Talk of the recession is, well, everywhere. And it can get depressing.

So, where are the contrarians? Who’s looking for (and telling others about) the silver lining in this grey economy? Who’s trying to describe an alternate reality?

Well, here are a handful for you to consider.

Graeme Thickins, in The Clear and Simple Solution to the Current Downturn: The Entrepreneurial Economy,  at Tech~Surf~Blog sees salvation in good ol’ entrepreneurism:

The big answer to our current economic plight is not a new one: it is staring us right in the face. It has brought us out of many a recession before this one, and it will do so again. It is simply this: the ingenuity and perseverance of the American entrepreneur.

Graeme also points us to two particularly relevant posts:

• The “Downturn” — Keeping Things in Perspective, by Jay Turo at the growthink blog.
• Fear Kills Businesses Dead, by Brian Solis at TechCrunch

Ben McConnell at Church of the Customer suggests that the downturn, if anything, presents an opportunity for marketers to try ideas they might not have been able to successfully champion during the last boom. Among his more intriguing ideas:

Adopt the simpler and affordable Net Promoter Score.

Evangelize the benefits of Twitter-driven customer support.

Build a customer, supplier, vendor or employee social network on Ning.

Host internal seminars about design thinking.

Speak out against testosterone-driven “barbarian” mission statements. (ed: Kinder, gentler mission statements? I’d like to see that.)

Underlying all this talk of the recession is the question of fear. As Brian Solis’ post puts it, fear kills. It sucks your soul, at at time when you need all the energy and optimism you can muster. If you find yourself losing sleep over the economy, I highly recommend this post by Robert Middleton on his More Clients blog.

Finally, if you’re seeking out the brighter side of the economy (and happen to live in the Twin Cities), be sure to attend the next UnSummit on Sat., March 7. The theme is “Hacking the Recession” and we’ll be discussing ideas and tools that will help us improve our economic well being individually and collectively. Some of the proposed sessions include:

• Social media survival kit — a workshop to get you up to speed
• Getting good ideas when times are tough
• How to increase your employability using community and social media
• Blogging for fun, profit and survival

Photo credit: Alternate realities by James Jordan

Jason Billingsley of the Get Elastic blog recorded this interview with Darren Tomey, VP of Sales from Compendium Blogware, at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2008 in Chicago.

I find it interesting that Darren uses organic SEO as the rationale for why big retailers should be blogging. I don’t disagree, but my first reaction would have been to say that retailers should blog in order to build communities.

Then again, if you do build a community around your blog, I suppose the SEO boost naturally follows (you’ve probably heard that search engines love blogs) and you end up in the same place anyway. So, not only is Darren correct, but he cuts to the chase and presents an argument that is more compelling to retailers, who are notoriously numbers oriented.

Incidentally, Connie Benson describes a conversation between her, Lee Odden, Albert Maruggi and Barry Judge about community building and SEO. Connie brings up a good question: If you engage in online community building (which could include blogging among other activities) with SEO in mind, should you make deliberate use of SEO keywords, which might result in stilted and possibly off-putting language? Or do you write au naturel? She seems to come down in favor of the latter and I have to agree.

Part 1: Dipping your toe into social media

This is the first in a 4 part series about how you can start a social media strategy program started in a risk-averse company. In part 1, we’ll start out very slowly and just dip our toe in to some of the basic platforms.

I’m sure you have a list of your favorite industry blogs, you’ve dabbled in LinkedIn and Facebook and you’ve even heard of Twitter. You undoubtedly know that you “need” to take advantage of social media to stay competitive, but you’re a bit overwhelmed and your company isn’t exactly sure it’s a good fit.

You know that connecting with your customers on a more personal level can improve your brand and your bottom line. You understand that social media can be a great way to influence behavior with minimal out-of-pocket expenses. And you realize that you’ll need to do something fast just to stay competitive. But, because you’re part of a large company, particularly if you’re in a highly regulated, risk-averse industry like health care or banking, your company may feel there’s just too much risk associated with that level of transparency. And thinking about shifting your marketing communications into conversations, your organization might feel like it would lose control over its message and its brand, and that there could be very real legal and IP considerations.

