A letter from the President of the National Association of Women Business Owners San Francisco Bay Area. Sent 5/6/10.

Changes are happening at NAWBO-SFBA!
Two upcoming events, including a new Board Induction

Please mark your calendar for two important upcoming events. On Thursday, May 13th we will have another mixer at the OMNI Hotel. Margaret Lukens will be our facilitator and will give us tips on how to be more effective and organized so we can follow through in our businesses – creating more success and more profits! Register here.

And on Thursday, June 10th we will have a terrific dinner meeting! On June 30th I will be stepping down as president and the new Board, with Jennifer Baum at the helm, will be stepping into place. Board Inductions will happen at the meeting on June 10th. Many of the Board members who have served over the past three years will remain on the Board, but we will be saying good-bye to some significant Board members. I will give them a special acknowledgment that night. Faleciai Favroth, whose business is demanding more of her attention, has decided not to take the Co-President role and will be turning over the membership chair position as well. May Pon, who has been on the Board for eight years, will be leaving and is moving to NAWBO-CA. Cynthia Fassler is revolving off the Board after several years of dedicated service to NAWBO-SFBA. Mary Janaitis has been a facilitator for the Walnut Creek Breakfast Meeting for several years and is now moving on. Mary will continue to facilitate the Leaders’ Circle Program along with her business partner Gussie Stewart. Register now!

I will also be acknowledging two of our long time vendors, Jennifer Donahue and Diana Kimbrell. Both Jennifer and Diana have served NAWBO-SFBA for several years and are moving on to other projects. We owe both of them a perpetual debt of gratitude for their dedication to NAWBO-SFBA.

And, if that is not enough – we will be welcoming back Dr. Mary O’Hara Devereaux, founder of Global Foresight, one of the world’s leading futurists and business forecasters, a sought-after keynote speaker, and the author of such best-selling books as Navigating the Badlands: Thriving in the Decade of Radical Transformation. Those of you who were here for Mary’s last talk will remember that we barely let her leave the room with all of our questions and desire for her knowledge and insight. Mary left us warned and prepared last time about the financial downturn and will update us this time about the future outlook and how to best launch ourselves into a prosperous future.

I look forward to seeing you all there!

Best regards,

Barbara Mark, Ph.D.
NAWBO®-SFBA President 2007-2010

During the first week of January 2007, Peridot was born, starting life with a single client rebranding. Over the course of the last three years, Peridot has evolved into an award-winning full service marketing company. We have developed several outstanding working relationships, and we are now very proud to be be celebrating our three year anniversary. In honor of this, here’s a look back at a few of our achievements.

* Peridot has helped over 50 companies – large, small, for-profit and not-for-profit – reach potential clients through web, print and social media.
* The Print Industry of Northern California awarded Peridot the honor of a Print and Design Award.
* Peridot has presented at San Francisco’s State of the Media Conference, on Social Media and Microblogging, and numerous other industry events.
* Peridot was certified as a Women’s Business Enterprise (WBE) by WBENC and The Supplier Clearinghouse Public Utilities Commission State of California, enabling us to help our clients better meet their supplier diversity goals.
* Peridot was certified as a Green Business by Alameda County Green Business Program.
* Our fearless leader, Jennifer V Baum, has been nominated as the San Francisco Bay Area Co-President of the National Association of Women Business Owners.

Plans are underway to expand the brand in the next quarter and to offer a timely set of new service packages. Please join us in celebrating this joyous occasion! If you would like to learn more, and perhaps open a bottle of champagne with us to wish us all a happy birthday, give us a call!

I have recently received newsletters from fellow marketing and branding professionals suggesting our businesses, and perhaps our lives, would be better if we all stayed away from social media. One newsletter that I recently received stated that sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tagged are overwhelmed and chaotic, and we should simply disconnect. Another suggests there are two types of people, “innies and outies.”  Those that are inner directed are deemed somehow better, and those that are outwardly directed, who use social media to build their business, are only filling a need for approval.

I couldn’t disagree more.

Building a brand and awareness around that brand can be handled in two very different ways.  It used to be widely perceived that interruption based marketing was the only way to reach your target audience. What is interruption based marketing? Think about the “direct mail marketing” you find in your mailbox that usually goes “direct” to your recycle bin. Or the TV commercials you can now fast forward through, or the pop-up and pop-under windows that turn you off to a brand faster than you can double-click.  This form of marketing is increasingly ineffective.

Today’s search and social media tools are a great way to get your target audience’s attention when they are looking for you. We are now more sophisticated buyers, and we prefer not to be inundated with meaningless advertising. When we want something, we want to be in control. This is why the Peridot team are big fans of social media for marketing purposes. Inbound marketing is when your ideal client finds you at the time they need your service or product. Through the use of social media tools, it becomes easier for your consumers to find your message, learn more about you, become a fan, and eventually, a customer.

Your online voice speaks volumes to those who are actively seeking your business.  We will not call you an approval seeker, rather, a smart business person more intimately connected to today’s smarter consumer.  So go ahead, be outgoing!

Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

It used to be that creating a marketing plan consisted of essentially knowing your product, your competition and your ideal client. You put an ad in the yellow pages, went to a rotary meeting, and made some phone calls.

