Christina resides in Rockville, Maryland with her husband and two sons.  Mendelson was born in New York City and earned a Bachelor of Science Degree in finance and marketing from The  University of Maryland, College Park. After college she conducted bank examinations for The Federal Reserve . A little over a year-and-a-half ago Mendelson joined forces with a friend to work at Marketing Incentives.

Heatherstone: Christina, as a full-server web development company, we become marketers for our clients, but almost entirely in the online world. Tell us a little about how marketing works in the physical world.

Christina Mendelson: That’s where we at Market Incentives fit into the picture. We create physical objects that help bring out the personality of our clients in a sticky way that keeps the client in the minds of their prospects and customers.

H: Sticky? How do you mean?

CM: “Sticky” here means that the person that receives the item will be continually reminded of our client because the item tends to hang around for a long time, delivering the relevant message over and over.

H: Ah, gotcha. So, you try to match the personality of your client. Could you give an example?

CM: Sure. Let’s say you have a company that produces technology solutions which reduces energy use, a “green technology” company.  We’ll look for items that are themselves made from recycled materials and, ideally, have some useful function that is environment friendly.  For example, we might pick a hand-cranked flashlight or a mouse-pad made from recycled tire rubber.

H: OK, so tell us more about the “relevant message” part.

CM: The relevant message is a combination of brand identity and a few words that help tie the item to the company and highlight benefits of working with our client.

H: Benefits! Excellent, we talk to our clients about the importance of highlighting benefits over features all the time.

CM: Yes.  The features of the item, like a utilitarian item such as a USB flash drive, help connect our client to good stuff.  When you are happy being able to store files in a readily transportable manner, it makes you feel positive about the person or company that gave it to you.  But the benefits can be harder to get across.  That’s why the type of item is so important.  I wouldn’t suggest a flash drive to a car detailer, but I might suggest a bottle of a high-end leather polish.  Then, the benefit “makes the leather in my car look great” gets connected to the detailer.

H: How about someone who is doing both online and “real world” marketing.  How do these tie together?

CM: These two actually work better together.  We routinely include a website address on our items.  When the client has good control over their own website, they will create a specific page on their site tied to the item-based promotion.  Then, the client can better track results of their promotion because the visits to that page are known to have come from our promotional item.

H: We get that.  We call it a landing page and that’s exactly how we track results of online advertising.

CM: Yes, and the website landing page gives our client a way to extend their message beyond what will fit on the item, which is often fairly short.

H: That’s great.  So, the name of the company is Market Incentives.  Where does the “Incentives” part come from?

CM: We actually have two sides to our company. I’m directly involved in the side of the business that provides promotional items.  We also have a side of the business that can develop an incentives or rewards program for an organization, whether that’s for employees or customers.  Think of programs where people earn points, then can come spend those points on products.  We can build those out and customize them to our clients – including providing the shopping experience, products, and fulfillment, a real turn-key solution.

H: Is there anything you might be able to offer our readers, something they can get for mentioning this interview?

CM: Sure, mention this interview and we’ll give them a great deal on our Air Tight pocket boxes. Make your sales pitch “Air Tight”, by offering this as your next promotional giveaway.  No minimums and Free set-up!  Features are water resistant, break away lanyard, and 1 1/8” thick container with locking latch.  Colors are  blue, red, yellow and white.  One color imprint included.  250 – $1.50 each; 500 – $1.25 each.

H: Fantastic. Christina, thanks for taking the time to talk to us about this.

CM: It’s my pleasure.  Here, have a flash drive.

H: Awesome possum.  You’re the best.

We’d like to send a special thanks to Christina for taking her time to talk with us and for helping to enlighten us about the physical world of marketing. Please be sure to check out the Marketing Incentives website to see the truly great work they do, and the great deals they offer.

For our Thinkspinner Innovation site, though, we needed each event to have it’s own booking form, since we’re using Guest List.  The same would be true if you were using EventBrite or some other external ticketing or registration tool.

Digging into the theme, it turns out to be not that hard to add this as an option.  My hope, of course, is that when I bring this solution to the attention of the Woo Theme team, they will update Diarise to include this option.

There are three files in the theme that need update to support the change. First, we need to make the option available in the Theme Options | Booking Form section.

Open the file includes/theme-options.php and change line 33 to this:

That gives us a fourth radio button to select that activates the option.  Next we need to be able to provide that URL in the post, which means updating the Woo options box in the post.  Still in includes/theme-options.php, add the following code, starting on line 558:

Save and close that file.  You can now go to an event post and within that box provide the URL for your external booking form specific to that event.

Next, there are two places where we need to update the display – on the home page in the featured events area and in the header on the event’s own post display.  In both places, there’s a button “Book Tickets” that should go to the newly specified URL.

