Paul Fleming - Flemo: Between Sydney, Philadelphia and the World Wide Web

Working in the online world does offer its benefits, mostly that you are not necessarily tethered to a location or a time. In my former life as a teacher, this was a very welcome adjustment. What proves to be the most difficult is the ‘always on’ mentality. Clients expect it, friends expect it, hell even I expect it. So when I come home to Sydney, I rarely get an extended period of time off as I’m still logging fairly extensive hours at night. I’ve tried to force myself to simply step away from all my connections but aside from a 1 week trip to Spain last year with only minimal activity, it’s mostly been pretty tough. Having your own business certainly doesn’t help but I have a feeling it’s becoming pretty common around all industries. So I read blogs and get opinions on how to do it and most people i talk with haven’t seemed to be able to make that adjustment either. Some online articles seem to provide answers but it’s always difficult to tell how genuine they are. Still, I try and have achieved only partial success at this but a couple of positive steps I’ve learned, have had a pretty good impact.

Step away from the machine – instead of taking my lunch at the computer, I started going to the gym. Sure some weeks I have several meetings that go through the lunch hour but at least 3 days a week have helped my cause during working hours.
On vacation I still haven’t been able to leave the Bberry at home. It’s on my list of to-do’s.
Cull that information – it took me a long time to refine my list of RSS feeds as well as certain twitter and facebook activities but in doing so, I think I’ve cut a significant amount of time from my day.

Only a couple of small steps but they can have a decent impact. While it’s far from the answer, every little step seems to help.

“Offline marketing and communication is about getting attention. Web marketing and communication is about PAYING attention.” – Gerry McGovern

Achieving Internet Marketing basics is something that alludes many small businesses. Whether it be poor advice, execution or simply poor decisions, we see a lot of common mistakes being made again and again, and it has a lot to do with listening. Having been part of both successful and not-so-successful campaigns I’m getting to see this pattern of what works and what doesn’t and the top on the list has to be the ability to effectively listen.

What should you listen to? There are a lot of things that you should be listening to:

- Listen to your audience
- Listen to your website

- Listen to people you trust
- Listen to the community
- Listen to your analytics

One of the greatest distractions from listening is yourself. A good number of our clients are “experts” at web designing. They have been to a lot of websites. They have read several articles about web design so their expertise is always invaluable during a redesign process. That is most likely how they came to be in the situation they are in.

Social Media is another area that clients are often “experts” in. I wouldn’t even consider myself comfortable using Social Media as a tool for Internet Marketing but i can tap into people who are and well-prepared to listen to them.

Listen to your website – there are a number of tools available to help with listening to your website. Analytics can be a big part of that. We’ll usually recommend Google Analytics particularly for its price point but also many of its useful features. The site overlay is very useful to determine where people are going, what they are doing and where their preferences lie. If you wanted visitors to contact you but they keep going to About you and bouncing, there may be an issue to address.

Listen to people you trust – sometimes you have to move forward on faith. A company that may have the skills you are looking for, may fall short. A website you thought would bring in traffic, may not fit the bill. As long as you don’t get locked into one of those ridiculous long-term agreements, you should learn from the experience. We do our own fair share of experimenting with services and websites so don’t assume that we are immune to it but because we are doing such a high volume, we can pretty quickly determine if there is any impact. In addition we can see things that raise red flags even before starting. If you plan to hire an SEO agency, how visible is their own website?

Listen to the Community – again there are a lot of tools out there to keep you abreast of any specific chatter happening online. Social media and online buzz can be captured through tools like Trackur and Google Alerts.

It’s very important to stress the benefits of listening for your business. Paying attention can ensure that you reduce the number of mistakes you may make and aligning yourself with some good, solid people to listen to is not a bad move either.

With the crazy gift-giving season coming up and most of us short on funds, E-Verse is sharing your concerns by offering up a Top 5 Tech Gifts (that may or may not be useful or worth the money) for less than $100.

5. Logitech Portable Lapdesk – It may be called a laptop but that doesn’t mean that you have to have OK with it scalding your goodies. Prevent those sweat marks or thigh burns with this handy little table. $30

4. WikiReader – The poor persons Kindle, this $99 bad boy may look like a waste of money for yet another thing to carry around but it gives you a direct line to information contained in Wikipedia! How amazing is that? I mean it’s Wikipedia people! Browse 3 million topics! That’s awesome! Oh c’mon, fork out the extra dough for the Kindle at $259.

3. Target Remote Control Gift Card – So Target has a knack for rolling out pretty interesting Gift Certificates (anyone remember the Camera/Gift Card that flew off the shelves last year?) Well they’ve got a new gizmo so you can satisfy your friends’ gadget needs as well as giving you the added bonus of not have to decide what to actually get them. Surely a win-win. $100

2. Dream Cheeky USB Fridge – Need to keep a coldie handy at all times to help either quench the thirst or settle the nerves after tweeting all day, check out the Dream Cheeky USB fridge. Simply plug in to your USB port and within 5 minutes it’s apparently cold enough to keep that coldie, cold. $25.

1. Swissflash Army Knife – File your nails, jot down a haiku, shine a light in other people’s eyes and then illegally transfer secure data from your mates computer with this awesome all-in-one device. From $39.99

BONUS
Drum T-Shirt – Impress the ladies by banging on your chest! Off to play a gig but forgot your kit? This t-shirt is for you. Or if banging on your chest causes bruising, maybe the finger drums.

Hot air Balloon – Start your own media wild goose chase for the sake of publicity with this Experimental Hot Air Balloon. Kid with strange name not included.

Otherwise I might be tempted by this new rip-off scheme…

Hi Counsel.

My name is Shih Dunson. I am contacting your firm in regards to a divorce settlement with my ex husband (David G. Dunson) who resides in your jurisdiction. I am currently on assignment in South Korea. We had an out of court agreement (Collaborative Law Agreement) for him to pay
$ 848,900.00 plus legal fees. He has only paid me $ 64,000.

I am hereby seeking your firm to assist in collecting the balance from
him. He has agreed already to pay me the balance but it is my belief that
a Law firm like yours is needed to help me collect payment from my
ex-husband or litigate this matter if he fails to pay as promised.

Sincerely,
Shih Dunson.