Here is an easy 4-day (or 4-hour) plan to dip your toe into social media. If you haven’t used these tools before, spend just an hour each week and you’ll be laying the groundwork for implementing a social media strategy for your company.

Day 1: Make it brief
Create a communications strategy brief. The operative word is “brief”. Don’t get bogged down in committee meetings, just create a one-page outline of who your target audience is, what your organization’s goals are for the next year and how you think your company and customers can benefit by adopting social media. Then, write down your top 3 concerns. This will be your guide throughout the process. It’s not set in stone, so feel free to update it at any time.

Day 2: Set up basic accounts
If you haven’t already, set up personal accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and start exploring. This will allow you to get familiar with what each platform offers without involving the company brand. Find a handful of people you know and start connecting with them. These can be friends, co-workers or thought leaders in your industry. The important thing is to explore without any grand agenda.

Day 3: Listen to the chatter
A fundamental benefit of social media tools that often can get overlooked is the ability to eavesdrop on conversations. You can search twitter posts, blog posts and reader comments to find out what people are saying about your brand, your industry and your competition. Here is two good places to start searching–just type in your company name, your product, even your name (come on, you know you want to):

• Search twitter
• Search blogs

What do you notice? Is there even anybody talking about you? Do you see any patterns? Are there people that you’d never heard of that your customers listening to? Did you find anything surprising?

Day 4: Participate in the community
You’ve created your strategy brief (you may have even updated it already), you’re more familiar with some of the core social media platforms and you’ve explored what others are saying about you online. Now it’s time to start participating. The easiest thing to do is to comment on another’s blog. Choose 3 of your favorite industry blogs and post comments on a couple of articles you find particularly helpful or interesting. Your comments don’t need to be lengthy or even deep. Eventually, you‘ll want to provide more insightful comments, but even thanking the blogger for their contribution or insight is enough. Your comments should be informal and authentic and this shouldn’t be used as an opportunity to directly sell your services. Just say what you would if that person were standing right in front of you.

What are you waiting for?
When you start using this simple plan, you’ll be laying the foundation for your company’s social media strategy with very little brand risk. You can do these steps in 4 days or 4 hours. The important thing is to take a little time each day or each week to explore and to participate. Become a part of the community you want to do business with.

In part 2, I’ll kick it up a notch and talk about how you can begin making the case to your risk-averse organization for adopting social media. Part 3 will talk about ideas for implementing social media internally. Finally, part 4 will discuss simple and low-risk ways to turn your social media program outward.

Photo by adactio. Creative Commons image license.

Recently we launched a project for Prolifiq, Inc., a Beaverton, Oregon SaaS (software as a service) provider that offers a killer 1:1 communications platform for sales and marketing. In addition to delivering a revamped Web site and interactive demo, we also created this web video commercial.

The communications challenge
Early in our engagement, we could see that it was difficult to describe what Prolifiq was without getting overwhelmed by an extensive list of cool features and its impressive behind-the-scenes technology. It’s not a blast email marketing platform and it’s not a content management system as we know it. Both can be quite cumbersome for “on-the-move” sales reps to use when they need it. And organizations certainly can’t get their personal email and CMS to interact with each other, much less provide useful metrics. Prolifiq can do all of that and much more.

Telling the story
Of course, the first obstacle in any sales process (especially for complex and technical products/services) is to get your target audience to understand what your product is and how it benefits them. The simplest and most compelling way for us to accomplish this was to create a video that tells the Prolifiq story. The story needed to go beyond a laundry list of whiz-bang features and it inherently needed to be more meaningful to the audience.

This video gives the Prolifiq sales and management team a great tool to introduce their product to prospects and it helps accelerate their conversations to the next level.

(The video is part of a larger interactive demo. Check it out!)

