Blog – Page 6

Old School Scrapbooking

I still scrapbook.

Not that Martha Stewart-y, Creative Memories, high-priced, super fancy way.

I don’t buy acid-free paper and attach every picture and memento on a designer piece of paper and place them inside sleeves with beautiful decorations, stickers and cutouts.

But I do save pictures, show tickets, school photos (including sports teams!), report cards, birthday and anniversary cards, letters back and forth from camp, and even the enclosures of flowers from my husband (because they are a rare sighting).

And 1-2 times a year, I dump the top drawer of my dresser where these things accumulate and do the following:

Use a 3 ring binder with old fashioned (non-archival rating) sticky sheets.
Put all the stuff in chronological order.
Either place them on a self-sticking sheet or three hole punch the item in order to place them in the binder.
Caption if necessary.
Decorate if I feel like it (not very often).

This past weekend, I scrapbooked 2014-2015. And I was happy. But, I noticed that my ratio of pictures to ephemera is shifting radically over the years. The number of pictures is pretty small; it consists of official graduation pictures, team photos, school photos and a roll of old fashioned film that I sent on a disposable camera with my daughter to camp.

So, now this week, I’m going to have to do some reconnaissance work. I’m going to have to move photos from my phone and from my email and from attached images in text messages to my home computer and on to my printer. I’m going to have to ask my daughter to find pictures of her trip with her grandparents and create a document with pictures (and even captions) to accompany all of the stuff she dutifully gave me that is already scrapbooked (museum tickets, restaurant stubs, airplane ticket).

What’s it all for?

Sometimes I ask myself, “Who cares about these scrapbooks?” I guess, ultimately, I do. I also know that my mom never scrapbooked. Her “stuff” is in shoeboxes, unsorted, unlabeled. In the, I hope far distant future, when she isn’t around, will I even know what’s what?

But then an event galvanizes my resolve. Last year, my daughter’s friends were over for her birthday and somebody mentioned a middle school basketball team picture, and I, of course, found it right away, in the scrapbook. This led to a call from her friends for the other scrapbooks, which I dutifully brought out. I cannot tell you the hours of entertainment and reminiscing that the scrapbooks provided, in a way that scrolling through photos on a phone or even on a jump drive just can’t do.

So maybe I scrapbook for me, for my mom, for my kids.

It’s my way of facilitating memories.

How My Smart Phone is Improving My Travel Experience

It was just a few days in New York. I had a free place to stay (thanks, wonderful brother).

And I had a true purpose: to pick up my college-aid kid whose nannying gig was ending.

And most of my time was already scheduled: a Broadway show that my brother wanted to see, a jazz performance that my brother-in-law wanted to see and brunch with aunts and uncles.

But, all was not planned. I had a few hours that were unaccounted for. What should I do?

It turns out that my phone was my best companion as I decided on my plan, which needed to include: good walks, a little art, not getting lost.

I had just seen the movie “Woman in Gold” and I decided I wanted to see the title painting, the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Where was it? My smart phone told me it was at the Neue Galerie. Five miles away. Perfect. I’ll walk there.

I checked out the Neue Galerie’s website regarding their collection, the admission price and their hours, along with the address. I already decided I would walk up Fifth Avenue as Central Park would be on my left, along with some pretty fancy addresses on my right.

It was a great walk, but I didn’t want to double it, and wanted to ride back to the apartment, arriving when everybody else was waking up. I had checked out the city’s transit system to figure out which train to take, where the closest stations were to start and where to disembark. And I also learned that I could buy a Metro pass, but there was a $1 surcharge. If I just bought a one ride pass, I could save a buck, literally. Sold. I entered the train as it continued to fill, and fill and fill.

Two days later, I was home alone while everybody was working. After getting some of my own work done, I made a decision to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. After extensive play on my phone, I found the critical advice: to take the subway to Brooklyn and walk from there to Manhattan (the views are better) with information on the closest subway lines to the beginning and end and the best places to eat in DUMBO (in Brooklyn) and architectural reviews of surrounding buildings.

Later that day, I had to walk from coffee with a friend to pick up my daughter. The most direct path was right across Central Park. Awesome detailed maps of Central Park showed the exact path.

I also used my Map my Walk app throughout all of my perambulations so I could keep track of my miles walked and calories burned, a bonus!

The only thing that became evident is that I need to get an external battery charger, because any of these apps that utilize GPS just drain the battery in a huge way!

