CCPA

By Audrey Julienne, Raison d’Etre

The principal of networking

Networking is only as effective as the network you have, so you need to grow that set of contacts as much as possible. The larger your net, the more fish you can catch.

Your network stats

• Check out your network stats to get an idea how many people are in your network out of the overall LinkedIn population which is currently over 40 Million.
• If your network is less than 1M you have some work to do.

People You Already Know: Webmail Contacts

• LinkedIn’s Webmail Contacts Importer can automatically check 15+ webmail providers for potential connections.
• The webmail contacts importer works well. Look to the right of each contact name for a small LinkedIn logo icon, which signifies they are already registered members. Deselect the ones that don’t have this icon unless you want to send them a message asking them to join.

People You Should Know: Colleagues and Classmates

• On the bottom of the home page is a section devoted to people you may know from companies you used to work or schools you’ve attended. This is a great way to pick up 5-10 connections per week.
• You can also do a search on your past companies and school names

People You Should Meet: Open Networker

• An Open Networker is a person who uses professional networking sites not just to keep in touch with contacts they already know, but also to create new contacts, connections, and new business opportunities. Open Networkers therefore gravitate towards professional networking sites to take advantage of the speed and efficiency the internet has enabled them to make new business connections.
• Sounds fine and dandy right? Well, almost. According to LinkedIn’s user agreement, it is against terms of use to, “invite people with whom you have no prior relationship to join your network.” What that means in practice is up to you to decide.
• In practice, connecting with someone is equivalent to exchanging business cards, and sharing partial visibility to the names and titles of people in your rolodex. It doesn’t imply you trust them with your life, or you’ll turn around and write them a recommendation.
• There are hundreds of LinkedIn groups that have popped up to support the needs of LinkedIn Open Networkers (a.k.a. LIONs). Joining these groups gives you access to discussion boards where people post what type of people they’d like to connect with, specific business projects they might be working on, or questions for the Open Networker community.
• The third way to increase your connection count and grow your network is to join these LinkedIn Open Networker groups and find new connections. Once accepted to a group, you can start a new discussion thread introducing yourself and other members will send you invites to connect.

Nourish your network

Your LinkedIn network is a living and growing entity that needs to be nourish regularly.

Take a moment at the end of the day or once a week to run through the LinkedIn search box the new people you met along the way. 9 out of 10 times you’ll find them and you’ll both increase each other’s network.

By Ursula Augustine, Ursula’s About Phace

Have you have ever wondered how celebrities got their makeup to look so flawlessly natural?  Wonder no more – Airbrush Makeup! Once the closely guarded secret of professional makeup artist in Hollywood, it is quickly becoming the makeup application of choice for women who want that “real skin” finish.

The precision application offered by Airbrush makeup has two major benefits:

• Full Coverage, Sheer Texture: Airbrush finishes are opaque, yet thin in texture, giving you full coverage that is weightless.
• Refined Finish: Because the 6-8 tear drops of foundation are sprayed onto the skin, from the Airbrush Spray Gun, the application closely resembles the way a camera reads textures – in pixels. The finish: Seamless! None of the trace marks that brushes and sponges can leave behind. The result is perfect looking skin achieved with a minimum of product, that lasts for a minimum of 18 hours!

Airbrush makeover shown includes; Airshadow, and Airblush!

Model: Mrs. Wendy Rosen

By Phyllis Mufson, Catalyst for Personal & Professional Growth

 Are you creative?

Once upon a time, long ago and far away – when the Russians were launching Sputnik satellites into space, there was a giant Fortune 500 company headquartered in the United States. This firm was investing millions upon millions of dollars of research and development money into beating the Russians in the ‘Space Wars.’

They hired the best scientists and engineers and gave them the best equipment and absolutely anything they could think of to help the scientists to generate creative ideas and innovative products. And the results were – disappointing.

A few scientists were innovating, but the majority were not.

What to do?? Thus began some of the earliest research into creativity. Researchers were hired to survey what the scientists read, what they ate for breakfast, their relationships with their mothers – the list goes on and on and on – and they found – - – nothing. No correlation at all connecting the questions they were investigating and who was producing results.

Until the researchers asked the following question, “are you creative?”

It turned out that the scientists who answered “yes” were producing creative, innovative, groundbreaking work, and the scientists who answered “no” were not.

