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| Volume 9, Issue 3 |
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In This Issue:
 How Chris Hughes helped launch Facebook and the Obama campaign
Lululemon's cult of selling
 Kick-ass copywriting…in 10 easy steps
 Pricing: How low can you really go?
 Eight marketing strategies to gain momentum in a sluggish economy
The top 10 dumb sales questions during a bad economy
Death of a sales meeting: Time for a change?
The 13 most annoying people to work with
Low-cost ways to motivate employees
 Time management: Making every hour count
 Seven words that will make your web site worth viewing
Five ways to supercharge your mobile marketing
 iPhone apps that foretell the future
 Is Craigslist the world's biggest bordello?
10 cars that could change the way we drive
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Boy wonder: How Chris Hughes helped launch Facebook and the Barack Obama campaign
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The Community That Hughes Built
Volunteers flooded My.BarackObama.com -- MyBO, to insiders -- from the day it launched, nearly crashing the site. Under Hughes, it became a virtual system for helping real people do what they wanted to do in real life: elect Barack Obama president...
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Lessons From The Trenches
Activating a customer base with digital tools isn't as easy as it looks. As Chris Hughes showed with both Facebook and Obama, detailed execution is at least as important as strategy. Some examples:...
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The untold story of how Chris Hughes, today only 25 years old, helped create two of the most successful startups in modern history, Facebook and the Barack Obama campaign.
Chris Hughes is having a philosophical moment. "I don't really know what 'community' means. And I never use that word." We are in Washington, D.C., just three days before his most recent boss, Barack Obama, will take office. It is so bone-jarringly cold that even nestled over coffee inside a Starbucks, we can see our breath. I
resist the urge to pat his nearly whiskerless cheek, or reach over to tighten his jacket against the frigid air. Such a baby face. But at the age of 25, Hughes has helped create two of the most successful startups in modern history, Facebook and the campaign apparatus that got Barack Obama elected. Both were dedicated to the
proposition that communities, and the way we share and interact within them, are vitally important. As he recounts his two years as director of online organizing for the man who put community organizing on the map, the existential reverie is understandable. He doesn't know what community means? Really? "Well, I just never
think of myself as being in the business of building an online community." Hughes is a technology star whose business is people...
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Lululemon's cult of selling
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Lululemon has created a cult following for its yoga gear. Its secret? The Secret, as well as other controversial self-help classics.
I'm balancing on my head, and I don't think I've ever been more relaxed. I am one of about 30 women who have assumed similarly vertical positions early on a Sunday morning in a yoga studio on New York's Upper East Side. Tibetan chants and dimmed lights block out the city's chaos just beyond the door. Motivational quotes painted
on the walls -- jealousy works the opposite way you want it to! -- seep into my consciousness. Seconds after our petite Indian yogi leads us through our final "ommm," piercing lights flicker on. People roll in tables of merchandise like stagehands between acts of a play, converting our urban ashram into a retail temple.
The women gathered at Lululemon Athletica -- the Mecca of yoga lifestyle gear -- know the drill. The free class is over, and they lunge toward the register to retrieve their 15% off coupons, still catching their breath from their last downward dog. One woman already has three $52 Alluring tank tops in hand. "If you want to be
successful in this industry," says Christine Day, Lululemon's CEO, "it's about being authentic." A cult following is the most coveted accessory in retail, and Lululemon's is even more lustworthy than its Velocity Gym Bag. It wasn't built on
the work of some Jobs-ian swami, however, but on...
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Kick-ass copywriting…in 10 easy steps
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Don't waste your ad dollars with an over-the-top sales pitch. Well-written copy follows these simple guidelines.
This article has been excerpted from Kick-Ass Copywriting in 10 Easy Steps by Susan Gunelius, available from Entrepreneur Press.
Whether you're a small-business owner, a medium-size business owner, an eBay seller, or simply trying to break into the copywriting industry, understanding the fundamentals of writing sales-oriented copy and put you on a path to success. At its core, copywriting is another device in a business' marketing toolbox. Well-written
copy can make or break an ad or marketing piece. With that in mind, copywriting can equate to either well-spent advertising investments or a waste of advertising dollars. Many people misinterpret the uniqueness of effective copywriting. I can't count the number of times I've heard freelance writers say they want to shift from
article writing to copywriting as if it's simply an extension of their existing abilities. Copywriting does come naturally to some people, but for most, it's a foreign landscape they do not know how to navigate. Copywriting is about more than...
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Pricing: How low can you really go?
Businesses reexamine their prices.
Tempted to cut prices? You're not alone. With slumping sales, many businesses have been quick to offer discounts. "Cutting prices is by far the easiest marketing technique you can use," says Frank Luby, a partner in Simon-Kucher & Partners, a pricing and marketing consultancy. But price cuts raise some tough questions: Will
deep discounts cheapen your brand? Once you cut prices, can you raise them again? How do you deal with narrower margins? Says Luby: "I try to get my clients to think about where they want to be as a brand when things turn around." Here are three companies that made big pricing changes and the results of those decisions...
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Eight marketing strategies to gain momentum in a sluggish economy
In the middle of a downturn, everyone is looking for an upside.
Your sales are down, marketing budget has been (or is about to be) cut and you're looking at ways to "do more with less." Don't despair: Here are eight marketing strategies to gain momentum in a sluggish economy...
