Cool Resource:100 Essential Cheat Sheets for Doing Business Abroad
A compilation of tipsheets covering international etiquette, toasting customs, appropriate dress, and more. Compiled from sources ranging from USA Today to ehow.com.
Category: Networking
A Fun Book About Marketing…A Great Strategy for Product Launch
I read a lot of business books, and too many of them are so dry you could use them for sawdust.
Last year, I happened to meet Kevin Daum at a dinner party Sam Horn threw in Washington, DC (where neither of us live) and we connected quickly and personally. Kevin is a sales and marketing guy who has a similar approach to mine, and he’s also someone who can write. He’s even working on a book about Green business!
Kevin’s latest book, Roar! Get Heard in The Sales and Marketing Jungle, is a classic business parable of the sort popularized by Ken Blanchard. I’ve read a lot of these. What’s especially interesting about this one, in addition to the quality of the writing is what he calls the “3500-year-old sales process,” rooted in, of all things, the metaphor of the Four Sons from the Passover Seder.
And it’s impossible NOT to get the message that every company employee needs to know how to highlight the company’s strengths and points of differentiation, both in general and to specific types of buyers with specific concerns.
As a marketer, you can learn a lot just by watching this book launch. Kevin is doing something very smart: he’s building his preorder list months in advance. And he’s built in lots of try-before-you-buy (something else I recommend). He’s even managed to find a bcouple of independent bookshops to do discount coupons. So you can go visit https://www.awesomeroar.com/index.htmand see a brief video, grab a couple of sample chapters, and read dozens of blurbs (including one from me). and of course order your advance copy, if you’re so moved. You can also read Kevin’s wonderfully transparent blog about his “Quest for the Jewish Super Bowl Ring”: to launch as a New York Times bestseller (where he’s not afraid to discuss failures in the campaign as well as successes).
Not a big surprise either that Kevin is a master networker who’s asked a lot of important people to help out. I’m glad to be in that category, and happy to alert you to what he’s doing.
Building Cooperative Marketing Relationships: Practicing What I Preach
Cooperate with others to open new markets. It’s one of the key principles of my brand new book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson), released this week by John Wiley & Sons. The book is a manual for thriving by doing the right thing, showing businesses that Green and ethical practices aren’t just a way to stay out of jail–they’re a success strategy–and cooperation is one of those practices.
So–do we practice what we preach? Here are some of the things we’re doing to launch the book:
So…adding Jay’s lists and mine together, we have about 94,000 subscribers. Adding Green America alone doubled that. Adding in the partners means we multiplied our original 94,000 by about eight times, to 890,000. Even chopping off ten percent for duplicates, that still means 801,000 people are hearing about this book, and that’s 703,000 people that Jay and I couldn’t have reached on our own. And that doesn’t even count Twitter, e-mail discussion lists, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
Oh yes, and let’s talk about my bringing in Jay as a partner co-author. Leveraging the strength of his name definitely helped to build all these partner relationships, as well as strong partner relationships within the publishing house. So now, instead of reaching 10,000 of my own subscribers to inform them of my newest book, I’m reaching 801,000, of whom 791,000 are the result of our outreach efforts, outside of my own network.
Cost to me? Only time. OK, quite a bit of time, including my assistant’s time, which I am paying for. But time well-spent.
Is it resulting in sales? A week ago, the Amazon sales rank for Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green was in the 575,000s. In other words, five hundred seventy five thousand books were outselling mine.There have been some wild swings, but at the moment, it’s at 28,793. In the environmentalism category, it’s #13 right now. And Amazon is only one of the five channels that we’re linking to from the books website, https://www.guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com. In other words, yes–people are BUYING the book, and in doing so, validating this key concept.
Seven Keys to Get Me to Follow You on Twitter and Other Twitter Etiquette Tips
Inspired by a Tweet from Susan Harrow, I’ve decided to post my Twitter policy every once in a while.
Some of this may sound harsh. Please keep in mind that as a somewhat public figure, I am absolutely bombarded with messages not only on Twitter but through many other channels. I have to cope with about 300 emails on a typical day, plus a three-inch stack of postal mail, plus the 1454 people I’m following on Twitter. 2390 are following me, and I recognize the disparity—but I also do have a business to run, a family to be with, and a physical need to be off the computer for half an hour or so after I’ve been on for about an hour.
