Sitegeist has Moved!

April has been a busy month at Splat Productions, most notably because we have launched our new site, which features Wordpress hosted blogging built in. Henceforth, Sitegeist entries, including the Tweet Martini Lunch question will be posted The SitegeistCome visit us!

Anecdotal Thoughts on Selling in the Recession: Know When to Fold' Em

As a small business owner, I am both blessed or cursed with the perspective of seeing the problems of selling in a down market from both the perspective of sales lead and salesperson. As the owner of Splat, I'm regularly approached by salespeople for various types of equipment or services. As a business owner and now principal salesperson for the company, I too am faced with the challenges of identifying leads and selling in this still-slower market we all face.

This column briefly explores some of these challenges and draws some completely anecdotal conclusions about identifying leads and brining in new business in a constantly changing sales landscape.

First, some observations from the perspective of the sales lead...

My phone rings constantly from salespeople trying to get my business. Of course, many of the folks calling are trying to sell me stuff I don't need and, frankly, those calls (or emails) either don't get answered or I immediately put the salesperson off. However, a certain number of calls we get are from folks trying to sell us stuff which, frankly, we'd consider buying. Maybe the call is for a piece of equipment we'd like to buy or maybe the call is for an interesting benefits or insurance product. But, the bottom line for us right now is that, as much as we're "future-oriented" and as much as we still dream about what we need to grow our business ultimately we, for the most part, are not in a position to really buy anything discretionary right now. This, I've noticed has created a sort of "trap" for salespeople which, I'm guessing, is not unique to the business of selling in any industry segment these days.

The challenge, I think, for salespeople these days is knowing who really is a legitimate prospect and who, like us, might be unable to say "no" at this particular moment because, in the abstract, we're legitimately interested in your product but just can't buy right now. Which brings me to my counter-intuitive, counter-cultural conclusion about selling in this market. In my experience, salespeople are taught to doggedly pursue prospects like us. The thinking, I believe, is that through a full-court press of persuasion or sheer attrition, you will wear down a prospect like us and eventually get us to say yes.

I beg to differ. Clients like us are in that quandary of not wanting to give up on the long term goals of their business but, if we're smart at all, are way too focused on day to day economic performance to allow ourselves to spend beyond our means. My advice to salespeople is this: stop the relentless calling and hitching yourself to the delusional prospect that the eighteenth call you make to that prospect who won't say "yes" but who won't definitively say "no" will finally land yourself a sale. Concentrate, instead, on looking for clients in industry sectors that are beginning to recover or other clients within the same industry sector who might be expanding.

Recovery is happening. Selling is relationship-building. Good relationship strategy involves knowing when to move on and identify others who might be better suited to beginning a relationship with. I know that, for myself, I've had to "move on" beyond some of the traditional industry sectors we've served because so many of our clients in these areas are still struggling. For Splat, I believe we're better served by identifying other, less recession-plagued businesses who will value from our services and thinking.

One good thing about recessions is that they do force businesses to reevaluate and rethink flawed or outdated ways of doing business. I'm going to try and remember that blessing the next time I'm turning down an offer to purchase a service or product we just can't afford right now.

Tweet Martini Lunch Question April 23, 2010

This fetching maiden from the era of our Founding Fathers was one of the country's most fashionable early First Ladies. Many of you will have no trouble recognizing her by this portrait alone, but this week's question is looking for some more esoteric knowledge about her particular accomplishments as first lady. 

This week's question: who is the woman portrayed above and what dessert did she introduce into the White House, for the first time? Finally, what flavor was that dessert?

Remember to post your answers on Facebook, Tweet me or leave a comment on one of the two locations where Sitegeist is published....

Tweet Martini Lunch Question, April 16, 2010

This week's "Tweet Martini Lunch" question refers to an iconographic moment in American architecture. The image shown above, slightly altered to avoid making this question ridiculously easy, is a signature building which contributes to the skyline of a major East Coast American city. Can you name the building and describe the building's significance in American Architectural History?

How to Talk Your Client Out of a Tree and Other Unsavory Tasks

As an advertising and design professional, I've struggled with many different types of difficult client situations over the years. Here's two from my sample of Greatest Hits:

There's Bob, the client that hasn't paid you his required deposit up front, or signed his contract but who, nevertheless, keeps calling to know "what kind of progress have you made on our web site?"

Or there's Mary who, after having been given a list of required base materials for a project, including photography requirements, copy documents, corporate timelines, etc -- keeps calling and wondering "what's holding this project up?"

