You also know we have the best talent in the great State of New Jersey.

Now you can help share us with the world.

I’m pleased to announce the Local Wisdom Referral Program (Sorry, no fancy acronym).

The Referral Program is pretty simple:

Tell people about Local Wisdom. For every qualified lead you give us, we will give you $100. A qualified lead is an opportunity that generates a Sales Discovery Meeting. A Sales Discovery Meeting is a chance for us to meet with the potential client to learn about their needs.

If we are able to close the deal you will receive a 2% commission of the of the total project budget. This commission will be given to the referrer upon receipt of final payment from the project.

As an added bonus, you will also receive our eternal love and gratitude.

For more information view our expertise or see some of our recent work.

If you have any questions, or would like to submit a lead you can contact me at dlarane@localwisdom.com.

Peter Shankman, the founder of Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and The Geek Factory, gave the people at the NJ Business Marketing Association a great talk on how he thinks about and uses social media to make his businesses successful. Thank you Peter, thank you BMA and thank you fellow Lwer Derrick, Christine, and David for attending with me.

Here’s what I took away from the talk

Grow your personal brand
Peter was big on the individual. Businesses don’t do business with people. People do business with people. Your business is a reflection of the people that run it. He wants everyone to develop their personal brand through social concepts like texting (twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc.), phone calling, and (yes) snail mailing notes. A quick side note on snail mailing notes. Last month we were hiring for project managers the people who are standing out in my head are the ones to followed up with a personal hand written note. Its all about doing something different to capture the minds of people. So go forth and start building your personal brand, its going to define you in the future.

Plan for backup??!!?
Peter made a great point stating that he was always told to “have a backup plan”. Why? Why not concentrate on a the plan for success? It’s better than concentrating on the plan for failure. My take is that when you have to plan for failure, what you are planning is costly thus increasing its risk. In Peter’s world (and ours) big things evolve from small things. Start small, start fast, and start now.

Information is free
The world as we knew it was broadcasted to us from only a few sources. Print, radio, and television were all broadcasted from a few to many. The internet is making information free and creating a many to many relationship. Breaking news doesn’t come from CNN anymore, it comes from twitter. In this world we are creating views of the world at the exact moment it happens and sharing that view with people all over the world.

Ask your customers, how they want to get information
There is so much information out there and so many ways to take it in. We listen to podcasts on the commute into work, we read blogs with the morning coffee, we check facebook status when we come home and sit down. We have developed routines of digesting information. So how do you get your information to your customers? Ask them. Talk to your customers often and ask them how they would like to get your information.

Peter says the Social Media is having other people do public relations for you. Here are is 4 fours of social media:

1. Be transparent - it will help you connect with people and if you don’t say it, people will still find out
2. Be relevant – media is fractured so ask your customers how and what they like to hear from you
3. Be brief - our attention spans 140 characters at a time (or 2.7 seconds)
4. Stay top of mind – talk to people often

Again thank you Peter for the great talk.

But by far the best commercial was definitely the Google one, very clever, very simple, and pulls on your heart strings. I only remember seeing it once, and it was so memorable. If you can think of a better commercial let me know in the comments, but I think they ended up with the best bang for the buck commercial by far:

It’s a classic hard work and determination story and if you want to hear more, you’ll have to call me.

Here is a recap of the eight axioms Michael Margolis covers in his recent article in Storytelling Magazine on Brand Storytelling.

1. The very act of naming something transforms our relationship to it.
2. Brands (just like the naming process) are the symbolic and psychic containers for communicating the meaning of stuff.
3. A Brand’s Story equals the collective sum of perceptions and representations of the brand as told by everyone.
4. Every storyteller has a brand, just as every brand has its stories.
5. Origins – Create a back-story for your brand with a clear sense of beginning.
6. Ethos – We all need something to believe in. Distinguish yourself with personality.
7. Cultural Contribution – Brands live and die within a cultural context.
8. Just as we are hard-wired for storytelling, we are hard-wired for brands.

Happy storytelling!

At the same time, our approach in the work we do is based on getting brilliant minds together to focus on an outcome and make it happen. Yes, we work in groups quite a bit. It can be difficult at times to keep things moving towards a creative end, but when done properly it saves a lot of time, money, and you get a great product that everyone loves.

The PsycBlog has a great post entitled How Groups Form, Conform, Then Warp Our Decision-Making, Productivity and Creativity and goes over some very good points on working in and facilitating groups over several subject areas:

• Formation, influence and leadership
• Productivity
• Decision-making
• Creativity
• The power of groups

Also, here is some supplemental reading: 10 Rules That Govern Groups

Here are the three best ways to convert Web traffic into sales:

1. Install a click-to-call feature. Body By Brooklyn Inc., a spa in Brooklyn, N.Y., had trouble getting people to reserve appointments online, so it turned to Karma Martell, chief executive of KarmaCom Inc., a New York interactive marketing company, for help. Ms. Martell suggested that the spa offer a more direct way to get customers to book spa times quickly and easily via a click-to-call widget on its Web site. Here’s how it works: Customers click the link. A box pops up. They insert a phone number and press a button. A short while later, customers receive a phone call, with the spa staff on the line. “It’s a fabulous way to get instant conversions,” Ms. Martell says. Mira Goldin, the spa’s owner, says she has a 5% to 10% conversion rate on the $250-a-year feature. The spa can also program its hours of operation so that the widget disappears when there’s no one available. Other click-to-call widgets are offered by Jajah, TringMe and Flaphone.

Using personal involvement to close a lead from the Web is smart, says Justin Kitch, chief growth officer for Intuit Inc.’s Small Business Group. “A little light human touch can have a big wow factor,” he says, “because the customer is not expecting it.”

