Free webinar on simple marketing tactics

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing fame will be giving a free webinar on Simple Marketing Tactics on February 11, 2009 at 12:00pm CST.

"Let's get back to basics and start utilizing simple, effective and affordable marketing tactics to create momentum that carries your business through the tough times and allows it soar in the good times."

Reserve your spot today!

Fail Gracefully

Tim Berry's blog post today on "failing forward" reminded me of one of my favorite engineering/application design phrases: fail gracefully.

What does this mean? It means that you should design your applications and web sites to provide the end user with useful and informative information when it runs into a problem. Failing gracefully means:

• Providing useful 404 pages on your web site
• Not displaying only error codes when your application crashes. Provide information that will help the user fix the problem.
• Not letting engineers write your error messages. (see point 2)
  
• Making sure errors behind the scenes don't bring everything else to a screeching halt

Beyond writing code and developing applications, the "fail gracefully"concept is useful in business. This means:

• Having good backup plans if things don't go as you originally planned.
• Knowing what your alternatives are.
• Planning ahead for optimistic and pessimistic scenarios
• Learning from your mistakes

Not that any of us ever want to fail, but it's inevitable in business, entrepreneurship and life. So, failing gracefully is a much better option than just failing.

Good business reading coming soon

I'm looking forward to two (most likely good) books from my favorite business authors that are coming out later this month:

Seth Godin's Tribes and Guy Kawasaki's Reality Check both come out in a few weeks and I'm sure they will quickly become required reading for entrepreneurs and marketers everywhere.

For a long time, I've admired both of these authors for their ability to cut through the BS and provide business advice that you can apply to your business immediately. There's no academic, theoretical garbage to muck up the messages. You come away from reading anything by these authors thinking, "I already knew what they told me, but they presented it in a much better way than I ever thought of."

Anyway, pre-order these books on Amazon. I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

Organize your Business for Growth

I really enjoyed John Jantsch's post yesterday about organizing your marketing. The real insight for me was the idea that even very small organizations should have an org chart for how they would like their organization to look in the future. To quote from John:

See, here’s the deal, even if it’s just you and Louie, he does this, you do that, you need an org chart for your business. Here’s why. No matter how many actual people you have in your organization, your business has many functions, it’s just that they are being done - or not being done - by just you and Louie.

By creating an organization chart, and acknowledging all the functions, you stand a far greater chance of developing individual systems and strategies to make sure the work in each area is organized and done. Not to mention the fact that you are laying the foundation for growth if and when you have bodies to put in more of the boxes on your chart.

This concept about laying the foundation for growth is critical for small businesses, especially as we all look at the global economic crisis and wonder how we are going to grow our businesses. They key is planning for growth and changing your outlook from "glass half empty" to "glass half full." This attitude alone will help you and your employees look forward and work with you to figure out how to grow rather than focusing all your time on working through worse-case scenarios.

So, go out and create your org chart and plan for growth. This discipline alone will help you organize your business so that you get things done. And getting things done will lead to growth.

MACs for Business

The excellent post over at Ars Technica about how Apple can gain significant OS marketshare speaks directly to an issue we have here at Palo Alto Software. As we've grown, our Mac culture has grown as well. More and more of our new hires come to the company as Mac users, despite the fact that the software that we market and sell is Windows only (for the time being). I have to admit, I even caved and got a Macbook Pro last fall and now I'm thinking of replacing the Vista machine I have at home with an iMac.

The problem is that Macs are simply expensive. I'm not trying to fan the flames on the decade-old war of Mac vs. PC in terms of cost/performance. The simple fact is that I can buy pretty good PCs for usually half of what a Mac costs. I know, these PCs probably don't benchmark what the Macs do, but for most of our employees, running a web browser and a few basic applications is all they do. And for half the money, it ends up being a pretty simple decision.

What I would like to see Apple do is provide me with the guts of a Mac Mini in a tower form factor that I can easily upgrade as I need to. Heck, Apple can even charge me around $1k for these machines, a nice $300+ premium over a mini. I'm not suggesting that they license their OS to Dell - they can keep the hardware market that they love so much. I just want them offer an upgradeable business machine that is flexible so that I can customize it for specific employees needs.

For example, most of our employees run dual monitors. The Mac Mini does not support this and adding a better video card is out of the question. External video cards are expensive. If the Mac was in an upgradable tower format, I could just upgrade using off-the-shelf components. Is that too much to ask?

So, my opinion is that Apple could begin to dominate the office market by simply creating an office-friendly computer: an upgradable tower for around $1k. This would fill the gap between the Mini and the Pro and give someone like me the flexibility to buy computers that fit our business at a reasonable price point. No need to bet the farm on a risky OS licensing deal - just build a simple computer that fills a basic need.

Green and Profitable

Check out CO2Stats.com when you get a chance. Looks like a cool idea and is apparently already profitable.

I like the fact that more and more companies are showing that you can work in the green movement AND make money at the same time. Not embracing that idea, that environmentally friendly businesses and capitalism can mix, is what is killing the US auto companies (among many other things).

What down economy?