Date:
A Saturday in Februrary or March. We’ll announce the date as soon as things are finalized.

Location:
TBD

Food, drink:
Yes. We’re looking to get some kind souls to underwrite food and drinks.

Topics:
I may need some help honing this down to a couple of snappy sound bites. In the meantime, here’s the big idea in prose…

The last UnSummit seemed to be all about social media. Nobody really planned it that way. It’s just what everyone wanted to talk about. I’m sure the next one will be chock-full-o’ social media goodness. But I’d like to see if we can focus our powers and take on the one thing that’s on everyone’s mind  — the economy.

Whether you’re a freelancer or consultant, business owner, an agency worker or a corporate cube dweller, the economy is creeping into every conversation. If you’re lucky, it’s only altered your plans for 2009. But more likely , it’s resulted in slower business and budget cuts. Maybe even a pink slip.

So, are we helpless in the face of job cuts and plummeting sales? If not, what can we do about it as individuals or as a community? Is there a way to hack the downturn and create Recession 2.0?

As creatives, geeks and entrepreneurs, I think this is a rich area for us to mine. I don’t presume to know all the questions people might have around the economy, but here are the one’s I’m asking.

• Is this downturn the same as the last one?
• Will it result in the same kind of carnage?
• Or will it result in an all-new kind of carnage?
• What wine pairs well with carnage? (seriously, let’s have a wine or beer talk!)

• Is everyone feeling the pinch?
• If you’re not, why not?
• Are you considering altering your business model due to the economy?
• What are some alternative ways to profit from your talents, skills and assets?

• What clever strategies are you implementing to survive the maelstrom?
• Which industries and clients still have budgets?
• What tools/techniques are you using to prospect and make sales?
• What tools/techniques are you using cut costs?

• We’re kind of a go-it-alone state. Still, how can we band together as a community to help job hunters and small biz owners?
• Is there anything we can do to speed up the recovery?
• How can we raise the profile of Minnesota as a go-to place for tech, creative and entrepreneurial talent?

I’m hoping that we’ll see three distinct, yet interrelated conversational currents:

• For freelancers, consultants and employees - focus on personal brand building, self promotion, networking.
• For small businesses & agencies - focus on business models, strategies, sales, staffing and efficiency.
• For community leaders - focus on community building, civic boosterism, making Minnesota more visible at a national level.

What do you think of this rough agenda? What do you want to talk about at the next UnSummit? Please drop a comment and let us know!

(We’ll move the conversation over to the UnSummit wiki in a week or so.)

If the last downturn taught us anything it’s that businesses can batten down the hatches very quickly, and that marketing budgets are the first to be thrown overboard.

Were you hoping to revamp or enhance your old Web site over the next few quarters? If so, a spending freeze memo from the boss could seriously hinder your plans. You might not have the funds to make the improvements you had in mind.

So, what can you do with your site on a paper-thin budget? Obviously you’re going to have to make some tough choices and prioritize what needs changing. We suggest looking at three key aspects of your site’s performance: visibility, flexibility and experience.

Visibility

There are a number of ways to measure your Web site’s visibility, but here’s a simple reality check: How does your site come up in Google when you simply enter the name of your business? If you are a small business, enter the names of the owners or key executives. You’d be amazed how many businesses can’t even get into the first page of results using their own name! It’s equally important to determine your competitiveness on key words that your prospects are likely to use in searching for information on potential vendors in your industry. This is particularly important if your business name is not unique. In such cases, prospects who hope to snoop your site might search on your company name plus your industry or city (e.g., Johnson + Consulting + Insurance).

Even if all of your business comes from personal referrals, you can’t afford to be invisible in search results. A prospective customer who is considering whether to include your firm in an RFP might conduct a search on your company, not just to find your Web site but to find out how prominent you are in your field. Does your name come up in news articles? Blogs and blog comments? Trade association Web sites? Being visible in peer and industry sites not only boosts your credibility in your field, but, if accompanied by links back to your site, can increase your site’s search ranking.