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The top 10 dumb sales questions during a bad economy
Steve Giglio is a renowned executive development consultant. Among the clients he's worked with are Vanity Fair, American Express, and Lexis/Nexis.
These are tough economic times, making the job of an executive sales leader even harder than usual. Needless to say, the last thing you need right now is for your reps to hobble themselves by asking all the wrong questions of their prospects.
If your team is fond of any of the following queries, you may find yourself in a world of trouble:...
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Death of a sales meeting: Time for a change?
With a weak economy forcing businesses to cut costs, now's the time to rethink your meeting strategy and opt for more interactive on-demand versions.
Faced with a weak economy and organizational imperatives to drive down costs, many companies are finding that once-robust travel budgets don’t stand a chance. Add up airfare costs—along with hotel fees, dining tabs and productivity lost due to travel—and the total becomes increasingly harder to justify. In fact, according to
the National Business Travel Association, 49 percent of company travel managers are investigating travel alternatives. This trend to pare down isn't lost on your sales force...
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The 13 most annoying people to work with
Most of us have had colleagues over the years who turned annoying into an art form.
Well, now it's a classifiable art form. Career experts Christine Lambden and Casey Connor, authors of the new book, "Everyday Practices of Extraordinary Consultants," have compiled a list of "The 13 Most Annoying People to Work With." How many of these does your company still have on its payroll?...
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Low-cost ways to motivate employees
Aside from cutting expenses, delaying payment of bills, ramping up collections and altering their business models, employers can try low-cost ways to motivate their employees to increase revenue and profitability, according to Suzanne Bates,
author of Motivate Like a CEO: Communicate Your Strategic Vision and Inspire People to Act!
"Money is only one of many factors that motivate employees. When people enjoy their jobs, like their co-workers, and believe their pay is basically fair, they don't focus so much on their compensation," says Bates, president and CEO of Bates
Communications. Among the low-cost and no-cost ways to keep people motivated in challenging times, according to "Motivate Like a CEO," are:...
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Time management: Making every hour count
Time management gurus hawking day planners aren't the only ones with ideas on how to manage your hours better.
Readers offered their own workplace-tested secrets for success on our Time Management blog, in a BusinessWeek reader poll, and on the social network LinkedIn. Here are 10 tips for taking control of the clock from readers who are already doing just that...
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Seven words that will make your web site worth viewing
Seven. A number like any other. But it does seem to come up on a fairly regular basis: the Seven Wonders of the World, the Seven Deadly Sins, and the Seven Dwarfs: Happy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Bashful, Doc, Dopey, and (my favorite) Grumpy.
Phone numbers have seven digits. And may say the optimum brand name should be no more than seven letters long. Seven, it seems, is a magical number, because the human brain can grasp only seven things at a time (on average). So I've been thinking, What are the seven most important words associated with Web-marketing?
I'll give you a hint: Search, engine, and optimization don't make the cut. So what words do make the list? What are the seven words that will make your Web site worth viewing?...
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Five ways to supercharge your mobile marketing
At this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the Consumer Electronics Association announced it expects mobile phone unit sales in 2009 to grow some 31 percent in North America, with global unit sales reaching approximately 1.2 billion.
The announcement validates the mobile market as a wellspring of untapped potential, but it also poses the challenge of how to effectively engage audiences increasingly selective about how, when, and where they buy. Consider this: It's all but impossible to watch television, surf the Internet, or use your mobile phone without
experiencing some sort of brand interaction. Brands are everywhere, from the shows we watch to the clothes we wear to the Web sites we visit. Consumers are more accessible now than at any other time in history: From broadcast to email to mobile
phones, there are ever-increasing numbers of channels for brands to reach customers through, but to what effect?...
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iPhone apps that foretell the future
More than just useful or fun, these iPhone apps point the way toward the future -- of the iPhone and smartphones in general.
Ah, the Apple App Store. Since July 2008, the month when Apple opened its wildly popular library of applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, the world has been treated to more than 20,000 apps, with some 500 million downloaded as of February 2009. Programs run the gamut from necessary, useful and a ton of fun all the way
through to "none of the above." And then there's another class of software -- iPhone apps that foretell the future. These are the applications that offer clues as to how mobile users are likely to use their smartphones -- whether it's an iPhone or one of the iPhone's rivals -- in the months and years to come. [Ready for a little reading of the tea leaves? Here's my personal list of iPhone apps that best exemplify the future of mobile applications...]
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Is Craigslist the world's biggest bordello?
Update 7 p.m. on Friday: Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster issued a statement. You can read the story here.
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Catherine is a 35-year-old sex worker in San Francisco who relies on Craigslist to reduce the physical risks often faced by a woman in her line of work.
"Craigslist is important to helping us avoid violence," says the woman, who is originally from Europe. "Craigslist is a way to filter out that kind of person...and with Craigslist there is no need for pimps."
For people in her trade, she adds in a thick accent, "Craigslist is vital."
It is also why Chicago Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart on Thursday sued the popular Internet classified service, accusing Craigslist of being one of the largest sources of prostitution in the country.
In an interview with CNET News, Dart said that the kind of sex services being advertised on Craigslist frequently involves...
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