Advertising professionals know the pain of working through these difficulties. Financial and "project management" issues, though, are actually some of the easier problems to address. Bob needs to be reminded to pay his bill and Mary needs to be reminded that the agency needs further base resources in order to proceed.

Some of the thornier issues to address are issues related to a client's questionable taste of lack of good critical thinking about their brand identity. In my next series of blog article, I'm going to be addressing a number of these difficult client situations. This week we're starting with one of my favorites, The Copycat Client.

We've all had them. The client that seeks you out, with a printout from a web site they've seen and like and exclaims, "We'd like you to design our site so that it looks like this... we LOVE this..."

Within the spectrum of Copycat Clients, there are different gradations of challenges. In a "not so bad" situation, the client has studied another web site and their reasons to use it for inspiration are well-founded. If, for instance, the site makes visual sense for the identity of the client's brand and the site isn't from a direct competitor, it might make sense to use it as inspiration. Borrowing heavily from a competitor in one's industry sector, though is bound to lead to brand confusion.

More often, unfortunately, the source of the client's desire to duplicate someone else's work stems from either an insecurity in their own ability to create a unique brand presence for their product of an insecurity in the designer's skill to do the same. So, what does a competent design professional do when faced with a Copycat Client? Do what you'd do with any jittery kitty:

Talk them out of the tree they've trapped themselves in.

I usually begin by having a frank discussion about what it is they like about the site they've brought to our attention. Sometimes, you'll find that they actually don't want the entire look of the site duplicated, rather they're fixated on a couple of "likes" which are pretty easy to duplicate in a new, unique web presence. Other times, I go straight to the heart of the matter and express my concerns that, in duplicating the work of (especially) a competitor, the client is really weakening their own brand through lack of differentiation. And, finally, if I detect some insecurity in our ability to create a unique web site for them, I basically restart the sales process. I ask them why they came to us in the first place and take the time to review with them portfolio projects which I know will appeal. I basically try to reestablish the trust that is necessary to successfully move forward.

Copycat clients can be a challenge but, if you understand that, at the root of their insistence on "borrowing" from others' work is a sense of insecurity, you can help talk them through that insecurity and move them to a place where they feel more comfortable letting you do what you know you do best: designing unique, well-positioned and functional web sites for them.

Second Tweet Martini Lunch Question

(Note: Sitegeist is blog written by the folks at Splat Productions, Inc. Images shown above courtesty of IMDB.com and Warner Home Video...)

Released in 1939, this film classic is an exercise in class, bitchiness and extramarital sabotage. Revolving around a plotline of marriage, affairs, divorce and high society, the film is remarkable for its intentional omission of any male character, prop or pet. This all estrogen comedy/melodrama featured many well-known starlets from the Golden Age of Cinema. This week's question: name the film and the three stars shown above...

Remember, winners can either post a comment here, on our Facebook Fan page or direct message me on Twitter at Daaveey. First correct answer wins; full contest details in the Notes section of our Facebook Fan page...

First Tweet Martini Lunch Question...

Out of respect for the holiday weekend, the inaugural launch of our Tweet Martini Lunch promotion starts with a whimper and not a loud bark...

Our first week's question is this: the attached image is of a lesser known dog breed with ancient origins. Name what sort of pooch is pictured above AND name the year in which this pooch took home the biggest honors in the world's largest dog show, Crufts...

Does Facebook's Privacy Policy Presage a New Era of Virtual Civil Rights?

(Sitegeist is written by David Hitt, Chief Creative Officer at Splat Productions, a Philadelphia based interactive design and multimedia studio...)

I had yet another either wacky or, maybe, prophetic revelation this morning. I was reading a post on "Augie Ray's Blog For Interactive Marketing Professionals" which details the flap that recent suggested privacy changes on Facebook are creating within the Facebook user community. Essentially, Facebook is floating the idea by its users that would authorize Facebook to share user profile information with other websites, but only when FB users are signed in and browsing the internet. So, in other words, if I happen to log into Facebook and, while I'm using it simultaneously log into another website, FB might share information it has on file for me with that other site, so they can offer me a "more customized" experience.

Reaction to Facebook's idea has been swift and pretty universally negative. Turns out that there are lots of folks out there that are resentful that, now that Facebook has created a desirable online environment for them and collected a lot of (valuable) demographic information, they might actually want to sell that information and make some cashola.

