Remember that idea you’ve been sitting on?

I’m here with the swift kick in the pants.

While you’re waiting for the absolute right time to launch that business of yours, someone else is coming up with the same exact idea.

Except they are implementing on it.

Ideas are like water, folks. Really. My first startup, U Sphere, was really not anything new — a portal for college-bound students to connect with colleges.

In my case, the right time presented itself and I launched and didn’t look back.

It wasn’t wildly successful, but that’s okay — I learned a ton. Including what not to do next time. How to test and learn. What type of people to avoid working with — and who to gravitate toward.

Groupon? Nothing new, right? People buy stuff at a discount. One deal a day. Part Woot, part coupon site.

Oh yeah, and they probably hit a couple bumps in the road when they launched. But they were — are — first to market. HUGE advantage. Category killer — even though, again, not really a completely original idea. Beside the point.

You. Have. An. Idea.

Implement. Execute.

Perfect is good. Done is better.

Like everyone else, we’re watching BP and wondering if the oil spill will ever stop.

It may not. In the event that we’re still having this discussion in July 2011, here are three moves that BP can make right now to minimize loss of brand equity.

1. Cut prices at every one of your service stations by 25% effective immediately.

Why? You’re going to lose tons of business anyway.

For instance, heading out of town this weekend, I filled up on gas. I bypassed your station in Evanston, IL. Better to support the Marathon guy down the road. I made this decision simply because I didn’t want to give you more money than I already had to.

Then, on the Indiana Toll Road, my hands were tied. BP or nothing. Darnit. So I filled up at a BP station.

But there’s more to this, right? I mean, local dealers who sell BP have franchises and buy gas from you and all that stuff I don’t understand.

So it’s these guys that are gonna lose business. And lots of business.

Thus the 25% cut in prices. That will make me think twice. Right?

2. Buy an acre of Louisiana swamp land for every hour that the spill continues.

Pay market prices. Donate the land to the State of Louisiana. Call it a day.

3. Accept any Louisiana fishing claims without batting an eye.

If I have a shrimp boat in Louisiana, and I’m toast, I probably don’t have Environmental Insurance. Business Interruption Insurance. ANY INSURANCE. I’m not saying people can make crazy claims, but if a 40 year-old guy in the Bayou says he makes $75K a year fishing and will lose everything, cut him a check.

4. Know all that “Beyond Petroleum” stuff you have been doing? Do it again. And again. And again.

I want to see wind farms. I want to see soy biodiesel. I want you to revisit all those ads from a few years ago where you talk to people on the streets and they tell you what they want out of an oil company.

I want to see those ads and I want to see them now.

5. Get a YouTube Channel NOW.

See the ad up here? It has 200,000 hits.

Search for “BP” on YouTube and stuff like this comes up.

Not press conferences, updates from your executives, video of your own.

Get a channel and get it NOW.

Something’s bothering us at Area 224 HQ. Maybe you can help…

A few months ago, Steve Johnson in the Chicago Tribune profiled Eric and Kathy, the highly successful WTMX-FM morning show hosts. (If you’re not in Chicago, keep reading…there’s something in this for you.)

Very very early on, Eric implemented a rule: no fraternizing outside the office. Why? He didn’t want it to seem like a private party that the listeners couldn’t attend.

It works.

So, what’s bothering us?

The party. The one that everyone seems to attend, except you. This party takes a few shapes:

The “I’m better than you” Party

No one has all the answers, people. No one. In Social Media, in Marketing, in whatever industry. There’s a fine line between idea-sharing and aggrandizing. Please don’t cross it.

We’ve stopped engaging with some people who don’t engage back because they’re too good. They want to tell you how great they are, but when you question them, you get a blank stare.

The “Hidden Agenda” Party

We spend a ton of time on Twitter – and cannot stand the hidden agenda. The agenda that says we’re just creating a presence so we can sell you stuff. The agenda that wants to talk with you, but really wants to broadcast TO you.

The “All About Me” Party

I have made friends in social media. People who I would call up at the drop of a hat because they are just genuinely good people.

But there are others who refuse to engage in the give-and-take that NETWORKING requires. (Remember “networking?” The precursor to “social networking,” which spawned “social media?”)

We unfriended and completely removed from our life one such person in early 2010. Lots of reasons, but they all were part of a pattern of behavior that was, sadly, one-way.

We’re off our soap box now. Come join the party…

Just 3 stats – from 3 different corners of the marketing world. Our goal: help you learn more about the customer experience – or something we call “Empathy Marketing.” Enjoy.

