The USPS is has been in the news quite a bit lately as it battles plummeting volume, high fixed costs and massive losses.

Proposing no Saturday deliveries and raising stamp prices merely strikes at the branches and does not deal with the root issue of whether our beloved USPS is still relevant.

The truth is – Saturday deliveries or not – this downward spiral will continue to occur.  When the USPS has to keep increasing fees to continue covering losses, it drives more and more communication on-line.  With such a high fixed cost structure, the Post Office will be forced to continue drive prices higher and send their customer base scrambling to consider more economical modes of communication.

The heart of the issue here is our Postal Service is no longer relevant.

A few years ago I was asked to keynote a national panel of CD and DVD duplicators/replicators about the future of their industry.  Guess what, it didn’t go over too well…

As a tool to measure relevancy, I presented a concept of the “recovery time.” I simply asked the audience to consider the ramifications of eliminating their products and services from the marketplace.   The “recovery time” is the degree of pain the market would endure before the product’s replacement leaves us no longer wanting what we once had.

In addition to its application for the CD/DVD industry, I asked the audience to consider the “recovery time” of the newspaper industry, the corner video store, and the Postal Service.  Think of the long-term disruption if each of these were yanked away never to return.

Think about your own business and more specifically, how relevant are you to your clients and prospects?  If you’re feeling the world would have a short recovery time in your absence, it’s critically important start defining your real value by asking a few questions:

1. What would your 10 best customers say they value most about you, beyond your product and service?
2. What root issue, pain, or gap does your organization’s product or service solve/fill?  (Think transportation not wagon wheels, think editorial content not a physical newspaper)
3. What are your organizations unique talents?
4. What are there things you ask your customers and clients to pay a premium for, because you do them better than anyone else?

By asking yourself these sometimes uncomfortable questions and framing your discussions around them, you are addressing your business challenges at the root, and you may just find the additional relevancy and margin you’ve been seeking.

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Maybe you’re going to retire in the next five years. If that’s you, then don’t worry about a thing. But, if you plan on working in 2015, you should consider your relevancy now. As technology facilitates behavioral change, organizations of all sizes must develop new strategies. A clear path to irrelevancy is to ignore change or, worse yet, fight it.

If you continue to do business as usual, running your career and business day by day, then you will find that you might not be needed. Consider these red flags:

1. You don’t have a mobile strategy, yet you spend all your time relying on your mobile device to connect and communicate.
2. You have no defined online strategy, you just guess and explore, yet like eighty percent of all c-level executives, you  spend up to 4 hours a day on the Internet. more

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As someone who is not technology-savvy, I’m often asked by fellow CEOs and entrepreneurs how a guy like me got the inspiration to create an organization like MediaSauce (A close second being ‘where did we get our name?’ which I’ll cover some other time.)

The idea for MediaSauce formed a few years before the company was formed – which may sound familiar to most of you who have also launched firms from an idea or vision.

I’d been fortunate, or crazy enough, to have built two businesses from scratch and both earned spots on Inc. Magazine’s list of fastest growing companies. In my previous business, before MediaSauce, I owned a fast growing ATM distribution/processing company. Our success came, in part, from a really innovative branding program that helped us generate business from local financial institutions.  Growing nationally, we were struggling to get traction on the East coast and so I traveled there to immerse myself in the marketplace and find out why our program – working elsewhere in the country – wasn’t working there.

I asked each of our eight sales reps in the area to define our branding program – as they understood it. Keep in mind we had all the traditional marketing materials (brochures, video tapes, etc).  The result was a real shocker! I got eight different answers! more

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I’ve spent the past couple weeks attending conferences that included a mixture of academic leaders and corporate HR executives. An interesting term that kept coming up was “thought leader” and it seemed everyone wanted to be one.

After giving it some thought, I’ve decided I don’t want to be one.  I’d rather be a market leader.

Thinking is certainly an essential element of being a market leader.  Taking action is important, too.  Though, neither can compare to the most essential element of market leadership: results.

What do you think defines a market leader?

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So the kids and I went to check out Eagle Creek Reservoir Beach on Sunday afternoon.

I’m very proud of my oldest daughter. She has finally learned to swim (after this summer of swimming lessons). But she’s very particular about her nose. She has to have nose plugs on or she can’t go underwater. So be it. Nose plugs it is. No matter how silly she looks.

After being in the water for an hour or so, I decided to start pitching the kids in the air. They love it and it’s some exercise for me. They swim over, I count 1-2-3 then heave them in the air. There’s a big splash and a lot of laughter.

We did this for fifteen minutes or so and I was about done. So the last one is always a doozie. I threw my daughter up as far as I could and she came down with a huge splash. When she came up, her nose plugs were gone.

