Home Workers? Off with Their Heads!

Marissa Mayer of Yahoo gets the rules of the Fortune 500 CEO “Good Ole Boy’s Club”. It goes something like this - if you stamp your feet, pound your little fists on the table and push people around enough, then they’ll know who the boss is!” It’s one approach among others. Most more sophisticated approaches today are slightly more enlightened.

Some leaders would rather encourage the infinitely more evolved approach to a problem of this magnitude with one that is less polarizing by saying something like; “Certain aspects of new developments visa vie “work from home” positions in the work environment need closer scrutiny and certain mathematical justification before I can endorse them. Until then we will opt for the standard albeit slightly dated approach to work environments and bring everyone back into the office”.

All these people will now:
·         Add to gridlock
·         Suck up our precious resources
·         Get stuffed into already crowded offices and wall to wall cubicles
·         Add to the human stress in work environments which is proven to be unhealthy physically and mentally
·         Cause more redundant costs in real estate, IT, taxes, benefits and more
·         Reduce the company’s availability to the top talent pool by not including the people who can't or won't meet some arbitrary geographical restrictions
·         Increase our costs as a company thereby reducing our reach and flexibility to generate profit doing business globally 
·         Rule out a manner of business that done properly can reduce costs, increase profitability and make us more competitive

What’s the old saying –“Keep your mouth shut and let people wonder if you’re an idiot instead of opening your mouth and removing all doubt”. Yep, let’s go with that one. You’re the boss though so it’s your way or the highway. It’s good to be the king, right?

Hey your highness allow me the opportunity to edumacate you (Yeah, I spelled that right – thought it be more appropriate for your intellectual level). You are making the classic mistake almost all your predecessors have made and that is to think that just because things have been done a certain way since the dawn of the Industrial Age, they should continue uninterrupted another 150 years or so. So let me enlighten you. The dawn of the Technology Age is providing us with new opportunities in all aspects of the corporate structure – including how and where we can work.

What do you think outsourcing was?

Here’s a hint: it was a very expensive and poorly thought out “work from home” solution. In that gem of an idea we gave away our greatest technological ideas and patents to people who had mastered a mid-western accent. Well, that was a little more than a hint. Still I’m not sure you understood it. 

You've got that rare but distinguishable mentality that must be the result of breathing the strangely salted air densely stuffed into the clouds of your own personal Olympus…that certain Wiley Coyote-esque mentality that keeps you locked unto one bad idea after another like a pitbull on a human leg without any room for alternative thinking.

Here’s how it going to work. Well defined, intelligently built remote communities that combine a “remote to tote” component are the work environments of the future and for many smart companies that future starts today. It works like this:

·         It is not an across the board invitation for everybody to grab a laptop and go home

·         It has to be the result of a carefully analyzed evaluation of certain positions

·         These “potential” functions are tethered using the latest hardware and software combined with both online and in-house cultural integration

·         They are the result of a stringently applied process that includes; analysis, observation, interface activity mapping, cultural impact studies, double blind tests of all aspects related to productivity;  all wrapped into a proven program to evaluate what functions can move remotely and how and who this includes

·         And finally, the “remote to tote” concept of working certain people into company cultures by bringing them in to shared or in special cases “claimed” work spaces one day a week, three days every two weeks or even one week a month.

What can a company accomplish using this approach?

·         Reduced stress from workers

·         Greater productivity

·         Increased profitability

·         Reductions in “real” costs

·         Less people jammed onto already crowded and crumbling highways

·         Less office space packed with people doing redundant work because nobody has evaluated your company workflow in a decade

·         A greater pool of better talent not restricted by geography

I could continue into a real conversation on how you, as an enlightened leader, could assess the “mathematical probability factor” we generate using “nTelegenz” our one-of-a-kind preemptive analytical program and our own Trademarked “Tethered Communities™” which creates intelligent, easy to manage, practical and proven “seamless home to work environments”. But this idea isn't for you. It’s for the person who replaces you when your boss (shareholder) looks at the costs of the company soaring and can’t get an intelligent answer from you. The conversation will go something like this:

Boss: Our company operating costs are increasing and we’re not seeing any real increase in productivity to offset these costs, what’s going on?
You: Well we brought all those losers back and I proved my point; they were lazy at home and their just as lazy here
Boss: What are you doing about it?
You: Well, since pounding my little fists on the table and herding them all back into cubicles didn't work, I suggest some good old “inquisition” motivational “re-education” program!
Boss: Inquisition? As in the “Great Inquisition” using the rack and torture and all that?
You: Now you’re getting the idea. We just keep going back in history until we find the business model that works.

Boss: Back in time not forward?

