Grade A Entrepreneurs

Just saw this morning a RT by David Szetela of Esther Dyson‘s tweet: “Entrepreneurs, before you do the VC or angel deal, take a look: http://bit.ly/9YyFrq.”

Great, great reminder for many entrepreneurs! Don’t wonder, calculate! Do get emotional, calculate! For most entrepreneurs, it’s hard to get funded, and then, when they receive a term-sheet, at the same time they are thrilled, they worry (for good or bad reasons) about dilution, often terrified at the idea that they might have been ripped off. So prepare for that too, anticipate and use OwnYourVenture.com to know what to expect.

This simple tool was created a while back by Bo Fishback, who is the vice president of entrepreneurship for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the president of Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation.

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Practically Radical, by Bill Taylor, the co-founder of Fast Company, is about transforming your company, shaking up your industry, and challenging yourself. Now, where do you start? Not from a vacuum: the times for dreams of starting from a clean slate and building up utopias are long gone. So, be practical. Yet adopting a middle-of-the-road approach can only make you shrivel up into mediocrity. So, be radical, i.e. proceed from what the roots of your company are, from the raison-d’être of what your industry is, and find the wellspring of all information – others. Everything is here, around you, for you to reinvent yourself as an innovative executive, as a purpose-driven entrepreneur, as a movement leader. In a nutshell, be practically radical, i.e, find solutions. Taylor quite relevantly reminds us of one of the best Clintonian piece of advice: “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”

While the notion of “disruption” remains a pervasive marketing catchword, what I like most in this book is the idea that innovation stems from what I would call “constructive subversion,” which was also the underlying theme of Mavericks at Work that Taylor co-authored with Polly LaBarre. When the know-it-alls perceive the world from their allegedly expert standpoint, they show a strong propensity to downgrade novelty into a French expression, calling it “déja vu.” Creative minds reverse perspectives and look at a familiar situation as if they had never seen it before. They experience the “Vujà dé,” “a strange term” Taylor says, that may be attributed to various people (he mentions Tom Kelley, Bob Sutton and George Carlin). It refers to the old rhetorical device of re-arranging syllables of a word or words in a sentence (metathesis) that French people ultimately named verlan in 1950, and that became the language of the immigrants and the working class of the Parisian suburbs.

So, regardless of any former experience, become an immigrant within your own turf: what you will see will shape how you change, and where you will look will shape what you see. You will make Providence (RI) a safer place with Dean Esserman, rejuvenate the Swiss Swiss watch manufacturing industry as did Lebanese Nicolas Hayek who co-founded the Swatch Group – while resurrecting Omega – or redefine the standards of service for Internet retail (even those of you who believe you know everything about Tony Hsieh, read Taylor‘s visit to Zappos‘ headquarters as a … cevino – verlan for novice). The language of innovation recombines known syllables to create new emotions: “the most enduring source of competitive advantage is for emotionally charged employees to capture the emotionally drained customers.”

This book is remarkably well organized in three sections (transforming your company, shaking up your industry, and challenging yourself), each subdivided into three chapters, with each ending chapter reading as a collection of five takeaways: Five truths of corporate transformation, Five new rules for starting something new, Five habits of highly humbitious leaders. Each section can be read independently. Yet, albeit permitting an à la carte study, the entire book is compelling because of the underlying consistency of the message. Will you ever be able to transform your company or shake up an industry if you have all the answers? At best, you will just be a prefab manager in a prefab company in a prefab world speaking a prefab language in the midst of prefab people living their prefab lives… You will never even think of the hidden geniuses around you or around the world at large, and you will never have the “million-dollar idea to attract ideas” that enabled Reed Hastings of Netflix to improve the company’s recommendation engine by an order of magnitude. “The real genius of leadership today is knowing how to move forward when you and your senior colleagues don’t have all the answers — devising ways to uncover the most powerful ideas in the most unexpected places, even if those ideas come from outside the organization.”

So, be ambitious, yet remain humble, and become “humbitious,” and look at your company as a community where “everyone is in charge.” Tellingly enough, the penultimate chapter of the book ends with the Threadless phenomenon. Ultimately, modern leaders could be imaginative curators who make everybody shine.

