So What is this BNI?

BNI, Business Networking International, is a worldwide organization dedicated to building business through referrals. You join a chapter (for a rather substantial fee), and in return you receive training -- and are able to attend meetings. The process works best when you diligently attend the weekly meetings. The meetings are highly structured.

• They start with officers' reports - how much business has been generated so far this year, number of referrals, new member applications and so on.
• Then there is an educational segment, usually something learned from a business related book, or from BNI corporate.
• Going around the room, everyone has a minute to talk about their business and to ask for referrals.
• Next two members give more in-depth eight minute talks about their businesses. This is where you learn about other businesses in more depth, and get to know other members better so you're more comfortable referring business to them.



Schuyler Hatt, president,
closing the meeting of the Crossroad Connections
 in Delmar, NY.

• Finally we go around the room another time, and referrals are announced, on one on one meetings and  money earned through referrals from BNI members are reported.

I had heard about BNI for years and was pretty skeptical. I was afraid that people would be too pushy, that I would have trouble delivering leads and would be shamed, or it would be a bunch of dull people who just talked over coffee and didn't get much business done. I had also heard from people I trust that it had not worked well for them.

So I had ignored BNI for years.

Then I met the president of the Pittsfield, MA BNI at another networking event. She is a graphic designer, a business closely related to our web development and marketing business. She said BNI had been great for her, and she would like to partner with us on projects, and perhaps form a "power team". She was nice, professional, and not pushy at all.  I went to their visitor's day, and was very impressed. I liked them talking a lot about "Givers Gain" rather than everyone focusing on how you have to help them. Nice spin.

It turned out that there was another member who felt our businesses over lapped, so I reached out to local BNI managers to see if there was another chapter nearby that did not have a web developer.

At the end of the meeting, names
are drawn from the referral slips, and
each eight minute speaker gives a present.
Here Erik Lehtinen is posing with
his new mirror from Patrick Honda,
P&C Promotional Printing.

I went to a meeting of the Crossroads Connection in Delmar, NY and was again impressed by the amount of business being passed around. They were having a cocktail party mixer with another chapter later that week and they invited me so I could get a broader sense of what goes on at BNI. This was terrific because I was able to talk to people in the other chapter about how their web development member has done. I was told he has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in referrals. Well, that did it.

Not only were people nice, professional and low key, they were learning from each other and making money. How very nice.

So, I joined the Delmar chapter two months ago. I've given referrals and people have taken excellent care of my clients and friends. When you see each other every week, there is strong incentive to treat referrals well.

So far I have received two referrals, one for writing and one for a new web site -- both for other members. I'm told that it takes time to get referrals. People have to get to know you and trust you.

Our chapter has a powerful group centered around real estate: a lawyer, a realtor, a loan broker, a contractor, a home inspector, a specialty cleaner ("moldman") and a roofer -- all are able to give each other a substantial number of referrals. We are working on bringing in more members who's businesses sell to other businesses (B2B).

If you would like to try out a meeting, please come to the Normanside Country Club at the end of Salisbury Road in Delmar, NY any Wednesday morning at 7:30 am. Please feel free to ask questions here or shoot me an email. To learn more, go to the Northeast NY BNI web site, or look at our chapter's list of members and professions.

It's a beautiful day for a Business Expo -- SmAlbany in pictures

SmAlbany has been blessed with a gorgeous day. Go hear one of the presentations.

Story Telling Animations are Versatile - and a Good Investment

Stories make a complex product or service make sense, and animations are a great vehicle for telling your story.

Animations can be used on your web site, mailed on a CD or DVD, and linked to in an email, tweet, Facebook page or on LinkedIn. So you can use them in many different ways to get more mileage out of your investment.

Interactive ads also tell a story and are more engaging and memorable than static or print ads.

Why bother?

When you tell people about what you do, they tend to zone out, eyes glazing over. It is just too abstract! But then when you start telling them a story about how you helped someone and made a big difference, they lean forward, listen carefully and become engaged. The magic of story!

A Story

Barbara Bird and Brad Morrison use simulation to make ambulatory healthcare facilities more efficient. Kind of makes your brain hurt just reading it. But their work saves these facilities lots of money. They wanted to be able to go to trade shows and showcase the story of what they had done for the Northern Adirondack Planned Parenthood. They were so proud of their work, they wanted to submit it in national competitions, and send CDs about it to prospects.

They told us their story and gave us one picture of the group that worked on the project. From that we developed an animation that works on a CD, on the web, at trade shows, and whether they are there or not. They have shown it hundreds times with great results.

An Ad Story

Berkshire Products has advertised in print publications read by wood workers for some time. They were offered a low cost trial of an online ad, and it has made a huge difference. They get far more click throughs to their web site than they get from print ads, and people "get" what they do better because the ad has a number of images that clearly show what differentiates this lumber yard.

Great Concert at EMPAC -- Why Didn't More People Come?

The other night I went to a recital by RPI students and faculty at EMPAC, RPI's Experimental Performing Arts Center, and was amazed that there was hardly anyone in the audience. The people in the Rensselaer Contemporary Music Ensemble were very good, and playing work that you don't get an opportunity to hear a lot, including Alabama Song by Kurt Weil (beautifully sung by Lauren Lomanto), an incredible piece by Frederic Rzewski's Les Moutons de Panurge reminiscent of Terry Riley's In C, and the premier of a piece by a talented grad student, Anna Lindemann's Where do you come from little seedling?