You: Yeah, what have we ever learned from the future - unless you believe in crystal balls...Now the past, we know we can rely on methods from the past.
Boss: (now sarcastically) Like working children of 8 and 9 years old, fourteen hours a day?
You: I hadn't thought of that but I like the way you think, boss!

Good luck with that whole new uniform you’ll get to wear. I hear you get some comfy slippers with them. 

Super Virus

Super Virus

Hey, Fortune America are you listening yet?

To Mr, Misses, Mrs. or Ms CEO:

For 20 years I have been telling you that the time was right to commence structuring, testing and implementing a new business model. One that was more flexible, less top heavy, reduced gridlock yada...yada...yada... A business platform that generally made more sense for today's global environment with it's rapidly expanding and constricting fiscal sensitivities. Not that our economic foundation hasn't always been one bad idea from caving in, but now with the clear and evident understanding we are one natural catastrophe, or some other bizarre smackdown, away from a disaster that would be the equivalent of an asteroid hitting Manhattan having a second option in terms of how we construct our business operations is a really good idea.

I thought that back then, and I believe more firmly now that we can avoid more financial havoc, right our ship and begin to recapture our market by simply tossing out our current idea of how a Fortune level business should look and adjusting the picture to use models that emulate the best of both worlds -small and big business. I am talking about Tethered Communities™, our proprietary protocol for building seamless home to work environments.

I built the largest ever work from home (legitimate) calling company -sales and customer service-  employing over 500 people working from home- and this was just a few years before the Internet phenomena. Not just because it could be done, but that we were speedily heading toward a place where it would have to be done. I say this because,even then without the tools and technology we have today, it was plausible. 

Tethered Communities™

The concept is simple though the execution is not. You’ll need people who are really smart -that's where I come in. The concept, which would have stemmed the exodus of tens of thousands of American jobs from being unceremoniously shipped overseas, is to take any function that is conducted nearly or entirely over the phone – or can be converted to function over the phone (sales, customer service etc.) – to then box it up or deconstruct each element (hardware, software, emails, paperwork etc.) then to unbox it or reconstruct the function to be capable of being picked up and placed anywhere; making it entirely portable while making the function more effective, less repetitive, more efficient and less costly. You can even include the analysis and re-introduction of extemporaneous conversations. Yes, you can actually create a mathematical program to recreate the best possible application of any conversation from all sides. You merely have to know how it is done. I’ve got that covered.

The idea is to create a seamless home to work environment. And please I am not talking about the current state of remote work which by simple default means taking your laptop on the plane to catch up on emails. This is more like the ad you see on television where a salesperson needs to access something on the fly and yanks out his smartphone, which is way smarter than any smartphone I know, proceeds to pull up in an amazing full 21” screen graphics view, an Excel sales graph (you know with the 3-D bars) to change one bar to show an increase rather then a decrease. Good thing he finally thought of that at the last minute. Imagine showing up to a sales meeting without good sales figures. Now I know why they call it a smartphone. 

But Tethered Communities™ is a real-life situation where you intentionally decode the function and all applications to re-create  the function so you could literally pick it up and put it down anywhere and it would process much faster, with less redundancy, more efficiency and with greater flexibility.

Imagine, if you will, not building a huge campus with several buildings, which then requires moving several thousand positions to this location to take advantage of a temporary tax break. Say instead you decided you only wanted the very best people and you were smart enough to know you didn't want to move everything to do that; because moving either for you as the company or for the families of key employees is stressful, economically consuming and always at the whim of the economy. Now suppose you could build your company horizontally. That's right, instead of up -you build it out.

Of course you couldn't do this for everyone or everything. In fact it would only apply to something like 20 to 30% of the company (the jobs you outsourced to India or China). Continuing the thought - you are now able to attract the very best talent in the areas you Tether. They are 1099 so even though they are the best they will end up costing you less and still make the good money they deserve. Overall the company spends less money of peripheral costs as well; less real estate, hardware, software, insurances, fixed and variable costs - you get the picture. Plus you get an added bonus with this as well - you are now sleek and flexible. 

It's the best of both worlds. You get to have your huge army but you can train parts of it to be very mobile, guerrilla-like and extensible. Relocation of company parts becomes 30% easier. Costs for payroll drop 8-11% real percent points and the work gets done by Americans who so badly need the work. This idea could make you a hero or heroine.

The idea has risen to the surface. We are able to toggle from real life to work and back again on any of our handheld or laptop devices. There is only one problem and that is the mentality and thinking that comes with the Fortune level mind.  This is pretty "out of the box" thinking. It can't be done by default. These positions have to be carefully evaluated and every component and aspect analyzed to insure you can recreate the experience in individual pockets that are attached to your primary physical work environment. There are all kinds of unique "environments" that can be built; people who come in once a week, a month, by Web or in small satellites. But those are merely final dressing points. You have to ask yourself if sending these jobs overseas to call centers in foreign countries makes any more sense then developing the culture of properly constructed and intelligently Tethered Communities™ here in America. 