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis

Say you’ve worked and socialized with Indians for the last ten or fifteen years in America – does it help you to understand what India is about when you travel over there for a business trip? Maybe a little, but no more than that. India is a complex, multi-dimensional country with an intricately layered culture, where ancestral thinking models may seep into the most seemingly standard ways of doing business, often unbeknownst to the newcomer and even to his/her Indian host. That is, in a nutshell, what Anand Giridharadas’s India Calling is about.

Anand‘s book is a deep foray into the human, social, and business fabrics of modern India. Born in Cleveland, Ohio from Indian parents who came to the US in the 1970’s, and a graduate from the University of Michigan, he felt like a stranger when he came back to work in his parents’ homeland in the early 2000’s, reversing his parents’ path. His autobiographical story is the analysis of his disorientation, the dismemberment of what he thought he knew through his parents’ stories and visits to relatives as a child, as well as the anatomy of the image he had subconsciously formed about this quickly changing country from an American standpoint.

As you move through the six simple words that title each chapter of this book (Dreams, Ambition, Pride, Anger, Love and Freedom), you find out that these words do not depict a simple reality, but are instead huge baskets of interwoven cultural threads. Having become a journalist, Anand landed himself into an unexpected challenge: “it was terrific to have gotten the job, but how was I supposed to explain to others a country that I had to explain to myself.”

Within each chapter, the multiple protagonists that Anand meets either purposedly or haphazardly embody India’s self-invention, the stepping-in of people onto the fast-moving train of progress that distances them from the past. Yet, you see the uncanny capability of that past to come back like an agile animal. Methodically and incrementally, for instance, Ravindra moves away from his initial fate on an entrepreneurial track, as he goes through each of the stations toward the project of his life, the “project of himself” that he has so thoroughly planned. But can you plan everything? No: “It had not occurred to him that a woman, unlike an exam is not conquered simply by willling that you get her,” Anand notes. Ravindra leaves a telling message to the author: “Life sometimes becomes so selfish that it wants everything. And while trying 4 everything we miss something that is worth everything.” His “dream home” stands in front of the Hindu temple, a sobering reminder that not everything is about growth and success, that human beings do not make their way through one single time-dimension, but live on an unsteady vista point at the intersection of multiple fault lines.

Regardless of who they are and what they do, Anand’s encounters embody complexity. So hold off on any judgment. Depending on how you look at it, Mukesh Ambani and many others are moral, amoral, or even immoral. It’s not simply because the context-based ethics of dharma continues to compete with the occidental view of fairness, it’s also because the traditional caste system simultaneously morphs into new tribal values (where village-based allegiance may come across as influence peddling, for example). As dreams turn into ambition and ambition into pride, as “capitalism has transfixed the Indian imagination,” and as Hyderabad and its forrest of billboards herald a promised land, anger is also looming. Anand meets with the Maoist insurgent Varavara Rao and, then, his nephew Venugopal: he too has a dream – the dream of purging Indians from their “bad elements,” both the old and the new ones, yet,  “his own story was one of the oldest patterns of all: the Brahmin sitting high on his perch, imagining how the peasants down below should live.” History looks like a continuous cycle of reincarnations moving away from a past that is defined by either what you want to forget, as is Ravindra’s case, or what you want to resurrect, as is Anand’s quest.

In short, here is why you should read this book:

• If you are doing business with India. It will help you to scope out the realm of what you don’t know, and make you start to listen to others in order to build meaningful relationships within a complex culture.
• Or, if you like literature, read this book as a collection of intertwined short stories!

Guest writer: Sophie Delphis

We like to learn from living role models and marketing books. Famous figures of the past are equally inspiring, and the principles for success almost timeless….

