Today is Easter Monday in New Zealand, it is also two days before one of my good friends heads off overseas and a chance for the old girl crowd to have one final lunch together.

It was a beautiful day so we wanted to sit somewhere outside in the sun and chose our restaurant based on it’s nice big outside area. The trouble was, while the inside part was empty, all the tables outside were full.

So we asked if maybe they would move another table outside (there was pletny of room). The waiter looked at us like we were demanding prima donnas, and said ‘no sorry.’ So we said “ummm ok, we’ll try somewhere else then.” He shrugged and walked away.

I wonder what kind of half-full restaurant is so happy with their profits that they will turn away 7 people on a day that they charge and extra 15% holiday surcharge, simply to avoid moving a table.

Or maybe the waiter was so dis-enchanted with his boss, he simply didn’t care?

I would be a little worried if the staff I hired at the front end of a restaurant were so disinterested in making sales they lost me about $200 in business in the space of 30 seconds.

Firstly, I apologise to Xero for my angry behavior on Twitter, I already told you that I treat it like a messanger between friends and was over-exaggerating my anger for effect. I also have a tendency to get angry whenever I do accounting anyway (case in point, when I mentioned accounting this morning, Ben scarpered). So I didn’t really mean to question Xero, I think it’s largely awesome.

Secondly, how cool is it that you guys use Twitter to track what people are saying about you in real-time so when someone like me runs into massive super duper problems that kinda ruins their day, you call them out of the blue and apologise. AWESOME (even if I now feel horrible for writing angry Tweets)

If you have a company, track what people are saying about you on Twitter, from experience, I can guarantee it turns frantic customers into relaxed ones. Especially if you have a web company because a slow web application is a nightmare to deal with and it’s best you know ASAP that people are getting frustrated.

Turns out I’m quite the movie buff. I found this out when going to a dvd shop and walked down the aisle saying ‘wow this one is like the best movie of 2007′, ‘nah that one’s rubbish’, ‘average’, ‘great’… Until I realised there were only about 10 I hadn’t watched and they were either hard core action movies or ‘Bring it on 7′

But The three that have really stuck out for me recently as far as making me realise that building a business is really no big deal and I totally shouldn’t stress are:

1. Amazing Grace

Seriously. You think you’re addicted to your cause (your business?), you think you’ve mad sacrifices, lost friends and battled against overwhelming odds. Toughen up. It’s brilliantly made, totally inspirational and really drums home the fact that amazing feats only happen overnight after 10 years of trying. And when you feel overworked, ignored and like you are banging your head against a brick wall, compare it to these guys who didn’t even plan to make any money in the end.

I reckon it was the best movie I’ve seen since The Life of David Gale for the amount it totally floored me and how much time I have spent since then pondering it and how I can change my life to live by their principles.

2. The great debaters

I have done a little debating in my time and think it was responsible for opening my mind up to the world - when you have to negate ‘that gay couples should be allowed to adopt’ and your first reaction is to be ‘ok, lets just let the other team win’, you have to start really thinking wider and wider about how the world works.

This movie is set in the 1930’s in Southern America and is about a black debate team that ended up taking on Harvard. While this in no way offers any business lessons, the courage and determination displayed against such an overwhelming opposition (and I don’t mean Harvard) and all the different ways that different characters did what they had to do to wake up the next morning and know they were changing their world was powerful. The debates clearly centered around what would become the civil rights movement and were fascinating (if somewhat cheesy on occasion) and left me feeling that growing a successful business is a relatively mundane and easily achievable goal - which is a perspective I lack on occasion :)

3. Once

I LOVED this movie for slightly different reasons. It’s basically a soundtrack to a story and a super awesome idea for a couple of singer songwriters to get their music out there. In this day and age when everyone and their mum has a Myspace profile and is desperately trying to get famous, these guys made a beautiful, charming movie that had you so enthralled you didn’t even know that subliminally they were selling you music, until you arrive at a CD store and HAD to buy the CD (It helps that the songs were really good too). What a super awesome and original approach to marketing! I think they even won an Oscar or something in the end.