We have a very elaborate cost analysis that we can provide to show you how much money you could potentially save and how competitive this process can be compared to sending jobs overseas. I know we are now looking at in-sourcing phenomena as Fortune Level companies begin to realize the cost of jobs overseas is not measured simply a dollar amount and even then it is becoming less expensive to bring these jobs home. Imagine if we could make them even more economical by deploying Tethered Communities™. There are a slew of cultural and personal reasons that make working here more logical for a Fortune company - if they could make the dollars work. And that is my entire argument.  For the last ten years we have promoted and continued to improve the industry's only and most elite tools for creating this timely and amazing work process; the seamless home to work environment; nTelgenz (analysis for this specific purpose), Rganx (analysis for extemporaneous conversations), Tethered Communities™the process by which all of this occurs (hardware, software, emails, communications etc.). In fact, I am pretty certain that as a functional and replete package with all the moving parts already preconceived and fully engaged, we are the only company that comes in with the whole program and not just a consulting approach. 

The time is now!

Here’s where the commentary ends and the instructions begin.  Forgetting for the moment all your bad decisions of the past, we are now faced with a terror so frightening that the specter of it looming over our country right now is one that should strike fear into the heart of every father, mother, son or daughter. We have been staring down the barrel of dirty bombs, extreme Mother Nature attacks, rogue empires with nuclear capabilities, unstable nations, economic insanity but all that is kindergarten level threat compared to what is coming next.

We have finally uncovered it. It was only a matter of time and we have just about run out of that. The Mother of all bacteria is here. This is being termed the Armageddon or Apocalypse Bacteria because we are nowhere near having anything close to combating this if it becomes  a pandemic. And it will if it escapes its confines. In fact it may have already done just that. We know in these days and times the worst news can travel in the air we breathe from England to Los Angeles in only a matter of hours and that unintentionally.

What is your emergency plan? 

Tethered Communities™ should be the business model of the future for so many reasons. Not the least of which is continuity as a company and a community in the event of a airborne illness that forced us to stay home for a certain length of time. We know of a half dozen serious flues that could precipitate that conclusion and now we have the Apocalypse Bacteria. When we started to deporting our jobs I did a blog mathematically proving that we could compete in the long run and still keep a good portion of our jobs here. I even predicted that sending these jobs overseas would make cheaper products but leave us with no money to purchase them. 

For the record and simply put. Tethered Communities™ is a process of analysis, observation, education and allocation. It is a means of creating an alternative process for your vital in-house job functions. A way to take an inside employee position and re-create it as a mobile, seamless home to work environment securing 1099 contractors; thus saving on multiple insurances, redundant work hours, IT, real estate, management and a myriad of other incidental costs. It’s been 5 years and the situation has only become more complicated. I’m still here. I can teach you how to go guerrilla  get tactical, be flexible, cut costs, improve revenues and put people to work -am I missing something? Or is this a direction you simply cannot see your company occupying. Believe me when I tell you - someone will. Maybe not through me but some competitor is going to get this message and take it to market. And by the time you figure out how they are doing exactly what I am saying here should be done, your move, if you get to make one, will be an after thought. 

It’s now 2013 – in March 2008 we wrote a blog “Is that a Light at the End of the Tunnel?” The blog among other observations stated that the housing crash would starve this country until 2012 and then drag us under until “we have a fiscal stall due to overspending, unemployment and government debt. It will get so bad that there will be no fix possible. In 2012 we will simply have to push a Fiscal Reset Button”. I believe we are calling it the Fiscal Cliff. We called it pretty close, didn't we? And we have one heck of an alternative solution that can significantly reduce your operating costs and put more Americans to work. Not bad for a program, concept and idea conceived by 4 guys on a 4 day weekend in Vegas. You can believe me when I tell you it wasn’t the only thing we were busy doing.

Cultures

There are essentially four main operating components influencing your business today: the internal culture, the external culture, the market culture and the very distinct super culture.

The culture of any company is a complex entity existing within and outside of your brick and mortar or digital landscape dynamics. It is as much they way you perceive yourself, as it it is the way you perceive others in cooperation with yourself. It is as much about you thinking about the world as it is the world thinking about you.

It is a sense of character that is passed down from the very top of the company to the most fundamental personality in your company. Culture isn't any one thing, it is a combination and an amalgamation of many things - some very human by nature and some in the design and execution of the way you do business.