Aw, man. Now I’m pretty sure you all know lake water. It’s definitely not swimming pool or Hawaiian Island clear. Visibility is like six inches. And even that is questionable.

She was really upset. Now how was she going to swim?

I started feeling the rocky bottom as best as I could in the 36 inches of water. Nothing just a lot of little rocks.

After ten minutes, my brain was telling me this was a lost cause.

You are not going to find them. Just tell her you’ll buy her some more. What are they? 5 bucks or so. Is it worth it?

Maybe not? But I didn’t stop. I prayed a bit and I kept searching with my hands on the surface of the bottom.

Because of the depth of the water, it was a stretch and I couldn’t really go over a big area of the bottom. I was by inching myself along.

Finally, I thought, just go under and do a quick large scan of the immediate area.

I went under, forced myself to the bottom and reached out.

It only took three tries and I had them. I couldn’t believe how fast I found them. It was same area that I had gone across a couple of times but here they were.

My daughter was smiling and swimming again – funny-looking nose plugs and all.

So what’s the moral of this story – what did I learn?

That once I changed how I was searching, once I dove deep into that dark water – the thing I was looking for came right away.

I believe consumer insights are like those nose plugs. Often insights are hard to come by but they are extremely important.

There’s a good book by Phil Dunsenberry, “One Great Insight is Worth A Thousand Ideas” in which he goes into why an insight is much more powerful than an idea.

To find an insight in the past, we did surveys, focus groups, product testing, and/or relied on the engineers or service people to come up ways to make things better. Sometimes this works – sometimes it doesn’t. And it’s amazing how many companies bet the farm on a good idea but not an insight.

But with Social Media, you can find consumer insights. They are right there waiting to be picked like ripe fruit

If you are new to Social Media (blogs, forums, community networks), I’ll bet it looks a lot like dark lake water. There’s too much noise. You can’t spreadsheet the answers as easily as you can with organized and self-generated research.

But here’s the deal. If you dive in, dive deep and put your hands out, you going to find the answers you are looking for.

People (and this system is entirely made up of real people) will give you honest feedback if you act like a person and not a marketer.

It takes some time – but all good things do take time.

The good thing is that you can start now and catch up pretty quick. We are at the foundation level of this digital social media thing. You can cut your social teeth along with everyone else.

For all of you that think social media is Facebook and Facebook is fad, you are sort of right. Facebook is a fad but it is a pretty darn popular fad right now. Some other network might overtake it but it’s not going to be overnight. And it’s going to do a lot of the same things that Facebook is going right now.

BTW, Social Media is not Facebook. If you want a list of what Social Media is not, click here.

If you are still timid about social media, stop by MediaSauce or give us a call at 317.218.0500. We would be happy to help you. We have presentations and clinics you can attend. Most are free.

I believe after you’ve been swimming in social media for a while, consumer insights won’t be lost under lake water anymore. They will be floating in the clear blue.

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Dear Esteemed Leaders of the Phone Book Industry:

Congratulations on a great run!  From the early days of Alexander Graham Bell to the heydays of the 1990s, you connected people and businesses to each other in ways no one else had every done before.  Unfortunately, a couple things have happened recently that you might want to be aware of if you haven’t already.

Since I imagine you are pretty busy plotting the next clear-cutting of a pine forest in Georgia to handcraft the new edition of your fine publications, I’ve taken the liberty to assemble some information for you and your team:

1.  The Internet is here.
2. Google and other search engines help me find the people and businesses I need/want.
3. My wife and I don’t own a landline phone anymore and so technically don’t fit your database anymore.
4. We waste gasoline driving to the recycling bins the day after you deliver your publication.
5. I never asked for the ten you sent me last year.
6. You’re wasting about 10 lbs of paper for every household and about 250 lbs for the average small business.  
7. I am not the only one who has reached the limits of my patience with your waste and intrusion.
8. The Interconnected Age allows people like us to organize into digital swarms to voice our displeasure and change the course of history.

While I’m a peace loving person who doesn’t usually seek out a fight, I am an borderline idealist who does have a revolutionary streak in me.  I’ll give you a little bit of time to consider this research and come to the conclusion that your business model is outdated.  Let’s just hope you saved something for retirement and your kid’s college education. 

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So how do you get a siteless web presence?

Your website is one place on the web. One place that Google can direct traffic. When a person does a search for your site then you’ll hopefully pop up. If you have the right kind of URL, Title Tags, Meta Tags, and enough relevant content about you on the home page.

Now I’m not saying you need to talk about yourself a lot – just the right keywords. And I’m never into talking about myself too much – you should be talking to your customers, telling your story, and explaining your unique benefits.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll post a blog on what kind of tags you should be using and how they work on a website. Anybody interested in that?

