The H1N1 cock-up

By Stephen Rhodes

It’s hard to imagine a more complete cock-up than the rollout of the H1N1 vaccine.

First, there was year-long campaign The Pandemic is Coming. Chicken Little, in scrubs, paraded on national television, warning about the dire consequencies of a pandemic.

And not much happened.

Over the summer it started all over again, withThe Pandemic is Really Coming, honest,  and you need to be vaccinated.

Canadians were largely ambivalent until Evan Frustaglio, a 13-year-old hockey player from Toronto,  died on the eve of the H1N1 vaccine becoming available. Demand for the vaccine jumped overnight, catching health officials by surprise. I guess they didn’t believe their own clippings.

Suddenly there was a shortage of vaccine and only high risk candidates could be vaccinated.

About 4,000 people die in Canada every year from seasonal flu.

“By the time all the dust has settled on H1N1, somewhere between 200 and 300 people will have died in this country,” says Dr. Richard Schabas, chief medical officer of health for Hastings and Prince Edward Counties in eastern Ontario. who was interviewed on CBC News The National last week. He says public health officials and journalists have overstated the importance of the swine flu.

Either way, the challenge for health officials will be to convince a growing number of skeptics about the importance of the H1N1 flu shot.

If the public-relations effort to this point is an indication of what’s to come, we are in for a long winter. Worse, health officials have lost public confidence and their seemingly ad hoc approach to communications, and mixed messages, aren’t helping.

Panic is driving the bus because there is not enough information, and I don’t mean daily media reports about the latest screwup, to make an informed decision.

Communications strategy? Apparently not.

What do you think?

Who has seen you naked?

By Jeff Bowman

It has happened to all of us. That uncomfortable feeling, being exposed, nothing to hide behind, caught unprepared.  We can feel the embarrassment making our faces red, we search for a cover, but there is nothing there.  We have no choice but to stand there, naked, and open to public opinion.

Who has seen you naked?

I’m not talking about the step out of the shower, not a stitch on, surprise! kind of naked, I’m talking about the awkward moments when we are caught with our guard down, unprepared to answer questions posed to us, presenting to a large group and having holes poked in the slide show by those who relish seeing an uncomfortable expression creep across our face. It’s almost like cheap thrill some get by watching people fail on reality T.V. or on a YouTube video.

I recently raided my business partner’s bookshelf for some light business reading. I chose a book which was written  in 1992, an eternity ago. The book “I Can See You Naked” by Ron Hoff is a humorous look at the skills required to make highly successful presentations.

You’ve heard the expression “think of your audience being naked as you present” to make you less nervous, well my question was, what if you are presenting at a nudist convention? Hoff comes to the conclusion that speaking to a naked audience would certainly make eye contact essential, as well as make you feel rather overdressed. The fact is, it would be very distracting to say the least.

I apply this same thinking to the feeling we get when, as professional business people who pride ourselves on our knowledge and abilities, we experience that temporary “brain fart”, memory blip, the “Lost in Space” moment that leaves us stuttering and stammering searching for some kind of voice in our head to provide us with an answer. That is the moment when we are being seen naked by someone else. Sometimes we can recover quickly, and other times we just have to face the embarrassment.

It happens to everyone, and if it hasn’t happened to you yet, I guarantee  it will. The best way to handle it is to try and relax, think before you speak and pose your answer back in the form of a more clarifying question, which will give you a few valuable seconds to gain your composure, possibly provide you with more detail for the formulation of an answer and on the odd occasion, provide you with a bird’s eye view of a naked person who was unprepared for your desire for further clarification.

Eyeballs glued to the world wide web

By Stephen Rhodes

Communications strategist David Henderson was musing last week about eyeballs, specifically where there were focused as he and a friend watched passersby with heads down,  glued to their iPhones and Blackberrys (PDAs).

I have noticed the same thing and it’s not just teenagers. People walking along the street, in movie theatres, restaurants, board rooms… all with an almost insatiable need to stay connected. The other day I was standing on the main street of a small town in Ontario and I accessed Poynt on my Blackberry to help me find a restaurant for lunch. The street wasn’t that long.

