How is this for irony? In my review, one of my areas of improvement is to be careful about how transparent I am both internally with employees and externally to customers. I’m committed to improving, so I’ll try to pull out only the appropriate golden nuggets of information to share with you.
I’m not sure if many entrepreneurs/business owners/CEO’s have done a 360 degree, annual review, conducted by another employee to the rest of the company to get constructive feedback, but I really valued the process and the insight. It’s only fair that employees have an opportunity to review me, since I review our managers (and get accross-department feedback from other managers and other employees) and managers do very thorough reviews for employees. So here is what employees thought of me:
Strengths:
–His enthusiasm is infectious. When Ryan gets excited, it’s easy to get excited with him, and he can be a great motivator for the company as a whole.
–He genuinely cares about and considers everyone’s opinions and ideas on how to make eROI a great company to be employed by.
–Good networker and knows how to put eROI on the map.
–Encourages individual growth, from taking classes to focusing on strengthening skill sets.
–Focused leadership.
Areas of Improvement: (undoubtedly more improvements comments than strengths):
–Sometimes perhaps too involved in projects, seen as micro-manager at these times.
–Giving adequate time for internal projects to be fully flushed out. He should ask us what is a reasonable amount of time for us to get things done.
–Can be impatient.
–Very high expectations. Often, unrealistic expectations.
–Needs to let go of some of the marketing side of things and allow new ideas to come through.
Now, that I’ve opened the floodgates. It’s your turn to comment. What’s your feedback on me? Comment below.
Don’t worry, I have a box of tissues on my desk. Looking forward to your feedback, but try to make it as constructive as possible. Thx.
I hate making these blog posts for fear that I’ll jinx myself, but honestly, there seems to be such hyper-reactions in the market these days with big scary words like “stagflation” and, of course, “recession.” Information moves at lightning speed with real-time media postings on the internet, but I think fear feeds upon itself to do more damage than good.
As an entrepreneur, we have 3 paths in light recession fears touted by every media channel:
1. React to the fear, be conservative, and cut back on costs.
2. Keep doing the same thing and grow your company steadily.
3. Double down, take a risk, and reinvest heavily in your company to take it to the next level. High risk in the hopes of high growth and high return.
Being Naive Is The Answer
This is when being naive is a virtue. To start a high-growth company in a new industry like technology, you have to have an element of naiveté (also known as stupidity) for building something from scratch that is far more difficult than you ever imagined. Everyone doubts you, and that doubt makes you question your decision, but you do what it takes to get your new company off the ground and feed your family and indirectly your employees families.
The next test: talk of a recession. If all entrepreneurs reacted conservatively to this talk, it would drive our economy into a depression, let alone recession, and unemployment would be at an all-time high. However, my choice is #3 - to invest in our people, in growth and new employees, and in our products.
Chris spent all weekend and week (wait - is he working at all?) on this very cool video of his journey from Portland to New York City. Watch it and see the amazing amount of positive energy Chris has - nicely done!
Big things will happen in ‘08, Chris - let the journey begin!
Article excerpt: Your green top 10 list for 2008
So you’re ready to get started. Here are 10 more things you can start doing right away, all in 2008, to create a comprehensive, compelling and results-driven green strategy for your business and brand.
Internally
1. Recycling: Surprisingly, not very many of us are doing it, and not nearly to the level that we easily could. Office recycling programs now easily tackle not just paper, but also glass, aluminum, cardboard, catalogs, magazines, etc. — all in the same bin. Think also about how your company recycles office equipment, computer supplies, etc. Much of these tools can be donated or sold to companies and third-world companies that will put them to good use, reducing the need for new equipment manufacturing, which itself creates an incredibly high carbon footprint.
2. Transportation: Encourage and subsidize more of your employees to use group and public transportation. Rethink whether or not you need that business trip, or if a phone call, WebEx or video conference could suffice.
3. Power management: Consider implementing a PC power management solution, such as those described above. This can have an immediate impact on not only carbon footprint, but also operating costs.
