A while back I started an e-newsletter for Imagine Your Reality for the worst reason to do it: Because other, more famous and successful people said it’s a good thing to do and that they had succeeded in doing it. You might wonder why that’s such a bad reason. After all, aren’t those more successful people worth emulating? They clearly know what they are doing and they’ve succeeded.

Yes, it’s true they have succeeded, but how they succeeded has to do more something so fundamental and basic that many people ignore it in their rush to try and be like Mike, Chris, Brian, Jen, Kelly, or whoever it is they think is successful.

What makes a business activity effective isn’t doing it because other people tell you to do it. Instead it is understanding the value of doing that activity as it pertains to your experience of running your business. In other words, if you don’t understand why you’re doing an activity to benefit your business then just doing it doesn’t work. Or rather it might work, but you may not fully realize the benefit.

I’m doing my newsletter again…and now I know why I’m doing it, how it can benefit the people who are subscribed to it (click here to subscribe), and how it benefits my business. I’m not doing it because someone said to, because their reasons for doing that activity aren’t my reasons. And until I know my reasons for doing something, there will always be a part of me that hesitates and otherwise sabotages what I’m doing. Once you know why you’re doing something, you’ll always get behind doing it with complete focus on doing it well.

What do you think? Have you ever done a business activity because of what others were doing? When did it become an activity you did for your business?

Book Review: Fan To Pro (affiliate link) by Steven Savage

Disclaimer: I know the author as a friend.

Fan to Pro is a unique job hunting book, because the author’s focus is on teaching the reader how to turn hobbies and fan interests into viable, professional careers. With that said, it is undoubtedly a book that will stimulate you and make you think about how you can turn your interests into a professional career. The author does an excellent job of explaining how to turn your fan interests into a career. But he also goes a step further and provides easy to do exercises that can help you start to take steps to make it happen. The book is easy to read, but its important not to rush through the exercises. My only nitpicks are some spelling errors and the layout, but the concept and theme of the book is excellent.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

1. At networking meetings, instead of telling people your elevator speech, offer a helpful tip about something you do. This will provide people with useful information and also give them a better idea of how you can help them out, if they choose to work with you.

2. Donate some time and expertise to a local organization. Offering some time to a non-profit can be a good way to be of service and still market your business. You can help the non-profit with your services and ask in return that they tell other people about what you do. You should limit your donated time to a specific amount and make sure you get a donation form for tax deductions.

3. Be a mentor to others. Being a mentor doesn’t involve giving your services away, so much as choosing to be a positive influence on the lives of other people. Don’t provide unsolicited advise, but be open to people when they ask for advice. It’s a great way to help someone out and you never know when it could come back to you.

1. Update your profiles with accurate information about what company or business you are with as well as what your role is and what activities you do. Be concise in your description.

2. Review your contact list, to see if there are people you want to connect with, and if there are people you want to write compliments or recommendations for. If you want to connect with someone via a social media site write a personalized introduction that tells the person why you want to connect with him/her. If you’re writing a recommendation cite specific activities the person did in order to make him/her stand out more.

3. Examine your social media marketing plan and determine what your goals for 2011 are and what you will need to do to realize those goals. For example if your goal is to improve your social media relationships with clients and prospects and connections, you’ll want to look at what activities you need to do in order to achieve that goal. Are you making an effort to post consistently on social media sites and get involved in conversations? Are you responding to people in a timely manner?

Whatever your goals are for social media marketing, write down three activities you can do regularly to support the achievement of those goals and then do those activities when you schedule time for your social media.

4. Schedule time for social media. Be consistent about putting some time aside each day to be on social media sites. It doesn’t need to be a lot of time, but it does need to be consistent time. If you haven’t scheduled time for your social media efforts, now is a good time to start doing so. Businesses that do social media consistently get more return for their effort.

These are just a few tips that you can do that will help you get your social media marketing off to a great start in 2011. Remember if you’re not participating, no one knows you’re there.

Instead I’ll tell you what I’m doing this last week of 2010 so I can be ready for 2011. And you can decide if my actions are applicable to your business or not.

1. I’ve created both physical and electronic files for my 2011 financial books. I have categories sorted out appropriately and I’ll be able to start recording expenses on January 1st.

2. I’m closing my 2010 books on December 31st. I’ll staple all my receipts in specific categories by date, tally up totals for expenses as well as profit and have all the information ready for my tax person. I won’t actually deliver all the information until February, as I’ll be waiting for tax forms from other businesses, but it will be all ready to go.

3. I’m setting up several classes for the new year, as well as setting up my networking strategy by joining several new networking groups, while stepping up my participation in several others.

4. I’m checking my list of clients and prospects I need to call and getting all of the information ready so I can start making calls the first week of January. My goal, with those calls, will be to set up meetings so I can make proposals and get new clients.

5. I’m continuing work on my next social media book. My goal is to finish it by mid-2011 so I can get it published by the fall. I’m also putting together an outline for a book on networking.

These are just a few things I’m doing over the course of this week. 2010 is coming to a close, but business isn’t coming to a close and I want to start my New Year with steady momentum.

What are you doing to get ready for 2011?

People liked the name of the bread and were able to connect with it as a brand. More importantly, on some level, they also felt they could connect with Dave the person. What really sells something isn’t a slick marketing campaign or good PR…those are tools. What really sells something is personality and Dave has that in spades. People connect with his personality through the bread and the fact that the story is told on the bread wrapper. The bread also tastes really good. Perhaps what’s most important is that people love stories, especially stories where someone changes for the better. Why didn’t the marketing/pr company recognize this? They wanted to be “Safe”.

