I received an email last week from a very well known marketing guru.

He’s been around for many years; a best-selling author, world renowned speaker, and adviser to some of America’s biggest brands. (I’m tempted to reveal his name, for my own selfish impact, but I can’t bring myself to do that! Hint: His name is not Seth)

The email invited me, “…to attend a special teleconference for business owners, entrepreneurs and people with start-up business ideas.”

Just the type of thing I like to investigate. So I registered.

Here is a part of the confirmation email I received on the morning of the teleconference. Read it carefully and see if you can find the key missing components:

You are confirmed to participate in the 90 minute special Business
Building Teleconference workshop for business owners, entrepreneurs,
professionals and people with start-up business ideas.

Mark your calendar.  The call takes place on Saturday, April 21, 2007
at   Please check your local time differences, to make certain you don’t
miss the correct start time.

To review: the call will last 90 minutes.  It’s broken down into two
integrated, progressive parts.  The call will begin promptly at the exact
start time.  We recommend you have a thick pad and more than one pencil
ready.

The special dial in number to use is:

The pass-code to get in/on is:

Needless to say, I have a feeling the attendance was low. I doubt they made much money on whatever the special offer was going to be at the end of the call.

There is a surprising amount of planning, preparation and thought that goes into any successful event. You can’t afford to blow it.

Here’s our obvious advice: You can avoid disaster by simply checking, double checking, and triple checking the vital elements like date, time, location, phone number, and website address.

Now, I have to be honest here, our team has made our share of communication errors with a few of our launches, so my simple advice does not come from a platform of perfection, but from experience.

Apparently, even great, experienced marketers like the one mentioned above can rush past the details. So, don’t underestimate the obvious.

Remember that old adage: “Measure Twice, Cut Once.”

Final note on this; I admit to watching “The Apprentice” (sigh); and you might recall a few weeks ago that “The Donald” fired a candidate for including the wrong number on a marketing brochure.

Need I say more?

Check out these great posts for more information about this topic:

Gross Writing Errors Found on the Web

5 Common Mistakes that Make You Look Dumb

8 Proofreading Tips and Techniques

Make it Big (to Proofread)

How to Proofread

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Most marketers are afraid to do anything risky, bold, controversial, or polarizing. That’s why most marketing efforts go unnoticed.

Pay attention to the ads, offers, and promotions that catch your attention. They are almost always risky, bold, controversial or polarizing. Until you’re willing to “go there,” expect mediocre marketing campaigns.

An excerpt of a excellent new book by Dan and Chip Heath, Made to Stick (Random House, 2007) is featured in the April, 2007 edition of Fast Company, and focuses on the concept of polarizing your marketing message—here’s a summary of the article:

Polarize Me: If you want people to like you, first decide who needs to hate you.

We
examined more than 1,000 Match.com ads—from men and women, old and
young. Our search yielded headlines like this one:  “Hey,” Folks, if
your opening line is “Hey,” you better be hot.

Another
said “Looking for love,” Well, duh, you’re on Match.com. At least
two-thirds of the headlines said nothing—and did it poorly.

Why
do these headlines suck so much? Fear. Fear of saying too much. Fear of
saying something clever that someone might think is stupid. Fear of
saying something revealing that might turn someone off. The headlines
try desperately not to exclude anyone. In doing so, they succeed at
boring everyone…

…Consider
Honest Tea, a fast-growing indie beverage expected to hit $25 million
in sales this year. Its tagline? “Real Tea. Real Taste. Honest.” In
other words, “Hey”.

If
anything, the fear of being disliked afflicts marketers more acutely
than daters, because the stakes are higher. “Most marketers feel that
if they make a bold statement, they risk not just alienating
customers—but also their boss, and their boss’s boss,” says Charles
Rosen, founding partner of Alalgamated ad agency. “That fear takes the
edge off of all communications.”

Amalgamated put a stake in the ground with its campaign for Svedka vodka, which is
set in the year 2033 and features a “sexy” fembot spokesperson…Svedka
knows who it wants to date: irreverent urban party people who are out
until 3a.m. three times a week. If that’s not you, Svedka doesn’t care.
Its attitude helped it fetch $384 million…

Honest
Tea, though, wants everybody to like it, and that’s a shame because it
is a distinctive product—namely, it isn’t stiflingly sweet like some of
its competitors…it should say, “If ‘high-fructose corn syrup’ on the
label doesn’t make you cringe, we don’t want you.”

Concrete images and language, like Svedka’s, make it easier for like-minded people (and companies) to find one another.

