I won’t quote you a zillion studies – let’s just accept it as fact that for most businesses, referrals are both the least expensive and most effective source of new business. Referrals are also the best source of leads for job seekers and employers. There are customers and jobs and employees out there – referrals dramatically accelerate the matching process.

With that in mind, last year my friend John Jantsch created Make A Referral Week, a week-long event designed to educate people on making and encouraging effective referrals, and to drive people to action by making 1,000 referrals during the week.

There are several ways you can participate:

1. Free webinar Wednesday, 3/10, at 1pm EST with John Jantsch hosting a panel with Ivan Misner, founder of BNI and author Masters of Networking, Bob Burg, author ofEndless Referrals and the Go-Givers Sell More, Ben McConnell, author of Creating Customer Evangelists. Register here.
2. Make a referral (or two or three) and post it on the MARW Referral Counter.
3. Read guest posts from a long list of referral/networking/word-of-mouth experts all week at the Duct Tape Marketing Blog. Posts are already up by David Meerman Scott on The Referral Multiplier Effect and a podcast with Andy Sernovitz on Word-of-Mouth Marketing.
4. Join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #marw.
5. Keep up with the goings-on at the MARW blog.

I’ve contributed a guest post for later in the week on “selfish networking” – I’ll link when it’s up.

Let’s make our own economic stimulus package!

It’s marketing like this that gives the search engine optimization business a bad name. I got this email today regarding this site:

Subject: Get Your Website on the 1st Page of Google, Yahoo and MSN

Dear Website Owner,

How are you ? i hope that everything is fine over there, The reason of my e-mail that i did some analyze of your website. Your website design is really good and its also shows that you have done some SEO work on your website also , but still you don’t have any good ranking on search engines.

You must have to be on page 1 to get the maximum sales and revenue.

We are the purely organic SEO company, we can get your website on the 1st page of Google , Yahoo and MSN. And we will guarantee to get the ranking and traffic on your website.

SEO process is the investment returning process, means if you are investing something in SEO, so you will cover all the cost once your website on the first page. We will increase your business atleast 4 time, which you are doing right now.

Our Company Challenge – Our Price is the lowest and affordable price with the maximum service with quality and 24 x 7 customer support , includes Whole SEO, Directory Submission, Blogs, Social Bookmarking, Web 2.0. No SEO company will provide these service better than us with quality in lowest price, which we are providing and its our challenge.

So i want to chat with you regarding this. I have very good plans regarding this. Please let me know, if you are interested in this , so please reply me back.

I am waiting for your reply back with very excitement.

Please let me know, if you have any further query regarding this.

Thanks

Never mind the atrocious grammar. And by the way, if you can’t write English properly, you can’t do organic SEO properly, because organic SEO requires writing copy, and you’ve just proven to me that you’re incapable of that.

No, what really got to me was this: “still you don’t have any good ranking on search engines.”

For what???

The first step in SEO is understanding the marketing strategy for the site. Keyword research comes after that. If someone doesn’t know the strategy for my site, they can’t possibly know what (if any) keywords I’m optimizing for, and they certainly can’t know if I’m ranked well in search engines.

As it turns out, this site is actually ranked #1 for the only couple of search terms I really care about. See, search engine traffic isn’t really part of my strategy for this site. This site is all about closer engagement with people who find me through social media – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, my other blogs (which, by the way, are well ranked for the search terms they’re optimized for). It’s also about building my personal brand – Social media is my middle name.

How’s it working?

When I launched this site a year ago, the exact phrase “social media is my middle name” didn’t exist online…anywhere. Today, a Google search on the exact phrase “social media is my middle name” turns up some 9,000 search results. This site is #1 and probably 95% of the other search results link to this site.

The point is, it’s not always about search traffic, and even when it is, it’s not always about being ranked well for the most popular search terms. If you’re ever talking to a marketing consultant or SEO firm and the first question they ask you isn’t some reasonable variation of “What are you trying to accomplish with your site?” – RUN!

I just saw this tweet…

…and it reminded me of a story I’ve retold under the right circumstances for years, but never written down.

So a few years ago, I was a Lead Developer at Harte-Hanks Response Management, working on the IBM account. We were in the final stages of a huge project with a Monday morning deadline (well, internal deadline of Monday morning to show it to our IBM account team, Monday afternoon showing to the client).

I had worked 16 hours on Friday, 16 on Saturday, and was planning on an all-nighter Sunday. Other members of the team were pulling long hours, too, as their schedules and families would allow.

Sunday evening about 5:30, our manager, Mike Ortegon (one of the best managers I’ve ever had, and still at Harte-Hanks, by the way), showed up with Pizza Hut pizza for the whole team – everyone of course knows that geeks will work for pizza in a pinch.

