Ba de ya – say do you remember
Ba de ya – dancing in September
Ba de ya – never was a cloudy day

The fact that it’s November (not September) wakes me. When I wake, I’m 100% awake immediately. I work at home, and I love my work, so I generally rise, head the twenty or so steps right into the office, and begin working straightaway. Before social media, my work mornings peacefully began with work, email, and more work.

I’m now so connected it makes me dizzy. You too? I write a blog post, and it automagically updates my Twitter account which automaniacally updates my Facebook page and FriendFeed. My RSS feeds and email lists are also updated with the new post, and people write me email to comment or offer their experiences. (I would l-o-v-e it if people would comment right in the comments section below my posts, but they don’t. [Try it, you'll like it!])

So what happens when one of these communication mechanisms fails? Utter chaos.

Someone schedules me for a meeting via some online tool that sends an email in the wee hours of the morning, but the email doesn’t show up. I’m asleep when the meeting is happening, but I don’t know it. The client calls, the rep calls, and I’m dreaming of blissfully sunny skies and raspberry pie so nice, completely unaware of a meeting of great minds and a motivated team. And then the ‘ba de ya’ lyrics…

My point? Oh yes, that. Adding more steps to the prelude to a conversation is an ineffective means of communicating. I’m going to rely less on technology and more on good ole fashioned 1-2-step communication to make sure we continue running a smoothly gliding train.

Facebook messaging is a failure of communication
If you’re relying on me getting an email that’s sent from Facebook to tell me I have a message on Facebook, in which there is a link to a Facebook page that I first must log in to, then read and reply, so you get an email saying there’s a message waiting for you on Facebook, well, that’s setting up a failure of communication. It is literally and needlessly adding at least 3-4 extra steps to the communication process with no overt benefit.

Not intending to pick on Facebook here (well, maybe a little). The fact is that all online tools have a fail ratio. They all fail at some point.

Most of us are equipped with the awesome ability to speak to each other or zip off a quick email. I’m going with those.

If you want to get in touch, email me. If you have an urgent need, call me. I check email three times per day. If you don’t hear back in roughly 24 hours, you can assume that either I’m sick, on vacation, or Cornholio has killed me. I respond to every legitimate email I get, and I love hearing from people. Ba de ya.

Hot and cold water
It’s 95 degrees out. Hot food and drink are the last thing on my list of desirable sustenance. I’m pouring ice cold chocolate hemp milk into my coffee solely to bring the temperature down so that it does not heat up my body. And yet, every time I turn on the water at the sink, I turn on the hot water. It’s a bad habit. I keep correcting myself, but not before I feel hotness on hands. It costs money to heat water. Granted, it’s not much, but when you wash your hands as often as do I (yeah, I’m sort of a germ freak), it adds up. I’m teaching myself to turn on the cold water first, but years of badness are hard to undo.

This one isn’t bad, but it illustrates the point well
I eat a lot of soy yogurt. Heaps. I usually buy the 4-serving tubs, but sometimes they are sold out, so I get the 1-serving minis. The tubs come with a re-closeable lid, the minis with a foil peel-away lid. Every single time I get the minis, upon finishing the yogurt, I search the kitchen in vain for the plastic lid so I can recycle it. But there isn’t one, I realize eventually. My mind believes there is a lid because so often there is indeed a lid. I know that I must recycle that lid. Each time the product availability changes, I must change. If I do not change, I waste my effort.

Bad marketing is habit forming
Every week, it seems, I talk with agents and sales professionals who are trying to find easier ways to connect; ways to put less effort into their marketing, and ways to procrastinate from implementing tried and true marketing methods that work.

Procrastinating is habit forming. Bad marketing is habit forming. The more you invest in bad marketing habits, the more your business will flounder, and the more you will ask yourself when will it all turn around? Blaming slow business on the economy is a form of procrastination. Stop blaming and start marketing. When will it turn around?

It will turn around when you turn around.

Turn it around now!
Here’s a simple yet extremely effective exercise. Take a look at your marketing methods. List them out on a sheet of paper (or in Excel if you just can’t bring yourself to use paper and a pen). List out everything you do during your day that could possibly be categorized as marketing, and add it to your list. Now, write the time you are spending on each item on a weekly basis. Next, write the positive outcome in a third column, and finally, write the negative outcomes in a fourth column. It will be very easy to see what is an effective use of your marketing time. This exercise will take you all of about one hour.

