Toronto Estate Lawyer : Hull & Hull Law Firm : Trust Mediation and Succession Planning : Serving Ontario, Ottawa, Mississauga, Hamilton

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During Duct Tape Marketing's August 16 2006 podcast, the host, John Jantsch, interviewed Seth Godin, who has just published a new book,   Small is the New Big, which is essentially a compliation of Seth's popular blogs.

The theme of this book is that big used to matter.  Working for big companies used to be enviable, as big companies could defeat small companies with large marketing and advertising budgets. People were obsessed over the economies of scale and no one ever talked about economies of little.

However,  Seth's view is that when treat people with respect and as individuals, you have the flexibility to react to different changes and circumstances, in a sense you are acting small.

Seth points out that it doesn't matter if you are a big or small businesses, rather he is saying that businesses must focus on how they act, and the way that they operate in their own economic environment. When you act small, you can eventually become big.

Therefore, Seth expresses that in his experience there does not seem to be any core relationship between the size of the business and how the business acts.

One of the significant changes over the past short while, in Seth's view, is that people will now seek out information that they think is either important or interesting to them. As there are more alternatives, people are pickier about what they will participate in. He notes that the minute that you treat the client or consumer like a cog in the wheel, you will find your customer/client immediately looking at another competitive alternative.

Seth makes an important distinction between markets and marketing.

Markets are of course the trading of cash and goods and marketing is the art of telling a story people want to hear and believe. Now with the advent of interactive social media, we are beyond the constraints of focus groups and other relatively inexact resources, and when your story (i.e. marketing) is sent out, it is considered, reviewed, commented on,  often in a much broader and more interactive framework, mainly blogging and podcasting.

The challenge is to first craft a story that is authentic and real and then release it to the appropriate business environment, a group of people that want to hear it and have an ability to understand it.

In the process of telling your story/marketing, Seth points out that the story must be clear enough that it can be clearly understood. No one will spread your story/product to friends, if they don't understand it.

Seth uses the example of his own father's business which builds cribs for infants in hospitals. Although his business was growing big, his father had to think outside of the normal business parameters, as his cribs were so well built they were almost indestructible. Brainstorming, he went to one of the nurses at hospital who was a client, and asked her to imagine the perfect infant hospital bed. Those nurses gave his father a comprehensive input which resulted in a $10,000 crib.

This crib however had all the recent technological advancements built in, and while very expensive, the nurses using the bed were so impressed that they became its enthusiastic spokespersons and essentially its most successful salespersons.

The result is that this incredible infant crib has become his father's number one product line.

Seth demonstrated that it is a tremendous asset for businesses to think small and admit at times that you do not have all the answers.

All the best,

Ian and Suzana

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During the Marketing Online Live podcast #39, the hosts, Paul Colligan and Alex Mandossian, went on to provide us with the final three commandments of business podcasting.

Number Eight: Thou shalt Have a Monetization Strategy. This extends beyond the scope of Number Six, which discusses global strategies and focuses on the requirement to eventually truly monetize your podcasts. This monetization strategy could be something such as the book strategy, or simply ensure that your core audience is receiving helpful and relevant information and then throw out the possibility that you can be eventually retained to provide your services.

In our specific case, the obvious model is to assist estate lawyers in the process of their day-to-day practice with a view to being available to provide services beyond that which come naturally to the audience, such as litigation support.

Number Nine: Thou Shalt Consume the Best. The two speakers remind us that there is, of course, some prioritization that needs to happen in the context of podcast listening. You may listen to many hours of podcasting, you must ensure you are consuming the best of that podcast, and also ensure that you too are on top of the best in what is going on.  We already follow this practice in our daily lives, as most of us naturally want to watch the Olympics not the local regional finalists, just as we watch Tiger Woods, and not the 100th place PGA Tour Leader.

Number Ten: Thou Shalt Live the Freedom Lifestyle. By following the Ten Commandments, you can ultimately end up in this last commandment.

We really hope that this series on business podcasting best practice has been helpful and as always please send us your comments and questions, we would love to get your feedback on both our blogposts and podcasts.

All the best,

Ian and Suzana

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During the Marketing Online Live podcast #39, the hosts discussed the final five commandments of business podcasting.

Number Six: Thou shalt go in with a strategy.  As we were told, strategy acts as the hinges that open the doors to great business opportunities. The hosts provided us with a four-part breakdown on the question of strategy: strategize, monetize, residualize, and capitalize.

Never Seven: Thou shalt teach consumption. As podcasters, we need to get better at teaching people how to access and use our new venue. Adding easy access to the podcasts by clicking on the play button on your webpage is an illustration of how to assist the non-techy users to embrace podcasting. A great example is Proctor & Gamble, one of the best consumer companies in the world. who doubled their sales in shampoo by simply adding the word "repeat" to the back of their shampoo bottles.

In our next blog, we will talk about the final three commandments.

All the best,

Suzana and Ian

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Some of the great Podcasters note that, in the future, we will have more ear time than eye time.

Ian recently looked at an interesting book by Evan I. Schwartz entitled, "Digital Darwinism". In his book, Schwartz compares the competitive struggle to the battle between species that occurs in the natural environment. He concludes that, in order to succeed, companies must be better than their competitors, much like the survival of the fittest in nature. Whatever market niche they select, they have to be "smarter, faster, more innovative, and more adaptable" than ever, so that they do better than others.

After examining the successes and failures of many different e-commerce competitors, the author identifies key strategies to survive and thrive on the Web. In Digital Darwinism, we are presented with "7 Breakthrough Business Strategies for Surviviing in the Cuthroat Web Economy". They are:

1. Build a brand that stands for solving problems;

2. Allow your prices to fluctuate freely with supply and demand;

3. Let affiliate partners do your marketing for you;

4. Create valuable bundles of information and services;

5. Sell custom-made produces online, then manufacture them;

6. Add new value to transactions between buyers and sellers; and

7. Integrate digital commerce with absolutely everything.

Schwartz is also the author of "Webonomics", which talks about "9 Essential Principles for Growing Your Business on the World Wide Web". Blogging is one of those innovative marketing strategies that helps you survive in the Digital Darwinism world. Blogging uses the concept of social software in allowing for direct and indirect interaction from one individual to a group of individuals.

As a good examples of how big the social interaction has grown, the program "My Space", currently has approximately 40,000,000 dating participants. While this program has a wide variety of social interaction, including dating and teenager participants, from a business perspective, for example, the music business, My Space is an essential place to be. Just because a program appears to be on the surface simply something for consumers, such as a dating service, when you look deeper within the service you may find that it incorporates many niche market produces and services. Therefore, it may well be a business opportunity, given the numbers involved.

The key consideration is whether the program is a fit with your business and, presumably, a growth into more social interaction within the legal profession could be accommodated by this type of social software. Obviously, the networking aspect of social software fits well within the legal profession and it also can provide useful professional resources and resourcing. Social software also allows you to create a personal profile. You can use the software to tell others about yourself and express personal feelings about what can often be viewed as purely legal issues.

An important part of personalizing the professional relationships is to refer back to and link to friends and colleagues whom you do work with to allow the reader to better understand the nature of your practice and the nature of your professional context. For example, you can identify in your Blog an opportunity for someone who does a specific type of wok for you and it is essentially an indirect introduction to that resource for the readers.

That's all for now - all the best, Suzana and Ian. --------