Fetch and Not so Fetch: Rules for Social Media Posting

Social Media is a changing landscape. As such, it may seem like the Wild West: free, unfettered and lacking all order, unencumbered by rules or law.

The truth is that Social Media is more like the Mean Girls lunchroom: there are various groups talking to each other and each group has their own particular way of communicating and their own established norms.

So, there really are some rules for posting on social media for all businesses, small and large. Here are some that we follow:

1. Choose what social media channel works for your business. Where are you likely to find clients? Where do your customers hang out?

2. Plan your posts. Unlike your personal social media channels, your business social media should not be quite as spontaneous. Develop a calendar of big events in your business (sales, back to school physicals, tax filing, open houses) and plan your posts to coordinate with publication of issues and information regarding those events. At K2M, we utilize a social media platform that helps us post on multiple channels for multiple clients. We are always one week ahead of schedule and some posts we have already created several months’ ahead of time.

3. Use your social media posts to sell and advertise, but keep it to a minimum. Customers, patients and clients understand when their “feed” includes direct marketing from you, but they like to see it tempered with information, both serious and whimsical (depending on the nature of your business). Be sure to keep the balance mostly non-advertising, which seems counter-intuitive, but trust us.

4. Hire a social media manager, especially at the beginning. It takes time to really master the tone, timing and content of posts. Unless this is your forte, this is a great thing to outsource to people who know what they are doing.

5. Use the 1st person plural. When you post, say “we” and “our”. This is inclusive, making everybody at your office part of the post. Ideally you should make sure that all employees check the social media sites so they are conversant in the postings.

6. Space out your posts. Don’t over Instagram, or you will be un-followed. Don’t like your own posts on Facebook, or you will annoy your “friends”.

7. Use analytics to determine what time of day or even what days you receive the most likes, reaches or whatever. Utilize this information to tweak when you post or even what topics are the most interesting to your audience.

Making Pictures Perfect

Now that everybody has a camera in their hand at all times, we have seen the rise of the selfie. But just because our phones can take photos doesn’t mean that every photograph is appropriate for every venue. If you have a professional website, you need high quality photographs that represent the epitome of professionalism, not just your mastery of the selfie stick.

Here are some elements of website-worthy photos:

Photographs need to be high resolution. A lower resolution image looks grainy, blurry or pixellated when it is enlarged for a website.
Images must be legal. Just because you can copy and paste an image doesn’t mean you have the right or privilege to include the image on your website. A google search of an image will often aid you in determining the source of the image and whether or not the image is reproducible in a commercial setting. Sometimes, the image is reproducible if properly captioned or with permission from the photographer or publisher.
Portrait photography should be well thought out. You may want an image of you or your employees on a website. That is perfectly OK; however you should consider what settings of your photos would be the most natural fit for your website. Images of you in your office, meeting with clients or patients are often much more friendly, and less stilted looking than a classic headshot.
Consider the backdrop. A deluxe country club in the background might be jarring if you are trying to market yourself as cost effective and “man of the people”. Green screen backgrounds are often inappropriate and don’t always translate to websites.
Think about all aspects of your appearance if you are sitting for photos. Don’t wear summery outfits for an all-year website. Don’t wear loud patterns. Avoid sloppy or frayed clothing. Consider a professional make-up artist prior to photographs.
Consider purchasing images. There are many sources of what are called stock images. You can search for images and even crop the images. Once you purchase the image, you can use it to your liking on your website. Sometimes, we will purchase “demos” of these images and place them in a website that we are creating. These temporary images have a “watermark” over them that disappears once the image is officially purchased. By placing one of these images in an unpublished website, the client can eyeball the images before we have spent money on them. Once the images are approved, then we purchase them. Stock images are often available of your hometown, your industry, products, processes and a diverse group of people.
Hire a photographer, but only if he or she has shown you images that are similar to what you are seeking. Maybe there is a specific landmark that is important to you geographically. In addition, interiors of your office are often a way to show off what you do. For a client of ours who was a carpet cleaner, images of before and after added legitimacy to the website.

Websites are really words and images. The images attract our attention, but they shouldn’t distract from the text or offend our senses or sensibilities.

TV and Radio Ads: Not Just for Mad Men

We have created several commercials for our clients in the past and are in the process of creating one now.

