Your Faith and Business: Should You Wear It On Your Sleeve?

As a Christian business owner I have to ask myself how far out in front of my business card do I want to dangle my Christianity. There are a handful of questions that come to mind... Will wearing my faith on my sleeve turn a certain percentage of  potential clients off? Do we care? Do I expose myself to extra criticism when we make a mistake? Which we inevitably will.  Will we gain an advantage with Christian clients simply because we are like minded? Do we care? Morals and ethics aside, doesanything change during working hours as opposed to personal hours? Do we dumb it down between 9 am and 5 pm?

The questions really could go on and on but I'll stop there. The fact is that we could come up with a thousand questions and try to answer them individually but in reality we are only asking one: How "Christian" should I make my business? Here's the answer, drum roll please...... Uh, I don't know. I can't tell you that. That is between you and God. I'm not sure there's a formula.

I know a couple of business owners who have different takes on this. My good friend and mentor Mike who owns a very successful chemical application company and is as far out as he can be. From the name of the company to bible verses on their trucks, you know that this is a Christian company. He would say that over the years the his "way out in front" approach to his faith has certainly cost him customers but that God has blessed it so much it has more than made up for the loss. He would also say that his approach holds himself, his managers, and his employees accountable to a standard that is extremely high. If your going to be quoting Proverbs you better do world class work.

I also have a client that used to be a pastor and is now business consultant specializing in succession planning that doesn't nearly take that approach. He would never shy away from a conversation if one developed organically but he feels that he and his clients are best served by operating with honesty, integrity, and the highest level of client service. He feels these things will speak volumes into his client's companies as well as to them personally and if there is a time share his faith he will take it but he is mostly concerned about delivering world class service.

Here's the rub, both approaches are right and God honoring. Don't dismiss the fact that you have to get with God and figure this out for your company. There is no formula. This is a deeply personal thing God needs to speak into your heart.

Looks like there may be some face time in the near future.

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How to Take a Social Venture to Scale

By Paul Bloom


For a social entrepreneur with an innovative solution, the holy grail is scaling it—that is, taking it to a level where the new approach operates efficiently and effectively to achieve significant mitigation of a social problem. Indeed, many are under real pressure to scale as their supporters, not unlike investors in commercial ventures, clamor for higher social returns on their investments. But for every Habitat for Humanity, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and Teach for America that has managed to scale, there are thousands that have stagnated or failed.
For the past several years, I have been studying the successful scalers to discover how they made the leap from local to large-scale impact. The answer isn't as simple as we might wish: their leaders have pursued a variety of strategies, and there is no single "best practice" formula for scaling a social venture. But the good news is that there are common elements—seven organizational capabilities that can be developed and combined in different ways to take a promising innovation to the next level. They are:
Staffing. It's hard to take a venture to the next level without knowing how to recruit, train, and retain talented people. Perhaps more than anything else, this has been the key to PlayWorks' successful scaling. It has figured out how to keep growing a staff of great "coaches" to supervise and manage recess in schools all over the USA.
Communicating. Susan G. Komen for the Cure has excelled here, getting the word out about breast cancer and persuading hundreds of thousands to support its work combatting it.
Alliance-Building. A great way to grow impact without a large organization is to partner with other entities such as community groups, governments, and corporations. KaBoom does this to build playgrounds in needy neighborhoods.
Lobbying. Here, a model is the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, which has accomplished much by persuading legislatures, judges, and regulatory authorities to make tobacco products harder and more expensive for young people to acquire.
Earnings Generation. Increasing numbers of social programs grow with revenue generated by their own operations. Examples include the social enterprises in the "portfolio" of REDF (Roberts Enterprise Development Fund), which helps nonprofits create viable businesses (in food-service, property-maintenance, extermination, recycling, and other areas) to provide jobs to disadvantaged workers.
Replicating. Aflatoun has scaled its impact by making it easy for others to copy what it does, providing access to the curriculum materials it has developed for teaching children financial skills to franchise partners all over the world.
Stimulating Market Forces. The textbook example on this front is Fair Trade USA, which by creating a certification system for "fair trade" goods (that is, sustainably produced commodities like coffee, chocolate, bananas whose growers are not exploited by middlemen) gives consumers market information they previously lacked.
Does a venture need to have all seven of these SCALERS capabilities in place to have major impact? It seems safe to say that, in any scaling effort, improving at least most of them should be a goal. A given venture's "scaling strategy," however, can be thought of as the particular emphasis it puts on each of these capabilities relative to the others. And how does a given organization get that strategic balance right? It's a matter of careful thinking about the implications of the venture's theory of change and the ecosystem in which it operates.
Before even attempting to scale, the organization should be able to articulate and justify its theory of change—the logic model that shows how its innovation (whether it's a new product, new service, new way of harnessing human resources, new financing approach, new distribution method, or new legal or policy approach) contributes to mitigation of a social problem. If the innovation is a new pedagogical technique, it must be evident how it leads to lower drop-out rates, for example. If it is a new way to encourage childhood vaccinations, the innovator must show how it improves public health.
With the pathway to better outcomes clearly laid out, the next requirement is for the organization to study its ecosystem to understand how other resource providers, allies and rivals, forces and trends could affect its success. Depending on the "capital" (which can be financial, human, social, political, technological, or natural-resource capital) that others bring to the table, the organization can adjust the emphasis it places on building its own capabilities. Of course, ecosystems evolve, especially as economic climates and cultural norms shift, so this cannot be a one-time exercise.
A scaling strategy, in short, is a plan for creating a special blend of capabilities that fit well with an organization's theory of change and its surrounding ecosystem. Most social entrepreneurs want to maximize their ROI, even though the "social returns" they seek have more to do with jobs created, lives saved, or cleaner water. A well-thought-out scaling strategy is the best assurance —not only to them but to their many stakeholders —that they have the potential to make a real difference in the world.

