutions for Managing Your Business With Individual Customer Support.

Strong... Right?

Short...hits the key benefits... speaks to the perceived pain of the market, etc...

One problem. This was the text that came along with a web site template from coolhomepages.com. It just had "Insert Company Name Here" at the end.

When a $36.00 website template has copy that could easily fit your company message, it's time to make changes.

Go read the positioning statement and intro copy you have in your marketing material/web site and what your competitors have.

Even better, cut and paste them all into a word document and read through them really fast. Ask some friends to read through it and tell you if any of them pique their interest (I really recommend this exercise.... doing it vs. thinking about it).

Interesting what you may discover.

While up in Portland Maine not too long ago I had dinner at The Flatbread Company. In addition to truly amazing pizza, I noticed a great sign hanging over the bar:

"Flatbread Company is growing. Are more restaurants bad?
Not if we follow our purpose.

Groups in nature have a purpose...
100 apples in a tree
100 geese flying in formation
1000 fish in a school
10,000 bees in a colony

Our purpose is who we are. It gives us direction and makes the many of us one."

Click here to read their purpose and values.

There are thousands (probably tens/hundreds of thousands) of businesses making many millions a year in profits that have still never heard of twitter, a blog or facebook. Are they all wrong? Have they missed out or is the joke really on us? They go about doing business through personal relationships, by delivering great customer service and it is working for them. They are more successful, by any measure, than most of those spending hours pontificating about how you will lose if you miss out on social media and the latest wave. And yet they are doing business. Not writing about it. Doing it.

They missed out on the last dot com bubble and bust. Maybe they will miss out on the next one. Are we so sure they are wrong?

Ironically, the online world is enthralled with the TV series Mad Men. It provides a captivating window back to when work was social in that old face to face way. Work looked sexy back then because it was. No bicycles in the office, no foosball tables and empires were built without so much as a single tweet. We all like to cheer about how Advertising is broken now. But is it broken because we we are all too busy to be "interrupted" by it? And is that good? Or, just as it always has been, do we tune out bad advertising and, because good ads are so rarely engaging, we move on. I don't remember loving every commercial growing up but I can tell you I remember a truck load more of those jingles than anything I could remember in the past 5-10 years.

I am continually amazed by the number of people on Twitter, the sheer number of blogs that exist and the growth of people (and brands) on Facebook. But I also am amazed by how so many of of us are spending our time. The slaves we have become to our mobile devices and the glow of our screens. It used to be much more simple and, somewhere, simple turned into slow. It's not. Simple works. Always has and always will.

And yet, we strive to make it harder for ourselves. We worry about twitter followers, blog subscribers and getting "Dugg." Does it make us a dime? Really? Does it help us make a dent in the universe?

For a very few, maybe it does and that makes us all chase after that small glimmer of gold. But for most of us it has put our heads in the digital sand. Is it possible that we are so busy managing our "friends" that we are losing the power of real friends. Does anybody pick up the phone anymore?

What would happen if you unplugged back to 2000? Just simple email that you dialed in to check a few times a day and a phone that tethered you to a chair for a while.

Why are we sending emails and direct messages to see when a good time to call might be? When did picking up the phone to quickly resolve an issue become inefficient?

For the person with 368,000 Twitter friends I ask, how lonely do you truly feel?

I love the idea of all of these tools and am amazed at their possibilities. But I wonder how many are truly getting something more positive out of it than the alternative.

Are they actually improving interactions with brands or, as it always has, does your experience with a brand come down to how great or not great the person you had to call when something went wrong was in solving your problem? Layer on as much technology and social media icing as you want, for any brand, YOU are the product! My new iPod may be shiny but, if the Apple Genius is a jerk, then I am not loving the brand. My Audi salesman acted like a jerk when I decided to not lease a new Audi this time. It changed the way I think about Audi in a small but important way. Social media cannot change that fact.

What happens to what it feels like to be part of a business that is doing something truly great if we are spending more time protecting our personal brand? What did business do to all of us that made building your personal brand more important than doing and building something great together?

The echo chamber we are building is getting larger and louder. And look where we are as a nation and a world. More megaphones do not equal a better dialogue.