Below are just a few ideas for boosting your site’s visibility.

• Cultivate inbound links - The more external sites that point to your site, the better. While it may take some convincing and some valuable content to get bloggers and online media to link to your site, you can generate links quickly by registering your site with industry associations and chambers of commerce.
• Comment on blogs - Even if you can’t/won’t launch your own blog, you can still leave thoughtful comments on blogs that cover your industry. Good comments are always welcome. They not only reflect well on you and your company, but also result in inbound links to your site.
• Media sites - Sites like YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo and Slideshare are designed for content sharing. Your company might have content that could be uploaded to those sites as well, including photos of your headquarters, company party or annual meeting, PowerPoint sales presentations, videos of product demos, etc. As you set up and upload to these sites, be sure to include links back to your company web site in your profile page and in captions.
• Update your AboutUs.org page - Have you heard of this service? Go to AboutUs.org and you will probably find info about your company there. It has been “scraped” from your site. At no cost, you can register and modify the info. But for a couple hundred bucks, a professional staff writer will produce an in-depth article about your company, which will provide links back to specific pages on your web site.

Flexibility

If your business were to suddenly made a big move, say an acquisition or merger, or it were pummeled by negative news reports, how long would it take you to update your Web site in response? Could you post updated content to your site in a day? In hours? In minutes? What kind of content would you be able to post?

If your Web site feels old and inflexible, it’s probably for a reason, including programming, analysis paralysis or a simple lack of time and attention. To be fair, these are all valid excuses. But excuses don’t count in a competitive market or during a time of crisis. This is the age of instant publishing, in which anyone, especially your detractors, can publish content online and force you to play defense. In such an environment, your static, fussy Web site is no longer an asset. It’s a big liability.

How can you make your Web site more nimble? If you’re indeed on a skimpy budget, you may have to rule out the idea of rebuilding the entire site on even a basic content management platform. The cost of the platform is not the issue as much as the labor required to redesign the site and set up templates and then populate the site with content.

Instead, you should look for ways to apply low-to-no-cost content management tools to selected pages on your site:

• Start blogging. Many companies that keep blogs are able to cope with not only with crises but everyday industry challenges by posting their responses on the company blog. The tools are practically free. You just need a link from your main site to your blog and you’re all set.
• Use a free blogging account, such as Blogger, to feed your news and events pages. You create articles just like you would for a blog. A snippet of code on your site pulls in a feed from your blog account and displays headlines and articles on your site. Examples here and here.
• Post videos to Vimeo or YouTube and have them featured on your home page.
• Pull in and display a feed of your Twitter posts on your home page. (Drawback: you can’t edit your posts.)
• Use a service like PitchEngine for distributing and promoting your press releases. Again, you can pull in a feed of your press releases and display them on your news, press or home pages.

Experience

With a realistic sense of how your current site is faring in these areas, you may discover that you don’t have to overhaul your entire site. Instead, like a surgeon, you may be able to enhance the experience that prospects have when they visit your site.

Experience is a broad word and can encompass many things, but here is a short list of criteria on which you can evaluate your site’s experience.

• Performance – This used to be a common issue, back when the majority of people had dialup modems. Nowadays, a slow-loading site is a rarity, which makes it (when you do find one) a much less tolerable problem. However, site performance can be an issue at specific junctures within the site. Conduct an audit and make sure that your search, contact and other forms not only function as intended but provide a reasonable level of performance and responsiveness.
• Mobile-friendliness – Have you seen what your site looks like on a Blackberry, Windows Mobile phone or iPhone? If your site makes heavy use of Flash, you might be disappointed. Depending on your audience, mobile may be a bigger consideration going forward, particularly if you sell to C-suite executives, busy doctors or iPhone-carrying techies.
• Clarity - Does your site do a good job helping visitors understand the essentials about your company? Does it help visitors quickly assess the relevance of your products or services? Using a metrics tool, such as Google Analytics, zero in on your high-traffic pages (as well as critical pages that you believe deserve more traffic) and evaluate them with an objective eye. If that’s not possible, recruit prospects and customers to help you understand how those pages could communicate more powerfully.
• Conversion - Evaluate your product and service pages or any pages where visitors might logically want to make a purchase or request more information — and make sure your call to action is clear and the subsequent steps (specifiying a product, placing an order, filling out a contact form, etc.) are as streamlined as possible.