For the home page, open includes/events-calendar.php.  You’ll be replacing lines 716-718 of that file:

Delete that code and replace it with this instead:

Save and close that file. We also have to update the event page itself, so open single.php. Delete lines 91-93 of that file, which are the same three lines as appear in events-calendar.php as shown above, and replace them with the same block of code I just shared with you.

And now, I blockquote myself:

Make sure to think about benefits first, features second. Benefits answer the visitors top question, “What’s in it for me?” Benefits convince the visitor he really needs this product or service in general. Features answer the visitors question, “Why should I buy this from you?” If the visitor isnt sold on the benefits, the features are largely irrelevant.

Practice recognizing the difference by listening to radio ads while driving and calling out loud what each sentence represents: benefit, feature, call to action. My clients struggle with this element of great content more than any other, but the conversion rate impact when implemented is enormous.

You know you’ve seen them: “Hey, Bob! Check out this funny picture of a cat stuck all the way through both sides of a bird cage while a parakeet rests on his back!”

The Dangers
The thing is, forwarding email can have some dangers such as verifying your email address to spammers or the more obvious time sinks they can cause as the recipient browses around looking for more of the same or a snopes.com debunking of the included stories. You may not want to particpate, especially at work, but how do you tell your friend or family member you don’t want to without hurting feelings or even ruining a relationship?

“I Believe I’d Be Helping Spammers”
The first way is to tell the forwarder you are concerned about the aid this gives to spammers. Including the link from CNN I gave above might be helpful. That’s a particularly compelling reason, since everyone hates spammers. I bet even spammers hate other spammers. (I wonder if a spammer has ever been irritated after receiving his own spam in an email.)

You might want to start such an email with something like, “Thanks for sending this on to me. I’m happy to find out you were thinking of me.” Of course, one problem is that by sending a chronic email forwarder this message and including a link to why it’s a danger could result in the initiation of another long forwarded chain message as the email forwarder tells everyone he knows that forwarding emails is dangerous! And it’ll have your email address embedded therein. Oops.

Give a “Play” Email Address
Another great approach, especially if fighting spam at the risk of your friendships isn’t worth it to you, is to ask the email forwarder to use your “play” email address instead of your “work” email address. That play address could easily be one you set up for this express purpose for free on Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo. Hotmail might be a great choice, since it seems to attract lots of spam even if no one knows it.

Then, you can decide whether or not you ever actually check that play address. Maybe you never do. Replying to forwarded emails is usually not necessary and it’s rare that an email forwarder ever asks you, “Hey, what did you think of that email I forwarded? The one with the monkey and the squid?”

Never Yell at the Forwarder
You can really mess up a friendship or business relationship if you blast the email forwarder for sending you the email. Remember, he sent it to you because he likes you and wanted to share. That you aren’t all that interested in that particular activity is something he probably just hasn’t learned yet and he undoubtedly figures that simply clicking Delete is so easy that he’s not really bothering you anyway. His intentions matter. Be generous with your opinion of him and show you value the relationship far more than whether or not you get a few emails you didn’t really want.

Or, Ignore It
Of course, I simply ignore most forwards. I’m not an email forwarder, so the chain ends when it reaches me. I admit I’ve had an occasional chuckle out of something I’ve received. Most people that forward stuff to me eventually stop when I don’t forward stuff of my own or reply, but I don’t know of anyone that’s been offended by my silence.

That means I haven’t tried the “play”address technique. I’m guessing. I’d be very interested to find out from someone that tries it whether the play address starts getting spam. Now there’s something I’d be happy to have forwarded to me!

Answering his question meant creating a thumbnail write-up of how SEO works. I’ve removed the names of the parties involved, but otherwise, here’s the advice I gave our client:

{“Advanced Membership”} is something I would recommend staying away from. Early SEO efforts revealed that lots of links could improve search engine page rankings. This led to the creation of “link farms”, or sites that had no content other than line after line of links and you could pay to include your site, thus driving up your relevancy calculation.

Of course, the search engine algorithms change over time. The development teams at Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the like realized that people were using link farms to skew relevancy, so they accounted for it. Link farms became at best useless and at worst a way to get your site black-listed or devalued.This kind of gaming the system is called “black hat” SEO because it tries to find gimmicks to increase search engine placement. The search engine companies frown on such things and do their best to block each new gimmick.

The best kind of SEO is to use “white hat” techniques. Relevant articles are the best of these, although that means investing time and effort. Quality content added frequently leads to quality visitors and enhanced reputation for your site and your business.

