I don't know why it's not so obvious to other computer companies, but the way Mac delivers its product and starts off its first power-up is the best in the industry - well, maybe Tivo beats them out, but it's a close second, and Mac has better packaging.

Companies don't spend enough time creating an experience for their customers.  All this money spent on packaging and design, and so often they fail to wow the person who just bought their product.

Franki converted me a few years ago - and it's hard to back to the PC.

One of the keys to success in marketing is taking experiences from other industries and applying them to your clients.  In the last two years, my success in internet marketing, specifically in social media, can be shown in many ways to stem from my time as a recruiter.

Recruiters build relationships to gather information about the market, namely to generate referrals and job orders.  It's a data-heavy experience that depends on the ability to draw information from your network.  Learning to filter important data and make quick decisions from e-mail and searches is a valuable skill for recruiters, but I've found it to be important in using social networks to promote client sites.

Of course, finding information is only half the battle.  Candidates want to know where you found them, and so if you're going to delve into this area, make sure you know how to speak to the people inside the social network.  I want to showcase a friend of mine whose company helps sourcers build those lists from internet sources.  Broadlook is a pretty cool company with powerful software for recruiters, but the president has a deft touch in social media.  Watch as he pulls 4,000 names from a recruiting social network, and then to show that he can be trusted, deletes them. 

It's a good lesson on building a reputation, but it's also a lesson to marketers about the possibilities in social networks.  A first page google or Technorati search isn't enough anymore, and most marketers lack the tools or the training to dig deeply into a community.  With Broadlook, I'm able to apply my training and their software to bring recruiting knowhow into social media marketing.

Franki and I do the online thing - we cover your website and social media, and if you have a small campaign, we can handle your PPC and your e-mail marketing, but when you're in the big leagues, well, we're Triple-A players if you're bringing in $25,000 a month in product from your blog.

You have to know your limits, right?  Well, I know mine, and I need help, or rather a client does.  A client of mine in the employment business has a website and a social media guru, but needs an experienced e-mail marketing consultant who can direct campaigns, integrate with the web and social media guy (me), and basically be in charge of newsletter and e-mail design, tracking, and strategy.

This is no small deal. I know what a good one is worth, and if you have a record of working in the field of products and services marketing, I want to introduce you.  Shoot me a line on e-mail or call me.  We'd like this to get started June 1st.

Our clients are split into two distinct groups these days.  Half of our clients are in the employment space, based on my work and reputation as a recruiter.  The other half is marketing and traditional web design projects we built up over Franki's experience with e-commerce and branding.

Employment is getting bigger, in part because of the efforts we're putting into SocialMediaHeadhunter.com.  Add that to the desire of recruiters to understand how social media can be used to make more placements, and the result is my speaking schedule in the next few months.

I have invitation-only webinars with Sendouts.com for their client list that start tomorrow.   We'll be doing the same with Hireability's list of independent recruiters starting in May.  Those topics will consist of recruiting using Facebook and MySpace, as well as Social Media 201 and 301 classes for recruiters.  June 19th I'll be presenting on the topic of how to hire using social media in a seminar with Illinois staffing professionals.

Sadly, we're not able to attend many Web 2,0 and social media events this year, but we have big plans to expand in that space, primarily through pushing the social media headhunter brand.

Here's a post on what you need to be considered as a social media candidate.  It's very interesting.  In just about every industry in the US, the number of jobs far outweighs the number of qualified candidates.  Because it's so new, the supply of candidates in social media is larger than the number of jobs.

I give it about six months, before that gets flipped.

I've been hearing lots of grumbles about Facebook on the Interweb.  What started as grumblings about privacy has since moved on to a general discontent with a site that is primarily used for social purposes.  Facebook is big now, second only to MySpace, but while it's still growing, it's need to change into a revenue bearing entity is affecting the user experience.

Some people are starting to take notice.

Is Facebook over?  Of course not.  But it definitely has reached its media peak, and the talk of Facebook becoming the application platform can now be safely laughed out of the room.  Expect growth to continue, but be wary of the numbers.  I'm on Facebook, and I use it purely as a benchmark.  There are a lot of people like me.  We are Legion.

My clients often wonder how they're going to come up with something to write on their blogs.  It's not that they lack creativity, talent, or experience - it's that if they were professional writers, they'd be paid to write, and not to do their jobs.

Business blogging is especially problematic, as anyone caught writing exclusively about how their company is the premier company in the space (please can we kill that phrase!) is prone to a quick unsuscribe from our RSS reader.  So what's a new blogger to do?  The answer is simple - find other people to write about and celebrate their work.  While it seems counterintuitive to start a business blog and write about other people, the smart blogger realizes that readers want information, not copywriting. Writing (and linking) on the content of other bloggers helps brand you as informative, inquisitive, and connected. In fact, that's the purpose of your blogroll.

Did you know that people decide what kind of blogger you are based on who you have linked to your blogroll?  Think about that.  If  you link business blogs, or social blogs, or local blogs - you're easy to identify. If you link your own company's website and all your products - you're easy to identify, but in a good way.  The same goes for if you don't have a blogroll. 

Celebrate and promote your audience.  It's the first rule in blogging.

Speaking of better writers - if you're intimidated, think how I feel, having a wife who writes as well as this.  She's covering some design stories about our office over at 3rings, an architecture and design blog.  Read through that, and you'll see what I'm saying. It's clear from traffic patterns that you folks would much rather be reading her than me - so there you go!  From theory to action, I walk the walk.