This article offers a handful of options for improving your Web site and your broader online marketing efforts. But in reality, there are many low-cost options available, especially if you have more time than budget. The first step is to conduct a frank evaluation of your online marketing efforts. From there, you can explore and prioritize strategies for connecting with your prospects, being more relevant and making it easier for them to move toward a purchase decision.

Photo: Wishes by Shioshvili

What probably seemed clever in the mind of a 23-year-old, childless copywriter turned out to be quite offensive to many moms (and dads, to be sure) and unleashed a social media firestorm.

Within a few short hours, a movement was born, complete with its own #motrinmoms hashtag on Twitter, angry blog posts, video rants, CafePress stores, Flickr groups and parody videos. In less than a day, Motrin was forced to take down the ad and apologize.

• Morriss Partee has published a chronology of events.
• Enterprise Social Media has assembled a Harpers-like index of Motrin Moms activity, which also gives a good sense of how quickly, from Motrin’s point of view, this whole thing got out of hand.
• Jack Neff covers the incident in Ad Age.

Update:
My biz partner Dean Gulstad points out an article by Jakob Nielsen on participation inequality, which supports Neff’s view that Motrin acted too hastily in responding to the social media uproar. Nielsen points out that “In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.” Therefore, he says, “If your company looks to Web postings for customer feedback on its products and services, you’re getting an unrepresentative sample.”

Yet another update:
Seth Godin pans Motrin’s apology for its lack of humanity.

Just when you thought you’d seen every Google Maps mashup imaginable, the Commercial Crime Services division of the ICC (International Chamber of Commerce) has launched the Live Piracy Map. The map shows the locations of piracy incidents across the globe.

This is a great example of “data marketing” – disseminating meaningful data in order to help your prospects better understand their needs and/or your company’s relevance in meeting their needs. In this case, the ICC is not a business but a trade organization. But why couldn’t a maritime security company have produced such a map?

Via the ever-entertaining BLDGBLOG

Maybe your bosses, colleagues or clients seem to be dragging their heels into this “new-fangled” social media thing. Remind them that it’s been around for quite a long time. It’s as old as word-of-mouth marketing. Buy them a copy of the book, send them to the site or give them this PDF of the 95 Theses. Because if they don’t get off their butts and find effective ways to use social media, they’ll be kicked to the rear.

If you haven’t read the Cluetrain Manifesto recently, read it again–you can read it for free online. It emphasizes the importance of social media to an organization’s future: the unique opportunity to have conversations about your products and services in places where those conversations are already happening…with or without you. And if you’re not there, your competition probably is.

So, my friend just got back from a big conference on social media and is skeptical about the potential for using social media in the kind of marketing she does.

If I were to paraphrase the challenge as she described it, it goes like this:

• I know that all this crazy social media stuff is a force to be reckoned with.
• I don’t want to be late to the party.
• But, let’s be realistic. We sell to CFOs, financial managers, upper level, even C-level managers. They’re not exactly hanging out online waiting to be engaged by you or anyone else, right?
• So, is social media a mostly consumer-focused trend that will have little impact on our business and approach to marketing?
• Or are there B2B applications that are waiting to be discovered and/or pioneered?
• What are some cost-justifiable ways, if any, that we can use these tools (blogs, social networks, micro-blogging, etc.) to market more effectively?

What I’m asking for is your response to this challenge. Is it too early for my friend to do anything? Are there things that she needs to be doing now? What are your ideas? I will publish them in a follow-up post and of course give credit where it’s due