So go and buy hire or steal them if you need a little boost and a lot of inspiration… And feel free to share the movies that changed your life in some way last year…

Big companies ALWAYS shock me with how useless they are. Big companies pay a fortune for someone to come up with a marketing strategy, but forget to analyse who they are before hand. This results in me seeing massive banners, tv ads and sponsorships everywhere proclaiming one thing, then interacting with the actual company and experiencing just the opposite.

Take my favorite large company Vodafone for example. If you NEVER met anyone from vodafone, you would be under the belief that Vodafone was full of hip young things who are so clever and cool that while they are out skateboarding and surfing and at dance parties, they come up with super cool ways to help you make the most of now.

When you walk into a Vodafone outlet however, you come face to face with some angry young person who clearly doesn’t give two hoots about how you make use of your time because they wont even bother to look at you for the first half an hour (I was actually wondering today if a Vodafone store would be a good place to catch up with friends - all this space to sit in and you are invisible to the people actually working there).

And aside from the girls they dress in tiny little dresses at various events (and I’m only including them because I suspect the boys love them), you could hardly call the people you come into contact with as ‘cool’. I’m fairly certain none of them have EVER been surfing and the seeming inability to hold a conversation makes me think they don’t have many friends to practice on. This may seem really rude, but my take on the Vodafone marketing speel is that it relies on being the ‘cool’ company. Therefore it actually is important to have fun, approachable people in their shops - I have nothing against uncool people, but they simply don’t belong with Vodafone - this is the image they have built.

I don’t want to be accused of using ironic in the wrong sense like our friend Alanis Morrisette, but it does strike me as ironic that Vodafone shops are so full of high-tech gadgets and information about 3G and wireless internet and clever things you can do with technology these days, while in the middle of it all two bored looking people struggle to write your problem down in one of those tiny notebooks you use to write your spelling words in at school. Once again, using glass on your table tops and minimalist branding only gets you so far in convincing your customers that you are at the cutting edge of technology. When you are faced with a problem management tool that is not only decades only and inefficient, but surpassed by basically every low-tech company around, suddenly those big modern, open spaces just look as empty as the promises Vodafone makes about who they are.

My point is. Vodafone clearly doesn’t care (what are we going to do? Switch to Telecom?) But you should. If you can’t live up to what your marketing says about you, rethink your marketing strategy.

Once you have established who you are, EVERY INTERACTION ANYONE HAS with your company should reinforce that. Want to be seen as fun? Well have fun with your customers, chat with them, discuss awesome ideas you have for what you’re helping them with. Want to be seen as professional? Make sure no one within your company is ever rude to your customers and deliver everything on time. Want to be seen as cool? Hire people who are unique, have quirky clothing and interests and the ability to chat casually with random passers by.

Vodafone has the pleasure of my rant because they do this to me time and time again, but you do see it everywhere. While words CAN convince people about what you are for a while, eventually people will see through them and you’d better either have a monopoly on your market or ensure what’s behind them holds true. Otherwise, your customers WILL leave you, and they probably wont even bother telling you why. So don’t just go to a branding company and get them to decide who you are (not that any half decent one should let you do that). Put in the ground work, think about what makes you different and never swerve off that path.

I have grown to love the concept of LJ Urban’s marketing more and more. I think it is our duty as small business owners to help other people who haven’t been given the same opportunities as us and LJ Urban have hit the nail on the head by figuring out exactly how their business connects with people who are trying to do the same thing and giving them a hand.

What I loved about LJ Urban, when we first spoke (apart from the fact they’d been reading Simple and Loveable for a while) was how super enthusiastic they were about how they’d managed to avoid the traditional housing development marketing model. I hate billboards, I hate advertising, even if that was a viable marketing option for us, I’d never go there. It was waaay harder for them because billboards are what developers do. They’d put so much thought into how to achieve the same outcome (a lot of eyes on their project) while doing good in the world and the word they used to describe this clearly hefty ambition, was ‘fun’.

