Christopher Ryan

I was attending a fitness class at my health club this past weekend and the instructor was talking about how full the club was in early January and how many of the people were “New Year’s resolution” exercisers who would probably be absent within a month.  He said that many people have noble intentions and set major goals, but they take an approach bound for failure, by overdoing it in the early stages – for example, exercising every day for an hour or running six miles. This is an unpleasant way to start on the path to fitness, and many drop out.

In fact, most of us in this situation are better off with a slower and more reasoned approach — starting our program by exercising for 20 minutes or jogging around the block for 10 minutes.  It is easier to build success by starting small and increasing effort over time.

So what does this experience have to do with marketing?  Simply this: a small investment in time and energy, repeated consistently, can lead to impressive...

I just read an interesting article by Dan Pollatta in the Harvard Business Review, with the clever title I Don’t Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore.  The premise of the article is that business people speak with so much gobbledygook and industry jargon – it is hard to understand what they are talking about.

The topic of communication is important to us at Fusion Marketing Partners because we have to either create compelling messages for our clients or coach them on how to do so.  And whether or not a message is “compelling” should always judged by how prospects receive it, not how someone at your company writes it.  We always tell our clients that it is their obligation to present their message in a clear and comprehensible manner, and not the prospect’s obligation to figure out...

Last week, I was seated next to a guy at a business breakfast who told me he was embarking on a second career and becoming a writer.  The speaker at the event mentioned social media and the guy immediately stated, “I hate social media.  I know social media would be good to help me sell books but I’m not sure if I can bring myself to do it.  What do you advise?”

The first thing I thought of was to tell him not to spend any time doing anything he “hated.”  But since he himself acknowledged that it would be good for his business, why wouldn’t he do it anyway, or hire someone else to do the work. After all, all of us business owners have to do things that are unpleasant or not in our comfort zones.

So how does one choose whether or not to embark on the social media path?  Here are some of my thoughts on the subject:

DO participate in social media if:

Today’s post was motivated by an unsolicited email I received from an outsource payroll company, that made the following two claims:

• If your business has fewer than 20 employees, statistics have shown that you can save money by outsourcing your payroll operations.
• On average, 40% of the entire administration time of a small business deals with payroll processing.

Both of these claims suffer a credibility gap because neither is attributed to any independent source.  The company sending the email could claim that the moon was made out of green cheese, but since they are not exactly an unbiased purveyor of facts, their claims cannot be taken at face value.  Unless the claim is obvious on its face (e.g. for most small business owners payroll is a pain in the rear), you should always provide an outside source for statements that
involve numbers or statistics.

My second problem is that only the first of these claims is believable.  Most...