Snow Day

I am writing this from my car up in Mt. Baldy surrounded by snow. Today, a Thursday, I decided to take my family up to frolic in the snow. Yup, there are a few advantages to working from home and homeschooling our kids.

Unfortunately Sofia, one of my daughters, frolicked a little too much and sprained her ankle. So while I sat with her I pulled out my notebook and started writing this. That's notebook - as in wirebound sheets of paper, not as in computer laptop. Sorry to disappoint you but I actually wrote this draft using a pen and paper. I know, that's so yesterday.

As I started writing, I recalled a conversation I had this very morning with a printing salesman that I had worked with many years ago. We had not spoken in over 5 years and we reconnected thanks to LinkedIn. He had mentioned how he hand writes thank you notes to prospective clients after the first meets with them and gets a great response. "Nobody does this anymore," he told me, "everyone just sends emails or calls on the phone."

I also thought about how writing, I mean good writing, with correct spelling and grammar is becoming a lost art. I remember receiving an email not too long ago from one of my interns. It was written as if she was sending a text message to one of her friends. I mentioned to a good friend of mine how this younger generation communicates very differently. He told me that he noticed the same thing with his students (he was teaching a graduate course at UCLA at the time) - very short responses to everything. The way we process information and communicate is definitely changing. We have much shorter attention spans, we can send these quick, abbreviated messages to just about anyone from anywhere using our computers and cell phones and with the internet we can get any info we need 24/7. Life is moving pretty quickly around us these days.

I'm glad I was able to slow it down, even for just a few hours today here in Mt, Baldy.

Optimism in this Tough Economy

I have been feeling the effects of this tough economy big time, as many of us have. My business has been very flat for the past few months and even though I am typically an extremely optimistic person, I noticed I was getting pretty worried. I think many of us hear the news about how bad the economy is and we get depressed. Many businesses, in an effort to reduce their costs, started by cutting their advertising and marketing expenses. I am guessing that these business owners have very little faith in their marketing strategies. If you're marketing your business efficiently, you should be experiencing healthy returns of your investments and understand that this is an integral part of keeping your customers and attracting new ones.

Now is NOT the time to stop marketing your business. The results of that will probably not be favorable. It IS a time to reexamine your strategies and be more diligent in how that budget is being used. Now is the time for more creative solutions. I really hate to say this and use this overused expression, but here goes - maybe it's time to think outside the box (I really am sorry I had to resort to a tired old cliché but it does get my point across).

The methods of advertising your products or services and marketing your business have drastically changed in the past years. We hear about inbound marketing replacing outbound marketing. Are we taking advantage of new technology and new forms of communicating with our audience? Are we blogging, are we using social media, is our website optimized to attract traffic? And once we attract those visitors to our website, are we providing value to their experience or are we merely showing them a digital version of our company brochure?

Instead of feeling depressed about how lousy the economy is, we should be excited about all these new opportunities to reach our audiences. This excitement and positive thinking is what will bring our businesses strength and resiliency.

Vonage = HELL!

I created this blog with the intention of providing hopefully useful insight on how to build your business through print and online marketing. However, I need to further vent my frustration with Vonage regarding signing up for their service. So please allow me to use this blog to simply say that VONAGE REALLY, REALLY, REALLY SUCKS! I will spare you the details. If you really want to know more, email me.

I promise that all subsequent blog postings will be of more value to you.

Wow, I feel a little better already.

PS: This is day 4 with no phone line. Yup, I can't receive any incoming calls to my business line. Did I mention how much I dislike Vonage???

VOIP SHMOIP!

Boy, talk about a stressful day! Lately, I have had plenty to stress out over but I have made a strong effort not to let things get to me and try to stay positive. And I have done pretty well up until this morning. It's a long story and I won't bother you with all the details but let me just say that my phone had been down all day. I had been using Verizon's VOIP (called VoiceWing) for my iHOG phone service for the past year. A few weeks ago I received a letter from Verizon stating that they would no longer be offering this service and I would need to make other arrangements for phone service. So I went to the Vonage website (also a VOIP service) and signed up for service and set it up to keep the same phone number. Fast forward to this morning when I called Verizon to cancel my VoiceWing account since I had already installed my Vonage line and got a dial tone and everything seemed to be working fine. However, there is a process where my phone number has to be officially transfered from Verizon to Vonage. Apparently this had not happened and when I cancelled with Verizon, there went my phone number. After spending a lot of time with both Vonage and Verizon (most of the time on hold after being transferred back and forth), they still can't figure out how to fix this. In the meantime, I have no phone. Yes, I have my cell phone and oddly enough, I can make calls on my business line because evidently I have a temporary Vonage number (which they never told me what it is) but any calls to my business line with get a recorded message saying that the number has been disconnected. To make matters worse, I keep getting calls on the business line from creditors asking for someone else. Whoever had this temporary number before owes a lot of people a lot of money.

I can go on and on about how frustrated I am, especially with everyone at Verizon who is reading the same script and they keep asking me if they have answered all my questions and if there is anything else they can help me with. "You haven't helped me with anything!" I must have repeated that at least 5 times today.

So I have gotten very little work done today and I hope I haven't missed any important calls. I actually feel a little better expressing my displeasure.

Thanks for listening.

PS: Verizon and Vonage customer support sucks!