Things are a great deal more complex now and it’s bigger than traditional versus Web 2.0. Who is your competition? Are they even in this country? Where is your ideal client? How do you reach them? Consumers are harder to reach than ever before. No one watches tv commercials, reads their direct or junk mail or uses the yellow pages anymore.

Other important questions we need to ask ourselves is where will our industry be in a year, or even six months? Will the economy improve? Will there be another dreaded wave of foreclosures, a credit crisis, severe inflation? What is happening in your industry?

On September 11, I will be hosting a workshop in downtown San Francisco, close to BART, entitled, “Gaining Marketing Momentum for Growth in 2010.” This is an opportunity to witness how Peridot’s evolutionary model can help your company, regardless of what is happening in your industry. Because what they say is true – businesses that keep pushing forward on building their brand and reaching their ideal client will be the ones that shoot ahead when the economy recovers.

Here are a few of the questions I will be covering at the workshop.

Who is your target client?

Answer this as detailed as you can.  How old are they? Where are they when they are looking for you?

What is your business name, and Why?

Does your name fit your niche? Is it memorable? Does it appeal to your target audience?

Who are your competitors?

Where are they? What are they called? What makes them different and the same as your business?

What is your market differentiator?

What separates you from the competition? Why buy from your business?

Are you a NAWBO or BNI member interested in attending the workshop? Contact me for a coupon code valued at $100!

While meeting with a new client, we discovered they were attending two trade shows in two days with two different audiences. We back burnered the new client marketing evaluation and quickly changed our focus.

Do people understand what it is you do? Are you sure? Can you ask your colleagues to give your elevator pitch? If they can’t, you probably need some marketing help. The mistake we see most often with new clients is the language of their materials. Are you speaking to your clients? Are you speaking in their language? Or are you speaking in your own industry’s terminology? This is a crucial factor in whether or not a marketing campaign will be successful.

What we ended up with was a marketing miracle! In less than two weeks, the client had one data sheet that spoke to both audiences clearly and concisely. A colleague told our client the data sheet helped her to “finally and immediately understood what it is you do!” She had been confused before but didn’t know how to tell our clients that she just didn’t get their business.

But the best part of it all was when our client called the project fun!

San Francisco, California – April 10, 2009 – Peridot Productions, Inc. of Oakland, California received an award for outstanding achievement in Print/Design Excellence at the annual 2009 Showcase of Print Excellence Awards. The Showcase of Print Excellence is a printing competition covering Northern California and Northern Nevada, hosted by the Printing Industries of Northern California.

Competing against nearly 450 entries from printing and graphics arts firms, Peridot received a bronze. The company’s winning submission was Northern California Grantmakers 2007 Annual Report.

We are proud of our winning team! It’s an honor to be recognized by the industry as a company that produces top quality, award winning materials. Dan Nelson, PINC President agrees. “This was a great competition with a very impressive standard of entries. Peridot should be very proud of their company’s achievement and the excellent work done by their employees.”

The Showcase of Print Excellence recognizes those responsible for the creation and production of print communications in Northern California and Northern Nevada. The competition promotes excellence in print communications and rewards companies and individuals who produce the best in print media.

It was bound to happen.

Worlds collided on Facebook. Friends from high school were seeing Facebook updates that were posted by work colleagues who were seeing status updates by my family. Something had to be done.

“Create a new, private profile!” one friend suggested.

“Don’t friend your in-laws!” another said.

“Don’t worry about it, it doesn’t matter!” said yet another.

I knew something had to be done, though. Friends were posting decades old photos, colleagues were asking business related advice, and my family was mentioning it over Thanksgiving turkey. That’s when I created lists. Here’s how you can, too.

Log into Facebook and go to your Friends page. Click the Make A New List button. I created several – Family, Work Colleagues, High School friends. All friends is the default.

Once these lists are created, go to your Privacy Settings and select Profile. Each section (Profile, Basic Info, Personal Info, etc) has a pulldown menu you can use to select which Friend Lists can see what.  The choice is yours.

No update this week, we’re off to http://aboutleap.com/get-your-gig-on/index.php

In a recent issue of Wired magazine, BLOGS were declared dead, thanks to tools like Facebook and Twitter.

What do you think?

We’ll comment next week, but first we want to hear from you, our readers.

Are you ready to make the most of those business cards you have dutifully collected that are gathering dust in a shoe box? We’ve got some great suggestions for you. Email marketing is a fantastic way to reach out to people you have met.

1.  Follow up! Once you receive the card, review it and decide if this is a person you want on your list. If it is, pick up the phone! It’s rare to receive a phone call these days and it really makes a difference.

2. People love to hear their name. So make sure your email marketing is set up to  address the recipients by first name.

3.  Use white space. It’s true that you have about seven seconds to capture your reader’s attention on a webpage. Considering how much email we all receive, it’s even less in email campaigns. Write clearly and concisely, and be sure not to fill up the page with too much information. The more white space you have the better your chances are that your message will be read.

4. Be careful of certain words that catch spam filters. Just because you are offering a gift doesn’t mean you should write the word “free” in all caps at the top of your email. We’ve seen it spelled F.REE, for example.  Eventually, spam filter will catch onto this, too, so be creative.

5. Finally,  use the reports from your current campaign to get the most out of your next campaign. We partner with Constant Contact and highly recommend them for their great reports. Our clients like knowing who clicked on what articles, what percentage forwarded them to colleagues, and so on.

There is more…so much more. Stay tuned!