Intellmkt Blog

When Chris Lambrecht CMC® agreed to run the campaign of a friend running for a top county office recently, he suspected that there would be trials and tribulations in doing so. He had heard stories about previous candidates for similar offices “not playing fair.” He also suspected that the Institute of Management Consultants (IMC) Code of Ethics would come in as a handy tool when ethical matters were at hand.

“It was amazing to me how anything you did or said would be twisted to make us appear evil,” Lambrecht stated.

Of particular interest to Lambrecht in the Code was the pledge “I will report to appropriate authorities within or external to the client organization any occurrences of malfeasance, dangerous behavior, or illegal activities.”

“The legal definition of malfeasance is somewhat broad,” stated Lambrecht. “Basically it is any performance of an act that is legally unjustified, harmful, or contrary to the law.”

“One of the principles of our campaign was that we thought all candidates for this office should have complete transparency. But campaign law is somewhat unclear on many activities, so there are definite gray areas,” Lambrecht added.

“The Code actually gave me a great strategy. Whenever our opposition complained that we were doing something wrong, we would simply report it to the press.”

Lambrecht found the press to be quite receptive to this approach. “I think reporters from both the AJC and the Marietta Daily Journal had my number on speed dial.”

When the opposing candidate complained that “most of our signs were illegal”, I reported it to the press, along with the statement that we would remove any of our signs that were reported to County authorities to be outside of the guidelines.  They also included photos of signs of the candidate doing the complaining that were clearly not following local sign ordinance.

Additionally, when accused of emailing non-profit organizations for “political gain,” Lambrecht informed the press of exactly what he was doing and why.

“In both of these cases, transparency actually helped our campaign,” added Lambrecht. “We looked like the ones that were being forthright and the competition in both of these cases looked foolish. The IMC Code of Ethics actually helped our strategy.”

Chris Lambrecht is the lead consultant of Intelligent Marketing Solutions, a B2B strategy and marketing planning firm located in Marietta, GA. Additional information can be found on his website: www.intellmkt.com

For more information on Institute of Management Consultants and the IMC Code of Ethics, go to www.imcusa.org

I’m reading Seth Godwin’s fairly recent book by the same title. Unless I’ve missed it, Seth does not describe where the word “lynchpin” originated. Let me elaborate. The linch pin was the fastener that held the wheel onto the axle of a horse drawn coach or buggy. Hence, you had to have it for the coach or buggy to be of any use. It was, in fact, indispensable.  So, if you become the lynchpin of a organization, you become indispensable.

I am currently involved with two start-up businesses. We need people that want to create jobs for themselves where they can actively participate in their own success. We essentially will put them into business for themselves. In one example, they will have to pay to learn the system, but we are willing to bet on the right individuals and will allow them to pay for the required upfront training over time. In neither of these businesses do participants have to be responsible for marketing selling, or invoicing. One would think, during these troubled times, that there would be a number of people that would express some degree of interest. But yet, social networking and a few inexpensive “help wanted” ads have produced few results.

Several weeks ago I took my son to listen to a pitch on Adzzoo. Adzzoo is a multilevel marketing (MLM) organization that sells geographically based search engine optimization services to local businesses. To read more about their “opportunity”, go here: http://adzzoo.com/local_business/opportunity_overview.html What my son and I heard at their meeting, however, was not about selling SEO to businesses, it was about selling hope and perhaps dream fulfillment to the room packed full of hopeful entrepreneurs. The barriers to entry is a fee for the “Campaign Director Package” of $299.95 plus a monthly SSP fee of $14.95. Since that meeting, I’ve talked to three or four fairly successful business people that have jumped on their bandwagon and are recruiting salespeople. I’m not going to discuss the merits or faults of MLM, but it was clear to me that their pitch is more similar to Amway than to what we are offering, opportunities that are transparent from the beginning.

There is a large degree of wisdom in what Seth Godwin is talking about here. We all must think of ourselves of adding value regardless of the situation we approach. The model of working for one or two companies in your career to become “successful” is clearly broken.

When was the last time you attended an event and thought “This isn’t all what I expected”?  If you are like many, it has most likely been recently. Why does this happen? I believe I know, since I’ve often been the person responsible for “spinning” the event information to attract the largest audience. The problem with this strategy is that it works. Initially, more people will attend your event because it sounds too good to pass up. However, when you do not meet customers’ expectations, what happens? Yep, you lose your following. That is exactly what happens when you over hype your events and fail to deliver.

Here are some helpful hints to better market your events. I’m even going to be so bold as to call them “best practices” for now, but comments are welcome.

1. Make sure your speaker knows precisely who the audience will be. If it’s a mix, tell him to the best of your ability the dynamics of the mix.

2. Mention to your speaker that “interactivity” works well with your audience. You are most likely safe here because it usually does. If he or she is a good speaker, you are telling them something they already know, but this is OK.

3. Ask the speaker what the “take aways” are for the audience. Publish these in your marketing material, and have the speaker briefly review them at the beginning of his presentation.

4. Target your event to a specific audience, and publish this target. This may not fill as many seats, but do you really want unhappy attendees/customers because they attended an event that was not worth their time or money?

5. If at all possible, accept “at the door” registrations, even if you need to charge more. Many busy people simply cannot plan to attend minor events much in advance because of their dynamic travel schedules.

If you have additional hints or comments on the above, the de facto event planning community would love to hear from you.