Think of the culture of your company as a living organism that evolves with the company's growth, and grows in the way it best perceives - on whatever level that perception takes place- how that organism identifies it must grow in order to live and to thrive.  In any living process where thought and consequence are as important to survival as available area and resources are to the most elemental organisms on the planet; the company culture takes on a uniquely significant role. Here instead of some basic cell growth and division, we witness how the founder(s) replicates his or her characteristics throughout the growth of that company. 

This determination and imposition of behavior on others to evoke our will is as basic to human nature as anything else we do - it 's manifest destiny-  whether we do this for the good (Mother Theresa) or the for evil (Hitler). The stronger the will of that organism to impose it's perceived values and the more important that value is to the other organisms that attach themselves to this cause, the more directly these characteristics define a company. History is replete with these examples. Just because we do this on a much smaller scale, doesn't mean in some ways it doesn't have the same impact. How does your boss perceive quality? Pricing? Integrity? How does your Founder treat subordinate employees? Does he(she) hire to compliment their egos or to offset their weaknesses? 

When all is said and done, the people who believe that the end result of how they treat others is just as important as how many widgets they sell offer and how good their widgets look will be the people and the companies that we remember and support. It starts from the top down and then in a mad market of individuals, policies, competitors, pricing and selection - the companies with character as their culture stand out.

The Internal Culture is the natural evolution in the behavior people create and modify as they assimilate into environmental changes. It is the manifest evidence of people growing individually yet as a group. It’s about how they relate to one another - how they get along with management and how they talk about your company to people outside your doors. It’s about cliques, emails, phone calls, lunches, break room conversations and all the elements that make a culture a separate, living and thriving entity. It is the singular yet collective manner in which this body of people represents themselves to you, your managers and ultimately to the Market Culture (the people who buy your products and services).

The External Culture is made up of the people (sales, management, technicians, phone support, etc.) who represent your company with their own unique personalities. They sell and support your products and services directly to the Market Culture - hopefully with the same sort of enthusiasm and energy which originally built and defined your company.

The Market Culture is the most complex culture outside the Super Culture. Like all cultures, each in some way affects the other, but in the case of the Market Culture, its affect drives your business. It is the combination of your client’s employees working with your employees - interfacing to create their own distinct community. It is the market share exerting its influence on your company with the law of supply and demand. It is your buyers reacting to pressures from competition, market changes and new economic perspectives. It is the nature of business evolution as it turns, morphs and opens new doors of opportunities. It is the source of energy to inspire The Super Culture.

The Super Culture is where the spirit and personality of your company reside. It is the energy created from the results of all these influences converging in the hearts, minds and thoughts of employees, managers, salespeople, marketing people, clients and even competitors. From all these like and disparate components we learn the secrets that will inspire and impact your market. It is the juncture where the observational and quantitative values we’ve obtained from the Internal and External Cultures are processed to form the recommendations for adapting company structure and accelerating sales and marketing.

The Residual Impact is the anticipated but unidentified benefits that will result from our combined strategies and programs.

To learn more about how the dynamics of your company are defining and either inhibiting or increasing your growth, email Frank Bosson at frankb@thebossongroup.com for a frank discussion on how values are more important today than ever before, both in our lives and in our businesses. 

• 
• 

Genevieve leaves the Guf

The world…life…is filled with sudden and loud endings that force us to face new beginnings. If not for these events many of us would have certainly found much easier or at the very least more appealing paths through life. It is not to be so. It is these constant concussions sometimes seen and sometimes seen and denied that are woven in blood and tears through the fabric of our life. It is this cloak we wear that becomes heavier with the blood, darker absent the life and less colorful as we age. It is the face that people put upon us drawn in crayon like blue clowns poorly traced in a toddler’s coloring book; and all from their own, very carefully sallied chair looking out their personally arranged window to gaze upon their very particular lawn revealing to them a uniquely packaged kind of world.

Then there are the people who dance across the top of your life and tickle you with their laughter.

The special few that comfort you with their love and boost you with their support.

They are the laughers, the talkers, the care-givers the special bonds that make life so wonderfully artful.

So important they are like your special secret – Oh how could she see me as so wonderful…I know what I am…dare I tell her? She knows and that’s what makes her so important…

The kind of important you tuck so perfectly and neatly away in the very near fold of your heart. There her song is always sung and private moments are continually replayed - forever.

How many times did we say that? How many times did we forget? How much of that matters when it really is the music of your voice I so desire? Did I call you last or did you call me? How did I get to be so special to someone so special to me?

The child and the lady…The sister and the friend. Of course I loved her…she was the only one who accepted me with all the dents, dings and doubts that I clumsily dragged about. But whatever else I know, I know a secret that I can now share. She was exactly who she needed to be, to be the best she could be to every person who needed to lean in her direction and she did it with grace and a truthfulness that made you believe that no matter what…in her eyes you were just fine.

