Barbara Walters Price

"You probably don’t want to admit it but you love distractions. In fact, just like monkeys, you get a shot of dopamine every time something pulls you in another direction."

Okay, I admit it. I do love distractions. It can be hard for me to focus but while it's sometimes difficult, it's not always difficult because I also LOVE checking things off my list - big, crazy, detail-oriented projects. 

What about you? Read 7 Things Highly Productive People Do (from Inc.) and let me know what works for you.

 

"Stress isn't the enemy in the workplace. Indeed, stress is the only means by which we can expand capacity...Our real enemy is the absence of intermittent renewal."

A great article from Harvard Business Review - How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. But will your partners or boss go for it?

Marketing Info You May Have Missed

• The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Creating Social Media Buttons - Mashable - Useful and actionable info 
• Replace Meaningless Words with Meaningful Ones - Harvard Business Review - "Meaningful words stated in the declarative mood, assertively, and positively are more likely to beget meaningful actions." 
• LinkedIn "Company" Pages: An (Undervalued) Gem for Organizations of All Types - Social Media Today - Does your firm have a LinkedIn Company page?  
• Embarrassed About Being Embarrassed? Don't Be. Embrace Your Humanity - Nick Morgan - Great advice for those who use speaking engagements as a practice building tool  
• Answers to 31 Social Media Questions You're Too Shy to Ask - Hubspot - Do you know the answers to each question?  
• Five Common Strategy Mistakes - Harvard Business Review - A helpful reminder as we approach a new year  
• 7 Epic Marketing Uses of LinkedIn Answers - Hubspot - I got an idea or two from this post  

Happy Monday (Holiday Style)

Useful and Easy SEO Tool for Wordpress Blogs

You, dear reader, likely know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. We work hard to produce useful content for our target market(s), so we want that content to be found via an internet search. Yet search algorithms are always changing. That's why there are firms dedicated to nothing else but helping us with SEO.

However, if your firm is like most, you are not big enough to warrant these services. What do you do? You try your hardest to include tags as well as keywords in your content in an appropriate way. 

Yet, there is a tool to help. The Wordpress SEO Plugin by Yoast allows you to quickly optimize your content for search. There is a great summary of the tool at Blogging Your Passon. Per BYP:

Once you install this plugin, there will be a new feature added just below your content box inside WordPress. This is what allows you to quickly optimize your content.

For example, Let’s say I have chosen the keyword phrase “how to become a mechanic.” If someone uses that phrase to search in Google, then I want to be on the first page and get traffic. The phrase is actual used over 1,300+ times each month.

After I write or paste my content in WordPress, I scroll down to the WordPress SEO feature. It asks for my focus keyword, so I put in “how to become a mechanic.” Now the plugin will tell me either yes or no if my blog post is optimized for the search engines. You can then make some simple changes that the plugin suggests, and then hit publish. See the picture below for a better view.

There are many advanced features as well; however, most of us won't take advantage of them. Here is the list of features for the plugin:

1. Post titles and meta descriptions
2. Robots Meta configuration
3. Canonical
4. Breadcrumbs
5. Permalink clean up
6. XML Sitemaps
7. RSS enhancements
8. Edit your robots.txt and .htaccess
9. Clean up head section

Told ya ... most of these we won't touch, yet the functionality described above is worth it. If you have a Wordpress blog, check out this tool.

"Marketing?" professionals would say, "we've got a girl down the hall who does something like that."

Bruce W. Marcus has written an article that professional service firm marketers and the fee-earners in those firms should read. Titled "Why Professional Services Marketing 3.0 Matters for Your Future - and What To Do About It," the article takes us back to Professional Services Marketing 1.0 (where some firms sadly still live) and the Bates decision (1977) which struck down the ethical rules that prohibited any promotional activity for legal and accounting firms.

Marcus asserts that the Bates decision created the beginnings of the marketing practices used today and it introduced the concept of competition as "the major driving force in not only developing new marketing practices, but in changing the nature of the professional firm itself."

In the early days after the Bates decision (and I would argue up until the 1990s), most accounting and law firms had not begun to adapt and the condescending line quoted in the title of this post was likely often said and heard. (An aside: I know professional service firm marketers today who have been heard such language - even been the subject of it.) These firms were, as Marcus puts it, in the 1.0 stage of professional service firm marketing. 

Stage 2.0 is "the growth and development of contemporary marketing" and Stage 3.0 is "the emerging marketing practice in which professionals fully participate in—and are even beginning to be the initiators of— the marketing process" which further accelerates the change in professional firms, according to Marcus.

Marcus notes that the evolutionary process from Stage 1.0 to Stage 3.0 results in change and that change, "particularly in a dynamic economic environment" makes it difficult to plan for the long-term. Yet, plan we must. He offers steps to planning for a 3.0 firm (or those heading towards 3.0). I have bolded the points that resonated most with me:

• Recognize that competition is one of the most important factors governing the contemporary practice. Anything you do should always be in a competitive context.
  
  
• Recognize that change is inevitable—you can't escape it and still thrive in today's business environment.
  
  
• Recognize the difference between long- and short-term planning. Many of the likely business circumstances are foreseeable in the short term—less so in the long term, which is why long-term planning rarely works out. There are too many random and unforeseeable events that alter plans.
  
  
• Recognize that the key factor in planning is not "What kind of firm do we want to be," but how much you understand about the market for your services. (One of the factors in the recent rash of firm mergers involves law and accounting firms too deeply immersed in a declining industry.) For a manufacturer, long-term planning involves the market as well, but also plant construction and transportation, neither of which looms large in legal or accounting practice.
  
  
• Go as deeply as possible into your clients' business and industries. Look for trends. Read the trade journals and attend industry organizations and conferences. Don't guess. Try to know.
  
  
• Competitive intelligence is crucial in a competitive environment. Innovation is not imitation; it's improvement over what others are doing.
  
  
• Understand that successful marketing is client-based strategy, not a collection of marketing skills and mechanics routinely applied, and that it is client-focused, not firm-focused. "This is what I'm selling" is not the same as selling from a clear understanding of client needs.
  
  
• Understand that change is not an event—it's a process. Its future is rooted in its past, which is why understanding its past is important for understanding its future. Nor is it always a straight line—it's opportunistic. It's responsive to a changing environment, so pay attention to your profession's and your market's environments.

Marcus says it best when he wraps up the article:

Today, there are firms still in 1.0 and firms thundering forward in 3.0. The 3.0 firm is the one that is most likely to survive the future.

This is all part of his new book, Professional Services Marketing 3.0, which I hope to be reading soon.