This was the breakthrough. With further investigation the researchers found out more. The scientists who considered themselves creative turned out to be better at tolerating ambiguity. This tolerance allowed them to keep going when the outcome was unclear, when the data didn’t make sense, and when they ran into information that seemed to be a paradox, to contradict itself. These traits allowed the creative scientists to persist until they finally reached success.

How about you? How might your life be different if you had faith in your creativity, in your ability to venture into the unknown and persist until you reached success?

What would you begin if you had that confidence?

Are you creative? Are you willing to consider the possibility that you are?

By Laura Sicola, PhD, Sicola Consulting Group

In the midst of Entrepreneurship Week here in Philadelphia, on April 23, 2009 the CCPA very generously held a half-day workshop entitled “Marketing for Tough Times: Strategies for Future Growth” at the Radisson Warwick Hotel. All three key presenters (CCPA members themselves) had valuable insights, suggestions and strategies to offer and I, for one, am very glad to have attended. Allow me to share a few highlights:

First off, Rick Simmons (President, Dinkum Interactive) addressed the increasingly hot topic of social media. Rick demystified a lot of the terms and purposes of social media marketing – e.g. blogs, Twitter, etc. – as it differs from other more traditional forms of communication, and very fairly offered suggestions for how to tailor a marketing plan to meet any budget, even a virtually non-existent one! A key point for me was the sobering realization that, as Rick said, online, the consumer is “in charge,” and the best we can aim for is to be visible. Then, once you’ve got their attention and they have clicked over to your website, you have a paltry two seconds to convince them to stay there and read more or click other links, otherwise they back out and try somewhere else that seems like it might be more immediately relevant to their needs. There’s a reason for SEO (search engine optimization) if I ever heard one!

Second, Steve Bauer (Co-founder, The Three Marketeers; Founder & Instructor, The Referral Academy) clarified the nature of referral relationships and how to position yourself to make the most of them, no matter what your role – buyer, seller or referrer. Ultimately, as Steve put it, referrers accelerate the process of finding the “fit” between the buyer and seller. After all, who wants to waste time and resources with lots of trial and error? Thus, it’s important to know enough about both parties to give a good referral that will fit the needs and values of both, thereby strengthening your own reputation and the three-way relationship. And of course, we all want to get referrals from others as well, so it was good to be reminded that we need to carefully consider the ideal referral profile, i.e. not only the market in general but the specific type of people in that market with whom we want to interact, e.g. an end user vs. company decision-maker. Then, the question becomes what you do with a referral once you have the contact information; having a clear system for follow-up builds credibility and trust for you as seller or referrer alike, and that’s where everything begins.

Finally, Bill Ringle (Founder, MyBusinessGym.com) offered a condensed workshop, Developing New Business: When the Economy won’t Co-operate. The overriding theme to Bill’s piece was “the universe rewards action,” which he professed and behaviorally reinforced throughout the session. Bill brought a variety of worksheets and handouts from his Business Gym, some of which we did there and then, and others that were for later independent use, ranging from Likert-style scale ranked concepts to open ended questions, with short term and long term analysis. In the end, all of the take-aways were very practical and thought-provoking. I left with lists of concrete issues to address and next steps to take, specifically relating to my own business.

Overall, this CCPA workshop not only gave me a clearer picture of where my business is, and in what ways I need to continue to clarify my vision, but it left a great impression regarding the caliber of professionals we have among us – as demonstrated by the quality of the presentations as well as the discussions among the participants! I look forward to the next CCPA opportunity of this sort, and whole-heartedly encourage everyone else to attend as well. Trust me – you’ll be glad you did!

By Laura Sicola, PhD, Sicola Consulting Group

April 20-25, 2009 was “Entrepreneurship Week,” a series of free seminars, networking events and other opportunities organized by the Empowerment Group (EG) (www.empowerment-group.org) to support the needs of budding and established small businesses in Philadelphia. I was fortunate to have the flexibility in my schedule to attend three events: (1) Certifying as a Minority- or Woman-Owned Business; (2) Get Noticed: Creative Marketing Strategies; and (3) An Evening with Philadelphia’s Business Elite. For me, as a sole proprietor and relatively new Philadelphia business, there were a lot of lessons learned – some intended, some probably not – that I’d like to share with you here.

