A week or so ago, I wrote about the effectiveness of your business cards, and Matt from Polon was nice enough to inform me about Moo.

Moo is awesome. Moo makes business cards exciting and different. Moo is also mastering the art of word of mouth marketing by offering various promotions in conjunction with various very cool and talk-friendly companies (ie. 10,000 FREE sets of 10 Flickr mini cards, or 10,000 FREE sets of 10 Skype mini cards)

Redefining Business Cards 

The concept of the mini card is interesting for business owners, gone are the days where a business card was really kept. These days, they are simply the way of transporting your contact information from you to someones elses phone/contact database or other contact storage device, and once this task is complete, they are trashed.

Moo makes this process more fun – each card is different and very nice to look at, they are more convenient and earth friendly (being smaller) and they have managed to single handedly refresh the way I look at business cards. Excellent work :)

Keep and Eye Out 

Not entirely convinced by my gushy blog post? Keep an eye on their blog for the next freebie and send away to see for yourself (I seem to be a bit slow off the mark these days and am yet to be one of the top 10,000) 

You can look at the world in a million and more different ways, the trick to having a great day is to see things from the right angle, preferably the angle that makes you feel no less than fantastic!

1. Keep your vision clear, everyday

We all need a clear vision to get us really pumping enough to drive through each moment with a passion and consistency that leaves us looking back at the day with nothing less than, a woohooo, or that quiet confidence you get from knowing you're on fire. We've all got vision, but you don't have to always be visionary to get your vision clear, if you lose sight temporarily turn to those who can see, and feed off them until you're clear again yourself. Remember, vision is always yours, whether you've created something from scratch, or seen someone elses and developed it in your own way, its your vision.

2. Use Other Peoples Vision to wake you up

I've spent the majority of my business life full of ideas and vision, its what pulls me along, I feel if I follow it, life will get better everyday. Theres a lot ahead you can see, when you see something that fires you up try not to just sit looking at the potential of the future in your minds eye, you've got to head towards it, make it happen and roll around having fun in the middle of it once you get there. Vision and getting everyone involved and seeing there own view of it is what drives businesses, and any action. In business, I spend alot of time in detail making things happen in everything from designing products, to marketing and sales, supporting customers and sorting funding, but it seems that my mainstay is seeing and developing the vision so when someone in the crew, a customer, anyone who's connected to the business gets bogged down or lost in the woods, they can use me to get pumped back up, and inspired, be this person, or recognise who they are around you and use them.

3. A clear vision comes from living a lot of detail

If you subscribe to the thinking that theres ideas people and theres doers, then this goes right against that. People often say I've got great vision, All I can say back is, I just spend and have spent time involved in the details of enough things so that my mind can in its own time see whats really happening and present a vision. You don't just make a vision, you go around doing things with your eyes open and give your mind something to create a vision from. Even with people who don't think they have good vision, you ask whether they currently see something they don't agree, everyone does, you ask them how they could see it being better, they usually see at least something of the new way. This is the start of vision, it just needs to be expanded, you just need to follow it, find out more about why things are as they are, what things are part of changing things and get on board.

4. Connect what you spend your minutes doing with what you're really trying to achieve

In the end the big things you're trying to achieve require a bunch of detail, heaps of end on end moments to bring them to life. So you have to keep this perspective when you're in the moments. You may feel like you're low down chugging away, but if you feel like this, or use this sort of language thats just cementing a persepctive that you can and should let go of, in reality you're doing exacty what you need to do to get what you want, so enjoy the moments, they'll pile up soon enough into your dreams coming true! If you're unhappy with what you have to do today because your vision is further ahead, then you've got to get yourself further towards it, let the fact that you're not quite where you'd like to be, be inspiration for powering through whats on your plate so you get out and past it faster.

Virtually every day since we've been back in Wellington, there has been a different charity having their annual fundraising day. On my walk to work, I invariably scramble round my bag for coins, grab my sticker and be done with it. Generally, on the streets those with the stickers are the minority.

It all changed this morning.

Today is Daffodil Day, and I must say that the Cancer Society has fully grasped that they are part of this marketing game as much as any company is. These day's the charity market is chocka-block, charities face many of the same problems as small businesses do, which boils down to the challenge of how to stand out in the crowd. But they face a much harder problem: consumer fatigue – Basically, as the number of charities grows, so, it appears does the number of problems this planet faces. We still haven't cured world poverty or cancer, although we've been giving for years, we're kind of swamped with the enormity of it all, and we're starting to wonder if our money just falls down a dark hole.

