Got a great idea, but need some input?

Sometimes you get what you think is a great idea, but you're not positive and you sure could use a little input from the peanut gallery. Enter crowd sourcing websites. For a small fee, you post your idea and ask for feedback. While not quite as focused as a focus group, crowd sourcing sites are a tremendous source of opinion from a wide swath of folks who use the web.

For details about the concept, dial up this piece on American Express' Open Forum blog. http://tinyurl.com/bp7mf97

Nice package: clearing up a misconception

One of the misconceptions about advertising agencies is that soliciting help from one requires deep pockets, big boardroom meetings on Madison Avenue and hearing campaign pitches, with lots of fancy artwork atop easels.

That does, of course, exist, but smaller agencies often offer less expensive options and will customize a campaign (fancy word for “do you need a logo, a website, bus-bench signage, radio spots?”) to fit your budget (another fancy, and sometimes intimidating, word for “what do you want to spend?”).

If the thought of even a very modest campaign still sounds too expensive and complicated, there’s another option: [insert drum roll here] The Package.

Ad packages are simply various types of basic advertising, bundled into a single fixed low cost. They’re generally comprised of the kind of advertising that typical businesses need. One package option might be, for example, a logo, business cards, a one-page website and a one-page brochure. They can become more involved with print advertising, sales kits, promotional items, maybe even a Facebook business page, depending on your needs and … gulp … budget. The point is that an ad package created by an agency will yield cost-effective creative design and professional production versus going with that place in the strip mall down the street, Floyd’s Printing, Design and Knick Knacks—We’re Not Good, But We’re Slow. You also know up front exactly what you’re getting and how much it will cost.

If you’ve never worked with an ad agency but are considering it now and want to wade in slowly, inquire about advertising packages. They’re a great, inexpensive way to get to know an agency for possible future work while fulfilling a need now that we at Ryan William’s believe is crucial to any business: advertising.

Brand you

If you’re a small business entrepreneur, you virtually are your business. So what happens when you and your business part ways? Maybe you sell it for boatloads of money or maybe things just don’t work out. Where does that leave you? The simple answer is that unless you’ve taken steps to brand yourself as an individual, if your business goes away, so might you. But a strong personal brand can be leveraged by an entrepreneur to capture attention and bounce back.

Take Donald Trump, the consummate example of branding oneself separately from a business and rebuilding after a fall. His personal branding is so strong that most folks don’t even know the name of any of his companies, and talk about getting back up on the horse—the man has filed for bankruptcy on behalf of his companies four times.

Now, granted, Trump is the uber showboat and he’s now as much a celebrity as he is a businessman. However, as an entrepreneur there are two major steps you can take to build your personal brand and help ensure a long-term career as a business owner.

1. Actively sell yourself and your skills to the media.

No matter what kind of widgets you sell or services you provide, the fact that you're in business for yourself makes you an expert on a number of subjects. Identify your areas of expertise and spread the news. Blog about your skills. Send press releases to the media. Start a Facebook page and offer "friends" advice. Tweet. Join LinkedIn. Create YouTube videos. And, of course work in information about your business as well as yourself, which gives you credibility, offers a little extra-added exposure to your company, and gives the news media a wider selection of story angles. 

2. Create a personal website. 

When people search for you online, what results come up? If you build a website—which is becoming simpler via blogging sites like WordPress and Blogger—and change it up often to maintain its search engine optimization, you can help keep the search results that you want people to see near the top of the page.

Direct people via your tweets, Facebook page and other social networks back to your website. Link your corporate website to your personal website. And keep your material informative, entertaining and fresh, generating new entries to all your social networks at least weekly and at best daily or more.  

Sound like a lot of work? It is at the outset, but soon a rhythm sets in. Whether you undertake the project yourself, however, or contract with an agency (we know a good one), in today’s economic climate, personal branding is becoming a powerful tool in the entrepreneur’s arsenal.  

