Oliver Fritsch´s MarketingBlog

I found a nice surprise this morning in the new edition of the Economist:

 http://www.economist.com/world/united-states/displaystory.cfm?story_id=16112080

It also reminded my, why I live here: Asked why he moved to Boise, Mr Gombert raves about the quality of life. The sun shines for 300 days a year. Crime is as rare as the colossal steaks. And the great outdoors is only a few blocks away. Mr Gombert loves to fish, hike and ski. Also, since both of his children have taken up golf, he selflessly plays with them at weekends.

There is a lot of space in Boise. A 25-mile green belt runs through the city. The nearby foothills are latticed with biking trails. At 3,000 people per square mile, the population density is less than a twentieth of Manhattan’s. Yet although Boise is remote—the nearest big city is 340 miles away—it is no backwater. Since 1978 it has been home to Micron, a large semiconductor firm. (The local potato billionaire was an early investor, leading to inevitable jokes about the shift from chips to microchips.) A cluster of high-tech start-ups has appeared. Surprisingly, between 2005 and 2007 Idaho generated more patents per worker than any other state.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure to give a lecture on leadership to students of the Boise High School BHS Leadership Class, lead by Mr. Arnold.

It was encouraging to see the faces of these highly motivated, smiling students that will lead us in the future.

What seemed new to them was the fact that flattened hierachies will leave them with less “position power”, which means that they will have to convince by their deeds rather than dictate. 

 The other new notion was that they will have to learn to lead people they only know through Facebook, Webcasts or phone calls - and might never meet them face to face.

 If you are interested in my notes, you can download them here: Oliver Fritsch Views and experiences with Leadership Boise High School BHS Presentation Notes

There are only two commercials that ever brought tears to my eyes

- and still do.

This one http://www.metacafe.com/watch/2132949/dream_deutsche_telekom/

and this new one from AT&T

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEInSyTHcpc

HOW DO THEY DO THAT?

Which cell phone to buy? Never mind. I used to have AT&T and I am enjoying prepaid Telecom now… can´t wait for forced deregulation of the cell phone industry in this country too!

It did wonders in Europe!! No contracts necessary, 8 cents per minute but only for outgoing calls. International country to country roaming 50 cents.
Wake up FCC!
Get with the program and give your cell phone consumers a break!

I sit on the board of directors of Anser Public Charter School and we have finally found a great new building in a neighboring community of Boise, Garden City.

In addition to press releases and media appearances, we decided to create and hang some posters in high traffic areas, like libraries and public buildings.

To make the poster, I could have used Adobe Indesign or Photoshop or any other program, but I decided to give it a shot with the new Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 version. All it took was a snapshot of a student I took during one of our exhibitions and a few hours of my time, setting the document size to 11 x 17 inches (roughly DIN A3 format) placing the picture, adding a headline and some copy. I saved everything, exported it into a PDF with fonts embedded and CMYK turned on, emailed it off to the local copy shop and had it printed on poster paper at less than 1$ per poster. 24 hours later: Voila!

If you have children living in the area, I can strongly recommend checking out this great school and signing up your children for the lottery. Check out http://www.ansercharterschool.org/

Oliver

I finally admit it: Listing to my own voice in this Podcast made it painfully clear to me: 9 years of studying English in the German public school system, 4 years of study at Middlesex University in London and 10 years of living in Boise, Idaho, USA did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to neutralize my strong German accent. Can´t wait for Jay Leno to start making fun of me. Whatever!

Anneliese Olson, Director at Hewlett Packard interviews me in her SMB Podcast about the Market Success eBook, challenges in starting up your own business, how to improve the design of HP´s Printers and a ton of other things.

Listen to it from her website or here (MP3, 12 MB)

Chapter-3-Prospecting

Are your sales down?
Suffering the recession blues?

Forget everything you have heard about Internet Marketing!
Start prospecting old-school with your phone in hand instead of playing the waiting game.

If you are a small business owner, chances are that you have spent thousands of Dollars for your precious website and maybe even more for on-line search ads.

If still nobody is calling you, you are not alone.

Unless your site gets thousands of hits every day chances are that you find new customers through it quickly are slim.

Download my new chapter about how to:
-find new customers
- qualify them
- talk to them and then
win them over for free at: http://www.hp.com/sbso/special/doityourself/ebook.html

Good selling!

Oliver

Chapter 2: Innovating
Are you looking for “tiebreakers” that give your customers a good reason to choose your product over a competitor’s product? As more and more services and products degenerate into commodities, your challenge will seldom be to come up with new ideas, but to select the few precious thoughts that will make a real difference for your customers - and your business. In this chapter we will show you how to develop new ideas, how to manage those ideas and, most importantly, how to test them quickly and inexpensively.

This was a difficult chapter to write for exactly the same reason. There are countless books on innovation out there, but I have not come across a single one that provides any useful advice for a small business or a small enterprise (called “SME´s” in Europe.) I guess that´s the reason why companies come to us when they need help in re-energizing or re-engineering their R&D and product development departments. All too often, a small business creates one great product that fulfills its role as a cash cow and then fall short of coming up with the next great idea. Consider 1-trick ponies such as Rubik’s cube / AOL´s Dial-up Service, or Skype. All of them struggle with the same question: what should be next?