Five Steps to Fundraising Success

1. Give the fundraising day a name.

   No more 'The SPCA's Official fundraising drive', it's Daffodal Day

2. Own the town.

   Because it's all about atmosphere. We love streets lined with yellow balloons, the feeling of spring being on the way, the thought of being part of something cool.

3. Get a cooler giveaway than stickers

   I'm not a huge fan of plastic, one use flowers, and wish we could get a real Daffodil, but in the meantime, it's generally accepted that a sticker is not worth donating for, but a lovely yellow flower is.

4. Choose your collectors carefully

   Yes that's right. Those tired and disillusioned collecters do nothing for 'team morale'. If you're going to do it, get the type of people who call out a cheerful 'thanks' when you pass them, or a 'good morning'. Also get school kids involved, especially polite ones who make us workers feel like there's hope for the future ;)

5. Make people feel good

   It is a well known fact that encouragement is better than punishment. Most charities seem to try to entice donations by showing us just how bad things are (starving children, dead whales etc etc), whereas Daffodil Day makes us feel positive and happy. Yes, there is a serious message behind it, and yes, we have a lot to feel guilty about in this world. But psychology is a funny thing and guilt is not inspiring!

The Cancer Society is a fairly substantial organisation, however, none of the above list requires a lot of money, just a bit of smarts and creativity – Simple and Loveable. Happy Daffodil Day!

If you're a small business and want to advertise on TV and live in the USA (the criteria sound quite stringent but really aren't), head straight over to Spotrunner to enter this very cool competition.

It's not often small businesses get anything for free so grab this chance while you can. If you are like me and excluded from the competition due to geographical reasons, don't be sad! You automatically get the spot prize of seeing a successful buzz marketing campaign in action (I got the news from Becky at Small Biz Survival, who got it from The Small Business CEO, who got it from…)

Entries close on September 5th – Good Luck!

When you are a computer geek it is difficult to find the time to leave your computer and get active. Web 2.0 has responded to this dilemma in true web 2.0 style, combining the real world, communities, goal tracking and feedback, all mixed together in simple, fun looking applications that give you that same 'I will really stick with it this time' feel as you get from infomercials.

When Tim from Silverstripe put us onto Traineo, I instantly fell in love. Aside from their magnificent website, what is suprememly cool is the fact that you nominate 4 friends to act as your excercise interrogators – if you fail, they will know and they will taunt you and make you feel like the loser that you are. Excellent. I guarantee you that if you pick the right friends, you are well on your way to the fit, happy lifestyle you've always wanted.

It's been a while since we profiled a web 2.0 tool. There are a few reasons for this, one of which is the 'stagnation' of the space – Although there are about 5 Basecamp clones launching weekly, the stream of tools that attack different problems is fast turning into a trickle. However, this is not a gripe, because I found one such tool, and I think it's great.

LogoPond Helps you Test Your New Logo

I f you're feeling particularly brave, push your current logo into the viper nest to see if it's time for an upgrade – or try your competitor's logo for a bit of Monday Morning Sport.

I break out in a cold sweat when I consider saying ANYTHING negative about Basecamp out in the open -  I have seen others bombarded with hate mail for mentioning 'Basecamp' and 'Not perfect' in the same sentence. However, over here, we're thinking very seriously about web 2.0 applications, what is missing and what holes need filling. So my eyes just got a whole lot more critical. 

We have a running joke about how 37 Signals can proclaim 'We just cut features from Basecamp' and have crowds flock to sign-up/pay more. How they have the perfect marketing pitch – 'You can pay us more to offer you less!'. For the most part I love it, but recently I worked on a project that involved 3 seperate businesses and 22 page layouts, and Basecamp left a lot to be desired.

3 Business 22 Pages, Not Huge Right? 

But a couple of weeks into it, I had no idea where each page was at, and the only way to find out was to trawl through the messages to locate the last message/comments posted about a particular page. Tim can vouch that it drove me insane. We even resorted to email just to de-clutter our project space!!! It struck me that we weren't so unique. All projects have tasks, and all those tasks need tracking. If you have more than about 5 individual tasks, I'm just not sure how Basecamp caters for you.