All the louder and more devastating the concussion. If you wake up on some every other morning and the world is missing a particular sound that even though you heard it very seldom, still it meant so much to you that you instantly know your world is quieter, less colorful, sadder. Something really valuable and important is gone. Not a piece of the pissing random muddle of human defecation that smolders over liquored up foul-ty or the rum-a-dum-dum of the next big deal…

No, this is that very special song that is as much a remnant of the tune you made as it is the one you made together…. A sound that if it could be seen would glitter like gold, taste like the finest of wines and the sweetest of cakes. It is a visceral element of being who you are and what you are to the secret you that only you know lives inside your broken shell…and to all those “other” people and most especially other people like her. Only the few are able to achieve such a vital and wondrous place inside you. A place that when you open it’s hearts door to listen in, however rarely, you were properly jerked from the patter of your silly scurry to know that marvelous melody over and over again.

Then that concussion. It hits so hard. It doesn’t care about night or day, cold or hot, near or far –BOOM- and the world grows eerily quiet as you adjust to a new world. Something important has ceased to be a part of the music that created the equanimity that balanced your oddly shaped life. It is a silence that drowns out all the other music that you might hear. It is a noise that scratches across the surface of your skin and makes you shutter to the bone. It is everything about living and dying that we so oddly stuff away from sight…until the BOOM.

It isn’t the loss that you fear. It isn’t the impact that it will selfishly have on your life. It is the realization that the sound you once danced to was far more important than the force march your life and body continually sustain for purposes that are of far less value and when weighed and measured come up wanting and are at best, queer. You would have been wiser to embrace that dance – especially for the part of me in which she resided.

An hour ago a phone rang. A voice of someone I used to know and still love weeping- a person who had taken responsibility for keeping that wonderful music in my life for so long. I heard the music pass away even before she blurted it out between her suffocating sighs. One light goes out and many others are in their own way forever dimmer. The music that once held a place in my mind where I could go to when I needed to hear her song is yet another hole in my soul. I will cling desperately to the memory of her face, laugh, touch, song and kiss but they will go to grey before long; until the day we are once again allowed to play together and make a whole new kind of music. Along with this comes the death of that part of who I am and more importantly who she is inside me. Now it becomes the concussion that moves me either to the left or the right – subtly or dramatically to another destination I could not have anticipated.

Another soul leaves the Guf. Another time Gabriel will reach into the treasury. One more minute we are all closer to becoming a concussion in someone’s life. A moment in time when our song becomes more fleeting to some and more important to others–

Our light a bit dimmer and burning more brightly depending on every facet and which way we turn our face.

It is a symphony and each note is connected to the last and to the next.

It is a dance that we all dance by ourselves and all together.

It is every twist and turn whether we race or pace, run or crawl, scream or whisper, sing or curse, love or hate.

It is the scent of every move, every note which will waft across your silly little galaxy drenching those closest and sprinkling just a twinkle on those who revolve in the furthest away rings of the air – the atmosphere of our own magical privacy.

SHE WAS A GIANT CONCUSSION.

There is a screaming silence from the music I allowed her to occupy in my sad, little and lonely kingdom. I can feel myself and others so intimately connected and so foreign to my life already changing our dance. As they dance away I can only pray that their lives are absent too many of these monstrous shockwaves .

I have designed my life to avoid as many of these as possible. Of course the tradeoff is that I will not create much of one on my own on that strange and certain someday when my soul drifts from the Guf and into the Hand of my Lord.

God Bless

PART II: THE DIGITAL LANDSCAPE

Contact us:
fbosson@thebossongroup.com
209 333 7786

WHAT ABOUT THOSE PESKY SOCIAL MEDIAS?

There has never been a time in the history of our country’s business infrastructure when we had at our disposal such a diverse myriad of free venues which could, potentially -when working in harmony with a greater strategy -have an enormous impact on your bottom line! This is true for every company no matter how large or small. But as we discussed in Part I, this blog is meant for the larger portion of our clientele, the small to mid-size business.

Before the onset of theses free venues (Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn and the plethora of RSS opportunities etc.) companies went to great lengths to deliver their message:

· Paying big money to create videos (television commercials, online videos etc.) in order to get their name, message and business products or services in front of their proper audience

· Contract expensive marketing programs to deliver messages whether through complex mail systems or costly email programs

· Find ways to engage their clients in relevant conversations which would demonstrate their superior awareness of the industry as it applies to client needs (conferences and conventions)

· Find creative ways to certify your rightful position in a crowded marketplace and display the significant solutions you offer

· Spend a lot of money to clearly define your core competencies so clients won’t dismiss you as a small package but rather view you as a unique adjunct

In fact these forums validate some distinct market positions through which (when used with other more traditional business tactics) you can communicate directly with your client privately and all just for what it takes to know which to use, why to use them and how you anticipate they will impact your company.