4. Office guidelines: Default all printers to duplex printing. Encourage employees to only print what’s necessary and to use “soft copies” for everything else. Encourage and reward activities across the company that demonstrate employees “living the green brand.” You’ll be surprised what unique and compelling green strategies individual employees come up with that can become internal and external sustainability strategies for your business and brand.
5. Supplier & partner guidelines: Encourage or require your partners and suppliers to maintain certain green-friendly operating standards. Several companies, such as Wal-Mart, are already doing this, and are thereby impacting sustainable practices well beyond their own.
Externally
6. Community engagement & activation: Encourage your customers to be green with you. If you’re enacting PC power management solutions within your business, encourage your customers to do the same. Getting them involved and participating with you in your green strategies is an excellent way to build community and create strong bonds between brand and customer.
7. Community participation: Find ways to actively participate in existing community activities, organizations and other efforts to be green and sustainable, especially efforts that align with your company and brand’s core values and brand message. This can be local or national organizations and efforts — focused on employee participation or widespread customer activation.
8. Channel choices: Consider the carbon impact of your marketing channels, and how you read, influence and empower your customers. Participating in a trade show, for example, is a carbon footprint-heavy strategy compared to an online-based, community-based activity that likely can achieve the same awareness or demand generation results. And if you’re making channel choices based on what’s most sustainable, tell your customers and prospects about it. They’ll appreciate the motivation behind your choice.
9. Competitive advantage: If being green is truly a key and possibly new part of your brand message and positioning, lean into it. Make it something that everyone across your organization — sales, marketing, customer support, etc. — is reciting as a mantra in their individual engagements with your customers and prospects. Make your green strategy a true competitive advantage.
10. Endorsements & associations: Partner with Energy Star, buy products from suppliers with strong environmental stories (such as HP for computers and printers), and work with credible speakers, writers and authorities already in the green and sustainable world to align with your brand, endorse your strategy and help tell your story.
Businesses Must Support Their Local Community or they will suffer (PR backlash, customer and vendor pressure). Local is the new Organic, but for businesses, not just consumers. There is such truth to the expression - the more you give, the more you get. It applies to giving of your time and money to charity causes and even non-profit professional associations. On the surface, it appears to be a major expense and unproductive distraction to give a significant amount of executive time, employee resources, and company money to local charities like Friends of the Children, Start Making a Reader Today, Zenger Farm, or the Boys and Girls Club. The same logic applies to professional organizations like Oregon Entrepreneurs Network, Starve Ups, Portland Advertising Federation, Software Association of Oregon, American Marketing Association, and a handful of others. Examples of companies who focus on giving back to their communities (click on each company name to go directly to their community involvement webpage) include Kettle Foods, Jive Software, and eROI.
However, it is flawed logic to look at giving back to the community as an expense. Here’s why:
Gain awareness to large groups of prospective clients. Customer acquisition costs are much lower when a business and its customer have a shared connection and shared values.
Community involvement creates a halo effect of positive association to an altruistic organization with shared values.
Employee involvement in non-profit organizations deepens the emotional connection and loyalty between the employee and the company.
Employee recruiting is a whole lot easier with greater local awareness and the positive association with your business doing the right thing (especially in the younger generation of recent college grads).
Serving on non-profit committees and Board of Directors gives you access to some of the smartest local business execs that can give valuable entrepreneurial business advice you can’t get anywhere else.
Public relations and marketing is a lot easier locally when people are genuinely routing for you.
Finally, doing the right thing for your community is the whole point of being in business in the first place.
If you don’t run a company built on a socially-conscious business model, the least you can do is get involved in your community and I guarantee you will have a huge return on investment for that effort.
Social networking sites will turn into collaborative software platforms (think online Calendar, spreadsheets, word processing, web conference, presentation collaboration, image manipulation between many parties, and the already-standard email, chat, IM, blog, profile pages). Social networking isn’t just for kids anymore. Over 60% of new Facebook users are over 30 years old now. These 30, 40, 50, and a few 60somethings are professionals who will leverage these online communities to help with more than just business development.
If Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social community sites add professional collaboration tools like personalized calendars, spreadsheets, whiteboards into the mix, business people and businesses as a whole will standardize their entire internal communication operations (document sharing, chat, IM, blog, email threaded discussions) on these collaboration communities for increased productivity, mobility and trackability. A leader in the new frontier of Web 2.0.0.8 Collaboration Software is Portland’s own Jive Software and their blazing hot new product called Clearspace.
Email Service Providers (ESPs) will specialize in optimizing the content rendering on mobile devices. You’ve received email newsletters on your Blackberry that have image links and website links that are 4-5 lines long per link. It’s a usability nightmare to attempt to read a long newsletter with a complex layout. The Email Experience Council ran a poll in May’07 where they found that 61% online marketers thought email should be optimized for mobile devices, yet less than 5% of ESPs offered it. ESPs will adapt and fill this customer need in ‘08.
Traditional agencies will acquire online marketing software companies and interactive agencies. No, we (eROI) don’t want to be acquired for at least the next decade. Yes, this prediction is very real. Traditional agencies will be around for the long haul. They get the big picture. They get branding. They get traditional advertising mediums (TV, outdoor, print, etc.). They do not get interactive.
Interactive agencies get interactive because the entire culture is focused around it. Account folks talk about what they read in the daily newsletters of EmailInsider, eMarketer, MarketingVox, iMediaConnection, or MarketingSherpa. Interactive designers talk about how well certain designs will work with CSS standards, Flickr feeds, blog engines, and other limitations of the online medium that serve as amazing problems to overcome in elegant ways. Technical programmers figure out how to connect it all to a database and make sure it is strong enough to withstand huge traffic spikes if the online campaign becomes truly viral. Some of the most cutting-edge interactive work is done by smaller interactive shops or recently acquired interactive shops that have become an interactive division of a large traditional agency. In a marketing world of increasing complexity, the best quality is being produced by niche specialists (which even includes old examples of the first large-scale viral website Subservient Chicken made by a small interactive agency, the Barbarian Group).
Publishing content to a website, blog, and email campaign will be integrated in many ESP (Email Service Providers), RSS (Real Simple Syndication), and CMS (Content Management System) platforms. Clients want one place to login to manage the layout, text, images, and tracking of their email campaigns, web content and analytics, and blog content and analytics. Marketers will begin to demand that a blog post is published to the blog, a different website, and an article within the e-newsletter - by clicking a single button. Behold the power of the “one-to-many” relationship in this form of unified messaging.
B2B Companies will update their Whitepapers, Guides, and Case Studies in ‘08. Have you ever noticed how so many B2B companies let their online Resource Centers get really outdated (and yes, that includes eROI for a few of our 45+ free guides, case studies, and email studies). 2008 is the year that this will change. Without fresh content, B2B companies’ marketing programs begin to die.
Email Brand ROI. Email Marketers will standardize a formula that most everyone can agree on for putting a hard figure on the benefit of email marketing to your brand (perhaps the Email Experience Council will drive this, or we will highlight it in the online marketing world). Email is an often under-valued medium because of its ubiquity and ease of use, but it is also the backbone of online communication.
From a branding perspective, customers and prospects often get more “brand touchpoints” through email than any other medium (examples include monthly newsletters, resource downloads, quarterly events, webinars, monthly blog posting summary emails, etc). If your brand comes across as unprofessional or irrelevant in those emails, you are not only missing a huge opportunity to convert more prospects to customers but you’ll damage the long-term trust in your brand.
Online marketing dollars will rapidly shift towards Custom Web Apps and Widgets. We really can’t take credit for this prediction - every panelists and keynote speaker (including top folks from NBC Universal, CondeNast, and Google) at the Sep’07 MediaPost’s OMMA East show was preaching the power of widgets. Why? Because users don’t want to leave the online communities where they socialize and interact in. Until recently, brands and media companies assume that online users will leave Facebook, MySpace, or other community and go to the advertiser’s site or media site to learn more.
