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As many of you know, I just went to Chicago to attend the 2008 AMA Leadership Summit. Just about every one of the 78 AMA chapters sends representatives to this annual get-together. We have a ton of meetings, talk in the hallways, break bread together, drink cocktails together, and learn, learn, learn.

This year, I went as our chapter’s incoming President-Elect. With me were our President (Jean Conover of TradeMark Media), our Secretary (Amanda Koellhofer of SolarWinds) and our VP of Programming (Robyn Milder of Red McCombs Media). Also joining us was Stacy Armijo of Pierpont–she was our President two years ago and was a presenter at the summit this year.

When you have three straight days of back-to-back meetings and networking events, it’s hard to come up with even a semi-coherent list of takeaways, but I’ll give it a shot anyway.

1. The smartest person in the room is not you. No way, no how. That other person you’re talking to, or that whole group of persons…now, they’re smart. All you have to do is figure out how to transfer their smartness to you. Sometimes it takes one or two questions, and sometimes it happens during an idle conversation while waiting for a cab. But it will happen if you let it happen.
2. Anything is possible if you’re clear on your values. Don’t make the mistake of setting goals for an organization before you’ve figured out your core values. It’s okay if you only have a few, or if you’ve just got them in your head–but you have to have them. You can’t build an organization or put together an action plan without values.
3. Every opportunity is a threat, and vice versa. Same goes for strengths and weaknesses. When you run a SWOT analysis, don’t be fooled! Those little lists don’t just stay in their static little boxes. They tend to jump around a bit. You say you’ve got a really strong sense of humor among your board members, and that’s a great strength? Maybe one day it’ll be your greatest weakness, that you just can’t get serious about anything.
4. Running it like a business really covers a multitude of sins. As executive board members, we are trustees of the organization, much like you as an executive of your company are a trustee of the company’s bottom line and profit margin. Although we are a non-profit, that is not an excuse to run the organization into the ground. We have to run it like a business–watch expenses, price our products with enough margin, communicate effectively, and so on. It also means that we have to behave like a business–communicating with integrity and candor internally and having a customer service mind set with our members and prospective members.
5. Don’t forget to have fun. The best brainstorming happened during off hours. We came up with some dandy ideas for themes, events, and what not while enjoying cappuccinos post-dinner. More than once I found myself trading war stories with people in the hallways and wishing I had ready access to paper as we laughed and reminisced. Once you let your hair down a bit, things start happening!
6. It’s the people that matter the most. I cannot tell you how happy I was to see certain people. Some I hadn’t seen in two years. Others I hadn’t seen since last year’s Crystal Awards (when several of us convened in Houston to judge their entries). No matter what, my fealty is not so much to the nebulous concept of AMA or to “marketing” but to these people. They are part of my network, my practice, and my life. I’m grateful for that.

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I hope you weren’t one of the 500,000 IIS sites hit with a SQL injection attack over the weekend. For all of us, regardless of platform, we need to remember to sanitize all input before we allow data to touch our databases! Especially in this day and age, when it seems that everything lives in the cloud.

Read the whole story over at Wired.

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Combine Twitter and the traditional startup pitch…and you get the TwitPitch.

The Twitpitch is the invention of Stowe Boyd, a business strategy and information technology consultant. Boyd had plans to attend the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo, but was having trouble scheduling meetings with startups. To address this problem, on Tuesday he posted on his blog that in order to make things simple for himself, he was posting a schedule of times when he was available for meetings. He added that he would not accept email-based proposals for these meetings, only Twitpitches.

Read the full piece hereand watch this space carefully. There will be plenty more things crushed down to 140 characters for easy digestion in our snack culture, for example:

• Serialized summaries of books, movie plots, and other longer-length media.
• Summaries of web APIs and web services.
• Summaries of news headlines (already in clear evidence).
• Anything related to “breaking news” or “emergency information” — perhaps government channels for security information?
• Summaries of opinions or issues, with or without links (more and more of this!).
• Live sampling/surveys of reactions to panels, speeches, workshops (sanctioned, not guerrilla).
• Replacing blanket emails with twitter channels — thereby removing the reply-all evil in the world.
• Games that play out in real life — think of those annoying games held by radio stations involving asking people at a mall if they are the guy with the $10,000 certificate.
• Some kind of advertising will have to take effect here…a retail store using twitter to broadcast deals, but not being confined to a zip code or locality. Hmmmm…
• Integrating with time-tracking applications, RFID, mobile devices, warehouse inventory systems, hmmmm. This is all content too!

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Paul Walhus of Spring.net interviews me about SxSW 2008 and other subjects.

See the interview.

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For all of you who are feeling despair about having to sell an intangible service or a product with an extremely long sales cycle, please drop what you are doing right now and read the following story. I won’t even comment on it. Go ahead, scram. Go read it now. Then go out there and sell something.

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I’m attaching a PDF here from Richard Cole. He gives out some pretty good advice on how to market in a recession.

Notes from Richard Cole

One other thought….if you want to really do well in a recession, try out this one-two combination punch:

1. Target recession-resistant industries or demographics. The wealthy never feel the pinch of a downturn, if you’re in the B2C world. Similarly, there are always sectors (like housing, medical/health, automotive, and financial services) that get pounded during a recession, but others keep going strong. It’s up to you to figure out which B2B sectors still need help.

2. Move your marketing dollars closer to the sale. Instead of spending lavishly on branding efforts or big-time spends (media advertising), pour your money into lead generation efforts, sales support, and grass-roots efforts that involve community building.

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Every once in a while, I get asked by friends and colleagues to share some of my favorite business books. I don’t know why, mostly I guess because I read about 10 books a month and let everyone know what my opinion is. In any case, I used to maintain this list in PDF format and email it out to anyone who asked. However, at some point (probably when I switched to the Mac) I lost track of that document.

So what I’ve done is create a Listmania list over at Amazon.com that I’ll keep up to date as I discover good books. The list has 9 books on it now (and I’m sure I’ll add a few more before the weekend is out!). The URL provided by Amazon was horribly long, so I created a redirect URL here at Tripledogs.com:

http://www.tripledogs.com/bizbooks

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YHPAA (pronounced ya-paw) is the Young Hispancs Professional Austin Association. They had an entrepreneurial panel on Wednesday April 9th. I was on the panel along with Becky Arreaga of Mercury Mambo, Nora de Hoyos Comstock of Las Comadres, and Carlos Esteves of CGE Inc., a local construction firm.

We talked quite a bit about running businesses, and took questions on finding funding, how we got the idea to start our businesses, what our biggest challenges were, and what we do different if we were to start over again.

Funny enough, most of us agreed on a lot of things. Becky spoke for all of us when she said that if she had really known about all the challenges in front of her, she probably would not have even tried to start her company. Nora talked a lot about the power of relationships and networking. Carlos focused on the personal challenges of leaving a high-tech career to start a construction company. As usual, I roamed around quite a bit, mostly talking about things like “excellence” and figuring out your passion.

I’ve been promised photos (I saw the flash going off!) so once I have them, I will post here.

UPDATE: Here are the photos.

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In an earlier post, I compared lead generation to dating. I said that many companies take to lead generation like they do the singles scene, except instead of buying drinks and saying hello to strangers, they go around the room asking anyone and everyone to marry them right off the bat. It’s a ridiculous way of doing things, and it hardly ever gets the kinds of results you want or need. Just like no guy/girl is going to accept a marriage proposal from a total stranger (and even if they did, what does that say about them?), no customer is going to get sucked into a complex B2B sale right off the bat.

At the other end of this extreme is what I call the Bachelor Syndrome. The Bachelor is a reality TV show in which the producers set up a guy to look like this prize catch and then parade a bunch of candidates in front of him to see if one of them can win his love. The guy is usually young, studly, and apparently wealthy and quite a catch. The women on these shows are the usual combination of beauty, brains, and what have you–from pretty much all walks of life (except for their inability to resist this kind of denigrating experience, apparently).

Just like companies can’t succeed by running around the room asking total strangers to marry them, they’re not going to succeed by putting on a Bachelor-type competition. If your customers feel like they’re on some kind of gameshow or contest to win your love, then it’s really not lead generation. I’m not sure what you call it, other than counterproductive, but it isn’t in the true spirit of providing valuable information to the marketplace to attract suspects and then nurturing those suspects into prospects and then transacting some business with them at a future time.

How do you know if your programs are more Bachelor game show than actual lead generation?

* If you have to keep reminding people that they need to make a buying decision now, you don’t have a lead generation program. You have a let’s-coerce-them-to-buy program. The analogy: if you tell your dates that you need some kind of next step in the process, then you’re just looking to score, not trying to be with that other person. If the person you’re with thinks you’re worth another date, then whatever it is you’re doing is working.

Try being a bit more subtle. Here’s where an automated lead nurturing program (like you find in Marketo or other tools) really helps. If they sign up for the white paper, invite them to the webinar. If they come to the webinar, invite them to the demo. At the demo, invite them to buy. If they don’t do these things, have different offers for them. Keep them in the loop, but if they don’t express immediate interest, don’t just keep asking them to buy with a louder voice.

* If the only reason you talk to people is to discuss money, a sale, or the status on a transaction or deal, then you don’t have a lead generation program. Listen, you have to spend a lot of time educating people. Giving them the power to make a good decision. We’re talking special reports, podcasts, demos, and the like.

If you’re in the jewelry business, then this won’t relate to you. People either buy or they don’t (at least, to my extremely limited knowledge about jewelry). Same goes for things like cars or groceries. Yes, people may want to research MPG or whether to buy organic or not, but the decision cycles pale in comparison to say, CRM software, where there may be hundreds if not thousands of decision points that need fleshing out.

Therefore….flesh them out! Don’t just hammer away at price or TCO. There’s lots more to talk about!

* If you’re not talking to the 95% of your database that hasn’t purchased yet, then you don’t have a lead generation program. The vast majority of your list will be people in wait and see mode. They’re trying you out. They’re examining your product or service from every angle. They’re talking to others who have bought from you. So why not give them a hand? Talk to them. Answer questions. It doesn’t take a glitzy approach. Just host a teleconference and answer questions. Or hold a workshop and take lots of questions.

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Recession looms, and yes, its more than just some media-inspired (or pundit-inspired) conspiracy. Anyone who has studied economics for more than 5 minutes can tell you that attitudes and behaviors of market participants can have lasting effects on the market itself. In other words, if everyone is scared, it turns the marketplace into a scary place.

Here are three things you can do to get through any recession.

1. STOP THE PANIC MINDSET. Stop rushing about. Stop flip-flopping. Stop making erratic decisions. Stop sampling. Stop the sudden changes in direction every week. Instead, talk to your customers. Find out what they need. Find out what is killin’ them. Find out what is at the heart of their problems. Then offer to help them fix that problem or remove the pain. They will love you for it.

2. Leverage the Web to the hilt. It’s much cheaper to run a blog than to run advertising. It’s cheaper to publish white papers and host a podcast series than to try to get a superbowl ad. It’s better to run free online workshops than to churn out endless amounts of swag. Its easier to leverage your LinkedIn community than to try to cold call 1000 strangers, 80% of whom don’t want to talk to you. It’s more profitable for you to optimize your web site and get incoming links than it is to buy a ton of banners somewhere.

3. It’s time to look within…so do it. What processes can you improve internally? What training do you need? Is it time to slow down a bit? Maybe take a few days off? It sounds counterintuitive, but when things slow down, give yourself a break. The market will pick up in six months or a year, and you’ll be back in the thick of things. When that time comes, are you going to be refreshed or are you going to be whipped?

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