We’re going to spell it out for you

At the outset, this topic might seem a little sophomoric for an ad agency blog whose readership is made up of business owners. But as we can readily attest: Sometimes it’s the most fundamental principals that get overlooked. The topic? Grammar in your marketing, advertising and PR, and in all your written communications, really.

Your written words are an extension of you and your business, and whether that business is lawn maintenance or running a charter school for advanced students, your market has a level of expectation about your professionalism. And one of the marks of professionalism is high-quality writing.

You know the message you get about a job seeker who submits a resume peppered with typos, or the feeling you get when you read “expresso” on a coffee shop menu instead of the correct “espresso.” Well, if you want to keep from feeding that perception about your own business to your market, just apply the following three concepts to all the words generated by your company and you’ll catch the vast majority of poor grammar before it gets out the door.

1. Sit on it.

Whether copywriter, journalist or a businessperson who generates 100 emails a day, the more comfortable you get with words, the faster you can whip them out. Grammatically, however, speed can get you into trouble. It leads to transposed letters, misspelled words, you name it. So, let the copy sit for a length of time, and then read it again.

In the ad agency biz, we let copy marinate from weeks to a day to sometimes an hour or less, depending on the scope and urgency of the project. But you can be sure we have a zero-tolerance system in place that involves setting aside the words for a period of time. If your “project” is an email, then sitting on it for you might mean five minutes, and that’s fine. The point is that with the passage of time, your eyes recharge and get fresher. Also, because proofing your own work is difficult, a second set of eyes is always a good idea.

2. Read it aloud.

Reading silently and reading aloud employ different brain functions. When you read silently, the tendency is to fix typos in your mind and accept poor choices in verbiage—basically correct subliminally what is incorrect on the page. Reading silently concentrates on what is said.

Reading aloud focuses on how it is said. You can hear the words independently of each other and also their rhythm in combination. Typos become more evident, as do misspellings, missing words and poor grammatical choices.

3. Turn on your spellchecker.

The number of people who don’t use the spell check feature on their computer is astounding. Is it always right? Heck no. Will it catch every error? Not even close. If you don’t know the difference between a painter’s “palette,” a wooden “pallet” and the “palate” in your mouth, for example, chances are spell check won’t catch the misuse of the three nouns either. But what it does catch makes it a powerful and handy backup.

Of course, there are a lot more tools in the copywriting trade and if you ever want to while away an afternoon discussing them, we’d be glad to oblige. However, if your hands are full running your business and you’d like RWA to worry about your marketing- and advertising-related grammar, we’d be glad to help you out there as well. Just pick up the fone. 

Who says there are no new ideas?

Each week the RWA staff sits at our Medieval Round Table to swill from our tankards and toss around ideas for our kingdom of clients. Inevitably someone pipes up with a “Oh! Oh! Oh!” worthy of Horseshack in Welcome Back Kotter and all attention turns to the excited party.

“What about…” it begins. The idea is pitched with gusto, but greeted with silence. I look around the table. We just don’t get it.

“You know,” Horseshack says. “It’s like that ad for ______ where the guy ____... ”

Whoa, Nelly, my equine friend. We’re an advertising agency. We sell ideas. New ideas. Not an idea that’s “like” another idea that’s already out there. That’s not a new idea… or is it?

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison once said, “There are no original ideas. There are only original people.” Now I haven’t a clue who Barbara Grizzuti Harrison is, but she must have been (or maybe is) one smart lady. She seemed to recognize that it’s smart thinking that translates into success. Sure, maybe your idea’s been done before, but it hasn’t been done your way.

Take Blake Mycoskie, for instance. Blake is the founder of TOMS Shoes, this really cool, progressive company that donates part of the proceeds of his business to the needy. A philanthropic business model? Rare, yes, but not really new. What’s new about Blake is the way his company helps the needy. Rather than send money or conduct fundraisers or other old methods, TOMS Shoes gives shoes to those without shoes. In fact, for every pair of shoes you buy, someone somewhere gets a free pair of shoes.

