We are fortunate – very fortunate actually – to have a very talented team of managers, consultants and sales professionals here at MIPRO.  Every day, you, our daily readers, have the opportunity to read something new, exciting (we hope) and in most cases of high value (we really hope), here on our blog.  And for those of you who visit us every day know that the real treat comes on Fridays when Jeff Ventura launches into a very entertaining, creative string of thoughts, opinions and links! (Ed. Note: Even though we let him do most of the writing here, we are well aware that Jeff Ventura is a strange person.) I cannot, nor will I try, to compete.

But, it does cause me to think about blogging and why it has become a very important tool of communication.  Has it replaced methods of communication?  Not sure.  But it certainly is a highly effective method of reaching a vast community of people with common interests.  Something we never could have done even just a few short years ago.   Think about how we used to reach our customers with an announcement.  It used to go something like this.  Sound familiar?

1. We’d have an internal meeting about what ‘message’ we want to send.
2. We’d hire a graphic artist and a tech writer to capture our ideas.
3. They would have their own meeting to discuss what they heard in our meeting
4. A follow up meeting in most cases would be necessary for clarification and follow up questions.
5. Then, they would create a draft of the message for us to review.
6. We would edit and send back.
7. Final edits would be completed and sent back for final review.
8. ACCEPTANCE!
9. We’d go to print.
10. We’d wait for print job to be completed (hopefully we weren’t too far down in the queue).
11. Final print docs are returned.
12. We’d mail and/or distribute to our customers.
13. Profit?

And, that my friends, was the de facto way to get information to our clients back in ‘the day’ — to a very contained list of companies and contacts. Today, the process goes like this:

1. We have an idea that we want to share.
2. With editorial guidelines and a modicum of discretion in place, we publish our thoughts and news here on this blog every day; it’s there for countless visitors to read and, if they so choose, share.
3. Profit!

In our case, what began as 10 readers a month grew to 5,000 in the space of a year and a half.

Blogs and blogging are just a bit mind boggling (pardon the alliteration!) if you really stop to think about it.  Content is king, but to stop on occasion and realize effectiveness of these new methods is worth the consideration.

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More links:

MIPRO Consulting main website.

MIPRO on Twitter and Facebook.

About this blog.

Harold Meyerson, writing a terrific — and educational (at least for yours truly) — op-ed piece about Germany’s economy in The Washington Post:

Germany’s economy is the strongest in the world. Its trade balance – the value of its exports over its imports – is second only to China’s, which is all the more remarkable since Germany is home to just 82 million people. Its 7.5 percent unemployment rate – two percentage points below ours – is lower than at any time since right after reunification. Growth is robust, and real wages are rising.

It’s quite a turnabout for an economy that American and British bankers and economists derided for years as the sick man of Europe. German banks, they insisted, were too cautious and locally focused, while the German economy needed to slim down its manufacturing sector and beef up finance.

Wisely, the Germans declined the advice. Manufacturing still accounts for nearly a quarter of the German economy; it is just 11 percent of the British and U.S. economies (one reason the United States and Britain are struggling to boost their exports).

(Via John Gruber)

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More business posts.

John Gruber points out the headline to Microsoft’s press release announcing Windows Phone 7 from a few days ago:

“Windows Phone 7: A Fresh Start for the Smartphone: The Phone Delivers a New User Experience by Integrating the Things Users Really Want to Do, Creating a Balance Between Getting Work Done and Having Fun”.

That’s title and sub-title.  It says quite a bit without saying much of anything, although to us marketing types know the intent is positive and well-meaning.

Then there’s the introductory quip from the release.

The goal for Microsoft’s latest smartphone is an ambitious one: to deliver a phone that truly integrates the things people really want to do, puts those things right in front of them, and either lets them get finished quickly or immerses them in the experience they were seeking.

This is worse.  I know it sounds perfectly suit-and-tie serious for shareholders and enterprise IT folks who will be asked to add WP7 to their smartphone whitelist, but this can be so much better.  Saying ‘deliver’ and ‘integrate’ and ‘immerses’ in the same sentence is way too wordsmithed to come out on the other side meaning much to potential customers, especially the tech-savvy and jaded smartphone crowd.

