Last week I had the opportunity to travel to Las Vegas to speak to the Network Affiliates Group on the subject of Designing an Experience Your Clients Will Talk About.  The conference was held at The Wynn Hotel which is an experience in and of itself.  Steve Wynn certainly knows how to build hotels. 

In preparation for the presentation I surveyed the group on a number of topics.   Here are the key findings:

• 71% indicated that they have 10 or more brand ambassadors for their firm
• 53% categorized their employees as “highly motivated.”
• Only 35% stated that they have “excellent employee morale.”
• 47% believe that their client satisfaction is excellent
• 53% have very low employee turnover - that is lower than 5% turnover
• Only 24% indicated that they believe they have an “excellent system for hiring the right people.”
• I was happy to see that 65% have a right hand marketing person
• 59% conduct client satisfaction surveys
• Only 41% affirmed the fact that 80% of all decisions are made emotionally.  Some believed that number to be as low as 20%!
• Only 24% have a system in place to keep staff informed of firm progress, goals, challenges and successes

We had some great discussion and I want to thank Harlan Schillinger, Norty Frickey and Tammy Kehe for inviting me to come.  I always walk away having learned far more than I taught.

There was an excellent article in Forbes magazine today about how Facebook and MySpace would like to help grow small businesses.

Ditch your Web site. Facebook and MySpace are eager to help small businesses find friends

The “curse of knowledge” is that when you know something, it’s extremely difficult to put yourself in the state of mind of someone who doesn’t know it.  This psychological tendency consistently blocks our ability to create ideas and messages that stick in the mind of our target audience.  We assume that they know things that they don’t because it’s common knowledge to us.  This “curse of knowledege” can make us miss the mark on our messages.

In the business book “Made to Stick” the authors identify 6 principles at work whenever an idea or message breaks through the clutter and really “sticks” in the mind of the audience.

1. Simplicity - stripping ideas/messages to their core so they’re easy to remember.
2. Unexpectedness - avoiding predictability in your statements.
3. Concreteness - using specific details to help people understand and remember ideas/message.
4. Credibility - doing what’s necessary to make your ideas/message believable.
5. Emotion - ensuring that others care about your ideas/message by making them feel something.
6. Stories - getting people to relate to and act on your ideas/message.

To communicate your message, simplicity is better than complexity.  Concreteness provides the details that resonate in the brain.  Credibility is essential to making people believe your message.  Unexpectedness jolts listeners into thinking in new ways.  Emotion makes people feel why your idea is important.  And a good story can move others to action.

Viral marketing campaigns are less effective than the buzz about them would indicate, says a new report from New York bases Jupiter Research, which surveyed 3,580 marketers for their opinions.  Per the report, viral marketers plan to decrease use of this tactic by 55% within the next year.

While they effectively increase brand awareness, only 15% of viral campaigns in the last year actually achieved the marketer’s purpose of getting consumers to buy into and promote the company’s message to others.  And if a consumer doesn’t repeat the message to another, is a campaign really viral?

According to the report, the biggest problem viral marketers face - other than tracking campaign performance - is general ad clutter.

I picked up the New York Times the other day and on the front page there was an article entitled “Internet Giants Vie to Snap Up Web Ad Firms.”  It talked about the race among industry power players like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL to acquire small Internet advertising companies. 

NYT writer Miguel Helft states that “underlying the deals…is a transformation of the advertising world away from traditional media like television, radio and print.”  It is directly after that statement that chief executive of 360i, Bryan Wiener, makes the profound revelation that “we’ve reached a tipping point.”

How does this relate to the legal industry, and more specifically PI law?  How much time do you have?  LOL  The fact is the writing is on the wall.  Traditional mass media is experiencing diminished results with each passing month.  Replacing it in power and pervasiveness are targeted efforts to capture the vast niche audiences that turn to the Internet to assess credibility and make purchase decisions.

Bottomline:  it’s time to reallocate some of your traditional mass media advertising resources to the web.  Many opportunities exist in this arena so study it and choose your venues carefully.  Just don’t wait too long. 

Business Week arrived in my mailbox today and as I perused the table of contents I was drawn to an article entitled “Buying Clicks To A Tragedy.”  At first I thought it appalling but as I read it, I started to think about the practical application to our industry.

The fact is that there is an “ever-growing chunk of total revenues coming from the Web.”  Because of that, news outlets now “scramble their online marketing staffers as quickly as they do reporters when a big story hits.” 

And what does that tell us?  It tells us that once again, traditional mass media advertising is being replaced by the web.  The newspapers of the world have been forced to quickly adapt and embrace the web because their more traditional print medium is no longer as effective as it once was.  Don’t get me wrong.  There are millions of people that read newspapers.  They are not going away - at least not yet.  However, the web is becoming increasingly important.

And now the application to the PI industry.  This story immediately made me think of the biggest PI firms in the country.  When a relevant story hits, or a drug is recalled or a local catastrophe occurs, our ranks are so trained to call their advertising agency and scramble to run a series of TV spots.  That is if their advertising agency doesn’t call them first.  But how much of our time and resources are allocated to the web.

The Business Week article stated “At the risk of sounding crass, these do become marketing events for these news sites.”  When the Virginia Tech tragedy occurred the business operations of the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and Time magazine bought ads on either Google or Yahoo so that anytime someone searched the phrase “Virginia shooting,” their links would pop up prominently on the right-hand side of the page.  That strategy is called pay per click advertising, and I’ve found it to be very effective when properly researched and placed. 

So let me ask you this.  How are you embracing and utilizing Web 2.0?  However that might be, I suggest that you step it up a few notches.  If you want to talk about it, give me a call at 610-692-2950. 

USA Today had an article in yesterday’s paper that talked about the continuing decline in viewership for television.  But the statement that really grabbed me was this one: