Amtower, a leading expert on marketing to the government, was one of the first 200,000 people to join LinkedIn when it launched in 2004. He credits David Meerman Scott’s book “The New Rules of Marketing PR” with causing him to realize that he was “sitting on a gold mine and not using a shovel.” Amtower now regularly fields “over the transom” new business opportunities that are a direct result of his LinkedIn strategy.

“The job of your Linked In profile is to create some buzz around what you do,” says Amtower. “To do that you have to make sure it does three things: define your position in the market, substantiate that position, and provide value to your target audience.”

All right, Amtower-LinkedIn-Black-Belt-Guy, I thought, Let’s see what you’ve got. I challenged him to look at my profile (which is at 100% and includes six glowing recommendations) and point out the worst, most egregious mistake, if I promised to out it in this post.

He didn’t need to look further than the headline. “Here’s a major mistake everybody makes,” he said. “Take a look at this: ‘Helena Bouchez, Principal, Helena B. Communications.’ That doesn’t really help you much. You’re just repeating your position. Make it descriptive. Look at mine.” Amtower’s reads: “Leading expert on marketing to the government; consultant, speaker; LinkedIn black belt.” (Me: “Oh. Duh.”)

Another shot follows closely, this time at my website names. Amtower said, “You need to change ‘My Website’ to be the name of your company or blog. Leaving it the default does nothing to differentiate you or pique anyone’s interest to click on the link.”

He also urged me to collect as many additional recommendations as possible by seeking out people that I already am connected with and writing them a recommendation first. LinkedIn will automatically ask them to write a recommendation for me in return.

But to glean the most benefit from LinkedIn, according to Amtower, you must be pervasive. Connect with everyone you know (even a little bit) and that you also respect. Join groups, start conversations, and comment on them. Be sure to add unique value. (Read: Do not just rehash old ideas or “Me-too” it.)  Also, don’t be afraid to update your profile. LinkedIn has a powerful SEO structure; every time you make the slightest change, your page is crawled and updated by the search engines. And changes are then rolled up and sent out weekly in LinkedIn’s “update” email.

These tips are just the tip of an iceberg’s worth of information Amtower has to share. For additional great advice on how to (finally, really) leverage LinkedIn to be found and generate new opportunities, tune into Amtower’s upcoming  MarketingProfs Web seminar, Where’s Waldo?’ Getting Found and Gaining New Business on LinkedIn, Thursday, Oct. 14 at 12 p.m.( Eastern standard time).

To maximize effectiveness and profit, however, marketing firms should strive to be as narrowly positioned as possible, says business consultant, David C. Baker. His firm ReCourses, Inc. has provided individual consulting, seminars, speaking, and writing exclusively for firms in the marketing industry since 1996.

1. What exactly is positioning, and why is it so important?
“Positioning is a statement of relevance. Broad positioning isn’t all that unique; it means your services are relevant to many possible clients,” says Baker. “To maximize effectiveness and profit, your firm should be very narrowly positioned, which increases your relevance to and ability to draw a smaller, specific subsection of clients. The purpose of this is to diminish the availability of substitutes. Offering expertise that is narrow and deep (rather than general and more shallow) means there will be fewer substitutes for what you do best.

“Being broadly relevant increases the number of available substitutes, which drives down the value of the services, because they are widely available. It also makes it more difficult to experience the application of specific expertise to a similar situation and get smart quickly. If you’re continually having to ‘become an expert’ to service a client properly, you’re learning on their dime and not delivering the value you should.”

2. How are effectiveness and profit connected to positioning?
“Focusing your work in one area allows you to collect an enormous amount of intelligence, and develop the ability to recognize patterns,” Baker notes. “Meaning, once you’ve had the opportunity to apply your expertise, patterns begin to emerge and enable you to begin to take shortcuts safely.  Your work becomes more effective because you’ve seen the patterns and know what works and what doesn’t, allowing you to work more efficiently than your generalist colleagues, so you can do more of what you know works.  For example, if you look at a generalist firm that is about 10 years old, you typically find that their expertise in each area is one year’s worth repeated 10 times, rather than 10 years of experience in one area.

“Increased profit is related to efficiency. When you don’t have to continually learn what it means to be an expert, that savings can fall to the bottom line and you can charge more. Fewer available substitutes in the marketplace rewards you by paying you more money based on the law of supply and demand.”