So many businesses don’t get this, but want to.  They want to connect with their customers, to have real conversations, to speak without needing that abstraction layer so many find necessary to lay atop normal speech.  In fact, if you ask a company marketing exec to explain an idea, they more often than not will do a great job verbally.  Ask the same exec to write down the idea, and out comes the B-school speak.  Why?  I don’t know, but it happens even when executives are actively trying to speak to their customers over social media — a conversational medium if there ever was one.

I don’t have the solution nailed down yet, but there is a problem.  And it’s a problem nobody wants to have — that’s the ironic thing.  Nobody says, ‘This paragraph is too crisp and clear.  Can we muck it up a bit with some business clichés?”

As Gruber notes, let’s go back to 2007 when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world.

Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. And here it is.

Simple as that.  There’s nothing integrated, there’s no leveraging, nobody’s being immersed, and there’s absolutely zero alignment going on.  Here’s what we’re doing, here’s the product, and oh by the way it will do the talking from here on out.

Everyone wants that style, but so few get there.  And that’s a bummer, because it’s a fight worth fighting.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More business posts.

The first two Windows Phone 7 (WP7) ads have been released, and they are, in a word, excellent.

The first, called ‘Season of the Witch’, is set to Donovan’s song by the same name, depicts a post-apocalyptic scene of accidents caused by people with their heads buried in their phones. Very clever, and the music is a strong hook.

The second, called ‘Really?’ summons SNL’s Seth Meyers and is also pitch-perfect.

It’s funny because it’s true.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More business posts.

Then he gave me some advice about teaching that’s stuck with me for more than three decades: “Just pretend you’re teaching you. How would you do that? What would you want to know? What did you dislike when you were taught? What stories would you tell to make it understandable? What would keep you interested and engaged?”

—Steve Blank in Teach Like You’re the Student

As a boutique/specialist consulting firm, one of the nice things about breaking the mold of big-box companies is that we have an opportunity to create our own culture.  A lot of that affects how our employees experience working for us (something we’re proud to say we’ve done pretty well), but also how our clients experience working with us.

One of the precepts we hold dear is candid conversation.  We’ve turned down available work because we’ve told a client what he needed to hear instead of what he wanted to hear (in this case, that he didn’t need our services for another application he was considering).  We’re not afraid of the difficult conversation in the name of championing a client’s best interest.  And we’re dramatically opposed to the opaque, buzzword-filled communications that infect so much of business, especially in the enterprise IT space.  Don’t believe us?  Check out our Twitter feed, Facebook page and this very blog to get a feel how we engage our clients.  (We even try to humanize our datasheets.)

A lot of what drives us to this idea is that we don’t like being talked at in a jargon-heavy style any more than most of our clients do.  We find the best way to help clients understand our value as a specialist firm is to speak openly and naturally with them. When we help clients with knowledge transfer, we teach them like we would want to be taught ourselves, because it’s stickier that way.  People remember not only what you’re helping them with, but also you as a company.

It’s not always easy to explain how a consulting firm can be different above and beyond the standard R&R: resumes and rates.  But in 2005 we founded our company on ideas that ran a bit counter to the norm, and our clients have noticed.  And that’s the most we can ask for.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More business posts.

Zach Golden, copywriter, has some really fantastic ads for TiVo:

Very clever.  And if you’re a TiVo user, you know they’re bang-on accurate.

(Via SvN)

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog.  If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website.  If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More marketing posts you should read.

In anticipation of the 2010 World Cup (11 June – 11 July), Nike has released a promotional ad that mixes feature film, brand development and flat-out hype of an event that will captivate a good percentage of the world for a month.  The production value is absurd.

I’ve always said Nike is one of the best marketing companies in the world, and it’s the #1 sports brand globally.  CEO Phil Knight famously commented, “Business is war without bullets.”

The vision and dedication to production value are direct descendants of Nike’s ambition, aggressiveness and irreverence.  And for a company that crosses so many sporting chasms, every piece they make seems resonate with the insiders of any given sport.  Given the company’s size, this level of ‘getting it’ is pretty spectacular.

Can’t wait for June 11th.

Jerry Murrell, founder of the astonishingly good Five Guys Burgers & Fries, talks to Inc.’s Liz Welch:

The magic to our hamburgers is quality control. We toast our buns on a grill — a bun toaster is faster, cheaper, and toasts more evenly, but it doesn’t give you that caramelized taste. Our beef is 80 percent lean, never frozen, and our plants are so clean, you could eat off the floor. The burgers are made to order — you can choose from 17 toppings. That’s why we can’t do drive-throughs — it takes too long. We had a sign: “If you’re in a hurry, there are a lot of really good hamburger places within a short distance from here.” People thought I was nuts. But the customers appreciated it. [...]