Communication- Changing Forever

We normally don't consider 18-29 year old's a viable market unless your marketing energy drinks or a new way to download free music. It's not like there are too many 26 year old young men looking for marketing services or someone to build their new deck. This generation (the millennials) is living at home longer, going to school longer and not engaging in what even Gen Xers like myself would consider to be the adult norm, marriage, kids, house, car payment, blah blah blah. However while they may be slower to come around to adulthood, infuriating marketing firms across the nation, they are not that far off and the way they have chosen to communicate between each other and the rest of the world is altering the landscape of traditional marketing forever. Sound crazy, consider this, when is that last time you saw a young person pick up a phone book, or stop and write a number down off a billboard, or even watch a television commercial?

I don't want to say there isn't a genuine need for these things because there are quite a few generations ahead of these guys where this marketing is still relatively effective. Not nearly as effective as it used to be because even these preceding generation are adopting some of these communication mediums, albeit more slowly, but adopting none the less. The mediums include but aren't limited to: online video, text messaging, facebook, twitter, pintrest, blogging, and forums.

So the choice has to be made, do we choose to test the waters now on some of these non-traditional marketing ideas or do we let the wave crash on our heads in the next few years. There are so many opportunities to inexpensively make your marketing/advertising dollars work for you that doesn't include a $2000 monthly billboard.

Seek and you shall find.

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Posted 11 June 2012 21:13pm by Patricio Robles 

Since going public in what may be remembered as one of biggest IPO disasters ever, Facebook has come under fire as industry observers question the efficacy of its ad offerings.
But is all of the criticism of Facebook deserved? No, at least according to comScore.
Despite the fact that a large percentage of Facebook users say they're ignoring Facebook ads, comScore says that it's "time to change the discussion on measuring Facebook effectiveness."
In a blog post last Thursday, it previewed some of its findings from its upcoming report, The Power of Like 2: How Social Marketing Works. comScore's key claim: "Facebook earned media is having a statistically significant positive lift on people’s purchasing of a brand."
It came to this conclusion through a "test vs. control methodology", which the analytics firm believes is far superior to the surveys which have indicated most Facebook users are not paying attention to ads and marketing content on Facebook.
"While surveys can be useful in assessing ad effectiveness lifts across attitudinal dimensions such as brand awareness, favorability and purchase intent, people tend not to provide very accurate assessments of their own behavior. And their accuracy in recalling their own behavior over an extended period of time can be especially unreliable," comScore's Andrew Lipsman explained.
So do comScore's findings, which will apparently cast a more positive light on Facebook, trump all of the evidence, some of it anecdotal, that Facebook just isn't as powerful a marketing platform as many had hoped it would be? Perhaps, but there are a few key points worth keeping in mind:

• comScore is not a disinterested observer. As AllThingsDigital's Peter Kafka notes, Facebook is a comScore client and the two companies collaborated on this new report, as well as an earlier report on Facebook marketing. While it would be inappropriate to suggest that comScore and Facebook are cooking the books so to speak, there's no doubt that with so much money being invested in social, companies in the online advertising ecosystem have little incentive to say "It just doesn't work!"
• There is no such thing as earned media on Facebook. comScore's report focuses on 'earned media' on Facebook, but is there really such a thing? Brands invest a lot of money in their Facebook Pages, but they don't really own them. Through its EdgeRank algorithm, Facebook can control the reach of brand messages, and when Facebook makes changes, those changes can have a huge impact -- and not always for the better.
• ROI may still be questionable. Even if there are ways marketers can use Facebook to positive effect, brands will still need to look at ROI. After all, 'earned media' on Facebook isn't free. Case in point: of GM's $30m in Facebook spend, $20m of it was apparently going to its 'free' Facebook Page. Clearly, content doesn't create itself, and Facebook initiatives don't run themselves.

At the end of the day, the differing views on the efficacy of marketing on Facebook serve as a strong reminder that there's no substitute for defining, tracking and analyzing.
Facebook is changing, and will continue to change. Mobile usage is up, audience growth is slowing, and the company will continue to try new things. The only way brands can really make smart, well-informed strategic decisions around their Facebook marketing investments is to make sure they've defined KPIs for Facebook initiatives, are collecting the data needed to measure them and have staff diligently analyzing the data regularly to see if their investments are bearing fruit.
Brands doing anything less than this (like trusting a survey or a report) might as well flip a coin to answer the question, "Does Facebook marketing work?"

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Go Big or Go Home.... or Stay Small?

There is this misnomer that a company has to choose to either focus on large multi-service projects or strictly stick to small "one up" type of transactions. This is unfortunate because opportunity on both sides are going to present themselves and if a company is unprepared for one or the other they are going to miss out on a potentially lucrative revenue stream.

At E35 Creative we run into this on a weekly basis. We're an outsourced digital marketing company. We offer everything from graphic design to website development to brand management and social media integration. We have many companies who choose to utilize us with just one of those services because we're not in a position to turn the work down and I'm not sure I ever want to be. In fact we're in the process of starting and E35 Creative arm that builds websites in three days called 72hoursites.com. That's a "one up", transaction type of business if I've ever seen one. The end goal is to gain trust so we can be their 360 degree marketing company but they have to enter into our services somewhere.

The tough thing in this day and age is to build trust with a consumer who is bombarded with companies saying "trust me". If you can open several doors to your business so your customer has many entry point options, you have a better chance of turning a potential customer into an actual customer. Then you can execute their singular project well and get a chance to sell them on some of your other services.

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Don't Put All Your Eggs In One Basket

 via Small Business Trends

Your website serves as your best tool for attracting attention from potential customers online. Since your web content is what really carries your message across and secures conversions, your content marketing needs to be optimized for your targeted customer profile.

But what if you have multiple targeted customer profiles, with different tastes and motivations, and they all require a different approach? Do you optimize for one group, at the risk of alienating or under-representing another? Do you target your content as little as possible, leaving your website with vague, muddled content that doesn’t attract any customers?