When thinking about SEO, the golden rule is that search engines attempt to model as closely as possible what the person using the search engine will actually want to see. Figure out what your visitors want to see, what will get them to pick up the phone and call (or whatever your goal might be) and that’s what should be on your site.

Will random visitors be drawn to become customers of yours because of a page filled with automatically generated links to pages you’ve never looked at? It seems highly unlikely. I would save my time and money for more worthwhile alternatives. It’s important to remember that your website has a goal beyond attracting visitors, namely visitor conversion.

At the same time, they wanted to be able to embed a lot of photos and manage that themselves. After all, it gets expensive to hire your web developer to upload photos for you all the time, especially when your site requires highly visual marketing and frequent updates.

We’re very pleased to have been able to rise to the challenge: a week later, the new First Impression Hardscapes site launched.

The header images that automatically rotate are managed via a WordPress page that is otherwise supressed from view. They do require sizing in advance, but our client only needs to upload a set of photos to the page’s gallery, use the drag-and-drop functionality to sort them, and they display in rotation as you see on the site. Getting the rectangular photos to site behind the curved header required some fancy CSS work, too.

On pages like the Rob S. project showcase, we made it even easier. The client uploads a bunch of photos roughly sized for full display (no more than about 600 pixels in either direction) and again, can sort them using simple drag-and-drop.

We automatically take the first image and place a mid-sized version at the top of the page. Then, by simply placing a WordPress shortcode (“lightshow” in brackets,) we take all the images in the page’s gallery and format the thumbnails, pop-ups, and the full-sized slideshow. Easy-peasy!

The lightshow and image rotater functionality came from the fine folks of Project Seven, but getting this to work well with WordPress instead of requiring processing in Dreamweaver was where we got to shine.

Congratulations to John and Mike at First Impression Hardscapes!

There are a host of features that made building this site particularly interesting. FOLMC needed the ability to display upcoming events, support local chapters through announcements, accept donations and sell memberships, provide directions to the libraries and bookstores, and provide secured areas to distribute information to help chapter leaders and librarians in their roles.

While there were some WordPress plugins out there that would support embedding both Google Maps and Google Calendar, there were a couple of things we wanted to be able to do to make it easier for FOLMC staff to work with these, so we wrote our own. Our calendar plugin, for example, supports multiple calendars easily so staff can do a mash-up of general events and those presented by a specific chapter on the chapter pages.

The best part for FOLMC staff has been the ability to manage their own content directly (via WordPress) that we build into every Foundation Website we develop. There was a day, a few weeks after we were first hired to do this work, when we were sitting down with a couple of staff members and pulled up the WordPress dashboard and changed something on an early draft of the site. There were audible gasps and one person said, “Oh! Until this moment, I didn’t get that’s what you meant when you said we could make changes ourselves!”

It just goes to show that what’s clear and obvious to a web developer is still remarkable and new to others. It was great to see our clients even more excited than they started.

Are you in Montgomery County, Maryland? Perhaps you can support our clients and a worthy cause by becoming a member of Friends of the Library. We did.

So, the age-old quandary with sales is this: how do you promote sales and secure new business without alienating the clientele?  In days past there were very few methods to promote sales.  You could hire a salesperson and pray he was persuasive and non-affronting.  You could pay for an advertisement and hope to hit the target audience and convey a convincing argument.  But no tool has ever existed that provides the kind of influence that a website does.  It’s an advertising, networking and selling tool that works for you, even when you’re not working.  It has the ability to promote your sales and secure new business without alienating the clientele.

Ensuring that a website does all three of the aforementioned processes is the real trick.    So many times we forget the sheer power that a well-designed website can have.  Having a website these days is almost an after-thought; simply an affirmation of a business’s legitimacy.  But a well-designed website?  A well-designed website based on a call to action can make the difference between a new client and a lost client.  So which do you want?  It seems like an insultingly simple question with an obvious answer, but have you asked the hard questions lately?

Is your business growing because of your website, or is it simply “there”?  How can you tell if you’re earning business because of your website?  What’s your return of investment on your website?  Do you consider your website an investment?  Do you have the time to even bother redesigning your website?  If you’re unsure about the answers to these questions, then join me weekly as I discuss developing effective websites from a sales perspective, and explain in simple terminology how to make a website that ultimately increases your sales.

In the meantime, what questions do you have about using websites as a sales tool?  Do you believe that a website can bring you business?

I interviewed social media strategist Terri Holley of Creative Blog Solutions about the ever-growing presence of social networking websites and how they relate to businesses.

Why should businesses choose to use social networking websites?