Most economists would say that it is impossible for them to succeed when a large part of this project is basically charity. I believe the opposite, they will be super successful because they are building a sustainable company, based on building sustainable products, cutting out the marketing waste and helping other people start using the same model in their own countries. Check out the review on Springwise, they described this much better than me.

LJ Urban have also got me thinking hard about what to do with my company. I love what I do and wouldn’t necessarily get hands on in many of the things I believe in at this stage, but it would be awesome to track a cut of our revenue towards a project that I believe in. I’m going to be putting a lot of thought into this in the near future but would love to hear about or from other companies who run their business in a way that benefits not only their bank account, but the community around them in a real, significant way.

Koz twittered this link a few days ago about how to improve your presentations.

I hate giving presentations, but have learned a few tricks in the past to avoid falling too flat on my face and the article basically covers them all in really fine detail. It got me reminiscing about lessons I have learned every time I’ve been standing sweaty and shaking, about to open my mouth (even the thought makes me nervous… that’s why I hide behind my blog ;))… Anyway here are my pearls of wisdom:

• Speak reeeaaalllyyy slowly, and then you will probably come across at your normal speed or just a bit quicker (funny how you go into sonic mode when there are people watching)
• Imagine everyone naked. This is a popular one. It has never worked for me. Some people swear by it.
• Pretend you’re already 5 minutes in. I got this from my dad who has been regularly thrown in front of tv cameras and spoken at some fairly high profile, high pressure events. It’s quite true, the start is the worst, then you relax into it, so pretend you’ve already been going a bit.
• Keep it snappy. Dunno about you, but I hate waffling, I get bored, especially if I’m not the waffler.
• The biggest one is BE PREPARED. It’s so true. My biggest fear is forgetting what I have to say and no one likes looking at screeds of notes. No one, for that matter likes listening to someone reading them screeds of notes. So practise, practise, practise and make sure you feel confident

Ok, so it’s not quite Steve Jobs, but the article is really good.

Greenpeace is holding a ‘name the whale’ competition (finishing today our time so tomorrow for the rest of the world). One of the whale name candidates is ‘Mr Splashy Pants’, from the sounds, this was only an option because ‘it was too funny to leave out’… However some fan of the name ‘Mr Splashy Pants’ caused no end of controversy when they set out on a one night attempt to make Mr Splashy Pants the most popular choice for the poor whales name.

In one of those mysterious twists of fate, websites with some of the largest viewership on the internet saw the sudden spike in votes and wrote about it… Now the full story has come out and the internet has gone crazy with a campaign to name the whale Mr Splashy Pants.

You may already know this, but what I love about it, is that that Greenpeace through the power of having something a little quirky have created a massive viral marketing campaign around their campaign to stop the killing of whales by Japanese whaling boats. People are currently:

• Wearing Mr Splashy Pants t-shirts
• Joining a Mr S.P Facebook group
• Sticking a Mr Splashy Pants bumper sticker on their cars
• Revising their logo - Check out Reddit

Mr Splashy Pants has ALREADY done more for Whales already than he could ever have been expected to do. However just imagine the global outrage if the Whalers harpooned him! I’m seriously wondering if I hope they do because if they did, he would be making the ultimate sacrifice to ensure that once and for all Whaling is made illegal worldwide. If Mr Splashy Pants became a victim of the harpoon, we wouldn’t stand for it.

Whatever you think about the tactics Greenpeace uses to make the world a fairer place for those with no voices, you can’t help but congratulate them on being some of the leading lights in viral marketing and exploiting the internet to their full advantage - So join the campaign and don’t forget to vote

I HATE networking. To me, it falls into the same category as speed dating - I just feel awkward when I’m put in a room with a bunch of people with the sole intent of chatting them up to close the deal (I’m talking about networking here, I’ve never done speed dating).