David’s blog quotes Erik Qualman’s book Socialnomics:

• One billion iPhone apps were downloaded by iPhone users in the first 9 months.
• Americans have access to one billion Web pages.
• Newspaper circulation is down 7 million in the last 25 years but unique visitors to online news sources are up 30 million in the last 5 years
• More video has been viewed at YouTube than on all of the TV networks in the last 60 years.
• Barack Obama raised $55 million in one month during his 2008 campaign … all through online social media.
• Twitter was a primary means of communications between ordinary citizens in Iran during the contested 2009 presidential elections.

David adds that Google’s research shows:

• 25% of search results for the top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
• 34% of the 95 million bloggers in America post opinions about new products and services … and they have influence.
• 78% of consumers online trust peer recommendations.
• Only 14% of Americans trust advertisements.

He concludes we no longer search for the news, the news finds us … on our PDAs and that companies and organizations need to become an online resource, act more like storytellers, party planners, aggregators and content providers than traditional advertisers or promoters.

Marketing today is a two-way street. To be good at it, you need to keep your head down.

Learning by doing nothing…sort of

By Jeff Bowman

Lead, follow or get out the way is how I would characterize my approach to most things in life.  Headstrong, determined and persistent are words people might use to describe me, among others that can’t be printed here.

I know that we all need to relax, breathe it all in and discover our “happy places”, I just have a ton of those places I need to get to in a hurry.

The last three weeks sitting housebound with my leg plastered and elevated, has led to some interesting discoveries. I guess it took this period of imposed inactivity to make me realize that there are alternative ways to make a business work, and despite the mountain of things I can’t do, there are many things I can.

Naturally, I owe this revelation to my wife, who has taken on all the household duties lately.  I have tried to help, but mostly I have been in the way.  In frustration, I was looking for ways to be useful and the next thing I knew a basket of laundry was dumped beside me on the bed, with simple instructions “fold this!”

Eureka, I can fold laundry. I also discovered I can fill the dishwasher sitting down, iron from a chair (who knew ironing boards were adjustable?) make shopping lists from the flyers etc. I am useful!

This little life lesson, annoying as it is to everyone around me, has a business application. I have discovered my limitations; so what is it in our business lives that someone else could do better,  and allow us more time to focus on the things we can do best?

Are there other people who work with us or around us who not only could do more, but want to?

I am now taking this forced period of inactivity to look at what I do and how I do it.  What alternatives do I have? What are the pros and cons of each? Are there ways to expand my business activity based on the things I do best?

When we are busy we don’t often think about these things. I have had lots of time. Now, back to flapping sheets.

The more things change…..

By Stephen Rhodes

Re-posted from our newsletter

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

In communities, or as Wikipedia says, groups of ” interacting organisms sharing an environment,” we recognize the need for people to come together, where intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks, and a number of other conditions may be present and common.

Marketing guru Seth Godin wrote a book about these collectives called Tribes. He defines them as any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea.

He says, “for millions of years, humans have been seeking out tribes, be they religious, ethnic, economic, political, or even musical (think of the Deadheads). It’s our nature.”

Godin’s point is that the Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost, and time. Blogs and social networking tools are building new communities of common interest where thousands, even millions of people, join forces around ideas, causes, sports team and product lines.  In Facebook alone, 250 million people are interacting.

People in small towns understand community. They get together at the local hockey game on a Friday night, or the market on a Saturday morning or church on Sunday. These communities within the community grow out of a common interest.  And within these communities an inherent trust develops between the participants.

Have you ever asked your neighbour how he likes his new Cadillac, a movie or who he uses for insurance. Are you likely to trust his opinion?

In business, formal networking provides significant opportunity for growth on the strength of the trust developed within the group. If you have personal experience with a lawyer in your networking group and a friend or associate needs a lawyer, you are likely to connect the two. But let’s say you don’t know a lawyer, but someone you trust in your group does.  The trust developed within the group provides the comfort you need to make a referral.

The Internet and community builders like Twitter, Facebook and You Tube allows you to build bigger communities faster.

Innovation is the mother of invention

By Stephen Rhodes

Innovation is something new or a new way of doing something old. It can involve changes in thinking or approaches, new products or new processes and often is revolutionary in scope. It needs to move us beyond the pale, metaphorically speaking.

Innovation depends on putting invention into practice, making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear and taking it to market where value is created for a customer. An idea may lead to an invention, but it isn’t an innovation until it is commercialized. The benefit is to improve productivity, create jobs, and prosperity, improve our quality of life and along the way create wealth in a economy.

As a country our investment in innovation creates a competitive advantage. Canada has no shortage of good ideas; but we fall short with the support needed to transform our inventions into innovations. We have a long  list of innovations in agriculture, mining,  forestry and fisheries. And there is acrylics, basketball, the Canadarm, the electron microscope, five-pin bowling, goalie mask, insulin, jolly jumper, kerosene, pablum, paint roller, rollerskate, snowblower, telephone and th zipper. Oh, we also invented Superman.

But with our natural resources in great demand around the world, it is easier and more profitable to invest in resource development. While the prospect of triple-digit oil prices will clearly fuel Canada’s post-recession economy for a while, long-term sustainability will always be an issue.

A Conference Board of Canada report card in 2008 says we are well supplied with good universities, engineering schools, teaching hospitals, and technical institutes. We produce science that is well respected around the world. But, with some exceptions, Canada does not take the steps that other countries take to ensure that science is successfully commercialized and used as a source of advantage for innovative companies seeking global market share.

The Board places Canada 13th in the world in its report card. In short, it says Canada needs to move away from short-term job protection policies that consume important resources and instead support  long-term innovation.

What do you think?

Traditional sales bunk

By Jeff Bowman

Step right up ladies and gentleman, you won’t believe your eyes, let me direct your attention, you’ll be amazed!

We all know that selling is the oldest profession in the world. We’ve seen the old fashioned sales tents and the stands with the barkers, and we’ve heard the pitches:
“Don’t be misled by other’s claims”
“Can you afford to be without one”?
“A good wife will …”
“Act now; this is a limited time offer”

There have been monumental changes in the way goods and services are bought and sold in the last 100 years. My grandparents bought from a catalogue or the local general store and occasionally the trains would bring salesmen from afar with new and innovative products that supposedly worked miracles.

Today we have a varied and widespread method of message delivery including television, radio and the internet; hundreds of choices of stores or suppliers from which to purchase, and of course the catalogue and the barker (professional salesman) are still around; just watch some television in the wee hours of the morning.

Despite the increased competition, the ease with which we can purchase products, the complexity and length of some buying decisions and the ever-changing needs of the buyer, the traditional style of selling goods and services has changed little in the last century. The traditional sales approach preaches getting the buyer’s attention (you won’t believe your eyes!), stimulating their interest (let me direct your attention!), creating a demand for the product (you’ll be amazed!) and a call to immediate action (act now). Sound familiar?

Buyers in today’s world are much smarter and better informed. Professional buyers are certified in their trade. They don’t want cheap gimmicks, or one-time offers and today demand that the salespeople calling on them are product and service specialists, who make it their job to satisfy needs, provide advice, build a solid relationship and go the extra mile for them. In short, they want a Consultative Sales Professional.

Today’s salespeople need to be experts in all areas of their product offering; they need to build a strong relationship with the buyer; they should be able to accurately profile their own company, the competition and their customer and be able to probe to uncover opportunities and needs so they can offer a clear benefit for every feature of their product or service. Keep in mind, a product feature without a stated benefit to the buyer means little in terms of needs satisfaction.

It doesn’t stop at the salesperson, even though they are the focal contact with customers. Companies need to build a culture focused on providing the highest value to the customer. Marketing, customer service, finance, even warehouse employees and shippers need to be trained in the new consultative sales techniques.

In today’s market, the true winners will be organizations who value a customer-focused approach.

“Good afternoon, will you allow me a few minutes of your time to learn more about your business so that I can better service your needs?”