Some
singles have figured this out. Here’s a brilliant example: “Athletic
math nerd seeks someone to hum Seinfeld intro music with.” While
excluding, he’s simultaneously becoming more interesting to potential
soul mates. Another appropriately polarizing headline reads, “I might
just Bite!” Well done.

(For reprints of the entire article contact Fast Company at Reprint Management Services, 717-399-1900 Ext. 158)

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Information has always moved pretty quickly on the Internet. But the new technology allowing information to move in an organized, highly targeted way is changing everything about Internet marketing.

Entrepreneurs and small businesses who understand how to tap into the online world of community and customization will be able to reach buyers in ways we never dreamed before.

Take a moment and watch this powerful video below (over 2 million views), The Machine is Us/ing Us but before you do, if you’re not a “techie”, don’t focus on that aspect of this clip because you might glaze-over in the first 20 seconds. Instead, stick with it through the end and focus on what this video illustrates about the future of customized online information. What does it indicate to you about where the internet is going? What does it indicate about your need to understand the new speed of the Internet?

Brad Fallon, a search engine optimization expert had some interesting thought on this video:

“It’s a very cool combination of screen capture and video which makes some really salient points about the future of web technology and the effects it will have on how people interact and express themselves…This piece, “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” covers the changes occurring online that are democratizing and socializing the shared online spaces we occupy.

It’s got me thinking not just about what this means for “community” online, but what it can mean for business and commerce. In a lot of ways this kind of interactive development has brought the web full circle. Rather than having global mega-stores that sell everything, we see more and more mom-and-pop corner shops appearing, albeit with a potentially global customer base.”

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Seasoned business-builders typically recoil at the prospect of facing any public exposure of their failures, and they certainly don’t report their own mistakes to the world.

But Bessemer Venture Partners does just that. They actually report their “Anti-Portfolio”.

As someone who lives in the world of small business, it’s refreshing to observe that even the best entrepreneurs and investors make the same mistakes I’ve made; missed opportunities, wrong assumptions, poor judgment, and lack of foresight. All necessary lessons on the road to success.

Thanks to BVP for showing some light-hearted humility on our behalf:

“Bessemer Venture Partners is perhaps the nation’s oldest venture capital firm, carrying on an unbroken practice of venture capital investing that stretches back to 1911. This long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.

We chose to decline the investments below, each of which we had the opportunity to invest in, and each of which later blossomed into a tremendously successful company.

Our reasons for passing on these investments varied. In some cases, we were making a conscious act of generosity to another, younger venture firm, down on their luck, whom we felt could really use a billion dollars in gains. In other cases, our partners had already run out of spaces on the year’s Schedule D and feared that another entry would require them to attach a separate sheet. Whatever the reason, we would like to honor these companies — our “anti-portfolio” — whose phenomenal success inspires us in our ongoing endeavors to build growing businesses. Or, to put it another way: if we had invested in any of these companies, we might not still be working:

		Apple Computer BVP had the opportunity to invest in pre-IPO secondary stock in Apple at a $60M valuation. BVP’s Neill Brownstein called it “outrageously expensive.”
		eBay “Stamps? Coins? Comic books? You’ve GOT to be kidding,” thought Cowan. “No-brainer pass.”
		Federal Express Incredibly, BVP passed on Federal Express seven times.
		Google Cowan’s college friend rented her garage to Sergey and Larry for their first year. In 1999 and 2000 she tried to introduce Cowan to “these two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine”. Students? A new search engine? In the most important moment ever for Bessemer’s anti-portfolio, Cowan asked her, “How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?”
		Intel BVP’s Pete Bancroft never quite settled on terms with Bob Noyce, who instead took venture financing from a guy named Arthur Rock.
		Intuit Along with every venture capitalist on Sand Hill Road, Neill Brownstein turned down Intuit founder Scott Cook. Scott managed to scrape together only $225K from friends, including HBS classmate and Sierra Ventures founder Peter Wendell, who personally invested $25K to get Scott off his back.
		Lotus and Compaq (formerly known as Gateway Computer) Ben Rosen, one of the founders of Sevin Rosen, offered Felda Hardymon the chance to invest in both Lotus and Gateway Computer on the same day. Says Hardymon: “Lotus had just missed a payroll, and I was worried about the situation there. As for Gateway, I told him there was no real future in transportable computers since IBM could do it.”
		Paypal David Cowan passed on the Series A round. Rookie team, regulatory nightmare, and, 4 years later, a $1.5 billion acquisition by eBay.”

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Check out these great posts for more information about this topic:

Embracing Failure

Don’t Hide Your Failures-Advertise Them!