I’m quite an outgoing person, but I clam up at the prospect of walking into a room full of strangers and breaking in. I think most women are useless at it - case in point: every single women’s only networking event I have attended, people only seem to talk to people they know. Seeing as I know noone, I have to walk right up to people and try to start conversations that seem to only ever be met with one word answers.

What I’ve learned

Don’t network. Make friends

I’m never going to be a networker, but I am a friend-maker. I attend events now with the intention of meeting one cool person. I don’t care if they have anything to do with my business or if I never have the remotest possibility of working with them at all.

Somehow, that takes the pressure off. It’s amazing what snippets of gold you get or fun nights you have when this is your intent. Quite often, you do end up meeting people who can help you out business wise anyway.

Use your one liners

Man it’s tough. I try to have a stack of one liners (told you it was like speed dating) that can break me into a group. I have accumulated these by watching men do it. Seriously, guys get networking! Mine are fairly dumb (but I’m still learning) like ‘hey, have you been to one of these before?’ or if there is food somewhere, i wander over and grab some and make a joke of it - this clearly only works if they are snacks provided and not someones private meal.

The one thing I’ve noticed is that when you are alone, no one notices you. You know how you stand there feeling like every eye in the room is focused on you and wondering why such a loser bothered to turn up? Well it’s a total lie. Even if you break into a conversation, say something dumb and fail dismally… Chance are, no one will even notice. This means you get quite a few chances.

Let them talk

My biggest worry is that I will run out of things to say - which is weird, because in all my life, I don’t think I’ve ever had that happen. However, if you ease the pressure on yourself and spend a good portion of your chats ASKING the questions, you don’t have to spend as much time answering them. This way, if you are nervous, you have time to regroup your thoughts and come up with sparkling, witty comments that describe yourself in a way that makes people like you. This is something I find really beneficial.

I was told once that if you ask others questions and talk less about yourself, people walk away thinking you’re the most interesting person in the room. This is because you talked about them, which to them is the most interesting topic in the world. Simple but exceptionally good.

Be brave

It’s like when you go to a country where you know no one. You can be someone entirely different. Well, if you’re in a room, and you know no one, it’s like another country. So be the brave version of you. Take a chance that you wouldn’t take if you had your best friend standing beside you.

Sometimes, it takes me 5 pages of documentation and a lengthy chat to decipher what it is a particular business actually does. I figure if I don’t get it, then chances are the viewers of the website I build for them wont get it either.

Sometimes I feel thick because I have to ask a potential customer so many questions, part of me just wants to nod along and pretend I know what they’re up to so they’ll feel comfortable spending money with me. But another part of me figures that if a business is making me feel dumb and intimidated because I don’t get what they do, surely they aren’t marketing themselves very well.

Publish a five word summary puts in very concise words one of the biggest things I think we offer our customers and WHY we think it’s so important.

I realised this very early on after starting a blog - the 5 word summary of what the blog was about appeared in every review and directory listing people gave us. They just copied and pasted it. We made it so easy for them to spread the word about us, they just did it (I just realised that we’ve somehow deleted that summary, I’ll put it back up tomorrow)

I also notice it when talking to people about what we do. If I give the 5-15 minute explanation, people often get a polite but entirely bored look on their face. Most people just don’t care about the inner workings, they just want the 5 word summary. If they get your business in 5 words - especially if they know nothing about the industry - they feel smart. They like you AND they can tell their friends about you.

So, what’s your five word summary?

James has been super busy over the last few weeks helping a US startup Social Media get the new version of their website slick and beautiful. We were stoked to see this morning that Social Media has now been featured on both Tech Crunch and Venture Beat, looking absolutely amazing. And if PlanHQ’s time on Tech Crunch is anything to go by, it means thousands upon thousands of eyes on a Decisive Flow designed website, which is kind of really super cool.

Congrats to Social Media for raising $3.5 million in financing and I bet we’re sure to see more of them in the future (especially as our entire office is glued to Facebook), and go James for getting out yet another beautiful website, you’re a superstar!