Stat #1: “2 Million Plus Uniques on Foursquare.com in March.”

This means: Foursquare is “four real” – but has a ways to go. Evidence: these greater than 2 million unique visitors in the month of March represent exponential growth since October of last year, when Foursquare launched.

For the Empathy Marketer: How is location-based marketing changing the way you think? That depends – are you a B2B brand, or a restaurant looking to micro-target? Put your brand in the shoes of a customer or prospect. Will folks care if someone unlocks a badge when they visit your location. THEN figure out if it makes sense.

Stat #2: 75 Million Mexicans are Unbanked.

If you think the online world is the one to play in 24/7, the above estimate comes from a March article in Institutional Investor.

For the Empathy Marketer: Online bells and whistles are great IF you rely on online traffic. Foot traffic is probably much more important to Mexican businesses. Think Western Union focuses its efforts on online marketing – or on making sure that they reach Mexicans living in the US who need to wire money back home?

Oh, and Western Union might not ask much about Social Media Marketing. Social Media Marketing cannot sell your product to someone without a computer.

Stat #3: 65+3>96

The NCAA announced it was expanding its Men’s Basketball Tournament by just three teams, going from 65 to 68 teams.

This is better than the alternative – a rumored expansion to a 96 team format that would have been a disaster.

But I’m not alone in editorializing – and the NCAA scores points for (a) floating the trial balloon about this expansion, (b) listening to the hue and cry from fans about how lame it would be to expand to 96 and (c) backing down.

For the Empathy Marketer: Test and learn. Test and learn.

So, just three little stats; and from three random places. Empathy Marketers: don’t forget to put yourselves in the shoes of prospects, customers, fans. Listen to what they’re saying – to your face and behind your back.

There are no real rules to life, right? For instance, in this day and age, any schmo can launch anything and call it a business. Whether it gets on your nerves or not — well, it’s the new rule. Or non-rule.

So, to celebrate our new freedom as a society, here are 18 rules for everything. Courtesy of your friends at Area 224. You’re welcome.

1. Co-opetition. If you enter the world of business without this attitude, you miss out on ways to make some real noise. Witness RealSMM.
2. Failure is okay. Admit it and move on. I failed with my first startup, a business called U Sphere. I learned a ton.
3. Belt matches shoes. Fail this test, gents, and you look like a goober.
4. Be nice. You can be direct and still be nice.
5. There is immeasurable value in looking someone in the eye. (I thank Jim Alexander for teaching this to me again this past weekend.)
6. The world is not out to get you.
7. Being genuine is a lost art.
8. Pedestrians: obey walk lights.
9. Drivers: watch out for pedestrians.
10. As we’ve said before – Ninjas do not introduce themselves.
11. There is a bell curve of knowledge. Any subject, there’s a small subset of people who know too much, and a subset of people who know nothing. Everyone else is in the middle.
12. Pocket squares are always a nice touch.
13. Assume nothing.
14. The seat in the middle of the table at a meeting holds the most power.
15. Life’s too short not to use chopsticks.
16. Use your phone. Email is great for explaining things. But you can often cut through the clutter with the phone.
17. Passion cannot be faked.
18. Bottled water is way too expensive.

So, any rules YOU live by???

Above the masthead on the Chicago Sun-Times read this little banner: “Still 75 cents.”

Amidst a global recession, the casual observer might think: “Wow, the price of something is staying the same.”

But observers of this space know that intuitive thinking like this, while safe, doesn’t get you where you need to be.

Chicago’s days as a two-paper town have been numbered for, like, forever. There’s the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. Both can’t survive long-term (right?) so the Sun-Times apparently thinks it needs to compete on price.

How bout this: Compete with Relevance.

Is it that easy? NO. But here’s what’s wrong with the price tactic:

1. It does not communicate value. “Still” 75 cents? That’s spare change. That also tells me you’re less-expensive than your competitor, which means…
2. You’ll get the price shopper – and not the value shopper. Buying a newspaper isn’t buying a car. Might be closer to buying a cup of coffee. Ooh, nice analogy…

That’s where the relevance factor comes in.

The Sun-Times just might be the most relevant paper in Chicago. But they lost me at the masthead.

They’ve hired away columnists from the competing Tribune – and they have brand-name journalists on staff. This is the paper that gave you Roger Ebert long ago.

Can Newspapers Learn from Starbucks?

There’s relevance for ya. Pick one and roll…

Starbucks is relevant not just because of its ubiquity but because of how they communicate value. Every cup has something attached to it that you’re willing to pay extra for — there’s a lagniappe factor here that’s part ambiance, part smell, part music, part coffee. I pay for it – not all the time, but I don’t hit the Dunkin’ Donuts unless I want something quick and less-expensive.

The Sun-Times might be the Starbucks of newspapers, but they have to tell me that. Thus, here’s the 3-step plan for Newspaper Relevance.

1. Personal Brands. Lots of em. Start by taking your individual rock star columnists — I’ll use Rick Morrissey as an example, as he’s one of those recently hired away from the Chicago Tribune — and positioning them as, well, the rock star columnists they are. Give them their own mini-sites or micro-sites. Treat them like personal brands. It’ll make your product stronger — it’s still a muffin if you buy it at Starbucks, but you’re more likely to buy it at Starbucks because it’s showcased right next to the cashier.

2. Perceived value equals value. I received my home-delivery of the Chicago Tribune this morning and looked below the masthead, in small print. “$1.00 City and Suburbs.” The Trib has always been more expensive – it has also always been perceived as the white-collar paper.

The Wall Street Journal – if you talk about perceived value, then whoa, Nellie, that’s something I’d pay top dollar for.

Any newspaper’s relevance alone won’t be determined by price, but the perception of “you get what you pay for” is pretty spot-on.

3. Make your web sites suck less. It’s not a secret — newspapers are not good at doing the website thing. I won’t single out any of the bad ones — I’ve visited scores of newspaper websites, and, save for three (The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and USA Today), they all follow the same formula: let’s take a paper product and put it online, but also use it as a means of selling more ads.

USA Today should be singled out for being the most “Web 2.0″ looking of them all; but all three take their product (NEWS) and package it online extremely well.

The Chicago Tribune, it should be pointed out, is doing something interesting with the “relevance” thing when it comes to their “Chicago Breaking Sports” page. As long as the news itself is relevant (read: “actual news” and not rumors), they score serious points for getting in my head.

Can this 3-step program fix your newspaper’s “relevance” issue?

Maybe. Each paper has its own personal brands – think of the reporter who has been at every local high school playoff since 1963. There’s a brand.

Each paper also has a price/value perception issue – and while I’m not advocating across-the-board price raises, or cuts, I am saying that communicating that you’re the lowest-priced competitor means little when free news is everywhere. Give me something worth paying for by showing me you’ve got something worth paying for.

Oh, and every newspaper has to have some web guru, 20-something on staff who can ramp up your quality without sacrificing things like revenue.

Agree? Disagree? Barking up the wrong trees?

Lesson We Learned: Explaining Art + Science of Social Media…

Area 224 returns for not one but TWO repeat engagements of 3 Weeks to Social Media Success.

Up there on our site you’ll see it say “3 Weeks is Back!” That’s because we did this program in December and, well, we had quite a few people ask us if we’d do it again. So here we are.

PLUS – this is more laser-focused, less sessions, and some one-on-one time and group time and…we’re really excited.

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BUT…what about Real Estate? Don’t you guys have something for that, too?

YES…our Real SMM product has 3 Weeks to Real Estate Social Media Success. Real Estate people – agents, brokers, investors, title company, mortgage people…etc., they can all learn from the experts (we’ve been doing webinars like these ALL through 2009).

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So, if you ARE in Real Estate, check out the Real SMM site and sign up there. If you aren’t, see more info on our 3 Weeks program right here.

Cheers!

Ever since the Tiger Woods story broke, we’ve been watching it from a communications perspective: How Tiger communicates, what he says when, and whether or not he’s handling this crisis right. We blogged about it last week (you can see that post here).

And, since it broke, we’ve also noticed something really eerie: for someone who talks to the press a lot, who relies on his public image for income (endorsements, public appearances, things outside of golf) — Tiger Woods has really bungled this crisis.

Then there’s David Letterman.

Remember his admission of guilt — for what would appear to be similar “transgressions” — on his TV show?

We reached out to some of our smart contacts in the Communications world to ask why David Letterman emerged from his story relatively unscathed — and Tiger’s story appears to keep going and going, putting his endorsement deals and his status as the first “Billion-Dollar Athlete” in serious jeopardy.

An About-Face of Character?

