[You can also find this on Response Source]:

It’s a rocky road to the top: business stories needed for monthly column

Business Matters Magazine, the market-leading publication for UK SMEs, is launching a monthly column dedicated to the banana skins that business people tread on as they follow the road to success.

Every month we want to feature two or three light-hearted tales of business woe that befell successful entrepreneurs in their early days. We’d like the items to be funny and inspirational real-life stories from high-achieving individuals who can look back at sticky situations and laugh.

If any of your clients fit the bill, drop us a line on bm.editorial@clearsightpm.co.uk for a chat!

Alternatively, just fill in my contact form. We’ve had a few good responses so far, but we’d like some more. Cheers!

I spent yesterday doing some recording with Jen Pearson. I haven’t had time to (inexpertly) mix many of the tracks yet, but here’s a quickie that came out quite well. Listen out for me forgetting the chords in the bridge before losing it completely:

“Some get their kick from cocaine/ I’m sure that if I took even one sniff/ It would bore me terrifically too…”

Love it!

Repetitive Strain Injury from typing is a complete bastard if you are self-employed in a role that demands that you write. I’ve learned to live with it, so, for the benefit of posterity and @amandita, here are some top tips:

• Apparently posture is important, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference to me because my problems are in my hands and wrists. If you get back or neck pain, though, read this.
• Wrist rests actually seem to make things worse, possibly because they force me to stretch out the backs of my hands and put pressure on the undersides of my wrists.
• Lots of problems can be solved by ditching a mouse and using a pen tablet. Wacom is the best brand. They are much more natural than mice, and don’t force your wrist into an unnatural position or put pressure on the back of your hands when you click. Plus you can use handwriting recognition software, which is fun and oddly therapeutic, but slower than typing.
• Get a new keyboard. As keyboards age, some keys get sticky and need more pressure to depress, even though you don’t notice it. A really sinner is the <ENTER> key, which you usually go for with the (weak) fourth finger of your right hand. I always choose soft keyboards (laptops are best, but the new Apple standalone keyboards are excellent) and try to change them at least once a year.
• If you’ve been on the lash the night before, rehydrate.
• RSI tends to feel better after exercise, presumably because the blood gets moving through the effected parts once more. Get out on your bike.
• Lots of people swear by microbreaks and stretching exercises, though they don’t seem to make much difference to me.
• Use your hands in different ways. I play the piano, but you can also knead bread etc. Guitar makes it worse.
• Think twice about speech recognition. I’ve yet to find software that really performs.

If I had to choose one single thing that had made the biggest difference, it would be the pen tablet - even though, bizarrely,  strain from use of the mouse should only affect my right hand.

Now that September’s Business Matters has been polished off, zipped up and sent to the printers, I can pack in being a journalist-stroke-editor for a few days and do a bit of copywriting. There’s quite a bit to do, too, and not much time for blogging, but I thought I’d share this video with you.

It’s a British Rail TV ad from the mid-15th century. Not sure about the exact date, but definitely some time shortly before the fall of Constantinople. Check out Jimmy Savile, who was cracking on a bit even then:

I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about the ad. I just love the tagline: this is the age of the train. It’s perfect.

Why? Well, leaving aside any meaning it might carry, as a short piece of copy it’s technically brilliant. The balance is beautiful. Say it to yourself and listen to the weight of the words: this is the age of the train. It almost sounds like a Psalm verse from the King James Bible - simple, short, Anglo-Saxon words bound together in a rock-steady rhythm. That rhythm is doubly glued together by the assonance of age and train.

The copywriter (the late Rod Allen) could have opted for all sorts of variants that said the same thing in exactly the same number of words: the age of the train is now, the train’s time is now, this is the train age and so on. None of them would ever have been remotely as memorable.

This blog is not in the habit of giving publicity to shilly-shallying liberals, but today I’m making an exception for well-known hippy Donald Rumsfeld.

Below is something the old beatnik said at a press conference a few years ago. You may need to read it a couple of times, but it’s worth it:

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

Rummy got some stick for this at the time, mostly because he was speaking in the larger context of that well-known triumph of customer relationship management, the invasion of Iraq. The ridicule wasn’t entirely fair, as he has said much dumber things, and if you ignore all the ‘knowns’ and ‘unknowns’ sounding a bit funny (and the fact that Rumsfeld just looks a bit funny - kind of like J.R. Ewing right after he was shot) what you have is a very intelligent piece of analysis, and one that is bitingly true of all sorts of situations that entrepreneurs and SMEs find themselves in.

Take my friend Kevin, who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

Kevin (I’ve changed his name) has a lot going for him: he’s very bright, good-looking and likeable. He has drive. After a successful few years in the media, he’s now got a great idea for an online business, one that could potentially earn him a good income. The problem is, he doesn’t know where to start. He knows that he wants an interactive web service, but he doesn’t know what expertise he needs.

I - and quite possibly you - could tell him that he should learn or at least understand the purpose of simple technologies like HTML and CSS, before moving on to more complex stuff like PHP and Ajax. He needs to understand what a content management system is, why he’s probably going to need one, and that they can be had for free. He’s going to need to get an account with a webhost and make judgements about when to switch to dedicated hosting as his site takes off, as I’m sure it will. He has to grasp that the technologies he uses to run his site must marry with the software installed on his server. And that’s just the technology side. Let’s not even get him started on usability, SEO, PPC, social media marketing and the rest.