Consider that in the last ten years we have seen an explosion in social media sites including; FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs, YouTube and others. Now ask yourself, how are you using these networks to augment your sales?

“How are you using your social media?”

The Bosson Group interacts with many different types of businesses but we always start with their digital presence. Almost every time we begin our analysis we run in to the same problem; a poor digital position and an even worse understanding of what their cyberspace experience should include and why it should include what we recommend! Our job is to come in to a company define the market needs from the buyer’s perspective, provide solutions, structure, definitions, strategy and sales. The first thing we see virtually on every site and almost invariably is series of social media icons. And just as they almost always have some hyperlinked social media icons, they have an unused social media programs.

“I hardly ever use them?” “I don’t know why I have them!” “I don’t have time for them? “ “I have no idea what to do with them?” “I’ve got them but I don’t know what they do or how they can help me!”

In almost all cases when we talk with our clients about how they are using their social media programs, one of the above statements or questions is the response we get. If you are one of those businesses that has no idea why you have the programs or what to do with them; this blog will be useful.

If you are one of our clients and using our Tethered Communities™ sales solutions or you are using your own inside sales program then this little blog will provide critical information in making those ghostly hyperlinks power tools.

How and why should I use social media?

As we are primarily interested in addressing those companies that tie their efforts to inside sales which is almost all of our clients and most small to mid-size businesses. Let me say that most of the information in this blog will relate to an inside sales environment. And let me address why I expect this applies to all small to mid-size businesses. The reality for sales today is that to maintain the costs associated with an outside sales force falls to much larger companies with money to burn (and burn they will). By default, small to mid-size companies don’t have the cash flow for such a frivolous waste of their money. They are by nature of the beast, forced to conduct their business over the phone and through email so the addition of these social media functions are likely to impact their business significantly either way.

But that’s not bad news that’s the good news. If you start your company off learning the proper habits and carefully analyze how and what works best to acquire the most predictable outcome, then you are building a productive long term telephone sales and marketing program. This way as your company grows you can manage and anticipate your growth far more accurately without falling into the outside salesperson trap. Every business owner knows that it’s important that they deliver the right message to the proper audience.

Today’s business owner also knows that they should be using their digital tools like the website, emails, SEO to develop their business but they are uncertain and confused about how they should go about it. Let’s clear up some misconceptions and bring this into focus.

Social Media as a Strategy

If you are one who sees all of your social media links as one big black hole sucking up your precious time and resources, it’s time to bring your use of social media under control.

• Don’t think of them as all one kind of thing doing the same thing in different formats. Each has a unique structure and speaks to your audience in a very specific manner – understanding how each application works best and designing your free media to get the most out of each platform will help you make sense of how and why you need each format
• Get to know your audience as they relate to each social media and exploit those venues that make sense to you and don’t engage those that don’t
• Use them as individual strategic steps; each contributing in a different way to educate, inform and entertain prospective buyers with the overarching goal of driving buyers to your website where they will conduct business
• Remember everything revolves around your website, so design your site to do business and not to act as an online brochure.

The Website

I’m going to cover a lot of ground in a little time but this should give you some basic guidelines on how to make your website more than one in sixty million online bookmarks. You website should be built to do business. If a buyer can’t hit your home page and in under a minute answer these three questions…

• Why me?
• Why you
• Why now?

…Then your website doesn’t work.

Clients often tell me that they have the problem of explaining why they are unique – forget about that. Every site is unique – if they are at your site they want to know why it’s where they should spend their money. Few people surf the web to read sites and if you structure your site properly it will be visual, quick and easy for the client to understand who you are, what you do and what makes you special. Social Media sites express your individuality - your site is where you should conduct business.

If you are a consultant or if you offer complex services that require that people leave information about who they are and what they need, then provide that ability for them in at least three different formats. Every landing page should have:

• Testimonials (when relevant) upfront and where they can be seen
• A picture story about what you do or who you are (what you do if you do something – who you are if they are buying your time)
• Calls to actions everywhere
• Click-thrus to access clearly spelled out services and products
• Options to call, email, access your people or the person
• Video introduction to products and services and if you can include in under a minute the unique position you hold in the market – that to
• A resource library at the bottom of the page for access to linsk, news, information, employment etc.
• A navigation bar absent “Who we are” “Mission” or “Company History” (put these in your resource library if you feel they are relevant)

SEO

If you are spending money on SEO services STOP!