I’m going to be totally honest with you here. This exercise might make you feel bad about yourself. It might make you wonder why you’ve been wasting so much time on facebook or twitter. It might show you that your blog posts are ineffective. Or, it may show that all of these are wildly effective. (I hate to say it, but in most cases, they’re not.)

There are some side benefits of this exercise. In addition to giving you a bird’s eye view of your bad marketing habits, you will get a good sense of how much consistent effort you have actually put into each method, and ultimately, how much you are willing to invest in your success. It will tell you if you can effectively manage your own marketing, or if you really need a marketing manager to keep you focused and on task. Finally, it will help you discover your strengths and weaknesses, which can be applied to your personal brand development.

Things can change, but first and foremost you must stab those bad habits in the heart with the sharp end of a highly motivated goal. You can do it. You just have to do a little hard work. Meanwhile, I’ll be hunting around for a nonexistent yogurt top.

The interview went fine, and she seemed nice. I could tell she was firmly planted as a contemporary of the current generation, and it served as a perfect analogy for what I see in marketing nowadays: People lost in a sea of unknown choices, trying to make technology do for them what they could easily do themselves in less time and with greater effectiveness.

When she left, I asked if she needed directions. “Sure,” she said. Nice of her to accept them I guess.

I proceeded to tell her: “Go up the street to the stop sign, take a right, take a left at the signal, then another left at the next signal, and that will take you straight to I-5.” I could have drawn her a map in about ten seconds. They were pretty easy directions, but I could see she didn’t know what to do with them. I asked, “You’re going to use your GPS instead?”

She nodded her head yes, smiling, and walked out the door thanking me for the time. I poured some juice, and looked out the window about five minutes later. She was still sitting in the driveway messing with the GPS with a furrowed brow. She fumbled with getting the GPS to stay on the windshield for a couple minutes, before driving away.

People complain they haven’t enough time today. Today’s new processes take infinitely longer, even for the generation brought up on them, and they are less effective. Let’s take a look at a couple of simple examples of this.

Example #1
Old way of making contact:
1. Look up phone number,
2. Call,
3. Talk.
Conclusion: Pretty darn effective and quick to boot!

New way of making contact:
1. Turn on computer or PDA,
2. Log in to facebook,
3. Login failed,
4. Look up password,
5. Log in to facebook,
6. See if your friend is available for chat,
7. See that your friend is not available for chat,
8. Go to friend’s profile,
9. Mindlessly read their ‘wall’, and learn about Enquirer-like headlines
10. Send message to friend,
11. Wait for reply,
12. Still waiting for reply three hours later,
13. Take a facebook test. And so on.
Conclusion: Oh my. What do we have here? Why it’s a total waste of time and no connection!

Example #2:
Look at facebook ‘fan pages’ if you need another example. If you’re over the age of 30, facebook is not your primary communication tool, and you don’t ‘get it’. If you’ve started up a fan page for your business, you are not marketing. You’re playing. And that’s fine, as long as you’re not expecting a gratifyingly high return on the effort, and you have plenty of spare time in your business schedule for connecting with your friends, because that’s what facebook was designed for. Oh, and you already have enough business too.

What the hell does your business need a fan page for? Businesses don’t need fans. They need customers, plain and simple. Anything else is just playing around. Fan pages are akin to high school popularity contests, complete with cliques (approve your friend as your facebook friend), gossip (read your approved friends’ walls), and scratch fights. Well, maybe not the scratch fights.

I know, I know, updates can go out to your entire fan base with the click of a button. So? How big is your fan base? Is it 100 people? 250? 2000? Unless your fans number about 250,000, you are playing, not working. You can effectively reach infinitely more people with a plethora of other media in a fraction of the time. And remember that time equals money. Your time is valuable. Add it up.

Stop playing if you want your business to succeed. Look for the shorter processes that work instead of the longer ones that just waste time.

Now excuse me while I go try to find my GPS so I can wonder where my cell phone is so I can get that address so I can look it up on the GPS that just fell off the windshield and drive with one device in each hand while steering with my teeth.