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Smarta.com – a step in the wrong direction?

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Just over a year ago I blogged about smarta.com.

It was essentially a one page site, full of short videos of entrepreneurs of all kinds talking about their response to certain questions and challenges.  You just chose an entrepreneur and a topic and you were away.

No sign ups, no profiles, no networks, no business tools. Just quick, easy access to technical and emotional support for entrepreneurs.

This month the full smarta service was launched.  And it appears to have all the bells and whistles you would expect from an online entrepreneurs network.  But it is, in my opinion, complicated, time consuming, unintuitive and all those great resources are now presented in a much less creative and serendipitous manner.

I have joined smarta and will do my bit to help it work.

Fingers crossed!

Make Your Mark – Technology and the Enterpreneurial Journey

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Really interesting use of technology by the Make Your Mark people on their Pioneer project.

Essentially young entrepreneurs record video diaries of their journey which they can then use to reflect on and learn from.  http://tinyurl.com/cun9j5 for more info.

Couple of observations:

  • encouraging entrepreneurial characters to learn from reflective practice can be tricky.  They are usually obsessed about diving into the next experience rather than reflecting on the earlier one (generalising I know). This can be  a battle worth fighting!
  • this sort of project will appeal to those who are already entrepreneurial and risk taking by nature – great that we can support these people – but aren’t they likely to do it anyway?  Could we use technology to engage more ‘risk-averse’ and introverted types and use it to engage them in the enterprise agenda too?

Big THUMBS UP for the Make Your Mark team on this one.  A real effort at innovative enteprise support!

Word of Mouth – Marketing that Works

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There are at least three major challenges in marketing our enterprise services:

  1. More than 90% of the population does not see what we do as relevant to them – when it comes to enterprise they are pre-contemplators
  2. Getting our messages through – what are our key messages and how to we get them where they can be heard – by the people that matter?
  3. Giving people the confidence, conviction and commitment to act on the messages – to give us a call, to come to a workshop, to make an appointment, to have a conversation

Now the default setting for the VAST majority of enterprise projects are these:

We won’t worry about the pre-contemplators – we will target those who already have ideas they want to act on or already have the belief and the conviction that they can make progress.  This makes it easier for us to hit our numbers.

Our core messages will be:

1.  we can help turn your dreams into reality (if you don’t have dreams don’t call us)

2.  We can turn your business ideas into reality (ignore the fact that the ‘Dragons’ mash up and humiliate most of the poor saps that go to them – with our help you can’t fail)

3. It is quick – and relatively easy – (if you haven’t got the skills we can teach them to you) – you can be up and running in just weeks or months.  10 000 hours to master a field – forget it – who is Malcolm Gladwell anyway? 3 half day workshops and a bit of one to one on the business plan will “see you ‘reet”. (Glad no-one is measuring survival rates on our projects!)

4.  To get people to take action we will lure them in by hinting at the availability of money, childcare, bouncy castles and food.  We will even pay them the bus fare (yes, it costs a lot to administer but – what are we to do…?)

5.  We will spend a lot of money on marketing collateral, leaflets, web sites and e-mail marketing campaigns (digital exclusion! – you mean some poor people don’t have e-mail accounts – never mind they could never become proper business people anyway – they are not our target group).

6. We will attend every possible event and push our services hard – just like those guys who sell SKY TV and Credit Cards in the Merrion Centre – “You mean we shouldn’t be selling enterprise like any other commodity?  Why not?”

We know that these approaches:

  • are expensive
  • have very low hit rates
  • attract a whole load of people who just want to get the money without putting in the work
  • attract people easily seduced by the idea of a quick fix – rather than composing a life and a livelihood
  • elicit more suspicion, frustration and cynicism than enthusiasm and engagement
  • provide us with very high customer acquisition costs.  (interesting that most entrepreneurs are very interested in this number – yet most projects funded to support entrepreneurs don’t worry about their own cost per customer acquisition at all – ‘We are below targets – lets throw some more money at marketing then!’).

What about looking at marketing approaches that work.

Word of mouth.

Reputation building, seeking referrals and recommendations – based on the fact that we are bloody good!  That we do inspire, transform, care and coach.  That we are more than interested in people and their passions.  That we are with them for the long haul.

Worrying more about what every customer says about us to their mates, in the pub, in the clubs and on the streets, rather than some abstract and easily manipulated percentage that represents ‘customer satisfaction’ – YUK!

Being the kind of people and the type of service that our customers can’t wait to recommend to their friends.

Once we start to spend time and money on developing marketing and enagement strategies  based on:

  • reputation management
  • referrals
  • introductions
  • social networking
  • gatekeepers, and
  • the needs, interests, cultures and values of the communities we serve (rather than policy goals and outcomes)

we would start to see the basics of our own businesses transformed.

  • 10% of customers influence the purchasing decisions of the other 90%
  • 91% of customers are “likely” to buy off of a recommendation
  • 92% of customers “prefer” a word of mouth recommendation

Management Lessons from Frazer Irving

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Had the privilege of attending my first Creative Networks event at Leeds College of Art.  Frazer Irving – a wonderful illustrator talked about his career – from which I took the following:

  1. the seeds of your future are often sown early
  2. just because it sells does not mean it is good – heroin is not better than tofu – even if it does shift more units
  3. provoke, invoke, evoke
  4. 5 years of crappy jobs and being on the dole – being on the dole were the ‘happy days’
  5. ideas burning on the inside
  6. managers/editors can leave you with tears streaming down your face and your soul ripped out and thrown on the floor
  7. the bad times provide the fuel and drive to allow the good
  8. an incessant streak of optimism helps – on being rejected by judges in a portrait competition Frazer chose to believe it was because he wasn’t important – although it might have been because I wasn’t very good
  9. it takes a lot of time, training, passion and life experience to really master your subject
  10. great technology combined with great passion and skills produce remarkable, beautiful and important results
  11. sometimes you need someone to say ‘chin up – you will be alright’
  12. sometimes when your art is ripped off it gets you great new gigs – life-changing breaks…
  13. be a slave to the muse – let the story dictate the style
  14. it is really about finding out who you are and what you can become
  15. treat me as a ‘pencil monkey’ and you will get mediocrity
  16. in the comic world a lot of bad product is there because of poor management – comics and every other industry on the planet – management is perfectly evolved to get the results it gets
  17. if it is bad it is (nearly always) because the managers/editors have put the wrong people on the job
  18. if you have recruited the wrong people then forcing them to compromise WILL lead to mediocrity
  19. recruit great talent carefully and then trust it do deliver on its own terms – not yours
  20. when your hobby becomes your job – you get another hobby
  21. musicians jam and sometimes the results are great – what is the jamming equivalent for you?
  22. be careful about your reputation – one person saying you migh tnot hit a deadline in a public forum can be a killer
  23. sometimes it is best not to claim the credit for all your ideas
  24. it really is full of ups and downs – but you come out of the downs with even more resources – psychological and technical if not financial

This was a great networking event – convival atmosphere – great facilities – good food – great speakers and good managment.

If only all networking opportunities were this good!