3. Tight positioning requires business leaders to say no to business that doesn’t fit. What are some things you tell your clients to do to ease the transition?
Baker offers this advice: “I ask them to develop a focused marketing plan that will build the new position. In other words, divert all available money and time to looking for a certain kind of work that falls under new positioning. They can accept other types of work via referrals and repeat business … as long as they don’t tell anyone about it. You become intentionally schizophrenic, only putting marketing money into the work that you are seeking to build up under the new positioning.

“Another way to reduce the pressure is to trim your capacity to the point you cannot accept unrelated opportunities. When you have more capacity than opportunity, you wake up every morning with sense of dread, because you know you need to feed the machine. This leads to compromise and lowering of the bar for what kind of work and client you accept. It also affects what you can charge.

“In developed cultures, there is a mantra: ‘Never say no to opportunity.’ Looking back, however, we will find that most of the problems that are created result from not making tough choices about the opportunities that come to us. Anyone, once they are established, and assuming they are competent, will have opportunities. The question is what kind of opportunities and what are the consequences of accepting them. Saying ‘no’ is a wonderful antidote and keeps you from being forced into situations that will not serve you in the long term.”

4. Can you give an examples of a businesses who has made this transition?
“Tim McAlpine at Marketingcurrency.ca comes to mind,” Baker says. “His was a generalist firm and on top of that, located in the middle of nowhere, BC. Narrowing his positioning allowed him to build a very niche business doing great work exclusively for credit unions and charging a lot more for it because his clients appreciate his deep knowledge and expertise.”

5. Besides positioning, what do you think is the biggest obstacle to profitability and effectiveness for businesses?
“Discipline, or more specifically, lack of it,” Baker says. “Many firms make great plans but don’t follow through. For example: A firm decides it wants to narrow its positioning, and comes up with a plan that makes sense. But then it takes them three months to get website up, five more months to get materials ready, etc. Good ideas aren’t enough; there has to be execution and commitment to consistent action. And that means finding a way to do what you say you are going to do.”

For a more information about David C. Baker, visit ReCourses.com.

We do this. And this. And this. And this. And this. And, oh, also that. Here’s the whole list of keywords, in fact.
Branding by bullet point. Really bad idea.
Why do companies do this? I think one reason is that they don’t want to miss any potential business. Therefore, they feel compelled, on websites, on collateral, and in presentations, to list off every conceivable thing they do. In a live presentation, it’s one of the quickest ways to start the audience on a business nap.
The effect? The company that claims to do everything is doomed to be remembered for nothing. Plus, credibility is instantly lost, as savvy potential clients know that no-one does everything well.
The answer? Distill your capabilities down to a single, distinguishing message. Sure, you may do six things – but what is the one thing that you are best known for? What is the flag that you wave highest over the marketplace of your competition? What makes your company unique? Focus on that, sell on that, and leave the list of capabilities as a minor sub-point.
Speaking of naps, let’s say you’re having trouble sleeping and need a new bed. Will you be more inclined to reach out to Sleepy’s (tagline: The Mattress Professionals. Advertising jingle: Trust Sleepy’s – for the rest of your life), or to Vinny’s Home Furnishing Outlet (tagline: Whatever – it’s here. Advertising jingle: Vinny, Vinny, we got the skinny). You can just imagine the endless list of “whatever” at Vinny’s – but you know that at Sleepy’s, they’re talking about what you’re thinking about – sleep.
Now maybe Sleepy’s, or your business, has some other things to offer besides the main front-and-center offering. But people will be more inclined to consider those bullet points once they’re feeling like you have the one thing they need.
One of my business partners had a website that contained the usual list. But there was one section that really stood out – deep client-side experience. I encouraged them to center their message around “we’ve walked in your shoes,” rather than the list of “stuff we can do.” Competitors claimed to do all the same stuff. But they didn’t have the distinguishing element of practical experience on the client side of the fence.
You can be quite NON-memorable by saying too much. But you can stand out by saying one thing well.

However recent fake photographs from the 2008 Olympics, or the Iranian government show how easy it is to manipulate reality–thereby altering impressions and changing the conversation towards a particular point of view. It’s quite easy to manipulate photographs, so why do we trust them in the first place?

I recently stumbled upon a terrific article in the New York Times titled, “Photography as a Weapon.” The author of the piece, Errol Morris, is a filmmaker, and in the article he interviews Hany Farid, a Dartmouth professor and an expert on digital photography.

The article highlights some recently faked photographs of a missile launch by the Iranian government, where in an apparent attempt to cover-up a launch failure, the photographs were doctored with a photo application. Instead of showing a possible misfire, smoke clouds and a missile launch were inserted. The photograph was then made available on a website and republished in newspapers across the globe. It wasn’t until a week later that a blogger (of all people) noticed the manipulation and published his findings.