We continue to believe that TV and radio commercials can still be quite effective, despite tectonic shifts in the viewing and listening audience. Before you embark on this seemingly epic project, here are some questions you should answer or at least consider:

What are you “selling”? Do you have a new product, an innovative approach, a new brand identity or do you just want to have a greater impact in the marketplace?
Who is your target audience? This is a really significant question as it helps to narrow down what channels are the best fit for an eventual commercial. Consider the age demographic you are targeting, the geographic locations, urban vs. suburban, male, female, gay, straight, liberal, conservative…
What is your budget for a commercial and is it enough to produce a high quality product?
Do you have a vision for how a commercial should look or sound? Alternatively, do you have an idea of what should not be incorporated into the commercial? (It is perfectly OK if you do not have this vision; that’s why you hire marketing professionals.)
What aspect of your industry is underserved or not talked about? Can you address this in a short commercial spot?
Who are your competitors locally? Do you have any sense as to their marketing strategy?
Have you seen or heard effective commercials in your industry (locally, nationally or even in other markets)? What aspects of effective commercials in other realms move you or repel you?

Creating a commercial is a time-consuming and somewhat costly endeavor. But a commercial ultimately is a message that you control Not only that, you also choose when and to whom you send this message.

Corporate Law Firm Revenues: What’s Changing and What It Means

Law firms pay attention to the bottom line, as well they should. And the recent data is telling a story about the changing nature of the practice of law in the business world.

Partners in small, medium and large, international law firms regularly analyze the data in their various practice areas and have been noticing a few trends. This data has also been aggregated by Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor and Legal Executive Institute. Peer Monitor culls data from 141 firms, paying particular attention to billable hours. Peer Monitor focuses on large firms for its data.

Here is the takeaway:

Litigation work is declining among all law firms. The percentage of litigation work as part of the ratio of total law firm’s legal work has been declining for years. There were economists and law watchers who believed that litigation numbers would bounce back after the 2008 recession, but in fact that has not happened.

Litigation work is being concentrated in the largest law firms. Litigation isn’t totally dead. There are still cases to be had and billable hours to accumulate. But corporate clients are either utilizing their in-house counsel for a lot of the hours or only giving their litigation hours to so-called top tier law firms.

On the other hard, transactional work is being redirected to smaller firms. There is still plenty of legal work to be done. Peer Monitor’s data said that transactional work (real estate, tax, mergers and acquisitions, contracts and agreements) comprises 32% of all legal billable hours (compared to litigation’s 36%, which keeps decreasing). This transactional work is increasing more among the Am Law Second Hundred firms, which are the firms that rank between 101-200 in American Lawyer’s register of top 200 firms. So, this work is not going to the most expensive, elite firms. In fact, there is even evidence that corporate clients are splitting up their accounts, reserving their money for litigation for one set of law firms and using other firms for transactional expertise.

Companies are still trying to find a balance between legal work that gets done by in-house counsel and work that is done by law firms. Part of watching the bottom line is running a cost-benefits analysis. Law firms that can get excellent results in transactional work for a little less money will do so.

The Marketing Takeaway for Law Firm Management Teams: If you want to swim with the trend, then playing up your firm’s ability to manage transactional law, especially positioning your firm as more able to provide customized service at a more reasonable billable rate may position you much more favorably than the top 100 firm’s offerings.

Finding litigation work may continue to be difficult, as this work continues to be consolidated among the largest law firms. Occasional investment in experienced litigators, especially ones with experience at a top 100 law firm may be prudent, but only if that attorney has enough clout to bring his or her previous clients along to a new law firm placement.

Your law firm should also do its own data analysis on billable hours in the various practice areas to determine who and what are the true rainmakers in your firm. Finding what are your greatest revenue sources will guide how you market your firm and make hiring decisions as well as case assignments.

Summer Marketing To-Do List

Summertime and the livin’ is easy!

Well, don’t take it too easy if you are running your own business. Summertime is marketing retooling time. For some people, summertime is low season, although not for our realtor clients who are in high season now.

If it seems like you have a bit more time on your hands, utilize the time to knock of some of these important tasks:

Summer Reading: You may already do a lot of reading about your industry. Expand your horizons and do some really deep thinking while at work about various issues surrounding marketing and communication. Traackr (an online blog) suggests these books (among others): Optimize by Lee Odden about all kinds of marketing today and Human to Human: H2H by Bryan Kramer who discusses the interpersonal aspect of customers and marketing.

Website Home Page Makeover: Go visit your own website and hang around on the home page. Is there anything on there that is looking tired or do the words sound trite at this point? Think about what new images you would like on that page, if any, and tweak the words. If you have time to go deeper into your website, check out all of the pages and make changes.