Mike: “I figured y’all were hungry, so I got Meat Lover’s. I hope no one here’s a vegetarian.”

Scott Bellware (@bellware): “Actually I am…”

Mike: “Oh damn…”

Scott B.: “…except when I’m really hungry.”

Image credit: Matt McGee

Yup, the economic news for the new year isn’t what any of us had hoped. U.S. unemployment held at just under 10%, but only because 661,000 workers have “removed themselves from the workforce”, a euphemism meaning they’ve given up looking for a job because they believe none are available. The picture’s not particularly brighter in the rest of the world either.

This hits close to home. Odds are good that you personally know at least 10-20 people who are currently unemployed, or as is increasingly common, under-employed, i.e., they have some part-time work, freelance work, or a full-time position at significantly lower pay than they’re accustomed to.

Sue Connelly wants to do something about that. As founder of KIT List, “an email job posting service where employers and recruiters advertise permanent or consulting job opportunities to over 58,000 high-quality professionals,” she knows that the jobs are there – she sees them come across the list every day.

So what’s her big idea? Simple, really – a “pay it forward wave”, this week – a concentrated effort to be proactive about getting our friends back to work. Here are some suggestions she has for simple ways to help:

• Forward a job lead
• Write a LinkedIn recommendation
• Review a friend’s resume and give objective feedback
• Set a time to meet for coffee or a drink (heck, we all need one these days!). In-person meetings are important, it buoys spirits and sparks ideas and energy – plus it’s fun!
• Make some calls on a friend’s behalf
• Pass on a link to a good job site or a great article on job search
• Make an introduction to a friend in a company he/she is interested in
• Reach out to a colleague who has been laid off from your company to see how he/she is doing and offer to make connections for him/her
• Become a “Job Buddy” – commit to meet on a regular basis to set goals and provide gentle accountability (if you are both looking for jobs, there’s a double benefit)
• Offer to do some role playing for a job interview
• Tell (and write down!) four strengths/qualities you see in your friend
• Review or help write a strong cover letter
• Invite a friend to connect to you on LinkedIn with the purpose of giving them access to your network so he/she can see if you have contacts in companies on their wish list
• Help with career ideas, brainstorm on other ways to use their skills, suggest good companies to target, how to transition into a new industry

And, of course, you can share about this on email lists, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.

If we each just did 1-2 of these things every day, we may not end unemployment completely, but we might at least help the people we know and care about get back to work sooner rather than later.

Image credit: Photomish Dan

This has been bugging me ever since I first saw this. I figured maybe blogging about it would be cathartic.

Watch:

First off, let me say that I think this is an awesome program and I don’t mean to disparage it or the recipients of its services in any way. That said…listen again to what the woman at about 0:14 says:

You don’t know how very basic essentials are until you have none.

Huh? That sentence makes absolutely no sense. It sounds like it should. I understand what she means. But what she said makes no sense. I think maybe she meant:

You don’t know how essential the basics are until you have none.

That would make sense.

Now I don’t fault the woman. In an ad hoc interview, I’m sure I’ve said all kinds of stuff that didn’t entirely make sense. But what I’m wondering is who at Tide (or their ad agency) let this get through. I can’t imagine that out of the hundreds of people they’ve provided this service to, that was the best quote.

If you’re in the business of communicating, you need some quality control. The amount is proportional to the amount of exposure/risk you have. A freelancer lifestreaming to Twitter? Not a big deal. A national PR campaign across multiple media? A big deal.

Maybe I’m being a grammar nazi. But you know what? If you’re a multi-national corporation, or an ad agency who works for them, you should have a grammar nazi on staff who reviews everything – twice — before it goes out.

I’ve been working for the past few weeks with sales trainers Alice Kemper and Nancy Bleeke on the launch of their new product, Sharpenz, which launched today. (Congrats, ladies!!!)

As disclosure: yes, they’re clients; no, this post isn’t part of my consulting engagement with them – I just think they have a really cool product some of you might be interested in, plus it’s plain good business to promote your clients, even when they’re not paying you to do so, right?

As a student of entrepreneurship, I’m always fascinated when someone comes up with a truly innovative product in what you might otherwise think is an already saturated market segment. You’d think, for example, that sales training would be a pretty mature field. Sure, there are always new perspectives and techniques being developed, because the nature of buying and selling is constantly changing. But what about the delivery mechanism? What’s left to innovate there?

And then I saw Sharpenz.

The concept is simple enough, but I’ve still never seen anything quite like it.

I’ll explain the basics, but if you’ve got a couple of minutes, you really should check out the videos from Nancy and Alice and hear it in their own words. Those links open in a new window so you can watch & listen as you continue reading, if you like.

(more…)