Sometimes safe works, but sometimes you have to take a risk, and if you recognize that what makes a business is personality and the relationships that people feel they have with that business or with the brand, you quickly realize that what makes people loyal is not even the product, but rather a sense of intimate connection to someone that they either identify with or look up to. In Dave’s case, he’s someone who turned his life around for the better and in the process showed people that it is possible to have a successful life, even when you’ve made some mistakes.

Business is built on trust and relationships, something which marketing and PR can’t and won’t always get. The message is important, but what’s even more important are the people on either end of the message, and the relationship that arises as when a message is crafted to not just present a product, but also present an intimate feeling of connection.

The old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words can be applied to video as well, except that video is interactive, shows facial and body expressions and lets people hear the tone of voice, so video is actually worth a million words. And now video is something people can do much more easily especially with the variety of cameras that are available. I filmed the testimonial video above with my HD Flip Camera. This camera has good quality, but admittedly people can also tell that it’s an amateur video.

But the fact that it’s an amateur video is in my favor, because people identify with those videos more because its more acceptable now. Most importantly, when people view this video on my website they get to see Diane’s happiness about working with me and get a better feeling for who I am and how I’ll work with them.

I’ve switched from using written testimonials to video testimonials, both for my professional speaking and for my business testimonials. While I’ll still keep some written testimonials, showing people other people who’ve worked with me will speak a lot louder to visitors to the website.

Are you using video testimonials? How have they helped your business stand out more to visitors to your website?

While all the new technology is useful for communication, it is important to remember that sometimes no amount of texting will really be that useful if you are in a situation where you are lost or in danger. And sometimes you need to have a conversation that can’t occur via email or text, because there’s too much to say that won’t be captured in such limited mediums.

Another acquaintance recently told me that her son shipped off to basic training. He’s been learning the fine art of hand writing letters to his family. Apparently he enjoys it a lot and has found that it makes him spend time really considering what he will write. Pretty valuable lesson, especially in an age where you can quickly type off a 140 character message without thinking about it.

New media is great, but so is traditional media and teacher younger generations to appreciate it can also teach them the value of context and knowing what medium to use and when to use it. And sometimes that could make a big difference, especially in a situation where calling on the phone will get you a lot further than updating your facebook status.

The reason: I’ve gotten so used to social media, and even the phone that it hadn’t occurred to me to think about using his approach. He also has a decided advantage of being about a decade older than me, and so his experience includes that concept of taking a flyer and walking door to door with it.

And it makes me realize as well that it’s rather easy to discount tried and true methods of marketing when we have the glamor of new technology in front of us. Don’t get me wrong: social media has value and can do a lot for your marketing, but as I’ve advocated before it needs to be complemented with traditional marketing. I’ve done that with written letters and cold calling, but actually beating the streets with a flyer? It’s not something you see as much anymore, and yes that’s what makes it precisely so valuable to do. When people aren’t doing something, and yet it can be effective, its worth your time to do it.

I consider this a lesson learned for me, as well as a valuable recognition of how important it is to meet with other people and learn what they are doing, that you could also be doing. Find out what other businesses do to stand out and see if you can adapt what they do to your own methods. You’ll be surprised at how well some of it will work and also how you’ll continue to be challenged in all the right ways to improve your business.

In order for social media to be accepted those businesses need to learn how it can be utilized in a timely manner, with effective strategies and processes for automating the activities that people do on the social media sites. At the same time, we must also acknowledge that just because something is old doesn’t mean that it no longer has value. In fact, if anything, sometimes a traditional approach can be more effective.

While I use social media to keep up with people and make new connections, a lot of my relationship building occurs in person. I also send cards to people as a way of thanking those people their business or their help. A card can be much more personal than a direct message on Twitter. At the same time, having a customer service rep on a social media site can be more effective immediate than trying to pick up a phone and wade the automated options designed to weed people out, as opposed to genuinely helping them.

Traditional media and marketing has its place in your marketing strategy and ideally what should occur is a complement of social media marketing with traditional marketing, using both to reach out to a diverse array of people who use different mediums to do research on their wants and needs. By combining traditional marketing with social media we can do more to reach out to people than just using one or another.

Social media isn’t the ultimate solution to marketing. It is just another form of marketing that can be as effective as traditional marketing. We shouldn’t discard traditional marketing out of hand, nor should we ignore social media for too long, as more and more people use it to do research on what they want and need.

That said, social media can be considered a time drain if it isn’t managed effectively. And for many people social media is initially a gaming platform (how many people do you know who play mafia wars on Facebook?). At the same time because social media is integrated into our cell phones and other mobile devices, it makes it increasingly easy to post to social networks from anywhere. The stream of information consequently has risen as a result.

Social media is changing our behaviors in some ways. We see this with the increased reliance on social media for communicating with people, the choice Pepsi made to spend 20 million on social media campaigns instead of TV commercials for the super bowl and in how more businesses are starting to use social media for some of their customer service efforts.

While social media will never replace traditional marketing, it is influencing the choices businesses make in how they reach out to people, and also in how we interact with each other. As it becomes more integrated into our lives, it will also become more of a major marketing platform, and as a way to schedule meetings, holding conversations, and connecting with businesses that offer things we want or need.