Yogi and Strategic Planning

By Stephen Rhodes

“The future ain’t what it used to be,” Yogi Berra once said.

Strategic planning identifies where a business or organization wants to be at some point in the future and how it is going to get there.

It scares people, in part, because it seems so remote from the tactics required to keep one’s eye on the ball, especially now. The old joke about draining the swamp when you are up to your keester in alligators comes to mind.

Strategy is about looking around corners a few years away, while many businesses are currently focused on what’s happening right now and rightly so.

Last week, I was one of the mentors at the Brampton Small Business Enterprise Centre’s Energize Your Business workshop. I had table chats about strategic planning with four groups of eight businesses, all different,  but all wondering if long-range planning was some sort of magic elixir, perhaps because the short-term view was so unappealing.

Some openly mused about the value of strategic planning in such a volatile environment. And nearly all complained about external factors, things they could not control, impacting success.

I talked about better understanding internal and external factors and suggested each conduct a simple SWOT analysis to separate the things they could control from those they could not.  Planning helps identify what they are and forces you to think about how you might respond.

Most of the 32 businesses were coping, some even doing better than expected. But only one had a plan that spanned more than a year.

The “strategic” part of planning is the need to pay attention to changes that impact your business – internal and external -over a period of time. Unless you have a crystal ball, strategic plans will undoubtedly require course corrections.

As Yogi would say, “you gotta be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, otherwise you might not get there.”

Do you have a vision and a long-range plan for your business or organization? How is it weathering the current economic storm?

Marketing to perfection

By Jeff Bowman

Have you ever tasted the perfect drink, mixed to perfection, or had the perfect steak grilled and seasoned like no other?  I’m sorry to say I haven’t.

I have had outstanding drinks, thirst quenching droplets from the gods, and steak that melted in my mouth and left me wanting after each bite. But perfect?

Perfection is a goal, the ultimate accomplishment in anything we do. After perfection, what else is there?

During many years working in Product Management, I was given the task of creating the perfect marketing mix to launch, market and track both new products and products that were approaching the maturity stage of their life cycle, one last kick at the can. Despite fantastic launches, great promos, and the ultimate in product tracking software, it didn’t go off without a hitch.

Good marketing is about pushing boundaries and creating a buzz.  Marketing is about being in the minute, altering your course and speeding ahead when you see a break and taking evasive actions when threatened.

Few marketing plans are implemented to perfection.  But then the words on the page don’t mean as much as the action that is put into implementing them. By the time the plan is written, accepted, communicated and tested, things can change.

Prepare the plan, implement with a keen eye to detail and measure the results. Be wary of changing market conditions. Don’t be afraid to change course if conditions dictate.

Spontaneity is often a strange bedfellow to perfection.

A celebration of the little guy

By Stephen Rhodes

Welcome to Small Business month. It’s a celebration of the people who keep our economy ticking – small companies that collectively employ lots of people, create jobs and provide much of the innovation that keeps Canada competitive.

There are more than one million small businesses in Canada employing about 5 million people or 48% of all working Canadians. Firms with fewer than 50 people contribute 27% to Canada’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 98% of businesses in Canada have fewer than 100 employees. Last year small business created 50% of all new jobs in Canada. The 10 year average is 36%.

More than half of Ontarians work in SMEs, (less than 500 employees) with 70% of those employed by firms with fewer than 100 employees. But here is an interesting stat. Businesses without employees also play an important role in the provincial economy. There are more than 513,000 such businesses, each generating at least $30,000 in annual revenue. Do the math.

And while small is relative, some say under 500 employees, some say under 100 employees, it’s mostly the little guy (and gal) that ignites the world. And that’s worth celebrating.

Check out you local Chamber of Commerce or Board of Trade for activities. In Brampton, the Small Business Enterprise Centre (SBEC) and The Brampton Board of Trade (BBOT) have partnered around a number of activities, workshops and seminars throughout October and November. There are also opportunities to just kick back and network. Get involved and let’s celebrate.

What’s your take on small business?