Get Out There: You know there are ways to meet potential clients and potential referral sources. But life gets in the way. Use the summertime to take out colleagues that you trust in “adjacent” industries (not your direct competition) or even contact colleagues in your industry but from other cities. Use these people as resources to tall you about good organizations and charities that give you exposure to a larger group of people than your regular “peeps”. Whether it’s a specific bar association subcommittee, or a golf tournament or home tour that really has movers and shakers or a charitable cause that moves you, find out ways to be “out there” that are good for you, good for the community and may eventually be good for the bottom line.

Client File Management: How do you organize your clients and patients’ files? If you don’t spend time on file management, this task can become epic and monumental. Instead, spend time culling through your files, pull out clients and patients that you haven’t seen for a set time (what’s a good time for your business? 3 years? 2 years?). In addition, as you are going through these files, you might want to keep a running list of future interactions you would like to organize with certain clients. Keep this list for future business plans (I remember that I sold a house to Mrs. Jones, but she had older parents who were considering moving. I should call her to see if she’s still interested in looking.)

Create a Marketing Calendar: You know how your business cycle runs, for the most part. Think strategically about effective marketing campaigns and their time frame. If you want to encourage referrals, when would be a good time to do a referral marketing blitz? If you run a retail establishment, what specials and sales and even events would bring traffic to your store or to your website? You can even plan ahead as to what social media posts you will make in the future and write them ahead of time.

Clean Up Your Email: Every sent email is saved, but you may not need both your incoming and outgoing emails saved. This is a good time to really delete excess email from your systems, both temporarily and even permanently.

Password Protection: Summer is a great time to change all of your passwords. You can use password encryption software or just redo your passwords yourself. Be sure to keep a copy of your new passwords in a safe, but accessible place.

It’s important to remain productive throughout the summer. These longer days give you time to hang out in “planning” mode.

We’re Planning Your 4th of July Party

Sometimes, we get involved in event planning. And sometimes in our personal lives, we even socialize. So, to benefit you, our blog readers, we are cyber-catering your 4th of July party with our best ideas. We will not be there, you have to purchase everything and clean up afterwards, but here are some sizzling ideas to make your party a celebration:

Step #1: The invitation

Evites and texts and phone calls work well. But if you want to be creative, grab a small watermelon and Sharpie the invitation details (when, where) right on there and hand deliver the watermelons to your guests. If you want, you can make your party BYOW, bring your own watermelon. You can also attach an invitation to a sparkler and make the event BYOS.

Step #2: The menu

You know your guests and party style, so maybe you have a typical cookout menu (burgers, potato salad, pasta salad, cole slaw, etc.) or maybe you have a more refined palate (grilled salmon, sweet potato fries, grilled corn, roasted asparagus). If you have guests from lots of backgrounds, you can have them bring something from their home country, and make a melting pot party. You can have an apple pie theme. You can have all kids of burgers: fancy blue cheese ones, veggie burgers, salmon burgers, bacon cheese burgers, etc.

We also have a cheap and easy flag cake that we “make” when time is short: Make a yellow sheet cake or buy a rectangular one from a grocery store. Ice the cake yourself with Cool Whip (any amount of fat is fine.) Then using sliced strawberries, make stripes and put blueberries in the corner for stars and you have a flag cake.

Potent potables: Make sure there are non alcoholic drinks for kids and designated drivers. Put some fun into both. If you make sangrias for the drinkers, make some punch with fruit, too. Jello shorts old hack? Try some pudding shots!

Step #3: The activities

If you can do a firepit, then s’mores is an activity unto itself. Good music is important, making sure that some patriotic tunes show up in the playlist. Be sure you have sparkler time (which must happen concurrently with John Philip Sousa’s march). Bring out the guitars if somebody is talented. Put on the fireworks from the National Mall in Washington DC on TV (but beware of the bewitching quality of the screen). Old fashioned games are a blast and people will do them: whether it’s croquet on the lawn, horseshoe tournaments, charades or Bingo, any easy game let allows all ages to participate in any physical condition keeps people occupied and out of the kitchen.

Step #4: Clean up!

Start cleaning up as you go. This encourages your guests not to be piggy. Spread around sufficient garbage cans so people can clean up after themselves. If anybody asks what they can do, have them change out the garbage bags or make a round doing pick-up.

Learning Our Lessons

There are new things to learn everyday.