First – certifying as a minority- and/or woman-owned business. The general gist of the lunchtime presentation was that if your business falls under either or both of these categories, you will be given preference for government contracts in your industry – provided your skills competitively match their needs, etc. – because (to put it bluntly) the government is obligated to meet a minimal quota in the diversity of their contractors and subcontractors. Why not take advantage of such an opportunity? For more information, go to http://mbec.phila.gov/home/. That’s the “intended” take-away I learned.

For better or for worse, there were a few snafus the organizers encountered that made a stronger impression. Note: this is not intended as a complaint, but rather as observations and a helpful checklist of “don’ts” next time you need to hold an event of this sort. The problem was that the original venue was still under construction, and far from completion. I don’t know at what point they realized it would not be ready for use, but it wasn’t until I arrived that an EG representative standing on the corner saw my confusion and told me – and another confused attendee – about the relocation, handing me a bus token so I could head 10 blocks back in the direction from which I had come. The new venue must have been a last resort: it was a crowded Rittenhouse bar, and ill equipped to handle the event. We were packed so tightly in rows of chairs in our little corner to the point that I could not even take notes or reach under the chair when something fell, the din was so loud that the presenters were barely audible, the PowerPoint was projected onto a brown brick and cement cellar-like wall, making it partially illegible, and there were not have enough handouts so there was virtually no way to catch everything they were saying. At the end the speakers promised to send electronic copies of the PPT slides and handouts to anyone who sent an e-mail request. Sadly, what should have been a redeeming opportunity became a final disappointment to punctuate the event, as I e-mailed the two presenters (city officials) who had personally handed me business cards and invited my e-mail correspondence, but to date have neither responded nor alternatively provided the promised documents. I think you can gather your own lessons from this. Needless to say, it was a rather inauspicious start to Entrepreneurship Week. The good news is that thing got much better as the week – and even the day – went on!

That evening I attended a panel discussion entitled Creative Marketing Solutions panel at the Helium Club, with Sharon MacWilliams from Philadelphia’s City Paper, Adam Cohan from Brio Solutions, specializing in internet marketing, and Darrell Williams from NBC 10. For me, they really drove home the need to not only explicitly define my niche, but to even more explicitly define the niche customers I seek and establish a budget – no matter how big or small – to reach that specific market. Another important discussion topic pertained to measurement of the return on investment from any initiative, which can never be fully measured, but a variety of options were discussed, ranging from experimenting with a bunch of different “landing pages” for your website to see which gets the best result, to simply asking every person who calls, writes or visits you how they heard of you in the first place, and tally the results. The best part is that most of these ideas are free!

The panel also gave a very nice and succinct explanation of the difference between branding, marketing and advertising, three terms which many of us are familiar with but have a hard time clearly distinguishing. In a nutshell (in case you are wondering,) branding defines who you are, your image, and what you stand for, so consistency is a crucial factor in raising brand awareness! Marketing is how you get involved in the community you want to support, often through non-paying efforts, and advertising is simply how you try to reach your customers.

In the end, they all agreed on a few other key points. First, if you’re targeting the 20-30-year-old market, you must advertise on the Internet. Second, when possible speak to an account manager, ask for the medium’s marketing reports, and don’t let yourself get “pushed into” anything you are not comfortable doing, no matter what. Overall a very interesting and enlightening evening, and got my enthusiasm back up for future events.

Wednesday I went to “An evening with Philadelphia’s Business Elite” at World Café Live with Hal Real, owner of the World Café Live itself; Susan Ellman, co-owner of FruitFlowers; and Bill Decker, co-founder of The Hub. As a small business owner, I was encouraged by their stories of “building the plane in-flight,” and glad to hear that learn-as-you-go is a common path taken by just about all start-ups. There was a lot of valuable advice for larger companies with more employees as well. One example was reinforcing the need to create a strong system of operation since others will be executing the details when you are not around. Another was to remember to pay your employees first, no matter how much other “creative bill paying” you need to orchestrate to get through leaner times; the employee loyalty and trust is the motor that keeps your company wheels turning.

So there’s a rather lengthy description of the three Entrepreneurship Week events I attended, and lessons learned. Whether you are looking to get your business off the ground, or get a new boost to one that’s already established, I would recommend looking at the Empowerment Group’s website. They have a variety of resources and tons of contacts, so you will inevitably find something that suits your needs.

Good luck!