An adventurous entrepreneur, Helena Rubinstein: I recently read Michèle Fitoussi’s Helena Rubinstein: La femme qui inventa la beauté (The woman who invented beauty, Grasset 2010), a new biography of the woman behind one of the original cream and cosmetics mega-corporations. Rubinstein, born in a Jewish ghetto of Krakow in 1872, was not a likely candidate for fame and riches. Her father was a generally unsuccessful shopkeeper more interested in the Good Book than his accountability books. As a woman, Helena’s main pre-ordained purpose was to marry young and as well as possible (the fact that she was the eldest of eight girls, all of whom would need dowries, made getting her married off a particularly pressing matter for her parents). However, the stubborn and intelligent bit of a woman (standing at only 4’10”) would have none of the potential suitors – she wanted her own life, and a life far more glamorous than her Orthodox neighborhood could offer her.

In her early twenties, she took a ship to Australia, where she would work for one of her expatriated uncles in Coleraine, in Western Victoria. (Her parents, presumably, could only shrug off this far-flung exile as their unmarried daughter’s earned lot). The conditions were rough, and particularly for the rather dainty Helena, who was only accustomed to city living. However, she was also an avid worker, and not content to remain forever stranded among rough men and herds of sheep. It would take her several years to find, but she did finally hit upon her exit strategy – to develop and sell a face cream to Australian ladies eager to remedy their sun- and wind-damaged skins.

The art of living and breathing marketing: Here are the beginnings of an international corporate empire They are humble and quasi-accidental, which is the case of so many of the major brands that shaped the twentieth century. Helena Rubinstein’s start-up had all the right factors for success: a good idea with good timing, obsessive amounts of work from its founder, and brilliant positioning. What is so engrossing about this entrepreneurial saga is how much Rubinstein consciously and carefully created her brand and her image. She lied, or rather, she re-arranged facts, beautifying reality. She was certainly not the first or last to do this, but she did it with a keen sense of consumer demands and needs. She not only sold the benefits of her creams and, later, cosmetics, but her entire persona as well, letting herself become in people’s minds a glamorous woman of wealthy, perhaps noble origins. When she launched Velaze, her first cream, she positioned it as the recipe of a world-famous European doctor containing exotic ingredients. She purposefully overpriced her product, recognizing that women wanted to buy luxury. She established a salon where she enticed journalists to come try her skincare line. In short, Helena Rubinstein, from the very beginning, lived and breathed marketing.

The result of her work ethic (or perhaps, more accurately workaholism) coupled with her fantastic imagination for selling herself, her company, and by extension her goods, is a company that made her one of the richest women of her time. She was, in the truest sense, a self-made multi-millionaire. Her model, although in some ways specific to her field and time, is also universal, and her business adages hold true for entrepreneurs of any time:

• Find something worth selling that people actually want to buy.
• Devote yourself to formulating a product that can compete against others.
• Know what your consumers want so that you can market to them specifically and successfully.
• Always be ready to adapt to evolving needs and trends.

The fact that so many brands that have become institutions today followed a similar structure and growth pattern is no surprise: no matter the period or the product, the bases of human interest and interaction remain the same.

More about the author, Michèle Fitoussi (in French).

Guest writer: Sophie Delphis

My mother is currently finishing up her French translation of Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, which comes out in the US on March 8^th. As in past translation work she has done, I’ve been providing irregular advice on how to adapt certain phrases or anecdotes in a way that conveys the comfortable, conversational tone of the original English. And I’ve also taken the opportunity to read the book myself. I’m not necessarily the immediate target demographic as an opera student. However, the book’s theme is in fact right up my alley, as I attempt to enchant audiences every time I sing. In fact, having heard the pitches of dozens of entrepreneurs since I was born, I realize that enchanting is at the base of any human interaction.

I love that Guy has readers share their own stories at the end of each chapter, as they show the breadth of what experiences have a lasting effect. I myself was not initially introduced to Guy Kawasaki as a business man, or a start-up guru and author. As the president of my mother’s American company, ACIUS, he was throughout my childhood the man who had given me a nearly life-size stuffed tiger when I was a baby. Photos abound of me through the various stages of my being able to keep myself upright, at first merely smiling at this gigantic (but apparently gentle) creature on the ground, and later riding courageously on its shoulders. And now, two decades later, I still have not only the toy, but also the set of memories that goes along with it. Guy’s gift amazed me as a small child, conjuring exotic forests and fantastical adventures in our Paris apartment, and still enchants me as a young adult.

