HogBlog

My New Blog

2009-04-23T16:43:00.001-07:00

Goodbye Blogger

2009-03-18T14:25:00.000-07:00

I think my blogging experiment with Blogger is coming to an end soon. Google's application is surely easy to use and allows people to get their own blog up and running quickly. But the time has come for Blogger and iHOG to part ways. It's not you Google, it's me. I have outgrown you and now need to see other blogging solutions. We can still be friends and I will continue to recommend you for people who want an easy to use, personal blog. I'll still be here for a few more weeks but will be using my new website for all future blogs.

You get what you pay for...

2009-03-18T14:22:00.000-07:00

It's pretty much a given that if you have a business, you have a website. But how much thought have you put into your website? In my experience, I have seen way too many small business owners whose only question is how much will it cost. They see it more as a necessary evil than a great tool to communicate with customers and sell their products or services. I just met with a customer who has a fantastic product but has very little market share. Nobody knows about him and his product. He currently has an admittedly ineffective website that is several years old and looks like his kid nephew created it. I proposed ways that we could engineer a new site that incorporates current Web 2.0 technologies to attract traffic, capture valuable information, enhance visitor experience and track data. I also highly recommended using social networking sites and starting a blog that would offer tremendous value to his niche market.

We never even talked about price. Yesterday he told me that he found a web designer whose price was way too cheap to pass up so he hired him. Yikes! So much for a complete marketing solution.

So are you just looking at how much money you need to spend on a website? Or are you asking how money you can generate from your website? Most business owners are not marketers but they should educate themselves and find experienced, knowledgeable marketing professionals who will truly provide solutions. You could have a fantastically talented web designer but if he or she can provide you with merely a pretty-looking website with little functionality, is that a wise investment?

I love this company!

2009-03-04T22:21:00.000-08:00

I just love it when a company does something beyond the ordinary that really makes you take notice. I had met a member of the band The Thirsting (a great Catholic rock band, yes I said 'Catholic') at a conference last year and have been listening to their music on my iPod ever since. When I tried to find it online to buy it for my niece for Christmas, the only place I found it was at CDBaby.com, a company I wasn't familiar with. I placed my order and waited for the usual email that my item had been shipped. Instead I received an email that contained the following:

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved "Bon Voyage!" to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Tuesday, December 16th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year." We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Sigh...

Isn't that great! I fell in love with this company. I immediately thought of Seth Godin and his book The Purple Cow. If you have never heard of it, do yourself a big favor and get it.

Ironically, just the other day I stumbled upon the website of Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby without knowing who he was and sure enough, he mentions that Seth Godin is one of his favorite marketing authors.

Now all you business owners and marketers, do something that sets you apart from the rest of your competition!

Snow Day

2009-02-19T23:21:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-14T07:42:00.000-08:00

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!

2009-02-05T16:43:00.000-08:00

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!

2009-02-02T15:44:00.000-08:00

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!

Who am I?

2009-01-29T22:34:00.000-08:00

I'm having a hard time trying to come up with an answer when I am asked what I do for a living. For many years I have been saying that I am a graphic designer. But now but I don't think that is an accurate job description anymore. Those of you who are very familiar with iHOG know that about 3 years ago I ambitiously expanded my company and hired a web programmer, online marketer and had a few graphic design interns. During that time I immersed myself into learning as much as I could about online marketing. I had been in the print world for almost 20 years and I realized that, in the best interest of my clients (current and future), iHOG needed to do more than offer creative services. The internet had opened up so many possibilities to advertise and market one's products and services and there are new buzzwords to keep up with constantly. I wanted to help other businesses grow there businesses not only through ink on paper but by integrating that with landing pages, relevant emails, and a highly functional web presence. This was exciting stuff. If I had a nickel for every white paper, webinar, book, blog, etc that I read on online marketing, I'd have a bucket full of nickels (a really big bucket).

For example, I am currently working with a new client where I am not only designing the marketing collateral (brochure, media kit, etc.), which is what I had typically done for the previous decades, but now I am building the website as well as developing a marketing strategy that incorporates a blog, social networking sites, viral videos and email blasts to create brand awareness. Creativity is just one small part of it. Technology, I feel, has brought function over form. By that I mean that it has become less important how cool a website looks and much, much more critical on how it functions. As a designer at heart, it isn't easy for me to admit that creativity has to share the spotlight with technology but I honestly understand that it is in the best interest of my clients. So I have partnered with the best programmers and 'techies' that I could find to make sure I can offer the best of both worlds.

iHOG update

2009-01-05T21:12:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! This is the year of the HOG right? Oh, it's not? Well, for me it is, so there...

I know I still have our outdated iHOG website but I have been working on a new one and it's going to be pretty cool - it's just taking longer than I thought. It's going to have a whole new look and I've even designed a new logo. Yup, our old friend the little piggy, is being retired. As I figure out this whole blogging thing, (yes, I'm new to this) I will try to add some sneak peeks at my new logo and site. I also plan to create a separate section with marketing ideas and tips as I've become obsessed with the countless marketing books, websites and blogs out there. I might add it to this blog or create a new one, not sure yet but I will give the opportunity to all of you to receive the info via email.

I don't usually make new year's resolutions but for 2009, I am going to try to dedicate some time to maintaining this blog. I have 2 main reasons for this. First, I feel that I constantly come across valuable information that many of you may be able to use in your particular business or organization. Second, I keep reading that successful businesses need to have a blog. Not that I feel I need to have one just to be successful but I want to see for myself if that is truly the case. That info might benefit some of you who may have been considering it. I have also looking into many of the most popular social networking sites for the sole purpose of - no, not to meet eligible singles who are looking for a good time, remember I'm very happily married - but rather as simple market research to see if some of these really offer true opportunities for business to communicate with new or existing customers. I hope to report on my findings.

That's it for now. Any comments, please post them here or email me.

GB,
John

My 1st HogBlog

2008-12-11T21:53:00.000-08:00

I know I'm pretty late jumping on the blogging bandwagon, but better late than never. I'll use this to post interesting, business-related material that I feel may help you grow your business. And I may throw in some totally irrelevant stuff that you might like as well...