When I go to similar concerts at Bard and Williams, the auditorium is always at least 3/4s full... so you can't argue that there isn't a local audience for new music. I think that the other colleges have worked harder at a community partnership and simply market better. They also have arguably been at it longer. People in the region don't think of RPI when they think of music. At the same time, the emails I receive from RPI are in plain text and don't excite me like the pretty ones I get from Bard. And the print material left around when I go to non-RPI events at EMPAC just gloss over upcoming events. There isn't enough detail to get me salivating like the more lengthy pieces from Williams and Bard.

The program for the evening was also light on back story. When you're building an audience, and people aren't familiar with works, you need to build context around things that they may know, or build a story. The story of the collaboration between the graduate composer, Anna Lindemann, and the faculty cellist, David Gibson, would have been great to read about before coming. The marketing of the event, logically enough, focused on the most well-known piece by Weil... but more story would certainly have brought a bigger audience.

Some recommendations:

• Story is needed to build empathy and to give context to the unfamiliar.
• Stronger graphic marketing material is needed to compel people to go out and experience new things.
• Create a Contemporary Music group on LinkedIn to build audience.
• Give more background on what's happening at EMPAC on the Facebook Fan page. Talk about what's happening with artist residencies and what's happening in rehearsals.
• Make it easier for emails to go viral with a Send to a Friend box on the iEAR emails.  (It is great that there is a Twitter follow button and an email signup on EMPAC's home page, and Twitter posts are good!).
• Hold more non-RPI events at EMPAC so more people are aware of what's going on, and have more comprehensive marketing material available.
• Explore more cross marketing with other regional music schools, and performing arts groups.

Adobe Folds InContext Editing into Business Catalyst -- Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!

I don't know who their target market is with this move... ok, it benefits their investors, but certainly not their customers.

Disclaimer:
Before we started our ad agency 15 years ago, I developed trading systems for Merrill Lynch. I know what it means to have to get a system back up quickly in the middle of the night, and I like having support I can call. We try to treat our clients' sites with the same respect and urgency as a trading system.

So, I've avoided open source because I like support that I know I can call.

Background
We used Adobe Contribute as our Content Management System (CMS) for many years, but found the overhead with check in/out to be cumbersome. Our Windows clients had some difficulty with it -- having to re-install -- and Mac users often couldn't get it to work at all -- all highly frustrating and somewhat embarrassing -- so we went looking for another CMS.

There are lots of options in the open source world, fewer in the paying world. We tried out the Adobe InContext Editing beta soon after it was released, figuring you are always safer pointing your clients to a big name brand. I really like the browser based CMS. Posting questions to the Adobe InContext forum, we got some very useful help from the folks at Page Lime -- a similar CMS developed by ex-agency folks. We ended up licensing Page Lime -- even though InContext Editing was still free -- and have been very happy. Our reasoning was that we didn't know what Adobe was going to charge for InContext Editing once it came out of beta, and we already had our frustrations with Adobe support. The folks at Page Lime get right back to us whenever we have an issue.

We left one picky client on InContext Editing, and now I'm just amazed by Adobe's arrogance forcing everyone to move to Business Catalyst and Adobe hosting.

 Business Catalyst

OK, it is handy to have a CMS, email, e-commerce and blog all in one package, but at this point their email and blog software are not best of breed. I think that most people would rather stay with Blogspot or Wordpress for blogs and Constant Contact or Cooler Email for email marketing.

I think that Adobe is arrogant forcing all InContext users to use their hosting -- even if they are giving users about a year to migrate. They are only providing email support, no phone support, and many other web hosts provide 24/7 phone support for less. The Partner costs are also exorbitant at $995 or $1995.  Their baseline pricing for the whole hosting package is high at $39/month, and the web starter at $16/month is no bargain. 

I understand that this is a shifting time for Adobe as they navigate the move to mobile browsing and continue to negotiate with Apple to get Flash on the iPhone, and they move furthere into technical application development with Flex.

The acquisition of Business Catalyst is fine, but forcing a move to Business Catalyst is an awkward one for their core designer client base. They should have been more careful getting the product up to speed before being so pushy. 

For now, I recommend that InContext users migrate to Page Lime. The coding you insert in your pages is very similar to InContext. We've made the move, and it is an easy one.

Great Examples of Social Media

The AMA had a terrific lunch last week on Marketing 2.0 with Bernie Borges from Find and Convert and Rick Short from Indium.

We had a great table. There was Liz Lisuzzo, a Consumer Research Analyst from Golub. What an impressive gal! She's worked her way up into market research and is in charge of their social media program, crafting their emails and message on Facebook and Tweeter. It was so interesting to hear how people are going to Facebook to talk with Price Chopper... since they get near instant feedback. Customer interaction is moving from Customer Support to market research -- isn't that an interesting unexpected consequence of social media?

Then there was the marketing manager from Albany Molecular Research (didn't have a card and I missed her name - sorry!). We were talking about doing Webinars, podcasts and video casts. She leaped in doing a multi-location video cast with their business partners with 300 participants. We agreed that it is ok to post these online events without much marketing. People find them. I've been amazed that podcasts on our site are out top pages.

Indium makes high tech solder paste in Utica. Rick Short, their marketing manager, has made amazing use of social media. They have 60 bloggers, mainly engineers, that are known throughout the world. He also has made viral videos, like this one with his wife:

Albany Center Gallery Thread Show a Visual Treat

The Threads show gives you a whole new perspective on how fabric -- and thread can be used to create art. Two MFA graduates are exhibiting. One with embroidered pieces -- room layouts, catchy phrases, and one with 3 D fabric pieces.

And, our son, Fritz, played at the opening.