Of course, my tiger is not strictly a case of business enchantment, but it isn’t so far off, either. The gift was so peculiar and particular that it stuck, not only with me, but with my mother as well. Being able to affect a colleague’s child so much also means making a lasting impression on the person with whom you work. The enchantment was deeply entrenched in both of us because the gift was not merely a bland token of respect sent without thought, one of the dozens of nameless and faceless stuffed animals I received in the first few years of my life from people who were themselves to remain nameless and faceless to me. The grandiose and whimsical nature of my tiger made the gift personal, and has made me associate it with the ACIUS team, and Guy in particular, ever since. The tiger has born its fruits, as I’m reading Guy’s books twenty years later!

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis

The Mesh, an old word meaning the “opening between the threads of a net” got its technology flavor with the concept of mesh networking generally defined as “a type of networking wherein each node in the network may act as an independent router.” For Lisa Gansky, in her book The Mesh, Why the future of business is sharing, “the Mesh is the new way of doing business.” It is made possible by the increasingly sophisticated understanding of consumers’ behavior patterns, as well as multiple technologies that matured over the last fifteen years, ranging from RFID, broadband management, GPS-enabled mobile web devices, to social media networks or data processing.

Described in chapter 1, “Getting to know the Mesh,” the Zipcar experience provides a foundational example from which Gansky presents the “Mesh business” that has fleshed out over the last ten years. It is defined through five main attributes:

• Shareability: Products or services can be shared within a community (whatever it is);
• Advanced Web and mobile networks, and information infrastructures: They allow real-time tracking of what is shared;
• Immediate availability: Users can access the shared goods wherever they are physically;
• Evangelization through social networking: Happy users spread the word about their experience;
• Global service networks: Any Mesh service can come with a network of ancillary services through partnerships.

Gansky ends up adopting/adapting the technology definition of mesh networks: “A mesh describes a type of network that allows any node to link in any direction with any other node in the system.”

The advantages and the meaning of the Mesh economy are spelled out throughout the following eight chapters for both the users and the providers of Mesh services. The on-demand availability of physical goods creates a new type of cooperative and trust-based environment as well as, ultimately, a cultural shift that points toward the new aspects of our liberal economy. This includes:

Usage-based consumption models: Why not take advantage of shareable goods when they are easily available? How many cars do we really need in a family? Do we need to buy new clothes all the time? Why not swap children’s clothing and toys through ThredUp, for example? The Mesh economy provides us access to many goods while sparing us from the constraints and superfluous expenses of ownership, as well as the depreciative process of accumulating things. The throwaway economy is disappearing quickly.

Global anti-waste approaches:  While many anti-waste measures in our life are still primarily corrective, the Mesh is designed to structurally reduce the amount of garbage in the first place. Continued participation in the Mesh requires goods that hold up to repeated uses, i.e. that are durable and reparable. On the production side, this entails demand-driven and tightly integrated distributed supply chains that also provision “reverse supply chains,” as the goal is not only to sell products, but also to repair them or recycle and “upcycle” parts.

Marketplace-driven overhead reduction principles: Remember the noise ten years ago about how Internet was removing the middleman and how we were entering the disintermediation age (strikingly enough, a word that was coined in the sixties and originally referred to the ability for consumers to invest directly in securities)? This is actually happening. Tellingly, to defend itself in 2008, Prosper, a p2p financial company, had to argue that that it was not a bank, but a marketplace, which the SEC’s investigators admitted. Great news. Structures do not build the economy, consumers do… and they do so precisely in a marketplace where they expect transparency.

My summary: The Mesh, a consumer-driven free economy: Mesh businesses address people and send them recommendations and/or advertizing messages based on their personal behavioral patterns: that’s why they are winning at a fast pace. While traditional liberalism mandates the right to undertake from the entrepreneur’s standpoint and is predicated on mechanisms pushing products to consumers, the Mesh liberalism factors in the consumers’ pull and their ability to transform any company into a service company delivering services to which they may or may not subscribe, depending on the quality of the offering and assistance they get.