And at K2M Creative Media, we have been learning a lot. As our company has grown and changed, we have had to adapt and take on new issues and challenges. Some of us are kinesthetic learners and can only learn when experiencing things ourselves. Some of us can read a blog and learn without experiencing. So, here are our lessons, our takeaways from the recent past; you can learn from them while reading or you can try to experience them yourselves…

Lesson #1: Familiarity Breeds Contentment. Sometimes it’s so fun to be creative. But even in a creative business, there have to be familiar, cut and dry systems. Invoicing needs to happen on a set date, we still have to track our to do lists, calendars have to be synched. It’s not the most exciting part of the enterprise, but if you don’t have basic operating systems that are familiar and dependable, you can’t spend enough time being creative.

Lesson #2: Sometimes Bigger IS Better, Sometimes Bigger is Just Bigger: When we add clients, and we have, there is not always economy in scale. Obtaining graphics doesn’t become less expensive and the same goes with paying for writing and web design. We can buy paper in bulk, but not labor.

Lesson #3: We Still Have to Meet: We are very adept at texting and emailing and saving things in the cloud. The downside is that we at K2M sometimes can fall into the trap of not feeling the need to meet face to face. But, we need to be in our workplace and sometimes it is not only more efficient to be literally at the same table, but it enables more creative juices to flow. That doesn’t mean that the table always has to be in the same place. This “we still have to meet” lesson also applies to our clients. More communication, ultimately, is always better for most relationships (insert joke about disliked family member here…)

Lesson #4: Marketing is still an Art Form: We would like to be able to tell our clients “If you do x, your business will grow by y”. But it just doesn’t work that way. Marketing involves study, planning and tweaking and tweaking and tweaking. We tweak the message, the method, the media and the money spent. And then the market changes again. Marketing isn’t inherently frustrating, it is inherently changing.

We pride ourselves on continuing to grow and learn and change. Our kids might have the summer off, but we don’t. We suspect, as adults, there’s no vacation for learning.

Nor should there be.

#Hashtagfails

Creation of good Twitter hashtags is more art than science. The Twitter hashtag has to be memorable and should be a little protected from being mocked. The hashtag’s home social media channel is Twitter, but we see hashtags everywhere now, on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat posts. Hashtags are not only a way for people to “gather” around a similar issue, but as appendages to posts, they allow a commentary, often wry, on the post or the mood of the poster.

So, for your perusal, here are some recent hashtag fails and the lessons we can learn from their failure:

#celebration #of #learning: A local school (which shall remain unnamed) posted on their Facebook account an end of the year celebration of seniors’ recent projects. Unfortunately, the “marketing guru” did not understand how hashtags work and posted these way too generic hashtags, which were then picked up by the far more savvy high school seniors and reposted, tweeted and appended with their own snarky remarks.

Lesson: Understand how hashtags work before diving in. Ask a tech-savvy friend or colleague or find a somewhat wired adolescent to at least peruse your hashtag and give you feedback. Ideally, hire a marketing consultant.

#wtff: If you missed it, this was a failed Burger King hashtag where the letters stood for “what the French fry”. As you can imagine, this was not a rousing campaign.

Lesson: Your hashtag has to be immediately understandable by reasonably intelligent people. Also, “wtf” has other connotations and just adding another “f” doesn’t fix that.

#nowthatchersdead: This hashtag went live when Margaret Thatcher died (during a spate of other famous people’s death, thereby necessitating the “now”). Unfortunately, the lack of punctuation and spacing that is a part of hashtag regular usage caused people to read it as “now that Cher’s dead” and assumed incorrectly that Cher was dead, which she wasn’t and still isn’t.

Lesson: Run your hashtag by others and be sure there are no ambiguities.

#notguilty This was the hashtag that Entenmann’s used to promote their newest low calorie baked goods offerings. Unfortunately, #notguilty was already trending following the decision in the Casey Anthony murder trial. Entenmann’s not only didn’t like being associated with a murder trial, but the entire #notguilty campaign was quickly derailed.

Lesson: No matter how well-thought out your hashtag is, you must go onto Twitter and search for the hashtag to ensure there are no unsavory aspects of it. Current events may obviate the need to abandon even the best hashtags.

#askVentra, #McDStories, #askJPM: These were various hashtags created by Ventra (the Chicago transit authority), McDonald’s and JP Morgan. All were bombarded with completely negative Tweets and created far more negative buzz than anything else.

Lesson: Be sure that your product is without reproach at the time you launch the hashtag. And even if you think it is, come up with an exit strategy if things go bad.

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