For businesses that want to grow and become profitable, social networking is an excellent way to generate more leads, retain existing clients, and create additional streams of revenue.  By leveraging blogging, interactive media, and other social channels, businesses can reach more people in their target market and deepen relationships with prospects, clients and constituents.  A vehicle for word-of-mouth marketing, social networking enables business enthusiasts and customer evangelists to spread news and opinions via their social channels.  Social networking also has the potential to drive a massive amount of traffic back to a business site and create a large number of repeat visitors.  And unlike other forms of marketing, social media has a very low barrier of entry and it is something anyone can master.  Most social technologies can be leveraged in-house with a little training and knowledge.

What are the pros and cons?

I really have a hard time coming up with reasons why businesses should not jump into the social media space while prospects and customers are having conversations about their brand, products, and services with or without them.  The smartest thing seems to be becoming an integral part of the conversation.  The pros include being viewed as a business that cares, influencing the tone and flow of the conversation, and enjoying an honest and open dialogue with those who can make or break your business.  With tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and Yelp, consumers can quickly control how the public perceives a business and its products and services.  Whether the perception is positive or negative, having a presence in the social media space allows a business to be a contributing member of an online community.

Is it beneficial to have a profile on more than one social networking website?  Why or why not?

I think it is important to make a judicious selection of social media channels, the most important factors being the social media profile of your target market and the ways in which your prospects and customers engage with social technologies.  For example, with the 18-25 age group still dominating Facebook, a fan page on this site may not be the best strategy for reaching those who are 65 and older.   If you set up a blog, will your target market know how to leave a comment or navigate the site?  Will your target audience understand Twitter?  These are all important factors to consider.  On the other hand, some believe that signing up for the most popular social networks might prevent someone else from being mistaken for your business and might protect a profile that you may use later.

How much does social networking contribute to business growth and sales?

It is well known that the growth and sales of a business are directly proportional to its relational capital.   Social networking and other forms of social media can help a business build relationships.  I view social networking as a perception-builder as opposed to a direct money maker.  My belief is that the perceptions a business creates and the relationships it builds today will lead to a healthy, profitable, and sustainable business tomorrow.

What does an active presence on social networking websites say about a business?  How do clients or prospective clients view this?

An active presence on social media channels is very important.   The recent Cone Business in Social Media Study revealed that 93% of Americans expect companies to have a presence on social media sites.  The study also revealed that about 60% of Americans interact with companies using social media, one in four interact more than once per week, and 56% feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they interact via social media.  This shows that Americans are welcoming the consumer/business interaction in the social media space.

What kind of commitment does the introduction and maintenance of profiles on social networking websites require for a business?

Like any other form of marketing, time, manpower, and other resources are needed to begin and sustain an effective social media marketing campaign.  The great news is that innovative technologies are emerging every day to make the process of social media marketing much more manageable and efficient.  Moreover, businesses that are successful with integrating social media marketing into business practices are now discovering ways in which social networking can save time and resources.

How can businesses that use social networking websites set themselves apart?

Creativity, relevancy, and personality rule in the social media space.  Businesses that leverage their authentic voice will not only set themselves part, they will be viewed as a breath of fresh air to consumers who are becoming numb to traditional marketing.  I also believe that businesses that step into “Web 3.0” or focus on optimizing the customer experience will be the real winners in the social media space.

For those that haven’t read the book, it lays out a method of what they call “principled negotiation.” This is an alternative to the classic “positional negotiation” that’s little more than starting at two extremes and haggling to some center point with little regard for what makes sense. They also point out that positional negotiation can also be less adverserial, although possibly just as destructive, when one or both negotiators are falling over each other to make concessions in the interests of protecting the relationship, such as when a boyfriend “gives in” to his girlfriend, despite what he really wants.

The authors cover four basic aspects to the method then relate how to use the method even if others in the negotiation aren’t. As with Difficult Conversations, they include plenty of examples and one of the impressive aspects is that those examples range from a husband and a wife figuring out a floor plan for a custom home to the Camp David Accords.

Like many of the best books in the self-improvement and business categories, much of what’s in the book will be familiar. (“I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have gone ourselves.” – E M Forster)

We’ve all negotiated with others many, many times and had varying levels of success. The successful negotiations often included inadvertent or instinctive reliance on some aspects of these methods. But the complete method described in Getting to Yes brings it all together, explaining why some negotiations have failed and how others could have gone better.

In just the last few days, I’ve already had several opportunities to start practicing the techniques from figuring out what to have for dinner to improving the possibilities for two deals that my company is seeking to make with other companies – one as a vendor, one as a customer. As such, I can’t help but pile on the bandwagon and recommend this book as what ought to be required reading. If you haven’t read it, you need to, and not just for work. If you have kids, you need to get them to read it, too, as I think it will be one of those things that prepares them for adulthood more than anything they will learn in school.