Netflix slayed the “movie dragon,” because consumers are the ones who make or break companies (more so than ever). They are free social animals, choosing with whom they interact and to whom they want to listen, and are moving away from business institutions that do not hear their conversations. In many respects, the world of the Mesh is the expression of a consumer-driven free economy as well as the market incarnation of Rousseau’s social contract “by which every person, while uniting himself with all, shall obey only himself and remain as free as before.

A very interesting book, which also includes an extensive “Mesh directory.”

Thanks to Seth Godin for attracting my attention to this book!

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis

The shibumi strategy by Matthew E. May is both a parable and a lesson on the quiet aesthetic simplicity and transformative energy in Japanese culture. It all starts with Andy Harmon’s sudden misfortune. One day, his company closes. A good husband and good father (very much the image of the perfect, hardworking American for a magazine cover of the 50’s… only several decades later), he can’t just go back home to tell his family that he is out of the job and lament.

He has a few hours to find a solution in a small town with virtually no job openings except, perhaps, at the town’s only car dealership. After enjoying a corporate position in a customer service call center, Andy decides to try his luck as a salesman at Mainstreet Motors, something for which he doesn’t initially have the right profile. The result is that he must basically reinvent himself – and he does. Through a Zen self-discovery process, and a fair amount of trial and error, he finds out how to be something else than the stereotypical car salesman, and meets with success by building a long-term referral business.

All’s well that ends well. Albeit a little bit schmaltzy at times, this book is an interesting perspective on leadership. If you are tired of exhortative talks “(yes, think-hard-you-can do-it”) and of in-your-face leaders who gab about business and their grand exploits just as passionately as car salesmen go on and on about their Toyotathon sales events, read this book. It is focused on internalizing leadership, rebuilding your own balance to look at your environment with fresh eyes, and transforming what’s around you for the better. Leadership is about pulling, not about pushing, and “shibumi” is about effortless effectiveness. Incidentally, the author also refers to the Italian “sprezzatura,” with the new meaning that Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529) gave to the word in the The Book of the Courtier: a sort of nonchalance, “so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says seem effortless, and almost unpremeditated.”

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis

Chatting over breakfast the other day at Il Fornaio with Nilofer Merchant, whose book The New How, Building Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy I discussed in a former post, I realized that a “new how” often starts with a “new me.” This “new me” can be triggered by unforeseen events – events that can either traumatize and send us into dispiriting limbos or, instead, move us forward. The latter definitely illustrates the early life of Nilofer. A Muslim girl born in Mumbai who followed her mother to the United States when she was five, she was culturally destined to become the lovely wife of (preferably) a rich man.

The tale of two worlds: Nilofer’s mother came to the Silicon Valley after she divorced her husband in India. In order to make a living to support her children, she decided get a degree in respiratory therapy. Nilofer saw her mother become a student – a great role model in a way. Yet, it’s a case when role modeling doesn’t necessarily mean that much. Nilofer’s mother worked out of necessity and not for self-development or accomplishment. In other words, she stuck to the culture in which she was born; as a result, she did not inspire her own daughter the way she intended, and the relationship between mother and daughter turned into a dialogue between the deaf when the time came of discussing the terms of Nilofer’s arranged marriage.

Nilofer had graduated from high school and just started Community College. She did not have an issue with the arranged marriage itself, and she had no interest in a cultural rebellion. “I knew,” she says, “that it was my responsibility to accept an arranged marriage. My mother had made many hard decisions to raise us. I always felt a combination of debt and gratitude, and my assigned cultural role was to get married in such a way that it would dowry-wise take care of my mother.” So what went wrong? One day, Nilofer, coming back from school, found her entire family (uncles, aunts, and cousins) in the midst of a sort of pre-Nikah party celebrating the fact that a contract for the arranged marriage had been completed. Everything would have been fine, except that when Nilofer asked her uncle if the contract arranged for college for her, he responded that her mother didn’t want to put the topic on the table. Being raised in the US, Nilofer asked to simply add this clause in the contract. Her mother wouldn’t allow it. After a few days of fighting, Nilofer realized that her threat of leaving the house wouldn’t sway her mother. So, she packed books and clothes in boxes and moved away — and was disowned: ” I no longer had a family;  I no longer had a culture. I no longer had a community,” Nilofer says.

