MOO created Printfinity – a special printing process that allows you to print a different design on the back of every business card in your set. That may not sound like much at first – but think about the possibilities and it gets really exciting. If you’ve ever ordered business cards before you know that the good ones are far from cheap. If you have more than one product, or even more than one business, expenses for business cards for each can stack up fast.

But lets get even more creative. MOO is probably most popular for photographers – who can effectively create a portfolio of their work on the back of business cards and easily fan them out and show off their work. Apply this concept to any business with a product to sell and you’ve got a powerful and impressive way of showing off your wares.

You can purchase as few at 50 cards for $21.99 – or even get a free 10 pack to try out the product (MOO even pays the shipping for you).

We’re designing a set of 10 sample cards for an industrial insulation client – can’t wait to show you all what we come up with and how they’ll be used.

I had my vendor list all planned out and I knew I needed to visit two of the eSignature companies booths. I’d done some research on both companies but still had some very specific questions I needed answered. I visited eSignature company 1 and got great information and just really enjoyed the booth staff. They were friendly, knowledgable, and seemed genuinely happy to be there. Plus they could do everything I needed – and more.

I wondered around and found eSignature company 2.

Let me start by saying this particular company had the cutest screaming flying monkey tchotchkes. We picked some up from them the year before and they turned out to be the hit of the office so I wanted to grab one for my daughter during this trip.

Their booth was dead quiet, no expo attendees in their 10×10 space – sweet I can get both reps undivided attention, this should be great. I walked up and both the man and woman working the booth had arms folded across their chests and just stared at me. I stood there and stared back for a few awkward moments and finally said “Hi, I’m Heather – can you guys answer some questions for me?” and I kid you not the man nodded towards his rack of marketing material and said “You can grab some of those and if you still have questions you can come back.” Woah. Woah. Did that really just happen?  Oh, but it gets better. I grabbed their single sheet of material which was just a brief regurgitation of the website. Disappointed I told him I’d read all this already and had some specific questions about his product. His reaction was a long sigh so I told him forget it – I’m going with eSignature company 1.

But I still had to get my monkey. I ended up sending my colleague over to grab one for me because I couldn’t stand to talk to those people again – and they were just as rude to her.

All of this happened over 2 years ago – with employees who likely don’t even work for the company anymore, but that experience still sums up the way I feel about that company. I’ve avoided them as a solution for my clients and probably always will. eSignature company 1 is a little more expensive – but its a price I’m willing to pay to be treated well and to know my clients always will be as well.

Remember the customer

For the most part I see that clients know their products and services better than anyone else ever can. Sometimes thats fantastic, but sometimes it ruins their content.

When you understand something in and out and have done it for years, its easy to forget that your customers don’t have the same level of experience or knowledge you do – that’s why they’re coming to you after all – so keep your content on their level. One advantage of using an outside marketing or writing service is the outsider perspective. A consultant is likely to ask the questions and have the same concerns that your clients will. Don’t forget that you’re writing for your customer and you need to answer their questions and meet their needs.

Keep it fresh

So often I hand the reigns of a website, Facebook page, or twitter account over to my client – a gleam in their eye, visions of earth shattering blog posts & regular website updates dancing in their heads – and when I check in a few months later I’m not all that surprised to find that their sites look exactly the same as they did the day I handed it over. Even my clients who don’t purchase a support plan get periodic visits and reminders that fresh content is imperative to their internet marketing success.

When you decide to run your own marketing it is essential to keep putting out new content. Update your blog. Interact with your customers through social media. Add new content to your website. Customers won’t come back if there’s nothing new to draw them in and search engines love eat that new content up like candy – so keep it coming.

Use an editor

Something has happened to us a society – and my husband complains about it on a daily basis. No one can spell anymore. No one uses proper grammar. But if everyone’s forgotten everything they learned in 7th grade English class then its ok to have typos and bad punctuation, fractured sentences and zero formatting, right? WRONG!

Your customers may be among the masses who’ve left behind the rules and regulations of the English language – but that doesn’t mean they’ll forgive you for it. Have someone, rather many people, review everything you write for your blog and website. Do your work to make sure you’re putting out readable content. At the very least, use your browser’s built-in spell check (that’s what those little red squiggly lines all over the page mean).

Leave the hard stuff to the pros

When it comes down to it there are some things you just shouldn’t DIY. Don’t use a free website building platform, don’t deal code unless you understand what you’re doing, and don’t make your own graphics and videos unless at least 5 people who really don’t like you all that much tell you they look great. People who do like you will lie to spare your feelings and then send your sad creation to everyone else you both know.

If you think a website, a custom Facebook or twitter page, or any number of other internet marketing initiatives are just out your budget be sure to do your research before you decide to do it all yourself. There are agencies and consultants out there who will over charge and take advantage of you – but for everyone one of those there are 10 honest, ethical, and fair small-business marketing agencies ready to take great care of their customers and clients. Just like you

Get a complimentary website and social media evaluation from Blue Steele Solutions

Joomla! is an open source content management system that makes Websites and online applications easier and more efficient to manage.

So what is a Content Management System?

A Content Management System (CMS) is a system that organizes the content, templates, and style sheets of a website or online application. Using a CMS is great, because once everything is set up to run, updating and managing a Website is incredibly simple.

And what about this Joomla! thing?

Joomla! is (in my opinion) one of the best CMS’ available. First of all, its free. Many of the templates and add-ins are free. There are thousands of support forums out there that are all free. Did I mention its basically free?