I did seven Tweets outlining my policy, and I think they’re worth repeating here (slightly modified with the benefit of “but I MEANT to say” hindsight and spelling out the contractions/not needing to cram it into 140 characters):
1. I don’t follow you just because you follow me (on Facebook and LInkedIn, BTW, I pretty much do). I check out a few each profiles from new followers day (somewhat randomly, but if your follow notice includes a keyword I pay attention to—see #5, below—it ups the odds substantially). If your feeds interest me, I follow. I don’t unfollow you for not following back, since I followed you in the first place because I found your profile interesting and not because I expected reciprocity. And I don’t track whether or not you unfollowed me; it doesn’t matter in the way I sue Twitter unless you’re someone I have an actual friendship with.
2. You can drastically increase odds that I follow back by sending me an @ (NOT a spam), naming me in #followfriday, or Retweeting me; this will get me to look at your profile .
3. Having watched with horror as spammers killed e-mail, I zealously protect Twitter as useful tool. Spam me and I make it public/block/report. (I will tolerate a clueless auto-DM when I follow, unless it links to something scummy. If your auto DM or an @ message sends me to a game-the-twitter-system-get-more-followers site, porn, dating or gambling site, I’m gone. If you did it as other than an auto-DM on follow, I report and block you too.
4. The first time your account gets hijacked and you involuntarily spam me with “join my mafia family,” I cut you slack and tell you I’m not interested. If it happens again, I assume you’re not smart enough to change your password and that spammers will bother me through you. At that point, I block you.
5. I tend to follow: Green/eco/ethical, soft-sell marketers, book publishers and authors, social media people, folks into progressive social change, quoters, people who post interesting links, people who tweet leads from reporters looking for sources. If you fall into one of these categories and you @ me telling me so, I’ll certainly click on over for a look.
6. I always like to say that I became a writer because I’m interested in almost everything, but don’t forget the almost part. If you have a great profile about stuff that I’m simply not interseted in, now matter how good it is, I won’t follow. A few subjects I find uninteresting: online gaming, hard-sell interruption marketing, get-rich-quick stuff, football, super-techie computer coding…and schemes to get more followers you haven’t earned.
7. I tend to follow people who offer a mix of glimpses into their personal lives, interesting tidbids they find online, dialogue with the community, and no more than 20% blatant promotion. And I try to keep my own Tweets in this pattern. I try to be helpful, friendly, useful in my Tweets. Follow me because you like my posts, not to game the system with one more well-connected follower.
George Kao's Social Media Secrets: Notes From the Call
Yesterday, I co-hosted a teaching call with the amazing George Kao, a social media trainer who specializes in highly productive techniques for using social media (and who is socially conscious, too.
George gave me permission to share his very informative handout: his slides are at https://georgekao.com/socialslides
I also want to share a few of the takeaways
* Find the actions that provide the greatest benefit for the least work (he lists many of these in the slides)
* Balance the human and the professional/expert
* Find easy ways to show you care, like spending one second to click and say you like a comment on Facebook
* Multiple approaches increase likelihood of connecting
* Twitter is not only indexed by Twitter, but searchable on Google–BIG reach! Easy way to spread ideas
* Make your last comment of the day (or in a batch of posts) count–it has more staying power because it will be at the top of your page all night
This was the fourth call with George I’ve been on since June. I always learn so much! In fact, it was the incredible value of his content that made me reach out to him, form a friendship (we and our wives had dinner when I was in San Francisco this summer) and partner with him to deliver this call to my network.
I’m going to be participating in his 12-session coaching program on social media, and also his program on running webinars for fun and profit, and eagerly looking forward to both. I have *never* encountered a better social media trainer, and I’m an avid consumer of coaching calls.
You may want to as well. There’s a signup link at the end of the slides. Each course is usually $720, but I’ve arranged a discount–you can learn form this “Jedi Master of Social Media” (my term–he’s much too modest) for $480. Mention my name. If you order both of George’s programs (normally $1440) with the one-payment option, it’s $920. Mention my name (Shel Horowitz), and George will paypal you a $200 rebate on this double package.
Full disclosure: yes, I make a commission on this. But more importantly, you get a tremendous education in social media that can knock months or years off your learning curve, set you on the path to profitability, and save you hours per week.
Will I see you on the calls?
Networking can Happen ANYWHERE
Proving yet again that you can network pretty much anywhere…I was listening to a teleclass and 37 minutes into the call, the presenter fell off. He didn’t come back on, but someone else asked if anyone was there, and I responded.
Fifteen minutes later, I had been booked as a guest on his radio show, he asked me if I would collaborate on a joint venture involving a pitch to National Public Radio, and another person who’d been quietly listening joined the call to invite me to consider a project he’s involved with.
All because I took 30 seconds to explain what had happened and introduce myself.
What networking opportunity can you seize? (Need idea starters? I suggest my award-wining sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.