Alea jacta est (The die has been cast): Such a defining moment comes by chance or mishap. It’s an inflection point on the road of your personal history, a sudden discovery that shatters your world and creates the acute sense that you must act quickly. Had Nilofer ever dreamed of moving out and settling into the tiny space she was given as student body treasurer? Obviously not: but she recognized that, while her mother had power because she owned her community, she herself had the power to negotiate because she was a valuable commodity. She saw two choices ahead of her that had never materialized before – one safe, the other unknown – and chose the uncharted road. In that act, she unwound her personal destiny from her cultural and family identities, and placed it into her own hands.

For Nilofer, reinventing herself was not so much an act of mutiny or even of provocation (in fact she was sure that her mother would change her mind) – as it was the instinctive acknowledgement that the world exists beyond one’s doorstep. Nilofer worked her way through college for ten years, landing jobs at Apple, GoLive Systems, and Autodesk. I found interesting that, as soon as she completed her MBA, she named her consulting firm Rubicon Consulting (a company she ran successfully for ten years). She is now onto her new venture, also quite significantly branded: Innovative Cultures & Kicking Ass.

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis

What I like about long flights is that they enable me to read an entire book in one shot. This is how I read The Dragonfly Effect by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith from Vonavona ventures (an advisory and consulting practice), published earlier this year.

This excellent book focuses on how social media have the power “to make a difference.” In a way, that’s what all the books about social media are about. However, the special focus of The Dragonfly Effect is to emphasize the behavioral components that drive the actual impact of social media campaigns, and “make them stick,” to reuse the expression coined by Chip Heath, who wrote the foreword of the book. The dragonfly metaphor gives the authors the four wings of the model that governs the efficiency of a social campaign: Focus + GET (i.e. Grab Attention, Engage, Take Action): “A dragonfly travels with speed and directionality only when all for wings are moving in harmony,” the authors note. Each wing constitutes a chapter, and each chapter details the specific design principles for building up the emotional contagion process.

The book starts with the powerful story of two teams who ended up joining forces, Team Sameer and Team Vinay. Contrary to most social media stories, we are not in a fairyland here: Sameer Bhatia and Vinay Chakravarthy both lost their battle against leukemia in 2008. But both teams achieved phenomenal success by making an impact, not only by raising awareness about donating bone marrow, but also by getting tangible results – i.e. changing mindsets and doubling the number of South Asians registered with the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP).

The initial condition of success in social medial is to have a focus; in other words, “to hatch a goal that will make an impact.” This focus is driven by five design principles: Humanistic, Actionable, Testable, Clarity, and Happiness. Yet, focus, however clear it may be, is not enough. How are you going to stand out in an “overcrowded, overmessaged, and noisy world?” This is when the art of “grabbing attention” comes in, with its own design principles: send out a message which is personal, unexpected, and visual, triggers a visceral reaction, and subsequently enables people to connect with your goal — engage. People will join your cause if you tell them a story in which they can believe, if you are authentic, address them when they can listen, and if, in turn, you respond to their engagement. Once this is done, you have all the basic prerequisites for people to feel empowered and take action. This is the sort of groundwork that gets 100,000 people to join your Save Darfur Facebook group. “Your goal is to inspire and enable your group to take action.” In short, “movements that begin online must be backed by real-life action; otherwise, there is no point.”