That has changed. Now, brands need to make their marketing messages more interactive and more portable. YouTube popularized this with providing the code for any video for people to copy and paste onto their blog, website, Facebook or MySpace page. Doritos, NBC, HBO, and any other savvy advertiser or media company is starting to do this. For example, HBO put a widget of a disco ball countdown on its site FutureSexLove.com. When the show launched, the disco ball virtually exploded across the thousands of sites, blogs, and profile pages that downloaded the widget.
User-Generated content will be an ingredient in most business website launches (and nearly all consumer sites). In 2006, YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook got all of the press. Wait, they still do. But, legions of major consumer brands launched their own primary sites or campaign micro-sites with clever concepts that drove consumers to feel a sense of ownership of the future of those brands. Notable examples include HBO’s Justin Timberlake show FutureSexLove, ABC/Disney’s 13 Nights of Halloween, and Doritos user-generated Super-Bowl ads.
In 2008, B2B companies will follow suit, but it won’t be easy. User-Generated content needs to be used in a way that accomplishes specific marketing objectives, and oftentimes B2B companies meet those objectives through Resource Centers (whitepaper, case study, and guide downloads), web forms, giveaways, or surveys. None of these online marketing tactics allow for community building, commenting, rating, “digging”, or creating profiles.
Extending this to what we do as an online marketing company that works with other businesses (not consumers), we just launched our own site, eroi.com, and there simply aren’t any social networking tools built into our primary site. We have done a tremendous amount of Web 2.0 tactics outside of our main site - four distinct blogs with built-in RSS feeds, Pageflakes, delicious, and digg capabilities, our own Facebook Group page, MySpace page, YouTube Channel, and Flickr feeds, but we haven’t pulled them all together and integrated social networking tools into our primary site. As a self-fulfilling prophecy, we could look at implementing some of these tools into our site or, even better, our products. Online support can leverage the wisdom of other customers and allow searchable discussion threads for product support issues between multiple customers. B2B technology companies can learn from Salesforce, Google and Facebook and open the API to their products to allow for anyone to build modules that easily integrate into their online products.
The online green marketing theme will trend from green worshipping to green irreverence. This year’s inconvenient truth is that green has hit the marketing world like a coal-spitting freight train against a pristine mountainous backdrop. Whether it’s Subaru advertising its gas-gulping vehicles as magically green now, despite the fact that they don’t have a single hybrid model in their entire product lineup. The Green Life named Subaru as One of the 10 Worst Greenwashers in 2003. The company made the list for “reclassifying the Outback from a car to a light truck, thus skirting fuel economy standards and violating the distinction in its marketing campaign between Outbacks and SUVs.” For all the greenwashing that is happening in traditional and online marketing campaigns, there are quite a few genuine stories of companies that are green in almost every aspect of what they do and how they do it. For example, TerraCycle created a conveyor belt system to take a huge amount of food waste and have worms eat it and poop it out into containers. The company makes all of its products and its packaging out of waste. Its marketing reflects the eco-friendly values of the business. Furthermore, Kettle Foods, an Oregon company that buys locally, uses its cooking oil twice to fuel its fleet of trucks and marketing cars on biodeisel, uses solar power and wind energy, and restores wetlands at its plant, makes sure it tells its authentic story of green-rootedness through co-creating its products and brand with customers. This year, realtors are marketing themselves as LEED Certified, attorneys have a whole new practice of green, sustainable experts, and even accountants are joining the fray. This is fantastic - it’s the right thing to do and a competitive differentiator, especially if there is true sustainable expertise there. However, their marketing concepts and themes are often so serious and borderline pious to an already serious topic of choking the Earth from a huge, global, carbon emission problem. 2008 will be the year that green-friendly and green-blooded companies in every industry will have the confidence to assume that consumers are aware of the problem and focus their marketing message on humor and a bit of green irreverence.
The Brits Don’t Like Social Media in Email?November 20, 2008, 11:02 am - It was interesting to read this from the UK. Really you don’t like video in email? It does not make you click? I would totally be up
