.:RIMproInsider:.

“Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions.
All life is an experiment.
The more experiments you make the better.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

An idea for a revenue kick next week. Many of you have built into your contract a fee to replace damaged boxes that are no longer holding up, are falling apart and don’t sit in the rack properly. Why not do a incentive program for one week with your warehouse staff or drivers and have them replace as many as they can (that really need it). Incent them by offering a small payment for each box completed. You get paid, they get incented, the warehouse looks and works better and the customer files get a brand new home. A win for all. Just make sure you are free to do so under the terms of your agreement with your customer.

Bill Virgin, columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer writes a decent article on the paper economy that keeps driving our business.

And now a report from the paperless society. Stop that snickering out there.

One need lift one’s eyes no farther than to sweep the rest of the office — provided you can see over the in-box stacks of reports and documents — to see how laughable the prospect, once taken seriously, of a world freed from paper has become.

Computers and electronic communication will end the need for paper? Oh sure. People send messages and documents and access information from an infinity of Web sites all day. And what’s the first thing they do with an e-mail or document they want to save? They print it out, not on some commonly shared, clunky, noisy dot-matrix paper fed with fan-fold paper, but from small, quiet printers, often one per desktop.

Check out the rest of the article.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Italian painter, sculptor and inventor

I had the opportunity today to attend PR Idol, a cool business workshop loosely based on the “American Idol” idea. It’s sole purpose was to teach business people how to create positive stories and pitch them to press people. This workshop was beneficial in that it actually had a teaching component, but the best part of the event was the opportunity to make a pitch to actual business writers and media. They took the role of judges and responded to every companies pitch. The things I learned from their responses were very valauble.

1. The media needs you as much as you need them. They need to write a great story everyday or every week.
2. They don’t want your marketing spin, they want your story, or a story that is about you, a customer of yours, something cool that happened, some dirt, some controversy, a success story or something that will get readers attention. They don’t want to buy your product. Don’t try to sell it to them.
3. Reporters are pretty normal people doing their jobs. They don’t like being bothered about things that don’t relate to them. Don’t pitch a medical story to a business writer unless the story is something a business writer can write about. Pitch that story to a medical writer. Don’t keep calling. They get hundreds of calls per day pitching them.
4. You have to hit the right reporter on the right day with the right story. In some ways it is a crap shoot.
5. The odds are not in your favor, but that doesn’t mean don’t pitch. Remember that your story might be the thing they are looking for three months from now when you have forgotten about it. A few months ago I got a front page, 3/4 page article written about me in the Life section of our local city newspaper. The pitch happened months before. That article generated at least ten new motivational speaking opportunities for me. Was the intial pitch worth it? You bet it was! Both from an income perspective and a increased profile perspective.

My two cents…. a free article about you, mentioning you, quoting you is worth a months of advertising, and it is free. Get some press.

Search engine use is growing. From Neilsen //NetRatings:

Search engine use among active Internet users spiked to 114.5 million unique users or 39 percent of Americans in January 2004, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. The top five search venues in January were Google (59 million visitors), Yahoo! Search (46 million), MSN Search (45 million), AOL Search (23 million), and Ask Jeeves (13 million).

Maybe I talk about this too much, but we need to get our companies listed in these engines. We now have a good way to build your site in the Google rankings. Use the LINK MANAGER. Go there and enter the information for your site. To prove that Google is looking at it, check out my stats as of today. The top line shows the Google Search Bot visits to the Link Manager part of the site in February. Remember that this part of the site just went live a couple of weeks ago.

That basically shows that the Google spider has been on my site 79 times in the last few weeks. And if Google finds your link there while it spiders my site, it is one small way to assist in boosting your web rankings. So do it today. Typical time from spidering to actually showing up in the rankings takes time. Use appropriate words in your link description. See my earlier posts about increasing your Google Ranking.
1. Raise Your Google Page Rank
2. Follow Up on Google Rankings

In the next few weeks I will offer ideas and methods to make some waves in the other major engines.

Wow… I love this. Ideas from the employees at a MINI plant in Oxford, UK have saved the company over 10 million pounds at the production plant owned by BMW.

Every employee has a target of implementing three ideas a year to improve the business. 11,064 ideas were put into practice from a total of 14,333 submitted in 2003, an 80% implementation rate.

Can you believe it? Apparently, BMW is great at this. Reports suggest that through this scheme BMW worldwide saved more than 4 times that amount.
I hope you see your staff as valuable as BMW does.