But, by himself, he doesn’t know what he needs to learn. And you know what? It’s not easy to find out. Kev knows that there are technologies out there that he needs to know about (he has, to skip back to Rummyworld, known unknown unknowns) but has no idea where to start looking for information on them, and in what order they should be approached.

For Kev, the solution is relatively simple. He’s got lots of mates who do understand this stuff, and we’re more than happy to help him out. Alternatively, he could partner with a tech expert - providing he can find one he is happy to work with - or, the brute force option, take a large amount of time out to simply learn the stuff himself from the bottom up.

A lot of SMEs I come across don’t have friends like Kevin’s, and they certainly don’t have a ton of time. I know a successful and profitable small company that operates in an environment, related to the construction industry, which has allowed it to be very traditional and stay waaaay behind the times in terms of tech and communications. The Managing Director knows he needs a better website than the out-of-a-box AOL homepage he’s used for five years, but he doesn’t have too many ideas how to go about getting one. He doesn’t know what a server is, is a bit hazy on how to use a browser and is generally sub-Rumsfeldian when it comes to any technology unrelated to shifting large piles of gravel around.

What does he do? He calls me. Why? Because I worked on a company brochure for him a couple of years ago, and he remembered I was an all right sort of bloke who knew at least something about the internet. I’m able to point him in the right direction.

Some SMEs never get pointed in the right direction, leading to all kinds of screwups, missed opportunities and overinflated invoices from gurning charlatans. And, of course, to trainwreck websites.

What are these guys supposed to do? The knowledge divide in the business community is becoming more marked. On the one side we have:

• People who have known knowns - they know what web technologies can do, and they know how to make them do it.
• People who have known unknowns - who are like me. Although they might be a bit weak when it comes to setting up a server or coding in PHP, they know that these technologies are available and where they might fit in a project.

And on the other:

• People with unknown unknowns, who may have a reasonable idea of what they want their business to achieve online, but no idea how to go about achieving it.

Those of us in the first group spend so much of our time in internet la-la land that we sometimes don’t realise that the second group is a long way behind. We tend to dismiss them as old (which they are not, necessarily) and out of touch, when in truth they are often full of vitality and ideas, and brilliant in their own fields of expertise. But unless the members of that second group take time out to educate themselves, their only option is to throw money at their online problems and hire web firms to handle everything. They can use all kinds of traditional mechanisms (referrals and the like) to make sure they work with someone who at least has a good reputation. But how do they know if their provider is right for them, or delivering best value?

They don’t, usually. There’s a big opportunity here, and plenty of folks are having a go at exploiting it. I’m just not sure that anyone’s got it right yet, at least in a way that delivers reliable value to the unknowing unknowers.

We’re sending this out in advance of the print edition as a bit of a teaser:

It’s an overview of Twitter for small businesses, and features insights from Stephen Waddington, MD of Rainier, one of the UK’s leading specialist tech PR firms. If you feel like passing it on or Twittering it yourself, here’s the TinyURL:

http://tinyurl.com/5kl7m3

Update

A shoutout to Dan Howarth for being the first person to spot the two deliberate typos I left in the piece specifically to provide SPaG geeks with a little pleasure on an otherwise dull afternoon…. ha ha ha….whoops.

…because the marketing supplement I’ve been writing and editing is coming out in the September issue. If you run a UK-based small to medium business, the subscription is free. Click here to fill in your details and get your copy in the post every month.

In the marketing supplement you’ll find…

• Interviews with Jacqueline Gold (author and Ann Summers chief exec), Syed Ahmed (from The Apprentice), Rachel Clacher (of Moneypenny.biz) and Richard Denny (author and sales guru);
• Advice on outsourcing marketing development;
• An overview of online advertising for small businesses;
• Tips and tricks for writing and formatting a press release from Guardian journalist Louise Bolotin;
• A guide to Twitter from Stephen Waddington, MD of Rainier PR;
• Expert copywriting advice from me!

So it’s definitely worth a look. I’ve also got a feature in the main mag this month, too, all about university enterprise programmes and the benefits they can offer small businesses.

Dean Rieck has a good post on Copyblogger about how to make the most of testimonials. Well worth a look - testimonials are fantastic for building trust with prospects, but if you handle them the wrong way they can blow up in your face. They are a regular topic of conversation with clients.

I’ve added a couple of my thoughts in comment #6.

This is pretty old now, but I’m surprised by the number of people who haven’t seen it. It’s a lovely, informative short from the Screenwipe series. Charlie Brooker discusses the ways TV makers distort reality:

A tchotsky - also sometimes called a feelie or a widget, I’m not making this up, honest - is a promotional object that can be sent out with a marketing mailing. I’ve been acting as a UK mail monitor for my client Untangle, and their latest direct mail campaign has included some really cool tchotskyage. My favourite is the Little Green Man:

The deal with a tchotsky is that it’s cool and fun - and, therefore, the kind of thing that’s likely to hang around on a prospect’s desk a long time after the paper components of a DM package have been passed on, lost or thrown out. The tchotsky sits there, with your logo on it, constantly reminding the prospect of your company’s existence.

A good tchotsky shouldn’t have a practical function as its main purpose - branded tea and coffee mugs are fine, for example, but tchotskies they ain’t, because they’re too mundane and useful. The defining feature should be coolness or cuteness. Or, as in the case of the LGM, both.

Untangle’s Little Green Man doesn’t live on my desk because he tells me the time, but because he has personality. Choose a good tchotsky and you can buy permanent advertising space that stays right in front of your customers’ eyes, every working day - for pennies.