Anyway, back to siteless web presence, after your Google search on your website, other sites pop up. Are they your competitors or just useless information that Google pulls out of the web universe?

You should dominate that page, right? You don’t want a competitor sitting right below you or above you if they know what they are doing with search and you don’t.

You can with a siteless web presence. If you take your content and put it out on other websites that are consistently searched by Google then soon you will begin to dominate Google searches. Now this doesn’t work for all searches but when it comes to a search for you, you should be there.

Here’s what I’ve done for my company, MediaSauce. Now this isn’t guaranteed. It’s a work in progress all the time because Google is constantly updating its algorithm and indexing more and more sites.

Search for MediaSauce through Google.

We come up right away. Then there are links to some blogs where people mentioned us and then there’s a software company that sells a product named MediaSauce (they used to dominate our page but I’m trying to work them down off the front page) then there are our blogs and our Flickr account.

Now how is it that just a few mentions in an outside blog can drive a link in the middle of my search page. Well, it’s all about Google believing that the content is relevant to MediaSauce. Which it is. And I’m going to give the blogger, Jenny Lu, some Google love by pinging her back with this blog.

But our siteless presence that I can control deals more with putting our content on outside sites, putting the right information in about our company and tagging it appropriately so Google can see it and index it.

Now as far as I know there isn’t a set of steps you can do that will automatically work. It’s more trial and error and if anyone knows a set of steps, please fill me in. But what I’ve found that works is making sure you are constantly updating your external sites as much as you update your own website. By adding more and more relevant content.

Here’s what ad agency, Modernista, did. They took it to an extreme but I think it’s very powerful. Having a site like this is not for everyone and I am in no way saying you shouldn’t have a website.

I’m saying you need to also have a siteless web presence which means letting people take your stuff and put it wherever they feel like it on the web.

Take for example, you sell something in retail – maybe shoes. You have your little store in Broadripple and you are just getting into online selling. Some of your customers that are farther away are starting to buy online and you are promoting it as best you can.

What I would do to give myself a siteless web presence…I would take photos of all the shoes and put them up on Flickr or Photobucket or Smugmug with links back to my website for purchase.

I would take videos of models (my employees with good feet) walking around in my beautiful shoes. I would put them on many video sites using heyspread.com or just doing the standard youtube.com.

I would make a widget using Slide pulling from Flickr and then put that on my blog about shoes (you need a blog, just get over it and do it where I talk about shoes).

I would also allow people to take the slide widget off my website if they want so they can put it on their facebook or myspace profile or wherever they want.

I would get a cool technology company to build me a retail selling widget based on my store so if someone wanted to take my retail store and put it on their site, they could. I would take this widget and put it on my profile pages.

Then I would visit other people’s shoe blogs and talk (positively – no need to flame anyone here) about their shoes and leave behind my link or small slide widget on their forum or blog. I wouldn’t promote my own shoes but I would join the conversations and let people follow the links if they wanted.

Then I would be very careful to watch my conversions in my online presence. Is stuff working or is it not? I would watch my analytics to see if people were using the widgets or visiting the site. Then adjust.

And I would search myself on Google and make sure I was easy to find and I dominated my page…I would work on getting into other searches like basic shoe searches for the brand names I carry, etc… but that’s a blog for another time.

I feel like this blog isn’t finished. There’s so much more I would do but these are some of the basics. Siteless web presence is getting your name out on other sites instead of just trying to get them to come to you. Go where the people are.

What do you think?

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Fresh from the 92nd running of the Indianapolis 500, I can’t help but turn it into a metaphor for the digital revolution.  After all, I think its tagline is one of the best – The Greatest Spectacle on Earth.  According to Princeton’s Wordnet database, a spectacle is “an elaborate and remarkable display on a lavish scale” and I have no doubt that’s worthy of our consideration.

For those who have never been, you just have to experience it in person to truly understand the sheer scale of this event.  Sitting 25 yards away from 33 cars driving 220 MPH is visceral.  The vibrations create a near out of body experience and the human drama that unfolds over 200 laps is breathtaking.  I will never again doubt that this a true sport.

