Why you DON’T want to use graphic design templates

Neal, a cool, young internet saavy speaker and author, is thinking about some new business cards. “Do you have templates at your printing company,” he asked, striking up a conversation at a recent O.C. marketing event.

“The problem with graphic design templates, is that they’re just that: templates,” I responded. They make your business look like every other business. And that’s deadly for your marketing, be it in print or on the web.

If your marketing looks like it was “cut and pasted” from another company, that’s a clear message: You don’t have your own story to tell. So you just borrowed someone else’s.

Marketer Seth Godin says it well: “There is no roadmap.” If you’re in business, you’re in the marketing business. That means you have to create your own map. You get to define the customer, and the business model. And of course you must design the ad, brochure or business card that communicates that model.

No, I don’t have templates, and I promise I never will. BTW, Neal appears to be quite an accomplished LinkedIn artist. You can find him here.

Are you a “Linchpin?”

What do you bring to your work? Your heart and mind? Or just your body?

In his new book Linchpin, revolutionary business thinker Seth Godin helps us find the art in our work, regardless of job description. Here’s a 60 second interview about what we can bring to each day of our working lives:

Linchpin Meetup

From Seth: This is first ever unofficial Seth Godin Linchpin worldwide Meetup. It’s a completely non commercial chance to find and connect with other members of Seth’s tribe, an opportuity to talk, challenge, and inspire your fellow travelers.

The first ever Rancho Cucamonga Linchpin meetup will be held on June 14, in the Copies&Ink meeting room. As of this post, we’re up to 7 attendees, but wherever you live, there’s a meetup near you. If you’d like to participate here’s some information.

Twitter Your Way to Success

For a lot of folks over 30, Twitter appears to be nothing more than a huge waste of time. No so for this Texas based small business owner.

Has Twitter been a boom or a bust for your business? We’d like to know!

Social Media 101

I found this post online. It echos what so many small business owners are feeling at this moment in time:

Over the past couple of months I have been muddling my way through setting up a social media marketing “strategy” (both personally and corporately) here at SamePage. Currently, my strategy resembles the equivalent of a bunch of “digital post-it notes”:various bookmarks, URLs, links what-have-you scattered across my desk(top), browser, iPhone, etc. How do you scrape all this together into a coherent, useable, package? RSS, Twitter, tehnorati, ning, FB….a couple of times I have literally deactivated my FB account because I felt a responsibility to maintain it even though I found most of the content completely irrevelant.

IMO, there’s no one answer, or a single course of action that’s guaranteed to bring marketing Nirvana. What seems to apply best to small business marketers is outlined here:

1. Make your blog the centerpiece of your social networking strategy.

A “well connected” blog can feed content to other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, and do so automatically. Fresh content on your blog has the added advantage of improving ratings on search engines such as Google. Google loves fresh content, that is rich in relevant keywords. From a larger picture/strategic standpoint: the blog is the a natural place to generously share your expertise with the world and create a network of fans.

2. Tie your blog closely to your website and overall web presence.

The best thinking about the new web puts you in the middle of an online community. Websites built to function only as an online brochure likely won’t do much to generate buzz about your products and services.

3. Don’t start until you have something worth talking about.

No amount of clever online strategy will create buzz if your product or service itself is boring, commonplace or irrelevant to the world. As master marketer Seth Godin says, being remarkable is at the center of it all.