We are busier than ever before doing more disconnected activities than ever before. Multi-tasking has become a badge of honor. I want to know why.

We walk the streets with our heads down staring into 3 inch screens while the world whisks by doing the same. And yet we are convinced we are more connected to each other than ever before.

Don't get me wrong, what we can do now is nothing short of spectacular. But the ability to generate real wonder and awe is fleeting. We no longer care how an airplane can fly us around the globe. Instead, we grouse about the food or the fact that you cannot check your email at 37,000 feet while moving 580 miles per hour. We rage against a short
Twitter outage when it is a service that we get for free but shrug our shoulders and wait it out quietly when our paid electricity gets knocked out by a storm. When did we become so entitled to that which we don't value enough to even pay for?

I don't have all the answers to these questions but I find myself thinking about them more and more. In between tweets, blog posts and facebook updates.

We all seek to find powerful ways to differentiate our companies. We search for new ways to market, new strategies and the big new idea that will give power to our claim that our business is truly unique.

We may be missing the most important road block...Working off of a pre-determined "Bucket" of the industry you are in.

If you start off by saying you are a consulting firm, a travel agent, an accounting firm or an advertising agency then you are stuck in the constraints of what history has constructed those words mean to people. The road is then more difficult as you try to tell the story of why you are different than all of the rest.

Why not first try to create an entirely new bucket based on the problem you are solving, your purpose or the need you are trying to fill.

Consider this quote from Scott Goodson, chief creative officer of Strawberry Frog, a new breed of (Bucket omitted), talking about what they can do:

"..they are more like political movements for clients and their products"

Even the author of the article (about a new breed of ad agencies) immediately moves to place Mr. Goodson back into a bucket with this statement "Some of what Goodman says is hype - he's an adman, for goodness' sake"

Perhaps it is hype or "marketing speak" but I would rather someone tell me that they are going to turn my business into a political movement than they are going to manage my ad campaign (Better still if they show how their unique thinking will make it happen). Ad agencies conjure up my own ideas about what I can expect and why I should be skeptical. The longer you can keep me from connecting your business to my pre-conceived beliefs the better chance you have of helping me understand how you want to help me vs how I believe you cannot.

If someone is presenting their company to you in a way that is uncomfortable because it does not fit into an easy "frame" that you can relate to, try to live with the discomfort a bit and focus on what they are saying first. You won't solve complex problems in fresh new ways by saying.. "We need to hire an __________."

Think about what you are actually delivering for your customers/clients and focus the description of what you do around that.

My wife is an exceptional school teacher. A few years ago, her 5th grade class wanted to do more than just a bake sale to help the children affected by Hurricane Katrina. Inspired by her reading to them from Kevin Carroll's "Rules of The Red Rubber Ball" they set out to write a book of poems and short stories all about "Hope," its importance and the need to never lose it. Sales of the book were used to raise money for a charity that was helping to rebuild the Gulf Coast.

What impacts me most about the project (Beyond the "inspiring story" part) is the purity of the motive behind it. The students worked for months on their stories, their poems, their drawings and simply the meaning of hope. Nothing to gain. No fame. No glory. Just the pure and sustained inspiration to do something more for those that were in need created their real power of purpose.

I spend a lot of time talking to my clients about the real purpose of their business. Just as I did (and do), each and every one finds it a challenging exercise.

I am talking about a true purpose, one buried below the taglines, marketing fluff and the obvious desire to make money (Although if making lots of money is your true purpose than that is what it is). What I am really looking for is a motive that is, for lack of a better word, pure. What makes you get out of bed each day? Why do you do what you do?

While very few businesses can really claim a truly pure motive, I propose that the closer they can move towards that goal the greater power their purpose, and business, will have.

When you think about the "Why" of what you do, work hard to uncover the motives and purpose behind them. I think you will find that from that truth will come the power to drive your business better than any marketing or advertising campaign you could buy. The specific steps you must take to deliver on that purpose will come into clear view. Real innovation will be sparked there.

If you need inspiration, you may want to begin with Kevin Carroll's book.

During a recent trip to South Africa, for a speaking engagement and a few workshops, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by my friend Mongezi Mtati for his Netweb TV series. As a bonus, how many people get to be interviewed in the "Zombie Room?"