The book reads well (and is well-written), and again, has the merit emphasizing the social psychology side of leveraging social media both for the initiator and the followers of a social media movement. Multiple examples relevantly illustrate the point of the authors. We may take some exception, to a certain extent, with the use of the Obama campaign as a model. While it is true that the Obama social media campaign itself exemplifies the four wings of The Dragonfly Effect and showed efficiency in making people vote, it is also obvious that Obama failed to create an enduring movement capable of morphing into a lasting political groundswell supporting him as President. An additional chapter could have dealt with the art of stringing campaigns together with a more precise analysis of the complexity of the dialectical interactions between the online and the real worlds – a topic that I partially addressed in a preface I wrote for Seth Godin’s Tribes. While it is customary to emphasize the social media aspect of the Obama campaign, the actual efficiency of the campaign was founded upon a complementary relationship between the analog and digital worlds.  The physical side of the Obama tribe fizzled out, which, in turn, made his team overlook the necessity of coining an efficient social media message moving forward. No Social Web can affect change without a “ground crew” on Terra Firma and, as Dan Ariely mentions in this afterword, an understanding of the predictable irrationality “of what motivates the people behind the social network.”

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis

Reaching out to customers has been most companies’ motto for over twelve years, except that back then, “reaching out” mostly meant finding ways to bring them to your website with the maximum of bells and whistles through large email marketing campaigns. Great. It works, and works well, but it’s only one side of the equation. Reaching out to customers today also entails going where customers are and interacting with them where they are: social networks. In other words, you must interact with people your company does not already know because they haven’t already necessarily filled out a form on your site, chosen to get squeezed into giving their email address, or expressed that they “like” you.

Invite socializers to stretch their neck: Build up a base of followers. But you may not want to do this by blasting messages only about your company to people who didn’t especially care about you in the first place. Also send meaningful information showing that you care about them and that you are not simply company-centric. People do notice useful data and interesting messengers. Then, they feel like stretching their neck a little bit. Each time you send a message that includes a link (whether it leads to your company’s site or not), associate an ObjectiveMarketer landing page. Here is how it works:

• You write your message using ObjectiveMarketer;
• You choose the landing page you want to associate to your messages.

For example, at TWTRCON in San Francisco the other day, I sent this tweet:

When people clicked on it, here is what they could see: The page of the TWTRCON site I was referring to and a reminder of me, as the messenger, at the top of the page – the landing page- where my two latest posts are automatically displayed.

Think of the benefits for a company or a company division!

The ObjectiveMarketer landing page is:

• A frame of whatever size you like that accompanies the messages that you send.  You can create different types of frames depending on your campaigns.
• A stage where you can add information under any form: a link to your site, a video, a chat box, an image, coupons, a shopping cart, you name it!
• A Website on-demand on the fly. The department where you work may offer promotions at a faster pace than what the corporate Web development team can implement. So just tell your story through a dynamic landing page!

The ObjectiveMarketer landing pages present the capabilities of traditional lead capture pages and can be indifferently reference or transactional landing pages depending on how you decide to design those frames. The possibilities are virtually unlimited. Just look at the wide set of features and designs offered by Marketing Hits, a Web Design, SEO, and Online Marketing company created by Brian Yanish, that also offers custom Objective Marketer landing pages: “MarketingHits custom landing pages are designed to leverage social media ROI by providing top of the page brand recognition and click-through,” Brian says. “In today’s fast-paced Twitter and Facebook world,” he adds, “brands need new ways to connect web content to their brand. Landing pages provide a unique opportunity to drive visitors to a company’s website sales or content pages – of course without violating the rights and the revenues of the site that is framed by that landing page.”

Marketing Hits has designed the landing pages of multiple companies.

Here, the agent tweets about a post from inman news.

When the user clicks on the link, he/she sees inman news but also has the opportunity to know more about the agency’s hot listings in the videos placed on the landing page.

It’s a win-win situation. A tweet brings traffic both on the site that is tweeted about and that of the messenger, who can increase his/her own traffic by 30%, and often much more.

Note: Traffic generated by an ObjectiveMarketer landing page is controlled by the user of ObjectiveMarketer, never by ObjectiveMarketer as a vendor – which makes OM’s landing pages completely different from the advertising banners implemented by technology vendors in exchange for free usage of their products. Disclosure: I am a board member of ObjectiveMarketer.