As the largest single day sporting event in the world, the folks running the race are doing many things right.  Take a few moments to visit the Indianapolis Motor Speedway website to see the fine job they’re doing off- and online.  What can we learn from them?  Let’s find out:

• Make it more than a one-time event.  The first thing I learned when we moved to Indy was that “the race” was a month long series of events – at the speedway and throughout town.  Between practice days, promotional events, qualifying days, a mini-marathon, a pet walk, community day (where you can drive your own car once around the track), a downtown parade, and the race itself, the Indianapolis 500 impacts pretty much everyone in the metropolitan area.  Plus, it attracts attendees from all over the country and across the globe.
• Preserve the core and encourage innovation.  I was impressed with the rich pageantry and traditions that come with the race – the winner drinking from the milk jug in Victor Circle, “Gentlemen and Ladies, start your engines”, and the one-yard width of bricks from the original race surface as the finish line.  And equally impressive is how all these things coexist with the indomitable spirit of innovation.  Millions of dollars and human hours are invested for the glory of winning the Borg-Warner Trophy.
• Create space for a wide variety of spectators.  Outside the fences, we saw all types of memorabilia stands, entertainment spots, and food booths.  Inside the speedway, you could party in the infield (oblivious to the race), cheer from the bleachers, or enjoy many creature comforts from inside a climate controlled box.  
• Give options on how to participate.  Watching from home (if you’re outside of Indy), listening on the radio, sitting in the speedway with ear plugs, listening into the scanners to follow the teams as they plot their strategies.  Each of these speak to the idea of an audience-focused mentality.  Bring your story to the person in the form they want.

Armed with these principles of success, it’s time to lead your business or organization to the next level and stake your claim at being the “Greatest Spectacle on Earth”.  

What 2 or 3 things can you do to make that dream a reality?  

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I’m still in disbelief about the transformational change that’s happened at the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles.  

Ever since I got my learner’s permit for driving at age 15, I have endured Soviet-style bureaucracy and have come to believe it is just one of those hardships we all go through.  Two years ago, when my family and I moved to Indiana, we logged a full morning getting our license plates and driver’s licenses.  That was actually an improvement from what we went through in the Atlanta area four years prior.    

This month, I needed to renew the license tags for both cars.  Unfortunately, I missed the April 30 deadline to get it all done via their website.  On Tuesday, I headed to the local BMV office with a bag of work and a book to keep me occupied while I slogged through the crowds and dealt with waiting in between multiple stops in the cattle line.   

As I walked into the foyer, I noticed a kiosk off to the side.  Fortunately, I read the sign and noticed it was a self-service license tag renewal kiosk.  In total shock, I entered a few digits, swiped my card, and took my registration cards & license renewal tags out the door within 2 minutes of starting.

Today, I was visiting with Sarah Robbins, our director of emerging technology, who shared the odd experience of going online to book an appointment for her driver’s license renewal.  When she showed up at the appointed time, the friendly greeter welcomed her and remarked that they were ready to help with the renewal process.  In 15 minutes, she was done (10 of that was spent waiting for the printer to chug out the card).  Her only disappointment was that they didn’t have pink in the drop down box for hair color (check out her website to see why that’s correct).  

Not only can you book an appointment and renew your license plates, you can get a whole host of things done online. Take a few moments and visit their website today: Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles.  

How does your organization compare to the BMV?  Is it time to put together your digital road map?

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 We are always seeking leaders who want to pull off something big – no matter when they lived.

Someone who unified warring tribes on the steppes of Mongolia and built an empire four times the size of the Roman Empire by the time of his death is worthy of consideration.  Even more so when we consider that the resulting empire continued to expand until it occupied 22% of the Earth’s land mass.  

After watching a screening of “Mongol” at this year’s Indianapolis Film Festival, I delved deep into the rich history of Genghis Kahn and the Mongolian Empire.  Technology is wonderful for those who are curious.  Check out Wikipedia’s various entries, download this map overlay for Google Earth to zoom down onto the steppes of Mongolia to see it for yourself, or watch this BBC special on YouTube.

Scattered tribes and ancient kingdoms across Eurasia lived under the belief that they were the masters of their domain.  With a cloud of dust and lighting speed, the Mongolian army caught many by surprise.  As time went by, they would meet little or no resistance as word of the ferocity of their victories spread quickly across Eurasia.

To some degree, today’s globalization mirrors the world as it was during the time of the Mongolian Empire.  Industries, corporations, and organizations of all sizes have existed for many years with moderate or incremental change.  With the rise of the digital revolution, we are seeing the rise of digital Genghis Khans in every industry and sector, creating massive transformations.  

How do you make sure you are a digital Genghis Khan?

• Approach every battle with an integrated strategy – use the digital equivalents of a disciplined cavalry, long-distance archers, and siege tactics.
• Fight fiercely as parts of the whole, not individual warriors – one arrow can be broken, but a bundle of ten cannot.
• Abandon the entitlement of the past for the meritocracy of the present – reward achievement and abilities alone.
• Recruit artisans and talents from the cities you conquer – use their innovative minds to create new strategies and tactics. 
• Build strong discipline within your ranks by promoting close community.
• Develop and maintain an efficient courier system that allows widely distributed teams to react quickly on many fronts.

What are your thoughts?  Who is today’s equivalent of Genghis Khan?

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