When we first opened, the Pentagon called and said, “We want 15 hamburgers; what time can you deliver?” I said, “What time can you pick them up? We don’t deliver.” There was an admiral running the place. So he called me up personally and said, “Mr. Murrell, everyone delivers food to the Pentagon.” Matt and I got a 22-foot-long banner that said ABSOLUTELY NO DELIVERY and hung it in front of our store. And then our business from the Pentagon picked up.

The entire interview is just fantastic.  There’s a Five Guys about a half hour from the MIPRO offices, and it’s worth every bit of the drive.

You might think that in our fragile economy companies that target the huge, amorphous mid-market would be thriving.  You’d be wrong.  The ‘mushy’ middle market — served by brands like Sony, Dell, GM and others — is getting cannibalized at the high end by brands like Apple and Hermes, and at the low end by Ikea and H & M.  The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki explains:

The products made by midrange companies are neither exceptional enough to justify premium prices nor cheap enough to win over value-conscious consumers. Furthermore, the squeeze is getting tighter every day. Thanks to economies of scale, products that start out mediocre often get better without getting much more expensive—the newest Flip, for instance, shoots in high-def and has four times as much memory as the original—so consumers can trade down without a significant drop in quality. Conversely, economies of scale also allow makers of high-end products to reduce prices without skimping on quality. A top-of-the-line iPod now features video and four times as much storage as it did six years ago, but costs a hundred and fifty dollars less. At the same time, the global market has become so huge that you can occupy a high-end niche and still sell a lot of units. Apple has just 2.2 per cent of the world cell-phone market, but that means it sold twenty-five million iPhones last year.

Robert Scoble:

The writing is on the wall. Small business marketing is moving away from focusing on SEO. Why do I say that? Because, well, Google and Bing are changing the rules so often and are getting so good at figuring out the real businesses that deserve to be on pages. Search Half Moon Bay Sushi and you get real answers from sites that didn’t focus on SEO. Yeah, there are exceptions, but they are increasingly getting rare.

With other searches, like one for Tiger Woods, you’ll get a page filled with stuff that SEO just doesn’t affect much anymore. In the middle of that page is a real time box that brings items from Twitter and Google News. It no longer is good enough to be just an SEO expert to get items onto pages like these. You’ve gotta be great at creating content that gets Google’s algorithms to trust it enough to shove it onto these new hybrid pages.

But there’s something deeper going on. Google has built systems that aren’t Page Rank controlled anymore and are giving far better analytics to small businesses than they did a year ago. They know a LOT more about your behavior now other than you clicked on a link, even to the extent that they know whether you called that business or bought something and THAT is changing the skills SEO/SEM types need to have.

No longer is it about optimizing search engine results and the new breed is going beyond just search engines to provide holistic systems that find and track customers not only on search engines like Google and Bing, but on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

I see the same thing.  I do very little SEO/SEM work on this blog or our main website, but our search performance has skyrocketed over the past year.

Why?

As near as I can tell, consistent content creation.  We try to post something to this blog every weekday, and we’ve done a pretty good job of this all year.  No author of this blog writes for keyword karma: we simply post content that we think will be useful or interesting to our customers, prospects and industry colleagues.  The rest just happens, and I attribute that to consistency.

Of course, we have aircover from our Twitter and Facebook activity too, and as the new real-time web emerges, new content developed through these channels will factor into search performance.  Early this year, I was telling people how consistent, quality tweeting was important to draw new followers through Twitter’s official search engine.  Now, as 2010 approaches and social content is being integrated into Google and Bing search results, the importance simply cannot be overstated.

The ground is shifting away from static SEO keyword saturation and more towards behavior-driven merit systems.  Google and Bing are getting smarter at weeding out SEO farming sites (save a few examples, like appliance searches), and during 2010 I think we’ll see the semantic web in the sense that search engines will understand intent much better than they do now.  That’s not to say the system won’t be gamed anymore, but increasingly new content, interaction and effort will be rewarded rather than metadata and keyword concentrations on business websites.

So.  All that said, what’s the real value of intelligent, consistent social media activity for business?  If it wasn’t massive before, it is now.