How do you generate and collect new ideas systematically?
How do you evaluate them and pick the right ones to move on?
Download our full chapter for free here: http://www.hp.com/sbso/special/doityourself/ebook.html

Heike Mayer, Assistant Professor Urban Affairs and Planning at Virginia Tech, created an awesome looking map of Boise, Idaho based tech startups.

As you know, I absolutely love smart graphics.

Heike, a fellow German, created an image of the tech universe in Treasure Valley. At the center you see the “Stars” (or sometimes “black holes” if you like), Micron (Public, NYSE:MU), Hewlett Packard (Public, NYSE:HPQ), and Boise State University. Concentric rings around them show the years of startup companies whose founders left these big companies and ventured out on their own. It also shows relationships between them. The big arrow in the image obviously points to my companies, VocationLab LC and Cendesic.com

What stroke me when looking at the map was the large number of companies flying around in this community of just 250000 people living here – most of which I had never heard of, let alone know what they are doing. This map could be a great starting point for someone of getting in touch and connecting us all. The obvious choices: our Chamber of Commerce or the local press seem to be asleep at the wheel in this regard. Heike, maybe you want to take a stab at it? You´ve got all the data at your fingertips now

The map is available as a poster being distributed by Idaho TechConnect and the Department of Commerce. (Contact Krissa Wrigley at 562-3701 (krissa.wrigley@idahotechconnect.com) or Julie Howard at 334-2470 (julie.howard@commerce.idaho.gov) to order copies.) Thanks to Eddie Kovsky from the Idaho Business Review for writing in his blog about this map.

In case you wondered why I didn´t update my blog for such a long time, I have a good excuse: I was too busy writing this book.

HP commissioned me to write a marketing book to inspire their small and medium business customers about the cool things that can be done with their color printers. I teamed up with Ines Bitsch, one of Europe’s top art directors and graphic designers to illustrate my ideas and insights I gained during 15 years of marketing execution.

What looked like an easy shoo-in during the concept phase turned into a labor of love that lasted the summer, fall and spring of 2007 and 2008. Vacation plans were scrapped, editors commissioned (Thank you Jim Lyons and Brianna Gask-Wilson), new work stations installed and hundreds of customers were interviewed about what kind of marketing and selling help they really need to become more successful.

Well, I keep it short today, here it is.
Download the starter chapter directly from HP´s web site here:
http://www.hp.com/sbso/special/doityourself/ebook.html?LinkfromOliversBlog

Every month HP will publish another chapter until its final publication in print in October 2008.

Let me know what you think and tell me which other chapters you would like to see in the future.

Cheers!
Oliver

What happens when lawyers shape a Web 2.0 Community

Ahhhh the big guys are finally waking up to the promise of free labor coming in the form of Social Networking sites.Following in the footsteps of Dells (NYSE DELL) Idea Storm (www.dellideastorm.com) and Procter and Gamble´s (NYSE PG) Capessa Community (www.capessa.com) some Toyota (NYSE TOYOF) Marketing bigwigs had the great idea to invite the American creative community to help them generate new marketing ideas for free.

The invitation was delivered via a HOW magazine email and read like this:

“Toyota wants you to be part of a network of young, creative individuals: a special project called HEYA. At HEYA.toyota.com, we have built an online room that serves as art studio, inventor’s garage and screening room. The question that sums up HEYA is “What can we do together?” Why would you want to be involved with HEYA? $2500 sponsorships and support for your projects Maybe you have a creative web site idea, want to do a graphic design art show, or have an idea to creatively raise awareness for an issue that matters to you. This could be your chance to get Toyota’s help. Get to voice your opinion directly to Toyota. Toyota wants to listen to your thoughts on their marketing and print ideas, their car design, and most of all to hear what creative young adults care about. Connect with others and collaborate on innovative new projects. Perhaps you are a graphic designer who needs a photographer, or you’re a publisher who needs people to weigh in on feature ideas, or maybe you just want to meet creative people from a wide variety of talents - city planners, web designers, artists, surfers, engineers and musicians - and pick their brains. HEYA is limited to 500 members and US residents only. For consideration for this group, please take our screener at: www.HEYA.toyota.com”

I felt almost tempted to apply for one of the limited 500 spots to work for free for this great company.Unfortunately, I never made it through the screener: With over 25 detailed questions, Terms and conditions, a privacy policy and a code of conduct spanning more than 28 pages and 8916 words it became clear to me that the lawyers are still reigning at Toyota. What´s the point of contributing my valuable insights and trying to influence this beautiful brand if it would never reach the intended audience? Hey, I could even be held liable for participating and donating my time for free:

“ Think (BOLDED) , before commenting or posting content. Be sure to thoroughly review Toyota’s Online Privacy Policy which outlines other safeguards pertaining to the protection of your interests, including Toyota and HEYA’s obligations to you. You Could (SIC!) be Held Legally Liable. When you choose to go public with your opinions, comments or content, you are legally responsible. Individuals can be held personally liable for any commentary deemed to be defamatory, obscene, or offensive. In essence, you post at your own risk. Outside parties actually can pursue legal action against you for postings.“

If you want to create a customer insight community for your company that respects the intelligence and goodwill of its volunteers talk to us first (oliverf@cendesic.com) – and leave the lawyers at home!