New Media (R)evolution – Traditional Meets New
Published August 24, 2011 | 
In looking at marketing tools that have been able to maintain effectiveness in the new media technology environment, the modern press release has increased its level of affective relevancy in the new digital world, owed to immediate distribution to the public by way of the Web. To take it several steps further, when the press release is revved up, loaded and optimized with keywords (increase index value to search engines) and content (i.e. links, images, video content and integrated for social media to increase interest and share-ability etc.), it quickly develops into a new marketing stratagem in and of itself.
So, we wonder then that with the continuing rapid change and explosive growth in new communication tools along with new channels, and so many more companies seemingly everyday using and attributing value to their social media strategies and initiatives, measurable active audience engagement still remains at low levels. This is probably attributable to many professionals haven’t adapted to and adopted new channels for communication, and haven’t changed the way they communicate.
It seems that many continue to use all available channels in a shotgun strategy (including social media) and widest possible use of broadcast platforms to promote and press their messages to the masses. They need to instead, narrow their communication focus and learn to use these many channels including both new and traditional to nurture conversations taking place in the market, and tailor their content to very specific audiences and become participants in the constant and enduring evolution of the message.
The question that comes to mind is, exactly how to do this? How to integrate both the traditional and new methods and strategies to not only reach, but engage all of your identifiable audiences, whether they consider themselves social or not?
The truth is what we’ve always known about creating lasting relationships, talking about things that matter, while being consistent and intentional is still relevant. Everyone needs to understand that we’re just going about things in a whole new way with new more effective processes. Processes that starts with, ends, and cycles around continuing direct-engagement with the customer.
Executive Summary – Your Company’s Unique Advantages
Published October 20, 2010 | Once the investor understands the business and agrees there is a need for the company’s products and services, the final step is demonstrating that the company has an “unfair competitive advantage” in the market. 
Examples of unfair advantages could include a world-class management team, proprietary technology, proven operational systems, key partnerships, long-term contracts with major customers, as well as other successes-to-date. The plan must document and detail these compelling advantages.
Provide a clear and concise look into the evidence that gives you the confidence the business has advantages it can quickly leverage and begin building success, beginning with the world-class management team that is critical to the reduction of risks to investors and increased success in the market.
You should briefly describe the main executive management team. A section that highlights the individual team members’ strategic accomplishments in your market will be sufficient. 
(Keep in mind the complete resume of each management team member will be included in the business plan). In the event that your team is not entirely put together don’t agonize over it. Often a VC can assist you in the placement of a crucial executive within your organization.
Next continue the close examination with any proprietary assets, from technology to operational systems, to products and services. Following should be proven strategies for market penetration and any existing relationships you have already begun cultivating. Practicality is the important word to bear in mind here. Make sure that you have discovered all current and potential competitive influences in the marketplace. Once you describe these influences, place your product or service in relation to the opposing influences in the market. From the perception you have an apparent competitive advantage, 
carry the narrative a step more and make a statement about your business strategy to maintain that advantage.
In addition, discuss any key partnerships, exclusive relationships with major customers and the long-term affect on the market and future strategies for identification and cultivation of additional major customers.
Your Business Road Map
Published October 18, 2010 | 
To prove and set up important credibility it is crucial that a business plan does not allow too much for market sizes, take too lightly the competition, or get carried away and project results too aggressively. To be more precise, they must present reasonable game strategies for accomplishing success, including:
• Highlight past accomplishments: One of the best indicators of future success is a company’s past record of success. The formal business plans prepared for previously funded companies must illustrate what milestones they set and were able to achieve with those funds. New businesses must show how the achievement of past successes by the management team will make it possible for the company to meet and prevail over expected challenges.
• Clearly understand and define the realistic and relevant market: Incorrect sizing of a company’s target market is an illuminating indication of a badly rationalized business plan. Let’s take the U.S. healthcare market for example, even if the U.S. healthcare market is a trillion dollar market, a company does not exist that could reap $1 trillion in healthcare sales.
To be more precise, a more meaningful measure is the appropriate market size, which represents the company’s sales if it were to secure 100% of its specific niche of the market. Always Keep in mind that defining and communicating a believable appropriate market size is considerably more persuasive than offering generic industry figures.