All of this has gotten me thinking about much larger political and cultural issues. This dilemma Facebook finds itself in is fed by the obvious yearning by many for some sort of "universal" public space on the internet. These desires, currently, are at odds with the legitimate commercial interests of that space's creator.

Facebook, it seems, is finally realizing one of the earliest promises of the early dot.com era. They've created a single forum on the Internet where virtually everyone and their grandmother hangs out. (I knew this universality was real when I get a friend invite from my nearly 80 year old Mom two weeks ago...) Their success, though, might prove to be their undoing.

The problem with individuals or companies creating a wildly successful, "game changing" paradigm for the way we live our lives is that sometimes folks start thinking that it's their right to indulge in that new paradigm, absent the commercial aspirations of its creators.

I guess what I'm driving at is: suppose we begin to take the idea of a universal "virtual world" as not a privilege but an actual right? So much of our lives now revolve around our worlds online. I spend my day checking email, Tweeting, writing a blog and checking out CNN.com. At night I play an online multiplayer game for a couple of hours, which is basically like spending my evening in a Virtual World. My experience is more the norm than the exception these days.

So, much in the way that we, as a society, decided that there needed to be public spaces, marketplaces, parks, etc, in the actual world, might we not decide that such places online are also universal rights that everyone should be afforded?

I dunno, maybe it's a wacky thought...

Get ready for the Tweet Martini Lunch!

Hey all --

Next week we're rolling out our homage to the way Old School Advertising used to be done -- with closed doors, some puffy stogies and a couple of Martinis to lubricate the dealmaking...

Here's how it works:

Every Friday we'll be posting a trivia question or contest to our fan page on Facebook. (We'll also be tweeting from Daaveey...) Questions will be posted sometime between noon and 1 p.m. each week. Questions and contests will range in content. The winner of each week's contest will be the first responder to either post the answer on our fan wall, at Sitegeist, or send a direct message to my twitter account at Daaveey. Winners will receive a $25 gift certificate (which oughtta buy you about three martinis!) from either a Philadelphia restaurant or, if the winner is not local, we'll send you a certificate to the national chain of your choice.

Current or past employees or their relatives are not eligible for the contest and winners must sit the bench for six months before they can compete again.

So, roll up your sleeves, square away your paste-ups and join us for a Power Lunch!

A Little Unsolicited Advice to Facebook

So I had an epiphany of sorts today... As I was walking to the gym, I was coming to grips with a challenge that's been troubling me in business for the last few months. Basically, our company, like many of our clients, is attempting to develop a comprehensive approach to integrating social media with our business blog and website maintenance. The strategy pretty much exists in my mind...

On the one hand we are about to roll out our new website, which we've built from a Wordpress platform which supports not only blogging but makes the site search-engine-ready. We created a business fan page on Facebook and I'm regularly updating it. Finally, I've been tweeting for months now and, yesterday, was at last able to get my Twitter app (Tweetdeck) to feed directly into our Facebook fan page.

This morning, on my way to the gym, I began banging myself over the head over my lack of blog-writing discipline, when a thought occured to me. Facebook should build a blogging platform
directly within the application. Here's why this would be a good idea:

1. Businesses, as well as individuals, are already using FB everyday to both market, position and interact with their clients. Blogs are, of course, both a personal and professional means of reaching out and engaging clients or friends.
2. Social media interactions, it seems to me, fall into three distinct content ranges currently. The first, most transient and sparest in range are the micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter or SMS. The second would be mostly anecdotal or conversational interaction -- longer than what SMS or Twitter allows but often spontaneous and unscripted in nature. This would be the sort of interaction which make up the bulk of communication on Facebook currently. The last piece in the Social Media puzzle is blogging, which represents longer-format communication which, often, is more premeditated and planned. Facebook already has a lock on the second "content level" and is the unchallenged place where this sort of communication takes place. With the easy integration of Twitter feeds into Facebook, it also makes integrating microblog content into fan or personal pages a breeze. If Facebook is interested in getting more businesses to advertise and interact on their platform, which it clearly is, why not go the final mile and build in a blogging platform?

This sure would make my life a lot easier, as I could use FB as a pretty complete portal to the outside world for my business. Customers could still visit www.splatworld.tv when they need detailed information about Splat Productions but, by and large, our FB presence alone would give a pretty complete overview of who we are and what we do. This seems like such an obvious observation on my part that, surely, someone out there must be
working on this...