Let’s end the talk about SEO here and now. If you don’t have a Wordpress site or a self-managed site with a built-in Content Management System, get one. Until then if you have your managed site, take the time to make sure your webmaster knows how to get all your key words in the places they should be. Don’t forget that Google owns YouTube and you will be seen there as well (keyword section). Start using a blog and distribute it to prospects, they will be seen by search engines. Send your blog to clients and prospects through email.

If you don’t know where and how to use keywords and set up your SEO and you don’t think your webmaster does either then go to YouTube and find about a zillion tutorials on them. Or Google SEO and learn all the tricks and continuing changes search engines make to insure clients are reaching the right company the first time they type something in.

Google is not interested in whether you get a fair shot at the first page and companies pay a lot of money to have their names show up there. So the best you can hope for is to get your name on the same page as larger competitors. You don’t go do a private bakery because it’s cheaper than Walmart. You go to a private bakery because it has better bagels than Walmart’s pre-made fifty pound bags of bagel dough! Don’t pick a fight with Walmart.

If your buyer is looking for cheaper and doesn’t care about quality, outcome, attention to detail and personal interest in their success through your specific offering then you are probably not the solution they need. I tell all of my clients that they need to bring their sales conversation to a place and time absent their competition.

FACEBOOK

Think of FaceBook as digital geography. This doesn’t mean that you need your buyers to be local to get value out of FaceBook but that’s how it should be used. If you think about “Starbucks” and their FaceBook protocol then you understand the “geography” concept. How many people get “new products” and deals from Starbucks on their Facebook?

Use FaceBook to pull together your products or services in way that makes it logical for buyers in a digital geographic community. If you offer services in financial consultation nationally or internationally than make your efforts through FaceBook take on the look and feel of the general community of financial services as they relate to the whole of your industry. It’s a digital geography – it simply means that you are a part of the conversation that is relevant to the client-base either because you are local or you are a part of the larger online community that deals in similar aspects of your industry. You carve out your place by location or industry – you make it relevant by providing services or products in a way that is consistent with the person you want to visit and re-visit your FaceBook page.

• Host conversations that make sense to the people and companies that occupy your digital landscape.
• Every time someone leaves a business card, asks for information online and provides their email or any time you are using the phone and acquire email addresses have a process for developing that lead.
• Create your CRM, and begin to cultivate new leads on your social media.
• Have a short but convicting email to send them to in order to convince them to “like” your FaceBook page (we will discuss invitation to other venues)
• Liking your page generally happens because you are hosting a variety of information, headlines, news article and comments all valid to the people who populate your geographic online community (buyers, Human Resource Managers etc.).

In other words, don’t just talk about you and your company, make your FaceBook a page where you moderate discussions on a variety of topics relevant to your population and not just your business.

If you are talking about serving people in a general location, talk about the community, the town, the area. If you are carving out a landscape by community then host conversations, links, articles and information that relates to the person or company in that community. Nothing gets a client’s attention more than showing them that you are current in the industry and have strong opinions and observations about how current events can improve their company culture.

Pictures of your family, your vacation and any other personal material are totally inappropriate so keep them off. Don’t use your Avatar from some online war game as your profile picture anywhere at any time. Keep your profile points business relevant; no one wants to know your relationship status as it relates to business

TWITTER

Probably the most misunderstood and maligned of the social medias, Twitter stands alone as one of the most enigmatic digital strategies. This platform, when used in conjunction with a probably structured FaceBook , LinkedIn and/or RSS pages, acts in concert and independently of any other strategy beside your website.

It is easier to tell you what Twitter is not then to help you understand what it is.

• It is not a popularity contest where ten thousand random and unrelated viewers are just stacking the list to make you appear important - this is extremely transparent and leaves your prospect asking whether you don't know how to use Twitter or you are falsely trying to inflate your Twitter value with anonymous followers
• It is not a competition to see how many followers you can get - look at who chooses to follow you and look for people that you think fit your purpose on Twitter - which may be altogether different then the message you create in LinkedIn and different form either in FaceBook
• It is not a place where you as a professional go to make inane comments, clichéd and spent quotes or links to riddles and jokes
• It is not a place to spend hours of time fooling around with icons and symbols in an effort to repeat a story told a hundred other times or one that has little or no value to the audience

So, what is it? Recently, The Bosson Group, after years of development has produced a first-of-its-kind in preemptive analytics tool, Tethered Communities™ (now Trademarked). This process maintains over 2000 fields of data which are compressed, compared, valued and defined by 12 different analytical programs (including our own organic algorithm for extemporaneous conversations specific to a particular function). We used Twitter as a way to build a following of people and companies that might regard our findings and follow them to determine both accuracy and relativity. We did this with calculated invitations to an entirely new level of prospective client as a way to prove our value. We may have only 400 followers but the body of them are key people in the industry (Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News Financial., Jim Cramer, Moody’s etc.)