• Understand and accommodate to customer needs: Investors have an extremely precise focus on the company relationship with its customers. In its business plan, a business must clearly make a statement about how its products and or services meet precisely identifiable customer wants and needs, and recognize which target markets most demonstrate these needs.
The business plan must also delineate an easy to follow and reliable roadmap of the company’s strategies to fully understand its customers.
• Establish barriers to entry: A business plan must include strategies that best demonstrate how the company not only can, but plans to develop long-term barriers around its customers. Asserting a first mover advantage is plainly not persuasive enough in today’s funding environment.
• Develop realistic financial assumptions: Many lenders and investors go straight to the financial section of the business plan. It is extremely crucial that the assumptions and projections in this section be as accurate and reasonable as possible. Plans that show market penetration, operating margins and revenues per employee statistics that are inadequately logical, incompatible or purely unlikely, to a great extent harm the reliability of the whole business plan.
In complete difference, clear-headed, well-thought out financial assumptions and projections convey operational reliability and trustworthiness.
Understand it is more imperative than ever to present lenders and investors with a practical, realistic and convincing business roadmap that plans for success. Such a business plan sets a company apart from the literally thousands of other companies actively looking to raise capital, and strongly indicates to investors and lenders that your company is effectively well-managed and prepared for success.
The Zen of Success – Engage
Published June 25, 2010 | One by one, people are realizing that some things are truly best shared and they are part of the evolution taking place all around us that will continue to grow, reform and spread to engage many more of us, and the
engagement is reshaping everything from how we go to market, to whom we partner with, and how we find new customers. The Successful recognize and seize the opportunity to embrace the engagement that is weaving its way into the fabric of the market and hopefully to discover how their current or new business can connect with, engage and inspire their customers in a world where access trumps ownership.
Is it the end of how we relate to ownership, as we know it?
There’s an evolution that’s happening causing people throughout the world to reconsider how we relate to the things in our lives as well as our social geography, and this evolutionary realignment has been taking place and building for decades, but the velocity and reach has overwhelmingly grown in the past five years, as we’ve quietly, yet dramatically changed our thinking about our lifestyles and the quality of life is moving distinctly away from what we own as the basis on which we measure the level of quality, success and happiness.
Some things are always best shared?
The Successful understand that an engaged-market means new levels of collaboration where every voice is heard and most welcome, promotes learning and more importantly sharing, suggests a balance of opinion and thought, proposes great connected communities that share a passion, is consistent with our mashup capabilities that combines technology, data, functions or ideas to bring everything together, brings a critical element of transparency, suggests a network that exists at the intersection of learning, sharing, collaboration, and problem solving, and with countless intersections in the market fabric it presents a shared approached to problem solving, and finally, encourages action for the greater good and shared success.
What are You the Most of?
Published April 9, 2010 | 
There is an old adage that’s as true today as it’s ever been, but is often overlooked or ignored as a valuable component of entrepreneurial strategies, and it says, “Be the First with the Most.” Try to think about all of the different type of businesses, organizations and the diversified fields of expertise present by everything all together, and endless number of brands, claims each one makes, and the general noise and group clutter generated by the collective market voices each day. Now you start to realize the size of the most important challenge of any organization or individual is about rising above the collective mass of voices in the fray, and the fact that it is no longer effective to be just okay or pretty good at everything you do, but you have to be the best or most of something you do, perhaps the most colorful, elegant in your presence and delivery, the most responsive in times of need, as well as the most accessible to the market niche you have targeted.
For years and years businesses, organizations and their leaders have become very comfortable with developing and maintaining strategies that didn’t rock the boat and kept themselves and what they represented in the 
“middle of the road” because that’s where they identified their customers being and their position gave them a strong feeling of safety and security, and they were right.
But now, with so much changing, and associated increases in uncertainty and the feeling of unsustainable practices and policies throughout the economy, and pressure to adapt to new ways of doing things, it is no longer wise or safe to be in the middle of the road, which has become a path to failure.
Being in Texas, I get to hear some of the greatest and most memorable statements in the world for describing positions, be it business or politics, and the best Texas saying about the middle of the road is “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.”
The lesson is, in order to stand out from the fray and clutter of today’s overcrowded market you simply can’t play by the same old rules from the past and expect any measure of success in today’s highly competitive and volatile economy.
So, what are you the most of?