Divide and Prosper: Target Multiple Customer Profiles

The internet is a very versatile medium, and you shouldn’t worry about reaching one profile or another if your business caters to multiple customer bases. Your website cannot only be optimized for a single customer profile; you can optimize it for any number of customer profiles by putting extra work into creating separate user experiences for each customer base.
In simple terms: you can make your website reach who you want, and deliver it in a way that they can customize for themselves.
There are many different ways to implement multiple content sets for different customer profiles. Generally speaking, it is easiest to target individual customer profiles by creating a specific microsite or separate landing page for different customer types, and letting your visitors define who they are on arrival. Allowing your customers to identify themselves through selective content options can provide a wealth of valuable data that can drive your future online strategies.
To accomplish this, you need an entirely different set of webpages for each client profile. You can create individualized landing pages that speak to the pain points and specific needs of a hyper-focused target segment, or you can generalize a bit more and classify your targeted groups by profession, interests, or level of expertise.
Your website will need some sort of navigation options that make your differentiated webpages available to your visitors. This can be done with a simple dropdown menu, a site prompt upon arrival, a gateway page listing specific destinations for visitors, or any other number of creative, attention-grabbing methods.

Wikipedia Segments Their Content, and So Can You

The most common example would be any international website. Take Wikipedia for example. The landing page you arrive on is simple to understand, and vastly segmented. If you are a French or Italian visitor, Wikipedia would be fairly inaccessible to you if you landed on Wikipedia’s English-language front page.
By providing a globally-focused landing page to all users that arrive on their front-most landing page, Wikipedia has segmented their content based on language. The user then clicks their preferred language, and can access the content specifically tailored to them.
Amazon.com also segments their webpage based on languages. If you scroll to the bottom of the homepage, you will see under their bottom-most logo a list of other nations. Canadian shoppers can select Amazon Canada and access Canadian products at Canadian prices. Not only have they segmented their websites by language, but also by visitors’ professional levels immediately above this. If you are an investor or a member of the press, you can find content specially catered to you at Amazon’s Investor Relations pages or the Press Releases page.
Many international businesses have elegant, minimal landing pages that offer segmentation by geographic region, language, and level of interest. These are incredibly broad segments, and may not be immediately applicable to small businesses. You can, however, apply these general ideas to your small business website easily.

Make Segments Work for Your Business

Identifying your targeted segments is the first step in the process. You can use business research, site analytics, and any other resources on this site and others. Once you’ve researched your customers, you should be able to form a general profile of who your most valuable customers are. If you sell kitchen appliances, your segments may include profiles like “The Soccer Mom,” “The Newlywed Couple,” or “Dads Looking to Upgrade.”
From there, you can design content strategies around each profile. What motivates each profile? What do they not like? What are they looking for from your business? After the lengthy task of developing custom content for each of your specifically-targeted customer profiles, you can create special landing pages and other web content specifically tailored to them.
After your segmented content pages are done, you should include a navigation option or engaging interactive elements that prompts the user to identify themselves. However specifically or generally you provide definitions for what defines your visitors, make it clear that there are different categories they should fall under. Designations like “Just Browsing?” and “Looking to Sell” can direct visitors to entirely different sets of content.
After your navigation element is in place, watch your site usage statistics. The types of pages people visit will tell you the success or failures of your targeted segments. If you have one set of content that is hit far more often than another, you’ll know that the lower-performing target profile may need fixing, or might be unnecessary.
By watching your statistics and knowing where your traffic comes from, as well as where they go and who they are, you can craft content marketing strategies that drive results and greatly increase ROI with laser-focused, customer-targeting accuracy.