That’s awfully nice, but does this new twist on an old idea really work? Apparently so, Blake says in a recent interview. According to Blake, companies can even make money being the good guys.

Could you give away shoes too? Sure, but that’s already been done. “You know… it’s like that company ____ where the guy ____...” So instead of using someone else’s idea, take Barbara what’s-her-name’s advice and be an original thinker. Don’t know how? Pick up Blake’s newest idea, his book “Start Something That Matters” or stop by for our next round table discussion at RWA. Inside our walls, imagination has no limits.

Facebook Wants You

In the movie about Mark Zuckerberg and his partners founding Facebook—The Social Network—cofounder Eduardo Saverin is portrayed as pushing for the site to sell online advertising, which, in the early days according to the movie version, Zuckerberg apparently wanted nothing to do with. “We don’t even know what it is yet,” the Zuckerberg character says when Saverin continues to push his agenda.

Times have changed and Facebook sure knows what it is now.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has announced she’s planning a strategy similar to one she employed while VP of global online sales and operations at Google. Reports are that the largest social networking site in the world will begin offering $50 advertising credits to as many as 200,000 small businesses as early as next week. Why? Because just as at one time you probably didn’t even know what Facebook was and now you check your page multiple times a day, the brass at Facebook recognize that people’s obsession with Facebooking opens up a whole new advertising opportunity.

Word is Facebook will set you up with an ad that racks up a cost per click—say 5 or 10 cents—and spot you the first $50. According to Sandberg, that’s enough for a typical small business to target everyone it needs to at least once, recognize that the concept is a viable way to generating ROI, and create the latest addiction among Type A business owners—obsessing over their Facebook ad campaigns while sipping their morning coffee.

No word yet on how Facebook is going to divvy out the credits, but we’ll certainly keep our ear to the keyboard for you. Because even if you can manage to keep the cyber monkey off your back and not renew after your initial credit is gone, $50 is $50, and a lot of businesses are liable to get in line fast once the program is launched.

So Saverin’s idea wasn’t such a bad one, it seems. Just his timing was off. Maybe if he’d waited a few years to push for Facebook advertising, he’d still have his 30 percent stake in the company. But, hey, maybe with a few of your advertising dollars thrown into the mix, Eduardo won’t be living out of his Bentley for too much longer.

What’s in a name?

That which we call Schweddy Balls by any other name would taste as sweet. Bill Shakespeare would roll over in his grave if he read how we just mangled that (or Francis Bacon for you conspiracy theorists). But sometimes, depending on your business, the attention garnered by a shocking or irreverent message can go a long way to racking up sales. 

Take Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, for example. They just came out with a new flavor, Schweddy Balls—vanilla ice cream with fudge-covered rum and malt balls. The name pays homage to a Saturday Night Live skit featuring Alec Baldwin, a baker, Pete Schweddy, who sells popcorn balls, cheese balls and rum balls during the holidays. “No one can resist my Schweddy Balls,” Baldwin’s character says.

The Vermont company is introducing the new flavor nationwide, but in a trial first run in case the concept is just a wee bit too over the top. This isn’t the first time Ben & Jerry’s has shocked the ice-cream loving world. A spin-off of the company’s adored Chubby Hubby flavor, Hubby Hubby, celebrated the move by some states to legalize gay marriage. It’s too early to tell how well Schweddy Balls will sell, but the story has gone viral in a very short time, and whether you love the concept or hate it, it’s getting Ben & Jerry’s a lot of attention.

Now if your business is a funeral home or manufacturing nuns’ habits, this direction might not be the best option. However, with a little creativity, you can give virtually any product or service a twist that toes the line just close enough to grab a ton of attention and increase sales while not being overly offensive. If this blog alone, however, has you as mortified as Bill Shakespeare, don’t schwet it; at RWA we can accommodate the advertising needs and business philosophy of any company.