What does Twitter have to do with me?

Twitter is an excellent format to provide definition and depth to who you are and what you do. Create short but meaningful statements that link your reader (follower) to information in your resource library or directly to pages within your site related to your products or service

• It is a place to tie yourself to important information and announcements in your company
• It is a place to define the character of who you are and what you do
• It is a place to continue to show your clients and prospective clients that you have your finger on the pulse of your industry and you know what’s happening
• It is a way to gradually bring clients to important locations in your website or on other social media platforms

Twitter is a digital organism and like any organism you must continue to feed it or it will die. This is a social media and it is contingent upon you to look for and invite the followers you feel will get the most out of what you say. This is definitely a place where you can show your astuteness, intelligence and awareness.

If someone offers you 10,000 followers for $500 and you think that’s a good deal. You are not using Twitter properly.

LINKEDIN

Now we are entering the first of my two favorite social media platforms; LinkedIn and RSS. LinkedIn is one of the most underrated and underused venues in all of cyberspace. Here is a place where you can start or join discussions in your field or vertical markets and get seen by some of the real innovators and leaders in industry. You can explore cross-sections of your market as wells as following new industries to round out your opinion and knowledge base to make you more fit for discussion engagements in LinkedIn. It is a place where you can personalize your position and personality in cyberspace.

LinkedIn is unique in the way in which it can level the playing field for you. Here you are equal to any other President or CEO and you opinion is as qualified and regarded as any other. You are for all intents and purposes on equal terms – take advantage of this opportunity but know your stuff before you make yourself known. Naturally when you are in the company of intelligentsia , some of the good glitter can rub off on you and some of the bad stuff rub against your prospects. But, two simple rules can help you here:

• Don’t debate issues in which you are not certain you can at least hold your own on and secretly believe you can win.
• Don’t engage in conversations that end up being cyber-slanted arguments with people you do not know and are on an equal level with you. The last thing industry leaders want to participate in is an argument between two potential vendors.
• Take the high road and bail out of any hostile conversation without even a good-bye. The sooner ended the sooner forgotten. Besides prospects will respect you for not wasting their time in what otherwise may have been a valuable discussion –pick it up at another time when you archenemy is not participating

Twitter is a place to go and make your presence known – especially about all you know in the presence! It is also a motivation for you to begin reading, studying and educating yourself about the entire culture of your market. A couple of well written and thought out conversations have more than once led me to a new or prospective client.

RSS (REALLY SIMPLE SYNDICATION)

We are now taking over 90% of our clients into YouTube, blogs, online radi for a number of different opportunities; “How To’s”, “Did you Know?”, “Learn This” and so much more. With over 20 million people visiting YouTube every day we are using this process in concert with other venues such as LinkedIn and FaceBook and Twitter to help create significant positioning for our clients.

But it isn’t just YouTube it’s so much more. It’s using the technology of the web to digitally enhance our client. It’s a way for us to engage our client’s prospects and our own prospects in a time and at a place that is absent our competitor. Whether we are doing time-lapse photography for construction or monetizing learning events on YouTube’s private channel, we are finding new ways to define our clients using online RSS (radio, blogs, videos audio even Webinars) .

In online programs we are teaching our clients about making videos without spending a fortune. What to say and how to get it in front of the right audience. We are helping them with webinars, radio blogs, blogs and even online meetings like Webex.

Many of the places and events that we have clients involved in are no cost forums. In these cyber-channels we can help our client’s find and define their voice. We use our own proprietary highly graphical, totally interactive, instant notification email, AlphaByters.com to communicate to vast numbers of prospects for as little as .60 cents per contact (that includes an introduction and communication with a potential client under controlled circumstances).

SUMMARY

By blending these individual social media components in cyberspace to obtain a specific goal, we are able to educate, inform and entertain prospects outside of our website – leaving our website the responsibility and focus of conducting business with our clients; new and old.

Our rule of thumb is one hour per week per venue. That’s all the time you should need to create, build and engage prospective clients through these FREE venues. If you are using these venues properly and with regularity, you can expect to see real results with a direct impact to your business in as little as six months.

For more information email frankb@thebossongroup.com

Frank Bosson
CEO, The Bosson Group
www.thebossongroup.com
www.alpahbyters.com
209 333 7786
209 642 2821

Next in Part III, We will talk about the phenomena of Telefluence and our own highly graphical, permission granted, instant notification email program Alphabyters.com. Learning to combine strategies to make better use of your phone for sales