While the whole escapade of creating digital forgeries is interesting, a larger question asked by the NYT article is “why do we trust photographs in the first place”?

Granted there are many avenues through which our minds process information–visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory etc. However, Hany Farid seems to think that many people have a special affinity for photographs and the emotion that they can sometimes evoke. “Vision is a pretty unique sense for the brain,” he explains. “It’s incredibly powerful–so it’s not surprising that it has an emotional effect on us. The brain is very good at processing visual imageries and bringing in memories associated with images.”

This mental processing is so powerful that even after an image is exposed as a forgery, many continue to remember the picture as accurate. Mr. Farid notes, “And there are psychology studies, when you tell people that information is incorrect, they forget that it’s incorrect. They only remember the misinformation.”

This brings us back to the photo manipulation of the Iranian missile launch. Even as the photographs are exposed as a forgery, many people will either not have this updated information, or forget the photographs are a fake. The image of the missile launch, and the ramifications and meaning of the launch are burned into our minds–long after the photo is exposed as fraud.

Jack Trout, in the marketing classic, “Positioning: The Battle for the Mind” mentions that the approach of positioning is to not, “create something new and different, but to manipulate what’s already–in the mind, or retie the connections that already exist.”
I believe the Iranian military is not trying to introduce a new topic by releasing these photos–after all, world powers already know they have military capability. However, fake or not, the missile launch photographs attempt to position a point of view and change the conversation.

With the introduction of these photographs, the conversation changes from, “Does Iran have the capability?”–to instead; “That one launch was a fake, but is Iran still dangerous? Could they strike a neighbor? Could they strike the United States?”

And of course, the cynics among us will ask–rightfully so, “How do we even know there really was a missile launch?”

Regardless, a new conversation is started and in the minds of most people, impressions are altered–mission accomplished for the Iranian military.

I don’t bring up this particular instance of the Iranian photograph to have a political or military discussion. In fact, I’d like to avoid this.

I am, however, interested in how photography is used for marketing purposes and how images (altered or not) can ultimately end up changing perceptions, positions (in our minds), and therefore our actions/inaction.

Questions for DailyFix readers:
* Do you apply careful cynicism/diligence to the pictures you see on the web or in publications?
* Does the medium denote trustworthiness? Meaning a photograph in the LA Times is to believed over one captured in the National Enquirer?
* When a “trustworthy medium” mistakenly publishes an altered photograph, how do you feel? Angry? Cheated? Do you blame the publication or those who produced the photograph?
* What other examples have you seen where someone attempted to “change a conversation” or reposition an existing idea or POV with the introduction of a photograph?
* Every photograph is in essence altered reality to some degree (accounting for time, place and how the photo was framed by the photographer). Why then do we trust photographs in the first place?

There’s a fight brewing between producers of lab-grown diamonds and diamonds dug from the ground–and marketing is in the thick of the battle. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, “Gem Wars”, January 13, 2007, gem quality diamonds (produced in a lab) are hitting the streets and going for about 15% less than mined diamonds.

According to the article, an expert in the diamond business examined three diamond stones. The first he easily recognized as cubic zirconium–it was too perfect. The other two stones origins proved more difficult to discern however. One came from a lab and another from the ground. Both were diamonds. In fact it was only through inspection of a high powered microscope that a small serial number was displayed on the lab produced diamond. The jeweler even pronounced the lab produced diamond as “the best of the three!”

The article notes, “lab produced diamonds–once suitable only for industrial use are being produced with color and clarity that match or exceed the quality of diamonds dug out of the earth. And unlike cubic zirconia, which is a chemically different subject, lab gems are considered true diamonds and not fake.”

Marketers from both sides are taking their positions and have come out swinging. The diamond establishment is quickly positioning lab-produced diamonds as “synthetics” while the lab produced diamond industry is trying to use the word “cultured.”

Tiffany and Co., on one hand, has no interest in lab-produced diamonds. “They don’t fit in our stores,” says Mark Aaron, VP of investor relations. Another retailer, Randy McCoullough, who owns the 97-store Samuelers Jewelers sells the lab produced stones and says, “At the end of the day, it’s a diamond.”

So the battle is set: man made diamonds vs. those dug in the ground. How many people out there will care (especially at a 15% savings and perhaps better color and clarity)?

Is this a battle of the authentic vs. in-authentic, or are both the real deal?

Is this just marketing spin that one diamond is better than another because it was found in the ground vs. man-made?

Come on ladies, and (men, too) your opinions please–