I hope the people at TiVo are watching my DVR, because Franki and I watch commercials.  Not the bad ones, but if something looks interesting, or it's a product we like (BMW), we stop and admire.  That's not good for local advertisements, but big national brands interest us, so we watch.

Careerbuilder, who we've followed before because of our attachment to the recruiting world, has launched a series of new ads after their "Heart" commercial in the Superbowl failed so badly.  We've discussed job board ads before - Franki compared last year's Monster ads to eHarmony, and pointed out that actual user experience aside, the ads work because they sell "hope."  That's what you need in a job search. You uproot your life and take a chance, hoping the new job will be better than the old one.

So what exactly is Careerbuilder doing?  They're not selling hope - they're selling disgruntlement.  Not a word, but it's what they are doing. Maybe it's the constant media drumming on a likely recession, but Careerbuilder has decided that the way to boost the job board industry is to talk about how much your job sucks.  I'm not sure about the wisdom of the approach, but I do like the tagline.  Start Building.

Although a job board isn't the place to start networking, the message is the right one, and I found this commercial to be funny, and relevant.  When everyone in your life is telling you it's time to go - it's time to go.

The last post I wrote was about referrals, but it was jumpstarted by something John Jantsch wrote about last week.  In reading his post, it gave me the idea to explain what we are looking for in client referrals.  Once again, the blogosphere make me better at what I do. 

What John said at Duct Tape Marketing:

Many times, when I mention this notion to small business owner they have a tough time coming up with the description of the ideal narrowly defined customer until I suggest that we start by describing who they don’t want as a customer.  

It’s just human nature I guess, but we seem to have a much better grasp of what we don’t want in our life than what we do. So by first categorizing things like the types of customers that you can’t serve well, the kinds of people you don’t work well with, or the size of projects that don’t fit you may be on your way to better understanding your ideal customer.

Sounds like a good experiment. Here is a list of what Durbin Media Group does not want in clients, followed by a list of what we do want.

Not Want:
1) We don't want people who aren't willing to invest time as well as money into their project:

  If you don't care about your project as anything but revenue, how can you expect your customers to do so?

2) We don't want mean people:

  I'm an entrepreneur myself, and the older I get, the more I appreciate toughness in small business people.  If you aren't tough, you'll get eaten alive.  So I get tough.  But mean is a different matter.  I don't mind someone that sends a steak back that wasn't cooked right or who insists on getting quality from the work they are paying for.  I do mind someone who insults a waiter simply because they're a waiter, or treats every deliverable as a chance to renegotiate the price.

3) We don't want clients that can't make up their mind:

  In the last year, I have instituted a two meeting policy.  If I go to two meetings with you, and we don't have a signed proposal for work, I decline new meetings.  This is simple self-preservation.  Yes, 15 meetings may eventually lead to a big sale, but in that time, I could have had 8 clients who collectively pay me 4 time what the big sale might have accomplished. 

Was talking with a client this morning - we were chatting about referrals, and they wanted to know who else in their industry I wanted to work with.  I was flattered, but the funny thing is my first response was I didn't need more referrals from his industry - I needed referrals from the best people he knew.

We've been very fortunate in our business.  Everything Franki and I do is referral-based (or from searches or blogposts), and it has kept the lights on so far, so it seems to be working.   But we don't take every client that comes down the pike.  It's not that we're elitists, or even terribly picky - it's that our brand of selling requires that we have an idea that if executed properly, will bring returns for our clients.

Basically - if I can't figure out how to use your website (or blog or online presence) to make money, I don't do a proposal for you.  I'd rather pass you on to someone else or just give you a few words of encouragement to do it on your own.  The effect of this, has been clients we really like.  In social media terms, we're picking the best brands that have the best customer service to work with, and that makes our projects a lot more successful.

Now, we're not perfect - and we're not all-knowing, but I'd say that even when a project fails to deliver, we build something of value for the client, and end up assisting them in another way.  If the website doesn't sell enough of the product, one of my key referrals with another client leads to a big sale that covers cost.  If the market for a product isn't there, the website is used to launch another service offering that is more profitable. 

So the answer, of who to refer to us, is a simple.  Refer to us the best people you know. Refer people with a light in their eyes, who get up each morning excited about what they're doing.  Give me a dozen of those clients a year, and we'll remake the world.

Last year, I popped into the Best Buy to pick up an iDock for some condo music - Franki gave me a price and sent me in. I called her when I got there, and checked on the price in the store. She checked online, and found it was cheaper online. I went to the front desk, and negotiated a cheaper deal with what was shown on the online store.

To make it better, Franki found another store selling the iDock for the same price, but with a $24 iTunes card. I shared this with the manager, who looked it up, verified it, and promptly gave me A $25 iTunes card to go with my reduced-price iDock.

I felt pretty cool, but now that we have smart phones and the iPhone and web access with cheap data plans, the possibility of doing live shopping without the help of someone at home is really going to take off. In addition to shopping at retail stores, we can comparison shop with friends, setting location against location, and pitting both against online versions.

Automobile dealers often complain about customers that come in with calculators. Calculators mean they can't trick you with the complex payments, making negotiation easy for them, and hard for the person who doesn't do complex math in their head.

I've been preaching that social media is going to change the way we shop, interact, and buy. Most people don't go to the lengths that Franki and I do, but I imagine good times are coming when Mom turns to her six year old to text Dad the price of a new Honda Accord.