Gary Unger, Creative Genius, @garyunger on Twitter, says that when image doesn’t match reality, reporters and the public look for more:

“My initial thoughts are that Letterman has been known to be an @ss throughout the years. Recently his rants on Sarah Palin showed him to be ‘not very nice’ as far as continuing to pick on someone who lost. Not good form for the most part. (But now that Palin is back in the spotlight I think she’s fair game). And previously with Bush, Misc. sports stars, some movie stars. But more notably he was called out years ago for his philandering. I believe his wife now was his live in girlfriend for about 10 years. And he had multiple girlfriends at the same time. So Letterman’s character is ‘old news.’

Now Woods is a different story, he’s been projecting this squeaky clean image all these years. Great relationship with his dad and mom. Wasn’t photographed at strip clubs, buying drugs, or even having temper tantrums. And then all of a sudden this accident and some ‘weird’ parts to the story. Then Woods went into hiding. Not a good idea since reporters can smell the ‘weird’ and want to reconcile the weird part of the story to reality. Woods who is likely at base character a nice guy did what nice guys do, they try to stay out of the spotlight when they do something embarrassing and see that they went off the path and want to get back on the correct path.

The difference between the two: Letterman came right out and said it to America and that took the initial sting out of the issue. Reporters don’t have the ‘scoop’ and now can only report, not ‘find.’ Woods gave the sharks what they live for, the scoop. Not only that Woods is not talking, Letterman talked to whoever wanted to talk about it.

Letterman: ‘I’m an @ss, what are you going to do about it’

Woods: ‘uh….’”

Avoid the Phrase “No Comment” at All Costs

Rachel Kay (@rachelakay on Twitter), from Rachel Kay Public Relations (whose blog is called CommuniKaytrix), on Tiger’s “no comment,” thoughts she first shared right after the story broke:

“When we take clients through media training, one of the first rules we teach is to never say ‘no comment.’ The idea is that ‘no comment’ is essentially an admission of guilt. Whether or not it really is, ‘no comment’ can leave people feeling like they are uninformed, misinformed or that a concern is being disregarded. As the investigation into the accident heats up, what was concern for Tiger seems to be shifting to a feeling of what is Tiger not telling us?”

Get Out in Front, NOW.

Gini Dietrich, CEO of Arment Dietrich Public Relations, and author of the Spin Sucks blog:

“David Letterman got out in front of his ‘situation,’ he told people what happened, what he did, and he made it a non-story. Media talked it about it maybe two days and then got bored with the story because there wasn’t any dirt to dig up. With Tiger, just like what you blogged about last week, if he’d gotten out in front of the story (even 24 hours later) and was honest, no one would be digging up all of his mistresses.

This is crisis PR 101. Describe the situation, be honest, apologize, say what you’re going to do to fix it, and live your life. When it becomes a story is when you lie, when you avert questions, and when there clearly is something people want to find out to bring you down.”

So, we ask you, fair readers: how should Tiger communicate from here on out?

What are you doing today to “Find the 5 percent?”

We’re serious when we say this – you remember Pareto, the geneticist, philosopher, Italian economist? He noticed that 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the people. Applying “80/20″ is easy to do just about anywhere – 80 percent of your joy comes from 20 percent of your relationships, 80 percent of your company’s profits come from 20 percent of your customers.

It’s a great theory – but I’m going to argue that it’s WRONG.

Today, it’s more like 95/5.

You could talk about the distribution of wealth, you could talk about your company’s profits, or you could talk about your relationships.

Find the 5 percent. Be the 5 percent.

Example: I sat down last week for a meeting with a couple Chicago-area entrepreneurs. (Let’s assume, for a moment, that their business sells computer hardware, so they have something in-demand from just about everyone.) Their sales strategy involved going after the Global 2000 companies and finding out who held key relationships in their industry with those Global 2000. Then going after those relationship holders.

Now we’re talking.

The 80/20 route would have started with the Global 2000 and stopped there. But, if we’re talking computer hardware, is it easier for them to go after 20% of the market (the Global 2000), or finding the INFLUENCERS for the 5%.

Good for them. But what about you?

Take a look at your clients, your customers – you don’t have to rank them, but find out where the pain is coming from. Is it the 80 percent? Or is it more like 95 percent?

Find out where the joy is coming from – where the challenge, the euphoria, the fun is coming from. Probably, again, a smaller sliver than even Pareto would have thought.

Oh, and in your own business, your own personal life – are you being the 5 percent? Adding value in your personal relationships? Delivering in business? If not, what habits do you need to start to get into that 5 percent?

Find the 5 percent!