So Is Less More? Or is it Just Less? 

Maybe this is more of a rant about extreme simplicity in the general Web 2.0 space. Can you seriously use something that just doesn't do much? I'd say Basecamp is one of the more complex of the web 2.0 tools, and it's just managing to balance successfully right on that line between exceptionally cool, and kinda useless. And I wonder if it would be so bad to add a feature or two (I mean, Basecamp is quite well established now as a product), add a little task tracking functionality, even in it's most simple form (ie. Assigning messages/files to an item (task) on a to do list)? 

But 37 Signals are so clear on there 'less is more' approach that I can't help but be peer pressured into believing that I'm of the old school of complex software, that I'm just not making full use of the simple, elegant flexibility they offer. And even though I was left frustrated and confused at many points in that particular project, it was still completed on time, which may mean that 'project management utopia' simply means something a little different from what I had imagined?

If you ask most people in business if they would like to have an up to date and useful business plan that they feel they are going to achieve, most say absolutely! if you ask the same people if they have this plan, most say, no.

So Whats the problem?

Is it that planning is one of those nice to haves that you just dont have 'real' time for unless you absolutely have to because you're getting investment or applying for a loan? We think not. Nat and me have always have various versions of plans for our business as its continued to take various changes in course, and among other things we're about to start a new venture very shortly (more on this soon), so its again on of those required times to get right up to the moment with our planning,

not the main reason to plan, but one that certainly kicks you into gear. Also in my previous working life I was involved in international business development for a New Zealand energy efficieny technology business and my final work there was helping secure $11million in an 18 month capital raising effort that saw myself and the Chief spend 3 out of 12 months roaming the US from Sanfran to New York selling the story to investment bankers and VC's seriously re-hashing our buiness plan some 13 times. In the end the money came from home, New Zealand. You really do get sick to death of a this sort of document, but all the while understand its importance in getting you and the team focused, growing the business, and getting investment.

Business Planning Fails because:

• Provide limited value in daily, weekly activities
• Have to be read top to bottom
• Provide no means of monitoring, evaluation and feedback
• Difficult and boring to digest
• Very time consuming to maintain currency
• Lacks integration with other business activities, information and systems
• Difficult and costly to keep all stakeholders informed (eg. Investors, team members)

The Solution

Business plans need to be simple and loveable, and useful for your whole team, and anyone else who has a vested interest in your business (investors, banks…). Read

The Zen of Business Plans by Guy Kawasaki for some really useful ideas.

Business plans need to be simple and be something that you can immediately link to your daily actions. They need to be easy to update, and easy to monitor progress against. They need to provide people quick insight as to when they've changed and let everyone whos contributing to or benefiting from the plan know whats happening.

Put yourself together a simple and loveable business plan and bring your planning to life. 

We spend alot of time churning through new ideas, for our customers and ourselves. Having the luxury to think and work on new ideas is most often supported by having some business as usual ticking away, and theres a constant balance to be struck between the two. Natalie and me are working on a couple of significant business opportunities now, set to take our business to the next level, they fit with the 'simple and loveable' philosophy, but they're very new business streams additional to our marketing; branding and web design services and will take us back to the world of web product developers for another shot.

The hard thing is that new ideas are exciting and can quickly become the focus of your attention, which is essential to getting them off the ground, but the simple reality is that theres still plenty of client work in progress to be completed. And me and Nat are pretty much the business at the moment so we're stretched between the worlds, with a proportionally larger volume of the client work falling onto Nat. Which again is tough, because we really need to have both of our heads together on these new business opportunities, at the same time, and the last thing we want is to be imbalanced with our thinking, and Nats pretty good at keeping us on track with that.

So the answer is to let most of our clients down and focus on the new fun stuff : ), no ofcourse not, but getting the balance right is hard, so we're doing our best to find as many strategic angles on our clients projects as possible, so that we see each of them as key in taking us where we're headed, and that new opportunities for us still spell great results for our current customers.

PS. Existing customers if you're reading, we know you've helped us get here, and we'll always look after you.

I'm a little behind the times with this one, but just enjoyed a morning of 'non-thinking' tasks while listening to this excellent talk on providing an experience that customers love, by Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users fame – A must-listen for all small businesses, so pop on those headphones :)