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New Facebook Pages Help Businesses Better Manage Their Social Media

BY Mikal E. Belicove| 18 hours ago|

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If you manage a business or brand page on Facebook, you'll be happy to know there's a slew of new features that can help make your job easier. Here's a rundown:
Administrative roles: You can now assign administrative roles to the people who help manage your page. There are five different roles: manager, content creator, moderator, advertiser and insights analyst. To assign roles to your Facebook page's admins, login to your Facebook account, visit the Page you manage, click Edit Page above the Admin Panel, and click Admin Roles in the left column.
Scheduled posts: You can schedule your updates to post at a future date and time using the Facebook sharing tool (that's the box you use to create and post a Status Update). Until now, the only way to schedule a post in the future was through a third-party app. But now, simply by clicking the symbol resembling a clock in the bottom row of the sharing tool and selecting a time and date that you'd like it to go live, you can post a Status Update, photo or video up to six months in advance.
Promoted posts: You can pay a fee to promote a post so it will be shown in the news feeds of more of the people who like your Page than you would reach normally. Friends of Facebook members who have interacted with a promoted post will be more likely to see the information in their news feeds. Promoted posts cost $5 or more.
Only pages with 400 or more likes are eligible to promote posts, and similar to scheduling a post to publish on a particular date, promoted posts are initiated from within the sharing tool. To promote a new post, click Promote on the bottom row of the sharing tool, where you'll be asked to set your budget and confirm a method of payment. To promote a post you've already published and is less than three days old, click the Promote dropdown menu in the lower right corner of the post from your Page's Timeline.

Google+ Adds New Local Listings Tab for Businesses

BY Jason Fell| May 30, 2012|

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Google's fast-growing, if only still nascent, social network Google+ has rolled out a new tab dedicated to providing information on local businesses. Located on the right-hand side of the Google+ page, Google+ Local allows users to search for businesses that are nearby, read reviews and find them using Google Maps.
For instance, if you search for "cheeseburgers" on Google+ Local, it will generate a list of restaurants near your location that serve cheeseburgers. If you click on one of the listings, you'll be taken to a local Google+ page that includes photos, reviews from people in your Google+ Circles and other information such as address and opening hours from the company's Google Places for Business listing.

For business owners, this means that a company's information on its Google Places for Business listing will now be available to users across Google search, maps, mobile and now Google+. It can be even more important now for business owners to verify their basic listing data, make updates, add photos and respond to customer reviews.

Related: What You Need to Know About the New Google+ Design 
Additionally, Google has integrated a business's Zagat score into its Google+ Local listings. Google purchased the popular business survey rating service last fall for more than $150 million.
"For example, a restaurant that has great food but not great decor might be 4 stars, but with Zagat you'd see a [score of] 26 in Food and an 8 in Decor, and know that it might not be the best place for date night," Google product management director Avni Shah wrote in a blog post announcing the Google+ Local launch.
The search giant also hinted that it will be further integrating Google+ business pages and Google+ Local listings.
"We know many of you have already created a Google+ Page for your business, and have been hosting hangouts and sharing photos, videos and posts," Jen Fitzpatrick, Google's vice president of engineering, wrote in a separate blog post. "We're excited that we'll soon extend these social experiences to more Google+ Local pages in the weeks and months ahead."

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The Infamous Pipeline

There's no great way to say this.... keep stuffing! The risk for many start ups or established companies that may be seeing a dip in revenue is to get frustrated and stop doing the things that you know will reap rewards in the end. For many owners and CxOs in this situation the temptation is to stop making contacts, stop walking in on other business owners, and stop picking up the phone. They've had several "good" conversations but nothing is panning out. I know how you feel, because I have been their in the past and I'm there in a few ways now.

I wish there was some game changing advise. There's not. The only thing I can tell you this: Established companies, take a look back at your history, this is probably not the first time you have been in this place, it will get better with disciplined systems and lots of contacts. Continue doing what's made you successful up to this point. Start Ups: Even though you are a start up this is probably not your first job, you probably have some experience in the field you've chosen to start a company in. Remember why you did it, be encouraged, and make sales calls. Have the guts to call on customers, figure out ways to reach out when they aren't banging down your door.

The business pipeline is a fickle mistress. You need to have her full and satisfied at all times but even then the faucet doesn't always turn on and when it does sometimes it's just a trickle. Many times she leaks before she's sent leads all the way to the end. But know this, it will always be like this. You may get better at putting in business that she prefers and you may get more skilled at nudging her along but the system will never change. Embrace it, make your calls, do your follow up, and she will flow... eventually.


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