It’s open source – with a great supporting community. Its also fairly low barrier to entry. For those of us who have been developing websites a while and are pretty decent code jockies, Joomla! is a cinch to drop into. There’s a standard file structure for your templates, a few proprietary tags to drop into your index file, a specific XML packaging file and that’s basically it. {and if you have no idea what I just said – make your way over to the free stuffs}

Joomla! is the preferred CMS here at Blue Steele Solutions, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. We still check in on the other CMS options out there, and occasionally develop a site or 2 on other platforms, but we keep coming back to the old standby.

But What in the World Does Joomla! Mean?

It comes from the word jumla a Swahili word meaning to come together – quite fitting, I’d say. I’m not sure though why the exclamation point {!}

The next time you have an event to attend – be it a trade show, a networking event, a usergroup meeting, etc, do a little work ahead of time to make sure you meet with and get the contact info for key attendees.

Make a list of the people you want to be sure to meet at the event, and if you can, track down their email addresses. At the very least, you’ll be able to make a list of names to check off as the event progresses, but with a little effort you can do so much more than that.

Research:

Turn an Email Address into a Social Profile.

Do a litte digging on the people you want to meet. See if you can find their blog, their website, their facebook page, etc (use a tool like Flowtown to get headed in the right direction). With Flowtown, a simple email address unlocks the door to social profiles, and even compiles them all in once place. You can snag an image, jot down a few notes about the person, and maybe even connect in advance of the event. At the very least with a little additional insite to their personality you’ll be able to keep the conversation going with a few specific talking points.

Compile Your List:

Now take your list of names and email addresses and compile that will all the other little goodies you found about the people you want to connect with. You could put these together and print them on a small card (leave room for phone numbers and email addresses for those you don’t already have).

Get Tech Savvy:

Bump

If you’re really good, you’ll take your list of contacts and preload it – with all the additional info you found – into your phone’s address book. This way when you do get a chance to meet someone you can quickly add their contact info the address record you’ve already created. You could also try adding Bump or a similar app to your phone to make exchanging contacts super fast.

This certainly beats an akward business card exchange – and having to enter all the business card info into your CRM or address book later.

Another cool trick would be to use CardLasso from Model Metrics. CardLasso allows you to take a picture of a business card and have it automatically transcribed and entered to a csv file, your Outlook contacts or even to Salesforce as a new lead. I’m guessing the CardLasso trick is the least cost effective, but when I saw it at Dreamforce ’08, it was really very cool.

Don’t forget to bring your business cards – you’ll still run into people who expect them – and create a plan of action for following up with all of your new-found friends in a timely manner.

Have any of your own networking tips? Share them in the comments.

My buddy Steve Caldwell and I came up with a simple work around that takes about 5 minutes to implement and doesn’t cost a dime. Rest assured, your org will still find a way to enter duplicate contacts, they always do, but this should help save some of your time and sanity.

1. Create A Unique ID Field

Create a text field (allow about 20 characters) and name it Unique ID. Make it read-only and don’t add it to any page layouts. Be sure you mark the field as a Unique ID field.

2. Create a Workflow

Now create a workflow that runs anytime a contact is created or edited. Assign a Field Update action to that workflow that combines the First Name and Last Name into one string in the Unique ID field. (John Smith unique id = johnsmith).

3. Update All Contacts

You’ll want to run the rule once to a. populate all the Unique ID fields and b. pull a list of existing duplicates. If you use the Apex Data Loader, this is really easy to do. Simply run a report that includes all of your contacts. You’ll only need to include the Contact ID column in this report. Then turn around and run an update through the Data Loader using that same list. Wa-lah! You’ve just updated all your contacts to have a Unique ID and your error report contains a list of existing duplicates you can go clean up.

4. Salesforce Administrator Triumphs

The next time a user tries to create a contact with the same first and last name as an existing contact, they’ll receive an error message that the Unique ID already exists and won’t be able to save.

This little trick should work for most objects you need to prevent dups on (leads, opportunities, custom objects, etc). If you run into multiple contacts with the same name, you may need to do something a bit more sophisticated or check the App Exchange for some paid solutions.

It’d be nice if you could just train people to provide great service. If there was just some half day training everyone could attend, or even a series of workshops – sure to turn even the most crotchety of folks into “service with a smile” types.

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t work that way. The knack for going the extra mile is one that’s hard to learn.

I’ve been working with a Drawloop over the past 2 months to implement an electronic document that feeds data to our Salesforce account. We pushed the envelope a little more than we realized with the project and ended up taking up quite a few more hours than anyone originally thought. Our contact over there, Caitlin, has been absolutely wonderful through the whole process.

She understands how important it is to understand our needs and foresee troubles we may run into down the road. She’s also always prompt and thorough with her responses to us. Her great level of service has gone a long way toward convincing me that Drawloop is a company worth working with and recommending in the future.

No level of training or protocol can create that for your business. Those things help streamline the experience and foster of a culture of good service, but it has to start with a group of people who are just plain good at it.

So, here’s a little teaser about something that will most likely be done this month. A while back, before all this new job stuff got going, I had the chance to interview a writer for Career Builder. One of the guys that gets posted to the front page of MSN quite a bit. I wanted to take a peek into their SEO training and level of knowledge. Its pretty interesting stuff, combining journalism with the Web. I think there are some pretty common ideas out there that to do good SEO you have to sacrifice good content, but we all know that’s just not true, right? So, look for that in the next week or so.

Also, I’m doing a total revamp of the Website at the new job, so I’ll be tracking some of my wins and losses with that for you guys.

In the mean time, don’t delete me, please! I promise I’ll be back in full force before ya know it!

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