2. Chat with customers online. In late April, home improvement e-tailer Improvement Direct Inc., of Chico, Calif., used a chat feature on its site to converse directly with customers about its products and services. The response was overwhelming. “We got flooded,” says Brandon Proctor, vice president of marketing. “We couldn’t believe how many chats we were getting.” In July alone, the company had more than 300 chats daily and converted them into sales at a rate of 9%. Although it had eight staffers answering the chats, the company was forced to temporarily shut the feature last month because of its popularity, Mr. Proctor says. The company is set to relaunch the chat feature, using Bold Software LLC’s BoldChat program, in the next week or two with more staffers. Cost: $15 to $200 per month, depending on the package.

Nick Georgalas
Mike Gallagher, a golf club specialist, uses a chat widget to turn prospects into customers.
For a free chat program, you can try Meebo Inc.’s chat program, just like Mike Gallagher, a golf club specialist and club fitter for TopGolf golf shop in Wood Dale, Ill. He also runs FittingBlog.com, where he installed Meebo’s chat widget a month ago. He chats with about five to 10 prospects daily and the number of fittings has risen nearly 20% in the past month. It’s “a way to better interact with our customers and have more of a one-to-one relationship with them,” says Mr. Gallagher, adding that the technology reassures customers who’re spending hundreds of dollars for a golf club fitting.

3. Offer a try-before-you-buy program. For the past three years, Brendan Quirk, owner of Competitive Cyclist, has seen a 60% conversion rate from its nationwide demo program, in which customers can try out a $4,500 bike before buying it. The Little Rock, Ark., high-end bike e-tailer has a fleet of about 175 bikes that it ships to anyone in the continental U.S. for a fee of $300. Customers try one for a week and have 14 days to buy the bike; if they do, they’ll get a $300 credit towards the purchase. The company sends out 600 bikes a year. Mr. Quirk says he’s taking out the No. 1 hurdle that’s preventing customers from taking the big leap: buyer’s regret.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Today we had a vivid conversation about our elevator speech. Maria, Derrick, and Pinaki had the wonderful opportunity to be an exhibitor at a Johnson & Johnson tradeshow. This gave us the opportunity to practice our sales pitch.

We reviewed our thoughts with the team today and after talking about we came up with this.

Some General Rules

• Limit your “UM”s to zero or less
• Keep eye contact
• Smile (this is big)
• The objective is to get a follow up meeting
• If they look bored switch the conversation and have them talk about themselves
• Everyone sells with their own flavor
• Adding detail makes what you say more concrete
• Limiting words that make you sound unsure will help (words like: about, approximately, etc.)
• Be sincere, you are talking to real people and not autonomous robots. If you don’t mean it, don’t say it.
• Stay positive, we don’t want anyone to associate something negative to you. “That’s the girl who always complains about her workload”

Here are the major steps:

1. Connect with who you are talking to
Depending on the situation, you might want to start off with easy conversation that revolves around something you both share. Yes, the weather, sports, babies, food, travel, house work, are all easy conversations that we have everyday. We want to build a personal relationship with them as opposed to selling to them. We understand that no one likes to be sold to, people don’t really like to be talked to either, people to LOVE being listened to.

2. Listen
The goal is to listen twice as much as talk. We’ve heard the adage, “… that’s why God gave us two ears and one mouth”. We want them to feel comfortable, secure, and in a trusted relationship.

3. The Local Wisdom Opening
Here we give them some context around who you are, what you do, who you work for, and what your company does. It works something like this:

Hi, I’m [your name here]
I work for Local Wisdom
We design, develop, and manage websites
I [brief explanation of your role]
What do you do?

4. Listen
Yes, we are listening again. Listen to what they do and open it up for discussion when they say something you can relate to. “Yes, I’ve faced that with IT.” “Yes, getting everyone to agree is tough.”, etc.

5. The Experience of Local Wisdom
So, not only do we design and develop websites, but we have some real experience to back it up. Here are some quick facts that always raise eyebrows:

• We’ve been in business for 10 years
• We’ve been working with Johnson & Johnson for 6 years
• We’ve been managing JNJ.com for the last year
• Other customers include global companies such as: Berlitz, ELS,
• We have 21 employees (half are project-based and the other half are full time consultants managing a portfolio of websites and interactive communications)
• We are always at arms reach, located in Somerset, NJ (only 5 minutes up the road from corporate)

6. Listen
Learn about their company.
Learn about their experience with websites.
Learn about how they update their websites.
Learn about how they feel about their website.
Learn about the last agency they’ve worked with

7. Closing
Now, you’ve reached the end of your conversation. One of you has to leave or is uninterested in continuing the conversation. If its the latter, please don’t keep them tied to you, as you are wasting their time. If they are engaged and so are you, plan to meet up. Exchange business cards and let them know you will call them (and tell them when you plan on calling them).

So this is a work in progress. Please please comment and share your thoughts, critique, ideas, and experiences as you talk about us.

Today, we’ve refocused our company and brand. Its all about the website! (and yea, we do other things as well)

Download the new brand guidelines and pop some comments with your thoughts.

In a nutshell he says,

I call at odd hours. By that I mean, hours when I’m most likely to catch the boss, but not the staff who usually get in my way. That means early in the morning, late in the evening, and even on weekends.

Now that we have cellphones, this is embarrasingly easy to do.

Start off with a quick opening like, “I’m glad I caught you. I need to talk to you about something really important. There’s a huge benefit for you, but we keep missing each other during the week.”

If someone showed you that kind of commitment, wouldn’t you meet them?